Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

My old boss David Boaz has a great piece on Rudy Guiliani’s abysmal record on civil liberties:

It should distress many conservatives that Giuliani took umbrage at affronts to his dignity, perhaps most notoriously when he tried to stop city buses from carrying a New York magazine ad saying the publication was “possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.” The First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams notes in his book, “Speaking Freely,” that “over 35 separate successful lawsuits were brought against the city under Giuliani’s stewardship arising out of his insistence on doing the one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids: using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of government itself.”

As a presidential hopeful, Giuliani’s authoritarian streak is as strong as ever. He defends the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. He endorses the President’s power to arrest American citizens, declare them enemy combatants and hold them without access to a lawyer or a judge. He thinks the President has “the inherent authority to support the troops” even if Congress were to cut off war funding, a claim of presidential authority so sweeping that even Bush and his supporters have not tried to make it.

Giuliani’s view of power would be dangerous at any time, but especially after two terms of relentless Bush efforts to weaken the constitutional checks and balances that safeguard our liberty.

I’ve already said I think McCain is scary. And I’m not so keen on Mitt “Double Guantanamo” Romney, either. It’s looking increasingly likely that this will be the second election in a row in which I’m rooting for the Republican nominee to lose.

Back in January, my old boss David Boaz pointed out that even has Hugo Chavez has been telegraphing his disdain for the rule of law and consolidating dictatorial powers, the press has been reluctant to call him what he plainly is: a dictator.

Today, the Grey Lady gets in on the act, with this surreal article about how “President Hugo Chávez” is in the process of shutting down the only major television station in the country that is openly critical of him and turning its broadcast license over to a state-run station. The article notes that several other stations had been previously critical of Chavez, but have changed their editorial stance in recent months to be more supportive. These stations have not been shut down.

Presidents in democratic countries do not get to shut down the major media outlets of their opposition. Indeed, there are few actions that strike closer to the heart of liberal democracy. Yet the Times reporter describes the whole situation in a very dry, he-said, she-said manner, as if this were a discussion of whether to cut the capital gains tax. “Onán Mauricio Aristigueta, 46, a messenger at the National Assembly who showed up to support the president,” says that “RCTV lacks respect for the Venezuelan people.” On the other hand, “Elisa Parejo, 69, an actress who was one of RCTV’s first soap opera stars” says this shows that Venezuela is becoming a dictatorship. She makes a good point, but who is to say, really?

Now, I realize there’s a difference between a news story and an op-ed. I don’t expect Mr. Romero to abandon any semblance of objectivity in writing the story. But the fact that reporters aren’t supposed to overtly inject their opinions into coverage of a story doesn’t mean that any way of framing a story is as good as any other. A reporter who was genuinely worried about Chavez’s actions would have started his story something like this: “In a move that raised fresh questions about his commitment to democracy, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez shut down one of the last television outlets critical of his administration. International human rights groups warned that Venezuela was becoming a dictatorship.”

I agree with Radley that MeMe Roth should be ashamed of herself:

It’s estimated that about one-tenth of Iraq’s population has fled that most dangerous place on Earth since the United States & Co. liberated it in 2003. In the last seven months, The Wall Street Journal reports, the U.S. has admitted 69 Iraqi refugees.

Since 2003, the U.S. hasn’t even come close to admitting 1,000 Iraqi refugees in a single year. Why such pitifully low numbers, given that the U.S. helped unleash Iraq’s bloody civil war?

The refugee wave is tricky for an administration eager to portray the recent troop “surge” as a boost to improving security and curbing the sectarian killings in Iraq. There’s also genuine concern that encouraging large-scale flight from Iraq will compound the coutnry’s many challenges, by luring its most talented citizens to the U.S.

Uh-huh. Well, this is no surprise. So it has ever been. The asylum program has played second fiddle to the politicians’ foreign-policy whims since time out of mind. What’s especially galling is this notion that talented Iraqi individuals ought to be, for all intents and purposes, sacrificed for the hypothetical good of Iraq as a whole. 

