B. Caplan on Presidential nullification

Obama recently announced that he would stop deporting illegal immigrants, thus effectively nullifying parts of immigration law through non-enforcement. The injustice of immigration law today is so gross that we may well applaud this particular move. However, in response, B. Caplan writes:

I say the laws on the books are so overwhelmingly wrong that even random Presidential nullification would be a huge expected improvement.

In the year 2012, Caplan argues that an even more imperial Presidency would be a good thing, not in this one instance, but as a general rule. He has surveyed the landscape of the American government and decided that the big problem is that Presidents don't have enough unaccountable power. Yes, let's bring back the days of Worcester v. Georgia, when the Supreme Court failed to order federal marshals to enforce the ruling, for fear that Andrew Jackson would not comply!

Furthermore, the statement has a ridiculous premise. Laws will not, of course, be nullified at random. They will be nullified in the exact ways that Presidents find most politically advantageous or ideologically compelling. I suggest you ponder on your own whether you think that will be a good thing in general. At best, I think it is a mixed bag. Certainly, cravenly seeking political advantage can sometimes (as with Obama's strategic courting of the Latino population here) lead to policy outcomes that improve the welfare of many people, simply because politics is the art of getting many people to vote for you. And the dominant ideologies of American politics are not entirely malign (although a libertarian like Caplan should perhaps feel some unease at the thought that Presidents from the very parties which, allegedly, have been passing so many terrible, liberty-destroying laws will wield nullification as a liberty-enhancing tool).

It is remarkable how ideology can impair the thinking of extremely intelligent people. The points I make above are not the product of any profound thinking. Had Caplan focused his mind on his own statement in a similarly critical way, he might well have ended up feeling uneasy as well. But he did not, or he overcame that unease anyway.

I blame his ideology because I see this error as one common to a lot of libertarian thinking. Libertarians often embrace the wrong measures of the intrusiveness of government. Caplan thinks that less law will lead to greater liberty. (This is a cousin of the fallacious notions that lower tax rates lead to less government interference in the economy[0], or that private governments whose edicts are backed by the force of property law are not governments.) But of course that is an error. We should seek to have the right laws, and, perhaps equally importantly, just mechanisms for establishing the right laws. To focus on whether there are more of them, or fewer, is rather akin to King Philip in Amadeus criticizing Mozart's compositions for having "too many notes — just cut a few".

Now, our laws are hardly Mozart operas, but the point is it's a silly way of measuring things. Just so with a typical libertarian's ways of measuring government.

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[0] This is an error in at least two ways. First, lower taxes without lower spending merely time-shift interference into the future. Second, a simple, universal tax injects less entropy into the market mechanism than a large number of narrowly targeted taxes applied inconsistently; if we view markets as information-gathering mechanisms then this information-theoretic view of taxation may be a better measure of government interference than tax rates.

Cynicism and libertarian ends (again)

Why M. Yglesias is a nationally acclaimed writer and I am not, exhibit #7572: a couple of years ago I wrote a somewhat convoluted post about cynicism and libertarianism, whereas today Yglesias wrote this which is elegant, readable, and much more worth your time.

Cynicism and libertarian ends

So when I wrote that cynicism about government does not help the libertarian cause, a libertarian might regard the suggestion with suspicion, given that I'm just another big government liberal. Well, at least one libertarian agrees with me. And his NYTimes column actually contains a lot of stuff that I find pretty risible.

Cynicism about government does not help the libertarian cause

TLF has been much less interesting since Tim Lee left, and this piece by J. Harper is the sort of thing that is reducing my desire to keep the TLF feed in my Reader. I'm not going to address the ostensible main thesis of the piece, but I just want to comment on one aspect that strikes me as dramatically misguided:

I’m a person who notices premises, and Lessig sets up an interesting premise indeed: What he calls the “naked transparency movement”—unvarnished access to government data—”is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system off the cliff.”

Yes, Lessig has “change” and “pushing faith in our political system off the cliff” in opposition. So, the only thing that qualifies as “change” is improving faith in our political system? This pegged my bs detector.

First, there's an elementary error of logic here. The proposition

"change" and "pushing faith in our political system off the cliff" are in opposition

does not in any way entail that

"improving faith in the political system" is the "only thing that qualifies as change"

Political change and faith in the political system are variables in a very high-dimensional space, and the observation that they converge at the origin does not entail that every single increase in one is correlated with an increase in the other. Or in less math-metaphorical terms, even if you grant Lessig's premise, there might be a large number of changes which slightly reduce faith in our political system, or hold faith in our political system constant, and this would still not contradict Lessig's statement. (N.b. I say this as someone who thinks that "faith" in our political system is about as misguided as any other kind of faith.)

