Liberty, General Welfare, and the State

In an earlier post I said that “the economy isn’t a zero-sum game.” That assertion warrants explanation and elaboration. Here it is.

Gains from Specialization and Trade

Imagine a very simple economy in which Jack makes bread and Jill makes butter. Jack also could make butter and Jill also could make bread, but both of them have learned that they are better off if they specialize. Thus:

Jack can make 1 loaf of bread or 0.5 pound of butter a day. (The “rate of transformation” is linear; e.g., in Jill’s absence Jack would make 0.5 loaf of bread and 0.25 pound of butter daily.)

Jill can make 0.5 loaf of bread or 1 pound of butter a day. (Again, the rate of transformation is linear; e.g., in Jack’s absence Jill would make 0.25 loaf of bread and 0.5 pound of butter daily.)

If both Jack and Jill make bread and butter their total daily output might be, to continue the example, 0.75 loaf and 0.75 pounds.

Alternatively, if Jack specializes in bread and Jill specializes in butter their total daily output is 1 loaf and 1 pound.

Now, the question for Jack and Jill is this: At what rate should they exchange bread and butter so that both are better off than they would be in the absence of specialization and trade? There is no right answer to that question. The answer depends on Jack and Jill’s respective preferences for bread and butter, and on their respective negotiating skills. But of one thing we can be certain, Jack and Jill will strike a bargain that makes both of them better off than they would be in the absence of specialization and trade.

Consider some possibilities:

Jack makes 1 loaf of bread, keeps 0.5 loaf, and trades the other 0.5 loaf to Jill in exchange for 0.25 pound of butter. Jack, with 0.5 loaf and 0.25 pound, is where he would be in the absence of specialization and trade. Jill makes 1 pound of butter and trades 0.25 pound to Jack for 0.5 loaf of bread. Jill, with 0.5 loaf and 0.75 pound, is better off than she would be in the absence of specialization and trade (+0.25 loaf and +0.25 pound). This outcome is unlikely because Jack, seeing his lot unimproved, would have no incentive to specialize in bread and trade with Jill. Jill, therefore, would have an incentive to strike a bargain with Jack that makes both of them better off than they would be in the absence of specialization and trade.

At the other end of the spectrum of possible trades, Jill could end up no better off while Jack reaps all the gains to specialization and trade. But this outcome, too, is unlikely because Jill, seeing her lot unimproved, would have no incentive to specialize in butter and trade with Jack. Jack, therefore, would have an incentive to strike a bargain with Jill that makes both of them better off than they would be in the absence of specialization and trade.

More realistically, then, Jack and Jill make a trade that leaves both of them better off. For example, Jack trades 0.5 loaf to Jill for 0.5 pound of butter, leaving him ahead by 0.25 pound of butter. Jilll ends up with 0.5 loaf and 0.5 pound of butter, leaving her ahead by 0.25 loaf of bread.

In sum, liberty — which includes the right to engage in voluntary exchange — makes both Jack and Jill better off. Moreover, because they are better off they can convert some of their gains from trade into investments that yield even more output in the future. For example, to continue with this homely metaphor, imagine that Jill — fueled by additional food — is able to produce the usual amount of butter in less time, giving her time in which to design and build a churn that can produce butter at a faster rate.

Liberty advances the general welfare, which means the general well-being — not handouts.

Enter the State

Under a regime of liberty there is no “exploitation” of Jack by Jill, or vice versa, unless one of them cheats or robs the other. In the naïve libertarian view of the world, cheating and theft are irrational. If Jack cheats or steals from Jill, Jill refuses to trade with Jack until he made things right. If he refuses to do so he would face a lifetime of living less well than he could by trading honestly with Jill. Alternatively, Jack would come to understand that this thievery or cheating will weaken Jill and diminish her ability to produce 1 pound of butter a day. That understanding should cause Jack to desist from cheating or thievery.

But Jack would not desist from cheating or thievery if he had a taste for such things, nor would Jill if she had a taste for such things. (Wealth-maximization, contrary to many economists and all naïve libertarians, isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of human existence.) Even if neither Jack nor Jill has a taste for cheating or thievery, they must beware predators who have such tastes.

The Delusion of Statelessness (or Anarcho-Libertarianism)

An anarcho-capitalist (or anarcho-libertarian) would have Jack and Jill protect themselves (from each other and outside predators) by hiring a third party to enforce their trading contract and deal with predators. An anarcho-libertarian would call such a third party a private defense agency. But an entity that has the power to enforce contracts and keep the peace is the state, no matter what you call it.

