Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXIV)

Posted on October 25, 2019 by Loquitur Veritatem

“Not-So-Random Thoughts” is an occasional series in which I highlight writings by other commentators on varied subjects that I have addressed in the past. Other entries in the series can be found at these links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, and XXIII. For more in the same style, see “The Tenor of the Times” and “Roundup: Civil War, Solitude, Transgenderism, Academic Enemies, and Immigration“.

The Transgender Trap: A Political Nightmare Becomes Reality

Spygate (a.k.a. Russiagate) Revisited

More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

Thoughts on Mortality

Assortative Mating, Income Inequality, and the Crocodile Tears of “Progressives”

The Transgender Trap: A Political Nightmare Becomes Reality

Begin here and here, then consider the latest outrage.

First, from Katy Faust (“Why It’s Probably Not A Coincidence That The Mother Transing Her 7-Year-Old Isn’t Biologically Related“, The Federalist, October 24, 2019):

The story of seven-year-old James, whom his mother has pressured to become “Luna,” has been all over my newsfeed. The messy custody battle deserves every second of our click-bait-prone attention: Jeffrey Younger, James’s father, wants to keep his son’s body intact, while Anne Georgulas, James’s mother, wants to allow for “treatment” that would physically and chemically castrate him.

The havoc that divorce wreaks in a child’s life is mainstage in this tragic case. Most of us children of divorce quickly learn to act one way with mom and another way with dad. We can switch to a different set of rules, diet, family members, bedtime, screen time limits, and political convictions in that 20-minute ride from mom’s house to dad’s.

Unfortunately for little James, the adaptation he had to make went far beyond meat-lover’s pizza at dad’s house and cauliflower crusts at mom’s: it meant losing one of the most sacred aspects of his identity—his maleness. His dad loved him as a boy, so he got to be himself when he was at dad’s house. But mom showered love on the version of James she preferred, the one with the imaginary vagina.

So, as kids are so apt to do, when James was at her house, he conformed to the person his mother loved. This week a jury ruled that James must live like he’s at mom’s permanently, where he can “transition” fully, regardless of the cost to his mental and physical health….

Beyond the “tale of two households” that set up this court battle, and the ideological madness on display in the proceedings, something else about this case deserves our attention: one of the two parents engaged in this custodial tug-of-war isn’t biologically related to little James. Care to guess which one? Do you think it’s the parent who wants to keep him physically whole? It’s not.

During her testimony Georgulas stated she is not the biological mother of James or his twin brother Jude. She purchased eggs from a biological stranger. This illuminates a well-known truth in the world of family and parenthood: biological parents are the most connected to, invested in, and protective of their children.

Despite the jury’s unfathomable decision to award custody of James to his demented mother, there is hope for James. Walt Hyer picks up the story (“Texas Court Gives 7-Year-Old Boy A Reprieve From Transgender Treatments“, The Federalist, October 25, 2019):

Judge Kim Cooks put aside the disappointing jury’s verdict of Monday against the father and ruled Thursday that Jeffrey Younger now has equal joint conservatorship with the mother, Dr. Anne Georgulas, of their twin boys.

The mother no longer has unfettered authority to manipulate her 7-year old boy into gender transition. Instead both mother and father will share equally in medical, psychological, and other decision-making for the boys. Additionally, the judge changed the custody terms to give Younger an equal amount of visitation time with his sons, something that had been severely limited….

For those who need a little background, here’s a recap. “Six-year-old James is caught in a gender identity nightmare. Under his mom’s care in Dallas, Texas, James obediently lives as a trans girl named ‘Luna.’ But given the choice when he’s with dad, he’s all boy—his sex from conception.

“In their divorce proceedings, the mother has charged the father with child abuse for not affirming James as transgender, has sought restraining orders against him, and is seeking to terminate his parental rights. She is also seeking to require him to pay for the child’s visits to a transgender-affirming therapist and transgender medical alterations, which may include hormonal sterilization starting at age eight.”

All the evidence points to a boy torn between pleasing two parents, not an overwhelming preference to be a girl….

Younger said at the trial he was painted as paranoid and in need of several years of psychotherapy because he doesn’t believe his young son wants to be a girl. But many experts agree that transgendering young children is hazardous.

At the trial, Younger’s expert witnesses testified about these dangers and provided supporting evidence. Dr. Stephen Levine, a psychiatrist renowned for his work on human sexuality, testified that social transition—treating them as the opposite sex—increases the chance that a child will remain gender dysphoric. Dr. Paul W. Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics and cellular biology at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, testified that the risks of social transition are so great that the “treatment” cannot be recommended at all.

Are these doctors paranoid, too? Disagreement based on scientific evidence is now considered paranoia requiring “thought reprogramming.” That’s scary stuff when enforced by the courts….

The jury’s 11-1 vote to keep sole managing conservatorship from the father shows how invasive and acceptable this idea of confusing children and transitioning them has become. It’s like we are watching a bad movie where scientific evidence is ignored and believing the natural truth of male and female biology is considered paranoia. I can testify from my life experience the trans-life movie ends in unhappiness, regret, detransitions, or sadly, suicide.

The moral of the story is that the brainwashing of the American public by the media may have advanced to the tipping point. The glory that was America may soon vanish with a whimper.

Spygate (a.k.a. Russiagate) Revisited

I posted my analysis of “Spygate” well over a year ago, and have continually updated the appended list of supporting reference. The list continues to grow as evidence mounts to support the thesis that the Trump-Russia collusion story was part of a plot hatched at the highest levels of the Obama administration and executed within the White House, the CIA, and the Department of Justice (including especially the FBI).

Margot Cleveland addresses the case of Michael Flynn (“Sidney Powell Drops Bombshell Showing How The FBI Trapped Michael Flynn“, The Federalist, October 25, 2019):

Earlier this week, Michael Flynn’s star attorney, Sidney Powell, filed under seal a brief in reply to federal prosecutors’ claims that they have already given Flynn’s defense team all the evidence they are required by law to provide. A minimally redacted copy of the reply brief has just been made public, and with it shocking details of the deep state’s plot to destroy Flynn….

What is most striking, though, is the timeline Powell pieced together from publicly reported text messages withheld from the defense team and excerpts from documents still sealed from public view. The sequence Powell lays out shows that a team of “high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president’s National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity—they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn—but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false” [in an attempt to “flip” Flynn in the Spygate affair]….

The timeline continued to May 10 when McCabe opened an “obstruction” investigation into President Trump. That same day, Powell writes, “in an important but still wrongly redacted text, Strzok says: ‘We need to lock in [redacted]. In a formal chargeable way. Soon.’” Page replies: “I agree. I’ve been pushing and I’ll reemphasize with Bill [Priestap].”

Powell argues that “both from the space of the redaction, its timing, and other events, the defense strongly suspects the redacted name is Flynn.” That timing includes Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel on May 17, and then the reentering of Flynn’s 302 on May 31, 2017, “for Special Counsel Mueller to use.”

The only surprise (to me) is evidence cited by Cleveland that Comey was deeply embroiled in the plot. I have heretofore written off Comey as an opportunist who was out to get Trump for his own reasons.

In any event, Cleveland reinforces my expressed view of former CIA director John Brennan’s central role in the plot (“All The Russia Collusion Clues Are Beginning To Point Back To John Brennan“, The Federalist, October 25, 2019):

[I]f the media reports are true, and [Attorney General William] Barr and [U.S. attorney John] Durham have turned their focus to Brennan and the intelligence community, it is not a matter of vengeance; it is a matter of connecting the dots in congressional testimony and reports, leaks, and media spin, and facts exposed during the three years of panting about supposed Russia collusion. And it all started with Brennan.

That’s not how the story went, of course. The company story ran that the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, after learning that a young Trump advisor, George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton….

But as the Special Counsel Robert Mueller report made clear, it wasn’t merely Papadopoulos’ bar-room boast at issue: It was “a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government,” that the DOJ and FBI, and later the Special Counsel’s office investigated.

And who put the FBI on to those supposedly suspicious contacts? Former CIA Director John Brennan….

The evidence suggests … that Brennan’s CIA and the intelligence community did much more than merely pass on details about “contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign” to the FBI. The evidence suggests that the CIA and intelligence community—including potentially the intelligence communities of the UK, Italy, and Australia—created the contacts and interactions that they then reported to the FBI as suspicious.

The Deep State in action.

More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

I’ve already adduced a lot of evidence in “Why I Don’t Believe in Climate Change” and “Climate Change“. One of the scientists to whom I give credence is Dr. Roy Spencer of the Climate Research Center at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. Spencer agrees that CO2 emissions must have an effect on atmospheric temperatures, but is doubtful about the magnitude of the effect.

He revisits a point that he has made before, namely, that the there is no “preferred” state of the climate (“Does the Climate System Have a Preferred Average State? Chaos and the Forcing-Feedback Paradigm“, Roy Spencer, Ph.D., October 25, 2019):

If there is … a preferred average state, then the forcing-feedback paradigm of climate change is valid. In that system of thought, any departure of the global average temperature from the Nature-preferred state is resisted by radiative “feedback”, that is, changes in the radiative energy balance of the Earth in response to the too-warm or too-cool conditions. Those radiative changes would constantly be pushing the system back to its preferred temperature state…

[W]hat if the climate system undergoes its own, substantial chaotic changes on long time scales, say 100 to 1,000 years? The IPCC assumes this does not happen. But the ocean has inherently long time scales — decades to millennia. An unusually large amount of cold bottom water formed at the surface in the Arctic in one century might take hundreds or even thousands of years before it re-emerges at the surface, say in the tropics. This time lag can introduce a wide range of complex behaviors in the climate system, and is capable of producing climate change all by itself.

Even the sun, which we view as a constantly burning ball of gas, produces an 11-year cycle in sunspot activity, and even that cycle changes in strength over hundreds of years. It would seem that every process in nature organizes itself on preferred time scales, with some amount of cyclic behavior.

This chaotic climate change behavior would impact the validity of the forcing-feedback paradigm as well as our ability to determine future climate states and the sensitivity of the climate system to increasing CO2. If the climate system has different, but stable and energy-balanced, states, it could mean that climate change is too complex to predict with any useful level of accuracy [emphasis added].

Which is exactly what I say in “Modeling and Science“.

Thoughts on Mortality

I ruminated about it in “The Unique ‘Me’“:

Children, at some age, will begin to understand that there is death, the end of a human life (in material form, at least). At about the same time, in my experience, they will begin to speculate about the possibility that they might have been someone else: a child born in China, for instance.

Death eventually loses its fascination, though it may come to mind from time to time as one grows old. (Will I wake up in the morning? Is this the day that my heart stops beating? Will I be able to break my fall when the heart attack happens, or will I just go down hard and die of a fractured skull?)

Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) has been ruminating about it in recent posts. This is from his “Six Types of Death Fear” (October 24, 2019):

1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation….

2. There is the fear of surviving one’s bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion….

3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors….

4. There is the fear of the unknown….

5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment….

6. Fear of one’s own judgment or the judgment of posterity.

There is also — if one is in good health and enjoying life — the fear of losing what seems to be a good thing, namely, the enjoyment of life itself.

Assortative Mating, Income Inequality, and the Crocodile Tears of “Progressives”

Mating among human beings has long been assortative in various ways, in that the selection of a mate has been circumscribed or determined by geographic proximity, religious affiliation, clan rivalries or alliances, social relationships or enmities, etc. The results have sometimes been propitious, as Gregory Cochran points out in “An American Dilemma” (West Hunter, October 24, 2019):

Today we’re seeing clear evidence of genetic differences between classes: causal differences. People with higher socioeconomic status have ( on average) higher EA polygenic scores. Higher scores for cognitive ability, as well. This is of course what every IQ test has shown for many decades….

Let’s look at Ashkenazi Jews in the United States. They’re very successful, averaging upper-middle-class. So you’d think that they must have high polygenic scores for EA (and they do).

Were they a highly selected group? No: most were from Eastern Europe. “Immigration of Eastern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, in 1880–1914, brought a large, poor, traditional element to New York City. They were Orthodox or Conservative in religion. They founded the Zionist movement in the United States, and were active supporters of the Socialist party and labor unions. Economically, they concentrated in the garment industry.”

And there were a lot of them: it’s harder for a sample to be very unrepresentative when it makes up a big fraction of the entire population.

But that can’t be: that would mean that Europeans Jews were just smarter than average. And that would be racist.

Could it be result of some kind of favoritism? Obviously not, because that would be anti-Semitic.

Cochran obviously intends sarcasm in the final two paragraphs. The evidence for the heritability of intelligence is, as he says, quite strong. (See, for example, my “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications” and “Intelligence“.) Were it not for assortative mating among Ashkenazi Jews, they wouldn’t be the most intelligent ethnic-racial group.

Branko Milanovic specifically addresses the “hot” issue in “Rich Like Me: How Assortative Mating Is Driving Income Inequality“, Quillette, October 18, 2019):

Recent research has documented a clear increase in the prevalence of homogamy, or assortative mating (people of the same or similar education status and income level marrying each other). A study based on a literature review combined with decennial data from the American Community Survey showed that the association between partners’ level of education was close to zero in 1970; in every other decade through 2010, the coefficient was positive, and it kept on rising….

At the same time, the top decile of young male earners have been much less likely to marry young women who are in the bottom decile of female earners. The rate has declined steadily from 13.4 percent to under 11 percent. In other words, high-earning young American men who in the 1970s were just as likely to marry high-earning as low-earning young women now display an almost three-to- one preference in favor of high-earning women. An even more dramatic change happened for women: the percentage of young high-earning women marrying young high-earning men increased from just under 13 percent to 26.4 percent, while the percentage of rich young women marrying poor young men halved. From having no preference between rich and poor men in the 1970s, women currently prefer rich men by a ratio of almost five to one….

High income and wealth inequality in the United States used to be justified by the claim that everyone had the opportunity to climb up the ladder of success, regardless of family background. This idea became known as the American Dream. The emphasis was on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome….

The American Dream has remained powerful both in the popular imagination and among economists. But it has begun to be seriously questioned during the past ten years or so, when relevant data have become available for the first time. Looking at twenty-two countries around the world, Miles Corak showed in 2013 that there was a positive correlation between high inequality in any one year and a strong correlation between parents’ and children’s incomes (i.e., low income mobility). This result makes sense, because high inequality today implies that the children of the rich will have, compared to the children of the poor, much greater opportunities. Not only can they count on greater inheritance, but they will also benefit from better education, better social capital obtained through their parents, and many other intangible advantages of wealth. None of those things are available to the children of the poor. But while the American Dream thus was somewhat deflated by the realization that income mobility is greater in more egalitarian countries than in the United States, these results did not imply that intergenerational mobility had actually gotten any worse over time.

Yet recent research shows that intergenerational mobility has in fact been declining. Using a sample of parent-son and parent-daughter pairs, and comparing a cohort born between 1949 and 1953 to one born between 1961 and 1964, Jonathan Davis and Bhashkar Mazumder found significantly lower intergenerational mobility for the latter cohort.

Milanovic doesn’t mention the heritabiliity of intelligence, which is bound to be generally higher among children of high-IQ parents (like Ashkenzi Jews and East Asians), and the strong correlation between intelligence and income. Does this mean that assortative mating should be banned and “excess” wealth should be confiscated and redistributed? Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders certainly favor the second prescription, which would have a disastrous effect on the incentive to become rich and therefore on economic growth.

