Author: Loquitur Veritatem

See https://politicsandprosperity.com/about/.

An Addendum about Classical Music

My litany of off-putting things about most “classical” music written after 1900 should have included dissonance, atonality, and downright dreariness. Music can be serious, but it needn’t be boring or depressing or just plain unlistenable. But a trip through the list of 20th century composers turns up relatively few who wrote much music that’s endurable. Among the many 20th century specialists in sheer boredom or cacophony are John Adams, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, George Crumb, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern.

If you want to hear how a true master delivers somberness and dissonance, all the while keeping the listener engaged, listen to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, op. 133. Click here and scroll down to track 7 to hear the first minute of Beethoven’s 16-minute masterpiece. Beethoven composed the piece in 1825-26. One hundred seventy-eight years have passed and no one has come close to matching its effervescent blend of inventiveness, sobriety, and esprit.

The Only Vote That Counts

As of the moment, if you believe polls, Kerry will collect more popular votes than Bush, even in a three-way race with Nader. But it’s close, and the election is more than two months away.

Well, suppose Kerry does “win” the popular vote, at the national level. So what? Why should anyone pay attention to that vote? The only vote that matters is the electoral vote.

Repeat after me…

Why Kerry’s War Record Means So Much to Democrats

Democrats are mostly against all wars and have been since the venture in Vietnam went sour (here in America, not there in Vietnam). Democrats flocked to Kerry when it seemed that his war record — coupled with his sort-of, sometimes opposition to the war in Iraq — would legitimate their knee-jerk antiwar stance.

When you live by a candidate’s war record, you die by the candidate’s war record. Kerry’s candidacy is beginning to die the death of a thousand swift cuts.

Krugman, Fisked

I’ve written a few things about Paul Krugman, a self-promoting economist of middling talent who has taken up a second career as a shill for the Democrat Party on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Krugman’s nemesis in the blogosphere is Donald L. Luskin, proprietor of The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid. Luskin has just delivered a ferociously accurate Fisking of Krugman. Read it.

McGovern(ment) to Earth

George McGovernment,* speaking from somewhere in space, has transmitted these thoughts to breathlessly waiting Earthlings:

“Liberals are lambasted,” he said. “Some people don’t even want to say the word.”

He said conservatism and liberalism have always had their place in U.S. history and both should continue to be at the cornerstone of American politics.

It’s true that “liberals” don’t even want to say the word; they’ve switched to “progressives”, for all the good it will do them.

So conservatism is okay? What kind of “progressive” are you, McGovernment? But what about libertarianism? Probably never heard of it.
__________
* One of my children — who have always been wise beyond their years — gave McGovern this more appropriate surname sometime in the 1970s.

Democracy, Is It for the Masses?

That’s the subtext of a piece in The New Yorker, with the title “The Unpolitical Animal”, by Louis Menand. Some excerpts:

Skepticism about the competence of the masses to govern themselves is as old as mass self-government. Even so, when that competence began to be measured statistically, around the end of the Second World War, the numbers startled almost everyone. The data were interpreted most powerfully by the political scientist Philip Converse, in an article on “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” published in 1964. Forty years later, Converse’s conclusions are still the bones at which the science of voting behavior picks.

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologies,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what” -— of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy….

Just because someone’s opinions don’t square with what a political scientist recognizes as a political ideology doesn’t mean that those opinions aren’t coherent by the lights of some more personal system of beliefs. But Converse found reason to doubt this possibility….

All political systems make their claim to legitimacy by some theory, whether it’s the divine right of kings or the iron law of history. Divine rights and iron laws are not subject to empirical confirmation, which is one reason that democracy’s claims have always seemed superior. What polls and surveys suggest, though, is that the belief that elections express the true preferences of the people may be nearly as imaginary. When you move downward through what Converse called the public’s “belief strata,” candidates are quickly separated from ideology and issues, and they become attached, in voters’ minds, to idiosyncratic clusters of ideas and attitudes.

In the face of this evidence, three theories have arisen. The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as “the will of the people” is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, “fire alarms” (sensational news), “October surprises” (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and “gotchas.”…

A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is élite opinion….

The third theory of democratic politics is the theory that the cues to which most voters respond are, in fact, adequate bases on which to form political preferences. People use shortcuts—the social-scientific term is “heuristics” -— to reach judgments about political candidates, and, on the whole, these shortcuts are as good as the long and winding road of reading party platforms, listening to candidate debates, and all the other elements of civic duty….

