Minimum Wage
This will be the last ECON MOMENT until I experiment with the mic situation. I realize this sounds like I’m being huffy, but I don’t feel like reading a bunch of comments from people offering to buy me a mic every time I post one of these. Hopefully by the weekend I will see how much additional time it takes for me to incorporate an audio track and synch it up (which was always the constraint). After getting a few of these under my belt, I’m hoping it actually won’t be as much of a time suck as I had first thought…
Krugman Lets the Cat Out of the Bag on Socialized Healthcare
Like that guy in 1984 who liked Big Brother a little too much, I think the Party higher-ups may have to take care of Krugman for running his mouth a little too recklessly in his discussion of the Supreme Court and ObamaCare:
Well, ObamaRomneycare is basically a somewhat klutzy way of simulating single-payer. Instead of collecting enough revenue to pay for universal health insurance, it requires that those who can afford it buy the insurance directly, then provides aid — financed with taxes — to those who can’t. The end result is much the same as if the government collected taxes from those under the mandate and bought insurance for them.
I’m not going to bother looking up quotes, but I’m sure a bunch of “paranoid” people said this was effectively a federal takeover of health insurance. It wouldn’t even surprise me if Krugman made fun of them.
Anyway, Krugman also says:
Yes, the system is surely less efficient than single-payer, both because it’s more complex and because it introduces another layer of middlemen. That’s what happens when you have to make political compromises. But it is in no sense more interventionist, more tyrannical, than Medicare; it’s just a different way of achieving the same thing.
I have two comments:
(1) When Medicare was introduced, I bet a bunch of “paranoid” John Bircher types said it would lead to a slippery slope of a total federal takeover of health care. And I’m also sure that a bunch of reasonable people told them how crazy they were, that this was just a limited program to take care of elderly people that the free market had condemned to agony. Suuuuure, this limited program would one day be cited as a precedent for a total government takeover. This is the USA, not Soviet Russia!
(2) Since Krugman says there’s nothing in here that’s not in Medicare, we don’t need it, right? I mean, we have Medicare right now.
See Bob, Tom Woods, and Other Nutjobs From the Convenience of Your Computer
Tomorrow I will participate in a live Q&A session. I start at 8:30pm eastern, then Israel Andserson, then Tom Woods, then Michael Bolding. Details here.
Why Conservatives and Progressives Are Both Right and Wrong
Uncomfortable Laws from the Old Testament
It would be easy enough for me to dwell on the goodness of Jesus and wax eloquently on how much better the world would be, if more of us followed His example. However, that would seem to skirt the tough issues, so let me deal with a particular command from the Old Testament that I see in the comments here and on Facebook (when people want to ridicule Christianity). Deuteronomy 22: 28-29 says:
28 If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29 he shall pay her father fifty shekels[c] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.
This is a particularly troubling passage right now, in light of an awful story involving a Moroccan girl who committed suicide when finding herself in just this predicament.
Before I try to reconcile this with my belief in the Bible–including its claims that the God who issued this rule is infinitely good–let me acknowledge that this really is troubling to me. So it’s not that I’m saying, “What’s the big deal here?” I don’t want to make light of these situations by any means.
I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: I literally came to my faith in God through Jesus, in at least two senses. First, as an atheist I thought I could best make sense out of history by hypothesizing that there really was a guy named Jesus, who really believed he was the prophesied Jewish Messiah, and that he really did go around healing people through the power of suggestion. (I don’t remember if I thought he “came back from the dead,” before I realized that some type of God existed. That whole period was pretty fluid for me and I can’t remember the precise order of events, but for sure I thought Jesus existed and committed “miracles” that could be rationally explained, before I believed in God.)
However, there is another sense in which my faith in the Biblical God came through Jesus. It was only because I trusted the man who issued all of the gorgeous and wise teachings in the gospels, that I entertained the notion that the God depicted in the Old Testament could be good. I knew Jesus was a far better man and had a more developed moral sense than I did, but the God of the Old Testament had seemed fickle and malevolent at times. Yet Jesus clearly says that this person is not only good, but perfect. So that really made me think.
So when I try to make sense of that Deuteronomy passage, here are some reactions:
(1) I don’t really know. This is the honest answer. I’ve explained several times and in different ways why I think there is a God, and I believe that Jesus was His human incarnation. I also believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. So given those views and all they imply, it has to be the case that it was just for God to issue the rules in Deuteronomy, even though many of them admittedly sound quite draconian and some even seem evil. As many of my atheist critics point out, it is presumptuous of any of us to discuss what motivates an omnipotent and omniscient being. So the real answer is, I don’t really know.
