For my views about the present effort to bail out home buyers who borrowed money foolishly and lenders who lent money foolishly, see this and this. Just change the subject from bankruptcy to default.
Month: April 2008
An Honest Woman Speaks Out
The “My Turn” feature in the April 14 issue of Newsweek offers “I Am Not the Enemy,” by Felicia J. Nu’Man. She writes so compellingly and wisely that I am tempted to reproduce her every word. But I won’t. Here’s a sample:
I battle crime every day, and I defend myself every day, too. I’m a [__] prosecutor in Louisville, Ky. I have presented cases before juries, but from my first day on the job I have felt that I have been on trial in the court of public opinion. Even my maternal grandmother once asked if I was a Republican (I’m not), while others just asked the ultimate question: how can you put our [__] men in jail?
Depending on my mood, the answer can be a three-part speech on the decay of moral values, educational-attainment levels and teenage motherhood. Other times I simply tell them the defendants put themselves in the penitentiary and I facilitated their exodus from the community. Or better yet, my favorite answer: I didn’t put the crack in their pocket and a gun in the other….
My job is not that of a social worker or a social scientist. I was hired to enforce the laws as drafted. I have a duty to the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, including all the [__] victims of the drug culture. These victims are not just the dead rival drug dealers but the addicted mothers who neglect their children, the neglected children themselves and the overburdened extended families who care for these addicts and their children.
…Race does not enter the equation for me. My question to these [__] people who believe me to be a traitor is, when will you connect the dots? Please realize, the police and the prosecutors are not the problem; it is the criminals in these depressed neighborhoods who are.
…Of course, [__] people are treated unfairly. Of course, the inner cities have a decaying infrastructure. But there is absolutely no reason to break a reasonable, appropriate law. None. The alternative is chaos.
If you hadn’t guessed, my underscoring replaces the word “black.” And Nu’Man is a brave and wise woman who happens to be black:
James Chance / Rapport for Newsweek
The "Thin" Constitution
Not long ago I came across Louis Michael Seidman’s “Can Constitutionalism Be Leftist?” The paper is an encomium, of sorts, to Seidman’s mentor, Mark Tushnet, who seems to be something oxymoronic, namely, a constitutionalist-socialist. How one could claim to be both things with a straight face is beyond me. It is true, however, that lawyers, politicians, and deluded citizens have conspired (often unwittingly, always in the name of “good,” and seldom admitting their socialism) to replace the Constitution with a socialist manifesto (e.g., see this and this).
In any event, Seidman remarks (on page 5) that
Most of the great goals of the Constitution’s preamble that form the center of Tushnet’s thin constitution — to “establish Justice … promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty….”
Which is to admit that Tushnet does not honor the Constitution. For the Constitution is not its preamble, it is the text that follows. That text specifies, in some detail, how justice, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty are to be realized under law.
Tushnet’s “thin” Constitution, then, is no Constitution at all. It is a do-it-yourself approach to law, in which the majority may steal the minority’s property, and vice versa, as long as it is done in the name of “social justice.” (See also this.)
Politicizing Economic Growth
UPDATED (04/09/08, 04/10/08)
According to economist Dani Rodrik, the author of the following graph (one Larry Bartels) claims to have shown that
[w]hen a Republican president is in power, people at the top of the income distribution experience much larger real income gains than those at the bottom–a difference of 1.5 percent per year going from the bottom to the top quintile in the income distribution. The situation is reversed when a Democrat is in power: those who benefit the most are the lower income groups.
Source: Dani Rodrik’s Weblog, “American political economics in one picture.”
As I discuss below, the graph is deceptive because of the period it encompasses. Taking into account the downward trend in real GDP growth that began a century ago, and the timing of Democrat and Republican presidencies from Truman’s second term onward, the graph shows only this: Republican presidents (when they had congressional support) enacted tax and regulatory policies that encouraged economic growth. The rewards of stronger growth, naturally, went mainly (though not exclusively) to those who contributed the most to growth, namely, risk-takers and highly skilled persons. Conversely, Democrat presidents (when they had congressional support, which was more often) enacted tax and regulatory policies that discouraged economic growth, which harmed high earners more than low earners.
