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What does it mean to “burn down” ____? (Or,…

by Jon

If you’re not familiar with the work of Rusty Guinn and Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory (ET), you’re missing out. Their clarion calls about good works, community, citizenship, and fixing broken political and economic systems are required reading. These frequent topics make Hunt’s famous phrase — Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down. (#BITFD) — jarring to many regular readers of ET.

They understand this objection. As Hunt put it in a tweet announcing a piece on what they mean by BITFD: “Many of you are uncomfortable with our call to #BITFD… you *should* be uncomfortable.” And as Guinn put it in the actual piece:

“No, anyone who considers themselves a small-c conservative should feel uncomfortable about burning anything down without knowing what “it” is. Anyone who considers themselves a small-l liberal should feel uncomfortable about burning anything down without knowing “how” we plan to do it… And anyone who is furious about the literal burning being done to communities and businesses by, say, the LARPers in Portland, Seattle and Rochester ought to be uncomfortable if the idea looks anything like that, too.

If you feel like any of those descriptions fits you, I’ve got two messages for you:

The first message is that we agree with you.”

If you’ve read ET for any length of time, none of this will be a surprise. I opened this post by mentioning some of their frequent topics (good works, community, citizenship, and fixing broken political and economic systems). There’s so much of that in their work that when you read BITFD, you can’t possibly think that they mean destruction (at least not of admirable things); you know they mean something more like reform. Put differently, it’s hard to mistake their meaning when you’re familiar with their larger body of work.

Why do I keep emphasizing that word? Because it gets to the “full hearts” that Hunt and Guinn are always talking about. And because it gets to an excellent way to judge whether someone is trustworthy or a partisan hack.¹ Like all the best lessons, once it’s seen, it can’t be unseen.

For me, the lesson came from Nassim Taleb:

“You can criticize either what a person said or what the person meant. The former is more sensational, hence lends itself more readily to dissemination. The mark of a charlatan^[2]… is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on some of his/her specific statement (“look at what he said”) rather than blasting his exact position (“look at what he means” or, more broadly, “look at what he stands for”), the latter of which requires an extensive grasp of the proposed idea.”

When someone twists another person’s words to make the person sound evil, to discredit them, to win a debate point, or the like, it’s a mark of bad faith — of hackery. (It could also be a mark of misunderstanding or stupidity.) While we’re all guilty of doing this, we really ought to do our best to avoid it. Taleb goes on to talk about the principle of charity as the opposite of this kind of hackery. It’s best to understand a person’s meaning, to be able to state their position without sensationalizing it, and then to tear it down for being wrong, if necessary.

Sam Harris has articulated the same idea, speaking about the ethics of journalism and a healthy public discourse. When talking with Scott Adams, Harris offered to edit out anything in their podcast if Adams wasn’t happy with how his words were sounding, and went on to explain how that’s the opposite of how many journalists operate. From Parsing Persuasion’s transcript of that Harris/Adams podcast:

“my goal is – and this doesn’t just apply to you – my goal is always to be dealing with the best version of the other person’s case. I want you to be happy with what you’ve said on the podcast. So this is the opposite of a gotcha interview. And I don’t think that many people understand that and, having been on the other side of literally hundreds of interviews at this point as I know you have, I think we both can say that almost no one operates this way. Journalists deliberately don’t because they want to reserve the right to catch you saying something embarrassing. This completely perverse ethic that seems to have been enshrined in journalism where, if you say something is off the record before you say it, well then they’ll generally keep it off the record but if you say that about something you regret saying just two seconds ago, something that didn’t come out right, well then they won’t let you take it off the record after the fact. This has always struck me as a less than ethical way to deal with people, and their ideas.“

I can’t possibly be the only person who wants to read and listen to people who operate as Taleb and Harris seek to have us act, rather than the “journalistic” ethos of which they complain. I like Twitter for this purpose; I can banish hacks from my feed when they become too tedious, and give more credit to information from people who consistently demonstrate that they’re good-faith actors.

Twitter is great for another reason related to this discussion. We can extend the benefit of the doubt to people whose words appear to be outrageous — “what do you mean?” we can ask them directly, rather than simply assuming that we understand.

If you want to know what ET means when they talk about burning down ____, you can read it straight from them.³ If you want to know what other people mean by burning down ____, you could ask them, but watch out for dealing with crazy people. As Guinn pointed out, “LARPers in Portland, Seattle and Rochester” are literally burning down businesses — I would say they’re destroying the property of countless people who have nothing to do with police misconduct (or whatever excuse rioters are using to justify their violence), to say nothing of the murders and lesser crimes toward people that have occurred.

I have a feeling that many of these people mean our system of private property and free exchange when they talk about burning down ____, but I generally don’t care what rioters think. People who demonstrate the principle of charity, who operate in good faith, on the other hand….

******

^[1] If you’re a fan of the ET “pack” idea, I’d also say that attempting to act in accordance with this lesson is a necessary but insufficient condition for a person to claim membership in that pack.

^[2]If you didn’t click through on the Taleb link above, you don’t know what the ellipsis omitted. He accused Sam Harris of being a “journalist” (a Talebian criticism) and “promoteur of pseudo-rationality.” I don’t know if there are good reasons for these accusations. However, I think it’s hilarious in light of Harris’ comments to Scott Adams, outlined above. I omitted the Harris reference because it’s a distraction from the main point.

(The fact that Taleb and Harris have both addressed the importance of the principle of charity makes me wonder whether there’s some misunderstanding that’s driving their public comments about the other person. I suspect I’m not the only one who’s curious about that feud.)

^[3] I’m on board with most of their program. Look at this list of problems and tell me that they’re off target on more than one or two:

Our two-party political system
Our federal tax code
Our antagonistic, militarized model of policing
Our system for establishing for-profit state enterprises
Our politically broken news media
Our broken relationship with elite universities
Our Federal Reserve’s realized mandate
Our “independent board” system for shareholder representation
Our monopolies (of several varieties)
Our forever wars

I hope to make some time to address some of these problems. This post has something to do with #5. If you’re pining for a third party as the solution to #1, best of luck to you; I’m *sure* that you’ll figure out how to replace/supplement one of the major parties, where generations of people before you have failed. I believe that our first-past-the-post voting system sorts voters into two major parties by design. Accordingly, instant runoff voting is my strongly-preferred answer there, so I’m excited about what’s happening in Maine and some other places with that policy.

Politics

State Capacity Libertarians and the not-so-invisible hand of internet…

by Jon

Tyler Cowen doesn’t name names, but we should all want to be in his club. In diagnosing what has been happening to the libertarian movement, he proclaims that “the smart classical liberals and libertarians have, as if guided by an invisible hand, evolved into a view that I dub with the entirely non-sticky name of State Capacity Libertarianism.” If those labels (classical liberal or libertarian, which I’ll collapse into libertarian from now on) could conceivably apply to you, you obviously want to be among the smart portion of the group.