The principal shortcut that people use in deciding which candidates to vote for is, of course, the political party. The party is the ultimate Uncle Charlie in American politics. Even élite voters use it when they are confronted, in the voting booth, with candidates whose names they have never seen before….

Of course, if Converse is correct, and most voters really don’t have meaningful political beliefs, even ideological “closeness” is an artifact of survey anxiety, of people’s felt need, when they are asked for an opinion, to have one. This absence of “real opinions” is not from lack of brains; it’s from lack of interest….

And whence the lack of interest?

First, the rise of the professional political class and its support system of allied interest groups has taken most decisions out of the hands of the typical voter. It’s like the workplace: most of the work gets done by a minority of workers. Why take an interest when what you do matters little to the outcome?

Second, the rise of the professional political class and its support system of allied interest groups has dragged government into matters in which government shouldn’t be involved, such as social security and redistributive taxation. Such issues are too complex for most professional politicians and academicians, the majority of whom are mindlessly predisposed toward tinkering with the economy. So, it’s really a matter of blind elites trying to lead blind masses.

No wonder voters take shortcuts. It enables them to spend more time on things they can do something about: making a living, raising a family, and having fun.

More on the Debate about Judicial Supremacy

The debate about judicial supremacy continues. Well, William Watkins at Southern Appeal is keeping it alive. His latest post is here. He rebuts the notion that Marbury v. Madison (1803) settled the matter in favor of the U.S. Supreme Court. Watkins refers to an earlier post in which he discusses Larry Kramer’s book, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review:

Perhaps the hardest part for lawyers in understanding Kramer’s argument is our legal education. We are taught that the Framers intended the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter of the Constitution and that in Marbury John Marshall enshrined this principle forever. This is the “first principle” from which we begin. Kramer challenges this and distinguishes fundamental law from ordinary law. He argues that fundamental law (i.e., the Constitution) was never understood to be subject to the same judicial authority as ordinary law. To a modern lawyer this sounds like heresy, but Kramer assembles impressive evidence to support his position.

So, what is the solution? Kramer makes this suggestion:

To control the Supreme Court, we must first lay claim to the Constitution ourselves. That means publicly repudiating justices who say that they, not we, possess the ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution. It means publicly reprimanding politicians who insist that “as Americans” we should submissively yield to whatever the Supreme Court decides. It means refusing to be deflected by arguments that constitutional law is too complex or difficult for ordinary citizens. Constitutional law is indeed complex, because legitimating judicial authority has offered the legal system an excuse to emphasize technical requirements of precedent and formal argument that necessarily complicated matters. But this complexity was created by the Court for the Court and is itself a product of judicializing constitutional law. In reclaiming the Constitution we reclaim the Constitution’s legacy as, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, “a layman’s instrument of government” and not “a lawyer’s contract.” Above all, it means insisting that the Supreme Court is our servant and not our master: a servant whose seriousness and knowledge deserves much deference but who is ultimately supposed to yield to our judgments about what the Constitution means and not the reverse.

It reads like a passage from the script for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It also reads like a recipe for anarchy. There’s no doubt that the Supreme Court has badly twisted the Constitution. But think of where we might be if very many people were to take Kramer seriously. It makes me shudder.

As I have written before, the logic of judicial supremacy is irrefutable — like it or not:

1. Congress enacts laws for whatever reasons it will. Members of Congress may have stirring debates about the constitutionality of a particular law, but in the end Congress will do what it will do. It’s true that Congress should enact only constitutional laws, but that’s like saying children who live in a match factory shouldn’t play with matches.

2. If the executive doesn’t like a particular law for any reason (one of which may be his opinion that the law is unconstitutional) he may veto the law. If his veto is overridden, the law is the law.

3. In the absence of a specific judicial decision nullifying a specific law, the executive is bound to enforce that law. That is what the Constitution contemplates: The legislature legislates and the executive executes. There’s nothing mysterious or arcane about that.

4. If a party with standing challenges a law, it’s up to the courts to decide whether or not it’s a constitutional law. As it says in Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution:

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States….

Which means, as far as I’m concerned, that the executive must defer to judicial decisions about the application of a specific law.

Kerry and Vietnam

He was for it before he was against it before he was for it.

Making Sense about Classical Music

ArtsJournal.com recently ran a 10-day blog, “Critical Conversation: Classical Music Critics on the Future of Music”. It “tackled the question what/where/are the Big Ideas in classical music?” The blog “involved 13 prominent American music critics.”

