And Just Where Is The Constitutional Authority For FEMA, Congressman Paul?

My statement back during the time of Katrina, which was a rather risky political statement: why do the people of Arizona have to pay for me to take my risk... less people will be exposed to danger if you don't subsidize risky behavior... I think it's a very serious mistake to think that central economic planning and forcibly transferring wealth from people who don't take risks to people who take risks is a proper way to go. -- Ron Paul, The Charles Goyette Show, March 30, 2007

Herewith, a notice from Congressman Ron Paul's office assuring constituents in the Texas 14th Congressional District, which by the way includes Galveston, that "getting help to everyone affected [by Hurricane Ike] is his utmost priority."

The Congressman’s office is acting as a liaison between Federal agencies and constituents to ensure that available assistance is as accessible as possible, and that FEMA and other government agency activities are appropriate, efficient and helpful to Texans.

You can, of course, make an argument even as a libertarian -- I know this because I make it, myself, from time to time -- that standing on principle is sometimes simply foolish. I, for one, will gladly accept any federal largess that comes my way, too. I'm a libertarian, not an idiot.

Even so, it might be amusing to hear the good congressman explain the differences between federal aid following Katrina and federal aid following Ike.

Selfishness, Egoism and Altruistic Libertarianism

It is a cliché among many psychologists and economists that human beings behave self-interestedly. Moreover, since Adam Smith’s somewhat theological, somewhat anthropomorphic “invisible hand” metaphor, it has been almost an article of faith within the latter discipline that the collective, societal result of individual self-interested behavior is ironically salubrious.

It is a faith to which I also ascribe, although like all but the most zealous of religious fanatics I season that faith with the occasional heresy here and there. Crucially, however, it needs to be noted at the outset that not just any sort of self-interested behavior contributes to the common wealth and greater good. Specialization and trade, voluntary association, bargained-for exchanges, common rules and some sort of enforcement mechanism to address rule breaking are all necessary elements for human society to flourish economically, for the invisible hand to prove, as it were, optimally dexterous.

Most importantly, “self-interested” is not synonymous with “selfish.”

Discussions about selfishness elsewhere on this blog got me thinking about these things. I am no Ayn Rand scholar, nor do I purport to be an Objectivist. Undoubtedly, however, Rand’s followers constitute a significant and vocal segment of the libertarian community. (It’s a non-gated community, after all, noted for its lack of zoning regulations, restrictive covenants or entrance requirements.) Anyway, given that Rand published a collection of essays entitled The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, it should be clear just from the title’s use of the word “egoism” that she or Nathanial Brandon, as the case may be, intended to give the word “selfishness” a special, technical meaning in the overall context of Rand’s worldview.

But selfishness and egoism are two separate things, a fact I assume Rand understood perfectly well when she deliberately invoked the apparent contradiction of selfishness as a virtue for its rhetorical impact. Whatever Rand’s standing as an intellectual and participant in the history of political philosophy, she was also certainly a polemicist with a particular political agenda in opposition to what she correctly perceived as the 20th century’s greatest threat to humankind; namely, the threat of collectivism. You simply cannot read Rand fairly without bearing that in mind.

The important point is that selfishness is a common language concept, not a technical term. Anyone fluent in English knows what it means and knows, more importantly, that it entails a negative moral judgment. Selfishness is by definition a bad thing. It’s using up all the hot water in the shower when others are waiting, eating up all the cookies instead of sharing them with friends or family, and so forth. (Except, perhaps, at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, although Ms. Sinclair couldn’t have really been much of an Objectivist since the first thing she did was violate Maggie's pacifier property rights.)

Selfishness moreover logically entails and presupposes that there is some preexisting community to which the individual belongs and some moral commitment to that specific community. I, for example, live with my family in a household where there is a finite supply of hot water and cookies. If I stand in the shower for an hour shoving one increasingly soggy chocolate chip cookie after another into my mouth until both supplies are exhausted, I am acting selfishly relative to my family. It is less clear that I am being selfish when I buy the last package of cookies at the store, thus depriving the next cookie junkie from his or her fix, or when I purchase the big, heavy-duty water heater for my house. It is less clear, still, that it is properly called selfishness to eat any of those cookies or use any of that hot water knowing that many millions of people across the globe have neither cookies to eat nor any hot water to shower with.

To be sure, there are those who claim that the last is selfish, although the overwhelming majority don’t really believe it based on how they, themselves, actually live. The notion that we as individuals have moral obligations to humanity at large is, to put it mildly, very problematic. The point, in any case, is that we wouldn’t be inclined to call all sorts of behavior like eating a cookie selfish simply because every cookie eaten is, necessarily, a cookie no one else can eat. The morality of sharing does not require splitting my cookie into several billion pieces so everyone can have some.

Egoism, by contrast, is not an ordinary language word or concept. Mothers don’t scold their children for being egoists when they selfishly eat the last cookie. Indeed, if you peruse its Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry you will discover that there is not even a single technical sense of the term.

We pause now while I grind a philosophical axe for a moment. There is a critical difference between, on the one hand, the theory of psychological egoism, the theory that claims it is simply a fact that human beings always and under all circumstances behave self-interestedly and, on the other, ethical or rational egoism. These theories contend that morally right behavior or rational behavior, respectively, simply is self-interested behavior.

These latter may be right or wrong and are certainly subject to criticism, but at least they both admit of the possibility of unethical or irrational behavior. That is to say, the ethical egoist acknowledges that people are capable of behaving other than self-interestedly, she simply argues that they shouldn’t. So, too, the rational egoist doesn’t claim that we always act rationally, i.e., self-interestedly, but only that we should or that it is only when we do that our actions deserve the appellation “rational.”

Psychological egoism, by contrast, obliterates the normative force of self-interested behavior, whether for good or bad. Indeed, it obliterates normative considerations in the same way all strong forms of determinism do: if “ought” implies “can” but one cannot act differently than one does then it is absurd to claim that one ought to have acted differently. Moreover, if all behavior is, by definition, self-interested, then it is a fair question to ask of this non-falsifiable metaphysical theory what sort of substantive claim, if any, it really is making.

Axe grinding concluded, I’m reasonably confident that Rand was an egoist in both the ethical and rational egoism senses. In retrospect, however, it is perhaps unfortunate that she chose to use “selfishness” as a rhetorical device to describe her egoism because it opens both Objectivism in particular and libertarianism in general to the sort of prejudicial criticisms Mr. Hanley recently bemoaned.

In fact, Rand aside, there is nothing at all incompatible about libertarianism and altruism. Not, at least, if altruism is understood not as Rand technically used the term but simply as the opposite of mere selfishness. It is hardly altruistic, in the ordinary sense of the term, to coerce other people to behave in supposedly selfless ways in order to achieve your personal vision of the greater collective good even if that greater good is thereby realized. But it is unarguably immoral to coerce others using that rationale when, in fact, it becomes painfully obvious that the exact opposite results.

Indeed, if we’re looking for a single lesson from the history of the 20th century, we could do much worse than conclude that, no matter how noble their advocates’ intentions may have been, collectivist social and economic orders yield disastrous results. Obviously, therefore, noble intentions are no guarantee of success. Libertarianism has never claimed that in a libertarian world order everyone will win and "all must have prizes." In fact, as far as I know, only utopian collectivists and Lewis Carroll's Dodo have made that claim.

But then Carroll, of course, knew he was talking nonsense.

Patent Nonsense

One of the things that distinguishes intellectual property from the more intuitively obvious tangible variety is that the very notion of intellectual property requires a justification in the sense that tangible property almost never does. Utopians of one variety or another have tried, almost always with disastrous consequences, to abolish the institution of private property, but as far as I know there has never been a society that has denied the existence or necessity of property rights of any sort at all. Typically, their alternative has been to assert some sort of collectivist or communitarian ownership; but while it may be that the clan or the tribe “own everything in common” or the “people (collectively) own the means of production,” woe be any rival clan or tribe or people who happen by and start asserting similar property rights in the same stuff. Wars have been known to start that way even in utopia.

