Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Clergymen in England had significant legal disabilities as well as privileges. Blackstone’s Commentaries; 1-11 says:

But as they have their privileges, so also they have their disabilities, on account of their spiritual avocations. Clergymen, we have seen,7 are incapable of sitting in the house of commons; and by statute 21 Hen. VIII. c. 13. are not allowed to take any lands or tenements to farm, upon pain of 10£ per month, and total avoidance of the lease; nor shall engage in any manner of trade, nor sell any merchandise, under forfeiture of the treble value.

Steve Sailer reports on a lecturer at Leeds University who has been suspended from his job for publicly stating the obvious fact that IQ differs among races: (more…)

The Washington Times tells us

The dispute began in January 2003, when the two Oakland employees created a subgroup at their workplace called the “Good News Employee Association.” It was partly in response to a group of homosexual employees having formed their own group 10 months before and being given access to the city e-mail system. One e-mail, dated Oct. 11, 2002, invited city employees to participate in “National Coming-Out Day.”

When several employees asked whether such a posting was legitimate city business, they got an e-mail from City Council member Danny Wan, reminding them that a “celebration of the gay/lesbian culture and movement” was part of the city’s role to “celebrate diversity.”

In response, the Good News employees posted an introductory flier on the employee bulletin board Jan. 3.

It said: “Preserve Our Workplace With Integrity: Good News Employee Association is a forum for people of faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day.” It said it opposed “all views which seek to redefine the natural family and marriage,” which it defined as “a union of a man and a woman, according to California state law.”

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Colin Bird asked what I thought about Hayek’s view of economic methodology, in particular, about his criticism of it in his 1937 Economica article. I might not be understanding it fully, but my impression is that what he doesn’t like about the economic theory of his day is that it:

1. Ignores the fact that people are imperfectly informed and differently informed about prices, products, and methods;

2. Ignores the interesting question of how people become informed;

3. Makes policy conclusions on the basis of theories deficient in their treatment of information (i.e., from points 1 and 2).

This is clearest in his 1945 AER article, the most famous one, which is mostly about the role of prices rather than methodology:

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A lifeboat will hold 5 people without sinking in the next storm (an inevitable one), but 6 are in it. All will die unless one is thrown out.

1. Should law and morals allow one person to voluntarily and unilaterally jump overboard and die?

2. Should they be allowed to agree unanimously to draw straws and use a gun to kill one person? (kill, because after he finds he has the short straw he changes his mind)

3. Suppose we know they would all have agreed, but they don’t actually have the discussion. Instead, one of them, a very honest person, draws a straw for each of them. If he had the short straw, he would have killed himself, but he is lucky and Sam has the short straw. He then shoots Sam with the gun and they thrown Sam overboard. Is that OK?

4. Suppose they have a discussion, and they and we know that everyone *would* agree to the scheme if it was a choice between all 6 drawing straws and all of them dying. Sam, however, says: “I won’t agree. I know that even if I hold out, the other 5 of you will do a 5-straw scheme and one of you will go overboard and the rest of us will be saved. So I’m opting out.” Is it OK to include him in the straw scheme anyway, against his will?

5. Suppose that they have a discussion and Sam sincerely says he is opting out because even if his opting out would sink the boat, he doesn’t want to have any chance of being thrown overboard now instead of dying in 30 minutes when the storm hits. And in fact if he doesn’t agree, the resulting bickering will prevent even a 5-straw scheme. Is it OK to include him in the straw scheme anyway, against his will?

The Catholic Encyclopedia says:

“Another statute, of the first year of William and Mary, prohibited Catholics from residing within ten miles of London…

In 1700 an Act was passed which, Sir Erskine May observes, “cannot be read without astonishment”. It incapacitated every Roman Catholic from inheriting or purchasing land, unless he abjured his religion upon oath…

Concerning this Act of William III Hallam remarks, “So unprovoked, so unjust a persecution is the disgrace of the Parliament that passed it.” But he goes on to add, “The spirit of Liberty and tolerance was too strong for the tyranny of the law and this statute was not executed according to its purpose. The Catholic landholders neither renounced their religion nor abandoned their inheritance. The judges put such constructions upon the clause of forfeiture as eluded its efficiency.” No doubt this is generally true. But as Charles Butler tells us in his “Historical Memoirs” (London, 1819-21), “in many instances the laws which deprived Catholics of their landed property were enforced.” He adds that “in other respects they were subject to great vexation and contumely”. They were a very small and very unpopular minority in an age when a common creed was regarded, in every European country, as the chief bond of civil polity and dissidents from it were more or less rigorously repressed. As a matter of fact, it is to a great English magistrate that we owe the ruling which placed an almost insuperable difficulty in the way of the tribe of informers. At the trial of the Rev. James Webb on the 25th of June, 1768, at Westminster, at the suit of a notorious common informer named Payne, Lord Mansfield told the jury that the defendant could not be condemned “unless there were sufficient proof of his ordination”. Such proofs, of course, were not forthcoming. Lord Mansfield, as Charles Butler relates in his above-mentioned “Historical Memoirs”, discountenanced the prosecution of Catholic priests and took care that the accused should have every advantage that the form of proceedings, or the letter or spirit of the law, could allow. And at that period the same temper animated English judges generally….

