The Capitalist Paradox Meets the Interest-Group Paradox

An insightful post at Imlac’s Journal includes this quotation:

Schumpeter argued the economic systems that encourage entrepreneurship and development will eventually produce enough wealth to support large classes of individuals who have no involvement in the wealth-creation process. This generates apathy or even disgust for market institutions, which leads to the gradual takeover of business by bureaucracy, and eventually to full-blown socialism. [Matt McCaffrey, “Entrepreneurs and Investment: Past, Present, … Future?,” International Business Times, December 9, 2011]

This, of course, is the capitalist paradox, of which the author of Imlac’s Journal writes. He concludes with these observations:

[U]nder statist regimes, people’s choices are limited or predetermined. This may, in theory, obviate certain evils. But as McCaffrey points out, “the regime uncertainty” of onerous and ever changing regulations imposed on entrepreneurs is, ironically, much worse than the uncertainties of the normal market, to which individuals can respond more rapidly and flexibly when unhampered by unnecessary governmental intervention.

The capitalist paradox is made possible by the “comfort factor” invoked by Schumpeter. (See this, for example.) It is of a kind with the foolishness of extreme libertarians who decry defense spending and America’s “too high” rate of incarceration, when it is such things that keep them free to utter their foolishness.

The capitalist paradox also arises from the inability and unwillingness of politicians and voters to see beyond the superficial aspects of legislation and regulation. In Bastiat‘s words,

a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

The unseen effects — the theft of Americans’ liberty and prosperity — had been foreseen by some (e.g., Tocqueville and Hayek). But their wise words have been overwhelmed by ignorance and power-lust. The masses and their masters are willfully blind and deaf to the dire consequences of the capitalist paradox because of what I have called the interest-group paradox:

The interest-group paradox is a paradox of mass action….

…Pork-barrel legislation exemplifies the interest-group paradox in action, though the paradox encompasses much more than pork-barrel legislation. There are myriad government programs that — like pork-barrel projects — are intended to favor particular classes of individuals. Here is a minute sample:

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, for the benefit of the elderly (including the indigent elderly)

Tax credits and deductions, for the benefit of low-income families, charitable and other non-profit institutions, and home buyers (with mortgages)

Progressive income-tax rates, for the benefit of persons in the mid-to-low income brackets

Subsidies for various kinds of “essential” or “distressed” industries, such as agriculture and automobile manufacturing

Import quotas, tariffs, and other restrictions on trade, for the benefit of particular industries and/or labor unions

Pro-union laws (in many States), for the benefit of unions and unionized workers

Non-smoking ordinances, for the benefit of bar and restaurant employees and non-smoking patrons.

What do each of these examples have in common? Answer: Each comes with costs. There are direct costs (e.g., higher taxes for some persons, higher prices for imported goods), which the intended beneficiaries and their proponents hope to impose on non-beneficiaries. Just as importantly, there are indirect costs of various kinds (e.g., disincentives to work and save, disincentives to make investments that spur economic growth). (Exercise for the reader: Describe the indirect costs of each of the examples listed above.)

You may believe that a particular program is worth what it costs — given that you probably have little idea of its direct costs and no idea of its indirect costs. The problem is millions of your fellow Americans believe the same thing about each of their favorite programs. Because there are thousands of government programs (federal, State, and local), each intended to help a particular class of citizens at the expense of others, the net result is that almost no one in this fair land enjoys a “free lunch.” Even the relatively few persons who might seem to have obtained a “free lunch” — homeless persons taking advantage of a government-provided shelter — often are victims of the “free lunch” syndrome. Some homeless persons may be homeless because they have lost their jobs and can’t afford to own or rent housing. But they may have lost their jobs because of pro-union laws, minimum-wage laws, or progressive tax rates (which caused “the rich” to create fewer jobs through business start-ups and expansions).

The paradox that arises from the “free lunch” syndrome is…. like the paradox of panic, in that there is a crowd of interest groups rushing toward a goal — a “pot of gold” — and (figuratively) crushing each other in the attempt to snatch the pot of gold before another group is able to grasp it. The gold that any group happens to snatch is a kind of fool’s gold: It passes from one fool to another in a game of beggar-thy-neighbor, and as it passes much of it falls into the maw of bureaucracy.

[The interest-group paradox] has dominated American politics since the advent of “progressivism” in the late 1800s. Today, most Americans are either “progressives” (whatever they may call themselves) or victims of “progressivism.” All too often they are both.

The Eclipse of “Old America”

This is the second installment of a series that explores the true nature of liberty, how liberty depends on society, how society (properly understood) has been eclipsed by statism and its artifacts, and how society — and therefore liberty — might re-emerge in the United States. In this installment, I take up the first of several possible objections to my model of a society’s essence and workings. This series will close with a blueprint for the restoration of society and liberty.

If you have not read the first installment, “Liberty and Society,” I recommend that you do so before you continue. This post addresses the following question: Is Society, as I define It, Impossible? Or, Isn’t This All Rather Romantic?

The answers are “no” and “no.” All that the existence of a society requires is the general observance of the Golden Rule. This is not difficult in relatively small communities.

You will have known such a community if you have ever lived or spent much time in a rural or semi-rural village, or in an urban enclave consisting of persons bound by ethnic or religious affiliation. Everyone may not know everyone else in such a community, but the circles formed by common bonds (family, church, etc.) are interlocking. (And a lot of the community’s members will “know of” almost everyone in the community.)

One result of this kind of living is less anti-social behavior and outright crime, but without a lot of formal rules and regulations or more than a token police presence. (Anonymity not only fosters crime but also rudeness, as is evident in comment threads, e-mail exchanges, and behavior on the highway.) Another result is genuine charity, based on direct knowledge of persons who are in need, or a sense of community with them.

Do such communities know unkindness, conflict, and crime? Of course, but to suggest or demand otherwise is to be deluded or to demand impossible perfection. It should be good enough that such communities — where they still exist — are better places in which to live than the mostly anonymous urban complexes that now dominate America.

The United States, for a very long time, was a polity whose disparate parts cohered, regionally if not nationally, because the experience of living in the kind of small community sketched above was a common one. Long after the majority of Americans came to live in urban complexes, a large fraction of the residents of those complexes had grown up in small communities.

This was Old America — and it was predominant for almost 200 years after America won its independence from Britain. Old America‘s core constituents, undeniably, were white, and they had much else in common: observance of the Judeo-Christian tradition; British and north-central European roots; hard work and self-reliance as badges of honor; family, church, and club as cultural transmitters, social anchors, and focal points for voluntary mutual aid. The inhabitants of Old America were against “entitlements” (charity was real and not accepted lightly); for punishment (as opposed to excuses about poverty, etc.); overtly religious or respectful of religion (and, in either case, generally respectful of the Ten Commandments, especially the last six of them); personally responsible (stuff happens, and it is rarely someone else’s fault); polite, respectful, and helpful to strangers (who are polite and respectful); patriotic (the U.S. was better than other countries and not beholden to international organizations, wars were fought to victory); and anti-statist (even if communitarian in a voluntary way). Living on the dole, weirdness for its own sake, open hostility to religion, habitual criminality, “shacking up,” and homosexuality were disgraceful aberrations, not “lifestyles” to be tolerated, celebrated, or privileged.

It is now de rigeur to deride the culture of Old America, and to call its constituents greedy, insensitive, hidebound, culturally retrograde, and — above all — intolerant. But what does that make the proponents and practitioners of the counter-culture of the ’60s and ’70s (many of whom have long-since risen to positions of prominence and power), of the LGBT counter-culture that is now so active and adamant about its “rights,” and of recently imported cultures that seek dominance rather than assimilation (certain Latins and Muslims, I am looking at you)?

These various counter-culturalists and incomers have not been content to establish their own communities; rather, they have sought to overthrow Old America. Intolerance is their essence. They are not merely reacting to the intolerance that may be directed at them. No, they are intolerant, and militantly so. They seek to destroy what is left of Old America. — and they have enlisted the power of the state in that effort.

Has Old America receded just because its enemies have enlisted the power of the state? Not entirely. There was (and is) also a collective-action phenomenon at work, and it began while Old America was dominant. Americans prospered with the rise of industrialization after the Civil War. But industrialization led to greater productivity in agriculture (thus fewer farm workers per unit of output) while demanding more workers in factories, and thus putting in motion America’s long march toward urban anonymity and away from rural and semi-rural communities. That march led to the New America, where governmental power, geographic displacement, and cultural intermarriage have diluted (and often destroyed) the social norms that bound Old America.

These changes, once put in motion, were bound to continue (unless interrupted by a shock or massive social change) because of path dependence: decisions made in the present are constrained by decisions made in the past. Quite simply, the possibility of quitting the urban scene for rural splendor — however attractive in theory — was closed to most Americans by economic reality, that is, the necessity of making a living and the perceived necessity of doing as well as the urban Joneses. And, worse, the values of Old America simply could not (and cannot) be replicated in New America, given its reliance on governmental power and widespread rejection of the values of Old America.

On that point, I interject a personal note: I have, in my adult life, lived in semi-rural splendor. And I can tell you that it has much to commend it as a way of life, especially as a way of life for one’s children. And I can tell you, also, that living in semi-rural splendor — despite the generally lower cost of living — does require the acceptance of a lower standard of living than that enjoyed by the urban Joneses. Most Americans who recognize and pine for the virtues of rural and semi-rural life, cannot realize those virtues except vicariously on vacation trips or upon retirement, when small towns, small cities, and retirement enclaves beckon.

At any rate, the eclipse of Old America owes much to the bad guys — especially leftist “educators,” so-called intellectuals, and politicians who have conspired with intolerant minorities in the effort to overthrow Old America. But Americans who long for the Old America must also blame themselves and their forbears for its eclipse because of urbanization — a (mostly) voluntary movement. Nothing could demonstrate more starkly the saying that “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

All of the foregoing might lead you to think that I am incurably pessimistic about the possibility of a resurgence of Old America. I am not. For what I have said, up to this point, is merely prologue. For one thing, somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of Americans still live in rural and semi-rural places. (See the statistics and definitions on this page of Census.gov.) Nor has the core of Old America has shrunk; it is relatively smaller than it was in, say, 1900 — but it is absolutely larger. In fact, the number of persons living in a rural place (defined by the Census Bureau as having a population of less than 2,500), grew from 46 million in 1900 to 59 million in 2010. And in 2010, another 30 million persons lived in a so-called urban cluster (a place with a population of at least 2,500 and less than 50,000).

Of course, not all of the 59 to 89 million persons represent Old America. But surely a lot of them do; and a lot of urban dwellers long for Old America. Just look at the number of States that are Red and getting Redder, despite predictions of a permanent Democrat (i.e., leftist) majority. Have adherents of Old America been let down by Republicans? Of course they have. Have some adherents of Old America been tempted to join the statist brigade, and sometimes succumbed to temptation? Of course they have. But would Old America prevail, and attract new followers were those who preach its values to hold sway in Washington long enough and securely enough to stay true to those values? Of course it would.

Before I leave this topic, I must address the fallacy, propounded by “liberals” and libertarians, that a return to Old America would mean a return to the bad old days of Jim Crow and subservient women. Such a claim is nothing more than a smear on liberty-lovers. “Liberal” fascists have no shame and will resort to any distortion of truth and logic that might help them to retain their hold on power. Libertarians — I should say, pseudo-libertarians — have proved themselves no better. But they, at least, are powerless.

Would the resurgence of Old America transform America into a society? Of course not. A society, as I have described it, cannot be as extensive as a nation the size of the United States. But the resurgence of Old America would enable societies to flourish again in America, and those societies — with their many common values — would form the backbone of a nation that is far less fragmented and far freer than the America that arose in the 20th century.

The third installment is here; the fourth installment is here.

Related reading:
Arnold Kling, “Enrico Moretti on Mobility,” EconLog, July 28, 2012
Bill Vallicella, “Systematic Deracination,” Maverick Philosopher, August 5, 2012
Russell Nieli, “Religion as a Public-Bonding Fiction,” The Public Discourse, August 9, 2012
John Derbyshire, “Si Jeunesse Svait, Si Viellesse Pouvait,” Taki’s Magazine, August 9, 2012

Pseudoscience, “Moneyball,” and Luck

Orin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy endorses the following clap-trap, uttered by Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball) in the course of a commencement speech at Princeton University:

A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.

Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.

This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.

So far, sort of okay. But then:

This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I’m sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.

Never forget: In the nation’s service. In the service of all nations.

Thank you.

And good luck.

I am unsurprised by Kerr’s endorsement of Lewis’s loose logic, given Kerr’s rather lackadaisical attitude toward the Constitution (e.g., this post).

Well, what could be wrong with the experiment or Lewis’s interpretation of it? The cookie experiment does not mean what Lewis thinks it means. It is like the Candle Problem in that Lewis draws conclusions that are unwarranted by the particular conditions of the experiment. And those conditions are so artificial as to be inapplicable to real situations. Thus:

1. The teams and their leaders were chosen randomly. Businesses, governments, universities, and other voluntary organizations do not operate that way. Members choose themselves. Leaders (in business, at least) are either self-chosen (if they are owners) or chosen by higher-ups on the basis of past performance and what it says (imperfectly) about future performance.

2. Because managers of businesses are not arbitrarily chosen, there is no analogy to the team leaders in the experiment, who were arbitrarily chosen and who arbitrarily consumed the fourth cookie. For one thing, if a manager reaps a greater reward than his employees, that is because the higher-ups value the manager’s contributions more than those of his employees. That is an unsurprising relationship, when you think about it, but it bears no resemblance to the case of a randomly chosen team with a randomly chosen leader.

3. Being the beneficiary of some amount of luck in one’s genetic and environmental inheritance does not negate the fact that one must do something with that luck to reap material rewards. The “extra cookie,” as I have said, is generally produced and earned, not simply put on a plate to be gobbled. If a person earns more cookies because he is more productive, and if he is more productive (in part) because of his genetic and environmental inheritance, that person’s great earning power (over the long haul) is based on the value of what he produces. He does not take from others (as Lewis implies), nor does he owe to others a share of what he earns (as Lewis implies).

