This posting is Part XVI in a series of postings about economic thoughts.
Robert Nisbet once said: “Only Hayek has rivaled Bertrand de Jouvenel in demonstrating why redistributionism in the democracies inexorably results in the atrophy of personal responsibility and the hypertrophy of bureaucracy and the centralized state instead of in relief to the hapless minorities it is pledged to serve.” So what are some of the ethical issues that arise out of redistributionist public policies?
In the Introduction to Bertrand de Jouvenel’s book, The Ethics of Redistribution, John Gray writes:
[Open full post]Bertrand de Jouvenel’s study in the ethics of redistribution is distinctive, in the first instance, because it focuses precisely on the morality of redistribution and not on its side effects on incentives…[it] embodies a fundamental challenge to the values expressed in redistributionist thought…[he] is concerned with the impact on individual liberty and on cultural life of redistribution rather than with its effects on productivity…
Rhode Island is ranked sixth amongst the six New England states in science education, and has not shown any improvement in the last five years. Here’s the Projo‘s Jennifer D. Jordan on the subject…
Rhode Island’s science scores have not improved in the past five years, even as lawmakers and educators begin to place more emphasis on this critical subject.
The state continues to trail the five other New England states and is stuck in the middle of the pack nationally, according to the latest results of standardized science tests.
Governor Donald Carcieri wants to address this problem head-on. He has proposed a number of initiatives aimed at improving science education in Rhode Island. They include establishing a statewide science curriculum, introducing innovative programs like Physics First and Project Inner Space, and providing more funding for the professional development of science teachers (list, from the RI 2007 Budget Executive Summary, page 38).
However, the Emergency Campaign for Rhode Island’s Priorities, which claims the endorsement of the many of Rhode Island’s powerful special interest groups, wants to eliminate the Governor’s science education initiatives from the 2007 budget (h/t Kmareka).
ECRIP believes that that science education should be cut from the budget in order to pay for Rhode Island’s already generous social service programs. Here’s their list of science education initiatives they would like to see cut…
Postpone New Spending: “Inspiring Excellence in Technology, Engineering and Mathematics” teacher training program, Physics First, Project “Inner Space” and the hiring of new Science Project Manager
ECRIP claims that eliminating science education from the budget would save Rhode Island $3,700,000, but tallying up the programs they’ve named appears to yield only about $2M in cuts. However, if ECRIP’s numbers are off, I’m sure they will have no trouble finding more education funding to cut, as the priority of ECRIP seems to be cutting education to pay for welfare.
UPDATE:
I just noticed that ECRIP lists the “National Education Assoc., RI” as one of their “endorsers” on the memo that outlines the plan for eliminating funding for science education. Is the NEA really on board with this part of the proposal?
[Open full post]President Ronald Reagan died two years ago today.
As a reminder of his leadership, here is an excerpt from his January 1989 Farewell Address as he left the Presidency:
[Open full post]…And in all of that time I won a nickname, “The Great Communicator.” But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: it was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation–from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I’ll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.
Common sense told us that when you put a big tax on something, the people will produce less of it. So, we cut the people’s tax rates, and the people produced more than ever before. The economy bloomed like a plant that had been cut back and could now grow quicker and stronger. Our economic program brought about the longest peacetime expansion in our history: real family income up, the poverty rate down, entrepreneurship booming, and an explosion in research and new technology. We’re exporting more than ever because American industry became more competitive, and at the same time, we summoned the national will to knock down protectionist walls abroad instead of erecting them at home.
Common sense also told us that to preserve the peace, we’d have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons–and hope for even more progress is bright–but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease…
The lesson of all this was, of course, that because we’re a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there’s no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.
Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from the ideologies of the past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980’s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive…
Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: “We the People.” “We the People” tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. “We the People” are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which “We the People” tell the government what it is allowed to do. “We the People” are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I’ve tried to do these past 8 years.
As a child, did you ever make up a new game and spend time trying to define the rules of that game? If so, did you ever end up fighting with your friends because, after you started playing the game, something unplanned happened and conflict broke out? After the conflict broke out, did you find that you could work it out with certain friends – without having to write down an entirely new set of rules? That your ability to work things out informally was only possible if you shared common values with the friends – and the others likely ceased being your friends after that? In retrospect, did you ever look back and realize that there was no way to anticipate every possible outcome, to write out explicit rules to cover all outcomes?
Okay, maybe not. Which is probably why you didn’t go to law school later in life.
But, it is a relevant analogy as we extend the concept to a broader societal level. Unfortunately, we have devolved to the point where we frequently turn to government every time there is a problem and request new legislation to “fix” it. Never mind that the new law may be in conflict with existing laws. Never mind that the laws are frequently written with vague language and then turned over to faceless, nameless, unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats for rule-making from afar. Never mind that rule-making from afar only allows rigid rules that must apply uniformly to everyone and offer no subtlety of application that can occur at the local level where there is personal knowledge of what is needed and what will work. Never mind that societal changes may obviate the need for the legislation but the regulations will continue on regardless. Never mind that trying to legislate every issue increasingly eliminates the freedom to apply judgment to different situations, no two of which will be identical.
