There's No Such Thing as "Religious Liberty"

I wrote this a few weeks back, never got around to actually posting it. So pretend it's last month and then keep reading.

With Hobby Lobby Stores v. Sibelius in the news--and frequently cast as a conflict between reproductive freedom and religious freedom--I found myself wondering something. What, exactly, do people mean "freedom of religion?" I confess I'm not entirely sure. From where I sit, there's no such thing as "freedom of religion."

Sometimes, when people invoke "freedom of religion," it seems like they mean the freedom to believe certain things, that is, the freedom to not be punished merely for what they believed. But we have a term for this: "freedom of conscience," which follows as a consequence of your ownership of your body and mind.*

Sometimes, when people invoke "freedom of religion," it seems like they mean the freedom to gather with other believers and to hear the words of clerics, preachers, and the like. But we have terms for this: "freedom of assembly," "freedom of association," and "freedom of speech," all following from self-ownership. If I own a building, it is my business who comes and goes and what is said there.
Sometimes, when people invoke "freedom of religion," it seems like they mean the freedom to possess and use certain devotional or ceremonial objects. But we have a term for this: "property."

Of course, other times, when people invoke "freedom of religion," they mean that other people should not be permitted to do things that offend or disgust them. If that's "freedom of religion," who would want it? We can dismiss this claim as obviously insubstantial, yet it's the only claim so far that isn't readily expressible in terms of other, more basic, rights.

To be a useful concept, "freedom of religion" must mean something more than freedom to believe, freedom to associate and gather, freedom to speak. "Freedom of religion" therefore entails that persons who justify their beliefs with reference to the supernatural are entitled to certain immunities, privileges, etc. that the rest of us are not. As distinctions go, that one seems especially arbitrary.
Which brings us to Hobby Lobby.

Professor Epstein has it right:

One depressing feature of the misguided constitutional debate over Obamacare was that it started from the common assumption that any general “freedom of contract” objection to the statute was dead-on-arrival. This dubious premise warps the entire constitutional discourse. A robust interpretation of freedom of association blocks the contraceptive mandate, not just for religious organizations, however defined, but for every group, regardless of its purposes or members. Any group that wants to supply contraceptive services is, of course, free to do so. But any group that opposes the mandate is free to go its separate way. Civil peace is preserved because no one faction or interest group can out-muscle any other.

The contraceptive mandate is illegal period, but the sad state of Constitutional jurisprudence means that the debate has instead focused on whether freedom of religion is contravened.

The First Amendment offers two prohibitions: Congress may not establish a religion, nor may it prohibit the free exercise of religion. The first prohibition seems sensible enough. The Founders were well acquainted with the benefits of religious toleration and the dangers of state religions. The only objection I would raise is that it puts politicians in the unenviable position of having to decide which religions are "real" when setting policy. If Keynesianism were a religion, we might be a whole lot freer, since it couldn't be made mandatory! The free exercise clause, in contrast, strikes me as either vacuous or a grave mistake.

Suppose free exercise entails that any sort of behavior motivated by belief in the supernatural must be permitted. Do we have to allow human sacrifice? The torture of heretics? One hopes not. The free exercise clause mustn't protect any and all religiously motivated activity--that would be a terrible affront to human rights.

Surely, however, certain religious practices must be protected. Where to draw the line? I argue we don't need to draw a line; it's already been drawn. Religious practices are protected to the extent that they don't violate other people's rights. It's time to dispense with the idea of "religious liberty."

This isn't pie-in-the-sky stuff. There are implications here and now. For example:

• If I'm a conscientious objector, why is it easier to be discharged if I'm Christian than if I'm not?
• Why should anyone tolerate irreversible elective surgery on the genitals of infants, on whatever grounds?

Earlier this week, Cato's Ilya Shapiro asked "Is There No Alternative to Forcing People to Violate Their Religious Beliefs?" Shapiro suspects religious liberty (again, whatever that means) will win this round, but concludes "the more that the government expands and takes over areas properly left to civil society, the more clashes of conscience will result."

More clashes of conscience are indeed to be expected, but even if Shapiro is right and the state loses this round, we should not rejoice too much. The law moves slowly, but at some point, property rights and freedom of contract must be rehabilitated. Any sort of lasting progress depends on it. "Religious liberty" is no firm footing from which to brace ourselves against the state's maelstrom. At best, it's a superfluous notion. At worst, the concept clouds our thinking about rights and weakens the libertarian case.

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* I'm assuming a natural rights framework in which all rights derive from a single right (in this case, self-ownership). One of the main advantages of such an approach is that it avoids the problem endemic to rights-pluralist accounts of what to do when rights conflict. See Hillel Steiner's "The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights" (1977) and Roger Pilon's "Ordering Rights Consistently" (1979).

Clockmakers and Thought Experiments

Last time I wrote about a category of thought experiments in ethics where you are presented with a choice between performing some kind of ethical transgression or not, with the consequences of not performing the transgression being incredibly dire. There are a few things someone could be trying to argue for with this sort of setup--utilitarianism, intuitionism, or merely an alternate deontological ethics that doesn't forbid the act in question.

The thing I always want to know when someone brings up one of these situations is this: where's Snidley Whiplash?

Not to be confused with Dick Dastardly.

A bunch of people got tied to the traintracks, and the only way for me to save them is to kill an innocent bystander. Suppose also that no one else is in a position to save the people. Well, how the hell did they get there? Who's the clockmaker, so to speak? Because if Snidely Whiplash tied them to the tracks, then it seems like he's the one at fault if they die, and my refusal to murder an innocent doesn't make me the murderer of the tied-up people, even though I could have prevented their deaths by not refusing.

This is even more clear if we imagine that instead of setting up a situation that somehow mechanically requires me to commit murder, Snidely Whiplash retains control of the fate of the tied-up group. "Strangle this toddler, philosopher, or I'll kill everyone here!"

Look, Snidely: I'll do me, you do you. I'm not responsible for Snidely Whiplash's choices. If he want's to kill a boatload of people, that's on him. What I have under my control is whether or not I strangle the toddler, so I don't.

Just beneath the surface here is the fact that once Snidely has set up the trolley problem, we've entered upon a second-order problem of what to do about puzzles that only arise once the rules have already been broken (Set aside the possibility of some kind of trolley-problem natural disaster). So how can we reconcile our first order duty to "keep our hands clean" so to speak with this second-order problem?

I don't think we can, really, at least with respect to our behavior to bystanders. Someone might argue that because my set of permissible acts with respect to Snidely Whiplash changes once he's broken the rules, it is plausible that my set of permissible acts might change with respect to other people. I don't buy it. We might say that it would be noble for a bystander to "take one for the team," so to speak, but to require this of them because someone else has broken the rules would be to inflict an undeserved punishment on them.

