On the Soapbox

I read this post in my RSS reader, and it got me thinking about the economics of education.

This is a topic that I have not thought much about before, and if someone asked me about education, I would usually give a canned response about how education is a public good and thus public education makes sense. But the explicitness of the language used in the post that I read caused me to pause and reconsider whether or not education really is a public good.

"... situations where there is very, very little control over who gets the benefits of the good (no matter who paid for the good)."

For starters, I would not make the argument of education as a public good quite that way. If a parent were to spend lots of money on private tuition, their child will be the direct and most significant beneficiary of that expenditure.

This is not to say that education is not a public good, though. In my view, education has what I would call an institutional public good effect. The public good benefits are of an educated public in general...

1. Democracy requires good, informed public discourse and a public that understands and appreciates the principles of the social contract into which they are bound. We can look at the United States and scoff at the state of our public discourse, but if we look at many other worse-off countries where democracy has stumbled or outright failed, we would see that a poorly-educated public plays a large (though by no means exclusive) role in their failure.
2. Inheritance is one of the kinks of the libertarian ideal. Dynastic wealth and aristocracy are generally not things that libertarians embrace, and they are most certainly not compatible with free markets. Our notions of equal opportunity and the self-made person necessitate public education (and other things like the estate tax). One could consider the support of these ideals to be public goods.

Those are the two public good arguments that can be made for education. Argument #1 is limited in scope because it really only covers things like reading, economics (that this subject is not a high school requirement is tragic), history, and civics. Argument #2 covers the problem of inheritance (which we would never eliminate unless we establish some sort of Brave New World system where the family unit is abolished), and the public goods argument here is fairly weak and limited in scope as well, since the public good is just the promotion of what we hold to be a positive ideal.

It would seem, then, that my support for public education based on the notion of it being a public good is a fairly weak one, and as I more carefully thought about the role of education in society, it became clear to me that I have been falsely attributing many of the arguments for public education to the weak (though non-dismissible) notion of public goods.

Education is an investment in human capital. In an efficient market, resources will be allocated such that those who would gain the most from the investment will get the most. On some levels, this works. A student with a low IQ who struggles in school will probably not spend much on higher education: either no college or an inexpensive community college, and this person will most likely opt for a job that requires just labor and not labor with a lot of invested capital. Similarly, a student with a high IQ who learns things very quickly will most likely invest more in education: take out large student loans to pay for expensive medical school, for example, and in the end, this student will be in a high paying job that requires that its labor have a lot of invested capital. In such a case, the market has allocated resources efficiently: the factory has a laborer with an appropriate IQ and an appropriate level of education, and the hospital has a laborer with an appropriate IQ and an appropriate level of education. The problem, however, is that family ties make it such that capital is often allocated based on who the child's parents are and not necessarily on the child's abilities or potential. The children of rich parents will often receive a lot of educational investment regardless of their abilities or potential, and children of poor parents will often receive a low level of educational investment regardless of their abilities or potential. The former case is just a waste of resources, while the latter is a more tragic case where someone may be deprived of opportunity. Although some exceptionally bright children will develop very well even with a very low level of investment so that poor resources do not play as large of a role, for many children, the level of educational resources that they receive do play a large role. A higher degree of financial freedom (e.g., student loans, financial aid) along with a clearer picture of each person's abilities make it such that wholesale privatization of higher education makes some amount of sense (and before the post-WWII boom of state universities, this was the norm in higher education), but this is not a sensible approach for primary, or to a lesser extent, secondary education, especially since it is difficult to gauge a child's abilities (and thus the appropriate level of capital investment) until secondary education at the earliest. I would thus say that the most important argument for public primary and secondary education is that it corrects for a market failure brought about by ties of blood interfering with the efficient allocation of resources. And by giving everyone a fair and equal chance, it will also result in a better, more accurate picture of what someone's abilities are when they reach a stage where there is increasing differentiation of investment (e.g., this will increase the likelihood that if a poor child fails to get into college or into an AP class in high school, it is because of factors inherent to the child and not because an unfair lack of educational investment), thus correcting for another market failure brought about by imperfect and distorted information.

Finally, proponents of public education see an educated population as a public good in respect to industries having a better labor pool to draw from. I think that this claim should be dismissed. Instead, I would like to approach this from a different angle and propose the idea that public education encourages more investment in human capital because it diversifies away the risk of this sort of investment. If public education did not exist, then the tax dollars spent on education would end up in the hands of individuals and businesses. Individuals could use that same money to put themselves through private school and businesses could use that money to educate and train their employees, thus resulting in, at least on paper, the same level of education spending as before. However, let us consider a thought experiment where each person has $100 to spend on education. In this thought experiment, $100 spent on education may result in either $220 worth of extra income for a net gain of $120, or it may result in failure, no extra income, and thus a net loss of $100. Assuming equal probabilities of both outcomes, the expected result is a positive gain of $10, or 10%. However, as most people are risk adverse, many will not make such an investment, and society as a whole will miss out on that 10% gain. If, instead, the investment costs were paid by society, the risk is diversified away, and that overall social gain of 10% will thus be realized. Similarly, employers educating their employees about the things that public education would otherwise teach will face similar risks in addition to a free-rider problem where one company can lure away employees educated by another, thus gaining an educated employee while forcing the other company to bear the costs. This will generate risk and will discourage companies from spending too much on human capital investment. Thus, assuming a positive overall return on education, then public spending on education will have a positive overall effect and would thus benefit society as a whole (though, individually, the effects would be mixed).

On the whole, I think that the market inefficiencies introduced by public education are far outweighed by market efficiencies gained from the correction of market failures and from the diversification of risk. That, coupled with the secondary, though still important, public goods arguments, is why I believe public education is an institution that must exist.

Note: Upon further reflection, I suppose I should clarify and say that the arguments for public education are really the arguments for publicly-funded education. Through the use of vouchers, it should be possible to maintain public funding for education while also giving schools an incentive to operate efficiently and effectively. While I do strongly support vouchers in principle, I have many reservations about their actual use because in most cases, vouchers are just a cleverly dressed-up vehicle for people to shield children from secular education and to indoctrinate them in religious schools. Legitimate use of vouchers to transfer a child to a better school do exist, but they account for only a small minority of cases. I also have many reservations about implementation, practice, and how the way reality plays out may differ from the theory on paper.

Has anyone noticed the Bush Administration's fondness of the phrase, "mistakes were made," which was most recently used to describe the political firings of eight US attorneys. As a commentator on NPR pointed out this morning, instead of using the active "I made mistakes" or "we made mistakes," the Bush Administration habitually uses the passive "mistakes were made," to acknowledge the making of mistakes but never explicitly admitting to making them and thus never explicitly accepting the responsibility for making them. For an administration whose 2000 campaign war cry was responsibility and accountability, it certainly has a clever way of dodging it.

I recently read this column by Sam Harris* at the LA Times. The crux of what he has to say is neatly encapsulated in the 5th-to-last paragraph:

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists--men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals--who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally--deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

While I have never liked religious extremists and fundamentalists, religious moderates and liberals are those whose beliefs I do not agree with, but that I will happily respect and accept. Harris' argument that moderates serve as an enabler and shield for those who are more extreme is thus a troubling--though interesting--take on things. On one hand, I think it is intriguing. But for the most part, I have some doubts about how true it is in reality and to what extent those in the middle of the spectrum really do provide a favorable environment for those at the extreme, and this is certainly not helped by Harris being a poor articulator of ideas. I am curious what others think about this.

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* He is basically condensing what he wrote in his book, The End of Faith, into a much shorter form with this column, and quite frankly, I think it is much more lucid and well-articulated here (though still scatter-brained) than it ever was in his tediously long-winded book.

A person once said,

On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism."

No, this was not a bleeding-heart liberal; in fact, this is someone who most bleeding-heart liberals have learned to detest. This was a 1981 Senate speech given by Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. It is ironic that most people consider Ronald Reagan to be Goldwater's ideological successor. Various authors have pointed to the loss of the Goldwater campaign as the start of the modern Republican Party. John McCain remarked that Goldwater created the "breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan." A conservative columnist for the Washington Post described the 1980 Reagan election with the words, "it took 16 years to count the votes [of the 1964 election], and Goldwater won." But Reagan was not Goldwater's ideological successor. Goldwater was a libertarian. Reagan's right-conservatism was an unusual and hideous marriage of libertarian principles with religious zealotry. And 26 years after Reagan's election, moderate Republicans are beginning to see just how pernicious Reagan's alliance has been.

I wasn't planning to comment on the Chinese missile test, but after hearing the near-hysterical American reaction on the evening news, I'll throw in my two cents.

