Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Going Wobbly

Here are Part I and Part II of a three part series entitled "Going Wobbly":

As we consider the state of the market and whether it exaggerates or understates the underlying fundamental risk, bear this question in mind: What role have investors played in today's perceived financial market risk?

I have it on good authority part III will be published shortly.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Reader Question of the Day

Did I eat turkey for Thanksgiving, ask Brad L. from Detroit and Jen R. from Atlanta?

Why, yes I did.

It's not just that I lack the moral fortitude to suggest not having turkey to a family full of farmers. Frankly, I've seen what vegetarians eat for Thanksgiving, and what most of them cook -- I'd rather eat their hemp shoes. Not content to have a nice big dish of holiday mushroom ravioli or lentil loaf, vegetarians seem curiously afflicted with a desire to conform to the season. Curious, I mean, given how this desire is punctuated with screaming fights with their relatives about having "that beautiful living creature you MURDERED on my table!"

But, we must have something that captures the spirit of Thanksgiving. Not a turkey, you understand, because we love all the little birdies, and want them to be able to run free in the wild, instead of being cruelly slaughtered for our tables.

[Do not try to tell a vegan that since turkeys can't feed themselves or reproduce unassisted, it's likely to be a very short stint in the wild, because their native habitat is not the woods, but the farmyard, and their natural niche is being raised for slaughter. Those hemp shoes pack a surprising wallop.]

No, we can't have turkey. But we want something, y'know, turkey-ish. So they award the place of honor on their Thanksgiving to some form of special-for-Thanksgiving ersatz meat.

Now, meat substitutes can be delicious, provided they are drowned in chili sauce or teriyaki, and surrounded by vegetables, so you don't notice the excessively chewy texture or total absence of flavor. But getting a tofurkey or that wheat gluten stuff the name of which I can never remember which is just as well since the mere thought of it makes me ill, and sticking it in the middle of your table sans accompaniment just so you can pretend it's like having a turkey except that the soybeans can reproduce unassisted. . . well, as I said, why not just cut up the artisanal Guatamalan tablecloth into bite sized squares and let us eat something that has a little texture?

I am a vegetarian, but I'm not, y'know, doctrinaire. We had an eighteen pounder stuffed chock full of delicious apple, sausage, and dried cranberry stuffing, drowned with turkey-dripping-and-apple-cider gravy.

I ate myself sick.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Seemingly Really Good Ideas

Just goes to show you why theory is never quite the same as practice.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Bravo

Just found Andrew Sullivan's Thanksgiving meditation on America. Marvelous.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Holy Toledo, Batman

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From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the Day

Why did so many sites take such pleasure in saying "the Thanksgiving story is a myth" and instead relaying the worst dark side of the pilgrim tales?

[Full disclosure: I am descended from John and Priscilla Alden, and probably some other Pilgrims. Not that I can imagine why that would matter, since I am also probably descended from some of the natives they displaced.]

I mean, yes, there is a strong element of mythology to the pilgrim story. There are very strong elements of mythology to any story any group tells about itself. Believe me, I know -- I just watched Reds last night. How come people who get quite hysterical telling you that the apologists for Stalin were all right, really, because they meant well can't cut the Pilgrims a little slack for being creatures of the 17th century instead of the 21st? It's not, after all, as if they infected the Indians with smallpox whom they displaced; those folks were gone before they got there. It's not that there isn't a dark side to the Pilgrim story, mind you, but it certainly isn't the whole story. Those folks had the balls to get in a tiny little ship and sail into the unknown, build a community several thousand miles from the nearest folks who spoke their language, survived the death of half their colony in the first year, and made something of it. Unless you could build a colony in an unknown country with just some abandoned fields, the contents of one ship, and Squanto, it behooves you to pay that accomplishment some respect.

I don't mind, per se, those who publicize the little known aspects of the pilgrim story. What sets my teeth on edge is the relentless focus on the negative, which is just as false as the fairy tale we tell five year olds. The Pilgrims were not lying, murdering scum; they were people persecuted for their religion who came to the New World in search of a place where they could practice their religion and keep their culture. Just like, say, the Jews. They did not always behave well. But their early treatment of the indians was, while not exemplary, not all that bad either. It helps if you stop thinking of the Indians as the Eco-Demi-Gods of the commercials, and think of them instead as actual real live people, who were busy having lives, clashing with each other, and periodically exterminating other tribes, long before the Pilgrims got here. What the Pilgrims did was not sacrelige; it was the same kind of opportunistic expansion into the territory of another group that has characterized the whole of human history, including the history of the Indians. We have, I hope, evolved morally and politically since then. Such a thing wouldn't happen today. But of course, the reason it wouldn't happen today is that those Pilgrims came over here and founded a colony that eventually showed the world that there was a better way.

Publishing such thoughts on Thanksgiving seems rather childish, the sulking teenager at the dinner table who can't wait to tell everyone what's wrong with the pole lamps and the overstuffed sofa and the deep freezer out in the garage. It's not just that they don't want to enjoy the holiday; none of us can because it's not authentic. You know, the right does not, by and large, spend labor day pissing all over the Hollywood Ten and all the other heroic myths of the left. For one day, could you be polite and let everyone else enjoy their turkey?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Happy Thanksgiving

Among the many blessings I enjoy is living in a society that has
largely recognized the unproductive and authoritarian nature of collectivist systems. In that vein, I suggest you read Caroline
Baum's column on an important Thanksgiving lesson we should have learned in school. (Here's a similar column from Jeff Jacoby)

For other things they didn't teach you in school, read about Squanto and the European disease vector.

Thanks for visiting, and all my best to you and your loved ones.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Happy Thanksgiving

At this time of year, I like to cast around and pick up something I feel thankful for to bear in mind while I'm rolling pie crus and basting turkey.

Today, it's my dog.

I haven't blogged about it because I have an engineer's superstitious fear of predicting a good outcome for any operation, but we're out of the danger zone now.

My dog almost died this year.

He had a slipped disk. We didn't know what it was, of course; all we knew was that every time he got up he gave a scream of agony that broke your heart every time you heard it. Unfortunately, the vet we had thought it was his elbow dysplasia, so we screwed around for three months treating that. Towards the end, we realized that if we didn't treat it soon, we were going to have to put him down. He had no life; couldn't go to the park or run or even enjoy sitting with his family because of his constant pain. It had to end one way or the other.

The first time the vet brought it up I started sobbing and didn't stop for six hours.

We tried a last ditch effort: massive doses of steroids. The transformation was miraculous. So miraculous that we decided to take him to another vet, since the swift effect of steroids seemed to indicate a neurological problem rather than a joint problem, but his vet, an orthopedist, seemed disinclined to treat. Our new vet had us up to Westchester for an MRI the next day. The MRI confirmed it -- he had a massive disk rupture below his spinal column, almost on his tail.

The doctor told us surgery had a 95% chance of total success. We gladly forked over the massive sums they wanted to perform it and agreed to leave him overnight so he could have surgery the following morning. We visited him for a little while, and he seemed fine -- still couldn't get up, but he's a sweet dog and he seemed to bear us no ill will for handing him over to strangers.

Two days later, we were allowed to visit again. He was on morphine, and not himself -- unresponsive to stimuli, and seemingly in pain. He had a T shaved into his back for his incision, which seemed large and ominous with those black stitches everywhere. We fed him his dinner and left, with a little hope -- but not too much, because when you've suffered with your dog for three months and come to the end, it feels dangerous to hope.

Well, he came home the next day, and he's been getting better ever since. It's been like a miracle -- he runs, prances, rolls on his back, just like he used to. No pain at all. Lately he's taken to climbing back on the sofas, and we're so glad to see him moving again that even laundering slipcovers is a joy.

No, really. If you have a pet you know what I mean. The mute suffering of an animal is probably the worst thing on earth next to the suffering of a child, because they don't understand, and they wait, so patiently, for you to make it all better. And if the love of an animal is not human love, it is perfect nonetheless.

So I am very, very thankful that Finnegan has more years to run and play and drool on the furniture. And I offer, for your maudlin Thanksgiving pleasure, the following tribute to that noble creature, The Dog:

Tribute to a dog

It is claimed that this is a speech George Vest, a lawyer, made defending a client in 1870, when a man's foxhound named Drum was shot. Drum's owner sued the man who shot Drum. Although there was no evidence, after Senator Vest finished speaking, the jury was in tears. They fined the man $500, even though the maximum fine was $150.

"Gentlemen of the Jury," The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most. A man's reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us, may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him and the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog."

"Gentlemen of the Jury," A man's dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master's side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounters with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth, an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him to guard against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when the last scene of all comes, and death takes the master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even to death."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Wedding Bells are Ringing

I've known about this for a little while, but held silent per the wishes of the parties involved. Now apparently the secred is out, so I shall help to spread the happy news:

Sasha Castel and Andrew Ian Dodge are getting married!

