I Know What Some of You Are Thinking…

…about this story:

Court: Terror Fears Can’t Curb ‘Liberty’

Sat Oct 16, 7:06 PM ET

By C.G. WALLACE, Associated Press Writer

ATLANTA – Fear of a terrorist attack is not sufficient reason for authorities to search people at a protest, a federal appeals court has ruled, saying Sept. 11 “cannot be the day liberty perished.”

A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news – web sites) ruled unanimously Friday that protesters may not be required to pass through metal detectors when they gather next month for a rally against a U.S. training academy for Latin American soldiers.

Authorities began using the metal detectors at the annual School of the Americas protest after the 2001 terrorist attacks, but the court found that practice to be unconstitutional….

But it’s not nice to say it in a blog. Curb your enthusiasm.

"Red Sox Fear"?

Susan Estrich, in a pre-emptive complaint about “disenfranchisement”, says,

Red Sox fear animates the Kerry campaign, and Democratic activists across the country.

What’s that all about? Is she off her meds? Is she hallucinating?

“Red Sox fear” — what a great slogan. I can see the T-shirts.

The only thing the Red Sox have to fear is themselves.

Irrational Risk Aversion at Work

Daniel Drezner is listing heavily toward Kerry. Here’s a telling remark:

Given the foreign policy stakes in this election, I prefer a leader who has a good decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I don’t like, over a leader who has a bad decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I do like.

In other words, because Drezner is afraid of the small probability that he will be killed in a traffic accident he would rather walk to the corner store, and be ripped off, than get in his car and drive to Wal-Mart. When did the oyster replace the eagle as America’s symbol?

To change the metaphor, think of Kerry’s foreign policy as a zero. Kerry is a whiz at multiplication, but no matter how well he multiplies, the result is always zero. Bush, on the other hand, has a foreign policy with a value of, say, 10. According to Drezner, Bush may sometimes multiply that foreign policy by zero and get an answer of zero — but not always. Bush’s answer will usually be closer to 10 than zero.

Anyway, who says Kerry has a better decision-making process than Bush? That’s all hype. Kerry keeps asking questions because he’s searching for his principles and can’t find them. There’s more about Kerry’s vaunted decision-making style here.

Trying to Overcome Our Past

Daniel Henninger, writing at OpinionJournal, explains why “Change Is Inevitably Not Popular.” Here’s his key point:

…After three presidential debates, it is clear that George Bush is asking the American people to make[an] abrupt break with the comforts of the political past. Proposals such as Social Security privatization or individually run health-savings accounts are not being offered as just an intriguing “policy” alternative. These ideas are an historic necessity to surviving in the world economy as it exists today.

Intellectually, the case for making the leap is compelling. Emotionally, the way forward is less obvious. Most Americans have already adjusted to the disturbing realities of Iraq and of waging–and leading–a war on global terror. But it’s quite a lot to ask them in the same election to step away from 50 or more years of federally guaranteed social protection. That would have been large without Iraq and terror.

The Kerry campaign is riding on the belief that the American electorate, at the margins in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, isn’t ready to make the break. And they may be right. That to me is the meaning of the relentlessly close poll results that persist in this election. John Kerry is a fundamentally weak presidential candidate, but about half the electorate is uncertain whether it is able to sign up for all the risk and uncertainty implicit in the next Bush presidency.

That’s what 100 years of regulation and 70 years of welfare dependency will do to you. As Henninger says,

Back in the 1920s, Republicans won presidential elections with whopping 60% majorities. Calvin Coolidge presided over an economy growing at nearly 5% annually. A nation tied to business success was working. The Depression changed everything.

Very few Americans can remember the 1920s. Too many can remember the Depression and its legacy of misplaced faith in the regulatory-welfare state. It’s not clear that we can overcome that dependency. Hang on for a bumpy ride.

Due Process of Law

Jeff Jarvis asks “Would you go to jail for your weblog?” It’s a long post about the case of Judith Miller of The New York Times, who’s been jailed for contempt in her refusal to name sources in the Valerie Plame case. Jarvis wants to make Miller’s plight into a First Amendment case. It’s not that at all, as I said in my comment to Jarvis’s post:

There’s no freedom of speech or freedom of the press issue here. What’s at stake is due process of law, and that’s what Miller and her ilk are trying to subvert.

