Whiners — Left and Libertarian

I have come to the conclusion that the well-spring of whining is a cosseted existence. Thus the American Left (in particular, the rich-to-ultra-rich-Left) — which reaps the economic benefits of liberty under the rule of law — has the luxury of denigrating capitalism, celebrating terrorism, and pushing a degenerate agenda that threatens the social cohesion which is necessary to ordered liberty.

Over on the “libertarian” side there are many (too numerous to link) who seem to equate almost any preventive effort to detect and defeat terrorists as a threat to liberty — even as a form of “enslavement,” for example. And yet . . . there has been no “chilling” of free speech (far from it), American citizens (except a couple of known enemy combatants) have not been held incommunicado, and Americans are not being rounded up and made to show their “papers.”

In short, life proceeds apace, except in the fevered imaginations of libertarian purists and their brethren of the Left. Their ideal world has no room in it for the dirty, day-to-day business of preserving liberty. Liberty is something that simply must exist effortlessly, experience to the contrary. Nothing less than a world of perfect liberty will do — in the perfect stateless world of libertarian purists, and in the perfect (and self-contradictory) state-designed world of Leftists.

What rich Leftists and libertarian purists have in common is their detachment from reality. They take for granted the degree of liberty that they enjoy because of the rule of law. Rich Leftists don’t have to live in the real world. When they choose to go there they are only slumming (with bodyguards), and they can leave when they wish. Libertarian purists may encounter the real world, but its orderliness deludes them. They object to the state when it inconveniences or offends them, but they fail to remark that the state (not its absence) is what enables most of them to survive the real world.

In sum, the worldviews of rich Leftists and libertarian purists are delusions made possible by the ordered liberty in which they live. They are like rebellious adolescents who accept the largesse bestowed on them by the very parents whom they disdain, despise, and even reject.

AnalPhilosopher: Richard A. Posner on Utopianism
Moi: The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism, A Dissonant Vision

Anti-Western Values, in the West

UPDATED

I came across ~~two~~ three excellent posts today. There’s “Oncoming” at davidwarrenonline, which includes this:

It is only in retrospect that we understand what happened as the 1930s progressed — when a spineless political class, eager at any price to preserve a peace that was no longer available, performed endless demeaning acts of appeasement to the Nazis; while the Nazis created additional grievances to extract more.

This is precisely what is happening now, as we are confronted by the Islamist fanatics, whose views and demands are already being parroted by fearful “mainstream” Muslim politicians. We will do anything to preserve a peace that ceased to exist on 9/11. Not one of our prominent politicians dares even to name the enemy.

And there’s “The Suicidal Left: Civilizations and their Death Drives” at The American Thinker, in which Vasko Kohlmayer observes:

Deeply averse to the West’s moral code, the Left contemptuously refers to it as bourgeois morality. It denigrates the West’s cultural triumphs, contending they are no more unique than those of other societies. It disparages the West’s past by painting it as nothing more than an amalgamation of oppression, exploitation and all-around ignominy.

Scoffing at the notion of the limited State, the Left rejects the climax of western political tradition. And the Left, of course, despises free market capitalism – the West’s economic foundation – which it claims to be inherently exploitative, unfair or worse.

The Left, however, does not confine itself to mere criticism, but aggressively seeks to transform its anti-Western attitude into reality. Even a cursory glance at some of its successes should give us an idea of just how effective its efforts have been.

Virtually demolishing the West’s traditional morality, the Left has managed to legitimize promiscuity, illegitimacy, abortion and homosexuality. This transformation has reached a point where in many quarters these behaviors are not only considered acceptable but outright commendable.

Through its aggressive atheism, the Left has succeeded in virtually eliminating Christianity from our public arena, and to a large degree from the private sphere as well. This trend has been especially pronounced in Europe where only some seven percent of the population engage in some form of regular religious observance. . . .

The West’s moral decline, the collapse of its religion, economic sluggishness, and the indifference to its own historical and cultural achievements – all this is the Left’s doing. Ominously, it has succeeded in inculcating large segments of the western population with contempt for their own culture and heritage. This is a dire state indeed, for no society that is despised by its own people can go on for very long.

Regardless of its rhetoric or avowed objective, the driving force behind the Left’s every movement is to strike against some aspect of Western society. Environmentalism, for instance, hits at the West’s economic foundation of free-market capitalism. Multiculturalism seeks to unravel its cultural coherence. The gay rights movement strikes at its moral underpinnings, and so on. The Left, of course, will deny the real reason for its actions. But to evaluate the true value of any act we need to look at its effect not the rhetoric behind it. And the effects of the Left’s actions are invariably – in one way or another – destructive to the West.

The Left’s gains have been greatly facilitated by its ingenious modus operandi, which is to cloak its destructive intent in the language of good causes. Civil rights, gender equality, ecological preservation are among some of its favorite ploys. The ostensible caring is not real, for these are not at all what the Left’s efforts are ultimately about.

The West’s greatest threat is neither Islam nor any other external foe. It is its own political Left. All the great ills and woes under which our civilization so agonizingly belabors – and under the weight of which it is slowly sinking – have been either brought on or inflamed by it.

To which I add: The Left’s weakening of the West makes the West more vulnerable to militant Islam.

UPDATE: I have just come across a column by Dennis Prager at townhall.com, where Prager has this to say:

For a decade or more, it has been a given on the Left that Israel is to blame for terror committed against Israelis by Palestinian Muslims (Palestinian Christians don’t engage in suicide terror). What else are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they had Apache helicopters, the argument goes, they would use them. But they don’t, so they use the poor man’s nuclear weapon — suicide terror.

The same argument is given to explain 9-11. Three thousand innocent Americans were incinerated by Islamic terrorists because America has been meddling in the Middle East so long. This was bound to happen. And, anyway, don’t we support Israel?

And when Muslim terrorists blew up Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,500 others, the Left in Spain and elsewhere blamed Spanish foreign policy. After all, the Spanish government had sent troops into Iraq.

When largely Muslim rioters burned and looted for a month in France, who was blamed? France, of course — France doesn’t know how to assimilate immigrants, and, as the BBC reported on Nov. 5, 2005, “[Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy’s much-quoted description of urban vandals as ‘rabble’ a few days before the riots began is said by many to have already created tension.” Calling rabble “rabble” causes them to act like to rabble. . . .

[O]ne way to describe the moral divide between conservatives and liberals is whom they blame for acts of evil committed against innocent people, especially when committed by non-whites and non-Westerners. Conservatives blame the perpetrators, and liberals blame either the victims’ group or the circumstances. . . .

We don’t know who will be the next target of Islamic or other murderers from poor or non-Western or non-white groups. All we can know is that liberal and leftist thought will find reasons to hold the targeted group largely responsible.

Lefty Profs
Apropos Academic Freedom and Western Values
Riots, Culture, and the Final Showdown
Government’s Role in Social Decline
Capitalism, Liberty, and Christianity

Sunstein and Executive Power

Cass Sunstein endorses unilateral executive action. But Sunstein doesn’t mean to endorse George W. Bush’s use of executive power to defend America. Sunstein’s aim is to justify the resuscitation Franklin D. Roosevelt’s disastrous New Deal.

Sunstein at the Volokh Conspiracy
More from Sunstein
Call Me a Constitutional Lawyer
(Sen)seless Economics
Cass Sunstein’s Truly Dangerous Mind
An (Imaginary) Interview with Cass Sunstein
Slippery Sunstein

Apropos Academic Freedom and Western Values

My recent post about “Lefty Profs” sparked a post by Joe Miller at Bellum et Mores. There, Joe has penned “A Defense of the Loony Left“), which is really a witty defense of academic freedom, not of the loony left.

This post adds to what I have said in “Lefty Profs” and “A Politically Incorrect Democrat” (which is about Larry Summers’s decision to step down as president of Harvard). An unspoken but very real motivation for those posts is the danger that the so-called loony left poses to the very freedoms we enjoy because of Western culture. Apropos that theme, Keith Windschuttle has posted a long essay at thesydneyline entitled “The Adversary Culture: The perverse anti-Westernism of the cultural elite.” Along the way, Winschuttle observes:

Cultural relativism claims there are no absolute standards for assessing human culture. Hence all cultures should be regarded as equal, though different. It comes in two varieties: soft and hard.

