Bad Arguments For/About Voting

Because it's Election Day, I would like to respond to a few bad arguments about voting.

Bad Argument #1: "I may not agree with who you choose to vote for, but you should just vote, no matter what."

Response: You should definitely not vote in any election for which you are too ill-informed to vote. If your vote equates to a coin toss, then it is not important at all if you vote, in fact it's better if you leave the vote to people who are actually informed about the issue. You should not make your voice heard if you essentially have no voice or if your voice is so ill-informed that it could sway an otherwise valid election.

Bad Argument #2: "I would vote for a third party, but they have no chance of winning."

Response: Suppose your family votes on what to have for dinner; Choice 1 is something you love, but everyone else hates; Choice 2 is something you hate, but everyone else loves; Choice 3 is something everyone hates. How should you vote? Should you choose something you definitely love, even though you'll "lose the vote," or should you vote for something you definitely hate, just so that you can "win the vote?" It makes no sense to vote for Choice 2 in this case. You'll end up with something you hate, and the only thing you would have gained is the feel-good moment of having cast your vote for the option that ultimately won, even though you didn't want it to. Choice 1 is not a "wasted vote," it's an honest vote. Choice 2 is a wasted vote for sure: You definitely vote for something you don't want, and you gain nothing for doing so. "But at least I didn't end up with Choice 3!" Hmm.

Bad Argument #3: "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain."

Response: The exercise of your right to free speech is not contingent on the exercise of your responsibility to vote. Whether you vote or not, you can always complain. But notice: Those who cast a vote bear the responsibility of the electoral outcome. If successful politicians end up doing things the voters didn't want, they have no right to complain; after all, they voted, and thus must either bear the responsibility of having voted for the politician, or "accept the outcome of the election."

Bad Argument #4: "You must vote for the lesser of two evils."

Response: Suppose I offer you the choice of punching either your son or your daughter; but you also have the choice to abstain, in which case I will make my own choice and punch accordingly. Should you vote and bear responsibility for which one gets punched? Or, should you abstain and force me to bear the full brunt of the moral culpability? I'd say the latter, wouldn't you?

Bad Argument #5: "You can't love someone and vote their rights away."

Response: Yeah, we've all seen that video. Guess what, though: politicians from every party want to take away your rights. Some of them want to take away your reproductive rights; some want to take away your private property rights; some want to take away your gun rights; some want to take away your contract rights; some want to restrict your speech; some want to take away your due process rights; etc. Everyone you plan on voting for in this election and all other elections will ultimately take away some of your rights unless and until you vote libertarian, which most of you won't. So chances are good that you A) Think you love me, and B) Plan on voting some of my rights away. You are either a hypocrite, or your argument isn't valid after all. I'm going with the latter, because I have smart friends and family who aren't often hypocrites.

Bad Argument #6: "Voting might not be perfect, but it's the only way to make your voice heard."

Response: No, there are so many other ways to make your voice heard. And you don't have to wait for a special every-two-years event to make your voice heard. Figure out some other ways to make your voice heard, and do them. True whether your choose to vote, or not.

Bad Argument #7: "Local elections matter a lot more than national elections."

Response: Many of the local elections on my ballot this morning had only one candidate, so there was no real choice there. Those elections essentially didn't matter at all.

Bad Argument #8: "Oh well, at least [bad candidate] didn't win!"

Response: But take a look at who actually did.

Okay, that's all I've got for you for a little while. I hope you voted or not voted according to your conscience and that you can live with your choice! I also hope your ethical system allows enough grace and humility for you to forgive your friends, relatives, and neighbors who made different electoral choices than you. Elections come once every couple of years, but our social and familial bonds are with us every day. Pour your energy into the ones you love - no politician can take that away from you unless you allow them access to your soul.

Life In A Global Pandemic, Part 12

I received the Moderrna COVID-19 vaccine.

Instead of selling it on the open market, the world's largest capitalist economy has decided to use central planning to distribute the vaccines. I wish I could say I didn't see that coming, but the global response to this virus has been a disaster of central planning from the very beginning. It stands to reason that the "end" (?) of the pandemic should unfold the same way.

Tarrant County provided a website, distributed mainly by word-of-mouth as far as I can tell, through which residents could register to receive the vaccine. It is not first come, first served. Instead, patients were linked to an electronic form, in which we disclosed our age, race, sex, and so on, along with any "preexisting conditions" we might have. This is to ensure that the vaccine goes first to the sick and the weak, rather than to the young, strong, socially active people who are probably responsible for transmitting the virus so widely. That said, I do think the old and the at-risk ought to have first crack at the vaccine.

"Luckily" for me, I acquired type 1 diabetes more than a decade ago. (Tempus fugit!) The county's electronic form doesn't differentiate between type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and of course it is only type 2 diabetes that is listed as the kind of "preexisting condition" that puts one at risk of death from COVID-19. Since I can't go on the open market and buy myself a shot, though, I didn't feel too badly about answering truthfully that I have "diabetes" and letting the health department sort out the details. Within a week, I had my appointment for receiving the vaccine scheduled.

The health department called me three times on Friday. I didn't recognize the number, so I let it go to voicemail. In any case, it was an automated call all three times. They also sent me three identical emails the text of which was verbatim to the phone calls I received. The emails contained a link to confirm my appointment, and so I did. The appointment was scheduled for the following day "between 9 AM and 11 AM."

I showed up at about 8:45 AM, and there was already a long lineup of cars waiting to park. Police split traffic up into four separate queues, which eventually merged back into two separate lines. Once we found a parking space, we lined up again inside the building - two separate lines this time. I waited in line for perhaps 40 minutes, during which time volunteers checked my paperwork no less than five times. Finally, I arrived at a registration table, where my paperwork was checked again, my driver's license and insurance information were taken down, and then I was directed into an all-new queue. This queue happened to split into two lines for about 20 yards, before merging back into one queue again. Central planning is wonderful, isn't it?

At last, I was allowed inside a conference room, where I sat at a table and someone administered the vaccine. I was then directed to a second person who gave me my "vaccine card," along with a memorized set of instructions that I will never be able to remember. The gist of it was that I needed my "vaccine card" to get my second vaccine dose, which I will be able to receive in four weeks' time. She also told me, despite CDC information to the contrary, that I cannot mix vaccines, meaning that since I received the Moderna vaccine, I should only get the Moderna vaccine for my second dose, otherwise it won't work. Finally, she gave me a sticky-note with a time written on it: 10:14 AM, the time when I would be allowed to leave the building. Apparently they make people wait in the conference room for 20 minutes to ensure that nobody has an adverse reaction to the vaccine.

Then I went home.

My sister had received the Moderna vaccine a few weeks before I did. By her account, the vaccine causes muscle cramps, tiredness, feverishness, and so on. I expected to have a similar experience, so I quickly went for a nice, hard run when I got home. I figured that if I was going to be out of commission for a day or two, I should get a good workout in before I started feeling down.

None of those adverse reactions happened for me. The injection site became about as sore as it would be for a tetanus or DTAP vaccine. I did not experience tiredness, pain, fever, or anything else. I feel perfectly fine.

I would recommend the vaccine to others. Hopefully, most everyone will eventually receive an effective vaccine, and the spread of this disease can be minimized as much as possible. I understand that this is one of the first widely used mRNA vaccines ever made. I was curious about it for that reason. This is a new mechanism of action, one that has not previously received widespread federal approval. (According to a handout I received when I was given my vaccine, the Moderna vaccine is "not FDA-approved." They want everyone to know that they are getting an unapproved vaccine, presumably so that no one will ever think to blame the FDA if something goes wrong. Nothing says "accountability" quite like government.) I think now that the concept has essentially been proven, we can expect to see more mRNA vaccines in the future. This could mean a cure for the common cold, to say nothing about all the other, more serious, diseases we might be able to cure with new vaccine technology. 