I addressed these matters in “Intelligence, Assortative Mating, and Social Engineering“:

So intelligence is real; it’s not confined to “book learning”; it has a strong influence on one’s education, work, and income (i.e., class); and because of those things it leads to assortative mating, which (on balance) reinforces class differences. Or so the story goes.

But assortative mating is nothing new. What might be new, or more prevalent than in the past, is a greater tendency for intermarriage within the smart-educated-professional class instead of across class lines, and for the smart-educated-professional class to live in “enclaves” with their like, and to produce (generally) bright children who’ll (mostly) follow the lead of their parents.

How great are those tendencies? And in any event, so what? Is there a potential social problem that will have to be dealt with by government because it poses a severe threat to the nation’s political stability or economic well-being? Or is it just a step in the voluntary social evolution of the United States — perhaps even a beneficial one?…

[Lengthy quotations from statistical evidence and expert commentary.]

What does it all mean? For one thing, it means that the children of top-quintile parents reach the top quintile about 30 percent of the time. For another thing, it means that, unsurprisingly, the children of top-quintile parents reach the top quintile more often than children of second-quintile parents, who reach the top quintile more often than children of third-quintile parents, and so on.

There is nevertheless a growing, quasi-hereditary, smart-educated-professional-affluent class. It’s almost a sure thing, given the rise of the two-professional marriage, and given the correlation between the intelligence of parents and that of their children, which may be as high as 0.8. However, as a fraction of the total population, membership in the new class won’t grow as fast as membership in the “lower” classes because birth rates are inversely related to income.

And the new class probably will be isolated from the “lower” classes. Most members of the new class work and live where their interactions with persons of “lower” classes are restricted to boss-subordinate and employer-employee relationships. Professionals, for the most part, work in office buildings, isolated from the machinery and practitioners of “blue collar” trades.

But the segregation of housing on class lines is nothing new. People earn more, in part, so that they can live in nicer houses in nicer neighborhoods. And the general rise in the real incomes of Americans has made it possible for persons in the higher income brackets to afford more luxurious homes in more luxurious neighborhoods than were available to their parents and grandparents. (The mansions of yore, situated on “Mansion Row,” were occupied by the relatively small number of families whose income and wealth set them widely apart from the professional class of the day.) So economic segregation is, and should be, as unsurprising as a sunrise in the east.

None of this will assuage progressives, who like to claim that intelligence (like race) is a social construct (while also claiming that Republicans are stupid); who believe that incomes should be more equal (theirs excepted); who believe in “diversity,” except when it comes to where most of them choose to live and school their children; and who also believe that economic mobility should be greater than it is — just because. In their superior minds, there’s an optimum income distribution and an optimum degree of economic mobility — just as there is an optimum global temperature, which must be less than the ersatz one that’s estimated by combining temperatures measured under various conditions and with various degrees of error.

The irony of it is that the self-segregated, smart-educated-professional-affluent class is increasingly progressive….

So I ask progressives, given that you have met the new class and it is you, what do you want to do about it? Is there a social problem that might arise from greater segregation of socio-economic classes, and is it severe enough to warrant government action. Or is the real “problem” the possibility that some people — and their children and children’s children, etc. — might get ahead faster than other people — and their children and children’s children, etc.?

Do you want to apply the usual progressive remedies? Penalize success through progressive (pun intended) personal income-tax rates and the taxation of corporate income; force employers and universities to accept low-income candidates (whites included) ahead of better-qualified ones (e.g., your children) from higher-income brackets; push “diversity” in your neighborhood by expanding the kinds of low-income housing programs that helped to bring about the Great Recession; boost your local property and sales taxes by subsidizing “affordable housing,” mandating the payment of a “living wage” by the local government, and applying that mandate to contractors seeking to do business with the local government; and on and on down the list of progressive policies?

Of course you do, because you’re progressive. And you’ll support such things in the vain hope that they’ll make a difference. But not everyone shares your naive beliefs in blank slates, equal ability, and social homogenization (which you don’t believe either, but are too wedded to your progressive faith to admit). What will actually be accomplished — aside from tokenism — is social distrust and acrimony, which had a lot to do with the electoral victory of Donald J. Trump, and economic stagnation, which hurts the “little people” a lot more than it hurts the smart-educated-professional-affluent class….

The solution to the pseudo-problem of economic inequality is benign neglect, which isn’t a phrase that falls lightly from the lips of progressives. For more than 80 years, a lot of Americans — and too many pundits, professors, and politicians — have been led astray by that one-off phenomenon: the Great Depression. FDR and his sycophants and their successors created and perpetuated the myth that an activist government saved America from ruin and totalitarianism. The truth of the matter is that FDR’s policies prolonged the Great Depression by several years, and ushered in soft despotism, which is just “friendly” fascism. And all of that happened at the behest of people of above-average intelligence and above-average incomes.

Progressivism is the seed-bed of eugenics, and still promotes eugenics through abortion on demand (mainly to rid the world of black babies). My beneficial version of eugenics would be the sterilization of everyone with an IQ above 125 or top-40-percent income who claims to be progressive [emphasis added].

Enough said.

“Capitalism” Is a Dirty Word

Posted on December 27, 2017 by Loquitur Veritatem

Dyspepsia Generation points to a piece at reason.com, which explains that capitalism is a Marxist coinage. In fact, capitalism

is what the Dutch call a geuzennaam—a word assigned by one’s sneering enemies, such as Quaker or Tory or Whig, but later adopted proudly by the victims themselves.

I have long viewed it that way. Capitalism conjures the greedy, coupon-clipping, fat-cat of Monopoly:

Thus did a board-game that vaulted to popularity during the Great Depression signify the identification of capitalism with another “bad thing”: monopoly. And, more recently, capitalism has been conjoined with yet another “bad thing”: income inequality.

In fact, capitalism

is a misnomer for the system of free markets that could deliver abundant prosperity and happiness, were markets left free. Free does not mean unfettered; competition for the favor of consumers exerts strong discipline on markets. And laws against theft, deception, and fraud would serve amply to keep markets honest, the worrying classes to the contrary notwithstanding.

What the defenders of capitalism are defending — or should be — is voluntary, market-based exchange. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but that’s no excuse for continuing to use a Marxist smear-word for the best of all possible economic systems.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIV)

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Loquitur Veritatem

UPDATED 04/19/15 WITH THE ADDITION OF TWO ENTRIES

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

* * *

Paul Mirengoff explores the similarities between Neville Chamberlain and Barack Obama; for example:

We see with Chamberlain the same curious dynamic present in the Obama presidency. At home, a tough-as-nails administration/political machine that takes no prisoners and rarely compromises; abroad, a feckless operation with a pattern of caving to belligerent adversaries. [“Neville Chamberlain and Barack Obama: The Similarities Run Deep,” Powerline Blog, April 15, 2014]

See also John Hinderaker’s Powerline post, “Daniel Pipes: The Obama Doctrine Serves Up One Disaster After Another” (April 6, 2015), and a piece by Eileen F. Toplansky,”Obama’s Three Premises” (American Thinker, April 20, 2015).

What is Obama up to? For my take, see “Does Obama Love America?”

* * *

If it were possible to convince a climate alarmist that he is wrong, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley is the man for the job:

“What Evidence,” asks Ronald Bailey’s headline (www.reason.com, April 3, 2015), “Would Convince You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?”

The answer: a rational, scientific case rooted in established theory and data would convince me that manmade climate change is a problem. That it is real is not in doubt, for every creature that breathes out emits CO2 and thus affects the climate.

The true scientific question, then, is not the fatuous question whether “Man-Made Climate Change Is Real” but how much global warming our sins of emission may cause, and whether that warming might be more a bad thing than a good thing.

However, Mr Bailey advances no rational case. What, then, are the elements of a rational, scientific case that our influence on the climate will prove dangerous unless the West completes its current self-shutdown?… [“How to Convince a Climate Skeptic He’s Wrong,” Watts Up With That, April 9, 2015]

There follows a step-by-step dismantling of Mr. Bailey’s case for alarmism. Lord Monckton ends with this:

[I]f Mr Bailey does me the courtesy of reading the above, he will realize that temperatures are not rising by much, glacial ice-melt (if occurring) is on too small a scale to raise sea level by much, global sea ice extent shows little change in two generations, ditto northern-hemisphere snow cover, there has been little increase in rainfall and (according to the IPCC) little evidence for “stronger rainstorms”, and the ocean warming is so small that it falls within the considerable measurement error.

The evidence he adduces is questionable at best on every count. The Temple of Thermageddon will have to do better than that if it wants to convince us in the teeth of the evidence….

…[N]o rational scientific or economic case can be made for taking any action whatsoever today in a probably futile and certainly cost-ineffective attempt to make global warming that is not happening as predicted today go away the day after tomorrow.

The correct policy to address what is likely to prove a non-problem – and what, even if it were every bit as much of a problem as the tax-gobblers would wish, could not by even their most creative quantitative easing be cost-effectively solved by any attempt at mitigation – is to have the courage to do nothing now and adapt later if necessary.

The question is why, in the teeth of the scientific and economic evidence, nearly all of the global governing class were so easily taken in or bought out or both by the strange coalescence of powerful vested interests who have, until now, profited so monstrously by the biggest fraud in history at such crippling expense in lives and treasure to the rest of us, and at such mortal threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of science itself. [Ibid.]

My own modest effort to quell climate alarmism is summarized in “AGW: The Death Knell.”

* * *

Steve Sailer has some fun with the latest bit of experimental hocus-pocus by the intelligence-isn’t-heritable crowd, as interpreted by a reporter for The Washington Post:

In the last few years, there appears to have been a decision to blame racial differences in intelligence on differences in income level, although, of course, that’s not very plausible. That’s what people said way back in 1965, but then the federal Coleman Report of 1966 showed that affluent black students weren’t setting the world on fire academically on average, and vast amounts of data have accumulated validating the Coleman Report ever since.

But a half century later we’re back to asserting the same untested theories as in 1965….

Allow me to point out that a national newspaper has asked a couple of guys who know what they are talking about to punch holes in the latest bit of goodthink and, as of press time, the American public hasn’t dug up Hitler’s DNA and elected it President. So maybe we’re actually mature enough to discuss reality rather than lie all the time?…

Six decades from now, the Education Secretary of the hereditary Bush-Clinton Administration will be declaring the key periods for federal intervention are the eight months and 29 days before birth … but not a day sooner! [“Charles Murray and James Thompson Asked Their Opinions in ‘Post’ Article on Brain Size; World Hasn’t Ended, Yet,” The Unz Review, April 15, 2015]

Along the way, Sailer links to Dr. James Thompson’s post about the article in question. There’s a followup post by Thompson, and this one is good, too. See also this post by Sailer.

Gregory Cochran has a related post (“Scanners Live in Vain,” West Hunter, March 31, 2015), where he says this about the paper and the reporting about it:

There is a new paper out in Nature Neuroscience, mainly by Kimberly Noble, on socioeconomic variables and and brain structure: Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents. They found that cortex area went up with income, although more slowly at high incomes. Judging from their comments to the press, the authors think that being poor shrinks your brain.

Of course, since intelligence is highly heritable, and since people in higher social classes, or with high income, have higher average IQs (although not nearly as high as I would like), you would expect their kids to be, on average, smarter than kids from low-income groups (and have larger brains, since brain size is correlated with IQ) for genetic reasons. But I guess the authors of this paper have never heard of any of that – which raises the question, did they scan the brains of the authors? Because that would have been interesting. You can actually do microscopic MRI.

Even better, in talking to Nature, another researcher, Martha Farah, mentions unpublished work that shows that the brain-size correlation with SES is already there (in African-American kids) by age one month!

Of course, finding that the pattern already exists at the age of one month seriously weakens any idea that being poor shrinks the brain: most of the environmental effects you would consider haven’t even come into play in the first four weeks, when babies drink milk, sleep, and poop. Genetics affecting both parents and their children would make more sense, if the pattern shows up so early (and I’ll bet money that, if real, it shows up well before one month); but Martha Farah, and the reporter from Nature, Sara Reardon, ARE TOO FUCKING DUMB to realize this.

And John Ray points to this:

Quick thinkers are born not made, claim scientists.

They have discovered a link between our genes and the ability to remain mentally on the ball in later life.

It is the first time a genetic link has been shown to explain why some people have quick thinking skills.

Researchers identified a common genetic variant – changes in a person’s genetic code – related to how quickly a person is able to process new information. [Jenny Hope, “Quick Thinkers Are Born Not Made: The Speed at Which We Process New Information Is Written in Our Genes,” DailyMail.com, April 16, 2015]

Dr. Ray links to the underlying studies, here.

I’ve probably said more than I should say about the heritability of intelligence in “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications,” “Evolution and Race,” “‘Wading’ into Race, Culture, and IQ,” and “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality.”

* * *

Speaking of equality, or the lack thereof, Daniel Bier explains “How Piketty Manufactured Rising [Wealth] Inequality in 6 Steps” (Foundation for Economic Education, April 9, 2015):

Piketty’s chart on US wealth inequality displayed a trend that none of its original sources showed. Worst of all, he didn’t tell his readers that he had done any of this, much less explained his reasoning.

But now Magness has deconstructed the chart and shown, step by step, how Piketty tortured his sources into giving him the result he wanted to see….

If your methods can produce opposite results using the same sources, depending entirely on your subjective judgment, you’re not doing science — you’re doing a Choose Your Own Adventure story where you start from the conclusion and work backwards.

Now that you’ve seen how it’s done, you too can “piketty” your data and massage your narrative into selling 1.5 million books — that almost no one will actually read, but will be widely cited as justification for higher taxes nonetheless.

Committed leftists will ignore Piketty’s step back from extreme redistributionism, which I discussed in “Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIII).”

* * *

Committed leftists will lament the predicate of “Has Obamacare Turned Voters Against Sharing the Wealth?” (The New York Times, April 15, 2015). The author of the piece, Thomas B. Edsall (formerly of The Washington Post), clearly laments the possibility. (I do not, of course.) Edsall’s article is full of good news (for me); for example:

In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed by Gallup said that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States. By late 2014, however, Gallup found that this percentage had fallen 24 points to 45 percent, while the percentage of respondents who said health care is not a federal responsibility nearly doubled to 52 percent.

Edsall’s main worry seems to be how such a mood shift will help Republicans. Evidently, he doesn’t care about taxpayers, people who earn their income, or economic growth, which is inhibited by redistribution from “rich” to “poor.” But what else is new? Edsall is just another representative of the elite punditariat — a member of the “top” part of the left’s “top and bottom” coalition.

Edsall and his ilk should be worried. See, for example, “The Obamacare Effect: Greater Distrust of Government” (the title tells the tale) and “‘Blue Wall’ Hype” which debunks the idea that Democrats have a lock on the presidency.

* * *

The question of nature vs. nurture, which I touched on three entries earlier, is closely related to the question of innate ability vs. effort as the key to success in a field of endeavor. “Scott Alexander” of Slate Star Codex has written at length about innate ability vs. effort in two recent posts: “No Clarity Around Growth Mindset…Yet” and “I Will Never Have the Ability to Clearly Explain My Beliefs about Growth Mindset.” (That should be “to explain clearly.”)

This is from the first-linked post:

If you’re not familiar with it, growth mindset is the belief that people who believe ability doesn’t matter and only effort determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure, and better-in-a-bunch-of-other-ways than people who emphasize the importance of ability. Therefore, we can make everyone better off by telling them ability doesn’t matter and only hard work does.

