Here is a short version of it [I know this isn't the full version, but for the sake of brevity...]:

Person A: No Scotsman dislikes haggis.
Person B: My uncle is Scottish and he doesn’t like haggis.
Person A: No true Scotsman dislikes haggis.

Now consider this:

Person A: All fruit is edible
Person B: Plastic fruit isn’t edible.
Person A: All real fruit is edible. [or substitute true if you prefer]

What is the difference between the two?

In the first, a sweeping generalization is confronted with a counterexample. The response is to change the definition of the term. At first, a Scotsman is merely a native inhabitant of Scotland. Then when confronted with the counterexample, the term Scotsman mutates to become bound up definitionally with the practice of eating haggis, such that the very meaning of Scotsman is “one who eats haggis and is a native inhabitant of Scotland,” and only became so for the purpose of excluding that specific case.

What about the second? Why does it not suffer the same deficiency? Aren’t we changing the definition of fruit just to exclude fake fruit?

No, because edibility is intrinsic to the definition of the term fruit. (I am of course only speaking of the common literal use of the term. Not metaphorical uses like “the fruits of one’s exertions,” or scientific terms like fruiting body.) That’s why it must there be preceded by the qualifier “fake.” Eating haggis is not an intrinsic characteristic of the term “Scotsman.” When Person A says that all real fruit is edible, it is not the same as saying all fruit is red. To be fruit is to be edible.

I’ve noticed this tendency lately. Someone will make a strawman characterization of an opposing political view. Another will respond, asserting a correct or more complete definition. The first will then claim the second is committing the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Some clown with a website says, “libertarianism is always bound up in the continuation of systems of oppression such as racism, misogyny, christianism, nativism, and the like.” It is such an absurd caricature that anyone with even a modest acquaintance with its principles can see that those are not necessary and intrinsic characteristics of the philosophy. Not only that, but they are incompatible.

Someone responded by providing a list of libertarian writers who forcefully oppose those, and he is accused of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, as if he is engaging in some ad hoc refinement of the scope of the term to include ONLY those writers.

If anything, it appears the converse is taking place. Instead of No True Scotsman, it is All True Scotsmen.

Person A: All libertarians are crazy fruitcakes who believe horrible things I find morally repugnat.
Person B: These libertarians don’t believe those things.
Person A: Well, all True libertarians do, even if they don’t know it.

Roughly 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to healthy farm animals to foster rapid growth and make up for unhygienic living conditions. Many bacteria that live on animals adapt and transfer to humans, spreading superbugs that are often resistant to treatment.

For more than 35 years, the FDA has recognized that giving antibiotics to farm animals poses a risk to human health, yet the agency has done almost nothing to stop it. Indeed, it has mastered the art of making inaction look like action. Last May, NRDC and our partners sued the FDA to prompt it to take action. Instead, the agency retrenched.

It started by claiming the livestock industry could police itself. In our lawsuit, we asked the FDA to finally rule on two citizen petitions — one filed 12 years ago, the other six years ago — urging the agency to stop the use of antibiotics in healthy animals. In November, the FDA announced that although it shares concerns that the use of antibiotics to make animals grow faster is dangerous for humans, it would deny the petition because it was pursuing an alternative strategy.

This “alternative strategy” turns out to be just another name for the status quo. Instead of banning the use of antibiotics in healthy animals, the FDA is allowing the livestock industry to follow a voluntary approach. But we already know voluntary doesn’t work. The FDA has been operating under that model since 1977, yet the practice has expanded exponentially over the years. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house.

In December, the FDA tried to further justify its inaction by erasing the historic record. Back in 1977, the agency proposed to withdraw approval for the use of several antibiotics in animal feed based on findings published in two notices posted in the Federal Register. The notices containing the findings have been listed in the Federal Register for more than three decades. But just before Christmas a few weeks ago, the FDA pulled the notices. Soon after it buried its 35-year-old proposal, the agency tried to have it both ways. On January 5, it proposed banning off-label uses of a class of antibiotics known as cephalosporins on healthy livestock.

To be clear, although I’d like to avoid the consumption of antibiotic-treated livestock as much as possible, I don’t think the FDA should ban it — a clear overreach of government power.

The lesson here, though, is that when a government agency is tasked with protecting the public interest, public-sector incentives make it a near certainty that the agency will eventually instead collude with special interests in working against the public interest. Instead of serving the one function that is clearly useful for industry oversight — education and advice to consumers who can then make a more informed choice — the FDA has become a legal arbiter of illusory safety.

If the FDA allows a product or practice, the public at large regards it as safe. If the FDA disallows something, society assumes danger. But instituting a top-down decision-making process to centralize the level of risk that consumers should be allowed to take leads to a system that serves nobody well. Life-saving drugs are barred from being used by people who are more than willing to accept their potential hazards. The sale of healthy food is criminalized because of the mere possibility that it could make somebody sick, despite the fact that people can and do get sick from the FDA-approved alternative. And, as shown in The Atlantic, because people trust that D.C. paternalists are looking out for them, they carelessly consume anything that the FDA has let slip through its otherwise iron grip.

A bureaucratic overlord is incapable of choosing the correct balance between risk and reward even for the people in his neighborhood, let alone for more than 300 million strangers scattered throughout the country. There is, however, an alternative, as Larry Van Heerden noted in The Freemam:

The first step to correct these problems is to abolish the FDA, stripping the government of the power to approve drugs (and medical devices) for the market or to remove them from the market. Any rule-making for disclosure and lawsuits for fraud should be devolved to the states.

Even if the FDA were omniscient, objective, and impervious to outside influence, it would be wrong to give it the power to withhold drugs from the market. The proper function of government is to protect individual rights and guard against fraud, not to restrict freedom of choice to protect people from their own ignorance. In fact, the FDA has shown itself to be imperious, subject to prevailing political winds, and indifferent to the thousands of deaths and injuries it has caused.

[...] Forcing all consumers to live by rules that cater to the least responsible individuals imposes huge costs on everyone else and ultimately fails to protect even the willfully ignorant.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

Take Jeffrey Sachs. In “Libertarian Illusions” he attempts to unveil and discredit the ism behind the Ron Paul phenomenon. It’s a pretty lame attempt. Here’s his basic characterization of his target:

Libertarianism is the single-minded defense of liberty. Many young people flock to libertarianism out of the thrill of defending such a valiant cause. They also like the moral freedom that libertarianism seems to offer: it’s okay to follow one’s one desires, even to embrace selfishness and self-interest, as long as it doesn’t directly harm someone else.

Yet the error of libertarianism lies not in championing liberty, but in championing liberty to the exclusion of all other values. Libertarians hold that individual liberty should never be sacrificed in the pursuit of other values or causes. Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable — all are to take a back seat.

A well-educated liberal-leaning friend of mine gave the exact same rap years ago. He also referred to “liberty as a value,” so I’ve long pondered that odd phrasing. I think of liberty as a condition dependent on relationships (with other people). I don’t primarily think of it as “a value.”

I value liberty, yes, and will agree with Sachs that it is not my only value; I have many others. Nearly all freedom-lovers do. They have lives. Personal lives, communal lives, careers, hobbies, interests . . .

Yet, I do value liberty highest in the political and legal context. 

This distinction is important. In which domain of life and thought is liberty relevant? What does it compete with — that is, what do some folk place higher, or “alongside,” liberty?

Sachs provides a list. An odd list. Among his enumerated values are compassion, honesty, decency, etc., — and I rate these human characteristics highly, too. I promote them in various ways, every day, in my personal life, within the community I inhabit. But when it comes to making policy for the instrumentality of coercion within my community and nation — which Barack Obama recognizes as the distinct realm of political governance — I take caution. Compassion for people in groups A and B isn’t going to elicit from me policies that would be unjust to individuals X, Y and Z, or folks in groups C and D, no matter how my heart “bleeds” for them, to use a common cliché.

Which brings us immediately to: Justice. Sachs is no Sidgwick. The great 19th century utilitarian philosopher understood how individualist liberals (i.e., libertarians) regarded liberty (freedom):

It has been held that Freedom from interference is really the whole of what human beings, originally and apart from contracts, can be strictly said to owe to each other: at any rate, that the protection of this Freedom (including the enforcement of Free Contract) is the sole proper aim of Law, i.e. of those rules of mutual behaviour which are maintained by penalties inflicted under the authority of Government. All natural Rights, on this view, may be summed up in the Right to Freedom; so that the complete and universal establishment of this Right would be the complete realisation of Justice,—the Equality at which Justice is thought to aim being interpreted as Equality of Freedom.

Sidgwick then went on to argue that this idea doesn’t quite work, in his lights, though he saw its attraction. But note: He didn’t pretend that justice “is a value” separate from liberty. He understood that, for libertarians, justice is liberty systematized — or, at the very least, law is only just when systematically organized around the idea of basic, equal rights to freedom.

To say that libertarians shove justice to the back seat is either witless error or sly dishonesty. Sachs being no dummy, I suspect the latter.

Of course, rhetoric in political debate rarely ascends to honest dialectic. It’s mostly filled with cheap, dishonest verbal barrages. And no doubt Sachs thinks that, since the libertarian view of justice doesn’t work for him, he may characterize libertarian views of justice as, in effect, “non-justice.”

Odd, in someone who valorizes honesty in his list of things over to which liberty must, at least sometimes, give up the driver’s seat.

The reason to talk about liberty “as a value” is that, when we speak of values, we order them: This is more important than that; the other less vital than yet another. And it’s pretty obvious Jeffrey Sachs wants liberty to slide over, even take a back seat, to a number of other issues and interests. So you can see why speaking of liberty “as a value” is so strategically important to him, and to other modern “liberals”: they want to shunt aside considerations of freedom much of the time.

Often, like Barack Obama, they’ll talk about particular liberties running up to an election — checks on governments’ ability to put you in prison or kill you outright, based on mere suspicion — but it’s no surprise that such folk abandon liberties-talk when they get into power. Guantanamo was an enormity to Obama before election; a necessary part of the war on terror, after.

This experience with politicians, which every libertarian has had, is probably one of the largest influences on why we valorize liberty so highly. Politicians are in the business of compromising about the practice of coercion. Justice, in its fundamentals, is not about compromise. Politics is. So libertarians cast a suspicious eye on political processes, and certainly do not regard the outcomes of such processes as anything like “justice.”

More importantly, the liberty element in justice comes down to a core idea that Sachs does not ever mention. He never cracks the nut of the libertarian idea: Liberty limits coercion, the use of force — we are free only to the extent that we are not being robbed, beaten, bullied, or otherwise victimized by some agent (individual or group of same, under cover of some hallowed idea or symbol, or not). Libertarianism is basically the doctrine that no one has the right to initiate force; only defensive and retaliatory force can be justified.

Indeed, crimes are defined by the use of initiated force, or (by extrapolation) fraudulent machinations to extract one’s time or property by deception in contract. To say that liberty must be “balanced” by “other values” is to say that those other values trump one’s right not to be bullied, pummeled, entrapped, coerced, etc. Sachs does not bother even mentioning how his “other values” could possibly warrant the strong arm of initiated force: How does honesty trump liberty? Argue, please, how respect justifies threatening with force those whom you allegedly respect for not complying with your schemes.

Sachs’s list of “values” appears hastily constructed indeed.

Honesty, for example, is the origin of much libertarian analysis. Libertarians regard most of the common rationales for force as dishonest, inconsistent, and overlaid with flowery garlands of rhetoric.

And, in matters where people make contracts, honesty becomes a prime concern. It’s on the grounds of honesty that fraud — a concept derived from initiated force and the notion of rightful property — makes sense. So to say that libertarians place liberty above honesty seems, as P.H. Nowell-Smith neatly phrased such talk, logically odd.

Listing “respect” as something libertarians shunt aside, or back down the value scale, proves equally absurd. Most who advocate liberty for all (rather than merely take liberty for oneself) do so out of respect for others. Indeed, in the standard rhetoric of rights, “recognizing” a right is the same thing as “respecting” a person’s rights. Respect is what it’s all about, at core.

The idea of respecting individuals as individuals, and not merely for their utility in some governmental scheme, or because they fall into this group or that (race, religion, ethnicity, income category), has been central to libertarian thought for a very long time. It was there in Kant, and there, as well, in anti-Kantians like Herbert Spencer and Ayn Rand.

But don’t consult Sachs to learn out about libertarian thinkers. His short treatment of Rand is a travesty: “Ethical libertarians, exemplified by the late novelist Ayn Rand, hold that liberty is the only true virtue. Rand claimed when a rich man responds to a poor person’s plea for help (even by giving mere pennies), the rich man actually debases himself. This view is the opposite of Christian charity and Buddhist compassion, according to which moral worth is achieved by helping others.”

