Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

Something we can all rally behind…

This would be a lot funnier if I didn’t have to worry about my brother being drafted for the forthcoming invasion of Iran. And as Matt notes, one of the bizarre things about this primary is that the “moderates” who are most likely to be disillusioned with the war seem to be throwing in their lot with John McCain, probably the most consistently hawkish guy in Washington.

This from Will Wilkinson is one of the most artful put-downs I’ve read in a long time:

David Brooks is one of America’s most successful thinkers in much the same way that Thomas Kinkaid, painter of light, is one of America’s most successful artists. And Brooks’s column on Teddy K’s endorsement of Obama is artful in much the way “A Day at the Cinderella Castle” is artful.

Will goes on to make some sharp observations about Brooks’s dislike for individualism, but I doubt it would have been possible to top those first two sentences.

Giuliani’s Florida strategy fails to pay off.

Edit: And we lose Edwards as well!

Any day where I know that, going forward, I will hear less about Rudy Giuliani or John Edwards — that is a good day.

… I don’t understand the Middle East.

Egypt is under pressure by Israel and the United States to reseal the Rafah [Egypt-Gaza] border crossing to prevent the flow of terrorists and weapons into Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Okay… I get that part.

Palestinian militants, acting with the approval of the Hamas leadership, blasted through parts of the wall [that blocks access to Egypt from Gaza] Wednesday.

I kind of get that part too.  Egypt wants things quiet with Israel, Hamas doesn’t.

Egyptian and Hamas security forces began sealing parts of the Gaza-Egypt border Monday to stem the flow of Palestinians into Egypt

What! Why would Hamas, who apparently supported explosive-enabled Gaza-Egypt access on Wednesday, turn around and send armed personnel to seal it on Monday?

“When we decide to open it, [we] open it, when we decide to close it, [we] close it — us and the Egyptians,” Ahmed Yusif said.

Okay, okay, you’ve convinced us of your fickle nature!  But… if you guys really have the keys to the wall, why did you blow it up in the first place?
Let me amend my first statement: I don’t understand the Middle East because CNN is doing such a crappy job of reporting on it.  Time to repeat what is becoming a daily task: discover incomprehensible foreign policy story on major news site, spend 10 times as long googling sites to figure out what the hell they thought they were talking about.  What did we do before the internet?  Oh right, I had to take their useless stories at face value.

This has been part 129 in our series: “Why CNN Gives Me Dangerously High Blood Pressure.”

Continuing in the line of “government capture,” comes this book link from Marginal Revolution: Free Lunch. The subtitle is: “How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)” and that’s all I need to know about the book. Railing against corporate welfare is so easy it should be fattening. It’s just wonderful — because no one can ever say “but what about the CEO’s, starving on the street?” — and I think libertarians would do well to do more of it.

Responses to the “evil rich people getting a free lunch” fall into two camps:

1. “Therefore we should close those loopholes, increase taxes for rich people and stop corporate welfare, which I also define as tax breaks/reductions!” This is the left viewpoint, and ignores the fundamental difference between letting an evil CEO keep the money he has earned (okay) and redistributing someone else’s money (not okay) to him. Which is why I like option 2:

2. “Therefore we should remove the laws/taxes that have these loopholes, because loopholes always exist, and they always disproportionately benefit the rich, because they have time and money to figure them out. Also, if “low taxes” are good for rich people, they’re even better for poorer folks — reduce them too! Oh, and let’s reduce the amount of money governments can throw around for corporate welfare, because let’s be honest — is there any world where democratically elected politicians aren’t going to be beholden to the rich people who finance their campaigns?”

Every election we seem to get a silly article explaining the deeper meaning of candidates’ typographic choices. (Here is the 2004 version) The effort seems about as scientific as reading tarot cards, and considerably less entertaining.