1. China is not the Soviet Union, and this is not the Cold War.
   • China does not share in the hegemonic goals that the Soviet Union had of spreading Communism and destroying capitalism.
   • China has abandoned Communism in all but name. With the rapid erosion of the state's roles, China is by some measures even less socialistic than the United States is.
   • China is even on the slow--though often uneven--path of political reform and is gradually creeping towards democracy and the rule of law.
2. China has been historically pacifist. They like the boast that, unlike white nations, they have never invaded and occupied foreign soil. Additionally, over the course of the past several years, China has reduced the size of its armed forces by over half a million.
3. China is all but drowning in growing domestic unrest and strife. The political instability of a war would likely put the ruling party at grave risk, especially since the only thing that is keeping China's head above the rising waters of unrest is the tremendous economic growth and income that comes from trade with the West. Any disruption in that trade would hurt both China and the West, but it would hurt China much more as their economy is less diversified and more dependent on trade and because of the importance of that trade on its political stability--something that the exceedingly self-preservationist ruling party is keenly aware of.
4. The European Union was founded on the principle that economic trade would make wars all but unthinkable in a region that was once the greatest hotbed of wars. This is certainly the case with China. Strong economic ties and trade are the best and most permanent guaranteers of peace.
5. Although American foreign policy has been less rational lately, it strikes me as very odd that China would see the West as any sort of military threat that it needs to compete with, especially given how very allergic to war the West has become. The only real potential flash point is over the status of Taiwan (to be sure, a point that is not to be underestimated), but it seems that both China and Taiwan have now comfortably settled into the status quo of Taiwan's de facto but not de jure independence.
6. Right now, the greatest threat to American national security is Islamic terrorism, and the greatest threat to Chinese national security is also Islamic terrorism. Lost in all the news about Iraq is the fact that China, which borders a number of Islamic countries and whose western provinces are the home to a significant number of Muslims, was the victim of well over 200 Islamic terrorist bombings in 2005, some of which even happened in the capital Beijing. Like the bombings in Iraq, many were conducted by foreign fighters who infiltrated China's western borders. I trust that in the long term, the national security interests of both China and the West will be identical.

For all these reasons, the missile test perplexes me. It perplexes me how the Chinese government (which, by the way, is not a monolithic and single-minded entity, much like how the American government, divided between the two parties and the factions within the two parties, is far from monolithic and single-minded) ever got the notion that testing this sort of weapon would be in its interests. Political Islam and terrorists are China's newest and most immediate enemies, and they won't have have any satellites to shoot down. In fact, recent newscasts from China paid little or no attention to the missile test whereas the state of the conflict in Iraq and the battle against Islamic extremism seems to get much more spotlight and coverage. At the same time, the American overreaction is puzzling, too. Perhaps this is because most Americans are still stuck in a Cold War mentality and fail to realize just how different China is from the Soviet Union. In any case, I think that China and the United States are much more alike than either side would admit and that ultimately, I think that that it would be most sensible for the two to act as allies instead of rivals.

I have long known that the notion that the United States was "founded as a Christian nation" is nothing more than a fabrication of the historical revisionism of the religious right. What I didn't know was that this concept was actually expressed in a government document. As it turns out, the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, as ratified by the United States Senate, contains the following phrase:

... the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion ...

While reading about this, I also came across these words from the famous infidel who penned the Declaration of Independence:

Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. ... Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the wall of separation between church and state, therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

It is amusing, then, to observe the revisionists of the religious right painting this "wall" as a liberal fabrication unsupported by the views of the Founding Fathers. Ironically, members of the religious right should be grateful for this wall of separation, as Jefferson was right about the wall of separation helping stave off corruption. This wall of separation is arguably the most important reason why the United States today is, for better or for worse, more devout than Europe, Canada, or even Israel, where there currently is or has been state-supported religion.

This article in the Washington Post makes me very angry. Especially the last line:

"I still think this is a great country," Hettinga said. "In Mexico, they would have just shot me."

Gee. What consolation that is. But why couldn't this country be even better?

This sort of thing is the main reason why I hate Democrats (and this new breed of equally corrupt big-government Republicans). I am certainly not opposed to government playing a role to correct natural market failures, but why do people always insist that government play a regulatory, rule-making role? If there is a market failure that needs to be fixed (externalities or insufficiently informed consumers), then fix the market failure. Why is there always this itch to go one step further and to start making rules to regulate and control? Want something to happen? Fine, go and incentivize it, don't force it. Even if people don't accept the moral argument against governments forcing behavior, why not the practical argument that regulatory policies--no matter how good-intentioned they may be at the outset--represent "security holes" (to use a software engineering analogy) that almost invariably invite "exploits"--corruption and abuse at some point in time; to those who say that libertarian policy is built upon idealistic wishing, I say that expecting government to always do good is even more unrealistically idealistic.

While I'm on the topic, the recent ban on trans fats in New York City is an excellent example of a gross regulatory overstep. Why is the city imposing a blanket ban on this stuff? Yes, most restaurants can do without it for most foods, but there may be some dishes that require odd ingredients that may contain some amounts of this stuff. Even if that were not the case, why go as far as ban it? Why not just inform the customers by requiring that restaurants post information about the trans fats in their foods, and let the consumers decide if they want to patronize someone using harmful ingredients (given the amount of money that is made hawking heart health products in this country, I think consumers do care very much about their mortality). Or if the city is concerned about the rising health care costs that result from these fats (since health care is taxpayer-subsidized), they could even tax trans fats to offset the costs to the taxpayers and also to give businesses a cost incentive to switch away from them. Any of those methods would've been just as effective and much less blunt (and immoral!) than just tossing in an outright ban.

Since his death on Thursday, I have read a number of Milton Friedman tributes and obituaries. My favorite one so far has been this one at Salon by left-of-center economist Brad DeLong, which I think captures Friedman's world-view fairly well. DeLong's obituary is both amusing and insightful, and I highly recommend that people read it.

I think that Friedman's particular brand of libertarianism very closely matches my own. He believes in limited government, but unlike Ayn Rand and her wayward ilk, he believes that government does have a role to play because the natural order (e.g., markets) is imperfect and that, as a result, intervention is sometimes necessary. Like all economists, he is aware that perfect free markets do not (and will never) exist for a variety of reasons ranging from externalities to asymmetric information. For example, here is his take on externalities:

"Free markets" is a very general term. There are all sorts of problems that will emerge. Free markets work best when the transaction between two individuals affects only those individuals. But that isn't the fact. The fact is that, most often, a transaction between you and me affects a third party. That is the source of all problems for government. [source]

The DeLong obituary brings up the example of the London congestion tax, and in the case of environmental policy, Friedman has voiced support for controlling atmospheric emissions through a cap-and-trade system (the most well-known example of a cap-and-trade system to reduce pollution is the Kyoto Protocol). I have read comments from the left end of the political spectrum denouncing Friedman as heartless and as not caring about the losers problem of economics. While Friedman did support abolishing Social Security, welfare, and the minimum wage (all three of which I would like to see abolished as well), his calls for their abolition were not made in vacuum. Most people are not aware that he had championed for the negative income tax¹ as their replacement. Unfortunately, the NIT never gained political traction, and today, Friedman is remembered more for his attacks against the minimum wage than for his support of the NIT.

Although I agree with Friedman in principle, I sometimes do not come to the same conclusions that he does. For example, while he advocates selling off public lands, I think that the market's tendency to fail to properly price future value (a common problem with non-renewable resources) will make this a bad idea. Friedman justified government intervention based on pragmatic cost-benefit analyses: if the benefit to be gained from a market correction outweighed the cost of giving the government that extra bit of power, then there should be intervention, otherwise, it's not worth it. I personally am not as skeptical of government as he is because, at least amongst civil servants (politicians are a different story), there are many people who genuinely believe in doing good and not abusing power. This is not to say that government can be trusted, but that because people tend to have a non-zero sense of ethics and principle, the cost of granting that power to government may be lower than he estimates, and thus there are a larger number of circumstances where the cost-benefit analysis works out. I also think he sometimes overestimates the efficacy of private institutions that could take over some of the roles of government. In the case of selling off public lands, the private institutions that have power and influence right now are generally industrial in nature (which is partly the fault of government having taken the place of private institutions in conservation and partly the fault of markets being unable to price long timescales), and in the time it would take for opposing private groups to gather in strength to counterbalance industry, a lot of irreversible damage could be done. In any case, the differences in conclusions come mostly from technical points and not from points of principle, which is why I, too, will say that Milton Friedman will be missed.

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¹ Although I will not go into detail about the NIT here--the pros and cons of the NIT is something that I've been planning to write about in a separate blog post for some time now--the NIT would have not only served the same social welfare functions, it would have actually been even more effective at doing so.

Several days ago, I saw this NYT headline: Incoming Democrats Put Populism Before Ideology. Um, on last check, populism¹ is ideology.

