Liberal Condescension…

…by Hillary Clinton. Nailed by Walter Williams.

Why Ohio Is Getting Bluer

A post at RealClearPolitics notes that “Ohio Is Looking Blue” for election 2008. That’s not surprising, given that enterprising Ohioans have been fleeing the Buckeye State for decades; for example:

So, Ohio turns Blue, while sun-belt Red States (e.g., Texas and Georgia) turn a deeper shade of Red. Quelle surprise!

P.S. See also.

The Shoe Is on the Other Foot

UPDATED THRICE, BELOW

From Law Blog – WSJ.com: The O.C.:

According to Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports, a blog on comings-and-goings in legal academia, UC Irvine, which recently got approval to start a law school, reached an agreement with Duke’s Erwin Chemerinsky (pictured), a prominent constitutional law scholar, to have Chemerinsky be its inaugural dean — and then rescinded the offer yesterday because of his [liberal] political views….

“I’ve been a liberal law professor for 28 years,” Chemerinsky said. “I write lots of op-eds and articles, I argue high-profile cases, and I expected there would be some concern about me. My hope was that I’d address it by making the law school open to all viewpoints.”…

He added: “Obviously I’m sad because it’s something I was exciting about. I’m angry because I don’t believe anyone liberal or conservative should be denied a position like this because of political views.”

I must here admit to a bit of schadenfreude, given that academia is ruled mainly by Leftists who are in the habit of not hiring and not promoting conservatives.

But, but, but…many (even some conservatives) will say “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Actually, thousands of wrongs have been committed against conservative academics, but the un-hiring of Chemerinsky isn’t a wrong. I have encountered his view of the Constitution, and have found it highly unconstitutional. He shouldn’t have been hired for the deanship in the first place. The man has no place teaching constitutional law, anywhere. It has been his good luck (and our misfortune) that many law schools (like most of academia) are dominated by the Left.

UPDATE (09/17/07): Conservatives just play too nice. UC Irvine has been suckered into hiring Chereminsky as law dean, after all.

See the new law school open next year. Hear the new dean promise “to respect all points of view.” Wait for the new law school to begin veering to the Left. Peer into the not-so-distant future as the school drives out the few conservative-libertarian profs it was willing and able to recruit.

You can what’s going to happen because Brian Leiter, a Marxist who parades as a law prof, is happy about the news of Chereminsky’s hiring. (For more about Leiter, see this, this, this, and this.)

UPDATE (09/18/07): Chereminsky, I now learn, has been representing Rachel Corrie’s family in its suit against Caterpillar, Inc. Corrie, as you will remember, was the pro-Palestinian protester who failed to get out of the way of an Israeli-wielded Cat. So, Corrie’s family sued the company. “This is a case about direct commercial sales,” Chemerinsky said. “It’s about holding corporations liable when they aid and abet violations of human rights.”

Corrie’s family has a right to representation, but Chemerinsky wasn’t obliged to represent the family. In choosing to do so, he revealed his anti-U.S., anti-Israeli bias.

Fortunately, in this case, the Ninth Circuit (surprisingly) did the right thing: It affirmed the dismissal of the family’s suit by a district court judge. A telling passage from the court’s ruling:

It is not the role of the courts to indirectly indict Israel for violating international law with military equipment the United States government provided and continues to provide. . . . Plaintiffs may purport to look no further than Caterpillar itself, but resolving their suit will necessarily require us to look beyond the lone defendant in this case and toward the foreign policy interests and judgments of the United States government itself.

Which is precisely what the Corrie family, their supporters, and Chemerinsky sought: judicial intervention in what are essentially political questions. Isn’t that the Left’s preferred way? You bet it is. And that’s part of the mindset Chemerinsky will bring to the deanship of the new law school.

UPDATE (09/19/07): See this related post by Gail Heriot of The Right Coast.

A Mini-Fest of Links

It’s time to disgorge some of the links that I’ve been hoarding.

First up is Arnold Kling’s “Religion, Government, and Civil Society.” I had missed it because it was published in February of this year, when I was neither blogging nor reading blogs. Kling compresses much wisdom into a relatively short essay. (For my views on the importance of civil society — as opposed to statism — read “On Liberty” in the sidebar and go here.)

Relatedly, here is Tyler Cowen’s post about philanthropy. (I hereby apologize for having thought bad thoughts about Cowen.)

Next is a piece (reproduced here) by Douglas Kmiec about the (now-stayed) ruling by an Iowa judge, in which he struck down Iowa’s defense-of-marriage act. That is to say, the judge ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. (My views on the subject are in this post, among others.)

“Crunchy cons” — love ’em or hate ’em — always stir the pot. Here are two posts by Mr. Crunchy Con himself, Rod Dreher. It seems, on the surface, that Dreher is a “civil societarian,” as Arnold Kling defines it. But do not be deceived by the reasonable tone of Dreher’s posts (linked above). Dreher is, in fact, a pseudo-civil-societarian with a statist agenda. For more on that, go back and read this post (toward the bottom) and this one.

I wrote recently about “The Slippery Slope of Constitutional Revisionism.” The U.S. may not have traveled as far down the slope toward vicious statism as has the U.K. But it could do so, quite easily. Let this be a warning to you.

The Rational Voter?

To act rationally is:

(a) to apply sound reasoning and pertinent facts to the pursuit of an objective, or

(b) to apply sound reasoning and pertinent facts to the pursuit of a realistic objective (one that does not contradict the laws of nature or human nature).

Answer: (b).

It’s true that voters often reason poorly and are largely ignorant of particular facts when they cast their ballots. But voters mainly fail to vote rationally because their objectives are wanting in reality. They (and the candidates for whom they vote) tend to believe in “six impossible things before breakfast” (the White Queen to Alice, in Alice in Wonderland).

Given that, the likelihood of finding a rational voter in a polling booth is vanishingly small. That most voters are irrational is certainly my view, and that of Bryan Caplan of EconLog and George Mason University‘s economics department.

