Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

I was thrilled to read that Glen Whitman has been granted tenure. And no wonder: his notable publications have included “The Political Economy of Non-Coercive Vampire Lifestyles” (sadly not available online), “A Search Theory of Suicide”, and Against the New Paternalism: Internalities and the Economics of Self-Control, in which he considers the public policy implications of the “internalities” you impose on your future self when you eat a twinkie. Oh, and he wrote some more serious stuff too.

Seriously, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy, and I hope he has a long and happy life in academia. Perhaps, with his job security assured, he’ll be able to devote more time to his real passion, blogging!

If you haven’t seen it yet, whitehouse.org is good for a few laughs. There’s are dozens of “Ask the White House” features, including this one of “The Average Iraqi”:

Jake Wycliffe, from Niagara Falls, NY writes:
Hello, sir. When you’re taking a breather from jubilantly showering your liberators with flowers and candy, do you ever wonder what the monument to G.W. Bush you’re going to build is going to look like?

The Average Iraqi:
To be honest with you, Jake Wycliffe, few among our people have yet had time to think of this, as even today, though flowers and candy are in short supply, we remain consumed with the overwhelming drive to revere our heavily-armed liberators – often by forming impromptu naked human pyramids for their amusement and satisfaction. As for our future monument to your glorious president, we shall employ the principles of FREEDOM® to democratically select a final design – to be constructed following the awarding of a nine-figure no-bid contact to the Kellogg, Brown, & Root subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation.

And the site also has a “Media Action Center” with sample letters to the media like this one:

Dear DemocRATic Puppet of the LIEberal Media – President Bush has asked me to write you today and tell you how SICK AND TIRED we NON-HOMOSEXUALIST AMERICANS are getting of your negative reporting about Iraq. By daring to rub impressionable independent voters’ faces in full-color photographs of dead American GI’s and the frenzied anarchy of chanting, rocket-launching raghead hordes who detest us, you are HELPING THE TERRORISTS ELECT HILLARY! I believe President Bush when he says that right now we all need to be BLINDLY SUPPORTIVE of him, no matter how many expendable enlisted grunts and worthless Arabiac children he orders killed for whatever made-up reasons that may pop into his Jesus-anointed mind. Boy, you elites sure are STUPID for being intellecturals! If you don’t like it here in America, why don’t you pack up your lederhosen, your sissy little French poodle and hop an Air Commie red-eye to North Korea! Otherwise, why don’t you try dispensing FAIR AND BALANCED information about Iraq and leave all those Right-of-Center, Center and Left points of view to Al Jazeera? President Bush and I recommend you start your research here: http://www.whitehouse.org/iraq/index.asp. Goodbye!

Finally, don’t miss Sex is for Fags and Iron Hymen, the White House’s abstinence education campaign for boys and girls, respectively.

“California Town the Latest to Snub Wal-Mart”:

The city council of the mixed-race bedroom community of 23,000 east of San Francisco voted this week to invoke eminent domain to block Wal-Mart Stores Inc. from building a 99,000 square foot (9,200 sq meter) store near the town’s waterfront…

“To use eminent domain is such an abuse of the process [emphasis added],” said Rex Hime, president of the California Business Properties Association, which represents large retailers.

“We’ve seen cities come up with land restrictions, we’ve seen cities come up with environmental restrictions, we’ve seen cities do any number of things … but never going so far as to using eminent domain,” Hime said. “This is the beginning of a very slippery slope…”

For the record, I too am a defender of stuff that is funny. And few things are as funny as Brooke. Click the link to read about her escapade with Oliver North. (She has photographic evidence!)

Virginia Postrel’s website was the first blog I ever followed regularly, way back in 2001. So I’m especially pleased to read about her successful surgery to donate a kidney to a friend of hers, AEI’s Sally Satel.

Here’s Satel’s account of the experience in the Weekly Standard. She points out that the people who run UNOS, the national organ-donation network, actively discourage people from donating organs earmarked for a specific patient. This, you see, wouldn’t be fair to other patients on the list. Never mind that the donor probably wouldn’t have donated at all if he hadn’t been touched by that patient’s appeal. And never mind that it removes the patient from the waiting list, allowing everyone below her to move up the list.