One of the critics, Greg Sandow of the Wall Street Journal, is also a composer. Sandow’s home page is here. It includes a link to a page about his “Quartet for Anne” (his wife). You can hear it performed by the Fine Arts Quartet by clicking here. (It’s only about five and a half minutes long.) If this is the new direction of classical music, I’m all for it. It’s a hauntingly lovely piece reminiscent of Antonín Dvořák’s work.

As I’ve written before and will write again, Dvořák was one of the last great composers of the golden era of classical music, which began around 1700 and came to an end around 1900. What happened after that? Another participant in the blog, Kyle Gann of the Village Voice, had a few useful insights:

Throughout the 20th century, each new movement represented an advance in complexity and abstraction over the last. Serialism brought that process to a dead end….

[O]ne thing that composers of my generation have almost universally lost patience with is the presumption of historical inevitability. The idea that 12-tone music was the inevitable music of the future and that anyone who didn’t learn to write it was “useless” (Pierre Boulez’s word) left a bitter taste in our mouths. [Just as Boulez’s so-called music left a bitter taste in audiences’ mouths: ED]

But Gann and most of the other bloggers are hung up on compositional techniques; fusions with pop, rock, and jazz; experimentation with electronic music; the role of gender; the role of political ideas; the influence of Chinese composers; and on and on. All of which misses the point.

What happened around 1900 is that classical music became — and still is, for the most part — an “inside game” for composers and music critics. So-called serious composers (barring Gershwin and a few other holdouts) began treating music as a pure exercise in notational innovation, as a technical challenge to performers, and as a way of “daring” audiences to be “open minded” (i.e., to tolerate nonsense). But the result isn’t music, it’s self-indulgent crap (there’s no other word for it).

Thus I return to Greg Sandow, who is on the trail of the “next big idea” in a post headed “Truly big classical ideas”:

A new Big Idea would be very welcome, at least to me — a reintroduction of performer freedom, but to what now would be considered a drastic degree. You can find examples of this in old recordings, especially by singers. Look at Ivan Kozlovsky, one of the two star tenors at the Bolshoi Opera during Stalin’s rule. To judge from films and recordings, he’s clearly one of the greatest tenors who ever lived, measured simply by technique, breath control, range (all the way up to an F above high C, with Cs and C sharps thrown out like thrilling candy), phrasing, and expression….

But what makes him most unusual — and, to many people, quite improper — is that he sang at least some of the time like a pop singer, using lots of falsetto, almost crooning at times, and above all taking any liberty he pleased, slowing down and speeding up as the mood suited him. To my ears, he’s mesmerizing when he does that. You can’t (to bastardize an old cliche) take your ears off him. And when he does it in the Duke’s opening solo in the duet with Gilda from Rigoletto, he nails the Duke’s character as no other singer I’ve ever heard could do. You don’t just theorize that the Duke is attractive to women; you feel it, and want to surrender to him yourself. Or, perhaps, run away, which is exactly the kind of dual reaction a man like that would really get….

[Kozlovsky is] in part just a sentimental entertainer. But what sentiment, and what entertainment! And what perfect singing. When he croons “O Mimi tu piu non torni”…, some people might roll their eyes at the way he slows down at the peak of the phrase, but you can’t ignore his genuine feeling, or his perfect control as he slowly dreams his voice into the lightest of pianissimos.

Singing like that would be absolutely forbidden in opera today. No teacher, no coach, and no conductor would let any singer try it. And yet, if someone stepped out on the stage of the Met singing that way, the audience would go insane. The applause wouldn’t end. And opera would come back to life.

When I follow Sandow’s point to its logical conclusion, here’s where I arrive: Classical music, on the whole, would come back to life if more composers were to reject self-indulgence and write music for the enjoyment of peformers and audiences.

The Meaning of Patriotism: An Introduction

It’s “love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it,” according to TheFreeDictionary.com. Before I looked up the definition, I was going to define patriotism merely as “love of country.” The part about “willingness to sacrifice for it” raises the stakes; it suggests that love of country must be backed by deeds, not just mouthed in words.

Far better than the dictionary definition of patriotism is a NYT op-ed by a U.S. Marine serving in Iraq. Key excerpts:

Now we are on the verge of victory or defeat in Iraq. Success depends not only on battlefield superiority, but also on the trust and confidence of the American people. I’ve read some articles recently that call for cutting back our military presence in Iraq and moving our troops to the peripheries of most cities. Such advice is well-intentioned but wrong – it would soon lead to a total withdrawal. Our goal needs to be a safe Iraq, free of militias and terrorists; if we simply pull back and run, then the region will pose an even greater threat than it did before the invasion. I also fear if we do not win this battle here and now, my 7-year-old son might find himself here in 10 or 11 years, fighting the same enemies and their sons.