In this year, 1778, the first Catholic Relief Act was passed. It repealed the worst portions of the Statute of 1699 above mentioned, and set forth a new oath of allegiance which a Catholic could take without denying his religion.

Harry Lime: “Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?”

“The cuckoo clock.”

(From Orson Welles, The Third Man, as repeated here)

I found an interesting website with See: examples of trying to translate Nietzsche’s maxims.

Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie? – Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das.

Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does. (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” #12)

I’d seen that as

Man does not live for pleasure; only the Englishman does. (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” #12)

Though less accurate, I like the mistranslation better.

Mark Steyn has a good column on the inanity of trying to make people safer by preventing them from defending themselves.

…It was a “gun-free zone” except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

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It’s common for liberals to call any political group they don’t like, “right-wing” or “conservative”. The Nazis as conservatives are an example. The National SOCIALIST party complained about rich people, were anti-Christian, wanted stronger government control, and had no interest in restoring the Kaiser or any other German government system that had ever existed. They were anti-Stalinist, but so, of course, were the Trotskyites. Similarly, in the 1980′s we used to hear about Kremlin conservatives and conservative Maoists— by then, even the Communists were honorary conservatives to liberals.

I came across a funny example of that in a column about India by Martha Nussbaum.

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This topic came up at lunch.

• In 2001, the average charge for a surgical abortion at 10 weeks’ gestation was $468; but since most abortions in the United States are performed at low-cost clinics, women on average paid $372 for the procedure. (31)

How much does a medical abortion cost? In 2001, the average charge for a medical abortion was $487. (31)

Who pays for abortions?

• Some 74% of women pay for abortions with their own money; 13% of abortions are covered by Medicaid, and 13% are billed directly to private insurance. Some women who pay for the procedure themselves may receive insurance reimbursement later. (31)

Does the U.S. government help poor women who need abortions pay for them?

• Congress has barred the use of federal Medicaid funds to pay for abortions, except when the woman’s life would be endangered by a full-term pregnancy, or in cases of rape or incest. As of November 2006, 17 states used their own funds to subsidize abortion for poor women. (38)

I enjoyed the Christianity Today debate between Hitchens and Wilson because my guy was winning, but Hitchens was too easy a target. He embarassed himself by misunderstanding The Good Samaritan and he apparently hadn’t ever asked himself about the basis for his moral opinions, which he thinks are both self-evident and universally shared.

Here’s what he should have said to defend his position, an argument harder to attack. (I cross post this as a comment on Wilson’s blog, BLog and Mablog)

“Human morality is the result of evolution. We all share brain wiring that makes us feel guilty when we murder our fathers, steal from our sisters, and lie out of pure malice. Therefore, a human is well advised not to do these things. That is why I call them immoral. Also, our wiring makes us feel happy in condemning them, so I do.

I admit that our hard-wired morality won’t take us as far as I’d like. I can’t really say that infanticide or genocide are wrong, because too many people do these things without guilt, if the context is right. Our innate morality is designed for small groups of hunter-gatherers. But on top of that, we have the norms of our society, and the laws. My parents taught me to feel guilty if I stole even from strangers, plus I might get caught, so I don’t do it. Someone from India might well disagree, but I will cheerfully stand by my society’s principles and condemn him to other people in my society, at least. That’s fine for keeping me happy, even if it’s not universal.”

That argument require admissions of relativism and lack of personal autonomy, but it’s an argument, which Hitchens didn’t have. Also, I’m afraid that it does cause a collapse of the silly side Hitchens is defending in the debate, that Christianity has been bad for the world. A lot of his morality is society-linked, not universally human. His problem is that as a moralistic atheist, he really ought to concede that Christianity is a huge influence on his personal notion of morality and that Christianity’s influence is why he prefers the moral climate in England to that Iraq or India. His preferences (as I imagine they are) for things like equality, truth, respect for human life, and democracy are not universal.

