Fishy Reasoning
Overfishing is seriously depleting oceanic fish populations, and Ronald Bailey is correct to observe that this is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. When an asset is owned in common, so that any of a large number of people can use it freely, the asset will almost inevitably get overused. Nobody has an incentive to conserve such resources, because the benefits of using them are private, whereas the costs of using them are public and dispersed over a large group. As Bailey puts it, “A fisher has no incentive to leave a fish in the sea so that it can reproduce because she knows that the next fisher will come along and take it anyway, so she may as well reap the rewards of the catch immediately.” (Aside: I do sympathize with the desire to mix in feminine pronouns to achieve linguistic gender parity, but it strikes me as odd to do it in a profession that is I’ll bet is overwhelmingly dominated by men.)
Bailey also says (and I agree) that there are two ways to deal with a commons problem, regulation and privatization, and the latter – when possible – is generally preferable. For example, privatization has done wonders for elephants in Africa. But privatization is not always feasible, and the oceans are a textbook example. Unless the boundaries of fishing territories are drawn so broadly that schools of fishes rarely cross them, there will still be external costs associated with the decision to catch more fish.
Bailey contends that ocean privatization has worked in some locations, but the mechanisms he cites don’t really qualify as privatization. They are essentially regulatory solutions improved by the injection market forces at the margin. Bailey’s leading examples are Iceland and New Zealand, where fisherman are assigned “individually transferable quotas” (ITQs) that entitle them to a share of the total allowable catch (TAC). ITQs can be traded among fishermen so that a market in the quotas can emerge, and this is what creates the illusion of a privatization solution. But the overall TAC is actually set on the basis of scientific analyses by some body of experts; and though Bailey doesn’t say where this body came from, I’m betting it’s actually either a government agency or a private agency with a government mandate. In other words, we’re talking about a solution that is, at its fundament, regulatory.
Bailey says “The result of privatization is that fishers have a strong incentive to maximize the number of fish in the sea because their allowed catches go up as the fish population increases.” But this is actually no different from the incentive they have in a commons situation. In the commons, if a fisherman chooses to reduce his catch, the benefits (or avoided costs) of doing so are spread out among all fishermen. Being a fisherman himself, he will reap some fraction of that benefit, but not *all* of it, and that’s the source of the problem. And under the ITQ system, that problem remains: if a fisherman releases fish, the benefits will be spread among all holders of ITQs. As a holder of an ITQ, he’ll get some fraction of the benefits, but not all of them. The only thing inducing the fisherman to reduce his catch in the ITQ system, as compared to the commons system, is that he’ll be punished if he exceeds his quota. It’s the regulatory aspect of the system, not the market aspect, that does the heavy lifting here.
My point is not to criticize the ITQ system. As Bailey observes, it seems to be working, and full-on privatization is probably infeasible in this type of situation, at least with current technology. In such circumstances, regulation may be the best available option. The inclusion of a market mechanism for transferring rights among fisherman is useful because, among other things, it assures that fishing rights are allocated to the most efficient fishermen. Similarly, pollution vouchers assure that rights to pollute are allocated efficiently among firms, so that reduction of air pollution is accomplished at the lowest possible cost. But it would be inaccurate to say that the pollution voucher system is privatization instead of regulation. The total quantity of pollution vouchers is set by a regulatory body, just as the total number of ITQs is set by a regulatory body. It’s great to see that market mechanisms are being used to improve the efficiency of regulation – but it’s still regulation.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Tribute
The final episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” airs tonight.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephoneOther tributes:
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
…
The stars are not wanted now, put out every one.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
- excerpted from “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden
The Weekly Standard
The L.A. Times
TV Guide
Monday, May 19, 2003
I Know the Feeling
The academic life has many desirable attributes. But as Jeff Cooper eloquently observes, grading is not one of them:
Must ... read ... final ... exams .... Must ... not ... permit ... self ... to ... become ... engaged ... in ... fascinating ... discussion ... of ... legal ... realism ... and ... formalism .... Must ... focus ... on ... dry ... repetitive ... essays .... AAARGH!
