For me, [Bastiat’s “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen“] is the pinnacle of economic profundity. You can call it obvious. But when I first started learning economics at the age of 17, none of Bastiat was obvious. I was an honors student at a well-regarded California high school. Yet as far as I can remember, I had never heard any argument against the minimum wage, Social Security, or the FDA in my entire life.
Every teacher and book I ever encountered treated naive populism like the Law of Gravitation. Evil businesses aren’t paying workers enough? Raise the minimum wage; problem solved. The elderly are poor? Increase Social Security payments; problem solved. Evil businesses are selling people bad drugs? Impose more government regulation; problem solved.
If you favor these programs, you can call these arguments straw men. But I assure you: These “straw men” were never presented by opponents of these policies. On the contrary, these “straw men” were invariably presented by people who favored these policies. How is that possible? Because during my first 17 years of life, I never encountered an opponent of any of these policies! You might assume I was grew up in a weird Berkeley-esque leftist enclave, but bland Northridge, California hardly qualifies.
What was going on? The best explanation is pretty simple: I only heard straw man arguments in favor of populist policies because virtually everyone finds these straw man arguments pleasantly convincing. Regardless of the merits of the minimum wage, Social Security, and the FDA, economic illiteracy is the reason for their popularity. If someone like Bastiat convinced people that the pleasantly convincing arguments are inane, proponents would have to fall back on arguments that are intellectually better yet rhetorically inferior.
Bryan Caplan, “Who Loves Bastiat and Who Loves Him Not”, EconLog, 2012-08-15
June 28, 2013
June 27, 2013
Progress and regress in the pursuit of care for the mentally ill
In City Journal, James Panero looks at the history of treatment of the mentally ill in America:
If it’s true that “men moralise among ruins,” as Benjamin Disraeli wrote, the ruins of America’s nineteenth-century mental institutions should invite some serious reflection. Built between 1850 and 1900, these crumbling edifices speak to our onetime dedication to caring for the mentally ill. Almost all were designed on the Kirkbride Plan, named for Pennsylvania physician Thomas Story Kirkbride, author of an influential treatise on the role of architecture and landscape in treating mental disorders. Even in their dilapidated state, it’s possible to see how the buildings, which followed a method of care called the “moral treatment,” gave the mentally ill a calming refuge from the gutters, jails, and almshouses that had been the default custodians of society’s “lunatics.”
Unfortunately, in the middle of the twentieth century, as asylums became grossly overcrowded and invasive treatments aroused public concern, the moral treatment came to seem immoral. The eventual result was the process known as deinstitutionalization, which steadily ejected patients from the asylums. Instead of liberating the mentally ill, however, deinstitutionalization left them — like the asylums that once sheltered them — in ruins. Many of today’s mentally ill have returned to pre-Kirkbride conditions and live on society’s margins, either sleeping on the streets or drifting among prisons, jails, welfare hotels, and outpatient facilities. As their diseases go untreated, they do significant harm to themselves and their families. Some go further, terrorizing communities with disorder and violence. Our failure to care for them recalls the inhumane era that preceded the rise of the state institutions. The time has come for new facilities and a new moral treatment.
[. . .]
At a time when the medical science of mental illness was in its infancy, the Kirkbride Plan created alternative, protected worlds for patients. It echoed many of today’s more holistic approaches to treatment by encouraging patients to participate in social activities, games, and crafts. Kirkbride institutions often sported their own baseball diamonds, golf courses, bakeries, bowling alleys, ice cream shops, dairy farms, gardens, and stages for plays and other performances.
But in the twentieth century, a shadow fell over the Kirkbride asylums, as doctors there began using more invasive procedures. The Austrian psychiatrist Manfred Sakel introduced insulin shock therapy, now known as insulin coma therapy, in the 1930s. Electroshock therapy arrived from Italy soon after. Both treatments induced seizures to alter brain chemistry in patients with depression and schizophrenia. In 1949, the Portuguese neuropsychiatrist Egas Moniz won a Nobel Prize for developing the frontal lobotomy, which he had invented in 1935. Walter Freeman, a clinical neurologist in Washington, D.C., further popularized the treatment through his own outpatient procedure, which came to be known as the transorbital, or “ice-pick,” lobotomy.
Section 13 repealed
In all the news from the US yesterday, this little civil liberties tidbit got pushed off the front page:
As I write this I am still only being updated by text message on the proceedings in the Senate chamber but I am told Bill C-304 has passed third reading and will receive Royal Assent tonight making it law.
