Idiot Parents Refuse to Vaccinate Their Children

Megan McArdle links to this New York Times article about what Megan calls "twee Bobo sociopaths" who refuse to vaccinate their children, either due to religious beliefs or woo-woo personal antipathy toward vaccination. As the article points out, kids who aren't vaccinated expose other kids to possible infection, not to mention adults whose immunity has faded. They think vaccines are dangerous -- which they are to some small extent -- and so they expose their own children, and other children, to the much greater risk of the underlying diseases, effectivley free-riding off the parents who have had their children immunized.

But some parents go beyond leaving their children unvaccinated. They actually expose their children to the actual diseases the vaccines are intended to protect them from:

Some parents of unvaccinated children go to great lengths to expose their children to childhood diseases to help them build natural immunities.

In the wake of last month’s outbreak, Linda Palmer considered sending her son to a measles party to contract the virus. Several years ago, the boy, now 12, contracted chicken pox when Ms. Palmer had him attend a gathering of children with that virus.

“It is a very common thing in the natural-health oriented world,” Ms. Palmer said of the parties.

Oh, well, then it's OK then. If it's common in the "natural health" world, then it's fine and dandy.

Megan thinks that the unvaccinated ought to be barred from exposing members of the public to risk of disease:

Of course, I recognize that people have a right to abide by their conscience, and I would not want public health officials to force children to be vaccinated. I just think that people who are unvaccinated, unless they have a legitimate medical reason for same, should not be allowed to use public roads, public sidewalks, or public services. They have a right not to vaccinate their children. But they do not have a right to risk my health.

I suppose we could have "Natural Health Colonies," along the lines of leper colonies, for those who forego vaccination. They might get wiped out by diseases from time to time, but I suppose that there would always be a new crop of natural health nuts to fill them back up. And yet administering this system seems a bit difficult. What are we going to do, tattoo a "U" on the forehead of the unvaccinated?

I prefer the option she rejects: have public health officials force children to be vaccinated, even if the parents object on religious or other grounds. In general, I believe in personal freedom, and if people want to risk their own health, so be it. Jump out of airplanes, smoke cigarettes, drink raw milk, go to an acupuncturist when you have cancer -- I really don't give a damn. Your body, your life.

But we all agree that children are a special case, because they are not yet mature enough to make decisions about their own lives. (Some adults aren't either, but that's another post.) So somebody has to decide things for children. But who?

Well, one answer is that the state could do it. The problem with that is that the state tends to do a pretty bad job at that sort of thing. Most parents love their children and in general are motivated to do a good job of taking care of them. That doesn't mean they don't screw up at times, but they do a better job than the goverment would if it tried to raise all children en masse.

But we recognize exceptions to that general principle. Parents are required to give their children basic nutrition, clothing, and shelter. If Jewish or Muslim parents don't want to feed their kids pork, that's fine, but they have to feed them something. Spanking is still legal, but severe beatings are not allowed. Nor does it matter if parents are motivated by religion as they abuse their kids. Christian Reconstructionist parents are allowed to believe whatever they want, but they can't stone their children for talking back. If parents lock their kids in the attic, as in that awful Flowers in the Attic book, then social workers are supposed to come and take them away to a nice foster family, where, one hopes, the children won't be locked in the attic or sodomized by the kid in the next bunk. Granted, that's not always a given, which is why children are only taken away for good reason. But abuse or neglect is a good reason.

Failure to vaccinate your child ought to be considered a form of neglect, just like denying that child any form of medical care. Now, some kids have legitimate medical reasons to not be vaccinated, and of course they should be exempt. But "personal beliefs" or "relgious objections" Give me a break. Somebody might have a religion that requires him to sodomize his kid every Tuesday night, but we don't let people do that.

If a person't religious or personal beliefs cause them to forego medical care, fine. But their children aren't capable, yet, of making an informed and rational choice. Since the parents obviously aren't either, the state should require vaccination. And anybody who takes their kid to a "measles party" to intentionally infect them ought to lose all parental rights and have some serious time in the slammer.

Paging Doctor Mengele

Megan McArdle links to this article by Graeme Wood arguing in favor of harvesting the organs of executed convicts. But wait! It turns out that most methods of execution ruin the organs. How do you get around that? Wood argues in favor of the "Mayan Protocal" -- executing people by removing their organs:

But by using what the bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls “the Mayan Protocol”—a term derived from the ancient Mayan practice of vivisecting their human sacrifices—the removal of organs would itself be the method of execution. If this sounds inhumane, compare it to current practices: botched hangings, painfully long gassings, and messy electrocutions. Removal of the heart, lungs, and kidneys (under anesthesia, of course) would kill every time, without an instant of pain.