But never mind that.

The point I really want to make is that Harper seems to think that cynicism about the political system is in some way helpful to the libertarian cause. I'm not exactly a libertarian but this strikes me as completely wrong. Cynicism breeds two things: (1) apathy and (2) shameless exploitation. A population that is truly cynical about politics leads to even greater disengagement plus even greater corruption than prevails in the ordinary course of government.

Libertarians are not cynical about politics. A true cynic would adopt the essentially nihilistic stance of today's Republican Party leadership, whose political strategy is basically

• Use the government to enrich one's political allies.
• Sabotage any attempt to use government as an instrument to enhance the general welfare.
• Distract people from the former two points by a systematic campaign of deceitful propaganda relating to irrelevancies.

On the contrary, principled libertarians are in fact extremely idealistic about the possibility of government being reformed in ways that either enhance the general welfare (in the case of utilitarian libertarians) or are more respectful of the libertarian conception of natural rights (in the case of natural-rights libertarians).*

In short, true cynics either become players in the game or stop playing; libertarians hate the game. And hating the game requires a certain belief in the possibility of a better game. Basically, Harper seems to be deeply confused about the distinction between procedural and substantive liberalism.

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Oh, all right, I'll say a little bit about the primary thesis of the piece. I don't read TNR and I don't want to start, but my view on transparency is more or less in line with Aaron Swartz's: exposure is necessary but it's not going to change things without the development of social practices and norms which increase civic engagement.

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*Of course I disagree that actually existing libertarianism does either of these things but that doesn't have anything to do with how libertarians justify their own beliefs.

On banning prostitution (of a particular sort)

So, this Spitzer thing. Much commentary from male writers on the broader issue of prostitution and the merits of legalizing it; you may fruitfully begin your traversal with Ezra Klein or T. Cowen or even A. Tabarrok (whom I usually find odious).

My comment is simple and not at all original. There are many different ways of exchanging money for intimacy — physical or otherwise — that are not only legal, but mostly socially accepted, as long as one does them discreetly.¹ Here are some of them:

• It is legal to pay someone to go out on a date with you, and even be physically intimate with you (hugs, kisses, cuddling, etc.), as long as there is no explicit quid pro quo w.r.t. genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone to give you a sensual massage, as long as the massage does not involve direct prolonged genital contact.
• It is legal to pay someone someone to strap you to a bench and strike you with a whip for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to take off their clothes and dance in front of you for your sexual satisfaction.
• It is legal to pay someone to perform arbitrary sex acts on camera with you, and then either sell or give away the video.
• It is legal to have sex with someone who would not be having sex with you if you did not buy them many gifts and support their lavish lifestyle. (Fun personal note: I have a (female) friend who knows a girl who once said, quite frankly, "I am not going to sleep with a man until he has spent at least a thousand dollars on me." See also this Valleywag post. See also all four characters on Sex and the City, none of whom ever dated a $25k-annual-salary social worker as far as I know.)

The upshot is that everything is permitted, except the straightforward transaction of exchanging a modest sum of money for someone else to privately give you an orgasm by applying friction in the genital area. If you're sufficiently rich, or if your particular sexual kink does not require penetration, or if you like to have sex on camera, prostitution is legal for you. Laws against "prostitution" — which is to say, one very narrow subgenre of sexual commerce — are a hypocritical, hairsplitting exercise in moral hysteria and a massive waste of law enforcement resources.

Finally, I want to point out one more thing. The argument that (one narrow flavor of) prostitution should be illegal because it's closely linked to organized crime and human trafficking is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Prostitution" is undoubtedly tied to organized crime in part because society frowns upon it so much that respectable businesses don't want to be involved in it. Organized crime is fundamentally inefficient, due to unprotected property rights, unenforceable contracts, illiquidity of capital, and all the other standard problems that come with operating a business without the protection of a well-run modern government. If a business like McDonald's or Starbucks ran brothels, they would drive organized crime out of the market pronto. People like Nicholas Kristof heap opprobrium on "prostitution" and then bemoan the inevitable results, namely that women and girls get exploited by criminals.

This is roughly equivalent to the scam whereby Republicans get elected and trash the government every couple of decades, and then point to their own incompetence as proof of their ideology that government doesn't work. It is like pissing on the rug, and then complaining that the rug stinks of piss.²

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¹ Bonus link: The Purchase of Intimacy, by Princeton sociology professor Viviana A. Zelizer, has been on my to-read list for a long time. Perhaps I will finally order it.

