Who Will Watch Freedom Now?
I have been at an insurance conference since Wednesday night and haven’t had time to look into this much, but anyway Fox has canceled Judge Napolitano’s show FreedomWatch. Lew Rockwell gives contact information if you want to tell someone at Fox your feelings about this move.
Does anyone have objective ratings information? Obviously many of us are suspicious of the motivations for this move, but I’m wondering if there are hard numbers? Surely that information must be out there, for purposes of advertising.
If people feel like having a discussion, here’s a topic: In the long run what’s better? To have guys like Napolitano and Stossel keep Fox from being completely neoconservative, or just to start over in a new venue and have libertarians stop watching Fox altogether?
(BTW I should note that from a completely selfish perspective, this announcement troubles me since I was a frequent guest on Napolitano’s show.)
Potpourri
* Mario Rizzo is clearly not one of us. He writes, “Over the past two years I have been reading more than I ever dreamed about rationality in economics, especially in the standard neoclassical theory of choice. I have done this because I want to get at the root of the controversies concerning whether people’s behavior is, in particular contexts, rational or not.” Mario, if everybody spent two years reading up on a field before pontificating, the economics blogosphere would come crashing down. What would Kant think of your antisocial behavior?
* A nice presentation from David R. Henderson on free-market fallacies. My favorite part is where he asks the students what types of monopolies bother them, and David is expecting them to list things monopolized by the government. One kid says, “Airlines!” and David basically says, “No, that’s not what bothers you, airlines have been deregulated.” (I love David like an uncle, by the way.)
* A nice video by Tom Woods on the wit and wisdom of Rick Santorum. (I love Tom like a brother, by the way.)
* A nice post from Scott Sumner blasting Keynesians. (I love Scott like a customer service representative, by the way.)
* A new Voluntaryist website.
* Even I don’t have the time to watch this raw footage of an interview a guy did of me, for a documentary on the Panic of 2008. But some of you may be more bored than me.
* I’m kind of a big deal. I intend to answer the most popular questions next week.
Lessons from Solyndra
I have the EconLib featured article this month. If you haven’t really been following the Solyndra story, and want to get up to speed, this is your one-stop shopping. An excerpt:
My goal here is twofold: first, to summarize the key events in the Solyndra case and explain why it is a scandal and not just a bad investment; and second, to look beyond the Solyndra case to critique the very concept of government loan guarantees to particular companies. Because both the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations supported such loan guarantees, this is a bipartisan critique.
Even if one accepts the premises of environmentalists who argue that the government should encourage private investment in technologies that do not emit greenhouse gases, the Department of Energy loan program is unjustified. Much more efficient policy options are available—options that are much less susceptible to corruption than are federal officials channeling hundreds of millions of dollars to privileged corporations.
Bloggers Need God
Such was the informal title I had given to the growing list of links on my computer’s calendar, and I thought it was sort of catchy so I used it here.
I recognize this particular Sunday post might sound more aggressive than my usual fare, like I’m now being more a stereotypical American evangelical who wants to ram my worldview down everyone’s throat. All I can say is that I used to be a “devout atheist” (my term at the time), so I don’t think the people I’m about to criticize are stupid. I used to hold views like theirs, in several of the examples. Yet now that I believe in God and am no longer trapped in the materialist mindset, it is amusing and alarming to me how such bright people (including my former self) could have so easily fallen for such fallacies. (And yes, I realize the immediate reply will be, “I know you are but what am I?”)
The point of this post is to go through several examples of the bloggers I frequently read, where they make very simple errors that are glaringly obvious to someone who believes in a God of the popular monotheistic traditions. In most of the examples (not all) even an atheist should be able to spot the error, but the point is that there wouldn’t have even been the slip-up had the person reflected on the nature and existence of God. It was the blogger’s agnosticism (or at least, lack of believing in anything like the Judeo-Christian / Muslim God) that left him vulnerable to the mistake.
Two caveats: (1) If I am wrong in assuming that each of these bloggers doesn’t believe in this type of God, then my apologies. I will correct the post if anyone shows me otherwise. (2) I’m going to move from my weaker examples to the stronger ones, so in the beginning even those of you who agree with me might not think it’s a big deal.
To get the ball rolling we’ll start with Bryan Caplan’s recent post on a former slave who wanted (perhaps apocryphally) back wages from his former master before he’d work for him again. Bryan quoted the former slave saying: “Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.” Then Bryan commented: “Too bad the last sentence turned out to be wrong. Life is not fair.”