Wasn’t that the kind of idiotic dogma Dubya & Co. were hoping to dethrone in their quixotic, tragically misguided effort to socially re-engineer the entire Middle East?

Dubya is likely to sign a refugee bill that will increase to 500 a year the number Afghan and Iraq military translators allowed to come to America. A Democratic-sponsored bill to welcome a measly 15,000 Iraqis a year hasn’t even been scheduled for a vote. Not only are the Democrats unwilling to stand up to Dubya on the war itself, they won’t even vote on a bill to do a small favor for just a few of the people whose lives their own votes helped to make a living nightmare.

Hawks are fond of arguing that regardless of one’s prospective position on the war, since the U.S. government invaded Iraq it took on a moral obligation to help the country transition into a place resembling something other than the eighth circle of hell. I’d say we’ve already given them plenty of opportunities, including repeated elections that were largely free and fair, to determine their own course. Whatever obligation the U.S. took on has been discharged, in my view, especially given that two-thirds of Iraqis want American troops out.

But if there is some kind of moral obligation incumbent on the U.S. today, doesn’t it include opening its doors to at least a few of the huddled masses yearning to breathe this country’s free and peaceful air?

Or should they have to sneak in through Mexico?

(Title reference explained.)

Walking through my neighborhood today, I encountered a portly middle-aged white guy from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers handing out the following flyer:

PLEASE DO NOT PATRONIZE

SUBWAY SANDWICHES AND SALAD SHOPS

Electrical construction work has been performed at Subway Sandiwches and Salad Shop at 1205 Hampton, St. Louis Missouri, by an employer who pays their employees less than the area standards wages and benefit rates earned by our members.

We area residents have continually sought to improve and MAINTAIN WAGES AND BENEFITS for our families, and we do not want others lowering the wages and benefits that our parents have diligently worked for and their children rightfully deserve.

We also believe that employers who cut wages and benefits reduce the earning power of all working people and contributes to a situation which ultimately hurts us all.

Now, it’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about economics that that last sentence is patently false. When competition within a profession drives down wages in that profession, consumers outside of that profession benefits from the resulting lower prices for that profession’s output. And in general, an economy that sets wages via supply and demand will be more prosperous than an economy that sets them based on the collusive behavior of professional guilds, because the former type of economy does a better job of allocating workers to those professions where they’ll be most productive.

But the really offensive thing about this flyer becomes obvious when you think about the implications of the fact that Subway “pays their employees less than the area standards wages and benefit rates.” The question we should ask is: who are these employees? Obviously, they’re not members of IBEW. And presumably they didn’t have the bargaining power to get the IBEW’s preferred wage and benefit rates for their work.

Which means that these workers had two choices: they could work as electricians at lower wages, or they could not work as electricians at all. IBEW seems to be asking us to be outraged that those workers didn’t choose the latter option. We should all take to the streets to demand that they go back to flipping burgers so that IBEW workers can continue to enjoy union scale wages.

I’ve got a better idea: If the guy handing out flyers isn’t satisfied with the wages he can earn as an electrician, maybe he should get off his ass and develop some new skills that earn higher wages. If he’s not willing to do that, then he should spend some time pondering the fact that he makes a pretty average salary in the most prosperous nation on Earth. He’s not a charity case, and there’s no reason the rest of us should pay higher prices on the goods and services we buy to inflate his salary.

Alex Tabarrok comments to point out that he’s not a victim of cognitive dissonance, and has long been a vocal supporter of liberalizing immigration restrictions. Here is a 2000 essay making the case for allowing more immigrants.

Via Ezra I think this isn’t quite right:

Lant’s and my views on immigration contrast with those of George Borjas, another colleague and outspoken opponent of expanded immigration. The Senate deal’s preference for a point- and skill-based immigration policy would have pleased George, since he has been advocating for such a change for years. But I am pretty sure he will not like the temporary work program element.

