Re: Townhall.com – 2/25/2009 – “Judging Obama” – John Stossel

Stossel says “How will we know if President Obama's must-have "stimulus" program succeeds?” Good question. The success of Obama’s program will be judged most by the shape of our economy at the conclusion of the program. If the economy is better than it is now the program will be judged a success and if the economy is not better, it will be judged a failure. But that judgment will not be based on any real scientific measure the success of the stimulus program because we cannot simultaneously have results of a no stimulus or different stimulus program for comparison. While most of us will defer our unscientific judgments on Obama’s programs to give them time to take effect, it is clear that a majority of the politicians have made up their mind one way or another and are unlikely to be swayed by future facts.

Stossel is right that “Politicians grab credit for everything” although he should also add that politicians also throw blame at least as often. So no matter how good or bad things actually turn out to be, half the politicians will claim things would have been worse and the other half of the politicians will claim things would have been better without the stimulus.

Stossel says “[the stimulus advocates in Congress] excuse is already prepared: The stimulus was too small”. Based on my interpretation of the results of government intervention to “cure” the Great Depression and WW-II’s success in actually so doing, if we are headed into a Great Depression, we probably need a stimulus as large as WW-II, and by that measure, Obama’s proposed stimulus package is probably too small. On the other hand, if we are heading into a mini-depression (or a super recession, take your pick), then the size of Obama’s stimulus package might be large enough. Time will tell.

Stossel says “Since monopoly bureaucracies are not as efficient as competitive businesses, government efforts won't get as much bang for the buck as private efforts. They will likely destroy wealth”. I wonder why Stossel thinks that. The idea of the stimulus is to get cash into circulation to replace the credit lost in the bursting of the financial bubble --- in effect creating controlled inflation to just balance an on-going deflation. The government won’t shred paper currency with the stimulus, it merely prints money to hand over to private citizens to do with it what they will do. If projects planned and/or paid for by government, say to improve transportation, are not as effective per dollar as private projects to improve transportation, that means that on a per transportation project result basis, government gets more money into circulation than private industry could, right? Wouldn’t that be a plus for a stimulus where we need to inject more money than there are planned projects? Seriously, government can be inefficient at times, efficient at other times --- the proof is in the execution and not some philosophical prejudice.

Stossel has the quaint idea that people held back on spending and investing because “they don't know what activist government will do next. Will it prop up housing or other prices? Will it nationalize the banks?“ But until well after the economy began to nosedive, neither people nor the government had even thought of propping up the then robust housing market and/or intervening in what were then thought to be healthy banks. Stossel apparently believes that the effects predate the cause --- a belief most of us recognize as fallacious. Banks failed not because the government planned to intervene in their finances but rather government is intervening in the banks’ finances because it was feared by the government and by the banks themselves that without intervention, the banks would go bankrupt. Banks stopped lending because they didn’t have sufficient financial strength to make loans on their own coin and couldn’t get other banks to make loans to them. That’s why government opened its credit window wider and injected capital directly into banks. Not vice versa.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/24/2009 – “The Presidency as a Series of Tele-Prompter Speeches” – Michael McBride

Although there are some basic principles of leadership that are beneficial to all leaders, some of the attributes of successful leaders are personal --- what works best for one person doesn’t necessarily work best for another. And the demands of leadership are different depending on situations --- leadership under great uncertainty requires different skills that are unnecessary or even counterproductive when little uncertainty exists and leading a small group (say 5 people) is different from leading a moderate group (say 50 people) is different from leading a large group (say 5000 people) is different from leading an entire nation.

Leadership by example is always a beneficial skill for leaders. For small to medium sized groups, direct but unthreatening demonstration of lower level job skills to workers one-on-one is a marvelous leadership skill. But for larger groups, such one-on-one demonstrations with each worker are impossible, and leadership by example consists mainly of demonstrating more abstract personal abilities such as dedication, honesty, intelligence, the ability to listen to and understand the problems and needs of others, etc, skills that of course are beneficial to small group leadership as well.

Like it or not, Joe the plumber (or 5 or 10 Joes) is not the only constituency of the President of the United States. The President leads hundreds of millions of Joes, some plumbers, some electricians, some file clerks, and, for that matter, some bank robbers and investment swindlers. Personally leading each and every Joe is not a feasible basis of Presidential leadership. But the President more directly leads politicians, bureaucrats, and all sorts of technical wonks, and demonstrating his competence in these areas is not only possible but hugely beneficial.