The soft version now prevails in aesthetics. Take a university course in literary criticism or art theory and you will now find traditional standards no longer apply. Italian opera can no longer be regarded as superior to Chinese opera. The theatre of Shakespeare was not better than that of Kabuki, only different.

The hard version comes from the social sciences and from cultural studies. Cultural practices from which most Westerners instinctively shrink are now accorded their own integrity, lest the culture that produced them be demeaned.

There are absolute standards for assessing human culture. Here’s mine: A culture that respects life, fosters liberty, and protects the pursuit of happiness will — among other things — yield economic well-being greater than that of a culture which does not repect life, foster liberty, or protect the pursuit of happiness.

Windschuttle concludes:

The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam, the idea of objective inquiry had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. In the twentieth century, the first thing that every single communist government in the world did was suppress it.

But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. All of these thinkers profoundly offended the conventional wisdom of their day, and at great personal risk, in some cases to their lives but in all cases to their reputations and careers. But because they inherited a culture that valued free inquiry and free expression, it gave them the strength to continue.

Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to resist.

The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies.

My counsel isn’t to round up the loony left and ship it off to Afghanistan, salutary as that might be for the loony left and the rest of us. No, my counsel is that those of us who value the best of Western culture must vigilantly defend it against the depradations of the loony left. That is why I speak out.

(Thanks to Political Correctness Watch for the link to Windschuttle’s essay.)

Another Voice Against the New Paternalism

Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia weighs in:

If we think of a person as consisting of multiple selves—the present self who wishes to indulge in transient pleasures versus the future self who wishes to be healthy—then arguably the present self’s choices can force externalities on the future self. Those within-person externalities have been dubbed “internalities.” And just as we might impose a pollution tax on a factory to control the externality problem, we mightimpose a sin tax on items like cigarettes, alcohol, and fatty foods to control the internality problem.

The concept of internalities, although not yet a part of mainstream economics, is gaining attention. It is one among many novel economic models recently deployed by a new generation of paternalists. Paternalistic arguments advocate forcing or manipulating individuals to change their behavior for their own good, as distinct from the good of others. At one time paternalists argued that adults, like children, don’t really know what’s best for them. Some preferences, they argued, such as those for unhealthy food or casual sex, are just wrong. But such arguments hold little sway in a free society, where most people believe they should be able to pursue their own values and preferences even if others don’t share them. So the “new” paternalists have wisely chosen not to question people’s preferences directly; instead, they argue that internalities (and other sources of error in decisionmaking) can lead people to make decisions that are unwise even according to their own values and preferences.

In short, the old paternalism said, “We know what’s best for you, and we’ll make you do it.” The new paternalism says, “You know what’s best for you, and we’ll make you do it.”. . .

First, the new paternalism blithely assumes that, when your present self can impose costs on your future self, the outcome is necessarily bad. But preventing harm to the future self might involve even greater harm to the present self. There’s no valid reason to assume, when there is an inconsistency between present and future interests, that the latter must trump the former.

Second, the new paternalism ignores the fact that harms can be avoided in multiple ways. Restricting present behavior is one way to reduce future harms, but that doesn’t make it the best way. The future self might be capable of mitigating the harm at lower cost by other means.

Third, the new paternalism neglects the possibility of internal bargains and private solutions. All of us face self-control problems from time to time. But we also find ways to solve, or at least mitigate, those problems. We make deals with ourselves. We reward ourselves for good behavior and punish ourselves for bad. We make promises and resolutions, and we advertise them to our friends and families. We make commitments to change our own behavior. Internality theorists point to these behaviors as evidence that the internality problem exists. But they are actually evidence of the internality problem being solved, at least to some degree.

People are not perfect, so we should not expect real people’s actions to mimic those of perfectly rational and perfectly consistent beings. Mistakes will occur; self-control problems will persist. But paternalist solutions will solve them no better than personal solutions. What is really at stake is how self-control problems will be addressed—through private, voluntary means or through the force of government.

The new paternalists would have us believe that benevolent government can—through taxes, subsidies, restrictions on the availability of products, and so on—make us happier according to our own preferences. But even if we place little or no value on freedom of choice for its own sake, the paternalists’ recommendations simply don’t follow. Public officials lack the information and incentives necessary to craft paternalist policies that will help the people who most need help, while not harming those who don’t need the help or who need help of a different kind. Individuals, on the other hand, have every reason to understand their own needs and find suitable means of solving their own problems.

That’s just what I’ve been saying:

The Rationality Fallacy
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
Back-Door Paternalism

Lefty Profs

Orin Kerr’s post about “Radicals in Higher Education” at The Volokh Conspiracy has drawn 138 comments (and still counting). Here’s the post:

Last week, Sean Hannity expressed the following concern on Hannity & Colmes:

Kids are indoctrinated. They’re a captive audience. What can be done to remove these professors with these radical ideas from campus?

Michael Berube responds here.

Professor Bérubé also responds with a comment, in which he replies to some of the early comments and offers a link to his lengthy defense of academic freedom. (Which I may bother to eviscerate someday.) But the real issue isn’t academic freedom, it’s the one-sided political tilt that prevails in the academy.

My own comment:

Professor Bérubé protests too much. I have no time for Sean Hannity, but the essence (if not the tone) of Hannity’s question deserves a thoughtful reply. The usual appeal to academic freedom is no more than an effort to deflect attention from the intellectual bankruptcy of leftist academic cant. I have not noticed that Americans are better off for having been subjected to such cant. It took me a few decades to outgrow my own “indoctrination” at the hands of the mostly left-leaning faculty at a State-supported university. And I suspect that my alma mater was far less to the left when I went there in the Dark Ages of the late 1950s and early 1960s than it is today. As for the bias evident in Professor Bérubé’s own port-side emissions, I had this to say a while back about a piece Bérubé wrote for The Nation:

Michael Bérubé [is] a professional academic who is evidently bereft of experience in the real world. His qualifications for writing about affirmative action? He teaches undergraduate courses in American and African-American literature, and graduate courses in literature and cultural studies. He is also co-director of the Disability Studies Program, housed in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State.

Writing from the ivory tower for the like-minded readers of The Nation (“And Justice for All“), Bérubé waxes enthusiastic about the benefits of affirmative action, which — to his mind — “is a matter of distributive justice.” Bérubé, in other words, subscribes to “the doctrine that a decision is just or right if all parties receive what they need or deserve.” Who should decide what we need or deserve? Why, unqualified academics like Bérubé, of course. Fie on economic freedom! Fie on academic excellence! If Bérubé and his ilk think that a certain class of people deserve special treatment, regardless of their qualifications as workers or students, far be it from the mere consumers of the goods and services of those present and future workers to object. Let consumers eat inferior cake.

Bérubé opines that “advocates of affirmative action have three arguments at their disposal.” One of those arguments is that

diversity in the classroom or the workplace is not only a positive good in itself but conducive to greater social goods (a more capable global workforce and a more cosmopolitan environment in which people engage with others of different backgrounds and beliefs).

Perhaps Bérubé knows the meaning of “capable global workforce.” If he does, he might have shared it with his readers. As for a workplace that offers a “cosmopolitan environment” and engagement “with others of different backgrounds and beliefs” I say: where’s the beef? As a consumer, I want value for my money. What in the hell does diversity — as defined by Bérubé — have to do with delivering value? Perhaps that’s one reason U.S. jobs are outsourced. (I have nothing against that, but it shouldn’t happen because of inefficiency brought about by affirmative action.) Those who seek a cosmopolitan environment and engagement with others of different backgrounds and beliefs can have all of it they want — on their own time — just by hanging out in the right (or wrong) places.