Hulk SMASH puny exams! Hulk SMASH students who didn't listen to Hulk in class all semester! Hulk SMASH!!
(Er. Sorry. I'm okay, really. Must go back ... to ... reading ... exams ....)
Saturday, May 17, 2003
West Virginian Contradiction
A conversation with my dad about John Ashcroft’s fair-weather federalism – in which my dad observed that Republicans’ lack of support for states’ rights goes all the way back to the first Republican president, Lincoln – reminded me of a bizarre legal anomaly that I noticed a few years ago: that West Virginia should not be a state. Or at least, it can only be a state if you buy the South’s position on the legality of secession.
Why? Because the acceptance of West Virginia as a state relied on two distinct acts of secession. First, Virginia had to secede from the Union; and second, West Virginia had to secede from Virginia. Now, Lincoln and the Republicans took the position that the secession of southern states was illegal and unconstitutional and hence *never happened*; for the entirety of the Civil War, they were not a separate nation or nations, but union states in rebellion. If that’s so, then Article IV section 3 of the Constitution still applied to Virginia:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.In other words, as long as Virginia was part of the Union, as the opponents of secession claimed it was, then West Virginia could not have become a state without the consent of the Virginia state legislature – consent that I’m pretty sure was never given.
(It’s not obvious to me whether the final phrase about consent of the legislatures concerned applies to the clause before the semicolon about forming a state within the jurisdiction of an existing state, or if that phrase only applies to states formed by the junction of states or parts of states. But it doesn’t matter, because either way West Virginia’s statehood would have been unconstitutional – either because it was ruled out entirely, or because the Virginia legislature’s consent was never given.)
There is, of course, a legal theory that would justify West Virginia’s statehood: the theory that secession of a state is legal and constitutional. If Virginia actually left the Union, then the constitutional provision above did not apply. The acceptability of secession was, of course, the position of the southern states. But this theory was rejected by precisely the people who voted to admit West Virginia to the Union.
UPDATE: Turns out that Lincoln consulted the members of his Cabinet on this question, and received differing opinions. Salmon P. Chase offers an interesting argument in defense of admitting West Virginia as a new state: that while some Virginian state legislators were in rebellion, other Virginia state legislators and loyal citizens established a convention in Wheeling (a town in what is now West Virginia), and that body constituted the only legitimate legislature of Virginia. Thus, the Constitution required only this legislature’s consent. A clever argument, but I don’t think it quite works. Article IV section 3 requires consent of the legislatures, plural, of the states, also plural, concerned. Now, the Wheeling convention was either the legislature of Virginia or the legislature of West Virginia, but it cannot have been the legislature of both! Therefore, at least one required consent was missing. Now, I suppose one might claim that this position would have denied the people of West Virginia their right of self-determination, i.e., their right to govern themselves without the consent of people living in the Virginian counties in rebellion. But notice that self-determination is the basis of the secessionist argument, so again, the Unionists could not support that argument without contradicting themselves. Also, it’s worth pointing out that the Constitution has specific language prohibiting this form of secession (one part of a state unilaterally separating itself from the rest to become a new state), whereas it does not contain any language prohibiting secession of a state from the union as a whole. So it’s odd, to say the least, to contend that the Constitution allows the former yet prohibits the latter.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Overreach Around
WARNING: X2 spoilers in this post.
If you watched X2 and didn’t catch the mutants-as-homosexuals metaphor, you just weren’t paying attention. That scene where Iceman comes out to his parents (and his mother asks if he’s tried *not* to be a mutant) was rather far from subtle. Still, I think this L.A. Times article pushes the analogy a bit too far. The article’s author sees homosexual metaphors in every character and subplot of the movie, including these:
• Jean Grey is torn between Wolverine and Cyclops, “unable to consummate her love for either.” Hold on a minute -- she did choose, right? And besides, she and Cyclops slept in the same quarters, so I’m figuring they consummated their love on a pretty regular basis. In any case, the love triangle is an incredibly common theme in film and fiction -- does every love triangle now count as evidence of a homosexual subtext?
