Quotulatiousness

September 25, 2012

It’s not just your imagination: libertarians really are weird

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Jonathan Haidt at the Righteous Mind summarizes a recent study published in PLoS ONE which looked at the psychology of libertarians (using conservatives and liberals as controls):

The findings largely confirm what libertarians have long said about themselves, but they also shed light on why some people and not others end up finding libertarian ideas appealing. Here are three of the major findings:

1) On moral values: Libertarians match liberals in placing a relatively low value on the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity (e.g., they’re not so concerned about sexual issues and flag burning), but they join conservatives in scoring lower than liberals on the care and fairness foundations (where fairness is mostly equality, not proportionality; e.g., they don’t want a welfare state and heavy handed measures to enforce equality). This is why libertarians can’t be placed on the spectrum from left to right: they have a unique pattern that is in no sense just somewhere in the middle. They really do put liberty above all other values.

2) On reasoning and emotions: Libertarians have the most “masculine” style, liberals the most “feminine.” We used Simon Baron-Cohen’s measures of “empathizing” (on which women tend to score higher) and “systemizing”, which refers to “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” Men tend to score higher on this variable. Libertarians score the lowest of the three groups on empathizing, and highest of the three groups on systemizing. (Note that we did this and all other analyses for males and females separately.) On this and other measures, libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest. Libertarians, more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.

3) On relationships: Libertarians are the most individualistic; they report the weakest ties to other people. They score lowest of the three groups on many traits related to sociability, including extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. They have a morality that matches their sociability – one that emphasizes independence, rather than altruism or patriotism.

September 19, 2012

Jacob Sullum on the legacy of Thomas Szasz

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:48

Jacob Sullum‘s post on the influence the late Thomas Szasz had and continues to have:

The idea that psychiatry became scientifically rigorous soon after Szasz first likened it to alchemy and astrology is hard to take seriously. After all, it was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) stopped calling homosexuality a mental disorder.

More often, psychiatry has expanded its domain. Today it encompasses myriad sins and foibles, including smoking, overeating, gambling, shoplifting, sexual promiscuity, pederasty, rambunctiousness, inattentiveness, social awkwardness, anxiety, sadness, and political extremism. If it can be described, it can be diagnosed, but only if the APA says so.

[. . .]

For more than half a century, Szasz stubbornly highlighted the hazards of joining such a fuzzy, subjective concept with the force of law through involuntary treatment, the insanity defense, and other psychiatrically informed policies.

Consider “sexually violent predators,” who are convicted and imprisoned based on the premise that they could have restrained themselves but failed to do so, then committed to mental hospitals after completing their sentences based on the premise that they suffer from irresistible urges and therefore pose an intolerable threat to public safety. From a Szaszian perspective, this incoherent theory is a cover for what is really going on: the retroactive enhancement of duly imposed sentences by politicians who decided certain criminals were getting off too lightly — a policy so plainly contrary to due process and the rule of law that it had to be dressed up in quasi-medical, pseudoscientific justifications.

Szasz specialized in puncturing such pretensions. He relentlessly attacked the “therapeutic state,” the unhealthy alliance of medicine and government that blesses all sorts of unjustified limits on liberty, ranging from the mandatory prescription system to laws against suicide.

September 18, 2012

Canada ranks fifth in the world for economic freedom

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

The annual Fraser Institute report on world economic freedom may confirm what a lot of Canadians have been noticing: we’re now much more free than our American friends, at least by the measurements tracked in this series of rankings (PDF):

