10-30-10 Hodgepodge

Craig Biddle: "Justice for John P. McCaskey"

Note: I have retracted this endorsement.

Second Note: Kendall J makes the following pertinent comment: "Even if Peikoff had morally condemned McCaskey, the Rand citation does not in any way imply that he is obligated to explain himself."

Third Note: The interested reader may find links to statements about this matter by ARI and Leonard Peikoff here.

Craig Biddle has posted a call for justice for John McCaskey at his personal web site. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Peikoff-McCaskey dispute, and find that the piece clarifies many of the issues involved. I am grateful for that clarification, as well as for the fact that he took this stand.

Although I would normally include some salient quote(s) from such an article at this point, I will not do so here since the context of everything Biddle says is extremely important and he deserves a full and fair hearing.

I will, however, cite the quotation Biddle drew from Ayn Rand that most clarified things for me:

"When one pronounces a moral judgment, whether in praise or in blame, one must be prepared to answer 'Why?' and to prove one's case -- to oneself and to any rational inquirer." -- Ayn Rand, "How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?," in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 84.

Based on my knowledge of this dispute, including what I have gathered from this piece, I fully agree with Biddle.

Although it should be clear to anyone reading Biddle's piece, let me briefly emphasize that my agreement with Biddle and my consequent support of McCaskey do not imply a repudiation of Leonard Peikoff.

In addition, I remain a supporter of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Note: I have retracted this endorsement.

Second Note: Kendall J makes the following pertinent comment: "Even if Peikoff had morally condemned McCaskey, the Rand citation does not in any way imply that he is obligated to explain himself."

Third Note: The interested reader may find links to statements about this matter by ARI and Leonard Peikoff here.

Weekend Reading

"Coloradans can avoid the mistakes of Massachusetts, save money, and protect their health care freedoms by voting for Amendment 63. What more could one ask for?" -- Paul Hsieh in "The 'Right To Health Care Choice' is right for Colorado" at The Denver Post. (Dr. Hsieh was also recently interviewed at Capitalism Magazine on the subject of the pros and cons of ObamaCare.)

"This year’s ballot presents voters with a mystery. Amendments 62 and 63 are based on opposite political premises, yet many prominent groups either endorse both or oppose both. What explains this contradiction?" -- Diana Hsieh and Ari Armstrong in "A62, A63 reveal ideological rifts" at The Denver Daily News

"The choice in the upcoming election boils down to whether you think you are your brother's keeper or whether you have a right to live your own life as you see fit." -- Charlotte Cushman in "The Real Choice This Election" at American Thinker

How to Spot Voting Fraud

Speaking of elections, there may, unfortunately, be a few opportunities for last-minute activism right before you vote.

Popping up Everywhere

Some time ago, Amit Ghate called the frequency of Objectivist editorials in mainstream publications a "welcome problem." The same sometimes goes with other random mentions.

Here are a couple of good ones from this week: First, my favorite productivity blog, Lifehacker, devoted an entry to Francisco d'Anconia's "money speech" -- "Is Money the Root of All Evil?" -- this week. The entry itself was noncommittal, but it did link to the full text at Capitalism Magazine. Second, through Paul Hsieh and Amit Ghate, I learned about a fascinating Wall Street Journal blog entry about a turning point in intellectual property history. "What Smartphone Makers Can Learn From the Sewing Machine Patent War," drew on an academic article by Adam Mossoff, who is affiliated with ARI.

-- CAV

Updates

11-3-10: Added note of retraction to first section.
11-5-10: Added second note to first section.
11-13-10: Added a third note to first section.

Three from the Mailbag

Being behind and in a hurry this morning, I'll lean on my in-box for today's post...

1. My Mom recently reminded me of the following quote from Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer of the C++ computer language:

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

She titled the email, "me in a nutshell."

The acorn doesn't fall too far from the tree, then!

2. Stephen Bourque reminds me at his blog of a Bill Whittle video -- embedded there -- that I first heard about on the HBL mailing list. I never got around to watching it.

Sez he:

Bill Whittle of PJTV makes stunningly insightful observations about wealth creation, including the relationship of prosperity to freedom and the fact that in a free exchange all parties benefit. (I say "stunningly" because I am unaccustomed to hearing such things spoken of outside of Objectivist circles.)

Bourque does add some criticism to this appraisal, however.

3. Some time back, a friend mentioned a thread at Objectivism Online about the merits of the composers Rachmaninoff and Bach. He considers "Bach perhaps the greatest composer," but regards Rachmaninoff as "one of my all-time favorites," and particularly recommended one of the posts in the thread.

-- CAV

A Ph. D. in Hard Knocks?

Via Dismuke and Glenn Reynolds is a YouTube video that would be a lot funnier if it didn't depict the prelude to a common and tragic waste of youthful talent and enthusiasm. The video shows a college student asking for a recommendation to graduate school. She wants to become an English professor.

Of course, if you don't want to watch a cartoon, there's an article on overproduction of Ph.D.s by a professor who has decided on that basis to stop accepting new graduate students. Were the video not a cartoon, I'd just about have to check that it didn't star the author.

They walk into my office every spring, dressed in new suits (the men) or dressy pantsuits (the women). They are prospective graduate students, and they're nervous. We engage in a few pleasantries, and then I ask them what they want to do with their Ph.D.s. They all reply that they want a tenure-track job at a research university. I then ask them what they know of the academic job market in my discipline (social psychology). Smiles faltering a bit, some say they've heard it was rather bad at the moment; others say they don't know much about it. I explain to them that calling the job market "rather bad" was akin to calling Katrina "a bad storm" and that the market is as bad as I've seen in my 23 years as a professor. They gulp hard and then reply gamely that they are prepared to work hard to achieve their goals. I smile back at them and applaud their initiative. Inwardly I wonder if they truly know what they are getting into, that even if they work hard and amass an impressive vita, it still might not be enough to enable them to earn that coveted tenure-track job.

Getting a PhD in any field is very hard work -- and not in the Boxerian sense, either! It also takes years.

I would go so far as to say that anyone considering a Ph.D. in any field -- not just the humanities -- think long and hard about it. Don't do this unless at least one of the following is true: (1) there is a healthy demand outside academia for doctorates in your field and at a good level of compensation; or (2) you have a very clear idea about what you hope to accomplish in your field and a solid alternative plan in case your academic career does not work out for some reason. (By an academic career "not working out," I include such things as people discovering that they really do not like academia, or that their interests have changed enough to make such a career less appealing.)

So think. And then, think again.

The below is from the same article:

... I think academia shares many of the classic elements of a social trap: It is in most faculty members' and departments' best interests to recruit a lot of graduate students. Churning out Ph.D.s is one of the major metrics of departmental "success." Departments need graduate students to teach their classes, and faculty members need them to run their labs. Yet, as in any social trap, when everybody acts in their self-interest, a negative collective outcome ensues. I have served as chair or co-chair of 13 Ph.D. students in my career, a number I'm guessing is typical of most research faculty. Population growth of that magnitude is a Malthusian melt-down in the making and simply isn't sustainable. We're not creating enough academic jobs to absorb all those Ph.D.s, and in today's economy, applied jobs are disappearing as well.