The obvious thing about tangible property is that, being stuff, it’s there whether we call it property or not. That is, whether ♫ This land is my land (or) this land is your land ♫, this land is here whether we say so or not, let alone whether ♫ This land was made for you and me. ♫ And so are its flora and fauna and minerals and water running through it or beneath its surface, etc.

How human society has gone from the realization that the world is filled with stuff to the notion that some of it is our stuff (or your stuff or, most importantly, my stuff) is an interesting topic, but not one with which I wish to concern myself here in any detail. If you care, I’ll merely note in passing that I reject all “natural right” theories of property, personally, especially including the so-called Lockean “labor + stuff = property” theory.

Still, I constantly run across fellow self-described libertarians who believe in one sort of natural rights theory or another and a fairly large number of them believe that their theory justifies the notion of tangible personal property (whether, forgive the legalism here, real or chattel) but not intellectual property. Intellectual property – by which I mean here the usual unholy trinity of patents, copyrights and trademarks – is on this account the equivalent of a state enforced and, worse yet, state created monopoly. To which I respond:

Yes, that’s true. Exactly like the state-created and state-enforced monopoly any owner of any sort of property whatsoever enjoys versus any non-owner. To be sure, the land would still be there with or without a state enforced legal system, but it wouldn’t be anyone’s property. Not in anything like the sense we mean by property now, that is. All of our philosophical twaddle about what should or shouldn’t or can or can’t be deemed property aside, the ownership of a patent or trademark is no different from the ownership of an automobile or a condominium. They are all creatures of the state or, more specifically, of a state enforced legal system one of the principle justifications for is the sorting out of competing claims over the same resources.

Ah, say my opposition, but land and the stuff we find and trap or kill or take and make new stuff out of on the land (and sea) are quintessential examples of real resources; namely, natural resources. Patents and trademarks and copyrights are mere fictions.

I agree. But they are highly useful fictions, and if my libertarian confrères would get off their pseudo-Kantian high horses about absolute right and wrong and concentrate instead on the far more useful questions of pragmatic good or bad, I think they’d be more inclined to agree with my perspective. Which is as follows:

(1) The state of the law of intellectual property is in need of serious reform, but (2) we would all be better served by, for example, a reformed law of patents than by the entire abolition of patents. For you theorists, I will add (3) there are no serious theoretical reasons, ethical or otherwise, precluding us from, as it were, saving the baby even as we throw out the dirty bathwater here.

By way of giving an example of the sort of unnecessary and counterproductive infanticide I have in mind here, let me quote extensively from a recent Kevin Carson piece over at Art of The Possible. Carson makes his point by quoting a commenter there, and because I am too lazy to edit extensively I will do the same, as follows:

2) Eliminate drug patents. Patents are often justified by the allegedly high cost of developing drugs. But as frequent AoTP commenter quasibill observed, the main source of the expense is not developing the version of the drug that is actually marketed, but gaming the patent system. He challenged the popular misimpression, encouraged by smarmy drug company ads,

that what big pharma is researching is cancer meds. It’s not. In the rare instances that big pharma produces and markets such medicines, it has purchased them from small start-ups that themselves are the result normally of a university laboratory’s work. When big pharma cites to billions of research costs, what it is talking about is the process whereby they literally test millions of very closely related compounds to find out if they have a solid therapeutic window. This type of research is directly related to the patent system, as changing one functional group can get you around most patents, eventually. So you like to bulk up your catalogue and patent all closely related compounds, while choosing only the best among them, or, if you’re second to market, one that hasn’t yet been patented.

This work is incredibly data intensive, and requires many Ph.D’s, assistants, and high powered computers and testing equipment to achieve. But it is hardly necessary in the absence of a patent regime. In the absence of patents, (and of course the FDA), you could just focus on finding a sufficient therapeutic window, and cut out the remaining tests.

Patents also grossly distort the market, leading drug companies to focus most of their research on “me too” drugs that tweak an existing formula just enough to enable it to be repatented, and use it to replace the older version that’s about to go generic. Then the drug reps hit the hospitals and clinics, drop off some free samples and pamphlets, and (most M.D.s relying on drug industry handouts for their information on drugs that come out after they leave med school) the “me, too” drug becomes the new standard form of treatment.
The license cartels and drug patents are two examples of essentially the same phenomenon: First, the government creates a honey pot by enforcing a monopoly and making particular forms of service artificially lucrative. Then the market skews toward where the money is, as practitioners adopt the more lucrative business model and crowd out affordable alternatives.

Okay, so let’s clear the air here a bit. In the first place, whatever may be the truth about the claim that “[p]atents are often justified by the allegedly high cost of developing drugs,” the better question is whether we will have more and better drug research and development with patents or without them regardless of whether those patents go to “big pharma” or to “small start-up firms.” That is, we shouldn’t really care who the incentive of profitable patent rights is spurring on to do research, and that is true whether such research is on cancer drugs or toe fungus drugs.

If Mr. Carson or his commenter believe that there are better ways to encourage such research, they should by all means argue for them. I, however, know of no better incentive than self interest and until I am shown fairly compelling evidence to the contrary, I am not inclined to believe that removing the profit motive from drug research is likely to produce a better, more readily available or affordable pharmacopeia.

Now, that said, no one bothering to read this far should leave thinking I’m an apologist for the pharmaceutical companies. Their successful efforts some years back to retroactively extend the life of patent protection (and similar so-called “reforms” in copyright for the entertainment industry) constitutes nothing more than massive theft and the politicians who voted for such theft should all be horsewhipped. They all created and / or invented whatever they did when the state of the law provided a certain term of proprietary rights and they should enjoy the benefit of that bargain, but nothing more. If the case could be made for patents or copyrights of longer duration, whether for drugs or novels or whatever, fine. But such revised laws should take effect only prospectively. Retroactive extension deprives the public (you and me) of our rightful future expectations with regard to these properties, future expectations we have been paying for throughout the life of the original patents or copyrights. Moreover (okay, go ahead and get back on your Kantian high-horse for a moment here), fair’s fair and a bargain is a bargain.

I don’t deny that the current state of patent law should be extensively reformed (starting with repealing the patent extensions granted “big pharma” in the recent past). It is also true that, to use Mr. Carson’s phrase, patents “distort the market ... [skewing it] toward where the money is.” But, ignoring the emotive connotations of “distort,” it is true of all property schemes that they provide incentives toward certain sorts of behavior and against others.

Perhaps the current system does encourage gaming of sorts which we want to discourage, instead. Perhaps we permit new patents on new drugs that are too closely similar to previously developed drugs. I say perhaps. In fact, I don’t know whether it does or not. The point, however, is that there are all sorts of ways of changing the existing system short of simply abolishing it.

And replacing it with what? The milk of human kindness as a spur to research or, what I fear is the real intended replacement, more massive government control and funding?

Do you want more invention and innovation or less? Do you want more creative works of art or fewer? Those, I think, are the critical questions in any useful discussion of intellectual property. And at the risk of repeating myself, details aside, I know of no better means of getting more of both than by encouraging self-interest through the creation of private property interests in the fruits of such invention and creativity.

Do you?

New Corn Laws Adam Smith Would Also Dislike*

Diamonds are scarce like every other economic good. Their scarcity, however, is vastly exaggerated by those in the business of marketing them as a luxury. If the cure for cancer were discovered tomorrow, however, and if it somehow required natural, i.e., not man-made diamonds, the demand for diamonds would skyrocket and they would legitimately command an even higher price.

Food, by contrast, is not a luxury but a necessity, at least in its most elementary forms. Moreover, the poorer you are, the more you will spend of whatever your income may be on food and the more vulnerable you will be to any sudden and significant increase in its price. Four dollar a gallon gasoline inconveniences middle-class Americans but a 75% increase in global food prices is catastrophic for poor people around the world.