When critics of the war say their advocacy is on behalf of those of us risking our lives here, it’s a type of false patriotism. I believe that when Americans say they “support our troops,” it should include supporting our mission, not just sending us care packages. They don’t have to believe in the cause as I do; but they should not denigrate it. That only aids the enemy in defeating us strategically.

Michael Moore recently asked Bill O’Reilly if he would sacrifice his son for Falluja. A clever rhetorical device, but it’s the wrong question: this war is about Des Moines, not Falluja. This country is breeding and attracting militants who are all eager to grab box cutters, dirty bombs, suicide vests or biological weapons, and then come fight us in Chicago, Santa Monica or Long Island. Falluja, in fact, was very close to becoming a city our forces could have controlled, and then given new schools and sewers and hospitals, before we pulled back in the spring. Now, essentially ignored, it has become a Taliban-like state of Islamic extremism, a terrorist safe haven. We must not let the same fate befall Najaf or Ramadi or the rest of Iraq.

No, I would not sacrifice myself, my parents would not sacrifice me, and President Bush would not sacrifice a single marine or soldier simply for Falluja. Rather, that symbolic city is but one step toward a free and democratic Iraq, which is one step closer to a more safe and secure America.

I miss my family, my friends and my country, but right now there is nowhere else I’d rather be. I am a United States Marine.

Glen G. Butler is a major in the Marines.

Fatuous-Libertarian-of-the-Month Award

The winner is Gene Healy, for this post:

Questions on Iraq and the GWOT

Given that our intelligence agencies have a dearth of Arabic speakers, who’s been reading Al Qaeda email traffic since the fall of 2002? [How about contracting-out Gene? Ever hear of it? It’s a sort-of free-market way of performing government functions; it avoids the need to carry a permanent payroll of bureaucrats and, if done right, it’s a more effective way of spending taxpayers’ dollars. Haven’t you noticed that the intelligence agencies seem to have been doing a pretty good job lately? And do you suppose they’re really telling the truth about their capabilities. What kind of naive putz are you Gene?] I assume quite a few of the folks with the necessary language skills have been shifted from that task to dealing with Iraq. [See previous comment.] Who’s reading it now while we’re busy trying to deal with Moqtada al-Sadr or whoever the next enemy of the month is? [See previous comment, and stop trying to be so clever. You’re not that good at it.]

If the “flypaper” theory is true, and there is a fixed number of terrorists and it’s all about whether we want to fight them here or abroad, then why don’t we invade Saudi Arabia, put mouse ears on the Kabaa, and start charging admission to fat Christian tourists? That would really rile up the terrorist monolith, at no extra risk to us domestically! [He’s kidding, of course, because as a libertarian he doesn’t really care where his oil comes from as long as he can buy it at a good price. And an invasion of Saudi Arabia would certainly disrupt his supply of oil for a while. He’s too busy trying to be clever to understand that the Saudis must be worried about what happens when we’re through with Iraq — which is why GWB doesn’t tip his hand about such things. One despotism at a time, Gene. Patience, please.]

More seriously, if the “flypaper” theory is true, then why do we need to “drain the swamps” by democratizing the Middle East? [Drained swamps don’t always stay drained, dummy.] Doesn’t the latter theory depend on the idea that there aren’t a fixed (or relatively fixed) number of terrorists? (See the Rumsfeld memo.) If there’s a fixed number of terrorists, what important war-on-terror goal is served by turning Iraq (and later, Saudi Arabia, Syria, et al) into secular liberal democracies? [See previous comment. Also, do you have something against secular liberal democracies? Or is that you don’t think Arabs could possibly be as enlightened as we are? That’s hardly a libertarian way of looking at the world.] Surely it can’t be the case that already-practicing terrorists are going to lay down their arms in gratitude when democracy comes to the Arab world. [You’re right, Gene, that’s why we’re also trying to kill as many of them as we can while we have the chance. Oddly enough, the more we kill the fewer there will be because (1) some will be dead and (2) others will think twice about getting their butts shot off. I mean, that would be your reaction Gene, and you’re a fairly fanatical person yourself. Or do you believe that Arabs have a superior degree of fanaticism. If so, that’s racial stereotyping. Tsk, tsk.] Or is the theory that since they hate us because we’re free, once they’re free, they’ll hate themselves, and be too busy to bother with us? [If you’ve been paying attention Gene, you will have figured out that they will either be free, dead, cowed, or targeting bigots like you.]

