As a Rawlsian, more or less, I actually sort of like the overall picture here, minus the excessive and rather perverse dogmatic-legalistic strict tidiness of the segregations of duties. It makes sense to have a market in which private actors basically look to their own interests within a system in which regulatory steps have been taken to ensure that they do not, in the aggregate, make a giant, intolerable mess of the whole world. Flawed as any regulatory system is sure to be, it’s less reasonable to expect all the individual actors to be sufficiently attentive to, hence to take individual responsibility for, the whole. We don’t need to go so far as to treat them as weirdly obliged to be totally blinkered to the whole system. But we shouldn’t make each individual responsible for solving what is, in effect, a collective action problem, and a snarly knowledge problem to boot.

But I wonder what Posner would say about the following. Take two cases.

1) there’s a severe recession.

2) there’s serious income inequality.

We’ve got both; the causes of both are broadly similar. Namely, a lot of actors individually engaged in narrowly self-interested, more or less rational economic activities. The regulations in place, such as they are, have permitted these results. But we take it for granted that trying to do something about the former is presumptively permissible. Why should there even be an issue (beyond a practical issue) about whether it’s appropriate to take steps to do something about the latter?

Some people might argue that the second isn’t necessarily bad, but I don’t think we should take that seriously. What this lot are thinking is just that 2 is a possible outcome of a lot of individually permissible activity. Since we don’t want to say those activities were wrong, we shouldn’t say the result is wrong. But even if you accept this (for the sake of argument) you should still reply as follows: no one argues that severe recession cannot be a bad thing, so long as it can be shown to be the result of a lot of activity that was permissibly engaged in. Recessions can be bad without needing to be anyone’s fault. Likewise, we ought to be willing to say, at the very least, that serious income inequality – some people are rich, others don’t have enough to eat – is a bad thing. Because people going hungry is bad thing. Whether any individual actors are to blame for the bad thing is a separate question.

And some folks might persist in quibbling, even past this point, that it’s tendentious to characterize a hunger problem – an absolute poverty problem – as though it were a relative income problem. But I don’t think so. Why do we regard a recession as a problem? Recession, too, is a relative wealth comparison. We take ‘recession’ to be the relevant category in part because the fact that we were doing significantly better just a year or so back suggests this is something we should be able to get out of. Likewise, income inequality is provoking to people, not because they are inherently resentful of the rich (not necessarily) but because it suggests to them, prima facie, that poverty in this environment ought to be get-outable-of. At least we ought to try.

Now: I think there is a tendency among liberals – hence by extension, conservatives, when engaging liberal views – to treat the case of a severe recession morally differently from that of income inequality. The latter is, presumptively, a ‘social justice’ issue. The former an unfortunate event. It isn’t unjust for the economy to go into recession. That would sound odd, because everyone takes for granted that no one wanted this result, let alone engineered it expressly. But no one wants income inequality either. Not per se. Yet we may be inclined to say the latter result is not just bad but unjust.

It would make a certain amount of sense to recalibrate our notions so that both problems look morally equivalent. When bad things happen, overall, that it is no individual’s job to fix – like recessions, or severe income inequality – then it is the job of the government to do something about it, if possible.

I think Posner would not like this result, as he would think it puts us on a slippery slope to more aggressive interventions against the entity formerly known as ‘social injustice’ – now excitingly rebranded as: big bad things – than he would think wise. That is, regulators acquire a mindset in which we assume that it is their (the government’s) job to fix anything big and bad that it’s no one else’s job to fix. But really, that is the government’s job, on Posner’s view. It isn’t anyone else’s job, by hypothesis, and – if it’s bad enough – the bad does need fixing. The only proper restriction on the government’s efforts, in this regard, are legal/Constitutional, plus a due sense of humility about the technical possibility of fixing any given ‘big bad’ thing, without making too many other things worse.

No one thinks trying to get out of a recession is, per se, wrong, just because we should let ‘the market decide’. We don’t like recessions. But then the same goes for anything else we really don’t like: like people going hungry. The effect of thinking this way would be to bleed ‘let the market decide’ of any vestige of moral, as opposed to prudential, authority. And the prudential point reduces to: don’t rock the boat too much. Don’t make regulatory interventions in complex situations that might make things worse. (Of course, if you are arguing with someone who doesn’t see any value in any market mechanisms whatsoever, then ‘let the market decide’ can amount to a substantive suggestion that, in general, markets can work pretty well. But, since liberals and progressives are not Maoists, we can ignore this as presently irrelevant – not that Glenn Beck will ignore it, oh no.)

