Month: January 2008

Conspicuous Consumption and Race

“Conspicuous Consumption and Race” is a paper by Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov, which I have summarized and addressed here. Now comes Ray Fisman, writing at Slate, to add his $0.02 worth:

A few years ago, Bill Cosby set off a firestorm with a speech excoriating his fellow African-Americans for, among other things, buying $500 sneakers instead of educational toys for their children. In a recent book, Come On People, he repeats his argument that black Americans spend too much money on designer clothes and fancy cars, and don’t invest sufficiently in their futures….

If signaling [conspicuous consumption] is just part of a deeper human impulse to seek status in our communities, what’s wrong with that, anyway? If a household chooses to spend a lot on visible consumption because it gets happiness from achieving high standing among its neighbors, why should we care? To return to [Bill] Cosby’s concerns, if blacks are spending more on shoes and cars and jewelry, they must be spending less on something else. And that something else turns out to be mostly health and education. According to the study, black households spend more than 50 percent less on health care than whites of comparable incomes and 20 percent less on education. Unfortunately, these are exactly the investments that the black families need to make in order to close the black-white income gap.

Okay, so far, but in his next (and concluding) paragraph Fisman says this:

In his controversial speech, Bill Cosby appealed to the African-American community to start investing in their futures. What’s troubling about the message of this study is that Cosby and others may not be battling against a black culture of consumption, but a more deeply seated human pursuit of status. In this sense, Cosby’s critics may be right—only when black incomes catch up to white incomes will the apparent black-white gap in spending on visible goods disappear.

Here, Fisman reveals himself as a racial paternalist. “Deeply seated culture” may be a reason for conspicuous consumption, but it is not an excuse for it. We are not dumb animals; we are human beings, capable of thinking about our future and how to make it better, and capable of acting on our thoughts.

Fisman’s article is a thinly disguised apology for income redistribution and affirmative action. To which I say this: Those who have chosen to rise above their cultural and “instinctual” disadvantages should not be forced to subsidize those who have chosen to be bound by those disadvantages.

Index of Economic Freedom, 2008

The Heritage Foundation has published the 2008 Index of Economic Freedom. I am not impressed by the degree of economic freedom in the world, given that the United States ranks fifth; Canada, sixth, and the UK, tenth.

Intellectuals and Capitalism

Why is “capitalism” a dirty word in academia?

Andrew Norton notes that disaffected intellectuals since Rousseau have been attacking capitalism for its failure to meet ‘true human needs.’(26) The claim is unfounded, so what is it about capitalism that so upsets them?

Joseph Schumpeter offered part of the answer. He observed that capitalism has brought into being an educated class that has no responsibility for practical affairs, and that this class can only make a mark by criticising the system that feeds them.(27) Intellectuals attack capitalism because that is how they sell books and build careers.

More recently, Robert Nozick has noted that intellectuals spend their childhoods excelling at school, where they occupy the top positions in the hierarchy, only to find later in life that their market value is much lower than they believe they are worth. Seeing ‘mere traders’ enjoying higher pay than them is unbearable, and it generates irreconcilable disaffection with the market system.(28)

But the best explanation for the intellectuals’ distaste for capitalism was offered by Friedrich Hayek in The Fatal Conceit.(29) Hayek understood that capitalism offends intellectual pride, while socialism flatters it. Humans like to believe they can design better systems than those that tradition or evolution have bequeathed. We distrust evolved systems, like markets, which seem to work without intelligent direction according to laws and dynamics that no one fully understands.

Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them. It does not need them to make it run, to coordinate it, or to redesign it. The intellectual critics of capitalism believe they know what is good for us, but millions of people interacting in the marketplace keep rebuffing them. This, ultimately, is why they believe capitalism is ‘bad for the soul’: it fulfils human needs without first seeking their moral approval.

“Why Capitalism Is Good for You,” by Peter Saunders

Related posts:
“Lefty Profs” (21 Feb 2006)
“Why So Few Free-Market Economists?” (12 Oct 2006)
“Academic Bias” (22 Oct 2007)

Hillary Admits Error

Error, in this case, being Democrats’ opposition to deficit spending (when it’s the result of GOP tax cuts) because it’s “fiscally irresponsible.” Now that she’s running (scared) for president, Hillary has changed her tune:

“Stimulus shouldn’t be paid for,” declared Mrs. Clinton on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “The stimulus, by the very nature of the economic problems we’re facing, is going to require an injection of federal funding.”