Now here, I’m mostly nitpicking. If Bryan had known more about the Bible, he would have understood that this was a Scriptural reference. So this guy is saying to his former master, “You had better repent of your sins before meeting your Maker.”
But the thing is, Bryan’s statement is actually silly, even if we don’t believe in the afterlife. Does Bryan, the tenured college professor, really think he needs to inform a former plantation slave that life isn’t fair? So my point is, whether you believe in the afterlife or not, Bryan’s statement makes little sense. It’s not that Bryan observed that there’s no afterlife, and so now he empirically can conclude, “Too bad, that guy’s hypothesis was falsified.”
My next blogger is Karl Smith, who is the James Joyce of economics blogging. In this post, Karl makes an analogy of the economy as a giant forest, and talks about why we should try to save the trees. He writes:
[W]e shouldn’t sit by while a new virus sweeps through and destroys the trees we love. In perhaps the grandest sense we could say, that yes these trees may die but we don’t worry because eventually they will be replaced by other trees in a never ending circle of life.
This is very true. But, we care for and love these trees — and that matters. On a deepest level it matters because our emotions are the ultimate source of value. At their core the trees are just another set of molecules. They are beautiful because they are beautiful to us.
It’s the part I put in bold that concerns me. This is materialism in all its beauty / ugliness, depending on your value system. First, note that this is a completely arbitrary statement on Karl’s part. Does the Pythagorean Theorem exist? It doesn’t consist of molecules. Indeed, do molecules exist? Physicists will say that they aren’t really “solid” things either; they’re mostly empty space. If you really push it, according to cutting edge theories matter itself becomes more and more like an idea, rather than that “hard stuff” that’s “really” “out there” as opposed to the “not as real” stuff that’s in our minds.
If you want to be really basic about it, the notion of a physical universe is a theory that we use to explain the more fundamental sensory data that we experience. After all, we might all be in The Matrix.
The true irony in Karl’s statement about the trees being “at their core” a bunch of molecules, is that in another post he writes:
On video I have a tendency to smile and laugh a lot. I am also a generally happy-go-lucky type of person. This combined with my sloughing off of long term issues has people often mistake me for a Pollyanna. That is someone who thinks everything will be ok.
Ironically – or not – I believe the exact opposite. Everything will definitely not be ok. I often tell my students: if you ever find yourself worried sick about whether or not things are going to turn work out, don’t worry, things are definitely not going to work. Everything is going to go horribly, horribly badly.
This is the essence of life. We are not forever. Our institutions are not forever.
Indeed, in a relatively short time, we and all the things that matter deeply to us will be annihilated. They will not exist at all and they will never come back. Not at least as we would think of such. There will be no faint hint of them in the background of the universe or spirit occupying another plane.
All things we care about are at their heart information – particular arrangements of the building blocks of reality – and entropy eats information. Everything we care about will be gone.
Yikes! Talk about a blogger needing God! Karl, please entertain the idea that there reputedly was a man who said many things that you would agree are very wise and good, and that this same man reputedly said paradise awaits us if we don’t reject it.
Beyond the tremendous burden of walking around with that worldview, Karl’s statements are (again) arbitrary and unscientific. He says these things won’t be in a “spirit occupying another plane,” but modern science doesn’t tell us that. And to tell people that “in a relatively short period of time” entropy will engulf everything we care about is pretty close to demonstrably false. I mean, relative to what?! Karl is saying humanity will necessarily be extinguished, when every possible reference point is also extinguished. Short of eternity, what could be longer than the maximum age allowed by the laws of physics?
Of course, the other problem is that Karl is here betraying the materialism from his other post. Information is itself not a physical thing. For humans to perceive it with their sense organs, it must be instantiated somehow, I grant you. But the information itself is more than the physical components that represent it. (Read Gene Callahan’s great post on these themes.)
Now we’re moving on to a really fun one. In this post, Scott Sumner was criticizing the Rothbardian view of the Great Depression. Sumner was arguing that the Fed couldn’t possibly have caused an inflationary boom in the 1920s. In the comments I asked him to clarify one of his arguments that amazed me, and he said:
I’ve shown there was no inflation as the term was defined at the time. I’ve shown that there was no alternative non-inflationary policy as understood by policymakers at the time, including those in the 1920s who claimed the Fed was too inflationary. It makes no sense to argue things were inflationary because M2 went up, if M2 didn’t exist. There are no policy implications. M2 was an idea invented much later.
