More Stupidity from Cato

I read Cato-at-liberty mainly to find good examples of obtuse libertianism. I’m seldom disappointed. Today, for example, I find “The Weakness of Watch-Listing,” by Jim Harper. I won’t take the time to Fisk the post. I’ll just point out two fatal flaws. First, Harper says:

Easy to evade, [watch-listing] provides no protection against people who haven’t yet done anything wrong, who haven’t come to the attention of security officials, or who have adopted an alias.

Harper doesn’t know how easy it is to evade a watch list because he doesn’t know how much information we have about known or suspected terrorists. Neither do the terrorists. A suspected terrorist needn’t have done anything “wrong” to be on a watch list. To evade watch-listing, therefore, terrorists must be extra cautious and forgo some opportunities for terrorism that they would otherwise exploit.

Is watch-listing perfect? Of course not. But it’s part of a defense in depth. No part of a defense in depth is perfect, but all parts — taken together — can prove quite formidable.

Harper goes on to say:

Watch-listing has a deeper flaw, though. It does not fit with our system of law enforcement.

In the U.S., people who have done something wrong are supposed to be arrested, taken to court and charged, then permitted to contest the accusation. If they are found guilty, they pay money or serve time in jail.

Watch-listing follows no similarly familiar pattern. Law enforcement or national security personnel place a person on a list and then, wherever that list is used, treat the person (and other people with the same name) differently, stopping them, interrogating them, searching them, or whatever the case may be. This unilateral process is alien to our legal system.

Rather than watch-listing, people who are genuinely suspected of being criminals or terrorists should be sought, captured, charged, tried, and, if convicted, sentenced.

It’s obvious, again, that the concept of a defense-in-depth eludes Harper, who wants to substitute prosecution for watch-listing, instead of doing both (which involves little or no competition for resources).

The deeper flaw in Harper’s argument, however, is to think of terrorism as crime. It is not crime, it is war. The “unilateral process” of watch-listing is part of a war effort. Success in war demands sacrifices on the part of civilians. Being placed erroneously on a watch list is one of those sacrifices. As an inconvenience it barely registers on the scale of inconveniences suffered by Americans during World War II.

The Anti-Hall of Fame and Baseball "Immortals"

Baseball’s Hall of Fame is cluttered with pitchers and batters who plainly do not belong there. I hereby present my Anti-Hall of Fame: players who do not belong in the Hall of Fame.

A Hall of Fame pitcher will have

at least 300 wins

or, at least 250 wins and an ERA+ of 120 or higher. (Go here and scroll down for the definition of ERA+.)

or, at least 200 wins and a W-L average of .600 or better and an ERA+ of 120 or higher.

or, for relief pitchers, an ERA+ of 120 or higher.

The following pitchers therefore belong in my Anti-Hall of Fame:

Chief Bender
Jim Bunning
Jack Chesbro
Dizzy Dean
Don Drysdale
Dennis Eckersley
Red Faber
Rollie Fingers
Pud Galvin
Lefty Gomez
Burleigh Grimes
Jesse Haines
Waite Hoyt
Catfish Hunter
Fergie Jenkins
Addie Joss
Sandy Koufax
Bob Lemon
Ted Lyons
Rube Marquard
Hal Newhouser
Satchel Paige
Herb Pennock
Eppa Rixey
Robin Roberts
Red Ruffing
Dazzy Vance
Rube Waddell
Ed Walsh
John Ward
Vic Willis

With the removal of those 31 names, 35 pitchers would remain in the Hall of Fame.

The selection of batters for my Anti-Hall of Fame is a somewhat trickier business. Consider Johnny Bench: a lifetime .267 hitter but a great catcher and a leader on the field. Should I place a Bench in my Anti-Hall of Fame? What about Luis Aparicio, a fine shortstop who stole a lot of bases relative to his peers? The list could go on and on. So I decided to construct an anti-Hall of Fame that applies only to batting. Some players in this Anti-Hall of Fame might belong in the Hall of Fame for their other exploits, but they do not belong there for their batting skills. My batting criteria:

an OPS+ of at least 150 (Go here and scroll down for the definition of OPS+, which is a measure of offensive prowess that adjusts for a player’s ballpark and the era in which he played.)

or, at least 2,800 lifetime hits and a lifetime batting average of at least .300

or, an OPS+ of at least 120 and at least 2,000 lifetime base hits or a lifetime batting average of at least .300

My Anti-Hall of Fame for batters:

Luis Aparicio
Luke Appling
Richie Ashburn
Earl Averill
Frank Baker
Dave Bancroft
Lou Boudreau
Lou Brock
Willard Brown
Roy Campanella
Max Carey
Gary Carter
Frank Chance
Jimmy Collins
Joe Cronin
Larry Doby
Bobby Doerr
Johnny Evers
Carlton Fisk
Nellie Fox
Gabbby Hartnett
Billy Herman
Harry Hooper
Monte Irvin
Travis Jackson
Hughie Jennings
George Kell
George Kelly
Ralph Kiner
Tony Lazzeri
Freddie Lindstrom
Rabbit Maranville
Bill Mazeroski
Tommy McCarthy
Bid McPhee
PeeWee Reese
Phil Rizzuto
Brooks Robinson
Ryne Sandberg
Ray Schalk
Red Schoendienst
Joe Sewell
Ozzie Smith
Joe Tinker
Pie Traynor
Bobby Wallace
Lloyd Waner
John Ward
Ross Youngs
Robin Yount

The deletion of those 50 names would leave 91 batters in the Hall of Fame, including . . . Johnny Bench.

You can consult the Hall of Fame listings for pitchers and batters to see who would remain in my Hall of Fame after excluding those listed above.