Alhough Bérubé seems blind to the economic cost of affirmative action, he is willing to admit that the practice has some shortcomings:

Affirmative action in college admissions has been problematic, sometimes rewarding well-to-do immigrants over poor African-American applicants–except that all the other alternatives, like offering admission to the top 10 or 20 percent of high school graduates in a state, seem to be even worse, admitting badly underprepared kids from the top tiers of impoverished urban and rural schools while keeping out talented students who don’t make their school’s talented tenth. In the workplace, affirmative action has been checkered by fraud and confounded by the indeterminacy of racial identities–and yet it’s so popular as to constitute business as usual for American big business, as evidenced by the sixty-eight Fortune 500 corporations, twenty-nine former high-ranking military leaders and twenty-eight broadcast media companies and organizations that filed amicus briefs in support of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action programs in the recent Supreme Court cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

Stop right there, professor. Affirmative action is “popular” because it’s the law and it’s also a politically correct position that boards of directors, senior corporate managers, and government officials, and military leaders can take at no obvious cost to themselves. Further, those so-called leaders are sheltered from the adverse consequences of affirmative action on the profitability and effectiveness of their institutions by imperfect competition in the private sector and bureaucratic imperatives in the government sector.

As I wrote in “Race, Intelligence, and Affirmative Action,” here’s how affirmative action really operates in the workplace:

If a black person seems to have something like the minimum qualifications for a job, and if the black person’s work record and interviews aren’t off-putting, the black person is likely to be hired or promoted ahead of equally or better-qualified whites. Why?

* Pressure from government affirmative-action offices, which focus on percentages of minorities hired and promoted, not on the qualifications of applicants for hiring and promotion.

* The ability of those affirmative-action offices to put government agencies and private employers through the pain and expense of extensive audits, backed by the threat of adverse reports to higher ups (in the case of government agencies) and fines and the loss of contracts (in the case of private employers).

* The ever-present threat of complaints to the EEOC (or its local counterpart) by rejected minority candidates for hiring and promotion. Those complaints can then be followed by costly litigation, settlements, and court judgments.

* Boards of directors and senior managers who (a) fear the adverse publicity that can accompany employment-related litigation and (b) push for special treatment of minorities because they think it’s “the right thing to do.”

* Managers down the line learn to go along and practice just enough reverse discrimination to keep affirmative-action offices and upper management happy.

I reject Bérubé’s counsel about academic freedom as utterly as I reject his counsel about affirmative action. Academic freedom seems to be fine for leftists as long as they hold the academy in thrall. More parents would send their children to schools that aren’t dominated by leftists if (a) there were enough such schools and (b) the parents could afford to do so. But the left’s grip on the academy seems to be as secure as the grip of the labor unions on the American auto industry — and you can see what has happened to the auto industry as a result.

As I wrote here,

The larger marketplace of ideas counteracts much of what comes out of universities — in particular the idiocy that emanates from the so-called liberal arts and social sciences. But that’s no reason to continue wasting taxpayers’ money on ethnic studies, gender studies, and other such claptrap. State legislatures can and should tell State-funded universities to spend less on liberal arts and social sciences and spend more on the teaching of real knowledge: math, physics, chemistry, engineering, and the like. That strikes me as a reasonable and defensible stance.

It isn’t necessary for State legislatures to attack particular individuals who profess left-wing blather. All the legislatures have to do is insist that State-funded schools spend taxpayers’ money wisely, by focusing on those disciplines that advance the sum of human knowledge. Isn’t that what universities are supposed to do?

For another view, let us consult Katherine Ernst’s City Journal review of David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Some choice bits:

The Professors profiles scores of unrepentant Marxists, terrorist-sympathizers (the number of profs expressing utter hatred for the US and Israel is astounding), and the just plain nutty working in today’s American academe. . . . The hostility to the free society, venomous racism—it’s open season on whites and Jews, apparently—and total disregard for objectivity of these far-left-wing ideologues add up to a travesty of the idea of higher education.

These academics—whose radicalism is widespread in today’s university—are “dangerous” not because they hold such beliefs, Horowitz argues, but because they replace scholarship and the transmission of knowledge with classroom activism and the ideological subjugation of paying students. . . . Horowitz is clear: everyone “has a perspective and therefore a bias.” Academics, however, have an obligation “not to impose their biases on students as though they were scientific facts.” Academe’s left-wing establishment—which first conquered its turf during the sixties countercultural movement—is so sure of its intellectual supremacy over conservative dolts and their military-industrial-complex buddies in the White House and corporate America, that it believes it’s obligated to spread the left-wing gospel to unsuspecting students. They need to save the world from the war-mongering criminal class running the country, after all!

Stories of indoctrination run through the book, from the education instructor who required her students to screen Fahrenheit 9/11 a week before the 2004 presidential election, to the criminology professor whose final exam asked students to “Make the case that George Bush is a war criminal.” (The prof later claimed the request was to “Make the argument that the military action of the U.S. attacking Iraq was criminal,” but he had conveniently destroyed all his copies of the original exam.) Once again, the academics’ own words do the loudest talking. Saint Xavier University’s Peter Kirstein: “Teaching is . . . NOT a dispassionate, neutral pursuit of the ‘truth.’ It is advocacy and interpretation.” . . .

Faux-intellectual academic fields like “Peace Studies” are now the latest fad gobbling up university capital. Basically, they’re advocacy platforms for college credit. “Why, if the Joneses want to spend $40,000 for Bobby to study ‘Marxist Perspectives on Fema-Chicana Lit,’ by all means, let them,” some might respond. Yet as The Professors warns, the craziness has inexorably spread to fields that once held sacrosanct the pursuit of objective knowledge. Members of Horowitz’s 101 teach economics, history, and English Literature, among other standard subjects.

Many of The Professors’ profiles offer outrages matching those of Ward Churchill, the infamous 9/11-victims-were-Nazis prof. The lunacy that was Professor Churchill, it’s worth remembering, enjoyed adoration for decades within academe until the public caught on. It may be wishful thinking, but if Horowitz’s book reaches enough hands, there could be some long-overdue collegiate shake-ups this year.

Let us hope so. “Academic freedom” is not a license to waste the money of taxpayers, parents, and students on propagandizing. Academics — like politicians — aren’t owed a living, in spite of their apparent belief to the contrary. It isn’t a violation of “academic freedom” or freedom of speech to say “The junk you teach is worthless, and besides that you don’t teach, you preach. Begone!”

Related posts: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech (a collection of links)

Those Hard-to-Find Items

You say you can’t buy a left-handed buggy whip anywhere? Need a button hook for those shoes you’ve had since 1900? Having a hard time finding replacement blades for your Schick Injector Razor? Just move to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. If a store in Massachusetts doesn’t stock something you’d like to buy, the Commonwealth’s bureaucrats will set things straight.

Negotiating with Fanatics

“If you reward cruelty with kindness, with what do you reward kindness?”
–Hillel

Related: Rick Moran’s piece at The American Thinker about how “The left hasn’t learned a damned thing from 9/11.”

(Thanks to Dr. Helen for the quotation from Hillel.)

Anarcho-Authoritarianism

I picked up the term from Ed Driscoll, who points to a Weekly Standard review by Fred Siegel of a biography of H.L. Mencken. Siegel explains anarcho-authoritarianism, taking Mencken as an exemplar of it:

Part of the reason it’s so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that “a marketplace of ideas” (to use Justice Holmes’s term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it [free speech] in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel. [Emphasis added by me.]

In other words, for Mencken and his ilk liberty is a personal convenience, not a general principle. Mencken showed his true colors when he wrote disdainfully of the “booboisie” (boob + bourgoisie). Mencken was a closeted statist who compensated for his frustrated ambitions by ridiculing those whom he could not dominate. A different kind of compensatory rhetoric is to be found these days mainly on what we call (inaccurately) the Left. As I wrote recently, Leftists

have become apocalyptic in their outlook: the environment will kill us, our food is poisonous, defense is a military-industrial plot, we’re running out of oil, we can’t defeat terrorism, etc., etc., etc. . . .

The emphasis on social restraints [in order to avert the apocalypse] means social engineering writ large. [The Leftist] wants a society that operates according to his strictures. But society refuses to cooperate, and so he conjures historically and scientifically invalid explanations for the behavior of man and nature. By doing so he is able to convince himself and his fellow travelers that the socialist vision is the correct one. He and his ilk cannot satisfy their power-lust in the real world, so they retaliate by imagining a theoretical world of doom. It is as if they walk around under a thought balloon which reads “Take that!”

