How Paternalistic Should a Parent Be?
In church today the pastor–who is a super right-winger–derided the San Francisco ban on Happy Meals. Although I can’t recall him ever discussing it, somehow I don’t think my pastor objects to those same wacky Californians banning people from consuming marijuana. Assuming I’m right, then, my pastor actually doesn’t have a problem with the principle of banning Happy Meals, he just objects to the particular decision.
I had my own bout with paternalism later in the day, while in the car with my (almost) 6-year-old son. Out of the blue he asked, “Are there bad guys in Nashville?” I said yes. He then asked if they were all in jail. I said some of them were. Then he asked who put them there, and I talked about police and judges. He asked what judges do, and I had to decide whether to explain judges right now in this world, or judges in daddy’s fantasy land. (I opted for the former.)
Then he asked a really tough one: “Does the jail turn them into good guys?” This is really a profound question. Was my son a budding utilitarian? A social reformer? Or was he merely concerned about the use of my tax dollars?
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I truly don’t want to indoctrinate my son with my worldview, both for ethical and pragmatic reasons. Ethically, it’s not fair to “force” my views on him, especially since I’m surely wrong on several issues (hopefully none too important). And pragmatically, he’s eventually going to form his own opinions, and so I don’t want to put a bad taste in his mouth for all this “Jesus and liberty stuff” early on.
After a pause I answered, “It turns some of them into good guys.” Then after thinking a few moments, I elaborated: “But sometimes jail turns them into really bad guys.” My son didn’t understand, so I explained, “Well, there can be guys that are a little bad, and guys that are really bad, right? So if they put a guy who’s a little bad into jail with guys that are really bad, then the guy who is a little bad might turn into a guy who’s really bad too.”
Then after a few minutes, I decided it was acceptable to proselytize the captive audience in the car seat: “But do you know who turns a lot of bad guys into good guys in prison?” “Who?” “Jesus. If people tell the bad guys in the jail that Jesus loves them and is their friend, then sometimes they turn into good guys.”
Then Clark asked, “Oh, when Jesus comes to Nashville?”
Talk about a great concert!
Soak-the-Rich Is Bad Policy
I have a Mises Daily today about Sunday’s 60 Minutes segment on hiking taxes, especially on the rich. Don’t tell anyone, but I actually used a bunch of empirical arguments! (This is permitted once every 7 years on Mises.org.) An excerpt:
The only true solution to the federal and state fiscal crises is to cut government spending. Governor Gregoire can pretend that this would return people in her state to the Dark Ages. In reality, the total operating and capital budget for Washington State grew from $53.5 billion in the 2003–2005 budget period to $68.5 billion in the 2007–2009 budget period.[2] That 28 percent growth over a four-year period works out to a growth in spending of 6.4 percent per year. Now some of the increase could be blamed on price inflation, and some on population growth, but even so, Washington State could trim its spending merely by returning to its budget of a few years ago.
Off to Oregon, and Murphy-Krugman Debate Update
Posting has been and will continue to be sparse; to steal a line from Dennis Miller, I’ve been traveling a lot–I make Kerouac look like an agoraphobe. On Thursday Carlos Lara and I will be speaking at Tom McFie’s Life Benefit$ Freedom Retreat.
In the meantime, a quick update on the Murphy-Krugman debate. Today we broke the $50,000 mark, less than two full weeks after the launch of the campaign! This is really incredible. When things settle down, I really will do a “Murphy’s Angels Roll Call” and highlight the big-ticket pledges.
At this point this is a legitimate news item and we can release the hounds. I know some of you have already been calling up talk radio hosts, posting it on your blogs, and emailing people (including Krugman). To the extent that you are looking to me for central planning, I would suggest holding off on putting it on Krugman’s blog itself; I think it will be more effective to wait for the $100k mark for that. But by all means, please continue spreading the message in friendly venues.
One big tip: Don’t tell people to go to The Point, or even YouTube. I think you should keep it simple and point people to “KrugmanDebate.com”, especially if you are calling into a radio show. It’s really really tough to get people to hear something on the radio and then end up making a pledge online. Don’t cloud things with multiple references; just keep it as: “Go to KrugmanDebate.com for details.”
Beyond your grassroots efforts, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve. But I will keep you in suspense…
In closing, let me share these two comments on my campaign:
“I would love to see this debate, all the moreso after watching Murphy’s two promotional videos, each so entertaining in its own way that they made me want to send him money independent of the Krugman thing.”—Steve Landsburg
“Krugman is refusing to debate. If he finally consents, he can say, “I was just trying to help more poor people.” I know that’s what I would say. Then he will get his head handed to him by Murphy. He will run into a buzz saw. His Nobel Prize will do him no good at all.”—Gary North
It’s All About Me, and My Brother
Because of my hectic schedule I have been remiss in posting my Mises Daily articles. I don’t think I’ve posted the following three yet:
* Today I ask whether we should include interest payments on past borrowing, as part of the “total cost” of something (like the Iraq invasion). David R. Henderson argues that we shouldn’t, while other economists argue that we should. I wuss out and plant myself in between the two extreme positions.
