Potpourri
==> I excerpted some of the best parts of Larry Summers’ recent speech arguing for an end to the ban on crude oil exports. There is some new stuff in this one, if you’ve only been reading my posts on the topic.
==> Nick Rowe writes on everything in this post. If I were a tenured academic, I don’t know exactly what I would do with myself, but it would involve more cow bell and more Nick Rowe.
==> Like climate change, Michael Goldstein argues that when it comes to Bitcoin, the risk is in not acting.
==> Daniel McCarthy launches a counterstrike against Sheldon Richman and me regarding liberalism and empire.
Krugman Has Met the Cockroach, And It Is Krugman
This is just too funny. Ah, sometimes it’s fun to be an economist.
Two Stories on “Rape Culture”
This is another of those posts that I’ll surely regret, but…
==> A few weeks ago the story broke of students who had invented a nail polish that changes colors when exposed to common “date rape” drugs. (The idea is that a woman can stir her drink with her finger and see if her nail changes color.) Feminist groups were critical of the idea, saying that it blames the victim and that instead of teaching women how to avoid getting raped, instead society should be teaching men that rape is unacceptable.
As you can imagine, the people in my social media circles absolutely flipped out about this feminist response.
==> Now this story is circulating, about a police officer who gave women the advice that if they want to avoid being raped by police officers at traffic stops, then one tip is to not break traffic laws and get pulled over in the first place.
As you can imagine, the people in my social media circles absolutely flipped out about this police response, saying it blamed the victims and that the real solution here is for cops to stop raping women at traffic stops.
==> I am really not being snarky here or even implicitly accusing anyone of hypocrisy. I understand, and agree with, BOTH reactions above (from my social media circles). But I’m not exactly sure why I think the situations are different.
Breakin’ the Law, Breakin’ the Law, Non-Compliant Health Plan Style
I came across this in my research on the ACA, just FYI for those of you who buy your own health insurance:
[I]n March 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that, through October 1, 2016, state insurance commissioners could permit health insurers to re-enroll individuals and small businesses in existing plans that do not comply with certain market and benefit rules that took effect in 2014, allowing such coverage to continue through September 2017. That announcement extended an action announced in November 2013 that permitted the renewal of noncompliant policies through October 1, 2014 (extending that coverage through September 2015).
Potpourri
==> My colleague Dan Simmons (at IER) on the BBC. I told him he should’ve adopted a Paul McCartney accent.
==> This is an interesting graphic contrasting Keynesian with Austrian economics. (HT2 Tom Woods) I could quibble with a few little points but that would be like objecting to the Hayek/Keynes rap video for not discussing reswitching.
==> How do you guys feel about this “explain Bitcoin like I’m five” piece? (I’m not the author, to clarify.)
==> Jeff Tucker on Bitcoin and Mises’ regression theorem.
==> I’m not positive, but I think Tyler Cowen is saying we’ve been getting “lucky” with various groups not wanting to secede. As Vader might say, “It would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison here.”
==> A while ago I had a pretty good line on Facebook asking, “Would people be as terrified if they were the Koch sisters?” Well, someone sent me this.
Privatize the Borders, Part 2
I continue my discussion of the immigration question. This diagram–and how I tweak it–may be the most important thing I contribute to libertarian evangelism. No need to PayPal me donations, a simple “gracias” will suffice.
Questions From the Mighty Samson
Samson Corwell sent me some good questions on an-cap legal theory but I am too busy to answer. He said I could post them here. Feel free to respond in the comments…
An important thing to keep in my mind that a society’s legal system is an altogether separate matter from its form of government (i.e., stratocracy, anocracy, diarchy, monarchy, etc.). Legal systems can differ from each other in different respects, so elements which you or I may see as fundamental to a system of law might be missing from others. common law, civil law, and sharia are the three dominant legal system of the world. Common law places gives a good deal of weight to precedential case law decided by judges. Civil law’s key feature is codification. Sharia is, as you already know, religious in nature and is a bit more extensive than the other two, dealing also with hygiene/purification, diet, economics, and dress code. I’ve noticed that “polycentric law” seems to be a libertarian neologism, but I think that there a more mainstream name for that. A nicely organized chart summarizing the basic differences between the three systems can be found here. The table includes a column on “socialist law”, but there is debate in the legal community as to whether this constitutes a different system.
There are two types of cases in common law: criminal and civil. The distinction between the two is not one of “public versus private”, but rather one of burden of proof and the absence of the right against self-incrimination in a civil suit (i.e., the defendant can be made to testify). Although common law systems place great importance on precedent, basic systems of torts are still outlined by codified law. It is in this way that the libertarian solution to pollution is confused in that torts are not grounded in property rights themselves. I’m not sure on this point, but I think another difference is that double jeopardy does not attach in civil suits. The first principle of law is due process, and there are two kinds in the United States: substantive due process (a favorite doctrine of mine) and procedural due process.
Property law is one of the “core” legal subjects, but it’s a thousand times more complex than libertarians seem to think. In fact, property rights aren’t as fundamental/atomistic as many libertarians make it out to be. Some of its intracies include liens, adverse possession, conquest, and easements. A crucial distinction is made between real property (immovable) and personal property (movable). The difference between a property right in a plot of land and a property right in chattel is the difference between a property right in a location and a property right in a physical object. Property law outlines/creates the legal aspects of property itself, not crimes that may or may not involve property. There is even “quasi-property”. This is why the libertarian understanding of property and the rights associated with it is hopelessly muddled. The majority of law (i.e., contracts, crimes, laws of war, etc.) is to be found in other subjects. Another important thing to note is that “property” is what an entity has in something; it is not the thing itself. So, one can have a property right—an exclusive right to use—in intangible things (there’s no inconsistency or contradiction or whatever). Debt is one of these things.
