Category: Libertarian

Training To Do As We’re Told

I haven’t blogged nearly enough recently, or in the last year. Blah, blah, blah. The only reason I’m raising that point is because today’s the 6th anniversary of Rolling Doughnut. I’ll only remark in jest that I should wipe one of those years off, given the breaks I’ve taken recently. But that’s not fair to myself since I’ve still managed nearly 200 entries in the last year. I just need to be more consistent.

That’s a meta way to advance to today’s story, which is strangely related to my post marking last year’s anniversary. Last August 16th, you’ll remember, I had an adventure with TSA and an experimental, voluntary search that I refused because I could. They didn’t like that, not that it surprised me. But it made the point that we’re becoming a more complacent society, that we’ve agreed to stop valuing liberty when it comes to being searched. The appearance of safety is enough for most.

Today, I purchased Madden 10 at Best Buy. This should be a simple process. Instead, it involved asking for it at the register, the cashier charging me for it, me paying, the cashier giving the game to the security person at the door, and me showing my receipt to the security person. This is two¹ steps too many.

I stated my displeasure to the security person. I’ve done this before, so I knew I’d get the same explanation. Best Buy (or any store) can explain that it’s to guarantee the customer gets what he paid for, which is nonsense. Even if that’s true, my perception is that the store doesn’t trust its customers. At best it suggests they don’t trust their cashiers. If that’s the case, they should spend the time they’re wasting with me on training or different oversight.

When I told the security person all of this, he tried to deflect by saying that many stores are doing this. True, and I don’t have to shop at them or Best Buy. To this he responded: “It’s just like you have to stand in line for security at the airport.”

Buying Madden for the Xbox 360 is not like boarding an airplane. Entertaining the notion that it is demonstrates the extent to which we’ve accepted every intrusion, no matter how stupid, inefficient, and unproductive. When a business says “Line up,” we can so “no” by requesting a refund. I didn’t today, but I have in the past. I’m sure I will in the future. But that’s a low cost process. I can always go to Game Stop or Target to buy Madden. If we won’t challenge those without guns, we should expect no better treatment from those with guns.

So, yeah, I’m still here.

¹ Three, really, but I’ll skip the idiocy of the first step.

The Market Does(n’t) Produce Non-Smoking Bars

Pulling again from the month-old-but-still-interesting Internet archives, Megan McArdle w;rote about smoking bans and the apparent market failure to produce the desired outcome commonly professed

Henry Farrell’s interesting post on smoking bans reminds me of an ongoing question that I have never heard a libertarian answer satisfactorily. Smoking in bars and so forth is dangerous to bystanders who have pulmonary disease (the dangers of secondhand smoke to those who are not already breathing-impaired seem to be largely mythical). It’s noxious to some other number of people who do not smoke. The libertarian rejoinder to the smoking bans is that bars could choose not to smoke if people wanted it. But in practice, despite the fact that smokers are a minority, and most people hate it, almost no establishment went non-smoking without government fiat.

I don’t see the flaw. People profess to want a lot of things. They don’t always back those claims with corresponding actions.

Here, the libertarian rejoinder should be that those who have pulmonary disease are not entitled to a smoke-free bar environment provided by another person. The same applies to healthy people (like me) who find cigarette smoke abhorrent. When bars were filled with smoke and I didn’t want to inhale smoke, I didn’t give smoke-filled bars my business. Since they survived, I assume enough people didn’t mind the smoke as they said or valued the overall bar experience more.

Lest I give you the impression that I’m trying to educate Ms. McArdle, she mostly gets to the same place in her next paragraph.

This seems like a market failure. You can explain it through preference asymmetry and the profitability of various customer classes: heavy drinkers are more likely to also be heavy smokers, and they are the most profitable customers. Bar owners don’t want big groups of people who are going to take up three tables for an hour and a half while nursing one white wine spritzer apiece. They want people who are there to drink. In a competitive equilibrium, they couldn’t afford to go non-smoking because they’d lose their most profitable customers to all the other bars.

Like I said, I don’t see the flaw. This is the free market responding. Want a smoke-free bar but none exist? Open a smoke-free bar. If there’s a market for it, it will survive without the force of a ban.

Again, Ms. McArdle understands this. But her last paragraph adds an incorrect assumption that allows her to get the idea that there is a flaw in libertarian thinking (emphasis added):

You can explain it, but this doesn’t seem like a good market outcome by any measure. Let me be clear, I’m still against the smoking ban, even though I personally vastly prefer smoke-free environments; I think interfering with property rights like this has even heavier costs. But I also recognize that I’m in a minority. And I think that politically, if not intellectually, the success of smoking bans is a heavy blow to libertarian credibility.

