Examples of really splendid use of parentheses

"Does this mean that there is nothing that the state can do to help the poor? Two answers are possible. One (which is actually more attractive than is commonly supposed) is no."

-- Richard Epstein on forced pro bono.

Common Ground

Here is a list of things on which I agree with Occupy Wall Street:

1) Open the borders to all immigrants, legal or illegal. Offer immediate, unconditional amnesty, to all undocumented residents of the US.

Not entirely; I'm okay with screening would-be immigrants for infectious disease, criminal history, links to terrorism, and a few other things like that. But if one adjusts this to read something like "Significant liberalization of current immigration law," that would be just splendid.

2)Institute a negative income tax, and tax the very rich at rates up to 90%.

I'm good with the first part of that. See also MIlton Friedman, though note that the headline of this piece calling him a conservative makes me want to throw things.

3)Strengthen separation of church and state.

I'm not entirely sure what specifically they're exercised about; the Supreme Court precedent in this area is actually pretty good. Occasionally social conservatives say silly things about wanting to use the government to promote religion, but fortunately Rick Santorum remains an even more marginal figure in American politics than Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich. Still, if they just mean strong separation of church and state, then fine.

4)End the 'War on Drugs'.

Please see relevant tag along the sidebar.

Fed Soc in Review

Well, I'm back from the annual three day extravaganza that sometimes can feel entirely too much like a not-entirely-functional family reunion. Unpleasant altercations with ex-boyfriends were safely avoided! Only one friend told me that I'd inadvertently inspired her to commit a federal felony! Mike Mukasey avoided keeling over mid-speech! Good times all around...

More seriously, for those who weren't able to attend the panels, there are videos online. It's impossible for any one person to see everything, but I recommend in particular Showcase Panels II and IV (video not yet online, but should be in a few days' time at the link above.) Re: Panel II, Richard Epstein in particular is always worth the price of admission. In some ways, though, the individual parts are better than the whole. It might've worked better as two separate panels-- one on the Epstein book and one on co-panelist John Tomasi's book - since some of the panelists did seem to be talking past each other. But the individual speeches should nonetheless be of interest to people interested generally in classical liberalism.

The ideas presented on Panel IV were new to me, and I'm still not sure what I think of sunset laws generally. Nonetheless, the panelists were all exceptionally clear and coherent in presenting both the cases for and against them, and I felt like I came away with a good grasp of both pros and cons. Special bonus for any ex-Yalies out there: Bill Eskridge's Guido Calabresi imitation is hilarious.

I also recommend the bullying panel. I spent about four or five months in my day job thinking over these issues, and I might be too mentally and morally exhausted to ever write anything about them again. But if you're interested in these issues, that panel offers a solid overview.

I am meh about the Mukasey address. I'm well aware that libertarians are split on foreign policy generally. I feel nervous and tentative writing about issues about which my intellectual heroes disagree passionately. Plus, the more I read about them, the more I'm convinced I don't know. That's probably why I almost never write about them here. Nonetheless, caveats about my lack of real knowledge of these issues aside, parts of Mukasey's speech sat ill with me. I'm uncomfortable saying that non-Muslims ought to think that there is only one true Islam -- the ugly and radical kind. The point ought to be that there are many different manifestations of Islam, some more friendly to small-l Western liberalism and some not. Regardless of what's most consistent with original text, we ought to pick the more liberal-friendly varieties and encourage them.

Things I Have Read Recently and Not Liked

This Above the Law column on a cert petition in a First Amendment case, in which plaintiff is a teenager who couldn't run for student council secretary because she referred to administrators at her school as "douchebags" on her LiveJournal blog. Your humble correspondent's initial knee-jerk reaction was, "Exhibit 2,114 of why I am a libertarian and not a conservative."

And then my immediate post knee jerk reaction was... it's interesting that a post at a law blog would hit the theme of professionalism so hard. You'll notice that plaintiff Ms. Doninger's sin, in this columnist's eye, was that this behavior would be inappropriate in many professional environments. Indeed it would be, and I doubt that anybody seriously disputes that the loss of the school secretary position is important in the greater scheme of things. But the actual doctrine regarding how schools may regulate off-campus speech in the Internet age is far from settled, and untangling the relevant precedent is actually quite interesting. Yet the ATL columnist opts to wave that inside instead for snark along the lines of "Bet she's going to grow up to be the kind of lawyer who wears ballet flats when pumps are really called for." It reminds me of much of what I disliked about law school: the near obsession with the mannes and mores of becoming a Professional coupled with low levels of interest in the law itself.