I wouldn't call any of the behavior above truly "self-interested," but people really do such things. I think the real problem lies in massive government encouragement of higher education creating a system of non-objective incentives like the one described above.

This is certainly not to say, "Never even consider getting a Ph.D!" It can be a very rewarding pursuit and lead to a wonderful career. (I often thought of one professor of my acquaintance that it was as if he had found a way to get paid to pursue his hobbies full time.) But if you must dive in, know the waters and know yourself very well.

-- CAV

Valuing "Naughtiness"

Paul Graham once again shares his insights about human nature and the requirements for success in an essay. "What We Look for in Founders," is a longer version of a piece he wrote for Forbes about what his investment group looks for when they decide whether to fund tech startups. The whole thing is worth a read, but I found what he said about a quality he calls "naughtiness" most interesting:

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage -- hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

It is the view about "rules" I find intriguing here because of a couple of common confusions about the rules we adopt for human interaction that slow many people down for various reasons.

The first confusion is evident in Graham's clarification of what he means by "good." Obviously, he's not going to be interested in helping thugs or pickpockets get ahead, but I suspect that Graham might find the choirboy who meekly does everything he is told to do a less-than-ideal funding candidate.

Since the idea of an objective morality is alien to most people (but morality as a laundry list of arbitrary commandments isn't), the need to make such a distinction clear is understandable, but if morality were commonly understood to have an objective basis, this would be unnecessary.

Interestingly, on "big questions," like violence and theft, almost everyone can see practical reasons for not doing such things, so the common notion of the moral-practical dichotomy is not such a big impediment to people having, in effect, an objective moral code on such "big questions" most of the time.

But on some, less-clear issues, the practical reasons for pursuing one course of action or another are not so clear, and people are more likely to end up defaulting into what everyone else does -- or "rebelling" by doing whatever they feel like doing. These "small questions" include not just what most people regard as moral questions, like whether to give to a charity, but also to things like rules of etiquette and common ways of doing business or solving problems.

Thus, what Graham is looking for seems to me to really be someone who more closely approaches having an objective approach to moral (and practical) questions. Actually having such a code would require one to understand morality in a principled way, so the best one will usually see is someone who gets "big questions" right and is open to exploring anything else. Such an openness requires a high degree of independence of mind from what others say. Indeed, such a refusal to simply "observe [arbitrary] proprieties" reflects at least some rudimentary grasp of a distinction Ayn Rand calls, "the metaphysical versus the man-made."

Man's faculty of volition as such is not a contradiction of nature, but it opens the way for a host of contradictions -- when and if men do not grasp the crucial difference between the metaphysically given and any object, institution, procedure, or rule of conduct made by man.

It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. Man is not omniscient or infallible: he can make innocent errors through lack of knowledge, or he can lie, cheat and fake. The manmade may be a product of genius, perceptiveness, ingenuity -- or it may be a product of stupidity, deception, malice, evil. One man may be right and everyone else wrong, or vice versa (or any numerical division in between). Nature does not give man any automatic guarantee of the truth of his judgments (and this is a metaphysically given fact, which must be accepted). Who, then, is to judge? Each man, to the best of his ability and honesty. What is his standard of judgment? The metaphysically given.

The metaphysically given cannot be true or false, it simply is -- and man determines the truth or falsehood of his judgments by whether they correspond to or contradict the facts of reality. The metaphysically given cannot be right or wrong -- it is the standard of right or wrong, by which a (rational) man judges his goals, his values, his choices. The metaphysically given is, was, will be, and had to be. Nothing made by man had to be: it was made by choice. ("The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," in Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 27.)

If morality (or any other field) can be approached in an objective manner, and it is a practical science, one must see this distinction at least on some implicit level to blaze trails.

This is not to say that, if the view that the rules of morality were of practical import and could be discovered by reason were more common, everyone would be an innovator, however. There remains the fact that every individual can know only so much, and will simply find some issues much more interesting to think about than others. Back in grad school, for example, I was frustrated at how useless my Windows computer and crippleware at home were, but there was no way I could have (or would have wanted to) come up with the Linux and other software I used to solve that problem. It wasn't that my imagination was limited or that I didn't question -- in the form of rolling my eyes or cursing -- why my computer couldn't do anything: It was that I wasn't interested enough in computing to solve the problem on my own. (Of course, that sets aside the whole matter of whether I would have been a very effective programmer.)

I bring this up because Graham wonders whether "naughtiness" and imagination are redundant items in his list. Even without our common, deficient moral vocabulary getting in the way of understanding what this naughtiness is, I don't think so. As my own stab at this, I think that perhaps naughtiness is an increased drive to apply imagination to certain types of problems that is absent in most other people. Indeed, the drive is increased because it provides such people with enjoyment.

At this point, naughtiness might seem redundant to another list item, determination, but I'm not so sure about that either. How many ace computer programmers (or innovators in other fields) have what it takes to succeed in business? If both of these things are species of determination, I think they are different enough to warrant different metrics.

-- CAV

PS: Don't miss the essay Graham links within the one I discuss above. "How Not to Die" has some useful insights on maintaining focus on major projects that can probably apply beyond starting a business.

Privatize NPR

Jack Shafer of Slate calls the conservatives' bluff on their cynical, empty threats to defund NPR in the wake of the Juan Williams firing:

President Richard Nixon wanted to defund public broadcasting, [Jesse] Walker notes, as did the Reagan administration. Just weeks before he became speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich talked of his ambition to "zero-out" federal funding of all public broadcasting. Now John Boehner is making noises about killing NPR, which he calls a "left-wing radio network." But the Republican threats never go anywhere, Walker writes, because the GOP's primary goal is to "whip" the networks into line, not to defund them. NPR and PBS have been such useful campaign targets for Republicans that if they didn't exist, the Republicans would have to invent them. [links dropped]

All I'd change in the above paragraph would be to insert "claimed he" between "Nixon" and "wanted," and take out the last sentence. Conservatives hate government news media the same way they hate government schools, as one can see through their actions with respect to the latter: Rather than fight to get rid of public schools, they fight to use them to ram Creationism down the throats of everyone's children.

But Schafer does us one better in his column: He makes an explicit connection between freedom of speech and independence from government funding.

No matter what the percentage, you'd think 1) that by now NPR would be sick of being a political pawn and 2) that it would want to liberate itself permanently from all of the Nixons, Reagans, Gingrichs, and Boehners. Far from being a radical idea, this has been the direction the network has been heading in since its founding...

...

Having come this far, NPR should go all the way and remove its fingers from the public pocket. Only by making itself independent of government funding will it become independent of government meddling.

From Shafer's list of men he doesn't want pulling the strings, I presume he's on the blue end of the political spectrum, but he shows a far better appreciation for the side benefits of capitalism than Sarah Palin did when she blathered that, "NPR says its mission is 'to create a more informed public,' but ... Congress should make clear that unless NPR provides that public service, not one more dime."

Too bad Palin doesn't know or care about the real reason NPR should be defunded, and too bad Shafer doesn't see the dangers of government meddling beyond the threat it poses to the integrity of his favorite radio network.

A sports writer likened the latest round of NFL action to Seinfeld's "The Opposite" episode. Good comparison, but that's nothing compared to the current political debate. Were it only just, "Opposite Era!"

-- CAV

Time for a Knock-Out

This is, without a doubt, the funniest campaign ad I've ever seen.