This is all twaddle, as “Alexander” shows, more or less, in his two very long posts. My essay on the subject is a lot shorter and easier to grasp: “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality.”

* * *

ENTRIES ADDED 04/19/15:

Obamacare, not unsurprisingly to me, has led to the rationing of health care, according to Bob Unruh’s “Obamacare Blocks Patients Paying for Treatment” (WND, March 6, 2014). And Aleyne Singer delivers “More Proof Obamacare Is Increasing Coverage but Not Access to Health Care” (The Daily Signal, December 9, 2014).

None of this should surprise anyone who thought about the economics of Obamacare, as I did in “Rationing and Health Care,” “The Perils of Nannyism: The Case of Obamacare,” “More about the Perils of Obamacare,” and “Health-Care Reform: The Short of It.”

* * *

Ben Bernanke asks “Why Are Interest Rates So Low?” (Ben Bernanke’s Blog, March 30, 2015). His answer? In so many words, business is bad, which means that the demand for capital financing is relatively weak. But in a followup post, “Why Are Interest Rates So Low, Part 2: Secular Stagnation” (Ben Bernanke’s Blog, March 31, 2015), Bernanke argues that the problem isn’t secular stagnation.

I agree that interest rates are low because the economy remains weak, despite some recovery from the nadir of the Great Recession. But, unlike Bernanke, I don’t expect the economy to make a full recovery — and I’m talking about real growth, not phony unemployment-rate recovery. Why Not? See “Obamanomics in Action” and “The Rahn Curve Revisited.” The economy will never grow to its potential as long as the dead hand of government continues to press down on it.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIII)

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Loquitur Veritatem

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

* * *

Jeremy Egerer says this “In Defense of a Beautiful Boss” (American Thinker, February 8, 2015):

Leftists have been waging a war against nearly every personal advantage for years: if they aren’t upset because your parents are rich, they’ll insult you because your parents are white, or maybe because you have a penis. In their most unreasonable moments, they might even be upset that you deserve your own job. It seems only reasonable to expect that sooner or later, they would be complaining about whether or not our bosses keep themselves in shape.

This is because at the heart of all leftism lies an unreasonable envy of all advantage (disguised as an advocacy of the disadvantaged) and an unhealthy hatred of actual diversity (disguised as an appreciation of difference). They call life a meritocracy when your successful parents raise you to win, which is a lot like complaining that your parents raised you at all. It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether they loathe the laws of cause and effect. In the fight against all odds – not his, but everyone’s – the leftist hasn’t only forgotten that different people breed different people; he’s forgotten that different people are diversity itself, and that diversity, the thing he claims to be championing, means that someone is going to have natural advantages.

Spot on. I have addressed the left’s war on “lookism” in “How to Combat Beauty-ism” and “An Economist’s Special Pleading: Affirmative Action for the Ugly.”

* * *

John Ray tackles “Conservative and Liberal Brains Again” (A Western Heart, February 14, 2015):

Most such reports [Current Biology 21, 677–680, April 26, 2011 ª2011. DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017] are … parsimoniously interpreted as conservatives being more cautious, which is hardly a discovery. And if there is something wrong with caution then there is everything wrong with a lot of things. Science, for instance, is a sustained exercise in caution. So conservatives are born more cautious and Leftist brains miss most of that out. So [a commentary that conservatives are] “sensitive to fear” … could be equally well restated as “cautious”. And the finding that liberals “have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts” is pure guesswork [on the part of the commentators]. As the report authors note, that is just “one of the functions of the anterior cingulate cortex”.

Despite the apparent even-handedness of the authors of the study cited by Dr. Ray, the field of psychology has long had a pro-left tilt. See, for example, my posts “Conservatism, Libertarianism, and the ‘Authoritarian Personality’,” “The F Scale, Revisited,” and “The Psychologist Who Played God.”

* * *

Income inequality is another item in the long list of subjects about which leftists obsess, despite the facts of the matter. Mark J. Perry, as usual, deals in facts: “US Middle Class Has Disappeared into Higher-Income Groups; Recent Stagnation Explained by Changing Household Demographics?” (AEI.org, February 4, 2015) and “Evidence Shows That Affluence in the US Is Much More Fluid and Widespread Than The Rigid Class Structure Narrative Suggests” (AEI.org, February 25, 2015). The only problem with these two posts is Perry’s unnecessary inclusion of a question mark in the title of the first one. For more on the subject, plus long lists of related posts and readings, see my post, “Mass (Economic) Hysteria: Income Inequality and Related Themes.”

* * *

Speaking of leftists who obsess about income inequality — and get it wrong — there’s Thomas Piketty, author of the much-rebutted Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I have much to say about Deidre McCloskey’s take-down of Piketty in “McCloskey on Piketty.” David Henderson, whose review of Capital is among the several related readings listed in my post, has more to say; for example:

McCloskey’s review is a masterpiece. She beautifully weaves together economic history, simple price theory, basic moral philosophy, and history of economic thought. Whereas I had mentally put aside an hour to read and think, it took only about 20 minutes. I highly recommend it. (“McCloskey on Piketty,” EconLog, February 25, 2015)

Henderson continues by sampling some of Piketty’s many errors of fact, logic, and economic theory that McCloskey exposes.

* * *

Although it won’t matter to committed leftists, Piketty seems to have taken some of this critics to heart. James Pethokoukis writes:

[I]n a new paper, Piketty takes a step or two backward. He now denies that he views his simple economic formula “as the only or even the primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth in the 20th century, or for forecasting the path of income and wealth inequality in the 21st century.” Seems his fundamental law isn’t so fundamental after all once you factor in things like how some of that wealth is (a) spent on super-yachts and bad investments; (b) divided among children through the generations; and (c) already taxed fairly heavily. In particular, the rise in income inequality, as opposed to wealth inequality, has “little to do” with “r > g,” he says….

Piketty’s modest retreat isn’t all that surprising, given the withering academic assault on his research. In a survey of top economists late last year, 81 percent disagreed with his thesis. And several used fairly rough language — at least for scholars — such as “weak” and not “particularly useful,” with one accusing Piketty of “poor theory” and “negligible empirics.”

This is all rather bad news for what I have termed the Unified Economic Theory of Modern Liberalism: Not only are the rich getting richer — and will continue to do so because, you know, capitalism — but this growing gap is hurting economic growth. Redistribution must commence, tout de suite!

But Piketty’s clarification isn’t this politically convenient theory’s only problem. The part about inequality and growth has also suffered a setback. The link between the two is a key part of the “secular stagnation” theory of superstar Democratic economist Lawrence Summers. Since the rich save more than the middle class, growing income inequality is sapping the economy of consumer demand. So government must tax more and spend more. But Summers recently offered an updated view, saying that while boosting consumer demand is necessary, it is not sufficient for strong economic growth. Washington must also do the sort of “supply-side” stuff that Republicans kvetch about, such as business tax reform.

…[C]oncern about the income gap shouldn’t be used an excuse to ignore America’s real top problem, a possible permanent downshift in the growth potential of the U.S. economy. At least Piketty got half his equation right. [“The Politically Convenient but Largely Bogus Unified Economic Theory of Modern Liberalism,” The Week, March 11, 2015]

About that bogus inequality-hurts-growth meme, see my post, “Income Inequality and Economic Growth.”

* * *

Harvard’s Robert Putnam is another class warrior, whose propagandistic effusion “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century“ I skewer in “Society and the State” and “Genetic Kinship and Society.” I was therefore gratified to read in Henry Harpending’s post, “Charles Murray and Robert Putnam on Class” (West Hunter, March 20, 2015) some things said by John Derbyshire about Putnam’s paper:

That paper has a very curious structure. After a brief introduction (two pages), there are three main sections, headed as follows:

The Prospects and Benefits of Immigration and Ethnic Diversity (three pages)
Immigration and Diversity Foster Social Isolation (nineteen pages)
Becoming Comfortable with Diversity (seven pages)

I’ve had some mild amusement here at my desk trying to think up imaginary research papers similarly structured. One for publication in a health journal, perhaps, with three sections titled:

Health benefits of drinking green tea
Green tea causes intestinal cancer
Making the switch to green tea

Social science research in our universities cries out for a modern Jonathan Swift to lampoon its absurdities.

Amen.

* * *

Putnam is a big booster of “diversity,” which — in the left’s interpretation — doesn’t mean diversity of political, social, and economic views. What it means is the forced association of persons of irreconcilably opposed social norms. I say some things about that in “Society and the State” and “Genetic Kinship and Society.” Fred Reed has much more to say in a recent column:

In Ferguson blacks are shooting policemen as others cheer. It does a curmudgeon’s soul good: Everything gets worse, the collapse continues, and unreasoning stupidity goes thundering into the future.

We will hear I suppose that it wasn’t racial, that teens did it, that discrimination caused it, white privilege, racism, institutional racism, slavery, colonialism, bigots, Southerners, rednecks—everything but the hatred of blacks for whites.

And thus we will avoid the unavoidable, that racial relations are a disaster, will remain a disaster, will get worse, are getting worse, and will lead to some awful denouement no matter how much we lie, preen, vituperate, chatter like Barbary apes, or admire ourselves.

It isn’t working. There is no sign that it ever will. What now?

The only solution, if there is a solution, would seem to be an amicable separation. This methinks would be greatly better than the slow-motion, intensifying racial war we now see, and pretend not to see. When the races mix, there is trouble. So, don’t mix them….

The racial hostility of blacks for whites can be seen elsewhere, for example in targeting of crime, most starkly in interracial rates of rape…. The numbers on rape, almost entirely black on white, also check out as cold fact… This has been analyzed to death, and ignored to death, but perhaps the most readable account is Jim Goad’s For Whom the Cat Calls (the numbers of note come below the ads).

Even without the (inevitable) racial hostility, togetherheid would not work well. The races have little or nothing in common. They do not want the same things. Whites come from a literate European tradition dating at least from the Iliad in 800 BC, a tradition characterized by literature, mathematics, architecture, philosophy, and the sciences. Africa, having a very different social traditions, was barely touched by this, and today blacks still show little interest. Even in the degenerate America of today, whites put far more emphasis on education than do blacks.

The media paint the problems of blacks as consequent to discrimination, but they clearly are not. If blacks in white schools wanted to do the work, or could, whites would applaud. If in black schools they demanded thicker textbooks with bigger words and smaller pictures, no white would refuse. The illiteracy, the very high rates of illegitimacy, the crime in general, the constant killing of young black men by young black men in particular—whites do not do these. They are either genetic, and irremediable, or cultural, and remediable, if at all, only in the very long run. We live in the short run.

Would it then not be reasonable to encourage a voluntary segregation? Having only black policemen in black regions would slow the burning of cities. If we let people live among their own, let them study what they chose to study, let them police themselves and order their schools as they chose, considerable calm would fall over the country.

If the races had the choice of running their own lives apart, they would. If this is not true, why do we have to spend such effort trying to force them together?

It is a great fallacy to think that because we ought to love one another, we will; or that because bloodshed among groups makes no sense, it won’t happen. The disparate seldom get along, whether Tamils and Sinhalese or Hindus and Moslems or Protestants and Catholics or Jews and Palestinians. The greater the cultural and genetic difference, the greater the likelihood and intensity of conflict. Blacks and whites are very, very different….

Separation does not imply disadvantage. The assertion that “separate is inherently unequal” is a catchiphrastic embodiment of the Supreme Court’s characteristic blowing in the political wind. A college for girls is not inherently inferior to a college for boys, nor a yeshiva for Jews inherently inferior to a parish school for Catholics. And maybe it is the business of girls and boys, Catholics and Jews, to decide what and where they want to study—not the government’s business….

Anger hangs over the country. Not everyone white is a professor or collegiate sophomore or network anchor. Not every white—not by a long shot—in Congress or the federal bureaucracy is a Mother Jones liberal, not in private conversation. They say aloud what they have to say. But in the Great Plains and small-town South, in corner bars in Chicago and Denver, in the black enclaves of the cities, a lot of people are ready to rumble. Read the comments section of the St. Louis papers after the riots. We can call the commenters whatever names we choose but when we finish, they will still be there. The shooting of policemen for racial reasons–at least four to date–is not a good sign. We will do nothing about it but chatter. [“The Symptoms Worsen,” Fred on Everything, March 15, 2015]

See also Reed’s column “Diversity: Koom. Bah. Humbug” (January 13, 2015) and my posts, “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications,” “The Hidden Tragedy of the Assassination of Lincoln.”, “‘Conversing’ about Race,” “‘Wading’ into Race, Culture, and IQ,” “Round Up the Usual Suspects,”and “Evolution, Culture, and ‘Diversity’.”

* * *

In “The Fallacy of Human Progress” I address at length the thesis of Steven Pinker’s ludicrous The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In rebuttal to Pinker, I cite John Gray, author of The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths:

Gray’s book — published 18 months after Better Angels — could be read as a refutation of Pinker’s book, though Gray doesn’t mention Pinker or his book.

Well, Gray recently published a refutation of Pinker’s book, which I can’t resist quoting at length:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day, Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument consists in showing that the past was more violent than we tend to imagine…. This “civilising process” – a term Pinker borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias – has come about largely as a result of the increasing power of the state, which in the most advanced countries has secured a near-monopoly of force. Other causes of the decline in violence include the invention of printing, the empowerment of women, enhanced powers of reasoning and expanding capacities for empathy in modern populations, and the growing influence of Enlightenment ideals….

Another proponent of the Long Peace is the well-known utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who has praised The Better Angels of Our Nature as “a supremely important book … a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.” In a forthcoming book, The Most Good You Can Do, Singer describes altruism as “an emerging movement” with the potential to fundamentally alter the way humans live….

Among the causes of the outbreak of altruism, Pinker and Singer attach particular importance to the ascendancy of Enlightenment thinking….

…Pinker’s response when confronted with [contrary] evidence is to define the dark side of the Enlightenment out of existence. How could a philosophy of reason and toleration be implicated in mass murder? The cause can only be the sinister influence of counter-Enlightenment ideas….

The picture of declining violence presented by this new orthodoxy is not all it seems to be. As some critics, notably John Arquilla, have pointed out, it’s a mistake to focus too heavily on declining fatalities on the battlefield….

If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars. Neocolonial warfare in south-east Asia, the Korean war and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the Vietnam war, the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, covert intervention in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the invasion of Iraq, the use of airpower in Libya, military aid to insurgents in Syria, Russian cyber-attacks in the Baltic states and the proxy war between the US and Russia that is being waged in Ukraine – these are only some of the contexts in which great powers have been involved in continuous warfare against each other while avoiding direct military conflict.

While it is true that war has changed, it has not become less destructive. Rather than a contest between well-organised states that can at some point negotiate peace, it is now more often a many-sided conflict in fractured or collapsed states that no one has the power to end….

It may be true that the modern state’s monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass killing, and one should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror…. Pinker goes so far as to suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke, and cautions that any history of the last century that represents it as having been especially violent may be “apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history” (the italics are Pinker’s). However, there is an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of the violence of the last century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision….

While the seeming exactitude of statistics may be compelling, much of the human cost of war is incalculable…. [T]he statistics presented by those who celebrate the arrival of the Long Peace are morally dubious if not meaningless.

