Shrinking Hours and Obamacare

Small business is sometimes said to be the engine of jobs creation in America.  If so, the following chart doesn't bode well for employment opportunities in the future with Obamacare coming on line.

Hat Tip: John Goodman's Health Policy Blog

Ferguson v. Krugman

As I've made clear in various post and comments, I never go out of my way to read Krugman anymore, especially since various colleagues and acquaintances send me his columns fairly often.  The following four articles by Niall Ferguson (Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University; Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University) are a good example of why I don't read Krugman:

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 1

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 2

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 3

Civilizing the Marketplace of Ideas

Here is a brief excerpt from the last article:

As economists go, they do not come much mightier or more influential than Paul Krugman. A Nobel laureate who teaches at Princeton University, Krugman is also a columnist for the New York Times, whose commentaries and blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” are read with an almost religious fervor by liberal (in the American sense) economists and journalists around the world. He is a Twitter superstar, with more than a million followers. [...] 

Krugman has been the intellectual equivalent of a robber baron, exploiting his power to the point of driving decent people away from the public sphere – particularly younger scholars, who understandably dread a “takedown” by the “Invincible Krugtron.”

For those who find Krugman's columns powerful and true, the above articles won't convince you otherwise. However, they will give you a description from an excellent and concise historian of what some of us see when we view Krugman and his writings.  And from there, you can imagine that if you encountered someone who looked like that to you, you'd probably ignore him as well.

Divided We Stand

Sweden is often held up as an example of an excellent political-social-economic system, especially by those on the Left.  And while it's possible to quibble over the numbers, it's pretty hard to deny that in virtually every measure of well-being of a society, Sweden ranges somewhere from quite good to top notch.

As a result, everybody can probably learn something of value by studying Sweden.

I'm no exception.  What I've learned from looking at Sweden over the years is that 2 to 20 million people is a really nice size for a country.  It's big enough to have the diversity of talents and desires to form a vibrant economy, yet small enough that the people have a feeling of belonging and camaraderie with their fellow citizens.  It's big enough to support the necessary institutions of government and trade in the modern world, yet small enough that the government feels accountable to the citizens. It's big enough to create and accumulate wealth, yet small enough that it's worthwhile for citizens to protect their property and country from those who would use political power to take it.  All of the advantages of being big enough, but not too big.

When the United States declared independence in 1776, the population was about 2.5 million, a nice size. But even at that small size, the founders focused on forming a federation, with the individual states keeping the vast majority of legislative power and a high level of autonomy, even though each state only had a few hundred thousand people.

A few hundred thousand in this day and age may be too small to support itself effectively.  But what Sweden proves, unequivocally, is that 9 million is definitely not too small.

The United States has over 100 times as many people when it was founded.  It has also concentrated the power in the central government.  This has led to an Angry America where tens of millions of people don't have a feeling of belonging and camaraderie, don't feel that government is accountable to them, and feel like they are being taken advantage of by the ruling political class.  I believe this has led to constantly rising hostility, government shutdowns, out-of-control government spending, subdued economic growth, and a desperate and hopeless feeling on the part of many that their country, and a place where they can live in peace and prosperity, has been irretrievably lost.

My belief is that if we could reduce the population of the United States to 9 million people, the vast majority of these problems would go away.  310,000,000+ people is not a manageable size.  9,000,000 people is.

Obviously, it's not possible to reduce the population, even though it would be an interesting experiment to send 300,000,000 million people to Sweden and see how it goes there.

The only possible approach is to split the country into smaller Pieces.  Around 50 Pieces would work well, leaving, on average, 6.2 million people per Piece.  Each Piece would be given complete sovereignty over itself. I would suggest that all the Pieces form an alliance for mutual defense and foreign relations, sort of like a mixture of NATO and NAFTA.  They could call this alliance the Northern American Pieces, or NAP.

Then people could move to the Piece that best fit their ideology and way of life and that would diffuse the anger in Angry America.  The Pieces would let people in other Pieces live in peace and prosperity.  Divided we stand, united we fall.

Your Guide to Obamacare

In case you were wondering why they're having trouble with the software for the exchanges (click on thumbnail for larger size image)...

Hat Tip: The Belmont Club

Angry America

"Life is choice."

That's what life is to me, anyway.  While not the standard definition of human life, the dead make no choices. Someone in a coma is alive in some sense, but we don't hold them up as an example of vigorous human life. I think of someone in a coma as more "existing" than alive.  To be fully alive is to make choices continually and experience the consequences, good and bad, of those choices.  No choices, no life, rather mere and bleak existence, which for me, is little or no better than being dead.

