A Stitch in Haste

The shameless shaman is at it again:

Mike Huckabee said Monday he wouldn't run a TV ad he'd prepared blistering Republican rival Mitt Romney as dishonest. Then he showed it to a room packed with reporters and cameramen.
...
He denounced the "very negative and nasty tone that the campaign has taken" and said he had mistakenly come to the conclusion that the only thing to do "was to respond with a counter-punch." He said the ad was supposed to start running Monday but just an hour before the news conference, he had ordered his staff to stop it.

Someone really needs to pull Friar Huck aside and explain to him that just because his redneck Evangelical supporters are mindless dolts, that does not mean that everyone else is.

Apparently the man simply has spent too much time preaching to his flock of illiterate Southern Baptist jackasses to understand that there can even be such a thing as a non-jackass in America.

It almost makes you want to vote for Ron Paul.*

(*Not really.)

City housing officials acknowledge that they have no hard data on the numbers of cases of harassment between landlords and tenants.

Which, of course, does not stop them from seeking to intervene in what the Washington Post histrionically describes as landlord-tenant "wars" --

"We want to give tenants the power of the law to fight intimidation," said Councilman Daniel Garodnick, one of the sponsors of the first bill, Introduction 627, which has the backing of 34 of the [New York City] council's 51 members. The issue is so contentious that Councilwoman Maria Baez of the Bronx, who introduced the rival bill, Introduction 638, to protect landlords, withdrew her support for it after an angry protest by housing activists outside her office.
...
Representatives of landlords say incidents of harassment are rare. They say that a new law is unnecessary because 10 existing laws deal with similar issues and that the state housing agency has been hearing harassment cases for years.

Are all landlords saints? Surely not. But I wonder which is the more ubiquitous problem: landlords illegally harassing tenants or tenants not paying rent on time (or otherwise violating leases)?

And keep in mind that a significant, perhaps overwhelming, proportion of these harassment allegations (including the false ones that no doubt exist) are in reference to rent-regulated apartments. When the government, by negating property rights, creates a powerful incentive to evict a tenant paying a minuscule fraction of a market rent (the eviction allows the rent to rise at least a bit with the next tenant), then who can claim to be surprised when a handful of landlords cross a line that the government itself created?

Does that excuse harassment or other illegal conduct? No -- two wrongs do not make a right. But let's at least acknowledge that the precedent wrong exists -- and persists -- as a matter of public policy.

---

Meanwhile:

The workers say their wages are trailing inflation and don't reflect the booming value of the office buildings where they clean, run elevators and staff the doors.

The backstory is a pending strike by the Service Employees International Union against the Realty Advisory Board, which represents many, perhaps most, commercial office buildings in Manhattan.

The part of that sentence that is most fascinating (i.e., most frustrating) is the citation to "the booming value of the office buildings." Why should the underlying value of the property matter to the value of the services a janitor provides? Since when do employees have an underlying claim to the value of the property on which they work?

This obfuscation -- best reflected in the insolent attempt by some malcontents to replace the word "stockholder" with the gobbledygook term "stakeholder" -- blanks out the fact that property values reflect entrepreneurship and risk-taking, the return to the factor of production called "ownership," just as wages are the return to the factor of production called "labor."

If workers want to share in the "booming value" of office buildings, then let their unions take equity stakes in the properties. Earn a share in the reward by taking on a share of the risk. After all, wasn't the end goal of socialism always for workers to own the means of production?

Maybe they should actually give it a try sometime -- though they may be surprised by what they learn.

Mike Huckabee:

It's that I don't want some government official or some school person becoming responsible for the religious indoctrination of my children. That's my responsibility.

I was not aware that "indoctrination" was either a universally recognized parental responsibility or a proper Christian virtue. I'm glad we have Friar Huck to set the record straight.

---

Speaking of straight:

MR. RUSSERT: And, and this is what you wrote in your book, "Kids Who Kill," in 1998: "It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations — from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia." Why would you link homosexuality with sadomasochism, pedophilia and necrophilia?

GOV. HUCKABEE: Well, what I was pointing out is all of these are deviations from what has been the traditional concept of sexual behavior and men and women having children, raising those children in the context of a, of a traditional marriage and family. And, again, taken out of the larger context of that book, speaking about how so many of our social institutions have been broken down.
...
MR. RUSSERT: But this is what concerns people. This, this is what you did say about homosexuality: "I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle." That's millions of Americans.

GOV. HUCKABEE: Tim, understand, when a Christian speaks of sin, a Christian says all of us are sinners. I'm a sinner, everybody's a sinner. What one's sin is, means it's missing the mark. It's missing the bull's eye, the perfect point. I miss it every day; we all do. The perfection of God is seen in a marriage in which one man, one woman live together as a couple committed to each other as life partners. Now, even married couples don't do that perfectly, so sin is not some act of equating people with being murderers or rapists...

MR. RUSSERT: But when you say aberrant or unnatural, do you believe you're born gay or you choose to be gay?

GOV. HUCKABEE: I don't know whether people are born that way. People who are gay say that they're born that way. But one thing I know, that the behavior one practices is a choice.

There is one unarguable truth in this exchange: Mike Huckabee is certainly a sinner.

As for the rest — what a cruel, dishonest and decrepit little mind this shameless shaman has.

Time to clean out the aggregator —

ITEM: The Department of Defense has announced that ten more detainees have been released from Guantanamo Bay. Which is odd, given that the military has repeatedly insisted that absolutely everyone detained at Guantanamo is unarguably guilty.

