Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I found this discussion, which is interesting to think about in light of real v. pecuniary externalities, in William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, BOOK 3, CHAPTER 13 “Of Nuisance”

Also, if I am entitled to hold a fair or market, and another person sets up a fair or market so near mine that it does me a prejudice, it is a nuisance to the freehold which I have in my market or fair….

If a ferry is erected on a river, so near another ancient ferry as to draw away its custom, it is nuisance to the owner of the old one. For where there is a ferry by proscription, the owner is bound to keep it always in repair and readiness, for the ease of all the king’s subject; otherwise he maybe grievously amerced:18 it would be therefore extremely hard, if a new ferry were to share his profits, wich does not also share his burden. But, where the reason ceases, the law also ceases with it: therefore it is no nuisance to erect a mill so near mine, as to draw away the custom, unless the miller also intercepts the water. Neither is it a nuisance to set up any trade, or a school, in neighborhood or rivalship with another: for by such emulation the public are like to be gainers; and, if the new mil or school occasion a damage to the old one, it is damnum absque injuria.

Reading Peter Hitchens’s good A Brief History of Crime, I learned that in medieval England citizens were expected to own arms and use them against criminals. The 1688 Bill of Rights included a right to bear arms, which must have been the model for the similar provision in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Attempts to regulate guns were made in the 19th century but were defeated.

Much more important, though, is something I realized from reading this: ONLY RECENTLY HAVE STATES CLAIMED A MONOPOLY ON THE USE OF FORCE. Such a monopoly is not only not the essence of a state, but is a modern anomaly. What has been common, rather, is the requirement that people, and rulers too, use force only as prescribed by law. Someone could stab someone trying to murder him, or stab the murderer as he tried to escape. There was not a difference between citizen and policeman. Indeed, there were no policemen. People were supposed to help in the hue and cry to catch a criminal who attacked their neighbors.

This is completely sensible. Why should we care whether it is a policeman who shoots a fleeing criminal as opposed to a victim shooting him? Or a bystander? The effect is the same– justice is done. Of course, if someone shoots his neighbor for no reason, that is a crime, and he should be prosecuted. But that has nothing to do with shooting criminals.

A set of comments at National Review on Dinesh D’Souza’s thesis that Islamists have been successful because Islam is hostile to modern Western immorality shows how lost conservatism is. It’s not that the commentors–who include smart people like Victor Hanson and Stanley Kurtz– disagree with D’Souza; rather, they don’t even comprehend his thesis. His argument goes like this:

1. The Left won the Culture War in the Western World.

2. The Left’s immorality is now spreading worldwide, including to Islamic countries.

3. Mainstream Moslems are therefore now turning to the leadership of radical Islamists to fight back against infectious western decadence.

Thus, the Left caused 9-11. This is not moral causation, because it was not the intent of the Left to cause 9-11; it is just “efficient causation”, to use Aristotle’s classification. Or, if you like, it is somewhere in between: the Left wanted to spread its ideas around the World, and it sparked a war that it didn’t intend to cause.

The comments say that the Left is not to blame, which may be right (causing something bad doesn’t mean you are to blame for it), and that the Islamists are a bigger threat than the Left (which any conservative should think is false, as I have posted on before). Perhaps the problem is that many people categorized under “conservative” today are not conservative at all. They are foreign policy realists, or libertarians, or neoconservatives who approve of homosexuality, divorce, and pornography, and thus do not see the Left as a threat except to national security and to their pocketbooks. Naturally, such a person would not agree with D’Souza, and might even have trouble understanding his point, and why the Islamists are so angry.

Dinesh D’Souza, much attacked of late, is actually quite sensible in connecting 60’s radicals with present-day Islamists. His thesis is that Islam is turning to people like Bin Laden as a defense against decadent Western immorality, not because of Israel or an attempt to extend Islam. This makes sense, once you think about it. For hundreds of years Moslems were moderate and made no attempt to attack the West. This continued even after Israel was established. Since 1970, however, mainstream Moslems have turned increasingly to radical Islamism. This has occurred at the time that the West has become *less* Christian, not more. The obvious conclusion is that when Islamists say they are fighting Western decadence, the innovation of the 60’s, they are being truthful. Or, if you like, that they are saying this because they know it is what brings in recruits, because it appeals to the average Moslem.

(more…)

How sad. Dinesh D’Souza has been making the point that traditional Moslems and American conservatives are natural allies, which is quite true, and almost obvious. He of course is careful to distinguish traditional Moslems from the Bin-Laden style radicals, who represent traditional Islam about as well as Trotsky represents traditional liberalism. But now I read this by D’Souza:

At one point Berkowitz accuses me of holding that “the cultural left presents a threat to America as grave as that posed by radical Islam.” What? The Left is as dangerous to America as al Qaeda, the radical mullahs in Iran, the jihadist insurgents in Iraq, and the worldwide network of radical Islam? Nowhere do I say this, and I challenge Berkowitz to substantiate his allegation.

