The Loss of Collective Imagination

One of the things that bothers me about the ever growing governments of the world is that people are losing the ability to even imagine alternatives to the State, to imagine non-governmental solutions to problems, to imagine how to get by without the State.  The economic historian Robert Higgs describes the situation as follows:

Familiarity may indeed, as the saying goes, breed contempt, but it also breeds a sort of somnolence. People who have never known anything other than a certain state of affairs ... have a tendency not to notice it at all, to relate it, so to speak, as if they were sleepwalking through it. Such is the situation of modern people in relation to the state. They have always known it, and they take it completely for granted, regarding it as one might regard the weather: whether it brings rain or sunshine, lightning bolts or soothing spring breezes, it is always there, an aspect of nature itself [...]

where that "somnolence" is

... the ideological “hypnosis” (as Leo Tolstoy characterized it) that keeps most people from being able to imagine life without the state ...

I was considering this inability "to imagine life without the state" recently because of a discussion on an email list of friends from MIT that I'm part of.  It started with the following excerpt:

Professor Mazzucato documents the leading role of the government in, for example, “all the technologies which make the iPhone smart,” including the Internet, wireless systems, global positioning, voice activation and touch-screen displays. That is not to detract from Apple’s role, but to put it into context. Without government, the technological revolution that has allowed iProducts to exist would not have happened. [emphasis added]

The implication, though not the explicit wording, is that there can be no major technology innovation without government. Those systems were all (at least partially) developed for defense applications, so perhaps they would have been developed on a different timeline, but it seems impossible to me, given the commercial value of communication that comparable technologies would never have happened without government.

Even more disconcerting to me, was the enthusiastic agreement of my MIT friends with Professor Mazzucato.  Here are a couple of the responses from the MIT crowd:

I can’t think of anything good (in the sense of general welfare) that could have happened if it weren’t for government interference.

 Nothing good without government. He can't imagine even one thing. Ever.

Without the Internet as we know it we might all be dialing into AOL.

Here's my (snarky) response to this last one:

Because nobody would've invented anything else?  UUCP couldn't've evolved into a P2P network?  Cable companies wouldn't've wanted to play and invented cable modem broadband?  Phone companies wouldn't've bothered to invent something like DSL?  The concepts of URLs and HTML are really so complicated that without the government, nobody could've come up with something else to fill the void? 

All that demand there, all that money there, and nobody would've risen to the occasion to fill it, and we'd still be stuck with just dialing into AOL.

That would indeed've been quite a market failure.

But more than a market failure, it would be an unbelievable failure of imagination.  And I find it an astounding failure of imagination to not be able imagine alternate paths that technology and history could take.  We are definitely being transformed from clever foxes to the stupid herd of sheep, in part, because of the ever growing State that is our shepherd.  Transformed from thinking individuals to Higgs' entranced zombies.

A third comment worried me yet more:

Local governments would never reach that height [of sequencing the human genome]. Neither would any corporation ...

And here's (part of) my response to that one:

The word "height" triggers, in my mind, the example of the Great Pyramid of Giza.  Clearly, it couldn't've been built without the full focus of the government at that time.  It was probably considered to be extremely important by the rulers of the time.  It was the tallest man-made structure in the world for nearly 4 millennia and the world remains amazed by this marvel to this day. 

Nobody knows for sure how it was built, but there were clearly a LOT of workers (tens of thousands), who may or may not have been slaves (and "slave" may have had a bit of a fuzzy definition back then).  That means a HUGE proportion of the resources of the society were dedicated to building the marvel.

It seems to me to be a clear example of a very successful government project, and one that couldn't possibly have been done any other way. 

And yet...

Is that really the goal and destiny of humanity?  To reach new and ever higher heights?  

To collectively band together to pour ever more resources into increasingly grand and amazing projects?  For those of us, who in the natural order of such a collective are towards the bottom of the metaphorical pyramid, to be happy enough with our lot and support such things?

Perhaps that really is or ought to be the direction of humanity - for the elite to deploy resources as they see fit and for the rest of us to go along and be proud of whatever accomplishments are achieved.

And yet...

That approach is at least somewhat in conflict with Liberty.  There can, of course, be a balance struck between Liberty and collective achievement, but more of one does pretty much mean less of the other.

I am a little bit inspired by the Great Pyramid.  I am a little bit inspired by the horrible awe of the results of the Manhattan Project.  I am a little bit inspired by going to the moon.  I am a little bit inspired by the sequencing of the human genome.  And so forth.

But, personally, I'm very much inspired by the concept of Liberty and would happily forego many of those government successes for more Liberty.

I hope that one day we can find a balance between Liberty and collective achievement that makes us all happy and fulfilled enough and enables us to all live in harmony.

And beyond Liberty, I hope we can find the balance between collective achievement and imagination since without imagination we are not truly human, in my opinion.

Conceptually Challenged

From the New York Times, The Problem with Free Health Care.

A woman over 40 can have a free screening mammogram. But if she notices a breast lump and goes to her doctor to have it evaluated, she’ll pay for a diagnostic mammogram.

There are ten other instances in the op-ed, every one of them demonstrating, just like Phil Robertson and "racist", the ongoing Progressive #WarOnWords.

Quote About PC

Richard Fernandez writing about the Sterling brouhaha and other topics:

Political correctness is not interested in what you actually are. It is only interested in how you look. ...  There is not — nor was there ever — any intention for PC to purge the human heart of racial hatred or personal vileness, though that is its ostensible purpose. Codes governing hate speech are not meant to suppress hate. They are meant to suppress speech.

I would love for Sterling to sue Silver and the NBA and in discovery dredge up all the racist, sexist, and generally nasty remarks by all of the owners, staff, and players of the NBA.

And then let he who is without sin cast the first stone.  If that were the case, call me crazy, but I don't think many stones would be cast.

Reality Bites

Toyota Motor has announced it will move 2,000 employees from Southern California to Texas.

The move is a victory for Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and his campaign to woo businesses from California. Toyota considered several sites in the United States before deciding on the Dallas area, where taxes, real estate and other costs are considerably lower than California’s.

Federalism is the strongest bulwark against socialism.

Creation Myth

Why Are We Here?

"Daddy, why are we here?" my daughter asked me one evening when she was four years old.

"Well, because it's time for bed and we always tuck in and read a bedtime story here at this time," I said, rather hoping she wasn't trying to begin an existential philosophy discussion.

"No daddy, I mean what made us?"

"No one knows for sure, sweety.  Many people believe that there's a thing called God that created everything."  Even though I'm not religious, I decided to take the easy way out.

"Is that what you think too?" she asked.

"No, I don't," I said, not wanting to be dishonest, but definitely dismayed that she just didn't ask more about the deity concept for which there are a lot of standard and easy answers.

"Why do you think we're here?"