• After Jean Grey apparently commits suicide “in part due to her own sexual identity conflicts” (huh?), “Cyclops and Wolverine are forced to console one another, though they cannot make direct eye contact.” But it’s well known that heterosexual men (including non-mutants) aren’t overly prone toward displays of emotion toward each other. That commonplace observation hardly qualifies as a covert message about homosexuality.
• This one’s my favorite: one scene in the movie features “a phallic symbol in the shape of a soda bottle, handed from one character to another who blows on it to make the soda cold.” And here I thought we’d outgrown the Freudian notion that every elongated shape represents a penis.
This article’s author is so eager to impute a particular social message to X2 that he actually undersells the movie. Yes, there was a homosexual metaphor in X2 -- and also a race metaphor, a war-on-terrorism metaphor, a clash-of-cultures metaphor, and probably a few others I didn’t catch. Procrustean literary criticism only obscures the thematic breadth of the film.
Monday, May 12, 2003
The Rational Romantic Strikes Again
Yet more evidence for the search theory of romance, discussed in three previous posts. The following letter appeared in Carolyn Hax’s advice column:
Dear Carolyn: I was dumped by my girlfriend of two years for a logical but emotionless reason: "There are 6 billion people in this world, I think we should try and find a better match for each other." This was my first serious relationship and I dove into it headfirst only to be rudely initiated into the dating game. Now I have adopted a cynical view. Love is a game where we always try to "trade up," and if we can't or run out of time, we settle for the closest competitor. Could it be that in this individualistic society we have trivialized this sacred bond called love?Dear Cynical: Dude, that’s rough. Say, could you give me her number?
— Cynical, 23 Years Old
(Carolyn’s reply: “Or, love is still love and you're just bitter because you got dumped. Either way, you're going to answer your own question by falling in love again, which is why this "game" is so great.”)
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Raiders of the Lost Archive
Does anyone know how to make Blogger update my most recent archive every time I make a new post? I’ve found that people have difficulty linking to my most recent posts because of the archiving delay. Also, my archives as a whole seem to need republishing rather often; am I doing something wrong, or is that just the price of not paying for BloggerPro?
Fair-Weather Federalist
More proof that John Ashcroft doesn’t really believe in federalism when it thwarts his other policy goals: the U.S. Justice Department is cracking down on physician-assisted suicide in Oregon, on grounds that the use of the prescription drug overdoses is a violation of federal drug laws. (Site registration required.)
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
XY-Men and XX-Women
I saw “X2” over the weekend -- twice -- and the rumors are true: it’s fantastic, even better than the original (which I liked quite a bit). So many bloggers have already commented on this subject that I can’t begin to link them all; check out Jacob Levy’s post for a sample. (When I read Jacob's post yesterday, it had lots of links to others’ posts, but they seem to be gone now.)
However, I am constitutionally incapable of watching a movie, even a great one, without picking a few nits. (Don’t worry -- no major spoilers here.) At one point in the movie, a character states that the “mutant gene” is carried on the Y-chromosome, and hence is passed only from fathers to children. I’ve been trying to find a way that this could make sense from a genetic standpoint, and I’ve failed.
First, since only men have Y-chromosomes, we would have to conclude that *only men can be mutants*. X-linked traits like hemophilia and colorblindness can be possessed by either sex, because both men and women have X-chromosomes. But Y-linked traits can only be possessed by men. But we know that there are numerous female mutants in the movie, so it can’t be true that the mutant gene is Y-linked. (Incidentally, my college biology professor told me that biologists have only discovered one Y-linked trait: hairy ears. But that was back in 1995, so maybe they’ve discovered more Y-linked traits by now.)