In an effort to avoid the necessity of the state, the anarcho-libertarian posits competing private defense agencies. But if a generally peaceful and cooperative people cannot control one state (or private defense agency), such a people surely cannot control competing states — or warlords — all of them armed and many of them having a taste for dominance.

For a sample of the consequences of warlordism in the American experience, consider the Civil War. An anarcho-libertarian would be quick to call Abraham Lincoln a warlord. But it takes two warlords to foment a war. And so — with the creation of a rival warlord in the South — there was a civil war: a war that resulted in 50 percent more military deaths than did World War II (twice as many deaths per capita); a war with dire, long-lasting consequences for race relations in America (e.g., Jim Crow and “black redneck” culture); a war that would not have happened if the South had not chosen to form a “competing defense agency.” (For more about anarcho-libertarianism and defense, read this post and the posts linked at the bottom.)

The Busybody State

The lesson here is simple, the best way to reap the benefits of liberty is to create a single, accountable state with limited powers — and to be vigilant about enforcing the limits. When vigilance fails, those who control the levers of power will use that power to interfere with the lives, liberty, and property that they were hired to protect. The Framers of the Constitution knew that well, and so they designed a system of checks and balances to circumscribe the power of the state. (The design is still there, on paper, and — with time and the right Supreme Court — can be re-applied.)

The fact of the matter is that the state has no moral standing with respect to its citizens. For example, a person who “fails” to give money or assistance to a fellow citizen owes an apology to no one, especially not to the busybodies who happen to control the state. The state’s moral judgment in such matters is “superior” only in that it is enforceable through the power of the state. Let us not lose sight of this fact: Edward Kennedy and his ilk (of all political stripes) have no claim whatever to moral superiority.

To return to Jack and Jill, suppose that Jill becomes ill and incapable of producing anything. As a result, Jill has no income and Jack is reduced to providing for himself. It isn’t Jack’s fault that Jill is incapable of working; Jack is worse off because Jill isn’t working. It isn’t Jack’s fault if Jill has not somehow insured herself against illness (e.g., by stockpiling bread and butter). Is Jack nevertheless compelled to give Jill some of his reduce income?

Jack, out of empathy for a fellow human being, may wish to give Jill some of his bread and butter. (In fact, absent the busybody state, Jack would be more willing and able to do just that.) Jack may even make an economic calculation and decide that if he gives some of his bread and butter to Jill she will recover and return to work, making both of them better off. But when the state — namely, the controlling faction of busybodies — is empowered to dictate the terms of Jack’s chartity toward Jill, here’s what happens:

The busybody state taxes Jack by taking away some of the bread and butter he produces, which is less than he had when Jill was capable of working (a fact that never occurs to the busybody state).

The tax (whether it’s an income tax or a consumption tax) makes work less attractive to Jack, assuming that he is producing more than he needs for subsistence.

When work becomes less attractive in relation to leisure, Jack chooses more leisure and therefore produces less.

As a result, Jack has less “excess” food to stockpile against misfortune or to sustain himself in efforts to improve his bread-and-butter-making technology (which would enable him to give more aid to Jill).

In sum, when the state becomes Jack’s conscience, it is far more likely to make matters worse than it is to make them better. Jill’s plight is unfortunate, but Jack is the only person who is in a position to make the right decision about how to respond to Jill’s plight. It is false and cheap compassion for the busybody state to tell Jack what to do about Jill.

Moreover, the state’s patent willingness to extort aid from Jack has the effect of (a) blunting Jill’s incentive to build a stockpile of food for a “rainy day” and (b) blunting Jill’s incentive to return to work when she is able to do so.

The state’s busybody ways make both Jack and Jill worse off, in the end.