We have a deeply dysfunctional organ donation system. It’s run by self-appointed “bioethicists” who seem less concerned with the fact that thousands of people every year are dying on waiting lists than they are about the fact that some people might get an organ before it’s “their turn.” It’s arbitrary, it’s stupid, and–most importantly–it’s deadly.

There’s absolutely no reason this should be a partisan or ideological issue, but so far, this has been an issue that libertarians get worked up about, while everyone else has pretty much ignored it. I’m pleased to see that lefty blogger extraordinaire Ezra Klein gets it. I hope some of his friends on the left notice.

I emailed Ezra to encourage him to check out LifeSharers. You should too. My girlfriend and I both joined last year. If we should ever be in need of organs, membership just might save our lives. More importantly, by expanding the size of the LifeSharers community, we’re increasing the incentive for others to become organ donors too.

So, I’m belatedly reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You. For those who haven’t read or heard of this book, the basic premise is that modern media (video games, tv, etc.) are, contrary to popular belief, increasing in complexity and sophistication. At one point in the book, Johnson attempts to defend reality television. The argument is that shows like Survivor improve (and exploit) our “social intelligence”; viewers are forced to assimilate and analyze social data in order to fully appreciate the show.

Now, I fully recognize the importance of such social skills in one’s personal and business life. Labor markets, especially tournament-style ones, generously reward social intelligence. However, it’s pretty easy to model a labor market such that social skills, perhaps beyond a certain minimum threshold, fail to contribute to social utility. Office politics can be about seizing scarce firm resources (props to cooperative game theory, sadly a bit neglected these days) and not socially efficient coordination of effort.

I am open to persuasion on this one, and I may be mislead by my personal bias against people who are a bit too smooth. It’s instructive, though, to imagine groups of technically competent, smart, but socially less polished people collaborating to achieve some goal. Numerous real-world instantiations of this seem to be doing just fine without the assistance of those obnoxious (but proactive!) MBA social-climber types.

Apparently the honest accounting drive I mentioned here got rolled up the federal level — thank you again, USA Today. While the local governments in the first article claimed that Duluth had a $8,000 obligation per household, the national numbers reveal… *drumroll*…

Taxpayers owe more than a half-million dollars per household for financial promises made by government, mostly to cover the cost of retirement benefits for baby boomers, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The exact number is $510,678 per household, and it’s growing. In fact, it’s growing really damn fast.

Like an unpaid credit card bill, the balance grows every year — about $25,000 per household annually.

Does anyone want to compare that to the average yearly household income?

The debate of whether or not we should have all these programs is slightly irrelevant when we obviously aren’t going to be able to pay for them without crippingly high tax rates or cutting promised benefits. Can anyone explain to me how this is sustainable?

Americans’ government obligations are five times what people owe for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other personal debt

It really takes a lot to be less responsible with money than American households. It takes an incredible amount to be FIVE times less responsible. It takes criminal negligence for someone else to be that irresponsible at the expense of those very households.

The list of people describing “employing illegal immigrants” as “modern slavery” increases. What especially perplexes me is this charge is levelled by some… anti-immigration people. If the plight of illegal immigrants is so terrible, wouldn’t sending them back to the country they fled be even worse? It seems less like sympathy for these poor immigrants, but rather a way to take a cheap shot at the corporations that employ them — and are likely to be political opponents to those who would crack down on illegal immigration.

Does anyone have any additions to this list? I propose that we keep a detailed accounting, so that we can, in the spirit of their hysterical over-reactions, treat them like they were in a Soviet Gulag! By which I only mean, of course, publically ridiculing them.
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Winterspeak at Asymmetrical Information links an article that describes what certainly sounds like a great idea:

State governments have been made to honestly account for their healthcare liabilities by putting the cost of those future liabilities on the books today. No changes are being made to the promises, or to taxes, or to any part of the system — everything remains exactly as it was except an implicit cost is being made explicit.