* In this article I explain the background for my debate challenge to Paul Krugman. If you liked this idea, but were afraid to just send the silly YouTube videos, this article is much more likely to get a newcomer to think, “Oh OK, he is making an ass of himself on purpose.”
* And in this article, I elaborate on how a private legal system would handle appeals. If you like the Rothbardian vision but can’t quite picture how it would play out in the real world, you might enjoy this one.
In other news, Stewart was one of the attendees at the seminar I put on last Friday in Boston with Bob Wenzel. Afterward, as promised, a bunch of us went to the karaoke bar. In the first clip below, Stewart captured my opening warm-up song. The bad thing is that plenty of people have me doing “New York, New York” on YouTube, since it’s one of my two standard openings. However, the audio quality on the below is the best yet. If you click it, move the pointer to about 1:55 or so, since the beginning is boring.
And then Stewart also captured a large chunk of my brother Al doing “Billie Jean.” I think it’s safe to say I have Al on vocals, but he has much better stage presence. (During renditions of “Only the Good Die Young,” he has been known to throw the microphone behind his back.)
Be Who You Must, That’s a Part of the Plan
(That’s a reference to a Dan Fogelberg song.)
Well I’ve had an interesting day. It ties in with last week’s post, where I acknowledged that you really have no control over your life. All you can do is respond to events in the character of the person you want to be.
My brother (who lives 30 miles outside Boston) was driving me to the airport after the Murphy-Wenzel extravaganza. About 15 miles away, his temperature gauge went way up and the light came on. So I blasted the heat, and that fixed the problem. I told him it was probably just a screwed up reading.
Well scratch that theory. About a minute later the gauge went back up to H, and then cold air started coming out of the vents. The engine started making a bad clicking noise, and he could feel the acceleration dying. So we pulled off to the side of the interstate and turned off the truck. It didn’t start ever again.
So that was obviously a kick in the pants for both of us. My brother had recently moved out there for a job, and the people he knew best happened to be out of town. My flight was supposed to start boarding in about an hour, and we were on the side of the interstate still about 15 miles from the airport. Oh yeah, it was a Sunday morning.
My brother called AAA while I called the airline. The woman at AAA told him they couldn’t find his name in their system. My brother said that maybe it was because his membership expired, but she said no, they still should show him in their system as expired. But, she went on, they’d been having a glitch lately where they couldn’t look people up. (You’d think AAA might try to address that problem, as that seems to me–an outsider, I grant you–a major part of their business model, to be able to tell who has signed up for them, when people break down and call from the side of the highway.) My brother had a good line. Apparently she said, “Is there anything else I can assist you with?” and he said, “Well you didn’t assist me with the first thing.” He called Geico and they ended up telling him how to get a tow truck.
I am truly not making a xenophobic statement here, but it was frustrating on my end to deal with a non-native speaker. It was very difficult for me to convey my situation, and to understand what my alternatives were. But it appeared that the only thing I could do over the phone was to book a flight leaving at 10pm that night (instead of my original 11:09am flight) and paying an extra $900. So I declined.
About a half hour after we broke down the tow truck came. The guy took us to a Ford dealership at a town in the direction of the airport. (Of course no one was there, as it was a Sunday.) So now our new plan was to get me to the airport, so that I could try flying standby on the two remaining flights out of Boston that would ultimately get me to Nashville. My brother, for his part, was trying to figure out if he should just plan on missing most of his work day on Monday (waiting for his truck to get fixed) or if he should take a train back to his town, bum a ride from somebody to work, and then take the train back in to pick up his truck after-hours on Monday.
We had to kill about an hour while we waited for my brother’s friend (whom he remembered after we got to the town on the outskirts of Boston) to come get us. The friend would take me to the airport, and then either let my brother crash at his place or take him to the train station.
So we went to eat lunch at a deli. My brother made small talk with the owner and explained our odd situation. A few minutes later, while we were eating the sandwiches at the deli’s table, another customer sits down and stares at us. To condense some of the story, it somehow transpired that this guy owned a rival auto shop across the street from the Ford dealership, and my brother ended up giving the guy the key to his truck. The guy said he would tow the truck that afternoon to his shop, and have his guys look at it first thing in the morning.
As we were walking away from the deli, we were joking that if the guy stole his truck, nobody would have any sympathy for my brother. But I reassured him that it was a crazy situation and it actually made perfect sense that my brother had given his key to a guy he had met 10 minutes earlier in a deli.
So we still had a half hour to kill. I was paranoid about leaving my computer in his truck, since the guy had the key and for all we knew, the guy was going to go get hammered at a bar watching football. So I wanted to make sure that my brother’s key fob still worked, and that I would be able to get my luggage out of the truck when my brother’s friend showed up in about 30 minutes. (In other words, if the key fob didn’t work for some reason, I was going to sprint back to the deli and catch the guy before he finished his own sandwich, to get the actual key back to unlock the truck.)
OK so the key fob worked, and I felt comfortable strolling around the town while we killed the remaining half hour. After we walked about 10 minutes away, I was hit with a moment of panic. I exclaimed, “Whoa, he could be towing the truck right now! I have to get my stuff outta there!” (In retrospect that seems obvious, but it didn’t occur to us at the time because the guy had originally said he would tow it Monday morning. So when he later said he’d get it Sunday, we pictured it being later in the day.)
We jogged back to the Ford dealership, and saw the guy’s tow truck driving (empty) past us. I said, “Yep, he already towed it.” But fortunately we found it in an outside lot. So we were doubly relieved: (A) I could still get at my stuff and (B) the guy was really connected with a rival auto shop.
My brother’s friend showed up soon afterward. Since my brother’s cell phone was about to die, our story must leave him at this point (since I don’t know what he ended up doing) and follow our protagonist.
I got to the airport and had to pay $150 in order to switch my reservation (from the flight I had missed to a new one), but thankfully the lady at the counter didn’t make me pay the fare difference. (Why this wasn’t an option when I called two hours earlier, I do not know.)
I flew from Boston to DC with little fanfare. Then I went to check on the gate for my connecting flight to Nashville. It said the flight had been canceled due to plane servicing. Suh-weet.
I jumped in the customer service line for United, and was about 5th in line. I think the guy at the front was trying to go to Mars via Yemen, because he was taking forever. I foolishly tried to call their 800 number again, thinking I could beat the rush.
The only options the person gave me were to pay the $900 to fly out that night, or to take a flight in a few hours that would put me in Alabama, 102 miles from Nashville. I declined.
Anyway I am now blogging from a hotel room in DC. United at least paid for it and gave me $15 off dinner. I have a guaranteed ticket on a flight that puts me back into Nashville about 36 hours after I first left for the airport. All in all, not a bad resolution. I can objectively say I was less stressed about everything than most of the other people in the customer service line, but then again my job is flexible. And as I always remind myself when I’m feeling pitiful: I imagine there are people in Afghanistan who can come up with worse sob stories.
Since it’s Sunday I should try to relate this to the Bible. How about this from Jesus? (Luke 12:22-26)
22Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. 23Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. 24Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! 25Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life[a]? 26Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?
When I was younger and used to freak out about stuff more than I do now, I would be in awe of old-timers who weren’t easily flustered. But of course what happens is that old-timers have gone through a lifetime of stressful events that turned out, in retrospect, to not be nearly as awful as they initially seemed.
ATTENTION BOSTONIANS! Last-minute Switch
In an effort to thwart the feds in the nondescript van outside the building, Bob Wenzel and I are implementing a last-minute change in the location of our evening talk here in downtown Boston.
Originally, the talk was to be held at the Omni Parker. But we are moving the evening talk to a restaurant where we will have a private room to ourselves. It is literally two blocks from the original location, and it is a very nice place.
So, for those coming tonight at 7pm to hear me talk on the Great Depression and Wenzel to talk on “interperting the code words of the elite,” please come to:
KO Prime restaurant,
in the Nine Zero Hotel, which is at
90 Tremont Street
(617) 772-0202
We tried emailing everyone who already paid, but I’m posting this here as well in case some of you were going to just show up at the door. Sorry for the possible inconvenience, but this alternate location will actually suit our needs much better.
incidentally we had a nice turnout for the lunch event. Hope to see some new faces tonight!
Come See Murphy and Wenzel in Boston This Friday!
On Friday, October 29, Bob Wenzel of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and I will host an afternoon and then evening seminar at the historic Omni Parker House in downtown Boston. The two seminars will feature independent content:
* During the lunch seminar from 12pm – 2pm, Murphy will discuss 5 reasons investors should study Austrian economics, rather than Keynesian. Wenzel will discuss Austrian business cycle theory, and how it should be used by investors.
* During the evening seminar from 7pm – 9pm, Murphy will discuss the Great Depression and its lessons for today. Wenzel will explain how to talk code like the elites, so that you can navigate the regulatory framework as an insider. Wenzel will illustrate his lessons using real-life examples of techniques he and acquaintances have used to achieve remarkable goals while others have been suffocated by regulations.
Both seminars will be held in the luxurious Omni Parker House:
Please note that food and drinks will be available to attendees at both the afternoon and evening seminars, but that they will have to be purchased separately.
The admission fee for either event is $30 at the door. However, if you order online, admission for each event is only $24. If you order online for both events, the total fee is $32.
==> Click here to order the afternoon seminar.
==> Click here to order the evening seminar.
==> Click here for the best value to order both seminars.
In addition to the above public seminars, Wenzel is available for private consultation. Contact him for details.
And on Friday night, Murphy is available for karaoke requests. 2-drink minimum.
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