That's right, two of the blogosphere's finest are tying the knot. They met and fell in love entirely through their blogs, and now they're making it official. While I believe that Chris Kanis of Spoons Experience qualifies as the first blog-inspired engagement, this one is probably the first of two bloggers who met through blogging. Head over and give the happy couple your best wishes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Crunchy Conservatives

I saw this post on crunchy conservatives and had to laugh. Is there such a thing, or has Rod Dreher just discovered that the lifestyle choices of young urban professionals transcend politics?

I don't know the answer. If there is such a phenomenon, I guess I'm part of it. I'm a vegetarian. I keep an enormous dog fed on a raw food diet rather than dog food. I cook most of the food I eat from vegetables hand chosen at the local farmer's market or produce stand, including making my own applesauce, and participating in the annual family canning fest. I have been known to bake my own bread. My idea of a great vacation involves skiing, hiking, or white water rafting, not lolling on the beach. Yet, I think the Sierra Club would have me on their blacklist, if they had such a thing.

I think that to the extent there is a separate crunchy conservative movement, it is this: the conservatives are not self righteous. I am a vegetarian, but I don't prosletyze. (Well, a little. It is healthy and delicious.) I don't think it's wrong to go to Aruba for your vacations, only that it is not to my taste. I do not think you will find among the crunchy conservatives the kind of aggressively self-righteous environmentalist who thinks there oughta be a law making the entire world be a vegetarian. Just as, to be fair, you probably won't find all that many Christians on the left who think the entire nation should embrace their religion.

But the reason I had to laugh is that when my friends from business school discovered this site, more than one of them expressed sheer amazement at my location on the political spectrum. "I thought you were the compleat hippie," said one, expressing a common sentiment. Having spent most of my life on the Upper West Side, where my politics, when known, are reviled as the worst sort of troglodyte oppression, it was quite a shock to find that outside of my hothouse environment, I come across as the girl with the knee-high leather moccasins and the tie-dyed shirtwaist.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Long on Rhetoric, Short on Sense

Now, I am not under the impression that all feminists, or even professors of Women's Studies, believe this sort of nonsense. But I've spent enough time around the movement to know that the majority don't challenge the people saying it, which is almost as bad.

WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article, “The Future—If There is One—Is Female,” writes: “At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race.” What do you think about this statement?

MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

(VIA Instapundit)

Leaving aside the question of how, exactly, we would go about limiting the population of males to 10% without infanticide or other practices rightly denounced when they are applied to women by barbaric cultures, how exactly is this "species responsibility"? If these women spent less time on the Utne Reader, and more time actually studying the environment they claim they wish to protect, they'd know that what they're proposing is to reduce species diversity by 80% -- hardly a recipe for a healthy species. One could forgive such idiocy if it were not that the same people advocating such "solutions" are wild about diversity when it comes to endangered species, or for that matter, endangered ethnic groups.

I'm also aware that the reason they say things like that is that no one pays attention to them. But if you're going to propose genocide with the offhand arrogance of a high school essayist, you can't really complain that no one takes you seriously.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

We have met the enemy and he is us

Robert Shapiro explains why we'll never get the Jane Galt Tax Plan. Sigh.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

WWJD Redux

I've been somewhat bemused by the vehement reaction to the What Would Jesus Drive campaign by some on the right. Now, I'm not an evangelical Christian, but it seems pretty fair to say that Jesus, if he were here, would probably oppose contributing to global warming in order to gain a trivial benefit for yourself -- because, say, you feel more manly driving a Ford Expedition than a Toyota Corolla. The authors of the campaign that I saw didn't say you couldn't drive an SUV and be a good Christian -- they just said that as Christians, you should think about how much car you really need, and not drive one bigger than you have to have. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

On the other hand, in this excellent post Sasha Volokh points out that while in general it's a good idea to refrain from criticizing private activist movements as harshly as we criticize those who are agitating for government intervention, there are times when such campaigns are counterproductive -- that is, they work to the detriment of what we assume to be their founders' goals. He also points out, however, that you'd better be damned sure what those goals are before launching an attack on such grounds.

On a side note, if the Volokh Conspiracy doesn't stop making the rest of us look bad, I think a secondary boycott may be called for.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Censorship, Chilling Effect, or just Freedom of Association?

Goodness! The blogosphere is up in arms about Rittenhouse Review's attempted secondary blogroll boycott of LGF -- or rather, Steven Den Beste's critique of same.

The heart of RR's argument:

I can no longer in good conscience include on the Rittenhouse Review’s blogroll any weblog that has provided a permanent blogroll link of its own to the site known as “Little Green Footballs” or “LGF.”

It is with great regret and considerable lament that I have adopted this position -- or been forced to adopt this position -- as I am normally a passionate advocate of an author’s right to choose his associates and to establish and maintain her own chosen associations.

However, it has become painfully clear, to the extent it wasn’t already, that the hosts of LGF, while preciously coy about their own political persuasions, all too willingly and not without satisfaction have allowed their site to become a vile cesspool of racism, bigotry, prejudice, ignorance, and hate.

The heart of Den Beste's argument:

In essence, you have no obligation to associate with people like that. You have no obligation to in any way help them spread their opinions. But you should not attempt to actively suppress them, to actively work to try to prevent them from expressing their point of view. In part that means you should not attempt to use the power of government to persecute them, but it also means you should not attempt to coerce others to join you, except through the power of argument on the basis of the issues. Where you cross the line is when you do anything which works to prevent others from making up their own minds.

Translated into modern terms and choosing an example, it would go like this: if you hate the Nazis, you should not link to their web site. If you find others who do link to the Nazis, you can send them mail and try to convince them that the Nazis are despicable and that the link should be removed on that basis. But when you go beyond that, and try to use means not related to the issues (e.g. threatening a boycott of the person's business) then you've crossed the line. You've ceased to try to deal with the issues, and moved into attempts to suppress information to prevent others from even being exposed to the issues. That's where disapproval ends and censorship begins.

Mill differentiates between not helping others find opinions of which you disapprove (which he thinks is acceptable) and actively working to prevent them from accessing those opinions (which he condemns).

RR is completely justified in not linking to LGF. RR is completely justified in attempting to convince others that LGF is not worth linking to. But with this step, RR is moving beyond that to attempt to use a level of direct coercion which I don't consider acceptable.

Den Beste also makes fun of Rittenhouse Review's template, which I think detracts from his main argument, but which is also sending RR's defenders into irrational paroxysms of rage. I'm not going to address that issue, because frankly I haven't any high moral ground to stand on in the matter of template design, or for that matter, cluttering posts with distracting side comments.

But what about freedom of expression? what about standards of decency. Most importantly, it seems, what about meeeeeee?

First, no one is arguing that Rittenhouse Review hasn't the right to stage such a boycott. They're arguing about whether RR ought to stage such a boycott. RR's defenders are trying to force their opponents to apply the very stringent standards of argument that we use to determine what absolute rights we believe people have, such as life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc. This is silly. No one is arguing, I think, that what Rittenhouse Review is doing is beyond the pale, only that it's a bad idea -- and argument which requires much looser standards of proof.

So, is it a bad idea? On the one hand, freedom of association is precious, and although some people would disagree with me, I think the forceful expression of revulsion against ideas we find repulsive is an important part of the marketplace of ideas; it keeps polite people from turning over the public square to loud wingnuts who think child pornography should be a civil right and certain ethnic groups are natural slaves, or whatever current vileness passes for thought among the dark places of the intellectual world.

For example, I do not subscribe to any newspaper that carries Ted Rall cartoons. I am sufficiently appalled by his callous and juvenile treatment of the WTC widows that I decline to have even a tiny fraction of my custom go to support his continuing imprecations. Am I limiting the marketplace of ideas? In one sense, yes. In another sense, I am contributing to it, by expressing in the most effective way my disapproval of the particular ideas Ted Rall represents. Or rather, of the way he chose to represent them. I think there are arguments to be made about the relative compensation of WTC families and other disaster victims, of the media treatment of the subject, and other sensitive issues surrounding 9/11. I just don't think that the way to discuss these issues is to make nasty jokes about the families. So one can argue that by enforcing the social norm of confining arguments to ideas rather than personalities, I am in some way enhancing rather than taking away from the public discourse. In my own exceedingly tiny way, I mean.