What does this bill do?
There are a number of amendments to the act that help limit abuse but the main one is this:
2. Section 13 of the Act is repealed.
To put it bluntly, the means you can’t take someone through the federal human rights apparatus over hurt feelings via a blog post or a Facebook comment.
Now the bill is passed and will become law but like many acts of Parliament it will not come into force for a year.
Still after a long hard battle to restore free speech in Canada, this is a victory.
Bulgarian protests now into second week
In the Guardian, John O’Brennan brings us up to date on the much less reported-on protests in Bulgaria:
Bulgarians are protesting against far-reaching and systematic corruption and the “capture” of the state by rent-seeking oligarchic networks. Oresharski was appointed by the BSP to head a so-called “expert” government, after a general election in April produced a tight outcome. The technocratic government came about because the leading figures within the two largest political parties, the BSP and the centre-right Gerb (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria) were widely discredited. And although the prime minister has now withdrawn the appointment of Peevski, for protesters the episode suggested that even respected figures like Oresharski are incapable of shaking off the shadowy world of oligarchic power in Bulgaria.
In Bulgaria it is often impossible to know where organised crime ends and legitimate business begins. The nexus between the two is characterised by complex bureaucratic structures, opaque corporate accounting and a maze of offshore accounts. In Varna, Bulgaria’s third largest city, the protests have taken direct aim at TIM, a business conglomerate allied to Gerb and long the real power in the region. Some estimates suggest that it controls up to 70% of Varna’s economy, including most of the tourist infrastructure. When protesters in Varna yell “M-A-F-I-A” they are automatically collapsing business into politics and implicating local municipal officials as the agents of this powerful oligarchic network.
Varna perfectly illustrates why the current protests are largely non-party-political and anti-politics in tone: the definitive division in today’s Bulgaria is no longer between right and left, but between the citizens and the mafia. This is a world where the guilty don’t just go unpunished; they ascend to the highest citadels of power.
Although corruption and the abuse of power are the central themes of this protest, economic hardship also plays a role. New data from the EU demonstrates that Bulgarians have the lowest standard of living in the European Union, at around 50% of the EU average. Even Croatia, which will accede to the EU on 1 July, is significantly more prosperous than Bulgaria.
How many “environmental” groups are actually harming the environment
Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That:
Now, given that poverty is the greatest threat to the global environment, the inescapable conclusion is that the only way the global environment stands a chance is if poor countries can develop economically.
And that is why the anti-development, pro-expensive energy stance of the large environmental NGOs is one of the great environmental tragedies of our times.
Here’s the chain of causality:
1. Climate alarmists, with the strong support of the major environmental NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, declared war on CO2.
2. The method that they chose to fight CO2 was to discourage fossil fuel use by making energy more expensive, using a combination of taxation, legislation, international pressure, and expensive subsidies to achieve that end. Obama’s War on Coal, announced today, is just one of hundreds of examples of the wealthy NGOs and the rich governments working to increase the price of energy.
3. Since energy is development, expensive energy keeps poor countries in poverty. When the World Bank denies loans for coal fired plants in India, the poor suffer … but the environment suffers more. Until they can afford to use coal and gas, they’ll run the country on wood … I refer you back to Figure 1 for how well that works out.
4. Expensive energy slows a country’s economic development, and as President Obama pointed out, people worried about money don’t pay attention to the environment.
This ends up in a bizarre position—the actions of the major environmental NGOs are ensuring continued environmental destruction in the developing world.
June 26, 2013
Buh-bye, DOMA
I was away from my computer for about an hour this morning and when I came back online, my Twitter feed had exploded with news and opinion links about the US Supreme Court striking down the Defence of Marriage Act. While I’m delighted with the result (check my posts tagged Same Sex Marriage if you’re curious), it’s interesting to watch the reactions on all sides of the issue.
Glad we got the @boingboing RainbowJusticeMindControlLaser™ working today. We tried aiming it at #SCOTUS yesterday, too, but sadly missed.
— Boing Boing (@BoingBoing) June 26, 2013
Evil Koch brothers defeat the amazing Bill Clinton, RE: #DOMA. #HeadsExplode
— Corie Whalen (@CorieWhalen) June 26, 2013
90 minutes into the post-DOMA era: MY HETEROSEXUAL MARRIAGE STILL STRONG. Will wait another 30 minutes to see if it sticks.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) June 26, 2013
.@CatoInstitute is the only org that filed briefs on the winning side of #SCOTUS rulings on #VRA, affirmative action, AND #marriageequality!