The radically contingent nature of the figures is another reason for not taking them too seriously. (For a critique of Pinker’s statistical methods, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay on the Long Peace.)…

Certainly the figures used by Pinker and others are murky, leaving a vast range of casualties of violence unaccounted for. But the value of these numbers for such thinkers comes from their very opacity. Like the obsidian mirrors made by the Aztecs for purposes of divination, these rows of graphs and numbers contain nebulous images of the future – visions that by their very indistinctness can give comfort to believers in human improvement….

Unable to tolerate the prospect that the cycles of conflict will continue, many are anxious to find continuing improvement in the human lot. Who can fail to sympathise with them? Lacking any deeper faith and incapable of living with doubt, it is only natural that believers in reason should turn to the sorcery of numbers. How else can they find meaning in their lives? [“John Gray: Steven Pinker Is Wrong about Violence and War,” The Guardian, March 13, 2015]

* * *

I close this super-sized installment of “Thoughts” by returning to the subject of so-called net neutrality, which I addressed almost nine years ago in “Why ‘Net Neutrality’ Is a Bad Idea.” Now it’s a bad idea that the FCC has imposed on ISPs and their customers — until, one hopes, it’s rejected by the Supreme Court as yet another case of Obamanomic overreach.

As Robert Tracinski notes,

[b]illionaire investor Mark Cuban recently commented, about a push for new regulations on the Internet, that “In my adult life I have never seen a situation that paralleled what I read in Ayn Rand’s books until now with Net Neutrality.” He continued, “If Ayn Rand were an up-and-coming author today, she wouldn’t write about steel or railroads, it would be Net Neutrality.”

She certainly would, but if he thinks this is the first time real life has imitated Ayn Rand’s fiction, he needs to be paying a little more attention. Atlas has been shrugging for a long, long time. [“Net Neutrality: Yes, Mark Cuban, Atlas Is Shrugging,” The Federalist, March 18, 2015]

The rest of the story is outlined by the headings in Tracinski’s article:

The Relationship Between Net Neutrality and Atlas Shrugged

Internet Execs Are Already Uncomfortable with the Net Neutrality They Demanded

The Parallels Extend Into Fracking

Government Shuts Down Any Runaway Success

Atlas Shrugged Is Coming True Before Our Eyes

As I did in my post, Julian Adorney focuses on the economics of net neutrality:

After a number of false starts and under pressure from the White House, the FCC gave in and voted to regulate the Internet as a public utility in order to ban such practices, thus saving the Internet from a variety of boogeymen.

This is a tempting narrative. It has conflict, villains, heroes, and even a happy ending. There’s only one problem: it’s a fairy tale. Such mischief has been legal for decades, and ISPs have almost never behaved this way. Any ISP that created “slow lanes” or blocked content to consumers would be hurting its own bottom line. ISPs make money by seeking to satisfy consumers, not by antagonizing them.

There are two reasons that ISPs have to work to satisfy their customers. First, every company needs repeat business….

For Internet service providers, getting new business is expensive…. Satisfying customers so that they continue subscribing is cheaper, easier, and more profitable than continually replacing them. ISPs’ self-interest pushes them to add value to their customers just to keep them from jumping ship to their competitors.

In fact, this is what we’ve seen. ISPs have invested heavily in new infrastructure, and Internet speeds have increased by leaps and bounds…. These faster speeds have not been limited to big corporate customers: ISPs have routinely improved their services to regular consumers. They didn’t do so because the FCC forced them. For the past twenty years, “slow lanes” have been perfectly legal and almost as perfectly imaginary….

…ISPs shy away from creating slow lanes not because they have to but because they have a vested interest in offering fast service to all customers.

Contrary to the myth about ISPs being localized monopolies, 80 percent of Americans live in markets with access to multiple high-speed ISPs. While expensive regulations can discourage new players from entering the market, competition in most cities is increasingly robust….

ISPs still have to compete with each other for customers. If one ISP sticks them in the slow lane or blocks access to certain sites — or even just refuses to upgrade its service — consumers can simply switch to a competitor.

The second reason that ISPs seek to satisfy customers is that every business wants positive word of mouth. Consumers who receive excellent service talk up the service to their friends, generating new sign-ups. Consumers who receive mediocre service not only leave but badmouth the company to everyone they know.

In fact, this happened in one of the few cases where an ISP chose to discriminate against content. When Verizon blocked text messages from a pro-choice activist group in 2007, claiming the right to block “controversial or unsavory” messages, the backlash was fierce. Consumer Affairs notes that, “after a flurry of criticism, Verizon reversed its policy” on the pro-choice texts. The decision may have been ideological, but more likely Verizon reversed a policy that was driving away consumers, generating bad press, and hurting its bottom line.

In 2010, an FCC order made such “unreasonable discrimination” illegal (until the rule was struck down in 2014), but even without this rule, consumers proved more than capable of standing up to big corporations and handling such discrimination themselves.

In competitive markets, the consumer’s demand for quality prevents companies from cutting corners. Before the FCC imposed public utility regulations on the Internet, ISPs were improving service and abandoning discriminatory practices in order to satisfy their users. Net Neutrality advocates have spent years demanding a government solution to a problem that markets had already solved. [“Net Nonsense,” The Freeman, March 18, 2015]

Amen, again.

Nature, Nurture, and Inequality

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Loquitur Veritatem

I almost always agree with John Derbyshire, and this post by him is no exception. But he does err in the course of the aforementioned post when he says:

The Left, which I am using to mean approximately people who want a more egalitarian society [a generous characterization], believe that the causes of human inequality are external to the individual human being. If you fix the external causes, then you get a more equal society. The Right, who are more tolerant of inequality, believe that components of human nature are innate. Customary and traditional social arrangements that are not obviously harmful shouldn’t be disturbed for projects of human improvement that are likely to prove futile.

Both sides have a case. The Left does have a case. Human nature has somewhat improved. Rigid hereditary social hierarchies of the kind that a conservative over 200 years ago would have fought to the death for, proved to be not as necessary as they thought. Most human beings in most places no longer enslave, eat, or publicly torture each other. So human nature does improve. Many of you have probably read Stephen Pinker’s recent book about the long term decline of violence. We’re kinder and gentler than our remote ancestors.

Pinker’s book is hogwash. I won’t repeat all of the reasons for saying that. Just go here and see for yourself. See also this excellent article by William Kirkpatrick.

Derbyshire soon gets back on track:

But the Right also has a case. And much of the strength of that case comes from the last few decades of research in the human sciences.

Individual personality seems to resemble what physicists call “shape memory alloys.” These are metal alloys that you can construct that remember their shape—you can take a bar of this stuff and bend it into a knot, and when you heat it up, it unbends itself and remembers its original shape. Human nature seems to be much like that. You can push people in certain directions during childhood and adolescence, but the finished adult human being seems to follow the Judith Rich Harris model: 50% heredity and the rest environmental.

I am sure that some of you know that last month [October 2014] was the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray‘s book, The Bell Curve. There have been a number of commemorative articles on human science websites. The grand metaphysician of the Human Biodiversity movement, Steve Sailer, published what I thought, was a very witty comment about it. He said that there had been a complete change in our understanding of, for example, educational attainment. Statistically, 20 years ago there was definitely a hierarchy of educational attainment. At the top you had Orientals, below them you had Caucasians, below them you had Chicanos, and below them you had Blacks on average statistical attainment. Now things are completely different. Now there is a new hierarchy. At the top you have Asians, second you have Whites, third you have Hispanics, and fourth you have African Americans.

So, bottom line there, not much has changed. Where the Left favors a belief in high levels of malleability, reality does not seem to agree.

But reality, as usual, eludes the left. Consider for example The Economist, which is a useful tool of the left. Here is Dr. James Thompson on the case:

There is much innocent fun to be gained from The Economist’s coy avoidance of the genetics of intelligence. They are mired in Blank-Slatism, but are cautiously tip-toeing towards admitting a few things, only to then back away again, thus taking them back to where they came from. This is not all bad: by conceding the importance of intelligence and then immediately saying it is driven by wealth they keep the Faith, whatever it is, but hint that they know more than they will let on in public….

…[I]n The Economist’s view brighter people marrying brighter people is not seen as a positive development, but a practice which “increases inequality”. Of course, duller people marrying duller people also increased inequality. In fact, couples assort themselves on intelligence more than anything else:

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2014/12/five-gold-rings-inherited.html ….

In a related article they spell out their concerns: An hereditary meritocracy: The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem….

[T]he problem seems to be that they deserve to get ahead, the bounders! …

None of The Economist’s articles or the papers they quote make it clear that intelligence must be considered a driving force in economic life and, consequently, in earnings, social status and resultant wealth. Curious, isn’t it, that a magazine written by the smart fraction for the smart fraction cannot bear to mention the smart fraction in a positive light? Perhaps they fear they will be cursed by the deity, or slaughtered by the baying mob. Noblesse oblige.

[The quotations are from “The Economist Takes a Half Step Forwards,” Psychological Comments, January 23, 2015. Thompson refers to three articles in The Economist: “America’s New Aristocracy,” “Getting ‘Em Young,” and “An Hereditary Meritocracy,” all dated January 24, 2015.]

In the left’s demented view, it would be better if the human race were populated by seven billion equally stupid (and equally unattractive) persons, all scrambling for survival, than to allow the brightest to intermarry and produce a relative handful of intelligent producers whose efforts enrich the lives of the billions (or a large fraction of them). Heaven forbid that the relative handful should thus be rewarded with more than a “fair share” of the riches that they create.

I am certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the “smart fraction” would not want to live in a world where its superior ~~intelligence~~ glibness went unrewarded.

* * *

A Case for Redistribution, Not Made

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Loquitur Veritatem

Jessica Flanigan, one of the bleeders at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, offers this excuse for ripping money out of the hands of some persons and placing it into the hands of other persons:

Lately I’ve been thinking about my reasons for endorsing a UBI [universal basic income], especially given that I also share Michael Huemer’s skepticism about political authority. Consider this case:

(1) Anne runs a business called PropertySystem, which manufacturers and maintains a private currency that can be traded for goods and services. The currency exists in users’ private accounts and Anne’s company provides security services for users. If someone tries to hack into the accounts she prevents them from doing so. The company also punishes users who violate the rules of PropertySystem. So if someone steals or tries to steal the currency from users, that person may have some of their currency taken away or they may even be held in one of PropertySystem’s jails. These services are financed through a yearly service fee.

This sounds fine. If everyone consented to join PropertySystem then they can’t really complain that Anne charges a fee for the services. There will be some questions about those who are not PropertySystem members, and how Anne’s company should treat them. But for the membership, consent seems to render what Anne is doing permissible. Next,

(2) Anne thinks that it would be morally better if she gave money to poor people. She changes the user agreement for her currency holders to increase her maintenance fee and she gives some of the money to poor people. Or, Anne decides to just print more money and mail it to people so that she doesn’t have to raise fees, even though this could decrease the value of the holdings of her richest clients.

By changing the user agreement or distribution system in this way, Anne doesn’t seem to violate anyone’s rights. And PropertySystem does some good through its currency and protection services by using the company to benefit people who are badly off. Now imagine,

(3) Anne decides that she doesn’t like PropertySystem competing with other providers so she compels everyone in a certain territory to use PropertySystem’s currency and protection services and to pay service fees, which she now calls taxes.

…[T[here are moral reasons in favor of Anne’s policy changes from (1) to (2). She changed the property conventions in ways that did not violate anyone’s pre-political ownership rights while still benefiting the badly off. If Anne implemented policy (2) after she started forcing everyone to join her company (3) it would still be morally better than policy (1) despite the fact that (3) is unjust.This is the reason I favor a basic income. Such a policy balances the reasonable complaints that people may have about the effects of a property system that they never consented to join. Though redistribution cannot justify forcing everyone to join a property system, it can at least compensate people who are very badly off partly because they were forced to join that property system. Some people will do very well under a property system that nevertheless violates their rights. But it is not a further rights violation if a property system doesn’t benefit the rich as much as it possibly could.

Flanigan’s logical confusion is astounding.

To begin with, if (3) is “unjust,” implementing (2) as a subset of (3) almost certainly expands the scope of injustice. Flanigan assumes, without justification, that those who are “very badly off” in are so “partly because they were forced to join the property system.” What’s much more likely is that those who are “very badly off” would be very badly off inside or outside the property system because they lack the mental or physical wherewithal to better themselves. By the same token, most of those who are very well off under the property system — including most members of that despised straw-man class, “crony capitalists” — probably would be very well off outside the property system because they possess the wherewithal to better themselves.

Flanigan, like most leftists, wants to blame a “system” instead of looking to the ability and determination of individual persons. Blaming a “system” justifies (in the minds of Flanigan and her ilk) “fixes” that are intended to favor those whom they assume to be “victims” of the “system.”

Flanigan’s simplistic taxonomy of cases — (1), (2), and (3) — bears no resemblance to political reality, that is, to the “system” that has existed in the United States, or to the “system” that has prevailed in the world at large for eons. Reality looks more like this:

The current “system” — the U.S. under the Constitution that was ratified by some of the people in 1788 — began with the imposition of a more intrusive central government on all of the people living within the geographical area defined as the United States. The constituent jurisdictions — the States and their political subdivisions — were governed to greater and lesser degrees of intrusiveness. But, slaves and indentured servants excpted, Americans were free to move to jurisdictions that they found more congenial. The westward expansion of the United States under minimalist territorial governments made “exit” an especially attractive and viable option from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. With the end of slavery (but not of government-imposed racial discrimination), negative liberty reached an apogee (for whites, at least) during the late 1800s.

The Progressives of the late 1800s and early 1900s — a vocal and eventually powerful minority — then began to use the central government to impose their paternalistic designs on the populace as a whole. There have since been some pauses in the accretion of power by the central government, and a few reversals in selected areas (e.g., limited “deregulation” of some industries). But the centralization of power has grown steadily since the Progressive Era, and the exit option has became almost a nullity.

Plugging that bit of potted history into Flanigan’s taxonomy, I would say that with the adoption of the Constitution Americans were thrust wholesale into stage (3). Because of the opening of the frontier, however, Americans (or a goodly fraction of them) had a shot at something less onerous for a while (call it 3-minus). But with the ascendancy of D.C. over the hinterlands we’ve all been in stage (3) for several decades. And income redistribution — whether it’s called welfare, Social Security, or UBI — is (a) nothing new and (b) nothing more than one among many features of stage (3).

Nor is that the end of the story. It’s impossible to sort the winners and losers under the “system” that’s been in place since 1788 — or 1781 if you prefer to begin with the Articles of Confederation, or 1607 if you prefer to begin with the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. It would require an intricate analysis of the economic and social effects of all the laws and regulations of the the United States — or the Colonies — and their subdivisions. And it would require the allocation of those effects to every person now living.

But that wouldn’t be enough, would it? Total fairness would require an accounting of the conditions in the various lands from which persons came to the United States, or which were absorbed into the United States. How far back should the analysis go? Perhaps not as far back as the origin of life 3.5 billion to 4.5 billion years ago, but certainly as far back as the advent of homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago. After all, where human beings are concerned there’s no such thing as a pre-political state of nature. Politics is what human beings “do” to get along with each other and to dominate each other, whether the polity in question numbers two or two billion persons.

Any less-detailed accounting, such as the one suggested by Flanigan, is meant to discriminate in favor of those persons (or classes of persons) favored by bleeding hearts, at the expense of those not favored. Why so? Because bleeding hearts (i.e., “liberals”) jump to conclusions about who’s “deserving” and who’s not. Further, they jump to conclusions about groups, not about individual persons, as if every member of an arbitrarily defined group had emerged from the same background, in every particular.