The first step in the addiction recovery process is admitting you have a problem. Or more precisely, this is step zero — correcting the books so that it’s possible to see you have a problem. But I still have a few questions…
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Thank you for having me! Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute some useful things in the highly refined fields of sinning, anger, libertarianism and technology.

I thought I’d just throw some quick links to the background of the viewpoints that interest me personally, since they’re most likely to be the topics I’ll be posting on.
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On two occasions in recent weeks, I’ve encountered men who looked to me like they were maybe 10 years older than me, only to learn that they have college-age children. In fact, I think both of them are in their mid-to-late 40s. (I’m 26)

My parents say that when they go to a college campus, everyone there looks like children. That’s not true for me yet, but I’m starting to see how it could happen. You never perceive the people in your own peer group as especially old or young. Your cohort gets older, while college students, middle-aged people, and retirees all stay the same age.

Via Will at the Cato blog, Virginia Postrel links to this priceless anecdote about attitudes toward job security in France, in which the New York Times’ James Traub’s interviews French presidential hopeful Ségolène Royal:

In fact, Royal seems innocent of any taint of economic liberalism. She regards Villepin’s peremptory imposition of the new law as a sign of a systematic failure to listen to ordinary people; but she does not view the national suspicion of market forces as a comparable source of paralysis. I was surprised, I said during our interview, that someone whose entire life constituted a triumph over adversity would join the campaign to insure against précarité….Royal countered my observation with a familiar refrain: “The problem is that everybody isn’t subject to insecurity. Do you see businessmen being fired for incompetence? The young see politicians, who also have a stable and secure job, being civil servants, lecturing others on insecurity. So the young graduate will say, ‘In the name of what am I going to sign an insecure contract?’ ”

Then the conversation took an odd turn. Royal asked me, with the air of someone pulling out a trump card, “Are you in an insecure situation?” Actually, I explained, as a contract writer for this magazine, I have little security.

Royal wasn’t going to be put off the scent that easily. “Yes, but how many years does your contract last?”

“I sign a new one every year.”

Now she was frankly incredulous. “You could be fired every year?” For all her own experience, Royal apparently viewed précarité as a kind of socioeconomic stigma rather than the price you might choose to pay for freedom. Or maybe you could say that for her, as for the left generally–and not only in France–market liberalism and globalization have the status merely of fact, which is categorically inferior to a right. This is no less so if the fact appears to obviate the right. “The global economy shouldn’t be supported by wage earners,” Royal insisted. “They have to be able to build a future, like any human being.”

As someone who’s changed jobs twice and careers once in the 3 and a half years since graduating from college, I’ll just say that they can take my flexible labor markets from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Of course, an advocate of the French system would point that I’m one of the lucky ones who’s been able to find jobs I love with reasonable pay. Which is true. However, it’s not obvious how the French alternative is superior. France has a permanent underclass of about 10 percent of the population that’s not only unable to rise into comfortable middle-class life, but is unable to get a job at all. Moreover, France’s immigrant population has been relegated to second-class citizenry, in contrast to the American experience in which generation after generation of new immigrants comes into the country poor, but have children or grandchildren who rise into the ranks of the middle class.

As Will points out, our lifetime happiness is strongly influenced by our job satisfaction, and one of the best ways to improve your job satisfaction is to try a bunch of different options to figure out which one you like the most. I think that applies to lower-income people as well as high earners. There are a variety of semi-skilled trades that virtually anyone can learn with a reasonable amount of effort. When the law makes firing difficult, it inevitably makes hiring difficult as well. Which means if you get a crappy job, you’re far more likely to be trapped in it for life. That sucks regardless of where you lie on the pay scale, but it’s liable to suck far more for low-income individuals, for whom the bad jobs can be truly awful.

I’m pleased to announce that as soon as some technical details are worked out, the Angry Blog will be joined by another new contributor. And I can even tell you his name! Brian Moore is a software developer in Little Rock, AK. He moved there from Cleveland to be near his fiancee, who’s in medical school. He’s a libertarian and an all-around smart guy. His personal blog is Fall of the State.

