An Economist’s Special Pleading: Affirmative Action for the Ugly

It’s hard to tell whether economist Dan Hamermesh is pulling our collective leg, or if he’s serious. In either event, here’s a portion of his proposal to instigate affirmative action for the uglies among us (“Ugly? You May Have a Case,” The New York Times, August 27, 2011):

While extensive research shows that women’s looks have bigger impacts in the market for mates, another large group of studies demonstrates that men’s looks have bigger impacts on the job.

Why this disparate treatment of looks in so many areas of life? It’s a matter of simple prejudice. Most of us, regardless of our professed attitudes, prefer as customers to buy from better-looking salespeople, as jurors to listen to better-looking attorneys, as voters to be led by better-looking politicians, as students to learn from better-looking professors. This is not a matter of evil employers’ refusing to hire the ugly: in our roles as workers, customers and potential lovers we are all responsible for these effects.

How could we remedy this injustice? With all the gains to being good-looking, you would think that more people would get plastic surgery or makeovers to improve their looks. Many of us do all those things, but as studies have shown, such refinements make only small differences in our beauty. All that spending may make us feel better, but it doesn’t help us much in getting a better job or a more desirable mate.

A more radical solution may be needed: why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals?

Why would Hamermesh take a special interest in the advancement of ugly persons? It’s probably a case of special pleading:

(I knew Hamermesh when he was in his early 20s. The beard is a cosmetic improvement.)

Hamermesh’s curriculum vitae is fairly impressive, but it is evident that he failed to make the grade in the Ivy League. If Hamermesh blames his looks for his inability to rise higher in his profession, he should not. As economists go — and I’ve known dozens of them — his looks fall in the mid-range. So, if Hamermesh is disappointed in his professional standing, he should blame it on the inner man, not on his looks.

He should consider, also, that there is a high correlation between looks and intelligence. Good-looking individuals are not more successful, on average, than their less-blessed peers; they are more successful because they generally are smarter than their peers.

But none of this will matter to Hamermesh, if he is serious, or to those who are serious about combating what they call look-ism or beauty-ism. The search for cosmic justice — the rectification of all that is “unfair” in the world — is relentless, knows no bounds, and is built upon the resentment and punishment of success.

The Fire This Time

UPDATED 08/10/11

Riots in the UK — especially in London — are drawing much attention from the media. Why are there riots in the UK? It’s the welfare state, stupid. Take away a person’s self-reliance and dignity by putting him on the dole, and he has little in the way of inner resources and skills to draw on when you take him off the dole. (Michael Gove understands this; Harriet Harman does not.)

What about the less-publicized black-on-white “flash mob” attacks taking place in the U.S.? The same answer, with the added indignity of the job-killing minimum wage.

It is my fervent hope that American police forces be allowed to respond to “flash mobs” with force, and that American courts prosecute mobsters vigorously and mercilessly.

It is my fervent hope that American politicians will not throw money at the sector of the populace whence the mobs come, in the vain hope of quelling their anger. As a start on solving this “problem” — another instance of government failure — the minimum wage should be abolished and the rabble should be told to get off the streets and get jobs.

To the end of getting troublemakers off the streets, laws against loitering should be reinstated and enforced. It’s time to stop coddling people who truly aren’t paying their “fair share” of taxes.

UPDATE:

The always-excellent Theodore Dalrymple weighs in (link below); for example:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

At the same time, his expensive education will have equipped him for nothing. His labor, even supposing that he were inclined to work, would not be worth its cost to any employer—partly because of the social charges necessary to keep others such as he in a state of permanent idleness, and partly because of his own characteristics. And so unskilled labor is performed in England by foreigners, while an indigenous class of permanently unemployed is subsidized.

The culture of the person in this situation is not such as to elevate his behavior. One in which the late Amy Winehouse—the vulgar, semicriminal drug addict and alcoholic singer of songs whose lyrics effectively celebrated the most degenerate kind of life imaginable—could be raised to the status of heroine is not one that is likely to protect against bad behavior.

Finally, long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime. For the rioters, crime has become the default setting of their behavior; the surprising thing about the riots is not that they have occurred, but that they did not occur sooner and did not become chronic.

__________

Related reading:
Walter Russell Mead, “American Tinderbox”
Bill Vallicella, “Flash Mobs”
Victor Davis Hanson, “Paralytic American Society”
Bruce McQuain, “London Rioting — Are We Seeing the End of the Welfare State?”
Theodore Dalrymple, “British Degeneracy on Parade“

Congressman Bachmann?

Walter Russell Mead is an articulate, insightful, and prolific blogger. His Via Meadia is a must-read for me.

Now for the “but.” In a post about Michelle Bachmann, Mead refers to her as “Congressman Bachmann.” Perhaps Mead simply intends to use “Congressman” for the reasons that I use “he” and “him.” The latter are clear, simple, and traditional forms that should not be displaced by awkward, politically correct locutions such as “he or she,” “him or her,” and the egregious “they” and “their.”

Nevertheless, “Congressman Bachmann” is jarring phrase, and unnecessarily so.

I have long avoided the use of “Congressman,” “Congresswoman,” and “Congressperson” because such terms are applied exclusively — and wrongly — to members of the U.S. House of Representatives. There is another chamber to be reckoned with: the U.S. Senate.

Senators are members of Congress; a senator could properly be called “Congressman.” But “senator” has a long history and a connotation of distinction. A senator would be offended if someone were to refer to him as “Congressman.” “Senator” also has the advantage of being a correct and precise designator.

“Representative,” on the other hand, is not a word that connotes distinction. Salesmen, for example, often are called representatives. My guess is that “Congressman” and its ilk came to the fore because members of the House of Representatives did not want to be classed with salesmen.

Well, that’s too bad. Members of the House of Representatives are (or are supposed to be) representatives, whether they like it or not. And that is what I insist on calling them.

P.S. “Representative,” like “senator,” has the advantage of being gender-neutral. A representative is a representative, regardless of gender, and need not be called a “representativewoman” or “representativeperson.”

Facets of Liberty

Liberty is not a “thing” or a kind of Platonic ideal; it is a modus vivendi. Roger Scruton captures its essence in this pithy paragraph:

People are bound by moral laws, which articulate the idea of a community of rational beings, living in mutual respect, and resolving their disputes by negotiation and agreement. (An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, p. 112)

Fittingly, Scruton’s observation comes at the beginning of the chapter on “Morality.” I say fittingly because liberty depends on morality — properly understood as a canon of ethical behavior — and morality, as I argue below, depends very much on religion.

Where is libertarianism in all of this? Read on:

LIBERTY: ITS MEANING AND PREREQUISITES

Liberty can be thought of as freedom, when freedom is understood as permission to act within agreed limits on behavior.

Liberty, in other words, is not the absence of constraints on action. In a political context (i.e., where two or more persons coexist), there are always constraints on the behavior of at least one person, even in the absence of coercion or force. Coexistence requires compromise because (I daresay) no two humans are alike in their abilities, tastes, and preferences. And compromise necessitates constraints on behavior; compromise means that the parties involved do not do what they would do if they were isolated from each other or of a like mind about everything. Compromise is found in marriage, in friendships, in social circles, in neighborhoods, in workplaces, as well as the formal institutions (e.g., Congress) that one usually thinks of as “political.”

Where there is liberty, social norms are not shaped by the power of the state (though they may be enforced by the state). Rather, where there is liberty, social norms consist solely of the ever-evolving constellation of the voluntary compromises that arise from “non-political” institutions (i.e., marriage, etc.). It is the observance of social norms that enables a people to enjoy liberty: peaceful, willing coexistence and beneficially cooperative behavior.

Self-styled libertarians (about whom, more below) seem to reject this reasonable definition of liberty, and its antecedent conditions. They can do so, however, only by envisioning a Utopian polity that comprises like-minded persons who are for abortion, same-sex “marriage,” and open borders, and against war (except, possibly, as a last-ditch defense against invading hoards). They are practically indistinguishable from “liberals,” except in their adamant defense of property rights and free markets. (And some of them are lukewarm about property rights, if the enforcement of those rights allows discrimination based on personal characteristics.)

In summary, only where voluntarily evolved social norms are untrammeled by the state can individuals possibly live in peaceful, willing coexistence and engage in beneficially cooperative behavior — that is to say, live according to the Golden Rule.

What are the key attributes of those norms? Jennifer Roback Morse says, in “Marriage and the Limits of Contract” (Policy Review, No. 130, April 1, 2005):

[l]ibertarians recognize that a free market needs a culture of law-abidingness, promise-keeping, and respect for contracts…. A culture full of people who violate their contracts at every possible opportunity cannot be held together by legal institutions, as the experience of post-communist Russia plainly shows.

But whence “a culture of law-abidingness, promise-keeping, and respect for contracts”? Friedrich Hayek knew the answer to that question. According to Edward Feser (“The Trouble with Libertarianism,” TCS Daily, July 20, 2004), Hayek was firmly committed

to the proposition that market society has certain moral presuppositions that can only be preserved through the power of social stigma. In his later work especially, he made it clear that these presuppositions concern the sanctity of property and of the family, protected by traditional moral rules which restrain our natural impulses and tell us that “you must neither wish to possess any woman you see, nor wish to possess any material goods you see.”[1]

“[T]he great moral conflict… which has been taking place over the last hundred years or even the last three hundred years,” according to Hayek, “is essentially a conflict between the defenders of property and the family and the critics of property and the family,”[2] with the latter comprising an alliance of socialists and libertines committed to “a planned economy with a just distribution, a freeing of ourselves from repressions and conventional morals, of permissive education as a way to freedom, and the replacement of the market by a rational arrangement of a body with coercive powers.”[3] The former, by contrast, comprise an alliance of those committed to the more conservative form of classical liberalism represented by writers like Smith and Hayek himself with those committed to traditional forms of religious belief. Among the benefits of such religious belief in Hayek’s view is its “strengthening [of] respect for marriage,” its enforcement of “stricter observance of rules of sexual morality among both married and unmarried,” and its creation of a socially beneficial “taboo” against the taking of another’s property.[4] Indeed, though he was personally an agnostic, Hayek held that the value of religion for shoring up the moral presuppositions of a free society cannot be overestimated:

“We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted… If we bear these things in mind, we can better understand and appreciate those clerics who are said to have become somewhat sceptical of the validity of some of their teachings and who yet continued to teach them because they feared that a loss of faith would lead to a decline in morals. No doubt they were right…”[5]

LIBERTY IN TODAY’S WORLD

Social norms and socializing influences (like religion) are essential to self-governance, but self-governance by mutual consent and mutual restraint — by adherence to the Golden Rule — is possible only for a group of about 25 to 150 persons: the size of a hunter-gatherer band or Hutterite colony. It seems that self-governance breaks down when a group is larger than 150 persons. Why should that happen? Because mutual trust, mutual restraint, and mutual aid — the things implied in the Golden Rule — depend very much on personal connections. A person who is loath to say a harsh word to an acquaintance, friend, or family member — even when provoked — often waxes abusive toward strangers, especially in this era of e-mail and comment threads, where face-to-face encounters are not involved.

