Wyatt's Torch: Reason, Self-Interest, Liberty

Further thoughts on Newtown

2012-12-16T10:38:00.002-05:00

Since yesterday' post I came across two other interesting items. One is an article that appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy:

Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder And Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence by Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser. The authors conclude with:

The burden of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially since they argue public policy ought to be based on that mantra. To bear that burden would at the very least require showing that a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that have imposed stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world.

And, lest we not forget shortly before the Newton massacre another shooting occurred at a mall in Oregon where the shooter took his own life, just as the Newtown shooter did. However, there is an interesting twist that kept the Oregon incident from becoming as awful as the one in Newton: an armed citizen. According to The Examiner:

The shooter … was confronted with an armed citizen, at which time he ran away and shot himself. By the time police arrived on the scene, [the shooter] was already dead.

Interesting that this fact has managed to not surface in the media coverage, isn’t it? The paper above has the following in its last paragraph that touches on this tendency to bury inconvenient facts.

Over a decade ago, Professor Brandon Centerwall of the University of Washington undertook an extensive, statistically sophisticated study comparing areas in the United States and Canada to determine whether Canada’s more restrictive policies had better contained criminal violence. When he published his results it was with the admonition:

If you are surprised by [our] finding[s], so [are we]. [We] did not begin this research with any intent to “exonerate” handguns, but there it is—a negative finding, to be sure, but a negative finding is nevertheless a positive contribution. It directs us where not to aim public health resources.

Why do I bring this up in light of the Newtown tragedy? Am I committing the same error as those who immediately use the victims as fodder for a political cause? To be fair both sides of the gun control debate think they’re defending the best interests of everyone. I believe the “solution” proposed would not prevent other tragedies. We’re treating a symptom as opposed to trying to figure out the root cause and coming up with a solution (if there is one) that treats the source. To me banning guns is like removing mercury from a thermometer in hopes that it will make the fever go away. Banning guns will only make tragedies like Newtown more likely, as the evidence in the Kates-Mauser paper shows. And that in itself is a tragedy.

Understanding Mass Murder by Robert James Bidinotto

2012-12-16T08:50:00.001-05:00

This week's massacre at Newtown has set off the to be expected firestorm over gun control. I highly recommend this post, Understanding Mass Murder. Robert, a good college friend, spent a lot of time studying criminals as well as talking with the survivors of the crimes committed. He talks about the sense of power shooters like this. (I won't mention the name so as not to contribute to whatever legacy or infamy he was hoping for.)

You have to understand this to grasp that, for the mass killer, murder is an empowering event. He is playing God with other human lives, and gets a tremendous "rush" of power and control by treating other humans like playthings.

I think this is especially true when these massacres occur at an elementary school where the perpetrator know that the kids won’t be able to over-power him (and the teachers are unarmed).

I find it interesting how quickly gun control advocates capitalize on tragedies like this to clamor for more controls on guns. I hear precious little talk about what other factors (cultural, social, psychological, etc.) that lead up to this. Excuse me if I get a bit sarcastic but that would take too much time and thought … and rational argument with people who might not agree. Instead we’re urged to rush into taking action even if ultimately that action might not prevent another tragedy like Newtown. And that is the deeper tragedy that most people don’t see.

The Pinocchio Press - WSJ.com

2012-09-07T16:34:00.000-04:00

This article covers the new "fact checking" cottage industry that has sprung up. The Pinocchio Press - WSJ.com

Also be sure to check out PolitiFact Bias and Sublime Bloviations.

Elizabeth Warren and China

2012-08-02T09:08:00.001-04:00

This article in Reason does a nice job analyzing the flaws in Elizabeth Warren’s comparison of how much China spends on their infrastructure versus ours. http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/30/ira-stoll-on-why-liz-warren-wants-americThere are a couple links below showing an example of a Chinese ghost city, an entire city that was built by the Chinese government which is unoccupied and likely to stay that way. Just what we need here, right?

