Quick thought on Gov't Bailouts and FDR

In the present state of opinion there is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society. The increasing tendency to rely on extreme administrative measures where a modification of the general rules of law might, perhaps more slowly, achieve the same object, and to resort to direct state controls or to the creation of monopolistic institutions where judicious use of financial inducements might evoke spontaneous efforts is still a powerful legacy of the FDR period which is likely to influence policy for a long time to come.

So you know: I'm an American first and a Conservative second

Lost Poster from the China Olympics

Does Your State Allow You to Revolt?

Well, the New Hampshire Constitution does mention a right of revolution:

Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

No wonder the state motto is "Live Free or Die."

Kids: Are You Popular?

I agree that parking in cars with boys isn’t what determines a girl’s popularity. It’s what she does in the backseat that makes her prom queen. Hey-ooo!

Can't complain about some good mellons

I Love this Palin kid!

Problems with people who say they are a Communist and an Anarchist

Sure, there are people who assume the label of "communist" who claim to be anarchistic, and these people are different from the Stalins and Castros of the world. However, it is a mistake to take such people seriously on matters of political organization, since their view of a perfect society happens to be an impossible utopia, based upon premises far outside of actual experience.

The truth is that communism cannot exist without force because it depends so heavily upon squelching individual human ambition and making it subservient to the community. The momement an individual in a communist society attempts to take property for himself, or trade with others for his own profit, there must be a collective force available to stop his activities. That neccessity leads to a strong government, which eliminates any potential for an anarchistic communism. Even softer forms of communism must eventually evolve into their totalitarian bretheren. Accordingly, I'd prefer to see the whole lot discredited, regardless of what luminaries might be contained within their numbers.

Damnit I dropped something. Can you guys help me find it?

Classic!

Gay marriage and Ex Post Facto Clause:

I sometimes get from students this questions about the Massachusetts gay marriage case: If Massachusetts passes a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriages, and retroactively canceling all marriages created under the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's Goodridge decision, would that violate the Ex Post Facto Clause? The answer is "no." Though the Ex Post Facto Clause restricts state as well as federal decisions -- it's one of the few federal constitutional rights that bound the states even before the Civil War Amendments -- it has consistently been interpreted as barring only retroactive criminal laws. See Calder v. Bull, 3 U.S. 386 (1798). Justice Thomas suggested in his concurrence in Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel, 524 U.S. 498 (1998) that Calder might be mistaken, but it's a pretty firmly entrenched precedent, and I doubt that courts will reverse it.

What about the Contracts Clause, which bars states from impairing the obligation of contracts? Say that the Massachusetts voters cancel existing gay marriages, and don't substitute civil unions for them, thus essentially abrogating the existing marriage contracts. Would this violate the Contracts Clause? I suspect the answer is still "no"; the Contracts Clause has generally not been seen as applying to marriage contracts, which, I take it, is why states have been allowed to relax their divorce laws. See, e.g., Adams v. Palmer, 51 Me. 480 (1863); White v. White, 4 How.Pr. 102 (N.Y. Sup. 1849). (If a state used to forbid divorces, or allow them only in rare circumstances, it was essentially treating the marriage contract as very strongly binding; the enactment of a permissive marriage law would thus diminish the legal force of the marriage contract.) But if anyone has more specific legal authority for me on this, I'd love to see it and cite it.

Thoughts on Americans' Expectations for Economic Success

In America we have some expectations when it comes to economic status. Expectations may be good, and they may be bad. Either way we need to remember that they are expectations and not reality. In fact success in America is measured by certain expectations. If a person meets or exceeds those expectations we have celebrations and fan fare. And, when those expectations are not met, then a person’s fiscal failings are kept in the shadows, something that we would rather not talk about. Fiscal failings are considered a source of embarrassment for the man down on his luck. But, if this information is kept hidden and not spoken about, then no one really knows if the expectations are even reasonable.