Just to drive home the point about Lewis’s cluelessness, I will address his book Moneyball, from which a popular film of the same name was derived. This is Amazon.com‘s review of the book:

Billy Beane, general manager of MLB’s Oakland A’s and protagonist of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that’s smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.

Lewis was in the room with the A’s top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play…. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane’s economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike.

The only problems with Moneyball are (a) its essential inaccuracy and (b) its incompleteness as an analysis of success in baseball.

On the first point, “moneyball” did not start with Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, and it is not what it is made out to be. Enter Eric Walker, the subject and author of “The Forgotten Man of Moneyball, Part 1,” and “The Forgotten Man of Moneyball, Part 2,” published October 7, 2009, on a site at deadspin.com. (On the site’s home page, the title bar displays the following: Deadspin, Sports News without Access, Favor, or Discretion.) Walker’s recollections merit extensive quotation:

…[W]ho am I, and why would I be considered some sort of expert on moneyball? Perhaps you recognized my name; more likely, though, you didn’t. Though it is hard to say this without an appearance of personal petulance, I find it sad that the popular history of what can only be called a revolution in the game leaves out quite a few of the people, the outsiders, who actually drove that revolution.

Anyway, the short-form answer to the question is that I am the fellow who first taught Billy Beane the principles that Lewis later dubbed “moneyball.” For the long-form answer, we ripple-dissolve back in time …

. . . to San Francisco in 1975, where the news media are reporting, often and at length, on the supposed near-certainty that the Giants will be sold and moved. There sit I, a man no longer young but not yet middle-aged, a man who has not been to a baseball game — or followed the sport — for probably over two decades….

With my lady, also a baseball fan of old, I go to a game. We have a great time; we go to more games, have more great times. I am becoming enthused. But I am considering and wondering — wondering about the mechanisms of run scoring, things like the relative value of average versus power…. I go to the San Francisco main library, looking for books that in some way actually analyze baseball. I find one. One. But what a one.

If this were instead Reader’s Digest, my opening of that book would be “The Moment That Changed My Life!” The book was Percentage Baseball, by one Earnshaw Cook, a Johns Hopkins professor who had consulted on the development of the atomic bomb….

…Bill James and some others, who were in high school when Cook was conceiving the many sorts of formulae they would later get famous publicizing in their own works, have had harsh things to say about Cook and his work. James, for example, wrote in 1981, “Cook knew everything about statistics and nothing at all about baseball — and for that reason, all of his answers are wrong, all of his methods useless.” That is breathtakingly wrong, and arrogant. Bill James has done an awful lot for analysis, both in promoting the concepts and in original work (most notably a methodology for converting minor-league stats to major-league equivalents). But, as Chili Davis once remarked about Nolan Ryan, “He ain’t God, man.” A modicum of humility and respect is in order…. Cook’s further work, using computer simulations of games to test theory (recorded in his second book, Percentage Baseball and the Computer), was ground-breaking, and it came long before anyone thought to describe what Cook was up to as “sabermetrics” and longer still before anyone emulated it.

…I wanted to get a lot closer to the game than box seats. I had, some years before, been a radio newscaster and telephone-talk host, and I decided to trade on that background. But in a market like the Bay Area, one does not just walk into a major radio station and ask for a job if it has been years since one’s last position; so, I walked into a minor radio station, a little off-the-wall FM outfit, and instantly became their “sports reporter”; unsalaried, but eligible for press credentials from the Giants….

Meanwhile, however, I was constantly working on expanding Cook’s work in various ways, trying to develop more-practical methods of applying his, and in time my, ideas….

When I felt I had my principles in a practical, usable condition, I started nagging the Giants about their using the techniques. At first, it was a very tough slog; in those days — this would be 1979 or so, well before Bill James’ Abstracts were more than a few hundred mimeographed copies -– even the basic concepts were unknown, and, to old baseball men, they were very, very weird ideas….

In early 1981, as a demonstration, I gave the Giants an extensive analysis of their organization; taking a great risk, I included predictions for the coming season. I have that very document beside me now as I type…. I was, despite the relative crudeness of the methodology in those days, a winner: 440 runs projected, 427 scored; ERA projected, 3.35, ERA achieved, 3.28; errors projected, 103, actual errors committed, 102; and, bottom line, projected wins, 57, actual wins 56….

By this time, I had taken a big step up as a broadcaster, moving from that inconsequential little station to KQED, the NPR outlet in San Francisco, whence I would eventually be syndicated by satellite to 20 NPR affiliates across the country, about half in major markets.

As a first consequence of that move, a book editor who had heard the daily module while driving to work and thought it interesting approached me with a proposal that I write a book in the general style of my broadcasts. I began work in the fall of 1981, and the book, The Sinister First Baseman and Other Observations, was published in 1982, to excellent reviews and nearly no sales. Frank Robinson, then the Giants’ manager and a man I had come to know tolerably well, was kind enough to provide the Foreword for the book, which was a diverse collection of baseball essays….

At any rate, there I was, finally on contract with a major-league ball club, the Giants, but in a dubious situation…. I did persuade them to trade Gary Lavelle to the Blue Jays, but instead of names like John Cerutti and Jimmy Key, whom I had suggested, Haller got Jim Gott, who gave the Giants one good year as a starter and two forgettable years in the pen, plus two guys who never made the majors. But deals for Ken Oberkfell and especially for John Tudor, which I lobbied for intensely, didn’t get made (Haller called 20 minutes too late to get Oberkfell). I still remember then-Giants owner Bob Lurie, when I was actually admitted to the Brain Trust sanctum on trade-deadline day, saying around his cigar, “What’s all this about John Tudor?” (Tudor, then openly available, had a high AL ERA because he was a lefty in Fenway — this was well before “splits” and “park effects” were commonplace concepts — and I tried to explain all that, but no dice; Tudor went on to an NL ERA of 2.66 over seven seasons.)

When Robinson was fired by the Giants, I knew that owing to guilt by association (remember, Robby wrote the Foreword to my book) I would soon be gone, and so I was. My term as a consultant with the Giants was about half a season. In that brief term, I had had some input into a few decisions, but most of what I advocated, while listened to, was never acted on.

But having once crossed the major-league threshold, I was not about to sink back into oblivion. Across the Bay was an organization with a famously more forward-looking front office, with which I had already had contact. I asked, they answered, and so my career with the A’s began.

Modern analysis has shown a whole treasure chest of interesting and often useful performance metrics, but it remains so that the bedrock principle of classic analysis is simple: out-making controls scoring. What I call “classic” analysis is the principles that I presented to the Oakland Athletics in the early 1980s, which governed their thinking through 20 or so successful seasons, and which were dubbed “moneyball” by Michael Lewis in his book of that title. Because of that book, there has arisen a belief that whatever the A’s do is, by definition, “moneyball”; with the decline in their fortunes in recent years has come a corresponding belief that “moneyball” is in decline — dead, some would say ^{^[1]} — because the A’s and moneyball are seen as essentially one thing.

That is simply wrong…. “Moneyball,” as the name says, is about seeking undervalued commodities [emphasis added]. In my day, what I regard as the crucial aspects of run-generation, notably on-base percentage, were seriously undervalued, so “moneyball” consisted in finding batters with those skills.

A team that today sustains one of the lowest on-base percentages in baseball, and actively acquires players with drastically low career on-base numbers, is very obviously practicing a different “moneyball” than that for which it became famed. Today’s A’s, it seems, see the undervalued commodities as “defense and athletic players drafted out of high school” (as a recent article on the organization put it). These are not your father’s A’s. What success their new tack will have remains to be seen (their present fortunes are a transition state); but “moneyball” as practiced today by the A’s seems no longer to have at its core the same analytic principles that then-GM Sandy Alderson and I worked with a quarter-century ago, and that I presented to Billy Beane in that now semi-famous paper [“Winning Baseball”]….

In 1994, Sandy promoted Billy Beane to assistant GM. At the same time, he asked me to prepare an overview of the general principles of analysis for Billy, so that Billy could get in one sitting an idea of the way the organization was looking at talent. In the end, I delivered a report titled “Winning Baseball,” with the subtitle: “An objective, numerical, analytic analysis of the principles and practices involved in the design of a winning baseball team.” The report was 66 pages long; I still grit my teeth whenever I remember that Michael Lewis described it as a “pamphlet [on page 58 of this edition of Moneyball].”…

My goal in that report, which I seem to have met, was to put the ideas — not the detailed principles, just the ideas — forward in simple, clear language and logical order, so that they would be comprehensible by and reasonable to a working front-office executive. Sandy Alderson didn’t need a document like this, then or at the outset, but he was a Harvard-trained attorney; I considered myself to be writing not just to Billy Beane but to any veteran baseball man (which, as it turned out, was just as well)….

Lewis not only demotes “Winning Baseball” to a pamphlet, but also demotes Walker to passing mention on three pages of Moneyball: 58, 62, and 63 (in the paperback edition linked above). Why would Lewis slight and distort Walker’s contributions to “moneyball”? Remember that Lewis is not a scientist, mathematician, or statistician. He is a journalist with a B.A. in art history who happened to work at Salomon Brothers for a few years. I have read his first book, Liar’s Poker. It is obviously the work of a young man with a grievance and a flair for dramatization. Moneyball is obviously the work of a somewhat older man who has honed his flair for dramatization. Do not mistake it for a rigorous analysis of the origins and effectiveness of “moneyball.”

Just how effective was “moneyball,” as it was practiced by the Oakland Athletics? There is evidence to suggest that it was quite effective. For example:

Sources and notes: Team won-lost records are from Baseball-Reference.com. Estimates of team payrolls are from USA Today’s database of salaries for professional sports teams, which begins in 1988 for major-league baseball (here). The payroll index measures the ratio of each team’s payroll in a given year to the major-league average for the same year.

The more that a team spends on player salaries, the better the team’s record. But payroll accounts for only about 18 percent of the variation in the records of major-league teams during the period 1988-2011. Which means that other factors, taken together, largely determine a team’s record. Among those factors is “moneyball” — the ability to identify, obtain, effectively use, and retain players who are “underpriced” relative to their potential. But the contribution of “moneyball” cannot be teased out of the data because, for one thing, it would be impossible to quantify the extent to which a team actually practices “moneyball.” That said, it is evident that during 1988-2011 the A’s did better than the average team, by the measure of wins per dollar of payroll: Compare the dark green regression line, representing the A’s, with the black regression line, representing all teams.

That is all well and good, but the purpose of a baseball team is not to win a high number of games per dollar of payroll; it is to win — period. By that measure, the A’s of the Alderson-Beane “moneyball” era have been successful, at times, but not uniquely so:

Source: Derived from Baseball-Reference.com.

The sometimes brilliant record of the Athletics franchise during 1901-1950 is owed to one man: Cornelius McGillicuddy (1862-1956). And the often dismal record of the franchise during 1901-1950 is owed to one man: the same Cornelius McGillicuddy. True fans of baseball (and collectors of trivia) know Cornelius McGillicuddy as Connie Mack, or more commonly as Mr. Mack. The latter is an honorific bestowed on Mack because of his dignified mien and distinguished career in baseball: catcher from 1886 to 1896; manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1894 to 1896; manager of the Philadelphia Athletics from 1901 to 1950; part owner and then sole owner of the Athletics from 1901 to 1954. (He is also an ancestor of two political figures who bear his real name and alias: Connie Mack III and Connie Mack IV.)

Mack’s long leadership and ownership of the A’s is important because it points to the reasons for the A’s successes and failures during the fifty years that he led the team from the bench. Here, from Wikipedia, is a story that is familiar to persons who know their baseball history:

[Mack] was widely praised in the newspapers for his intelligent and innovative managing, which earned him the nickname “the Tall Tactician”. He valued intelligence and “baseball smarts”, always looking for educated players. (He traded away Shoeless Joe Jackson despite his talent because of his bad attitude and unintelligent play.^[9]) “Better than any other manager, Mack understood and promoted intelligence as an element of excellence.”^[10] He wanted men who were self-directed, self-disciplined and self-motivated; his ideal player was Eddie Collins.^[11]

“Mack looked for seven things in a young player: physical ability, intelligence, courage, disposition, will power, general alertness and personal habits.”^[12]

He also looked for players with quiet and disciplined personal lives, having seen many players destroy themselves and their teams through heavy drinking in his playing days. Mack himself never drank; before the 1910 World Series he asked all his players to “take the pledge” not to drink during the Series. When Topsy Hartsel told Mack he needed a drink the night before the final game, Mack told him to do what he thought best, but in these circumstances “if it was me, I’d die before I took a drink.”^[13]

In any event, his managerial style was not tyrannical but easygoing.^[14] He never imposed curfews or bed checks, and made the best of what he had; Rube Waddell was the best pitcher and biggest gate attraction of his first decade as A’s manager, so he put up with his drinking and general unreliability for years until it began to bring the team down and the other players asked Mack to get rid of him.^[15]

Mack’s strength as a manager was finding the best players, teaching them well and letting them play. “He did not believe that baseball revolved around managerial strategy.”^[10] He was “one of the first managers to work on repositioning his fielders” during the game, often directing the outfielders to move left or right, play shallow or deep, by waving his rolled-up scorecard from the bench.^[12] After he became well known for doing this, he often passed his instructions to the fielders by way of other players, and simply waved his scorecard as a feint.^[16]

* * *

Mack saw baseball as a business, and recognized that economic necessity drove the game. He explained to his cousin, Art Dempsey, that “The best thing for a team financially is to be in the running and finish second. If you win, the players all expect raises.” This was one reason he was constantly collecting players, signing almost anyone to a ten-day contract to assess his talent; he was looking ahead to future seasons when his veterans would either retire or hold out for bigger salaries than Mack could give them.

Unlike most baseball owners, Mack had almost no income apart from the A’s, so he was often in financial difficulties. Money problems – the escalation of his best players’ salaries (due both to their success and to competition from the new, well-financed Federal League), combined with a steep drop in attendance due to World War I — led to the gradual dispersal of his second championship team, the 1910–1914 team, who [sic] he sold, traded, or released over the years 1915–1917. The war hurt the team badly, leaving Mack without the resources to sign valuable players….