After outlining the planks of what I assume is his SCL philosophy, he concludes: “Furthermore, ‘which ideas survive well in internet debate’ has been an important filter on the evolution of the doctrine. That point is under-discussed, for all sorts of issues, and it may get a blog post of its own.” He’s talking about a blog post of his own, but I’d like to take a shot at kicking things off.

I start with what should be the obvious invisible hand/internet debate angle, and then propose a hypothesis about the smart club who will respond well to the SCL philosophy.

II.

Policy debates sometimes occur among people with very different value systems. For these debates, it’s naturally going to be hard, if not impossible, to get to a “right” answer (not that debates usually achieve that, or that they’re even designed to). If there isn’t some sort of shared premise between participants, then even if they agree on all of the analysis, one side may conclude that the policy is good, while the other reaches an opposite conclusion. Think libertarians vs. socialists on tax policy.

People of a libertarian persuasion probably don’t really care what those of a more socialist persuasion have to say about any given question, and vice versa, because they fundamentally disagree with the value judgments of the other side. Some may even see denunciations by their opposites as a sign that they must be on the right track. But even when opposites debate policy, each participant is probably animated, at least in part, by an appreciation for something that the other side agrees is an ethical value (or something that each participant recognizes will be seen as an ethical value by most reasonable people; even a socialist should recognize that liberty is an important value, to give one example).

As long as that condition exists, I would expect any discussion to have the possibility of making any participant look like they’re ignoring some important value, revealing terrible judgment, or having some similar effect. Call that losing the debate. Nobody will like losing the debate. But if it happens to you often enough, or in spectacular fashion, I would expect you to either adopt your opponent’s position or, more realistically, adapt your position to account for the important value that it previously ignored or underweighted. Surviving internet debate, as Cowen puts it.

When would such an outcome be more common? One scenario is where your primary motivation is to avoid losing the debate to your opposite. That would have the potential for immediate and widespread claims of being dunked on, assuming something like a Twitter exchange. Another is where you’re in a conversation with someone whose values you see as very similar to your own, whose judgment you respect. Most of us are capable of responding to reason, particularly from people like that.

Regardless of which type of discussion is more likely to lead a participant to a more reasonable position, I would expect them to happen with far more frequency on social media than anywhere else.

(Not that the proportion of social media discussions looking like this will be higher than elsewhere. I’m not blind to trollish behavior and ad hominem responses that dominate the internet. It’s simply that there are only so many people who publish in academic journals, books, magazines, or who are invited on television; so much more discussion happens in less formal forums, particularly Twitter.[1])

Hopefully this was all obvious from the time Cowen’s invisible hand/surviving debate points were seen next to each other. Like Adam Smith’s (and like all good ideas), the mechanism of the invisible hand guiding us toward reasonable positions should seem pretty obvious once we give it a moment’s thought.

III.

It isn’t clear what the modal response, if any, to Cowen’s SCL idea will be. However, I’m intrigued by the reactions to it from corners friendly to libertarian thought. Some people have been taking it as an invitation to reflect on their own intellectual evolutions, to support his variation of libertarianism, to refine libertarian ideas, or at least to improve their marketing.

A few brief observations about these reactions, and about the SCL idea:

It is not at all clear what work the libertarian appendage to the state-capacity idea is doing. One comment that I saw rightly noted that the word “seems to be there to bring along hesitant people who like that label, not for its descriptive value.”
I wonder if Cowen’s first plank of SCL (“Markets and capitalism are very powerful, give them their due.”) is first for a reason, and what that is. It might be about Cowen’s values, it might be about appealing to libertarians,[2] it might be something else entirely.
If Cowen’s project includes the L word to bring along those who like the label, it might prove effective at getting them to avoid some traps that have kept them largely out of power forever. My initial take on SCL was that Cowen was saying something to the effect of “my allies should see the shortcomings of their idiosyncrasies, and adopt my libertarian idiosyncrasies, because [reasons].” This is another way of saying that we should discuss policies based on their individual merits. And of course all reasonable people think that.
Who are these reasonable people? I suspect that libertarian types who see some – or a lot of – merit in Cowen’s SCL project are likely to have something in common. I would expect them to reject what people dismiss as taxation-is-theft libertarianism, if not out of principle, then at least out of usefulness for public discussions.

To expand on this last point: If you’ve had debates with libertarians, you’ve certainly heard this type of argument. It’s what Jerry Taylor called “decoder-ring policy analysis”; take certain axioms, then deduce the right answer from them as a matter of logic. It’s an example of what Scott Adams calls “word-thinking”; attempting to win the debate by definitions. Scott Alexander makes the same point, helpfully doing so in The Non-Libertarian FAQ:

“Our language contains a lot of words like these which package a description with a moral judgment. For example, ‘murderer’… and of course that old stand-by ‘infidel’… It’s a stupid, cheap trick unworthy of anyone interested in serious rational discussion.

And calling taxation ‘theft’ is exactly the same sort of trick.

This only sounds like an argument because the person who uses it is hoping people will let their automatic negative reaction to theft override their emotions, hoping they will equivocate from theft as ‘taking without permission’ to ‘theft as a terrible act worthy only of criminals’.

Real arguments aren’t about what words you can apply to things and how nasty they sound, real arguments about what good or bad consequences those things produce.”

I don’t mean to pick on the question of the extent to which taxation is like theft. My point is more to propose a hypothesis. I would expect libertarian types who have appreciated Cowen’s SCL post to have learned not to fall into the trap of word-thinking. They would all agree with Scott Alexander’s old line about freedom as a value: “I completely agree freedom is an extremely important good, maybe the most important. I don’t agree it’s an infinitely important good”. They want to improve the world, even by the judgment of people who don’t agree with Alexander’s inclination – and mine[3] – that freedom is up there as, or among, the most important values.

To the extent that libertarian is doing anything in Cowen’s SCL idea, I think it’s emphasizing the maybe the most important hypothesis about freedom as a value; freedom is still underappreciated. Appealing to markets and capitalism as the first plank of SCL may be a plea to those for whom freedom is an overwhelming value to join the debate in which smart people are participating.[4]

[1] I liked how Venkatesh Rao explained this point on EconTalk before going on to cite Twitter as the paragon of this type of feedback loop: “And my own papers–I’m not going to spend my career as anything great. But I think I was an okay researcher. I got maybe a few citations for the few papers I wrote while I was in academic research. But when I moved over to the blogosphere, it’s so much a richer environment, and the conversation gets smarter and better so much faster. So, my best blog posts, they’ve gotten thousands and thousands of reactions and wonderful conversations have come out that. Things that never happened with my academic work, which kind of languish in obscurity. And most academic work, by the way, deserves to languish in obscurity.”

[2] Ron Bailey highlighted some research into Jon Haidt’s moral foundations that informs people how to appeal to libertarians. One blog title from a few years ago on it said Libertarians Do Too Have Morals: Just Different (Better) Ones From Those of Liberals and Conservatives. It noted that “This is why libertarians can’t be placed on the spectrum from left to right: they have a unique pattern that is in no sense just somewhere in the middle. They really do put liberty above all other values.”