More generally, there is a human tendency to treat friends differently than acquaintances, acquaintances differently than strangers, and so on. The closer one is to a person, the more likely one is to accord that person trust, cooperation, and kindness. Why? Because there usually is a difference between the consequences of behavior that is directed toward strangers and the consequences of behavior that is directed toward persons one knows, lives among, and depends upon for restraint, cooperation, and help. The allure of doing harm without penalty (“getting away with something”) or receiving without giving (“getting something for nothing”) becomes harder to resist as one’s social distance from others increases.

When self-governance breaks down, it becomes necessary to spin off a new group or establish a central power (a state), which codifies and enforces rules of behavior (negative and positive). The problem, of course, is that those vested with the power of the state quickly learn to use it to advance their own preferences and interests, and to perpetuate their power by granting favors to those who can keep them in office. It is a rare state that is created for the sole purpose of protecting its citizens from one another and from outsiders, and rarer still is the state that remains true to such purposes.

In sum, the Golden Rule — as a uniting way of life — is quite unlikely to survive the passage of a group from community to state. Nor does the Golden Rule as a uniting way of life have much chance of revival or survival where the state already dominates. The Golden Rule may have limited effect within well-defined groups (e.g., parishes, clubs, urban enclaves, rural communities), by regulating the interactions among the members of such groups. It may have a vestigial effect on face-to-face interactions between stranger and stranger, but that effect arises mainly from the fear that offense or harm will be met with the same, not from a communal bond.

In any event, the dominance of the state distorts behavior. For example, the state may enable and encourage acts (e.g., abortion, homosexuality) that had been discouraged as harmful by group norms, and the ability of members of the group to bestow charity on one another may be diminished by the loss of income to taxes and discouraged by the establishment of state-run schemes that mimic the effects of charity (e.g., Social Security).

LIBERTY VS. “LIBERALISM”

The dominance of the state is the essential creed of modern “liberalism,” which has been diagnosed, quite rightly, as superficially benign fascism.

What about the “liberal” agenda, which proclaims the virtues of social liberty even as it destroys economic liberty. This is a convenient fiction; the two are indivisible. There is no economic liberty without social liberty, and vice versa:

[W]hen the state taxes or regulates “economic” activity, it shapes and channels related “social” activity. For example, the family that pays 25 percent of its income in taxes is that much less able to join and support organizations of its choice, to own and exhibit tokens of its socioeconomic status, to afford better education for its children, and so on. The immediate rejoinder will be that nothing has been changed if everyone is affected equally. But because of the complexity of tax laws and regulations, everyone is not affected equally. Moreover, even if everyone were deprived equally of the same kind of thing — a superior education, say — everyone would be that much worse off by having been deprived of opportunities to acquire remunerative knowledge and skills, productive relationships, and mental stimulation. Similarly, everyone would be that much worse off by being less well clothed, less well housed, and so on. Taxes and regulations, even if they could be applied in some absolutely neutral way (which they can’t be), have an inevitably deleterious effect on individuals.

In sum, there is no dividing line between economic and social behavior. What we call social and economic behavior are indivisible aspects of human striving to fulfill wants, both material and spiritual. The attempt to isolate and restrict one type of behavior is futile. It is all social behavior.

If markets are not free neither are people free to act within the bounds of voluntarily evolved social norms.

LIBERTARIANS AND LIBERTY

Although most of today’s libertarians (rightly) pay homage to Hayek’s penetrating dismissal of big government, his cultural views (noted earlier) are beneath their notice. And no wonder, for it is hard these days to find a self-styled libertarian who shares Hayek’s cultural views. What now passes for libertarianism, as I see it, is strictly secular and even stridently atheistic. As Feser puts it in “The Trouble with Libertarianism,” these

versions of libertarianism … do not treat conservative views as truly moral views at all; they treat them instead as mere prejudices: at best matters of taste, like one’s preference for this or that flavor of ice cream, and at worst rank superstitions that pose a constant danger of leading those holding them to try to restrict the freedoms of those practicing non-traditional lifestyles. Libertarians of the contractarian, utilitarian, or “economistic” bent must therefore treat the conservative the way the egalitarian liberal treats the racist, i.e. as someone who can be permitted to hold and practice his views, but only provided he and his views are widely regarded as of the crackpot variety….

[T]here are also bound to be differences in the public policy recommendations made by the different versions of libertarianism. Take, for example, the issue of abortion. Those whose libertarianism is grounded in … Hayekian thinking are far more likely to take a conservative line on the matter. To be sure, there are plenty of “pro-choice” libertarians influenced by Hayek. But by far most of these libertarians are (certainly in my experience anyway) inclined to accept Hayek’s economic views while soft-pedaling or even dismissing the Burkean traditionalist foundations he gave for his overall social theory. Those who endorse the latter, however, are going to be hard-pressed not to be at least suspicious of the standard moral and legal arguments offered in defense of abortion….

By contrast, libertarians influenced by contractarianism are very unlikely to oppose abortion, because fetuses cannot plausibly be counted as parties to the social contract that could provide the only grounds for a prohibition on killing them. Utilitarianism and “economism” too would provide no plausible grounds for a prohibition on abortion, since fetuses would seem to have no preferences or desires which could be factored into our calculations of how best to maximize preference- or desire-satisfaction.

There are also bound to be differences over the question of “same-sex marriage.”… [A] Hayekian analysis of social institutions fail to imply anything but skepticism about the case for same-sex marriage. Hayek’s position was that traditional moral rules, especially when connected to institutions as fundamental as the family and found nearly universally in human cultures, should be tampered with only with the most extreme caution. The burden of proof is always on the innovator rather than the traditionalist, whether or not the traditionalist can justify his conservatism to the innovator’s satisfaction; and change can be justified only by showing that the rule the innovator wants to abandon is in outright contradiction to some other fundamental traditional rule. But that there is any contradiction in this case is simply implausible, especially when one considers the traditional natural law understanding of marriage sketched above.

On the other hand, it is easy to see how contractarianism, utilitarianism, and “economism” might be thought to justify same-sex marriage. If the actual desires or preferences of individuals are all that matter, and some of those individuals desire or prefer to set up a partnership with someone of the same sex and call it “marriage,” then there can be no moral objection to their doing so.

I do not mean to belabor the issues of abortion and same-sex “marriage,” about which I have written at length (e.g., here and here). But, like war, they are “wedge” issues among libertarians. And most (perhaps all) libertarians whose writings I encounter on the internet — Feser’s contractarian, utilitarian, and economistic types — are on the libertine side of the issues: pro-abortion and pro-same-sex “marriage.” A contractarian, utilitarian, economistic libertarian will condone practices that even “liberals” would not (e.g., blackmail).

RELIGION AND LIBERTY

The libertine stance of “mainstream” libertarians points to moral rootlessness. Such libertarians like to say that libertarianism is a moral code, when — as Feser rightly argues — it is destructive of the kind of morality that binds a people in mutual trust and mutual forbearance. These depend on the observance of actual codes of conduct, not the rote repetition of John Stuart Mill’s empty “harm principle.”

It is my view that libertarians who behave morally toward others do so not because they are libertarians but because their cultural inheritance includes traces of Judeo-Christian ethics. For example, the non-aggression principle — a foundation of libertarian philosophy — is but a dim reflection of the Ten Commandments.

As Roback Morse and Hayek rightly argue, a libertarian order can be sustained only if it is built on deeply ingrained morality. But that morality can only operate if it is not circumscribed and undermined by the edicts of the state. The less intrusive the state, the more essential are social norms to the conditions of liberty. If those norms wither away, the results — more rapaciousness, heedlessness, and indolence — invite the the growth of the state and its adoption of repressive policies.

The flimsy morality of today’s libertarianism will not do. Neither the minimal state of “mainstream” libertarians nor the stateless Utopia of extreme libertarians can ensure a moral society, that is, one in which there is mutual trust, mutual forbearance, and promise-keeping.

Where, then, is moral education to be had? In the public schools, whose unionized teachers preach the virtues of moral relativism, big government, income redistribution, and non-judgmentalism (i.e., lack of personal responsibility)? I hardly think so.

That leaves religion, especially religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it:

The precepts [of the last six of the Commandments] are meant to protect man in his natural rights against the injustice of his fellows.

His life is the object of the Fifth;

the honour of his body as well as the source of life, of the Sixth;

his lawful possessions, of the Seventh;

his good name, of the Eighth;

And in order to make him still more secure in the enjoyment of his rights, it is declared an offense against God to desire to wrong him, in his family rights by the Ninth;

and in his property rights by the Tenth.

Though I am a deist, and neither a person of faith nor a natural-rights libertarian, I would gladly live in a society in which the majority of my fellow citizens believed in and adhered to the Ten Commandments, especially the last six of them. I reject the currently fashionable notion that religion per se breeds violence. In fact, a scholarly, non-sectarian meta-study, “Religion and its effects on crime and delinquency” (Medical Science Monitor, 2003; 9(8):SR79-82), offers good evidence that religiosity leads to good behavior:

[N]early all [reports] found that that there was a significant negative correlation between religiosity and delinquency. This was further substantiated by studies using longitudinal and operationally reliable definitions. Of the early reports which were either inconclusive or found no statistical correlation, not one utilized a multidimensional definition or any sort of reliability factor. We maintain that the cause of this difference in findings stemmed from methodological factors as well as different and perhaps flawed research strategies that were employed by early sociological and criminological researchers.The studies that we reviewed were of high research caliber and showed that the inverse relationship [between religiosity and delinquency] does in fact exist. It therefore appears that religion is both a short term and long term mitigat[o]r of delinquency.

But a society in which behavior is guided by the Ten Commandments seems to be receding into the past. Consider the following statistics, from the 2011 Statistical Abstract, Table 75. Self-Described Religious Identification of Adult Population: 1990, 2001 and 2008.
Between 1990 and 2008

the percentage of American adults claiming to be Christian dropped from 86 to 76,

the percentage of American adults claiming to be Jewish dropped from 1.8 to 1.2 percent, and

the percentage of American adults professing no religion rose from 8 to 15 percent.

What is noteworthy about those figures is the degree of slippage in a span of 18 years. And the degree of religious belief probably is overstated because respondents tend to say the “right” thing, which (oddly enough) continues to be a profession of religious faith.

Moreover, claiming adherence to a religion and receiving religious “booster shots” through regular church attendance are two entirely different things. Consider this excerpt of “In Search of the Spiritual” (Newsweek, August 28, 2005):

…Of 1,004 respondents to the NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll, 45 percent said they attend worship services weekly, virtually identical to the figure (44 percent) in a Gallup poll cited by Time in 1966. Then as now, however, there is probably a fair amount of wishful thinking in those figures; researchers who have done actual head counts in churches think the figure is probably more like 20 percent. There has been a particular falloff in attendance by African-Americans, for whom the church is no longer the only respectable avenue of social advancement, according to Darren Sherkat, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University. The fastest-growing category on surveys that ask people to give their religious affiliation, says Patricia O’Connell Killen of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., is “none.” But “spirituality,” the impulse to seek communion with the Divine, is thriving. The NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll found that more Americans, especially those younger than 60, described themselves as “spiritual” (79 percent) than “religious” (64 percent). Almost two thirds of Americans say they pray every day, and nearly a third meditate.