Here’s some free advice, Gene. Don’t try to mix humor and serious commentary. You’re not up to it.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

Let them slug it out with Kerry and his minions. The truth, to the extent it can ever be known, will come out in the process — which will generate much more heat than light. But that’s the way of politics.

It’s far better than the alternative, which is to suppress political speech. We’re almost there, thanks to McCain-Feingold, Bush’s decision not to veto, and the Supreme Court’s abandonment of the First Amendment in upholding McCain-Feingold’s most oppressive elements.

If free speech is on the way out, as it may well be, at least it’s going out with a bang.

That’s all I have to say. I’m sorry to disappoint you if you found this post because you were searching for something meaty about the Swift Boat Vets. But, as long as you’re here, have a look around. There’s some rather meaty stuff on other issues.

Distilling the Essence of Modern Libertarianism

In an earlier post I traced the underpinnings of modern libertarianism to their origins with John Stuart Mill and Friedrich A. Hayek. I used a lot of space (though far from enough) to spell out their arguments for the primacy of the individual as against the state. Wikipedia nicely summarizes the philosophy that results from their arguments:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy which advocates individual rights and a limited government. Libertarians believe that individuals should be free to do anything they want, so long as they do not infringe upon what they believe to be the equal rights of others. In this respect they agree with many other modern political ideologies. The difference arises from the definition of “rights”. For libertarians, there are no “positive rights” (such as to food or shelter or health care), only “negative rights” (such as to not be assaulted, abused, robbed or censored), including the right to personal property. Libertarians further believe that the only legitimate use of force, whether public or private, is to protect these rights.

In summing up the reasons for subscribing to that statement, I said:

Mill instructs us that personal freedoms should be preserved because through them we become more knowledgeable and more capable; therefore, the state should intervene in our lives only to protect us from physical harm. Hayek then makes the case that the personal and the economic are inseparable: We engage in economic activity to serve personal values and our personal values are reflected in our economic activity. Moreover, the state cannot make personal and economic decisions more effectively than individuals operating freely within an ever-evolving societal network, and when the state intervenes in our lives it damages that network, to our detriment. That is the essence of modern libertarianism.

The closing sentence of Mill’s On Liberty reminds us of what happens when the state prevails against the individual:

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

The economic cost of statism is high, as I have argued here and here. The social costs are incalculable.

A Telling Truth

Experimental economics is being used to create data about economic behavior, with which to test economic theories. An economist has even won a Nobel prize for his work in experimental economics. In a earlier post I argued that

A controlled experiment involving human behavior doesn’t yield valid results if its subjects know they’re participating in an experiment or if their environment is manipulated for the purpose of an experiment.

It happens that some behavioral psychologists are conducting laboratory studies to see if liars can be detected by their behavior. Critics of those experiments make this point:

Some researchers think…that the design of the laboratory studies is responsible for the poor rates of lie detection. “People are very good liars when nothing is at stake,” says Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England. “But a lab setting is not real life.”

In most experiments, researchers tell the subjects whether or not to lie, and the lies have no effect on their lives. There’s no significant reward for a liar who’s believed or punishment for a judge who’s duped.

“There is definitely a lack of real-life stuff in this field of research,” says Vrij.

Exactly!

Modern Art: Less of It Is Better

Munch’s famous ‘Scream,’ ‘Madonna’ stolen. That’s the headline from AP (via al.com). Here’s a bit of the story:

A French radio producer, Francois Castang, said he was visiting the Munch Museum in Oslo when thieves burst in and made off with the paintings, including the painter’s depiction of an anguished figure with its head in its hands.

“What’s strange is that in this museum, there weren’t any means of protection for the paintings, no alarm bell,” Castang told France Inter radio.

“The paintings were simply attached by wire to the walls,” he said. “All you had to do is pull on the painting hard for the cord to break loose — which is what I saw one of the thieves doing.”

Well, who’d have thought they were worth stealing?

Understanding the Essence of Modern Libertarianism

A lot has been written about libertarianism, but most of it is superficial. Take this definition from Wikipedia, for instance:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy which advocates individual rights and a limited government. Libertarians believe that individuals should be free to do anything they want, so long as they do not infringe upon what they believe to be the equal rights of others. In this respect they agree with many other modern political ideologies. The difference arises from the definition of “rights”. For libertarians, there are no “positive rights” (such as to food or shelter or health care), only “negative rights” (such as to not be assaulted, abused, robbed or censored), including the right to personal property. Libertarians further believe that the only legitimate use of force, whether public or private, is to protect these rights.

