Author: Loquitur Veritatem

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

Censorship Knows No Political Bounds

From Australian IT:

Labor bid to block net porn

Emma-Kate Symons

AUGUST 16, 2004

ALL internet service providers would be forced to block hard-core pornography reaching home computers under a radical plan to protect children being pushed by federal Labor MPs….

I’m not getting into the merits of the debate. I simply want to point out that conservatives have no monopoly on censorship. Of course, we knew that already because campus speech codes are an entirely left-wing initiative. But I couldn’t resist an off-campus example of left-wing censorship.

Education as Conspicuous Consumption

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution asks “Is education good for growth?” He answers himself by quoting from an analysis by Phil Mullan at Spiked:

Challenging the conventional view, there is actually a striking global correspondence between the world economic slowdown since 1973 and ever-increasing levels of educational spending. Comparisons between countries also confound the idea that more education translates into more growth. For example, South Korea is often given as an example of a country that made education a priority since the 1960s and saw significant economic growth. But as Professor Alison Wolf from King’s College London points out, Egypt has also prioritised investing in education, but its growth record has been poor (4). Between 1970 and 1998 Egypt’s primary enrolment rates grew to more than 90 per cent, secondary schooling levels went from 32 per cent to 75 per cent, and university education doubled – yet over the same period Egypt moved from being the world’s forty-seventh poorest country to being the forty-eighth.

A retort might be that education isn’t the sole determinant of growth – other factors may offset its positive economic role – but it remains a necessary one. But this argument doesn’t stand up either. The rapid growth of Hong Kong, another of the East Asian tigers, wasn’t accompanied by substantial investment in education. Its expansion of secondary and university education came later, as more prosperous Hong Kong parents used some of their newfound wealth to give their children a better education than they had had.

A study for the World Bank came to similar conclusions….

As Cowen says, “The consumption component of education is commonly underrated. Rich countries spend more on education for the same reason that they consume more leisure.”

There you have it. If you work in the “white collar” world, think about how many of your colleagues have pursued advanced degrees because those degrees carry prestige and make them more promotable — not because they have acquired more skills but simply because they have acquired a piece of paper from a university. Now think about how much more productive those colleagues have become because they acquired their advanced degrees. Oh, you’re still waiting to see the results? Fancy that!

I Wish I’d Said That

Michael Munger, writing at the Library of Economics and Liberty, remembers when he worked at the Federal Trade Commission:

…In the afternoon, we would take a break from our exhausting day of blocking asinine regulations, and go have a big frozen yogurt at a place right beside the entrance to the Washington School for Secretaries. Sitting there having a yogurt, watching dozens of attractive women walk by, we would sometimes say to each other, “You know, this is criminal. We are just stealing our money.”

But then one of us would state the standard defense, one all of us believed fervently: “Not true! If it weren’t for us, occupying these crucial desks, they might very hire someone who would write new regulations! We are doing God’s work here, gentlemen! We are constipating the intestines of the cow of regulation!”…

And he had a good point. I often felt guilty about working for a tax-funded think-tank. But at least I tried to enforce frugality, and I fought the good fight against “diversity” — in the name of which an entire program has been erected since my retirement.

The Rationality Fallacy

MSNBC runs a piece by Jerry Adler of Newsweek International headlined “Mind Reading”. Adler is quick to repeat a common misunderstanding about economics:

For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models.

Balderdash and hogwash! Economics says that individuals try to maximize their satisfaction, as they understand it. Maximizing satisfaction isn’t always the same thing as maximizing wealth, which is apparently the measure of rationality being used in the article; viz.:

Economists have many ways of demonstrating the irrationality of their favorite experimental animal, Homo sapiens. One is the “ultimatum game,” which involves two subjects….Subject A gets 10 dollar bills. He can choose to give any number of them to subject B, who can accept or reject the offer. If [B] accepts, they split the money as A proposed; if [B] rejects A’s offer, both get nothing. As predicted by the theories of mathematician John Nash (subject of the movie “A Beautiful Mind”), A makes the most money by offering one dollar to B, keeping nine for himself, and B should accept it, because one dollar is better than none.

