The Course of the Mainstream

When I hear liberals complain that conservative-libertarian judicial nominees are “out of the mainstream,” this is what I visualize:

THE MAINSTREAM THEN


THE MAINSTREAM NOW

The mainstream has shifted considerably to the left in the past 70 years. Being in the mainstream of current political thought is no virtue; being out of the mainstream of current political thought is no vice. A conservative-libertarian judicial nominee should be proud of being out of today’s mainstream — and on the side of liberty

No Wonder Families Are Fleeing the Cities

Headline: Child Population Dwindles in San Francisco

What?

San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city. Just 14.5 percent of the city’s population is 18 and under.

It is no mystery why U.S. cities are losing children. The promise of safer streets, better schools and more space has drawn young families away from cities for as long as America has had suburbs.

But kids are even more scarce in San Francisco than in expensive New York (24 percent) or in retirement havens such as Palm Beach, Fla., (19 percent), according to Census estimates.

Why? This is part of it:

San Francisco’s large gay population — estimated at 20 percent by the city Public Health Department — is thought to be one factor…. [No kidding!]

Then, there’s this:

Another reason San Francisco’s children are disappearing: Family housing in the city is especially scarce and expensive. A two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot starter home is considered a bargain at $760,000.

And this:

Determined to change things, Mayor Gavin Newsom has put the kid crisis near the top of his agenda, appointing a 27-member policy council to develop plans for keeping families in the city.

“It goes to the heart and soul of what I think a city is about — it’s about generations, it’s about renewal and it’s about aspirations,” said Newsom, 37. “To me, that’s what children represent and that’s what families represent and we just can’t sit back idly and let it go away.”

Newsom has expanded health insurance for the poor to cover more people under 25, and created a tax credit for working families. And voters have approved measures to patch up San Francisco’s public schools, which have seen enrollment drop from about 62,000 to 59,000 since 2000.

One voter initiative approved up to $60 million annually to restore public school arts, physical education and other extras that state spending no longer covers. Another expanded the city’s Children’s Fund, guaranteeing about $30 million a year for after-school activities, child care subsidies and other programs.

“We are at a crossroads here,” said N’Tanya Lee, executive director of the nonprofit Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. “We are moving toward a place where we could have an infrastructure of children’s services and no children.”

“Children’s services” cost money, which requires higher taxes, which in turn will drive more young, middle-class families out to the suburbs. But “city planners” just don’t get it:

Other cities are trying similar strategies. Seattle has created a children’s fund, like the one in San Francisco. Leaders in Portland, Ore., are pushing developers to build affordable housing for families, a move Newsom has also tried.

Why should families stay in the city?

They can enjoy world-class museums, natural beauty and an energy they say they cannot find in the suburbs.

Well, the enjoyment of museums and so-called beauty doesn’t happen through osmosis. It takes an active effort. The same enjoyment can be had by occasionally commuting into the city from the suburbs. As for “energy,” that’s just another word for crime, pollution, congestion, and weird people.

A Libertarian Paternalist’s Dream World

I wrote recently — and unadmiringly — of libertarian paternalism. What is it? It’s a “brave new world” in which corporations, acting at the behest of the state, dictate our choices — for our own good of course:

The underlying notion is that people don’t always choose what’s “best” for themselves. Best according to whom? According to libertarian paternalists, of course, who tend to equate “best” with wealth maximization. They simply disregard or dismiss the truly rational preferences of those who must live with the consequences of their decisions. Richard Thaler [an economist who is a leading proponent of libertarian paternalism] may want you to save your money when you’re only 22, but you may have other things to do with your money, such as paying off a college loan.

A libertarian paternalist who isn’t fixated on wealth maximization might prefer the European model, in which the state dictates the amount of leisure one should enjoy. As Chris Bickerton, writing at spiked, explains:

The ‘European social model’ serves to rationalise low growth through the prism of individual wellbeing. In reality, this means that the cost of low growth is paid by Europe’s working population. Governments that find it politically expedient to promote policies for tackling unemployment do so by reducing working hours by diktat and forcing through moderated wage claims or even wage freezes. They get away with this because of the demonisation of growth and productivity as social goals.

Faced with this situation, we should refuse to accept that work can only be conceived of as a limitation to the development of human capabilities. We should also refuse to accept the idea that the path to human happiness is through idleness. Contrary to what Jeremy Rifkin [author of the wrongheaded The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream] might think, our modern world is about something more than the number of weeks’ holiday we get each year.

Bickerton, a PhD student in international politics at St John’s College, Oxford, has a much firmer grasp of reality than do economics professor Richard Thaler and his statist collaborator, law professor Cass Sunstein.

It’s true that happiness, for many of us, is about more than wealth maximization. But if wealth maximization makes you happy, you have a better chance of attaining nirvana in the U.S. than in Europe. Not because of libertarian paternalists, but because the choice between wealth and leisure is yours to make (for now). Liberty is all about choice, not about being forced to make the “right” choice by libertarian paternalists.

Where Do You Draw the Line?

How far can you go down the following list before you disagree with a statement?

1. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” summarizes the American ideal.

2. America’s sovereignty provides a shield behind which Americans may pursue the American ideal.

3. Americans’ ability to pursue the American ideal therefore depends on the successful defense of American interests and America’s sovereignty.

4. Americans, acting through the state, should defend American interests and America’s sovereignty.

5. It is foolish and irresponsible to wait until an enemy strikes a blow before acting in self-defense.

6. The American ideal is subverted when, in the pursuit of specific ends that seem laudable, some Americans use the power of the state in ways that effectively deprive Americans of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

7. There is a slippery-slope effect in human affairs; the acceptance of behavior that had been unacceptable establishes a new “baseline” of acceptable behavior, from which departures then become acceptable, and so on.

8. Abortion and involuntary euthanasia are steps down a slippery slope toward the use of state power to shape human destiny.

9. Heterosexual marriage with a stay-at-home mother is the backbone of a civil society, that is, a largely self-regulating society in which the norms of acceptable behavior are inculcated within a family.

Scoring:

If you disagreed before you get to #5, you probably should live in a different country, or in a Blue State.