Slave owners jumped to the same conclusions about African Negroes. The all-powerful state — the state that can tax X and give the money to Y — is the moral equivalent of a slave-owner. Taxation is a form of slavery.

* * *

Income Inequality and Economic Growth

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Loquitur Veritatem

Standard & Poor’s adds fuel the the already raging fire of economic illiteracy with its research report entitled, “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening U.S. Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide.” The S&P paper mines the Marxian-Pikettian vein of “underconsumption,” which (in the Marxian-Pikettian view) leads to economic collapse. (That Marx was wrong has been amply demonstrated by the superior performance of quasi-free economies, which have lifted the poor as well as the rich. Many writers have found grave errors in Piketty‘s reasoning– and data — these among them.)

The remedy for economic collapse (in the Marxian-Pikettian view) is socialism (perhaps smuggled in as “democratic” redistributionism). It is, of course, the kind of imaginary, painless socialism favored by affluent professors and pundits — favored as long as it doesn’t affect their own affluence. It bears no resemblance to the actual kind of socialism experienced by the billions who have been oppressed by it and the tens of millions who have been killed for its sake.

I have read two thorough take-downs of S&P’s screed. One is by Scott Winship (“S&P’s Fundamentally Flawed Inequality Report,” Economic Policies for the 21st Century at the Manhattan Institute, August 6, 2014). A second is by John Cochrane (“S&P Economists and Inequality,” The Grumpy Economist, August 8, 2014). Cochrane summarizes (and demolishes) the central theme of the S&P report, which I will address here:

[I]nequality is bad [because] it is bad for growth, and if the reason it is bad for growth is that it leads to insufficient consumption and lack of demand….

That bit of hogwash serves the redistributionist agenda. As Cochrane puts it, “redistributive taxation is a perennial answer in search of a question.” Indeed.

There’s more:

Inequality – growth is supposed to be about long run trends, not boom and slow recovery.

Professor of Public Policy at U.S. Berkeley Robert Reich argues that increased inequality has reduced overall aggregate demand. He observes that high-income households have a lower marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of income than other households.

Let us begin at the beginning, that is, with some self-evident postulates that even a redistributionist will grant — until he grasps their anti-redistributionist implications:

All economic output is of two distinct types: consumption and investment (i.e., the replacement of or increase in the stock of capital that is used to produce goods for consumption).

The output of consumption goods must decline, ceteris paribus, if the stock of capital declines.

The stock of capital is sustained (and increased) by forgoing consumption.

The stock of capital is therefore sustained (and increased) by saving.

Saving rises with income because persons in high-income brackets usually consume a smaller fraction of their incomes than do persons in middle- and low-income brackets.

The redistribution of income from high-income earners to middle- and low-income earners therefore leads to a reduction in saving.

A reduction in saving means less investment and, thus, a reduction in the effective stock of capital, as it wears out.

With less capital, workers become less productive.

Output therefore declines, to the detriment of workers as well as “capitalists.”

In sum, efforts to make incomes more equal through redistribution have the opposite effect of the one claimed for it by ignorant bloviators like Robert Reich.

So much for the claim that a higher rate of consumption is a good policy for the long run.

What about in the short run; that is, what about Keynesian “stimulus” to “prime the pump”? I won’t repeat what I say in “The Keynesian Multiplier: Phony Math.” Go there, and see for yourself.

For an estimate of the destructive, long-run effect of government see “The True Multiplier.”

Income Inequality and Inherited Wealth: So What?

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Loquitur Veritatem

Greg Mankiw offers a refreshing take on Thomas Piketty’s infamous thesis, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Mankiw opens by asking, “Is inherited wealth making a comeback?” He continues:

Yes, says Thomas Piketty…. Inherited wealth has always been with us, of course, but Mr. Piketty believes that its importance is increasing. He sees a future that combines slow economic growth with high returns to capital. He reasons that if capital owners save much of their income, their wealth will accumulate and be passed on to their heirs. He concludes that individuals’ living standards will be determined less by their skill and effort and more by bequests they receive.

To be sure, one can poke holes in Mr. Piketty’s story. Since the book came out, numerous economists have been doing exactly that in book reviews, blog posts and academic analyses.

Moreover, given economists’ abysmal track record in forecasting, especially over long time horizons, any such prognostication should be taken with a shaker or two of salt. The Piketty scenario is best viewed not as a solid prediction but as a provocative speculation.

But it raises the question: So what? What’s wrong with inherited wealth?…

The bottom line is that inherited wealth is not an economic threat. Those who have earned extraordinary incomes naturally want to share their good fortune with their descendants. Those of us not lucky enough to be born into one of these families benefit as well, as their accumulation of capital raises our productivity, wages and living standards.

Unlike Mankiw, I would have stopped at “so what?” The incessant attacks on income inequality and inherited wealth arise not only from faulty economic reasoning, as Mankiw points out, but also from envy and resentment.

Envy and resentment are found among non-achievers, of course, but they are rampant in the ranks of the affluent. There we find pseudo-academic poseurs like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, leftist pundits, well-heeled politicos, and cossetted bureaucrats who feast on the spoils of the welfare state. These hypocrites can’t attack “the rich” with a straight face, so they attack “the very rich,” a class that they define (conveniently) to exclude themselves.

That said, I can’t resist the temptation to add to Mankiw’s short list of links to posts and articles that are critical of Piketty’s analysis. Here’s a small sample of related readings:

Richard A. Epstein, “The Piketty Fallacy,” The Libertarian, May 5, 2014
Arnold Kling, “More Contra Piketty,” askblog, May 21, 2014
Scott Sumner, “The Middle Class Is Doing Fine,” EconLog, May 21, 2014
Pejman Yousefzedah, “Facts Are Stubborn Things … As Thomas Piketty Is Beginning to Find Out,” Pejman Yousefzedah, May 23, 2014
Ed Morrissey, “The Perils of Piketty,” Hot Air, May 25, 2014
Tim Worstall, “Why Income Inequality Is Really Very Good for Us Indeed,” The Adam Smith Institute, June 2, 2014
Mark J. Perry, “Sorry Krugman, Stiglitz, and Pikkety: Income Inequality for Individual Americans Has Been Flat for More Than 50 Years,” Carpe Diem, June 5, 2014

For many more readings, see the links at the bottom of “Mass (Economic) Hysteria: Income Inequality and Related Themes.” See also my many posts tagged “income inequality,” and follow the links therein.

(Full disclosure: I am an “unprivileged” child of “unprivileged”parents. I have inherited not so much as a penny. In 31 years of salaried, full-time employment, I earned above-average compensation. My earnings were in the top-5 percent of individual incomes for a few years at the end of my full-time working career.)

Mass (Economic) Hysteria: Income Inequality and Related Themes

Posted on February 19, 2014 by Loquitur Veritatem

It seems as though everyone’s talking and writing about stagnant wages, growing income inequality, gender discrimination in pay, concentration of wealth, no/less/too-little upward mobility, shrinking middle class, foreclosure of opportunity, end of the American Dream, higher mortality rates (due to income inequality), and on and on and on. (Insert exclamation marks to heighten the sense of outrage.)

All of these complaints — which emanate from the left and resound loudly in the media — presuppose the existence of several Platonic ideals; for example: correct wage levels, correct degrees of income and wealth inequality, correct rates of upward (and downward) mobility, an actually identifiable and permanent middle class, a measurable and optimum amount of opportunity, a definition of the American Dream that is more than pablum, and on and on.

All such ideals, of course, exist only in the minds of those who complain about stagnant wages, etc. But no matter — any excuse for further government intervention in the economy will do. And further government intervention will only harm those persons whom it is meant to help, by further reducing the rate of economic growth.

But nothing daunts true believers — Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Joseph Stiglitz, and their ilk — who always want government to “do something.” Their preachings bolster the pro-government-spending biases of most pundits and a large fraction of politicians. One aim of the true believers is to shape the fickle mood of the general public and garner support for government action.

Anyway, the various manifestations of economic hysteria listed in the opening paragraph can be met with logic and facts — and often are. (See the list of readings at the bottom of this post.) It’s unlikely that logic and facts will sway those who are emotionally committed to the exaction of redistributive justice, and who have no interest in its infeasibility, high costs, and perverse consequences. But until that lucky day when legitimate government is restored to the United States, its defenders must rely on logic and facts.

Consider income inequality. Not only is there inequality — which should be unsurprising, given inequality of ability, ambition, etc. — but there is supposedly a growing gap between America’s “haves” and “have-nots.” A do-gooder would leave it at that. Not being one of them, I’ll ask the questions that they’re unwilling/afraid/too-jejune to ask:

What is a have? Is it someone/a household whose income exceeds the median for all persons/households? Is in the top 20 percent of all such incomes? The top 5 percent? The top 1 percent? The top 0.1 percent? (Pick your favorite point along the continuous curves in the graphs here.)
Or is a have defined by his/her/its wealth? And, if so, how? (See preceding bullet.)
Do haves “rig the game” so that they are, in effect, stealing from have-nots?
If haves are clever and determined enough to do that, isn’t it likely that they’d still be haves without “rigging the game”?
Is one’s economic status a permanent thing, or do people in fact move up and down the economic ladder during their lifetimes?
Are the have-nots of today — who, mostly, aren’t the have-nots of yesteryear — really worse off than their predecessors, or are they really better off?
Are they worse off relatively?
Will tomorrow’s have-nots be better off if the haves are deprived of income/wealth through redistributive actions taken by government?
Or will redistributive actions simply make haves worse off and less likely to do the things that make have-nots better off (e.g., give huge sums to charity, invest in growth-producing investments)?

Questions 1 and 2 are unanswerable; the distinction between a have and a have-not is purely arbitrary. (It has been said, with some accuracy, that a rich person is someone who has more more money than you.) The answers to the other questions are: (3) only to the extent that some of them are aided by government through perverse regulations favored by do-gooders; (4) yes; (5) not permanent, plenty of movement; (6) better-off absolutely than earlier have-nots; (7) probably about the same, relatively, but they’re mostly different people; (8) worse off; (9) yes, redistributive actions make have-nots worse off by hindering economic growth. (For more, see the list of readings, below.)

Before signing off, I want to say a bit more about haves, have-nots, rigging the game, and hypocritical politicians:

Most of the haves — given their ambition, intelligence, and particular skills — would succeed famously, even without rigging the game in their favor. In any event, government does most of the rigging — mainly to “protect” the have-nots from “ruthless” operators. For example, there’s licensing and regulatory barriers to entry to high-paying professions, such as the creation and trading of financial instruments, doctoring, lawyering, and making licensed, patented drugs. The entire left-leaning entertainment industry thrives on government-granted copyrights

In free markets, there would be no rigging, or it wouldn’t last long because the high profits generated by rigging would entice competition. So, if you want to blame rigging for the advantages enjoyed by the haves, blame their cronies in government, many of whom make a career of crying (all the way to the bank) about inequality. (Relevant aside: It is no coincidence that in 2012, five of the top-six counties in median household income were in the D.C. area.)

Isn’t is strange that most of the pissing and moaning about inequality emanates from people who are either in high-income brackets or whose political rank enables them to live as if they were? (Obama, Biden, and members of Congress, I’m looking at you.) Isn’t it evident that the pissing and moaning results mainly from economic illiteracy, guilt, and political opportunism? It should be evident, unless you’re a complete naïf of the kind who still believes in the tooth fairy and free lunches.

I must add that I have yet to meet a pro-equality “liberal” who pays more taxes than demanded of him by the IRS, opens his house to the homeless, or associates with the unwashed masses. As Victor Davis Hanson observes, there are no (true) socialists among the powerful and affluent lefties who spout egalitarian slogans.

I’ve addressed income inequality and related matters in several posts, including “The Last(?) Word about Income Inequality,” “Taxing the Rich,” “More about Taxing the Rich,” “In Defense of the 1%,” and “Progressive Taxation Is Alive and Well in the U.S. of A,” “How High Should Taxes Be?,” and “Some Inconvenient Facts about Income Inequality.” (See also the links embedded in and appended to those posts.)

There’s much more on the web. The following is a small sample of the vast trove of reasoned, fact-filled writings that leftists ignore because they prefer myths to facts.

Income inequality, wealth inequality, and economic mobility
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, “The Myth of Increasing Income Inequality,” The Manhattan Institute, Issues 2012, March 2012
James Pethokoukis, “Obama’s Fact-Challenged Inequality Speech,” AEIdeas, July 26, 2013
James Pethokoukis, “3 Charts That Show What’s Really Going On with Economic Mobility in the U.S.,” AEIdeas, December 12, 2013
James Pethokoukis, “If All You Know about Income Inequality Is This Famous Chart, You Really Don’t Know Much,” AEIdeas, December 23, 2013
Don Boudreaux, “Questions about and for Those People Obsessed with Income Inequality,” Cafe Hayek, December 24, 2013
Raj Chetty, et al., “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility,” Working Paper 19844, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2014 (related: N. Gregory Mankiw, “How Much Income Inequality Is Explained by Varying Parental Resources?,” Greg Mankiw’s Blog, January 24, 2014)
John Goodman, “Myths about Inequality,” John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog, January 15, 2014
Thomas Sowell, “Fact-Free Liberals (parts I, II, and III),” creators.com, January 21, 2014
James Pethokoukis, “Does Obama Know That Wealth Inequality Is Lower Now Than 25 Years Ago?,” AEIdeas, January 21, 2014
Ironman, “Debunking Income Inequality Theory,” Political Calculations, January 23, 2014
David Harsanyi, “State of the Union: Maybe You’re Not As Screwed As They Think You Are,” The Federalist, January 27, 2014
David Henderson, “Why Income Mobility Is Larger in the Middle,” EconLog, February 10, 2014
Linda Gorman, “More Accurate Measures Suggest Declining Income Inequality [not that it matters, one way or the other],” John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog, March 14, 2014
Mark R. Rank, “From Rags to Riches to Rags,” The New York Times, April 18, 2014

Executive pay, the “undeserving” rich, and the “1%”
James Pethokoukis, “Stunning New Study Dismantles Obama’s ‘1% vs. 99%’ Inequality Argument,” AEIdeas, August 16, 2013
James Pethokoukis, “Why Steven Kaplan Says Brad DeLong Is Wrong about CEO Pay, the Superstar Theory, and Income Inequality,” AEIdeas, August 19, 2013
James Pethokoukis, “Why the Much-Hyped Oxfam Study on Global Inequality Is Misleading,” AEIdeas, January 21, 2014
Don Boudreaux, “Deidre McClosky on Oxfam’s Calculation of World Wealth ‘Distribution’,” Cafe Hayek, January 27, 2014
Walter E. Williams, “Politics of Hate and Envy,” creators.com, January 29, 2014
Robert J. Samuelson, “Myth-Making about Economic Inequality,” RealClearPolitics, February 3, 2014
N. Gregory Mankiw, “Yes, the Wealthy Can Be Deserving,” The New York Times, February 15, 2014
N. Gregory Mankiw, “CEO’s Are Paid for Performance,” Greg Mankiw’s Blog, February 17, 2014
Mark J. Perry, “‘Rich America Is Not the ‘Idle Rich’, but rather a Working America, an Educated America, and a Married America,” Carpe Diem, February 19, 2014

Rigging the system: “our” government at work
Bruce Yandle, “Bootleggers and Baptists,” Regulation, May/June 1983
Bruce Yandle “Bootleggers and Baptists in Retrospect,” Regulation, Fall 1999
Richard K. Vedder, “Federal Government Has Declared War on Work,” Commentary Articles, The Independent Institute, January 20, 2014

