Positive Liberty

John Hagee, a religious lunatic of the highest order, gives his opinion of the Roman Catholic Church.

Oh yeah, he just endorsed McCain who said he was “very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement.”

Bill Donahue’s Catholic League responds.

Mark Olson has some very interesting comments on my post “Marriage Against the State.” His first point is as follows:

Marriage has been, historically and socially perhaps even “humanly”, been regarded as more than a contractual matter. A sacramental, liturgical, and eternal significance has almost universally been attached to this event. The phrase, of “pledging our troth before man and God”, is common because it is …, well, common. Marriage (first marriages at least) makes sense as celebration and virtually all cultures that aspect is there in abundance. There is also universally a religious aspect. At the very least, shared liturgical praxis is a to touch the sacred. Charles Taylor in A Secular Age begins by looking at the word “secular”. “Secular” comes from the Latin, saeculum, meaning a period of time. A liturgical rite, in a primal fashion, is a denial of time. It is meant to forge a connection with all the other rites that are the same. The Eucharist for example is a forging of a connection with the first Eucharist during that passover night almost 2000 years ago and every other Eucharist performed everywhere else since then. Marriage ceremonies are the same, a denial of time. This connection between the lover’s bound in marriage and eternity is almost as universal.

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The point of Thomistic Natural Law is that Reason is not opposed to Revelation (a.k.a., truth revealed by religion, and specifically, in the Christian instance, by the Bible).

Reason and Revelation are not enemies or even opposites. They are complements to one another. Each, in the opinion of this author, as well as many esteemed minds of the past, is diminished by the absence or suppression of the other.

There may be disagreements between persons on how, specifically, these two things complement one another. But very few people that I’m aware of believe these two concepts are outright enemies within their own persons.

Yes, there are fundamentalists out there. Yes, there are also hardcore atheists out there. Yet everyone reasons, even if they do it inconsistently or poorly — so poorly, in some instances, that they’re dangerous. And everyone has faith in something, even if they might want to call their “faith” by a different name.

Even more important, as someone who values the Bible: Revelation requires interpretation. How else can one interpret Revelation if they lack Reason?

At best, what can be said is that each person has a presupposition that starts with either Revelation or Reason. But what does that tell us about the result? Not much.

As the Answers in Genesis crowd (6-day creationist) proves, one can start with Revelation and then start playing science (albeit poorly).

One could just as well start with Reason and then turn to Revelation for support — a stance that appears to have been quite popular in the Founders that my co-blogger Jon Rowe quotes. But just a couple generations after the Founders, this Reason to Revelation approach was Continue Reading »

First, the serious bit: Matt comments (on “Corporatism“),

Something like this is, I think behind the opposition to markets by the European left. Consider a typical privatisation in an EU country.

Corporation makes a donation to ruling political party.

Corporation is invited to tender for a government asset.

Corporation gains control of that asset for far less than it would fetch in an open market.

Government provides a subsidy that more than repays whatever the corporation paid for the asset.

Any profits are taken by the corporation, any losses are met by the taxpayer.

And this we are told is the marvel of the free market and private enterprise!

It’s certainly a terrible abuse, and I could see how someone might end up hating the “free market” if this were what he usually found under that name. Without a doubt, there are better and worse ways to privatize a state-owned enterprise. Perhaps a useful constitutional rule would be to outlaw asset sale privatization, while allowing for other forms of privatization.

Cracked features the Nine Most Baffling Theme Parks From Around the World. Weird food tie-in: Bon-Bon Land, which is just really scary. Now With Devastation: Grutas Park, also known as “Stalin’s World.”

The Onion’s A.V. Club has started hosting food reviews. I’m delighted. The first item on the menu is that twitchingly horrid canned cheeseburger we all read about a few weeks back. With video. My god, with video.

Cliopatria isn’t one to be left out, I guess. I can’t decide if this is the funniest or the most tasteless thing ever linked at the heart of the history blogosphere. But it’s a new record either way, with weird food and devastation in every single frame.

The last scene redeems it all, in a macabre sort of way.

And last, never count out Wikipedia. From the entry on “Shock and Awe,” we read,

Following the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, the term “Shock and Awe” has been used for commercial purposes. The United States Patent and Trademark Office received at least 29 trademark applications in 2003 for exclusive use of the term. The first came from a fireworks company on the day the United States started bombing Baghdad. Sony registered the trademark the day after the beginning of the operation for use in a video game title, but later withdrew the application and described it as “an exercise of regrettable bad judgment.” Miscellaneous other uses of the term include golf equipment, an insecticide, a set of bowling balls, a racehorse, a shampoo, and condoms.