That’s all right, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t say why today’s libertarians believe what they believe about the primacy of the individual as against the state.

To learn that, we must begin with John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who advanced the principles of libertarianism beyond their 18th century origins in John Locke (who believed in divinely bestowed inalienable rights) and Adam Smith (who understood that the “invisible hand” of the market translates economic self-interest into general well-being). A look at the Wikipedia entry for Mill tells us that his long essay, On Liberty is

about the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. One argument that Mill formed was the harm principle, that is people should be free to engage in what ever behaviors they wish as long as it does not harm others.

That’s the sum of Mill’s argument. Now let’s turn to the meat of it.

First, with regard to freedom of speech, Mill says, in Chapter II of On Liberty:

We have now recognised the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate. First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

In other words, freedom of speech advances the truth, and we are better off for knowing the truth, however much we might resent hearing it in some instances. Similarly, in Chapter III Mill argues that we are better off if we respect individuality rather than impose uniformity of behavior:

As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions of customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.

Having established the importance of freedom of speech and action, how does Mill balance these freedoms in a societal context? At the onset of Chapter IV, Mill says this:

What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?

Each will receive its proper share, if each has that which more particularly concerns it. To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interests society.

Though society is not founded on a contract, and though no good purpose is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it [touché, Rousseau], every one who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists first, in not injuring the interests of one another; or rather certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights; and secondly, in each person’s bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation. These conditions society is justified in enforcing at all costs to those who endeavour to withhold fulfillment. Nor is this all that society may do. The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others, or wanting in due consideration for their welfare, without going the length of violating any of their constituted rights. The offender may then be justly punished by opinion, though not by law. As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person’s conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like (all the persons concerned being of full age, and the ordinary amount of understanding). In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.

That is, for the sake of preserving individuality, a person who actually harms another person may be punished by the state. But a person who merely says or does something that offends others may be punished only by the force of opinion and reason, to which he may or may not choose to bow. Mill applies his principles in Chapter V:

The maxims are, first, that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. Advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people if thought necessary by them for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express its dislike or disapprobation of his conduct. Secondly, that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishment, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection….

In many cases, an individual, in pursuing a legitimate object, necessarily and therefore legitimately causes pain or loss to others, or intercepts a good which they had a reasonable hope of obtaining. Such oppositions of interest between individuals often arise from bad social institutions, but are unavoidable while those institutions last; and some would be unavoidable under any institutions. Whoever succeeds in an overcrowded profession, or in a competitive examination; whoever is preferred to another in any contest for an object which both desire, reaps benefit from the loss of others, from their wasted exertion and their disappointment. But it is, by common admission, better for the general interest of mankind, that persons should pursue their objects undeterred by this sort of consequences….

Again, trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principle, comes within the jurisdiction of society: accordingly, it was once held to be the duty of governments, in all cases which were considered of importance, to fix prices, and regulate the processes of manufacture. But is now recognised, though not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality of commodities are most effectually provided for by leaving the producers and sellers perfectly free, under the sole check of equal freedom to the buyers for supplying themselves elsewhere. This is the so-called doctrine of Free Trade, which rests on grounds different from, though equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this Essay. Restrictions on trade, or on production for purposes of trade, are indeed restraints; and all restraint, quâ restraint, is an evil: but the restraints in question affect only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them. As the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of Free Trade, so neither is it in most of the questions which arise respecting the limits of that doctrine….

Thus, despite his acknowledgment that commerce is a social act, and despite having made a good defense of free trade, Mill believes there is an essential difference between personal and economic freedom.

Now comes Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) to unify personal freedom and economic freedom. Virginia Postrel, writing earlier this year for The Boston Globe, explains:

Hayek’s most important insight, which he referred to as his “one discovery” in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the “man on the spot.” Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods.”

The economic problem of society,” Hayek wrote in his 1945 article [“The Use of Knowledge in Society”], “is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given’ resources — if `given’ is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.’ It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality.”

The key to a functioning economy — or society — is decentralized competition. In a market economy, prices act as a “system of telecommunications,” coordinating information far beyond the scope of a single mind. They permit ever-evolving order to emerge from dispersed knowledge….

Information technology has strengthened Hayek’s legacy. At MIT’s Sloan School, Erik Brynjolfsson uses Hayek to remind students that feeding data into centralized computers doesn’t necessarily solve a company’s information problems. In any complex operation, there is too much relevant information for a single person or small group to absorb and act on.

