A Stitch in Haste

--Is it a proper function of police to "spend the evening in the pub playing 'spot the drunkard'"?

--Who is being accused of the intellectual property theft of Harvard University's magnificent animated video, "The Inner Life of the Cell"?

--What topic was able to unite Senators Evan Bayh, Joseph Lieberman, Sam Brownback and Hillary Clinton?

--Should a woman, pregnant from a one-night stand, be allowed to give the child up for adoption without ever telling the father about the child? And which country's appellate courts recently answered, "Yes, she should..."?

--A special guest question: When did Star Wars jump the shark?

America's Lecher Mayor responds:

Rudy Giuliani dismissed a report Wednesday that he expensed the cost of his security detail to obscure city offices for trips to a Long Island resort as the then-mayor began an extramarital affair with current wife Judith Nathan.

"First of all, it's not true," he said during a GOP debate hours after the story broke. "I had 24-hour security for the eight years that I was mayor. They followed me everyplace I went. It was because there were, you know, threats, threats that I don't generally talk about. Some have become public recently; most of them haven't.

Note the Slick Willy style word play: It is "not true" that he -- active voice -- wrongly allocated expenses to city agencies totally unconnected to mayoral security.

But that was never really the allegation. The Politico report -- which is based on government records and is ironclad and indisputable -- was passive voice: the expenses were wrongly allocated (i.e., by someone). It was not explicitly suggested that Giuliani personally crafted or approved the practice.

And in any case: So what?

Isn't Giuliani emphasizing his "executive experience," especially relative to Hillary Clinton? Well, "executives" deal with issues like this. At least the good ones do.

Also, even if Giuliani were not disingenuous in his wordsmithy denial of the undeniable -- again, so what? Regardless of how the expenses were allocated (or misallocated), since when is it a proper use of taxpayer funds to shuttle a mayor to an adulterous rendezvous? Someone living under 24-hour "threats" might, in the name of wizened "executive" prudence, not only keep his fly zipped but also keep it at home.

To review: The income effect simply says that, ceteris paribus, the more money you have, the more (of most goods) you will purchase. Somewhat more loosely: The more money you have, the more you will splurge.

Armed with that:

Ikea's pennywise founder is famous for being cheap. He flies coach, drives a 1993 Volvo and often dines at lower-tier restaurants. He also reportedly furnishes his home with Ikea's affordable merchandise. [Ingvar] Kamprad was recently quoted as saying that the only luxuries he splurges on are the occasional upscale cravat and Swedish fish roe.

To ABC, such billionaires are "frugal." To Boing Boing, they are "cheapskates."

Notice the sour grapes trap such malcontents lay for these hyper-rich individuals (who, for the most part, are self-made entrepreneurs). If they spend their money, they are damned for their "wasteful," "opulent" "conspicuous consumption" on "positional goods." If they don't spend their money, they are damned for being "cheapskates." All that matters is that they are damned. Details are irrelevant.

Meanwhile, the simple notion that all tastes and preferences are subjective, and that there is generally no "right" or "wrong" way to spend (or not spend) one's money — no matter how much or how little of it you have — is too difficult a concept for the malcontents to absorb.

Judges (as a group) are infinitely morally superior to politicians (as a group).

This is self-apparent simply by considering what each group does: Judges seek to defend life, liberty and property; politicians seek to infringe upon life, liberty and property. Judges seek to defend the insular minority from the tyranny of the majority; politicians seek to champion and incite the tyranny of the majority.

But there is another reason why judges (as a group) are so morally superior to politicians (as a group). Notice how each group responds when a member of the group goes astray:

A judge was removed from the bench Tuesday for jailing 46 people after none would admit to having a cell phone that began ringing during his court session.

Judge Robert Restaino "snapped" and "engaged in what can only be described as two hours of inexplicable madness" during the 2005 session, Raoul Felder, chairman of the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, wrote in the decision to remove the judge.

Consider also the recent "inexplicable madness" of two other judges: Alabama's emotionally disturbed theocrat, Roy Moore, and the pathetic "$54 million pants judge." Each proved himself unfit for his solemn position. Each was removed -- by his fellow judges.

Compare that to: Larry Craig, David Vitter, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Ted Stevens, Cynthia McKinney, Bill Frist, Bill Clinton -- etc., etc., etc. All disgraced their high offices, none was forcibly removed by their colleagues. Indeed, only one national politician has been involuntarily removed from office in recent years, and only a puny smattering have been expelled in the entire history of the federal government.

Is that because politicians tend to be saints, or because the system for controlling them is sinful?

"Integrity requires carefully developing and upholding a set of inviolable beliefs. People of integrity are not inflexible, but their decisions are made in the context of strongly held values. Principled leaders must not only set a moral compass, but also effectively communicate a code of conduct to those they lead. They are obligated to remain faithful to their core convictions in order to demand and inspire the same in others."
--Giuliani Partners website

So first Christopher Hitchens says:

Until 1978, the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was an officially racist organization. Mitt Romney was an adult in 1978. We need to know how he justified this to himself, and we need to hear his self-criticism, if he should chance to have one.

To which Andrew Sullivan concatenates:

The awful history of the LDS church's treatment of African-Americans requires an accounting by any leading Mormon, as Romney is, who didn't protest at the time.

To which I concatenate: Indeed. An "accounting" by Romney is definitely in order...

...right after we get an "accounting" from Rudy Giuliani on how he justifies to himself his continued participation in the Roman Catholic Church, which has been far more discriminatory and fundamentally unjust to women — for many many more centuries — than the Mormons ever were to blacks.

This is especially true given that the Mormons abandoned their racist policies. Seen any female Catholic priests recently?

