The Augean Fallacy

Named after Heracles' cleaning of the Augean stables, The Augean Fallacy is my new name for the theory that

All we need is a strong enough leader, and we could clean out all this bullshit.

Where is the problem, part II

Devin, unsurprisingly insightful in the comments on this post, addresses the question of police power.  Great line:

The original American design for cities was to have the police report to a mayor with the power to hire/fire. The mayor would report, via elections, to the people. The problem was that the mayor could use the ability to hire/fire as a method of vote buying. All city employees become a voting block, which ensure perpetual rule of the party. The end result was machine politics.

He continues, by asking how to prevent?

My understanding of the extra-brilliant insight of BBdM is that this situation is inherent NOT in democracy, but in ANY situation where power-block cooperation is required.  Slaves in ancient Greece with special talents got paid, in order to extract the full use of their talents, because force just wasn't enough.  The idea that central authority, properly constituted has all the authority it needs is just wrong.  Central authorities need cooperation from others.  There's ALWAYS a power-block that needs to cooperate.

Moldbug is right that in democratic systems, the (generally) most powerful power-block are permanent government employees...though rich enough corporations can compete effectively enough that MOST government interventions harm small or mid-sized companies MUCH more than large ones.  

What Moldbug seems to miss, in his devotion to Royalism is that the dynamic doesn't change much in autocratic systems.  It's still all power-block all the time.   Maybe the permanent civil service has somewhat less power, and the unions have less power, and the permanent governor/king has somewhat more power (staying power especially)...but the corrosive influence of large corporations moving government about to do their bidding doesn't change.  

As far as I can tell, Moldbug is making the SAME mistake the progressives/communists/totalitarians are making.  If we can only put the right people in charge, and give them enough power, they can fix things.  The real problem (AFAICT) is that concentration of power itself CAUSES the problem.  Just like American was the 1st nation ever founded on the idea that diminishing the power of the government was the central problem (and it only succeeded from 1789 to 1865/1913, depending on how you count)...The anarchist/left-libertarian position is ... OK that failed...clearly the central government had TOO MUCH power.  Next time we try something, we need to give less, and stronger safeguards.  Remember, the Civil Rights act of 1875 was declared unconstitutional, as were income taxes in 1895...so federal power had not advanced too much in the first century of the republic.

The principled libertarian says: clearly our first try failed.  The best analysis (Hayek, Coase, Public Choice analysis, and especially de Mesquita) says that it's a problem with centralized power-structures themselves... regardless of how they are constituted or created.  

Perhaps a high enough degree of homogeneity among the population (Sweden, Denmark), a high-enough-growth-rate (Singapore, Hong Kong, ??China??), or a decentralized/direct/low power enough system (Switzerland), or just a small enough system (all of the above besides China between 5-10M people) might mitigate the problem.

So what do the libertarians want?  A decrease in the centralized power structures.  It worked awfully well in England from 1680-ish to maybe 1850-1900.  It worked awfully well in the US from 1776 to at least 1860, maybe 1913.  Perhaps on the third try, we could do better, and last 300 years instead of one or two hundred, like our last two tries.

My personal (and the generally libertarian) line is that it seems far more likely that centralized power is the cause of the problem than a solution to any problems.

So when I talk responsibility to citizens...I prefer that the citizens pay the police salaries directly.  And that there are more than one police agency (think Pinkertons).

Roughly, I start close to most of the Libertarian-AnCap types, and have since concluded that the position is actually substantially more radical than is normally understood.  With a note that it might not work...and so one might not do to be over-committed to the completely anti-government position.... but it's clearly the first one to try.

College is Dying, part 74

Instapundit links to the NYTimes article on the unsustainability of the current higher-ed system.  While Glenn's comments are good, Joel Grus from a couple days ago has much better things to say.

Roughly...Girl spends four years, gets $100K of debt for a 4-year "women's and religious studies degree" at NYU, and is now surprised that she can't make enough to pay it back decently.  Stunner, I know.  Brings us back to the Aretae line on the future of education:

Undergraduate education as we know it in 15 years will be in no better shape than newspapers are now.  Other forms of education will not be far behind.

Left-Libertarianism, part 933

Before we address the Moldbugian project of designing society, it might first be worth addressing the question of  what problems we're trying to solve.  My personal goals are to (a) increase economic growth and (b) increase actual positive+negative liberty for human beings.

(a) leads me to take the economists, especially Mr. Sumner among the Macroeconomists, rather seriously.

(b) led me originally towards libertarianism, and then recently to left-libertarianism.

Almost everything the government does (in reality, not in a progressive fiction) benefits either large business (or their partners, the large labor unions) or else government.  Because government action is force-based interaction, it tends to be zero/negative sum.  And if it's pro- large business or government, one should assume that it's anti- small business or citizen.  This includes even the very weak constrained picture we have of capitalism, as about money-based exchange (in order to tax it).

Eventually, I hope to find the one true post that explains left-libertarianism to those still stuck thinking conventionally.  To the left-libertarian, the right-libertarian is nearly as confused as those seniors recently spotted screaming "keep your government hands off my Medicare".  I haven't found it yet.

On the other hand, Charles Johnson lays it out some of how government favors large enterprise in a series here, that's worth reading.

QoTD

I'd forgotten how much I liked this quote by Kling, until reminded of it by Mike Gibson:

The key, I think, is to transfer people’s emotional attachment from their government to something else, like a religious sect, ethnic identity, or a sports team. You can have Yankee fans and Red Sox fans living next door to one another without infringing on each others’ rights. It’s when people give their emotional loyalty to government that you get friction.

Why do we like government?

In theory it's to protect the poor and defenseless.  Except...ya know...private associations are better at it.  RadGeek points to a Mother Jones story pointing to useless government hotlines, and helpful internet community...in the sex trafficking business.

Fukuoka over Salatin?

Isegoria uncovers (new to me) Natural Farming in Japan, a movement led(??) by Masanobu Fukuoka, which may be even cooler than Michael Pollan's paen to American hyper-sustainability as exmplified by Joel Salatin.  Check it out.

Most interesting parts to me:

Fukuoka jokes that his Natural Farming techniques can support a person with three days a year of work. Fukuoka has also consistently produced the highest yields-per-acre of rice in Japan, and quite possibly the highest yields in the world, with continuous cultivation (no fallow periods) and no fertilizers, natural or artificial. There is no tilling of soil, minimal weeding, minimal pest control, no irrigation, and not much else being done either.

Oddly enough, there are not a lot of books about Natural Farming out there, perhaps because it is a plan that emphasizes “not doing” instead of “doing.”

Health Care

Peter Suderman has a great article pointing out what the studies on HSAs tell us:

They're the only thing ever discovered that decreases medical costs...and they increase use of preventative medicine...and they're probably mostly illegal under Obamacare. 

Of course, readers of this blog have been hearing this for the whole lifespan of the blog.  I'll repeat the thesis:

If you want lower-cost medicine, you must do one of 3 things:

1. Allow innovation (on price, like Wal-clinics)
2. Stop restricting supply (FDA, AMA, Med Schools)
3. Consume LESS medicine, and especially less new, premium, end-of-life-care medicine

Any one of those would work.  

1. Europe (poorly) controls costs by #3 in the form of stealth rationing.
2. India does a whole lot less than we do to restrict supply (Bachelor's in Medicine can practice)
3. HSA's, as per Singapore, are an alternate solution to #3, but individual-choice based, rather than government-choice based.

On other news...for popularity...the New York Post cites Ron Johnson, Randian (Ayn, not Paul) candidate in Wisconsin saying:

"Mitch Daniels has the solution." Indiana's Republican governor has offered state employees the choice of consumer-controlled Health Savings Accounts, and 70 percent of Indiana state workers now choose them.

Isn't it cool that only recently we discovered the first solution that actually works, and now the government is  prohibiting it, in its efforts to help us?