But if you ignore the equations and focus on how people actually behave, you see something different….People playing B who receive only one or two dollars overwhelmingly reject the offer. Economists have no better explanation than simple spite over feeling shortchanged. This becomes clear when people play the same game against a computer. They tend to accept whatever they’re offered, because why feel insulted by a machine? By the same token, most normal people playing A offer something close to an even split, averaging about $4. The only category of people who consistently play as game theory dictates, offering the minimum possible amount, are those who don’t take into account the feelings of the other player. They are autistics.

Such experiments may prove something about wealth maximization, but they prove nothing about rationality because they fail to take into account the dynamics of human interaction. Being offered only one of 10 dollars is an insult, and accepting an insult isn’t worth a dollar, to most people. When someone who is holding 10 dollars offers you only one dollar, that person is sending you a signal about your worth in his or her eyes. It’s like approaching a panhandler with a fan of five-dollar bills in your hand and plucking out one of those bills for the panhandler — who might take it, refuse it, spit in your face, or grab all the bills. If your purpose is to give the panhandler five dollars, without insulting the panhandler, you approach the panhandler with a single five-dollar bill in your hand and give that bill to the panhandler — who will accept it with thanks. (By the way, why do some people give money to panhandlers? After all, it’s not a way to maximize one’s wealth. That’s right, it’s a way to maximize one’s satisfaction. Those who give money to panhandlers feel better about themselves.)

There is simply a lot more to maximizing satisfaction than maximizing wealth. That’s why some people choose to have a lot of children, when doing so obviously reduces the amount they can save. That’s why some choose to retire early rather than stay in stressful jobs. Rationality and wealth maximization are two very different things, but a lot of laypersons and too many economists are guilty of equating them.

Regulation, Competition, Wages, and Employment

Just a quick note to remind non-economists about the effects of regulation on wages and employment. It’s been shown many times, by many economists, that economic regulation raises the costs of doing business, thereby discouraging business formation and reducing competition. The results: (1) Prices are higher because (a) costs are higher and (b) there is less competition. (2) Wages are lower because there is less demand for labor. (3) Employment is also lower because there is less demand for labor.

It’s about Time

The Observer, at Guardian Unlimited, tells us:

US to redeploy 100,000 troops and shut bases

Peter Beaumont

Sunday August 15, 2004

The Observer

President George Bush will announce tomorrow that the US military will pull up to 100,000 troops out of Europe and Asia in the biggest redeployment since the end of the Cold War [14 years ago!].

The plan will see a number of US bases in Germany closed down [good!], and troops returned home or redeployed to Eastern Europe.

The redeployment – first reported by The Observer in February last year in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq – will be presented by Bush as a logical response to the war on terrorism [true] when he addresses the 2.6 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars at its annual convention in Cincinnati.

In February last year, however, when the proposal was first mooted, Pentagon officials presented the closure of the bases in Germany as punishment for Germany’s refusal to back the war in Iraq [also true].

Pentagon officials, who confirmed the planned announcement in yesterday’s Washington Post, said the change is necessary to adapt the nation’s military to the demands of the global war on terrorism and to take advantage of new technology [also true].

But the planned restructuring also comes amid overstretch in a US army struggling to juggle commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan and other theatres, and has been responsible for declining morale particularly in combat units…. [Another good reason for pulling troops out of Germany.]

So many good things can flow from one rational decision. Of course, being Americans, we’ll probably help Germany again if it falls under the rule of an evil dictator or is threatened by an evil empire to its east.

I’ve Changed My Mind

It’s been coming for a long time. I can no longer resist it. But now that I’m blogging, and thus thinking more deliberately about various political philosophies and their implications for the human condition, I’ve come to a conclusion. As a libertarian — who believes that a legitimate function of the state is to protect humans from force — I can no longer condone the legality of abortion. For one thing, legal abortion is a step on the path to legal euthanasia. But legal abortion stands by itself as a crime against humanity. IrishLaw explains, in a reply to a commentary by Will Baude at Crescat Sententia about a statement by Alan Keyes.

