Coyote Blog

Remember all that BS about the Obama administration only being ruled by facts and science?  This is a mythology at the core of the progressive movement, that it is possible to have a wise dictator who uses the heavy hand of government coercion only for the best interests of the country, driven only by science and not by political influence.

This is of course a crock.  It was a popular point of view in the early 20th century, and at the heart of efforts like Mussolini's fascism, which in turn was much admired by FDR and emulated in US efforts like the NRA (the blue eagle, not the gun organization).  Over time, history has demonstrated folks like Hayek right on the knowlege problem (no one can possibly be smart enough to make optimum decisions for everyone, particularly when everyone has different preferences) while we have plenty of evidence to demonstrate the incentives for politicians are skewed so badly as to make good decisions almost impossible.

But the myth persists, even in the face of obvious counter-examples, like this (emphasis added):

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken."The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think."

The analysis, performed by Medicare's Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a "nonpolitical" office, set off alarm bells when submitted. "We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff," says the HHS staffer, "and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary's office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report."

In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote -- the review by the secretary's office reportedly took less than three days -- and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration.

Wouldn't want to influence a vote with actual facts.

For years I have argued that the killer app that may someday actually lead to school choice will not be individual liberty (because no one in government gives a rip about that any more) and not education quality (because again, its clear no one really cares) but speech and religion.  If the right messes up schools enough, the left might finally be willing to shed their alliance with the teachers unions and consider school choice.  From a live-blog of a Texas Board of Education meeting (via Radley Balko)

9:27 - The board is taking up remaining amendments on the high school world history course.9:30 - Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with "the writings of") and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson's ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don't buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar's problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 - We're just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board's far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America's exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America's Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

The NY Times has a fairly ugly story, though hardly unique, of a project to restore water flow to the Everglades turning into a corporate welfare project for United States Sugar.   The short story is that in a time when United States Sugar was in desperate financial straights and when real estate prices in Florida were tumbling, the Florida government treated USS like it had all the power, rolling over to paying above-market prices and letting USS pick and choose the land parcels to be purchased.  The story did not mention much about it, but there is a second large sugar producer in the area who it strikes me could have been played off against USS to get the best deal.

Remember that the US Sugar operation likely exists only because of sugar tariffs and import quotas that raise the price of sugar in the US well above the world norm.  So consumers are paying extra, and drinking soft drinks with crappy HFCS, so that US Sugar can screw up the Everglades and get bailed out by taxpayers.   Readers will understand it is the purest coincidence that US Sugar's attorney is chief of staff to the state's governor.

From running my recreation privatization blog, I know that there are many folks who will ascribe this to a failure of private enterprise and an excess of corporate speech and money in politics.   But to my mind this is a great example of why election and speech limits don't have any utility.  This is all back room lobbying, cronyism, and quid pro quo politics that doesn't show up in any monetary ledger, and thus are not and have never been subject to any limits.  As I wrote here:

when the stakes of government are so high, money and influence never goes away.  Just as in any economy, when you ban money, a barter economy arises.  So if we ban large campaign spending, then the quid pro quo becomes grass roots efforts and voter mobilization.  Groups like the UAW become more powerful (we are seeing that already).  They are trading their member's votes for influence.  Connected companies like GE are doing the same thing, trading their support for legislation that is generally hostile to commerce for specific clauses in said legislation that exempts GE and/or makes the laws even more punishing on their competition.  The problem with all this activity is it is hard to see and totally unaccountable "” at least with advertisements we see people out in the open with their agendas.

The other obvious point is that no private entity would ever allow themselves to get rolled so badly by US Sugar.  They would have sense USS's weakness and broken its knees in the negotiation.  One US Sugar manager even says as much:

For its board members, Mr. Crist's overture was appealing in part because they figured a government purchase would be far more lucrative than a private deal.

"It wasn't another company coming in and bottom-fishing you," Mr. Wade said. "They knew it would be for fair-market appraisals."

Over at my privatization blog, I wrote about a deal in Chicago where the government made four or five huge mistakes in issuing a private contract that a private company (or at least one that is not going to go bankrupt) would never make.  So of course the problems are blamed on privatization.

I had a dinner conversation last night with my Massachusetts mother-in-law.  She is pretty interesting to talk to because she is a pretty good bellwether for Democratic talking points on most issues.  She was opposed to the recent Supreme Court speech decision removing limits on third party advertising near an election  (I think she misunderstood the scope of that decision but that is not surprising given the shoddy reporting on it, up to and including Obama getting it wrong in his State of the Union).   She advocated strict campaign spending restrictions (both in terms of amount of money and length of the campaign season) combined with term limits.

We could have gone a lot of places with the discussion, but we ended up (before we terminated the conversation in the name of civility) discussing whether restrictions on money were equivalent to restrictions on speech.  She of course said they were not, and said under strict monetary controls I still had freedom of speech - weren't we still talking in the car?