If there is anything positive about any of this, that's it. It's exciting to be a part of medical history. I'll let you know if I grow a demonic hand or something, but at this point I am expecting it to be smooth-sailing from here.

3-D Chess And The Federal Minimum Wage

MSN.com reports that President Joe Biden is signing an executive order to set the wage minimum paid to federal employees and contractors at $15 per hour.

Note that this is not actually "an increase in the federal minimum wage." Biden's executive order is about the wage that the federal government pays to its own employees. It is not an executive order about setting a national minimum wage. If I'm not mistaken, the latter requires Congress and could never be achieved by an executive order. 

Biden has always been popular among federal employee unions, school unions, and the like, because he has always been quite favorable to their policy preferences in the past. So it will not be surprising if we hear members of these unions reacting quite happily to Biden's executive order on federal wages. That's a political win for Biden.

Interestingly enough, though, it might also be an example of 3-D chess. Why? Because increases in the minimum wage are well-understood to decrease employment. When you make something more expensive - in this case, labor costs - you get less of that something - in this case, labor. This is one of the most empirically robust findings in economics. It's not even worth debating anymore. Increases in the minimum wage decrease employment. 

Thanks to both the covid-19 pandemic and the various government lockdowns attendant thereto, the economy is in quite a pickle. The federal government is spending money like a drunken sailor, money it doesn't actually have. So the government's debt is increasing, and its budget deficit is increasing, and the US economy is not very healthy. One solution proposed by those who favor "austerity measures" is a reduction in federal spending. 

So the question is, how would a Democrat who wants to make unions happy choose to reduce federal spending while still pleasing his union supporters? One way might be to raise the wage standard such that the federal government hires fewer employees, reducing costs. Of course, this can only happen if the workforce reduction (or its growth rate) is reduced by more than the cost of the wage increase. Well, the federal government is now free to reduce the size of its workforce as much as it wants, since the unions are happy and US citizens in general have received the signal that Biden is "good for labor."

It will be interesting to watch and see what happens to the size of the federal workforce.

Is There Racial Disparity In Coup Attempts?

There are a lot of Twitter screenshots floating around out there about how 52 people got arrested for yesterday's crazy quasi-coup attempt at the Capitol building, versus 14,000 arrests during the George Floyd protests. This disparity, according to those who point it out, proves "white privilege" and "structural racism."

Has the world gone mad? The US government was possibly attempted to have been taken over by a furry yesterday, and people want to argue about how bad it would have been if the furry had been black. 

For perspective, imagine that you're walking through Times Square, when suddenly a flying saucer descends from the skies, lands right in the middle, the door pops open, and out walk three greys and Jesus Christ, all wearing polka-dot space suits, and when the crowd falls silent, they all yell in unison, "Whassup, my n-words!!!" Then, the next day, everyone on Twitter starts arguing about whether it was racist for them to have used the n-word. Not a peep about proof of extraterrestrial life or the second coming of the Messiah, no, it's all about racism.

I am sensitive to the plight of the marginalized, but our present predicament desperately needs to remain fully contextualized. The outgoing president of the United States of America may or may not have committed incitement or treason or sedition or whatever, using a deranged army of furries. Maybe now is not the time to remark that black lives matter.

They do matter. But what the flying fish just happened yesterday???

Texas: The Ups And The Downs

Over at Econlog, Bryan Caplan has written a post about his impressions of Texas, based on his recent trip/speaking tour of the state. He correctly identifies many of the multiplicitous positive aspects of Texas and life here. 

 Texas has a lot going for it, but there are a few downsides. The main downsides are:

(1) Sprawl: I'm all for new development, but a sea of identical-looking houses interspersed by the occasional fast food chicken restaurant does not make for very pleasant living.

(2) Antipathy for plants? The older areas of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex are very nice indeed, with enormous oak trees and beautiful parks. In the newer, sprawling areas, all trees are instantly mowed-down and replaced with lawn and concrete. This makes the landscape uglier, hotter, and more prone to flooding.

(3) Government corruption: Many of Texas' infrastructure projects are simply boondoggles, transfers of wealth from the taxpayers to the construction-company friends of politicians. Road construction is the classic example, in which miles of highway are torn up, and then rebuilt exactly as it was before. Rather than improving or widening the roads, they simply tear them up and rebuild them again, over and over, in an endless transfer of taxpayer money to construction companies.

There are a few other things I could point to that I dislike, but the simple fact of the matter is that no location is perfect-perfect. But, for a happy mix of good weather, fine people, excellent economic opportunities, and low cost of living, Texas circa-2020 is about as good a place as you're likely to find out there in the world. 

I think most of the people who dislike it here have what I would call niche criteria when it comes to choosing a place to live. You won't find purple mountain majesties or a large Lebanese diaspora here, for example. Most of what Texas is lacking consists of these sorts of niches. If someone were to say, "I'll never live in a place where I can't have a weasel as a pet!" or "I insist on paying a state-level income tax!" then, okay, Texas might not be for you.

Still, for the average Joe, Texas is a great place to be. No wonder people keep moving here.

An Idea For Improving Politics

Almost everyone agrees that the political situation in America today is dire. Very dire. Political polarization is at an all-time high, and neither of the major political parties seems equipped to reduce that polarization. The Republican Party has more or less traded in its old platform ideas for the sake of advancing a cult of personality, and not even a particularly attractive personality. (Seriously, have you ever heard anyone since before 2015 say that they want to be like Donald Trump or that they emulate him as a person?) Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is being held captive by an increasingly shrill and literally destructive mob of critical race theorists whose ultimate objective is to destroy, not racism, but capitalism. Both sides are becoming increasingly violent, where here "violent" means, "literally engaged in causing physical harm to members of the opposing political team."

It's scary out there, and there is very little hope for improvement. Granted, a vote for Joe Biden at least appears to be a vote for establishing the old status quo - not that that was a particularly attractive thing, but merely that it seems better than four years of a worsening political environment under Trump. That, of course, assumes that four years of the Biden-flavored status quo would improve the political environment at all. I'm hopeful that it will, but there's no guarantee, and a wide array of hypothetical scenarios in which things could get worse. 

If only someone had a good idea for improving America's political environment. Lucky you, faithful readers! I have given this issue a few moments of idle thought, and have unsurprisingly solved the whole puzzle over the course of a can of La Croix.

It came to me as I was reading a friend's Facebook status. He remarked that the federal US legislature had passed a particularly low number of bills this year: 158, compared to the usual 500 or so. His point was that the obstructionists in the legislature were preventing all the other well-intentioned legislators from doing their job, which is of course to create new laws and pass them.

The astute, libertarian reader will immediately note that my friend's assumption is that many of the problems we currently face as a country stem from there being too few laws. If the legislature could only pass more of them, more of our country's problems would be solved!

Not to give away the ending of this post too quickly here, but the astute, libertarian reader will have already guessed how this thing ends, anyway.

I thought to myself, ("Self," I thought), What if one of the underlying problems here is that we see the government's job as being "to create new laws and regulations, and to enforce those that already exist?" In such an environment, a "successful" politician will be the one that passes more new laws, and/or enforces the existing ones more stringently. Assuming all politicians have only the best of intentions (ha, ha), the most successful politician in a world like that will be the one that succeeds at creating and enforcing laws; over time, politicians will become more successful at doing so; ever-more laws will have to be created, and ever-more-stringent enforcement mechanisms will have to be devised to ensure the "success" of the political system, subject to its assumed purpose.