So leaving aside grand, sweeping questions of cosmic right or wrong: does Rittenhouse Review's action add to, or detract from, the free interplay of ideas? To some extent, obviously, that depends on whether or not you agree with LGF. But one of the hallmarks of liberal thought is the recognition that it is extremely dangerous to decree which subjects are arguable and which are sacred totems that may not bequestioned. To the extent that Rittenhouse Review's action is based on content rather than tone -- and given the tenor of the blogroll, I find it hard to make a cogent argument that Rittenhouse Review's objection is primarily to the tone of the LGF commenters -- it is detrimental to the liberal interaction of ideas.

Moreover, it seems that Rittenhouse Review is not merely trying to express their disapproval of LGF. The intent, however unlikely to be successful, seems to be to prevent anyone from reading the ideas on LGF. As Den Beste points out in his essay, the nature of web traffic is that for a site to get significant traffic, much of it must be pushed there via links from other sites; thus, an attempt to get a website delinked is in essence an attempt to prevent the expression of the ideas on the site.

This is not the best way to ensure the triumph of the truth. Certainly, Rittenhouse Review has no obligation to send its readers anywhere it believes that the writing is offensive or the ideas are wrong. For example, I do not have a permalink to Rittenhosue Review. Trying to ban those ideas, however, by keeping everyone from linking to the site, does not advance the search for truth. Ideas which are shoved off into a ghetto populated only by the like-minded do not die; they fester. If Rittenhouse Review believes that LGF's ideas are wrong, a better strategy would be to bring the ideas into the light and expose their untruth, rather than trying to keep the Faithful from ever encountering them.

It is not fair, of course, to say that such cocooning is endemic only to the right or the left. But a propos of nothing in particular, I note that the much-excoriated right-wing of the Blogosphere, supposedly the civil-rights-hating heirs of John Ashcroft, have responded in classical liberal fashion -- not by attempting to ban Rittenhouse Review, but by vigorously opposing the actions of which it disapproves.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Thoughts for the "New Plutocracy" Crowd

Instapundit points out an article about Tyler Cowen. Here's an interesting excerpt from one of his papers:

The net effects of the United States Social Security System are complex, and I do not count them as part of the welfare state in this paper. In any case most of the redistribution is across generations rather than to the poor per se. Earlier generations (the current elderly) get the best deal and subsequent generations receive increasingly inferior deals, given the pay-as-you-go feature of the system (e.g., the very first generation received benefits but did not pay a comparable tax burden). More generally, returns are tied to what individuals put into the system. Many aspects of Social Security are regressive, given that the payroll tax stops at $76,200, the poor start working earlier (thus increasing their contribution) and tend to die sooner, thus lowering their payout.

Many of the largest and most expensive government programs benefit the rich or the middle class, rather than the poor. Christopher Jencks estimates that in 1980 only one-fifth of all social welfare spending was explicitly aimed at the poor. Subsidies to higher and lower education do most for the upper middle class. The real value of public goods is greater in wealthy communities, even relative to local tax expenditures. Many health care subsidies benefit the elderly, who tend to be wealthier than the national average. Our tax system is only weakly progressive, all things considered, and many kinds of taxes, such as sales taxes, have a regressive impact. Milk price supports, most tariffs, and corporate welfare are but a few of the many regressive policies enacted by the American government.

So that was the situation in 1980...

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A Strip of Anna Kournikova's Fabric

Squash was my sport. It's a clean-cut preppy one with no money and little glamour. College and pro squash players go on to run hedge funds and opine on healthcare and politics. It's an anachronism in today's world (until you've seen Fives, that is).

Perhaps that is about to change. The 18th ranked woman player in the U.K., one Vicky Botwright, has stirred up quite a buzz by taking the court in a thong! After gaining the requisite notoriety, she even auctioned the thong off in Hong Kong.

Somebody tell Tony Pierce.

Incidentally, last night I watched an episode of CSI that my Tivo had spooled up for me. It was preceded by a slew of warnings about "brief nudity". Added bonus! Good Tivo! I settled in to watch TV cheap-thrill history in the making.

It was a corpse. Dead boobs. What the hell? Based on this and the unedited Schindler's List I'd say the evolving TV nudity code is "we'll show skin if the character is murdered...or about to be." The mind reels. If I was the sort of person to lament cultural sickness, I'd...well, I'd be lamenting right now.

I'll stick with squash and the quite healthy Ms. "Bodright".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Jane Galt Tax Plan

Fritz Schrank asks how we should simplify taxes. Well, here's the Jane Galt version, guaranteed to please no one but its author:

1) Get rid of all our poverty programs, except those aimed at the disabled, and temporary unemployment assistance, and institute the negative income tax. That is to say, the system should be continuously progressive, from a steep negative rate of up to 100% on very low earners, gradually declining until it zeroes out around $28,000 a year, and then rising gradually until it maxes out around 35% on the top brackets.

2) Eliminate FICA and pay for Social Security and Medicare out of general revenue. It's time to stop pretending it's a pension system, when there are no assets in the "trust fund"

3) Eliminate the corporate income tax

4) Eliminate the special treatment for capital gains. All income should be taxed at the same level, regardless of its source.

5) Eliminate all deductions. Period, end of statement. No mortgate, student, child, etc. All causes are equally worthy in the eyes of the person who possesses the deduction; it is a waste of our time as a nation to sit around arguing about who deserves what.

6) Just say no to the Value Added Tax. In theory, it's a good tax. In practice, because it is extremely hard to tell what proportion of the price of anything represents the tax, it removes the good and natural pressure upon tax rates.

7) Get rid of the estate tax, and tax the capital gains on whatever is sold.

So why these particular features?

Well, the negative income tax does two things: encourages work by removing the disincentives created by potential loss of benefits; and means that the entire country, poorest to richest, faces a marginal tax increase if they want more spending: the poor have to give back some of their rebate, while the rich have to pay higher rates. For many on the left, that may of course be a bug, not a feature, as it forces the electorate to think much harder about whether or not they want new spending.

The arguments between conservatives and liberals often go like this:

C: The rich pay all the taxes
L: That's not true -- what about FICA?

Both have points. But the central issue that the conservatives are trying to get at is that the majority of the electorate does not face a marginal tax increase when they agitate for new spending. FICA may indeed be regressive, but its rates are unaffected by the level of spending in government. So a majority is prone to agitate for higher taxes, because they will not be paying those taxes.

I don't think it's a healthy situation for the electorate when a large majority is voting for spending that costs them nothing. To the minds of someone who pays no income tax, there's no cost/benefit analysis to be made; they're getting stuff for free. Even something of trivial benefit to them is thus better than not raising taxes. So we end up spending money on a lot of crap, because most of the voters don't care -- it's not their money.

On the other hand, liberals have a point about fairness. It isn't fair to say that some guy who brings home $20K should pay the same quarter of his income as Warren Buffett. The decrease in Joe Schmoe's standard of living represented by that 25% is much greater than the decrease in Warren Buffett's SOL from taking a quarter of his loot.

A negative income tax increases fairness, removes perverse incentives from the current benefit system, and makes sure that everyone has to think about whether they really want that new spending they're voting for -- enough to give up some of their cash.

Killing FICA increases fairness while removing some of the obstacles to reform by eliminating the fiction of an insurance program.

Eliminating the corporate income tax while equalizing treatment between capital gains does a number of things. It mitigates the current bias towards (tax deductible) debt financing. It ends all the ridiculous distortionary crap that corporations do to get around taxes. It ends the bias towards retained earnings that helped produce such interesting results in the stock market. It takes away a large chunk of the ability of the rich to avoid taxes by deferring their income in capital gains. It ends the tax preference for stock options that helped make the start of the new millenium so lively. Under this plan, income is income is income, no matter where it comes from. Thus we can stop the multi-billion dollar industry in shifting income from tax-disadvantaged to tax-advantaged forms.

If you just end the corporate tax without changing capital gains, you keep much of the distortion and shelter for the rich. If you eliminate special capital gains treatment without eliminating the corporate tax, you bias the economy away from investment, because now income is taxed at a high level twice -- once when its made by the company, and a second time when its distributed to the company's owners. This way, we tax it once, when it hits a real person.

We eliminate deductions for two reasons. First of all, they're distortionary. If it makes economic sense for adults to go to school, they will go to school. Giving a tax credit for it just encourages marginal activity that wouldn't pay for itself without a subsidy. Try thinking of it not as a tax credit, but as you giving someone else money to follow their dream of learning Old Church Slavonic, and you see what I mean.

Second of all, deductions are the way that the rich make sure that they pay a lot less taxes than the upper middle class. There is a reason that Barbra Streisand thinks that income taxes should be raised; she isn't going to pay much more tax. Most of her money is in assets, earning more money. It's the guy who owns the gas station down the street who's going to get it in the teeth. If we want to tax the rich, let's tax them, not give umpteen zillion deductions so they have the same marginal rate as your average bike messenger.