  • In the chain-linked index, average economic freedom rose from 5.30 (out of 10) in
    1980 to 6.88 in 2007. It then fell for two consecutive years, resulting in a score of
    6.79 in 2009 but has risen slightly to 6.83 in 2010, the most recent year available.
    It appears that responses to the economic crisis have reduced economic freedom
    in the short term and perhaps prosperity over the long term, but the upward
    movement this year is encouraging.
  • In this year’s index, Hong Kong retains the highest rating for economic freedom,
    8.90 out of 10. The other top 10 nations are: Singapore, 8.69; New Zealand, 8.36;
    Switzerland, 8.24; Australia, 7.97; Canada, 7.97; Bahrain, 7.94; Mauritius, 7.90;
    Finland, 7.88; and Chile, 7.84.
  • The rankings (and scores) of other large economies in this year’s index are the United
    Kingdom, 12th (7.75); the United States, 18th (7.69); Japan, 20th (7.64); Germany,
    31st (7.52); France, 47th (7.32); Italy, 83rd (6.77); Mexico, 91st, (6.66); Russia, 95th
    (6.56); Brazil, 105th (6.37); China, 107th (6.35); and India, 111th (6.26).
  • The scores of the bottom ten nations in this year’s index are: Venezuela, 4.07;
    Myanmar, 4.29; Zimbabwe, 4.35; Republic of the Congo, 4.86; Angola, 5.12;
    Democratic Republic of the Congo, 5.18; Guinea-Bissau, 5.23; Algeria, 5.34; Chad,
    5.41; and, tied for 10th worst, Mozambique and Burundi, 5.45.
  • The United States, long considered the standard bearer for economic freedom
    among large industrial nations, has experienced a substantial decline in economic
    freedom during the past decade. From 1980 to 2000, the United States was generally
    rated the third freest economy in the world, ranking behind only Hong Kong and
    Singapore. After increasing steadily during the period from 1980 to 2000, the chainlinked
    EFW rating of the United States fell from 8.65 in 2000 to 8.21 in 2005 and
    7.70 in 2010. The chain-linked ranking of the United States has fallen precipitously
    from second in 2000 to eighth in 2005 and 19th in 2010 (unadjusted ranking of 18th).

Jaywalking in LA County: a capital offence

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

A very disturbing story at the Simple Justice blog:

Jonathan Cuevas was a jaywalker. That’s right, a jaywalker. And jaywalking is an offense. This means that those who are of the view that the simple solution to whatever stems from the commission of an offense is, by definition, justified. After all, Cuevas chose to jaywalk. He chose to commit the offense. So he has no one to blame for his killing than himself.

And if this is what you think, then you have lost any shred of humanity.

[. . .]

The gun is a red herring. Notwithstanding the fact that the video fails to show anything remotely suggesting that Cuevas pulled it on the unnamed deputy, and despite the absurdity of such a claim, he was shot, again and again, in the back as he ran away. There is no theory to explain an officer in fear from a person’s back as he ran away. This, of course, didn’t stop the police from asserting with absolute certainty that it happened.

Yet, there is not only a lack of focus on what is clearly shown in the video, but the possibility that it was wrong to execute Jonathan Cuevas for the heinous offense of jaywalking was dismissed because the police and district attorney “investigated.” After all, if they investigated and decided that this was a righteous shoot, what more is there to say?

September 17, 2012

Volokh: When you reward certain kinds of behaviour, you get more of it

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

The context here is the various arms of the US government scrambling to condemn the alleged maker of the alleged film Innocence of Muslims. Eugene Volokh explains that this is actually inviting further demands for “satisfaction” on the part of the offended:

In recent days, I’ve heard various people calling for punishing the maker of Innocence of Muslims, and more broadly for suppressing such speech. During the Terry Jones planned Koran-burning controversy, I heard similar calls. Such expression leads to the deaths of people, including Americans. It worsens our relations with important foreign countries. It’s intended to stir up trouble. And it’s hardly high art, or thoughtful political arguments. It’s not like it’s Satanic Verses, or even South Park or Life of Brian. Why not shut it down, and punish those who engage in it (of course, while keeping Satanic Verses and the like protected)?

I think there are many reasons to resist such calls, but in this post I want to focus on one: I think such suppression would likely lead to more riots and more deaths, not less. Here’s why.

Behavior that gets rewarded, gets repeated. (Relatedly, “once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.”) Say that the murders in Libya lead us to pass a law banning some kinds of speech that Muslims find offensive or blasphemous, or reinterpreting our First Amendment rules to make it possible to punish such speech under some existing law.

What then will extremist Muslims see? They killed several Americans (maybe itself a plus from their view). In exchange, they’ve gotten America to submit to their will. And on top of that, they’ve gotten back at blasphemers, and deter future blasphemy. A triple victory.

Would this (a) satisfy them that now America is trying to prevent blasphemy, so there’s no reason to kill over the next offensive incident, or (b) make them want more such victories? My money would be on (b).

September 15, 2012

Malaysia working on its “homosexual problem”

Filed under: Asia, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:43

From the Guardian:

The Malaysian government has begun holding seminars aiming to help teachers and parents spot signs of homosexuality in children, underscoring a rise in religious conservatism in the country.

So far, the Teachers Foundation of Malaysia has organised 10 seminars across the country. Attendance at the last event on Wednesday reached 1,500 people, a spokesman for the organisation said.