This is double especially true given Giuliani's joke of an annulment — after 14 years of marriage — to his first of three wives, courtesy of the "uphold family values, defend traditional marriage" Catholic Church (as represented, incidentally, by an accused child molester and suspended monsignor later hired by — wait for it — Giuliani Partners). Any "accounting" required for all that?

Extreme skepticism toward organized religion and its assorted lunacies is a noble undertaking. So noble that it shouldn't be sullied (no pun intended) by insolent double-standards. The Catholics are hardly a sect with standing to damn the Mormons.

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Speaking of Giuliani, women and accounting:

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York's Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

Remember: "People of integrity are not inflexible" — especially when cooking the books and bilking the taxpayers.

I want to play a game with you...


(Click to enlarge.)
The four young adults in this picture are politically active college students preparing for a televised debate.

The four comprise: two Republicans, one Democrat and one Big-L Libertarian.

Care to guess who's who?

Answer here (see the comments).

By now you have seen the reports concerning the arrest, by Sharia witch doctors, of a British schoolteacher in Sudan for committing the "religious crime" of insulting Mohammad:

Ms. Gibbons, 54, asked a 7-year-old girl to bring in a teddy bear and asked her classmates to pick a name for it.

"They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad," [the school's director] said.

When it came time to vote, 20 out of 23 children choose Muhammad, one of the most common names in the Muslim world.

The school

is known as one of the more expensive private schools in Khartoum. The students are the children of wealthy Sudanese families and foreign diplomats, a mix of mostly Muslims and Christians, and the lessons are in English.

So being wealthy, sitting next to Christians and being taught in English are not offenses to Islam, but naming a bear Muhammad is? Go figure.

In reality, the Sharia witch doctors just make this stuff up as they go along. When you're a backward Muslim in a backward nation, sometimes you just need to blast the West for -- well, for something. Just like you need to lash someone (preferably a woman) or hang someone (preferably a gay) -- every so often. (Ms. Gibbon indeed faces lashing, as well as imprisonment and fines, if convicted.) After all, if you don't brutalize an infidel every so often, then what's the point of even being a theocracy adhering to the Religion of Peace?

And when religious criminals are in short supply, they must be manufactured -- no different than any scarce commodity.

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The latest reports suggest that Sudan is caving to international pressure and likely to release the teacher. Let us hope so. And perhaps Westerners, even those with "humanitarian" motives, think twice about setting up shop in nests of brainless barbarism.

In case you were wondering, Chris Dodd is a moral defective:

I believe the time to put an end to the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy has come — a change I called for some time ago. As President, I would call for a meeting with the Joints Chief of Staff to draw up plans that put an end to this policy within 6 months.

That's Dodd's gobbledygook. It's also (more or less) Clinton's, Obama's and Biden's gobbledygook. It is HRC's gobbledygook.

Here's reality:

DADT is a statute. It is no different than any other statute. It can be repealed, any time, by the plain, ordinary "I'm just a bill..." legislative process. Putting aside for now the pesky problem of a Bush veto (cf., ENDA), what gays need is not a President Dodd/Clinton/Obama/Biden working to end DADT, but a Senator Dodd/Clinton/Obama/Biden working to end DADT.

Recall: Such a bill already exists in the House — the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (H.R. 1246). As of October 20, 2007, it had 137 sponsors and cosponsors. It could pass the Democratic House any time the Democratic leadership wanted it to.

And the Senate?

Information on efforts to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the US Senate forthcoming.

That information has been "forthcoming" since at least February.

Each of the four sitting Democratic senators running for president is doing what Democrats running for high office always do to gays: talk the talk, then rev up the bus under which they will throw us when it comes time to follow through. And far too many gay Democrats will gladly go along with it, like they always do. They are the political equivalent of styrofoam packing peanuts: you use them to get your merchandise to its destination, then you throw them out.

The one nice thing I can say about Dodd is that he is not Clinton. Dodd merely spits in our faces with disingenuous garbage like this. Clinton also urinates on us (since she is on the Armed Services Committee and therefore could have special influence regarding DADT if she chose to), and then defecates on us too (by not compelling her pervert husband to publicly apologize for signing DADT into law in the first place).

Dodd is just another yawn of a sundry Democratic politician. Clinton is ... a Clinton.

Nevertheless, a pox on all four of these alleged "champions of gay rights."

UPDATE: And Biden. And Obama. And Clinton. All four moral defectives in perfect, worthless syncronization. And with the also-worthless Human Rights Campaign praising each one for their "stay tuned" attitude rather than demanding explanations for their inaction today. Absolutely pathetic.

Mitt Romney is a soulless bigot. This is not new news.

What is new news is the fact that he may also be a flaming idiot:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "...based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified."

Romney disputes that account. A Mormon arguing with a Muslim via the Christian Science Monitor? It's practically a sitcom.

If the columnist's version is accurate, then in one moronic (Mormonic?) sentence, Romney has shot himself in the political foot not once, not twice, but three times:

1. The idea that Cabinet positions should be allocated by demographics at all. (One wonders: Would half of a Romney cabinet be female?)

2. The idea that quotas should particularly apply to tertiary religions. Stated differently: A man whose religion only constitutes 1.4% of the U.S. population might want to think twice before pointing out how few Muslims there are in America (0.6%) and what offices they are or are not "justified" in holding.

3. The idea that such ignorant blather could come from a Mormon desperately trying to convince non-Mormons, within his own voter base, that being a member of a poorly understood, widely untrusted, minority religion shouldn't matter in questions of politics and governance. "There is not enough black in America to warrant any Kettles in a Pot Administration!"

Of course, playing the Muslim card (i.e., saying idiot things) is not necessarily idiotic when your target audience is itself comprised primarily of idiots -- especially red state redneck neoconservative idiots (cf., "We should double Guantanamo!"). But target audiences change, especially if one actually becomes a nominee. And if Romney does prevail in the Republican race, then he just handed non-idiot voters yet another reason not to vote for him.