Aretae on political systems

1. Humans are pack animals.  We (necessarily) live in a society that has to function together.  How?
2. Economic growth is the killer feature of society.  What everyone SHOULD care most about.  
3. Social status is what everyone DOES care most about.  This is probably unavoidable and biological, given mate-scarcity.
1. Correlary: Group solidarity is a much more powerful human motivation than truth or justice.  True of Police + Politicians too.
4. [UPDATE] Liberty is good.  Both positive and negative.  For every individual.  Not the ONLY good, but a substantial one.  Probably in 2nd place after growth.
1. But Crime reduces real freedom.
5. Power corrupts in proportion to its quantity.  Politicians have the most power, and the more absolute the power, the more corrupt.  There may be some folks who are un-corruptable, but it's awful hard to figure out who those folks are.  Neither police nor leaders are immune in any way.
6. When Bob doesn't have a voice at the political table, Bob's interests aren't taken into account (unless he's sleeping with Alice, who has a voice at the table).
7. People don't understand economics (half because it's counter-intuitive, and half because it violates status rules.)  
8. Most everything good in the world is bottom-up, not top-down.
9. Politics is about splitting the surplus among the elite.
10. Law is primarily a means by which the privileges of the elite are enforced (mostly against the poor)
11. Legal effectiveness is substantially reduced by lack of resposibility (the public choice insight -- indirect democracy has un-fixable problems) 
12. Best places in the world to live (presently) are (depending language, preferences) ... USA, Singapore, Denmark, Switzerland.  

Aretaevian political outlines:

1. Small systems.  By observation, the most obvious feature of good, working political systems is they're all small in number of people covered.  No larger than the population of a large city.  Of course associations will be made between systems...and the charter of a city
2. NO organizational immunity -- police-persons, presidents, and corporate CEOs must be treated NO BETTER THAN, and preferably MORE STRICTLY than if they were acting alone...and in hostile courts.  Lawmaker/executor liability for unconstitutional law...Police personal liability for rights-violation.   
3. As little law as possible (may or may not be none)
4. As little legal design as possible (maybe none).    Germanic-Celtic, bottom up, voluntary associations.
5. As little formal institution as possible (maybe none).  
6. If we decide that formal law is necessary, 

1. As constrained as possible (cannot make tariffs, cannot make laws re: what you can smoke, or what you can sell, cannot make future financial promises -- Social Security, cannot do occupational licensing, cannot make IP law)
2. Jury nullification formally enshrined, AND no jury-picking.  Maybe professional judges, with history published.  
3. Limits on length of statute (1000 words?)
4. Law creation -- one of:
1. Supermajority of direct democracy.  
2. Absolute majority of citizens, with non-votes counted as nos for law-creation, yes's for repeal.
3. Heinleinian bi-cameral system with 2/3 vote in one house to create law, 1/3 vote in other house to repeal.
4. Hansonian vote on goals/priorities + goal/bonus/penalty structures for managers for meeting/failing to meet the goals (penalty may/should include death/exile/stripping of assets under some circumstances).
1. Maybe includes bid process for implementation, with substantial penalties for failure.
5. No Prisons (for after-conviction).  Death, Exile, pain (Caning).
6. Citizen/voter = Persons who have paid taxes (at above 20%[??] of median tax) for three years of the prior 5, and who have been physically present in the country for 1500 days [of those 5 years] )
7. Military: Prohibition against sending more than 100 troops off-soil.  

As always, my primary influences are: de Soto, de Mesquita, van Creveld, the Masonomists, and the AnCap/Left-Lib crowd.

Important Positions I believe with attribution

Aretae:

1. The feedback system defines the system itself
2. Economic growth is more important (over time) than whatever you're worrying about
3. Goals come before truths.

Hanson:

1. Your individual reasoning is feeble compared with social aggregate reasoning
2. Status is THE driving force (It's a better explanation than the conventional for ALL cases)

Cowen:

1. It's actually more complicated than that (for all it, and all that)
2. Try it, but then be viciously value-seeking when deciding to finish it (for almost all it)

Kling:

1. The goals of the leaders aren't the goals of the experts
2. Regulation/law is a complex game-theoretic problem with NO stable solution
3. Distributed information is the key ( & government-unsolveable) problem

Seth Roberts:

1. Self-experimentation is good
2. No one is immune to the status game

Roissy:

1. What is attractive to women is nowhere near as variable as is usually claimed.
2. People don't actually know what they want.   

Megan McArdle

1. The other side has a [good] point, don't dismiss it. (for roughly all other sides)

Yudkowsky

1. Arguments against the other side's weak positions are cowardly and unhealthy for you.

Post of the Day

Sheldon Richman links to The Freeman, writing about libertarian anti-racism:

For obvious reasons libertarians are committed to freedom of association, which of course includes the freedom not to associate, and the right of property owners to set the rules on their property.

....But no libertarian I know relishes saying, “I disapprove of your bigotry, but I will defend to the death your right to live by it.” 

...For example, a libertarian who holds his or her philosophy out of a conviction that all men and women are (or should be) equal in authority and thus none may subordinate another against his or her will (the most common justification) — that libertarian would naturally object to even nonviolent forms of subordination.  Racism is just such a form (though not the only one), since existentially it entails at least an obligatory humiliating deference by members of one racial group to members of the dominant racial group. 

....Seeing fellow human beings locked into a servile role – even if that role is not explicitly maintained by force – properly, reflexively summons in libertarians an urge to object. (I’m reminded of what H. L. Mencken said when asked what he thought of slavery: “I don’t like slavery because I don’t like slaves.”)

....[Sit-ins are trespassing?]  I could buttress this defense of sit-ins by pointing out that those stores were not operating in a free and competitive market. An entrepreneur who tried to open an integrated lunch counter across the street from Woolworth’s would likely have been thwarted by zoning, licensing, and building-inspection officers. He would have had a hard time buying supplies and equipment because the local White Citizens’ Council (the “respectable” white-collar bigots) would have “suggested” to wholesalers that doing business with the integrationist might be, shall we say, ill-advised. And if the message needed to be underscored, the Ku Klux Klan (with government’s implicit sanction and even participation) was always available for late-night calls. 

Read the whole thing.  

Good Government vs. Less Government

Scott Sumner, and Tyler Cowen, both among my favorite economists, link (with comments) to this discussion at the Baseline Scenario about the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom.  The basic position in 1 line:

Good government is not the same as Less Government

According to this, The Heritage Index measures several items, and we ought to to take them as three areas: Government spending, Property Rights (+ anti-corruption), and Structural economic factors.  Roughly, the claim is that the 8/9 -factor index (without government size) is better than the 10-factor Heritage Index.

Scott's (partial) response is intelligent as always:

It is widely known that richer countries tend to have much bigger governments than poorer countries.  

But, again, I want to bring up a point that no one seems to be talking about.  It's Aretae's 2nd law:

Economic growth is more important (over time) than whatever you're worrying about

Heritage's IEF is a tool that we use for 2 purposes.  Those purposes are (1) to measure freedom, and (2) to predict good stuff.  Both purposes are part of the goal of the index.  So here's the question...which measure predicts economic growth better?

No one addressed that topic...and we libertarian types would be surprised if size of government doesn't substantially negatively impact growth.

On the other hand, the Moldbugians will be happy with lines like the following:

we can observe several countries that score in the upper third on the Heritage Index that strike us as weak states.

Overall, I think the entire discussion is highly missing the point.  Rich countries have lower growth.  Poor countries can have MUCH higher growth.  If you're not talking growth (adjusted for GDP), total GDP, and checking what other factors impact GDP Growth, you're still on side-issues.

Tino and Scott Sumner talk about this semi-frequently, but it didn't much come up here, except for maybe Scott's close:

 I believe that in time the Singapore approach to social insurance will be shown to be better.  But despite my right-wing reputation, I regard Denmark and Sweden as highly successful countries.  