What if we instead defined the government's job to be something like, "to serve as the final arbiter of conflict?" In such an environment, a "successful" politician would be the one that most effectively arbitrates conflict. The goal of legislating would not be to simply create and enforce new laws, but to create laws that reduce conflict and eliminate conflicting laws. The goal of the executive would not be to merely enforce the law, but to reduce conflict with the law. The goal of the judiciary would be to literally arbitrate between two conflicted parties. The more conflict is reduced in such a system, the more "successful" politicians are deemed. 

That all sounds a bit idealistic, but I'm not really articulating a view about the mechanics of government. Rather, I'm articulating a view about how ordinary people can think about government, such that our political environment improves. 

Change the way we think about government, in other words, and we might just change our political system.

There is no room for cynics in this idea, though. Cynicism is a cancer that destroys everything it touches, and it's probably responsible for most of the terrible things you see out there, at least as far as politics goes. 

So, if you want to be hopeful, maybe it's time to try my idea on for size. How might your attitudes and opinions change if you thought of government as a conflict-resolution mechanism, rather than a law-enforcement mechanism?

Something Is Inevitable - But What?

These last few years, especially the first half of this tumultuous 2020, have been an almost surreal experience for me. Even the simplest facts seem incredible. For example, who would ever have guessed that Donald Trump would become the President of the United States? Whether or not you like his policies, you have to admit that the mere fact of his presidency is highly unusual. I'm not sure there is a historical analogue for it.

It's not just the Trump presidency, of course. There are just so many things about life today that seem strange. America's ongoing military campaigns across the Middle East, a violent historical fact that has depleted our national treasury and strained our military resources, are 20 or 30 years in (depending on where you start counting) and show no signs of abating, even as we descend into an economic depression the likes of which has never been seen before. The United States of America, stereotyped as a bastion of free enterprise and laissez-faire capitalism, is now engaged in some of the most protectionist and mercantilist policies -- not just of the USA's brief history, but also comparatively across contemporary nations. The "socialist" European Union and communist People's Republic of China often give more powerful defenses of free international trade than any public figure in the United States today, other than the usual free-market libertarians who have been around for decades. The Black Lives Matter organization, a publicly Marxist organization with a professed antipathy toward the institution of private property, is the anti-racist organization that has captivated our youth; BLM, rather than any other organization out there. 

Even my fellow libertarians are acting out of type, making arguments for universal welfare schemes and environmental paternalism, arguing against democracy itself, or in some cases defending racism as a human right. 

The common denominator in all of this seems to be impassioned extremism, rather than stoic rationalism. It almost seems to me as though even-tempered and restrained thoughtfulness is just... gone. In its place, even formerly rational people seem to be competing with each other to tackle quirky, zany, and/or extreme ideas for their sheer novelty. 

Is that it? Do people now latch on to the extremes and the quirkiness mostly for their novelty, whereas reasonableness is boring? Or, is it that reasonableness doesn't make the news because it doesn't generate enough popular interest? Something else?

Now, when I look at what's happening around me, I am overcome by a single thought: "This can't possibly go on." It's not sustainable for a diverse country of 350 million to stop trading in the international marketplace while deficit-spending many several Middle Eastern wars and flirting with socialist populism. It just can't continue. It will inevitably end.

The end is inevitable, but how will it happen? Will the United States grow more restrained, reduce its global military presence, reduce its annual budget, seek more inter- and intra-national cohesion, and become a calmer nation overall? Or, is this the beginning of the end of the United States as we know it? 

I honestly don't know.

An Offhand Thought On Political Reform

In an overview of his five-part series on wealth and wealth taxation, The Hoover Institute's John Cochrane makes a fairly innocuous and casual statement: "Saez and Zucman want to confiscate billionaires' wealth, because they think billionaires have too much political power."

Years ago, I went on a half-vacation to El Salvador, during which I had the opportunity to hear a lot about recent (post-civil-war) Salvadoran history from the guides at several museums and tourist spots. It was said to me that, after the civil war, the Salvadoran government fired the entire police force and every politician in the country, and hired all new people; people whose families had not previously been in the police or the government. It was a fresh start, so to speak. (The Chapultapec Peace Accords.) I am not an expert in this subject, so I cannot say to what extent the "average Jose's" understanding of the Chapultapec Peace Accords aligns with the literal truth. That's not important. What's important was that it struck me as being an incredibly wise idea to bar prior politicians and their families from getting into politics.

It makes sense in El Salvador, because these politicians and policemen were precisely the aggressors who had stoked the flames of the country's terrible, terrible civil war. Surely it's an idea that wouldn't scale well to a relatively stable country like the United States. But that doesn't mean there isn't some wisdom to be gleaned from it.

Suppose, for example, that Saez and Zucman are correct when they note that billionaires have too much political power. One solution might be to eliminate billionaires. A different solution, however, might be this: impose strict limits on the political power of billionaires. If the problem is that too many billionaires influence government, then why not outlaw that kind of influence?

Perhaps there are gains to be made from barring billionaires from holding public offices or lobbying positions. Perhaps we could limit -- or eliminate -- the ability of politicians to invest in companies owned, founded, or run by living billionaires. Perhaps we could outlaw the kind of private meetings had between politicians and billionaires that are otherwise inaccessible to average, non-billionaire citizens. Perhaps we could prohibit the granting of major tax loopholes, credits, or waivers to billionaire-owned companies unless they are extended to all other businesses at the same time.

These limits would not necessarily need to be so strict as to strangulate a billionaire's ability to participate in the political system. Billionaires could still found non-profit organizations or fund academic research. They could still vote like the rest of us. But they would be prohibited from engaging in special audiences and agreements with the government at any level.

These ideas, too, would limit the political power of billionaires. We need not confiscate their money.

It's a somewhat natural impulse for people to believe that, if billionaires corrupt government, then we should simply do away with billionaires. I think it should be at least as natural an impulse to do away, not with the billionaire, but with the influence. Why do these propositions never seek to impose harsher limits and punishments on politicians? Why do we only ever punish one side of a two-sided corruption?

"Politics The Mind-Killer" And Other Stories

Twelve years ago, Eliezer Yudkowski introduced a concept that has taken root across the international community of smart people. In a blog post entitled, "Politics is the Mind-Killer," he writes:

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation . . . When, today, you get into an argument about whether “we” ought to raise the minimum wage, you’re executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

Right off the bat, he loses me. The ultimate thrust of his idea, is a good one. He concludes by saying simply, "It’s just better for the spiritual growth of the community to discuss the issue without invoking color politics." In order to arrive at this point, however, Yudkowski makes a terrible error that no one has ever bothered to go back and correct. Yudkowski thinks politics is an evolutionary response. I don't.

The fact that human beings are social is almost certainly an evolutionary fact. All of the great apes and most of the primates are social animals. It would be strikingly odd to discover that one of the most common primates was completely atomistic, in contrast to every other similar species. I think it's also self-evidently true that politics is a form of social interaction. From this, we'd be tempted to follow a chain of logic that goes something like this:

1. Social interaction is an evolved behavior.
2. Politics is a form of social interaction.
3. Therefore, politics is an evolved behavior.

This kind of analysis is so superficial that I'm surprised it could convince anyone. Consider an analogous argument:

1. Social interaction is an evolved behavior.
2. Laser tag is a form of social interaction.
3. Therefore, laser tag is an evolved behavior.

What's the problem here? Human beings evolved to link up with each other and behave cooperatively. Playing a game of laser tag certainly involves linking up with other human beings and cooperating, and thus involves a cognitive response that can be traced back through the millennia, but the specific context of a game of laser tag is completely disconnected from any evolutionary pattern. Laser tag is not a biological fact, but a technological one.