Thoughts on Thought Experiments in Ethics: A Reply to Matt Zwolinski and George H. Smith

Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

-- Romans 3:20, New International Version

In a series of blog posts starting with this piece, Matt Zwolinski and several other discussants have been weighing the value of Rothbard's Non-Aggression Principle ("NAP") as a foundation for libertarian ethics. That led up to this piece, and the comments section thereof, where Zwolinski engages George H. Smith in an extended discussion of how the NAP holds up in hard cases where the choice a person faces is to violate the NAP or accept dire consequences, for example a large number of people being raped, or the person's own death, or an innocent third party dying, etc. Situations like air pollution where small NAP violations seem to result in large social benefits are also discussed, but I want to set that set of cases for purposes of my own discussion here.

Zwolinski seems to think that these sin-or-die cases he has constructed where it seems like a reasonable person would violate the NAP show the NAPs weakness as a moral principle. He describes himself as a moral pluralist, which means he thinks acting ethically involves weighing several prima facie plausible moral arguments and deciding on the right course of action using our (properly honed) moral intuition.

I wasn't completely clear on Smith's final position, but I will try to summarize it as best I can. Smith thinks that usually the NAP is both a rule about justice (meaning roughly what rights people have) and a rule about moral permissibility (meaning roughly what actions it is or is not wrong or right to take), but that the two concepts are distinct and in some cases they diverge. Smith holds that, for example, in the case where someone must break into a cabin they don't own or face death from exposure, it is morally permissible for her to break into the cabin and furthermore that this morally permissible action is a violation of the cabin owner's rights. The cabin owner would be entitled to expel the person by force should she so choose and would be entitled to compensation for the trespass.

Smith describes himself as an ethical egoist, meaning he thinks doing the right thing means acting in one's own interest, properly construed. This will be familiar to libertarians as Rand's position, though I am not sure whether Smith considers himself a Randian.

My own position on the NAP controversey is that while Zwolinski is right to point out that most of the heavy lifting in Rothbard's ethics is done by his theory of property, not the NAP, I think his objections to Rothbard's ethics in general are not very convincing. I think he does offer a fairly convincing case that its better to treat the NAP as a heuristic than a foundational rule, though he would be disappointed by this conclusion as his aim is a "paradigm shift" in how libertarians think about ethics, which I think would be a huge mistake.

That said, I think Smith and Zwolinski are both making a mistake in how they are thinking about the relationship between thought experiments about extreme cases and ethical systems. I don't think Zwolinski's contention that we might expect a person to act contrary to the NAP in certain circumstances, and might even be sympathetic to them acting that way, tells us much about the validity of the NAP as a moral system. I think Smith's view that both the cabin owner and the cabin invader can be in the right is plausible, but I don't think it's necessary for him to go through any contortions just to demonstrate that how we would expect a person to normally act in a situation--breaking into the cabin--is an ethically permissible act.

This discussion points at a category of mistakes in ethical theory I want to now discuss at some length.

Consider this proposition, P.

P: In some set of circumstances C, I believe I would break rule R of some given moral system S.

My thesis is that P is a proposition about psychology and has no bearing whatsoever on the correctness of S.

The implied argument here seems to be as follows.

1. I am a good person.
2. Good people never do bad things under any circumstances.
3. I would break rule R in circumstances C.
4. It is not wrong to break rule R.
5. System S is incorrect.

Christianity, as per the quote I opened with, asks us to reject (1). I want us to reject (2). Sometimes people value things, like their own life or the life of a loved one, more than acting morally. This shouldn't strike us as odd, and the fact that we can imagine people acting  on those values isn't a problem for a proposed moral system.

Now, that isn't to say that we don't feel sympathy for the actions of the trespasser. I just don't think, like Zwolinski seems to, that this sympathy means the cabin owner was not wronged and that justice demands the trespasser either be punished or make restitution, etc., depending on what our thoughts on crime and punishment are.

One plausible view we might have here is Randy Barnett's position that when we're looking at the treatment of criminals, we ought to give a lot of weight to what their behavior signals about their likely future behavior. In the cabin-in-a-blizzard example, unless our trespasser makes a habit of getting lost in blizzards and breaking and entering, it seems like she's unlikely to be habitual rights violator--at least not moreso than the average person--and we ought to be fairly lenient. If, on the other hand, it becomes clear through a chain of incidents that this person isn't taking adequate preparations against the weather because she knows she can just break into a house if things go bad, then it makes sense to throw the book at her, life-or-death situation be damned.

Another way to look at the situation is to ask what we would think of a person who froze to death rather than break into the cabin, or to take a more extreme example from Zwolinski's thought experiements, lets the world be destroyed rather than scratches someone's finger against their will. We might very well have a hard time relating to a person who acted that way--but wouldn't we also see their actions as somehow admirable?

People have brought up the Joker in The Dark Knight in this context--"Tonight you're gonna break your one rule"--but this impulse goes much deeper in human culture. I am reminded of a vignette from Arthurian legend where a knight--I think Galahad--comes upon a tower of damsels, who tell him the only way for their lives to be saved is for him to commit a mortal sin. The knight refuses, and the damsels are revealed to be demons, the tower an illusion. I couldn't find this story specifically (I read it in The Once and Future King), but here is a similar story.

So, fiat justitia ruat caelum, I say. Just don't judge those cabin trespassers too harshly--they're only human.

The Tea Party

This post has sort of been *ahem* brewing in my head since late October/early November of last year. There are many reasons for this delay--election season, finals, the holidays, etc--but perhaps it was for the better as now we have a bit of perspective. The impetus for writing was a at least semi-scientific survey I came across--more on that in a minute--and an article I came across giving something of a brief history of the Tea Party to that point. Now, after the election, and with the new Congress about ready to get down to business, it is fairly clear that the Tea Party is going to have at least some staying power in American politics, and that makes a sort of retrospective analysis seem appropriate.

The very interesting Wall Street Journal piece "Birth of a Movement" has it that while small pockets of protesters began coming out of the woodwork during the Bush bailouts, the watershed moment was Rick Santelli's February 19th 2009 rant from the floor of the stock exchange in Chicago.



That is probably as good an event to pick as any. But before the epithet of choice for the guy in a tricorn hat waving a Gadsden Flag and throwing tea into bodies of water was "teabagger," it was "Paultard."

On November 5th, 2007, Ron Paul raised $4.2 million dollars in 24 hours. No one connected to the campaign was involved with planning it--I am reasonably certain none of them knew about it before the money started rolling in, and if they did, they certainly didn't expect it to get as crazy as it did. I remember following this on The Daily Paul and being awestruck (I stopped going to The Daily Paul after it was overrun by conspiracy types for a period...I don't know if this is still the case.). What was even cooler was this other site, though, which I am surprised to find still exists: http://ronpaulgraphs.com/. The site harvested date from the campaign's widget and used it to calculate things like estimated new donors, and you could watch all kinds of graphs updating in real time, which was especially fun whenever there was a money bomb.

Which brings me to the point I was trying to make--the second money bomb was on December 16th, 2008--the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. In addition to an even bigger money bomb (Wikipedia has the total between $6 and $6.6 million, arguably still the largest amount donated to a campaign on a single day. Roughly half of these donations came from people who hadn't given to the previous effort. A video promoting the money bomb went quasi-viral...there were a lot of very well done amateur Ron Paul campaign videos back then, now that I think of it, many of which struck quite an emotional chord with me at the time.



