em7el

The Moral Person Principle

2006-06-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

Many months ago, the New Yorker had an excellent article about Billy Graham and his son, Franklin Graham. It brought an old thread of thought back to the surface of my mind; the distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists. Billy Graham is an evangelical. Franklin is a fundamentalist. What is the difference? The difference arises not from dogmatic issues; Evangelical Christianity is not simply Fundamentalist Christianity Lite(tm). Fundamentalist Christianity is not Evangelical Christianity with extra Hellfire. The difference between Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism arises from the degree of respect given by each to the unbeliever.

In the intellecutal bad-lands of business-speak, there is a worthwhile concept called the "Reasonable Person Principle". It states that if you have a disagreement with someone, you have to start from the assumption that they are a reasonable person, and are not being willfully stupid or dishonest. We can adapt this principle to the present discussion, and call it the "Moral Person Principle". I define this principle as stating that if you have a moral disagreement with someone, you start with the assumption that they are a moral being like yourself, and are not being willfully evil. (By "moral being", I mean an individual capable of moral reasoning, i.e. an adult human, not a cow or an infant.) The fundamentalist does not adopt this principle. Anyone who does not echo their creed is called a witch, a heathen, or a democrat, depending what century you live in. The evangelical, while they may appear similar to the fundamentalist in dogma, is qualitatively different as a result of their adherence to the Moral Person Principle. While many evangelicals adopt roundly conservative stances on issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and pre-marital sex, you can often have reasoned and calm debates with them about these issues. Not so with the fundamentalist, who sees no problem harassing or assaulting people entering a planned parenthood clinic. The reason that evangelicals are so much less noxious is that they respect your faculties of moral reasoning. While they do think they're right and you're wrong, they attribute this difference to a divergence in the reasoning you each have used.

This makes them more like you and I than most people care to admit. While many people take offense at pages such as this one, which claims that "with enough prayer, homosexuals can change", espousing such a position does not make one a fundamentalist. If it did, most of us would have to accept the label of fundamentalist liberal, since we of course believe that any jesusfreak can change too, if only they would read some Nietzsche. In fact, many of the liberals I know do in fact deserve the label fundamentalist, as they do not observe the MPP. It is all well and good to disagree, even vehemently, with the idea that homosexuals need to change or be "cured". But many people go farther, saying that anyone espousing such an idea is either willfully or congenitally stupid, or perhaps simply brainwashed. To attribute such shortcomings in these cases completely denies the agency of the Christian human to make moral judgements; it is a blatant rejection of the MPP.

I am not arguing for moral relativism. I believe that many beliefs held by conservative Christians are morally wrong, and I am always eager to present arguments refuting these beliefs. But without the MPP, we are essentially reduced to a pack of screaming apes. If you believe that anyone who disagrees with you is either too stupid to understand why you're right, or too brainwashed to see beyond their indoctrination, the implication is that your beliefs are the only beliefs a moral person could possibly hold. Are you really that sure of yourself? Would you really say that your way is the one, true way, the only path to the mountaintop? Because that sounds awfully familiar...

Some readers may object that you are not obligated to give respect to sufficiently backward beliefs, in much the same way that a science magazine need not host a debate between a flat-earther and geologist. However, that analogy is not suitable. Science is a framework for rational thought driven by empirical observations (i.e. an epistemology). The flat-earther has rejected that epistomology, and so the geologist, who still operates within the strictures of the scientific framework, is under no obligation to take the flat-earther seriously. In moral reasoning, no such framework exists, because part of moral reasoning is choosing the framework in the first place. A refutation of this idea would have to define the unique and superior moral framework that subsumes all others (Is is pragmatism? Or libertarianism? Maybe darwinism?).

Pragmatism, by the way, is what underpins my thesis. If we do not accept the MPP, we can never convince those we disagree with that they are wrong. You can't argue with someone if you don't first respect their humanity - i.e., their moral agency. You can only shout at someone who you regard as little more than an ape, even if you use big words to do it. The MPP is, quite simply, the only hope for changing people.

I am still not a kook.

