The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years

The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years

Reason Magazine, ever delighted to snipe at others, points out a load of silly hype from Time.

If only what was good for the goose was good for the gander: no, wait! Is it possible that Reason Magazine has published something that was ridiculous hype? Could they have published some libertarian point of view that is ludicrously alarmist or otherwise silly in hindsight?

Let's collect a top 10 silly articles from Reason. Pick a back issue at random and look at it for the ridiculous. Extra bonus points for black helicopters!

Seasteading redux.

Seasteading: Libertarians Set to Launch a (Wet) Dream of 'Freedom' in International Waters

Brad Reed takes an amused look at Patri Friedman's seasteading plans, yet another repeat of utopian libertarian daydreams for the wealthy.

This must be at least the fourth or fifth version of this sort of plan. As I see it, all the old ones foundered on the problem of distrust of their centralized planning by incompetent or downright criminal organizers.

In the "Freedom Through Technology" index. Hat tip to Markus Cavanagh for this one!

Parable of the ship: why Austrian Economics fails.

Many libertarians and other conservatives look to Austrian economics because they find their preferred positions explained with clear moral stories. But the great fault of Austrianism is that it is not scientific. Science is a better way of knowing than philosophy, because scientific theories have to explain close to all the scientifically collected data. For all the faults of conventional economics, it is far closer to a science than Austrianism because it relies heavily on data. Austrianism has a methodological disrespect of data. It is structured as a medieval philosophy based on authority, rather than systematic adherence to real-world data.

I've collected criticisms of Austrian economics for many years in my index Austrian Economics. But a sheaf of miscellaneous criticisms may not be as clear as a parable.

The owner of a ship noticed that his ship was filling with water. Being an educated man (if not nautically trained) he knew there were many possible causes for water in a ship: leaks in the hull, the bilge pump being broken, waves washing over, condensation, and even the crew urinating in the hold. He heard the bilge pump running, he saw water from waves pouring in the open hatches, but worst of all he smelled urine in the hold! Being sensible, he ordered the crew to shut the hatches and then gave them a lengthy, stern harangue on hygienic use of the head. While he was lecturing the crew, his ship sank due to a combination of causes: large, unobserved leaks in the hull, a bilge pump that was running but not pumping correctly, and condensation that had shorted out warning circuitry.

Now, it's easy to write a story to justify or ridicule any course of action, any philosophy. Indeed, that described Ayn Rand's fiction. But my purpose here is to illustrate ways in which the owner failed to think correctly. Ways which are STRONGLY analogous to Austrian economic methodology.

In every theory-rich subject, there can be a multitude of explanations of cause. For example, there might be 5 possible causes for a specific problem, be it inflation or disease or whatever. All or none of those causes might be valid. If all of them are valid, some might be unimportant because they cause very little of the problem or cause the problem very infrequently or cause the problem only under specific circumstances. But more than one of the causes might be quite important, singly or in combination. Economics is just such a theory-rich subject.

There is no way to identify from philosophy which of these might be the case. You need to be able to observe enough to quantify these factors. However, Austrianism is staunchly against measurement: indeed, it is innumerate because it does not use measurement. Rothbard, Mises, and Hayek railed about how measurements were philosophically invalid.

In the parable, the owner did not investigate condensation; he presumed the pump was working correctly without measurement; he did not attempt to measure leaks; he presumed (again without measurement) that the water sloshing in the hatches was the right amount to explain the filling; and he distracted the crew from finding the real problems with his own assumptions and moral haranguing.

Since Austrians are innumerate, instead they must rely on their assumptions, which needless to say tend to have a very right wing bias. Science does not work that way. Nor can Austrians really defend their assumptions: no assumption about the real world is totally true which means that there is fallacy in all their logic about the real world. They make up for this in bluster and old-fashioned appeal to their own authority.

When confronted with real-world problems that could have multiple causes, logical verbal models are insufficient. You MUST introduce measurement and mathematics into your models if you want to have any hope of valid answers. Logical verbal models are sufficient to specify possible chains (or networks) of causation, but telling which are significant is a quantitative problem that requires measurement.

This is not a new position: it is basic to science and ought to be basic to philosophy. Hume said it very clearly 260 years ago:

Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 12, "Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy"

Two new Milton Friedman critiques.

Over in the Milton Friedman index.

Going Galt part two: others point out the stupidity.

As UUbuntu pointed out in comments to the previous Galt post,

Steven Colbert rips apart the Going Galt theme in his Rand Illusion sketch. I'm afraid the ironic humor might not mean as much to folks who come back to this in later years.

In addition, In Contempt comics has an excellent "Galt Gestalt" comic with accompanying commentary that will make clear the issues to folks who come late to this contretemps. If you don't have the background for Colbert's sketch, read this first.

A friend of mine, early internet jokester Rich Rosen ("we are all Rich Rosen"), sent me a link to his essay: When Atlas Shrugs, People Listen... But Why? He does have an indignant, serious side.

Hoisted from his comments is The Last Person On Earth To Turn To Now Is Ayn Rand by Johann Hari at the HuffPo. He points out at length a number of Randian idiocies.

Building on a response to that last one, I'd say that Ayn Rand was the unattractive Ann Coulter of her time. Except worse in that she was a cult leader, was even more divorced from reality, and a horrible writer.

Going Galt: the latest propaganda.

Hilzoy writes: It's a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneurial class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue....

I agree with Hilzoy about the reference. He says it's strange that the producing entrepreneurs seem to be staying in place.

Much more obvious is that it is not the Randian Ubermensch that are dropping out: it is the workers/consumers. They've closed their pocketbooks and ceased spending as much, starving the entrepreneurs who now have unaffordable overhead on their idle productive capacity.

The interesting thing is that Rand had wrong in so many ways if you want to consider this analogous to "Atlas Shrugged". The causes were a real estate bubble and interlocking dependencies between banks. The players are essentially all from publicly owned corporations, rather than privately held corporations led by the owners. I haven't read Rand in 35 years (who could stand it as an adult?), but I don't think she mentions bubbles or bankers or non-owners as causing the collapse.

So if anybody is using the term "Going Galt", they're WAY OFF, and probably trying to pretend they're powerful in this crisis, rather than helpless. They'd like our supplication, not our scorn.

The Libertarian From Nazareth?

The Libertarian From Nazareth?

Thanks to Paul Trombley for pointing this one out. A perfect illustration of "Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism" from my Libertarianism in One Lesson.

The simplest reason that Jesus was obviously not a libertarian is because he does not condemn slavery: instead he tells slaves to be like their masters. A five-second google search for "jesus" and "slavery" turned up SLAVERY and the BIBLE, which details all the missed opportunities Jesus had to condemn slavery.

If I wanted to be as stupid and anachronistic as the author, Butler, I'd also point out that Jesus doesn't preach for a right to keep and bear firearms. Or any more temporally-correct form of weapons.

It's been added to my Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism as an example of amazingly awful reasoning crossing the line into self-parody. Not to mention Libertarian Revisionist History. The idea that Jesus was a libertarian is one of the most amazingly stupid anachronisms I've ever heard.

What is Political Capitalism?

A week ago, I wrote a response to a Marginal Revolution post about "political capitalism". I wrote:

"Political capitalism" is yet another far-right think tank spawned pile of crap. Every few years, the right needs new, less boring clubs with which to beat their opponents. We've seen a number of them in the past: trickle down, Laffer curve, etc. Austrianism is required to believe in this one, according to the author.

You need only look at the biography of the author to see just how pathetic this is. His PhD was under Murray Rothbard at the now-defunct International College in Los Angeles, and pretty much all of his work has been based on Austrianism.

The author, Rob Bradley, responded.

Sorry to see that one participant has turned the discussion into argument against the person.

Two comments: One, a review of my dissertation, published as Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience, was published in the Southern Economic Journal by Tyler Cowen.

Two, a major endorsement of my "political capitalism" theme comes from Gabriel Kolko, a New Left historian out of the Marxist tradition, who stated on the back cover of my new book, Capitalism at Work: "Fascinating, comprehensive ... far surpassing my own history of political capitalism done in the 1960s."

I tried to respond again, but my post was supposedly filtered for too many links (no other responses appeared.)

So rather than waste my efforts, I'll post here so that I have them for reference....



Bradley criticizes me for "argument against the person", and defends himself with appeal to authority.

Take a look at Tyler's review of his published thesis which is as fine an example of damning with faint praise as I've ever seen.

Yet another review says "it is ironic that the main criticism one can direct against him relates to his ideological a priori attachment to the belief that any form of government intervention in the market economy must always and everywhere be pernicious and counterproductive."

If you check the Gabriel Kolko wikipedia page, it points out that "political capitalism" is a term Kolko used for corporatism, but hardly anybody else adopted it in the subsequent 40+ years. There isn't even a wikipedia page for "political capitalism", nor does it redirect to corporatism.

Yet he totally ignores my first paragraph where I point out that two other giant negatives for his credibility: that he is a tool of the right wing think tanks, and that he relies on Austrian economics.

A little reading of his introduction tells the full story. Shorter Rob Bradley: "Enron and Ken Lay failed because they were victims of a mixed economy even though every other corporation that fails or succeeds is in a mixed economy. Fairytale pure capitalism, as fantasized by Ayn Rand, would be free of these problems."

Comic quotations:

"Adam Smith, Samuel Smiles, and Ayn Rand elucidated the character traits, mental models, and interpersonal conditions behind success and failure, while differentiating sharply between free-market entrepreneurship and political rent-seeking."
Right. Female industrialists swooning before the economic might of mighty male industrialists, as in Atlas Shrugged.

"In the twentieth century (chapter 3), the philosophy of Objectivism, formulated by Ayn Rand, explains how Enron’s financial bankruptcy was at root a philosophic one."
Shorter Rob Bradley: It's only because Ken Lay was not an Objectivist cultist, unlike every successful CEO.

"Smith, Smiles, and Rand did much to frame what can be called heroic capitalism"
Most of us outgrow moralistic stories of heroes by the end of our teens. And Smith was much more sensible than Smiles or Rand: he showed good and bad in capitalism. Not simple heroism.

"But why did inferior thinking in the social sciences and humanities prevail? [...] The answer is the by now familiar one: arrogance."
Ah, the classic crank explanation for why everybody else is wrong, and he's right. How humble of him to proclaim that they're arrogant, every one!

There are so many stupid things in this introduction that it beggars description. Essentially, he wordily describes the Enron/Lay problems as hubris, but attributes the hubris to the mixed economy. Sorry, jack, but hubris doesn't need mixed economy to occur.

He also declares that he worked at Enron (and for Lay) for years. That's honest, but it sure points out that he has an incentive to find somebody else to blame. Was he the one point of light at Enron who wasn't suffering from the moral flaws that brought Enron and Lay down? Somehow, I doubt it.

I guess I'll finish by quoting my Libertarianism in One Lesson and Libertarianism in One Lesson; The Second Lesson, because Rob Bradley embodies these caricatures:

Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.

Require perfection as the only applicable standard to judge government: libertarianism, being imaginary, cannot be fairly judged to have flaws.

Government causes pollution, crime, discrimination, slavery, poverty, and all the other evils of the world. Businesses and individuals only produce wealth: they are not involved and not responsible for any of those problems.

There are no market failures, only government failures. Which is why we should abolish corporations, patents, copyright and other intellectual property; they are established by government interference with free markets.

Libertarian loser of the week.

Every now and then, another libertarian writes another stupid rebuttal to my FAQ, and the sycophants gather around and cheer because they're no smarter, and can't recognize the errors.

One such twit, "KipEsquire", wrote an addition to the latest and made all sorts of stupid errors.

I responded with corrections to his errors, and pointed out that I am a Madisonian social contract fan, as opposed to Locke or Hobbes.

Kip replied without anything more than ad hominem and berating me for not appealing to the authority of Hobbes and Locke.

I pointed that out, and explained that I didn't need to appeal to social contracts that were philosophical fantasies when Madison created an actual, practical social contract. After all, why would I appeal to flying horses and flying carpets when I could talk about airplanes?

I tried to check back, and Kip had locked me out. So I used an anonymizer, looked, and sure enough the coward had deleted my response. What a baby. I wrote another taunting him, which he'll probably delete.

It's funny how many libertarians can't defend their claims, and instead have to rely on deletion and lockouts to silence their opponents. They really are authoritarian when they feel threatened, and shut down free discussion by hiding behind their property rights.

Venn Diagram of Poker Hands: Solution

Venn Diagram of Poker Hands:


FOUR OF A KIND and FULL HOUSE are both inside THREE OF A KIND and TWO PAIRS, but do not overlap.

THREE OF A KIND and TWO PAIRS are both inside PAIR.

ROYAL FLUSH is inside STRAIGHT FLUSH.

STRAIGHT FLUSH is inside STRAIGHT and FLUSH.

PAIR, STRAIGHT and FLUSH are all inside HIGH CARD.

Because any hand has a HIGH CARD and HIGH CARD includes all the others, HIGH CARD is identical to ALL HANDS.

The above diagram is topologically correct, I think, so it doesn't really matter what sizes or shapes the boundaries take.


An additional problem, for those who love easy combinatorics, would be to show the numbers and probabilities for all the regions. This requires a slightly different interpretation of the labels: for example, HIGH CARD is interpreted to mean "HIGH CARD ONLY" which excludes PAIR, FLUSH and STRAIGHT.

Biomimicry of evo-devo patterns.

The evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology) idea is that organisms have basic developmental core processes (a toolbox) that are regulated during development by other genes. Thus basic mechanisms such as development into segments can be regulated to produce few-segmented organisms such as insects or many segmented organisms such as snakes.

