Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

… about this topic actually needs to be written:

We live in a country where, during a death row case, a judge and a prosecutor neglected to inform anyone that they’d been screwing for years. We live in a country where an innocent man was murdered by the state on the basis of hoodoo science. And people are obsessing over [the innocence of] some dude who raped a kid?

Can we at least all try to pretend that we actually believe that it shouldn’t matter how famous you are?

This is a huge deal:

We find that the teacher performance pay program was highly effective in improving student learning. At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations (SD) in math and language tests respectively….

We find no evidence of any adverse consequences as a result of the incentive programs. Incentive schools do significantly better on both mechanical components of the test (designed to reflect rote learning) and conceptual components of the test (designed to capture deeper understanding of the material),suggesting that the gains in test scores represent an actual increase in learning outcomes. Students in incentive schools do significantly better not only in math and language (for which there were incentives), but also in science and social studies (for which there were no incentives), suggesting positive spillover effects….

School-level group incentives and teacher-level individual incentives perform equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools significantly outperformed the group incentive schools in the second year….

We find that performance-based bonus payments to teachers were a significantly more cost effective way of increasing student test scores compared to spending a similar amount of money unconditionally on additional schooling inputs.

Via MR.  I can’t wait for an American version of the study.

Michael Moore’s new movie: “Capitalism: A Love Story,” advocates for the idea that capitalism has failed. Since I haven’t seen the movie yet, all I have is this Larry King interview:

King: Are you saying capitalism is a failure?

Moore: Yes. Capitalism. Yes. Well, I don’t have to say it. Capitalism, in the last year, has proven that it’s failed. All the basic tenets of what we’ve talked about the free market, about free enterprise and competition just completely fell apart. As soon as they lost, essentially, our money, they came running to the federal government for a bailout — for welfare, for socialism. And I thought the basic principle of capitalism was that it’s a sink-or-swim situation. And those who do well, the cream rises to the top and, you know, those who invest their money wrongly or, you know, don’t run their business the right way, then they don’t do well.

So Michael Moore believes that the primary principle of capitalism is the Darwinian part (I would debate this, but he has a right to believe it): good businesses succeed, bad ones fail.  Yet, isn’t that precisely what happened?  The investment banks who said “oh, those credit default swaps are a bad idea, I will not purchase as many” are doing much better than the ones who did.  The car companies that made efficient cars people wanted are doing better than the ones that didn’t.  It seems like things are going exactly as Michael Moore’s imaginary capitalist might want.  Well, with one exception:

And if you run your business the wrong way, where does it say that you or I or anybody watching this has to bail them out?

Michael Moore, upon hearing about the debate (that he himself described this way) between the capitalist method of letting a company “sink-or-swim” or the non-capitalist method of “bail[ing] them out,” he declared that he felt we shouldn’t choose the latter.  Which side is he on?  Similar misunderstandings persist:

I understand why everybody seemed to get behind it, because a lot of people were afraid, because these people down on Wall Street had taken our money and made bets with it. I mean, they essentially created this invisible virtual casino with people’s money — people’s pension funds, people’s 401(k)s. They took this money and they made bets. And then they made bets on the bets. And then they took out insurance policies on the bets. And then they took out insurance against the insurance — the credit default swaps.

Suddenly we’ve forgotten the entire “sink-or-swim” mentality.  The only thing I can glean from this is that Michael Moore believes that pension funds and 401k’s are not “capitalist,” because he implies that they shouldn’t be used as “bets.”  Michael Moore’s imaginary capitalist would approve of the failure of those who invested their 401k’s poorly.  It’s fine to say that people’s retirement funds should not be subject to the whims of the stock market and should be guaranteed somehow, but if capitalism is all about “sink-or-swim,” you can’t blame it when things, well, sink.  Michael Moore can’t even make his case against a strawman.