If you made it through #7 without disagreeing, you might be a libertarian realist.

If you agreed with all 9 statements, you are a libertarian realist, that is, someone who puts “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” above libertarian cant.

But there’s more, for those of you who agreed with all of the statements above. Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?

1. There are just some things people shouldn’t be allowed to say in the presence of anyone who might be offended.

2. It’s all right to say anything, as long as what you say doesn’t constitute a direct threat to anyone.

3. It’s all right to say anything, period.

4. It’s not all right for anyone — not even the press — to divulge information that would help an enemy harm Americans or their interests.

Scoring:

If you agreed with #1 you are either of the Left or Right. Game’s over. You lose.

If you agreed with #2 you are half-way to being a libertarian realist.

But if you then agreed with #3 you are a libertarian idealist who is wedded to libertarian cant. Game’s over. You lose.

Whereas, if you disagreed with #3 and then agreed with #4 you are truly a libertarian realist. Welcome to an exclusive club.

Getting It Right about Terrorism

This makes sense to me:

In Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism (NBER Working Paper No. 10859) Alberto Abadie…finds that the risk of terrorism is not significantly higher for poorer countries, once other country-specific characteristics are considered. In particular, Abadie finds that a country’s level of political freedom better explains the presence of terrorism….

After controlling for the level of political rights, fractionalization, and geography, Abadie concludes that per capita national income is not significantly associated with terrorism. He finds, though, that lower levels of political rights are linked to higher levels of terrorism[.] [C]ountries with the highest levels of political rights are also the countries that suffer the lowest levels of terrorism. However, the relationship between the level of political rights and terrorism is not a simple linear one. Countries in an intermediate range of political rights experience a greater risk of terrorism than countries either with a very high degree of political rights or than severely authoritarian countries with very low levels of political rights.

Why this relationship? Abadie offers two possibilities. “On the one hand, the repressive practices commonly adopted by autocratic regimes to eliminate political dissent may help [keep] terrorism at bay,” he explains. “On the other hand, intermediate levels of political freedom are often experienced during times of political transitions, when governments are weak, political instability is elevated, so conditions are favorable for the appearance of terrorism.”

(Thanks to EconoPundit for the pointer.)

Proof, If Proof Were Needed…

…that Slate and most of its readers are Left-leaning, from Leftist Timothy Noah:

The New York Times will soon start charging to read its op-ed columnists online. The Times is offering its columnists as an all-or-nothing deal, but I proposed that each columnist be priced according to his or her value. I invited readers to allocate a $25 fee among the eight op-ed regulars….An even allocation, I noted, would be a subscription price of $3.13 to read any given columnist online for one year. But not all Times op-ed columnists are equally worth reading. Hence my reader poll….

The Times columnists, in descending order of perceived value:

Paul Krugman: $6.90

Thomas L. Friedman: $4.10

Frank Rich: $3.92

Maureen Dowd: $3.42

Nicholas Kristof: $2.35

Bob Herbert: $1.42

David Brooks: $1.39

John Tierney: $0.31

…That the two most conservative Times columnists—Tierney [a libertarian, actually: ED] and David Brooks —are the two lowest-ranking may reflect some liberal bias among Slate readers, or even some liberal bias within Chatterbox himself. (Let he who is without sin…)

“Liberal bias”? No kidding!

Here’s how I allocated my $25 (a negative amount means that I’d have to be paid to read a columnist):

David Brooks $100
Maureen Dowd – $100
Thomas L. Friedman $0
Bob Herbert -$100
Nicholas D. Kristof -$100
Paul Krugman $0 (not negative only because he produces easily rebuttable material for econ bloggers)
Frank Rich -$100
John Tierney $325

Net amount = $25

As for Slate, I read it for the same reason that econ bloggers read Paul Krugman: It propagates easily rebuttable Leftist cant.

Bambi Blogging

Bambi (or Bambette), in our front yard around 9:30 on Tuesday morning:

After about 5 hours in that spot, the fawn finally skeedaddled to find Mom, who seems to have stashed it in a more secure place on our property. We see one or the other of them from time to time, as they venture out to feed.

They’re beautiful animals but a major threat to expensive landscaping. They must think they “own” the land on which our house was built. Well, they do, in a way.

Thoughts of Winter

As I welcome summer to central Texas — after a rainy fall, a drizzly winter, and an unusually cool spring — I reflect on the seasons and their associations. Winter, much as I dislike it — even in the relative warmth of central Texas — has its compensations:

The soft glow of twilight through the trees

A rumbling fire in the hearth

A chamber work on the sound system

A fine single-malt at my side

The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World in my hand:

I have had enough of wisdom, and enough of mirth,
For the way’s one and the end’s one, and it’s soon to the ends of the earth;
And it’s then good-night and to bed, and if heels or heart ache,
Well, it’s sound sleep and long sleep, and sleep too deep to wake.

From Wanderer’s Song, by Arthur Symons (1865-1945)

The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
And the Deuce knows what we may do —
But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
We’re down, hull-down, on the Long Trail — the trail that is always new!

From The Long Trail, by Rudyard Kipling (1869-1936)

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Inchohare Longam, by Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finish’d and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yes, hungry for the lips of my desire;
I have been faithful to thee Cynara! in my fashion.

From Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae, by Dowson

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.

One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife —
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

From The Hill, by Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1930)

The beauty, shattered by the laws
That have creation in their keeping,
No longer trembles at applause,
Or over children that are sleeping;
And we who delve in beauty’s lore
Know all the we have known before
Of what inexorable cause
Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

From For a Dead Lady, by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

“For Auld Lang Syne.” The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered, and the song was done.
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below —
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

From Mr. Flood’s Party, by Robinson

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

From War Is Kind, by Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

Time, you old gipsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?….

Last week in Babylon,
Last night in Rome,
Morning and in the crush
Under Paul’s dome;
Under Paul’s dial
You tighten your rein —
Only a moment, and off once again;
Off to some city
Now blind in the womb,
Off to another
Ere that’s in the tomb.

From Time, You Old Gipsy Man, by Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962)

Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

From In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae (1872-1918)

And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England,
The have no graves as yet.