Other QoTD

IOZ is always good for quotes:

Look, I know that George W. Bush failed by not personally parachuting into New Orleans to run the sump pump, but you know, the problem was simply that earthen levees, however well maintained and properly designed, cannot ultimately protect a hugely inappropriate city from its fateful geography in the face of one of nature's most powerful and destructive forces. As for the oil spill, frankly, I think Obama was probably smart to risk appearing timorous by not airlifting himself into the middle

It's worth finishing the read.

QoTD

From Buzz:

Patri:

But whaddaya expect in the farce called democracy where you choose leaders by a popularity contest...you get leaders who are tall, handsome, charismatic, and inoffensive.

H.K.:

[T]hat's not entirely true. Some of the leaders chosen are definitely neither tall, handsome or charismatic. Some are not inoffensive, and a few are not even bad.

Probability of Error

The Aretae book, when it eventually comes out, will be on the topic of feedback systems and error.  The thesis: since error is so underestimated, universal, ubiquitous...we need much much stronger systems for dealing with error-management and strong feedback systems are the key.

By observation, the average lifespan of a company is around 50 years.  The average lifespan of a person is near 80 years.  The average lifespan of a political system does not seem to be substantially different (in the modern world) than that of a Human, though certainly the oldest continuous systems seem to be somewhat older.  (The UK since unification...or since power formally transitioned to Parliament in the late 1600s?  The USA since 1789, though 1865 + 1913 were fundamental shifts in the kind of government.  Switzerland?  Isle of Man?  Icelandic Althing?)

And the quality of both company and Government is as variable as quality of person (GM was awful good in 1950....).

Overall...my line is:
Humans have very little idea of how to do much of anything NEW with low probability of error (some very incrementalist simple science projects aside).

• Project plans (in software especially) usually (not quite always)  fail due to unforseen circumstances...I vote for Scrum, with less planning, unless you have 10,000 historical examples like the bridge-builders do.
• Battle plans usually fail, always because the other guy is planning also...I vote for preparation, and a hard-core OODA loop
• Manufacturing is usually at least 3-5x more expensive, costly, slow than it needs to be.  Start with something that you know isn't good enough...and then increment yourself up.
• Government regulation almost always fails, because the regulators simply cannot react as fast as the companies do, and then there's regulatory capture 

In engineering, there's EXACTLY one path to success on complex systems.  Prototyping.  If you ain't prototyping, and you ain't 1:1 copying, expect a below-10% success rate.



Back to my argument against the Moldbugians:

I read Moldbug as usually arguing that we really ought to pursue copying...The British/Dutch colonial system worked (even though most other countries' success was decidedly more marginal).  Do it again.  The way to pacify natives is known.  Do it again.  Winning wars?  Known.  Repeat. 

Occasionally, Moldbug proposes a highly specific new plan, as the software engineer (/architect?) he is.

I read Romer as arguing that we should be prototyping, as the CEO-type that he is (when he's not professoring). 

I personally read those as VERY different lines.  But I admit to being a less-devoted scholar of Moldbug and the pre-moderns than everyone else I'm arguing with...and I might well be wrong about what's being argued. 

Arguments around Paul Romer

I'm having a bit of a tussle with Isegoria, chez lui, on the topic of Paul Romer...and it's mostly Foseti's fault.  The question is whether Romer is stealth-Moldbugian.  I disagree vehemently, and think that Romer is 2-3 levels of meta- above (and therefore better than) Moldbug.  Most recently, I said:

That hypothesis doesn’t fit Romer’s prior career. Mine does.

Romer is an economist specializing in new growth theory — he’s one of the seminal figures in the movement — and his work says that roughly all economic growth is knowledge growth. Romer is about increasing knowledge to increase growth, which is the only big issue besides violence and war.

Romer also knows that knowledge only increases by trying new stuff — and then he read public choice and saw that government institutions basically don’t change their rules. Hence governments don’t increase knowledge and don’t get better.

Since his obsession is growth, by means of trying new stuff, it’s hardly fair to say he’s only echoing the boring Moldbug hypothesis. He’s far smarter than that, and besides, politically mostly liberal.

His line is that you don’t know what will work best, and neither does he. At best he’s pushing neocameralism for a first try, in order to garner some extra support for his actual radical position of trying lots of different things.

Again with Aretae's 1st law:

The feedback system defines the system itself

Romer is arguing that the system of governance worldwide is stagnant.  The only path out, according to all of us contrarians, is to have places that try new things.  Some of the new things will work better, some won't. But until we have places to try new things, nothing will get better.

Moldbug argues (with Carlyle) that a specific system (USG-Corp), or almost any system in a specific direction (formally aristocratic) would be better. 

This is a nice line, and there's some chance that it's true...but it's nowhere near as interesting TO ME as the Romer line that the evolution and improvement of legal systems has been interrupted and needs restarted. 

For those who have forgotten...here's Romer's kickoff of the idea at TED...in which he explains things the way I did.

You can't fix stupid

Foseti calls it.  wow.

Beautiful Women, Cheating

Instapundit links to this article which asks why beautiful women get cheated on so much?  The article is nutty. 

Much better (Roissysphere) answer:

Men want women with good looks, women want men with status (wealth is a form of status).  Simplified:
Men (generally) have a sexual appetite for as many women as they can find ...while women (generally) have a sexual appetite for the best guy nearby.  Polygamy vs. hypergamy.  
The hottest women get the highest status guys, and especially the high status guys...who are then tempted by every other woman on the planet who also would prefer those same guys.  Second, Willpower is conserved.

What would happen to an average woman, married to a great, caring husband, but who was approached regularly to have drinks by Denzel Washington, Bill Clinton, LeBron James, Lance Armstrong, Reggie Bush, Prince William, Sergei Brin, and other super-high status folks?  3:1 says that almost every woman on the planet would have a bad willpower day...and wake up naked in a hotel room.

This is the real world that super-high status guys deal with every day.  Are we surprised about the outcome?

Humans are monkeys that talk...not self-control experts.  Train him all you want, but a hungry monkey in a free banana store is gonna take one.

Evidence on IP?

Slashdot points us at this TED discussion of industries with IP law vs. industries without, like fashion.  Claim: Fashion has no IP (no trademark), and fabulous growth/development/new idea flow.  Compare to Music/Art/etc...and Fashion is more dynamic, more interesting, better.  Look at other industries with no IP...seems better.

Applied Anarchy

Roderick Long links to two discussions of Somalian anarchy, and how it compares to Somalia when there was a government.  Unsurprisingly, given the source, both find that Somalia now, in a state-free society, is in at least somewhat better shape than back when they had a government.  Very much encouraging from an anarchist PoV: government collapses, nothing replaces it, and life gets at least a little better.

Rorschach stories

Some stories, you expect to work as a Rorschach test for people.  You can learn substantial amounts about people from how they respond to stories like this one from Isegoria:

Woman offered £200 to be sterilised

Private group, druggie neighborhood.  Is it wrong?

QoTD -- lol edition

From Patri's Twitter feed, a link to Discordian Quotes:

Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn't doing very well

Intellectual Property, the argument

Intellectual Property is perhaps the most disputed corner of libertarian thought.  Some libertarians are pro-, others are against, and there are many sides to the argument.  After a conversation with a friend, in which he pointed to occupational licensing as one of the major injustices of the day, I countered that I'd recently been thinking that IP law should go in that category.  He suggested that he'd love to see a discussion of I, and I haven't found any recent ones beyond this bit from Dr. Long.
 
As always, I'm prone to acknowledge that it's not a one-sided discussion, but here's the libertarian argument.


Disclaimer: my primary expertise is in teaching first, education-in-general second, and writing software third.  I am mostly a performance artists, but one who would have a hard time being duplicated.  Hence I shouldn't have too much of an interest in IP law for my own benefit, even though I am writing education software.