But which of the 35 pitchers and 91 batters who qualify for my Hall of Fame are true baseball “immortals” who belong in a select inner circle? My criteria for “immortality” are somewhat more stringent than my criteria for membership in the Hall of Fame. An “immortal” pitcher will have at least 250 wins, a winning average of at least .600, and an ERA+ of at least 120. (A reliever qualifies with an ERA+ of at least 120.) An “immortal” batter will have an OPS+ of at least 150 or at least 2,800 hits and a lifetime batting average of at least .300.

Herewith the “immortal” pitchers:

Pete Alexander
John Clarkson
Bob Feller
Lefty Grove
Carl Hubbell
Walter Johnson
Tim Keefe
Christy Mathewson
Kid Nichols
Jim Palmer
Eddie Plank
Charley Radbourn
Tom Seaver
Bruce Sutter
Hoyt Wilhelm
Cy Young

And the “immortal” batters:

Hank Aaron
Cap Anson
Jake Beckley
Wade Boggs
George Brett
Dan Brouthers
Jesse Burkett
Rod Carew
Roberto Clemente
Ty Cobb
Eddie Collins
Roger Connor
Sam Crawford
Ed Delehanty
Joe DiMaggio
Jimmie Foxx
Frankie Frisch
Lou Gehrig
Charlie Gehringer
Hank Greenberg
Rogers Hornsby
Willie Keeler
Nap Lajoie
Mickey Mantle
Willie Mays
Johnny Mize
Paul Molitor
Stan Musial
Mel Ott
Sam Rice
Frank Robinson
Babe Ruth
Al Simmons
George Sisler
Tris Speaker
Honus Wagner
Paul Waner
Zack Wheat
Ted Williams

Thus my Hall of Fame would have an inner circle of “immortals”: 16 of 35 pitchers (vice the present number of 66) and 39 of batters 91 (vice the present number of 141). La crème de la crème.

Terrorists’ "Rights" and the Military Commissions Act of 2006

Cato’s Mark Moller finds that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 “is not patently unconstitutional—but it is hardly on uncontrovertible constitutional footing, either.” That is not a surprising conclusion, coming as it does from a member of the “libertarian” camp that cannot seem to focus on a key purpose of the Constitution: the protection of the liberties of American citizens.

Andrew McCarthy, writing at National Review Online, is well focused — as usual. As McCarthy points out,

Congress has already given al Qaeda detainees the very rights the critics claim have been denied [by the Military Commissions Act of 2006].

Last December, Congress enacted the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA). It requires that the military must grant each detainee a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) at which to challenge his detention. Assuming the military’s CSRT process determines he is properly detained, the detainee then has a right to appeal to our civilian-justice system — specifically, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. And if that appeal is unsuccessful, the terrorist may also seek certiorari review by the Supreme Court.

McCarthy explains that, under the Constitution, terrorists have no habeas corpus rights or treaty rights:

Congress cannot “suspend” habeas corpus by denying it to people who have no right to it in the first place. The right against suspension of habeas corpus is found in the Constitution (art. I, 9). Constitutional rights belong only to Americans — that is, according to the Supreme Court, U.S. citizens and those aliens who, by lawfully weaving themselves into the fabric of our society, have become part of our national community (which is to say, lawful permanent resident aliens). To the contrary, aliens with no immigration status who are captured and held outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and whose only connection to our country is to wage a barbaric war against it, do not have any rights, much less “basic rights,” under our Constitution. . . .

Isn’t habeas corpus necessary so that the terrorists can press the Geneva Convention rights with which the Court most recently vested them in its 2006 Hamdan case? Wrong again.

To begin with, although its reasoning was murky, the Hamdan majority seems technically to have held that Geneva’s Common Article 3 applied to military commissions because of a congressional statute, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Again, if a right is rooted in a statute, not in the Constitution, Congress is at liberty to withdraw or alter the right simply by enacting a new statute. Such a right is not in any sense “basic.”

If the Supreme Court were to decide that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is unconstitutional, it would be high time for President Bush to take a Jacksonian stance: “The Supreme Court has made its decision, now let them enforce it.” I would base that stance on an earlier holding by the Court:

The provisions of the Constitution which confer on the Congress and the President powers to enable this country to wage war are as much part of the Constitution as provisions looking to a nation at peace. And we have had recent occasion to quote approvingly the statement of former Chief Justice Hughes that the war power of the Government is “the power to wage war successfully.” . . . Therefore, the validity of action under the war power must be judged wholly in the context of war. That action is not to be stigmatized as lawless because like action in times of peace would be lawless.

— Justice Felix Frankfurter, concurring in Korematsu v. United States (1944)

Apropos Paternalism

Will Wilkinson, in a TCS Daily review of John Cassidy’s New Yorker article about neuronomics, writes:

Paternalism is the use of coercion to force people to do or refrain from something against their will for their own good. Liberals of all stripes generally reject paternalism for reasons most lucidly laid out in J.S. Mill’s masterpiece On Liberty. First, we assume the individual is the best judge of her own good. Second, whether or not the individual is the best judge of her own good, we rightly doubt that another individual (or assembly thereof) has the legitimate moral authority to substitute their judgment for the individual’s by force — especially in light of widespread disagreement about the nature of a good life. Third, truth is hard to come by, and none of us can be fully certain we’ve pinned it down. Allowing people to act on diverse opinions about morality (or rationality) broadens the search for truth about good lives by setting up a decentralized system of social laboratories where experiments in living succeed or fail in plain view. So, unless an action harms somebody else, people should be at liberty to satisfy their preferences, whether saintly or sinful, coolly rational or impulsively emotional.

The conceit of the new paternalism is that the state isn’t going to be in the business of telling us which beliefs and desires we are allowed to act on, but will simply nudge people into doing what we wanted to do anyway, but couldn’t manage by ourselves. The idea is that there are things we want to do, but, due to some foible of mind, we are unable to do it without a little outside help. . . .