(2) But that’s no fun. Let’s try. The first thing is that you should read the whole chapter to put it into context. You’ll see that there are all sorts of rules, most of which sound fine, if perhaps a bit odd. There are other rules regarding sex, and although they are very harsh, they’re actually fairly equal in their treatment of the two sexes. E.g. if something would cause a woman to die because of her unchaste behavior, the guy dies too (whereas you might have expected the woman to die but not the male adulterer).
(3) Continuing with the above, it is clear that the point of the rule is actually to protect the woman. That sounds crazy to modern ears, but that’s because in our society, a woman’s future wouldn’t be ruined to the same degree by being raped as it would have been, back then. (Again, in saying that I’m not minimizing how traumatic/shaming/etc. it is today. My point is, it was way worse back then, when women didn’t have a lot of career options and men would not want a non-virgin for a bride.) There’s not really a great analogy available, but the rule might be something like this: “If a man cuts off another man’s arms, so that he cannot earn a living, then the criminal must take in the victim into his own household, and care for him until he dies of old age.” Now on the one hand, that sounds disgusting–why the heck would I want to live with a guy who cut my arms off?! But in a society where an armless guy is dead, you can see why that might not have been such a terrible rule.
(4) I actually have Jesus Himself saying something like this in a different context. When asked about divorce, on one occasion Jesus says the only reason Moses allowed men to divorce their wives was because “of the hardness of your hearts,” and then explains that this was never what God originally intended when He created the institution of marriage.
(5) One obvious complaint with rationalizations such as the one I just gave, is to accuse me of moral relativism. “Oh, so your omnipotent God of perfect justice, has evolving standards of righteousness over time? Huh, how convenient. Of course, this is just what we’d expect if God were an invention of humans, whose ‘eternal’ precepts changed with cultural norms.”
Right, I get why an atheist would say that, but I can just as well say this: God has standards of perfection. No matter what, we humans can never live up to them. So, dealing with us as we are, God issues rules that are the best for us, at the time they are applicable.
Look, in economics when I was teaching undergrads, I would say things all the time that weren’t quite right. In other words, I would get a concept or a viewpoint across, using an argument that was actually invalid, or at the very least I was offering a “proof” of my conclusion without actually supplying all the steps.
For a while this troubled me, but I didn’t know how else to teach the kids. If I actually tried to do it properly, I would have lost most of them and they would have remained in their state of ignorance.
My brother (6 years younger) was in a mathematics doctoral program, and he had to teach undergrads in calculus classes. So I asked him if he did the same thing, and he said yes. In other words, even in the most “objective” and logical discipline possible–mathematics itself–he was telling me he actually taught “proofs” and other techniques (for taking integrals etc.) to the kids, that weren’t really rigorous. His justification, of course, was the same as mine: The kids wouldn’t even know what he was talking about if he tried to explain the subtle little thing you had to worry about when proving why L’Hopital’s Rule works (or whatever).
So I think there is something analogous with God as He teaches us morality. For those of you with kids, think of how you raised them. When they were little, you didn’t have philosophical discussions about right and wrong. No, I’m guessing you told them flat out that hitting the other kid at the playground was wrong, that it was nice to share with siblings, etc. And you probably were “mean” and “angry” when they did things wrong. But as they got older, you seemed to mellow out and tried to reason with them more, appealing to their growing moral sense and so forth. (You also probably mellowed out because you finally caught back up on your sleep.)
That’s how I view God interacting with humans. The Ten Commandments were very explicit, and mostly told you what not to do. Yet when Jesus was asked the greatest commandment, He said to love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and added that the second greatest was to love your neighbor as yourself. Note, however, that Jesus didn’t invent these two concepts to crystallize the individual commands from the Old Testament. No, those two commandments were themselves issued by the “mean” God much earlier (here and here).
Climate Wars Bask
I am going to do a follow-up post (here at Free Advice) next week regarding my recent post on the Heartland Institute / Peter Gleick affair. I still agree with my main points in that post, but in the comments here Stickman made me realize that I had misunderstood what Peter Gleick’s official story was. So, now I am more open to the possibility that he didn’t write that bogus strategy memo, than I was when I wrote my first piece on this. (But to repeat, none of this newfound perspective changes what I had to say in that first article.)
Before I write my follow-up thoughts, however, I’d like to do a sampling of the various climate blogs in their handling of the big scandals. So my questions:
(1) Did RealClimate say anything about the Heartland affair? I know Gavin Schmidt (sp) commented on it, since I saw other blogs quoting his statements, but did he do that elsewhere, and not at RealClimate?
(2) Do we have examples of prominent “skeptic” blogs claiming that the Climategate emails show that “global warming is a hoax” or anything comparable to such a sweeping conclusion?
ECON MOMENT: Unintended Consequences
This one is actually somewhat interesting. Like, even a 7th grader might be able to bear it. It starts out with armed robbery.
ECON MOMENT: Oil Speculators and Iran
Instead of procrastinating by reading other people’s banal blog posts, I have found a new way to keep from earning income directly…
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