“It is a multi-religious and multicultural [event], after all, all religions are basically against that type of behaviour,” said the official.

The federal government said in March that it is working to curb the “problem” of homosexuality, especially among Muslims who make up over 60% of Malaysia’s population of 29 million people.

According to a handout issued at a recent seminar, signs of homosexuality in boys may include preferences for tight, light-coloured clothes and large handbags, local media reported.

[. . .]

Official intolerance of gay people has been on the rise. Last year, despite widespread criticism, the east coast state of Terengganu set up a camp for “effeminate” boys to show them how to become men.

H/T to Christopher Taylor for the link.

September 11, 2012

Thomas Szasz, RIP

Filed under: Books, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

A brief obituary notice for Thomas Szasz:

Thomas Stephen Szasz, M.D., 92, died at his home in Manlius, N.Y. on September 8, 2012. He was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1920, and emigrated to the United States in 1938. He graduated the University of Cincinnati with an undergraduate degree in physics in 1941, and as valedictorian of the medical school in 1944. After medical internship at Boston City Hospital and psychiatry residency at the University of Chicago, he pursued psychoanalytic training. [. . .] He argued that what are called mental illnesses are often better described as “problems in living,” and he opposed involuntary psychiatric interventions. His reputation in defense of these principles was launched in 1961 with The Myth of Mental Illness. He published 35 books, translated into numerous languages, and hundreds of articles in the subsequent 50 years.

Manufacturers may follow the music industry pattern

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

An interesting article in The Economist:

As an expert on intellectual property, Mr Weinberg has produced a white paper that documents the likely course of 3D-printing’s development — and how the technology could be affected by patent and copyright law. He is far from sanguine about its prospects. His main fear is that the fledgling technology could have its wings clipped by traditional manufacturers, who will doubtless view it as a threat to their livelihoods, and do all in their powers to nobble it. Because of a 3D printer’s ability to make perfect replicas, they will probably try to brand it a piracy machine.

[. . .]

As with any disruptive technology — from the printing press to the photocopier and the personal computer — 3D printing is going to upset existing manufacturers, who are bound to see it as a threat to their traditional way of doing business. And as 3D printing proliferates, the incumbents will almost certainly demand protection from upstarts with low cost of entry to their markets.

Manufacturers are likely to behave much like the record industry did when its own business model — based on selling pricey CD albums that few music fans wanted instead of cheap single tracks they craved — came under attack from file-swapping technology and MP3 software. The manufacturers’ most likely recourse will be to embrace copyright, rather than patent, law, because many of their patents will have expired. Patents apply for only 20 years while copyright continues for 70 years after the creator’s death.

[. . .]

In that, the record industry was remarkably successful. Today, websites and ISPs have to block or remove infringing material whenever they receive a DMCA takedown notice from a copyright holder — something that happens more often than actually justified. Google reckons that more than a third of the DMCA notices it has received over the years have turned out to be bogus copyright claims. Over a half were from companies trying to restrict competing businesses rather than law-breakers.

Rallying under the banner of piracy and theft, established manufacturers could likewise seek to get the doctrine of “contributory infringement” included in some expanded object-copyright law as a way of crippling the personal-manufacturing movement before it eats their lunch. Being free to sue websites that host 3D design files as “havens of piracy” would save them the time and money of having to prosecute thousands of individuals with a 3D printer churning out copies at home.

September 10, 2012

Extending the state’s say in private decision-making

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

Barbara Hewson on recent legal developments in Britain which extend the state’s ability to interfere in the private lives of adults:

For centuries, the High Court has claimed an ‘inherent jurisdiction’ to take care of the persons and property of those who could not look after themselves. This power covers minors and wards of court, as well as adults who lack mental capacity. It originates in an ancient Crown Prerogative, going back to feudal times (1). But in a little-noticed legal development, some judges of the Family Division have started to claim an ‘inherent jurisdiction’ over the lives of adults in full possession of their faculties.

This is a disturbing trend. These rulings are given at private hearings. Parliament, the public, and indeed the Ministry of Justice, are none the wiser. The problem, at base, is a constitutional one. Our judges are unelected, and are not supposed to make laws. That is parliament’s function.