There’s much more to be said for an economic order of voluntary exchange, in which the state’s only role is to enforce contracts and keep the peace. Here’s some of it:

The Destruction of Income and Wealth by the State (start here)
Why Outsourcing Is Good: A Simple Lesson for Liberal Yuppies
Fear of the Free Market — Part I
Fear of the Free Market — Part II
Fear of the Free Market — Part III
Trade Deficit Hysteria
Social Injustice
The Sentinel: A Tragic Parable of Economic Reality
Why We Deserve What We Earn
Who Decides Who’s Deserving?
The Rationality Fallacy
Brains Sans Borders
Why Class Warfare Is Bad for Everyone
Fighting Myths with Facts
Debunking More Myths of Income Inequality
Free-Market Healthcare
Understanding Economic Growth
Socialist Calculation and the Turing Test
The Social Welfare Function
Funding the Welfare State
A Mathematician’s Insight
Giving Back to the Community
Computer Technology Will Replace Concrete
Second-Guessing, Paternalism, Parentalism, and Choice
A Non-Paradox for Libertarians
“The Private Sector Isn’t Perfect”
Whose Incompetence Do You Trust?
Understanding Outsourcing
Much Ado about Donning
Joe Stiglitz, Ig-Nobelist
A Simple Fallacy
Ten Commandments of Economics
More Commandments of Economics
Three Truths for Central Planners
Bits of Economic Wisdom
Productivity Growth and Tax Cuts
Zero-Sum Thinking
Risk and Regulation
Wal-Mart and Jobs
Economist, Heal Thyself

Giving Back to the Community, Redux

I wrote about it here. Don Boudreaux has a very good post, from a slightly different angle, here.

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.

Anarcho-Libertarian "Stretching"

Tim Swanson, writing at the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, announces with glee “An Anarchistic Oasis In The Middle Of The Desert.” The “anarchistic oasis” is the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), which, according to an article quoted by Swanson,

is a free trade area, an enclave with no taxes or customs duties and no restrictions on foreign ownership. That, in itself, is nothing special: Dubai has nearly a dozen [free trade areas] already. But what’s unique about the . . . DIFC . . . is that Dubai’s normal civil and commercial laws do not apply within.

Under a formal decree of the United Arab Emirates, and local laws signed by the late Ruler of Dubai, the two authorities that hold absolute power carved out an area from which they withdrew their own system of laws. The concept is breathtaking: here in DIFC, English common law reigns supreme – and under a British chief justice. Although there are some similarities to the Vatican, Hong Kong and even Gaza, it is thought to be the first time that any state has done this.

State sponsorship of English common law under a British chief justice is hardly the stuff of anarchy, or even of Hayekian spontaneous order. Welcome as the rule of common law may be (and I welcome it), the DFIC is not an instance of anarchy in action. State-imposed anarchy is an oxymoron. The DFIC is an instance of state-sponsored liberty, such as Americans enjoyed (more or less) from 1789 until about 1933 — and moreso from 1865 until about 1933.

"Addicted to Oil"

Are Americans “addicted to oil” as President Bush — borrowing a line from environmental extremists — said in his State of the Union message last night? We are “addicted” to many things, for example breathing, eating, and sleeping — which are unavoidable aspects of living. So, let’s boil it down to an “addiction” to living.

President Bush presumably would not deny us the right to live, so he must want to deny us the right to live as well as we can. Of course, living as well as we can should not encompass cheating, lying, fraud, deception, theft, or murder. (I will resist the urge to pronounce here on politicians and the parasites upon whose votes they depend.) Assuming for the moment that Americans generally do not do such things in order to live, it seems that President Bush is telling us that there must be a limit on how well we should live. Moreover, that limit would seem to apply indiscriminately. The relatively poor person who relies on oil (or its derivative forms of energy) for transportation to work, enough light to read by, and enough fuel to cook with is just as “addicted” as the very rich person who relies on oil for jetting about the globe, projecting motion pictures on a home theater screen the size of Rhode Island, and eating food prepared and served by a small army of servants. (Oops, they’re not called “servants” anymore, are they?)

Thus government, in its wisdom, shall punish poor and rich alike for their “addiction” to living — or at least to living as well as they are able. How will it do that? By taxing us all for research into and development of alternative sources of energy. Isn’t it strange that government should have to do that when the “obscene profits” garnered by oil companies will surely call forth from the private sector the very same kinds of research and development?

Not only would private research and development be funded voluntarily, but it would more assuredly pay off. Private actors who have put their own money at risk do not make perfect decisions, but they make better decisions than politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats who get to play with taxpayers’ money. It’s not “real” money to politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats — but it’s real money to the rest of us.

And most of the rest of us are not very rich. We’re addicted to living, and trying to live as well as we can. President Bush’s program would punish our addiction and make it harder for us to live as well as we can.

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.