Of course, Rand doesn’t consider liberty a virtue at all. Her virtue is rational self-interest, a “new concept of egoism.” And though I reject Rand’s ill-conceived “virtue of selfishness,” and have argued against it as one of the gravest errors any libertarian thinker has made, I’ll say this: I don’t remember her arguing that benevolence and charity and generosity were “debasements” of the rich man. I’d like to see the reference. Did Sachs cull this notion from some early, Nietzschean work, such as the repulsive spectacle, Night of January 16th?

In times past, the Sachses of this world would have targeted Herbert Spencer as the callous anti-compassionate individualist. And those folks were wrong, too, for Spencer, though dubbed a “Social Darwinist,” was the 19th century’s chief theorist of empathy (following Adam Smith, he made do with a nuanced meaning of the traditional term, “sympathy”). Spencer grounded liberty on altruism as well as egoism, expounding at length on the importance of beneficence to the good society, the free society (see the final two books of his Principles of Ethics).

Spencer is relevant to this discussion because he so clearly limned the structure of morality, specifying that justice requires non-aggression (Sidwick’s “non-interference”) and that benevolence must be placed as something beyond justice, a supplement. Rights to freedom were more fundamental than compassionate giving, yes; but Spencer provided reasons for this prioritization: liberty defends and encourages the voluntary co-operation that actually advances civilization and a true sense of general well-being; beneficence has much more limited social utility.

Trade is a form of voluntary co-operation, and its benefits are mutual: both parties to any exchange aim to gain. Compassionate giving is not mutual, on the face of it. It’s one person giving to another, with the gift coming off the tally of wealth or energy of the giver and accruing to the recipient. It does not increase the powers and wealth of both parties, which is why Spencer treated it carefully, urging caution. It is also why libertarians are very skeptical about those who push “compassion” above freedom, who conflate justice with love.

It is compassionate to give to the poor, or the less well-off in whatever realm of life (to assist the slow in learning, to help the sick to heal, to comfort the dying). And in point of observable fact, compassion is as important for most libertarians as it is for most human beings. And it can be both compassionate and generous to give to organizations designed to provide aid to the victims of chance or fate or even their own perversity.

But it is neither generous nor compassionate to force A, B, and C to help D, E, and F. One cannot be generous with other people’s money: that’s the worst form of prodigality. One cannot be compassionate in taking from some to give to others. Such a practice makes mockery of the very word “compassion” — one only has to listen to the political clamor for student loan forgiveness, or against any critique of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, to witness both cupidity and effrontery in near pure form.

Strangely (and indicatively), the technical difficulties of giving to others are rarely addressed by the alleged advocates of compassion. Instead of dealing with them, Sachs provides a stark thought experiment comparison, imagining rich folk on the one hand, and starving folk on the other — and in that context many folks unhesitatingly follow his line of thought. But that’s rarely the context of actual need . . . though one could argue that, today, the only cases where taking from the rich and giving to the poor really make much sense would be in massive expropriation from middle-class and wealthy westerners, giving that wealth to the deeply impoverished in Africa and Asia.

And yet such a vast international transfer rarely sees the light of day. But if liberty must be abandoned for compassion in the face of true needy, that policy would surely be primary. I guess in Sachs’s trinity of “liberty, compassion, and civic responsibility, these three,” the greatest of these is . . . nationalism.

But when one forgets borderlines, and struggles to consider helping the truly needy, the problems become more obvious. What do we give to whom? How much? Are there negative effects to giving?

These problems expand exponentially when forcing some to help others and making such actions an ongoing program. Recipients aren’t simply meek receptacles of others’ largesse. People respond to the incentives of the permanent gift environment. They change their behavior to get more. If the benefactor gives to mothers without husbands, some women will indeed engage in riskier sexual behavior that leads to more offspring. If benefactors pay for (or write off) hospital bills to the uninsured, some people will choose not to insure for illness and injury. If it becomes expected that benefactors will pay for all retirements, then fewer people will adequately save for their retirements.

These incentives influence folks on several levels, and is not a matter, always, of conscious life planning. It’s often about levels of risk in the face of the diminishing bad consequences of risky behavior. If the risks of “bad behavior” are made less, we are likely to get more of that bad behavior.

But it gets worse . . . when unilateral giving is coupled with vast takings, not only does the recipient list for all that “compassion” tends to grow, but class divisions increase as more expect to live at the expense of others, and greater “contributions” are required from those others to support the dependent classes. Parasitism emerges as a dominant social mechanism.

After decades of such programs, people now wonder why the number of “poor people” increases. Why, after billions spent on a “War on Poverty” is there still poverty?

It’s because it pays to be poor.

This is well demonstrated in both economics and sociology, though rarely talked about. Honesty would require the advocates of compassion to discuss this often, but those who speak of a “compassionate politics” rarely hazard such concerns. And they deride those who do. Without compassion.

Nearly every person I know who has adopted the freedom philosophy while coming from other commitments has thought about this at some level. Not all read the vast literature on these subjects — and very few dare read the dread Herbert Spencer! Many simply reflect on the general experience with socialism and the welfare state as preparation for adopting the libertarian idea.

And personal history often helps. Anyone who’s given their labors in a modern society a second thought recognizes the play of incentives on what they themselves do. The longer unemployment benefits are extended, the longer one is likely to remain unemployed. Statistics bear this out, but introspection often suffices. Though libertarians may rank among the hardest working of Americans, we all feel the tug of leisure, and it’s easy to lose one’s grip on the work ethic — the tough work required to seek and maintain employment, whether as a wage earner or professional contractor or entrepreneur.

I focus on compassion longer than his other trumps because it obviously means so much to Sachs. Libertarians realize something that Sachs does not address: That compassion and giving have severe limitations, and — when coupled with governmental exploitation and political demands — too easily becomes the acme of compassionate giving’s opposite: greed. There may be no group greedier than a public employee union pushing for the expansion of their benefits and the bureaucracies that allegedly help “others.”

True progress happens when people face up to the ultimate truth about voluntary co-operation: You must please others to get ahead. Some others. Some paying others.

The great tragedy of the poor is that they have little to offer anyone else. So they are left with gifts or plunder as a way of life. The horror of this is not well recognized, because, like death, the truth is so unpleasant. Though poverty is a frequent subject of literature, no tale has done for poverty what Leo Tolstoy did for mortality in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” The degree of universal evasion of the truth of this condition eclipses my ability to measure.

That this message isn’t a main and explicit lesson provided by “public education” is a good sign that education isn’t very educational.

Jeffrey Sachs would undoubtedly point to education as a vitally important “public good” tinged with a dollop of redistributive “compassion” that advocates of “civic responsibility” must advance. And yet this industry is one of the prime examples of massive and thorough government failure. Government-provided (tax-funded, government-run) schooling has engendered a whole education culture mostly devoid of practical use. We live and think in the context of near-universal miseducation.

Most libertarians have thought themselves out of at least some of the traps that establishment educators have set for them. And if they place the idea of resistance to force above all else, it is not in a vacuum, fed only by folks like Ron Paul and Ayn Rand and others.

We who are libertarians have dealt with these ideas on a personal level as well as theoretical ones discussed by economists and philosophers. Vague hand-waving about “civic responsibility” cannot trump our preference for a society respecting individuals and based on a humane division of responsibility that does not evade the actions and actual potential of human beings.

Indeed, when libertarians speak out, protest, devise legislation and repeals, and even go so far as to engage in the ugly work of politicking, they are engaged in “civic responsibility”; pretending that libertarians do so for narrowly selfish reasons is absurd. When Sachs says that the “vast majority of Americans today embrace liberty, civic responsibility, and compassion, and seek a government built upon all three,” libertarians don’t necessarily disagree. The difference? Libertarians judge massive expropriation as not only undermining of justice but also as corrupting the actual culture of voluntary giving.

It is not compassionate to denigrate individual liberty and personal responsibility. It is not compassionate or responsible to advance the war of all against all in the form of the modern redistributive state.

And it is not compassion to wear “giving” on one’s sleeve. That’s a pharisaic something else.

Compassion can only flourish where liberty is the rule.

Generosity and sympathy, when set loose in the environment of the modern state, are corrupted by dangerous greed and the vile temptations of plunder. Sachs’s brief dismissal of libertarianism ignores the modern state’s grave hazards — and carefully elides any mention of substantive libertarian critique of that state. (He engages, instead, in a typical canard: Praising Europe at America’s expense. This tactic quickly loses any grip on reality as Europe descends into poverty and strife.) Sadly, Sachs’s work in general rests upon acceptance of vast patterns of coercion and theft. It is understandable how a person so highly placed in the intellectual wing of the modern state would find the general order a great and grand thing. It is a system that valorizes his own very dear self.

But enormities, too, are big, impressive, over-powering.

Against such powers and principalities, libertarians insist that such influences need not over-power our reason and judgment.

And against lame attacks on the libertarian idea? Actual, informed arguments against libertarian ideas would be of more use. For, it may be that only by overcoming the problems (real or perceived) in libertarianism will we ever achieve a free society.

Final thought: Sachs’s main gambit, the “play of many values,” was precisely the issue that decisively turned me to libertarianism. Value subjectivity and value diversity present grave problems for moral philosophy and political practice. They do not require the kind of robust state that Sachs seems to think they do.

The Fonz could knock down doors with a slap of his hand, summon any girl with a snap, and most often on the show displayed his classic power of fixing the jukebox by banging on it. It’s a seductive fantasy that one might be able to fix a complex piece of machinery through an application of blunt force, without having to worry about the intricate mechanisms that actually allow the machine to work.

Unfortunately, this is the mentality that has reigned for decades in applied public policy.

Is the economy broken? Bang on it. That’ll get it chugging along again. Wait, that didn’t work? You didn’t bang it hard enough. Or maybe your leather jacket needs to be a little cooler next time. At any rate, it’s your fault. If you’d only smacked the economy the way that Fonzie showed you, it totally would have worked.

Economic prescriptions thereby stem from a non-falsifiable tenet of faith in a grown-up power fantasy.

This kind of magical thinking convinces many because it is accompanied by a veneer of rigorous thought. There are even equations! Surely, equations are scientific! But as economist Don Boudreaux pointed out at Cafe Hayek:

The ability to write letters on a board in the form of an equation, to give those letters names that seem to correspond to some imaginable economic things, and to assemble quantitative data on those things, is not necessarily good science.

Keynesian macroeconomic variables lump heterogeneous goods and services into undifferentiated masses, no longer to be understood as the complex workings of a dynamic system of social cooperation. But just because you can gather a bunch of statistics and aggregate them into a variable doesn’t mean that the variable has a meaningful application to the real economy.

If you want to fix a jukebox in real life, a mechanic might be able to get the job done by tinkering with the machinery until each piece once again functions correctly. It’s easy for people who have a facility with physical forms of engineering to take a similar view of the economy, thinking that if only the right people were in charge, they could tweak policy here and there to ensure successful outcomes for everyone. Adam Smith explained why the economy can’t be successfully engineered in such a way:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Even though an economy can’t be planned, or even tailored, successfully from on high, that form of scientism is at least understandable. It at least takes into account a small measure of the complexity of decentralized economic activity, even if it doesn’t — indeed, can’t — consider the rest. Keynesian macroeconomics is far worse, shunning even the scientistic attempt to grapple with at least some heterogeneous microeconomic factors as being the causal source of economywide trends. Instead, they insist that policymakers expropriate as much cash as humanly possible and wallop the economy with it as hard as they can.

Economist Steven Horwitz summed up the real prescription for economic recovery:

Being too focused on Keynes’s aggregates can also mislead us as to the best ways to get out of the recession once we’re in it. It may look as if all we need more is investment or more jobs. But once we understand that the “fundamental mechanisms of change” have to do with the boom’s microeconomic misallocation of capital and labor, we see that what is needed is a reallocation of resources not just more of them. Capital needs to move out of unproductive lines and back toward productive ones, and the same is true of labor.

Stimulus spending, bailouts, and extension of unemployment benefits only prevent the fundamental mechanisms of change from doing their work in unwinding the errors of the last decade. The cure for macroeconomic discoordination is freeing up the entrepreneurial market process to reallocate and coordinate resources. But 80 years after Hayek first made the point, the fascination by economists and politicians with Keynes’s aggregates continues to conceal the fundamental mechanisms of change, and in so doing, also continues to block the processes through which a sustainable recovery can take place.

