Politics

The US Government has 73 Armed Agencies

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2013-09-17 Armed Feds

Yeah, that’s right: seventy three agencies of the US government have armed personnel. That’s 40 that have their own armed divisions outright, and 33 more via various offices of the inspector general (which provides watchdogs for other government agencies that might not have their own pistol-packers).

This came to light when the EPA sent some of their own SWAT-style troopers to participate in a multi-agency raid in Alaska. The raid involved armed officers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and the Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Park Service in addition to the EPA. I’m not saying environmental regulations aren’t important, but I’m curious to know how they justify the use of a paramilitary assault.

I’m also not sure what is more ridiculous: that NOAA has armed officers or that apparently the feds plan raids like teenagers planning a house party when the ‘rents are out of town. Did they just print up flyers and distribute them to every federal agency they could find? Was anyone not invited to this shindig? Somewhere, are the armed agents of the Federal Reserve Board (yes, they have some, too) upset that they didn’t find out until too late to fly to Alaska and join in?

Hey, at least this time it wasn’t an undercover FBI sting operation on Amish dairy farmers.

(You thought I was joking about that last one, didn’t you? And then you clicked the link and realized I wasn’t even exaggerating. Now you’re not sure whether to laugh or cry. Welcome to my world.)

What To Do About the Science of Political Bias

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2013-09-13 Irrational Politics

It’s not new news, but here’s another article about another study that confirms that people loose their ability to think rationally (including doing fairly basic math) when politics are at stake.

Everyone likes to share these stories, but most folks don’t really think about them very much. Here are two thoughts I’ve had. 

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India’s Powerful “Abused Goddesses” Anti-Domestic Violence Campaign

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2013-09-15 Abused Goddesses

As Buzzfeed reports:

The campaign simply and effectively captures India’s most dangerous contradiction: that of revering women in religion and mythology, while the nation remains incredibly unsafe for its women citizens.

Haunting, but worth viewing. Also: another uncomfortable reminder of the extent to which feminism in the West has been co-opted as a battleground exclusively for the concerns of politically powerful upper-middle class married women.

Ronald Coase, 1910-2013

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase died recently at the age of 102. Many fine tributes have been written over the past week, but a common theme in many of them is that Coase was an economist interested in what actually happens in the economy. Or, as he explains below, “the approach [to economics] should be empirical.”

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Reconciling Murray

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GMU’s Bryan Caplan has an interesting 2012 post on reconciling the work of controversial political scientist Charles Murray. Caplan views Murray’s three main books on poverty–Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, Coming Apart–as complementary. To review:

Charles Murray

– Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 criticizes the welfare state for giving the poor perverse incentives.

– The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (written with the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein) argues that the poor tend to have lower IQs.

– Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 claims that the poor are generally lacking in particular virtues and social norms, namely marriage, industriousness, religiosity, and honesty (in relation to rising crime rates).

Caplan sets it up as follows:

  • “The Bell Curve emphasizes the most stable difference between the rich and the poor: The poor tend to be less intelligent. Cognitive ability is an important determinant of success in almost any society. Smarter workers are simply more productive, and competing employers reward them accordingly. In the long-run, therefore, people with low intelligence tend to have correspondingly low incomes.”
  • “People with low IQs aren’t just less productive; they’re also more impulsive…Implicit: One of the best ways to help impulsive people reach decent long-run outcomes is to give them a lot of strong short-run feedback.”
  • “In Losing Ground, Murray shows what happens when the welfare state shelters people from this short-run feedback.”
  • “The impulsive are swayed more by guilt and shame than careful calculations about the distant future. In Coming Apart, Murray shows that over the last few decades, this tradition/social pressure mechanism has gradually broken down for the working class – and transformed the working class into a dysfunctional leisure class…Removing short-run feedback led to worse behavior, which undermined traditional norms about work and family, which reduced social pressure, which led to worse behavior.”
  • “Elites live in a high-IQ, low-impulsiveness Bubble. When they introspect, they correctly conclude that the welfare state has little effect on their behavior. They then incorrectly infer that the welfare state has little effect on anyone‘s behavior.”

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The Administration’s Case for a Strike on Syria

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The Washington Post has video of a speech by US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power which, I presume, represents that Obama Administration’s official position on Syria.

What I like about the argument:

In arguing for limited military action .. we are reaffirming what the world has already made plain in laying down its collective judgment on chemical weapons. There is something different about chemical warfare that raises the stakes for the United States and raises the stakes for the world.