The strong Christian support for the Republican party in this country has long struck me as a curious oddity. Religion has always been a populist institution at its core. It preaches traditional social values and morals while, at the same time, it frowns upon massed wealth and generally advocates a socialist economic agenda. After all, free market capitalism is an extremely Darwinian institution and can be considered the social counterpart to biology's evolution. The Republicans tend to be right-conservative, so while they share the same social agenda as populists, they have conflicting economic agendas. The Democrats tend to be left-liberal, so while they share the same economic agenda as the populists, they have conflicting social agendas. Similarly, libertarians, who one may regard as the foil to populists, dislike Republican attempts to legislate morality and Democratic attempts to hinder the free market. While libertarians tend to be fairly evenly split between the Republican and Democratic parties (based roughly on whether social liberalism or economic liberalism is more important in the eyes of each libertarian), evangelical Christians (who technically should be populists) are overwhelmingly Republican. But as the Democrats tone down their social liberalism in an attempt to win over the evangelical base, the populists are starting to find a greater voice. Indeed, there is a growing number of Christians who are starting to consider a fuller picture of populism and are putting more emphasis the economic dimension of populism instead of myopically focusing on the social/cultural dimension. The Republican party recognized this trend when, in 2000, Bush ran with the message of "compassionate conservatism", though that failed to win the hearts of populists when it quickly became clear that it was nothing more than a superficial label.

Why it has taken so long for religion to rediscover its populist roots may lie in the 19th century. While many socialists were Christians at the time, the spotlight shifted in 1848 and the atheistic Marx and his Communism became a sort of poster boy for socialism. Fast forward a hundred years to the Cold War, the fact that our Communist rivals were staunchly atheist probably contributed greatly to the rift between religion and socialism. Also, 19th century religion was more corrupt and was more interested in advocating the status quo than in notions of social justice. Only in more recent years, as the evangelical movement has grown, have more people began to take in the populist message of religion, and coupled with Communism fading away from our collective consciousness, religion in America is started to rediscover it populist nature.

In any case, I think that the 2006 elections can be marked as a victory for populism. A number of the Democrats who were elected (e.g., Bob Casey, Bill Ritter, etc.) were populists instead of the usual left liberals. A small, but growing number of Christians are also abandoning the Republican party as they decide that economic issues like minimum wage are more important than social issues like abortion. I wonder if this is the beginning of another great political realignment in America (the previous one, which changed Democrats from the party of white Southerners to the party of multiethnic Yankees, started with FDR's new deal and ended with the Civil Rights Act) as the strength of the religious vote forces one of the parties² towards a populist position. The next few decades will be interesting indeed. Perhaps if the country gravitates from a left-liberal vs. right-conservative mindset into a populist vs. libertarian mindset, libertarians may finally find a party to call home.

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¹ For those of you not familiar with the terms that I will use, here is a very over-simplified comparison of the four general poles of belief. Populists are people who are socially conservative (supporting traditional values) and economically statist (skeptical of the free market), right-conservatives are people who are socially conservative and economically liberal ("liberal" in the classic sense; i.e., pro-markets), left-liberals are those who are socially liberal and economically statist, and finally, libertarians are socially liberal and economically liberal. Taken to their ideological extremes, populists are authoritarians, right conservatives are fascists, left liberals are communists, and libertarians are anarchists.

² Though it is unclear which party it will be, whether it will be the Democrats toning down their social liberalism or whether it will be the Republicans further embracing "big-government conservatism".

Milton Friedman has died.

How many times have you heard someone oppose abortion or stem cell research because they claim that embryos are the equivalent of people and that they are morally the same thing? Now, if someone says that they oppose abortion or stem cell research because they think that it is unethical and that any benefit that is gained for the two does not outweigh the moral cost, then that's fine, and I respect their conviction. It is when people say make the claim of moral equivalence that I start to wag my finger.

A popular thought experiment is this: imagine that you are in a burning building. There is a container full of embryos that you could save, and there is a little kid in the room that you could save. You could save only one, not both. Which would you save? If someone truly believe that they are morally equivalent, then they would save the container containing multiple embryos (and potentially many kids) instead of saving just one child. I would venture a guess that almost everyone would opt to save the kid. The tradition of women and children coming first before men when evacuating a ship is another example, and the murder of a mother and a child typically carries a stronger sentence and attracts much greater moral outrage than killing a pregnant woman.

Of course, these are not choices that people would like to make, and these are choices that most people would not face. And if people want to say that the destruction of an embryo is so terrible that we should not do it, that's fine. Just don't say that it is so terrible to the point of it being the moral equivalent of killing a living person. One can argue that embryos carry enough moral value that they should not be destroyed without having to go as far as to establishing this false equivalence.

Unfortunately, this is a practice that is not going to go away anytime soon. This false equivalence is more effective as a rhetorical tool because it plucks people's emotional strings. Also, I suspect that people actually believe in this false equivalence because it allows them to deal with absolutes, even though reality is clearly relative (and you know how conservative moralists just hate relativism). That most people never have to make these sorts of choices makes it easy to avoid the reality that this equivalence is false and untenable. This equivalence keeps them off the slippery slope of trying to relatively quantify the moral value of something. But reality is reality, and people should not resort to the delusion of absolutism simply because they want to stay off an unpleasant slippery slope. Unless you have someone who would rather save a box containing multiple embryos instead of a single living, breathing child from a burning building, then the cold hard reality is that this is indeed relative and that there does need to be an open debate on the relative moral values to be assigned.

Edit: Perhaps a better illustration would be this: An apple and an orange are both classified as fruit. However, that they have the same classification does not necessitate that an apple and an orange are thus equivalent and the same thing. Similarly, if people want to claim that embryonic destruction is in the same "morally incorrect" category as killing a living human, they can do that, but such a classification does not necessitate that the two are also morally equivalent (and as the thought experiment above shows, they are quite far from it). In short, people should not mistake similarity for equivalence. While this point may seem like a mere quibble, it does have implications in the nature of the rhetoric because people should defend and explain the reasons for assigning a certain amount of moral value to embryonic life instead of just conveniently invoking a sleight of hand by calling them morally equivalent.

Lincoln Chafee is certainly very graceful about his defeat. According to this article, "He said his loss may have helped the country by switching control of Congress." Wow. Not everyday you get a politician who thinks that his defeat might have been a good thing. He also penned a nice post-election NYT op-ed in which he laments the hard-line position that the GOP has taken with its movement conservatism. Interestingly, his op-ed mentioned Jeffords. I wonder, if he had managed to hold onto his seat, would he have pulled a Jeffords and switched sides in order to change control of the Senate?

I feel sorry for Chafee. He was one of the few decent Republicans in the Senate: a Republican of the old Eisenhower pedigree instead of one of the new Reagen-Bush abominations. He deserved to keep his seat. That, and CNN did a good job of picking a very effective "sad face" for their article's picture.

I have also been reading about the election margins. Apparently, House elections favored the Democrats by something roughly on the order of 5% while the Senate elections favored the Democrats by something roughly on the order of 13%. Interestingly, some liberals are complaining that because of the huge 13% senate margin, the slim Democratic victory in the Senate does not fully reflect the extent of the victory. Are these people forgetting that the long Senate terms and the staggered Senate elections were specifically aimed at making the Senate relatively stable and static? Besides, of the 33 Senate seats up for election, the Democrats won 24 of them, which is a seat-wise victory margin of 45% (the House seat-wise victory margin is between 6% and 7%, so it closely matched the electoral victory margin). Of course, a disproportionately high number of Democratic seats, many of them in "blue" states, were up this term, so this large discrepancy between 45% and 13% is to be expected.

And finally, Tom Toles:

Looks like the extraction tax proposition (#87) is going to be defeated in California. Guess Big Oil's millions spent in that campaign did the trick (they tried to paint the extraction tax as a gas tax that will raise prices for consumers), but I'm still surprised; California, of all places! The thing that the opponents of prop 87 fail to mention is that California is the only state without an extraction tax, and that it is illegal for the extraction tax to be passed onto the consumers. Furthermore, because market demand has driven up the price of oil while extraction costs remain fairly constant, this means that the price of gas is dependent not on its extraction and production cost, but instead on market demand. Because there is no free entry into this market, this discrepancy between the price set by demand and the price that would have been set by production costs translates directly into an economic profit and this also makes it such that such a tax would have no effect on the final price seen by consumers (because those prices are bottlenecked and thus set by demand, not by extraction costs). So not only were the oil company's disinformation ads (which implied higher gas prices) completely misleading and false, this also means that California remains the only state without an extraction tax, making it the most oil-friendly state (what irony!).

Although an extraction tax is not perfect (a perfect solution would be an extraction tax coupled with a gasoline tax), it is important because it corrects for the market's failure to properly deal with exhaustible resources and an extraction tax is a perfectly market-compatible solution (in a state that is very regulation-happy, taxing instead of regulating is a step up for them). And it was defeated. Sigh. This is probably the single most disappointing result of the entire election¹, and I don't even live in California any more.

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¹ For some people, anti-taxes is their main issue. For some, it's pro-abortion, for some, it's anti-abortion, etc. Me? I really don't care about those issues. The one issue that motivates my politics more than anything else is the environment because what the heck do taxes or birth control matter if we destroy this planet? Moderate libertarianism is important, too, and I often couch my environmental views in that context: correcting for the market failures of environmental externalities is perfectly compatible with free-market libertarian ideology, but ultimately, the environment is still the litmus test issue for me, and if I had to choose between a populist anti-abortion environmentalist and a libertarian pro-abortion anti-environmentalist, I'd go with the environmentalist.