Actually she does us a favor in showing how government can build an infrastructure -- which she says businesses need in order to exist – that no one uses. This is the reverseof Frederic Bastiat’s analysis of the broken window fallacy in which he refutes the claim that destroying things actually is good because it creates work for those who can rebuild what was destroyed. See more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window. My point is the opposite: The Chinese government built entire cities for which there was no need. As a result the resources spent on these projects are not available for other projects for which there might be a legitimate need. As Bastiat noted we focus on what can be seen – the brand spanking new but empty city –and not what can’t be seen – the lost opportunities to meet the real needs and wants of people as well as the wasted resources.

This brings me back to Warren’s and Obama’s rant about businesses being unable to do their thing without a strong infrastructure. What strikes me is the indignation both of them exuded. Maybe I missed something but I don’t recall seeing business owners running around claiming they built their enterprises without any assistance. To me both Warren and Obama set up a straw man to advance their case for higher taxes and reveal their deep seated antipathy for business and capitalism.

In China we have examples in these ghost cities of infrastructure being provided that no one is willing or able to use. More importantly it reveals what happens in a country that with a government that doesn’t recognize or protect individual rights. It says a lot that Warren proudly holds up China as an example to which we’re supposed to emulate.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/07/30/why-elizabeth-warren-wants-america-to-be

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1975397_2094492,00.html

http://www.financialpost.com/news/business-insider/ghost+cities+China/3982854/story.html

You Didn't Build That: Two Analyses

2012-07-24T17:36:00.000-04:00

I like how Maverick Philosopher dissects Obama's remarks on "you didn't build that." Maverick Philosopher: Who Built the Internet? Obama's Straw Man Fallacy

Better yet is Ari Armstrong's analysis. http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog/index.php/2012/07/you-didnt-build-that-obamas-ode-to-envy/

King Barack I vs. the American Gospel of Success By Robert Tracinski

2012-07-22T15:04:00.001-04:00

I like this analysis byRobert Tracinski. It covers a lot of ground and I agree with the points he makes.

King Barack I vs. the American Gospel of Success

Over the years I've met several business owners who have created their enterprises from nothing. One is a college friend of my wife who spent years scrimping and saving, working insane hours without knowing whether or not her business was going to succeed or not. Finally over. Here's the business to take off and eventually was bought out by a much larger organization. Our friend was asked to stay on and help continue managing the business the sheep built. But for years we saw very little of her because she was working 18 hour days six and seven days a week.

I also recall meeting a fellow while working on account where he and some of his coworkers bought the plant that was being sold by the parent company. They scraped together enough money by mortgaging their homes to buy the plant. There were no guarantees either business was going to survive. And if the businesses had failed the guys who bought the plant I mentioned above could have easily lost their homes.

Why tell the stories to uphold liberal friends of mine live in the area and indicate how much these people put on the line and how many hours they work I get to look of disbelief as if they are saying, “How could that possibly be?” In fact when one friend almost comes out and says it's not possible anybody could work harder than him. I'm not saying he doesn't work hard but I also know he engages in a lot of activities such as biking, tennis, hiking etc. that our friend I mentioned above had to completely abandon in order to build her business. I don't begrudge her the money she made. But I do sense resentment from our friends.

Obama talks about how people who have succeeded in creating and building their business are basically not smarter than the rest of us or haven't worked harder than the rest of us (although I would dispute that). He conveniently ignores one point that distinguishes people who have succeeded in creating their own businesses: they have taken risks that other people have not taken or are not willing to take.

He also conveniently forgets to mention the fact that the same people who created businesses from nothing did so from a vision of what they wanted to create.

If polled I would assume that the majority of business owners would agree with Obama's general point that it would not have been possible for them to create their business without the foundation of the infrastructure provided by local and federal taxes. To me this is the equivalent of saying we all need soil in order to grow crops. But it still takes someone with initiative, vision, and willingness to take risks to plant their seeds in the soil and spend the time and effort and sweat it takes for the seeds to grow. All this without a guarantee that their seeds will actually sprout.