Some of the new so-called “soft” paternalistic measures, such as employers helping workers to increase their rate of savings by requiring them to opt out of, rather than opt into, a retirement plan aren’t paternalistic in any sense; that’s a part of a fully voluntary labor contract. [ED: This is not true when government, through tax incentives, encourages the widespread adoption by employers of such practices.] And policies like increasing the taxes on cigarettes or fatty foods in order to discourage potentially harmful consumption choices, are straightforwardly paternalistic in the old sense, requiring a one-size-fits-all value judgment about how much and for what reason we should consume certain goods.

Those kinds of judgments aren’t the proper work of government. In any case, if you really think people make systematic “mistakes” in judgment and choice, there is no reason to believe that democratic voters — who have less at stake when casting their ballots than when choosing what to have for lunch — will be especially good at populating the government with Spock-like rational legislators interested in tweaking cognition through expertly targeted policy rather than with well-coiffed primates interested in hoarding status and power.

As Michael Munger puts it, in an essay at The Library of Economics and Liberty,

The boundary we fight over today divides what is decided collectively for all of us from what is decided by each of us. You might think of it as a property line, dividing what is mine from what is ours. And all along that property line is a contested frontier in a war of ideas and rhetoric.

For political decisions, “good” simply means what most people think is good, and everyone has to accept the same thing. In markets, the good is decided by individuals, and we each get what we choose. This matters more than you might think. I don’t just mean that in markets you need money and in politics you need good hair and an entourage. Rather, the very nature of choices, and who chooses, is different in the two settings. P.J. O’Rourke has a nice illustration of the way that democracies choose.

Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diets and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And—since women are a majority of the population, we’d all be married to Mel Gibson. (Parliament of Whores, 1991, p. 5).

O’Rourke was writing in 1991. Today, we might all be married to Ashton Kutcher, instead. But you get the idea: Politics makes the middle the master. The average person chooses not just for herself, but for everyone else, too. . . .

The thing to keep in mind is that market processes, working through diverse private choice and individual responsibility, are a social choice process at least as powerful as voting. And markets are often more accurate in delivering not just satisfaction, but safety. We simply don’t recognize the power of the market’s commands on our behalf. As Ludwig von Mises famously said, in Liberty and Property, “The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite, and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of profitable people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given by the public.”

Paternalism — when it is sponsored or enforced by government — deprives us of the ability to think for ourselves, to benefit from our wise decisions, and to learn from our mistakes. It all adds up to regress, not progress.

The Big Bang and Atheism

From a press release issued yesterday by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:

The [academy] has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 jointly to John C. Mather NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA, and George F. Smoot University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation”. . . .

This year the Physics Prize is awarded for work that looks back into the infancy of the Universe and attempts to gain some understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars. It is based on measurements made with the help of the COBE satellite launched by NASA in 1989.

The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the Universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE. These measurements also marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science. . . .

According to the Big Bang scenario, the cosmic microwave background radiation is a relic of the earliest phase of the Universe. Immediately after the big bang itself, the Universe can be compared to a glowing “body emitting radiation in which the distribution across different wavelengths depends solely on its temperature. The shape of the spectrum of this kind of radiation has a special form known as blackbody radiation. When it was emitted the temperature of the Universe was almost 3,000 degrees Centigrade. Since then, according to the Big Bang scenario, the radiation has gradually cooled as the Universe has expanded. The background radiation we can measure today corresponds to a temperature that is barely 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. The Laureates were able to calculate this temperature thanks to the blackbody spectrum revealed by the COBE measurements. . . .

The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.

According to Wikipedia, “[m]ost cosmologists consider [cosmic microwave background] radiation to be the best evidence for the hot big bang model of the universe.” That model, and the observations which support it, suggest

that the universe has expanded from a state in which all the matter and energy in the universe was at an immense temperature and density. Physicists do not widely agree on what happened before this, although general relativity predicts a gravitational singularity (for reporting on some of the more notable speculation on this issue, see cosmogony).

What preceded and caused the Big Bang? The possibility of a creation by an intelligent force cannot be ruled out. Atheism, therefore, is an unscientific stance because it posits an unfalsifiable hypothesis: the non-existence of an intelligent creator.

The Dow and the Stock Market

There is much ado today about the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which hit an all-time high. That’s nice, but the Dow is a narrow, price-weighted index of stock prices. It does not include gains from reinvested dividends, and it is not adjusted for inflation.

Far better is the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index (better known as the Wilshire 5000), which now tracks about 5,400 U.S. stocks and is weighted by the market capitalization of those stocks. There is a total-return version of the index that includes gains from reinvested dividends, as opposed to price gains only. (I obtain monthly values for the total-return index here.)

When adjusted for inflation, the total-return index gives a good indication of the state of the U.S. stock market as a long-term investment vehicle. (I use the CPI-U, available here, as the measure of inflation.)

The green and red lines trace the “trading channel” around the long-term trend (black line), the equation for which is shown on the chart. The long-term trend represents a real, annual gain of 8.4 percent a year, with dividends reinvested.

It’s evident that the cumulative value of U.S. stocks, in real terms, remains well below the speculative peak of six years ago. That’s just as well. We are seeing steady, restrained growth in the inflation-adjusted cumulative index — much like that of the late ’80s and early ’90s — which is a good sign for the stock market and for the economy.

A Skewed Perspective on Terrorism

When economists think about terrorism their thinking tends to be muddled. Glen Whitman, an associate professor of economics and co-proprietor of Agoraphilia, amply demonstrates muddleheadedness in “Perspective on Terrorism,” where he says this:

At Cato Unbound, in response to a lead essay by John Mueller, Clark Kent Ervin rejects the comparison of the death rate from terrorism to the death rates from bee stings, lightning, drowning, etc. Ervin’s argument is so unpersuasive (to me) that I think it deserves a fisking.

It is undoubtedly true that Americans are far more likely to die from “bee stings, lightning, or accident-causing deer” than terrorism, but so what? … This statistical argument implicitly equates deaths from bee stings, lightning or close encounters with marauding deer with deaths from terrorism.