2006-05-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

My close friends have put up with a lot of my borderline-paranoid libertarianesque ranting about mass schooling (public school in particular). In the hopes that I can further convince them that, at the very least, I'm not a complete crank, here's a really good (and brief!!) synopsis of the basic position I take on the issue: http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm. It's basically an executive summary of John Talyor Gatto's "The Underground history of American Education", who, I understand, is slightly more long-winded and libertarian than most people I know can tolerate.

This page spends a lot of time quoting prominent figures in the formation of our current system of public education over the years. The sheer volume, nay, superabundance of ghastly quotations from captains of industry, secretaries of education, presidents, chairs of the columbia teacher's college, behavioral psychologists, etc, was what ultimately convinced me of Gatto's message. Otherwise, I might have passed him off as an embittered libertarian crank.

Quotations of course, can be taken out of context, and so I've started to read the entirety of some of the more important works that he cites, when I can find them. Here's a link to Horace Mann's 7th annual report to the Massachussetts Board of Education: http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/docs/1701.htm. It gets interesting around page 5, where Mann says:

But allowing all these charges against the Prussian system to be true, there were still two reasons why I was not deterred from examining it.

In the first place, the evils imputed to it were easily and naturally separable from the good which it was not denied to possess. If the Prussian schoolmaster has better methods of teaching reading, writing, grammar, geography, arithmetic, &c., so that, in half the time, he produces greater and better results, surely, we may copy his modes of teaching these elements, without adopting his notions of passive obedience to government, or of blind adherence to the articles of a church. By the ordinance of nature, the human faculties are substantially the same all over the world, and hence the best means for their development and growth in one place, must be substantially the best for their development and growth every where. The spirit which shall control the action of these faculties when matured, which shall train them to self-reliance or to abject submission, which shall lead them to refer all questions to the standard of reason or to that of authority, -- this spirit is wholly distinct and distinguishable from the manner in which the faculties themselves should be trained; and we may avail ourselves of all improved methods in the earlier processes, without being contaminated by the abuses which maybe made to follow them. The best style of teaching arithmetic of spelling has no necessary or natural connection with the doctrine of hereditary right: and an accomplished lesson in geography or grammar commits the human intellect to no particular dogma in religion.

You could argue from all this that at least Mann was well-meaning. Perhaps he was. Still, he knowingly helped create a system that, by his own admission, could be used to instill blind obedience to whatever power structure came to wield it, and then assumed that by some act of providence, the system would never fall into the hands of those who would use it to secure and advance their own power. His assumption that the teaching of grammar and the training of subservient citizens are totally orthagonal is also suspect. By what method other than making them totally subservient to authority can you get a room full 3rd graders to sit still long enough for a grammar lesson?

This post powered by ethanol.

2006-03-30T08:48:00.000-08:00

The peak oil doom-merchants love to say "ethanol is a net energy loser! It takes more than a gallon of gas or diesel to produce a gallon of ethanol! We're doomed!"

Yesterday, I found out that this is just FUD. In hindsight, I am amazed that I was gullible enough to believe them without investigating further, but it just goes to show... Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Here are two excellent rebuttals to the "ethanol is an energy loser" meme:

And here's my summary of what's wrong with the doom argument:

The claim that ethanol is a net energy loser seems to be based on a recent study by David Pimmental. I won't go into the full laundry list of what's wrong with his study (see the first link above) but suffice it to say: He assumes 1979 ethanol refining technology. He commits various fallacies regarding how much energy it takes to fertilize and harvest the corn. He mistakenly assumes that all of the corn harvested is used to make ethanol - in reality the byproducts of the conversion process include plant protein and corn oil, both of which we have ample use for (human and animal food).

And that's not even going into the small matter of fact that corn is not the only ethanol feedstock, nor is it even remotely the best! Ethanol can also be produced from plant cellulose, which means that native prairie grasses can be used to make ethanol. These plants once covered substantial portions of the great plains, and so they obviously don't need pesticides, fertilization, or irrigation, if polycultured, are perrenials, so they don't require the energy investment of replanting every year. The biggest benefit, of course, is that these sorts of feedstock produce far more yield per acre than corn, rendering all the ultra-pessimistic land-use estimates of the doomers null and void.

Doomers like to say that peak oil isn't about technology, it's about energy, and the foolish optimists conflate the two when saying that technology will save us. But they then completely ignore technology, which will ultimately make fools of them. The efficiency of ethanol-producing techniques has substantial room to grow, and is nowhere near running into any of the laws of physics that the doomers love to quote.