[3] I call it an inclination, not an ideology. I suggest doing what Paul Graham says: keep your identity small. Nick Gillespie has a similar idea.

[4] I’m not sure if this entire post is me seeing things based on having just written a retrospective that excerpted Alexander’s The Non-Libertarian FAQ and Adams’ word-thinking, or if Cowen’s SCL post really has some connection to what was discussed here.

Uncategorised

My best of the decade: SSC, Adams, Graham, Ridley,…

by Jon

Hopefully it gets harder to change how we see the world as we age because we understand it better over time. That’s the good reason to be set in our ways; if we’ve already given plenty of consideration to diverse viewpoints, any additional one is less likely to add new information, and to have already been incorporated in our thinking. But it might get harder to change our perception because of more mundane reasons, like time constraints. We can’t find new ideas if we’re not spending time looking for them, and adulthood has a way of making the search for these ideas less of a priority (what with having to produce value for a living at some point, rather than consuming schooling).

With a new decade upon us, and it basically coinciding with a decade of being out of law school, I thought I’d outline a certain kind of work: the thinkers who I found in the 2010s, and who I’ve continued to read (or listen to) on a regular basis after finding them. With each of them, it was quickly apparent that they had something important to say.

Scott Alexander (www.slatestarcodex.com “SSC”)

SSC came to my attention when Scott Adams shared You Are Still Crying Wolf shortly after the 2016 presidential election. He said something to the effect that the piece wouldn’t change anyone’s mind, but it was too good not to share. That led me down a fantastic rabbit hole; SSC is essential reading. It features a very convenient Top Posts page that will get you hooked. And Alexander’s prodigious output (thousands of posts) and occasional humor (seriously, he can be hilarious) will keep you coming back.

I highly recommend I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup and The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories, but you almost can’t go wrong with his work. Almost. I still argue that he’s very confused with some thinking that involves ideas like – and this is a literal quote – “Jobs are actually a big cause of poverty”.

One post of interest for libertarian-types is Why I Hate Your Freedom, which he posted many years ago (reposted here), and much of which he would probably take exception to today. It’s his critique of a certain kind of libertarian thought, and it would be very useful for anyone of that sensibility to consider. To get an idea of the place from which he critiques that kind of libertarianism, see this from its Moral Issues section:

“And this generalizes to an answer to the original question. I completely agree freedom is an extremely important good, maybe the most important. I don’t agree it’s an infinitely important good, so I’m willing to consider trade-offs that sacrifice a small amount of freedom for a large amount of something else I consider valuable. Even the simplest laws, like laws against stealing, are of this nature (I trade my “freedom” to steal, which I don’t care much about, in exchange for all the advantages of an economic system based on private property).“

Scott Adams (www.scottadamssays.com)

SSC coming to my attention via Scott Adams has some kind of irony to it. One of Adams’ big themes involves the limits of logic and reason, while SSC is basically the homepage of the logic-and-reason internet.[i] We’re certainly all aware of Adams from Dilbert, but his work that has affected how I see the world came in the form of his blog and books. (Count me as not a fan of his more recent turn toward video.)

I’m sure that I had heard from him via reason.com long before eventually diving into his blog posts (much the way I did with SSC once I discovered it), but I’m not sure about the timing of that deep dive. It probably came either slightly before or just as he was pivoting to talk about Trump all the time. His campaign analysis through 2016 was excellent, particularly what he calls his “persuasion filter.” I think of that filter as the shorthand for Adams’ various beliefs about what moves us to act in many contexts. For example:

cognitive dissonance (“a situation in which a person is presented with facts that contradict that person’s self-image, causing said person to say things that sound 100% reasonable to the speaker while sounding like nonsense to others”)
his moist robot idea (“rational thought is mostly an illusion except for simple tasks and perhaps math. The good news is that the small, rational voice in your head can sometimes muster enough control to send you in a productive direction”)
you persuade with emotion, not reason
sometimes you persuade by dropping anchors, and sometimes by omitting details
lists are persuasive, even if each individual item is weak

If you’ve read his post-election I was right book (Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter), you’ve got the idea. It rehashed much of the same material from his blog. I recommend his earlier book (How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life) more than Win Bigly, but they’re closely related. Until reading Adams, I hadn’t taken any real looks at work in psychology or advertising. That gave me a real appreciation for some different fields.

He has some writing suggestions I wish were more ingrained in me. And he’s pretty entertaining on Twitter – as we should expect from a man who writes comics for a living.

Paul Graham (www.paulgraham.com)

Paul Graham is a late addition to this list. I read some of his essays at random points earlier than this year, but it wasn’t until mid-2019 that I realized I had read more than one of them. I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, reading more of his essays might be the thing for 2020. I’ve referenced a few of them recently:

Economic Inequality: “economic inequality is not just one thing. It consists of some things that are bad, like kids with no chance of reaching their potential, and others that are good.”
The Refragmentation, in which he “propose[s] a hypothesis: that all these trends [political polarization, cultural and geographic divisions, and economic inequality] are instances of the same phenomenon. And moreover, that the cause is not some force that’s pulling us apart, but rather the erosion of forces that had been pushing us together.”
Keep Your Identity Small: “Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”
The Age of the Essay was so on-target that I updated the About page of this blog based on it.

His undelivered high school graduation speech (What You’ll Wish You’d Known) should be required reading, not just in schools, but year after year by parents and kids alike. It delivers insights that should help stop us from giving up because we aren’t Albert Einstein (“I’m not saying there’s no such thing as genius. But if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right”). And it explains that feeling that so many of us experienced in high school:

“And the proof is that you’re bored. You probably weren’t bored when you were eight. When you’re eight it’s called “playing” instead of “hanging out,” but it’s the same thing. And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids and I could play all day.

The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old…. that’s what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness.”

I’ll stop talking about Graham after mentioning something that should make a nice companion piece to the graduation speech. In The Lesson to Unlearn, he expands on an insight about the evaluation systems that get ingrained in our approach to problems (“wasting your time is not the worst thing the educational system does to you. The worst thing it does is to train you that the way to win is by hacking bad tests”), and how we shouldn’t make these problems so complicated.

Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything)

When you see teenagers and young adults with existential angst about the future of the Earth, what do you think? I feel bad for them. They’ve been taught that we’ll all be underwater thanks to rising oceans, or starving thanks to a boiling atmosphere, or some other such doomsday scenarios. Matt Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist is the cure. I mean that literally. Please give it to your loved ones if they’re heading down this path, or pick it up yourself if you fear these things, or if you want to understand the key to prosperity (the short version: trade).

Scott Adams talks about his filter as a mechanism to make predictions and be happy. Ridley’s analyses, both there and in his later work (The Evolution of Everything), should inform the filters that we all use. To the extent we incorporate those into our filters, I predict that those predictions will improve and that we’ll be happier.

Some key takeaways from those books include the above-mentioned key to prosperity, and that our world is much more a product of bottom-up interaction than top-down designs.