² In fact, I hereby coin a new term for this fallacy of reasoning, akin to "poisoning the well" or "begging the question": "pissing the rug". To piss the rug is to endorse a course of action which leads to a bad outcome, and then blame those who disagree with you for the bad outcome. The grandest example of pissing the rug in recent times is, of course, the Iraq War apologetic wherein liberal war opponents are blamed for the bad consequences that would follow withdrawal. Oh, wait — Kristof did that too. Maybe we should just call it the Kristof Maneuver.

The revealed preferences of tax-cutting libertarians

M. Yglesias made a good point yesterday on the relationship between the "starve the beast", tax-cutting approach to "shrinking" government, and disaster preparedness funding:

If you wanted to go about trimming the government in a principled way by cutting spending, you'd start off with things that are genuinely pointless (farm subsidies) or else hugely expensive (Medicare). When you try, instead, to attack it purely from the revenue side and hope this will "force" spending cuts in the future, you're all but guaranteeing that the cuts will be focused on programs that just happen to lack powerful constituencies. That means, as we've seen, anti-poverty spending and spending aimed at either forestalling long-term problems or else preventing low-probability ones. That's terrible public policy, but it's the only possible result of the strategy the Republican Party has adopted.

As a result, yes, everyone who's endorsed Bush's various tax cuts -- from Alan Greenspan on down -- deserves their share of the blame. When you support a cut that's not explicitly paid for, you're implicitly supporting spending cuts. And not "spending cuts" in the abstract or the spending that you happen to think should be cut, but the spending that is, in fact, likely to be cut as a result. Which is precisely to say spending on worthy, non-porky infrastructure, and spending on poor people. It's easy to say that the money could be found in less destructive ways, but if it isn't found that way up front, it isn't going to be found that way amidst the murk of the appropriations process.

I'd add that, furthermore, unfunded tax cuts contribute to government debt, which must be paid down eventually with interest. When libertarians vote for politicians who enact tax cuts without matching spending cuts, their "revealed preference" is to use the coercive power of government to extort money from future generations rather than the present one. In this light, it's hard to take such libertarians' anti-government rhetoric very seriously.

Libertopia and the fabrication bomb (a parable)

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a land called Libertopia. In Libertopia, the right to private property was absolute and there was no taxation. Law enforcement, infrastructure construction, national defense, and nearly all the other supposed "functions of government" were all handled by private companies.

In fact, the only government was a system of courts, which were funded by a system of voluntary donations; these donations were run through a secure cryptographic protocol for anonymized electronic cash that erased all information about donors, and even the amounts donated, so that nobody could effectively claim to buy influence. Yet the courts always met their budget needs exactly (the donation servers were shut down for the year as soon as the annual goal was met). Libertopian judges were subject to a training and apprenticeship regimen so rigorous and effective that they were known all across the planet for their fair-mindedness and keen insight.

Of course, Libertopia also had the planet's most efficient and flawless market. First, they had a virtually cost-free electronic cash transfer system. Second, they had the planet's most pristine standards for corporate accounting and transparency (set by private-sector certification agencies, a sort of Libertopian Underwriter's Laboratory for corporate governance). Third, they had a ubiquitous nationwide information technology infrastructure which made sure that buyers and sellers always had the best possible information about the current state of the market. And, of course, all of Libertopia's citizens were rational market actors, as they had been educated in private schools that, due to market pressures, were the envy of the planet.

Although this system led to vast disparities in personal wealth, nobody was subject to poverty in an absolute sense --- for an elementary result in Libertopian economics (which was far more advanced than Earth's) demonstrated that, in a frictionless market, the economic value of an active, healthy human being's outputs was always greater than the inputs required to sustain his or her life. And as for the unhealthy, disabled, or elderly, there was the insurance market: prudent citizens bought enough insurance against these eventualities for themselves and their children. And all Libertopian citizens were prudent.

And so, all of Libertopia's citizens were prosperous and happy. It was universally held by the planet's economists --- who, of course, understood the theory of markets exceptionally well, having been provided with such a magnificent concrete embodiment of their theories --- that Libertopia was the best of all possible nations. Except for a few irrational holdouts, all the world's peoples were busily remodeling their societies after Libertopia. Become Libertopia, went the dictum, and the market shall provide.