Second, something is fishy about the idea that changes in *one* gene could result in all the many different mutant powers we observe in the movie, from teleportation to weather control to fast healing to body morphing. Some are mental, others physical; it’s pretty odd that they would all be controlled by the same gene. Gene interactions are certainly possible, though, so perhaps it works like this: the “mutant gene” interacts with the other genes in one’s body to produce a variety of different phenotypes (expressed traits). This still doesn’t overcome the men-only problem, though.
Here’s a more complicated explanation: there is a single gene, found on the Y-chromosome, that causes mutations to occur in genes on *other chromosomes*. This mutation-inducing effect only occurs during the process of meiosis in the male’s germ cells. As a result, a child can only be born with mutations (of the super-power variety) if her father possessed the mutant gene. This explanation works, except for one problem: once a female child is born with a mutation in her non-Y chromosomes, she can pass it on to her children (unless she’s sterile). So even if super-power mutations had their origin in the mutation-inducing effects of a Y-linked trait, the mutations themselves would not be Y-linked and could be passed on by either men or women.
One more nitpick about the movie: I think they changed the nature of Storm’s powers. In the original movie (and, as I recall, the comic book), it is strongly implied that Storm can only control the weather when she has a direct line of sight to the sky. (Warning: minor spoiler from the first movie coming.) When Sabretooth pins her against the wall of the train station and starts choking her, she is unable to hit him with a lightning bolt until Cyclops accidentally blows a hole in the roof. Yet in the current movie, she causes major weather effects inside a room that is entirely closed off from the outside world.
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
Gephardt of Darkness
Part 3: “The horror, the horror!”
I’ve really said everything that I want to say about Gephardt’s specific proposal. But I’m making one more post under this title because (a) I needed an excuse to include the most famous quotation from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and (b) I wanted to make some general observations about attempts to provide “national healthcare.” Some of these observations have been inspired by comments below.1. Healthcare and health insurance are not the same thing. As Amy observes, you can buy healthcare without having health insurance, and you can have health insurance that does not pay for certain kinds of healthcare. We must explode the myth that people who are uninsured -- or who have insurance that doesn’t cover certain procedures -- necessarily lack healthcare. Healthcare and health insurance are necessarily linked only with respect to low-risk high-cost events (i.e., catastrophic care) that generally cannot be covered except through insurance.
2. In general, people want two things when it comes to healthcare. First, they want it to be under their control -- i.e., they want choice. Second, they want it to be free. The problem, of course, is that you can’t have both (though you can certainly have neither). If you give people a choice about how much free healthcare to consume, a great many of them will consume as much as they possibly can. They will continue to buy healthcare goods and services long past the point where the benefits justify the costs. This is particularly true with regard to optional procedures designed to boost quality of life, such as acupuncture and massage therapy. But it’s also true of various aspects of other, more “serious” procedures. Given the option, people will stay in the hospital for longer stays, always choose the private room, take more pain medication, opt for name-brand over generic medicines, demand more frequent nurse visits, sign up for an extra month of physical therapy, etc. And while nobody chooses to have terrible conditions like, say, lung cancer or AIDS, they do choose how much to expose themselves to the risk of such conditions through their choices about smoking, drinking, eating, sex, and so on. When you insure people against risks, they tend to take greater risks; this phenomenon is known as moral hazard. The *only* way to assure that people purchase healthcare products if and only if the added benefits exceed their added costs is to face them with a price at the point of sale.
3. Trying to make healthcare free is a good way to make it more expensive. (Nice sound bite, eh?) Healthcare is costly to produce because it requires the use of scarce resources. Any policy attempt to make healthcare free to some group of people will eventually increase the real price -- you know, the money that actually gets paid by somebody because the doctors and nurses aren’t working for free -- by artificially inflating demand. If you’re unwilling to face people with a price for their choices, the only other option is to limit their choices via bureaucracy and/or queuing.