One doesn’t have to be a Christian to see the non sequitur. As I wrote here, “I wonder how Sumner explains the massive deaths during the bubonic plague? Did doctors even know what bacteria were back then?”
I am naive. I expected Scott to say something like, “Wow, I don’t know how that one slipped through my keyboard. Sorry guys, that was silly. But I still don’t think the Fed created a ‘bubble’ in the stock market, the way the Austrians claim.” Yet to my knowledge, Scott offered no such retraction. I don’t have the links, but Scott’s views on the nature of reality are downright freaky. I am not putting words in his mouth, he has said (paraphrasing) that phenomena exist when the top experts in that field agree that such existence would prove useful. If you agree with me that this type of view is freaky, I note that–whatever else you want to say about monotheism in the popular traditions–it blows up that sort of view really quick.
And last we come to a very religious atheist, Steve Landsburg. In a passage about Godel’s work that truly fills me with brotherly love, Steve writes:
The code is cleverly constructed so that there’s a statement in pure arithmetic (say, for illustration, that it’s the statement “every even number is the sum of two primes”) that corresponds to the English sentence “The statement that every even number is the sum of two primes cannot be proven.” These statements are either both false, in which case it’s possible to prove a false statement, which we believe (and hope to God!) is not the case — or they’re both true, in which case we’ve found a true statement in pure arithmetic that can’t be proven.
You’re right, Steve: I don’t think arithmetic contains an internal contradiction. Before, when I was an atheist, I had no real basis for believing that, except for the same reason I didn’t believe in aliens. And yet, you and I both really, utterly, deeply believe that mathematics is elegant, gorgeous, and free from contradiction. If it’s just a handy dandy tool that makes us more likely to pass on our genes, then that is one huge coincidence. (Why should the conditions of our world be such, that having brains capable of perceiving flawless mathematics gives us a reproductive edge? We don’t have perfect vision or speed or digestion or anything else. Why is math so elegant?)
On the other hand, if the entire universe was created by an omniscient and rational Being, who also loved us and created us in His own image, then the existence of mathematics makes sense. I grant you, I can’t explain where the Being came from or His properties, but given my metaphysical view, the existence of consistent arithmetic pops out nicely. For the secular humanist, mathematics itself remains a puzzle to be explained.
Potpourri
* “Stuff” that libertarians say (HT2 Tyler Cowen). Some made me chuckle.
* Glenn Greenwald on Leon Panetta’s confirmation (not in so many words) that yes, Barack Obama is Emperor Palpatine.
* Speaking of which, did you actually read the details of what happened to those British tourists who were tweeting jokes about digging up Marilyn Monroe? It’s not like they were put back on a plane right away.
* This customer service call to Verizon–to dispute a billing charge–crystallizes for me 90% of human conflict. First of all it’s hilarious, as most arguments are. (I lost the links, but recently John Cochrane, a big-shot economist at the top school in the world, tattled on Paul Krugman for hurting his feelings. Then Nobel laureate Krugman responded that Cochrane had started it.) The kid in this call is obviously correct, and he’s understandably frustrated at the “idiots” at Verizon. But hang on–the kid actually didn’t do a good job explaining the problem. A few times he started down the right path, but then crucially he swerved away before driving home the lesson. Furthermore, he would periodically insult the people, while they could hear him. So of course the Verizon people–who must deal with thousands of people using bogus excuses to try to get out of their bills each week–aren’t going to really listen to him. Think of this way: If you’re the manager, and you’re talking to this kid after he’s been through 5 of your subordinates, you’re not thinking, “Wow I bet this kid is right, our whole billing infrastructure is based on a simple math error, and our staff are so stupid that 5 people in a row missed it.” No, you’re thinking, “This kid is a punk who doesn’t want to pay his bill. Yep! He just sarcastically said we don’t know math. Uh huh, I’ve dealt with wisealecks like this before.”
* Speaking of Krugman and civility, Richard Williamson noticed a contradiction (Kontradiction?) in Krugman’s views on this stuff. Incidentally, there is another Kontradiction: Krugman always complains that nobody takes him seriously, that all the “Very Serious People” believe in austerity. And yet, when justifying his rudeness to intellectual opponents, Krugman asks Cowen et al. to point to polite commentators who have more influence than he does.
* A former (online) student is working at FEE, and asked me to plug their summer seminars. Of course, if you can stand the heat, nothing beats Alabama in late July.