And here’s why I know it’s a strawman:

Moore: It didn’t change in terms of what I was looking at, but it did, obviously, offer probably the best example of why this is a system that is really corrupt at its core — corrupt because it doesn’t, it isn’t run with democratic — small “d” — democratic principles. There’s no democracy in our economy. You and I and the people watching have no say in how this economy is run. The upper 1 percent, the people down on Wall Street, the corporate executives, they’re the people that control this economy.

I think lots of people oppose capitalism for exactly the same reasons I oppose more central control economies: because they have this concept that a shadowy cabal of Wall Street corporate executives sit in a dark, smoky room and chart the course of our economy.  And so the logical response is “hey!  we should have more say in how this goes; if this is capitalism, it must be bad!”  But this is just people’s limited understanding of complex systems — in the same way that a religious mind immediately jumps to “creationism” when they see the immense complexity of biology, someone like Moore says:  ”I do not understand this, therefore someone must be controlling it.”  Yet all those shadowy corporate execs were unable to prevent the destruction of so much of their wealth.  Those at GM were unable to stop customers from fleeing their brand like the plague.  It’s almost like something else is controlling the system.

And this is where Moore’s “economic democracy” is very scary.  Yes, sure, accuse me of communist fear-mongering, but what else is he proposing?  Right now our economy is “controlled” (using Moore’s terms, because he’s not going to get the reality) by the economic decisions of billions of people.  I say “I want a Ford, not a GM!” and if enough people agree with me, Ford succeeds and GM fails.  It’s easy to get behind the idea of snatching the reins of power away from greedy CEO’s, but if democracy is going to rule our economy, it’s going to get to vote whether or not I get a Ford or a GM too.  Is this me exaggerating a slippery slope?  What else does Moore imply?  It’s precisely what our democratically elected government is doing right now with tariffs on tires, bailouts of GM and so forth — they are actually, democratically, influencing the economy.  Yet Michael Moore doesn’t like these bailouts because he (accurately) sees this as (for better or worse) taking our money and giving it to powerful corporations.  Does he want more or less economic democracy?

He really doesn’t get this:

Moore: I’ll tell you why. Because your employees are your biggest success. And, as you’ve noticed in the last few months, as the unemployment rate has gone up, so has the Dow Jones. Now, you’d think, you know, that Wall Street would respond with “Oh, my God, unemployment is going up, you know, this is bad for business.” But the reality is, is that Wall Street likes that. They like it when companies fire people because immediately the bottom line is going to show a larger profit.

King: Are you saying the investor is more important than the employee?

Moore: Yes. The investor — and the investor, these days, they want the short-term, quick profit and they want it now.

But as Moore just pointed out, the investor and the employees are not separate groups of people.  Most people think “shadowy guy in a suit” when they think investor, but Moore was kind enough to point out that they are really pension plans and 401k’s — owned by you and me, employees of other companies.  So if a company lays off a worker and splits up their salary amongst the investors, they were actually doing something Moore wanted: making the 401k’s and pension plans succeed.  Which do you want?

A final insanity:

Moore: And General Motors, that year [20 years ago, when Moore made Roger and me], made a profit of $4 billion. And yet they had just laid off another 30,000 people. Now, why would you lay people off when you’re making a record profit of $4 billion?

I mean that was totally insane. But they thought, well, you know, we can make a bigger profit. Maybe we can make $4.2 billion if we move those jobs to Mexico. And so they’re always, you know, we can make a little bit more money if we do this. By firing those workers, Larry, they got rid of the very people who buy their cars.

Yes, the reason GM went out of business was because their laid-off employees weren’t buying enough of their cars.  Does Moore seriously believe this?  Even if GM were purely a company that made cars (it isn’t) it’s hard to imagine that even if every single person who had ever been laid off by GM over the last 20 years used that experience to decide to never buy another GM car, that it would’ve had the effect on GM that we see today.  Ford was pretty damn aggressive with their workforce awhile back, but they seem to be doing much better than GM.  It’s almost like there are other factors at work!