Mencken, the closeted statist, settled for ridicule. Today’s not-so-closeted statists cannot be content with ridicule; they must instead consign the objects of their derision to an imaginary hell.

Government’s Role in Social Decline

Americans have come to expect much from government. There is the notion that government is supposed to provide a “social safety net” for ourselves, our children, our elderly parents. Then there is the idea that government is supposed to ban things that are bad for us and force us to do things that are good for us (e.g., smoking bans and mandatory seatbelt laws). Related to that is the use of government to make the world a sightlier and more pleasant place by zoning private property, providing public parks, banning billboards, and suchlike. Finally (for now), there is the idea that government should be “in charge” of certain endeavors, such as education, broadcasting, stock trading, election campaigns, and private voluntary conduct that might affect the “rights” of certain “protected” groups of persons.

The realization of all those expectations (and more) has had these effects:

Americans have learned dependence, instead of self-reliance.

Civil society has all but vanished, and with it our ability to solve problems and resolve conflicts cooperatively. Instead, we are forced by government to accept one-size-fits-all solutions.

As someone once said, the symbol of America is supposed to be the eagle, not the clam.

The Left Is No Longer (in My Lexicon)

I have for too long used “the Left” as a synonym for statist appeasers who oppose economic freedom, freedom of association, free speech, and much else that the Constitution stands for. I will henceforth refer to their ilk as “the Opposition” and — when it is appropriate — “the Disloyal Opposition.”

Liberty and "Fairness"

Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy posts a question from a student:

I consider myself to be a classical liberal (free trade, freedom of expression, freedom of religion …)with an exceptionally large bleeding heart (there is no excuse for having hungry kids or the mentally ill out on the streets), but I am trying to understand what it means to be a libertarian.

My advice: I recommend Arnold Kling’s Learning Economics, which is available on the web, here. But I would like to deal directly with the student’s implied question, which seems to be how the “less fortunate” would cope under a regime of liberty.

The student implies that there is a tension between liberty and what he or she might call “fairness.” The idea seems to be that some kids are hungry and some mentally ill persons are homeless because . . . because what? Because persons who are not hungry or homeless have taken food and health care from the hungry and homeless? No, that can’t be the answer, if you understand that the economy isn’t a zero-sum game.

Perhaps the hungry are hungry and the homeless are homeless because those who are “more fortunate” aren’t paying enough taxes to provide for our “less fortunate” fellow citizens? On the contrary, taxes (and regulations) stifle economic growth, which benefits everyone who is willing and able to work. That includes the parents of children who might otherwise go hungry. That includes persons who are prone to mental illness but who would have greater access to health care, given a job and/or health-care benefits.

So, a regime of liberty would actually be to the advantage of most of the “less fortunate” among us. The “least fortunate” would benefit from private charity, which is stifled by the present regime, which I call the regulatory-welfare state.

For more about the effects of the regulatory-welfare state on the general welfare, go here. For evidence that taxation suppresses private charity, go here and read to the end.

Conservatism, Libertarianism, and "The Authoritarian Personality"

The Myth

There is a renewed effort to identify conservatism with racism and authoritarianism. It’s not quite as overt as that (except on the hard Left), but it goes like this (corrective analysis in brackets):

Bush voters (and only Bush voters) are “conservative.” [What kind of “conservative”? A Burkean, limited-government, classical liberal who knows that evolved social traditions contain much wisdom and who therefore opposes change when it is imposed by the state? A neo-isolationist protectionist like Pat Buchanan, who spouts many of the same lines as “liberal” Lou Dobbs? A “redneck” who hates government except when it comes time to pick up his welfare check? A life-long Democrat who goes to church and tries to obey the Ten Commandments? The Burkean is a conservative. The Democrat has conservative tendencies (probably unacknowledged). Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, and the “redneck” simply exude certain attitudes, not coherent philosophies of governance. Define your terms.]

Research “shows” that Bush voters are racist. [Actually, an uncontrolled, online “experiment” (see first three links above) purports to find an unspecified degree of correlation between (a) persons whose (unverified) zip codes coincide with congressional districts where Bush prevailed and (b) a somewhat more negative, self-reported (i.e., calculated) reaction to black persons than that of test-takers whose (unverified) zip codes coincide with congressional districts where Bush did not prevail. It would be just as valid to conclude that Bill Clinton is a racist because his daughter did not attend public schools in the mostly black District of Columbia. Actually, Bill Clinton’s condescendion toward black persons does strike me as a form of compensation for latent racist tendencies.]

Hitler was “conservative.” [The canard that will not die. Hitler was a statist Leftist who would have been at home in today’s Democrat Party.]

Hitler and his adherents were racist authoritarians. [The part about “racist authoritarians” is an undeniable truth, which — when linked to the myth that Hitler was “conservative” — ties Republicans and “conservatives” (of whatever stripe) to racist authoritarianism. The modern liberal agenda of taxation and regulation is patently authoritarian in nature, yet a “good liberal” — who cannot see that his or her agenda is authoritarian — also denies his or her own racism by bending over backward to seem non-racist, regardless of the truth of the matter.]

Therefore, conservatives are racist authoritarians. [The implication here is that conservatism is authoritarian (and therefore racist, by the Hitler analogy). Yet, the reverse is true. Modern liberalism is authoritarian, and Burkean conservatives-classical liberals-libertarians have resisted modern liberalism since its ascendancy in the 1930s.]

The line of “reasoning” that I have just “fisked” illustrates three types of logical fallacy: false dilemma, false choice, and package deal. In this instance, the perpetrators of the fallacies do not know, or care, about their logical failings. Their aim is simply to convey the following message: Conservatism is sociopathic, if not psychopathic. They do not wish to distinguish among brands of conservatism: all are anathema to those who perpetrate and pertpetuate the myth that conservatism is a psychological illness on a par with Hitler’s pathological racist authoritarianism.

Academic Origins and Echoes

The effort to portray conservativism as an aberrant psychological disorder goes back to the publication in 1950 of The Authoritarian Personality, about which I was instructed by Prof. Milton Rokeach, author of The Open and Closed Mind (related links). Here is how Alan Wolfe, who is sympathetic to the thesis of The Authoritarian Personality, describes its principal author:

Theodor Adorno, the senior author, was a member of the influential Frankfurt school of “critical theory,” a Marxist-inspired effort to diagnose the cultural deformities of late capitalism.

Hmm. . . . Very interesting.

Wolfe continues:

Unlike much postwar social science, The Authoritarian Personality did not present data showing the correlations between authoritarianism and a variety of variables such as social class, religion, or political affiliation. Instead the authors tried to draw a composite picture of people with authoritarian leanings: Perhaps their most interesting finding was that such people identify with the strong and are contemptuous of the weak. Extensive case studies of particular individuals were meant to convey the message that people who seemed exceptionally conventional on the outside could be harboring radically intolerant thoughts on the inside.

Despite its bulk, prestigious authors, and seeming relevance, however, The Authoritarian Personality never did achieve its status as a classic. Four years after its publication, it was subject to strong criticism in Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality” (Free Press, 1954), edited by the psychologists Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda.Two criticisms were especially devastating, one political, the other methodological.

How, the University of Chicago sociologist Edward A. Shils wanted to know, could one write about authoritarianism by focusing only on the political right? In line with other works of the 1950s, such as Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, 1951), Shils pointed out that “Fascism and Bolshevism, only a few decades ago thought of as worlds apart, have now been recognized increasingly as sharing many very important features.” The United States had its fair share of fellow travelers and Stalinists, Shils argued, and they too worshiped power and denigrated weakness. Any analysis that did not recognize that the extremes of left and right were similar in their authoritarianism was inherently flawed.

Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley, survey-research specialists, scrutinized every aspect of The Authoritarian Personality’s methodology and found each wanting. Sampling was all but nonexistent. The wording of the questionnaire was flawed. The long, open-ended interviews were coded too subjectively. No method existed for determining what caused what. Whatever the subjects said about themselves could not be verified. The F scale lacked coherence.

Composite pictures, case studies, exclusion of Leftist dogmas, not to mention seriously flawed methods. Wolfe nevertheless defends the flawed methods by saying “social science being what it is, fault can be found with any methodology” — which is really a condemnation of social science, not its critics. (One might use Wolfe’s reasoning to excuse murder.)