First, Keyes (as quoted by Baude), responding to an interviewer’s question:

…I’ve often asked people: So we are supposed to punish an innocent child because his parents have committed an offense like incest, or his father an offense like rape? Would you want to be punished for the deeds of your parents? Would you want to be killed because your parents committed an offense? We know that that’s not fair. … People like to make assertions…. we should make arguments for the positions we take.

Next, Baude:

Well, that is an argument. It’s a terrible one, but it is an argument.

Abortion is not designed to punish the aborted fetus (“killed baby,” if that terminology is more to your liking)– it’s designed, in the case of rape and non-consensual incest, to restore a wronged person to her “whole” state. Now if Mr. Keyes means that innocent people (if indeed a fetus is one) should never ever have costs, especially very large costs, imposed upon them by anybody else in the interests of justice, that is an interesting position (though it probably has to be asserted rather than argued).

Finally, IrishLaw:

Start with the first contention. Abortion may not be designed to punish the unborn child in these cases, but I don’t see how it can be understood as doing anything but. The child is alive before the abortion, and the child is dead after the abortion. The only reason why this innocent child is different from any other innocent aborted child is the very unhappy circumstance of his conception, which difference lies not with the child; and so from that perspective the innocence, lack of culpability, and lack of necessity for death are the same. But if a child is a human being regardless of how he was conceived, why should abortion be permissible dependent on the circumstance of conception? Of course we want to do everything we can to help a wronged woman become whole again. But actions cannot be undone, and they certainly cannot be undone by killing an innocent third party.

Which leads to the second point. I agree that it is an interesting question whether and to what extent costs may be imposed on the innocent in the interests of justice. Is it just, for example, not to hire (or admit to university) more qualified nonminorities (or non-preferred minorities) so that the asserted just end of making up for past discrimination is served by admitting less qualified, preferred minority applicants? (The Supreme Court says no, though they apparently have accepted that achievement of “diversity” is an acceptable just end.) In that case, justice imposes a cost on innocent third parties who were never personally responsible for discriminatory hiring or admissions processes in the past. There must be many hypothetical situations to discuss in this regard. But in what other case would Will assert that the death of an innocent person was an acceptable cost to bear in the interests of justice for a separate party? That is not only a “very large cost,” it is the ultimate cost. I don’t see how asking an unborn child to pay with its life (or, rather, not asking but just doing) is justified in the interests of helping heal the mother, no matter how tragic the injury she has suffered.

Once life begins it is sophistry to say that abortion doesn’t amount to the taking of an innocent life. It is also sophistry to argue that abortion is “acceptable” until such-and-such a stage of fetal development. There is no clear dividing line between the onset of life and the onset of human-ness. They are indivisible.

The state shouldn’t be in the business of authorizing the deaths of innocent humans. The state should be in the business of protecting the lives of innocent humans — from conception to grave.

I come to that conclusion from a non-religious perspective. I am, at best (or worst), an agnostic. I am no less a libertarian for being opposed to abortion and no less moral for being an agnostic libertarian.

I therefore respectfully refute Feddie at Southern Appeal, who pointed me to the Keyes-Baude-IrishLaw controversy by saying “Libertarians are Republicans without morals.” Not so. Libertarians are libertarians because they take a fundamentally moral position, which is that humans have the right to enjoy life, liberty, and happiness.

My position on abortion may not be a typical libertarian position, but neither is it exclusively a Republican position. There are, in fact, a large number of anti-abortion Democrats and more than a few pro-abortion Republicans.

I Just Have to Say Something about This

Many other bloggers have commented on this, but I can’t resist adding my dime’s worth. Media left, right, and center are parroting the party line about the effects of the Bush tax cuts. As the Washington Times (of all papers) says:

Bush tax cuts seen hurting middle class

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Bush’s tax cuts since 2001 have shifted more of the tax burden from the nation’s rich to middle-class families, according to a study released yesterday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The tax rate declined across all income levels — but more so in the top brackets, the report said….