It is hard to reach common ground when one person is arguing from a strict rights-based point of view while the other is arguing from a utilitarian point-of-view.   Essentially she knows in her heart that she is restricting speech, but wishes to do so to reach a better outcome.  I made a couple of utilitarian arguments, including:

• I pointed out that when the stakes of government are so high, money and influence never goes away.  Just as in any economy, when you ban money, a barter economy arises.  So if we ban large campaign spending, then the quid pro quo becomes grass roots efforts and voter mobilization.  Groups like the UAW become more powerful (we are seeing that already).  They are trading their member's votes for influence.  Connected companies like GE are doing the same thing, trading their support for legislation that is generally hostile to commerce for specific clauses in said legislation that exempts GE and/or makes the laws even more punishing on their competition.  The problem with all this activity is it is hard to see and totally unaccountable -- at least with advertisements we see people out in the open with their agendas.
• I observed that it was smart to add term limits to her plan, as otherwise her recommendations would be the great incumbent protection act.  But by limiting money, immediate advantage is given to people who already have name recognition and celebrity.  Think we have too many actors and athletes running for office?   Well be prepared for a flood with stricter campaign finance restrictions

However, I tend to shy away form utilitarian arguments.  The best arguments I have against the notion that money can be restricted without restricting speech are:

• Her comment that I still had freedom of speech (ie I am talking freely in the car) with strict campaign cash restrictions ignores the actual wording of the First Amendment, which reads "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech."  Her test, which is "Am I still able to speak in some forum even if I can't in others" is not a valid test for conformance to the First Amendment.  Otherwise, speech could be restricted at will as long as there was some narrow safe harbor where one could express his opinion.    The better test is whether the proposed law, ie a restriction on how much and when a person can spend money advertising his or her opinions, abridges or reduces freedom of speech.  And I think it is hard to deny that everyone has less freedom, in the form of fewer options and reduced scope, after such legislation.
• One interesting test is to broaden the question -- Does restricting spending on something (in this case speech) constitute a restriction on one's underlying right to the activity (e.g. speaking freely).  I was tempted to ask her (she is a strong and vocal abortion rights supporter) whether she would therefore consider the right to abortion to be untouched by Congress if a law were passed to limit each person's spending on abortion to $5 a year.   Abortion would still be entirely legal  -- all government would be doing is putting on some spending restrictions.   Obviously one's scope and options to get an abortion would be limited -- only those who happened to have a doctor in the family could perhaps get an abortion -- just as under her speech plan only those who had a large newspaper in the family could speak fully and freely before an election.

A friend of mine from Princeton days writes:

... and you seem in favor of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs the FEC, I was wondering how you feel about being a customer or supplier or competitor of large businesses who can spend far more than your business to influence the rules of the game.

From what I read, I am sure you have a compelling answer, but I would be scared to death. (Maybe that's why I work for a large corporation [Target] instead of attempting to run my own business.)

I thought this was a pretty good question, and I answered:

1. I try hard not to make utilitarian arguments to Constitutional and rights issues.  As an example, I am sure we might have less crime if the police were empowered to incarcerate anyone they wanted without trial, but we don't do it that way.
2. I worry most about corporate lobbying (e.g. by Immelt at GE) and this is unaffected by this ruling - it was legal before and after.   This decision allows corporate advertising, which is public and visible, which I can at least see and react to, as opposed to back room deal making.
3. Libertarians certainly worry about your question, and why many of us fear that what we are creating in this country is a European-style corporate state, rather than socialism.  To a libertarian, the answer is not less speech, but less government power to pick winners and losers in commerce.

Kevin Drum writes a post that I would interpret as saying "I really can't dispute the Supreme Court speech decision on principles but I am going to anyway because I don't like the result.  He ends by saying

In the end, I guess I think the court missed the obvious "” and right "” decision: recognizing that while nonprofit corporations created for the purpose of political advocacy can be fairly described as "organized groups of people" and treated as such, that doesn't require us to be willfully oblivious to the fact that big public companies are far more than that and can be treated differently. Exxon is not the Audubon Society and Google is not the NRA. There's no reason we have to pretend otherwise.

This is silly.  Just because people are not organized primarily as an influence group does not mean that those folks, once they are pursuing their goals, don't find the need to try to have influence, or have somehow given up their right to try to have influence.  And whose fault is this anyway if Exxon shareholders feel the need to influence the political process?  If the Left hadn't targeted commerce with a never-ending proliferation of restrictions and wealth-confiscations, commercial enterprises probably would not see much reason to waste money on advocacy.  I can tell you that the last possible thing I want to spend money on in my company is kissing some Senator's ass or buffing up the NY Times ad budget, and would spend money to do so only under a pretty existential threat.

But why is there some mythology that members of Audubon or the NRA somehow have more control of the organization's advocacy than Exxon's shareholders?  Sure, when you join the NRA you probably have a good idea what their positions are going to be, but are you really any less able to predict Exxon's positions on most issues?  As I wrote in his comment section:

When you say "Exxon is not the Audubon society," I am not sure how? I am a stockholder of the first and a member of and contributor to the second. I have bought products from both. I have written both (well, actually I wrote Mobil once but it is the same now as Exxon) about their issue advocacy, each time with equally small effect. It is as difficult as a stockholder of Exxon to even get a disclosure of their issue advocacy and lobbying efforts as it is for Audubon (though I am smart enough to take a pretty good guess at both). Neither allows me, as a shareholder/member/contributor to vote on their advocacy/lobbying, either in terms of amount spent or direction. Each carry substantial influence in particular government realms.