Which is precisely what an unpublished World Bank study is being reported as claiming.

In the rush to report such things (and, yes, the rush to report such reports), it more often than not occurs that sensational conclusions such as this are not only misleadingly taken out of context but, once the data is actually made available, subsequently shown to be unsubstantiated by that data. That needs to be said here, as well.

Still, whatever the figure may be, whether it is 75% or the laughably and unbelievably small 3% the U.S. government has claimed plant-derived fuels contribute to recent food price increases, it takes no more than common sense (never in large supply, I grant you) and a passing grade in intro economics to realize that a new and large demand for a commodity will at the very least temporarily raise its market price. Moreover, at some point, if that demand continues or, worse yet, continues to grow, suppliers will not be able to meet such increased demand at whatever the former market price may have been.

U.S. energy policy (not unlike U.S. health care policy) is criminally broken. I mean “criminal” in a moral, not a legal sense, and yet the fact that alternative bio-fuels like ethanol are being mandated by our elected weasels in Washington artificially skewing both the energy and the food markets and contributing no end to the misery of the world’s poor probably should be a crime of some sort. It is, in fact, simply a forced redistribution of wealth for nothing more than the ephemeral political advantage of those office holders who temporarily placate their constituencies as a result, never mind the unintended and sometimes tragic consequences others must suffer.

But that is the political reality. Starving people in third world nations don’t vote in U.S. elections, whereas Kansas and Nebraska corn farmers do.

(* Yes, I do in fact know that when Adam Smith first wrote about corn laws the word "corn" was a generic term for grains.)

It's a Bug and a Feature!

Today's (UK) TimesOnline reports "Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol." The scientists in question are the Silicon Valley variety and the bugs in question are the genetically engineered variety. The report goes on:

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

So it is, or will be. How soon, however, is another question and another month is, to put it mildly, a tad optimistic.

But who knows? That's the thing about technological revolutions. While they do, indeed, build on what has been discovered or invented before, there really are "Eureka!" moments that change everything forever, too. I have little doubt that as physics, engineering, electronics and computer science were the motive forces of 20th century technology, genetic engineering and genetic medicine will be the big stories of the 21st century, certainly revolutionizing medicine and quite possibly revolutionizing energy production, too.

Meanwhile, no word so far on whether scientists have had any luck bioengineering bugs who eat politicians and excrete productive people.

The Ethics of Public Health and Safety Officials

Today’s (UK) Independent Online runs a story entitled "Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits." While noting that the now over 25 year old disease continues to kill “more than all wars and conflicts,” the far more newsworthy (in the sense of new and unusual) part of the story is as follows:

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organizations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalized epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

This is, to be sure, not good news for homosexuals or Africans; but it is, that sad fact notwithstanding, well past time the epidemiological realities of HIV/Aids risk were acknowledged. Just in case there is an outbreak of candor going on among public officials (yes, I know), perhaps someone could say the same thing about resources misspent through the generalized screening for possible terrorist suspects to avoid profiling.

This is a delicate topic. When the “pink disease” was first detected among a handful of homosexual men in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, this originally named Gay Related Immune Deficiency began to attract serious general public attention in the U.S. only after cases of heterosexuals contracting the disease (e.g., female sexual partners of AIDS patients and blood transfusion recipients) were documented. I speak here purely anecdotally, but my impression in the early to mid 1980s was that the U.S. shifted rapidly from a state of almost complete indifference over the plight of homosexuals and IV drug users to a state of panic over their own risk.

Of course, the medical community was mostly ignorant of the nature of HIV/Aids, itself, in the 1980s. But a decade later we had a much better understanding of the retrovirus and, thankfully, much better available treatments. Most relevant here, however, we also had ample epidemiological evidence leading to an almost overwhelmingly obvious conclusion: white, heterosexual male, non-IV drug users -- in other words, the demographic group who wielded the most power in the U.S. and, indeed, in the world – faced just about the smallest real risk of contracting HIV/Aids possible.

Counter-factual arguments being what they are, there is no way of telling whether public support and, more to the point, public funding for HIV/Aids research would have been nearly as extensive in the past quarter century if the general public had known that claims of the universal risk of contracting HIV/Aids were, although true, highly misleading.

Certainly, however, it is at least not unreasonable to suspect that support and funding would not have been as extensive, and perhaps not nearly as extensive, which raises the following interesting ethical question: Is misinforming or misleading the public ever ethically justified on grounds of public health and safety?

By way of addressing this issue somewhat obliquely, let’s ignore for now concerns about giving undeserved ammunition to homophobes and drug warriors whose worldview continues to include the belief that HIV/Aids is God’s punishment for being gay or using drugs. (In passing, I have yet to hear from those who hold that view how it is that God is so piss-poor at punishing junkies and queers that all He can manage to do is put them in a higher risk category?!?) Let’s consider Africa, instead.

A month or so ago, the Onion ran an almost throw away one-liner in the crawl below one of their Onion News Network videos. It read:

ABC cancels new reality show Who Wants To Save Africa? after second episode.

Indeed. (And, yeah, it’s so painfully true that it is funny.)

Of course, you’d be hard pressed to come up with ways in which sub-Saharan Africa isn’t a basket case, and even if you could magically eliminate HIV/Aids from the continent, Africa’s public health record would still be abysmal. But, no doubt about it, HIV/Aids has been epidemic in Africa’s general population to an extent unlike everywhere else. Why?

Dr. de Cock (I know, I know!) says:

It is the question we are asked most often – why is the situation so bad in sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors – more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships.

Sexual behavior is obviously important but it doesn't seem to explain [all] the differences between populations. Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships creating sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point of view, are more efficient at spreading infection.

Which is to say that there are not only political and economic differences but also social differences in much of African culture which make the spread of HIV/Aids that much more intractable.

Here is the reality, though. As terrible as HIV/Aids is, it is only one of the terrible ways people die needlessly in Africa or, for that matter, around the world. As reason’s Ronald Bailey recently wrote in a report on the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus Conference, “[T]he number 1 priority identified by the experts in the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus was combating HIV/AIDS. That dropped to number 19 in the 2008 ranking."

Ceteris paribus, the same must be said of the U.S., as well.

There are, to be sure, all sorts of objections that can be raised in good faith to that perspective. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the medical research focusing on a cure for HIV/Aids didn’t yield important findings for other diseases and disorders. I suspect that the rise of HIV/Aids in the U.S. actually contributed positively to the struggle for gay civil and human rights, ironically enough. Whether disingenuous or not, suggesting that the entire population was similarly at risk for HIV/Aids diminished the stigma unfairly attached to those who, for whatever reason, contracted it. These are certainly collateral benefits to the emphasis in HIV/Aids research and public health policy in the past twenty-five or so years.

But every benefit has a cost, and every tradeoff is susceptible to the reasonable question, was that a good deal? Put differently, only progressives – and not very bright progressives, at that – whine at this point “Well, it shouldn’t be a case of ‘Either / Or.’ We should be able to support HIV/Aids research and treatment and address all those other health and safety problems, too. You’re arguing a false dilemma.”

It may be a false “dilemma,” but it is a very real tradeoff. A dollar spent on X is necessarily not a dollar spent on Y.

So, too, with our most recent insanity, the War On People Living In Caves Terrorism and its most strikingly absurd manifestation in commercial air travel. Randomly searching the luggage and persons of geriatric Lutheran women from Minnesota will not increase air safety any more than police All Points Bulletins advising to be on the lookout for suspects “of no particular demographic characteristics” will help apprehend the bad guys. To all intent and purposes, such women are the statistical equivalents of the white, heterosexual male, non-IV drug users in the case of HIV/Aids.

Yes, there’s a real and vitally important difference between describing someone who has actually committed a crime and targeting people simply because there is a statistically significant correlation between their demographic characteristics and the commission of a potential crime. (And, yes, police engage in the sort of racial profiling that no court can prohibit because, for better or worse, it’s the same sort Jesse Jackson and Chris Rock engage in. And, yes, it’s a bad thing and one of the reasons why, comparatively speaking, being black in America still sucks.)