From Elegy in a Country Churchyard, by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1956)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Fire and Ice, by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw
in November or a paw-paw in May, did she wonder, does
she remember? . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs?

From Cool Tombs, by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

“We are earth’s best, that learnt her lesson her.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said;
“We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!” . . . Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say,
— And then you suddenly cried and turned away.

From The Hill, by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

Heart, you were never hot,
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

From Greater Love, by Wilfred Own (1893-1918)

Stick your patent name on a signboard
brother — all over — going west — young man
Tintex — Japalac — Certain-teed Overalls ads
and land sakes! under the new playbill ripped
in the guaranteed corner — see Bert Williams what!
Minstrels when you steal a chicken just
save me the wing for if it isn’t
Erie it ain’t for miles around a
Mazda — and the telegraphic night coming on Thomas
a Ediford — and whistling down the tracks a headlight rushing with the sound….

From The Bridge (“The River”), by Hart Crane (1899-1932)

Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the bush —
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!

From Ode to the Confederate Dead, by Allen Tate (1899-1979)

It’s no go the merry-go-round, it’s no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison….

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

From Bagpipe Music, by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

From Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

But those thoughts are for the melancholy and nostalgic reveries of winter. I now rejoice in glorious summer:

Into the rooms flow meadow airs,
The warm farm baking smell’s blown round.
Inside and out, and sky and ground
Are much the same; the wishing star,
Hesperus, kind and early born,
Is risen only finger-far;
All stars stand close in summer air,
And tremble, and look mild as amber;
When wicks are lighted in the chamber,
They are like stars which settled there.

From Country Summer, by Leonie Adams (1899-1988)

A Contrarian View of Segregation

TheFreeDictionary.com reminds us that today is the 109th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896):

In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed a law that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. Concerned, several black and white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to the repeal of that law. They eventually persuaded Homer Plessy, an octoroon (someone of seven-eighths Caucasian descent and one-eighth African descent), to test it. Plessy purchased a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway from New Orleans to Covington. The railroad company had been informed already as to Plessy’s racial lineage, and after Plessy had taken a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was asked to vacate it and sit instead in the blacks-only car. Plessy refused and was arrested immediately….

Announced on May 18, 1896, the 7-1 decision, with one abstention, upheld the Louisiana statute.

Segregation of the type considered by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson suffers two fundamental flaws:

  • It allows for no subtlety, as in the case of Plessy, who — as an octoroon — may have been no less “white” than many “whites” who rode in “whites only” railway cars.
  • It declares an entire group of otherwise law-abiding persons “off limits” to society, rather than allow the members of that group to be considered on individual merit.

The second point goes to the heart of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in the case (as quoted in Wikipedia):

[I]n the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

I agree with Harlan, up to that point. The law should be racially neutral. By the same token, the law should not tell private parties whom they must employ and with whom they must trade and associate. As I wrote recently,

we would be much better off, socially and economically, if government intervention were limited to the equal protection of everyone’s life, liberty, and property. Such a regime would enable persons of ability — regardless of race or gender — to prove their worth and earn the trust of others. That is true progress.

The Economy Works, in Spite of Zany Economists

This post is from the archives of the pre-blog version of Liberty Corner. I wrote it in 1998. I still like it.

Even though Stephen Jay Gould once accused social scientists of “physics envy,” he did not deter economists’ efforts to practice the dismal science as if it were really a science. Thus, for example, a Robert Shiller of Yale University arms himself with data about the past performance of the stock market and warns us that the Dow will lunge from 8,000 (make that 9,000 . . . 10,000 . . . 11,000) to 6,000 or less. The problem with such analytical exercises is that they tell us what has happened but not what will happen. Statistics predict the past with uncanny accuracy.

Not that Professor Shiller is entirely wrong about the future performance of the stock market. He is almost certainly right, in principle, because the only known monotonic trends in the universe are its expansion and its aging — and a lot of physicists aren’t sure about the permanence of those trends. No, Professor Shiller will probably be right, some day, because — as the old saying goes — a stopped watch is right twice a day.[*]

John Maynard Keynes (created Lord Keynes for his services to economic thought and to some members of the Bloomsbury Set) averred that a government could spend an economy out of a depression. In spite of Keynes, the United States and Great Britain remained mired in the Great Depression for most of the 1930s. Some have argued that Keynes was vindicated by post-World War II prosperity, which they attribute to the the binge of consumer spending spawned by the massive infusion of government spending in wartime. That argument overlooks the inconvenient possibility that the Great Depresssion, like earlier depressions, would have ended without the benefit of government largesse. The argument also overlooks the fact that, unlike the United States, Great Britain did not plunge into prosperity at the end of World War II.

One could argue that Germany and Japan proved Keynes right because unemployment in those countries vanished in the face of their massive arms buildups. Yes, and one could say that the members of a chain gang are well off because they have “jobs.”

Enough of old feuds. Let us return to the present scene.

Today’s “green economists” advance the notion that free markets are all right in their place — but not when it comes to protecting the environment. Conjuring dire results for humankind if markets continue to cater to the crass demands of consumers, those economists would commandeer the economy in the name of future generations yet unborn. (Sound the trumpets! Wave the flag!) If one reasonably assumes that such economists know that there are market-based ways to solve the problems caused by pollution, what is one to make of their anti-market rhetoric? Answer: Just like any consumer of “political pork,” they’re perfectly willing to have the government aggrandize their own (psychic) income at the expense of the general welfare. That is, they simply don’t like economic growth and don’t care who is hurt by their anti-growth propoganda.

Consider, finally, the antediluvian agitators for antitrust actions against successful companies. The scions of Roosevelt the First seem to be stuck in a zero-sum view of the economic universe, in which “winners” must perforce be balanced by “losers.” Or perhaps they, like their green brethren, suffer a form of success envy.

Whatever the case, the antitrusters forget (or wish not to remember) that (1) successful companies become successful by satisfying consumers, (2) consumers wouldn’t buy the damned stuff if they didn’t think it was worth the price, and (3) “immense” profits invite competition (direct and indirect), which benefits consumers. On the third point, if the USPS — a government monopoly that claims to own my mailbox — can’t stave off competition from alternative delivery services and e-mail, what’s to keep a new Bill Gates from building a better mouse (pun) trap? Only the fear of being pursued by the almighty federal government. Thanks a lot, feds.