There are only market outcomes here. Good is a subjective evaluation, a declaration that what one expects to occur should occur. But why should it? People who like to smoke and drink in bars probably wouldn’t deem voluntary smoking bans a good outcome. Why don’t their opinions factor into good? I conclude that, while smokers are a minority, people who will tolerate smoking while having (or serving) a beer are not.

Fear for Sale

This entry by Patri Friedman is old in Internet terms (i.e. one whole month), but it’s timeless and interesting. I can’t do it justice without posting it all, I think, so here it is:

Among my many contrarian beliefs, I don’t believe in pandemics. Not that they haven’t happened, or that they can’t happen, but that incipient pandemics reported by the CDC, WHO, and the media are fearmongering and blown way out of proportion. SARS, bird flu, and swine flu are the most recent examples.

Here is the problem. The CDC and WHO exist to fight global health issues. Having them report on the dangers of pandemics is like asking the American Association of Sleep Doctors whether people are getting enough sleep. They have a huge incentive to find danger. Combined with media sensationalism, the result is a lot of bullshit.

In typical govt agency fashion, the approach is sneakily win-win. If the pandemic materializes, it is blamed on nature and inadequate funding – the agencies did the best they could. Surely you can’t short them in the budget now! If it doesn’t materialize, it was due to their noble efforts, and they deserve at least cost of living raises. Either way, more supposed threats gives more opportunities for wins.

Its too bad that prediction markets don’t seem to work in practice (only a narrow set of topics produces the trader interest required for liquidity and good estimates), because conditional policy markets (“how many people will die of the flu if the CDC budget is $XXM next year?”) are a theoretically great answer. Funding these agencies like traditional nonprofits, accountable to their donors, rather than via politicians spending other people’s money, would be a step in the right direction.

Every word is relevant to the way WHO, CDC, and the media treat circumcision and HIV. If we don’t circumcise every male from birth, 25 trillion people will become infected with HIV next year. Because it’s the foreskin, not unsafe sex, that leads to HIV transmission. No matter what, though, know that the data will tell the story the organizations want to tell.

I find the prediction market idea fascinating, too. In this context, I’d take a large short position that HIV rates will decrease as predicted among the newly circumcised men and children in Africa.

We Could Treat Them Like Adults

This Washington Post editorial from Sunday is discouraging in its call for authoritarianism:

SOME THINGS only seem like a good idea at 3 a.m. Increasingly, the Amethyst Letter, which more than 100 college presidents and chancellors signed last year to advocate rethinking the drinking age, looks like one of them. A study just published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that binge drinking has decreased nationwide with the increased drinking age — everywhere but on college campuses.

Because of an obvious flaw, my response is something akin to “yeah, so?”. College students are overwhelmingly not children and adolescents. This is a critical point, soon to be ignored without justification by the Post. But first:

Those on college campuses who favor a lower drinking age point out that students will decide to drink regardless of the law, and forcing them to do so in secret and illegally will make behaviors such as binge drinking harder to monitor. …

Probably, but that’s not the only – or best – justification for lowering the drinking age to 18.

… But outside college campuses, where underage drinking is clearly prohibited, young people more often have made the decision not to drink.

So let’s prohibit college, if drinking is that appalling. Or we could maybe consider whether a lower drinking age, and perhaps the supervised assimilation of those under 18 into responsible alcohol consumption, will reduce binge drinking. The Post doesn’t bother to consider it here. Why?

… This, in turn, has helped drive down drunk driving, assault and other unsafe behaviors. …

Citation for the causal link, please.

… For further proof, college administrators should consider their drug policies; the perception that drug use will not be tolerated can and does influence students’ choices.

Have the Post’s editors ever experienced college in America?

All that is to establish credibility for the call to increase control.

The journal’s study drives home the fact that, when young people know that the law will be upheld, they adjust their behavior. It’s time for college administrators to stop passing the buck to the drinking age and start taking their in loco parentis role more seriously. Instead of complaining about the drinking age, they should try enforcing it.

College students are overwhelmingly not children and adolescents. They are legally adults. They (presumably) attend college to learn. They are not at college to replace one parent with another.

More importantly, again I must wonder if the Post’s editors have ever experienced college. During my time at Virginia Tech, administrators, via the campus police, enforced the drinking age. Of course this wasn’t effective at stopping binge (or non-binge) drinking. It merely drove it behind closed doors. This is predictable. The only way to further enforce drinking laws would require invasions of privacy not currently accepted. CCTV in all dorm rooms, anyone? Breathalyzers installed in any car registered for campus parking? Is this what the Post wants, because it is the only way to achieve what it advocates here? How far is too far for in loco parentis?

