One Small Blow for Freedom of Speech

First, the bad news:

Andy Roth of The Club for Growth posts a roundup of reactions to McCain-Feingold Iron Curtain Day. As David Keating explains in a followup post,

our free speech rights disappeared at 12:00:01 AM this morning.

It is now illegal for virtually all nonprofit groups to run any radio or TV ad that merely mentions the name of a congressman. Even a 10 second spot that simply had a congressman’s photo and no audio could land you in jail.

David goes on to quote “Former FEC Chairman Brad Smith [who] explains the ‘reform’ today and asks”:

In exchange for surrendering our First Amendment rights, what have we gained? Do you feel Congress is more ethical than before? Less attuned to special interests? Do you feel more empowered, or less empowered, than you did four years ago, when the law passed? Can you name any tangible benefit from these prohibitions?

Absolutely none. Not a one. The only benefit accrues to McCain, Feingold, and the other hypocrites on Capitol Hill who have used their power to immunize themselves from criticism and to perpetuate their incumbency.

Well, I’m mad as hell about it, and I’m going to do something about it.

So, here’s the good news:

This is an open invitation to the supporters of any U.S. House or Senate candidate who has opposed McCain-Feingold, and who is running against an incumbent who voted for it. Send me the links to your candidate’s web site and to his or her statements about McCain-Feingold. If your candidate has indeed opposed McCain-Feingold and his or her opponent did indeed vote for it, I will publicize those facts right here on this blog.

UPDATE (12/09/06): No one has yet taken up my offer. Sad.

Economics: The Dismal (Non) Science

Marton Fridson, writing at TCS Daily, pours some “Rain on the Economic Forecasters’ Parade“:

Investors are keenly interested in the pronouncements of economic forecasters, judging by the massive amounts of ink and airtime allotted to them by the media. It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that heeding the prognosticators is useful in selecting securities. Whether or not seers have insight into future conditions is a testable proposition. If it turns out that they don’t, governmental attempts to guide the economy also come into question. Such efforts, after all, rely on forecasts generated by the same methodology that private-sector economists utilize.

Statistics compiled by Bloomberg L.P. shed light on the success of prominent forecasters. Each month, the financial information company surveys 60-plus economists from business and academe. The respondents handicap key indicators for the current quarter (which will not be reported until after quarter-end), and for the next four quarters. Among several indicators covered in the survey, I’ll focus on gross domestic product (GDP), the most popular measure of aggregate economic activity. . . .

[The forecasters] overestimated current-quarter GDP 15 times and underestimated it just 6 times, with one bulls-eye. . . .

[D]uring 2001-2006, the year-ahead forecast hardly varied from one year to the next. The median prediction was in the range of 3.1% to 4.0% in every single quarter. Perhaps not coincidentally, the actual quarterly GDP increase over the past 25 years (1981-2005) averaged 3.14%. The forecasters, in aggregate, perennially thought that one year hence, business conditions would be just about average. In reality however, actual GDP gains gyrated between 0.2% and 7.5%. The forecasters’ nearly inert consensus was all but worthless. . . .

As for government policymakers, the message is to forget about trying to control short-run economic performance. Given the lagged impact of fiscal or monetary intervention, deciding whether stimulus or restraint is needed depends on knowing where GDP will be a few quarters down the line. That isn’t something economists have shown they can reliably predict. A more appropriate mission for government policy is to refrain from meddling that ultimately undermines confidence among business and consumers.

Fridson corroborates my similar critique of macroenomic forecasting (first link below). But the failure of economics as a quantitative discipline runs deeper than its inability to model macroeconomic activity with any degreee of reliability.

“Hard science” is far from “hard.” But economics, by comparison, is essentially a pre-scientific, a priori mode of analysis. That’s not to denigrate the valid insights of the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, but to suggest that the validity of their insights precedes quantification and does not depend on it.