In that context, two recent comments on The Corner by Jonah Goldberg and Andy McCarthy offered a thoughtful perspective on how increasingly explicit laws adversely impact our social order.
Jonah Goldberg makes the first comments:
My understanding of the Hayekian social order is that life is complex but that the public, written, law should be clear. Bright lines are necessary to illuminate clear principles. It is in the shadows of these bright lines that hidden law operates. We have clear laws – and ethics – against doctors killing patients, but most of us understand that in the outer-reaches of the real world, there will be situations where the rules should be bent or even broken. But we don’t then change the law to make the rare case the norm. It may sometimes be morally necessary to look the other way when a cop smacks someone, a desperate man steals something, a doctor kills a hopelessly suffering patient, but we don’t rescind the laws against police brutality, theft, or – until recently – euthanasia, in response.
Andy McCarthy then offers some profound observations:
[Open full post]The awful thing about the hyper-lawyered society we are becoming is that there is less and less hidden law. The hidden law is where judgment, discretion and common sense reign. It’s like the referee who you only notice when there’s a bad call. We only think about it when there is some blunder or atrocity, but these are the rarest of aberrations.
Traditional law assumed a society’s values are shared and that people will act accordingly even when there is not a precise regulation telling them what to do. When a screw-up (or worse) happened, we assumed the person – not the regulatory system – was at fault. Modern rule by lawyers, to the contrary, assumes the aberration is the rule and must be explicitly regulated against. It figures that if we account for every possibility, we won’t need to trust individual judgment anymore – the system will save us from ourselves. It’s what makes bureaucrats say: “What’s the big deal about making the competent, honorable 99.9 percent of troops go through sensitivity training because of something screwy done by the other .01 percent?” – a .01 percent, by the way, which will do the something screwy no matter how many hours of values training you make them endure.
Rogues will be rogues no matter what the rules are. But rule by lawyers doesn’t see it that way. One Nixon gets you 30 years of FISA – on the seeming assumption that if only we’d had FISA, Nixon would never have happened. Meantime, the fact is that we are simply not smart enough to anticipate every contingency and every technological development. So your one-size-fits-all FISA, in addition to being irrelevant if there is ever another Nixon, turns out also to be inadequate when email, cellphones and al Qaeda come along.
That’s modern law: politically correct, unresponsive, and unreal.
This posting is Part XV in a series of postings about economic thoughts.
The excerpts in this posting are taken from Thomas Sowell’s book Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy and addresses the many consequences of price controls – both ceilings and floors:
[Open full post]To understand the effects of price controls, it is necessary to understand how prices rise and fall in a free market. There is nothing esoteric about it, but it is important to be very clear about what happens. Prices rise because the amount demanded exceeds the amount supplied at existing prices. Prices fall because the amount supplied exceeds the amount demanded at existing prices. The first case is called a “shortage” and the second is called a “surplus” – but both depend on existing prices.
This posting is Part XV in a series of postings about economic thoughts.
The excerpts in this posting are taken from Thomas Sowell’s book Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy and addresses the many consequences of price controls – both ceilings and floors:
[Open full post]To understand the effects of price controls, it is necessary to understand how prices rise and fall in a free market. There is nothing esoteric about it, but it is important to be very clear about what happens. Prices rise because the amount demanded exceeds the amount supplied at existing prices. Prices fall because the amount supplied exceeds the amount demanded at existing prices. The first case is called a “shortage” and the second is called a “surplus” – but both depend on existing prices.
Last week, Projo columnist Bob Kerr wrote about the disproportionate attention given to journalists killed or wounded in the war zone in Iraq. His point is not that journalists receive too much attention, but that regular soldiers receive too little…
A television news crew gets hit by a car bomb. And the war in Iraq gets moved to the front page.Capt. James A. Funkhouser was the soldier killed alongside the journalists.
The explosion, during another bloody day in Baghdad, killed CBS cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan. It seriously injured reporter Kimberly Dozier.
And, oh, by the way, an American soldier was also killed in the blast. His or her name was not included in the story. This war, this horrible muddle, continues its strange and frustrating presence on the fringe of public awareness. The birth of the child of two vapid celebrities will claim far more attention than the death of thousands in a war gone brutally out of control.
Kerr offers two explanations for what he believes to be underreporting of events in Iraq. First, he believes that war coverage is being improperly “controlled” by the American military…
[Dozier] has pushed the war news into higher visibility by becoming part of it.Second, Kerr suggests that dangers inherent in a war zone place a limit on the ability of journalists to fully report on what is important…
She has done it while covering the war in the masterfully controlled way that has allowed the military to keep so much of the carnage out of public view….
Horror stories occasionally slip through the control net, but it will be a long, long time before we know all there is to know.
We don’t see reporters moving around Iraq as reporters moved around Vietnam. We see the war in very narrow focus. It is partly because of imbedding, partly because the country is so terrifyingly unpredictable. There is apparently no place totally secure, no place where murder and kidnapping are not a possibility.If, as Kerr speculates, American “control” of journalists is as serious a problem limiting the scope of war reporting as is the nature of war itself, then a conflict without the “controlling” American presence should receive more complete coverage, right?