(Final?) Words about Preemption and the Constitution

Toward the end of “Libertarianism and Preemptive War: Part II” I said that

[t]he decision to preempt is a political judgment in which Congress puts America’s sovereignty and the protection of Americans’ interests above putative treaty obligations. It seems unlikely that a court (the U.S. Supreme Court, in particular) would find that the constitutional grant of power to declare war, which is so fundamental to America’s sovereignty and to the protection of Americans’ interests, can be ceded by treaty to an international body that cannot be relied upon to protect our sovereignty and our interests.

When I quoted a portion of that passage in a comment thread at Catallarchy, Joe Miller took exception in a post at his blog, Bellum et Mores. Joe and I then had an inconclusive exchange in the comment thread. We focused on the constitutionality (or lack thereof) of those provisions of the UN Charter that bear on the conduct of war by members:

The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security. (Article 39)

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security. (Article 51)

I won’t repeat the whole exchange between Joe and me (which you can read here), just some of my main points:

[The Charter] (in theory) delimits Congress’s authority to declare war, even though that authority isn’t delimited in the Constitution. (There’s no mention there of “self defense,” for example.) The . . . UN Charter, therefore, amounts to constitutional amendment by treaty. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to be amended. . . .

. . . Our membership in the UN . . . amounts to a general concession that the Security Council (not Congress) gets to decide when we are acting in self-defense and when we can go to war when we are not acting in self-defense (as the Security Council sees it). . . . [T]he provisions of the UN Charter with respect to war do not merely implement Congress’s authority to declare war — rather, they fundamentally modify that authority.

. . . I have no problem with treaties that implement powers granted to Congress and the president (e.g., the negotiation and ratification of trade treaties). I have a fundamental problem with a treaty (the UN Charter) that circumscribes the power of Congress to declare war. That isn’t an implementation of a constitutional power, it’s a denial of a constitutional power. . . .

In ratifying the Charter, the Senate essentially surrendered a good chunk of (if not all of) Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war. . . . In other words, if the U.S. were to abide by the letter of the UN Charter (as interpreted by the Security Council, not Congress), the president and Congress would be prevented from taking actions that they judge to be in the best interest of Americans. That, it seems to me, vitiates the Framers’ intent, which was to place the decision about going to war in the hands of the elected representatives of the people of the United States — and certainly not in the hands of foreign powers. . . .

It all comes down to [this] question: Who gets to decide whether certain conditions [for going to war] are met — Congress or an international body over which Congress has no authority? Answer: international body over which Congress has no authority. The U.S. (in theory) can go to war only with the approval of both Congress and the international authority. Again, I submit that that’s an unconscionable violation of American sovereignty.

Brian Doss says it very well in a post at Catallarchy, which ends with this:

[S]ince the Constitution is the ultimate source of authority in the US government, and as it trumps both law and treaty when there is conflict; and as the Constitution may not be amended by treaty but by manner prescribed by the Constitution; and as it would require an amendment to the Constitution to substantively modify Congress’ warmaking authority; the UN treaty therefore is not a legal constraint upon the US Congress’ warmaking authority, and Congressional [authorizations for the use of military force] or declarations of war are necessary and sufficient for a US war’s legality.

Precisely.

But I’m confident that we’ll be hearing more from Joe. Stay tuned.

Related posts: War, Self-Defense, and Civil Liberties (a collection of links)

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.

The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism

The anarcho-libertarians at the Ludwig von Mises Institute are at it again. They’re flogging “The Production of Security,” by Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912). The idea, as usual, is to sell the notion that police services and even national defense can be provided through competitive, private firms. Toward the beginning of the essay Molinari asserts that

if everyone had, in one word, an instinctive horror of any act harmful to another person, it is certain that security would exist naturally on earth, and that no artificial institution would be necessary to establish it. Unfortunately this is not the way things are. The sense of justice seems to be the perquisite of only a few eminent and exceptional temperaments. Among the inferior races, it exists only in a rudimentary state. Hence the innumerable criminal attempts, ever since the beginning of the world, since the days of Cain and Abel, against the lives and property of individuals.

Well, there seem to be enough of “the inferior races” (of all races) to guarantee that “criminal attempts” will continue, without abatement, unless the potential victims of those attempts establish institutions for the purpose of deterring and punishing crime. Molinari, of course, believes that private institutions can do the job. Toward the end of the essay he says that

[u]nder the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals. If some audacious conqueror tried to become dictator, they would immediately call to their aid all the free consumers menaced by this aggression, and they would treat him as he deserved. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace us the natural consequence of liberty.