Against:

• The justification of property rights is founded on scarcity.  If I'm growing crops on a plot of land, you can't grow crops on the same land.  Intellectual Property (a song) is not scarce, therefore you can't use the same justification for it.
• The value in ideas comes from combining and recombining.  "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" (variously ascribed to all great artists).  The business of copyright & patent has a tremendous chilling effect on good art, as the great bits of one (recent) thing cannot properly be reused in the same ways that all historical art has.  Ditto other countries' approaches to IP.  Ideas are shared. 
• In reality, while real property rights are bottom-up (agreed, naturally, by people in the absence of government), IP is top-down.  IP is a creation of the government.  Specifically, a patent (or copyright) is the same kind of animal as a monopoly: the right to extract unreasonable profits from the  populace by means of government restrictions on others doing the same job.  Formalized for a few years in ancient Greece, and then again in 1623 in England.  Apart from that, patents were unknown.  In China, IP law was instituted for the first time in 1985
• If you look at the impact of IP law, it works almost identically to other government granted monopolies.  The primary beneficiaries of the law are (a) large corporations that play the legal game and (b) lawyers.  The benefits to individual artists are quite mixed.  They have some control over their own works, except insofar as the RIAA owns the copyright...however they are prevented from using others' work (see Disney).  Patent law is almost identical, with patent-thickets being a modern large-corporate strategy by which they prevent themselves from being sued by other large companies and can prevent smaller players from playing at all.
• According to New Growth Theory, economic growth is (basically) the growth of ideas.  Patent law very simply prevents ideas from being combined.  Therefore there is a real (and substantial) cost to economic growth from having patents protect new inventions. 
• Coase, my other favorite economist, points out that transaction costs are the root of all evil.  Patents create transaction costs on idea-usage.  Even worse, this effectively prices the poor out of the market.  This is between bad and horrible. 
• It is unclear whether under current hyper-competitive pressures, patent law would make any difference at all in companies creating new ideas...If new ideas aren't adopted in a company, the company in the market that does adopt new ideas has a competitive advantage.    
• Software, Business Method, and Gene patents are both absurd and morally wrong.  Math is unpatentable, so is science.  Software is math, in the form of algorithms.  Genes pre-exist.

IP Law: Unjustified, Anti-value, Government-created, lawyer-favoring, Growth-slowing, poor-excluding, unclear benefit, and some categories are horrid.

FOR:

• IP law encourages the creation of ideas, which encourages growth.  If I, Joe Plumber, have a better way to make a toilet-snake, I might only do so if I have a reasonable expectation of making a profit off my idea.  Similarly, without IP law, a Chinese firm might wait for an American firm to create an idea, but then produce it more cheaply, thus decreasing the incentive to create new ideas.
• It is a moral good for artists and inventors to receive payment for the fruits of their labors (which are mostly mental), regardless of how you justify it.
• In the case of Pharmaceuticals, given the current regulatory structure (FDA!!!), it is so costly to create new medicines ($500M-$1B????) that without the promise of IP-law based monopoly, there would be no new (or at least massively reduced) development of drugs and medical devices.  

IP Law:  Morally just, Encourages idea-creation and therefore economic growth.  Medical advancement requires something like IP law.

OK.  It's blatantly obvious which side of the debate I'm sitting on.  Are there arguments I'm missing?

Summary:

• It's unclear whether or not IP law encourages growth.  While first analysis says it does, second analysis is, in my opinion, opposed.
• It's not justified under normal property-like considerations, on close examination, though it looked like it might be on first glance.  
• In theory, it should benefit artists and inventors.  In reality, it mostly benefits Disney, IBM, the RIAA, and lawyers, and sucks for poor artists + inventors.
• May be a necessary evil (given other crazy laws) in the case of drug/medical device development
• Some categories are especially atrocious.

Nuclear Family

Though I've asked it before, here it is again.  Is the nuclear, non-extended family the proximate cause for all economic growth?  Steve Sailer asks the question in a long discussion about the British book The Pinch.  I'm surprised, actually, that Isegoria's commentary on the post didn't suggest that this would actually provide some support for the Clarkian hypothesis of English survival of the fittest.  If the English almost uniquely ran nuclear families and the kids moved out, then there was much more room for natural selection (on IQ + non-impulsiveness). 

Left Libertarianism, Wilkinson edition

For a while there, it seemed as if there were two branches of the libertarian left....the Cato + Will Wilkinson Beltway libertarians, and the Anarchist/Agorist "States are evil" left-libertarians like me.  But then, I go read Will's QoTD, and maybe we're not so far apart after all..

Germanic vs. Roman

It seems as if the intelligent discussion on social systems among the libertarian-leaning is heading in the direction of arguing about deep, fundamental approaches to systems.  Devin pointed out that Szabo and Moldbug had a fantastic discussion about this in the comments here.  For those of you who don't have the time to read 100K words in argument, you might instead try this shorter version by Roderick Long, presenting a case for the Germanic-Celtic approach to law, and opposing the Roman one.  He begins:

The current debate over gun control is the latest, and perhaps the last, skirmish in a centuries-old conflict between two radically different visions of social order: the Celtic-Germanic system and the Imperial Roman system.

Robin explains discrimination

Robin is spot on in pointing out that height + beauty are permitted forms of discrimination, as well as are gender, race, disability, and national origin discrimination in marriage.  He then explains:

I despair of finding a way to see our general pattern of which discriminations we allow as an application of some general moral principle. Instead it seems more likely that recent cultural elites preferred to discourage the types of discrimination that favored their cultural competitors, while retaining the types that favored them or their allies.  For example, since today’s cultural elites tend to be pretty, they have little interest in preventing discrimination against the ugly.

QoTD

Sheldon Richman, beautifully laying out the left-libertarian position:

Despite what you may read at other libertarian sites, the welfare state is not the result of efforts by lazy poor people to enslave and live off the productive classes. Rather, it is the result of efforts by the political-social-corporate elite to subordinate and control the poor for a variety reasons -- the same elite, by the way, that seeks to loot the productive classes. Missing or ignoring this distinction leads to a slew of fallacies, misstatements, and attitudes.

Talking past one another

Foseti calls me on attacking a straw-man in arguing that lynching isn't good when it's done by government or by people.  This is incorrect on two counts.  Before the Civil Rights Act, it was the police lynching blacks, and looking the other way when private citizens did so.  The important part of the CRA (much like in the case of slavery) was in stopping the legally mandated discrimination that was going on. 

I address what actual left-libertarians have to say about the civil rights act in a previous post, so I'll skip that here. 

However, he ignores the first, important part of my post, which argues what left-libertarianism is:

• Leftists have identified real, important problems that are largely unaddressed by the current/old systems, and mostly around fairness towards the weak, marginalized, and poor
• Government intervention is never the solution, and usually the cause of the problem.

Unsurprisingly, the position above is taken by all the left-leaning libertarians in my other post.  Discrimination was a problem...voluntary action, absent state action was the solution. 

Left-Libertarians on the Civil Rights Act

Rand Paul first.  For those who aren't paying attention, Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, is the all-but-libertarian Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky.  He created a great kerfluffle among the chattering classes a couple days ago by saying that parts of the Civil Rights Act might not have been a good idea, what with mandating what private businesses could do.  

The left libertarian perspective:  Rand Paul is a vulgar-/right- libertarian-conservative politician who (as any libertarian) isn't comfortable with the Civil Rights Act's preemption of private business, but needs to make up some sort of plausible-sounding bullshit so as to not get destroyed in the general election.  It's politics, and his position is incoherent because it's supposed to be. 

If you want a left-libertarian response to the Civil Rights Act, try some actual left-libertarians, not politicians.  Sheldon Richman, for instance, says this:

It was only government power that created and sustained the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow, um, LAWS. They were preemptions of the free market, so how could it have abolished them?

And this:

Why is it not enough to oppose racial discrimination and support peaceful social movements against it? Why must one also endorse using government force against what is, after all, nonviolent behavior? (Not all loathsome behavior is violent.) Is endorsement of State force necessary to show one's bona fides as a humane person? If so, that is very strange, indeed. 