ITEM: I blogged previously, and recently made a YouTube video, about the "War on Sniffles" — the idiotic de jure restriction (and de facto ban) of decongestants containing pseudoephedine — in a warm-fuzzy-feeling attempt by activist legislators to create the illusion of fighting the War on Meth. Now it turns out that the War on Sniffles may also have been instigated by the Politics of Pull:

The main company that stands to benefit from a law — passed in the name of the patriotic war on drugs — that effectively marginalizes [its] main competition and gives a boost to its inferior product spent millions in lobbying and campaign donations in the very year that the law was passed.

The company is Boehringer Ingelheim; its "inferior product" (and my experience definitely confirms that) is phenylephrine (i.e., the "PE" in "Sudafed PE"); the details are here (cf., Merck buying a compulsory vaccination law from Texas governor Rick Perry).

ITEM: A new insider account of the discussions leading up to President Bush's first veto, blocking federal funding of stem cell research, asserts that the president was specifically concerned about the potential rise of fictional reproductive technologies posited in the dystopic novel Brave New World. For better or for worse, at least the president was invoking the correct nightmare — unlike Mitt Romney, who illiterately called stem cell research "Orwellian." (Via Wired Science Blog.)

ITEM: The sex offender mania has jumped yet another shark — New Jersey has enacted a law prohibiting some convicted sex offenders from any and all use of the Internet (except work-related). "We live in scary times," said Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey. Indeed.

ITEM: A lawsuit is working its way through a federal court alleging illegal gender-based discrimination by New York City recreational establishments. (Translation: Another "Ladies Night" lawsuit.) As I blogged previously, sometimes it's not the anti-discrimination lawsuit that is "frivolous," but the anti-discrimination law itself, which in some jurisdictions explicitly authorizes and even encourages such litigation.

On this last Sunday of 2007, let's look back on the fun we had with our Sunday Cute YouTubers.

(For background on the choice of music, see here.)



Happy New Year!

--Should deaf parents be allowed to deliberately conceive deaf children?

--What is the slogan of the Idaho Peace Officer Standards and Training Academy Class of 2007?

--Related: What is the mission statement of the San Francisco Zoo? (Right column, under "Welcome.") (Via Fark.)

--Is it demeaning to women not to rape them? (Via EclectEcon.)

--A Special Guest Question: "Should we spend $6.1 billion today to avoid spending $345 billion in global warming costs ninety-three years from now in 2100?"

You read about the Muslim female who gets blown up (by other Muslims, of course).

You might not read about the Muslim female sold into slavery at age 11 (by other Muslims, of course):

He's forty, she's eleven. And they are a couple — the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. "We needed the money", Ghulam's parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan's Ghor province know better: "Our men don't want educated women." They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

It is true that there are other barbarian proto-cultures besides the Religion of Peace in which soulless parents sell their prepubescent daughters into slavery insolently cloaked as "marriage." Point conceded. But those other barbarians don't typically go around insisting that it is in fact Westerners who are the "infidels" and who must, when confronted with primitivism, either submit to it or die.

It's one thing to be a threat to the little girls in your backward, goat-herder village; it's another thing the threaten all the little girls in the world — with dynamite if not with slavery.


(Photo by Stephanie Sinclair.)

I report, you decide --

ITEM: The State of Texas is set to impose a $5 tax on patrons of strip clubs. Since erotic dancing is constitutionally protected expressive conduct (sorry, Robert Bork), the tax -- apparently the first of its kind -- is being challenged as a violation of the First Amendment:

In their lawsuit, the clubs said nude dancing is protected by the First Amendment, and the state cannot selectively tax it, even if it is conduct some may find offensive.
...
Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University, said the Texas tax goes too far. "It seems clear legislators are targeting strip clubs because they're unpopular," Turley said. "Laws like this would expose any unpopular industry to punitive taxes. It could be abortion clinics."

MY TAKE: If the government generally cannot impose viewpoint-dependent restrictions on speech (and it can't), then I'm not sure how it can impose viewpoint-dependent taxes without violating the First Amendment. By way of analogy: a state could tax all books, but probably could not tax only erotic fiction. Then again, restrictive zoning of strip clubs and adult bookstores seems to be permissible under current jurisprudence, and Alabama's disgraceful "sex toy merchant ban" survived (non-First-Amendment) court challenges. Still, it seems clear to me that a "selective speech tax" is too close to a "selective speech ban" to survive strict scrutiny under the First Amendment. Also unaddressed is whether the tax applies to male strip clubs patronized by women; that could be a whole other constitutional can of worms. Finally, I found it very depressing to see many economically illiterate comments in the article implying that the demand for strip clubs is perfectly inelastic -- which is a preposterous assertion and a wholly illegitimate rationalization for the tax.

ITEM: In a somewhat related story, an activist legislator in Wisconsin wants to impose a tax on video games and gaming equipment. The revenues would be targeted to funding the state's juvenile detention system:

[T]he idea is that the tax is "a kind of kids-kids thing," with gamers helping out fellow youth stuck behind bars in an adult prison system[.]

MY TAKE: The pesky facts that: (1) not all gamers are kids, and (2) video games generate no demonstrable externalities and therefore warrant no targeted taxation, are of course unaddressed. The Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling has long aimed its laser rifles, dark matter guns and hyperblasters at the video game industry; this insolent proposal is in that sense nothing new. (Via Tax Policy Blog.)

ITEM: When you go to the mall to buy your taxed video games, watch out for protestors --

The California Supreme Court has ruled that shopping malls can't stop protesters from urging the boycott of stores while on mall property.

In a 4-3 decision Monday, the justices ruled that the Fashion Valley mall in San Diego violated California's free speech laws when it kicked out demonstrators in 1998.
...
The high court ruled that California's free speech laws protect such demonstrations.