Posner’s extreme position seems to me most useful for helping to map out a range of possible positions. We’ll start with his.

1) Individual economic actors are permitted to be (and may be obliged to be) borderline psychopathic in their solipsistic pursuit of narrow self-interest. In this case, you really need a government/regulatory system that is very actively concerned with the entity formerly known as social injustice – a.k.a. really big bad things.

2) Matthew Yglesias gets what he wants: “What’s really wanted here is for the United States to be a different kind of country with a more public-spirited business class wherein the bank executives could be persuaded to “do the right thing” in light of all the crap that taxpayers were doing on their behalf. But we live in the United States of America. Fundamentally, though, as with a lot of this stuff I think what’s being implicated is much less America’s financial crisis emergency response policies than our background conditions of social justice.”

3) We should ‘let the market decide’. That is, there is some reason to suppose the market gets things ‘morally right’, so if some people have less money, we should presume, prima facie, that this is the ‘right’ result. But then what is the justification for trying to moderate the business cycle? If we trust the market to decide what everyone deserves to have, then why not conclude that the reason why we all do less well in recessions, on average, is that we all become inherently less deserving people, on average. The business cycle has always been a bit of a mystery: maybe it’s fueled by an underlying moral cycle of inherent desert. Some years you get out of bed and you are just plain a worse person, economically, hence more likely to be unemployed for the next 18 months or so. And rightly so. (It’s a metaphysical thing. You wouldn’t understand.)

I could take 3 a bit more seriously, but I’m not really going to bother. The idea that you can’t make at least some judgments about what overall social-economic situations are desirable or undesirable, is pretty silly. Obviously there can be cases in which people really seriously do dispute whether a given arrangement is desirable or undesirable, in some global sense. But there are enough clear cases that we can stick with those, and grant upfront that the government has a lot less business – quite possibly none – intervening when it isn’t clear to everyone that we should want to get rid of state of affair x, if just waving a fairy wand were all it would take. (No one likes recessions or hungry poor people. We all agree that waving a fairy wand to eliminate those problems, if we could, would be an appropriate policy.) Once you grant this much, the rest is just arguing practical policy limits, pending the invention of functional fairy wands.

What I think is notable here is that liberals/progressives are more or less ok with 1 or 2, if they are spelled out in some satisfactory way. Whereas conservatives are really only happy with 3, philosophically. Very few of them will regard either 1 or 2 as philosophically tolerable, spell them out how you like. But this doesn’t seem to me like a good situation to be in.

I expect that one major line of resistance to all this would be: seriously, dude, you are underestimating the practical limits on government. You change one thing here and 12 things go wrong over there. Part of the problem with this is it assumes liberals and progressives are all Jacobin lunatics. Part of the problem is that it is actually an argument for 2 being a better option than 1. But mostly the problem is that it implicitly concedes that either 1 or 2 could still be philosophically correct.

I hammered all that out pretty quick. I’ll bet people won’t like it. I could write a post about fonts, if you want.

More from Scott, here.

US plans to levy fees on European Union tourists and business travellers visiting the US have come under fire in Brussels and could prompt the EU to enact its own visa-like system for US travellers, according to diplomats. … In the past, most Europeans visiting the US for less than 90 days have not had to make pre-departure arrangements. The same applies to US visitors to the EU under visa-reciprocity guidelines. “If this tax is indeed introduced, the Commission will have to re-evaluate once again whether it is tantamount to a visa,” said a spokesman for Jacques Barrot, the commissioner for justice and home affairs, on Tuesday.

If the EU carries through on this threat, American tourists to Europe who have to pay visa fees, wait in queues at overworked consulates etc, should know who is responsible – the Walt Disney Corporation of America.

JAY RASULO STOOD IN FRONT OF TWO MASSIVE SCREENS, each projecting his balding visage, and did what he loves to do: sell a big idea. The dapper, diminutive chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts implored 500 tourist industry executives to ask the federal government for an expensive favor. … Executives from tourism giants such as Marriott, American Express and Hertz buzzed with excitement—and skepticism. Getting taxpayers to underwrite overseas commercials had been the travel industry’s Holy Grail for decades. But the idea had never gotten very far in the councils of government. … A big lobbying push was needed for a big Ask—the term lobbyists use to describe what they are pleading for from Congress.

It’s an interesting story. When it became clear that the travel industry was unlikely to get US taxpayers to pay for a $200 million travel promotion campaign, lobbyists started looking for alternative ways of raising money – and the most obvious was to top up the industry’s own efforts with the Mickey Tax. Hence the bill, and hence the possible retaliatory measures from Europe. All thanks to Jay Rasulo and his balding visage.