I certainly buy that there are standards of taste in typography, and that some campaigns’ design decisions may be classier, trendier, prettier, etc. than others. But I sincerely doubt that John Edwards’s typographical choices prove he’s “subtly distancing himself from his unsuccessful 2004 bid” or that Hillary’s logo is “begging for legitimacy instead of demanding respect.” Maybe I’m underestimating the complexity of a modern presidential campaign, but I find it hard to believe the candidates would either reach these kinds of conclusions themselves or call in a graphics design guru to explain to them the subtle connotations of their typographical choices.

Of course, an article that only critiqued the logos in stylistic terms without trying to psychologize the candidates through their typography would only be interesting to typography nerds. So to be interesting to a broader audience, they have to try to resort to the typography equivalent of phrenology.

In discussing a… certain… recent book, Tyler Cowen references Dan Klein’s “The People’s Romance,” and I love it. I don’t know how I’ve missed it before, but it’s a great paper. If you’ve read it already, please take this opportunity to mock me for my ignorance. If you haven’t, you’ll like it.

Monday Update: Will weighs in on the topic, without explicitly saying so.

Overcoming Bias has been running “Rationality Quotes” for a few days now. This is my favorite so far:

“The future is coming, Bill Joy. [of Sun Microsystems, known for his cautionary statements re: technology such as nanotech] Like a juggernaut. There’ll be no slowing it down. A billion people in India (substantial numbers of programmers riding the wave of the silicon revolution) and more than a billion people in China want a decent standard of living and they’re counting on future technologies to deliver it for them. To slow down the future, you would have to nuke them. Are you going to nuke them, Bill? I didn’t think so.”
– Jeff Davis

That’s basically the response I feel whenever someone talks about the dangers of technology as a reason to slow down advancement. I don’t really care whether relatively wealthy Americans like Mr. Joy or myself reap the benefits of new technology — we’re going from a 9.8 on the Well-Off-O-Meter to 9.9 — but the benefit to people around the world is inestimable. They will receive direct benefit through physical application of new technologies to improve their lives as well as indirect benefit — through jobs and industries created to produce and research this progress.

Surely, technology has a dark side. Every invention has some negative side effect or alternate deadly usage. But that is reason to be careful, not to slow down progress. Progress, technology, advancement — these aren’t just buzzwords we crazy libertarian technophiles are irrationally attached to. They represent tangible quality of life improvement (if not necessary for their mere existence) for billions of people around the world, and promise even more as the rate accelerates. You’d better have a damn good reason to slow this down.

Hah, take that all you no-good peaceniks, you thought we were going to send troops into Iran!  Shows what you know!

Now this is the future.  Thanks, Hit’n'Run — for the link, and for making the Terminator reference I was afraid to.

Glenn Greenwald notes that a Canadian publisher of the infamous Mohammed cartoons has been hauled in front of the government to determine whether he’s committed a thoughtcrime. The publisher taped the interview and posted it on the web:

Greenwald puts it better than I could:

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing “offensive” or “insulting” or “wrong” political ideas. The mere existence of the “investigation,” interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

For those unable to think past the (well-deserved) animosity one has for the specific targets in question here, all one needs to do instead is imagine these proceedings directed at opinions and groups that one likes. If Muslim groups can trigger government investigations due to commentary they find offensive, so, too, can conservative Christian or right-wing Jewish groups, or conservative or neoconservative groups, or any other political faction seeking to restrict and punish speech it dislikes.

Down that ugly path lies people like Newt Gingrich, openly advocating that the First Amendment be narrowed considerably to exclude advocacy of “radical Islam” as a means of combating terrorism. People who favor and seek to exploit Canadian and European hate speech laws are but opposite sides of the same tyrannical coin as Gingrich and his allies who are eager to restrict political expression here.

The S.S. Rudy continues to take on water off the coast of Florida:

Two new polls appear to show Republican Rudy Giuliani slipping in Florida, a state he once called “crucial” to his presidential chances.

In a survey conducted for the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times, the former New York mayor only registers 15 percent among Republican primary voters. That puts him in a tie with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has spent little time in the state and has only a fraction of the organization Giuliani has there.

John McCain and Mitt Romney are statistically tied for the top spot in the poll — McCain’s at 25 percent and Romney’s at 23 percent.