Interestingly, the difference of views has nothing to do with the economics of immigration, on which I think we all agree. Expanded immigration is likely to exert downward pressure on workers’ wages in the U.S. Where we disagree is on whether the gains to the rest of the world make this still a worthwhile effort (in the context, of course, of efforts to cushion the adverse effects on U.S.). As Alex Tabarrok points out in a recent post, the differences have to do with what we think is the relevant moral community for making public policy decisions. George thinks the purely national perspective is the right one, and he figures the aggregate gains for the U.S. are small relative to the distributional costs, which makes this bad policy. For my part, I believe cosmopolitan considerations should enter our calculus when the gains abroad (or to foreign nationals) are sufficiently large, which they would be with temporary labor flows. (So I am not a strict nationalist on these matters, to revert to Tabarrok’s terminology.)

It’s important to keep in mind that under almost any realistic scenario, the US as a whole will benefit from increased immigration. The lower wages paid to low-skilled American workers will mostly be passed along to American consumers in the form of lower prices, while the larger labor force will allow for increased division of labor, increasing the overall productivity of the economy.

This means that to be a rational opponent of immigration, it’s not sufficient to be a nationalist. You have to be a nationalist and an egalitarian. You have to simultaneously believe that the interests of Americans counts more than the interests of foreigners and that the interests of poor Americans counts for more than the interests of middle-class and wealthy Americans.

It’s easy to see why this combination of views would be appealing to an unskilled American laborer: for him it just amounts to “my interests outweigh other peoples’ interests.” That’s a self-serving perspective, but at least it’s coherent. In contrast, I would think the perspective would create massive cognitive dissonance for wealthier Americans like Rodrik and Tabarrok. If egalitarian concerns lead us to favor the interests of unskilled American workers over those of skilled workers, shouldn’t those same concerns lead us to side with unskilled Latino migrants, who are a lot poorer than their American counterparts?

POMED:

On Thursday, the House passed H.R. 1585, the Defense Authorization Bill for Fiscal Year 2008. Among the amendments made in order by the House Rules Committee was an amendment (see SEC. 12) co-sponsored by Representatives DeFazio (D-OR), Paul (R-TX), Hinchey (D-NY), and Lee (D-CA), which would have prohibited military action against Iran without further explicit authorization from Congress. The amendment was defeated 136-288.

So all options are on the table, and Congress doesn’t feel the need to be there…

On the one hand, I think it’s incredibly refreshing to have someone on the national stage pointing out the obvious but often-ignored point that Al Qaida hates us largely because of our policies in the Middle East. On the other hand, I really wish the libertarian movement could find some spokespeople who didn’t have such a tin ear:

Now, I agree with the substance of everything Ron Paul said. But when Wolf Blitzer asks if Paul is “blaming the United States for 9/11,” the first thing you say has to be “of course I’m not blaming the United States for 9/11.” The second thing to say is “obviously, Osama bin Laden are his henchmen are to blame.” Only then can you go on to make a policy argument about blowback and so forth. Otherwise, all people will hear is “Ron Paul blames America for 9/11,” they’ll be outraged, and they won’t listen to anything else he has to say.

In that sense, Ron Paul is the Michael Dukakis of this year’s Republican primary:

Before the second debate, Dukakis had been suffering from the flu and spent quite a bit of the day in bed. His performance was poor and played to his reputation as being cold. The most memorable moment came when reporter Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis whether he would support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. Dukakis’s answer analyzed the statistical ineffectiveness of capital punishment. Several commentators thought the question itself was unfair, in that it injected an irrelevant emotional element into the discussion of a policy issue, but many observers felt Dukakis’ answer lacked the normal emotions one would expect of a person asked about a loved one’s rape and death.

It’s hard to think of two more universal sentiments in American politics than “9/11 was bad” and “rape is bad.” Every politician, regardless of their views on foreign policy or the death penalty, should go out of his or her way to condemn rapists and terrorists. By failing to do this, Paul is not only hurting his already-slim chances of winning the primary, but he’s also ensuring that most of the audience won’t even take his argument seriously.

