Let the Punishment Fit the Crime

Donald Boudreaux, chairman of George Mason University’s economics department, is an excellent economist. I’m a devoted reader of his blogs, Cafe Hayek and Market Correction. Boudreaux also writes a twice-monthly column for PittsburghLive.com. His most recent column reminds me of this old joke:

An engineer, a priest and an economist are trapped together at the bottom of a well. The engineer looks around for a while and thinks he has a solution.

“Given the materials we have amongst us, I should be able to build a contraption to get us out of here,” says the engineer.

The priest replies, “No. That will never work. We must pray, and put our faith in God. He will show us a way out of here.”

To that, the economist says, “You’re both wrong. Assume a ladder.”

Boudreaux, who has both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in economics, fancies himself an expert in the “game” of sentencing. In the course of his recent column he asks why we don’t “punish rape even more severely — say, by executing convicted rapists?” His answer

is “if rapists were punished as severely as murderers, the number of murders would rise.”

Put yourself in the place of a man who is a threat to rape women. If you learn that rapists will no longer merely be locked in prison for years but, instead, executed, you’re a bit less likely than before to rape. That’s good. But suppose that this higher “marginal” cost of committing a rape isn’t sufficient to prevent you from raping a woman. So you rape a woman. Once you commit the rape, you are subject to being executed if you’re caught and convicted.

What will you now lose by becoming also a murderer? Nothing. In fact, you have everything to gain by killing your rape victim. If you let her live, you run a real risk of being identified, captured and convicted — and then executed. But if you murder the woman after you rape her, you reduce your chances of being caught and convicted. (The chief eyewitness to your heinous crime, after all, will be in her grave.) So with nothing to lose and much to gain by killing your rape victim, you’re more likely to kill her than you would be if the penalty for rape were lower than is the penalty for murder.

Punishing rape less severely than murder ensures that rapists still have something more to lose if they kill their victims.

Notice the critical assumption that Boudreaux makes so glibly: “If you learn that rapists will no longer merely be locked in prison for years but, instead, executed, you’re a bit less likely than before to rape.” (My emphasis in bold italics.) How does Boudreaux know that the threat of capital punishment would make rape just a bit less likely? And just how much is a bit? In short, Boudreaux has arrived at his preferred answer — don’t execute rapists — by making a critical and unsubstantiated assumption, namely, that the net effect of imposing capital punishment for rape would be more murder.

It is also possible, of course, that the effect of imposing capital punishment for rape would be a lot less rape and, therefore, a lot less murder (to borrow from Boudreaux’s arsenal of imprecise terminology). That is, the threat of capital punishment for rape would, at the margin (as Boudreaux is wont to say), deter rape and therefore avert many instances in which rapists would otherwise kill their rape victims because they have “nothing to lose” by doing so.

The correctness of Boudreaux’s assertion is an empirical question, not one to be decided by assumption. If, on balance, the threat of capital punishment deters murder, it ought to deter rape. There is empirical evidence that capital punishment does deter murder, just as crime generally declines as the certainty of punishment rises. Score one for me.

Boudreaux isn’t finished, however. He goes on to offer us his theory of finely calibrated punishments:

Of course, the same logic applies also to other crimes. We don’t execute armed robbers not because we don’t want to further reduce the incidence of armed robbery; it’s because we don’t want to strip armed robbers of incentives to let their victims live.

And likewise for the entire range of criminal sanctions. For all of its imperfections, our current criminal law generally — and sensibly — punishes crimes of lesser significance less severely than it punishes crimes of greater significance. Pickpockets impose real costs on society, but (because pickpockets are both unarmed and don’t invade the privacy of people’s homes) these costs aren’t as high as those costs imposed by robbers and burglars. So the law recognizes that it would be a fool’s gambit to attack pickpocketing by increasing the severity of its punishment so much that pickpockets shift into robbery and burglary.

I find it hard to believe that Boudreaux believes this. If he does, it’s because he’s been locked in the ivory tower for too long. For one thing, not all criminals are capable of or interested in committing all crimes; a pickpocket, for example, isn’t necessarily a repressed murderer. For another thing, criminal law, which varies from State to State, is roughly calibrated “to let the punishment fit the crime.” The kind of precision posited by Boudreaux simply doesn’t exist.