Read on:
About Economic Forecasting
Is Economics a Science?
Economics as Science
Maybe Economics Is a Science
Hemibel Thinking
Physics Envy
Proof That “Smart” Economists Can Be Stupid
Time to Retire the Fair Model
The Thing about Science
What’s Wrong with Game Theory
Debunking “Scientific Objectivity”
Science’s Anti-Scientific Bent
Ten Commandments of Economics
More Commandments of Economics
Science, Axioms, and Economics
Mathematical Economics

Academic Fools

AP story:

Harvard dean defends Khatami invitation

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The dean of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government defended the decision to invite former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to speak on the eve of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

“Do we listen to those that we disagree with, and vigorously challenge them, or do we close our ears completely?” Dean David Ellwood said in an interview published Thursday in The Boston Globe.

This is an excellent example of what passes for rational thought in the academy.

What Dean Ellwood says, in effect, is this: We should listen to an armed thug who is preparing to attack us because if we listen we might learn something. Right! What we’ll “learn” is that the armed thug really isn’t preparing to attack us — just before he does that very thing.

It should come as no surprise to academicians of Ellwood’s ilk (which seems to be most of them) that non-academicians take them for deluded fools, dupes, and Leftists who prefer despotism to freedom. For that is what they are.

The Source of Rights

Stephan Kinsella of Mises Economics Blog, in a pugnacious and meandering post, finally gets around to naming the source of rights, as he sees it. That source is empathy, which is:

1. Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives. See Synonyms at pity.

2. The attribution of one’s own feelings to an object.

Empathy has something to do with it. But my view is that rights arise from self-interest, best expressed as the Golden Rule:

“Love your neighbor as yourself” – Moses (ca. 1525-1405 BCE) in the Torah, Leviticus
“What you do not want others to do to you, do not do to others.” – Confucius (ca. 551–479 BCE)
“What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man.” – Hillel (ca. 50 BCE-10 CE)
“Do to others as you would have them do unto to you.” – Jesus (ca. 5 BCE—33 CE) in the Gospels, Luke 6:31; Luke 10:27 (affirming of Moses); Matthew 7:12;
“Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you” — Muhammad (c. 571 – 632 CE) in The Farewell Sermon.

The Golden Rule implies empathy; that is, the validity of the Golden Rule hinges on the view that others have the same feelings as oneself. But the Golden Rule also encapsulates a lesson learned over the eons of human coexistence. That lesson? If I desist from harming others, they (for the most part) will desist from harming me. (There’s the self-interest.) The exceptions usually are dealt with by codifying the myriad instances of the Golden Rule (e.g., do not steal, do not kill) and then enforcing those instances through communal action (i.e., justice and defense).

The lesson here is three-fold:

Rights are “natural,” but not in the sense that they are somehow innate in humans. Rather, rights are natural in the sense that they arise from a nearly universal sense of empathy and an experiential belief in the value of mutual forbearance.

Those “natural rights” have no force or effect unless they are generally recognized and enforced through communal action.

Rights may therefore vary from place to place and time to time, according to the mores of the community in which they are recognized and enforced.

Those "Dedicated" Public "Educators"

They not only refuse to teach, they also try to prevent others from teaching. What a web of woe we have woven around our children — except for those who are lucky enough to have escaped the public school system.

See also: Detroit Teachers Put Special Interest Politics Ahead of Students (written in anticipation of the Detroit teachers’ strike) and Schools Need Competition Now (John Stossel’s take on the public-school monopoly).

Is Exit Unrealistic?

Joe Miller (Bellum et Mores) writes that “the preferred libertarian solution to political philosophy, namely exit, isn’t a realistic option right now. Voice, however poorly it might work, is an option.” His views seem to parallel mine:

Social norms can and do evolve. Moreover, in a society with voice and exit they will evolve toward greater liberty, rather than less, if exit is not mooted by legislative and judicial imposition of common norms across all segments of society.

Exit remains an option within the United States, because there are significant inter-State differences in tax rates and regulatory burdens, as I discuss here. But it is undeniable that those differences have dwindled as the central government has usurped more and more power from the States and the people.

Which leads to the question whether exit would be a realistic option were the laws of all States to approach oppressive homogeneity. Americans seeking liberty would then have to look elsewhere for it. Exit would then become far less feasible than it is now, given the high emotional and finanical costs of leaving one’s homeland for a foreign land. Consider, for example, the list of nations that rank as high or higher than the United States on the 2006 Index of Economic Freedom:

Hong Kong
Singapore
Ireland
Luxembourg
United Kingdom (?????)
Iceland
Estonia
Denmark
Australia
New Zealand

The looming loss of exit as a realistic option argues for redoubled efforts to resist — and to roll back, as far as possible — the encroaching homogeneity of the laws of the States. It is likely that that homeogeneity will be neither of the “Left” nor of the “Right” (and certainly not libertarian) but a blend of the worst of both possible worlds. There will be no winners under a homogeneously oppressive central government, except those who run it.