The tax cuts didn’t hurt the middle class (whatever that is). As the story says, the tax rate declined across all income levels. How does a lower tax rate for the middle class hurt the middle class? Oh, the middle class didn’t get as big a tax break as the so-called rich, who continue to pay the lion’s share of income taxes. It’s just not fair — to the “rich”.

Don’t Call Us…

Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy posted recently about the national do-not-call registry. Zywicki defends the do-not-call (DNC) registry on economic grounds; that is:

…It took an ambiguously defined property right (when can telemarketers call you), defined it clearly (telemarketers can call you whenever they want to), and provided a low-cost way of reallocating the property right (register on the DNC)….

…Based on the registration numbers, a majority of Americans want to be free from telemarketing calls. So why not make the default rule “no calls” and make the telemarketers get your permission? Leaving aside the logistical problems (Would calling you to ask you if you want to be called count as a telemarketing call?), the …rule [adopted by the FTC] is efficient because the transaction costs of reallocating are so munch lower for consumers than for telemarketers, especially because the FTC made registration so easy….

That’s one way to look at it. But I look at it differently. My phone is my property. You don’t come onto my property without my permission. The government, in this case, is merely enforcing my negative right to be free from trespass.

Refuting Rousseau and His Progeny

I’ve been pinging on Rousseauvian philosophy in recent posts (here, here, here, and here). Rousseau is the spiritual father of socialism and communism. His modern adherents, who might disclaim socialism and communism by name, nevertheless spout the party line when they claim that we don’t deserve what we have. Their ideas hark back to Rousseau’s The Social Contract, about which Wikipedia says, in part:

According to Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law.

In other words, individuals will be free only if they surrender their freedom to the “collective will” — which, of course, will be determined and enforced by a smaller group of citizens, whose authority cannot be questioned by the majority.

Latter-day Rousseauvians dress it up a bit by making assertions like this:

[T]here’s no good reason to believe that a system of free-market and private property is anything close to a merit-based system. Some people work hard on worthy projects for their whole lives or take exceptional risks on society’s behalf and nevertheless remain comparatively poor; others, through being lucky or rich, get to be as rich as Croesus. Is Warren Buffet more morally deserving than the firefighters on 9/11? Of course not. He doesn’t think so, they don’t think so, we don’t think so….

Warren Buffet can speak for himself. Those who remain comparatively poor can speak for themselves. And the “we” at Crooked Timber can speak for themselves. But they cannot speak for me or the millions like me who disagree with them. They are promoting a view of the world as they would like to see it — nothing more, nothing less.

And therein lies the refutation of their worldview. There is no Rousseauvian social contract. There cannot be when millions of us reject the concept. Rousseau’s self-appointed priests and acolytes may judge us to their heart’s content, but their judgments are meaningless because we, the millions, do not accept those judgments.

Scientists in a Snit

Some scientists are “hopping mad” because the Bush administration doesn’t always do what they want it to do. As AP reports via Yahoo! News:

Science, Politics Collide in Election Year

By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer

Last November, President Bush gave physicist Richard Garwin a medal for his “valuable scientific advice on important questions of national security.” Just three months later, Garwin signed a statement condemning the Bush administration for misusing, suppressing and distorting scientific advice.

So far more than 4,000 scientists, including 48 Nobel prize winners, have put their names to the declaration….

Later in the story we get some perspective:

Scientists collect evidence and conduct experiments to arrive at an objective description of reality — to describe the world as it is rather than as we might want it to be.

Government, on the other hand, is about anything but objective truth. It deals with gray areas, competing values, the allocation of limited resources. It is conducted by debate and negotiation. Far from striving for ultimate truths, it seeks compromises that a majority can live with.

When these conflicting paradigms come together, disagreements are inevitable.

The catch is that scientists don’t always “describe the world as it is.” Take the pseudo-science of climatology, for instance, which seems to be populated mainly by luddites who think that the world is coming to an end because of SUVs. (I exaggerate, but not by much.) Working from inadequate data and arguably false premises, they would have us stop in our tracks and revert to a standard of living last “enjoyed” in the 1800s. And climatologists aren’t the only “scientists” who inject their personal preferences into their recommendations.