All told, the A’s finished dead last in the AL seven years in a row from 1915 to 1921, and would not reach .500 again until 1926. The rebuilt team won back-to-back championships in 1929–1930 over the Cubs and Cardinals, and then lost a rematch with the latter in 1931. As it turned out, these were the last WS titles and pennants the Athletics would win in Philadelphia or for another four decades.

With the onset of the Great Depression, Mack struggled financially again, and was forced to sell the best players from his second great championship team, such as Lefty Grove and Jimmie Foxx, to stay in business. Although Mack wanted to rebuild again and win more championships, he was never able to do so owing to a lack of funds.

Had an earlier Michael Lewis written Moneyball in the 1950s, as a retrospective on Mack’s career as a manager-owner, that Lewis would have said (correctly) that the A’s successes and failures were directly related to (a) the amount of money spent on the team’s payroll, (b) Connie Mack’s character-based criteria for selecting players, and (c) his particular approach to managing players. That is quite a different story than the one conveyed by the Moneyball written by the real Lewis.

Which version of Moneyball is correct? No one can say for sure. But the powerful evidence of Connie Mack’s long tenure suggests that it takes a combination of the two versions of Moneyball to be truly successful, that is, to post a winning record year after year. It seems that Lewis (inadvertently) jumped to a conclusion about what makes for a successful baseball team — probably because he was struck by the A’s then-recent success and did not look to the A’s history.

In any event, success through luck is not the moral of Moneyball; the moral is success through deliberate effort. But Michael Lewis ignored the moral of his own “masterwork” when he stood before an audience of Princeton graduates and told them that they are merely (or mainly) lucky. How does one graduate from Princeton merely (or mainly) by being lucky? Does it not require the application of one’s genetic talents? Did not most of the graduates of Princeton arrive there, in the first place, because they had applied their genetic talents well during their years in high school or prep school (and even before that)? Is one’s genetic inheritance merely a matter of luck, or is it the somewhat predictable result of the mating of two persons who were not thrown together randomly, but who had a lot in common — including (most likely) high intelligence?

Just as the cookie experiment invoked by Lewis is a load of pseudoscientific hogwash, the left-wing habit of finding luck at the bottom of every achievement is a load of politically correct hogwash. Worse, it is an excuse for punishing success.

Lewis’s peroration on luck is just a variation on a common left-wing theme: Success is merely a matter of luck, so it is the state’s right and duty to redistribute the spoils of luck.

Tolerance on the Left

UPDATED (BELOW), 08/10/12

I begin with the Chick-fil-A controversy. If you know more about it than is good for your mental health, jump to the text that follows the second row of asterisks.

* * * * *

For the benefit of anyone who has just returned to the U.S. after spending six weeks in Tierra del Fuego, the Chick-fil-A controversy began when the company’s president and COO, Dan Cathy,

made what was seen as an inflammatory statement. Cathy stated: “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage’. I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”^[43]^[44]^[45]

And it took off from there:

On July 2, 2012, the LGBT watchdog group Equality Matters published a report with details of donations given by Chick-fil-A to organizations that are opposed to same-sex marriage, such as the Marriage & Family Foundation and the Family Research Council.^[46]^[47]^[48] Also, on July 2, Biblical Recorder published an interview with Dan Cathy, who was asked about opposition to his company’s “support of the traditional family.” He replied: “Well, guilty as charged.”^[49]^[50] Cathy continued:

“We are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that. … We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that,” Cathy emphasized. “We intend to stay the course,” he said. “We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.”^[49]

In the wake of this interview, Thomas Menino, the Mayor of Boston, stated that he would not allow the company to open franchises in the city “unless they open up their policies.”^[51] Menino subsequently wrote a letter to Dan Cathy, citing Cathy’s earlier statement on The Ken Coleman Show and responding: “We are indeed full of pride for our support of same sex marriage and our work to expand freedom for all people.”^[52] In Chicago alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno announced his determination to block Chick-fil-A’s bid to build a second store in the city: “They’d have to do a complete 180,” Moreno said in outlining conditions under which he would retract the block. “They’d have to work with LGBT groups in terms of hiring, and there would have to be a public apology from [Cathy].”^[53] Moreno received backing from Chicago’s Mayor, Rahm Emanuel: “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values,” Emanuel said in a statement. “They disrespect our fellow neighbors and residents. This would be a bad investment, since it would be empty.”^[53] San Francisco soon followed suit on July 26 when mayor Edwin M. Lee tweeted, “Very disappointed #ChickFilA doesn’t share San Francisco’s values & strong commitment to equality for everyone.” Lee followed that tweet with “Closest #ChickFilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”^[54]

In the wake of this interview, Thomas Menino, the Mayor of Boston, stated that he would not allow the company to open franchises in the city “unless they open up their policies.”^[51] Menino subsequently wrote a letter to Dan Cathy, citing Cathy’s earlier statement on The Ken Coleman Show and responding: “We are indeed full of pride for our support of same sex marriage and our work to expand freedom for all people.”^[52] In Chicago alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno announced his determination to block Chick-fil-A’s bid to build a second store in the city: “They’d have to do a complete 180,” Moreno said in outlining conditions under which he would retract the block. “They’d have to work with LGBT groups in terms of hiring, and there would have to be a public apology from [Cathy].”^[53] Moreno received backing from Chicago’s Mayor, Rahm Emanuel: “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values,” Emanuel said in a statement. “They disrespect our fellow neighbors and residents. This would be a bad investment, since it would be empty.”^[53] San Francisco soon followed suit on July 26 when mayor Edwin M. Lee tweeted, “Very disappointed #ChickFilA doesn’t share San Francisco’s values & strong commitment to equality for everyone.” Lee followed that tweet with “Closest #ChickFilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”^[54]

The proposed bans in Boston and Chicago drew criticism from liberal pundits, legal experts and the American Civil Liberties Union. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones magazine said “[T]here’s really no excuse for Emanuel’s and Menino’s actions… you don’t hand out business licenses based on whether you agree with the political views of the executives. Not in America, anyway.”^[55] UCLA law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh observed, “[D]enying a private business permits because of such speech by its owner is a blatant First Amendment violation.”^[56] Echoing those views were Glenn Greenwald of Salon, professor [Jonathan] Turley of George Washington University, and Adam Schwartz, a senior attorney with the ACLU.^[57]

The city of New York is heard from, as well:

A powerful New York politician claims she was just speaking as a private citizen when she tried to run Chick-fil-A out of town, but she used her official letterhead and even invoked her position as City Council speaker to apply pressure on the embattled chicken chain.

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has mayoral aspirations, sent a letter to New York University president John Sexton on Saturday asking the school to immediately end their contract with the fast food restaurant. The Atlanta-based company’s sole New York City outlet is in the school’s food court.

“I write as the Speaker of the NYC Council, and on behalf of my family. NYC is a place where we celebrate diversity. We do not believe in denigrating others. We revel in the diversity of all our citizens and their families,” the letter begins….

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week that he would not follow the lead of his counterparts in Chicago, San Francisco and Boston, who all said Chick-fil-A was not welcome in their cities. Bloomberg said it was “inappropriate” for any government to decide if a business can or cannot operate in a city because of someone’s political views.

(The first two block quotations are from Wikipedia, as of July 30, 2012. I note the date because history and interpretations of history are notably unstable elements in the hands of Wikipedia’s contributors and editors.)

* * * * *

It is good to know that there are those on the left (the ACLU, Kevin Drum, and Glenn Greenwald, RINO Bloomberg) who defend Chick-fil-A’s right to exist. But those few voices do not cancel or diminish the left’s general stance of vitriolic disrespect toward persons who oppose the LGBT agenda. That agenda includes legal recognition of same-sex “marriage” (of course), the legalization of adoption by same-sex couples, and a laundry list of other “rights.” All would be secured by depriving non-believers in the LGBT agenda of freedom of conscience, freedom of association, and property rights.

Tolerance in America — left-wing style — has become a one-way street: Conservatives must succumb to the left’s social agenda, but the left need not tolerate the beliefs of conservatives. Conservatives who oppose the left’s social agenda are not viewed as mere political opponents. Nay, they are — depending on the issue at hand — hate-filled racists or hate-filled gay-bashers.

In a lifetime that now surpasses the number of years prescribed in Psalms 90, I have heard, read, and witnessed much hate. But for sustained, high-volume hate, nothing in my experience exceeds that which pours from the lips and keyboards of left-wingers. As a group, they are intolerant of truth, where it contradicts their cherished beliefs , and hateful toward those whose values conflict with theirs. For example:

Skeptics of the flimsy evidence for anthropogenic global warming, and who offer ample evidence against AGW, are flat-earth-global-warming-deniers.

Those who believe that governmental interference in economic affairs leads to slower growth and more poverty are not merely drawing out the implications of economic logic and empirical analysis. No, they are the hand-servants of greedy, exploitative corporations and super-rich fat cats (who, oddly enough, bankroll many left-wing causes).

Persons who object to the killing of human beings at the fetal stage are not merely principled defenders of life, they are meddling moralists who seek to deny women the convenience of abortion.

Those who understand that marriage is a long-standing social institution which cannot be redefined by statute are hate-filled, bigoted troglodytes, not defenders of an essential, civilizing institution.

Left-wingers march in lockstep like wind-up toy soldiers. And all it takes to wind them up is to propose a governmental intervention in social or economic affairs — preferably one that flouts a social tradition that is based on decades and centuries of of experience. Why do leftists have so little respect for the wisdom that accrues in social norms? Because leftism is rooted in two psychological tendencies. One of them is adolescent rebellion, which can persist for decades past adolescence. This explains the left’s hatred of conventional authority figures who (usually) represent conservative (civilizing) values (e.g., parents, police officers, military officers, members of the clergy). The other psychological tendency is the urge to dominate others, an urge that leftists project onto conservatives. (See this, this, and this.) In that regard, I have observed, at first hand, that vociferous leftists are fiercely defensive of their autonomy, despite their willingness to deny autonomy to others. (Think “liberal” fascism; more here and here.)

In the face of incessant propagandizing for LBGT causes by the left’s vast academic-entertainment-opinion-cum-news conspiracy, those who dare to be different are not lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered persons. No, the LGBTers are figuratively ensconced in the left’s sheltering arms, where their outré “lifestyles” are celebrated, promoted, and proclaimed to be normal — or, at least, The New Normal. Those who dare to be different, these days, are the defenders of traditional sexuality, traditional marriage, and traditional families — the core of civilized society. UPDATE: It fact, it is now possible to be accused of a crime for the mere act of stating a preference for traditional sexuality, traditional marriage, and traditional families. This is not surprising, given the growth of the ~~thought~~ hate-crime industry.

And so it has come to pass that heads of hugely influential corporations (e.g., Google and Amazon) lend their names and money to the LGBT cause. Having become “the thing to do,” the LGBT cause is joined by lesser corporations. That cause is today’s version of affirmative action; it is embraced by boards of directors and senior executives who do not have to live with the consequences of their politically correct policy edicts. The consequences include the reduction of corporate income (which belongs to shareholders) by the hiring, retention, and promotion of otherwise unqualified persons — so that the directors and senior officers can feel good about their commitment to “inclusiveness.”

But that is nothing to the destruction of liberty that is sought in the name of LBGT “rights.” Consider the case of same-sex “marriage”:

It was only yesterday, was it not, that we were being assured that the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex partnerships would have no impact on persons and institutions that hold to the traditional view of marriage as a conjugal union? Such persons and institutions would simply be untouched by the change. It won’t affect your marriage or your life, we were told, if the law recognizes Henry and Herman or Sally and Sheila as “married.”

Those offering these assurances were also claiming that the redefinition of marriage would have no impact on the public understanding of marriage as a monogamous and sexually exclusive partnership. No one, they insisted, wanted to alter those traditional marital norms. On the contrary, the redefinition of marriage would promote and spread those norms more broadly.

When some of us warned that all of this was nonsense, and pointed out the myriad ways that Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and others would be affected, and their opportunities and liberties restricted, the proponents of marriage redefinition accused us of “fearmongering.” When we observed that reducing marriage to a merely emotional union (which is what happens when sexual reproductive complementarity is banished from the definition) removes all principled grounds for understanding marriage as a sexually exclusive and faithful union of two persons, and not an “open” partnership or a relationship of three or more persons in a polyamorous sexual ensemble, we were charged with invalid slippery-slope reasoning. Remember?

No one, they assured us, would require Catholic or other foster care and adoption services to place children in same-sex headed households. No one, they said, would require religiously affiliated schools and social-service agencies to treat same-sex partners as spouses, or impose penalties or disabilities on those that dissent. No one would be fired from his or her job (or suffer employment discrimination) for voicing support for conjugal marriage or criticizing same-sex sexual conduct and relationships. And no one was proposing to recognize polyamorous relationships or normalize “open marriages,” nor would redefinition undermine the norms of sexual exclusivity and monogamy in theory or practice.

That was then; this is now….

…[A]dvocates of redefinition are increasingly open in saying that they do not see these disputes about sex and marriage as honest disagreements among reasonable people of goodwill. They are, rather, battles between the forces of reason, enlightenment, and equality—those who would “expand the circle of inclusion”—on one side, and those of ignorance, bigotry, and discrimination—those who would exclude people out of “animus”—on the other. The “excluders” are to be treated just as racists are treated—since they are the equivalent of racists. Of course, we (in the United States, at least) don’t put racists in jail for expressing their opinions—we respect the First Amendment; but we don’t hesitate to stigmatize them and impose various forms of social and even civil disability upon them and their institutions. In the name of “marriage equality” and “non-discrimination,” liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined.The fundamental error made by some supporters of conjugal marriage was and is, I believe, to imagine that a grand bargain could be struck with their opponents: “We will accept the legal redefinition of marriage; you will respect our right to act on our consciences without penalty, discrimination, or civil disabilities of any type. Same-sex partners will get marriage licenses, but no one will be forced for any reason to recognize those marriages or suffer discrimination or disabilities for declining to recognize them.” There was never any hope of such a bargain being accepted. Perhaps parts of such a bargain would be accepted by liberal forces temporarily for strategic or tactical reasons, as part of the political project of getting marriage redefined; but guarantees of religious liberty and non-discrimination for people who cannot in conscience accept same-sex marriage could then be eroded and eventually removed. After all, “full equality” requires that no quarter be given to the “bigots” who want to engage in “discrimination” (people with a “separate but equal” mindset) in the name of their retrograde religious beliefs. “Dignitarian” harm must be opposed as resolutely as more palpable forms of harm….