Humans put their evolutionary abilities to use to invent laser tag, just as chimpanzees put their own abilities to use to build nests in the trees. No one would argue that nests are a part of chimp evolution. Chimps evolved to sleep and to prefer comfort to discomfort; thus, over time, they discovered a technology that satisfied their needs. Humans evolved to reason, and to think up games to practice strategy; thus, over time, they developed a laser tag technology that satisfied their needs.

My argument: Politics is merely a kind of social technology*.

When we invoke politics, we're not engaging in something inevitable from out evolved biology, we're choosing a particular kind of social technology designed to facilitate cooperation. Ludwig von Mises would ask, Is the chosen means the best way to achieve the desired end? Well, doesn't that depend on what end one is working toward?

There is an unstated assumption among good people discussing an issue in good faith that we're all looking for the truth, and that if we can debate it and publicly investigate the evidence, eventually we'll all come the same understanding of an issue and agree on what is to be done. We commonly deride others when they "play politics," because on some level we know that politics is antithetical to the search for truth and evidence-based consensus. On some level, we all know that politics is more akin to short-circuiting rational analysis in favor of a cruder emotional response. In light of that, one possible alternate definition for politics is: Appealing to emotions to gain consensus when evidence and logic is insufficient or costly to present.

Consider any political issue about which you feel strongly. Any at all. Consider the things you most typically say about this issue. Does most of what you say consist of formal presentations of the best available empirical evidence, and a clear outline of the underlying logic in defense of a particular policy response? Or, do you mostly say emotional stuff about how the good guys agree with you, the bad guys disagree with you, and that anyone with a modicum of humanity should obviously prefer your policy set? Probably the latter, right? We tend to save our formal, empirical reasoning for our professional lives, mostly because it's hard work (i.e. "costly to present").

We humans are obviously not computers or robots. We evolved both logical and emotional cognitive abilities to handle different kinds of scenarios. Emotional appeals work particularly well in resolving the conflicts of love, for example, while logical appeals work well to get jobs done, put food on the table, solve immediate technological problems, and so on. Love is the glue of social cohesion, and so it's not particularly surprising to see people use emotional responses to attempt to solve problems of social cohesion.

For better or worse, the human species has flourished to the point that some of the things that used to be entirely about social cohesion, such as the distribution of resources within a community, have now become mostly technological problems. When we were hunter-gatherers that acquired resources communally, emotional appeals were probably appropriate means of requesting additional resources in times of need. In the modern world, the economy is so complex that acquiring additional resources can no longer be seen as a matter to be solved through emotional appeals. We now have technologies for the collection and distribution of financing, and many worthy causes that compete against one another for limited resources. The worthiest cause is no longer the one with an important moral claim or a particularly emotional backstory. The worthiest cause is the one that can make the best empirical case that it will put the resources to good use.

You can argue that this technology is cold and unfeeling, but you cannot argue that it isn't fair or that it doesn't distribute resources efficiently. Playing politics thus becomes a way to distract from the best use of our resources and to express emotional vigor over a particularly hard empirical problem to overcome.

Politics isn't a "mind-killer," exactly, but rather a technology best used to resolve individual emotional conflicts, rather than large-scale problems within the state.

__________________

* Here I am using "technology" in the same sense that Mises would have used it.

"The Best Tech"

There's a scene in the excellent True Fiction, by Lee Goldberg, in which one of the characters leans back in his chair and marvels at how the US intelligence forces have all "the best tech." It's a silly scene in a silly book, and I won't spoil it by delving too deeply into it. The reason I bring it up is because it's emblematic of a common belief about law enforcement in the United States: that their skills and technological prowess are on a level far superior to anything ordinary human beings can fathom. In the psyche of many Americans US law enforcement and military have taken on almost the same esteem of super-heroes.

I thought about this over the weekend, while I was riding my bicycle.

It was supposed to be a pair of relatively easy rides. For a week, I had been looking forward to exploring a bicycle path I'd recently heard about from a fellow cyclist. Meanwhile, it's long been a goal of mine to ride my bicycle from my house to a particular relative's house, some 30-40 miles away, across the metroplex. Last weekend, a friend of mine was having a music concert at a block party just off the bicycle path I wanted to explore; then, later that afternoon, my relative was having a house party of her own.

Perfect! I thought, I'll ride the twelve or so miles to see my friend's concert, then I'll ride from there to my relative's house, another twelve or thirteen miles from the concert. At less than thirty total miles of easy riding, I was disappointed that I wouldn't get a hard ride in, but happy about being able to "kill two birds with one stone" by exploring the new bike path and riding to my relative's house on the same day.

The ride to the concert was pleasant and uneventful. The concert was also very good. I hopped on my bicycle and started riding to my relative's house. I made it about halfway when I noticed that a major stretch of road had been closed, including an overpass above a major highway. I decided to try to ride through the closed road anyway. I went a few blocks before a police officer indicated with her siren that I needed to find another route. I waved acquiescence and turned onto a side-street to see whether I could find my way to the next overpass.

I rode for another 10 minutes or so before I finally realized that I needed the help of my GPS. I scanned for a route on my phone, found something I thought might work, and headed out. To my chagrin, my GPS map kept "resetting" the route to the shortest, most direct route: across the closed overpass. There was no way for me to find an alternate route. I decided to head back the way I came and ask the police officer for directions.

The officer and I talked for a while. To my surprise, when I asked her for directions, she pulled out her personal cell phone, fired up the Google Maps application, and showed me a 10-mile detour I'd have to take to get around the road closure. I thanked her and went on my way.

But: the officer didn't tell me anything I hadn't already learned looking at my own Google Maps app. In fact, as we were discussing possible routes, I also pulled out my phone and searched right along with her. The police don't seem to have any better sense of directions than anyone else, and it's all based on the same "tech." Their Google Maps is exactly the same as mine. I'm grateful to the officer for trying to help me, but I marvel at the fact that consumer technology and police technology are one and the same.

If anything, with more bicycling and route-finding experience on my end, I might have been the better one with finding a route.

While this, of course, "proves nothing," I think it is a good example of the fact that law enforcement is not necessarily any more technologically advanced than the average person. When libertarians occasionally suggest that certain government provisions could be painlessly eliminated, we are stereotypically presented with a confrontational question: "But without government, who would build the roads?" In this case, this "road" has been built by Google, and placed in the hands of consumers and government alike.

Violence

Comic book author Alan Moore wrote a comprehensive critique of American culture's preoccupation with violence. The critique became a smash hit, sold record numbers of copies while in production, continues to sell millions in reprints, and was made into a box office hit film.

The critique is called Watchmen.

Most people my age and older have seen or read Watchmen, and many of those people have entirely misconstrued the message. Part of the reason for that is that Moore is an extremely intelligent man who presents moral issues as they are - complex and nuanced - rather than as we would like them to be - dichotomous, discrete choices between "good" and "evil."

In reality, it is pathological to American culture to simultaneously engage in dichotomous moral thinking and to conclude that the proper solution to any major policy issue is put the largest proton blaster into the hands of the side you're cheering for. Thus, the perceived solution to illegal immigration is to "shoot them." The perceived solution to mass shootings is more good guys with guns. The perceived solution to terrorism is a never-ending war and constant drone-bombings. And so on.

As my fellow libertarians are quick to point out, all laws are essentially violent threats against non-compliance. A gun control law is a threat to shoot anyone who attempts to own the wrong kind of gun. An anti-immigration law is a threat to shoot anyone who attempts to cross the border without "papers, please." If you ever doubt that laws are violent threats, then consider how many people are shot by police for "resisting arrest." A law against resistance is a threat to shoot anyone who tries to resist.