(Via Matt Yglesias by way of Unqualified Offerings.) More thoughts at Crossed Pond, Liberty Papers.

Awkward:

When trustees of Palm Beach Community College reached a tie vote in August on a proposal to offer health insurance for the domestic partners of employees, the measure failed and advocates for gay professors and other employees were disappointed. Because the college only pays for employees' benefits, the proposal wouldn't have cost the college a penny, but would have opened up quality insurance at a lower cost for the partners of gay and lesbian employees.

Now -- in a move that is seen as adding salt to those wounds -- the college has added a new health insurance benefit for some (unmarried) household members of employees: pet health insurance.
...
College administrators have endorsed the idea of extending benefits to the partners of employees, but have yet to persuade enough board members.

Of course, the two benefits are completely apples-and-oranges, but it is interesting to note that the defeated domestic partner insurance plan would not have cost the college any money -- which means that the trustees who voted against offering the benefit had no rational basis for doing so. Their only possible rationale had to be their own anti-gay bigotry.

And the timing was, as a local gay rights group noted, just plain obnoxious:

"A PBCC announcement that employees could insure their pets being made a mere 90 days after the PBCC announcement that employees could not insure their domestic partners is an affront to PBCC employees with domestic partners."

Hard to quibble with that.

Elsewhere, major public universities have insisted that overly expansive bigot amendments (i.e., those than not only "defend traditional marriage" but also forbid all public recognition of same-sex unions) are hurting their ability to recruit and retain faculty. In their rabid quest to persecute gays, they punish innocent students specifically and their own community generally. Quite the lesson plan there.

(Via Matt.)

--Are we winning the War on Art Professors?

--How about the War on Lesbian Parenting?

--How is Mitt Romney's "compulsory health insurance" law working out?

--Is Sesame Street unsuitable for children ("a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home")?

--Speaking of youngsters: saving the planet by banning Christmas cards in school ("rather than lying awake in excitement waiting for Santa Claus, children will be kept up by scary visions of climate catastrophe")?

It has been brought to my attention that this blogpost of mine, on the recent Supreme Court case Samson v. California, No. 04-9728 (2006), has been quoted in the latest supplement to the leading criminal procedure casebook, Modern Criminal Procedure: Cases, Comments and Questions, by Kamisar, LaFave, Israel, King ... and now also Orin Kerr.

Here's the passage that Kerr the authors apparently considered casebook-worthy:

[G]iven the ongoing sex offender mania and its premise of permanent recidivism as the basis for lifetime registries and prohibitions on residence and occupation and such, one wonders whether some activist legislature will now jump the shark and propose extending Samson to a lifetime forfeiture of Fourth Amendment protection for convicted sex offenders, even after the term of the parole has ended.

Legislatures, including Congress, have certainly not relented in their sex-offender-mania activism since Samson. Neither has the Fourth Amendment fared well recently, especially in the context of the War on Terror. Bottom line: One still wonders.

I'll be humble and presume that the quote won't find its way into the next full-blown edition of the casebook itself. But thanks to Professor Kerr for the inclusion in the supplement.

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And if that's not enough — the casebook quote of my post has itself been quoted in the Wikipedia entry for "Jumping the Shark." So now I am not only a legal authority, but a pop culture specialist too. Go figure.

Time to clean out the aggregator --

ITEM: The Supreme Court, as was universally expected, has agreed to hear an appeal to a successful challenge to the District of Columbia's draconian gun control laws. This will be the first time in 68 years that the Second Amendment has been interpreted by the Court and may settle the long-standing question of whether that Amendment enshrines an individual right to firearms or merely reiterates a state's power to raise a militia. Previous posts here.

ITEM: A federal appeals court reportedly expressed skepticism over a lawsuit by blind activists to compel the federal government to make currency more accommodative to the visually impaired. I was skeptical before they were.

ITEM: The City of Philadelphia, meanwhile, expressed skepticism about whether the local Boy Scouts chapter should continue to enjoy rent-free (i.e., taxpayer-subsidized) use of public property in light of the city's anti-discrimination laws. My view is unchanged: If the Boy Scouts or any other group want to be bigots, then let them do so on their own dime.

ITEM: The Georgia Supreme Court has struck down that state's draconian sex offender residency restrictions as they apply to those who owned their homes prior to the law's enactment. The court held that to force sex offenders to abandon their property constitutes an unconstitutional taking of property without due process. Flagship post here.

ITEM: Another taser-related death in Canada -- the third in recent weeks. Meanwhile, another flagrantly improper tasering, by a Utah state trooper, has made its way to YouTube. My position is (obviously) unchanged.

ITEM: More libertarians declaring their opposition, or at least their lack of support, for Ron Paul's presidential campaign. Previous posts here.

It's the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and you know what that means:

Shopping!



Having flown over the weekend, I can assure you that AwkwardChronicles is only scratching the surface of all the wonderfully entrepreneurial offerings available in the SkyMall catalog.

Some very confused malcontents at — where else? — a liberal arts college seem to think so:

Randolph College simply wanted to sell four highlights from its renowned American art collection to boost its endowment and protect its accreditation. Instead, it has fallen into a bitter legal battle with art lovers who consider the sale an unethical breach of public trust. That fight has led the Virginia Supreme Court to block the sale by the New York-based Christie's auction house.
...
The art community sees as a moral imperative to keep the collection intact at the college's Maier Museum of Art for the education and cultural enrichment of students and the community.

"There's an ethical contract between donors and a museum," said Ellen Agnew, the former associate director at Maier and a plaintiff in the art lawsuit. "You're using this for an educational resource. Museums do not think about objects they hold as a financial asset."