The lesson, it seems to me, for those of us who believe that the conjugal conception of marriage is true and good, and who wish to protect the rights of our faithful and of our institutions to honor that belief in carrying out their vocations and missions, is that there is no alternative to winning the battle in the public square over the legal definition of marriage. The “grand bargain” is an illusion we should dismiss from our minds…. [Robert P. George, “Marriage, Religious Liberty, and the ‘Grand Bargain’,” Public Discourse, July 19, 2012]

The battle over the legal definition of marriage (and other items on the LGBT agenda) will be won through the exercise of political power, abetted by lies and chicanery, and not by sweet reason. Conservatives will (and should) eschew lies and chicanery, leaving them to the LGBT crowed and its allies. But conservatives should not flinch from the use of political power; their cause is liberty, and it is just.

* * *

Related reading:
Michael Brown, “The Rise of the Intolerance Brigade,” Townhall.com, August 2, 2012
Matthew J. Franck, “Truth and Lies, Nature and Convention: The Debate Over Same-Sex Marriage,” Public Discourse, July 30, 2012
Christian Smith, “An Academic Auto-da-Fé, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2012
Michael Barone, “Supporters of Ted Cruz and Chick-fil-A Break News,” The Examiner, August 4, 2012

Liberty and Society

This is the first installment of a series that explores the true nature of liberty, how liberty depends on society, how society (properly understood) has been eclipsed by statism and its artifacts, and how society — and therefore liberty — might re-emerge in the United States.

The typical libertarian — like the one who commented on my post “Not Guilty of Libertarian Purism” — will say something like this:

Liberty is simply defined as “do what you want, constrained only by the harm to others.”

This is just a restatement of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” which first appears in Chapter I, paragraph 9, of Mill’s On Liberty:

[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

Mill himself reveals the emptiness of his formulation in paragraphs 11 through 13:

[11] …I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people. If any one does an act hurtful to others, there is a primâ facie case for punishing him, by law, or, where legal penalties are not safely applicable, by general disapprobation. There are also many positive acts for the benefit of others, which he may rightfully be compelled to perform; such as, to give evidence in a court of justice; to bear his fair share in the common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to the interest of the society of which he enjoys the protection; and to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving a fellow-creature’s life, or interposing to protect the defenceless against ill-usage, things which whenever it is obviously a man’s duty to do, he may rightfully be made responsible to society for not doing. A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury….

[12] But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.

[13] No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

The latter two paragraphs (12 and 13) would seem to satisfy the typical libertarian. But they are as empty of content as the bald statement of the harm principle in paragraph 9. What Mill does in paragraph 11 is to pour content into the harm principle — content that the typical libertarian would find abhorrent, for its statism if not for its utilitarianism. The discussion of liberty in paragraphs 12 and 13 cannot be understood without reference to Mill’s restrictive definition of harm in paragraph 11.

To put it another way, liberty — “do what you want, constrained only by the harm to others” — is an empty concept unless it rests on a specific definition of harm. Why? Because harm is not a fixed thing — like the number 1 or your house — it is a vague concept that has meaning only when it refers to specific types of act, which then may be judged as harmful by some and unharmful by others. But until harm is defined and agreed through mutual consent (explicit or implicit), liberty lacks real meaning.

My goal in this post is to outline the social conditions that conduce to actual liberty, that is, a kind of liberty that could be found in the real world, given the nature of human beings as self-centered, quarrelsome, often aggressive individuals, as well as loving, cooperative, and generous ones. (Social behavior, in this context, includes what is usually called economic behavior, which is just a kind of social behavior.) I will try to be realistic (rather than pessimistic) about the degree to which liberty is attainable.

I begin with my definition of liberty, which is

peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior.

That may seem just as vague as the harm principle, but it is not. The harm principle is meaningless without an agreed definition of harm. My definition is operationally meaningful, in itself. It says that liberty is found wherever there is peaceful, willing coexistence and beneficially cooperative behavior. Why? Because a society which meets those conditions is a free society to its members, who (by definition) prefer it to alternative conditions of existence. Among other things, they must be agreed about what constitutes harm and how it should be treated.

It is now only(!) a matter of describing the kind of society in which there can be peaceful, willing coexistence and beneficially cooperative behavior. Going from broad characteristics to narrow ones, this is such a society:

1. “Society” has many meanings. This one rings truest:

an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another.

The “organized patterns of relationships” will include rules about behavior (a moral code). On the negative side, the rules will specify (if only tacitly) what is allowed, what is not allowed, how transgressions should be treated, and how certain mitigating circumstances figure into judgments about and the treatment of transgressions. On the positive side, the rules will specify (if only tacitly) expectations about how certain members of society should treat others (e.g., respect for elders, voluntary aid to those in need, mannerly behavior of certain kinds). A society, in other words, is inseparable from its moral code.

2. Mutual trust, respect, and forbearance allow differences within a society to be resolved through voluntary means, according to its moral code (1).

The means will include compromise; not every member of a society will agree with every rule, the way in which rules are enforced, or every resolution of differences, but every member of society will accept them. When a member of society can no longer compromise his preferences with the enactments of society, and has voiced his discontent to no avail, exit is his only option. Exit, at this stage, is exit from a society, as defined in 1. Unlike the situation that pertains when a person can no longer abide the rules imposed on him by a distant and unrepresentative government that controls a large geographic area, exit from a society need not require physical exile.

3. Mutual trust, respect, and forbearance (2) depend, in turn, on genetic kinship and cultural similarity.

Human beings are, at bottom, tribal creatures. This is a fact of life that cannot be erased by wishful thinking: “Why can’t we just all get along with each other?”

4. The voluntary institutions of society (civil society) inculcate and enforce a society’s moral code (1), foster mutual trust and respect (2), and help to preserve cultural similarity (3).

The institutions of civil society include families, friendships, neighborhoods, churches, clubs, markets — and interconnected circles of them. Enforcement of the moral code, up to a point, is by voluntary observance (for fear of the social and physical consequences of non-observance. Where unacceptable behavior persists or is egregious, it is dealt with by civil institutions, including ad hoc groups organized for the purpose of controlling, confining, and punishing behavior is uncontrollable through the usual means. Those means include intra-familial punishment, physical retaliation, social signalling (ranging from expressions of approval and disapproval to ostracism, at the extreme). The means, themselves, are encompassed in the moral code.

5. A society’s moral code (1) and culture (3) evolve by trial and error, through the operation of the institutions of civil society (4).

The members of a society perceive that certain behaviors enable the society to thrive, and that others do not. Thriving is a matter of social and economic success, of the attainment of outcomes that the members of society find pleasing, and which they seek to promote by encouraging the behaviors that are consistent with pleasing outcomes and discouraging the behaviors that work against those outcomes. These signals — pro and con — are transmitted through the institutions of civil society (4) and thus become part of the society’s culture (3). Observance of the signals is essential to the maintenance of mutual trust and respect (2).

To summarize: A society coheres around genetic kinship, and is defined by its common culture, which includes its moral code. The culture is developed, transmitted through, and enforced by the voluntary institutions of society (civil society). The culture is the product of trial and error, where those elements that become part of received culture serve societal coherence and — in the best case — help it to thrive. Coherence and success depend also on the maintenance of mutual respect, trust, and forbearance among society’s members. Those traits arise in part from the sharing of a common culture (which is an artifact of societal interaction) and from genetic kinship, which is indispensable to societal coherence.

If the foregoing description is correct, there is one aspect of society — and one only — that a society cannot “manufacture” through its social processes. That aspect is genetic-cultural kinship. To put it another way, it is unlikely that a society’s membership can be drawn from more than one genetic grouping (or cluster), of which there may be dozens. Throw in cultural differences, originating in the geographic separation of otherwise genetically close populations, and the number of distinct genetic-cultural groupings must be very large indeed.

Though it is possible that an occasional outsider can be accepted into a society through acculturation and acceptance, because of bonds that develop between the outsider and insiders, it is far less likely that a society will welcome significant numbers of outsiders. This contention is borne out by the checkerboard and tipping models of voluntary racial segregation:

[E]ven when every agent prefers to live in a mixed-race neighborhood, almost complete segregation of neighborhoods emerges as individual decisions accumulate. In [Thomas Schelling’s] “tipping model”, he demonstrated the effects which emerge when people have varying levels of perception as to acceptable levels for other ethnic groups in the neighborhood. The model shows that members of an ethnic group do not move out of a neighborhood as long as the proportion of other ethnic groups is relatively low, but if a critical level of other ethnicities is exceeded, the original residents may make rapid decisions and take action to leave. This tipping point is viewed as simply the end-result of domino effect originating when the threshold of the majority ethnicity members with the highest sensitivity to sameness is exceeded. If these people leave and are either not replaced or replaced by other ethnicities, then this in turn raises the level of mixing of neighbours, exceeding the departure threshold for additional people. Domino and tipping models were suggested to be explanatory factors for white flight in the 1960s US. Schelling also noted that in different societies, people have residential preferences, for factors other than ethnicity, such as age, gender, income levels.^[41] In 2010 Junfu Zhang found support for both the checkerboard model of residential segregation as the only stable spatial arrangement (arrangement not subject to tipping effects), and for tipping effects, showing how these lead to integrated residential areas being irreversibly tipped into complete segregation.^[40]

This is “wrong,” in the “liberal” and left-libertarian view of the world. That view is not based on what can be, given the nature of human beings, but on what ought to be: a desirable but unattainable ideal (see nirvana fallacy).

I will next consider several possible objections to my model of a society’s essence and workings. This series will close with a blueprint for the restoration of society and liberty. The first sequel is “The Eclipse of ‘Old America’ “; the second is “Genetic Kinship and Society“; the third is “Liberty as a Social Construct: Moral Relativism?”

That’s Life … Expectancy

UPDATED (BELOW) 07/24/12

For no particular reason, I looked up the most recent U.S. life tables issued by … are you ready? … the National Vital Statistics System of the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The full citation is Arias, Elizabeth; “United States life tables, 2007“; National vital statistics reports, vol. 59, no. 9; Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics, September 28, 2011.

Relevant quotations from the report:

There are two types of life tables—the cohort (or generation) and the period (or current). The cohort life table presents the mortality experience of a particular birth cohort—all persons born in the year 1900, for example—from the moment of birth through consecutive ages in successive calendar years….

…[The] period life table for 2007 [the type presented in the report[ assumes a hypothetical cohort subject throughout its lifetime to the age-specific death rates prevailing for the actual population in 2007. The period life table may thus be characterized as rendering a ‘‘snapshot’’ of current mortality experience, and shows the long-range implications of a set of age-specific death rates that prevailed in a given year…..

…Hispanic females continued to have the highest life expectancy at birth (83.4 years), followed by non-Hispanic white
females (80.6 years), Hispanic males (78.2 years), non-Hispanic black females (76.5 years), non-Hispanic white males (75.8 years), and non-Hispanic black males (69.6 years)….

I constructed a couple of graphs from tables 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, and 18 of the report. The first depicts the additional number of years that a person of a given age (in 2007) could expect to live:

The second graph is self-explanatory:

Mortality rates bottom out at around age 11. Then rates then rise sharply, especially among males. The dangerous years for males extend from age 12 to about age 22. Male mortality then levels off or declines slightly before embarking on its long, steady, inexorable rise.

Hispanic females are the longest-lived of the groups, and have the lowest mortality rate at almost every age. But the pattern of the Hispanic-female mortality rate resembles that of male mortality from age 12 to age 22. Perhaps a lot of Hispanic female are exposed to the risks that beset males in their teens and early twenties. Nevertheless, Hispanic females in that age group fare better than other females.

Non-Hispanic black females fare as well as Non-Hispanic white females until age 20. But in the age range of 35 to 60, Non-Hispanic black females experience mortality rates that are second only to those of Non-Hispanic black males.

UPDATE

The statistics in the tables cited above include estimates of person-years attained for 100,000 live births. The disparities are striking:

	Person-years	Index*
Hispanic females	8,337,374	1.00
Non-Hispanic white females	8,061,655	0.97
Hispanic males	7,823,786	0.94
Non-Hispanic black females	7,654,925	0.92
Non-Hispanic white males	7,580,601	0.91
Non-Hispanic black males	6,963,840	0.84

* As a fraction of the number for Hispanic females.

Dan Quayle Was (Almost) Right

Regarding The New York Times piece by Jason DeParle, called “Two Classes in America, Divided by ‘I Do,'” Rick Garnett says, “Maybe the piece should be called “Dan Quayle was right”? There’s no “maybe” about it. Dan Quayle was right when he said this in 1992:

Right now the failure of our families is hurting America deeply. When families fall, society falls. The anarchy and lack of structure in our inner cities are testament to how quickly civilization falls apart when the family foundation cracks. Children need love and discipline. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father. It is from parents that children come to understand values and themselves as men and women, mothers and fathers.

And for those concerned about children growing up in poverty, we should know this: marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program of them all. Among families headed by married couples today, there is a poverty rate of 5.7 percent. But 33.4 percent of families are headed by a single mother are in poverty today.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Where there are no mature, responsible men around to teach boys how to become good men, gangs serve in their place. In fact, gangs have become a surrogate family for much of a generation of inner-city boys….

The system perpetuates itself as these young men father children whom they have no intention of caring for, by women whose welfare checks support them. Teenage girls, mired in the same hopelessness, lack sufficient motive to say no to this trap….

Ultimately, however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failure to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this.

It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown – a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman – mocking the importance of a father, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another “lifestyle choice.”

I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. Now it’s time to make the discussion public….

Quayle’s message was derided by the usual suspects, of course. But Quayle’s remarks now apply just as much to whites as to the inner-city blacks whose behavior Quayle cites.

