August 08, 2003
An intriguing idea
Maureen Craig has an interesting idea-- the opt-in welfare state.
Long description: You work for the government (federal/state/local) for four years and get all of the benefits of the welfare state (federal health insurance, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment, subsidies,etc.) for the rest of your life, as well as free college education. If you choose not to work for the government for four years, you can either pay a slightly higher tax rate to receive the welfare-state benefits or you can go libertarian, pay the "mininum" tax (which covers stuff everyone shares, like roads, the military, public works, and public education) and forego the welfare state. There can also be "hedge the bet" options where you work for only two years and get half-benefits.
Now, yes, this idea has its flaws, several of which Ms. Craig discusses but I think these flaws might actually be reparable, and the idea might have some legs. The biggest problem, of course, is the possibility that all of the money which currently finances welfare state benefits might be drained from the pool. As the economist would say, people who expect to have high incomes won't bother to enter the program, while people who expect to have low incomes will. But then again, maybe not.
After all, the program effectively functions as a form of insurance. You could restructure the program (perhaps) so that it only provided benefits to those who needed them (by having, say, a fairly low income) and therefore it cost a lot less to buy one's way in. Then it's quite possible that many well-to-do people would be willing to lower their risks by paying for a small safety net. Those who had readily available safety nets of their own would be unlikely to enter, but many of those safety nets can actually cut across class lines somewhat-- church, family, etc. Yes some of the big money would leave the system, but I don't think it would be all of it, and some of the little money might leave the system too.
Furthermore, because people are risk averse and make the choice to enter government service at the beginning, plenty of people might decide that they may as well go work for the government for a while. The job-hungry recent college graduate (of which I know many) might happily throw her services into the government because in addition to the various welfare benefits she could also gain valuable work experience and postpone real life for another four years. I might suggest dissociating college benefits from this part of the program, or finding a separate scheme for paying for education because it would be far better if the government could grab people after they'd graduated college (skilled labor being much more valuable than unskilled labor).
A second problem, which I'm not quite sure how to solve, is the "involuntary samaritan" problem. I've spoken to a lot of people who say that they're uncomfortable with letting people "opt out" of the welfare state because if the people got into really big trouble they'd feel morally obligated to help them anyway. In other words, we're compassionate enough that we're not going to leave you dying in the street just because you didn't pay your taxes, so we'd better make your taxes in case you end up dying in the street. Note the curious structure of this claim, which essentially holds that since the samaritans won't be able to stop themselves from coming to your rescue, you're required to pay for their services up front (and not, of course, at the market rate). The trouble with claims like this is that having stated them, there's little one can add to refute them. If this seems like a good idea to you-- favoring person A's moral desire to help person B instead of person B's moral desire to get person A to leave him alone-- then the opt-out welfare state will not convince you.
Are there other logistical flaws with this plan? Quite possibly. Are they insurmountable? Quite possibly not. Further study required.
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A puzzlement
(Via How Appealling): Judge Richard Posner recently denied various motions to submit amicus curiae briefs with the observation that such briefs rarely say anything knew and are rarely an effective use of time, effort, and money.
In my experience in two decades as an appellate judge, however, it is very rare for an amicus curiae brief to do more than repeat in somewhat different language the arguments in the brief of the party whom the amicus is supporting. Those who pay lawyers to prepare such briefs are not getting their money's worth.
But this leaves us wondering... if that is the case, then why do people pay lawyers to submit these amicus briefs? After all, a lot of groups that submit amicus briefs are fairly experienced at the process, from the Institute for Justice to the American Civil Liberties Union, so why do these groups keep submitting amicus briefs if they don't work. And if people aren't getting their money's worth from these groups, why do they keep giving them money? There are a few possibilities, I suppose.
One possibility is that this is some sort of interest-group-deception, where people don't realize that the odds of a free speech case winning have very little to do with a unique argument raised in an amicus brief. Even in a major case, like Lawrence v. Texas, where a brief may be rumored to have changed a Justice's mind on some point (as the Historian's brief is rumored to have changed Justice Kennedy's) the odds of an individual brief having any effect are quite low. But if nobody realizes this, then they continue to pay groups to submit them, and if people are willing to pay for them, the group will keep submitting them. This is how telephone psychics make money.
Another possibility is signalling. People and groups don't actually care about affecting the outcome of the case, but they want to go "on record" and feel as if they have made their voices heard. Of course, this doesn't explain why they choose the rather expensive format of the amicus brief rather than the newspaper op-ed, or rather than a simple letter or affidavit, as Judge Posner suggests elsewhere in his opinion.
