DISQUS

Pithlord, "Baptists and Bootleggers" just is part of "crude" public choice lore. Morally-motivated regulation can be one of the most powerful sources of cover for those who profit from them.

If public choice theory is the theory that no one is morally motivated, then not even the inventors of public choice theory believe in it.

Jason, So, basically you are accepting my distinction between an instance of coercion and the harm from coercion. But you say I'm playing a language game. Yes. It's called "English". I think you're just table-pounding, insisting that instances of coercion that are more harmful are ipso facto more coercive, but this seems to me just obviously wrong. I agree that some coercive acts are more coercive than others, but the degree of coerciveness seems more or less independent of the degree of harm.

(a) I threaten to kick your shin unless you give me your $10 million van Gogh painting. You capitulate.

(b) I grab you by the throat and, angry eyes blazing, credibly threaten you with violent death unless you give me everything in you pockets. You give me everything you have: $.45.

In what universe is (b) not more coercive? The harm is probably rather greater in (a) but that doesn't make it more coercive, does it?

Coercion is the use of force or the threat of force to gain compliance. If I stipulate that the same amount of force is used steal $100 and $1000, you can't just reply that, no, really more force was deployed in the $1000 case, since that's more money. Or maybe you're playing language games?

Jason, I find your intuition to be exactly parallel to "The guy with the thicker wallet got mugged more," which doesn't make sense. Why do you think you're not saying that?

And your example flatly fails. Suppose at the 90% rate, there is perfect compliance. Or low compliance but the government does little about it. But at the 1% rate, a ton of people resist, and the government constantly comes with guns and throws people in jail until they pay up. Evidently the place with the lower rate has the more coercive government.

Jason, Suppose you are taxed once a year. Some people pay a higher rate, some people a lower rate. There is ONE instance of coercion per taxpayer. Just like there is one mugging per victim, regardless of the thickness of their wallet. You really want to say that people with the lower rate are coerced less?

Anyway, you are threatened with jail even if your pay 0%, as many millions of Americans do. You still have to file. So you may be coerced even if you pay nothing. But I maintain that these people are a lot better off than the people who have to pay, freedom-wise. Don't you?

Micha, Good point. The intrapersonal utility comparison is do-able. And so they SHOULD be talking about higher taxes as more harmful, not as liberty-reducing. But they don't. They talk like normal people do and say it is a matter of freedom.

To reiterate... My point -- ill-made, I'm afraid -- is that even ideological rights libertarians, when they are speaking unreflectively, use "liberty" just like other English speakers, and think that paying less in taxes is a gain in freedom just because it is a reduction in the loss of opportunity. They don't talk about harm because they really do think of it as a question of liberty, even though their theory says they shouldn't.

Pith,

So, suppose the just functions of the state require a 10% tax rate. The rate goes down from 45% to 30%. That's no change in freedom, right?

Crispin, No one doubts people can fare poorly under states. But some of states seem pretty good! Does Switzerland regularly dip from the well of utilitarian disaster? Don't people there do really well? Is there really a feasible alternative anarchist scheme that the Swiss could get to from here that would leave them better off?

Are you a George Kateb fan? Me too!

Matt, Except what you say is a lot clearer!

My point was just that behavioral economics leaves the debate about paternalism more or less untouched. If the arguments for paternalism before it came along were good, then they're still good -- but not extra-special good -- and if they were bad, they're still bad.

mk,

Sorry, I don't think I understand what you're asking. When modeling behavior, you should use the best model. And there is nothing morally illegitimate about a cost-benefit analysis. Legitimacy pertains to policy, and the legitimacy of policy is a matter of justice, among other things, and the question of justice is not exhausted by determining a policy's net benefit.

Luis, The proportion of the population in the top and bottom decile cannot cannot change. That's the sort of thing we're talking about. And the issue is about WHETHER inequality has increased, not whether to be concerned about it. That prices may rise slower or that quality may increase faster for the goods typically purchased by the poor doesn't neutralize concerns about growing inequality, it may actually stop the inequality -- the kind that matters -- from growing.

Brooks strongly implies that an increase in secularization will harm American happiness. That's a causal claim. If you think that, other things equal, p causally implies q, then showing a number of instances of p (secularization) that not only do not coincide with q (decreasing average happiness), but coincide with not-q (increasing average happiness) STRONGLY UNDERMINES the causal claim. That's all I'm saying.

Yes, Jason raises a logical possibility, but so what? Go ahead and look at the multivariate regression.

John, That may explain why Europe is secularizing faster than the U.S. But it remains that many European countries have become happier while becoming less religious. It's not clear to me why the mechanism matters.

Rue, Don't have time for research right now. In terms of cognitive and emotional maturity, and given the nature of the choice, I suspect the marriage age ought to be around 35.

K.Larson, Excellent, as was your comment in the last previous thread. Thanks!

