An ongoing review of politics and culture

Best Practices In Education

Most of us remember that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2

But why?

Via François Taddei comes this wonderful video:

I’m willing to bet none of us were taught it like that, and yet once you see it it’s so obvious. It’s one of those “A-HA!” type moments.

It reminds me of reading about KIPP schools in Work Hard, Be Nice and reading that the schools had turned the multiplication tables into sing-song ditties that the entire class sings, which of course makes it much easier for children to remember. (I still remember the torture it was to learn multiplication tables as a child, and I still don’t know them. If you ask me what 4×8 is, I do the math in my head.)

There’s of course an important policy point to be made about all this: I’m willing to bet all the money in my pocket that if a fry cook at McDonald’s comes up with a faster way to make a Big Mac, his manager will notice, who will get his team to use it, and the information will trickle up to his manager and so on, and then trickle down and a year later all McDonald’s fry cooks around the world will be using the new, faster Big Mac cooking technique.

Such are the virtues of the competitive sector. Not all private sector companies are like that. Much has been written in the business literature about kanban, the process of continuous incremental improvement which was so instrumental in the trouncing of US automakers by Japanese automakers. Elsewhere, I’ve described bureaucracies as “Institutions which do not see themselves as being under competitive pressure.” In the case of Toyota vs GM, GM became a bureaucracy because it forgot it was under competitive pressure, while Toyota was very aware that it was competing with GM and so the impetus to innovate and then broadly apply best practices was felt throughout the organization.

Forgive me for thinking this is precisely a feature public educational systems lack.

Why Voting On "The Issues" Is Stupid And It's Fine If Voters Are Uninformed

There are tropes popular among elite watchers of electoral contests that are treated as self-evident and that I think are self-evidently wrong and portray a misunderstanding of how democratic elections and governments work.

The first is the idea that voters should vote based on “the issues” and that voting for/against a candidate based on her character is silly.

The ideal voter, in this scheme, would print out all the 10-point plans on the various candidates’ websites, read them, and then make an informed decision as to which policies she likes more. Conversely, she should utterly disregard attack ads pointing out that this guy is a philanderer and that guy is a hypocrite.

This is completely backward to me, and here’s why: what determines policies enacted by a head of government are her political coalitions and managerial/political skills, not her position papers.

Remember when Barack Obama stood apart in the Democratic primary by coming out with a mandate-less healthcare plan? And we ended up with a healthcare law that includes a mandate? It’s not that Barack Obama is a “flip-flopper” or had a change of heart or what have you, it’s that the healthcare plan that ended up being enacted was a function of political debates and coalition-building in the Congress. Conversely, whatever differences there might have been to a plan enacted under President Rodham Clinton would not have been due to the differences in whatever was on her campaign website, but to her managerial/political skill at navigating Congress and public opinion. And the reason why there was a universal healthcare bill to begin with was that the liberal/progressive movement had been chomping at the bit for decades for political circumstances that would allow for such a bill. What mattered was not any candidate’s “issues”, but the political context and the managerial/political skills of the chief executive. And anyone who expected otherwise betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of how American (indeed, democratic) government works.

“The issues”, in other words, are merely positional signaling, ie marketing, ie akin to the TV ads that sophisticated political watchers so disdain.

And yet, to most higher-educated politics watchers, a voter who had said “Well, I’ve read Clinton and Obama’s position papers on healthcare, and I’m going to vote for Clinton/Obama because I’m for/against a mandate” would have been applauded as sober and reasonable, while a voter who had said “Well, I’m going to vote for Obama because he seems more, put together, you know, more charismatic” would have been the subject of Twitter snark. But it strikes me as a much sounder basis for choosing a chief executive to point to their level-headedness and charisma—character traits that one assumes useful to running a government—than any 10-point plan, which is by definition a list of things that won’t happen.

Beyond broad strokes (are they “conservative” or “moderate” or “progressive”—in other words, what kind of coalition will they put in charge of the executive?) and a handful handful of litmus tests (it’s completely reasonable to refuse to vote for someone who advocates something you find abhorrent, whether that’s bank bailouts or foreign wars or what have you) “the issues” are useless in picking a candidate.

As I’ve written before, 99% of what presidents do is appointing and firing people who do the actual work of government. The remaining 1% is the most intangible and the most important—the Cuban-missile-crisis-type decisions, the do-we-go-to-war-with-Iraq-type decisions.