MY TAKE: There is no such thing as "private censorship," "freedom of speech" is not synonymous with "freedom to trespass," and the First Amendment does not quash property rights -- at least not in a jurisdiction with sane judges. To give you an idea of how utterly disconnected from common sense this decision is, consider the dissent:

[J]urisdictions throughout the nation have overwhelmingly rejected [this reasoning]. We should no longer ignore this tide of history. The time has come for us to forthrightly ... rejoin the rest of the nation in this important area of the law. Private property should be treated as private property, not as a public free speech zone.

Sounds about right. The case is Fashion Valley Mall v. NLRB, No. S144753 (Supr. Ct. Cal., December 24, 2007) (PDF - 46 pages).

ITEM: The Supreme Court of Minnesota recently decided an intriguing search and seizure case -- "intriguing" because the court held that the Fourth Amendment's reasonableness requirement depends on the time of day:

We also note that the protection against nighttime searches is aimed at a period of time -- nighttime -- and at certain private activities that occur in the home during that time. Accordingly, we believe it is appropriate to define the interest protected as freedom from intrusion during a period of nighttime repose.

MY TAKE: The court found that the nighttime search in this case was unreasonable and unconstitutional. I suppose any Fourth Amendment victory is a welcome development, but it just doesn't sit well with me to suggest that the Fourth Amendment can mean one thing at noon and another at midnight. Property rights are property rights and privacy rights are privacy rights -- the clock be damned. Moreover, as someone who once worked nights and whose father once worked nights, I also find it utterly unrealistic and unfair to presume a time-of-day homogeneity of the population that simply does not exist in modern society. In short, these are the kinds of problems that arise when a constitutional guarantee is measured in terms of "reasonableness" rather than as absolutes or near-absolutes. The case is Minnesota v. Jackson, No. A05-247 (Minn. Supr. Ct., December 6, 2007). More thoughts at FindLaw's Writ.

You have likely already clicked through the current Sidebar Sidetrack, which shows how Fox Sports appears to have used, without permission, a photo of a blogger's dog ("I can has all rights reserved copyrights nao?").

I know exactly nothing about copyright law and am not eager to learn any. Fair use or not, legal or not, what Fox did was unarguably unethical. Point conceded.

But consider this statement buried in the blogger's indignation:

I'm trying to imagine what went through the person's head that did this. Did they think that FOX, being a big ol' monolithic Capitalism-with-a-cap[it]al-C company could sort of, err, do whatever the hell they wanted?

Ah yes, the infamous "all capitalism is exploitation, and most exploitation is probably capitalism" canard. What a pity that this blogger misses the point entirely: To the extent that Fox infringed upon Truman the Dog's image, the company was being decidedly un-capitalist.

Capitalists produce; thieves steal. Capitalists offer to enter into voluntary contracts for mutual benefit; thieves steal. Capitalists know that sometimes their offers will be rejected; thieves steal.

So, in this instance, was Fox exhibiting capitalism, or thievery? And which, exactly, are we upset about?

Does this sentence make any sense to you?

"Dogs have feathers, because birds have feathers and dogs would therefore have feathers if they were birds."

No?

Then how much sense does this sentence make? (WSJ - $)

The FairTax rate is 23% on retail sales when calculated "inclusively," as are income tax rates.

But just as a dog is not a bird, a sales tax is not an income tax. So to say that a sales tax rate can legitimately be presented by the same metric as an income tax rate is as ridiculous as saying that "dogs have feathers -- assuming that dogs are birds."

It is as simple as it is unarguable: the FairTax proposal is a 30% national sales tax:

"0.30 / 1.30 = 0.23"
is a 30% sales tax, not a 23% sales tax. All else is willful deceit...

...as is the 30% itself, incidentally.

A comment I left on another blog, in which the author posits a purported contradiction between the simultaneous presence of Evangelical Christians and anti-tax advocates within the Republican Party (i.e., insisting that "true Christians" must embrace aggressively redistributionist tax policy):

"The basic Christian ethic is this: help your neighbor. That's it."

--Exactly, but there is a difference between "help your neighbor" and "seize from the neighbor you disfavor to help the neighbor you favor."

--The only Christian tax doctrine I'm familiar with is "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." Stated differently, the only correct "Christian tax doctrine" is to have no Christian tax doctrine whatsoever.

"a more equitable tax structure that asks the wealthy and corporations to contribute more fairly"

--If I refuse to pay my taxes, men with guns come and take me to prison. That is not "asking," and it is intellectually dishonest to suggest otherwise.

--Also: "more fairly"? To whom, by what standard? (Again, "by a Christian standard" is an oxymoron.)

---

I'll add as a postscript a reminder that corporations do not pay taxes; they merely collect them. Only individuals pay taxes.

Perhaps the New York Times editorial board has finally embraced fiscal responsibility?

Congress has passed and President Bush is sure to sign into law a bill that will spare some 23 million Americans from having to pay the alternative minimum tax next April.
...
What they fail to say is that the bill doesn't include a way to make up for the lost revenue[.] To make up the shortfall, the government plans to borrow the money, which will have to be paid back later with interest, either by raising taxes or reducing government services.
...
That's at best bait and switch, or at worst gross negligence.

That's also the Social Security "trust fund" — which the Times embraces and adores. Go figure.

The FICA taxes — one-eighth of most Americans' paychecks — that the federal government confiscates currently exceed current Social Security liabilities. The surplus is spent on other stuff: war, domestic spying, bridges to nowhere, etc. It is also used to lie to the American people about the size of the federal budget deficit (i.e., the reported deficit is the operating or "on-budget" deficit, reduced by the size of the Social Security surplus, which is "off-budget;" some people might call that "Enron accounting").

How deceitful — or stupid — does one have to be to call "war, domestic spying and bridges to nowhere" a "trust fund"? Yet that is exactly what the Social Security "trust fund" is — FICA taxes that have already been spent on other stuff.