Under a regime of liberty, the natural organization of the security industry would not be different from that of other industries. In small districts a single entrepreneur could suffice. This entrepreneur might leave his business to his son, or sell it to another entrepreneur. In larger districts, one company by itself would bring together enough resources adequately to carry on this important and difficult business. If it were well managed, this company could easily last, and security would last with it. In the security industry, just as in most of the other branches of production, the latter mode of organization will probably replace the former, in the end.

The “customers would not allow themselves to be conquered”? Tell that to those who pay gangsters for “protection” and to the residents of gang-ridden areas. Molinari conveniently forgets that the ranks of “competitors” are open to “the inferior races,” who in their viciousness will and do “unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals.” If not everyone is honorable, as Molinari admits, why would we expect private providers of security be honorable? Why would they not extort their customers while fighting each other? The result is bound to be something worse than life under an accountable state monopoly (such as we have in the U.S.) — something fraught with violence and fear. Think of The Roaring Twenties without the glossy coat of Hollywood glamour.

Molinari and his anarcho-libertarian descendants exhibit the Anne Frank syndrome. About three weeks before Frank and her family were betrayed and arrested, she wrote this:

It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

Molinari and his ilk do not express the jejune belief that all “people are truly good at heart,” yet they persist in the belief that the security can be achieved in the absence of an accountable state. That is, like Anne Frank, they assume — contrary to all evidence — that “people are truly good at heart.” But competition, by itself, does not and cannot prevent criminal acts. Competition, to be beneficial, must be conducted within the framework of a rule of law. That rule of law must be enforced by a state which is accountable to its citizens for the preservation of their liberty.

The present rule of law in the United States is far from perfect, but it is far more perfect than the alternative dreamt of by anarcho-libertarians.

Defense, Anarcho-Capitalist Style
But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?
My View of Warlordism, Seconded

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.”

Economist, Heal Thyself

Bryan Caplan (EconLog) “proves” that comparative advantage makes people better off, even if some of the people are less capable than others:

Trade between two people or groups increases total production even if one person or group is worse at everything. Suppose, for example, that Brains can make 5 Computer Programs or 10 Bushels of Wheat per day, and Brawns can make .1 Computer Programs or 5 Bushels of Wheat per day.

Computer Programs Bushets of Wheat

Brains 5 10

Brawns .1 5

Brains and Brawns can still trade to mutual benefit: Just have one Brain switch from farming to programming (+5 Programs, -10 Bushels of Wheat), and three Brawns switch from programming to farming (-.3 Programs, +15 Bushels of Wheat), and total production rises by 4.7 Programs and 5 Bushels of Wheat.

What Caplan has shown is that, for a given population, it makes economic sense for individuals to specialize in those occupations in which they have a comparative advantage. In Caplan’s example, the Brains’ comparative advantage lies in the writing of computer programs (20:1) over the growing of wheat (2:1), whereas the Brawns’ comparative advantage lies in the growing of wheat (1:2) over the writing of computer programs (1:20).

So far, so good. But in a later post Caplan tries to apply the same principle to the question of population growth, specifically, the relative rate of growth among Brains as compared with Brawns:

What happens when low IQ people have more kids? It encourages greater specialization and trade. High-IQ people have a stronger incentive to focus on brainy work, because there are more low-IQ people to handle the non-brainy work.

The implication is that it doesn’t matter if population growth is faster among Brawns than among Brains. Not so. To continue with the example from Caplan’s earlier post, the addition of a Brain increases total output by 5 programs or 10 bushels of wheat, whereas the addition of a Brawn increases total output by only .1 program or 5 bushels of wheat. On the economic dimension, then, I would always prefer the addition of a Brain to the addition of a Brawn.

I’m not making an argument for eugenics — just an observation about the mathematics of the issue. The only lesson to be drawn from this is that economists often tend to misapply the principles of static analysis to dynamic situations.

Economic Sanity

Russell Roberts (Cafe Hayek) exposes the phoniness of the “growing gap” between “rich and poor.”

Donald Luskin (Chronicle of the Conspiracy) vindicates the Laffer Curve.

McQ (QandO) points to more evidence that Maryland’s anti-Wal-Mart legislation will harm Marylanders.

Wal-Mart and Jobs

Thomas DiLorenzo, writing at the Mises Economics Blog, asks “Is Wal-Mart Overpaying?“:

If the idea of prices and wages is that they should clear the market, leaving neither shortages or surpluses, consider that Wal-Mart might be overpaying. According to ChicagoBusiness.com: “The new Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location opening Friday in suburban Evergreen Park received a record 25,000 applications for 325 positions, the highest for any one location in the retailer’s history.”