For determining who’s better at either of those, “the issues” are useless. And character, on the other hand, that thing that we are told should be irrelevant, is (nearly) everything. It’s very hard to judge a person’s character, but looking at their biography, their public appearances and so forth is going to give you a better indication than “the issues.”

Famously, George W. Bush campaigned on a “humble” foreign policy, and gave us anything but. Is it because “Bush lied and people died”? Of course not. It’s because 9/11 happened. If you cared about foreign policy, the relevant question wasn’t “Do I agree more with Bush/Gore/McCain?” but “Who has the character to respond more intelligently and competently to the unknown crises that are bound to happen?”

Deciding that based on TV ads, campaign appearances, little details like whether they seem honest, and so forth, is highly imperfect. But it’s a heck of a lot more reliable than “the issues.”

This brings up the broader question about whether voters should be “informed”. Yes, they should be!, we are told. A popular “contrarian” view we see once in a while is that uninformed and apathetic voters should just stay home if they can’t bothered to make an “informed” choice. But, again, this seems to me to miss how democracy works.

Democracy, as a political regime, is worthwhile because it has given us over the long run much superior policy and economic outcomes than alternative regimes. Yes, Singapore is better run and richer than Greece, but on the whole and over the long term, democracies tend to be freeer and more prosperous than non-democratic regimes.

The main reason for that is quite simply the following: leaders who deliver bad outcomes get fired, no excuses. That’s it. It’s the only regime we know where, at regular intervals, if most households feel that things are getting worse, whoever runs the government is out. The “no excuses” part is important, too. What matters is how implacable it is.

In the corporate world, e.g. Cisco CEO John Chambers has been given a free pass for over a decade by supposedly sophisticated investors for not lifting the company’s stock price because he came in during the tech bubble and so has to deal with circumstances out of his control. Supposedly unsophisticated voters, meanwhile, are much too clever to grade on a curve. It doesn’t matter that you “inherited the recession from Bush”—fix it, and fix it now, or you’re out.

This is a wonderful spur to providing good outcomes, and on the long run, in most cases, it works. If we could invent a regime that chose leaders any other way but had the crucial bad-performance-gets-you-fired feature, it would deliver superb outcomes over the long run. (Arguably, this is what the Chinese Communist Party is trying to build, at least if they’re smart.) People talk about a “democratic deficit” in Britain because the constituency, first-past-the-post system “underrepresents” some parties in Parliament and causes a relatively low number of swing voters in key constituencies to decide the fate of the country, but the system works nearly flawlessly: there was an economic crisis under Labour, and now Labour is out, and if the Conservative-LibDem coalition doesn’t fix it, they’ll be out in the next election, as they are well aware. Same thing with the Electoral College in the US.

Therefore, the only question you need to be able to answer when voting in an election is this: Do I feel better now than I did last time I voted? That’s it. You don’t need a PhD. Heck, you don’t even need to be 18. It’s the famous Reagan appeal.

Over the long run, it’s probably better to have a more informed polity, as many political decisions need to be made with the assent of the governed and it helps that the governed have good ideas/notions, but for the specific duty of voting for a president/governing party, these things really don’t matter. Not to mention the fact that being “educated” correlates with positions on social and other issues that are moral/aesthetic/tribal and have on the merits nothing to do with how educated one is, and the fact that the highly educated tend to have a bias toward believing that other highly educated people should run things, a bias which in my view the last decade has thoroughly debunked (in this sense, I would much rather be governed by the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty).

So, in sum, I hope I’ve disabused you of a few notions and convinced you of the following:

• Don’t vote on the issues, vote on character.
• Don’t complain that fellow voters are uninformed, it means the system’s working.

Of CEOs, Private Equity Titans and presidents

Jim Manzi has had an excellent discussion on the relation between Mitt Romney’s professional background and what he might be like as a president. Megan McArdle has also been discussing this at length.

I’ve made no secret that I think Mitt Romney should not get the GOP nomination, as now looks inevitable, and should not be the next President, as looks likely if the economy does not improve over the next year (but, on this score, I’ll probably be lucky).

I believe that the fundamental and egregious dishonesty that has characterized every step of his political career to date ought to disqualify him from city dogcatcher, let alone wielding the launch codes.

All that said, I think the background of a Harvard JD/MBA, private equity investor and occasional turnaround CEO is great for running the executive branch.