Someone — presumably a government official — may have committed a crime. The press has no right to thwart the investigation of a crime.

The Remarkable Mind of Roger Penrose

It’s been a while since I read Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind, an exploration of consciousness and the possibility of replicating it in computers. Penrose is a scientist with his head screwed on right, as I am reminded by an article by Martin Gardner in The New Criterion, “Theory of everything.” There, Gardner reviews Penrose’s new book, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.

First, Gardner summarizes Penrose’s views on the replicability of consciousness:

…Penrose’s two best sellers, The Emperor’s New Mind and its sequel, Shadows of the Mind, were slashing attacks on the opinions of a few artificial intelligence mavens that in just a few decades computers made with wires and switches will be able to do everything a human mind can do. Advanced computers, it was said, will some day replace the human race and colonize the cosmos! Penrose disagrees. Not until we know more about laws below the level of quantum mechanics, he argues, can computers cross that mysterious threshold separating our self-awareness from the unconscious networks of computers. Maybe the threshold will never be crossed. Computers of the sort we know how to build obviously are no more aware of what they do than a typewriter knows it is typing….

Amen.

Now, on to physics:

Penrose is frank in admitting that he has “prejudices” which other physicists reject. For another instance, he is not impressed by the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum phenomena. According to this eccentric view, every time a quantum event takes place the entire universe splits into two or more parallel universes, each containing a possible outcome of the event!

Take the notorious case known as “Schrödinger’s cat.” Imagine a cat inside a closed box along with a Geiger counter that emits random clicks. The first click triggers a device that kills the cat. Some quantum experts, notably Eugene Wigner, believed that no quantum event is real until it is observed by a conscious mind. Until someone opens the box and looks, the poor cat is a “superposition” of two quantum states, dead and alive. In the many-worlds interpretation the cat remains alive in one world, dies in the other. This proliferation of new universes, like the forking branches of a rapidly growing tree, naturally must include duplicates of you and me!

If these billions upon billions of sprouting universes are not “real” in the same way our universe is real, but only imaginary artifacts, then the many-worlds interpretation is just another way of talking about quantum events. Yes, the talk erases some of the bizarre concepts of quantum theory, but with such an enormous violation of Occam’s razor….

And that’s just a taste of the nuggets to be mined in Gardner’s review. Makes me want to buy the book.

Free-Market Healthcare

Arnold Kling writes today at Tech Central Station about “market-oriented reforms for health care.” Some key points:

…On the demand side, I propose event reimbursement in health insurance instead of procedure reimbursement. On the supply side, I propose reputation systems instead of credential-based regulation.

Event reimbursement insurance would give you a lump sum if you become injured or seriously ill. The lump sums might be in multiples of $5000. You might get $5000 for a broken wrist that requires surgery, $25,000 if you are diagnosed with stage one breast cancer, etc. The insurance contract would spell out which events result in which dollar amounts….

One advantage of event reimbursement compared with procedure reimbursement is that it gives patients and providers the incentive to control costs. It also gets insurance companies out of the business of setting fees for services. Providers set fees, and consumers decide either to accept those fees or go somewhere else for service. Relative to current practice, this is a radical concept, and it would take some learning on the part of both consumers and health care providers to adapt. We seem to be able to handle this aspect of markets in other goods and services, so I am optimistic that this would work.

However, the primary advantage of event reimbursement insurance is that it is true insurance. As I pointed out in “You Call This Health Insurance,” the traditional “health insurance” that we have today is really something quite different. The current system cannot deal with someone who develops a disease that puts him or her at risk for expensive procedures going forward. The competitive market breaks down at that point….

…Leaving aside medical insurance, for the medical field as a whole I believe that reputation systems would work better than our current system of credential-based regulation.

A friend who is an optometrist puts a lot of time into lobbying the state legislature. That is because the boundaries between what he can do relative to an optician or an ophthalmologist are determined by state laws. One group is constantly trying to use the legislative process to take territory away from the others.

These sorts of regulatory boundaries impose tremendous costs on consumers, without our realizing it. Like fish unaware that they are swimming in water, most of us go through life without ever thinking about the pervasive, murky regulatory swamp through which we swim when we seek medical care.

