4-30-11 Hodgepodge

Another Thought on Biased Thinking while Thinking about Biased Thinking

Heh!

Earlier in the week, I looked at an article that made good points about biased thinking -- only to end with an example of its author's own biased thinking! Yesterday, I encountered another such discussion. Here's a good point, from a post called, "Climate, Vaccines, and Human Psychology: The Public vs. Science," over at Ars Technica.

David Ropeik, a journalist turned lecturer and consultant, started off by describing why the public doesn't always come to terms with science. The first point he mentioned is that all of us, even experts, never have a complete picture of a complex topic -- he termed the situation "bounded rationality," where we try to make reasonable extrapolations from the information we do have. He also pointed to the work of Dan Kahan, which has indicated that we accept or reject information in a way that reinforces our identity as part of a social group. If you think your peers don't like evolution, for example, you're more likely to reject information that supports it. [links removed]

On the one hand, Ropeik does a good job of describing some of the problems related to the fact that we can't all be experts in every scientific field -- as have quite a few other scientists and commentators lately. On the other hand, I find it richly ironic that these same commentators exhibit a sheep-like conformity of political opinion on the matter of whether certain issues, like man-made global warming, are legitimate political concerns.

Might many scientists, dependent as they are on government funding, and as fashionable as socialism is, be making the very kinds of cognitive errors (innocently or not) regarding political philosophy, as they see laymen making about their fields of specialization? At the end of the day, economy-wide fuel rationing imposed by the Leviathan state does not follow from even the most ironclad case for global warming.

Weekend Reading

"... America now faces a dangerous duopoly: a religious left and right alike that have made peace with the welfare-warfare state, to the detriment of lovers of reason, liberty and capitalism." -- Richard Salsman, in "Holy Scripture and the Welfare State" at Forbes

"Bernanke has an opinion on the economy, but so do millions of other participants -- and their actions drive the market prices of everything we trade. That's what we should watch." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Beranke's Confident. Why Isn't Anyone Else?" at SmartMoney

"People who achieve excellence and develop competence along the way avoid an irrational desire for infallibility." -- Michael Hurd, in "You Can't Be too Perfect" at DrHurd.com

"If you've seen the new Atlas Shrugged movie but haven't yet read the book, you may be wondering what the novel itself has to offer." -- Onkar Ghate, in "The Radicalness of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged" at Fox News

My Two Cents

The Ghate quote is his first sentence. I haven't chuckled this much from the hook of an op-ed in a long time. And that's because I am aware that so much was left out of the movie.

A Douglas Adams Anecdote

Either of these gentlemen could have been me about fifteen years ago.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, [the stranger] stood up and walked away.

I'd react differently to such a situation now, but I'd leave without an amusing story. I'll stop now so as not to spoil it. Go ahead and read it all: It's short and very funny.

-- CAV

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An Original Technique?

This week, I randomly encountered a small slide show of stunning images created by German artist Simon Schubert, whose technique consists of folding paper. The text near the link that took me there led with a teaser about his technique, but there was no elaboration beyond the obvious. As you can see here, the images are impressive for the high level of detail Schubert achieves.

Information about the artist is almost as hard to come by as information about his technique. In the below excerpt, I quote almost everything of substance about Schubert from the Wikipedia entry about him:

Inspired by Surrealism as well as by Samuel Beckett, Schuberts works imagine architectonical settings, common situations and objects, whereas the material he uses are either simple or sophisticated - white paper folded or mixed media arrangements. Some of his paper foldings entered the West Collection, Oaks, PA, while the Saatchi Collection, London, owns sculptural works in mixed media. [footnote removed]

You can see many more such images at his website.

-- CAV

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With Help Like This...

John Stossel's latest column takes a look at how government handouts have harmed Amerindians, by comparing North Carolina's Lumbees, a tribe ineligible (at least for now) for government "help," to others. He has to start out, though, by debunking a recent claim by Barack Obama that, "Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans."

Ignored? Are you kidding me? They should be so lucky. The government has made most Indian tribes wards of the state. Government manages their land, provides their health care, and pays for housing and child care. Twenty different departments and agencies have special "native American" programs. The result? Indians have the highest poverty rate, nearly 25 percent, and the lowest life expectancy of any group in America. Sixty-six percent are born to single mothers.

Against this backdrop, and after informing us that there are efforts underway to add the Lumbees to the government rolls, Stossel gives us a whirlwind tour of the fruits of this neglect:

Lumbees own their homes and succeed in business. They include real estate developer Jim Thomas, who used to own the Sacramento Kings, and Jack Lowery, who helped start the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Lumbees started the first Indian-owned bank, which now has 12 branches.

The Lumbees' wealth is not from casino money.

And later, Stossel quotes Lumbee businessman Ben Chavis on why this is so:

Because a government trust controls most Indian property, individuals rarely build nice homes or businesses. "No individual on the reservation owns the land. So they can't develop it," Chavis added. "Look at my tribe. We have title and deeds to our land. That's the secret. I raise cattle. I can do what I want to because it's my private property."

Read the whole thing. Most Americans are unaware of the intrusiveness of the government in the daily lives of Amerindians. This not only helps perpetuate the idea that government handouts are a solution to the poverty so many suffer, but it also keeps the public at large from grasping what is, in fact, a cautionary tale about where this country overall is heading.

-- CAV

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Eager to Smear

Here's another one I probably should have seen coming...

Some time ago, when I encountered news that Haley Barbour might run for President, I commented on how eager the left was to paint him as a racist hick, rather than focus on his qualifications or actual political philosophy. What I didn't foresee was the wave of polling of his fellow Mississippians that has ensued, and what leftist commentators would do with it. Whether the polling was prompted by Barbour's possible candidacy, I am uncertain, but so what? The left obviously imagines it has found a gold mine.

Citing a poll result that would have surprised me until recently, but which really isn't news at this point, a Slate blogger comments as follows on the finding that nearly half of Republican voters from Mississippi wish the South had won the Civil War:

I can't get enough of these Public Policy Polling surveys, and to tell the truth I wish they were doing more. How many Republicans in North Dakota think that Barack Obama might be the antichrist? How many Democrats in Cook County, Illinois think the planes that hit the World Trade Center were actually holograms? How many people think tax cuts always increase revenue? [bold added]

Please note the caricature of -- and the blatant attempt to cause the reader to associate racism and gullibility for conspiracy theories with -- the idea of reducing our confiscatory tax rates. That idea (and the fact that Republicans often support it) is, at best, a sloppy surrogate for the "unknown ideal" of capitalism.

I know why the poll results surprised me: I grew up in Mississippi and know for a fact that that there are lots of decent people there. But it shouldn't have surprised me how the results are being used. The left has long used smears like this against opponents, and commonly portrays itself as rational or scientific -- and its opponents as, therefore, evasive or worse.