Wolfe then tries to deflate Shils’s “political” criticism by arguing as follows:

Certainly the criticisms of Edward Shils seem misplaced 50 years on. Communism really did have some of the authoritarian characteristics of fascism, yet Communism is gone from the Soviet Union and without any influence in the United States. . . .

If one could find contemporary “authoritarians of the left” to match those on the right, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality could rightly be criticized for their exclusive focus on fascism.

Wolfe would have us believe that Communism and fascism are essentially different. They are not, in that both are extreme manifestations of authoritarianism. Wolfe also would have us believe that the official demise of Communism somehow precludes the rise of “authoritarians of the left.” But Wolfe, like a fish in water, is unable to see that liberty in the United States has receded largely because of the efforts of the Democrat Party. “Democrat” simply has a nicer ring than “Communist.” (It’s like the Ministry of Peace in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Wolfe sees authoritarianism only when it seems to emanate from the Republican Party. Actually, now that the Communist Party is safely beyond criticism, Wolfe is free to apply the label “authoritarian” in the same undisriminating way that John Birchers used to apply the label “Communist.”

How does Rokeach’s work relate to Adorno’s? Here’s Rokeach, in his own words:

The Open and Closed Mind grew out of my need to better understand and thus to better resist
continuing pressures during my earlier years on my intellectual independence, on the one side from orthodox religion and on the other side from orthodox Marxism-Leninism.

Research as a continuation of adolescent rebellion? Hmm. . . . I wonder what Dr. Freud would make of that?

An Academician’s Corrective

Let’s turn to Australian psychologist John J. Ray, who assesses The Authoritarian Personality, The Open and Closed Mind, and related works in “Does Authoritarianism of Personality Go With Conservatism?“:

The problem that has plagued 30 years of work on authoritarianism is doubt about the validity of the scales used to measure it. From the start there was the apparently inexplicable fact that authoritarian governments on the world scene were at least as likely to be Left wing as Right wing. . . .

We now have data from three separate societies which suggest that when authoritarianism of personality is validly measured, it shows no association with political ideology. To reconcile this with previous findings we must insist on the distinction between authoritarianism of attitudes and authoritarianism of personality. One refers to how a person habitually feels and the other refers to how he behaves. . . .

It was because they failed to make such a distinction that Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950) [The Authoritarian Personality] mistakenly identified the person who tended to admire traditional authority with the person who himself liked to dominate others. . . . One group admires authority because they would like to exercise it themselves while the other group admires it because they are so incapable of exercising it themselves. It is the former group that most of us would identify as authoritarian but the latter group which gets high scores on the F and related scales [devised by Adorno, Rokeach, and others]. . . .

It would seem, then, that if we wish to detect people something like the ones Adorno et al. (1950) had in mind, we need to know their scores on both a scale of authoritarian attitudes and a scale of authoritarian personality. It is only high scorers on both who fit their image of the Fascist personality. Authoritarian personalities alone are equally likely to be found on either side of the Left-Right divide. [All emphasis added by me.]

There’s more in Ray’s article about “Libertarians and the Authoritarian Personality.” Keep in mind, as you read the following excerpts, the proximity of Burkean conservatism to libertarianism:

The literature starts out with the now-famous book by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality. This book had its genesis in an attempt by these four Jewish scholars to explain the rise of German Nazism. Most of the research reported in the book, however, was done in California.

These authors constructed a “scale” (list) of authoritarian attitudes which they administered to a wide variety of population samples. They found that those who “scored high” on this scale (endorsed most items on the list) tended to be sympathetic to the political Right and in fact showed “pre-fascist” personalities. . . .

A follow-up book by Christie and Jahoda challenged the California findings on both methodological and substantive grounds. . . . Methodologically, the point was raised that Adorno et al. had included in their list of attitudes only pro-authority items. There were no actual pro-liberty items. One could only express pro-liberty attitudes by rejecting pro-authority statements. . . . A high scorer could be either simply agreeable or a genuine authoritarian; in such circumstances, one could never be sure whether it was acquiescence which was correlating with right-wing attitudes or whether it was genuine authoritarianism.

The substantive point raised against the California studies [by Adorno et al.] was that they were simply obviously false. Right-wingers such as Nazis and Fascists may be authoritarians but equally so are Communists such as Mao and Stalin. Authoritarianism was to be found not at one end of the political spectrum but rather at both ends. . . .

A new proposal that substantially helped to resolve this dilemma was a long overdue reconceptualization of political allegiance along two dimensions rather than one. This reconceptualization was associated with the names of Rokeach and Eysenck. . . . They rightly identified authoritarianism/libertarianism as being at right angles to (unrelated to) the normal radical-conservative dimension of politics. . . .

Communists and Fascists could be shown to fall at opposite ends of the first dimension (radicalism-conservatism) but at the same end (authoritarian) of the second dimension. Democrats and Republicans on the other hand could be shown to fall also on opposite sides of the radicalism-conservatism divide but in the same position on the authoritarianism-libertarianism dimension (half-way between the two). . . .

Neat as this schema was, however, there proved to be a great deal of difficulty in showing that people’s individual attitudes could in fact be ordered in accordance with it. . . .

Rokeach’s scale (the “D” scale) also shared with the Adorno et al. “F” scale, the problem of one-way wording. Again there were no explicitly libertarian items.

Three attempts to remedy this problem were made by [me] using Australian data. . . . Three new scales were constructed wherein there were equal numbers of authoritarian and libertarian items. . . . The results obtained with balanced scales are then much more trustworthy than results from one-way-worded scales.

Thus, at this point, although we have seen that there are theoretical inadequacies in a one-dimensional description of political options and although there have been methodological inadequacies in much of the research in the area, the overall conclusion when all these are taken into account is still the same as that originally drawn by Adorno et al. — it is authoritarians, not libertarians, who tend to be politically right-wing and fascist.

In fact [I] showed that both by the mechanical/statistical procedures of factor analysis and by the criteria of various historical definitions, the Adorno et al. “F” scale was indistinguishable from a measure of conservatism. . . .

There are two very important ways, however, in which the Adorno et al. account has not been shown to be true. First, authoritarians /conservatives can not be shown to be psychologically sick, and, second, authoritarian attitudes can not be shown to go with authoritarian behaviour.

Various measures of authoritarianism have repeatedly been found not to correlate with various measures of maladjustment. . . . Attributes that authoritarianism has been found to correlate with (e.g., rigidity, dogmatism) are obviously not always maladaptive. As “stick-to-it-iveness”, such attributes might in some circumstances be, in fact, rather admired. . . .

The failure of authoritarian attitudes to relate to authoritarian behaviour is . . . a more serious failure of the Adorno et al. account. In fact, to psychologists the attitude/behaviour discrepancy is a familiar phenomenon. It is certainly true in other fields such as racism. . . . One cannot even guess whether the acknowledged motivation is the real motivation or not. . . .

Since a distinction is necessary between authoritarian attitudes and behaviour, a very obvious question becomes: Given that we have seen authoritarian attitudes to be characteristically conservative, is it also true that those who behave in an authoritarian way are conservative? The evidence on this question is not yet extensive but so far all available results show no relationship between the two whatever. . . . People who behave in an authoritarian way are equally likely to be from the Left, the Right or the center. [All emphasis added by me.]

In sum, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality define conservatism to be authoritarian. They then wrongly assert that “authoritarians” (conservatives) are psychologically “sick” and that they behave in an authoritarian manner. The fact, however, is that authoritarian behavior knows no ideological bounds. The histories of Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Britain (under Labour), and the U.S. (beginning especially with the New Deal) amply demonstrate that fact.

Obiter Dicta

One can be a rigid Democrat, a rigid Republican, and even a rigid libertarian. Rigidity, like compromise, is sometimes a useful way to approach the world, and sometimes a self-defeating way to approach the world. As a Burkean conservative-libertarian, I find anarcho-libertarianism especially rigid and self-defeating. Anarcho-libertarians are loathe to face the reality that government is unlikely to go away. Their answer to all problems, it seems, is to wish government away. All would be better in their best of all imaginary worlds.

