Blinks: Economist consensus on Christmas, NT Wright on Salvation and Eschatology, Econtalk on Climate Change

• Economists don’t think Christmas is inefficient. They usually make the point that presents have intangible benefits for people, even though recipients of presents could satisfy their preferences better with cash. Bryan Caplan is more suspicious.
  
• A debate between NT Wright and James White on whether the apostle Paul believed in salvation by grace alone (solo gracia). Interpretations in popular Christianity take Paul as saying that works don’t matter. NT Wright thinks he was referring only to older Jewish traditions, not good works in general.
  
  NT Wright represents some version of The New Perspective on Paul.
  
• More NT Wright, this time on heaven and hell.
  
• Cognitive Strain Repost: Tyler Cowen thinks everyone is religious and I don’t think they have to be.
  
• Econtalk podcast with Judith Curry on Climate Change. My take on the interview is that she’s reasonable, but struggled a bit in explaining things in lay terms.

We can give something up to get more of it

When a lie sounds good people often believe the lie, especially when it doesn’t really effect them personally.

A couple clear examples comes from libertarians and anti-war advocates. Libertarians will often say that sacrificing liberty for the sake of liberty is absurd. Anti-war advocates will say war for the sake of preventing war is absurd. They certainly sound absurd if you don’t, and never will, think more than 5 seconds about it. It is exactly the contrasting terms in these slogans that make them sound somewhat profound.

The truth is that it is quite possible to sacrifice a little of something to prevent losing a lot more.

Libertarians often like ex-post corrective policies – if I steal from you I have to give it back with an extra fine. That’s trading liberty for the sake of liberty. But ex-anti preventive policies trade a little liberty to prevent a lot more being taken away. A camera in every house might help liberty, but just because the liberty-liberty tradeoff exists does not mean that every possible case is one. Even having a government at all is a liberty-liberty tradeoff.

It is perfectly possible that starting a small war that costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars could prevent a big war that costs hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Of course, the pro-war advocates seem to think that by simply saying that the tradeoff theoretically exists, that’s the tradeoff we’re making. It is hard to see that as the case, but if you’re going to be against the war, I don’t think it is a thoughtful response to simply assert that the war-war tradeoff is absurd. It isn’t.

Blinks: Jeff Miron Video on Drug Prohibition, Doug Wilson interviews Natural Revelation Advocate, Peter Thiel on Luck, Bryan Caplan and Charles Murray

•  Jeff Miron Video on Drug Prohibition. He’s factual and logical.
  
• Doug Wilson talks to J. Budziszewski about natural law and natural revelation. He seems to be a moral intuitionist.
  
• Peter Thiel: You are not a lottery ticket.
  
• Bryan Caplan and Charles Murray on Selfish Reasons to have more Kids. Murray mostly agrees with Caplan, but where he disagrees on children without a male role model contradicts Bryan’s evidence.

How to not Seek

The failure to seek and understand is a basic, universal, moral failure. It is very serious, so it is important to note the ways that people don’t seek.

I think about two different ways -- avoiding and pretending.

Avoiding means ignoring your basic urge for meaning. It is filling your life with stories, games, and consumption so that you don’t have to think about basic things. It is lets eat and drink for tomorrow we die. It is making fun into the good. It is seeking the maximization of sensational pleasure. It is living for the next thrill. It is not living the examined life. It is believing whatever your culture believes without critical thought. It is ignoring reason.

Pretending means not seeking but acting like you are. It is generally not pretending for others, but pretending to convince yourself that you’re a seeker. It is examining your life, but lying about the results. It is open-mindedness about some possibilities, and closed-mindedness about others. It is bias. It is a conclusion first way of thinking. It is examining whatever your culture believes, only to find better reasons for why what you’ve always believed in the first place is true. It is abusing reason.

The Backwards way Paternalistic Drug Prohibitionists Think

Your child scrapes his knee doing something he shouldn’t be doing on his bike. How do you respond?  Nobody I know believes that the appropriate response is to punish the child. But this is exactly what paternalists do with drug prohibition. Drugs are dangerous and bad, therefore, lets make them more dangerous and bad by having men with guns come after you. Parents reserve punishment for activities that don’t punish themselves. So even from a “government know what’s best” standpoint, drug prohibition is completely backward.

The reason drug prohibitionists punish drug offenses, oftentimes severely, is because they believe it will discourage drug use. That’s fine, but minimally they have to recognize the tradeoff between that making drugs more dangerous. The death sentence will discourage drug use too, just ask Singapore, but it is hard to ignore the fact that you’re also killing people. In light of this clear-cut tradeoff, why do drug prohibitionists believe that drugs aren’t dangerous enough? It is easy to imagine that without drug prohibition everyone would become druggies, but that picture doesn’t get past the edges of their skulls. The actual evidence is that drug prohibition at most discourages a modest amount of drug use. They have to make the case for why drug users irrationally ignore the costs of the drugs themselves, but the evidence is that they irrationally ignore the prohibitory costs of drugs.

