DISQUS

And don't go all conjunction fallacy on me.

"We need larger income differences as incentives for individual effort"

Your version sounds a lot weirder.

delendi sunt?

It's been a while since I took Latin, but should it be "Nixonites delenda sunt"?

I'm not aware of anyone having gone crazy over the nomination, and I've been reading National Review. So I decided to defend what I see as a very common reaction to the nomination among conservatives, namely being upset.

Maybe my reading comprehension isn't great, but I go mostly by tone. The tone of Will's post seemed to imply that if people would just pay some attention, read up on Sotomayor a bit, and stop being so gosh-darned partisan all the time, they'd realize that she's just a moderate, trying like everybody else to apply the law fairly in this crazy world. I'm not outraged, but my assessment of Judge Sotomayor is that she is about as liberal as a reasonable person might have expected from Obama at present, which is to say, fairly liberal.

I was probably too careless with words in the last comment, and don't mean to say that those who oppose Sotomayor are fully justified in attacking her background and character; but that isn't the kind of stuff I've actually seen from anyone. The main objection that I tend to see is that she would become a dependable member of the Supreme Court's liberal bloc. That is the real question at issue here. And despite Will's attempt to rise above partisan bickering, what I've seen so far indicates that those who object on those grounds are correct.

One more thing:
you aren't a democraphobe if you are only upset by the results of democracy when the side representing the faction of the Supreme Court you dislike wins

This isn't really the forum for this, but I do disagree. Democraphobia is the fear that democracy will fail to hit on the right answer, which of course assumes that you know what the right answer is. Yes, I'm upset when democracy yields the wrong answer, and that happens often. Not all the time, but often.

You’d think you’d wait to learn something about this before saying something about her, but no. People just proceeded to go crazy on cue.

The fact that Republicans would have objected to anyone Obama nominated has no bearing on whether or not she really does line up with the faction of the Supreme Court that I don't like.

Under the influence of Hasnas' Myth of the Rule of Law, I'm not going to pretend that I object to Sotomayor on the grounds of incompetence or anything but my own political preferences. She's on the side of a political faction that I don't want in charge of the Supreme Court, or any other part of the government. And yes, that opinion lost the last election, but since I'm democraphobic anyway, can't I still be upset?

Like you, I hadn't heard the name Sotomayor before the nomination was made. Inspired by your post, I spent the last 5 minutes finding out some stuff about her. Wikipedia (thanks, Adam) tells me that in NY Times v. Tasini, when the Supreme Court made its ruling, "two dissenters (John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer) took Sotomayor's position." In Malesko v. Correctional Services Corp, when the SCOTUS decision came down, "Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer dissented, siding with Sotomayor's original ruling." Those are the only two cases where the decisions are broken down by Justice, but the best heuristic I have for making 30-second decisions is telling me that she's at least at the median of a group of judges I don't want on the Supreme Court.

The only argument against the vitriol, really, is that people shouldn't act so surprised. Obama won the election, and this is exactly the kind of Justice we should have expected him to nominate.

Your initial accusation is correct, I haven't done the in-depth research to firmly support my impression that she really is closer to J. Stevens than to CJ. Roberts, but my opinion doesn't make enough of a difference for in-depth research on Supreme Court nominees to be worthwhile.

Great post. Thanks for the link.

My vote is also in enthusiastic support of Glen. And, like GilM, I'm way less than 100% sure what Will is saying about anything in this post. He warned us it was going to be disorganized, and it was. Of course, I post incoherent stuff all the time, but no one listens to me, so no harm done. Considering the response this post got, we could have used something a bit clearer and more organized.

Interesting, bbartlog. We've gotten this far so I might as well ask: what is Storm 33?

LemmusLemmus, you're my hero. Thanks.

Thanks, uknowbetter.

I'm curious as to what this would have been in German, though. I can't seem to find a poster or anything with a motto that looks similar to this one. Obviously google images is a pretty limited resource in this regard, but that's all I have.

Text-wise, "seid Deutsch", "bleibt Deutsch" "seid ihr Deutsch," or "seid Deutscherinnen" yield nothing. But reverse translation is hard.

Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

I found this book with google books but I can't find the citation page. Can anyone find a source for these mottos?

Secularization is part of a long trend toward moral liberalization

Hm... I'm much more comfortable saying that secularization correlates with moral liberalization. I'm all for moral liberalization, but to the extent that it makes sense to be against secularization (on an individual level), I'm against it.

I'm skeptical of a narrative that says that getting away from the pernicious influence of religion is making people more liberal. I'd say they're liberal first, and choose not to associate with organized religion because of that.

