Ademo Freeman and Fear, the State’s Primary Weapon
Since his conviction on August 13, I have been meaning to publicize the case of Adam Meuller, aka Ademo Freeman. He is the founder of CopBlock.org, a site dedicated to the peaceful yet persistent pursuit of police perfidy. The folks at CopBlock do things like post videos of cops beating the heck out of people, and act as a clearinghouse for reports of police abuse. Apparently the police don’t like people recording them with their cell phones, and Freeman and others have previously spent time in jail for such acts.
(Let me offer a quick aside: In the competitive private sector, trucks have signs on the back that say, “How’s my driving? Call 888-555-1234 to report problems.” Funny that “New York’s finest” and other public servants don’t have a similar policy.)
The latest incident with Ademo Freeman, however, concerns a high school student who was manhandled by a police officer in the cafeteria. I don’t want to get bogged down in the details in this post, so I’ll outsource them. Here is a Reason blog post on it, and for the most information (though obviously coming from a pro-Freeman perspective) here is the dedicated link at CopBlock.
The quick version is that a high school student apparently took his sister’s purse and had it at lunch. A school official asked for it back, and he repeatedly refused, saying they were just screwing around and he’d eventually give it back to her. Finally they took it from him and told him he was suspended. He said, “What the f*ck am I suspended for?” and that’s when a police officer (who I guess works at the school, which is weird to me) slammed the kid onto a table. The kid’s buddy recorded the whole thing on his phone, and lied to school officials when they told him to delete the recording. CopBlock got the footage and publicized it. Freeman then called the police and school the next day, asking why the officer was still reporting to work etc., and recorded those calls. He posted a YouTube of the calls, and that is why he’s now serving jail time. He was charged with 3 felony counts of wiretapping, and could’ve gotten 21 years if they had thrown the book at him. (!!) Perhaps because he realized the case was absurd, the judge actually sentenced Freeman to “only” 3 months. (Technically he was sentenced to 12 months with 9 months suspended.)
Here are my reactions to these events:
==> First and foremost, Ademo Freeman is a hero. I don’t know much about him personally, but insofar as he founded a website to use nonviolent means of curbing police brutality, and is willing to go to jail for this cause, he is a hero. When someone on “our team” gets pinched like this, there’s not much the rest of us can do except to say, “Hey, that’s awesome that you are willing to do that.” So, Ademo, that’s awesome that you are willing to do that.
==> Second, notice that this is really all the government can do to you. Sure, they can have guys from the CIA kill you, but in terms of garden variety activism, of just alerting your neighbors to what you perceive to be abuses by the State, really the worst thing that is going to happen is that guys with guns will come to your house, and throw you in a cage. If you can deal with that–and notice that you have to get over fear of black people, if that’s something plaguing you–then things become much clearer. The State relies not so much on force, but on fear. And that is power that you give it over yourself.
==> Third, I feel I must say this, even though I know it may cause some grumbling: This particular case never had a shot of garnering mass sympathy for CopBlock or the broader civil liberties movement. Why? Because the victim here was not particularly sympathetic. Most people over 45 hearing of this story are going to think, “Somebody should have slapped that kid around, teach him some manners.” I’m not condoning that reaction, I am just stating a fact.
The sad fact is that most Americans right now do not believe they live in a police state, even though the New York Times openly discusses the fact that the president and his advisors have a secret list of Americans whom they are trying to kill with flying robots. I can’t believe I just typed that sentence, but I did, and it is true. As Jar-Jar Binks would ask, “Whensa yousa thinkin we’s in trouble?!”
So the primary task of liberty lovers right now is to get others to see the problem. It makes it difficult to do this when people on our side are dropping f-bombs and coming off as completely disrespectful. The Civil Rights movement was effective to the extent that its participants seemed completely harmless and in the right. When you are hopelessly outnumbered, you have to appeal to the moral conscience of the masses to win them over.
Being educated, eloquent, and well-mannered isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also the best strategy for liberty.
David R. Henderson, Manipulator of Crowds
David posted the below video of his talk at Middle Tennessee State University, on how economists helped end the draft. I haven’t watched this particular talk, but I’ve seen/read David on this topic before, and it’s really good stuff to help all of us think that maybe we can make a difference.
However, the real lesson here is what David does after his song. In his post, David says, “If you want to see me sing, go to the 30:20 point.” So naturally, that’s the first thing I did. What’s great is, look at how David just owns this crowd.
Three points:
(1) He gets them to ask him to sing.
(2) He busts the kid for being asleep, thereby putting the whole room on notice that he’s watching.
(3) He does a slight little head bob at the end, letting them know, “Now’s the time when you all clap for me.”