So I am confused how they are different, except perhaps that you are personally sympathetic to one and not the other.

Just to remind you the existential threat that causes corporations to want to speak out in public, I will take an example from Drum himself, when he said:

It means the health insurance industry is scared that we might actually do something in 2009 and they want to be seen as something other than completely obstructionist. That means only one thing: they've shown fear, and now it's time to bore in for the kill and gut them like trouts. Let's get to it.

So I guess Exxon is indeed different from the Audubon Society - no one is trying to gut the Audubon Society like trouts.

The reaction by the left to the Supreme Court decision yesterday overturning speech limitations on corporations seems tremendously hypocritical.  No one seems to complain on the left when certain groups/corporations (call them "assembly of individuals") get special access to the government and policy making.  Jeffrey Immelt and GE, Goldman Sachs, the SEIU, and the UAW all get special direct access to shape legislation in ways that may give special privileges to their organization -- access I and my company will never have.

Deneen Borelli wrote, in response to Keith Olberman's fevered denunciations of free speech for corporations

"It also seems as if the pot is calling the kettle black. MSNBC is currently owned by General Electric. GE Capital was bailed out by the taxpayers. GE CEO Jeff Immelt is a close advisor to President Obama, and GE would profit from Obama policies such as cap-and-trade. Olbermann has served as a cheerleader for all of this. Are Immelt and Olbermann simply afraid to allow others to possibly gain the attention and influence GE has had all along?"

Here is an example -- has the health care bill considered my company's situation, where we have 400 seasonal workers, almost all of whom are over 70 and on Medicare already?  How, in these circumstances, do we offer health care plans?  Are we relieved of the penalty for not offering a plan if they are on Medicare or a retirement health plan already?  The legislation does not address these issues (see Hayek) and I am sure numerous others, but I will never be able to cut a special deal for my workers or my industry as GE or the UAW have.

Further, corporate paid speech is alive and well in this administration, you and I just can't see it.  Lobbyists are all having record, banner, unbelievable revenues, in large part because the government is putting such a large chunk of the economy in play for forced redistribution and everyone who can afford it is paying to influence the process.

But nothing in any of the good government reforms have (rightly) ever put any kind of restrictions on this kind of speech directly to legislators.  The only speech they limit is speech to the public at large.  In effect, McCain-Feingold said that it is just fine to spend gobs of money speaking directly to us government folks, but try to go over our heads and talk directly to the unwashed masses, well, we have to make that illegal.  Far from tilting the balance of power to a few rich elite firms, the recent Supreme Court decision gives new power to the rest of us who don't have privileged access.

Update: Speaking of hypocrisy, the NY Times Corporation is outraged other corporations have been given the same rights it has had all along.  In a sense, the Times is lamenting their loss of a monopoly.

Update #2: Ilya Somin:  Corporate speech is actually an equalizer for far worse inequalities of political influence and access that already exist.

Via Greg Pollowitz:

Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity," according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world's would-be environmental watchdog.

The purpose of the paper, put together after an unpublicized day-long session in Switzerland by some of the world's top environmental bureaucrats: to argue for a new and unprecedented effort to move environmental concerns to "the center of political and economic decision-making" around the world "” and perhaps not coincidentally, expand the influence and reach of UNEP at the tables of world power, as a rule-maker and potential supervisor of the New Environmental Order.

The positions argued in that paper now appear to be much closer at hand; many of them are embedded in a four-year strategy document for UNEP taking effect next year, in the immediate wake of the much-touted, 11-day Copenhagen conference on "climate change," which starts on Dec. 7, and which is intended to push environmental concerns to a new crescendo.

The major difference is that the four-year UNEP plan expresses its aims in the carefully soporific language that U.N. organizations customarily use to swaddle their objectives. The Swiss document makes its case passionately -- and more important, plainly -- than any U.N. official document ever would.

I would have said that classical liberalism and the protection of human liberty would be a competing such narrative, but its not surprising the UN wouldn't think so.

It is interesting that after years of skeptics being derided for comparing modern environmentalism to a religion, this characterization is starting to be accepted by the environmentalists themselves.

Apparently, Massachusetts companies that have bought influence via Ted Kennedy are worried about their future.

Believe it or not, I am actually in Washington DC.  I am on the executive committee of our little industry's trade group, and as such it is expected that once a year we venture to DC to talk to Senate and House staffers about what legislation is pending that may affect our business.  I won't call this "lobbying" as that word implies we have any influence over outcomes.  It is more of a grim due dilligence to see what we are going to have to try to deal with next.

As this activity has roughly the same appeal for me as being dragged naked by a truck down the Interstate, I have avoided this task for years.  I finally relented to my duty, and here I am.