The loose and variable hierarchy of punishments imposed by various States, courts, and judges owes more to Biblical precedent (“an eye for an eye”) than to Boudreaux’s game-theoretic version of sentencing guidelines. Some States impose capital punishment but others do not, for example. If the effects of punishment on crime were as well understood and agreed as Boudreaux makes them out to be, every State would impose capital punishment. And every State would impose it — with fierce certainty — in cases of rape as well as in cases of murder.

The Real Thomas Jefferson

David N. Mayer of MayerBlog posted “Thomas Jefferson, Man vs. Myth” yesterday in observance of the 263rd anniversary of Jefferson’s birth. Mayer debunks a lot of bunk that’s been written — and believed — about Jefferson, including his standing as the “father of American democracy”:

Many people today – including historians, political scientists, and even Jefferson scholars – misunderstand Jefferson’s commitment to republicanism and particularly his advocacy of “self-government,” confusing it with democracy. But democracy is government by the majority of the people; republican government is government by the representatives of the people; and limited, constitutional, republican government – the American system – is government by the people’s representatives whose power is limited by various constraints imposed by the constitution. “Self-government,” as Jefferson understood it, meant, literally, individuals governing themselves, without the interference of government. Early in his presidency Jefferson wrote, “Our people in a body are wise, because they are under the unrestrained and unperverted operation of their own understandings.” He viewed the United States as the leading model to the world for “the interesting experiment of self‑government”; that it was the nation’s destiny to show the world “what is the degree of freedom and self‑government in which a society may venture to leave it’s individual members.” To “leave” them to do what? To be free – to govern themselves.

Mayer, who devotes a section of the post to a clear-eyed assessment of Jefferson (no idolator is Mayer), also writes about the Sally Hemings myth and several aspects of Jefferson’s belief system, including his deism and embrace of free markets. Read the whole thing.

Hillary’s Latest Brainstorm

Thirteen years ago Americans were saved from HillaryCare. Now the wannabe president-of-us-all wants to undermine one of the pillars of economic growth, which is capital investment. Larry Kudlow has the story; here’s his opening:

In a speech delivered in Chicago earlier this week, the New York Senator went on ad nauseam about all these alleged problems plaguing our booming American economy and how to fix them. She said “we cannot go on letting our basic infrastructure decay and failing to invest in new technologies if we expect America to maintain its economic leadership.”

Mrs. Clinton’s idea? She wants to see us put into place a “national investment authority.” This brilliant idea is based on a recent report by Felix Rohatyn and Senator Warren Rudman that would create some newfangled government institution to help “finance accelerated commitment to rebuilding our national infrastructure.” Read between the lines and all this means is just more intrusive meddling and spending from Washington. We know where that gets us.

Kudlow goes on to explain why Hillary’s latest brainstorm is yet another dangerous Clintonian fantasy. And yet, Ms. Rodham Clinton’s proposal will resonate with the intelligentsia, who like to believe that they are smarter than markets, and who certainly would like to tell us what to eat for breakfast (for starters).

One of the intelligentsia who probably applauds HillaryInvest is Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, who thinks he has proved the superiority of government over the private sector in the realm of R&D. I popped that thought balloon a while back, in this post, where I concluded that

[t]he true private rate of return to R&D is about 4 to 6 times that of the government rate of return. What else would one expect, knowing that the private sector responds to the signals sent by consumers while government just makes it up as it goes along?

But logic and facts will not daunt committed statists like Hillary Clinton and Joe Stiglitz.

