Radley Balko
On the appeal of libertarian women: Based on personal experience, I'll agree with Gene's commenters. I can say without reservation that in D.C. at least, libertarian women are head and shoulders more attractive, sexier, smarter, and more passionate than politically-conscious women of other philosophical stripes.
The problem for John Galts seeking Dagny Taggarts has never been quality, it's been quantity.
Radley Balko
Publication date: 1886.
Pat Lynch
Roderick T. Long
Senator Rick Santorum, chief supporter of the Federal Marriage Amendment, has said that his effort"was not about hate" but was simply a matter of"doing the right thing for the basic glue that holds society together."
Given Santorum's infamous comparison of homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality, one may be forgiven for doubting his sincerity when he denies being motivated by prejudice. But suppose we give him the benefit of the doubt, and grant that he was merely seeking to defend society's matrimonial glue. What would one have to believe in order to accept Santorum's position?
First, one would have to believe that marriage in its present form is necessary for the preservation of the social order. But why should anybody believe that? Marriage in its present form -- as a heterosexual, monogamous union of legal equals -- is the exception, not the rule, in history. (Has the Senator read his Bible?)
Second, one would have to believe that allowing homosexual couples to marry would threaten the status of heterosexual marriage. But why would it do so? Is anybody really going to say,"Gee, I was all ready to marry someone of the opposite sex, but now that gay marriage is legal I won't"? If anything, providing recognition of homosexual marriage probably strengthens the institution of heterosexual marriage by reinforcing the legitimacy of marriage per se. (Indeed, one might well think that is a better argument against gay marriage than any Santorum has offered!)
Finally, even if the first two points were to be granted, one would have to believe that government has a right to restrict the free choices of individuals in order to promote socially beneficial institutions -- which amounts to believing that government has the right to enslave the individual for the sake of the collective. It's easy to see how a Communist or a Nazi could accept this third premise. But it's harder to see how Santorum can justify such a collectivist and authoritarian delusion after writing the following words:
To the Founders, these God-given truths -- that"all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" -- are no more open to discuss or debate than the laws of gravity. They are simply there, part of the created order. And because they are divinely sanctioned, it followed that even if a wicked and depraved majority tried to subvert them in the name of"democracy," the moral minority would be obliged to resist the majority’s wishes in the name of moral truth.On the issue of gay marriage (and many other issues, of course), Santorum has precisely attempted to organise a"wicked and depraved majority" in a coalition to subvert a minority’s claim to"equal and inalienable rights" -- thereby proving that the principles of ’76 mean more to him as tools of rhetorical manipulation than as genuine living commitments. Happily, in this case God hath brought the counsel of the heathen to naught.
Roderick T. Long
A correspondent asks me what rights the Federal Marriage Amendment would have violated. Gays would still have had the right to have private, non-state-sanctioned marriage ceremonies, he argues; they would simply have forfeited governmental benefits to which no one has any right anyway.
I think this is too quick. These"governmental benefits" include rights that any couple either should have (e.g., the right not to have employer-paid insurance for one's spouse counted as taxable income, or a citizen's right not to have his/her noncitizen spouse deported) or should be able to contract into (e.g., the right to make medical decisions for one's spouse when necessary). These are not special state-conferred privileges we're talking about. (Of course marriage does come with such privileges also. So does being a police officer or a physician -- but that's no argument for banning gays from being police officers or physicians. Instead we should be fighting to get rid of the privileges.)
Wouldn't civil unions solve such problems just as well as marriage? Maybe. But such a"separate but equal" approach strikes me as repellent. What would we say if black couples could have" civil unions" but only white couples could legally"marry"? (And in response to those who reject this analogy on linguistic grounds, arguing that marriages are heterosexual unions by definition, see my post from a year ago: Who Defends Marriage?.)
In the present case, however, debating the merits of civil unions is beside the point, for the Federal Marriage Amendment would arguably have banned civil unions as well. Recall the actual wording of the proposed Amendment:
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.As I read this language, the Amendment would have forbidden states to offer even civil unions to gays. After all, it forbids construing any state law (present or future) to confer"marital status or the legal incidents thereof" to"unmarried couples or groups." I take the choice of"or" rather than"and" to mean that even laws conferring only the"legal incidents" of marital status (rather than marital status itself) are forbidden -- and that would seem to ban civil unions too.