"Well, I think it's like if you watch the static on the TV, eventually you'll see your favorite movie."

"What's static?"

Damn, I had forgotten that TVs don't have static anymore. "Umm, well, huh, let me think about how to answer your question a little better and I'll get back to you."

"Okay, daddy."

As a result of this interaction, I decided to formalize my own personal Creation Myth, though I never shared it with either of my daughters.  But, lucky you, I'll share it with you instead!

I Love Lucy

To me, any good Creation Myth has to, at minimum, have both humor and chocolate as part of the narrative, without which, the universe would be a cold and empty place and not worth even thinking about.  And so we'll start with my favorite 3 minute segment of the I Love Lucy show where Lucy and Ethel work on a chocolate factory line.

The purpose of this 3 minute segment is to ask how long would one have to watch random static on an old-style TV before you saw this sequence?  Or, in more modern terms, a close-enough question is on a 1920 by 1024 monitor with 24 bit color at 30 frames per second connected to a random number generator, how many 3 minute segments would you have to watch to have 99% chance of seeing Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory?  You'll see why these questions are important a little later.

So I started calculating away but the number of random episodes was so large that my calculator started smoking and then died.  I then downloaded a high-precision package to my computer and it still couldn't do it.  That shows how infrequently people do these sorts of calculations.  Fortunately, I found a wonderful shortcut (especially footnote 6) and was able to help me calculate the answer to be approximately 10^{700,000,000,000} episodes.

That seems like a really big number, and it is in terms of human experience.  It's a 1 with 700,000,000,000 zeros after it.  If you started writing the number when you were born and were able to write several hundred zeros per second, you might finish writing it by the time you died.

Essentially Zero Relative to Infinity

But even numbers like 10^{700,000,000,000}, huge as they are, are essentially zero relative to infinity. Or its close cousin eternity (which is just infinity along the time axis).  That is to say, no matter what number we can come up with, no matter what number we can calculate (not using infinity or dividing by zero or a couple of other cheats), no matter what number we can represent on paper, that number will always be much, much closer to zero than to infinity.

An informal proof: come up with any humongous number, call it X.  Create a new number, Y, by rounding X up to the nearest integer and then applying the factorial operator to it (i.e. Y =⌈X⌉!).  Now, while X is a humongous number, it's a teeny, tiny, puny little fraction of Y.  In other words, it's much, much, much closer to zero than to Y, or essentially zero compared to Y.  And Y is essentially zero relative to infinity.  How do we know?  It's just some other humongous number, like X above, so we can apply the same logic recursively to it.

Infinity and eternity take things that are essentially impossible and turn them into something that will almost surely happen.  The probability that you could sit down in front of the TV with the random number generator connected to it and see the I Love Lucy segment is pretty much zero.  But an immortal being would almost surely see the I Love Lucy segment on the random TV and almost surely see it many times if he was sufficiently patient.

In The Beginning

In my Creation Myth narrative, there is no beginning or end.  Things like, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth...," and "...at some moment all matter in the universe was contained in a single point, which is considered the beginning of the universe," just don't work for me.  They're fine creation myths, of course, and many people believe in the Judeo-Christian Genesis creation myth or the Big Bang Theory creation myth constructed by the priests of science, but they ring very, very hollow for me, and I definitely don't "believe in" them.

My Creation Myth narrative has all dimensions being infinite in both the plus and minus direction.  It also has an infinite number of non-orthogonal, non-linear dimensions, and no time dimension, but I'm neither going to get into that, nor defend that, in this post.  For this post, assume the 3 more-or-less orthogonal, somewhat close to linear physical dimensions, and the time dimension which we all experience.  And assume they're all infinite in both the plus and minus directions.

Why Would There Be Nothing?

Now we need to get back to a variant of my daughter's original question.  Why is there something?  As opposed to nothing?  My answer below is admittedly a non-answer, but hey, I also admit this is a Myth, not some sort of factual compendium for explaining existence.

The concept of "nothing" has no meaning without the concept of "something."  You can't have one without the other.  It's a yin and yang sort of thing.

And that leads to my belief that there's actual neither really "something" or "nothing" but rather just noise - that which is fluctuating randomly between something and nothing. In all the systems I deal with, noise is the natural state of things.  Neither a perfect signal, nor perfect quiet, as both are too ordered to be a natural state.  Just the static that you saw on old TVs or the static you heard on old radios.

Overall, not quite "something" and not quite "nothing."  Just noise, just randomness.

Noise of the Universe

In the universe, in my Creation Myth, the noise is ripples around the zero energy level.  They're tiny ripples, but every once in a while, they randomly have enough oomph to create matter/anti-matter virtual particle pairs, which, almost all of the time, recombine and dissipate back into the noise.

Since this is a Myth, I'm trying to avoid using scientific concepts whenever possible.  However, in this case, what I'm describing is something like the concept of vacuum energy and virtual particles.  Not exactly like that, but the gist is close enough if you need something more to stimulate your imagination.  And since this post is nothing but imagination, I figure there's no reason not to tap into other people's feverish imaginations as well.

So every once in a while, the noise has enough oomph to create very short lived particles, even less often it has enough oomph to create them and push them apart such that they don't immediately recombine, at least under certain conditions.  How often does this happen in any localized spot in space?  I have no idea, but it doesn't matter a bit, because no matter how long between particle creation events, the time is essentially zero relative to infinity.

How long would it take for 10⁸⁰ such particles and anti-particles to form in reasonably close proximity with the particles all going one way and the anti-particles going another (I picked 10⁸⁰ particles since that's approximately the number of particles thought to be in the universe that are observable by us)?  A really, really, really, long time, but that time is still essentially zero relative to infinity.  So it would almost surely happen.  Again and again and again.

And that's the gist of my Creation Myth.  Random energy fluctuations and infinity conspire to create possibility.  Watch the TV with the random number generator connected and eventually there will be something interesting to see.  Not in human time frames or even galactic time frames.  But relative to infinity, lots and lots of interesting stuff to see.

I call random creations of large numbers of particles (10⁸⁰ for example) relatively close to each other Large Cosmological Events (LCEs). There have been an infinite number of LCEs like the one in which we exist, just separated very, very far apart in space and time.  They are usually separated by such large distances and time that we can't observe any evidence of other LCEs, though it may be that some of the particles and bits of energy in our portion of the observable universe are particles that originated in a different LCE a really long, long time ago.

Generally, all of the energy and matter dwindle away back to the background noise level way before they could be detected within other LCEs.  Our LCE will also dwindle away to nothing and then in this part of the universe, nothing of interest will happen again for a very long, long time.

Noise And The Big Bang

As I mentioned above, I don't find the Big Bang Theory very convincing.  But my Creation Myth doesn't exclude it as a possibility.  If you need some Bang in your Myth, either the particles swirl down into a point singularity and from there the Big Bang Theory can take over or there could have been a huge random energy spike in the vacuum right at the point of the Big Bang, essentially creating all of the particles at once at more-or-less the same point.