4. Liberals, listen up: Socialization encourages regulation of lifestyles. Why? Because as healthcare becomes increasingly expensive (see previous point), political pressure will mount to get costs under control. Once everyone is paying for everyone else’s care, your personal lifestyle choices are no longer just your own. The argument that your actions “don’t hurt anybody” no longer flies, because your risky choices affect everyone else’s expected tax bill. Note that in a private system, your insurance company or HMO might “regulate” your lifestyle by charging you a higher premium for risky activities, but you still have a choice -- one that you must pay for (and that’s just as it should be). But in system that’s socialized, you can’t opt out of coverage or accept a lower price, and therefore others will automatically be exposed to the greater costs associated with your actions. Indeed, the process is already well under way: notice that the tobacco and fast-food lawsuits are premised (in part) on public health arguments, such as the notion that unhealthy choices increase public expenditures on Medicare and Medicaid. Helmet laws are justified on grounds that motorcyclists burden the publicly funded emergency rooms. Arguments like these will only become more viable as the healthcare industry is subjected to increasingly intrusive regulations, and they would become positively irresistible under a single-payer system.
Gephardt has not proposed a single-payer system. But as I argued in Part 1, his proposal (and others like it) would exacerbate the problems in the status quo, thus creating a fertile political environment for further regulation. Each encroachment of the state into the healthcare industry increases the momentum toward establishing a single-payer.
Friday, May 02, 2003
Gephardt of Darkness
Part 2: “It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage…”
To understand what’s wrong about Gephardt’s National Healthcare proposal, you need to understand (some of) what’s wrong with the status quo. The basic flaw in our current system can be traced back to WW2, when firms laboring under government-imposed wage and price controls were casting about for ways to attract employees without raising wages. They hit upon the idea of providing workers with health insurance and other benefits, and the War Labor Board gave them the thumbs-up. Eventually, the Board’s policy was written into the tax code.Ever since then, employers have been able to provide health insurance to their employees tax-free. If your employer buys your health insurance, you’re not taxed on it, because it’s treated as a cost of business; but if you buy health insurance for yourself, you have to buy it using after-tax dollars. Now, tax breaks are generally a good thing, but not when they create perverse incentives. This particular tax break creates two. First, it encourages people to buy their health insurance through their employers, instead of individually or through other organizations like churches, schools, fraternal societies, etc. The result is that your health insurance is tied to your job, so that you may lose it if you lose your job. (Subsequent COBRA legislation mitigated this problem marginally.)
Second, and more importantly, the fact that the tax break is for health insurance only – not for other healthcare expenditures – encourages people to get the most expansive health insurance policies possible. Why pay for any healthcare with after-tax dollars if you can use pre-tax dollars instead? Routine and elective expenditures are now regularly included in health insurance plans, which is much like including gasoline and car washes in auto insurance plans. Consequently, health insurance has increasingly been transformed into a pre-payment system. You send checks to bureaucrats who send checks to doctors, even though it would be simpler and cheaper to pay your doctor directly for most services. The unsurprising result is rising healthcare prices.
The regular inclusion of routine and elective expenditures in health care plans has an additional disadvantage. Because these expenditures are typically more elastic than expenditures for low-probability high-cost (a.k.a. catastrophic) expenses, consumers respond to the low price at the point of service by purchasing a lot more of them. Every sniffle or cough leads to a doctor visit, because the doctor visit has effectively already been paid for. Healthcare providers are enabled to raise prices for these visits, because the consumers are insensitive to the price increase (because the insurance company is picking up the tab). In the aggregate, of course, everyone ends up paying more, because premiums must rise to cover all the extra visits and higher service prices. But the insurance system transforms the marginal costs (what you would have paid per doctor visit) into a fixed cost (the amount you pay out of your wages each year for insurance). Fixed costs don’t affect marginal decisions, so people continue to buy too many healthcare products and services for prices that are too high.