The "Treasury bonds" (actually just a notebook in West Virginia) that comprise the Social Security "trust fund" are nothing more than an IOU from the government to itself. And just as IOU from yourself to yourself is not a "trust fund," so too is an IOU from the government to itself not a "trust fund."

Those ledger entries in that notebook in West Virginia are nothing more than a pledge by the federal government to fund future Social Security shortfalls — starting in less than a decade — with higher taxes or higher deficits in the future. Exactly the same fiscal shenanigans that, in the context of AMT reform, the Times blasts as "at best bait and switch, or at worst gross negligence." Yet it can't be negligence in one context and competence in another.

How, exactly, is it "at best bait and switch, or at worst gross negligence" for Congress to call spending money today and promising to pay for it tomorrow in the context of the AMT but not in the context of Social Security? How is less of a "bait and switch" to call it "tax relief" than to call it a "trust fund"?

This is not a difficult concept, except to the extent that politicians and their apologists try to make it difficult.

No use crying over banned milk?

But only Paul has introduced a bill to legalize unpasteurized milk.

No, he introduced a bill to end federal regulation of unpasteurized milk. There's a difference.

Madame Speaker, I rise to introduce legislation that allows the transportation and sale in interstate commerce of unpasteurized milk and milk products, as long as the milk both originates from and is shipped to states that allow the sale of unpasteurized milk and milk products.

So we see, yet again, that Paul does not love liberty. He merely hates Congress. No libertarian would suggest that banning unpasteurized milk is perfectly hunky-dory at the state level, just not at the federal level. Property rights and economic substantive due process either exist or they don't, either are guaranteed by the Constitution or are not (including that pesky Fourteenth Amendment that Paul in another context so insolently dismissed yesterday as "wasn't in the original Constitution").

Of course, the 2008 election will not be decided on the issue of raw milk. Neither does the fate of raw milk rise to the level of domestic spying, preemptive war, same-sex marriage (which Paul actively opposes), jurisdiction-stripping of federal judges (which Paul actvely supports) or even compulsory vaccinations in his home state of Texas. But it illustrates nicely the key philosophical point that the Paulbearers refuse to tackle: Ron Paul is simply not a libertarian.

If you want to argue that an anti-federalist is better than "business as usual," then fine. But please stop with the "Ron Paul is a libertarian" idiocy.

(Via Hit & Run).

Time to clean out the aggregator:

ITEM: Congress has, as part of its omnibus energy bill, called for the elimination of incandescent light bulbs. The War on Light Bulbs is a classic example of the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling, as I explained in a previous post.

ITEM: That same energy bill continues the insanity of ethanol subsidies, by requiring

a fivefold increase — to 36 billion gallons — in the amount of alternative home-grown fuels, such as ethanol, that must be added to the nation's gasoline supply by 2022[.]

Ethanol does nothing to alleviate carbon emissions but does much, by artificially inflating demand for corn and sugar, to raise food prices (e.g., tortillas).

ITEM: The latest estimate of unfunded state and local government employee health care liabilities? $1.4 trillion. Private businesses, meanwhile, are required by law to pre-fund their future health and pension obligations. Go figure — literally. I've blogged about unfunded state and local pension liabilities previously.

ITEM: Speaking of bogus government accounting, the federal budget deficit would be almost 70% higher — $275.5 billion — if the federal government used the same Generally Accepted Accounting Principles that private businesses are required to use. Netting out the lie of the Social Security "trust fund" and similar fraudulent intergovernmental accounts would add another $300 billion to the deficit. Previous post here.

ITEM: Having solved all other problems, the federal government has gone to great lengths to ensure that letters mailed from post offices in the District of Columbia actually bear a D.C. postmark. The announcement of course came from malcontents who seek to unconstitutionally confer full House representation on the District. Most recent post here.

ITEM: Having solved all other problems, Tennessee's Knox County Commission has passed a resolution asking people to urge politicians to recognize God as the "foundation of our National Heritage." I was not aware that "national heritage" had become a proper noun, let alone a theocratic one. Most recent post here.

ITEM: Speaking of dysfunctional local governments, the judge overseeing a lawsuit filed by Manalaplan Township, New Jersey, against a former mayor has quashed an unconstitutional subpoena served on Google seeking the identity, and all other available information, about an anonymous blogger. Previous post here.

ITEM: Speaking of judges, a panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has found that a district court judge, Thomas Porteous, may have committed impeachable acts. While it is occasionally true that a rogue judge might act as morally defective as most politicians, judicial leadership is much better at policing itself than legislatures ever are. Previous post here.

ITEM: A jury in Louisiana has sentenced a man to death for repeatedly raping a five-year old girl. The question of whether the Eighth Amendment forbids capital punishment for any crime other than murder has never been addressed by the Supreme Court. Previous post here.

ITEM: The New York Times has an article on a growing trend of homeowners to seek, based on falling housing values, reduced assessments for property tax computations. As I have argued previously, property taxes should based on the underlying structures and not sale prices of neighboring properties.

--Are Santa's reindeer male?

--Speaking of the reindeer: Comet, Cupid, Who and Blitzen?

--What's Kip's favorite Christmas song?

--What's Diamond's favorite Christmas song?

--What do you want for Christmas?

A few weeks ago, in an episode of "Questions," I asked:

Whatever happened to the Dell Dude?
Although fictional, Steven the Dell Dude was arguably the first forerunner to the modern YouTuber. Hence we pay tribute to him on this last Sunday before Christmas:


To put this Fall 2000 commercial into perspective: The Pentium III processor was decommissioned in 2003; today $849 will (almost) buy you a Dell desktop with Intel Core2 2.4GHz processor; 3GB RAM and 320GB hard drive (no monitor), or a 17" laptop with AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processor with 1GB RAM and a 120GB hard drive. (On the other hand, both examples include Vista, so Steven's package may be the better deal after all.)