Is this really the best anti-capitalism can muster?  A guy who thinks things actually work like this?  I’m accusing Moore of attacking a strawman of capitalism, but I kind of feel like I’m cheating because he’s a strawman for anti-capitalism. The sad part is, he can’t even show that the evil thing he’s imagined capitalism to be is wrong.

And we haven’t even really explored the” everything else” that is capitalism.  If you think it’s only CEO’s in dark rooms of Wall Street, then again, you’re an idiot.  Every day that food shows up on your table, you go see a bad documentary at your movie theatre, or buy gas at the station, all of these things are capitalism not failing.  It’s funny that he chose the last 20 years as the setting for his statements, especially when those 20 years have seen a billion people in China and India escape poverty as a result of adopting more capitalist systems.  It is fine to say “I feel like we should do more to mitigate the times that capitalism results in crises” but you can’t condemn the entire system without analyzing the benefits as well — at least not without stating why you feel like those billion people are worth sacrificing for your more equitable financial system.  And I’m not exaggerating — it’s Moore who said that the financial crisis was a condemnation of capitalism as a whole — as opposed to just a call for minor tinkering of our financial regulation, while leaving the rest intact.

A final cheap shot, and no, it’s not because he stole my last name: is anyone really going to listen to the economic advice of a guy who hangs out with Hugo Chavez?

The best sign to me about the economic crisis was that most everyone agreed that we shouldn’t respond to it with crazy protectionism or trade wars. Let’s not blow that reputation:

HONG KONG — Just two days after the United States slapped Chinese tire imports with hefty tariffs, Beijing has hit back by saying it would launch an anti-dumping investigation into automobile and chicken products from the U.S.

China’s Commerce ministry said Sunday that the probe was in response to complaints from local manufacturers that claim some products from the U.S. have an unfair advantage. At the same time, Beijing condemned protectionist policies adopted elsewhere.

The “protectionist” policy that seems to have triggered the Chinese tit-for-tat investigation was an order signed on Friday by President Barack Obama that imposes a 35% tariff on tires imported from China on top of the existing import duty of 4%.

Very bad.  Look, Mr. Obama, no amount of talking about financial regulation or health care reform having great economic benefits will matter if you do this stuff.  No one is going to take you seriously as someone trying to help the global economy recover if you enact tariffs like this.  Ludicrously, it is in the exact industry that we just spent billions (cash-for-clunkers) trying to make the product cheaper — and now we enact a tariff making tires (which, attentive readers may note, are an ingredient in many cars) more expensive.

At the risk of sounding apocalyptic, it’s a staple of even our miserable high school history education that the high protectionist tariffs enacted during/before the Great Depression made things a lot worse.  Is it really a revelation to our President? This is junior league stuff.

Or more accurately, I don’t get why people are so invested in them.  Jim Manzi:

First, I am making a fact claim. My fact claim is this: The findings of the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology (MES) do not demonstrate that the universe is not unfolding according to a divine plan that privileges human beings

This has been going on for awhile.  Manzi is just making, what seems to me, to be a pretty basic claim: that evolution doesn’t preclude believing in a god that’s running the show.  Which seems pretty defensible, especially when you can define “god” as just about anything you want, including “a guy who uses evolution as a tool to create human life.”  But you have a whole herd of “con” people who don’t want to grant that because they see it as a slippery slope for theocracy (I guess?) and the “pro” people who are trying to stake out some territory for whichever religion they support.  It’s “anti evolution” people vs “pro evolution” people, but neither side seems to realize that even if they win, they haven’t proven anything.