Many people will be unduly impressed by an anti-Bush declaration signed by 4,000 scientists. They shouldn’t be. Science is like sausage-making. When you see how it’s done, you have qualms about swallowing the end product.

The Social(ist) Contract

In two earlier posts (here and here) I tore into a blogger for his presumption that we don’t deserve what we earn. The blogger is, apparently, a proponent of Rousseau, who penned The Social Contract. Here are some tidbits about The Social Contract from Wikipedia:

Perhaps Rousseau’s most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order. Published in 1762 and condemned by the Parlement of Paris when it appeared, it became one of the most influential works of abstract political thought in the Western tradition. Building on his earlier work, such as the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau claimed that the state of nature eventually degenerates into a brutish condition without law or morality, at which point the human race must adopt institutions of law or perish. In the degenerate phase of the state of nature, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men whilst at the same time becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law. Whilst Rousseau argues that sovereignty should thus be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereign and government. The government is charged with implementing and enforcing the general will and is composed of a smaller group of citizens, known as magistrates…Much of the subsequent controversy about Rousseau’s work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free….

Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property, and therefore is often considered a forebearer of modern socialism and communism (see Karl Marx, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings). Rousseau also questioned the assumption that the will of the majority is always correct. He argued that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of the will of the majority….[emphasis added]

In other words, the magistrates decide what’s best for the people. As I said before, “there’s a philosophy that’s fit for (dare I say it?) Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russian, and Mao’s China.” I rest my case.

Some "Thinkers" Just Think Too Hard

Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, writes:

What if Al Qaeda acquired a nuclear bomb? In releasing its report, the 9/11 Commission underscored bin Laden’s nuclear ambitions. As the commission members said, “Our report shows that Al Qaeda tried to acquire or make weapons of mass destruction for at least 10 years.” In commission chairman Thomas Kean’s words, “Everybody feels that they are trying to mount another attack, and everybody feels that, given their ideology, they’re doing their best to make it chemical, biological and nuclear because it kills more people.”

For most Americans, the question of what bin Laden could possibly hope to achieve by such devastation has been confused by Bush administration rhetoric that characterizes Al Qaeda as “nothing but cold-blooded killers.”

To the contrary, any careful reader of bin Laden’s fatwas, statements, and tapes will find a chilling but quite specific list of strategic objectives. Bin Laden’s demands of America include:

Withdrawal of all American troops from Saudi Arabia.

Elimination of American political and economic influence from Muslim countries.

End of the “Judeo-Christian crusades” that have occupied and/or corrupted Muslim countries.

End of American’s military, financial, and public support for regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other Arab countries.

Let’s see if I understand this. Suppose you own a store and an intruder rushes into your store brandishing an Uzi. He demands that you close your store because your business “offends” him. You know that he has killed other store owners whose businesses also offended him. Now he threatens to kill you if you don’t close your store.

It’s true that the intruder isn’t just a cold-blooded killer. He’s a cold-blooded killer who happens to be a fanatic. His fanaticism doesn’t cancel his cold-bloodedness, it only magnifies it.

(Thanks to The American Thinker for the tip.)

Aha!

In the previous post I suggested that a certain Chris Bertram was either omniscient or arrogant, and I pointed out that his line of thinking empowers the beast of the state.