You will notice, however, that she’s calling for more spending (for the children, I presume), not further tax cuts. How cynical can you get?

Related posts:

“Curing Debt Hysteria in One Easy Lesson” (21 Apr 2004)
“Debt Hysteria, Revisited” (17 Sep 2005)

The Current Crop of Candidates

If you have read my posts “Presidential Legacies” and “The Modern Presidency: A Tour of American History since 1900” it will not surprise you to know that I find little to admire in the current crop of presidential candidates. The candidate who comes closest to matching my views on a range of issues (seven points of agreement on eleven issues) is Fred Thompson, who has the proverbial “snowball’s chance in hell” of winning anything.

All I can hope for, at this point, is a GOP winner in November. That’s not because I much like any of the GOP candidates (I don’t), but because I would rather have Supreme Court appointments in the hands of a Republican president. From that perspective, even Rudy Giuliani looks good.

UPDATE (01/21/08): A McCain–Clinton presidential contest seems most likely at this point. A President McCain might very well subject prospective Supreme Court nominees to a McCain-Feingold litmus test. George Will writes:

McCain says he would nominate Supreme Court justices similar to Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Sam Alito. But how likely is he to nominate jurists who resemble those four: They consider his signature achievement constitutionally dubious.

When the Supreme Court upheld McCain-Feingold 5-4, Scalia and Thomas were in the minority. That was before Alito replaced Sandra Day O’Connor, who was in the majority. Two years later, McCain filed his own brief supporting federal suppression of a right-to-life group’s issue advertisement in Wisconsin because it mentioned a candidate for federal office during the McCain-Feingold blackout period prior to an election. The court ruled 5-4 against McCain’s position, with Alito in the majority.

McCain and Clinton: Not a dime’s worth of difference as far as I can see. Both are statists to the core.

If the LP comes up with a candidate who’s better than Michael Badnarik (the LP’s 2004 nominee), I might just waste my vote on that candidate.

If You Like Old Comic Strips…

…read this and this, and go here.

Quotation of the Day

Mark Steyn quotes Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.

Precisely.

There are valid, libertarian reasons not to accept everything that is claimed to be a libertarian cause (e.g., sodomistic “marriage,” abortion on demand, and absolute freedom of speech). Those reasons are libertarian in that they go to the foundation of liberty, which can exist only in a civil society founded on the mutual respect, trust, and restraint that arise from the observance of socially evolved norms. The undoing of those norms by the state in the name of liberty is a form of civilizational suicide.

Related posts:
“Rights and Liberty” (12 Dec 2007)
“Optimality, Liberty, and the Golden Rule” (18 Dec 2007)

Drinking and Voting

Is it necessary to drink heavily before voting for a Democrat? The answer seems to be “yes,” based on the results of the 2004 presidential election:

Sources: Share of popular vote, by State, derived from this page at Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. Index of alcohol consumption (total of beer, wine, and spirits) in 2005, by State, derived from “Per capita ethanol consumption for States, census regions, and the United States, 1970–2005” at the website of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health.

The four most bibulous (not Bible-reading) jurisdictions are Delaware (index of 2.59), Nevada (2.83), the District of Columbia (3.05), and New Hampshire (3.26). New Hampshirites should change their motto, “Live Free or Die,” to “Live Hard and Die Cold.”

Ron Paul: Anticipating the Smoking Gun

My guest blogger, Postmodern Conservative, was on the right track in these posts (dated 12/13/07 and 12/20/07). James Kirchick of TNR published his “smoking gun” article on 01/08/08.

France, Happiness, and Socialism

What price happiness? French President Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking an answer to the eternal question — so that happiness can be included in measurements of French economic growth.

That’s the lede of an AP story, “French Use Happiness As Economic Measure” (January 10, 2008). The story continues:

Sarkozy said he asked U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel economics prize and a critic of free market economists, and Armatya Sen of India, who won the 1998 Nobel prize for work on developing countries, to lead the analysis in France….

Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics and author of the 2005 book “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,” said Sarkozy may be seeking recognition for policies, popular in Europe, that promote well-being but don’t show up in the GDP statistics….