Of course, employers and other buyers of insurance policies have a strong incentive to control these costs. But how can they do so while maintaining the tax break? More and more, the solution has been to rely on HMOs. The primary function of an HMO is to ration healthcare services demanded by patients who pay close to nothing at the point of service. If the rationing is not accomplished by price, it will be accomplished by queues and bureaucracy. This is, of course, the primary source of animosity toward HMOs: people don’t like having someone else make all their decisions for them. But healthcare services are not costless, and therefore they must be rationed somehow. The only alternative to bureaucratic control of personal healthcare choices is to face the consumers with more of the cost at the point of service. (This is also, by the way, the problem with single-payer systems: they replace rationing by price with rationing by bureaucracy and queuing. A single-payer system is like one really big HMO.)
Back to Gephardt. Given all the above problems, which can in large part be traced back to the tax incentive for employer-provided healthcare, you might think that a healthcare reformer would try to break that link. We could eliminate the tax break, or we could expand it to cover all forms of healthcare expenditure (not just insurance) and types of buyer (not just employers). But Gephardt does nothing of the sort; in fact, it does precisely the opposite. His plan is designed to strengthen the bond between health insurance and employment. As noted in my post below, he would require all employers to provide health insurance. In addition, he would *double* the size of the tax break.
Interestingly, this is how Gephardt plans to dodge accusations of expanding Big Government: he’ll point out that he’s using a tax break, which is allegedly good for business. Yep, this is what passes for free market policy these days: corporate welfare. Calling it a “tax break” sounds good on the surface to free marketers, but it’s a complete misnomer. In the status quo, the tax break excludes health insurance expenditures from all income tax. There is already 100% tax avoidance here; anything over 100% is no longer a tax break, it’s a subsidy! In this respect, Gephardt’s “tax break” is a lot like the “tax credits” given to low-income people who paid almost no taxes in the first place. (See Amy’s comments on this subject.) And let’s not forget that Gephardt plans to finance his “tax break” by eliminating the tax cuts planned by the Bush Administration, which means the net impact on the nation’s tax burden will be breakeven *at best* – and that’s assuming Gephardt’s own optimistic cost projections are correct. In all likelihood, the cost will be much larger because of the incentives in his proposal for the further inflation of healthcare prices.
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Gephardt of Darkness
Part 1: “Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate..."
Dick Gephardt has announced the outlines of his National Healthcare plan, which he plans to make the centerpiece of his 2004 presidential campaign. Chuck suggested that I should “kindly destroy him, with extreme prejudice” on this site, and I’m strongly tempted. However, there’s just too much to say all in one post, so I figure I’ll do it one argument at a time.The most glaring flaw in the Gephardt plan is that it would *require* all employers, regardless of their number of employees, to provide a health insurance plan for their employees. I’ll set aside the standard objections about imposing costly mandates on business (or rather, I’ll postpone them for another day’s blogging), and instead simply point out that “health insurance plan” is not a well-defined notion. There are many different health insurance plans, from the barest of bare-bones to the most bloated plan you can imagine. To enforce the policy – hell, even to *define* the policy – the government will have to state the contents of a health insurance plan that satisfies the mandate.
Adopting a vacuous phrase like “basic healthcare products and services” will not solve the problem, because what is basic to some is crucial to others. Does contraception constitute basic healthcare? How about psychotherapy? Dental care? Chiropractic? The phrase “medically necessary” is just as problematic, because there is no objective definition of necessity. And if even if there were, it wouldn’t matter, because the content of the law will be determined by the legislative process. The “basic” package to be included in all healthcare plans might initially be minimal, but over time it will succumb to the same special-interest lobbying that affects every other area of public policy. If psychotherapy is not initially included in the package, eventually it will be, once the psychotherapists’ lobby has its way. And likewise for contraception, dental care, chiropractic, acupuncture, hair transplants, liposuction, ad infinitum.