Before I talk about the national elections, the races that interested me the most this election were a number of races in my former home state.

1. Kansas Governor: In a heavily Republican state like Kansas, not only did Kathleen Sebelius get re-elected in 2006, she cruised to an easy victory, winning, according to CNN, many of the rural counties of Kansas (instead of just winning the big cities). She even managed to get the former chairman of the Kansas GOP to switch parties. She's the sort of politician the this country needs more of. Solidly moderate, clean campaign ads, and the ability to genuinely reach out to the opposition party instead of resorting to partisan rhetoric (that both the soon-to-be-Speaker Pelosi and Bush are very guilty of). She was rightfully named by TIME as one of the best governors in the country. Unfortunately, she's pretty much unknown outside of the state, but wouldn't it be nice if she ran of President? A Democrat with broad rural support in the midwest is rare and would be good for this divided country.
2. Kansas #2: I remember how remarkable it was back in 1998 when one of the four Kansas seats went Democratic. And now, another Kansas seat has gone Democratic? The Third District with Kansas City and few rural residents is one thing, but the Second District is mostly rural, and while Lawrence is very liberal, it is tiny compared to Kansas City.
3. Kansas #3: Speaking of the Third District, CNN is reporting that Dennis Moore is holding onto his seat there by a 30-point margin, 65-35. Considering how he barely won his seat in '98 and barely defended it in '00 (I left Kansas after '00), it's interesting to see a victory margin as large as this.

As I write this (around midnight EST), the Democrats, as expected, are projected to win the House but not the Senate. The numbers don't look good for the Democrats in Missouri and Tennessee, so it looks like that we'll have a GOP Senate for the remainder of the Bush Presidency. I think I am pleased with the outcome.

1. After six years of one-party rule, a divided government is exactly what we need to tamp down on government spending and abuses. House control will accomplish that.
2. The Democrats not winning the Senate may be a good thing; it will reduce the likelihood of them shooting themselves in the foot, which they have a great tendency to do.
3. The House can now investigate the Administration and hopefully tease some truth out of a very secretive and shadowy White House.
4. People wanted a referendum on Bush, and they got it.

However, if one compares tonight's election to the one held 12 years ago, it'll become apparent that this was a lukewarm victory for the Democrats. The approval rating of Congress was much lower in 2006 than in 1994. Likewise for the Presidential approval rating. There wasn't an unpopular and costly war in 1994. There haven't been gross abuses of government power and encroachments on the Constitution (issues that have not only angered Democrats, but also the libertarian wing of the Republican party). In that respect, I think that the Republicans have been victorious tonight because despite all of those things, their loss in 2006 is nothing like the Democratic loss in 1994.

The problem is that the Democrats are disorganized and incoherent. This is not to say that the Republicans are marching in lock-step (they aren't), but they do a much better job of exuding confidence and displaying unity. For starters, the Democrats have moved further to the left. Clinton signed the NAFTA free trade agreement, and Democrats are now back to toying with protectionism. They also fail to stand for something aside from "we're not Republicans". Gingrich was successful in 1994 because the Democrats were imploding and because the Contract With America was a brilliantly crafted piece of coherent marketing that defined what the Republicans stood for and what their vision is. In contrast, Democrats are successful today only because of a Republican implosion; they lack a coherent vision to let them further capitalize on the moment. The Democrats will stand little chance of winning in 2008 if they continue to allow the Republicans to dictate for them what their vision is (since the Democratic vision is reactionary).

The Democratic victories in 2006 would not have been possible without the many libertarian-leaning people who jumped ship from the Republican Party and voted for the Democrats in protest (after all, a country with economic liberty but no social liberty is really no better than China, where the "communist" regime is hoping that free-market capitalism will serve as the bread-and-circuses that make their citizens forget about political rights), and the Democrats would be wise to cater to this group in hopes of making them new members of the party's constituency. If anything, these new additions to the party could very well offer the seductive Big Idea that Democrats have lacked for so long.

Update: Hmm. Guess I was wrong about the Senate prospects looking dim. Apparently, a lot changed in the Missouri count over the course of two hours.

Here is an idea that I recently read about: why not treat the combating of global warming as a form of insurance? Businesses and industry are no strangers to the notion of insurance: paying a small amount of money now to guard against the unlikely event of a loss of a much larger amount of money in the future. The main stumbling block for environmentalists is the argument that a catastrophe is unlikely because the scientists are overestimating the effects of global warming. While I personally do not believe in this argument (it is the product of an elaborate propaganda campaign against science), there are many people who do take stock in such a view. And therein lies the beauty of marketing of this as a form of insurance because one can now sell the idea of fighting global warming without having to convince people that catastrophe is a likely scenario.

PS: It puzzles me to see conservatives, who are typically very risk-adverse (remember Reagan's rather expensive military-buildup insurance policy against Soviet aggression?), take such a risky position on global warming by refusing to do anything. I suspect that this may be because environmental legislation have historically involved heavy-handed regulations instead of market-oriented methods of rectifying the pricing failures of environmental externalities. On that note, the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to cap greenhouse gases through an emissions-trading market, is a fine example of a market-oriented solution.

PPS: Yea, yea, I know, there is one big glaring problem with this whole insurance idea: The Tragedy of the Commons. But if the marketing is done in such a way as to convince people that they do have a tangible stake in the outcome, then this idea may still be workable.

As it becomes more and more certain that 2006 will be to the Republicans what 1994 was to the Democrats, I can't help but wonder if a 2006 victory would actually be good for the Democrats.

For starters, Americans tend to be allergic to one-party rule. Therefore, if Democrats are in control of the Hill when 2008 rolls around, the public would be less likely to vote a Democrat into the White House. Of course, there have been exceptions to this one-party aversion over the past few elections (keep in mind that, by the popular vote, Americans supported split-party rule in 2000), but September 11 and a weak Democratic candidate in 2004 may have had an effect. If the Democrats win the Hill in 2006 and if the Republicans nominate an electable candidate (vs. an unelectable one), then chances are, a Republican will be elected to the White House in 2008.

Another problem is that, come 2008, Democrats can no long scapegoat the Republicans for the nation's woes if they control the Hill. I am confident that the two topics that Americans care about the most--the economy and Iraq--will remain bleak for the next two years.

In the case of the economy, there is very little effect that government has on the market. It is a pet peeve of mine whenever a politician talks about "job creation" because jobs are created and destroyed by the market, not by some politician in Washington. The economy has been growing for the past several years, and it will most likely continue to grow from now until 2008. Despite this growth, most of the people on the street have a pessimistic view of the economy. This is because the world economy is currently in a long and painful process of correcting of the gross labor-capital imbalances brought about by centuries of Western imperialism (this, by the way, is just another way of describing globalization; I like to use this when I'm talking to left-liberals because they tend to balk at the "g" word). While globalization is good for our national economy, it is imbalanced in that those who derive income from labor are worse off and those who derive income from capital, who tend to be fewer in number and richer, are better off (of course, added together, the net gain is positive; trade is not a zero-sum game). However, this imbalance is not the fault of any Republican or Democratic policy. Just as investors should have a diversified portfolio, people, ideally, should have diversified income streams (vs. relying just on labor wages) so that they can cash in on economic prosperity regardless of whether labor or capital is gaining. Of course, this does not happen in reality partly because those who rely on labor for income are generally not well-educated enough to know the importance of putting money aside for investing and partly because our overly consumerist culture means that there is actually a negative savings rate, so that instead of saving and investing money, most people are racking up debt and indulging in consumption. Ultimately, the problem of the income disparity is due largely in part to poor economic decisions by individuals (CEOs reaping lots of money may make the headlines, but those causes of income disparity represent only the tip of the iceberg), and there is nothing that any party can do about it except step up government's Robin Hood role, but that would only serve as a bandage and not as a lasting solution (a lasting solution would be to make microeconomics a required part of high school curricula).¹

In the case of Iraq, an immediate withdrawal will be disastrous. As I have argued before, once the mistakes of the invasion and the mismanagement of early reconstruction were made (to be sure, these are serious errors for which the Republicans must be made accountable), there is no turning back and we must finish what we started lest we want to exacerbate those mistakes. The Democrats seem to have trouble understanding this, and even if they did opt to try to clean up the mess, it would still be exceedingly difficult to reach a mediocre resolution, especially by 2008.

So come 2008, Americans will be disappointed as income disparity continues and as Iraq remains in turmoil, despite having the Democrats in Congress. The Republicans, humbled by the 2006 defeat, will have two years to shake down the party and to rediscover the discipline and principles that they have lost. And with the Democrats in charge of Congress, Americans will likely vote in a White House to counterbalance them. Since he (or she) who controls the White House controls the upcoming Supreme Court vacancies of Stevens and Ginsburg, I would much rather that a Democrat win the White House in 2008--even if that means secretly hoping for a Republican victory in 2006.