There is a surprising analogy in the UNIX (and thus LINUX) operating system design philosophy: "Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines." The short version is "mechanism, not policy".

The X windows system, written about 25 years ago, made heavy use of this design principle. X provided the mechanism for user interfaces that did all the hard work of drawing and reacting to user input in a very concise and general way. Specific user interfaces such as Motif and OpenLook (that looked very different) could then be created just by controlling the use of X mechanisms.

A more recent development (10 years) exploiting this design principle has been the addition of cascading style sheets to HTML. The underlying HTML of a web page can be displayed in radically different ways depending on the style sheets applied to it. (For explanation and some amazing variations, see Zen Garden.)

Another possible example of this biomimicry is the Constitution of the United States, as I explain in Mechanism, Not Policy: Creation Of The Second Invisible Hand. This one predates modern evo-devo ideas by quite a bit, but is my own (possibly crank) interpretation.

The evolution (in the sense of change over time by modification) is obvious in all three of these examples.

Venn Diagram of Poker Hands

A couple of years ago, I took a course on teaching Discrete Math at Tufts. While we were talking probability, we used Venn diagrams to illustrate how to compute some probabilities. And it occurred to me that it would be interesting to make a Venn diagram of all the types of poker hands. After I did it, I looked on the web to see if there was one posted any where, searching with "venn" and "poker", but couldn't find any. This is the best I found today:



It's obviously got some gross mistakes. For example, the straight circle is by itself, rather than including straight flush. And the non-straight circle is an abomination.

The challenge is to make a correct Venn diagram of the poker hands. Every kind of hand should be properly nested in all the simpler kinds of hand. I'll post my answer in a week or so. Alternatively, if you can find a better answer on the web or elsewhere, I'd like to know where.

Update 1/17/09:
Here is the solution. No peeking until you've solved the problem!

Moderation Policy

I've been participating in online community discussions for about 35 years now (starting with the Plato System in 1974.) I've seen numerous discussion groups start, grow, become diseased (with trolls, hostile opponents, etc.), recover, mature, senesce, and die.

I was among the first on Usenet Groups (which were an imitation of the newsgroups on the Plato System), and if you want to read some of my early (1984) Usenet postings, search google groups for "Huybensz" (my maiden name, which nobody ever pronounced or spelled correctly, now shortened to Huben) or "mrh". Google's cache of early postings is very incomplete.

So when moderation policy issues come up, I do think I know something about it. Sometimes they have come up here, sometimes people who dislike my position or style bring them up in their own blogs.

Here, as a heuristic, I tend not to allow anonymous comments. It is trivial to create a pseudonymous google (or other) identity: that's no real obstacle, despite protests from fools like Skeptico. It does deter the most casual annoying commenters. But the big win is that it allows us to have lines of argument person by person, rather than a contradictary chorus of an anonymous crowd.

I also rarely delete comments. I'm reluctant to do so, but sometimes there are good reasons that are not encapsulated by simple rules.

The best explanation of managing comments in blogs that I've seen is from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, her post NOT titled Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space.

Here are her principles:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

3. You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you’re going away for a while, don’t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they’ll still be there when you get back.

4. Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

7. Things to cherish: Your regulars. A sense of community. Real expertise. Genuine engagement with the subject under discussion. Outstanding performances. Helping others. Cooperation in maintenance of a good conversation. Taking the time to teach newbies the ropes.

All these things should be rewarded with your attention and praise. And if you get a particularly good comment, consider adding it to the original post.

8. Grant more lenience to participants who are only part-time jerks, as long as they’re valuable the rest of the time.

9. If you judge that a post is offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant, it’s important to get rid of it, or at least make it hard to read. Do it as quickly as possible. There’s no more useless advice than to tell people to just ignore such things. We can’t. We automatically read what falls under our eyes.

10. Another important rule: You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets.

11. You can’t automate intelligence. In theory, systems like Slashdot’s ought to work better than they do. Maintaining a conversation is a task for human beings.

12. Disemvowelling works. Consider it.

13. If someone you’ve disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You’re acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice.

The One Ring

I don't really have a personal blog (just how many should I have?) but I want to stash this somewhere on the web.

I teach Precalculus, and one of the key ideas for explaining the trigonometric functions is the unit circle ( with a radius of 1.) Tolkein fans might appreciate how appropriate this poem is:



The One Ring
(Great Circle Of Power,
Math Student's Bane)

One Circle to rule them all,
One ring to find them,
Unit circle to calculate all,
and in trigonometry bind them.
In the study of Precalculus where the functions lie.

Lame Duck Ideological Sabotage Deterrence Bill

Yesterday, there was an NPR report that the Bush administration is charging ahead with plans to change regulations in industry-friendly ways that Obama would not be able to undo. For example: bypassing environmental regulations, approving various applications, etc.

This could be forestalled with a Lame Duck Ideological Sabotage Deterrence Bill. The idea is to get the threat out there that any company that benefits from lame duck regulatory changes (before Obama and Congress get to act) will be socked with a massive penalty tax, far in excess of the profits expected from the regulatory change.

Of course, this could be prettied up and done informally.

Alternatively, Obama could be negotiating with Bush not to do this. Obama has a major bargaining chip: how freely he will unleash the furies to discover and prosecute Bush administration crimes and malfeasance. I'd settle for a truth and reconciliation commission, though I'd love to see Bush and Co. extradited to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes such as torture. Bush cannot pardon anybody for international crimes, only for crimes against US law. I don't think Obama would ever use this club against Bush, but it sure would make me feel good.

Sarah Palin Proudly Ignorant

Sarah Palin's speech ridiculing fruit fly research earmarks as wasteful has spawned an enormous reaction. However, that reaction is almost as wrongheaded as Palin.

When I read the criticism at Skeptico, I just couldn't resist deflating that (sometimes good and reasonable) windbag again for his confidence in his ignorance.

So many people are so wrong about this, that I've decided to post my response here as well. I wrote:

While it seems many people have their hearts in the right place on this subject, the press (and this site) are showing an incredible ignorance as well.

The common name "fruit fly" is used for SEVERAL FAMILIES of flies. The olive fruit fly (Bactrocera oleae) is in the family Tephritidae, while the common fruit fly of genetic research (more accurately called a vinegar fly or pomace fly) is in the family Drosophilidae.

Olive fruit flies have NEVER been important for genetic research, and anybody implying that this earmarked research is important for genetics is a fool ignorant of the differences between flies. I've yet to see the research proposal itself, but the few words I've seen describing it make it sound as if the research was for biological control through release of sterile irradiated males: a technique that has been used successfully to control several pest fly species such as the screwworm fly. That's economically valuable research that Palin is wrong to ridicule, but it also has nothing to do with genetics.

Once again, we see Skeptico (this time following the herd) making comments on a subject where he is extremely ignorant, where anybody familiar with the subject (like me: I had a course in fly systematics at Cornell) could immediately spot the howlers. I suppose his excuse is that he's as ignorant as most people, and doesn't have the sense to consult an expert in the RIGHT FIELD before he regurgitates bullshit from experts in the wrong field, who can't tell one family of flies from another.

Ayn Rand is not the source of the problem.

A correspondent wrote "Was just curious if you thought that the vast economic problems we're now facing could possibly be tracked to ideologies that Ayn Rand so cleverly designed and sold?"

A lot of people are trying to pin this down on Rand. But that makes no sense to me.

The basic source is the plutocracy of corporations and their owners. They are the first class citizens: government, business, and entrepreneurs serve them first. Rand was merely an entrepreneurial repackager and popularizer of plutocratic ideologies. As was Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard. As are CATO, Heritage, and a host of other think tanks.

I'm sure that the plutocracy would much rather we misdirected the blame at libertarians and other cats paws.

The financial crisis and libertarianism.

Jacob Weisberg has a new Slate article titled The End of Libertarianism: The financial collapse proves that its ideology makes no sense.

It's not a perfect article, and it may claim a bit more than is justified, but the basic point is sound. Financial markets cannot regulate themselves in ways necessary to prevent disasters, contrary to libertarian propaganda.

The largest cause of the financial contagion has been the credit default swap. These are unregulated, high-leverage derivatives that were created to circumvent normal insurance regulations. Without these derivatives, the damage done by the housing bubble collapse would not have paralyzed the entire lending industry.

Libertarians love to claim that markets swirl around and circumvent attempts at government control. Now we see the result of letting them do it. Numerous people called for this to be regulated, but the market fundamentalists were too influential.

Krugman wins his Nobel Prize

Many years ago, Steve Kangas pointed me to Paul Krugman as a really good economist. I've followed his writings in numerous sources since then, and have at least ten of them in the Critiques indexes. (Go to the All Links page and scroll to the first mention of his name.)

Krugman has many harsh things to say about libertarianism and Austrian economics. The one that is really relevant today is The Hangover Theory: Are recessions the inevitable payback for good times?.

Why we won't have Mars or Moon colonies for a LONG time.

A thought while driving.

I've long loved the science fiction / futurist dream of establishing extraterrestrial colonies. But I've realized why it won't happen any time in the next century or so.

A colony requires a technology of production that will (in combination with trade) allow self-sufficiency and growth.

If we look at past successful colonizations, we can spot the technologies. Europeans brought technologies for dominance and agriculture, and were able to adapt technologies of the native peoples. Polynesians brought marine and agricultural technologies.

Now, some polyannas might claim we have the technologies for the Moon or Mars, and start listing solar power and other Heinlein/Clarke stuff, but it's obvious to me that's wrong. Yes we have those technologies, but they are not right or sufficient. We have a very simple demonstration why, right at our doorsteps.

Antartica.

It would be far easier to colonize Antartica than anywhere in space, and yet we haven't in roughly 100 years. We have some stations there, but NOTHING IS BEING PRODUCED for local consumption or for trade. (Yes, you could argue that scientific information is being produced, but face it: a real colony has a COMMERCIAL life that supports its own population.) Other excuses are easily made (for example international treaties), but if there was commercial opportunity due to technology in Antartica, we'd exploit it as fast as we exploited offshore oil: the treaties would change.

We haven't even colonized tropical shallow waters, let alone under water. Offshore oil fields are not colonized. Vast commercial opportunities await in those locations, but no colonies. Because it isn't enough to have a technology for commercial exploitation only: you must have an array of technologies for daily living of a community before you really have a colony. Otherwise you're just an outpost. It can be argued that Chilean's have a permanently occupied Antartic colony, and that satisfies the daily living technology requirement. But I'd point out that it is not a commercial success: it is a highly subsidized investment in geopolitical claims staking.

Paying for the bailout.

I know I've got maybe 3 readers but I want to be on the record with this one.

All the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the general public having to pay for the bailout seems to be missing three little words.

Capital. Gains. Tax.

Nice populist ring to them: but you won't hear them from somebody like McCain.

Now, I don't know if that makes any economic sense as an idea, and I'm not proposing it as a serious solution because I'm not knowledgeable enough to think it through. But I'm shocked that nobody's using the words yet. Populists could use the bailout as a justification for continuing or increasing the CGT. Plutocrats could use the CGT as justification for the bailout -- what have they been paying for all this time? Spin could go either way.

A further source of joy for me is to hear all the howls of "communism" coming from the usual capitalism-uber-alles lunatics. Here they have the most compliant right-wing presidential lapdog they could ever have asked for. But when faced with the possibility of being branded the second Herbert Hoover for bringing on a second world-wide great depression, he scurries to nationalize. Maybe that sounds as if he's working against his patron capitalists, but chances are it will boil down to government handouts to the corporations and the rich.

Enough pissing match with Skeptico for me.

This answer to Skeptico is being held for review by him. So in the mean time...

The discussion with Skeptico is getting tedious, so I'm not going to answer everything (we know how that would lead to exponential growth) but instead will pick the low-hanging fruit.

Like many pompous people, Skeptico seems to think his reasoning is logical, and other people's fails to be logical because he sees them as rife with fallacies of logic. That's simply a delusion: we ALL engage in defeasible reasoning except in a very few excruciatingly precise circumstances where we start out with agreed upon precise meanings of terms, assumptions, and premises and apply only logical operators. In short, it doesn't happen much outside of mathematics. We see lots of examples of this delusion in Skeptico's latest response: I'd love to see him identify ONE example of where he uses a logical argument with unquestionable assumptions, definitions, and 100% true premises. He says, for example, "...not one shred of evidence in there that you are right and I am wrong about anything..." What perfection! I couldn't make up better examples. But of course, he can only make that dishonest claim because he is referring to the introduction, not the evidence that follows. The term for that is "quote mining" or "taken out of context".

Skeptico describes my introduction as "poisoning the well". Would Skeptico ever commit such a heinous crime? Well, let's see: a quick google search for "woo" turned up 454 hits at his blog. But is it really poisoning the well? I'd say it is an abstract presenting a model, and the remainder of my post was evidence supporting the model I presented. Thank goodness we have folks like Skeptico to show us that science journals worldwide have been utilizing such fallacies of argument!

"In fact, I don't think I've ever mentioned low food prices before, although I could be wrong." Well shucks, perhaps you should learn to search your own postings, or perhaps maybe even remember what you said.
"If GM actually did produce low food prices, most people would view this as a good thing."
But here is only one of many uses of weasle words by Skeptico: he pre-excuses himself when it is convenient to write something and he doesn't care if it is a lie.

"Random factoid (of debatable veracity), also a straw man and I believe even a Reductio ad Hitlerum logical fallacy. (And don't deny that - what other context of the German phrase "uber alles" is there but "Deutschland uber alles" and Hitler?)"
Well, if you look at what Wikipedia says about it, August Heinrich Hoffmann [...] wrote the text in 1841[...] The first line, "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt" (Germany, Germany above everything, above everything in the world), was an appeal to the various German sovereigns to give the creation of a united Germany a higher priority than the independence of their small states. It has been the national anthem of Germany since 1922 during the Weimar Republic. Its origin and adoption had no connection to Hitler or Naziism. Your contention that there is no other context is merely due to your own cultural ignorance, susceptibility to WWII propaganda and lack of research.