This blog post isn’t a joke or something; I am being dead serious. This is the kind of stuff you have to watch if you want to improve your Econ Celebrity game.
This Time Will Be Different
“One good question some of my readers have been asking is how the Fed’s new policy might actually boost the economy — that is, how could changes in expectations turn into a real increase in demand?
…
[W]e actually can hope that the Fed’s new policy will boost housing as well as operating through other channels, and therefore that it can act more like conventional monetary policy in fostering recovery.
That said, I’m still skeptical about whether monetary policy alone can come close to doing enough…” — Paul Krugman, September 16, 2012
“If the story of the current U.S. economy were made into a movie, it would look something like ”55 Days at Peking.” A ragtag group of ordinary people — America’s consumers — is besieged by a rampaging horde, the forces of recession.
…
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
Judging by Mr. Greenspan’s remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman’s crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.” — Paul Krugman, August 2, 2002
Brief Post on Free Will and God’s Sovereignty
I keep putting off this post until I “have enough time to do it justice,” but that apparently will never happen. I have written about this before, but there are a lot of newcomers, and also when it comes to economics posts, I’m certainly not afraid to repeat myself…
The view of God as portrayed in the Christian Bible is that He knows everything that will ever happen in time, before He even created the universe. That isn’t too controversial, though some people do doubt it.
What’s a little more surprising, and only something that I personally have come to realize in the last 5 years or so, is that in an important sense God wills everything that happens, including evil actions.
To justify that last claim, consider that in the Bible, it doesn’t merely say, “God anticipated that Pharaoh would refuse to let Moses and his people go.” No, it says that the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Exodus 9:12 captures both at the same time; the New Living Translation does exactly what I need for the point here, but the other translations work too:
“But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and just as the LORD had predicted to Moses, Pharaoh refused to listen.”
So the way I now view things, it doesn’t even make sense to try to distinguish God’s predictions of what Pharaoh would do, from God’s control over Pharaoh’s actions at the time in question. In other words, I don’t think that Exodus 9:12 is some anomaly; I think that’s what happens every nanosecond of existence. Yes, we can use science to explain why it rains, in terms of the water cycle etc. etc., but it is a true statement to say, “It is raining right now because God willed it to do so.”
(I realize it is pointless for me to try to avoid misunderstanding on this point, but let me engage in futility just on principle: I am NOT saying that scientists should stop what they’re doing, because we can just say, “Hey, your eye is shaped like that because that’s how God designed it. Thanks Jesus, I love my vision, the end.” I am NOT saying that. What I’m saying is that if an omniscient Creator of the universe exists, then I think the “laws of nature” are simply economical ways we’ve discovered to describe His will as it pertains to material objects. And the reason He chooses to act in this fashion, is to make our home comprehensible, so we don’t go nuts.)
OK, what about our consciousness? Well, in addition to creating the material universe, God also created distinct beings, with our own wills or egos. We experience the material universe but are distinct from it. We are not simply a collection of atoms. As C.S. Lewis put it, you don’t have a soul–you are a soul, and you have a body.
From our perspective, it appears that we can influence the material world. For example, I can use my “mind powers” to control my right hand. We take it for granted because we can all do it, but if I could move a rock the way I can move my hand, it would be astonishing. Yes, we can trace the cause-and-effect from the muscles in my hand up to my brain, but nonetheless it sure seems like I am “freely choosing” to open and close my hand. It really looks like I control a small part of the events in the universe, and the only way a strict materialist can really deny that, is to ultimately deny that the term “I” means anything. (That’s why going down the path of materialism, leads to nihilism and drunken Facebook sessions.)
Now the tricky part: I think what happens is that God anticipated what everybody would subjectively want to do, and then designed the laws of the material universe such that it sure looks like we are controlling atoms with our thoughts, when “really” we are just watching a movie unfold before our eyes.
Here’s an analogy: Suppose that a filmmaker could perfectly anticipate where every moviegoer’s eyes would look on the screen. Then he put up each of our names on the screen, and they started moving around. In other words, when the movie started, I would see “Bob Murphy” moving around the screen at the theater, no matter where I looked on the screen. But the guy to my right would see his name up there too, and no matter where he looked on the screen, the letters of his name would perfectly track his line of sight.
If we watched this movie for 10 minutes, and there was never a hitch, we would all be absolutely convinced that we were controlling the movement of the letters. We would think the movie theater had employed some new technology, and that there were sensors in the theater that took our muscle movements as input, and then translated that into commands for the projector, so it would “know” where to shoot the letters for us to see. This, we would convince ourselves, was the only explanation for our apparent control over the letters.
But no, suppose it really were a regular movie, put onto the film months previously. The way it works is that the filmmaker somehow knew exactly who would be watching the film that day, where we’d be sitting, and exactly where we’d be looking, down to the 10th of a second, for the whole film.