The effect of assortative mating on household income
Henry Harpending, “Class, Caste, and Genes,” West Hunter, January 13, 2012
Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran, “Assortative Mating, Class, and Caste,” manuscript, December 1, 2013
Jeremy Greenwood et al., “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality,” Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, January 12, 2014
Ironman, “In Which We’re Vindicated. Again.,” Political Calculations, January 28, 2014

The non-war on the middle class, women, and blacks
Mark J. Perry, “Yes, the Middle Class Has Been Disappearing, but They Haven’t Fallen into the Lower Class, They’ve Risen into the Upper Class,” Carpe Diem, July 12, 2013
Steve Sailer, “Breakthrough Study: Poor Blacks Tend to Stay Poor, Black,” Vdare.com, July 24, 2013
John B. Taylor, “The Weak Recovery Explains Rising Inequality, Not Vice Versa,” WSJ.com, September 9, 2013
John B. Taylor, “My Take on the Middle-Out View,” Economics One, September 9, 2013
James Bessen, “No, Technology Isn’t Going to Destroy the Middle Class,” The Washington Post, October 21, 2013
Bryan Caplan, “Is Average Over? Two Equivocal Graphs,” EconLog, January 4, 2014
N. Gregory Mankiw, “Does Income Inequality Increase Mortality?,” Greg Mankiw’s Blog, January 29, 2014
Christina Hoff Sommers, “No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men,” The Daily Beast, February 1, 2014

Some Inconvenient Facts about Income Inequality

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Loquitur Veritatem

Follow these three links at Census.gov and you’ll find Table P-28, Educational Attainment—Workers 18 Years Old and Over by Mean Earnings, Age and Sex. (Similar tables are available, but the numbers reported in P-28 are based on a consistent definition of educational attainment.) Drawing on Table P-28, I constructed the following statistics for 1992 and 2012, which are years with similar rates of growth in GDP per capita (2.19 percent and 2.05 percent, respectively):

Employment earnings and 20-year changes in earnings

Men and women are separated because it’s a fact of life that — on average — they don’t earn the same incomes. This isn’t a matter of discrimination, but of differences in education (discipline as well as level of attainment), occupation, experience, and hours worked. (See, for example, “No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men,” The Daily Beast, February 2, 2014.)

Tables 1, 2, 4, and 5 show something that should surprise no one: income rises with age (a proxy for experience) and level of education. This is a key fact that is never mentioned in the usual blather about income inequality. (There is, of course, a drop in real earnings among persons 65 and older, which reflects the fact that most persons in that age bracket have retired or shifted to part-time work.)

Tables 3 and 6 are especially interesting for what they reveal about changes in real income between 1992 and 2012 for cohorts at various levels of educational attainment. For example, the real earnings of men with a 9th grade education who were 18-24 years old in 1992 had risen by 94 percent 20 years later, when they were in the 35-44 age bracket.

Among the male cohorts under the age of 65 in 2012, only one (of 24) experienced a decline in real earnings. Male cohorts in the 35-54 age range show impressive rises in real income between 1992 and 2012. Among women, no cohort below age 65 experienced a drop in real income between 1992 and 2012; and most experienced a healthy increase.

Of course, some persons who worked full-time in 2012 earned less in that year than they did as full-time workers in 1992. But it’s evident that those 20 years were good for almost everyone. Otherwise, the numbers wouldn’t look as good as they do. In addition to the evidence of tables 3 and 6, consider this: average real earnings rose by 24 percent between 1992 and 2012. (So much for wage stagnation.)

Tables 3 and 6 indicate that persons high levels of educational attainment have done better than persons at the low end of the educational ladder. That’s simply a fact of economic life, not the result of a conspiracy. It reflects the ever-increasing demand for highly technical goods and services — from nanosurgery to Google glass. In 2012, there were 1.7 million, 8.3 million, and 17.1 million persons in the top 1-, 5-, and 10-percent income brackets. Such large numbers are hardly the stuff of conspiracies.

What about the distribution of incomes? (Note to the uninitiated: Incomes aren’t “distributed,” they’re earned. “Distribution,” in this context, is shorthand for frequency distribution, a statistical term. Unfortunately, too many people interpret “distribution” as a reference to a mysterious and conspiratorial doling out of a big pie in the sky.) Taking into account the number of persons represented in each age-education group, I constructed these distributions for 1992 and 2012:

Mean income by percentile, 2012 vs 1992

The two curves have almost the same Gini coefficient: 0.239 for 1992, 0.242 for 2012. That is to say, the distribution of average incomes (taking men and women together) wasn’t any less equal in 2012 than it was in 1992.

The details for 2012 are in the next table. (Professional degrees include MD, JD, DDS, DVM, and similarly occupation-specific advanced degrees; doctorates include PhD and EdD.) The mean is $46,615; the median, $42,250.

Mean income by percentile, sex, education, age - 2012

And don’t forget, these numbers include part-timers as well as full-timers; college students as well as high-school dropouts; and a large contingent of under-educated (and probably not very bright) oldsters. These numbers don’t include the many sources of income and income-in-kind represented in the “social safety net”: unemployment compensation, disability benefits, survivors’ benefits, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and on and on.

Note to Obama and friends: Go peddle your phony stories about income inequality where they’ll be appreciated — Tsarist Russia, for example.

* * *

Not-So-Random Thoughts (V)

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Loquitur Veritatem

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

Added 08/13/12: Patience as a Tool of Strategy

I wrote about this a while ago. My closing thoughts:

Patience is not a virtue that accrues to amorphous masses, like nations. It can be found only in individuals or groups of individuals who share the same objectives and are able to work together long enough to attain those objectives. Whether such individuals or groups lead nations — and lead them wisely — is another matter.

Imlac’s Journal has a relevant post, about Roman consul and general Fabius Maximus (280 – 203 B.C.),

exemplary in terms of his patience, endurance and self-sacrifice. He reminds one in many ways of George Washington. Both men lost battles, but in the long run their steady and sensible strategies won wars.

It is possible to be impatient in small things — to have a hair-trigger temper — and yet to be patient in the quest for a major goal. Impatience in small things may even serve the strategy of patience, if impatience (deployed sparingly and selectively) helps to maintain discipline among the ranks.

Added 08/13/12: Beauty-ism

I was amused to find that my post “How to Combat Beauty-ism” has been linked to in the opening paragraph of “Beauty and the Beast: The ‘Othering’ of Women by the Beauty Industry.” This post is on the website of something called The South African Civil Society Information Service: A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?

The author, one Gillian Schutte, who seems to be a regular contributor, is styled “an award winning independent filmmaker, writer and social justice activist.” Ms. Schutte (if “Ms.” is the proper appellation for a South African) appears to be a well-groomed, passably attractive (but not beautiful) person of middle age. She writes:

Beautyism is an assumption that physical appeal prevails [sic] knowledge, value, or anything personable [sic]. It is the inherent bias that bestows all sorts of unproved talents and privileges onto a person simply because she is beautiful.

And it could be, as Ms. Schutte’s writing demonstrates, that a lack of beauty is no guarantee of intelligence. In fact, it might be a source of bitterness, which surfaces as rage against the West and those who dare to be civilized and prosperous. Thus, according to Schutte, the beauty industry

along with the mainstream media, is premised on beautyism and has employed a very effective tool of “othering” those who do not fit into the idealised picture of what is pleasing to the male gaze….

“[O]thering” is a tactic that is used in the marginalisation of many groups of people by the moneyed mainstream. These include the LGBTI sector, the poor, Muslims, and Blacks – and they are marginalised so that those doing the marginalisation can use them as a means to an end. An example is the demonization of Islam in order to push the imperialist oil grabbing agenda of the West.

Wow! From beauty-ism (my preferred spelling) to oil-grabbing in a single post.

I have not seen any oil-grabbing recently, unless it is considered oil-grabbing when Westerners choose to buy the oil that Islamic nations deign to offer for sale. If Islam has been demonized, chalk it up to Islamic extremists, who — among many things — have committed acts of terror against innocents, have punished and murdered persons of the “LGBTI sector,” and are not known for their appreciation of the social value of women, except as bed-partners, bearers of children, and domestic slaves. Such is the selective outrage of the professional “social justice activist.” I could not have written a better parody of “social justice activism” than the one that Ms. Schutte has unwittingly produced.

Income Inequality — The Pseudo-Problem That Will Not Die

“The Mismeasure of Inequality” (Kip Hagopian and Lee Ohaian, Policy Review, August 1, 2012) is as thorough a primer on the pseudo-problem of inequality as anyone is likely to find, anywhere. The authors’ facts and logic will not convince hard-leftists who believe in income redistribution and are blind and deaf to its dire consequences for low-income persons. But reasonable people might be swayed.

Closely related are Deirdre McCloskey’s powerful defense of free markets: “Actual Free Market Fairness” (Bleeding Heart Libertarians, June 26 2012) and authoritative demolition of MIchael Sandel’s anti-market screed, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limit of Markets” (Prudentia, August 1, 2012).

Cass Sunstein

Ken Masugi’s “Missing the Significance of Cass Sunstein” (Library of Law and Liberty, August 7, 2012) is a just indictment of Sunstein’s anti-libertarian agenda. For example:

Sunstein has written among the most radical critiques of the American Constitution ever espoused. While not a Marxist revolutionary, his criticism is scarcely less transformative. His project of radicalizing the New Deal and the work of Progressives is captured in the subtitle to his book The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever. But the book that is even more explicit is After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State (1993).

Sunstein claims to present the regulatory measures of bureaucratic government “in a way that is fundamentally faithful” to the American Constitution. The book’s second sentence acknowledges that “Modern regulation has profoundly affected constitutional democracy, by renovating the original commitments to checks and balances, federalism, and individual rights.” That transformation of basic constitutional principles “culminated in the rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s”—meaning the Great Society and post-Watergate programs. Sunstein’s task is to reinterpret the regulatory regime “in a way that is fundamentally faithful to constitutional commitments and promotes, in a dramatically different environment, the central goals of the constitutional system—freedom and welfare.”

Sunstein weaves three “more particular goals” throughout the book: 1.) the practical one of combating the Reagan and Thatcher reforms, which were based on market principles and “private right,” 2.) defending the history of government regulation in America, and 3.) proposing “a theory of interpretation that courts (and administrative agencies) …. might invoke in order to improve the performance of modern government.” Sunstein emphasizes that he wishes to save the “basic commitments of the American constitutional system,” not the text of the Constitution or the structure it sets forth. Of course the “rights revolution” has transformed the meaning of those commitments, so we are left in a universe that is open to Sunstein’s creative interpretation. As Postell observes, “The final triumph of postmodernism is to avail itself of modern or pre-modern justifications whenever they come in handy, and disparage them when they don’t.”

This post-modern perspective is richly abundant throughout After the Rights Revolution. If you thought freedom of speech is a “basic commitment” of America, think again: The “fairness doctrine” and even more extreme measures are justified to protect citizens from injuries to their “character, beliefs, and even conduct.” (For Sunstein’s regulatory schemes for the internet, including schemes for requiring links and pop-ups to alternative points of view, see Edward Erler’s Claremont Review of Books essay, “Liberalchic.gov”) In a regime of equal opportunity, racial preferences remedy market failures that permit employment discrimination. Of course property rights yield to the common good, as determined by political arrangements on behalf of the general welfare. Thus, the Civil War was fought not to affirm the founding principle of self-government (not to mention the quaint notion that each man owns himself) but to herald the regulatory regime of the New Deal.

With “friends” like Sunstein, liberty and the Constitution need no enemies.

Free Will

This perennial subject of philosophical and psychological debate gets another going-over by Steven Landsburg, in “Free to Choose” (The Big Questions, July 18, 2012). Landsburg defends the idea of free will. I prefer my defense (from “Free Will: A Proof by Example?“):

Is there such a thing as free will, or is our every choice predetermined? Here’s a thought experiment:

Suppose I think that I might want to eat some ice cream. I go to the freezer compartment and pull out an unopened half-gallon of vanilla ice cream and an unopened half-gallon of chocolate ice cream. I can’t decide between vanilla, chocolate, some of each, or none. I ask a friend to decide for me by using his random-number generator, according to rules of his creation. He chooses the following rules:

If the random number begins in an odd digit and ends in an odd digit, I will eat vanilla.

If the random number begins in an even digit and ends in an even digit, I will eat chocolate.

If the random number begins in an odd digit and ends in an even digit, I will eat some of each flavor.

If the random number begins in an even digit and ends in an odd digit, I will not eat ice cream.

Suppose that the number generated by my friend begins in an even digit and ends in an even digit: the choice is chocolate. I act accordingly.

I didn’t inevitably choose chocolate because of events that led to the present state of my body’s chemistry, which might otherwise have dictated my choice. That is, I broke any link between my past and my choice about a future action.

I call that free will.

I suspect that our brains are constructed in such a way as to produce the same kind of result in many situations, though certainly not in all situations. That is, we have within us the equivalent of an impartial friend and an (informed) decision-making routine, which together enable us to exercise something we can call free will….

Even if our future behavior is tightly linked to our past and present states of being — and to events outside of us that have their roots in the past and present — those linkages are so complex that they are safely beyond our comprehension and control.

If nothing else, we know that purposive human behavior can make a difference in the course of human events. Given that, and given how little we know about the complexities of existence, we might as well have free will.

See also “Is Free Will an Illusion?” (a virtual colloquium at The Chronicle of Higher Education), “Brain might not stand in the way of free will” (New Scientist, August 9, 2012), and my post, “Free Will, Crime, and Punishment.”

Not-So-Random Thoughts (I)

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Loquitur Veritatem

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

Secession

Ilya Somin, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy, on secession:

The US Constitution, of course, is one of many where secession is neither explicitly banned or explicitly permitted. As a result, both critics and defenders of a constitutional right of secession have good arguments for their respective positions. Unlike the preceding Articles of Confederation, the Constitution does not include a Clause stating that the federal union is “perpetual.” While the Articles clearly banned secession, the Constitution is ambiguous on the subject.

Even if state secession is constitutionally permissible, the Confederate secession of 1861 was deeply reprehensible because it was undertaken for the profoundly evil purpose of perpetuating and extending slavery. But not all secession movements have such motives. Some are undertaken for good or at least defensible reasons. In any event, there is nothing inherently contradictory about the idea of a legal secession.

Of course, whether or not a secession is legal, it may be morally justified. Conversely, a legal secession may be morally unjustified, as was the case with the Southern secession. But the history of the Southern secession does not taint the legal and moral grounds for secession. As I say here,

The constitutional contract is a limited grant of power to the central government, for the following main purposes: keeping peace among the States, ensuring uniformity in the rules of inter-State and international commerce, facing the world with a single foreign policy and a national armed force, and assuring the even-handed application of the Constitution and of constitutional laws. That is all.

It is clear that the constitutional contract has been breached. It is clear that the Constitution’s promise to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” has been blighted.

Desperate times require desperate measures. I suggest that we begin at the beginning, with a new Declaration of Independence, and proceed from there to a new Constitution.

Obamacare

In a post at The American, John F. Gaski writes:

On the central issue of ObamaCare’s notorious mandate—i.e., whether it is constitutional for the federal government to compel a consumer purchase—everything hinges on the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause. That element of the Constitution gives the federal government authority to regulate interstate commerce or activities affecting it. So far, so reasonable.