And there’s “always the possibility,” the ever incompetently vigilant TSA will tell you, that Osama Bin Laden could recruit some Prairie Home Companion grandmother to pack some C-4 up her, well, you know to blow up that puddle jumper from Omaha to Ft. Worth, too. Absolutely true. Here are some other possible occurrences: invasion by space aliens, commercially viable cold fusion energy using ordinary household products, George W. Bush winning the Nobel Peace Prize, my wife finally unpacking and sorting the stuff in the garage (Ouch! Sorry, dear!), a Pauly Shore movie not sucking, and, well, you get the picture.

Exaggerating the risk from or to Group A while discounting the risk from or to Group B always has attendant costs, costs that could otherwise be used to address some of those other perhaps even more important health and safety issues. In some cases, those attendant costs have been unconsciously, obscenely high.

So I return to the original question. Is misinforming or misleading the public ever ethically justified on grounds of public health and safety? When public support for a policy objective, any policy objective depends on deliberately misinforming the public, part of the non-economic attendant costs of that lie must surely be harm to the very core of popular sovereignty.

It remains to be seen whether we will abandon the rewards and risks of genuine popular sovereignty for the promise of health, safety and happiness from our paternalistic nannies. Reality is always a mixed bag, but many recent trends suggest we are well down the road toward making a very bad tradeoff.

Jobs Immigrants Won't Do

Planning a family road trip from Delaware to Texas this August, my wife and I were researching various cities and other attractions along the way we might want to check out with the kids. We've never been to Little Rock, Arkansas, for example, but then we read on one web sit that among the Top Ten things to see there was Murry's Dinner Theater (located at the corner of Asher and University in the K-Mart Shopping Center; dinner at 6, the show starts at 7:45.) So much for Little Rock.

Dollywood looks promising, both because I have faith that Dolly Parton ("You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!") would never lend her name to anything shoddy and also because, hey, I mean, it's Dollywood, fergawdsakes! Tickets are a bit pricey though, no doubt due to the high cost of living in in Pigeon Forge, TN, so we're still pondering that option.

My wife suggested a day or two in Memphis, which frankly surprised me. Neither of us are, to put it mildly, Elvis fans and a trip to Graceland based on its astronomically high kitsch/camp/cheese factor would be lost on the kids. While I'm sure Memphis (and, yes, even Little Rock) has many family attractions worth seeing, the only thing other than Elvis that comes to my mind is Beale Street which, like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, is best seen late at night and definitely without the kiddies.

Doing a bit of web surfing this morning, however, I did chance on at least one other Memphis attraction hitherto unknown to me. It seems Memphis is the first city in America to offer lawn mowing and other gardening services by bikini clad women! Actually, Tiger Time Lawn Care's Bikini Cut service appears to be in very good taste as this sort of thing goes.

But it struck me that this clever marketing stunt also belies the old canard about immigrants doing jobs like gardening that Americans won't do any longer. Judging from the company's photos, I deduce two conclusions. First, it is clear that these are jobs native born Americans definitely will still do if the price is right. Second, and I believe I am on very safe ground here, it is almost inconceivable that first generation Latina women would don bikinis to mow lawns for a living. Then again, something tells me that when their affluent grandchildren own their own suburban McMansions they won't let their husbands hire bikini clad Anglo gals to mow the lawn, either.

Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Voldemort!

J.K Rowling has again cast her Novelus Blockbusterus spell on most of the English speaking, or at least the English reading world with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. There probably follows a two to three day plummet in the demand for electricity, as televisions and game systems are temporarily abandoned for the unpracticed pleasures of reading. Woe be it, also, to the author whose publisher thought so little of him as to release his book for sale this week, as both display and shelf space in bookstores will have been slavishly devoted to Pottermania to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

I'm not wild about Harry, having read and enjoyed the first book because of its clever inventiveness and charmingly offbeat characters but grown, well, disenchanted with each newer, longer, darker and more convoluted offering. I gave up somewhere around the fourth or fifth book, I honestly can't remember which, and my interest in Harry's fate or that of his friends isn't particularly keen. My guess, though, is that Rowling isn't nearly big enough of a goose to kill the wizard that laid the golden royalty check and that Harry will survive his "final confrontation" with He-who-must-find -a-good-plastic-surgeon just in case she decides, say, ten years from now that she misses the attention or is down to her last billion pounds.

In any case, Megan McArdle has written an interesting column in the (U.K.) Guardian, complaining about Rowling's muddled sense of economics in the Potter novels. I'm not sure McArdle, herself, is a economics wizard (her use of the term "opportunity cost" is a bit wierd), but she's definitely on to something amiss about the magical world Rowling has wrought. Why, for example, are the Weasleys poor? Why would any even semi-accomplished wizard want for material goods when they learn how to change inanimate boxes into mice and such in elementary school? Can changing lead to gold be that much harder? For that matter, why on earth would gold, itself, be valuable to such people, unless of course they were using it to buy goods from ordinary people, which apparently they do not. It seems they have their own self-contained demimonde society with shopkeepers and such. It is one thing, after all, if only a few people possess magical skills or such magic is clearly limited in its power. But in Rowling's world everyone has enough magical power to live in the style to which Rowling, herself, has since become accustomed.

McArdle's larger point is that there is no satisfactory explanation of the distribution of magical powers or their limitations in the books. There is no internal consistency, either. Rowling is forever inventing new gizmos and spells to resolve otherwise impossible situations. To paraphrase McArdle, Rowling can't get by with the occasional deus ex machina; she needs an Olympian pantheon of such plot rescuers time and again. On any sort of close scrutiny, the world she has created simply isn't believable, not because of the existence of magic but because of the sort of world the widespread prevalence of magic has supposedly created. It has, at best, a sort of ad hoc dream logic about it, so little wonder the dream turns so easily into a nightmare.

In a sense, therefore, one can understand Voldemort's perspective. What good is magic, after all, if the end product is no more than some sort of quaintly absurd pseudo-Victorian society where the economy makes no more sense than the officious but otherwise useless bureaucracy? What better way to put magic to use in such a world than to acquire power over such a dimwitted lot who, by the way, seem not at all troubled by their own effective enslavement of a different sentient species? Voldemort's ambitions may be ignoble, but at least they make sense.

Location, Location, Location

That's the mantra of every real estate agent I've ever encountered, their way of saying, in effect, that the price of real estate is a function of, well duh!, supply and demand. Pack millions of people into an island roughly 23 square miles in size like, oh, say, Manhattan and it's little wonder that supply and demand makes for a healthy seller's market. So it is that the New York Times reports on the sale of condominium parking spaces in Manhattan with a going price of $225,000 apiece.

However outrageous such prices may seem to many of us, the fact is, at least according to Steven E. Landsburg, what is really outrageous is how underpriced parking is in most cities and how significantly that contributes to the problem of urban congestion.

Food for thought the next time you complain about feeding the meter.

The Protectionist Price of Patriotism

The price for American flags will rise in Minnesota when, as the (U.K.) TimesOnline reports, a new law goes into effect requiring "all US flags sold in the state to be of American manufacture. Violations of the law, which comes into force at the end of the year, will be punished by a $1,000 fine or 90 days in jail."

The man behind the law, Democratic state congressman Tom Rukavina, reasons as follows:

The biggest honor that you can give the flag is that it be made by American workers in the United States of America.... Nothing is more embarrassing to me than a plastic flag made in China. This replica of freedom we so respect should be made in this country.... I think this Bill is about jobs, jobs for Americans.

Several things, elected officials high among them, embarrass me far more than Chinese plastic flags, but we'll let that ride.