Noise and Deities

My Creation Myth doesn't preclude deities either, as long as deity is defined as extremely advanced conscious entity that has figured out how to utilize the vacuum energy of space to sustain itself for eons.  The deity would have originated as an intelligent life form on some planet or something somewhere in a Large Cosmological Event and then transformed itself to survive the eventual dissipation of the matter and energy of the local universe that allowed it to form and evolve.

While the deities would eventually dwindle to nothing and die due to being corrupted by the noise of the vacuum, it's possible that they might survive long enough occasionally to encounter one or more LCEs and the resulting habitable planets at some point.

Noise and Life

I've seen statements like "we now know the odds against the spontaneous generation of life are astronomical."  I don't personally subscribe to that analysis, but even if life is extremely unlikely in any one Large Cosmological Event, given an infinite number of them, life will almost surely happen in some of them.

In addition, the possible deities mentioned above might seed life as they drift through space and encounter LCEs, making life occur much more frequently than it would via random chance.

Thus, some life may be a mix of Creation and Evolution.

Party Coachella Music and Arts Festival 2014

Someone recently pointed out that the subtitle of this blog indicated that there would be posts on partying and since there hasn't been a partying post in many, many years, due to popular reader demand, I'll do one now.

My wife and I and our 2 kids attended Coachella, a venue that offers 150+ bands spread over three days across 6 stages with 80,000 attendees.  I personally saw around 30 bands which is easily more than I've seen in the entire rest of my life.  I had earplugs, but still have some residual hearing loss, hopefully not permanent.

At 55, I was definitely in the oldest 1% of the age distribution, and it was more than a day before I saw anybody else that I was fairly sure was older.  My youngest daughter, at 14, was easily in the youngest 1% of the age distribution.  I'm guessing the median age was around 21 and the average age around 24.

So what the heck were oldsters like my wife and I doing at Coachella?  Well, our 17-year-old daughter (almost 18) really wanted to go with a bunch of friends, and we decided to let her, but we wanted to be close by just in case something bad happened.  And hey, since we were going to be close by, why not attend the festival?  And since my wife and I were going, we kinda had to bring the younger daughter as well (who was more than happy to do so).

We all had a really good time!  I had a much, much better time than I expected.  Generally, I don't like crowds and I don't like loud, but the crowds were remarkably tame and friendly and I got used to the loudness really quickly.

I think the crowds were tamer than I expected for two reasons: I think a fairly large percentage of them had that marijuana mellowness and because the festival is pretty expensive ($400 a ticket, plus expensive food, plus expensive lodging or camping, plus expensive transportation), it ended up catering to a bit of a more richer and refined group.

I found the alcohol versus marijuana thing interesting.  Backpacks and other bags were searched each day as we entered the festival grounds and pockets were patted down.  They were incredibly strict about bringing in any sort of liquid including sealed bottles of drinking water.  So it was extremely difficult to smuggle alcohol in.  On the other hand, they didn't search anywhere near thoroughly enough to find less voluminous drugs like marijuana and once on the grounds, the festival staff didn't put any effort at all in to prohibiting or even limiting illegal drug use.  I'm guessing this was purposeful since alcohol is a rowdy and aggressive drug and marijuana is a anti-aggression drug and much better for crowd control.

I normally wouldn't care at all about drug use except the resulting clouds of smoke (tobacco, marijuana, and smells I'd never smelled before and have no idea what they were) coupled with the natural dust of the desert setting was a bit of a respiratory nightmare and my lungs and sinuses were pretty irritated by the end of each day.  It's also a good thing that I don't have to pass any drug tests for my jobs because I'm not sure I could pass given all the second hand smoke I inhaled.  I'm wondering if those who do have to pass drug tests for their jobs could get away with going to things like Coachella?

The sound systems were great, especially on the main stage, and that's why it made the "loud" easy to get used to.  It was really nice to hear a lot of contemporary music, though I probably won't run out and buy any of it.  A lot of it was pretty good, though there was an interesting conflict between the live shows and what I hear on the radio.  A good example is Ellie Goulding, a singer whose music I find downright boring on the radio, but she sounded incredibly good at Coachella and was probably my favorite act out of the 24 bands I heard (though Muse, Beck, MGMT, Cage the Elephant, and Naked and Famous were very close runners up).

The people watching was fairly fun too.  Since it's a hot desert setting, women typically wore bikinis with coverup or shorts or some combo.  Men wore shorts with or without a t-shirt.  I was surprised by the remarkable lack of body hair on the men and my wife pointed out that they were probably waxing their chests (and/or backs). I knew that body builders going to competitions did that, but I didn't realize that it had become popular among non-body builders. Ouch! Well, I guess women also wax things which I think shouldn't be waxed, so what the heck, but definitely count me out!

Anyway, it was a great party and I might even choose to do it again someday.

A Case Against Free Trade

I'm generally for allowing trade to occur between entities with as little interference from government(s) and others as possible.  I'm pretty vocal about that, so people are often very surprised when they learn that I'm NOT for completely free international trade.

Let's start with a specific definition for Free Trade found by typing "Free Trade Definition" into Google:

free trade noun

noun: free trade; modifier noun: free-trade 

1. international trade left to its natural course without tariffs, quotas, or other restrictions.

I'll focus on tariffs because that's my preferred way of "restricting" trade.  A tariff is just a tax.  Taxes are required for governments to operate.  Even radical libertarians think that at least a minimal government is required for civilization to flourish and therefore, taxes of some sort (or multiple sorts) need to be collected from somewhere.

I've yet to see a good argument why the tariff sort of tax is less legitimate than any other sort of tax such as the sales tax, income tax, real estate tax, estate tax, capital gains tax, health tax, etc.  To the extent that revenues from tariffs can replace those other taxes, I don't think that tariffs are any more onerous for an economy and society than any of those other taxes.  In addition, tariffs are a fairly efficient tax in that there are a limited number of ports where goods can enter the country, as opposed to income tax where 300,000,000 individuals in the United States alone have to file.

Trade enables specialization.  Specialization leads to efficiency and innovation and enhanced wealth creation, leaving the trading entities better off overall, potentially far better off.

But I think that the incremental advantages of trade diminish as the scale increases.  Two people trading with each other are much better off than each doing everything for himself, 100 people better off than 2, a million better off than 100, etc., but it may break down at some point.  500 million may be better off trading with each other compared to restricting trade within groups of 50 million, or maybe not.

How about 5 billion versus a half a billion?

My guess is no.

Consider the approximately half billion people in the North America Free Trade Area (NAFTA).  It contains labor from first and third world countries, at least some of nearly all natural resources required for any economy, and extensive diversity of people and geography. I think that NAFTA and the trade that occurs within it is a good thing and very beneficial for the countries that are members.