The reason I bring this up is because many people believe that the solution to our culture's violence-obsession problem is more laws. They fail to realize that the proposed solution is a reification of the problem itself. Everyone seems to think that if bastards will just do what I say then everything will be fine!!! This is violent thinking. It's authoritarian thinking, for sure, and that might be a problem, but I think the more serious fact is that this kind of thinking is inherently violent.

Thus, every policy dispute tends to turn violent, if not in actual fact, at least in overall emotional content. This is why Twitter is such a toxic medium; there are so many violent opinions that level-headed discourse is impossible. This is why politics has become so polarized in America; we're given a choice of competing violences and asked which we prefer. The option of non-violence is neither requested nor given. Nobody wants it, and nobody gets it. It's easy to blame the political system for this, but that blame is misplaced. Politicians can only succeed by making us offers that seem to appeal to us. Non-violence does not seem to appeal to Americans.

You could say that "not all Americans" feel this way, and you'd be right. After all, I'm an American, and I don't feel that way. But look around you. We are in the minority.

The violence inherent in the political system means that any policy change that attempts to reduce the number of mass killings will not solve our underlying violence problem, even if it does reduce mass shootings. You might be passionate about gun control, but I am passionate about violence reduction. I would like to see a concrete reduction in Americans' obsession with violence. But how?

*        *        *

It's clear that our violence problem is cultural. I don't merely mean to say that it's "culture-wide" (although it is that, too), but rather to say that our preference for violence is hard-baked into American culture. This might seem like an incredible claim to you, so I'll offer a few points to help make my case.

First, consider the entertainment media. Consider how we arrive at movie content ratings. As long as violence is not depicted with blood or presented in an anatomically correct way, it can make its way into any PG-rated movie, and even plenty of G-rated movies. By contrast, non-sexual depictions of female nipples are basically an automatic PG-13 rating. Even sexual content without nudity can get a film an R-rating. Whatever your opinion on the appropriateness of sexual content ratings, you can't deny that there is a bizarre disparity between how Americans rate movie violence and how we rate movie sex. If you've ever seen American films in foreign countries, you know that foreign countries rate these things differently. The point here is a simple question: is it really safe to say that violence is more appropriate for children than sex is?

N.B.: I'm not arguing that children should be exposed to more sex, I'm arguing that they should be exposed to less violence. But our entertainment media is keen on giving violence the lowest possible rating, while giving anything remotely sexual the highest possible rating. Sex might not be appropriate for children, but it is at least a non-violent expression of positive emotions.

Next, consider the phenomenon of road rage. I am unable to find reliable international statistic on road rage, but the statistics presented at The Zebra are sobering. Road rage violence isn't just an American problem, it's an American problem that is getting worse as time goes by. The Zebra's statistics show us an ever-increasing problem that younger generations are increasingly susceptible to. From my perspective as a late Gen-Xer, I can remember first hearing accounts of "road rage" in the 1990s. For a while, it was a much-discussed topic. Because I seldom read or hear discussions of road rage as a concept anymore, I was surprised to learn that road rage itself has been steadily increasing for 30 years. I shouldn't have been surprised, though. It stands to reason that a culture obsessed with violence would express more violence on the roads.

Now, it does surprise me that a nation whose majority religion is Christianity would become obsessed with violence. Say what you will about Jesus Christ, he is a peaceful figure in the history of religion. He turned the other cheek, he let the centurions take him, he was arguably quite radical in his pacifism. Perhaps other religious figures are more pacifist than Jesus, or perhaps not, but at any rate, anyone who considers himself a Christian should probably have a bias toward peace and non-violence. It is quite a surprise that a nation founded by Quakers and Puritans would become a nation dominated by displays of force.

*        *        *

From within the culture is hard to see. Batman is awesome, I mean come on. He beats up bad guys. He's got all the best tech. He lurks in the shadows and then pounds criminals into oblivion. It's only when we see this image reflected back to us through conduits such as Watchmen that we begin to understand.

In the movie version of Watchmen, there's a scene in which Dr. Manhattan walks in slow motion through a Vietnamese battle field, zapping Viet Cong soldiers one by one. He points a finger and they are vaporized, torn apart in a way that does not look like flesh and blood. It looks more like paper, or smoke. One zap, and that's the end of them.

This scene is powerful for a variety of reasons, but the one relevant here is the contrast between the act of human killing and the utterly fantastic, unrealistic depiction of death itself. Those who are not copacetic to the underlying social critique of the story will tend to view this scene as a display of Dr. Manhattan's might. Look what he can do! He single-handedly won the Vietnam War! But the juxtaposition in this scene was a deliberate choice. The Vietnam War was, after all, the first televised war, the first time Americans had to confront the brutal reality of wartime violence face-to-face. There is actual video footage of actual Viet Cong soldiers being blown to bits. Americans old enough to have been alive at the time remember seeing the footage on the nightly news.

Moore's point is that we sanitize violence by making it seem like "comic-book violence." It's less real that way. The good guys in a war movie always die while sputtering a heart-felt message to their squadmates, "Tell Donna Mae I love her!" Not the bad guys. The bad guys just explode. No need to dwell on that, after all, they're bad guys!

This is the reason why police body-cam footage of violence causes such controversy among the "back-the-blue" crowd. They find it offensive to be reminded that police have gunned people down as they begged for their lives or shouted messages for their loved. They are vexed to know that "bad guys" don't die in real life the way they do in the movies. Or that sometimes the police are the bad guys. It is quite annoying to find that death cannot be so easily compartmentalized when you're staring it in the face.

Still, it's not enough to turn the tide. Twenty years of Columbine and 9/11 and drone bombs and beheading videos and body cam videos and all the rest of it. 20 years, and we've yet to recoil from all this violence. 20 years, and we're no closer to shutting down the torture chambers in Guantanamo Bay or the concentration camps at the border. 20 years of teaching preschoolers how to react to active shooter situations. If anything, things are worse now than they've ever been.

*        *        *

I don't know what it will take to cure America's obsession with violence. What could be powerful enough to overturn our legacy of hunting down Native American scalps for money? Of torturing and killing African Americans for fun, long after having declared them "emancipated?" Of living in a state of perpetual war since the Pearl Harbor attacks? Of injecting deliberately Guatemalans with gonorrhea just to see what would happen? 

I don't think gun laws will change anything, although I concede that they may reduce the number of deaths, and that might help. I don't think more laws or changes to the education system will fix the underlying problem. 

Somehow, Americans need to unlearn violence on a cultural level. We need to become a nation of "lovers, not fighters." Imagine the American spirit of rugged individualism and independence combined with a commitment to peace and love. God, that sounds like hippy bullshit, but think about it. If we could somehow extract the best of American individualism and mix it with the best of peaceful humanism, we'd really have what the American system was supposed to produce.

Instead, we have this thing, this sad thing. We have a debt-driven war machine that cranks out drone bombings and road rage and mass shootings, and there is no end in sight. I don't know how it will ever be fixed, but if you've ever considered becoming a more peaceful person, I think now is the right time to start.

Nothing Is Stopping You

Not too long ago, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution shared a link to an article about how shade has been reduced in modern American cities, possibly as the result of zoning regulations. I do not know enough about zoning or history to comment intelligently about the veracity of that article's claims, so I won't.

As a result of reading that article, however, I did take notice of how little shade there is in my local neighborhood, and in similar neighborhoods across North Texas. Even in the city parks, the most typical layout features large, expansive green grass fields surrounded by patches of trees and vegetation. It's nice being in a park like this during the winter months, when the added sun keeps you warm, but it's oppressive during the summertime. And considering how long and how hot Texas summers are, this strikes me as being a design flaw.