I don't know if Minnesota ever had any extensive textile manufacturing, but if it did I rather doubt it wasn't lost years ago to cheaper Southern textile manufacturers who, in turn, lost to cheaper foreign concerns. But who knows? Apparently the Flag Manufacturers’ Association of America is behind the legislation (surprise, surprise!), and perhaps they have offered to keep or build in Minnesota a flag plant to supply the state's new "Made in the U.S.A." needs.

Of course, the state government can impose any restrictions on itself it wants and if taxpayers have to pay a fraction of a penny more in state taxes because their flags have just tripled or quadrupled in price, well, that's just another case of concentrated and visible benefits and diffuse and invisible costs.

Whether Minnesota can, let alone should, keep it's own citizens from buying U.S. flags made in China is another matter entirely. Even if the law is a constitutionally permissible restriction on interstate commerce, which I doubt, its practical effect will be to drive "unpatriotic" Minnesota flag buyers to make their purchases via mail-order or online. Of course, I have no idea what the size of the market for flags in Minnesota is, but the law might even end up reducing the state's net number of jobs. If so, let's hope state congressman Rukavina is among the first to be let go.

Fascinating, If True: "The World In America"

I can't vouch for its accuracy (can D.C. really have the same GDP as New Zealand? What the hell does it produce?), but Andrew Sullivan has linked to a map of the U.S. showing how the fifty states and D.C. compare in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to various nations of the world. (You may find linking from Sullivan's blog to the larger map version helpful. I did.) As with most such things, there is probably both more and less information there than "meets the eye," but it is fascinating, nonetheless.

My Baby Just Wrote Me A Letter ... Now Where The Hell Is It?

Like the government itself, the U.S. Postal Service rarely misses an opportunity to be both arrogant and inefficient. Recently, as the Washington Post reports, the Post Office (it will always be the Post Office to me) has taken to “delivering mail to communal cluster boxes as a way to keep pace with booming residential growth while controlling labor costs” or, more simply, to keep providing less and less service for more and more money.

"Instead of going from door to door, from lawn to lawn, from driveway to driveway, we have a central location," said Luvenia Hyson, a postal service regional spokeswoman.

But see, Luvenia, that’s the problem. People don’t want a central location, they want their mail delivered right there to their homes, and not, by the way, by having the mailman – he or she will always be a mailman to me – traipsing all over our lawns, dammit! Sure, multiple residence locations have central mail delivery; but, um, you know, that’s one of the down sides of living in an apartment or condominium complex, not one of it’s friggin’ advantages. (Where do they get these spokesmen – they’ll always be spokesmen to me – from Microsoft, fergawdsakes?)

First class mail, the only sort we still care about at all, is less and less convenient and more and more expensive all the time. Perhaps it simply isn’t possible to run a mail delivery service the size and scope of the postal system efficiently or economically or well enough to satisfy customers. Possible or not, though, it sure as hell isn't going to get done by a government protected monopoly.

But first class mail is also less and less important all the time. There really aren’t any good arguments left why the postal system shouldn’t be entirely privatized and opened to competition. If the wiring infrastructure of telephone service and electricity isn’t a sufficient reason to preclude competition, there sure as hell is no reason why mailboxes should be.

Okay, so this isn’t exactly up there with Iraq, health care or immigration, but the candidate who was willing to say let’s get rid of the postal monopoly once and for all would certainly pick up more than a few votes from those suburbanites who have to go fetch their mail down the block.

Be Happy! Pay Taxes!

New "research" indicates (?) we feel better when we pay taxes! Giving to charity makes us even happier! (That much I believe.)

Well, now. This little tidbit made the memeorandum aggrigator, so I took a peek. Sooooo.... let's take a look at the experiment here: Nineteen (count 'em, 19!) all female university students at the University of Oregon? $100 at stake? Yeah, that sounds to me like a tightly controlled experiment, a representative sample and statistically significant results.

That the researchers did detect some correlation between MRI readings and revealed preferences, I don't doubt. Conclusions beyond that?

Geez!

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, by Bryan Caplan

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. -- attrib. Albert Einstein

I am fond of writing, even if you are not fond of reading it again, that I know just enough about law, philosophy and economics to be dangerous, mostly to myself. As it happens, I blogged twice about Bryan Caplan’s new book The Myth of the Rational Voter, acknowledging on both occasions that I hadn’t read the book but was responding only to comments written about it.

Of course, that not only doesn’t pass the minimal standards for scholarship, it doesn’t even pass the minimal standards for journalism. My plea in mitigation is that I am neither a scholar nor a journalist, a fact I make abundantly clear all the time by what and how I write here without needing to confess the fact as well. Still, having wasted so much virtual ink on the subject already (admittedly, a sunk cost), I’m happy to report that I have now, oddly enough, read the book.

This would not usually have been the case so quickly because I do not review books professionally and must therefore either buy them or wait for a library copy. I like buying books, but I am cheap and thus usually wait until they have been remaindered, which means I'm always behind the power curve on the cocktail party chat circuit. In this case, however, I received a free copy courtesy of my older son who, serendipitously, just attended a seminar in which Mr. Caplan was one of the speakers. Indeed, he even inscribed the book to me, which was kind of him but which raises a problem. He wrote in it that I am “a rational man in an irrational society.”

This would be puzzling if I took it as more than a gracious sort of inscription to a stranger. Aside from his lack of evidence about my rationality – we’ve never met and I seriously doubt he reads this blog (we’ll get to society’s irrationality in a minute) – there is the definitional problem of rationality, itself, and it is a problem that underlies Caplan’s argument. Rationality, as economists understand it, is tied very closely to their concept of efficiency, the layman’s version of which is getting the maximum bang for your buck. Caplan also imports the notion that truth seeking, perhaps even apart from its usual connection to efficiency, is an integral component of rationality as well. No doubt, under many conditions these are good operational criteria of rationality. But if the bang you are buying with your buck or your vote is your own subjective sense of well being, not only can ignorance be bliss, so can false beliefs. There is, at least, certainly nothing illogical about such a possibility. Indeed, not only the possibility but the fairly high likelihood that I am, by his criteria, at least somewhat irrational is at the heart of Caplan’s contention.

I move now to the jargon-laden version: Caplan contends that the collective effect of individuals’ systematic biases resulting from preferences over beliefs, when combined with an understanding of democracy not as a market but as a commons, undermines the Public Choice concept of rational ignorance as a means of understanding the workings of democracy. If I tried to explain all these terms, I would fail, so you should read the book instead. (And since you're not cheap, you should buy a copy now.) Still, I'll take a shot at a concept or two.

The rational ignorance hypothesis is easy enough for even dumb guys like me to understand – acquiring knowledge is time consuming and, at least in that sense, expensive, therefore people tend not to acquire more knowledge than they believe they need. People know, despite idiotic “Your Vote Counts” propaganda campaigns, that even if their votes get counted those votes never really count in the sense of altering the results. Thus, they tend to vote, if at all, largely out of ignorance and, as a result, essentially randomly. If so, this is either good or bad, depending on whether you believe the Miracle of Aggregation (the ignorant masses cancel each other’s vote out while the very few people who know beans from bacon make the real choice) or the Gucci Gulf theory that self-serving weasels, leeches and parasites politicians, lobbyists and special interests seek and get the goodies while no one else notices or cares.

But Caplan argues that it isn’t rational ignorance but an ironically ‘rational’ sort of irrationality that is the key to understanding why, for example, voters continue to prefer protectionist policies despite the fact that such policies are not in their or the nation’s best interests. Let's call it the "We can't all be that dumb so we must be crazy" thesis. If democracy is really a commons and not a market, then as with most commons situations there is negligible cost to the individual voter resulting from casting his vote as a method of indulging his preferred beliefs over his desire to opt for objectively rational (that is, efficient) economic policies. Moreover, if voters’ motives are altruistic (or, and here’s your vocabulary building word for today, sociotropic), they have that much less motive to correct their (objectively) mistaken beliefs about the relative efficacy of one economic policy versus another.