Giuliani also finds himself in third place spot in a new American Research Group poll with 16 percent, a statistical tie with Mike Huckabee’s 17 percent. John McCain is on top with 29 percent and Mitt Romney is second with 22 percent.

His campaign is also running out of money.

Giuliani is not a conservative. Nor is he an especially appealing choice for the presidency in other respects. Not surprisingly, once voters in a state start scrutinizing the candidates, they inevitably find they prefer someone other than Rudy Giuliani.

Commenter Pithlord asks a good question about how one uses the process of democracy to accomplish liberty-enhancing but “anti-democratic” institutions like strong property rights. I gave a slightly snarky answer, but it’s also worth noting that this is the underlying strategy of the Institute for Justice, which is engaged in a long-term campaign to re-build a jurisprudence of economic liberty and private property rights that was left in tatters by the courts in the first half of the 20th century. Their attorneys carefully select cases with sympathetic clients in friendly legal venues, in the hopes of establishing precedents favorable to a more vigorous defense of economic liberties by the courts. And of course they’ve done the same thing with eminent domain. Whether their efforts succeed in the long run is largely going to be driven by future court appointments, which will in turn be driven by broader intellectual trends. But IJ is laying the groundwork so that if elite opinion does drift in a more libertarian direction, friendly jurists will have plenty of raw material to work with in fashioning new precedents upholding the courts’ role in defending individuals’ economic liberties. Despite the loss in Kelo, I think the strategy has already paid off to some extent on the eminent domain front, as a number of state Supreme Courts have strengthened property rights.

It’s not often I say this about a politician, but I have to give John McCain credit for political courage on the Florida insurance subsidy issue. Subsidizing disaster insurance amounts to subsidizing risky behavior, which in turn leads to more risky behavior. It’s a horrible policy idea, and McCain deserves credit for resisting it in the face of strong pressures to pander to a pivotal primary state.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth blasts the Fed for its recent 0.75% rate cut:

Greenspan acted carefully, logically, and basically prudently. Several years of anomalous economic data are a reasonable basis to think that the rules have evolved. You would have to have a Swiss (700 years of stability) or Chinese (”we think it’s too early to tell if the French Revolution was a good idea”) approach to stick with economic theories that are at odds with the facts for very long. Greenspan made a mistake, and it will have huge consequences for the US for a generation, but he had reasons for that mistake. Bernanke just blinked, he panicked, despite knowing better.

We now have rigorous economic explanations for all that is happening. We have come to understand, quite clearly, what is going on in the world. The deflationary Eastern wind has been identified. We know there is no productivity miracle in the US, no change in the laws of physics or economics. So we know that the US patient is addicted to easy money morphine, medicine that was prescribed with good intentions by Dr Greenspan, medicine that has in the last 7 years made the patient more ill and not less. More morphine today constitutes malpractice, not economic innovation. We know the consequences of more morphine – stock prices will rise artificially (4% yesterday, on the news of the shot), house prices will stumble along, companies will take longer to default on their loans.

Bernanke might be hoping to do what Greenspan did – retire before the addiction becomes entirely obvious. Too late. While the Fed is clearly not willing to admit it, the markets have just as clearly taken their own view, that the prognosis is not good. They are smart enough to see that all Bernanke has done is cover up the symptoms of malaise, and many are using the temporary pain relief to head for safer territory. I expect that any relief will be brief, market recoveries will fade, the rout has been deferred but not averted.

I’m only old enough to remember one previous recession, so I don’t know how typical the current situation is, but I’ve been shocked by the apparent determination to avert the next recession. This is nuts. Recessions happen for a very basic reason: people make bad investments, and at some point those investments have to be written off. The Fed can delay those write-offs by injecting more money into the economy, allowing people to roll those bad investments over with new borrowing. But it can’t make the bad investments go away. To the contrary, too much easy money convinces people that the markets are going to keep going up forever, which gives you a bubble. I suspect that’s what happened with the stock market in 2000, and to the real estate market last year.