Nassim Taleb (Incerto)

Several of Nassim Taleb’s popular books (Fooled By Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) are bound to go down in history, or at least modern history, as classics. I would assume that nearly everyone reading this knows of Taleb’s work. I expect to re-read it at some point, and may have something to say about it then. Until then, just know that he once replied to an observation I made by saying “this is perfect”.

Mr. Money Mustache (www.mrmoneymustache.com)

Where Taleb made a fortune as a trader, Mr. Money Mustache is the opposite creature: a saver. And not just a saver, but the epitome of the modern financial independence/retire early movement, a man who quit his job at 30 thanks to uncommon thrift.

I don’t know anybody who lives like MMM. However, that’s exactly why his ideas need to be more widely distributed. High-schoolers and their parents need to absorb his philosophy before they add to the criminal student-loan burden that so many in this country face. Workers need to understand the numbers that he presents before we continue to save infinitesimal portions of our salaries for decades, subjecting us to lifetimes of working too hard, for too long, with too little to show for it.

Am I berating you the way that MMM scolds his readers? Not at all. And in any event, his scolding is in good fun. A taste of his recurring insults show up in the titles of some posts (e.g.,”Case Study: Average Everyday Complainypants Seeks Redemption,” “How to Tell if You’re a Complainypants,” and “What is Hedonic Adaptation and How Can it Turn You Into a Sucka?“).

But I am a big believer in tradeoffs. And if we don’t even know that working until deep into middle age isn’t required, that there are alternatives available, then we can’t decide whether the tradeoffs that he suggests are right for us.

Sam Harris (www.samharris.org)

Sam Harris came to my attention from someone sharing his appearance on Bill Maher’s show, when his arguments seemed to cause cognitive dissonance in Ben Affleck. I was impressed by his composure and response to Affleck’s comments, and started looking into his work. His Waking Up (now Making Sense) podcast was one of the first I listened to, and I picked up a couple of his books. While I really enjoy many of his podcast conversations, I found his book The Moral Landscape to be outstanding.

The foundation of a large part of Harris’s work of the last several years may be laid out in that book. While its subtitle is How Science Can Determine Human Values, and it aimed to resolve the fact/value problem from moral philosophy, that angle didn’t really resonate with me. (Some argue that that angle actually leads to some nightmarish scenarios: “It will be no objection, then, to say that you do not agree with the “scientific” conception of the moral good. After all, you do not know what is good for you. You are unaware of what you are missing. You need to have your brain updated, by force.”)

Rather, it was the return to philosophical problems after spending several years forgetting about them. Harris is an unapologetic opponent of moral and cultural relativism. One review quoted a line from his conclusion in The Moral Landscape, that we “must admit that some interests are more defensible than others. Indeed, some interests are so compelling that they need no defense at all.” I find this conclusion to be obvious. Unfortunately, there are people out there who have some sort of nihilism or similarly-confused attitudes that need to be opposed. Harris seems to be doing his best to oppose them, even if he gets things wrong from time-to-time.

[i] But they both have similar points to make on certain subjects. For example, here’s SSC:

Real arguments aren’t about what words you can apply to things and how nasty they sound, real arguments about what good or bad consequences those things produce.

And here’s Scott Adams on “word-thinking”:

I have never heard of anyone winning an argument by adjusting the definition of a word. But that doesn’t stop people from trying. We argue over whether a fetus is “living” at any particular point. We argue over the definition of a true “conservative.” We argue about whether or not Trump won in a “landslide.” We argue about Trump being a “fascist.” I doubt any of this word-thinking changed minds.

Some law professor of mine cited some Supreme Court justice (Holmes, maybe?) saying the same thing: there is much confusion caused by thinking in words and labels, rather than things and constructs. As if the truth of the idea isn’t obvious just from seeing it once, I kind of marvel at it coming from intelligent people from different backgrounds – a psychologist, a cartoonist, and a lawyer.

Politics

Watch for CPC lies about internment camps in China

by Jon

A genuine crime against humanity is occurring in western China, at the hands of the Communist Party of China. Short of launching World War III to liberate the million-plus innocent Uighurs held prisoner there,[1] people around the world are wondering what to do to help. I’m one of them.

I heard a great phrase in a related discussion (we were talking about other problems posed by the CPC[2]) that others may find useful when considering that question. Rusty Guinn advised that there are a range of responses to atrocities, and that we don’t have to jump from “thoughts-and-prayers” straight to “Ticonderogas-and-Tomahawks.”

Even a President can’t expect to look at a menu of responses, pick the right one, and watch an atrocity resolve itself. Life isn’t so simple. While it would be nice to have a menu to turn to when needed, most of us aren’t in a position to use such a thing. But we can watch the CPC’s explanations for their evil with clear eyes. To help with that, I want to highlight a lie that came to my attention that everyone should be aware of, and that everyone can and should ridicule when they see it.

Look at the two enormous events involving China — the mass imprisonment of the Uighurs and the ongoing mass protests in Hong Kong — that are capturing our attention, and the narrative that the CPC is trying to craft about them. That’s where we’ll see the lie; the CPC uses rhetoric appealing to the Rule of Law to justify its conduct, but that conduct doesn’t resemble what the rest of us have in mind when we think about the Rule of Law.

I’ve written before about that idea:

What does rule of law mean? Various principles are often associated with it. Some of the big ones that come to mind are government of rules, not rule by men; no individual is exempt from the rules; the rules apply going forward, not to past conduct; and non-arbitrary enforcement of the rules. Particularly when it comes to aspects such as non-arbitrary enforcement, rule of law is pretty clearly an aspirational ideal that can be achieved to greater or lesser degrees, rather than a binary status (present or not).
From Corporate welfare violates the rule of law

What does the CPC say about the atrocities it’s committing against the Uighurs? Once they acknowledged that something was even happening in the region (no small feat), their thin justifications appeal to various aspects of Rule of Law, such as non-arbitrary enforcement:

Hu Lianhe, a senior official with the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, who defended the program before a U.N. panel last month. He denied arbitrary detentions were taking place and said the centers are being used as vocational training centers for petty criminal offenders.
From American Lawmakers Push to Sanction Chinese Officials Over Xinjiang Camps

Or countering violence:

Chinese officials, including Mr. Chen’s Uighur deputy, have defended their Xinjiang policies as benign efforts to eradicate extremist and separatist violence, and to ensure ethnic harmony.
From China’s Hard Edge: The Leader of Beijing’s Muslim Crackdown Gains Influence

And not just violence, but violence aimed at destroying the political order:

China’s government insists the detention sites are “vocational” centers aimed at training and skills development. In a report earlier this year to counter criticism of internment camps and other oppressive security in the traditionally Islamic region, China said it had arrested nearly 13,000 people it described as “terrorists” and had broken up hundreds of “terrorist gangs” in Xinjiang since 2014.
From China and West clash over claims Beijing oppresses Uighurs

I’m sure there are plenty of similar statements from CPC officials involving Hong Kong. (Send me more examples about the Xinjiang and Hong Kong situations and I’ll probably add them here.)