That's fine, I hear you say, but why all the deductions? Why not just the bad ones?

Because, as we've found since Reagan's simplification, there's no such thing as just one deduction. If you want the mortgage tax credit, you're going to need to give someone else the land-use abatement, and then there's the guy with his Urban Empowerment Zone Qualified Small Business, and next thing you know, we haven't gotten anywhere. The only way to get a clean code is to get rid of all of them. This won't be fun for many people. Housing prices will drop, for starters. On the other hand, so will tax rates. And come on -- why should an apartment renter be paying more taxes so you can frolic in the greenery?

Why get rid of the estate tax? Because the revenues raised are trivial, and people spend an enormous amount of time and money structuring their estates to get around them. Again, a disproportionate share of the tax is paid not by the super rich, but by the poor schmucks with one or two big assets they can't structure to get around the tax. On the other hand, when it's sold the inheritors should pay all the capital gains -- if you get rid of the estate tax, you should get rid of the stepped-up basis as well.

So that's Jane's plan. As you can see, it would be efficient, fair, and has absolutely no chance of ever getting passed unless they make me Dictator for the Decade.

Sigh. I could solve so many problems, if only people would let me tell them what to do. But no, they insist on mucking it up by deciding for themselves.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's About Time

Here's something you won't hear from other New Yorkers: subway fares are going up, and that's a good thing.

In 1910, when most of the system had been completed, the subway fare was 5 cents -- 1/20th of an average day's wage.

Even the minimum wage workers in New York don't pull any $30 a day. And minimum wage workers are a trivial segment of New York's labor force.

In 1910, the system covered its operating expenses, and even made enough to cover capital costs, with a little profit thrown in.

Now it doesn't cover expenses, certainly doesn't cover capital costs, and profit? Who dat?

It's overused, because its price is artificially below market. It's overcrowded, and its services are underappreciated.

A bus fare ought to cost $4.00 just to cover its operating expenses. That doesn't include negative externalities like traffic, pollution, and noise, nor does it cover the cost of buying the bus, maintaining the Metropolitan Transit Authority, or other physical plant -- just gas, maintenance, and driver wages. Yet the fare has stayed $1.50 for ten years, while the trains and buses overcrowd, and the transportation system on the East Side, which is strained to the breaking point, cannot afford expansions which would ease traffic levels.

25 or 50 cents -- the proposed raises -- are a drop in the bucket.

But what about the poor, you say? If the poor really can't afford to ride the trains, we should raise their income until they can, not subsidize every pinot-noir-guzzling investment banker and corporate lawyer along with them. But let's be real. We're talking about a trivial expense alongside the average $8-10 cost of lunch in a New York City deli. People aren't complaining because they can't afford to ride the subway at $2.00; they're complaining because they don't want to pay. Liking to get things for less than the cost of providing them is hardly unique, but neither is fulfilling those wishes some sort of civic duty.

It's time for New Yorkers to pay their way.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hmmm

Interesting question.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

That or Which?

It seems that there are people in the world who do not understand when one uses "that" and when one uses "which".

But you knew that. Over the years, the editorial staff of Asymmetrical Information have observed that there is a large class of people who seem to believe that "which" is simply the formal locution, used to dress up important documents. This is incorrect. There is a time for using "that" and a time for using "which, a time for "like" and a time for "as", a time for the subjunctive and a time for the conditional. . .

But those are other rants.

Those of you who know and love Jane in her incarnations as Chicago MBA or Former Technology Consultant may be unaware that she has several other past lives. In one of them she was a Penn English Major. And no, that does not mean she is going to regale you with naughty stories, though of course, being a Penn English Major, she could if she so chose.

She will, however, explain to you now the difference between that and which: that denotes a restrictive clause, and which denotes an unrestrictive clause.

But what does this mean? I hear you cry.

Well, we use "that" when we want to restrict our subject to some smaller subset, by using the descriptive phrase that follows that. Hence:

Please pick up the clothes that you dropped off at the dry cleaners yesterday.

I don't just want you to pick up any old clothes; I want you to pick up the ones you dropped off yesterday. No other clothes will do. Hence, I use the restrictive "that" to tell you exactly what clothes I want you to pick up.

Compare this with the correct unrestrictive usage of "which":

When I was a junior in college I drove a lime-green 1977 chevy, which I bought with the pittance I earned in my summer job with Greenpeace.

The clause following "which" doesn't tell us information we have to have in order to know which car it is. Even if we don't know that you spent your summer haranguing people to wear hemp shoes, we would still know exactly what car we're talking about: your car, the unfortunately colored American gas-guzzler that leaks oil and parallel parks about as well as the Love Boat. The information provided by our descriptive clause is interesting, but not necessary for us to identify its subject.

Notes:

Often, "that" is dropped in spoken, and increasingly, in written English. That's perfectly fine. Nonetheless, in order to tell which one you should use, try sticking the "that" back in and seeing if it makes sense.

"Which" and "That" both do duty elsewhere, as you can see from the above sentence. The distinction under discussion applies only to their use in clauses.

In spoken English, "Which" is freely substituted for "That", even though it shouldn't be. This is why seeing what "sounds right" is no substitute for learning proper usage, and why you should take that English teacher you had in eighth grade who told you that the important thing was to express yourself, and express your displeasure by shaking her violently until her brain starts working again.

Next question?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Decentralization of Information and the American Ideal

You know what I love about having a blog? I love the fact that I can return to the same subject over and over and hammer it into the ground until y'all are begging me to stop. Like that's going to work. Ha! If you've got something to say, say it with cash. Tip jar's over on the right. If you want something out of me, you pile gold before me until I smile.

Anyhow, as I was saying, I've been thinking more about open v. closed security. Generally, you can find me voting with the libertarians, but on this one, I'm of two minds.

On the one hand, a decentralized, open information system works better at processing information for the optimal answer. A large part of why communism failed was that no one did any work, of course; but another large part is that the economic system did a very poor job at finding out what people needed and how badly they needed it. So instead of basing their decisions on what people needed, the guys in charge of production based their decisions on what they thought people needed. If you have parents you know this is not the same thing. No matter how well-meant the decision-makers, the result is decidedly sub-optimal.

So on the one hand, releasing potential security holes to the entire population and allowing the giant processor that is the hearts and minds of the American public is an order of magnitude more likely to produce an innovative way to plug your hole than is asking a small team of experts to come up with the solution.

But on the other hand, some security holes don't have fixes; or at least, many of the cures are worse than the disease. Let's say that we didn't have these nifty heat scanners for cargo containers. That would be a major security hole. However, the likely solutions -- open every container, go back to non-container shipping, or shut down shipping -- would likely cause more damage and lost lives than a terrorist attack, as they would cripple our economy.

At that point, releasing the information doesn't enhance your security; it gives the terrorists ideas, without producing new solutions.

The problem is, there's no way of telling in advance which problems have solutions that just haven't been discovered yet, and which are insoluble. They're all insoluble to your little team of experts.

So you have to make a tradeoff between finding solutions and not giving terrorists ideas. And you tend to err on the side of security. This is not unreasonable; after all, if you have the experts on your team, you've already got the people most likely to generate solutions. Even though sheer weight of numbers means that the American public would be even more likely to do so, the curve is not smooth; there are diminishing returns to telling more people, while the heightened security risk is real.

At this point, the hard core open source/open society types tend to say that of course the terrorists will have thought of anything you can. Now, that's just silly. First of all, a lot of the holes in security are visible only to people in highly specialized professions: pilots, engineers, scientists. There aren't a lot of those in terrorist groups, because they have, y'know, jobs.

And second of all, that giant processing system works the other way. There are a lot more of us than there are of the terrorists, and consequently, we're going to generate a lot more high-quality ideas for bringing the nation to its knees. Mathematically, some of those ideas are going to lack solutions, cost-efficient or otherwise. After all, we've been working on the problem of finding a really good low-calorie dessert for fifty years, and what have we got? Snackwells.

There's a certain element of "to the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Sure, open source does a great job of patching Apache. But Apache still gets hacked. And let's get a little perspective here: software security is not the same thing as personal security. When I wrote a post criticizing medical residency programs for having residents work 48 hour shifts, old friends emailed to point out that I used to do "mission critical" work on shifts that lasted up to, one momorable weekend, 65 hours. Okay, guys, we're getting a little exaggerated idea of our own importance. I worked on a box of bolts. If it went down, the companies I worked for lost a lot of money. But at the end of the day, all of the little bankers got up from their desks and went home to their families. Equating the two is sheer hubris.

Urging people to publish their ideas on security weaknesses with the intent of pressuring the government to do something about the security holes has the flavor of an open source suicide pact. If you don't have a ready solution, all you're doing is giving someone else an idea they may not have had. And not just terrorists, either. There are, I regret to say, homegrown American lunatics of the non-terrorist variety who might like to take up some of your ideas for their very own.