These immigration prisons constitute the new face of imprisonment in America: the speculative public-private prison, publicly owned by local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in depressed communities. Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes. The possibility of riots usually goes unmentioned. … Initially, most speculative prisons were privately owned, a case of the federal government outsourcing its responsibilities. But prison outsourcing is rarely that simple anymore. The private-prison industry increasingly works with local governments to establish and operate speculative prisons. Prison-town officials have a mantra: “If you build a prison the prisoners will come.”

Most of the time, these public-private prisons are speculative ventures only for bondholders and local governments, because agreements signed with federal agencies do not guarantee prisoners. For the privates, risks are low and the rewards large. Usually paid a set fee by local governments to operate prisons, management companies have no capital investment and lose little, other than hefty monthly fees, if inmate flows from the federal government decline or stop.

… Prisons are owned by local governments, but local oversight of finances is rare, and the condition of prisoners is often ignored. Inmates such as those in Pecos are technically in the custody of the federal government, but they are in fact in the custody of corporations with little or no federal supervision. So labyrinthine are the contracting and financing arrangements that there are no clear pathways to determine responsibility and accountability. Yet every contract provides an obvious and unimpeded flow of money to the private industry and consultants.

The piece isn’t perfect – it can’t quite decide whether it is a story about the problems of the prison system or about the problems of the US approach to immigration. The two are of course closely connected, but each is very complicated in its own right, and trying to explain both at once makes for a top-heavy account. I would also have liked to have seen more aggregate data to support the specific arguments that the author is making (I suspect though that one of the problems with keeping this metastasizing system under control is that there isn’t any source of good general data out there). But it is an eye-opening piece of investigative journalism, looking at a story that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves. Recommended.

The interesting question to me is why is it that “pissing off liberals” is
delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas “pissing off conservatives” is boring and earnest?

Several years ago bumper stickers appeared that read “Annoy a Liberal. Work hard. Succeed. Be happy.” I was living in Arizona at the time, so they became a routine part of my commute. Possessing neither the blunt empirical thesis of “Guns Bought Your Freedom” nor the slow fuse of “Body Piercing Saved My Life”, the barefaced cheek of the non sequitur made the sticker absurd and irritating at the same time. I remember wondering what a parallel message to conservatives would look like. Sure enough, attempts at rebuttal soon started appearing on (other) bumpers. They were lame—stuff like “Annoy a Conservative. Think for yourself. Defend the Constitution. Balance the Budget.” Noble sentiments, but watery stuff by comparison.

Why did they seem so ineffective a response? Perhaps stronger material was needed. Might “Annoy a Conservative. Burn the Flag. Convert to Islam. Have an Abortion” work better? No. While that kind of thing can have some punch (“Jesus Loves You, But Everyone Else Thinks You’re An Asshole”), it doesn’t seem like the right tack. Instead, the best riposte to the “Annoy a Liberal” sticker is simply the same thing with the target swapped out: “Annoy a Conservative: Work. Succeed. Be Happy”. The effect is more or less the same as the original, especially if placed on the back of your Lesbaru. Temporarily suspending my longstanding irritation at divisions of this sort, much of what passes for “Pissing off Conservatives” is really an effort to rebut some ridiculous charge or other, instead of a genuinely symmetrical attempt to piss someone off. Or, as the story has Lyndon Johnson arguing, it’s better to kick off the conversation in a way that forces the other guy to deny that he’s a pig-fucker.

Additional Corner hilarity: someone ought to tell n00b Lee Edwards about his colleague Andrew McCarthy’s views. Edwards puts forward Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer as a more plausible Nobel Peace prize-winner, as she supports peaceful dissent from the Chinese government over its “deliberate and often brutal campaign to suppress the Uighur language, culture, and religion (the Uighurs are Muslim).” I couldn’t agree more, but there’s that niggling “Muslim” detail. McCarthy opposed the release of any of the 17 Uighur detainees at Guantanamo, calling them “alien jihadists” who are “affiliated with a terrorist organization and have received terrorist paramilitary training.” Likewise, during the recent conflict between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang, McCarthy deferred to “accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media” in his sober assessment entitled “Hard to Believe the Lovable Uighurs Could Be Involved in Terrorism . . . ” Then again, this is the same McCarthy who observed that “as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.” Thus, as a man of the hard Right, McCarthy is more comfortable with a totalitarian Communist regime than he would be with a free Chinese society. I feel something has gone sort of wrong there, but—SCARY MUSLIMS OMG!