All of which underscores another old saying: A sucker is born every minute — and then he moves to Washington.
__________
* In fact, I agreed with Prof. Shiller and had already moved the bulk of my investments from the stock market to fixed-income securities. Better too soon than too late; when the market crashes, it crashes fast.

Class in America

The New York Times is running a series on “Class in America,” the introduction to which includes the usual Leftist cant,* and which assumes that class is tied to occupation, education, income, and wealth:

At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more.[**] At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe….In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say….

One way to think of a person’s position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class. [Click here to see where you fit in the American population.] [***] Face cards in a few categories may land a player in the upper middle class. At first, a person’s class is his parents’ class. Later, he may pick up a new hand of his own; it is likely to resemble that of his parents, but not always.

Well, success in school, income, and health are linked tightly to intelligence, and those who have the genes for high intelligence tend to have more schooling, make more money, stay healthy, and pass their genes on to their children. Is that somehow wrong? The Times implies that it is.

In spite of the tight link between genetic inheritance and success, there is a lot on intergenerational mobility across the income distribution. (Who are you going to believe, the lying NYT or me?)

In any event, the Times swings and misses twice when it comes to defining and measuring class.

First, the Times deploys the card-game analogy quoted above, which suggests that life is a zero-sum game in which the winners win at the expense of the losers — when that isn’t the case. The Times reinforces the zero-sum notion by introducing a class scale that measures relative status; someone must move down the scale if someone else is to move up it.

Second, and more fundamentally, class is something that one possesses independently of job, education, income, and wealth. A super-rich person can inhabit the lowest class, while an extremely poor person can inhabit the highest class. We could be a nation composed entirely of high-class persons. There’s nothing to prevent it — nothing, that is, but the choices each of us makes about three facets of life:

  • Tastes – our likes and dislikes. A high-class person eschews loudness, crudeness, and ostentation and adopts reflective pursuits (e.g., writing, reading demanding works of fiction and non-fiction, understanding music and art).
  • Manners – overt behavior toward others. A high-class person is polite toward and considerate of the feelings of others, even in fleeting encounters.
  • Ethics – the rules by which we live. Regardless of tastes and manners, a person cannot be high-class without also being honest, fulfilling obligations, and avoiding the temptation to use power to dictate to others.

Money makes it easier to have good taste and good manners, but money is no guarantee of either; Paris Hilton and scores of rock musicians, sports stars, movie stars, and other celebrities are cases in point. Ethics seems to have little do with money or high station, as business and political “leaders” are wont to remind us by their actions, year after year.

Consider the presidents of the U.S. from FDR through Clinton. Based on their tastes, manners, and ethics, I rate them as follows:

  • Low-class: Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton
  • Middle-class: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter
  • High-class: Ford, Reagan, Bush 41

In other words, it’s entirely possible to be something less than high-class even if one has held the most prestigious job in the world, earned a college degree (or two), made a high income, and possessed considerable wealth (as have most modern presidents). Class comes from within, not from the material attainments by which the Times would judge us.
__________
* Leftists like Charlie Rangel like to think that by attacking the rich they are helping the poor, when just the opposite is true. Well, Rangel is evidently a lot richer than I am, so I guess he is going to hell, if I am to believe this exchange with Chris Matthews on 04/07/05:

Matthews: “I mean Charlie, Jesus didn’t hang around with the swells- the rich people.”

Rangel: “Well, he said the rich people are going straight to hell.” [Courtesy Trey Jackson]

Just the place for him. He’ll like the company, which undoubtedly includes at least one other infamous racial demagogue.

** What people do with their money is — or should be — a personal matter, subject only to the proviso that they do no harm to others. Gated community? Fine. I’d like to live in one, as would many if not most of the poor with whom the Times seem to identify. What’s wrong with keeping the riff-raff at bay? Do you think that law-abiding poor people enjoy living where they do? When the poor finally make enough money to afford a move to the suburbs, they do so to escape their former neighbors, not to mingle with them.

*** I followed the link (bracketed in the original) to learn my “class standing” and wound up in the 87th percentile, based on my pre-retirement job and (in today’s dollars) income and wealth. By the same criteria, my father was somewhere in the 40th to 50th percentile. Not bad. But my grandfather undoubtedly was somewhere near the bottom. I didn’t steal from anyone to move up, nor did my father, nor did the vast majority of those who now stand higher than their parents and grandparents on the Times‘s class scale. But my standing on the Times‘s scale would be meaningless had I the tastes, manners, and ethics of a Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Racist or Realist?

UPDATED BELOW

From AP via Yahoo! News:

Mexico’s Fox Defends Comment on Blacks

MEXICO CITY – President Vicente Fox refused to apologize Monday for saying Mexicans in the United States do the work that blacks won’t….

Lisa Catanzarite, a sociologist at Washington State University, disputed Fox’s assertion. She said there is intense competition for lucrative working class jobs like construction and that employers usually prefer to hire immigrants who don’t know their rights.

“What Vicente Fox called a willingness to work … translates into extreme exploitability,” she said.

No, it translates into a willingness to work. No one forces Mexicans to cross the border to work — and work hard — for low wages.

Here’s the acid test: Given a choice between hiring an anonymous group of Mexicans and an anonymous group of American blacks to do the same job at the same hourly rate, which group would you choose? I think most employers would choose the Mexicans.

That’s not to say American blacks are lazy, but that they’re less likely to perform well at low-wage work because the welfare system removes the incentive to perform well. Illegal immigrants, on the other hand, don’t have full access to the welfare system. It’s another example of the perverse consequences of the regulatory-welfare state, which destroys income and wealth.

UPDATE: So Fox has “regretted” his statement. But he hasn’t withdrawn it.

The End of MSM as We Know It?