“As Hayek pointed out, the key thing is to have the decision rights and the information co-located,” says Brynjolfsson. “There are at least two ways of achieving that. One is to move information to decision maker. The other is to move decision rights to where the information is.”

This analysis, which applies as much to culture as to economics, informs Hayek’s best-known work, The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote as a wartime warning to a popular audience. Published in 1944 and dedicated “to the socialists of all parties,” the book argued that the logic of socialist central planning implied the erosion of personal freedoms. Britain’s well-intended socialists were headed down the same path as the National Socialists whose rise Hayek had witnessed in Austria….

[H]e argued that to fully control the economy meant to control all aspects of life. Economic decisions are not separate from individual values or purposes. They reflect those purposes.”We want money for many different things, and those things are not always, or even rarely, just to have money for its own sake,” explains Jerry Z. Muller, a historian at Catholic University….”We want money for our spouses or our children or to do something in terms of the transformation of ourselves — for everything from plastic surgery to reading intellectual history or building a church. These are all noneconomic goals that we express through the common means of money.”

Hayek argued that only in a competitive market, in which prices signal the relative values placed on different goods, can people with very different values live together peacefully. And only in such a market can they figure out how best to meet their needs and wants — or even what those needs and wants are…

There you have it: Mill instructs us that personal freedoms should be preserved because through them we become more knowledgeable and more capable; therefore, the state should intervene in our lives only to protect us from physical harm. Hayek then makes the case that the personal and the economic are inseparable: We engage in economic activity to serve personal values and our personal values are reflected in our economic activity. Moreover, the state cannot make personal and economic decisions more effectively than individuals operating freely within an ever-evolving societal network, and when the state intervenes in our lives it damages that network, to our detriment. That is the essence of modern libertarianism.

The Main Causes of Prosperity

UPDATED 08/21/04

In an earlier post, I reported that government intervention in the economy since 1906 has reduced per capita GDP in the U.S. by about 40 percent. What happened?:

First, the regulatory state began [in 1906] to encroach on American industry with the passage of the Food and Drug Act and the vindictive application of the Sherman Antitrust Act, beginning with Standard Oil (the Microsoft of its day). There followed the ratification of Amendment XVI (enabling the federal government to tax incomes); World War I (a high-taxing, big-spending operation); a respite (the boom of the 1920s, which was owed to the Harding-Coolidge laissez-faire policy toward the economy); and the Great Depression and World War II (truly tragic events that imbued in the nation a false belief in the efficacy of the big-spending, high-taxing, regulating, welfare state).

The Great Depression also spawned the myth that good times (namely the Roaring ’20s) must be followed by bad times, as if good times are an indulgence for which penance must be paid. Thus the Depression often is styled as a “hangover” that resulted from the “partying” of the ’20s, as if laissez-faire — and not wrong-headed government policies — had caused and deepened the Depression.

You know the rest of the story: Spend, tax, redistribute, regulate, elect, spend, tax, redistribute, regulate, elect, ad infinitum. The payoff: GDP per capita was almost $38,000 in 2003; without government meddling it might have been as much as $68,000.

Now that the U.S., like most other countries, has attained a high level of government spending, taxation, regulation, and welfare, how is the U.S. able to maintain its outstanding record of economic performance?

The relative prosperity of a market economy* today depends mainly on three things: the rule of law, free trade, and educational attainment. I base this conclusion on statistical analyses of data for 59 countries. I used the indices of economic freedom for 2000 from Economic Freedom of the World** and 1998 data for average national IQ and GDP per capita published by La Griffe du Lion (who derived the data from an article by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, “National IQ and Economic Development: A study of Eighty-One Developing Nations,” in Mankind Quarterly (Summer 2001).

I correlated GDP per capita with the various indices of economic freedom. Based on those correlations and some preliminary regression analyses, I found that GDP per capita can be explained mainly by two indices: The rule of law (Area 2: Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights) has a significantly positive effect on GDP per capita; the mean tariff rate (Area 4.A.ii) has a significantly negative effect on GDP per capita. The rule of law is a measure of the independence and integrity of the judicial system and the degree to which intellectual property rights are protected. The use of law to regulate the economy is captured in various other indices, of which the tariff rate is one.

IQ (verbal IQ to be precise) has a significantly positive effect on GDP per capita. IQ, in this instance, probably measures education, which should be the proximate cause of prosperity, at least up to the point where education ceases being an investment and becomes conspicuous consumption.