— Cato Institute (@CatoInstitute) June 26, 2013
Gay men and women, today is for celebrating. Tomorrow is for the awkward conversation, followed by the acrimonious breakup.
— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) June 26, 2013
Remember when you were against it? Fun times. MT @BarackObama Today's Supreme Court rulings mark a major milestone on the road to equality.
— Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) June 26, 2013
Who DOESN'T cry at weddings!? RT @GovMikeHuckabee My thoughts on the SCOTUS ruling that determined same sex marriage is okay: "Jesus wept."
— Rachel B (@rachelbensen) June 26, 2013
Petitioning to “save” Kensington Market
John Pepall on the claimed 80,000 folks who’ve signed petitions to stop WalMart and Loblaws from moving near the historic area of Kensington Market:
What these people must be saying is that many people who now shop in the Kensington Market would, if the Walmart or Loblaw’s opened, choose to shop at them instead. And they want the City government to deny them that choice.
Just conceivably the petitions could be a kind of voluntary market survey, kindly warning Walmart and Loblaw’s that people won’t shop at their stores. That they will lose money because people prefer to shop at the Kensington Market. But plainly they are not. The petitioners call themselves the Friends of the Kensington Market and claim they are trying to Save the Kensington Market. The big corporations and their big stores are the baddies. And the retailers of Kensington Market are the good guys.
What are they up to then? If they are a statistically significant sample of people who regularly shop at the Kensington Market, they have nothing to worry about. Unless they own shares in Walmart or Loblaw’s. They will continue to shop in a thriving Kensington Market and Walmart and Loblaw’s will struggle and perhaps go away.
Might they? Just might they be people who already shop at the Loblaw’s on Christie or Whole Foods on Avenue Road and, perhaps, fashionable organic farmers’ markets and occasionally go down to Kensington Market for fine cheese or fish, or vintage clothing and a bite at one of its characterful restaurants?
If so, and at over eighty thousand and rising the petitioners must go way beyond the regular household shoppers in the Market, they are basically local tourists who want to restrict the shopping choices of those who live in the Kensington neighbourhood so that they can have a picturesque market to visit when they tire of the Distillery District or funky Queen Street West.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
Australian PM deposed in party coup
It may seem fitting that Julia Gillard was ousted from the premiership in the same way she achieved the position – an internal party coup:
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Wednesday pulled off one of the most sensational political comebacks in Australian history, ousting in a party vote Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the woman who replaced him as leader of the Labor Party in a 2010 party coup.
The victory by Mr. Rudd in a closed-door vote late Wednesday paves the way for an end to the rocky tenure of Ms. Gillard, who had called the surprise vote in an effort to head off a challenge from Mr. Rudd’s backers. Much of the momentum to reinstate Mr. Rudd came from a steady drumbeat of polls showing that the party under Ms. Gillard was almost certain to face a catastrophic loss in elections to be held in September.
Ms. Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister in a 2010 party coup that ousted Mr. Rudd, who was derided during his tenure for an authoritarian leadership style. But she has seen her poll ratings plummet since announcing in January, unusually early, that federal elections would be held in September.
[. . .]
Despite Mr. Rudd’s victory within his own party, he is not automatically assured of becoming the new prime minister. It remained immediately unclear whether he had enough support from the independent lawmakers whose backing allowed Ms. Gillard to form a government after Labor’s disappointing showing in the last elections. The process starts when Ms. Gillard now formally asks the country’s governor general to make Mr. Rudd prime minister.
The many personae of Bob Rae
At Gods of the Copybook Headings, Richard Anderson says goodbye (for now) to Bob Rae:
There has, in truth, not been one Bob Rae in Canadian public life. There have been several, each slightly less obnoxious than the last. The ex-interim Liberal leader holds the rare distinction of actually having improved with age. From student radical and Rhodes Scholar, to NDP hell raiser who helped topple Joe Clark’s government, to enabler of David Peterson’s coup d’grace for the Ontario Tory dynasty in 1985. The Bob is a very well travelled pol. Few vote chaser survive this long in the game, so a measure of respect is due. I’ll measure it out by the thimble.