This video from Julian is fantastic:

If it’s true that Bryan Caplan is right, and the idea of “rational voters” is a myth, then it seems like the solution is clear: reduce the power of the people those crazy voters elect. Obviously I’d prefer a massive dose of rationality to descend upon the general populace, but I find that unlikely.  Caplan (via Somin) agrees:

Bryan also argues that voter ignorance and irrationality justify limiting the size and scope of government in order to leave more decisions in the hands of the free market and civil society

There is one problem with this idea: the only people who can stop these pesky irrational voters… are officials elected by those irrational people. But I have a fix for that, and the basis for it is also provided by Caplan’s book:

As Bryan shows in detail, this helps explain why the majority of voters routinely fall prey to gross fallacies in their analysis of public policy – such as the belief that protectionism helps the overall economy; that the rise of modern technology is a major cause of longterm unemployment; and that foreigners are beggaring the American economy (all of these are actual examples from the book).

Ah! So we must resort to The Manchurian Candidate plan for electoral domination — have a candidate without any fixed political beliefs who will simply parrot the most popular public beliefs and coast to victory. Then, once in office, unveil his evil libertarian mission. Maybe one of the existing candidates is already executing this very plan…

Ezra and Matt seem to be upset about this graph:

The United States, you see, isn’t that little “10″ bar on the right. It’s the complete absence of a bar to the right of that. That’s right, the United States has no mandatory vacation at all!!!

Yet I’m pretty sure every full-time job I’ve ever had has included paid vacation time. At the Show-Me Institue, I got 10 days of vacation, 12 paid holidays, and 5 “personal days.” That’s a total of 27 days off, which is precisely the same as the median for the 20 countries in that graph, which appears to also be 27. At my last job working for Cato, and when I worked for the government before that, I got similar amounts of vacation time: ~10 paid holidays and ~15 vacation days.

Now the obvious retort is that I’m working in a relatively cushy white-collar profession, which is true. So I’m sure the average number of vacation days in the United States is somewhat less than the average in other countries. But the average isn’t zero. And a graph that shows the legally mandated minimum, rather than the average number of vacation days people actually get, just doesn’t tell us very much.

Also, I think we have to keep in mind that there is a matter of personal liberty here. There are jobs that offer significant amounts of vacation—teachers, for example—and those who prefer to trade more leisure for lower pay have every opportunity to do that in the United States. Indeed, if there were really a strong demand for a different work/leisure trade-off, there’s every reason to think that employers would cater to it by advertising longer vacations as a perk. The fact that they don’t do that suggest to me that most Americans aren’t that upset about their lack of vacation time. It’s not clear that those who prefer more leisure to higher paychecks should force that trade-off on those who would rather take fewer vacations and earn more money.

Oops! I didn’t notice Brian’s post there. I agree with a lot of it, but I don’t think I quite follow Brian’s criticism. Brian says the problem is the existence of “lots of people in the Middle East who seem to desire to kill lots of other people,” as though an entire society just suddenly went crazy and decided to go on random murderous rampages. But I just don’t think that’s right. Terrorists never kill people entirely at random. Terrorists in Northern Ireland kill Brits and British sympathizers. Terrorists in Chechnya kill Russians. Timothy McVeigh killed (or at least was trying to kill) employees of the federal government. Basque terrorists kill people Spaniards. Palestinian terrorists kill Israelis.

And while of course nothing justifies their actions, they usually have some concrete grievance that in some sense explains their actions. They almost always perceive the people they kill as being somehow connected to a perceived injustice to their own group, however they define it. It’s insane to kill random civilians in retaliation for perceived injustices by their governments, but the fact that their actions are unjustified doesn’t make them incomprehensible.

I don’t think Al Qaeda is fundamentally different. Their definition of the enemy is much broader than most terrorist groups, so it seems like they kill people at random. But in fact there are definite patterns to their attacks. Most of them have occurred in countries that were at the time engaged in military operations on the Arabian peninsula. As far as I know, there have been few if any Al Qaeda attacks in Southeast Asia or South America.