Plus one

Like every other semi-tech-savvy-ish twenty-something in the country, I've secured an invite to Google Plus and started playing around with the Circle feature. It's a pretty cool solution to the eternal quandary of what to share with which of one's friends. The dog haters need not be bombarded with micro-updates about the latest developments regarding little puppy Willow's upcoming arrival, and my guy conservative friends need not be bothered by my fashion dilemmas.

Of course, this all works for politics. I can create a separate circle for libertarians and another for libertarians plus conservatives and easily share only thoughts that will likely be agreeable to each group with them. On the one hand, this is good; Facebook is not a great forum for political debates, and I don't want to annoy my non-libertarian friends (say, people from high school or childhood) with the kind of crankery that my D.C. based policy friends eat up. On the other, it means that I miss opportunities for conversion. Not that anyone's likely to undergo a radical conversion overnight thanks to a 400 character update; I get that. But maybe a slow and steady accumulation of exposure to alien views might slowly move an acquaintance in a new direction. It would be sort of sad -- not tragic, but a little bit unfortunate nonetheless -- if embrace of Google's new platform makes people less likely to encounter opposing ideas than they would be otherwise.

Gary Johnson v. Ron Paul As Communicators?

This post by economist Steve Horwitz about a blogger conference call with Gary Johnson is a few weeks old, but I thought I'd flag it anyway as of interest since it's not as though the information in it is time sensitive. I think I've said before on here that while I like Johnson a lot, I agree with Horwitz that he has a near zero chance of winning the Republican nomination, and so I'm reluctant to get too attached to his candidacy. The comparisons with Ron Paul are also especially interesting. Like my husband, I think that Johnson comes off as less kooky than Paul and that this lack of kookiness could be a real boon for libertarianism. Horwitz's claim that Paul is better at popularizing economic ideas is an interesting one, though, and suggests a real weakness for Johnson's campaign going forward. While I hope that isn't true, and is not something I've noticed personally, I can see how it could be a point of real liability. I would just be disappointed if that's indeed the case.

Richard Epstein Trivia in the New York Times

From a New York Times article about summer jobs of the rich and famous:

Perhaps Another Career

Richard A. Epstein, a law professor at New York University and a libertarian scholar, worked at a gas station as a mechanics’ assistant in the summer of 1957. The garage job was the idea of his father, a prominent physician. Expecting his son to follow in his footsteps, Dr. Epstein wanted him to develop more than mental dexterity — as Professor Epstein put it, he was “to learn how to use my hands.”

How did it go? “I did watch, and occasionally unscrewed a spark plug,” he recalled, but the expertise he developed most robustly was "ferrying in cherry Cokes from the nearby restaurant."

He added: “I learned about cars, but what I mainly learned was I didn’t want to work on them.”

Treating Epstein here as a celebrity is maybe a little weird, but I'm not going to protest too much.

On the drug war

"One of the few “successes” (and I’m speaking ironically here) of the drug war has been to convince people that the negative effects of prohibition are actually the negative effects of drugs.

People see violence on the street and say “that’s because of drugs” when, in fact, it’s because of the drug war. And so they call for more enforcement even though (as we know) that won’t help the problem but rather make it worse."

-- From interesting post on the drug war.

Constitutional amendments are for losers.*

Jeffrey Rosen asks "Why are conservatives, not liberals, fixated on amending the Constitution?" He claims that the answer is "Populism." Maybe, but a simpler answer might be that liberals already largely have the Constitution that they want.

Rosen notes that "Conservatives didn’t always dominate the market in constitutional amendments. During the last wave of progressive constitutionalism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Harvard Law graduates like Louis Brandeis and muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell helped mobilize grassroots support for trust busting and anti-monopoly laws by vilifying reckless bankers and oligarchs like J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller who took risks with “other people’s money.” At the same time, progressives pursued similar anti-corporate goals by successfully championing constitutional amendments that authorized a federal income tax and the direct election of senators.

But, as Alan Brinkley has argued, liberalism began to move away from this populist spirit in the middle of the New Deal, and, in the process, largely abandoned its interest in amending the constitution."

Might I suggest the issue was not a movement away from populist spirit, but that liberals largely got the Constitution that they wanted? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Commerce Clause and economic substantive due process meant something. It put real constraints on legislatures enacting the kind of regulation that progressives wanted. In 1937, in the West Coast Hotel case, the court abandoned that. The legislature became much freer to enact economic regulation. Progressives realized that they had what they wanted - and so they abandoned the project. And, although those precedents have been chipped away at some, the liberals still largely have the Constitution that they want. Conservatives and libertarians don't, which is why we want to change it.