Randolph spokeswoman Brenda Edson said that two of the paintings were donated and two were bought by the college — and that none of them came with any restrictions.

The capacity of self-appointed "protectors of the public trust" to demand unearned money, expropriated from taxpayers against their will, to overproduce politically favored art by politically favored artists, based solely on the irrational fiction that, somehow, "art is different," is well-documented on this blog.

But this is a whole new plateau. We now see the artocrats™ transcending their insolent dismissal of the pesky notions of enumerated powers and fiscal federalism, and launching an all-out frontal assault on both the law of property and the law of contracts.

Note carefully that there is no dispute over ownership of the paintings, nor is there any issue of competing interpretations of restrictive covenants (for the lawyers: this is not a cy près action). Two of the paintings were bought in the open market; the donated works came "with no strings attached" (which, incidentally, the donors could easily have insisted upon).

Yet none of that matters to the artocrats™. Of what importance is a concrete legal contract when there is a nebulous "ethical" contract? Of what importance is the fact that museums buy, sell, trade and bail (and charge admission to view) their holdings all the time? No — museums, we are told, "do not think about objects they hold as a financial asset." Oh really?

And let's not overlook the pesky (but hardly dispositive) complication that Randolph College is facing financial distress and perhaps even de-accreditation. How does it further a college's educational mission to force it to misallocate its (dangerously limited) resources? Whose interests trump whose — the tuition-paying students, the paycheck-earning faculty and staff, or the externality-exploiting "community"?

Occasionally, property rights are indeed complicated by restrictions and limitations. Sometimes such encumbrances are created voluntarily; sometimes they are imposed by government coercion. But they are almost always (and only properly) created ex ante — as part of the bargain, with full knowledge beforehand. Imagine the chilling effect, by contrast, if every private transaction came with the caveat that "you can buy whatever and whenever you like, but you can only sell when 'the community' considers it acceptable." Imagine if you could never again be an owner, but only a "public trustee." What would you be willing to not-quite-buy? What wouldn't you be willing to?

All this again because, somehow, "art is different."

When, as is the case here, title is unambiguously held free and clear, private autonomy must be acknowledged and respected. Shame on any court that refuses to acknowledge this highest of all human rights — the right to own property.

Kip's Law: Every advocate of central planning always -- always -- envisions himself as the central planner.

(First posted Thanksgiving Day, 2005)
In honor of Thanksgiving, here's what I'm thankful for.

I'm thankful for my readers. With however many millions of blogs there are, I know shelf space is limited. The fact that a few hundred people choose to find the time to read my posts each day is truly astounding to me, and I'm truly grateful.

I'm thankful for the comments people leave on my blog. Writing is of course more time consuming than reading, and the fact that what I write is provocative and evocative enough to generate responses reminds me how important it is to research, proofread and self-fisk my work before I post it. Comments must be earned, and I'm thankful that people think I've done so. I'm also thankful that people understand that I can't respond to every comment left at every post. Time constraints simply make it impossible.

I'm thankful for the people who send me emails. I'm very bad about responding to all the emails I receive; the people who send them deserve better. But I'm running at full capacity as it is, and of course new blogposts must always take priority.

I'm thankful for my blogroll. That there are so many people who are so smart and such good writers restores my confidence in the state of our intellectual world.

--I'm thankful for the libertarian bloggers who refuse to let dream of a proper society with a proper government go quietly into that Red State / Blue State night.

--I'm thankful for the blawgers who help keep my legal training from atrophying.

--I'm thankful for the econo-bloggers who try to help us understand the world in no less real and important a sense than do physicists.

--I'm thankful for the political bloggers, of whatever leaning, who help me see the events of the world in new ways.

--I'm thankful for the science & medicine bloggers who foster and perpetuate my sense of wonder at the universe, our planet and the human body.

--I'm thankful for the gay politics bloggers who, in their very special way, fight the good fight toward equal rights and basic human dignities.

--I'm thankful for the bloggers in the gay community who share their personal and social lives through their blogs and remind us why we invoke the image of the rainbow.

--Finally, I'm thankful for anyone else who has earned my thanks in some other way that I may have overlooked.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

A random sampling of commentary:

One of the traditions the Pilgrims had brought with them from England was a practice known as "farming in common." Everything they produced was put into a common pool; the harvest was rationed among them according to need.
...
Young, able-bodied men resented working for others without compensation. They thought it an "injuestice" to receive the same allotment of food and clothing as those who didn't pull their weight.
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After the Pilgrims had endured near-starvation for three winters, [Governor William] Bradford decided to experiment when it came time to plant in the spring of 1623. He set aside a plot of land for each family, that "they should set corne every man for his owne perticuler, and in that regard trust to themselves."

The results were nothing short of miraculous.

--Carolyn Baum (via EclectEcon).

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Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers' holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America's pride — just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.

--Ayn Rand

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We can thank Thanksgiving for the TV Dinner.

The "TV Dinner" was a brand of frozen ready meal invented in 1953 by CA Swanson, a major American food company. The story goes that they had massively overestimated how many turkeys they would need to meet Thanksgiving demand. How to get rid of the excess?

The company realised that packaging the whole Thanksgiving meal on one, compartmentalised aluminium tray that you could pop in the oven, then tuck into in front of the television, might be popular with customers. They reckoned they would sell 5,000 in the first year. They sold 10 million.

--Rob Lyons

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I of course will be partaking in the great holiday tradition:


More on Thanksgiving tomorrow. After that, expect little to no substantive blogging through at least Saturday and perhaps as late as Monday.

Gobble gobble!