Yet whatever he has done before or since, Bob Rae will always be the first and so far only NDP Premier of Ontario. Rae could win the Nobel Prize tomorrow and his obituary would still mention his epic single term as Premier. While I’ve never met the man, perhaps a saving grace for us both, he is the first political figure of whom I have a clear image. There is no figure in modern Ontario politics, aside from Mike Harris himself, who was as thoroughly despised as Bob Rae.
[. . .]
Rae Days were a sincere attempt to be politically Left wing while also fiscally sane. Roy Romanow was doing similar things in Saskatchewan at the time. But Prairie socialists seem to be saner than Ontario socialists. Perhaps it’s something in the water. An intelligent labour movement would have recognized that Bob Rae was trying to save their necks. The blockheads running the public sector unions in the early 1990s did not realize this or did not care to acknowledge fiscal reality. These were the sorts of people who refer to their fellow union members as “brothers and sisters.” They hadn’t gotten the memo about the failure of socialism. Judging by their successors the public sector union movement still hasn’t.
It’s believed that at some point in 1993 or 1994, looking out of his office at Queen’s Park toward a sea of protesting civil servants, that Bob Rae realized he was a Liberal. His brother was a Liberal. Many of his friends were Liberals. From time to time Liberals were known to balance the books and speak in coherent sentences. The Liberals were the party of sane statists. Since he was the NDP Premier of Ontario he decided to ride the whole thing out, delaying the election until the last possible moment. Mike Harris won. Bob Rae went into exile for eleven years and the rest is history.
With the Bob gone Justin is now left without adult supervision. Certainly Gerald Butts & Co are there to direct their ward, but they’re not grizzled old veterans. In his short stint as interim Liberal leader Bob Rae showed himself as smooth, graceful and facile. A long haul from the awkward socialist geek who stunned the country by winning power a generation earlier. Politics is a game won by professionals. For all his many sins and occasional virtues, Bob Rae was a professional politician. Justin Trudeau is not. There is some hope in that.
Mark Steyn on the rise of UKIP
It’s the attack of the swivel-eyed loons:
It’s all but impossible to launch a new political party under America’s electoral arrangements, and extremely easy to do so under Continental proportional representation. The Westminster first-past-the-post system puts the task somewhere in between: tough, but not entirely the realm of fantasy. The Labour party came into being at the dawn of the 20th century, and formed its first government in 1924. The United Kingdom Independence party was born in 1993 and now, a mere two decades later, is on the brink of … well, okay, not forming its first government, but it did do eerily well in May’s local elections. The Liberals were reduced to their all-time lowest share of the vote, the Tories to their lowest since 1982, and for the first time ever, none of the three “mainstream” parties cracked 30 percent: Labour had a good night with 29, the Conservatives came second at 25, and nipping at their heels was the United Kingdom Independence party with 23 percent.
They achieved this impressive result against not three opponents but also a fourth — a media that have almost universally derided the party as a sinkhole of nutters and cranks. UKIP’s leader, the boundlessly affable Nigel Farage, went to P. G. Wodehouse’s old high school, Dulwich College, and to a sneering metropolitan press, Farage’s party is a déclassé Wodehousean touring company mired in an elysian England that never was, populated only by golf-club duffers, halfwit toffs, rustic simpletons, and hail-fellow-well-met bores from the snug of the village pub. When I shared a platform with him in Toronto a few months back, Mr. Farage explained his party’s rise by citing not Wodehouse but another Dulwich old boy, the late British comic Bob Monkhouse: “They all laughed when I said I’d become a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”
The British media spent 20 years laughing at UKIP. But they’re not laughing now — not when one in four electors takes them seriously enough to vote for them. So, having dismissed him as a joke, Fleet Street now warns that Farage uses his famous sense of humor as a sly cover for his dark totalitarian agenda — the same well-trod path to power used by other famous quipsters and gag-merchants such as Adolf Hitler, whose Nuremberg open-mike nights were legendary. “Nigel Farage is easy to laugh at … that means he’s dangerous,” declared the Independent. The Mirror warned of an “unfulfilled capacity for evil.” “Stop laughing,” ordered Jemma Wayne in the British edition of the Huffington Post. “Farage would lead us back to the dark ages.” The more the “mainstream” shriek about how mad, bad, and dangerous UKIP is, the more they sound like the ones who’ve come unhinged.
