Consulting by RPM || Free Advice Blog

Is It Justified to Torture the Word “Libertarian” If It Makes Us Happier?

I don’t mean to be a whiner but check this out from Scott Sumner’s recent EconLog post:

Unlike many on the left, I don’t envy the rich. I’m really happy that Larry [Ellison] is really happy. If Larry was even a bit happier, and if that boosted total global happiness, that would be fine with me. But I can’t get away from the implication of (what I perceive as) diminishing marginal utility. Some redistribution is justified.

Larry Ellison is extremely lucky to live in a universe where:

1. Government is very inefficient.
2. Incentives have a surprisingly strong effect on behavior.

If not for those practical limitations to redistribution, it would be hard to argue against people who favor taking away almost all of Ellison’s wealth, and reducing his consumption levels back to roughly average. But that’s not the world we live in; Larry’s very lucky that incentives do matter a lot and that governments are very inefficient. Even Sweden tolerates multi-billionaires for pragmatic reasons. Thus even a pure utilitarian like me favors MTRs on top consumption peaking at perhaps 80%, not 99.999%.
…
I plead innocent to both charges. I’m a pragmatic libertarian who just happens to think that global happiness would be maximized by small government, free market economic systems, with a few interventions to deal with externalities like pollution, and also to redistribute consumption.

It just so happens that most of my policy recommendations help the super rich (but not redistribution). But it also just so happens that all of my policy recommendations help the poor. There may be some potential policies out there that boost Larry Ellison’s happiness by more than it hurts the happiness of the poor, and where a true libertarian like me would have to favor the rich over the poor.

I don’t think it is useful for Scott to refer to himself as a “true libertarian” after admitting that Larry Ellison is lucky that there are some practical roadblocks such that Scott only wants to tax 80% of his consumption rather than 99.999%. Doesn’t mean I’m right or that Scott is wrong, it just means that it’s pointless to use words if they can be used in such ways.

How Loving Jesus Has Transformed My Life

In this post, I will explain why my embrace of Christianity–accepting Jesus as my savior–has transformed my life. I offer this primarily for those who are open-minded and just really don’t understand what this is all about. However, I also offer it in the spirit of specificity for those who will say, “A ha! Bob’s invisible friend in the sky allows him to cope with life. Whoop de doo. I don’t need Sky Man to fight my battles. I have my reason–the finest that 5 billion years of a breeding competition acting upon randomness can buy.”

So to both camps, enjoy.

Among my faults, the worst is arrogance. But the great thing is, I can be cocky comparing myself to other people on a secular scale, so long as I acknowledge that compared to Jesus, we are all ignorant, evil fools. If I just went to church, then my vanity would build up over the week and get knocked back down every 7 days. But if I read the Bible daily, and listen to “praise & worship” songs in the car, my narcissism gets stomped down much more.

Stop and think about the ramifications: I genuinely believe that there is an omnipotent being who has designed the entire history of the human race in order to demonstrate His beauty, grace, and love to us. I genuinely believe that when I die, I will spend eternity basking in the pure intellect and creativity of this amazing Mind, who invented not just quantum mechanics and irrational numbers, but also baby tigers and rainbows. Suppose there really were a Being who deserved a host of angels singing of His glory, for eternity? Wouldn’t that affect how you dealt with getting laid off?

Now, thus far I’ve tried to get you to see how it would change someone’s life if he started respecting Jesus Christ. But let’s kick it up a notch. Suppose someone began loving Jesus Christ, indeed began adoring Him. What would that do to the person?

It would utterly transform him. Quick example: I was (am?) an alcoholic. I was the guy in college who would pass out on the staircase, crawling back to his room. But a year and a half ago–after a particularly “bad decision” in part due to drinking–I decided I was never having another drop of alcohol. I’ve kept to that, boom, done. I can go to a karaoke bar in Las Vegas and not even be tempted to get a drink.