But I think that if we expand beyond NAFTA, the adverse effects of the chaotic nature of trade will begin to overwhelm the benefits of specialization and economies of scale provided by trade.  As a result, I think that NAFTA should impose across-the-board, uniform tariffs on all goods coming into it and that the Eurozone and other free-trade areas should do the same.

A description of the chaotic nature of markets is provided by Professor David Ruelle in his book Chance and Chaos:

A standard piece of economics wisdom is that suppressing economic barriers and establishing a free market makes everybody better off.  Suppose that country A and country B both produce toothbrushes and toothpaste for local use.  Suppose also that the climate of country A allows toothbrushes to be grown and harvested more profitably than in country B, but that country B has rich mines of excellent toothpaste.  Then, if a free market is established, country A will produce cheap toothbrushes, and country B cheap toothpaste, which they will sell to each other for everybody's benefit.  More generally, the economists show (under certain assumptions) that a free market economy will provide the producers of various commodities with an equilibrium that will somehow optimize their well-being.  But, as we have seen, the complicated system obtained by coupling together various local economies is not unlikely to have a complicated, chaotic time evolution rather than settling down to a convenient equilibrium.  (Technically, the economists allow an equilibrium to be a time-dependent state, but not to have an unpredictable future.) Coming back to countries A and B, we see that linking their economies together, and with those of countries C, D, etc., may produce wild economic oscillations that will damage the toothbrush and toothpaste industry.  And thus be responsible for countless cavities.  Among many other things, therefore, chaos also contributes to the headache of economists. 

Let me state things somewhat more brutally.  Textbooks of economics are largely concerned with equilibrium situations between economic agents with perfect foresight.  The textbooks may give you the impression that the role of the legislators and government officials is to find and implement an equilibrium that is particularly favorable for the community. The examples of chaos in physics teach us, however, that certain dynamical situations do not produce equilibrium but rather a chaotic, unpredictable time evolution.  Legislators and government officials are thus faced with the possibility that their decisions,  intended to produce a better equilibrium, will in fact lead to wild and unpredictable fluctuations, with possibly quite disastrous effects.  The complexity of today's economics encourages such chaotic behavior, and our theoretical understanding in this domain remains very limited.

A graphical example of "tipping" points in a chaotic system is shown by the bifurcations in the following graph:

The system is perfect stable for r < 3, enabling a false sense of security and ability to predict the system response for other values.  By r = 3.6, the system has become completely unstable and unpredictable with rapid further increases in instability as r increases from there.

There are many real-world physical examples of this such as turbulent versus laminar flow of a fluid in a pipe where linear increases of pump pressure lead to more-or-less linear increases in flow rate until a certain flow rate is hit, after which the flow becomes turbulent and massive increases in pump pressure give little or no increase in flow rate. Eventually the pipe will burst from the pressure.

In the economy, chaotic effects are manifested in things like shifting comparative advantages between regions leading to the collapse of whole industries and sub-economies.  Examples include: steel shifting to Asia, gutting the U.S. steel industry and leaving the badly damaged rust-belt in its wake; and accelerated devastation of Appalachia from the changing economic viability of coal and farming.  Each of these examples were exacerbated by rent-seeking unions, government and environmental regulations, less than optimal management, technological innovation, and foreign subsidies, but the chaotic nature of markets still played a significant role and these other factors are an inherent part of the chaotic global political economy.

As the chaotic effects increase, investment risk also increases.  It's easier to get investment for a venture that can provide a positive ROI and an exit strategy in a short time frame than for ventures that have a longer time horizon.  This is partly inherent in the risk assessment and its effect on the subjective discount rate used in Net Present Value calculations which penalize longer time horizons.  However, a substantial part of the risk analysis takes the chaotic nature of markets into account.

I have personally experienced this sort of effect.  I may have a high degree of confidence that I'm the only one working on a certain innovation in a given region, but I'm unable to predict the status of this innovation world wide.  Investors, however, want to know if there's a chance they'll be blindsided by some competing group in India, or Israel, or Ireland, or Italy, etc. and if so, will be far less likely to invest.  I think that part of slowing of worldwide investment is partly due to this sort of phenomenon.  There's a lot money sitting, doing nothing, with nobody willing to pull the trigger to invest that money, because that money will be wasted if competing entities are working on the same thing.

Resilience is affected by chaos as well.  In March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami damaged a portion of the northeast coast of Japan and this affected the global supply of motor vehicle parts:

Located in the disaster region and adversely affected by these forces are a number of manufacturing facilities which are integral to the global motor vehicle supply chain. They include plants that assemble automobiles and many suppliers which build parts and components for vehicles. Some of the Japanese factories that were forced to close provide parts and chemicals not easily available elsewhere. This is particularly true of automotive electronics, a major producer of which was located near the center of the destruction.

While efficiency is increased by global trade, the above example shows that resilience is not.  Concentrating manufacturing in one or a handful of facilities to benefit from economies of scale leaves the world economy more vulnerable to natural and man made disasters.

Trade and fluid flows have similarities.  When fluid flows become turbulent, backing off the pressure helps. In a more complex fluid system, adding baffles can help.  Tariffs are essentially baffles in this context.  A 20% across the board tariff would enable redundant manufacturing of various products in different and independent regions, reducing chaos, increasing resilience.  While possibly somewhat less efficient, if the manufacturing is shut down in one region due to an earthquake, tsunami, meteor strike, political unrest, invasion, war, etc., the impact on the rest of the world economy will be mitigated.

In summary, I think there are issues of scale when it comes to free trade. I see no reason why tariffs are any more onerous than other types of taxes, and the chaotic and fragility effects are reasons to use across the board tariffs to restrict international trade.

Quote of the Time Since the Last Quote of the...

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. Jonathan Swift.

I have little doubt that Swift meant this in a derogatory manner.  But I take this quote as a bit of positive advice.  Many things, such as subjective preferences, have nothing to do with reason, though sometimes we attempt to rationalize such preferences after the fact.

I hate the color pink. Ugly, ugly, ugly, in my subjective opinion.  I didn't reason my way into that preference and nobody can reason me out of it.  Swift's quote points out that it's pointless to try and that it's a good idea to figure what things are just preferences to avoid silly debates - like arguing about my aesthetic revulsion to the color pink.

New Format

Due to popular reader demand for various features, with great trepidation, I'm going to upgrade the blogger template for Great Guys tonight at approximately 8:00 PM PST.  Supposedly I can always go back to the older template, supposedly everything'll be backed up (and I'll back up everything by hand that I have reasonably easy access to), supposedly it won't lose any comments, supposedly we'll have access to more features, and supposedly it'll be better.  Blogger has been bugging me (and probably my co-bloggers too) to do this for about 5 years.