Doesn’t D’Souza realize that the cultural Left is a far graver threat than radical Islam? Let us put aside the question of whether the culture Left will kill as many people in the future as it has in the past (remember Communism?). Suppose it will kill zero, and al Qaeda will kill 100,000 people. America minus 100,000 people is America almost entirely intact, indeed, perhaps even invigorated. World War III, with its much greater toll, did not come close to destroying America. But the aim of the Left is to eliminate most of what we think of as America. They repudiate the Founding Fathers as scientifically ingnorant, sexist, theocratic, racist, homophobic, and artistically backward. They dream of an entirely different world, one in which Christianity is drained of content, in which people are not allowed to say what they think about morality, science, or privileged minorities, in which what we eat and the things we buy are chosen by the government, not by ourselves, in which our earnings are taken by the Left and spent for us by them, not ourselves. Is this a real danger? Look at what’s happened already. And compare that with the petty successes of al Qaeda.

SODOMY LAWS are a good test for distinguishing between conservatives, process libertarians, result libertarians, and liberals. Conservatives are for laws against sodomy (though varying as to the extent to which the laws should be enforced). Process libertarians are against them, but believe the legislature should write the law rather than the courts. Result libertarians are against them, and want the courts to strike down any such laws. Liberals are for sodomy laws, but only the kind of law which encourages sodomy by granting it special protections.

That thought was stimulated by John Derbyshire ’s National Review column, “Confessions of a Metropolitan Conservative”. Here is the part of it that poses the key question:

“Ah,” she said, in the tone of someone who has just had her worst expectations confirmed, “that’s typical of you National Review types! Milk and water conservatives! You talk a good game, but when it comes down to it, you’re just another bunch of metropolitan liberals!”

I was thinking about this all the next day. The lady had a point, of course. I seriously doubt there is anyone at National Review who would vote for a sodomy law. None of those NR writers who have declared on the matter have come out in support of such laws. That is not the same thing as saying that a state should not be permitted to have such laws, if the people of that state want them. We are mostly Tenth Amendment, strict- construction types here at NR, and I’m guessing that my position on the constitutional point is widely shared. We don’t want to lock up homosexuals, though.

Now, 43 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll last May said that homosexual relations between consenting adults should not be legal. So the uncomfortable question arises: If we NR-niks are to the left of 43 percent of Americans on this issue, just what kind of conservatives are we?

Derbyshire’s link to the Gallup poll is broken, but I found another link for the fact that 42% of those polled believed homosexuality should be illegal (for the year 2001).

I think Proust has a good point in Times Rediscovered about starting from individual attitudes to understand national attitudes. It is the opposite approach of that in Plato’s Republic, of looking at the nation to understand the individual, but both approaches have their place. As always, it is a matter of starting with what is easier. (more…)

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION obviously got Jayson Blair his job at the New York Times despite his dishonesty and incompetence. But that is to be expected, even by supporters of affirmative action. The whole idea is that the employer chooses workers who are more likely to be dishonest or incompetent, because he is trading off that extra probability against the benefit of having a person of the race he prefers. If he isn’t doing that, it’s not affirmative action– it’s just hiring the most honest and competent person. So affirmative action proponents should be pleased if they see evidence of black and hispanic incompetence— it’s a sign, and an inevitable one, that affirmative action is being widely practiced.

Jonah Goldberg brought up an example of this today– students in the Bakke case:

Or recall the profile of Patrick Chavis, a black doctor who had been admitted to the UC Davis Medical School under the race-quota scheme that rejected Allan Bakke. Bakke, of course, sued and the result was the Bakke decision now under review by the Supreme Court. In a 1995 article, “What Happened to the Case for Affirmative Action,” Nicholas Lemann, a writer as talented as he is liberal, contrasted the two doctors. Chavis was a heroic obstetrician working in Compton. Bakke was a mediocrity toiling in obscurity in Minnesota. Giving Chavis an opportunity — according to Lemann and the activists and politicians who rallied to the article — was a boon not only to Chavis but to the community, the nation, humanity, indeed all carbon-based life forms. Alas, two years after the article appeared, the Medical Board of California suspended his medical license, partly on account of Chavis’s “inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.” Chavis was found to have been guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in three cases; the judge overseeing his case ruled that letting Chavis “continue in the practice of organized medicine will endanger the public health, safety and welfare.”

Goldberg got the story from William McGowan’s Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.

It is easy to take blessings for granted. I am warm, well-fed, healthy in body, with a secure job, recognition in my field, a wife, children, undivorced, and with no fear of violent death or immediate fear of natural death. Yet I take all that for granted.

It’s interesting that in modern America being warm, well-fed, and with no fear of violent death or immediate fear of natural death is almost universal, unlike in earlier times. But in earlier times having a secure job, a wife, children, and no divorce was almost universal, unlike now.

Here’s a comment I submitted to John Tierney’s blog.

Prof. Zimring and the criminologists didn’t predict the drop in crime that started in the 90’s, but it was what a simple model of deterrence would predict: when the probability of punishment rises to the level of the 1960’s, crime will fall to that level. (Actually, the probability didn’t rise that much for most crimes except murder, and the rates didn’t fall that much either). I didn’t predict it, but that’s because I didn’t have enough faith in the simple model.