The choices that form the basis for human life need not be rational choices.  They can be choices made by, or for the purpose of satisfying, the lower brain.  As far as I'm concerned, the usefulness of the rational, conscious portion of the brain in the vast majority of decisions is hugely overrated and often counterproductive.

"Human sociality involves something like an adaptive evolutionary arms race in the capacity to deceive and the capacity to reveal deception." Joseph Carroll

I subscribe to the hypothesis that the large size of the human brain is in large part due to the huge evolutionary advantage of being able to deceive others and detect being deceived by others.  Consciousness is an emergent property of that capability and is thus an indirect artifact of the tool of deception used by the lower brain to further its agenda.

"Building on Byrne and Whiten's concept of "Machiavellian intelligence," [in Why We Lie, David Livingstone Smith] presents a scenario for a genetic 'arms race' in human evolution between deception and detection, and its implications for the development of our big brain and its capacities. If the reader finds this something of a stretch, Byrne and Whiten's most recent data show that among infrahuman primate species, frequency of deception is directly proportional to size of neocortex." [emphasis added] Irwin Silverman

A critically important part of modeling deception and therefore deploying and detection deception, is self-deception, and intelligence seems to significantly increase the likelihood of self-deception:

"More than 90% of professors think they are in the top half of their profession."

As an indirect artifact of deception, our consciousness, the thing each of us refers to as "me," is mostly just along for the ride and is pretty much at the mercy and command of the lower brain which is where the real "me" resides.

The illusion of conscious control, while overwhelmingly strong (very possibly due to self-deception), is unconvincing when I give it careful thought.  Anything our conscious mind wants to do is at best a request to our lower brain since the lower brain comes between "us" and the control of musculature via the nervous system.  The opposite isn't true - the lower brain can completely ignore the conscious brain and do whatever it chooses without any interference of conscious thought.  Consider the many important life situations where it is clear that our consciousness plays a minimal role.  These include:

• Love: Falling in love is in no way a rational process.  We don't make objective measurements and consciously decide to fall in love.  It's our lower brain that determines our attraction to potential mates and then we rationalize why we fell in love after the fact.
• Sex: Need I say more? While I, of course, have always been in complete conscious control of my sex drive and have never ended up in situations that my rational self would consider non-optimal (if you believe that one, I'm better at deception than I thought), it seems that the vast majority of men and a non-zero number of women end up not infrequently motivated to do things by their lower brain sex drives that are nearly certainly counterproductive by any rational analysis.
• Acts of high stress, emotion, altruism and heroism: These pretty much happen with our conscious self just going along for the ride with little or no influence on our own actions.  For these sorts of actions, there's often just not enough time for us to consciously process the situation, so our lower brain just takes over completely.
• Food:  Have you ever been on a diet and found yourself eating something, like a piece of cake, that you're sure you didn't consciously intend to eat?  Usually, we just sort of zone out when we do stuff like that, but next time you're in that situation, try consciously focusing on the experience.  I've found it to be very odd.  You might be able to fight it and win (i.e. stop yourself from eating the piece of cake), but I find it disconcertingly difficult and that it takes an enormous amount of energy.

And that's the rub.  While our consciousness can sometimes negotiate with our lower brain and influence the outcome, it's very tiring and wears us down.  Any time our conscious analyses are in conflict with our lower brain desires, we eventually run out of stamina and the lower brain gets its way.  That's why so many people fail on diets, for example.

Sartre goes into a cafe. He says, "I'd like cup of coffee, no cream." 

The waitress says, "I'm sorry, Monsieur Sartre, but we're out of cream. Would you like that with no milk?"

In 1992, California enacted a mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists.  I've always worn a helmet when riding a motorcycle and I had ridden motorcycles for tens of thousands of miles prior to 1992.  Yet I remember being angry with the passage of that law.  Why, you might ask, would I possibly care since I always wore a helmet anyway?  I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that it's because it took away a choice. Every time I got on my motorcycle, I chose to put on my helmet.  That choice had been taken away. And with that choice, a bit of life.  I felt a little less alive and a little more like I was just existing.

"Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal." Robert Heinlein

Emotions emanate from the lower brain.  We feel anger, for example, and then try to figure out why we're angry, and that makes us a rationalizing animal.  Sometimes it's obvious.  Sometimes, as in the helmet law example above, it's not obvious at all.  Sometimes, it's unfathomable why we're angry, yet we still try to figure it out.  That's because it's painful, as in emotional pain, to be angry, and like every living thing with a nervous system, humans are designed to escape and avoid pain.

America is angry.