In the end, the economy is not a jukebox, and neither a mechanic nor Ben Bernanke in the coolest leather jacket ever made can save it from its turmoils. Instead, the economy is made up of hundreds of millions of people with billions of plans, many of which fail but some of which succeed. Nobody knows for sure which plans will pan out in advance — not the people making them, and certainly not their public officials.

Only by letting individuals, alone or in voluntary association with others, respond to local conditions with unique knowledge can the best plans be discovered, expanded, and replicated. That process is made much more difficult when they face continual interference from central planners who only pretend they can know what’s best.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

And then came the uproar.

Coke buyers didn’t like it. Many returned the product, thinking that it was either Diet Coke (whose silver can is, actually, very similar to the new white can) or else a modified product. A few Coke drinkers said that the drink tasted different. There was general confusion, as reported in the Wall Street Journal:

Mel Cyr, a 17-year-old Coke drinker from Sheboygan Falls, Wis., said she and other teenagers attending this week’s National 4-H Congress in Atlanta scratched their heads after seeing the white cans. “You can’t change something that’s classic,” said Ms. Cyr.

4-H delegates from Wisconsin said their chaperone was mistakenly served a regular Coke on the flight to Atlanta from Milwaukee after requesting Diet Coke. “The flight attendants were really frustrated” and apologized for the mix-up, said Sara Harn, 17, of Brooklyn, Wis.

Obviously, this is another innovation from Coca-Cola that didn’t take – reminiscent of the infamous “New Coke” of a few decades ago. Coca-Cola’s clientele was so negative that the august Atlanta company switched plans, and is now switching back to the red cans we all know and love, far ahead of schedule.

A lesson for us all. Consumers are sovereign. You can innovate up and down your line, but if consumers aren’t buying, you aren’t selling.

The doctrine of consumer sovereignty was defended, in the 20th century, by two curmudgeonly economists, W.H. Hutt and Ludwig von Mises. The word choice was spot-on. “Consumers are sovereign” doesn’t mean that producers are meaningless. But the sovereign(s) have the last word, it’s the sovereign who must be pleased.

And that’s what capitalism is all about.

This lesson is probably hard on the innovators at Coca-Cola. Take the lame ending of that Wall Street Journal article:

But Ed Rice, the 81-year-old chief executive of Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper Bottling Company, a longtime Coke distributor in Springfield, Mo., thinks the white can was innovative and engaged consumers. He downplayed confusion between the cans.

“If you put the cans side by side and blink, you might have to take a second look,” said Mr. Rice, who loaded his first Coke truck in 1945. “But I think there’s a distinct difference.”

Yes. But not distinct enough.

And besides, the customer is always right. Well, right in the one way that matters most on the market, right in being sovereign.

Note: I’m quite aware that the concept of consumer sovereignty is a metaphor, really, and not a technically pristine term. It was introduced by Hutt and Mises to counteract the nonsense now once again popular, the idea that corporations “push” us to do things against our will. This is patent nonsense, at least when it applies to the trades we make, the things we buy. We are pulled by producers, yes. But not pushed. We have the means to object. We can take our money elsewhere. We can simply not buy the product. As proven, once again, by the folks who drink Coke.

The video is obviously edited — for what purpose, I do not know. It could have been to cut down its length or to stitch together a narrative that puts the person being interviewed in the worst possible light. Though, admittedly, given his statements, I don’t know how that’s possible.

I understand that people who are put on the spot with a camera in front of their face are going to stammer and search for words. After seeing thousands of these kinds of videos, I’m convinced that people generally do not do well when confronted with on-the-spot interviews.

• The sentiments expressed seem to be endemic to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
• The easiest way for me to address this is to take it point by point with a wrap-up at the end.
• This is going to be a long post.

Man on the street: “The top one percent don’t produce anything.”

There are some awkward questions that need to be asked in response to this assertion.

Besides the obvious catchy “one percent of the people own 43 percent of the wealth” trope, why not move that arbitrary line to the top five percent? If the top one percent own 43 percent of the wealth, wouldn’t it follow that the top five percent own even more of the wealth? How about the top ten percent? The top 25 percent?

The arbitrary line is chosen because it fits nicely into the idea of the proletariat struggling against the bourgeois. What is being insinuated here is the top one percent own the means of production while the 99% are the factors of production.

How is the “1 percent” being defined here? One percent of the population of the United States or of the population of the world?

The question matters a great deal, for a couple of reasons:

One percent of the population of the United States is a little more than 3 million people (approximately the population of Mississippi). Just playing the numbers game, it strains all credulity to accept the assertion that the more than 3 million people being referenced here don’t produce anything.

One percent of the world’s population is about 70 million people (approximately the population of California, New York, and Ohio combined). Of course, this takes credulity to the breaking point.

The question hardly needed to be asked. The only population statistic being used here is the population of the United States. The OWS crowd skirts over the fact that if they were to count the entire population of world, the majority of them would end up in the top 1 percent of people who control wealth. That’s simply an argument they dare not broach. I’ve addressed this briefly here, but I’ll expound on it just a bit.

Even adjusting for purchasing power parity, if you make $34,000 or more per year, you are in the top 1 percent of world income earners. Income disparity between someone who makes $34,000 and someone who makes $500,000 per year in the United States seems pretty significant, but not nearly as significant as the income disparity between someone who makes $34,000 per year in the United States and someone who makes $7,000 dollars per year in India, or $1,000 per year in Africa.

The standard argument against this line of reasoning goes like this:

“Living off of $1,000 a year in sub-Saharan Africa is a lot easier than living off of $1,000 a year in the United States. In order for the comparison to actually have any meaning we need to adjust income for the cost of living in these various countries. In some places it is possible to live off of a dollar a day, and in some places you can’t live off of a hundred dollars a day.”

Lest I be accused of making up my own argument to refute, that’s a response I got on a recent Reddit thread addressing what I said above.

At first blush, this makes quite a bit of sense. Commodities do seem to be more expensive in the United States than they are in the Sub-Sahara (unless you are living in a country with hyper-inflation). Earning $1,000 per year will certianly not give you the purchasing power to buy or rent a house or an apartment. You may or may not be able to afford transportation. Food and clothing would also be difficult to acquire.

But, one is tempted to ask; would you rather live in the United States with an income of $1,000 per year or in Sub-Saharan Africa with an income of $1,000 per year?

Here are the two main problems I see:

First: The United States (and other First World countries) have many orders of magnitude more consumer goods and commodities to choose from than all of the Sub-Sahara put together. In the United States, $1,000 goes much further because there is so much more you can do with it. You must also consider basic welfare entitlements to every poor citizen in the United States to be used for food, shelter and clothing, along with other factors of income like child support payments and not being required to pay taxes.

It further discounts the ability to barter for goods, rely on charity, and utilize the cast-offs of the rich and middle class. Our country is awash with high-class “junk.” It is very easy to acquire clothes, furniture, gadgets (TVs, microwaves, phones, radios, etc.) just by asking for it. It’s unbelievable how much stuff the well-off just leave on the curb for others to pick up. Whole virtual communities like Freecycle and Craigslist thrive around the concept of either exchanging these types of goods or just giving them away. If you are savvy enough, it is possible to get hundreds of dollars worth of name brand products for free through the practice of extreme couponing. There are literally hundreds of blogs dedicated to the concept of extreme frugality, meaning there are people in this country who choose to live well below the poverty line by recycling, reusing, budgeting, couponing, growing their own food, bartering, etc. From all accounts, they have healthy and happy lives.

Second: If you take all other factors into consideration, even for those at the very bottom of the socio-economic scale, life is comparatively much better here. On average, people in the United States live 20–35 years longer than those in the Sub-Sahara. In America, there is an infant mortality rate of eight out of every 1,000. In Mali, the rate is 191 out of 1,000.

While millions have perished in Africa because of famine, I have not been able to find any account of a single person starving to death in America because of an inability to acquire food. There are rare cases in which people are starved through abuse or neglect, but the issue of general access to food was not a factor. On the contrary, we are constantly reminded that we have an epidemic of obesity in our country. Looking at population statistics, this is a problem that affects the poor almost exclusively.

Millions more have been butchered in war, slavery, and genocide in Africa during these past 20 years. With the exception of 9/11, war, slavery, and genocide have killed exactly nobody in America — unless you count the “War on Drugs.” (I’m excluding here our military adventures overseas — which both liberals and conservatives love — and focusing on civilian deaths within our borders.

More than 1 million people die from AIDS/HIV in the Sub-Sahara each year. Nearly 2 million more contract the disease yearly. The region accounts for about 14 percent of the world’s population and 67 percent of all people living with HIV and 72 percent of all AIDS deaths in 2009.

Contrast that to the United States, where there are approximately 1 million people infected with HIV. About 56,000 new people become infected each year, while roughly 18,000 per year die from AIDS.

Even the poorest of poor in America have the means and ability to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases that ravish other populations.

This represents just a cursory look over publicly available data, of course, but many inferences can be drawn. Living off $1,000 per year in the United States is actually a lot easier than living off of $1,000 per year in the Sub-Sahara.

In the United States, $1,000 per year still makes you pretty well off compared to a huge majority of the world’s population. Instead of the OWS asking why this is the case (different economic and political policies have different economic and political outcomes), they are insisting that it’s not the case, in the face of all empirical evidence. It’s a complete break with reality.

All of this begs a basic question. We know that there are millions of people living in Africa on $1,000 per year or less, but are there people living on $1,000 per year in America?

Maybe. According to the 2008 United States Census, the number of individuals living on $2,500 or less is 12,945. If you count households instead of individuals, that number drops to about 3,000.

Looking at demographics, we find that many of those either live on Indian reservations or in closed off religious communities. The vast majority live in very rural areas, with the exception of some communities in Texas and California.

This brings up another awkward question. Can we differentiate between the worthy and the unworthy poor? Is it safe to say that those living on an Indian reservation are most likely the victims of centuries of oppression, paternalism, and other factors beyond their control, and deserve our sympathies, while those whose religious doctrines call for unsustainable familial and community growth (though still collecting welfare entitlements) don’t?

Back to the original point. Taking this all into consideration, the speaker (along with 70 million of his fellow human beings) is more than likely in the top 1 percent of income earners in the world. Does he produce nothing? Do the other 70 million people produce nothing?

If he had a shred of intellectual honesty, he would advocate taxing anyone who makes $34,000 per year or more at a very high rate so that money can be redistributed to the absolute poor in Africa, India, China, Afghanistan, etc. If you’re going to advocate forced redistribution, what’s the more moral course of action? Paying off student loan debt and making secondary education free for those who are extraordinarily rich in comparison to world standards, therefore giving them further opportunities to collect more wealth, or giving that money to someone who will quite literally starve to death without it?

Interviewer: “Steve Jobs didn’t produce anything?”

Man on the street: “Steve Jobs took in the wealth that others produced. No, he didn’t.”

Even though you can tell he’s searching for the concept, what he’s attempting to recall is the Labor Theory of Value, which suggests that the value of goods derives from their labor inputs. Some take it a step further and suggest that goods should therefore be priced according to those labor inputs rather than in response to the demand for those products.

This murderous idea has been refuted too many times to count and isn’t taken seriously by mainstream economists. As with the devastating yet simple argument against Pascal’s Wager, this is a case of rudimentary logic pitted against religious thinking.

If a laborer labors all day making mud pies instead of pumpkin pies, he may well have put in a great deal of work, but still produces absolutely nothing of value. Not understanding why someone would do that, I come along with a novel idea. Why not hire that labor (which is obviously motivated to work) and have him make pumpkin pies instead? Which is more valuable, the labor or the idea that moved the labor in a profitable direction?

Given time, one of my workers gets a workable idea that it will actually make it more time- and cost-efficient to divide the labor and go into business for himself making ready-made pie crusts to sell back to me. In turn, he hires 10 more people.

Another person figures out that growing local pumpkins for production is not sustainable or efficient, so he saves his capital and starts an import business to buy pumpkins to sell back to me. In turn, he hires 10 more people. Of course, that import company creates demand from pumpkin farmers halfway across the country, signaling to them that they need to hire more people. But what about packaging? How will I wrap all those pies? Where will I get the metal for pie tins? How do I even make a pie tin? What if I want to branch off into cherry pies or apple pies? What if I want to sell coffee with those pies?

The Labor Theory of Value is an epic failure of imagination. At any given moment, there are two types of birds on the face of the earth, those that are airborne and those that are not. Do you know what the number of birds in each group will be, say, 10 seconds from now? The answer may well be impossible to ever figure out, but there is an answer as concrete and real as the computer screen you’re looking at. It will take a great deal of dispersed observation, knowledge, and computer power to ever figure out the answer to that question, but it takes an even greater amount of imagination to think of a use for the question in the first place.