For some figures, see this 1999 report by Morgan Reynolds.

http://www.ncpa.org/studies/s229/s229.html

I can’t remember where I’ve seen the attitude of the quote below from Proust’s Times Rediscovered– it’s been a long time since I was at Yale, which is probably where— but I like it. It’s good both that rich people feel themselves a special class, with duties, and that they also respect talent. Indeed, unless an untalented person has pride in something such as birth, it is hard for him to accept that someone else is more talented. If he does have pride of birth, then he is not threatened by intellectuals.

…that mental attitude of the faubourg Saint-Germain with which those who believe themselves the most detached from it are saturated and which simultaneously gives them respect for men of intelligence who are not of noble birth (which only flourishes in the nobility and makes revolution so unjust) and silly self-complacency. It was through this mixture of humility and pride, of acquired curiosity of mind and inborn sense of authority, that M. de Charlus and Saint-Loup by different roads and holding contrary opinions had become to a generation of transition, intellectuals interested in every new idea and talkers whom no interrupter could silence. Thus a rather commonplace individual would, according to his disposition, consider both of them either dazzling or bores.

“Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise,” says Charles Murray in the WSJ. He has wise things to say.

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

(more…)

Consider the old joke about the farmer who, having noticed that watermelons were disappearing from his garden, posted a sign saying,

“One of the watermelons in this garden is poisoned.”

(more…)

A proposed Wisconsin law of a few years ago would have resulted in the names of delinquent taxpayers being posted on the Net. This is a good example of my argument in my stigma article that one function of punishment is publicity. This function has relatively low cost, and has a direct beneficial effect on efficiency. Here’s the Wisconsin story:

(more…)

What is a good life? Not only is that a question for the
individual, but for the policymaker. The policymaker could use answers
to the question in a number of ways. For simplicity, imagine that
everybody in the country is identical, but the policymaker is standing
outside and deciding the country’s laws.

1. He could use his own notion of a good life, even if the citizens
disagree with him.

(more…)

More sentences from Proust’s The Times Rediscovered:

As to monuments, the destruction of a unique masterpiece like Rheims is not so terrible to me as to witness the destruction of such numbers of _ensembles_ which made the smallest village of France instructive and charming….

Even before the war they [the Americans] loved our country and our art and paid high prices for our masterpieces of which they have many now. But it is precisely this deracinated art, as M. Barrés would say, which is the reverse of everything which made the supreme charm of France. The Chateau explained the church which in its turn, because it had been a place of pilgrimage, explained the _chanson de geste_….

…M. Barrés who alas! has been the cause of our making too many pilgrimages to the statue of Strasbourg and to the tomb of M. Deroulède, was moving and graceful when he wrote that the Cathedral of Rheims itself was less dear to us than the life of one of our infantrymen. This assertion makes the rage of our newspapers against the German general who said that the Cathedral of Rheims was less precious to him than the life of a German soldier, rather ridiculous.

One point of this book seems to be that art is necessary to capture the present, or the past, or any time, and that even the mundane moment is valuable and worth capturing. Maybe it is easier to capture the grand and special moments, and so we should devote more time to them, but that is a different motive from the value of the grandness in itself.

At the AEA meetings, I heard Kenneth Elzinga contrast two views of freedom. One view, the usual political one, is of freedom from external coercion. The Christian view is of freedom from sin, which I interpret as freedom from internal coercion. Both of these, I think, are reasonable meanings for freedom, merely reflecting different obstacles to our wills. Someone who wishes to give up being a mobster might be prevented by fear of being punished by another mobster, or he might be prevented by his own greed. The greed is his own, but he might equally say to himself in both situations that *he* wants to give up his sinful life but cannot. The question with internal coercion is what “he” means. Which desire is the true man, the greed (which is the stronger) or the expressed will? In such a situation he might be thankful for being coerced externally into entering the government’s Witness Protection Program, giving up crime under the threat of imprisonment.

(more…)

Should a person read books or see movies that contain impurity? I recently watched Das Boot, a German movie about a submarine. It was in German, but there was plenty of nautically vulgar language, and a certain amount of gore. Viewing it desensitized me to some extent, though of course I am already mostly desensitized, and movies like that only act as “booster shots”. Thus, there is some rationality in the typical choice to keep such things away from children but not from adults. Adults are already desensitized, so the marginal harm is less, and the benefit of the movie is the same.

I’ll ramble around on this topic for a while. (more…)

Here is a story my brother sent me on the idea of randomly giving 1 voter a million dollar prize for voting, as encouragement to vote. (more…)

Is National Review still a conservative magazine? I’ve had the feeling for some time that the American Spectator has replaced it. Human Events certainly is more reliable. Some recent evidence is support by its authors for pornography and lesbian procreation (in the latter case, expressed as wishy-washy general disapproval with good wishes for each individual case): (more…)