Or how about this? I have no fear of going to prison. (A bunch of you are worried, deep down, that black men with tattoos will suddenly become gregarious in the shower. You can admit that, Free Advice is a safe place.) If and when I go, I’ll join/start a Bible study and a karaoke group, plus I’ll offer to teach math/econ classes to any inmates and/or guards who are interested. I’m not worried about it.

I have been wrong before on several big ideas, which is why I understand these issues so well (now). These include: Goedel’s incompleteness theorem, Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and the issue of whether government debt can burden our grandkids. I was confidently wrong on each of these in the past, and now that I see the truth it is funny that I could’ve missed the gaping chasms in my “logic” before, when I wallowed in confident error. (For example, I actually turned in a “counterexample” to Arrow’s theorem to my game theory prof at NYU. Fortunately I came to my senses and retrieved it from his mailbox [it was written on paper] before he saw it. Of course, what happened is that I had originally misunderstood the theorem. Now I can and do teach the proof of Arrow’s Theorem.)

And the biggest mistake of all I made, when I was in college: I confidently embraced atheism.

I’ll close with two examples to show what I mean–why it’s funny now to think back to my confident error on this score. For example, when I was an atheist, I would have found it very compelling if you had told me, “The story of Noah and the Ark isn’t unique to the Bible. There are many cultures that have a Flood myth.”

But now, it occurs to me (thanks to either C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton): If the Biblical flood actually happened, then of course any culture alive today is descended from the survivors, and therefore it shouldn’t surprise us that they remember it too.

A final example: I don’t mean to pick on the guy, but somebody I’m Facebook friends with, wrote up this post arguing that because we don’t see signs of alien life, it should make us think that the secular Darwinian account of the origin of life is more likely. Here’s his thesis in a paragraph:

In short, the seeming unlikelihood of the natural formation of certain life developments, along with the Great Silence—are complements to one another, and would serve to corroborate purely naturalistic evolution against the need for intelligent design arguments. Why, if there were intelligent fine-tuning for life in this universe, would we not expect to see more signs of it elsewhere? Would it not be more commonplace for divine intervention to have cleared the otherwise multitudinous challenges to it? Indeed, this lacking evidence of extraterrestrials pulls our Bayesian probabilities further in the direction of natural evolution from where they were before.

OK, how do we like this argument then? Because there are trillions of stars scattered across the universe–meaning our particular sun is nothing special–then I conclude that they must have been intelligently designed. I mean, if a creative being did invent stars, then this is exactly what we’d expect to see: stars flung out all over the universe. In contrast, if stars arose from purely naturalistic mechanisms, then those specific conditions might only obtain once in the history of the universe.

Does anyone like that argument? I doubt it. Well, both of the above can’t be right simultaneously.

If you are confident in your atheism, thinking that your observations of nature have reinforced your priors, I would ask you to seriously consider the alternative hypothesis, and how the evidence might be just as consistent with it.

Steve Landsburg Has Still Got It

In the last two weeks I have met two young’ins who volunteered to me that they are reading Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist. Ah, I fondly remember when I had just graduated from college and read Steve’s book. Not many people know why movie theaters charge so much for popcorn, but those two young’ins soon will.

Jon Stewart Rips the Media Attacks on Marco Rubio

Even if he does this just to maintain the appearance of balance, that’s still admirable. And it’s funny enough that I think he’s serious.

Krugman Kontradiction or Worse?

I extend David R. Henderson’s question on Krugman excoriating Republican governors for running up debts since 2008. Some of you are going to say I’m nuts, that Krugman is being totally consistent. Well, you’re wrong. No he isn’t. If Hitler closes down the concentration camps because he decides the war effort requires everybody gets back into the labor force, I suppose we can criticize him for violating his own rhetoric. But we shouldn’t call it a crisis.

Potpourri

==> Richard Ebeling doesn’t like trigger words.

==> Bryan Caplan catches an amazing piece on Paul Ehrlich.