The original was a sort of surprise -- one expected a movie based on a toy franchise to suck, but it was actually OK.  It had a bit of wit, probably Spielberg's influence.  The new movie is not nearly as good.  I give it about 2.5 stars, with that being an average of 1.5 stars when Megan Fox is off the screen and 5 stars when she is on the screen.   The director avoids doing anything to advance the plot when she is on the screen, which is good because it is hard to concentrate during those moments.

The one highlight for me was that most of the college scenes were filmed at my old alma mater Princeton.  With all due appologies to my friends, there is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to seeing 40 or 50 consistently smoking hot college girls wandering around the Princeton campus.  We had a name for women like that when I was there -- we called them "visitors."

One bit of credit -- unlike a lot action movie sequels, the plot was mostly coherant.   The humor was strained, more sophomoric and less witty than the original.  Thedogs having sex in the beginning was gratuitous, for example.

Anyway, my kids enjoyed it, and it was a decent way to spend a summer afternoon when it was 107 outside.  Air conditioning always adds at least 1 star to every movie during a Phoenix summer.

Which of these spent more political contribution and lobbying money in the last election cycle:

• Two largest defense contractors
• Four largest oil companies
• Two largest teachers unions

Yes, it was the teachers.  I am sure it was for the kids, though.  This actually understates the teacher's efforts.  The corporate donations of the oil and defense companies are spread pretty evenly between both parties.  They are simply trying to buy access.  The teachers gave their money almost entirely to the Democrats.

I am starting to discover that I am an exception in the blogosphere, which seems to turn its collective noses up at the Olympics.  Well, my family loves to watch the Olympics together, and it is a real event in our house these two weeks.

Anyway, I was watching Bob Costas interview President Bush last night, and he asked a question I would paraphrase as "how is the US going to exercise influence on China given China's increasing strength and all the problems we have in the US."

Now, I am the first one to criticize the US and its government on any number of dimensions, but when one pulls back to an international view, one has to have some perspective.  What are these overwhelming problems we face when compared to the struggle for freedom and/or economic sufficiency in much of the world?  The US media has developed a bedrock assumption that the US is some kind of wasteland in need of total overhaul, when in fact we are the example all the world emulates.  Just look at the images from China -- sure there are a lot of unique cultural differences, but in many ways you see a people trying to be like us.

Don't buy property in Paradise Valley (a suburb of Phoenix, near Scottsdale) if you actually expect the property to be fully your own.  Even the smallest revisions of your home can require multiple appearances in front of the town council.  By some odd statistical anomaly, property owners with friends in the city government seem to get these changes approved more readily than those without such influence. 

Anyway, things just get worse if you own a lot of land in PV. 

A residents group is preparing to launch a voter referendum against the
planned Ritz-Carlton, Paradise Valley Resort, claiming the project's
residences are too dense....

Scottsdale-based Five Star Development wants to build a 225-room resort
hotel, 15 1-acre home sites, 46 luxury detached homes and 100 patio
homes on about 105 acres northwest of Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive.

This really isn't very high density, but this can be a very flaky town.  One thing you have to realize is that I can't remember the last new home I saw go up in PV that was less than 5000 sq ft and 10,000+ sq ft is not at all unusual.  This may be one of the few cases where a town is trying to keep out the Ritz Carlton because its customers will bring down the neighborhood, lol, but that is exactly what is at work here, in part. 

Now I know you think I am exaggerating when I say the locals are worried about a Ritz-Carlton bringing down the neighborhood by attracting the unwashed, but here is the Zillow sales page for the area -- the vacant lot in the lower right is the property in question.

This piece of land has been empty and zoned for a resort for years.  I know it was zoned for a resort long before this sale because I was stuck in traffic court all day and had nothing to stare at but the town zoning map  (don't ever speed when crossing PV).  The buyers purchased this land several years ago (I think from the Wrigley family) after ensuring the zoning was solid.  If the town's residents wanted something else on the lot, they should have bought it themselves.  But it is ever so much cheaper to instead use your political influence to tell other people what they can and can't do with their property.

Another thought:  It is nearly an article of faith among libertarians that devolving government to the smallest possible unit enhances freedom.  Well, here is an example where it does not.  Not state or even city would pass a ballot resolution to change the zoning on one small piece of land.  But it is entirely possible this could pass in a town of just a few thousand people.

I don't really care that much how either party chooses their candidate, beyond a general plea to reduce the influence of Iowa so we can finally put ethanol subsidies to bed.  However, I thought this was a bit ironic:  A self-styled progressive who complained for years about how the 2000 election was decided argues that having the Democratic candidate selected by a few party elites is A-OK:

I really, really hope the Democratic primary doesn't
come down to superdelegates "” the privileged class of delegate that
gets to vote however they want, and were created to ensure that party
elites didn't lose too much control over the process.

Maybe
I'm just being contrarian here, but why would this be so bad? After
all, the only way it could happen is if the voters themselves split
nearly 50-50. And in that case, the nomination would end up being
decided by a massive effort to sway uncommitted delegates anyway. So
who cares if that massive effort is directed at superdelegates
(senators, governors, etc.) or the more plebeian regular delegates
(typically county chairs, local activists, etc.). And in any case, why
shouldn't the party elders, many of whom have to run on the same ticket
as the presidential nominee, get a little extra say in the process?