I agree. The time to start calling Barbara Boxer "ma'am" again is long overdue. (HT: Dismuke)

-- CAV

Gus Van Horn Turns Six

Six years ago today, I started this blog when I realized that I wanted a place to explore my interest in thinking and writing about political and cultural matters. Since then, I have written about 2,300 posts and received nearly 350,000 visitors. I have surprised myself with my tenacity, while also being pleasantly surprised that so many people have found it worthwhile to stop by and see what's on my mind over the years.

But those numbers really don't do justice to what I have been able to get out of blogging. This is because what I actually started six years ago was also the beginning of a journey of personal growth.

This daily routine of thinking and writing has helped me correct mistaken ideas, confirm that I am right about others (as well as better understanding why), and branch out to consider issues I might not otherwise have even become aware of.

On a daily level, blogging is something I usually enjoy, but sometimes I do have to push myself to do it. In the latter respect, blogging is a lot like running. Many runners speak of the value of having a "running buddy" to make the activity routine, and to help them see where they are in relation to their goals.

Although most of my writing here is driven by my own curiosity, knowing that people come here expecting to see something new each day has helped me in a similar way to having a running buddy. So, thank you, regular readers! You have been great running buddies.

In addition to a good number of "regulars," I have had random people from the gamut of occupations -- Starbucks baristas, car salesmen, and entrepreneurs just to name a few -- chime in on discussion threads, always with something germane to add. Thank you, commenters and occasional visitors!

Over the years, this routine has led to my making many new friends and acquaintances, and reviving a few other, older friendships. In the process, I have: received many tips on potentially "blogworthy" material; batted ideas around in interesting email exchanges; and have had lots of advice about things I can also use away from the keyboard, like restaurant recommendations and advice on time management. (Those two came together last Friday, as we headed out of town for a wedding: Mrs. Van Horn and I stopped at a barbecue place in Springfield that Jeff told us about -- and I noted on a list of possible things-to-do.) Thank you friends and fellow bloggers!

I'll close by thanking my family for their support. This goes especially for my wife, who puts up with my routine day in and day out, and in very good humor, at that.

-- CAV

10-23-10 Hodgepodge

Palin Makes Wrong Stand

In the wake of Juan Williams getting fired from National Public Radio for stating that seeing passengers in Moslem garb on his own plane raises his hackles, Sarah Palin and the GOP have suddenly become interested in defunding NPR.

Not especially to defend the GOP, but it has at least attempted to do this in the past and, arguably, has to start cutting government somewhere. But Palin unwittingly demonstrated why NPR should be defunded -- period -- with her unprincipled remarks:

NPR says its mission is "to create a more informed public," but by stifling debate on these issues, NPR is doing exactly the opposite. President Obama should make clear his commitment to free and honest discussion of the jihadist threat in our public debates -- and Congress should make clear that unless NPR provides that public service, not one more dime.

In other words, it's okay with Palin for NPR to keep on receiving money looted from American citizens, so long as it abides by her idea of fostering a free debate. (Ironically, by this standard, she has no argument against Obama stating that he's satisfied with the "debate" and that NPR should continue receiving funds.)

So Palin really isn't against the government funding a broadcast network, and arguably has no problems with the government telling a (semi-)private broadcaster how to run its business, including whom to hire and fire.

Wouldn't privatization have made this problem impossible in the first place? And, if so, why not advocate defunding NPR regardless of its policies, once and for all, on principle? First, if NPR were not government-funded, it could hire and fire as it pleased (like any other private broadcaster), with such free-market responses to its subsequent reputation as audience share and listener boycotts ensuring that, if it wanted to be known as an impartial journalistic enterprise, it would act like one. Second, with the government not funding NPR, its decisions would not become de facto government positions on ideological matters -- which the government shouldn't be in the business of promoting, anyway. Of course, it's not the government's job to makes sure we have objective journalism, anyway, but if it did its job -- protecting individual rights -- the market would take care of that on its own.

So much for Sarah Palin as a capitalist or a defender of freedom of speech.

Weekend Reading

"[John J.] Colby uses a tactic called 'psychologizing' to smear Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate John] Robitaille." -- Ellen Kenner in "Psychologizing and the Art of Smearing," Providence Journal

From the Vault

About this time in 2006, I asked the following question: "What makes the Dalai Lama a scientific collaborator?"

Defending the Drawl

I dislike hearing myself on tape, but the silver lining is that my southern drawl reminded me of an interesting thing I looked up some time ago: What does an American accent sound like to someone from England? I didn't save the discussion I found, but it's consistent with what I found as the first answer here: nasal and "Texan."

I guess that means I sound extra "American," at least to the English, then...

Mutilate Your Child's Mind

Qwertz takes a look at something I wondered about some time ago and concludes the following:

This ["science" textbook from Bob Jones "University" Press] appears to me to be deliberately disorganized so as to prevent students from making con­nections between the topics discussed. But I suppose it could also be a result of a profound mis­understanding of the empirical scientific method. It's scattershot.

That such a book was ever used by any one to attempt to teach science to children is simply appalling.

Agreed.

-- CAV

Updates

10-25-10: (1) Added missing hyperlink to Kenner op-ed. (2) Format edit.

Fried Green Tomatoes

No. Not the chick flick. The southern delicacy. Other than a feeble attempt to make them once years ago -- one that Mrs. Van Horn helpfully reminded me of last night as I cooked -- I am pretty sure that I otherwise hadn't had these in at least a decade before last night.

Luckily, an old friend who lives up here recalled my mention of fried green tomatoes as I admired the tomato vines in their back yard this summer at a barbecue. We're due for frost up here soon, so he picked all the green fruit and handed the bag over to me Wednesday at lunch.

Last night, I finally got around to cooking these with a recipe based on one my brother emailed me. They turned out okay, but needed more salt and pepper. (That's my fault, not his.) I also find the idea of a trying a little remoulade sauce on the side interesting, although also bordering on gilding the lily. (That idea came from the earlier Wikipedia link.)

Since I have enough tomatoes on hand for a second round, I'll probably tweak the recipe a little bit, as indicated below. (And I may go so far as to make a couple of batches of breading since that will probably be it until next year.)

If anyone is actually interested in making this, please pay attention to my notes in italics, as these include both recommendations and changes I am pretty sure will lead to improvements.

-- CAV

***

Fried Green Tomatoes
(A Work in Progress)

Ingredients

bacon grease or cooking oil, 1/2" deep -- If using cooking oil, at least add some bacon grease for improved flavor.
green tomatoes, 2 large -- I estimate that I used the equivalent of 3-4 large and had some breading left over.
milk, 1 cup -- Just fill a small, flat-bottomed bowl up to an inch or two. I might try buttermilk some time down the road.
flour, 1/2 cup -- I may raise this to 3/4 cup.
corn meal, 1/2 cup -- If I use more flour, I'll lower this accordingly.
salt, 1 tsp -- This was too little: I'll use 2 tsp next.
pepper, 1 tsp -- This was too little: I'll use 2 tsp next.