(For the statistically minded, the R-squared of the regression equation is 0.89 and the t-stats for the independent variables are as follows: rule of law, 7.55; mean tariff rate, -4.03; verbal IQ, 4.47.)

I don’t mean to imply that prosperity is determined solely by the rule of law, free trade, and education. Those three factors simply yield powerful statistical relationships. My analyses of the indices of economic freedom also point to several other significant factors, especially transfers and subsidies as a share of GDP, bribery as a cost of doing business with government, and the regulation of business. Most of the countries in the data set have large welfare programs (transfer payments) and impose a heavy regulatory burden on business. Thus those activities are unlikely to show up as statistically significant in a multivariate analysis of cross-section data. Similarly, it is hard to find a country with a robust economy that doesn’t impose high taxes on its citizens.

The moral of the story is that, although we in the U.S. could adopt policies that would make us worse off (e.g., eliminating patents and raising tariffs), we would be significantly better off if we hadn’t veered from the path of laissez-faire capitalism a century ago. The main cause of prosperity is economic freedom.

__________

* Command economies are excluded from the analysis because their performance is so far below that of market economies. For example, as of 1998 (the year of the IQ and GDP data) China was far from a market economy. If China had a market economy, and if that economy operated under the same rule of law and tariffs as the U.S. economy, the per capita GDP of China would have been about the same as that of the U.S. because China’s average IQ was about the same as that of the U.S. In fact, China’s per capita GDP was about one-tenth that of the U.S. That’s the cost of decades of political repression and central planning.

** The compilation of indices of economic freedom in Economic Freedom of the World is a continuing endeavor of The Fraser Institute of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. There are 37 individual indices. The individual indices are organized into five areas, each of which has a weighted index. And there is a summary index, which is a weighted index of the area indices.

The Folly of Being Nonjudgmental

It’s a sin to be judgmental in the brave (old) world of liberal wimp-speak. Mustn’t judge other cultures by our standards. Mustn’t condemn Islamists out of hand, they have a point of view and “legitimate” grievances (sorry, I just have to use quotation marks there). Consider the causes of crime (broken homes, poverty, etc.) and be less judgmental about criminals. And on, and on.

It makes me wonder what it would take to get a hemorrhaging cardiac organ (bleeding heart) to judge anyone. How about when she’s in line to buy tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert; would she judge me if I cut in line ahead of her? How about when he’s cruising down the freeway in his SUV, while talking on his cell phone, and I cut across his bow as I spot the exit I’ve been looking for; would he judge me then? You get the idea.

It’s easy to say “don’t be judgmental” until someone violates your personal space. But if you wait until that moment to be judgmental, you will have waited too long.

Another Blow to Climatology?

FuturePundit (again) points to an article at NewScientist.com:

Cosmic ray link to global warming boosted

10:27 17 August 04

The controversial idea that cosmic rays could be driving global warming by influencing cloud cover will get a boost at a conference next week. But some scientists dismiss the idea and are worried that it will detract from efforts to curb rising levels of greenhouse gases.

At issue is whether cosmic rays, the high-energy particles spat out by exploding stars elsewhere in the galaxy, can affect the temperature on Earth. The suggestion is that cosmic rays crashing into the atmosphere ionise the molecules they collide with, triggering cloud formation.

If the flux of cosmic rays drops, fewer clouds will form and the planet will warm up. No one yet understands the mechanism, which was first described in the late 1990s. But what makes it controversial is that climate models used to predict the consequences of rising levels of greenhouse gases do not allow for the effect, and may be inaccurate [emphasis added].

Some proponents of the theory argue that changes in the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth can explain past climate change as well as global warming today [emphasis added]. Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and Jan Veizer of the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, claimed in 2003 that changes in cosmic-ray flux are the major reason for temperature changes over the past 500 million years [emphasis added]….

You want more examples of research that suggests global warming may have little to do with human activity? FuturePundit has them.

Watch Out for Mr. Potato Head

As a public service, Ohio State University’s Research News warns us:

AGGRESSIVE TENDENCIES MAY BE REVEALED BY ASYMMETRY IN BODY PARTS, STUDY FINDS

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers may get some indication of how aggressively an angry person will react by measuring the size relationship between a person’s ears and other body parts, according to a new study.

Research showed that the farther certain paired body parts were from symmetry – if one ear, index finger or foot was bigger than another, for example – the more likely it is was that a person would show signs of aggression when provoked….

Now you know why Quasimodo and Frankenstein’s monster are so scary.

(Thanks to FuturePundit for the tip.)