As I’ve said, property law is only one legal subject and is limited in scope. There are many others like aviation law, space law, product liability, drunk driving, wills, child custody, personality rights, laws of war, maritime law, trusts, bankruptcy, equity, cyberlaw, and commercial law. They are irreducible and have distinct characterstics. As society develops so too does the law. Contract law in many nations, for example, now recognizes cryptographic digital signatures as legally binding. In this case the law needed to adapt to the rise of public-key cryptography. The development of radio required legislation to handle the matter of bands, broadcasts, and frequency jamming, too.
I hope what I’m writing here will help you to understand the nature of law and its disciplines. It cannot be looked at as a matter of markets/economics.
…
Mr. Murphy, how would you suggest that contracts could replace trusts, probate, wills, joint-stocks, and standard sales? Similarly, why should people adopt a libertarian scheme in favor of how mineral rights, water rights, liens, and easements work now? For example, the law in my state says that a person’s property line by the ocean extends to the high tide mark.
…
Another question, this time regarding the use of the term “intervention”. Why should things like intellectual property, prohibitions on child labor, or limited liability be considered anymore “interventionist” than property law or contracts? Surely contracts are nothing particularly special or more fundamental than the other things. An IBM or a Microsoft is not a network of agreements, but an organization. A joint-stock is property (of a sort) despite its intangibility. How do you deal with a body like the Catholic Church? How can a libertarian who is latched onto the concept of scarcity simultaneously advocate property in the electromagnetic spectrum? How do you deal with domain names and ICANN and internet governance (yes, it exists)? Or birth certificates?
Beware Smugness in the Name of Science
In the last hour I was assaulted by two wonderful examples of people misleading their audience while wearing the mantle of objective science.
First, I was reading to my son from Max Tegmark’s book, The Mathematical Universe. Tegmark is a physicist at MIT so he is a smart guy. In the begining of the book he was relaying the history of man’s efforts to estimate the distance and size of various celestial objects. Check out this quote from page 25:
Some ancients speculated that the stars were small holes in a black sphere through which distant light shone through [sic]. The Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno suggested that they were instead objects like our Sun, just much farther away, perhaps with their own planets and civilizations–this didn’t go down too well with the Catholic Church, which had him burned at the stake in 1600.
Now hang on a second. This makes it sound as if Bruno were killed because he had these cosmological views. But no, the Church wasn’t going to kill an astronomer for speculating about other civilizations. Here’s the Wikipedia account:
Giordano Bruno…(1548 – February 17, 1600), born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and astrologer. He is celebrated for his cosmological theories, which went even further than the then-novel Copernican model, proposing that the stars were just distant suns surrounded by their own exoplanets, and moreover the possibility that these planets could even foster life of their own (a philosophical position known as cosmic pluralism). He also insisted that the universe is in fact infinite, thus having no celestial body at its “center”.
Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines (including the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and Transubstantiation). Bruno’s pantheism was also a matter of grave concern. The Inquisition found him guilty, and in 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. After his death he gained considerable fame, particularly among 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science, though scholars emphasize that Bruno’s astronomical views were at most a minor component of the theological and philosophical beliefs that led to his trial. Bruno’s case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and the future of the emerging sciences. [Bold added.]
That’s a little bit different from Tegmark’s version, isn’t it? It should go without saying–but I’ll say it anyway–that the Church shouldn’t have killed someone for his beliefs, period. (Even if your sole goal in life were to get as many people as possible to accept Jesus in their hearts, killing heretics is arguably counterproductive; you’d get a bunch of people publicly confessing their faith, but who knows what they’d believe inside.) But it’s a bit more understandable that the Catholic Church in 1600 would have killed someone for heresy, who had been a Dominican friar and yet disputed the divinity of Christ, among other doctrines. Also, I note in passing, this hero of science was a Dominican friar. So the standard story of “Church vs. science” that Tegmark, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and other science popularizers like to tell, doesn’t work if you actually care about historical accuracy.
For my second example, watch Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks in February 2014 about what “science” tells us about climate change, and the certainty of this knowledge. Start watching at 7:30. If you have the time, I encourage you to let it ride till 11:10 or so:
That’s really astonishing. Scientists are as sure that human emissions will lead to dangerous consequences…as they are that touching a hot stove will burn you? The way you have to interpret Kerry’s statement to make it true, takes away all of the controversy in the political debates. Richard Lindzen of MIT, for example, doesn’t dispute that other things equal, adding CO2 to the atmosphere allows for greater heat retention. But he disputes that other things remain equal. And in fact, the catastrophic predictions rely on positive feedback mechanisms, which are not completely fictitious theories but certainly aren’t as well established as the fact that a hot stove will burn human skin.
Another major problem with Kerry’s remarks is that he leads the unsuspecting viewer to believe that the Earth has had a fairly stable temperature for millions of years, and that within the last ten years it’s reached all-time record highs. But no, that’s completely false; temperatures have been far higher in the past. Kerry is very carefully using the phrase “on record” so as not to be out-and-out lying. But coming on the heels of Kerry’s discussion about the optimal “average temperature” to make life possible, someone who didn’t know better would certainly conclude that recent temperatures were higher than at any point in millions of years.
To be clear, my frustration with Kerry isn’t that he said some misleading things about climate change. No, it’s that he did so in the midst of lecturing people on how simple and clear-cut “the science” on this was.
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