But the crux of the issue is whether forcing Americans to buy healthcare is regulation of commerce in the first place. Opponents note that non-purchase of healthcare should not be considered commerce or commerce-related activity. ObamaCare apologists, including some federal judges, make the remarkable claim that a decision not to purchase qualifies as interstate commerce or activity affecting interstate commerce, the same as a decision to purchase or a purchase itself. But even the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, in its 2009 assessment of likely PPACA constitutionality, acknowledged that Commerce Clause-based federal regulatory authority targets genuine activities that affect interstate commerce, not inactivity.

How to resolve this disagreement? The answer is staring us in the face, but has remained obscure to some lawyers and jurists who cannot quite see the forest for the trees. All you really need to know is what the word “commerce” means. To wit, commerce is “exchange of goods, products, or property . . . ; extended trade” (Britannica World Language Dictionary, 1959); “the buying and selling of goods . . .; trade” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1964); “the buying and selling of commodities; trade” (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1974); “interchange of goods or commodities, especially on a large scale . . . ; trade; business” (Dictionary.com, 2012). Uniformly, we see, the definition of commerce involves activity, not just a decision to act, and certainly not a decision to not act. The meaning of the concept of commerce presumes action, and always has. Moreover, even casual philology will confirm that the accepted meaning of “commerce” at the time of the Constitution’s drafting referenced activity, not inactivity, at least as much then as it does now (see C. H. Johnson, William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, October 2004). In the same way, the Commerce Clause has long been construed to apply to action in or affecting commerce, from the 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden Supreme Court case onward.

I am in complete agreement:

[T]he real issue … comes down to this: Does Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce extend to “health care” generally, just because some aspects of it involve interstate commerce? In particular, can Congress constitutionally impose the individual mandate under the rubric of the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause?…

It is safe to say that a proper reading of the Constitution, as exemplified in the authoritative opinions excerpted above, yields no authority for Obamacare. That monstrosity — the official, Orwellian title of which is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) — attempts to reach an aggregation known as “health care,” without any differentiation between interstate commerce, intrastate commerce, and activities that are part of neither, namely, the choices of individuals with respect to health insurance.

It may be a valid exercise of Congress’s power to regulate actual interstate commerce that touches on the provision of health care. It is not a valid exercise to aggregate everything called “health care” and to regulate it as if it were all within the reach of Congress. When that happens, there is no room left — in “health care” nor, by extension, any other loose aggregation of activities — for State action or individual choice.

In sum, Obamacare is neither a valid regulation of interstate commerce nor necessary and proper to a valid regulation of interstate commerce. It is a governmental seizure of 1/9th of the economy. The individual mandate — which is a central feature of that seizure — is nothing more than coercion. It is no less peremptory than the military draft.

Freedom of Conscience

Yes, Virginia, there is freedom of conscience in Virginia:

A bill that ensures that faith-based adoption agencies in the state of Virginia won’t be forced to place children in households led by same-sex couples has passed both houses of the General Assembly and is heading to the desk of Gov. Robert McDonnell, a supporter of the legislation, who is expected to sign it soon.

Gov. McDonnell and the majorities in the Virginia legislature are standing up for freedom of conscience, which is among the negative rights that is trampled by grants of “positive rights” (i.e., privileges). These

are the products of presumption — judgments about who is “needy” and “deserving” — and they are bestowed on some by coercing others. These coercions extend not only to the seizure of income and wealth but also to denials of employment (e.g., affirmative action), free speech (e.g., campaign-finance “reform”), freedom of contract (e.g., mandatory recognition of unions), freedom of association (e.g., forced admission of certain groups to private organizations), freedom of conscience (e.g., forced participation in abortions), and on and on.

Income Inequality

Thomas A. Garrett, a sensible economist, says good things about income inequality:

The apparent increase in U.S. income inequality has not escaped the attention of policymakers and social activists who support public policies aimed at reducing income inequality. However, the common measures of income inequality that are derived from the census statistics exaggerate the degree of income inequality in the United States for several reasons. Furthermore, although income inequality is seen as a social ill by many people, it is important to understand that income inequality has many economic benefits and is the result of, and not a detriment to, a well-functioning economy….

…[O]ver time, a significant number of households move to higher positions along the income distribution and a significant number move to lower positions along the income distribution. Common reference to “classes” of people (e.g., the lowest 20 percent, the richest 10 percent) is very misleading because income classes do not contain the same households and people over time….

The unconstrained opportunity for individuals to create value for society, which is reflected by their income, encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. Economic research has documented a positive correlation between entrepreneurship/innovation and overall economic growth.9 A wary eye should be cast on policies that aim to shrink the income distribution by redistributing income from the more productive to the less productive simply for the sake of “fairness.” 10 Redistribution of wealth would increase the costs of entrepreneurship and innovation, with the result being lower overall economic growth for everyone.

I am losing track of the posts in which I have made the same points. See this one and this one, and the posts linked in each of them.

The Left-Libertarian (“Liberal”) Personality vs. Morality

Will Wilkinson, a left-libertarian (i.e., modern “liberal”) if ever there was one, writes about his score on the Big-Five Personality Test:

I score very high in “openness to experience” and worryingly low in “conscientiousness”.

A true libertarian (i.e., a Burkean) would score high on “openness to experience” and high on “conscientiousness” — as I do.

As I have said, differences

between various libertarian camps and between libertarians, Burkean conservatives, yahoo conservatives, “liberals,” and so on — are due as much to differences of temperament as they are to differences in knowledge and intelligence.

But temperament is a reason for political error, not an excuse for it:

[T]he desirability or undesirability of state action has nothing to do with the views of “liberals,” “libertarians,” or any set of pundits, “intellectuals,” “activists,” and seekers of “social justice.” As such, they have no moral standing, which one acquires only by being — and acting as — a member of a cohesive social group with a socially evolved moral code that reflects the lessons of long coexistence. The influence of “intellectuals,” etc., derives not from the quality of their thought or their moral standing but from the influence of their ideas on powerful operatives of the state.

Joe Stiglitz, Ig-Nobelist

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

This reminds me of these:

Joe Stiglitz, Ig-Nobelist

Taxing the Rich

More about Taxing the Rich

Social Justice

More Social Justice

More about Taxing the Rich

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

This is a sequel to “Taxing the Rich,” which reproduces my correspondence with a correspondent who laments the unequal “distribution” of income and wealth. This installment is heavily edited, for the sake of brevity. And, for the sake of clarity, I have reorganized our exchange so that each of his points (in italics) is followed immediately by my response (in bold type).

My correspondent opens by referring to a link that I sent him about the distribution of wealth in the United States:

Granted 25% owning 87% is a lot better than 2% owning 90% like in S. America, but satisfactory? Warren Buffett doesn’t think so. Nor George Soros. Nor do I. So certainly not revolution, but reformation seems in order.

It may be that George Soros and Warren Buffet don’t like the way things are, but their own wealth merely proves that they’re good at making money, not at setting economic policy for the country. Experts who venture outside their own fields of expertise remind me of the doctors who used to endorse Camel cigarettes.

I’m not sure why it’s “bad” that one-fourth of the people in this country own a relatively large fraction of the wealth in this country. The composition of the one-fourth has changed greatly over time, and will continue to change greatly. There’s no entrenched aristocracy that somehow controls the country or determines who gets how much income, except to the extent that money buys a certain amount of political influence. But you will have noticed that the left has been far more influential than the right for a long time, and that a lot of the very rich (perhaps most of them) tend to favor government welfare programs, highly progressive taxes, and other things associated with your party.

In any event, big fortunes are (usually) made by people who did something for their money — invented computer software, picked good businesses in which to invest — and so on. They don’t steal their money from anyone. (The same is true of John D. Rockefeller and the other so-called robber barons of the late 1800s and early 1900s, popular mythology to the contrary.) What they really do is make a lot of money from their investments while — and this is important — also creating better jobs and higher incomes for a lot of Americans. It’s a win-win thing. And it’s been going on for more than 200 years.

So, I can’t understand why it’s thought of as “bad” that some people earn large fortunes in the process of contributing to the growth of the country’s economy. The “concentration” of wealth in a fraction of the populace is just something that happens — it’s not part of a plot. And it means that the wealthy are doing something good, for their own benefit and the benefit of a lot of other people, not that they’ve stolen from others or are somehow oppressing them.

I do understand why this theme is popular now, in a time of economic stress and concerted efforts to reduce the size of government. But, as I’ve said before, I don’t think those efforts can be pinned on “the rich,” though some of them are sympathetic and supportive — just as some of them, like Soros, are unsympathetic and opposed. There are millions of taxpayers who are also feeling the pinch, and they are fed up with the inexorable rise of government spending. The push to cut the size and cost of government is about as “grass roots” as anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.

I do think experts can develop more than one field, especially when they can afford to, and weren’t the doctors endorsing camels paid to do so? Probably not your best example.

And it may not be so bad that 25% own 87%, may be the inevitable Darwinian sort out as you suggest, and it’s not ownership I find so objectionable if I felt they paid their fair share.

I agree that it’s possible for someone to be expert in more than one field, but I haven’t yet read any utterances by Buffet or Soros on economic policy that go beyond pushing their political views. Perhaps I’m not paying enough attention to them, but I doubt that they have anything to offer that I don’t get from reading a variety of “real” economists. It’s probably true that the doctors were paid for endorsing Camels, but the analogy holds true: doctors aren’t necessarily experts in all aspects of medicine. I wouldn’t ask a thoracic surgeon for advice about how to deal with allergies, for example. But that’s beside the main point, which is the question of economic policy and whether there’s something “wrong” with a skewed distribution of income and wealth, and whether high-income people are paying a “fair share” of taxes” (given that they’re already paying the lion’s share). Bear with me to the end, because you’ll find out that my objective is to defend all taxpayers, and to promote growth that benefits all Americans. My defense of high rollers is merely incidental.

My thoughts about “fair share” and “Darwinism” are given below.

Is it not true that real wages/earnings of middle class or those less than or = $250,000/yr have shrunk or remained stagnant over last 30 years while income of top 2-3% (say, over $1,000,000/yr?) has grown exponentially? I’ve certainly seen studies re CEO pay.

The income of households in all quintiles of the income distribution has been rising, with some bumps along the way. This graph covers 1967-2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1967-2003.svg. There’s been no significant change since 2003, as indicated by this Excel spreadsheet from the Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0689.xls.
Also, it’s important to keep in mind that people aren’t “stuck” in a particular quintile; there’s a general tendency to move up as one ages, and then to drop down a bit after retiring. For more, see this: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/02/rich-getting-richer-and-poor-are.html.

My thoughts about CEO compensation are given below.

Isn’t the Tea Party focus on cutting government budgets just months after another unneeded/unwarranted huge tax break for the wealthiest a bit disingenuous? There will always be tug between those of us who think wealthy should pay more because they can afford to as either a Judeo/Christian responsibility or just self protection from violence, but…

Although there’s nothing new about organized efforts to cut government spending (it was a main theme of the GOP from the 1920s to the early 1950s), the current Tea Party movement began in February 2009. It had been gaining ground as an anti-spending movement well before the extension of the Bush tax cuts late in 2010.

Anyway, I don’t think of the two things — spending cuts and tax cuts — as contradictory. They are really complementary. If you see them as contradictory because tax cuts can exacerbate deficits, that may be because you don’t want to see the spending cuts. (I don’t know that for sure, it’s just a guess.) I, on the other hand, see tax cuts as putting more pressure on the folks in Washington to make some spending cuts. The serious problem with the looming deficits isn’t so much the mounting pile of government debt and high interest payments (though those are problems). The serious problem is that government spending absorbs resources that could be put to work building the economy through the operation of the market mechanism — which is how this country’s economic progress has been achieved. (Economic “Darwinism” is a matter of offering things that people value in their daily lives and business operations. If you’re good at it, you’ll prosper; if you’re not, you won’t. I can’t think of a fairer system; any alternative rewards people for doing the wrong things or doing them badly. In that respect, corporate welfare is no better than the other kind.)

As you know from our earlier exchange, high-income people already are paying the lion’s share of taxes in this country. (And, surprisingly, more than their peers in the other industrialized nations: http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/27134.html.) I don’t think it has much (or anything) to do with Judeo-Christian ethics or protecting themselves from violence. It’s the law, and governments have a lot of power when it comes to enforcing the law. Some would gladly pay more, which they can do by sending a donation to the U.S. Treasury. But it isn’t their place to speak for all high-income people, which is gross presumption. A mega-millionaire or billionaire who invests his money in new technologies is doing more for working people than a billionaire who sends the same amount of money to D.C.

The U.S. was prosperous resulting in surplus under Clinton, so we couldn’t go back to the higher tax rates of the Clinton years?

The prosperity under Clinton was a continuation of the growth that began with Reagan’s tax cuts and the success of the Fed’s anti-inflationary efforts in the early 1980s. There was a minor recession in 1990-91, but growth had resumed before Clinton took office. The surpluses that he eventually realized had a lot to do with the fact the his spending proclivities were reined in by the GOP-controlled Congress. So, no, I don’t see any magic in the higher tax rates of the Clinton years. The real magic is a combination of reduced government spending and more incentives for people to do things that create wealth for themselves and jobs and higher incomes for others — that is, lower tax rates across the board.

I know that you’d call this “trickle down economics,” but it’s not really. I’m not just trying to defend high-income earners from ill-advised taxation, I’m trying to defend everyone from it. Economic growth requires not only big investments by high rollers but also small investments by “little people.” Why? Because (a) most new jobs are created in smaller businesses (http://www.sba.gov/advocacy/847; http://www.sba.gov/advocacy/7495/8424), and (b) from acorns do mighty oaks grow (think Ford, Microsoft, and the like). And growth benefits working people generally, and everyone who has a spare dollar to invest in a mutual fund (stocks for the risk-takers, bonds for the risk-averse).

Mega millionaires & billionaires continue to make off with a disproportionate share have pitted us against each other.

I’m not sure what you mean when you refer to “disproportionate share.” Let’s take highly paid athletes. The top-100 single-season salaries in baseball (through 2010) range from A-Rod’s $33 million in 2009 to Richie Sexson’s $16 million in 2008. The average major-league player’s salary in 2010 was $3.3 million (http://baseball.about.com/od/newsrumors/a/2010baseballteampayrolls.htm). Are those multi-millionaires making off with a “disproportionate share,” relative to (say) a member of the grounds crew? Or are they simply being paid a requisite amount for their expected contributions to their teams’ bottom lines?

Is the case of CEOs vs. floor sweepers any different? If so, why? In any event, high CEO compensation is mainly a symbolic thing that’s a handy target for griping. Top CEOs don’t make any more than baseball players (http://www.theglobeopinion.com/section/business/executive-compensation), and they’re on the line for the performance of companies that are vastly larger than baseball clubs.

Taxing the Rich

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

UPDATED 03/20/11

The quotation below is the text of a private message I sent to a friend who laments the unequal “distribution” of income and wealth. (I use sneer quotes around “distribution” because the use of the word suggests that there is a pie to be divided; a fallacy that I address later.) The friend likens the United States to corrupt Latin American regimes of yore, where wealth and political power were concentrated in the hands of land owners. He then attributes this mythical situation to Reagan’s “trickle down economics.” Emotion trumps facts, as usual on the left.

I’m sending this for your private consideration, in view of your latest post. I’m not sure what prompted that post, or what it’s based on, but there are a lot of misconceptions about income distribution and tax burdens in the United States. First, income rises across the board; it isn’t just “the rich” who get richer (http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/02/rich-getting-richer-and-poor-are.html).Second, unlike Latin America, there is a lot of mobility across income groups; “the rich” are not the same set of people from year to year and decade to decade (http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/11/despite-mythology-income-mobility-is.html). Third, most of “the rich” in the U.S. got that way by earning their incomes (http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/04/inheritance-is-not-main-driver-of.html), unlike Latin American aristocrats. Fourth, “the rich” already pay the lion’s share of income taxes (http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html#Data).

Although most people in the United States deserve what they earn, because they’re not stealing it from other people, I agree that there are a lot of high rollers who earn more than they would if they weren’t granted special privileges by government. The giveaways to the financial industry are a notorious example. But bankers are only the tip of the iceberg, which extends down through many income levels. Not far from the top are members of Congress, who have one of the best self-created pension rackets going. (A cushy, guaranteed, taxpayer-funded pension amounts to a substantial, untaxed bonus.) Further down the ladder, but still worthy of note, are government employees — whether unionized or not — whose low quit-rates attest to the fact that their compensation (which usually includes generous pension benefits) is above what they could earn in the private sector. It is only in the past few years that public-sector employees have begun the feel the effects of tight budgets. Which is to say that they’ve had a free ride for a long time, at taxpayers’ expense.

Bottom line: A high income isn’t necessarily a sign of political corruption or special privileges. Nor is it clear that high-income earners are paying less than their “share.” A good case can be made that they’re paying too much, because it’s high-income earners whose investments fund growth-producing, job-creating technology and business start-ups. What bothers me is people — at all income levels — who are given special privileges by government, which the rest of us pay for in taxes and higher prices for certain goods and services.

UPDATE:

My friend replies:

Thanks for offering your views, but I can’t see how 2% essentially owning 90% is good for the country, nor do I think it will stand.

My response:

I don’t know what you mean by 2% “owning 90%” of the country. It’s true that wealth is concentrated, but that has been true since the birth of the Republic, and it’s to be expected because wealth is strongly (but not perfectly) correlated with income. And except where government grants the kinds of privileges I mentioned earlier, one’s income depends on talent and effort. Further, as I pointed out earlier, income disparities aren’t permanent; there’s plenty of mobility in the U.S., up and down the ladder.

The U.S. isn’t a feudal aristocracy, ripe for revolution because of actual oppression. Some people make it, and some don’t; those who make it (excepting the beneficiaries of government privileges) are able to do so because, in this country, they’re free to reap the fruits of their effort and ability.

Moreover, there’s no fixed “pie” of wealth that’s jealously guarded by a ruling clique. There’s a (usually) growing pie, to which each able person adds as he or she is willing and able. And it belongs to those who produce it — not to “the country.”

If you’re interested in actual facts (as opposed to myths and slogans), you should read the links I sent previously (if you haven’t already) and also this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States.

Social Justice

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

Despite a recent outburst, the proximate cause of this post is a column of Nicholas Kristof’s (“Equality, a True Soul Food“, The New York Times, January 1, 2011), in which Kristof pleads for less income inequality in the United States. His plea is based, in part, on the premise that persons of low status suffer because they envy persons of higher status (an assertion that’s based on research about monkeys). Don Boudreaux, Tom Maguire, and Max Borders have weighed in with insightful reactions. Will Wilkinson addressed the status-envy issue in 2006 (here and here), and has addressed it more recently (e.g., see this and follow the links therein). The Heritage Foundation offers a useful (if somewhat out-of-date) statistical analysis of income distribution (misleading word) in the U.S. I have written on the subject so many times that I can only refer you to lists of posts (here, here, here, here, and here) that include many relevant ones.

There is no theoretical or factual argument for income redistribution that cannot be met by a superior theoretical or factual argument against it. In the end, the case for (somehow) reducing income inequality turns on an emotional appeal for “social justice,” that is, for reshaping the world in a way that pleases the pleader. As if the pleader — in his or her pure, misguided arrogance — has superior wisdom about how the world should be shaped.

In fact, “social justice” usually (but not always) is code for redistributing income, either directly (through the taxing and spending power of government) or indirectly (through the power of government to require favoritism toward certain groups of persons). Make no mistake, there is no justice in “social justice,” which is nothing more than a euphemism for coercion by the state.

Social justice is possible only where there is a true society, not the bogus “society” or “community” to which bleeding hearts and statists refer when they mean the United States or most of its political subdivisions — which have become nothing more than geopolitical prisons.

A true society or community is one in which persons are bound by more than merely residing in the same nation, state, city, or other geographic entity. A true society is one whose members voluntarily commit acts of kindness and charity toward one another, as part of the social “bargain” that is known as the Golden Rule.

That “bargain” amounts to a delicate balance of self-interested and voluntarily beneficial behavior. The self-interested aspect of behavior is mutual forbearance — leaving others alone so that they will leave you alone. The voluntarily beneficial aspect is the commission of acts of kindness and charity. It is the latter that enables the former, because acts of kindness and charity help to build a true feeling of community by creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust.

Purveyors of “social justice” say that the voluntary arrangements of true communities are inadequate for the purpose of meeting this or that desideratum. Whence the desiderata? From the preconceptions of the purveyors of “social justice,” of course. They would substitute their “wisdom” for the wisdom that it embedded in voluntary social and economic arrangements. And they usually succeed because their arrogance incorporates a good measure of power-lust.

In sum, true social justice is possible only in a voluntary community that is founded on mutual forbearance, respect, and trust. It cannot be found in the kind of forcible leveling that is favored by advocates of “social justice.” There is nothing just about coercion.

Fascism with a “Friendly” Face

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Loquitur Veritatem

This is the core meaning of fascism:

Fascism is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation. In effect, fascism is simply a more subtle form of government ownership than is socialism.

A fascistic government — even a totalitarian one — will try to secure broad political support for itself. Scapegoating is a common technique for developing political support. Scapegoating, when successful, fosters the belief that the country’s economic and/or social problems — the ones that the fascistic regime promises to cure — are due to the actions of particular, identifiable groups of citizens. Another common technique is the suppression of dissent, which stifles critical commentary while imparting to the timid masses a lesson in the value of submissiveness to the regime.

Successful scapegoating serves two purposes. First, it turns public scrutiny away from the regime’s mistakes and misdeeds and toward the supposed misdeeds of the scapegoated groups. Second, scapegoating helps to build public support for the regime by identifying it as a force for good, as opposed to the scapegoated groups, which are painted as sources of evil.

Fascism, despite its prevailing image in the popular mind, need not come about through the efforts of black- or brown-shirted thugs. If you will re-read the opening definition of fascism, it should remind you of the present state of affairs in the United States, given that the federal government has assumed de facto control of two leading industries — financial services and automobile manufacturing — the first of which is central to the operations of America’s businesses.*

How did the United States get to this point? Through the “democratic” process, that’s how — without a shot, without a coup, without a foaming-at-the-mouth dictator. The citizens of the United States — enough of them, anyway — have, over the past eight decades, elected the members of Congress and the presidents (and, indirectly, their judicial appointees) who have brought us to our present state. The grinning FDR was a fascist; the smiling Obama is acting like one (see first footnote). Thus “Fascism with a ‘Friendly’ Face” (alternative title: “Bread and Circuses Redux“).

I now turn to the unfriendly face of fascism, that is, to scapegoating and the suppression of dissent. There was scapegoating a-plenty under FDR, as exemplified by his attacks on “economic royalists.” According to FDR, among many other rabble-rousers of the time, “the rich” were to blame for the Depression and were standing in the way of recovery. That FDR’s demonization of “the rich” and his schemes for centralizing power in Washington were the real obstacles to recovery is a fact that eluded his second-rate mind and which still eludes most Americans (even a Nobel laureate). (For much more, you should buy and read FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, which I own and have read critically. It’s repetitive and a somewhat dumbed-down, but generally on the mark.)

We are seeing, under Obama, a renewal of scapegoating. It is evident in his plans to soak “the rich,” which would (among other things) lead to income redistribution. As if the the recession could be cured by raising taxes on the very group that is most responsible for economic growth. As if very high incomes were the result of some kind of conspiracy and not symptomatic of a dynamic, growing economy. (For more about income inequality, see this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.) Scapegoating also is evident in Obama’s attack on hedge-fund managers who refused (how dare they!) to roll over and allow the holders of Chrysler bonds to suffer for the benefit of the UAW, to which Chrysler owes its (hoped for) demise. (One hedge-fund manager’s brisk and appropriate response to Obama’s attack is here.)

Then there is Obama’s decision to join the Left’s campaign to pin the “torturer” label on the Bush administration, thereby legitimating that campaign. We might yet witness the unprecedented spectacle of an incoming U.S. administration trying members of the previous administration for what amount to political “crimes” against Leftist sensibilities.

Obama’s ascendancy, though achieved by a fairly narrow popular-vote margin, has emboldened the Left (in and out of government) in other efforts to scapegoat conservatives and suppress conservative views; viz.:

this report from the Department of Homeland Security (especially the footnote on page 2) and related commentary (e.g., here, here, here, and here), all reminiscent of 1964, when Barry Goldwater was vilified (successfully) as an extremist because he stood against the concentration of power in Washington;

denunciations of the “tea party” movement (e.g. here and here);

efforts by universities and public officials to suppress dissent (e.g., here, here, here, and here), most notably Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s proposal to give the president authority to shut down the internet; and

a bill in the House of Representatives that would make it a federal felony to use blogs, the web, etc., to cause substantial emotional stress through “sever, repeated, and hostile” speech.

Regarding the suppression of dissent, it is noteworthy that Obama’s has tagged Cass Sunstein (a Chicago crony) to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House. (See this article for more about the likely direction of OIRA under Sunstein.) My biggest concern about Sunstein, who figures to be a strong influence on Obama, is his embrace of the oxymoronical thing known as “libertarian paternalism.” (For an exposition of its flaws, see this post and its predecessors, linked therein.)

“Libertarian paternalism” is nothing more than a dressed-up version of paternalism, in which the government is used to “nudge” people toward making the kinds of decisions that Sunstein and his ilk would make. That is to say, Sunstein (like too many other bright individuals) likes to believe that he knows what’s best for others. (That conceit is demolished in the posts mentioned at the end of the preceding paragraph and in these posts by an avowed utilitarian.)

“Libertarian paternalism” may seem innocuous, but there’s more to it than a bit of “nudging” (hah!) by the one-ton gorilla in the room (i.e., the federal government). Perhaps the most frightening item on Sunstein’s paternalistic agenda ties into Sen. Rockefeller’s proposal to give the president the power to shut down the internet — which amounts to the power to control the content of the internet. And make no mistake about it, Sunstein would like to control the content of the internet — for our own good, of course. I refer specifically to Sunstein’s “The Future of Free Speech,” in which he advances several policy proposals, including these:

4. . . . [T]he government might impose “must carry” rules on the most popular Websites, designed to ensure more exposure to substantive questions. Under such a program, viewers of especially popular sites would see an icon for sites that deal with substantive issues in a serious way. They would not be required to click on them. But it is reasonable to expect that many viewers would do so, if only to satisfy their curiosity. The result would be to create a kind of Internet sidewalk, promoting some of the purposes of the public forum doctrine. Ideally, those who create Websites might move in this direction on their own. If they do not, government should explore possibilities of imposing requirements of this kind, making sure that no program draws invidious lines in selecting the sites whose icons will be favoured. Perhaps a lottery system of some kind could be used to reduce this risk.

5. The government might impose “must carry” rules on highly partisan Websites, designed to ensure that viewers learn about sites containing opposing views. This policy would be designed to make it less likely for people to simply hear echoes of their own voices. Of course, many people would not click on the icons of sites whose views seem objectionable; but some people would, and in that sense the system would not operate so differently from general interest intermediaries and public forums. Here too the ideal situation would be voluntary action. But if this proves impossible, it is worth considering regulatory alternatives. [Emphasis added.]

A Left-libertarian defends Sunstein’s foray into thought control, concluding that

Sunstein once thought some profoundly dumb policies might be worth considering, but realized years ago he was wrong about that… The idea was a tentative, speculative suggestion he now condemns in pretty strong terms.

Alternatively, in the face of severe criticism of his immodest proposal, Sunstein merely went underground, to await an opportunity to revive his proposal. I somehow doubt that Sunstein, as a confirmed paternalist, truly abandoned it. The proposal certainly was not off-the-cuff, running to 11 longish web pages. Now, judging by the bulleted list above, the time is right for a revival of Sunstein’s proposal. And there he is, heading the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The powers of that office supposedly are constrained by the executive order that established it. But it is evident that the Obama adminstration isn’t bothered by legal niceties when it comes to the exercise of power. Only a few pen strokes stand between Obama and a new, sweeping executive order, the unconstitutionality of which would be of no import to our latter-day FDR.

Where will it all end? As I argue here, the United States already has descended into statism. The further descent into ingrained fascism is but a fine-tuning exercise for the vast, Left-wing alliance, which consists of public-school “educators,” liberal-arts academics, and their sycophantic students; Hollywood and New York celebrities and their hangers-on; “artists” and “intellectual workers” of most stripes; well-educated, upper-income, professionals who live in and around major metropolitan areas; and hordes of politicians (local, State, and national), who foster and benefit from the prejudices of the alliance. This broad alliance patronizes idealistic twenty-somethings, blacks, Latins, and labor-union members — the four groups from which its favored political candidates draw decisive support at the polls.

The Leftist alliance scorns America and its traditional (but largely abandoned) values of personal responsibility and respect for the persons and property of others. The alliance exalts, instead, the politics of entitlement and envy, of class, ethnic, racial, and gender conflict. As a result, the alliance has succeeded in demolishing the long-standing consensus that the main constitutional functions of the federal government are “to establish Justice, provide for the common defence,” and ensure the free movement of goods and persons among the States.**

Where will it all end? Unless we are roused from our Leftist idyll by some-one or some-thing, it will end in an Orwellian nightmare. The state will control our lives, in minute detail, from conception (and the prevention thereof) to death (and the means thereof).
__________
* For some views about our descent into fascism (even where it isn’t called that), see these posts of mine:
Things to Come
Reclaiming Liberty Throughout the Land
Are We All Fascists Now?

** The preamble to the Constitution also mentions “insur[ing] domestic Tranquillity,” “provid[ing] for the general Welfare,” and “secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” These injunctions — aside from a few specific, textual grants of power for dealing with insurrections — merely reflect the Framers’ hopes for the nation’s future under the auspices of the new Constitution.

Politics and Prosperity

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Tag Archives: income inequality

“Capitalism” Is a Dirty Word

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIV)

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIII)

Nature, Nurture, and Inequality

A Case for Redistribution, Not Made

Income Inequality and Economic Growth

Income Inequality and Inherited Wealth: So What?

Mass (Economic) Hysteria: Income Inequality and Related Themes

Some Inconvenient Facts about Income Inequality

Not-So-Random Thoughts (V)

Not-So-Random Thoughts (I)

Joe Stiglitz, Ig-Nobelist

More about Taxing the Rich

Taxing the Rich

Fascism with a “Friendly” Face

CONTENTS

The Transgender Trap: A Political Nightmare Becomes Reality

Spygate (a.k.a. Russiagate) Revisited

More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

Thoughts on Mortality

Assortative Mating, Income Inequality, and the Crocodile Tears of “Progressives”

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