At first glance, this strikes me as pretty unfortunate. I’m a huge fan of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her work in the Dutch legislature. Incidentally, everyone should buy her recent book, The Caged Virgin. But the move to AEI worries me for two reasons. Most obviously, I suspect Ms. Hirsi Ali will be less effective from across the ocean than she was when living near the epicenter of the problem. Secondly, I worry more broadly about the appropriation of the “liberalize Islam” movement by the hawkish Right. One can and should be opposed to radical Islam without supporting an aggressive foreign policy. Perhaps the Right gains from this conflation, if only by bolstering their “humanitarian” fall-back justification for the war, but in the long run it will only serve to undermine the fight against radical Islam. At some point here we are going to have to convert Muslims into Enlightenment liberals, and associating Voltaire (to whom Hirsi Ali has occasionally been compared) with Abu Ghraib is simply not helpful.

It’s probably not reasonable to expect too high a quality standard from Brainwash, a magazine whose writers are not paid and whose explicit purpose is to provide a forum for aspiring libertarian and conservative authors a chance to get their work published. Still, I have to say this article was an especially bad bit of foreign policy analysis.

“We need China,” runs the refrain. “We had better get used to it.” But heckler Wenyi Wang did not take a knee, and China’s dissidents grow increasingly active. Wang’s undiplomatic yawp reminds us that “bad China” remains: in the ability to outproduce us and fix currency, the ability to outpollute us without reprimand, and now, perhaps, even the ability to outproliferate us, as well, helping put nuclear technology in reach of our worst enemies.

We can’t resort to international law or the threat of force to wrangle China. We need great-power allies at a time of diplomatic multipolarity. The drama over Iran has shown divisions clearer than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Britain and France are together on Tehran, but Russia balks and China moves like a reticent chesspiece. The rhetoric may be civil, but the agendas are divergent and diverging. Economic ties are not enough to seal the gap.

One unglamorous but potent lesson of World War One is that well-integrated world markets cannot override the sudden antagonism of political interests. Sides develop out of crises despite goodwill. The Iranian crisis has put Europe closely on our side–including Germany–but it has also heightened the profile and power of Russia and China. We hem and haw over Russia’s expert consolidation of autocratic power, but it is China we cannot “solve,” China against which we are most reactive, China which is a culture less like ours among significant powers than any save radical Islam.

I made it all the way through the article expecting to encounter some argument showing why we should be afraid of China. They’re engaged in nuclear proliferation? How about an example? But no examples are to be had. Of course, we shouldn’t forget their fearsome ability to “outproduce” and “outpollute” us. The former isn’t true, and would be great news for everyone if it were. The latter is unfortunate, but hardly the kind of problem that justifies a confrontational foreign policy.

I wonder if it’s ever occurred to Mr. Poulos that “great power” wrangling of the type he’s advocating was responsible for the breakdown of well-integrated world markets in World War One. France and Germany didn’t have fundamentally incompatible interests that inexorably drove them to war. What happened was that France and Germany signed secret treaties that caused them to become entangled in what otherwise would have been a minor regional spat. The last thing we need is to build a network of alliances with China’s neighbors so that if there’s a regional conflict, we’ll be drawn into it.

Still, China lurks in the shadows like a reticent chess piece, waiting to stab us in the back with their divergent agendas. We never learn what those diverging agendas might consist of, aside from the fact that China doesn’t want us to attack Iran. If that makes you a menace to the United States, they should probably arrest me for treason right now.

Due to an avalanche of spambots, comments are going to be unavailable for a few days until I have time to clear out the spam and figure out a better way to deal with the problem.

Yglesias on the media’s reaction to Steven Colbert’s speech:

As Wood goes on to observe, there’s something uniquely American about the idea that the primary role of the newspaperman is to be boring and deferential. In other countries (or in the NYC tabloid market) where papers face actual competition instead of being organized as a series of local monopolies, the general idea is for your paper to be something that someone would want to read instead of being like a plate of brocoli that you ought to read.