So basically I'm fine with this post, as long as it has no policy implications.

I never manage to get these comments right the first time, and so I try again.

The idea that it is segregation that keeps poor communities down is just wrong. The problem isn't separation, it's accountability. Think about Canada: despite their tragic separation from the United States and significant transactions costs they incur if they want to do business with US citizens, they seem to be doing just fine.

But what if suddenly the United States were responsible for all law enforcement and education that goes on in Canada?

I'm an American politician, and in neither scenario do I particularly care one way or the other about the welfare of Canadians. Only in the second case does my indifference make a difference. Even though we have to police them, Canadians still can't vote, so I'm going to run Canadian law enforcement in a manner that is easy for me and makes U.S. citizens happy, not Canadians. If the Canadians get out of line, I'll throw them in jail. What do I care? They have no power to take me out of my job, and it's one less pesky Canadian to worry about. When it comes time to provide public services like education, I'm going to make sure that my constituents are happy by giving them all the important education contracts. Will that provide them with the best possible education for the money? Do I care?

People all over the world manage to get by without the US Government taking care of them. It can't be true that we are the cause of the problems in the inner city simply because we don't want to be near those people. There are lots of people in the world we don't want to be near. That only hurts them when we limit their autonomy and use their perceived helplessness as an excuse to enrich ourselves and our friends at their expense.

It's really hard for me to make any kind of meta-judgment about the overall justice of a particular distribution, when the methods that produce it are themselves so obviously unjust. Were I able to set policy priorities, my first principle in government would be “Do no harm.” That would mean a serious re-evaluation of when it's appropriate to put someone in prison. Drug offenders are low-hanging fruit in this regard, but I'm sure there are other opportunities here as well.

Second, we need to stop using the power of government to keep kids in a public school system that doesn't provide them with the education they need to be successful. Again, public schooling is only the most prominent example of a government intervention intended to help everyone but which ends up benefiting those groups best at securing political influence (and the poorest citizens aren't in this category).

If the terrible injustice and inequality we see today were to persist after a major scaling-back of the government programs that I think contribute to the problem today, then I admit, I would be somewhat stumped as to the next move. But we're not there yet, and before we start to bemoan the fundamental injustice of the universe and ponder what we can do to make right what God has made wrong, let's see what happens when the institutions we have supposedly created to solve that problem stop making it worse.

Point well made, Will. Naomi Klein clearly has the Shock Doctrine backwards. That said, I think the returns to your time and energy spent on the comments section are quickly diminishing.

Murphy's model is really good, since, as you say, it's useful in defining the terms of the debate and forcing people to make their assumptions explicit.

On the other hand, Murphy implies that making government "inefficiency" (alpha) go negative is a lot harder than it really is. "Inefficiency" isn't really a good term, though, since alpha is just a statement about the value of government spending. If government spending is quite valuable, then more spending can be a good idea, even if it has no multiplier effects.

As Mark Thoma writes, "Tax cuts won't build schools, or any other public good," and that's what it is really all about. Infrastructure, schools, welfare programs, and the like, are all considered by most stimulus advocates to be more valuable than private spending. If you are not a libertarian, it's easy to assume that alpha is negative.

Yeah, that's the reply I usually use, though I hadn't seen before the point about workers having to bribe managers in order to get a job in factories with higher standards. It strikes me as a really good reply, but it doesn't seem very effective.

I think the problem is that most people who argue for better labor standards believe that the market for manufactured goods is not very competitive, and that there are actually significant monopoly rents to be divided up. Thus these people don't believe that factory owners would really move to a different country if, say, wages were doubled, because they would still be making a profit at a higher wage. We would just need to make sure that the corporations couldn't just move to another country and exploit those workers.

On that point, I think another problem we face is that there is generally some confusion about what role we are supposed to be playing in this discussion. Okay, maybe we can convince people that legislation banning sweatshops won't have a positive effect. However, if we're the corporation that owns the factory, shouldn't we decide to stay in a country and give our workers better wages and labor standards? As consumers, shouldn't we be buying from companies that pay their workers a "fair wage"?

As long as people believe that there are monopoly profits to be distributed, they aren't going to buy the argument that corporations can't simply choose to give their workers a higher wage, if they want to.

Uh-oh, I'm starting to believe my own bulls---. But I think Will's earlier post was right, saying that the real problem is nationalism and the "club mentality" that creates these rents in the first place. In other words, I think we are too complacent about sweatshops, because we ignore the role government had in creating them in the first place. So-called "free trade" deals which use the power of government to create monopoly rents are a terrible injustice, but once the deal is in place, why should we make sure that all the rents only go to (for lack of a better word) the Capitalists?