If McBride prefers leadership by one-on-one example, I suggest he stay out of politics or get used to doing things he doesn’t like to do. If McBride likes to speak without tele-prompter, I suggest he not speak where millions are listening to each and every word he says and world wide every word in and out of context will be analyzed and discussed, and where a single misspoken word could bring the world to the brink of war or financial crisis.

We all can disagree on Obama’s abilities as a leader, and we can all be correct in at least one way; no one can be a successful leader of all the people. Successful leadership requires a lot more people follow than oppose the leader’s leadership. Right now Obama’s got me and a majority of US citizens as followers --- he seems to me to have as good an understanding of the issues that face us all, as good ideas as anyone in how to approach our current problems, a lot more commitment to his ideas than most other leaders in the public arenas, and sufficient intelligence to execute his ideas, all to a much greater extent than the administration that preceded him. I guess McBride feels differently. But if McBride thinks his feelings about Obama’s leadership are based on inescapable conclusions based on principles of leadership, then McBride doesn’t understand leadership in spite of whatever personal success he may have had as a leader himself. And at this point in time, McBride’s opinion of Obama is a minority opinion, even a minority among successful leaders.

Re: Family Security Matters – 2/19/2009 – “Bush Lied, People Died – But Did Bush Really Lie?” – Herbert London

The answer in short is yes, Bush lied, but not about what London says liberals say he lied about. What London says that liberals said was a lie was not an illustration of lying but of a general incompetence that characterized the Bush administration. Incompetence is not a very good trait for a President, but it is probably better than being a liar and having the lie come back and bite him.

Where Bush lied was when, in order to get legislative approval for an authorization of the administration’s discretion in using force in Iraq, he promised to use that force only if all peaceful means were exhausted and only if the danger of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the US was imminent. In fact, he hardly tried any peaceful means, rejecting, for example, further weapons inspections that Iraq had already agreed to, under the pretence of an immediacy which he and his administration knew did not exist.

I see an unfortunate trend in conservative columnists to ascribe any disagreement with their position as prejudice arising from hatred, which is neither better nor more justified than the liberal’s predilection to ascribe disagreement with them to conservative’s stupidity and/or ignorance. The left did not personally hate Bush and was not prejudiced against him because of hatred; rather the left hates many of the things that Bush did or did not do, and if they hate him at all its only after-the-fact for the results of those things. Personally, Bush seems to me like a nice guy with reasonable values (although not always in line with my own), and a traditional American concept of ethical conduct based on his “gut” feeling. But being a nice guy with a basically ethical gut does not alone qualify one for the Presidency. Hatred of what happened under Bush’s tenure and blaming him for those things hardly constitutes what I would call the personal hatred of Bush, but I must admit that because of his attitude of accepting little blame or showing little remorse for what happened under his watch, Bush himself makes a very good symbol for the hatred of what happened under his watch.

The issue of Bush’s lying demonstrates that for many, ideology trumps facts; for liberals some of the facts of Bush’s performance and for conservatives, other facts of Bush’s performance.

In the end, Bush will be remembered for the same kind of things all Presidents are remembered for. They all set objectives (partly on their own and partly dictated by the situations that occur during their tenure) and use whatever means are available to achieve their objectives (including lying) but they are remembered mainly for the change of the state of the union under their tenure. If under their tenure great problems were solved and/or great impending problems were obviously avoided, they are remembered favorably. If little good was accomplished or problems appeared under their tenure, they are remembered unfavorably. Bush will be remembered on the positive mainly for his managing public distress following 911 and his administration’s handling of the early part of the Afghanistan and Iraq military involvement, and remembered on the negative for his administration’s failures in responding to the Gulf Coast weather disaster, loosing focus on Afghanistan while pursuing Iraq, incompetence in reconstructing Iraq, the legacy of a huge national debt, and most of all for the contracting economy under his tenure.

Whether Bush did or did not lie, and what any lie he might have made was all about will not long be part of the American memory.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/6/2009 – “Where Have All the Tough Guys Gone?” – Dan Kennedy

Most any philosophy pushed too far is absurd. Real life is complex and no single solution solves all problems --- the real trick is to know what solutions are most likely to work for each specific kind of problem, and to know at what level of abstraction a philosophy becomes just dogmatic verbal pronouncements rather than a reliable guide to action.