The job of a President is basically two-fold: getting his agenda through the legislative branch, and running the executive branch. The former mostly requires political skill.

As to the latter, which is incredibly important in our era of the Imperial Presidency, a widely spread idea is that in the private sector you learn “management skills” and how to “get things done”. That’s the President-as-Jack-Welch meme. I think that’s largely an illusion for three reasons:

• The public sector works very differently from the private sector;
• The Federal government of the United States is immensely more complex than any private sector business;
• Most “management skills”, at least as taught in business schools, are largely a crock.

CEOs actually have much more leeway in terms of management than do presidents. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously spends a few weeks each year working in Amazon warehouses to get a better understanding of that side of the business and improve it. President Romney isn’t going to intern in the Patent Office for two weeks to see how applications could be streamlined. A CEO can decide to spin off, merge, or shut down departments. If President Romney (or Perry) wants to shut down the Commerce Department, he’s going to need an Act of Congress.

99% of the work the President does as manager of the executive work is the following: – Setting priorities – Hiring and firing

The other 1% are the Big Decisions, that are the least frequent but also the most important. It’s the part that can’t be taught and where the background is irrelevant.

In other words, the President behaves much more like an “executive chairman” of a company who has a hand over major strategic decisions than a CEO who runs it day to day.

This is also very similar to what a private equity investor does in a buyout: analyze the business, decide on a strategy and hire, retain (and fire) managers. He should have a “nuts and bolts” understanding of the business, but he’s not going to go into the factory to make widgets or tell the factory manager how to make widgets.

In other words, to reprise Ronald Reagan’s excellent phrase, to be a good manager of the executive branch, a President should know who to trust, and how to verify. These are also the skills a (good) private equity investor has in spades. Mitt Romney has decades of experience analyzing stuff and then hiring, holding to account and firing people.

Of course, when someone who is also a fundamentally dishonest liar with obvious contempt for his fellow citizens has these excellent skills, it’s an additional argument AGAINST nominating them to the position where they would have the power to detain fellow citizens indefinitely, appoint judges to the federal bench, and start wars.

But the question of whether Mitt Romney would make a good president is distinct from the question of whether a co-founder of a successful private equity firm, as such, would be suited to managing the executive branch.

A long disquisition on the death penalty that ultimately doesn't resolve anything

The death penalty is again in the news and on Twitter because of the execution of Troy Davis. It seems apparent that there is more than a reasonable doubt that Davis was in fact innocent and so that whatever one’s position on the death penalty, this was an unconscionable miscarriage of justice.

And indeed I should stress that everyone, regardless of position on the death penalty, indeed especially advocates of death penalty, should be strident advocates for due process and stringent standards of evidence.

But predictably enough people are also using this time to argue (or rather, hammer on) against the death penalty.

I ultimately and reluctantly support the death penalty, but perhaps more importantly I just think most of the arguments against the death penalty are bunk. (To be sure, most of the arguments for the death penalty are also bunk.) It reminds me of when I was against the Iraq War, and also against the arguments against the Iraq War.

The arguments most often brought up against the death penalty are, in my view, bunk. There’s only one valid argument against the death penalty. It’s also the one least often brought up.

So after reviewing some of the wrongheaded arguments against the death penalty, I hope to argue that the death penalty is preferable to alternatives, or at least justifiable and defensible.

Frustratingly, I had written many pages about this a while ago but lost them in a laptop theft, so I will try to breeze through the arguments and might be curt.

Here are some of the arguments we hear against the death penalty:

The death penalty is not a deterrent. That’s right. There is strong evidence to back this up. But it presupposes that deterrence is the only goal of judicial punishment, which I don’t think is correct. More on which below.

The death penalty is vengeance. No it’s not. If you brutally beat, torture and murder someone, vengeance is to brutally beat, torture and murder you. That’s what “an eye for an eye” means. Affording you all the privileges of due process, an attorney, human detention at trial, and as painless an execution as we can, all of which we should certainly do, might be bad, but it is just not vengeance. In a sense, it is even an opposite of vengeance, which is motivated by rage and hatred, whereas the death penalty carried out under judicial due process is (must be) dispassionate and careful.