Just think about the energy involved: I've read plants are about 2% efficient at converting sunlight into chemical energy. Sounds pretty crappy. Let's assume that ethanol production from plants is 1% efficient. Also pretty crappy. The total efficiency then is 0.02%. Sounds shitty, huh? But, the average solar irradiation per square meter at north american latitudes, over a full 24 hour period, is maybe 200 watts. (I got this assuming 1000 watts for 5 hours and 0 watts for 19 hours). So, the average power production of an ethanol agriculture utilizing 55 million acres is about 9 gigawatts. That's a hell of a lot of power. Of course I just pulled that model out of my ass, but I find it completely impossible to believe that it's going to be a net energy loser.

If you don't believe my analysis, look at brazil: The unsubsidized price of ethanol in brazil is much cheaper than gasoline. (source: http://www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/Biofuels.Apr2006.ppt) If they have to burn two gallons of gas to make a gallon of ethanol, how the hell can ethanol be cheaper than gas?

People like Jim Kunstler rebut these arguments by swearing, and saying "people are letting themselves be deluded into thinking we can run all our cars on ethanol forever". This is just suppressed american puritanism at its best. Cars are evil, and the evil will be purged.

RIP Stanislaw Lem

2006-03-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

Lem dies: http://salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8GK0EQ04.html

If you have never read Stanislaw Lem, you must. Though much of his work was done during and about the cold war, it completely lacks the quaintness that makes so much early science fiction so very difficult to read. Perhaps this is because, unlike Clark and Asimov, he wrote from behind the Iron Curtain, giving his words an authority sorely lacking in the works of corn-fed American authors of earlier eras. His allegories on the nature of conciousness, global military conflicts, and the vast gulf between the everday and the alien are vitally important to today's world. As a bonus, his less serious work is among the funniest I've read. He is somewhere between Vonnegut and Swift in hierarchy of satirists.

If you can read only one Lem book, read Fiasco. If you can read more than one, read:

The Futurological Congress
The Cyberiad
Solaris

For a more exhaustive review and catalogue of his works, see http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/vitrifax.html.

bicycle wheels part 1

2006-03-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

Today I started building up the rear wheel for the maruishi in the garage. I have it all laced up, and have just started tensioning it. Before I explain what all that means, let's talk about how a wheel works. I'm not talking about rolling. You already know that a wheel rolls. But a wheel does something else. It supports a heck of a lot of weight in proportion to its own weight.

My wheel - hub, axle, rim, and spokes (no tire or innertube on it), weighs just a hair over a kilogram. When it's finished (if I build it right), it should be able to support around 200 kilograms of radial force - force applied to the axle and pointing straight down. How is this possible?

A lot of people think that bicycle wheels support the weight of the rider because the hub hangs by the spokes from the top of the rim. In other words, they think that when you sit on your bike, the tension in the spokes at the top of the wheels increases (which is to say, the spokes at the top of wheel stretch), and that force is then transmitted around the circumference of the rim to the ground. Well, that's not the way it works.

How does it really work? In fact, the hub "stands" on the bottom spokes! That is, the bottom spokes get shorter which transmits the force of the rider directly through to the ground. A bicycle wheel actually works just like an olde-fashioned wagon wheel with wooden spokes. Don't buy the explanation? You can verify it for yourself. The easy way to verify it is by having someone straddle their bike and hold onto the handle bars. Then, pluck one of the bottom spokes with your fingernail. It will make a sound of a certain pitch, just like a guitar string would. Now, have your friend press down on the handle bars as hard as possible. Pluck the same spoke. The pitch will have gotten lower. You can use this same method to find out if the tension of any of the other spokes changes. You'll find that a few spokes at the bottom of the wheel change, but the ones at the top and the sides stay the same. If you don't believe that, ask yourself the following
question: If you had an un-laced rim (i.e. no spokes in it), would you expect to be able to sit on top of the rim without bending it? I wouldn't! Well, the rim would have to be that strong if it were to support your weight from the top.