It's a well-recognized, universal principle in American contract law that no court may compel an individual to perform on an employment contract. The court may award the employer (i.e., the victim of the breached contract) monetary damages, and may also, in some circumstances, enjoin the employee from working for anyone else in the same capacity. But the court cannot simply order the employee to work for the employer — to do so would violate the Thirteenth Amendment.

Armed with that:

Stagehands got the go-ahead to return to work on "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" today, but the joy in Who-ville was short-lived, as owners of the St. James Theatre said the curtain would remain closed.

"Grinch" producers responded by announcing they would head to court Tuesday to seek an injunction forcing Jujamcyn Theatres to allow "Grinch" — which is only slated to run for seven more weeks — to resume performances.
...
Jujamcyn issued a statement today noting that Local One had struck the St. James Theatre at 10 a.m. on Nov. 10, the morning after "Grinch" had its formal opening.

"'The Grinch' will not reopen until the union signs agreements and ends the strike at all theaters and all the other shows that have been closed by their strikes reopen on Broadway," the statement said.

Of course, the whole point of government-imposed collective bargaining is to enslave employers. This is not new news. What is new is the notion of an "a la carte strike" — the idea that a government-spawned labor union can not only shut down an employer, but can "cherry-pick" how it shuts down the employer.

It used to be that either you were on strike or you weren't. Now apparently you can strike this week, work next week, then strike again the week after. You can strike on Tuesdays and Fridays but work on Wednesdays and Sundays. You can strike during breakfast but work during lunch. What exactly wouldn't be permissible under this paradigm?

In any case, one would think that, in a sane and equitable world, the "no forced labor" principle in employment law would work both ways. Assuming that Jujamcyn Theatres is in material breach of its contract (and that is not at all clear), then the relief for the union and the producers should be limited to monetary damages only. The notion that the union, armed with the force of government, can effectively seize the theater and use it for its own ends is naked communism, pure and simple.

Don't expect any judge's heart to grow three sizes when the injunction request is presented.

UPDATE: I'm trying my best not to dismiss the ignorant jurist who absurdly granted the injunction as an "activist judge," but it's pretty obvious from the news reports that she turned the so-called "irreparable injury rule" completely on its head. The rule states that, for equitable relief to be warranted, it must be impossible to measure, or even to estimate, the monetary damages that would flow should the plaintiff prevail in the lawsuit. The damages here are trivial to estimate: lost wages to the strikers and lost royalties to the producers. My respect for judges is almost limitless, but in this instance she was flat-out, flunk-the-final wrong.

Also, welcome readers from the Adam Smith Institute Blog. I hope you'll have a holiday look around the rest of the blog.

For Discussion: Did the union agree to re-open "Grinch" merely because of its unique performance schedule, or to gain propaganda points (i.e., doing it "for the children"?)

A comment I left on another blog in response to a Jonah Goldberg column suggesting that Mike Huckabee is -- get this -- "too progressive" for "true" conservatives:

It's a bit retarded to suggest that the James Dobsons and Pat Robertsons of the right are fleeing from Huckabee because he supports a national smoking ban or a federal sales tax.

This is pure spin by the radical right to try to rationalize the refusal of social conservative theocrats to choose principles (Huckabee, Brownback) over winning (Giuliani, Romney).

Can you imagine such a scenario in the rear pews of the Evangelical churches:

--Baptist? Check.

--Life begins at conception? Check.

--Rejects evolution? Check.

--Uncompromising anti-gay bigotry? Check.

--School prayer? Check.

--Ban flag burning? Check.

--National sales tax? Egads! We can't support him now!

Preposterous.

More thoughts at Liberty Papers, Publius Endures.

Mike Huckabee demonstrates once again that there is no rational basis for any radical social conservative not to support his presidential campaign:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee rejects letting states decide whether to allow abortions, claiming the right to life is a moral issue not subject to multiple interpretations.

"It's the logic of the Civil War," Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. "If morality is the point here, and if it's right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can't have 50 different versions of what's right and what's wrong."

That is actually a perfectly viable, logical position — that just happens to be dead wrong. If you believe that a clump of cells with no brain and no nervous system — and therefore no consciousness — can somehow be "an autonomous human being," then of course abortion is immoral and should not be "left to the states. There is nothing intrinsically superior about rights — including purported "fetal rights" — being violated at the state level rather than at the federal level.

Something to keep in mind the next time Huckabee spews any anti-gay bigotry — which he certainly will: "If morality is the point here, and if it's right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can't have 50 different versions of what's right and what's wrong." Indeed.

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It would have been nice if Huckabee — who was speaking in the context of countering Fred Thompson's position on abortion — had also pointed out that overturning Roe v. Wade would not "send it back to the states." As I and a handful of others have tried, repeatedly, to emphasize, overturning Roe would send abortion back to Congress, which the Supreme Court just recently permitted to ban one form of abortion. Thompson's "world without Roe" lie reflects either his own ignorance of basic legal principles, or his reliance on his audience's ignorance of basic legal principles.

Either way, Huckabee claims both the moral and the pragmatic high ground relative to Thompson.

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On a tangent, Huckabee — under attack for an embarrassing "please raise taxes" speech he once gave to the Arkansas legislature — has reportedly embraced the fraudulent spin of the "fair tax" movement's calls for replacing the federal income tax with a federal sales tax. To review:

--The proponents of the fair tax lie, flat out lie, about the tax being "23%." It's 30%, diluted via a deliberately wrong denominator: 0.3/1.3 = 0.23; but the tax is still a 30% tax. All else is willful deception.

--And the tax rate wouldn't even be 30%; it would be at least 53% and perhaps as high as 82% according to one nonpartisan study.

--Income tax today + sales tax tomorrow = both taxes the day after tomorrow. Who seriously doubts this?

The devil you know...

In this special edition, all the entries are Special Guest Questions:

--"What does the "C" in SCHIP stand for again?"