See Also: "Don't Tread on Me," "The High Tide."

I would be remiss at this point if I didn't mention the name of Trevor Lyman who put a lot of effort and imagination into the grassroots fundraising. We also have him to thank for the Ron Paul Blimp, which is hilarious and awesome.

Anyway, as much as I love reliving the high point of the '08 primaries, I've started to drift a bit. The point is that a lot of the feet-on-the-ground activists associated with the Ron Paul campaign (often organized through MeetUp)had adopted the whole retro-American-colonial-era look long before there was a "Tea Party Movement." Here's a description of some of the Ron Paul Tea Party events in Boston in December 2007 from the Boston Globe: Ron Paul's tea party for dollars and here's a follow-up: Ron Paul raises millions in today's Boston Tea Party event. Here's an alternate take from the Washington Post: Ron Paul Beats Own Fundraising Record. Again--tricorn hats. Gadsden flags. Tea bags. Sound familiar?

Apart from the trappings of the modern Tea Party movement, we also see some of the language originating in the Paul campaign as well as some of the issues. No one was talking about the importance of the Constitution and the legacy of the founders before the Paul campaign. No one was chanting "end the Fed," either.

Ron Paul, of course, did not win the primary...but some of the funds raised ended up as seed money for Campaign for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty, so it can't be said that nothing positive came of the money bombs. I remember thinking at the time that maybe he should have spent more than he did on the primaries, but in retrospect it probably wouldn't have mattered.

The end of the campaign season left a whole lot of Ron Paul meetup groups with nothing to do, and I suspect that a great many of them became some of the original Tea Partiers. The next big "Tea Party" event was what people called the "Tax Day Tea Party," a series of simultaneous rallies scheduled on and around April 15th, 2008. There was an event in Pittsburgh, but I did not attend...I don't recall whether I had heard of it or not.

It was around then that the national umbrella groups started to congeal and FreedomWorks started trying to ride the wave. It was also when Glenn Beck began becoming more of a Tea Party icon...by September, the 9/12 crowd had done the whole "let's all go to DC for a day" thing that would flourish a year later with the whole Rally to Restore Honor thing. In any case by that time the Tea Party was a national story and I'm unlikely to add anything people already don't know by way of rehashing the narrative here.

Which brings us to the lead-up to the 2010 election, and a study I read by an organization called MyType. They get their data from Facebook surveys, which probably introduces some selection bias, but honestly it's probably not that much worse than landline telephone surveys, and they had a very large n. I've quoted the executive summary below.

MyType, a psychographic opinion research firm, surveyed over 17,000 Americans about the Tea Party to reveal the demographics, values, morals and personalities of the movement's supporters. Looking for the defining characteristics of a presumably cohesive party, MyType instead found the movement in the middle of an identity crisis. According to MyType's data, devoutly religious conservatives comprise 22.5% of the Tea Party and are its fastest growing segment. They bring with them a fundamentally different set of values, morals and personalities than libertarian supporters, a core group that represent 17% of the party. While the former tend to be morally charged, family-oriented traditionalists, many libertarian supporters are neither religious nor traditional – rather, they are independent, intellectual, and morally permissive. The rising prominence of religious conservatives within the movement, highlighted by recent religious right rhetoric from several prominent figures affiliated with the Tea Party, appears to be driving away libertarians and others. Despite the surge in support from religious conservatives, overall support for the Tea Party is in decline.

The complete study is available here. The results are summarized here, which is a nice intermediate-length read that I got a lot out of. I had always suspected that the Tea Party movement had a split personality, and the researchers were able to come up with distinct libertarian and Christian conservative psychological profiles that fit large portions of the movement.

I did attend the second Tax Day Tea Party event in Pittsburgh on April 11, 2009. Alan Keyes (barf) was the keynote speaker. I wore my "Students for Ron Paul" shirt, which was pretty well received. I also went to several Tea Party events in the summer of 2009 as part of my internship with Bureaucrash. These events were attended by a hodge-podge of paleoconservatives, libertarians, Libertarians, Objectivists, veterans groups, and one or two guys wandering around aimlessly with conspiracy theory signs (Almost always male, almost always with unkempt beards. Or maybe that's just my imagination filling in the gaps in memory, who knows.) Occasionally an abortion group would show up but other than that I didn't run into any culture warriors. There was dialogue. You could talk to these people, and they'd listen with interest.

As summer headed into fall and the election grew closer, the trend was a libertarian exodus and a religious conservative influx. Some have speculated that this was because religious conservatives are joiners whereas libertarians aren't. I don't think that explains it entirely. If it were true (and I'm not so sure that it is as true as the stereotype would have you believe), it would go a long way in terms of showing why the schism was causing one faction to leave rather than the other, but it doesn't explain there being a schism in the first place. Moreover, it doesn't explain why so many from the religious right would join a movement that had a fairly strong libertarian streak at the time.

My take is that what we're seeing happen to the Tea Party was probably inevitable from the beginning, for several reasons. First, there are only so many libertarians, and you can only convert people so quickly. The larger a "libertarian" movement gets, the less likely it is to be actually libertarian. Second, it isn't as though the religious conservatives just came out of nowhere. Many of them were probably in the movement from the very start, only at first the fault lines weren't visible. In the early days, the Tea Party was widely conceived as a movement about economic policy only. The libertarian and religious conservative elements (and presumably a variety of other elements) could coexist so long as "social issues" remained on the back burner (Let's leave aside for a moment whether such a dichotomy makes sense.)

The rub is that you don't have the option of not talking about social issues when you're running for office, and both moderate GOP primary opponents and liberal general election foes were eager to make Tea Party candidates talk about social issues. Being anti-bailout, anti-tax, anti-nationalization of industry was a good place to be in terms of popularity back in November. Being an incumbent was not. What we saw, I think, was a desperate effort on the behalf of establishment candidates to make the elections about something, anything, other than the economy.

This trend produced some bizarre political ads.

This one makes me laugh every time, although it isn't as bad as some pundits made it out to be. It was a risky ad that backfired to a degree.



Christine O'Donnell is obviously not the sort of person I'd ever vote for, but the fact that she felt compelled to go on television and deny that she's had congress with the beast strikes me as wrong on several levels. Speaking of the occult...

Is this even real?



That was a rhetorical question. It's real. Also, Aqua Buddha is my new god. You heard it here first, folks.

I get the sense that the media and other candidates just had no idea what to do with the Tea Party candidates...I think that this confusion was twofold; they didn't understand their tactics (even now most folks in Washington see politics as a top-down game), and they didn't understand where they were coming from ideologically. I won't deny that some of the vitriol directed at Tea Party candidates and the Tea Party generally is deserved, but I think a large portion of it is just the reaction of a group of people faced with something they both cannot understand and believe themselves to be above. I mean really, populist Constitutionalist conservatives? And they dress up in costumes? They're obviously rank amateurs, and all we have to do is wait for them to self-destruct while mocking them unceasingly. Leave politics to the professionals.