On the labor side of the equation, how many people per day, independent of each other, not even knowing of each other’s existence, were involved in making Steve Jobs’s ideas a reality?

Can you imagine it? Can you even begin to try to imagine it? When you do, dig deeper. When you do that, dig deeper still. You will find yourself trying to comprehend a voluntary network of a number beyond your comprehension all working independently but in concert with each other in order to make that idea a reality. The vast majority have no earthly idea that they are working toward a common goal.

If you’ve read the essay “I, Pencil,” you can start to grasp the amazing complexity of what goes into creating one simple product. Once you’ve started to grasp that concept, you realize that an iPhone or a Macbook is nearly infinitely more complex than a pencil.

When you think you have a grasp on all of that, add into the mix all the competition that Steve Jobs inspired in the economy. Microsoft, Google, Android, Unix, Linux, smart phones, laptops, programming, software and hardware development, battery efficiency — the list goes on and on.

Multiply everything above by factors unimaginable when you add in each new facet of competition.

How many people were involved in making Steve Jobs’s ideas a reality? Like I said, there is a concrete answer to this question. I don’t doubt that computers will some day be able to figure it out. I’m not confident that it will ever happen in my lifetime. However, if you are able to imagine the several billion neurons in your brain exchanging countless bits of information each second, culminating in what we call human consciousness, then you are getting close to the complexity involved in the network of voluntary exchange Steve Jobs helped put into motion.

Now think of the consumer side of the equation. For the purpose of this example, let’s limit ourselves to the latest model iPhone. For about $199, plus a two year contract with a cellular phone company, you can walk out the door with an iPhone 4S.

Putting aside for a moment all the apps you can use, these are the features that come built in, off the shelf:

• Two cameras, front and back. Rear camera is capable of HD, low light photography, f2/4 lens with face detection, and photo editing software.
• 1080p HD motion stabilized video camera, accompanied by an editing suite and the ability to share videos instantly with anyone on the Internet.
• Facetime video teleconferencing over a WiFi connection using either the front or rear camera.
• Unlimited texting to other iPhone, iPad, or iPod users, with the ability to exchange videos or photos.
• A digital assistant that is able to help efficiently organize your daily life. It syncs with any other device you use on iCloud.
• A phone. Pretty standard, but it lets you talk to any other human being on the face of the earth who also has a phone. It’s ridiculously portable, so you can use it anywhere there is cell phone coverage, which is pretty much 90 percent of the United States.
• Email. Check your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, or any other industry-standard IMAP and POP mail systems. Access multiple accounts at once. Write and send email without ever touching your keyboard by using its voice recognition software, Siri.
• Internet. You have a virtual world of information at your fingertips, accessible to you any time and anywhere.
• An iPod allows you to access your complete music library, with instant access to many thousands of songs.
• The video player allows you to rent or buy movies from iTunes, and either stream them or download them to your device.
• The photo organizer will store all your photos and organize them by location, date, or face. Take a photo and it will automatically share with all other devices hooked up to iCloud. Share photos by text, Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook. Print wirelessly through AirPrint.
• App Store with access to over 500,000 paid and free apps.
• iTunes to buy music, movies, TV shows, and ringtones. Download whole college courses and thousands of podcasts.
• Maps+Compass, with an automatically updated GPS displayed on up-to-date maps. Search for a location. Zoom in and out, view live traffic information, and receive point-by-point travel directions.
• Game Center allows you to play games against others over the web.
• Calendar.
• Contacts allows you to organize everything you want to know about a person — address, all phone numbers, email addresses, birthdays, notes, websites, and anniversaries. Make a change on one device and it is updated on all others through iCloud.
• Find My iPhone assists you in finding a lost or stolen iPhone by viewing its location on a map. Remotely wipe all info, remotely send a message to your phone to tell others it’s yours, and lock remotely.
• Newsstand to read magazines, newspapers, etc.
• An up-to-the-minute stock ticker.
• Extended weather forecasts for multiple cities and locations.
• A notebook.
• Access to YouTube.
• Voice Memos.
• Calculator (scientific).

Another exercise in imagination, if you will: Consider every bit of technology listed above (we will ignore the wonderful advances in lithium battery, sensor, and storage technology for the purposes of this exercise) and the infrastructure needed for it to work. Now take it back in time just 20 years, to 1991. Keep in mind, all of this wonderful technology is crammed into 4.5 by 3.11 by 0.37 inches, with a total weight of 4.9 ounces.

How much would something with comparable functionality cost back then?

The logical answer would be that the technology did not exist 20 years ago, so it would be priceless. But this is a thought exercise, so we can at least break down some of the components and price them individually.

In 1991, the most common portable analog phone (cell phone technology was still in its nascent stages) was a Motorola MicroTac 9800X. It was lauded for its compact size, and for being the first flip phone on the market. It was an inch thick and nine inches long (when opened), and weighed close to a pound. The only thing it did was make phone calls. The quality of the calls were reportedly pretty bad. You couldn’t use the phone while traveling outside your metropolitan area, and it was pricey to make any phone call.

It sold for anywhere between $4,153 and $5,822 in current dollars (adjusted for inflation).

The first digital camera was released in 1991. It was a Kodak Digital Camera System, and had a resolution of 1.3 megapixels. It also came with a 200 MB hard drive that could store about 160 uncompressed images. The hard drive and batteries had to be tethered to the camera by a cable.

Cost in current dollars, adjusted for inflation: $33,317.

This is where I stopped. At just two laughingly inefficient components (according to today’s standards; back then, they were miracles of technology) in comparison to what comes standard on any iPhone available for $199, I was already hovering around an overall price of $40,000.

Extrapolate all of that out, including all the infrastructure required to make it work, and you can easily conclude that literally all the money in the world in 1991 could not buy you an iPhone.

Today, I can walk into a store conveniently located near me and get a device that makes it nearly impossible for me to get lost, lets me communicate with people I’ve known my whole life who are scattered all over the globe, allows me to take wonderful pictures and record moments of my life, provides access to all the information available on the Internet, streams any number of movies or TV shows directly to me, tells me an extended forcast, lets me video chat with my daughters and phone anyone I wish, along with any number of other things — all for the paltry sum of $199 and the price of a two-year contract.

A product that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Queen of England, and any royal prince would be unable to purchase 20 years ago is now as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. That’s what Steve Jobs produced. And, as a bonus, the wealth created by his idea provided the means to countless other people around the world to purchase what he produced.

Interviewer: “The system you’re interested in is one in which somehow that voluntary web of association is no longer allowed.”

Man on the street: “Correct.”

This pretty much speaks for itself. In this guy’s preferred system that disallows voluntary economic association, in order to get from point A to point B, a whole lot of murder, mayhem, theft, and rape will have to occur first with an end result of abject poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

Interviewer: “So, instead of those voluntary associations, what would you put in its place? Who would make all those decisions?”

Man on the street: “All decisions would be made democratically.”

There’s quite a bit of political philosophy that can be addressed here, but the next question pretty much sums it up for me.

Interviewer: “Like, for instance, when Athens democratically decided to kill Socrates?”

Man on the street: …

This is a brilliant rejoinder. Popular democracy is nothing more than mob action. If everything is up for a vote and decidable by the “will of the people,” then there can be no individual rights, ever. The individual will always lose.

The argument I often hear in support of popular democracy goes a little something like this: Wouldn’t you vote against Hitler to keep him out of power? Well, the very fact that someone like Hitler can run for an election tells me that the system is completely invalid. If the election is deemed valid and workable because he weren’t voted in, it would be just as valid and workable if he were voted in.

That’s the long answer. The short answer is, “No, but I’d gladly shoot him in the face.”

Even the OWS crowd seems to understand that popular democracy is basically the rule of the mob, because they have set up rules in their assemblies dictating that 100 percent consensus must be reached before anything passes. But that just makes the mob smaller.

Man on the street: “I don’t believe there’s any need for individuals like Steve Jobs in this system to flourish based on their particular talents or particular genius.”

An argument from belief is a religious argument.

Also, framing an argument based on what you think that other people “need” is highly paternalistic. At worst, if carried out to its logical conclusion, this line of thought is murderous, if not genocidal.

What is not acknowledged or understood here is the notion that a person’s talents and particular genius are priceless. A person’s talent and particular genius is nearly the whole sum of a person. Disallow a person to use his talents or genius in voluntary association with others, and you’ve essentially murdered his spirit. You’ve destroyed the greatest resource on the face of the earth, and it can never be replaced. Ever.

Man on the street: “I don’t believe it’s possible to continue this kind of system. It’s a retrograde system. It’s a system that no longer works. It creates war. It creates mass unemployment. It creates poverty.”

I’ve already eviscerated this notion above. It obviously does work. It obviously does not create mass unemployment or poverty. It obviously does not create war.

In three minutes time, this person said he would do the following if he were in power:

• Disallow voluntary association.
• Steal money (and everything money represents) that doesn’t belong to him.
• Impose mob rule.
• Hobble those with talent.
• Impose poverty on the masses.

None of this can be done without a whole lot of guns and a whole lot of cold-blooded murder. And in his mind, Steve Jobs creates war, poverty, and unemployment?

I’ll just put these few examples here.

• Deaths in the Soviet Union from communism: 20 million
• Deaths in Communist China from communism: 65 million
• Deaths in Cambodia from communism: 2 million
• Deaths in North Korea from communism: 2 million
• Deaths in Africa from communism: 1.7 million
• Deaths in Afghanistan from communism: 1.5 million (and climbing)
• Deaths in Eastern Europe from communism: 1 million
• Deaths in Vietnam from communism: 1 million
• Deaths in Latin America from communism: 150,000
• Deaths caused by Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan:  60 million

Combined with all other genocides, wars, famine and repression caused by national governments, the death toll for the 20th century is approximately 160 million.

If you took half of the population of the United States (every other man, woman, and child) and shot them in the head, you would have the number of people murdered by governments, the majority of whom were killed by their own governments.

• Communism, socialism, Nazism, imperialism, theocracy, statism: 160 million dead.
• Steve Jobs: Zero dead.

Of those 160 million murdered, how many may have turned out to be like Norman Borlaug, the man credited with saving up to 1 billion people worldwide from starvation? For those of you counting, that’s one seventh of the world’s current population. Can one honestly confront that number and still insist that talent and genius are not important? That free association should be done away with? That mob rule should prevail?

Man on the street: “You know, to hell with Steve Jobs.”

As Billy Beck brilliantly said when he linked to this video on Facebook, “Have you ever seen a man cut his own throat with philosophy?”

Well, dear reader, you just have.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

We are what we do — not what we wish to be, not what we say we are, but what we do. And what we do here in Washington is rescue large companies, large financial institutions, and rich people from the consequences of their mistakes. When mistakes don’t cost you anything, you do more of them. When your teenager drives drunk and wrecks the car, you keep giving him a do-over, repairing the car and handing him his keys, he’ll keep driving drunk. Washington keeps giving bad banks and Wall Street firms a do-over: ‘Here are the keys; keep driving!’ The story always ends with a crash.

And:

We need to stop trying to imagine we can design housing markets, mortgage markets, financial markets, and compensation.

Watch the whole thing:

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

The Demands Working Group of Occupy Wall Street unanimously endorsed and is circulating for discussion the following demand, which will be submitted to the General Assembly of OWS:

Jobs for ALL – A Massive Public Works and Public Service Program

We demand a massive public works and public service program with direct government employment at prevailing (union) wages, paid for by taxing the rich and corporations, by immediately ending all of America’s wars, and by ending all aid to authoritarian regimes to create 25 million new jobs to:

-Expand education: cut class sizes and provide free university for all;
-Expand healthcare and provide free healthcare for all (single payer system);
-Build housing, guarantee decent housing for all;
-Expand mass transit, provided for free;
-Rebuild the infrastructure—bridges, flood control, roads;
-Research and implement clean energy alternatives; and
-Clean up the environment.

Wait, you didn’t think I was talking about corporate bailouts, did you?

No, I’m talking about the rich people who make up the Working Group of Occupy Wall Street.

There is a very inconvenient and awkward question that is not being answered by the OWS crowd, as it pertains to wealth. Even making the assumption that the majority of those protesting are lower-middle class (a very liberal assumption, by anecdotal evidence), that would still mean that they are richer than 80 to 90 percent of the world’s population.

In fact, the poorest 5 percent of the United States is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s population. When compared to the poorest in India, China, or Afghanistan, the inequality is breathtakingly staggering. That college kid who is 60 grand in debt may as well be Bill Gates to a girl born in parts of rural China or Afghanistan.