How Time Flies

About two years ago I drew on the archives of Dead or Alive? to list a number of erstwhile celebrities who were then alive at the age of 90 or older. I updated that list about a year ago. Here’s how the list looks today:

Charles Lane 101, ~~George Kennan 101~~, ~~Max Schmeling 99~~, ~~Eddie Albert 99~~, ~~Dale Messick 98~~, Michael DeBakey 97, John Kenneth Galbraith 97, George Beverly Shea 97, Ernest Gallo 97, ~~John Mills 97~~, ~~Estée Lauder 97,~~ ~~Al Lopez 97~~, ~~Fay Wray 96,~~ Luise Rainer 96, ~~Henri Cartier-Bresson 95,~~ ~~Peter Rodino, Jr. 95~~, Gloria Stuart 95, Kitty Carlisle 95, John Wooden 95, Joseph Barbera 95, Mitch Miller 94, Jane Wyatt 94, Byron Nelson 94, Karl Malden 94, ~~Constance Cummings 94~~, ~~Artie Shaw 93,~~ Art Linkletter 93, Lady Bird Johnson 93, Frankie Laine 93, ~~Ruth Hussey 93~~, ~~Oleg Cassini 92~~, Risë Stevens 92, Robert Mondavi 92, ~~Ralph Edwards 92~~, Tony Martin 92, Jane Wyman 92, Kevin McCarthy 92, Sammy Baugh 92, ~~William Westmoreland 91~~, ~~Frances Langford 91~~, Irwin Corey 91, Jack LaLanne 91, Richard Widmark 91, ~~John Profumo 91~~, Harry Morgan 91, ~~Geraldine Fitzgerald 91~~, ~~Archibald Cox 91,~~ ~~Julia Child 91~~

Here are some newcomers: Herman Wouk 90, Les Paul 90, Sargent Shriver 90, Eli Wallach 90

For many, many more names, go to “People Alive Over 85” at Dead or Alive?

Slippery Paternalists

Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia echoes my objections to “libertarian paternalism.” He says, for example, that

[t]he paternalists’ rhetorical purpose . . . is to get us to think of paternalism as all one thing, a nice continuous spectrum from policies that restrict choice slightly to those that restrict choice substantially. As they slide along this spectrum, they fail (I think deliberately) to draw attention to when they’ve crossed the line from libertarian (non-coercive) to unlibertarian (coercive). . . .

If paternalism can be coercive (as with a sin tax) or non-coercive (as with an employers pension plan rules), it is crucial to distinguish between these two types; acceptance of one form of paternalism does not imply acceptance of the other. Lest it seem I’m drawing a distinction without a difference, we should note that private non-coercive paternalism can be avoided much more easily than the public coercive variety. You can choose whether to take a job with a restrictive benefits package; you cannot choose whether to contribute to Social Security. You can choose whether to join AA or Weight Watchers; you cannot opt out of a sin tax.

Moreover, what “libertarian paternalists” really seem to want is for government to require such things as restrictive benefits packages (e.g., automatic opt-in to retirement plans).

UPDATE: I have just discovered an excellent article by Arnold Kling at TCS Daily. Some excerpts:

Roll over, Adam Smith. You said that we can trust the self-interested actions of individuals to benefit others. You said that an “invisible hand” guides markets, meaning that they did not require government control. But some of your economist descendants now claim that the self-interested actions of individuals do not even benefit themselves. Instead, government should intervene to make sure that individual choice serves to promote subjective well-being.

Alan Krueger and Daniel Kahneman hail the progress that has been made in measuring subjective well-being, or happiness. They say that researchers in this field, which is on the boundary between economics and psychology, have developed reliable methods to measure how well a person is feeling. This in turn enables them to make reliable assessments of how happiness is affected by income (both in absolute terms and relative to that of others), marital status, and how people allocate time among various activities, from socializing (good) to commuting alone (bad). . . .

[T]he reader may have surmised that I am not altogether sympathetic to Krueger and Kahneman. In fact, you may think that the totalitarian examples I have come up with are an unfair distortion of their work. They merely claimed to be “interested in maximizing society’s welfare.” Hasn’t that always been the goal of economists?

Indeed most economists, with the exception of the Austrian school, have seen the economist as an adviser to government. The advice of Adam Smith and David Ricardo was to promote free trade. To this day, I believe that the most reliable advice economists can give on topics such as trade, outsourcing, and immigration, is to point out the broad, long-term and often unappreciated benefits of these activities relative to their narrow, short-term and exaggerated adverse effects.

In the twentieth century, economists refined their analysis of the social benefits of markets. They proved that free markets lead to an optimal allocation of resources. This proof rests on a specific definition of “optimal allocation” and, more importantly, on perfectly competitive markets.