The state should not have the power to kill people. This is a facially conservative/libertarian argument; a more liberal version goes something like a civilized society should not have to rely on killing. Again, this strikes me as so self-evidently bunk that I don’t understand why smart people say this stuff. Every society in recorded history that I’m aware of makes allowances for lawful killing. Exemples of society-sanctioned lawful killing include self-defense, defense of an other, police and military action. These things are highly regulated (literally, in the sense that there are rules on when self defense or discharge of a police firearm or war are legal) but I’m aware of no society that does not allow the killing of its members under certain circumstances, including through arms of the state. These days, even London bobbies have guns. And few proponents of this argument against the death penalty argue for the unilateral disbanding of the military and law enforcement, or the immorality/illegality of self-defense.

I seem to remember Will Wilkinson, who makes the vengeance argument here, arguing elsewhere that soldiers who kill under the laws of war are murderers. Which… fine. If that’s where he is, I’m not going to be able to convince him of anything. But I’ll point out that while libertarians might bristle at any kind of killing by the arms of the state, they tend to be fans of the right of self defense, and while that is not killing by the arm of the state, it is certainly state-sanctioned killing.

The death penalty is cruel. It certainly is. It certainly is, and yet like any policy it must not be weighed in a vacuum but in relation to alternatives.

I remember then-presidential John Kerry trying to explain his opposition to the death penalty in terms that swing voters might agree to. The alternative to the death penalty, life imprisonment, is so hard, so cruel, that it’s actually worse punishment than the death penalty, Kerry said (my words, not his). I agree with John Kerry! I happen to draw the opposite conclusion. And here we get to arguments for the death penalty.

I cannot imagine punishment more cruel than life imprisonment, or indeed, any kind of extended imprisonment. It seems to me to be incredibly, furiously antagonistic to human dignity.

It seems to be a fact that any given society will have cold-blooded, inexcusable killers of shocking cruelty. And we all seem to agree that these people should be punished. How do we suitably punish them? The question then becomes not, is this punishment cruel or that punishment cruel—to some extent, all are. The question would be better phrased, at what threshold of cruelty should civilized society blanch, and where do possible punishments fall below or above that threshold.

And it is my sincere conviction that this threshold should be somewhere below life imprisonment. And therefore, because there needs to be some ultimate punishment for the most heinous crime, that threshold should be somewhere above the death penalty.

But it’s not just about what I believe, it’s about what society should believe. And I believe there are important society-wide considerations in favor of the death penalty.

They go something like this. (Argument two.)

When I was a first-year student in law school, we spoke about the difference between civil law and penal (criminal) law. The reason we have two different legal systems is because civil law is about protecting individual persons’ interests, while penal law is about protecting society’s values. It was not always thus: under some ancient moral codes, after being convicted of a crime you could either face punishment or “reimburse” the victim’s family, and in some societies “blood money” is still a thing. I believe this distinction is one of the features of civilizational progress.

To take an academic example: suppose I kill an unattached, homeless vagrant. Why should I be punished? Whose interests are harmed? If the victim has no loved ones, who can claim reparation? And under a morally blind, utilitarian argument, you can made the case that I’ve actually helped society’s material interest by removing a net burden. And yet, we decide that I should face punishment. Not because of any utilitarian calculus, but because we as a society have decided that we hold life to be an important value and that killing is gravely offensive and deserves to be punished.

(You could make some utilitarian arguments against wanton vagrant-killing: maybe that person is homeless but will one day discover a curse against cancer, so society should preserve the option value of the homeless becoming productive members of society; or maybe there’s a likelihood that someone who kills vagrants will move on to killing “valuable” members of society and so punishing vagrant killing is a deterrent against “actually harmful” killing. Whatever. These arguments make some sense, but if you believe that they’re the actual reasons why we punish killing vagrants, I suggest you give up your tenured professorship and sample the real world.)

Penal law is not about retribution. We don’t have the death penalty (as seen above) because of “an eye for an eye.” And though it should definitely have deterrence as a strong objective, the only criterion for penal law is not deterrence. Penal law is ultimately about a society deciding the hierarchy of its values.

And this is where the second argument against death penalty comes in: there is something skewed about a liberal, democratic society, saying, in essence: “We won’t take your life because that’s just so awful, but we reserve the right to take away your liberty in the most complete way imaginable.” It suggests that that society places life as a more important value than liberty. I submit that this is a serious and bad thing for a democratic society.

Life is a very important value. I want to live in a society that values life highly. But it is not, and cannot be, the most important value under any conceivable moral order. And particularly in any democratic order.