Whenever this is brought up, you will inevitably hear this as a riposte:

“The problem is that attitude can be very easily used as an excuse for dismissing the complaints of literally anyone who is not the most oppressed, marginalised, and miserable people in the world.”

In other words, you cannot ignore what is bad here because things are worse elsewhere.

Well, that statement may well have merit, were it argued in another context. In this context, it is meaningless. Here’s why.

The above “demands” have everything to do with trying to bring the classes to a parity rather than fixing the economy. We are constantly barraged with the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent rhetoric. This, in itself is a lie. At worst, the people protesting on Wall Street are the 32 percent. More likely, they are the 20 percent and up.

If there were one shred of intellectual honesty in this movement, the above demands would be much, much different. They would be calling for taxing everyone in America at a much higher rate and redistributing that money to the poor in China and India. As the holders of 20 percent of the world’s wealth, they surely can afford it. After all, there are millions upon millions of people living in soul-crushing, abject poverty at this very moment. A vast number of them can never hope to make more than $1 per day, if that.

Instead, we get demands for free education and free housing for all (well, for all the rich people living in the United States, anyway — everyone else can go get stuffed). This is nothing more than the rich seeking taxpayer money for bailouts through the use of force.

Sound familiar?

I’m not being flippant, here. When it comes to entitlements, tariffs, trade barriers, immigration or where I purchase my goods, I’ve not yet heard a convincing argument for why I should regard a middle-class or working poor American in any higher regard than the absolute poor of other countries.

When I’m told that I should buy American in order to save American jobs, I wonder why a South Korean’s job is of any less importance. When I’m told that I must pay my fair share to help the deserving and undeserving (relatively) poor of this country, I wonder why the absolute poor from other countries shouldn’t get that money first.

But this is what it’s come to, now.

Rich college-age kids asking for taxpayer funded bailouts in order to relieve them of a debt (paid by the taxpayers) that they voluntarily took on with full knowledge that they would have to pay it back. Not only that, the vast majority of them have the means to pay off said debt through hard word and dedication.

Now, tell me again why I should care that a rich kid got a liberal arts degree that didn’t pan out, when tens of millions are living in absolute poverty around the world. Tell me again why rich kids with liberal arts degrees aren’t sacrificing their income, well-being, and happiness to redistribute their wealth to those more in need.

It’s time that we stopped focusing on this murderous idea of “inequality” when we should be thinking instead of relative standards of living over time.

Maybe then we can focus on what’s wrong with our economy rather than just fight about which rich group of people get which bailouts.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

I doubt the cartoon’s creators were thinking about government stimulus of aggregate demand when they conceived this, so it has become a piece of appropriated satire. And, like pretty much all great satire, it doesn’t play completely fair with its target. Even so, it contains a substantial nugget of truth.

Readers of this blog who are familiar with the book from which it takes its name will be well-acquainted with the broken window fallacy, first created as a parable by Frédéric Bastiat and later appropriated by Henry Hazlitt, who applied it to a mid–20th century economy.

In a nutshell, the parable explains why destruction doesn’t make a society wealthier. It may stimulate short-run economic activity as people rush to replace and rebuild what they’ve lost, but always at the expense of overall prosperity.

Within the past few years, Bastiat’s and Hazlitt’s critical heirs have applied the fallacy again and again to modern Keynesians. Here’s a video that does exactly that to Paul Krugman’s application of Keynesian theory to the destruction wrought by terrorist attacks (featured on this blog last year):

One objection to this line of thought could be that the broken window parable doesn’t apply to general stimulus, because government spending absent a disaster isn’t the same thing as destruction, and so isn’t analogous with a broken window. One response to this objection would be that the broken window parable is part of a larger essay about the unseen effects of various types of economic action. People explaining the arguments in the larger essay, which does indeed include government spending, might reasonably refer to them by invoking the best-known portion of that essay, the parable of the broken window. Conjuring the whole of an essay by referring to one part would be a kind of allegorical synecdoche, if you will.

Another response would be that spending may not destroy useful physical objects, true enough, but it does divert resources from more productive to less productive uses. Although private-sector businesses can’t be sure what their most productive potential investment will be, the government is by nature even less informed and therefore less capable of investing wisely. Siphoning resources from the private sector to the public sector destroys wealth, even if it doesn’t destroy specific goods. An allegory of a destroyed object certainly applies to the reality of destroyed wealth.

Keynesian apologists, and even some non-Keynesians, have cried foul in still more nuanced ways, pointing out that advocates of government stimulus don’t per se want destruction, and may not even think it will bring increased wealth, but think instead that it will increase short-term economic activity, increasing employment and smoothing over economically troubled times.

There are indeed shades of meaning and intent here. Believing that destruction may benefit the economy in some structural way, thereby sustaining short-term damage for long-term gain, isn’t the same thing as thinking that any individual act of destruction will increase economic wealth. After all, as Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, entrepreneurs engage in short-term “creative” destruction all the time, writing off temporary losses as a necessary cost of pursuing their visions for long-term productive investment.

The evidence, however, shows that government spending intended to stimulate the economy and smooth out the business cycle instead exacerbates the business cycle, leading both to higher peaks and lower valleys.

As Russ Roberts pointed out at Cafe Hayek:

So the hurricane will put carpenters back to work. But it would be even better if there had been no hurricane and people had just given them a check. Charity is more productive than destroying stuff and paying people to get back to square one.

But the charity approach is what we’ve been doing for the last few years. It’s called unemployment insurance. I know, it’s supposed to be stimulative but there’s no sign that it is. Why would it be? It doesn’t solve the problem that there are too many carpenters.

When there’s a downturn in the business cycle, there’s a structural problem with the economy — too many people in some occupations, not enough people in others. General stimulus provides no economic information about where people should go to find sustainable productive work, meeting real demands by providing the goods and services that people want rather than the trumped-up illusory demand prompted by government spending. You can’t build a healthy body on a string of sugar rushes, and you can’t build a healthy economy on a series of artificial top-down influxes of cash.

Stimulus only spurs some sectors of the economy by dampening others, whether present or future. The more that government officials tamper with the economic signals that let entrepreneurs know when they should invest and when they should steer clear, the more skittish investors become. Regime uncertainty entrenches malinvestment, and keeps the economy limping along.

So, Keynesians, please stop celebrating destruction as a cure for economic ills. If truly creative destruction needs to happen in order to move less productive resources into more productive uses, private-sector entrepreneurs have the decentralized knowledge necessary to determine which of their own resources need to be replaced or reshuffled. Government officials do not.

The only real cure for our lagging economy is for the government to quit breaking windows.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

Let more and more of the resources that would have been exchanged in life-fostering and productivity-fostering trade between Joe, Al and Bob be confiscated by a fifth person, the king (who happens to have the only gun, a Kalashnikov that he grabbed from the ship before it crashed; elsewise no one would listen to him). And let this confiscated wealth (after a suitably large finder’s fee for the king has been deducted) be given to Sam to subsidize his slow and pointless blunt-stick production, since it would allegedly be unacceptable for Sam to have to accept alms in accordance with the sympathies and judgments of his fellows. And let the king perpetually demand more and more “revenue” to distribute and perpetually bray that criticism of his taxing and spending policies by “economic terrorists” is undermining confidence in the island’s economy.

What are the effects of this confiscatory and redistributive process on the prospects for the islanders’ survival? Discuss.

[Cross-posted to Davidmbrowndotcom.]

Today’s entry is this deeply confused article on the supposedly baleful influence of philosopher Robert Nozick and his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The only proper response to a piece this nonsensical is something like this:

Nonetheless, I am going to attempt to correct some of author Stephen Metcalf’s more glaring errors.

First, the central conceit of the article–or at least the subtitle–is flat out wrong. Nozick did write that “The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate.” Metcalf assumes that this statement is a renunciation of libertarianism, but that’s not what Nozick meant, as Nozick himself explained in an interview shortly before his death:

What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the “Core Principle of Ethics.”

Sadly, it doesn’t get any better from there. Metcalf quotes Keynes as highly critical of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, claiming that Keynes scribbled in the margins of his copy, “An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam.” Again, Keynes did write that and about Hayek no less, but the line appeared in his review of the dense economic tome Prices and Production. Liberal economist Brad Delong first blogged this error and goes on to note that Keynes was actually quite found of The Road to Serfdom, calling it ” a grand book….Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.”

Even more importantly, Metcalf drastically overstates Nozick’s importance:

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in ’75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

Metcalf may like to think that, but that doesn’t make it true. Don’t get me wrong–Nozick was one of the intellectual giants of libertarianism and made the philosophy a somewhat respectable position among academic philosophers. That’s a very insular group, however, and Metcalf presents no evidence that it was Nozick’s popularity that propelled Hayek and Friedman to their Nobel Prizes. Probably because that evidence doesn’t exist.

A more plausible explanation for the Sveriges Riksbank’s recognition of Hayek and Friedman is that the Keynesian consensus was collapsing in the mid-1970s, and Hayek and Friedman offered alternative theories. The combination of slow economic growth and high inflation known as stagflation is essentially impossible under classic Keynesian models, but both the British and American economies seemed cursed with it in the 1970s. Contrary to Metcalf’s nostalgia, the 1970s were a terrible decade economically, and Keynesian economics proved inadequate to address the problems we faced. I don’t deny that Nozick was a powerful advocate for libertarianism, but the economic crisis did more to shift people’s views on economic policy in a more market oriented direction than any single thinker.

Furthermore, although Nozick played an important role in the history of libertarian ideas, I believe he has been less influential than any of the other big names, by which I mean Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. I’ve been active in libertarian circles for nearly a decade now. I work for a free market think tank. I probably know around 1,000 libertarians personally. Yet I have not heard even a single person credit Robert Nozick for making them a libertarian. I’ve heard all the others–more times than I can count–but Nozick comes up only occasionally as an influence and never as the decisive one. I readily concede that this is not a scientific measure of Nozick’s influence among libertarians, but this is not a huge movement, and after working within it for this long, I think I have a pretty good sense of who the big influences are…or at least a better sense than Stephen Metcalf.

All this might be forgivable if Metcalf’s assault on Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment–which occupies a huge chunk of the article–was accurate and interesting. Unfortunately, Metcalf only engages with a strawman version of Nozick’s argument. Metcalf seems to think that Nozick intended for the Wilt Chamberlain example to be some kind of allegory for the economy as a whole. Instead, Nozick was simply showing why a specific pattern of wealth distribution is impossible to maintain without constant government intervention. As Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long explained in a 2002 article commemorating Nozick’s life and work:

ASU‘s most famous argument–the “Wilt Chamberlain example”–is also its most misunderstood. Criticizing “patterned” theories of justice–that is, those that regard the distribution of resources in society as just only if it fits some preconceived pattern (say, equality)–Nozick asked us to imagine a society that in fact realizes the desired pattern. He pointed out that if people are free to transfer their resources as they wish, the society will quickly deviate from the established pattern, as some individuals, like basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, become wealthy as a result of the voluntary decisions of other members of society who are willing to purchase the exercise of their talents.

If the original pattern is to be maintained at all costs, then the government must “continually interfere to stop people from transferring resources as they wish”; hence no patterned theory of justice can be implemented without “continuous interference in people’s lives” (p. 163). Nozick thus rejected patterned theories in favor of a “historical” theory, according to which a given distribution of resources, regardless of what pattern it fits, is legitimate so long as it arose through a process involving no violations of anybody’s rights.

Metcalf’s abuse of the facts are by no means limited to those detailed here, but going through all of them would require an article far longer than his original. In fact, if Slate removed everything that is incorrect or misleading in the article, they’d soon be left with nothing but prepositions. For that reason, I believe Slate’s editors should retract this piece. Not because I disagree with many of Metcalf’s philosophical principles, although that does appear to be the case, but because even with heavy editing and correction, this article is so fallacious that it detracts from public discourse.

I won’t address the religious justification for this position, but I’d like to point out that the author is overlooking several ways in which fairness matters for the free market. First, unfair outcomes such as poverty and economic immobility can be an indication that the market is not working so well as it should. This may be caused by government intervention or incompetence, as when centralized education policies trap poor children in schools that don’t prepare them to enter the workforce. Or it may be a sign of untapped opportunities, like the lack of access to banking services by residents of the central Amazon. Whether the solution is the curtailment of government power or entrepreneurial innovation, we should heed these instances of unfairness so that we can make the market better.