My comment:

There are a few things missing from your formulation. First, Wal-Mart is seeking persons with certain qualifications (as low as those qualifications might seem to us lofty bloggers). Having been in the business of hiring people (my portfolio included what’s now called “human resources”), I can tell you that job openings typically attract dozens of unqualified applicants for every qualified applicant.

Second, it’s also conceivable that Wal-Mart is offering better compensation than the applicants (including the qualified ones) are able to command elsewhere in the relevant geographic area. Given Wal-Mart’s superior business model, a person with a given set of qualifications is worth more to Wal-Mart than he or she is to, say, a 7-11 down the road.

Third, it’s also conceivable that there is presently a “surplus” of persons with the requisite skills in geographic area; reluctance to move, for various reasons, tends to create a kind of geographic “stickiness.” Thus, Wal-Mart’s entry creates jobs and soaks up some of the surplus.

The market-clearing notion applies only in the “perfect” microeconomic world where there is no stickiness and no growth.

Joel Stein’s "Logic"

For those few of you who haven’t read Joel Stein’s op-ed piece (“Warriors and Wusses“) in the L.A. Times — the one that begins “I don’t support our troops” — here’s the “logic” of the piece:

The U.S. has imperialistic ambitions (except when it doesn’t).

People who after 9/11 enlisted in the Army had noble motives (defense of the country) — but they really knew that they were signing up to advance the (sometimes) imperialistic ambitions of the U.S.

Those soldiers who knew that they were signing up to advance the (sometimes) imperialistic ambitions of the U.S. were “tricked” into signing up for the war in Iraq. (Okay, Stein, which is it?)

The war in Iraq is “immoral” (just because Stein asserts that it is).

Bush is to blame for the “immoral war” in Iraq (no mention of Congress, which authorized the war and still supports it).

But the soldiers who serve in Iraq really are to blame for the “immoral war” there because they refuse to lay down their arms. Why do they refuse? Because (according to Stein) they really enlisted either (a) to advance their country’s imperialistic ambitions or (b) because they were “tricked” into enlisting (by Bush, presumably) and persist in fighting even though (I’m reading between the lines here) they must by now be aware that they were “tricked.” Got that? (Stein never deigns to mention the possibility that the soldiers who serve in Iraq are executing a legal war in accordance with their contractual obligations, which they entered into because they chose to risk their lives in the defense of their country.)

Therefore — even though Stein is willing to concede that the U.S. should honor its contractual obligations to those “immoral” soldiers (e.g., health care and pensions) — it should not honor them with a parade because to do so would make traffic worse than it is already.

In sum, the price of “immorality” is to be denied a parade, but only because the resulting traffic jam would inconvenience Stein. Wow!

What a piece of work is Stein. Not a logical bone in his head or a patriotic bone in his body. He belongs with these people.

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

O(kay) Canada!

With apologies to my Canadian friends for some cheap jokes at the expense of Canada.

Okay, so Canada’s Conservative Party will succeed the Liberal Party as the largest minority in Parliament. It looks like the Conservatives have picked up about 25 seats in Parliament while the Liberals may have lost 30 seats. That’s a big swing. It was made possible, in large part, by the financial scandals* surrounding the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. But I think it also reflects some degree of discontent with Canada’s politically correct, anti-American, anti-defense, socialistic policies.

I suppose there were many Canadian celebrities (an oxymoron?) and other Leftists who vowed — like their Hollywood counterparts — to leave Canada should Conservatives gain control of the government. But where will those Leftists go? Not to Bush country, that’s for sure. Britain’s not a good bet, either, given Tony Blair’s “unseemly” determination to defeat terrorism. France is out, now that Chirac has vowed to nuke a terrorist-sponsoring state if terrorists attack France.

The resurgence of Canada’s Conservative Party also puts the damper on loose talk among American Leftists about moving to Canada. (Talk that is quickly quelled by the reality of actually living in Canada.)