Because some important industries clearly are not perfectly competitive, economists conceded the desirability of regulation of such industries. Then, during and after the Great Depression, economists focused on the need for government to manage the business cycle and in particular to fight unemployment.* Finally, in the 1970’s and later, economists discovered many types of market imperfections, notably problems related to information, that could be used to justify government intervention — see my essay on Hayekians and Stiglitzians.

My point is that — with the exception of the Austrians — economists have been going down a slippery slope of interventionism for a long time. Krueger and Kahneman are simply further down that slope.

Here’s my take on “libertarian paternalism” and related matters:

Libertarian Paternalism
A Libertarian Paternalist’s Dream World
The Short Answer to Libertarian Paternalism
Second-Guessing, Paternalism, Parentalism, and Choice
Another Thought about Libertarian Paternalism
The Economics of Corporate Fitness Programs
Another Voice Against the New Paternalism

Science’s Anti-Scientific Bent

Richard Lindzen, Alred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, writes about “Climate of Fear” at OpinionJournal:

Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes? . . .

Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man’s responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn’t just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn’t happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming. . . .

So how is it that we don’t have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It’s my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton’s concern was based on the fact that the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] had singled out Mr. Mann’s work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested–a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community’s defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences–as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union–formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton’s singling out of a scientist’s work smacked of intimidation.

All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists–a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry. . . .

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

The phrase “scientific objectivity” conjures an image of the super-human scientist — devoid of ambition and dedicated only to “the truth.” Such beings are few and very far between.

Scientific objectivity is an emergent phenomenon; it is not something that resides in a person or group of persons. Scientific objectivity happens when there is an open presentation of and debate about the validity and meaning of putative facts. Science — which is done by flawed, biased humans — yields useful results only if all voices are heard, most especially the voices of dissent.

When the scientific “community” circles its wagons around a particular thesis, it’s a pretty good indication that the thesis has flaws which the “community” wishes to hide from public view. That is the opposite of objectivity.

Sir Isaac Newton said “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” The scientific “community” today seems to be populated heavily by pygmies.

P.S. On that note, read this piece by John Stossel.

The Intellectual Life

Alanyzer posts a review of The Intellectual Life, by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. Read the review, then buy the book. A faculty adviser gave me a copy about 45 years ago. I read it then, and re-read it many times before passing it along to my son. I think I’ll buy another copy and read it again.

Where’s Substantive Due Process When You Need It?

McQ at QandO asks “Massachusetts ‘health care’ prelude to government takeover?” — and answers in the affirmative. When it happens, I am sure that the U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to step in. The Court ought to invalidate any such takeover as a violation of liberty of contract, which is guaranteed in Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution. The Court used to invoke the doctrine of substantive due process to uphold liberty of contract. As I pointed out here:

The Framers understood very well that obligation of contracts (or liberty or freedom of contract) is both a matter of liberty and a matter of property. For to interfere legislatively with liberty of contract amounts to a deprivation of due process because such interference prevents willing parties from employing their labor or property in the pursuit of otherwise lawful ends. That is, the legislature finds them “guilty” of otherwise lawful actions by forbidding and penalizing those actions.

State-run health insurance would deprive health-care providers and their patients of the freedom to decide the terms under which they will do business with one another.

This post at The Volokh Conspiracy suggests that the concept of substantive due process, which came to maturity in Lochner v. New York (1905), only to be cast aside during the New Deal, may be regaining respectability. If that’s true — and I hope it is — it will be just in time to save the citizens of Massachusetts from the Commonwealth’s version of socialized medicine.

Charles Murray’s Grand Plan

Charles Murray — he of The Bell Curve fame — recently unveiled his grand plan to overhaul the welfare state. His plan, which Murray outlines in his new book, In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State, amounts to this: Cut out the government middleman and give everyone who is older than 21 and not in jail $10,000 a year (or less, depending on income). The idea, I guess, is to accomplish three things:

Eliminate the “house cut,” that is, the cost of maintaining the multitude of bureaucracies, consultants, and contractors. In addition to wasting money, they often are effective self-promoters.

Eliminate myriad special-interest programs — each of which has a vocal constituency — because these are seldom cut or eliminated individually, in spite of an aggregate cost to which most taxpayers object. Make the welfare state an all-or-nothing proposition in which every free adult has an equal stake.