Or David Henderson (seems left-ish libertarian):

The Civil Rights Act of 1964--and its companion laws, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965--were designed to address abuses of state and local government power. The Jim Crow laws that sprang up in the South after Reconstruction and prevailed for nearly a century were not merely the result of voluntary association. Discrimination--public and private--was enforced by police power and often by violence.

Henderson again:

The fact of the matter is that this country moved from segregation required by law to segregation forbidden by law without trying freedom of association for a millisecond.

Followed, in the same post, by a long quote from Milton Friedman:

Is there any difference in principle between the taste that leads a householder to prefer an attractive servant to an ugly one and the taste that leads another to prefer a Negro to a white or a white to a Negro, except that we sympathize and agree with the one taste and may not agree with the other? I do not mean to say that all tastes are equally good. On the contrary, I believe strongly that the color of a man's skin or the religion of his parents is, by itself, no reason to treat him differently; that a man should be judged by what he is and what he does and not by these external characteristics. I deplore what seem to me the prejudice and narrowness of outlook of those whose tastes differ from mine in this respect and I think less of them for it. But in a society based on free discussion, the appropriate recourse is for me to seek to persuade them that their tastes are bad and that they should change their views and their behavior, not to use coercive power to enforce my tastes and my attitudes on others.

Or Roderick Long:

All the same, what Paul should have done is to argue that voluntary efforts at fighting discrimination are more effective than governmental efforts.

But to do that, Paul would have had to talk about a) the indirect (not just the direct) discriminatory effects of government policies, and b) the nonviolent means of fighting discrimination. (And I’m not even talking about the possibility of raising Rothbardian doubts about the legitimate property titles of the segregated businesses of the south. Baby steps, etc.) But he said nothing about either (a) or (b), and I suspect hasn’t thought much about them.

It's always funny

When the statists argue against anarchy by saying that anarchy can't solve problem X, and then we have a beautiful demonstration that the state can't solve problem X either.  Eric Crampton discusses quarantine:

So the country with the best chance of anywhere in the world of implementing effective quarantine [we're a very long flight from everywhere except Australia], with public institutions generally regarded as being among the most competent in the world, couldn't handle quarantine.

Growth FTW

Aretae's 2nd law:

Economic growth is more important (over time) than whatever you're worrying about

Though this is mostly because economic growth drives whatever you're worrying about.

Having re-re-re-reiterated that...it's nice to see Scott Sumner surveying countries economic growth over the last 30 years.  And unsurprisingly to anyone not suffering from cranio-rectal inversion, those countries with Free market policies just did better.  Significantly better.  Chile + Argentina -- Chile got a brutal dictator who forced free market policies, and moved from half Argentina's income to equal to Argentina's income in 28 years.  Singapore went from half the US average income to just above even.  Hong Kong roughly the same.

Basic rule...the more impressive the Free Market policies, the better the economic growth.  Note that the Nordic states did do a hard-turn to the free market recently, with Denmark almost identical to the US on the Index of Economic Freedom, and Sweden is way out in front of most of the rest of Europe as well.

Indeed, if you look at growth rate over the past 30 years among industrialized countries, it may be (haven't run all the numbers) that the ONLY countries which grew faster than did the USA were countries that list currently as top 11 economic freedom spots (Singapore, Hong Kong, Chile, UK).

Furthermore, and perhaps even more impressive, it seems as if, of the top 11 spots on the Index, 10 of them are Anglo-Saxon systems (Chile purchased their economics from University of Chicago economists, Singapore + Hong Kong were British holdings), and only Switzerland (another distributed-power republic) is in the top 11.  This argues strongly against it being something in the British character, and instead something in the British system.  

Old Hanson

Here's Hanson, talking about the best evidence we have:

• medicine has little correlation with health
• few show much interest in medicine quality
• police internal affairs report to police chiefs
• college graduates rarely use what they learn
• moral philosophers are not more moral
• managed funds on average lose money
• few give much to foreign or future poor
• voters dislike politicians committed to promises

Left Libertarianism

For the 85th time, Left-Libertarianism is a dual claim:

• Leftists have identified real, important problems that are largely unaddressed by the current/old systems, and mostly around fairness towards the weak, marginalized, and poor
• Government intervention is never the solution, and usually the cause of the problem.

Indeed, as Foseti has been known to say (paraphrasing) --

If you're dead, doesn't matter if it was government misbehavior or a criminal that killed you, you're still dead.

So too is it true:

If you're lynched for your skin color/sexual preference, it doesn't matter if it was government law (the way it was) or private individuals that did the discriminating.

Right to immigrate

Libertarian Walter Williams tries to trap the pro-immigration folks by implicitly asking,

There are close to 7 billion people on our planet. I’d like to know how the libertarians answer this question: Does each individual on the planet have a natural or God-given right to live in the U.S.? … I believe most people, even my open-borders libertarian friends, would not say that everyone on the planet had a right to live in the U.S.

Left-libertarian Roderick Long answers simply

yes, of course each individual on the planet has the right to live anywhere she chooses, so long as she violates no one’s rights.

Foseti responds incredulously,

I don’t know what Long thinks happens when you become a US Citizens, but in reality, you do get a lot of other "rights" that you didn’t have when you were a citizen of, for example, Zimbabwe.

Foseti is wrong.

Reactionary-types who believe in the power of the state should give up on "rights" discussions.  Given the Moldbugian sovereignty bit, rights are a contradiction.  Either the state has sovereignty or not.

Rights are a topic from ethics, specifically political ethics and apply only in the case that the individual is properly due something from other individuals, whether or not they are giving it.

Trying to mix ethical rights-theory with neo-realist power-politics makes for much incoherence.

There are a bunch of privileges that the US Government calls "rights" that are granted to you once you become a US Citizen...this much is true...

But the entire history of rights-theory and the foundational documents of the US of A don't see it the way Foseti talks about it at all.  Rather, rights theory, and American government are founded on the notion that rights inhere in individuals, and indicate what should not be done to them by any other human or group of humans.  The rights exist because they are human beings, not based on where they were born...and not based on whether their government is run by rights-violating Dictators or Kleptocrats.

Indeed...the strongest (not saying much) libertarian argument for the Iraq war was that Saddam was violating the rights of the Iraqi people, and it was appropriate to defend them against his rights-violations.  If you'll note, this justification only makes sense if the rights belong to the individuals, and have NOTHING to do with what the government is actually doing.

Of course, Professor Rod Long knows all of rights-theory history since the Icelandic sagas, and so he wouldn't be surprised by my explanation, but Foseti might be.

His simplest response is to give up the notion of rights as nonsensical...which in a neo-realist world it is.

Changes in a year

In the last year and some of blogging, I've developed several new positions.

• I've veered hard to the left-libertarian/agorist position.  Leftist-identified problems are much more important than conservatives/libertarians admit...even if leftist solutions are uniformly horrid. 
• I've become very aware of race issues (I see them in person regularly)
• I have shifted much deeper into the HBD/evo-psych camp.  Men + Women are very different psychologically ways, and an awful lot of it is hardcoded.  Race differences exist, but are smaller.  Evolution in general explains even more than I'd previously thought. 
• Sowell, Kling, and Hayek changed my thinking about political positions differences, with the constrained/unconstrained distinction.  
• van Creveld taught me about how important lack of violence/war is, and how unusual it is.  Thanks to Isegoria.
• de Mesquita taught me that formal political systems don't matter too much -- it's always factional -- fictions like a large difference between Monarchy and Democracy don't impress me much at all any longer. 
• Studying decision-making showed me that the smartest guy in the room (of 10) is likely to give the best answer only (at best) 3/10 times.  Listen more. 
• Relatedly, serious study on actual human decision making (Certainty, Thinking errors, estimation) taught me that rationality is much weaker than any smart person gives it credit for.  Experience > Intelligence.