It's a bit earlier than I planned, but I've fallen behind in real-world tasks due to a lingering head cold, and I need to get ready for an extended visit from a fellow blogger who will be staying with me next week. After New Year's, I'm off to Europe for a quick vacation.

So expect little substantive blogging through around January 10th.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Just a pass-along:

This paper is an encyclopedia entry on the political philosophy of libertarianism, written for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It discusses the major contemporary strands of libertarianism and their historical roots, and presents some of the main criticisms of these strands. Its focus is on libertarianism as a doctrine about distributive justice and political authority, and specifically on the consequentialist and natural rights formulations of these views.

The author is Matt Zwolinski of the University of San Diego, you can download the 25-page PDF here; registration may be required.

An excerpt:

In terms of political recommendations, libertarians believe that most, if not all, of the activities currently undertaken by states should be either abandoned or transferred into private hands. The most well-known version of this conclusion finds expression in the so-called "minimal state" theories of Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand and others, which hold that states may legitimately provide police, courts, and a military, but nothing more. Any further activity on the part of the state -- regulating or prohibiting the sale and/or use of drugs, conscripting individuals for military service, providing taxpayer-funded support to the poor, or even building public roads -- is itself rights-violating and hence illegitimate.

Libertarian advocates of a strictly minimal state are to be distinguished from two closely related groups, who favor a smaller or greater role for government, and who may or may not also label themselves "libertarian." On one hand are the so-called anarcho-capitalists who believe that even the minimal state is too large, and that a proper respect for individual rights requires the abolition of government altogether and the provision of protective services by private markets.

On the other hand are those who generally identify themselves as classical liberals. Members of this second group tend [to] share libertarians' confidence in free markets and skepticism of government power, but are more willing to allow greater room for coercive activity on the part of the state so as to allow for, say, state provision of public goods or even limited tax-funded welfare transfers.

Veteran readers of this blog know that I basically have one leg in the Rand/Nozick camp and the other in the classical liberal camp; I have little use for anarcho-capitalists. Moreover, the more narrowly one defines "public goods" and more clearly delineates "limited tax-funded welfare transfers" (i.e., to mean only to the truly incompetent -- orphaned, abused or neglected minors; refugees; those with bona fide incapacitating disabilities), I lean more toward classical liberalism; the more broadly you define public goods and welfare transfers, the more I tend to reflexively jerk back to Rand.

How about you? Which camp (including "none of the above") are you in and why?

You're probably familiar with the old joke about two explorers in the jungle who stumble upon a hungry tiger.* As they run for their lives, one explorer shouts to the other, "Why bother? We can't possibly outrun the tiger!"

"I don't need to outrun the tiger," the other explorer replies. "I only need to outrun you!"

That joke crossed my mind as I came across another joke: Paul Krugman's latest column —

In a 1963 essay for [Ayn] Rand's newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a "collectivist" myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, "would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings." On the contrary, he declared, "it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product."
...
In Mr. Greenspan's world, predatory lending — like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood — just doesn't happen.
...
Of course, now that it has all gone bad, people with ties to the financial industry are rethinking their belief in the perfection of free markets.

A few hasty stitches:

--It hasn't "all gone bad." The subprime "catastrophe" represents a subset of a subset of a subset of the securities markets. Ripple effects are, thus far, noticeably lacking.

--As I asked yesterday, what about "predatory borrowers"? Are they to bear no responsibility for their willful and in many cases flagrantly unethical contribution to this situation?

--Who was selling "poisoned toys"? Oh right, Communists. Anti-freedom charlatans pretending that "centrally planned capitalism" could possibly exist. Remind me again what the read-through is likely to be for mortgage lending (or socialized medicine or energy policy or education or ...)?

--Krugman is rebutting not Greenspan but a straw man. Capitalists don't "believe in the perfection of free markets." We only believe in the superiority of free markets over the prognostications and prescriptions of central planner wannabes. We don't believe we can outrun the tiger, but we know we can outrun Krugman.

It's quite simple really: The "greed" of Wall Street will never be more dangerous than the hubris of Washington or its apologist op-ed writers.

(Via no third solution.)

---

*I suppose today it's a polar bear. Or a smoke monster. Or something.

A comment I left at John Tierney's blog about the increased use of "smart elevators" in newly built skyscrapers such as the New York Times Building:

There are few more depressing sights than my daily walk to work in Midtown Manhattan in which I see, in the Twenty-First Century, traffic cops standing in intersections guiding vehicles in the same way they did in the 1920s and 1930s.

Depressing because, if people were neither stupid nor inconsiderate, then the technology designed to render them obsolete (i.e., traffic lights) would succeed. But all it takes are a few stupid or inconsiderate people and the whole "intelligent" system collapses and we find ourselves needing to revert to "simplicity trumps efficiency."

I have no doubt that the same will be true for "smart" elevators. The title of Mr. Tierney's post ["Smart Elevators, Dumb People"] says it all.

P.S. How successful did "double-decker" elevators such as those at Citigroup Center and the Smith Barney Building in NYC prove to be? My experience in both building has been: "not very."

I also suspect, however, that the ubiquitous presence of traffic cops at lighted intersections in New York City may merely be a police union boondoggle. Is there no escape from my cynicism?

--Does this look intelligently designed to you?

--Which European nation just forbade Amazon.com from offering free delivery?

--Don't they teach the tort of false imprisonment at Harvard Law School?

--A Special Guest Question: Did "Moral Values" and the Gay Marriage Backlash Play a Key Role in Bush's 2004 Victory? (You might be surprised by the purported answer.)