I just want to underline this point for my libertarian and pseudo-libertarian friends: you should be concerned about a society that says “Taking your life is beyond the pale, but taking your freedom is not.” That’s backwards.

So, that’s my two points in favor of the death penalty:

• Prison is immoral, cruel and unjust, and particularly life imprisonment. If we want to talk about what punishments are too cruel and beyond the pale, and we should, extended prison terms strike me as much more cruel than the death penalty.
• A free society should reflect in its laws the judgement that liberty is a higher value than life, though life is very important.

You might say that my argument for the death penalty as an alternative to prison is an argument against prison, not for the death penalty, but the thing is that there are evil, inexcusable murderers in the world. The question is what to do with them and, again, how far we are willing to go in terms of cruelty toward them. There might be an insanity defense for Anders Breivik, but not for Lawrence Brewer.

I just want to stress how horrible prison is. Except perhaps in Scandinavia, I’m not aware of any “good” prison, anywhere. They are everywhere a form of torture. Everywhere, violence and rape are rife. Everywhere, they are a laboratory and a school of crime. They are not only torture, not only institutionalized torture, but grotesquely and intrinsically so. And everywhere, the way politics work ensures that they will remain this way, because there will never be strong coalitions in favor of making prison “livable”, if that were possible. And even if it is, on principle alone, it remains an institution that is profoundly shocking to any notion of freedom. There is an argument for short and “medium” prison terms as punishment and rehabilitation, but I don’t believe there is one, in a democratic society, for very long ones.

“We will torture you with no reprieve for 20 years, but we won’t kill you, that would be too cruel.” Give me a break.

So that’s my case against prison, and for the death penalty.

All that being said, I haven’t broached a final argument against the death penalty, which is the risk of a miscarriage of justice. The death penalty is irreversible, and in the case of a miscarriage of justice there can be no reparation to the condemned.

And my answer to that is… That there’s no good answer. It is surely better to let a hundred guilty men go free than let one hang, and the mind reels at the thought of an innocent man hanging, as they surely have throughout history. That’s the reason why John Paul II personally opposed the death penalty. It’s also the reason why my parents and my wife do.

There are rejoinders: someone who is wrongly executed cannot ever be compensated, but can someone who was wrongly imprisoned for 10 years ever truly be compensated in any meaningful way? Punishment of the innocent is terrible to contemplate whatever the punishment, and yet society must punish and will always be imperfect. With increasing prosperity and improving evidentiary science miscarriages should only become less likely, not more.

Because of the concerns outlined above, I ultimately and reluctantly still come down on the side of the death penalty, but I don’t think there’s a logical “proof” that the possibility of miscarriage of justice can be overcome. I think it comes down to personal conviction and a personal weighing of values. If this is the reason why you oppose the death penalty, I disagree with you….and yet I can’t disagree with you.

(Going back to Troy Davis, this case becomes even stronger when it’s limited to the contemporary American criminal justice system, which is frightful in many ways.)

So there you go. A long disquisition on the death penalty that ultimately doesn’t solve anything. But I hope it does slay a few wrongheaded ideas and puts forward some useful ones, about how we think of legal punishment, freedom and hierarchies of value.

Industrial Policy Bureaucrats As Hedge Fund Managers

An old saw in finance research is what you might call the “monkeys at a typewriter” problem. If you put an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters, one of them is going to bang out Hamlet. Does that mean that monkey is a great writer?

Or, if you put a thousand people in a room and tell them to flip coins, one of them is going to flip heads 10 times in a row. Does this mean this person has particular skill in flipping coins?

By the same token, if a hedge fund manager has even a long track record of success, is that due to skill or to random chance?

It’s possible to see how this applies to industrial policy. If you have over a hundred countries pursuing industrial policy for the past 60 years, even by random chance a handful of those countries are going to end up with successful policies in a number of key areas. But that shouldn’t strike us as an endorsement of industrial policy as such, any more than we should listen to Ray Dalio when he says correlation doesn’t exist.

Looking at my own country, I’m struck by how right we’ve gotten some policies (VAT, energy, transportation) and how wrong we’ve gotten others. Is there some overriding logic behind those successes and failures that another country could draw inspiration from to replicate the successes and not the failures? It’s doubtful, at least.

No, illegal file-sharing is not theft

Matt Yglesias seems to have gotten himself into a debate about whether illegal file-sharing is stealing. And he’s absolutely right: it’s not theft.