Many newspapers reporting on the CPC’s tyranny in Xinjiang state that CPS officials either couldn’t be reached, or refused to comment. In the unlikely event that anyone actually has an opportunity to interview these monsters, it would be great to see them be grilled about what they think the Rule of Law means, and to what extent they think the internment camps in western China are consistent with it.

[1] Among the many reports of atrocities in Xinjiang, a few that have caught my attention are:

Muslim women ‘sterilised’ in China detention camps, say former detainees, in The Independent, August 12, 2019;

China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight, in Foreign Policy, August 22, 2018 (“In at least three counties, police have reported that they interned all or nearly all Uighurs born between 1980 and 2000, calling them an “untrustworthy generation”);

Brainwashing, Police Guards and Coercive Internment: Evidence from Chinese Government Documents about the Nature and Extent of Xinjiang’s “Vocational Training Internment Camps”, in Journal of Political Risk, July 2019 (“Decisive international action in response to the atrocities that are being perpetrated in Xinjiang is certainly not hampered by a lack of evidence on the true nature of this extrajudicial and inhumane internment campaign”);

They Come For Us At Night: China’s Vanishing Muslims, on Vice News, June 29, 2019 (undercover reporter Isobel Yeung captures footage from Xinjiang and interviews Uighur expatriates); and

My Uyghur family is quietly living in fear. This is how we become lost., in The Globe and Mail, July 27, 2019 (a Uighur expatriate in Canada tells of family and friends sent to camps over pretended offenses).

[2] I keep referring to the Communist Party of China rather than just China because it’s a valuable distinction and may prove to be required for internal change there. As Aaron Sarin put it in a great overview of CCP atrocities:
“But equally important is the support of the Chinese populace. We must decouple Party from people, making it clear that the former threatens us, not the latter. Language is crucially important here. If ‘the Communist Party’ and ‘China’ are separated in the political discourse, then Chinese citizens will be liberated to criticise the Party themselves, just as Deng Xiaoping feared.”

Corporate welfare

Corporate welfare violates the rule of law

by Jon

We all claim to believe in the rule of law, but I bet many of us haven’t given much recent thought to what that concept means. Or to what extent we’ve lost it. Recent conversations about economic development incentives — corporate welfare, because framing is 90% of the battle — have me thinking about this topic.

What does rule of law mean? Various principles are often associated with it. Some of the big ones that come to mind are government of rules, not rule by men; no individual is exempt from the rules; the rules apply going forward, not to past conduct; and non-arbitrary enforcement of the rules. Particularly when it comes to aspects such as non-arbitrary enforcement, rule of law is pretty clearly an aspirational ideal that can be achieved to greater or lesser degrees, rather than a binary status (present or not).

But rule of law should be something we strive for, not something to be shrugged about and ignored when we recognize activities that are clearly contrary to its ideal.

II.

When it comes to corporate welfare, those pushing targeted incentives tend to justify their proposals with appeals to pragmatism: investment, job creation, development, improvement. Whether their predictions about these outcomes are right or not (and my money is mostly on not, depending on their claims), advocates of corporate welfare completely ignore how their proposals relate to the rule of law.

A moment’s thought shows why they ignore that relationship: it’s not a good one. The whole point is to seek an exemption from the general rules, violating that principle of the rule of law. But the hostility that corporate welfare exhibits toward the rule of law is more than that.

Part of our instinctive distaste for the corporate welfare enterprise comes from our intuition that it’s the favored few who benefit, and that the rulers and exemption seekers aren’t being straight with us about the whole arrangement. This feeling may have roots in other aspects of the rule of law: that the rules are not arbitrary, and that they are created by individuals looking out for the common good, rather than for private interests. Part of having non-arbitrary rules is having a fair procedure for determining the scope of their applicability. But how fair can the procedure be when it comes to handing out exemptions from state and local taxes? How focused on the common good can these exemptions be when one of the most valuable companies in the world is a prime beneficiary of them?

III.

Another aspect of the rule of law is also a key aspect of fairness, of justice. Those who receive the benefit should share in the cost. Some people have said that democracy itself is basically an ongoing attempt to get other people to pay for the things we want. While that may be humorous, when it comes to government services that we largely take for granted (police and fire protection, government schools, courts, etc.), I hope that we all expect to share in their costs; they’re not free, and they don’t just magically appear.

The question of how these services should be paid for is a long-running question in governance debates. We’ve generally settled on funding them through property taxes, sales taxes, and in some states, personal or corporate income taxes. But allowing the favored few to avoid some or all of these taxes effectively increases the burden on the rest of us.

Think about those government services. When the population of an area increases, to maintain the same quality of such services, the money that funds them has to increase as well. (Advocates of corporate welfare are constantly promising new jobs, so population growth is either expressly promised or implicit in their claims. Justin Amash, another opponent of corporate welfare, outlined how this works in a nice series of tweets a while back.) Of course, not many people see the quality of government services very directly, so one result of a “successful” corporate welfare program is a poorer quality of service received by existing residents.

Which companies do you recall receiving corporate welfare subsidies? Subsidies should generally be minimized or eliminated. Where they flow from the relatively poor to the relatively rich, that’s even more true; having the poor pay more for services consumed by the rich seems to be a particularly galling violation of the burden/benefit aspect of the rule of law. Exempting the favored few from the tax burden that the rest of us have is immoral and unjust. It violates the rule of law, regardless of what any legislation says.

IV.

I’m a founding board member of the Center for Economic Accountability, a nonprofit corporation run by John Mozena that will be a voice for reason against corporate welfare. I hope you’ll follow us on Twitter (@AccountableEcon) and Facebook, watch our website, and join our cause.

Finance

Good reads: Guinn, Bastable, Noonan, Hunt

by Jon

Rusty Guinn uses Ace Ventura (“Shikaka. <kneeling> SHEEKKAAKAHH. <more kneeling> Shikasha! <An interrupted kneel> Uh…shishkebab…Shawshank Redemption…Chicaaago!“) as a hook for explaining the mimetic power of The Wall! and The 70% Tax! He says both are essentially substance-free issues that should be of interest mainly to policy wonks, but which are turned into symbols for purposes of mirroring engagements (among supporters) and rage engagements (among opponents). In other words:

“Like The Wall!, the 70% Tax! is an abstraction and a symbol. It is important to realize, even if you care about the underlying issue, that the debate isn’t about the thing. It’s about the abstraction, about all the things that we are being told that each policy supposedly stands for. Those things will feel very real to us, because that’s what the widening gyre does to our brains. It drives us toward the beacon of Good and Right Policy and away from the cesspool of Evil and Wrong-Headed Policy.”

Guinn’s article naturally appeals to me, as I was in the target demographic for Ace Ventura, and have a mild fascination with explanations of comedy. And tax policy. As a part-time policy wonk, I think I get to complain when the debate is not about the thing, because it should be.

*****

Conrad Bastable does a deep dive into a potential cause of cost disease in universities. Summary from @naval:

“Universities artificially limit the number of graduates, keep tuition prices high, and provide just enough financial aid to qualify as non-profits.