Don’t believe it? That is *exactly* what has happened in every state in the union, where mandated benefits laws require that any health insurance policy sold must include coverage for various products and procedures, including most or all of those listed above (yes, even hair transplants). Mandated benefits drive up insurance premiums, thereby pricing people out of the market and increasing the ranks of the uninsured. Given that medical interest groups have found it worth their time and money to lobby the 50 state legislatures to pass laws that affect only the individual state’s residents, it’s a no-brainer that they’ll do the same at the federal level. With Gephardt’s plan, the stakes will be immeasurably higher because (a) the law will affect the entire country and (b) businesses will be *required* to buy policies with the specified benefits (whereas with state-mandated benefits, individuals can choose to go uninsured).
As the number of medical products and services included in the government’s mandated “basic” healthcare package increases, the price of health insurance will inexorably rise. People who will now be covered for all these products and services, and who will have been forced to pay for them already (most likely in the form of reduced wages and compensation), will avail themselves of the medical products that will be effectively free at the point of sale – and the prices charged for those products will also go through the roof. (Indeed, that’s precisely why the medical lobbies will push to have them included in the standard package: because it will massively inflate demand, prices, and profits.) In short, Gephardt’s plan will lead to dramatic increases in the cost of both health insurance and healthcare products and services. All of this will, of course, get blamed on the free market, thereby fueling political demands for further state intervention in the healthcare system. I wouldn't be surprised to find Gephardt himself leading the charge.
Friday, April 25, 2003
Scheduling Conflict
April 21-27, 2003, has been designated as Turn Off TV Week. It’s a nice enough idea, I suppose, encouraging people to read, exercise, and go out drinking more… But dang, couldn’t they have scheduled this thing during the summer, when almost all the shows are in reruns? Spring is prime TV-watching season, because all the major shows are building up to their climactic season-ending episodes. The organizers of this event need to get with the program, because they’re clearly out of touch.I guess I have could have set my two VCRs to tape everything I wanted to see, but then the week after Turn Off TV Week would have been Watch Twice As Much TV Week.
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Cost-Benefit Analysis in Lifeboat Situations (Literally)
Mark Kleiman has a brilliant post in which he applies cost-benefit analysis to explain why it might have been sensible for the Titanic not to have enough lifeboats for everyone. Among other things, he points out the likely unintended consequence of a hypothetical law requiring one lifeboat seat per passenger: that ship lines would have shifted toward carrying more cargo and fewer steerage passengers, thus curtailing opportunities for the poor and desperate to immigrate to the New World. Overall, a beautiful little gem of economic thinking. I may expose my law-and-econ students to it next semester. Still, I do have to wonder: were the steerage passengers *aware* of the limited quantity of lifeboat seating? It's one thing for people to rationally accept a higher risk in return for a lower price. It's quite another for them to be misled about the service they're getting, thereby inducing them to accept prices that reflect lower risks while being exposed to higher risks.Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Putting Incest to the Test
Between Eugene (see links in post below) and Amy, the defense of legalizing consensual incest is pretty much complete. But I want to raise one more question, of the sort that economists are apt to raise: what is the elasticity of incestuous acts with respect to criminal punishment? My strong suspicion is that it’s damn near zero. It’s hard for me to imagine that a large number of people are just waiting for the chance to nail their siblings -- and are being deterred on the margin by the existence of a law against it. If I’m correct, then resources spent on prosecuting and punishing those who commit consensual incest are mostly wasted from the standpoint of deterrence, even if you agree that it’s the state’s job to deter such things.A similar observation applies to bestiality. How many folks would not currently do a sheep, but would suddenly give it a try if the law changed? Again, I’ll bet the number is just about zero. I suspect that basically everyone who leans that way, and who has access to a sheep, is doing it already.
Of course, the folks who support laws to enforce their own sexual preferences probably don’t agree that deterrence is the main purpose of the law. They like to pass laws purely for the “message” value. But unless that message actually prevents some acts of incest *on the margin* (no fair counting acts of incest that will be deterred by social disapproval, regardless of law), then I just don’t see the point.