Nor is this table conclusive of anything:
Source: Marginal Revolution, “More on Bartels“
The preceding graph and table both mask the long, downward trend in the real rate of GDP growth, which I document in this post. Thus:
Why the downward trend in real GDP growth? See this post. In sum, the downward trend is due to the policies of (most) presidents and Congresses since the early 1900s: deliberate expansion of the regulatory-welfare state, with almost no opposition from the Supreme Court after the mid-1930s.
Here’s a closer look at the GDP trend since Truman’s first year as an elected president:
Source: Year-over-year changes in real GDP computed from estimates of real GDP available at Louis D. Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, “What Was the U.S. GDP Then?“ MeasuringWorth.Com, 2008.
Given the long, downward trend in the real rate of GDP growth, it is statistical nonsense to pin the growth rate in any given year to a particular year of a particular president’s term. It is evident that GDP growth has been influenced mainly by the cumulative, anti-growth effects of government regulation. And GDP growth, in any given year, has been an almost-random variation on a downward theme.
As an additional piece of evidence for that proposition, I offer this: The strongest correlation between the year of a presidential term (i.e., first, second, etc.) and real GDP growth during 1949-2007 does not involve a one-year lag (as Dani Rodrik’s post suggests) but a one-year lead. There is a positive statistical relationship between growth rate and Democrat presidencies for the period 1949-2007 only because Democrats sat in the White House in half of the years from 1949 through 1981 and less than a third of the years after that. But Democrats weren’t responsible for the higher growth rate of those earlier years. They were, if anything, responsible for the lower growth rate of the later years. It took decades for the cumulative regulatory and redistributive effects of the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society to be felt. But felt they were, eventually, even during the years of the so-called Clinton boom — when the liar-in-chief compounded them.
A more useful analysis of the influence of government policy on growth is found in this post. It is about the Laffer curve and the real stimulus afforded by tax cuts, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.
UPDATE: Paul Krugman, of course, is eager to believe the pseudo-relationship “discovered” by Bartels.
SECOND UPDATE: An analysis by The Corner‘s Jim Manzi corroborates my points.
Left "Libertarianism" and Child-Bearing
I once wrote that “[l]iberty, to … the ‘libertarian’ Left, is the ‘right’ to believe as they do.” One “libertarian” Leftist is Will Wilkinson, who invites the wrath of Arnold Kling by invoking happiness research in support of his (Wilkinson’s) evident bias against child-bearing. (See for example, this dissection of Wilkinson’s position by Bryan Caplan.)
Wilkinson is so hard up for an argument against child-bearing that he ignores the libertarian doctrine of personal responsibility and falls back on “happiness research.” Thus Kling’s rightful wrath.
The Fed: Unconstitutional and Worse than Useless
Democracy vs. Liberty, in a Paragraph
Colin McGinn writes:
In order for democracy to be acceptable, it needs to be combined with legal protections for the rights of minorities (gays, atheists, et al), or else there will be a tyranny of majority rule. But these protections cannot be made subject to the will of the majority or they lose their point and force. So, they must stay in place even if the majority opposes them–which is undemocratic. Therefore, democracy is acceptable only if it is not absolute. A tolerable form of democracy cannot be consistently democratic. The problem is that democracy and individual rights are at odds with each other.
My own views about democracy and its insidious effect on liberty are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
(Thanks to Maverick Philosopher for the pointer.)
Cringing before the Enemy
Craven cringing in the face of Muslim threats is a European way of life. There’s no news there. And, given that, there’s no surprise here:
President Vladimir V. Putin, after meeting with NATO members in Bucharest on Friday, bluntly declared that an expansion that included Ukraine and Georgia, former Soviet republics with deep historical links to Russia, would constitute a threat.