Rosen's comments on the ERA are largely in line with my thesis as well -- once the feminists got the decisions they wanted, throwing their energies into pushing for an amendment seemed less attractive.

*The title's tongue in cheek, of course, but the point is that movements turn to constitutional amendments when they fail to get what they want through constitutional litigation.

In partial defense of Ayn Rand -- II

I may or may not have to start a Non-Objectivists' Ayn Rand Anti-Defamation League. To wit, another piece critical of Rand from Andrew Sullivan's blog.

I don't believe, as the reader claims, that Rand believed in the "perfectability of genius" or that genius is "incapable of making an error." This is indeed a peculiar claim, seeing as how Dagny Taggart spent much of Atlas caught in what Rand considered fundamental errors about the desirability of cooperating with the evil "moochers." We see Hank Rearden undergo a similar evolution over the course of the novel. Without these errors on the behalf of generally positive characters, there would not be much dramatic tension, and the novel would be far less interesting.The Fountainhead is similar; Gail Wynand is a tragic hero not because of his lack of intelligence or industriousness, but because he fundamentally fails to grok the nature of mob power.

Rand did say at various points that the nature of reality is such that contradictions don't exist, and so therefore it's impossible to make errors if one has one's premises right. I'm not sure I actually disagree with her much there. I do think she made a crucial error in estimating how difficult it is to get one's premises right with regard to fundamental questions and how easy it is apply fundamental principle to shifting questions of fact. I therefore agree with Sullivan's reader that Objectivism would have benefited from a healthy shot in the arm of what Sullivan has called the "conservatism of doubt." That said, the reader's criticism takes a sensible criticism way too far. In doing so, he may even commit the same error of which he accuses Rand.

In partial defense of Ayn Rand

while what happened to this young woman's family is terribly sad, it is perhaps worth noting that divorce and child custody disputes have a way of bringing out the worst in people. I've personally observed Roman Catholics, Jews, social conservatives, and progressives also act really, really badly in these situations. Objectivism may given the author's father a way of rationalizing his particular bad behavior, but I'm inclined to doubt that Objectivists are much worse than anyone else in these challenging domestic situations.

On unpaid internships, again

I can't remember if I've written about this before or not, but the New York Times has another article complaining about how unpaid internships are exploitative and evil. The writer calls on the Labor Department to crack down on enforcement of labor laws on these. The article doesn't consider whether such a crackdown would lead firms to offer fewer internships, leaving everyone worse off. Businesses' resources are not infinitely elastic, of course, and it's hard for even the smartest and most conscientious of interns to create much value for their employers. They're not there for very long; I've certainly had internships in which I felt like I'd barely figured out where the coffee maker and the copy machines were when it was time to leave.

Side note: the article's poster child is the son of two public interest lawyers. Even if each parent is a fairly junior public interest lawyer, it's safe to say that the two together are probably earning about $100,000 a year. If each parent is a senior public interest lawyer -as is likely, given that they have a son in college -- it wouldn't suprise me if their combined earnings are about $200,000. It seems strange that they would not be able to lend their son some money for a summer apartment if it were really important to them.

I'll stay mum for the moment on the question of whether these internships violate labor law, not having had the opportunity to look closely at the relevant statutes. But if they do, the law should be changed, period.

One more thing I read recently and liked

I have decidedly mixed views of David Brooks's writing generally. Here is a very interesting review by Will Wilkinson of Brooks's latest book. I haven't read it myself and so can't comment much; also, I don't know as much about the relevant research as Will does. But go read this thing anyway.

Things I read recently and liked

1. An excellent post from Bleeding Heart Libertarians on the "missing callous libertarians," with this nice commentary on Ayn Rand's views of the poor:

If libertarians really believed that, then it would seem hard to explain why so many of them are preoccupied with showing how markets, under the right conditions, end poverty.

Even Ayn Rand, of all people. In Atlas Shrugged, the most productive and innovative members of society–tired of being told they exploit everyone else–go on strike. The American economy collapses. This sends a clear message: the less talented need the more talented more than the more talented need the less talented. So far, there is nothing here to excite a high liberal or a person concerned with social justice.

But notice that Rand is at pains to show that the strikers only hasten an inevitable collapse. In Atlas Shrugged, socialist economies have been collapsing long before John Galt calls a strike. And Rand goes at great lengths to illustrate that the people who suffer the most from these collapses aren't her heroes (they all lead happy lives in the mountains), or the unheroic rich (they use their connections to exploit others), but instead the least talented and least advantaged members of society. So, in Atlas Shrugged, the bad guys try to exploit Rand's heroes, but Rand makes it clear that the innocent poor are the ones that suffer the most as a result. If Rand were utterly unconcerned for the poor, or anyone else––as she is often taken to be––why would she do this? As a mere reductio or taunt? (Rand, in thick Russian accent: “I couldn’t care less if the poor starve. But I know you socialists dislike it.”)