They should be equated. It doesn’t make sense to spend a billion dollars to prevent one death by terrorism if the same billion dollars could prevent ten or a hundred deaths by other causes. Death is death. It can be sensible to give different treatment to deaths by different causes, but only if there’s some reason to think one cause of death is more easily deterred than another.

Ervin may have made his case badly, but he is right and Whitman is wrong. To see why, let’s go back to Mueller’s statement

Although polls continue to show Americans notably concerned that they or members of their families might die at the hands of terrorists, astronomer Alan Harris has calculated that, at present rates and including the disaster of 9/11 in the consideration, the chances any individual resident of the globe will be killed by an international terrorist over the course of an 80-year lifetime is about 1 in 80,000, about the same likelihood of being killed over the same interval from the impact on the Earth of an especially ill-directed asteroid or comet. At present, Americans are vastly more likely to die from bee stings, lightning, or accident-causing deer than by terrorism within the country. That seems pretty safe.

That seems “pretty safe” only because the United States (and many other countries) have taken affirmative steps to detect and thwart terrorist attacks before they occur. We have seen the enemy’s successes. But we are unaware of many of his failures because it is stupid to give the enemy an inkling of how we have achieved all of our successes.

Comparing the ex post death rate from terrorism with such unpreventable and/or random events as asteroid strikes, bee stings, lightning strikes, or deer-caused accidents is a classic demonstration of academic cluelessness. Those unpreventable and/or random events will occur regardless of terrorism. Terrorism is an additional threat — not an alternative one. The worst mistake we can make is to underestimate that threat.

Now, Whitman would say that we can spend less money on the war on terror and more to prevent asteroid strikes, for example, and that we ought to determine the right balance of spending between the two activities. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but a correct determination of the balance of spending cannot be made by using probabilities of the type cited by Mueller.

Asteroids, bees, lightning, and deer — unlike terrorists — are not sentient enemies. Ignoring those “threats” will not enable them to increase their “attacks” on us; they will do what they will do, according to the “laws of nature.” Ignoring terrorists, on the other hand, certainly would enable them — and encourage them — to increase their attacks on us. The apparently low probability of being killed by a terrorist is low precisely because we have spent a lot of money to make it low.

Moreover, we must continue to spend a lot of money to keep that probability low. If we fail to do so, we will then find out what it is like to be besieged — to live lives that are markedly poorer, filled with anxiety, and isolated from that large part of the world in which Islamism will have triumphed.

Is it possible to eliminate that prospect and avoid a future of perpetual terrorism? I believe that it is, if we put enough money and effort into the war on terror. And if we never relent, even after terrorism is reduced to a “law enforcement” problem. Evil always lurks.

Because civilization depends on continually making the effort, of never giving in. It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark. These people [the Romans] gave in. They stopped caring. And because they did, this land fell under the darkness of a barbarism which lasted for hundreds of years.

— From Cicero’s “The Dream of Scipio” (Thanks to Verity of Southern Appeal.)

The Best Defense . . .

. . . is a good offense. That’s the lesson of World War I, when the entry of the United States into the war enabled the allies to go on the offensive. That’s the lesson of World War II, when the United States mobilized so massively that

we put Japan on the defensive by winning the Battle of Midway in June 1942, only six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

we sealed Germany’s doom in the spring of 1943 by turning the tide in the Second Battle of the Atlantic, thus ensuring that U.S. forces could mass for an invasion of Europe.

The lesson for World War IV (counting the Cold War as World War III) — which I led up to but did not spell out in “Reaching the Limit?” — is the same: The best defense is a good offense. But we have been mainly on the defensive since 9/11. We need not be on the defensive; we should not be on the defensive. Our ability to prosecute the war on terror should not be judged by what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even though there are not enough boots on the ground in those theatres of operation, we nevertheless possess massive amounts of military power — and potential military power — which, if brought into play, would turn the tide of the war abroad and lead to renewed support for it at home and amongst most of our allies.

Yes, there would be vocal opposition to massive, decisive, military action, but the president has the authority for such action in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force of September 18, 2001. And the sooner he exerts that authority, the sooner the silent majority of Americans can rally behind the war effort, the sooner Congress can vote the necessary increases in defense spending, and the sooner the war can be prosecuted as it should be prosecuted.

The war on terror should be guided by three strategic objectives: searching out and destroying or capturing terrorists until they are truly a “law enforcement” problem, neutralizing the state sponsors of terrorism, and securing the oil reserves of the Middle East against terrorism and economic extortion. I believe that those objectives can be met within five to ten years by:

mobilizing on a scale at least equal to that of World War II (That level of mobilization would require a doubling of our present level of defense spending, which would consume GDP at a rate only one-sixth that of our defense spending in World War II. See the second figure, here.)

vigorous, uninhibited surveillance of electronic communications overseas, between the U.S. and foreign countries, and within the U.S. (Intercepts of the last type of communication should follow guidelines approved by Congress, but those guidelines must not restrict warrantless surveillance to a period following a terrorist attack.)

clandestine operations ranging from the infiltration of terrorist cells to close monitoring of financial transactions to small-scale search and destroy (or capture) missions (without geographic limit)

military operations against terrorists, their bases, and their sources of supply (Such operations may be encounters of opportunity or sustained campaigns, as circumstances warrant. A corollary is the abandonment of nation-building exercises that tie down significant numbers of military forces.)

aggressive interrogation of captured terrorists and enemy combatants, under rules that require approval from higher authority (Approval would be required only to ensure that a particular course of interrogation is commensurate with the information being sought and that the person being interrogated likely has that information.)

military retaliation and/or economic sanctions against regimes that overtly or covertly interfere with our surveillance, clandestine operations, and military operations

the swift and uncompromising prosecution of persons and organizations that divulge and publish information about war plans and covert programs or operations.