Ilya Somin (of The Volokh Conspiracy and the George Mason University School of Law) argues, on the other hand, that American voters are “rationally ignorant.” Somin spells out his theory of rational ignorance in “Knowledge of Ignorance: New Directions in the Study of Political Information,” the abstract of which reads, in part:

For decades, scholars have recognized that most citizens have little or no political knowledge, and that it is in fact rational for the average voter to make little effort to acquire political information. This article shows that rational ignorance is fully compatible with the so-called paradox of voting because it will often be rational for citizens to vote, but irrational for them to become well-informed….

Somin, however, offers a naïve view of rationality; for example:

Assume that Uv = the expected utility of voting; Cv = the cost of voting; and D = the expected difference in welfare per person if the voter’s preferred candidate defeats her opponent. Let us further assume that this is a presidential election in a nation with 300 million people; that the voter’s ballot has only a 1 in 100 million chance of being decisive….

If we assume that Cv is $10 (a reasonable proxy for the cost of voting) and that D is $5000 (this can incorporate monetary equivalents of noneconomic benefits as well as actual income increases), then Uv equals $5, a small but real positive expected utility.

To be sure, actual voters are unlikely to calculate the costs and benefits of voting this precisely, but they might make an intuitive judgment incorporating very rough estimates of D and C. Furthermore, the fact that voting is a low-cost, low-benefit activity ensures that there is little
benefit to engaging in precise calculations such as these, so voters might rationally choose to go with a default option of voting and forego any detailed analysis….

By contrast, the acquisition of political information in any significant quantity is a vastly more difficult and time-consuming enterprise than is voting itself. Assume that Upi = the utility of acquiring sufficient political information to make a “correct” decision, and Cpi = the cost of acquiring political information…

If we conservatively estimate Cpi at $100 by assuming that the voter need only expend 10 hours to acquire and learn the necessary information, while suffering opportunity costs of just $10 per hour, then the magnitude of D would have to be nearly seven times greater — $33,333 per citizen — in order for the voter to choose to make the necessary expenditure on information acquisition. It is unlikely that many otherwise ignorant voters will perceive such an enormous potential difference between the opposing candidates as to invest even the equivalent of $100 in information acquisition. And this theoretical prediction is consistent with the empirical observation that most citizens in fact know very little about politics and public policy, but do vote.

The analysis changes only slightly if the voter does not care about the welfare of the entire nation, but only about that of a subset, such as her racial or ethnic group. Alternatively, she may care about everyone in the nation to at least some extent, but value the utility of some groups more than others. Similarly, it may be that the voter believes that her preferred candidates’ policies will benefit some groups more than others….

For example,…the result that obtains if…a voter…cares far more about the welfare of a subgroup of the population numbering 50 million than about the rest of the public, valuing members of the group five times as much as the rest….

…Uv will turn out to be $8.33, a slightly higher figure than [$5, calculated above]. At the same time, it would still be irrational for the voter to pay the costs of becoming adequately informed….[T]he per-person difference in welfare would have to be over $20,000 in order to justify a decision to pay the price of becoming informed.

Most of that is rote, simple-minded cost-benefit analysis. Aside from being no more than a vague, non-operational description of how voters choose to vote, it ignores the fundamental question: What do voters want? Or, in Somin’s terminology, what is “D” — the “welfare” (i.e., objective) that the voter is trying to attain by voting in a certain way?

Many voters can perceive (and long have perceived), in Somin’s words, “enormous potential difference[s] between…opposing candidates,” without making any special “expenditure on information acquisition.” Voters certainly knew, without benefit of research, the essential differences between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alfred M. Landon, between Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry M. Goldwater, and between Ronald W. Reagan and James Earl Carter — to take a few, obvious examples from the annals of presidential elections.

In such cases, which are a-plenty, voters eschew Somin-ized gyrations. They simply “know” whether they “like” the policies advocated by a candidate. That is, they “feel good” about what the candidate seems to “stand for”: peace through diplomacy, “social justice” through higher taxes on the rich, better health care through greater government control of it, and so on. (Alternatively, they are “put off” by candidate A’s opponent’s views on such matters, and vote for A as the lesser of two evils.)

That’s where the irrationality comes in. Many (a majority of? most?) voters are guilty of voting irrationally because they believe in such claptrap as peace through diplomacy, “social justice” through high marginal tax rates, or better health care through government regulation. To be perfectly clear, the irrationality lies not in favoring peace, “social justice” (whatever that is), health care, and the like. The irrationality lies in knee-jerk beliefs in such contradictions as peace through unpreparedness for war, “social justice” through soak-the-rich schemes, better health care through complete government control of medicine, etc., etc., etc. Voters whose objectives incorporate such beliefs simply haven’t taken the relatively little time it requires to process what they already know or have experienced about history, human nature, and social and economic realities. (Consider, for example, rich liberals who strive to get richer so as to leave wealth to their privately educated children, all the while propounding higher taxes that will hinder the efforts of the less-rich to do the same.)

Why do such voters not “know” what they know? Because they “feel” certain ways about certain things. They feel — for example — that higher defense spending is likely to lead to war, even though (in the America of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) defense spending has risen only after we have been attacked or an avowed enemy is already well armed. Voters who know such things, but nevertheless reject their policy implications, prefer to view history and human nature through the lens of their emotional preferences. They compartment what they know from what they feel, and they succumb to what they feel.

Another way to put it is this: Voters too often are rationally irrational. They make their voting decisions “rationally,” in a formal sense (i.e., as outlined by Somin). But those decisions are irrational because they are intended to advance perverse objectives (e.g., peace through unpreparedness for war).

Socialized Medicine in the U.S.A.

Cato‘s Michael Cannon has it exactly right in “Socialized Medicine Is Already Here” (TCS Daily). Go and read it.