It seems like a flawed experiment to me. From a New York Times article by John Tierney:

In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy…

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

Yes, yes, I switched doors a few times the first time through (a total of eleven switches, to be honest). But it wasn’t because I was trying to keep my options open (not, in itself, obviously irrational, but I digress). It was simply that I was looking for a pattern, and this is a quite rational thing to do. Life is full of patterns.

I thought that finding a pattern could pay off really big, big enough to make up for the lost opportunities. It seemed reasonable to me that the numbers behind the doors would not be random. Perhaps that one of the doors would start to pay more if I clicked in the proper sequence. Or maybe there was some pattern to be found in the previous numbers in the reward totals. Or… something.

It seems to me that the experimenters are neglecting the extraordinarily small knowledge base that each player starts with. It’s hardly fair to conclude that ignorant people must also be irrational whenever they don’t behave optimally: For rationality to manifest, it has to have at least some data to work with.

In the end, the numbers just seemed random to me. I decided one of two hypotheses must be correct: a) there was no pattern or b) I couldn’t find it. After that I just clicked like mad on one door and racked up the points. But I guess because I didn’t choose this strategy from the very first click, I’m irrational.

How silly: If there had been a pattern, and if I hadn’t looked for it, I could easily see some other behavioral economist calling me irrational for not seeking out opportunities in the market. Or somesuch.

The underlying problem is not irrationality at all — only an acute lack of data, coupled with an inability to judge the worth of each marginal datum: If I click once more, I’ll gain some information (of how much value?). But if I don’t click once more, I’ll gain some points (of how much value? and what am I giving up in exchange?).

No one can answer these questions before they play. What if, on the third change of doors, the program were to reward the player with a million points, while if he never changes, he just gets a few dozen? Who would be the “irrational” one then? What if you got the most points for “rescuing” a closing door? What if it would have helped to change doors when the last reward total you got was even, or divisible by five, or prime? These hypotheses could be easily programmed into this experiment, along with an infinity of others. As a kid, I played computer math games with some of these features.

I’m not alone in thinking this way. Here’s a comment from John Tierney’s blog post on the experiment:

The first time I played, it took a fair amount of door switching (I chose 4 clicks on each door as optimal) to determine that the payoffs behind each door were approximately similar (and remained approximately similar), and thus minimizing switching was the best strategy.

The second time I played, it took less switching to determine that this payoff structure remained, so I switched less — but that was a path-dependent result not connected to any irrationality about the emotional loss of disappearing choices.

Yep. If anything, we didn’t do enough experimenting. There may still be a pattern, for all I know. Or maybe not.

In any case, I know the real point of the experiment: Paternalism. The point is to establish that people are irrational (as defined by men in lab coats). Then the men in lab coats get to make all the important decisions for us. The point of this experiment — if one can even call it that — is to convince everyone, from ordinary joes to policy wonks to legislators — that it’s perfectly okay to take away other people’s choices. My colleague Will Wilkinson reaches a similar conclusion here, with several direct quotes in support.

Yes, we’ve discussed recently some of the reasons why paternalism isn’t a rational response to irrationality: If these experiments prove anything, they show that the people in lab coats are irrational just like the people out of them.

Yet irrationality in the market is at least voluntary. It’s noncoercive. It also produces incentives to find more rational behavior, and it can be curbed with a secondary market in decisionmaking skills (lawyers, financial planners, and sommeliers are just three examples, but nearly all white collar professions have some element of this to them).

Legislated irrationality — the kind belonging to friendly gentlemen in lab coats and not-so-friendly ones in jackboots — well, that kind lasts a lot longer. It doesn’t provide the incentives for its own demise. And it can’t be kept in check by paying smart people to help us figure things out.

So even if we grant the premise that “people are irrational,” the state isn’t necessarily the answer. To return to the experiment at hand, ultimately what it shows is how weak the support is for the premise itself.

I thought William F. Buckley was one of the best debaters and interviewers in the modern era. I used to regularly watch Firing Line when it was on. Plus he was right on the war on drugs.

“Liberty is a Gift from God himself, nor can they alienate the same by Consent, though possibly they may forfeit it by Crimes.”

It’s a noteworthy sentence from Cato’s Letters, the series of classical liberal essays for which the Cato Institute is named. But place this sentence into Microsoft Word, and the software recommends the following not inconsequential change:

“Liberty is not a Gift from God himself, nor can they alienate the same by Consent, though possibly they may forfeit it by Crimes.”

Microsoft: enemy of liberty?

Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.

The Reynard project will begin by profiling online gaming behavior, then potentially move on to its ultimate goal of “automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

Ten bucks says this is just a bunch of bored info-geeks pulling one over on their superiors.

