Lysander Spooner on Occupational Licensing

Speaking of licensing, someone once said,

"no one has yet ever dared advocate, in direct terms, so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor".

Vox on Occupational Licensing

Vox, one of my favorite leftist sites (Matt Yglesias is writing again, yay), does a quality overview of occupational licensing in flip-card form. Included is one of the best alternative ideas to licensing I’ve ever heard but only economists seem to talk about, certification:

Certification also requires education, training, and examinations. But there's a big difference: certification is voluntary. You can’t work without a license; you can work without being certified.

For example, to be certified as a surgeon, a medical doctor needs to complete a surgical residency, pass oral and written exams, and maintain that certification with renewal training and exams. But a doctor who has not been certified can legally perform surgery.

Gun Rights in a Bumper Sticker

Both guns and killers can both be causes of innocent deaths. We don't have to choose between them.
Since guns are an effective way of killing people, I expect the availability and cheapness of new and better guns to correlate with people killed.

On some margin, guns discourage deaths. In general though, I don' t think the American public are a bunch of Clint Eastwoods. So I don't think that guns prevent more violence than they cause.

Safety is not the only metric we care about. If you get familiar with risk of death statistics, guns should be low on your list of fears. Since it is already low, reducing gun deaths is relatively low benefit.

Private gun owners the vast majority of which will never hurt anyone spend a lot of money on guns (in the billions $). Thus I expect they derive a lot of utility from owning guns. There's a lot to lose (utility to gun owners) and little to gain (lower risk or gun violence).

It's hard enough to aggregate it into bumper sticker version, but it ends up sounding awful anyway (even though it's true).

"Guns kill people, but not enough to warrant taking them away!"
"Don't buy fewer school shootings by at the price of our guns!"
"My gun probably won't hurt anyone!"

Cure for Cancer Suppressed

I’ve never heard any reason to believe it, that’s the first tier of defense against this kind of thing. Stories are too often believes just because they fit in with someone’s worldview. The story isn’t necessary to someone’s worldview, but merely compatible. Just tell a story – “something bad because money.”

The second tier defense is this – if they make so much money selling a treatment for cancer, imagine how much they could sell a cure for? It makes me wonder why these people think any better product is ever sold. Why sell cell phones when landlines are so lucrative? Why weren’t CDs suppressed because cassette tapes are worth lots of money? But I’m sure cars that run on water are also suppressed because of oil companies.

I think that people being in love with their fantasy view of things is a critical aspect of the human condition – a fallen condition.

Peter Kreeft on Mercy implying Justice

Here is a very good conversation between Peter Kreeft, a catholic whom I’ve grown quite fond of, and a Muslim. The whole thing is good, but I wanted to bring up something Kreeft says around the 34:00 minute mark.

Would you not agree that justice and mercy imply each other? Unless there is a role of justice, mercy is meaningless. Unless you deserve to be punished, it is not merciful to take back the punishment.

He’s saying that mercy is not mercy unless it relieves the penalty of justice But then how can a perfectly just God also be merciful? If punishment is taken back, then that is merciful, but it is not just. If the punishment is not taken back then that is justice, but where is God’s mercy? One answer is that the justice is not set aside for mercy’s sake, but substituted from one to another.

Redefining Stereotypes

Definition: A stereotype is “...a fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or class of people.” (Cardwell, 1996).

"Even if there is a kernel of truth in the stereotype, you're still applying a generalization about a group to an individual, which is always incorrect," says Bargh.

When I google, “psychology stereotypes”, I believe I am witnessing an attempt to reconcile what people want to be true with what they want to be good. Somehow, true bad stereotypes doesn’t fit what anyone wants to believe, so the definition switches.

In order to maintain that stereotypes are false, these psychological articles define stereotypes as a generalization, and generalization as over-generalization or universalization. This is not how anyone ever defines generalization anywhere else. Some things are true in general. But in the context of stereotypes, generalizations become defined in a way to make them necessarily false.

Of course, in practice this is not the definition of the kind of stereotypes people cringe at. What violates the moral feelings is the idea of any generalization, not over-generalization or universalization. The definition changes in order to maintain the broader object of moral disgust.

Some stereotypes are true. I don’t think people want them to be, so they offer a definition that makes stereotypes necessarily false. The consistent thing to do is to bite the bullet and confess the simple logic that information is scarce so we have to employ generalizations on some level, many of these generalizations are about other people, and neglecting to employ these generalizations leads to poorer decisions than we otherwise could be making. Ignoring valid stereotypes leads to poorer decisions. You can call that immoral if you like, but don’t twist the definition to reconcile your contradictory moral intuitions against stereotyping and for believing true things.

 

By the way, stereotypes don’t come from an evil guy making stuff up in a tower. They emerge from our social order, so it would make a lot of sense that stereotypes were correlated with truth.

Don Boudreaux on whether a Few Extra Bucks Matters to Rich People

Boudreaux at Café Hayek makes a good point.

When I first tuned in to the “discussion,” the learned sports panelists were debating the appropriate penalty that the National Basketball Association should impose on L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling for his racist remarks.  All agreed that the penalty should be astronomically high because (in the words of one of the sports-talkers) “two million dollars means nothing to a billionaire like Sterling.”

The very next topic the sports-talkers turned to was the National Football League’s annual draft of college football players.  The sports-talkers unanimously and vigorously agreed with each other that the only reason the N.F.L. owners make such a spectacle of their association’s annual draft is to “squeeze every penny of profit from the fans” (to quote a sports-talker, who meant to be highly critical of N.F.L. owners).