Insofar as medicine is concerned, we have traveled all the way down the slippery slope, following one and then another of the paths I trace in “The Slippery Slope of Constitutional Revisionism.”

Can it get worse? Yes. See:

Thomas Sowell, “No Health Care?”
These three posts at Cato-at-Liberty

Note, also, the planned presence of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (“Independent”-VT) at the convention of Democratic Socialists of America. Were they honest about their true political orientation, almost all Democrats in Congress and far more than a few Republicans would join Sen. Sanders at the convention.

Students, Beware!

UPDATED, BELOW

I’m speaking especially to the students of Kevin Quinn, who teaches economics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Quinn also blogs at EconoSpeak. His first substantive entry there, “Safety,” leads me to fear that his students — if they do not question and challenge him — will learn socialism rather than economics.

Consider the example that Quinn uses to show how workers are “forced” to accept a high level of risk (breaks added for clarity):

Suppose there are two types of jobs, safe and risky, and 2 workers. Safe jobs have a safety index of 2 and pay $20,000, while risky jobs have a safety index of 1 and pay $30,000. Further suppose workers utility is the product of three factors: income measured in thousands of dollars, safety( measured by the index), and relative income. Now we have a standard prisoner’s dilemma [link added: LC]:

If you take the safe job, [my] taking the safe job as well gives me utility of (20)(2)(1) = 40. [My t]aking the risky job gives me (30)(1)(3/2) = 45, so I take the risky job.

If you take the risky job, I get (20)(2)(2/3) = 26.67 if I take the safe job and (30)(1)(1) [=30] if I take the risky job, so I take the risky job in this case too.

Each of us does better choosing the risky job whatever the other does, but when we choose the risky job we are worse off, with utility of 30 each, than had we both taken the safe job and gotten utility of 40 each.

Putting it more directly and explicitly, here are the “payoffs” to “you” and “I” (calling them “A” and “B,” respectively):

A takes a safe job and B takes a safe job — A = 40, B = 40
A takes a safe job and B takes a risky job — A = 26.67, B = 45

A takes a risky job and B takes a safe job — A = 45, B = 26.67
A takes a risky job and B takes a risky job — A = 30, B = 30

These results, when displayed in a 2×2 table, make it obvious (granting many assumptions, discussed below) that both A and B minimize their losses (the strategy of the game of prisoner’s dilemma) by choosing a risky job. If A chooses a safe job, his payoff could be as low as 26.67, instead of 30; if B chooses a safe job, his payoff could be as low as 26.67, instead of 30. Both therefore choose a risky job to ensure themselves of the “less bad” payoff: 30.

But prisoner’s dilemma rests on the assumption of non-cooperation. In fact, there is an alternative, known as a coordination game, in which A and B cooperate to their mutual benefit. In that instance, both A and B would choose a safe job. They needn’t cooperate explicitly; each of them could calculate that the best result for both is to choose a safe job.

In any event, Quinn’s conclusion rests on many convenient assumptions, explicit and implicit:

Utility is a simple, multiplicative function of three factors: pay, safety, and pay relative to that of a particular person (or class of persons).

Relative pay for the two jobs is as specified by Quinn.

Relative pay is an important determinant of utility — as opposed to the enjoyment one derives from one’s own pay, for example.

The pay of the other person (or class of persons) is determined by riskiness of his job, not by such factors as his productivity or the market value of the good or service he is involved in producing.

Safety can be indexed as in Quinn’s example.

The indices of safety for the two jobs are precisely 1 and 2 (or a multiple thereof).

A and B must choose jobs simultaneously and irrevocably, each without knowledge of the other’s choice, according to the stylized logic of prisoner’s dilemma.

Just like real life, eh?

Even if Quinn’s utility formula is realistic (which it isn’t), and even if prisoner’s dilemma is a valid model (which it isn’t), the outcome is sensitive to the values chosen for pay, safety, and the importance of relative pay. Different values yield different outcomes: A takes a risky job, B takes a safe job; both A and B take safe jobs; etc.

Here’s the bottom line:

Prisoner’s dilemma is a dubious model of behavior.

Quinn’s utility model is dubious.

Quinn’s example uses numerical values that conveniently support a certain conclusion.

That conclusion? A labor market that is unregulated with respect to safety “forces” workers to take risky jobs.

Why does Quinn want to reach that conclusion? Answer: So that he can make a case for mandatory safety measures. How does he do that? By rigging his example (as I have discussed), and then by asserting this:

Making safety level 2 mandatory makes both workers better off and has no effect on employers (the pay differential is assumed to reflect the cost of making the workplace safer) and is thus a Pareto-improvement.

Here, Quinn assumes that the pay differential between the safe and risky jobs is determined solely by “the cost of making the workplace safer.” That is:

The marginal cost of safety measures is constant ($10,000 per worker per year). (There might be one-time costs, as well, and those might drive the employer out of business or make the employers’ type of business less attractive to new entrants, thus eliminating a source of jobs for new entrants to the labor market. But I’ll let that go, for now.)

The employer simply reduces each worker’s annual wage by $10,000 to compensate for the cost of the safety measures, thus holding output, total cost, and profit at their “pre-safety” levels.

Given Quinn’s earlier (rigged) assumptions, workers gladly accept lower wages in return for greater safety, or…

Workers do not “gladly” accept lower wages, but they accept lower wages, anyway, because there are no other jobs for them, anywhere, or…

Other employers are unwilling to “exploit” the workers’ pay cuts by offering them more than they make as a result of Quinn’s government-enforced safety measures.

In other words, what Quinn dismisses, without discussion, is the likely effect of safety regulations: raising the cost of employing workers in jobs affected by those regulations and, therefore, reducing employment and wages in those jobs, in the longer run if not immediately. Safety regulations, in other words, narrow workers’ options by forcing them to accept certain levels of risk — set by regulators — regardless of how those levels affect workers’ jobs and pay, and regardless of workers’ own risk-reward schedules.