On one side, conservatives, tea-partiers, libertarians, etc. are angry, and while they rationalize it into different reasons, a common underlying theme is destruction of choice. A myriad of regulations and abuses interferes more with their lives, and even when the growing effect of those isn't direct, it's more and more noticeable and in-your-face every day.  Obamacare is the latest insult and many consider it a direct and massive destruction of choice.

That analysis may be completely wrong, of course.  They may be angry for some completely different set of reasons.

Or for no reason at all.

What is certain, is that they are angry.  And that they'll do anything possible to escape the pain of being angry.  Including, for at least some of them, finding that a significant risk of destroying America is perfectly acceptable.  The anger may or may not be rational or even rationalizable.  The response to the anger, which is to destroy that which is making them angry, is perfectly rational.

This makes America's progressives angry.  This anger is perfectly rational and explicable.  After all, they are the majority, they have the mandate, the power, and the moral high-ground to enact programs that will make the country and the world a better place.  And this relatively small minority of conservatives and their allies is getting in the way, resisting at every step, gumming up the works, and purposefully damaging the country with their  temper tantrums and other reactions due to their uncontrolled anger.  Who wouldn't be angry at that?  I certainly would be.

Everybody is angry.

What should be immediately obvious, is that there is no possibility of a rational, reasoned debate.  This is about a strong difference of opinion of lower brains.  This is an emotional conflict, not a conflict of reason. Even if you believe that the Democrats are completely rational, the Republicans certainly are not, nor can they be, about the intrusions of the progressive agenda into their lives.  There are no solutions, within the structure of American government, that will alleviate the anger.

Can a society with so much anger survive?

Heading Clovis's Direction

The other SWIPIAW and I are heading to Machu Picchu and the Galapagos this afternoon.  Back in three weeks; I hope I don't miss too much while I'm gone.

Inaccessible Link Error Fixed?

So I think I fixed the problem with the template that was keeping people from clicking on comments buttons and other links that happened to be to the right of the Andertoons widget.

Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen

For those of us who believe in vast conspiracy theories...

Hat tip: xkcd

Pink Parable

I really dislike the color pink.  Not only do I find it incredibly ugly, when I'm in an environment with a lot of pink in it, I get headaches and feel sick.  This is a lower brain stem sort of thing, has nothing to do with rationality, and is strictly a strong innate subjective preference.

Fortunately, there's not a lot of pink in my life.  The sky is blue, trees are green, and rocks are brown and grey.  My wife knows that I don't like pink and her wardrobe is pretty much devoid of pink clothes.  My older daughter seems to have inherited my aversion to pink.  My younger daughter likes pink a lot, but does her best to keep pink in her room which works just fine for all of us.

But let's say that instead of living with my family, I was living in a house with three roommates, all of whom liked pink a lot.  As with my younger daughter, as long as they mostly kept pink to their own rooms, it wouldn't be a big deal.  But what if they decided, as the majority of the household, that all rooms, including mine, needed to be pink?  I might try to resist somewhat, but realistically, I would simply move out and go somewhere that wasn't pink, even if other living arrangements were substantially more expensive.

But what if moving out wasn't an option? Let's say there was nowhere else to live or that the majority everywhere decided everything needed to be pink.  Every day, my roommates add more and more pink to the household.  Every day, my headaches and feeling of sickness get worse.  There's no place to go, the roommates refuse to back down no matter what, the misery is relentless.

What would you do?

A Public Service Announcement

Keeping those at bay who would rather smash and grab or destroy than do anything productive -- and no, I'm not talking about progressives here -- requires the rest of us to jump through all manner of annoying hoops.  As much as I'd like to provide an easy answer to bridging the gap between airport parking and reaching the gate, I can't.

However, I am going to throw out a suggestion for dealing with an aspect of keeping our lives away from the vandals who really need vigorous kidney punching: computer hackers.  As much as I'd like to provide an easy answer to captchas (Restating the Obvious's is particularly annoying, and it isn't Harry's fault), I can't.  But I'm going to throw out a way to deal with the plethora of security questions to which we are obliged to provide answers.

There are a couple serious problems with security questions.

First, depending on the question, the answer is knowable -- your high school, for instance.  Sarah Palin had her personal Facebook account hacked because she picked a couple questions just like that, and then gave the true answers.

Second, if multiple people are to have legitimate access, their answers can obviously vary, sometimes insidiously.  I temporarily lost access to a joint account with the other SWIPIAW because, as it happens, the spelling of female names is notoriously feminine, and there are probably a half-dozen different ways of spelling our maid of honor's first name.  Then there is the problem of whose first pet, junior high school, favorite teacher, book, food, song, ad nauseum.

Therefore, I recommend taking an entirely different approach to security questions: use a rule to provide an answer that has nothing to do with the question, and will provide the correct, and different, answer to any question.