I think all of that points to the only viable option for Canadian and American Leftists: They must walk toward the Great Lakes and meet each other halfway (in the middle of the lakes, that is).
__________
* I didn’t actually follow the financial scandals that plagued Paul Martin. It’s hard to take Canada seriously when it comes to money: Canada’s $1 coin is known as the Loonie 🙂

Clear Thinking about the Death Penalty

Here’s my position (from 10/04/04):

The econometric evidence is there, for those who are open to it: Capital punishment does deter homicide. See, for example, the careful analysis by Hashem Dezhbaksh, Paul Robin, and Joanna Shepherd, “Does capital punishment have a deterrent effect? New evidence from post-moratorium panel data,” American Law and Economics Review 5(2): 344–376 (available in PDF format here). Dezhbaksh, Rubin, and Shepherd argue that each execution deters eighteen murders. That number may be high, but the analysis is rigorous and it accounts for relevant variables, such as income, age, race, gender, population density, and use of the death penalty where it is legal. It’s hard to read that analysis and believe that capital punishment doesn’t deter homicide — unless you want to believe it. I certainly wouldn’t take “Ouija Board” Goertzel’s opinion over that of careful econometricians like Dezhbaksh, Rubin, and Shepherd.

Now, I must say that I don’t care whether or not capital punishment deters homicide. Capital punishment is the capstone of a system of justice that used to work quite well in this country because it was certain and harsh. There must be a hierarchy of certain penalties for crime, and that hierarchy must culminate in the ultimate penalty if criminals and potential criminals are to believe that crime will be punished. When punishment is made less severe and less certain — as it was for a long time after World War II — crime flourishes and law-abiding citizens become less secure in their lives and property.

John McAdams, a professor of political science at Marquette University, makes a succinct case for the death penalty, regardless of its deterrent effect:

I’m a bit surprised . . . [by the] claim that “the burden of empirical proof would seem to lie with the pro-death penalty scholar.” If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call.

I wish I’d said that.

(Thanks to my son for the lead to the McAdams quotation.)

More "McCarthyism"

No, it’s not that we’re having another spate of “McCarthyism” — it’s simply time to revisit the myth of “McCarthyism.” More than a year ago I wrote this:

. . . McCarthy was right, but his methods backfired and caused otherwise sensible people to conclude that the “witch hunt” was nothing more than that. From Wikipedia, here:

In 1995, when the VENONA transcripts were declassified, it was learned that regardless of the specific number, McCarthy consistently underestimated the extent of Soviet espionage. VENONA specifically references at least 349 people in the United States–including citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents–who cooperated in various ways with Soviet intelligence agencies.

It is generally believed that McCarthy had no access to VENONA intelligence, deriving his information from other sources. VENONA does confirm that some individuals investigated by McCarthy were indeed Soviet agents. For example, Mary Jane Keeney was identified by McCarthy simply as “a communist”; in fact she and her husband were both Soviet agents. Another individual named by McCarthy was Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to President Roosevelt. He was confirmed by VENONA to be a Soviet Agent.

And here:

The VENONA documents, and the extent of their significance, were not made public until 1995. They show that the US and others were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942.

The decrypts include 349 individuals who were maintaining a covert relationship with the Soviet Union. It can be safely assumed that more than 349 agents were active, as that number is from a small sample of the total intercepted message traffic. Among those identified are Alger Hiss, believed to have been the agent “ALES”; Harry Dexter White, the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie, a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin, a section head in the Office of Strategic Services. Almost every military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent, including, of course, the Manhattan Project. Even today, the identities of fewer than half of the 349 agents are known with any certainty. Agents who were never identified include “Mole”, a senior Washington official who passed information on American diplomatic policy, and “Quantum”, a scientist on the Manhattan Project.

Some known spies, including Theodore Hall, were neither prosecuted nor publicly implicated, because the VENONA evidence against them could not be made public. VENONA evidence has also clarified the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, making it clear that Julius was guilty of espionage while Ethel was guilty of cooperating, while also showing that their contributions to Soviet nuclear espionage were less important than was publicly alleged at the time. In fact, Ethel had been only an accomplice, and Julius’ information was probably not as valuable as that provided by sources like “Quantum” and “Pers” (both still unidentified.)

This is an extremely different picture from the one that which had developed over most of 50 years in the absence of solid evidence. While critics debate the identity of individual agents, the overall picture of infiltration is more difficult to refute. The release of the VENONA information has forced reevaluation of the Red Scare in the US….

Now comes David Berstein of The Volokh Conspiracy, who is reviewing Martin Redish’s book, The Logic of Persecution: Free Expression and the McCarthy Era. Among the many things Bernstein has learned while doing research for his review are these:

. . . .