In most industries, government does not get involved in defining work rules. If a company decides to have a financial analyst do computer programming or a computer programmer do financial analysis, that is none of the government’s business. In the medical industry, however, the government does dictate such work rules. This creates all sorts of supply bottlenecks. For example, if there is an increase in the number of patients needing help with starting exercise programs to recover from orthopedic injuries, the result is a shortage of “physical therapists.” Any other market would adapt by coming up with a close substitute. In medicine, that is not allowed.

Another example is the rule that only a physician may write prescriptions. This protects the income of physicians, but by the same token it prevents lower-cost alternative health delivery systems from emerging….

Although medical work rules serve primarily to carve out economic rents for health care providers, they are not sold that way to the public. Instead, these regulations ride in under the banner of “consumer protection.”

The free market principle is that as consumers we should protect ourselves. The key to protecting ourselves in a deregulated environment for medical care would be reputation systems. As Howard Rheingold discusses in his book Smart Mobs, the concept of reputation systems receives increasing attention in our information-rich, networked society.

There are reputation systems all around us. Consumer Reports ratings are a reputation system. eBay uses a reputation system to keep buyers and sellers honest. Mortgage lenders and other suppliers of consumer credit rely on a reputation system known as credit scoring.

In medicine, we already use reputation systems. The diploma on the doctor’s wall is one. The referral that is made by friends or other doctors is another. All sorts of private systems are springing up to evaluate data on hospitals, doctors, and so on.

Reputation systems could provide us with an alternative to the strict, credential-driven structure that we have today. Someone could earn a reputation as capable of training you to do certain exercises without earning a license as a physical therapist. Someone could earn a reputation as a reliable prescriber for certain types of medications in certain types of situations without getting a full-fledged MD. In fact, the drug industry could be deregulated, with reputation systems for medicines replacing “FDA approval.”

If you took away the centrally-planned regulatory system for medical care, my conjecture is that reputation systems would emerge as a more efficient Hayekian market response. In some cases, such as medicines, I would want to see a gradual deregulatory process, rather than lose consumer protection completely and suddenly.

Some of the expense of operating reputations systems could be offset by lower costs elsewhere. If bad doctors (and incompetent technicians as well) were dealt with by reputation systems, malpractice lawsuits would be needed much less, if at all.

If we took away the regulatory swamp, the changes would be dramatic. You could have your gall bladder surgery done by a dental assistant. That would not be a good idea, but it would be your responsibility as a consumer to make that decision. Your protection against making bad decisions would be common sense, information, and effective reputation systems.

My guess is that a lot of business process re-engineering would take place spontaneously if the regulatory swamp were replaced by consumer choice and reputation systems. I think that this is the best hope for allowing medical care to become as efficient as possible by taking advantage of the best technologies and practices our economy has to offer….

For more about the deregulation of healthcare, among other things, see my series “Fear of the Free Market” (here, here, and here).

An Almost-Correct Diagnosis

Rice at Southern Appeal says:

…If Bush loses, the debates will be a significant reason why. We had 4 liberal moderators. While moderators tend to have only a small impact on the debate, they do decide which topics are discussed. They frame the issues. Repeatedly, Iraq was framed as a failure by the moderators.

If Bush loses it will because he debated Kerry, period. I know that it’s unseemly for a sitting president to refuse to participate in the quadrennial test of cramming and makeup. But the debates do nothing but show how well a candidate can perform in the artificial setting of live TV. The debates have nothing to do with governance and everything to do with performance (in the showbiz sense).

Bush should have refused to participate in the debates, on the ground that he has more pressing things to do, such as prosecute a war. His refusal might have cost him a few points in the polls, but that’s nothing compared with the damage he has suffered by giving Kerry an opportunity to feign gravitas.

Is the Postal Service Next?

FuturePundit asks, “Can We Finally Retire The Space Shuttle?“

It is my hope that the success of [Burt Rutan’s] SpaceShipOne and the coming flights of SpaceShipTwo and other private spacecraft designs will allow the American public to get over their emotional attachment to the Space Shuttle.

Now, if Congress would only allow UPS, FedEx, and their imitators to deliver the mail. For one thing, I’ll bet that they would be willing and able to do the following: Let me set up an online account where I can simply check off the vendors whose catalogs I don’t want to receive. I’d gladly pay something not to lug those catalogs up the driveway, then back down the driveway, in the recycling bin.