==> Scott Sumner often seems incapable of understanding where his critics are coming from. In this post, for example, Sumner deals with Austan Goolsbee, who had posited a situation where real GDP growth is flat (because of a supply shock, presumably), and so the market monetarist response would have the Fed create 5% price inflation (to keep NGDP growing on target). Goolsbee then wondered: Would the markets really expect 5% price inflation to be a one-year thing, to go back to 2% the next year (when real growth recovered to 3%, if the market monetarists are right)? To answer him, Sumner pointed Goolsbee to the actual U.S. experience in 2008.

But no, that doesn’t really work. Goolsbee wasn’t asking, “Is it really possible for the market to quickly revise downward its expectations of price inflation?” He *knows* that can be done, for example if the Fed causes an awful economic crash–as everybody thinks Volcker did intentionally in the early 1980s, and as Scott Sumner and other market monetarists think Bernanke did unintentionally in 2007/08. What Goolsbee was getting at is that for the market monetarist Fed response to a temporary supply shock to work, it requires people in the market to go from experiencing 5% price inflation this year, to expecting 2% price inflation next year, all while the economy goes from high unemployment to full recovery. Does that really make sense? (Maybe it does or maybe it doesn’t, but Sumner doesn’t answer him by pointing to the worst economy since the Great Depression as proof that his system works…)

==> This Tom Woods interview with Doug Casey is a fun one.

==> Yet more evidence that Tyler Cowen and I think differently: He says that if he could go back in time and barter for an object to bring back to the present, and were interested purely in financial gain, that the “obvious” answer would be a painting by a famous painter. I would’ve thought the obvious answer would be to find the guy cleaning up after 13 men had just celebrated the Passover and said, “Hey, how much for that chalice?” If that fails (maybe because you can’t prove authenticity), then I would think you could buy stock certificates and make a lot more than what you’d get for a painting.

What Is Senator Whitehouse Smoking?

The best part of my new IER post is the title, but the content isn’t bad either. An excerpt:

Internet enthusiasts are quite familiar with Godwin’s Law, which says that the longer an online argument continues, eventually someone will compare his opponent to Hitler. Well we have already had that for years in the debates over climate policy. Those favoring aggressive government intervention aren’t content to call coal, oil, and gas “dirty energy,” or to label carbon dioxide emissions “pollution”—even though trees breathe it and we exhale it. No, the alarmists go even further with their rhetorical smears, routinely calling their opponents “deniers,” making an obvious (and intended) comparison to the Holocaust.

In his recent piece, Senator Whitehouse has decided that the Nazis apparently aren’t bad enough, so he’s bringing in lung cancer.

Potpourri

==> David R. Henderson replies (or did he issue a rejoinder?) on the question of a stock market bubble. Let me clarify my position: I am saying it wouldn’t surprise me (and indeed would be a repeat of recent history) if the market crashed in the next few years, then the Fed blew up another bubble, and then (say a dozen years from now) the market crashed again. In that scenario, David’s retirement plans would be in serious jeopardy, even if his suggested wager with me panned out the way he hopes.

==> Speaking of David, here’s his post on Thaler rediscovering Hayek. I also have to agree with David’s assessment that Thaler is mischaracterizing neoclassical search theory. In such models, you don’t keep looking for a new job every day you go to work. Rather, when you are unemployed and looking, then you adopt a rule setting out the minimum threshold at which you will accept a job offer. So although I applaud people–especially insiders–for being able to step back and make fun of the economics profession, on this narrow point it didn’t ring true to me. (Oh, you don’t feel like clicking the link? Well actually Thaler is parodying economist search models in the context of dating. More interested now? You shouldn’t be.)

==> I’ve seen lots of people on Facebook etc. (plus Tyler Cowen at MR) link to this funny story about a young guy who legally changed his name rather than pay an airline to fix a booking error on his ticket. But what’s really awesome is that he had to change his legal name to “Adam West.”

==> You know how the most vocal of the “consensus scientists” were biting the heads off of anyone who referred to the “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming? Well, now the new rhetorical move is to say, “Yes, using the old data there appeared to be a pause or hiatus, but now we’ve corrected the errors in the data and the pause/hiatus is gone.” Anyway, here’s Pat Michaels, Richard Lindzen, and Chip Knappenberger on it, plus Judith Curry.