Second, economic conditions change and the people who are privileged today could be needy tomorrow. We’ve all heard stories of people who lost their life savings in the latest recession; even in calmer economic times, giant corporations and once-profitable-looking investments can vanish as technology evolves. The existence of a safety net, possibly based on private charity, could give people the confidence to start new ventures and to take the risks necessary for innovation, knowing that their basic needs will be met if they fail. Charities should also ensure that the poorest people can survive without resorting to theft and crime, which can cripple a market system. The post’s author might counter that we should give charity without regard to fairness, but I don’t see how that’s possible. Do you give charity to the first wealthy person who walks by your door? Of course not. You look for the people who need charity the most–in short, the people in the least fair situations.

Finally, I’d like to remind the author that we don’t have a free market with perfect efficiency. While based on the econ textbooks, one might think that demand for innovations will lead to an increase in the number and quality of innovators, in real life that doesn’t always happen. If the person who could have cured cancer or revolutionized communications was born into unfair circumstances, he might not obtain the necessary human capital investments through no fault of his own. That’s not just a tragedy for him. It makes the rest of us poorer too because we don’t get to benefit from his potential contribution to the economy. So while we shouldn’t count on government to smooth every inequity, we should give serious thought to fairness if we want a successful market.

Click here for the podcast and the supplementary information.

Here’s the money quote from the very end of the discussion:

I think the problem with what I would call a market language rather than a market process is that, too often, government policy takes the language of markets, which is fundamentally about incentives, which is what this is about, and then tries to graft them into institutional arrangements where there’s no market process. There’s bureaucracy or government mandates, and the incentives are supposed to then be tailored and tweaked so that it looks like…acts like a market, because it has these incentives. And, the problem is without the full range of effects, it doesn’t work at all.

It reminds me of the California energy market, when they tried to use incentives to allocate energy, but they didn’t have a market. It was a government created market. And, it seems we’re are doing that in education, that the main beneficiaries are the people who, as we talked about earlier, who fund the…who create the circular add-ons, the consulting, the training, all the bells and whistles. They don’t get to the students. And, yet, it has the language of markets, so people like me are going to be lured into thinking, ‘well, they’re incentives, so it’s just like a market.’ But, it’s not. And, there’s no fundamental process that allows those market improvements to take place.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

—A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt

In 1919, Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed that you cannot “shout fire in a crowded theater.” The ignorant, the credulous and the cynical have been misusing that phrase ever since. The argument usually follows a well defined euphemistic process:

Person X says something offensive or inflammatory. Person Y denounces not person X but rather his speech by saying, “there is no such thing as free speech. You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater.” Implied is that speech is already restricted, so there’s no problem in restricting it further for whatever the reason du jour.

I’ve heard this argument from both sides of the political spectrum.

Here’s the thing. Justice Holmes was using the ‘fire in a theater’ analogy to refer to speech that had no “conceivable useful purpose,” or was “extremely or inherently dangerous.” In this case, the speech in question were fliers handed out in Yiddish opposing the draft for Mr. Wilson’s war. (In case you missed it, Mr. Wilson is the great “Progressive” president that oversaw a government apparatus of which Josesph McCarthy could only dream, longingly.)

Is this perfectly clear? Justice Holmes, with the full weight of the judicial branch behind him, with enthusiastic support from the executive branch, ruled that any verbal or written opposition to war was of no purpose and was extremely dangerous, essentially nullifying any First Amendment rights on the issue. Many hundreds of people languished in prison for long periods of time for the “crime” of “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” and this is inevitably the problem with arguments from authority or arguments from tradition. They almost always lead back to Yiddish-speaking pacifists. Please remember this the next time one of your friends feels the need to use this canard in any future discussions about speech.

I am going to be unequivocal in what I say next. There will be no genuflection. There will be no apologies. I ask for no quarter and welcome all challengers on the subject.

I will stand up for and next to mentally ill, idiotic, book-burning pastors with all the ignorant religiosity and disgustingly offensive things they stand for before I’ll give one nod of acknowledgment to the likes of Senators Harry Reid and Lindsey Graham (Democrat and Republican, respectively) and their pusillanimous simpering; anytime, anywhere.

When Harry Reid says, “We’ll take a look at this of course … as to whether we need hearings or not, I don’t know,” I say, “It’s none of your business. It’s none of the government’s business.” Not only should Harry Reid be fundamentally embarrassed for uttering such a statement, his constituency should be incredibly alarmed.

When Lindsey Graham says, “I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re at war,” my response is to ask, “when are we NOT at war?” I will also go on to say that in all of human history, nothing thoughtful or nuanced has ever been uttered after the phrase, “Free speech is a great idea, but. …”

Any bien pensant has more than a few choice words for the likes of Pastor Terry Jones and his ilk. He has expressed his First Amendment rights, as is his birthright, and we fight him in kind, with … wait for it … free speech. That’s how it works. We want people like Terry Jones and his maniacal followers in the light of day. We dare not use the force of government to censor him, for fear of driving him underground to fester, to lend him credence. That’s how it works in an enlightened, secular, civil society. When offended, we do not go around beheading people. We do not rend our clothes and beat our breasts. There are no overwrought gesticulations. We go to the public square, without hindrance of or succor from the government, and we fight it out.

It needs to be said. Clichéd euphemisms do not need protection. They are banal and lazy, but rarely offensive. We fight these battles at the desolate outer fringes of respectability. We do this because we understand that to censor speech is to set up a chair in the anteroom of all our minds, inviting any petty bureaucrat to have a seat. Whom do you trust to take on such a role? Senator Harry Reid? Senator Lindsey Graham? Who among your friends would you appoint the gatekeeper to your thoughts?

Burn a book? I would stand on the side of any person who burned every beloved word of William Faulkner if it demonstrated how serious I am about free speech. I say that with no small amount of emotion. Just the thought of it makes me tear up.

I do not wish to have the devil turn on me and, in turn, have no protection, all the laws of the land laid low.

Shame on those who think otherwise, whatever their political ideology.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

Perhaps the most heartening aspect of all this is that it seems to be a legitimate groundswell of popular opposition to all the repressive regimes from Yemen to Algeria. The most obvious historical parallel is to the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks during World War I in 1916, but that was primarily composed of Bedouins from the Arab peninsula–not a truly pan-Arab phenomenon. To find a similar string of uprisings across many nations, you would have to go back to the Revolutions of 1848 that swept almost all of Europe and spread the idea of national self-determination far and wide. Like the protests we see today, those revolutions were all driven by local problems and concerns, but participants frequently drew inspiration and solidarity from the knowledge that similar events were unfolding in neighboring countries.

Of course, bottom-up political change does not square with accepted faith of partisan hacks–both Democratic and Republican–that Washington is the prime mover in all earthly (and, in all likelihood, cosmic) affairs. It has been amusing to watch people absurdly attribute the millions of people gathered in Tahrir Square to Obama’s speech at Cairo University in 2009. Even more outlandish is the view endorsed by a few neoconservatives that recent events have somehow vindicated George Bush’s foreign policy of implementing democracy at the end of a bayonet. Left unsaid is that part of Bush’s (and Obama’s) foreign policy was propping up dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak with billions of dollars in foreign aid. Moreover, I hate to break it to them, but the rest of the world does not revolve around the United States (and the United States does not revolve around Washington D.C.), and you can’t centrally plan and export a revolution. The protesters have a variety of reasons for their actions, but a speech by an American president and an eight-year-old war hundreds of miles away are probably way down the list.

These revolutions are spontaneous orders–like markets or civil society–which governments do not respond to well, both because they frequently demonstrate how unnecessary the government is and they lack formal hierarchies. Most people believe that without government, society immediately turns into pandemonium, but despite the fact that the Egyptian government has been effectively shut down, the Egyptian people themselves are coming together to provide the services they need. In this video, Egyptians volunteer to clean up the streets, deliver medical care, and distribute free food to demonstrators. The New York Times also ran a superb article on Monday describing how regular Egyptians are keeping their society functioning even in the midst of great turmoil:

Out of these humble beginnings, the Popular Committee for the Protection of Properties and Organization of Traffic was born. “What we tried to do first was protect the electricity, water, gas — even the state-owned ones,” Mr. Mardini said, his voice a hoarse whisper after starting on the street at 8 in the morning on Sunday and finishing at 6:30 a.m. Monday, with a two-hour nap before hitting the road again. His stubble is gaining on his soul patch, and if he does not shave soon he will have a full beard.

Compared with the chaos in Cairo, Alexandria has seemed relatively orderly, though only relatively. In some neighborhoods the only building that has been destroyed is the police station, though there has been looting in others. The streets are filled with volunteers.

“We want to show the world that we can take care of our country, and we are doing it without the government or police,” said Khalid Toufik, 40, a dentist. He said that he also took shifts in his neighborhood watch, along with students and workers. “It doesn’t matter if one is a Muslim or a Christian,” he said, “we all have the same goal.”

[...]

The civic enterprise is now divided into four branches: traffic, cleanup, protection and emergency response.

Though others refer to him as the head of the committee, Mr. Mardini said: “We don’t have a leader. This is our country, and we all have to protect it.”

And being leaderless is is actually one of the revolution’s great strengths. If there was a leader or small group of leaders, Mubarak could attempt to co-opt them with money or positions of power. In fact, this is precisely what he is attempting to do with the army by appointing General Omar Suleiman to the vice presidency. A government can deal with another hierarchical institution, but an amorphous blob consisting of millions of pissed off people is utterly confounding.

There is only one thing Mubarak or any other government can do to retain power in such a situation, and it is best explained by an Egyptian quoted in that Times article:

“I am glad, that they [the citizen volunteers] are all on the streets to protect us from robbers,” said Hannan Selbi, 21, a student. “We are sure that it’s in the interest of the government to create chaos.”

Mubarak’s government has been exposed as malevolent and unnecessary, so he has little choice but to create the problem he purports to solve. Many Egyptians are reporting that when caught, looters frequently turn out to be plainclothes police officers loyal to Mubarak. When it comes down to it, there is really only one tool in government’s toolbox: a big fucking club, and Mubarak is using it to spread fear and instigate violence, which he hopes will make people submit to his rule once more.

The revolts in Egypt and elsewhere could still go terribly, terribly wrong. Mubarak could weather the storm and rule the country until his death. Or a radical Muslim faction could take power and institute a theocracy. Or a new government could start another war with Israel. Although I’m guardedly hopeful, I know that these things usually end in tears. That said, what these protests have already shown Egypt, the Middle East, and the whole world is that people do not need a strongman; they do not need a government. Society is an organic process, and it gets along pretty well without leaders. The lesson is there, but whether enough people will listen remains to be seen.

Headline reference here.

No.

It doesn’t work, because each cause has more than one effect, and the selected effect, the end, is not all that must be considered.

You will often hear conservatives complain about progressives’ lack of understanding in this department, how those on the left too often have a one-dimensional view of problems and solutions. Is somebody poor? Tax somebody else and give the poor guy some money. It’s as simple as that!

Well, of course, it isn’t as simple as that. And economists have been exploring the complexity of social causation since before Adam Smith. Unfortunately, advocates of dirigisme have won the public debate, for the most part, characterizing laissez faire as “simplistic” while their own notions depend on rashly over-simplified justifications and visions of causation, while the allegedly “simple” system of liberty has, for its justification, a complex, multi-causal, massively cybernetic view of social dynamics and order.

But, lest we target conservatives for too much praise, it’s worth remembering that even the savviest of them reduce their ideas to the starkest simplicity when it comes to foreign policy. They see a problem elsewhere, some bad guys doing something bad to some other folks, who may or may not be good guys. The solution? Send in the marines! Bomb them! Set up an “army base”!

All for Peace, of course.

The idea that such a course — what might be called American garrison state imperialism — might have unintended effects? Well, conservatives then regurgitate the “wisdom” of Lenin, and talk about broken eggs and the traditional cost of making omelettes.

In the course of writing about the current Egyptian revolt, Paul Jacob, a libertarian who often writes for conservatives, neatly challenges American imperialist simple-mindedness (see his regular weekend column on Townhall; see also his own website):

Some argue that Americans must support despots to block more serious threats. They forget that freedom and democracy must continually win the hearts and minds of the world’s people. To constantly wed our foreign policy to the thumb-screw can only breed enemies from people who should be our friends. Empowering the lesser of two apparent evils in every instance means that America’s face to the world can appear most clearly as one thing: Evil.

Talk about the wrong message, the wrong stance.

Jacob, a supporter of what he calls “citizen-powered government,” is a fairly well-known activist for term limits and the citizen initiative process. His take on democracy is not majoritarianism so much as constitutionally limited government supported by an active citizenry — that is, republican. In the old sense. This puts his brand of libertarianism a long way from, say, the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard . . . but not so far from the Constitutional approach of Rep. Ron Paul.