As in the debate about whether corporations are persons, I think it’s important to understand that words have meaning.

One of the cool things about France’s civil law system is that it places a premium on defining things precisely, and thus I’ve never seen a better definition of “theft” than that of the French Penal Code: the fraudulent subtraction of another person’s property.

The word “subtraction” here, of course, is key. To steal something is to fraudulently subtract from their property. With file sharing, of course, no subtraction occurs, since the file is copied.

And under French law, illegal file sharing falls under the rubric of counterfeiting, which I think is accurate. If you create a false document, you are not stealing anything from anyone, but you are fraudulently impinging on legal rights.

Neoliberal fascism

Thanks to Scenester David Sessions for alerting me that Friend of the Scene Freddie thinks I’m a neoliberal fascist because I wrote a column arguing for France to

Insert here a joke about how I don’t know which label to be most offended by.

I’ll only make a couple points, one about process and one about content.

First of all, about process. I am accused of endorsing fascism because I wrote a column urging the President of France to take rapid action to reform France’s economy.

I urge the president to “legislate by decree”—this sounds fearsome, but the process of “ordinances” is routinely used to legislate in France. What happens is that Parliament votes a law that enables the government to pass decrees that have the strength of law, on a certain topic and for a certain period, and after that the decrees have to be ratified by Parliament again to permanently gain the force of law. That’s not how a bill becomes a law in the US, but it is still perfectly consistent with legal democratic process. I’m sure there are also “fast-track” procedures in the US Congress.

I also suggest in one throwaway line that the President might wish to exercise the special powers clause of the French Constitution. It’s unlikely that he would be allowed to do so because, as a Freddie commenter points out, there are strict judicial controls on these war powers.

Second of all, about content. My “neoliberal fascist” policy recommendations for France are the following: enormous short-term stimulus spending, a revenue-neutral overhaul of the tax code and the end of various professional guilds and price controls. I don’t even say anything about unions. This puts me pretty much in line with that other sellout, liberal in name only, Paul Krugman (see e.g. here re: rent controls ).

I mean, we can have different views about financial reform and progressive taxation or what have you, but it’s pretty striking that someone would think calling for no tax cuts and a dramatic increase in government spending (I throw out a figure equivalent of 10% of France’s GDP) is neoliberal bitter medicine.

But hey, at least we now know it’s not only conservatives who suffer from epistemic closure.

The Physics of the Anti-Abortion Movement

Matt Yglesias, a writer whose work I greatly admire, continues to (willfully or not) misrepresent the views of pro-lifers.

He wrote a post last week on Ron Paul’s pro-life stance and its compatibility with his (professed?) libertarianism, and writes:

some people want to tell me that if you accept the erroneous metaphysics of the anti-abortion movement, that then treating women who terminate pregnancies as criminals makes perfect libertarian sense. For one thing, I don’t accept the erroneous metaphysics of the anti-abortion movement.

There’s a crucial point to be made here, which, if it were understood better by pro-choicers, would lead the abortion debate in a much saner direction. Here it is, and I can’t state it emphatically enough: the pro-life position has nothing to do with metaphysics.

In the contemporary United States a lot of people who hold pro-life views are also religious folks, and this understandably leads a lot of pro-choicers to believe that pro-life views are religious in nature, to the point where it’s become a sort of axiom.

But the biological, moral and legal status of the unborn child isn’t a question of metaphysics.

Whether life begins at conception isn’t a matter of religious faith, it’s a scientific question, and the answer isn’t very hard. Of course, you can choose to disbelieve it, just like you can choose to not to believe that CO2 molecules redirect infrared variations.

Now, science isn’t a moral guide. The fact that a fetus is a living human being doesn’t necessarily entail that it should receive legal protection. But again, resolving this issue requires no recourse to metaphysics.

It requires asking what are the criteria for qualifying as a person endowed with rights.

At first blush, it seems to me and many others that the entire project of the Enlightenment and modern Western civilization is premised on the idea that every single human being has certain inalienable rights. That these rights are not earned through accomplishment or inherited from forebears but that they are, well, universal, received simply by virtue of being human, and that it is incumbent on any just, or at least liberal, government to protect the rights of all human beings under its writ, not just the most visible.

And of course, that’s a wholly debatable argument. For most of human history the idea of universal human rights was unthinkable and then laughable and even now some people dispute its relevance. We find many examples throughout history of societies with classes of people bereft of rights, including societies ostensibly founded on liberal principles.