NATO rebuffed pleas by Mr. Bush and some other NATO allies to extend a preliminary “membership action plan” to Ukraine and Georgia, a major step toward full membership. Many have seen the move as a result of Russia’s warnings.
The obvious move is to invite Russia into NATO, because an alliance that includes your likeliest enemy is no alliance at all. Which seems to be the aim of “sophisticated” Europeans. They’ll continue to surrender their liberty, chunk by chunk, rather than confront any threat to it. Not surprising, in that they evidently haven’t the faintest idea what liberty is.
What, No Cattle Futures?
I noted last week that Senator Obama has for some reason not taken the opportunity to put some of his Schedule C income into a tax-deferred retirement account. Now that Senator Clinton and her husband have released their tax return, I see they also passed up the chance…. I believe each of them could have put $44,000 into a SEP-IRA, but apparently, … they chose not to.
Why? I suggested two hypotheses for Senator Obama: bad tax advice or the expectation of much higher future tax rates. For the Clintons, a third hypothesis is possible: Given their substantial income ($16 million in 2006), the chance of sheltering $88,000 may be too trivial to bother with.
There is a fourth hypothesis: Bill spent the money at Emperors Club VIP or somewhere north of Bear Mountain Ridge. And a fifth one: He is still paying hush money to Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell.
(I objected to muckraking about Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s husband, Thomas Athans, because he is not on a government payroll, as far as I know. Ex-president (fortunately) Bill Clinton receives a large government pension, a munificent expense account, lavish offices, a pre-humous memorial in the form of a presidential library, and costly Secret Service protection because of the office he once held, thanks (not) to H. Ross Perot. Clinton (born William Jefferson Blyth III) is a “public figure” of the second-worst sort: in a class with James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, though not as foul as Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, Mao Tse-tung, Ioseb Vissarionovich Jugashvili, or Adolf (Schicklgruber) Hiedler. Given Clinton’s detestable performance as governor, president and ex-president — and the fact that he is the only president to have plea-bargained his way out of a perjury charge — he deserves more ridicule than any thousand writers could heap on him in a millennium of trying.)
Religion in Public Schools: The Wrong and Right of It
Below the Beltway scorns a lawsuit, which (as FoxNews reports)
demand[s] that a popular European history teacher at California’s Capistrano Valley High School be fired for what they say were anti-Christian remarks he made in the classroom….
[Chad] Farnan recorded his teacher telling students in class: “What country has the highest murder rate? The South! What part of the country has the highest rape rate? The South! What part of the country has the highest rate of church attendance? The South!”
Scorn is the wrong reaction. If employees of public schools are forbidden, as they are, to proselytize for religion (or to allow students to do so through voluntary activities that might somehow be related to school), then employees of public schools, by the same token, should be forbidden to proselytize against religion. And that is evidently what the “popular” teacher did.
Classical Values, on the other hand, has it right. First, the relevant bits from another FoxNews story:
A Tomah [Wisconsin] High School student has filed a federal lawsuit alleging his art teacher censored his drawing because it featured a cross and a biblical reference….
According to the lawsuit, the student’s art teacher asked his class in February to draw landscapes. The student, a senior identified in the lawsuit by the initials A.P., added a cross and the words “John 3:16 A sign of love” in his drawing.
His teacher, Julie Millin, asked him to remove the reference to the Bible, saying students were making remarks about it. He refused, and she gave him a zero on the project.
Millin showed the student a policy for the class that prohibited any violence, blood, sexual connotations or religious beliefs in artwork. The lawsuit claims Millin told the boy he had signed away his constitutional rights when he signed the policy at the beginning of the semester.
The boy tore the policy up in front of Millin, who kicked him out of class. Later that day, assistant principal Cale Jackson told the boy his religious expression infringed on other students’ rights.
Jackson told the boy, his stepfather and his pastor at a meeting a week later that religious expression could be legally censored in class assignments. Millin stated at the meeting the cross in the drawing also infringed on other students’ rights.
Here’s what Classical Values has to say about that:
This is a public school, and the state is not supposed to take positions on religion. It would be one thing had the school told students that they must depict or display images of the cross, but here a student acted on his own, and in a constitutionally protected manner.