The whole thing is stupid (yes that’s my erudite conclusion), because there’s no possible result from this debate that helps anyone.  Let’s say Manzi is 100% right (and despite being an atheist, I think he is) — what does that get anyone?  Nothing.  You’ve proven that there might be a god.  Hurray.  That’s a long way from any specific religion, because absolutely zero religions only assert that there is a god.  They say “there is a god, therefore all these other things.”  What evolution does contradict is religions that say “here are religious tenets that you must accept, and one of them is that life was created in a way that is at odds with evolution” — such as “in seven days” or “from the maw of Cthulu” or whatever.  And, if your religion is also dependent on the idea that the book that expounds these tenets is infallible, then yes, evolution kicks out some of the major pillars of your faith.  And I think that’s why you get such resistance to evolution from “the bible is the literal and infallible word of god” Christians, because it does violate their principles.

But then, we really don’t even need such a high-falutin’ theory of evolution to do that — since there are blatant internal contradictions in the bible (specifically around some of the years in which kings took the throne, etc…)  And so Manzi points out some of these pre-evolution arguments as well:

[...] many changes that we observe around us seem to be what we intuitively believe to be evil – the classic case is a tortured and suffering child. How could a God that comports with our idea of benevolence actively desire every evil act in the universe? As everybody knows, this is the problem of evil.

Note that both of these objections to a divine plan are independent of evolution. Both are objections that could be (and were) raised long before Charles Darwin was born. So, for us to say that the MES [evolution, roughly speaking] rules out a divine plan that privileges humans, we must assert that there is some incremental knowledge provided by the MES that rules out such a divine plan that was not available to us prior to Darwin.

And this highlights, to me, the idiocy of the argument over the existence of god, and the term atheism in general.  It really is impossible to use evolution (or anything else) to prove that god doesn’t exist.  What you can do, however, is much important.  You can argue that god, whether he exists or not — doesn’t matter to the way I live my life.  I’m not really an atheist (though I do have the incidental belief that god doesn’t exist) — because that doesn’t define what I believe.  I am an a-religionist — I believe that the principles (when held collectively, obviously I agree with many individual ones) of all religions that I have encountered are wrong, outside their belief that there might be a god.  Whatever beliefs I do have I feel are justified by non-religious methods.  Which is why people like using the term “secular” or “humanist.”  Religion just doesn’t have any impact on my life at all.

Here’s the way I see it: if god popped up right now and said “look, you were wrong, I do exist”, I would say “oh, guess I was” and go on living my life the way I have been, except I would have a really cool story to tell people.  Because if everything that is, is because god made it that way, then I should be able to deduce what god wants me to do from looking at the world around me, regardless of any intermediaries.  And these are the conclusions I’ve come to.

Go now. Via Marginal Revolution.

“Health care reform is absolutely on a collision course with the doctor shortage. Something has to be done about it, and it is spelled GME.” (Graduate Medical Education)

Everyone’s plans for healthcare reform are pretty irrelevant in the face of not having enough doctors to execute them.

“Women physicians these days are increasingly dropping out of practice altogether in their 40s or early 50s. And men are seeking better lifestyle arrangements, too.”

This is because the medical profession is not very forgiving to part-time employment (there are high fixed operating costs). You can’t phase out slowly like you might be able to with other jobs — and being a physician in your 50′s means you have been working very hard for at least 28 solid years. The “lifestyle” issue is very big for both men and women.

As we value leisure and lifestyle more and more, becoming a doctor is becoming less and less appealing. Not everyone is willing to accept major curtailment of friends, family, hobbies, relaxation, sleep, dating and kids during the best years of their life — and make no mistake, that is what you accept if you are going to medical school and residency. Especially during internal medicine residencies (the one all those “primary care physicians” we want to have will be enduring) you are looking at 70-100 hour work weeks (yes, it’s “capped” at 80 hours officially, but that’s like saying drugs are illegal, so no one will have them).

At the most competitive residency programs, working 100 hours a week doesn’t mean just losing the things above, it means losing things like sitting down, eating, any sleep at all, and going to bathroom when you need to. If you want some scary statistics, look up how many residents abuse alcohol, prescription drugs, are on anti-depressants, are in therapy, etc…

The only reason we’re not facing an even more massive shortage right now is that residency programs are highly incentivized (up to including yearly 6 digit bribes from medicaid/care per resident) to retain residents they’ve conned into coming to their programs, and so have erected very high barriers to exit, or even changing specialties. Plus there are natural barriers, such as the sunk cost fallacy that “all those years would be wasted if I left” and your student loans, which can range up to a quarter of a million or more.