--Speaking of gays, moral values and victory: Will Survivor: China winner Todd Herzog, a self-described "openly gay Mormon," tithe one-tenth of his $1 million prize to the LDS Church? While we're on the subject: Can there even be such a thing as an "openly gay Mormon"? And if so, how the heck could he win Survivor? ("I wasn't the strongest. I wasn't the smartest. But I was definitely the most strategic." Sounds a bit like Mitt Romney.)

Think the Democratic presidential candidates would pay attention to this?

While some degree of early defaults are to be expected in subprime mortgage pools, the extraordinarily high level of defaults encountered by the 2006 vintage cannot be explained by home price declines alone. It has become increasingly evident that loans originated with lax underwriting and higher instances of fraud can have a material impact on a securitization.

They're not called "no income verification" mortgages for nothing:

BasePoint Analytics LLC, a recognized fraud analytics and consulting firm, analyzed over 3 million loans originated between 1997 and 2006[.] ... Their research found that as much as 70% of early payment default loans contained fraud misrepresentations on the application.

No one laments how the unethical borrowers who lie on the mortgage applications "exploited" the unfortunate bank. Nor should they: If you lend down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.

But that should work both ways: What is so "cruel" about being unsympathetic to those who deserve no sympathy? Competent consenting adults, hoping to game the system, got burned -- not by any "predatory lender" but by their own miscalculation (dare one say "their own greed"?). They could have stayed out of the housing market. They could have waited until their finances and credit improved. They could have done their homework before they signed the forms. They could have been, forgive the repetition, competent consenting adults.

Instead they try to cry foul and play victim of imagined Silas Barnabys -- and succeed? That simply cannot be right.

This is comparable (worse, in fact) to the "exploited" college student who opens up her first credit card account, promptly buys $1,000 worth of DVDs, pizza and airfare to Daytona for Spring Break, none of which she can afford, and subsequently becomes fodder for bill collectors. The pesky fact that she got to enjoy the money while the bank is out $1,000 doesn't stop malcontents from insisting that the student is somehow the "victim" and the bank is the "predator." It makes no sense at all.

Activist members of Congress are shocked, shocked to learn that some federal judges have the gall to seek private sector jobs after they leave the bench:

The House Judiciary Committee approved a bill last week that will bump up salaries of all federal judges by a whopping 31 percent.

But another provision in the bill would penalize any judges at retirement age who leave the bench for a high-paying job by reducing the amount of pension they receive.
...
District judges earn just over $166,000, slightly more than the base salary of a first-year associate at a big law firm. A number of judges have cited that figure in recent months when announcing that they are leaving the bench. Over the last two years, 17 judges have resigned, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

These are, of course, the same activist legislators who leave Congress, sometimes in disgrace, to become hyper-rich lobbyists (or, in the case of the ultra-hypocritical "populist" John Edwards, a hedge fund consultant). And they dare express indignation over a federal judge who chooses to recoup years of lost income after serving on the bench by putting in some low-profile time as a law firm partner?

Remind me again who are the "dedicated public servants"? And remind me again which group needs to be controlled and restrained, given their limitless megalomania and hubris?

To the Netflix subscriber who was expecting Lost, Season Three, Disc 1 but received Will & Grace, Season Seven, Disc 1:

My apologies — I put the disc in the wrong sleeve when I returned it to Netflix.

Of course, the two shows are essentially interchangeable: implausible characters on an implausible island facing implausible situations — and spending too much time pushing other people's buttons.

So perhaps you won't notice the difference.

To review: The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable seizures. When the seizure is by law enforcement officials, "reasonable" generally means either subsequent to a warrant or otherwise based upon probable cause.

So the question becomes: Is this reasonable?

Motorists may be in for a surprise if they spot flashing red lights in their rearview mirrors in this Sacramento suburb during the holiday season.

Police are stopping law-abiding motorists and rewarding their good driving with $5 Starbucks gift cards.

A traffic officer came up with the idea to "promote the holiday spirit and enhance goodwill between the traffic unit and the motoring public," police Sgt. Tim Curran said.

Call me a Grinch, but it is utterly mind-boggling to me that any police supervisor or government counsel signed off on this insanity. Pulling someone over -- government coercion -- is not a game and is not the proper forum for spreading holiday cheer and "goodwill toward men." The lost time, the stress of being pulled over, the incredulity upon learning the pretext for the stop -- is all that worth a $5 gift card? What were these morons thinking?

I see no reason not to conclude that such stops are actionable civil rights violations. Expect this nonsense to die a quick death.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Class warrior John Edwards this past Sunday:

Mr. Edwards said that a big-stick-carrying approach was the only way to effect change. Corporate resistance, he said, had ... resulted in a kind-to-the-rich tax policy[.]"

Reality:


(Click to enlarge.)
The only epilogue required is to note, yet again, that these figures are only for income taxes. Where the working poor are indeed oppressed is of course not federal income taxes but Social Security taxes, which seize one-eighth of working-class Americans' paychecks to fund a high-risk, low-return intergenerational transfer scheme that is in severe fiscal distress. Anyone who claims to champion the working poor should make meaningful Social Security reform his highest fiscal priority.

John Edwards?

He does not believe we need to reduce benefits, change the retirement age or increase the burden on average workers.

In other words, he's blind.

But not deaf:

Edwards will fight to keep the promise of social security by ending the Social Security tax exemption for workers making more than $200,000 a year.

To Edwards, the answer to everything, absolutely everything, is class warfare. Everything.

When did "The American Dream" start to mean "having someone else pay for everything"? When did "progressive social policy" start to mean "an unlimited and unapologetic willingness to spend other people's money"? When did "the new social compact" (Edwards' term) start to mean "the new socialism"?

More thoughts from Brink Lindsey.