Nader, the Bogeyman

Ryan Lizza of The New Republic has posted a piece about Nader’s influence on the outcome of the election. Key passages:

…Despite the fact that he is registering barely 1 percent in national polls, Nader is indeed perfectly positioned to cost Kerry the election. Consider Kerry’s current road to 270 electoral votes. The number of true toss-up states has dwindled to eleven: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico. Nader is on the ballot in all of these states but Pennsylvania and Ohio, where his access is still the subject of litigation. Each of these states is close enough that Nader could make the difference, and the damage he could do to Kerry becomes more obvious when one looks at the combination of states Kerry is likely to need for victory. Assuming Bush wins Florida and Kerry wins Pennsylvania, Kerry must then win Ohio and some combination of three to five of the remaining eight small toss-up states. These eight states have two things in common: in each, the race is almost a dead heat, and, in each, Nader is polling between one and four points. In other words, Nader is doing best in the most closely contested states….

In his pitch to students in San Francisco and Berkeley, Nader talks about the importance of organizing and getting involved in the political process. He notes that politicians only respond when people are mobilized. “It’s very important for the rumble of the people to come back,” he says. It is a bizarre statement in the context of liberal politics in 2004. On the left, there probably has not been as much energy and organization since the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. Bush has helped create the foundation for an entire New Left counter-establishment. From Moveon.org to the Howard Dean campaign to the liberal blogosphere to Air America radio to new think tanks sprouting up around Washington, D.C., an entire new network of exactly the kind of activists that Nader has long praised is suddenly being born. Their singular goal is to defeat Bush. At 70, Nader’s last great act as a public citizen might be to scuttle all their work. Not even the LaRouchies are that irresponsible.

Hey, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. If some lefties prefer Nader to Kerry, what are we supposed to do, shoot them in the back as they stand in a polling booth?

Ain’t democracy great? So it takes a bite out of liberty every once in a while, but sometimes liberty bites back.

Advice for the "Disenfranchised"

Some voters, particularly voters in States where a Kerry win is certain, complain that the Electoral College disenfranchises them. They say that their votes don’t count because the election isn’t decided by the national popular vote. I agree with you — 100 percent. So, here’s what you can do about it:

Let’s say you’re a Democrat in New York (or California or Massachusetts, etc). You know that your vote won’t make a difference because Kerry’s going to take your State’s electoral votes, no matter what. So don’t vote. And pass the word to several million other “disenfranchised” Democrats in your State. Suddenly, your State’s Republicans will feel enfranchised, for a change.

In the "So What?" Department

Wizbang‘s Kevin Aylward laments the distribution of income from CD sales:

This breakdown of the cost of a typical major-label release by the independent market-research firm Almighty Institute of Music Retail shows where the money goes for a new album with a list price of $15.99.

$0.17 Musicians’ unions

$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing

$0.82 Publishing royalties

$0.80 Retail profit

$0.90 Distribution

$1.60 Artists’ royalties

$1.70 Label profit

$2.40 Marketing/promotion

$2.91 Label overhead

$3.89 Retail overhead

That’s a pretty remarkable breakdown. Label[s] get $7.01per CD and retailers get $4.69 for a combined percentage of 73% of the price of each CD. Royalties, artists, and manufacturing costs combined total only $4.29.

Is someone forcing the artists to record at gunpoint? Why don’t we just take half of everyone else’s share and give it to the artists? Mmmm…I wonder what would happen to the marketing and sales of CDs then.

Here’s a better way to look at it, Kevin. The artists’ royalties from each CD are split among a small number of people. All the other entities in the production-distribution chain are corporations who have to cover the cost of wages, benefits, rent, utilities, supplies, lawyers, etc., etc. It’s fair to say that artists, per capita, do better than everyone else in the chain. But, as I asked above, is someone forcing the artists to record at gunpoint? If not, what they make is no one else’s business.

I’m surprised that a blogger who seems otherwise to have a firm grasp of conservative-libertarian principles would presume to second-guess the outcome of free-market transactions.