I was listening to a feeble and apologetic defense of opposition to mandatory seat belt laws by a local libertarian on the radio. It’s amazing how little respect for freedom there is in America. Why didn’t the libertarian just say, “Why should the police be able to stop me and force me to wear a seat belt when I’m driving two blocks down the street in a quiet neighborhood in my own car? What right do other people have to decide for me that seat belts are always, absolutely, necessary for safety? If I’m willing to take the risk, why can’t I?”

Listening to a presentation of Leigh Linden and Jonah Rockoff’s, “There Goes the Neighborhood? Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values from Megan’s Laws”, I thought of an idea for a commercial website. Some states have sites where you can look up an address and see how many child molesters live nearby. Sometimes the requirement for an ex-con to register ends after a certain number of years. A new private website could harvest the state data, or simply get it by Freedom-of-Info Act and keep it up forever. Information on other crimes committed by neighbors could also be included. The site could be funded by advertising directed at people buying new homes.

The NYT
had a long story on the Chinese cough syrup poisoning. Antifreeze was labelled as glycerine in China and used in cough medicine in Panama. This is a great example for my article on trust and trade with the Third World. It’s also a good warning. I think I’ll stop eating canned food from China. (more…)

It is widely recognized that CEO’s, being rich, are expensive to motivate with money. What do they have in more limited quantities? The esteem of their peers. “Money is just a way to keep score”. This has at least two big implications:

1. Past and present CEO’s make good directors. If a CEO knows he will be scrutinized by them, he will be ashamed to do badly and eager to do well. A professor or a politician’s opinion matters less, partly because they are too easy to fool.

2. Formulaic pay and options are worse incentives than bonuses and increases in base salary. If the CEO gets high pay just because the Return on Equity is high this year, where is the glory? He’ll get the high pay even if the directors don’t notice the great job he did. If the CEO has high income just because the stock price rose and he could cash in his options for millions, where’s the glory? He could do that even if the directors thought he had done a bad job and just got lucky. A subjective bonus, on the other hand, freely given, shows appreciation. Moreover, a bonus can be based on something subtle, like the hiring of a new marketing head or the decision to pursue a new project, that has no current effect on profits and that is unappreciated by the market analysts.

Via Christianity Today, I find that 1 in 30 late-second-trimester babies aborted in England for eugenic reasons are born alive, dying a few hours later. That’s 102 of 3,189 in this category over nine years (there are 190,000 abortions annually, in all categories). Do pro-abortion people count this as infanticide, or not? It is an interesting definitional question. It’s rare, of course, but 102 extra murders per year in Britain would, I expect, make a dent in the crime statistics.

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The dissent by Justices Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case is revealing in how it separates morality from human rights and interest in human life.

      Ultimately, the Court admits that “moral concerns” are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. See ante, at 28 (“Congress could … conclude that the type of abortion proscribed by the Act requires specific regulation because it implicates additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition.”). Notably, the concerns expressed are untethered to any ground genuinely serving the Government’s interest in preserving life. By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent. See, e.g., Casey, 505 U. S., at 850 (“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 571 (2003) (Though “[f]or many persons [objections to homosexual conduct] are not trivial concerns but profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles,” the power of the State may not be used “to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.” (citing Casey, 505 U. S., at 850)).

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The Kennedy opinion in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case is interesting because it uses an information-failure argument at one point (rather inaptly for the Carhart law, since it implies that the law could be fixed by requiring the doctor to explain to the mother the grisly details of what he is going to do to her baby). Here is what he says.

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Here’s a shocking example of the way people think. Don Imus’s brief vulgarity is atrocious and must be punished. The music group Three 6 Mafia, which is much more vulgar, is fine, because they won an Academy Award for it. Morality is all relative, and is defined for us by Hollywood. This, of course, is the attitude that tolerated segregation and lynchings back when they, and not rap, were in fashion–or would have, if their promoters were from Southern California instead of just the South.

Beverly Calendar-Anderson, director of Bloomington’s Safe and Civil City program, offered help.

“I think Imus should have known better; he should have known where the line was,” she said Friday. “When you are on public airways … you have the responsibility not to harm people.”…

She had some insights into why Three 6 Mafia can get away with their nasty viewpoints more easily than some, Imus in particular.

“I don’t care for their music. I won’t listen to their music. I won’t buy their music,” she said. “But they have been accepted by mainstream media. They are Academy Award winners. As much as I dislike their lyrics, our country in a way has said they’re OK.”