---

Actually, I have another post script: When Edwards rails against "big, multinational corporations" (as he did this past Sunday) he is of course damning the owners of those corporations — the shareholders. Who exactly does he think those shareholders are?

As a general rule, the stock of "evil" or "tax-privileged" blue-chip American mega-companies such as Exxon ("Big Oil"), Merck ("Big Pharma") and Cigna ("Big Insurance") is owned largely, often overwhelmingly, by the middle class — either directly (including via mutual funds and similar investment vehicles) or indirectly (via pension funds, including — gasp! — government employee pension funds). Not to mention all the (vicariously evil) universities, hospitals, scholarship funds and other non-profit institutions that rely on endowment income — do such institutional endowments tend to serve the poor, the rich or the middle class? (Recent example here.) So whom, consequently, does Edwards serve by declaring such corporations, and the income they generate, "the enemy"?

It's a pity that socialist megalomaniacs like Edwards have so corrupted the word "populist" that it is now essentially a synonym for "ignorant."

---

For those confused by the title, see here.

This kind:

"I have not been super-active in politics over the years, and so I am not current with all the issues and position papers," said Pete Kottra, 43, who helps his wife, Jeannie, 40, home-school their four children. "But with Mike Huckabee, I know he's a Christian. So I know he sees the world the way I see it."

Behold the political elites of Iowa:

• Iraq? Dunno...


• National sales tax? Dunno...


• Nanny state? Dunno...


• Christian? Check!

Splendid.

Note also the irony in the term "sees the world the way I see it" -- which for these yokels means not seeing evolution and not seeing gays as human beings and not seeing the difference between a church and a school or a church and a courthouse. For them, it's precisely about a desperate need not to see.

Meanwhile, I was of course not shocked -- not shocked! -- to learn that Christian homeschoolers (who perhaps more than anyone put the "radical" in "radical social conservative") are coming out in droves to support Huckabee:

Conservative Christians are said to represent the vast majority of the parents of the 1.1 million children estimated by the federal Department of Education in 2003 as home-schooled in the United States.

Remember, these theocrats do not homeschool in order to provide a better education. They homeschool in order to provide a redacted education. And in a decade or two, as these home-(un)schooled kids start to move off the farm and into the Twenty-First Century, this nation will find itself having to deal with a multitude of rural conservative-spawned illiterates to complement its multitude of inner-city liberal-spawned illiterates.

But at least the rural conservative-spawned illiterates will know that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that eating shrimp is an abomination, and that Jesus spoke English.

(Previously: What Kind of People Support Mitt Romney?)

One torture apologist tries:

It is luxurious to believe that we can defeat one of history's most virulent ideologies without moral sacrifice. Yet somehow liberals have convinced themselves that any deviation whatsoever from our principles reduces us to the level of the barbarians we are fighting. In other words, water-boarding equals suicide bombing, killing Muslim terrorists in the Middle East is the same as flying jetliners into the World Trade Center, or the Patriot Act is tantamount to Sharia Law.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. Right up there with "the Constitution is not a suicide pact"* and "a government computer can't violate your rights."**

It is not mandatory to equate waterboarding with suicide bombing in order to oppose it. One only requires the following:

• Waterboarding is morally wrong.


• Waterboarding is ineffective.


• If we waterboard, then so will they.

Each of those statements is reasonable and objectively demonstrable, to the point of being nearly axiomatic. (The second and third are, in fact, arguably optional; many choose, not unreasonably, to stop at "Waterboarding is morally wrong.")

So what does it say about those who cannot even attempt to rebut these uncomplicated premises and must instead leap straight to the absurd histrionics of "opponents of waterboading think it equals suicide bombing"?

It's quite simple really: The cure for the evils of barbarism is never "more barbarism."‡

As for the (hallucinatory) panic-hypothetical of the "ticking time bomb" (a/k/a the "Jack Bauer defense"), the correct framework is self-apparent: forbid the conduct, then leave post facto questions of propriety, morality and legality in particular instances (should they ever arise) to a jury, court-martial, etc., with the pardon as a moral stopgap of last resort. If Jack Bauer is willing to die for us, then surely he is willing to take a pardon for us.

---

More:

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and FDR interned Japanese-Americans and had six German spies executed after their trial before a Military Commission during WWll. Despite these actions, both men have always been considered two of America's greatest presidents.

It is universally accepted that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional, at least up until the point when Congress ratified it after the fact. And who today, apart from one mentally disturbed media whore, honestly believes that internment of American citizens during World War II was morally or even pragmatically justified? Stated differently, are Lincoln and Roosevelt considered great because of these incidents, or despite them?

May we soon cease to live in interesting times.

---

*Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949) (Jackson, J. dissenting).

**Richard Posner. See also here.

‡With all due acknowledgement to Al Smith (or is it H.L. Mencken?).

Time to clean out the aggregator:

ITEM: The Administration is defending the indefensible destruction of CIA torture tapes, in open defiance of two court orders, on the weaselly grounds that the taped interrogations did not take place at Guantanamo Bay. That is, of course, completely orthogonal to the question of whether they were relevant to policies at Guantanamo — which they surely were (and to the extent this issue is arguable, it should have been left to the judges who issued the retention orders to decide). Previous post here.

ITEM: The Supreme Court issued two opinions holding that the infamous 100:1 crack/powder penalty ratio in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines is, like the rest of the Guidelines, advisory only. Federal judges are now expressly authorized to hand down sentences below the Guidelines, subject to a "deferential abuse-of-discretion" standard of review by appellate courts. Kimbrough v. U.S. (No. 06-6330) and Gall v. U.S. (No. 06-7949). Previous post here.