And we can say all sorts of things like, well, maybe a fetus has a right to life, but a woman’s right to not be pregnant is stronger.

We can talk about all sorts of things.

But the idea that the pro-life argument is based in metaphysics is false, and I wish that people would stop perpetuating it. Of course, perpetuating it is politically advantageous for pro-choicers as it frees them from talking about the relevant questions and allows them to instead brush off their opponents’ arguments as “erroneous metaphysics.”

PEG Answers Bill Keller On Religion

Retiring New York Times editor Bill Keller has a column out arguing that candidates should be asked “tougher” questions about their religion.

Tim Carney mocked the column for labeling the Catholic Rick Santorum an Evangelical Christian, and indeed it’s easy to mock the secular Times as seeing all Christians as the same. And sure, though he never comes out and says it, it seems that there’s a bit of a “let’s pin those crazy theocrats” undercurrent to Mr Keller’s column. But I do think the column’s central point — that religion in general, and Presidential candidates’ in particular, matters, and thus should be treated seriously — is quite right.

If “hard secularists” and religiously-motivated political actors have one thing in common, it’s that they think religion is important, and that’s as good a starting point for discussion as any.

In a blog post attendant to the column, Mr Keller lays out a few questions he’d like presidential candidates to answer. Although I haven’t officially formed my exploratory committee, allow me to say how I would answer if I was a presidential candidate. (And also how I would like a Christian presidential candidate to answer.)

1. Is it fair to question presidential candidates about details of their faith?

It’s absolutely fair to question presidential candidates about anything that could affect what kind of president they will be.

2. Is it fair to question candidates about controversial remarks made by their pastors, mentors, close associates or thinkers whose books they recommend?

Sure.

3. (a) Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a “Christian nation” or “Judeo-Christian nation?” (b) What does that mean in practice?

I’m not sure what I can say about the words of unnamed “religious leaders.”

I can tell you what I think.

I think that the principles on which America was founded draw on a number of intellectual traditions, including ideas that are common to the Judeo-Christian faiths. I think that the ideals of self-determination and individualism, and indeed of the separation of church and state, have many roots, but one of the main roots is the Bible. It was Jesus who said his kingdom is not of this world, and who said we should give back to Cesar what belongs to Cesar, and implicit in the New Testament is the idea that a person’s choices determine their fate, not their station at birth.

I think that many people came to America specifically to practice their religion in peace and freedom, and that therefore our history and collective imagination is weaved through with religious fervor in a way that is unique among nations, and that this is good. I think that religion plays a positive role in American society and culture in getting people to care for their fellow Americans, their communities, and yes, sometimes to work towards policies that they believe are best for the common good.

I think that America should and does welcome everyone, regardless of religious belief or ethnicity. I think that the fact that many of our principles come from the Judeo-Christian tradition does not mean that they’re not universal; indeed, the opposite.

4. If you encounter a conflict between your faith and the Constitution and laws of the United States, how would you resolve it? Has that happened, in your experience?

Here’s the oath of office of the president: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s the job I aspire to.

I also aspire to promote policies that, to my mind, are the best policies for the common good of the American people. I hope to make the case for these policies on grounds that all Americans can understand. And I hope that’s how Americans will judge me.

5. (a) Would you have any hesitation about appointing a Muslim to the federal bench? (b) What about an atheist?

Here are my criteria for nominating judges: whether I agree with their philosophy of legal interpretation; whether I think they are outstanding Americans of great integrity.

6. Are Mormons Christians, in your view? Should the fact that Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons influence how we think of them as candidates?

I honestly don’t care.

7. What do you think of the evangelical Christian movement known as Dominionism and the idea that Christians, and only Christians, should hold dominion over the secular institutions of the earth?

I think that Dominionism exists largely in the minds of a few agitated cooks and of a lot of media editors based on the coasts of the United States.

And for the record, no, I don’t think Christians, and only Christians, should be able to hold political office. That would be unconstitutional, un-American. And also very stupid.

8. (a) What is your attitude toward the theory of evolution? (b) Do you believe it should be taught in public schools?

a) My attitude toward the theory of evolution is that as far as I can tell it’s settled science, and so I accept it as such. For the record, this is also the stance of the Catholic Church to which I belong. But that’s not why I accept evolution as settled science.

b) I think public schools should teach all kinds of sciences.