I am an individualist and a capitalist. If some cowardly leftist wants to claim knowledge of my inner thoughts -- by polling other people; or wants to pretend to explain my political philosophy -- by expressing it in two out-of-context words; or wants to dismiss anything I might have to say -- by insinuating that it's as connected to reality as a conspiracy theory; well, there's nothing I can do stop him. What I can do is continue my efforts to make a rational case for my opinions to the only people who really concern me: those who value the truth, and who, therefore, will evaluate my arguments on their actual merits.

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Another left-wing tactic/confession of impotence in the market of ideas -- and one that has been on the wane lately, at least as far as Ayn Rand goes -- is marginalization. Might the lack of a movie review for Atlas Shrugged by the New York Times thus best be described, along those lines, as an anachronism?

"What the hell am I doing in AP?" A retired school teacher describes how a school used unprepared students to make itself look good by corralling them into AP classes.

Most Egyptians want a legal and political system based on the Koran. If that happens, those who want it will get what they deserve, and those who don't will, sadly, also get what their opponents deserve.

The name "Joe Cimperman" would have fit right in as the name of a minor Atlas Shrugged villain: Cleveland imposes nanny-state regulation on smoking, trans-fats, and ...

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Whew?

In one sense, this could be good news:

Just like that, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour is out of the 2012 presidential sweepstakes.

It would be good news, in part because, despite his initially low polling numbers (and as the above-linked article argues), Haley Barbour has much more going for him politically than many would guess. It would also be good news because Barbour is credited for engineering the 1994 Republican congressional victory, yet seems to have escaped any blame for that "revolution" completely dissipating.

Barbour became a large part of the Republican effort to oppose President Clinton, and helped craft a strategy to take back control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in 40 years, working closely with Newt Gingrich and other congressional Republicans to establish the GOP as the "party of ideas."

...

In 1994, Barbour faced stiff opposition within the RNC for wanting to take out bank loans allowing them to maximize the amount of money they could spend on competitive House races. "His whole mantra that fall of 1994, was, ‘We've got to strike while the iron is hot,'" Nicholson remembered. "Haley prevailed, and it was the right thing to do. It helped us in key races."

Unfortunately, Barbour's notion of establishing the GOP as the "party of ideas" proved to be not what we needed (i.e., a fundamental shift in governing philosophy), but merely a cynical ploy, to be used merely to win an election. Get a load of the actual depth of his commitment to the idea of dismantling the welfare state brick by brick (as I recall some Republican putting it back then):

Barbour ... pushed back hard against the idea that Republicans were proposing cutting Medicare, emphasizing that they were merely slowing the rate of increase. He grabbed attention by taking out a series of ads promising to pay $1 million to anybody who could prove the following statement false: "In November 1995, the U.S. House and Senate passed a balanced budget bill. It increases total federal spending on Medicare by more than 50 percent from 1995 to 2002." While the ad produced a lot of claimants, and a series of lawsuits that dragged on for years (several Democratic members of Congress sued), ultimately they lost in court and the RNC kept the $1 million.

So, there you have it: Barbour's GOP came in like a lion and went out like a lamb, because it never really opposed the welfare state. Indeed, when push came to shove -- when it was time to at least say, "We need to cut back and eventually phase out all entitlement programs." -- Barbour's only idea was, "Why even try to beat them, when you can join them?" This is the last thing we need on the heels of George Bush and Barack Obama's dramatic escalation in the growth of the welfare state.

However, this could still be bad news. Politicians change their minds all the time, and Barbour could decide to run after all. To someone like him, Charles Krauthammer's three "axioms" could actually be helpful, for waiting to run could take the heat off, and keep the electorate in the dark until it's too late. So the danger from Barbour himself isn't necessarily over. Furthermore, I'd take his endorsement of any candidate as a warning.

-- CAV

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Biased "vs." Bias

Over at Mother Jones is an article on "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science," which takes on a vital subject, but whose analysis and persuasiveness are somewhat hampered by a major misconception on the author's part about what the purpose of science (or, really, knowledge in general) is.

The piece starts out promisingly enough, considering several clear-cut or common examples of people allowing unexamined emotions to interfere with their reasoning.

In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end -- winning our "case" -- and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

That's a lot of jargon, but we all understand these mechanisms when it comes to interpersonal relationships. If I don't want to believe that my spouse is being unfaithful, or that my child is a bully, I can go to great lengths to explain away behavior that seems obvious to everybody else -- everybody who isn't too emotionally invested to accept it, anyway. That's not to suggest that we aren't also motivated to perceive the world accurately -- we are. Or that we never change our minds -- we do. It's just that we have other important goals besides accuracy -- including identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of self -- and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.

Everyone, myself included, has, at some time or another, initially reacted to unpleasant news by denying it outright or attempting to explain it away. The author even correctly notes that, "[R]easoning comes later, works slower -- and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum." Unfortunately, Chris Mooney lacks two crucial tools for his analysis: Ayn Rand's revolutionary perspective on the nature of emotions (as , "lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values") and the connection she draws between thought, emotion, and values, which I once summarized as follows:

Two emotions that many ... people consider opposites, love and hate, are understood better with Rand's insight. To love is to value. Hatred is an emotional response to something that is the opposite of, or a threat to, that which we love. Why is this important? Because values motivate us as living beings. In order to survive, to prosper, and to be happy, we must identify, attain, and sometimes protect our values. What do you like to do? Exploring your emotional responses to certain activities can help you identify the right career, rewarding hobbies, and potential friends or romantic partners among those who share your interests.

Whether an emotion provides constructive motivation will, of course, depend on whether one's evaluation of the world is objective, and that will ultimately depend on whether one considers all facts that are available and how one does so (i.e., how thoroughly his philosophical beliefs are based on reality). One must step back (at some point) and consider why one feels a given emotion any time it is not clear why one is experiencing it. Emotions tell us only about how we evaluate some fact: They do not provide us with information about the outside world, as perception, for example, does.

This all may seem extraneous to Mooney's point, or at least beyond the scope of his article, but I think it goes a long way towards explaining what struck me as a bizarre way to end an article on such an important subject: [Added during editing: One can argue that the article is focused on an activist audience, and that this criticism is unfair. I don't have time to think about this issue and edit accordingly, so I will simply note this concern now.]

The upshot: All we can currently bank on is the fact that we all have blinders in some situations. The question then becomes: What can be done to counteract human nature itself?

Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

...

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values -- so as to give the facts a fighting chance. [bold added]

This point is true, as far as the art (and science) of persuasion go, but as living beings whose means of survival is the application of our reasoning minds to the problems of our own survival, shouldn't our first concern (as members of a general audience) be to know that something is, in fact, correct, before we go about trying to persuade others of its truth?

I am agnostic (tending towards skepticism) about whether there is man-made global warming myself, but let's say there is for the sake of argument. Mooney's closing paragraphs nevertheless have me scratching my head, because they slip in an assumption that ought to be questioned: Here we have an article about biased thinking that seems to take government solutions to any and every issue that science can speak to as a given.

When it seems like every scientific study is used as a rationalization to impose ever more government control over our lives, the negative reception so many scientific results meet is, although not rational, at least understandable. But really, how much noise would anyone make (one way or the other) about: AGW, if the state weren't on the cusp of being able to ration fuel economy-wide; evolution, if the state didn't run the educational system; or vaccines, if the state couldn't force people to administer them?