 But then there were the BIG shifts:

• The Bayesian revolution ate my brain.  True/False as normally understood/used aren't even coherent concepts any longer.
• de Soto rocked my world, by investigating the Coasian insight that transaction costs are everything, and he discovered that access to the law is the #1 killer transaction cost.   Ostrom got a Nobel for saying similar things: Transaction costs are the root of all evil, or at least of the "tragedy of the commons".
• Falkenstein, Hansen, and my wife helped me to finally understand how much status & envy matter.  I am glad that envy approximates greed a lot, or else economics wouldn't predict for shit.   It's that big.  Assume status is the motivation for all human action, and you're in pretty good shape.
• And most recently, economic growth took over as explaining everything.  If you wish to explain society, and you don't mention economic growth as a MAJOR factor, you're wrong.  Ethics? consequence of economic growth.  Freedom?  economic growth.  Culture?  economic growth.  Environmental protection?  economic growth.  Lifespan?  economic growth.  Happiness?  Economic growth.  Get the picture?  Economic growth swamps all other factors by an order of magnitude for ANY measure you care to use, except the anti-growth measures built by the "people are a cancer on the planet" morons. -- and this is before I read Matt Ridley and get really excited about the topic.

One more anti-slavery post

So strange it is that I move in circles that are so far from normal that I write posts opposing the institution of slavery.  It's that whole inner Aspie thing wherein I can ignore the social consequences entirely, and just address the abstract academic issue.

Here's the problem: Leftists have been pushing an inequality causes bad outcomes meme for at least a dozen, maybe many dozens of years.  One of their big lines was that income differences made substantial (+/-5year ?) differences in peoples lifespans (British study).  Eventually, the motivated libertarians got hold of the study, and Will Wilkinson, some years back, linked to an analysis that strongly challenged that point of view.  It turns out that the libertarian-approved study shows that income differences didn't matter.  It turns out that the difference between high and low income folks in Britain was autonomy.  People with high autonomy live longer than people with lower autonomy.  Significantly.

In other words: the loss of autonomy that constitutes slavery kills people.

Civil institutions

Foseti has an article on reactionary-ism, starting from Patrick Deneen at the Cato-Unbound discussion this month.  The one line Foseti calls out from the Cato essay as defining the reactionary position is:

The rule of the virtuous person is displaced by the explicit control of the centralized state.

 While there are interesting disputes available here, I think it's worthwhile to note that the overwhelming consensus from libertarianism in general is in agreement:

The state displaces civil institutions that are important.  That's bad.

 Life gets interesting though, with the economic growth focus.  Basically, the difference between our lives and the lives of our ancient ancestors can be summarized in ONE idea: economic growth.  Economic growth is enabled, again, by one basic activity: people trading and innovating for mutual profit, AKA the market. 

Here's the problem...all human progress (the way our lives are day-to-day better, less painful, prettier, longer) comes from the market, and the market is inherently destabilizing of civil institutions, particularly non-individualistic ones that Mr. Deneen opposes .  What do you do?

Difficulties Transhumanists have...

Robin Hanson calls it:

[June Scientific American] assigns a greater than 50% chance to advanced AI by 2050!

Scientific American seems unaware that the AI possibility’s expected effects far outweigh all the rest.  If accurate, this one forecast deserves vastly attention than a 700 word comment.  If they really took it seriously, they might devote an entire issue to the subject, or perhaps even their entire future magazine.  Either they don’t really believe their >50% number, they don’t understand its enormous civilization-remaking consequences, or they (and their readers) don’t find such vast consequences several decades hence of much interest. Which is it?

QoTD

Arnold Kling, talking macro:

The only thing I will add to Nick's post is that the exponents of the orthodox view were contemptuous of dissenters when they held their views of three years ago, and they are just as intolerant of dissenters to the new consensus.

Funnies

Commenter Borepatch, also a blogger in his own right, finds some funnies.  With a name like: "Does an Environmental Quality Commissioner, err, relieve himself in the woods?", you know the article has to be good.  Opener:

Not in Texas.

Vaccines

Ok...here we go again...introducing a topic that should folks convinced that I've jumped off the deep end.

A friend of mine, one Simon Funk, points me at this article on vaccines.  Roughly, the line is:

Historical data STRONGLY suggests that fatalities from the diseases we have vaccines for is roughly 99.97% orthogonal to the use of the vaccines. Mortality rates track water quality, sanitation, personal sanitation habits (Which really all track wealth, though the article didn't say that).  Vaccines are very simply a very small corner side issue for survival.

Links worth reading

From IOZ, while ranting about Rand Paul:

A libertarian who hates Black people, thinks they are racially and genetically inferior, and would, given the opportunity, refuse to serve racial minorities at his own business could nevertheless be better for Blacks than any cruise missile liberal. Ending the drug war and closing prisons and not sending poor Black people to die in crazy foreign adventures based on hazy "humanitarian" principles is more important than paying lip service to the Civil Rights office at the DOJ.

From Megan McArdle, while ranting about teacher's unions, and quoting this Steven Brill article, in a rather data-strong fashion:

The problem is that the structure [the unions] impose makes it almost impossible (though not quite!) to innovate, and to spread the innovations that work. The cushy job protections and strict work rules are great for the teachers.  But the schools aren't there for the benefit of the teachers.

From Radley Balko, subbing in for the Blogfather, while ranting about anti-reverse-panopticon laws:

But in Illinois the situation is quite a bit worse. In Illinois it actually is illegal to make audio recordings of on-duty cops–or any other public official.

Solutioning is Over-rated?

Isegoria is on a roll recently.  This, then this, then this.  The interesting question explored in all of these is...how much was Marx right in that everything is (more or less) historically determined.  Patterns ooze forward and people have little chance to move them? 

The masonomist position gets some backup

The Masonomist position, as described originally by Arnold Kling says:

1. Lose the "We"  [Government != society.   "We should" is a call for individuals to act, not governments.]
2. Markets fail. Use markets. [Government action is usually makes the problem worse AND prevents natural adjustments from fixing things]

Arnold Kling reports on a new, highly supportive paper that says:

[W]e do not find support for the hypothesis that better compliance with BCPs [Basel Core Principles] results in sounder banks

Translation: The biggest, baddest, most agreed on bank regulations ever don't make banks any safer.  Can we repeal them now?  Of course not...regulation is for keeping out new entrants, not for being effective at it's nominal purpose. 

Robin on regulation

Robin is wonderful here, with one of the strongest anti-regulation pieces I've ever read.  Theme (not quote!):

If you increase regulation after an (inevitable, regardless the amount of regulation) error, when do you decrease regulation?  What's the result of our current system of never decreasing? 

Note that this means that the very structure of democracy...where the politicians have incentives to look like they're useful, but none to remove laws...leads almost necessarily to the stupid regulatory results we're getting, unless you prohibit them outright.  And will always lead there unless you get a better type of voter.  

Bryan Caplan puts Robin in historical context.

Aretae's 1st law + Moldbug

As with last post, Aretae's first law is:

The feedback system defines the system itself.

And, as I've said before, I like Moldbug's critique of the modern system, as it lines up awful well with the standard public choice model, as well as my favorite modern thinkers (de Soto, van Creveld, de Mesquita). 

I especially like his "cathedral" analysis of Harvard and it's UU roots...It's the summation of an idea I'd been casting about for the idea since around 1988, when I called it "the Intellectual Establishment" [while railing against the stupid conformism to progressive propaganda that was appallingly clear in my smart-ish (120 IQ?) and otherwise surprisingly good 11th grade honors English teacher].

However, I think of Mencius much like I referenced IOZ writing about Freire:

Their admirable and often correct skepticism about and hostility toward the extant institutions of culture and society breaks apart when it becomes prescriptive.

As far as I can tell, democracy was instituted as an attempt to build a feedback system into social institutions, hoping that when the powerful elite got way the heck out of line, as they always tend to do, that the populace (or it's smartest quarter, anyhow) would be able to pull them back into line.  Which is why actual, functioning, limited power democracies with real recall capability don't devolve into Khmer Rouge-style hellholes.