But what does “spirituality” have to do with morality? Prayer and meditation may be useful and even necessary to religion, but they do not teach morality. Substituting “spirituality” for Judeo-Christian religiosity is like watching golf matches on TV instead of playing golf; a watcher can talk a good game but cannot play the game very well, if at all.

Historian Niall Ferguson, a Briton, writes about the importance of religiosity in “Heaven knows how we’ll rekindle our religion, but I believe we must” (July 31, 2005):

I am not sure British people are necessarily afraid of religion, but they are certainly not much interested in it these days. Indeed, the decline of Christianity — not just in Britain but across Europe — stands out as one of the most remarkable phenomena of our times.

There was a time when Europe would justly refer to itself as “Christendom.” Europeans built the Continent’s loveliest edifices to accommodate their acts of worship. They quarreled bitterly over the distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. As pilgrims, missionaries and conquistadors, they sailed to the four corners of the Earth, intent on converting the heathen to the true faith.

Now it is Europeans who are the heathens. . . .

The exceptionally low level of British religiosity was perhaps the most striking revelation of a recent … poll. One in five Britons claim to “attend an organized religious service regularly,” less than half the American figure. [In light of the relationship between claimed and actual church attendance, discussed above, the actual figure for Britons is probably about 10 percent: ED.] Little more than a quarter say that they pray regularly, compared with two-thirds of Americans and 95 percent of Nigerians. And barely one in 10 Britons would be willing to die for our God or our beliefs, compared with 71 percent of Americans. . . .

Chesterton feared that if Christianity declined, “superstition” would “drown all your old rationalism and skepticism.” When educated friends tell me that they have invited a shaman to investigate their new house for bad juju, I see what Chesterton meant. Yet it is not the spread of such mumbo-jumbo that concerns me as much as the moral vacuum that de-Christianization has created. Sure, sermons are sometimes dull and congregations often sing out of tune. But, if nothing else, a weekly dose of Christian doctrine helps to provide an ethical framework for life. And it is not clear where else such a thing is available in modern Europe.

…Britons have heard a great deal from Tony Blair and others about the threat posed to their “way of life” by Muslim extremists such as Muktar Said Ibrahim. But how far has their own loss of religious faith turned Britain into a soft target — not so much for the superstition Chesterton feared, but for the fanaticism of others?

Yes, what “way of life” is being threatened — and is therefore deemed worth defending — when people do not share a strong moral bond?

I cannot resist adding one more quotation in the same vein as those from Hayek and Ferguson. This comes from Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), a no-nonsense psychiatrist who, among his many intellectual accomplishments, has thoroughly skewered John Stuart Mill’s fatuous essay, On Liberty. Without further ado, here is Dalrymple on religion:

I remember the day I stopped believing in God. I was ten years old and it was in school assembly. It was generally acknowledged that if you opened your eyes while praying, God flew out of the nearest window. That was why it was so important that everyone should shut his eyes. If I opened my eyes suddenly, I thought, I might just be quick enough to catch a glimpse of the departing deity….

Over the years, my attitude to religion has changed, without my having recovered any kind of belief in God. The best and most devoted people I have ever met were Catholic nuns. Religious belief is seldom accompanied by the inflamed egotism that is so marked and deeply unattractive a phenomenon in our post-religious society. Although the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are said to have given man a more accurate appreciation of his true place in nature, in fact they have rendered him not so much anthropocentric as individually self-centred….

[T]he religious idea of compassion is greatly superior, both morally and practically, to the secular one. The secular person believes that compassion is due to the victim by virtue of what he has suffered; the religious person believes that compassion is due to everyone, by virtue of his humanity. For the secular person, man is born good and is made bad by his circumstances. The religious person believes man is born with original sin, and is therefore imperfectible on this earth; he can nevertheless strive for the good by obedience to God.

The secularist divides humanity into two: the victims and the victimisers. The religious person sees mankind as fundamentally one.

And why not? If this life is all that you have, why let anything stand in the way of its enjoyment? Most of us self-importantly imagine that the world and all its contrivances were made expressly for us and our convenience….

The secularist de-moralises the world, thus increasing the vulnerability of potential victims and, not coincidentally, their need for a professional apparatus of protection, which is and always will be ineffective, and is therefore fundamentally corrupt and corrupting.

If a person is not a victim pure and simple, the secularist feels he is owed no compassion. A person who is to blame for his own situation should not darken the secularist’s door again: therefore, the secularist is obliged to pretend, with all the rationalisation available to modern intellectuals, that people who get themselves into a terrible mess – for example, drug addicts – are not to blame for their situation. But this does them no good at all; in fact it is a great disservice to them.

The religious person, by contrast, is unembarrassed by the moral failings that lead people to act self-destructively because that is precisely what he knows man has been like since the expulsion from Eden. Because he knows that man is weak, and has no need to disguise his failings, either from himself or from others, he can be honest in a way that the secularist finds impossible.

Though I am not religious, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible for us to live decently without the aid of religion. That is the ambiguity of the Enlightenment. (“Why Religion Is Good for Us,” NewStatesman, April 21, 2003)

The weakening of the Judeo-Christian tradition in America is owed to enemies within (established religions trying in vain to be “relevant”) and to enemies without (leftists and nihilistic libertarians who seek every opportunity to denigrate religion). Thus the opponents of religiosity seized on the homosexual scandals in the Catholic Church not to attack homosexuality (which would go against the attackers’ party line) but to attack the Church, which teaches the immorality of the acts that were in fact committed by a relatively small number of priests. (See “Priests, Abuse, and the Meltdown of a Culture,” National Review Online, May 19, 2011.)

Then there is the relentless depiction of Catholicism as an accomplice to Hitler’s brutality, about which my son writes in his review of Rabbi David G. Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis:

Despite the misleading nature of the controversy — one which Dalin questions from the outset — the first critics of the wartime papacy were not Jews. Among the worst attacks were those of leftist non-Jews, such as Carlo Falconi (author of The Silence of Pius XII), not to mention German liberal Rolf Hochhuth, whose 1963 play, The Deputy, set the tone for subsequent derogatory media portrayals of wartime Catholicism. By contrast, says Dalin, Pope Pius XII “was widely praised [during his lifetime] for having saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust.” He provides an impressive list of Jews who testified on the pope’s behalf, including Albert Einstein, Golda Meir and Chaim Weizmann. Dalin believes that to “deny and delegitimize their collective memory and experience of the Holocaust,” as some have done, “is to engage in a subtle yet profound form of Holocaust denial.”

The most obvious source of the black legend about the papacy emanated from Communist Russia, a point noted by the author. There were others with an axe to grind. As revealed in a recent issue of Sandro Magister’s Chiesa, liberal French Catholic Emmanuel Mounier began implicating Pius XII in “racist” politics as early as 1939. Subsequent detractors have made the same charge, working (presumably) from the same bias.

While the immediate accusations against Pius XII lie at the heart of Dalin’s book, he takes his analysis a step further. The vilification of the pope can only be understood in terms of a political agenda — the “liberal culture war against tradition.” . . .

Rabbi Dalin sums it up best for all people of traditional moral and political beliefs when he urges us to recall the challenges that faced Pius XII in which the “fundamental threats to Jews came not from devoted Christians — they were the prime rescuers of Jewish lives in the Holocaust — but from anti-Catholic Nazis, atheistic Communists, and… Hitler’s mufti in Jerusalem.”

I believe that the incessant attacks on religion have helped to push people — especially young adults — away from religion, to the detriment of liberty. It is not surprising that “liberals” tend to be anti-religious, for — as Dalrymple points out — they disdain the tenets of personal responsibility and liberty that are contained in the last six of the Ten Commandments. It is disheartening, however, when libertarians join the anti-religious chorus. They know not what they do when they join the left in tearing down a bulwark of civil society, without which liberty cannot prevail.

Humans need no education in aggression and meddling; those come to us naturally. But we do need to learn to take responsibility for our actions and to leave others alone — and we need to learn those things when we are young. Such things will not be taught in public schools. They could be taught in homes, but are less likely to be taught there as Americans drift further from their religious roots.

Am I being hypcritical because I am unchurched and my children were not taken to church? Perhaps, but my religious upbringing imbued in me a strong sense of morality, which I tried — successfully, I think — to convey to my children. But as time passes the moral lessons we older Americans learned through religion will attenuate unless those lessons are taught, anew, to younger generations.

Rather than join the left in attacking religion and striving to eradicate all traces of it from public discourse, libertarians ought to accommodate themselves to it and even encourage its acceptance — for liberty’s sake.

The Next 9/11?

Obama has released a paper titled “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States.” It ends — as one would expect of a screed bearing Obama’s imprimatur — with a statement of “guiding principles”:

We must continually enhance our understanding of the threat posed by violent extremism and the ways in which individuals or groups seek to radicalize Americans, adapting our approach as needed….

We must do everything in our power to protect the American people from violent extremism while protecting the civil rights and civil liberties of every American….

We must build partnerships and provide support to communities based on mutual trust, respect, and understanding….

We must use a wide range of good governance programs—including those that promote immigrant integration and civic engagement, protect civil rights, and provide social services—that may help prevent radicalization that leads to violence….

We must support local capabilities and programs to address problems of national concern….

Government officials and the American public should not stigmatize or blame communities because of the actions of a handful of individuals….

Strong religious beliefs should never be confused with violent extremism….

Though we will not tolerate illegal activities, opposition to government policy is neither illegal nor unpatriotic and does not make someone a violent extremist….

That must set a record for the highest number of treacly, politically correct, operationally useless and self-defeating statements made in the span of a typewritten page.

If this is how the Obama administration sets about protecting Americans from terrorism, I fear that the next 9/11 isn’t far off.

For example, I challenge the administration to tell me that the following has not happened and cannot happen in the United States:

A large but dispersed collection of improvised weapons for improvised, mortar-style attacks has been gathered in and around major U.S. cities and transportation and energy nodes.

These weapons are positioned so that their activation, on a massive scale would create havoc and panic — and might well disrupt transportation and communication networks. (With a massive salvo, not every weapon must reach its target.)

These weapons can be activated remotely — perhaps through signals transmitted from a single point — so that they can be fired in coordinated waves. Each successive wave disrupts and complicates rescue and recovery efforts that ensue from preceding waves, heightens confusion and panic, and lays the groundwork for economic disaster and political repression.

Obama’s political correctness, I fear, goes hand-in-hand with his demonstrated fecklessness in matters of national security. The intelligence and special operations forces of the United States should be capable of detecting and dismantling a threat of the kind outlined above. But will they be given the necessary resources and leeway? I doubt it.

UPDATE (10/15/15): There are plenty of other cheap and easy ways of killing Americans en masse, making their lives unbearable, or crippling economic activity; for example:

A 2013 attack on an electric substation near San Jose that nearly knocked out Silicon Valley’s power supply was initially downplayed as vandalism by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the facility’s owner. Gunfire from semiautomatic weapons did extensive damage to 17 transformers that sent grid operators scrambling to avoid a blackout.

But this week, a former top power regulator offered a far more ominous interpretation: The attack was terrorism, he said, and if circumstances had been just a little different, it could have been disastrous.

Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission when the shooting took place, said that attack was clearly executed by well-trained individuals seeking to do significant damage to the area, and he fears it was a test run for an even larger assault.