There is a reason that the government is biased towards secrecy. Often, it probably goes too far, and that's why we need the libertarians and the ACLU and the open source afficionadoes pressuring it to give us more information. But the level of distrust where you think its safer to publish, in mass media, all your thoughts on how to attack America than to trust the government. . . well, I think you've been spending a little too much time reading your own literature.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Who are You?

"What Type Of Retro Gal Are You?" - Results:

You are the Girl Next Door. You're the sweet one. The quiet one. The one that he doesn't realize he's got until you're gone.

What Type Of Retro Gal Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Silence is Golden. . . Maybe

Steven Den Beste says we should keep our mouth shut about potential security holes. Aziz Poonwalla says au contraire, we should talk about them to pressure the government or businesses involved can fix the problem, or that we would want them to. I think there's a balance between the two.

Consider the topic that started this off: agricultural security. This chap has been loudly declaring the many ways our food supply could be breached by bioterrorism.

Now, it's not like the government has been ignoring the matter. But of course it's possible the government has been paying insufficient attention, and it's necessary to call the public's notice to the matter in order to put the heat on.

However.

It's also possible the government is adequately weighing risk v. reward, and what he's done is to call the terrorists attention to previously un-thought of ways to attack us.

For example, foot and mouth disease. It's a horrible illness, spreads like wildfire. Probably the terrorists had considered it, but what if they hadn't? Did you see what happened in England? Even an extraordinarily robust government response -- immediate slaughter of any animal within striking distance of an infected one -- left the disease spreading hither and thither. We have early detection and slaughter programs in place just like England -- any vet that sees it notifies the government, which sends in the troops.

What else can we do? Nothing, really.

Oh, I suppose we could strip search and swab every person who comes into the country, empty all their luggage and test it for biopathegens -- if we wanted to essentially halt international travel, and/or divert 10% of GDP to airport security and customs.

Or we could put into place programs which would lockdown any place where something like foot-and-mouth was discovered, placing it under martial law and ordering anyone who tries to travel out of quarantine to be shot on sight, that being how the disease seems to have spread so far in the recent English outbreak.

Or I suppose we could institute security screening for all agricultural workers, people who drive near farms, people who work at feed suppliers and stores, and associated possible industries where foot and mouth might be introduced.

We could put police patrols on high alert near the billions of acres of farmland in this country.

We could do those things. But it would be cheaper and easier to convince the whole nation to go vegetarian.

Given that we are not going to step up our security appreciably, or convert the nation to the extraordinarily sensible (and economical!) vegetarian diet, announcing that foot and mouth would be devastating is not improving matters. It's probably not disimproving them, but some of his other suggestions were less obvious, and offered no easier solutions.

If there is a feasible security response which might be made to plug the risk factor you've identified, then opening your mouth probably helps. But in many cases, it doesn't. The parallel to Microsoft is apt in this sense: there is a tradeoff between having features we like at a low cost, and having a higher security risk. If it isn't feasible to pay the cost or forego the feature, than a citizen's duty is to advise the government of any new information, and otherwise keep their mouth shut.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Just Say No To Christmas Puppies

Outstanding post by SKBubba on why you shouldn't get a puppy at Christmas. Oh, it's cute, all right. And actually, if it's just you and a spouse, I think it's probably fine, provided you're homebodies. But if you have children, it's verboten. When little Sally's tired and cranky from all the Christmas excitement and has to be put up for a nap at the same time little Rover needs to relieve himself, what are you going to do?

When little Joe eats a Christmas ornament and has to go to the hospital, who's staying home with the puppy?

Who's going to take time to housetrain the little scamp with all the relatives coming over for dinner?

When you're exhausted from kids, family, presents, and cleaning, are you really going to feel like taking Rover out for the walk he needs?

Puppies take a huge amount of attention. They're worth it. But when you're zipping madly around over the holidays is not the time. Besides, there will be a bumper crop of Christmas puppies in the shelter come January, where you can pick up a purebred puppy on the cheap.

Other good advice:

Don't buy from pet stores -- they get their puppies from puppy mills. What happens in puppy mills I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. There is a special circle in hell reserved for people who abuse animals, and puppy mill owners will have the center ring.

Don't buy from a backyard breeder. We did, although we were referred by a pedigreed breeder, so his line's all right, but she kept the puppies crated too much, which led to a lot of trouble housebreaking.

If you're in a city, be prepared -- it's a pain in the ass hauling little Rover out the four or more times a day necessary for city housebreaking. Also, in crowded cities like New York, they can't go out on the street for several months, so you have to paper train, then housebreak -- and by three months, they're very resistant to going on the street when they've got a nice, clean, private house upstairs.

If you're in an apartment, think very large or very small dogs. The very large dogs are basically mobile couches -- an hour a day does Finnegan more than nicely, and will also suit your Great Dane, English Mastiff, or a host of other large dogs. Small dogs get all their excercise in your apartment. Medium dogs, however -- say, Springer Spaniel and up -- are generally hunting dogs. They need much more excercise than the majority get to be happy -- several hours a day, at a minimum. If your lab or golden retriever is sorta depressed, that's why. Bullmastiffs are also affectionate, loyal, sociable, protective. . . downright perfect, when you come to think of it.

And with that, I have to go walk the lovable beast.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why Equity Research is Biased

From John C. Bogle, former head of Vanguard, in the WSJ (subscription required:

The incentive for the brokerages is to sell a product. If investors don't buy stocks, those of outstanding issues and IPOs alike, brokerage firms won't have much in the way of revenues. So the balance is one-sided in favor of buys. What is more, much -- perhaps too much -- research is based on interviews with company officials, so it takes some courage to risk their ire and recommend sales. Further, every single one of a firm's clients can act on a buy recommendation, but only clients holding the particular stock can act on a sell recommendation. There is no obvious way around these roadblocks.

But the money quote is this one:

The near-universal consensus among research providers and users alike is that if Street research could be purchased only with hard (i.e., real) dollars, [rather than being paid for out of commissions,] the amount spent on it would plummet. Yet it does not necessarily follow that all research lacks intrinsic value. While the value of an original, comprehensive, and insightful research study becomes zero at the moment it becomes available to all market participants, the value of the same study by the research department of a single institution remains as long as the information remains proprietary.

In other words, research that is freely available to everyone is worthless. Yet SEC rules mandate that information must be made available to all customers, or none. The tendency is naturally, then, for research to abdicate its role in providing information, and take up a new role juicing banking and brokerage businesses. It is not merely that brokerage and banking are more lucrative; it is that no one would pay enough to obtain information everyone else has to cover the cost of providing the information. Research has to support other businesses, or die.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's Not Us -- It's the Foreigners!

Consider these paragraphs from a WSJ editorial on Japan's banking crisis, which is worsening to the point where it looks like they may actually do something about it. Unfortunately, it has been worsening, and looking like they may actually do something about it, for ten years, so I wouldn't get too excited. The Japanese have proven extremely adept at staggering along without major change.

But I was speaking of the editorial:

Naturally, ordinary Japanese are going to ask who's to blame, and Japan's vested interests have already managed to deflect attention onto a scapegoat: the Americans. The declines in stock prices are the result of foreigners selling Japan short, this thinking goes. Reformers must be in the employ of vulture capitalists who want to wreck Japan Inc. so they can pick over its bones.

It's not a sophisticated story, but it bears thinking about. Two months ago the State Department quietly convened some Japan experts to look for signs that the country might repeat the history of the 1930s, when militarists exploited unemployment and thwarted national pride to take over the government. The U.S. academics didn't see much indication of that happening today.

What I found remarkable in these statements was not the possibility that Japan was going to revert to the 1930's (although the fear is not as odd as it seems. . . Japan's economic crisis seems so like our own in the Great Depression in many ways, that it's hard to look at the country without thinking of the 1930's) What struck me was how like they are to the responses of developing countries during the 1998 fiscal crisis, when it was those madcap foreigners, determined to destroy the stalwart people of [Malaysia/Thailand/Etc] who were the source of the problem, rather than hog-wild spending and a speculative boom. It seems a little odd for a developed, highly educated country like Japan to be making statements that sound as if they've joined the same club.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

JFK In the Dock

Meanwhile, conservatives are jumping on the fact that JFK was taking. . . well, rather more painkillers and mood-altering drugs than you would normally want in the guy with the authority to launch a nuclear war. I think they're probably getting a little overexcited, although it did produce this editorial on the politics of secrecy. After all, Winston Churchill was a controlled drunk who apparently suffered from pretty major depression, and yet England's still there. On the one hand, I don't think we want to exact lower standards from the president than we would from, say, our doctor. On the other hand I think we expect inhuman levels of perfection from our doctors, and our presidents. Where are we going to find all these demi-gods, sound of mind and body, reasoned of judgement, strong of character, kind of will, who never, ever make the least little mistake?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

WWJD

Thank y'all for bearing with me. . . for the past few days, I've felt like the pulp that's left clinging to the side of the glass after you drink a glass of homestyle orange juice.