"Here's the thing Mike. You are on the Internet, using what may be your real name or what may be an alias, conversing with others who may or may not be using aliases. You don't know who they are even if they tell you. We don't know who you are even if you tell us."
Ooo, don't the Hare Krishna's use something like this? Non Krishnas are demons and will lie, so we don't need to pay attention to their arguments? Or are you taking pyrrhonism to ridiculous lengths, denying the possibility of knowledge of my identity and qualifications? It so happens that if you do a little bit of homework, my identity and knowledge can be confirmed. And you don't even need the net (though you can): I am pictured on the front page of the Boston Globe newspaper today. Is that main stream media good enough for you? My resume, picture, and lots of other information are at my web sites, and have been for many years. If you're still worried about my identity, I can provide references. Twit.

"The evidence matters."
Yes, evidence does matter: but so does the framework of understanding which is necessary to judge it. You, and most of the readers here, don't have that understanding, any more than you have the necessary understanding of any number of other technical fields. Your conspicuous errors repeatedly show that you know little of the field. (Ugh, a pun.)

You have stated no qualifications in the subject of agricultural economics. I, on the other hand, have been following it for the past 35 years since I was a freshman at Cornell. That's why you bungled the difference between yield per acre and productivity.

"Now remember, I started my reply with 'I think you're saying...' - which any rational and mentally stable individual would have taken as a person's honest attempt to understand your point."
Ah, general purpose weasle words once again. Now, does that translate into "I declare that you are saying" or "It's possible that you are saying"? Or someplace in between? If you had wanted to convince anybody that you were making a decent attempt (rather than spewing the first foolish thing that came to your prejudiced mind), you would have considered more than one possible meaning and justified why you chose that one. Before you invented a litany of reasons why your misinterpretation meant that I was wrong.

"Reading your posts again I realize you don't show anger, and that I was perhaps projecting my own anger at your style of debating[...] I apologize for calling what you wrote "angry drivel". I was wrong saying that. I should have called it unnecessarily confrontational, aggressive, loud mouthed, smug arrogance."
So let's see. Skeptico is confessing to my accusations of his projection and anger. But not because he's an honest guy or anything, but because it's so damned obvious that even he can see it now. Is it clever sarcasm now to channel that same stupid anger into a backhanded compliment? And to use emotive weasle words like those? We've seen how those work: men are confident, women are smug. Sounds like more projection to me.

Skeptico (and others) quoted my statement: "I get paid to teach (at an elite public high school)". He wrote:
"LMAO. Oh you don't think you're infallible, noooo. You need to write to express not to impress[....]"
Ah, a perfect example of that old creationist favorite, quote mining. In context, I wrote that sentence as part of an explanation of why I would not waste my time answering demands for explanation from every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Not as a statement of authority in agricultural economics.

"An honest mistake, especially if expressed with some doubt (as I did), is not a straw man."
Wow, since when did you get to rewrite the rules of logic to grant yourself exceptions when you've used weasle words? And we're to believe you're honest when you've already confessed to being angry and projecting? Lots of creationists think they're honest when they misinterpret evolution: will you exempt them too? Or do they always forget to use the mystical weasle words?

"And Commodity prices drop due to technological improvements such as GM? Source please. And not just a graph of prices going down. A source that shows prices are going down due to technological improvements. Correlation is not causation. Source please."
If you want sources for basic knowledge in a field, you're rather ignorant. But here you go: Agricultural productivity at wikipedia. "Changes in TFP are usually attributed to technological improvements[...] As farms become more productive, the wages earned by those who work in agriculture increase. At the same time, food prices decrease and food supplies become more stable." The wikipedia Green Revolution article has a similar statement, though it is unsourced.

"“claque”? If you really meant “an organized body of professional applauders” (as Wikipedia defines it), this is just absurd."
Ah weasle words again: "If you really meant". However, if Skeptico had the competence to use a real dictionary, it would be obvious that I meant another, more common, and modern usage: a group of fawning admirers. It amazes me when people seem to go out of their way to reinterpret plain statements by selecting blatantly inappropriate definitions.

“why would farmers continue to pay for GM seeds if doing so reduced their overall profits and/or increases their debt? If GM makes them more competitive then they must be better off (ie not reduced profits) even after the cost of the GM seeds.”
Still whining, because you haven't enough understanding of the field to create a simple hypothetical example? I'll take pity on you and give you one.

Assume two farmers, A and B, both of whom have identical farms and grow identical traditional crops. Both net $50K/year.

Farmer B switches to GM seed, which gives him a lower cost of production (we'll assume that he produces the same yield, though that's not necessary.) The lower cost of production comes from less use of fuel that offsets the higher cost of seed. Now, A makes $50K, and B makes (lets say) $70K. Oooo, looks like GM is a good thing and doesn't hurt farmer A!

But wait! Farmer B has shown that this land can be more profitable. That means that the value of the land goes up, which means that the rent or taxes or both go up. No matter how little they go up, farmer A is worse off. The GM seed company observes the profitability, and as a monopoly, raises its price to consume that new profit. Indeed, the seed company can raise the price until farmer B makes as little as farmer A, because B's alternative is to do the same as A and make as little. Now both farmers are worse off. But because of the stickyness of land prices and long terms of loans, mortgages, and property tax rates, the lower earnings can stick.

It gets worse. Because there seems to be new profitability due to GM, more farmers plant more acres to GM and the supply increases. Pushing down the price of the crop, and reducing profitability still further for A and B.

All of these changes are more or less independent from each other, and not coordinated by government or markets.

In addition, there can be a prisoner's dilemma sort of race among farmers to be the first adopters of newly profitable technologies. The payoff if all adopt can be much lower than the payoff if all refrain. But because the payoff for a defector who adopts alone is highest, and the payoff for the sucker is lowest of all, there's no end to the defection.

Now this is a hypothetical example that answers Skeptico's questions. Very similar issues are the bread and butter of agricultural economics. The basic facts of US agriculture are very difficult to explain without such models: the enormous reduction of family farms, the enormous reduction of profitability of farms for families, the rapidity of adoption of technological change, and the increasing corporate ownership of farms. I'd also note that I assumed the GM changes didn't increase yield, but many have. Increased production can have nonlinear effects on prices and thus profits.

I don't expect you folks to believe this: doubtless some of you will be stupid enough to trot out equilibristic economics arguments for a subject that is famously not so. But once you've got as complicated a system as this one, simplistic ahistorical arguments like Skeptico's just aren't convincing.

The basis of skeptical argument.

Very few arguments are explicitly syllogistic: it is seldom that assumptions. inferences, and conclusions are all stated together in plain view. Consequently, most arguments rely heavily on background information and assumptions (facts, history, models, biases, etc.) that are not likely to be made explicit.

If one party to a discussion about some field is lacking the necessary background information and assumptions, they are unlikely to be able to make correct arguments. They will have omitted or incorrect assumptions. No matter how explicitly syllogistic such an argument seems to be, it is fallacious if an assumption (present or omitted) is incorrect. This is why expertise and authority is considered important to an argument. Without expertise, like a stopped clock you might sometimes be right, but much of the time you will be wrong.

So what does it mean when one person professes subject expertise in an argument and the other has no such expertise? Is that an invalid argument from authority? It could mean several things. It could mean "my analysis is based on better background information, so check the other guy's more carefully". No fallacy there. It could mean "if you need a heuristic clue as to who might be right, this is a defeasible shortcut." This is an informal fallacy of logic, but a very practical heuristic method of reasoning with non-monotonic logic. (See my Distrust in logic article.) Or it could mean I am right because I am an authority", in which case it is the informal fallacy argument from authority. Perhaps it could mean other things as well. Only that third option is the argument from authority, IMHO. The other two are USEFUL, perhaps more useful than classical logic as I explain in my article.

While arguing with Skeptico, I pointed out the differences between our expertise, and a number of his supporters have accused me of the argument from authority. To logically make their case, they would need to exclude the other possibilities. But what they really are doing is applying a weak form of defeasible logic: "he has sinned (never mind that we all are sinners, and don't you dare measure how egregiously or frequently we sin.)"

Jimmy_Blue, to his credit, found an excellent set of links that provide substantial background for this debate. Background that I assumed from long experience, which Skeptico plainly lacked. Background that confirms pretty much all the points I made in my initial response to Skeptico: Response to Skeptico: Must Pay for GM Seeds? I'll add one more reference, On the adoption of genetically modified seeds in developing countries... which confirms my claims about farm productivity increases and GM seed monopoly. "...these technologies can bring about major cost savings in pest control and reduce negative environmental externalities through reductions in the use of toxic pesticides. Studies by Qaim and Zilberman (2003) and Thirtle et al. (2003) reveal that GM crops can also increase yields in situations where pesticides are underused."

Jimmy_Blue writes:

Mike Huben I think makes a relevant point that does appear to be a fairly reasonable answer to Skeptico's question - that farmers must buy GM seed in order to remain competitve because of the various pressures on farmers resulting in particular from technological advances reducing commodity prices. Combine this with the possibility of monopolistic supply of GM seed, and economic pressures could result in a stark choice - buy GM seed or don't farm anymore.

The must comes from the fact that if a farmer wanted to stay a farmer, they would have to buy GM seed to remain competitive with other farmers - particularly the large corporate ones. Almost a compulsion by choice if you will.

Correct me if I am wrong in this summation.

Spot on. In my book, Jimmy_Blue is an excellent life-long student: not because he agreed with me, but because he constructively resolved a controversy with his own directed research, and shared the results. He avoided the mistake of confirmation bias (if he started with Skeptico's position), which often afflicts us skeptics just like ordinary people. I can get really pompous here and declare that was one of my motives, to goad people into learning for themselves, but it's obvious to me that Jimmy_Blue doesn't need to be taught by me. My hat's off to you!

Jimmy_Blue also spends a lot of his response fisking my style of argument, rather than the content. I can live with that. I've adopted an "afflict the comfortable" style, which I find handy for ridiculing pompous bullshitters (and Skeptico is one in this political subject. He's merely pompous in more scientific subjects.) Jimmy_Blue concludes "your argument does come across as probably valid but expressed by a total tosser" Probably valid: that's a much better judgement than I expected from any of Skeptico's supporters -- thank you Jimmy_Blue. Am I a "total tosser"? Well, since Jimmy_Blue spends his response showing how I do the same obnoxious things Skeptico does, shall I infer that he also thinks Skeptico is a "total tosser"? I can live with that: that's one of the things I set out to demonstrate.

A last couple of points about Skeptico's apparent ignorance of the subject that it would be good to clarify.

First, Skeptico and I have not been as clear (in our terminology) as we should have been about productivity of GM crops. Skeptico is correct that GM crops generally do not increase YIELD PER ACRE, which is one measure of productivity. But that measure is too narrow for this discussion, as anybody with a background in agricultural economics should know. The normal meaning of the word productivity in agricultural economics is yield divided by total costs of production, which include land, labor, and capital. GM crops have been designed to increase that latter form of productivity, and there is substantial evidence that they do (as documented in my additional reference.) That latter form of technologically-driven productivity is why farmers MUST buy GM seed or go bankrupt.

Skeptico's statement "There are no low food prices. Don’t you follow the news – they’re at record highs." is just wrong. As anybody at all familiar with agriculture knows, the prices of agricultural commodities have (long term) been declining for many decades. Jimmy_Blue's sources affirm that. Skeptico said something very stupid, based on short-term price information and his own ignorance. Unless you want to believe that he was intending to mislead us.

Skeptical infallibility

A little bit of knowledge can be laughable. We're all familiar with the newbie who, having learned of informal fallacies of argument, denies true claims because they are backed by arguments that could be incorrect due to their form. If I say that I see the sky is blue, the newbie squeals "argument from authority!" And then there's the guy who's taken freshman microeconomics who knows that the world runs by markets, and the whole world should be understood by perfect market assumptions. A close relation is the victim of "Atlas Shrugged". And most laughable of all, the religious/creationist zealot who has discovered the power of parroting arguments to bamboozle the unprepared. These people all get drunk on the "power" these learnings give them to argue with others less prepared.

The secular counterpart to the religious/creationist zealot is the dogmatic skeptic. (See Denialism for corporate-sponsored examples.) Armed with some preferred extreme position, having out-argued a few particularly stupid opponents by reciting arguments (which are sometimes good, unlike religious/creationist arguments), this sort of skeptic seems to think he is infallible in his pronouncements. The problem is when this sort of skeptic stumbles upon an argument he's not familiar with and attempts to respond.

The syndrome is a familiar one to those who argue with the religious. Some common responses are to:

(1) misconstrue the argument as one he can parrot a response to
(2) attribute strong emotions to the opponent while displaying them himself (psychological projection)
(3) attempt some combination of stand on dignity/sneering
(4) blame his mistakes on the other person's poor writing
(5) conveniently ignore clear refutations and throw out random factoids as if they adequately responded to a point
(6) deny clear misbehavior
(7) attempt to shift the burden of proof
(8) stubbornly insist on false dichotomies when presented with third options
(9) and proclaim himself the winner.

All these are ways of dealing with the harsh, ego-deflating failure to make a good argument, a form of self-delusion. Spaghetti forbid that the dogmatic skeptic should actually question whether his argument was competent, whether he really knows enough to make a good response, whether he has taken a correct position. He is righteous! The opponent must be wrong! He must be infallible!

Let's look at how Skeptico has responded to me for an example. These correspond to the 9 points above.

(1) Skeptico rewrote my clear statement, and now claims that he didn't understand it: how could he rewrite it accurately if he didn't understand it? He should make up his mind. I wrote "Commodity prices drop due to technological improvements such as GM." Perhaps it is too difficult for him to understand that other technological improvements have been reducing commodity prices since the inventions of the horse collar, steam engine, reaper, hybrid seed, etc. Having rewritten it, he made a specific (partly wrong) claim for GM seed, which did not address my more general statement.

(2) Skeptico writes: "angry drivel", "idiocy", "so-called arguments", "what the hell did you mean", "babbling", "Oh give me a break", "an arrogant, angry jerk". Who's displaying angry emotions here? Nor is this the first interchange where he's done this. "Perhaps if you calmed down a bit before you pushed post…" I notice that I thought on my response for 5 days, whereas his went up in two hours or less. Who's not calm?

(3) Let's see: for sneering we have "Wow – pretty desperate tactics. I’ll ignore most of your idiocy...". For stand on dignity, we have "You’re one to lecture about humility. You come across as an arrogant, angry jerk." Somebody needs to tell him the little secret that when you use these in combination, they add up to unconvincing.

(4) "If I misunderstood something you wrote, that would be your fault for being a crappy writer." Could there be a better example of how Skeptico cannot be at fault, because he must be infallible?

(5) When I was pointing out that soybean prices had been falling for roughly the last 25 years (in response to his irrelevant point that they were up this year), he responds that "GM has only been planted for ten. Kind of ruins your complete argument, doesn’t it?" This too is irrelevant.

(6) "I made no strawmen." A clear denial of his rewriting what I posted.

(7) Skeptico wrote "I’m sure it’s true that GM hasn’t (yet) resulted in significantly higher productivity or lower costs." When I pointed out a specific sales pitch that contradicted him and asked him for his source, he turns around and asks me for mine. No response to the request for his own source.

(8) Skeptico seem incapable of realizing more than a dichotomy when discussing why farmers oppose GM. He states the choices as (a) buy or (b) don't buy. But it is obvious that there are at least 3: (a) buy from a monopolist or (b) don't buy from a monopolist or (c) don't allow a monopolistic entry into the market.

(9) And here's the funniest one of all. Skeptico proclaims himself the winner of the debate! "You need to learn not only the humility that you hilariously think I need, you also need to develop a coherent argument and learn how to write it down. Because you haven’t even come close to making your case so far." Ooo, he's qualified to judge me and my argument, despite the fact that he has no visible qualifications at all. And he expects us to believe him. Because he's got to be infallible, no doubt.

We skeptics are not infallible, and when we argue with each other, we cannot make the presumptions we make when arguing with the dogmatic. Dogmatic responses of our own are adequate for run-of-the-mill purposes so frequently that some skeptics seem to feel they must be infallible, and forget the critical reading and thinking skills that are essential to creating new, customized arguments.

Response to Skeptico: Must Pay for GM Seeds?

At Skeptico's blog, he has a post: Must Pay for GM Seeds?

I read this post and despair at the smug confidence of nerds who probably never worked on a farm or studied agricultural economics.

Historically (and presently), farmers have been driven off the land, resulting in consolidation and eventual corporate ownership of farmland. There is a conflict between these pressures and the farmer's own ideas of the way they'd like to live and work. In most cultures, a farm represented sufficient resources and food security to raise a family, with surplus for markets. In the US, this was the basis of the Jeffersonian economic policy (which had the added benefit of omitting landlords.)

Forcing farmers off the land has been done directly (via enclosure acts) and indirectly by taxation and market pressures leading to foreclosure/bankruptcy. Farmers are forced to enter the market system to pay taxes. There, they must compete with other farmers in production of commodities. The prices of commodities are continually pushed downwards by increasing productivity of capital-intensive technology.

Farmers have always disliked this vise of economic pressure, and wished for freedom to simply farm and raise their families. Many years ago, they resented hybrid seed because it increased the pressures: if you didn't buy it, you couldn't survive at the now-lowered price of the commodity and you had to buy it year after year because it didn't come true from seed. That meant you had to finance the seed and its increased fertilizer, which made you more prone to bankruptcy in a bad year. The one good thing about hybrid seed was that there WAS competition, because the technology was developed and dispersed by state and federal research without patents. Indeed, when you look at Plant Patent law, it excludes patents on plants propagated by seed partly to keep seed prices low.

GM seed is generally patented. Most GM seed at this time is a monopoly: there's very little competition. And when you get a monopoly in a chain of production, generally the monopolistic link is able to profit at the expense of most of the other links by being a price maker. This means farmers make less profit, even as they are producing more. In addition, the greater investment for the seed, herbicide, and fertilizer for the crop makes farming even riskier. Corporations owning dispersed and varied farmlands can self-insure, but it is costly and difficult for small farmers. This tends to drive more land out of the hands of farmers and into the hands of agribusiness.

GM seed is only the latest of many technological pressures on farmers, but perhaps the most monopolistic pressure since the railroad shipping and grain elevator monopolies.

Now that I've given you a little background, let's look at Skeptico's statements again.

"Note the wording, farmers must pay for GM seeds year after year, rather than save seeds. Must. Apparently they have no choice. Which is funny, because I didn’t think that farmers were compelled to use GM seeds."

Yes, they are compelled by the stark choice of GM or bankruptcy. Commodity prices drop due to technological improvements such as GM. Unless their productivity can keep up, they will go bankrupt.

"But I’m willing to accept I might be missing something here, so please tell me exactly what I am missing – why would farmers continue to pay for GM seeds if doing so reduced their overall profits and/or increases their debt?"

Does that answer your question? Saving seeds would reduce their income because commodity prices drop. And debt (an investment) is not so much a problem as the uncertainty (risk) that a crop may fail and thus bankrupt the farmer. It's a racheting process that has been driving farmers off the land for more than a century in the US, and that is going on worldwide today.

So the farmer's opposition to GM seed comes partly from this latest of a long set of severe, inescapable pressures. They feel like they're in a nightmarish, involuntary game of musical chairs: every round, more farmers are driven out of their independent way of life. The solution would have to be a systemic solution, not just prohibition of GM seed. All the latter would do is buy some time. In Europe and Japan, they've adopted both systematic and anti-GM solutions to protect their farmers.

Destruction of crop genetic diversity is also a side effect of a capitalist system of industrialization of agriculture, and not specific to GM. GM is merely the latest competition with heirlooms, landraces and other reservoirs of genetic diversity.

The major problem that I perceive with GM is safety. Modern commodification of food conceals sources while ensuring widespread exposure. Remember the recent melamine contamination of pet food? That was traced quickly because it killed quickly. Say that some GM food had a thalidomide-like effect, that took close to a year to show? And that it was present in a widespread food such as soy or wheat? Or that it had an even slower to detect hormonal or carcinogenic effect? Do we really want to test GM foods on entire populations first? How costly would it be to expose the entire population to some unforseen harm that, say, caused improper development in children due to hormonal interference? How much testing should GM foods undergo before they are tested on the population at large? This question makes the European and Japanese anti-GM positions look much more reasonable.

The Madness of King Leonard

The Madness of King Leonard

Leonard Peikoff appears on Bill O'Reilly's show and rants so appallingly that O'Reilly looks sensible in comparison.

The Conservative Nanny State

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer

The full text of Dean Baker's book. Not aimed at libertarians, but points out many things libertarians are confused about and ought to oppose by both libertarian and progressive standards.

Defending Rachel Carson: the last word

Defending Rachel Carson: the last word

John Quiggin points out the extreme gullibility of the right wing and libertarian blogosphere for public relations ploys initiated by tobacco companies. The PR firms exploit the obvious confirmation biases of these ideologues. Their goal is to discredit opponents of tobacco such as the World Health Organization by falsely accusing them of responsibility for malaria deaths.

Libertarians and global warming

Libertarians and global warming

John Quiggan analyzes the bizarre libertarian reactions to global warming.

The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement

Thoughts On Steven M. Teles, "The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement"

Orin Kerr, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, reviews the new book, and highlights the origins of the libertarian George Mason University Law School.

The book has been added to my bibliography and the index for George Mason University.

Ron Paul Is Crazy

Ron Paul Is Crazy
A YouTube video from WebPundit points out why Ron Paul is an unrealistic candidate: because he offends almost everybody in one way or another.

In the Topical Issues category of the main page.

As Ron Paul resumes his lowly status as false-flag Republican congressman and thus falls off the election radar, I'll move the links about him to a separate index and off the main page.

Information and Economics: A Critique of Hayek

Information and Economics: A Critique of Hayek
Outlines Hayek's false assumptions, and points out problems of market capitalist economic miscalculation.

Libertarians frequently resort to the "socialist calculation problem" as a blanket denial that socialism could work well. Yet we are surrounded with counterexamples, such as the decentralized socialist public school system, or highly centralized capitalist enterprises such as WalMart. This critique helps us understand why Hayek's arguments should be considered little better than propaganda now.

Placed in the Austrian Economics index.

Trade and inequality: The role of economists

Trade and inequality: The role of economists

Dean Baker faults economists for exaggerating benefits of trade, and dishonestly ignoring or downplaying the distributional consequences: who wins and who loses. At the post-autistic economics network.

Placed in the Criticisms of Neoliberalism, Capitalism, and Free Markets index.

Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example

Tyler Cowen has written about Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example over at Marginal Revolution. It's interesting that in 100+ replies, nobody seems to realize the fallacious assumption Nozick makes.

Nozick assumes that claims on Chamberlain's income come from "a third party who had no claim of justice on any holding of the others before the transfer". (ASU p.162) But in the real world, third parties DO have just claims before transfers: they are very common. For example, if Chamberlain had been paying alimony to a wife (he never married), or had faced civil judgements for child support. If the owners of the basketball court or the other players insisted that Wilt be a paid member of the player's union if he wants to perform on that court or with those players. Wilt will not get rich by himself: he needs the cooperation of other people and they will require something for that cooperation.

A social contract such as citizenship is just such a pre-existing claim of justice: Chamberlain was a citizen obligated to obey laws, including laws on taxation. Libertarians frequently whine that citizenship is not voluntary, but that's not true: you can renounce citizenship and/or assume citizenship in other nations. Most US citizens have ancestors who did just that.

All of Nozick's major arguments rely on fallacious assumptions or illusions of logic. For example, the idea that liberty upsets patterns EXCEPT NOZICK'S IDEA OF HISTORICAL JUSTICE. Nozick simply distracts from the fact that property restricts the liberty of others, and that it is only by continuous interference with liberty by very strong coercion that the pattern of property is maintained. Without that continuous coercion, people would assert their liberty to use whatever they wanted.

Nozick's "Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is in itself just" can fail because of many implied requirements. Perfection of the original situation and the steps is required. Just initial situations are required (an impracticality.) And a demonstration of perfect justice-maintainance of the steps is required: a step may be just without maintaining justice. (This is a big problem: he's making an argument that only looks like mathematical induction without showing the critical step.) For example, if it is just to take a seat on a bus when there is no elderly person present, and it is just for an elderly person to enter the bus after that, but it is not just to remain in the seat after the elderly person has entered. But worse, in real life we can't ever have perfect justice of steps or starting situations. So the question is whether the steps move us closer or further from justice, and where an equilibrium will be reached (if one exists.) The Nozick statement has an implied binary logic model which real life doesn't match. Nozick doesn't begin to address a quantitative model of justice whereby we can state that any one situation is more just than another. Instead, he relies on the kind of "gut feelings" Steven Colbert ridicules so well with his persona.

The rest of Tyler's post is silly: he makes assumptions such as "no one should be forced to part with more than a certain percentage of his or her income". What next, Tyler, going to set the price of gold? Just as Tyler would think the price of gold should be set by a public, social decision-making process (a market), so the taxation rate should be set by another public, social decision-making process (a government.)

But I suspect the silliness is purposeful: to focus attention to the question of what rate is just, and thus slide in the propagandistic framing and assumptions without real discussion. Propaganda works by repetition, and Tyler is making his contribution to the right wing echo chamber. That, and entertaining his claque.

Shermer's The Mind of The Market

Shermer's The Mind of The Market

Libertarian Tim Sandefur finds both Shermer's libertarianism and skepticism disappointing and unconvincing.

Added to the Reviews Of Books Related To Libertarianism index.

What Makes a Miracle: Some myths about the rise of China and India

What Makes a Miracle: Some myths about the rise of China and India

Pranab Bardhan's Boston Review article debunks claims that China and India's economic development is solely due to capitalism: communism, democracy and socialism have also played major parts.

Added to the Government And Economics index.

Shleifer the (Counter-)Revolutionary

Shleifer the (Counter-)Revolutionary

Dani Rodrik ridicules Andrei Shleifer's "Age of Milton Friedman" triumphalism, pointing out how the evidence is misused.

Added to the Milton Friedman index.

Some Capital-Theoretic Fallacies of Austrian Economics

Some Capital-Theoretic Fallacies of Austrian Economics

Robert Vienneau attacks assumptions of Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Highly technical.

Added to the Austrian Economics index.

CFP's Laffer Curve Video

CFP's Laffer Curve Video

Law Professor Linda Beale debunks the latest Laffer Curve propaganda video from the "Center for Freedom and Prosperity" and CATO's Dan Mitchell.

Added to the CATO and Taxation indexes.

Ron Paul's record in Congress

Ron Paul's record in Congress

Ron Paul's bizarre track record as a congressman, particularly those bills he sponsored or co-sponsored.

Thanks to loyal reader Matt Golowenski for the lead to this article at Orcinus.

Market Failures In Everything: US Medical Care

Another in the continuing series mocking the triumphalist "Markets In Everything" series at Marginal Revolution.

Market-Based Failure — A Second Opinion on U.S. Health Care Costs
Robert Kuttner's brief editorial in the New England Journal Of Medicine, pointing out the obvious reasons why single payer universal health care would cost less than the current market-based system..

FAQ: Ron Paul and his Racist Newsletter

FAQ: Ron Paul and his Racist Newsletter

Ron Lawl provides a convenient FAQ rebutting the myriad excuses made for Ron Paul's longstanding activities with racists. Part of The Ron Paul Survival Report blog.

Added to the Topical Issues category in the main index of Critiques Of Libertarianism

Thanks to corespondent LoonyRonPaul for this suggestion!

Libertarian Troll Bingo

Libertarian Troll Bingo
See which libertarian commenter scores bingo first in your favorite blog!

Thanks to James M. Jensen II for the pointer. Added to the Humor, Satire, and Quotations index.

Skepticism and Freedom will not save libertarianism

John, in comments of the previous post, write:
... skepticism is really a bedrock principle of serious libertarian scholarship. A good suggestion would be to get out of the sandbox and read Richard Epstein's "Skepticism and Freedom."

The positivist, pragmatist, consequentialist, law and economics libertarians such as Posner, Epstein, the Friedmans, etc. have a good, flexible model of economics of legal issues. But the problem is the empirical content needed to make decisions (see Epstein quote below.) As soon as you claim to know the empirical content needed, you can be doubted on Hayekian grounds. Those guys substitute their personal authority for the kind of detailed and dispersed information that Hayek attributes to the market. They might as well be setting prices based on their personal authority. Legislative solutions might not be as good as markets, but they probably aggregate information better than these individual authorities.

What I really liked in Epstein's "Skepticism and Freedom" was this bit:
When you are young in this world, you believe that the class of deductive truths about social matters is larger than it turns out to be. The great attraction of libertarian thought lay in its deductive power. The hope was that you could axiomatize the system and sort of render social problems amenable to a set of principles that yielded necessary or deductive truths. That vision certainly fired my early academic life... Essentially, as I have gotten older and maybe a little bit wiser -- which why that 30 years really start to matter -- I have discovered, to my infinite regret, that most of the serious debates over the basic principles of any political order have an irreducible empirical content.

In that one short paragraph, he invalidates most libertarian writings, including quite a lot of his own.

Review Of Michael Shermer's The Mind Of The Market

Review Of Michael Shermer's The Mind Of The Market
Skeptics who love Shermer for his skepticism have difficulty with Shermer's libertarianism. Dan Schneider epitomizes this love/hate relationship.

This has been added to the reviews index. I'd welcome pointers to other reviews by critics.

Schneider's review suffers greviously from some of the same faults he finds in Shermer. Most obviously, he says Shermer's book is poorly edited: it is obvious to me that Schneider's review is extremely poorly edited.

That said, when I eventually read Shermer's book, I expect to agree with some of Schneider's points. I like Shermer's skepticism, but with respect to his libertarianism, I'd quote him: "Smart people believe in weird things because they are very good at defending positions they arrived at through non-smart reasons."

New Feature: Topical issues, starting with Ron Paul

After more than a decade of preferring perennial issues of libertarianism, I've decided that Ron Paul is noxious enough to justify beginning topical entries on my front page of Critiques Of Libertarianism.

Ron Paul: Quackery enabler
Orac's heavily linked post at Respectful Insolence is a good starting place for why Ron Paul is a loon. No other candidate sets off the alarms of skeptics for science, medicine, economics, racism, and religion the way Ron Paul does.

Is offshoring foreign aid?

The US is rightfully criticized for providing very little foreign aid, as a percentage of GDP.

BUT: should we count offshoring of jobs as foreign aid? We're one of the leading nations when it comes to offshoring (indeed, it's one of the reasons why I've changed from software support to teaching) and the jobs created in third world nations patently benefit their economies hugely. I suspect that the US is THE major exporter of jobs worldwide, that the costs to the US (in terms of reduced income for people like me and other loss of industry) exceed our explicit foreign aid, and that the benefits to other nations (more industry) exceed our losses.

Markets in everything: where libertarians come from.

You won't believe this one.

If only the FDA had protected us from this, we might not have so many libertarians. :-)

See also: Bask In The Glow.

This Choir Does The Preaching!

The Milton Friedman choir sings of how corporations are amoral and have no choice, so let us rejoice in privatization. Bizarre!

Link.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Oligopoly

I read somewhere that market power lies at the points of chains of sales where oligopoly or oligopsony exist. These price makers take the vast majority of consumer surplus in the maufacturing chain, leaving the competitors at other points in the chain with essentially no surplus, at subsistance levels.

For example, the oligopoly of cereal companies lies inbetween the commoditized market for grains and the highly competitive retail market. Thus, the cereal companies have much larger markups than their costs of inputs and operations would otherwise suggest.

Does anyone know the proper name for this, where I might have seen it, or have a reference to something descrbing it more explicitly?

Market Externalities in everything...

Routes of Infection: Exports and HIV Incidence in Sub-Saharan Africa

Free trade has externalities, including some of our most important diseases. (Also invasive species.)

Added to the Criticisms of Neoliberalism, Capitalism, and Free Markets index.

Very simply, trade has always been a substantial route for infection, including the black plague. Such externalities do not mean that trade should be stopped: rather they mean that efficiency should be improved by internalizing those costs of trade. Probably by government regulation, which may be the best of the second best alternatives.

Floating Utopias: The degraded imagination of the libertarian seasteaders

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias/

SF author China Mieville ridicules the numerous libertarian fantasy sea-states (such as the "Freedom Ship") that envision authoritarian class-based societies, but somehow never get built.

Based one chapter of Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk's book "Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of NeoLiberalism".

Placed in the "Freedom Through Technology" index.

Market Failures in Everything: malaria net distribution

I started my "Market Failures in Everything series" in response to Tyler Cowan's "Markets in Everything" series. So I was pleasantly surprised when he published the following:

Tyler Cowen writes:
In 2000, a world health conference in Abuja, Nigeria, set a goal: by 2005, 60 percent of African children would be sleeping under nets. By 2005, only 3 percent were.

It turns out that handing nets out for free works much better than branding them, marketing them, and selling them, albeit at subsidized prices. And when there are enough insecticide-laden nets in a village, mosquitoes avoid the place altogether (after the very first net, however, the mosquitoes simply move on to another nearby hut).

The sad fact is that the best insecticide-filled nets last no more than three to five years. And is this good or bad news?

...sales of malaria pills were way down.

Here is the full and fascinating story. Eternal vigilance is the price of foreign aid, or something like that...

Market Failures in Everything: Malawi farming

How Malawi went from a nation of famine to a nation of feast

Removal of a system of public financing for the poorest farmers (as advocated by Western economic advisors) resulted in crop failures and starvation on a scale not seen except under communist regimes. Restoration of the programs resulted in massive surpluses providing much needed exports.

Thanks to Bob Harris at This Modern World

New Index!

Prompted by email from Robert D. Feinman, I've finally added a new index for:

Criticisms of George Mason U. Economics (and Mercatus)

The Economics department of George Mason University has been strongly shaped by tens of millions of dollars of donations by the libertarian Koch Foundations of the billionaire Koch brothers. Most, if not all, of the staff is affiliated with the Koch-financed Mercatus Center, a libertarian pro-corporatist think-tank. The result is a propaganda mill with academic credentials.

Notable libertarian ideologues at both include:

Peter Boettke
Bryan Caplan
Tyler Cowan
Alex Tabarrok

NEW 10/07: Koch Family Foundations
The foundations of the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers have funded the organizations that produce much of the libertarian and corporatist propaganda that floods the media. Notably, Cato, the Reason Foundation, the economics department at George Mason University, and many more. From Media Transparency.

NEW 10/07: Charles Koch and Libertarianism: How to "Buy" a University
Robert D. Feinman's overview of the financing of libertarian George Mason University faculty by Koch Foundations. Faculty such as Tyler Cowan, Alex Tabarrok, and Bryan Caplan. Sucking at the capitalist tit has never been so good!

Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist.
Bryan Caplan's dismissal of Austrian Economics. He's more courteous than they deserve.

(Additional note: when I mentioned these first two links at Cowan and Tabarrok's "Marginal Revolution" blog, my response mysteriously disappeared. Could have been a blunder posting, or could have been censorship.)

An answer to reflexive pro-market yammer.

What would a progressive trade agenda look like?
Dani Rodrik favors globalization, but with benefits more widely distributed, leveraging democracy, and respect for different cultural norms.

Strange bedfellows

Strange Bedfellows
The libertarian Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has a wacky set of positions against the FDA, public health, evidence-based medicine, Medicare, the new world order, abortion, evolution, handgun safety, homosexuality, illegal aliens, fluoridation, environmentalism, vaccination, etc. From Kathleen Seidel's neurodiversity weblog.

In the Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism index.

The Dickensian Dystopia

The Dickensian Dystopia
David Packman's criticisms of libertarian fantasies, based on history of company towns, propertarianism, enclosure of commons, slavery, and feudal tendencies.

Added to the liberal criticisms index.

While libertarians forever harp on unintended consequences of laws and government, history shows that there'd be plenty of unintended consequences for their favorite ideas as well. David makes a good start on these! Thanks, David, for pointing me to them.

Crank chemistry at About.com

Normally, I criticize libertarianism, but there's a broad overlap between many crank movements and libertarianism. Anti-fluoridation movements are grotesquely crank, and have a widespread libertarian following because public health policy is a government (not market) activity.

About.com's Guide to Chemistry, Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., unfortunately includes her opinion of fluoridation in the chemistry topic.

Why I Oppose Fluoridation of Public Drinking Water lists a standard set of pseudoscientific arguments, and links to a bunch more About.com articles by herself and Mary Shomon, the About.com Guide to Thyroid Disease.

A really clear howler is this statement: "Fluoride that we put in water today will still be in water tomorrow. Fluoride doesn't magically disappear from water once it has been added." Evidently, Helmenstein has never heard of the water cycle and evaporation. No, she explains how fluoride is a permanent contamininant. In her article "How to Remove Fluoride from Drinking Water", she doesn't mention the possibility of drinking rainwater or your own well water, and she makes distilled water sound scary: "keep in mind that 'distilled water' does not imply that a product is suitable for drinking water and other undesirable impurities may be present."

Perhaps in a health topic such as Thyroid Disease, there's room for pseudoscience. But in chemistry, there's little excuse. And even more inexcusable, is that neither author identifies their opinion as a minority opinion or links to counterarguments.

Interestingly, the one About.com article they link to that supports fluoride is Relationship Between Florinated Water And Cancer, in the Holistic Healing topic. It would be more accurately titled "No Relationship Between Florinated Water And Cancer": maybe that's why they listed it, by accident.

But a search of About.com with the keyword "fluoridation" doesn't find any other articles supporting fluoridation, or opposing the cranks against fluoridation.

Unenumerated: Ten ways to make a political difference

Nick Szabo suggests Ten ways to make a political difference for libertarians. Number 3 is "Make your own law."

And so what law does he create as an example? Censorship, of course. He's hidden the replies to Unenumerated: Government for profit because he looked foolish. And he's turned on comment moderation so that he won't have my responses there unless he likes them.

Just goes to show that property is opportunity for private tyranny.

What more can I say?

New Milton Friedman index.

Long overdue: an index for criticisms of Milton Friedman.

There are lots of poor rants against Friedman: I'd like to collect the better criticisms.

Check out the first entry and suggest more, please.

The Denialists' Deck of Cards

The Denialists' Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts

Chris Jay Hoofnagle details the public relations methodology of CATO and other anti-consumer, business-funded organizations. Count how many of these you've heard on your favorite topic: global warming, for example.

I think the cards angle is a bit lame (and disliked the Bush Iraq application), but the large number of strategies needs to be organized somehow.

In the Discussion, Environmental, and CATO indexes.

Tip of the hat to David Fetter, who suggested it.

Ask a Libertarian, Part II: The Constitution as Libertarian Myth

Ask a Libertarian, Part II: The Constitution as Libertarian Myth

Logan Ferree does a good job of dispelling libertarian myths about being like classical liberalism and the early USA. He also tries to distinguish between libertarians and objectivists.

This one is nice for the Libertarian Revisionist History index.

The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult

The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult
Murray Rothbard makes a very convincing case for Objectivism as a cult. It's delightful to see it compared to the communist party.

How To Explain Things to Libertarians

How To Explain Things to Libertarians

What it feels like to realize that you're talking to a libertarian. A great parody of the quiz. And more than 500 heartfelt reponses in agreement in one day.

Added to several indexes in Critiques Of Libertarianism.

Thanks to Michael Greinecker! Please, do contribute more suggestions everybody.

Markets Are Not Magic

Markets Are Not Magic

Mark Thoma, at Economist's View, explains when markets can perform very badly, and how the belief that "privatization and deregulation are always best" is wrong.

Krugman on Milton Friedman's free marketeering

[From The New York Review Of Books article, Who Was Milton Friedman?, by Paul Krugman.]

Consider first the macroeconomic performance of the US economy. We have data on the real income—that is, income adjusted for inflation—of American families from 1947 to 2005. During the first half of that fifty-eight-year stretch, from 1947 to 1976, Milton Friedman was a voice crying in the wilderness, his ideas ignored by policymakers. But the economy, for all the inefficiencies he decried, delivered dramatic improvements in the standard of living of most Americans: median real income more than doubled. By contrast, the period since 1976 has been one of increasing acceptance of Friedman's ideas; although there remained plenty of government intervention for him to complain about, there was no question that free-market policies became much more widespread. Yet gains in living standards hav been far less robust than they were during the previous period: median real income was only about 23 percent higher in 2005 than in 1976

Part of the reason the second postwar generation didn't do as well as the first was a slower overall rate of economic growth—a fact that may come as a surprise to those who assume that the trend toward free markets has yielded big economic dividends. But another important reason for the lag in most families' living standards was a spectacular increase in economic inequality: during the first postwar generation income growth was broadly spread across the population, but since the late 1970s median income, the income of the typical family, has risen only about a third as fast as average income, which includes the soaring incomes of a small minority at the top.

This raises an interesting point. Milton Friedman often assured audiences that no special institutions, like minimum wages and unions, were needed to ensure that workers would share in the benefits of economic growth. In 1976 he told Newsweek readers that tales of the evil done by the robber barons were pure myth:

"There is probably no other period in history, in this or any other country, in which the ordinary man had as large an increase in his standard of living as in the period between the Civil War and the First World War, when unrestrained individualism was most rugged."

(What about the remarkable thirty-year stretch after World War II, which encompassed much of Friedman's own career?) Yet in the decades that followed that pronouncement, as the minimum wage was allowed to fall behind inflation and unions largely disappeared as an important factor in the private sector, working Americans saw their fortunes lag behind growth in the economy as a whole. Was Friedman too sanguine about the generosity of the invisible hand?

To be fair, there are many factors affecting both economic growth and the distribution of income, so we can't blame Friedmanite policies for all disappointments. Still, given the common assumption that the turn toward free-market policies did great things for the US economy and the living standards of ordinary Americans, it's striking how little support one can find for that proposition in the data.

Market Failures in Everything: iodized salt

Marginal Revolution has a continuing series called "Markets in Everything" which highlights unusual markets. But for some reason they don't seem to have the opposite corollary, "Market Failures in Everything". I may not have their readership, but perhaps I can help anyhow.

MR pointed to an amazing NY Times article, In Raising the World’s I.Q., the Secret’s in the Salt.

The money quote is: "Worldwide, about two billion people — a third of the globe — get too little iodine, including hundreds of millions in India and China. Studies show that iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development."

And the solution is government regulation of private salt producers, forcing them to iodize the salt at a trivial cost, a little over a dollar a ton. The article details why this is necessary, but just on the surface it is obvious from the fact that universal iodization has never been market driven.

David Friedman's Blog

I've been posting a lot to David Friedman at his blog. David ranges widely on many subjects, and asks questions that are interesting not just because they are topical, but because they are posed from a set of libertarian premises that is unevenly informed by science and reality and also bizarre.

We had a really stimulating discussion at Academic Tabu. David (and others) totally missed the distinction between scientific ideas of race and cline, and thus why human races are a bogus idea. There were side trips on the value of S. J. Gould's "The MIsmeasure Of Man", and the creationist fallacy of whether evidence against a competing hypothesis increases the probability of a remaining hypothesis. A number of others don't get the simple point that genetics could be entirely responsible for all the variation of a character like intelligence within each of two populations, and yet there might be zero variation of intelligence between the two populations. Or that if there is variation between the two populations, it could be entirely due to some environmental influence.

Most recently, "Dishonest Words". There, David plays pot-calling-kettle-black. I also mention a real-life counter-example of the creationist fallacy: the Monte Hall Problem.

Playing with images....

Here I am....

Donald Rumsfeld has cut and run.

Perhaps I can be the first to make this obvious observation.

If only our troops were given similar options. Alternatively, isn't it a shame he can't have his tour of duty involuntarily extended and be reassigned to Iraq without sufficient body armor?

We should also note the timing: this was obviously planned long in advance, and scheduled to coincide with the election so that there would be fewer news cycles unfavorable to the Republicans and distraction from the Democratic victory.

The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology

Newly added:

Jeffry Sachs' Scientific American article on how social welfare states do as well as or better than low-tax, high-income countries. The punch line is that Friedrich Von Hayek was wrong.

Markets in everything: murder

At Marginal Revolution, the article Rent Seeking Kills makes an argument to legalize organ sales.

One respondant writes:

The people who are worried about slayings committed to involuntariyly harvest human organs are jumping at shadows. It might happen once in a great while under a regime of legalized organ sales, but far less than under a black-market regime. If anything, the option to pay for an organ from a voluntary donor is a substitute for knocking someone on the head and stealing it.

Outside the fact that this fellow has no real evidence about frequency (he's merely asserting it), we might ask if this same argument applies to murder. Right now there's a black market in murder: should taking lives be marketized?

A common theme at Marginal Revolution is "markets in everything". A common libertarian fantasy. So what would a murder market look like?

If you wanted to murder, perhaps you'd be required to negotiate for suicide, or buy a hunting/execution permit.

Or perhaps people would be issued a "life rights" deed, which they could hold onto or sell. The holder of the deed would be able to kill the "property" at whim.

We can explore this, but the basic problem is what societal purposes are being served with the creation of this market?

Additionally, our initial revulsion at this concept indicates subtle problems due to undermining of traditional underpinnings of our social institutions, especially the basic liberal assumptions of bodily security which are essential to political and commercial activity.

Iraqi oil revenues.

Jane Galt writes in Trust in oil? about some foreseeable problems with the idea of an oil trust for Iraq. Fair enough: we certainly couldn't expect perfection to spontaneously emerge, and the more problems anticipated, the better the designed solutions can be.

But she and the libertarian repondants miss the big point: who's getting the oil money now? Is the current distribution of oil profits and revenues anywhere near as good for the Iraqi people as even a flawed oil trust would be?

It would be nice if she had included a link to the original post.

Wiki propaganda watch: Rights

The wikipedia article on rights is badly in need of a rewriting to present a clear overview and index to the subject.

For a start, it does not address the fundamental difference between moral and legal rights. Moral rights are claims, can multiply like angels on a pinhead, and can conflict willy-nilly. Legal rights are claims that are enforced, and where they conflict they need to be resolved lest enforcement conflicts (battles) ensue.

In addition, it's entirely missing the Hohfeld taxonomy of rights, which emphasizes that every right creates an obligation (duty) for others.

But the annoying thing is this grotesque paragraph viewing rights through the ideological lens of positive and negative rights:

The conception of a right to something that implicitly creates an obligation on someone else to provide that thing (a positive right) is widely challenged. You can not enforce your wish for something (under the auspices of a right) if it implicitly constitutes an obligation on another to do something for you. However, one person's right to something creates a negative right in that you have the right for that thing not be interfered with by another, and that other is obligated not to interfere with your right to it. The obligation test is widely used to determine what constitutes a right. To illustrate: You have the right to own an axe, but you do not have a right to an axe. If you do own an axe, others have an obligation not to steal it.

This isn't a description of rights: it is an application of a libertarian theory of ethics to rights. In first world societies, positive legal rights abound, ranging from rights to jury trial to social welfare rights.

Revising the whole rights page would be a great deal of work: perhaps we should start small and address this one paragraph.

New Feature: Wiki propaganda watch

Posting frequency has been way down in this blog: I'm fairly busy, and don't want to get to involved in lengthy arguments. In addition, most of the things I want to write are longer than one sitting's worth of work.

However, it just occurred to me that there's something simple to do which could build traffic to this site and encourage others to perform a service.

Wikipedia is usually a fine starting point for investigating a subject. But as people come to rely on this, they become vulnerable if wikipedia can be corrupted by propagandists, ideology, business interests, and a host of other aggressive people who wish their viewpoint to become dominant.

Just as libertarians have injected their ideology in most web forums, they infest wikipedia. There are a number of wikipedia authors fighting the good fight to keep things more objective, but they are not omniscient. I'd like to help out by pointing people to some places which bear unmistakable marks of libertarian propaganda. Hopefully, some of you will feel inspired to make changes to improve the articles so that they won't indoctrinate innocents looking for basic information.

It will be interesting to see whether my suggestions produce some action, even if only in the discussion.

How does Walmart compare to public schooling?

Here's an idea I had, and thought I'd toss out. Partly I'd like to see if my 3 readers (a guess) are paying attention, and partly I'd like to explore this idea: I haven't decided if I like it or not.

Public schools are a bit like Walmart. Pretty much anybody can be served: you don't need specialty schools except perhaps for some very special students (such as the deaf.) There are economies of scale and combinatorial choice in (for example) a comprehensive high school.

If libertarians want to demand school choice as public policy, why shouldn't we demand shopping choice as public policy?

The Virtue of Sycophancy

For a good time, check out these two posts.

The Virtue of Sycophancy (1)
The Virtue of Sycophancy (2)
Daniel Barnes evaluates James Valliant's book "The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics".

It's also funny to read the Shia and Sunni reviews of this book at Amazon. There is no god but the market, and Rand is it's prophet!

For those who are wondering....

Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature

I've had "Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature" sitting on my bookshelf for a while, but hadn't yet opened it. So imagine my joy when Daniel Barnes wrote me to say that he's created a blog for its discussion! And to top that, I find that the whole book is available online (buy a copy anyhow!) So I've added two entries to the Critiques website.

Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature
Greg S. Nyquist provides perhaps the most extensive criticism of Rand. He finds that her assumptions about human nature do not match scientific knowledge of human nature.

Blog: Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature
Daniel Barnes has started a blog for the discussion of Greg Nyquist's 'A.R.C.H.N' and other criticisms of objectivism.

The first substantial entry in the blog is a thorough shredding of Fred Seddon’s review of ARCHN in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. This is an important kind of critique: believers rely on specious dismissals by authorities to justify ignoring criticisms of their beliefs.

Imaginary origin of Twoflower

I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series: I like fantasy that admits it's fantasy, unlike libertarianism.

Since the first book came out, I've wondered about the name of Twoflower, one of the major characters. A lot of humorous SF has in-jokes in the names of the characters: a great example is "The Flying Sorcerors", where the character Purple's name comes from a misunderstanding of a machine translation: "as a color, mauve", which is Asimov.

According to Discworld Annotations:
- [p. 24/22] Terry has this to say about the name 'Twoflower': "[...] there's no joke in Twoflower. I just wanted a coherent way of making up 'foreign' names and I think I pinched the Mayan construction (Nine Turning Mirrors, Three Rabbits, etc.)."

So the author denies intention in the name. But it's a basic principle of literary interpretation that the author's intentions don't limit legitimate interpretation. So, in that vein I'd like to offer my own origin of the name, which I thought of many years ago.

My idea is that Twoflower is a mistranslation from Greek. Aster, the Greek word for star, is a name of a flower in English. Perhaps in Greek also? I dunno. Dis is the Greek word for twice or two. Put them together, and you get DISASTER. And that's pretty much what you got whenever Twoflower was around, and what Rincewind and the other magicians thought of him: disaster. The origin of the word disaster means "evil star", which is literally what the red star threatens in the second book.

In conclusion, it's possible that Terry has been fooling us for 20+ years, and had this in mind all the time, in which case I deserve a prize. Or it's possible my creativity has driven me to lunatic lengths to create theories that rationally explain things that are merely accidents. The latter happens a lot in literary criticism.

In any event, I find it satisfying. And since this is fiction, I can set aside my normal skepticism and just enjoy it.

The Cato Hypocrisy

The Cato Hypocrisy

David Brin describes "truly grotesque hypocrisies, putting shame to any pretense that these Cato guys are "libertarians," let along honest intellects."

Added to the Criticisms of the Cato Institute index.

The Case Against Legalization

The Case Against Legalization

M.A. Paarlberg explains why libertarian-style drug legalization is the wrong approach for ending the drug war.

Added to the Drugs index.

Intelligent Design Overview For US Science Teachers

Here's something I slapped together to present to the science faculty at Boston Latin School.

Intelligent Design Overview For US Science Teachers
Mike Huben 5/19/06

Intelligent design is:
• A creationism masquerading as science.
• Supported by two main pseudoscientific theories: irreducible complexity and specified complexity.
• Unconstitutional to teach as science.
• A sophisticated public relations campaign, called the Wedge Strategy.
• Part of a larger US fundamentalist movement to create a god-centered society.
• Part of a conservative strategy to attack and discredit opponents.

Creationism:
• ID is a slight variation on the “argument from design” of William Paley and many earlier creationists.
• The only way ID differs from any other creationism is that it tries to hide its religious bias behind an ambiguous “designer”.
• 99% of creationism consists of attacks on evolution. (The rest is unscientific and/or theological.)

The great fallacy of creationist argument.
Successful attacks on evolution would:
• Make creationism scientific.
• Mean creationism must be right.

Irreducible complexity.
• The idea that complex systems could not have arisen through evolution, and thus must have been designed. Mousetraps, bacterial flagella and blood clotting systems are their favorite examples. Note this is not based on evidence of design or any other evidence.
• Orgel's second rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are."
• "Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience." Richard Dawkins

Specified complexity.
• Mathematical and philosophical nonsense designed to be outside the expertise of most biologists, and thus difficult for them to refute.
• Claims to infer design.
• Design is an evolutionary process: simply non-biological. If specified complexity worked, it would be an evolutionary process detector.


Pseudoscientific.
• There are no peer-reviewed studies supporting intelligent design in the scientific research literature.
• Funding is dedicated to public relations, not research.
• "...it's a strange scientific revolution that seeks to establish its position in secondary school curricula before the research itself has been accomplished."
• A callous disregard for accuracy and extraordinary misquotation and misrepresentation in the ID literature.
• Bogus institutional affiliations of researchers and affiliates.

Unconstitutional.
• Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
• Judge Jones barred intelligent design from being taught in public school science classrooms.
• A humiliating and thorough defeat.
• All those Dover school board members are out of office now.
• Judge Jones said: The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.
1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;
2) The argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and
3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.

Wedge Strategy.
• Set forth in a leaked Wedge Document.
• Goals: To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies; to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
• Outlines a public relations campaign meant to sway the opinion of the public, popular media, charitable funding agencies, and public policy makers.
o Phase I: Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity,
o Phase II: Publicity & Opinion-making, and
o Phase III: Cultural Confrontation & Renewal.
• Created by Phillip E. Johnson, author of "Darwin on Trial".
• Authored by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank.
• Run by the Center for Science and Culture (a subsidiary of the above.)
• Legal front groups: Thomas More Law Center, Alliance Defense Fund, and Quality Science Education for All.
• A creationist production company Discovery Media.
• Illustra Media, a front group for Discovery Media.
• Textbook “Of Pandas and People”.


Conservative/Fundamentalist Movement.
• Attempt to create a God-centered society, with Biblically-based laws and values.
• Vague “designer” makes ID compatible with mainstream churches, such as Catholocism, and evades conflict between old earth and young earth creationists.
• Major Funding from extreme right-wing Christians and foundations:
o Howard Ahmanson Jr.
o Philip F. Anschutz
o Richard Mellon Scaife
o MacLellan Foundation

The other Abrahamic religions also have creationism.
• Islam – Christian creationist arguments (including ID) are widely parroted by Muslim fundamentalists to attack westernism and secularism.
• Judaism – creationist teaching in orthodox-dominated public schools in Israel.

Combatting ID.
• Ridicule: Flying Sphaghetti Monster
• Teach the controversy: in a social studies class as an example of how public relations are used by special interests to sway public opinions.
• Debate only for the audience: you cannot convince the ID believer. Show the audience the fraud and errors, ignore the attacks on evolution.
• Do not debate without extensive preparation. They’ve prepared far more than you have. Read successful debate strategies at talk.origins.
• Beware of their framing: ignore their frames and impose those of science.
o “Evolution is a theory in crisis.” No, creationists are desperate.
o “Teach the controversy.” There is only religious controversy about this.

References.
• Wikipedia has surprisingly good articles and references to both sides.
• University of Ediacara, http://www.ediacara.org/ (talk.origins FAQs)
• Skeptic’s Dictionary, http://skepdic.com/
• Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism by Matt Young (Editor), Taner Edis (Editor)

Rothbard as a philosopher

Rothbard as a philosopher

Conservative philosopher Edward Feser says: "he seems incapable of producing even a minimally respectable philosophical argument, by which I mean an argument that doesn't commit any obvious fallacies or fail to address certain obvious objections." Ouch! Rothbard's argument for self-ownership is dissected.

Added to the Philosophical Criticisms Of Libertarianism and Conservative Criticisms indexes.

Open Borders

Dogmatic Libertarians

John Fonte (in National Review) writes a conservative response to the dogmatic Cato position on open borders. He points out the obvious that somehow libertarians seem to miss: borders are important to self-governance for basic reasons of security.

Added to the Conservative Criticisms and Cato indexes.

Minimum wage.

No Longer Getting By: An Increase in the Minimum Wage Is Long Overdue

Amy Chasanov's Economic Policy Institute briefing paper explains why minimum wages are a good idea and refutes the usual conservative/libertarian arguments against them.

Added to the Government And Economics index.

Libertarians support child labor.

In arguments with Miron's supporters, they bring up the standard libertarian arguments in favor of child labor. So I did a little hunting.

Can Developing Countries Afford to Ban or Regulate Child Labor?, by Mark Weisbrot, Robert Naiman, and Natalia Rudiak, points out that modern developing countries are as rich we were in the first world when we gave it up. Along the way they disabuse a number of other foolish arguments.

In my Privatization and Deregulation index.

Strategic Oil Reserve

President Bush has announced that he's deferring contracts to fill the Strategic Oil Reserve "in order to get more oil in the market and help reduce rising gasoline prices".

Since everything he says like this is a lie or misdirection, I wondered what was going on here.

The Strategic Oil Reserve is normally filled with "royalties in kind" (ie. a percentage of oil pumped from US-owned oil fields.)

It looks to me as if he's allowing the oil companies to profit from selling US-owned oil at extremely high prices, and they will then give us some oil later when the prices are low. In other words, it's another gift to oil companies. If instead the US accepted ownership of the oil owed to the government and sold it immediately, the treasury would benefit instead of the oil companies.

I'm open to evidence this isn't what's happening, but I'm so pessimistic about the Bush presidency that it's the sort of corruption I expect.

Food And Agricultural Global Cartels

I've been arguing lately over at Jeffrey Alan Miron's "The Case for Small Government". The author makes innumerate arguments of the "4 reasons for government, 6 reasons against" style, recycling totally standard libertarian talking points. No imagination, no new ideas, and he doesn't defend his positions: he lets libertarian idiots defend his assertions. Why do I bother? Well, he's supposed to be a Harvard economist, teaching a course in this twaddle, and that's just 2 miles down the street from me. Think globally, act locally. :-)

Another reason though is to incite me to find new resources for the Critiques site. So after Miron's usual innumerate criticism of antitrust, I decided to find some numbers because of the enormous fines I'd heard about for price fixing in lysine, antibiotics, and other commodities.

The Food And Agricultural Global Cartels Of The 1990s: Overview And Update
John Connor at Purdue details roughly 13 billion dollars of customer overcharges due to price fixing in just one industry sector. An excellent argument for the continued importance of antitrust law.

Added to my Privatization and Deregulation index.

Also there, and well worth reading:

Liberty! What Fallacies Are Committed in Thy Name!

Ruse swiftboats Wilson, and other atrocities.

Last night I attended a panel where Michael Ruse, Richard Lewontin, and three others discussed how to teach evolution. Ruse's presentation was shocking: he attacked E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and others with accusations of evolutionism.

Apparently, this is also part of his latest book, reviewed in The Evolution-Creation Struggle and Reviewing Ruse.

His presentation turned out to be a rehash of his article in Science: Is Evolution A Secular Religion? As I've come to expect from most philosophers, his argument is spectacularly bad. Essentially, he is claiming that evolutionism is a religion based on evolution, and his political opponents practice it.

The most obviously stupid argument that he made was his illustrations of churches and the British Museum of Natural History. See them in the article linked above. We're supposed to think how similar they are, and that it demonstrates his point. But of course, these buildings have columns and arched ceilings for much the same reason why both hippos and elephants have thick legs. When you want to build a large public building, there are many principles and traditions in architectural practice that tend to make the architecture somewhat similar. Which is why theatres, legislative buildings, large train stations, other museums, and any number of other buildings from that era also have columns and arched ceilings.

Ruse writes: In his On Human Nature, he calmly assures us that evolution is a myth that is now ready to take over Christianity. And, if this is so, "the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline"

Note how Ruse misrepresents scientific naturalism (which Wilson presents as all of consilient science) as only evolution, so that evolutionism can be limited to evolutionary biologists. But worse, he omits Wilson's explanation of why scientific materialism is myth-like: because belief in scientific laws relies on the unprovable assumption of materialism. So despite the ue of the word myth, Wilson is no different than any other scientist that way; just honest. So why did Wilson use the word myth? Because it was at the end of a chapter where he's describing humans as myth-using animals. Nor does Wilson forsee taking over Christianity: he sees merely disrepute of academic theology. The very next sentence, Wilson writes "But religion itself will edure for a long time as a vital force in society."

I find it strange that someone opposed to creationism would steal the epithet "evolutionism" and revive "progressionist" to describe scientists who attempt to inform political views with scientific knowledge. Judging from the bogus arguments I noticed, it looks to me as if these are simple political attacks on opponents, and unworthy.

The Scourge of Public Libraries

The Scourge of Public Libraries

Jeff Landauer somehow concludes that public libraries are failures because one of their minor sidelines, video tapes, doesn't do the volume of Blockbuster Video. Come see the violence inherent in the library!

This one is linked in Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism.. Tip o fth ehat to Mark Plus for the recommendation!

Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?

Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?

Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University, points out that the neoliberal prescription of free markets, privatization, and non-interference has been a great failure for developing nations. India and China have done vastly better with their own prescriptions.

Excuses for Liberty

Latest addition:

Excuses for Liberty
Carl Milsted Jr. harshly criticizes natural rights, utilitarian, and a priori justifications for libertarianism. But then he just as naively proposes economic arguments, which fail for similar reasons.

In the Libertarians Criticizing Each Other index.

State Of The Propaganda address

Today, I heard the conclusion of the Bush SOTU address (which I had dilligently avoided) on the radio.

BUSH: Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage. Like Americans before us, we will show that courage and we will finish well. We will lead freedom's advance. We will compete and excel in the global economy. We will renew the defining moral commitments of this land. And so we move forward optimistic about our country, faithful to its cause and confident of the victories to come. May God bless America.

This is not a speech: it is merely a litany of double-plus-good newspeak. Vague, glittering generalities of propaganda. This is why "politician's promises" are held in contempt: not one of these promises is concrete. Not one of these promises specifies any action by the government. And even if it did, it would probably be a lie, as so many Bush promises have been.

How Roe v. Wade will be overturned.

I feel like making my prediction publicly, even though I think nobody's paying attention. It'll be archived so that I can say I was right. Or (I hope!) wrong.

Roe v. Wade is close to settled law. It will not be overturned directly. Instead, conditions must be created to change the assumptions, so that it is conspicuously in error.

The key assumption that will be changed is whether or not the fetus has rights. I forsee the Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito block setting precedents for fetal rights. At some point, after fetal rights are firmly established in a variety of cases, Roe v. Wade will be found in error because fetal rights conflict with (and outweigh) the woman's rights.

First attempts along the lines of fetal rights have already taken place, both in the courts and in legislatures.

All that's needed is one more anti-abortion vote on the court. They will find for fetal rights, and then "regretfully" have to overturn supreme court precedent.

Mechanism Not Policy: response

Nick Szabo has written a response to my Mechanism Not Policy article. Here's my response to Nick.

I really enjoy when I get a good, hostile reading of my ideas by somebody with an axe to grind. First, because it stimulates my thinking a great deal, and second because such emotional, ideological responses invariably contain many errors whose debunking educates me.

Nick, you start out with a gross misreading: I didn't say "the law", I said "the Constitution". I stuck to one example, primarily because I wanted to make a point about interpretation.

As for common law evincing "mechanism, not policy", no. It's just historically not true. Bob Black's White Man's Ghost Dance provides lots of counterexamples. First, we wouldn't expect a distributed decision making system to be able to adhere to such a restriction. Second, decisions about the nature of contracts or property amount to policies. Third, common law does not set up its own mechanisms of judges and courts, the sovereign does (to the best of my knowledge: you may know better.)

I'll grant that the common law does provide mechanism for the people (as opposed to my example of providing mechanism for itself.) Of course, statute law often does that as well. For example, laws creating limited liability corporations (which I think I recall had to override common law.) These too are important modern inventions by common law countries, but not inventions of common law.

But common law (a common libertarian obsession) is a distraction from my point, that the US Constitution was primarily intended to define mechanism, not policy such as rights. Now that statement may be "absurd and awful" to you, Nick, with your heavy investment in ideology and received interpretation of law. But it's a fair historical hypothesis begging for an unbiased examination. So what examination do you give it besides crying "absurd and awful"?

Not much that I can see. Instead you unleash a torrent of unbacked and arguable (if not incorrect) assertions. For example, you write:

"In this case, the Founders (which for the Bill of Rights are the anti-Federalists, not generally the Federalists as Mike suggests) clearly had in their minds that the main purpose of the mechanisms was to protect individual rights..."

While the anti-Federalists won their Bill of Rights, it was written by arch Federalist Madison. And mechanism proponent, if I'm right. If anti-Federalists had written the Bill of Rights, we'd expect rather clear statements of rights not just against the federal government, but against everybody. Instead, we see extremely skimpy statement of rights, almost as if invoking the principle of least authority in rights. But exactly enough for mechanism purposes. I don't know if the anti-Federalists were snookered into thinking the rights were more generous, or if they were satisfied that they were adequate. But it's obvious that they don't resemble the Virginia Bill of Rights very much in ways typical of Madison, as I discussed.

You also say:

""Life" and "liberty" occur three times in the Constitution; "property" is protected in four different places. Mike's beloved welfare state, on the other hand, occurs nowhere in the Constitution. Much of the Constitution was intended to protect the mechanisms of the common law from the hubristic policymaking of legislatures and the arbitrary actions of government officials."

Far be it from me to snicker at the lame argument of counting uses of words without context, but you're really silly here. And if you want to say welfare state doesn't occur in the Constitution, well neither does common law. But I wouldn't expect such an anacronism, would you? If I'm right about mechanism, not policy, then there's no contradiction between the Constitution and the welfare state. Unlike, say, the Virginia Bill of Rights.

Now, if you're going to insist that the idea was to protect the common law from legislators, then I really have to wonder how the 5th Amendment came to permit deprivation of life, liberty, and property by due process of law. How do you read that as protecting the common law?

"The recent great strides of progress in human history, such as the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, and the abolition of slavery, were propagated by common law countries."

Now that's just silly. Those were widespread events, taking place over many nations with many different legal systems. Slavery, for example, was abolished innumerable times in innumerable countries. And we were among the last, with our commonlaw protecting slavery to the end. And slavery was never abolished by common law: always by legislation or other centralized fiat. The industrial revolution occurred in many other non-commonlaw nations, such as Germany. And the Information Revolution has prospered in large part due to non-commonlaw nations such as Japan and Sweden.

I recommend that you re-read my essay, and put up some real objections.

The easy way to deal with trolls and haters.

You'd think that with all the fuss over trolls and hate mail in blog comments that somebody would have come up with the obvious solution.

Instead of censorship or turning off comments, simply have a second set of comments. Nobody can post to them: they are the deprecated, shameful, unwanted, proscribed, improper, hateful, obscene, or otherwise inappropriate comments. Blog editors can consign noisome comments there (or back) with a simple checkbox. Perhaps checking an explanation category too. Perhaps some posters' comments are automatically put there. Readers can see exactly what is and isn't thought appropriate.

This accomplishes too things. It allows blog editors to maintain the atmosphere they want with the same effort it takes to delete a post. And it produces editorial transparency: communication of disapproval without censorship.

Doubtless some won't want this system. In my 30+ year experience of mail lists and news groups (starting on the PLATO system), trolls actually benefit many groups because they lead people to face their own understanding of the topics with more than just belief. But when there is a high volume of obnoxious or off topic posts, this might be a good solution.

A divider, not a uniter.

Bush came into office claiming to be a uniter, not a divider.

That lie was transparent from the start, though of course all of his ilk swore it was what made him great.

Well, what more evidence do we need than the most divisive supreme court nomination ever?

There were probably dozens of eligable candidates for the supreme court who would have sailed through the confirmation process essentially unopposed: which indicates they would satisfy the American people somewhat better than this extreme right ideologue.

Medical Care, Insurance, and Socialized Medicine

I've just now made a new index for Medical Care, Insurance, and Socialized Medicine. I don't know why I've not had this long ago.

The first (new) entry is Paul Krugman's "Health Care Confidential" artical from the New York Times, as quoted by Brad DeLong. It pretty much thrashes the libertarian-preferred idea that markets do it best. And it does it with the bane of ideology: real world facts.

If anybody would like to suggest the best sites that oppose the market-oriented provision of health care, I'd like to add some.

Spying on our own people.

Why is it that I haven't seen people pointing out that every major dictatorship of the past Century or so has has their power cemented by extensive, unsupervised, secret spying on their own people? The Soviet Union. East Germany. Every other communist party you can name. Saddam. Pinochet. Hitler.

Why is it that I haven't seen people pointing out how bad it was when J. Edgar Hoover was spying on Americans, and how it gave him incredible power to blackmail and otherwise destroy leaders and members of legitimate organizations for his own political purposes?

Where are the conservatives, who you'd think would want to preserve freedoms? Where are the liberals, who'd also want to preserve freedoms, but also would be the first ones victimized by radicals with such power?

Idiotarian = Sexcrime

Yesterday, I started thinking about the term idiotarian. Basically, it's a term of hatred, like sexcrime, newspeak for "our enemy", or "them, not us". Despite attempts at a defining FAQ, it resists more precise definition. Users revel in their childish power to denounce, much as others did with "commie" or "doodyhead". Usually attempts to justify such terms illustrate how the authors are accusing others of their own sins.

So, I've added a new entry to my "Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism" page.

Why We Fight: An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (2.0)

Eric Raymond, Open Source self-promoter and self-appointed libertarian savior, seeks new levels of pomposity and foolishness He declares that people who don't worship his views are his poopeyhead enemies.

Anybody who can accurately count the strawmen gets an honorable mention.

Mechanism, Not Policy: Creation Of The Second Invisible Hand

Here's my new year's offering, my first substantial writing in a while.

Mechanism, Not Policy: Creation Of The Second Invisible Hand

It was triggered by a discussion with Nick Szabo at his blog Unenumerated: Negative rights and the United States Constitution. Nick was arriving at conclusions by methodologies that I considered weak at best.

As I've often been challenged by libertarian interpretations of the constitution, I thought it was about time that I attempted to write down my own thinking as to how to interpret it. My idea is rather idiosyncratic, and sure to annoy pretty much everybody if they take it seriously enough.

This is a first version. As I've never really discussed it with anybody before, I'm sure I'll get lots to think about from criticisms and eventually fix problems in it.

Latest quote added at end of collection...

The evidence strongly shows that Hong Kong and Singapore benefit from being small island economies on major trade routes, established as entrepots. They are not models for development of tropical agricultural economies such as those in Africa. Switzerland shows that a landlocked country can flourish if it is itself surrounded by rich nations, such as those in Europe, and serves as a long-standing land bridge between them.
Jeffrey Sachs, Scientific American Jan. 2005 p.14

This quote is relevant because many libertarians decry aid to developing nations, saying Hong Kong is the libertarian-like example that should be followed. One responded to Sachs' article on development with this argument, and Sachs responded.

Of course there are MANY other reasons why the countries libertarians claim are models are not libertarian. For example, almost all property is owned by the Hong Kong government, and public housing accounts for roughly half the population.

Adam Smith's Soft Side

Adam Smith's Soft Side
US Congressman Sherrod Brown points out that Adam Smith was not the one-dimensional "classical liberal" portrayed by libertarian historical revisionists.

The whole "classical liberal" term is a propaganda ploy (unhappily adopted by some innocent academics) designed to convince us of authority and historicity of modern libertarian dogma. It's as if libertarianism needed papal succession to justify authority descended from Peter (Adam Smith) to modern popes (Hayek, Mises, Rand, etc.)

And like Catholic dogmas, it's full of gross historical inaccuracies and conveniently overlooks other contemporaneous Christian (liberal) sects.

Added to the Libertarian Revisionist History page.

For Mises' Sake

The latest addition to Critiques is a delightful blast at Austrians.

Tom G. Palmer savages Llewellyn Rockwell, the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Hans-Hermann Hoppe for Austrianism above and beyond the call of sanity in For Mises' Sake.

The money lines are:

"If Hoppe is the leading light of Austrian economics as the Mises Institute presents him, then Austrian economics should prepare for a long dark age. At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not only economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics, as well. This bizarre claim turned a serious scholar and profound thinker into a comical cult figure, a sort of Euro Kim Il Sung. Hoppe's scholarship is so pitiful that one of his own colleagues -- who is still involved in the Mises Institute -- once remarked to me that Hoppe's book on ethics was a truly remarkable achievement; it was the only book he had ever read in which every step of the argument was a logical fallacy."

This has been placed in the "Libertarians Criticizing Each Other" and "Austrian Economics" indexes.

The worst crime of the 20th century. Whodunnit?

In my Libertarianism in One Lesson, I point out the libertarian principle that "All food, drugs, and medical treatments should be entirely unregulated: every industry should be able to kill 300,000 per year in the US like the tobacco industry."

Reality dwarfs my cynicism. Tim Lambert, in
The worst crime of the 20th century. Whodunnit? points out that the pesticide industry is attempting to blame Rachel Carson and her green followers for malarial deaths. But in reality, that industry is responsible for the deaths because they have fostered pesticide resistance in mosquitos through indiscriminant sales of their pesticides. Their accusations range from 50 to 90 million.

Criticisms of Anarcho-Capitalism

Thanks to Minhea Tudoreanu for a couple of suggestions, now added to the Libertarians Criticizing Each Other index.

NEW 10/05: A Fatal Instability in Anarcho-Capitalism

NEW 10/05: Anarcho-Capitalism Dissolves Into City States

Paul Birch shows some good reasons to think anarcho-capitalism is a utopian pipe-dream.

Libertarianism in One Lesson; The Second Lesson

Need I say more?


Libertarianism in One Lesson; The Second Lesson

This is not a finished work: there are a number of things that could be patted into terser or funnier or more accurate jabs. And of course, there's room for lots more items. And I need to add some credits at the bottom for a few contributors. If you have suggestions, please let me know. Chances are I won't respond to all the comments on this one.

Blast from the past....

There's some fun activity in the comments of Somalia, the libertarian paradise. My old libertarian buddy Glen Raphael has decided to stick his oar in.

William Paley was not an anthropologist.

I've read a number of criticisms of Paley's watchmaker argument, but I've never seen one from the standpoint of an anthropologist. It would be fitting: after all, when we find artifacts, anthropologists are the ones trained to interpret what they tell us about their makers.

Presume a far-future anthropologist who discovers the watch. It (and I choose it because it may not even be of our species) is initially unfamiliar with watches.

Yes, the anthropologist would likely conclude that the watch was designed. It might even conclude that the watch, circa 1800 and obviously crafted by hand, was made by one "designer" or artisan.

But the anthropologist would not stop there. There is much more information inherent in the watch. Everything about the watch shrieks that there is more than just a designer. The diverse materials of the watch speak of commerce, of industry, of technology. No one designer would have assembled all those raw materials, purified and processed them into glass and metals and alloys. Nor would one designer be genious enough to invent all the technologies embodied in the watch (springs, gears, hands, numbers on the watch face, tools for manufacture, etc.); those obviously imply a long period of technological development. Nor would one designer devote such vast labor to invent and perfect the design to such an extent just for himself: the design speaks of use by customers. Indeed, the anthropologist would be very surprised if this was the only watch ever made, and would search for more.

The anthropologist would find numerous other timekeeping devices (as well as whole loads of other devices.) It would perceive patterns of historical development and spread of the technologies that compose watches and the other artifacts, and find evidence of myriad watchmakers over a long period of time, who produced timekeeping devices ranging from sundials to atomic clocks. The evolution of timekeeping would be seen to occur in gradual steps, except where other technologies that had themselves evolved gradually, were integrated for timekeeping.

Our hypothetical anthropologist looking at the watch would not conclude only that there was a watchmaker: we would conclude that the watchmaker was a member of an enormous technological civilization.

Wait: say the anthropologist found a plant of Zea mays, corn. Everything about the plant screams that it is unnatural and created: it requires dense stands for pollination to work, there is no natural dispersal mechanism for the seed, it cannot compete with ordinary plants, it's lacking most of the important chemical and mechanical protections for its seeds that wild plants have, etc. The anthropologist would obviously conclude that corn is artificial. But it is not consciously designed. A continuum of ancestors leading all the way back to a wild grass, teosinte can be found. The anthropologist could conclude that corn had a designer, but he'd be wrong. Corn didn't come about by a process of design: rather a process of selection among natural variation over a period of a hundred or more human generations.

What have we learned from this thought experiment? Besides the basic fact that the watchmaker argument is a very weak argument by analogy?

First, that slight extensions of the analogy lead very quickly to conclusions that Christians would not enjoy, such as the idea that their god is a mere watchmaker in a much more extensive culture of gods.

Second, that a slight change of the analogy to another human artifact that was created by humans but NOT designed can lead to an invalid conclusion of design. In other words, we are incapable of accurately discerning design from selection. Unfortunately, William Paley did not provide an analogy for discerning theistic selection from natural selection.

(What is this doing in this blog? I had no other really convenient place to put it right now. If anybody would like to provide a more appropriate home, let me know.)

Governmentium

A few weeks ago I was forwarded an annoying post about the new element Governmentium. Now, that post was funny, but annoyingly libertarian in terms of mocking government. I was irritated enough that I thought a little about how I would rebut it. Here's a link to one version: http://www.dullmen.com/governmentium.htm

I did a little google searching, and turned up more than 4000 hits for Governmentium. I noticed that there was actually a great deal of mutation between the different sites' versions. And I let it drop.

A couple of days ago, somehow I stumbled across Administratium. Lo and behold, very much the same post, except that it applies to bureaucracies in government or in private business. Google turned up more than 8000 hits. Here's a link to one version: http://www.abcsmallbiz.com/funny/administratium.html

I figured these would not go unremarked in Usenet Groups, which now are searchable with Google Groups. And I was right: first mentions of Administratium were in 1993. First mentions of Governmentium were in 2002. And they were followed with comments that Governmentium was an uncreative rewrite. (I also found a comment that Administratium was reported in The New Scientist in 1991.) Two years later, groups had versions that added: "When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium" (2004)

What lessons shall we take away from this?

Well, first, that ideologues (including the right wing and libertarians) are phenomenally uncreative, and generally adapt rather than create their own arguments. We see this all the time: for example Intelligent Design proponents are simply trying to resurrect the ancient creationist argument from design.

Second, the principles of almost any ridicule of government apply just as well to the private sector: it's just a matter of seeing how. When right wing or libertarian reframing points you towards government only, rather than the more general case, this can be hard to notice. That's when a little clever research can turn up the original, and let you point out the reframing.

Carnival of Bad, Bad, Baaaad History

I submitted my Libertarian Revisionist History, and it is now listed at the current Carnival of Bad, Bad, Baaaad History.

In an era where "balance" is emphasized to privilige ideology over knowledge, this is a pretty good idea.

I'd like to locate a site that emphasizes resources that can be used to criticize bad history. My page has a bibliography: I'd like to locate more.

Arizona LP politics

James Dallas has sent me a funny web site:

http://western-libertarian.tripod.com

Petty, back-biting libertarian politics at its best!

Warning: not funny to folks unfamiliar with local libertarian party politics.

Amazon list for countering Libertarianism

Listmania! Countering Libertarianism and Neoliberalism

A while ago, I played with Amazon's list facility to try it out. These are the most important books for countering the ideas of libertarians and neoliberals. Only 6, and some are quite difficult. But they're really good.

Abandoning Libertarianism

Election 2004, 14: Abandoning Libertarianism

Bruce Baugh's sad evaluation of the worth of libertarianism and libertarians.

His article reflects the lack of concern for his needs from libertarians, and that he suspects he'll get better through government.

Marxism of the Right

Marxism of the Right


Robert Locke's

The American Conservative

article is a remarkably good inditement of libertarianism that will
appeal to liberals and progressives as well as conservatives.

The appeal lies, I think, in a big-picture view of the REAL classical liberal issues that are addressed both by modern conservatives and liberals. REAL classical liberals balanced their interests in liberty with other, competing values such as order and justice. There's a nice discussion of this at

Liberals and Libertarians #1