Think Tough Gun Laws Keep Europeans Safe? Think Again by John Lott

2012-07-22T15:02:00.000-04:00

This article by John Lott from 2010 talks about how strict gun-control laws in Europe have not prevented similar tragedies as the one that happened in Colorado earlier this week. It is interesting that three of the top five mass killings that Lott refers to occurred in Germany, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in all of Europe.

Think Tough Gun Laws Keep Europeans Safe? Think Again... | Fox News

Interesting advice for Romney

2012-07-14T10:05:00.001-04:00

While I don't agree with Bruce Gabrielle's claim that the Romney campaign is "on the ropes" I like his advice.

http://speakingppt.com/2012/07/14/the-only-way-to-beat-a-story-is-with-a-better-story/

Obamacare: Crony Corporatism At Its Worst

2012-07-02T10:45:00.002-04:00

I wondered why it would take such a 2000+-page monstrosity of a bill to "cure" the ills of our healthcare system. Wouldn't it be easier to come up with something that does not disrupt what 90% of the Americans have for health insurance and deal directly with those people who do not have it? I'm thinking of something similar to what used to be called food stamps. Maybe they would be called med stamps! Or do what they do in Switzerland: provide a direct subsidy to people who cannot afford health insurance or if the cost of the insurance exceeds a certain percent of their income. One possible explanation is that Obamacare gives our wise government bureaucrats complete control over a large sector of our economy. I'm sure there's some of that motivating the drive to develop such a complicated mess of legislation.

I also figured it had to be the result of the unholy alliance we have between government and big business. (This relationship is often referred to as crony capitalism, however I prefer the term crony corporatism.) The post below by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute confirms this suspicion by providing some background on the birth (or should we say failed abortion?) of Obama care. Be sure to check out the link that Mitchell provides in his post to an article that appeared in the Washington Examiner.

http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/obamacares-corrupt-conception-sleazy-gestation-and-tawdry-birth/

Comments on Supreme Court ruling on healthcare bill

2012-07-01T12:41:00.000-04:00

I do not plan to provide lengthy commentary on last week’s Supreme ruling on the constitutionality of the healthcare act. Many other folks with whom I agree have spoken on the subject. However I will make a prediction: five years from now our situation with healthcare will be no better, if not worse, than it is today. And that will spur further calls for even more government intervention into the healthcare sector to "fix" the problems. This despite the fact that government has been involved in healthcare for at least 100 years in a series of actions, each of which has caused even further disruptions.

The first link from the Ludwig von Mises Institute provides an extensive list of links to various articles and studies on the effect of government's role on healthcare and how will we have now is not anywhere close to a free market in healthcare.

http://mises.org/daily/3737/Why-ObamaCare-Will-Fail-A-Reading-List

The first link in the list is an article by Murray Rothbard summarizes the history of the government’s intervention in healthcare since around 1910. http://mises.org/daily/6099/Government-Medical-Insurance

The Heritage Foundation collection of pictures and charts captures the key features of Obamacare. Http://www.heritage.org/research/projects/obamacare/obamacare-in-pictures

Robert Bidinotto identifies the collectivist premises that support the Supreme Court ruling and provides a link to his analysis of why conservatives continually lose the moral battle in these battles against the left. I strongly recommend reading both the article on his blog as well as the link to his article on “Up From Conservatism. http://bidinotto.blogspot.com/2012/06/us-constitution-rip.html

Meanwhile neo-neocon provides some interesting thoughts.

http://neoneocon.com/2012/06/30/more-reflections-on-scotus-and-obamacare-and-the-future/

http://neoneocon.com/2012/06/29/17713/

http://neoneocon.com/2012/06/29/what-hath-roberts-wrought-in-his-obamacare-decision/

http://neoneocon.com/2012/06/28/17691/

http://neoneocon.com/2012/06/29/a-new-meme-ive-noticed-today/

She also links to this analysis by Andrew C. McCarthy. http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/06/28/obamacare-ruling-pure-fraud-and-no-due-process/?singlepage=true

