I am not a law professor, but I find myself saying the words "Right answer, wrong reasoning" several times a day anyway.

See, e.g. It is not so much that we should not be subsidizing destroying the planet, but even if the fossil fuel industry were not destroying the planet, it is far from clear that these private businesses should be receiving help from the taxpayers. I am entirely with President Obama in thinking that we should stop these things. On the other hand, I am also against investing this funds in clean energy technology. It is not so much that I am convinced that clean energy technologies aren't viable right now, but that it is exceptionally hard for governments to pick the right horse among competing technologies. Markets are much better at that. 

Semi-amnesty, rule of law, and separation of powers

 Bryan Caplan and Arnold Kling have been having a very interesting discussion over at EconLog  about President Obama's recent announcement that he will stop deporting certain categories of immigrants. Like both Caplan and Kling, I support legislation that would more directly liberalize our immigration laws. As several commenters on the thread point out, the problem with the current approach is that it is quite easily reversed by the next President. I should point out also that I don't agree with Kling's separation of powers comment about the announcement, which I find to be precisely backwards. It's the job of the Executive Branch to enforce the law. As the head of it, the President is in a perfectly legal position to make decisions about enforcement priorities for the federal prosecutors serving as the executive branch's foot soldiers. Conversely, it's Congress's job to enact new legislation in this area. The President can certainly develop a plan and present it to Congress, but the job of passing it then falls to Congress.


I do want to highlight two very good sentences near the end of the post: " I would suggest having a broader discussion of how to address the problem of laws that many people neither want to repeal nor rigorously enforce. Having the executive nullify such laws one at a time may or may not be a good approach." I would second that, too. Like many libertarians, I have a deep-seated reverence for the rule of law; at the same time, I recognize that many laws currently on the books are unjust abridgments of freedom. Figuring out how to reconcile these impulses -- in either the immigration context or any other -- is not especially easy. More thoughtful discussion of these issues would certainly help me reconcile these questions.

Is this the little girl I carried? When did she get to be a beauty?

Happy (slightly belated) first birthday, Willow! You've gotten to be so tall and beautiful and magnificent-looking!

Libertarianism, chaos/order, and Muppets

So within the same week, I came across a blog post declaring that "Judge Kozinski doesn't have an ideology so much a Dungeons and Dragons alignment: Chaotic Neutral" and also Dahlia Lithwick's much-linked to "Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types." Clearly it is time to offer up some deep thoughts on alignment, libertarianism, and Muppets. In no particular order:

1. I am most definitely a Chaos muppet. Caveat: if I am doing paid work, involved in a volunteer cause that I care deeply about, or a student, I can temporarily channel an inner Order muppet and keep things from falling apart. I therefore suspect that at least some of my friends from such settings will be tempted to (falsely) categorize me as an Order muppet, but they would be wrong. Second caveat: if I am in a large group dominated by Chaos muppets who cannot pick a restaurant, etc. for the life of them, I will step forward and announce that we are having Indian at 6:30 unless somebody has principled objections. This is not so much because I am an Order muppet as because I have the kind of metabolism/temperament that requires food at regular and rapid intervals so as not to go insane, and because I am about twenty-eight years too old to carry around a plastic bag of Cheerios to deal with this problem.  I do not usually find myself in large social groups of Order muppets because they drive me crazy. Curiously, this  makes me the opposite of Lithwick -- i.e. I have a core of Chaos muppet encased in a veneer of Order. This may or may not indicate something deep about our respective very different judicial philosophies.

2. If Lithwick's alignments were amended to reflect the D&D system so that Order/Chaos/Neutral were options, I might well be a Neutral muppet.

3.  I think most libertarians are also Chaos muppets. This is probably why Non Curat Lex sees such tendencies in Alex Kozinski, who is of course famously libertarian. I am not sure that I would say that Kozinski lacks an ideology so much as an alignment; I haven't read enough Koz opinions. I will say that I have met some social conservatives who are not so much guided by a cogent abstract system of principles as by a strong inner sense of Order muppetry. All of this may or may not portend something deep about the future of right-fusionism.

Liberals and progressives are a trickier case. I think Lithwick is right that there are probably more Chaos muppet liberals than Chaos muppet conservatives. But adherents of these ideologies' ease with government planning of the economy sits ill with the Chaos alignment. It is in large part because I'm allergic to central planning that I find modern liberalism and progressivism off-putting.