Hot Blog-on-Blog Action
Lots of politico-sexual analysis over on the Volokh Conspiracy, thanks to Sen. Rick Santorum. Short version: Santorum likened homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, and incest. Eugene, giving Santorum the benefit of doubt, defends him by saying the comparison could be construed as a kind of constitutional slippery slope argument: even if homosexuality is not the same as incest, the Supreme Court might perceive it to be sufficiently similar, and therefore a precedent that constitutionalizes a right to (consensual) sodomy might be extended to protect a right to (consensual) incest as well. Jacob, after examining the full context of Santorum’s interview, concludes that Eugene has given him too much credit: Santorum really was condemning all these practices (homosexuality, polygamy, incest) as damaging to family values.But the sex talk doesn’t stop there. Eugene also (in the same post) enunciates the libertarian position on all of these matters – to wit: we believe in freedom of sex, as long as it’s consensual – and he responds effectively to a reader’s denunciation of his position on incest, twice. In a later post, he wonders why lesbianism is subject to the same legal prohibitions as male homosexuality, even though none of the arguments against male-on-male action (weak as they are) apply to female-on-female action. And then he defends bestiality – not as a cool thing to do, but as something that should be legal so long as it doesn’t constitute excessive cruelty to animals. All this following last week’s speculation on attitudes toward vibrators.
Eugene’s right on all of this (except for giving Santorum too much credit), but I have to think his future political career, if he wanted one, is probably shot. I’d vote for him, though, and not just for his views on the sex-related stuff. (I’ll post my own comments about incest and bestiality later.)
Monday, April 21, 2003
Is Strategic Disengagement in the Cards?
I was pleased, if somewhat skeptical, about this L. A. Times article about the Bush administration’s future plans in the Middle East. If true, then I may have to give the administration a little more credit:WASHINGTON -- With the threat of Saddam Hussein all but extinguished and Arab suspicions of American intentions running deep, senior administration officials say the U.S. military has begun taking steps to significantly reduce its presence in much of the Middle East.(I recommend reading the rest -- these are only the first few paragraphs.) This is, of course, the strategy that libertarians have been advocating all along. Interestingly, the article also provided probably the most persuasive argument for invading Iraq I’ve heard yet:
Last week's quiet removal of 30 of the 80 fighter jets and almost half the 4,500 personnel from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, where the U.S. has maintained thousands of troops since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, is just the beginning, officials said.
Within months, the Pentagon plans to close down most of its operations at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, leaving only a skeleton crew, and to move most of its aircraft and troops out of Qatar and Oman.
The plans, which are preliminary and subject to review, are a response to pressure from Arab governments incensed by the U.S. military buildup in the region over the last 12 years, the financial burden of maintaining vast numbers of troops overseas and the strain it has caused for families and military readiness.
"One of the unstated goals of the [Iraq] war was to be able to lance that boil and get out of this steady state of a very high-level commitment of forces in an area where that not only wears out the force, but causes all sorts of political problems," said retired Army Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, who commanded U.S. forces in the Mideast from 1991 to 1994 and helped negotiate agreements to base U.S. troops throughout the region after the Gulf War.I wonder why no one said that *before* the war? On the downside, however, there doesn’t seem to be universal agreement on this approach within the administration. For instance, according to this article, “An undersecretary of State told Israeli officials in February that the U.S. will ‘deal with’ Iran, North Korea and Syria next.” Time will tell whether the administration is serious about making a strategic retreat.
"The [Iraq] war has always been envisioned as a way to get out of the need to have forces in place designed to protect against an immediate assault," he said.
Sunday, April 20, 2003
Peanut Gallery Temporarily Disabled
Yes, I’m aware the comments feature isn’t working. I don’t know what the problem is, but it appears to be on SquawkBox’s end, not mine. I hope they’ll be up and running again soon. If you have any urgent comments to make before then, you’ll have to, um, do whatever you did before I installed the comments feature less than a week ago.UPDATE: The comments are now back in service, as of Monday morning.
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