DISQUS

I agree that "judicial activism" isn't a terribly useful term, not because it's meaningless, but because like "fascism" it's so, so often selectively applied.

That said, it does seems to me that the left has enjoyed a pattern of judges trumping the letter of the law (statutory or constitutional) by making a bogus claim that a judgment call needs to be made, and following up with a leftist judgment call. The right certainly does this sometimes. Parts of the right circling around Bork even seem to be scheming to run the pattern in reverse. So far, though, the right doesn't seem to have succeeded to nearly the same extent as the left

That doesn't mean the Right doesn't have its own history of using powerful offices to violate the letter of the law. If you want to feel more empathy about how libertarians (and various non-Bork-ish Republicans) react to such a pattern, try asking the leftist who influences you the most how he or she feels about Reagan's interpretation of arms control treaties, and of international law and statutory law limiting things like the Contras. And, similarly, about Bush's interpretation of laws, constitutions and treaties regarding torture, detentions, wiretapping, etc.

(At Cornell, a philosophy graduate student earnestly scolded me for being so naive, in my complaints about New Deal jurisprudence, because documents cannot have absolute meaning. An unanswerable argument...until the next time we met, when he incautiously led with his chin by choosing to complain about how Star Wars clearly violated arms control treaties. It had clearly never occurred to him that outside the philosophy departmental echo chamber, it would be mighty hard to defend both positions simultaneously.)

It really does seem to me that "empathy" here is primarily a recognizable code word for a pattern of leftist judges letting leftist priorities override the letter of the law. Thus, I find it creepy in about the same way that I would find it if some passionately Republican body empowered to appoint our next President started talking about selecting candidates based on seeming code for willfully ignoring clear statutory law, treaties, and the constitution: candidates with "vital executive courage" or some such thing.

If Obama had 6 or 36 months ago praised Rose Bird for the empathy she had demonstrated on death penalty cases, it might have have been politically unwise, but would it have been politically unclear?

Secondarily, "empathy" can mean the style of decisionmaking that has apparently given us modern used-to-be-contract tort law. As I understand it, a lot of contract law is traditionally judicial precedent anyway, so judges tweaking it seems a lot less scarily unsound than, say, reading new fine print (abortion rights! but no pot or homosexual or prostitution rights!) into a penumbra, or discovering that the New Deal was constitutional. But the result of the new precedents doesn't seem particularly good. In contracts in particular, unthinking populists and thinking tort lawyers do of course love their big jackpots. But thoughtful leftists should be disturbed by industries which have been severely screwed up, notably manufacture and development of vaccines.

Tertiarily "empathy" can mean, as you say, empathy with one's own ethnic group and gender. Nothing could be wrong with that! In fact, as they say, what could possibly go wrong? Of course, it is lucky that this value was not discovered a year ago, or else it might have encouraged men or whites to rationalize voting against Clinton or Obama, which would have been wrong. But now that it has been discovered and happens to be convenient, the principle should of course be applied vigorously. We can worry about putting the genie back in the bottle at some time in the future, if it ever happens that some election draws nearer.

I think it's complicated because, by the legal principles that libertarians tend to support, legal gay marriage is an appropriate voluntary contractual arrangement for pretty much the same reason that legal polygamy is, and the main coalition pushing for legal gay marriage is vocally opposed to legal polygamy.

Imagine an alternate history 1958 where the politically effective and academically fashionable coalition for changing the miscegenation statutes was to allow white men to marry black women, but still to forbid black men from marrying white women. With much self-righteousness about how this is in no way a slippery slope to allowing the barbaric practice of black men marrying white women, god forbid! In such a world, I think libertarians would be vaguely relieved about some of the restrictions coming down, but they'd also be vexed about the coalition loudly supporting other comparable restrictions.