Other libertarians (those whose beliefs are closer to mine) take the prosaic view that half a loaf is better than none. For example, in the best of all possible anarcho-libertarian worlds there would be no Social Security. That “best” world being an extremely unlikely one, pragmatic libertarians applaud Social Security reforms — such as private accounts — that would at least make Social Security something more like a real investment program and something less than the transfer-payment Ponzi scheme that it is.

Rigid, impractical libertarianism is no defense against the authoritarianism of Left and Right.

Pseudo-Science in the Service of Political Correctness

UnderstandingPrejudice.org, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (your tax dollars) and a branch of McGraw-Hill, is “a web site for students, teachers, and others interested in the causes and consequences of prejudice.” In its pages one can “find more than 2,000 links to prejudice-related resources, as well as searchable databases with hundreds of prejudice researchers and social justice organizations.”

I came across the site while I was searching for information about The Authoritarian Personality, about which I was instructed when I took my one and only college-level psychology course from Prof. Milton Rokeach, author of The Open and Closed Mind (related links). UnderstandingPrejudice.org reminds me very much of The Authoritarian Personality and Prof. Rokeach’s teachings, in that it perverts science and logic in an effort to “prove” that conservative views are based on blind prejudice and will lead humanity into the abyss of authoritarianism.

Here is an example of what UnderstandingPrejudice.org tries to pawn off as rigorous analysis:

[C]onsider the following hypothetical problem:

Suppose your school or organization is accused of sex discrimination because the overall percentage of female job candidates offered a position in the last five years is less than the overall percentage for male candidates. To get to the bottom of this problem, you launch an investigation to see which departments are discriminating against women. Surprisingly, however, the investigation finds that within each department, the percentage of female job applicants who are offered a position is identical to the percentage of male applicants who are offered a position. Is this possible? Can each department practice nondiscrimination, while the organization as a whole hires more men than women?

This problem is a variant of Simpson’s Paradox [link added] (a well-known paradox in statistics), and the answer to it is yes — nondiscriminatory conditions at the departmental level can result in hiring differences at the organizational level. To see how this might happen, imagine a simplified organization with two equally important departments, Department A and Department B, each of which receive the same number of job applications. As shown in Table 1, if Department A were to offer a position to 10% of its job applicants (female as well as male), and Department B were to offer a position to 5% of its job applicants (female as well as male), neither department would be discriminating on the basis of sex. At the level of the organization, however, more positions would be going to men than to women, because of the higher number of jobs offered by Department A than Department B. Unless there is a good reason for this difference in hiring, the pattern may represent a form of institutionalized sex discrimination.

Table 1. A Hypothetical Example of Sex Discrimination

Number
of Applicants Number
of Job Offers Percentage
Offered Jobs

Department A

Women 500 50 10%

Men 1000 100 10%

Department B

Women 1000 50 5%

Men 500 25 5%

Combined Total

Women 1500 100 6.67%

Men 1500 125 8.33%

First of all there’s the presumption that the school is acting discriminatorily if it does not offer jobs to female applicants at the same rate as it offers jobs to male applicants. This is stated without mentioning the possibility that qualified candidates are more likely to be male in some cases (e.g., math teachers) and female in other cases (e.g., art teachers).

Moreover, the writer of the quoted passage blithely promotes the illogical proposition that the school as a whole can discriminate even if individual departments do not discriminate. But the whole cannot be greater than the sum of the parts. If each department does not discriminate with respect to applicants for its positions, that’s that: Department A cannot discriminate against Department B’s applicants, and vice versa. The aggregation of departmental statistics is therefore nonsensical.

Nevertheless, if the thought police find it necessary to aggregate departmental statistics in order to point the finger of suspicion at an institution, you can be sure that the thought police will aggregate those statistics. Of course, if Department B were to bend over backward toward women by giving them 75 job offers instead of 50, the aggregate statistics would come out “right”: a total of 125 offers for women and 125 offers for men. That result — discrimination in favor of a “protected” group — is precisely the objective of the thought police, which is why they stoop to statistical tricks.

I know. I’ve been there.

Democracy vs. Liberty, Again

Arnold Kling adds a dimension to the critique of democracy:

I think that [Bryan] Caplan gives too much credit to well-educated citizens. While educated Americans might score somewhat better on measures of knowledge of economics, educated Americans are still far from trustworthy as policy formulators. Our most highly educated citizens, ensconced in the academy, are stuck on 1968 in the worst way. This includes many Ph.D economists.

Just as Caplan’s treatment of political power is too one-dimensional, his treatment of political wisdom is too one-dimensional as well. He caters to the view that more education implies greater wisdom, thereby catering to the vanity of professors who hold that their left-wing views should be a model for the rest of us.

. . . Protectionism is based in part on anti-foreign bias, which is more pronounced among the uneducated than among the academic elite. However, the other biases–anti-market bias, pessimistic bias, and make-work bias–are nearly as prevalent inside the academy as out. The academy is a hotbed of folk Marxism. But by sticking to the protectionist example, Caplan allows his academic readers to preen and wallow in their illusions of superiority.

However, one of Caplan’s elitist ideas intrigues me. At a couple of points, he suggests that “get-out-the-vote” efforts, which expand participation of uneducated voters, might be harmful. This is something to think about. We have expanded the franchise considerably over the past two hundred years. It seems to me that this expansion has been correlated with increases in government power–voting rights for women, who at the time tended to be less educated than men, seem to have clearly had this effect.

It might be the case that the academy has responded to democracy. That is, rather than continue to teach the virtues of markets and limited government, academics have responded to political reality by developing theories that conform more closely to popular prejudices. For example, one might see Keynesian theory as make-work bias dressed up as technical economics.

It could be that if we had kept a restricted franchise, then government would have stayed smaller. If government had stayed smaller, then perhaps academics would have been less focused on supporting government expansion.

As things stand today, I share Caplan’s doubts about the wisdom of ordinary people. But in addition I have much bigger doubts about the wisdom of the educated elite.

The influence of elites (academicians among them) on policy certainly has a lot to do with the fact that democracy — as it is practiced in the U.S. and other Western nations — tends to undermine liberty. As I wrote here,

[w]e have been following the piecemeal route to serfdom — adding link to link and chain to chain — in spite of the Framers’ best intentions and careful drafting. Why? Because the governed — or dominant coalitions of them — have donned willingly the chains that they have implored their governors to forge. Their bondage is voluntary, though certainly not informed. But their bondage is everyone’s bondage. . . .

[B]ecause we have undone the work of the Framers . . . , we have descended to tyranny by the majority, where the majority is a loose but potent coalition of interest- and belief-groups bent on imposing its aims on everyone.

Unchecked democracy undermines liberty and its blessings. Unchecked democracy imposes on everyone the mistakes and mistaken beliefs of the controlling faction. It defeats learning. It undoes the social fabric that underlies civility. It defeats the sublime rationality of free markets, which enable independent individuals to benefit each other through the pursuit of self-interest. As “anonymous” says, with brutal accuracy, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.”

More Foxhole Rats

First, there’s Joel Stein:

I DON’T SUPPORT our troops . . . .

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you’re not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you’re willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism . . . .

[W]e shouldn’t be celebrating people for doing something we don’t think was a good idea. All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return. But, please, no parades.

Seriously, the traffic is insufferable.

What’s with this “we” business, you insufferable jerk?

Then, there’s William Blum

a Washington, D.C. writer, [who] responded delightedly last Thursday on learning that Osama bin Laden had cited his book in an audiotape. Blum called the mention of Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower “almost as good as being an Oprah book”. . . .

Blum explained his response by saying he found bin Laden no worse than the U.S. government: “I would not say that bin Laden has been any less moral than Washington has been.” He even refused to distance himself from bin Laden’s views: “If he shares with me a deep dislike for certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy, then I’m not going to spurn any endorsement of the book by him. I think it’s good that he shares those views.”

Blum describes his life mission as “slowing down the American Empire…injuring the beast.”

What’s with these Leftists and their fixation on an American “empire”? These two, in particular, ought to be grateful they didn’t live in Nazi Germany, the ambitions of which were truly imperial — and genocidal, to boot.