--"How much is your right to vote worth?"

--Why does Paul Krugman hate Bill Clinton?

--"Is it not repugnant that some people are willing to let others die so that their stomachs won't become queasy at the thought that someone, somewhere is selling a kidney?"

--"Have we reached the moment when the United States is downgraded as an economic, political, and military power by the rest of the world — permanently — reflecting its new status as a super-debtor with $3 trillion in external liabilities?"

Time to clean out the aggregator:

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ITEM: Fallout continues over the taser death of a Polish immigrant in a Vancouver airport after another passenger posted his cell phone video of the incident on YouTube. Meanwhile, U.K. police are being criticized for tasering -- twice -- an already unconscious bus passenger. My view is unchanged.

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ITEM: Earthlink has announced that it has abandoned all further efforts to "partner" with municipal governments to offer "free" wi-fi Internet access, as it found the business model to be non-viable. This confirms my long-standing view that Internet access is not a public good and should not be the purview of government provision (or "partnership").

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ITEM: The latest manifestation of Hugo Chavez' "socialist paradise" in Venezuela?

Combined with price controls that keep farmers from profitably producing some basic foods, climbing incomes of the poorest Venezuelans have stripped supermarket aisles bare of items like milk and eggs. Meanwhile, foreign exchange controls create bottlenecks for importers seeking to meet rising demand for many products.

What's the point of looting other people's oil refineries if there's nothing to spend your stolen money on? Most recent post here.

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ITEM: Speaking of "socialist paradises," the latest
Bad Things are Bad blather from John Edwards: forcing workers to pay for family leave that they don't want. Of, course, that's not quite how he's presenting it, but that's what would actually happen. The laws of economics are not subject to veto by any presidential wannabe.

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ITEM: Desmond Tutu has openly criticized his superiors in the Anglican Church for their anti-gay bigotry. "If God, as they say, is homophobic I wouldn't worship that God." I find it ironic that an African is taking the Anglican leadership to task, since my long-standing thesis is that one reason, perhaps the main reason, that both the Anglican and Roman Catholic autocracies remain entrenched in their hostility toward homosexuality is because of their need to accommodate the cultural backwardness of the African Muslims and animists whom they are trying to convert.

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ITEM: Drowned out by the ENDA-T conundrum is another discrimination debate in Congress -- whether firing someone for not speaking English on the job is equivalent to firing someone because of their national origin. Any reasonable person knows it isn't, but we are not dealing with reasonable people -- we are dealing with politicians.

Did you notice that the hit counter down at the bottom of the page hit 500,000? And I didn't add it until the blog was several months old.

Still, sometimes I wonder whether I'm making any progress trying to save the world from the two Pauls (Ron and Krugman). But such doubts are always fleeting.

Rest assured that I, like TylerOakley, will never surrender to "the totalitarian compromise" (note: contains naughty language) —


A Stitch in Haste — intellectually shanking dumb bitches since 2004.

--Is there any rational basis for prohibiting convicted sex offenders from driving cabs? (Via S.O.R.)

--Should a German seeking to emigrate to Switzerland be required to take German lessons? (Via Fark.)

--Is Santa proclaiming "Ho! Ho! Ho!" offensive to women? (Via PoliBog.)

--Should it be a crime to kill an animal that is killing other, endangered animals? Should it be privileged conduct? What if the preying animal is itself endangered? (Via Concurring Opinions.)

--Did you notice that my bio graf in the right sidebar ticked up from "40" to "41"?

One of the points I try to emphasize from time to time is that a purported "right to health care" requires, as a matter of basic metaphysics, a "right to enslave health care providers." This is not histrionics: How, exactly, are you to enjoy your "right to an emergency appendectomy" without a surgeon to perform it? If your "right" truly is a right, and if no willing surgeon is available, then an unwilling one will have to be conscripted.

Health care socialists would respond that, no no no, they do not mean to enslave physicians (not to mention nurses, dentists, lab technicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, optometrists, etc.). They merely intend to enslave taxpayers — because if the government throws enough money at enough people, surely health care providers will come forward (i.e., for the right price) to provide the "health care" to which there is a purported "right."

Put aside the Kafkaesque implications of that reasoning: "private parties paying private money for private services" (i.e., throwing money around) is "compassionless" (and therefore immoral) but "government extracting taxpayer money for private services" (i.e., throwing money around) is "enlightened" (and therefore moral). Somehow.

My point instead is that, should push come to shove (and why wouldn't it?), even that perverse economic model might, indeed eventually almost certainly would, give way to something worse: Compulsory service — enslaved physicians.

Think it can't happen?

Under Arizona law, all superior court cases with less than $65,000 at stake go to arbitration. In Maricopa County, the arbitrators are drawn from a pool of local lawyers who get paid $75 a day. That's chump change for lawyers, many of whom would scoff at $75 an hour.

But the arbitration program is mandatory. All County attorneys with at least five years of experience must serve at least two days per year, if asked. [Mark] Scheehle was asked three times in two years. The third time, he refused, and the County fined him $900. So Scheehle sued, challenging the arbitration service as an unconstitutional taking and a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. ... But ultimately, the Ninth Circuit concludes that the Maricopa County program survives Scheehle's constitutional claims.

You can balk at the term "enslaved" all you want, but the premise is sound: Anyone who wants the privilege of being an attorney in Arizona must provide their services, on behalf of the government, for almost no compensation whenever instructed to. If that's not "slavery," it's close enough.

Now, how preposterous a leap would it be to replace "attorney" with "physician" in this fact pattern? To require — not just as a condition of eligibility for socialized medicine reimbursement, but as a condition of keeping your medical license — that you provide your services for free or essentially free on a regular basis and at the whim of the state, based solely on its "need" for your services?