UPDATED BELOW, 05/15/05

Three blogging powerhouses — ArmedLiberal.com, RogerLSimon.com and LittleGreenFootballs.com — are spearheading the formation of a consortium of news bloggers, to be known as Pajamas Media (announcement here, followup here, signup form here).

Here’s the deal: For a long time, the MSM got away with editorializing disguised as reporting. The rise of conservative talk radio and FoxNews began to expose the MSM for what it is, namely, a propaganda machine for the brand of Leftism that is pretty much responsible for America’s economic, moral, and military decline. The rise of blogging has exposed the MSM’s biases in detail, and in something close to real time.

Bloggers aren’t unbiased, of course, and I don’t expect PJ Media to be unbiased. What I do expect is that PJ Media will serve as a viable blogging alternative to the MSM because it will be the equivalent of a news network, major daily paper, or weekly news magazine — one-stop shopping for news and views on a variety of subjects — with a news cycle of seconds or minutes instead of hours, days, or weeks.

Will PJ Media (and its inevitable imitators) hasten the decline of the MSM or force the MSM to clean up its act? Decline seems more likely than reform: Blogging news services will suck advertising dollars away from the MSM, which the MSM will try to recoup by playing to its strength, which is a Left-oriented sensationalism, for which there will always be a market. Then, too, the MSM may simply begin to use the blogosphere in the same way as PJ Media and its ilk, further hastening the decline of print and broadcast media and setting up a classic Left-Right/Libertarian confrontation in cyberspace.

Now there’s a digital divide for you.

UPDATE: Newsweek sort of fesses up to a colossal error:

May 23 issue – By the end of the week, the rioting had spread from Afghanistan throughout much of the Muslim world, from Gaza to Indonesia. Mobs shouting “Protect our Holy Book!” burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces. The violence cost at least 15 lives, injured scores of people and sent a shudder through Washington, where officials worried about the stability of moderate regimes in the region.

The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Brandishing a copy of that week’s NEWSWEEK (dated May 9), Khan read a report that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo prison had placed the Qur’an on toilet seats and even flushed one. “This is what the U.S. is doing,” exclaimed Khan, “desecrating the Qur’an.” His remarks, as well as the outraged comments of Muslim clerics and Pakistani government officials, were picked up on local radio and played throughout neighboring Afghanistan. Radical Islamic foes of the U.S.-friendly regime of Hamid Karzai quickly exploited local discontent with a poor economy and the continued presence of U.S. forces, and riots began breaking out last week.

Late last week Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita told NEWSWEEK that its original story was wrong. The brief PERISCOPE item (“SouthCom Showdown”) had reported on the expected results of an upcoming U.S. Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Gitmo. According to NEWSWEEK, SouthCom investigators found that Gitmo interrogators had flushed a Qur’an down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. While various released detainees have made allegations about Qur’an desecration, the Pentagon has, according to DiRita, found no credible evidence to support them.

How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest? While continuing to report events on the ground, NEWSWEEK interviewed government officials, diplomats and its own staffers, and reconstructed this narrative of events:

At NEWSWEEK, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff’s interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur’an down a toilet. A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but NEWSWEEK National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK PERISCOPE item to a senior Defense official, asking, “Is this accurate or not?” The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the PERISCOPE draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report.

Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees—including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports of Qur’an desecration seemed shocking but not incredible. But to Muslims, defacing the Holy Book is especially heinous. “We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive,” says computer teacher Muhammad Archad, interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of last week’s protests took place. “But insulting the Qur’an is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate.”

NEWSWEEK was not the first to report allegations of desecrating the Qur’an. As early as last spring and summer, similar reports from released detainees started surfacing in British and Russian news reports, and in the Arab news agency Al-Jazeera; claims by other released detainees have been covered in other media since then. But the NEWSWEEK report arrived at a particularly delicate moment in Afghan politics. Opponents of the Karzai government, including remnants of the deposed Taliban regime, have been looking for ways to exploit public discontent. The Afghan economy is weak, and the government (pressed by the United States) has alienated farmers by trying to eradicate their poppy crops, used to make heroin in the global drug trade. Afghan men are sometimes rounded up during ongoing U.S. military operations, and innocents can sit in jail for months. When they are released, many complain of abuse. President Karzai is still largely respected, but many Afghans regard him as too dependent on and too obsequious to the United States. With Karzai scheduled to come to Washington next week, this is a good time for his enemies to make trouble.

That does not quite explain, however, why the protest and rioting over Qur’an desecration spread throughout the Islamic region. After so many gruesome reports of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the vehemence of feeling around this case came as something of a surprise. Extremist agitators are at least partly to blame, but obviously the reports of Qur’anic desecration touch a particular nerve in the Islamic world. U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, are uneasily watching, and last week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointedly remarked that any desecration of the Qur’an would not be “tolerated” by the United States. (As a legal matter, U.S. citizens are free to deface the Qur’an as an exercise of free speech, just as they are free to burn the American flag or tear up a Bible; but government employees can be punished for violating government rules.)

After the rioting began last week, the Pentagon attempted to determine the veracity of the NEWSWEEK story. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers told reporters that so far no allegations had been proven. He did appear to cryptically refer to two mentions found in the logs of prison guards in Gitmo: a report that a detainee had used pages of the Qur’an to stop up a crude toilet as a form of protest, and a complaint from a detainee that a prison guard had knocked down a Qur’an hanging in a bag in his cell.

On Friday night, Pentagon spokesman DiRita called NEWSWEEK to complain about the original PERISCOPE item. He said, “We pursue all credible allegations” of prisoner abuse, but insisted that the investigators had found none involving Qur’an desecration. DiRita sent NEWSWEEK a copy of rules issued to the guards (after the incidents mentioned by General Myers) to guarantee respect for Islamic worship. On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur’an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report. Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”

In the meantime, as part of his ongoing reporting on the detainee-abuse story, Isikoff had contacted a New York defense lawyer, Marc Falkoff, who is representing 13 Yemeni detainees at Guantánamo. According to Falkoff’s declassified notes, a mass-suicide attempt—when 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves in August 2003—was triggered by a guard’s dropping a Qur’an and stomping on it. One of Falkoff’s clients told him, “Another detainee tried to kill himself after the guard took his Qur’an and threw it in the toilet.” A U.S. military spokesman, Army Col. Brad Blackner, dismissed the claims as unbelievable. “If you read the Al Qaeda training manual, they are trained to make allegations against the infidels,” he said.