For that matter, it's not at all clear to me that the Amendment couldn't have been used to ban private ceremonies as well. The second sentence of the Amendment is a restriction on state and federal law (or construal thereof), but the first sentence is completely open-ended: couldn't it be read as authorising the federal government to interfere with same-sex marriages wherever in the country they occur, just as the 13th Amendment is generally interpreted as authorising the federal government to interfere with slavery wherever in the country it occurs? This wouldn't be a Spoonerite reading of the FMA, of course -- it conflicts with Spooner's Seventh, Twelfth, and Fourteenth Rules of constitutional interpretation -- but we all know it isn't Spoonerites who would have been doing the interpreting. In 1886, Lillian Harman and Edwin C. Walker were imprisoned for conducting their own non-state-sanctioned marriage ceremony; would the Rick Santorums and Roy Moores of this world be more lenient on same-sex couples who did likewise?
James Otteson
This is becoming received wisdom. (Here is an article about it from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but there are lots more out there.) But as Laurence M. Vance pointed out, the latest “Conservative Index” published by The New American presents evidence questioning the received wisdom.
The Index rates congressmen on the basis of “their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, to fiscal responsibility, to national sovereignty, and to a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements.” The Index gives each member of the House and the Senate a score between 1 and 100, with 100 representing perfect allegiance to those principles as reflected in their record in several recent votes. One person in the House got a perfect score: Ron Paul (R–TX); the highest-rated person in the Senate was John Ensign (R–NV) with 80.
But here’s the interesting part: the average in the House is 46 and the average in the Senate is 41. Thus with all those allegedly ideologically conservative Republicans, both houses don’t even make it halfway to “conservative.” Tom Delay, the House Majority Leader, scores 41, and Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, scores 43. Their respective Democrat counterparts, Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle, scored 27 and 30. So the Republican leaders are more “conservative” than the Democrat leaders. But don’t get too excited: that arch-Liberal Ted Kennedy scores 38, only whisker below Delay and Frist.
Vance takes the result to indicate that Republicans aren’t really “conservative” at all, despite what they say and what is commonly said about them. That seems a valid inference, but what strikes me is the credence it lends to the common libertarian complaint that there is no difference of substance between America’s two major parties. And it seems to undermine the idea that the parties are so far apart.
David T. Beito
Gene Healy
"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."
--George W. Bush, October 7, 2002.
I'm not talking about the fact that the dread Iraqi fleet turned out to be a few ancient Czech training drones. Put that aside. Focus on what he said.
Was he, or anyone else in the administration, really" concerned" that Iraq might unleash a fleet of chem-armed UAVs on the US mainland (after, I guess, ferrying them most of the way across the Atlantic so they were in range)? How low an opinion of President Bush's intelligence do you have to have to believe that he believed that statement? How low an opinion does President Bush have of the public's intelligence to make that statement? Oh well, no one ever went broke, like Mencken said.
The point is, that was a lie. Right?
Steven Horwitz
Interesting discussion about the effects of minimum wage laws shooting around the blogosphere. The big question seems to be why so few, at least recent, studies show any major effect of increasing the minimum wage. I think Tyler Cowen has it right in arguing that employers have multiple margins to adjust on when forced to pay higher monetary wages. To break it down a bit more precisely than Tyler does, imagine that an employee's total compensation consists of monetary wages plus various forms of non-monetary compensation. This is obvious to salaried workers who get health benefits, vacations, etc., but it's true even for minimum wage workers if you, as Tyler credits Gordon Tullock with doing, expand the category of compensation broadly enough.
The example Tyler uses is turning up the air conditioning (i.e., making it not as cool in the workplace). If you have to pay more in wages, rather than firing workers, you might choose to save in other ways. Other examples here could range from reducing employee discounts (no more free Big Macs), making employees pay for their own uniforms, increasing the level and intensity of monitoring so as to produce more output at the higher monetary wage, creating stricter rules about using company resources (such as phones, computers, or office supplies) for personal use, etc.. There are numerous ways in which firms can adjust to a mandated monetary wage hike so as to leave either their total compensation costs unchanged, or to squeeze more productivity out of workers without laying them off. Note that if governments pass mandated non-monetary compensation laws (forcing all firms to provide health insurance for example), we would see the same sorts of marginal adjustments elsewhere, this time including lowering monetary wages perhaps.
The big point here is that for some significant number of workers, the series of changes kicked off by the imposition of a higher minimum wage makes them worse off. If you imagine compensation as a bundle of goods, mandated benefits (whether monetary or not) adjust that bundle in ways that are very likely not to match the preferences of both employers and employees. (The old economist's counter-factual is that if people really wanted the new bundle, they could have negotiated for it. I don't buy that as being correct for everyone.) The bottom line is who knows better which bundle of compensation is more mutually satisfactory: decentralized negotiations between employers and firms or government trying to impose a one-size fits all solution? In that way, the argument is a good application of Hayekian knowledge considerations.