For examples: The answer to every security question is the first letter of each word in the question.  Or the second letter.   Or the first letter for the first word, second letter for the second, etc.  Or the first letter in each word, starting with the last word. 

The important thing is to pick one rule that is easy for you to remember, and use it every time. 

That means you can pick any question you want, always be able to provide the "correct" answer, and no one else will, no matter how much they know about you; unless, that is, you tell them your rule.  Using the first rule on a typical question, which may not even have an answer: 

<blockquote>What was the name of your first pet?  wwtnoyfp </blockquote>

And you thought Great Guys was good only for reasonably high-faluting sparring.

Knowledge and Power

Information is surprise.  To the extent that something is predictable, it doesn't contain information.  For example, let's say you're reading a book and you see the sequence "the sky is blu".  There is zero surprise and therefore no information conveyed when the next letter you see is 'e'.  If you already know the answer, there's no information conveyed.

In information theory, entropy is a measure of unpredictability or information content in a block of data.  If the data is maximally compressed, then every single bit of data is unpredictable and the information entropy is maximized.

High entropy, maximally compressed data is indistinguishable from gibberish (have you ever looked at compressed text, for example?) - unless you have the decompression key.

To send information somewhere, you need a channel to communicate.  The channel can be a wire or air or space or something else and uses some fraction of the available spectrum and bandwidth of the particular medium to send the information.

To maximize the amount of information you can send over a channel, you want to maximize the entropy of the information, and minimize the entropy of the channel.  In other words, you want to make the information look as much like pure noise as possible (compress the hell out of it and/or otherwise encode it) and you want to make the channel itself as quiet and noiseless as possible.

To summarize so far: information is surprise; surprise is unpredictable; maximum unpredictability is indistinguishable from noise without the key or code; and reducing the noise of a communication channel enables a higher rate of information transmission.  Except for a few minor details, that's everything there is to know about Information Theory. :-)  With some innovation regarding those minor details, coupled with an excellent business model, and you could be the next Qualcomm!

In the book Knowledge and Power, George Gilder proposes that Information Theory as described above is critical for understanding economic activity and economic systems.  Each of us has extensive localized Knowledge about consumption and production.  On the consumption side, we know what we'd like to consume and what we're willing to trade for those goods and services.  On the production side, we know what we're capable of producing and many of us have expertise, sometimes extensive, about various aspects of what's possible to produce given various inputs.

For that Knowledge to be useful, the information related to it must be transmitted to others.  For the vast majority of people, the vast majority of that information is indistinguishable from noise.  However, some have the "code" to understand the information being transmitted.  As a simple example, the price of rubber looks like a random squiggle to almost everybody.  However, to a tire manufacturer, there is critically important information embodied in those prices, especially when coupled with expected automotive demand and other related information.

The information channel that supports economic activity is critically important.  First, there needs to be one. The institutions of trade, property, law, etc. need to exist and they provide the infrastructure for the channel. According to Gilder, these institutions should be maintained by government.

With the Information Theory construct, it's clearly important that the economy's communication channel has as little noise as possible. This has two implications: the institutions that form the communication channel should be as predictable as possible since unpredictability means surprise which means noise; and the institutions themselves should be as quiet and non-intrusive as possible, otherwise the institutions use up precious channel bandwidth and compete with and overpower transmissions from economic activities, impeding the flow of that information and stifling the activities that would have resulted had that information gotten through.

In Gilder's view, predictability means that the institutions have structures and rules that are unchanging or slowly changing, easily understandable, and easy to follow.  This implies "rule of law" as opposed to "rule of man" (or "rule by fiat").  According to Gilder, keeping the institutions quiet means minimizing the information flow from the institutions through the channel.  Minimizing regulations, minimizing taxes and keeping the rules associated with the tax regime as simple as possible helps keep down channel noise and enables increased economic communication and activity.

Gilder notes that one of the problems with government institutions generating noise is that government has a lot of Power.  Its communications tend to be loud, high power communications, which uses up a tremendous amount of bandwidth, while Knowledge based economic communications tend to be quiet, low-power, numerous, and difficult to hear in the best of circumstances.  Communications with the Power of government can drown out large amounts of localized Knowledge within the economy.  According to Gilder, that is the fundamental relationship between Knowledge and Power.  Information transmissions regarding economic Knowledge moves the economy forward, while noisy information amplified by government Power holds it back.

While I find Gilder's ideas intriguing, he unfortunately leaves all the details to the reader.  As a conceptual metaphor for libertarians it's not bad, but without the mathematical relationships, empirical evidence, and plausible models, I don't think there's much one can do with it other than use it as the basis for some plausible thought experiments which I may propose in future posts.  Since Gilder is an ideas guy and definitely not a details guy, I doubt we'll see anything more directly usable from him on this topic.