Directions

1. While heating oil to 350 degrees, cut tomatoes into slices 3/8 inch thick.

2. In parallel with the next step, soak tomato slices in milk for a minute or two.

3. Mix flour, corn meal, salt, and pepper together in a sealable container.

4. Dredge tomato slices in flour-meal mixture and transfer to hot grease/oil.

5. Flip the slices when golden. -- This took about 3 minutes per side.

6. Take out of grease/oil and drain on paper towel.

Not a Revolutionary

A point Ayn Rand frequently made regarding why so many people reject the very idea of philosophy (even though they go right on living under its influence) is that so the much of the discipline has been so wrong on so many levels for so long that most people understandably reject it out of hand. (See Note below.) Since, as Rand also pointed out, men need philosophy in some form, this suspicion does nothing to stop them from seeking the kind of guidance it provides, although sometimes from quasi-philosophic sources, such as religion or misapplied science. A problem I have seen myself is that one way that pop philosophers take advantage of this state of affairs is by posing as intellectual mavericks. Sam Harris, famous for writing the ultimately mystical The End of Faith, is one such "maverick."

It is worthwhile to consider briefly in what way Harris poses as a maverick, in what way he isn't a true revolutionary, and why. Troy Jollimore reviews Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape for Barnes & Noble and finds it wanting. His reason for doing so strikes at the heart of all three of the questions I just raised.

It would be one thing to try to write intelligently about moral skepticism while avoiding the language of academic philosophy -- or at least, the unnecessarily finicky aspects of it -- with the hope of reaching a general audience. But to try to avoid not only the terminology, but large portions of the subject matter itself -- the "views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible" -- is to commit oneself to providing an incomplete and highly distorted account of the subject. This is unfortunate, given that Harris has a number of sensible and pertinent points to contribute to the debate. Moral skepticism is all too frequently advanced by people who have no idea what the arguments for it are, as if it were simply an obvious fact, accepted by all reasonable persons, that values cannot possibly aspire to the objectivity of fact, and that any evaluation must, at the end of the day, reduce to an expression of some indefensible preference or prejudice. Statements like "morality is just a matter of subjective opinion" are often uttered as if they required no defense -- even when it is easy to demonstrate that the skeptics themselves live and behave in ways that appear deeply incompatible with their alleged skepticism. [bold added]

I submit that Harris, although he holds himself out to be a champion of objective morality, is among those who unwittingly advance moral relativism precisely because he fails to engage the questions of moral philosophy -- although perhaps to a far worse extent that even his reviewer sees. This is a shame, because if Harris really were a champion of objective morality, he would be a true revolutionary!

As I noted years ago when I reviewed The End of Faith, Harris is, ethically, an altruist: "But there are far better reasons for self-sacrifice than those that religion provides." (p. 78) And what might those reasons be? Jollimore picks through Harris's footnote-littered Landscape to give us an indication:

A proper understanding of morality, [Harris] argues, will reveal that it falls well within the area of inquiry that is governed by science. For moral questions are questions about well-being, and questions about well-being are, in essence, empirical questions about what makes humans and other conscious organisms flourish and thrive. "Questions about values -- about meaning, morality, and life's larger purpose -- are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures," he announces on page one. "Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood."

This sounds like a promising start, but look where it ends up! Jollimore quotes Harris:

[Robert] Nozick . . . asks if it would be ethical for our species to be sacrificed for the unimaginably vast happiness of some superbeings. Provided that we take the time to really imagine the details (which is not easy), I think the answer is clearly "yes." There seems no reason to suppose that we must occupy the highest peak on the moral landscape.

If we take, say, one's race as one such "superbeing," it's not too hard to imagine where's Harris's train is going to take us. [Clarification: Harris's contention that our species can be sacrificed clearly indicates that he's okay with the sacrifice of individuals, as implicit in the above.]

What went wrong? Consider where another philosopher started her moral inquiry on the path to proposing an objective morality and reaching very different conclusions regarding human sacrifice.

What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions -- the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all -- and why?

Elsewhere, Ayn Rand asks two other relevant questions that Harris never touches: "What is man?" and "What are values?" Interestingly, Rand notices something that Harris apparently fails to: that even non-conscious living beings have values -- but only rational beings must learn what their (moral) values are in order to pursue them and live. She also considers two major questions that Harris seems fuzzy on at best -- the standard of value in morality, as well as the proper recipient of values obtained by one's effort.

What does Harris do? He jumps in mid-stream, accepting, as far as I can tell, the following premises without question: man needs "values," and those "values" pertain to some woozily-imagined "well-being in the universe at large." This is not scientific, although it is very bad philosophy. This is not revolutionary. This is not even wrong, and as such is not objective at all.

But Harris says he's casting aside the errors of religion, so he must be a revolutionary, and he praises sacrifice, so he must be good. He'll pass as a revolutionary in the minds of plenty of people who want to flatter themselves as fans of an iconoclast while not having to question common ethical assumptions. But he'll fail to satisfy even the most minimally critical readers, and, in doing so, may only confirm what many of them already "know:" that morality is not a rational pursuit.

Harris will thus lead fans astray and waste detractors' time alike because, for a brief instant at the start of his inquiry, he decided against objectivity.

-- CAV

Note: To consider just a couple of levels: (1) patently absurd conclusions like, "We can't know anything;" and (2) a largely rationalistic methodology, which manifests (in part) in tedious, boring arguments that alienate most "men-on-the-street."

Updates

10-22-10: Added a clarification.

You Don't Say!

There is a small cottage industry of debunkery of arbitrary claims that needn't be debunked since they are, as Wolfgang Pauli so famously put it, "not even wrong." James Randi is perhaps the most famous such gun-and-barrel angler. Why that analogy? Because any attempt to "prove" the arbitrary will involve a vast rip somewhere between the supposed experimental "evidence" and the fabric of reality. All one needs is some knowledge of where to look for the rip.

A news story I encountered yesterday reminds me a little of some of Randi's debunkery, although what is being debunked is something that actually does have a relationship with reality: It is plainly wrong and has already been shown to be wrong with savage and deadly results numerous times. (The similarity with debunkery of arbitrary claims is superficial. You needn't hunt for evidence against the arbitrary -- and won't necessarily find it; with the already-disproven non-arbitrary claim here, the additional evidence is superfluous.) That "something" is the whole idea that the "Palestinians" are genuinely interested in peace with Israel. In fact, the beginning of the article gives us a small taste of the kind of evidence that is swept aside with each fresh attempt at the "peace" process:

In the waning days of his presidency, Bill Clinton believed Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians were prepared to make peace. In September 2000, the Palestinians launched a guerrilla war. Five years later, President George W. Bush believed the secular Fatah faction would win the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006. Instead, the Islamist terror organization Hamas won by a large margin. Drawing from erroneous poll data and misreading the realities on the ground, Washington has too often minimized antipeace sentiment on the Palestinian street. Is President Barack Obama, in his current push for Middle East peace, about to repeat the mistakes of presidents past?

As if Obama needs any further evidence that he is wasting time (at best) -- and as if he will heed their warning -- the Foundation for Defense of Democracies recently commissioned a study of Palestinian sentiment expressed on line. What that study found comes as no surprise:

Although the Palestinian web landscape is not devoid of users with moderate to liberal views, it is dominated by radicalism. There is also little crossover between radical and liberal sites, indicating a lack of important debate.