And how much less like a scolding/back-slapping of his readers would this article have been, had it emphasized the personal importance of overcoming biased thinking for one's own benefit, instead of speaking simply to the question of persuading others of scientific results as a means of getting them to accept a political agenda that does not follow from them?

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Primo Pomodoro! That's Italian for "first tomato." On seeing a recent comment of mine on personal productivity, a friend told me about a personal productivity technique I'd never heard of, the Pomodoro Technique (PDF). I found it useful yesterday in getting through a backlog of mindless tasks -- it almost made it feel like a game -- and am going to try using one uninterrupted twenty-five minute "pomodoro" each morning to plan my day.

Whether you use Windows, Mac, or Linux, you may find this chart instructive for your next computer repair.

What's worse than failure? Hint: It can keep you from pursuing what you are passionate about. (HT: John Cook)

Somewhat related to today's post, Michael Hurd comments on, "The Greatest Human Error."

This might describe me once I get to try it: Fun with Gravity recommends Happy Camper IPA. Love the can design, and the name...

Updates

Today: Corrected a grammatical error.

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4-23-11 Hodgepodge

A Call for Objective Standards

This caught me a little bit by surprise, although it shouldn't have. As a scientist whose own work has drawn from multiple disciplines, and who has had colleagues in (legitimate) departments with names like "Integrative Biology," the phrase, "Integrative Medicine" sounds quite respectable at first blush. Apparently, however, it is being used to give pseudoscience a respectable veneer in our medical schools.

[W]hat's going on at Maryland's medical school? UMM is home to one of the nation's premier "integrative medicine" programs, which promotes a wide range of questionable practices. Its clinical services include:

• Acupuncture
• Homeopathy
• Reflexology
• Reiki
• Qi Gong

Although each of these has a different history, all of them are, well, nonsense.

Working to gain new insights through an interdisciplinary approach is legitimate science. Studying whether some folk medicine practice is beneficial and, if so, how, can be legitimate science. Pretending that superstition is the same thing as science, or that it can be integrated as is into actual science, is not legitimate science, and should not be called by such a misleading name.

I don't know whether ObamaCare covers things like acupuncture, but if government-run medical schools are teaching it, it sounds so me like it's just a matter of time before it does.

Weekend Reading

"Although the Obama administration stated that the IPAB would not ration medical care, its power to set payments to doctors and hospitals would give it de facto rationing power." -- Paul Hsieh, in "We Call It 'Rationing,' Obama Calls It 'Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board'" at PajamasMedia

"U.S. politicians must be cured of their deficit attention disorder." -- Richard Salsman, in "Phantom 'Federal Budget 'Cuts'" at Forbes

"Denial is similar to rationalization, in that you ignore crucial and relevant facts (like the effect on your health or finances) to 'arrive' at conclusions that conveniently 'feel right.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "The Danger of Excessive Behaviors" at DrHurd.com

"If an executive did knowingly offer false information to pump a stock, that would be the crime, and he would already be liable under anti-fraud laws." -- , Wendy Milling in "The Sheer Vacuity of Insider Trading Laws " at RealClear Markets

"[I]f you find yourself frustrated at rising gasoline prices, or rising electricity prices, or rising natural gas and heating oil prices, make sure you place plenty of blame on the environmentalists behind Earth Day; for decades they have found a reason to oppose every practical form of energy in the name of 'saving the planet.'" -- Alex Epstein in "Greens vs. Energy" at American Thinker

"And so as readers, sometimes against our previous beliefs, we side with her heroes and want to see them overcome their opponents." -- Debi Ghate in "Why Atlas Shrugged Changes Lives" at Pajamas Media

Congratulations and Thanks

Michael Hurd's column ends as follows:

Before I close, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the many, many readers who have commented on or otherwise responded to this column. In fact, you are reading the 300th article that I've had the pleasure of writing for The Delaware Wave! Time sure does fly when you're having fun.

Ignoring Hurd's political commentary, and assuming a pace of one column a week, this took only about six years. I'll take that (and, more important, the very last word quoted above) as a reminder of what is possible to a writer who learns how to work effectively.

Handicapping a Weak Field

Charles Krauthammer handicaps the weak Republican presidential field for 2012, but if his first few paragraphs are as far as Republican thinking goes, we are doomed to a second Obama term or, worse, a Republican who pays lip service to economic freedom, but is really a clone of Obama. We need someone who opposes Barack Obama, not someone who merely fails to repulse too many people who want to vote him out of office.

Actual Cash Value: 1/100th of a Cent

A email forwarded by my Mom comes with a picture and a comment:

I didn't realize it, but these coupons are good for one gallon of gas at most retailers. I have seen them around, but until recently never took advantage of them, I never realized their actual worth.

You probably have one or two just lying around somewhere, now is the time to use them before they lose their value and it's too late!!

The above title -- taken from the fine print on many coupons -- was my reaction. Just for fun, I decided to see how close or far off this was, in terms of real (i.e., gold-backed) currency. Before FDR, the dollar was fixed at 20.67 per ounce (28,349.52 mg) of gold. (Thus, a dollar was equivalent to 1371.53 mg gold.) As of this morning, it buys something like 22 mg. That is, today's dollar buys 16/1000th the amount of gold, or $0.016 in gold-backed dollars. Well, the dollar is still, apparently, worth more than 1/100th of what a cent used to be worth.

-- CAV

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Nice Problems

Today's post will be on "three good things," with a twist. For various reasons, I'll call these "three nice problems."

1. Wednesday morning, I woke up seeing a big time gap to fill and planning to use it for a few projects of my own choosing. Wednesday evening (and four emails later) I now have a project that wants the lion's share of that time, and have learned that I may have a lot less of that time than I thought I would. (Sorry, but that's about as much detail as you'll ever get from me about work-related matters.) From the perspective of time management for the next month or so, this is going to be quite a challenge. From the perspective of achieving a very difficult personal goal, this is fantastic news.

2. Fortunately, one of the projects I had started was to go through the recorded sessions of a personal productivity class I enrolled in a couple of years ago, only to find myself unable to attend the live classes. Wednesday morning, I realized the "homework" would probably be much more useful if I were busier. I got my wish, and I have come up with a very clever way of keeping track of all my "thinking on paper," if I say so myself. But that -- if it really works well -- is the subject for a later blog post, after I try it out and refine it. It was for the lack of a good non-paper system for keeping up with my thinking notes that I never got into the habit of using that technique, as effective as it can be. Oh, and it looks like a promising way to keep track of other thinking and things like lecture notes. That said, squeezing in the rest of the lectures for the course will be tricky!

3. Uncle Sam's choice to pickpocket a legitimate and profitable government agency is indeed horrible news, but it reminded me or led me to learn about some interesting trivia about the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Here's the interesting trivia:

Did you know that none other than Thomas Jefferson was the first patent examiner in the United States? See Historic Press Releases. Did you know that from 1841 to 1876 the Declaration of Independence was entrusted to the Patent Office and put on public display? See Declaration of Independence A History. Did you know that in 1865 President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural ball was held in the model room of the Patent Office? See Inaugural Ball.