* Here’s the video (parts 1 and 2) of that PorcFest roast of Stefan Molyneux, but be careful this is the director’s cut. My part starts around the 20:00 mark on the second one, and the Uncle Sam girl to whom I allude in on the first one. BTW, word on the street is that we will probably have another roast at this year’s PorcFest (in late June in New Hampshire).
Heads EMH Wins, Tails Its Opponents Lose
More circularity posing as profundity from Scott Sumner on the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH):
The past five years should have been an absolute gold mine for the anti-EMH types that supposedly dominates the hedge fund industry. Just think about it. Shiller says stocks are way too volatile, and the US stock market has been incredibly volatile since 2007. No need to worry about the market staying irrational for too long, the long run adjustments occurred quite rapidly. Then we had the mother of all housing bubbles in 2006, another great opportunity for people to rake in profits from market inefficiency. The year 2008 should have seen extraordinary profits to the hedge fund industry, with all that “irrationality” being corrected. Instead they lost more than they’d made over the previous decade.
OK, so if I understand Scott’s argument, it runs something like this:
(1) Hedge funds tend to be dominated by people who don’t believe in the EMH.
(2) If hedge funds do poorly, it means the EMH is true.
(3) Hedge funds did poorly in the last five years.
(4) Therefore the EMH is true.
So if that’s right, then if we could find a period where hedge funds did very well–as in, they beat other sectors of the market–then that should be an argument against the EMH.
Well, we do have such a period, from 2000-2007 or so. I know about it, because Scott discussed it about 3 paragraphs earlier in that same blog post.
As I pointed out in one of my favorite articles, “Economists Can Be Hilarious,” the EMH is a tautology, it’s a way of viewing the world. When Wall Street is doing great, believers of the EMH will say, “See? You can’t beat the market. These hedge funds have physics PhDs and supercomputers running crazy algorithms that squeeze every last ounce of arbitrage out of mispricings. Don’t even try to compete with these boys, just put your money in a mutual fund.”
Then, when the market crashes and all the hedge funds blow up, the believers of the EMH say, “See? What’d we tell you? It’s really hard to beat the market, even these billionaires can’t do it. Just put your money in a mutual fund.”
Last point: I’m not even saying the EMH is a bad pair of binoculars to wear, or that Sumner’s worldview is bad. I’m saying, Sumner thinks he is being empirical, when in fact no matter what happens, he will see his “theory” passing with flying colors.
P.S. Gene Callahan has a good critique of Scott’s post too.
Reminder About Mises Academy Class
Remember kids, my class on Mises’ first major work starts tomorrow; infomercial is here. As I said on Facebook: If you don’t have the money for it, put it on credit.
I don’t think we will have the time to talk too much about clearinghouses, but Mises does do a great job explaining that in his book. Why is it relevant? Because then you can solve Internet brain teasers, as David R. Henderson (quoting Jeffrey Rogers Hummel) shows.
The First (of Several?) Posts on Romans 13
Atheist libertarians love to quote Romans 13: 1-7 at me. I have been delaying addressing it for a long time, not because I have nothing to say, but because it’s such an important passage and requires a long answer. However, after at least 6 months of doing this, it’s clear that I’m never going to have time to “do it justice.” So I’ll fire off some of my thoughts on this post, probably argue with a bunch of you, and then presumably do follow up post(s) in the future.
OK so here’s the text:
1 Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.
6 This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. 7 Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.
Okay so here are my quick thoughts:
(1) On the surface, this is an admittedly odd passage. I understand why people are so bothered by it, because he makes very sweeping statements. So when I try to “explain it away”–as it will seem I’m doing to a lot of skeptics–let me at least admit to you, that I understand why this is so troubling.
(2) The thing is, we don’t even have to ask, “How could a decent libertarian support such statements?” No, the harder question is, “How could Paul himself believe such statements, if taken at face value?” Paul, remember, wrote four of his epistles (though not Romans) from prison. And moreover, it wasn’t like he slipped up and let his drinking get the better of him. No, he was in prison serving the Lord. So clearly Paul knew that it was possible for an earthly ruler to use his power to do evil.
(3) This isn’t really something foreign to the Bible. King Herod tried to have the baby Jesus killed, and an angel commanded Joseph to take Mary and his young Son to Egypt. Do we think it’s possible that Paul believed Joseph was doing the wrong thing by evading the ruler God had installed to implement His divine justice? Of course not.
(4) So now we have to ask ourselves: Does Paul really mean what a straightforward interpretation of Romans 13 suggests? If he does, then he apparently doesn’t understand his own life or any of the Bible. There are three main possibilities that I see:
(P#1) Paul is insane/illogical or the Bible is a bunch of nonsense stories and we shouldn’t be surprised at its blatant internal contradictions.
(P#2) Paul is speaking very broadly, in the sense that everything happening on Earth is a manifestation of God’s will. God is omnipotent, so everything that happens, occurs because God wants it to. For example: Why didn’t Pharaoh listen to Moses and let the Israelites go? The Bible doesn’t say, “Because Pharaoh had free will and was a bad guy, and God said, ‘Aww shucks now I guess I have to unleash some plagues.'” No, the Bible actually says “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.”
(P#3) Paul is conscious of the Romans trying to persecute Christians, and so he’s trying to be very subtle. When he says, for example, “Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor,” he’s being as coy as Jesus when He was asked if the Jews should pay the tax to Caesar. Jesus famously asked them to pull out a coin and say whose face was on it. They said Caesar, and Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.” So on the one hand, that sounds like He’s saying, “Pay your taxes,” but actually that’s not what He said. If you don’t think Caesar has any right to the coins you earned in commerce (say) then Jesus isn’t actually commanding you to pay. Paul might be doing something similar.
(5) If a typical American Christian tries to use Romans 13 against my libertarian/pacifist views, it’s shooting fish in a barrel. (I mean, it’s using nonviolent means to persuade the fish to stop swimming around the barrel.) I can ask him (of course it would be a guy arguing with me) if he supported the removal of Saddam Hussein, he would answer of course he did, and then I would ask why we had the audacity to send troops to remove the political ruler God had installed to punish Iraqi rapists and murderers. Oops.
(6) Another interesting point (HT2 Norman Horn) is to look at the preceding chapter. Right before Paul says the stuff that horrifies a modern Rothbardian who is an atheist, look at what Paul writes:
2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
…
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. 16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. 18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 19 Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. 20 On the contrary:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Now are the atheist libertarians really so sure that if more and more people did that from Chapter 12, but then also (because of Chapter 13) paid their taxes and didn’t try to violently overthrow the government, that the power of government would grow? Hardly. If the majority of people molded their hearts to conform to his outline in Romans 12, the politicians wouldn’t get anywhere, promising to lock up bad guys or blow up threats to national security. And in fact, in that respect the two chapters are very compatible: Even if you think the government is practicing evil, don’t you stoop to the same level in trying to overcome it.
(7) Last point for tonight: Sometimes I think today’s Christian anarcho-capitalists (yes there are some of us) try to go for the gold and make it look like the people writing in the New Testament were describing a Rothbardian paradise, with very efficient capital markets and 95 different Private Defense Associations in the phone book. Of course they weren’t thinking like that. So in this post, I’m not saying Paul would have endorsed For a New Liberty if you showed it to him. I’m guessing he would have said something like, “Well of course it would be a better world if nobody used weapons to implement political institutions or to fund armies. But why stop there? It would be a better world if nobody hated his neighbor, and this fellow Rothbard talks nothing about removing the hate from our hearts.”
Look, Paul couldn’t possibly have been thinking about political institutions, law enforcement, the most efficient way to distribute food to the hungry, etc. in the way that a Rothbard or other modern Austro-libertarian does, because Paul didn’t have the benefit of all the advances in economics and political analysis that have been made since he wrote his epistles. By the same token, a “regular” American evangelical Christian nowadays believes strongly in democracy/republican government in the vision of the Founding Fathers, even though that notion might have shocked Paul. (At first I was going to say, “Today’s evangelicals think women should be able to vote, though this would have seemed inconceivable to Paul”…except I wonder how many of today’s evangelicals think women should be able to vote?)
I realize this will sound like a huge cop-out to the atheist libertarians who wanted to really “get me” with Romans 13, but so be it: The way I am picturing how a just society would deal with criminals, I think Paul would say, “That’s the government in your world.” And if Paul and I were locked up together for 6 months, maybe I could even get him to see why my vision was more compatible with the way Paul assumed government “had to” operate.
So in conclusion, I admit the beginning of Romans 13 is problematic. But it’s problematic not simply for the extreme libertarian, it’s problematic for anybody who thinks Hitler was a bad ruler. And once you figure out how (if you think it can be done) Paul’s words can deal with that particular ruler, then you can use the same technique on every other political ruler, if you so happen to believe that all political rulers commit injustice by their very position.
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