Well, it turns out that Bertram is a member of the Rousseau Association. There’s a link on the Association’s site to a biography of Rousseau. It seems that Bertram, who presumes to judge whether we deserve what we have, emulates Rousseau in his arrogance, pretensions to omniscience, and willingness to entrust all to the state:

Rousseau reacted against the artificiality and corruption of the social customs and institutions of the time. He was a keen thinker, and was equipped with the weapons of the philosophical century and with an inspiring eloquence. To these qualities were added a pronounced egotism, self-seeking, and an arrogance that led to bitter antagonism against his revolutionary views and sensitive personality, the reaction against which resulted in a growing misanthropy. Error and prejudice in the name of philosophy, according to him, had stifled reason and nature, and culture, as he found it, had corrupted morals. In Emile he presents the ideal citizen and the means of training the child for the State in accordance with nature, even to a sense of God. This “nature gospel” of education, as Goethe called it, was the inspiration, beginning with Pestalozzi, of world-wide pedagogical methods. The most admirable part in this is the creed of the vicar of Savoy, in which, in happy phrase, Rousseau shows a true, natural susceptibility to religion and to God, whose omnipotence and greatness are published anew every day. The Social Contract, on the text that all men are born free and equal, regards the State as a contract in which individuals surrender none of their natural rights, but rather agree for the protection of them. Most remarkable in this projected republic was the provision to banish aliens to the state religion and to punish dissenters with death. The Social Contract became the text-book of the French Revolution, and Rousseau’s theories as protests bore fruit in the frenzied bloody orgies of the Commune as well as in the rejuvenation of France and the history of the entire Western world.

Ah, yes, “training the child for the State in accordance with nature,” and “banish[ing] aliens to the state religion and…punish[ing] dissenters with death.” Now, there’s a philosophy that’s fit for (dare I say it?) Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russian, and Mao’s China — speaking of “frenzied bloody orgies.”

Who Decides Who’s Deserving?

I explained why we deserve what we have after being inspired to do so by Will Wilkinson’s Tech Central Station essay “Meritocracy: The Appalling Ideal?”. Now, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber takes Wilkinson to task over a technical issue, which is whether the idea that we don’t deserve what we have can be attributed to John Rawls. Who cares? Stick to the point.

Bertram actually concedes the point that we deserve what we have when he says:

There does seem to be a psychological need for those who have profited from the system to be comforted by the idea that they deserve what they have. (Maybe some of them even do deserve what they have!)

Bertram gives away the game in the parenthetical comment. If “some of them” deserve what they have, which ones do and which ones don’t? If Bertram pretends to know the answer he is either delusional (thinks he’s God) or arrogant (thinks he knows who’s deserving and who isn’t). Or perhaps he has a formula for deciding who’s deserving and who isn’t: If you make more than, say, $200,000 a year you’re not deserving, but if you make a penny less, you’re deserving.

Mmm…as long as we’re being arbitrary, which Bertram is apparently willing to be, let’s try this definition of “deserving”: If you believe that all people aren’t deserving of what they have, then obviously you aren’t deserving of what you have. Your income will therefore be taxed at 100 percent, for redistribution to the deserving masses. Well, that’s how much sense he makes.

To quote my earlier post, here’s my take on the matter:

There are many, many, many people whose IQs are lower than mine but who have earned far more than me and who live far more lavishly than me. Do I begrudge them their earnings and lavish living? Not a bit. Not even dumb-as-doorknob Hollywood liberals whose idea of an intellectual conversation is to tell each other that Bush is a Nazi.

Unlike Chris Bertram, I don’t presume to judge whether people are deserving of what they have. That’s the difference between socialists like Bertram (well, he talks like one) and libertarians like me. And it’s an important difference, because once you let the state (who else?) decide who’s deserving and who’s not deserving, you have ceded omnipotence (if not omniscience) to the state. That’s okay as long as the state is doing things the way you’d like them to be done, but what happens when the state turns on you? Won’t you be sorry that you vested great power in the state?

Lefties like Bertram rail about things like the war on drugs, the Patriot Act, and corporate welfare, to name a few. How do they think such things came about? They didn’t happen overnight. They’re the result of a long accretion of power by the state, which began in earnest in the 1930s, thanks to the Chris Bertrams of that era.

It cuts both ways, laddie. When you loose the beast of the state, you are at its mercy, like the rest of us.