Read the whole thing later, to learn about a foolish trade-off of innovation for the paltry sum -- compared to the price tag of our various redistributionist schemes -- of $100 million. Even this is a nice problem, in a sense, but we won't even be able to have it for long if we don't fix it.

The links in the above excerpt lead to other interesting things. To end on a light note, in keeping with my practice of thinking about positive things on Friday, I found this patent drawing for a "continuous wave generating apparatus for simulated surfriding" rather amusing.

-- CAV

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Comrade Gaia

Via reader "J.C.," comes a link to a story so far-fetched even by today's loony standards that I scrolled back up to the top of the page to make sure the date wasn't April 1.

Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities". [links removed]

So much for the joke. Here's the punchline:

But the abstract new laws are not expected to stop industry in its tracks. While it is not clear yet what actual protection the new rights will give in court to bugs, insects and ecosystems, the government is expected to establish a ministry of mother earth and to appoint an ombudsman. It is also committed to giving communities new legal powers to monitor and control polluting industries. [emphasis added]

The Ayn Rand villain Ellsworth Toohey once said, "Don't bother to examine a folly -- ask yourself only what it accomplishes." In this case, we have a law whose proponents claim to want to protect nature -- while apparently oblivious both to the proper purpose of government and to the fact that man (and his mode of survival) is a part of nature. And yet they claim that they don't mean for it to cause the very problem even a left-wing news outlet implicitly admits it could.

Does Bolivia want to drive man to extinction, or enslave him by laws that are impossible for him to obey?

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Closely related to yesterday's post: Jim Woods comments on a news story about a teacher who brought a weapon to work and "joked" about killing students. Her job doesn't seem to be in any danger. When I was in high school back in the 1980's, a classmate of mine did something very similar, and he was expelled within the day.

Wanting to "think on paper" the other day and in need of a timer, I found this online alarm clock quite handy.

No comment needed: "Job Center Blasted for Giving Capes to Unemployed." Well, okay, this needs at least one comment. The headline should have started with the word "Government." The kind of mentality that would come up with something like this wouldn't last long enough in a free market to garner attention from the news media.

I frequently link to Michael Hurd's columns in my weekend posts, but he has a really good blog, too, that I re-discovered recently. There's no RSS feed, as far as I can tell, so you'll have to go to the site for your Daily Dose of Reason. [Update: A commenter provided a link to the RSS feed today.

Updates

Today: Added link to RSS Feed in last blurb (HT: Ben Percent)

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Do We Really?

I often catch a spot of news over lunch, and yesterday, I saw on a local channel that a whole section of a mall near where my wife had worked this winter had been closed off. As I tuned in, a SWAT team was preparing to enter. People were leaving the mall, some holding each other. There were helicopters overhead. My guess, fortunately wrong, was that, a few hours later, I'd be reading about yet another massacre by someone who should have been diagnosed and sent for treatment to a mental hospital for a serious psychiatric illness long ago.

[A]bout 40 officers responded to the scene from his department, surrounding departments, the State Police, and federal agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This massive police response was caused by: a man carrying an umbrella. Fortunately, I was wrong. More accurately, this was fortunate in one respect, but unfortunate in another.

Granted, after looking at the pictures in the Boston Globe, I can see how someone might, from a distance, mistake the umbrella for a rifle. And the man, not professionally attired (and carrying a backpack), probably didn't exactly look like a pillar of the community, either.

"It was interpreted to be a gun by five different people," said Burlington Police Chief Michael Kent. "We are always telling people to be vigilant. This is what we want."

Sure. In the sense that you want people to report what they deem to be actual emergencies, I agree. But in the sense that it is becoming increasingly common to view any stranger with great suspicion, this is exactly the opposite of what we want, in terms of the kind of society we live in. I considered this point at length some years ago, after reading the following excerpt from Oliver Sacks's Uncle Tungsten:

Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn't contain potassium cyanide. It doesn't even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances. Therefore, these budding young chemists don't have a chance to do anything engrossing with their chemistry sets. As I look back, I think it is pretty remarkable that Mr. Ziegler, this friend of the family, would have so easily turned over one-third of an ounce of potassium cyanide to me, an eleven-year-old boy. (86)

What has changed in the decades between then and now? Why is it that we could once trust older children with dangerous chemicals, but now panic at the sight of an adult carrying an umbrella? I hold that we are failing, culturally, to transmit civilized behavioral norms; and politically, to properly protect individuals from harm by those who can not or will not refrain from committing violent acts against others.

What good is shutting down a mall any time a suspicious character is spotted there going to do in the long term if mental hospitals and jails have revolving doors, and if state sponsors of terrorism aren't laid to waste? And, if we don't raise most people to act responsibly from a very early age, can we really expect the police to protect us from everyone else anyway?

-- CAV

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With Bubbles Like These...

There has been quite a bit of discussion, at least in my Internet haunts, of a "higher education bubble," and of the need, as law professor and blogger Glenn Reynolds puts it, to "face up to what's going on before the bubble bursts messily." There's no arguing the point, but the following post at Instapundit should give anyone in grad school (or considering grad school) great pause:

100 REASONS NOT TO GO TO GRADUATE SCHOOL: #55 -- There Are Too Many PhDs. "Colleges benefit from this situation, because there are so many well-credentialed people desperate for teaching positions that they will work for very little money. This would not be such a problem if the world outside of academe had more use for people with PhDs (see Reason 29). The fact that it does not is why there are so many people with doctorates who now find themselves working in part-time temporary teaching positions with no benefits (see Reason 14). . . . Perhaps most scandalous is what legitimate research universities have done to devalue the PhD, which is now awarded in fields ranging from hotel management to recreation and (most ironic of all) higher education administration. In the meantime, universities continue to lower standards for graduate degrees. The traditional American master's degree -- which once required a minimum of two years of study, the passing of written and oral comprehensive exams, as well as the writing and defense of a thesis more substantial than many of today's doctoral dissertations -- has been dramatically watered down. Will it be long before the PhD suffers the same fate?" [minor edits, links re-inserted from original post]

Doesn't that sound familiar?

[P]art of the cost of acquiring an education is artificially removed from the prospective student's consideration, making it difficult to reach a rational decision. Furthermore, the availability of such money economy-wide compounds the problem by making it virtually certain that anyone he competes with for a job will have the credential he is thinking about. Thus the cost of a very difficult undertaking is artificially lowered and the value of acquiring it is artificially raised.

A commenter to the 100 Reasons post linked above shows how this pans out in practice:

It's frustrating because now a PhD is seen as a reasonable requirement for positions that absolutely don't need one. So, if I'm toying with the notion of quitting grad school to pursue positions in admin or something, NOT finishing could in fact be a liability... even though my PhD would likely have no logical connection to that work.