The takeaway from this is this most claims of “cutting costs” are bunk.  Every time you cut costs in the healthcare market, there are going to be doctors getting paid less.  Sure, you can try to make sure that some of those burdens are born by insurance companies or just those evil specialists, but it’s not so likely.  But we’re rapidly reaching the end of salary reductions for the “regular” doctors and pediatricians — we simply can’t pay them much less and have them make enough to repay their student loans.  It’s already to the point that salaries are so low that anyone who can is going into a specialty.  Decrease that any more and you won’t get any more — and those who exist will retire or be forced out of business.

The thing that everyone harps on; the rising cost of healthcare, is not going anywhere.  You can slow it (and you should) by removing waste/fraud/abuse, but that’s never as easy as you think, because one person’s waste and abuse is another’s healthcare.  Healthcare costs are going up, no matter what.

Sure, elected members of congress shouldn’t jump up and yell during speeches, but I think that there are lots of people who deserve to not be yelled at.  The most powerful person in the world is pretty much the last person I’m going to be concerned about getting yelled at too much.  Or having shoes thrown at them too often.

Besides, even though I don’t even remember which specific thing “liar!” was yelled at, this establishes a precedent we can’t very well maintain.  If someone has to yell whenever a president lies, these speeches will take forever.

Update: Mr. Coates has the historical angle, which is always my favorite angle.  Also, isn’t the British Parliament (filled with even more Angles) famous for incivility?  Maybe my memory of British CSPAN is wrong, but I seem to remember lots of yelling and insulting.  And didn’t the South Korean legislature get into a fistfight a few years back?

Yup, was right.  South Korean lawmakers fight.  Youtube brings more fun: Ukrainian lawmakers fight.  Nigerian politicians fight.  Wow, this is hilarious stuff.  This needs its own UFC-esque channel.  So hey, I guess just yelling at the president is pretty tame, as legislatures go.

Update 2: Wait, he yelled about the “won’t cover illegal immigrants” line?  Hah!  That was seriously the most outrageous thing he found in that speech?  The one thing he couldn’t just sit silent for?  Oh dear.

Update 3: Reason.com steals my ideas!  Double plus rude, that was some original youtube reporting there!    Jerks.

Wait, what the hell, did people really not know this?

I’M NOT sure how the blogosphere managed to collectively miss this, but very little attention was paid to this piece last week in Slate by cardiologist Darshak Sanghavi which explained how Medicare and most private health insurers set reimbursements for different kinds of physician procedures. Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound so exciting, but it’s actually very, very weird.

It’s almost impossible to believe, but according to this article in Annals of Internal Medicine (cited by Mr Sanghavi), it appears to be true: in setting the price for a procedure, Medicare doesn’t consider how much healthier it makes the patient, any more than the old Gosplanconsidered whether anyone wanted to buy the USSR’s cruddy steel. Amazingly, private insurance companies have followed suit, basing their reimbursement rates on the same RVUs set by the AMA. The article points to the way this system has resulted in artificially high numbers of specialists and a shortage of primary-care doctors, but the problem goes deeper: this kind of pricing would obviously lead to the kinds of distortions Atul Gawande found in his celebrated New Yorker article this summer, on why America spends so much on health care.

I am honestly not trying to sound condescending here, because the reason I know this is not because I’m smart or well-read, it’s because my wife told me — but I just kind of assumed it was one of the major features of the healthcare debate that people would know about.  Also, the part is bold is extremely important.  It is not “amazing” that private insurers do this, it’s pretty obvious that they have to.  If you reimburse for less than Medicare, doctors will (over time) just bill Medicare for the procedure.  If you reimburse for more, doctors will bill you for it, and you’ll pay out much more than your competitors.  And unless the price-setting geniuses at Medicare and the AMA pick the precisely right price (ha ha, especially since they have a financial incentive to go high) then there’s going to be some problems.