Let individuals decide for themselves how best to use their “gift” from other taxpayers. On balance, they will make better decisions than bureaucrats, and those decisions (e.g., more education) will yield higher incomes. Thus the cost of the program will go down in the long run, and support for its expansion will be harder to come by.

Here are excerpts of Murray’s interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online:

Kathryn Jean Lopez: First things first. $10,000? Who’s getting and when? And can I use it on my credit-card debt?

Charles Murray: If you’ve reached your 21st birthday, are a United States citizen, are not incarcerated, and have a pulse, you get the grant, electronically deposited in monthly installments in an American bank of your choice with an ABA routing number. If you make more than $25,000, you pay part of it back in graduated amounts. At $50,000, the surtax maxes out at $5,000. I also, reluctantly but with good reason, specify that $3,000 has to be devoted to health care. Apart from that, you can use the grant for whatever you want. Enjoy. . . .

Lopez: How can even low-income folks have a “comfortable retirement” under your plan? Is that foolproof?

Murray: Someone turning 21 has about 45 years before retirement. The lowest average real return for the U.S. stock market for any 45-year period since 1801 is 4.3 percent. Round that down to 4 percent and work the magic of compound interest. Just a $2,000 contribution a year amounts to about $253,000 at retirement. A low-income couple that has followed that strategy retires with more than half a million dollars in the bank plus $20,000 continuing annual income from the grant. Sounds comfortable to me. As for “foolproof,” think of it this way: All of the government’s guarantees for Social Security depend on the U.S. economy growing at a rate that, at the very least, is associated with an historically worst average return of 4 percent in the stock market (actually, it needs a much stronger economy than that). Absent economic growth, no plan is foolproof. With economic growth, mine is. . . .

Lopez: Under your plan, the government spends more first, but saves money in the long run, right? But is there any guarantee folks in the future abide by the plan? Can’t a few pols wanting to restore an entitlement here or there ruin things?

Murray: I leave the size of the grant to the political process, but there is a built-in brake. Congress can pass hundreds of billions of dollars in favors for special groups, because no single allocation is large enough to mobilize the opposition of a powerful coalition opposing it. A change in the size of the grant directly effects everyone over the age of 21. Every time Congress talks about changing the size of the grant, it will be the biggest story in the country.

The one thing that can’t be left to the political process is the requirement that the grant replace all other transfers. That has to be a constitutional requirement, written in language that even Supreme Court justices can’t ignore. Assuming such a thing is possible.

And there’s the rub. Coalitions of special-interest groups will band together in defense of the status quo because each of them will seek to preserve “its” program. The fact that they and their constituencies are paying each other’s freight won’t matter. They’ll believe (or pretend to believe) that they’re soaking the rich and “big business,” when — in reality — they are burdening the poor by disincentivizing the inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs who are the mainspring of economic growth. Murray’s grand plan is therefore more likely to be implemented as an add-on to the welfare state than as a substitute for it.

Nevertheless, unlike the anarcho-capitalist contingent, I won’t characterize his proposal as unlibertarian. If it were adopted as an alternative to the present system it probably would lighten the weight that government places on us. That would be great progress, but anything short of the abolition of government is unacceptable to Rothbardians, for they dwell in a wonderland of impossibility. (See this post, for example, and follow the links therein.)

One commenter — a columnist at Bloomberg.com by the name of Andrew Ferguson — has a different objection to Murray’s plan:

His larger goal is to revive those social institutions, particularly the family, the workplace and the local community, which the welfare state has weakened and supplanted and “through which people live satisfying lives.”

If you want to see the enervating effects of the all- encompassing welfare state, he says, look at Europe, where marriage and birth rates have plunged and work and religion have lost their traditional standing as sources of happiness and personal satisfaction. . . .

In Europe, he says with evident disdain, “the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible.”

Here the reader of “In Our Hands” may suddenly pull up short. What began as a wonkish policy tract enlarges into an exploration of how people live lives of meaning and purpose.

Who knew? It turns out that Charles Murray, the nation’s foremost libertarian philosopher, is a moralist.