Among radicalized users, a small but distinct group of Salafists (prevalent on sites like muslm.net and aljazeeratalk.net) view conflict with Israel as a religious duty, viewing jihad as the only answer. One alarming trend was the extent to which Hamas supporters engaged Salafists in dialogue to iron out their theological differences. If Hamas and these Taliban-like groups find common cause in Gaza, it would bode very poorly for peace.

To be sure, Hamas's supporters were not monolithic about politics or Islam. But, drawing from Hamas' most popular discussion sites, our research found that a majority of them continue to support violence against Israel. On this score, Hamas showed little disagreement with Salafists.

...

Finally, our data showed that a majority of Palestinians do not support regional peace efforts. Palestinian internet users often derided diplomatic initiatives; discussion of peace talks was overwhelmingly negative. Thus, despite Washington's efforts to win Palestinian hearts and minds, the social media environment suggests that they have little support for a new peace initiative.

Although the study does uncover new information, it reminds me further of other instances in which conservatives or libertarians have shown that the facts favor some policy position they support, and yet found themselves scratching their heads at the prevailing direction of the political momentum. Privatized education and freedom in medicine are prime examples, and I recall commenting on these some time ago, after reading about some public policy "experiments" proposed by Arnold Kling:

What makes Kling think that the Democrats are going to be persuaded that school choice "works" from any evidence provided by such an experiment when there is already overwhelming evidence that public education is a miserable failure? And then there's the matter of school choice opponents selecting "indicators". I can think of lots of political indoctrination that the private school kids will miss out on and so be found "deficient". Come time to vote on whether to expand or terminate the experiment, the Democrats will have, with a big assist from the media, made it sound like the private schools were Hitler Youth Camps or worse. The experiment would end.

Not to pooh-pooh hard data, but it is worthless as a source of guidance or a means of persuasion without an integrating theoretical framework that relates it to a goal. Where conservatives and libertarians fall short (in slightly different ways) is through neglect of the need for this theoretical foundation.

The goal is for us to survive as men, and any theory uniting facts of reality with such a goal must give us guidance in how to act (i.e., ethics) and organize our society (i.e., politics). Conservatives imagine that the guidance is both arbitrary and often inapplicable to "real life" and libertarians pretend that such guidance is unnecessary. Until that changes -- or a better alternative gains cultural prominence -- we will have our fill of evidence against bad public policy that gets repeatedly ignored anyway.

-- CAV

Moral Chicanery

Jonathan Cohn, not satisfied that the world's billionaires are giving away their fortunes fast enough (surprise!), makes what he calls "Moral Arguments for Soaking the Rich" at The New Republic.

I ask you, gentle reader, to suppress the urge to tell him to put his money where his mouth is, give away all his possessions, and move to a third world slum -- at least long enough to consider what a tour de force of context-dropping this article is. (And that would be on top of his common, but unspoken assumption that morality equals altruism.)

According to the Republicans and many of their supporters, allowing tax rates on upper incomes to rise would punish the rich for their success, taking away money that the rich have earned. But this argument suffers from two key flaws.

One is that it fails to account for the power of luck. Almost by definition, people who are successful have benefited from some measure of good fortune. That fortune can take the form of obvious, material advantages--like access to advanced technology and good schools. Or it can take the form of more subtle, but still important, assets for moving forward in life--like good health or loving parents.

...

The other, albeit related, flaw in the conservative argument is that it fails to acknowledge the debt wealthy people owe to society. As Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly argue in their 2008 book, Unjust Desserts [sic],the proverbial self-made man is not exactly self-made. He (or she) is benefiting from the accomplishments of past generations, not to mention the support of public institutions (like the National Science Foundation) and services (like schools) that foster innovation and lead to greater productivity. [links dropped]

Cohn's arguments are both attempts to attack the virtue of justice by pretending that human character has basically nothing to do with the creation of wealth. He looks like he has launched a two-pronged attack, but each prong is just a different way of equating material gain with chance.

Cohn's first argument works in a similar way to cold reading, and relies on subjective validation: He knows that his less-wealthy readers will recall events in their personal histories that might have left them better off had they turned out differently and that his wealthier readers will recall events that could have left them poorer had they turned out differently. Cohn doesn't completely discount moral character, though: He just wants everyone to focus on the "could-have-been" long enough to forget the "actually-happened" at a few discrete points in their lives, as well as the fact that real success requires persistence, hard work, and (gasp!) a conquering of bad luck (aka adversity). In fact, everyone faces bad fortune and everyone catches a break once in a while. And everyone has to play with the hand he is dealt. Cohn wants us to pretend that the last never happens. It's basically all in the cards, and those rich people get royal flushes every time.

Cohn's second argument attacks the role of character in the creation of wealth by basically claiming that the odds have been stacked for the wealthy. Again, we are to ignore all the formerly rich wastrels out there and, I guess, the fact that -- at least in the case of his American readership -- we all grew up "benefiting from the [same] accomplishments of past generations" and various social institutions that any number of much more (and much less) successful contemporaries have. Of course, all we're really supposed to focus on is how those rich people leeched on Thomas Edison's work, the NSF, and our educational infrastructure while we -- oh, never mind.

But all that's nothing compared to the massive evasion about the whole purpose of Cohn's article, which is this: to justify taking money from the rich on the grounds that they don't deserve their money. (As if we'll "deserve" it after we take it from them by force.) Think about that for a second.

To Cohn, possession of wealth is, ipso facto, proof that it's okay to plunder it. Watch your wallet when church lets out: A common thief is at the pulpit delivering the sermon.

-- CAV

A Daily Arm Wrestle

Over at Spiked is an interesting look at a daily struggle between the trapped Chilean miners and the patronizing team of psychologists in charge of helping them through their ordeal.

One of the medical experts at San Jose -- part of a team of 300 people that oversaw the men's health and needs -- said there was a "daily arm wrestle" between the miners and the psychology team. That isn't surprising. The mental-health experts overground used a system of "prizes and punishments" to try to control the men's behaviour -- for their own good, of course. So when the men assented to hour-long phone calls with the mental-health team, as they did when they were first found to be alive 17 days after getting trapped, they were rewarded with prizes such as access to TV shows. But when they refused to talk to the psychologists, as they started to do in mid-September when their health and body weight were improving as a result of sent-down food and they insisted that "we are well," the psychology team would deprive them of luxuries. As one on-site doctor put it: "We have to say, 'OK, you don't want to speak with psychologists? Perfect. That day you get no TV, there is no music -- because we administer these things.'" [minor format edits]

The article comes across as more dismissive than critical of psychology, but it is worth a read.

-- CAV

Denial -- of What?

A New York Times editorial laments the fact that none of the Republican Senate candidates accept what it calls the scientific consensus that the world's climate is warming due to human activity.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

What's really lamentable here is left unmentioned by the article as well as by both "sides" of this "debate:" the fact that the GOP is in worse-than-denial about the founding principles of our country and the proper purpose of government. Both forbid any of the alleged Big Brother "solutions" to such a problem as global warming. There is not one mention in the article -- nor have I any recollection -- of any Republican politician making a stand like, "I don't give a damn what the science says: It still wouldn't make 'cap and trade' fuel rationing the right thing to do -- or a part of my job!"