For Libertarian Hawks

Tim Sandefur at Freespace skewers the (eponymous?) Libertarian Jackass:

The Ass is one of these Doughface Libertarians who believe that the only time the military should engage in anything is when the enemy is marching through the streets of Los Angeles (even then he would most likely accuse America of having instigated the attack by daring to refuel its Air Force planes over the Indian Ocean.)

Read the whole thing.

Who Said That?

The French are arrogant, rude and surly to foreign visitors, according to Bernard Plasait, a member of France’s upper house of parliament (from The Washington Times). The first paragraph of Plasait’s government-commissioned report reads thus:

Our bad image in this area, the arrogance we are accused of, our refusal to speak foreign languages, the sense we give that it’s a great honor to visit us are among the ugly facts of which we should not be proud.

Isn’t self-awareness the first step on the road to recovery from an addiction? It will take a lot more than twelve steps to overcome France’s addiction to its utterly delusional sense of importance.

(Thanks to my son for the tip.)

Novelists for Kerry

Slate interviewed 31 novelists about their preference between Kerry and Bush. In summary:

Thirty-one novelists participated, with four for Bush, 24 for Kerry, and three in a category of their own.

What do you expect from a bunch of fiction writers? Anyway, here’s my take on the gang of 31:

I’ve never read anything by 27 of them (and I read a lot of novels).

Of the other four, two (Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike) long ago became boring; one (Amy Tan) has always been boring; and one (Jane Smiley) wrote a passably good mystery about 20 years ago.

Joyce Carol Oates’s comment epitomizes the vacuousness of the knee-jerk pro-Kerry literati:

Like virtually everyone I know, I’m voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons. To enumerate these reasons, to repeat yet another time the fundamental litany of liberal principles that need to be reclaimed and revitalized, seems to be redundant and unnecessary. Our culture has become politicized to a degree that verges upon hysteria. And since I live in New Jersey, a state in which an “honest politician” is someone who hasn’t yet been arrested, I have come to have modest, that’s to say realistic expectations about public life.

No wonder her stuff has become unreadable. She has become detached from reality and logic. Maybe she should try “magic realism”.

By the way, the four pro-Bush writers are:

Orson Scott Card, a pro-war Democrat.

Robert Ferrigno, another pro-war type who says “Most novelists live in their imagination, which is a fine place to be until the bad guys come knock knock knocking.”

Roger L. Simon, another pro-war Democrat.

Thomas Mallon, who is worth quoting at length:

I’ll be voting for President Bush. His response to the 9/11 attacks has been both strong and measured, and he has extended a once-unimaginable degree of freedom (however tentative) to Afghanistan and Iraq. I am unimpressed by the frantic vilification that has come his way from even mainstream elements of the Democratic Party. The rhetorical assault is reminiscent of—though it far exceeds—the overheated opposition to Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984. Back then the intellectual establishment told us how repression and apocalypse would be just around the corner if the American “cowboy” were kept in the White House for another four years. Well (as Reagan might say, his head cocked to one side), I remember a rather different result from RR’s second term. And I’m hopeful about another four years under George W. Bush.

Two of the three agnostics have interesting things to say:

A.M. Homes:

Richard Nixon, because I found him so fascinating the first time around I’d be curious to see what he could do from the beyond … ?

Richard Dooling:

More than any other election in recent memory, this one reminds me of Henry Adams’ observation that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.

The left-wing political road rage directed at George W. Bush for being dumb and lying about the war reminds me of nothing so much as the right-wing obsessive invective directed at Bill Clinton for being smart and lying about sex. Rush Limbaugh versus Michael Moore, and let the man nursing the most unrequited rage win. The DRAMA and spectacle of the election will be fascinating to watch, but novelists, even more than actors, should be political agnostics.

The same goes for musicians, Richard.

Arab Logic in Detroit

From Reuters via Yahoo! News:

Arab American Voters Drop Support for Bush

Wed Oct 13,11:02 AM ET

By Michael Ellis

DEARBORN, Mich. (Reuters) – Hundreds of Arab Americans danced and celebrated in the streets of this Detroit suburb after the fall of Baghdad last year, and enthusiastically shouted thanks to President Bush.

Now, even some of the most vocal supporters of the president blame him for failing to stop the disorder and death in Iraq. One opinion poll shows Bush trailing Democratic Sen. John Kerry among Arab Americans in four key battleground states including Michigan, where every vote could count in a close Nov. 2 election.