In the end, though, moralizing and libertarianism make for an uncomfortable fit.

On the one hand, Murray says he wants to liberate citizens from the welfare state so they can live life however they choose. On the other hand, by liberating citizens from the welfare state, he hopes to force them back into lives of traditional bourgeois virtue.

Mr. Ferguson once wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush. And it shows in the shallowness of his analysis. Murray is not “moralizing.” Murray is explaining that when individuals are liberated from the welfare state they are more likely to adopt — voluntarily — those mores that keep the welfare state at bay. Murray isn’t hoping to “force” people “back into lives of traditional bourgeois virtue” (the condescenscion drips from that phrase), he is saying that liberty rests on what Ferguson chooses to call “traditional bourgeois virtue.” (For an extended analysis of that proposition, read this, and especially this segment.)

It’s Mostly a Matter of Attitude

Leftism/anarcho-capitalism vs. conservativism/neolibertarianism:

Libertarian-Conservatives Are from the Earth, Liberals Are from the Moon
The Worriers
More about the Worrying Classes
A Dissonant Vision

The Causes of Economic Growth

There are several reasons that the real value of aggregate and per-capita economic output increases with time, in a (more-or-less) free-market economy:

1. Hard work

The tradeoff here is with “non-work” activities, and the tradeoff can be costly. But those who choose wisely in sacrificing non-work activities then acquire additional cash income, which can be used to offset the loss of non-work time and/or to improve the tools of one’s trade.

2. Smart work

Working smarter requires education, specialized training, and on-the-job learning. Today’s workers are (on the whole) more productive than their predecessors because the education, training, and on-the-job learning of today’s workers incorporates lessons learned by their predecessors.

3. Saving and investment

Resources that are saved (not used to produce consumption goods) can flow into investment (services and goods such as pharmaceutical research and development, advanced computer and telecommunications technologies). It is investment that enables the production of new, more, and better consumer goods with a given amount of labor. (Government investment is an inferior alternative to private investment.)

4. Invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship

These are the primary activities through which saving becomes investment, usually via the medium of financial institutions. Inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs (along with shareholders, debtholders, and financial intermediaries) accept the risks associated with failure and the rewards of success. It is the prospect of rewards that encourages invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship — and the benefits they bestow on workers and consumers. (Invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship — like work — are “socially responsible” activities because the pursuit of gain is motivated by the satisfaction of wants.)

5. Trading

If A makes bread and B makes butter — and if both prefer buttered bread — both benefit from trade. Where they produce bread and butter matters not; A and B could be neighbors, live in different parts of the United States, or one of them could live in a different country. In any event, both are made better off through voluntary exchange.

6. Population growth

Given the foregoing, a larger population means more people to work “hard” and “smart”; more output that can be saved and invested; more inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs whose activities can be leveraged into greater per-capita output; and a multiplication of opportunities for beneficial voluntary exchange.

7. The rule of law under a minimal state

Predation — whether by individuals, mobs, or government — discourages everything that fosters economic growth. The more that government tries to direct the economy, the less it will grow and satisfy human wants.

Wrong Verdict

This galls me:

Texas Mom Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity

By JULIA GLICK, Associated Press Writer

McKINNEY, Texas – A mother charged with murder for cutting off her baby daughter’s arms in what her lawyers portrayed as a religious frenzy was found not guilty by reason of insanity Friday by a judge.

The proper verdict is “guilty but insane.” The proper punishment is treatment (for the little good it will do), followed by a life sentence without possiblity of parole. Instead, the woman in question “will be sent to a state mental hospital and held until she is no longer deemed a threat to herself or others.” But a “cure” for murderous behavior is unlikely, and the hospital’s incentive will be to pronouce her “cured.” After all, why should taxpayers support a nut-house that can’t cure nut-cases?

Hanging Separately

Norman F. Hapke Jr. has an insightful post at The American Thinker. In “The Antiwar Crowd Forgets We’re All in This Together,” he writes:

Wellington is reputed to have said, “A great nation cannot fight a small war.” His country’s success in the 19th century belied that idea for Great Britain, but our experience in Viet Nam and Iraq lends some credence to the phrase. In neither place were we ever in any danger of losing militarily, but in each our adversaries have focused on the real center of gravity, our self-confidence and will-to-win.