Just in case, if you have any pearls of wisdom in the comments that are critical to well-being of the human race, please make a copy of them (I'm not backing up comments - in theory, there's no need to).

This might be a long weekend.

Laugh or Cry?

Via Instapundit, an article titled "What Can Educators do to End White Supremacy in the Classroom?" was published on April 1st. It's a perfect parody of what some people on the right (ummm, like me), when they get way too carried away by their paranoid delusions, might imagine people on the left thinking and saying.  I assumed it was an April Fools Hoax and found it hysterically funny (I can laugh at myself with the best of them), but in the extensive comment section below the article, people were taking the article seriously.

Some people will take a really good hoax seriously, but it got me wondering, so I emailed the author and asked him about it.  His response:

The article is not an April Fools Day joke. We attended multiple sessions at the conference and reported on a few of them.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

One attendee, a teacher and the diversity director at his school, spoke about the activities he is implementing and said it is important for teachers and administrators to discuss social justice with their students. Radersma echoed his sentiment.

"If you don't want to work for equity, get the fuck out of education," Radersma said. "If you are not serious about being an agent of change that helps stifle the oppressive systems, go find another job. Because you are a political figure."

That explains a lot about the state of our educational system.

Radersma also argued the first step is realizing that all white people are carrying the signs of oppression.

"Being a white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic. I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor," Radersma said. "I have to everyday wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose everyday to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way."

We're all raceaholics.  Who knew?

Radersma said she taught a lower-level English class at the high school and her students were exclusively people of color. However, she said the Advanced Placement course in her school was almost all white and Asian students. Her principal observed class one day and commented on the difference in students between the two courses. 

That experience, and the fact that her boss did not know how to tackle the problem, led her to leave the classroom and work toward her Ph. D. Radersma told the group she realized the problem was the institutionalized racist structure of education and her white privilege was causing the racial achievement gap.

Yup. Institutionalized racism.  That's the only possible explanation.  But apparently not against Asians.

"Who's at fault? My white body is at fault," she said.

Her white body may well be at fault for some of the ills in our educational system, but I don't think "white" is the operative word and probably not "body" either.

"I can't teach students of color nearly as well as a person of color can."

Is that because 2+2 doesn't equal 4 for a person of color?

The conference was paid for in part with taxpayer dollars.

Yup.  Because there's nothing more worthwhile than something like this conference to spend the money on.

So are you laughing or crying?

Terrifying Inequality

The French economist Thomas Piketty is concerned about growing income and wealth inequality:

[I]f current trends continue, “the consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying.”

We're doomed! Doomed, I tell you, Dooooomed!!!

Errr, well, what are these terrifying consequences?  Scanning the article, I don't see any terrifying consequences at all.

The article above is in a nice liberal rag, The New Yorker, so I decided to go to that bastion of conservative thought, the New York Times, which summarizes the current understanding of inequality's effects thusly:

For all the brain power thrown at the problem since then, however, specific evidence about inequality’s effects has been hard to find.

Apparently, terrifyingly hard to find. As a result, folks like Piketty seem to have decided they might as well jump on every little terrifying possibility:

“People that worry about inequality for normative reasons have been very quick to jump on plausible hypothesis and a little bit of evidence to make sweeping conclusions about its consequences,” Professor Kenworthy told me.

Professor Kenworthy himself had been hoping to write a terrifying book on inequality's impacts, but disappointingly (for him), couldn't really find anything that would hold up to close scrutiny:

To avoid misleading correlations and better isolate inequality’s impact, Mr. Kenworthy studied its evolution over time, comparing how changes in income concentration across the world’s industrialized nations related to changes in a whole set of social and economic outcomes, from growth and employment to health and educational attainment.He came up mostly empty-handed: “My tests suggest it seems to be a small player in the overall story.”

Professor Stiglitz notes that the United States grew faster during the decades of low inequality immediately after World War II than it did after inequality started rising in the 1980s. But Mr. Kenworthy finds no meaningful impact of inequality on growth one way or the other. “Income inequality isn’t the only thing that differed between these two periods,” he said.

Similarly, Mr. Kenworthy found no significant relationship between increasing inequality and life expectancy, infant mortality or college graduation rates, among others. Even when some patterns do mesh — teenage pregnancy rates fell a little more slowly in countries where the share of income going to the top 1 percent grew fastest — the relationship is weak. If you take the United States and Britain off the list, the relationship disappears.

The relationship between inequality and the alleged stagnation of others' incomes is also not yet terrifying according to a colleague of Kenworthy:

“Most economists don’t feel there’s a logical mechanism that really is persuasive” linking the rise of the 1 percent and the stagnation of incomes for the rest, Professor Jencks said.

Even though hardly terrifying, Mr. Jencks still thinks we should take action:

Mr. Jencks describes the state of the debate between friends and foes of inequality in these terms: “Can I prove that anything is terrible because of rising inequality? Not by the kind of standards I would require. But can they prove I shouldn’t worry? They can’t do that either.”

That, alone, is enough to spur action. “Something that looks bad is coming at you,” he said. “Saying that we shouldn’t do anything about it until we know for sure would be a bad response.”

So not terrifying, but hey, something looks bad. So. We. Must. Do. Something!

And there's no doubt in my mind that "something" involves reduced freedom, bigger government, and more taxes. What a surprise!

Guess the author

In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men.  We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved.  We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom.  We lacked reverence ... for everything and everyone.  It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order.  ...   As cause and consequence of our general state of mind we completely misunderstood human nature, including our own.  The rationality which we attributed to it led to a superficiality, not only of judgement, but also of feeling.

update:

author: John Maynard Keynes

Although Keynes showed some willingness to change his mind when the facts changed, his near certitude expressed on many matters left me in the position of being rather stunned to learn of this quote.  It is particularly relevant for the conflict of visions that are at the heart of many disagreements that underlay policy differences and differing attitudes towards the desirability of limited government.

A slightly more extended excerpt is here.  A video from which I became aware of this quote is here (with a slightly extended version of the quote starting around 18:00).

Ever Deeper in Political Correctness

I know most of the readers here also read Instapundit, so you're probably at least vaguely familiar with a recent kerfuffle at UCSB between a small "pro-life" group and a professor:

Dr. Mireille Miller-Young — an associate professor with UCSB’s Feminist Studies Department — approached the demonstration site and exchanged heated words with the group, taking issue with their pro-life proselytizing and use of disturbing photographs. Joan claimed Miller-Young, accompanied by a few of her students, led the gathering crowd in a chant of “Tear down the sign! Tear down the sign!” before grabbing one of the banners and walking with it across campus.