Related to this is what I called the "wast[e of] talent and effort on a colossal scale," whose day-to-day consequences can be hinted at by the following piece of economic reasoning from an article titled, "At Home with the Kids and My PhD," by Dr. Troy Camplin, who had been scraping by teaching courses as an adjunct:

I cannot work to lose $400/month. Who can? Who would, even if you could? Thus, the decision was made to drop the four classes I had and to withdraw the children from daycare so I could stay home with them.

He now babysits by day, and moonlights as a hotel clerk.

I would strongly recommend pointing this blog out to anyone you care about who is considering starting grad school (particularly in the humanities) -- or finishing it, for that matter. While I would not categorically reject pursuing a ... terminal ... degree, I would urge anyone doing so to make that choice with open eyes and a very well-thought-out Plan B. And then wait, perhaps long enough to try something else, which the blog very sensibly points out can be done before starting grad school.

I'll close with a Top Ten list of reasons culled from the list to date (which is only up to #55), supplying my own titles.

Grad school (particularly in the humanities)...

1. ... will probably take the better part of a decade off your life.
2. ... represents a significant detour from reaching adulthood.
3. ... incurs psychological burdens.
4. ... can be very hard to shake.
5. ... can make it difficult to land a good job.
6. ... can cause fertility problems.
7. ... can dramatically affect one's family life.
8. ... can rob you of the most productive and enjoyable years of your life.
9. ... results in many people speaking gibberish.
10. ... can lay waste to one's personal finances.

Certain drugs have been banned for causing less harm, not that I advocate banning drugs.

Were graduate education chosen freely (i.e., without government nudging and encouragement), and paid for entirely by private funds, some do-gooder would have probably succeeded in having it outlawed by now -- not that it should be.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected spelling of "Glenn."

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Man, the Forgotten Animal

As I was in the process of looking for blogging fodder this morning, a Carolyn Hax column, addressed to a vegan in a tizzy over her husband's newly-acquired taste for meat, caught my eye. Not only is Hax's advice generally in the right direction, amounting to something like, "respect his right to make up his own mind," but the reader may enjoy, as a bonus, seeing a "compassionate" vegan having her own head handed back to her on a platter:

I can point out, though, that for all your reverence for animals, you're not showing much respect for the mammal you married. With my emphasis added, I'm going to give your words back to you: "How can someone I love not see the cruelty." Your love determines how someone else thinks?

I appreciate your passion and sympathize with your predicament -- dramatic change in a spouse is difficult, no matter what form it takes -- but you need to take a couple of rhetorical steps back to your side of the personal responsibility line. He is entitled to his own principles, which includes the right to revisit, revise or reject them. [bold added]

While just the question would be a thin reed on which to base the conclusion that the advice-seeker explicitly holds that all animals have rights, it is probably a safe bet that she does.

The notion that all animals, rational or not, have rights requires that anyone holding it regard something other than reason as the basis for rights. This notion is fundamentally at odds with consistently respecting the (actual) rights or rational judgement of others. Is it really any wonder this couple is now having problems?

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

My desire to close some browser tabs will benefit any fellow egg lovers: Here's a definitive guide to boiling the perfect egg, and here's one for poaching. I have an egg poacher, but find cleaning it to be a hassle, so I might revisit the second link the next time I want Eggs Benedict.

No, I haven't seen the Atlas Shrugged movie, yet. SB likes it, with qualifications. Roger Ebert pans it, but, to his credit, restricts his criticism to the film's artistic merits. On HBL, Harry Binswanger has reviewed it a couple of times, once from the standpoint of having just seen it with expectations lowered to account for the context of the making of the movie -- and again more on artistic merits. I'm leaning towards viewing it on DVD at some point, but feel no strong urge to do so right away.

This blog posting on "Living in the Zone" brought back the amusing memory of how the drawing on my blog's masthead came into being. (Hmmm. Need to update the old FAQ since I retired Mo from the address bar and the submarine being torpedoed from my comment posts some time ago...) But, yes, I, too am "a total jerk when I'm interrupted."

Ugh! Seeing Arsenal's last-second collapse against Liverpool yesterday was like watching an encapsulation of this season in one game: Promising start. Entertaining soccer. Too many passes and not enough goals. Mental weakness snatching a draw from the jaws of victory. Some worry that the team's new American owner might change the culture of the club too much, but given that the object of the game is to score more goals than the opponent, would that be such a terrible thing? I'd like to be able to watch a game without screaming, "Think of the goal as a passing target!" at the set...

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4-16-11 Hodgepodge

Magnolia State Reality Check

Just because I wish Jim Crow were a lot closer to dead doesn't make it so...

"Racial attitudes are changing. Day in, day out, there is certainly not the hostility there was years ago," University of Mississippi Professor Marvin King, himself in an interracial marriage, told the New York Times.

But perhaps King spoke too soon, as did the others quoted in the Times article who hyped Mississippi as a multiracial mecca far removed from its Jim Crow past. That's because results from a Public Policy Polling survey conducted in late March reveal that 46 percent of Mississippi Republicans not only oppose interracial marriage but believe it should be legally banned.

Taking these results at face value and absent a detailed breakdown of party affiliation in the state, this implies that anywhere from 14% to 23% (assuming Republican affiliation rates of 30% to 50%) of the voting-age population (or, perhaps, likely voters) feel that interracial marriage should be illegal. While it doesn't surprise me that some have this opinion, it disturbs me that so many do. Perhaps growing up in Jackson and attending integrated parochial schools gave me a rosier picture of progress against racism than is actually warranted.

At the first story linked above, Nadra Nittle offers her thoughts on why this is so, as does "ordinary gentleman" Mark Thompson at his blog. The first considers whether fundamentalism (for one thing) might explain this result and the second speculates that older voters account for the high numbers. These sound like plausible (although incomplete) hypotheses to me. The fundamental problem is that racists are not individualists. If they were, they would not condone such laws.

While the state has come a long way in the past half century, these poll results are worth keeping in mind, and show that cultural change is hardly a uniform process. Progress can be rapid and dramatic, but complacency can easily prevent consolidating and extending the gains, or even keeping them for long.

Weekend Reading

"A businessman whose proposals seek to destroy capitalism? There's nothing to respect about that." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Donald Trump is No Capitalist" at SmartMoney

"It's easy to laugh at Homer Simpson's folly, but America is doing the same thing with Social Security financing, and the end result won't be amusing." -- Paul Hsieh, in "The Homer Simpson Approach to Social Security" at PajamasMedia

"It's up to us, and us alone, to confront the choices before us and make the decisions that seem to be the best. Don't let anyone take this away from you." -- Michael Hurd, in "Do It for Yourself" at DrHurd.com

"[L]et those who criticize ObamaCare for leading America down the road to socialized medicine stop pretending that the preexisting condition scheme is anything but a step down that road." -- Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, in "The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions -- Part 3" at Forbes

My Two Cents

The Hoenig column is one to spread the word about now. Whether he gets far in the GOP or decides on a Ross Perot-style third-party candidacy, Trump's antics can afford an excellent opportunity to spread the word on what actual advocacy and support for capitalism mean.