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¹ I should clarify that I am not necessarily opposed to government playing the role of Robin Hood. Any good economist knows that money is an imperfect proxy for utility and that, as a result, defining taxation in terms of money is rather silly. This is because while utility, by definition, experiences no diminishing returns, money does. Therefore, a flat tax on utility necessitates a progressive tax on money and a flat tax on money is necessarily a regressive tax on utility.

I go to check the news today, and what do I find? Front-page coverage of Kerry's remarks (okay, he may be partly right, but how stupid is he to offer the Republicans such a tasty sound bite on a silver platter?). Sigh. Yep, leave it to John Kerry to, once again, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Why, oh why did Democrats pick Kerry to represent the party in 2004 instead of someone sensible like Clark? Oh right, I remember now, as the Republican outrage builds, the Democrats, like good little lemmings, moved further and further to the left and off the cliff, so of course they had to go Kerry, who was almost as unelectable as Dean, because they couldn't swallow the idea of nominating someone who had once upon a time voted for Reagan.

PS: The VRWC is going to have so much fun with this.

I'm beginning to think that "Dubya" might actually be a heck of a lot smarter than we think he is.

It all started when I read that a former White House staffer, David Kuo, recently published a book alleging that the White House was not really serious about the religious right. According to the book, the administration would cater to the religious right in order to win their support, but privately, Christian conservatives were described as "goofy" and "nuts". My first reaction was one of disbelief. How could a President who claimed that his favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ and who the media has reported as getting down on his knees every day and praying in the Oval Office be so indifferent to the religious right? It quickly occurred to me that all the reports and stories of Bush's religiosity have been based on his public displays: his speeches, his campaign statements, and his public actions. Even reports of what the President does in "private" come from members of his staff, who could very well have been told to tell such stories to the media (or perhaps what Bush does in "private" in the view of his liable-to-talk-to-the-media staff is different than what he does in private when consulting his trusted circle). This leaves open the possibility that Bush's much-publicized religiosity was really an elaborate façade and that he is saying things and pushing Congress to legislate things for the purpose of gaining the support of a certain large and powerful voting bloc. If this was the case, this certainly won't be the first time in human history that someone has exploited religion for political gain.

A couple of days after reading about Kuo's book controversy, I came across a comment on the Internet saying that Bush was not a poor speaker prior to the 2000 elections. This prompted me to search for old videos of Bush. I found two videos, and both of them seem to confirm this comment. The first video was from the 1994 gubernatorial race in Texas between Bush and Ann Richards. It was striking how natural he sounded in 1994: he spoke rapidly, without stumbling, and without grammatical gaffes. Although the person who compiled the video thinks that the change between 1994 and 2000 was due to a medical condition, I have a different theory. The second video, which appears to be a candid video from 1992, also featured a lucid Bush.

Could it be that Bush, who majored in history at Yale, has a much better understanding of American history than we give him credit for? Perhaps he was inspired by Andrew Jackson, whose presented himself as a more down-to-earth person, contrasting against the more bookish John Quincy Adams. The people who would criticize Bush for his grammatical gaffes are those who are well-educated and who are more likely to vote Democratic anyway. His folksy manners has appeal in a country with a long history of distrust of the educated élite. I suspect that he may have purposefully changed his speaking style and peppered his language with errors so that he would appeal to the average American and so that he could present himself as one of them instead of someone perched atop an ivory tower. Indeed, during the 2004 debates and recently during an interview, Bush acknowledged that his English was poor, but he phrased that acknowledgment in a way that had struck me personally as carrying a tone of "look at how these people talk; they do not represent your interests."

I realize that this is all speculation and that it's all a stretch, but if it is true, then it would seem that appearances are indeed deceiving. It would be diabolically brilliant to so completely and fully paint oneself as a religious everyman because that is the image that resonates with American's plebeian voter base.

Excerpts from The Economist:

That is easily enough libertarians to tip an election. And their votes are up for grabs. In 2000 George Bush won 72% of the libertarian vote, to Al Gore's 20%, by repeating the mantra "My opponent trusts government. I trust you." But in 2004, after Mr Bush increased the size of government and curtailed some civil liberties as part of the war on terror, his margin dropped to 59%-38%.

[...]

Mr Boaz and Mr Kirby argue that wooing the libertarian vote could propel either party to electoral success. Yet with an election only weeks away, neither shows much sign of trying. Republicans are rallying their religious base with jeremiads about stem-cell research and gay marriage. Democrats, on the other hand, would put up taxes, block school choice and lead a witch-hunt against Wal-Mart.

Libertarians are ignored partly because they are hard to find, not least because they just want to be left alone. (There is a Libertarian Party, but it gets hardly any votes.) [emphasis mine] Politicians can reach social conservatives through churches or union members through their unions, but where do libertarians gather? Parties will always court the votes that are cheapest to court because, for once, they are spending their own money.

Well, The Economist is right about the cost part of the cost-benefit analysis, but I am not so sure about the benefit part. Sure, it is easier and less costly to fire up the religious right or the labor unions, but those are people who already support you, and there is a significant problem of diminishing returns with getting your base to turn out on election day.

But it is also worth asking why libertarians are a disenfranchised group in American politics. As the article rightfully points out, "[F]ew Americans are familiar with the term 'libertarian'." Well, why is that? The word itself should not be a problem; people are probably more familiar with the root word "liberty" than they are with "republic". Libertarians do tend to be more educated and academic, but there is really nothing inherent to preclude someone who is poorly-educated from saying, "Government should mind their own business." I think that the education bias may be a result of self-selection in the sense that, when an ideology is so obscure in the mainstream political landscape, those who are not well-educated will be less likely to be exposed to it. But this brings us back to the original question, why are libertarians so obscure in the first place? And for that answer, I direct the reader to the emphasis that I added to the Economist excerpt above: the Libertarian Party of America, I think, is the primary reason for this political obscurity and for the subsequent disenfranchisement.

The problem is that there is a large number of libertarians who believe in a very black-and-white view of libertarianism. But taken to such a polar extreme, there is really little difference between libertarians and anarchists. What makes a libertarian a libertarian and not an anarchist is that a libertarian recognizes that there is indeed a need for government, and that the goal is to meet those needs efficiently with as few unwanted side effects as possible. An unconditional desire to reduce government without any regard to the need for a government is the hallmark of an anarchist. However, the failure to recognize this distinction is not the fault of people, but instead, it is a fault of the history and perhaps even nature of libertarian belief. This distinction regarding the role of government is easy to see and to recognize in the realm of personal freedoms, as the role of government can be fairly easily defined, which is, in rough layman's terms, "let people do whatever they want as long as they don't hurt others, and government should exist to ensure to make sure people aren't hurting (killing, stealing, etc.) each other." This is, in a nutshell, what Locke and Jefferson believed in, but they also formulated their beliefs before Adam Smith and modern economics.

The world of Locke and Jefferson was one of autarky. Yes, there was trade, but there was, relatively speaking, very little of it, and most of that trade was local in nature. It is because of this that there was never much thought given to the role of economics in the political discourse. There was the protection of property and a general desire to limit the amount of taxation, but that was about it. This changed, of course, with the Industrial Revolution. People were no longer islands isolated from the world. As economic specialization grew (and as populations grew), people became more dependent on each other and with this greatly increased interpersonal interaction, the general condition of "not hurting others" became much more complicated to define in the economic context. What used to be a simple "don't steal other people's property" now included issues like factory working conditions, monopoly pricing, pollution, etc. There is, of course, much controversy, even to this day, of whether or not these sorts of things constitute the sort of malevolent action that, like murder or robbery, government should try to control: the traditional way of looking at government's proper role does not make provisions for the new conditions that arose out of the Industrial Revolution. Because of the tangled web of unclear rights and wrongs that emerged out of this (how does one weigh an employer's "right" to pay whatever wage s/he feels is appropriate with an employee's "right" to a minimum standard of living?) and because it is difficult for government to address these issues efficiently and in a way that does not cause more problems than is solved, libertarians have traditionally stuck with a traditional Jeffersonian view of the role of government: prevent obvious crimes like murder, robbery, etc. and leave everything else alone.

While this traditional form of libertarianism is seductively simple and free of the controversial and sticky gray areas, this comes at a cost of turning a blind eye to reality, as reality is never this tidy. Fortunately, the field of economics--especially the work that has taken place over the past five decades--offer a sort of clarity that had previously been unavailable. Not only has the study of economics offered a more systematic and comprehensive way to precisely identify and describe the sorts of problems that need government solving, it also offers solutions that are efficient and that also minimize undesirable side effects. (I will not go into more detail here, as I have already written about some of these things, and it is impossible to go into detail in a meaningful way in the limited space here, but I do promise to write more about these things in more detail later on.)