“The butcher (Saddam Hussein) is gone, but the bloodshed is still there,” said Imam Husham Al-Husainy, a Shi’ite cleric who in 1979 fled Iraq and moved to Dearborn, home to many of the estimated 235,000 Arab Americans in Michigan.

“President Bush did a good job to remove the cancer,” said Husainy, who led a rally of more than 100 people in support of the invasion when Bush visited Dearborn two years ago. “But he did not do a good job of strengthening Iraq. Iraq is still like an infected patient in an emergency room,” he said….

Let’s see what we have here. Kerry might or might not have removed Hussein; we still don’t know which, and we never will. Bush removed Hussein and since then a bunch of Arab thugs have committed acts of terror against fellow Arabs. This is a reason to vote for Kerry?

I guess the guys in Detroit would be happier if Bush had simply nuked the place. No terrorists, no one to terrorize, “perfect” outcome by Arab logic.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

From Yahoo! News:

AP: Report Finds Lavish Spending at TSA

By LESLIE MILLER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The government agency in charge of airport security spent nearly a half-million dollars on an awards ceremony at a lavish hotel, including $81,000 for plaques and $500 for cheese displays, according to an internal report obtained by The Associated Press….

Par for the course in D.C. The feds do it. And the feds’ contractors do it. And it’s your money. I managed to kill my old (tax-funded) outfit’s lavish annual “holiday” party, but a lot of the Indians and not a few Chiefs were upset about it.

Oh, Canada; Oh, America

Yesterday, Alan at Occam’s Carbuncle noted this Volokh Conspiracy post about the state of free speech in Canada. Today he has more to say about the state of affairs in Canada:

…Clearly, most Canadians do not share my aversion to the Liberal brand of pernicious quasi-socialism, a system of government whereby the state assumes the burden of individual conscience and acts as overweaning bookkeeper to the populace, while maintaining the facade of prosperity, freedom and justice via creaking centrally planned and controlled core institutions like medicare and the Supreme Court. To me, the disadvantages of such a system are immediately evident. They are evident in the grotesquely high taxes I pay, in the minutiae of invasive regulations that pervade our lives, in the institutional rot of our government, in the systematic destruction of our once proud military, in the contempt for the public purse now increasingly coming to light….Reason, patriotism, tempered strength, honesty, love of freedom, a firm grounding in the very best from our history; these are the qualities that will be necessary to stem the socialist tide in this country. Socialism is, at its root, born of a dim, fearful view of life as a never ending series of risks to be averted. We, as libertarians and conservatives, need to help people to wake up to the idea of life as a continuous stream of opportunity.

Substitute “Americans” for “Canadians” and “Democrat” for “Liberal” and what Alan says is wholly applicable to the U.S. We’re just a few strides behind Canada on the road to serfdom.

I agree fully with Alan’s idea that libertarians and conservatives must sell people on the advantages of liberty. It’s necessary, at times, to attack and expose the idiocies of the left. But we must also make it clear that libertarianism and old-fashioned, small-government conservatism are positive philosophies — philosophies based on the principle that people are better off when they rely on themselves instead of “big brother”.

Libertarian Twaddle about the Death Penalty

In the middle of a post about the Supreme Court’s consideration of the death penalty for juveniles, McQ at QandO says:

…I am against the death penalty, have been for years. Yes I know all the arguments for to include the emotional ones. I simply don’t accept them as valid. My objection is based in man’s right to life, and unlike Jon, I feel it is inherent (man qua man) and therefore inviolable by all, to include the state. In essence I believe the state does to the murderer precisely that for which it is punishing the murderer….

By that logic, we shouldn’t have armed forces and use them to kill our enemies. As I have said:

…I don’t care whether or not capital punishment deters homicide. [Though it does, as the post explains.] Capital punishment is the capstone of a system of justice that used to work quite well in this country because it was certain and harsh. There must be a hierarchy of certain penalties for crime, and that hierarchy must culminate in the ultimate penalty if criminals and potential criminals are to believe that crime will be punished. When punishment is made less severe and less certain — as it was for a long time after World War II — crime flourishes and law-abiding citizens become less secure in their lives and property.