David T. Beito
Harry Truman's long-time opposition to interracial marriage during the same period (and later) is less well known, however. When a reporter asked the former president in 1963 if he thought school integration would lead to intermarriage, he answered"I hope not. I don't believe in it. The Lord created it that way. You read your Bible and you'll find out."
The reporter then asked Truman if he would want his daughter to marry a black man if"she loved him." He responded"She won't love sombody that's not her color." (Chicago Daily Defender, September 12, 1963)
Pat Lynch
I give you two stories to contrast the Jekyll and Hyde Bush. First from the Weekly Standard on what is probably the most protectionist Democratic ticket in history. Here we see the optimisic vision of Bush the free-trader who is just waiting for his second term to push for lower barriers.
Unfortunately there's this other guy......and he is best understood by this most recent election compromise this time on, of all things shrimp. My thanks to Andrew Cohen for pointing out this policy to me. Seems the president has decided that some countries are"dumping" shirmp on the U.S. because they can produce it at lower costs and thus charge us lower prices. Heaven for fend! Not surprisingly this will hurt industries in swing states like North Carolina and Louisana. To protect the Bubba Gump Shirmp business we've punished Vietnam. Stupid is, as stupid does.
So which Bush are classical liberals supposed to believe? The tariff wielding protectionist, who has been most visible during the first four years, or the promised free-trade convert? Should we be voting for a promise rather than a record? If the Bush record weren't littered with big government spending and offensive tariffs to support export industries it might be easier to believe the promises. Certainly Kerry and Edwards in contrast look so bad on trade that many of us may be tempted to believe the Bush rhetoric on what his next term will hold. However right now the White House is asking for a lot of faith among free traders that another four years will lead to freer trade.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
I've been impressed with the quality of recent discussion here at L&P over the war in Iraq, and I realize that even"nonpartisan" reports from governmental committees reek of partisanship. But with the 9/11 Commission preparing to issue its final, critical report, and with the Senate Intelligence Commission having issued its report, I really have one question for all the discussants here, a question that is being asked, it seems, of all Presidential candidates:"If you knew then, what you know now about the war in Iraq, would you have opposed (or favored) the US military campaign?"
And I mean quite simply, if you knew everything you know now, including the fact that the US would engage in a nation-building occupation, where would you stand?
I tend to think that most people in this debate have neither changed their positions nor changed the positions of their interlocutors (with the notable exception of Irfan Khawaja among recent discussants, who has spoken here of having opposed US intervention in Iraq previously, but who came to favor it). I know my own fundamental views have not changed, even if I think I've learned a lot from people on all sides of this debate. I don't think my essential concerns have altered one whit, because I do believe that most of the evidence has lent credence to my initial assumptions about the nature of the problems in the Middle East and the nature of US foreign policy.
Clearly the operative word for most people's viewpoints in this dialogue is: tenacity. So, have your views changed? Why? Or why not? Feel free to post here, or to simply think about it.
Pat Lynch
Just to refresh our memories, this allegedly conservative administration decided that the wealthiest segment of the U.S. population by age needed yet another large entitlement - govermnent subsidized prescription drugs. At the time the administration told Congress that the program would"only" cost around 400 billion dollars. Shortly after the bill was passed it became public that Richard Foster, an official at Health and Human Services, had done an analysis of the program that showed it would cost approximately 500 to 600 billion dollars per year. Of course the administration never sent that figure to the Hill.
Now, in what has to be one of the most underappreciated news stories of the year thus far, it turns out that Mr. Foster's boss, Thomas Scully, had threatened to fire Foster if he released the report. That's right, he threatened to fire the guy for telling the truth. But wait, it gets better!
Guess who Scully is now working for? He's now a lobbyist for a group of major drug companies, including Abbot Laboratories and Aventis, and a pharmacy benefits manager. But wait, it gets even better!
The GAO has decided that while Scully did threaten Foster with firing that the act WAS NOT ILLEGAL! Yep, government officials can deceive the public and essentially engage in fraud and not be prosecuted for it.
So let me get this straight. Martha Stewart is probably going to get sentenced to jail for lying to the feds, partially on the basis of perjured testimony from a government official related to an insider trading scandal that hurt nobody. And this guy Scully, who clearly committed fraud to the tune of 200 billion dollars by any reasonable definition, cannot be prosecuted? Someone has to be pick up this story and run with it; and someone should put the administration's feet to the fire on this.
David T. Beito
As I mentioned in Was the Constitution a Good Thing? historians have often failed to appreciate the Articles. For example, unlike the Constitution which followed it, it was not tainted by such subsidies for slavery as the Fugitive Slave clause.