“It would not be that hard to bring down the entire region west of the Rockies if you, in fact, had a coordinated attack like this against a number of substations,” Wellinghoff said Thursday. “This [shooting] event shows there are people out there capable of such an attack.”

Wellinghoff’s warning about the incident at PG&E’s Metcalf substation was reported this week by the Wall Street Journal, expanding on a December report by Foreign Policy magazine.

FBI officials said they are taking the shooting very seriously.

“Based on the information we have right now, we don’t believe it’s related to terrorism,” said Peter Lee, an FBI spokesman in San Francisco. But, he added, “Until we understand the motives, we won’t be 100% sure it’s not terrorism.”

Months after the shooting, the bureau has named no suspects.

Potential terrorism scenarios usually involve elaborate cyberattacks, expertly executed hijackings or smuggled nuclear weapons. But concern grows that California may have come unnervingly close to learning that calamity might just as easily be inflicted by a few well-trained snipers.

As law enforcement tries to piece together who fired at the electricity facility, lawmakers and analysts express bewilderment that little is being done to protect against a repeat performance….

The classified report was completed in 2007 and became public two years ago. Asked what has happened since then to protect the nation’s electricity system, Morgan replied that very little has been done.

The attack on the PG&E facility targeted the sophisticated transformers that are at the backbone of the nation’s electricity grid. The giant pieces of equipment are essential, costly and could take months to replace. Knock out enough of them, experts warn, and an entire region can be crippled for an extended period. They are also typically out in the open like sitting ducks.

On that April night, the attackers managed to disable 17 of them just by shooting through a chain-link fence. The bullet holes caused the transformers to leak thousands of gallons of oil, and ultimately overheat. Grid operators scrambled to reroute power from elsewhere to keep the system from collapse. The power stayed on, but just barely, because it happened during a time when demand for electricity was very low.

“Fortunately it was spring and we did not have air conditioners running full throttle in the morning,” said Stephanie McCorkle, a spokeswoman for the California Independent System Operator in Folsom, which runs most of the state’s electrical grid. “That’s why the situation was manageable.”

Wellinghoff, now a partner at the San Francisco law office Stoel Rives, said the grid’s interdependence on substations across large swaths of the country — and a scarcity of spare equipment — makes it possible to trigger an enduring blackout across several states simply by destroying key transformers in one of them.

Days after the April shooting, Wellinghoff flew out to review the damage with experts from the Pentagon and the FBI. They noticed piles of stones had been set up outside the site, apparently by someone who had scoped it out to guide the snipers. [Evan Halper and Mark Lifsher, “Attack on Electric Grid Raises Alarm,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2015]

“Intellectuals and Society” in Brief

From Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

[I]t was one of Papa’s guests, at the dinner party yesterday, who said: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach teach the teachers; and those who cant’ teach the teachers go into politics.”…

…What his sentence means isn’t that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.

What Do Women (Politicians) Want?

The standard femi-nazi line goes like this: Women (in general) are just as capable as men (in general); gender differences are social constructs. This is patently untrue with respect to physical strength and certain types of cognitive ability. (The math-science gender gap is not closing.) Further, it is patently untrue with respect to innate biological differences (e.g., reproductive organs and related bodily functions) that have physiological effects on emotions and cognition.

Some women, recognizing the futility of claiming biological equality with men, now claim that women’s unique traits make them superior political animals. This is from a recent article in The New York Times, “Gillibrand Wants Women Involved in Politics“:

[Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY] has begun a campaign, called Off the Sidelines, to mobilize women across the country, in advance of the national elections next year and as evidence emerges that the slow but steady progress made by women in elective politics has begun to stall….

In many ways, Ms. Gillibrand, who is 44, epitomizes the ways in which women are asserting themselves in politics these days.

For decades, women in elective office felt compelled to blur the distinctions between them and men: presenting themselves as tough and able while largely concealing their softer qualities. But like many political women of her generation, Ms. Gillibrand feels no such constraints, regularly talking about the demands she faces as a mother and a wife.

In fact, Ms. Gillibrand goes a step further, arguing that an infusion of women into the political system would go a long way toward changing the tone in Congress, a male-dominated world of fiercely clashing egos.

“We tend to be more results-oriented and less concerned with getting the credit,” Ms. Gillibrand explained. “The female approach is more conciliatory and less combative. We tend to use a more civil tone.”

Beyond that, Ms. Gillibrand contends, it should be a source of concern to women that the issues that are important to them — like workplace discrimination and access to child care — are being decided by lawmakers who are almost exclusively male.

As the last-quoted paragraph suggests, the purpose of seeking political office is to wield power. It is one thing to claim “soft” qualities, but the last place in which one finds “soft” qualities is in the political arena. Such qualities — when displayed — are for show; they are a mask behind which many a politician (male and female) attempts to hide the will to power, the urge to dominate.

So, just as it is true that some women are good mathematicians and scientists, and some women are stronger than most men, there are some women with egos on a par with those of the ego-driven males who dominate politics. Regardless of what those women say, do not expect them to change the tone of politics; when it comes to temperament, those women are the equal of the men whose jobs they seek.

The answer to the question “What do women (politicians) want?” is straightforward: They want power, just like male politicians. And they will pretend to be what they are not for the sake of gaining power, just like male politicians.

Ignorance Abounds

A story about the banning of Flannery O’Connor’s works at a Catholic school is a reminder of an incident in my professional life.

First, the story about Flannery O’Connor’s works, which is told by Joseph Bottum:

…Down in the traditionally Catholic Cajun area of southern Louisiana, there’s a school called Opelousas Catholic that serves several local parishes. Early this summer, an English teacher named Arsenio Orteza placed on the summer reading list for the high-school seniors some O’Connor, including The Artificial Nigger, a tale primarily about the moral and religious blindness of Southern bigots.

Not bothering to read the story or find out anything about O’Connor, an unspecified number of parents complained about the title to Fr. Malcolm O’Leary, the pastor of Holy Ghost Catholic Church, one of Opelousas Catholic’s supporting parishes.

Likewise not thinking it necessary to take a look at the story or learn about O’Connor, Fr. O’Leary gathered the parents of black students at the school to express their complaint – a meeting to which neither the teacher nor anyone else with Catholic literary credentials was invited. An African American himself and the wielder of considerable political power in a racially charged district, Fr. O’Leary then convened a meeting with his bishop to demand the removal of O’Connor from the high-school curriculum and the disciplining of the teacher who assigned her work.

Joining the parade of those southern Catholics down in Louisiana who seem never to have heard of the southern Catholic O’Connor and couldn’t take the time to read her challenged story, Edward J. O’Donnell, the bishop of the diocese of Lafayette, issued on August 17 a letter announcing his decision. “I do not want to require the firing of the teacher involved,” Bishop O’Donnell was brave enough to declare. But “I direct that the books in question should be removed from the reading list immediately.”…

The story is eleven years old, but its relevance has grown with the burgeoning stridency of aggrieved and yet triumphant “victims.”

Only a few years before the incident related by Bottum, I had my own encounter with ignorance and political correctness. As chief financial and administrative officer of a tax-funded think-tank, I had the onerous duty of finding ways to slash spending when the think-tank’s appropriation was cut by Congress. The most obvious way, of course, was to fire employees — and we did that. But we sought other cost reductions, for the sake of saving jobs.

I met with groups of employees to discuss the options under consideration. Somewhere in the course of one of the meetings, I used “niggardly,” and I used it correctly. At least one of the employees present was black. There may have been others, but I remember her because she was secretary to another vice president. That vice president later came to my office to tell me that “some employees” were offended by “niggardly.” I do not remember the exact wording of my response to the vice president, but the gist of it was that the problem was the ignorance of the “employees,” not my correct use of a legitimate word that has no bearing on race.

Of course, ignorance abounds in matters non-linguistic. Its most dangerous manifestations occur in matters legal and economic. It is ignorance, as much as anything else, that leads aspiring beneficiaries of the welfare state to confound the Constitution with the Communist Manifesto. It is ignorance, more than anything else, that leads those same aspiring beneficiaries to believe that the welfare state can coexist with a burgeoning economy.

Data Are

To me, the most offensive of the many abhorrent usages now current is the treatment of “data” as a singular noun. A person who says “data is” is at best an ignoramus and at worst a Philistine.

Language, above all else, should be used to make one’s thoughts clear to others. The pairing of a plural noun and a singular verb form is distracting, if not confusing. Even though datum is seldom used by Americans, it remains the singular foundation of data, which is the plural form. Data, therefore, never “is”; they always “are.

Fowler says:

Latin plurals sometimes become singular English words (e.g., agenda, stamina) and data is often so treated in U.S.; in Britain this is still considered a solecism…. (H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, second edition, p.119)

But Follett is better on the subject:

Those who treat data as a singular doubtless think of it as a generic noun, comparable to knowledge or information…. [A generous interpretation: ED.] The rationale of agenda as a singular is its use to mean a collective program of action, rather than separate items to be acted on. But there is as yet no obligation to change the number of data under the influence of error mixed with innovation. (Wilson Follett, Modern American Usage, pp. 130-1)

To say “data are” is to present oneself as a learned person of high standards. That, unfortunately, is an “old fashioned” attitude in this day of dumbed-down vulgarity.

In Defense of Wal-Mart

The U.S. Supreme Court’s finding for Wal-Mart in the case of Wal-Mart v. Dukes predictably set off a storm of criticism by Wal-Mart’s critics, who are legion. Those critics, predictably, are mainly upper-middle class professionals who do not shop at Wal-Mart, would not work at Wal-Mart, and fastidiously scorn the politics and religion of those who do shop and work at Wal-Mart.

But the Yuppie crowd nevertheless sympathizes with the employees of Wal-Mart because it represents an evil corporation — as corporations are, in the Yuppie worldview. Why is Wal-Mart evil? Well, it doesn’t treat its employees well. How do Yuppies know that? They just do, that’s how. It’s an article of faith among Yuppies, who tend to take their cues from left-wing pundits and academicians. Yuppies are too busy making money to support their SUVs and McMansions to do their own thinking, you see.

I have news for Yuppies and other critics of Wal-Mart. There are no goon squads dragging unwilling people in from the streets to work in Wal-Mart stores. There are no Wal-Mart employees caged in their work areas. There are secret prisons in Arkansas where they send Wal-Mart employees who elect to move on to more highly compensated jobs at other companies.

People work at Wal-Mart because it offers them the best combination of pay, benefits, and working conditions available to them. In other words, employment at Wal-Mart usually is a step up, not a step down.

But Yuppies and their leaders on the left don’t understand such things because they hold the strange view that there is a “just” level of compensation, which is always more than that paid by a villainous corporation like Wal-Mart. I wonder what those big-hearted Yuppies and lefties would say to a “just” compensation or $100 an hour for maids and yard men? I can say that $100 is “just” because — unlike Yuppies and lefties who don’t shop at Wal-Mart and wouldn’t care if it charged higher prices to cover higher compensation — I don’t have a maid or a yard man.

The Left and Its Delusions

Capsule commentaries on the left and its sure grasp of unreality.

An old meme: “Everyone wants less government spending, but no one wants government to cut their favorite programs.” This observation is used by big-spenders as an “argument” against cutting government spending.