Maybe you still have some doubts. How is it that the spokes can support weight pressing down on top of them? If you take a spoke by itself, and try to stand on it, it will bend immediately. The answer is pre-tension. (which is different than 'pretension', something I'm exhibiting by trying to add something new to the internet on the subject of the bicycle wheel). When you finish building a wheel, there's a lot of tension in the spokes - that is, each spoke is pulling outward on the hub, and inward on the rim. Then, when you put weight on the wheel, the tension of the spokes at the bottom of the wheel decreases slightly.

In other words, with no weight on the wheel, the spokes at all points of the wheel might be pulling the rim in towards the hub with 20 Newtons of force. When you put weight on the wheel, the spokes at the bottom of the hub decrease in tension, while the spokes at the top retain the same tension. So then you have, say, 10 Newtons at the bottom wheels and 20 at the top. This means that the hub is being pulled up towards the top of the rim harder than it is being pulled down towards the bottom of the rim, and so the rim can support as much weight as it takes to restore balance to the forces acting on the rim.

That's hard to conceptualize. People who have taken (and understood) a physics class have it beaten in to them to look at things this way, but most people find this counter-intuitive.

Here's another way to understand it. Suppose you and your friend are playing tug of war. You have a rope with a red flag in the middle of it, and you are pulling on the rope exactly as hard as your friend is. This means that the red flag in the middle of the rope doesn't move at all. Now, your other friend Manfred comes up behind you and starts to to push on your back. You're still pulling just as hard on the rope, but suddenly you start to move forward, and so does the red flag. But if
Manfred's sister, Uma, comes along and grabs the flag and starts pulling it back toward you with the right amount of force, then the flag will stop moving again. At this point, the tension betweeen the flag and your friend is the same as it was before, while the tension between you and the flag has decreased (because Manfred is pushing on your back). Well, substitute Manfred for the ground, and Uma for the weight of the rider - a bicycle wheel works the same way.

There are a lot of other forces that a bicycle wheel can support besides radial force. For instance, when you pedal, the spokes transmit the twisting force (the torque) on the hub to the rim, which makes the wheel turn, which makes you go. I'll write about how that works next time.

Lastly, if you want to build your own wheel, see http://sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html

2006-03-10T13:20:00.000-08:00

Just as I suspected - kids are more likely to drop out of school from boredom than from failure.

2006-03-01T14:03:00.000-08:00

Wow! A really, really good column by Cary Tennis: http://salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2006/02/28/bigoted_speech/

This is a humbling point if you believe it is true about yourself. I can personally remember times in my life when I was conciously bigoted in one way or another. Can you?

In other news - yes, I really am going to start on the bicycle wheel soon. Lately I've just been gathering up all the parts needed.

building a bicycle wheel

2006-02-15T09:12:00.000-08:00

I'm setting out to build my first bicycle wheel from parts (hub+rim+spokes). I'm very excited.

Since I'm so preoccupied with schooling and education lately, all I can think of is how to relate wheel-building to education. Specifically - wouldn't this be a wonderful thing to teach in school?

First and foremost, you would be connecting students to everyday objects. We are so alienated from most of what we rely on day to day. Who knows how to fix their car? Or their computer? Or even sharpen their own kitchen knives? People need to learn that things are built according to a set of comprehensible principles and skills - they don't just spring fully formed from the back room at walmart. The world we live in is not incomprehensible, and we don't have to be reduced to helpless consumers.

Second, teaching people to do useful things with their hands is highly undervalued in our educational system.

Third, imagine all the physics and math you could teach while building a bicycle wheel: Metallurgy & materials, statics, geometry and trig. Anyone who found this stuff interesting could learn most of their high school math and science curricullum, simply from studying how a bicycle wheel works.

So, I'm going to write a series of posts here on the bicycle wheel, specifically on my own attempt to build one. There is already ample information out there about how to build wheels, and about how they work. So my goal will be more to provide a bibliography, and provide some coherent breakdown of the topic so that it might be more easily introduced to interested kids.

peak oil is not being debated

2006-01-24T09:59:00.000-08:00

Recently I watched "The End of Suburbia". I can't very honestly recommend this documentary. It was relatively well-produced and fun to watch (despite spending about 30 minutes toward the end retreading the first 30 minutes), but, journalistically speaking, it was very disappointing.