Of course, while in some places things played out according to the establisment candidates' script, there were enough races where things didn't go down quite so simply.

And so Ron Paul's son is a Senator, and Harry Reid somehow got out of the race of his life (in a manner, incidentally, that I think smells to high heaven of foul play...but I haven't researched the matter thoroughly enough to know one way or the other), we had a write-in candidate somehow win in Alaska. Democrats were given a shellacking, and yet it seems like it's the Republican leadership that is the most terrified of anyone.

Then this nonsense down in Arizona happened. I have to admit I was expecting a bunch of noise from all sides about how we shouldn't politicize the tragedy and whatnot, but instead what happened was this bizarre race to point fingers followed by a series of "well-I-nevers" and takings of umbrage. And claims of blood libel...which is a can of worms I'm content to let rot on the shelf.

Getting back on track--we had this election. The Tea Partiers all lost the "don't talk about gays and weed" game they had been playing so well; indeed it would have been nigh-impossible to navigate an election cycle without opening Pandora's box. This is important because it has, I think, rather strong implications in terms of libertarian political strategy.

There is, of course a time and a place for coalitions and big tents and setting aside differences with conservatives (including religious conservatives and hard-core neocons, with particular care taken). What the Tea Party experience should have taught us is that electoral politics and grassroots activism is not the place. This brings me back to my dangling thread from earlier. There aren't really any "social issues" and "economic issues." Economic activity takes place in a social context; indeed it would be silly to try and describe an economic system apart from describing a social system. Issues like drug use and immigration, which some call "social," are in fact perhaps more reasonably seen as instances of a product ban and artificial barrier to trade in the labor market. The line is getting a little tired at this point, but I'm going to repeat it nonetheless: there is one freedom, and it is indivisible. We should have remembered that it is indivisible conceptually, and we have been reminded that it is indivisible practically. What we need to be doing is getting people to think about political issues in a systematically libertarian way. The a la carte approach, where libertarians are seen as oddities that are a hybrid of economic conservatives and social liberals, picking and choosing various positions from both sides, has to go. It is bad for branding and hinders libertarian activist efforts as a practical matter. I will say it again: we need to find ways to get people to think like libertarians, not get them to adopt positions which happen to be libertarian on a given issue. "Fusionism," as the doctrine of libertarian-conservative alliance is called, is a relationship where one party sees nearly all of the benefit, and here's a hint: it smells of elephant dung.

We need to stay on-message. The left and the right are hypocrites; the state is inimical to freedom, it is an instrument of violence which various political factions seek to wield for their own benefit, it is an unsuitable means of managing the increasingly complex network of human relationships we call society or civilization, and it must be severely curtailed if not abolished as both an ethical and a practical matter.

And that, I think, about concludes my remarks on the Tea Party.

UPDATE: David Boaz has weighed in, and he is considerably more optimistic than I have been above. Some food for thought here.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/does-the-tea-party-care-about-liberty/

Bureaucrash Update

Figured I'd post this here for people who follow this blog but not my writing elsewhere...below is a list of links to the writing I've done at Bureaucrash since starting to work there.

Boétie on Voluntary Servitude and Nonviolent Resistance
Tainted Eggs and Tainted Markets
Will the Internet Free Us From State-Controlled Currency?
Shouting "Fire"
Happy Birthday, Ludwig von Mises
Prepare for Trouble
The Myth of Libertarian Misanthropy: Technology, Alienation, Society, and Government
Of Spliffs and States’ Rights
The Four Loko Ban, the TSA, and the Banality of Evil
The Top 5 Obvious, Ubiquitous Fallacies of Political Economy
On Corporate Personhood
Private Currencies and the Regression Theorem

Back to Bureaucrashing

I have started working part-time at CEI, the place I interned last summer, and in connection with that have made my first blog post in a long time on the Bureaucrash main page. It's about Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Go take a look!

Happy Sucession from Britain Day

Just wanted to wish everyone good tidings on the anniversary of our ancestors' secession from Great Britain. I've also posted some actually content today, as well. See below.

Belated Rothbard Graduate Seminar Wrap-Up

Well, it's been a while since I got back from Auburn. It was a great week. I liked it better than the Mises University I attended last year. It felt less crowded and less rushed. There was more time for discussion, more face time with faculty, and since it's aimed primarily at grad students, we got deeper into the subject matter.

I want to pick out three things that stick out among all the things I learned.

Rothbard has an excellent discussion of tax incidence which I found revelatory. It is commonly argued that who "really" pays for a tax on a good depends on the elasticity of demand for the good; this will determine whether the seller of the good can raise her prices or not by some amount.

The flaw in this argument is that if the seller could charge more than she does currently, what was to stop her from charging this price before the tax was imposed? Given a stock of goods to sell, the entrepreneur will try to maximize revenue. Placing a tax on a good does not change the revenue-maximizing price. The entrepreneur will have to lower her price by the amount of the tax, so that the consumers' out-of pocket expenses are the same. This means the entrepreneur's product will bring her less revenue than before, which in turn causes her to impute lower values to the factors of production she buys. The result is that production of the taxed good will be reduced until the cost-revenue spread is substantial enough to keep the remaining firms in business. I don't remember whether Rothbard says anything on the subject, but it appears to me that exactly how much of the tax will be paid by the producer of the good and how much will be "paid" by her suppliers will vary from case to case based on the specific conditions in each case. The specificity of the factors of production in question will likely be the most important consideration.

Now that I think about it, if the tax is large enough that it acts as an effective price floor, the analysis will be a bit different, but the only thing I can think of that resembles a real-life example would be cigarette taxes.

The other two things I wanted to touch on are more technical matters regarding ordinal preference ranks. Austrians hold it true that we rank our wants from most urgent to least urgent, and likewise rank consumer goods that satisfy these wants. They also argue that the neoclassical assumption of transitivity doesn't hold. But ordinal preference ranks have to be transitive in the trivial sense, so it isn't clear why Austrians should have a problem with neoclassical transitivity, at least prima facia.

The issue is that neoclassical usage of "transitivity" implies a persistence of value ranks in time. If you chose an apple over an orange, a banana over an apple, and an orange over a banana successively, a neoclassical economist would say that your choices violated transitivity and were therefore irrational. An Austrian economist would say that for some reason, you must have changed your mind along the way, and that this was no cause for alarm.

The other point was that while there are difficulties in figuring out what someone's "complete" preference ranks are, all we need to do catallactics (the praxeological study of indirect exchange) is a subset of the "complete" ranks containing units of a single good and units of money--diminishing marginal utility ensures that within the subset, certain difficulties that arise when thinking about three or more goods. For instance, lets say given a choice between A, B, and C, you choose A. We know that A was at the top of your ranking at the time of the choice, but we want to know about B and C so that we can construct a demand schedule. One way we might think about that is if we go back and time and tell you to choose two of A, B, and C, expecting that you will choose A and your second-ranked good. But we cannot know that you will choose A at all, a priori. Maybe A is a beer, B is gin, and C is tonic water, and you like beer but love gin and tonics together while disliking them separately. But if we restrict the goods we consider to bundles of some consumer goods and bundles of currency, it would be reasonable to assert that if you chose A when you could chose one, you would have chosen A if you could chose two.