This enables the real business model – returns on massive endowments, compounding tax-free, and earning far more than tuition.”

If you buy this, consider blaming Moloch. If you don’t buy it, let’s hear about the holes in the theory.

*****

Peggy Noonan writes about immigration policy under a headline referencing the government shutdown. She outlines the parameters of where serious debate ought to be happening (“America is for legal immigration…. Both sides agree at least formally that a sovereign nation has a right to have borders…. Almost everyone would agree we have a right to determine the rules by which legal entry is attained. Most Americans would agree it is desirable to set those rules according to the nation’s needs”). So she says, about the shutdown and the immigration policy that’s presumably driving it, “Stop this. It’s embarrassing. And it’s wrong. Make a deal.” I don’t know… does either side with the power to make a deal actually agree about what the nation’s needs are, or failing that, what fair rules on immigration should be? Seems like one or both of those might be prerequisites to such a deal.

*****

Ben Hunt is angry, and it’s great. He sounds the alarm about Modern Monetary Theory, which he calls the Dr. Strangelove post-hoc justification for what the politicians are surely going to do next.

“So don’t tell me that the crowding-out effect of sovereign debt on the real economy isn’t a bad thing. Because it is. This is how entire economies are turned into zombies.

Don’t tell me that the monetization of sovereign debt, explicitly or implicitly, isn’t a bad thing. Because it is. This is how a middle class is destroyed.”

Finance

On “deficit-financed” tax cuts

by Jon

What’s the theory that some people use to argue that tax cuts are bad for us? I imagine they’re thinking about two issues — budget deficits and societal wealth — along these lines:

If Uncle Sam takes more money from people who are wasting it, that money can be put to better use. That would not only reduce our government’s budget deficit (because it will have more money), but the government investment would grow our economy more than would allowing the private sector to allocate that money.

If so, it’s a cute theory. Before accepting it, one should probably think about whether politicians and bureaucrats have track records of deficit cutting when revenues increase, of making wise investments with our tax dollars (relative to the private sector), and about the likelihood of those records (to the extent they exist) continuing.

Someone on the other side of this debate would have the opposite theory, something like:

If Uncle Sam takes more money from the private sector, it will be wasted by politicians and bureaucrats. It won’t reduce our government’s budget deficit (because as long as politicians can borrow money, they’ll do so, regardless of what tax revenues are), and it will lead to a poorer society because investments are better made by the private sector than by government.

I suspect that nearly everyone who asks questions like those above (about track records/likelihood of them continuing) is on my side of this debate, favoring lower taxes. But this post is mostly about a complaint on the deficit issue, rather than the question of how to create a wealthier society. I wish that this debate would focus solely on the creating-wealth side of the question, rather than the deficit-impact side. Why is that?

How likely do you think it is that:

most politicians will spend all of the tax revenues at their disposal (rather than giving them back to the taxpayer or paying down debt),
if they can borrow anything to supplement what is taken through taxes, they’ll do so, thereby adding to the debt, and
government revenues are necessarily limited to what can be raised through taxes and borrowing, while desires about how to spend money are unlimited (particularly desires by politicians, as they’re spending other people’s money)?

Doesn’t asking these questions reveal an obvious answer?

Deficits are by definition the result of both the revenue and expense sides of the ledger, so pretending that more revenue will somehow suddenly result in lower deficits (instead of what we have historically seen: even more new spending) seems like the height of naivety.

This complaint was most recently prompted by someone who’s very sharp (Josh Brown) referring to recent tax cuts as being “deficit-funded.” When I hear that concept, my first thought is that it presumes that the money we earn belongs to the government. (Of course it doesn’t.) Another very sharp guy (Rep. Thomas Massie) articulated this point in an interview with Matt Welch last year:

“Here in Washington, D.C., they keep saying that tax cuts need to be “paid for.” That’s a ridiculous notion. I want to pull my hair out, or throw my shoe at people here in D.C., when they say tax cuts need to be paid for.

Spending needs to be paid for. Tax cuts do not need to be paid for. They’ve got the whole notion backwards.”

But after that philosophical thought passes, I’m left scratching my head about why anyone thinks that more tax revenues would do anything to result in lower annual deficits. Over the long term, we’ve had increasing tax revenues basically forever (note that these charts are adjusted for inflation):

From https://www.justfacts.com/taxes.asp

The federal-only version looks virtually identical, minus a few thousand dollars per person going to the states (for those looking at the y-axis, that’s a little over $10,000 per US resident/per year in 2017 going to D.C.):

From https://www.justfacts.com/taxes.asp

Yet the debt keeps growing despite all of that additional revenue… weird! You don’t need to see visual evidence of that, because you know it’s true, but here’s another chart that starts at the tail end of the Great Depression anyway:

From http://www.justfactsdaily.com/what-the-20-trillion-national-debt-means-to-you/

If you think these things should be measured by portion of GDP for some reason, the charts might look even worse to you (see the most recent 40-year run of increasing debt):

https://www.justfacts.com/nationaldebt.asp#quantifying

It’s almost like politicians’ spending urges are permanent and insatiable by more tax revenue, or at least they have been since the late 1970s/early 1980s.

My summary: tax revenues have been increasing more or less continuously over the last century (and longer, but I’ll spare you more charts). At the same time, surprise! Spending keeps going up too, but by more, as shown by the fact that the national debt is increasing.

In theory, politicians could use the additional tax revenue to pay for what they previously financed with borrowed funds. It’s just that they’ve proven incapable of doing so, and show no signs whatsoever of reversing that trend. But sure, if you think tax cuts are bad for us because they increase the deficit/debt, go ahead and stick with the talking point that they would shrink if we taxpayers were forced to cough up more of our money; keep calling them “deficit-financed” tax cuts.

*****

PS: Anyone leaning toward accepting that tax increases are good (or bad) for wealth creation should also think about the extremes. When do you stop taking money from people? When is the government “investment” giving a negative return, rather than growing the economy?

If you think tax cuts are bad for us because the politicians will spend the money better than the private sector, that’s a far more interesting discussion than whether tax cuts need to be “paid for” or not. If we’re in a place with substandard or non-existent rule of law or other basic prerequisites to wealth creation, then I bet you could make a pretty good case that politician-directed spending (on the right causes) could be more beneficial. However, if we’re in a place with lots of wealth creation, yet politicians are spending money on ridiculous, frivolous, immoral, and obviously-harmful causes, maybe you should think about reform before you try to give the politicians more control over society’s wealth.

Politics

I went to an immigration conference so you didn’t…

by Jon

There’s probably going to be audio of all of this. Check reason.org if you’re interested in looking for it, and let me know if I’m not remembering anything correctly.

************

Academic conferences can be funny. You may think they sound like an extended trip to the dentist’s office, but I happily attended one last weekend to hear about immigration. There were three days of activities, but the third day seemed to have an excellent concentration of interesting panels, so that’s the only day I attended. One panel included a couple of constitutional law professors I’ve seen on Twitter, one featured Robin Hanson and Ronald Bailey discussing AI, and one featured Alex Nowrasteh from Cato. There were other panelists, but those were the draws that brought me.