And finally for a counter to the moral argument Obamacare proponents unleash on anyone who dares to oppose their “noble” cause check out Dr. Paul Hsieh’s article. http://pjmedia.com/blog/can-the-moral-narrative-of-obamacare-be-defeated/

The only way Americans can protect their long-term access to quality medical care is by demanding that the government respect their freedom and individual rights. Any system of “universal” health care necessarily requires a bureaucracy to control who can receive what services and when — if only to control costs. The medical rationing in Canada and the UK are typical results. In these countries, far from being a “right,” health care becomes just another privilege to be dispensed at the discretion of the bureaucrats.

Socialist or Fascist - Thomas Sowell - Townhall Conservative Columnists

2012-06-13T18:45:00.000-04:00

Thomas Sowell makes a distinction that many conservative commentators miss when they accuse Obama of being a socialist or a communist.

It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.

…

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.

I agree with him on this. He also correctly identifies fascism to the political left, not the right as most people do. However he doesn’t specifically mention how some folks like libertarians lay out the axis of the political spectrum with collectivism on the left and individualism on the right. A fascistic dictatorship, even if it favors business, still is a form of collectivism. The following definition provided in Wikipedia clearly shows the collectivist nature of fascism in which the individual is subjugated to the needs of the nation.

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical training, and eugenics.

Getting back to Sowell’s piece he makes a couple of key points.

Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.

Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous -- something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.

Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies.

This might seem like an issue of semantics but I don’t believe it is. I hold that incorrectly identifying Obama’s political position harms the credibility of the person making this claim. A knowledgeable opponent would have cause to ignore the comment because it shows ignorance at worst or sloppy thinking at best. It also incorrectly pits the right as being purely pro-business regardless of its relationship to government (i.e., the right supports big business cronyism while the left is protecting us little folk who need the help of our enlightened politicians to fight for our rights against the juggernaut of big business and the rich.)

Over time the left has done a good job of usurping certain terms in our language. An example is their term “right wing dictatorship” which can be safely uttered and no one challenges it. If we accept this designation we’re faced with the choice of a dictatorship of the proletariat on the left fighting the dictatorship of the bourgeois on the right. The individual is conveniently ignored in this spectrum.

How I Learned Not to Deny Climate Change by By Robert Tracinski

2012-05-02T16:04:00.000-04:00

This article gives a somewhat different perspective on global warming, I mean climate change. How I Learned Not to Deny Climate Change

The News Media as Instructors not Reporters

2012-04-18T07:25:00.000-04:00

This post from Ace of Spades HQ starts out with how the Washington Post buried a story about how Obamacare actually is going to increase the deficit, not lower it as was originally claimed. Further down Ace makes an interesting distinction about the role that the news media establishment believes they are fulfilling. His observations mesh with comments I’ve posted earlier about the Ruling Class. Ace’s analysis implicitly touches on the abandonment of any pretense of being objective. In our post-modern world these folks believe the truth is what they want it to be, especially if they believe it serves an end they feel is moral and justified. Just don’t ask them to objectively defend this position because, you know, objectivity is such a 20th century, out-of-fashion notion!

This story sums up everything that is wrong with the media, and why it is dying -- and why it should die.

The media is no longer in the information business.

They are in the instruction business.

This is an important distinction.

If you're in the information business, your stock in trade is information. You have no particular concern about how that information will be received, or interpreted, or used for making political arguments. That's not your business-- you are in the business of data, not Narrative and not the internal contents of your readers' minds.

You are not your readers' minders, nor their tutors: You stand equal to them. They are citizens are you are citizens; you have no special insight into The Truth, and they no special disadvantage in discovering The Truth.