9. Do you believe it is proper for teachers to lead students in prayer in public schools?

The federal government’s deficit last year was over a trillion dollars. The national debt is almost fifteen trillion dollars. The unemployment rate is 9.1%. I can’t even keep track of the number of foreign wars we’re in (do drone strikes over Yemen count?).

All of which is to say: I really, really don’t care.

Worst Case Paul

TAS Alum Conor Friedersdorf asks a very sensible question: what’s the worst thing that could happen in a Ron Paul presidency?

Salon’s Alex Pareene gamely takes up the gauntlet, and I largely agree with his diagnosis, although, of course, not always with his characterization of the diagnosis.

This, in particular, is regrettable but probably true:

Hacks with contempt for good government make bad political appointees, as Bush taught us. Ideologues actively opposed to the existence of a powerful federal government probably make worse ones.

In all likelihood a Paul presidency would start with a lot of gridlock and end with Congress basically taking over the country and overriding Paul’s veto pen. And anything that can get two thirds of Congress is certainly not going to be great, but it’s probably not going to be terrible, either.

But, as I told Conor on Twitter, the almost greek tragedy-like dilemma of a Paul presidency would be that to get anything he believes in done, Paul would have to embrace and extend the imperial presidency he so obviously detests.

And if Paul makes this Faustian bargain, then he becomes much more dangerous.

So here’s the worst case scenario of a Paul presidency, as I can see it.

President Paul and his appointees, realizing that they can’t end the Fed through Congress, decide to launch a bunch of far-reaching federal investigations of the Fed. Maybe a true-believin’ special prosecutor is appointed. American law being set up in such a way that if you investigate deeply enough you’ll always find something illegal someone did, the Fed is incapacitated. Maybe key figures and even Bernanke are driven to resignation and put before a Grand Jury but maybe it just makes it impossible for them to do their work.

Then an external shock—or just the market freakout caused by unleashing the Spanish Inquisition on the Fed—causes a financial collapse. Obviously a bailout is not forthcoming, nor is easy money. Maybe it’s not the banks that fail but investors who stop trusting the dollar and buying treasuries. (In which case the banks would fail, too.) The financial collapse turns into another Great Depression.

Fin.

You can also come up with a scenario under which prematurely yanking troops from Afghanistan ends up with such chaos that Pakistan becomes a failed state and nukes end up in the hands of terrorists. (And India invades to prevent that and China meddles and Paul is like “What? It’s way over there! Not our problem!”) But that’s probably fairly unlikely.

The most likely scenario is still nothing-happens-for-four-years. But most people who underestimated Ron Paul’s ability to do damage have been surprised.

Speaking of science and policy

Since we’re talking about the politics of science and the limits between the two…

There’s plenty of scientific advances I wish the US conservative movement would not be so uncomfortable about, like anthropogenic climate change and evolution.

If there’s one scientific fact I do wish, however, that the American left would come to grips with, it’s this one: that an embryo is a human being, by any reasonable definition of those words.

Now, just like recognizing the reality of the warming of the planet does not mean embracing a carbon command economy, recognizing the fact that a unicellular human being is still a human being does not automatically entail embracing the pro-life position.

As Jim rightly notes, the borders of actual science are not as wide as many people seem to think. What kinds of human beings should get which rights is a moral and political decision, not a scientific one.

But if we’re going to insist (as we should) on political actors embracing scientific consensus, we should do so consistently.

Why US global hegemony is here to stay

Inspired by a Tumblr conversation, I wrote a piece on Business Insider explaining why US global hegemony is here to stay, and why that’s a great thing, not just for the world but for the US.

The problem with Ron Paul and other isolationists (and their opponents) is that they’re looking at the problem the wrong way and missing the forest for the trees.

They’re missing the forest for the trees because the part about America’s global military power isn’t the part that fights wars. It’s the much, much bigger part that doesn’t fight any war.

And they’re looking at it the wrong way, because people make it a debate about politics, when it’s really about economics.

And the economics part of the discussion is important because there is so much overlap between libertarians and isolationists, and this is where the vigor in the isolationist movement comes from.

In a word, libertarians need to come to grips with the fact that global trade (which they love) is only made possible by global American hegemony (which they think they hate).

PEG Leads, The Economist Follows

…Patent edition.

Previous editions: swashbuckling French entrepreneurs and pensions.

Hey, just sayin’.