Joseph Priestley, like America’s key Founders he influenced, thought himself a “rational Christian” or “Unitarian Christian.” He thought the infallibility of the Bible was a “corruption” of Christianity; but nonetheless, some of the Bible to be true. Interestingly, he thought the Book of Revelation and the Millennium to be legitimate parts of the Bible.

This puzzled his mentees John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who rejected that part of the Bible as illegitimate. It was Priestley’s method of rationalism which he gave to them — the confidence in man’s reason to determine which parts of the Bible were legitimate, ala Jefferson taking a razor to the Bible and cutting out that which he deemed “unreasonable.”

Priestley fervently supported the French Revolution, even in the midst of the reign of terror. And he used the Book of Revelation to justify his support. He didn’t like the rise of strict Deism or atheism in France and wanted to convert everyone to his form of “rational” or “unitarian Christianity.” He fused his unorthodox enlightenment rationalist theology with biblical millennialism, and saw the French Revolution as playing a key role in ushering in the millennium. In that he was not alone. Other preachers, some of them orthodox Christians, likewise believed the French Revolution was part of some larger event in the ushering in of a millennial republic of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Anyway that’s the summary of this article. Check it out if you can access the entire thing.

Anthony Gregory, writing for the Future of Freedom Foundation, provides a good summation of the problem of Corporatism (an ill that has plagued both the Republican and the Democratic parties in America)…

Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism”… which is in fact a common adversary of the free marketer and the anti-corporate leftist…

Indeed, corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts — inflicts great harm on the modern American economy. Although [progressives] often misunderstand the fundamental problem plaguing the economy, they at least recognize its symptoms.

Conservatives and many libertarians, on the other hand, frequently dismiss many ills such as poverty as fabricated by the left-liberal imagination, when in fact it does a disservice to the cause of liberty and free markets to defend the current system and ignore very real and serious problems, which are often caused by government intervention in the economy. We should recognize that state corporatism is a [variant] of socialism, and it is nearly inevitable in a mixed economy that the introduction of more socialism [or corporatism] will cartelize industry and consolidate wealth in the hands of the few.

[Progressives] usually understand how wartime provides politically connected corporations with high profits and cushy contracts. What is more often neglected is

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Someone is selling a framed, James Madison picture featuring his fake Ten Commandments quotation for lots of money.

Constant Viewer was too lazy to post Oscar predictions, so let’s just say that CV was 100% correct. It isn’t true, of course, but let’s just say it anyway.

Actually, CV accurately predicted the winner in every major category but Female Actor in a Leading Role (née Best Actress). In fact, CV made no prediction in that category, having not seen the subsequent winner, Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose, or either Julie Christie in Away From Her or Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. As for Blanchett, who is rapidly becoming to Elizabeth I what Raymond Massey was to Lincoln and Hal Holbrook still is to Mark Twain, CV expects to hold an Elizabeth I marathon some day and compare Blanchett’s work to the splendid and still definitive Glenda Jackson miniseries in the 1970s. CV can only hope that in her dotage Blanchett has the queen pick up a six string and start singing It Ain’t Me, Babe.

CV’s faithful readers will remember that he thought, and still thinks, Atonement was the best picture of the year and then some; but, Hollywood being Hollywood, he knew either No Country for Old Men or Michael Clayton would get the nod. Timing, idiotically enough, is important in these races, and Michael Clayton was old news by the time the Oscars voting came around. On the other hand, there is a sense among many that two Coen Brothers almost equal one Orson Welles at his best (not to mention at his heaviest) and there’s just no point after a while in reminding geniuses that they’re geniuses. Who knows? Maybe Hollywood still feels guilty about how it treated Orson and is making up by tossing as many Oscars as possible to the Coens. Say this for the Brothers, they learned from him well enough to be happy, as they said last night, playing in their own corner of the sandbox.

Speaking of that blood drenched sand, there was never any serious question that Javier Bardem would win for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and very little that Daniel Day-Lewis would win the Best Actor in a Leading Role award. CV could easily have seen Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone) get the nod over Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, but CV entirely agrees that Swinton deserved the win, if only by a nose.

The fact is that 2007 was an absolutely golden, magical year for the movies. For once, Constant Viewer has practically nothing at all to grouch about. Admittedly, much of the magic was of the dark variety – most of the best pictures of the year were far from family fare (he alliterated annoyingly). Still, consider the following:

There wasn’t a single entry in any of the major categories (at least among those that CV actually saw, and that was almost all of them) that didn’t deserve their nomination and there were any number of deserving movies that weren’t sufficiently honored. CV would have gladly seen, for example, Ratatouille among the nominees for Best Picture. There wasn’t a single Best Actor in a Leading Role nominee that wasn’t absolutely superb, and yes that even includes George Clooney who, within limits, is fully capable of being not only a Big Star but an excellent actor.