OK I’ll stop here. Where I personally am still stuck, is the precise nature of our free will. As the Pharaoh example shows, I think there is a sense in which God even controls what we will, let alone the physical manifestations of our decisions.
For more on God’s control of even evil as players on a chessboard, check out G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.
I’m Being Serious: Why Was It Scott Sumner Day?
I’m not going to put in my trademark snarky comments in this post, because I’m being quite serious: I am reading some commentary, preparing to write an article on Monday talking about the Fed’s announcement. I had planned on launching a full-scale critique of Scott Sumner, who is being credited with inspiring this new move by the Fed. But I have to agree with Daniel Kuehn on this one–I just don’t see it. And I hope this doesn’t come off as jealousy or something: I want to link the Fed’s announcement to Sumner, so I can then plausibly criticize him. But I really don’t see how this has anything to do with what he’s been telling us his views are.
DISCLAIMER: I really do like Scott as a human being. When I first discovered his blog, I said (quoting a movie) something like, “At last, a man worth killing.” He told me thought that was hilarious. Fascination ensued. But on to my points:
==> First and foremost, the Fed is telling us it is going to keep interest rates “exceptionally low” through mid-2015. I learned from Scott Sumner himself that such announcements defeat the whole purpose of Fed action, because they are basically telling everyone, “The economy is going to suck at least through mid-2015.”
==> The Fed is buying the bonds of the US federal government, and mortgage-backed securities. In Scott’s ideal world, the Fed buys derivatives tied to NGDP itself. It doesn’t give a huge borrowing advantage to the most anti-U.S. business operation on earth, and try to inflate another housing bubble. Are microeconomics really that irrelevant in all of this? What if the Fed announced $40 billion in purchases from renewable energy companies and the Iranian government? Would that be market monetarism too? (Again, I’m not being snarky, I’m being dead serious. Teach me.)
==> The Fed isn’t doing a qualitative change in the nature of its policy. Before, say with QE2, Bernanke told us he was going to buy a bunch of bonds in an effort to help the economy. He didn’t say, “Now, when this round of purchases is over, we are DONE. I don’t care if the economy is fixed or still broken at that point, no more.” No, the implication was, after QE2 was over, the Fed would reevaluate and decide whether to continue buying more bonds to help the economy, or to stop because we were recovering. So how is that different from saying, “We are going to buy a bunch of bonds each month, until the economy is better, then we’ll stop”?
==> One of the big market monetarist arguments, deployed against the Austrians, was to say they wanted to shrink the Fed’s balance sheet. Bernanke was doing the wrong thing, just announcing how much money he was going to spend. No, the whole point (so we were told) was to change what his objective, to stop talking about inflation and unemployment and the size of purchases, and instead talk about doing whatever it took until the current expectation of future NGDP growth (or inflation or wages or whatever, depending on the market monetarist) is correct. So, the Fed now announces that it is going to spend a particular dollar amount per month buying bonds, and will keep doing so while carefully watching inflation and unemployment.
So again I ask: How in the world does this become Scott Sumner Day? What’s going to happen is that if it “works” (in the sense that everybody else means, not in the analogy-with-the-ocean-liner-captain way that Scott means “works”), then people will applaud the market monetarists. If it doesn’t work, then people will say, “Well, the Fed basically just did what it had been doing since 2008: Announcing it was going to buy more bonds, keep thinking in terms of a ‘dual mandate’ even though that’s stupid, foolishly paying interest on excess reserves, and for some idiotic reason, telling everybody interest rates would remain near 0% for another 3 years. I couldn’t have designed a worse policy at the time. If only people would have listened to Sumner.”
Would You Rather…
(A) …take Liam Neeson’s daughter against her will, or
(B) …repeatedly assert to Steve Landsburg that the natural numbers are consistent?
Remarks From Economics Bloggers That I Find Hilarious
==> “The day Garett [Jones] first visited GMU, I went home to my wife and told her, ‘I just met my new best friend.'” — Bryan Caplan
==> “[I]t’s Scott Sumner Day.” — Tyler Cowen
==> “Fed lowers its 2014 unemployment estimates by 0.3% or 0.4%.” — Scott Sumner, explaining why the Efficient Market Hypothesis should now lead us to believe that the Fed’s policy announcement is a good thing.
==> “I can honestly say that he’s influenced my thought on public policy issues more than any other blogger.” — Scott Sumner, hero of free-market economists, referring to Matt Yglesias.
==> “Perhaps the best analogy I could provide would be the Keynesian revolution. It had a small impact on 1930s policy-making, but not enough to promote a fast recovery.” — Scott Sumner, hero of free-market economists, reflecting on Scott Sumner Day.