One day, a Libertopian nanotechnology researcher named Alice came up with the Holy Grail of nanotechnology: a universal fabricator. The physics behind the universal fabricator is far beyond the ken of mere Earthlings like us, so I will not bother to explain it. The universal fabricator was so efficient that it could generate arbitrary physical objects, using only an equivalent mass of matter of any sort, plus a token amount of energy. Being a savvy individualist, Alice quit her job at Nanogen, waited for the non-competition clause of her employment contract to expire, and founded a startup. Shortly afterwards, Alice Inc. started producing nearly limitless quantities of every imaginable good under the sun, all pouring from a single cornucopian factory located in a heavily guarded complex in the middle of the desert. Alice Inc.'s stock price shot through the roof, and Alice became the world's richest person by several orders of magnitude.

Many of Alice's competitors went out of business, but the nimble and resourceful Libertopian people found new jobs, either working in the vast supply chain that distributed and resold Alice Inc. goods, or providing personal services (as butlers, sex workers, etc.) that could not be performed by mere objects.

Nobody could duplicate Alice's technology. Any publicly traded company that even came close was shortly bought out, taken over, and liquidated. After some years, only one small, secretive, privately held company succeeded, by partnering with a network of the world's foremost university researchers in nanotechnology.

They were horrified at what they found. For it turned out that the Alice Fabricator's operation caused a localized fluctuation in the strong and weak nuclear forces; and the fluctuation was harmonic, so that as more matter was fabricated by the Alice Fabricator, the fluctuation's magnitude increased. They calculated that at the current rate of production in the Alice Inc. plant, this localized fluctuation would cause the entire planet's atoms to spontaneously collapse inward on each other within ten years.

They published their results. The initial skepticism gave way, gradually, to a near-universal consensus among nanotech researchers that the results were correct. All the nations of the world quickly embargoed Alice's goods; and even many Libertopians decided to boycott products with the Alice Inc. label.

But Libertopia's largest businesses had been built around the new economic order of Alice: countless retail distributors, shipping companies that hauled garbage to the Alice plant and hauled goods away, and resellers who built value-added services around Alice Inc. products. And the stockholders didn't want to go broke; the boards of directors didn't want to lose power; the employees didn't want to lose their jobs; the consumers didn't want to give up their cozy material comfort. So these people began looking more closely, and they found a myriad of reasons to continue with business as usual:

"Think of all the jobs, all the communities, our entire way of life! Surely we shouldn't destroy all this based on the word of a few anti-business eggheads. Another series of studies, conducted by the Libertopian Institute for Environmental Science, shows that the Alice Fabricator will not destroy the world at all. In fact, recent results in quantum mechanics suggest that there have been random fluctuations in the strong nuclear force since the beginning of time, or that the observed fluctuations are due to an artifact of the instruments used to measure the nuclear forces. Besides, Alice is brilliant; she invented the Fabricator, so she'll probably come up with a way to fix the process pretty soon anyway. Plus, the issue's less pressing now, since worldwide embargo of Alice Inc. products has already reduced the output of the Alice fabrication plant a great deal. And these Chicken Little doomsday prophets are all hypocrites --- why, the food they eat was probably produced using Alice brand farming machinery, and the gas that fuels their buses was probably produced using Alice brand petroleum extraction robots! Just by riding the bus to the supermarket and buying an apple, they're doing more to make the strong force fluctuate than the average die-hard consumer of Alice Inc. products!"

That some of these statements contradicted each other, or were simply tendentious, didn't bother the people who uttered them in the least, for they were defending their very way of life. The nanotechnologists continued to shout, but their cries fell largely on unsympathetic ears. A majority of Libertopians continued buying Alice Inc. products happily.

For three years, as the evidence continued to mount, Alice Inc. kept on merrily humming, inundating the Libertopian populace with a tidal wave of material luxury. Eventually, a desperate group of citizens --- mostly scientists and a few wealthy philanthropists --- sued Alice Inc., on the unprecedented grounds that potentially destroying the world was an actionable tort, and demanding an injunction against further fabrication. But Libertopia had absolute respect for private property rights, and for the market. A series of court rulings, going all the way to the Supreme Court of Libertopia, upheld Alice Inc.'s right to continue doing business. Here are a few selected quotes from the Supreme Court's unanimous and strongly worded opinion:

The plaintiffs make two distinct principal arguments. First, they argue that continuing to operate the fabricators constitutes a credible and imminent threat of violence. However, although their comparison to 'a cosmic gun held to the planet's head' is colorful, it cannot be sustained conclusively by the science. An equal number of experts have been called on both sides . . . This court is reluctant to make a ruling on a matter of science, overriding the normal processes of the scientific market . . .

Second, plaintiffs argue that even if the nuclear force fluctuations will not have the dramatic effects predicted by some scientists, the production of nuclear force fluctuations constitutes a market externality, which must be corrected to maintain efficiency, as per Levine v. Terrence. However, even granting, arguendo, that the observed fluctuations are due to the defendant's activities, it is unclear why injunctive remedy is required, rather than fair compensation. . . .