And you thought compulsory jury duty was irksome.

This is the unacknowledged asymptote of socialized medicine: a surgeon, hovering over you with a scalpel, who is not only paid by the government, not only employed by the government, but actually a feudal serf of the government and in the operating room against his will. This, to health care socialists, is utopia.

Madness. Sheer madness.

The case is Scheehle v. Justices of the Supreme Court of Arizona, No. 05-17063 (9th Cir., Nov. 15, 2007) (PDF - 17 pages).

For Discussion: Of course, the state cannot enslave a physician who does not exist. So how, exactly, would there be a "right to health care" if people stop becoming physicians (not to mention nurses, dentists, lab technicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, optometrists, etc.)? Think it can't happen?

One of my first, worst episodes of "stupid shock" (i.e., the paradigm-shifting realization that there really are morons in the world) occurred at, of all places, Cornell University, where I was a graduate economics student. The catalyst: bovine somatotropin — also called bovine growth hormone, or BGH.

The issue, distilled, was as follows: Cows injected with BGH produce more milk. More milk means cheaper milk. Cheaper milk is good for poor people, especially poor children. Therefore BGH is good. QED.

Sorry, that was the reality-based version. This was the Cornell student body version: They're poisoning kids with cow hormones!

Of course, the pesky facts that: (1) Biologically speaking, BGH cannot, even under the worst nightmare scenario, possibly make its way into cows' milk, and (2) even if it could, the acids and enzymes in the human digestive system would completely destroy it, were of no import to these bright young Ivy Leaguers, who went around demanding the sort of things that agitated college students tend to demand — bans, boycotts, protests, etc.

Fast forward to today:

Pennsylvania is stopping dairies from stamping milk containers with "hormone-free" labels in a precedent-setting decision being closely watched by the industry.
...
State Agriculture Secretary Dennis C. Wolff said advertising one brand of milk as free from artificial hormones implies that competitors' milk is not safe, and it often comes with what he said is an unjustified higher price.
...
Agricultural regulators in New Jersey and Ohio are considering following suit, the latest battle in a long-standing dispute over whether injecting cows with bovine growth hormone affects milk.

I'm not very good at playing the game of "If I were a central planner..." But I must admit to having experienced a brief — very brief — twinge of sympathy for these paternalistic bureaucrats. People who pay a premium for milk from hormone-free cows, and people who infer that such milk is somehow "safer" than milk from BGH-treated cows are, frankly, idiots.*

(*I don't want to fall into the Dolphin-trap again: A consumer who has a different basis for preferring milk from untreated cows, such as some notion of animal cruelty concerns, is not necessarily an idiot — at least not for the purposes of this blogpost).

Still, a properly worded label ("hormone-free" is not a proper label, since all milk is hormone-free; the correct term is "from synthetic-hormone-free cows") is not inaccurate, but merely irrelevant. And I balk at banning advertising that is not inaccurate.

One of the few major failures of current First Amendment jurisprudence is the notion that truthful commercial speech should not enjoy full First Amendment protection. This dilution of property rights and economic substantive due process was yet another by-product of New Deal socialism initiated by Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934) (a case upholding milk regulation, incidentally). Truthful advertising enjoys some First Amendment protection, to be sure — see Central Hudson Gas v. Public Service Commission, 447 U.S. 557 (1980) — and it will be interesting to see whether this form of paternalistic censorship of truthful advertising is challenged in court.

As well-intentioned as these nanny-state regulators may be, businesses ought to be allowed to put whatever truthful label on their products that they see fit. And, as cynical as it may sound, consumers have a right to drawn false inferences from such truthful advertising claims. They have a right not to do their research. They have a right to pay a premium for something that others know to be worthless. There is, bottom line, a fundamental right to be a gullible shopper.

Paul Krugman lying yet again about Social Security:

But a determined defense by progressives in the media, on the blogs, and in Congress beat back one spurious argument after another, while the American people made it clear that they really want a program that guarantees a basic retirement income that doesn't depend on the Dow. And Social Security survived.

First of all, there is nothing more "spurious" than the fictitious and fraudulent Social Security "trust fund," which is nothing more than a solemn promise by the federal government — to raise taxes in the future, explode the deficit, or both.

Also spurious is the lie that any plan of voluntary* partial privatization would have to be invested in that most evil of contrivances, the stock market. One would think that such a supposedly brilliant economist as Paul Krugman might have heard of a money market fund — which would still outperform the returns Social Security offers its typical participant, and with zero risk to principal.

(*Sidebar: Isn't it interesting how the word "voluntary" is always conveniently omitted from every apologia for the status quo?)

But my main point is this: If it is indeed true that "the American people made it clear that they really want a program that guarantees a basic retirement income that doesn't depend on the Dow," then why not do exactly that? Why not abolish Social Security outright and simply replace it with a flat, egalitarian, public pension entitlement for all retirees equally — a program that guarantees a basic retirement income, paid not from a dedicated payroll tax but from general revenues?

If Krugman so correctly reads the American psyche, then he ought to advocate, indeed demand, the compete abolition of all FICA taxes. The federal government could replace those foregone FICA taxes by adjusting federal income tax rates and brackets, such that total federal receipts were not affected. It would be that much easier for employers (and the self-employed) to run their payrolls. Social Security's huge computation bureaucracy that must calculate credits earned, wage replacement formulas, etc., could be abolished and replaced with simple "Office of Retiree Check Printing."

And one more "benefit," at least to the Krugman types: Swapping FICA taxes for federal income taxes would be the single biggest "soak the rich" policy since the August Decrees. Far more redistributionist, incidentally, than that other radical liberal canard du jour, scrap-the-cap.