And of course, when bubbles pop it leaves a lot of people over-exposed and worse off than they would have been if the original recession had been allowed to simply take its course. This is what’s worrisome about the Fed’s apparent belief that a dip in the stock market is justifies a drastic cut in interest rates. Stock prices go down as well as up. Falling stock prices are not, in and of themselves, particularly worrisome. But inflationary pressures created by the Fed’s efforts to prevent the stock market from falling are a serious problem, and one that Chairman Bernanke seems not to be sufficiently concerned with.

Shuttleworth has some other smart things to say, so check out his whole post.

I didn’t find this bit by Matt Yglesias as compelling as Julian seems to:

One point of dispute, though, is that to me the idea of state committed to neutral and effective administration of justice around laissez faire lines seems like an illusion. The alternative to reasonably effective democratic institutions and a viable left-wing political movement isn’t free markets but the capture of the state by large economic interests as during the Gilded Age or, indeed, the Bush administration.

Part of the problem with an argument of this sort is that it’s sufficiently abstract that it’s not clear how it cashes out in practical terms. Obviously, no political system is going to give you a political leadership that’s perfectly “committed to neutral and effective administration of justice,” laissez faire or otherwise. If that’s your standard, libertarian policies are going to be a failure, but so are any Matt would car to name. You’d be hard-pressed to find a government anywhere in the history of the world where a certain amount of back-scratching and petty corruption didn’t go on.

The good thing about the kinds of “anti-democratic” policies that libertarians tend to champion—separation of powers, spending limits and balanced budget amendments, judicial protection for property rights and economic liberties, etc—is that they reduce the magnitude of the damage the state can do once it’s captured by special interests. It’s true that governments in the 19th century was often in bed with concentrated economic interests. But their ability to help those interests was substantially constrained by a judiciary that regarded the defense of property rights and economic liberties much the same way that modern courts regard free speech and the separation of church and state. 19th century courts repeatedly struck down attempts by special interests to use the power of the government for their benefit. Similarly, the federal government’s ability to line the pockets of political supporters was sharply limited by the small overall size of the federal government.

To give a specific example, the abuse of eminent domain (and related subsidies such as tax-increment financing) has become a major means by which local governments redistribute money toward concentrated economic interests. Back when the courts took laissez faire economic ideas seriously, they would regularly strike down efforts by city governments to take property from one private party and give it to another. Although in some cases this undoubtedly impeded some genuinely meritorious urban development programs, I think the consequences of abandoning that principle in the 1950s has turned out to be much worse. In the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of low-income property owners, many of them black, were displaced to make room for white-elephant urban renewal projects that did nothing to reverse the causes of urban decline. By the 1980s, cities had almost completely dropped the pretense of fighting “blight” as they began to brazenly condemn ordinary middle-class neighborhoods to make room for shopping malls and big-box retail stores.

Now there have certainly been cases where grassroots efforts, some of them with a “left-wing” cast, have successfully organized to block such projects. But these efforts have been the exception rather than the rule. The organized interests behind eminent domain abuse are shrewd about choosing targets that are unlikely to have the organization or resources necessary to fight back. In most cases, residents don’t realize the gravity of the situation until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Libertarianism, then, isn’t a fantasy about a government that’s magically free of the corruption of concentrated interests. Rather, it’s about finding institutional arrangements in which the powers of government are constrained by clear rules limiting the damage they can do. It’s certainly unlikely that we’ll resurrect the strictly limited federal government of the 19th century. But there’s nothing crazy about seeking new limitations on government power that work in ways analogous to the constitutional and jurisprudential limits of the 19th century. Besides the limitation of eminent domain abuse, these limits could include tax and spending limitations, a balanced budget amendment, and meaningful judicial protections for the right to earn an honest living. These won’t eliminate corruption in government by any means, but on the margin, they reduce the damage that corrupt officials can do.

Surely the people who run CNN.com have a sense of humor. Please, please, say it’s that they have a sense of humor. Because I don’t see any other explanation for this.

If you go to the CNN main international page, and look at the “most popular” news items, you find: “CNN readers respond angrily to ‘race or gender’ story”.

Within minutes of posting a story on CNN’s homepage called “Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in South Carolina,” readers reacted quickly and angrily.

Many took umbrage at the story’s suggestion that black women voters face “a unique, and most unexpected dilemma” about voting their race or their gender.

An e-mailer named Tiffany responded sarcastically: “Duh, I’m a black woman and here I am at the voting booth. Duh, since I’m illiterate I’ll pull down the lever for someone. Hm… Well, he black so I may vote for him… oh wait she a woman I may vote for her… What Ise gon’ do? Oh lordy!”

So, obviously CNN is aware of their stupidity. Because, well, they’re running a story on… their stupidity. The hilarious part is, halfway down the article, there’s a “Don’t Miss” sidebar with a link to the exact story that caused the outrage: Gender or race: Black women face tough choices in S.C. Priceless. It’s like some ouroboros of silliness. (more…)

Good article by Mr. Berg, containing good stuff from Mr. Wilkinson as well.

The upshot, once you add in the feedback effects of the market system, is that any society in which voters are willing to pass anti-discrimination laws is a society in which discrimination is likely to have only a limited detrimental effect on racial minorities.

I think this is a good point. I think the perfect example is the Civil Rights Act. It could not have passed without a majority of people and legislators being in support of its principles — and had it been imposed on a massively racist populace by a hypothetically anti-racist dictator, I think it would have failed. The counter to this argument (and it is addressed by Berg) is that yes, as a country in the 60′s most people had realized how racism was wrong, but it was necessary to impose it on small places filled with holdouts, such as in Little Rock.

The way I think about is to simply dodge the argument like the coward I am: the ways in which (historically, and even today) our government is pro-racism so dwarf the ways in which it is anti-racist that I really don’t care about the debate over the latter. For example, if I could get a pro-libertarian policy on the Drug War enacted, I think it would do so much good by relieving its incredibly discriminatory effects that I wouldn’t care which way we went on anti-discrimination laws.

While I was neither home-schooled, nor Christian, I understand the motivations of Mr. Jacobs here.

Two-and-a-half years ago my son Wes was starting seventh grade, and things weren’t going well for him. Sixth grade had been tough: small for his age, he was on the receiving end of a great deal of bullying that the school had no intention of controlling; plus, his teachers, with one wonderful exception, were indifferent or incompetent or both. In seventh grade things were still worse: all of his teachers did their jobs poorly — he was learning almost literally nothing — and the bullies’ aggressiveness was escalating. After a great deal of soul-searching, my wife and I decided to take him out of school and teach him at home for a period, just until we could figure out a long-term strategy.

What I do not understand is the extremely negative reaction from the commenter “Freddie:”

I went to public school, and I could not have had a better education, and I could not be prouder of where I went to school. You don’t know me, you don’t know where I went to school, you don’t know the hundreds of intelligent and hard-working and compassionate and incredibly open and fair minded kids I went to school with. You don’t know how competent and committed the large majority of my teachers were. And you don’t know how amazing a small few were who did whatever they could with limited resources to make things better for every student.

You don’t know my community. You don’t know my high school. If there’s ever a time I feel unsure or despairing about my political and ethical self, I just need to go back there. Because it’s a living, breathing argument for everything I believe about the justice of a egalitarian, progressive liberal democracy.

His entire argument seems to be: “I went to a really great public school, therefore you should keep your kid at his public school.” Which is like saying to a North Korean: “gee, my government is pretty nice and tolerant, quit your complaining!” I too went to an high quality (though I remember quite a few things about it that I didn’t like) public school. But I am also aware that there are schools of a lower quality, and I would consider myself very rude if I implied that another made a bad decision in removing their child from that school — it’s their child, and they know the circumstances better than I do. (more…)

Speaking of Dawkins, the advertisement for the paperback version of his recent book implies that religious belief is a necessary condition for suicide bombing. Wrong.