While wrong and probably in violation of the law, acting out on the basis of strong emotion is neither surprising nor can I get too worked up about it since no one was significantly hurt.  What's slightly more surprising and definitely more disconcerting, is that after the heat of the moment passed, Miller-Young still believed herself to be the victim. From the police report:

I asked Miller-Young what crimes she felt the pro-life group had violated. Miller-Young replied that their coming to campus and showing “graphic imagery” was insensitive to the community. I clarified the difference between University policy and law to Miller-Young and asked her again what law had been violated. Miller-Young said that she believed the pro-life group may have violated University policy. Miller-Young said that her actions today were in defense of her students and her own safety. 

Miller-Young said that she felt that this issue was not criminal and expressed a desire to find a resolution outside of the legal system. Miller-Young continued and stated that she had the “moral” right to act in the way she did. 

I asked Miller-Young if she could have behaved differently in this instance. There was a long pause. “I’ve said that I think I did the right thing. But I acknowledge that I probably should not have taken their poster.” Miller-Young also said that she wished that the anti-abortion group had taken down the images when they demanded them to. 

Miller-Young also suggested that the group had violated her rights. I asked Miller-Young what right the group had violated. Miller-Young responded, “My personal right to go to work and not be in harm.”

I guess free speech can be traumatic and "harmful" to others.  And many rallied to Miller-Young's defense.  For example, from the Belmont Club:

Stephanie Gilmore at The Feminist Wire lost no time in supporting Miller-Young, describing what happened to the professor as “domestic terrorism is intended ‘to intimidate or coerce a civilian population’” — meaning Miller-Young —  from feeling safe at her workplace."

Domestic terrorism? Wow. A couple of signs at a small, peaceful rally or bombs and jetliners flown into buildings.  Apparently, much the same.  Afterall, they do say that the pen is mightier than the fuel-laden jumbo jet.

But it turns out that Ms. Gilmore herself then stepped beyond the politically correct pale of the left by proclaiming:

But I stand with Mireille Miller-Young because she stands with women – ALL women – in the face of political intimidation and harassment.

As Heidi Cautrell pointed out in a comment to Ms. Gilmore's article:

“stand with” is abelist toward those who are unable to stand.

I hate to admit it, but I had no idea what "ableism" was prior to following the above thread.  In case you were also equally unenlightened, here is the definition:

a form of discrimination or social prejudice against people with disabilities. It may also be referred to as disability discrimination, physicalism, handicapism, and disability oppression. It is also sometimes known as disablism, although there is some dispute as to whether ableism and disablism are synonymous, and some people within disability rights circles find the latter term’s use inaccurate. Discrimination faced by those who have or are perceived to have a mental disorder is sometimes called mentalism rather than ableism.

By now I am so far into the unknown that I hardly know which way is up. Take any active verb and there's probably someone who can't do it.  If so, perhaps ableism should be called active-verbism?  What a crazy world.  As is often the case, I found much of Belmont Club's commentary on this topic insightful:

“Abelist” is a word from the world of Mireille Miller-Young, Stephanie Gilmore and Heidi Cautrell. If you don’t recognize the word, you might be forgiven. The Left is another country. They do things differently there. Even the words are different. The inhabitants of that strange country routinely refer to objects you might not recognize. They talk about Whiteness Theory, Phallogocentrism, Gynocriticism, and the Écriture féminine as you would WD-40, grass, spare tires or doorknobs.  They are everyday objects of their world though you may never have heard of them. 

If it has never occurred to you that to use the phrase “to stand with” is a mortal insult then you’re not with it. [...]

The inhabitants of the strange country take umbrage for reasons known only to themselves and it’s all that matters. It’s a clash of cultures, a collision between one part of America and another. 

The pro-life demonstrators holding up their poster can be forgiven for thinking they were still in America. After all they had crossed no marked boundaries. So they thought it was alright to peaceably assemble. But in reality they had wandered into the precincts of some strange tribe where such things are not tolerated; a kind of Twilight Zone; a place governed by mysterious customs, prey to obscure taboos and worshipping some monstrous, unnamed  idol. Everything was different there. Thus what followed was predictable. 

When Mireille Miller-Young snatched away the banner from Joan and Thrin Short, she was doing no more than fulfilling her tribal duty, defending her “workplace” against some interloper from Flyover Country, rumored to exist somewhere beyond the borders of the University of California, a place imbued with strange ideas about the First Amendment and the Constitution. [...] 

Neither Mireille Miller-Young nor the Short sisters are bad people judged by the standards of their own cultures. But they are different cultures.  Mireille Miller-Young has a simple desire: not to stop until her tribe conquers all the rest. And in that she is just as ordinary; just as commonplace, just as unimaginative as any tribesperson who ever lived in the long and doleful history of the world.

I disagree with the last sentence though.  I could never be so imaginative to create such a convoluted and crazy world.

Delayed Informative Speculamatation: MH370 is a Precedented, Prosaic Tragedy

Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 disappeared two days before I left on a trip that left me no time for blogging, so at the time I was scarcely able to delve into that stygian space between speculation and cogitation on the whats and whys. (Much of what follows comes from an email I dashed off to a friend of mine on March 11th, just before heading for the airport. This, too, is a bit dashed.)

At first I didn't pay it much mind, since I automatically assumed that some group had managed to get a bomb on board and blow the thing up. However, after a day without finding any debris, as improbable as it might be, the lack of debris from a 600,000 pound airplane along the route of flight could only mean one thing: it wasn't there.

Then I saw this graphic showing the last ATC radar contact with MH370.

Hmmm. The moment I saw it, I had that very ugly feeling that comes along with being among the first (excluding airline pilots) to know how a terrible tragedy transpired.

This is a screen shot from my iPad showing the first part of the route to Beijing. The coordinates I marked are essentially in the same place as shown in that graphic.

I have flown out of Penang (WMKP, about 180NM northwest of Kuala Lumpur, WMKK). At a glance, it was obvious that the last radar hit was at the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.

Someone specifically picked that point to turn off the transponder, because at that point MH370 was no longer Malaysian ATC's responsibility, and it would be awhile until Vietnam realized MH370 didn't check in because of a botched handoff, but rather due to something far worse. Because airliners (almost) never willfully deviate from assigned routing, everyone immediately assumed crash.

Meanwhile, as it turns out, the plane was flying southwesterly along the Flight Information Region boundary between Malaysia and Thailand.

(Air Traffic Control radars do not display primary (i.e., reflections from the aircraft itself) radar returns. Rather, they show transponder information (Callsign, altitude, airspeed) at the primary return location. However, military radars, since they are looking for things not announcing themselves, would see primary returns. That accounts for the discrepancy between ATC and mil radars about what they saw. What remains unexplained is that if the plane went southwest to west, it would have gone through an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) without air defense trying to identify it. (I have no idea what Jakarta's or Malaysia's air defense capabilities are.) UPDATE: The Malaysian has plenty of capability, and even more complacency.