Question of the day: why are people making a big deal about this What Would Jesus Drive campaign? (For those who haven't seen it, the answer is apparently "Not an SUV") I mean, I can't fault the people who are poking fun:

One theory is that Jesus would tool around in an old Plymouth because "the Bible says God drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden in a Fury." But in Psalm 83, the Almighty clearly owns a Pontiac and a Geo. The passage urges the Lord to "pursue your enemies with your Tempest and terrify them with your Storm." Perhaps God favors Dodge pickup trucks, because Moses' followers are warned not to go up a mountain "until the Ram's horn sounds a long blast." Some scholars insist that Jesus drove a Honda but didn't like to talk about it. As proof, they cite a verse in St. John's gospel where Christ tells the crowd. "For I did not speak of my own Accord..." Meanwhile, Moses rode an old British motorcycle, as evidenced by a Bible passage declaring that "the roar of Moses' Triumph is heard in the hills." Joshua drove a Triumph sports car with a hole in its muffler: "Joshua's Triumph was heard throughout the land." And, following the Master's lead, the Apostles car pooled in a Honda... "The Apostles were in one Accord."

Tee-hee! But I've actually seen commentators, left and right, arguing that they oughtn't to be advocating it. Even one poor host on Fox News trying to get the minister sponsoring the thing to admit that there was nothing supporting his campaign in the bible. His scriptural precedents seemed quite reasonable to me; imposing avoidable and dangerous negative externalities upon your neighbor certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Gospels. The left-leaning interrogators, on the other hand, seemed pleased by the message but outraged that the people sending it were otherwise evangelical Christians, as if to love nature you have to support ripping off your clothes and gamboling through the woods like a young Greek god.

Sigh. Nice to be back to slow news days, isn't it?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Don't Give up The Quote

My wife wished me to post this article about Senator Byrd's opposition to the Homeland Security Bill:

"This mon-stros-ity," Mr. Byrd has been calling the bill, repeatedly lifting its 484 pages above his head with trembling hands and flinging them down on his desk with the fury of Moses smashing the tablets. Mr. Byrd used to be known less for his distaste of federal bureaucracy than for his love of federal aid %u2014 he once vowed to be West Virginia's "billion-dollar industry," while his critics crowned him the "prince of pork." But now he is riffing against big government.

"Osama bin Laden is still alive and plotting more attacks while we play bureaucratic shuffleboard," Mr. Byrd told the Senate. "With a battle plan like the Bush administration is proposing, instead of crossing the Delaware River to capture the Hessian soldiers on Christmas Day, George Washington would have stayed on his side of the river and built a bureaucracy." Mr. Byrd imagined Nathan Hale declaring, "I have but one life to lose for my bureaucracy," and Commodore Oliver Perry hoisting a flag on his ship with the rallying cry, "Don't give up the bureaucracy!"

My reaction: "it would be less of a bureaucracy with civil service employment rules?"

The wife's reaction: It was James Lawrence who uttered those famous words, which Perry carried on the flag of his ship - a ship named after lawrence. A common mistake.

Interestingly for Byrd and the Homeland Security debate, Perry is actually famous for saying "we have met the enemy and they are ours", later appropriated with alteration in Pogo.

So there.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

BELIEVE IT OR NOT this

BELIEVE IT OR NOT this animal's name is fluffy.

I saw people buying juveniles of this breed at the reptile show last weekend. I doubt many of them knew what they were getting in to.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Those Bigoted Rockettes

. . . putting a Nativity segment in their Christmas Spectacular.

From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

. . . to lure spectators of all faiths (and nonfaiths) with the promise of an entertaining holiday revue, and then to ambush them with Christian theology, is dated and borderline offensive, especially at a time when understanding of other cultures and beliefs is more important than ever.

The show's creators are wrong to assume that Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians don't have the same right to holiday fluff that Christians do.

After all, the last thing that belongs in a Christmas show is some dumb story about Jesus's birth.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Apologies

I've got horrible flu and can barely sit up. Hopefully I'll be back posting tomorrow.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Archaeologists Looking For Evidence at Roswell

Tee-hee! Archaeologists looked for evidence of UFO's at Roswell in September for a Sci-Fi channel special.

In related news, I'm going to spend the next three days eating pop rocks and drinking coke to see whether I really do explode.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Low Hanging Fruit

Many people don't realize that much of the environmental "low hanging fruit" - the changes that make big differences in pollution with little differences in lifestyle -- have already been plucked. As population continues to grow, and people expect a rising standard of living, it's going to get harder and harder to keep reducing the footprint we leave on the earth. Fritz Schrank has one example: in Washington DC, vehicle pollution is presenting the politically impossible choices of intrusive mandated lifestyle change or no more transportation projects.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Pipe Dreams

I love the Atlantic's feature where they put old articles from the magazine on line. Today I found this treasure, by Igor Sikorsky, written in 1942. In it he predicts that helicopters will be the transportation wave of the future, like Jetson cars.

he time is 1955; the place a lovely meadow surrounded by deep woods on a hilltop overlooking a beautiful lake in the Catskill Mountains 120 miles from New York. It is quarter past eight in the morning, and you are about to commute to your office in the city. Yet there is no paved highway nearer than fifteen miles, and it is fifty to a railroad station.

Now you hear a low hum, and over the horizon appears a flying machine. You press the button of a box near by and a radio signal flashes to the machine. The aircraft, looking oddly like a horizontal electric fan, drones toward you. When the pilot is directly overhead, all forward movement of the machine ceases and it descends vertically until the cabin door is within a foot of the ground.

On the machine's gray side is painted Helicopter Express to New York. As you make ready to enter, the direct-lift machine does not touch the ground; it poises motionless under its whirling rotor blades like a gigantic hummingbird. The door opens and you step inside; you nod a greeting to the co-pilot who takes your commutation ticket, you wave to those of the other fifteen passengers you know. The door closes and the helicopter immediately ascends vertically to 1000 feet. Now it darts ahead, quickly attaining a forward speed of 140 miles an hour.

The co-pilot says conversationally, "How do you like your new home? Good, eh? Popular spot here. So many people have moved into these mountains that we've had to put on an extra bus to carry them."

Fifty minutes later the helicopter bus hovers over a midtown New York building, descends slowly to alight on a roof space some sixty yards square. You go into the building, take the elevator to the street below, and walk half a block to your office. Not quite an hour has elapsed since you drank your morning coffee in your home. Des this sound like a fantasy imagined by Jules Verne? If so, I can assure you, as a practical aeronautical engineer, that such a trip is neither fantastic nor impractical. Any of us who are alive ten years after this Second World War is won will see and use hundreds of short-run helicopter bus services. We shall see hundreds of thousands of privately owned direct-lift machines carrying Americans about their business and their pleasures.

In forecasting this aviation development I am not drawing upon any imagination, nor am I depending upon the future invention of a direct-lift machine. A practical helicopter that can do everything I have just described is at this instant within a hundred yards of me. Less than an hour ago this craft was hovering motionless ten feet off the ground while a man climbed to the cabin by a rope ladder. With a pointed stick on the nose of our helicopter, it was possible to spear a wooden ring twelve inches in diameter fastened to a pole only four feet from the ground. The helicopter could be backed, turned, and stopped motionless in the air right in front of a man who plucked the ring off the helicopter's nose. In April 1941, the VS-300, piloted by its designer, exceeded the record of endurance for this type of craft by remaining in the air for one hour, thirty-two minutes. The novelty of this record flight was that the ship hovered during the entire period over one spot less than half an acre in area. Since that time considerable further progress has been achieved with this project.

So here's the question for my readers, who tend to be smarter and more knowlegeable than I am: why didn't it happen?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Question is How Much

Mark Byron points out that except for the hard core economic libertarians, most of us do favor some social spending: the question is how much. Though I would part with him on some of his favored programs: I think parents shouldn't get a tax deduction, student loans should be abolished, and Medicare should be means-tested.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Augusta National

So what do I think about the flap over Martha Burk and the Augusta National?

Let's recap:

Martha Burk is trying to shame the Augusta National into going co-ed.

Kathryn Lopez of the Corner quoted a Martha Burk article advocating the forced sterilization of men, using a Norplant-like implant that doesn't seem to exist.

InstaPundit quoted her.