Precisely.
More about "Libertarian" Paternalism…
I Object
The follies of Thomas Athans, husband of Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), shouldn’t be an occasion for gloating by right-wing outlets (e.g., Newsmax.com and Michelle Malkin’s eponymous blog). Athans is not a government official. Stabenow, who is an egregious senator in her own right, shouldn’t be judged by or held to account for her husband’s peccadilloes.
Malkin quite rightly points out, however, that Republicans — who in the election campaign of 2006 were accused of fomenting a “culture of corruption” — have no monopoly on corruption. Never did have. Never will have.
Post-Season Play, Atheism, and the Worrying Classes
Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics yesterday published an interview of Bill James, founder of sabermetrics (statistical analysis of baseball). The interview reveals James as a no-nonsense purveyor of wisdom, and not just about baseball. Some examples:
Q: Billy Beane, G.M. for the Oakland A’s, has made sabermetric stats a major part of his “value” philosophy when building a baseball team. He’s frequently said that his method will build regular season winners but it doesn’t seem to work in the playoffs. Do you think that this is simply a result of a small sample size or the wrong statistics being used, or is it something more fundamental about “unmeasurable” statistics, like the ability to perform under pressure and “heart?”
A: Oh, I thought people had stopped asking that. Blast from the past there. Look, there’s a lot of luck in winning in post-season. You’re up against a really good team, by definition, and you’ve only got a few days to get it right. It takes some luck.
Are there also types of players and factors that are helpful in that situation? Of course. It’s like asking a physics professor whether there is a God. Scientists don’t know anything more about whether there is a God than morons do, because it’s not a scientific issue. This isn’t something I can measure. It’s a matter of faith.
James agrees with me about the meaning of post-season play, or, rather, its meaninglessness. James also reveals himself as a true scientist when he rejects “scientific” atheism.
Q: What unanswered questions (either baseball-related or not) are you thinking about right now?
A: Why does American society always perceive itself as becoming constantly more and more dangerous — and thus devote ever more and more effort to increasing security — even though almost all measurable dangers, including crime rates, have been falling throughout most of my lifetime? And … is this a good thing?
There speaks a man who seems to understand that we are over-regulated because of the “worrying classes” and their fear of the free market.
Orwell’s Television
Guest post:
Orwell got it partly right. But it’s not the use of two-way monitors that would impose social uniformity and mental numbness in modern society. Rather, I think it is the sheer ubiquity of the old-fashioned one-way idiot box. Granted I’m not a Luddite and enjoy watching DVDs. But the difference here is that I have control over what’s in my house.
The problem I’m talking about is finding TVs in banks, post offices, doctors’ offices, restaurants and even restrooms. My Orwellian experience of the week was discovering that a giant TV had been installed in our employee cafe. Whenever I have a frozen lunch I go there before the place gets crowded around noon. Now with the TV on it’s always crowded. The omnipresent screen is worse than physical claustrophobia; it’s a kind of mental suffocation. Worse yet, there is a kind of collectivism in that we are all forced to hear the same media pabulum 24/7.
Perhaps the real metaphor is not Orwell’s Oceania but Huxley’s Brave New World, with its comfortable big-brotherism enforced by mass entertainment. I think the lesson here is that civilization is only possible with civility. It cannot be enforced directly by the state, though it can be assisted a great by the upholding of the basic laws on the books. As for the marketplace, it is no more than a mirror of a society’s morals. Yet it seems to me that real liberty is possible only where we draw a line as to where others may intrude in our personal space. I have nothing against marketing in a store, but I don’t like it on my doorstep or on my phone. As for public places, that becomes a little trickier. I’m not sure I can point to an objective standard here. It’s mainly intuitive.
But one thing I am sure of—a hallmark of totalitarian society is that the public sphere crowds out the private and it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve a degree of detachment in daily life where one’s thoughts are truly one’s own.
Politics and Prosperity 