Remember: the working poor pay no federal income tax, but they do pay one-eighth of their income to Social Security (and Medicare). Surely the distribution of tax burdens would, if anything, become even more progressive if we swapped FICA for FIT, and surely any self-professed champion of the working poor would cheer such a proposal.

And yet they don't. Why?

Simple: Because, contra Krugman, the last thing in the world that apologists of Social Security want is "a program that guarantees a basic retirement income" (i.e., independent of any taxes paid to accrue such income).

There's another term for "a program that guarantees a basic income" — welfare. Americans love getting checks from the government, to be sure — but not when it's a welfare check. That's not a pension; it's a stigma.

The New Deal socialists who first devised Social Security recognized from the outset that the program must, at all costs, not be interpretable as "the dole." Yet the working poor would have seen a simple old-age pension entitlement as exactly that: They spend an entire career not paying any income tax, then suddenly they start getting checks from the government? That would be welfare, and that would be a dealbreaker. Thus was the FICA tax born.

What Americans really want is not a check from the government, but a check from the government that they can rationalize, that they need not feel embarrassed by. Which, one would think, would not be the prime criterion of "enlightened" central planner wannabes like Krugman.

One would think.

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UPDATE: Krugman has gone from blogpost to full-blown column. More thoughts from Greg Mankiw.

One should rarely if ever draw a conclusion having heard only one side of an argument.

Having said that:

We have the highest regard and respect for our stagehands. But, they are not, as the Union leadership characterizes them, the typical "little guys" as far as compensation is concerned. Their "average annual earnings," in salary and benefits, is more than $150,000, with many stagehands earning more than $200,000.

They are professionals and should be well paid, and will remain the best paid in this industry in the world. We simply don't want to be compelled to hire more workers than needed and pay them when there is no work for them to do.

For example:

--It takes a few minutes to move a piano, but we are forced to pay stagehands for four hours of work. As a result, over the course of a year, many stagehands add another $50,000 dollars to their six figure salaries from moving pianos or mopping floors.

--Head Electricians earn a six figure salary, but their contract only permits them to work a total of 80 minutes a week.

--A flyman making $160,000 annually in salary and benefits is required for all productions, even when there is no fly cue in the production and no flyman is needed.

--We are required to keep the same number of workers loading in a show as hired on day one for the entire load-in process regardless of how many workers are subsequently needed.

--We have offered a significant raise in wages, but the union says there will be a cut in wages. The only explanation is that this would be the result of fewer people being paid for not working.

Of course, Broadway theater owners are hardly noble Randian capitalists themselves. They enjoy privileged tax breaks at the expense of other New York businesses and residents. They have bought, from politicians and bureaucrats, restrictive zoning and land use rules in the Theater District to erect artificial (i.e., government-imposed) barriers to entry. They suckle at the teat of taxpayer-underwritten arts funding boondoggles. And all because, somehow, "art is different" (and, by corollary, because "Broadway is very different").

No one, meanwhile, dares suggest that maybe, just maybe, "show business" really is a "business" and should be treated as such.

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Alright, here's the other side of the argument (such as it is):

Theatre owners and producers are demanding a 38% cut in our jobs and wages. They have built a $20 million fund to be used against us from the sale of theatre tickets to the public.

Broadway is a billion dollar a year industry and has never been more profitable than now.

Cuts in our jobs and wages will never result in a cut in ticket prices to benefit the public, but only an increase in the profits for producers.

Some hasty stitches:

--See the last bullet from the producers about the fictitious "38% cut."

--Of course, the theaters are required by law to refund, immediately, all ticket revenue from closed performances. As for the earned revenue from successfully performed shows, why should it matter what the producers use it for? And how much, I wonder, does the union have in its strike fund?

--Also, why should theatergoers care whether it will be ticket prices or profits that go up or down? The price is the price; if you find it acceptable, buy the ticket; if not, then don't. It is per se irrational (not to mention per se socialist) to forego a show, not because "the price is too high" but because "the profits are too high."

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Meanwhile, Rolling Doughnut pens a critic's review of the Writers Guild strike.

The least professional of the "professional journalists," OpinionJournal's infant-at-large James Taranto, tries to spin the hypocrisy of certain radical social conservative theocrats as an indictment of his own personal ManBearPig, the "Angry Left" —

One ugly theme has emerged ... cross dresser ... They make Giuliani sound like Boy George. In fact, as we've noted, he's more Monty Python, having donned a dress on a couple of occasions purely for comic effect.

As Andrew Sullivan succinctly noted:

It's a good day when the gay-baiting, pro-torture James Taranto accuses me of being part of the "angry left" and a homophobe!

Indeed.


Of course, the idea that we-who-are-apparently-the-Angry-Left-merely-for-pointing-out-a-historical-fact are trying to convey by referring to Giuliani as a "cross-dresser" is not that we have a problem with cross-dressers. The idea is that radical social conservatives are hypocrites for not admitting that they have a problem with cross-dressers — a problem that they are apparently willing to overlook in order to rationalize their support (such as it is) for Giuliani.

Moreover, Giuliani's cross-dressing episodes (there have been several) are merely a convenient refraction, a pictorial distillation of all the other ways that Giuliani is (to the theocrats) hell-bound, but apparently now only by way of the White House. This one picture is worth a thousand inconsistencies: abortion, gay rights, gun control, twice ran for mayor as the Liberal Party nominee, etc.

We are not mocking Giuliani; we are mocking those who are not mocking Giuliani but who would mock anyone else who had Giuliani's record. These Evangelical "kingmakers," who insist that they "speak for the real America," (i.e., the Christian theocratic America) are betraying their spiritual principles for secular-political gain. They are selling their collective political soul to the devil (or devils). And we of the Angry-Not-Left have earned the privilege to call them out on it.

This is not a difficult concept — at least for anyone other than James Taranto.