It seems to me this should be unsurprising given the decades of libertarian vexation about women's rights to control their bodies (but not people's right to choose recreational or un-preapproved-by-FDA medicinal drugs, or women's right to take money to have a man put something in their vaginas instead of giving money to a man to put something in their vaginas, or pornography, or whatever). Even if we dodge the main controversy over where protectable life begins by setting aside abortion and looking only at contraception, libertarians tend to have mixed feelings about a coalition which affirms an intrinsic human right to contraception while denying the right to other drugs, medical practices, or consensual sexual practices. Given that history, why not expect the same sorts of mixed feelings here?

or freedom of religion but only for one politically connected currently-stomped-on religions, not all the others; or legalizing some fraction of currently banned drugs while redoubling efforts to suppress others; or freedom of the press for newspapers but not bloggers; or various other hypotheticals

Libertarians also take criticism for being too enthusiastic about the nineteenth century when the economic freedoms that they favor were too confined to white males. I think some of that criticism is unfair --- to a considerable extent, libertarians appeal to the nineteenth century to argue that secure property and freedom of contract and so forth worked, much as they appeal to repeal of Prohibition to argue that legalization worked. Appealing to the example of repeal of Prohibition doesn't necessarily show that one loves beer and hates pot, right? But some fraction of the criticism is fair, too, and from the way the Ron Paul candidacy played out, many of us judge that the fraction isn't negligible. So we should be vigilant about groups selectively promoting freedoms for some while denying freedoms to others, check. And only for strongly libertarian-affiliated groups, hmm?

"And for a blogger to command readers to 'go read their paper' without providing a link is ... not the greatest approach."

Agreed, but still, the second hit on Google for "Christian Broda" is what seems to be the paper in question, and the first is his faculty page where you might be able to surf to the paper, can we stop the complaints about the missing link at your comment (the second complaint about this, out of eight comments), and look at the paper?

faculty.chicagogsb.edu/christian.broda/website/research/unrestricted/Broda_TradeInequality.pdf

muirgeo writes "I'm not so sure you would because at some point your same arguments would be turned against you with regards to private property borders."

To me the opposite point seems considerably stronger. Private property is invalid because you can't get turtles all the way down, so there is always an original historical title which is invalid theft! PPIIB negative rights are insufficient in practice without positive rights to coerce services be coerced from others! PPIIB because it increases inequality! PPIIB because inheritance is morally invalid! PPIIB because the law in its august majesty forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges! These arguments are commonplace and evidently deeply felt. But they all seem even stronger if you substitute "national property and inherited citizenship are invalid because" for PPIIB. In particular, it seems like an amazing joke when non-internationalist socialists attack the fundamental invalidity of the original title of private property, or attack inheritance, or attack negative rights.

It is as if there are cozy leftist gentlecitizens' agreements not to use anti-private-property and anti-inherited-aristocracy arguments against nationalism. Also not to apply the big hammer of structural sexism allegations to the arguments for women being known to be superior as custodial parents. Also not to apply a woman's right to control her body to taking unauthorized drugs or to taking money for sex. Also not to apply the "no visits or economic advice to murderous dictatorships" taboo to socialist dictatorships. Etc. If such agreements weren't universally honored among all right-thinking citizens, these mighty arguments beloved of the left would seem to be even more dangerous to the left's own positions than to the positions they choose to argue against.

Private property has one strong practical argument in its defense: people who tell you they are going to get rid of property are often fools or lying. The same square meter of land can't very well be used to raise rutabagas and to collect photoelectric power; an orchard doesn't work if anyone who feels the impulse is entitled to convert it to a barbecue bonfire. So the question "who gets to use this thing" is one that needs quite complicated practical answers. Since it needs messy practical answers, criticism of a particular answer as imperfect is insufficient, you need to show that the answer is more imperfect than some practical alternative.

Conversely, many historically-important status questions like "who is allowed to strike whom whenever he pleases" or "who is allowed to leave the plantation, or the Socialist Republic" or "which ethnic groups shall be the slaves and which shall be the masters" don't need nontrivial practical answers, they can be basically unasked. In the past few centuries, various highly successful societies have answered basically "that's a stupid question, everyone should have the same rights," using our convenient bright line "is human." (We should enjoy the bright line while we can: two decades at the outside, I think, given AI and genetic modification...) Unlike special rights to property, special rights to citizenship look to me like an inherited legal status distinction, typical of the kind of questions which successful societies have unasked with equality under the law.

Nationalism does have one strong practical argument in its favor: at least since Napoleon, people have been understandably impressed by the effectiveness of nationalist armies. But if you consider that a compelling argument, you should be very uneasy about some other practical arguments that leftists (and ofttimes rightists as well) seem unconcerned about. E.g., a national rock-solid long-term credit rating was quite reasonably considered a major national security issue up until the 1930s or so. Whatever you think of the enormous wise overall-good net impact of changes like the New Deal, it seems flaky to wave away the centuries-old question of how fiat money affects the ability to float a bunch of 100-year bonds in times of need. (I've sometimes wondered what percentage of its GDP Britain was able to raise and spend in WWII vs. WWI. Every history mentions lend-lease and other credit-exhaustion symptoms. I've never seen a calculation of whether the credit exhaustion came proportionally earlier in WWII, as the old fogeys would've expected given how permanent fiat money was introduced between WWI and WWII.)

First Wilkinson and Howley, now Hanson, tomorrow the world^Wnation! Except...

Political arguments about trade may still be largely conducted in terms of discredited 1750-era mercantilist theory, but these ethics arguers may be much more rigorous than economics-oriented pundits, so you'd better watch out. I haven't yet read the *original* references myself, but pretty clearly from a zillion secondary references in political discourse, nations are known to be the happy medium: individual rights are bad, collective rights are good, universal rights are bad again. This is surely a well-studied theorem in the academic literature alluded to by Paul Gowder in his criticism of Hanson, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/world-wel... . So your point could look pretty darned dumb when Larison starts citing the classic proofs from those of the classics of nationalist ethics whose beauty hasn't been too damaged by tasteless stripmining by Nazis and segregationists.

"its pretty common to speak of barriers as subsidies."

I don't remember ever seeing import restrictions caused subsidies. Tax exemptions are fairly commonly called subsidies, yes. But I hope you won't imitate that, because it's sloppy and often a warning of slanted reporting. As you say, you have only so many words, and the effects of supply restrictions can be broadly similar to those of subsidies. But if you want to generalize across the first-order effects of import restrictions and subsidies, a phrase like "propping up wages" (describing those broadly similar effects) is completely accurate and not terribly long.

(I mostly agree with your moral arguments and policy conclusion. I basically support increasing the number of H1B visas. Given a choice between that tomorrow and nothing tomorrow, I solidly support increasing the number of H1B visas. My only objection is distaste for governmental micromanagement of the labor market when the price system seems likely to do much better: if we are to limit immigration, why not auction off the slots instead of letting Washington decide what specialists are allowed in?)

I would also disagree with you "that's just a fact." It does seem to be a political fact: a lot of the opposition to H1B visas seems to be driven by people's completely sincere belief in just the analysis you are making. And it's not a ridiculous analysis. But as a technical matter of economics, mightn't it be a very serious oversimplification? Imagine applying the same argument to someplace like current Manhattan or Silicon Valley (and internal passports). Under current supply conditions, it seems clear that a lot of skilled workers there get much their value by interacting with others there. So if today we artificially restrict the number of appropriately-skilled people who are allowed to enter, then wages for those who remain will tend to go up --- given an infinitesimally small change, considered over the short run. But over the medium run, or for a larger change, the effect could be highly nonlinear.

Consider a historical thought experiment. Assign all US skilled workers internal passports in 1955. Only ever stamp 10,000 passports to let them into what we now call Silicon Valley. The likely result, I think, is probably not high wages for the lucky 10,000, but the irrelevance of that stamp on their internal passport.

Imposing milder internal immigration limits later in history would have a less clear and dramatic effect, but I think it's likely that if we had imposed an 50% reduction to a nearly-fixed ceiling ten years ago, the value of a skilled-work-in-SV stamp in one's internal passport would be small today, and still falling. Is 50% reduction a reasonable parallel to the medium-term effects of today's limits on skilled immigration? Can you exclude the possibility that US is to World as Silicon Valley is to US?

I have found your art analogies somewhat unconvincing...but I like analogies. I think the analogies might be stronger if you appealed not so much to things with good taste, and more to things that work.