An Immodest Proposal

It should be clear by now that unilateral disarmament doesn't work, and pacifism is fatally flawed. Unfortunately, whenever a mass shooting happens, the Left immediately jumps to its default position: calls for more gun regulation, with hopes for confiscation.

That the former is useless, and the latter impossible seems not to register; in reality, that place where nothing is free and unicorns only appear in kids books, the Left would find greater odds of success in making the crazy sane, and the evil good.

By far the most delusional concept has to be "gun free zones", which serve only to clearly identify where utterly defenseless people are gathered in confined spaces so the murderously insane can go on their killing binges with impunity.

It is long past time to break that delusional cycle, and the Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) program provides the way out. FFDOs have to undergo training and regular qualification in order to carry a gun on the airplane. Their authority extends only as far as the flight deck door.

We need to extend that model by creating a Federal Violence Prevention Officer (FVPO) program. It would look something like this:

• FVPOs are authorized only to stop actions with murderous intent.
• Local police departments screen applicants. Approval for the program requires a completely clean background check, except for minor traffic violations.
• Minimum age: 25 years old
• Approved applicants must, at their expense, purchase an HK USP40 pistol, then successfully complete NRA approved gun safety and tactical shooting programs.
• Semi-annual qualification shooting.
• FVPOs may carry anywhere at any time.
• FVPOs may not carry when drinking alcoholic beverages.

The point should be obvious, and no, it isn't to give Leftists the vapours.

Rather, the FVPO program will stop the fundamental insanity of telling the murderously insane exactly where they can go to kill at will for the 5-15 minutes it will take before the police can arrive. Additionally, it greatly increases the odds that someone will be in the vicinity of a suicide killer when he starts his spree.

In the realm of quotidian murders, the kind that go practically unnoticed by their hundreds in urban neighborhoods, incentives matter. Criminals and gang members are going to put a great deal more thought into popping off caps if they know there are hawks among the pigeons, and there's no telling which is which.

To be perfectly fair, this proposal requires addressing its downsides. Which are ... ummm ... There aren't any. No cost to the government, except for program administration costs. There are already law abiding and trained people carrying guns everywhere they go. They are called police officers. What possible objection could there be to adding to their numbers people who are just as law abiding, and at least as well trained?

Okay, there is one. Self defense is anathema to the Left. Insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing, hoping for a different approach each time. It is long past time to think different.

With Government and Stagnation for All

Finally! We're heading for equality!

For the last 10 to 15 years, the rich are getting poorer and the poor are getting poorer.  Everybody's in the same boat and the falling tide is lowering everybody.

Better yet, all races are getting poorer at the same time!  We're all in this together!

I wonder where all the money has gone?

Ahhhh.  Found it!  The chart below is United States Government Spending (all levels) per capita in constant 2005 dollars.  We pay approximately 3 times as much per person as we did 40 years ago.

Yes, yes, I know.  I've painted the most dismal and pessimistic picture possible with these three charts. However, the above charts happen to match my observations and daily experiences so perhaps that explains my pessimism.

For better or worse, I think the United States requires forward momentum in terms of wealth generation to exist for the long term in its current form.  Another decade or two of stagnation coupled with continued growth of government spending per capita and the continuing onslaught on an increasing regulatory burden will cripple this country.

I'm strongly encouraging my daughters to look for opportunities beyond our borders.

One for the Physicists Among Us...

... who also like music: Bohemian Gravity

A Few Infographics

Income Inequality

Poverty Rates

Income Mobility

The Mystery Graphic

I'll update this post in a day or two identifying "The Mystery Graphic" along with some more commentary.  In the meantime, any guesses?

All four infographics clearly correlate with each other.  The correlation between "The Mystery Graphic" and Income Mobility looks to be quite high by eye.  Any causation between the four?  If so, which way does the causation run?

Update...

Someone had sent me the Income Mobility infographic a couple of months ago. When I saw it, it reminded me of one I saw many years ago when then Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D, N.Y.) quipped: "If you would improve your state's math scores, move your state closer to the Canadian border!" That infographic showed math scores by state and looked nearly identical to the Income Mobility one.

Hey Skipper identified the source for The Mystery Graphic it in his comment on 18-Sep-2013 at 8:26 AM which he then subsequently deleted. The Mystery Graphic is the percentage of the population that's black by county.  The darkest blue is used for counties that are greater than 50% black.

Personally, I think that the correlation between The Mystery Graphic and Income Mobility is the most interesting.  It seems that blacks never have had, and perhaps never will have, any Income Mobility.