ITEM: A federal appeals court, meanwhile, has granted a temporary injunction blocking a Missouri law banning protests at funerals. The law is generally thought to be inspired by and specifically directed at the Westboro Baptist Church, of "God Hates Fags" infamy. The underlying litigation (i.e., whether to permanently find the protest ban unconstitutional) will now proceed, with the understanding that the appellate panel that granted the injunction considers the ban unconstitutional and would likely find so on appeal. Phelps-Roper v. Nixon, No. 07-1295 (8th Cir., December 6, 2007) (PDF - 12 pages). Previous post here.

ITEM: Jaunting over to Georgia, that state's highest court revised its recent decision striking down residency restrictions for convicted sex offenders, to make clear that only prior owners of their homes are exempt from the law. Flagship post here.

ITEM: California this time — The litigation over a school district that banned "Tigger socks" as potential gang colors has been settled, with the students who were unconstitutionally disciplined having their records expunged. Price tag to Napa Valley taxpayers: $95,000 — and that's just for the plaintiffs' lawyers, not the school district's outside counsel. Previous post here.

ITEM: The Senate has passed a $286 billion farm bill that lacks any meaningful reform of payments to wealthy farmers growing politically favored crops. The House version had modest income caps; the White House wanted substantial reform and is threatening a veto. Flagship post here.

Keeping the Christmas music, losing the Mariah Carey:


All payette wants for Christmas is to successfully audition for Rent on Broadway. Hopefully Santa has some cast openings in his bag.

Concurring Opinions asks a question about gap-filling in statutory interpretation:

A legislature passes a statute. A new situation arises, one that doesn't seem to have been anticipated by the legislature at the time of passing the statute. Judges must interpret the statute, and they often make one of two arguments: (1) ... the court should interpret the statute with its best guess about how the legislature might have addressed the new situation had it been aware of it when it created the law; or (2) the statute must be strictly construed; if the legislature really doesn't like how the strict application of the statute's language applies to a particular situation, then it can change the law.
...
[P]people are convicted under these laws. People must make decisions based on these laws, which can be difficult if the laws have big ambiguities or don't address emerging situations.

My proposed solution is simple: Interpret a vague, incomplete or obsolete law in whatever way best preserves individual liberty or limits government. Depending on the circumstances, that can mean either Method 1 or Method 2, and it is not intellectually inconsistent to switch back and forth between the two so long as the goal (lenity) is consistently sought.

Two recent examples:

1. Commonwealth v. Hyde. An outrageously wrong 2001 decision by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, recently back in the news, finding that a vague state law forbidding wiretapping without consent somehow applies to a motorist tape recording, in his own vehicle, a traffic stop by police. The court used Method 2 (strict but absurd construction), and a shameful and unjust outcome resulted. Method 1 would almost certainly have resulted in an acquittal.

2. Watson v. U.S.* A federal drug law provides that punishment should be escalated if one "uses" a firearm in drug trafficking. Defendant received a firearm as barter for the drugs he delivered. Did he "use" the firearm? The Supreme Court, using Method 2, held unanimously that the answer was "no." (But cf., Smith v. U.S.**, holding — also via Method 2 — that the person who offers the firearm in trade for narcotics does "use" the firearm within the meaning of the statute; the dissent by contrast argues in favor of Method 1 and the opposite outcome.)

There is no basis to insist that either of the two methods is inherently superior to the other in all circumstances, or that mechanistically applying the same method (whichever one it might be), all the time in every case, is an inherently superior approach to switching between the two. The point is that, as with the presumption of liberty with (proper) constitutional interpretation, there should always be a presumption of lenity in (proper) statutory interpretation.

When in doubt, judges should simply apply whichever method is more likely to acquit the defendant or constrain the reach of government.

---

*No. 06-571 (December 10, 2007) (PDF - 12 pages).

**508 U.S. 223 (1993).

Question: What's the only thing more pathetic than an occupational journalist (journalism is not a true profession, therefore there is no such thing as a "professional journalist") who calls for licensing of bloggers?

Answer: An occupational journalist who calls for mandatory licensing of bloggers, is a mere copycat and, arguably, a near-plagiarist:

Advocates argue that the acts of collecting and distributing makes these people "journalists." This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a "citizen surgeon" or someone who can read a law book is a "citizen lawyer."

It took me a while, but I knew I had seen the insolent gobbledygook term "citizen surgeon" somewhere before:

Bloggers are called "citizen journalists"; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernible "citizen surgeon" movement[.]

The hubris of these insecure scriveners almost rivals that of politicians. As if composing the police blotter were equivalent to inserting an IV, or as if asking Dana Perino a question were akin to performing an emergency appendectomy.

My response then is my response now:

It is precisely the fact that occupational journalists are not "professionals" on the same plane with physicians (or nurses, attorneys, veterinarians, accountants or even optometrists) that is finally being exposed by blogging.

Occupational journalists face no mandatory educational curricula. They face no licensing examinations, no continuing education requirements, and need not subscribe to any legally binding code of ethics.

The very fact that occupational journalists often cannot see the difference between a journalist and a surgeon is why they are increasingly being ignored. They are not credentialed -- and it drives them batty that laypersons no longer see any need afford them the respect that they afford the true (i.e., credentialed) professions.

The ironic part of this whole "decline and fall of MSM" debate continues to be the pesky fact that most bloggers, myself included, freely admit that we are not news gatherers and do not strive to be news gatherers. We are commentators. I have no desire to be the next Brian Williams -- only the next George Will.

The point is that commentators -- and their readers -- often want raw news, without analysis or redaction. I love traditional news -- but only the kind that comes from the AP, Reuters or Dow Jones: objective, succinct and essentially anonymous. It's the faux "professionalism" of the high-profile occupational journalists -- the same ones who throw the tantrums -- that I find vestigial and in some cases counterproductive. Which, of course, is pre