Now growing up, I remember thinking that God had some weird priorities. I mean, everybody knows that the worst thing you can possibly do is murder somebody, right? And yet that silly deity had put that offense halfway down the list. You can sort of understand Him putting the stuff about God at the top–sort of for the sake of tidiness–but c’mon, putting respect for your parents above murder?! That is inconceivable.

Anyway, upon this last reading, the list made a lot more sense to me. Yes, it’s undeniable that my further progression (or retrogression, according to most of you who post in the comments on Sunday) into born-again Christianity is partly responsible. But I also think it’s my greater experience with humans, and understanding what motivates them. Take a look at this list (Ex 20:1-17):

20 And God spoke all these words, saying:
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3 “You shall have no other gods before Me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
7 “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
12 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
13 “You shall not murder.
14 “You shall not commit adultery.
15 “You shall not steal.
16 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

The numbering schemes are a little bit different, as Wikipedia the theologian explains, so I’m not going to refer to “#8″ etc. But from murder on down, the list makes perfect sense, right? The only possible question would be over adultery, but I think a libertarian agnostic who flips out over this one, is actually being inconsistent. Especially back in those days, marriage was a serious contractual relationship. So if you slept with somebody else’s spouse, it was like you were bearing false witness and stealing all wrapped up into one. (And yes, at the time it was patriarchal and treated women like the property of their husbands, but even in a more liberated time like ours, I think there is a sense in which someone “cheating on his or her spouse” is breaking one of the most solemn contractual and societal pledges possible. It’s certainly a lot more serious than shoplifting.)

Like I said earlier, not only does the placement of adultery make sense to me now (whereas I probably would have thought it should be #9 when I was in 8th grade), but so do the others. I think the point of the ordering is to show what one’s one priorities in life should be.

The point isn’t to say, “Oh, a guy who murders his neighbors but calls his mom every Saturday is better than the guy who refrains from murder but tells his mom she turned him into a pansy.” No, every thing on that list is forbidden; you are a “bad guy” if you do any of that stuff.

But the point is (I think), someone who is raised in a culture that orders the list of offenses in that way, and genuinely believes it, is a lot more likely to end up being what we think of as a “good person” than if you changed the order.

People don’t wake up one day and say, “You know, it hasn’t been inculcated in me that it’s wrong to go kill someone in cold blood, so I think I’ll eat some Cheerios and go murder me somebody.” No, the person who ends up murdering does it for a variety of other reasons, and the person only ended up in those situations because he didn’t honor the Lord above all else, keep holy the Sabbath, respect his parents, etc. etc.

As usual, I have been saving links waiting to write a piece de resistance. Instead, I’ll give hors-d’ouevres….

==> In this post Scott Sumner riffs on a recent Krugman post. Did you have any idea that Sweden ran a budget surplus of 2% of GDP in 2011? Me neither. Reading Krugman certainly did give me any reason to suspect that. Krugman had produced a chart and implied that the United States was engaged in more austerity than Sweden. Go look at his post. He calls it “spending side austerity” presumably to cover his bases. But it’s not like he says, “Oh, admittedly, Sweden is running a budget surplus, but I’m saying that’s because of their loose monetary policy which has boosted revenues and allowed them to reduce transfer payments…” No, none of that. He just implies that conservatives are insane, puts up an irrelevant chart, and then gives a very misleading analysis of it.

==> Sumner’s fun with Krugman is in line with Russ Roberts’ sarcasm from a week ago (HT2 von Pepe). The big picture is that in order to make the European situation fit his rhetoric, Krugman has decided to reclassify the relevant item as being government spending on consumption and investment, as opposed to all government spending (including transfer payments). That’s the trick he pulled to try to paint Sweden as being more profligate and “Keynesian” in the slump than the US, even though Sweden is currently running a budget surplus (or at least did in 2011). And he earlier did it in order to impugn the chart that Veronique de Rugy had assembled. (And I use the verb “impugn” with conviction. Go read how Krugman bit her head off, for having the audacity to chart a bunch of government spending figures in a debate over government spending.) Here’s a good summary of Krugman’s new rhetorical trick, in his own words:

…some people who should know better are conceding the point that maybe there haven’t been big spending cuts. Yes, there have.

For the fact is that you can’t just look at spending levels to ask what is happening to spending programs. Here in the United States spending on unemployment insurance and food stamps has risen sharply, not because the welfare state has expanded, but because a lot more people are unemployed and poor. Similar effects are at work in European countries, which have stronger safety nets than we do. Also, some spending represents banking bailouts, not exactly what people have in mind when they talk about big government.

And here’s how Russ responded:

I get it. An increase in spending that doesn’t reflect a desire for bigger government but instead reflects automatic stabilizers, say–well, that’s not a spending increase. It’s the intention that counts when you evaluate the impact on aggregate demand.
…
Silly me. I didn’t realize that in the Keynesian model it isn’t government spending that affects aggregate demand, but only certain kinds of government spending. Krugman goes on to show that much of the increase in spending in Ireland is due to bank bailouts and increases in transfers because of the “dire state of the Irish economy.” But I thought those transfers were supposed to stimulate the economy. Joseph Stiglitz taught me that it doesn’t matter what government spends money on, it’s all stimulus. And when Krugman was touting a two trillion stimulus package, I don’t remember hearing the part about making sure it was pushed through with the right kind of spending and the right kinds of motives. Who knew that government spending only stimulates when it springs from a desire for bigger government?

==> Last point I want to make: After seeing the actual spending figures (that de Rugy had compiled), my confidence in my own position went down. In other words, the European governments had slowed or reduced their nominal spending more than I would have guessed.

The irony here is that I was only really familiar with the UK’s figures, and that was the one Krugman had been harping on (saying the UK’s double dip was the death blow to austerity). I saw that the UK spending at best had merely tapered off, and so I assumed that other states (except Greece and Ireland) had probably just cut the rate of growth. I was actually surprised by how many had lower total nominal spending levels in 2011 than in 2010.

So I think Krugman should have simply said, “Yes, this is too austerity, spending went down. Now are you conservatives trying to say, ‘Oh it wasn’t big enough’? Are you kidding me? You didn’t like it when I said the same thing about the Obama stimulus package, so don’t you dare try to pull that move on me, now.”

That would have been a decent move for him to make. Instead, he throws up this nonsense point about the composition of spending. That issue could conceivably be relevant when evaluating claims like “Obama is a Big Government Man who grew the welfare state,” but it’s hardly relevant to evaluating whether demand-side policies are good at restoring economic growth.

Just to warn you, kids, I have a double shot of Krugman critiques being published next week in different outlets. After that, I really think I have to stop jumping up and down every time Krugman says something ridiculous and incredibly misleading. The novelty is wearing off.

UPDATE: David R. Henderson has some good thoughts on all this, too. He points out that whenever the debate came up over extending unemployment benefits, Keynesians touted the benefits to stimulating demand.

However, Krugman in this blog post says:

But an interesting parallel struck me here: I wonder whether the people who go on and on about the much smaller loss at Solyndra, the case that launched a thousand hearings, will get comparably worked about on this case [JP Morgan's $2 billion trading loss--RPM] (actually I don’t wonder — they won’t).

The obvious objection is that the government lost money on Solyndra, but hasn’t (yet?) on JPMorgan. But that’s less true than meets the eye. Solyndra was a small part of a broad program of loan guarantees, which inevitably ran the risk of loss — otherwise those guarantees wouldn’t have been worth anything, would they? And it was the only loss.

OK so it’s that part I put in bold that is problematic. Beacon Power had received a large taxpayer-backed loan (and perhaps a loan itself, I need to review the details before I write this up formally) and went bankrupt last year. This was a huge deal in these circles; people were saying it was the next Solyndra. At the time, Beacon settled with the Department of Energy, saying it would sell its plant in order to raise the money to pay back its loan.

Well, back in February they found a buyer, and in this news report a DOE official estimates taxpayers will get back 70 cents on the dollar.

So, do Krugman fans want to explain to me the sense in which Solyndra already lost taxpayers money, but Beacon Power didn’t? Are you willing to say, “OK Krugman was just wrong on this point, nobody’s perfect,” or is there some loophole I’m missing?

(I’m asking partly because I am indeed going to write up this episode formally, and I want to cover possible objections.)

Look, my view here is the same thing as with his dad’s newsletters: This was a joke in poor taste. Does Rand Paul hate gay people? Well, he says he doesn’t, and here he’s “preaching to the choir”; these aren’t his after-the-fact explanations offered up on CNN.

I also can’t help but point out that a lot of the people who are flipping out over Rand Paul’s remarks on Facebook, were also flipping out over Obama’s flip-flopping and dumb justifications too.

Do you think that Rand Paul would have made this remark about someone who had consistently been for gay marriage for the last decade, and whose justification was “equal rights before the law” or something like that? Of course not. The reason Rand Paul attacked Obama is that Obama’s justification is self-evidently silly pandering. He is making the statement for political reasons, and he knew he had to come up with some official justification so he cited the Golden Rule. That is absurd, just like the Facebook supporters of gay marriage were pointing out last week.

We were discussing the parable of the shepherd finding a lost sheep and the pastor read from a Christian scholar who had said (I’m paraphrasing) something like, ‘To the Jew of Jesus’ day, maybe if a sinner came crawling back to God and begged forgiveness, God would have had mercy. But never in a million years would God have gone out looking for lost sinners to redeem.’ In other words, we are supposed to infer that this was an innovation of Christianity.

But that strikes me as crazy. The single most important theme of the Old Testament (it seems to me) is that God continually forgives His wretched and straying people. He approached Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single “important” Old Testament character who wasn’t courted by God; the only one that is arguable is Jacob (who wrestled to obtain a blessing).

The psalms are full of tributes to God’s abundant mercy and forgiveness.

And consider the book of Hosea: God literally orders a guy to marry a prostitute, and to go out and bring her back home after she leaves him to return to prostitution, as a metaphor for God’s relationship with Israel and its swooning over foreign idols.

I think there is sometimes a tendency for Christians to exaggerate the innovations of Jesus. For example–not that my pastors would ever have made such a basic mistake–I myself used to think that when Jesus summed up the Law and Prophets by saying love the Lord your God with your whole heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself, that Jesus was a brilliant guy who took a bunch of specific rules from the Old Testament and unified them under two brand new principles. Sort of like the Einstein of morality.

The only problem with my neat little theory, is that both of those rules were in the Old Testament (here and here).

Don’t get me wrong, Jesus is “a nice guy” of whom I am not afraid, whereas the God who sent plagues on Pharaoh is scary and you don’t want to get on His bad side. But actually as Christians we believe they are the same PersonGod, and furthermore you can see the fire in Jesus’ ire for the religious hypocrites, not to mention what He does in Revelation. Going the other way, the God of the Old Testament is harsh at times but He’s not really like a spiteful god from Greek mythology, the way atheist critics sometimes claim. He is full of compassion, love, and mercy, and is constantly trying to get the nation of Israel to do what is in their best interest.

Today IER put up my detailed response. The two pieces get into some fairly technical issues, but I hope I managed to keep everything understandable to the reader who is willing to sit down and read both articles. If you’re interested in the economics of climate change, these two articles are worth reading. Nordhaus is a world-renowned pioneer in the field, whereas I am (to my knowledge) the only person with a journal critique of his policy conclusions, from a free-market perspective. (There are interventionists who have criticized Nordhaus on the grounds that his approach is far too timid in its recommendations for a carbon tax.)

One thing I will draw your attention to, is that (I must say) Nordhaus is very misleading when he reports on the economics literature modeling the potential damage from climate change. I won’t go so far as to say he intentionally misled his readers, but that almost certainly was the result. Here is Nordhaus discussing the state of the literature:

The question here is whether emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases will cause net damages, now and in the future. This question has been studied extensively. The most recent thorough survey by the leading scholar in this field, Richard Tol, finds a wide range of damages, particularly if warming is greater than 2 degrees Centigrade. Major areas of concern are sea-level rise, more intense hurricanes, losses of species and ecosystems, acidification of the oceans, as well as threats to the natural and cultural heritage of the planet.

Now when I first read that, my Spidey Sense was tingling. I was familiar with Tol’s work, and remembered progressive bloggers biting his head off, because his work showed that global warming was beneficial (on net) for decades. So I went and looked up the very survey article that Nordhaus is citing, and guess what? Tol shows that the majority of economic analyses do indeed find net benefits from global warming, up through 2 degrees Celsius, and only after that point do (most of) the models start moving into net harm territory. Furthermore, coupled with the IPCC’s estimates, this crossover point probably won’t happen for another 50 – 60 years.

So tell me, in light of that, if Nordhaus did his readers justice when he said: “The question here is whether emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases will cause net damages, now and in the future. This question has been studied extensively. The most recent thorough survey by the leading scholar in this field, Richard Tol, finds a wide range of damages, particularly if warming is greater than 2 degrees Centigrade.”

Lastly, David R. Henderson and David Friedman both discuss my post. They are interested because they each had talked about Nordhaus too (here’s Henderson and here’s Friedman).

* No idea at this point how I stumbled upon this news report on “Million Dollar Voices,” but it’s kind of neat. I’m sure there’s a lesson about the division of labor and population growth in there, somewhere.

* Here’s the interview Charles Goyette did for Carlos and me in April’s Lara-Murphy Report.

* Ralph Raico sent me this article on karaoke. (A sentence I never thought I’d blog.) I must disagree, however, when the alleged experts in the article caution people not to do “Hey Jude.” Perhaps that’s true in general, but not at Mises U:

NOTE: The above video is, to my knowledge, the only one in existence where I didn’t say, “Jeez, I swear I sounded better in person than that iPhone would suggest.”

So in the small society (and I use the term loosely) of my Facebook friends, people were very angry about the North Carolina amendment prohibiting gay marriage. One of the particular jokes, though, upon reflection is a bit odd.

So first, the joke: Flying around my “news feed” were several variations of a poster, showing a guy saying:

OK, that’s funny and I probably chuckled the first time I saw it. But why is it funny? Clearly, the only reason is that even the people pushing the poster around agree that barring first-cousin marriage is somehow more understandable than a state barring marriage between homosexuals.

OK, so where do that get off with that judgment? It can’t be because of the danger to children, since the proponents of gay marriage have made it abundantly clear that arguments about procreation are invalid. And it sure can’t be because, “Most people think first cousin marriage is unnatural and icky”–I have numerous FB status updates from various people yesterday, saying what they think about that kind of stance.

There are currently 25 (I counted fast, don’t quote me) states that prohibit first-cousin marriage. Isn’t this a monstrous violation of individual liberty? If two cousins love each other and want to spend their lives together, why should a state government have anything to say about it?

As most readers of this blog know, I am a Bible-believing Christian but also a pacifist who doesn’t endorse any form of the State apparatus as a way of achieving social objectives. So I obviously don’t think the government should have anything to do with telling people whom they can and can’t marry.

Yet I really do think this indignant reaction–pointing out that North Carolina allows first cousins to marry but not homosexuals–is interesting. For example, imagine if the NAACP launched a poster campaign after the Trevor Martin shooting that said, “Florida: A State Where You Get More Jail Time For Shooting an Illegal Than a Black Citizen.” Would civil rights activists have thought that was funny? I doubt it, because they would have been just as horrified if Zimmerman (in their minds) targeted and killed an illegal immigrant in cold blood.

So again I point out: Every single argument I have seen for gay marriage on FB, would also show that it is monstrous for States to prohibit first cousins from marrying. Thus, why was that joke about North Carolina funny, to the people who are really outraged by the amendment?