Assuming that everyone else is incompetent so you (the only person who is competent) must make all the decisions for others is dumb --- if everyone else is incompetent, chances are you are too, and even if you are more competent than most, chances are your not more competent every person at every single thing. Clearly the liberal attitude of helping people who cannot help themselves, taken to the extreme where everyone needs help in everything from everybody, is absurd.

But the conservative position that people helping themselves is always better than people being helped, taken to the extreme where no one needs help in anything, is just as absurd. If people should just help themselves (and others should not help them help themselves) then charity would be a sin and a good Samaritan would be a bad Samaritan and police protection would be unconstitutional. No reasonable conservative actually believes that in some cases people should not act to help others by providing temporary assistance to those who are temporarily unable to help themselves. In my experience, conservatives are just as likely to support charitable causes as are liberals. And in my experience, conservatives generally consider themselves even more charitable than liberals, but this is something I have not observed to be true. And even on issues of private vs government control, conservatives have issues that they like government to decide rather than leave the issue to the private sector, especially issues enforcing their views on religious and personal behavior and in actively supporting business over labor and consumers.

No liberal believes anything like “charity and/or government can fix all problems”. No  liberal believes that personal responsibility is not a necessary component of a successful society.

Liberals and conservatives differ mainly at drawing the line where self help alone becomes inadequate in solving problems and where public and/or private charity becomes necessary, and of course, how much of that help should be provided by government and how much by private charity.

A football team requires the individual physical and mental skills of the players as well as the coordination of individual actions imposed by the coaching staff. Jim Brown could not have run unimpeded thru a defense without offensive blocking, nor could he have run at all if the coaches never called on him to carry the ball in their plays or the quarterback never handed him the ball. In some ways, society is like football. Individuals in society need to use all their physical and mental skills, but even for the most able of us, such skills are insufficient. There must be a structure of rules (football’s rules and the coaches’ plays) and support (the “blocking” his offensive line gave Jim Brown), and it is to provide a structure of rules that “Governments are instituted among Men”. Too much structure and players become unmotivated and the team looses. Too little structure and you’ve got a lot of people running around with no observable unified purpose and the team looses. Winning teams have a delicate balance between structure and individual performance, and so to do winning societies.

Non-extremists conservatives and non-extremist liberals should get together to find that proper balance rather than sit around and listen to the extreme conservatives and extreme liberals hurl insults at one another. Both non-extremist conservatives and non-extremist liberals should stop letting the extremists speak for them.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/6/2009 – “Where Have All the Tough Guys Gone?” – Dan Kennedy

Most any philosophy pushed too far is absurd. Real life is complex and no single solution solves all problems --- the real trick is to know what solutions are most likely to work for each specific kind of problem, and to know at what level of abstraction a philosophy becomes just dogmatic verbal pronouncements rather than a reliable guide to action.

Assuming that everyone else is incompetent so you (the only person who is competent) must make all the decisions for others is dumb --- if everyone else is incompetent, chances are you are too, and even if you are more competent than most, chances are your not more competent every person at every single thing. Clearly the liberal attitude of helping people who cannot help themselves, taken to the extreme where everyone needs help in everything from everybody, is absurd.

But the conservative position that people helping themselves is always better than people being helped, taken to the extreme where no one needs help in anything, is just as absurd. If people should just help themselves (and others should not help them help themselves) then charity would be a sin and a good Samaritan would be a bad Samaritan and police protection would be unconstitutional. No reasonable conservative actually believes that in some cases people should not act to help others by providing temporary assistance to those who are temporarily unable to help themselves. In my experience, conservatives are just as likely to support charitable causes as are liberals. And in my experience, conservatives generally consider themselves even more charitable than liberals, but this is something I have not observed to be true. And even on issues of private vs government control, conservatives have issues that they like government to decide rather than leave the issue to the private sector, especially issues enforcing their views on religious and personal behavior and in actively supporting business over labor and consumers.

No liberal believes anything like “charity and/or government can fix all problems”. No  liberal believes that personal responsibility is not a necessary component of a successful society.

Liberals and conservatives differ mainly at drawing the line where self help alone becomes inadequate in solving problems and where public and/or private charity becomes necessary, and of course, how much of that help should be provided by government and how much by private charity.