My first complaint was that it was not a balanced picture at all. I know that "balance" is a disease of Fox right now (we report, you decide); I'm talking about the older and unperverted notion of balance. This notion does not require you to host a head-to-head debate between a geologist and a member of the Flat Earth Society - but it does require you to recognize when an issue has not yet been conclusively decided, and allow both sides of the issue to be heard.

"The End of Suburbia", and much of the larger Peak Oil crowd ("peakniks") fail at this task miserably. In TEoS, we are treated to an endless barrage of authors who make lots of money selling books about how peak oil is the end of civilization. Every now and then the movie visits a lively looking conference, with lots of thoughtful looking white people listening to someone talk about how everything is going to end. These conferences have names like "The 3rd annual meeting of the association for the study of peak oil and natural gas". In other words, it's a support group. Later, the movie makes an appeal to authority in the figure of Matthew Simmons, a very rich banker who is worried about the peak. Look! He's attractive! He's rich! He's disinterested! He agrees with us! We must be right!

This is the problem with Peak Oil. They are sooo sure of themselves that they actually seem to think it would be pointless to invite opposing opinions.

But there's a problem with the petro-optimist crowd as well. They don't seem to understand the arguments of the peak oil folks. And since neither side of the debate can be bothered to listen to the opposing side, we get the equivalent of a bunch of goats braying at each other, without anything resembling discourse occurring.

Here's an example of just how out of phase the two sides of the issue are:
optimist: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/1031/122_print.html
pessimist: http://dpodbori.livejournal.com/3005.html

In the optimists corner, we have Mr. Peter Huber, railing against the pessimists' use of EROEI measurements (energy return on energy invested), while failing utterly to understand what that measurement is about. He sets out to prove that it is pointless by trotting out the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and claiming "Every electric power plant, whatever it's fueled with, runs a huge Eroei deficit, transforming five units of cheap, raw heat into two units of electrical energy." This is *not* what eroei is about, and I'm amazed that someone with Mr. Huber's credentials doesn't understand it.

On the other side of the ring, we have Dmitry Podboritz, who ignores the valid points that Huber makes and instead goes for a reductio ad absurdum cheapshot: he claims that Huber's argument would support running our civilization on AAA batteries, instead of addressing the legitimate claims that Huber makes - specifically that there are petroleum deposits that might be recoverable despite what a naive EROEI analysis predicts.

Another way in which the two sides talk past each other is on the matter of reserves versus production. A typical optimist vs. pessimist debate on this topic goes like this:
optimist: "There are N trillion barrels of oil in the tar sands and oil shales of north america! we have enough oil forever!"
pessimist: "We can't keep increasing the daily production of oil, no matter what the reserves are. We've already harvested most of the light sweet crude in the world"

Well, they're both right, but they're both missing the point. The optimist misses the point that looking at reserves is not enough - we also have to look at what rate we can extract from those reserves. The pessimist misses the point that the rate of extraction is not one of the physical constraints on energy use that they are so fond of relying on. Improved technology can in fact increase the rate at which we extract oil from the ground. And in turn, the optimist misses the point that the longer we are able to continue increasing the rate at which we are able to extract oil from the ground, the faster we will eventually hit the wall when reserves become truly depleted.

You can go back and forth like this all day.

There are two other problems with the peakniks that I will touch on briefly.

The first is their refusal to consider the possibility that oil demand might be elastic. If you read through their material long enough, you'll see a plot with petroleum consumption over the past N years plotted against petroleum production over the past N years. Not surprisingly, the two track each other quite closely. But the graph goes on. They then extrapolate production according to hubbert peak theory, and extrapolate demand assuming the same sort of growth that we've seen over the last N years. All of their economic predictions hinge on this assumption - that demand will continue to grow. My point is not to say whether or not this assumption is valid - just to point out that it underpins a lot of the fear.

The second is their refusal to look at things with a sociological perspective. One of the most striking things about "The End of Suburbia" was that every single person they interviewed, every last one, was white, male, and middle to upper class. Why is this? I think it's because this is the economic class that feels most threatened by the spectre of economic collapse. They are the ones with the most to lose. But I think they're wrong. I think they are amazingly naive to think that the transformation of the world's energy economy might affect everyone equally. On the contrary, it may well affect the poorest the most, and we in the upper echelons of first world society may only have to make relatively modest adjustments: a 5 minute shower, taking the bike instead of the car to the grocery store, not flying to vegas on a whim.