June 25, 2013
Snowden’s character doesn’t matter – Snowden’s revelations matter a great deal
Gene Healy says that it doesn’t matter what you think about Edward Snowden, you should care a lot about what he’s revealed:
Here, the most disturbing aspect of the Snowden revelations is the NSA’s comprehensive, multiyear call-records database, with communication and phone-location information on millions of Americans. Especially if combined with metadata on emails, website visits and financial transactions that the agency is also amassing, that information is a potential treasure trove for political abuse — it can be used to ferret out the sort of information governments have historically used to blackmail and neutralize political opponents: who’s leaking, who’s organizing, who’s having an affair. The potential abuse of that information represents a grave threat to American liberty and privacy regardless of Snowden’s character and motivations.
In an post last week, Buzzfeed‘s Ben Smith makes the key point: “You Don’t Have to Like Edward Snowden.” Snowden, Smith argues, is “a source,” and the information sources convey is far more important than their “moral status” or the “fate of [their] eternal soul[s].”
Smith mentions Mark Felt, the FBI honcho who served as Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” during their investigation of the Watergate burglary and cover-up. Felt, it turned out, was simply settling scores in a bureaucratic power struggle. He had no scruples against criminal violations of privacy — in 1980 he was convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans through warrantless break-ins as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.
It was important for Americans to know that their president was a crook. That Mark Felt was also a crook is neither here nor there. As Smith puts it, “who cares?”
Portugal’s experience with drug decriminalization
The Cato Institute sent out a Twitter update, reminding everyone about the 2009 White Paper by Glenn Greenwald on how the Portuguese drug experiment played out after 2001:
On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were “decriminalized,” not “legalized.” Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.
While other states in the European Union have developed various forms of de facto decriminalization — whereby substances perceived to be less serious (such as cannabis) rarely lead to criminal prosecution — Portugal remains the only EU member state with a law explicitly declaring drugs to be “decriminalized.” Because more than seven years have now elapsed since enactment of Portugal’s decriminalization system, there are ample data enabling its effects to be assessed.
Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal’s decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for “drug tourists” — has occurred.
The political consensus in favor of decriminalization is unsurprising in light of the relevant empirical data. Those data indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although postdecriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization.
Maybe crime doesn’t pay after all…
680News reported on a Toronto Police drug investigation that ended up with 35 arrests on various charges. That sounds impressive until you get down to the summary of what contraband was confiscated in “Project Wanted”:
Thirteen grams of crack cocaine were seized, seven grams of marijuana, three grams of heroin, 34 grams of ecstasy. The total street value of the drugs was valued at $5,000. The police also seized $1,710.00.
Unless they managed to flush a huge amount of drugs before being arrested, you’d have to say that these people wouldn’t be listed as “drug kingpins”. And these are not amateurs, either:
Police also allege that the total number of convictions of those arrested is 723. The average number of convictions on each person’s criminal record is 20.
Twenty-seven of those arrested were on bail at the time the crimes were alleged to have happened. Nine were on probation.
“You cannot have a functioning democratic republic when the laws are so voluminous no one can know what the law is”
I really did think they were kidding about needing to pass the law to be able to find out what was in it, but this appears to be the way US laws are made nowadays:
When a bill is amended in a sneaky manner, as this one has been, no responsible senator could just read 100 new pages. The amendments are interspersed thoughout the bill — it’s not like you could sit and read them as a unit, even if you had the time. Since the proponents are clearly trying to pull a fast one, prudence, as Senator Cruz pointed out, would dictate rereading every line of text, old and new, to search for insertions — and, indeed, news reports indicate that numerous new buy-offs and pot-sweeteners have been inserted.
But there is a larger point: no “important legislation” should be 100 pages long, much less 1,200 (or the even more mind-boggling girth of monstrosities like Obamacare). The United States Constitution is about 4,500 words long — outfits like Cato and Heritage publish it in small pamphlets that can be read in a few minutes. Nowadays, not only are the bills so gargantuan that no one could conceivably master them and predict their consequences; each page produces even more pages of regulations. They can’t even be lifted, much less digested.
You cannot have a functioning democratic republic when the laws are so voluminous no one can know what the law is. And that is especially the case when (a) the rationale for passing new laws — according to “reform” proponents like Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan — is that we don’t enforce the laws currently on the books; (b) key parts of legislation consist of commitments to do what previously enacted law already commands; and (c) the president, notwithstanding his oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, claims the power to refrain from enforcing whatever laws he disapproves of. Washington has made a farce of the legislative process and of the once proud boast that we are ”a nation of laws not men.”