I suppose you might find doctors willing to go along and ignore that "First Do No Harm" thing. And if you did, well, think of the lives you could save!

Given the overlap between libertarians and science ficiton fans, it's hardly surprising that "Lou," Megan's first commenter, brought up the Larry Niven short story, "The Jigsaw Man." To give away the punch line: in that futuristic society, they required that death row inmates have their organs harvested. As a result, legislatures expanded the death penalty to include more and more offenses, until the defendant in the story faces the death penalty for being a recidivist traffic offender.

I don't think that it would go that far -- but there are ample reasons why the citizenry ought not receive collateral benefits from criminal punishments. (Following this theory, David Friedman has trumpted the virtues of inefficient punishments.)

Government = Santa Claus

I have often remarked to friends that modern liberals attribute to government the characteristics that small children attribute to Santa Claus. I wish I had said it here, on my blog, because if I had I'd have the perfect "gotcha" moment. As it is, I have such a moment, but those inclined to be skeptical can say (correctly) "but you never wrote it down."

Anyhow, believe me when I tell you that "modern liberals attribute to government the characteristics that small children attribute to Santa Claus" is a Cheerful Iconoclast aphorism. Well, I just saw this Hillary Clinton ad, via Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse:



I have seldom seen more vivid proof of one of my pet theories.

As Ann Althouse says, "Isn't this like when you get presents from family members and you know they charged it on your credit card?" Yes and no.

In truth, yes, of course. The recipients of these "presents" have to pay for them.

But in the mind of her target audience, the answer is no. The modern liberals that she's trying to reach think the government is Santa Claus. And so Santa can come up with these goodies, and nobody has to pay.

You know, there are a lot of libertarian-leaning people who tend to vote Republican who are very disaffected with George W. Bush and the Republican Party he has forged. This ad vividly reminds them of why they don't like Democrats.

Mike Huckabee -- The Anti-Corporatist

Some of our friends on the left seem convinced that Mike Huckabee is the genuine anti-establishment, anti-corporatist Republican candidate. Glenn Greenwald wrote a long (well, it's Greenwald) bit -- with five updates! -- about the anti-establishment candidates -- Ron Paul, John Edwards, and Mike Huckabee. Now, it's pretty ridiculous to call Edwards and Huckabee anti-Establishment -- Edwards is a trial lawyer with standard liberal "populist" views, and Huckabee is the ideological heir to George W. Bush. But it's interesting that he quotes, apparently approvingly, Huckabee's claim that he's not part of the "Wall Street-to-Washington axis, this corridor of power." Likewise, Jon Ponder claims that the members of the "corporatist Republican establishment" won't cede power to a Yahoo like Huckabee. Dave Neiwert has similar observations.

Guys, I'm sorry to tell you, but you have it exactly backwards. First of all, Huckabee is the direct ideological heir to George W. Bush. If you hate Bush, you should loathe Huckabee. He's even more of a religious fruitcake than Bush, and, in terms of policies, he seems not to differ from Bush a whit on, well, much of anything.

Sure, Huckabee talks like a populist anti-corporatist. But will that matter a whit in the end? Huckabee is the sort of big government Republican who will undoubtedly embrace all sorts of government programs, rules, regulations, and giveaways. As I noted in this post, corporatism isn't the result of bad people in office -- or not just the result of bad people. It's the result of structures and incentives. And I assure you that Mike Huckabee is not going to fundamentally alter the incentive structures that create corporatism. Nor will Hillary Clinton, or John Edwards, or Barack Obama, or anybody else with a plausible chance of winning.

The bigger the government we have the more corporatism we will have. And from the sound of things, Mike Huckabee wants a very big government indeed.

The Case Against Ron Paul

Stephen Bainbridge outlines a conservative case against Ron Paul (via Instapundit). Some of Bainbridge's issues don't bother me -- he's a conservative, and I am not. But Bainbridge leaves out the main reason to not support him: he's a kook. He's your crazy uncle, if you have one. Charming, well, I think so. Lovable, sure. Funny, when compared to, say, Mitt Romney, who is the ultimate blow-dried politician. Yes, I'd like to see a Republican Party with more Ron Paul in it. I think that the New Deal and Great Society were big mistakes, and that we'd be a lot better off today with much less government than we have now.