Or we could treat college students like adults capable of making decisions. Regardless of whether we approve of their decisions, until they harm someone, those decisions are rightfully theirs.

Immigration Laws Are Too Strict

Classically Liberal discusses a New York Times article on a decline in illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States. I can’t say it better, so here’s the whole thing:

Doesn’t the anti-immigration lobby find this curious? Under their theory of immigration these people should still be coming to the United States at the same pace as before. The anti-immigration crowd argues that immigrants are only coming to America to “get on welfare” and “live off the taxpayer.” Did someone abolish the American welfare state when I wasn’t looking?

Nope, it’s still there. What has changed is that lots of jobs have disappeared. With fewer and fewer jobs the immigrants are not coming in. Since welfare remains, since the “free” health care remains, since the public schools remain, then the this sharp downturn in immigration is a very, very strong indication that most immigrants come to America to work, not to live off welfare. I fear that the tendency to sponge off the state is a habit that is indulged in more by the native born than by migrants.

This is not proof, of course, but it is a logical first step in exposing the xenophobia embedded in most arguments against immigration.

Institutionalized Bigotry and Unintended Consequences

Heather MacDonald seems to accept that marriage equality is inevitable. That won’t stop her from trying to delay it as long as possible with incoherent theories. Several paragraphs into her essay, she writes:

If the black illegitimacy rate were not nearly three times the rate of whites’, I would have few qualms about gay marriage. Or if someone can guarantee that widespread gay marriage would not further erode the expectation among blacks that marriage is the proper context for raising children, I would also not worry. But no one can make that guarantee.

I’m calling bullshit on the first sentence, but it gets worse, so I’ll move on.

Why might it further depress the black marriage rate? There is a logical reason and a visceral reason. First, it sends the signal that marriage is simply about numbers: it is an institution that binds two (for the moment) people who are in love. It erases completely the significance that marriage is THE context in which the children of biological parents should be raised. And there are undoubtedly many other subtle meanings and effects of gay marriage that we cannot even imagine at the moment—which institutional shift is something that conservatives should be most attuned to.

She is not proposing laws to limit marriage to those heterosexual couples who can and will reproduce biologically, so there is no point here other than to deny individuals their rights based on their sexuality. But she can’t say that because she’s trying to appear concerned about society. To sell that facade, she can’t acknowledge that prior concerns about same-sex marriage have already been faced in several states and shown to be nothing but irrationalities.

As for the visceral reason: It is no secret that resistance to homosexuality is highest among the black population (though probably other ethnic minorities are close contenders). I fear that it will be harder than usual to persuade black men of the obligation to marry the mother of their children if the inevitable media saturation coverage associates marriage with homosexuals. Is the availability of homosexual marriage a valid reason to shun the institution? No, but that doesn’t make the reaction any less likely.

She is saying that black men are most likely to be bigoted about gays, a claim she does not support with evidence. It’s possible that it’s true, but she’s asking the reader to accept her premise on nothing more than her dubious claim that “it is no secret.” That is not a basis for restricting civil rights.

She then implies that we should cater to those who are bigots because changing their opinion might be difficult. I’d ask why this is so, but I’m more interested in how it’s relevant? Person A is stupid, thus Person B must be denied? That’s silly. We must reject the suggestion that a bigot’s opinion is pertinent to a discussion about the partnership of two consenting adults.

Worse, she expects us to base our laws on what she fears, not what she can prove. She is the arbiter and provides no evidence to suggest her fears may be realized. I’m not reassured.

Worst, she theorizes that black men may decide that marriage is a gay institution because of the media’s coverage of this cultural shift. She’s throwing out ideas to see what sticks. She is not a serious person.

Link via Radley Balko.

Ron Paul is still not a libertarian.

Timothy Sandefur explains how, based on Ron Paul’s recent statements on Texas Governor Rick Perry’s thinly-veiled call for secession.

Excuse me, Congressman, but the United States did not “secede” from Britain. The nation had a revolution. The difference between secession and revolution is, of course, one which paleoconservatives like Paul insist on ignoring, but it is a crucial one. Secession is the notion that a state may unilaterally leave the American union, consistent with the Constitution of the United States. Obviously since the revolution occurred in 1776, eleven years before the Constitution, it can’t be called “secession.” And perhaps that’s why the word was not used by the founding fathers when they engaged in the revolution or even afterwards.

The rest of Mr. Sandefur’s entry is worth your time.

“Buck Up, Little Camper”

Last week when the government finally released the torture memos, Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed this:

Mr. Obama condemned what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history” and said that the interrogation techniques would never be used again. But he also repeated his opposition to a lengthy inquiry into the program, saying that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

Obama’s stance is the standard cowardice of politics. Holding criminals accountable for their behavior is an ongoing campaign tactic, applied only to those who are not one’s peers. But it is nonsense if we are to avoid a repeat of this in the future.