Or the Tea Party.

So I was curious to see how Townhall.com’s readers reacted to Jacob’s recent column. Townhall readers can be pretty “far right” — but I have been noticing a subtle trend, there, away from the brain-dead Rush-Limbaugh-dittoism of the past. Could it be that the Tea Party has leavened the lump of the Townhall readership?

The early comments, so far, have pleasantly surprised me. Not the usual screaming legion of America-über-alles imperialists.

Though social causation in conflict still strikes neoconservatives and many others in the traditional alliance of the Republican Party as a fairly simple matter — as America’s Strong and Good, and No Match for Anyone Else — it could be that there is hope. It could be that conservative-minded folk will realize (are in the process of realizing?) what they have long suspected in the domestic sphere of life — that simple scenarios of rescue don’t cut it as policies because society is more complicated than progressives believe it is — applies also to the realm of international affairs.

As Paul Jacob indicated, there’s a trouble with the allegedly “sophisticated” ploy of backing dictators to fend off worse dictators: The public face you place in front of the world becomes that of supporting suppression.

And that is the very opposite message Americans want to send to the world. Or to each other.

NOTE: Paul Jacob’s column is also available as a PDF.

[Cross-posted at Shrubbloggers.]

…[W]ith no War on Drugs there would be, within one generation, no “black problem” in the United States. Poverty in general, yes. An education problem in general—probably. But the idea that black America had a particular crisis would rapidly become history, requiring explanation to young people. The end of the War on Drugs is, in fact, what all people genuinely concerned with black uplift should be focused on, which is why I am devoting my last TNR post of 2010 to the issue. The black malaise in the U.S. is currently like a card house; the Drug War is a single card which, if pulled out, would collapse the whole thing.

That is neither an exaggeration nor an oversimplification. It comes down to this: If there were no way to sell drugs on the street at a markup, then young black men who drift into this route would instead have to get legal work. They would. Those insisting that they would not have about as much faith in human persistence and ingenuity as those who thought women past their five-year welfare cap would wind up freezing on sidewalk grates.

There would be a new black community in which all able-bodied men had legal work even in less well-off communities—i.e. what even poor black America was like before the ’70s; this is no fantasy. Those who say that this could only happen with low-skill factory jobs available a bus ride away from all black neighborhoods would be, again, wrong. That explanation for black poverty is full of holes. Too many people of all colors of modest education manage to get by without taking a time machine to the 1940s, and after the War on Drugs black men would be no exception.

And in this new black community, young black men, much less likely to wind up in prison cells or caskets, would be a constant presence—and thus stay in the lives of their children. The black male community would no longer include a massive segment of underskilled, drug-addicted ex-cons churning in and out by the thousands year after year, and thus black boys growing up in these communities would not see this life as a norm. They would grow up to get jobs, period.

And something else these boys would not grow up with is a bone-deep sense of the police—and thus whites—as an enemy. Because there would be no reason for the police to prowl through his neighborhood.

That’s from McWhorter’s latest piece in The New Republic, and the whole thing is well worth reading. It should come as little surprise that policies created and implemented as a cudgel against minorities have disproportionately harmed them, and it’s long overdue that Americans admit to themselves that the drug war has never been about public health or safety but about persecuting cultural groups that middle class whites didn’t care for.

Cross-posted at Rough Ol’ Boy.

One person who seems to have a rough grasp on what WikiLeaks means in the long run is legendary New Leftist Todd Gitlin. Writing in The New Republic, Gitlin compares Assange unfavorably to Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking The Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, because Assange is seeking to cause “system-wide cognitive decline” in the government, and Gitlin understands what that means:

To value “system-wide cognitive decline” is to insist that the state is illegitimate. It should not be pressed to do better what it already does poorly. It should not be smarter. Assange says it should not be.

Gitlin clearly disagrees with Assange’s almost wholly negative view of the state, but what I don’t think even Gitlin understands is that this is ultimately not about ideology or value judgments anymore. As information becomes easier to disseminate, secrets will become harder to keep, and it doesn’t matter whether Assange is free or imprisoned, alive or dead, someone will leak information to the public, and the government’s ability to communicate will be further eroded. In short, system-wide cognitive decline will continue apace.

Assange certainly seems to understand what he’s doing, and zunguzungu offers the best summary of Assange’s apparent strategy to undermine the conspiracies that call themselves governments:

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspiracy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy. As he puts it:

“If total conspiratorial power is zero, then clearly there is no information flow between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or decrease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mean; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt…An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.”

In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

(That’s an important excerpt, but, seriously, do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing. The rest of this post will still be here when you get back, I promise.)

The politicians seem to be dimly aware of the threat an open flow of information poses to them and their power, but the only means they have of striking back is killing the messenger, literally, but they can’t fight the future. As a side note, if you believe that the politicians like Joseph Lieberman and John McCain who have called for Assange’s head are doing so because they believe it will help the average American or anyone but themselves, you are deeply deluded. One of the new WikiLeaks cables reveals that DynCorp, a Texas-based company, has been using taxpayer dollars to buy child sex slaves for powerful Afghan men. No federal politicians have called for investigations into DynCorp, and I almost guarantee that they won’t. They don’t care that tax money is spent to subsidize child rape; they only care that the public found out about it. And that’s why they must try to silence Assange, because he reveals the government as the callous, incompetent organization that it is.

What Assange is ushering in is nothing short of the death spiral of the nation-state. Nation-states are masters of centralization, and they thrived in an industrial era when centralization seemed to be the most efficient means of administration–both in political and business affairs. However, in an era based upon information, decentralization is a far more powerful method for generating and using important data, for reasons explained by Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek in “The Use of Knowledge in Society” over 65 years ago. Once the government’s monopoly on its own information is cracked by Assange and others, the need and likely even the desire for its centralized bureaucracy vanishes.

I don’t pretend to know what will replace the nation-state as an agent of administration, military power, diplomatic relations, etc. As a libertarian, I hope it’s some kind of polycentric government or competing agencies, but that’s far from guaranteed. Despite fighting my entire adult life against the nation-state, I concede that an even worse system could arise from its ashes. However, I am confident that the central mode of governance in the Western World for over two centuries is now on the wane and will begin to disappear over the next thirty to fifty years. Good riddance.

This procedure is rooted in medieval superstition — essentially, people believed that property used to commit a crime was haunted — and it biases the outcome in the government’s favor in a number of ways. First and foremost, in a civil case the government can win with a preponderance of the evidence as opposed to the much higher burden of a reasonable doubt necessary to convict a person of a crime. Also, because there is no person on trial, the owner has no Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and anything he says could be used later if criminal charges are ever brought.

Under Missouri state law, this seizure would be impossible because Missouri requires the owner to be convicted of a related felony before the property can be forfeited to the state. The feds are involved, though, so that minor detail becomes unnecessary. The Missouri Highway Patrol also stands to profit handsomely from pursuing forfeiture at the federal level instead of the state level, should they be successful. That’s because under the rules of equitable sharing, the federal agency will kick back up to 80 percent of the proceeds from the forfeiture, which — assuming Zoe sold at its $600,000 assessed value — would give the highway patrol up to $480,000. Property forfeited through Missouri state law must be given to a state fund for school construction in order to eliminate any incentive for police to enrich themselves by confiscating property, but the federal government has given them an easy way of working around the obvious intent of state forfeiture reforms.

The police allege that Tebeau knowingly allowed people to sell drugs at Camp Zoe. That’s a difficult allegation to prove, because unless they have proof that he was involved in dealing drugs — which seems doubtful, considering the lack of a criminal charge — it would require knowing his mental states. However, according to the official statements of the DEA and the Highway Patrol, the law enforcement agents deliberately allowed and contributed to the sale of drugs on the property. This highlights a contradiction in law enforcement goals caused by asset forfeiture. It seems that the police were pursuing the property instead of trying to prevent crimes. Undercover agents buying drugs could have arrested any dealers that sold to them on the property and made a show of it to deter other people from doing the same, but instead they chose to pursue a forfeiture case, in which they stand to gain over half a million dollars, by allowing people to sell drugs for four years.

Finally, I wonder how much property the feds could seize under the rationale that drugs are sold there by visitors. I think we can safely include every venue ever played by the Grateful Dead, Widespread Panic, the Flaming Lips, Government Mule, Phish, and Moe, among others. Furthermore, even land already owned by the federal government would not seem to be immune. Rainbow gatherings are held regularly on national forest land, and the Black Rock Desert where Burning Man is held is federal property. I don’t think anyone can credibly claim that the government doesn’t know what sorts of illicit activities can occur at these events. Simply put, if these are the legal standards, massive amounts of private property are subject to seizure anytime the DEA, or another federal regulatory agency, decides to investigate.

(Headline reference here for any of you who don’t remember the early 2000s.)

It’s debatable whether the scanners will even help prevent terrorism.  Security expert Bruce Schneier points out that terrorists can simply switch targets to public locations that don’t have scanners like malls, stadiums, trains, etc. Furthermore, the scanners don’t always catch dangerous items such as when this physicist showed how to sneak bomb components past the devices. But even if the scanners do save some lives through thwarting would-be terrorists, if more people choose to drive than fly, there will be more traffic deaths as a result of the new policies. In 2003, The American Scientist estimated that driving is 65 times riskier than flying the same distance. By making flying intolerable in the name of safety, the government is not only invading people’s privacy, they are making us less safe.

Coolfire Media, the St. Louis production and design studio behind Budweiser, Maybelline and Verizon Wireless ads, has spun off a separate company to develop ideas for reality TV shows and scripted comedies.

The minds behind Coolfire Originals say they will specialize in offering Midwest storylines, characters and actors as a niche — and a cheaper alternative — in a world of coast-centric programs. [...]

Coolfire Originals hopes to tap into some of the $3.5 million in Missouri tax credits still available this year for the TV and film industry and the $4.5 million in state tax credits available next year, Breitbach said.

First, there is a fiscal problem. The state government in Missouri is facing historically low revenues, and has to make cuts to services that are arguably more important than reality television — such as education and public safety.

Second, there is a fundamental problem: This program diffuses the cost of reality television production onto the taxpaying population, and concentrates the benefits on reality television producers. Missourians will pay a marginally higher amount of taxes as a direct consequence of this policy.

I have many questions. Will Brett Michaels ever find love, and will he find it in Missouri? How much money in state incentives will it take for the “Rock of Love” bus to park in the Central West End of Saint Louis?

Additionally, what is the economic multiplier on reality television production? I know that contestants on dating shows like “The Bachelor” and the “The Bachelorette” purchase a considerable number of restaurant meals, so I suspect that it may be high. Similarly, if Kate brought her gaggle of Gosselins to Missouri, she’d probably buy a lot of diapers and children’s clothes in state.

Coupled with a lower marginal tax rate on income relative to other states, will this policy incite reality television stars to move to Missouri? Perhaps Snooki would consider moving to Missouri because the top marginal state income tax rate in New Jersey is 8.97 percent, whereas it is only 6.0 percent in Missouri.

Could a producer receive tax credits for making a reality television show about an activity that is also financed by state tax credits? Perhaps ”Extreme Home Makeover: NorthSide Saint Louis” could feature a large private development that uses tax credits for historic preservation, low-income housing development, and/or brownfield remediation.

For the purpose of this post, I tried to brainstorm a list of titles of Missouri-specific reality shows that the state could subsidize with its film tax credit program. I encourage our blog readers to leave additional ideas for titles the comments section of this post.

• Who Wants to Marry a Missourian?
• Mississippi Shore
• The Hill**
• Pimp My Tax-Exempt Yacht
• The Real World: Chillicothe, Mo.
• The Real Housewives of Osage County
• Grundy County’s Got Talent
• Top Chef: Kansas City Barbecue
• Iron County Chef
• Are You Smarter than a Saint Louis Public School Fifth Grader?
• East Saint Louis High School Musical
• I’m in the Missouri Bootheel, Get me Out of Here!
• Poplar Bluff’s Next Top Model
• Survivor: Lake of the Ozarks Party Cove***
• Branson Idol

* Title reference here.

** A reality show that follows the personal lives of several Italian-American young adults living in the Hill neighborhood of Saint Louis.

*** David Stokes tells me that a reality show about the Lake of the Ozarks’ Party Cove would make the stars of Jersey Shore look like participants in the Algonquin Round Table, and I concur.

[Cross-posted at Amateur Philosophy.]

This debacle highlights the need for greater federalism in our political system. If the feds have to sign off on every state law, the drug war will continue forever because Lord knows there are only a handful of politicians at the federal level of either party willing to challenge the status quo. And, for many liberals, that’s just fine.