Why should government narrow workers’ options and force them to accept fewer jobs and less pay? After all, workers are not literally forced to take risky jobs. The choice is theirs, no matter how Quinn rigs his example. Perhaps Quinn thinks he’s living in the Soviet Union, where workers actually were forced by the “dictatorship of the proletariat “to take certain jobs — many of them risky ones.

What Quinn wants is an end to “injustice.” But he has a strange formula for ending it: Cut jobs, cut pay, and narrow workers’ options. Why? Because, in effect, Quinn doesn’t believe that workers should take certain risks, even if they voluntarily choose to do so.

Quinn, in other words, is a paternalist or a socialist. Actually, it doesn’t matter which of those he is (in his heart of hearts) because government-enforced paternalism is just socialism in a Santa Claus costume. Both regimes attempt to substitute the preferences and judgments of élites (the Quinns of this world) and their minions for the preferences and judgments of the millions of workers and businesspersons who face the actual risks and rewards of daily life.

The judgments can be made by fiat, but they can’t be made correctly by socialists or by “libertarian” paternalists; viz.:

Practical Libertarianism for Americans: Part I (especially the paragraph that begins “Whether or not you subscribe to the abstraction of self-ownership…”)
Practical Libertarianism for Americans: Part II (especially the synopsis of Friedrich Hayek’s views toward the end of the section on “The Evolution of Libertarian Thought: The Unification of Economic and Personal Liberty”) and the Addendum (especially the first three block quotations)
Socialist Calculation and the Turing Test
The Social Welfare Function
Libertarian Paternalism
A Libertarian Paternalist’s Dream World
The Short Answer to Libertarian Paternalism
Second-Guessing, Paternalism, Parentalism, and Choice
Another Thought about Libertarian Paternalism
Ten Commandments of Economics
A Little Putdown of Politically Correct Shopping
More Commandments of Economics
Three Truths for Central Planners
Risk and Regulation
A Further Note about “Libertarian” Paternalism
Apropos Paternalism

UPDATE (10/04/07): Interesting paper here about the positive relationship between cooperation and IQ. (Thanks to Arnold Kling for the pointer.) That the relationship is weaker now that it was about 40 years ago supports the thesis that the rise of socialism leads to the breakdown of civil society. How? The state rips asunder socially evolved norms and networks and replaces them with impersonal laws and bureaucracies.

The Slippery Slope of Constitutional Revisionism

In “The Erosion of the Constitutional Contract,” I attribute the accretion of government power to the misapplication of four elements of the U.S. Constitution:

the phrase “promote the general welfare” in the Preamble [and in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1]. This was a desired result of the adoption of the Constitution, not an edict to redistribute income and wealth [or an unbounded power to tax and spend].

the power of Congress “to regulate commerce…among the several states [Article I, Section 8, Clause 3].” This power was meant to prevent the States from restricting or distorting the terms of trade across their borders, not to enable the federal government to dictate what is traded, how it is made, or how businesses operate.

the authority of Congress “[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof [Article I, Section 8, Clause 18].” The words “necessary and proper” have been wrenched out of their context and used to turn the meaning of this clause upside down. It was meant to limit Congress to the enactment of constitutional legislation, not to give it unlimited legislative authority.

the “equal protection” clause of Amendment XIV: “…nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Amendment XIV was meant to secure the legal equality of those former slaves whose freedom had been secured by Amendment XIII. Amendment XIV became, instead, the basis for Supreme Court decisions and federal laws and regulations that have given special “rights” to specific, “protected” groups by curtailing the constitutional rights of the many who cannot claim affiliation with one or another of the “protected” groups. As the proponents of such groups might ask, is it fair?

Here, with the help of Wikipedia, I sketch our path down the slippery slope to our present state, which I once captured in these questions:

If liberty is so bounteous, why don’t we enjoy it in full? Why are our lives so heavily regulated and legislated by so many federal, State, and local agencies at such a high cost? What happened to the promise of liberty given in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution?

Our way down the slope has been led, of course, by the U.S. Supreme Court. I restrict the following quotations from Wikipedia to historically accurate background material and summaries of the Court’s actions. My notes and comments are in brackets and initialed LC.

The General Welfare Clause (a.k.a. the Taxing and Spending Clause)

Two theories of the taxing power have been advocated by constitutional scholars: (A) the narrower Madisonian view that taxation must be tied to one of the other specifically enumerated powers such as regulating commerce or providing for the military, and (B) the broader Hamiltonian view that taxation is a separately enumerated, independent power, and that Congress may tax and spend in any way that will benefit the general welfare….

[The Madisonian view was] overturned in United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936)^[3]. In that case the Court held that the power to tax and spend is an independent power; that is, that the Taxing and Spending Clause gives Congress power it might not have anywhere else. [See also the history of Social Security, which cites other instances — most notably, the passage of the Social Security Act — in which the Court conveniently adapted its tune to the times, as if Madison’s long-prevailing view of the “tax and spend clause” had been a mere whim of the Court. John Eastman, in “Restoring the General to the General Welfare Clause,” argues at length and convincingly “that the blank check interpretation given to the clause since Butler simply cannot be squared with the original understanding of either Hamilton or Madison.”: LC.]

The modern Supreme Court has interpreted this clause to give Congress a plenary power to impose taxes and to spend money for the general welfare, including the power to force the states to abide by national standards by threatening to withhold federal funds. See South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987)^[4]. [I need say no more: LC.]

The Commerce Clause

In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that….[contrary to Amendment X: LC] “[T]he power of Congress does not stop at the jurisdictional lines of the several states. It would be a very useless power if it could not pass those lines.”…

In Swift v. United States (1905), the Court ruled that the clause covered meatpackers; although their activity was geographically “local,” they had an important effect on the “current of commerce” and thus could be regulated under the Commerce Clause….