The third main possibility that I can think of is that amicus briefs do have an effect, either because Judge Posner is wrong and they often do raise new arguments, or because some Judges are persuaded by them anyway (perhaps because they mistakenly judge "democratically"). It's possible that the Judge himself is unusually hard to sway with such arguments but that many of his colleagues on that and other circuits are not. Given the Judge's experience and acuity, I find this pretty unlikely-- if the Judge Woods, Bauers, and Easterbrooks on the world tended to be swayed by amici, I suspect he would know about it from serving on panels with them.
So we have what they call a trout in the milk. A strange fact which we can't quite explain. An economically literate, long-standing, respected Judge tells us that amicus briefs are a waste of money, and yet somehow armies of lawyers and whoever pays them happily go on wasting it.
Endnote: There's also an interesting article that finds a strong correlation between amicus briefs on questions of cert. and grants of certioari-- that is, the more amicus briefs submitted suggesting the court hear a case, the more likely the court is to hear the case. This might seem unsurprising-- the cases that pile up lots of amicus briefs are usually important ones which the court is likely to hear anyway-- but again it doesn't answer the question of why the amici bother to submit their briefs, if the case is important enough to be taken in the first place. The article is: Gregory Caldeira and John Wright, "Organized interests and agenda setting in the United States Supreme Court," American Political Science Review 82 (December 1988): 1090-1127.
Those with a serious interest in interest groups and judicial politics are advised to consider the following articles:
Kim Lane Scheppele and Jack L. Walker, Jr., "The litigation strategies of interest groups," in Jack L. Walker, Jr., Mobilizing interest groups in America: Patrons, professions, and social movements (Michigan, 1991): 157-84.
Lee Epstein and C. K. Rowland, "Debunking the myth of interest group invincibility in the courts," American Political Science Review 85 (March 1991): 205-17.
Karen Orren, "Standing to sue: Interest group conflict in the federal courts," American Political Science Review 70 (September 1976): 723-41.
Gregory Caldeira and John Wright, "Lobbying for justice: Organized interests, Supreme Court nominations, and the United States Senate," American Journal of Political Science 42 (April 1998): 499-523.
(With thanks to Professor John Mark Hansen, from whose syllabus these articles come)
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Sabotage
Timothy Sandefur asks and answers interesting questions about sabotage. Namely, if you give sleeping pills to somebody without them knowing and they get in a car accident because of it, are you morally responsible? (Mr. Sandefur says yes) This is an interesting question, but not as interesting as the more complicated corollary.
Suppose that several players are entering a tennis tournament, and one man is known to be the favorite. It is also known that he regularly takes some sort of medication. One of this player's enemies sneaks into his locker room and replaces his medicine with cyanide, which will kill him when he consumes it. Then a second player, unaware of the first player's actions, sneaks into the same locker room and replaces the cyanide pills (which he thinks are medicine) with sleeping pills. He's a little bit of a nicer guy, though he's still willing to drug somebody to win at tennis. Then, as before, the good player takes the sleeping pills, thinks they are medicine, gets in a car, and has a fatal car accident because of the sleeping pills.
Which of the two pill-switchers murdered him? The first switcher can argue that he never did anything to harm the player. He tried to poison the player, but since he never consumed the poison he can hardly be blamed for his death. But the second switcher can argue that he never did anything to harm the player either! After all, all that he did was replace a deadly pill with a less deadly sleeping pill. Yes, he tried to harm the player, but he actually gave him a higher ex ante probability of survival.
For an even more twisted twist, you can have the player not killed but merely wounded by his sleep-induced car accident. Then the second pillswapper's defense is even stronger. You can hardly blame me for his injury, since I actually saved his life!, he cries. But of course the first pillswapper's defense remains just as strong. I tried to give him cyanide, which he never took. And if he had taken it, he would have died, and it was purely by accident that he didn't take it. Therefore, I may be guilty of attempted murder, but I am not guilty of actual injury.
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Welfare/Warfare
J.H. Huebert suggests that if Libertarians don't trust the government to operate a welfare state, they shouldn't trust it to operate a warfare state.
If you don't trust the state with the power to operate a welfare program, why would you trust it with the power to use weapons of mass destruction against governments it unilaterally determines to be objectionable?
I'm not a hawk, particularly. I do think that it's morally questoinable to coercively spend other people's money on foreign policy projects without their permission. That said, it's important to remember that most Libertarians do support police force and a government-run justice system. While the police generally only employ weapons of limited destruction, the paralell to war can sometimes be quite strong. As I understand it, the best Libertarian position for war is that just as we should be forced to spend money against our will to provide physical protection to our fellow citizens, we should be forced to spend money against our will to provide physical protection to citizens in other nations.
But wait, you cry! In America, we pay for what we get-- that is, we pay for our Justice system and then we benefit from it. But this is only partially so. After all, our Justice system protects babies (if not fetuses) and the destitute as much as it does the rich. So clearly an ability-to-pay is not entirely necessary to qualify for Libertarian justice, even when provided at taxpayer expense.