I say this while at the same time wondering whether such a run would represent a good way to "vote for Obama without voting for Obama" if the GOP ends up going with a sufficiently atrocious candidate, like Mitt Romney.

Hot and Heavy

Via John Cook's Weekend Miscellany, I encountered this interactive gravity map of the planet this morning. "Hot" colors show where gravity is strongest.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Added link to Amit Ghate article. (2) Removed said link upon seeing that the article, although good, is a year old.

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Nine Entrepreneurs

Following a link from a link earlier in the week, I came across an inspiring list of nine captains of industry who, in the words of Business Insider, "faced utter failure and came back to kick ass."

If you're like me and find such stories inspiring -- but also find having to click your way through a "slide show" annoying -- just ignore the urge to "click here to see the icons," and scroll down after you follow this link.

For each entrepreneur, the profile lists the now-famous company, the setback, the turnaround, a quote, and a lesson. The one I found most inspiring of the lot was that of Henry Ford, pictured.

Company: Ford Motor Co.

Setback: Ford suffered a few failed automotive endeavors early in his career, including Detroit Automobile Co., which he started in 1899. Its cars were low quality and too pricey for average consumers.

Turnaround: Ford continued to develop better auto designs and gained national acclaim in 1904 by demoing a car -- the "Ford 999" -- that broke the land-speed record by going a mile in about 40 seconds. In 1908, he released the Model T, a well-made, low-priced car that quickly gained traction with U.S. consumers. Annual sales topped $250,000 by 1914.

Quote: "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't -- you're right."

Lesson: Building a brand requires more than just building a good product.

Why do I like this? Ford fought and won a two-front war, succeeding in both fixing his product and finding a good marketing strategy. Especially noteworthy is that the "turnaround" was not like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It took time, effort, and commitment.

Read the whole thing.

-- CAV

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Kleptifornia

Reader Snedcat alerts me to a news story about several states, most notably California, treating private property in safe deposit boxes like found money.

San Francisco resident Carla Ruff's safe-deposit box was drilled, seized, and turned over to the state of California, marked "owner unknown."

"I was appalled," Ruff said. "I felt violated."

Unknown? Carla's name was right on documents in the box at the Noe Valley Bank of America location. So was her address -- a house about six blocks from the bank. Carla had a checking account at the bank, too -- still does -- and receives regular statements. Plus, she has receipts showing she's the kind of person who paid her box rental fee. And yet, she says nobody ever notified her.

"They are zealously uncovering accounts that are not unclaimed," Ruff said.

This story is hardly atypical, nor is can it be dismissed as a bureaucratic glitch in light of the clear purpose of policy changes pertaining to unclaimed property in recent years.

California law used to say property was unclaimed if the rightful owner had had no contact with the business for 15 years. But during various state budget crises, the waiting period was reduced to seven years, and then five, and then three. Legislators even tried for one year. Why? Because the state wanted to use that free [sic] money.

Oh, and these thefts are not restricted to the contents of safe deposit boxes. Given that the state is violating the principle that individuals have rights, I know I shouldn't be surprised by anything in this story, but I am still shocked.

A state comptroller in charge of "reforming" this immoral expropriation scheme sounds like his heart is in the right place, but he does not seem to question the propriety of laws such as the one that forces "[b]anks and other businesses ... to turn [unclaimed] property over to the state for safekeeping."

On Page 1 of this story, an attorney filing a class action suit against California is quoted as saying that his clients, "figured the safety-deposit box was safer than keeping it under the mattress..." As he states further, many of them were wrong.

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Here's a sober assessment of the significance of Japan's recent reclassification of the Fukushima Daiichi event as a CHERNOBYL LEVEL!!!! accident. From the posting: "For comparison, it's been estimated that the radiation released by the Fukushima reactors is 1/10th that released to the environment at Chernobyl."

I'm with Myrhaf. Income tax withholding, deductions, and refund checks are all social engineering. I've long thought that, until we phase out the income tax, it should be payable in full on April 15. Update: This is too good to pass up. "Is the tax code void for vagueness?" Read the whole thing.

I got a good chuckle at the end of this jar-based analogy about time management over a lifetime.

"James Williams needed a device that would destroy a burrowing animal and give an alarm so that it could be reset." His solution was simple and patentable, but in the words of Greg Ross, "a bit ... direct." Follow the link for an amusing drawing of the invention.

Updates

Today: Added update to blurb on income tax.

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Ten Percent, at Least

Somehow, this doesn't surprise me:

Inflation, using the reporting methodologies in place before 1980, hit an annual rate of 9.6 percent in February, according to the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter.

Since 1980, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the way it calculates the CPI in order to account for the substitution of products, improvements in quality (i.e. iPad 2 costing the same as original iPad) and other things. Backing out more methods implemented in 1990 by the BLS still puts inflation at a 5.5 percent rate and getting worse, according to the calculations by the newsletter’s web site, Shadowstats.com.

I recall some years ago hearing that government bureaucrats had changed the inflation index for the plausible-sounding purpose of providing a more accurate gauge of how "consumers" were affected by inflation. In one sense, I suppose it can be helpful to know, based on what one is likely to spend the most money on, more precisely how one's purchasing power is dwindling in the near term.

But in terms of what inflation actually is in today's political context -- an increase in the supply of fiat money and, therefore, a mechanism by which the government can deprive us of the value represented by (and denominated in) currency units -- this is fraudulent.

So this re-indexing is about as "helpful" as a mugger informing me that he is planning to rob me of only ten bucks before taking my wallet, and as "honest" as him living up to his word. What am I supposed to say to that? "Thanks. See you tomorrow?"

Technological advances do indeed make many things cheaper for us (in terms of nominal price or improvements) or allow us to work much more efficiently (also making things cheaper for us in terms of the time or effort needed to work to obtain them). That is, advances in technology reduce our cost of living. That effect would be more pronounced under a stable currency, and it is a completely different phenomenon than a change in the size of the currency unit. As things stand, inflation partially masks this effect and this effect partially masks the effect of the government printing money. This latter would be true even without changing the collection of goods used to measure cost trends. The re-weighting of the CPI thus further masks the amount of government theft that is going on.

I appreciate their efforts to expose this sleight-of-hand, but even by the old measure, Shadow Government Statistics is itself underestimating the tax-that-isn't-a-tax we know as inflation. Perhaps the economists there could account in some way for the increased productivity we have seen due to technology since the 1980s.

-- CAV

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Show Me Capitalism

En route to other things, I learned something interesting about the urban development of St. Louis, in my grandmother's home state of Missouri, that fellow advocates of capitalism could profit from: It is dotted with small enclaves called "private places." Upon encountering this odd term, I naturally looked it up, and learned the following.

A private place is a self-governing enclave whose common areas (e.g. streets) are owned by the residents, and whose services are provided by the private sector.

The urban history of St. Louis, Missouri is significant in the development of private places. Most were laid out by Prussian-born surveyor and planner Julius Pitzman, who conceived the idea around 1868 as a way for residential landowners to control real estate speculation and maintain property standards, in an era before the protections [sic] of zoning. Pitzman designed 47 of these developments over a 50-year period.