A football team requires the individual physical and mental skills of the players as well as the coordination of individual actions imposed by the coaching staff. Jim Brown could not have run unimpeded thru a defense without offensive blocking, nor could he have run at all if the coaches never called on him to carry the ball in their plays or the quarterback never handed him the ball. In some ways, society is like football. Individuals in society need to use all their physical and mental skills, but even for the most able of us, such skills are insufficient. There must be a structure of rules (football’s rules and the coaches’ plays) and support (the “blocking” his offensive line gave Jim Brown), and it is to provide a structure of rules that “Governments are instituted among Men”. Too much structure and players become unmotivated and the team looses. Too little structure and you’ve got a lot of people running around with no observable unified purpose and the team looses. Winning teams have a delicate balance between structure and individual performance, and so to do winning societies.

Non-extremists conservatives and non-extremist liberals should get together to find that proper balance rather than sit around and listen to the extreme conservatives and extreme liberals hurl insults at one another. Both non-extremist conservatives and non-extremist liberals should stop letting the extremists speak for them.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/12/2009 – “The Two Faces of Darwin” – Dinesh D’Souza

D’Sousa calls “Darwin the patron saint of modern atheism”, a rather curious statement considering that atheists not only don’t believe in God’s existence but don’t believe in saints either.

D’Souza quotes Richard Dawkins “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. What Darwin gave atheists was a scientific model to explain the origin of species without necessarily relying on God, but even without Darwin, atheists had at least as valid a model as those who believed God created the species in a big bang event. While prior to Darwin atheists could not explain the creation of species, creationists could not explain why the story of creation in the Bible failed to explain the historical evidence of the time modification of life forms such as were preserved as fossils and as observed prior to Darwin in the selective breeding of plants and animals.

D’Souza says “Atheists say God does not exist while agnostics say they don't know one way or the other”, but what many agnostics really say is that there is no way to objectively determine whether or not God exists, and thus the question “Does God exist?” is moot because it has no possible testable answer. There is really a big difference between ignorance and logical indeterminacy.

D’Sousa quotes E.O. Wilson as saying “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species”. I am sure there are atheist evolutionists who would agree with Wilson, but evolution itself neither affirms nor denies the existence of God and nobody really believes evolution “made’ anything --- only explains how certain kinds of things change over time. What the theory of evolution says about God is that (1) if God created the species, God did not do it in a big bang but according the laws of evolution, and that (2) God is not a necessary element in the evolutionary explanation of the origin of the species. Nowhere can any evidence be found that God had anything or nothing to do with the creation of the species.

D’Souza spends too much time looking at what Darwin and others believed compared to time considering the scientific and philosophical implications of what Darwin and others discovered. Unlike history, science itself deals with scientific fact and the utility & verifiable correctness of theory. The history of science deals with the scientists as well as the science, and most of what D’Souza has to say is relevant to the history of the theory of evolution but is completely irrelevant to the science of evolution or the philosophical implications of evolutionary science. Whether someone is atheist, agnostic, or theist may be a predictor of possible bias on the issue of evolution but has absolutely no value in determining whether evolution is a good scientific theory, its implications on the philosophy of science, or whether evolutionary theory is or is not useful in the explanation any particular physical phenomena.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/11/2009 – “The Hell With Our Constitution” – Walter E Williams

Williams says the Constitution has “no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research”. Global-warming research has the same constitutional justification that the research of the National Weather Service has. Lots of government’s activities are not specifically (by name) authorized in the Constitution but are implied by being “necessary and proper” to execution of one or more of the Constitution’s enumerated powers. The Constitution does not specifically authorize either military weapon research or an air force, but the necessity keeping our weapons up to date, including the adoption of air based weapons and the forces that use them in supporting the objectives of the armed forces (which consisted of only land and naval forces at the time of the Constitution) is undeniable. So too is the necessity of understanding climate and weather --- these are “necessary and proper” understandings in the regulation of interstate and international commerce. My reasoning follows the Court’s reasoning in McCulloch vs Maryland (1819) which held that the Constitution recognized Congress’ power to take action to implement its enumerated powers.

Williams cites Higgs that “federal courts had respect for the Constitution as late as the 1930s”. But as early as 1824 in Gibbons vs Ogden, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote “[regulatory] power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the constitution”. In Burrows-Giles Lithographic Co vs Sarony (1884), the Court held that copyright protection could be extended to photographs by interpreting “author” as originator rather than as writer. These, and lots of pre-Roosevelt Supreme Court decisions may be construed by Williams and others as the unconstitutional actions of such infamous judicial activists as John Marshall, but to blame Roosevelt for the long history of Court precedents allowing Congress to react to situations unimagined at the time the Constitution was written is just plain absurd.