The state doesn’t do to the murderer that for which it is punishing the murderer. It does to the murderer that which the murderer shouldn’t have done, as a lesson to other would-be murderers, and as a way of ensuring that that murderer won’t murder again. Similarly, the state deprives other criminals of freedom (but not life) for doing what they shouldn’t have done, and as a way of keeping them away from the rest of us for a while. Or does McQ object to depriving criminals of their freedom? After all, freedom is right up there with the right to life in the pantheon of libertarian values. Oh, and what about abortion?

Remembering an Unsung Hero

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution posts about “The Man Who Killed the Draft“:

The influence of Milton Friedman in ending conscription is well-known. But an economist named William Meckling arguably played a larger role, read the story.

Here’s some of the story, as told in 1999 by David Henderson:

If you are an American male under age 44, take a moment of silence to thank William H. Meckling, who died last year at age 76. Even though you probably haven’t heard of him, he has had a profound effect on your life. What he did was help to end military conscription in the United States.

Between 1948 and 1973, here’s what you knew if you were a healthy male born in the U.S.A.: the government could pluck you out of almost any activity you were pursuing, cut your hair, and send you anywhere in the world….

Bill Meckling didn’t think that was right….He had been drafted into the army in World War II and witnessed the government’s incredibly wasteful use of manpower when it could pay below-market wages. He tucked that lesson away and would use it 25 years later.

Meckling went on to become an economist. In 1962 [sic] he was named the first dean of the University of Rochester’s new business school, where he continued until 1983….

When the [President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force] was created, in 1969, the members were not unanimous on ending the draft. In his recent coauthored book, Two Lucky People, Mr. Friedman writes that 5 of the 15 commissioners — including himself, Mr. Greenspan, and Mr. Wallis — were against the draft to begin with. Five members were undecided, and 5 were prodraft. Yet when the commission’s report came out less than a year later and became a paperback book, all 15 members favored ending the draft.

What happened in between? That’s where Bill Meckling comes in.

Meckling was chosen as executive director of the commission. As soon as he started his work, he got a nasty surprise: he had thought that everyone involved was opposed to the draft and that his job would be narrower than it turned out to be. “I thought that I was hired to estimate supply curves,” he joked in a 1979 speech; he neither intended nor desired to get into a debate over conscription. But Meckling quickly adjusted to his new position. He hired some economists (who estimated those supply curves) as well as some historians; members of both groups wrote papers making a strong historical and philosophical case against the draft. The commission’s work was done in less than a year, under budget and ahead of schedule. Three years later, the draft was dead….

…Many of you who have made or are now making your fortunes would not have done so if the draft had been in the way. Consider Bill Gates, who in 1975 dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft: during the draft years, young men like him who left college risked being certified as prime military meat. Computer programmers and other IT workers, who often do their best work relatively early in life, regularly drop out of college now because high-paying, interesting jobs beckon. If we still had the draft — even a peacetime draft — many wouldn’t have that chance.

People often wonder why today’s 20-somethings have such entrepreneurial spirit. One reason, I believe, is that a whole generation has grown up without the draft looming over its head. For that I thank, among others, Martin Anderson, Milton Friedman, W. Allen Wallis, and William H. Meckling. Bless them all.

When I left graduate school in 1963 and went to work for a defense think-tank in the D.C. area, Bill Meckling headed the division to which I was assigned. Bill didn’t leave the think-tank to become dean of the B-school at Rochester until 1964 or 1965. Anyway, the rest of the story is right about Bill and his role in ending the draft. Some of the economists and historians who worked on the staff of the commission were seconded from the defense think-tank where I worked. In fact, the staff was housed in the same building, though in separate quarters. The intellectual and physical proximity of the commisstion’s staff to the think-tank was no coincidence; the University of Rochester had held the contract to oversee the think-tank since 1968.

In 1983, as Bill was nearing retirement as dean of Rochester’s B-school, the university’s oversight of the think-tank was under fire from then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. (That’s another story.) Rochester’s president thought it prudent to review the think-tank’s management practices. Bill was a member of the university’s review team. One of his tasks was to interview me about quality control (I was responsible for reviewing the think-tank’s formal research publications). It was the last time I saw Bill Meckling — an economist who truly advanced the cause of liberty in America.

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