Jean-Philippe Cotis, the former OECD chief economist who took over as head of France’s statistics office Insee two months ago, said Wednesday that a measure of happiness would complement GDP by taking into account factors such as leisure time — something France has a lot of.

France’s unemployment rate is stubbornly high, and when French people do work they spend less time on the job — 35.9 hours per week compared with the EU average of 37.4.

In other words, if you don’t have the political clout (or stomach) to repeal France’s state-imposed limit on the length of the workweek (35 hours), then you justify it by “proving” that it makes the French happier. (Pourquoi pas?)

And who better to do the job than Stiglitz and Sen, socialists both? Layard’s endorsement of the effort is a dead giveaway, for Layard is a leading proponent of the politics of envy and leveling.

Joseph Sobran: Final Verdict

Guest post:

Aristotle famously said: “I love Plato, but I love truth even more.” Can defenders of Joseph Sobran say the same?

While I don’t wish to make a blanket condemnation of paleocons, I am disappointed how many of them are wedded to an “old boys’ club” mentality. One sees this in the emotive rebuttal by Scott P. Richert (published on Taki Theodoracopulos’ blog) to James Hitchock’s criticism of Sobran and other paleocons in Human Life Review. Richert waxes nostalgic over Sobran’s essays for past issues of Human Life Review. But this is a case of resting on past laurels. Sobran may have done some good in the past but, if like Ezra Pound, a brilliant mind suddenly takes up with bizarre attitudes, this does not mean we should do the same.

What also bothers me is Richert’s mudslinging. He treats Hitchcock like a sophomoric upstart. Never mind that Hitchcock is a veteran conservative commentator and university professor (with a 1965 doctorate from Princeton), who has been in print at least as long as Sobran (who got started with National Review in 1972). To put Richert’s argument as simplistically as it deserves: “Hitchcock is just another neo-con hack. Neo-cons are stupid. Therefore, Hitchcock’s criticism is invalid.” This is the sort of ideological denunciation and deflection that one expects from Marxists.

Here are Hitchcock’s accusations (all documented in the article):

During the 2006 election campaign… Joseph Sobran, a Catholic who considers himself one of the few remaining spokesmen for authentic conservatism… characterized James Webb, the Democratic candidate for senator from Virginia,… as someone “who commanded my immediate trust and respect”….

Despite [Howard] Phillips’ obvious lack of interest in the abortion issue, Sobran has often endorsed the Constitution Party, which he says is the only reliably prolife party in America, and after the election (November 16 [2006]) he found it impossible to distinguish between two “factions” pretending to be two different political parties, but he expressed great satisfaction that Webb’s opponent, the “arrogant” Senator George Allen (who happened to be anti-abortion), had been defeated; then he declared (December 21) that Bush was a worse president than William J. Clinton (who happened to be by far the most zealously pro-abortion president ever to occupy the White House).

[Sobran] praised the pro-abortion Democratic Senator Joseph Biden as “someone who takes his faith very seriously”….

Sobran questions the justice and wisdom of American involvement in World War II.

After the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Sobran wrote a series of articles questioning (and sometimes ridiculing) the fear that al-Qaeda constitutes a threat to American security, and five years later… he reported that for him the real experience of terror was having to undergo a security check at Dulles Airport.

Does Richert address these? Not that I can tell.

I had my own dispute with a Sobran supporter recently. I was told that the controversial columnist was witty and incisive (it is his selling point against humdrum mainstream conservatives). But when I pointed out his collaboration with holocaust revisionists, this was chalked up to sheer guilelessness. So which is it? Either Sobran is a genius, in which case he must be right to get cozy with far-right racialists and anti-war leftists, or he’s a political naïf whose contributions to the conservative cause are extremely limited…. in fact, non-existent at this point.

Previous post: “Sobran’s Intellectual Decline and Fall“

A Misdirected Apology

American Thinker Blog notes that Columbia University professors are apologizing to Ahmadinejad for the “insulting remarks” (i.e., factual statements) aimed at the Iranian nut-case by Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, on September 24.

Would the same Leftist grovelers think to apologize to conservative academics whom they have barred from or driven out of Columbia? I don’t think so.

What is it with Leftists and anti-American regimes? The question answers itself.