An Open Blog Post to Garett Jones
Hi Dr. Jones, I look forward to your posts on EconLog. I see right out of the chute you’re having a tussle with Scott Sumner. I’ve been watching him for years, in much the same way that the FBI tracks Sicilians. Let me give you a tip regarding your recent exchange.
Economists tell a lot of stories about how a fall in dollar spending can hurt the real economy. And we should be forced to tell these stories–we shouldn’t take it for granted that a fall in spending causes a fall in output, we shouldn’t assume the can opener of general gluts.
Why bother explaining the root causes of gluts when so many think they can see a glut by just looking out the window? Because gluts conflict with one of the best ideas economists have ever had: That surpluses–of workers, of unsold homes, of cars rusting on the lot–push down prices and move the product out the door.
Surpluses set in motion a process that ends the glut: Just watch the last half hour of a garage sale.
Any force strong enough to fight against the power of prices should be a strong force indeed, strong enough for all to see. But when economists talk about the “frictions” that keep gluts alive, we usually talk about “sticky prices” and “sticky wages” and cultural norms and public sector unions and a few other forces. Strong forces, yes, and forces I believe in, but stronger than creative destruction and supply and demand? For years on end?
Here’s my favorite friction, one that exists by force of contract, not because of worker sociology: Debt.
OK, fair enough. Rather than coming up with things like “employers don’t want to hurt morale,” here Jones is saying that a contractually fixed debt payment is certainly something that could explain why nominal levels matter, and the economy can’t just instantly readjust to a new situation.
Enter Scott Sumner. He was being playful in the beginning, of course, but he wrote this:
I’m still morose about Arnold Kling’s retirement from blogging, but the entry of Garett Jones into the blogosphere is a nice silver lining. I plan on welcoming him the only way I know how—attack, attack, attack.
Garett argues that the sticky wage/price mechanism is not strong enough to create major business cycles, and that debt is the key sticky price:
Any force strong enough to fight against the power of prices should be a strong force indeed, strong enough for all to see. But when economists talk about the “frictions” that keep gluts alive, we usually talk about “sticky prices” and “sticky wages” and cultural norms and public sector unions and a few other forces. Strong forces, yes, and forces I believe in, but stronger than creative destruction and supply and demand? For years on end?
Here’s my favorite friction, one that exists by force of contract, not because of worker sociology: Debt. Debt in the household, debt in the firm, and–for state and local governments at least–government debt.
I have several objections to this. Debt prices are not sticky at all (check out the bond market.) I believe Garett is referring to debt payments, which are sticky. That’s true, but they aren’t prices. Debt coupon payments are sunk costs and benefits that have almost no effect on the incentive to produce output at the margin. Even worse, any impact they do have goes the wrong way. A debt crisis often makes people poorer. But we have a lot of evidence that leisure is a normal good, and hence people work harder when they are poorer. Americans used to work six day workweeks. If I became bankrupt, I’d work much harder, I wouldn’t take a vacation.
Now from the above, you’d think that not only was Sumner saying that Garett Jones was a little off on his nomenclature, but that the very idea of using debt to explain the relevance of nominal variables was wrong.
And yet, Scott has often said the exact same thing, at least upon my reading. For example:
In the long run NGDP is of no importance at all; Japan’s NGDP is nearly 40 times larger than America’s. But sudden unexpected changes in NGDP matter a lot. Because nominal wages are sticky, a sudden downshift in NGDP growth will cause fewer hours worked and (except in Germany) a sudden upswing in the unemployment rate. More than enough reason for me to be monomaniacal about NGDP.
But there’s more, debt contracts are also denominated in nominal terms. During most recessions that’s not a big problem. However this time around there were two factors that made the NGDP downshift have a much bigger impact than usual. First, the decline in NGDP growth was unusually large. And second, both debtors and financial institutions were already greatly stressed by the sub-prime fiasco, even before the NGDP crash occurred. The NGDP crash then made the debt crisis much worse.
When I made this argument in early 2009 I don’t recall finding many takers. It seemed obvious that “the” debt problem was due to reckless practices of US banks and GSEs. But then the crisis spread out of the sub-prime ghetto and engulfed other types of real estate debt. Then municipal debt came under stress. And now we have the euro-debt crisis. Is it just a coincidence that all these separate debt crises flared up at about the same time? Is it just coincidence that they all occurred just after the biggest drop in NGDP since the Great Depression? Given that economic theory predicts that a sudden drop in NGDP growth will make it much harder to repay loans, my monomaniacal focus on NGDP doesn’t seem quite as crazy as in early 2009.
So back in that post, Scott wasn’t arguing that debts make us all work harder…
Anyway good luck Dr. Jones. Don’t let Sumner scare you.
Recent Comments