That's what is ultimately depressing about the issue to me. The fact that if the peakniks are wrong, I will likely live the rest of my life in comfort, while our foriegn policy apparatus steals energy from poor people and rapes the environment.

I am Not A Kook

2006-01-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

Without reading the rest of this post, go to this website and see if you can figure out what it is.

That is the website of the ChannelOne program, owned by a compnay I've never heard of called Primedia. What do they do? They give schools AV equipment (TVs/VCRs) in exchange for the schools' commitments to put their students in front of ChannelOne's programming for an amount of time that apparently ads up to a full week of in-class TV watching. (Several hours of which are advertising). How does ChannelOne make money? Of course, the "sponsors" of the program are paying in order to get their advertisements in front of students who may not choose not to watch them! According to this source, students in ohio have actually spent time in juvenile detention centers for refusing to watch ChannelOne's programming.

My beliefs about public school have been getting progressively less and less mainstream. But, now I feel pretty confident that it isn't that I'm getting kookier, it's that I'm getting more and more *correct* in my beliefs. It's fashionable to say that school is nothing but state-sponsored daycare. But the truth is much worse than that. School is an apparatus of the state and of our centralized economy, the purpose of which is to turn human beings into consumers. This is why so much of school is built around destroying independent thought and making students dependent on authority figures.

I used to feel kooky when I said "School is for making compliant consumers!" But now, I've found there's an example of students being sent to JAIL for refusing to watch advertising supported TV during class time. So if you don't think school is a tool of our centralized economy, I accuse *you* of willfully ignoring the evidence before your very eyes.

you have no right to speak spanish in this country

2005-12-15T10:47:00.000-08:00

Gawd: http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/12/afa/142005c.asp

This would pass without notice as yet another example of Kansas (my birth state, btw) plumbing the depths of human stupidity, but the article itself is quite interesting to me.

The article was apparently written by agapepress.org, whose other recent headlines include "Keeping Christ in Christmas -- The Most Important Tradition" and "Wal-Mart Preparing to Offer Another Carrot to GLBT Community". So I expected at least a whiff of bias here. But, I'm impressed - the article seems to be written with a very restrained hand. I'm used to seeing evangelicals fall in line with all manner of right-wing crap, even stuff that has nothing to do with christian teachings. It's nice to see at least one counterexample.

Secret Sins

2005-12-13T15:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a compelling read:

http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm4.pdf

Bombastically written, but worthwhile. I've committed these sins myself.

This reminds me of another thought I've had. This has probably been thought of by other people before, if you know who, please tell me. The idea is: If a field publishes papers on statistical results, and the accepted threshold for statistical significance is 1% (meaning that there is a 1% chance that the results were due to randomly picking a perverse sample), then 1% of those papers' conclusions will be bogus!

The question then, is: Which ones?

Power Line: The panic over Iraq

2005-12-09T10:17:00.000-08:00

Power Line: The panic over Iraq

This is amazing!

(If you can't tell, I've decided to embark on a venture into the nether regions of the internet.)

Let me briefly summarize this post, I don't expect many people to endure actually reading it. The post excerpts from and comments on an essay by Norman Podhoretz. The claims he makes are (slightly exaggerated here):

1. The US invasion of Iraq is just like the American Revolution. (complete with Tom Paine quotes)
2. Turncoats in the american revolution turned traitor because they were afraid the British would win.
3. But The US can't possibly lose the war in Iraq! (After all, it's not like we've ever lost a war of unclear purpose in a country we don't understand before...) Besides, things are going swimmingly!
4. Furthermore, no one can possibly deny the conclusion that victory is "staring the US in the face". I mean, it's self-evident!
5. Therefore, the people currently opposed to the war (i.e. Traitors) are opposed not because they want to be on the winning side, but because they actually want the US to lose!

I'm not sure I know what to say. The only thing I can possibly imagine (other than that these people are just simply insane) is that, a few years down the road, we are going to see a repeat of the claim that "we could have won if the air force had been given its reins", i.e. "if the peaceniks and the goddam hippies had let us drop an H-bomb on those commie gooks^W^Wislamofascist ragheads, we wouldn't have suffered this national embarrassment".