Now, if you're in the Instruction business, things are quite different. You stand not as an equal with your readers, but as a Teacher. And, worse yet, they are Children in need of your guidance.

You cannot just offer information willy-nilly to children. …

You must be protective of Children, who are, in final analysis, incompetent (legally as well as actually) individual who need to be told what to think and how to think. You cannot give them license to think whatever they like, for they are not mature enough for that.

They haven't yet learned the skill of thinking.

Thus, everything you tell a child must be with rounded corner and soft padding. Children are dangerous, after all, to themselves and others, if not properly minded at every moment.

Why do people -- and not just strong partisans, but most anyone who isn't a diehard liberal partisan -- hate the media?

Because of this, this belief of the media that we wish or need their Instruction in ordering our lives and ordering our thoughts.

But they are determined to do just that.

…

This isn't even restricted to news -- the media's strong belief that it is the Thin Black and White Line between semi-retarded barbarians from Idiocracy and civilization is present in films and fictions, too.

Every goddamned movie is a children's movie, with a soporofic, corporate-approved Moral (don't hate strangers; be yourself!).

Even movies for adults. Especially movies for adults.

This is called "being responsible." It's also called "being condescending" and "making infantile, bad art," but they prefer "being responsible."

Reflections on Inequality

2012-04-04T11:18:00.000-04:00

This short essay by Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, nicely captures in a very few words key libertarian counter-points to the Occupy Wall Street stance on inequality.

Israeli president Shimon Peres reminds us: "By and large, those in the world who placed freedom above equality have done better by equality than those who placed equality above freedom have done by freedom." That observation, apparently lost on the Occupy Wall Street crowd, has a moral component as well: It is more just to reward effort, even if it cannot be proven to benefit the least affluent, than it is to reward the least affluent, even if they exert little effort to improve their status. Moral superiority does not entail punishing the industrious wealthy to sustain the indolent poor.

Further, the top 1 percent of income earners — persons earning more than $343,000 in 2009 — paid 38 percent of income taxes. And that doesn't reflect the nondeductibility of capital losses, the tax on illusory gains due to inflation, and the double tax paid indirectly by shareholders on corporate profits before they're distributed or impounded in stock prices. By contrast, according to the Committee on Joint Taxation, more than half of American households paid zero income taxes. Those numbers are astonishing. Even persons who embrace progressive taxation are hard-pressed to argue that the tax code is insufficiently discriminatory. How far must progressivity extend to satisfy the left's notion of fairness?

Read the whole thing. It’s only seven paragraphs long!

A Lesson for Krugman, et al, about Canada’s Real Fiscal Restraint vs. the United Kingdom’s Faux Austerity « International Liberty

2012-02-19T09:51:00.000-05:00

Here is a post well worth reading.

A Lesson for Krugman, et al, about Canada’s Real Fiscal Restraint vs. the United Kingdom’s Faux Austerity « International Liberty

Review - Reckless Endangerment:How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon Review

2012-01-14T17:05:00.000-05:00

After the financial collapse as I expected a flood of books swept the market to explain why it happened. Some were written by people on the right and some by people on the left. If you’re interested in reading a book that explains how the housing bubble burst and, more important, how it was inflated in the first place from a non-ideological source I recommend Reckless Endangerment. The authors do a good job of detailing how the people within Fannie Mae cooked the books and used various means to ensure folks who normally wouldn’t qualify for loans got them. It also details how some within government, both Republicans and Democrats, defended Fannie Mae.

Gretchen Morgenson, the lead author, is a business reporter and writes the Fair Game column in The New York Times. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her coverage of Wall Street. Her co-author, Joshua Rosner is a partner at Graham Fisher & Co., an independent research consultancy.

Morgenson and Rosner report how Barney Frank and Chris Dodd vigorously defended Fannie/Freddie against various people who questioned the economic wisdom of what they were doing.