The first guess is racism, but as an explanation it has several holes.  Whites are also prejudiced against Asians, yet Asians have higher median incomes than whites.  Also, many of the ancestors of today's Chinese-Americans immigrated to work on the railroad, and were treated only a little, if any, better than the black slaves in the south.  Men are accused of being prejudiced against women, but women now graduate from college at far higher rates than men.  There's plenty of prejudice against Jews even today, yet no affirmative action is required there.  In the middle east, Arabs sometimes seem ignorant and backwards, but Arab-Americans do quite well on average.  In the last several decades, every group except blacks have had significant income mobility.

Also, if the answer is overwhelming racism, then why on earth are blacks moving back to the South?  In fact, why are they staying there at all?  I believe that anti-black racism is more prevalent in the South, but ultimately, money trumps racism for businesses making hiring decisions and catering to customers.  You may loathe the black customer, but his money's just as green as everyone else's, and if you want it, you'll be nice enough to him.  If you need to hire someone to get a job done, and the black guy can do it for a bit less than the white guy, you're going to hire the black guy.

For whatever reason, blacks have no significant income mobility, and are hugely over represented in the lower quintiles of education, earnings and opportunity.  This has been the case for generations.  Affirmative Action has made only the tiniest difference (and some would argue that it's not a positive difference), massive increases in spending on public education has made no difference at all (for anybody of any race), and welfare has fattened them up, but hasn't provided any additional opportunity.

They are stuck, nobody knows why, and there doesn't seem to be a solution.  Bummer.

Stuck Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

In a line, that pretty much describes our Syrian national security dilemma.  

While it is a truism, it isn't necessarily trite to note that the choice of solution depends upon framing the problem.  The opening sentence itself contains a frame: what happens in Syria is important to US national security.  Obviously, context matters.  It isn't necessarily true that Syria's civil war should amount to anything but a particularly murderous current event.  Think Rwanda.  

Except that the Assad regime used sarin gas.  To which the enquiring mind might ask, "So?"  There has been plenty of slaughter to go around, and there seems to be no obvious reason to prefer death by shrapnel evisceration over succumbing to sarin.

That the reason isn't obvious should be put down to improperly framing the problem.  Sarin gas is one leg of the triumvirate that comprises Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Aside from pointless wordiness (why not Mass Destruction Weapons?), nerve agents are distinctly different from nuclear and bacteriological weapons.  All three are the antithesis of precise application of force, but nerve agents are unique.  Like bacteriological weapons, and unlike nuclear weapons, they do not cause any infrastructure damage.  Unlike bacteriological and nuclear weapons, nerve agents like sarin have no persistent effects.

Which means we always needed a different term for nerve agents.  Something along the lines of PMW: Profitable Murder Weapon.  It requires no intellectual exertion to demonstrate that some people, given sufficient power, will start from the basest convictions and create hecatombs. What makes PMWs different is that it not only makes hecatombs easy, it makes them profitable.  For the price of a few crop dusters, entire districts can be had intact with only the bother of clearing corpses.  Ethnic cleansing without having to queue up the cattle cars.

That should frame the problem exquisitely.

The Assad regime's undeniable use of sarin presents a meta-problem.  By that I mean a problem that exists above other problems in the same realm.  In national security terms, resorting to a PMW requires a response independent of normal Hobbesian international relations.  And, unfortunately, the only country able to transcend Hobbes is the United States.

Which is one of the reasons why President Obama is stuck between the devil and the deep blue Sea.  Taking the appropriate action against the meta-problem could run directly counter to our Hobbesian interests; since it is impossible to say which victory is worse for us, Assad's, the Sunni's or the Shia's, our national security policy should be aimed at all of them losing for as long as possible.  Indeed, the Obama administrations seeming fecklessness in this regard might well be a cover for a far more cynical foreign policy than his worshipers would ever be willing to acknowledge.

Therefore, if I was the National Security Advisor, my advice would be:  1.  Doing nothing is, counterintuitively, doing something.  2.  This is a meta-problem; doing nothing isn't an option.  3.  The goal of doing something is not to dissuade the Assad regime from using PMWs again, but to make it (or others similarly inclined) sorry they ever thought about it in the first place.

Mr. President, I grant doing so could shift the balance of power to a party that is contrary to our national interests, but since they all are, that is, practically speaking, an imponderable distinction without difference.  

Presuming the President took my advice, the speech I would have written would have made the punitive point clear, and left the suggestion that the Snowden affair might well be a false flag operation:  "Everyone significant in the Assad government and military -- our PGMs have you on speed dial."  The clear goal to make those loyal to Assad, and their families, start to fear us more than him.