Here is how I think such a scenario will play out.  I think by convention time Obama will substantially lead Hillary in the polls.  However,  Hillary will be at a distinct advantage in the knife-fighting for long-time party movers and shakers.  We could well see the party elites overturning what at the time may be a strong popular sentiment among Democrats for Obama.  Hillary's biggest advantage will be that many party officials will be afraid to cross her.  Obama needs to be able to assure them that he has their back if they scorn Hillary. 

I have not been able to read a Grisham lawyer novel since "the Runaway Jury,"  which was an absolutely amazing ode to the joys of jury tampering.  Seldom does one see an author treat so many abuses of due process and individual rights so lovingly, all because it is OK to take away a defendant's right to a fair trial as long as the defendant is an out-of-favor corporation.  (On the other hand, Grisham's "the Painted House," about growing up on a small cotton farm in the south, is wonderful).

Grisham's biases in the Runaway Jury become clearer to me now that I now he pals with Dickie Scruggs, notorious Mississippi tort lawyer who is soon to be sharing a cell next to Jeff Skilling, that is unless they can delay his investigation until Jon Edwards is attorney general.

Anyway, it seems Grisham may be up for the bad timing award:

With what might seem like startlingly bad timing, Scruggs chum/novelist (and campaign donation co-bundler,
if that's the right term) John Grisham is just out with a new fiction
entitled The Appeal, whose thesis, to judge by Janet Maslin's oddly favorable review in the Times,
is that the real problem with the Mississippi judicial system is that
salt-of-the-earth plaintiff's lawyers are hopelessly outgunned in the
task of trying to get friendly figures elected to judgeships to sustain
the large jury verdicts they win. One wonders whether any of Maslin's
editors warned her about recent news events -- she doesn't seem aware
of them -- that suggest that the direst immediate problems of the
Mississippi judiciary might not relate to populist plaintiff's lawyers'
being unfairly shut out of influence. Of course it's possible she's not
accurately conveying the moral of Grisham's book, and if so I'm not
likely to be the first to find out about it, since I've never succeeded
in reading more than a few pages of that popular author's work. By the
way, if you're wondering which character in the novel Grisham presents
as the "hothead with a massive ego who hated to lose," yep, it's the
out-of-state defendant.

If you would prefer a novel that make villains of tort lawyers and treats Mississippi as a trial-lawyer run legal hellhole, my novel BMOC is still on sale (and actually selling pretty steadily) at Amazon.

Outside of trade policy and climate treaties, I very seldom discuss foreign policy.  First, because it is not my first interest.  Second, because I am not an expert and do not spend the time to keep myself sufficiently informed on the issues to have useful insights.  Third, because of exactly this problem stated so well my Megan McArdle:

I periodically flirt with isolationism, or if you prefer,
"non-intervention". Like most libertarians, I'm attracted to "high
concept" political philosophy: simple rules that can be stated in a
sentence or less. No arguments about causus belli, blowback, or
ultimately unknowable political ramifications; just a simple "yes or
no" test. Did a foreign army invade the United States? For "Yes", press
one; for "No", press two, and go back to arguing about what should
replace child welfare laws in the coming anarcho-capitalist society.

Besides, all the foreigners hate having us there. Why not leave, and
see if absence makes the heart grow fonder? (I suspect that many
nations which have come, over long decades, to regard regional peace as
some sort of natural law, will get a rather nasty surprise. This might
make our influence look, in retrospect, rather appealing.)

But anyone who thinks at all seriously about libertarianism will,
fairly early on, be faced with a very high hurdle. There are a handful
of wars in which American intervention unambiguously halted gross
abuses of human liberty. World War II is one, though many end up going
around, rather than over . . . arguing that the Nazis were the direct
result of American intervention in World War I; or that it was
justified because Japan attacked us¹; or that Russia and Britain would have defeated Hitler anyway².  The American Civil War, however, is by far the highest leap; and the hardest to dodge.

In theory, every state has the right to secede, and the stated
Federal rationale for the Civil War--preserving the union--was the
vilest tyranny. In practice, chattel slavery was a barbarism even
viler.

And so we killed 20-30% of the Confederate Army, not a few of our
own, and uncounted numbers of civilians. That's not counting the
wounded, who probably outnumbered the dead. All we managed to achieve,
at this horrendous cost, was a corrupt and brutal occupation, followed
by the "freedom" of Jim Crow, sharecropping, and "separate but equal". And it was worth it.
The good guys won. We didn't do everything we wanted to, or even
everything we could have, or should have. Jim Crow was putrid. But it
was nonetheless so much better than slavery that it was worth the
horrendous cost--in my opinion, and that of almost everyone in the
world.