Now, that leaves some questions about whether we can work with preference ranks when there is no medium of exchange in the economy (ex. a Robinson Crusoe economy), but that's a separate issue. We can certainly construct supply and demand schedules, and that's what we care about for almost all of economics.

All in all, RGS was awesome and I'm very glad I went. I'm about two thirds of the way through the copy of Bureaucracy by Mises that I bought during the week, and so far that's been enjoyable. If there's anything really awesome in the part I haven't read yet I'll be sure to blog about it, otherwise I think my next entry will be a commentary on Boetie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Been putting that off for ages now.

The Berlin Batman

My favorite item hanging on the Mises Institute walls is a framed display of The Batman Chronicles #11, showing the cover and a few excerpted panels.


It's a Batman comic book. So yeah, automatically awesome, but what else is there to say? I mean, it's the goddamn Batman!


Well, actually, that's from "All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder," and the Mises Institute's comic book is from a different Batman series, and on top of that is an "Elseworlds" story, which Wikipedia tells me was part of a series of comics putting superheroes out of their traditional settings.

This particular Batman story is about "Baruch Wane," a closeted upper-class Jew living in Nazi Germany. So what does Batman do in Nazi Germany? Well, he fights Nazis, obviously.

Well, the Mises Institute obviously doesn't like Nazis, what with the Nazis' general anti-freedom tilt, but that isn't why this particular issue is enshrined on the premises. You see, the comic book's dastardly Nazis are--among other misdeeds--planning to raid the library of a certain Economist and Austrian Jew. And now we see where this is going. If you'd like to see Batman try to save von Mises' library from falling into the hands of the Nazis, you can read an excerpt from The Batman Chronicles #11 here. Mises.org has a brief review as well; it's a bit more in-depth than my treatment here.

The best part of this is that much of the story is true. The Nazis did seize von Mises' library, and it was subsequently taken by the Soviets before finally being recovered years later. Mises himself fled the country, making his way to America.

Incidentally, the Berlin Batman is Ron Paul's favorite superhero.

Lunch with David Gordon and Bob Murphy

I'm still down in Auburn at the Rothbard Graduate Seminar. I've been learning a lot about some of the finer points of the Austrian School, but I think those would be best held back for a capstone post at the end of the week. I played soccer with some of the other grad students last night, and oh man am I out of shape. It still felt great to get out on the field again though, and it's served as an inspiration for me to get back on the saddle in terms of fitness. I was pleased, however, to see that my touch on the ball isn't completely gone.

This morning we had a talk about the current direction of the Rothbardian research program and of Austro-libertarian academics in general. Dr. Gordon mentioned that there was opportunity to be had in giving John Rawls a good Austrian lambasting, which excited me because I had actually been thinking of just that as a possible direction I could go with my own academic endeavors. Rawls is one of the most influential of modern political philosophers and ethicists, and any attempt to establish an alternative system would likely be required to address the Rawlsian position first.

Dr. Gordon's primary work currently is in writing The Mises Review and says of his work, "I regard book reviewing as a blood sport." Needless to say, Dr. Gordon is a pretty funny guy.

At lunch today I sat at Dr. Gordon's table (as noted in the title, Bob Murphy was there too) with the intention of picking his brain on the prospects for an Austro-libertarian attack on Rawls. What happened instead was a discussion of professional wrestling.

Dr. Gordon was apparently a friend of the late Lou Thesz, and currently corresponds with Glenn Jacobs, noted blogger, member of the Free State Project, but known best as the WWE wrestler "Kane." Apparently Kane recently picked up some tips from a YouTube video of Thesz that Gordon had sent him. Thesz apparently used to half-jokingly give Gordon self defense advice (to avoid a fight, turn around and walk away--but if they follow you, surprise them with an elbow to the face). Either Gordon didn't mention how he met the wrestlers, or I've forgotten, but I imagine that would be another tale in itself. To round out the story, I should note that there is an autographed picture of Jacobs hung in the Institute, made out "to Lew and the Mises Institute, the heavyweight champions of liberty and freedom."

It is my second favorite item on the Institute's walls. For the first, you'll have to check my next blog post.

Dinner with Tom Woods

This week I'm at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama for a program called the Rothbard Graduate Seminar. The program is a series of talks on Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State taught by the Institute's faculty.

Tonight was the welcome dinner, and Tom Woods recognized and sat next to me. Awesome. When I was here last summer (for the Mises University program), I tended to do more listening than talking during the meals, and tonight continued that trend mostly, but I did ask Dr. Woods about his new book, and I wanted to share that vignette because I thought it was pretty funny. I'm going to paraphrase as best as I can remember, although the payoff line is verbatim.

Grant: So I hear you've got a new book?
Dr. Woods: Yup.
Grant: On secession, right?
Dr. Woods: Nullification. What do you think I am, some kind of radical?

Dr. Woods' new book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, comes out on June 28th. He is scheduled to speak to the Iowa Republican State Convention on the 26th. Hopefully that will be posted somewhere--Dr. Woods is an insightful and entertaining speaker and with the talk being so close to the release of his book, it should make for some interesting listening.

In Which Rand Paul Sticks His Foot In His Mouth

So, shortly after winning the Republican primary for the Senate seat in Kentucky, Rand Paul has commented that the parts of the Civil Rights Act that restrict the actions of private businesses were incorrect. Everyone and their mother has jumped on this as typical "racist Republican" buffoonery. Even sympathetic voices are wondering if perhaps Rand has taken his small-government views too far.

He hasn't. It is perfectly coherent to sincerely abhor racism, and not think the Civil Rights Act should have included restrictions of private agents. It is only incoherent if you believe the only way to affect social change is with government violence. Mainstream socio-political thought, however, sees government as the proverbial hammer and every challenge faced by humanity as a proverbial nail.

Implying that Rand Paul is a racist because he opposes the violent attack on the rights of people to say who can and cannot be on their property (even when they make poor decisions in this regard) follows the same logic as saying that he's a communist because he thinks communists should be allowed to say or publish whatever they want (even though communists say and publish reprehensible things). It should be obvious that Paul is no communist. It might be objected that there's a big difference between freedom of speech and property rights, but this is simply false, both from a philosophical and practical standpoint. Freedom is an indivisible whole and no part is of a different class than the others--there is no line between "economic" freedom and freedoms of expression and thought.

Outlawing the effects of racism is simply foolish. It would be like if you tried to outlaw rain, knowing you couldn't get rid of clouds. Racism is a cultural problem, not a civic one, and attacks against it should be made on those grounds.

The Democrats and the Patriot Act: How Much Cynicism Is Too Much?