Mr. Crook has a theory of what is wrong with American politics. It involves partisanship, of the kind not practiced by himself and his friends.

From the column:

Increasingly, rage is the dominant mood of US politics – but the feeling is not confined to the far right. Committed partisans on both sides question their opponents’ legitimacy. It is one thing for an adversary to be mistaken, quite another to be a liar or traitor. You do not argue with an opponent like that, or seek an accommodation. You silence him, you shout him down, you impeach.

… We floating voters see things differently. We approve of consensual politics, thinking that it delivers better policies. And we believe this for two main reasons.

First, good policy involves trade-offs. In the farther reaches of left and right, these are forbidden. For the left, there could never be a reason to lower taxes on the rich. To improve incentives? No, the less you tax the rich, the richer they become and the lazier they can afford to be. … Second, good policy requires stability. Though Democrats apparently find this hard to imagine, they will not always control the White House and both chambers of Congress. Measures that infuriate the other side – remember the Bush tax cuts? – can be reversed.

And when he is criticized for drawing a false equivalence between the left and right, he responds:

I take the point (though I think this way of putting it is pretty generous to Jimmy Carter). I wasn’t trying to equate these views, or compare their merits, only to give examples from each side of attacks that question not the judgment but the legitimacy of the other. Charges of that kind, which seem to be becoming the standard line of attack, are uniquely toxic.

The problem with these claims is not that they are unreasonable on their face. They are contestable – Nancy Rosenblum’s recent book provides an excellent critique of the ‘fIoating voter as exemplar of independent good judgment’ line of argument – but they are far from ridiculous. And Mr. Crook’s suggestion that leftwingers are constitutionally incapable of understanding that there can ever be any benefits to lowering taxes on rich people can be dismissed as standard right-wing pundit shtick.

The more fundamental problem is that Mr. Crook is peculiarly unsuited to lecture anyone about silencing, shouting down, and questioning not only the judgment but the legitimacy of people whom he disagrees with. Perhaps he truly believes that there is some difference between “questioning the legitimacy” of one’s intellectual opponents, and coming out with vicious slurs like

The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects.

But me – I’m not quite sure what the precise distinction is between “uniquely toxic” attempts to shout one’s opponents down, and suggestions that people whom one disagrees with view the deaths of several million of their fellow citizens as a “reasonable price to pay” for achieving their political aims. Maybe that’s because of my previously demonstrated “incompetence” and “total lack of good faith.” If so, I look forward to Mr. Crook explaining further the doubtless self-evident (to those who are not chumps like meself) dividing line between the objectionable forms of rhetoric that he dislikes so much, and the presumably non-objectionable forms that he himself spouts so enthusiastically.

In the meantime, I have a theory (it’s no more than that) of what is going on here. Mr. Crook clearly considers himself to be an independent mind, floating above the political fray and pronouncing judgments upon it. But given his past form, he is quite obviously wrong. His particular attitude to the online left suggests that his tribal loyalties are every bit as strong as those of the partisans whom he deplores – he is demonstrably happy to engage in rage-filled, irrational and delegitimizing rhetoric when it is aimed against the enemies of the “We” who “approve of consensual politics.” His tribalism is one of the center rather than the partisan left or right, but it is perhaps more pernicious for being completely unselfconscious.

Here’s the more speculative bit, which you can take or leave as you like. Crook’s more loathsome rhetoric over the last year or so has been consistently reserved for those who
want to see torturers and enablers of torture prosecuted. In a backhanded class of a way, I think this may possibly reflect well on him. I suspect that at some level he is genuinely conflicted between the standard DC bipartisan line on torture (that it is best to brush it all under the carpet) and the argument that torture is a fundamental and basic abrogation of civil rights. Hence – perhaps – his calumniation of those who put the strong case that we should neither forget nor forgive those who authorized torture – it is much easier to ignore their arguments if one defines them out of existence in advance.

As stated – take this suggestion for what it is worth – I have no sources of special insight into Mr. Crook’s psychology. Regardless, Mr. Crook should steer well clear in future of columns (which he has written more than one of over the last few months) deploring the hateful state of American politics and rhetoric. He is himself, after all, a not-insignificant contributor to this problem.

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[5] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

They are basically planning to start with the King James Bible and then just make it say what they think it should. Not only do they apparently regard it as inessential to involve anyone with knowledge of the original texts – although they off-handedly contemplate this as a possibility – they are touting ‘mastery of English’ as one of the benefits those who help with the project can expect to reap. What can one say? I find it hard to believe the whole thing isn’t some sort of elaborate, Borat-style hoax. Could it be? (Is Conservapedia for real?) Discuss.

via Sadly, No!