More allegations, credible or not, are sure to come. Bader Zaman Bader, a 35-year-old former editor of a fundamentalist English-language magazine in Peshawar, was released from more than two years’ lockup in Guantánamo seven months ago. Arrested by Pakistani security as a suspected Qaeda militant in November 2001, he was handed over to the U.S. military and held at a tent at the Kandahar airfield. One day, Bader claims, as the inmates’ latrines were being emptied, a U.S. soldier threw in a Qur’an. After the inmates screamed and protested, a U.S. commander apologized. Bader says he still has nightmares about the incident.

Such stories may spark more trouble. Though decrepit and still run largely by warlords, Afghanistan was not considered by U.S. officials to be a candidate for serious anti-American riots. But Westerners, including those at NEWSWEEK, may underestimate how severely Muslims resent the American presence, especially when it in any way interferes with Islamic religious faith.

So much for all those layers of editing and fact-checking. So much for candid acceptance of blame. Newsweek doesn’t have a motto (that I know of) but if it did, it would be this: “Sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism, and the consequences be damned.” Or this: “Pass the buck.”

Democracy and Great Art

I have written much about democracy’s insidious effect on liberty. For example, in Part V of “Practical Libertarianism for Americans” I said:

[P]ublic opinion, elite opinion, and the media have combined to undo the great work of the Framers, whose Constitution prevented tyranny by the majority. Unchecked democracy has become the enemy of liberty and, therefore, of material progress. As Michael Munger says, “The real key to freedom is to secure people from tyranny by the majority, or freedom from democracy.”

The last best hope for liberty and prosperity lies in the neutralization of public opinion through a renewal of constitutional principles.

To which I added, in Part VI:

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.”…

Human nature has overcome constitutional obstacles. The governed and their governors — locked in a symbiotic relationship that is built on a mistrustful worldview, economic illiteracy, and baser instincts — have conspired to undermine the Constitution’s checks and balances. People, given their mistrustful and ignorant nature, have turned to government for “solutions” to their “problems.” Government, in its turn, has seized whatever power is necessary to go through the motions of providing “solutions.” For rare is the legislator who doesn’t want to legislate, the executive who doesn’t want to act, and the judge who doesn’t want to exercise his judgment by interpreting the law rather than simply apply it…

[L]iberty has been vanquished in the mistaken belief (or hope) that government can effectively and efficiently make us better off, salve our woes, and put an end to social and racial divisions. To those ends, the governed and their governors, walking hand in hand, have taken liberty for a stroll down a slippery slope. Every step they have taken down that slope has made more problematic our journey back up the slope.

Think of the Constitution as a great work of art that has been altered through the operation of public and elite opinion. The result is analogous to this:

That’s da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, in case you don’t recognize it.

Abortion and Crime

REVISED 05/15/05 (9:11 PM)

Several months ago, in “How to Fight Crime,” I said:

According to an article in today’s NYTimes.com, “Most Crimes of Violence and Property Hover at 30-Year Lows.” Three important things happened after 1995 — the year in which the rate of violent crime began to drop markedly. First, the incarceration rate continued to rise: Persistence pays off. Second, the percentage of the population that is male and 20-24 years old continued to drop, in keeping with the general aging of the population. (Age usually brings with it a greater degree of maturity, stability, and aversion to committing criminal acts.) At the same time, spending on criminal justice functions (police, corrections, and courts) continued to rise, especially spending on police.

I’m sure there are other causal factors, but those are probably the big ones. The first and third of those factors — incarceration and spending on the criminal justice system — go hand in hand. And they are the public-policy weapons of choice in a society that values individual responsibility.

Then Freakonomics was published. In it economist Steven Levitt challenged that orthodoxy. Here’s how The Washington Post reported Levitt’s findings about the drop in crime:

Freakonomics is packed with fascinating ideas. Consider Levitt’s notion of a relationship between abortion access and the crime drop. First, Freakonomics shows that although commonly cited factors such as improved policing tactics, more felons kept in prison and the declining popularity of crack account for some of the national reduction in crime that began in about the year 1990, none of these completes the explanation. (New York City and San Diego have enjoyed about the same percentage decrease in crime, for instance, though the former adopted new policing tactics and the latter did not.) What was the significance of the year 1990, Levitt asks? That was about 16 years after Roe v. Wade . Studies consistently show that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by those raised in broken homes or who were unwanted as children. When abortion became legal nationally, Levitt theorizes, births of unwanted children declined; 16 years later crime began to decline, as around age 16 is the point at which many once-innocent boys start their descent into the criminal life. Leavitt’s [sic] clincher point is that the crime drop commenced approximately five years sooner in Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York and Washington state than it did in the nation as a whole. What do these states have in common? All legalized abortion about five years before Roe .

Well, Steve Sailer (among others) has attacked Levitt’s findings:

First, Levitt’s theory is predicated — at least publicly — on abortion reducing the proportion of “unwanted” babies, who are presumed to be more likely to grow up to be criminals. The empirical problem with this is that legalization (which occurred in California, New York, and three other states in 1970 and nationally in 1973), didn’t put the slightest dent in the illegitimacy rate, which is, by far, the most obvious objective sign of not being wanted by the mother and father, and has been linked repeatedly with crime:

You’ll note that the growth in the illegitimacy rate didn’t start to slow down until the mid-1990s when the abortion rate finally went down a considerable amount.

My article offers a simple explanation, drawn from Levitt’s own research, of why legal abortion tends to increase illegitimacy.

Second, the acid test of Levitt’s theory is that it predicts that the first cohort to survive being culled by legal abortion should have been particularly law-abiding. Instead, they went on the worst teen murder rampage in American history. Here’s a graph showing the homicide rate for 14-17 year olds, and below each year is the average birthdate of the 14-17 year old cohort.