Additionally, this court finds unconvincing the extraordinary claim that the defendant's actions constitute a tort against the entire planet's population. In support of this claim, the plaintiffs cite the Bayard v. Northeastern Regional Electric standard for determining the size of the population affected by market externalities. However, Bayard only establishes such liability when a specific and demonstrable chain of causation connects the act to an injurious effect on the plaintiffs, which does not hold in this case. To date, no injury by Alice Inc. has been demonstrated against any specific party. Indeed, if we were to follow the plaintiffs' line of argument to its absurd conclusion, then all non-nano-fabrication based industrial plants in the economy would be held liable for their carbon dioxide emissions, since the global atmosphere is shared by all . . .

Seven years later, every atom in the world imploded on itself at the speed of light. All that remains today of the magnificent Libertopia, and the planet upon which it resided, is a black hole.

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Q1: Whose fault is the destruction of the world?

Q2: If the Alice Fabricator had only a 50% chance of destroying the world, how would your reaction to this thought experiment change? Only a 10% chance? A 1% chance? What if, instead of destroying the world, it would simply destroy several cities and kill a few hundred million people?

Q3: Is the difference between the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the Alice Fabricator a difference of kind, or one of degree?

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Oh, uh, file under Catosphere.

John Tierney: Credulous stenographer for right-wing think tanks

Today's Times Magazine has a really infuriating article on the "social, moral, and environmental case for driving more", penned by John Tierney, which approvingly cites ideologues such as:

• The Independent Institute scholar Randal O'Toole,
• Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Wendell Cox,
• Manhattan Institute scholar Peter Huber, and
• Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Sam Kazman.

all without ever mentioning that all these policy institutes are right-wing think tanks. The slant of these organizations may be well-known in public policy circles, but general readers will be utterly in the dark. For example, how many readers will know that (from Disinfopedia):

Robert D. Tollison, Richard E. Wagner and Thomas Gale Moore are members of the Board of Advisors at [The Independent Institute], Gary Anderson, Robert Ekelund, Dwight R. Lee, Mark Thornton and S. Fred Singer are Research Fellows at TII and Richard Vedder is Senior Fellow at TII. Most of them have a long history of working for the Tobacco Institute (TI) and/or Philip Morris and all nine were also members of the 'Academic Advisory Board' for the pro-tobacco junk science report 'Science, Economics, and Environmental Policy: A Critical Examination' published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) on August 11, 1994. AdTI received money from both TI and Philip Morris. (See: AdTI-Funding)

This doesn't necessarily mean that Randall O'Toole is a fraud, but how far would you trust someone employed by a think tank that's run by, and employs, scholars who take money from the tobacco industry to publish junk science about the environmental effects of tobacco? How far would you trust an organization that takes money from Microsoft while Microsoft is under antitrust investigation, then publishes a book about antitrust regulation, and then lies about how much money Microsoft gave them?

Enough about the "Independent" Institute. As for CEI and AdTI, I'm a computer scientist, and I can say that basically everything I've ever read coming out of the Competitive Enterprise Institute or the Alexis de Toqueville Institution about computing technology issues has been bullshit (for example, the AdTI's recent hacktackular critique of open source software).

And Heritage? Don't make me laugh.

Throughout the article, Tierney frames the debate as one between (1) woolly-headed feel-good liberals who love cities because of their elitism and desire to control everybody else's lifestyle, and (2) serious scholars who've done the "number-crunching" and debunked the "myths" and favor automobiles. Tierney never mentions that all the people he quotes in category (2) are employed by self-consciously ideological, structurally dishonest institutions.

BTW this is the same John Tierney who wrote, regarding the fake, Republican spin-driven NASA bunny suit pseudo-fiasco, "If there was anything Senator John Kerry's strategists were hoping to avoid this week, it was the image of a Massachusetts liberal in funny headgear." I'm not sure whether Tierney's a right-winger himself, or he's just a totally gullible moron who lets himself get spun by right-wing operatives because he doesn't know any better. Either way, to borrow Jon Stewart's phrase, he's a douchebag.

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Holy shit, I just turned to the Week in Review, only to find another John Tierney byline heading up an equally ridiculous article that pounds repeatedly on the "John Kerry is a flip-flopper" line while masquerading as news analysis. Shallow horse-race campaign coverage ahoy! America would objectively be a better place if somebody briskly paddled the Week in Review editor's ass with a cricket bat every time (s)he ran an article on the tactical maneuverings of a political campaign instead of the substance of the issues.