The system established by the Articles had several accomplishments to its credit. Here are a few:
First, during this period, the United States not only declared Independence but won a war against the greatest military power on the planet.
Second, it negotiated a favorable peace treaty.
Third, it instituted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which provided a system of disposing of land in the west. The Ordinance also banned slavery in the Northwest and created a system for admitting new states on an equal footing with the old ones.
Fourth, it began to pay down the wartime debt.
Fifth, the United States began a strong economic recovery in the mid 1780s after a normal post-war recession.
Historians have often dismissed the government of the United States in this" critical period" of the Articles as a failure. To be sure, the document had its flaws but it also created a government that had some remarkable accomplishments and certainly compares well with other post-revolutionary governments (France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, etc.).
At the very least, the Articles deserves more credit in in U.S. survey textbooks and lectures as the governing companion document of the Declaration of Independence. Like the Declaration, it reflected the radical whig distrust of centralized political, military, and economic power.
James Otteson
I am a philosophy professor at the University of Alabama. (Professor Beito asked me to introduce myself, but knowing that you won’t be interested in me, but only--possibly--in what I say, that should suffice. E-mail me at jroii@hotmail.com if you would like to know more.) I’m new to blogging, so apologies in advance if I struggle with the art. I’ll get better.
Mortimer Adler said in his classic book How to Read a Book that the purpose of college is to teach students how to read a book; the purpose of graduate school is to learn one book really well. He was thinking of a liberal arts college education, and of graduate training in a humanities field. Still, for being so simple, that is surprisingly insightful. Adler was right that reading a book is a far more difficult and labor-intensive task than it is routinely taken to be, and he was also right—already in the 1940s, when the book was first written—that reading was one of those skills that everybody thought he had but few in fact possessed. Like painting: as Hegel said, anyone can pick up a brush and make strokes on a canvas, but that does not make you a painter. My own observations lead me to believe things have only gotten worse, with people, students in particular, having become even more self-assured that they can read and yet their abilities in fact having declined.
Here’s why I bring it up. I’m currently writing a book outlining and defending the “classical liberal” moral and political tradition and applying that tradition’s principles to moral and political conflicts occupying our attention today. The book is pitched at undergraduates and aims to be a counterweight to books like Peter Singer’s influential and widely used Practical Ethics. My travails associated with writing this book, which lend anecdotal credence to complaints that a certain political bias has a firm grip on the academy, may be the subject of future postings. I bring it up now, however, because one of the criticisms the manuscript has received from reviewers is that it uses too many “big” words that undergraduates cannot be reasonably expected to know.
Here are some of the words singled out as being unreasonable to expect undergraduates to know: vapid, ineluctable, stultiloquence, oafish, fustian, salubrious, and inscrutable. Some of these words are obviously less common, thus harder, than others; and perhaps some of them count as “big.” But each of the words was used in a context that gave strong clues about its meaning. And we are talking about university students here, all of whom are supposed to have had several years of English classes. Is it really unreasonable to expect them to know these words? What is it reasonable to expect them to know, then?
But I would like to question the premise that we should drop use of a word if students aren’t likely to know it. Why? Why shouldn’t we challenge them? Why shouldn’t we expect them to make the effort to look up a word they don’t know? More pointedly, why should we talk down to them rather than expecting them to rise to higher standards? Goodness: consider just how many great works in Western history would have to be excluded on that criterion!
It is not a new argument that if you lower standards, students’ performance will descend accordingly. I think we should raise our sights and expect, even demand, students meet them. Why shouldn’t a college graduate be able to use a word like “inscrutable” or “vapid,” and decipher a word like “salubrious” from the context—or go look it up?
David T. Beito
I have several problems with this. While Ralph has a point in his historical analysis, I doubt that today any politician would openly, or even secretly, consider *only* a Jew, Irishman, or Italian for chair of the Democratic Party of New York or as a candidate for a particular office.
Now....it is true that politicians continue to consider ethnicity and religion as *factors* in picking candidates or party leaders. I have no objection to that, at least in moderation. However, I can't think of a single example in recent years when a particular religion or ethnic qualification was singled out as the only factor in such a selection e.g. a factor that could trump all the others.
In 2000, for example, Lieberman's Jewishness was probably a positive factor in his selection but nobody claimed that it was the only one. In fact, I think that had Gore begun his veep search by saying he was looking for"a Jewish candidate," and only a Jewish candidate, he would been roundly booed by both sides. Yet, Dale does it and few object. There is a double standard here, no matter how you cut it. The stategy of selecting party positions such as chair on the basis of race also fails on practical terms in my view. Recent (and not so recent) history indicates that party differences are increasingly determined by ideology than the skin color of party leaders or politicians who carry out policies.