And the source of this cushy, Soviet-style pricing scheme appears to be the monopoly power of America’s doctors’ association. Now, this is the first time I’ve ever read about this system, and it’s possible that I’m completely missing something here. But it seems to me that if anyone is really worried about socialism in America’s health-care system, they should be taking a close look at the AMA’s RVU Update Committee and why it is allowed to set the wages that doctors are paid.

Well, duh — this one of the key features of why I’m (and I assumed lots of other people) are against the healthcare reform being proposed.  The more government control of this sector, the more important that pricing scheme becomes, and the more incentive doctors have to lobby to inflate it, and then everyone’s costs go up, including the people on private plans.  I thought the “Medicare determining private insurance reimbursement rates” concept was front and center in the healthcare debate.  I guess if it’s not, it should be.  It’s a prime example of how the level of government involvement in healthcare is already making the system worse. (more…)

Seems like this would backfire: (via CNN)

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.  I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn. I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.  I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

He then goes on to describe how important education is — and I agree.  But the problem is, as highlighted by the portion in bold above, education is not just about how hard you work, or how responsible you are, or how responsible your parents are.  Well, to be fair, right now it is — because the educational system is doing such a bad job, the only variables left are how hard you self-educate, and to what extent your parents can teach you, or purchase extra teaching for you.  Which is why life success is so correlated to those things.  But this is not how it should be.

The entire point of a public education system is to give those who don’t have those pre-conditions for success a chance — and ours is failing precisely those people.  And, despite that poor education, I believe that most kids (apparently this is addressed at school children of all ages, k-12) are capable of seeing through the silliness of Obama’s speech, most likely due to the practice they’ve had with all the other authority figures who have lectured them over the years.  By talking about “responsible teachers” he’s basically providing cover for what we must frankly admit are terrible teachers (like all professions, there are good and bad teachers, but it is not a coincidence that there are more bad ones at schools that produce bad results) and terrible schools.  If you’re a young boy in an inner city school where teachers and administrators assume you’re just a thug and refuse your your correct homework because “you’re too stupid to have done this right without cheating” then Obama’s speech is not going to motivate you.  It’s just going to reinforce what you already know: that this system had a responsibility to inspire you, but that it doesn’t really give a shit.  And so you’re going to check out.

And perhaps more importantly, this is why Democrats should be the one who don’t want Obama to speak to the kids — this makes him the public face of their education –

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too.

– their really bad education.  When kids drop out of school, (or more accurately, mentally drop out) they don’t say “wow, Obama was right, I just wasn’t responsible enough.”  No, they say “school sucks, it’s their fault.”  Sure, we can say this betrays their lack of responsibility because they’re blaming the school instead of themselves — but have you seen what their schools are like?  These kids aren’t stupid.  They’re just looking at a system that seems designed to imprison, abuse and disrespect them, and deciding that maybe they don’t really like those things very much.  And now Obama is the one telling them to stick it out, and if it doesn’t work out as well as he’d thought, it’s because, well, you’re just not responsible enough:

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

I nearly laughed out loud at the “best schools in the world.”  Yup, school kids, stop failing in your responsibilities to yourself!  That’s definitely the only thing standing in your way!  I think my response would’ve been a lot more profane if I were still forced to be in school.  No offense to adults like Mr. Obama, but here’s what you don’t get: kids see right through this crap.  If you’re telling them that the teachers (and incredibly, the president himself!) are trying really hard to make our schools the best in the world, they are not going to believe you, because they actually have to spend every day in those schools.  If you then follow up with how “if only they were more responsible, they could grow up to be doctors and senators,” they are going see how stupid that is.  To the extent that they buy into the system, they will feel betrayed.  To the extent that they’ve already checked out, they will see this as just another stupid adult telling them to work hard and everything will be great, despite how that isn’t working in the reality they see every day.