As I said, there are still cases to be made that a Libertarian should be against most wars (for reasons of aggregate cost or collateral damage) or against all wars as a rule (because of some principle-- though I'm not sure what that principle is), but the question that anti-war Libertarians have to answer is what it is about being American that entitles you to receive government-subsidized protection against coercive power, and why other people are less deserving of that right (at least from us).
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Go Arnold?
(Via Virginia Postrel) Justice Scalia once wrote that the campaign promise is possibly the least binding form of human commitment. Be that as it may, with little other information (rational ignorance being what it is) I am going to quietly root for the candidate who espouses the most things that I believe in. That's a particularly possible strategy for Libertarians because few politicians ever got elected by pretending to believe in a Libertarian agenda. With that said, here are California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger's stances on a series of issues. Interestingly, I agree with him on every one except for possibly gun control, where my own position is sufficiently inchoate and nuanced that I don't really know whether to call it "for gun control". Will he get elected? If so, will he walk the walk?
TAXES-- "I still believe in lower taxes -- and the power of the free market. I still believe in controlling government spending. If it's a bad program, let's get rid of it."
GAYS-- "When it comes to sex, I don't give a s-- what anyone's trip is."
GUN CONTROL-- "I don't run around every day with a gun in my hand. So I want kids to understand the difference: One is make-believe, like we do in movies. But in reality, I'm for gun control. I'm a peace-loving guy."
ENVIRONMENT-- "I will fight for the environment. Nothing to worry about."
GOVERNMENT-- "I come from Austria, a socialist country. There you can hear 18-year- olds talking about their pension. . . . Individualism is incompatible with socialism. I felt I had to come to America where the government wasn't always breathing down your neck or standing on your shoes."
CLONING-- "At the moment, they're dealing with it by putting the religious spin on it. I understand that; there are some people who are religiously fanatic, that feel uncomfortable with it. But I think that's also a mistake."
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Mailbag
Reader and fellow UofCer Maureen Craig writes in to point out two reasons that liberal-thinking people might be more likely to boycott "homophobic" marriage institutions than liberal-thinking people once were to boycott "racist" marriage institutions:
You noted that there weren't large numbers of liberals not marrying to protest anti-miscegenation laws during the Civil Rights Era. However, cohabitation and sex outside of marriage was very much frowned upon before the late 1960s--these practices do not receive nearly that amount of disapproval today. Additionally, the social stigma attached to interracial relationships meant that there simply weren't very many couples that dared to cross the color line--hence, even many civil rights activists didn't personally know any interracial couples. Today, gay couples are fairly common, and most of the heterosexual couples that would be interested in boycotting marriage for political reasons know gay couples. In short, the main differences between the possible situations are:
1. Risk of social disapproval--large in 1960s, small in 2003
2. The laws in question affecting you/friends--unlikely in 1960s, likely in
2003.
I hope this helps answer your question.
These are both extremely good points. I'd like to note that the first point, that it's much easier to be unmarried to the one you live with today, can cut both ways. It might be that everybody who's seriously willing to be unmarried today already is, and thus the people who would be most likely to not marry in protest can't because they're already not married. With that one caveat, I concede that these are too very good points. And I'd be very interested to hear from any readers (unrepresentative a sample though you are) who would consider boycotting marriage in protest if a Defense of Marriage-style Constitutional Amendment passed. As you've all probably figured out, our emails are over on the sidebar, and also at the beginning of each post.
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Confirmation of Bishop Gene Robinson
Mike over at Begging to Differ has a very nice piece on the ordination of the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop. He focuses on
the real story of Gene Robinson and his family.From these articles, one learns that Robinson was born in Kentucky in 1947 to tobacco sharecroppers, and raised in a church and in a community where he learned that he had to refuse his sexual orientation, "that yielding could only lead to suicide or a life of drugs, alcohol and rejection." As Robinson recalls,
"It was so abhorred that those who understood how condemned it was by God just did the logical thing and did themselves in," Robinson said. "Suicide was something we thought the good homosexuals did."
Even after leaving Kentucky for a New York seminary in his early 20s, Robinson did not accept his sexual orientation, but instead spent years in "reparative" therapy, attempting to become ready for a relationship with a woman. He met and fell in love with Boo Martin, and within a month told her of his doubts about his sexuality and of his past relationships with men. With eyes wide open, Boo assured Robinson that they could deal with it if questions about his sexuality resurfaced, and they were married in 1972.
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Who Knew? part Two
In response to my noting that my reading list is almost uniformly "harmful to minors," I've gotten several emails from readers suggesting that maybe some of those books actually should be kept away from children. The main offenders appear to be the works of Heinlein, criticized because they are patronizing to women, and Tender is the Night which the reader suggested is "harmful to anyone."