A better design can be seen in some of the area's older parks, such as Burnett Park in downtown Fort Worth, or some of the oldest parks in Dallas. There, grass fields are interspersed with enormous oak and cypress trees that cast shade over everything. Often, these parks are built where there is some elevation change (rare in a prairie state like Texas), so that trees on hills cast even more shade than they otherwise would.

Intelligently designed landscapes can offer a tremendous respite from the burning summer sun. With a little forethought, a space can be made into an inviting and worthwhile place to spend hours even during the hottest parts of July and August. I notice this immediately when I'm passing through older, wealthier neighborhoods in the area. Mansions are beautiful places to begin with, but even a small, modest home looks luxurious when the owners take design cues from the rich. Wealthy home owners make ample use of large, thick trees that cast shade over their entire yard. I strongly suspect a major reason mansion owners like these trees is because they are large and provide a great deal of privacy to anyone on the property; but my interest isn't in more privacy, but in more shade, and these large trees provide shade in spades.

You can spot other helpful tricks in the old parks, botanical gardens, and wealthy mansions. One is ground cover: low-lying shrubbery for use in landscape beds in lieu of traditional coverage such as mulch or gravel. Obviously gravel, being made of stone, conducts far more heat than mulch, which in turn conducts more heat than foliage. So if one wanted to create a cool and inviting yard, one would prefer mulch to gravel and foliage to mulch. It's so simple. Another important trick is to cast shade across all the windows of the home, either with awnings and pergolas, or with small, decorative trees like myrtles.

The reason I bring all this up is not to enthuse about landscaping, but to draw a contrast between the article I read and the situation in front of me. One can become very frustrated reading articles like the one mentioned above, but at the end of the day, how likely is it that we'll ever be able to make a widespread impact on the city's zoning laws? Perhaps a vote, petition, or city council meeting here and there is an important civic duty, but that's not a very efficient use of your time.

What's a more efficient use of your time? If you want more shade, plant more trees. Make some changes to your yard, and enjoy the benefits of your work almost immediately. Surround yourself and your home with pleasant things that make your life tangibly better. There might be some screwed up laws and regulations out there, but generally speaking there's nothing stopping you from making your own home a marginally better place. So do it.

Is Welfare Socialism?

An interesting idea has been allowed to take hold in the libertarian community. The idea is that the word "socialism" should not be used interchangeably with the phrase "social welfare spending." On that narrow and somewhat semantic point, I agree.

However, on the broader point that welfare spending isn't really socialism, I can only ask, "What the hell are you talking about?" Of course social welfare spending is socialism. What else would it be?

Now, don't get me wrong. I do understand the purpose of trying to make the case that social welfare spending isn't socialism. It's sort of a two-pronged attack.

The one prong involves libertarians' collective self-awareness about the fact that no one in the 21st Century appears to be prepared to relinquish the welfare state. It is now too entrenched in modern society to simply swipe it away. Savvy libertarians, then, have moved on to spreading more popular notions of liberty, such as marijuana legalization, criminal justice reform, and small business deregulation. This enables libertarians to present ourselves as being less quixotic than the reputation that precedes us. We can say, "No, no, I'm not coming after your food stamps. I simply want to prevent crony capitalism." That's a much more appealing message than, "Trust us, the poor will be richer if we stop giving them free food stamps and health care. No, I mean it, trust us."

The second prong is a little more elegant and requires a long-run vision, but the idea basically comes down to this: If social welfare spending is inevitable no matter what libertarians say, then we may as well do the least-disruptive form of social welfare spending, i.e. transfer payments. Ergo, various "libertarian cases" for the Universal Basic Income, welfare reform, and so on. First, the proponents say, we implement a negative income tax; then, we gradually phase-out other forms of social welfare spending and rely entirely on the UBI. I question the wisdom of this from both strategic and practical sides, but that's the argument in a nutshell.

Of course, all of this really dodges the question: Is social welfare spending "socialism" or not?

Those who claim that it is not, reason like so: Socialism is defined to be "government ownership of the means of production." Since it is entirely possible for private parties to own "the" means of production, and then just tax their money away and redistribute it, welfare is thus not incompatible with capitalism. And so it can't  be socialism.

I raise two important objections here. The first is, what do we suppose the communists meant when they said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"? Was that the rhetoric of a capitalist who just happened to recognize that social insurance was not necessarily incompatible with free market economics? No, of course not. Wealth redistribution is, was, and always will be the calling card of socialism. Actually, that is why socialism exists. The whole point of socialism is to redistribute wealth from the privileged class to the lower classes. It strikes me as odd to suddenly suggest that wealth redistribution is no longer socialism, provided the means of production in the nation's economy are still owned by the private sector.

But that brings me to my second objection: Who do we suppose owns the means of the social welfare spending production? To whom are our taxes paid, and from whom are these welfare payments doled? Why, the government, of course. Private wealth distribution means the non-government not-for-profit sector, organizations like Catholic Social Services, the Red Cross, and your local soup kitchen or food bank. But these are precisely not what anyone has in mind when they say "social welfare spending."

So, let the argument rest. Because social welfare spending is owned and operated by the government, and because wealth distribution is an explicit objective - if not the primary objective - of socialist economic organization, then therefore social welfare spending is socialism. Period.

Now, this doesn't mean that it's a sin to favor social welfare spending or that libertarians are wrong to focus their energies on more popular policies than depriving the poor of social security checks. Nor does it mean that any nation that has a social welfare system "is a socialist country." Socialism is not a single policy, after all, but rather a consistent pattern of economic organization.

Even so, let's not go coo-coo here. Social welfare spending, regardless of its relative merits, is socialism. It is incorrect to say otherwise.

Politics Versus Mario Kart

One of the first theories I ever heard about "why Donald Trump won the election" was that, at the end of the day, Republicans would rather vote Republican, even when their candidate is not particularly Republican on any major issue. Seen from one angle - that the only thing Republicans stand for is being against Democrats - this criticism strikes me as being unfair. Seen from another angle, though - that "he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard" - and it makes a little more sense.

Suppose that you were like me in 2016, and you had no one good to vote for. In a choice between two terrible candidates who will both make your life worse, but each perhaps in their own unique way, the decision criteria shift away from the issues and toward more petty concerns. For example, I know more than a few people who voted for Trump mainly to spite Hillary Clinton and all those who desperately wanted her to win. I don't condone spite, much less using it as a basis for national political decision-making, but that doesn't mean people don't make decisions based on spite. There was an old blog post from The Last Psychiatrist that argued that if schools make grades basically meaningless, then employers will start basing hiring decisions on things like racial prejudice, since they have no useful way of using grades to make a hiring decision. I don't doubt for a second that, absent a solid policy-making argument for Hillary or Donald, many people just chose to vote "against the woman" or "against the pig."

It's sad that national politics has to come down to something like this, but that's the direct consequence of a lobby-corrupted two-party government duopoly whose main purpose is to enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayer and at the price of pandering to the public employment sector.

It isn't surprising, then, that people would tend to lose interest in national elections and voter turnout could be generally pretty low. I looked into the data and found voter turnout to be roughly flat for the last 100 years, so even despite cataclysms like World War II and the Great Depression, and even the Civil Rights Movement, people have about as little faith in politicians as ever. I think many of us see through the charade. Out of that enlightened population, a few become anarchists, a few more become insufferable cynics, and the vast majority become people who would just rather go home and read a book.