II.

Nowrasteh is an immigration policy expert, and he was hilarious. He had a mild viral moment a while ago on Tucker Carlson’s show when he was confronted with some goalpost moving, but didn’t give an inch. At the conference, he happily assumed the label of elitist and globalist (just like his Twitter bio), at least for part of his pitch. The focus of much of his panel was the economic benefits that would flow from the freer flow of people across borders, but that was relatively boring. (Spoiler alert: apparently those benefits would be huge.)

When asked by an audience member to address cultural arguments about immigration, he said something to the effect of I just played the role of a liberal elitist, but let me put on my conservative hat for a minute. He then proceeded to give a rousing defense of modern American society that left one of his co-panelists at a loss for words. (She basically said wow. Just wow, and had to go in a different direction.) He probably had several iron-clad points, but the idea that stuck with me was that not all cultures are equal; Nowrasteh made perfectly clear that he’s no cultural relativist, and emphasized that he’s quite a fan of American culture. It shouldn’t take courage to say that, but I get the impression that doing so is taboo — after all, it’s a direct criticism of others. (His point was about our freedoms, IIRC.)

Another audience member suggested that the economic argument for immigration, and focusing on individuals’ self-interest, wouldn’t change many minds. The reasoning was pretty intuitive: we care about more than our own self-interest — we care about the communities in which we live. Therefore, if you want to encourage people to support more immigration, you need to convince them that those communities won’t be fundamentally altered for the worse.

Despite focusing on economics in their main presentations, Nowrasteh’s panel (which included Robert Guest from the Economist, and Ito Peng from the University of Toronto) was broadly in agreement on this point about communities. They somewhat confessed ignorance on the relative merits of various arguments for persuading people, but Nowrasteh had one of his funnier lines about that. He said that the gulf between what immigration law actually is, and what it’s perceived to be, is so monumental that it’s absurd. An example he gave was of an elderly lady who asked him why those illegal immigrants don’t just go to the post office to register — needless to say, it works nothing like that.

III.

My main interest in attending was to hear Robin Hanson and Ronald Bailey talk about robots. Hanson is an economics professor who I’ve heard on Sam Harris’s podcast, and who has written about this topic, and artificial intelligence, including in The Age of Em. Bailey is a Reason reporter who I’ve heard a few times, including a few years ago at a smaller event near home. He’s always seemed to analyze things similarly to me, and to often reach the same conclusions. He kept that up on the panel. (One of Bailey’s points at the prior event was about doomsday scenarios: his book publisher told him that selling catastrophe is easy and profitable, but selling optimism is neither. I wonder how relevant that is to the AI doomsday pushers.)

The AI panel was of particular interest to me because I’ve previously written about the topic. And the week of the event, Hanson and I discussed it at decent length on Twitter.

While the conference was supposed to be about immigration, and this panel was supposed to be on the relationship between immigration and AI to the demographic crisis, it quickly devolved into a discussion about whether robots would result in job loss. This was great for me, because it’s a question on which I have an opinion.

I can’t tell a story about what led to what, and who responded to who with respect to this panel. But some points that I think I recall correctly are:

Hanson and the person who was brought in to poke holes in his argument (Roman Yampolskiy) both agreed that at some point, AI would exceed human capabilities in pretty much everything. (If you think AI > humans = no more jobs, just keep in mind that that’s a different issue. And see my above article.)
There are huge disagreements about when that point might be. Hanson provided a historical overview showing that this fear is nothing new, that all previous fears of it seem overblown in hindsight, and was skeptical that this result will occur in the near future. Yet he still thinks it will happen at some point.
The people who think AI will exceed human capabilities liked to point out that if your fear of this situation is job losses, that you may be missing the bigger problem. I think they’re talking about a Terminator/Skynet-like situation, where robots actively and directly harm us.
AI isn’t necessarily a substitute for labor; there’s a good case that it’s more like capital, which would obviously make labor more productive overall. (This is the standard story about how we have increasing wealth in our lives.)
Bailey talked about farming today, and compared it to farming from years ago. He never would have believed that people could make a living selling tomatoes that had been individually cared for like today’s organic/small farm tomatoes are. Call them luxury tomatoes. Yet he thinks we have these types of operations because of technological advances and increased immigration, because those things are how we get more specialization. and therefore more wealth.
Technological change also creates new industries that will lead to more specialization and therefore more wealth. They cited hairdressers and similar personal care industries as things that didn’t exist until we could grow food without as many people as before. They also (at least Bailey) recognized that luxury tomatoes are a byproduct of this phenomenon, and that people seem to value these things. (If that example doesn’t work for you, consider that an exact copy of the Mona Lisa won’t sell for the same thing as the original, or that we wouldn’t necessarily pay to see robots play sports; we value human talent.)

I enjoyed talking to Hanson and Bailey after their panel about this, as well as Shikha Dalmia, the organizer of the conference. The latter two seemed to understand my point about comparative advantage resulting in plenty of things for people to do, even with advanced AI potentially making people inferior. However, Bailey isn’t on board (yet) with my point that even with a complete advantage over people, AI will not drive people out of all productive activity.

IV.

The first panel was on whether the US Constitution gives Congress unrestrained authority to control immigration. There was a soft consensus on the panel that it’s completely irrelevant for purposes of actual policy today, because the Supreme Court isn’t going to overturn the Chinese Exclusion Act cases that effectively said the answer to that question is yes. But the conversation was interesting, if you’re into constitutional law. (Think, debates about what the Declaration of Independence might have to say about the powers of the King of England, and the sovereign powers claimed by Congress via Article I.)

I could use a lot more intelligent discussion about immigration, AI, and where we ought to be driving policy with respect to these issues. We all could use more intelligent discussion about these issues. If they interest you, then whenever the audio is available from the conference, you could do worse than to listen to the recording of that Saturday in Michigan when these conversations took place.

Cooperation

On markets and alternatives

by Jon

James Flynn — an academic famous for the “Flynn effect” (of increasing intelligence scores over time) — has some very left-wing views. In the course of discussing unrelated issues on a psychology podcast, he argued that the world would be better if people’s contributions to it weren’t so subjected to market-based rewards (emphasis mine):

Both of us want a society in which people who lack the entrepreneurial virtues, and have other virtues, have a better access to a good life. I mean it’s terrible how the present economic trend is separating off people with so-called entrepreneurial virtues, into an elite that leave the rest of society behind in terms of access to life to an extraordinary degree. It would be much better if we had a recognition that human beings are more than working machines. That they have a life outside of work. You know, it would be much better that rather than just emphasizing what pays in terms of the market, we encourage people in a humane way, to have access to as good a life as possible. For example, there are plenty of people I know who love working with wood and working with their hands. Now there is no reason why the state shouldn’t provide workshops where they can go and exercise that skill that are relatively free. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t subsidize sport on the amateur level or theater, where people who have intelligences — as Gardner calls them — different from analytical intelligences have a much richer life… You have a good society when there’s a rich and rewarding way of life and as many people have access to its benefits as possible. And we by merely allowing the market to label what’s socially valuable, we condemn many people not to have as rich a life as they could, given their non-entrepreneurial talents.

