Once the level of sophistication goes up in any field, specialization starts to exert its influence. Niche players claim greater expertise in particular areas, and they start to push the all-purpose stars to the side. That tendency is accentuated in economics as high-powered mathematics and large data sets gain prominence. They make it ever more difficult for any person to be expert in more than one or two subfields of inquiry.The demands of the profession influence the kinds of students who enter into it, so that free-spirited intellects like Milton Friedman are less likely to be drawn to the field than they were 100 or even 50 years ago.

Friedman’s influence may have been a product of the times. As Epstein suggests, the question that animates the symposium also asks “why there are no Keyneses, no Hayeks, no Wittgensteins, no Russells, no Eliots, or other giants who once strode the earth.”

Other essays  address Friedman’s personal attributes. David R. Henderson’s brief essay, “Why Milton Friedman was Rare,” for example, takes this approach and provides some useful insights into the man and the influence he had on the author. Henderson recalls how he first discovered Friedman as a 17-year old, after having worked through the works of Ayn Rand. A few years later, he would have the opportunity to meet with Friedman. As Henderson recalls:

Friedman had what I regard as the two main characteristics that lead to warmth: he was totally comfortable in his own skin, and he genuinely liked people. At age 19, a few weeks after graduating from the University of Winnipeg, I flew down to Chicago and went to his office at the University of Chicago. Friedman invited me in warmly and took about ten minutes of his time to convey two main messages to me. The first was that there’s more to intellectual life and development than Ayn Rand. The second—and these were his exact words—was, “Make politics an avocation rather than a vocation.” Then he gently escorted me to the door. But he gave a 19-year-old kid ten minutes.

The essays are brief, chocked full of personal anecdotes, and well worth a few minutes of your time.  I look forward to comparing their insights to those of a new intellectual biography of Friedman that I have on pre-order.

Weighting Taxation

The freedom index “weights” each policy variable by the dollar-terms amount of benefit received by victims of government intervention from a one-standard-deviation, nationwide shift in the variable in a freer direction. So the weight for taxation is simply the number of dollars represented by a one-standard-deviation shift in state and local tax burden as a percentage of personal income. The mean of tax burden is 0.095 (9.5% of personal income). The standard deviation is 0.0124. Therefore, the weight of the variable in the index is 0.0124 times national personal income, which was $12.357 trillion in 2010: $153.1 billion. That ends up being worth 28.6% of the total weights for all variables in the index.

That’s a lot. The numbers don’t lie, but we do note in the text one reason why this number may actually overestimate the true “loss of freedom” caused by taxation:

This index’s weight for tax burden assumes that all taxes take away freedom. But in fact some taxpayers consent to at least some of the taxes that they pay, as long as the taxes are legal and generally paid by others. Therefore, taxation is not wholly a violation of their freedom, as “freedom” is defined above. However, most criminal justice policies do not operate along these lines. For instance, an imprisoned drug possessor is no more likely to consent to being confined if others are as well, and a driver fined for not wearing a seat belt does not usually consent to being fined if others are, and so on.

Rather than trying to figure out how much of the observed taxation truly represents a diminution of freedom, this study uses aggressive estimates of the value of freedom from taxation and other fiscal policy measures, and then boosts the weighting of certain personal freedoms and economic regulations, as explained in the relevant sections below. The point is to make sure that the index is using an equally aggressive method for estimating the values of all the different freedoms it covers.

Now, one might believe that we have not gone far enough to adjust for this problem, and indeed that is the whole point of putting the spreadsheet online and encouraging reader customization. The freedom index as it currently stands is in some ways a libertarian’s index. If you think that all taxation diminishes freedom, you will like the weight it enjoys in the published study.

But what if you are a philosophically sophisticated progressive or “liberaltarian,” who does not have any personal issue with taxation, but who nevertheless thinks that negative liberty is part of justice, and that the costs that others associate with taxation are worth taking into account. What weight should you put on tax burden?

Let’s assume that the current tax burden in each state represents the ideal point of the median voter. Positive theories of democracy would suggest that this is as good a guess about where public opinion lies as any. Then 50% of voters would prefer a higher tax burden (and the services it would finance), and 50% would prefer a lower tax burden. Right away, we can slash the tax burden weight in half, because 50% of voters nationally would not see the taxes they currently pay as any diminution of their freedom at all. Now, this move assumes that the median-dollar taxpayer is the same as the median voter. That is unlikely to be the case. In fact, the median-dollar taxpayer is likely to be somewhat wealthier than the median voter and thus more ideologically conservative and more hostile to taxation. Thus, if anything, slashing tax burden in half on these grounds is somewhat too aggressive.

But we’re not done yet. Of the 50% of voters/taxpayers who would prefer a lower tax burden, most of them would not see all of the taxes they pay as a diminution of their freedom. That is, they would be fully willing to pay a lower tax burden that is greater than zero. To illustrate the logic, assume a normal probability density function over possible tax burdens, as follows:

On the X axis is tax burden, and on the Y axis is the proportion of the population corresponding to a particular view on tax burden. Fifty percent of the curve lies to the left or right of the mean of the tax burden distribution, which is 9.5, the actual national mean of state and local tax burden. (I have drawn the curve under the assumption of a standard deviation of 2.375, a fourth of the mean, but nothing that follows hinges on this assumption. Note that the standard deviation of voters’ views on taxation should be significantly greater than the standard deviation of actual state tax burdens, because each state tax burden roughly represents a median of a distribution.)

Now, what are the losses experienced by those who prefer a lower tax burden than what currently exists in their state? The loss curve will look like a mirror image of the left side of the normal density function. Those who want zero taxation will see all 9.5% of income taxed away as a loss of freedom. Those who want taxation of 2.5% of income will see 7% of income taxed away as a loss of freedom. And so on. Because the loss function is a mirror image of the probability density function, the area under the loss curve is also 0.5. So only 4.75% of personal income, in total, is a loss to those who prefer lower taxation. We can divide tax burden’s weight by two again, or by four in total.

The way to do this in the weighting spreadsheet is as follows. On the 2001-2011 worksheet, you can find all the standard deviations and weights of the variables in column GW. The weight for tax burden (“ainctot3″) is in cell GW10. You can divide the value there by four to create a new weight. All the other weighting cells automatically recalculate, and you now see in cell GV10 that tax burden is now worth just 9.19% of the index. (Why not one-fourth of 28%? Because reducing taxation’s weight also reduces the sum of all weights.) Fiscal policy as a whole is now worth just 17% of overall freedom, while personal freedom is 42%, and regulatory policy is 41%.

Note that all of the measures we took to boost personal freedom in the study remain in place, so this approach really does aggressively reduce the importance of taxation. I’ll call this new, nerfed-taxation index “Sandals,” as contrasted with the published index, which I’ll call “Suits.” How do the rankings of states differ between “Suits” and “Sandals”? See the table below.

The two rankings still look pretty similar! Three of the same states are in the top five in both indices, and the bottom three are identical as well. Indiana moves up from #16 to #2 between “Suits” and “Sandals,” and Nevada moves up from #20 to #5. Meanwhile, Oklahoma falls from #5 to #18, and Alabama falls from #18 to #40. But those are some of the biggest changes in rank; most states stay in a pretty similar location. It turns out that even a left-leaning index of negative liberty puts red and purple states at the top and deep blue states at the bottom.

Including Abortion

Abortion policies have to be imported from another spreadsheet in order to be included in the freedom index. A little more Excel mastery is helpful here. The abortion policy spreadsheet is available at statepolicyindex.com (p_abor_11.xls).

Now, there are a few things to note about state abortion laws. Most state abortion laws that are actually enforced do not do much to limit first- and second-trimester abortions. Because of Roe v. Wade, states do not have the right to prohibit abortions before fetal viability. However, some abortion policies we code, like requiring that only licensed physicians perform abortions, requiring that abortions be performed in a hospital, restricting private insurance coverage of abortions, and imposing waiting periods for abortions, can raise the effective cost of getting even an early abortion. Some pro-choicers, particularly libertarians, might well see certain state restrictions, such as prohibiting Medicaid funding for abortions, restricting partial-birth and late-term abortions, and requiring parental notification for minors’ abortions, as justifiable.

The variable “pabor” gives a summary indicator of state abortion laws based on principal component analysis. It is available only for 2006-2010 because one of the constituent variables is unavailable for 2000. States scoring higher on “pabor” have more abortion restrictions, including limits on public funding. To insert the variable into the freedom index, simply create two new rows in the freedom index spreadsheet and paste the “pabor” values into the first row (values/transpose). Since abortion laws affect personal freedoms on any interpretation, you may wish to include abortion policies with the personal freedoms, for instance on rows 139 and 140. You may wish to carry 2006/7 values back to 2001.

Next, you need to adjust the raw values of “pabor” to put them on a standardized scale with other variables. Every other row of the spreadsheet consists of these adjusted values. The adjusted values lie right below the raw values of each policy variable. If you think fewer abortion restrictions enhance freedom, then you think that higher values on “pabor” are worse. Find another variable like that — “tpubfin” is an example on rows 125-126. You can copy and paste the formula for adjusted “tpubfin” values to adjust the “pabor” values. If you think fewer abortion restrictions threaten freedom, then you think that higher values on “pabor” are better. Find another variable like that — “tgprp” on rows 133-134 is an example. Copy and paste the “adjusted” row.

Next, make sure that the mean and standard deviation of the variable are calculated in columns GV and GW. Below the mean and standard deviation are the weights. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll give abortion a weight equal to same-sex partnerships, about $10.4 billion. Make sure that the percentage weight is calculated in column GV by copying and pasting one of the bolded percentage weights from another variable (it doesn’t matter which). Also make sure that the summed weights is updated by changing the formula at the bottom of column GW (row 243 after inserting two rows for abortion). Make sure that the dollar weight for abortion laws is included.

Finally, update the personal freedom scores. For instance, go into GU143 and type at the end of the parenthetical expression: “+GU140*$GV140″ (without quotes). That updates Wyoming’s score. Then just drag the formula all the way to the left. Personal freedom scores are all updated, and overall freedom updates automatically.

Now what does the freedom ranking look like? I’ve taken the steps to create a pro-choice ranking that also nerfs taxation. Here it is:

Not all that different. I’ve taken all the assumptions most favorable to a “liberaltarian” conception of negative liberty, and most states do not jump or fall very many places in the ranking. I don’t say this to tweak liberaltarians, but to point out how robust the freedom ranking is to even drastic changes of assumptions. It’s such a big dataset that seemingly big changes have small effects on the end result. New York, California, and New Jersey really are the most regulated states, no matter how you slice it. The Dakotas, Tennessee, and New Hampshire really are among the least regulated states. “Conservatarians” may be distressed by the low placement of states like Mississippi, West Virginia, and Louisiana in the published index. My guess is that the freedom ranking will be equally robust to changes in more right-wing direction, such as by nerfing many of the bonuses we gave to personal freedom variables, including abortion restrictions as a plus for freedom, and so on.

Although the freedom index is reasonably robust to changing assumptions about which freedoms matter how much, we still encourage readers to tinker with customizing the index. For one thing, very radical changes may well have radical effects. If you are interested in marijuana laws and business regulations but not at all in taxation, gun laws, or tobacco laws, your freedom index might look quite different after all. Our freedom index is tailored to the “average American” adversely affected by government intervention, but the “average American” is a statistical construct that probably corresponds to no actual person.

[The IRS commissioner] has known for at least a year that this was going on and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.

All scandals are not created equal.  But I don’t see how even the most rabid left-wing partisan would not find Meyer’s point pretty compelling.

Great quote from Jonah Goldberg:  ”It’s a very exciting time to see the press corps interested in its job all the sudden.”

Not a good week for our President.

In the modern U.S., what is the most efficient way for the federal government to spend an extra billion dollars? What is the maximally utilitarian way for the federal government to spend this sum? (In both cases, assume that tax cuts are not an option). Use everything you’ve learned to craft a thoughtful answer, and be specific.

Judging by his summation of the responses he got, I would have been very disappointed too. Here’s how I would approach the question:

1. Addressing the efficiency part of the question likely requires looking at the most underaddressed collective-goods problems in the U.S. today, that is, situations in which we are falling well below the Pareto frontier. Perhaps invasive species eradication?
2. Addressing the utilitarian part of the question also requires making interpersonal comparisons of utility. I’m not too surprised many GMU students reject the possibility of such comparisons. Although I’m not a utilitarian, I don’t think interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible. Perhaps funding an endowment, the annual interest from which will fund a very long-run basic income experiment in randomly selected locations?

How would you answer the question, Pileus readers?

Sorens thinks the project’s success stems partly from its modest approach. “The whole point behind the FSP was to avoid utopianism,” he says. Rather than trying to “build this new society,” he says, Free Staters “opted instead for incrementalism, making small but noticeable, meaningful changes.” Building an entire new world requires a massive investment before anybody sees results, big or small. The Free State Project already has won victories without spending much money or ripping up social architecture.

At a recent Porcfest (a summer gathering of Free Staters and fellow travelers), it was fun to see our friend and colleague treated like a rock star.  May the legend – and the FSP – grow!

The long-term fiscal picture of the US is still scary; entitlements are still un-reformed; the expansive federal state continues to march on mostly unabated, sucking up economic capacity and squashing the entrepreneurial spirit.  But, you know what I think is still the most likely outcome, the only one that is backed-up by roughly four centuries of evidence?

America is still likely to outgrow all the problems our knuckle-headed leadership in both parties have created for us.  It always has before.

Sounds reasonable.  But apparently wrong.  A committee set up by the National Institute of Medicine (part of the CDC) just released their review of the research: no benefits from low salt consumption.  The leader author on the report says, according to the NY Times:

Although the advice to restrict sodium to 1,500 milligrams a day has been enshrined in dietary guidelines, it never came from research on health outcomes… Instead, it is the lowest sodium consumption can go if a person eats enough food to get sufficient calories and nutrients to live on. As for the 2,300-milligram level, that was the highest sodium levels could go before blood pressure began inching up.

In its 2005 report, the Institute of Medicine’s committee said that sodium consumption between 1,500 and 2,300 milligrams a day would not raise blood pressure.

That range, Dr. Strom said, “was taken by other groups and set in stone.” Those other groups included the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, which formulated dietary guidelines in 2005.

This reveals a lot about how government guidelines are made:

• Lack of a research foundation was not a significant obstacle to creating the guideline.
• The upper end of the “safe” range was dropped in favor of the lower end.
• The lower end that became the guideline is that minimum level necessary to maintain life; thus it is not surprising that some studies have shown that as salt intake approaches that 1500 milligram level that other bad things start happening.
• There are a lot of warnings (for good reason) about the political power of the food industry in setting dietary guidelines.   Manufacturers of high sodium foods make lots of money, yet this low guideline still persisted. Lesson: the political power of those who oppose processed foods should not be ignored.  [Interesting political query:  how did this diffuse interest conquer the concentrated interest?]
• Lots of people think that sodium is bad.  How many of them know that a sodium deficiency will kill you? Really fast.

Before you start adding more salt to your potatoes, however, it is good to remember that this new body of research is not based on the carefully controlled experimental framework that we would like to see.  Indeed, much of what we “know” about nutrition is similarly suspect because it is very, very hard to do those types of studies on human beings.

Dietary guidelines are largely based on pieces of empirical observation connected by theories–not on RCTs of real diets.  The same could be said of a lot of social science work, including economics, so I’m not picking on nutritionists.  And if you think nutrition science is suspect and politicized, just take a little trip through psychology.  Those folks have been fighting about revisions to the DSM for a long time, and the casualty count is very high.

Because people are much harder to study than laboratory mice, we know much, much less than we think we do.  Even about mice, I presume.

The reasoning the IRS gave us is that the FSP was simply a political action group trying to benefit the Libertarian Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. The FSP has never run or endorsed candidates or given money to any candidates. The FSP has never endorsed specific legislation or lobbied any elected or appointed official. More importantly, the FSP has never had any ties, formal or informal, with the Libertarian Party. Plenty of FSP participants reject electoral politics altogether. To my knowledge, the FSP has never received even a single donation from any foundation, government, party, or any other corporate entity whatsoever.

The FSP clearly qualifies as a social welfare organization, if not a public-benefit, charitable organization (“501(c)(3)”), according to the IRS’s own rules. The point of the FSP is to promote New Hampshire as a destination to people who are philosophically classical-liberal or libertarian. That’s it. The FSP spends money on advertising and promotion, maintaining a website, and holding two annual educational-social events in New Hampshire. The FSP believes that is an organization operated for the public benefit, especially with the educational programs held at its events. However, even if the IRS does not buy that interpretation, it is clearly an organization intended for the social and educational benefit of philosophic libertarians. It is clearly not a political action organization. Indeed, had the FSP applied for section 527 recognition, it probably would have been denied, leading to the absurd likelihood that the IRS would have considered the FSP a nonprofit fitting into no nonprofit category.

Since then, the FSP has operated just fine as a generic nonprofit corporation with no IRS tax status; since the organization’s expenditures always exceed its merchandise sales, it does not have any tax liability. However, 501(c)(4) status would have been a useful designation and signal to donors of the organization’s credibility.

Conservatives would like to find Obama’s fingerprints on the current IRS scandal, but they are unlikely to do so. Career bureaucrats at the federal agency that collects taxes from Americans are unlikely to be friendly to American antitax groups. The IRS’s hostility to antitax groups will manifest itself in a variety of ways, but that hostility is apparently nothing new or even particularly surprising. That doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong, of course.

On a gut level, I vastly prefer the passionate party activist who sends $200 to her favorite fire-breather to the lobbyist who coolly covers his bets by supplying $2,000 to both candidates in a race. One is acting as an engaged citizen. The other is a glorified bagman. But both have the potential to break our political system.

Just as big money is corrupting, small money is polarizing. And it’s polarization that probably poses the bigger threat to American politics right now. Big money, for example, generally wants to raise the debt ceiling. Small money is one reason Republicans in Congress came close to breaching it. Big money often wants the two parties more or less to get along; no one gets a tax break if legislation dies on the floor. Small money will turn on you if you dare cut a deal with the other side. Big money erodes what little trust Americans still have in their political system. Small money attacks the bipartisanship that, for better and worse, is required for the system to function.

When I said “altered my thinking,” I did not mean, of course, that he led me to where he (and many other MSM types) want election financing to go, namely in the direction of public financing.  I hadn’t really thought of this big money/small money distinction before, and I think the point about small money and partisanship makes a lot of sense.  But I part ways with Klein (who is mostly borrowing the ideas here from Sen. Chris Murphy) regarding the normative implications of this theory.  As is so often the case, Klein jumps from the positive to the normative and assumes that everyone will jump with him without even realizing it.

When Klein says that bipartisanship is “required for the system to function,” what he is really saying is “required for the Congress to pursue a centrist agenda.”  To his ilk, functioning means what we have seen steadily over the past century–an ever increasing scale and scope of the federal government (nicely illustrated in Marc’s recent picture of the uninterrupted trend in per-capita spending).

Klein goes on to say that we “need to change the rules and incentives to keep polarized parties from undermining the well-being of the country.”  Again, to translate, by “well-being of the country” he means “the centrist, statist, country that I value.”

One of my colleagues argued with me awhile back that it is not an unreasonable normative theory to give weight to the preferences of the median voter, which will always be centrist.  But those preferences, facilitated by bi-partisan cooperation over the years, have led to the steady creep, creep, creep of the federal state.  As we inch closer to a debt crisis, it is hard to imagine a centrist, bi-partisan solution to those problems unless someone’s feet are held to the fire through some combination of the many anti-majoritarian safeguards infused into the Constitution.

The problem with turning our Republic over to the median voter is that the median voter really sucks at math.  He is like the accountant that has hidden the cost column on his spreadsheet and cannot understand why the company seems to be unraveling.

Centrists (both those who lean right and those who lean left) have the right to argue their ideology as much as any non-centrist.  I just get really annoyed that their ideology is couched in terms of  ”functioning” or “getting things done.”  Non-centrists want to get things done, too, they just have different visions of what that means.

As for me, nothing could be better describe as “getting things done” than putting the brakes on Leviathan.   Perhaps small money and anti-majoritarian safeguards can accomplish what bi-partisanship probably never will.

I have been updating some charts for a second edition of a book I wrote a while back. One of my favorite charts presents inflation-adjusted spending per capita. I focused on domestic spending in this chart not because I discount the importance of defense spending, but because it was in support of an argument I was making. To give you a flavor of the numbers, consider the following (all figures are in 2005 dollars):

• Starting at the New Deal, the peak level of domestic spending before US entry into WWII was $865 per capita (1940).
• Let us leap forward to the 1960s. The highest level of domestic spending per capita under LBJ was $2,265 (1968).
• Peak domestic spending during the Reagan presidency was $4,950 (1987).  That is 218 percent of the Great Society levels (Don’t fight the urge to cheer “LBJ, All the Way”).
• President Clinton assured us that we were witnessing the end of Big Government. While federal spending as a percentage of GDP fell to 18.6 percent (2000), per capita domestic spending stood at $6,206.
• George W. Bush increased that figure to a peak of $7,215 (2007). And Barack Obama made history in 2010, when domestic spending per capita hit $8,631 (it stood at $8,141 in 2012).

A couple of thoughts: First, while many may associate “big government” and FDR,   “that man” (as Grover often calls him) was a piker. In inflation adjusted terms, the Reagan Revolution entailed spending 5.72 times that sum. In 2010, the federal government was spending almost 10 times that amount. Second, these numbers grossly understate overall domestic spending. State and local governments expenditures are 11.3 percent of GDP—a larger share of GDP than the federal government spent in any year during the domestic phase of the New Deal (the peak was 10.3 percent in 1939). If we combine federal domestic, state and local spending for 2012, it stands at $13,034 per capita. Third, the big driver is the combination of demographic trends and mandatory spending on entitlements programs.

However, it is a bit surprising that another member of the Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni never graduated from Rutgers according to the Rutgers Registrar (as reported by ESPN)!  

Can one be a distinguished alum – or even an undistinguished alum, by definition, without actually graduating?   According to Merriam Webster’s definition, it seems possible: “a person who has attended or has graduated from a particular school, college, or university.”  But is that the common sense understanding of the term?  For those readers of ours who attended college but never graduated, do you consider yourself an alum of that school?  Is my wife an alum of Harvard University since she took a class there once?  When do we get the invites to the alumni reunions (and the awesome networking opportunities)?  And what class are you placed in if you never graduate?

If you combine Rector’s evidence with common-sense moral beliefs about the deserving poor, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that few “poor” Americans qualify. The moral admonition to “help the deserving poor” asks us come to the aid of people who are (a) genuinely destitute, even though (b) they took reasonable measures to avoid destitution. Rector shows that few Americans qualify on either count.

How many of those poor, single-parent families are so because the marriage broke up? How many of those families are so because the father was incarcerated? Fewer than half of children currently in single-parent households were born outside wedlock. You can blame mothers in many of these cases for a poor choice of partner, but living in poverty with your children is a hell of a sentence for that kind of mistake. Some of these households could well be considered “deserving poor.” And yes, their material circumstances are usually not dire, but dignity has to do with a lot more than material circumstances. If you have a refrigerator and a TV but can’t afford to go back to school and get an education to improve your lot in life, are you really well off?

Fatherlessness is important for explaining poverty, but that doesn’t mean fatherless families don’t deserve help.

[Note: "1%" corrected to "71%" above. Copy and paste error - apologies!]

State governments continue to insert themselves into the contractual relationships between car manufacturers and dealers, typically to the ostensible benefit of the latter. The New Hampshire Senate recently passed a bill regulating the terms and conditions of dealer contracts with manufacturers, prohibiting manufacturers from requiring dealers to alter the appearance of their showrooms, for instance. (Disturbingly, the state director of Americans for Prosperity in New Hampshire supports the bill.) The bill is actually unlikely to change any “balance of power” between automakers and auto dealers. Automakers will simply respond by vetting potential dealerships far more closely and perhaps charging higher franchise fees. The onus of this response is likely to fall more on new dealerships than on incumbents. So the real losers from the bill are going to be potential entrants into the car dealer industry and, of course, consumers.

These are not the only examples of “state protectionism,” in which state governments adopt laws meant to reduce competition from out-of-state businesses for the benefit of local incumbents. Some states still prohibit certain out-of-state direct-to-consumer wine shipments. Regulatory barriers can accomplish the same ends. States have widely varying regulations on insurance products, making regulatory compliance a huge barrier for a company trying to market a standard policy in multiple states. For a long time, major life insurance companies lobbied Congress to adopt a national life insurance regulatory regime, pre-empting state laws. They were opposed by local life insurance agents, for whom knowledge of and compliance with distinctive state regulations were a significant source of competitive advantage. In the end, no national legislation materialized, but Congress authorized the formation of an interstate compact, essentially a contract among consenting states that sets up a single insurance regulator. More than 40 states have joined the Interstate Insurance Product Regulation Commission, which regulates life insurance and annuities.

Such state protectionism potentially runs afoul of the so-called “dormant commerce clause” of the U.S. Constitution. The commerce clause allows Congress to regulate trade among the several states. By implication, then, states are presumptively prohibited from burdening interstate trade, unless authorized by Congress. Unfortunately, courts have been reluctant to scrutinize state economic regulations that have an essentially protectionist character, although especially blatant discrimination against out-of-state imports has been overturned.

Beyond judicial intervention, however, another solution may be the interstate compact. The U.S. Constitution requires Congress to authorize interstate compacts, though, and given Congress’ dysfunctionality, that is often a tall order. Moreover, topic-by-topic compacts will fail to achieve the comprehensive results that something more along the lines of a World Trade Organization analogue would. For instance, few states would want to join a compact dedicated solely to liberalizing the rules on auto sales. The dealer lobby is too strong in most places. But they might have an interest in joining a compact setting up an Interstate Trade Organization to liberalize rules on many different kinds of commerce. In that context, “exporters” might gain enough political influence to outweigh the demands of “import-competing” industries. The key is the ability for state governments to make policy “trades” across different dimensions, increasing the scope of the interstate organization’s remit. A state might “lose” (politically) on one dimension, like direct auto sales, but gain on another dimension of greater importance to its own export industries, like direct wine sales. As Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal (2001: 770) note in their article, “The Rational Design of International Institutions”:

Sometimes two seemingly unrelated issues are linked. A trade issue, for example, may be linked to a security issue to facilitate agreement and compliance. Or a side payment may be offered, as when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty offered the transfer of peaceful nuclear technology to states that agreed to forgo nuclear weapons. Such side payments are clear evidence that scope is being manipulated to facilitate cooperation.

Koremenos et al. conjecture that the “scope” of an organization increases with the heterogeneity and number of the members and the severity of the “distribution problem” (for instance, prisoner’s dilemmas as against coordination games) and of the “enforcement problem” (how to punish defectors). For state governments engaging in protectionist policies, just as for national governments doing the same, all of these problems loom large. Therefore, wide scope is likely to be important for any organization dedicated to trade liberalization.

But they weren’t the only rent-seekers attempting to eat from the public trough: “The professional sports teams were all backing a Florida Senate proposal that would have allowed each of them to compete for a share of state tax dollars. The measure would have created a process for pro teams to vie for $13 million a year in state incentives.” 

Fortunately, Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford wasn’t willing to go along and didn’t allow the funding package through the legislature.  However, his remarks suggest that we should only give Weatherford one cheer for his move: 

“I think part of the complication was the fact that it wasn’t just the Dolphins,” Weatherford said Friday. “You had five or six different franchises that were looking for a tax rebate, and that’s serious public policy. You’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, and I think the House just never got comfortable there when the session ended.”

So would Weatherford have been comfortable giving away tax dollars to make rich men richer if only one pig had sidled up to the trough?  The Dolphins tweaked their logo this year.  Perhaps they should have changed their name to another animal.

A less covered aspect of this story is that Jason has an identical twin brother, Jarron, who is also an NBA veteran and who spent many years underperforming for my Utah Jazz. Jarron is straight and claims to have had no idea whatsoever that his twin brother is gay until very recently. Jarron and Jason have never publicly confirmed or disproven that they are monozygotic (identical) twins. My understanding of twins is that, especially as they grow older, identical twins prefer to emphasize their individuality rather than their genetic commonality, causing them to reject the “identical” moniker. For a variety of reasons, identical twins have slight variations in appearance that usually allow them to be differentiated by people who are paying attention, even though they have the same genes. But most people who have watched the Collins over the years would find it shocking if they were not monozygotic (more shocking than one of them being gay, actually).

There is a long history of studying variation in genetic phenotypes with twin studies . Homosexuality has always proven a genetic puzzle because it lowers reproductive fitness and, therefore, should die out over time. A recent study in the Quarterly Review of Biology (University of Chicago Press) says, “Pedigree and twin studies indicate that homosexuality has substantial heritability in both sexes, yet concordance between identical twins is low and molecular studies have failed to find associated DNA markers.” Thus, if the “born this way” mantra is true, it is clearly more complicated than a simple genetic story.

This same study offers a different account of the biological origins of homosexuality. The authors propose an epigenetic model of sexual orientation. Epigenetic studies (which try to understand how genes are expressed) are all the rage now (just last week I was at an NBER conference where there was an interesting paper on epigenetics and cognitive development in rhesus monkies), and many biosocial phenomena are thought to result from the combination of genes and the environment, where the prenatal environment of the developing fetus is particularly important. It seems that epi-markers are often heritable, which would account for observed heritability in the absence of DNA markers.

I have read a variety of twin research over my career, since twin studies are quite common in economics. Dabbling into this genetic research on homosexuality, I am struck by how little there has been in the past couple of decades, especially given the importance of gay rights as a social concern. But perhaps the politics explains the lack of science. It would be disconcerting, at least, to embark on a field of study where an increasingly large group of politically motivated, influential and often angry people are already convinced they know the answer: sexual orientation is innate and immutable. The activist community wants acceptance, not understanding.  Hence, most people will avoid doing science that will cause people to hate them if they get unpopular answers (or, even worse, label them as hateful for even asking the questions).

Both the innate and immutable claims might prove to be true, but as more and more people buy the hype, the science gets harder and harder to do.  What if, perchance, this new epigenetic research leads to a medical or other treatment (perhaps prenatal hormonal therapies) that could “turn off” the development of homosexual orientation in utero or sometime thereafter? How would this affect the gay rights movement?

Shouldn’t even people who are gay rights activists be in favor of the development of knowledge that might lead to such a discovery? A consistent theme I hear when homosexuals tell their stories about coming out is how hard it was to admit, first to themselves and then to others, that they are gay. Many of them tell stories of great pain and anguish prior to coming out (and sometimes thereafter).  Wouldn’t eliminating that pain be wonderful?

The obvious response to this is that it isn’t homosexuality that causes the pain, but is instead the “homophobic culture” we live in. Fair enough.  But consider the thought experiment where the culture is completely accepting of homosexuality. It seems that even in this homophilic wonderland, there are compelling reasons to prevent homosexuality. First of all, the desire to create biological children that are related to both parents seems a powerful (and biologically rooted) urge. Second, mate selection is much harder for homosexuals purely for statistical reasons.  Third, the social self-sorting of homosexuals into urban environments, where mate selection is easier, can be costly, especially for individuals who don’t like those environments for other reasons. Finally, there is always stress (sometimes a lot) for growing up as a minority, whether minority status is defined, by race, religion, ethnicity, or sexuality.

In short, a central claim of the gay rights movement is that homosexuals do not choose to be gay. But if they could, would they? If there were a simple treatment that their mothers could have chosen, wouldn’t it be desirable? Sure, many activists are going to say, “No Way. Gay life is wonderful. We are proud of who we are.” I believe they are sincere. Yet I wonder, even for that group, what they would tell their mothers to do if they could go back in time.  Would not even people who are completely accepting of homosexuality choose heterosexuality for their children if given the option?  Certainly some would not, but I wager that the overwhelming majority would.

I know this language of “prevention” drives many people nuts. Homosexuality is not a deviation, not abnormal, not a disease, not something that needs to be fixed, etc., etc. Yes, yes, I know this rhetoric. But that’s what it is: political rhetoric. It used to be that large majorities of people (including scientists) had never even entertained the notion that homosexuality could have biological origins. Indeed, Franz Kallman, one of the earliest (and widely cited) advocates of genetic origins began his 1952 study in The American Journal of Human Genetics with the claim that “an allusion to a possible relationship between sex and organic inheritance is unlikely to provoke more than a polite smile of skepticism.” Yet his findings comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twins were quite striking, suggesting strongly that genetic origins are important. As most do, Kallman concludes his study with a plea for more research: “The urgency of such work is undeniable as long as this aberrant type of behavior continues to be an inexhaustible source of unhappiness, discontentment, and a distorted sense of human values” (p. 146). This from the guy who is fighting to get people to take genetic origins of sexual orientation seriously!

Since that time, public and scientific opinion has shifted considerably. But it is important to note that the science has never followed a pathway that supports the “innate and immutable” story. That mantra is political, not scientific. As the study cited earlier reminds us, the genetic concordance of homosexuality in identical twins is low, much less than 50% in most studies. The new epigenetic story is at its heart an environmental story, and environments can be changed (genes can, too).

My worry is that the quest to understand will be squashed before it really gets started. It would be a shame if acceptance and tolerance crowd out inquiry.  When politics drives out scientific inquiry, nobody wins.

George Will thinks Obama is right on Syria – but right in the sense of not ultimately being willing to back up the red line talk.

Damon Linker argues that Syria may be Obama’s biggest foreign policy blunder and that the U.S. needs – indeed, is duty bound – to follow a self-interested policy. 

I think Linker’s is better because it provides a much broader perspective on whether states have moral duties to intervene that would be analogous to individual duties to help.  He doesn’t think that the analogy holds.  Here is my favorite part of Linker’s column that is straight out of the American liberal realist playbook stretching back to Washington and J.Q. Adams: 

The primary duty of the nation’s commander in chief — the duty that overrides all others — is to uphold the common good of the United States and protect the rights of individual American citizens. If that sounds selfish, that’s because it is. And rightly so. The president’s duty is to us. He can have no duty to the citizens of another nation. That’s why the greatest acts of statesmanship will always be more self-interested than the highest acts of individual virtue.

In keeping the United States out of the Syrian conflict for the past two years, Obama has showed that he understands this. But in laying down his now-transgressed “red line” on chemical weapons, he showed that he doesn’t understand it well enough. It’s as if the president wants to have it both ways: to be a tough-minded realist who puts American interests first, but also to become an idealistic do-gooder (who, like all presidents, salves his conscience by ordering other people — the nation’s soldiers — to sacrifice themselves) once a certain line has been crossed. And Assad has called Obama’s bluff.

And I particularly like the parenthetical since too often the history books that praise presidents for their statesmanship and character forget that it is other people who have to fight, suffer, and even die to make good on the easy promises and claims of moral duty that leap forth so easily from their mouths and alleged hearts.

1.  During my most recent trip, my crotch was frisked so intensely by a TSA agent that I thought he was going to need a smoke afterwards.  I jest, but this is no laughing matter.  I did not enjoy the experience at all and felt that my rights and dignity were violated.  Given the power differential between me and the TSA, I was helpless to respond in any way that would protect my rights and dignity without incurring very large costs.  I really wanted to punch the guy right in the head and get him the heck away from me.  Fortunately, it was over quickly but it is sad that TSA agents are essentially empowered to do what they will while we suffer what we must (FN: Thucydides).  I really wish that my head instantly thought “voice” rather than “violence” at the moment of the frisk since I should have used what I could to counter his aggression with the only weapon I reasonably had available under the circumstances.  By the time I did start thinknig, I just thought how pathetic it would be to have a job involving regularly bending over and feeling up other people of the same sex as part of some “security theatre” designed to make us “feel” more secure.  So I walked along mourning our relative powerlessness in the face of the modern bureaucratic state.

2.  On another trip, I opted out of the ”naked picture” machine while going through security.  The TSA agent told me to step to the right and wait for a screener.  I complied.  He then instructed a passenger behind me who was walking towards the machine that she needed to take all the money out of her pockets (which was a considerable amount of change, actually).  I then decided quickly to test my theory that people in such circumstances will essentially do what they are told if instructed with considerable confidence by someone seemingly authoritative.  Sheep go where the shepherd tells them.  So in an official sounding voice (and I was well-dressed, if memory serves), I said, “Please place the money in my hand” or something like that.  And as I guessed, she started to do so before I quickly told her I was joking.  And no, that did not result in a cavity search by the screener.

3.  On the way to the airport for a return flight home, I had a long cab ride with a Somali immigrant.  I love to hear about the lives of my immigrant cab drivers for some reason, and they always seem so excited when you actually know something about where they live (perhaps because most Americans are so ignorant about the rest of the world?).  Anyway, we eventually got onto the subject of daily life in the Horn of Africa and khat comes up.  He proceeds to tell me that it isn’t illegal in the US – by which he meant, as our conversation later showed, that one can do it with a fair amount of immunity.  I probed him a bit and suggested gently that it is indeed a controlled substance in the US.  And he actually knew that given this interesting story he told me about another immigrant:  A Somali immigrant he knows owns a little shop in a big American city and was openly selling khat.  Why not, it is perfectly legal back home and his clients were others from the Horn of Africa where it is part of the daily life of many people.  Apparently he had no idea (or so the cab driver said) that he was essentially a drug dealer according to the laws here!  Long story short but eventually the cops get wise.  I had a bit of trouble understanding the rest but it seemed to end with some measure of common sense as he was informed of the law and had to stop.  I’m just not sure if there was any arrest, fine, or jail time involved.

“For the GOP, politics is not a zero-sum game — and I don’t mean this in a good way. It is entirely possible for Obama to lose on a variety of issues and for Republicans to lose as well, in ways that make future victories less likely.”

Michael Gerson (Washington Post) decries those in the GOP who are “convinced that the only duty of an opposition party is to oppose” rather than to offer a compelling alternative.  Greg Sargent agrees (the Plum Line), referring to the GOP’s “post-policy nihilism.” Both are worth reading.

The case being made by Gerson and Sargent may be a bit overstated. However, it seems like the GOP was the party of ideas for much of the last few decades, likely the product of heavy investments in think tanks and the vigorous interplay of competing factions of the conservative coalition. While the Democrats sought to preserve the status quo and maintain a disintegrating New Deal coalition, conservatives and libertarians were often deeply engaged in a serious examination of core public policies and the generation of alternatives. Much of this, in turn, influenced policy decisions. Whether one is speaking of economic management, education, tax policy, regulatory design, or welfare reform, the story of post-1970s domestic policy simply cannot be told without referencing these debates.

To say that the GOP was the party of ideas is not to say that all the ideas were good ideas (are they ever?). To claim that the GOP is no longer the party of ideas is not to suggest that the Democrats have somehow assumed this role.  Indeed, it may be the case that no party can make this claim. If this is the case, we may have competition between two parties of “no” in an era when ideas are critically needed.

The results seem to imply that Americans value freedom and are willing to vote with their feet for it. Of course, some freedoms are not very plausibly related to migration. Tobacco, alcohol, and gambling laws can be evaded through travel or the black market. It seems unlikely that very many people at all will move from New York simply because of the high cigarette taxes. There are cheaper alternatives. And some freedoms with high symbolic importance, like eminent domain reform or legalization of sodomy (prior to 2003), are unlikely to drive anyone to move, simply because so few people are likely to suffer from their denial. Sodomy laws were almost never enforced, and eminent domain for private gain is rather rare even where totally unregulated.

But some other freedoms are plausibly related to migration. People definitely consider tax burden in their choice of a new home. Business regulation can dampen job opportunities, and people tend to move where the jobs are. Medical cannabis users move where their medicine is legal; gun enthusiasts move where their lifestyle is respected; same-sex couples move where they have legal rights; home-schooling parents move where they can educate with less state control.

In this blog post, I explore some other ways of testing whether the relationship between freedom and migration is causal. The first technique is something I call “matched-neighbors analysis.” The independent variables here, including freedom, represent the value of the variable for the given state minus the average value for its neighbors (technically, the weighted-average value, where the weights are the neighboring states’ populations — I’ve also tried using a pure average, with nearly identical results). This procedure is called “spatial differencing.” So the notion here is that states that are freer than their neighbors will be more likely to see net in-migration. Let’s see if that’s true.

First, some specs: regressions include all 50 states (unlike the results with just the Lower 48 included in the F50S study), all independent variables are standardized to mean zero and standard deviation one (so that the coefficient estimates represent the effect of a standard-deviation change in each variable), and the dependent variable, net migration, is measured over 2000-2012 instead of just 2000-2011 as in the original study. Here are the results:

The p values are in parentheses. The different equations reported here use different control variables: WRLURI (an index of land-use regulation), state CPI (cost of living), accommodations GDP, capital per worker, and state real income growth from 2000 to 2007 (latest available date). In all these equations, fiscal and regulatory policy are strongly statistically significant and positive. Personal freedom is positive but never quite statistically significant. Its coefficient is also quite a bit smaller than those on fiscal and regulatory policy. The coefficient on regulatory policy implies that a standard-deviation increase in regulatory policy score in 2001 is associated with a two-percentage-point increase in net migration rate over 2000 to 2012. Note that CPI is strongly correlated with fiscal freedom and land-use regulation, so models including the CPI may actually underestimate the total effect of fiscal and regulatory freedom on migration. (Land-use regulation on its own is not significant, perhaps because it is endogenous: land-use regulation drives away future in-migration, but states where people expect more in-migration are more likely to have strict land-use regulation to begin with.)

The second technique is spatial regression analysis, where “spatial lags” of the dependent and independent variables are included in a maximum-likelihood estimation, a so-called “spatial Durbin model” (Lesage and Pace 2009). The spatial weights matrix is the same as that above (weights are neighboring states’ population shares). The idea here is to test whether neighboring states’ freedom levels are associated with migration to a state. If freedom causes migration, state i’s neighboring states’ freedom levels should be negatively associated with migration to state i. Because of the small N and the doubling of the number of variables, statistical significance might well prove elusive in these models. (There is a “degrees of freedom” problem.) Here are the results:

Once the state CPI is included in the estimations, the results are mostly as predicted. Own state’s fiscal, regulatory, and (maybe) personal freedom is positively associated with net in-migration, while neighboring states’ freedoms are negatively associated with net in-migration. However, the results on personal freedom are again weak. Also, the spatial lag of fiscal freedom is not quite statistically significant at conventional levels. We can be most confident that neighboring states’ regulatory freedom is harmful for own state’s migration. Overall, the results seem to buttress a causal interpretation of fiscal and regulatory freedom’s association with in-migration.

Finally, I look at state-to-state (directed-dyadic) migration. The dependent variable here is a logarithmic transformation of the proportion of state i’s initial population that moved from state i to state j: Y = ln((mig/pop)/(1-(mig/pop))). State-to-state migration numbers come from the IRS and cover the years 2000-2010. It correlates with the Census Bureau monadic data over the same years at r=0.98, when summed to the state level. Consistent with other work using state-to-state data, I exclude Hawaii and Alaska (when I include them, they are extreme outliers).

I expect Y to be a positive function of state j’s freedom levels minus state i’s freedom levels and a negative function of state j’s to state i’s cost of living ratio. In addition, we have to control for the log of distance between the centroids of two states, since states that are far apart will send fewer migrants to each other, and for the sizes (populations) of the source and destination states. The estimates end up being a bit more unstable in these models than in the monadic ones, since state populations correlate with other features of those states, including freedom levels. Still, the basic results pop out pretty clearly. Here they are:

When CPI is excluded, the only freedom variable that is statistically significant is fiscal policy. When it is included, none of the freedom variables is individually statistically significant. However, I have a line in this table showing the p value on a test that the summed coefficients on the freedom variables amount to zero. This null hypothesis is consistently strongly rejected. Indeed, had I included overall freedom in these regressions, it would have been statistically significant. So we can conclude that it is difficult to apportion credit for driving migration to just one dimension of freedom, but we can be pretty confident that all freedom variables, taken together, associate positively with state-to-state migration, even controlling for the cost-of-living channel. Moreover, the sum of these coefficients comes close to the absolute size of the CPI coefficient and is much larger than the coefficient on accommodations GDP.

In summary, all of these results suggest that the relationship between at least economic freedom and interstate migration is causal. If some omitted variable were driving the results we report in the book, then we would not expect neighboring states’ freedoms to be negatively associated with own-state migration–but they (probably) are. The monadic, 50-state results suggest that personal freedom, at least over the entire 2000-2012 period, is likely not as important for migration as economic freedom, but the state-to-state results bring personal freedom back in as a potentially important predictor of migration. Indeed, it is almost statistically significant on its own in the final model above. Part of the reason for the difference might be that amenity-driven migration declined significantly after the 2007 recession in favor of economic migration or even just staying home and riding things out (especially for those with underwater mortgages). Indeed, the state-to-state migration results show little support for “moving to nice weather.” As we accumulate a couple more years of data, it will be possible to run models on 2000-2007 migration and 2007-2013 or 2014 migration separately. It is likely that amenities played a larger role in the earlier period.

1.  More violence in Iraq.  According to CNN, “At least 25 people were killed and 69 others were wounded in five car bombings in Iraq on Monday.”

2.  Friend of Pileus Damon Linker finds a Christian message in Terrence Malick’s ”To the Wonder.”  Apparently everyone else in the movie crit biz missed it – which isn’t surprising considering how illiterate so many American elites are (including Christians!) about religion.  This was a real problem when I was teaching ethics at an elite northeastern SLAC and tried to discuss the Christian pacifist tradition.  The students had no ability to critically engage the arguments in the reading on the many sides of that issue.  It was a very depressing teaching experience.  Whether one is a believer, a deist, an agnostic, an atheist or otherwise, it is impossible to deny that religion is an important force in the world and liberally educated students should know a bit about the major traditions.

3.  On Rand Paul’s alleged 180 on drones. 

4.  O. Henry’s fictional “A Newspaper Story” might be a good medium through which to teach the difference between correlation and causation if the usual ways aren’t working or you want to try something new and different.  A three page short-story (in my edition), it is a fun but quick read.  See here.

5.  And don’t forget, it is playoff beard time.  Is there any doubt that Lanny McDonald had the best one of all-time?  Here’s hoping that Tyler Seguin has an excuse to prove he can even grow one!

It is unworthy of the dignity, as well as equity, of Americans, to become partizans of either of the belligerent nations. We are bound to wish liberty and good government to every people under heaven—Having professed an impartial neutrality, public exultation shewn on one side, and goading the other with scorn, reproach and obloquy, gives the lie to our profession of hostility. We solemnly announce to the world that we shall not inter-meddle. Where then is the propriety of our newspapers, clubs, and some of our public bodies, shewing dispositions the very reverse of our professions?

And I highly recommend dipping your toe into the great primary resources available in the Document Library at the Teaching American History website. 

[After California banned affirmative action, t]he number of blacks and Hispanics enrolled fell, particularly at the flagship schools, Berkeley and UCLA.

What was more surprising was that in the entering class of 2000 a record number of black students graduated on time. Mr Sander and Mr Taylor argue that previously low black graduation rates were a result of the mismatch which occurs when a student granted preferential admission winds up at an institution for which he is not academically suited. He begins at a marked relative disadvantage and falls behind quickly. His grades get lower and lower and in the worst cases he loses confidence and fails to graduate.

Mr Sander and Mr Taylor attribute a host of bad outcomes to mismatch. For example, more black than white high-school seniors aspire to science and engineering careers, but once in college twice as many black students as white abandon those challenging fields.

Note that if you buy this argument against affirmative action, you should also oppose “legacy” preferences in affirmative action (and rational parents would not oppose the move, leaving no apparent constituency on the other side of the question).

Nevertheless, affirmative action in the United States is not as noxious as ethnic and racial preferences in many other parts of the world. In Sri Lanka, ethnic Sinhalese university applicants receive large preferences relative to ethnic Tamils. The reason seems to be nothing other than that Sinhalese are the majority in the country, and they will damned well discriminate against minorities however they please. (Such is the reality of democracy in the developing world.) In Malaysia, Malays and other bumiputera receive wide-ranging preferences in education and business. (For instance, firms must have at least 40% Malay ownership.) Chinese and Indians suffer.

So in most of the world, “affirmative action” just means that politically dominant ethnic groups get to repress the politically subordinate. But in the United States, affirmative action does not mean the translation of the ethnic majority’s political power into other spheres of social life. Blacks in the U.S. remain a small minority of the population and thus suffer from collective political disadvantage (due in part as well to their overwhelming support for one political party, which leads politicians to take their votes for granted). Eliminating all educational and economic advantages for blacks will alienate most of them. Of course, many African-Americans oppose affirmative action — but most still support it and see a role for it. The Supreme Court should be reluctant to impose a judicial solution to a sensitive political problem. A sweeping ruling constitutionally prohibiting virtually all racial preferences in all walks of life is more likely to increase racial tension than diminish it. The justices should apply the law but do so humbly, with the understanding that nine justices cannot foresee all future political contingencies.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides.

They continue:

The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty. Plus, lawmakers — especially those with long careers in public service and smaller bank accounts — are also concerned about the hit to their own wallets.

Nancy Pelosi famously assured her audience “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Now that lawmakers have found out what is in it, it appears they are not too pleased.  Or should we interpret their actions differently?

The debate is by no means over and it may prove of some interest as the budget battles heat up and policymakers turn their attention to the vexing issue of entitlement reform. For a recent installment in the discussion over the growth-debt relationship, see Martin Wolf’s column (“Austerity loses an article of faith”) in the Financial Times.

There’s some evidence that when it comes to politician quality, you get what you pay for; Besley finds that higher pay for U.S. governors predicts governors with more experience in politics, and Ferraz and Finan look at Brazilian data and find a slower revolving door and better educated politicians in regions where politicians get better pay. But alas the egalitarian ethos in democracies makes it difficult to raise the pay of politicians.

But there’s a countervailing effect of high salaries for politicians: they increase careerism. With high salaries for politicians, you’re more likely to get candidates who give the voters what they want so that they can get (re-)elected. And one of the themes of Jones’s post is that the voters are ignorant and excessively egalitarian: we shouldn’t always give them what they want. We need politicians who are intelligent, informed, and public-spirited. High salaries get us more of the first two and less of the last.

What else does the evidence suggest? In the American states, governments that pay legislators more and generally have more professionalized legislatures have higher government spending. Neil Malhotra has found good evidence that the causal arrow goes from spending to professionalism rather than the other way around. However, his study, for all its sophistication, has some evidentiary holes, and I believe the last word has not been spoken. From my own observations of the highly deprofessionalized, low-paying ($100 a year) New Hampshire legislature, I would say that it attracts candidates who are ideologically motivated but not careerist. They deviate significantly from the views of the median voter, for good or ill.

Free-market environmentalism emphasizes markets as a solution to environmental problems. Proponents argue that free markets can be more successful than government—and have been more successful historically—in solving many environmental problems.

A book length treatment of FME can be found in Terry Anderson and Donald Leal’s classic Free Market Environmentalism.  Of course, everything I’ve ever read by Anderson has been thought-provoking, so check out his Amazon page (here) or the many resources at the website for Anderson’s wonderful (as I’ve seen first hand on several occasions) Property and Environment Research Center.  KPC recommends reading this Anderson piece on property rights for Earth Day.

However, if you think property rights (and the markets that develop when property rights are well-defined and protected) are anti-environment, you might also want to think about what happens when land, water, and other natural resources are held in common.  One place to start is with Garrett Harding’s classic “The Tragedy of the Commons.”  There is certainly a lot in this piece to disagree with, but the following section is seminal – and useful for debunking a lot of the garbage you’ll usually hear on Earth Day:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of −1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another… But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Hmmmm…..what might be the answer to this problem?

“It’s perfect, too, that this message [the libertarian/Ayn Rand strand in their earlier music, especially Trees] is married to music so over-the-top in technical skill, as if they’re out to prove how superior and worthy of distinction they are.”

Very well said.  For more on prog rock and Rush in particular, see the erudite dean of prog rock commentary, Brad Birzer (here is a recent example).

Here is the video for “Trees” (Caveat: not even close to a top 10 Rush song in my book though I certainly appreciate the lyrics and Lee is as great as usual on the bass):

And here are the lyrics:

“The Trees”

As for public opinion, we have heard endlessly that close to 90 percent of the nation supported expanded background checks. The puzzle: how can an elective body thwart the will of 90 percent of the population? The explanation is not that hard to find. Gun control was cited as the priority for only 4 percent (according to the most recent Gallup poll).  There is every reason to believe that the issue was far more salient for opponents of gun control.  The opposition was quite successful in making the argument that background checks would lead to registration and, ultimately, to confiscation of guns. The fact that this was impossible under the proposed legislation made no difference (if senators fail to read the bills before a vote, there is little chance that citizens do.) Regardless of the features of the legislation in question, a sizable minority (44 percent) thought it likely that there would be gun confiscation in the next decade. (Noam Scheider has an interesting piece today in The New Republic that attributes the defeat of gun control primarily to the contours of public opinion).

There seems to be a bit of legislative incompetence at work here as well. The Senate bill discarded a ban on assault weapons and large capacity magazines, focusing instead on background checks. Arguably, a stronger bill would have provided room for bargaining (note to potential homebuyers: your first bid should never be the price you hope to settle on at the end of negotiations).  But beyond this mistake, one has to wonder what to make of the majority’s incapacity to count heads and schedule votes accordingly.

Finally, we turn to the president. One of the long-standing critiques of the Obama administration has been the President’s style: broad proclamations followed by withdrawal (sometimes Vice President Biden is sent in to save the day).  The President adopted a somewhat different strategy this time: he went public, hoping that he could sway legislators by making a series of public appearances and denigrating the opposition. As Tim Stanley noted in the Guardian, the failure of the president’s approach was a product of his past behavior and his depleted political capital:

Nobody listens to what he says anymore, nobody is interested in winning his approval and nobody much cares if he thinks they have “let the country down”. This is typical for a second-term president who has lost all their leverage because they’re no longer running for office and everybody is patiently waiting for the day when he quits the White House. But Obama’s difficult personality has doubled the size of the challenge. Gloating in victory, adolescent in defeat – the Prez doesn’t make it easy to work with him. Why should conservative senators give him a legislative victory after he has spent four years painting them as knuckle-dragging rednecks who hate women and the poor?

Stanley concludes that the failure of gun control was “a damning indictment of Obama’s presidency – a flash of style, lots of soaring rhetoric and, when the votes are actually counted, little show for any of it.” His prediction: we are facing four years of a lame duck presidency.

It may be a little early to arrive at this conclusion. The next legislative priority for the Obama administration is immigration reform and there is a strong argument that the GOP needs to embrace reform if it wants to expand its base. Yet, one can only imagine that today’s news regarding the Boston Marathon bombers—they were legal permanent residents of Chechen origin—will prove quite useful for those who want to block reform by claiming that the first priority should be to fix the current system. If immigration reform fails, Congress will turn attention to the 2014 midterms and the narrow window for moving the agenda will have effectively closed.

In selecting an appropriate visual symbol of the Senate in its founding period, one might consider an anchor, a fence, or a saucer. Writing to Thomas Jefferson, who had been out of the country during the Constitutional Convention, James Madison explained that the Constitution’s framers considered the Senate to be the great “anchor” of the government. To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to “cool” House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea.

Recently, though, the Senate has been the body acting on the fickle political winds and intemperate passion (see John McCain’s behavior, for examples).  Fortunately, the House has taken on the role of being a “necessary fence” against rash actions (like a gun bill that if in place before Newtown would have done absolutely nothing to stop that tragedy) through its use of “regular order.”  This braking-device – and Republican use of it in the House – is explained in this nice piece by Robert Costa in National Review.  There, Costa notes that ”‘Regular order’ allows House Republicans to dictate the pace of legislation and makes ‘grand bargains’ of any sort harder to pass.”  Of course, there have been some exceptions (such as Sandy Relief) even of late to regular order that prove why faster action isn’t necessarily going to produce better policy.  But it is a way to keep Boehner from selling out in hopes of some grand bargain or fleeting good press for the party.  So three cheers for slowing down the legislative process to cool the passion of the demos, the Senate, and the President.  But it certainly seems like the legislature is upside down.

God did not bestow all products upon all parts of the earth, but distributed His gifts over different regions, to the end that men might cultivate a social relationship because one would have need of the help of another, and so He called commerce into being, that all men might be able to have common enjoyment of the fruits of the earth, no matter where produced.

Quoted in Pietro Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy.

1.  Our thoughts are with anyone injured in the bombing.

2.  Initial reports are very likely to be wrong; this is inevitable, and does not mean that a conspiracy is afoot.

I’d add a few others about terrorism:

1.  The President should not be criticized for not calling, initially, the Boston attack a “terrorist” bombing.  As the Washington Post reports, he “was careful not to use the words ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’ as he spoke at the White House Monday after the deadly bombings, but an administration official said the bombings were being treated as an act of terrorism.” 

Although forests have been cleared debating the definition of terrorism, a good definition I use is that terrorism is the intentional targeting  of (or threat to target) innocent non-combatant civilians with physical violence for political ends by non-state actors.   Given this definition and a lack of anyone apparently claiming public responsibility at the time, the President was likely not sure that this was at attack with political ends as opposed to criminal behavior.  Therefore, circumspection and caution was warranted in his speech even as the administration worked to figure out what happened and who was responsible.   

2.  Given my working definition above, I would argue that the old saying that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is ridiculous.  It is never morally acceptable in my view to intentionally target innocent non-combatant civilians with physical violence for political ends.  And anyone interested in freedom properly deplores such attacks and anyone engaging in such actions is not a true freedom fighter.  Of course, many governments around the world find it advantageous to call insurgents fighting against them terrorists but that doesn’t hold water (the Patriots at Lexington and Concord, for example, were not terrorists by my definition).  This case was a pretty pure case of targeting innocents.  So if there was a political agenda of any sort behind these attacks, we should properly label the perpetrators terrorists and the appropriate level of government should punish them to the fullest extent of the law (and, of course, if there was not a political agenda behind the attacks, the government should punish the criminals behind it).

3.  If the attack was committed by terrorists, we need to remember that law enforcement and public resilience are two of the best means for winning the “global war on terrorism” (yes, I know, we don’t call it that anymore).

Jason boiled down what I was saying to a simple logical argument for the existence of God.  Though I don’t mind such attempts, it was not my purpose.  My key point was not about the existence or role of God (which would require some sort of definition for God, for starters).  My essay was on the implications of denying the metaphysical.

Science is agnostic, and rightly so.  Science is about drawing conclusions from observable phenomena.  For instance, human beings have the capability to discuss moral values and can behave in ways consistent with moral values in observable and describable ways.  A large body of neuroscience literature can tie these moral faculties, emotions, and reasoning back to basic brain chemistry.  And evolutionary theory can describe the development of human morality through the powerful (yet often hard to falsify) theory of natural selection.  Moral notions that improve reproductive fitness are more likely to be selected and become part of the human genome.  Cultural evolution of moral notions happens, too, as those values which promote the survival of human societies are carried forth not only in our genes but in our cultural patterns.

But those observable patterns do nothing to answer the question of why one should care about them.  And science has nothing to say about whether the existence of humanity, the world we occupy or even the universe is something we should care about.  Indeed, why should the moral intuitions and reasoning of any species be of a concern unless there is a reason to care about that species in the first place.  In the scientific view, the initial big bang created a universe of energy and matter.  But there was no purpose for this, no cause, no choice, no reason, no intent.  There was just the physical.

So, at every point in the natural history of our species we have consisted only of chemistry.  We cannot be more because there is nothing more.   The only difference between our world and the primordial soup from which crawled the first life forms is that the chemistry on the earth now (including the creatures known as human beings) is different than it was before.  Not better or worse, just different.  Creatures on the earth now are more capable of sustaining themselves against various environmental forces, but they consist, still, only of chemistry.  Since all that existed at the beginning was chemistry, we can’t borrow from the metaphysical world and come up reasons for why some chemical compounds (humans) matter more than other chemical compounds (rocks).  The period table contains all sorts of information about the universe.  It contains no information about morality.

A simple process of water crossing cell membranes is, according to this hyper-naturalistic view, not fundamentally different than a complex mass of chemicals known as a human being offering assistance to another human being.  Both are the result of chemical process that are entirely the function of a long string of pointless, random events occurring in a pointless, random universe.  Chemicals do not make choices.  They just obey the immutable laws of the universe.  Do not the chemical interactions in our brain that precede the chemically-based signals from our brains to the different body parts (signals such as: do this, say that, pick that up) obey the exact same fundamental laws that cause osmosis to occur?  Do chemicals stop and consider their actions?  Well, maybe if you get the right combination of chemicals together in sufficient numbers in the right quantities and combinations, they will pause for a moment of reflection?

All the new atheists and their naturalistic brethren really have to tell me is a story of how the chaotic universe produced creatures that are capable of intuitions (both conscious and subconscious, perhaps) and reasoning, which they like to call morality.  But that morality exists, according to them, only because it has selective value that produced and preserves our species.  They have nothing to tell me about why the species or anything about it—including its ability to reason—has any value in the first place.

They can tell me, perhaps, how living a moral life might bring me or others more pleasure or satisfaction (all of which can be reduced, of course, to chemical reactions in the brain), or they can tell me how certain ways of living are consistent with respecting the dignity and autonomy of others.  But they can tell me nothing about why I should care about any of it.

It is from that unobserved, unexplained wellspring of value that true morality comes.  It is what gives us answers, however incomplete, to why one would care about humanity and the moral questions humans ask. One thing is sure. Those answers don’t come from the periodic table.

One of the paradoxes of the Angolan conflict was that Cuban forces were given the task of defending American-owned oil installations from attacks by American-backed rebels. 

My position on the Reagan Doctrine and American intervention in places like Angola has changed a lot over time.  As a much younger man, I bought into the administration’s (and Charles Krauthammer’s) argument and was led to believe that people like Jonas Savimbi could help increase human freedom in the Third World while aiding U.S. interests in the Cold War struggle with the Soviets.  Oh, how time, experience, study, and data have changed my mind!  Not only were peripheral conflicts like Angola unnecessary for beating the Soviets and securing US interests but many US proxies were ultimately found to be hostile to American values as well.  And then we have the sheer human cost and blowback from US policies. 

Here are some further points from Meredith about the war in Angola that may be useful when reflecting on the Reagan Doctrine, Jonas Savimbi, and other aspects of what today seems like an ancient historical contest:

The overall cost of the war was huge.  During the 1980′s more than 350,000 died and a million more – deslocados – were uprooted from their homes (601).  [GC - And this doesn't count the costs of the civil war that continued after the end of the Cold War)]

As for Unita, it was Savimbi’s personal fiefdom, a vehicle for his relentless drive for power.  For all the praise heaped on him by President Reagan and other Western admirers, Savimbi was a ruthless dictator with a messianic sense of destiny, insistent on total control and intolerant of dissent and criticism from anyone in the movement (603). 

Yet, like the MPLA, Savimbi relied heavily on an extensive security apparatus to maintain his grip, using fear as a method of control.  He systematically purged Unita of rivals and critic, ordering death sentences not only for party dissidents but for members of their family as well.  Human rights groups reported incidents of how women and children, accused of witchcraft, had been publicly burned to death, on a bonfire (604).