Clearly, this isn't what has happened.  Yet just as clearly even President Obama's most fervent critics must admit that what to do about Syria is a dilemma for which either horn could be argued effectively, solely based upon how the problem is framed.

So, no matter the decision, I won't criticize the President for making it.

However, there is criticism aplenty for his administration.  That the Assad regime had significant quantities of a PMW was no secret, nor should the possibility of its use in a regime-threatening civil war have come as any surprise.  That the Obama administration reacted like a headlight-pinned deer when the first small PMW uses occurred is bad enough, but that it should maintain that glassy-eyed posture when Assad stopped fooling around and got busy is almost unfathomable.  

Unfortunately, Obama himself, and the Left in general, are responsible for their own paralysis.  Having excoriated President Bush for having made a far more thorough case for eliminating Saddam, then gotten Congress's approval for doing so, Obama faces charges of gross hypocrisy on one hand, or dereliction in the face of eminently foreseeable provocation on the other.

Just because I framed the problem as I did doesn't make it right.  It would be easy to frame this horrible situation purely in terms of amoral state interests.  I think that would be risking the long term consequences of short term thinking, but there is no denying that the only way to the long term is through all manner of short terms.  

Leaving aside the administration's curious incompetence -- which I think we should, because even competent foreign policy would likely be in the same position -- I have a great deal of sympathy for him.  There is simply no good way out.

Oh, one other thing.  I have learned to absolutely loathe the term "boots on the ground".  If there was ever a dehumanizing term with which to refer to those who swear to risk their lives on our behalf, that must be it.  They are soldiers, people, not boots.  It is bad enough that all manner of people thoughtlessly use that wordy slander, but for the Commander in Chief to include it in a state speech is appalling. 

Andertoons

I've added Andertoons, one of my favorite cartoonists, to this blog's sidebar, so now you can stop by for your daily chuckle.

Who? And When?

At any given moment in time, I have no doubt that some number of poor individuals are better off with the big government welfare state. I don't mean better off in just a gaming-the-system somewhat materially enhanced sort of way, but truly better off.  Some number of other individuals are no doubt worse off.  The welfare state saves some lives.  Others die because of the welfare state.

As with any set of policies, there are winners and losers.  With the welfare state, lobbyists win, politicians win, bureaucrats win, some of the poor win, some of those win who have a strong subjective preference that some of the poor win via help from the government, and most others lose.  Given that there are winners and losers, it's always possible to construct utility functions that justify the welfare state or show that it's a net negative.

Let's for a moment examine one of the more well thought out analyses that's often used to justify the welfare state. A Theory of Justice by John Rawls does just that.  He does this by stepping through a set of clever thought experiments.

Everything flows from the first innovative thought experiment called the original position:

The original position is a hypothetical situation developed by American philosopher John Rawls as a thought experiment to replace the imagery of a savage state of nature of prior political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes. In the original position, the parties select principles that will determine the basic structure of the society they will live in. This choice is made from behind a veil of ignorance, which would deprive participants of information about their particular characteristics: his or her ethnicity, social status, gender and, crucially, Conception of the Good (an individual's idea of how to lead a good life). This forces participants to select principles impartially and rationally. [...]

Rawls argues that the representative parties in the original position would select two principles of justice:

1. Each citizen is guaranteed a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties, which is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all others;
2. Social and economic inequalities must satisfy two conditions:
   1. to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (the difference principle);
   2. attached to positions and offices open to all.

The reason that the least well off member gets benefited is that it is assumed that under the veil of ignorance, under original position, people will be risk averse. This implies that everyone is afraid of being part of the poor members of society, so the social contract is constructed to help the least well off members.

In other words, Rawls claims that those in the original position would all adopt a maximin strategy which would maximize the prospects of the least well-off.  Inequality is allowed to happen, but only to the extent that it creates incentives for the well-off to produce more such that it benefits the least well-off:

The Difference Principle regulates inequalities: it only permits inequalities that work to the advantage of the worst-off. 

The vast majority of academic criticism of A Theory of Justice came from the Left (i.e. it's not socialist enough).  However, "in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick argues that ... Rawls's application of the maximin rule to the original position is risk aversion taken to its extreme."

But depending on when the maximin rule is applied, I'm not sure it is extreme in its risk avoidance.  A thousand years ago, it was pretty important to avoid being among the worst-off pretty much everywhere in the world.  Even now, an awful lot of the world is pretty awful and if Rawlsian justice were achievable in those awful places, it would be pretty tempting to adopt it.  Unfortunately, it's precisely because no sort of justice is achievable in most of the awful places that they are awful in the first place.