Indeed, DeParle focuses on the example of two white women, Jessica Schairer and her boss, Chris Faulkner:

They are both friendly white women from modest Midwestern backgrounds who left for college with conventional hopes of marriage, motherhood and career. They both have children in elementary school. They pass their days in similar ways: juggling toddlers, coaching teachers and swapping small secrets that mark them as friends. They even got tattoos together. Though Ms. Faulkner, as the boss, earns more money, the difference is a gap, not a chasm.

But a friendship that evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself. That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college, find good jobs and form stable marriages.

Ms. Faulkner goes home to a trim subdivision and weekends crowded with children’s events. Ms. Schairer’s rent consumes more than half her income, and she scrapes by on food stamps.

DeParle also hammers at inequality in a companion piece to the article quoted above:

An interesting pattern over the last four decades is that inequality has grown much faster for households with children than it has for households over all — an indication that changes in family structure (as opposed to wages and employment alone) have increased inequality….

While the decline of two-parent families is most striking in the bottom quarter, that is a familiar story and had largely occurred by 1990. Much of the recent growth has occurred in the second-lowest quarter, sometimes called the working class. In that group, the share of households with children headed by unmarried parents has soared to nearly 40 percent and the growth has continued in recent years:

The focus on inequality is perverse but predictable, inasmuch as DeParle is writing for The New York Times. Yes, DeParle eventually gets around to mentioning the choices made by the women in question:

College-educated Americans like the Faulkners…

Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree….

[Ms. Schairer] got pregnant during her first year of college, left school and stayed in a troubled relationship that left her with three children when it finally collapsed six years ago. She has had little contact with the children’s father and receives no child support. With an annual income of just under $25,000, Ms. Schairer barely lifts her children out of poverty, but she is not one to complain. “I’m in this position because of decisions I made,” she said.

Why, then, the focus on economic inequality, which is an unsurprising consequence of the kinds of decisions made by Ms. Schairer and growing numbers of white women? DeParle eventually acknowledges the latter point:

Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but no four-year degree.

But Ms. Schairer finds herself in “the lower reaches of the white middle class” because of her decisions — not because of a mysterious force called inequality, which has become the left’s all-purpose excuse for social ills.

The focus on inequality is surely meant to suggest that there is a “problem” about which government should do something. But the real problem is not economic inequality, which (though inevitable) is exacerbated by the rising trend toward broken families and one-parent homes. And that is the real problem, because its victims are innocent bystanders: the children of broken families and one-parent homes.

Rick Garnett asks, what “[c]an can law [i.e., government] do, if anything, about the challenges identified in [DeParle’s] piece?” The correct answer is that government should not compensate women like Ms. Schairer for the consequences of their bad decisions. Where government, through various welfare schemes, does compensate the Ms. Schairers for the consequences of their bad decisions, the result is to encourage more such bad decisions. (Economists call it moral hazard.)

The most that government can and should do is to cancel the perverse incentives that it has created in the past several decades: lax divorce laws; favoritism in employment and child-care subsidies that lure women into the working world, away from their children; and, of course, the welfare programs that reward bad decisions.

Government can’t do anything about the real problem, which is the decline of Judeo-Christian values as a guiding force in the affairs of Americans. Government has hastened that decline, but anything that it might do in an effort to reverse the decline is sure to be counterproductive.

Dan Quayle was almost right when he closed his infamous speech with this:

So I think the time has come to renew our public commitment to our Judeo-Christian values – in our churches and synagogues, our civic organizations and our schools. We are, as our children recite each morning, “one nation under God.” That’s a useful framework for acknowledging a duty and an authority higher than our own pleasures and personal ambitions.

Quayle’s counsel is one of lip-service and, strangely, reliance on government.

Judeo-Christian values, to be vital and effective in the affairs of society, must be inculcated within the family circle. Only when government stops breaking up families will there be hope for a broad resurgence of Judeo-Christian values in America.

I am a realist, however. And so I must close by paraphrasing the conclusion of a recent post. I do not believe that America can recover from its descent into hedonism. Therefore, the “single-parent problem” will not go away, and the dwindling fraction of Americans who conduct their lives conscientiously will subsidize an ever-growing fraction of Americans who make bad “life choices.” America is becoming (has become?) a moral wasteland, replete with one-parent “families,” broken families, and children who suffer spiritual neglect.

Given this state of affairs, it is prudent and desirable for traditional families to insulate themselves, as much as possible, from “mainstream” America. This can be done by limiting one’s social relationships (other than superficial ones) to those persons who share one’s values (even to the exclusion of family members, if necessary), and by home-schooling one’s children or sending them to private schools that can be relied on to transmit Judeo-Christian values.

Progressive Taxation Is Alive and Well in the U.S. of A.

Re-posted here.

Obama’s Big Lie

I was too easy on Barack Obama in “Barack Channels Princess SummerFall WinterSpring.” It’s not that I gave him a pass for denigrating the accomplishments of successful businesspersons. Far from it. But the Obama piñata deserves another good beating.

This beating is prompted by Jason Brennan’s tone-deaf post, “On Quoting Out of Context and the Right-Wing Smear Machine,” at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. Referring to Obama’s remarks in Roanoke, Virginia, on July 13. Brennan writes:

Obama said:

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own…

If you are successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet, so then all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that, when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

The right-wing smear machine quotes this out of context, as follows:

If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Wow, notice how quoting out of context changes the apparent meaning of those two sentences. In context, the sentences mean: If you own a business, you relied upon background institutions, infrastructure, and help from others to build that business. Your success depended upon many of the rest of us and on government. You didn’t create everything from scratch. The bolded “that” refers to “this unbelievable American System” and “roads and bridges”. This is what Obama actually said.

Out of context, the sentences seem to mean: You didn’t build your business; someone else did. Quoting him out of context makes it seem like the bolded “that” refers to your business.

Well, as it happens, the only way to interpret Obama’s statement — in or out of context — is to read it exactly as the so-called right-wing smear machine interprets it. To help Brennan understand that, I hereby reproduce the paragraph from the official White House source:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Note that the official source places an em-dash where Brennan places a comma. I will come to the em-dash in a moment.

The pronoun “that” in the fourth sentence unambiguously refers to “business,” which (in context) is the antecedent of “that.” And the em-dash that sets off the clause “you didn’t build that” makes it all the clearer that “that” refers to “business.” For it is the task of an emphatic clause set off by an em-dash to make an additional or clarifying statement about what immediately precedes the clause.

Further, having introduced the “that” in the fourth sentence, Obama repeats it in the next sentence. So, what Obama says in the fourth and fifth sentence of the paragraph is this:

If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that [business]. Somebody else made that [business] happen.

One doesn’t have to be a right-winger to see through Obama’s rhetoric.

It may be legitimate to say that (almost) nothing is accomplished (these days) by individuals working on their own. But Obama is trying, not so subtly, to denigrate those who are successful in business (e.g., Mitt Romney) and to make a case for redistributionism. The latter rests on Obama’s (barely concealed) premise that the fruits of a collective enterprise should be shared on some basis other than market valuations of individual contributions. (Brennan seems to share that view, so perhaps he is not altogether unsympathetic to Obama’s aims.)

It is (or should be) obvious that Obama’s agenda is the advancement of collectivist statism. I will credit Obama for the sincerity of his belief in collectivist statism, but his sincerity only underscores and how dangerous he is. (Note to Jason Brennan: “his” and “he” refer to “Obama.”)

Related reading:
Thomas Sowell, “Obama’s Rhetoric,” Townhall.com, July 19, 2012
Thomas Sowell, “Trashing Achievements,” JWR Insight, July 19, 2012
Mark J. Perry, “Milton Friedman Responds to Obama’s Claim That There Is No Such Thing As Individual Achievement,” Carpe Diem, July 20, 2012
Mark Steyn, “Golden Gateway to Dependency,” National Review Online, July 21, 2012

The Rationing Fallacy

Sheldon Richman writes:

[S]ome defenders of government control [of health care] acknowledge that rationing is the logical consequence of their ambition. They parry objections by saying in effect: “So we’ll have to ration. Big deal. We already have rationing—by the market.”

For example, Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor and advocate of government-controlled medicine, writes, “In short, free markets are not an alternative to rationing. They are just one particular form of rationing. Ever since the Fall from Grace, human beings have had to ration everything not available in unlimited quantities, and market forces do most of the rationing.”

Sadly, interventionist economists are not the only economists who talk this way. Most free-market economists would agree that where there is scarcity there must be rationing and that the most efficient way to ration is by price, that is, through the market.

This is factually wrong and strategically ill-advised. As we’ll see, markets–even completely free markets–do not ration….

To see that the market does not ration one need only see that “the market” doesn’t do anything. To talk as if it does things is to reify the market—worse, it is to anthropomorphize the market, ascribing to it attributes — purposes, plans, and actions—that only human beings possess. We may also see this as another instance of literalizing a metaphor, which, as Thomas Szasz has so often warned, is fraught with peril.

I’m not saying that economists don’t realize this diction is a metaphor. Of course they do, and there’s no harm in using this shorthand among those who understand it as such. The problem, as I see it, is that the general public doesn’t fully grasp the metaphorical nature of these statements. For the sake of public understanding, free-market advocates should not welcome a debate in which they begin by saying, “Our method of rationing is better than your method of rationing.”

Better to respond to the interventionists this way: The market does not ration or allocate. The market does not do anything. It has no purposes or objectives. It is simply a legal framework in which people do things with their justly acquired property and their time in order to pursue their own purposes.

I once put it this way:

Economic goods are not rationed by price; price facilitates voluntary transactions between willing buyers and sellers in free markets. Rationing is what happens when a powerful authority (usually a government) steps in to dictate the organization of markets, the specification of goods, and — more extremely — who may buy what goods and at what prices (though dictated prices are essentially meaningless because they do not perform the signaling function that they do in free markets)….

I added:

How will … rationing entice doctors and hospitals to provide services that they are now unwilling to provide? If doctors leave the medical profession, and new doctors enter at reduced rates, what would [an advocate of rationing] do? Begin drafting students into medical schools? What about hospitals that refuse to conform? Would they be nationalized, along with their nurses, orderlies, etc.?

What a pretty picture: Soviet-style medicine here in the U.S. of A. Yet that it precisely where outright rationing will lead if the politburo in Washington sees a shrinking supply of doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers — as it will. Most politicians do not know how to do less. When they create a mess, their natural inclination is to do more of what they did to cause the mess in the first place.

Rationing (in peacetime, at least) is the last refuge of political scoundrels. It gives the appearance of solving a problem, while making it worse.

Barack Channels Princess SummerFall WinterSpring

The princess of the title is Elizabeth Warren, self-reputed to be of Cherokee descent. And, as Native Americans go, Warren is about as authentic as Princess SummerFall WinterSpring of Howdy Doody.

You may remember Warren’s bleat of last September, in support of Obama’s plan to soak “the rich.” It caused ripples in the blogosphere (here and here, for example). The bleat? It goes like this:

I hear all this, you know, Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Last week, in Virgina, The Mighty O said the same thing in slightly different words:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

I repeat what I said in response to Warren’s bleat:

Who said anything about anyone getting rich on his own? But didn’t the factory owner — and other “malefactors of great wealth” — pay a “fair share”of the taxes that support roads, education, and police and fire forces? Yes.* Didn’t the factory owner pay his workers for their labor? Yes, and sometimes (in the case of union workers) at the expense of consumers and those workers who couldn’t find employment because unions effectively limit entry to the labor market.

If anyone owes “the rest of us” anything, it’s the workers who received subsidized educations that enabled them to earn good wages at factories that were built because factory owners, shareholders, bond holders, and (sometimes) venture capitalists put their own money at risk.

Workers and others (including Elizabeth Warren) ought to be grateful to the “malefactors of great wealth” who have — against heavy odds — enabled America’s prosperity.

Tom Smith of The Right Coast weighs in with this:

…{H]ow many more successful businesses, inventions, products, services, toys, tools, insights, and just plain fun would there be, if government did not in the first place make it so ridiculously difficult to start a business and keep it going? I don’t see our young president taking credit on behalf of the state for all the failures it help cause, all the ideas that never got off the ground because the regulatory hurdles were so high, or all the established companies that never had to face competition because they had managed to get their rents written into law. This is part of the seen and not seen insight of Bastiat. What you see is a successful business when it manages to survive, and then people run up, the same people who taxed and regulated it nearly to death, and say I helped! I helped! What you don’t see are all the businesses that perished or never got started because of the heavy hand of the state. And it’s a very heavy hand….

I started a business, commercially unsuccessful, sadly, but we created some great technology. I was a libertarian before that, but I was really a libertarian afterwards. It’s difficult to even explain how pervasive, expensive, frustrating and sometimes just plain insuperable the regulatory and taxation burden of the state is. It’s not what did our venture in, but it helped….

It’s obvious, but still worth saying — for our young President to suggest that government deserves some large part of the credit for the achievements of business founders who manage, in spite of it all, to start a business and make of a go of it, is deeply, deeply perverse. What it ought to get credit for are all the unseen businesses, no longer here or never to be, that it is responsible for.

I can tell you, from bitter experience as a business owner and corporate officer, that Smith is exactly right. The burdens that government imposes on the creation, expansion, and operation of businesses are myriad and onerous. Most Americans aren’t aware of just how much government does to discourage the creation of jobs, income, and wealth because most Americans — even those who are employed — are not exposed to the ugliness of the business-government interface. If business-government transactions were rated like movies, they would be rated XXX.

There is one more thing to be said about the Warren-Obama attack on industriousness. It’s wrong, as any economist worth his salt could tell you. (That excludes Paul Krugman and his fellow worshipers at the altar of big government.) Despite the pretensions of bleeding heart libertarians and their brethren on the left, no one on Earth is qualified to say how much a person deserves to earn. Aside from thieves and others who coerce their earnings from others (e.g., government officials, members of compulsory unions), Americans earn what they are able to command for their services, on the basis of the value of those services to others.

