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.