This isn’t to say that reporters never challenge the powerful or break big stories. Obviously they do, at least sometimes. But even when reporters are doing their best work, the height of journalistic achievement in America is to uncover a big outreageous scandal and then successfully cloak your outrage behind the canons of stodgy neutrality. It’s bizarre. Every successful innovation in political media for decades — from talk radio to Fox News to the blogosphere to the Colbert Report and the Daily Show — has been premised on trying to take the ideas and information and transmit them in an appealing way. It’s no coincidence that these innovations all come out of media ecologies where there’s competition.

Gene rants about the flimsy spines of the “9/11 changed everything” crowd:

Christ, you’d think it would be good news that AQ had been reduced to bloody gestures of futility, as yet hypothetical. Yes, they can shoot up a school. They can bomb a library. But any group of determined and crazy individuals can do the same. But when Columbine happens, when the D.C. Sniper happens, when the Fairfax police station shooting happens, we go on about our lives. We recognize (or most of us do) that it’s damned silly to recommend major policy changes because in an open society of 300 million people you can’t put the homeland security equivalent of a bike helmet on everything.

Conservatives see this when it comes to things like school shootings and gun ownership. They reject the chimera of a risk-free society, and recognize that, while in a costless world, the optimal number of school shootings is zero, we don’t live in such a world. However, when it comes to the entirely speculative chance of a WMD attack by a Third-World thug who never dreamed of it, they become tightly wound bundles of fear and rage, and cheer a costly, destructive war. If the Iran debate is any indication, “bomb today for a brighter tomorrow” hasn’t lost much of its appeal for the Right.

Meanwhile, George Will–who has been excellent of late–falls off a bit this week. Will has gone to see Flight 93. And he says “The message of the movie is: We are all potential soldiers. And we all may be, at any moment, at the war’s front, because in this war the front can be anywhere.” You can almost picture George on the way to the elevator at ABC, eyes coolly scanning the lobby for anything amiss, one hand in pocket, clutching his hidden quill pen with steely purpose.

Yes, any of us could find ourselves in the middle of a terrorist attack. And we hope that if the call comes, we’ll be able to acquit ourselves half as well as the brave men on Flight 93. But we should also realize that the opportunities for such heroism are likely to be vanishingly rare. There’s more likely to be a truck or a bloodclot or a cluster of cancerous cells with your name on it. And one ought not to be hysterical about any of it.

I think part of the problem here is that at a deep psychological level, we’re all very bad at math. When we see an airplane smash into the World Trade Center, or we read about kids being shot up in Columbine, we’re not psychologically equipped to discount our feelings of horror by the relevant odds of those things happening to the ones we love. As a result, we’re terrified of terrorist attacks that kill 3000 people every 5 years, but we’re nonchalant about automobile accidents, which kill 3000 people every month. That’s not because terrorist attacks are inherently worse, it’s simply that terrorist attacks make better media spectacles, so we hear about them more and we’re more likely to remember them and worry about them.

Our grandparents faced Nazi Germany, a modern, technologically advanced nation that had a realistic shot at conquering all of Europe. Our parents faced Communist Russia, which came within hair’s breadth of launching a nuclear exchange that would have killed tens of millions of people. Our generation is facing a few hundred fanatics who live in tents in the desert and manage to kill a few hundred people every year. Yet to hear a lot of people tell it, we’re facing a grave threat to our way of life.

The biggest threat to our way of life is that we’ll lose a sense of perspective. We’re not the first generation to face a dangerous world. Previous generations coped with far greater dangers without compromising fundamental freedoms.

I’m excited to report that my former roomie and good friend Julian is resurrecting his personal blog, which has long languished in the shadow of the mighty Hit and Run. His blog was one of my favorite reads back in the day when Julian was afflicting the comfortable and… well afflicting the comfortable anyway. It’s got a snazzy new look, so go check it out.

In addition, he’s starting a new online clearing house about Robert Nozick. If you know of any Robert Nozick resources that ought to appear on such a page, please let him know.

If I knew Scientology gave you dark Jedi powers, I would have signed up years ago!