Here’s a more apt observation: “There’s no free lunch.” When you have “favorite programs,” for which others must pay, you are (in effect) allowing others to have “favorite programs,” for which you must pay. Log-rolling is as old as the Republic.

The obvious answer to the big-spenders is this: Cut everyone’s favorite programs — and taxes — in one muscular stroke of the budget axe. And repeat this exercise annually until government is reduced to its legitimate functions: protecting the people from foreign and domestic predators.

* * *

The incessant drumbeat of progressivism: share the wealth (of other people), protect my job (at the expense of others), save the planet (from a nonexistent threat at any cost), be nice to people who are different (even if they want to kill you), make my old age more secure (and charge it to my grandchildren).

* * *

Q. When was the last time you “gave” money to someone who needed it less than you do?

A. When income taxes were withheld from your paycheck. That’s the thrust of Steven Landsburg’s proof that public-sector workers are overpaid. If you read Landsburg’s post and still find yourself in favor of public-sector unions, you are (a) an emotional leftist (possibly a hate-filled one) and (b) the kind of person who would take money from others (via taxes) in order to feel good about yourself.

* * *

The author of Bookworm Room writes:

[A]fter years and years of indoctrination, Liberals see the world so fundamentally different[ly] than the rest of us that they can no longer recognize human fallibility and evil…. This Liberal view not only cannot survive … , but is the enabler of its/our own destruction.

A case in point, from a recent news story:

A coalition of over 100 interfaith, nonprofit and governmental organizations plans to rally in New York City against a planned congressional hearing on Muslims’ role in homegrown terrorism.

The Islamic, faith-based war against America began in 1979. “Liberals” don’t want to admit that there is such a war and that the Islamic aggressors justify it on religious grounds. “Liberals” don’t care because they think, mistakenly, that their “liberalism” protects them. Tell that to the Americans who were held hostage in Tehran. Tell that to the victims of 9/11. Do you suppose that the Muslims who perpetrated those events (and others) took the time to sort out the “liberals” so that they could focus their hatred on real Americans?

* * *

I will coexist with statists because I must, and only for as long as I must. But I will never willingly acquiesce to them.

* * *

NewsReal Blog reminds us that the political correctness of another day — anti-anti-communism — led to the near-victory of communism:

In fact, the rightful criticism of [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy is that his theatrics and personal foibles ultimately thwarted a wholly necessary campaign against domestic enemies of the Constitution. Those enemies survived him. They continued their “long slow march through the institutions,” affecting socialism through evolution rather than revolution. They infiltrated the schools and the universities. They infiltrated the churches and other houses of worship. They engaged in “community organizing” to build “coalitions of power” with which to bring about “redistributive change.” Ultimately, they shaped the worldview of the sitting president of the United States. For all intents and purposes, they won.

And so will radical Islam win if today’s political correctness — “mustn’t offend our enemies” — dictates our political discourse.

* * *

The minimum wage denies many young persons a chance to step on the ladder of success. It dooms them to a life of dependency and criminality, all in the name of “compassion.”

* * *

Regulation:

It is thought of as a cure-all, but it rarely is one. Stuff still happens.
It imposes costs indiscriminately, thus making many people at least a bit worse off, at no gain to them.
It follows from 2 that a lot of regulations make a lot of people a lot worse off, at no gain to them.
In fact, the net cost of regulations — which restrict output and hinder innovation and entrepreneurship — has been estimated at $1.5+ trillion/year for the U.S. economy.

Regulation is like alcoholism. A little bit makes you feel good, so you up your intake. And then it becomes a habit that you can’t break. As a result, you age prematurely and die relatively young because you have effectively killed yourself by poisoning your body.

* * *

Bookworm Room captures my frustration with the leftist mindset. It is armor-plated with myths and slogans, and nearly impervious to facts and logic. If I have anything to show for my recent effort to acquaint a leftist with facts and logic, it is probably to tamp down the rhetoric he exposes to my scrutiny. Beyond that, I expect nothing.

* * *

Leftist critics of “materialism” and “consumerism” seem to think that mankind’s striving for greater comfort and convenience and the trappings of status began in the United States, sometime in the 1920s. But a great swath of the long history and betterment of mankind’s lot can be ascribed to “materialism” and “consumerism.”

Leftists condemn such things not because they are anti-materialistic (quite the opposite) but because they want to decide for themselves the allocation of the products of economic endeavor. That their presumptuous schemes have slowly strangled the economy and harmed the worse-off into the bargain matters not one whit to them. They either don’t understand the consequences of their schemes or don’t care about the consequences of those schemes. They are like children lashing out at “unfairness,” but with much greater and lasting effect.

* * *

Social justice consists of taking money and jobs from some people, giving them to others, and congratulating yourself on your generosity.

* * *

The wailing and gnashing of teeth among “liberals” about the possibility that Congress will de-fund “public” broadcasting has given rise to the canard that NPR is an “objective” source of news. Anyone who believes that is a “fish in water” — so immersed in the “liberal” point of view that he cannot see it for what it is. In fact, an analysis of NPR’s audience (compiled and published by NPR) indicates that NPR’s listeners are “124% more likely to have a very liberal political outlook.” A bit of algebra yields the result that 69% of NPR’s listeners are “very liberal.” Which — given the natural human tendency to listen to, read, and watch that which pleases us — is strong evidence of NPR’s “liberal” bias. “Objective,” my foot.

* * *

There is almost nothing to be gained by the use of facts and logic against the quasi-religious zealotry and willful ignorance of “liberalism.” For every convert to realism, at least one more “liberal” is created by adolescent rebellion or obdurate stupidity. Think about that, and its implications for the possibility of reclaiming liberty in the United States.

* * *

I just read the phrase “we’ve collectively decided,” in reference to government policy. Surprisingly, this abomination appears on the blog of a self-proclaimed libertarian. (For shame!)

There are no “collective” decisions in a nation the size of the United States, or in a State, or in a city, or in any group with more than a few dozen members. What “we” mostly have are decisions made by majorities of so-called representative bodies (which usually represent factions of minorities), and by executive and judicial fiat.

I don’t know about you, but no one makes decisions for me. I can be (and often am) forced to abide by the decisions of others, but those decisions are theirs, not mine. Only the prospect of a fine or jail time keeps me in line. And sometimes I just say “the hell with it.”

* * *

Democracy is inimical to liberty. That heretical thought, which I have expressed here and here, finds eloquent support here. A sample:

This illusion, that the democratic process is the same as liberty, is an ideal weapon for those few who may desire to destroy liberty and to replace it with some form of authoritarian society; innocent but ignorant persons are thereby made their dupes.

* * *

The virulent reaction of Dems to budget-cutting efforts reminds me that the belief in a “free lunch” is alive and well in America. It likely will remain so until the economy crashes under the weight of government spending and regulation. The only question in my mind is about what happens first: a still-prosperous China refusing to buy any more U.S. debt or an economically crumbling China unable to buy any more U.S. debt.

* * *

When a “liberal” finishes telling you how open-minded he is, ask him for his opinions about religion, homosexuality, abortion, Republicans, public schools, labor unions, capital punishment, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Movement, defense spending, and Israel. Then stand by for a recitation of the usual talking points from NPR. “Liberals” are open-minded all right; they open their minds and let the lame-stream media fill them with pre-packaged views.

* * *

“Liberals” who are angry about the GOP’s insistence on budget cuts remind me of predators who are frustrated by the presence of sheep dogs.

* * *

“Liberalism” is to liberty as the Ku Klux Klan is to racial harmony.

* * *

If you believe Obama, the “American dream” is to have others pay for your retirement and health care.

* * *

Obamacare is to health care as a set of bald tires is to safe driving.

* * *

Civil servants and union members are drones to politicians, senior bureaucrats, public-school administrators, and union bosses — the “queen bees” whose luxurious salaries and perks the drones make possible simply by virtue of their existence. Private-sector “drones” have the satisfaction of producing real goods and services, and the “queen bees” (for the most part) deserve what they earn because of their managerial and financial contributions to the output of real goods and services.

* * *

The New Republic to the contrary notwithstanding, the Framers of the Constitution did not rely on disinterested institutions to protect the public interest, they relied on checks and balances. There is no such thing as a disinterested institution; institutions are colored by those who happen to dominate them. Checks and balances failed, eventually, because the legislative, executive, and judicial branches came to be dominated by like-minded “liberals.”

* * *

Here’s some research which concludes that

compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease.

Which meshes neatly with the conclusions of my own analysis:

If you are very intelligent … [y]our politics will lean heavily toward libertarianism or small-government conservatism. You probably vote Republican most of the time because, even if you are not a card-carrying Republican, you are a staunch anti-Democrat. And you are a happy person because your expectations are not constantly defeated by reality.

* * *

Speaking from experience, I can tell you that P.J. O’Rourke is on to something when he says that

“A” students work for “B” students. Or not even. A businessman friend of mine corrected me. “No, P. J.,” he said, “ ‘B’ students work for ‘C’ students. ‘A’ students teach.”…

…or work in think-tanks, where they are not held accountable for the consequences (if any) of their airy-fairy theorizing.

* * *

Leftists and rightists — statists, in other words — labor under the illusion that everything would be all right if only the “right kind of person” was “in charge” of things. Their worldview does not allow for the proneness of humans to ingrained biases, unfounded optimism about favored courses of action, and blindness to inconvenient facts.

* * *

“Liberals” believe in Santa Claus government: its coffers are bottomless and its good intentions override the corrupting influence of human nature. Conservatives understand that the “bottomless coffers” of government are filled by taxing and borrowing. They understand, further, that every dollar spent by government is a dollar that cannot be spent — usually in better ways — by the people who surrender their money to goverment. Conservatives also understand that a person does not automatically become wiser or less venal on becoming part of government, and that government cannot replicate the complex interactions that yield economic satisfaction and progress. Government cannot make people better off generally; it can make a relatively small number of people better off, temporarily, at the expense of the many and, in the long-run, at the expense of everyone.

* * *

The millennium has arrived: 51 percent of U.S. households pay no income taxes. Meanwhile, 1 percent of individual and joint returns account for 39 percent of income tax collections. What’s this business about making “the rich” pay “their share”?

* * *

The battle for the hearts, minds, and bank accounts of Americans will continue for as long as there is, in Thomas Sowell’s phrase, “a conflict of visions” among them. The conflict is between unrealistic and realistic views of human nature and resource constraints.

On the unrealistic side are leftists, whose magical thinking leads them to believe that government can solve all “problems” with the stroke of a president’s pen. Thus “the rich” can be taxed unto impoverishment and the economy will not suffer and all God’s children will cheer for Uncle Sam.

On the realistic side are most conservatives and libertarians, who understand that human nature is immune to social engineering, which means that bad things happen when people are compelled to support the state in its schemes for their betterment, which can only be afforded by giving up things of value (like economic growth). Realists understand, further, that “problems” are not problems, but facts of life, which can be made better by free persons acting voluntarily through markets and other social institutions.

Leftists understand the terms of this conflict — viscerally, at least — which is why they resist efforts to privatize education. To do so would free America’s children from the grasp of the statists who administer and teach in most public-school systems. To do so would sow the seeds of the destruction of the regulatory-welfare state because America’s children would then be free do adopt the realistic vision.