4. Hannah from HBO's Girls is a Chaos muppet. Marnie is an Order muppet. This can led to tension, as it did in last night's episode. Hanna Rosin is wrong, however, that these differences alone make their friendship unpersuasive. As Lithwick says, groups of friends need the yin and yang of rival strains of Muppet. It's therefore in my view inevitable that they will reconcile and the friendship will continue -- and not merely to keep Alison Williams (the actress who plays Marnie) on the air.

Women, fashion, and lawyers: why you are all doing it wrong, again

Another day, another blog post on how female attorneys are doing things wrong, fashion-wise. This edition is complete with the sentence "In male-dominated fields like law, skirts and dresses are particularly rewarded, as they are more appealing to men." I occasionally wonder if this entire genre is produced by George Soros-funded shills who are trying to convince me that sexism is rampant in the world so that I will start supporting comparable worth legislation or something. If it is not, perhaps Soros should consider hiring some of these people to do his bidding.

Why is it that "a little mascara" is always the default response to queries about how to wear a little makeup but not too much? Honestly, mascara is one of the first things that I'll drop from makeup routines if I'm feeling pressed for time. I guess it's... subtle, but that's because it's scarcely noticeable. Much better to do lips (mine tend toward thc chapped and dry), blush (I tend toward the freakishly pale and ghastly; this would have helped me in Victorian times, but accomplishes little now) or foundation (again, evens out skin tone and can help slightly with the ghastliness.) Is it that I'm supposed to be wearing more?  Or is it possible that I've been benefitting for many years from eyelash privilege of which I have been tragically unaware?

Depressively convincing

I don't have many bones to pick with this essay, so let me just say that I found it very interesting. Here are the first few paragraphs to give a taste of it:


The United States has been shaped by three far-reaching political revolutions: Thomas Jefferson’s “revolution of 1800,” the Civil War, and the New Deal. Each of these upheavals concluded with lasting institutional and cultural adjustments that set the stage for new phases of political and economic development. Are we on the verge of a new upheaval, a “fourth revolution” that will reshape U.S. politics for decades to come? There are signs to suggest that we are. In fact, we may already be in the early stages of this twenty-first-century revolution.


The great recession that began in 2008 caused many to suggest that the United States is entering a period of “decline” during which it will lose its status as the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation state. The metaphor of “decline” presumes that the American people will sit by passively as their standard of living and international status erode year by year. That is unlikely to occur: Americans will do everything in their power to reverse any such process of national decline. Thus, what the United States is now facing is not a gradual decline but a political upheaval that will reshape its politics, policies, and institutions for a generation or two to come. There is no guarantee that the nation will emerge from this crisis with its superpower status intact, just as there were no guarantees that it would emerge from the Civil War or the Great Depression in a position to extend its wealth and power. The most that we can say is that, in the decade ahead, Americans will struggle to forge a governing coalition that can guide the nation toward a path of renewed growth and dynamism.


The financial crisis and the long recession, with the strains they have placed upon national income and public budgets, are only the proximate causes of the political crisis now unfolding in the United States. The deeper causes lie in the exhaustion of the post-war system of political economy that took shape in the 1930s and 1940s. One pillar of that system emerged out of the New Deal with its emphasis upon national regulation of the economy, social insurance, expanding personal consumption, and public debt; the second emerged out of World War II with the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the U.S. military as the protector of the international trading system. The post-war system created the basis for unprecedented prosperity in the United States and the Western world. That system is now unwinding for several reasons, not least because the American economy can no longer underwrite the debt and public promises that have piled up over the decades. The urgent need to cancel or renegotiate these debts and public promises on short notice will ignite the upheaval referred to here as “the fourth revolution.” There will follow an extended period of conflict in the United States between the two political parties as they compete for support either to maintain the post-war system or to identify a successor to it.


It is not possible to outline in advance the precise lineaments of the fourth revolution. After all, few Americans living in 1798, 1858, or 1928 could have foreseen what was going to happen to their country in the years immediately ahead. The best that we can do is to look for some general patterns in these earlier events that might serve as guides for what is likely to happen in the United States in the next decade or two.

Rome on the Potomac

This article (via) about the culture that is Washington has been popping up regularly in my Facebook feeds for much of the last week or so. Parts of it feel familiar, if occasionally exaggerated in the service of turning a literary phrase. I found the bit about car ownership particularly silly -- you don't have much real need for one if you live in an upper NW neighborhood or a close-in suburb, and finding parking and maneuvring around the #%**T&! circles are generally vastly more trouble than it is worth, unless one finds oneself often taking road trips outside the city. This, not so much an issue in less dense places like Youngstown. Still, such distortions aside, the disconnect between a wealthy government-fueled economy and other areas described therein is troubling.