In America people have accepted that they should be better off in every proceeding year from the last. A small cost of living raise serves as an illusion to this expectation, while it shows a rising wage, it doesn’t always even match inflation. When a company is doing well they will often compensate the employees, but these compensations aren’t always justified in their distributions. Truth be told, fiscal failings behind common expectations are the rule rather than the exception. Americans have discovered how to continue the illusion in the face of this failure to meet expectations. Americans have taken to borrowing money in order to appear that they have exceeded expectations.

American expectations plaque the American economy in many ways.

The entire mortgage crisis that has recently burst the housing market bubble was caused by people meaning to appear to meet the expectations of the American dream. People bought into the idea that things were going to be better further down the road. They deluded themselves into believing that five years down the road they would be able to pay the mortgage when the payment jumped in their sub-prime loan.

Let me take the example of some people I know, who confided recently that they will be moving out of their house. Five years ago when they bought the house they were able to do so by borrowing the money at a low interest rate. Even with that low interest rate they still had to make a $3000 per month mortgage payment. I don’t really know what they were thinking when they were told that in five years the payment would jump to $6000 per month. They were able to make the $3000 per month payments by having several families live in the same house and pool their resources. In addition one of the women in the house opened a day care in the house to take care of the children a raise a bit of extra cash. I could imagine that they might have been thinking that they could increase the number of children that they took in to significantly defray the cost when the payment jumped. They could have been thinking that they would all be making double their wages in five years and hence have the additional money needed when the payment jumped. Maybe they were thinking that they could double the number of occupants in the house over the next five years so that they could make the payment when it doubled. I don’t know what they were thinking, but whatever it was they were not able to make it happen; so they will be moving out of their house shortly.

The whole story above was forced into play by unreasonable expectations. The people moved into that house because they had expectations that they should be living in this house that was beyond their means. But, in America we have expectations that anyone should be able to “make it” if they work hard. They people living in this house accepted those expectations and proceeded the best way they knew. They set up an illegal day care and tried to make some extra cash. They work extra long hours putting in as many as they could, leaving in the morning before sunrise and getting home long after sunset. The main obstacle was not motivation or ingenuity. Their main obstacle was the expectation.

Expecting success often delivers success. A person is often motivated to work hard just believing that success will find a way. Many people, myself included, have operated under this premise. The ugly truth, however, is that many people also fail to meet these expectations following these same principles. Success or failure is not conditioned on how much work is put into an endeavor. Success or failure happens for many unforeseen reasons. And, because the reasons are unforeseen each individual that succeeds succeeds mainly because of luck. And, the entire concept of success is nestled in the expectations for the endeavor itself.

So, American entrepreneurial spirit is based on expectations. Entrepreneurs expect to invest time, energy and resources into a risky venture and succeed in producing something new and novel. This type of expectation is good for America and infects the American society with the can-do rags-to-riches mentality. But, if everyone in the country comes to expect that they to can become wealthy by selling shlock that no one wants or needs to the next guy, then that entrepreneurial spirit has changed from a net positive to a net negative for American society as a whole. And, the only real thing that has changed in this equation is the expectation. People once believed that innovation was a key to make a new product worthwhile has been changed into the belief that slick marketing can sell any old crap to anyone and make the seller wealthy. People won’t by crap was once the counter to this argument. But the real life counter example to that argument is how many people bought Windows computers and operating systems instead of much better alternatives such as Unix. The legacy lives on unfortunately. Marketing outmaneuvers substance.

Marketing after all is all about expectations. Marketing starts out by telling you what you should expect, then it claims to fill that expectation with the perfect product. Since America is the capital of the capitalist world we shouldn’t expect anything different than the marketing of many unfulfilled expectations and products that can’t fill them.

Since the Great Depression and FDR calling for Americans to expect a chicken in every pot our expectations have continued to grow with American marketing machine. Chickens in our pots, Cars in our garages, houses on our golf courses and yachts on our rivers and lakes we finally expect that we should control the world itself. Obviously we can always create expectations that are higher than we can realistically achieve and we most likely will continue to do so. And, when we do so how will we be able to know which expectations are reasonable and which ones are not?

I love Yoga

Housing Market is Good for Buyers at least

Technology watch:

Here's what I want, one day. Something like an iPod, where I can store a ton of audio files and, say, play it on "random," with the following features:

• I get to put files into categories and randomize within categories only, i.e., "randomize within Classical," or "randomize between Classical and Rock 50-50, and randomize within each category."