Status, Spite, Envy, and Income Redistribution

Andrew Roth of The Club for Growth summarizes the current blogospheric debate about income redistribution. Will Wilkinson (The Fly Bottle) adds what I think is the clincher. Go. Read.

(My views about income inequality and redistribution are captured in the preceding post and the various posts linked to therein.)

Your Labor Day Reading

This, this, and this (summarized here). The poor in the U.S. are less poor than they used to be (and they are not, by and large, the same poor of a generation ago). Moreover, the poor in the U.S. are no poorer than the poor in the socialistic “paradises” of Western Europe and Canada. But the poor in the U.S. can become better off than the denizens of those other nations. And the chances of becoming better off are much greater in the U.S., given its superior economic performance.

Related links:
Now and Then, by Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek
More Data on Middle Class Americans, ditto
Half Empty or Half Full, Part I, by Russell Roberts of Cafe Hayek
A Kept Promise, by Greg Mankiw of the eponymous blog
A Primer on the Standard of Living and the Cost of Living, by Russell Roberts of Cafe Hayek
Census and Sensibility, by Jerry Bowyer at TCS Daily
Is the Increased Earnings Inequality among Americans Bad?, by Gary Becker of The Becker-Posner Blog
Why Rising Income Inequality in the United States Should Be a Noninssue, by Richard Posner of ditto

A Haunting Lyric

I think I first heard A.A. MIlne‘s “Disobedience” as a rope-skipping chant. It’s a hanting lyric, the first three lines of which you may never be able to banish from your mind. Here is the first stanza:

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he;
“You must never go down
to the end of the town,
if you don’t go down with me.”

You Bet Your Life

Most persons who are confronted by an armed mugger will accede to the mugger’s demands for wallet, jewelry, etc. The immediate prospect of being killed or injured generally outweighs the thought of resistance or flight, neither of which is likely to be effective and both of which might simply infuriate the mugger. The instintive logic at work in most persons goes like this: My odds of surviving this incident unharmed are much greater if I accede to the mugger’s demands than if I try to resist or flee. I value my life and limb more than the money and jewelry demanded by the mugger. Therefore, I will accede to the mugger’s demands.

Environmental alarmists react to the very mixed and uncertain evidence about climate change and its causes as if they were facing an armed mugger. Oh, they say (in effect), let’s give in to the “mugger” and forswear our wealth so that we might live to see a cooler, less turbulent day.

The difference, of course, is that the threat posed by the mugger is immediate and obvious. He’s right there in your face. That is not the case with climate change; we see the change (e.g., rising temperatures) but we are very far from certain about its causes, effects, and future course. (In addition to the item linked above, see this, this, and this, and follow the many links in the third item. See also John Ray’s Greenie Watch, which is replete with relevant material.)

Those who counsel environmental “action” in the face of such great uncertainty about the causes, effects, and future course of climate change are not being mugged, nor are they witnesses to a mugging. They are spectators to a scene that is visible to them through a translucent screen. They see something going on and they assume that it is a crime and that they can identify and shoot the criminal without harming the victim. In fact, there may be neither criminal nor victim. To assume that there is a crime and an identifiable criminal runs the risk of harming innocent persons (i.e., everyone) for the sake of nothing.

We are not facing the one-sided certainties of such screen “gems” as The Day After Tomorrow or An Inconvenient Truth. We are peering through a sceen darkly. The only muggers we face, in actuality, are the perpetrators of such propaganda as The Day After and Inconvenient — and those scientists who abet them, wittingly or not.

Do you want to bet your life (or livelihood) on the biased inferences of environmentalist muggers? I don’t. I want a lot more information about what is happening to the climate, why it is happening, whether the consequences for humans are good or ill, and what (if anything) humans can do about it if the consequences are ill.

Related link: Reality-Based Skepticism of Government Action to Reduce Global Warming, by Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek

Is the State Necessarily Paternalistic?