Thanks for the link, Kerry. I should have suspected that the situation was over-hyped by those who are determined to view poor people always as helpless victims.

I'm afraid the argument is going to have little traction with people who believe that sex work is fundamentally different from any other type of work and inherently exploitative, but I guess it's unreasonable to ask you to come up with an argument that would convince people who refuse to be believe that prostitutes are free people.

I am always puzzled as to why this point isn't more persuasive. So how do you respond to the usual reply to this argument, which runs something like

"Well, obviously, banning sweatshops alone wouldn't do anything, we have to advocate for higher labor standards in sweatshops. Don't tell me multinational corporations can't afford to pay their workers more. They make so much profit!"

Also I don't think I understand your point about human trafficking. The conventional story on that seems to be that it involves both fraud (to get children away from their parents) and coercion (forcing the children to stay). Maybe the alternatives are still worse, but the point is a lot murkier than people who choose to work in sweatshops.

But you don't have to deny that "anti-corruption" and "civic responsibility" are important to argue that government can't work. As I wrote on the previous thread, most businesses build in a certain level of trust just to make things operate smoothly. But that doesn't mean that I can just make any ol' business model and rely on honesty to get me through.

Banks could save a lot of money if they didn't have to buy safes or keep records of how much money people gave, but rather just trusted everyone not to steal the unguarded money and to be honest about how much they had deposited. But I'd argue with someone who wanted to start a bank based on that idea that it isn't going to work. The fact that most people are honest and trustworthy doesn't change my opinion that it's a really bad idea. My skepticism would not be diminished if the potential bank-owner told me he also had a plan to instill a greater sense throughout society that it's very wrong to steal from banks.

It's silly to say anything about "government" because there are so many different kinds, but you do have to mock the idea that government is a unique institution that doesn't have to take the honesty of people as a given, like any other corporation would have to.

Honesty is super important, but in a sense that doesn't matter because it's not something we can affect.

Encouraging “anti-corruption” and “civic responsibility” is a silly solution. These norms aren't special; they are just the governmental analogues of honesty and caring for others. We already have norms for these things, and they are enormously important. In restaurants, people are expected to pay for their meals after they've eaten, and they do it (they even tip their servers). But in a society where people are, on average, rather honest and selfless, you ought to wonder why this huge organization, government, seems to attract people who are below average on these measures.

Norms of honesty and caring make transactions easier and less costly, but they are limited in what they can do. It's hopelessly idealistic to design a system that makes corruption reward-maximizing while thinking that you can just instill an anti-corruption norm that will neutralize this effect. In setting up a government, as with any corporation, we need to take the amount of corruption in society as given, and figure out how to design a system that doesn't reward that corruption.

I'm not an anarchist in that I don't really care one way or the other whether we have some entity called "government," but I don't believe we can claim that once we have something called "government," the normal rules of economics no longer apply.

This is the kind of problem for which Experimental Philosophy was created. We know there's no difference between pushing the fat man in front of the speeding train to save five people and flipping the switch to save the five by killing the one, and yet we feel the difference.

Morally, we've got to bite the bullet here. Either everything is okay, or nothing is. Walmart didn't ask for the interstate highway system, they just figured out a way to take advantage of it. We feel like there's something wrong with trying to write the laws in your favor, but what if, as Benquo says, a law is going to be written, whether you like it or not? Blame politicians? But they didn't ask to be part of a system where the path to success lies not in creating "fair" laws, but rather in appealing to special interest groups. They're just playing the game. It's the fault of you and me, for allowing the government to have so much power? Well, they've got the guns, and plus, we've got to earn a living; we can't spend all our time thinking about what the best form of government is (even if we did, the returns would be very, very small).

And none of us asked to be born in the first place.

When you excuse someone who was "just following the rules," it seems to invalidate the moral basis of Libertarianism. How do you circumscribe "the rules"? Using the highways vs. lobbying for public subsidies seems to be, morally, just a case of pushing the fat man vs. flipping the switch.

Sorry, I'm still trying to understand your position.

So you are against government action in this area on practical, not moral, grounds? If you thought it would actually work, you wouldn't object to coercion in having people abandon sexist practices, since that would be a good kind of coercion (just as protecting private property is good coercion)? But you don't think it would work, so social norms are a better tool than government action. Yes?

Matt Zeitlin, TGGP, and Tim Lee are right. You want libertarianism to do too much. Not every concern about social interaction is a libertarian concern.

Like Tim, I usually agree with you, and I think you are wrong here, ergo you should write more on this subject.