Our enemies are vile and heartless but they are not stupid. There is a direct bright line from the Buddhist monk’s self-immolation in Saigon in 1963 through Somalia in 1998 to Abu Ghraib and every suicide bomber driving the streets of Baghdad today. They know we are susceptible to what the media, by its institutional imperative, wants to show us, and they exploit our openness. That fact of our society is a given.

What is not a given is how our elites have reacted. . . .

Our elites and politicians have failed to realize that the best chance we have of winning this war quickly and with minimum losses is if our adversary sees a united, resolute America putting its disagreements aside so that it can bring maximum power and ingenuity to bear on achieving its objectives. If we foreclose the only avenue they have of ever coming close to defeating us, the war will soon be resolved. We can argue the origins of the war, the faulty intel, and all those presently irrelevant issues when our boot is on the bloody neck of the last terrorist. Until then we should concentrate on winning. No one on this planet can defeat us. We can only defeat ourselves.

Precisely. I concluded “Shall We All Hang Separately?” with these thoughts:

The Left has, by its words and deeds over the decades, seceded from the mutual-defense pact of the Constitution. The Left has served notice that it will do everything in its power to weaken the ability of those Americans who aren’t post-patriotic to prepare for and execute an effective mutual defense.

Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And Lincoln was right, but he was able to reunite the “house” by force. That is not an option now. The Left has more effectively seceded from the Union than did the Confederacy, but the Left’s secession cannot be rectified by force.

And so, those Americans who wish “to provide for the common defence” are forced to share a foxhole with those post-patriots who wish to undermine “the common defence.”

If the Left’s agenda prevails, we shall indeed all hang separately.

There’s No Such Thing As a Business Tax

I cringe whenever someone proposes a business tax (or tax increase). Businesses don’t pay taxes; we all pay business taxes, one way or another.

It is true that a static, microeconomic analysis can “prove” that a particular kind of tax falls on business owners, under certain circumstances. But that is a first-order effect; it overlooks the dynamic, long-run effects of business taxes.

Even if a business tax can be contrived so as to fall (immediately) on the owners of certain kinds of businesses, the result is to drive up the costs of operating those businesses. Some businesses may be able to recoup higher costs by increasing prices, which means that the consumer is able to buy fewer units of a good or service, thus reducing the demand for the labor and capital used in the production of that good or service.

To the extent that a business tax can’t be passed along to consumers (and, indirectly, employees), the affected businesses experience lower profits. That makes business formation and expansion less attractive, thus reducing economic growth and job creation.

In any event, it should be clear that business taxes are “bad business” for consumers, workers, and business owners (who happen also to be human). A business tax has many victims, most of them unintended.

Government executives and legislators resort to business taxes because (a) they don’t understand who really pays those taxes or (b) they do understand and don’t care because their constituents don’t understand. And it makes their constituents feel good when a politician “sticks it to business.” (It’s sort of like rooting for the executioner when you’re next in line for the guillotine.)

So, when your mayor, city council, governor, or State legislature proposes a business tax (or an increase in a business tax), shout “no!” and hold onto your wallet.

Two Heroes and a Blackguard

Laurels to

[t]wo Ukraininan doctors, Vadym Lazaryev and Vladymyr Ishchenko, [who] have been seeking asylum in Ireland since 2004, after they were forced to flee their country for exposing appalling human rights abuses of women and unborn children in the Ukraine.

The doctors were part of a group working to uncover a macabre system of medical trafficking in the bodies of unborn babies, European Life Network reported today. Doctors were deceiving women into aborting their babies for false “medical” reasons, and then selling the bodies of the children. The children would be aborted live, and their bodies cut into separate organs. In some cases live dissection took place.

Most of the body parts were apparently sold to the burgeoning cosmetic industry of “foetal tissue” youth-enhancing treatments, as well as quack “medical therapies.”

In many cases, women were paid to get pregnant and to deliver the baby at a given gestation. They were paid a higher price for carrying the child closer to term, since abortion is illegal in the Ukraine after 12 weeks gestation.