These comments ignore the worst offenders on the list-- Ada, which deals in not entirely negative terms with a lifelong love and incest beginning at age 12, and Harmful to Minors itself, by Judith Levine, subtitled: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. Just to give you an example, the book ends:
There are many ways even the smallest children can partake of [sex]. Our moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which every child can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires of every child– for accomplishment, connection, meaning, and pleasure– can be marvelously fulfilled.
Note: I don't actually think any of these books should be kept from children at all. I think that children ought to be allowed to read absolutely any book that they wish, ideally with the knowledge of, but not requiring the permission of, their guardians.
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Bloggered
So as Ampersand and several readers have pointed out, our permalinks are currently bloggered. I've tried republishing the site (which I thought one didn't have to do much with Blogger2) and that doesn't seem to help. The permalinks in some of our archives have also been broken for some time. Does anybody have any suggestions for fixing this? Note: I'd rather not hear "switch to Movable Type" unless said person also wants to do all of the technical scut-work for the transition.
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More East Baton Rouge Parish School System deseg
I was optimistic that the ongoing school desegregation case back in Baton Rouge was nearing settlement. But now, from an inaptly titled article, comes word that
Four different people or groups filed comments in federal court Thursday, three of them objecting to at least parts of a proposed settlement of the 47-year-old East Baton Rouge Parish school desegregation case. . . . The three objections came from: The five members of the Education Committee of the local NAACP; Fannie Godwin, a longtime School Board watcher and a former member of the NAACP Education Committee; and Mattie Cox, a local city planner and the mother of a 4-year-old girl. . . .I don't know if I should be grumbling at the NAACP EdCtte or the newspaper that printed this article... it would be too much to ask for a Lexis cite, but a relevant case or precedent might be nice. Or, to simply be realistic, if they could simply name which part of the agreement is infringing on which constitutional right, then I could evaluate their argument. But no, it jumps straight to the rhetoric, leaving all substance behind. Perhaps someone could mention the source of this group's dispute with the NAACP -- one of the original plaintiffs in the suit against the EBRPSS -- which did reservedly approve the agreement.The Education Committee had opposed signing the agreement, but lost in a close vote to the larger membership of the local NAACP at a contentious July 10 meeting.
"We [believe this settlement agreement is grossly unfair to people of African descent and is not in the best interests of the citizens of East Baton Rouge Parish," according to the filing.
They argue that the agreement "would waive the constitutional rights of African-Americans with no semblance of a comparable concession on the part of the defendant." . . .
The committee members also reject the idea that theirs and the interests of other African-Americans are represented by the local NAACP. The group has been named the representative for the class of citizens for whom the case was brought.The committee members urge Judge Brady to require every black citizen be contacted and to allow people to opt out of the settlement.
"Although the African-American community is comprised wholly of people of African descent, it is far from being a homogeneous community," they wrote. "No one individual or organization may presume to speak for the whole African-American community without the informed consent of the community."
Eesh. Contact every black citizen? That's roughly half the city. What on earth would it mean for an individual to be able to "opt out" of a parish-wide deseg agreement? There's still going to be just one public school system.
Finally,
The five education committee members are particularly upset that the state of Louisiana considers Teach for America and Teach Baton Rouge teachers "highly qualified." . . . But the NAACP Education Committee members say highly qualified should mean fully certified, "culturally competent," and "capable of addressing different learning styles."I understand that certification is important, but at the end of the day, I don't care if you've got a certificate or not, if you can do anything to address the deplorable shortage of competent calculus teachers. And if the teacher actually knows American History and can teach it well, I personally don't care if he's a law prof, dismissed from LSU in disgrace for giving scholarships earmarked for minorities to members of his (white) frat. I'll understand if others are upset at the latter, though.
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Since you asked
The following books from my quotes page are harmful to minors in Arkansas, according to Amanda:
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless
Antigone
The Blind Assassin
The Handmaid's Tale
Oryx and Crake
Chimera
Being Good
Possession
If on a winter's night a traveller. . .
The Baron in the Trees
The Name of the Rose
Tender is the Night
The End of the Affair
The Heart of the Matter
The Quiet American
The Cat Who Walked Through Walls
The Door Into Summer
Friday
Glory Road
To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Herodotus's Histories
High Fidelity
How to be Good
The Institute for Justice's brief in Lawrence v. Texas
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Harmful to Minors
The General in his Labyrinth
Love in the Time of Cholera
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Modern Gentleman
Ada (boy is it ever!)
Modern Manners
The Club Dumas
The Fountainhead
Bonjour Tristesse
Othello
Arcadia
Indian Ink
The Invention of Love
Jumpers
Night and Day
The Real Thing
Voyage
All the King's Men
To name just a few...
As you can see, you shouldn't let me or my literary tastes near your children.
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