Therefore, someone intentionally diverted MH370, and knew precisely where to do it in order provide the maximum time until someone noticed. In and of itself, that is not particularly arcane knowledge. Nor is the primary automation (heading and altitude controls on the glare shield control panel). Plenty of people have enough "hands-on" experience with the B777 via personal computer based simulation to have understood what needed doing (Here is an example of how detailed these things are.)

So, in theory, at this point it is well within the realm of reason that a great many people, sufficiently motivated, could have pirated the airplane.

However, there are other facts demanding attention.

The first, and most important, is the Intrusion Resistant Cockpit Door (IRCD) installed on all airliners since 9/11. The odds of someone getting onto the flight deck without cooperation from the other side of the door are extremely small; not quite zero, but so close as to render any piracy by that avenue so unlikely as to deter the attempt.

Second, and nearly as fundamental, once commandeered, then what? Per the 9/11 plot, the airplane should have been used as a missile.

Except it wasn't.

That still leaves the possibility that the plan was to disappear the airplane for some future horror show, perhaps, or especially, including 249 human shields.

Yet this raises further obstacles. To bring some such atrocity to fruition would first require bringing the airplane back to earth in a reusable condition. In order to attain that end, at least 5,000 feet of runway is essential. At night, that runway would have to be lit (for a manual landing) or have an Instrument Landing System. GPS will get an airplane in the close vicinity of a runway, but isn't suitable for an automated landing. An ILS is extremely precise, but the citing and operational requirements are extremely demanding. So in the former case, a very skilled pilot is required; in the latter, the facility requirements are so demanding that there is no possibility of a 777 showing up unnoticed. Yet given the extreme improbability of breaching the IRCD, the only source of a skilled pilot (Asiana not withstanding) is the flight deck. And there are hardly any runways that meet the most minimal requirements and could hide an unnoticed B777.

In the words of Sir Conan Doyle, via Sherlock Holmes, having eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the explanation.

MH370 is both precedented and prosaic.

The only non-impossible explanation is that one of the pilots commandeered the airplane. It has happened. Someone I met flew an A10 into a mountain west of Denver. An Egypt Air pilot committed suicide, and took 217 people with him. A FedEx pilot attempted to kill the crew with the goal of crashing the plane into the Memphis hub. A Singaporean Captain likely crashed a B737.

So this the least unlikely sequence of events. On some pretext, one of the pilots got up out of the seat approaching the handoff point, grabbed the crash axe and killed the other pilot. That pilot then turned off the transponder, flew along a course most likely to exploit military radar complacency, and used cockpit circuit breakers to remove power from almost all the aircraft reporting systems. (All of this was glaringly apparent by March 11th.)

Then he flew the airplane to one of the most remote parts of the planet and committed suicide.

Sexist Math Nerd Humor

In mathematics, a manifold is "a topological space that is connected and locally Euclidean," that is to say flat and predictable, at least in the region of interest.

But what if it's still curvy and unpredictable locally? Would that be a womanifold?

Back to the Garden of Eden

Many people are concerned about (allegedly) increasing inequality and some people are concerned about fertility rates permanently decreasing to below non-replacement leading to eventual extinction of the human species.  While I'm not personally worried about either of those issues, the good news is that there are long term forces that may eliminate both of these "problems."

I base this on the glorious and well-known (though not universally accepted) fact that stupid people have more children than smart people:

Demographic studies have indicated that in humans, fertility rate and intelligence tend to be inversely correlated, that is to say, the more intelligent, as measured by IQ tests, exhibit a lower total fertility rate than the less intelligent.

We're getting stupider at a pretty good clip:

Retherford and Sewell examined the association between the measured intelligence and fertility of over 9,000 high school graduates in Wisconsin in 1957, and confirmed the inverse relationship between IQ and fertility ..., they calculated a dysgenic decline of .57 IQ points per generation.

So that's 20 to 30 IQ points per millennium, making a person of average intelligence, one-thousand years from now, borderline imbecilic.

And probably plenty fertile.

The intelligence range of humans will probably be quite compressed as well.  That has the added benefit of compressing inequality since nobody will be smart enough to "get ahead" and humans will eventually become one big happy tribe wallowing in the muck in a new Garden of Eden, where ignorance and stupidity is bliss.

Hopefully, no one will then be stupid enough to eat the fruit of knowledge and bring the numerous problems associated with intelligence upon humanity again.

Oh The Possibilities!

One of my facebook friends posted the following:

Sitting next to a woman in Starbucks with her toddler and I overhear her say "Yes, someday you will marry a nice woman." 

How sad. Not only is she not allowing for the fact that maybe her son is gay and might marry a man [...]

I started to chuckle as I imagined the poor woman trying to explain the full range of LGBT options to her toddler: "Someday you might marry a nice woman - or a man, or you might have a sex-change operation in which case you could still marry either the man or the woman but it would be a little different, or by the time you grow up anti-polygamy laws will probably be repealed in which case you could marry one of each, or two of each, or heck, go for a dozen of each, and you could live on a sheep farm and..."  I don't know, but given the complexity of possibilities and the fact that even where gay marriage is allowed there are still one-hundred times as many hetero marriages as gay ones, I can't blame the woman for playing the odds and keeping the explanation as simple as possible. Hopefully, if the toddler does end up gay, he'll not be forever traumatized by this one conversation with his mom.

I'll be you all can quickly guess which city in the United States this woman lives in.

Challenge Accepted

Harry, being the local stand-in for progressives everywhere, frequently hauls out the racist slime bucket, which, subject to merely cursory examinations, has thus far proved completely empty.

The goal, right out of Alinsky's playbook, is to demonize dissent, stifle disagreement, and force those too stupid or evil to accept Progressives' glorified self-estimation into defending themselves against scurrilous nonsense.

This time, though, they have heartless conservatives dead to rights. Via Harry(page search on "heartless"), and provided by that bastion of unexamined ideas, ThinkProgress, comes this clip from a GOP presidential primary debate, entitled "Crowd Yells Let Him Die":

Yep, no doubt about it, conservatives are heartless.

Hmmm. Instead of indulging progressives in their leaping to self-congratulatory conclusions, perhaps it might be worth a few seconds to — and I know this sounds extreme — consider facts, context, and consequences.

Wolf Blitzer asks Ron Paul this question, slightly paraphrased:

A healthy 30 year old young man has a good job makes a good living, but decides not to spend 200 or 300 dollars per month for health insurance because he's healthy, decides he doesn't need it, but something terrible happens, who pays for that?

Ron Paul's response focused on freedom and personal responsibility.

To which Blitzer replies:

But Congressman, are you saying society should just let him die?

First, a couple trivial facts. As it happens, the crowd clearly did not yell "let him die" even once, never mind, pace Harry, chant it; instead, it was Blitzer himself. Oh, and Think Progress Instead of Accuracy cut off the bulk of Ron Paul's response. Dowdification is strong in progressives.