Parliament has said that people become adults at age 18 (2). Most people think that the point of reaching adulthood is that you get to decide where you live, and who your friends are. If you make unwise decisions, that is unfortunate, but it is not a basis for the authorities to intervene. However, last March, in a case called ‘DL’, the Court of Appeal said that the High Court is entitled to disregard adult decision-making (3).

[. . .]

Judges of the Family Division of the High Court have been seduced by what Frank Furedi has called ‘the fatalistic sociology of the precautionary principle’. This views all human beings as innately powerless, vulnerable and at risk (7). And if to be at risk is a condition of life, then everyone becomes a legitimate target of judicial intervention and protection. This refusal by the courts to acknowledge adults as self-determining agents has ominous implications for liberty and the law.

September 5, 2012

“What kind of Mormon is Mitt Romney?”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

L. Neil Smith says that — unlike most of the Mormons he’s met in real life — Mitt Romney “has the same respect for individual liberty and the Bill of Rights that a dog has for a fire hydrant.”

Now I asked jokingly a while back on FaceBook, what kind of Mormon is Mitt Romney? One side of his family let the United States Cavalry drive them into Mexico (despite the constraints of the First Amendment), rather than give up what they believed in. But if Romney was a Mormon like that, at his age, with his wealth, he’d have sixteen wives by now.

Instead, he’s the kind of Mormon who rolled over like an obedient cur and changed their customs so they could be a state. The irony is that, hating gun ownership as he does (the list of his crimes against the Second Amendment is as long as Brigham Young’s wagon train) and favoring abortion and government healthcare, as he has, he couldn’t get himself elected in Utah even throwing around the kind of money he has.

So, skipping Michigan, where he grew up, he went to the Massachusetts S.S.R, and began the sort of lying and cheating that recently got him his Presidential nomination. He claimed to have “fixed” the Olympics, but the numbers are in now, and the man’s a fraud. He couldn’t make the residence requirement in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts so he most likely bought his way around the ballot laws, as he buys his way around everything, exactly like a Kennedy.

The silliest, most dangerous thing in the world is a communist with money. Look at Michael Moore. Look at Bono. Look at Rosie O’Donnell. No, you don’t really have to. It was just a rhetorical exercise. Twenty years ago, I heard Cher admit on TV that she was a grown woman and married before she realized that Mount Rushmore is not a natural phenomenon. These people have the intellect of a boiled onion.

September 4, 2012

TANSTAAFL is not the whole story

Filed under: Economics, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

At The Freeman, Sandy Ikeda points out that the handy little saying “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is not enough to explain modern prosperity::

Economics teaches us the importance of TANSTAAFL and capital investment. Again, the trouble is they are not the whole truth.

As I’ve written before, however, there is such a thing as a free lunch, and I don’t want to repeat that argument in its entirety. The basic idea is that what Israel M. Kirzner calls “the driving force of the market” is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship goes beyond working within a budget — it’s the discovery of novel opportunities that increase the wealth and raises the budgets of everyone in society, much as the late Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Madam C.J. Walker (probably the first African-American millionaire) did. Yes, those innovators needed saving and capital investment by someone — most innovators were debtors at first — but note: Those savings could have been and were invested in less productive investments before these guys came along.

As McCloskey, as well as Rosenberg and Birdzell, have argued, it isn’t saving, capital investment per se, and certainly not colonialism, income inequality, capitalist exploitation, or even hard work that is responsible for the tremendous rise in economic development, especially since 1800.

It is innovation.

And, McCloskey adds, it is crucially the ideas and words that we use to think and talk about the people who innovate — the chance takers, the rebels, the individualists, the game changers — and that reflect a respect for and acceptance of the very concept of progress. Innovation blasts the doors off budget constraints and swamps current rates of savings.

[. . .]

Indeed, innovation is perhaps what enables the market economy to stay ahead of, for the time being at least, the interventionist shackles that increasingly hamper it. You want to regulate landline telephones? I’ll invent the mobile phone! You make mail delivery a legal monopoly? I’ll invent email! You want to impose fixed-rail transport on our cities? I’ll invent the driverless car!

McCloskey’s book has shown up a few times on the blog.

Want to ensure that your shipment is opened and fully inspected at least once?

Filed under: Government, Humour, Liberty, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:01

If you’re not happy unless your package has been thoroughly inspected by trained professionals on its way to the destination, you’ll want to stock up on this new item available from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

September 2, 2012

The importance of encryption for private citizens

Filed under: History, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Wendy McElroy relates one of the earliest examples of private encryption in the young American republic:

In America, the tug of war between privacy and forced access to encrypted data is as old as the nation’s formation. As always, forced access was executed by authorities against individuals.