Likewise, it is depressing to realize that almost all of the people who are too slow to actually understand the debate, and the merit in having it, will attempt to reproduce themselves.

TGGP, There are facts of the matter about what leads to longevity, happiness, pleasure, wealth, the realization of certain human potentials, etc. And it is a fact that, other things equal, more life is better than less, less pain is better than more, more happiness is better than less, wealth is better than poverty, etc. etc. Certain systems of institutions and norms facilitate the realization of these aims better than others, and we ought to have a system that makes people better off rather than worse off in all these ways. There is of course no way to prevent you from disagreeing with all this, just as there is no way from preventing people from being criminals, parasites, or sadists, if they are really determined.

If the way you want to put it is that decent people "prefer" that men not rape their nieces, but you think nothing of it, then you can put it that way, but it puzzles me why you would want to.

I think that's neat, too, as long as they can read some language.

"Normative cognitive functioning? As in the way ones mind ought to work? Forgive me if I believe this oversteps bounds. I myself wouldn’t like someone telling me that some of my particular habits - including the one that afflicts most Americans, too much TV time - run afoul of proper normative cognitive functioning."

So you don't think that kids ought to be able to read by a certain age?

TGGP, Popper was wrong. Marxist theories of false consciousness are falsifiable. And they are false. It is possible to find out how the mind works and to develop intelligible conceptions of normative cognitive functioning.

I think you're being a bit obtuse in your selective moral skepticism. You seem to endorse some normative conception of freedom but then pretend you don't even know what other conceptions might even mean. It's just not interesting or useful.

TGGP,

The correct answer: An elaborate form of rape.

So if a teen is, say, nutritionally stunted, illiterate, and incapable performing rudimentary tasks, is that just a different way of developing capacities, or a way of not developing capacities?

You cannot prevent someone from denying something. But you can show that they are wrong to deny it by saying something intelligible about the conditions for meaningful consent and showing that they are met. I don't even think it takes that much. If any of those teen brides had lived with "not weird" folks for a year and then come back, that would be evidence of meaningful consent. Having had an education that created the possibility for contextualizing and evaluating the decision, that would be evidence consent was meaningful. Etc. Why are you interested in making the obvious intelligibility of the idea of meaningful or informed consent less than obvious?

Matt, Fair enough. But parroting Kerry is in fact a reliable epistemic strategy, because she is never wrong, which is easily verifiable through intuition.

Reading Friedman, I don't actually find see any substantive defense of this FLDS community's practice other than his pointing out that other religions also involve distributing teen girls to older men. So the point is: that aspect of those religions ought to be illegal too? OK!

He's probably right that the case is bunk, legally, that the state is making some stuff up, etc. But I'm interested in the idea that kids have a right to develop their moral capacities, are denied them in these kinds of conditions, and so they really are not giving meaningful consent to participate in this way of life. It's bad for all of them, but girls in particular are turned into baby-making machines without their ever becoming able to seriously considering an alternative life.

TGGP, Don't call it brainwashing if you don't want. Thought experiment: Suppose I find an infant girl one day on my doorstep. I raise her in total social isolation in my basement where I feed her well, teach her to read, etc., and tell her about how I am God, and she must never leave the basement because the world is evil and only I can protect her. When she reaches the legal age of consent, I tell her she must let me have sex with her. She says OK. Is that informed consent? Or a very elaborate form of rape?

Steve, Good point. I think the state plays a perverse double role in this. First, the state bans polygamy, pushing it into the margins of society, isolating the children in insular enclaves, largely gutting their ability to eventually exercise their right to exit. Next, the state SUBSIDIZES THE WHOLE THING with welfare checks! Then, the state notices the kids are mistreated and takes them away. I suspect the state wouldn't need to step in if it hadn't done so much to facilitate the existence of this community.

TGGP, Of course this sort of thing freaks DFR out, because, as Steve points out, the possibility of insular authoritarian brainwashing communities structured around child rape is a pretty drop-dead objection to the desirability of anarcho-capitalism.

I don't know much about the procedural details of the case. Like I said, the state's case may be screwed relative to the law. But I know enough about the practices of the community to think if they're out of the reach of the law, well-applied, then that might well be a problem with the law failing to function with respect to the protection of children's rights. They fall on the wrong side of the line, IMO. The argument ought to be where to put it, not whether to have one.

Everybody, I agree that what matters is the marginal harm from carbon emission. I also agree that an effective, too-high carbon tax is pretty much politically impossible. But I think the main intellectual issue -- figuring out the net externality -- stands. For which, see Jim.

For those who like to frame mitigation as a public good that needs to be subsidized, I think I can reframe my point in those terms, too. Growth is an underprovided public good that needs to be subsidized. But it also contributes to warming. If growth is a tax on mitigation, and mitigation is a tax on growth, then what do we end up with? Again, see Jim.