I turned that page in section B where there was a short item about two El Pasoans slain yesterday in a Juarez bar shooting. Back page stuff. Hidden near the end of the story was the astounding body count: nearly 2900 people, including more than 160 this month alone, have been killed in Juarez since a war between drug traffickers erupted January 2008 . John Wesley Hardin wouldn’t stand a chance.

Jesus. You’re probably safer in Kandahar.

the real news is the evidence that tobacco lobbyists secretly worked with McCaughey to prepare her infamous New Republic article “No Exit.” As I argued back in 1995 in “A Triumph of Misinformation,” everything about McCaughey’s role in the debate depended on her pose as a scrupulous, impartial, independent scholar who, after leafing through the endless pages of the Clinton health proposals, had been shocked by what she found. If it had been known at the time that she was secretly collaborating with one of the main interest-group enemies of the plan, perhaps the article would never had been published; at a minimum, her standing to speak would have been different.

Ms. McCaughey was apparently unwilling to be interviewed for the Rolling Stone article that Fallows is riffing off. This is a pity. It would have been interesting to have found out a little more about the precise role that tobacco lobbyists played in helping draft McCaughey’s notoriously mendacious piece (since the proposed reforms would have been partly bankrolled by a tobacco tax, they clearly had a considerable interest in influencing debate).

Update: The Manhattan Institute appears to be denying that McCaughey ‘worked with’ Philip Morris.

Is this a question of a lobbyist grossly exaggerating his “influence” to impress bosses and funders? That’s a very familiar pattern in Washington. On the other hand, the lobbyist’s detailed knowledge of Betsy McCaughey’s writing plans suggests some interaction. I don’t know the underlying truth here. It would be valuable if Ms. McCaughey, who has specialized in detailed textual analysis, would address in specific what these documents contend.

That politely acidulous ‘has specialized in detailed textual analysis’ is quite nice. I suspect that all this turns on the precise definition of what the term ‘worked with’ means or can be taken to imply.

As of April 1, 2006, out of a 2004 Census estimated population of 18 in Teterboro, there were 39 registered voters (216.7% of the population, vs. 55.4% in all of Bergen County).

Sadly, the answer may be prosaic. From earlier in the same Wikipedia entry:

The 2000 census failed to count any of the residents of the Vincent Place housing units who had moved into the newly built homes in 1999. The uncounted residents, including the Mayor and all four Council members, would help make up a projected tripling of the population enumerated by the census.

And while Republicans have proposed several compromise amendments, most of their provisions seek to delay the mark-up process and undermine the bill. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), for instance, introduced an amendment (Hatch F7 [pdf]) to “add transition relief for the excise tax on high cost insurance plans for any State with a name the [sic] begins with the letter ‘U.’”

Update Sunstein’s appointment was approved by the Senate on a near party line vote 57-40. Six Republicans (Bennett, Collins, Hatch, Lugar, Snowe,Voinovich) voted Yes. The No votes included Bernie Sanders who opposed Sunstein for much the same reasons I would and some Blue Dogs notably including Ben Nelson, who followed the Beck line (all of the Dems voted for cloture). Obama’s only real chance of achieving anything is to dump both the filibuster rule and the Blue Dogs. End update

First, if Beck succeed in derailing his appointment as regulatory czar and presumptive future Supreme Court Justice, Sunstein would be no loss, either intellectually or as regards the progressive cause.

But more importantly, Sunstein has been one of the strongest, and, given his closeness to Obama, the most influential advocates of the view that the polarization of US politics is the result of a failure of communication, and that if people on both sides only talked more, they would realise how much they had in common.

Whether or not Beck’s attacks are successful, I’m confident Sunstein is about to find out how wrong he is on this. On the contrary, the more interaction liberals (even those as lukewarm as Sunstein) have with the Republican base the more they will realise that they are dealing with people whose political views are a closed system, impervious to factual evidence or to any form of morality more developed than loyalty to the tribe. And, I bet, Sunstein will look in vain for support from his friends at the American Enterprise Institute.

The whole history of the Obama Administration so far has been one long demonstration that ideas of bipartisanship or postpartisanship are meaningless as long as they involve dealing with the Republican party or its supporters. Maybe Beck’s attack on Sunstein will be enough to drive the lesson home to the centrist establishment.

(Googling, I found very similar sentiments from Jim White at FireDogLake)