Consider a few options: A) drugs are too dangerous B) drugs aren’t dangerous enough C) drugs are just dangerous enough. The reasonable answer is A. After all, that’s the starting argument of most drug prohibitionists – talk about how bad or dangerous drugs are as if that implies we ought to make them more dangerous. It doesn’t imply that. If drugs are too dangerous, how does making it a crime help? In what world are drugs more dangerous? The world where drugs ruin your life or the world where drugs ruin your life and you’re a criminal for doing them?

Here’s the weirdest thing – drug prohibitionists want a greater added danger to more dangerous drugs. It seems if marijuana is not dangerous enough, then they would want to make it significantly more dangerous to put it in the same league as cocaine, meanwhile cocaine users should be left alone. If there is some sort of danger / discouragement sweet spot, where the costs of added danger outweigh the benefits of discouraged use, harsher penalties for harsher drugs is the wrong way of getting it. Rather, we should want harsher penalties for milder drugs.

Contrary to the make bad things worse way of thinking, we should want to reduce the harm that drugs do, even though it will likely encourage their use. If we could make sure heroine users are using clean needles we should. If we can reduce the nausea, vomiting, and itching, heroine causes, we should. If we can reduce the possibility of fatal overdose, we should. And we should want to make drug treatment more available, even though it effectively lowers the price of drug use, and we should expect more people to do drugs as a result.

What I’m ignoring: economists have a different, more rational argument for some kind of drug policy. They give externality arguments. To the extent that the cost of drugs are internalized, no public policy is required. Most of the harm of drugs is internalized, so these externality arguments (however good they are), imply a much less harsh drug policy than the popular rational which tries to price the internal costs of drugs with public policy.

Bryan Caplan on Concerned Tolerance

Here is Bryan Caplan at his best. Provocative but right on the money.

Guns cause suicides, and suicides are bad.  But despite this risk, guns also have major upsides.

Bryan is pushing a Taboo Tradeoff. Never ask a parent if they would buy a less safe car seat, and never ask society if they should buy fewer school shootings, or suicides in this case.

$89 Billion per year in Revenue for Legalizing Drugs

Libertarian Miron from the libertarian Cato institute estimates $42 billion in savings from enforcement of drug laws, and $47 billion in additional revenue from taxing drugs at roughly the rate of alcohol. That means $89 billion a year in savings from enforcement plus revenue from taxing.

How much trust do I put into the study? The way I think about it is this: Jeffrey Miron is a libertarian who works for the libertarian Cato institute, so I’d normally mentally adjust the estimate downward because libertarians like reasons why drug prohibition is bad. But in this case, I happen to find Jeffrey Miron in particular intellectually honest. He’s not a fundamentalist libertarian, and he typically acknowledges evidence that isn’t libertarian at all. Drug laws are also his specialty. Moreover, the report also, “assumes that the demand for drugs would not shift” (reasons on pg. 8). To the extent that laws actually are discouraging drug use, which is a very real possibility, his estimate is too low. I also don’t think that rigid nature of the evidence leaves him much play to skew the evidence according to libertarian biases. Drug use is what it is, enforcement costs are what they are, and the only thing he has to play with is how much drugs are discouraging drug use, which he leaves at 0!

In light of that, I take Jeffrey Miron’s estimates as a good ball-park figure. In the scope of things, $89 billion isn’t going to fundamentally change anything. It is a good chunk, but when people talk about taxing drugs they oftentimes make believe that this is going to pay down the debt, or pay for some major government program like universal health care. It isn’t. Not even close. Total government revenue is $5.5 trillion (including state and local, since Jeff included them in his estimate). That’s about 1.5% increase in tax revenue.

Another thing: we should see this kind of increase in tax revenue as a good thing. Hypothetically, this increase in tax revenue could be given back to tax payers, but that isn’t going to happen. Government is going to be the one spending the additional revenue. Isn’t that a bad thing from a libertarian point of view? I don’t think so. Most of the things that government creates aren’t bad (except perhaps offensive defense spending). It is that the resources being employed have higher valued alternative uses. Health care, education, and care for the elderly are all valuable. But the relevant question is what is the opportunity cost? When government taxes a market, the government grows and the market shrinks. But in the case of the additional revenue from drug legalization, it isn’t taxing an already existing market, it is taxing a market that formerly did not even exist. So without regard for the other costs and benefits of drug prohibition/legalization, this is free money, and an extra marginal benefit for legalizing drugs.