Unfortunately, many libertarians are still living in a Jeffersonian fantasy world. They recognize the need for government in the traditional contexts, but they fail to recognize it in the modern contexts. The principles are still the same: government does have a role to play, but it should pursue that role as efficiently and unobtrusively as possible. The difference is that moderate libertarians (a number of whom are economists) hold a more realistic view of the role of government and recognize that government does need to address, in additional to murder, robbery, etc., issues such as monopolies, externalities, and the need for wealth redistribution, but in ways that are efficient and consistent with free market economics (e.g., see my essay on the merits of pricing/taxation instead of regulation as a way to address environmental issues). (Aside: there is a huge difference between some of the solutions that a moderate libertarian would support and what a leftist would support; as I like to say, Republicans and traditional libertarians try to brush away the problem, Democrats valiantly try to fix the problem, but in the wrong way because they have been blinded by socialism, and moderate libertarians try to fix the problem the right way.)

There are invariably objections from traditional libertarians. Some will claim that government intervention flies in the face of free market economics. This is a common myth held by many who do not fully understand the nuances of economics. This flies in the face is laissez-faire economics, but not free-market economics, and the two are not the same. Asymmetric information, externalities, natural monopolies, etc. are features of real-life laissez-faire economics and are things that preclude an efficient free market. An efficient free market thus requires that these problems be addressed (but also addressed in such a way that does not destroy other aspects of free markets, which is why the moderate libertarian approach of pricing rectification is better, less intrusive, and more efficient than the socialist approach of regulation; the poorly-engineered regulations of the left are sometimes just as bad as the traditional libertarian approach of ignoring the problem). Another common objection is that doing this is increasing the role of government. I do not dispute that this is true, but I do dispute that this is a problem, considering that the goal of libertarianism (as opposed to that of anarchism) is not to blindly whittle down government, but instead to accomplish what needs accomplishing in a way that is efficient and unobtrusive, thus constraining the whittling down of government only to cases where it makes sense and is appropriate.

And this brings us back to the question that I was asking: why are libertarians out in the political wilderness? The Libertarian Party is a party of traditional libertarians who inhabit a Jeffersonian illusion and who are in denial of the realities of the world. This detachment has made the Libertarian Party a radical fringe party that many libertarians (such as myself) would not support. Yet, they are the closest thing libertarians in this country have to a banner under which to rally. Needless to say, there is very little in the way of libertarian leadership, and without this leadership, there is no infrastructure to organize like-minded libertarians, to educate voters about the party, and to get the libertarian name out into the public spotlight. Even the Green and Reform parties have more effective leaderships, which is quite remarkable for a country whose founding was so profoundly rooted in libertarian philosophy. As the age-old cliché goes, "Every journey begins with a step." The first step that libertarians must take if they wish to emerge from obscurity is to acknowledge that the traditional Jeffersonian flavor of libertarianism is an outdated relic from another era and that, with the help of economists, effective, efficient, libertarian-style solutions are possible. Once this first step is taken, the libertarians can finally begin to provide the rational political middle ground than this country has been in desperate need of for so long.

This is a follow-up to a post that I made back in July.

As I wrote in July and as I will write now, I am not a fan of conspiracy theories. As a result, I approached the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? with a fair amount of skepticism, but since I had not seen the film when I first wrote about it in July, I held back on passing judgment. Well, I finally got a chance to watch it last night...

1. This film takes a surprisingly balanced view in that, in addition to presenting its side of the story, it takes the time to explore and address a number of the counter-arguments as well.
2. The film seems to be more documentary in nature than some of the other politically-motivated "documentaries" in the sense that I did not get the feeling that it was frothing at the mouth with anger. It was fairly rational, and does not try to take the conspiracy too far (unlike Loose Change, which made a number of claims that bordered on the ridiculous).
3. Lingering objection: If electric cars were really that great, why did they not take off in environmentally-friendly countries? The film indicated that Toyota made electric vehicles, but they are not an American company. Why did they not introduce such vehicles in Japan? Japan's consumer base is more rational and adoring of new technology. They do not have a powerful oil industry, and their government, in certain respects, is less corrupt than ours. The same could be asked about Europe.
4. Lingering question: Is the film representative of EV1 drivers? Were most EV1 drivers really as satisfied as those portrayed or did these people represent a minority of those who tried out the EV1? I have no reason to suspect that the latter is the case, but I would be interested in knowing the answer to this.
5. Lingering objection: This still does not address the problem that our electrical infrastructure is in no way suited to handle the sort of strain that electrical vehicles would produce on a large scale. Granted, a hydrogen infrastructure would be even more costly, and the cost of upgrading the electrical infrastructure could easily be pushed off to the utilities who would stand to profit in the long run from this.

Overall, I think that the film is surprisingly good and presents the case without exhibiting much of a tin-foil-hat syndrome. Go watch it.

Something tells me that imposing sanctions on a country that has been in autarky for all these decades isn't going to do much good. Yes, this is the fault of the regimes in Russia and China being annoyingly uncooperative as usual, but one does have to wonder if there was a way to make them more cooperative. We have no choice; we need stronger international consensus in order to deal with North Korea and Iran, and while alienating the international community with our post-9/11 arrogance and the sacrifice the our foreign policy moral high ground in Iraq may not necessarily be the cause of this fragmentation of international politics, it certainly does not help us gather together the allies and cooperation that we need.

Despite the firestorm of controversy over his excessive use of signing statements to overrule Congress and to undermine the separations of powers, Bush continues to make ample use of them, this time to defy Congress over provisions of the Homeland Security bill signed into law on Wednesday.

The final three paragraphs of the Associated Press article are worth noting, however.

Bush's signing statement Wednesday challenges several other provisions in the Homeland Security spending bill.

Bush, for example, said he'd disregard a requirement that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency must have at least five years experience and "demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security."

His rationale was that it "rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."

The portion of the signing statement from which the above was derived:

Section 503(c) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, as amended by section 611 of the Act, provides for the appointment and certain duties of the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Section 503(c)(2) vests in the President authority to appoint the Administrator, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, but purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office. The executive branch shall construe section 503(c)(2) in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution.

So Bush is essentially insisting that the new requirement that the FEMA director be experienced and knowledgeable will somehow rule out people who are "best qualified by experience and knowledge."* Bush's predecessor was certainly not a perfect president, but at least Clinton appointed people based on qualifications, even if that meant appointing Republicans to prominent administration positions such as the Secretary of Defense. Has Bush learned absolutely nothing from the case of FEMA director Michael Brown or about the consequences of appointing people to office based simply on their passing his litmus test of loyalty?

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* Of course, this is not the first time that his astounding command of logic has been on display.

Donald Rumsfeld said today that those who oppose the Bush Administration's war in Iraq "seem not to have learned history's lessons." He specifically referred to the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930's, comparing our resistance against the war in Iraq to Chamberlain's policy towards Hitler. With Rumsfeld echoing Santayana's famous "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," the apropos retort would be, "Those who misinterpret and misapply the lessons of the past are condemned to make even worse blunders."

Rumsfeld's analogy of the anti-war sentiment to British appeasement is flawed in that, before the destabilizing invasion, Iraq was not a source of terrorism. A failure to pursue al-Qaeda would be appeasement, not a failure to pursue Saddam. It should be noted that many in the CIA believe that Rumsfeld's early preoccupation with Iraq in 2001 resulted in insufficient resources and troops for Afghanistan and the subsequent failure to capture top al-Qaeda leaders at Tora Bora. In a way, this obsession with Iraq instead of the real targets has resulted in us giving our modern-day "Hitler" quite a helping hand.

So what is the correct analogy, if there is one? Our war in Iraq has effectively amounted to something that would have been analogous to us going to war with the Soviet Union in the 1930's: Hitler would have been delighted at the prospect of the Allies exhausting their resources fighting an enemy that (at the time) posed no threat to the Allies and that was not closely aligned with Hitler. Not only has Iraq weakened us, Rumsfeld's foolhardy invasion of Iraq has created a breeding ground for new terrorists where none existed before. It is still not a perfect analogy (as perfectly analogous situations are really quite rare in history), but it is certainly a better one than what Rumsfeld is proposing. Methinks Rumsfeld would have done poorly with the SAT's analogies.

I never thought that I'd say this, but Orrin Hatch makes a pretty good argument towards the end of the first half of this video. The first half of this video is about stem cell research, and Mr. Hatch did a surprisingly good job (for a conservative Republican) of smacking down the anti-stem-cell guy. In any case, it's a video worth watching.

As reported by C|Net, the New York Times, and the BBC, the new flight restrictions in the UK extend beyond just a ban on liquids, but a ban on just about any sort of carry-on item, including cell phones, laptops, and even newspapers. The NYT article mentions people who were forced to discard cell phones and iPods because there was no time before the flight departure to check in those items. Thankfully, the US has so far been more sensible about this and has limited the restrictions to just liquids.

There are several problems with the UK's approach. First, not everything should be checked in. Sensitive electronic equipment and fragile objects are not things that should be checked in. This also includes valuables, which up to this point, airlines have recommended carrying on due to the risk of damage or loss of checked items. And in today's digital age where laptops can often carry sensitive information (like those government laptops with sensitive data that were lost, or in my case, where my laptop contains an archive of a decade of personal correspondence), there are things that people will simply not feel comfortable letting out of sight.