Whether “global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package” are Constitutionally reasonable items for inclusion in a stimulus package is dependent on only two things: (1) Is there an enumerated power for Congress related to these items, the answer to each of the above items being yes, the Commerce clause; and (2) Are these items “necessary and proper” in carrying out Congress’ function, and again the answer in my opinion is yes. But there is a third test we should all consider, and that is whether these items ought to be included in the stimulus package even if Congress has the right to do so. To this, I’d answer: no to global-warming research which would support Commerce’s constitutional duties but is neither necessary nor proper in dealing with our current economic problems; yes for urban mass transportation which would be constitutional under the Court’s pre1900 interpretation of interstate as being part of an transportation network including more than one state and because it is a good source of jobs to rekindle the economy; yes for food stamps and unemployment insurance which are long-standing and pre-existing programs and can easily be targeted to those displaced from jobs due to the current economy; and no for Medicaid which again is a pre-existing program but bears little relation to or effect on the current economic crisis.

It is my personal belief that arguments like Williams’ are reflexive applications of the wrong principle at the wrong time --- sort of like: I don’t like this and I don’t want this but I don’t have the votes to defeat it, therefore it must be unconstitutional.

Some of the provisions of the stimulus package are unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive to fighting our current economic crisis. But they just aren’t unconstitutional!

Re: Regular * Folks * United – 2/16/2009 – “Democrats: Hey, Let’s Destroy Health Care So We HAVE To Fix It” – Tabitha Hale

We should note that the issue of universal child health care is very different from the issue of universal adult health care.

In a democracy like ours, all adults are presumed by society and in law to be in control of actions affecting their own wellbeing, and the only steps government should take in limiting adults’ personal choices in action are to protect others from the direct effects of the actions. There are some arguable exceptions to this, prominent among them the legal prohibition of the personal use of dangerous drugs and of suicide, but in general, we should all be pretty much free to behave in any way that does not materially hurt others.

In a democracy like ours, adults, presumed responsible for the effects of their actions on themselves, should be allowed to reject health insurance but at the same time be expected to demand no medical treatment when they cannot afford it. Government shouldn’t provide health care financing for those who don’t want it, either before or after the health care is needed.

We should note that if there is universal health care for adults, someone has to pay for it. Health care is expensive and leaving payment for those who choose to be uninsured to all of us is preposterous --- the insured would end up paying for their own health care as well the health care of those who, because of lack of insurance, could not afford to pay for their own health care. The financial burden of paying for our own health care (either thru insurance premiums or on a cash when needed basis) is nearly unbearable. The financial burden of paying for our own health care and someone else’s would be unbearable.

That’s why we do not have universal adult health care insurance --- the only affordable way to finance it is to make those with insurance stop paying for their own insurance and instead pay into a pool insuring us all. Although there are ways to do this efficiently and effectively without government intrusion into medical services covered by health care insurance, they will probably never be implemented in our current bimodal political climate. Despite claims of the necessity of universal health care insurance by some of the political left in our country, a significant fraction of the political left and a strong majority of the political center and right do not support any universal health care insurance proposal.

But children are another matter. Children are presumed by society and in law to be incompetent to make some decisions for themselves and adults must make these decisions for them. Parents are assumed to be the decision makes for their children, but under certain circumstances (for example, when there is child abuse present) government must be able to override the decision making power of parents. Perhaps failure to provide adequate funding for health care for a parent’s children is a failure in a parent’s responsibility that, like abuse, requires government intervention.

While the arguments against universal adult health care payment proposals are compelling, the arguments against child universal health care payment are less so. But the same major financing problem that has doomed universal adult health care coverage to date dooms past attempts to implement universal child health care insurance --- parents who pay for their own children’s coverage cannot afford to pay for coverage for others’ children. Hawaii did not adequately face that problem and until government recognizes that problem, universal child health care will not work. But that doesn’t mean it can never work.