For example, the 14-17 year olds in the not particularly murderous year of 1976 were, on average, born about 1960 (i.e., 1976 – 16 years of age = 1960), so they didn’t “benefit” from being culled by legalized abortion the way that the 14-17 years olds during the peak murder years of 1993 and 1994 should have benefited, according to Levitt.

In contrast, the homicide rate for the 25 and over cohort (none of whom enjoyed the benefits of legalized abortion) was lower in 1993 than in 1983.

Levitt seems to have a good answer to Sailer’s second point. But Sailer has the better of it on the first point, which is the critical one to Levitt’s case. As Sailer puts it in his American Conservative article:

The most striking fact about legalized abortion, but also the least discussed, is its pointlessness. Levitt himself notes that following Roe, “Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …” So for every six fetuses aborted in the 1970s, five would never have been conceived except for Roe! This ratio makes a sick joke out of Levitt’s assumption that legalization made a significant difference in how “wanted” children were. Indeed, perhaps the increase in the number of women who got pregnant figuring they would get an abortion but then were too drunk or drugged or distracted to get to the clinic has meant that the “wantedness” of surviving babies has declined.

If the legalization of abortion did result in less crime it’s only because abortion became more prevalent among that segment of society that is most prone to commit crime. (I dare not speak its name.) What policy does Levitt want us to infer from that bit of causality? Would he favor a program of euthanasia for the most crime-prone segment of society? Now there’s a fine kettle of fish for Leftists, who favor abortion and oppose “oppression” of the the segment of society that is the most crime-prone.

I stand by my original assertion that ” incarceration and spending on the criminal justice system…are the public-policy weapons of choice” in dealing with crime. Whatever abortion is, it isn’t a crime-footing tool.

Related posts:
Does Capital Punishment Deter Homicide?
Libertarian Twaddle about the Death Penalty
Crime and Punishment
Saving the Innocent?
Saving the Innocent?: Part II
More on Abortion and Crime
More Punishment Means Less Crime
More About Crime and Punishment
More Punishment Means Less Crime: A Footnote
Clear Thinking about the Death Penalty
Let the Punishment Fit the Crime
Another Argument for the Death Penalty
Less Punishment Means More Crime
Crime, Explained

Illusory Progress

Ed Brayton, who writes Dispatches from the Culture Wars, opined recently:

I am a passionate advocate for the principles of natural rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But I am also firmly convinced that our nation is far closer to living out those ideals today than at any time in the almost 230 years since that document was written. It has taken the extraordinary sacrifice of many great men and women, an enormous amount of social upheaval and even a civil war to put those principles into action, but it has brought us closer to making the promise of those self-evident truths a reality for a far higher proportion of our people.

What Brayton overlooks is the vast amount of damage government has done to the social and economic fabric of this nation. It’s easy to see the “good” that government action has wrought (or the “good” that its proponents claim for it), but hard to see the evil it has done, unless you know where to look. (See my series on “Practical Libertarianism for Americans,” especially Part V and its addendum.) On the whole, government’s intrusiveness in our social and economic affairs has made us much worse off than we could have been.

But what about the end of segregation and the social and economic progress made by blacks and women? To the extent that progress on those fronts came about through government action, it came about because of the inevitable evolution of social attitudes. Government’s ability to force social change is limited by the a people’s ability to circumvent social engineering — as we have seen in the case of campaign finance “reform.”

In fact, programs such as affirmative action — which impose unequal treatment under the law — have backfired, to the extent that they have fomented resentment of and doubts about the qualifications of their intended beneficiaries. It is easier for an employer to reject a black or female applicant than it is for that same employer to fire a black or female employee. The employer may be making a mistake in rejecting a black or female applicant, but the operation of the law encourages such mistakes.

So, my contention is that we would be much better off, socially and economically, if government intervention were limited to the equal protection of everyone’s life, liberty, and property. Such a regime would enable persons of ability — regardless of race or gender — to prove their worth and earn the trust of others. That is true progress.

What’s Your Point?

Apropos today’s scare in the air over D.C., Slate’s Timothy Noah writes:

[J]udging from past history the de facto procedure is that an airborne threat to the White House or the Capitol will not be shot down if doing so poses a meaningful risk that one or more bystanders will be killed. I applaud the policy. But if I’m able to figure this out, I have little doubt that al-Qaida figured it out long ago.

It ain’t necessarily so. A lot depends on the response (or non-response) of the pilot of an aircraft that ventures into the no-fly zone above Washington, D.C., as well as other information that might be gathered about an intrusive aircraft.

Yes, shooting down an intrusive aircraft might pose a risk of casualties and damage on the ground, but that risk must be weighed against the risk of a catastrophic strike on the White House, Capitol, or other symbol of American pride. The loss of such a symbol — and the disruption of government that might accompany it — would be far more damaging to America and Americans than the collateral damage from a shoot-down.

Perhaps Noah is cheering al-Qaida on, in the hope that it will again venture an airstrike against a prominent government building. It would be in keeping with his Leftist anti-Americanism.

PETA Propoganda?

Following my own advice, I watched another animated feature from Disney’s golden age. This time it was Bambi, which I hadn’t seen in more than 50 years. Originally released in 1942, Bambi seems to have been re-released in 1947, 1957, and 1982. Then there are the never-ending rentals.

I now know how PETA members and sympathizers are created. Three generations of impressionable youth have grown up loving “cute” animals and hating “predatory” humans because of Bambi.

Bah! Humbug!

Science in Politics, Politics in Science

Here’s Will Saletan of Slate, writing about Intelligent Design (ID):

In September 1999, [John] Calvert founded the Intelligent Design Network to promote his mutant line of creationism. The next year, a political asteroid struck Kansas. Alarmed by the 1999 curriculum changes, voters went to the polls and wiped out the education board’s creationist majority. With the old species out of the way, the new one took over. In January 2001, as the newly constituted board reopened the curriculum standards, IDnet proposed revisions radically different from [those of the Creation Science Association for Mid-America (CSA)].