* * *

The current polarization of American politics represents a “conflict of visions,” in Thomas Sowell’s phrase. The realignment of the parties, which began in ’48 when the Dixiecrats walked out, has led to a Democrat Party whose leaders and hard-core adherents are committed to the welfare state, and to a Republican Party whose leaders and hard-core adherents are committed to a drastic reduction of the welfare state — thus the Ryan plan. Compromise is seen as betrayal, and is grounds for removal from power (especially among Republicans).

If there is to be a compromise, the GOP will have to blink first; there are too many irrational voters who cannot bring themselves to refuse the welfare state’s promise of a “free lunch.” Witness the recent upset in the NY special election, which would have been close, at best, even without a Tea Party spoiler in the field. Despite that, GOP leaders are leery of the political cost (to themselves) of compromise.

Therefore, I do not expect an orderly, agreed retreat from the entitlement “commitments” that are now on the books. It may well take a full-scale financial disaster (e.g., a federal default of some kind) to spur serious action. But, by then, the requisite action (a severe scaling back of the welfare state) would exacerbate the economic turmoil that surely will follow a financial fiasco. The result: something worse than the recent “Great Recession.”

* * *

They just don’t get it. My health is my business, not the state’s. I want to be free to buy my own medical care, and to live as I wish to live. I don’t want the state to tell me how to live as a price for the promise of “free” medical care. “Free” is in quotation marks, of course, because it is not free when the state controls it, and it certainly is not as good when the state delivers it.

* * *

From The Heritage Foundation, via The Blaze:

As Congress looks for much-need cuts in federal spending, some are wrongly looking to balance the budget by decimating defense. That’s a dangerous, wrongheaded road to head down.

We live in a hostile world, and being prepared — no matter the challenge — is key to the federal government living up to its constitutional duty to protect America. But as even as the military continues to wage war overseas, defense spending is at historic lows, all while critical investments in modern equipment are postponed.

Marshall of the Royal Air Force Sir John Cotesworth Slessor said it best:

It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditure on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of the social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free. (Strategy for the West, p. 75)

* * *

A post at The Volokh Conspiracy: “Gay Athletic Group Has First Amendment Right to Limit the Number of Straight Players on a Team.”

In a libertarian nation, the converse would be true, as well, and everyone could enjoy freedom of association.

* * *

From an MSNBC print ad:

We didn’t put a man on the Moon because some company thought they might be able to make a profit doing it. It takes vision to involve the common good of the American people without regard for profit. If you’re charting a course for this country and your big idea is, “No we can’t,” then I don’t want you leading the country.

Rachel Maddow

How sad that Ms. Maddow must be led. Evidently, she lacks the wherewithal to choose and pursue her own goals. She — like most liberals — then projects her own shortcomings onto others. It is especially sad that Ms. Maddow thinks of putting a man on the Moon as something that advanced the common good of the American people. It assuaged the egos of a handful of presidents and countless government employees, and it enriched no small number of government contractors, but the vast sums that were spent on the scientifically sterile task of putting a man on the Moon (not to mention other, equally sterile government projects) would have been better spent by the taxpayers whose money funded the effort. Think of the real jobs that might have been created; think of the consumption and investment goods that might have been produced. Now, there’s vision for you.

* * *

The latest constitutional innovation:

The Richmond Federal Reserve Bank hoisted a rainbow [gay pride] flag outside its building this month in a bid to support acceptance of diversity in the workplace….

According to the [Richmond] Times-Dispatch, Richmond Federal Reserve officials placed the flag at the request of PRISM – a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) bank employees – in recognition of LGBT Pride Month in June.

Sally Green, the bank’s first vice president and chief operating officer, said last week: ‘We are flying the pride flag as an example of our commitment to the values of acceptance and inclusion.’

Bank spokesman Jim Strader said there were no plans to lower the flag, noting the Federal Reserve bank operates independently from the federal government.

I wish I could say that.

* * *

Democrats favor “death panels.” Greg Mankiw explains:

[U]nder the likely scenario that healthcare spending keeps rising faster than GDP, the Center for American Progress [the Democrat Party’s pseudo-think-tank] would give government the power to prohibit people from buying expensive health plans with their own money. That is not my idea of progress.

Nor mine. But I am unsurprised.

* * *

The main psychological root of “liberalism” is a lack of trust, which surfaces in two important ways. First, there is an inability to believe that others can take care of themselves, given the freedom and incentive to do so. Second, and related to that, there is an inability to believe that progress occurs without being imposed from above, according to a master design. This lack of trust is, in fact, a projection onto others of the “liberal’s” own lack of imagination and resourcefulness.

* * *

Item:

Just before the 1964 election, a muckraking magazine called Fact decided to survey members of the American Psychiatric Association for their professional assessment of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican nominee against President Lyndon B. Johnson….

The psychiatrists’ assessment was brutal. Half of the respondents judged Mr. Goldwater psychologically unfit to be president. They used terms like “megalomaniac,” “paranoid” and “grossly psychotic,” and some even offered specific diagnoses, including schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder….

Say what you will about their motivation, these doctors had given very specific and damaging psychiatric opinions, using the language and art of their profession, about a man whom they had not examined and who surely would not have consented to such statements.

I could say plenty about the motivations of those ~~doctors~~ quacks, but I refer you, instead, to something I wrote about one of their ilk: “The Psychologist Who Played God.” The “God” part should be a clue.

* * *

Marx said, “Religion is the opium of the people.” But that was in 1843. Later, Marxism became the opium of some of the people, but “enlightened” leftists eschewed the violence necessary to achieve true Marxism for the non-violent accretion of the regulatory-welfare state.

* * *

Some leftists (including a few of my acquaintances) seem to think that the welfare state is justified by the admonitions of Jesus Christ on the subject of the poor. Hmm… I doubt it. The lessons of the Sermon on the Mount and suchlike are aimed at individuals, not states. Let he who is truly charitable cast the first stone.

We, the Children of the Enlightenement…

…are lost in it. Roger Scruton explains:

…Ferdinand Tönnies … formulated a distinction between two kinds of society — Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft — the first based in affection, kinship and historic attachment, the second in division of labour, self-interest and free association by contract and exchange. Traditional societies, he argued, are of the first kind, and construe obligations and loyalties in terms of a non-negotiable destiny. Modern societies are of the second kind, and therefore regard all institutions and practices as provisional, to be revised in the light of our changing requirements. The transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft is part of what happened at the Enlightenment, and one explanation for the vast cultural changes, as people learned to view their obligations in contractual terms, and so envisage a way to escape them.

Max Weber wrote, in the same connection, of a transition from traditional to “legal-rational” forms of authority, the first sanctioned by immemorial usage, the second by impartial law. To these two distinctions can be added yet another, du to Ser Henry Maine, who described the transition from traditional to modern societies as a shift from status to contract — i.e., a shift from inherited social position, to a position conferred by, and earned through, consent.

These sociological ideas are attempts to understand changes whose effect has been so profound that we have not yet come to terms with them. Still less had people come to terms with them in the late eighteenth century, when the French Revolution sent shock waves through the elites of Europe. The social contract seemed to lead of its own accord to a tyranny far darker than any monarchical excess: the contract between each of us became an enslavement of all. Enlightenment and the fear of Enlightenment were henceforth inseparable. Burke’s attack on the [French] Revolution illustrates this new state of mind. His argument is a sustained defence of “prejudice” — by which he meant the inherited store of human wisdom, whose value lasts only so long as we don not question it — against the “reason” of Enlightenment thinking. But people have prejudices only when they see no need to defend them. Only an enlightened person could think as Burke did, and the paradox of his position is now a familiar sub-text of modern culture — the sub-text of conservatism….

It was Marx who developed the most popular explanation of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment saw itself as the triumph of reason over superstition. But the real triumph, Marx argued, lay not in the sphere of ideas but in the sphere of economics. The aristocratic order had been destroyed, and with it the feudal relations which bound the producers to the land and the consumers to the court. In place of the old order came the “bourgeois” economy, based on the wage contract, the division of labour and private capital. The contractual view of society, the emphasis on individual freedom, the belief in impartial law, the attack on superstition in the name of reason — all these cultural phenomena are part of the “ideology” of the new bourgeois order, contributions to the self-image whereby the capitalist class ratifies its usurpation.

The Marxist theory is a form of economic determinism, distinguished by the belief that fundamental changes in economic relations are invariably revolutionary, involving a violent overthrow of the old order, and a collapse of the political “superstructure” which had been built on it. The theory is almost certainly false: nevertheless, there is something about the Marxian picture which elicits, in enlightened people, the will to believe. By explaining culture as a by-product of material forces, Marx endorses the Enlightenment view, that material forces are the only forces there are. The old culture, with its gods and traditions and authorities, is made to seem like a web of illusions — “the opiate of the people”, which quietens their distress….

…Thanks to Marx, debunking theories of culture have become a part of culture. And these theories have the structure pioneered by Marx: they identify power as the reality, and culture as the mask; they also foretell some future “liberation” from the lies that have been spun by our oppressors.

Debunking theories of culture are popular for two reasons: because they are linked to a political agenda, and because they provide us with an overview. If we are to understand the Enlightenment, then we need such an overview. But ought it to be couched in these external terms? After all, the Enlightenment is part of us; people who have not responded to its appeal are only half awake to their condition. It is not enough to explain the Enlightenment; we must also understand it….

[A]s I noted in discussing Burke, Enlightenment goes hand in hand with the fear of it. From the very beginning hope and doubt have been intertwined. What if men needed those old authorities, needed the habit of obedience and the sense of the sacred? What if, without them, they should jettison all loyalties, and give themselves to a life of godless pleasure?… [T]he very aim for a universal culture, without time or place, brought a new kind of loneliness. Communities depend upon the force of which Burke called prejudice; they are essential local, bound to a place, a history, a language and a common culture. The Enlightened individualist, by forgoing such things, lives increasingly as a stranger among strangers, consumed by a helpless longing for an attachment which his own cold thinking has destroyed.

These conflicts within Enlightenment culture are part of its legacy to us. We too are individualists, believers in the sovereign right of human freedom, living as strangers in a society of strangers. And we too are beset by those ancient and ineradicable yearnings for something else — for a homecoming to our true community…. But … there is no going back, … we must live with our enlightened condition and endure the inner tension to which it condemns us. And it is in terms of this tension, I believe, the we should understand both the splendours and the miseries of modern culture. (An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, pp. 24-9)

Religion, community, and common culture have been displaced by the regulatory-welfare state, anthropogenic global warming, feminism, “choice,” and myriad other totems, beliefs, “movements,” and “leaders,” both religious and secular. Are our minds less troubled, do we sleep better, are we happier in our relationships, is our destiny more secure? Something tells me that the answer to each of those questions is “no.”

The tale was told long ago:

[1] Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman: Why hath God commanded you, that you should not eat of every tree of paradise? [2] And the woman answered him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: [3] But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die. [4] And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. [5] For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.

[6] And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband who did eat. [7] And the eyes of them both were opened: and when they perceived themselves to be naked, they sewed together fig leaves, and made themselves aprons. [8] And when they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in paradise at the afternoon air, Adam and his wife hid themselves from the face of the Lord God, amidst the trees of paradise. [9] And the Lord God called Adam, and said to him: Where art thou? [10] And he said: I heard thy voice in paradise; and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.