Re: Townhall.com – 3/1/2009 – “Remember the Maginot – or, don’t shoot the dog” – Paul Jacobs

Jacobs is right on about the necessary of citizen robustness and quick citizen reaction in emergencies to support the efforts of a thin veneer of professionals. It is not possible to have a standing “army” of professionals ready to respond to any problem we can (and can’t) think of. The economic cost of such an “army” is too high, the between problem inactivity too demotivating to the “army”, and the lack of the responsibility for responding to crisis by the general population makes us unable to respond to unanticipated problems.

But Jacobs is wrong in his interpretation of the “Dead Pet Dog” parable. The problem was not due to “professional” responders; volunteer responders with or without professional leadership (posse or vigilante responders) have a long history of much greater overreaction and error rate in our country than our professional police forces. Volunteer responders led by professionals are preferable to purely professional responders not because volunteers do better (they don’t) but because when professionals cannot adequately respond to all problems, they need volunteer support for the things that they are insufficiently staffed to do. In the Dead Pet Dog incident, volunteers were not necessary and their presence would probably have made matters even worse.

Placing our trust is government is beneficial, so long as (1) we put our trust in government to do only what government should be doing, and (2) we insure thru the general practice of democracy that our government is competent at doing what it is supposed to do. There are limits to what government should do, and these limits reflect what volunteers cannot (or more to the point, do not) successfully do.

What FEMA was supposed to do during Katrina --- make federal resources available to local responders and provide coordination among local responder organizations, including local governments --- was right on. But what FEMA actually did do failed to justify our trust in their competency to do their job. We should continue to recognize government’s FEMA mandate but we should take steps to insure that FEMA is actually prepared to do its job. It is unfair and inaccurate to blame FEMA’s Katrina failure on anything other than that it’s managers being chosen by political and personal relationships instead of professional emergency response management competence, and as such neither understood what could/should have been done in preparation for a Katrina-like event, or (apparently) even what could/should have been done once a Katrina-like event occurred.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/8/2009 – “How Congress Trumps Darwin” - George Will

I think Will has fallen into a trap often taken by lesser minds --- he has confused a measure with the thing being measured.

The main purpose of the protection of endangered species is not to protect the endangered species pre se (but of course it is hoped to accomplish that goal as one of its results) but to protect and help restore a balance of nature that humans desire, if not need. By stopping mankind from inadvertently killing off his cohabitating creatures, mankind may be protected from his own inadvertent self destruction. Miners used to take caged canaries down into mines. When a canary keeled over in their mine it meant that if the miners didn’t do something quick, they’d be next. A dying canary was an indicator of danger in the mine and probably danger to the miner. That, in a nutshell, is the primary purpose of the endangered species act --- it forces mankind to consider the effects on itself of its actions that harm other species.

Unfortunately, the endangered species act is not perfectly formulated. It does not adequately distinguish between endangered species as indicators of potentially harmful behavior to mankind’s environment and endangered species as species to be protected even though they are evolutionary unfit for survival. It errs in trying to stop specie-destructive human action instead of merely making mankind consider the long term effects of those human actions. But the endangered species act is better than nothing and better than any of the yet suggested replacements I have seen --- neither I nor anyone else seems to know how to formulate an effective protective policy for our environment other than by protecting, one by one, its components.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/18/2009 – “Economic Miracle” – Walter E Williams

The n*(n-1) law Williams cites applies only to mutually distinct entities interacting in a one-to-one basis. In fact, most real communications are partly hierarchical and actually follow fewer but longer communication paths, and/or have some communications so infrequent that for all practical purposes they do not occur at all. Sometimes, entities are so strongly correlated that they can be counted as a single entity, or groups of related entities combined to form an independent super-entity --- in mathematical terms, an n*n matrix can often be transformed to a set of m block-diagonal matrices upon which computation are greatly simplified.

In chemistry and physics, statistical mechanics (the physical sciences analog to the workings of the economic free market) can explain well known observational laws and can be used to calculate results independent of the use of those observational laws. But many computations within the domain of statistical mechanics can be made to greater accuracy and with much less effort by using the observational laws instead of statistical mechanics. You don’t need statistical simulations of a zillion consumers to come up with a problem specific version of the law of supply and demand every time you want the know the price of bread at the store --- you go to the store and look. There are things the market can tell us that Congress and/or administration regulators can’t, but there are lots of things that Congress and/or administrative regulators and/or just us plain consumers on our own can figure out without waiting for the market to tell us what happened. If in fact only the market thru its action could tell us where it is going, businesses would be unable to make and carry out financial, production, and marketing plans even as long as 1 day in advance. Businesses can and does plan to a great deal of success, and so can/does government.