The same could be said for Supporting Actor and Actress. Blanchett was, in fact, remarkable as Bob Dylan and Philip Seymour Hoffman was, well, Philip Seymour Hoffman, which is to say he was excellent as usual. So, without exception, were the other nominees. (In deference to the no longer striking writers — CV could almost make an exception in his loathing of unions in their case — both original and adapted screenplays were excellent this year too. By the way, did you hear the one about the Hollywood starlet who was so stupid she slept with the writers? CV never gets tired of that joke!)

The movies, themselves, were simply amazing. Constant Viewer continues to believe that Atonement would have won in a New York minute in just about any previous year for the past decade or so and will only go on to become far better appreciated as the years pass. There Will Be Blood has the sort of epic sweep (its surreal and somewhat disappointing ending, aside) that one typically associates with David Lean classics, Michael Clayton was a great Hollywood style big picture and Juno was a great Indie little picture and, after all that, it is hard to argue that No Country For Old Men wasn’t easily as deserving of a Best Picture Oscar as most of its 79 predecessors.

Every year for some time now, the business model for motion pictures has shifted farther and farther away from a focus on domestic box office, i.e., viewers in the U.S. actually going out to watch movies at the local multiplexes. Of course, both new media and the significant improvements in some old media (e.g., wide-screen HD TV) is largely responsible for this. But so, too, is the largely abysmal quality of the movies, themselves, throughout the 2000s. If you, like so many others, have simply fallen out of the habit of going to see movies the way they are still meant to be seen, now is the time to pick from nearly any of this years Oscar nominated films and performances and head for the mall. For the most part, though, leave the kids. At its best, it’s no country for children this year, either.

…with this brilliant post from Jim Henley:

Most libertarians would agree that it’s a messed-up state that:

* Creates a massive crime problem in poor minority neighborhoods with a futile, vicious and ever more far-reaching attempt to prevent commerce in popular, highly portable intoxicants that leaves absurd numbers of young men with felony records, making them marginally employable.

* Fails to provide adequate policing for such neighborhoods.

* Fails to provide effective education in such neighborhoods after installing itself as the educator of first resort.

* Uses regulatory power to sharply curtail entry into lines of business from hair-care to ride provision, further limiting the employment options of people in such neighborhoods.

* Has in the past actively fostered the oppression of said minority, up to and including spending state money and time in keeping its members in bondage.

* To make up for all of the above, provides a nominal amount of tax-financed welfare for the afflicted.

But it’s a messed-up libertarianism that looks at that situation and says, “Man, first thing we gotta do is get rid of that welfare!”

People have diverse interests and priorities, and we don’t all have to work on my issue of the moment. But given finite political energy, we can for instance agitate to stop paying Big Sugar tax dollars to foul the Everglades with runoff or end the inheritance tax. We can pressure the government to curtail torture or Medicaid. These are not close calls.

They’re not close calls at all. I think the libertarian reforms that would do the most good for America right now would be as follows:

1. Bring the troops home. From everywhere.
2. End the drug war by legalizing recreational drugs.
3. Lift licensing and other regulations on small businesses and business startups to ease entry into the entrepreneurial class.
4. Establish a low, flat tax for all earnings above some generous baseline. Repeal all other federal taxes, above all those on consumption goods.

Other things would be great too, and if I were in power I would hardly stop here. But few changes would do the people quite as much good as these, and I think each would be better than dismantling welfare right off the bat. One, three, and four are not unthinkable, even in today’s political climate. And each of them has a distinct advantage: Liberals will have a very hard time looking at someone who favors this platform and saying, “he only cares about the rich.”

There is great dispute over how to properly understand the natural law that America’s Declaration of Independence invokes. One side argues such an idea is entirely compatible with classical and Christian concepts of natural right and the other argues the Declaration’s natural rights teachings are novel Hobbsean/Lockean and hence modern ideas.

Ellis Sandoz, a traditional Roman Catholic scholar at LSU argues contra Leo Strauss, for the traditional classical/Christian side of the natural law contained in the Declaration. He has a new book out on the matter which I’m sure makes an invaluable contribution to the debate.

I can’t resolve who is right in the debate though my sympathies lie with the Straussian side which views the natural rights teachings of the Declaration to be “modern” and subversive of attempts to use politics to preserve the traditional Christian order.

However, one thing is undeniable, and unfortunately, all too often misunderstood by the Protestant “Christian America” crowd, but not by the traditional Roman Catholics for whose side Sandoz eloquently argues, and that is “nature” defines as what is discoverable by reason as opposed to revealed in the Bible. Continue Reading »

That’s what Abraham Bishop, a Connecticut Republican, did during Jefferson’s Presidency. At least he didn’t say Jefferson was bigger than Jesus. Philip Hamburger details this in Separation of Church and State.