The alternative — if we continue to allow the enemy to take the initiative — is an endless and ultimately futile two-front war. On one front, of course, are terrorists and those who sponsor and support them. On the other front are those of the Left and Right whose counsel, if heeded, would enable terrorists and their state sponsors to slowly grind down our resolve and (even more likely) the resolve of other Western nations. Eventually, we would be held hostage within our own borders — isolated, poorer, and living lives of anxiety.

World opinion might (and probably would) turn strongly against us initially. But as our resolve is met with success, we will capture the hearts and minds of those whose hearts and minds we ought to care about.

We cannot go on as we are. Perhaps the best time of our life as a nation was when we basked in the glow of total victory following World War II. We can bask in that same glow again, if we put our resolve and our resources to it.

Median Household Income and Bad Government

Remember this map?

It appeared in the Detroit Free Press on August 30, and it was picked up quickly by the Left-blogosphere because it seems to discredit President Bush’s economic policies. (For example, Kevin Drum (Political Animal) got the map from the Freep, John Campanelli at Daily Kos got it from Drum, and Benj Hellie at Leiter Reports linked to Campanelli’s post.)

In case you missed it, Stuart Buck and Megan McArdle, in a September 14 piece at the DCExaminer, describe the map and discredit it — as have other savvy observers. As Buck and McArdle explain,

the Detroit Free Press published a horrifying map showing huge losses in household income across America. Horrifying and totally wrong, that is.

According to the map, between 1999 and 2005 median household income had fallen in 46 states, sometimes by double digits, plunging by 6 percent in the U.S. as a whole.

We knew incomes had fallen slightly since the peak of the technology bubble. . . . But the declines shown on the map were shocking. The Free Press claimed that nine states, with a total of 75 million citizens, had seen median incomes plummet by roughly 10 percent.

More surprisingly, these figures didn’t match those in the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, or CPS, which showed that median household income in the US had fallen only 2.8 percent — and had risen in around 20 states, not four. Where, we wondered, had they gotten their figures?

An e-mail exchange with the journalists gave us the answer: They had taken their 2005 numbers not from the CPS, but from the American Community Survey, a new research product that is scheduled to replace the detailed “long form” census collected every decade. But they hadn’t taken the 1999 figures from the ACS — in fact, the ACS is so new that it didn’t even publish nationwide data for 1999. Instead, the journalists had taken the 1999 income figures from the official 2000 census.

Some statisticians already will be shaking their heads in dismay; different surveys, taken at different times and asking slightly different questions, often produce very different pictures of the economy. If the journalists had checked the helpful section of the Census Bureau Web site called “Using the Data”, they would have discovered this warning: “Users should exercise care when comparing income figures from the American Community Survey with those of Census 2000.”

They might also have found another Census Web page warning that “[E]stimates from any one survey will almost never exactly match the estimates from any other (unless explicitly controlled), because of differences such as in questionnaires, data collection methodology, reference period, and edit procedures.” Or had they Googled “Comparing the ACS and the Census,” they’d have discovered a helpful document on the comparison problems, available from multiple state governments. It calls the two income numbers “not comparable.”

With good reason. A 2003 report by census staff indicated that median incomes from the ACS were much lower than those from the 2000 census: 4.4 percent lower for the United States.

What does this mean? Simple: If you start with income from the 2000 census, and then compare it to income from the 2005 ACS, which we know tends to be much lower because of survey differences — you’ll find a much greater decline than really was the case. Much of the reported 6 percent drop — probably more than half — comes from comparing apples to oranges.

There’s more to be said, however, and I said it on September 5 in a comment on a post at AnalPhilosopher. Here are the key points of my comment, which I have edited to focus on the issues at hand:

The use of the period 1999 to 2005 amounts to cherry-picking the data. (The use of incompatible data sets, of which I was unaware at the time of my comment, merely compounded the cherry-picking.) Specifically, real median household income in the U.S. declined from 1999 — while Bill Clinton was president — through 2004, then rose in 2005, though the 2005 level was below the 1999 level. (To see what I am talking about, open this Census Bureau report and go to Figure 1, which I have reproduced below.)

The 1999-2004 decline is typical of a long-standing pattern, one that the figure below depicts only as far back as 1967. Even in the relatively brief period since 1967 there have been dips in real median household income more severe than that of 1999-2004. There is nothing at all unusual about a temporary dip in real median household income; it is part of the natural cycle of long-term economic growth. (Leftists like to imagine that there’s an alternative to such cycles, which involves the counter-productive fine-tuning of the economy by an omniscient Left-wing government or the even more destructive practice of income redistribution.)

The fact that some States (e.g., Michigan) fared worse than others during the recent downturn can be attributed to Michigan’s particularly benighted economic policies (e.g., high taxation and unionization), which have been impoverishing Michiganders for decades.

“The Sick Man of the Midwest: Michigan — a liberal failure,” by Rich Lowry at NRO, confirms my point about Michigan. Lowry reports:

According to the free-market Mackinac Center for Public Policy’s analysis of United Van Lines data, Michigan is now the No. 1 state in the continental United States for outbound traffic. An estimated 65 percent of the moving company’s Michigan interstate traffic is families moving out of the state, headed to more economically open and vital destinations. As an official in Wyoming put it, “Michigan has been very good for us.” . . .

Michael LaFaive of the Mackinac Center calls Michigan “the France of North America.” Economically competitive states might have a personal income tax, or corporate income tax, or sales tax — Michigan has all three. It has long been the only state with a European-style, value-added tax — the Single Business Tax. A company can be in bankruptcy and still have a tax liability, making Michigan a bad state even to lose money in. In a 2002 filing for relief from the tax, General Motors explained that it would operate at a loss, but one of its projects would still create a $7 million-a-year tax liability. . . .