If government were to want to open a grocery store (other than the military supply distribution chains it already runs), what in the world makes Williams think government would appoint a czar for every product. Government would structure their grocery business just like private industry would. It would first create an agency (the government analog of a corporation), select a management team, then middle managers, and then workers. The agency would have divisions, just like a supermarket, where wine, meats, fresh vegis, bakery, etc, needs would be centralized. And there would be agency wide support divisions, such as finance, personnel, and purchasing. In fact, except that the board of directors (Congress) can’t fire the chairman (the President) except for high crimes or misdemeanors, there would be little structural differences between a government grocery store business and its corporate analog.

As for an auto czar, would he/she be doing anything that Warren Buffet does not do for all the companies under his control? Buffet doesn’t run the businesses Berkshire Hathaway owns, but he does oversee their budget and their CEOs.

In my opinion, Williams is batting 0 for 4 on this article. He doesn’t seem to understand the workings of math, economics, business, or government.

Williams says “If you have doubts about Adam Smith's prediction, ask yourself which areas of our lives are we the most satisfied and those with most complaints. Would they be profit motivated arenas such supermarkets, video or clothing stores, or be nonprofit motivated government-operated arenas such as public schools, postal delivery or motor vehicle registration? By the way, how many of you would be in favor of Congress running our supermarkets?“ While I’d prefer private grocery stores to government ones, I see little difference between state and private universities (there are really good ones and some pretty lousy ones in both and I’ve studied and taught at both) and definitely prefer buying my physical security (police and military) from the government rather then private providers.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/10/2009 – “De-Programming Students” – Thomas Sowell

School indoctrination is nothing new.

I grew up during the era where we were taught that almost any ally of our country was “good” and a “friend” and any supporter of Soviet Communism was “bad” and an “enemy”. One day in class, just after hearing on the radio the night before that Juan Peron had just arrested virtually all of Argentina’s opposition newspaper editors for criticizing his rule, my teacher yet once again repeated that dumb “good/friend” statement. I raised my hand and asked her whether it was good to arrest journalists who disagreed with the government, and whether Peron was a great friend of Argentina’s free press. I earned no points with my teacher that day.

By the time children get to school (certainly by the time they learn to read) they should have been taught by their parents that not everything they read or are told in school is necessarily 100% true and belong to one of three “truth classes”: some things are true (or false) and rational dispute about these things should end once all the facts are known; some things are a matter of opinion for which debate can be endless but truth and falsity are not relevant attributes; and for some things it really doesn’t matter if they are true (or false) because if you do not behave as if they are true (or false) you will be punished. And children should have learned which kinds of things belong in which truth class. No student should be so unprepared for education that the student should not be able to question and even challenge professorial opinions (within the structure of the class) with questions and on exams. I and all my friends did.

Surprisingly, I found my high school education slightly on the “conservative” side and my college education miraculously unbiased even though I took several courses in government and philosophy, areas where you would expect professorial bias --- presumably because my university stressed intellectual process over opinion. My graduate degrees were in the hard sciences, where issues of political (and even scientific) bias are hardly relevant.  When I left industry for academia as a professor, I found my academic colleagues slightly on the liberal side. I guess that means in my experience, either education has little net bias or education has moved from slightly conservative to slightly liberal, either in time or as I progressed from elementary to graduate school. At any case, the conservative to liberal change, if it existed at all, was relatively minor.

But confronting educational bias builds the ability to think as others might --- a very desirable intellectual skill and is a skill too often inadequately developed. Winning people over to your side requires you to speak to their loves and fears, not your own, and effective negotiation requires you to understand what is the value to you and those you wish to win over, and seek to trade off something of no value to you but great value to the others for something that is of great value to you but no real value to the others. Looking thru the eyes of those who you disagree with is just as valuable as looking thru your own eyes, so long as you can tell the difference. Exposure to bias different from your own is good for you. I get the impression that Sowell sees education as a process of indoctrination instead of a process of developing reasoning and communication skills that enables the educated to formulate and communicate rational opinions.

When I see people complain about not including anti global warming study along side of pro global warming study or Creationism along side evolution, I an reminded of how many of those complainers are the ones who want to prohibit discussion of most birth control methods but allow discussion of “just say no” birth control. Bias exists at the left, the right, and in the center. We ought to learn to live with the biases of others to the same extent that we expect them to live with ours, and if nothing else, gain something from being forced to deal with biases, either ours or theirs.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/9/2009 – “Our Deadly Debt: How “Stimulus” Prolongs Pain” Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

Morris & McGann apparently are unable to distinguish debt to fund consumption with debt to fund investment in future production.

Debt supporting consumption is a dead weight on the economy --- it results in no long term income to the debtor necessary to pay off the debt, and as such is a capital drain on the economy in the future. In the present, however, it encourages consumption and thus helps the economy. Debt supporting investment is paid off from the future returns on investment and does not serve as a drag on the economy --- in fact, it is one of the major driving forces of a strong economy. No amount of debt is excessive so long as it: (1) in the long term is paid back by the economic gains from the investments it finances, and (2) in the short term requires no more repayment than cash flow provides. Both consumption and investment debt will help our current economy, but only investment debt will not hurt our future economy.

A college education is not a consumable and does not depreciate. Spending for education is an investment that is easily statistically justified by the increment in future earnings that education generates. Education is an important foundation of innovation and productivity growth. On both a personal and societal level, investing in education is wealth producing. Low cost government loans are appropriate for financing education because the payback time on educational loans is too far into the future to allow borrowers to service their dept near term, and too risky (due to possibilities of untimely death of debtors) for loaners without a huge base of loan customers. But for government, with a huge statistically significant debtor base and a long term prospective, the individual risk in the short term is adequately compensated by the long term return.

Morris & McGann should look to history (the Great Depression, Japan’s recent deflation) and see that our current economic problems may well last past next year, and that an exclusively short term focus may well be detrimental to the solution of our economic problems.

I would agree with Morris & McGann that government borrowing and spending to support non-income producing personal assets is unlikely to help and likely to hurt our attempts to shake our current economic problems. But I strongly disagree with Morris & McGann on the desirability (perhaps even necessity) of other forms of government loans and expenditures at this point in time.

Re: Townhall.com – 2/18/2009 – “Upside Down Economics” – Thomas Sowell

Sowell says “Both HUD and the Department of Justice began bringing lawsuits against mortgage bakers when a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants were turned down for mortgage loans”. Perhaps Sowell is younger than he looks, but I remember times of systematic discrimination by the home loan industry where minority (especially black) loan applicants were denied loans regardless of income, wealth, and/or other indicators of good credit risk for all properties except those in minority ghettos. The free market did that without any help from government intervention. In fact, government intervention against discriminatory lending occurred only because of the unethical actions of virtually all major free market lenders. If government intervention to stop such prevalent practices went too far, the real blame is not with the government intervention but the unethical practices that existed on the free market that brought on the government regulation.

Re: Business & Media Institute – 2/2/2009 – “’Bulls & Bears’ Guest Can’t Find Example of Stimulus Success” – Lauren O’Reilly

One of the most striking features of the social sciences is that there is never an example of any action that can be shown to have definitely worked or failed to work in solving a problem. The reason for this is that science requires controlled observation of a statistically significant number of solutions applied to essentially the same problem. Time cannot be rolled back to try alternate solutions to the same problem and not enough essentially identical situations can be found to constitute a statistically significant collection for inference.

FDR’s actions did or did not help us through the depression. One can argue that it did (the depression would have been even worse without FDR’s intervention), it didn’t (the depression would have ended on its own without FDR, whose actions actually prolonged the misery), or any host of alternative conclusions (my favorite being that FDR’s policies didn’t work because they weren’t large enough in scope to cure us of depression --- only WW-II was a large enough government action to end the depression). None of these theories has any real evidence to back them up.

Not only the social sciences lack true scientific testability. The theories of the origin of the universe also belong to this class of testless science --- while the basic theories underlying our beliefs about the origin of the universe are testable, there is no way to prove (or disprove) that the universe was actually created according to the predictions of those theories.

In cases like these, belief is based on faith, not testable scientific conclusions. Some political economists see government action as the cause of all good, others see government action as the cause of all bad. Most realize that government has both good and bad influences on the economy. A few realize that there is not a single example in modern (and probably ancient) history where either government or non-government actions were absent, so the best science has to offer is general guidelines on where more or less government action seems correlated with good or bad results --- these are scientifically weak results hardly rising to the level of pronouncements of success or failure in any particular case.