Second, there is a problem of diminishing returns to security. There are only so many resources that society can afford to spend on security, and because of diminishing returns, every extra resource spent in this whack-a-mole game of turning airplanes into flying prisons will yield fewer gains. There are countless better ways to spend those resources, from securing borders to developing programs to identify and address the social causes of militant religious extremism. One has to wonder just how much security is added by prohibiting books on a plane. (See this March column by security expert Bruce Schneider in Wired for more about the problem of diminishing returns in airport screening.)

Third, while the marginal benefits of this extra security is decreasing, the marginal cost is increasing, and not just in the form of the direct cost of implementing the extra security, but also in the cost of lost time (especially now that time spent on a long-haul flight is totally wasted as the UK bans things as mundane as reading material), lost convenience, and discarded, lost, or damaged items.

And finally--and most importantly--we seem to lose sight of the goal of terrorism. Their goal is not to blow up planes or to kill people; to think that is to mistake a means for an end. Their goal is to convince us to give in to their demands and desires, and blowing up planes is just one way to cause the fear and disruption necessary for their goals. They hope that we would grow so sick and tired of them that we would give in, much like how Israel grew so weary of Hezbollah's attacks that they withdrew from Lebanon back in 2000. Thus, their goal is to cause the most amount of fear and disruption, and not necessarily to blow up the most number of people (though that helps). With that in mind, we have to ask, are the actions that we are doing do "protect" ourselves helping to stem fear and disruption or helping to spread it? To be sure, there is a certain amount of security that is necessary to make their activities more difficult, and up to a certain point, more security is a good thing. But beyond that point, the marginal benefits are so low and the marginal costs are so high that the extra security actually helps their cause more than it hurts it. Perhaps a good analogy would be the human immune system. We must have an adequate immune system (which people with AIDS lack) in order to survive, but an overzealous immune system can sometimes be just as damaging (such as in the case of multiple sclerosis, arthritis, diabetes, allergies, etc.). If a terrorist attack was the bite from an insect such as a mosquito, then a security overreaction would be the itchy bump that forms, and just as in the case of a mosquito bite, it is entirely possible that we could inflict upon ourselves more suffering than the terrorists could ever dream of inflicting by themselves. Looking at the way that the UK has reacted recently, one might even say that just by being caught, the terrorists were successful in their goal of terrorizing.

Up until the recent foiled attacks, I think that we have had a good balance of security. I am encouraged by the fact that the US has not resorted to the sort of Draconian measures adopted by the UK and that DHS Secretary Chertoff has promised to do away with the extra measures regarding liquids once the TSA has had a chance to find a better solution. I hope that this is all true and that we would soon return to the sort of balance that we had before. If not, then perhaps we should adopt a tiered security system where there are flights with this extra prison-camp security and flights with normal security. Then, people who believe that the benefit outweighs the cost (after all, this cost-benefit analysis is quite subjective, as it depends on how risk-adverse each person is, how much each person values convenience and personal freedom, how long the flight is, etc.) could ride on the "safer" flights and people who are willing to accept the consequences of increased risk could fly on reduced-security flights (and on routes without enough traffic to warrant separate flights, they could just default to extra security to be on the safe side). This would at least allow people to individually decide for themselves their cost-benefit equation instead of some whimsical government agency. I have a feeling that if people were given the option to choose, there would be a surprisingly large number of people who would choose less security. After all, even with terrorists, flying is still much safer than driving.

Imagine that you are at a theatre to see a play. As you enter, you find that you have lost your ticket. Would you pay $10 to buy another ticket, assuming that there is no assigned seating? Now imagine that you had not acquired a ticket in advance and that instead of losing the ticket, you have lost a $10 bill. Would you pay $10 for a ticket? In a well-known experiment conducted by Kahneman and Tversky, a majority (54%) of the people who were presented with the first scenario said that they would not buy a new ticket if their ticket was lost, but 88% of the people presented with the second scenario said that they would buy a ticket if only money was lost. In the first scenario, because the ticket had already been purchased, it is a "sunk cost". Therefore, losing the ticket is effectively identical to losing the $10 bill, yet there is a large discrepancy in how people would react. Economists call this phenomenon the failure to identify and ignore sunk costs, and it is one of ways in which people act irrationally. But what does any of this have to do with the title of this post?

Although there are many different arguments against the deployment of American troops in Iraq, one of the most prominent arguments is that this war was a mistake--that we were deceived and that we entered under false pretenses without a plan. This, I do not dispute--and have not disputed since 2003. In many ways, this war has been a disaster. We too quickly shifted our resources and focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, without having devoted enough energy and troops to stabilize Afghanistan--a mistake that is growing increasingly apparent as the Afghan government stumbles about while the Taliban is reclaiming power. We have significantly boosted the power of the Iranians by removing the most significant check against their power from the region, by helping establish a pro-Iranian government in Iraq, and by tying up our resources in such a way that Iran no longer sees our military as a significant threat. We have destabilized a country and turned it into a massive terrorist training camp, which reverses any gains that we made by neutralizing their Afghan infrastructure. And finally, we have soiled our image and reputation within the international community. Thus, in so many ways, this war was a grand mistake and an enormous disaster.

However, that the Iraq War has been a huge mistake should not inform our judgment about what needs to be done next. Yes, we should draw lessons from it so that we do not repeat such a mistake in the future, and we should strongly rebuke those who are responsible (especially since the Administration has yet to act honorably by admitting to this mistake), but when it comes to deciding what to do next, we must act rationally and thus treat this mistake as something akin to a sunk cost; we must ignore it. The main question that we should ask ourselves is whether or not withdrawal from Iraq would make the situation better; any argument for withdrawal that is based on the war being a mistake is irrational and is a failure to recognize the what-is-done-is-done nature of this war.

With that in mind, it is my belief that withdrawal would not make things better. It cannot undo the damage that has been done (that would require a time machine, not a troop withdrawal). If we consider the problems in Iraq right now--that it is destabilized, that civilians are being killed every day, that there has been an exodus of skilled and educated citizens, and that it is a training ground of terrorists--withdrawal will in all likelihood make these problems worse. Remember the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan? The mistake of entering the war has already been made, and leaving now would not change that, but it would magnify the effects of that initial mistake, and for that reason, I believe that we cannot withdraw until the "job is done", even if that requires (and I think it does) more troops.

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the Suez Crisis. Marking this anniversary, the July 29th issue of The Economist ran a special feature on this subject, giving its readers a historical refresher while highlighting the parallels that can be drawn. It's an excellent article that I think everyone should read.

In a nutshell, for those who do not wish to read the article, when Egypt's Nasser seized and nationalized the Suez Canal, the British and French viewed the act as threatening and unacceptable. They decided to use military force to retake the canal (there was even hope for a regime change to rid themselves of the troublesome Nasser, who they had compared to Hitler and Mussolini). To avoid international criticism, they accepted Israel's under-the-table offer to invade the Sinai (Israel was looking for a chance to retaliate against Egypt's involvement in Gaza), which would give the British and French an excuse to send in troops to secure stabilize the region and to keep the peace. Israel invaded, the British and French feigned surprise, issued an ultimatum demanding a cease-fire, and then joined the fray. The United States, under the Republican president Eisenhower, demanded that the British and French stop their offensive, and with the threat of withholding reconstruction funds, they succeeded in forcing the British and French to a ceasefire. They then proceeded to call an emergency session of the UN (therefore bypassing the British and French vetoes) and established a UN peacekeeping force to secure the area.

In my opinion, what was most striking about all this is the degree to which things have reversed themselves over the course of these fifty years. Saddam, in many ways, tried to follow in the footsteps of Nasser, and, like Nasser, his critics compared him to Hitler and wished for regime change. Except that in 2003, instead of the French wishing for an invasion and regime change, it was the United States, and instead of the United States opposing military action, it was the French. In 1956, the United States masterfully used the UN to resolve the problem, and in 2003, the United States more or less brushed aside and dismissed the UN. In 1956, it was the French and British who sided with Israel and it was the United States who opposed the Israeli invasion; of course, in 2006, the opposite is true. And while the United States were allergic to imperialistic notions in 1956, it is often accused of such today.

So what had changed? Perhaps it was the fifty years of superpower status? Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and as a nation, it may be that the United States had forgotten the sorts of principles that it once cherished. Have those who support the American troop presence in the Middle East forgotten how violently allergic colonial Americans were to British troops in the days leading up to the Revolutionary War? Or perhaps the shift over the past fifty years was the result of the Cold War, where we took on a quasi-imperialistic agenda in order to thwart the spread of Communism (opposing the spread of Soviet Communism was good, but we may have allowed our principles to be compromised in our zeal). Or perhaps it is the resurgence in American politics of the more bellicose and fundamentalist South over the past fifty years (with its virtual takeover of the GOP) after having been marginalized after the Civil War. Or perhaps nothing really has changed, and the Iraqi invasion of 2003 and the opposition to an Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire in the past two weeks are simply the result of a misguided (and clueless) leader who has obviously not learned much from history.