Meanwhile, unions make the state an inhospitable place to do business. A company can be bankrupt in Michigan and still face threats of a strike, as Northwest Airlines and the auto-parts maker Delphi have learned. Michigan’s unionization rate of 21.8 percent is much higher than the national average of 13.5 percent. This accounts for it having the second-highest unit-labor cost in the nation, according to the Mackinac Center. States with right-to-work laws, and consequently less unionization, experience more growth and create more jobs, at the expense of troglodytes like Michigan.

It used to be that unions could force unnaturally high wages and benefits on U.S. manufacturers, and the costs would be passed along to consumers. Those were the days prior to globalization when the U.S. auto industry had a lock on the domestic market and experienced little international competition. It was inevitable that Michigan would find the new competition disruptive, but not that it would react to it so poorly.

The way to thrive in a globalized environment is to create a low-tax economy without the rigidities that come with heavy unionization and regulation. For those who disagree, Michigan beckons.

Addendum: See also this post at The Club for Growth blog.

Here’s the figure from the Census Bureau report:

See also:
Your Labor Day Reading
Status, Spite, Envy, and Income Redistribution

Who Are the Parties to the Constitutional Contract?

A recent post by Tom W. Bell of Agoraphilia and two recent posts by Timothy Sandefur of Positive Liberty sent me back to The Federalist Papers, specifically, to No. 39 by James Madison. There, Madison says that

the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a NATIONAL, but a FEDERAL act.

That it will be a federal and not a national act, as these terms are understood by the objectors; the act of the people, as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation, is obvious from this single consideration, that it is to result neither from the decision of a MAJORITY of the people of the Union, nor from that of a MAJORITY of the States. It must result from the UNANIMOUS assent of the several States that are parties to it, differing no otherwise from their ordinary assent than in its being expressed, not by the legislative authority, but by that of the people themselves. Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States would bind the minority, in the same manner as the majority in each State must bind the minority; and the will of the majority must be determined either by a comparison of the individual votes, or by considering the will of the majority of the States as evidence of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Neither of these rules have been adopted. Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution. . . .

[T]he proposed government cannot be deemed a NATIONAL one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

The persons who signed the Constitution in 1787 signed it as representatives of the people of their respective States. The persons who then ratified the Constitution in special conventions did so as representatives of the people of their respective States. The Constitution is a contract among the States on behalf of the people of each State. The States retain sovereignty, on behalf of their people, except where the Constitution transfers it to the United States (e.g., the regulation of interstate commerce).

Reaching the Limit?

Mark Steyn on 9/11:

In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote: “The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a failure of imagination.” That’s not really true. Islamist terrorists had indicated their interest in U.S. landmarks, and were known to have plans to hijack planes to fly into them. But men like John O’Neill could never quite get the full attention of a somnolent federal bureaucracy. The terrorists must have banked on that: After all, they took their pilot-training classes in America, apparently confident that, even if anyone noticed the uptick in Arab enrollments at U.S. flight schools, a squeamish culture of political correctness would ensure nothing was done about it.

Five years on, half America has retreated to the laziest old tropes, filtering the new struggle through the most drearily cobwebbed prisms: All dramatic national events are JFK-type conspiracies, all wars are Vietnam quagmires. Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef’s successors make their ambitions as plain as he did: They want to acquire nuclear technology in order to kill even more of us. And, given that free societies tend naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens, one morning we will wake up to another day like the “day that changed everything.” Sept. 11 was less “a failure of imagination” than an ability to see that America’s enemies were hiding in plain sight.

Michael Liccione picks up the theme:

Americans and Westerners generally do not, as a whole, seem yet to understand what all the conflict within and about the Middle East has in common. This is not a war about “terrorism,” which is only the most obvious weapon wielded by our true enemy. Whether one looks at Iraq, Southern Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, or any place where Islamist terrorism has spilled blood, the enemy is the same: radical Islamic jihadism, whether of the Sunni (Wahhabi) or the Shi’ite variety best represented by Hezbollah and sustained by Iran in Iraq too. The aim of all jihadists is the same: the destruction of Israel and ultimately of the West, making way for the worldwide rule of Islam. . . [T]he trends throughout the Middle East and Southern Asia . . . are toward increasing convergence of jihadist groups. Saddam paid off the families of Palestinian suicide bombers of Israelis and tolerated Iraq’s homegrown jihadist group, Ansar al-Sunna. The hydra-headed monster had been, and has since been getting, more cohesive for quite some time. One might argue that the overthrow of Saddam and the subsequent Iraqi insurgency has only accelerated that process; but if it has, that is not such a bad thing. It helps prevent people from sleeping too long.

Wherever there is Islamist terrorism, one finds jihadists from many different countries joining together. We’re seeing only the earliest stages of what will, in due course, evolve into a true “clash of civilizations.”

At some point those Americans who are playing nicey-nicey — when they are not imitating ostriches — will embolden and enable the enemy to do something that not even a Democrat or a Buchananite will tolerate. Fair warning to the enemy. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

A Democrat House?

Many conservative/libertarian voices are saying that a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives would be a good thing. (See this and this, for example.) It’s the gridlock theory, you see. With a divided Congress, the GOP’s recently found big-spending ways will be stymied. Moreover, voters’ rejection of the GOP will send a message to the GOP: stop your big-spending ways.

I believe none of it. First, if Democrats control the House the bills passed there will be even more profligate than the ones now being passed by a GOP-controlled chamber. Second, the Senate — which is dominated by Democrats and RINOs — will gladly move in the direction of greater profligacy. Third, I don’t expect President Bush to start brandishing the veto pen that he has wielded only once in almost six years.

Losing Sight of the Objective

Those who are so keen to bestow constitutional rights on terrorists have lost sight of a key purpose — perhaps the key purpose — of the Constitution: to provide for the common defense. Of Americans. Against their enemies: foreign and domestic, overt and covert.

Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice: Part I

Negative rights — one’s free enjoyment of life, liberty, and property as long as one does no harm to others — are for all, in a regime that honors and protects such rights. With negative rights there is no involuntary taking from some to give to others, except to underwrite those state functions (justice and defense) that protect negative rights. (As for the necessity and inevitability of the state, read this, this, and the posts linked to therein.)

Postive rights, on the other hand, are assigned selectively by a regime that takes from some and gives to others, not just to provide for justice and defense but also to dispense “social justice” to those who are deemed “deserving” of it. How much the “donees” receive from the “donors” depends only on the dictates of those who are in charge of the regime.

Joe Miller (Bellum et Mores) supports positive rights:

. . . I still hold on to one core insight of liberalism: respect for autonomy means more than just non-interference. I can have all sorts of freedoms from various things, but those freedoms don’t mean a damn thing if I’m too cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated to exercise them. And I remain convinced that, at least for right now, the only way to ensure that everyone has the shelter, medicine, food, education, and access needed to enjoy his/her freedom is through some form of redistribution. Insisting that you redistribute part of your wealth is no more a violation of your autonomy than is insisting that you refrain from hitting me in the nose. Both hitting me in the nose and refusing to help those too poor to exercise their freedoms are violations of autonomy.

Joe is far from alone in his views, of course. His co-believers are legion. Consider, for example, George Lakoff (about whom I have written here). Lakoff, too, is a proponent of positive rights, which he propounds in Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea. Anthony Dick, writing at NRO Online, reviews Lakoff’s book:

“Freedom is being able to achieve purposes,” [Lakoff] writes, “either because nothing is stopping you or because you have the requisite capacities, or both.” He elaborates with a barrage of italics: “Freedom is the freedom to go as far as you can in life, to get what you want in life, or to achieve what you can in life.” This, he explains, means that freedom has a significant positive component: “Freedom requires not just the absence of impediments to motion but also the presence of access. . . . Freedom may thus require creating access, which may involve building.” What Lakoff is describing, in other words, is a type of “positive freedom,” in the sense that it requires the provision of certain goods and services to citizens to ensure that they have the capacity to achieve their goals. On this view, you aren’t “free” unless you have been provided with what you need in order to be successful. . . .

Lakoff’s conception of freedom is thus in direct conflict with that of the Founders. When government seeks to provide entitlements for some in the name of “positive freedom,” it must necessarily interfere in the lives of others. This is because all government action is predicated on taxation and coercion, which by definition entail infringements on liberty. The state can’t give a welfare check to one person without taking money from someone else; it can’t fund a Social Security system without forcing people to pay into it.

People who don’t have food or health care or education have not been deprived of freedom. What they lack is not freedom but material goods and services. This is a matter of vocabulary, not ideology. The court of common word usage simply rejects Lakoff’s claim that being free means having the capacity to achieve one’s aims.

Roger Scruton, in the “Philosophical Appendix” of his The Meaning of Conservatism, says this:

What, then, is meant by the ‘freedom of the individual’? I shall distinguish two kinds of liberal answer to this question, which I shall call, respectively, ‘desire based’ and ‘autonomy based’ liberalism. The first argues that people are free to the extent that they can satisfy thier desires. The modality of ths ‘can’ is, of course, a major problem. More importantly, however, such an answer implies nothing about the value of freedom, and to take it as the basis for political theory is to risk the most absurd conclusions. By this criterion the citizens of Huxley’s Brave New World offer a paradigm of freedom: for they live in a world designed expressly for the gratification of their every wish. A desire-based liberalism could justify the most abject slavery — provided only that the slaves are induced, by whatever method, to desire their own condition.

Joe’s formulation could be dismissed simply by noting — as does Anthony Dick — the contradiction inherent in the concept of positive rights. It is simply illogical to say that “Insisting that you redistribute part of your wealth is no . . . violation of your autonomy.” Such insistence, at the behest of the state, can be nothing other than a violation of “your autonomy,” that is, the autonomy of the person whose wealth (or income) is being redistributed. Joe’s formulation also could be dismissed simply by noting — as Roger Scruton suggests — that an agenda of positive rights means that the state can enslave (or at least enthrall) its subjects by dictating the conditions of their existence.

But I will not simply dismiss Joe’s formulation of positive rights with those two observations, acute as they may be. Joe’s formulation demands a more thorough response because it challenges the emotions in its appeal to the “cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated.” I will make that more thorough response in Part II, where I will make the connection between positive rights and “cosmic justice,” upon which I have touched here.

A Further Note about "Libertarian" Paternalism

I last discussed “libertarian” (or “soft”) paternalism here (and posted a related note here). Any single instance of government-sponsored (and therefore government-encouraged) paternalism may seem benign. But it is not.

Take the case of default enrollment in 401(k) plans, which the Pension Protection Act of 2006 further encourages. Default enrollment in 401(k) plans — however benign its intention and however easily overcome by the enrollee who wants out — is a small act of paternalism that opens the door to more intrusive ones. What comes after default enrollment? Mandatory enrollment? Mandatory enrollment in certain types of retirement fund (e.g., government bond funds for the feeble-minded)?

Analagous questions can be asked about any government-sponsored paternalistic scheme. And such questions should be asked, because government-sponsored schemes shift decison-making power from individuals to bureaucrats, with their one-size-fits-all rules.

Moreover, as Peter Van Doren, editor of Regulation,* observes in a post at Cato-at-liberty,

government actors appear to be no more rational than economic actors — and it is quite possible that soft paternalism could be more detrimental to public welfare than the private choices studied by behavioral economics. Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser states this case (pdf) in the summer issue of Regulation.

In a subsequent (and too-optimistic) post, Mark Moller quotes from the conclusion of Stephen Choi and Adam Pritchard’s 2003 article Behavioral Economics and the SEC (Stanford Law Review; working paper version available here):

Regulators are vulnerable to a wide range of behavioral contagion. Regulators may suffer from overconfidence and process information with only bounded rationality. . . .