I support that rationale and limited, symbolic strikes based on it. Strikes that do not have the intent of changing the balance of the conflict or of disarming Assad, because such goals beyond what is required to sustain the convention against use of chemical weapons, and would incur an open-ended use of American power leading, potentially, into another quagmire.

Samantha Power Discusses Use Of Chemical Weapons In Syria

What I do not like about her argument, however, is the fact that it is irrationally manipulative and basically an extension of the Bush Doctrine. First, she describes a father’s grief at the loss of this two little girls. Personal tragedy is no basis for foreign policy, and the inclusion of this rationale is not merely spurious. It’s an affront to common sense and an insult to the intelligence of her audience. 

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The Bet

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There was a review in The Wall Street Journal last week of the new book The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future, which covers the Simon-Ehrlich wager (you know, the one where population doomsdayer Paul Ehrlich lost to economist Julian Simon regarding the dropping price of commodities). As the WSJ explains,

Mr. Ehrlich was allowed to select the five commodities that would be the yardstick…As they settled on their terms, Mr. Sabin notes, Messrs. Ehrlich, Holdren and Harte “felt confident that they would prevail.” They didn’t. In October 1990, Mr. Ehrlich mailed a check for $576.07 to Simon…Although world population had increased by 800 million during the term of the wager, the prices for the five metals had decreased by more than 50%. And they did so for precisely the reasons Simon predicted—technological innovation and conservation spurred on by the market.

Pic from Mark Perry

Ehrlich’s reaction to the lost bet is instructive:

Mr. Ehrlich was more than a sore loser. In 1995, he told this paper: “If Simon disappeared from the face of the Earth, that would be great for humanity.” (Simon would die in 1998.) This comment wasn’t out of character. “The Bet” is filled chockablock with Mr. Ehrlich’s outbursts—calling those who disagree with him “idiots,” “fools,” “morons,” “clowns” and worse. His righteous zeal is matched by both his viciousness in disagreement and his utter imperviousness to contrary evidence. For example, he has criticized the scientists behind the historic Green Revolution in agriculture—men like Norman Borlaug, who fed poor people the world over through the creation of scientific farming—as “narrow-minded colleagues who are proposing idiotic panaceas to solve the food problem.”

Mr. Sabin’s portrait of Mr. Ehrlich suggests that he is among the more pernicious figures in the last century of American public life. As Mr. Sabin shows, he pushed an authoritarian vision of America, proposing “luxury taxes” on items such as diapers and bottles and refusing to rule out the use of coercive force in order to prevent Americans from having children. In many ways, Mr. Ehrlich was an early instigator of the worst aspects of America’s culture wars.

When it comes to political disagreements, try a little more evidence and a little less name-calling.

U.S. Competitiveness

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The World Economic Forum recently released their latest Global Competitiveness Report and after years of decline the US finds itself back in the top five at…#5. This time around, America falls behind Germany (#4), Finland (#3), Singapore (#2), and Switzerland (#1). Gains over the Netherlands and Sweden provide reason to hopeful. What stands out, however, are the things that the survey identifies as America’s biggest hindrances to competing in the global economy: tax regulations (the US was #69 in “Paying Taxes” in the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings), tax rates, and inefficient government.

Pic from James Pethokoukis

Food for thought.

Buzzfeed, Pro-Lifers, and the Streisand Effect

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The Streisand Effect is named after an episode where Barbara Streisand attempted to suppress photos of her Malibu house in 2003 and accidentally triggered much more interest in the story than there otherwise would have been. It now refers to any “phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.”

So a couple of weeks ago Personhood USA, which is a somewhat radical, upstart pro-life organization, put up a list on Buzzfeed on 8 Outrageous Things Planned Parenthood Was Caught Doing.

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Building Bridges Across A Race Division

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There’s no denying the raw emotion behind this video, just as there’s no denying the historical reality that drives those emotions.

I don’t disagree with a single word, but I do disagree with how Adam Mordecai at Upworthy decided to introduce it: If You Have To Tell Your Kids This Stuff, Then You Probably Aren’t A White Person. According to that presentation, the way we relate to cops is something that divides us. Black boys have to fear cops while white boys have nothing to fear. Dave Chapelle, who is hilarious, made the same point:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ3dk6KAvQM

So there’s one view of reality, a view in which white people have absolutely nothing to fear from cops, and black boys are completely alone in their fear of police brutality. Here’s my view of reality. 

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