The factory owner who makes a lot of money does so — after having taken the considerable risk of owning a factory and putting up with a lot of crap from government — because what he produces is valuable to others. He is being rewarded more than his employees because he is taking risks and putting up with harassment. He is, in other words, being rewarded for his contributions to the success of his enterprise. (Did Barack or Elizabeth do anything to help him create it? Did the workers do more than they were paid to do? No, to both questions.)

And if the factory owner loses a lot of money and goes out of business, is it the fault of those who failed to buy his products? Would Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren say that everyone let him down? They should, because by their “logic” the failed factory owner was failed by everyone who didn’t buy his products, and so they owe him something.

But most American business owners are not whiny brats like Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, and the freeloaders whose votes they depend on to stay in power.

Don’t Use the “S” Word When the “F” Word Will Do

Every once in a while, Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) warns against calling Obama a socialist. Here’s a sample:

It is a tactical mistake for libertarians and conservatives to label Obama a socialist. For what will happen, has happened: liberals will revert to a strict definition and point out that Obama is not a socialist by this strict definition. Robert Heilbroner defines socialism in terms of “a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production.” To my knowledge, Obama has never advocated such a thing. So when the libertarian or conservative accuses Obama of socialism he lets himself in for a fruitless and wholly unnecessary verbal dispute from which he will emerge the loser.

It is enough to point out that the policies of Obama and the Democrat Party lead us toward bigger government and away from self-reliance, individual responsibility, individual liberty, and sound fiscal policy. If you want to use the ‘S’ word, you can say that Obama & Co. are pushing us in the direction of socialism. But calling him a socialist is tactically inadvisable. Never forget that the whole point is to remove him and his gang from positions of power. To achieve that goal we need to persuade large numbers of fence-sitters that that he is leading us down the wrong path. That persuasion is less likely to happen if we come across as extremists who misuse language….

It’s good advice, and not just for the reasons given by Vallicella. It seems to me that persons of the left — and I mean to include so-called left-of-center “liberal” moderates as well as their “bomb-throwing” brethren on the hard left — suffer a not-fully requited passion for government control of almost everything. As long as it’s their kind of government and as long as their livelihoods are unaffected by what that government controls, of course.

How can so-called “liberal” moderates and “bomb-throwers” be brothers under the political skin? Simple. The so-called moderates like to say that they are against socialism — saying that is what makes them so-called moderates. Yet, whenever a something comes to their attention that they consider unjust, unfair, inequitable, and so on, their knee-jerk response is that government ought to “do something” about it, or to endorse (without thought) the usual and inevitable call for government to “do something” about it. In sum, so-called moderates differ from “bomb-throwers” mainly in being less honest with themselves and others about the depth of their attachment to socialism.

As Vallicella says, leftists will argue that Obama isn’t a socialist. But they will do so only because they know “socialist” is a scare word. And they don’t want their “boy” tainted by a scare word. So they will get technical and defend him (and themselves) by denying that he is in favor of something scary

But, really, they don’t care. To be a socialist is a good thing, even for the so-called left-of-center moderate who tries to conceal his true feelings from himself.

And that is the real reason why it is counterproductive to call Obama a socialist. To be thought of as a socialist (i.e., a lover of big, all-powerful government) is high praise to a large chunk of the citizenry. Daniel B. Klein explains:

Government creates common, effectively permanent institutions, such as the streets and roads, utility grids, the postal service, and the school system. In doing so, it determines and enforces the setting for an encompassing shared experience—or at least the myth of such experience. The business of politics creates an unfolding series of battles and dramas whose outcomes few can dismiss as unimportant. National and international news media invite citizens to envision themselves as part of an encompassing coordination of sentiments—whether the focal point is election-day results, the latest effort in the war on drugs, or emergency relief to hurricane victims — and encourage a corresponding regard for the state as a romantic force. I call the yearning for encompassing coordination of sentiment The People’s Romance (henceforth TPR)….

TPR helps us to understand how authoritarians and totalitarians think. If TPR is a principal value, with each person’s well-being thought to depend on everyone else’s proper participation, then it authorizes a kind of joint, though not necessarily absolute, ownership of everyone by everyone, which means, of course, by the government. One person’s conspicuous opting out of the romance really does damage the others’ interests….

TPR lives off coercion—which not only serves as a means of clamping down on discoordination, but also gives context for the sentiment coordination to be achieved….

[N]ested within the conventional view that government is not a mammoth apparatus of coercion is the tenet that society is an organization to which we belong. Either on the view that we constitute and control the government (“we are the government”) or on the view that by deciding to live in the polity we choose voluntarily to abide by the government’s rules (“no one is forcing you to stay here”), the social democrat holds that taxation and interventions such as a minimum wage law are not coercive. The government-rule structure, as they see it, is a matter of “social contract” persisting through time and binding on the complete collection of citizens. The implication is that the whole of society is a club, a collectively owned property, administered by the government…. [“The People’s Romance: Why People Love Government (as Much as They Do),” The Independent Review, v. X, n. 1, Summer 2005, pp. 5–37]

Which brings me to the “f” word: fascism. This is the core meaning of fascism:

Fascism is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation. In effect, fascism is simply a more subtle form of government ownership than is socialism. [Morris and Linda Tannehil, The Market for Liberty, p. 18]

That is a proper definition of fascism. It is proper because it is devoid of the emotional baggage that the word carries because of its association with the (rightly) despised regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and lesser figures of the past and present. (That Hitler’s party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — is an inconvenient fact, and therefore one that is ignored by the left.) Fascism is not — I repeat — not synonymous with such things as concentration camps and the Holocaust. Those were vile aspects of Hitler’s regime, but they were not fascistic as such. But — and this is a big “but” — it is the lingering memory of concentration camps and the Holocaust that invests “fascism” with its emotional baggage.

The emotional baggage carried by “fascism” can be very useful to libertarians and conservatives who want to see the back of Obama and his crew of brown-shirts. Why? Because, the Tannehills’ definition of fascism fits Obama’s regime (and that of his spiritual predecessors) like a bespoke suit.

If only Romney could find copywriters who had the skills to connect Obama and fascism — subtly but convincingly. The evidence is there, it’s just a matter of connecting the dots. The word “fascism” couldn’t be used, of course, because it’s a smear word, and its overt use would backfire. But the word could be implied by factually describing the thrust of Obama’s policies, then adding punchlines like these: “Policies that were disgraced long ago”; “Is this the America you want your grandchildren to inherit?”; “Utopia comes at a high price.” The punch lines would be accompanied by newsreel clips that do not show Hitler, Nazis, or Nazi rallies, but which unmistakeably depict the Germany of the 1930s. Let viewers connect the dots.

Am I going too far in calling Obama a fascist? I think not. Fascism is simply another manifestation of The People’s Romance:

Notwithstanding the arguments of political scientists – who would distinguish fascism from other collectivist –isms such as communism, socialism, or national socialism (Nazism) – these distinctions are really irrelevant because all these forms of collectivism are equally pernicious to, and destructive of, individual rights and freedom. Leftists like to use the terms fascism or fascist as pejoratives because they naively believe that socialism is somehow less evil than collectivism of “the right” – that the murder of millions of people killed by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, by Mao in Red China, or by Pol Pot in communist Cambodia somehow was less evil than the murder of millions of people killed by Hitler’s regime in Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s regime in fascist Italy. Leftists have no legitimate claim on the truth, and neither do they have any monopoly on use of the terms fascism or fascist as pejoratives. [David N. Mayer, “2008: Prospects for Liberty,” MayerBlog, January 11, 2008]

* * *

…B.C. Forbes, the founder of the eponymous magazine, denounced “rampant Fascism” in 1933. In 1935 former President Herbert Hoover was using phrases like “Fascist regimentation” in discussing the New Deal. A decade later, he wrote in his memoirs that “the New Deal introduced to Americans the spectacle of Fascist dictation to business, labor and agriculture,” and that measures such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act, “in their consequences of control of products and markets, set up an uncanny Americanized parallel with the agricultural regime of Mussolini and Hitler.” In 1944, in The Road to Serfdom, the economist F.A. Hayek warned that economic planning could lead to totalitarianism. He cautioned Americans and Britons not to think that there was something uniquely evil about the German soul. National Socialism, he said, drew on collectivist ideas that had permeated the Western world for a generation or more.

In 1973 one of the most distinguished American historians, John A. Garraty of Columbia University, created a stir with his article “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression.” Garraty was an admirer of Roosevelt but couldn’t help noticing, for instance, the parallels between the Civilian Conservation Corps and similar programs in Germany. Both, he wrote, “were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth ‘off the city street corners,’ Hitler as a way of keeping them from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets.’ In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.”

And in 1976, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan incurred the ire of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), pro-Roosevelt historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and The New York Times when he told reporters that “fascism was really the basis of the New Deal.” [from David Boaz’s “Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt: What FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the 30s,” a review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939]

Obama’s regime is nothing less than a new New Deal — on steroids.

Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications

This is the third (and probably last) post in a series. The first two posts are “Race and Reason: The Derbyshire Debacle” and “Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action.” The purpose of the series, as suggested by the titles of the posts, is to inject reason (and facts) into the discussion of race. It has been done before, of course, but it cannot hurt to add another voice to the chorus of race-realism.

Yes, I am a race-realist. I believe (based on fact) that the socioeconomic divide between blacks and other racial-ethnic groups in America is primarily a product of genetic and cultural differences that work to the general disadvantage of blacks.

I know that some readers will quickly reject what I have to say, and a lot of them will do so as soon as they reach the end of the preceding paragraph. Why? Because the facts that I present will not comport with their view of the way the world ought to be. What is the “ought to be”? Briefly, it is an imaginary world in which all races are equal in ability, and in which cultural differences hove no bearing on economic achievement. If that is your view of the world, and if you are unwilling to consider a different, fact-based view, you may stop reading now and return to the land of unreality. Before you do that, however, I want you to be aware of one important thing: My own racial views are neutral; that is, I am unprejudiced toward blacks as blacks, though I am greatly opposed to pro-black policies (as opposed to race-neutral ones), which have been harmful to black Americans as well as their countrymen. For evidence of my race-neutrality, see the note at the bottom of this post.

Then there are those readers who might agree with the facts that I present here, but who prefer to ignore them because they might “feed racism” and be used as an excuse to treat blacks as second-class citizens. Racists need no help from me or anyone else who presents the facts about the causes of the socioeconomic divide in America. Racists are immune to facts and see the world as they think it ought to be, which is free of blacks or with blacks shunted to second-class citizenship. The socioeconomic gap between blacks and other Americans cannot be shrunk by ignoring the reasons for the gap. The gap can be shrunk (though never closed) only by understanding its real causes and adopting policies that address those causes.

A note about usage: It is my practice in this blog to put “liberal” (and its variants) in quotation marks when referring to modern liberalism, which is quite a different thing than classical liberalism. The difference, of course, is that modern liberals espouse statism. In particular, they believe that what is adjudged “good” by academic-political elites should be imposed on everyone by the state. And liberty — despite its etymological relationship to the word liberal — be damned. Thus the sarcastic quotation marks, or sneer quotes. In any event, I have, in this post, omitted the quotation marks for the sake of typographical neatness. Rest assured, however, that where I use “liberal” and its variants in this post I am referring to statists and statism.

Continued below the fold. Continue reading “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications” →

Homage to a Former Blogger

I learned recently, and belatedly, that Ilkka Kokkarinen — late of Sixteen Volts, The Fourth Checkraise, and The Wingnut Musings — has retired from blogging. Earlier this year, Kokkarinen published The Wingnut Musings, a no-longer-available book that seems to be drawn from his blog posts.

It is Kokkarinen’s misfortune (in my view) to live and work in uber-politically-correct Canada. (He teaches computer science at Ryerson University in Toronto.) A sad fate for someone like him, who seems born to coin politically incorrect mots justes by the bucketful. It was, evidently, political incorrectness that led to the shutting down of Sixteen Volts in 2006.

In 2007, however, Kokkarinen returned to blogging with The Fourth Checkraise. He took a brief break in 2010. At some point he renamed his blog The Wingnut Musings. That blog ended its run earlier this year. It is possible to find many snippets and chunks of Kokkarinen’s writings — just Google on Ilkka Kokkarinen or the names of his blogs (especially the last two). I cannot choose a favorite insight among his many incisive ones, but I can give you a typical one:

If national borders are bad and everyone should be allowed to live wherever they want regardless of their citizenship status and ethnic heritage… why do you think that it so wrong for some international corporation to move its factory (or some fat Western retiree to move his ass) to some poor Third World country?

You can find much more by Googling (e.g., this, this, and this).

It is fitting to close this homage to Kokkarinen by hoping that he will return to blogging (if he may), and by quoting the Amazon.com description of his book (a description that only he could have written):

Do you ever wonder how it is possible for all smart people to know that there is no such thing as intelligence? Or why the most progressive areas tend to have the highest levels of poverty, inequality and distrust, and even the progressives themselves do their best to insulate themselves and their loved ones from their ideas? Or why those eager to get the government out of our bedrooms seem to be equally adamant in giving the government the complete power over living rooms, kitchens, boardrooms, shop floors, classrooms and sports arenas? Or why the ideology that preaches environmentalism and localism but only when it comes to food can proudly extol its frequent flyer cosmopolitanism in all other things, while its twin ideology that preaches sustainability can barely sustain even itself more than one generation? Or how Wal-Mart, fast food, nuclear power, industrial farming and fishing, shopping malls, automobiles, suburbs, drug companies, oil, cheap airline travel and mass tourism can be targets to so much of intellectual disdain even though they have achieved more than all intellectuals together in making the average person wealthier, healthier and more free than the richest emperors of the past? This collection of short but all the more provocative essays throws rocks at many ideas that dominate the modern discourse but ultimately boil down to nothing but narrow group shibboleths for the social class that is anxious of its status, its position ever more precarious due to societal changes that have already made it obsolete. Their ideas are not meant to inform but to enforce conformity and groupthink, and to distinguish the anointed from the lower orders that they are not wealthy enough to avoid being mistaken for. They tolerate no competition or criticism, but form a pervasive and suffocating bubble that always provides the default answer for everything. Even worse, intentionally advocating policies that are harmful for weaker people serves as an imaginary status signal that has detrimental effects on society and those unable to escape their very real consequences… and this group will include many who blithely assumed that they would not be part of it, but will learn differently soon enough. A vaccination against many mind viruses that people believe not because they have thought through the facts and logic but merely because all nice people they know proclaim to believe these things, this book is guaranteed to annoy those on the left side of the political spectrum, and with its spirit of raucous zingers sprinkled amidst blunt observations, both educate and entertain those on the right side of ideas and history.