Last weekend, I heard a wonderful interview on the radio where a professor of political science was discussing the results of his research.

It would appear that in the United States, "conservative" is a more popular and desirable label than "liberal". This has been true for "as far back as [is] capable of tracing with the data." So we live in a country where people aspire to conservatism and values commonly associated with conservatism. This is not surprising, but what was really fascinating is what happened when the researchers asked their subjects what positions they hold on a range of issues. For people who identify themselves as "liberal", 3% of them held issue/policy positions that were mostly conservative. However, for people who identify themselves as "conservative", nearly a quarter of them held mostly liberal policy positions. This would suggest that, because the conservative label is more desirable and is what more people associate with "American values", people will label themselves as "conservative" without any clue as to what this actually translates to in policy. Whereas people who are liberal are going against the grain in terms of labeling and thus have would be more likely to have actually thought out their positions before labeling themselves as such.

The interviewee then goes deeper with his analysis. The other side of this issue is how the Republicans have been exploiting this tendency to associate "American values" with "conservative". They have tried--successfully--to claim certain values as their own and to associate such values, such as "patriotism" and "hard work" with "conservative". This creates a false dichotomy as it is certainly not the case that all Republicans are patriots and that all Democrats are not (if anything, flaunting the Constitution Bush-style is quite unpatriotic) and it is certainly not the case that conservatives are all hard workers while liberals are not (think of Bush and his long, lazy vacations and of the rich who are born with a silver spoon in their mouth). This is also why the Republicans tend to focus on broad strokes and labels in their rhetoric. They talk about "freedom", "patriotism", and "family values" because they have been able to associate these labels with themselves and with "conservatism", and as such, they are able to avoid substance and rely on such sweeping and lofty labels to prop up their positions. This may explain why the Democrats often talk wonkishly about policy while the Republicans often fire back with broad-stroked attacks involving "too liberal", "patriotism", or "hard-working Americans".

Unfortunately, this is not a problem that can be solved easily. Average Americans are not very bright and have little understanding of government and politics. The problem is as much Republicans distorting politics as it is Joe Sixpack--who is more concerned about voting for trash shows like American Idol than voting for government--having no idea what is going on, and thus allowing a quarter of "conservatives" to confuse themselves. And of course, the group that really gets screwed by this are the libertarians; how many Joe Sixpacks will label themselves as "libertarian" (how many even know what the word means?). It is times like this that I question of wisdom of allowing the masses vote for President; I know this is blasphemous, but the Electoral College, in its original form, might not have been that bad of an idea after all...

And speaking of Electoral College, I'm going to finish this post off by going off-topic and pointing out this article, which proposes a fix for the Electoral College. Instead of the electors from each state informally agreeing to toss in their vote for whoever won the state, they'll just agree to toss in their vote to whoever won the national popular vote. And thus, through an informal agreement not too unlike the existing agreement, we can essentially eliminate the Electoral College without revising the Constitution or doing anything Draconian. Not only will this eliminate anomalies such as where Gore loses the election that he won, but it will also give Massachusetts Republicans and Kansas Democrats a voice that they haven't had. I think it's a marvelous idea; if the President is going to be elected by popular vote, then we might as well do it right by implementing a system like this!

There is a new documentary movie this summer titled Who Killed the Electric Car? Although I have not seen it, I did see the trailer for it, and I have been reading about it in the news media (e.g., at CNN). It's a big conspiracy theory movie, and I'm not sure I'm sold on their claims. Of course, I should reserve full judgment until after seeing the actual film, but here are some of my preliminary concerns:

1) As we have witnessed in recent weeks, our power infrastructure is severely strained. In California, the problem is generation capacity. And throughout the country, but especially in the east, the problem is transmission capacity. Forget about the hassles and logistics of adding new power plants; just upgrading the existing $1-trillion electrical transmission infrastructure with millions of miles of wiring to handle the enormous extra load that electrical cars would generate would not be trivial in either time or money.

2) Batteries are imperfect devices. How efficient are these batteries that are used, and how long will they last?

3) While Americans have not exactly been the greenest people on this planet, there are other wealthy industrialized nations that are much more environmentally conscious. Why hasn't there much in the way of electrical car development in Europe or Japan?

4) While electrical cars may be more efficient and environment-friendly (yes, there is pollution associated with electrical generation, but it will be concentrated and easier to deal with) than gasoline cars, the real standard that should be used is whether or not they are that much better in terms of efficiency and practicality than the other green alternatives, like hybrids or hydrogen fuel cells. Hybrids are nice in that they achieve a large efficiency gain without any infrastructure requirements.

5) Did they really kill the EV1 because of some evil conspiracy, or was it killed out of purely economic concerns, such as the worry that not enough people would buy it to justify manufacturing and support costs?

In the end, I still think that the best solution is massive gasoline taxes to address the issue of the unpriced petrol externality. I think we may finally be getting to the point where Americans are finally starting to let go of the absurd notion that cheap gasoline is some sort of basic human right, which would make European-style gas taxes possible. And once that's in place, the market will take care of the rest. In the meantime, this is an interesting--albeit a bit off-topic--article from the July issue of the Scientific American.

The coverage of the latest Middle East conflict has been plastered with cheesy sensationalism, like the bolded all-caps CNN.com headline of "Bombs and Tears" that persisted for a few days and the focus on the great nail-biting escape of Westerners from Lebanon. But there doesn't seem to be much said about what Israel hopes to accomplish...

Are they trying to disarm Hezbollah and Hamas? Their official line and their sending of ground forces would suggest this. But recall that Israel had occupied southern Lebanon for many years (it is even the reason why Hezbollah was founded) and during those years, they have failed to destroy Hezbollah. Do they seriously expect that re-occupying that area would allow them to accomplish what they have been unable to do in the past? Likewise, do they think that ground forces in Gaza would stop Hamas, considering that Hamas prospered through the Israeli occupation of Gaza?

Are they trying to get local governments to disarm these groups? The Lebanese government is, at best, weak, following the end of the Syrian occupation and the end of the long Lebanese civil war. They are in no shape to do anything about Hezbollah. Israel seems to acknowledge this, however, as they have made it clear that they do not expect the Lebanese government to be of much help in disarming Hezbollah. As for Hamas, when Arafat was in power, he was unable to control Hamas and their militias. Israel had tried many of the same tactics: sending in troops, punishing the government, etc., but the end result has always been the same: the Palestinian government remains impotent in dealing with the militias, and Israel is unable to stem the violence. Now that the Palestinian authority has a relatively weaker and more divided leadership and government, they are in an even worse position to deal with these mostly independent militiamen; it has been reported in the news that even Hamas itself is divided and that not all of its elements heed the words of its political leadership.

Are they trying to drum up international support and get pressure placed against Hezbollah and Hamas? The international community had long ago called for the disarmament of Hezbollah (complete with a UN Resolution and what little good that did) and there was already pressure on Hamas to moderate. If anything, the recent conflict is turning international opinion against them. The leaders of the Arab world have condemned Hezbollah, but these are mere words, and the people still overwhelmingly support Hezbollah.

Are they trying to send a message that they will not stand by and let themselves be attacked? If so, when has such a gesture ever deterred an irrational people who are willing to die for their cause?

In the end, the thing that bothers me about all this is the bleakness of the outlook, as I'm not sure that what they are doing will bring them any bit closer to neutralizing Hezbollah, and at the same time, it is destabilizing a fledging moderate democracy (a rarity in the Middle East), and we all know what destabilized Middle Eastern governments will produce... Did they learn anything from their 1982 invasion of Lebanon?

It seems that while everyone is focusing on Bush's use of "shit", most people are overlooking the true gaffe: See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over. This misuse of language is probably much more revealing of Bush's nature than his mild cursing. :) It is also amusing to see the media act like the stereotypical child who utters, "Oooh, you used a bad word! I'm telling!"

It is easy to defend free speech for journalists, political groups, and everyday people. It becomes harder to defend free speech for pornographic and violent content. And the defense of speech that almost everyone finds utterly distasteful is sometimes a Herculean task.

When people talk about defending the right to deny the Holocaust, rosy principles of free speech look dim and many people are understandably left to wonder exactly what social good and value is to come from the defense of such speech. Slippery slope arguments carry little weight as people scoff at the naïve black-and-white binary nature of such arguments. Alan Dershowitz's pet example of how he would support the right of neo-Nazis to peacefully* march through Jewish neighborhoods would strike all but the most staunch civil libertarians as aloof and overly idealistic. While I am staunchly libertarian and idealistic when it comes to such matters, most people, understandably, are not and require arguments of pragmatism. In the end, we have overblown racial hysteria when an art project that resembled a cross was burned** and a number of European governments whose lofty stances on liberties are marred by bans on Holocaust denial.

The New York Times published a review that