Where reality is allowed to rear its ugly head, several people in the crowd did in fact yell "yes" in response to Blitzer's prompting. Which really isn't the same, or even remotely like, the crowd chanting it. But never mind, in this case I'm happy to take progressive feelings as a stand-in for reality, and that heartless conservatives really want to let him die.

Which is precisely where progressive thinking, such as it is, stops, and reaching for the slime bucket starts.

Perhaps, though, there is rather more going on here than the instant offense brigade either understands, or acknowledges.

Remember the question's context: a healthy young man who could afford to purchase health insurance instead rolls the bones, and loses.

Now what? To Blitzer, who is so steeped in progressivism he, despite having a great deal of time to prepare still asked the wrong question, the answer he is trying to trap Ron Paul into giving is obvious: society must step in.

To non-progressives, though, this isn't the least bit apparent. For those who don't buy earthquake, fire, or flood insurance, should society be on the hook if their house is knocked down, burned to a crisp, or swept away? For those who neglect to pay for car insurance, should society pony up to replace for the unlucky their rides that ended up nose first in the jersey wall?

What those "heartless conservatives" are reacting to, and progressives can't spot, is a question that, shorn of its emotional baggage is asking precisely this: what do the rest of us owe parasites?

Progressives' reflexive accusation of conservative heartlessness, instead of even casting a glance at the underlying situation, proves they are unable to ascertain the moral hazard that is at the heart of socialism. It inevitably rewards vice, penalizes virtue, makes personal responsibility worse than futile, and positively encourages dependency.

In that light, "yes" isn't heartless, but rather an expression of the seemingly obvious. The best way to get more of something is to pay for it. If the goal is to make responsibility the inferior option to shirking, then by all means subsidize the parasite.

While at the individual level being compassionate with other people's money may be emotionally appealing, it isn't perhaps the acme in heartlessness to not be wild about an entire society like the feckless hypothetical.

So why do progressives keep trotting out these transparently fallacious instigations for two minutes hate? Only one reason I can think of: progressivism is a religion that worships the sanctity of progressivism. Because it is self-evidently correct, everything that at first glance confirms the wonderfulness of progressives to themselves is ipso facto true.

And just like unquestioning religionists throughout history, nothing, not even their own repeated failures (Robertson, Justine Sacco, Carlton, Walker staff emails, this video, to name but a few of the most recent examples), will either stop their drive to demonize, or start them thinking.

Lots of little gems

A recent Michael Barone column about Obamacare is full of little gems.  First there is the subtitle:

The Washington elites who designed the law must be bewildered: Why doesn't everyone behave as they do?

I think that speaks for itself as a common state of most statists.  He then gives attention to three assumptions about the health insurance market that aren't holding up very well.

He concludes with highly relevant cultural and historical perspectives:

But policies that work well in Scandinavia or Minnesota and North Dakota won't necessarily work well in a wider United States, where a much larger proportion of people are socially disconnected.

And such policies may not work as well as they might have in the United States of the 1950s and early 1960s, in which disconnectedness was much less common. That was an America in what I call the Midcentury Moment, a period when World War II and unexpected postwar prosperity produced a conformist and (mostly) culturally homogeneous nation with low rates of divorce and single parenthood, and high rates of social connectedness. A nation accustomed to a universal military draft and wage-and-price controls, and in which increasing numbers worked for giant firms and were members of giant labor unions, probably would have been more amenable to a centralized command-and-control policy like ObamaCare than the culturally fragmented America of today.

In the long run of American history, the Midcentury Moment was just that—a moment, an exception, not the rule. We have been in some sense a multicultural nation from our colonial beginnings. The Founding Fathers, seeking to unite Puritan New England, Anglican Virginia, Dutch New York and Quaker Pennsylvania with the Scots-Irish warriors on the Appalachian frontier, determined that the federal government would impose no religious test for office and make no law regarding a religious establishment. They provided for a limited central government and a wide free-trade zone in which local cultures could prevail, local preachers could convert, and local entrepreneurs could innovate. 

ObamaCare cuts against this grain. The trouble that has resulted—from the architects' apparent failures to anticipate the behavior of fellow citizens who don't share their approach to the world, and the architects' determination to impose their mores, such as contraception coverage, on a multicultural nation—is a lesson to national policy makers, conservative as well as liberal. Govern lightly if you want to govern this culturally diverse nation well.

Not only are we culturally different from other places, we are to some extent different from ourselves.  Some of the conflicts are a continuation of the English Civil War.  Wherever you wish to place the roots of such conflict, we will not get along if there are no limits on the things we must all do together.

Ready...aim...sing!

Earlier this week Pete Seeger died.  There are some interesting perspectives outside the conventional mainstream praise that I thought were of note.  Bird Dog over at blog Maggie's Farm had this to say:

Grew up middle class, went to prep school and Harvard, affected a working class style but I doubt any working class people were ever interested in him. A likeable old commie, naive and innocent to the end.

Ron Radosh at PJMedia who knew Seeger personally concluded with this:

I know Pete would not have said that if I had been writing books about fascism.

More than likely, he would have praised my doing so. Pete, like so many others on the Left, simply failed to realize that communism is fascism’s twin.

Some also take umbrage, as does Graham, with calling Seeger anti-American. In his Mother Jones ^[8] article, David Hajdu, who spent time with Seeger before writing the article, called him “devoted to a few simple ideas, a nostalgist whose worldview often seems frozen in the era of his own coming-of-age.” He adds: “A strain of anti-Americanism has always run through Seeger’s work.”

If you don’t think that is the case, listen to the Smithsonian Folkways CD “Pete Seeger Sing-a-Long,” recorded at the Sanders Theater in Cambridge, Mass., in 1980. In an impromptu remark, Seeger makes a comment about how if the people had guns, you better watch out, because you don’t know whom the people would use the guns against. The comment receives huge cheers. That is to be expected of from an audience in the People’s Republic of Cambridge.

Sunkara is right about one thing. He quotes Bruce Springsteen, who wrote that Seeger showed how song could “nudge history along.” Seeger did indeed help make communism more fashionable, and that is a tragedy, not something for which Pete Seeger should ever have received praise.

 Glen Reynolds at Instapundit linked to others...

JOHN FUND: Pete Seeger, Totalitarian Troubadour. “We shouldn’t forget that Pete Seeger was Communism’s pied piper.”

Related: Spengler: Pete Seeger: A Mean-Spirited and Vengeful Recollection. “I was not just a Pete Seeger fan, but a to-the-hammer-born, born-and-bred cradle fan of Pete Seeger. With those credentials, permit me to take note of his passing with the observation that he was a fraud, a phony, a poseur, an imposter. The notion of folk music he espoused was a put-on from beginning to end. There is no such thing as an American ‘folk.’”

Instapundit  finished the post with a link to a fitting song by mathematics professor and satirist Tom Lehrer:
(which is as good an excuse as any for this post)