The clause was the subject of conflict between the U.S. Supreme Court and the Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935-37 when the Court struck down several of the President’s “New Deal” measures on the grounds that they encroached upon intrastate matters. After winning the 1936 election, FDR proposed a plan to appoint an additional justice for each unretired Justice over 70. Given the age of the current justices this permitted a court population of up to 15….

There was widespread opposition to this “court packing” plan, but in the end the New Deal did not need it to succeed. In what became known as “the switch in time that saved nine,” Justice Owen Josephus Roberts and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes switched sides in 1937 and, in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, upheld the National Labor Relations Act, which gave the National Labor Relations Board extensive power over unions across the country.

In 1941 the Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated the production of goods shipped across state lines. In Wickard v. Filburn, (1942) the Court upheld the Agricultural Adjustment Act, stating that the act of growing wheat on one’s own land, for one’s own consumption, affected interstate commerce, and therefore under the Commerce Clause was subject to federal regulation….

The wide interpretation of the scope of the commerce clause continued following the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which aimed to prevent business from discriminating against black customers. In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), the Court ruled that Congress could regulate a business that served mostly interstate travelers; in Katzenbach v. McClung (1964) the Court ruled that the federal government could regulate Ollie’s Barbecue, which served mostly local clientele but sold food that had previously moved across state lines; and in Daniel v. Paul (1969), the Court ruled that the federal government could regulate a recreational facility because three out of the four items sold at its snack bar were purchased from outside the state….

Many described the Rehnquist Court’s commerce clause cases [links added: LC] as a doctrine of “new federalism”. The outer limits of that doctrine were delineated by Gonzales v. Raich (2005), in which Justices Scalia and Kennedy departed from their previous positions as parts of the Lopez and Morrison majorities to uphold a federal law regarding marijuana. The court found the federal law valid, although the marijuana in question had been grown and consumed within a single state, and had never entered interstate commerce. [Thus giving Congress the power to regulate anything done anywhere within the United States: LC.]

The Necessary and Proper Clause

Strict constructionists interpret the clause to mean that Congress may make a law only if the inability to do so would cripple its ability to apply one of its enumerated powers (“foregoing powers”). Others argue that the elastic clause expands the authority of Congress to all areas tangentially related to one of its enumerated powers. It is often known as the elastic clause because of the great amount of leeway in interpretation it allows….

In McCulloch v. Maryland [1819],…the court held that because the Congress has the power to control national economic policy [a power not specified or enumerated in the Constitution: LC], creating a national bank is necessary and proper to carry out its duties….

The clause has been paired with the commerce clause to provide the constitutional basis for a wide variety of laws. For example, Congress may make it a crime to transport a kidnapped person across state lines, because the transportation would be an act of interstate activity over which the Congress has power. A series of Supreme Court decisions resulting in the desegregation of private businesses, such as hotels and restaurants, were supported on the basis that these business establishments, although not directly engaged in interstate commerce, no doubt had an effect on it. Since the New Deal the Supreme Court has been reluctant to limit the scope of authority allowed under the combination of these clauses. United States v. Lopez was the first modern case finding limits to Congress’s authority in this regard. [Those limits were short-lived, as discussed in the last paragraph of the section on the Commerce Clause: LC.]

The Equal Protection Clause

[T]he Equal Protection Clause, along with the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment, marked a great shift in American constitutionalism. Before the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights protected individual rights only from invasion by the federal government. After the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted, the Constitution also protected rights from abridgement by state governments, even including some rights that arguably were not protected from abridgement by the federal government. In the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment, the states could not, among other things, deprive people of the equal protection of the laws. What exactly such a requirement means, of course, has been the subject of great debate; and the story of the Equal Protection Clause is the gradual explication of its meaning [and the gradual corruption of its meaning: LC].

The next important post[-Civil W]ar case was the Civil Rights Cases (1883), in which the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was at issue. The Act provided that all persons should have “full and equal enjoyment of … inns, public conveyances on land or water, theatres, and other places of public amusement.” In its opinion, the Court promulgated what has since become known as the “State Action Doctrine,” which limits the guarantees of the equal protection clause only to acts done or otherwise “sanctioned in some way” by the state….

The Supreme Court has [ruled] that the equal protection clause itself does not forbid policies which lead to racial disparities, but that Congress may by legislation prohibit such policies. [What the Court taketh away with one hand it giveth back with the other: LC.]

Take, for example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids job discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex or religion. Title VII applies both to private and to public employers. (While Congress applied Title VII to private employers using its interstate commerce power, it applied Title VII to public employers under its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment…. [What Congress cannot do under one judicially created loophole it can do under another: LC.]

Although the Supreme Court had ruled in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited denial of the vote based on race, the first modern application of the Equal Protection Clause to voting law came in Baker v. Carr (1962), where the Court ruled that the districts that sent representatives to the Tennessee state legislature were so malapportioned (with some legislators representing ten times the number of residents as others) that they violated the Equal Protection Clause. This ruling was extended two years later in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), in which a “one man, one vote” standard was laid down: in both houses of state legislatures, each resident had to be given equal weight in representation. [Thus undoing arrangements that the Framers implicitly accepted when they guaranteed each State a republican form of government: LC.]

It may seem counterintuitive that the equal protection clause should provide for equal voting rights; after all, it would seem to make the Fifteenth Amendment and the Nineteenth Amendment redundant. Indeed, it was on this argument, as well as on the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, that Justice John M. Harlan (the grandson of the earlier Justice Harlan) relied in his dissent from Reynolds. Harlan quoted the congressional debates of 1866 to show that the framers did not intend for the Equal Protection Clause to extend to voting rights….[But a majority of the Court is not to be persuaded by the logic and meaning of the Constitution when it has a result to accomplish: LC.]

And so it goes, down the slippery slope of constitutional revisionism toward a dystopian future, in which Congress may recklessly (but with impunity) herd us into absolute, collectivist conformity. What has been done by the Supreme Court is likely to remain done, given stare decisis. And so what has been done will become precedent for the few remaining leaps down the slippery slope. Dystopia, we’re almost there!