There is proverbially an enormous amount of room to disagree about good taste. And even when I question tastes and goals, I tend to somewhat impressed by execution. E.g., I don't see *why* people want to make long open-water swims, but I can still be impressed. So setting aside questions of taste and color in your over-the-top art examples, I can still be impressed by their craftsmanship.

There's admittedly some room to sincerely disagree about what works. (And there's always unlimited room simply to disagree. E.g., speaking of being impressed by execution, it is no great feat to invoke China's economy as an example of Communism, but quoting Chinese economic growth figures to fractional percentage points so shortly after the recent revisions left me in flabbergasted awe.:-) But I think there's distinctly more agreement among reasonable people about what works than about what's tasteful.

So generally I think you could get broader and more heartfelt agreement by appealing to analogies like the battlefield failings of armies optimized for parades or ideology, or the limitations of big thinkers fondly imagining planning econonomies or software engineering processes down to the last interchangeable humanoid unit; or the realities of working aristocracies or spacecraft or plantations or armies vs. Hollywood or whitewashed fantasies.

(Of course, to the extent that there's overlap between what works and what's elegant and tasteful --- as argued off and on throughout history, recently by Paul Graham in "Taste for Makers" --- it's a poorly defined question which kind of analogy is more convincing.)

You write "an antipathy to the freedom of movement."

So there's *more* godawful Paul nastiness? Or are you just not making distinctions (that I consider important)? Anti-immigration of course, but is Paul anti-right-of-exit too?

I'm a pro-immigration extremist, but I can have a reasonable discussion with people who think high immigration is pragmatically bad, or who think the right to immigrate to the US is not a negative right in the same way as (say) the right not to be invaded for violations of US drug policy. I find it much harder to have a reasonable discussion with people who deny the right of exit. And it's not like it's a negligible issue compared to immigration: test cases huge (Communist countries especially) and merely large (USA penalizing emigrants at a level and for a period of its own choosing, Saudis famously and other other countries less famously doing all sorts of creative things with women and guest workers...) are sadly easy to find.

The right of exit is the first thing that I associate with the phrase "freedom of movement," and as far as I know, that's a pretty common usage. So are you saying Paul opposed right of exit? It could be, since after all it seems dismayingly common: one reason I tend to be grouchy at leftists is having been on campus when Reagan's stand over the Berlin Wall was a live issue, and the tendency doesn't seem to've gone away since then.[*] But Paul? If so, it's nastiness I hadn't heard; if not, I think you should make the distinction.

[*] Libertarians take flak for being critical of Lincoln and the Civil War even when the upshot was to end slavery. I can certainly see the point --- the Civil War was a horrible bloody mess, but on net it sure seems like the outcome was worth it. But I also think there's a pretty good excuse in that Lincoln (very clearly) and the North generally (fairly clearly) gave nationalism precedence over emancipation. Anyone who knows the first thing about libertarians should understand how they'd naturally find this really bad, and a moment's thought should show that particularly intense hatred of slavery isn't going to make it seem any better. As far as I know, paleocons (and, alas, a nonnegligible number of self-identified libertarians) who wax nostalgic about the South and play down the significance of slavery have no such excuse. Do liberals have any such excuse for playing up the good points of modern states which hold people captive and force them to work?

LarryM writes "It may be true (probably is true) that economic literate people are marginally more likely to become libertarians than are economically illiterate people, but that’s another matter, and doesn’t tell us much of value."

I think I could make a case that liberals have a bigger problem with swallowing camels than libertarians do. Granted, I don't know whether either the libertarian hoi polloi or the libertarian-ish politicos and activists are qualitatively better than their nonlibertarian counterparts. (For the hoi polloi, I don't know even know how to define the question: there is no useful consensus on how to decide whether a given voter should be considered libertarian. For the politicos and pundits, I grant that strong elements of libertarianism do not protect against silliness and cant.) But what about academics? It looks to me as the serious libertarian-ish academics of the past two generations have a pretty good claim to have gotten various important things right. Further, I think there's a pretty clear pattern that they avoided being confidently wildly incorrect as often as their more mainstream counterparts.

More correct is only partly synonymous with more economically literate. For someone who swallows camels to support his politics, it doesn't much matter much how economically literate he is. Paul Samuelson was no dummy, and no libertarian. And the mainstream academic economics community that made his intro textbook a bestseller wasn't illiterate or libertarian either. But I save my 1976 edition of that textbook as a reminder of various freaky things which I consider serious embarrassments to the left. E.g., charmingly quaint phrases like "a market economy enriched by government planning and macroeconomic control." (Will that attitude be on the test, professor?) And an asinine estimate of the performance and prospects of Communist economies. In that analysis, covering much of a chapter, my "favorite" asinine-even-without-hindsight bit was the assessment of USSR subjects' satisfaction with the system. Samuelson writes "It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable. Although it is undoubtedly true that few citizens of the West would trade their degree of economic comfort and political freedom for life in the Soviet, it is also true that a Soviet citizen thinks that he is living in a paradise in comparison with life in China or in earlier times." The chapter doesn't deign to mention the Soviet practice of building walls and minefields to keep them in. While the quoted sentence could be literally correct, it's still freaky. It's as though a history text assessed the attitudes of American slaves that way, "it is a vulgar mistake to think that most slaves were miserable...," without presenting evidence to support the assessment and without mentioning the amount of effort required to keep slaves from escaping.

I know libertarian academics have been accused of swallowing camels, too. E.g., I remember accusations that Milton Friedman, in lionizing Hong Kong's economic success, should have given credit to their high level of socialized housing. But it seems to me that the academic mainstream has more camel skeletons in the water closet than the libertarian-ish/pro-market academics do. I agree with Bruce Bartlett's first sentence, and I don't know of comparably important things where the marketeers got it wrong. Endorsing Limits to Growth (and lionizing Paul Ehrlich) were embarrassing too (not as a big problem for academic economists, I think, but a clear problem for mainstream academics in general). And today, I see howlers like Barbara Ehrenreich (not an academic, but an honored speaker on university campuses) reporting that the difficulty of the poor finding housing near work as "the market, stupid" without mentioning zoning (in her several-page treatment at the end of _Nickel and Dimed_, where for some reason owners of a lucrative trailer park don't convert it to higher-density housing, and homeowners no longer convert their houses to boarding houses as in every other historical novel I've read). Or Brad DeLong blaming high medical insurance costs on the "free market in health care," http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/unclear_o... . If a libertarian had said "the free market in health care" shows that free markets spontaneously keep untrained quacks from practicing medicine and undercapitalized insurance companies from out of state from offering bogus coverage, it'd be ludicrous, and he'd be reminded of the high barriers to entry wisely erected by the benevolent state, right? those barriers may be wise, but in their presence it's silly to describe high costs as due to "free market."

Gah, this seems to be a hard thing to write clearly about. I'm confused by others' attempts, and trying to explain clearly myself, I'm not doing so well. I miss LaTeX and a shared mathematical vocabulary.:-( But I will try.

I, like Larry and others, found the twice-as-much-growth thing confusing. I also reached the same conclusion as Sigivald independently, without reading the comments. I think both sides are right: it is confusing, but not such nonsense that one can't figure it out after "wha?"

I think the "close to the difference between GDP per capita tripling rather than doubling over that time span" looks correct. I don't know what compound interest calculator LarryM refers to; I will try to calculate it from first principles. It's a 36-year period. Raising 1.01 to the 36th power gives 1.43. One of the things that number means is that if the GDP of country X starts equal to country Y, then grows 1% proportionally faster per year for 36 years, afterwards the GDP of X will have grown to 1.43 times the GDP of Y; we could say it has grown to 43% larger. Now if country X is the United States of Imagination with some policy which lets it grow 1% faster, and country Y is the United States of real-world America what happens? USA1973 has grown to 2.00 times the GDP of USA1947; ISA1973 has grown to 2.00*1.43=2.86 times the GDP of USA1947.

If by some happy miracle my publicly posted calculation doesn't contain a stupid error, then "almost 3" seems like a fair paraphrase of 2.86; given that the answer depends on a rate of 1%-for-the-sake-of-argument, rounding to 1 digit of accuracy seems more reasonable than reporting "about 2.9" or "about 2.86".

LarryM, re. privatization.

The problems you refer to are quite real. Alas, I don't have a great reference on hand to show that that they are taken seriously by libertarians. Instead I will express my respect for one particular libertarian by betting that Alex Tabarrok took some trouble looking into them in his book about privatization of prisons. (haven't read it)

Note, though, the difficulty of such problems seems to vary a lot between cases. Prisons seem like at least a moderately difficult case. In some cases, there can be even harder problems than you mention, like the technical difficulty of expressing property rights for many kinds of water supplies (huge aquifers, e.g.), or the technical difficulty in saying anything usefully precise beforehand about what you're buying (custom-written software for air traffic control, e.g.). On the other hand, there are various niches where those problems don't look very difficult. Privatizing mail delivery, for example, might be nearly as simple as just eliminating the laws which prevent services other than the USPS from doing ordinary mail delivery.

Note also there is ambiguity in "privatization" as in "deregulation." Libertarians generally favor privatization and deregulation, but that doesn't mean that any damfool thing which its backers or critics call by those names is a good idea. Roughly, libertarians dislike prior restraint, central control, and rule of men as opposed to law. We prefer rule of law, freedom of contract, clear and tradeable property rights, and such. The electric power "deregulation" in California worked notoriously badly, and I have come to expect people to see that as a telling criticism of libertarian ideas. My usual response is that "deregulation" with arbitrary price controls set by some government board, isn't: it's like "democracy" where the elections are limited to candidates chosen by some government board. Similarly, when a libertarian wants to privatize the postal service, it probably means he wants allow anyone who wants to to offer postal services. However, what is often called "privatization" in working politics is often something quite different. If I hear a postal service is "privatized" in the next ten years or so, I will expect it to mean something different: there is still a state-imposed monopoly on mail, it's no longer given to a department of the state, but to some corporation or other.

LarryM: The first two paragraphs of your post are about things I wrote, as opposed to what Will Wilkinson wrote. There are three things in those paragraphs I'd like to respond to.

First, "high growth and high marginal rates are compatible" and "that doesn’t make Chait RIGHT, but it does make his argument at least plausible." My point was just that one particular argument for his conclusions was technically inavlid. That point doesn't depend on my disproving the conclusion. It seems as though you might have misread me, to think I was trying to disprove the conclusion. (That would not be an outrageous misreading on your part. I'm sure it's clear that I do disagree with the conclusion. And in choosing an analogy to a policy with widely-acknowledged second-order effects, I chose one where those effects are widely acknowledged to have damaged growth.) Really, I was trying to point out that the argument is technically invalid, independent of the conclusion. If someone writes "like all other geometric figures, kittens before the age 10 days have no more than five corners, therefore there the set of prime numbers is infinite," the argument is invalid. Is there an infinite number of prime numbers? Yes, in fact there is, so the conclusion is correct, but the argument is still invalid.

I don't think I'm just being a partisan in thinking this is important here. By coincidence, very recently a similar technical error was made in (for me) the opposite partisan direction: see the comments at http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_09_16-2... . Technically the two cases are quite parallel. (Here, Chait implicitly claims that the terms after the first in a Taylor series are negligible. There, Roth implicitly claims that the terms after the second in a Taylor series are negligible. In both cases, the implicit assumption is so extreme that it is unreasonable to make it without mentioning it and supplying some serious justification.) For me as a partisan, the cases run in opposite directions: I broadly oppose Chait's conclusions, and broadly support Roth's. (I think historians, and others like staff writers at the _Economist_, *should* have be embarrassed for having signed off on that bilge.) But the partisanness difference didn't stop me from seeing technically similar problems, and seeing them as similarly important. (However, on VC I didn't get to point out the problem. Here, I was fifth poster. At VC, that might happen on the day the moon loses her daughter, if that occurs in a week when two Mondays come together.)

Second, once you set out to defend the logical validity of Chait's argument by defending the factual correctness of his conclusion, you appeal to high US growth in the 40s, 50s, and 60s to say "it DOES seem to suggest - well, no, prove - that high growth and high marginal rates are compatible. [...] Now, that doesn't make Chait RIGHT, but it does make his argument at least plausible [...]." That seems like damning with exceedingly faint praise. How many real-world economic policies are so stunningly bad that they pretty obviously screw up economic growth singlehandedly? Near-total state control of the economy is the single candidate I can think of. And even for a policy as all-encompassing and bad as that, I think many people wouldn't find the evidence convincing if it weren't for the crude controlled experiments in partition of Europe in general, Germany specifically, China, and Korea.

It is entirely typical, when a policy which is well-understood to be inefficient, it can be said that high growth and SuchAndSuchHorriblePolicy are not incompatible. For example, racially discriminatory laws like Jim Crow and apartheid are not just morally objectionable, they have long been understood to be economically inefficient. (See http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Columns/LevyPear... for some colorful history.) That inefficiency is not disproved by pointing out that various countries have grown rapidly despite them. Similarly, trade barriers are inefficient even though of course countries can grow despite them: there are there are lots of examples.

In fact, for trade barriers, there are not just lots of factual examples, but the aforementioned Smoot-Hawley tariff makes an amusing counterfactual example. I've never heard a serious economist try to explain the Great Depression solely in terms of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Thus, I'm probably in good company in this opinion: if other things had been right in the 1930s, the Smoot-Hawley tariff alone would not have been enough to kill economic growth. So it's as though this is the second time running that a defender of the efficiency of high income tax rates has chosen an argument which would suffice to defend the efficiency of Smoot-Hawley.:-|

Third "that doesn’t make Chait RIGHT, but it does make his argument at least plausible, and requires of his critics stronger arguments than have been deployed against him." Really? Of course you are correct that it requires of his critics stronger arguments than claims that 60ish-percent income taxes always suffice to cause very slow economic growth. However, I don't think it is the case that not a single critic, anywhere, has put forward an argument which is stronger than that.

Chait wrote "Look, economists agree that, all things being equal, lower marginal rates help long-term growth, and higher deficits hurt long-term growth. There are disagreements about how much either helps or hurts. The effects either way tend to be pretty small. They're second-order effects."

In fact, second order effects don't need to be small: this should be mathematically obvious to most people who understand what "second order effect" means, and it should be emphatically confirmed by anyone who's spent any time using perturbation theory or asymptotic analysis (like lots of ex-physics folk, including me).

It is quite true that ordinarily second order effects do become small compared to first-order effects as a perturbation becomes sufficiently small. In the problem under consideration, I think almost everyone would agree that second-order effects would be small with an income tax of 10% or so, e.g. But higher-order effects (second order, third order, etc.) tend grow in importance more than linearly with the size of the perturbation. Are the >40% marginal tax rates that Chait endorses sufficiently small that their higher-order effects are necessarily proportionally small? As I understand it, Chait scoffs at Feldstein's efforts to answer this question directly, so let's try another tack, appealing to consensus on a historically distant tax. As far as I can see, the ill effects of tariffs should be second-and-higher order in pretty much the same sense as the ill effects of marginal income taxes under discussion. Then looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot-Hawley_Tarif... I find "The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act 'imposed an effective tax rate of 60% on more than 3,200 products and materials imported into the U.S.,' quadrupling previous tariff rates." Is Chait prepared to argue that at 60%, the higher-order harmful effects of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act can reasonably be assumed to be small compared to their revenue-raising effect? If so he seems indeed, as suggested by The Economist, to be in a group so elite "that by late afternoon even his shadow falls outside the charmed circle." If not, why is it safe to assume that the second-order harmful effects of higher-than-40% income tax rates must be small compared to their first-order revenue-raising effects? Obviously responses to tariffs and responses to income taxes are different in detail, but it's not obvious to me why response to income taxes should necessarily be vastly more linear than response to tariffs.

What is it about morality, exactly, that is supposed to become impossible if free will doesn't exist?

Consider that "social system which works well" or "economic system which works well" have some general similarities to "good moral system" in many people's minds. (Objectivists, as I understand it, profess to nearly equate them, but I don't think you need to go that far to admit that there's some resemblance.) Even in a perfectly deterministic world it's perfectly reasonable for borders between markets and command economies to end up with different outcomes on the two sides. Similarly, it seems to me, even in a deterministic world immoral actions can lead to bad consequences. Perhaps determinism confounds some people's intuitions about punishment or revenge or other aspects of justice. But I think even if one had to back off from concerns about whether revenge is emotionally satisfying or not, and could only concentrate on good or bad consequences, it wouldn't obviously doom the philosophical project of morality.