Losing interest and going off to do something more productive is precisely the best response to this kind of futility. If the average person can't move the political needle in any positive direction without doing even worse damage, then clearly the best response is to hold a Mario Kart tournament in your game room with beer and pizza. It may be sub-optimal, but it's Pareto sub-optimal. (That's a joke, folks. I know that I'm describing an optimum. Don't @ me.)

But the hallmark of a great economic mind is that such a mind will think at the margins, no matter how bad the margins get. Just because you're circling the drain doesn't mean you can't circle it a little better; just because the odds of disaster are 98:1 doesn't mean they couldn't be 97:1 with a little creative thinking. We just have to ensure that the cost of going from 98 to 97 isn't higher than the opportunity cost. For most people, the opportunity cost is a foregone Mario Kart tourney, and is thus too steep. For a very few of us, it involves much smaller shifts in perspective.

How do you know which group you're in? Pay attention to the conversations you're having. If your political discussions tend to be highly partisan in nature, and to re-hash a lot of the same points again and again, the odds are pretty good that you should be playing more Mario Kart. If your political discussions tend to be had with very learned people who are experts in their field and who respond to you in long form rather than short form, then you're probably in the latter category of people who can afford to try to push the needle in a positive direction.

Push the needle in a positive direction by arguing at the margins. You'll probably never convince your friend that taxation is a form of theft, but you could probably very easily sway him to reconsider the worthiness of a new tax. You might never convince someone to change from one stance on abortion to another, but put to him a pretty good case for why a new abortion law should be tweaked slightly toward your end of the spectrum.

And if you can't, just stop talking and go play some Mario Kart instead.

A Reductio Against Universal Basic Income

Today, while reading Bryan Caplan's list of "common sense" policies that no presidential candidates are proposing, I had a thought about proposals for a "universal basic income" (UBI).

Libertarians often propose direct transfer payments as economically efficient alternatives to traditional welfare. Thus, the so-called "libertarian case" for a universal basic income involves scrapping all existing welfare programs and replacing them with the equivalent per capita universal basic income. In other words, if it costs the country, say $1000 per capita to deliver $500 in welfare benefits to qualifying citizens, we could improve economic outcomes by delivering $500 in cash to qualifying citizens at less than $1000 per capita. This is achieved by (1) eliminating the administrative burden of submitting welfare applications, (2) eliminating "means testing," i.e. investigating welfare claims, (3) cutting the workforce at the welfare departments, (3) passing the savings onto the taxpayers, and (4) empowering welfare recipients to spend their money however they think is best.

You might not agree with the above argument -- I sure don't -- but that's how it goes.

This underlying argument is often deployed on a much smaller scale. For example, when people debate steel tariffs, economists are quick to point out that steel tariffs cost American consumers hundreds of thousands of dollars per steel worker. If we really wanted to use policy to protect the steel workers, we'd be better off scrapping steel tariffs altogther and then paying each steel worker, say, $150,000 per year not to work at all. It sounds radical, and maybe it is, but the point of the argument is to show how costly steel tariffs are, and how we could lower domestic steel prices and still take care of American steel workers without creating large market distortions that hurt everyone.

In thinking about this, however, it struck me that the libertarian case for a universal basic income can be deployed against policies that libertarians traditionally do not object to. One example is the armed forces. It would be more economically efficient to eliminate the US armed forces and use the Department of Defense's annual budget to pay all Americans an annual self-defense stipend, which they could spend however they deemed appropriate. Some would squander the money on non-defense spending, but others would conscientiously invest in martial reinforcements for their homes and/or communities, thereby eliminating market distortions and saving taxpayers money.

The reason most people reject this proposal is because they broadly believe that the government does a better job providing military protection than home-grown militias do (for a wide variety of reasons). The idea that the government should just shutter one of its essential functions and "pass the savings on to you" suffers from the fatal flaw that it still leaves you without essential services, such as basic military protection against foreign military invasions.

What this reductio ad absurdum demonstrates is that there is at least one case to which the basic libertarian argument for transfer payments must be rejected: the case of "essential government services," whatever that terms happens to mean to you. Obviously, if you're a left-leaning person, you will tend to include more social welfare programs in the list of "essential government services," and if you're a right-leaning person, you will tend to include more national defense and infrastructure programs. In either case, the argument simply falls flat.

And the reason is simple. People don't care about saving money when it comes to essential care. They'd like essential care at the lowest possible cost, of course, but they would still rather ensure that the government spends money and provides essential care than eliminate essential care and disseminate the savings among the populace.

One group of people are clear exceptions to all of the above argumentation, however: Anarchists, especially anarcho-capitalists.

Libertarianism And The Light Triad

Most people are familiar with the so-called "Dark Triad" of psychological traits that are sometimes used to define people as being evil. That triad of traits is: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

Now, a new study seeks to define a "Light Triad," three traits associated with particularly good people and prosocial outcomes. Psychology Today reports:

The three subscales of the Light Triad Scale are conceptualized as follows:

Faith in Humanityㅡor the belief that, generally speaking, humans are good.

Sample item: I think people are mostly good.

Humanismㅡor the belief that humans across all backgrounds are deserving of respect and appreciation.

Sample Item: I enjoy listening to people from all walks of life.

Kantianismㅡor the belief that others should be treated as ends in and of themselves, and not as pawns in one’s own game.

Sample item: When I talk to people, I am rarely thinking about what I want from them.

Whether these three factors truly comprise a "Light Triad" is certainly a matter of opinion, but it's hard to argue that anyone who significantly expresses these traits is anything other than prosocial.

What I found most interesting about this proposed "Light Triad" is how closely it corresponds to run-of-the-mill libertarianism. Libertarianism in the classical tradition is based on the belief that human beings can figure out tough problems emergently, without the aid of government decrees to force it to happen; that's faith in humanity by anyone's measure. Libertarians also believe deeply in a profound sense of human dignity (via freedom) and respect (via equality); and that's humanism through-and-through. Finally, freedom in the libertarian sense of the word is steeply rooted in the belief that human beings are not slaves and should not be forced to do anything. We often contrast this to the implications of things like socialized health care, which seem to suggest that patients are entitled by right to the labor of doctors and nurses. In other words, we object to such things because we don't think doctors and nurses ought to be treated as means to someone else's end. And that is the essence of Kantianism.

Naturally, none of this should imply that libertarian individuals should score high on the "Light Triad." All I mean to suggest is that libertarianism is consistent with the "Light Triad," and thus we can consider it prosocial, at least by that measure.

Nazis

A coincidence occurred this morning.

One of my libertarian friends on Facebook posted a link to an article outing another "libertarian" as a neo-nazi. This apparent neo-nazi was "mutual [Facebook] friends" with 101 other libertarians of note. That's a conservative estimate, since the person who posted this is surely not Facebook friends with every libertarian of note. So, it is disturbing to my friend that over a hundred famous-among-libertarians people would be friends with a neo-nazi.

Meanwhile, another libertarian friend of mine posted evidence on Facebook of famous philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's being an actual, literal nazi. Gadamer is not well-liked in libertarian circles, but his ideas have infected the sort of woke left-libertarian social justice and/or disingenuous Niskanen Center crowd. One even rose to defend Gadamer until this libertarian friend of mine presented so much evidence that no one could argue favorably for Gadamer in good conscience.

Gee, are we libertarians getting it from both sides, or what? What the heck is going on with all this nazi stuff, anyway?

I'd like to present a hypothesis that aims to explain the pervasiveness of such pernicious ideas, not just among libertarians, but among people in general. I hope that part of what I write here will unsettle you about your own beliefs. We get nowhere in life by refusing to confront the uncomfortable. Sometimes the world is uncomfortable in ways that threaten our most highly regarded mythology.