Obama signs one-year extension of Patriot Act

My personal favorite snippet from the article: "The Senate also approved the measure, with privacy protections cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them. Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government's authority to spy on Americans and seize their records."

So a giant scheme to enrich health insurance companies at the expense of young people is important enough to warrant discussion of using reconciliation (a legislative tool with an Orwellian name if there ever was one), but defending fundamental civil liberties isn't. I guess Democratic Party impotence cuts both ways. Ah well, maybe I'm overreacting. It's not like we've replaced warrants with names scribbled on post-it notes or anything.

FBI Replaced Legal Process with Post-It Notes to Obtain Phone Records

Oh.

That'll teach me to open my big mouth, I guess.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that without fundamental changes--not just "vote the bastards out," although that would be a good start--all we can expect from Washington is further looting of our pocketbooks and tightening of the handcuffs clamped on our wrists.

Take action while you still have circulation in your hands.

In Which I Decline the USSA's Request to Lobby Senatory Casey About Student Aid

The United States Student Association is a lobbying group that somehow got my email address because I'm the head of a student organization. I know they are allocated money by Pitt's student government, but beyond that I don't know much about them.

Anyway, I had an interesting email exchange with a rep of USSA which, upon reflection, is essentially a blog post. So I'm posting it.

The original mass mailing:

Dear student leaders,

My name is Nila Devanath, and I am the president of the Pitt Chapter of the United States Student Association. I am contacting you today to ask for your support in fighting for student financial aid reform, an issue that affects all students in higher education.

This coming Thursday at 3pm, the USSA Pitt Chapter will be sending a delegation of students to meet with Senator Casey about the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA). SAFRA is a federal bill that supports a better system of financial aid for college students and it is currently on its way through the House and Senate.

Senator Casey is in a crucial position for casting a vote in favor of the bill, allowing it to pass. However, he is currently being lobbied by banks and lenders that have been traditionally unfavorable to affordable student aid to vote against the bill.

We will be holding a short press conference at the Regional Enterprise Tower at 425 Sixth Ave downtown around 3:45pm, and we invite and encourage you to attend to show Senator Casey that college students support SAFRA and encourage the passage of the bill.

If passed, SAFRA legislation will:

- Convert subsidized federal education loans to the Direct Loan Program with low interest rates
- Increase Pell Grants
- Increase Perkins Loans
- Simplify the FAFSA and more

For further information, please visit:
http://edlabor.house.gov/blog/2009/07/student-aid-and-fiscal-respons.shtml

It is important to have a student presence because Senator Casey sits on the Education Committee but has a strong relationship with Sally Mae, an education lender that is against SAFRA. Our presence will encourage him to place students over banks.

Please let me know if you can attend! It would be greatly appreciated.

[Signature omitted out of courtesy]

Here is my initial reply, which I sent to everyone who got the initial note:

Everyone,

I have no idea why I got this email, and I imagine many of you are in the same boat. That said, if you were planning to lobby Sen. Casey to vote for this bill, I urge you to reconsider.

If the bill is actually as characterized in the email, the net effect of this bill would be to bid up the price of tuition even higher, and saddle students with more debt. I urge everyone to fight this measure.

Yours,
Grant Babcock

The USSA rep hit "reply all" right back, writing:

Dear Grant,

Thank you for your prompt response. The e-mail was sent out to all presidents of student organizations at Pitt to encourage support for SAFRA from the USSA Pitt Chapter student group.

I believe you may be confused about what SAFRA legislation would entail. Please take a look at the link again or feel free to look for information in other sources. The link again is http://edlabor.house.gov/blog/2009/07/student-aid-and-fiscal-respons.shtml .

SAFRA will help students get rid of debt by going directly through the federal govt. instead of going through banks and lenders as a "middle man" for loans and grants. I encourage you to research more information about SAFRA on the web.

Once you've taken another look, please let me know how you think SAFRA would increase student debt.

Thank you.

[Signature again omitted]

Well, I was invited to explain myself, so I did:

[Name omitted],

I have just read your link and what I saw was not reassuring in the least, I'm afraid.

The bill increases the volume of student loans and student grants. This means there are more dollars available to spend on college tuition. This would not lead to an increase in tuition rates if all of the money would be spent by people who otherwise would not enroll, but this is highly improbable and history has shown it not to be the case.

The result is that those who are able to get grants see a nominal decrease in the cost of tuition for themselves, and everyone else sees a nominal increase. Those who cannot afford to pay this increase out-of-pocket are forced to drop out or incur debt.

Where these loans come from is immaterial. Either we're borrowing from the banks at a pure market rate, or we're paying with our tax money. Subsidized loans are not free. Replacing subsidized loans from banks with subsidized loans from the government doesn't change this.

We run into the same problem with grant money. It has to come from somewhere. In this case, we run into the rather ironic problem of taxing people who can't afford college to pay for other people to go to college. A certain number of people will be able to attend college on grants who couldn't otherwise, but at the same time the tuition increases would put college beyond the means of other prospective students and their families.

On top of all this, the bill includes payoffs to historically black colleges which I imagine are designed to ensure their support, and pork spending on community colleges and public schools. None of this spending seems to have any bearing on university education in general.

The link you sent also says that this will save taxpayer dollars because the direct loan program will be cheaper than the existing system. My skepticism about government cost estimates aside, what would save taxpayers even more money and reduce administrative costs even more would be for the government to get out of the student loan business entirely. Moreover, whenever you see the words "public-private partnership," you can be sure that some bureaucrat's drinking buddy is going to make a killing.

I hope this note sufficiently clarifies my position to the extent that I no longer appear confused. In any case, I'm sure most people would rather I didn't clutter their inboxes any further, and I've said my piece.

Please do not support this legislation.

Sincerely,
Grant Babcock

Obviously I glossed over a few of the nuances an ignored most of the peripheral issues, but I think I got the point across pretty well. Two folks complained about me filling their inbox with junk mail, and two others sent me notes of thanks and encouragement.

I doubt much will come of this, but I thought it was a teachable moment. I'll update if anything else significant comes up.

Choo Choo!

I just put up a post over on Bureaucrash.com about trains. Specifically high-speed commuter rail transport. I told my friend this, and we have been saying "choo choo!" to each other for the better part of this week as I have been putting on the finishing touches.

Check it out here: http://bureaucrash.com/2010/02/03/choo-choo/

How to Avoid DUI Convictions, or, What Use Is Your Philosophy Major, Anyway?

Imagine the following scenario.

You're on trial for drunk driving. The evidence the police have against you consists in a confession which you don't remember writing and the testimony of the arresting officer. Luckily for you, the arresting officer just got fired for corruption in an unrelated manner. You plead not guilty and instruct your attorney to make the following defense.