It’s not a perfect book but it details the greed that drove the key participants within these organizations. It’s ironic because the only time I recall the media or liberals use the word greed was to chastise Wall Street’s role, not those within government and the Government Sponsored Enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As the authors say:

We found that this was a crisis that crept up, building almost imperceptibly over the past two decades. More disturbing, it was the result of actions taken by people at the height of power in both the public and private sectors, people who continue, even now, to hold sway in the corridors of Washington and Wall Street.

Reckless Endangerment is a story of what happens when unfettered risk taking, with an eye to huge personal paydays, gains the upper hand in corporate executive suites and on Wall Street trading floors. It is a story of the consequences of regulators who are captured by the institutions they are charged with regulating. And it is story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.

They don’t use these terms but Reckless Endangerment exams the perils of crony capitalism. I’d also reverse their order of cause and effect: government policies to encourage home ownership lead to the formation of GSEs which blend the private and public sectors.

Reckless Endangerment shows that the seeds were set several decades before 2008. The change in the tax code in 1986 eliminated the interest deduction on debt except for mortgages thus setting the stage for making housing “Americans’ most favored asset.” Then in 1994 President Clinton launched the National Partners in Homeownership, a private-public cooperative with one goal: raising the numbers of homeowners across America. As they point out this cooperative had a problematic feature: it teamed regulators with the organizations they were supposed to be policing.

The book then shifts to the role of James Johnson who took over Fannie Mae and began relaxing loan underwriting standards. In addition the executive pay structure changed. “Compensation became tied almost solely to earnings growth.”

[CBO study revealed that] the companies passed on to borrowers only about two thirds of the billions in benefits they received. Fannie and Freddie kept $2.1 billion for themselves and their shareholders. … [It became clear] how Fannie Mae could pay its executives as much as they did. Equally evident: Holding on to so much of its subsidy let Fannie Mae fund its elaborate self-preservation scheme, make its massive charitable contributions, pay for it extensive ‘political outreach,’ and hire academics to write favorable studies about its role in the mortgage market.

Federal investigators later found that you could predict what Fannie’s earnings-per-share would be at year-end, almost to the penny, if you knew the maximum earnings-per-share bonus payout target set by management at the beginning of the year.

Towards the end of the book Morgenson comments on the attempt to “fix” the earliest abuses by passing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. “The irony of having two of the nation’s most strident defenders of Fannie Mae sponsoring the new reform act was lost on few of those who knew the sordid Fannie story.”

While Reckless Endangerment nicely reports on the shenanigans of those in government, the GSEs and on Wall Street it suffers from a lack of a clear understanding of free market economics. Nor does it address the philosophical premises that support the efforts to expand home ownership. For a nice analysis with a philosophical explanation check out Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis by Richard M. Salsman. I would add that those who pushed for home ownership did indeed justify it by pointing out that people who normally couldn’t afford homes now could but a number of those advocates obviously had purely self-promoting reasons for doing so such as the Fannie Mae execs who reaped huge bonuses for their “selfless” work. So you end up with deadly recipe for disaster: altruistic justification for bad policies, profit taking by those who administered the GSEs, politicians who made political hay with their support, financiers who sold derivatives that rested on an inherently faulty foundation, regulators and financial rating agencies who turned a blind eye and finally (as covered in the book) academics who cooked their numbers in their analyses to hide the flaws.

I’d like to say we (speaking collectively) learned a lesson from all of this but based on the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill plus other more recent developments I’m afraid we’re no better off than we were before the 2008 crash. In other words Reckless Endangerment continues.

Bad-Faith Journalism - WSJ.com

2012-01-08T09:58:00.001-05:00

Bad-Faith Journalism - WSJ.com

This article by James Taranto touches on PolitiFact's "fact checking" and how some on the Left respond with violent ad hominem attacks to PolitiFact's occasional conclusion in which they actually agree with a comment on the Right. The nerve!