(2) Hollywood scriptwriters who were members of the Communist Party (CPUSA) were expected to use their positions to promote Communist doctrine and the Party’s agenda, or, if that was not possible, at least to work to exclude anti-Soviet sentiment. (And I already knew, but you might not have, that each of the Hollywood Ten was a member of the CPUSA.)

(3) The first federal prosecution under the Smith Act (later used to prosecute CPUSA leaders) was the prosecution of eighteen leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party 1941. The CPUSA not only applauded this action; Party leaders assisted in the prosecution.

(4) The Smith Act prosecutions of CPUSA leaders were largely a result of the fact that top government officials had recently learned from decoded “Venona cables” between the Soviet Union and its agents and affiliates abroad that the Soviet Union used American Communists to engage in wide scale espionage against the United States. The CPUSA leaders were not prosecuted for espionage and related charges (conspiracy) because that would have involved revealing that the U.S. had deciphered the Soviets’ code, and also much of the additional evidence the government had was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Instead, the government resurrected the Smith Act, and proceeded with prosecutions of highly dubious constitutionality (though upheld by the Supreme Court, which implicitly recognized that these prosecutions were “special”).

(5) Not only did the CPUSA recruit spies for the Soviet Union through its “secret apparatus,” it was prepared to engage in violence on behalf of the Soviet Union.

(6) The Smith Act prosecutions and other government and private anti-Communist activity destroyed the usefulness of the CPUSA to the Soviet Union for espionage.

(7) Many of the questionable tactics used by the government against domestic Communists in the late 1940s and 1950s, including Smith Act prosecutions, were previously used by the government against domestic Nazis and fascists in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the Roosevelt Administration.

(8) Alger Hiss was not prosecuted for spying because the statute of limitations had expired.

(9) During the “Red Decade” of the 1930s, Hollywood Communists ran their own blacklist againist their political enemies. Because the studio bosses didn’t support this blacklist, it wasn’t as effective as the 1950s blacklist of Communists, but it seriously harmed careers nevertheless. Also, many in Hollyood boycotted those who testified before HUAC, allegedly as revenge for “naming names”. But is there any serious doubt that the boycotters’ attitudes would be very different if their targets had discussed with Congress Nazi, as opposed to Communist, infiltration of Hollywood?

(10) Then there’s this quote from historian Ellen Schrecker, who is generally sympathetic to the Communists, regarding the blacklist, which conflicts with the theme of a couple of major Hollywood movies: “Most of the men and women who lost their jobs or were otherwise victimized were not apolitical folks who had somehow gotten on the wrong mailing lists or signed the wrong petitions. …Whether or not they should have been victimized, they certainly were not misidentified.” On the other hand, anti-Communist historian Klehr states that “many innocent people were harassed.” But Redish concludes that “for the most part, it seems that the blacklists were accurate.”

(11) Much of what is now labeled “McCarthyism” consisted of spontaneous action by private individuals and groups to boycott Stalinists. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a sound source that persuasively explains to what extent these private actors interacted with the government. For example, I still don’t have a firm sense to what extent the Hollywood blacklist was the result of a fear of bad publicitly and threats to boycott the industry from various anti-Communist groups, and to what extent it was motivated by fear of potential government regulation.

The use of “questionable tactics” should not diminish the fact that the enemy was in our midst. The “scare” wasn’t a scare — it was about the real thing.

"Natural Rights" and Libertarianism

UPDATED, 01/25/06

Some relevant reading:

Natural Rights: Useful Fiction, by John Henke at QandO NEW

Government: The Social Contract Market, by Jon Henke at QandO

Rights Schmights, by Max Borders at TCS Daily

The Right in My Garage, by Jon Henke at QandO

The Paradox of Libertarianism, A Footnote to My Theory of Rights, and The Origin and Essence of Rights, by moi

Politics and Prosperity

Liberty, General Welfare, and the State

Recommended Reading about NSA’s Surveillance Program

Giving Back to the Community, Redux

Liberty and "Fairness"

Anarcho-Libertarian "Stretching"

"Addicted to Oil"

Conservatism, Libertarianism, and "The Authoritarian Personality"

(Final?) Words about Preemption and the Constitution

Pseudo-Science in the Service of Political Correctness

The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism

Democracy vs. Liberty, Again

Economist, Heal Thyself

Economic Sanity

Wal-Mart and Jobs

Joel Stein’s "Logic"

More Foxhole Rats

O(kay) Canada!

Clear Thinking about the Death Penalty

More "McCarthyism"

"Natural Rights" and Libertarianism

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