CalPundit says it's a lie, the article's a spoof.

InstaPundit says, the point is, a white male conservative wouldn't have been allowed to write such a "spoof" without criticism.

Brad DeLong weighs in.

Now, I know the burning question in most of your minds is: what does Jane Galt think? So I rushed to my keyboard to tell you.

First of all, I think the feminist movement's focus on, and attitude about, reproduction is to its detriment. There are two sides to the abortion debate. But feminists act as if those two sides are "Pro Choice" and "Hates Women". The fact that some people prefer the right of a fetus to get born to the woman's right not to have to bear a child is not proof that they hate women; it's proof that they're weighing two sets of conflicting rights differently from you. If you continue to imagine the debate in terms of juvenile evil enemies, you will lose. It is why the pro-choice side is losing ground now outside its strongholds on the coasts.

Reproduction is not fair. It is not going to be fair. Nature designed it that way. Writing articles trying to transmute the unique problems of being female onto males is not going to work, because the relationship is asymmetrical. There are no easy metaphors for the extremely complex and emotional issues that surround reproduction, and I wish the feminist movement would stop looking for some.

Second, don't think I'm letting you guys off, here. A lot of you act like big fat jerks. Just because evolution designed you to act that way doesn't mean you shouldn't let civilization overcome those instincts. Nature also designed you to sleep in the woods and die at twenty, and if you can't be civilized, I suggest you oblige. If, for example, I hear a male adopt the pro-life side, he'd better be willing to step up and shoulder his responsibilities with a ring.

Third, there is a double standard operating here on both sides. Many conservatives who would tolerate people advocating Norplant for welfare mothers are mocking up some outrage about this. On the other side, leftists who would be hopping up and down in rage should, say, Newt Gingrich advocate such a thing, seem to think it's just fine. Hypocrisy doesn't sell to anyone except fellow travelers, guys.

I really, really hate double standards for women. It's not 1960 any more. No, I don't think women are all the way there. But we're getting there. It's time to stop arguing that men have to treat us like equals, except when it would be to our benefit to be treated unequally, when they have to oblige. That's adolescent. If we want to get accepted as full grownups, we have to adhere to the same standards. Sure, we're going to suffer a little. But we'll suffer more if we demand to be stuck in a separate class with special needs, because then we aren't equals -- we're a protected class that can be unprotected when the powers-that-be change their minds.

On the same note, arguing that only women have the right of free association, but men must sacrifice theirs in the name of equality, is not advancing the cause of equality.

I know that some of our friends on the left believe that they are doing this for the cause of women's equality. But friend, turning women into just another special interest group claiming as much as possible at the expense of the other side, is not helping us. Please stop. Or at least, please stop saying you're doing it because you care about advancing the cause of women.

Fourth, and most importantly, if integrating the Augusta National is a major item on the feminist agenda, then stick a fork in the movement: it's done. We've achieved our goals and should disband. CBS or no CBS, the club has 300 members. We're talking about a trivial wrong done to a handful of supperrich women who could afford to, or be asked to, join the Augusta National. If this is the most important cause Martha Burk can find, it's time to acknowlege that feminism has done its work and turn to something more pressing, like the plight of Russian orphans or Rwandan refugees.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Cranky Professor has moved!

Everyone's favorite Cranky Professor has relocated to a snazzy new site at www.crankyprofessor.com! Get out the bundt cakes and the ambrosia and drop by to say welcome to his new home.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

So Lonesome in the Saddle Since My Horse Died

Hello? Where did everybody go? Hello?

I have come close to hanging up my keyboard, since I just haven't been burning with the kind of indignation I had when I started (10/1/01), and I can't maintain the sleep-deprived pace I once kept.

Yet I don't know where to keep the "annotated bookmarks" I get from keeping a blog. I can't tell you how many times I've been able to dig up old commentary, or pull up my own thoughts laid out in a semi-structured way.

If the FBI is correct, all my old pals will be back.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Military in Science Fiction

Eric Raymond has a great post on the ethics of the military in science fiction. If you like that sort of thing. Me, I do.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

D.A.R.E. to be Timid

I am happy to discuss drug and sex-related issues with my oldest son (11). He enjoys a scientific approach to both topics (what happens; why; at what risk), and I like arming him with facts and my own perspective.* What I find difficult is explaining adult hang-ups and silly uber-sensitivity. For instance, the notion that to ridicule something is to somehow condone it or that laughter is somehow an endorsement.

My son is in fifth grade and is therefore subjected to the "D.A.R.E." drug awareness program. I don't know much about the program, frankly, but I know it's controversial in my hometown. On the other hand, how could a drug (or sex)-education not be controversial?

Apparently the kids were asked to do some role play. My son and two classmates were assigned a vignette in which one boy tries to convince another to take drugs. As an inducement, the influencer points to another boy who is already high - played by Dreck Jr. - to point out what a good time he is having. On cue, my son (as he describes it) staggered a little and fell down. The class found this amusing, but not hilarious.

The instructor let him have it. He is forbidden from participating in future role plays and he was disciplined for being "inappropriate". Dreck Jr. is a very sensitive soul. Tears come to his eyes just in the retelling. Subject to verification of my son's version of events, this instructor/police officer may receive a Real-Time Fisking^TM.

In the meantime, I have to explain to my son that some adults think that to ridicule is to "make light." I also tell him that perhaps the instructor is just worried about having to defend the goings on in class to some other satire-challenged parent, teacher or education bureaucrat. My boy doesn't understand why adults have such a....stick up their arses and I can't explain it beyond helping him understand that it's reality nonetheless.

It seems that the fear of giving offense when discussing such subjects causes something akin to the committee effect - normally sensible people become consensus-seeking pabulum-spewing morons.

Ridicule is sometimes an optimal tool in argument. Ask any blogger. And one of the problems with intoxication is you look stupid and fall down. As we New Yorkers like to say, "You got a problem with that?"

*Of course, like any kid his age, he would prefer to discuss video games and cartoons, as Steven Den Beste found out.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hope Scholarships for Everyone

Dwight Meredith proposes a National Hope Scholarship program, modeled after Georgia's but funded by repealing the cuts in the estate tax:

We propose a Federal Hope Scholarship Program modeled after the Georgia Hope Scholarship. Any child who maintains a B average in high school and gains admission to an accredited university would receive a scholarship equal to 100% of the tuition at his or her state university as long as the student maintained good grades in college.

We propose to pay for that program by repealing the portion of the Bush tax cut that benefits the top 1% of income earners (as well as repealing the elimination of the Estate Tax). We frankly have not done the work to accurately calculate the cost of such a program. We suspect that there are 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 college students with B averages. The tuition at the University of Georgia is roughly $3,500.00 per year. If those numbers are accurate (and the number of students is only a guess) then the yearly cost of the program would be $17.5 billion to $21 billion per year, less the savings from eliminating duplicative programs.

The Bush tax cut was more than $1.3 trillion dollars over ten years. The top one percent received approximately 40% of that amount. Repealing that tax cut would generate about $500 billion over the ten-year period. At $17-21 billion per year, the National Hope Scholarship program would be affordable. . .

Ok, so what is wrong with that proposal?

Well, since you asked. . .

The first problem is that its cost assumptions are naive. They're using what's known as a static-line model, which is fancy economic speak for saying that it assumes that if you change one variable in a model, everything else will stay the same. But this is not true. If you make it free to go to college, more people are going to go to college.

On the one hand, it assumes that the supply of kids with B averages in high school/college won't increase, which is unlikely. If a B- kid has a choice between losing his scholarship and pulling up his average, he'll probably pull up his average. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course.

More disturbingly, it would probably cause colleges to inflate grades. Remember, 80% of colleges in the United States are non-selective, meaning they admit 2/3 or more of the people who apply. Especially at those colleges, but really at any public college, you're going to see tremendous pressure on teachers to inflate grades to keep the money flowing. You've seen this already with college athletes, many of whom don't belong in college, and don't do the work to stay there, but are passed along because the financial incentives are there for the college to do so. I suspect that granting a full ride to everyone who has a B average would mean that effectively, almost no one would ever get less than a B. It's common to refer to this as grade inflation, but what it really is is grade compression: all the grades are forced into a narrow band between B and A.

Compressing the grades people get into an ever-narrower band isn't good for the students, who lose feedback on how they're doing and incentive to excel, and it isn't good for their prospective employers, who lose valuable information about the students.

The same would be even more true of high schools, one imagines, if they could earn their kids a free ride for four years merely by assuring that they got a B average.

Which brings up the question of where you're going to put all those extra students, and who will teach them.

Will you force kids to go to school in their own state, or will you let them attend any state institution? Out-of-state tuition at top schools can run into the $20-25K range.

Also, in-state tuition may be $3,500 per year in Georgia, but that's not what it costs to educate a student. Increasing the supply of students will increase the cost by much more than in-state tuition. That's an unfunded mandate, which the Feds are not allowed to issue -- which means you'll have to find money not just for tuition, but for covering all the (currently subsidized) costs of the extra students you've put into the system.

You'll also be segregating the middle class students at state colleges from the rich at private colleges much more than you do now, since currently private schools offer competitive financial aid packages, but couldn't compete against a 100% free ride, as I think you'll find Georgia has discovered.

But the most important question is: would the program be effective? Programs to make sure that everyone goes to college mean well, but I feel that proponents usually aren't examining the link between what they're trying to achieve, and the means they're proposing to achieve it.

What are we trying to achieve by sending everyone to college? I assume that most of us want to better their economic opportunity.

Here's the problem: most college doesn't train people in economically useful skills. Oh, we'd probably all be better off if we sent more kids to engineering programs or medical school, but that's not what these programs propose to do: they propose to give kids a free ride for 4 years no matter what they study. And I think it's safe to say that most of our future engineers and medical students are already going to college. I think what we're talking about is more English and Art History majors and such.

I was an English major, which was an enriching experience. I enjoyed the subject greatly. But the only economically useful skill I learned was typing 80 wpm. Oh, later my writing skills came in handy, since I was in a technical field where very few people can write. But for the majority of English majors, it's safe to say that their ability to deconstruct a sonnet has not proven to be renumerative. Ditto almost any humanities course for almost any student. Even economics students are usually being rewarded more for their conformity and willingness to tolerate boredom than their ability to draw pretty supply curves.

I have no doubt that someone is, even now, mentally composing the email telling me how enriching humanities courses are. Indeed they are. But I misdoubt that anyone's fellow citizens wants to toss them upwards of $25,000 to go get enriched. Your fellow citizens want to see you support yourself and contribute something to the common weal; that's the rational behind giving you money for college. Or they want to give everyone middle class opportunities. Mental enrichment is something we expect people to pay for out of their own pocket.

But people who want to send everyone to college to ensure they have middle class opportunities have cause and effect reversed. College does not provide one the tools to make a living. For most people it is what economists call a signalling mechanism: something not intrinsically valuable, but only as a signal that the applicant has something else employers value. Which is to say, employers do not value your college degree because they value what you learned; they value it because it shows that you have sufficiently internalized middle class values to get through four years at school, whether through being born into the middle class, or having sufficient gumption to get yourself through college.

But sending everyone to college will not avail them all of the benefits of the signalling mechanism; rather, it will render the signalling mechanism useless. You're not going to magically transform every extra person you send to college into someone who earns college wages; college is the gatekeeper to a limited number of such jobs, not a producers of said jobs. While normally I am skeptical of people who claim that there is a limited number of good jobs to go around, and therefore we need to redistribute them so that no class gets to hog more than their fair share, in this case I am hard pressed to explain how sending someone to study Medieval Philosophy or Lesser Poets of the 19th Century is going to magically produce a high paying job for them. The areas where jobs are going begging are the areas we don't expect to get a lot of extra students, such as engineering. I have no doubt that there are, somewhere on the American continent, some potentially gifted engineers with the requisite math preparation who are not attending college because they can't afford it. But I can't imagine there are many.

Now, perhaps we would be fine with embarking on this program if by destroying the gatekeeper it served to level the opportunity between the children of the poor, the middle class, and the rich. After all, this is America; we want people to get what they deserve, not what their parents bequeathed them. But is that really how it would work? Since the fact of the college diploma will mean less, and grade compression is likely to remove the other valuable signal that a college education can provide, won't employers be more likely to look only at children from relatively privileged backgrounds? For one thing, employers are likely to rely more heavily on referrals from people they know, which is to say, from privileged parents finding opportunities for their privileged kids. And for another, privileged kids are more likely to have internships and such to signal that they are capable of the work that employers want them to perform. If you're a poor kid who had to work at the Stop and Shop for rent, you may be hard-working, but an accounting firm has no way of knowing whether you can build a balance sheet -- and since we've taken your degree and grades out of the equation, no way of finding out.

I also suspect that middle class families will set up alternate signalling mechanisms which serve to ensure that their children maintain the pipeline to success. Indeed, I would argue that it has already happened to some degree, as student loans have democratized the college degree and worn off some of its cachet. I grew up in a very privileged milieu: the New York City private school system. A positively astonishing number of my high school classmates, something like 2/3, are possessed of master's or professional degrees, or doctorates, and not because my classmates were noticeably smarter or harder working than the population at large.

As more people got college degrees, the pipeline to very high paying jobs, such as white-shoe law firms and investment banks, has come to rely on gilt-edged degrees from both an Ivy, or Ivy-Equivalent undergrad, and a top professional school. For example, the top tier investment banks recruit almost exclusively at 5-10 business schools, most of whose graduates come from privileged backgrounds, and virtually all of whom attended elite undergraduate programs. More interestingly, as the value of the college degree as a signalling mechanism has declined, business schools have come to require more work experience from applicants -- from no years in the 60's, to 5+ years today -- in order to better differentiate those likely to succeed. Business school itself is an enormous signalling mechanism, as most people's coursework bears little resemblance to what they do in their careers. But the mere fact that you survived an arduous application process and two years of school gives employers greater confidence in hiring you.

In short, while you can confer upon everyone a college degree, you cannot thereby confer upon them what the college degree currently gives those who hold it: a ticket to a higher paying job. You can only force companies to seek alternative signalling mechanisms, ones which I argue would have more to do with class and "people like us" than the current ones do, and segregate the children of the rich in private schools with the children of the poor and middle class funneled into the less prestigious, because less exclusive, state system. Not, I think, a recipe for a more equal society.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Free Market Solutions for Corporate Fraud

No, really, I think this might work:

This principal-agent conflict has existed since New Deal-era securities laws first required "independent" audits of public companies. As long as an accounting firm was reasonably competent, it had every incentive to go easy on its clients—even if the public would benefit from more vigilance. Toughness would just encourage the client to replace the auditor with a more pliable firm. The conflict became truly intractable in recent decades, as the tax code grew more complex and accounting firms built massive consulting arms. With audit fees shrinking to a sliver of overall revenues, accountants had even less incentive to ride herd on their clients.

In theory, an auditor's concern for its own reputation should deter it from signing off on cooked books. But the experience of Arthur Andersen, which presided over a series of accounting debacles before Enron without major client defections, shows that deterrence doesn't happen in practice. Either companies were too lazy to change accountants, or they were simply oblivious to Andersen's failures, or they may have wanted the lax treatment for themselves.

. . .

But there is a way to use the power of the marketplace—which until now has conspired against good auditing and accounting—to bring corporations to heel. We should require publicly held companies to purchase accounting insurance. Joshua Ronen, a professor of accounting at New York University, floated this idea in a March New York Times op-ed. It makes even more sense today.

Of course, the problem with this is the problem with every regulation that has existed since the beginning of time: how are the companies going to get around it? It's always wise to try to imagine how if you were a company, you would try to turn a regulation to your own advantage.

In this case, I can think of two:

1) Hollow out your insurance coverage so that it appears you have a lot of insurance, but you actually don't. This is what doctors in high-malpractice states are doing now.

2) Get congress to fiddle the laws so that many items are excluded

I'm sure there are more. Nonetheless, this sort of regulation is probably easier to implement as a broad principle, and let the market work out the details, than is the kind of micro-managing regulation many are advocating.

Of course, there's a third problem: how much would such insurance cost? After all, insurance companies are just like casinos in one regard: the percentage is always to the house. Requiring broad new insurance coverage will not be free. Nonetheless, it may be better than the alternatives.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Masters' Nanny

We'll have to call this one the "Roseanne Roseannadanna" award. Here's Selena Roberts in a hysterically idiotic column entitled "Augusta's Chairman Lives in a Time Warp."

It must be comforting to live inside a vintage Sylvania, cozy in a black-and-white world where June Cleaver is your ideal woman. "Now, there's a lady," you say. "Not only is the gal one hot biscuit baker, she worships the wingtips Ward walks on."

Comforting, yes, but sexually frustrating. Getting it on with an old cathode ray tube is difficult, to say nothing of the problems caused by static electricity. Who is this sitcom deviant, and when did he say that?

It's beyond you, isn't it, Hootie? You can't understand why women don't just keep cookin' and stop stewin' over Augusta National's male-only membership. As you told the news media this week, providing yet another scary glimpse into your unenlightened mind, race and gender discrimination are on two different levels.
"Isn't it enough that we've put an end to the fried chicken jokes?" you think to yourself.

Funny, I've read the whole article as we