It is probable that blacks in November will vote 90 percent Democratic. It will not make much difference to them that Dubya has appointed the first blacks to two major power positions: secretary of state and NSC head. It will also not make much difference to them that Kerry's top staff is lily white and his veep is an over forty white male.
Dubya might sway some black voters if he picked Powell (a moderate) as veep though he probably wouldn't if he picked Rice (a pro-war conservative). I used to think otherwise about Rice but no longer do.
I would even content that if the GOP in Mississippi picked a conservative Republican black as chair and the Democrats picked a liberal white, I don't think, voter alignments would change too much.
Moreover, of course, the quota mentality of Dale and others not only perpetuates something that is morally dubious but is rather insulting and patronizing (and will probably be seen as such) of the good sense and savy of both black and white voters.
Radley Balko
How convenient, then, that Jenkins himself owns a tobacco farm. And that the bill he helped draft and push through the house will land he and his wife a cool $55,000. In a day's work, Jenkins netted himself more money from U.S. taxpayers than most of his constituents make in a year.
Congressmen are always quick to exempt themselves and their offices from most of the laws they pass. Funny how they forget to include those exemptions when the bill in question gives them a stall at the public trough.
Radley Balko
Waxy.org plays on this theme with the Amazon knee-jerk contratrian game, which seeks out the most asinine one-star Amazon.com reviews of acknowledged classics.
A few of my favorites...
Of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue:
"If pretension, tedium, and self-indulgence are your idea of what should animate music, then this is the album and Miles Davis is the 'artist' for you."Of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds:
"It's full of bland harmonizing by guys that could barely swim."Of Bob Dylans' Highway 61 Revisited
"He set the precedent that doomed rock 'n roll to always being a semantic eunuch."Of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme:
"Nobody will care about the technical achievements of these guys in 100 years."Of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane
"Please stop the hype on Citizen Kane. It doesn't work. It's like you are trying to convince people that poop smells good."Of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:
"Anyone who is an ancestor to that worthless excuse of an American novelist should be offered sincere consoling and extreme sympathies."Here are a few I found of my own... Of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird:
"...about as deep as a rain puddle.""...one of the most overrated and hyped books of our time. It's an uneven paste-job of short stories and pieces by Harper Lee promoted by her liberal New York publishing friends.""I can't say enough negative things about this book. It takes place in the South, shortly after the slaves were freed. It's told from the point of view of an 8-year-old (that alone should tell you how stupid this book is) and is written as she would talk."Of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita:
"In my mind Lolita is nothing more than trash wrapped up in a pretty package by a famous writer. People continue to be drawn to it (men mostly, I suspect) by its titillating subject and Nobokov's reputation as a writer. They use the excuse of"good literature" to read a lurid book that they otherwise would be too embarassed to pick up. It provides little else but mental masturbation and is nothing more than an arrogant, self indulgent exercise in language manipulation."Of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment:
"There aren't very many books that I can't finish, and I am a bit embarassed to admit that this was one of them. After I got halfway through the book I determined that it was named Crime and Punishment for a reason. The Crime was him writing the book, and the Punishment was my reading it.""Less enjoyable than a bowl of warm mayonaise."Of one of my personal favorite movies, Hoosiers:
"This film starts out promisingly with some beautiful photography showing Indiana in the fall. It soon bogs down to repetitious basketball footage and cliche characters going about their wretched lives pointlessly. If you like shots of basketballs bouncing off of backboards, this film might be entertaining. To me, it was like being hit in the face continually with a basketball for the better part of two hours. Oh well, it beats watching the NBA."Of the movie Cool Hand Luke:
"Let's be honest here - if your teenage kid got drunk and ripped out a bunch of parking meters, wouldn't you think it was a really stupid thing to do ? If he let a bigger kid beat him silly, would you think him heroic, or lacking good judgment ? Would you consider your kid praiseworthy for eating 50 eggs ? So why do these absurd actions make Luke (who is supposedly an adult) such a hero in the eyes of this film's fans ?"Of The Velvet Underground & Nico:
"I've listened to this album repeatedly, and I just don't like it. Why should I settle for a band with very little musical talent? There are so many other bands that have good songwriting AND talent to spare that I don't see the point of dripping praise upon Andy Warhol. I wonder if anybody has ever compared Velvet Underground to Phish. I think this comparison perfectly demonstrates the difference between bands with opposite levels of talent.""This is one of the worst albums I have ever heard in my life; the singing is horrible and the lyrics are insipid..."I wonder if this is how Christopher Hitchens got started.
Steven Horwitz