The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street - Jonathan Haidt, Reason Magazine

2011-12-30T18:46:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Haidt, author of one of my favorite books, The Happiness Hypothesis, applies his theory of moral foundations to the Occupy Wall Street movement. I’ve provided some quotes below. I like his approach.

My colleagues and I found that political liberals tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. They are very concerned about victims of oppression, but they rarely make moral appeals based on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation. Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm but much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object). Libertarians, true to their name, value liberty more than anyone else, and they value it far more than any other foundation. (You can read our complete research findings at www.MoralFoundations.org.)

So what is the mix of moral foundations at Occupy Wall Street (OWS)? In my visit to Zuccotti Park, it was clear that the main moral foundation of OWS is fairness, followed by care and liberty. Loyalty, authority, and sanctity, by contrast, were very little in evidence.

Many pundits have commented on the fact that OWS has no specific list of demands, but the protesters’ basic message is quite clear: rein in the influence of big business, which has cheated and manipulated its way to great wealth (in part by buying legislation) while leaving a trail of oppressed and impoverished victims in its wake.

Will this message catch on with the rest of the country, much of which also values the loyalty, authority, and sanctity foundations? If OWS protesters engage in acts of violence, flag desecration, destruction of private property, or anything else that makes them seem subversive or anti-American, then I think most Americans will quickly reject them. Furthermore, if the protesters continue to focus on the gross inequality of outcomes in America, they will get nowhere. There is no equality foundation. Fairness means proportionality, and if Americans generally think that the rich got rich by working harder or by providing goods and services that were valued in a free market, they won’t support redistributionist policies. But if the OWS protesters can better articulate their case that “the 1 percent” got its riches by cheating, rather than by providing something valuable, or that “the 1 percent” abuses its power and oppresses “the 99 percent,” then Occupy Wall Street will find itself standing on a very secure pair of moral foundations.

I particularly like what he says in the last paragraph about fairness. While fairness is a valid concept on the social level in terms of how people treat each other in a non-legal context elevating fairness to trump rights and to be a governing political principle is a path fraught with peril. When the OWS folks talk about fairness they shift our focus away from the conditions necessary for each individual to live freely and to pursue happiness to the relationship between individuals. In other words OWS substitutes the concept of individual rights which has an objective basis (if formed properly) with fairness, which can mean whatever one wants it to be. I think is precisely their motive.

Repo Men - Kevin D. Williamson - National Review Online

2011-12-29T11:24:00.000-05:00

This scathing article by Kevin Williamson targets Obama and his Democrat colleagues for their profiteering from intimate connections with Wall Street while pontificating how they're protecting the little guy, us 99% to use the Occupy Wall Street lingo. Republicans aren't spared his scorn either. And rightfully so (no pun intended). Just a warning. If you suffer from high blood pressure be sure to take your medication before reading this expose.

Williamson's points support what I said in my previous post: http://thinkingobjectively.blogspot.com/2011/09/palins-political-observations-plus-my.html

Saving the New Year - Megan McArdle

2011-12-28T11:47:00.000-05:00

I'll admit that this post by Megan McArdle doesn't at first glance appear to fall in the category of political or social commentary and yet I feel it's worth sharing for her financial advice. Why? Because our current financial condition is similar to what is happening in Europe I think we're going to face serious changes (i.e., cut backs) to Social Security, Medicare and other "entitlement" programs if (and that's a big IF) we're going to face the incredible financial hole we've dug for ourselves with trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities. The more we can rely on our own personal financial resources the more we can isolate (or try to isolate) ourselves from relying on the "safety net."

After a long explanation of the different economic and political factors that affect us she offers this advice.

The important thing is to pay yourself first. Savings should be the first thing you do, not the last. After you've saved, then you budget your consumption. I won't tell you what to cut, because when you confront your new, slightly leaner budget, you'll be perfectly able to calculate what's no longer worth the money to you. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that after a few weeks or a few months of initial pinch, you won't remember that you miss the money much.