2. I suspect that Tom Vilsack is the anti-matter version of me. In response to Vilsack's claim that farm subsidies are necessary to make rural Americans feel better about themselves, Ezra Klein makes sensible points about economics. Perhaps this constitutes a glimmer of hope for the doomed liberaltarian alliance?

Haidt, moral intuitions, and organs

I wrote once before on this blog about my puzzlement at a question on Jonathan Haidt's moral intuitions test that asks about whether one would be comfortable accepting a blood transfusion from a criminal. Now I find an op-ed in the NYT about states' unwillingness to let executed prisoners donate their organs. Most of the ostensible reasons for the ban given in the column don't seem to make sense. I wonder if something like the moral intuition described in the Haidt test is the real culprit? If it is, let me once again register my bafflement at this form of moral reasoning.

The plan: 1. Legalize drugs. 2. Legalize gay marriage. 3.Sell drugs, oil, and Koch napkins to gay people. 4. ??? 5. Profit!

As Constant Readers know, I derive far too much amusement from crazy anti-Koch conspiracy theories. I lack much of substance to say refuting the crazier real ones that hasn't been said by others. But here is a brilliant parody of an anti-Koch conspiracy theory.

(No, I didn't write it. Constant Readers will know I'm too much of a Victorian to throw around the f bomb like that. My satirical efforts tend toward the more prim.)

On being a girl in a boys' club

Amber linked this article entitled "How to be a Girl in a Boys' Club," which might fairly have been subtitled "How to Avoid Misadventures in Being a Woman in the Libertarian/Conservative Legal Movement." The sections about getting along with other women and the frustrations associated with feeling "exceptional" are particularly on point. Fear and Loathing in Georgetown also weighs in by acknowledging some of the article's better points and making sensible criticisms about others.

Other addenda:

1. Yes, it is good to try to communicate with some of the more sympathetic members of the boys' club about what you are thinking and experiencing. That said, please keep in mind the problems associated with "sanctibullying" during the course of your conversations. Phoebe's posts about why the "your privilege is showing" line of conversation is unlikely to be effective and how one should instead make the same point are a good place to look for advice on this.

2. Sometimes, the guys in the group will say things that rub you the wrong way, although you are not quite sure why. Or, alternatively, you will try to explain to them why you found something confusing or offensive, only to met with an argument that seems plausible enough but that you can't quite bring yourself to buy. Too often, you will feel like you have two choices: either you give in totally, or just keep in effect yelling loudly, "But you hurt my feelings!" Neither will feel quite right.

I have found remembering a tidbit from (of all sources) Nathaniel Branden's My Years With Ayn Rand useful in these situations: Emotions are not perfect tools of cognition, but they're not useless either.

Or, in words less off-putting to those who didn't spend their teenage years soaking up Objectivist jargon: your feeling that something is wrong and offensive about what was just said is a valuable sign that something is. But it's not an infallible sign that something is. In such cases, the best thing to do may be to say something like, "You raise reasonable points, but there's still something about X incident that doesn't sit right with me. I need to think more about why, though; I'm just not able to put my finger on it right now. Maybe it would be best if we talked about something else and revisited this another time." I have occasionally wondered if I am being a bad feminist or somehow unforgivably weak-willed for putting ideas in these terms. Perhaps it is terrible that I'm not more articulate and insightful in these situations; I wish I were. But fessing up to my own uncertainty seems more helpful and more likely to lead to productive discourse -- at least among friends -- than faking certainty and moral clarity when I haven't found such yet.

3. That said, once disengagement is complete, do actually take the time and space to think through the incident. Sometimes, upon reflection, you really will come to a better understanding of what transpired.

Miscellany

1)The WSJ on the market for high fashion.

2)Jacob Levy on Sasha Volokh's infamous asteriod post. I particularly like this paragraph:

If we do so, one consequence is that we should view state officials as wielding a great deal of power in our social world that is probably not justified all the way down. States did not come about by individualist contractualist consent; they are not the institutional form of morally foundational nations; religious, hereditary, and customary forms of legitimation may remain sociologically credible in some places but are surely not morally well-grounded accounts of the justifications for the organized use of violence. Yet states are such well-entrenched features of the political landscape that, if can constrains ought at all, we are probably not morally obligated to abolish the state form in favor of some other form of political organization or in favor of anarchy of any description. We must morally make the best of them, making do with what we have.