For me, a big part of the problem is one of information -- generally, most of the information one might find useful in deciding if X is a good war to pursue is from the government, an institution that demonstrably cannot be trusted based on past history when it makes this case.  Non-interventionism seems the right way to go, except for the
(relatively few) times it is not.  The problems is, to paraphrase the
famous dictum about advertising money, "half (or more) of our wars are
a waste -- we just don't know in advance which half."  Megan uses the
example of the Civil War, saying that that war was worth it because we
got rid of slavery.  But the war by no means began that way.  It wasn't
really until well into the war that both sides were pretty much in
agreement that the war was about ending or retaining slavery. I would argue that in advance, that war looked like an awful, terrible, horrible proposition.  The initial value proposition was "let's go to war so the Feds can have a bigger empire to run."  Only later did it become, "let's go to war to free a large part of our population."  There was a female professor, I forget her name, who made the point that the Emancipation Proclamation changed the war from a bloody waste of time to a moral positive.  But that came years into the fight.

The other problem I have is that the war is fought by, well, the government, the institution for which I have no trust.  One way of thinking about it is that every time we go to war, we put our lives and treasure and very future as a country in the hands of the Post Office.  Eeek.

For a while now, I have been fascinated by the contrast between the Left's position on abortion and its position on universal health care. 

In the abortion debate, the Left was careful to try to establish a broader principal than just support for abortion.  Their position was (and still is) that the government should not interfere in a woman's decision-making about her own body.  Cool.  That's a general principal that any libertarian could love  (Note that there are many libertarians who accept this principal but argue that abortion is the one exception to it if one considers the fetus an independent life.)  The National Organization for Women have cleverly embodied this general principal in the T-Shirt below:

So now we come to universal health care.  And most every leftish plan has the government paying all of our health care bills.  Well I can absolutely assure you now, both via common sense and observance of practices in European countries with socialized medicine, that a couple of things follow from universal coverage:

1. The government will be the final decision maker for what care each person will or will not get, how procedures will be performed, and what drugs will be authorized.  If they did not take on these decisions, the system would simply implode financially.  The government cannot afford to pay the bills while allowing individuals to still make their own choices about their care.
2. The government will have a strong financial incentive to change people's individual lifestyles.  What they eat, how they exercise, their sexual practices, etc. all have a great influence on future health care costs.  Already, we see countries like Britain starting to meddle in these lifestyle choices in the name of reducing health costs.  It is why I have termed the health care Trojan horse for fascism.

I don't think even universal coverage supporters would refute these two points except to say maybe "yes, the government will do those things but we promise to be gentle."   Here is Jon Edwards:

"I'm mandating healthcare for every man woman and child in America and that's the only way to have real universal healthcare."

"Evertime you go into contact with the helathcare system or the govenment you will be signed up."

During a press avail following the event Edwards reiterated his mandate:

"Basically every time they come into contact with either the healthcare
system or the government, whether it's payment of taxes, school, going
to the library, whatever it is they will be signed up."

When asked by a reporter if an individual decided they didn't want healthcare Edwards quickly responded, "You don't get that choice."

So given that, how does the left hold universal coverage in their head at the same time as they argue that "a woman should make decisions for her own body"?  How can the NOW website sell "Keep your laws off my body" T-shirts while promoting universal coverage laws on their home page?  How do you reconcile "pro-choice" with Edward's "you don't get that choice."

I am really interested in someone taking a shot at this.  And don't tell me that the difference is that in universal coverage, the argument is just over what the government will and won't pay for.  I agree not having the government pay for something is not the same as banning it when there are plenty of private alternatives.  But in the systems being advocated by Democratic candidates like Edwards, there will be no "other system" -- the government will be the monopoly provider, or at least the monopoly rules-setter.  It will be what the government wants to give you or nothing.  And there won't even necessarily be another country to which one can run away to get her procedure, because America is that country today where victims of socialist medicine escape to get needed and timely care.

From Tyler Cowen:

The NIH works as well as it does because the money is mostly protected
from Congress. It is not a success which can easily be replicated. The
more money is at stake, the more Congress wants to influence
allocation. We should guard this feature of the system jealously and
try to learn from it. If we can.

I had not ever thought about it this way, but this is probably a correct observation about government:  The more money in a program, the more likely it is that Congress will want to direct that money to take political credit for it and reward their cronies, and therefore the more likely the program is to fail.

From
Megan McArdle:

Matt may be right that I haven't harangued people about climate change
recently, so here goes: dude, if you're still a climate change skeptic, it's
time for a rethink. When the science correspondent for Reason magazine
comes over to the reality of anthropogenic global warming, it's safe to say that
the skeptics have lost the debate. Not only the vast majority of the scientific
community, but even most of the hard-core skeptics at conservative magazines,
have abandonned the hope that we are not warming up the climate.

There's still debate about the effects of the warming, and what we should do
about it. But there's not much question that it's happening.

Duh.  The vision of the skeptic community denying that the world is
warming at all is a straw man created by the climate catastrophists to avoid
arguing about the much more important point in her second paragraph.  What I
can't understand is McArdle's, and many intelligent people I meet, seeming
unintrest in the degree of man-made impact.