The Libertarians, the Masonomists, the public-choice economists, Romer, Friedman (II, III), Moldbug, Szabo, me, and a bunch of others noticed that it didn't work to constrain all/most government excess (past about 1913 in America, different dates elsewhere).

Moldbug's solution is to prefer a less constrained government with incentives in place. 

My direction is to look at the feedback system...check how easily bad results can be undone, and how carefully policies need to be prototyped tested in order to be implemented.  (Repeal the 17th Amendment, require most federal law to be copied, almost word-for-word, from a state law that has been in place for N years). 

How good is the feedback system on Moldbug?  How good is the feedback meta-system?  By my count, semi-unlimited power gives the capability to succeed well, and screw up badly.  And screwing up is properly very very scary (Hugo Chavez...12 years to destroy a country's economy?)  How robust is Moldbug's system against the possibility of Nero instead of Marcus Aurelius?

Aretae's 1st Law & the NYT

Aretae's first law says:

The feedback system defines the system itself.

A longer formulation would be:

A system's quality is very predictable by the quality of the feedback system.  The quality of the feedback system can be roughly measured as the average length of time between a wrong action being taken and an adjustment being made to correct that type of action, keeping in mind that many systems require stabilization time between changes (think showers with very slow responses to temperature requests). 

Megan McArdle finds the NYT saying that performance reviews suck because ... the feedback system's round trip is too large.

French Fries

So how long do you have to make french fries, anyhow:

The current technique in a nutshell: Peel potatoes, cut into fries and rinse.  Soak in a 0.4% solution of Pectinex SP-L and water for 1 hour at room temperature. Blanch fries in boiling water with 3% salt added (or to taste).  Make sure the water temperature doesn’t drop below 80°C.  Blanch for 14.5 minutes.  Drain fries on a cooling rack, but don’t force dry them.  Fry them at 170°C till they form a crust but are still blond.  Fry a second time in 190°C oil till crispy and golden brown. Eat.

Taxes

So...there comes a time in everyone's political thinking when you need to decide...are taxes for raising revenue, or are taxes for pulling down the rich?  I know, it's a hard topic, but really, it seems that time has gotten a lot closer due to a graph from New World Economics (HT: Isegoria).

WOW!  Total taxes collected are basically flat.  Rate doesn't matter.  If you want the government to spend money on the poor, great...but after reading this, it should no longer be possible to pretend that taxing the rich will actually get the government more money to spend. 

Also, that means that tax rates should be designed around GROWTH, not anything else. 

Public Choice & QoTD

About 50% of everything economics has to say about government appears in this short bit from Buchanan (HT: Wilkinson):

A central message of public choice theory tells us that if politics generates undesirable results, it is better to examine the rules than to argue about different policies or to elect different representatives.

Buchanan (read it, he's smart) goes on to discuss, very interestingly, what kinds of rules might fix our current system.  According to him, 3 amendments would go a long way towards fixing things:

1. Balanced Budget (3/4 override)
2. Governmental non-discrimination (Can't make rules that apply only to some people)
3. Fix the commerce clause ( should read "prevent interference with voluntary exchanges" not "regulate interstate commerce")

He recognizes that they are in order from least to most difficult.  IMO, those are insufficient...as our major budget issues are not primarily about balancing, but about future promises. Social Security, Medicare, Pension Plans.  On the other hand, I think that #1 and #2 might be doable under Tea Party excitement.

CPU, GPU, Brain

Roko at LessWrong wrote an interesting post suggesting that in humans, rationality is like a CPU (main chip), and social processing is like a GPU (Graphics chip/card).  [Actually, the post is about what to do, given that your graphics card sucks...but that's not what I want to talk about].  In the memeverse wherein all smart folks are Aspies, this works as a backhanded compliment.  Sure, you're stupid socially, but you've got the important juice where it counts.

In real life, that's only a good example if people are modeled as teens' home computers.  Sure, it's nice if the computer has a nice CPU.  But what actually matters for 95%+ of what the computer gets used for is how good its GPU is.  The CPU is useless, except when doing the High School programming assignment to find all prime numbers less than 1 Million.  Stupid, useless assignment.  But the CPU is good at it.

The libertarian/anarchist position

Maybe the simplest way to explain it, here:

Anarchy is a system of law in which those who apply the law don’t have any specially privileged status to do things that would be crimes if other people did them.

For example, taxation is theft. War, as conventionally understood, is mass murder. Arrest for a “crime” with no actual victim is kidnapping.

In hunter-gatherer systems, there frequently was no legal prerogative.  Roughly, we anarchist-types are simply suggesting that states act like criminals...but because they convince other people to call them "states", they are treated differently.  Or maybe it's because they have superior firepower, and people are finitely interested in calling powerful bullies powerful bullies.

Left-Libertarianism example

Liberals + Libertarians (a little), Conservatives + Reactionaries (a lot) frequently think of the police as being on the side of law-and order.  Progressives + Left libertarians think of the police as a force for this kind of activity, with occasional forays into justice on the side.

In other news, here's Sheldon Richman explaining left-libertarianism, several years back.

Foseti answers my question

A few weeks back, I asked:

Who's more racist?  Portland-dwelling white-flight-ers, or Arizonans.

Foseti answers, "Portlanders".  More completely:

[T]he worst form of racism is to support polices that force other people to integrate and then move somewhere with no minorities (often an expensive proposition, which means other cannot afford to make the move as well).

Then he links to a Steve Sailer post saying the same thing:

So if your kid goes to a school where Mexicans are dominant in numbers, and is therefore made uncomfortable by Mexican declarations of ascendancy, then that just shows to the white liberal mind that you and your kid are losers. Obviously, you can’t afford private school or to live in an expensive school district, or you aren’t smart enough to figure out how to manipulate the magnet and charter school rackets in order to get in with the right people.

Disclaimer: I grew up in one of those white-flight towns that priced itself out of the each of minorities (mostly by means of having expensive houses, no jobs to speak of, and a plague of college students willing to work for "experience" and slave wages).  My parents still live there, and my sister moved to Portland, which is the same kind of place.  I've since lived in very mixed-race areas in Houston and Austin, but now I live in the Western suburbs of Chicago, which are not only white-flight, but everyone paying attention knows they're white flight.  If you live here, you're looking for good schools and zero crime.   Just happens that there are also no minorities or poor people.   Makes it so my cute, sweet, small wife scares the neighbors, the shopkeepers, and the police.  Which is mostly why we're moving.

QoTD & Left Libertarianism

IOZ is typically snarky, but manages a really good line:

You know, Freire is a very interesting thinker and writer even though he's wrong. Most leftish thinkers are. Their admirable and often correct skepticism about and hostility toward the extant institutions of culture and society breaks apart when it becomes prescriptive. The radical critique becomes a plan for new institutions. The solution to the perpetuation of dominant culture through its institutionalized educational structures is . . . education? Wait, what? Yo, these new institutions quickly professionalize, evolve a managerial and technocratic culture that leads inevitably back to status quo liberalism. Mandatory education is by definition indoctrination, no matter how radical the political content of the curriculum.

Aretae claim:  That which distinguishes the left-libertarian from the regular (or vulgar) libertarian is the acceptance of substantial quantities of leftist social critique as both valid and important.  That which distinguishes the left-libertarian from the progressive is what kinds of solutions we think can solve the problems.

As I have previously said, Progressives are great at identifying cases where the weak/poor are screwed by the existing system.  In general, libertarians, with their government/economic analysis don't focus as much on this, and conservatives and reactionaries don't either.

On other news...it's hard to think of a political view that would be less status-promoting than left-libertarianism.  For the poor, against the progressives.  

The Toe of God

Found! (HT: My Dad)

QoTW

Sheldon Richman nails it:

The familiar old trap is set: Do you want unfettered markets and oil spills or government regulation and safety?