In a world filled with states, officeholders and officials should view themselves as having political responsibility as analyzed by Weber, which is much like [David] Miller’s remedial responsibility. They wield power that is not morally legitimated by its origins; the power exists because of morally neutral historical and social accidents. What remains is moral responsibility for what is done with the power.

3)A strong entry in the contest for Stupidest Thing Ever Written About Libertarianism. Much of this is obvious, but in case anyone is listening:

a. The guy who called Dick Cheney a war criminal was being kind of a jerk. People who heckle speakers are generally jerks. Although I lack scientific data on this point, most sane libertarians with whom I have corresponded agree on this point. It's unfortunate that some libertarians are jerks. It is equally unfortunate that most other social movements consisting of more than three people usually have at least one person who is kind of a jerk.

b. Re: drugs, some social conservatives are with libertarians on legalization. National Review is the most famous example. Does McCullough wish to eject them from the pantheon of acceptably conservative thought? And, briefly, there are plenty of arguments for legalization that do not turn on one's love of pot. I highly recommend Googling Radley Balko's work highlighting some of the police abuse associated with the drug war and its staggering costs.

c. I've written before on the GoProud controversy. Let me just highlight again, however, that their agenda is not terribly radical. It's actually about as modest for a gay conservative group that one could expect. They are officially silent on the gay marriage issue. Most of their legislative priorities involve limiting domestic government or strong national defense abroad, stuff that is standard fare for conservative groups. The lone exception is their opposition to a federal marriage amendment. In other words, their radical agenda comes down to wanting to leave the constitution the way it is. This is really not all that radical.

Also, to my knowledge, they did not object to the inclusion of socially conservative groups. They didn't want them to boycott the conference and are in no way working to actively silence them. I have not read anything by any GoProud suggesting that they did.

In defense of diving, Part Two

Still on the side of diving, having heard the panel.

1. Many of the anti arguments come down to insularity of the movement, as I suggested in the first post. I.e. it's weird if you run into a former significant other at too many of the same social events. This can be a problem, but can also be a problem if you try to date someone from an insular social group of high school, college, or grad/professional school friends. The alternatives include dating people that one meets randomly in bars or coffee shops, but there it's easier to run into either a loon or someone with whom one lacks any common interests without knowing it. There's also the various internet services, which I admit I never tried, but again, it seems like it's easy that way to rack up a lot of brief dates with no real return.

2. One panelist mentioned "girl detente," i.e. the tensions that one runs into with another female if you've both dated the same guy. Yes, this can happen. On the other hand, potential for the same problem exists if one dates within a group of non-movement friends; see above.

3. For women, there is the social climbing problem -- dating someone who's much older or more experienced within the movement can be seen as an attempt at social climbing and thus reflect badly on the woman. Again, I suppose this is a possibility, but the more narrow solution seems to be "avoid situations where there are really big age/power imbalances." I would hope that most women also have a sixth sense for being able to identify That Guy who preys on interns like so much fresh meat. Those That Guys are usually identifiable from a mile away.

4. Of course, one should also try other strategies for finding a partner. Insisting on dating exclusively within the movement is probably a bad strategy. But ruling it out pre-emptively is also silly.

In defense of diving

I feel badly because I have not actually been to one of the more serious America's Future Foundation events in months. Wednesday nights are usually bad. Still, in perhaps yet further demonstration of my total lack of intellectual substance, to this post-Valentine's Day intra-movement dating panel.

Admittedly, I am not sure what the argument against diving is supposed to be. Yes, obviously dating somebody who is your direct superior or supervisee is a bad idea. I would hope that this is obvious and does not need to be explained. I would also generally avoid dating someone who works for the same small organization, but dating someone who works in a very different arm of a sufficiently large organization (say, Heritage) might be fine. Again, everyone in the world already knows this.

But if I'm understanding the blurb correctly, then two of the panelists are speaking out against dating someone who just works in the same movement generally. This I don't understand. One, the libertarian movement is not that big, but it's not so small that an ex can't be avoided with a little work. Two, it's possible that I am just anti-social, but I don't think that there is that much professional risk from having something end badly. The movement is not high school. Nobody spends weeks analyzing whether Jane was too mean to Joe and whether that means Jane shouldn't get to be president of Cato in 2028. Most libertarians have other pleasures and hobbies competing for our attention, and so we can't get (totally) hooked on movement gossip. Three, only when like marries like can there be any happiness. That doesn't mean that everybody in the world should impose rigid political litmus tests on their partners. For some people, being alike on other dimensions will be more important. But compatibility in political interests and professional interests is nice. It rarely hurts to have it and may often help.