Caplan contends that because irrationality and not the prevailing Public Choice hypothesis of rational ignorance better explains these voting patterns and habits, we have “neither well functioning democracies nor democracies hijacked by special interests [but] democracies that fall short because voters get the foolish policies they ask for.” More succinctly, he invokes Mencken’s famous observation that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

As Caplan notes, “recognizing irrationality is typically equated with rejecting economics.” Even so, if it is true that people have preferences over beliefs and that, as a result, they deem irrationality as a good among other goods, then they will in some cases prefer irrationality; that is, they will demand a certain amount of irrationality depending on its price. What he perhaps fails to stress sufficiently is that this is important only in the prescribed sense of rationality economists employ. In fairness, however, he does address the issue:

Many escape my conclusions by redefining the word rational. If silly beliefs make you feel better, maybe the stickler for objectivity is the real fool. But this is why the term rational irrationality is apt. Beliefs that are irrational from the standpoint of truth-seeking are rational from the standpoint of individual utility maximization. More importantly – whatever words you prefer – a world where voters are happily foolish is unlike one where they are calmly logical.

I think this is a critical acknowledgment. Whether it is rational under Caplan’s or most economists’ definition of the term or not, it has been my experience more people would prefer to be happily foolish than calmly logical.

Efficiency, while a dandy instrumental good, is neither an intrinsic nor an exclusive good. (I am using the term good here as a normative term and not as an economic term of art.) That is, there is nothing per se irrational in the sense of being internally contradictory as opposed to merely being less than optimal in terms of efficiency about a normative outlook that holds efficiency to be only one of sometimes competing values. More broadly, I’d simply note that consequentialism is not the only ethical game in town. Say what you will of Kant, you'd be hard pressed to call him irrational.

Caplan makes a few other claims I find questionable; for example, that the Self-Interested Voter Hypothesis is false. It may really be false, but I found his confidence regarding that claim unconvincing and his examples capable of alternative explanations that would still support the basic (and, I think, generally useful) intuition that people, including people acting as voters, act in their own perceived self-interest. However, these sorts of disputes can run a high risk of having the very concept of self-interest turned into mere tautology and, in any case, the point may not be critical to his case. He also invokes his epistemically privileged understanding of his own preferences in evidence against the revealed preference thesis, a sort of introspectionist attack on the nearly universal operational behaviorism of social science. I think there's a good point lurking there, but it needs more development.

Finally, there is the question of who the intended audience is for this book, and I’m guessing it isn’t the likes of me. As mentioned before (and, once again, made abundantly clear), I am not an economist; but I found the claim that democracy is a commons and not a market, once made, both insightful and uncontroversial to the point of being obvious. That is, it is obvious in that "Oh, of course!" way someone else's hard work seems simple once the work is done for you. But Caplan seems to think that both economists and political scientists will find the claim highly controversial, so what do I know? Further, perhaps again because I simply don’t get it because I’m not an insider, it isn’t clear to me what difference between the rational ignorance hypothesis, tweaked a bit here and there, and Caplan’s alternative account would be for practicing economists. Then again, I’ve always found the “rational” part of phrases like “rational self interest,” “rational maximizer,” etc. a bit suspect. On balance, though, this book is an extended theoretical argument aimed at or at least aimed to Caplan's fellow theoreticians.

Theory aside, human society orders itself in all sorts of ways. There is, if you will, a market for markets and a market for democracy. In many cases markets and democracy can and perhaps should compete to determine which works best for people. Caplan contends that “democracy overemphasizes citizens’ psychological payoffs at the expense of their material standard of living.” But assuming there are to be tradeoffs at all, what is the right balance?

Generally speaking, I prefer markets to government and so, obviously, does Caplan. However, in my own case my preferences go at least as much to what I believe would be the psychological benefits of the greater freedom of markets as they do to my belief that I would be better off materially, though I happen to think that would usually be the case as well. But the fact is that I probably would rather be happy than right just as I probably would rather be more happy and less well off materially than vice versa.

Indeed, any other choices would strike me as irrational.

What's Red and Green and Blue All Over?

Libertarians of a certain sort are notoriously obsessive when it comes to political theory and economics. The too easy trope for such political obsession, whether of a libertarian bent or not, is to call it 'religious' and for some, at least, the label is apt. There are Articles of Faith, after all, about which any contrary evidence is brushed aside, studiously ignored or defined away. In full rant mode, the true believer's gaze takes on a disquietingly feral intensity of the sort that, in another setting, would prompt mental health professionals to go running for the industrial strength Haldol. You know the type; otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.

Still, when it comes to a fanatical devotion usually reserved for the unexpected minions of the Spanish Inquisition, nothing beats your dyed-in-union-label Marxist. I fondly remember listening back in the 60s and 70s to these fellows at school, standing behind tables strewn with ink smudged CPUSA pamphlets printed on paper too flimsy to make credible toilet tissue. As it became my avowed purpose in life by the mid 70s to distance myself as far as possible from my proletarian origins, their efforts were ultimately wasted on me. Still, like Scientologists, Lyndon LaRouche's followers and cultists of all sorts, one had to admire their almost inexhaustible capacity for cognitive dissonance.

They're getting harder and harder to find these days, even in American universities. Harder but, by golly, still not quite impossible. Here then, by way of Arts & Letters Daily, is a bit of newly-minted nostalgia (hey, that phrase sounds vaguely dialectical!), eco-socialist John Bellamy Foster's latest searing indictment of The Imperialist World System.

Let me just stir your own memories with the opening paragraph:

The concept of the imperialist world system in today’s predominant sense of the extreme economic exploitation of periphery by center, creating a widening gap between rich and poor countries, was largely absent from the classical Marxist critique of capitalism. Rather this view had its genesis in the 1950s, especially with the publication fifty years ago of Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth.1 Baran’s work helped inspire Marxist dependency and world system theories. But it was the new way of looking at imperialism that was the core of Baran’s contribution. A half-century later it is important to ask: What was this new approach and how did it differ from then prevailing notions? What further changes in our understanding of imperialism are now necessary in response to changed historical conditions since the mid-twentieth century?

Oh, yeah... good times!

If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes

It is the essence of identity and special interest politics that those who identify with a cause or make it the critical issue of their political support depend upon the comparative indifference of others for their success. It is not always, however, just another example of concentrated and visible benefits to a special interest at the diffused and thus largely invisible cost of the general population. Sometimes it also occurs that the benefits accrue not only to the special interest activists but to their putative enemies, as well.

Thus, America’s drug warriors serve to keep urban crime rates high and the international drug cartels in business. Similarly, the American Cuban population, despite their protestations to the contrary, have helped keep the Castro regime in power and the Cuban population poor by their continued insistence on keeping the U.S. trade embargo of Cuba in place. Ironically, they may well have been the most effective though unintentional supporters of Castro’s continued reign in post-Soviet Cuba.

Journalist Bella Thomas writes in (U.K.) Prospect Magazine that Castro’s continued political survival after the end of financial support from the Soviet Union owes primarily to the same fierce patriotic nationalism among Cuba’s remaining population that is also the driving force behind its U.S. expatriate community. Castro, she contends,

… was always a nationalist in communist clothing, and, throughout the 1990s, the communist references in his speeches were gradually replaced by nationalist ones.

The continuing hostilities with the US have played into Castro's hands. It was as an embattled nationalist leader of a small island, standing up to an aggressive, neighbouring superpower, that Castro preserved his revolutionary credentials most effectively. The shortcomings of life under his regime were, he argued, attributable mainly to the US embargo. Many swallowed the argument. He knew, too, how to capitalise on the latent anti-Americanism in Latin America, Europe and Canada to give his struggle more universal appeal.

