Positive Liberty

Leitmotif: It’s alright, we’ve told you what to dream.

Various dreams from here and there, below the fold.

From the Campaign Trail, Radley Balko asks Barack Obama some difficult questions, including the following:

– You have called for a “civilian national security force,” essentially a non-military public service corps that in your words is “just as powerful, just as strong,” and “just as well-funded” as the military. Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren has estimated that your proposal would cost somewhere between $100 and $500 billion—or between 10 and 50 percent of all federal income tax revenues. How do you plan to pay for this program?

My sarcastic two cents: If the non-military public service corps is “just as powerful” as the military, do they get the bomb, too? If not, what on earth does this phrase mean? I think I can guess — conscription — but I’d like to hear it spelled out. I almost think we’d be better off giving the Peace Corps the bomb (at least they wouldn’t use it) than giving them conscription.

(Radley’s questions to McCain were good, too.)

From the Dinner Table, Daniel Sumner explains what’s wrong with the “eat local” trend:

California as a whole is a large net importer of wheat and it would not make much sense to plow under the grape vines to plant more wheat to go with the local wine. It would use far more resources and be far more expensive to attempt to grow rice or wine grapes in Minnesota. In food, especially, comparative advantage is tied to endowments of natural resources.

Local means the local season and most of us choose to eat grapes in May and strawberries in October no matter what the local season is. Most of us also enjoy variety of diet and the luxury of consuming from the global buffet. I am not about to say that such consumers are morally deficient.

It is also far from clear that local production is more conserving of energy, has a smaller greenhouse gas footprint, or is otherwise nicer to the environment.

Consider the energy it would take to grow lettuce in greenhouses compared to in the fields of Monterey County. It turns out shipping long distances is cheap in many ways compared to fighting natural comparative advantage to grow crops in inhospitable environments.

If wealthy consumers demand more local production they will get it. Rich folks in New York or San Francisco can hire personal gardeners to grow things for them in the backyard or on the roof tops as noted in recent NYT articles. But given the huge costs of such practices, that is unlikely to be a significant share of the food consumption for normal people.

Perhaps there are crops that aren’t subject to these kinds of reductios — I doubt the locavores really mean to grow grapes in Minnesota. But if these crops do exist for a given area, then chances are they’re already being grown there, because producers could save on shipping. Otherwise, comparative advantage applies.

From the Lab, I’m totally unqualified to comment on this alternative energy proposal:

Imagine being able to convert water into a boundless source of cheap energy. That’s what BlackLight Power, a 25-employee firm in Cranbury, N.J., says it can do. The only problem: Most scientists say that company’s technology violates the basic laws of physics.

Yet something doesn’t add up about it. What’s more plausible as the source of power in this setup? We’ll give readers two choices. Is it

a)

Mills’ theory, which he expounds upon in his self-published 2,000 page book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics, rests on what he describes as his discovery of the hydrino - an altered version of hydrogen that has an energy level lower than its ground state, or the baseline energy level. These modified atoms, he argues, are the stuff that comprises dark matter, the invisible material that many scientists believe composes more than 90% of the universe. The mechanism that creates hydrinos - a chemical reaction whose released energy can allegedly be harnessed for power - is what Mills calls the BlackLight Process.

or

b)

the patented cocktail that enables the reaction - a solid fuel made of hydrogen and a sodium hydride. . . .

I’m not asking for technical prowess here. I’m asking you to play the law of averages. Water has a proverbially bad track record as a fuel. Sodium hydride ignites in air. And in water. Which one is more likely to be the real reason for the apparently excess power?

You don’t need to know the physics, or the pseudo-physics, to understand these facts. Yet they do become relevant when thinking about likely explanations.

I’m not saying I’m certain. I’m not claiming any special knowledge. I am only saying that I wouldn’t bet the other way, and that we’ve seen this type of thing before.

From the Library, another thing we’ve seen before: the game of Confessing to Great Books I’ve Never Read. The last time this went around, I copped to never having read Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but then I immediately turned around and read it. A commenter asks about another type of literary confession:

I’m more ashamed of extended works I completed although it was clear they made no impression on me, such as Of Human Bondage.

Which great works of literature have you read without any lasting impression, one way or another? Which ones left you entirely unmoved?

I can’t say that Wuthering Heights falls in this category, since it did make an impression on me: I hated it. This book wasn’t just bad. It was execrable. I still have strong feelings about it, then.

As to books that should make a profound impression, but left me flat: Othello strikes me as perfectly unremarkable, and I suspect it would never have been noticed if it weren’t for its famous author. The Vagina Monologues is a decent play, but not worth the dudgeon, or the acclaim, and I think we all know it. Victor Hugo’s poetry is forgettable. Novels? The Old Man and the Sea isn’t spare; it’s overwrought. And boring. I loved The Catcher in the Rye, but I think I’d find it bland the second time through.

From the Stiftung Leo Strauss, a parable. Maybe social contract theory isn’t historically true. But it’s truer for the United States than for virtually anywhere else, and it does explain an uncomfortable lot.

And, again from those who would hope to run the machine, here’s John McCain’s latest on gay adoption:

MCCAIN: I think that two parent families are best for America…

I think that family values are important, when we have two parent — families that are of parents that are the traditional family.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But there are several hundred thousand children in the country who don’t have a home. And if a gay couple wants to adopt them, what’s wrong with that?

MCCAIN: I am for the values that two parent families, the traditional family represents.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, you’re against gay adoption.

MCCAIN: I am for the values and principles that two parent families represent. And I also do point out that many of these decisions are made by the states, as we all know. And I will do everything I can to encourage adoption, to encourage all of the things that keeps families together, including educational opportunities, including a better economy, job creation. And I’m running for president, because I want to help families in America. And one of my positions is that I believe that family values and family traditions are preserved.

Curiously, he doesn’t seem to be condemning same-sex adoption. He’s only condemning single-parent adoption, and presumably single-parent families of any type. At any rate, he’s much more explicit in attacking single moms here than he is in attacking a two-parent lesbian or gay household.

Straight talk it isn’t. If an employee were to be this evasive, and require this much parsing in his communications to his boss, he’d be fired. So why should we want to hire McCain?

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