[11] And he said to him: And who hath told thee that thou wast naked, but that thou hast eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat? [12] And Adam said: The woman, whom thou gavest me to be my companion, gave me of the tree, and I did eat. [13] And the Lord God said to the woman: Why hast thou done this? And she answered: The serpent deceived me, and I did eat. [14] And the Lord God said to the serpent: Because thou hast done this thing, thou art cursed among all cattle, and beasts of the earth: upon thy breast shalt thou go, and earth shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. [15] I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.

[16] To the woman also he said: I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions: in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee. [17] And to Adam he said: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life. [18] Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herbs of the earth. [19] In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return. [20] And Adam called the name of his wife Eve: because she was the mother of all the living.

[21] And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife, garments of skins, and clothed them. [22] And he said: Behold Adam is become as one of us, knowing good and evil: now, therefore, lest perhaps he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever. [23] And the Lord God sent him out of the paradise of pleasure, to till the earth from which he was taken. [24] And he cast out Adam; and placed before the paradise of pleasure Cherubims, and a flaming sword, turning every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Book of Genesis, Chapter 3)

A particular feature of the Enlightenment was that its rationalism gave rise to leftism. Thomas Sowell writes about the wages of leftist “intellectualism” in Intellectuals and Society:

One of the things intellectuals have been doing for a long time is loosening the bonds that hold a society together. They have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, hav long been treated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia, and new ties that intellectuals have created, such as class — and more recently “gender” — have been projected as either more real or more important. (p. 303)

In my view, the

left’s essential agenda is the repudiation of ordered liberty of the kind that arises from evolved social norms, and the replacement of that liberty by sugar-coated oppression. The bread and circuses of imperial Rome have nothing on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and the many other forms of personal and corporate welfare that are draining America of its wealth and élan. All of that “welfare” has been bought at the price of economic and social liberty (which are indivisible).

Freedom from social bonds and social norms is not liberty. Freedom from religion, which seems to be the objective of American courts, is bound to yield less liberty and more crime, which further erodes liberty.

Is College for Everyone?

Of course not. But don’t tell that to Obamanauts and other purveyors of what is mistakenly taken for compassionate wisdom these days.

This is from my post, “The Higher Education Bubble“:

When I entered college [in 1958], I was among the 28 percent of high-school graduates then attending college. It was evident to me that about half of my college classmates didn’t belong in an institution of higher learning. Despite that, the college-enrollment rate among high-school graduates has since doubled.

Here is a recent view from the front lines of higher education in the United States:

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college. (“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” The Atlantic, June 2008; h/t Maverick Philosopher)

Perhaps the higher-education bubble is about to burst. A serious effort to reduce government spending would surely lead to the reduction of tax subsidies to state colleges and universities. Or so one can hope.

Some Leit(er) Reading

In recent news:

“Still waiting for any of the brilliant liberals to explain the difference between Leiter’s ‘philosophical musings’ and Sharron Angle’s discussion of Second Amendment remedies.”

“It’s sad that Brian Leiter seems to put so much effort into reinforcing — or, perhaps the proper term is ’embodying’ — right-wing stereotypes regarding the academy.”

The Ethics of Publishing Cease-and-Desist Letters

Which is old news for Leiter “fans”:

Brian Leiter Is an Idiot

What’s With the Name Calling?

Through the Looking Glass with Leiter

Making an Exception

A Tribute to Home-Schooling

My daughter-in-law and son home-school their children, with excellent results, as far as I am able to tell from occasional visits to their home 1500 miles away. It takes loving dedication and vast outlays of time and energy to educate several children in subjects ranging from the “three Rs” to French, German, and Latin, while also arranging extramural music lessons and other educational activities and transporting the children to and from those activities. The effort will have continued, without pause, for about three decades by the time the youngest child has completed the equivalent of 12 grades of schooling. To put it simply, I am in awe of my daughter-in-law and son for what they are doing to ensure that their children are thoroughly and roundly educated.

I was prompted to write this by a couple of posts at EconLog by David Henderson. In “Home Schooling and Socialization,” Henderson writes:

We should become modern abolitionists, like the abolitionists of the nineteenth century who demanded the end of slavery, and for similar reasons. Abolition brings an end to the government’s role in schools, which means four things: the end of compulsory attendance; the end of government control of content; the end of government control of who teaches; and the end of the government’s practice of taxing some people to pay for other people’s children to go to school. With the end of government’s role, learning would flourish. I can’t tell you how. No one can. I can tell you what I think is unlikely: classes every day in big buildings from 8:30 to 3:00, or, in the case of our local government middle school, from 8:13 to 2:40. The beauty and the power of freedom is that different people use their freedom differently to produce all kinds of results, results that they themselves, and certainly the rest of us, can’t predict.

He follows up with some horror stories about the goings on in the public schools of his youth. They remind me, too much, of the public schools of my own youth. I would have given anything to have been placed in an environment where the emphasis was on learning, not on suffering through hours, days, months, and years of classes with packs of pre-adolescent and adolescent animals.

That is the reality of public schools for most American children, who don’t attend the idealized schools of Hollywood teen movies, where the bullies are well-groomed, drive sports cars, and are put down by beautiful blonds with hearts of gold who prefer nerds to jocks. Nor do most American children attend exclusive private schools (and their “public” counterparts), which are mainly the preserves of the children of the upper professional classes, high government officials, well-paid senior civil servants, and public-school teachers.

The Left’s Agenda

A post at Bookworm Room caught my eye:

Andy McCarthy writes about the elephant in the liberal living room; namely, Islamic attitudes towards rape: Women are almost always asking for it, especially Western women, and, once having forced an innocent man to give in to his base animal nature, they deserve to be beaten, arguably to death.

That analysis, of course, must get paired with CBS’s muted and delayed reporting of the horrific rape that its reporter, Lara Logan, suffered at the hands of an Islamic mob. CBS tries to spin it as a normal tale of a mob that’s gotten out of control, but people paying attention to the Islamic world understand that, while Western mobs attack cars and shops, Islamic mobs attack women.

Why have American leftists so eagerly embraced Islam, with all of its ugly features, while rejecting pro-Western Israel? What is the left’s agenda with respect to Islam and Israel? What is the left’s agenda, period?

Don’t expect to understand the left by looking for rational explanations of leftist beliefs and behavior. The left is in an arrested state of adolescent rebellion: “If it’s ‘bad’ or dangerous, I want it, just to be ‘different’ (well, not different from my peers, whose approval I seek) and to express my ‘independence’ (as long as ‘Daddy government’ gives me an allowance, birthday presents, cell phones, etc.).”

To put it bluntly — and this is entirely consistent with my experience — persons of the left are like unthinking, selfish adolescents who want what they want, regardless of the consequences for themselves or others.

It seems natural for adolescents and young adults to flirt with leftism. The persistence of leftism beyond one’s twenties is a sign of arrested emotional development. (By the way, I would say the same thing about doctrinaire libertarian extremists, the kind who believe in fairy tales about stateless societies.)

Modernism and the Arts

Robert Blumen, writing at Mises Economics Blog, asks “Why Do We Hate Modern Classical Music?” Blumen opens with this:

Modern classical music is primarily a project of the classical music industry’s managerial elites which has no basis in consumer demand. Despite decades of proof that audiences do not like this music, the managerial elites continue to push this agenda. When questioned, their response is to blame the classical music audience for not liking the music.

It’s not only the managerial élites who are to blame:

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the visual, auditory, and verbal arts became an “inside game.” Painters, sculptors, composers (of “serious” music), choreographers, and writers of fiction began to create works not for the enjoyment of audiences but for the sake of exploring “new” forms. Given that the various arts had been perfected by the early 1900s, the only way to explore “new” forms was to regress toward primitive ones — toward a lack of structure…. Aside from its baneful influence on many true artists, the regression toward the primitive has enabled persons of inferior talent (and none) to call themselves “artists.” Thus modernism is banal when it is not ugly.

Painters, sculptors, etc., have been encouraged in their efforts to explore “new” forms by critics, by advocates of change and rebellion for its own sake (e.g., “liberals” and “bohemians”), and by undiscriminating patrons, anxious to be au courant. Critics have a special stake in modernism because they are needed to “explain” its incomprehensibility and ugliness to the unwashed.

The unwashed have nevertheless rebelled against modernism, and so its practitioners and defenders have responded with condescension, one form of which is the challenge to be “open minded” (i.e., to tolerate the second-rate and nonsensical). A good example of condescension is heard on Composers Datebook, a syndicated feature that runs on some NPR stations. Every Composers Datebook program closes by “reminding you that all music was once new.” As if to lump Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven.

All music, painting, sculpture, dance, and literature was once new, but not all of it is good. Much (most?) of what has been produced since 1900 is inferior, self-indulgent crap.

In other words, if you can’t readily do better than your predecessors, you take the easy way out by doing something different — ugly as it may be. And you call it “progress.”

My observation of the “arts” in the modern age leads me to the following conclusions:

Taste is not dictated by élite opinion, which is more about exclusiveness than excellence.

Therefore, that which élite opinion designates as “art” is not necessarily art — and is likely to be its opposite.

In fact, most of the works of modern “artists” are mere artifacts, having no more relation to beauty than rusty tools, derelict boxcars, and abandoned buildings.

Affirmative Action for Conservatives and Libertarians?

John Tierney’s recent column in The New York Times, “Social Scientist Sees Bias Within,” points to a new variation on an old theme. The old theme is this:

Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences.

The new variation is played by Prof. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, who

polled his audience [at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference] at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

The alternate explanations include the canard that “liberals” are smarter than libertarians and conservatives, and that libertarians and conservatives tend to “select out” of academia mainly because they are doers rather than teachers. In fact, Tierney addresses this issue in 2004, in “Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find,” where he quotes Daniel Klein:

“Screened out, expelled or self-sorted, [nonleftists] tend to land outside of academia because the crucial decisions – awarding tenure and promotions, choosing which papers get published – are made by colleagues hostile to their political views,” said Professor Klein, who classifies himself as a libertarian.

In any event, Haidt’s observations are hardly new. Tierney points to other evidence in his recent column, where he mentions Klein in passing. Klein merits more than passing mention, for he has written extensively on the subject of the left-wing bias in academia. (His C.V. is here.) This is from the Summary section of “Narrow Tent Democrats and Fringe Others: The Policy Views of Social Science Professors” (2004), co-authored by Charlotta Stern:

Democrats dominate the social sciences. Anthropology and sociology are the most lopsided, with D-to-R ratios upwards of 20 to 1, and economics is the least lopsided, about 3 to 1. Among professors up through age 70, the overall Democrat-to-Republican ratio is probably about 8 to 1.

The Democratic domination has increased significantly since 1970. Republicans are being eliminated….

The Democrats not only dominate, but they have a narrow tent. Whereas the Republicans usually have diversity on an issue, the Democrats very often have a party line. It is clear that there is significantly more diversity under the Republican tent….

We find strong evidence that Republican scholars are more likely to be sorted out of academia.