That’s what struck me: this is a very, very conservative speech.  Especially in light of Tyler Cowen’s “What is Conservatism“:

4. On the domestic front, education is the keystone issue.  Societies succeed if strong family structures support an emphasis on learning and acculturation.  While this does not rule out public sector education, if public sector education works the credit is not to be found in the public sector.

And especially:

10. Responsibility is a more important value than either liberty or equality.

It’s long been a conservative stereotype that the poor or unsuccessful are that way because they’re lazy, irresponsible or don’t try hard enough.  Why is Obama the one saying this? (more…)

This is a good piece by Jim Manzi:

I’ve been attending a fascinating series of monthly dinners here in Washington, in which liberals and libertarians exchange ideas. One thing that has become clear to me through these dinners is that there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism.

He then sets up this paradox:

The freedom to experiment needs to include freedom to experiment with different governmental (i.e., coercive) rules. So here we have the paradox: a liberty-as-means libertarian ought to argue, in some cases, for local autonomy to restrict some personal freedoms.

This brings up the obvious example of this:

Now, obviously, there are limits to this. What if some states want to allow human chattel slavery? Well, we had a civil war to rule that out of bounds.

Good point.  I think most libertarians tend to think that their beliefs are justified using the tools of the first category (liberty-as-goal, type one) and then subsequently then think that federalism (a tool of liberty-as-means, type two) is a good way to achieve it.  A combination of both seems to be necessary.  If you are purely federalistic, you would allow slavery — but then Manzi touches on an Arnold Kling-esque point:

Further, this imposes trade-offs on people who happen to live in some family, town or state that limits behavior in some way that they find odious, and must therefore move to some other location or be repressed. But this is a trade-off, not a tyranny.

But in some cases, this is a tyranny — and actually in precisely the scenario he suggests: slavery.  It requires some basic type-one libertarian leanings to declare slavery wrong, because you feel that slaves have rights that can’t be violated by slavery.

But even the type two has a solution for this: “sure, we let a state declare slavery legal, but for federalism to work, we require that all people have the right of exit from that state, including people the state declares to be slaves.”   A slave state that lets slaves leave whenever they want won’t be a slave state for very long.  Now, Manzi could retort that the definition of a person is something that states could have the right to determine (for example, in the contest of abortion) within an extremely federalistic system, but I think this points to the fact that no one is a pure type two libertarian — there has to be some mutual adherence to the moral concept of what constitutes a rights-endowed person that trumps everything else.

So, I think that, for type two libertarians, this is less of a paradox (and I think Manzi himself states that it isn’t a paradox for type one libertarianism already) than it might seem.  Plus, there is another method of objecting to liberty-infringing policies that a type two could put forth, but it isn’t necessarily libertarian: you could argue simply that the documents that all of the various experimenting states have jointly agreed upon place this action out of bounds.  You could say that they should be interpreted in such a way that slavery is illegal, regardless of the moral (type one) or practical (type two) issues.

Other randomness: this might seem like craziness, but at what point do we start to allow people to change their jurisdiction without necessarily changing their location?  For example, even right now, I am currently a citizen of Ohio, but most of the laws governing my employment are those of Arkansas, the state in which I work — though I am only rarely within the actual borders of that state.  Obviously many laws are not transportable in this way: Ohio traffic laws should always take precedence in Ohio, no matter my preference for the ones in Arkansas.

But take Manzi’s prostitution example: if the entire transaction takes place within private property and no argument could be made that negative externalities are seeping out and harming prudish natives, couldn’t one elect to be a member of a different state’s jurisdiction for matters of sex, regardless of petty matters of borders?  As more of our employment, entertainment and transactions take place well, in the United States of nowhere — it seems like one day this crazy libertarian scenario might work.

Megan McArdle managed to last a week longer than me before declaring healthcare debate pointless:

It’s a judgement call.  Not all values are commensurable.  There are multiple theories of politics.  And justice.