The chief debate really boils down to those of us who think that
climate sensitivity to CO2 is closer to 1C (ie the degrees the world will warm
with a doubling of CO2 concentrations from pre-industrial levels) and those who
think that the sensitivity is 3-5C or more.  The lower sensitivity implies a
warming over the next century of about a half degree C, or about what we saw in
the last century.  The higher numbers represesent an order of magnitude more
warming in the next century.  The lower numbers imply a sea level rise measured
in inches.  The higher numbers imply a rise of 1-2 feet  (No one really know
where Al Gore gets his 20 foot prediction in his movie).  The lower numbers we
might not even notice.  The higher numbers will certainly cause problems.

The other debate is whether the cost of CO2 abatement should even be
considered.  I have talked to many people who say the costs are irrelevant -
Gaia must come first.  But steps to make any kind of dent in CO2 production with
current technologies will have a staggering impact on the world economy.  For
example, there are a billion Asians poised to finally to enter the middle class
who we will likely consign back to poverty with an aggressive CO2 reduction
program.  With such staggering abatement costs, it matters how bad the
effects of man-made global warming will be. 

There are many reasons a 1.0 climate sensivity is far more defensible
than the higher sensitivities used by catastrophists.  My
argument a lower climate sensitivity and therefore a less aggresive posture on
CO2 is here.  Cross-posted at Climate Skeptic.

Update: Sure, we skeptics debate the degree of past warming, but it really can't be denied the earth is warmer than 100 years ago.  The problem catastrophists have with defending their higher climate sensitivities is that these sensitivities imply that we should have seen much more warming over the past 100 years, as much as 1.5C or more instead of about 0.6C.  These scientists have a tendency to try to restate historical numbers to back their future forecast accuracy.  We skeptics fight them on this, but it does not mean we are trying to deny warming at all, just make sure the science is good as to the magnitude.

One other thought - everyone should keep two words in mind vis a vis CO2 and its effect on temperature:  Diminishing Return.  Each new molecule of CO2 has less impact on temperature than the last one.  Only by positing a lot of weird, unlikely, and unstable positive feedbacks in the climate can scientists reach these higher sensitivity numbers (more here).  A good economist would laugh if they understood the assumptions that were being made in the catastrophic forecasts that are being used to influence government action.

It is always dangerous to argue with the insane, but I am actually willing to answer Lou Dobbs question:

And what I can't quite figure out amongst these geniuses who are
so-called free traders is, why do they think that about a 35 percent to
40 percent undervaluation of the Chinese yuan to the dollar is free
trade? Why do they think 25 percent duties in tariffs on American
products entering China is free trade?

I will leave aside the question of how he or anybody else knows the yuan is undervalued by this much.  I will accept his premise on the basis that we know the Chinese government spends money to keep the yuan lower than it might be otherwise.  Here is my answer:

Yes, it is not perfectly free trade.  But we let it continue because the freaking Chinese government, its consumers, and its taxpayers are subsidizing Americans.  The Chinese government is making all of its consumers pay higher prices and higher taxes just so American consumers can have lower prices.  Napoleon advised that one never should interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake -- after all, this same strategy managed to earn Japan a decade and a half long recession.  Our correct response is not tariffs, it is to say, "gee, thanks."  This is for the Chinese people to stop, not our government. 

Why is China doing this?  Because it government is using monetary policy to help out a few favored exporters who have political influence at the expense of all of their consumers and exporters.  And Lou Dobbs wants the US to respond exactly the same way, to punish our consumers to favor some of our favored politically-connected exporters so the Chinese consumers can have lower prices.  Great plan.  Is Lou Dobbs an Chinese agent?

A while back, I talked about a conversation I had with a friend of mine that prices for oil were set $20 dollars or more above the natural clearing price because a few oil traders controlled the market.  I argued in a long post that this was absurd, and might be possible for a few minutes in the trading day, but over multiple years it would be just impossible either to store the extra oil supply or hide the efforts to suppress supply from thousands of sources.

Well, another argument I made is that buyers in the oil markets are big boys too, and would not tolerate paying $20 a barrel too much for years or even hours.  After all, it was silver buyers and the exchange owners who stopped the Hunt's famous attempt to corner the silver market.

Anyway, one proof of this latter proposition is this:

The alleged manipulation occured during the so-called "Platts window,"
a 30 minute interval at the end of the trading day when the energy
publishing firm Platts pulls data used to set prices for other foreign
and domestic crudes. CFTC said Marathon tried to sell oil below market
prices during the window in order to get a lower price set for oil it
intended to purchase.

Again note the timing -- trying to influence the market for minutes, not years.  If companies like Marathon are willing to risk criminal prosecution to get lower oil prices for purchase, they certainly are not going to sit back and tolerate a multi-year manipulation that raises prices $20.

Todd Zywicki notes that Congress "has been on a binge diet of junk social science."  Is there another kind of social science?  Particularly in the media, I really think the main influence of social science has been to substantially lower the bar for scientific inquiry and skepticism thereof.