(1) My client asserts he was not drunk the night in question.
(2) The state maintains that he was.
(3) Both of them cannot be correct. Either the state is correct, and my client was drunk, or my client is correct, and he was not drunk.
(4) An account produced while intoxicated is not sufficient to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
(5) The only potentially credible evidence the state has is my client's written confession, produced the night in question.
(6) Let us assume that the state is right. In this case, my client's written confession was an account produced while intoxicated, and is therefore not sufficient to establish the guilt of my client beyond a reasonable doubt. We conclude that my client should be acquitted.
(7) Let us assume that my client is right. In this case, my client was not intoxicated on the night in question. We conclude that my client should be acquitted.
(8) Since in both cases my client should be acquitted, we conclude that my client should be acquitted regardless of whether the state is correct or whether my client is correct.
(9) It may be objected that in (6) I have conceded that my client was intoxicated, and that therefore we can conclude that he should therefore be found guilty in this case. All this proves is that the proposition that the state is correct contradicts itself, because it makes my client simultaneously guilty and unconvictable.

This isn't a cut-and-dry case of the liar paradox, since we're not concerned with truth and falsity but the empirical establishment of a fact beyond a reasonable doubt. I don't think a jury would ever acquit someone on this basis, but I do wonder about the following.

Suppose a judge should disallow any testimony by a person who is drunk either at the time of the incident in question or at the time of the testimony, because it is so unreliable as to be irrelevant. Suppose the same argument holds as to whether a judge should allow into evidence a confession produced while drunk.

Should such a confession be allowed in all cases, or all cases where the confessor is not accused (among other things) of being intoxicated?

One probable course one might try is that in this case, the confession is always admissible, but only the form, not the content, of the confession may be considered evidence of anything when operating under the assumption that it was written while intoxicated. So supposing the writing is sloppy and there are numerous spelling or grammar mistakes (compared to something the confessing party wrote while not intoxicated), the confession would be evidence that the writer was intoxicated and only that the confessor was intoxicated.

If the confession is written in clear script or printing and is free of error, (again, compared to a writing sample made while not intoxicated), what would that imply?

Assume the confession was written while intoxicated. In this case, the admissible evidence suggests that the writer was sober. We have a contradiction, and conclude that the confession was written while sober.

Assume the confession was written while sober. In this case, the admissible evidence suggests that the confession was written while intoxicated!

It seems that under this potential ruling by the judge, we get the liar paradox.

What hasn't been considered, I think, is the bearing of the defendant's sobriety at the time the confession was written on his or her sobriety at the time they were allegedly engaging in an activity it is illegal to do when intoxicated.

If we assume that the writer is drunk, then we can only make arguments about their sobriety at the time of writing. The question becomes, if they were drunk at the time of writing, is it provable beyond a reasonable doubt that they were also drunk earlier, and at that time driving? I think that in the absence of reliable outside testimony (which is absent here) the answer is clearly no.

So we can only prove anything from the confession about the person's sobriety earlier in the evening if we assume they were sober when they wrote it. However, we are not entitled to make that assumption, as we only know that they were either sober or they were not.

I'm going to conclude that the judge should rule the confession admissable, but that when operating under the assumption that it was written while drunk it may only be used to determine whether the person writing it was drunk at the time, not whether they were drunk at any other point in the evening. I'm then going to say that in light of this, the jury should find not guilty.

So, that concludes a blog post that is neither about what I had planned to write about today (MLK day, or rather, just after midnight on the day after), which was the philosophical basis of nonviolent nonparticipation, nor really about freedom. In any case, I thought it was interesting. And probably completely wrong. Oh well.

Speaking of building the movement...

Packed House for Grand Opening of Schiff Campaign HQ

"The campaign has also earned momentum from the latest Rasmussen Poll, which has Peter Schiff beating Chris Dodd in a head-to-head matchup."

Poll: Rand Paul has Big Lead in Kentucky GOP Senate Primary

"The numbers: Rand Paul 44%, Secretary of State Trey Grayson 25%."

Poll: GOP Favored to Hold Kentucky Senate Seat

"Paul, a conservative activist and son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), leads state Attorney General Jack Conway and Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo by identical margins of 42%-36%."

Anti-War Activist Mounts GOP Campaign for Congress

"He’s a candidate for Congress in New Mexico’s 3rd district, looking like the Republican front-runner just one short year after he crashed the convention."
"Depending on who’s analyzing the race, New Mexico’s third district is either an ideal or a poorly chosen battlefield for a candidate like Kokesh."

I think that Rand has the best chance, followed by Schiff, followed by Kokesh. The problem for Schiff is getting out of a crowded primary field. Rob Simmons is a former Republican Congressman, and Linda McMahon is very rich. At that point, it will be a matter of whether the bailouts are still fresh enough in people's minds, and how the healthcare issue plays out. Kokesh is probably my favorite of these guys, but he's also the most radical. I predict he will have no problem mobilizing a campaign, but might have trouble getting the average New Mexican to the polls.

If libertarian-leaning candidates manage to be successful in the next election cycle, expect things to get exciting moving into Obama's reelection campaign. Obama is on the clock--midterm elections tend to go against the incumbent party, and Obama made a lot of very big promises. Failure to deliver could lead to disappointment for him at the polls.

Philosophy vs. Conspiracy

Philosophy vs. Conspiracy

Caught this article by Jerry Salcido over on Campaign for Liberty's site. In light of the points he raises, I'd like to relate a few anecdotes of my own on the issue.

At the fall semester activities fair this year, some of the local LP guys showed up. This was good, they should be helping us with recruitment. What was not good was that they were also handing out 9/11 conspiracy theory DVDs and pamphlets as well as copies of America: Freedom to Fascism, a movie which holds that the income tax is a massive fraud perpetrated by big financial sector interests on the American people. I'm pretty sure The Obama Deception was in there too.

We were next to a student anti-genocide club. One of the conspiracy theorist pamphleteers gets drawn into a discussion. Upon hearing that they're an anti-genocide group, what do you imagine is the first thing he says? Not, "I think genocide is one of the worst consequences of totalitarianism; we should fight genocide at the source." Not, "I think you'll find a lot of similar-minded people in the libertarian movement, although some of them may have different ideas about how to solve the problem than you might."

No.

The first thing the guy says is:

"Did you know that the AIDS virus was created by the government to wipe out the black population in Africa?"

I paraphrase, of course.

What did this guy think he was accomplishing? Have enough people, upon hearing him say this, all of a sudden said, "Wow, I had never heard that, tell me more!" that he's come to think that leading with that line is the way to go?

Or maybe, as was the case this time, did the person he was talking to usually just start smiling and nodding for the rest of the conversation?

I sort of collect conspiracy theories, the way some people collect the pamphlets that some evangelicals hand out on street corners.

I was reminded of one of my favorites at the End the Fed rally I documented a few blog posts ago. One of the fellows on the megaphone relates how the Federal Reserve literally deals in blood. At the beginning he talks about how by enabling deficit spending, the Fed finances America's unending global war on everything. Fair enough. Then he explains how our debt to China is secured in human lives, and if you want proof, just put your Social Security number into the New York Stock Exchange.

My friend tried this later and did not report success. I suspect it was because he didn't make the correct Bilderberg-Illuminati gang sign when he hit the enter key. He didn't have a webcam running, but they know anyway.