Krugman and DeLong, a Prevaricating Pair

A few days ago I called Brad DeLong for dishonestly focusing on the transition costs of privatizing Social Security. Now, DeLong’s intellectual peer, Paul Krugman, has done the same thing:

Social Security is, basically, a system in which each generation pays for the previous generation’s retirement. If the payroll taxes of younger workers are diverted into private accounts, there will be a gaping financial hole: who will pay benefits to older Americans, who have spent their working lives paying into the current system? Unless you have a way to fill that multitrillion-dollar hole, privatization is an empty slogan, not a real proposal.

Krugman conveniently ignores the same fact that DeLong ignores. I must, therefore, repeat what I said about DeLong:

[T]he cost of not privatizing Social Security will far exceed the transition costs. If Social Security isn’t privatized, benefits will be cut and/or payroll taxes will rise — and it will be forever, not just during a transition period….

Does Krugman not know that the transition costs argument is phony — a diversionary tactic to scare people away from privatization — or does he know this all too well?

In other words, is Krugman an idiot or a liar? Well, Krugman is a Ph.D. economist, so he’s probably not an idiot (though I’ve known some Ph.D. economists who came close). I must conclude that he’s a liar.

Interesting but Not Surprising

Kevin Hassett, writing at Tech Central Station, reports on Kerry’s budget proposals. The bottom line:

Even with [a] generous accounting, the Kerry spending promises add up to an extraordinary amount of money. Our best estimate is that Kerry’s proposals will add up to between $2 trillion and $2.1 trillion over the next ten years. Since the revenue from his tax proposals relative to the current baseline is actually negative, this implies that the Kerry proposal would increase the deficit by perhaps as much as $2.5 trillion over the next ten years.

It’s not the greater deficit that matters as much as the greater spending. The real cost of government is measured by the resources it commandeers through spending.

Boring Things

Just a quick list of boring things, starting with — but not limited to — sports on TV.

The Olympics — Winter, summer, spring, or fall, it doesn’t matter at all.

The Tour de France — Why not watch your neighbor mow his lawn?

Professional basketball — Ten tall guys running up and down a bowling alley elbowing each other.

Professional football, American style — A European once said it best: “They all stand up, they all fall down.”

Professional football, European style (a.k.a. soccer) — An exciting game ends in a 0-0 tie.

Major league baseball — Two-hundred ten minutes of non-stop boredom on TV. Two-hundred ten minutes of non-stop canned music at the ballpark.

Announcers, commentators, and analysts for all of the above — Never have so many people had to say so little of substance for so much money.

“Classical” music and visual art created after 1900 — Indecipherable nonsense into which pseudo-intellectuals and the nouveaux riches try, and fail, to pour meaning.

Ditto jazz created after 1940.

Most French movies, except for the actresses.

Any musical written after 1950, especially if it was written by Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Broadway-style singing, most of which derives from the “can belto” school of vocalism.

Andrea Bocelli, Charlotte Church, and all other over-amplified vocalists who mangle great arias.

Any novel written before 1900 and any “experimental” novel written anytime, anywhere, by anyone, starting with James Joyce. (For goodness sake, please provide a beginning, a middle, and an end. If I want to solve a puzzle I’ll buy a Rubik’s cube.)

The front section of the daily paper — It’s already been on cable news and the internet, so why kill a lot of trees to repeat stale news and views?

Ditto the sports section.

“Comic” strips that try to be realistic about families and personal relationships — Hey, we get enough of that at home.

Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly and their ilk — It pays (handsomely) to be rude, but I don’t have to watch it.

Daytime TV, “reality” shows, and situation comedies — Take up reading before your brain rots — really. Those things must cause Alzheimer’s disease.

Any “news story” that’s more than a day old — TV still isn’t safe for Laci Peterson’s parents. And, yes, I got the gist of the Abu Ghraib business the first time, thank you.

To quote Porky Pig — who was truly boring in contrast to such contemporaries as Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Bugs Bunny, and Tom & Jerry — B-b-b-b-b…that’s all, folks!

Literacy Tests — An Idea Whose Time Has Gone

Jonah Goldberg of The Corner favors literacy tests, in principle. It’s true that all votes aren’t created equal. Some are more informed and reasoned than others. Why should the stupid majority tyrannize the intelligent minority? But who would concoct such a test, and who would determine what constitutes a passing grade?