(I'm no philosopher, though.)

Maybe it's a typo or something, but a comparison like "the top 1 percent of households have seen their incomes go up by 7 percent and the bottom 80 percent have seen their income shares go down by 7 percent" immediately sets off my "dishonest advocate"/"lying with statistics" alarms. Why slightly-deniably contrast one "income" number on one hand to one "income shares" number on the other hand? Assuming both statistics are interesting, wouldn't ordinary practice be to compare two "income" numbers (one for each bracket) in one sentence, and then to compare two "income share" numbers in another sentence?

I find it significant that it's in the direction that, given economic growth over the period, would tend to make the implied comparison sound more dramatic than the underlying numbers actually are. The rich number gets puffed up by the economic growth over the period (because it increases income) while the poor number is chosen not to reflect growth (because growth doesn't necessarily affect share)? That seems pretty good evidence that if Furman is a dishonest advocate, he's a leftist. (And I hope that in this context I may be forgiven for crafting the sort of prose which misleads careless readers into a logical fallacy which says something which technically isn't what I wrote.)

And the twentieth century history of ideas is full of cases where someone showed you just can't find a solution satisfying a reasonable-sounding set of constraints. Close to the article, there's Arrow's theorem; further away, Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem and the halting problem and quantum indeterminacy are high peaks in a complicated landscape that stretches quite a long way in all directions.

If one cares about reality, then it's worth carefully distinguishing whether "the fact that Joe’s does not serve oysters on the half shell is not an issue of freedom" is one aspect of a rule the writer has in mind, or instead a constraint on what not-yet-specified rule the writer would be willing to accept.

Arguing for or against individual constraints can be well and good, but as Arrow's theorem illustrates, it is quite possible to specify so many reasonable-sounding constraints that in fact no rule can satisfy the constraints, and even for the narrow technical problem of voting systems, people's informal intuitions about how many constraints can be satisfied may not be very reliable. If an author embraces enough constraints that it's not clear that they are mutually satisfiable, arguments about morality can be a form of intellectual pornography where extreme excitement might come with a drawback of conditioning the reader to unrealistic expectations.

Kevin O'Reilly writes "Has the refusal of scientists to debate critics of evolutionary theory hurt or helped the cause of intelligent design?"

Possibly, but (1) note that live oral debate is not how scientists cope with other controversies either, and (2) other debate media (like usenet newsgroups) are full of scientists, and (3) ID seems to be a fighting retreat from the defeat of the young-earth creationists, and the YE creationists managed to lose even without scientists having lots of live oral debates with them.

If you don't immediately see point (1), and perhaps think that scientists are treating fundamentalists' criticisms unfairly by not having oral debates with them, consider five reasonably controversial scientific revolutions of the twentieth century: relativity, quantum mechanics, continental drift, limits on proof (such as the work of Goedel, especially his incompleteness theorem), and the big bang. Were live debates important in any of them? Not to my knowledge. (And for fairly good reason; good luck covering all the issues in, e.g., the precession of Mercury in an oral debate of reasonable length.) I believe that scientists can sincerely and legitimately think that it's weird and unreasonable to be expected to support complicated positions against not-necessarily-reasonable criticisms in 40 minutes of spontaneous speech.

For point (2), consider Internet debates like the usenet group talk.origins. I haven't paid attention to it for over ten years, but back around 1990 I read it for a while, and I remember energetic folk holding up the mainstream science end. Also, the mainstream science folk maintained FAQs, which seem to be a very effective tactic in online debate against dishonest yammerers. When it becomes obvious that a debater is stubbornly (or just mindlessly...) repeating a claim without addressing classic refutations (because the FAQ is out there, pointing to the classic refutations) the debater becomes unconvincing to all but the truest of believers.

Point (3) is just my anecdotal experience, I used to run into YE creationists and now I run into ID instead (occasionally in the same individual that I've been in contact with for a long time). I don't know how to back it up rigorously without spending serious time searching and surveying.