Mr. Coates stated why:

I think this is wrong. More than that I think it’s dismissive, silly and bordering on insult to any literate human being. In point of fact “spending our time and energy laying blame for the past” is exactly what the justice system does. By Obama’s logic murderers would go free in the streets. The real question is not whether you’re going to lay blame for the past, but who your [sic] going to lay it on, and for which past. What Obama is really saying in this statement is he won’t hold this particular group accountable, for this particular past.

This is a dangerous course because it doesn’t simply not “lay blame for the past,” it shrugs off arguably the solemn responsibility of safeguarding the future. The price of doing nothing, of not enforcing laws, is the implicit statement that it really is OK to torture, that the most you’ll face is a wag of the finger. The concern isn’t mere vengeance.

This is exactly right. It is obvious that the United States tortured prisoners during the Bush administration. Yes it will be uncomfortable to prosecute high-ranking officials, including a former president. But justice is important if we are to walk back from the insanity of the Bush years. The difficulty in effort and emotion is not a sufficient reason to avoid the necessary task.

Mr. Coates contemplates this difficulty:

All of that said, what really disturbs me about all of this, is that most Americans still don’t think torture is a big deal. I think in the case of Bush, particularly after 2004, we–the American people–got the government we deserved. I think Bush said a lot about who we were post-9/11. I’d like to see some exploration into how to make this torture argument directly to the people. Maybe we can’t. Maybe people really don’t care that much. But if we’re wondering why Obama isn’t willing to press forward, I think it’s fair to also wonder why the people aren’t pressing him to press forward.

I’m not wondering why Obama isn’t willing to press forward. However, the readiness of so many to look away or actively encourage this behavior is disgusting. I suspect I won’t like the answer if we press forward with prosecution. But I’d rather know that people think this than pretend they don’t.

**********

The title of this post is a reference from here about this:

“Don’t be discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks,” he told [CIA] employees. “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the C.I.A.”

This way is not moving forward. It is moving sideways until the next time this happens.

Americans Legislate the Same Dichotomy

Update: I reread this post after a Nathan from To the People commented. I achieved a full-on SnarkFail. To be clear, I agree with Nathan in every point he makes. I clarify how in my response in the comments. I need to remember that sometimes saying “Jackie Chan is a moron” would be more effective than a more subtle approach. So, to clarify: Jackie Chan is a moron.

Nathan at To the People mocks Jackie Chan for comments he recently made (Story here):

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

Chan added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

The Communist Party leaders who control the Chinese who “need” to be controlled are not controlled. Are they just doing what they want?

**********

Nathan states this in response to the real-world outcome exhibited in another of Mr. Chan’s comments, that Mr. Chan would buy a Japanese TV if he needed one because a Chinese TV might explode:

Hmm… “If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want,” huh? Like build a TV that won’t explode, for example? Heaven forbid.

That reminds me of this video:

I’m sure the Chinese who drive that car would be happier with something to control their engines rather than having it barrel into their torsos. Alas, no such “luck” with political controllers.

Every Policy Affects Real People

This excerpt is important, but read the entire post at The Crossed Pond:

… I was the face of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for many a sailor, and I kicked out my first queer in 1990. Nothing earth shattering, no complex investigation or lawyerly maneuvering, just a young guy quietly living with a lover, even known about by many of the crew, until the wrong dude found out and reported it. A few questions asked, an admission made, and he was gone.

The next one was more disturbing. He was a hard working deck hand, a book worm, a loner, and a fundamentalist Christian. He made the mistake of leaving a moderately erotic drawing of a partially nude male on his rack in his assigned group berthing compartment. Someone took it, reported it, officers questioned him, and then we kicked him out. But along the way, I learned about self loathing. This young man believed he was demon-haunted and devil-tempted. He could resist these urges so long as we stayed in our home port, where he could attend nightly services at his small church, and pray for strength with the handful of other worshippers. But when we left home port, spending weeks at sea where he had no access to his support group, he grew weak, and would seek anonymous sex in the usual hang outs at the first port call. He hated himself. He comes to mind often; I wonder if he ever came to terms with his sexuality, if he still exists in his self imposed purgatory, or if he killed himself. My questions and doubts grew.

‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was wrong in 1993. It is wrong today. It should be repealed immediately. Every competent individual willing to serve should be able to serve openly, with his or her character measured only by conduct applicable to job performance. The politician’s who have enabled this policy – and continue to enable it – should be reminded that they are on the wrong side of decency and history with their cowardly, unconscionable refusal to correct this mistake.

Link via Positive Liberty.