Update: On a related note, these really low academic standards in the social "sciences" are the reason I think firing Ward Churchill is bogus, as I wrote here.  Academic standards for things like ethnic or gender studies are incredibly low, particularly for the "research" done in these departments.  As I pointed out before, Cal State Long Beach, for example, hired a paranoid schizophrenic who had served prison time for beating and torturing two women as the head of their Black Studies department.  It is almost impossible to imagine Ward Churchill fired for violating the academic standards of his discipline because his discipline tends to have none, and everyone knows it.  The University of Colorado fully knew what it was getting with Ward Churchill, but they hired him to check a politically correct racial/gender/ethnic box.  Everything UC supposedly fired him for were known to them or should have been known to them with the most minimal of due diligence when they tenured the guy.  Nothing has changed, except that he is no longer a PR asset for the university.  As I wrote previously:

I could go out tomorrow and find twenty tenured professors of
ethnic/racial/gender studies in state universities whose academic
credentials are at least as bad as Churchill's and whom no one would dare fire.  This has nothing to do with Churchill's academic work or its quality.  UC is getting exactly
what it expected when it tenured him.  This is about an attempt to fire
a tenured professor for the content of his speech, speech that has
embarrassed and put pressure on the university, and I can't support
that.

Even More:  Background from KC Johnson:

Churchill was hired through a "special opportunity" position, designed
by the university to help "recruit and hire a more diverse faculty." He
had an M.A. from little-known Sangamon State University and no Ph.D at
all. As documents from the time noted, his qualifications included only two items: strong lobbying from Evelyn Hu-DeHart,
the chair of the Ethnic Studies program, and the now-disputed fact that
"Ward is a Native American," meaning his hire would contribute "to
increasing the cultural diversity on campus."...

How, then, could his fellow academics have originally found Churchill's
scholarship acceptable? The outcome, alas, suggests that in politicized
fields such as African-American Studies, Women's Studies, and Ethnic
Studies, the message too often trumps quality. In this case, it appears
that Churchill's extremist arguments that the U.S. government engaged
in genocide against Native Americans blinded his academic reviewers to
the poor quality of his scholarship. Indeed, some Churchill
sympathizers, led by Cornell professor Eric Cheyfitz,
have continued to maintain that the former professor's writings
constitute appropriate scholarship for the field of Ethnic Studies.

I contend that Churchill was and is still exactly what UC thought he was, and his scholarship was and still does exactly conform to the (miserably low) standards of his discipline.

Nick Gillespie at Reason asks folks for their favorite business novels.  I vote for Noble House by James Clavell.   Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has a great deal of influence on me, but that book is ultimately about government making business impossible, not about the conduct of business per se.  Noble House is a sympathetic and hugely entertaining depiction of business people being business people in as close to a libertarian environment as we might find (1960s Hong Kong) in the modern world.  Sure its not real business -- too much deal making, not enough productive investment, but it is a novel for god sakes, and not a seminar on the capital asset pricing model.

PS - Is there anyone out there who has read both novels and would rather hang out in a bar with Hank Reardon than Ian Dunross?  I didn't think so.

PPS- Personally, I think this business novel is good too.

Congrats to Santa Barbara for breaking new ground in government paternalism:

The City Council here had already created a class of affordable housing
several years ago for people making up to 200% of the median income.
Last week, they agreed to tailor the Los Portales project for people
making up to 240%, or nearly $160,000. (To keep these affordable condos
affordable, buyers would be subject to price controls on resale that
would restrict any price increase to about 2% a year.)

Wow, government housing projects for people who make $160,000!  I loved this quote:

"it's hard to get sympathy for people making $160,000 a year if you're
down in Texas or something," said Bill Watkins, head of the UC Santa
Barbara Economic Forecast Project.

No shit.  So, why the project? 

But this is Santa Barbara, a built-out city hemmed in by the Santa Ynez
Mountains to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the south and politics in
every possible direction. And this is believed to be Santa Barbara's
last vacant lot big enough to hold a housing development.

So this is just the fault of geography and the bad old supply and demand system, right?  Well, it turns out the government had just a little to do with it too:

The city is zoned for 40,005 housing units. About 38,000 have been
built, and the only housing construction these days is in-fill: a few
units here, a few there. Unlike other land-poor cities, Santa Barbara
has been loath to tear down large swaths of outdated structures and
rebuild, said Paul Shigley, editor of the California Planning &
Development Report.

"They think they've got paradise," Shigley said. "They don't want it to change."

The tallest building here is the eight-story Granada Theatre, built in
1924. It could never be replicated today, in part because the City
Charter strictly limits buildings to 60 feet, about four stories. And
even four stories is a hard sell.

Oh, so the lack of new lots is an artificial government zoning limit, AND the government limits the height of new building to just a few stories AND the government won't allow tear down and gentrification of old neighborhoods.

By the way, housing projects like this in expensive areas are really just massive corporate welfare subsidies of local businesses.  If workers really need their housing subsidized to live there, and the government does nothing, one of two things happen:  Either busineses go somewhere else cheaper, or else they have to pay their employees more to live in the area.  By subsidizing this housing, the local government is in effect subsidizing local businesses by letting them pay lower wages.  In particular, this is typically a subsidy of tourist businesses (hotels and restaurants) which have a hugely disporportionate influence on local governments and who typically are tied to the local area and can't leave.  The town of Vail, for example, has subsized similar housing under presure from the ski resorts.

Hat tip: Hit and Run