Dr. Eric Pianka, on the other hand, probably roots for the dark side:

[A] few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth’s population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka . . . , the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. . . .

. . . Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us. . . .

Pianka . . . began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it’s too late.

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world’s population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved. . . .

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third’s of the world’s population. . . .

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn’t merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause. . . .

He spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces their one-child policy. He said, “Smarter people have fewer kids.” He said those who don’t have a conscience about the Earth will inherit the Earth, “. . . because those who care make fewer babies and those that didn’t care made more babies.” He said we will evolve as uncaring people, and “I think IQs are falling for the same reason, too.”

With this, the questioning was over. Immediately almost every scientist, professor and college student present stood to their feet and vigorously applauded the man who had enthusiastically endorsed the elimination of 90 percent of the human population. Some even cheered.

Pianka and his sychophants, I am sure, believe that they are among the chosen 10 percent who should be spared. Pianka clearly belongs to that breed of doom-sayers which wants a society that operates according to its strictures. But society refuses to cooperate, and so the doom-sayers conjure historically and scientifically invalid explanations for the behavior of man and nature. By doing so they are able to convince themselves — and gullible others — that their vision is the correct one. Because they cannot satisfy their power-lust in the real world, they retaliate by conjuring a theoretical world of doom. It is as if they walk around under a thought balloon which reads “Take that!”

I would trade a million Piankas for Drs. Vadym Lazaryev and Vladymyr Ishchenko.

(Thanks to my daughter-in-law and son for pointing me to the linked stories.)

More Communitarians

Occam of the Carbuncle improves on my analysis of communitarianism:

. . . Liberty Corner offers a convenient compass for navigating the political jungle.

“The communitarian state is simply too seductive. It co-opts its citizens through progressive corruption: higher spending to curry favor with voting blocs, higher taxes to fund higher spending and to perpetuate the mechanisms of the state, still higher spending, and so on. Each voting bloc insists on sustaining its benefits — and increasing them at every opportunity — for one of two reasons. Many voters actually believe that largesse of the communitarian state is free to them, and some of them are right. Other voters know better, but they grab what they can get because others will grab it if they don’t.” . . .

I would add a third type of communitarian voter to Tom’s list – the one who knows the state’s largesse is not free, but sincerely believes that the strictly enforced “compassion” of collectivist initiatives is the best way. This voter is typically driven by a belief in the inevitability of poverty and a sort of noblesse oblige toward the less “fortunate”. Typically, the paying of taxes is viewed by this sort of voter as a sacred duty and even a privilege. The state is seen as a massive charitable organization.

Spot on.

More than Enough of Armchair Critics

I wrote “Enough of Amateur Critics” in response to all the finger-pointing and blame-shifting that ensued the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. The principles therein apply to matters other than natural disasters. There’s war, for instance. In that regard, Jay Tea of WizBang! advances my theme in “Everyone makes missteaks.”

Remember the "Little Ice Age"?

George Will does. As do I.

One Sunday morning in January or February of 1977, when I lived in western New York State, I drove to the news stand to pick up my Sunday Times. I had to drive my business van because my car wouldn’t start. (Odd, I thought.) I arrived at the stand around 8:00 a.m. The temperature sign on the bank across the street then read -16 degrees (Fahrneheit). The proprietor informed me that when he opened his shop at 6:00 a.m. the reading was -36 degrees.

That was the nadir of the coldest winter I can remember. The village reservoir froze in January and stayed frozen until March. (The fire department had to pump water from the Genessee River to the village’s water-treatment plant.) Water mains were freezing solid, even though they were 6 feet below the surface. Many homeowners had to keep their faucets open a trickle to ensure that their pipes didn’t freeze. And, for the reasons cited in Will’s article, many scientists — and many Americans — thought that a “little ice age” had arrived and would be with us for a while.

But science is often inconclusive and just as often slanted to serve a political agenda. (Also, see this.) That’s why I’m not ready to sacrifice economic growth and a good portion of humanity on the altar of global warming and other environmental fads.

More about Just War

Edward Feser replies to a reply from David Gordon on the subject of just war. For background, read my earlier post about the Feser-Gordon exchange, and follow the links therein. Feser’s latest is here.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: