When we were young and wise

A few days ago, James posted an interesting question that I’ve been pondering.  He asked “Is an interest in Marx, then, also an indication of an immature mind, a phase perhaps understandable in the young but unforgivable in adults?”  He asked this question in response to similar critiques of Rand and in recollection of a former professor who referred to Nozick’s libertarianism as “a young man’s philosophy.”

I would broaden this question and ask “Is devotion to a particular philosopher, in general, a young man’s game?”  Do those engaged in philosophical pursuits tend to become less doctrinaire as they get older?

A common — though by no means universal — feature of the intellectual maturation process seems to be increased awareness of the inherent difficulties and uncertainties associated with any particular point of view or direction of inquiry.  As thinking people get older, they tend to become more aware of how little they know and about how hard it is to know anything.  I contrast this with those people who tend to become intellectually hardened and incapable of considering any ideas that challenged their longstanding opinions.  Indeed, I think the hallmark of an educated person is that he/she is a person of the first type mentioned, not the second.

In my observation, the young frequently develop a passion for a particular philosopher–be it Marx, Rand, Nozick, Rawls, Kant, Hayek, or whoever.  The philosopher seems to be less of an issue in explaining the passion than the age of the follower.  Those who don’t study philosophy can still get passionately involved in political causes in much the same fashion.  So, do people “grow out of” certain philosophies or do they just grow out of philosophy?  And, if one grows out of Nozick or Marx, what does one grow into?  Some mixed or pragmatic approach perhaps?

This question reminds me of the bumper sticker that says “Hire a teenager while he still knows everything!”

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Frustration and the Flotilla

It is an interesting and sad time to be in Tel Aviv. Tonight we were returning from dinner via taxi and we had to get out and walk because the pro-Israel rally outside of the Turkish embassy had become so large that the police were forced to close down traffic. People young and old were walking the streets with Israeli flags.  There seems to be an increase in the number of armed IDF members roaming the city, automatic rifles at the ready. (Surprisingly, I saw no coverage of this demonstration on CNN International, but I might have missed it).

Two of the gentlemen we had dinner with (academics from Tel Aviv University) had attended a protest against the boarding of the flotilla, and they estimated that the number of protesters ranged between 600 and 1000. The anti-Turkish protest seemed much larger.

There was a real sense of frustration among the academics who were uniformly on the Left. Some of their observations:

1. The political Left in Israel has collapsed since the Second Intifada (or more correctly, it has moved dramatically to the Right). As a result, there is far greater unity among Israelis than before.
2. There is a real sense that so many foreigners who critique Israel have no sense of what things were like on the ground (rockets and mortars out of Gaza, etc) and the sense of insecurity it created on a daily basis.
3. As much as one might want a negotiated solution, there is agreement that any such efforts would be futile. There are no bargaining partners.  There is little sense that the US is playing a positive role. There is only frustration, insecurity, and anger that past efforts were so thoroughly rebuffed and the press (and external critics) has agreed on a narrative that will be pressed regardless of whether it matches the empirical record.

On to Jerusalem tomorrow…

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Souter’s Lame-Brained Judicial Philosophy

Am I the only one perplexed by the embarrassingly lavish praise heaped upon David Souter’s Harvard commencement address by left-liberal commentators? In bashing the notion that judges should rule on the basis of “fair reading” of the law, Souter tries this mind-bogglingly inane reductio ad absurdum:

For those whose exclusive norm for constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown [v. Board of Education] must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision.  Those who look to that model are not likely to think that a federal court back in 1896 should have declared legally mandated racial segregation unconstitutional.  But if Plessy was not wrong, how is it that Brown came out so differently?  The language of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be hard to say that the obvious facts on which Plessy was based had changed, either.  While Plessy was about railroad cars and Brown was about schools, that distinction was no great difference.  Actually, the best clue to the difference between the cases is the dates they were decided, which I think lead to the explanation for their divergent results.

As I’ve said elsewhere, the members of the Court in Plessy remembered the day when human slavery was the law in much of the land.  To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant progress.  But the generation in power in 1954 looked at enforced separation without the revolting background of slavery to make it look unexceptional by contrast.  As a consequence, the judges of 1954 found a meaning in segregating the races by law that the majority of their predecessors in 1896 did not see.

If we take what Souter is saying here seriously (which we probably should not), he is saying that Plessy v. Ferguson was rightly decided. After all, his stated view here is that judges should read the constitution in light of the values of their time (arguably, it’s even worse – a close reading of the speech suggests that he thinks judges should simply rule on the basis of their own values).

And then what about this nonsense? “To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant progress.” O RLY? In Plessy, the Supreme Court ignored the plain language of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits states from “mak[ing] or enforc[ing] any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Prosecuting someone for sitting next to a person of color pretty clearly abridges his privileges and immunities. In Plessy, the Court was affirming the conscious and premeditated attempts of Southern state legislatures to re-establish white supremacy after Reconstruction. In doing so, they reversed an earlier decision allowing Congress to prohibit state-level segregation. There is simply no excuse for saying that Americans of that time viewed “separate but equal” as “progress.”

This is what you get when you nominate mediocrities to the Supreme Court.

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Best sentence today (so far)

“And going by Turkey’s rhetoric about the incident and its undying love for the nation-deprived Palestinians, you’d have no idea that the Turks have been killing nation-deprived Kurds for longer than Israel has existed, and have treated them with far more cruelty than Israel would ever dream of doing.” — Jonah Goldberg in The Goldberg File, June 3, 2010.

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When and Why We Regulate

Regulation has attracted more than a few posts as of late, and with good reason. The last few years have brought one of the greatest regulatory failures of the past century, Congress and the administration are in the process of producing the greatest regulatory expansion since the 1970s, and now the catastrophic situation in the Gulf of Mexico.

The standard take on regulation is simple: government regulates to address the various forms of market failure (e.g., informational asymmetries, the failure of firms to act as price-takers, negative externalities, transaction costs, public goods, etc.).  However, as Charles Wolf and others remind us, the market and the state are imperfect alternatives. Every attempt to address market failure introduces the potential for government failure. Each has its costs and benefits, and a prudent person should carefully weigh them rather than assuming ex ante that government solutions are superior to imperfect markets.

I am a bit skeptical of the positive theory of market failure for reasons that are beyond this posting (in essence, I find the market-state dichotomy on which it is premised to be highly suspect given the role of law and public institutions in constituting the economy). Nonetheless, informational asymmetries, negative externalities, etc., do provide compelling justifications for regulation (the real challenge is finding the most appropriate regulatory instruments).

That being said, I would like to highlight an additional role for regulation:  it can induce economic actors to exercise some “enlightened self-interest” and engage in higher levels of self-regulation.

Some regulatory analysts note that corporations work under a regulatory warrant (i.e., what is permitted by laws and regulations) and a social warrant (i.e., what is permitted by a broader set of stakeholders). If corporations violate the social warrant, they may find themselves subject to a stricter regulatory warrant.  Highly salient crises can lead to an expansion of mandatory regulations. Many corporate managers understand this and, as a result, often go “beyond regulation,” seeking to nurture their reputations and protect their social warrants.

Consider the following example. Following the tragic Union Carbine chemical release in Bhopal India, the chemical industry began a concerted effort at self-regulation in the hope of forestalling more significant mandatory regulations. The result (Responsible Care) began relatively weak, but evolved rapidly into a global set of management standards. A similar story can be told in other industries (e.g., nuclear energy, wood and paper production).

For effective self-regulation to occur, it seems necessary that there be some association committed to managing the industry’s reputation as a collective good and willing to eject members for failure to comply. At the same time, regulation (or the threat of regulation) seems imperative to force industry to make the investment in self-regulation.

In the past decade or two, some scholars have concluded that market forces are sufficient to force higher levels of corporate responsibility. To the extent that pollution is a form of waste, for example, the elimination of waste streams can provide cost-based advantages. To the extent that consumers value environmentally friendly production, firms can claim differentiation-based advantages.  This may be true for some firms, but I am skeptical that market forces are sufficient when taken by themselves.

Although many libertarians discount the need for regulations (after all, “didn’t Coase show…”), they may play a positive role in creating inducements for greater self-regulation, thereby forestalling a more direct form of regulation that could prove pernicious on a number of grounds.

One can only hope that, as the recent debacle in the Gulf of Mexico focuses attention on an expansion of regulations, the petroleum industry will respond by dramatically enhancing its self-regulatory capacity. I remain somewhat mystified that the American Petroleum Institute and the International Petroleum Institute have not developed a more coherent set of responses to every potential contingency and developed rapid response teams with easily deployable equipment to ensure that when accidents occur (as they inevitably will), they will not do undue damage to industry reputation.  Hopefully, this recent disaster will help the industry better understand the concept of enlightened self-interest.

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Charles Murray on Rand

A late, but well-aimed, review by Charles Murray on two recent Ayn Rand biographies.  Here is the final paragraph:

Ayn Rand never dwelt on her Russian childhood, preferring to think of herself as wholly American. Rightly so. The huge truths she apprehended and expressed were as American as apple pie. I suppose hardcore Objectivists will consider what I’m about to say heresy, but hardcore Objectivists are not competent to judge. The novels are what make Ayn Rand important. Better than any other American novelist, she captured the magic of what life in America is supposed to be. The utopia of her novels is not a utopia of greed. It is not a utopia of Nietzschean supermen. It is a utopia of human beings living together in Jeffersonian freedom.

I read Heller’s book and found it worth the time despite already knowing many of the stories.  It is better on Rand’s personal life than on her ideas – so I almost wished I had chosen to read Burns’ instead (since I’m not sure I need to read two biographies of Rand in the same year having already read and watched a lot of/about Rand over the years).

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Licensing Journalists? In the USA??!

This sounds like a story out of Nigeria or somewhere. A Michigan state senator is introducing a bill to license journalists! (Really, certification – you wouldn’t need the license to report, but it would be a state-sponsored credential.)

HT: Hit & Run

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Authority and Opinion

In his essay, “Of the First Principles of Government,” David Hume wrote:

Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded.

Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, is complaining loudly that the federal government is not doing enough about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Jindal lays the fault mainly at the feet of President Obama. My co-blogger Grover Cleveland has linked to a couple articles critical of the attitude of many—including, apparently, Jindal—that (a) the president should just do something, anything; that (b) the president is responsible for all problems, big or small; and that (c) no matter what the problem is, the president can, as if by magic, fix it. Of course, this president has done his share to court these attitudes by enjoying the posture of the I-can-do-anything superhero. (Remember his 2008 “This Is Our Moment” speech, in which he said that his election would mark the moment when, among many other things, the “rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?)

The catastrophe in the Gulf is showing us once again the silliness of believing that the president, or any other person, can, like Zeus, change the world merely by nodding his head.

But back to Jindal for a moment. Why doesn’t he just do what he wants to do? Why is he waiting for permission from President Obama, or from anyone else? I understand that while Louisiana has authority over its own coastline the federal government has jurisdiction in the Gulf where the oil leak is, but so what? This is clearly an emergency situation in which standard operating procedures may not apply. If there is something Jindal believes needs to be done, and he is ready and prepared to do it—both of which he is claiming are the case—then by all means go ahead!

The power that the federal government enjoys in this case may have statutory authority, but I think Hume’s dictum is right: It rests ultimately on opinion. Jindal has been waiting for permission because it is his opinion, and that of most others, that he needs to ask for permission. It is a habit of obedience and subservience that might serve well in other, normal circumstances. This is a time of crisis, however. So I say: Governor Jindal, become the leader you deride President Obama for failing to be. The near and practical consequence might be a lessening of the consequences of this present disaster; the further consequence might be a healthy challenge to the growing, and I think worrying, consensus that the federal government is the seat of all authority.

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