And in groups the decisionmaking of regulators may decline rather than improve. On the one hand, groups and organizational structures may help alleviate some of the mistakes that derive from individually biased decisions. Studies of group decisionmaking provide evidence that the total can indeed be greater than the sum of individuals in enhancing the accuracy of decisions. But cognitive illusions may grip entire groups. Groupthink may also lead to an uncritical acceptance of regulatory decisions.

Will Wilkinson adds a post in which he observes that

[b]ehavioral economics done right is just good science. The real peril is in the transition over the gap from psychology to policy. Big philosophical and ideological assumptions lurk in the gap.

The biggest assumption is that government can and should steer the lawful behavior of individuals in certain directions, not knowing the specific circumstances that cause individuals to choose particular courses of action.**

We are mired in a tremendously costly regulatory-welfare state that arose from paternalistic concerns. Will we never learn? No, we will not. We will move further and further from realizing our economic potential by depleting individual freedom of choice. The road to dependency on the state is paved with the benign intentions of academics, politiicians, and bureaucrats.

* Full disclosure: I worked for Peter Van Doren in 1999-2000, when I was the managing editor of Regulation.

** A case in point: I did not enroll in my company’s 403(b) plan (the nonprofit equivalent of a 401(k)) when I was 22, because I needed the money to accrue household capital. But by the time I was 24, I could afford to join, and I did.

I Said It First

Well, I said it before George Will did, anyway. There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about Will’s column of today, in which he defends Wal-Mart. What did I say on September 2? This (among other things):

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.

Read on.

Singer Said It

From an article at LifeSiteNews.com:

In a question and answer article published in the UK’s Independent today, controversial Princeton University Professor Peter Singer repeats his notorious stand on the killing of disabled newborns. Asked, “Would you kill a disabled baby?”, Singer responded, “Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole.” . . .

“Many people find this shocking,” continued Singer, “yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion.” Concluding his point, Singer said, “One point on which I agree with opponents of abortion is that, from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby.”

Let us be clear: Singer admits that it is the people who don’t support a woman’s “right” to have an abortion who insist that there is no distinction between the fetus and the newborn — or the fetus and an old person whose death might be convenient to others. Given Singer’s endorsement of involuntary infanticide — abortion and the killing of “disabled” newborns (“disabled” as determined how and by whom?) — Singer accepts, by implication, the rightness of involuntary euthanasia.

How to View Defense Spending

Jeffrey Tucker, one of the inmates of the Mises Economics Blog, posts “Why Libertarians Should Care about Defense.” The entire post consists of this chart:

Because Tucker doesn’t state the point of the chart, I’ll have to read his mind. He’s probably trying to convey a message like this:

Defense spending was just “right” (i.e., close to zero) in the years immediately after World War II, which might or might not have been a justifiable war for the United States.

Look at what has happened since then: Defense spending (in inflated dollars) has risen to a very large number.

Inasmuch as the United States really needs little defense, we’re obviously spending way too much on it.

Defense spending, unlike domestic spending is driven by the outside world, by what others could or would do to us, regardless of our delusions about their benignity. It is necessary to spend a lot on defense even when we are not at war, for two reasons: deterrence and preparedness. With that thought in mind, let’s look at three indices of real (inflation-adjusted) government spending: defense, federal nondefense, and state and local — the red, black, and blue lines, respectively:

Sources: Indices of government spending derived from Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 3.9.1: Percent Change From Preceding Period in Real Government Consumption Expenditures and Gross Investment. Real GDP from What Was GDP Then? (Louis D. Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, “The Annual Real and Nominal GDP for the United States, 1790 – Present.” Economic History Services, April 1, 2006, URL : http://eh.net/hmit/gdp/). Population statistics from U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 Statistical Abstract, Population: National Estimates and Projections, Population and Area: 1790 to 2000 and Resident Population Projections 2005 to 2050.

What does the chart suggest? Several things:

The benchmark for “necessary” defense spending is World War II. Real defense spending has yet to return to that level.

But, as a result of our foolish rush to demobilize after World War II, defense spending had to rise in response to Soviet- and Communist Chinese-backed aggression in Korea and the growing military power and aggressiveness of the Soviet Union.

The partial demobilizations following the Vietnam and Cold Wars necessitated remobilizations to deal with the continuing Soviet miltary buildup and the USSR’s adoption of a forward naval strategy; the likelihood that second-rate powers (e.g., Russia) would strive to counterbalance U.S. power; and our belated understanding of the threat posed by terrorist organizations and their state sponsors.

Federal nondefense spending and state and local spending have risen generally in step with GDP (green line), and faster than population (purple points and purple regression line). (Note that the chart does not reflect the massively disproportionate growth in spending on transfer-payment programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.)

In sum, having becoming locked into the regulatory-welfare state via the New Deal and Great Society, nondefense spending at the federal, state, and local levels has kept pace with what we can “afford” to spend on programs that actually destroy income and wealth. By contrast, defense spending has fluctuated around a high but necessary level, a level that we are much better able to afford now than we were in the days of World War II.

It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditures on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of the social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.

— Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, in Strategy for the West

Pornography: A Definition and an Example

The proprietor of Imlac’s Journal observes that

the candid news photograph of a person grieving over a tragedy is as pornographic as a blue movie. It is because the individual has become another object of lurid interest to the voyeur, stripped naked physically or emotionally.

Also pornographic, in my view, is the non-sexual movie that appeals to the “lurid interest” of the rabid partisan. A good example of such a movie is what James Pinkerton calls “that new Bush snuff movie,” Death of a President. Pinkerton continues:

Some might say that “snuff movie” is too strong a term — but how else to describe a movie that clearly revels in the prospect of George W. Bush’s being assassinated?

How else, indeed, except to say that it is pornographic?

What I Said about Climate Change . . .

. . . here. Read it, if you haven’t already, then go here (first two items).

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