Instead, even if the GOP gives the Democrats the shellacking they deserve this November, we are at the mercy of whether a GOP Congress believes that man-made global warming is real, and whether it sees similar legislation of its own as desirable in some expedient sense.

People warn of complacency setting in before the elections, but the far bigger danger is letting it set in after. Too many in the GOP who even know that political principles exist are in denial about their nature and importance.

-- CAV

10-16-10 Hodgepodge

More on the Peikoff-McCaskey Dispute

I commend to the reader the following blog posts:

• "The Resignation of John McCaskey: The Facts," by Paul and Diana Hsieh
• "Best Approach to Disputes in a Movement?," by Burgess Laughlin

I look forward to perusing the very long comment thread at the NoodleFood post upon my return to Boston this evening. Just scanning, I see that it includes comments by Dismuke, North Bridge, and Travis Norsen, all of whom I respect. Also, I became aware of Travis Norsen's review of David Harriman's The Logical Leap long before I was aware that there was any kind of dispute. I found the review thought-provoking.

As Objectivism continues to grow and to gather momentum as an intellectual movement, Objectivist thinkers will necessarily grapple both with complex philosophical questions outside of Objectivism, such as the theory of induction -- and with non-obvious applications of the philosophy to other areas, some of them new, or difficult to investigate for some other reason. In each case, there can sometimes be lots of room for honest disagreement, unlike in the case of fundamental philosophical principles. This dispute, as well as some non-philosophical disagreements I have recently had with other Objectivists, makes this issue starkly apparent to me.

In a past job, a coworker explained to me our boss's practice of raking people over the coals during lab meetings. "Would you rather have him ask the hard questions now, among friends, or would you rather get them at a conference?" This is what we Objectivists must do for each other when we can on these new frontiers. I have nothing to say one way or the other about how this book was critiqued before it was released, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is flawed. I'd rather see another Objectivist be the first to point that out.

My naive sense of this dispute is that there has been at least some kind of misunderstanding on the order of the etiquette necessary to handle such disagreements. (I claim no particular expertise in that department.) And even if I am completely wrong about that, the issue remains that sometimes the best way to support a colleague is to challenge what he says.

Whether or not my impression is correct, this dispute has helped me see that there is an important issue here that isn't going to go away any time soon.

Weekend Reading

"... 87% of individual investors throw away their proxy statements, which is unfortunate considering how – as Western’s gutsy activism demonstrates – those votes directly impact how companies and funds are managed." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "The Case for Shareholder Activism" at Smart Money

"[T]he silent killer would take its toll in the form of additional expenses $5,000 more -- each year -- larger than their entire medical budget. Had they known this, they would have begged the president to forget about ObamaCare and get this relentless and remorseless killer out of their lives." -- Gus Van Horn, in "Government Regulation of the Economy Is the 'Silent Killer'," Pajamas Media

Comment of the Week

This one's over at Pajamas Media: "I am an entrepreneur. As little as 5 yrs ago I would tell myself it cost $50k to create a 'Sam' job. The number is now $100k and rising rapidly, especially with ObieCare." -- Ben Cook

From the Vault

Around this time in 2007, I quoted the following from the '92 platform of a major U. S. political party. It seems remarkably apropos now, with the midterm elections fast approaching:

Freedom of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty ... must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever.... We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental ... doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.

No. Were we so lucky that this had been in the Republican platform! This is from the Democratic platform ... in 1892. I'd be happy to see something like this in at least one of the major parties' platforms ... on the way towards a pledge to realize laissez-faire capitalism.

A Triumph of Capitalism

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal writes about the pivotal role of the profit motive in the dramatic rescue of the Chilean miners.

The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

A remarkable Sept. 30 story about all this by the Journal's Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.

It was nice to see an article like this after seeing "greed" blamed for the miners' predicament several times on the news.

That said, a newscast I watched did grudgingly report that a Bolivian miner rebuffed an offer of free (confiscated?) land from leftist president Evo Morales: "The miner has agreed to visit Bolivia next week. But his family says he wants to remain in Chile – a setback to Morales, who promised to bring Bolivia's most famous miner home with him."

-- CAV

Let's Stop This Silent Killer

My op-ed about government regulation as a "silent killer" afflicting millions of Americans now appears at Pajamas Media.

I'm not quoting from the op-ed here because I took an unorthodox, anecdotal approach with it. What I will do here is describe why I ended up doing that, because I find it intriguing as a writer.

I wrestled with this topic one night, but beyond an intro that I heavily edited later, I remained stuck with a single paragraph. (That dense, impenetrable thicket of facts eventually became the basis for the three paragraphs before the last in the article.) By the time I returned to work on it again, though, something had clicked and the words just flowed. The following, which I cut from an earlier draft, summarizes well what the problem was.

Public awareness campaigns about deadly, but hard-to-detect diseases often vie for attention with clever sound bytes, like "the silent killer." But beyond the novelty, these phrases utterly fail to convey what such a condition can mean to an individual human being. Statistics can be even worse: Data that should be a clarion call instead muffles us behind a layer of abstraction. Double for the staggering costs. Already hard to come to grips with, these figures land on overwhelmed ears.

And triple for the solution, especially when the problem is cultural and political in nature like this one. I'm glad I was able to work in an approach to solving the problem at the end. On top of all that, I was baffled as to how to discuss the annoyance of appliance regulations and the destructive, cumulative effects of regulation in a single article. This approach solved that problem as well.

I'd like to thank Amit Ghate for suggesting I turn this topic into an op-ed and Paul Hsieh for his editorial feedback.

-- CAV

Socialist Myth Exposed

Via Arts and Letters Daily is an interesting article by entomologist Deborah Gordon about ant behavior that skewers the ant-colony-as-social-ideal trope cherished by collectivists and other fans of individual sacrifice. More positively, there are valuable lessons with real-world applications to be had from understanding how self-organizing systems like ant colonies actually work.

Understanding how ant colonies actually function means that we have to abandon explanations based on central control. This takes us into difficult and unfamiliar terrain. We are deeply attached to the idea that any system of interacting agents must be organized through hierarchy. Our metaphors for describing the behavior of such systems are permeated with notions of a chain of command. For example, we explain what our bodies do by talking about genes as "blueprints," unvarying instructions passed from an architect to a builder. But we know that instructions from genes constantly change, as genes turn off and on in response to local interactions among cells.

And, later on in the article:

The tension between what we really know about ants -- that no ant directs the behavior of another -- and the familiar metaphors for social organization, permeates not only our stories about ants, but also the scientific study of ants. These contradictions appear in biologist E. O. Wilson's novel Anthill (2010), ...

Of course, this new information will do nothing to deter little dictators from working to transform human society into the kind of paradise they imagine an anthill to be. After all, the desire to shoehorn men into such a society depends in part on ignoring man's nature in the first place.

At best, such utopians will move on to a different metaphor. Why? Because while anyone can see the study of nature as requiring objectivity, too many effectively place man outside nature, exempting such fields as ethics and politics from rational study. Fortunately, I know of at least one thinker who does not make such an error.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Changed "etymologist" to "entomologist." Never trust a spell-checker! (2) Added a hyphen.