Let me begin by saying that this is not a uniquely libertarian problem. Gadamer, for example, is beloved by the left, as is Heidegger. So, the left has been quite affectionate toward the philosophies of nazis. Nor is there any shortage of former clansman among right-wing politicians. Most famously just this past month high profile Republicans and Democrats in Virginia were both outed as people with a history of wearing blackface.

This kind of thing probably seems bewildering to any of you who have never been to the "deep south." It was bewildering to me for a long time, too. I spent the first 30-odd years of my life outside the deep south. Then I moved here and gained some new insight. The ideas behind the Confederacy are still very much alive down here. Not all of those ideas involve race hatred, of course, but we'd be fools to deny the race hatred involved. I have seen a lot of heart-wrenching mistreatment of African Americans since moving down here, to say nothing of mistreatment of Latino and South Asian immigrants. It's bad. And, as far as I can tell, it is based in culture, not in political affiliation, which is to say that it's not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem or a Libertarian problem. It's a people problem. People are messed up, and the Confederacy played a big role in messing people up.

While I'm at it, let me follow a brief tangent here. I recently took a short trip to South Carolina. While in Charleston, I took the time to visit some old Confederate memorials. It was my first time ever having done so, and I can pretty much guarantee you that it will be my last.

It's one thing to think about Confederate memorials in the abstract, statues of war generals and such. One can imagine a big bronze statue of Robert E. Lee on a rearing horse or something. We've all seen statues like this, even if not explicitly Confederate ones.  What makes Confederate memorials different -- what makes them physically nauseating to me, and I mean that literally, as I was moved to physical nausea when I saw these memorials -- is the bizarre, cultlike religious fervor baked into them. There is a sort of "savior complex" idea permeating all of these memorials, religious undertones and references to god, and the statues are super-human. The people depicted in the statues are made almost into Ubermensch. The style reminded me instantly of the art carved into the desert rock of Moab, Utah by a literally insane man:

Anyway, back to nazis. In the early days of nazism, the German government was presented as a sort of miracle. No one could believe that the loser of World War I could make such an economic and social turnaround as Germany had made. For that matter, Germany was one of the great cultural centers of the world leading up to World War II, but also before. All of the great music composers and philosophers were from Germany. All of the great social scientists were German. Many of the great physicists who revolutionized our very understanding of reality were either German or trained in Germany.

This is important because these days nazis have a tendency to be the patsies in our social commentary. "Nazi" is a general term for "mindless evil zombie." To claim anything positive about nazis is to present yourself as a fool, and if you happen to be writing fiction, nazis are the best possible villains because none of us feel any kind of sympathy for nazis whatsoever. Our current understanding of nazis is quite simply that they were all brainwashed dolts who committed great atrocities because they were brainwashed dolts. They are both maximally evil and maximally stupid.

Therefore, to recognize the truth about Germany is to rupture an important story we're telling ourselves. The truth is that Germans were great, Germans were brilliant, Germans achieved wondrous things. Germany was a cultural center of the universe for hundreds of years.

All that cultural greatness culminated in nazism. That's the scary part. The scary thing isn't that stupidity and brainwashing overtook a good nation. The scary part is that nazism is the ultimate result of all the ideas that made Germany wonderful and great prior to the rise of nazis. If you wanted to avoid re-creating a nation of nazis, part of what you'd want to avoid is all the great sociological and philosophical innovation produced by Germans in the 19th Century. You'd want to avoid the conclusions of Marx, and Engels, and Heidegger, and Gadamer. You'd want to throw those things away, recognizing them as the gateway to nazism that they are.

Unfortunately, that is not what people in today's world want to believe. People would much rather believe that nazism is just something Hitler made up that somehow overtook every good brain in Germany, turning it to evil mush. People would much rather believe that there are important things to salvage from Heidegger and Gadamer. People would much rather believe that the Confederacy was a legitimate states' rights movement.

These notions are "escape hatches" designed to protect us from confronting the horrible realities of life. The realities are that nazi Germany was a lot like pre-nazi Germany, and even a lot like post-nazi Germany. People who aided in the slaughtering of Jews had children whose views toward Jews are only improved at the margins. And, indeed, here in the States, the ideas of the Confederacy still infect the south, because the south was inhabited by intelligent people who had abhorrent ideas. Those intelligent people had intelligent children, whose ideas were only marginally less abhorrent. And those children had children, and theirs had children again, and so on marches time. Ideas have slowly improved over time, but we trace their legacy back to something abhorrent.

In order to improve the world, we must learn to discard what is abhorrent. We must not try to salvage a good "states' rights" message out of the Confederacy. We must not try to find worth in Heidegger or Gadamer. We must also not pretend people who believed in the Confederacy or the "reich" were brainwashed morons. We must recognize that terrible, noxious, infectious ideas can very easily take hold of intelligent and good people, and cause them to act in evil ways.

Remembering that ideas can be evil, and that they can infect good people as well as bad people, is the only thing that will help us prevent greater evil in the future.

Now having said that, I realize that it is a core part of Jordan Peterson's message, as well.

Haidt On Trump

Yesterday, I read an interesting interview with Jonathan Haidt, who non-libertarian leftist Paul Crider once referred to as a "crypto-conservative." (For those of you who don't understand this reference, "crypto-conservative" is a rephrasing of the term "crypto-fascist," a pejorative term meant to describe politicians who pose as reasonable, but are secretly fascists. For the record, I take Haidt at his word when he describes himself as a left-leaning centrist.)

The whole interview is interesting for many reasons, but one part stood out for me the most:

What we found—because we actually knew how do progressive and conservatives fill it out—what we were able to show is that conservatives can pretend to be progressives and they can accurately fill it out as though they were one. But progressives can’t pretend to be a conservative and fill it out accurately because they don’t really get the group loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity or purity. They don’t really get those so they kind of dismiss those and they assume that conservatives just like to kill puppies and things like that.

That was the case for a number of decades. Trump has shifted a lot of things around. The Republican Party is no longer the social conservative party. I believe, in other research I’ve published with Karen Stenner, a political scientist in Australia, Trump is appealing to more authoritarian tendencies. It’s very hard to see how Donald Trump is a conservative. So the psychology that I just described a moment ago no longer quite applies. The Republican Party, I don’t know what’s happening to it, but it is bringing in elements that are overtly racist. It is bringing in desires for rapid change, which is not a conservative virtue, generally.

 So I think we’re in a time of chaos in which both parties are in flux. What might come out is we might get ever further away from having a center-left Democratic Party and a center-right Republican Party, which is what we had for a number of decades. We might have two much more polarized or ideologically disparate parties and it could make for some very interesting politics and even less cooperation than we have now.

Most of this is not something any reasonably well-read person will find surprising, but it stood out to me because of what it signifies. When a famous volcanologist says something like, "We're seeing all the stuff that corresponds to a big volcanic eruption like Mt. St. Helens," then that's enough to perk anyone's ears up. When a famous expert on human morality and moral affiliations says that the president appeals to authoritarian tendencies on the right and bringing out overtly racist elements, it perks my ears up.

This is not because I had never heard this line of argumentation or that I hadn't considered the possibility. It simply means that the theory has evolved past the point of being "stuff politically engaged people say about abhorrent politicians" and into the point of being "stuff claimed by academic experts on moral affiliation." (So much for "crypto-conservatism," by the way!)

That's what it means to me. What it inspires in me, and this is the reason I chose to write about it today, is a sense of obligation to highlight more important links on my blog. This is something I once used to do all the time, but I stopped doing it out of a sense of duty toward explaining more about myself and my views. Now I think I ought to go back to highlighting important links when I find them.

The above interview with Jonathan Haidt shall be the first of these. Read the whole thing.