Correspondence with a reader about my post, “The Feds and ‘Libertarian Paternalism’,” leads me to this observation:

The state is not paternalistic per se. The state acts paternalistically when it forces or incentivizes its citizens to behave in certain ways. But the state is not acting paternalistically when it shields its citizens and enables them to behave as they will, in accordance with the harm principle as it is properly understood (see below).

Related definitions:

paternalism – the attitude (of a person or a government) that subordinates should be controlled in a fatherly way for their own good

shielding – the act of shielding from harm

Democrats: The Anti-People People

From a story by Jim Kouri at The National Ledger:

The continuous demonizing and vilifying of Wal-Mart Stores by Democrat Party officials is not working to turn Americans against the enormously successful US retailer, according to a recent poll. It may actually be hurting some Democrat politicians who are trying to hide their liberal-left agenda.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark on Friday released the following statement on a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

“This poll is the latest proof that politicians will turn off most voters by attacking Wal-Mart and that the attacks themselves are not working. America’s working families want to decide for themselves where to work and where to shop.

“The numbers make it clear that America’s working families value Wal-Mart’s job opportunities, savings, and the benefits we provide the communities we serve. By attacking Wal-Mart, politicians show they are out of touch with working families.

“Working families support Wal-Mart because the company creates tens of thousands of jobs each year, provides health care for as little as $11 per month, and because economic studies verify that Wal-Mart saves American families $2300 a year.”

Here’s the moral, in a nutshell, for those Democrats who are open to reason: Wal-Mart provides jobs for low-income families; Wal-Mart offers low prices to low-income families. When politicians hurt Wal-Mart, they hurt low-income families. Get it? Republicans do.

Related: See this post by Donald Boundreaux, whom I sometimes chide for his radical libertarianism. When sticks to economics he is first rate.

Remembrance of Teachers Past

With the aid of the Social Security Death Index (searched via this tool), I “found” several teachers and school adminstrators from my K-12 days who have passed on. At the end of this post I draw meaning from this trivial exercise. First, the list of “found” educators:

First grade:
Margaret S. Lester, 02/24/1921 – 04/03/1989

Third grade:
Ethel Parsons, 05/27/1895 – 05/xx/1974

Fourth grade:
Lila Nurenberg, 02/07/1905 – 07/xx/1972

Sixth grade:
Esther L. Minnie, 08/05/1909 – 03/xx/1980

Seventh grade (homeroom):
Maurice B. Greene, 10/22/1910 – 06/22/1995

Junior high principal:
Stanley R. Hardman, 09/13/1901 – 03/05/1992

Junior high math:
William L. Laidlaw, 11/12/1904 – 03/xx/1972

Senior high principal:
Omer P. Bartow, 09/15/1902 – 08/22/1992

Senior high math:
Frank B. Yon, 01/04/1920 – 08/11/2001

Senior high Latin:
Thelma Sharritt, 04/07/1900 – 01/xx/1982

Senior high English:
Aharas Kresin, 10/06/1908 – 01/23/2001

Senior high social studies:
Dwight Lange, 08/02/1918 – 01/05/1994

Senior high guidance counselor:
Burman J. Misenar, 07/25/1915 – 08/06/1994

Superintendent of schools:
Howard Crull, 04/09/1898 – 06/xx/1968

Superintendent of schools:
Norris Hanks, 05/06/1900 – 10/xx/1981

Missing are: female teachers who were unmarried when they taught me but went on to marry and use their husbands’ names, teachers with combinations of first names and last names that are common, and teachers whom I knew only by last name. Also missing, of course, are those teachers with uncommon first name-last name combinations who are still among the quick.

I am convinced that the principal of the first school I attended (a Mrs. Forbes) was born soon after (if not during) the Civil War. I exaggerate (a bit), but it is evident that my worldview was influenced strongly by many persons who came of age in the early part of the 20th century, persons who remembered vividly the Great Depression and World War II. Then there was the influence of my maternal grandmother, who came of age in the late 1800s. (See here.)

Think about the persons who were influential in your life when you were a child and adolescent. When were they born? What great events did they live through as adults? Do you, in some ways, see their attitudes reflected in yours?

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