To me, the primary problem with the original position, the veil of ignorance, the maximin rule, and the difference principle, is that they don't even attempt to take into account the effect of the structure of society on the future.  For example, assume that human civilization will ultimately span 100,000 years (it's spanned somewhat less than 10,000 years so far).  If a society constructed around completely free markets grew at a mere one-hundredth of one-percent per year faster than a society constructed around Rawls' difference principle, the median GDP per capita over the 100,000 year period for the free market society would be 148 times greater than for the difference principle society.  Even if we assume that the worst off get only one-hundredth as large a piece of the pie, the better bet from the original position, if you didn't know which time frame you were going to be part of, is the free market approach for all but the most extremely risk adverse people in the original position.

One of the biggest problems I have with the welfare state is that I believe that it's stealing from me now, but even worse, it's stealing even more from my children's future, and a tremendous amount from their descendants.

To summarize, the welfare state has winners and losers, but more and more losers over time.

Hey, What's Libertarianism, Anyway?

In the posts and comments on this blog, the term "libertarianism" is used quite a bit.  Unfortunately, like most "isms", it means significantly different things to different people.  I can't say what others mean when they use the word, but I'll at least try to be a bit more concrete by what I mean by it.

We'll start with the extremely useless dictionary definition:

lib·er·tar·i·an

noun

1. a person who advocates liberty, especially with regard to thought or conduct.

Anyone who's read a sampling of the posts here knows that liberty is extremely important to me, and is part of the reason libertarianism has appeal to me.  However, there's a bit more to it than that.

Moving onward to Wikipedia, we have:

Libertarianism (Latin: liber, "free")^[1] is a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end.^[2][3] This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty,^[4][5] political freedom, and voluntary association. It is the antonym to authoritarianism.^[6]

 

That definition is more complete, but still not adequate, because the Wikipedia article points out:

Different libertarian schools of thought disagree over whether or not the state should exist at all and, if it should, to what extent.^[7] While minarchists propose a state limited in scope to preventing aggression, theft, breach of contract and fraud, anarchists advocate its complete elimination as a political system.^{[8][9][10][11][7][12][13]} While certain libertarian currents are supportive of private property, such as in land and natural resources, others reject private ownership and instead advocate collective or cooperative ownership and management.^{[14][15][16][17]}

Whoa! Some libertarians "reject private ownership" and "advocate collective or cooperative ownership" instead?  I'll admit that's news to me and I definitely don't mean that when I use the term.

When I think of a libertarian state, I think of the United States just after the constitutional convention.  At the Federal level, it was mostly a Minarchy:

In the strictest sense, it holds that states ought to exist (as opposed to anarchy), that their only legitimate function is the protection of individuals from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud, and that the only legitimate governmental institutions are the military, police, and courts. In the broadest sense, it also includes fire departments, prisons, the executive, and legislatures as legitimate government functions.^[1][2][3] Such states are generally called night-watchman states. 

Minarchists argue that the state has no authority to use its monopoly of force to interfere with free transactions between people, and see the state's sole responsibility as ensuring that contracts between private individuals and property are protected, through a system of law courts and enforcement. Minarchists generally believe a laissez-faire approach to the economy is most likely to lead to economic prosperity.

That's a pretty good definition of the direction I'd head and what I mean by libertarianism.

There are a few caveats.

1. I only advocate for libertarianism at the federal level.  As far as I'm concerned, the 50 States can do whatever they like (within constitutional constraints) since I can always move.
2. I'm libertarian leaning as opposed to libertarian.  That is, I believe that all incremental change at the federal level should be towards a smaller government and that the change should be done in small increments as opposed to a revolution or rapid restructuring.  I suspect that well before we got to a true minarchy at the federal level, I'd want to put on the brakes, but we're so very, very far from that point today, that I simply needn't worry about it now (or in my lifetime).  I'm also very, very sure that the federal government does not need to get any bigger and yet more cumbersome.

So that's what I mean when I use the term libertarianism.

Ranch Liability

I went on vacation (with my wife and daughters) to a ranch (Rankin Ranch) last week.  The main activity is riding horses.  All guests have to sign a liability waiver which says something to the effect that we indemnify, hold harmless, and promise not to sue regardless of what happens during any and all activities (including horseback riding) while on the ranch.  Even though I'm well aware of the substantial danger of riding a horse, I was perfectly happy to sign that form and accept the risk.

I was talking with the ranchers, and they still have a large and very expensive liability insurance policy which imposes a number of restrictions on the types of horseback riding that's acceptable (for example, it's okay to gallop, but the guests have to be in a straight line while doing so) and the ranchers are still extremely worried about losing the ranch to lawyers because some guest gets hurt.

I don't know that much about liability law.  Why does the ranch need to be concerned with liability if everyone has signed a liability waiver?