Related post: Slopes, Ratchets, and the Death Spiral of Liberty (among many others in the category Constitution – Courts – Law – Justice)

For Labor Day

“The Truth about Labor Day,” from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

“Toward a Capital Theory of Value,” “A Very Politically Incorrect Labor Day Post,” and “Your Labor Day Reading,” by me.

A Telling Contrast

Two tenured professors of economics: the gentlemanly, rather conservative, well published N. Gregory Mankiw vs. the rancid, Leftist, seldom published J. Bradford DeLong.

Then there’s Arthur Miller, the typical I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand* kind of Leftist.
__________
* Linus van Pelt of Peanuts, circa 1963.

My Sentiments, Exactly

Here.

The State of England

It seems to be going the way of Detroit.

"Liberalism," as Seen by Liberals

This is from a book review in The Washington Post. The book attempts to rehabilitate “liberalism” in the United States. The book seems unwittingly to disclose the truth about the modern version of liberalism, which is not liberal all:

…The revolutions in 17th-century England that limited monarchical power, for example, left English subjects paying higher taxes [emphasis added] than any other people in Europe.

By opening up power to progressively broader participation, liberal constitutions have subjected government to scrutiny, criticism and even resistance, and thus have helped to protect citizens against overweening bureaucracies. At the same time, they have made democratic states more legitimate and have enabled them to borrow, tax and, until recently, conscript more and more. Paradoxically, then, constitutionally limited states [i.e., “liberal” states] historically have wielded more power than despotic ones [emphasis added]….

Although [the author] recognizes that those who rebelled against liberalism in the United States felt disrespected by the liberal elite, he pays too little attention to this emotional side of the debate. In an alarmingly colossal understatement, he says of the 1960s, “The experience of that time did give rise to some legitimate concerns about what liberalism stands for and whether it works.” Liberalism’s revival now depends not just on reaffirming its core values and achievements, as Starr does so insightfully, but also on repairing relations with lower-middle-class voters whose religiosity, anxieties about globalization and fears of rapid social change were often dismissed by liberal leaders. To be right is never enough in politics; to appear condescending is fatal.

An enlightened liberal (newsman Frank Mele) sees it this way:

[C]onsidering that I was raised as a good Democrat and a proud liberal, it pains me to have to admit such distaste for the current state of liberalism….

Week after week, I endeavor to write columns which raise questions and propose answers. Week after week I am told by my liberal friends that my questions are foolish and my answers are stupid. Yet I wait in vain for anyone to read my last two columns on global warming and show me where I went wrong. What I hear instead is that “all” the climate scientists in the world agree that global warming is man-made and ruinous, with the implication left hanging or spoken aloud that I am supposed to shut up, get in line and do what I am told.

Sorry, but I don’t work that way.

What I believe in is looking at the evidence for myself, weighing it with the scales of logic and reason, and then making up my own mind. I have been studying the evidence on global warming for more than two years, and for all the reasons already listed the past two weeks I am convinced that this is a manufactured crisis….

It is almost as though liberals are at war with liberalism itself — with the spirit of freedom. Consider, for instance, what liberals themselves say they believe in. Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, wrote an interesting essay on “What it means to be a liberal” in which he lists 10 fundamental principals that encapsulate the liberal position. [For my analysis of Stone’s essay, go here: ED.] Here are the first three:

“1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others.

“2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference.

“3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate….”

Say what?

I just need to look at my mail bag to know that some liberals have gone seriously astray in their efforts to “doubt their own truths” and “be tolerant and respectful of difference.” And as for rights, the only one I know for sure that liberals apportion to me is “the right to remain silent.”

Here are a few examples of liberals “doubting their own truth” in response to my last two columns on global warming (note: grammatical and spelling errors have been corrected):

• “Those who claim that research has been falsified have not been able to demonstrate that to legitimate climatologists. It’s easy to make claims. It’s not so easy to back them up. But I’m not surprised that those on the right don’t understand how science works. Those facts are cleverly hidden in books.”

• “The way Frank Miele cherry-picks factoids to match his Rush Limbaugh opinions right down the line every week is absolutely irresponsible. He says there is no ‘scientific certitude about a long-range trend’ but he doesn’t seem to realize the simple fact that there is no such thing as scientific certitude. There is however something called ‘likelihood.’ The overwhelming evidence is that this warming trend is most likely to be due to human activity. But Frank and his right-wing cronies only like things to be black or white.”

• “Another right-wing rant… Frank does not appear to understand science.”

• “With all your latent scientific knowledge you should be the USA’s leading climate scientist. The problem is not that you’re a schmuck, which you are, or that you’re an a–hole, which you are, but that you’re a damned FOOL.”

Nor is this kind of ambush mentality limited to liberals who read my column, and want to shut me up. It appears to be part and parcel of the liberal agenda to bring all humanity into compliance with — well — the liberal agenda.

An example of this mentality was exhibited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the “Live Earth” concert last month, when he jumped into the vanguard of global warming fanatics by denouncing skeptics as “corporate toadies” for “villainous” enemies. Remarkably, he declared that holding a scientific view counter to his own was “treason,” and said, “we need to start treating them now as traitors.”

“Off with their heads,” as the equally emphatic Queen told Alice in Wonderland.

Fortunately, RFK Jr. does not control public policy yet, but he speaks for a large group of people in this country who want to silence or besmirch the opposition. In a sense, the Global Warming Movement is the framework for a liberals’ version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, although presumably without the bloodshed. Today’s “corporate toadies” would have been called “capitalist roaders” back in 1966 when Mao launched his attack on the culture, history and freedom of his own people — but aren’t they really the same thing? Isn’t the name-calling just an effort to stifle debate?