Sigh. I'm so depressed by this kind of idiocy.

walmart is our friend?

2005-11-29T08:34:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest from the libertarian blog-miasma:

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2005/11/progressive_wal.html

Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon and saying, "see, you goddam bleeding hearts were wrong! WalMart is Good!!!"

This is just more libertarian intellectual laziness. Here's a story about how the free market is succeeding. No need to think hard about it, because it must be true! The free market always succeeds!!

The assumption here is that if walmart were not addressing the needs of its consumers, it would not be the behemoth that it is, because people would simply shop elsewhere. You need some heavy-duty blinders on to believe this.

What are the flawed assumptions made here?

That WalMart is not and cannot be a monopoly. This is flawed, because despite the existence of other big box retailers, some communities may have no retailer in driving distance other than WalMart. WalMart may (and I strongly suspect, does) have a local monopoly in many places.
That lower prices necessarily are better. This is obviously flawed to any one who would bother to spend 5 minutes thinking about it. We know that WalMart has lower prices than other retailers, and lower prices than the smaller business that it displaced. But, we don't what products WalMart doesn't carry that were available before, and we don't know what products it does carry that weren't available before. In other words, prices may be lower, but how do we know how the value available to consumers has changed? It may have decreased.
That higher value (assuming that WalMart's lower prices do reflect higher value to the consumer, and not just slightly worse crap for slightly less money) is by itself good for low income people. The original article says that WalMart has lowered prices by 200 billion dollars in aggregate, while suppressing wages to the tune of a mere 4.7 billions dollars. So, the argument goes, consumers had 4.7 dollars taken out of their paycheck, and 200 dollars handed back to them at the cash register. So what's to complain about? Shitty statistical inferences, that's what! We don't know (or, at least, the article isn't telling us) how the price savings or the wage suppression is distributed across the population. All we know is that the economy is probably growing, which is no surprise.

And what about social justice concerns? WalMart has defended some of its pharmacists' refusal to sell various forms of birth control. In many areas there are no other pharmacies, and so the effect is that we have a large corporation effectively controlling the private lives of the poorer individuals in some communities. Is this illegal? No, probably not. Is this troubling? I think so. Should people complain loudly when they see this happening? Absolutely, and they shouldn't be labeled hypocritical socialists for doing so.

And what about concern for the American landscape? WalMart is a dreadful, sickening place, and it is just the sort of thing you get when you worship at the altar of Mammon. If any libertarians come across this post, they'll say: "see, you blew your cover: You're just another walmart hating socialist." Ok, fine, I hate WalMart. I don't believe the false faith that the invisible hand will always improve everything. I believe it will only make things cheaper - in every sense of the word.

health care != groceries

2005-11-23T11:37:00.000-08:00

Those pesky free-marketeers:

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2005/11/calls_for_gover.html

This is an amazingly fatuous and disingenous argument. It should be obvious that groceries and health care are not the same. To argue that they are the same is pure sophism.

I think the simplest rebuttal shows up in the comments on that post: People enjoy food; they do not enjoy going to the doctor. Therefore, if you can show that people will overconsume food given the opportunity, it does not follow that they will overconsume healthcare given the opportunity.

Another reason why groceries are not the same as health care: It is possible to eat a very healthful diet while being quite frugal. That degree of choice is not always present in health care, as your expenditures are driven by your state of health, which is not something you have total control of. That is, if you get cancer, you have to pay to for cancer treatment, or else die. Not much of a choice. Now, you can argue that a free-market health care system will incentivize people to maintain their health to the best of their abilities, but that is:

a) Irrelevant, because the topic of this post is whether health care and groceries are the same.
b) Wrong and stupid, because if one's own health isn't enough of an incentive to maintain one's own health, then why is money going to be a good enough incentive? Besides which, (though I have no statistics handy to back this up) I suspect that poorer people have both poorer health on average and are also likelier to go bankrupt from health care bills - that is, they have the most fiscal incentive to preserve their health, and seem to be the worst at doing so. (I can think of all sorts of reasons why this might be so, but that's off-topic).

YABIWNU

2005-04-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

Yet another blog I will never update!

But, this time I'll try - really I will.