Unfortunately saving for the future isn't nearly as much fun as splurging on buying things today, even if it means using our house basically as an ATM as many people did before the housing market imploded (and then expected someone to help extricate them from bad decisions).

Works and Days » ‘When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend’

2011-12-17T10:15:00.000-05:00

Works and Days » ‘When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend’

Yet another brilliant piece by Victor Davis Hanson.

PJ Media » What’s the Matter with Obama’s Kansas Speech?

2011-12-10T16:37:00.001-05:00

I like Neoneocon's analysis of Obama's recent speech on PJ Media » What’s the Matter with Obama’s Kansas Speech?

For me a telling phrase in Obama's speech is this one, especially the last sentence.

There is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked.

Should we really be so surprised by his comment? I ask this because I recall coming across a similar sentiment when helping my daughters with the Social Studies homework when they were in middle school more than ten years ago. I recall reading in their textbook how FDR’s New Deal policies saved capitalism from its own excesses and continue to do so. Obama is just touting the same line of thinking. (For a contrary -- and I think more plausible -- explanation of what caused the Great Depression and our current economic woes I recommend checking out the Ludwig von Mises Institute for the Austrian school of economics perspective.)

Getting back to Neoneocon’s article I would take a somewhat different angle. She correctly identifies that “Obama repeatedly mentioned this goal of fairness while blurring or ignoring the all-important distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome as a measure of that fairness.” While this is indeed a valid distinction fairness also masks an inherent fuzziness that works to the advantage of (to use one of Obama’s favorite phrases) those who want to expand the concept of fairness to suit their agenda. I would argue that the concept of individual rights gets forgotten in this line of argument. We can argue forever over which definition of fairness we use unless we have a valid concept of individual rights to ground this argument and to settle disagreements over what is “fair.”

I’ll admit that the Left has successfully eroded or expanded the idea of individual rights to justify their desired enlarged of the role of government but it took some mighty verbal acrobatics to do it. For a good discussion of how FDR did this check out NeverEnough: America’s Limitless Welfare State by William Voegeli. However if we get sucked into debating definitions of fairness we have already lost the intellectual fight. With individual rights there is some objective standard to which we can repair.

Fairness, like a magician’s sleight of hand, gets us to shift our focus away from the conditions necessary for each individual to live freely and to pursue happiness to the relationship between individuals. In other words Obama and his supporters substitute the concept of individual rights which has an objective basis (if formed properly) to fairness, which can mean whatever one wants it to be. I think this is precisely their motive.

While fairness is a valid concept on the social level in terms of how people treat each other in a non-legal context elevating fairness to trump rights and to be a governing political principle is a path fraught with peril.

Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault by Jason Brennan, Bleeding Heart Libertarian

2011-11-30T10:55:00.000-05:00

This post is a bit polemical but I agree with its main points.

A Failure of Capitalism? Really?

2011-11-10T15:45:00.000-05:00

With all of the hoopla surrounding Occupy Wall Street and constant claims about how the economic mess we're shows how the free market doesn't work I like this short summary of an different point of view.

A Failure of Capitalism? Really?

Now comes the financial collapse of 2008, and it’s the free market to blame all over again. Forget that for a full century, the economic interventionists have promised to fix all the problems caused by capitalism. Ignore the fact that leftist professors have been claiming that FDR remedied these kinds of problems for all time. Now we are dealing with a new crisis and surely free enterprise is the culprit. With Bush saying he had to abandon free market principles to save them, with Greenspan saying he was too trustful of the market to regulate itself, surely now everyone is on the same page and the government measures necessary to fix the economy will easily be implemented. The bailouts of late 2008 were absolutely necessary to get us on the right track, we were told by all establishment voices.

Maverick Philosopher: Silly Expression: 'The Government is Us'

2011-11-10T15:42:00.001-05:00

While this post is a bit polemical I agree with his analysis.

Maverick Philosopher: Silly Expression: 'The Government is Us'