The Cultural Revolution was an effort to institutionalize Communist Party thinking as the mechanism of massive social change under the guise of inevitable progress. Similarly, the Global Warming Movement is intent on institutionalizing environmental thinking that will lead to massive social change under the guise of indisputable science. Mao used the Cultural Revolution to empower the masses to crush intellectual debate and the free exchange of ideas in the service of the “higher calling” of “class struggle.” The Global Warming Movement is empowering the mass media to crush intellectual debate in the service of the “higher calling” of “saving the planet.”…

Liberal or not, it is up to all of us to listen to opposing ideas, expose ourselves to challenges, and engage in Socratic dialogue. Otherwise we will be no more than stagnant, unevolving, politically correct lumps of mud that will never experience the pleasure of walking upright, unafraid and unbowed.

It is time to live the life of free thought that we espouse.

(Thanks to John Ray for the pointer to Mele’s column.)

Social Norms, State Action, and Liberty

Only a benighted anarchist can believe that liberty consists in doing as one pleases, period. That belief, as I explain here, is antithetical to liberty.

The question then becomes this: When and how are restraints on behavior consistent with liberty? True liberty exists where restraints come in the form of voluntarily evolved social norms, which (and only which) the state enforces, and where there is voice and exit. (The preceding sentence encapsulates the argument of a series of posts, collected here.)

Therefore — I say provocatively — the discriminatory actions of whites toward blacks (and vice versa) may be consistent with liberty, though such actions are not necessarily libertarian, as I will come to. Why “consistent with”? Because many whites have adopted, voluntarily, a social norm which has led them to discriminate against blacks (and vice versa). But…discrimination is (obviously) anti-libertarian when it extends to slavery. Moreover, state-enforced discrimination is anti-libertarian because it does not allow for acts of non-discrimination by those who choose not to discriminate.

By the same token, if discrimination (absent slavery) is practiced widely, but voluntarily, it is libertarian. As I say here,

regardless of how many citizens agree on a particular subject, that agreement is not tantamount to state action if the subject lies outside the power granted the state. Enforcement of an extra-constitutional collective agreement rests on the voluntary submission of citizens to that agreement. The same citizens who entered the collective agreement may dissolve it piecemeal by abandoning it, one or a few at a time, whereas they cannot similarly revoke a power specifically granted the state.

I bring this up because I am weary of “anti-discrimination” measures — extant and proposed — all which have the stated aim of “protecting” various groups based on their color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Such measures, because they are (or would be) state-enforced, are anti-libertarian. The wrong of state-enforced discrimination against blacks does not make right any form of state-enforced discrimination for blacks — or women or any other group. Such discrimination, when you think about it for less than a minute, is state-enforced discrimination against someone. Several wrongs do not justice make.

Continuing, from above,

I conclude that the state has no business telling its citizens how they may or may not carry their racial [or other group-related] attitudes into the conduct of their affairs, as long as that conduct is passive — that is, as long as it takes such forms as not buying from, hiring, or otherwise associating with members of certain groups…[W]e have gone far beyond the abolition of slavery and the granting of equal civil rights. We have practically repudiated freedom of association, we have severely undermined property rights, and — more lately with speech codes and hate-crime laws — we have entered an early stage of thought policing.

Not to mention Euro-style behavior control.

For many, many, related posts, go to:
Affirmative Action – Immigration – Race
Constitution – Courts – Law – Justice
Leftism- Statism – Democracy
Liberty – Libertarianism – Rights
Self-Ownership… – Gender – Etc.

Affirmative Action: Two Views from the Academy, Revisited

I wrote “Affirmative Action: Two Views from the Academy” almost three years ago. What has happened since to the second view, that of UCLA law professor Richard Sander? Sander’s evidence-based article, “A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” (other related links here) concludes that race-based affirmative action hurts, rather than helps, black law students.

Gail Heriot of The Right Coast, who is a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law and a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, pens an update:

No one claims Sander’s findings are the last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny as least as well as the work of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the” mismatch thesis” can be definitively accepted or rejected.

Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Sander’s data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, these thinly-disguised political operatives don’t want anyone to know.

Take William Kidder, a University of California staff member and co-author of a frequently-cited attack of Sander’s study. When Sander and his ideologically-diverse co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California, Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure “risks stigmatizing African American attorneys.” At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, subtly threatened future litigation against the State Bar. Coincidentally, one of Kidder’s co-authors, University of Michigan law professor David Chambers, is a former SALT president.

Sadly, the State Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn’t formally explain their decision to deny Sander’s request for the non-personally-identifiable data, but the root cause is clear: Over the last forty years, many distinguished citizens–university presidents, judges, philanthropists, and other leaders–have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy. If it’s not working, they too don’t want anyone to know.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hopes that it can persuade the State Bar to reconsider. Its newly-released report on affirmative action in law schools specifically calls for state bar authorities to cooperate with qualified scholars studying the mismatch issue. Its recommendation is thus modest. It doesn’t claim that Sander is right or his critics wrong. It simply seeks to encourage and facilitate important research.

Its deeper purpose is to remind those who support and administer affirmative action polices of something that ought to be obvious: The good intentions of one’s predecessors do not give anyone a permanent moral free ride. Good faith requires a willingness to re-examine the consequences of one’s actions from time to time. Deliberate ignorance is not an option….

Sander doesn’t need to be proven 100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative action supporters. Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be simply a wash–neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not least among them the human cost that results from the failure of the supposed affirmative action beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar. Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. The real question therefore is how great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify this. If it is decreasing the number, it can hardly be defended.

Well, it can (and will) be defended if you are a Leftist who is bent on shaping the world to suit his preferences, be they about affirmative action, “global warming,” crime and punishment, defense of the nation, or the host of other topics on which Leftists are obdurately ignorant and wrong. Leftists like to call themselves “reality based,” but reality-based Leftism is an oxymoron of the first rank.

UPDATE: There’s more here, here (but the name is Sander, not Sanders), here, and here.