Ah, there’s the rub. You can be sure that the tests and standards would be jiggered to suit the party in power at the time they’re established. And you can be sure that, once established, it would be difficult thereafter to change the tests and standards. There would be the usual “firestorm of controversy” and all that. So we’d be stuck with some combination of tests and standards that tends to exclude certain classes of people and skew election outcomes in the way that literacy tests and poll taxes did in the South for so many decades.

The real problem isn’t that too many people vote. The real problem is that their elected representatives, in pandering for votes, have usurped powers that aren’t rightly theirs. The solution, if one is ever to be found, lies in the proper interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. Making that happen should become a serious, long-term project of conservatives and libertarians, working together.

(There, I’ve re-established my credentials as a true libertarian by shooting down the idea of literacy tests. And I’ve suggested an alternative that ought to please libertarians. Please, may I have my “libertarian” card back?)

I Missed This One

Thanks to Dean’s World, which points to The Queen of All Evil, I learned about this piece of trash that ran in the Austin American-Statesman about five weeks ago:

Ritter: The messages we send when moms stay home

By Gretchen Ritter

LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

…It is time to have an honest conversation about what is lost when women stay home. In a nation devoted to motherhood and apple pie, what could possibly be wrong with staying home to care for your children?

Several things, I think.

It denies men the chance to be involved fathers…. [Not really. They don’t work all the time. Or should all fathers be stay-at-home dads?]

…It is not selfish to want to give your talents to the broader community — it is an important part of citizenship to do so, and it is something we should expect of everyone. [Working for pay isn’t an act of citizenship, it’s an economic act. Those mothers who choose not to do so are making a deliberate choice to raise their children rather than have them raised by strangers. That’s a rather decisive act of citizenship, if you’re looking for one.]

Full-time mothering is also bad for children. It teaches them that the world is divided by gender… [Only if they never see their fathers.]

…Our sons and daughters should grow up thinking that raising and providing for a family is a joint enterprise among all the adults in the family. [So, mothers who stay at home don’t “provide” for their families? Is that it? That’s hardly a good feminist attitude.]

…Many middle-class parents demand too much of their children. We enroll them in soccer, religious classes, dance, art, piano, French lessons, etc., placing them on the quest for continuous self-improvement. Many of these youngsters end up stressed out…. [She’s probably speaking from first-hand experience because she has no idea how it’s done by parents who really give a hoot about their children.]

Finally, the stay-at-home mother movement is bad for society. It tells employers that women who marry and have children are at risk of withdrawing from their careers, and that men who marry and have children will remain fully focused on their careers, regardless of family demands. Both lessons reinforce sex discrimination. [Well, then, let’s force all mothers to go to work.]

This movement also privileges certain kinds of families, making it harder for others. The more stay-at-home mothers there are, the more schools and libraries will neglect the needs of working parents, and the more professional mothers, single mothers, working-class mothers and lesbian mothers will feel judged for their failure to be in a traditional family and stay home their children. [I’d say that’s their problem. If they can’t stand the heat, they ought to get into the kitchen.]

By creating an expectation that mothers could and should stay home, we lose sight of the fact that most parents do work — and that they need affordable, high quality child care, after-school enrichment programs and family leave policies that allow mothers and fathers to nurture their children without giving up work. [So in fact most parents (i.e., mothers) do work (an unsupported statement), but it’s an invisible fact (don’t ask me how, if all those mothers are out there working), so that taxpayers (I guess they’re not mothers) don’t realize that they’re not shelling out enough for each others’ child care, etc., etc. That’s about the best I can do with that convoluted piece of “logic”.]

Raising children is one of the most demanding and rewarding of jobs. It is also a job that should be shared, between parents and within communities, for the sake of us all. [Ah so, it takes a village to raise your children, does it Ms. Ritter?]

Ms. Ritter is director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (whatever that is) at the University of Texas and an associate professor of government and women studies (whatever that is). My Texas tax dollars at work. Grrrrrh!