The Power of a Woman’s Tears

It’s not hard to believe that Hillary Clinton won the Democrat primary in New Hampshire because of the tears she shed (or almost shed) the day before the primary. Her mediagenic emotional moment must have garnered sympathy from many a female voter — perhaps from many of them who hadn’t planned to vote, until the tears welled up.

It’s as if a goodly fraction of the women of New Hampshire rose up and said, “We are woman…we cry.” This is a qualification for office?

One Hall of Famer

By my standards, only Goose Gossage and Less Smith should have been elected to the Hall of Fame yesterday. Well, the Goose made it. Better yet, no undeserving player was selected from a long list of undeserving candidates.

If only it were politic to un-elect the undeserving, membership in the Hall would really mean something.

Why Popularity Is a Bad Thing

A popular phenomenon (a song, a political movement, a cliché, an item of merchandise, a TV show or movie) is one that a large fraction of the population enjoys, endorses, practices, purchases, or watches. The fans, followers, speakers, buyers, and watchers who make a phenomenon popular are of two types: those who find intrinsic merit in the thing; those who find merit in adhering to what is popular. On which half of the population do you suppose the popularity of a thing mainly depends: the more intelligent half or the less intelligent half?

Now, do you really think popularity is a good thing?

Sobran’s Intellectual Decline and Fall

Guest post:

As a disillusioned paleocon, I’ve complained about the old-right infatuation with extremism in my discussion of the late Samuel Francis. A further example of the paleocon meltdown is the career of Joseph Sobran, former National Review editor turned embittered pamphleteer, holocaust revisionist, and part-time campaigner for the Democratic Party—he has favored liberal candidates against Republicans, and has a decided preference for Democratic foreign policy. Not surprisingly, Sobran has alienated many readers over the years. Recently his erratic political musings were documented by a major Catholic intellectual (James Hitchcock, “Abortion and the ‘Catholic Right’,” Human Life Review, Spring 2007). This is particularly important because Sobran has marketed himself as a latter-day ultramontanist, publishing in Catholic journals like The Wanderer.

Sobran justifies his rhetorical excesses by pointing to the opposite extreme. But surely one can oppose racial quotas and reverse racism without endorsing the nearest Klan leader. Sobran, however, doesn’t have that sense of finesse. As early as 1986 he was offering cautionary praise (but praise nonetheless) for Instauration, a journal published by Wilmot Robertson who wrote The Dispossessed Majority, the bible of high-brow American racialism. As an aside, Robertson is as anti-Christian as he is anti-Jewish. The point here is that it’s hard to write off Sobran’s extremist statements as occasional foibles. No one can commit that many faux pas without really trying!

When people started criticizing Sobran, one of the first persons who rushed to his aid was Mark Weber, long-time member (currently director) of the Institute for Historical Review. The IHR is well known as a “holocaust revisionist” front for neo-Nazism. Sobran has returned the favor many times by championing the “courageous” views of the IHR. Sobran’s worst bit of journalistic muddling is seen in his piece “For Fear of the Jews,” which adopts his usual ingénue style of coy provocation. In it he tells us that Mark Weber is really a nice guy, which is quite beside the point (he’s trying to whitewash Adolf Hitler, who wasn’t a nice guy). As it turns out, Sobran was penning things for the Journal for Historical Review throughout the 1990s, including an essay on “Jewish Power” (January/February, 1999). In 2001 and 2003, Sobran attended conferences hosted by David Irving, who shares Weber’s habit of Hitlerian spin control.

Next time, an answer to apologists for Joe Sobran….

A Fact of Life Is No Excuse for Bad Behavior

I was intrigued by this (at Freespace):

Judicial notice

“…speaking of college students generally the court observes that it is a matter of common knowledge and well established that groups of students are for the most part exuberant, boisterous, and hilarious, and that they do not ordinarily keep regular hours and are addicted to the use and abuse of vibrant and sonorous musical instruments.”

City of Long Beach v. California Lambda Chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity, 255 Cal.App.2d 789, 796 (1967).

It seems that the City of Long Beach had enjoined fraternities from maintaining frat houses in an area that is zoned for apartment houses. Long Beach prevailed at trial; SAE appealed. Does the quoted passage evince “understanding” of the mores of frat boys? It could be read that way.