This seems to be a common sentiment in certain circles. And it almost sounds reasonable when you listen to him make his case (he only wants to encourage people, after all, and in a humane way — he must be totally reasonable!). But it’s literally an express call to subsidize people who Flynn feels bad for, on the basis of… it’s not clear what exactly. (Which is fine; the main the topic of the podcast was something else.)

The desire to subsidize the less fortunate is probably a universal sentiment, with people merely disagreeing about the boundaries of those who should receive subsidies.

I don’t want to address those boundaries — reasonable people will surely disagree on where to put them. I want to address the dismissive attitude Flynn’s comments demonstrate toward markets.

II.

Imagine you’re out for a meal downtown, making your way to your destination on foot, when you come across an extremely sub-par musician performing on the corner. He has a few crunched-up dollar bills in some case in front of him, the universal sign for pay me please. You’re not legally obligated to pay him — which is something we should all be thankful for. If Flynn had his way, this might be a person you would be legally required to compensate.

I appreciate woodworking — I paid a friend who loves making things to make a counter for my basement bar (you can see it here). Most of us appreciate sports, and those who are in the business of entertaining us with their athletic talents can obviously do very well. Talented musicians and actors are in the same boat. But I wanted a counter of specific dimensions, made of specific wood, with a specific finish. Should I have had to pay for the dealer’s choice? (That’s a rhetorical question — my friend built to spec.) If you’re only willing to pay for a rock concert, should you have to pay if the band decides it wants to play country music?

Life would be horrible if we were required to compensate people for doing the things that they wanted to do, rather than the things that we want them to do. Yet this is exactly what Flynn proposed: government subsidies for wannabe woodworkers or amateur athletes or actors are public compensation for skills that the rest of us have demonstrated we are not willing to purchase on our own from those individuals (at least not at the levels Flynn would like).

What he derides as entrepreneurial values and merely allowing the market to label what’s socially valuable is hardly worthy of condemnation. (It also suggests that we only think things are socially valuable if they get you paid. Is that a common viewpoint?) These phrases he uses could be replaced with concepts like serving society and giving people what they want. When I heard his euphemisms, I heard a ridiculously intelligent man trying to justify his desire to pay his favored producers at the expense of people who are producing goods and services that the rest of us actually desire.

III.

In a futile attempt to preempt some rebuttals that you might respond with, look at some of the things that Flynn said that I didn’t criticize:

Both of us want a society in which people who lack the entrepreneurial virtues, and have other virtues, have a better access to a good life.

I’m not sure I know what he means by “people who lack entrepreneurial virtues” (he may not know either). But if it’s a euphemism for people who don’t earn much money, then this is a platitude; nearly all of us want poor people, or people with hard lives, to have opportunities to earn more money or to have an easier time.

It would be much better if we had a recognition that human beings are more than working machines. That they have a life outside of work.

Who is he arguing with here? Nobody thinks that people should be “working machines,” or that their lives should be tied to work.

Lots of us think that if people want rare goods and services, that they should have to contribute something of similar value to the world. Do you want your options to be lousy musicians playing awful music on a corner (who you’re forced to compensate), or great musicians giving amazing performances to people who have chosen to see them? If merely picking up an instrument entitled a person to fast cars or whatever Flynn has in mind for the good life, we would all step up. And then who would do all the other necessary tasks?

Politics

When should we debate?

by Jon

When I was in law school, a student group brought in the director of a local film festival, or someone like that, to talk about a state subsidy that had become a political issue. The speaker told a story about the fallout from a fight over a small state grant, but she made some sweeping generalizations about the legislators involved that I knew to be false (I had worked for one of them for a few years before law school, so I knew the background).

Her big claim was that everyone against the subsidy had lost their reelection campaigns. It didn’t feel right telling her that her conclusion was misinformed in front of a large crowd. And the rest of my classmates didn’t ask any questions that would have revealed the shallowness of the speaker’s understanding of the relevant first amendment issues (even though I’m fairly certain that everyone in the room could see a few distinctions that the speaker didn’t seem to recognize).

I thought about that event recently when the conservative publisher Ben Shapiro challenged the congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a debate for $10,000. Following a few less-than-flattering interviews in which Ocasio-Cortez made some unusual comments, Shapiro seemed ready to get in on the fun. But her response was to compare that debate offer to getting catcalled on the street.

That’s actually a pretty great response. It completely shifted the attention away from the prior interviews and toward something that everyone can relate to, even if only from seeing it on television. We can easily visualize men whistling at attractive women in the street, but visualizing budget deficits or the relative merits of financing healthcare one way rather than another? C’mon.

So the result of that is that Shapiro is compared to a creepy guy, and Ocasio-Cortez looks like a leader for correctly asserting that she doesn’t owe a response to unsolicited advances from either creeps looking for companionship, or ideological opponents looking for attention.

The downside of this distraction — and it is a distraction; Ocasio-Cortez could have simply ignored Shapiro and achieved the same result with respect to the proposed debate — is that we’re not having a public debate about the misery that would follow from moving the country in a socialist direction. Instead, we’re literally having a debate about debates.

It seems like we’re forgetting the basics about these things. One of the main benefits of real debates is that open-minded people can see who has a better case on some issue. People who like to participate in debates rarely are expecting to change the mind of the person that they’re debating; they’re participating because they want to convince the undecided audience that they are right, or to change the minds of people in the audience who aren’t as tied to a position as the debate participant.

My classmates and I could have pointed out to the film festival speaker that refusing to subsidize art isn’t the same thing as censoring it, but everyone in the audience already knew that. Unfortunately, it’s obvious that many people still need to learn how awful socialism is. In this, and in other matters of public importance, it seems like there are far too few instances of people from opposite sides of the issues having real public debates.

(Isn’t it odd, though, that it’s always the socialists who don’t want to have these discussions?)

There’s a time and a place to talk about any given issue. During a lunch event at a law school with an invited guest didn’t seem like the right time to get into the details of which candidates lost which elections. And I don’t get the feeling that before a congressional candidate is even elected is the time to be debating conservative commentators.

Ocasio-Cortez is not yet elected to congress. Her general-election opponents include a 72-year old Republican who is a professor of economics. If I were the Republican, I would want to have as many debates with her as I could schedule, particularly because she made an issue in her Democratic primary about her opponent not wanting to debate her.

I’m not sure how many bets are more of a sure thing than that the Republican is not going to win this election, but what an opportunity for public debate. Assuming he avoids talking about irrelevant issues, you would think that an economics professor could show how awful socialism would be for Americans. (Based on the two brief articles I’ve read about the Republican, however, I don’t actually think this economics professor could do that, but that’s not really the point.)