Voting D is significantly correlated with having Democratic parents, being employed in academia, being an anthropologist or sociologist, having statist policy views, and having a more recent degree….

Simple measures show that the libertarians are quite exceptional. The minimum of the dissimilarities between them and any other group is greater than the maximum of dissimilarity between any pair of other groups.

The “liberal versus conservative” formulation of American politics omits the libertarians from the landscape, yet the libertarian and conservative groups appear to be equal in size in the social disciplines (each cluster-group consisted of 35 individuals). If freedom is a core political value, then there is something very wrong with a formulation that omits the ideology most aligned with that value.

Well, freedom is not a core political value for most of today’s social-science academics, as Klein and Stern amply demonstrate. They underscore that point in a later paper, “Is There a Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economics Association Members” (2007). It begins with this:

Political economists are in general quite suspicious of governmental intervention. They see in it inconveniences of all kinds–a diminution of individual liberty, energy, prudence, and experience, which constitute the most precious resources of any society. Hence, it often happens that they oppose this intervention.

Frederic Bastiat (1848)

IN 1848, BASTIAT’S STATEMENTS were probably true. Nowadays they are not. Here we present evidence from a survey of American Economic Association (AEA) members showing that a large majority of economists are either generally favorable to or mixed on government intervention, and hence cannot be regarded as supporters of free-market principles. Based on our finding, we suggest that about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters.

Specifically:

IN MARCH AND APRIL 2003, 1,000 U.S. members of the American Economists Association were surveyed using a randomly generated list of members. The original survey and supporting documents are available online at a homepage devoted to the survey. (2) The AEA members returned 264 (nonblank) surveys….

In addition to the 18 specific public policy questions, there was the following question about voting behavior:

To which political party have the candidates you’ve voted for in the past ten years mostly belonged?
    []       []        []          []        --
Democratic  Green  Libertarian  Republican  other
Among the 264 respondents, 153 (58 percent) reported voting Democratic, and 61 (23 percent) reported voting Republican. The other 50 respondents either checked Green (2), Libertarian (7), gave miscellaneous responses (17), (4) or declined to answer the question (24). Since 90.9 percent of the respondents answered the question, we are confident about the partisanship information derived from this question. The data yields a Democrat to Republican ratio of about 2.5 to 1….

THE FORMAT OF THE 18 policy questions was in the form of a statement to which the respondents were asked to indicate their view. The question on tariffs can be used as an example:

Tariffs on imported goods to protect American industries and jobs:
  []        []        []         []       []        []
support   support  have mixed  oppose   oppose   Have no
strongly  mildly    feelings   mildly  strongly  opinion
  1         2          3         4        5
The numbers 1-5 did not appear in the survey. They show how we weighted each response when creating a mean response. The “5” value corresponds to strong support of free-market principles….

THE CUTPOINT FOR BEING a free-market supporter is 4.0 (“oppose mildly”)….

To be a free-market supporter is to take positions like those taken by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, George Stigler, James Buchanan, and Vernon Smith….

Economists as a group have a mean score of 2.64. That is, on average, over 18 forms of government activism that any real free-market person would tend to lean against, usually strongly, economists lean slightly in support of government activism. Even among the Republicans, the mean score is 3.20, indicating that the average Republican economist is “middle of the road” on concrete examples of government activism. The average Democratic economist tends to be mildly supportive of government activism. As we saw, Democrats outnumber Republicans 2.5 to 1. Thus, a large majority of AEA members are either interventionist or middle-of-the-road Democrats, and most of the residual are middle-of-the-road Republicans….

My score, which will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, is 4.67. Where did I go “wrong” — why not a perfect score of 5.0? With regard to question 16, which asks about “tighter rather than looser controls on immigration,” I strongly oppose unselective immigration on economic and social grounds, for reasons detailed here. Also, the answer to question 17, which asks about “military aid or presence abroad to promote democracy and the rule of law,” must take into account whether (in particular cases) such actions serve Americans’ long-run interests.

Klein and Stern offer an alternative analysis, in which they drop two questions that seem unrelated to free-market principles: the one about military aid or presence abroad, and one about monetary policy. Dropping those two questions has little effect on the results of their results; the average score barely rises, from 2.64 to 2.66. (My score drops from 4.67 to 4.44.) For the 16 issues, the mean score for self-identified Democrats was 2.34, as against 3.30 for self-identified Republicans. Although Republicans are, on average, “middle of the road” (according to Klein and Stern), the distribution of scores highlights the marked difference between Democrat and Republican economists:

Klein and Stern propose several answers to the question “Why so few free-market economists?” — none of which I find compelling. I offer two answers. First, relatively few academic economists self-identify as libertarians; the average score of those who did was 4.30. Second, libertarians aside, most persons who garner a Ph.D. in economics (i.e., most members of the AEA) go through a “hazing ritual,” which Arnold Kling describes:

One of the best incumbent-protection rackets going today is for mathematical theorists in economics departments. The top departments will not certify someone as being qualified to have an advanced degree without first subjecting the student to the most rigorous mathematical economic theory. The rationale for this is reminiscent of fraternity hazing. “We went through it, so should they.”

Mathematical hazing persists even though there are signs that the prestige of math is on the decline within the profession. The important Clark Medal, awarded to the most accomplished American economist under the age of 40, has not gone to a mathematical theorist since 1989.

One of the consequences of indoctrination in mathematical economics is that its practitioners come to believe, wrongly, in their understanding of and ability to predict economic phenomena. That leads them to the consequent belief that — if only they or like-minded persons were “in charge” — the economy could be fine-tuned, in the large and in the small. Fine-tuning in the small means, among other things, preventing or correcting so-called market failures, which are those market outcomes of which self-deluding “omniscient” economists disapprove.

This belief is, in fact, nothing more than a rationalization for a point of view that is prevalent on the left, and especially among “intellectuals.” In A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell characterizes it as the “unconstrained vision.” Adherents of the unconstrained vision (the left) are wedded to the rhetoric of “ought to be” and its close relation, the Nirvana fallacy. They judge existing arrangements against unattainable standards of perfection (invented by themselves), and proclaim themselves to be on the side of all that is good because they would, by legal fiat, command the attainment of the good, despite its unattainaibility. Unsurprisingly, adherents of the unconstrained vision dominate academia, where it is de rigeur (especially among social scientists) to tailor the “truth” to fit one’s preconceptions about what ought to be.

One of the things that ought to be, of course, is equality of outcomes, regardless of the facts about racial and sexual disparities with respect to aptitudes. As Haidt says, “Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation.”

Which brings us to the question of affirmative action for conservatives (and here I include libertarians who are thought of as right-wingers by leftists). Greg Mankiw, in a post from 2007 about diversity in academia, observes:

If right-wingers are underrepresented in universities relative to the population and discriminated against by the left-wing majority, as Larry [Summers] suggests, should there be affirmative action for right-leaning academics? It seems that, on principle, those on the left (who favor affirmative action to promote diversity and correct past injustice) should endorse such a university policy, and those on the right (who more often oppose affirmative action) would be against.

Ilya Somin comments:

…In this excellent Econlog post, economist Bryan Caplan explained why ideological discrimination is more likely to flourish in academia than in most other employment markets. Even aside from discrimination, the ideological homogeneity of much of academia causes a variety of problems, such as reducing the diversity of ideas reflected in research, skewing teaching agendas, and generating the sorts of “groupthink” pathologies to which ideologically homogenous groups are prone.

However, whether or not [ideological] discrimination is the cause of the problem, affirmative action for conservative academics (or libertarian ones) is a poor solution. Among other things, it would require universities to define who counts as a “conservative” for affirmative action purpose, a task that they aren’t likely to do well. Affirmative action for conservatives would also give job candidates an incentive to engage in deception about their views in the hopes of gaining professional advancement. Moreover, conservative professors hired on an affirmative basis despite inferior qualifications would find it difficult to get their ideas taken seriously by colleagues and students. They might therefore be unable to make a meaningful contribution to academic debate – the very reason why we want to promote ideological diversity in hiring to begin with.

In other words, two wrongs don’t make a right.

Is the Anger Gone?

That’s the question Matt Bai asks in yesterday’s NYT (“After Tuscon, Is the Anger Gone?”). His answer, if there is one in his assumption- and error-laden piece, is irrelevant. Bai’s article deserves a good “fisking,” which I may yet deliver. For now, I will content myself with the following observations.

“After Tuscon…” offers a strong (if unwitting) argument for reducing the footprint of the central government, which is a leading source of the division and anger evoked by the tragedy in Tuscon. Of course, those who favor a strong central government would then be angrier than they already are — and they are angry, as evidenced by the rhetoric of Krugman, Olbermann, and their ilk.

True federalism — where the central government has a hands-off policy on economic and social matters (but not civil rights) — would allow those who favor heavy-handed government to live in States that offer such government. The problem is that the people who would be (and are) attracted to such States aren’t content to endure heavy-handed government by themselves; they wish to bestow its “blessings” with everyone else. And they have succeeded in very great measure.

Most commentators, it seems to me, proceed from the assumption that those who oppose heavy-handed government have no rational basis for their “anger.” They do, but those who are wedded to heavy-handed government — most politicians and pundits, and the sheep-like majority of Americans — cannot see it. And, being unable to see it, they view anti-government rhetoric as a manifestation of psychological disturbance, when it should be viewed as a manifestation of righteous resentment at being over-taxed and over-regulated.

No amount of “dialogue” or “shared experience” can bridge the gap between statists and anti-statists. Thomas Sowell explains this well in A Conflict of Visions — a sometimes maddeningly balanced analysis of the contrasting world views that shape the divide between statists and anti-statists.

(Jared) Lee Harvey Loughner?

The rush to ascribe Jared Lee Loughner‘s despicable acts of murder and attempted murder to a right-wing “climate of hate” reminds me of the immediate reaction to the shooting of JFK in Dallas.

Because Dallas was, at that time, a media-designated hot-bed of right-wing extremism (anti-Catholic, anti-civil rights, pro-John Birch Society), the murder of JFK was immediately ascribed to the “climate of hate” which, one gathered, hung over Dallas like a miasma. It was ironic to learn, fairly quickly, that the apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a communist who had lived in the USSR, supported Castro’s regime in Cuba, and tried to assassinate retired Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, a noted right-winger of the time.

History repeats itself as farce. And the present farce is the rush of the usual suspects on the left to pin Jared Lee Loughner’s acts on the “hate” that oozes (so it would seem) from the pores of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others on the right. (Whereas Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, and their ilk speak only sweet reason.) It is evident that Jared Lee Loughner does not possess a coherent political view of any kind, and that if he has been influenced by anyone it is extraterrestrial beings.

Even if Loughner were a certified right-winger of some kind, would that make Palin et al. accessories to his crime? And if so, wouldn’t that pin the assassination of JFK on Nikita Khrushchev and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan on Jodie Foster? Or perhaps everything is the fault of “society,” as the left likes to say when it comes to criminals.

Facts and logic will not keep the left and its allies in the media from spewing and spreading hateful rhetoric aimed at discrediting their political enemies. Nor will it keep them from trying, again, to use the power of government to disarm Americans and stifle speech of which they disapprove, speech that threatens their agenda of regimentation.

When a leftist cries “hate” and “fascism” he should be looking in a mirror.

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