...

Many of these developments are well-preserved and still gated, patrolled, and functioning as private enclaves. [hyperlinks and footnotes omitted]

The short Wikipedia entry on private places is interesting in itself, but it also cites a thought-provoking reference I plan to look at more closely at some point: David T. Beito's "From Privies to Boulevards: The Private Supply of Infrastructure in the United States during the Nineteenth Century," which appears as a chapter in Development by Consent: The Voluntary Supply of Public Goods and Services.

The Amazon synopsis of the book reads as follows:

This book explores how myriad goods and services -- among them the generation and delivery of electricity, building and maintenance of roads, sewage and refuse disposal, water delivery, education, and transportation -- have been voluntarily supplied by individuals and groups in the absence of government mandates or sanctions. A recollection of the voluntary habit that predominated in nineteenth-century America stands in marked contrast to the expansive contemporary role of government in the United States and other countries, both industrialized and developing. Many additional examples conjoin in this volume to provide both leaders and citizens of debt-ridden governments with case experience of nongovernment alternatives for supplying sorely needed goods and services.

An implication of the evidence in this volume is that the development of any country can occur as a result of expanding the consenting actions of its citizens -- in the absence of a growing government, or in spite of it. Poorer countries are most likely to benefit from acting on the lessons of this book; voluntary means for meeting people's demands are even more appropriate where resources are less abundant. All countries can benefit from prohibiting the additional expense of having government do what its citizens would do otherwise. Richer countries may be able to afford the excess burden (or deadweight loss) that is incurred when government supplants private endeavors with its own. But in poorer countries, such additional cost is truly waste, and may very well preclude development. Better the voluntary alternatives of this book, and development by consent.

And here's the opening paragraph of the chapter on private places:

During the late 1970s, the term privatization first came into common currency to describe a process which was then emerging. Whether or not the term itself is of recent origin, there is no doubt that the reality of privatization has deep historical roots. Throughout the nineteenth century, the private sector played a major (often dominant) role in nearly every imaginable service now monopolized by government.

Regulars here, and anyone who has been influenced by the ideas of Ayn Rand, will already appreciate the enormity of the task of effectively promoting capitalism. The fundamental task of such cultural activism is, if not to promote egoism and capitalism, to at least cause many more people to question common assumptions regarding the propriety and practicality of altruism and collectivism.

Needless to say, concrete examples of the efficacy of capitalism, often lacking in today's cultural and political context, are always helpful. It looks like I have bumped into a very useful resource indeed!

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Some time back, I blogged John Swansburg's "I Hate My iPad." I see that he eventually followed up with some curated reader responses, pro and con, and some additional commentary of his own. (He still hates his.) I very much like the email he quotes at the end of the second article.

Not your patriarch's Koran reading group... Amy Peikoff is starting a Koran reading group. I won't be participating, but the following line from the announcement made me smile: "We will read approximately 20 pages of the Koran per week, along with the corresponding commentary published by Robert Spencer. " I see that the link takes me to a series called, "Blogging the Koran."

This is sad. If what this young writer says is true about her upbringing, I don't blame her one bit for rejecting "objectivism." (Compare her account of her upbringing to the answer Leonard Peikoff gives to the following question: "How do you explain the concepts of 'religion' and 'God' to pre-school-aged children?") The facts that the article blatantly misrepresents Objectivism and incorrectly refers to it with a common noun speak ill of the editorial staff of Salon in more than one respect.

If you didn't get enough to think about here, Myrhaf has just posted the fifth installment of his "Cavalcade of Links" series.

Updates

Today: Corrected "The Atlantic" to "Salon."

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The "General Welfare"

Dear Uncle Gus,

How can I best explain that "in order to form a more perfect union ... promote the general welfare" was not written to promote a welfare state? Talk to me Goose.

Signed,

Fer

Dear Fer,

Following a definition of the word in the entry for "Welfare" on the glossary page at USConstitution.net come the following inimitable words:

Welfare in today's context also means organized efforts on the part of public or private organizations to benefit the poor, or simply public assistance. This is not the meaning of the word as used in the Constitution.

A page about the Preamble there further elaborates on the phrase in question:

promote the general Welfare

This, and the next part of the Preamble, are the culmination of everything that came before it -- the whole point of having tranquility, justice, and defense was to promote the general welfare -- to allow every state and every citizen of those states to benefit from what the government could provide. The framers looked forward to the expansion of land holdings, industry, and investment, and they knew that a strong national government would be the beginning of that.

As you can see from there, and from any good general discussion of the General Welfare Clause, which appears later on in the Constitution, it is fairly straightforward to show historically that the Founding Fathers didn't exactly have today's welfare state in mind when they put that phrase and that clause into the Constitution. For example, Wikipedia quotes Thomas Jefferson on the matter as holding that the clause limits the purposes for which Congress can raise taxes. For advocates of laissez-faire, that illustrates a problem with the premise underlying your question, but we'll return to that later.

So the answer to your question is straightforward, but based on many discussions I have seen and heard, I don't think you would be satisfied if I were to leave it at that. I suspect that what you really are interested in doing is arguing that the welfare state violates individual rights and thus is not a proper purpose of government. You hope to use the Constitution to bolster your case, because its essential purpose is to set up a government that protects individual rights -- but you are running into problems caused by the fact that it has been "interpreted" over time by some Constitutional scholars to sometimes mean almost exactly the opposite of how it was intended. On top of that, parts of it are in fact at cross-purposes with its essential goal, most glaringly those parts pertaining to slavery before the Thirteenth Amendment. Even if you made an airtight case, based on the Constitution and what the Founders said about it, that none would have ever approved of the modern welfare state, the recipient of your argument could simply say, "Well, what about slavery?" As important as the Constitution is, it can't pinch-hit for philosophical principles, specifically when arguing for or against the propriety of something like the welfare state, taxation, or slavery.

Books can and have been written about such topics, but how might one best at least get someone to consider the idea that the welfare state is at cross-purposes with the proper role of the government, given the problems that leaning too heavily on the Constitution can cause? I think one can get most people to agree generally that our Founders were seeking to protect individual rights (it might help to enumerate a few: life, liberty, property), and go forward from that premise. From there, I might "follow the money," so to speak, to get at welfare through a line of questioning. If, for example, the other person concedes that the welfare state is expensive, point out the enormous amount of taxation it requires, and ask whose money that is. If the other person concedes that it's not the recipient's money, ask by what right someone can take it from its owner. Point out that when the government forcibly takes money for any purpose, it is acting no differently than the swindlers, thieves, and foreign invaders it is supposed to be protecting us from. If you can do something like that, you can get the other person to see for himself that the welfare state contradicts the proper purpose of the government, or at least get closer to seeing that. In fact, you can even bring up slavery as an example of something that was part of -- but contradicted the purpose of -- the Constitution and was, properly, amended out of it. (Depending on the conversation, you may need to since, as we noted earlier, Thomas Jefferson himself was okay with taxation, and the more glaring error can help you show the difficulty that presents.)