What makes a good society

In response to Foseti's challenge, I've been trying to put together my list (of what makes a good society), roughly in order (yes, caveats, not strict order, etc.):

• Health (long-lived, not ill, not injured, etc.)
• Total Wealth (Richer = better, for all known history, for all known human goals)
• Autonomy/Liberty (Negative liberty is more important than positive liberty in general, and inside normal ranges.  Besides libertarian bias, I've also seen evidence somewhere that the British studies that showed a correlation between inequality and poor health are better explained by feelings of autonomy and good health)
• I want to say something about psychological well being, or human nature-fulfillment, or something of the sort...but I haven't successfully formulated it.

Interstingly, what has impacts on these?

Health?  Honestly?  

• Wealth first, war 2nd, crime 3rd.  
• I'm interested to know if the net negative effect of the FDA is larger than the total crime impact on the country's health.  
• I'm also interested  to know whether the total drug war impact is a larger negative effect on crime than the rest of crime put together.    
• As Foseti says, it doesn't matter if the person is dead by government or by private killer.   Neither does it matter if the person is dead by crime or by illness...they're dead all the same.  Let's measure QoLYs.

Wealth ... This one is easy ... 

1. economic growth rate
2. economic growth rate
3. economic growth rate

Autonomy/Liberty ...

• Wealth
• My prior list

Psychological Health?

• Not quite clear.  
• Robin Hanson's been on a roll recently pointing out the extent to which we as humans are poorly psychologically adapted to inequality
• Everyone anywhere near modern psych/anthropology has heard Dunbar's number (150 to a tribe). 

Overall...it seems as if we should be about 90% interested in economic growth, and 10% interested in other stuff.  So...the puzzle of econ growth is the puzzle to solve.  And that puzzle is largely solved for us.  Economic growth is largely practical knowledge growth ("how to", not "that" knowledge).  This is facilitated by:

• Ability to plan for future
• Contract enforcement (public or private)
• Crime prevention (ditto)
• Stay out of wars (Seems like peace through superior firepower is the best real answer -- easy if you're rich enough)
• Expectation of stable rules (government the hell out of the economy)
• Incentives 
• If 100 hours a week is only worth 10% more than 30 hours a week, no one works 100.  
• Fair play
• Big existing companies can't squelch competition from small/new companies/individuals.
• Real IP Law (MPAA, RIAA)
• ~95% of Government regulations
• Private thugs/Pinkertons

Quotes

1. Foseti, insightfully points out:

[L]ibertarians make a very fine distinction between harms caused by government using force and harms caused by citizens using force. The reactionary draws no such distinction. A person executed by the state is no more or less dead than a person executed by another citizen.

2. Arnold Kling says:

I think being precisely wrong is worse than being vaguely right, but then, that's why Kocherlakota is President of the Minneapolis Fed and has an outstanding reputation in academia, while I write a blog.

3. Loyal reader Rob sends this excellent article on the impact of evolutionary theory on the social sciences which interestingly critiques the "end of adolescence" position.  The article ends with this:

In a world in which religious fundamentalists and some postmodern liberals stand in unholy alliance against Darwin's science, we will do well to keep our minds open. Our children will benefit from a view of them and their care that includes our best understanding of that science.

4. Foseti has his QoTD as well, extracted from a Vox Popoli post, and suggesting that while college isn't real useful for learning, it's also not useful for other stuff.  You'll have to follow the link. 

Crime and the History of Policing

Again, in response to a comment of Foseti's, I give you the history of the Police in the Anglosphere, and a theory of crime.  Half a dozen different readings support this, so I'll just write:

Pre-1500: No police.  Justice was owned by the citizenry (Rome isn't in the Anglosphere).
1500-1850: Private watchmen.
1663-Present: Paid police, starting in largest metro areas, but SLOWLY spreading.  Private watchmen in many areas w/in 10 miles of london in 1825.

USA:
Police in Philadelphia established 1750.
Police in New York established 1845.

Here's the line...protection of public safety was in the hands of the citizenry until very recently.  The existence of significant crime in the cities against gentle-people was relatively unlikely because

1. the gentlemen were armed and trained in use of arms
2. the ladies didn't go dangerous places alone
3. the riffraff were not as dangerous as the gentleman, who has practiced with swords / pistols, and is carrying them

In this blogger's opinion, having lived in Chicago and Houston, Houston's a lot safer city after dark. And it's for 1 reason only.  In Chicago, unlike Houston, the law abiding citizens have given up their option of self-defense, which is the ONLY effective deterrent against crime.  In places in North Houston, friends of mine fondly recounted growing up with private security companies, and how much worse crime got when the police moved in. 

Government mismanagement and the creation of defenseless citizens is roughly 75% responsible for dangerous spots like DC.   The next 24% is drug-war based, creating classes of economic activity that don't have access to the legal system.  I'm sure the quality of government does impact what's left. 

In sum...crime is a fabulous example of government over-reach causing problems, while governments staying the heck out of policing, drug policy, and gun control would solve the problem entirely. 

To respond to Foseti directly:
The libertarian does consider DC Crime a problem...and it's a problem CAUSED by government action.  Decrease the power of government over drugs and gun control to what it was in 1750, and the problem goes away.

Libertarians, Moldbugians, Progressives

Thanks to comments by the ever-helpful Devin and Foseti, I believe I have again increased my understanding of the Moldbugian position.

Progressives believe that government will work right if you get the right people leading.
Many branches of conservativism (neo-con, theo-con, Ike/Nixon/Bush -ist) think the same thing.
Moldbugians and Libertarians don't agree.
Moldbugians believe that government will do less harm if you get the right incentive structure in place.
Libertarians believe that government will do less harm if you somehow limit it.

In different words:

Progressives, neo-cons, and theo-cons believe government can be a force for good. 
Moldbugians and Libertarians find this laughable.
Moldbugians believe that it is more absurd to hope to limit government than to build good incentives.
Libertarians believe that it is more absurd to think static incentives can beat governors' powerlust than to build government limitations. 

QoT Next D

David Henderson explains government regulation:

if the CEA had veto power, we wouldn't be in the CEA. General Motors would be pushing for their guys to have the jobs that our trade guys have. Ditto with U.S. Steel. We wouldn't get these jobs.

QoTD

From the article linked by Foseti comes the QoTD.  A lawyer who defends accused witches:

His principal advice to clients, he said, was to act normally and refrain from casting any spells in the courtroom.

Government is for

I've said it before:

Government is the institution by which the powerful protect their own interests against those of the weak, usually while pretending they're doing something noble.

Foseti finds an article today that says:

By some estimates, about 40 percent of the cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions.
Foreign human-rights groups have noticed that many of the targets of prosecution are vulnerable types (like Pygmies, or even children), and nongovernmental organizations that exist to encourage the rule of law are embarrassed that the “law” in this case resembles the penal code of 17th-century Salem. 

And then Caplan, today, also says: 

[M]ost constitutional rules are about permanently locking in existing political advantages.

I repeat again, to the liberals and the Moldbugians:  How can anyone support governments' powers in the face of what we know about governments.

The Strongest Case supporting the Foseti/Carlyle slavery claim

Foseti famously argued that it's not clear whether black Americans & women are free-er now than in, say, 1800.  The argument comes from Carlyle, and it's somewhat stronger than often understood, but I've disagreed loudly (also see the comments). 

My position is that freedom has several components, among the most important being:

1. Freedom against bodily harm (being beaten)
2. Freedom to own property
3. Freedom of contract 
4. Freedom of speech 
5. Freedom of conscience

On 1-3, women and slaves were (at best) treated as children are now: no legal rights, but a nice husband/owner could act as if you had them, when he was in a good mood.
On 4, everyone (100% of population) has more freedom now...though I'm starting to consider becoming more fond of British or even Singaporean libel law.
On 5, There is a case that #5 was retained...but that's like saying the crypto-jews in 1500s Spain had freedom of conscience as well.


Regardless my position, there's evidence that Foseti has something of a point.  Perhaps the strongest point is the prison system, which uses effectively slave labor, and in which 1/3 of black males are at some point imprisoned, usually for drug-related offenses that whites don't get jailed for.