Stossel on Economic Freedom

John Stossel reports that the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom lowers the ranking of the United States to eighth out of 179 nations (and behind Canada). I find the first sentence of the following especially worrisome:

[Bill] Beach [of the Heritage Foundation] adds that the rule of law declined when the Obama administration declared some contracts to be null and void. For example, bondholders in the auto industry were forced to the back of the creditor line during bankruptcy. And there's more regulation of business, such as the Dodd-Frank law for the financial industry and the new credit-card law. But how could the United States place behind Canada? Isn't Canada practically a socialist country?

Rule of law -- sometimes including even bad laws, if they are predictable -- is far more conducive to long-range planning than anarchy or the whims of a dictator (which are functionally the same in many respects). The avalanche of new regulations will function in a way more similar to the absence of law than bad law until its extent is fully known.

-- CAV

Dismal Debate

Over at Spiked is an article on a debate over college spending that has been going on in Britain for some time. What is remarkable about the article is that it illustrates nicely how bad philosophical fundamentals can cripple even the most thoughtful attempts to approach such questions. Here is the closing of that essay.

[T]here is an alternate, humanistic view of higher education that stretches from the recently beatified John Henry Newman, via Matthew Arnold, right up to the 1963 government-backed Robbins Report on giving more social classes the opportunity to study. And it's a view that conceives of education, of subject-centred learning and research, as a good in itself. As the Robbins committee wrote: "[The] search for truth is an essential function of the institutions of higher education, and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes in the nature of discovery." Such arguments for higher education conceive its value in non-monetary terms. Its ends were not seen as extrinsic to education; they were intrinsic.

Of course one cannot simply resuscitate such ideals. The historical conditions -- a sense of Britain as a world power, with a world mission -- that enabled Matthew Arnold, for instance, to talk confidently of the universal importance of "the best which has been thought and said in the world" are long gone. But right now, with the supporters of higher education parroting the same vacuous, bean-counting nonsense as its critics, there needs to at least be an attempt to address the purpose of education in terms other than those of the dismal science. [minor edits]

The forgotten man in Tim Black's essay is the one man who could correctly frame this debate and thereby end it properly: the individual. The very fertile question, "Of what value is an education?" is rendered barren without reference to him, and Black, like countless other thinkers and men-on-the-street is left with an unsatisfactory "alternative:" (1) claiming that education has some incalculable, "higher" value intrinsic to itself -- or (2) claiming that education has some calculable, "lower" value determined by the needs of "society." In either case, why an individual might value an education is forgotten (or taken for granted at best), and how it might benefit an individual is given short shrift. And so, the question of why some individuals should pay for what other individuals get remains unexamined, as does the one idea that must be "resuscitated:" that one ought to pay for such things oneself.

This false dilemma can be solved only by considering what values are, and why we need them, on which question I'll defer to Ayn Rand.

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between "is" and "ought." (from "The Objectivist Ethics," in The Virtue of Selfishness, 17)

So long as one considers the "value" of an individual's education apart from the individual's needs, absurd debates like the one Black discusses will drone on and on, with either "bean-counters" on both sides -- or with bean-counters on one side conducting cost-benefit analyses on behalf of the Leviathan state, and Pollyannas on the other side saying that the value of an education is too high to worry about its expense. The individual remains out in the cold, the matters of whether he is educated, and whether he will have to pay for an education, severed from each other -- and at the mercy of whoever "wins" the debate.

Black's use of the term "dismal science" is interesting here, given that he sides with the Polyannas. (Spiked is a more-or-less pro-free-market site, and Black sees a dire problem with making only a "bean-counter's case" for higher education. That said, Black seems to lack confidence in capitalism: otherwise, why not stand up for a fully private educational sector?) Since what passes for fiscal restraint (and hence, pro-capitalism) in Europe is the bean-counting type, this essay can easily come off as cautioning against going "too far" in the direction of economic analysis (and hence, capitalism). (That may well be the case, and the fact that too many classical liberals avoid making a moral case for capitalism plays right into this.) Economic analysis does need to be complemented by moral analysis, but a morality severed from reality won't save the day.)

The term "dismal science" here seems to imply that Black finds such cost-benefit analysis short-sighted and beneath dignity. Right answer, wrong reason! Here's the right answer: If man's individual life is the proper standard of value, how long-range can one's thinking be when such matters as his education and his finances are left to the whims of others? Cost-benefit analysis is proper only in contexts where no party is being coerced, and, properly applied, is an indispensable guide to rational planning. If Bill's attending college to major in English will make him a pauper, he ought to know this ahead of time so he can decide whether to do so with open eyes. What's so "dismal" about him deciding that a comfortable lifestyle is important enough to forgo college, or of deciding he loves literature enough to make less money? There are no guarantees in life -- and guaranteeing that others will be forced to soften any blow to Bill can only spread misery -- and there is nothing "dismal" about owning up to that.

But one sees that economics is anything but "dismal" only when one regards the individual -- man's life -- as the proper moral standard. Otherwise, the "dismal science" is seen as depriving Bill of college so he can contribute more the the GDP -- with only an appeal to some Platonic ideal of Education as a recourse.

In such retrospect, it seems diabolically clever it was on the part of Thomas Carlyle to have nicknamed economics "the dismal science" when he saw that it, "finds the secret of this universe in 'supply-and-demand,' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone." Economic analysis frequently demolishes the whole idea that we should have a welfare state (the close cousin of the slavery Carlyle sought to defend). To anyone with any goal that contradicts full government protection of individual rights, economics will look like a "dismal science," and to such a person, it will seem advantageous to belittle such a science.

-- CAV

Drowning in Law

Note: Posting may be light to absent over the next few days due to travel.

***

Via RealClear Politics, I have found a long, but very promising article about how regulations are thwarting American entrepreneurs:

Instead, the land of opportunity is more like legal quicksand. Small business owners face legal challenges at every step. Municipalities requires multiple and often nonsensical forms to do business. Labor laws expose them to legal threats by any disgruntled employee. Mandates to provide costly employment benefits impose high hurdles to hiring new employees. Well-meaning but impossibly complex laws impose requirements to prevent consumer fraud, provide disability access, prevent hiring illegal immigrants, display warnings and notices and prevent scores of other potential evils. The tax code is incomprehensible.

All of this requires legal and other overhead - costing 50% more per employee for small businesses than big businesses.

Sounds like a certain report I ran into not long ago is making the rounds...

-- CAV

Two Classics Converge

Sunday morning, I read an article about fictional restaurants food writer Marene Gustin wishes she could visit. The piece reminded me of a favorite television series -- and the series, in turn reminded me indirectly Leonard Peikoff's "Objective Communication" course, which I am taking.

Like Gustin, I own the DVDs for the series, but I still got a good chuckle out of the below scene.

Here, we see, in rapid succession, two very different ways of suggesting that someone really ought to sample his food before seasoning it. My guess is that one would probably work better than the other on most people. However, the less effective persuader does get points for virtuosity in the art of the insult: "I hate you with a passion you can only dream of." The dialog of the series is full of gems like that.

I am pretty sure I've seen the entire series by now, but the story arc of the third season makes it much less enjoyable than the first two.

-- CAV

PS: At the very end of the segment, the woman in the polka dots reminds me of the following question someone once asked Ayn Rand after she explained why nationalization would be bad for the steel industry: "I understand why regulation is wrong in the steel industry, but what about the coal industry?"