Take blogger Josh Marshall, for example. Marshall writes that he would have voted against the measure for two reasons: 1) Because he’s over 40 (translation: he doesn’t smoke anymore, and his friends who do are professionals who don’t have to worry much about arrest) and 2) because “unless I’m missing something, it amounts to nullification.”

Marshall is missing something because if Prop 19 amounted to nullification it would have demanded that state officials prevent federal law enforcement from enforcing federal laws. The proposition did no such thing; it simply would have removed state penalties for marijuana and left the DEA to try and enforce federal law as best they could. Regardless, Marshall’s centralist mindset reveals something very disturbing about many modern American liberals: they’d rather have a federal government of nearly unlimited powers rather than one with a defined and limited role, even when, by their own admission, the federal government’s policies harm millions of Americans.

Shortly after Kentucky Senator-elect Rand Paul won the Republican primary back in May, he made a controversial remark about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, essentially saying that the federal government should not prohibit private businesses from engaging in racial discrimination. This was almost immediately followed by a firestorm of liberal criticism that charged Paul with trying to thrust the country back to the Jim Crow South. I’m not interested in defending Paul’s statement at the moment, but I think it’s fair to say that even if that portion of the Civil Rights Act were repealed tomorrow, only a tiny fraction of businesses would attempt to return to racial segregation, and they would almost certainly be subjected to boycotts, protests, and all manner of bad press–and rightfully so.

There are, however, a set of policies known as the drug war, which serve to put literally millions of minorities in cages and turn inner cities into war zones. The best hope to challenge those policies is at the state level with reforms like Prop 19, but many liberal pundits seem more interested in preserving the overwhelming power of the federal government to enact countless utopian schemes than in ending this new Jim Crow.

There may have been a time when federal action was the only remedy for the horrors of segregation, but that danger is by and large in the past. Now the federal government is far more likely to imprison a young black man than to protect his right to vote from the Klan. If we want to destroy the system that is oppressing people in the here and now, we have to abandon the idea that the federal government is the primary protector of our rights, for it is the most powerful enemy any of us could ever know.

Normally I wouldn’t even want to pay $8 for some of these prepackaged Halloween costumes–they’re usually not very good. (If they are $8 on sale, it’s because they are the fancy $35 costumes) I find it especially interesting to compare the photo of the model in the costume with the actual garment–often there are telling details that the model isn’t even wearing the product advertised. It is a given that the model’s back is covered with clips pinching back the fabric so that the somewhat shapeless product can hug her body attractively, as though it were a well-made garment. Another trick is that, if it is a “sexy” costume, the model probably has breast implants. This is important, because if the outfit seems supportive enough to hold up your boobs, keep in mind that implants stay up on their own, so if your tits are subject to gravity (and boy, mine sure are!), they are not going to look so perky in that Halloween costume that offers no chestal support.

So one of my new discount treasures is this awesome Supergirl outfit made of stretchy velvet and metallic spandex, the kind used for swimsuits and overpriced dance costumes. The “S” logo is this really thick, sturdy applique` (patch). What does this costume tell me about the state of the world today? It tells me that Capitalism has gotten so efficient at coming up with and efficiently using resources, that the most expensive resource is human effort: in other words, the time of a Mexican child is worth more than specialty fabrics.

When sewing a garment for retail, after you cut out all the pieces, you use a really fast, weak stitch to go around all the edges of the fabric so that they won’t unravel while you are working on the garment. Then later you go back and sew everything together, and you hem (make the edges look pretty) the edges that are exposed. Still with me? Well on the Supergirl skirt, they just left the crappy preparation stitching on the edge, no real hem. On the cape, they didn’t even do the crappy edge stitching, leaving it completely unhemmed, and the edges aren’t even cut out quite right, with snaggles hanging torn at the corners.

It’s not expensive, in terms of materials, to hem a garment. It just uses more thread. My mom used to always tell me to make sure I leave enough extra thread on sewing projects, because you can always cut it off, and “Thread is cheap.” That was her motto. That and, “Don’t talk to boys!” So why would this costume manufacturer spend the money on the expensive fabric and then sell the product half-finished? Because in his shady, exploitive (check out the positive connotations to the word “exploit,” by the way) little factory, what he has to ration is the precious time of his underage, uneducated employees. Sure, they could hem that cape at no cost and in next to no time, but even that would take away from his profit margin. This really makes me wonder what the real cost of the materials could be at the source, since the metallic fabric alone, if purchased at an American fabric store, would certainly cost more than the $8 I paid for the finished, multi-piece outfit that has been transported hundreds of miles for my convenience and entertainment.

I think it also says something about the prosperity of our nation that this fancy garment can’t really be washed (although you could probably sponge it off). This makes it almost disposable, a one-use dress like Marla Singer’s bridesmaid dress. (Side note: Marla, no one intensely loves a bridesmaid dress for one day. Of course, Marla’s probably never been to a wedding, so she wouldn’t know that.)

So put that lesson in your pipe and apply it.

A friend of mine recently applied for an off-air position at a radio station. The interview went well–until they asked if he were a Christian. When he said he wasn’t, they responded that they were sorry, but they were running a Christian talk station and they could only hire Christians. They said that they had to have this policy in order to comply with FCC regulations.

That seemed pretty bizarre. I could understand a Christian station wanting to hire people with similar beliefs, but what did the FCC have to do with it? Then I looked up the FCC’s Equal Employment Opportunities regulations. The FCC requires stations to do a lot of things to avoid discrimination in recruitment. They have to participate in job fairs, sponsor job fairs, host job fairs, offer internships, or take other actions that have been approved by the FCC. All of those measures impose some costs on stations. However, a religious station need not take these steps to recruit for an open position if it makes religious belief a qualification for the position. So to keep their recruitment costs down, Christian stations bar non-Christians from employment. Rules that were supposed to prevent discrimination are actually causing stations to discriminate.

The religious discrimination might even out, so to speak, if there were equal numbers of stations affiliated with many different creeds. But of course, the vast majority of religious radio stations are Christian. There are very few Muslim stations or Jewish stations; I’ve come across online Buddhist broadcasts, but no brick-and-mortar Buddhist stations. And I haven’t found any atheist radio stations, although there are individual shows dedicated to atheist ideas. A Christian who wants to work in radio likely won’t miss out on any opportunities, but a Muslim or an atheist will be passed over when religious stations are hiring.

Would that happen even if the FCC didn’t impose these regulations? Not necessarily. I’d expect Christian stations to exclusively hire Christian for on-air positions. And probably they would want only Christians to write content for religious shows. But there are other jobs, like board operator or call screener, that people with different beliefs could still perform competently. Religious stations might hire people of other faiths for those roles, if the FCC didn’t give them an incentive to discriminate.

I encourage you to read it not because it is in any way exemplary or honest or commendable. Instead, it is a great example of base rhetoric and unthinking partisanship. There’s so much hypocrisy and double standard, in evidence — and behind that a vast reservoir of thoughtless hate — that it almost boggles the mind.

Indeed, it contains no real argumentation. The business about income inequality, allegedly at the heart of the piece, is all invective and ridicule on Ames’s part. He simply mocks Wilkinson and lets it go at that.

Now, I am not a friend of Will Wilkinson, and I defend him not because of any connection that I know about, but simply on the grounds of decency and some sympathy. I haven’t exactly been following his career. From the few Bloggingheads.tv episodes that he participated in, and that I watched, he struck me as an intelligent person who loves liberty but fails to follow any else’s plumbline. So perhaps I identify with him in that sense. I, too, love liberty, hate coercion; I oppose bullies, thieves, and vindictive advocates of mass imprisonment or regimentation, whether such lockstep marching orders hail from the lightning left or the thunderous right.

That is, I’m a libertarian.

But I have an independent streak, and keep on finding new avenues of thought to explore. Wilkinson seems of similar cast. I vaguely recall his interest in evolutionary psychology.

Ames insinuates that libertarians argue what they do and believe what they do because some billionaires have poured money into a bunch of libertarian institutions, one of which is Cato Institute (wrongly identified by Ames as “the first libertarian think tank”). He gives us no reason to believe this. In fact, he gives us reason not to believe that. Wilkinson, he chortles, was fired from Cato (he says) for not being on the Tea Party bandwagon, which the Kochs also fund.

I don’t know if that’s true, half-true, or just a large hair ball of falsity. But I do know that you cannot call Wilkinson the Kochs’ “whore” (as Ames does, with that very word) and then deride him for being unemployed for an ideological stance which offended some Mr. Moneybags’s other commitments.

Note to Ames: Being paid to do something you love is not tantamount to whoredom. Indeed, I assume that many people on the left (who love complaining about rich people’s spending habits . . . or very existence) get paid out of funds donated by (shock of all shocks) rich people. Indeed, I know that this is precisely the case with nearly every major “liberal” and leftier journal extant.

Pot, see the kettle? It, too, steams up over heat. And it, too, sheds little light.

Granted…but in my opinion, it is you considerate, humane men, that are responsible for all the brutality and outrage wrought by these wretches; because, if it were not for your sanction and influence, the whole system could not keep foothold for an hour. If there were no planters except such as [Legree] the whole thing would go down like a mill-stone. It is your respectability and humanity that licenses and protects his brutality.

So here’s what I propose: no one should get American citizenship at birth. Everyone in America, citizen or not, should still have all the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but if someone wants to vote or run for public office, it is completely reasonable to demand that they have a working knowledge of American government. When an immigrant seeks naturalized citizenship, he has to take a test that covers American history and civics–vital information for being an informed participant in the democratic process–and I fail to see, at least in principle, why we shouldn’t all potential voters to pass the same test.

Pundits constantly bemoan the fact that the electorate is uninformed or, even worse, misinformed. This would remedy that problem to some degree and could very well lead to better policy outcomes. In The Myth of the Rational Voter, which I discussed in my last post, Bryan Caplan shows that the informed public is far more likely to agree with economists on issues like free trade and immigration (i.e. more supportive of both) than the general public. I’m under no illusion that restricting the franchise to the informed would usher in my libertarian utopia, but it might lead to fewer obviously stupid policies like protective tariffs.

My one reservation about this plan is that there would be an incentive for a powerful interest group to game the test and systematically exclude certain sets of people, and I think that’s worrisome enough that I’m not adamantly in favor of implementing such a system. Nonetheless, in principle I think the idea is sound. Democracy should not be an end in itself. It is only good if it produces good policies, and there are numerous (and mostly obvious) reasons to think that an informed public would vote for better policies than the ones we currently live under. It would be nice if all Americans were well informed about our government and public policy, but that’s never going to happen–the incentives just aren’t there–so why not limit the electorate to those who actually care enough to know what they are doing when they vote?

Cross-posted at Rough Ol’ Boy.

Politicians’ wiggle room creates opportunities for special interest groups–private and public, lobbyists and bureaucrats–to get their way. On my account, though, interest groups are unlikely to to directly “subvert” the democratic process. Politicians rarely stick their necks out for unpopular policies because an interest group begs them–or pays them–to do so. Their careers are on the line; it is not worth the risk. Instead, interest groups push along the margins of public indifference. If the public has no strong feelings about how to reduce dependence on foreign old, ethanol producers might finagle a tax credit for themselves. No matter how hard they lobbied, though, they would fail to ban gasoline. (Emphasis in original.)

I think this explains much if not most of public policy, but there are some glaring exceptions where special interests have persuaded Congress, by comfortable majorities, to override public opinion. To take a recent example, solid majorities opposed bailing out GM and Chrysler, and the public followed the issue about as closely as any in the last two years, yet it still passed Congress with bipartisan support. Similarly, although the TARP was initially popular, by the time the second round of funding was set to be released, the public had turned overwhelmingly against it, but there was never a realistic possibility Congress would rescind the funding.

Now, I’m sure these votes will come back to hurt some Congressmen in November but not all that many, and I think this is where Caplan’s theory falters. Congressional districts are so heavily gerrymandered that most incumbents never face a serious challenge regardless of their voting record. Nancy Pelosi could kill and eat a hobo in the Haight-Ashbury, and the people of San Francisco would still return her to Congress. Members of Congress from safe districts, which is about 70-80 percent of the House, are essentially free to indulge whatever special interests they please, so when basically every lobbyist in Washington starts telling them that the sky will fall if they don’t start shoveling money into the yawning mouths of failing banks and auto companies, they willingly complied without regard to public opinion.

Although I’m only about forty pages into the book, Caplan’s theory of democratic failure seems relatively sound, but he should take into account how non-competitive most elections are.

Cross-posted at Rough Ol’ Boy.