The force be with you, Ilkka.

The U.S. Supreme Court: Lines of Succession

I have added a page of that title to this blog. Readers may access it through a link near the top of the left sidebar. The page includes a large table that gives the dates of service and lines of succession for every person who has served on the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the text that accompanies the table:

Though there are now only nine justices and nine seats on the Supreme Court, this table lists eleven lines of succession. There is one for the chief justiceship and ten for the associate justiceships that Congress has created at one time an another by changing the size of the Court. In other words, two associate justiceships have “died out” in the course of the Court’s history. The present members of the Court, in addition to the chief justice, hold the first, second, third, fourth, sixth, eighth, ninth, and tenth associate justiceships created by Congress.

The name of every justice is associated with the name of the president who nominated that person to a justiceship (chief or associate). The first date under a justice’s name is the date on which he or she took the oath of office (or was appointed in a recess of the Senate). There is a second date below the name of every justice (except for the nine now serving). That date is the date on which the person left the Court, by death or resignation, and that date may be (and usually is) associated with a president other than one who nominated the justice. The date of a justice’s departure from the Court usually appears directly above the name of the next justice in the line of succession for the same seat on the Court.

Because there is a separate line of succession for the chief justiceship, persons who were already on the Court and then elevated to the chief justiceship are listed in two different places. Also, the names of a few justices appear in more than one place because they served non-consecutive terms on the Court.

Obamacare and Zones of Liberty

Uwe Reinhardt, a professor of economics at Princeton, offers this tantalizing idea:

Let us set up two distinct systems for health care within our nation. Call one the Social Solidarity system and the other the Libertarian system. Ask young people — at age 25 or so — to choose one or the other.

People joining the Social Solidarity system would know that they will be asked to subsidize their less fortunate fellow citizens in health care through taxes or premiums or both. They would also know, however, that the community will take care of them, and they will not go broke, should serious illness befall them.

People choosing the Libertarian system would not have to pay taxes to subsidize other people’s health care, and they would pay actuarially fair health insurance premiums — low for healthy people and high for sicker people.

Libertarians, however, would not be allowed to come into the Social Solidarity system, unless they were so pauperized as to qualify for Medicaid. Hospitals would have every right to use tough measures to make them pay their medical bills in full, to prevent freeloading at the expense of others.

Furthermore, care would have to be taken to prohibit the kind of estate planning that now often permits well-to-do individuals to take advantage of Medicaid benefits. [“Health Care: Solidarity vs. Rugged Individualism,” in Economix, The New York Times, June 29, 2012]

Reinhardt’s suggestion has much merit — his loaded labels aside. The “social solidarity” model really amounts to freeloading, or the futile attempt to freeload. The “rugged individualism” model really amounts to a preference for making one’s own decisions instead of having decisions rammed down one’s throat by government — in other words, a preference for liberty.

But, as I say, the suggestion has merit. And the merit extends far beyond the matter of health care. As John Goodman puts it, “why restrict the choice to health care?”

Which leads to my immodest proposal for zones of liberty:

The 50 States (and their constituent municipalities) are incompatible with the kind of federalism envisioned by the Framers. Today’s State and municipal governments are too bureaucratic and too beholden to special interests; they have become smaller versions of the federal government. For, in today’s populous States and municipalities, coalitions of minority interests are able to tyrannize the populace. (The average State today controls the destinies of 25 times as many persons as did the average State of 1790.) Those Americans who “vote with their feet” through internal migration do not escape to regimes of liberty so much as they escape to regimes that are less tyrannical than the ones in which they had been living.

The kind of federalism envisioned by the Framers — and the kind of federalism necessary to liberty — would require the devolution to small communities and neighborhoods of all but a few powers: war-making, the conduct of foreign affairs, and the regulation of inter-community commerce for the sole purpose of ensuring against the erection of barriers to trade. With that kind of federalism, the free markets of ideas and commerce would enable individuals to live in those communities and neighborhoods that best serve their particular conceptions of liberty.

What do I have in mind? A zone of liberty would be something like a “new city” — with a big difference. Uninhabited land would be acquired by a wealthy lover (or lovers) of liberty, who would establish a development authority for the sole purpose of selling the land in the zone. The zone would be populated initially by immigrants from other parts of the United States. The immigrants would buy parcels of land from the development authority, and on those parcels they could build homes or businesses of their choosing. Buyers of parcels would be allowed to attach perpetual covenants to the parcels they acquire, and to subdivide their parcels with (or without) the covenants attached. All homes and businesses would have to be owned by residents of the zone, in order to ensure a close connection between property interests and governance of the zone.

Infrastructure would be provided by competing vendors of energy, telecommunications, and transportation services (including roads and their appurtenances). Rights-of-way would be created through negotiations between vendors and property owners. All other goods and services — including education and medical care — would be provided by competing vendors. No vendor, whether or not a resident of the zone, would be subject to any regulation, save the threat of civil suits and prosecution for criminal acts (e.g., fraud). Any homeowner or business owner could import or export any article or service from or to any place, including another country; there would be no import controls, duties, or tariffs on imported or exported goods and services.

The zone’s government would comprise an elected council, a police force, and a court (all paid for by assessments based on the last sale price of each parcel in the zone). The police force would be empowered to keep the peace among the residents of the zone, and to protect the residents from outsiders, who would be allowed to enter the zone only with the specific consent of resident homeowners or business owners. Breaches of the peace (including criminal acts) would be defined by the development of a common law through the court. The elected council (whose members would serve single, four-year terms) would oversee the police force and court, and would impose the assessments necessary to defray the costs of government. The council would have no other powers, and it would be able to exercise its limited powers only by agreement among three-fourths of the members of the council. The members, who would not be salaried, would annually submit a proposed budget to the electorate, which would have to approve the budget by a three-fourths majority. The electorate would consist of every resident who is an owner or joint owner of a residence or business (not undeveloped land), and who has attained the age of 30.

A zone of liberty would not be bound by the laws (statutory and otherwise) of the United States, the individual States, or any of political subdivision of a State. (The federal government could impose a per-capita tax on residents of the zone, in order to defray the zone’s per-capita share of the national budget for defense and foreign affairs.) The actions of the zone’s government would be reviewable only by the U.S. Supreme Court, and then only following the passage of a bill of particulars by two-thirds of each house of Congress, and with the concurrence the president. (A zone could be abolished only with the approval of four-fifths of each house of Congress, and with the concurrence of the president.)

Absent such an experiment, I see only one hope for liberty — albeit a slim one — a Supreme Court that revives the Constitution. Politics as usual will only take us further down the road to serfdom.

I wrote that two years ago, and it is based on a post that is now more than six years old. Much has happened since, almost all of it to the detriment of liberty. Would our rulers dare allow at least a few of us to undertake an experiment in liberty? It is doubtful, because they fear the possibility that the experiment would succeed. And if it did, they would face the prospect of demands for more of the same. And where would that leave them? Without vast power. Scratch the idea of asking the federal government or any State government for a zone of liberty.

But maybe it isn’t necessary to ask. Suppose that a new (unincorporated) city were to spring up in, say, an isolated county with a friendly government. Suppose, further, that the new city’s citizens were to do nothing to organize themselves but (a) set up a police department and (b) hire legal counsel to ensure that the residents obey those State and federal laws that they must obey. And suppose that the city were to be an economic and social success, despite the absence of all of the codes and ordinances that ensnare the residents and businesses of today’s typical city.

Isn’t it worth a try? And doesn’t it beat trying to entice libertarians to move to New Hampshire (brrr!) or to live in international waters (pirates off the bow)?

Obama: Not Bailed out by CJ Roberts

UPDATED 07/03/12

Chief Justice Roberts’s bailout of Obama care — a.k.a. CJ Roberts’s sellout — may have brought some wavering believers in big government back into the corral, but probably not enough of them to rescue Obama from defeat at the hands of Mitt Romney. I continue to forecast a Romney win over Obama, the strong possibility of a GOP takeover of the Senate, and approximately no change in the GOP’s large House majority (see left sidebar).

Further evidence for my forecasts, is found in Scott Rasmussen’s polls about the “popularity” (i.e., unpopularity) of Obama and Obamacare:

Sources: Rasmussen Reports, Obama Approval Index History and Health Care Law.

The latest poll results show a net disapproval rating of -18 for Obama (as of July 3) and a net disapproval rating of -14 for Obamacare (as of June 29-30, the two days immediately following CJ Roberts’s bombshell).

Obama’s net disapproval rating measures the percentage of respondents who strongly approve of his performance, minus the percentage of respondents who strongly disapprove of his performance. It has been three years since the arithmetic yielded a positive number, which is why I usually refer to the poll results as Obama’s disapproval or unpopularity rating.

The ratings for Obamacare are constructed as follows: For the period before Obamacare was signed into law on March 23, 2010, the numbers represent the percentage of respondents who strongly favored the passage of Obamacare, less the percentage of respondents who strongly opposed the passage of Obamacare. From the enactment of Obamacare to the present, the numbers represent the percentage of respondents who have strongly opposed the repeal of Obamacare, minus the percentage of respondents who have strongly favored the repeal of Obamacare.

Needless to say, Obamacare has always been in negative territory. In the latest poll (June 29-30) it gained only one percentage point from the poll conducted a week earlier. The recent uptick began in May, probably as a result of the intense p.r. campaign conducted by Obama and other Democrats (most notably Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee).

The save-Obamacare campaign may have worked on CJ Roberts, but its overall effect has been small. In fact, the recent gain in popularity is minuscule in comparison to the bandwagon-effect gain that began in January 2010 — when it became clear that Obamacare would become law — and continued until the eve of enactment on March 23, 2010.

The real silver lining in the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision — if there is any silver lining — is that the Obamacare target still hangs from Obama’s neck.

Another Thought or Two about the Obamacare Decision

In the preceding post, I alluded to commentators who found silver linings in Chief Justice Roberts’s alignment with the Court’s liberal wing in upholding the individual mandate. I feel compelled to say more about the supposed silver linings.

I begin with Ilya Somin, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy:

Although the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate as an exercise of the Tax Power, a majority of the justices also ruled that it is not a legitimate exercise of Congress’ powers under the Commerce Clause. In doing so, they endorsed the plaintiffs’ argument that the individual mandate exceeds the scope of the Commerce power because it does not regulate “economic activity,” but instead targets inactivity.

But, as Somin points out:

The problem is that Roberts then proceeds to “empower Congress to make those decisions [to buy health insurance]” for us under the guise of imposing taxes.

Why did Roberts not simply join the four dissenting justices and throw out Obamacare while making clear the limits on Congress’s Commerce Clause power? The same (hypothetical) majority opinion also would have found unconstitutional the feds’ expansion of Medicaid.

Sean Trende, writing at RealClearPolitics, has much to say in Roberts’s defense, including this:

Thursday’s health care ruling shocked most observers. It upheld the health care law as constitutional. But rather than find that the law was justified under Congress’ authority to regulate commerce, it instead found it was justified only under Congress’ power to tax. It also imposed limits upon Congress’ ability to condition spending grants to the states upon those states taking certain steps. To my knowledge, former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger was the only person who thought that the court would ultimately rule on those grounds. I certainly was surprised.

Even more surprising, the decision was 5-4, and Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion upholding the law, rather than Anthony Kennedy. Conservatives are flabbergasted by the chief’s decision (or, in their view, betrayal)….

But I think if you scratch the surface here, Roberts embarked upon a gambit much like [Chief Justice John] Marshall did 200 years ago [in Marbury v. Madison]…

Let’s start with Roberts’ presumed crass political considerations. Namely, as a conservative Republican, he would not want the health care law implemented….

If Republicans win the Senate and presidency, the law is doomed. They will use reconciliation to repeal it, or to gut it….

And the decision may help to ensure a GOP sweep in November by energizing unenthusiastic conservatives and fiscally prudent independents.

Trende continues:

Five justices just signaled to lower courts that, but for the unique taxation power argument, they were prepared to rule that a major act of Congress that plainly touched upon economic activity exceeded Congress’ commerce powers….

The most important aspect of the ruling, however, comes with respect to the spending clause. Seven justices just agreed to real limits on Congress’ ability to attach strings to legislation. This is significant. Until today, these limits were hypothetical, and it was believed that Congress could, for example, remove all Medicaid funding as a punishment for a state’s refusal to comply with the Medicaid expansion. I did not expect the court to rule the way it did here, much less to do so by a 7-2 vote….

Roberts has basically … [i]nsulate[d] the court from criticism of bald partisan bias and infidelity to, as he once put it, calling balls and strikes. He’s earning plaudits from the left. Though the right is grumbling, I suspect they won’t be doing so for long.

This is not the last battle to be fought on the Roberts Court. It might not even be the most significant. In the next term, for example, the court is being asked to reconsider its affirmative action jurisprudence. There are almost certainly five votes to overturn court rulings from a decade ago upholding some forms of affirmative action.

Following that, the court will face a variety of tough decisions. There are probably five votes to uproot the entire campaign finance system, a decision that would make Citizens United look like small fry. And there are probably five votes to invalidate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

I don’t think invalidating the ACA would have affected the court’s legitimacy that much, at least outside of liberals in the legal academy. But taken as a whole, this series of decisions really might have irrevocably hurt the court’s reputation for independence.

But Roberts has something of an ace up his sleeve now. Accusations of hyper-partisanship are much harder to make against him, and he has more freedom to move on these issues….

Yes, but Roberts and his conservative brethren have life tenure, and what the public thinks about the Court surely is less important that what the Court does. Giving ground to seem “nice” is a classic conservative blunder.