There are doubtless other approaches you could take, but I think you generally should focus on the essential goal the Founders had, rather than leaning too heavily on an imperfect and often grossly misinterpreted document for your case. (Also, you don't have to convince someone in a short conversation to be effective. Often, just getting someone to consider an idea he hadn't before is good progress.) That said, you may find legal philosopher Tara Smith's discussions of judicial interpretation helpful, especially if I have misunderstood your question, and you are more focused on interpreting the Constitution than I have guessed. In addition, since most people don't see a problem with taxation and can't imagine alternatives, I'd recommend (re-)reading and thinking about Ayn Rand's essay on, "Government Financing in a Free Society," in The Virtue of Selfishness.

I hope that helps. If you have any further questions or my readers have any further suggestions, I invite them in the comments.

-- CAV

If you'd like to ask a question, type it into the box labeled, "Ask Uncle Gus," at the upper right of this blog's main page, or at the top of the question-and-answer list hosted by FormSpring.

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4-9-11 Hodgepodge

Lead-In

Directly pertinent to Richard Salsman's column (linked below) at Forbes this week is an article in the Hillsdale College publication, Imprimis, in which, as Jeffrey Meek of Rational Public Radio notes, "Seth Lipsky, founding editor of the New York Sun, asks the question, 'What would happen if we let the kilogram float?'" The Sun itself put out a much shorter editorial making the same basic point, in February.

[O]ne could go whole hog and fix the value of both the kilogram and the dollar but float the value of time. You say you want to be paid $100 an hour. That's fine by your boss. But he gets to decide how many minutes in the hour. Or how long the minute is. You know you'll get a kilogram of meat for the price a kilogram of meat costs. But you won't know how long you have to work to earn the money. It strikes us as a risky deal. But speaking here for The New York Sun, we say if people are going to insist that the whole point of the kilogram is its constancy, then we're going to say that there's no point to it without, as well, a constant dollar.

Meek is right to praise the connection Lipsky makes between fiat money and the violation of property rights, but the shorter piece is also ingenious in its own right -- for making clear how fiat money impedes even the simplest transactions.

Weekend Reading

"Since private gold holding was legalized, the gold price has increased by nearly eight-fold, from $185/ounce to $1464/ounce, and precisely because the U.S. dollar, officially unhinged from gold, has declined in basic purchasing power." -- Richard Salsman, in "The Bank Runs of the Early 1930s and FDR’s Ban on Gold" at Forbes

"[T]o accept that the proper role of government is to facilitate ... charity doesn't just pervert our status as a capitalist economy, it destroys the basic premise of individual liberty on which the U.S. is built." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "U.S. Should Value Greed, Not Need" at SmartMoney

"When a person rejects the very good in favor of nothing less than the perfect, he or she will most often be left with something even worse than the most menial job: The futility of having given up." -- Michael Hurd, in "Make Your Second Career a Reality" at DrHurd.com

My Two Cents

Michael Hurd addresses his column to retirees, but anyone attempting career change (or even just looking for work) would do well to read it. The grind of a job hunt added to constant reminders of how bad the economy is can make one forget what's right in the world, and become pessimistic. Hurd shows how to overcome such thinking by formulating five basic strategies for a successful search.

At this point, I'll chime in and reiterate my longstanding recommendation to look at Nick Corcodilos for additional advice on the nitty-gritty of finding opportunities and landing a job.

Heh!

I like this illustrated chart of "APA Philosophy Referee Hand Signals," but I see that my favorite NFL hand signal ("Too many men on the field."), pictured at right, doesn't appear.

Perhaps it means, "not even wrong," but went missing because of its resemblance to "I'll have to consider that."/"Loss of Down."

[Fill in your own joke about how this might explain the persistence of mysticism through the ages here.]

France's "Mechanical Internet"

I think I've heard of this before, but perhaps referred to as a "mechanical telegraph."

Telecommunications got an early start in France, where inventor Claude Chappe built a series of towers between Lille and Paris in 1792. Each tower was topped with a set of movable wooden arms that could be arranged to represent symbols; if each operator viewed his neighbor through a telescope, a symbol could pass through 15 stations covering 120 miles in only 9 minutes, giving France a valuable communications advantage over the surrounding powers during the sensitive period of the revolution. It makes an appearance in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Follow the link for the relevant literary passage.

-- CAV

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A Promising Approach

From opposite sides of the planet come really bad news and a ray of hope. Getting the bad news out of the way, yet another report of superbugs on the loose came, this time from India, the other day:

A gene that makes [bacteria] highly resistant to almost all known antibiotics has been found in bacteria in water supplies in New Delhi used by local people for drinking, washing and cooking, scientists said on Thursday.

As a story on the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria pointed out some time ago, the loss of this defense against infectious bacteria would be a disaster for modern medicine.

Dr Livermore, whose grandmother died for lack of infection-killing drugs in 1945, is director of the antibiotic resistance monitoring and reference laboratory of the Health Protection Agency. Last year, the HPA put out an alert to medical professionals about NDM 1, urging them to report all suspect cases. Livermore is far from sanguine about the future.

"A lot of modern medicine would become impossible if we lost our ability to treat infections," he says. He is talking about transplant surgery, for instance, where patients' immune systems have to be suppressed to stop them rejecting a new organ, leaving them prey to infections, and the use of immuno-suppressant cancer drugs.

But it is not just an issue in advanced medicine. Antibiotics are vital to abdominal surgery. "You safeguard the patient from bacteria leaking into the body cavity," he says. "If you lose the ability to treat these infections, far more people would die of peritonitis." Appendix operations would carry the same risk as they did before Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928.

Fortunately, nanotechnology may be well on the way to providing an answer, by overcoming some of the limitations found in a couple of classes of molecules that were being investigated for their antibiotic properties:

[C]harged peptides like magainin can be difficult to work with. Charged polymers have proven to be preferable to peptides because their manufacture is easier and cheaper to scale up, and because they are less haemolytic -- they are better at killing bacteria than they are at killing red blood cells. But the fact that they are not biodegradable poses a problem when it comes to their use in humans.

[Fredrik] Nederberg et al. made charged polymers out of cyclic carbonates, which are nontoxic and biodegradable. Their degradation produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, and they degrade slowly, so they have prolonged antimicrobial functions inside the body and long shelf-lives outside of it. Because of their amphiphilic nature -- they have a positively charged region, which is hydrophilic, but also a hydrophobic region -- these nanoparticles spontaneously form small spheres in water, so they can hide their hydrophobic parts inside.

The enhanced charge of the spheres allows them to more efficiently bind to the bacterial cell wall than other antimicrobial polymers that act as single molecules. The nanostructures were effective against Gram-positive bacteria, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, and had an efficiency comparable to that of conventional antimicrobials at their best, all while leaving red blood cells alone. [link to journal abstract added]

Test results with mice sound promising.

We're not necessarily out of the woods. I understand that drug development can be tricky, and human tests could always reveal some unforeseen problem. But setting aside those pitfalls and interference from the FDA, we may well see catastrophe averted.

-- CAV

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