• I get to rate audio files, and the rating affects the probability that a piece gets played in the future, i.e. a "1" gets chosen rarely while a "5" gets chosen more often.

Does that exist, and if not, is someone working on this?

Who should we take in?

I doubt the legal/illegal immigration debate will be a hot topic in the upcoming administration or Congress but I thought I might look at the standards that should be applied to the legal entrants. What shall they be?

I hear two major complaints about the current groups of immigrants, legal and illegal combined:

1. Too many are unskilled.
2. Too many don't speak English.

Whether we agree with these complaints, a politically feasible proposal must in some way address them. I propose a three-tier system, with the following criteria:

1. One group of immigrants would buy their way in. A certain number of slots would be auctioned off.

Note that this group of emigrants is likely already skilled and wealthy to some degree. While they may not speak English, linguistic assimilation would not appear to be a problem. Furthermore the funds received could go to bear the general costs of immigration. The money could be awarded to state or city governments in proportion to the number of migrants who live there.

2. One group of immigrants would be chosen on the basis of work skills.

We already give favorable treatment to nurses, and Canada uses skills as a criterion for immigrants, with success. Note that this class of immigrants is unlikely to create major problems.

Before proceeding, I would like to challenge the view that all emigrants should be highly skilled. In part we gain by trading with people who are not like us. We wish to have maids, gardeners, and manual laborers. Furthermore America has a special interest in the well-being of its neighbor Mexico. The problems of Mexico will be our problems, increasingly. So for the third category I propose the following:

3. Test the unskilled for IQ and perseverance. Allocate a larger number of legal spots to Mexico and other poorer nations, with the goal of taking in unskilled laborers. Give special priority to Mexico. That being said, we should allocate these spots rigorously based on the following criteria:

a. Some measure approximating IQ
b. English language proficiency

In other words, give them all something like an SAT test, in English, and take in the winners. This will select for intelligence, drive to succeed, ability to persevere in study, and willingness to learn English. It should improve dramatically the quality of our unskilled immigrants. It should make the immigration of unskilled labor much more politically acceptable. It will give Mexicans an incentive to learn English.

Of course we can argue about the relative magnitudes of the three categories. For humanitarian reasons, I would prefer that the third category be especially large. But practical politics may not leave us many degrees of freedom. If we need to jiggle the weight of the categories to increase the total number of immigrants, so be it. Here is a general recipe for more legal immigration, more gains from trade, and more human freedom, while simultaneously making immigration more politically acceptable to the American public. I'm not holding my breath, but I prefer this solution to the other proposals I have seen.

Quote of the Day

From the St. Louis Today website an article titled, "A plan to survive the Obama years" by Z. Dwight Billingsly gives a wonderful quote about why not every black person should or will be proud of what happened in Nov. 2008:

Another side effect has been white people contacting me to say that I should be proud to see a black man become president. Could there be a comment that is more condescending, more insulting, than that? If I believed that in America a black man could not be president, then I would be proud to see any black man elected president. But because I always have believed that nothing in America prevents a black man from becoming president or anything else he wants to be, I can be embarrassed, not proud, to see someone as unqualified and inexperienced as Obama become president.

Times Have Changed:

Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting in United States v. Roth (1972):

"In my view, every citizen who applied for a government job is entitled to it unless the government can establish some reason for deny in the employment."

It's hard to imagine a Justice writing this today. Reading USSC opinions from the early 1970s (the Court's liberal heyday) is always interesting, because the underlying assumptions, methodologies, etc., have changed so much.

Simpsons Resource

I just found an incredible resource for fans of The Simpsons. Check out the episode guide for one of my favorite episodes, "Like Father, Like Clown" (in which Krusty is reunited with his estranged rabbi father). The detail is incredible (though a few of the Yiddish translations are questionable). Also incredible is the site's "freeze frame fun" feature, which points out the exacting detail in The Simpsons' animation which most viewers miss.

Classic blond vs brunette in the battle of the bimbos

The Dangers of LSD!!!!