So how then is the dearth of coverage of a war like the current civil war in the Congo, where the US has no “control” of any sort, explained? As Time magazine describes in its coverage of “The Deadliest War in the World“…
Simmering conflict in Congo has killed 4 million people since 1998, yet few choose to cover the story. Time looks at a forgotten nation — and what’s needed to prevent the deaths of millions more.A key difference between Iraq and the Congo, of course, is that Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq, but not in the Congo. But is that the full extent of the discussion? Does the lack of American involvement in a war, no matter how brutal, justify not covering it? This result of this version of blood-and-soil nationalistic thinking runs counter to the reasonable rule-of-thumb laid out by Kerr at the start of his column — out-of-control wars deserve more coverage than “the birth of the child of two vapid celebrities”. By this standard, the civil war in the Congo should defintiely receive more coverage than it does. That it doesn’t has nothing to do with any supposed military “control” of journalists. Bob Kerr needs to look beyond blaming-America’s-military-first to explain why violent conflict doesn’t always get the scale of coverage it merits.
One final point: a widespread willingness to ignore national-scale violence, so long as Americans are not involved is what makes the position of withdraw-from-Iraq and damn-the-consequences held by politicians like Carl Sheeler and Sheldon Whitehouse so deeply unsatisfying. The idea of making violence in Iraq easier to ignore, because once America is no longer directly involved, Iraq won’t get very much coverage, is not a sound basis for American foreign policy. [Open full post]
Well, after extensive efforts since the company devoured Fleet, Bank of America has finally succeeded in persuading me to take my business elsewhere. From several varieties of inconvenience to an extremely unpleasant job fair to the fees (my God, the fees!), the behemoth has finally overcome the natural inertia against changing banks.
The company’s corporate approach to handling customers was consolidated for me in a single policy that I discovered a number of months ago: if a customer should write checks for more money than is in his checking account, the bank offers the service of automatically transferring the funds from his savings account. Charging a fee for such a thing is fair — it is the customer’s error, after all, and one that a bank understandably discourages — but Bank of America takes the fee out of the checking account, without automatically transferring that amount as part of the service.
During a particularly hectic time last year, when I simply had to handle my finances on autopilot, I fell into a cycle of not transferring sufficient funds to cover the fees that were automatically being withdrawn from my checking account, and those fees piled up. When I called to complain, the bank did forgive a handful of them, but my awareness that somebody within the organization had made the decision to arrange fees in such a way as to trip up busy customers left me resolved to, at some future date, quit the bank. Now that I’ve discovered another policy having to do with numbers of transactions that conflicts with a banking strategy that I’ve followed since I was fourteen, I won’t delay any longer.
In fact, the entirely different feel that I’ve gotten from Bank of America than from any of my previous banks makes me wary of financial trends toward automation. It used to be mainly on general principle that I preferred to handle each paycheck and bill — so as not to lose touch with the flow of my money. But now I think automatic deposits and withdrawals may represent a much more insidious trend. How much higher the barrier is to changing banks when doing so requires one to recall and then figure out how to change bank information with any number of third parties!
I fear that movement toward the ideal of convenience — not just in finance — may lead to a more oppressive corporate culture, as each company becomes akin to a monopoly of its own client base.
This posting is Part XIV in a series of postings about economic thoughts.
Milton and Rose Friedman, in Chapter 5 of their 1979 book, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, discuss the issue of equality:
[Open full post]…In the early decades of the Republic, equality meant equality before God; liberty meant liberty to shape one’s own life. The obvious conflict between the Declaration of Independence and the institution of slavery occupied the center of the stage. That conflict was finally resolved by the Civil War. The debate then moved to a different level. Equality came more and more to be interpreted as “equality of opportunity” in the sense that no one should be prevented by arbitrary obstacles from using his capacities to pursue his own objectives. That is still its dominant meaning to most citizens of the United States.
Neither equality before God nor equality of opportunity presented any conflict with liberty to shape one’s own life. Quite the opposite. Equality and liberty were two faces of the same basic value…
A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades…equality of outcome…Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty. The attempt to promote it has been a major source of bigger and bigger government, and of government-imposed restrictions of our liberty.
The Providence Journal (which, to build an incidental point on Andrew’s previous post, Matt Jerzyk believes to be too conservative) continues its support for same-sex marriage:
Time, however, may be on his side. Despite various state drives to ban same-sex marriage during the 2004 elections, it appears that the idea of such unions is gaining acceptance. Society is better off when any two adults can make a commitment to care for each other. And more and more Americans believe that sexual orientation should not bar anyone from enjoying the rights accorded by marriage.
In that spirit, we extend best wishes to Attleboro’s most prominent newlyweds — and to all who may be exchanging vows in a new bridal season, regardless of sex.
Those who’ve followed this debate for awhile will spot the (probably unintential) revealing of the chute down the slippery slope: If society “is better off when any two adults can make a commitment to care for each other” — the Projo’s gender-free paraphrase for marriage’s purpose — why can’t those two adults be related? Why, for that matter, must it only consist of two adults?
One final question: can the thinking behind an editorial position be both short-sighted and blind?