So why talk any more?  I can’t believe how nasty this debate has gotten.  I can’t believe that people who claim to value a classically liberal market society, on the one hand, and people who say that all they want to do is help people, turn into such screaming, hate-filled lunatics when the subject comes up.  A debate over health care should not remind me so much of a debate over the Iraq War.  I write thousands of words on innovation, and John Holbo boils my concerns about lost years of life down to “indifference to the poor”–as if, first, the poor will not be helped by new treatments, and second, we should do anything at all, no matter how horrific the results, as long as it helps the poor.  Well, and third, as if the poor weren’t on Medicaid, but that’s another rant.  This is about as useful as my saying that John Holbo’s basic philosophical premise is a desire for my grandchildren to die young.  I devoutly hope that if any of his freshmen said anything remotely this silly in a paper, Mr. Holbo would flunk them.

This is why I think Yglesias’ wish that we focus more on the moral/ethical component of political issues, while perhaps a good idea if everyone were calm and rational, is probably a bad idea in practice.  Mr. Holbo has decided to state that McArdle doesn’t really have real objections to healthcare reform, but is motivated primarily by a desire to see poor people die.  I wish that were an exaggeration to cast him in a bad light, but it isn’t:

Philosophically, there just isn’t a case to be made against reform unless it’s this simple one: if you don’t have any money, you shouldn’t be entitled to any medicine. McArdle is very indignant when people accuse her of indifference to the fate of the poor, but – honestly – if it isn’t that, then it’s nothing. At the philosophical level.

This is what we get when people bring the moral and ethical component to policy debates.  ”The opponents of my chosen policy are evil and wish to see poor people die.”  What’s especially hilarious about this is that we explicitly have a policy already in place that provides healthcare for people who “don’t have any money” and nothing she has ever proposed involves removing it.

If healthcare reformers were merely proposing expanding medicaid coverage, that would be one thing.   But they seem to insist that opponents of their plan are opponents of medicaid, when they are not.  The reason for this is that they have well-honed their rhetorical skills against these people, whom they believe to be evil.  Fair enough.   But this is, in reality, a debate about a massive reconstitution of the healthcare industry as a whole.  There are bound to be many who have substantive issues with this, but they are more difficult to cast in an “evil” light, which subsequently makes it harder to rally support and denounce foes.  It might not be intellectually honest, but they certainly feel it is productive in a political sense.  So, they’ll continue to do it — though I would be remiss if I failed to note that many opponents of reform do exactly the same thing.  So people who have honest objections to healthcare reform get disgusted and go do things that are more likely to produce results, like smashing their fingers with claw hammers.

Everything Scott Sumner writes is good, but this is some of the best:

[...] the obvious choice for most successful prediction [of the past 20 years] is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 claim that “history was ending,” that the great ideological battle between democratic capitalism and other isms was essentially over, and that henceforth the world would become gradually more democratic, peaceful, and market-oriented.

Good news is never news.  No one ever wants to hear about how things are getting better.  Who would we blame?  What political goal would this serve?

Please, please, don’t let this be real:

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

No one could ever write this in seriousness, right?  This has to be some post-modern inside joke (albeit in very bad taste) that I just don’t get.  There’s no way that a real person could write “yeah, some no name lady dying is no big deal so long as a big and powerful guy has some beneficial ideas” in good faith.  This is not a debate.  If you ask this question, you need to think long and hard about your priorities.

I’m not big on declaring people’s statements out of bounds of a healthy political discourse, but if this really is a serious article, then I think I feel confident saying that this qualifies.

It’s a joke right?  There really aren’t people out there who consider people dying to be acceptable prices to pay for Noble Statesmen, even if someone buys the convoluted argument that the two events were related.  Because that would be a horrible thing to believe, and then I would have to worry about those people being extremely indifferent to my death, if I happened to be an enabling mechanism for some really good law.

Via Reason.com.