Question: does or does not a few extra bucks matter to rich people?

Scott Sumner on the Internal Consistency of Pessimists

Here is Scott Sumner at the Money Illusion.

Some pessimists worry that we are merely creating “McJobs” for the least skilled. Others worry that most of the new jobs require lots of skills, leaving the unskilled without good prospects.  Most pessimists worry about both problems, even if it isn’t internally consistent.  Just as pessimists worry that machines will take the place of workers in Japan, and that there won’t be enough young people to take care of the elderly.

Bryan Caplan writes a Letter to Nationalism

My last post reminded me of a Bryan Caplan post; a letter to nationalism.

Nationalism, I know you're itching to lecture me about how you're better than all the other Nationalisms out there.  That may be true, but it's no excuse for the way you treat me.  Stop talking like you own the house I live in, the air I breathe, or me.  You don't.  You never did.  Frankly, Nationalism, you make my flesh crawl.

Bill Hicks on Proud to be an American

Morgan Freeman on Income Inequality and Racism in America

Here is Morgan Freeman on income inequality and racism in America.

Is Morgan Freeman a liberal? Judging from his answer alone (and the fact that youngconservatives.com posted the video), it seems like the answer is no. But there are two very strong predictors of liberalism which he owns, one is being black and the other is being a Hollywood actor. This builds a very strong presumption of liberalism which any other more specific factors have to tug against. Most likely scenario: he’s a liberal who deviates from the popular liberal tone on this subject.

Freeman stops short of saying what conservatives seem to believe, and I think is correct, which is that racism these days is overblown. Instead he says that the media exacerbates the problem by talking about it so much, which is different from saying that there is no problem.

Is Freeman right about income inequality? He says that we need a middle class to buy things which the rich produce. Without a middle class you don’t have consumers. This is a common answer for non-economists to give, less common for economists, although I’ve heard it. There is something like what he said that has a stronger economic foundation (aggregate demand shortages). But the dollar bills that are not in the middle-classes hands – demanding goods and services - have not disappeared off the face of the planet. For many decades we had income inequality and we still had demand and production and employment. And we’ve had business cycles for two centuries during both income inequality and income equality periods.

I think this explanation is so appealing to people because inequality is a villain. And whenever there is a story where the villain is the cause of something bad, we buy into that story. Kind of like the people who think global warming or GMOs are killing the bees. There isn’t a single bit of evidence for it, but global warming and GMOs are also villains. All we need to believe that our villains are behind some problem is for it not to be absolutely impossible.

Bryan Caplan’s Fertility Thought Experiment

Bryan Caplan says:

Imagine a Eugenic America where citizens who earn less than median income are forbidden to have children.  Enforcement isn't perfect, so 5% of all kids born are "illegals."  Over time, this leads to a substantial stock of people who weren't supposed to be born in the first place.

Regardless of your political standpoint, you probably think the libertarian advocate of Open Breeding has right on his side.  Suppose then you were transported to Eugenic America.  How would you rebut your side's stereotypical objections to free reproduction?  How convincing would you be?  If your honest answer is, "Not very," what does that tell you about your compatriots?

Bryan never says so explicitly, but his thought experiment is an analogy for boarders.

Steve Sailer responds:

According to Gregory Clark's research on wills in England from 1200 to 1800, that's pretty much how English society worked: the richer you were, the earlier you could get married and the more children you would tend to have.

And we all know how badly that turned out!

Bryan:

Indeed, his two-sentence comment strongly suggests two frightening positions:

1. There is no important moral distinction between (a) a social system where everyone is perfectly free to have children, but rich people end up having more kids than poor people, and (b) a social system where draconian eugenic policies actually forbid poor people to have kids.*

2. The social consequences of England's historic differential fertility were so outstanding that we shouldn't morally criticize draconian eugenic policies likely to have similar effects…

Generalizing this approach would imply, for example, that there is no important moral difference between a 99% Catholic country with freedom of religion, and a 99% Catholic country where an Inquisition cruelly persecutes dissenters to maintain Catholicism's dominance.

Are Elijah and Enoch in Heaven?

Did Enoch and Elijah die? Or are they in heaven?

And Enoch walked with God; and he was not; for God took him”.

Let us turn our attention to the phrase in Gen. 5:24, “ he was not“. That phrase is often used of death in the Old Testament. We read, for example in Jer. 31:15, “….A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not“. And the phrase is used in the same way in Job 7:21, “…..for now shall I sleep in the dust; but Thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be“.

 

Does that mean that Elijah never died, but went directly into heaven? I think we must consider Jn. 3:13 again, “No man hath ascended to heaven but He Who came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven”. Let us consider this passage in II Kings more carefully.

To begin with, the Hebrew word translated “heaven” is “shahmahyim“. The “im” tells us that it is plural, i.e. there is more than one heaven. It is used of the dwelling place of God in Gen. 1:1 where we read, “In the beginning God created the heaven(s) and the earth”. It is also used in Gen.1: 26 where we read, “and God said, ‘Let us make man in Our image…..and let them have dominion over…… the fowls of the air (shahmahyim).…..”. And in Gen. 7:11 we read, “In the sixth hundredth year of Noah’s life, ……were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven(s) were opened”. So the same Hebrew word is used of the heaven where the birds fly, where the clouds gather and where God is on His throne. The question we must answer then is; to which heaven was Elijah taken?