In 1785, a resolution authorized the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs to open and inspect any mail that related to the safety and interests of the United States. The ensuing inspections caused prominent men, like George Washington, to complain of mail tampering. According to various historians, it also led James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to correspond in code. That is, they encrypted their letters to preserve the privacy of their political discussions.

The need for Founding Fathers to encrypt their correspondence is high irony. The intrusive post office against which they rebelled had been established specifically to provide a free flow of political opinion. In the 1770′s, Sam Adams urged the 13 colonies to create an independent postal system because the existing post office, established by the British, acted as a barrier to the spread of rebellious sentiment. Dorothy Ganfield Fowler in her book Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office observed, “He [Adams] claimed the colonial post office was made use of for the purpose of stopping the ‘Channels of publick Intelligence and so in Effect of aiding the measures of Tyranny.’”

Alas, the more government changes, the more oppression remains the same. Soon the Continental Congress itself wanted to declare some types of matter ‘unmailable’ because their content were deemed dangerous. Anti-Federalist letters and periodicals became one of the first types of information to become de facto unmailable. (Anti-federalists resisted centralized government and rejected a Constitution without a Bill of Rights.) During the ratification debates on the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were unable to circulate their material through the Federalist-controlled post office.

August 22, 2012

Reason.tv: Can legal cannabis revolutionize the US economy?

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

“How can you have 56 percent of Americans in support of fully ending the drug war, and zero senators in support of it?” asks Doug Fine, investigative journalist and author of new book, Too High To Fail.

Fine sat down with ReasonTV’s Tracy Oppenheimer to discuss his time spent in the cannabis capital of California, Mendocino County, and why he thinks this drug can help save the American economy. And it’s not just about collecting taxes.

“The industrial [uses] may one day dwarf the psychoactive ones. If we start using it for fermentation for our energy needs, it can produce great biofuels,” says Fine, “already, cannabis is in the bumpers of Dodge Vipers.”

August 21, 2012

The 21st century equivalent to the enclosure movement

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

Joseph R. Stromberg reviews The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth, by Fred Pearce.

The Land Grabbers is a wonderful primer on the newest manifestations of an ancient form of plunder: the seizure of other people’s resources and destruction of their livelihoods. The author, Fred Pearce, is a well-established British environmental journalist. Here he surveys the ongoing alienation of allegedly “unused” or “underused” land in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Australia, and elsewhere at the hands of international corporations, both private and state-owned. Politicians in the affected countries are key partners in operations that resemble the late-19th-century scramble for control of Africa. The land grabs aim at enriching privileged companies and their political allies, usually at the expense of those already on the land. States, companies, and their frequent close friend, the World Bank, see no reason to respect sitting owners and resource users, whatever their rights under customary law and (sometimes) postcolonial statutes. Pastoral nomads get even less respect. In Tanzania, for example, governments and safari capitalists have reduced the traditional grazing lands of the Maasai herdsmen to a fraction of what they were. And in Ethiopia, the government’s “villagization” policy, Pearce writes, resettles peasant farmers “in the manner of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot,” clearing the way for deals with foreign capital.

Where agriculture is concerned, the effort goes forth under an ideology that claims that only industrial-scale farming, modeled on subsidized American agribusiness, can feed the world. The ideologues in question include John Beddington, chief UK government scientist; Paul Collier, former research head at the World Bank; and Richard Ferguson of the investment company Renaissance Capital, who hopes to see “industrial-sized farms of a million hectares.” To realize that vision, smallholders, hunters, gatherers, and pastoralists must get out of the way and submit themselves to wage-labor, wherever they find it. The ideology goes hand in hand with the form of globalization that relies on the power of the United States and some associated countries to dictate the contours of world trade. While the U.S. has toppled states seen as hostile to American business interests (as in Guatemala in 1954), today’s methods are often more subtle. They include USAID programs, American domination of World Bank policies, and a web of treaty obligations, especially international investment agreements.

Pearce is an environmentalist, but his book is not especially ideological. He’s more interested in presenting data. Wherever possible he has figures for acreage (or hectares) and tells us who did what to whom and where. He also faults wealthy environmental idealists and NGOs, noting that their parks and preserves can displace local people and their property, just like commercial hunting preserves, sugar plantations, logging operations, and the rest can.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress