Saalon Muyo

Honest question: Are Austrian School economists out and out wrong or are they universally terrible rhetoricians?

Arnold Kling at EconLog, while discussing his discomfort with the fiscal stimulus package proposed by President-Elect Obama and criticizing some of its supporters, wrote the following:

2. Both of them are keen on trying a big stimulus. Stiglitz says that everything done so far has been a failure, but again he doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion. Instead, he says we have to try something bigger and different.

You have to sort of marvel as someone tries to make a clear point and just straight up undercuts it themselves.  Exactly what’s wrong with someone saying “What’s been done  isn’t working so we have to do something different?”  I know that what he’s trying to knock is the “bigger” portion, but saying “Let’s try something bigger,” and saying “Let’s try something bigger and different” are two wildly different things.

Not that Kling’s point would necessarily be valid if he had stopped at “bigger.”  His post goes on to compare the fiscal stimulus package to the Battle of the Somme in World War I, equating it to the decision to follow up failed offensives with a larger  and ultimately unsuccessful offensive.  He’s saying, basically, that if something isn’t working, it’s obvious that a greater quantity of the must also not work.

Is it true in this case?  Maybe, but it’s not a certainty by any stretch of the imagination.  How about a different analogy?  My couch is on fire.  I’ve been told that water puts out fires, so I grab the biggest container near me – a gallon pitcher – and fill it up.  By the time I’ve returned to the living room, the whole couch is engulfed in flames.  I toss the water on the fire, but other than a lot of steam and slightly smaller flames on the area where the water directly hit, I’m still in crisis.  Only, it wasn’t the action I took at fault.  It was the magnitude.  Bringing in a fire hose and dousing the couch with hundreds of gallons of water would leave me with a charred but flameless couch.  It would  not result in the Battle of the Somme.

I enjoy dissent, and I like that people are engaging in a spirited debate of our economic crisis.  But I’m becoming frustrated with many of the laissez-faire economists who have little to offer but unsupported negativity.  I’m unlikely to support the kind of anarcho-capitalism they stand behind (were I to go for anarchy, I think the Anarresti variety is preferable), but when it comes to new ideas I try to take something away from them to challenge and augment my own views.

It’s not easy when even their scholars can’t form a coherent argument.  My suspicion – since every pure free-market argument I read is littered with misleading statistics, incorrect inferences and poor logical construction – is that they’re simply wrong.  This might be unfair.  A badly made argument is not, by default, untrue.  But at this point I’d think one of them would be able to articulate their views without falling back on overstatements and murky analogies.

I’m talking about hospitals, not this blog.

This abortion debate went beyond the point of rationality years ago, but the outgoing administration’s mission to impose one religion’s moral stamp on our institutions further damages the reliability of our nation’s medical care.  The Bush administration has put in place a new rule that allows health care professionals to refuse to give certain types of services, including information about those services, based on their religious beliefs.

Under current federal and state law provisions doctors and nurses can opt out of conducting abortions while the new rule now encompasses all health care workers who can now refuse to provide information, including a referral, to patients seeking an abortion.

If you’re thinking that this isn’t such a big deal, because you can just choose to go to a heathen doctor who will perform your grotesque baby killing for you, there’s something you’ve missed.  This doesn’t just cover the doctors you choose to see on a day to day basis.  It covers every health professional you meet, even during emergency room visits.

While imposing the new rule the administration cited a 2007 Connecticut law that requires hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims and hospitals that object to it can use independent providers for the procedure.

Hospitals are not the place for religious debate.  They are institutions which provide a public service, and so long as emergency contraception is legal, allowing the people charged with providing our health options to withhold information because of their personal religious beliefs is both wrong and dangerous.

Look at the description of the Connecticut law.  If a hospital objects to offering an emergency contraceptive service, they can bring in an independent group to do so.  If you have beliefs that prevent you from simply referring a patient to another doctor, you should not be working in a hospital.   There are plenty of private practices and specialty institutions where you could maintain your personal morals without denying people the care options they deserve.  If you choose to stay in the hospital, you need to play the role you’ve accepted: a servant of the public good.

Let me offer one analogy and one thought experiment.

Let’s say your religion has rules against accepting blood transfusions.  Would you be allowed, then, to not provide someone in the emergency with a blood transfusion because it goes against your religious views?  This is not an imaginary position: The Jehovah’s Witnesses are not allowed to take blood transfusions, and there are over a million followers of this faith.  Should a member of this church who becomes a nurse or doctor be permitted to not only deny blood transfusions but also refuse to suggest to a patient that their family member donate in advance of surgery on their behalf?  Should they even be permitted to withhold facts about the possibility of a transfusion saving your life during surgery?

Now, let’s say a police officer is faced with a situation where subduing a subject requires the use of a firearm, and that shooting this perpetrator will likely kill him.  Should there be a law giving the policeman license to not fire that gun solely out of personal belief?  Would we want our public servant, charged to protect us, to allow a religious prohibition against killing to stop him from completing his public duty to serve and protect?  Or do we want our policemen to put aside all but his duty, as we expect our military servicemen to do in times of war?

A person does not always have the luxury to sort through medical professionals to find the one that will not deny them options.  Since this new rule does not even require that those refusing to give care to must give a referral to someone who would, they are empowered to deny the possibility of  legal medical coverage to patients who may not share their beliefs.  A doctor should not be forced to perform an operation he does not believe in, but he should be required to call in a replacement who will.

See? McCain isn’t that old. It’s clear Anna Nicole Smith, at least, is capable of, um, arousing him. And I suppose in Smith he has someone who actually makes Sarah Palin look smart in comparison.

Not.

If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

Ben Smith at Politico nicely stripped away the fallacies in this quote, though I wish he hadn’t prefaced it by claiming a risk of pedanticalness. Frankly, I’m sick of the slightly more complicated nature of fact giving those who speak it a bad name as out of touch, elitist of intellectual.

Coming from a Mayor who floated the idea of banning books from the public library, cries of First Amendment violations sound particularly idiotic, but her lack of understanding (or purposeful misinterpretation) of one of the cornerstones of our governmental system just throws the whole thing into Wacky Land.

Let me make this clear for you, Governor. The First Amendment is not there to protect your feelings. It does not exist so people will be nice to you, or even to force people to tell the truth (a fact I am sure you will be pleased to learn). It exists to protect speech from the suppression of government bodies. Specifically, it exists so that ideologue Mayors with poor knowledge of our nation’s laws can’t do something like pulling books about homosexuality out of public libraries.

There are laws to protect people from lies and distortions in the media, but they are not part of the First Amendment. If what you are alleging is libel, slander or defamation of character, then press those charges. I know defamation might be a big word for you, but that’s what we hire lawyers for, right?

But allow me to warn you of something, since your ambition is your most defining trait. Your ability to remain unchallenged on the things you say slips when you seek widespread public status. If you’d like to become the new face of the GOP – and I urge you to, for the good of the country – I’d suggest getting used to people writing things about you that you don’t like.

I’d also suggest actually picking up a copy of the Constitution and putting it under your pillow. Learning by osmosis has no scientific basis, but when has that stopped you from believing something?

So there’s this town in Japan called Obama.  Seriously.  And Barack has given them the once in a lifetime chance to piggy back hometown publicity with U.S. politics. What to do?  Sing!

I’m honestly not making this up.

Via Politico.

“Oh, you think that’s funny?!” the large bearded man said. His face was turning red. “Yeah, that’s real funny…” he said.

And then he kicked the back of my leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground.

- Joe Killian,  “How I Became Joe Sixpack”

It’s beginning to feel like every report of a McCain/Palin rally comes with its own unique section of violent outrage.  This started about a month ago, when an African American sound man was told to “Sit down, boy!” in the same rally a reporter heard a man shout “Kill him!” as Gov. Palin asked the crowd who Barack Obama really was.  Since then, I’ve heard a number of tepid arguments defending the McCain campaign from being associated with these situations.  He can’t control who goes to his rallies.  Idiots come to rallies of all kinds.  Obama is trying to make all McCain supporters out to be racist lunatics.

I have certainly seen these people at other types of rallies and gathering, and I doubt even the majority of McCain supporters would condone kicking a reporter in the back of the leg simply for looking up at pro-Obama protesters.  One or two stories of this nature wouldn’t concern me.  A couple of people in campaign shirts that use them as license to insult and attack would not be a surprise.

It’s the quantity of them that scares me.

N&R political reporter Mark Binker and I were on different sides of the crowd – but we both got the same reaction from Palin fans as we craned our necks to see what the disturbance was.

“That’s not the story, the story’s up there on the stage!” someone yelled at Binker.

“Ain’t nothing to look at and don’t you write about it!” I was told.

- Joe Killian,  “How I Became Joe Sixpack”

It’s also that they appeared as soon as the McCain/Palin strategy became one of attack, and specifically took up the question “Who is the real Barack Obama?”  When this stump speech first appeared, it was met with protests.  Many on the left thought it was racist.  Of course, since no one said “darkie” and no McCain staff members tap danced in black face, this was brushed off.

But are these complaints really invalid?  Let’s work backwards.

Following the reveal of the new stump speech, stories of hateful language, violent acts and threatening comments began to bubble to the surface.  Senator McCain being asked by a woman about Obama being an Arab.  A lady at a rally suggesting Obama may be a terrorist because “He’s got the bloodlines.”  A man with a monkey doll with a piece of paper wrapped onto its head, who he referred to as “L’il Hussein.”  These people were not created by the McCain campaign, but something convinced them that friends would be present at one of his or Sarah Palin’s rallies.  They even felt so at home that they had no problem saying these things into a camera, even after these videos started to show up on YouTube.

To me, this is evidence of some change in Senator McCain’s campaign strategy.  But what about the “Who is Barack Obama?” line would call out to the racist and angry in our nation?

Let’s look at the argument itself.  In it, former weatherman Bill Ayers is brought up, as is Obama’s community work he did while on a board Ayers was also a part of.  In this speech, Sarah Palin would wonder if Barack Obama really sees America the way her followers do if he’s willing to pal around with terrorists.

That sounds hyperbolic, certainly, but racist?  Not if our criteria for racist language is ends at “He’s got the bloodlines.”  Throughout this election, viral e-mails have been going out about Obama’s middle name, using it to suggest he was educated at a fundamentalist Islamic Madrasah or that he was secretly a Muslim.  The guy with the Obama monkey was certainly the target audience of those e-mails.  Now, in the middle of stump speeches, you start saying that Obama is friends with terrorists.

What do most people think of, right now, when you use the word “terrorist” to describe them?  Someone of any race, creed or culture who happens to use terror as a weapon?  Or this?

What I mean is this:  If you say to someone – who already thinks a man who is a U.S. citizen and is running for president and is the son of a Caucasian woman and a Kenyan man is secretly an Arab fundamentalist Muslim – that Obama “pals around with terrorists,” what do you think is popping into their head?  Obama with a white 60’s radical on the board of a community organization?  Or this?

To deny that these stump speeches lacked a racial component works only if you read racism only as white people hating black people.  While I certainly think the people who have been kicking and shouting at reporters are racist in this way as well, they are not only afraid of dark brown people.  They’re afraid of light brown people as well.  Once you subscribe to the idea that someone of a different color than you is inherently more dangerous, you’re probably not going to restrict that to one color.  An insinuation that Obama is dangerous because he associates with terrorists (read: Arab Muslims) is going to play with people who also think he’s dangerous because he’s a watermelon and fried chicken eating Negro.

To be fair, it might be more accurate to say that Palin and McCain have been playing to their bases’ xenophobia, even though I think that’s largely the same thing as racism.  They are saying to be scared of Obama because he’s different than you.  Because he travels on exotic and foreign vacations (to Hawaii) and because he wants to talk to (Arab and Latino) leaders before bombing them.  When they ask if we know the real Obama, they want people to wonder if he’s even American at all.

And frankly, the only people batshit enough to think that a man running for the U.S. presidency is secretly not an American citizen who has connections to Islamist terrorism are the ones who were prejudiced against him for some other reason.  Say, the color of his skin and his decidedly unWASPy name.

Do I believe that John McCain wanted a bunch of Obama monkey-waving cretins to come to his rallies and kick reporters?  No, I do not.  (In all honesty, the jury’s still out on Palin with me, but I’ll let that lie).  But I do believe that he was hoping to raise doubts about Obama as a risky choice.

And I blame him for not realizing that using incendiary language in an election that was already bound to bring out the racist fringe of our nation would not be heard as a siren’s song to them.  In Senator McCain’s desperation to win the U.S. Presidency, he has given a seal of approval – however inadvertently – to those whose primary motivation is hatred.  The people coming to he and Palin’s rallies spewing hatred and anger have come because they believe they’ve been invited.

There’s no closing the box, at this point.  But I’d like any John McCain supporters to consider this question.  Isn’t shouting at a reporter to stop covering a story and then assaulting him when he does not listen a lesser form of terrorism? And before you say that Ayers set a bomb and that’s a lot worse, let’s not forget that the last time a culture of racial hatred got scared of the specter of racial equality, it led to a couple of things that anyone would label as terrorism.  Maybe even Sarah Palin.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahah!

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!

…wait, this was satire, right?

People are wondering if Sarah Palin was knocking places like California and Massachusetts as being anti-American when she said this:

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one.

She wasn’t. She was obviously talking about how nice it was being away from her anti-American home state of Alaska, where her friends in the Alaskan Independence Party feel a hatred of our government so hot that the fires of hell are glaciers in comparison.

So chill out, everyone.

Want to keep your candidate of choice in the game?  Polls are hard to game from the outside, but by God, I bet you could bamboozle Intrade!

An internal investigation by the popular online market Intrade has revealed that an investor has been attempting to artificially boost the prediction that Sen. John McCain will become president.

Over the past several weeks, the investor has pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into one of Intrade’s predictive markets for the presidential election, the company said, resulting in great financial losses through a strategy that belies any financial motive.

Was the perceived benefit that Intrade granted the McCain campaign (which couldn’t have been large, as Ben Smith at politico notes) worth the money this cost?  You probably could have bought the number of votes this would have swung McCains way at a better rate than you got on Intrade.

Really, really weird.

A lucid point about the Joe the Plumber taxation thing is made by John Seery at HuffPo:

Joe versus Sam. You could line up economists spouting elegant theories for each side, but the basic arguments can probably be reduced to Joe’s and Sam’s respective positions on very gut levels. Joe’s never made $250,000, but he feels that if he ever reaches that threshold, he shouldn’t be “penalized” for his success. He seems to believe that cutting taxes for wealthy individuals somehow serves his current financial interests and his aspirations for the future. Sam’s already lived those trickle-down and dream-up Republican talking points but now rejects them with hard-won conviction.

I’m not going to say there aren’t business owners over the $250k range that wouldn’t disagree with this, but I think it’s anecdotal evidence of what I talked about yesterday.  The real recipients of the high-income taxation message are middle class voters who are encouraged to project their fantasies of wealth into Obama’s tax plan. It simplifies a complicated issue of the effects of taxation into meaninglessness.

There are cases where appropriate spending of fair taxation helps everyone, just as there are cases where inappropriately high taxation can hurt an economy, just as there are cases where an imbalance in tax proportions unfairly benefits a minority of Americans.

Sam’s point stands, though.  If your consumers can’t afford to buy from you, a difference in 4% taxation isn’t what’s going to cause you to lay off workers.  We could cut your taxes to nothing and you’d still go out of business.