Democracy and the Irrational Voter

It is well understood that voters, by and large, vote irrationally: emotionally, on the basis of “buzz” instead of facts, and inconsistently. (See this, this, and this, for example.) Voters are prone to vote against their own long-run interests because they do not understand the consequences of the sound-bite policies advocated by politicians (nor do politicians, for that matter). American “democracy,” by indiscriminately granting the franchise — as opposed to limiting it to, say, married property owners over the age of 30 who have children — empowers the run-of-the-mill politician who seeks office (for the sake of prestige, power, and perks) by pandering to the standard, irrational voter.

Essentially, then, democracy is an enemy of liberty, as I have explained several times in various ways:
Democracy vs. Liberty
Something Controversial
Yet Another Look at Democracy
More about Democracy and Liberty
If Liberty Depends on Democracy, We’re Doomed to Slavery
Conservatism, Libertarianism, Socialism, and Democracy

The Upside-Down World of Liberalism

A few examples:

Mutually beneficial economic exchange is a zero-sum game, thus the legalization of labor unions, opposition to free trade, and so on.

Punishment is excessive, except when it comes to white-collar crime.

The absence of war is the “peace” of appeasement and surrender.

The enemies of Western values and capitalism have rights.

The concept of man-made global warming must be defended because…well, because it is a stick with which to beat the very capitalism that enables many rich liberals to bankroll anti-Western, anti-capitalist movements.

The failure of liberalism to come to grips with reality convinces me that most liberals are either dumb or “victims” of arrested emotional development.

The Psychology of Extremism

Extremists of the Right and Left (same thing) have much in common with extreme libertarians. What is that? A tenacious attachment to a set of values that defies reality.

Extremists of all stripes find their happiness in an inner world of their own making. They interact with the rest of the world mainly for two reasons: (a) to satisfy basic needs (making a living, having sex, etc.) and (b) to manipulate others (to the extent that they can) in furtherance of their world-views.

The extremist personality seems to contain one or more of these traits: Alexithymia, autism spectrum disorder, lack of empathy (arising from autism spectrum disorder), and even psychopathy. Except for the more pronounced variants of autism, these are not crippling disorders.

To the contrary, such disorders enable an extremist to maintain an emotional distance — an inner coldness — and thus to pursue his aims without conscience, even while simulating “normality.” The more intelligent, cunning, and socially adaptable the extremist, the more likely he is to accomplish his aims.

Timely Material

Apropos yesterday’s post, “Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice: Part IV,” today I came across these pieces:

In “The downside of diversity,” at The Boston Globe, Michael Jonas reports on a study by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (“E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2), 137–174.). Putnam, according to Jonas,

has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

John Leo, writing at City Journal (“Bowling with Our Own“), first discusses Putnam’s findings; e.g.:

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”…

Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness….

Leo then discusses the fact that Putnam had delayed announcing his findings:

Putnam has long been aware that his findings could have a big effect on the immigration debate. Last October, he told the Financial Times that “he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.” He said it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that,” a quote that should raise eyebrows. Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings…

Though Putnam is wary of what right-wing politicians might do with his findings, the data might give pause to those on the left, and in the center as well. If he’s right, heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born. Putnam is hopeful that eventually America will forge a new solidarity based on a “new, broader sense of we.” The problem is how to do that in an era of multiculturalism and disdain for assimilation.

Myron Magnet, also writing at City Journal (“In the Heart of Freedom, in Chains“), addresses “elite hypocrisy, gangsta culture, and failure in black America.” Magnet asks

how can there still exist a large black urban underclass imprisoned in poverty, welfare dependency, school failure, nonwork, and crime? How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families?

And answers:

The legacy of slavery and racism isn’t the reason, economist Thomas Sowell has long argued [link added]….

Beginning around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure.

What was going on in the mid-sixties that could explain such a startling development? Political scientist Charles Murray gave the first answer to that question: welfare benefits sharply rose just at that moment. Offering more purchasing power than a minimum-wage job, the dole, he argued, provided an economic incentive for women to have out-of-wedlock babies and for their boyfriends to live off their welfare payments, too.

A decade after Murray, I suggested that, though welfare was part of the answer, the real explanation was larger. It was cultural, not economic. Begun by the elites, vast changes reshaped mainstream attitudes in the 1960s. Sex became fine outside marriage, and illegitimacy lost its stigma. Drugs were cool; social authority and tradition weren’t. America was deemed a racist, unjust society that victimized and impoverished blacks, who could rarely better their condition and who therefore deserved generous welfare benefits as reparations for past and present oppression. If blacks committed crime, the system that drove them to it, out of poverty or as an act of protest, was at fault: we shouldn’t blame the victim, as the saying went—meaning the poor criminal, not his prey. Since people shape their actions according to the ideas and beliefs they hold, when these new attitudes reached the inner cities, what could result but an epidemic of social dysfunction?

(Regarding the importance of social “signaling” — and the blocking or reinforcement of it by the state — read this, this, this, this, and this.)

Finally, here’s Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, writing about

Charles Karelis’s truly intriguing The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Poor….

It can make more sense to give money to people on the verge of leaving poverty, rather than people deeply mired in poverty. The former transfer will get people onto “normal” marginal utility curves, but the deeply poor will just squander their new wealth, as it doesn’t much alleviate their unhappiness.

That’s today’s food for thought.

Postive Rights and Cosmic Justice: Part IV

I have published at Liberty Corner II a very long post: “Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice: Part IV.” Here is the bottom line:

Redistribution in an effort to make us “more equal” is not only counterproductive and unfair, it is futile. Or if not entirely futile, largely wasteful. All human beings (or at least those who are citizens and lawful residents of the U.S.) deserve equal rights. But the equal rights they deserve are the negative rights of the original Constitution, not the positive rights sought by generations of so-called liberals and progressives. There is nothing “liberal” or “progressive” (in the root meanings of those words) about redistribution.

I back that up with a long, substantiated argument. Go there and read.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: