Ear Rational Thoughts

Boudreax on Pragmatism

Don Boudreax responds to a reader's call for pragmatism regarding the certain dangers of immigration:

You insist: “...Pragmatism tells that letting more immigrants in [will] bankrupt American tax payers who pay for welfare. It’s that simple...."

... How would you react if Milton Friedman had said that, “while in an ideal world we should allow everyone the freedom to live as long as they like, with Social Security and Medicare in place, we simply cannot do that. The reality of Social Security and Medicare make it impractical for us to allow Americans unrestricted freedom to age into – to ‘immigrate into’ – age-groups whose members are eligible for Social Security and Medicare benefits. Strict numerical controls must be put on the number of Americans allowed to live past 65.”

Does “pragmatism” counsel that we kill large numbers of Americans on their 65th birthdays – or at least, perhaps, deport these aging and increasingly infirm Americans to some remote part of Mongolia – so that they’ll not be a drag on American taxpayers? (Remember, all Social Security and Medicare disbursements are paid out of current government revenues.)

Your pragmatism comes close to justifying such a policy of controlled aging – that is, controlled ‘immigration’ of younger people into older age groups.

I'm sure the point is lost on the original emailer, but it's a valid one.

Overestimating pessimism

Bryan Caplan responds to Tyler Cowen's post on the sure-to-arrive food shortage with some generally good advice:

The fact that we've gotten as far as we have shows that true disaster must be extremely rare. Unless fears almost always failed to materialize, we'd already be back in the Stone Age, or plain extinct. It's overwhelmingly unlikely that we've gotten lucky a million times in a row.

I usually don't like the notion of relying on the past to predict the future. But in this case, I think Caplan may be expressing a systematic human bias to see things as likely to be very bad. Which it seems they rarely are.

The regulation ratchet

Robin Hanson:

Look, in any area where we let humans do things, every once in a while there will be a big screwup; that is the sort of creatures humans are. And if you won’t decrease regulation without a screwup but will increase it with a screwup, then you have a regulation ratchet: it only moves one way. So if you don’t think a long period without a big disaster calls for weaker regulations, but you do think a particular big disaster calls for stronger regulation, well then you ... apparently want the maximum possible regulation, which is probably to just basically outlaw that activity. And if that doesn’t seem like the right level of regulation to you, well then maybe you should reconsider your ratchety regulation intuitions.

Bryan Caplan has a good quote on this topic:

George Stigler famously observed, "If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport." I heard that he wasn't amused by his secretary's corollary, "If you never make a typo, you're typing too slow."

I'll have to send that one to my boss.

Arnold Kling's Good News

This is hysterical:

From an email:

Dear Grantseeker,

One of the best kept secrets in Washington is that the new Health Reform Act is channeling millions of dollars in funding to other areas of vital interest to other nonprofits, tribes and local government!. This includes, but is not limited to, funding for social services, senior programs, services for low-income families, funding for disabilities, and much more!

This is good news...

Good for people getting money from the the government, bad for those sending money there. Thankfully the President pointed out "the fact that in our democracy, government is us. We, the people". Yay us.

The stupidest argument against libertarianism *ever*

It comes from Paul Krugman courtesy of Alex Tabarrok:

... in this old interview, Milton Friedman says that there’s no need for product safety regulation, because corporations know that if they do harm they’ll be sued.

... Meanwhile, in the real world:

In the wake of last month’s catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is “not where we need to be right now” she said.

Ok, so from this he concludes:

And don’t say that we just need better politicians. If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.

And so, Paul, your argument is that instead we need more regulation? Conceived of by whom, exactly? Apparently politicians are incorruptible when writing regulations, but are less so when managing the tort system? It's an odd sort of hypocrisy.

The definition of freedom

Courtesy of Macrumors, we get details of an exchange between a blogger and Steve Jobs:

[Blogger:] If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with "revolution?" Revolutions are about freedom.

To which Jobs replies:

Gosh, why are you so bitter over a technical issue such as this? Its not about freedom, its about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users. Users, developers and publishers can do whatever they like - they don't have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if they don't want to. This seems like its your issue, not theirs.

... By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

I used to get very frustrated reading Slashdot for the same reason Jobs gets annoyed here. Here was a group of people who seemed to only care about "freedom". As a long-time Linux user and libertarian, it seems like a group of people I could enjoy. But their idea of freedom - and it's shared by the improperly named Free Software Foundation (FSF) - is in forcing everyone else to do what they want. You make software? You must give me the source code. You make music? You must give it to me without DRM.

Listen, if you build something, you can do what you want with it. But when I build something, it's not "freedom" if you're going to tell me what to do. I suspect that much of what they claim is about "free" as in speech is mostly about "free" as in beer. As in, "I don't build anything so I have no money, but I still want all the neat stuff that you build, therefore you must make it "free"."

Indulgences

Courtesy of Don Boudreaux quotes a friend responding to a piece in the WSJ:

Joe Queenan’s rant on the dismal prospects of the class of 2010 makes ridiculous claim that “Even the Pilgrim toddlers in 1620 had better prospects” than today’s graduates.

He goes on to point out all the ways this is - obviously - ridiculous. But this was more interesting:

Sure, today’s job climate is tough. And bright young drama and music major Ivy League graduates like Mr. Queenan’s friend may wish they’d majored in accounting or engineering instead indulging their passion for the arts at $40,000 a year.

This seems to be a fundamental issue with young people today (and really, ever). The notion that if you get a college degree in anything, people will automatically pay you. But in reality, the reason college graduates get paid more is because they are capable of making more of what other people want. Getting a degree is something you want is not the same.

The virus of totalitarianism

Don Boudreaux continues his crusade against evil:

The virus of totalitarianism is seldom detected when it first infects ‘progressive’ intellectuals. ... Think of the fawning admiration bestowed for many years by the likes of Ida Tarbell, Lowell Thomas, and Sigmund Freud upon Mussolini. Or of Lincoln Steffens’s and Dorothy Parker’s enthusiasm for Stalinism. Or of Joe Kennedy’s present-day coziness with Senor Gen. El Presidente-for-Life Hugo Chavez. Well-meaning intellectuals all, and nary a word of dissent from their contemporary comrades-in-ink-and-paper-and-podium.

Your pages today offer yet another alarming example of how easily ‘progressive’ intellectuals regress into championing tyranny. Insisting that Bill McKibben’s proposals for saving the planet are too modest (!), Paul Greenberg – reviewing McKibben’s lastest use of trees to spread the Green gospel – endorses, as allegedly being the only practical means of saving the earth, “some overarching authority, a kind of ecologically minded Lenin”.

Read Greenberg’s words carefully. Read them again. Ponder them.

No degree of global warming poses to humanity anywhere near the danger that is posed by intellectuals who are fascinated with the prospect of rule by strong men.

I want a bumper-sticker based on that last sentence.

Jupiter's Southern Equatorial Belt has disappeared

Jupiter's Southern Equatorial Belt has disappeared!

Jupiter with only one belt is almost like seeing Saturn when its rings are edge-on and invisible for a time -- it just doesn't look right

Crazy giant planets with their strange never-ending storms.

Reckless fattening or greedy starvation?

Don Boudreaux responds to Paul Krugman, who claims that anti-tax conservatives have deprived the US of the revenue it needs to avoid becoming the next Greece:

[This argument] assumes that the expenditure side of Uncle Sam’s budget accurately reflects the appropriate will of The People while the revenue side reflects the evil machinations of forces bent on undermining The People’s will and best interests. Prof. Krugman can’t have it both ways. If he insists that Congress and the President are inspired public servants when they fashion the spending side of the budget, he cannot legitimately insist that these same officials are dupes or miscreants when they fashion the revenue side.

Put differently, it’s at least as justified to accuse left-liberals of recklessly fattening the beast with excessive spending as it is to accuse conservatives of greedily starving the beast with brakes on tax hikes. Indeed, given human beings’ natural irresponsibility when spending other people’s money, the former accusation is far more plausible than the latter.