Perhaps I can find solace in a column by Tom Socca, writing at Slate:

There were two battles being fought in the Supreme Court over the Affordable Care Act. Chief Justice John Roberts—and Justice Anthony Kennedy—delivered victory to the right in the one that mattered….

The scholars expected to see the court gut existing Commerce Clause precedent and overturn the individual mandate in a partisan decision: Five Republican-appointed justices voting to rewrite doctrine and reject Obamacare; four Democratic-appointed justices dissenting.

Roberts was smarter than that. By ruling that the individual mandate was permissible as a tax, he joined the Democratic appointees to uphold the law—while joining the Republican wing to gut the Commerce Clause (and push back against the necessary-and-proper clause as well)….

This is a substantial rollback of Congress’ regulatory powers, and the chief justice knows it. It is what Roberts has been pursuing ever since he signed up with the Federalist Society. In 2005, Sen. Barack Obama spoke in opposition to Roberts’ nomination, saying he did not trust his political philosophy on tough questions such as “whether the Commerce Clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce.” Today, Roberts did what Obama predicted he would do.

Roberts’ genius was in pushing this health care decision through without attaching it to the coattails of an ugly, narrow partisan victory. Obama wins on policy, this time. And Roberts rewrites Congress’ power to regulate, opening the door for countless future challenges. In the long term, supporters of curtailing the federal government should be glad to have made that trade.

This strikes me as more of the same. But perhaps Trende and Socca are on to something. Roberts, by reaching out the the Court’s left, may have gained useful allies for future fights. Kennedy, despite his surprising (to me) absolute opposition to Obamacare, can and will stray off the conservative reservation without warning.

There is also the important and still-to-be-decided issue of Obamacare’s effects on religious freedom. This is from a post by Sarah Marshall and Jennifer Torre at The Foundry:

…The Court’s ruling to uphold Obamacare doesn’t mean the law has cleared its legal challenges, however. Twenty-three federal lawsuits against Obamacare’s Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate—which goes into effect on August 1—now take on added urgency….

The HHS anti-conscience mandate is a completely separate rule from the individual mandate, and its constitutionality was not considered by the Supreme Court in the cases decided today. The HHS mandate, along with the individual mandate and the rest of Obamacare, still presents a clear threat to individual and religious liberty. Nothing short of full repeal of the statute will adequately protect our freedoms from this federal overreach.

The next legal battleground against Obamacare resides in the fight to protect employers from the coercive requirement to provide coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization under the HHS mandate….

Obamacare’s anti-conscience mandate affords the narrowest religious exemption in federal law, effectively covering only formal houses of worship. Countless other religious employers, like schools, hospitals, and religious charities, are forced to provide coverage for the mandated services despite moral or religious objections—simply because they step outside the four walls of a church to serve others.

Creating the choice to violate conscience or forgo providing health insurance entirely—and risk hefty fines under Obamacare—the HHS mandate profoundly and adversely affects many employers and the people they serve….

Perhaps this is one of the fights anticipated by Roberts. And perhaps he wants to win it by more than 5-4 (or to ensure that he wins it). Robert John Araujo of Mirror of Justice has some related thoughts:

[The following observation of Justice Ginsburg and her colleagues in their partial concurrence and dissent might suggest that the debate and probably the litigation involving the legality of this legislation will continue for some time to come. As she says about the provisions of the Constitution that exist to check Congressional overreaching:

A mandate to purchase a particular product would be unconstitutional if, for example, the edict impermissibly abridged the freedom of speech, interfered with the free exercise of religion, or infringed on a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause.

…[I]t would appear that this subject which Justice Ginsburg, and those who agree with her, has identified may well be in the courts in the not-too-distant future [as discussed in the preceding quotation].

Could Roberts be angling to enlist Ginsburg as an ally in the looming freedom-of-conscience cases? That strikes me as a long shot because Ginsburg — “good” statist that she is, will no doubt find a way to wiggle out of her implied commitment to the free exercise of religion. But Roberts’s real targets may be Justices Breyer and Kagan, who joined his opinion — including the ruling that the expansion of Medicaid was unduly coercive of the States.

If Roberts has made the political calculations attributed to him — and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has — my only wish is that his calculations prove correct. If they are not, he simply will have wasted what would have been a perfectly good majority opinion, namely, the dissent of Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito.

Obamacare, Slopes, Ratchets, and the Death Spiral of Liberty

Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the matter of Obamacare (National Federation of Business et al. v. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al.) is portrayed by some commentators as a victory of sorts for limited government. Consider the following excerpts of the Syllabus:

[T]he individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause….

The power to regulate commerce presupposes the existence of commercial activity to be regulated. This Court’s precedent reflects this understanding: As expansive as this Court’s cases construing the scope of the commerce power have been, they uniformly describe the power as reaching “activity.”… The individual mandate, however, does not regulate existing commercial activity. It instead compels individuals to become active in commerce by purchasing a product, on the ground that their failure to do so affects interstate commerce.

Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. Congress already possesses expansive power to regulate what people do. Upholding the Affordable Care Act under the Commerce Clause would give Congress the same license to regulate what people do not do. The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. The individual mandate thus cannot be sustained under Congress’s power to “regulate Commerce.”…

Nor can the individual mandate be sustained under the Necessary and Proper Clause as an integral part of the Affordable Care Act’s other reforms. Each of this Court’s prior cases upholding laws under that Clause involved exercises of authority derivative of, and in service to, a granted power…. The individual mandate, by contrast, vests Congress with the extraordinary ability to create the necessary predicate to the exercise of an enumerated power and draw within its regulatory scope those who would otherwise be outside of it. Even if the individual mandate is “necessary” to the Affordable Care Act’s other reforms, such an expansion of federal power is not a “proper” means for making those reforms effective.

So far, so good, but

for the reasons explained, the Commerce Clause does not give Congress that power.It is therefore necessary to turn to the Government’s alternative argument: that the mandate may be upheld as within Congress’s power to “lay and collect Taxes.”… In pressing its taxing power argument, the Government asks the Court to view the mandate as imposing a tax on those who do not buy that product. Because “every reasonable construction must be resorted to, in order to save a statute from unconstitutionality,”… the question is whether it is “fairly possible” to interpret the mandate as imposing such a tax….

The Affordable Care Act describes the “[s]hared responsibility payment” as a “penalty,” not a “tax.” That label is fatal to the application of the Anti-Injunction Act. It does not, however, control whether an exaction is within Congress’s power to tax. In answering that constitutional question, this Court follows a functional approach,“[d]isregarding the designation of the exaction, and viewing its substance and application.”…

Such an analysis suggests that the shared responsibility payment may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax.

What a strange tax it is that must be paid to the government in order to breathe life into a program for which there is no constitutional remit in the “limited and enumerated powers” of the government. The government’s powers to tax and spend are not open-ended; they must serve a constitutional purpose.

There is more:

[T]he Medicaid expansion violates the Constitution by threatening States with the loss of their existing Medicaid funding if they decline to comply with the expansion….

The Spending Clause grants Congress the power “to pay the Debts and provide for the . . . general Welfare of the United States.”… Congress may use this power to establish cooperative state-federal Spending Clause programs. The legitimacy of Spending Clause legislation, however, depends on whether a State voluntarily and knowingly accepts the terms of such programs…. When Congress threatens to terminate other grants as a means of pressuring the States to accept a Spending Clause program, the legislation runs counter to this Nation’s system of federalism….

Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid is transformed into a program to meet the health care needs of the entire nonelderly population with income below 133 percent of the poverty level. A State could hardly anticipate that Congress’s reservation of the right to “alter” or “amend” the Medicaid program included the power to transform it so dramatically. The Medicaid expansion thus violates the Constitution by threatening States with the loss of their existing Medicaid funding if they decline to comply with the expansion….

The constitutional violation is fully remedied by precluding the Secretary from … withdraw[ing] existing Medicaid funds for failure to comply with the requirements set out in the expansion.

Again, gratifying as the holding may be to some parties, it assumes (and therefore affirms) the constitutionality of an act that “meet[s] he health care needs of the entire nonelderly population with income below 133 percent of the poverty level.” Where does the Constitution set forth Congress’s power to do any such thing?

My outrage is echoed in the dissent by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito; for example:

The striking case of Wickard v. Filburn, … , which held that the economic activity of growing wheat, even for one’s own consumption, affected commerce sufficiently that it could be regulated, always has been regarded as the ne plus ultra of expansive Commerce Clause jurisprudence. To go beyond that, and to say the failure to grow wheat (which is not an economic activity, or any activity at all) nonetheless affects commerce and therefore can be federally regulated, is to make mere breathing in and out the basis for federal prescription and to extend federal power to virtually all human activity.

As for the constitutional power to tax and spend for the general welfare: The Court has long since expanded that beyond (what Madison thought it meant) taxing and spending for those aspects of the general welfare that were within the Federal Government’s enumerated powers… Thus, we now have sizable federal Departments devoted to subjects not mentioned among Congress’ enumerated powers, and only marginally related to commerce: the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The principal practical obstacle that prevents Congress from using the tax-and-spend power to assume all the general-welfare responsibilities traditionally exercised by the States is the sheer impossibility of managing a Federal Government large enough to administer such a system. That obstacle can be overcome by granting funds to the States, allowing them to administer the program. That is fair and constitutional enough when the States freely agree to have their powers employed and their employees enlisted in the federal scheme. But it is a blatant violation of the constitutional structure when the States have no choice.

The Act before us here exceeds federal power both in mandating the purchase of health insurance and in denying nonconsenting States all Medicaid funding. These parts of the Act are central to its design and operation, and all the Act’s other provisions would not have been enacted without them. In our view it must follow that the entire statute is inoperative.

Amen to that. And the same goes for Social Security and Medicare. (My words, not the words of the dissenting justices, unfortunately.)

Where does today’s ruling leave Americans? Further down the slippery slope to serfdom. The “slippery slope” is

an argument for the likelihood of one event or trend given another. Invoking the “slippery slope” means arguing that one action will initiate a chain of events that will lead to a (generally undesirable) event later. The argument is sometimes referred to as the thin end of the wedge or the camel’s nose.

That is to say, once it became accepted that the federal government could establish programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, it became relatively easy to expand those programs to encompass the “national emergency” of the day. And so, the stage has been set for government-run health care in the United States, with all that goes with it: long queues, worse care, rationing, and death panels, and more.

Another metaphor for the inexorable engrossment of state power is the ratchet effect,

the commonly observed phenomenon that some processes cannot go backwards once certain things have happened, by analogy with the mechanical ratchet that holds the spring tight as a clock is wound up.

The acceptance of the status quo (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) as a baseline sets the stage for a ratcheting up to a new, more expansive and expensive status quo (Obamacare), on the ground that if X is good, X+ will be better. That X is good and X+ will be better are articles of faith, which become widely accepted without serious consideration of the burden they impose on the most productive citizens, the negative effect of that burden on the nation’s economy, or the liberty of the people. It has been heartening that most Americans have opposed Obamacare, in the main because of the perceived insult to liberty known as the individual mandate. But, alas, a majority of the Supreme Court has found a legalistic way in which to ratchet up the mainspring of government power.

Perhaps the best metaphor for today’s ruling is the death spiral. Reliance on government usually creates more problems than it solves. But, having become accustomed to relying on government, most Americans rely on government to deal with the problems caused by government’s previous enactments. That only makes matters worse, which causes Americans to rely further on government, etc., etc. etc.

In the case of Obamacare, what we have is a reaction to the high costs of medical services and the presumed failure of markets to provide adequate health care for large chunks of the population. It escapes the notice of most Americans — and is of no interest to most politicians — that the high costs and supposed “market failures” are due to government action: tax subsidies for employer-provided insurance (which results in an artificially high demand for medical services); mandated insurance coverages; barriers to interstate competition in insurance markets; the FDA’s long, death-inducing approval process for new drugs; the AMA’s government-sponsored stranglehold on the training and licensing of doctors; a similar stranglehold on the establishment of health-care facilities; and on and on.This is the real “national emergency,” which today’s majority blithely ignored in its quest to find an extra-constitutional (i.e., precedential) basis for the further expansion of government power.

It is long past time for Americans to declare their independence from the legislative, executive, and judicial tyranny under which we labor for the benefit of politicians, bureaucrats, and freeloaders.

Posts about government power, its effects, and ways to combat it:
FDR and Fascism
The People’s Romance
Fascism
Fascism with a “Friendly” Face
Secession
Democracy and Liberty
The Interest-Group Paradox
Is Statism Inevitable?
Inventing “Liberalism”
The Price of Government
A New, New Constitution
Zones of Liberty
Fascism and the Future of America
Secession Redux
A New Cold War or Secession?
The Price of Government Redux
The Real Constitution and Civil Disobedience
The Near-Victory of Communism
A Declaration of Independence
The Mega-Depression
Tocqueville’s Prescience
First Principles
As Goes Greece
Accountants of the Soul
Ricardian Equivalence Reconsidered
Zones of Liberty
The Constitution: Original Meaning, Corruption, and Restoration
Society and the State
I Want My Country Back
Estimating the Rahn Curve: Or, How Government Inhibits Economic Growth
The Bowles-Simpson Report
The Bowles-Simpson Band-Aid
Regime Uncertainty and the Great Recession
Re-Forming the United States
The Stagnation Thesis
Taxing the Rich
More about Taxing the Rich
America’s Financial Crisis Is Now
The Southern Secession Reconsidered
A Declaration of Civil Disobedience
The Repealer
Regulation as Wishful Thinking
The Real Multiplier
Vulgar Keynesianism and Capitalism
Why Are Interest Rates So Low?
The Commandeered Economy
Estimating the Rahn Curve: A Sequel
In Defense of the 1%
The Real Multiplier (II)
Lay My (Regulatory) Burden Down
The Burden of Government
Constitutional Confusion
Reclaiming Liberty throughout the Land
Economic Growth Since World War II
More Evidence for the Rahn Curve

In Mourning

I am in mourning for liberty in the United States, which has been killed by today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus the black band at the top of this blog.

More to come.

UPDATE (09/06/13)

I’ve gone back to red because I’m fighting mad, and plan to stay that way.

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