The board’s draft standards said, “The fossil record provides evidence of simple, bacteria-like life as far back as 3.8+ billion years ago.” CSA would have tried to remove that sentence. IDnet embraced it and proposed to add a prepositional phrase: “almost simultaneously with the postulated habitability of our earth.” This would underscore Calvert’s argument that life arose faster than randomness could account for. A few lines later, the board’s draft mentioned the fossil record, radioisotope dating, and plate tectonics. CSA would have fought all three references. IDnet affirmed them and asked only for a revision to limit their implications: “Certain aspects of the fossil record, the age of the earth based on radioisotope dating and plate tectonics are consistent with the Darwinian theory. However, this evidence is not inconsistent with the design hypothesis.”

Two years later, in a bioethics journal, Calvert and an IDnet colleague, biochemist William Harris, summarized the differences between Biblical creationism and ID. “Creation science seeks to validate a literal interpretation of creation as contained in the book of Genesis,” they explained. “An ID proponent recognizes that ID theory may be disproved by new evidence. ID is like a large tent under which many religious and nonreligious origins theories may find a home. ID proposes nothing more than that life and its diversity were the product of an intelligence with power to manipulate matter and energy.”

Last year, conservatives regained a narrow majority on the Kansas board. They’ve reopened the curriculum, but this time, CSA isn’t running the show. Calvert and Harris are. At last week’s hearings, Calvert presented 23 witnesses—– scientists, philosophers, and teachers — —to make the case for ID. A lawyer representing evolutionists asked the witnesses how old the earth was. Most affirmed the conventional geological estimate: 4.5 billion years. Only two stuck to the young-earth theory.

Essentially, ID proponents are gambling that they can concede evolutionist earth science without conceding evolutionist life science. But they can’t. They already acknowledge microevolution — —mutation and natural selection within a species. Once you accept conventional fossil dating and four billion years of life, the sequential kinship of species loses its implausibility. You can’t fall back on the Bible; you’ve already admitted it can’t always be taken literally. All you’re left with is an assortment of gaps in evolutionary theory — —how did DNA emerge, what happened between this and that fossil— — and the vague default assumption that an “intelligence” might fill in those gaps. Calvert and Harris call this assumption a big tent. But guess what happens to a tent without poles.

Perversely, evolutionists refuse to facilitate this collapse. They prefer to dismiss ID proponents as dead-end Neanderthals. They complain, legitimately, that Calvert and Harris are trying to expand the definition of science beyond “natural explanations.” But have you read the definition Calvert and Harris propose? It would define science as a continuous process of “observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.” Abstract creationism can’t qualify for such scrutiny. Substantive creationism can’t survive it. Or if it can, it should.

It’s too bad liberals and scientists don’t welcome this test. It’s too bad they go around sneering, as censors of science often have, that the new theory is too radical, offensive, or embarrassing to be taken seriously. It’s too bad they think good science consists of believing the right things. In the long view — —the evolutionary view— — good science consists of using evidence and experiment to find out whether what we thought was right is wrong. If they do that in Kansas, by whatever name, that’s all that matters.

The money quote: “It’s too bad [liberals and scientists] think good science consists of believing the right things.” Not all scientists think that way, but it’s obvious that many of them do. Politically correct science is dangerous science, for it can be used to “prove” that we ought to do things that are against our own best interest.

Consider this:

Our planet’s air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.

Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.

And this:

While researchers argue whether Earth is getting warmer and if humans are contributing, a heated debate over the global effect of sunlight boiled to the surface today.

And in this debate there is little data to go on.

A confusing array of new and recent studies reveals that scientists know very little about how much sunlight is absorbed by Earth versus how much the planet reflects, how all this alters temperatures, and why any of it changes from one decade to the next.

Determining Earth’s reflectance is crucial to understanding climate change, scientists agree.

And this:

Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.

Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: “The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

“The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years.”…

Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki’s research. “While the established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is certainly significant,” he said.

“It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor.”

And this:

Earth’s temperature is on the rise, researchers say, and environmental watchdogs are howling, hoping it’s not too late to avert negative effects that could range from melting icecaps to mass extinctions.

Some scientists, however, now think global warming is irreversible. In light of this sobering view, certain economists and scientists are searching for a silver lining. While the good news they find might not be global, some researchers believe the benefits of Earth’s warming will help compensate for the harmful consequences.

But global warming may in fact be a long-term cyclical phenomenon, and it may have little or nothing to do with human activity.

In spite of vast uncertainty about the causes and consequences of global warming, many scientists have joined the Luddites of the Left in their demand that we do something about global warming, namely, curtail economic activity and impoverish ourselves. Why? Because scientists are human, too. And many scientists, beneath a pretense to objectivity, are in fact Leftists who view global warming as a moral issue — it must be the consequence of our sinful embrace of capitalism and economic growth — and not as a series of unsettled scientific questions:

  • What actually causes global warming?
  • Is it permanent?
  • What might we be able to do about it, if anything?
  • Are its consequences, on balance, negative or positive — and for whom?

Why should we trust Left-wing scientists (or nonscientists) on the subject of evolution when we can’t trust them on the subject of climate?

Another Thought about Anarchy

REVISED 05/11/05 (8:57 AM)

Re the preceding post:

Individualist anarchists (like Lysander Spooner) and anarcho-capitalists believe that we’d be better off in the absence of a state. They’re right, in one respect: We’d be better off in the absence of a state like most of the states that now exist and have existed in human history.

But anarchy isn’t a real option. The urge to control is as deeply rooted in humans as the urge to be free. Anarcy is therefore an unstable state of affairs, one that will always resolve itself into some form of control. The question is: What kind of control? The real choice in the real world isn’t between benign anarchy and a state that’s entirely evil. The real choice is between a state that’s entirely evil (e.g., Soviet Russia), one that’s somewhat evil (e.g., France), one that’s somewhat benign (e.g., the U.S.), and one that’s entirely benign (none that I know of).

We can and should work to make the U.S. more benign, that is, more libertarian. But if we didn’t have our somewhat benign state to protect us it’s quite likely that we’d live under one that’s entirely evil. Remember Hitler and Stalin? Those bad guys were really bad — even worse than FDR, Truman, Johnson, and Clinton. And there are plenty more where they came from. Just look around you at the world we live in.