Shall We All Hang Separately?
Foxhole Rats
Foxhole Rats, Redux
Know Thine Enemy
The Faces of Appeasement
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Non-Aggression?
We Have Met the Enemy . . .
Words for the Unwise

Back-Door Paternalism

Shane Frederick, an assistant professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, suggests (in so many words) that the “best and brightest” should make decisions for the rest of us. He makes his case in “On the Ball: Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making.” Frederick begins well enough, with premises that seem well supported:

Bright people have a lower time preference than less-bright people; that is, bright people are more likely than the less-bright to forgo current gratification in favor of greater future gratification (e.g., more income), where the attainment of the greater gratification is fairly certain.

In addition, bright people are more risk-tolerant than less-bright people, where there is the prospect of a gain; that is they are more willing than the less-bright to gamble a given amount of money for the prospect of winning an even larger amount of money.

Here are excerpts of the evidence adduced by Frederick:

People with higher cognitive ability (or “IQ”) differ from those with lower cognitive ability in a variety of important and unimportant ways. On average, they live longer, earn more, have larger working memories, faster reaction times, and are more susceptible to visual illusions. . . .

Despite the diversity of phenomena related to IQ, few have attempted to understand – or even describe – its influences on judgment and decision making. Studies on time preference, risk preference, probability weighting, ambiguity aversion, endowment effects, anchoring, and other widely researched topics rarely make any reference to the possible effects of cognitive abilities (or cognitive traits). . . .

Many researchers have emphasized the distinction between two types of cognitive processes: those executed quickly with little conscious deliberation [System 1] and those that are slower and more reflective [System 2]. . . . System 1 processes occur spontaneously, and do not require or consume much attention. Recognizing that the face of the person entering the classroom belongs to your math teacher involves System 1 processes – it occurs instantly and effortlessly, and is unaffected by intellect, alertness, motivation or the difficulty of the math problem being attempted at the time. Conversely, finding [the square root of] 19163 to two decimal places without a calculator involves System 2 processes – mental operations requiring effort, motivation, concentration, and the execution of learned rules. . . .

By contrast, consider the problem below:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost? ____ cents

Here, an intuitive answer does spring quickly to mind: “10 cents.” But this “impulsive” answer is wrong. . . .

In a study conducted at Princeton, which measured time preferences using both real and hypothetical rewards, those answering “10 cents” were found to be significantly less patient than those answering “5 cents.” Motivated by this result, two other problems found to yield impulsive erroneous responses were included with the “bat and ball” problem to form a simple, three item “Cognitive Reflection Test” (CRT), shown in Figure 1. The three items on the CRT are “easy” in the sense that their solution is easily understood when explained, yet reaching the correct answer often requires the suppression of an erroneous answer that springs “impulsively” to mind.

Figure 1. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT)

(1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
____ cents

(2) If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100
machines to make 100 widgets?
____ minutes

(3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
____ days

Over a 26-month period beginning in January, 2003, the CRT was administered to 3,428 respondents in 35 separate studies that also measured various decision making characteristics, like time and risk preferences. . . .

The notion that more intelligent people are more patient – that they devalue or “discount” future rewards less steeply – has prevailed for some time. . . .

The widely presumed relation between cognitive ability and patience has been tested in several studies, although rather unsystematically. . . .

Collectively, these studies offer some support for the view that cognitive ability and time preference are somehow connected, though none has identified the types of intertemporal decisions over which cognitive ability exerts influence, nor explained why it does so. Toward this end, I examined the relation between CRT scores and a wide variety of items intended to measure various aspects of “time preference.” . . . .

As predicted, those who scored higher on the CRT were generally more “patient”; their decisions implied lower discount rates. For short term choices between monetary rewards, the high CRT group was much more inclined to choose the later larger reward. . . . However, for choices involving longer horizons . . . , temporal preferences were weakly related or unrelated to CRT scores.

A tentative explanation for these results is as follows: a thoughtful respondent can find good reasons for discounting future monetary outcomes – the promiser could default, one may be predictably wealthier in the future (with correspondingly diminished marginal utility for further wealth gains), interest rates could increase (which increases the opportunity cost of foregoing the immediate reward), and inflation could reduce the future rewards’ real value (if the stated amount is interpreted as being denominated in nominal units). . . . However, such reasons do not apply with the same force for short term options; they are not sufficiently compelling to justify choosing $3400 this month over $3800 next month (which implies an annual discount rate of 280%). Hence, for choices . . . where the careful deliberation associated with “System 2” ought to strongly oppose one’s intuitive “System 1” preference for the more immediate reward . . . one observes considerable differences between CRT groups. . . .

Thus, greater cognitive reflection seemingly fosters the recognition or appreciation of considerations (like interest rates) that may favor the later larger reward. . . .

To assess the relation between CRT and risk preferences, I included several measures of risk preferences in my questionnaires, including choices between a certain gain (or loss) and some probability of a larger gain (or loss). For some items, expected value was maximized by choosing the gamble, and for some it was maximized by choosing the certain outcome.

. . . In the domain of gains, the high CRT group was more willing to gamble, particularly when the gamble had higher expected value . . . , but, notably, even when it did not. . . . This suggests that the correlation between cognitive ability and risk taking in gains is not due solely to a greater disposition to compute expected value or adopt that as the choice criterion. For items involving losses . . . , the higher CRT group was less riskseeking; they were more willing accept a sure loss to avoid playing a gamble with lower (more negative) expected value. . . .

Frederick then reinforces the connection between CRT and intelligence; for example:

[T]hough the CRT is intended to measure cognitive reflection, performance on it is surely aided by reading comprehension and mathematical skills (which the ACT [American College Test] and SAT [Scholastic Aptitude Test] also measure). Similarly, though Cacioppo et al. . . . claim that NFC [the “need for cognition scale] is “clearly separable” from intelligence, their list of ways in which those with high NFC were found to differ from those with low NFC sounds very much like the list one would create if people were sorted on any measure of cognitive ability. Namely, those with higher NFC were found to do better on arithmetic problems, anagrams, trivia tests, and college coursework, to be more knowledgeable, more influenced by the quality of an argument, to recall more of the information to which they are exposed, to generate more “task relevant thoughts” and to engage in greater “information-processing activity.”

The empirical and conceptual overlap between these tests suggests that they would all predict time and risk preferences. . . .

In his concluding discussion, Frederick jumps to the unwarranted implication that the “best and brightest” should make decisions for the rest of us; viz.:

[T]ime and risk preferences are sometime tied so strongly to measures of cognitive ability that they effectively function as such a measure themselves. For example, when a choice between a sure $500 and a 15% chance of $1,000,000 was presented to respondents (along with an eight item version of the CRT), only 25% of those who missed all eight problems chose the gamble, compared to 82% among those who solved them all. Should this result be interpreted to mean that choosing the gamble is the “correct” response for this item? . . .

. . . I suspect that if respondents were shown the respective test scores of those who chose the sure $500 vs. those who chose the 15% chance of $1,000,000, they would, in fact, feel more disposed to take the gamble; the correlation between cognitive ability and preference would hold some normative force for them. . . .

[A] relation between cognitive ability and preference does not, by itself, establish the correct choice for any particular individual. Two individuals with different cognitive abilities may experience outcomes differently, which may warrant different choices (for example, what magazines to read or movies to attend). But with respect to the example motivating this discussion, one must ask whether it is really plausible that people of differing cognitive abilities experience increments of wealth as differently as their choices suggest. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the low CRT group has a marked kink in their utility function around $W+500, beyond which an extra $999,500 confers little additional benefit. It seems more reasonable, instead, to override the conventional caveat about arguing with tastes . . . , and conclude that choosing the $500 is the “wrong answer” – much as 10 cents is the wrong answer in the “bat & ball” problem.

Whatever stance one adopts on the contentious normative issues of whether a preference can be “wrong” and whether more reflective people make “better” choices, respondents who score differently on the CRT make different choices, and this demands some explanation

Frederick, in effect, makes the following argument:

Bright people are good at getting right answers to questions for which there are right answers.

Bright people are good at evaluating prudent risks.