So had we adopted a policy in, say, 1950 that no American troop will ever enter Middle Eastern soil, that the CIA won’t try to install puppet governments in Middle Eastern countries, etc, I find it extremely hard to imagine that anything like the September 11 attacks would have happened. So in some sense, our activities in the Middle East were a contributing cause of the September 11 attack. And as we make foreign policy decisions in the future, we ought to consider these sorts of reactions in our calculus. Not because the attacks are in any way justified, but simply because all else being equal, 3000 fewer deaths is better than 3000 more deaths.

Now that does not mean that if pull out of Iraq all our terrorism problems will go away overnight. We’ve got too many bases scattered around the Middle East to withdraw them all at once. Even if we could, people have long memories and so they might still be inclined to blow some of us up out of spite for perceived harms that have already happened. But I don’t think there’s any way to deny that if we were to pull all of our troops by the end of the year, and keep them out, that our chances of being subject to an Middle Eastern terrorist attack in 2030, 2040, or 2050 will be much lower. Our pulling out might have a beneficial effect on the region, reducing the overall number of bitter people. But even if our leaving doesn’t improve things over there, it will at least ensure that in the long run, they’ll no longer have any cause to blame us.

I’ve criticized Ron Paul a bit on this blog, but by God was this refreshing:

What’s really frightening is that I think Rudy’s expressions of outrage at Paul’s statement seemed genuine. I mean, Bin Laden hasn’t exactly been shy about explaining his motivations. Is it really possible that he’s completely oblivious to Bin Laden’s writings?

Gene Healy (guestblogging at The Agitator) points out an exchange between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani at the recent Republican candidate debates. Now, I’m pre-disposed to be favorable to Paul, but I think the issue is more complex that either Paul or Giuliani understand. I think both the “we provoked September 11th with our interference” and the “they attacked us because they hate our freedom” both betray a certain US-centered viewpoint. (Understandably, since this is an election for the chief policy-maker of the United States, this makes sense.) But I think neither is entirely correct. (more…)

John Stossel does some horrible reporting on tax cuts.

UPDATE: Regarding the comments below, the reporting is horrible because Stossel is talking about particular tax cuts, and there’s no way they increased tax revenue. I trust Andrew Samwick and Greg Mankiw on this issue.

It provides an exogeneous shock, facilitating econometric analysis. School choice works:

We find that 16% of parents responded to NCLB notification by choosing schools that had on average 1 standard deviation higher average test scores than their current NCLB school. We then use the lottery assignment of students to chosen schools to test if changed choices led to improved academic outcomes. On average, lottery winners experience a significant decline in suspension rates relative to lottery losers. We also find that students winning lotteries to attend substantially better (above-median) schools experience significant gains in test scores.

Non-technical summary in the NBER Digest.

Seen on Wikipedia just now:

Jerry Falwell (August 11, 1933 – May 15, 2007) was an American fundamentalist Christian pastor and televangelist. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. He also founded Liberty University in 1971 and co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979. He finally died like 15 minutes ago and the collective world couldn’t be happier.

I went in intending to delete that last sentence, but looking at the history, it appears that someone beat me to it. The sentence lasted for approximately 2 minutes.

At least we aren’t the only nation with moronic regulators wondering “what’s best for us” when it comes to television.

Just like in our country, meddling idiots worry about TV’s effect:

“Advertisements create desires, which cannot be satisfied by people’s current economic position,” wrote Phuntsho Rapten of the Centre for Bhutan Studies. “Crimes and corruption are often born out of economic desires.”

Do you know what else causes desires which cannot be satisfied by people’s current economic position? Being in a really crappy economic position. Gosh, I wonder why those 31.7% of Bhutanese below the poverty line have so many desires? How crass and materialistic of them.

In a world where so many differences divide us, it’s heartening to know that the stupidity of regulators remains a uniting constant.

Matt’s commenters make funny:

Isn’t blogging ironic, don’t you think?
It’s like your computer crashing right before you click post,
It’s Matthew Yglesias agreeing with Kaus,
It’s the awesome convention that the Heritage Foundation hosts.

For the record, Heritage’s big convention is actually not bad, albeit a bit too full of right-wingers for my taste.