I was gratified to learn, via FindLaw (free registration required), that the appellate court upheld the judgment of the trial court,

which, in effect, declared that defendants (fraternity houses) be enjoined from occupying, maintaining and using certain described properties in an “R-4” zone unless a variance or exception to the zoning ordinance of Long Beach be obtained.

The City of Long Beach brought an action to enjoin the named fraternities from continuing to use and occupy described premises as fraternity houses. The described premises are located in what is generally known as the “R-4” apartment house district under the Long Beach comprehensive zoning ordinance….

The ordinance in this instance is a valid and proper exercise of the police power, the city council properly and legally exercised its discretion in restricting fraternity houses in an “R-4” zone.

If the City of Long Beach sought to enforce the ordinance against the fraternity because of the behavior of the frat boys, so much the better. Statutory law should, if nothing else, preserve the norms of civilized behavior. Frat rats* are, in my experience, decidedly uncivilized — as noted by the court.
__________
* “Frat rat” was, in my long-ago days as a college student, a derogatory term for fraternity members. (Perhaps it’s still in use; see no. 3, here.) GDIs (Gosh Darned Independents), such as I was, used the term advisedly, having heard, seen, and endured more than enough of the rude, crude, and lewd doings of frat boys.

"Global Warming," Close to Home (II)

UPDATED (02/17/08)

I wrote here about the temperature records at the weather station nearest my home. (The station is about two miles from my home — as the crow flies.) The average temperature for 2007 has just been posted, leading me to make some further observations:

  • It remains the case (as I reported before) that half of the eighteen warmest years on record (years with an average temperature more than one standard deviation above the mean for 1854-2007) occurred before 1980.
  • Every year from 2000 through 2007 (but one) has been cooler than the two very hot years of 1998-99. Moreover, the trend is downward.
  • The cumulative, five-year-average temperature peaked in 2002. That peak was only 0.54 degree higher than the previous peak, which occurred in 1935.

In the interval from 1935 to 2002, my city’s population grew ten-fold; twenty-fold when you include the city’s sprawling suburbs, of which there were none in 1935. What was in 1935 a mid-sized city had become by 2002 a top-40 metropolitan area and, thus, an urban heat island.

UPDATE: See this teaser about the UHI effect in Phoenix.

It’s Happening in Britain…

…and if it’s happening there, it can happen here. What? The suppression of politically incorrect speech by the state — not just a tax-funded university, but the central government itself.

Wolf Howling has the story. It’s about a British blogger, Lionheart, who lays it on the line here, and links to his “offending” posts.

P.S. A good subtitle for this post is “Cowering before Islam.” Someone who is not cowering before Islam, even though his government would like to is Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. (Thanks, again, to Wolf Howling.)

P.P.S. I should have mentioned Canada, of course. Cases in point, the “human rights” complaints against Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Wisdom from Mises

As if to rebuke the extreme individualists who invoke his name, Ludwig von Mises writes:

Seen from the point of view of the individual, society is the great means for the attainment of all his ends. The preservation of society is an essential condition of any plans an individual may want to realize by any action whatever. Even the refractory delinquent who fails to adjust his conduct to the requirements of life within the societal system of cooperation does not want to miss any of the advantages derived from the division of labor. He does not consciously aim at the destruction of society. He wants to lay his hands on a greater portion of the jointly produced wealth than the social order assigns to him. He would feel miserable if antisocial behavior were to become universal and its inevitable outcome, the return to primitive indigence, resulted.

It is illusory to maintain that individuals in renouncing the alleged blessings of a fabulous state of nature and entering into society have foregone some advantages and have a fair claim to be indemnified for what they have lost. The idea that anybody would have fared better under an asocial state of mankind and is wronged by the very existence of society is absurd. Thanks to the higher productivity of social cooperation the human species has multiplied far beyond the margin of subsistence offered by the conditions prevailing in ages with a rudimentary degree of the division of labor. Each man enjoys a standard of living much higher than that of his savage ancestors….

One of the privileges which society affords to the individual is the privilege of living in spite of sickness or physical disability. Sick animals are doomed. Their weakness handicaps them in their attempts to find food and to repel aggression on the part of other animals. Deaf, nearsighted, or crippled savages must perish. But such defects do not deprive a man of the opportunity to adjust himself to life in society….

Related post: “A Critique of Extreme Libertarianism” (27 Jul 2007)