10-9-10 Hodgepodge

Tracinski's Crack-Up

As someone who once actively promoted the work of Robert Tracinski, I feel obligated to urge anyone who has read his take on the Peikoff-McCaskey dispute to work towards a more complete perspective. Perusing the post and discussion on that matter at New Clarion, particularly the remarks by Dismuke and North Bridge, would be a good place to start.

Weekend Reading

"Thus Rand not only establishes how to champion limited government without appealing to religion — she also shows why we must." -- Amit Ghate in "Values and the Defense of Freedom" at PajamasMedia

"Western civilization did not originate slavery, racism, warfare, or disease--but with America as its exemplar, that civilization created the antidotes. " -- Thomas Bowden in "Let's Take Back Columbus Day" at FoxNews

"Can it be that antitrust prosecution of Apple would serve no purpose other than punishing the company for its success? The evidence points in that direction." -- Thomas Bowden in "Apple Now Targeted for Success" at Investors.com

"By intervening in markets, bureaucrats succeed only in manufacturing the panic and unnecessary volatility they had hoped to prevent." -- John Hoenig in "How to Ruin the Stock Market" at SmartMoney

"Obama was correct when he said we are a nation of citizens bound by a set of values. But as to what those values are, he hasn't a clue. Sadly, many Americans don't, either." -- Charlotte Cushman in "Is America a Christian Nation?" at The American Thinker

Procrastination Article

Over at Lifehacker is what looks to be an excellent article on procrastination. It may sound like I'm joking or procrastinating or both, but I probably won't get around to it myself until tomorrow...

From The Vault

Today last year, I posted some gorgeous photos of Boston.

Houston Metro Unveils Rickshaw Lines

Heh!

-- CAV

Periodic Tables

Over at Mental Floss this morning, I encountered a pretty good list of gag tables modeled after the Periodic Table of the Elements. (That said, I don't watch Mad Men, so the merits of the first table are lost on me.) My favorite among them by far is Crispian Jago's "Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense," which I show below, and which I believe he is merchandising successfully. (Scroll down at the link.)


Jago seems unfortunately to have fallen partially under the spell of Peter Singer, so there are a few "elements" missing from his table, but I like what he's cataloged so far!

And missing from the above list of tables is an old favorite of mine, the "Beeriodic Table," which I have on a tee shirt very similar to the one pictured at this link. (But it looks like it appears on one of the other lists at the bottom of the page there...)

-- CAV

Trickle-Down Altruism

Some time ago, in a reply to a comment, I recounted the first time my childhood interest in science caused me to become skeptical of the kinds of doomsday claims that are the stock-in-trade of environmentalists.

My epiphany was learning about the water cycle after a year or so of turning the faucet off and on when I brushed my teeth in order to "conserve water."

It never occurred to me wonder what an environmentalist would say were this inconvenient physical phenomenon brought up as an objection to the left's fatwa against green lawns, hot showers, and clean laundry.

Nevertheless, this morning over at Slate, I got to see exactly that. A reader asks the "Green Lantern" the following question: "[H]ow is it possible to waste water when it's constantly being recycled through evaporation and rain?"

Water shortages are really a problem of distribution. We may have enough freshwater on Earth to meet the global population's current needs, but we can't always make it available where it's needed, when it's needed, and in the quality in which it's needed.

So far, so good. Of course, part of the reason it never occurred to me to ask the above question is that when it was most on my mind, the eco-propaganda of the day ignored the finer points of the actual problem. One commercial stands out in my mind for its dishonest image of an Earth-as-round-sponge being thoroughly squeezed by a pair of pasty white hands for the few drops of water it contained.

Since then, environmentalists have had to become somewhat more sophisticated. Today, instead of glossing over the fact that we can easily make up for local shortfalls in the availability of water, they (grudgingly and incompletely) acknowledge that such shortfalls can be addressed. However, they still make it seem harder than it is, imply that it's a waste of other of the "Earth's" resources, and call it "sinful" to boot:

Let's say your city takes water from a nearby river and then returns its treated wastewater to the same source. (This is usually how it works in cities that withdraw from surface waters.) In that case, the water that goes down your sinks, toilets, and tubs stays in the local system; it quickly gets recycled, becoming available for reuse in the same community.

On the other hand, water sprayed on a lawn will ultimately evaporate or transpire -- it's essentially lost to the community, making it what's known as a consumptive use. (That category also includes most water consumed by humans, animals, and plants, or incorporated into products.) That water may return from the atmosphere as rain, but if you live in an area that doesn't get a lot of precipitation, then you can't exactly count on receiving a timely, balance-restoring [local] deposit. ...

If you live in a city that pumps most of its water out of the ground, however, the distinction between consumptive and nonconsumptive uses may be moot. Though some utilities make an effort to pump treated wastewater back into the source aquifer, most discharge it into a stream or river that eventually flows out to the ocean -- meaning water that spirals down your drain doesn't get returned to the city's account. So in those areas, epic showers are just as sinful as profligate lawn spraying.

Energy costs further distort the image of water as a renewable resource. For every gallon of tap water you use, your utility company has to extract it, clean it, pump it to your house, pump it back out, reclean it, and eventually discharge it. [links dropped]

Left unmentioned, in part because the era of public utilities has caused many people to forget that such a thing even exists, and in part because it would quickly solve the many real problems of water supply we face today is the Law of Supply and Demand. As Thomas Sowell once noted regarding a water shortage in the American West:

Like everything that is made artificially cheap, water is used lavishly, including the growing of crops like cotton that require huge amounts of water. It is one thing to grow cotton in Southern states with abundant rainfall. It is something else to grow it out in a California desert with water supplied largely at the taxpayers' expense.

So what if some guy in Phoenix wants a green yard? If he can pay for it, he should have it: In a free market with full protection of property rights, if he can buy that kind of water, all this nattering about exactly how much water is in any given locale at any given time will have already been rendered moot.

But to solve a real problem, one must first identify a real problem, and to do that, one must correctly identify for whom something might be a problem. That is, one's practical questions always end up being dictated by normative criteria (and thus, a standard of value), and this explains both why we didn't adopt free market solutions to the problem of water supply long ago and why "advances" in environmentalist thought resemble those in creationism in that they light from one "gap" in common knowledge to another.

Environmentalists see water shortages as a problem of keeping humans from using water, rather than as how to help men get what they need. Thus, environmentalists are looking for convenient excuses, while capitalists are fighting for their lives.

As long as someone's "needing" water trumps someone else's ability to earn it as a criterion for public policy, we will have artificially cheap water, as well as the waste and shortages that go with it. And as long the basis for most people's thinking about ethics involves a prohibition against egoism, it will be to whom (or to what) we give away all this life-giving water that will also drive public policy.

As to the excuses: There is just enough selfishness -- thank goodness -- left in the American people that environmentalists have to pretend to justify their quasi-religious strictures with a veneer of rational- and scientific-sounding reasoning. But for all the conservatives -- Sowell emphatically included -- who think that all that must be done is to strip away this veneer to discredit this ilk once and for all, I have a question: Why, after five decades of debunkery, is environmentalism stronger than ever as a cultural force?

Hint: Don't dismiss the concept of "sin" so easily -- either as motivation or as impossible to ground rationally (and thereby correct once and for all).

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.