In fact, the regime seems to act with zeal to ensure that the embargo continues. When it looks as if the US government might consider ending it, some heavy-handed Cuban act ensues that the status quo prevails. In 1996, when Clinton was keen to initiate rapprochement, the regime shot down two US planes manned by members of a Cuban exile group rescuing those escaping the island on rafts. When, in 2003, an influential cross-party lobby in the US seemed set to dismantle the embargo, the Cuban government promptly incarcerated 75 prisoners of conscience and executed three men who hijacked a tugboat with a view to getting to Miami.

Thomas doesn’t contend that the embargo is the only factor in play, and neither do I. It is, however, the single most effective psychological factor (Cuba does have, after all, most of the rest of the world to trade with) and the factor, sadly enough, most likely to ensure continued hostility between Cuba and the U.S. once Castro finally joins his communist comrades in the literal ash heap of history. Thomas again:

In their call for the US to keep its "hands off Cuba," western supporters of the Cuban regime seem to miss the irony that this, unfortunately, is precisely what the US is doing. Were the US to relax its embargo, the result would be a tidal wave of US capital, which the regime would be unlikely to survive. Many Cubans would grow richer and more demanding, and would no longer accept playing second fiddle to the tourists.

That’s just about exactly right. Cuban-American pressure to maintain the embargo is antithetical to the U.S.’s long term interests regarding Cuba. If insanity is, as Einstein suggested, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, the most sane policy the U.S. could adopt now would be to let free trade do what its absence has failed utterly to accomplish; namely, serve the best interests of both the Cuban people and the American public at large.

Constant Viewer: The Lives of Others

Constant Viewer rarely watches foreign language films, at least not in first release, and realizes this is a great failing. CV has never been comfortable reading subtitles and rarely finds such films aesthetically or emotionally satisfying as a result. For that reason and despite its almost universal praise, CV does not recommend seeing The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) on the big screen. The good news, however, is that it will probably soon be released on DVD. Of course, if you speak German or if subtitles don't bother you in the slightest, you can probably still catch it at the cineplex, too. Seeing it on a smaller screen later won't significantly diminish its merits, though, so CV would still lean towards waiting for the DVD release.

Constant Viewer does not believe this film deserves the lavish praise it has received. It is a very good film, a movie definitely worth seeing, but CV can't help but harbor suspicions that any foreign language film so thoroughly understandable to the average American film goer (and, hence, reviewer) makes that viewer feel all clever and international and thus disposed to a favorable review. The fact is that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's writing and directing is painfully linear and obvious almost to the point of being insulting. The dialog beats the viewer over the head with whatever plot or political point is being made, and while there are several nice and unexpected twists along the way, there is nothing really special or tricky or "artistic" about the acting or directing or story line. Any viewer failing to get the plot or the message here would have been bewildered by the storyline of a Pokemon movie.

Of course, another way to look at all of that is that it is art to conceal art and that Donnersmarck and the cast have done an entirely credible job with an entirely competent and workable script -- the story of the increasingly intertwined lives of an East German playwright and his actress lover with that of a Stasi (secret police) officer assigned to spy on them. But it is the absurdity of the final days of the East German state that make the movie worth seeing, whereas no one ever said, for example, that what makes Citizen Kane great is how much one learns about William Randolph Hearst.

For the perennially ax grinding sorts among us, there are no doubt analogies to be made between the bathetic spy vs. spy nightmare of the DDR and post 9/11 PATRIOT Act America. But don't kid yourself. Unless you have ever been to East Germany before the system collapsed or to any of the other Soviet satellite states during the Cold War, you haven't a clue what it was really like. CV was in East Berlin once before the end of the regime and then again a few months after the Wall came down. The first trip was the most eerie of my life. It physically felt like the exact opposite of the scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and steps into a world of color. Crossing Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, all the color in the world washed out into a dull, lifeless gray almost instantly. It showed at once in the poorly lighted streets and unmaintained buildings and in the faces and body language of the poorly dressed and unkempt people on the streets. East Berlin was the closest thing to the walking dead in a limbo of perpetual dusk I have ever witnessed.

And it was the most prosperous and flourishing showcase of the entire Soviet socialist world.

And for Christmas, Everyone Gets a Pony!

Barack Obama is now making a plan for universal health care a campaign promise in his bid for the presidency.

Details, such as they are, are reported by the AP (with my emphasis added) as follows:

Under Obama's proposal, everyone would be able to obtain health insurance, and the Illinois senator would create a National Health Insurance Exchange to monitor insurance companies in offering the coverage. In essence, Obama's plan retains the private insurance system but injects additional money into the system to pay for the expanded coverage.

Those who can't afford coverage would get a subsidy on a sliding scale depending on their income, and virtually all businesses would have to share in the cost of coverage for their workers. The plan that would be offered would be similar to the one covering members of Congress.

His package would prohibit insurance companies from refusing coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

"My plan begins by covering every American. If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this plan is that the amount of money you will spend on premiums will be less," Obama said. "If you are one of 45 million Americans who don't have health insurance, you will after this plan becomes law."

In addition to broadening coverage, Obama called for a series of steps to overhaul the current health care system. He would spend more money boosting technology in the health industry such as electronic record-keeping, put in place better management for chronic diseases and create a reinsurance pool for catastrophic illnesses to take the burden of their costs off of other premium payers.

His plan also envisions savings from ending the expensive care for the uninsured when they get sick. That care now is often provided at emergency rooms. The plan also would put a heavy focus on preventing disease through lifestyle changes.

In all, Obama said, the typical consumer would save $2,500 a year.

Obama conceded that the overall cost of the program would be high, while not providing a specific number.

"To help pay for this, we will ask all but the smallest businesses who don't make a meaningful contribution to the health coverage of their workers to do so to support this plan," said Obama. "And we also will repeal the temporary Bush tax cut for the wealthiest taxpayers."

Sounds great, doesn't it? Hey, if you already have insurance, your rates as a consumer (never mind your rates as a taxpayer) will go down, and if you don't have it the government will pay for it. Where's the (yet uncalculated) extra money going to come from? Why, from rich and greedy businesses (don't worry, their prices and profits will magically remain the same) and the "wealthiest" taxpayers (everyone but the poor) and from everybody's lifestyle changes!

My only question is this: Who is the Hillary Clinton operative planted inside Obama's headquarters working to ensure his defeat?

"Trust me, I'm an expert."

Bryan Caplan certainly is getting a lot of press these days. Not necessarily good press, mind you; but as any publicist will tell you, bad press is better than none at all when you’re hawking a new book. Writing in that font of all economic wisdom, the New York Times, Princeton associate professor of politics and international affairs Gary J. Bass reviews Caplan’s book and writes as follows:

To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that the American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign aid; they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration. In a similar vein, Scott L. Althaus, a University of Illinois political scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it would overcome its ingrained biases and make different political decisions. According to his studies, such a public would be more progressive on social issues like abortion and gay rights, more ideologically conservative in preferring markets to government intervention and less isolationist but more dovish in foreign policy.

If the public doesn’t know how to think, is there a solution? Caplan has some radical medicine in mind. To encourage greater economic literacy, he suggests tests of voter competence, or “giving extra votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy.” Until 1949, he points out, Britain gave extra votes to some business owners and graduates of elite universities. (Since worse-educated citizens are less likely to vote, Caplan dislikes efforts to increase voter turnout.) Most provocatively, perhaps, in an online essay Caplan has suggested a curious twist on the tradition of judicial review: If the Supreme Court can strike down laws as unconstitutional, why shouldn’t the Council of Economic Advisers be able to strike down laws as “uneconomical”?

Let’s back up a bit, shall we?

One of the reasons physicians enjoy a vastly better reputation than lawyers or economists is that there is no medical specialty dedicated to protecting the interests of viruses or cancer. Ethical issues abound in modern medicine, but physicians still treat patients one individual at a time and the life and health of each patient is of paramount and often exclusive importance. We might invoke a distinction and say that there is usually no serious conflict of interests between what we might call positive medicine and normative medicine – the health and physical well being of the patient comes first even if the physician has good reason to believe that the world would be a better place without him. Moreover, as far as other competing interests are concerned, even Peter Singer’s addled and adoring minions have not yet taken up the cause of the interests of malignant cells.