Bright people, therefore, are likely to be correct in all forms of risk-taking.

Thus all of us would do well to follow the instruction of bright people.

Frederick’s logic fails, first, because he blurs the distinction between (a) the kind of prudent risk-taking that’s involved in short-term financial transactions with fairly certain outcomes (which bright persons do well) and (b) straight-out gambling (for which bright persons seem to have a penchant). He compounds his confusion by treating gambling as a mere mathematical problem to which there is a right answer:

[C]hoosing the $500 is the “wrong answer” – much as 10 cents is the wrong answer in the “bat & ball” problem.

But getting the right answer to the “bat & ball” problem is trivial; it’s a closed problem to which there can be only one right answer. Frederick seems to think that getting the “right” answer to the betting problem depends only on being able to calculate the “expected value” of the prize (value of the prize x probability of winning it). Well, when the expected value is $150,000 and one stands to lose “only” $500, it would be stupid to take the $500 instead gambling on the million. Right? Wrong:

Expected value is an artificial construct; one cannot win the expected value of anything.

If there’s a 15% chance of winning the million, there’s an 85% chance of not winning the million.

A person to whom $500 is a lot of money (a month’s rent, for example) is stupid to gamble it with an 85% chance of losing it.

By Frederick’s logic, bright jerks should be put in the position of gambling away other people’s rent money. Or, to put it more generally, our affairs should be placed in the hands of the “best and brightest” — empowered by government to regulate our lives. (Frederick doesn’t come right out and say that, of course, but the subtext is clear.)

Actually, since the New Deal, successive Congresses, presidents, and Supreme Courts have been regulating our lives with the help of the “best and brightest” (a.k.a. the “brains trust”). And see where it has landed us.

In sum, Frederick’s paper amounts to nothing more than a contrived justification of statist paternalism.

Fear of the Free Market — Part I
Fear of the Free Market — Part II
Fear of the Free Market — Part III
The Rationality Fallacy
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
“The Private Sector Isn’t Perfect”
Three Truths for Central Planners
Risk and Regulation

Obtuse Nonsense

Mark A.R. Kleiman (The Reality-Based Community) closes a post with this observation:

All judges judge by their personal beliefs. Whose beliefs would you expect them to judge by?

Kleiman misses the point entirely. Judges should judge from their “beliefs” about the law: what it requires, like it or not. Too many judges, however, judge from what they would like the law to require. There is a vast difference between those two positions, but Kleiman is too obtuse to grasp it or too argumentative to admit it. Kleiman’s relativistic standard allows him to excuse seven decades of Leftist opinions that have made a mockery of the Constitution and denuded it of liberty. Just what one would expect from a “reality-based” blogger.

Fie on Steve Bainbridge, who recommends Kleiman’s post.

Brian Leiter, Exposed

Brian Leiter — whose lunacies I have exposed here, here, and here — is now the subject of a blog titled, appropriately, Brian Leiter, Academic Thug. The blogger is Keith Burgess-Jackson, himself a philosopher (as Leiter claims to be) and an attorney (which Leiter is). Burgess-Jackson’s first post (12/25/05) sets out the purpose of the blog:

Brian Leiter has been abusing people with impunity for far too long. It’s time someone stood up to him. This blog is devoted to exposing his abusiveness. . . . If you have been abused by Leiter (as I have) and wish to become a member of this blog, please contact me through my blog AnalPhilosopher. I will allow you to blog anonymously, especially if you are untenured.

Nothing of a defamatory nature will be posted on this blog. That is to say, everything posted will be true. Nor is it an attack blog. It is a blog devoted to publicizing the awful truth about a very bad man—a man who uses his power as a tenured professor (and as a prominent ranker of law and philosophy programs) to humiliate, intimidate, degrade, and punish those with whom he disagrees. If you know of instances in which Leiter has abused (or tried to harm) someone, please bring them to my attention. Anonymity is assured. I will investigate the matter and, if appropriate, post links. . . .

The purpose of this blog, therefore, is to hold Leiter responsible for his abominable behavior. It is to give him his due. That is the essence of justice.

Thug now consists of 23 posts — all worth reading. I’ve added Thug to my daily reading routine.

(Thanks to Maverick Philosopher for the pointer.)

Economics: The "Democrat" Science

From “AEA [American Economics Association] Ideology,” by William A. McEachern (Econ Journal Watch, January 2006):

One way of summarizing the findings is by showing those populations with no Republican contributors, those populations with one Republican contributor, and those populations with two Republican contributors, as is done in Tables 1, 2, and 3. . . . Among the entire eligible set listed in the three tables, the overall tally is 182 Democrat contributors to 10 Republican contributors [among advisory board members, officers, editors, and contributors to the American Economic Review, AER Papers & Proceedings, Journal of Economic Literature, and Journal of Economic Perspectives]. Democrat contributors filled 182 of a possible 1,583 slots, or 11.5 percent. Republican contributors filled 10, or 0.6 percent. . . .

For the 2,000 AEA member sample, the ratio of Democrat-to-Republican donors was 5.1 to 1. . . .

What’s the harm of having extremely high Democrat-to-Republican contribution ratios among those involved with AEA publications, especially among the discretionary journals? The Association recognized the possible harm more than 80 years ago when the Certificate of Incorporation called for “perfect freedom of economic discussion.” Recall that campaign contributors are also more likely to be politically engaged in other ways. We should not expect editors, referees, authors, reviewers, and acknowledgees who have contributed to campaigns to just turn off that mindset in their dealings with the Association’s publications.

As an example of possible harm of a lopsided political representation, consider the absence of a Republican contributor among the 247 book reviewers with U.S. affiliations appearing in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2003 and 2004. A JEL review will likely be the most visible, if not the only, review some books will ever receive. Couldn’t the same political sensibilities that motivated a reviewer to contribute to Democrats also shape his or her assessment of a book? . . .

But loading the dice, however unintentionally, with 20 Democrat contributors and no Republican contributors seems unfair to some authors and unhealthy for the profession. . . .

Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University and research director at the National Endowment for the Arts, has argued that:

Any political position that dominates an institution without dissent deteriorates into smugness, complacency and blandness. . . . Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition, ironically seductive in that the more one feels at ease with compatriots, the more one’s mind narrows (2004). . . .

. . . The AEA claims to be the “organ of no party.” That is, of course, true de jure, but contributor ratios that favor Democrats 9.5 to 1 among regular AER authors and 38 to 1 among authors in remaining publications at least raise a question whether the Association is de facto an “organ of no party.”

Thus, we read this, by noted economist William J. Baumol (also from Econ Journal Watch, January 2006):

There are, actually, at least two very good reasons why the entrepreneur is virtually never mentioned in modern theory of the firm and distribution. The first is that innovation is an entirely heterogeneous output. Production of whatever was an invention yesterday is mere repetition today. So that entrepreneurial activities do not incorporate the homogeneous elements that lend themselves to formal mathematical description, let alone the formal optimization analysis that is the foundation of the bulk of micro theory.

The more critical explanation of the absence of the entrepreneur is that in mainstream economics the theory is generally composed of equilibrium models in which structurally nothing is changing. Equilibrium models exclude the entrepreneur by their very nature. . . .

That’s true, as far as it goes. But Baumol goes on to say this:

My conclusion is not that the neoclassical theory is wrong in excluding the entrepreneur, for it is dealing with subjects for which she is irrelevant. But that does not mean that no theory of entrepreneurship is needed. . . . It would, in my view, be as indefensible to require all micro writing to give pride of place to the entrepreneur as to exclude him universally. . . .

But universal exclusion condemns us to leave out of our discussions what I consider to be the most critical issues that should be examined (though not exclusively) in microeconomic terms: the determinants of innovation and growth and the means by which they can be preserved and stimulated. . . . Why have the relatively free-market economies in the past two centuries been able to outstrip, probably by more than an order of magnitude, the performance in terms of growth and innovation, of all other forms of economic organization? The answer is not merely matter of pandering to what Veblen called the economic researcher’s idle curiosity. Rather it is the missing underpinning for growth policy in both the developed and the developing world.

A somewhat less “Democrat” profession would try harder to account for entrepreneurship, without which economic growth would be impossible.

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