I think that's enough for now. Let's suppose, then, that every single conspiracy theory is true. Ok. What now?

Do we seek to expose the conspiracy to the light of day? Won't this more likely have the effect of, I don't know, getting us unceremoniously killed, than, say, ending mankind's suffering at the hands of tyrants? Let's say that by some miracle, our efforts to throw open the curtains succeed, and every television in America shows irrefutable proof that an international banking cabal controls world politics. What then? The citizens take to the streets, and throw the bastards out? The bastards hiding behind tanks and missiles? Are the world's soldiers going to stop obeying orders because of a TV show?

What happens when the whole thing gets retconned by the corporate media as just a joke made in poor taste, or an accidentally leaked trailer from a new movie?

Libertarians of all stripes are fond of saying that truth is power, that truth will set us free.

Power is power. We will set us free.

Power is power. But libertarians don't want power--a trait that makes them unique among all political factions. They don't want it, but they sure as hell need it. To dismantle the apparatus of oppression, we need to be in the driver's seat. Because that's where the kill switch is.

Whether you're a gradualist or a revolutionary, before anything can happen, the libertarian movement needs power. It needs resources and legitimacy and reach and so on.

So what? For starters:

• No matter how right you are, you had better be prepared to spend as much on hair care as Mitt Romney and John Edwards. Combined.
• For most people, radicalism is not a conversation-starter. It is a conversation-ender. Our core message is simple and relatable. Freedom is more ethical than tyranny, freedom is more effective than tyranny. Put that in your own words, and repeat it to people. A lot.
• We are weird. Most people know very, very little about economics of any kind, and nothing at all about Austrian economics (or whatever freedom-oriented flavor of economics you like). Most people would prefer to maintain this state of affairs. Monday Night Football is on in ten minutes, and they don't want to miss kickoff listening to you explain capital consumption.
• Again, we are weird. Politics is boring. Political theory is even more boring. Jefferson is an old dead guy. Locke is an older, deader guy. Megan Fox is a young, living woman, and therefore automatically less boring. Also, you can see her on the same screen as giant robots which occasionally turn into giant explosions. There is a reason you spent your weekend at a tea party and your neighbor spent his or her weekend at Transformers 2.
• Well, I'm not sure I can top that last image. But I have to press on anyway.
• Talk to people about things they care about. People don't care about monetary policy. They do care about accountability. This is why Dr. Paul's Audit-the-Fed bill has about one billion cosponsors and his End-the-Fed bill...yeah.
• Anarchism is a nuanced and coherent political philosophy. It is also what the protesters at the G20 in Pittsburgh who broke the window of Pamela's Diner claimed to believe in. Barack Obama likes Pamela's, because the hotcakes have crispy edges. The point is buried in here somewhere.
• Power doesn't mean force. There is a world of literature on how to get your way without holding a gun to anyone's head. I, and you, should read more of it.
• The Republican party is ours for the taking. The neocons are on the defensive and the theocrats aren't what they once were. The teapartiers are willing to listen to what we have to say, and many of them are with us already.
  
• Education is important. It is not more important than getting people elected.

Before I go too far afield, let's tie some of that together. If you are not a conspiracy theorist, the thing to do is to start disabling the apparatus of power. If you are a conspiracy theorist, the thing to do is to start disabling the apparatus of power. There are lots of ways to go about that, and almost none of them involve shouting on a street corner about how the Federal Reserve deals in human lives, or telling a college student that the AIDS virus was created to rid the world of black people.

In any case, it is my hope that by the time I run for office, libertarianism will be mainstream enough that I won't have to answer any questions about electability or how my supporters are all insane. Because, you know, Obama's supporters are all completely stable, and Minnesota didn't elect a professional wrestler Governor. A professional wrestler who is currently the host of a television show about conspiracy theories.

Howard Dean and Anthony Weiner Tell Us Their Problems With the Healthcare Bill

Dean urges defeat of emerging healthcare bill

That was the headline. OK, you've got me, I have to click--what problem could Howard Dean possibly have with the healthcare bill?

"'You will be forced to buy insurance. If you don't, you'll pay a fine,' said Dean, a physician. 'It's an insurance company bailout.'"

Oh, well that's reasonable. I'm glad someone in the Washington establishment is willing to call a spade a spade. Oh, and it sounds like other Democrats have some problems with the bill too, this is promising.

"When House and Senate negotiators go to conference to work out a compromise bill, Weiner said, 'We should move away from some of the things the Senate has done and move back to where the House is. You need to contain cost. You do that with a public option.'"

No, Captain Numskull, you "contain cost" by not forcing people to buy products and services they neither want nor need. Because, you sanctimonious twit, doing that would not only be immoral, but also spectacularly idiotic.

If this bill passes, expect the same thing to happen to healthcare costs as happened to the cost of college education after the government started "helping" (although granted the tuition issue is a bit more complicated). Prices will skyrocket, the industry will grow fat and happy, and the government will blame the problem on "greed." Newsflash, humans have been greedy for going on 200,000 years now. And yet somehow large corporations magically become greedier a few years after the government reforms their sector of the economy. Yup, that's what it is, every time. I can't believe people still put up with this crap.

You want to drive costs down? Stop giving monopolists the keys to the kingdom.

I need an Advil.

Bailouts Revisited

It's finals week here in Pittsburgh, which can only mean one thing: procrastinate instead of doing important things by doing less important things that I used to be...putting off doing.

Which means it's time for a blog post.

The initial damage reports are in from the bailouts: Taxpayers lost $61B on AIG, auto bailouts but gain on bank bailouts

Breaking it down,

• the government lost over $30B on AIG,
• lost over $30B on Chrystler and GM,
• and is projected (by the Treasury) to end up gaining $19.5B on the bank bailouts.

But don't worry, the $700B program has been extended through October, so there's still time for things to get worse.

Speaking of worse, the bailouts were a bigger blow to American taxpayers than the numbers imply. For one thing, insolvent banks weren't the only one's receiving TARP money. Healthy banks were forced to take it as well (the Fed didn't want TARP funds being more of a scarlet letter than they already were), and pay it back with interest. One wonders how much of that $19.5B was extorted from healthy banks.

And let's not forget the Cash-for-Clunkers program, which amounts to Auto Bailouts II: the Revenge.

But the real cost can't be encapsulated in a simple number. What the government has done is to give us a zombie economy. And if there's anything we Pittsburghers understand, it's zombies. I'm not usually a bit National Review fan, but let me point you for further reading to this article from February 2009: Caution: Zombie Economy Ahead. Imagine a horde of undead congresspersons shambling down Wall St. groaning "caaaaaaaaaaars," and you'll have a pretty good picture of what the country is going go look like for the next decade or so.

The more pessimistic picture is a Misesian crack-up boom, which would be the result of the Chinese and holders of petrodollars trying to cash in for assets, a process which would soon spiral out of control until people started burning Federal Reserve Notes to keep warm.