Lawyers also labor for the most part at what we might call the micro level, representing one party’s rights and interests to the exclusion of and often in opposition to the interests of others. Well, they can go get their own lawyers, can’t they? Still, like a life threatening disease, litigation is often a zero sum game and, win or lose, the parties to the dispute can’t help but notice that there are lawyers fighting for the ‘cancerous’ interests of their opponents. Part of the bad reputation lawyers suffer comes, ironically enough, from the professional ethics of the profession that requires the lawyer, once retained, to be a zealous representative and advocate of his client’s interests. Whatever qualms he might have about the plight of the sympathetic tenant about to be evicted from her apartment, his client landlord nonetheless has legal rights, too, and it is his lawyer’s obligation to see to their enforcement and protection. Still, helping to oust widows and orphans on to the streets isn’t an optimal public relations strategy.

Economists, by contrast, tend to work at the macro level as advisors to policy and decision makers who, in turn, take personal credit for decisions that work out well and blame their advisors when they turn out badly. Still, like lawyers and physicians, economists have a certain expertise noneconomists do not have. Their knowledge is far from perfect or complete, but they nonetheless really are useful in figuring out how best to achieve certain sorts of results. They are especially good at advising on questions of economic efficiency and the effect of incentives on behavior.

Note, however, that efficiency is, itself, a normative concept and, more importantly, that what sorts of behavior should be encouraged or discouraged is, except in terms of economic efficiency, a question beyond the positive knowledge of economics. Most of us agree that, all other things equal, efficiency is a good thing. Waste not, want not, as our mothers used to say. Whether economic efficiency is of paramount importance, however, or whether some of those other considerations should take precedence in matters of public policy is a question about which economics itself can shed no light.

Milton Friedman famously drew the distinction between positive economics and normative economics – between how the cause and effect of economics in fact works and how we should use that knowledge, arguing that economists should attend exclusively to positive economics. (Ronald Coase, in turn, famously noted that Friedman’s most widely read article to that effect was essentially normative.) Disputes over Bryan Caplan’s thesis need to take the distinction into account.

Unlike the general public whose opinions regarding free trade or immigration may well be the product of little more than ignorance and bias, professional economists insofar as they are applying positive economic theory to the question of the impact of trade or immigration on the economy tend not to differ wildly in their conclusions. There is no serious dispute over the basic mechanics of price theory among economists and even the major disputes of the past century over macroeconomics are far less in dispute than they were fifty years ago.

Thus, for example, in Christopher Hayes’s review of Caplan's book the other day when he mentioned hundreds of economists who supported a raise in the minimum wage, it would have been far more intellectually honest to note as well that those economists were not denying the general truth that a raise in the minimum wage will increase unemployment but only that under current economic conditions such effect would be minimal and outweighed, in their opinion, by other factors. But the other factors here are critical, for at least some of those economists were making normative claims, not merely positive ones – they were saying, in effect, “we prefer to accept the minimal bump in unemployment (among, for example, teenage part-time workers) in return for other effects we favor.”

This is a complicated topic about which I may feel compelled to write more. For now, however, this is the bottom line. If there were, in fact, clear and overriding economic goals and principles adopted by the nation as the economic equivalent of our constitutional principles, having a supreme court of economists overrule politically motivated legislation that violated those principles might not be such a bad idea. But, of course, we don’t.

Most people, if they understood economics better, would be inclined to support free markets and open immigration unless the effects of those policies adversely affected them in particular (e.g., if they were among the few to lose their jobs as opposed to the many to enjoy lower prices). Still, some people who do understand the economics involved nonetheless still prefer protectionism over open markets; that is, they are willing (for us all) to pay the price of bad, that is, inefficient economic policy.

Those of us who prefer economic efficiency should be more candid in admitting that fact and, more to the point, that any such view contrary to the purely economic view is “irrational” in only a very crabbed and technical sense. By the same token, those who favor bad economic policy for whatever other normative reasons they might believe or assert should be sufficiently honest to admit as much, as well.

Maybe, just maybe, if both such sides were more candid about such matters the voting public might be a little better informed and a bit less “irrational,” too. I wouldn’t worry about the public becoming too “rational,” however. After all, in their roles as private citizens and voters, many professional economists can be every bit as “irrational" as the rest of us.

Who Isn't Afraid of Democracy?

Writing in the "progressive" In These Times, Christopher Hayes asks the provocative question, Who's Afraid of Democracy?

I am. So, almost certainly, is Hayes, although he is unlikely to admit it. You should be, too.

Hayes's article focuses on George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. The issue Caplan addresses is how it can be that individuals acting as consumers and producers behave as the sort of rational, self-interested actors classical economics both presumes and predicts and yet as voters can and do frequently favor political policies such as, for example, minimum wage laws, that are clearly irrational from an economic perspective. Caplan's position as described by Hayes is that people act rationally as consumers because they directly and visibly experience the consequences of their decisions, whereas acting as voters they are rationally aware that their individual votes are inconsequential and thus feel free to vote for objectively irrational policies. Whether that is an accurate description of Caplan's position or not, it is a rational position.

Hayes's problem with that position, however, is that "it quickly leads to some very dark places," such as considering a requirement that people pass a basic economics test as a prerequisite to vote. Given that Hayes considers a recent bit of economic research suggestive "that we are all, more or less, intuitive socialists" and describes Caplan as being willing "to embrace the darkness [and] articulate in lurid detail the obscene id of Chicago-school, Grover-Norquist-style, free market fundamentalism," the prospect of Hayes, himself, voting suggests to me that there may be something to this notion of an economic literacy test after all.

Hayes also indulges in some muddled counterargument about economic consensus and the comparative value of public opinion versus economic expertise almost too silly to bother mentioning. Here, in any case, is Hayes's real objection. He writes, "Given a choice between democracy without free markets or free markets without democracy, many conservatives would gladly choose the latter."

Hayes is obviously happy to include libertarians without qualm or qualification into his over-broad definition of conservatives, but insofar as his topic is the sort of economic "conservativism" that is the hallmark of libertarianism versus "progressive" economic theory, perhaps that isn't unreasonable or unfair. The critical point, however, is not whether there is some per se ideological preference for markets over democracy insofar as they might lead to different results, but whether democracy is itself an intrinsic or a merely instrumental good. If democracy is an intrinsic good, well then, that's that. If merely instrumental, however, then it is entirely appropriate to ask what the limits of its instrumental value are and whether there are better alternatives. There is a reason why, for example, neither Mr. Hayes nor I decide what to order in a restaurant by a show of hands from the other customers.

Restaurants aside, without speculating too much about Hayes's own political or economic views, I suspect it is fair to assume that he, too, would contend that there are serious problems with democracy understood simply as majority rule. Even liberals and progressives understand the tyranny of the majority problem, perhaps better than many conservatives do, though far worse than libertarians do. So it simply won't do for Hayes to tut-tut the notion that at least some things are too important to us as individuals to permit a mere majority of others to vote them away. And if we are agreed at least to that extent, then we end up, as the old joke goes, merely haggling over the price; that is, Hayes's list of inalienable rights might differ from yours or mine, but unless he is willing to embrace the non-"elitist" notion that a majority (or even super-majority) vote to, say, reestablish slavery would be just hunky-dory, then he too must at least in principle fear unmitigated democracy.

If so, then how do we decide which rights are inalienable? Obviously, majority vote won't do. At least the "economic conservative," i.e., the libertarian has an alternative solution; namely, to the maximum extent possible, leave individuals alone to decide for themselves what to do with their liberty and their property. Surely, that is at least part of the background from which Caplan might well suggest that market solutions are often preferable to political solutions.

It is not, of course, an entirely unproblematic solution. But one might still ask what sort of solution Hayes thinks is preferable and how he ethically justifies his preferred solution. Perhaps intuitively?