But what Ron Paul and many libertarians don't understand is that Americans are naturally conservative, in the sense that they tend to resist radical change. Sure, they say they want "change," but they want change within a certain range. The real challenge for a serious libertarian is finding a path from here to where we want to be. A way of unwinding the administrative/welfare state.

Even if you agree that we'd be a lot better off with less government -- and I do -- the fact is that people do depend on government programs right now. It's all well and good to say we'd be better off thirty years from now if we adopted more libertarian policies, but if you want to sustain a transition to a more limited government, you have to find some way to ameliorate the transition. And that is a question that Ron Paul seems not to even have thought about.

Costs of Prohibition

Clayton Cramer has an interesting post on drug prohibition and related issues in which he makes a number of very interesting points. It's well worth reading in full, even if you disagree, and I may come back to it in the future, but for now I want to focus on one issue. In discussing the experience with alcohol prohibition, Cramer makes this point:

As I have mentioned before, cirrhosis of the liver rates fell roughly in half within a few years of the start of Prohibition. They came back up again (although not as quickly) with a few years of the end of Prohibition. Pretty clearly, alcohol consumption, and especially the regular, high consumption of alcohol associated with cirrhosis of the liver, fell because of Prohibition. Whether the other negative consequences of Prohibition (such as gangsters and corrupt politicians) was too high of a price to pay is a legitimate question. It is also a legitimate question whether Prohibition disproportionately discouraged those drinkers who weren't the social problem. I rather suspect that people that had the occasional beer before Prohibition, or some wine at home with dinner, weren't the ones hitting speakeasies--and they weren't the problem that Prohibition was trying to fix. But let's not pretend that prohibiting a commodity doesn't affect consumption rates.

First of all, I concede that of course prohibition, whether of alcohol (then) or illegal drugs (now) does affect consumption rates. When you raise the price of something, you have less of it -- that's darn near close to a universal truth.

That said, "gangsters and corrupt politicians" weren't the only cost associated with alcohol prohibition, though it is the one that libertarians tend to talk about the most when discussing the parallels between alcohol prohibition and the current War on Drugs. Rather, one of the costs was that people who wanted to drink were prohibited from doing so. Clayton is right that "people that had the occasional beer before Prohibition, or some wine at home with dinner, weren't the ones hitting speakeasies--and they weren't the problem that Prohibition was trying to fix." They may not have been "the problem Prohibition was trying to fix" -- although Temperance crusaders, like drug warriors, weren't big on the distinction between recreational and abusive uses. But so what? It was illegal for them, too. And because they were, for the most part, law-abiding people who enjoyed some beer or wine but were perfectly willing to do without, they generally did without rather than incurring the risks of breaking the law. And they were thereby deprived of the experience of having a bottle of wine among friends over dinner. Taking that pleasure away from people -- well it's obscene.

I am fully aware that alcohol has very real social costs. And yes, I think that Al Capone and the other gangsters and hoodlums who prospered during Prohibition were indeed a good reason to do away with it. But the infringement on liberty alone was sufficient reason to object to prohibition. I enjoy having a glass of wine with dinner from time to time, or a beer with my pizza, and I don't see why I should be deprived of that pleasure because some people cannot drink responsibly.

Likewise, the War on Drugs has very real costs, some of which I've touched on before. I think those costs are good and sufficient reasons to get rid of the war on drugs. But that's not the only reason. For the most part, I think I think that taking now-illicit drugs is a bad choice, and if the sorts of drugs that people now use recreationally were legalized, I doubt I'd partake in them. But that would be my choice. People who decide to use heroin or meth might well be throwing their life away, making a very poor choice. But it's their life, and their choice. They should have the freedom to make it.

Cory Maye and No-Knock Raids

Radley Balko has a long and moving post about his recent trip to Mississippi where he visited the family of Cory Maye. Now, I sometimes think that Radley goes off the rails, but his work on the Cory Maye case has been exemplary. There's a lot of detail involved in the case, and while I don't claim to have followed every twist and turn, this Radley Balko Reason piece gives some background. Maye's home was raided by the cops late one evening. Awakened from his slumber, Maye ended up shooting and killing one of the police officers on the raid. He claimed he didn't know they were cops, that he was acting in self-defense, albeit mistaken self-defense. The jury rejected his claim and convicted him.

The case touches all sorts of issues involving, poverty, criminal procedures, and the use of arguably-unreliable forensic evidence. But to me the key point is this: so long as we have the "war on drugs," we are going to have cases like Maye's. It's something I touched on in my last post, talking about this California case in which a homeowner shot and killed two young men who broke into his home. In that post I argued that the fact that the homeowner shot the intruders in the back mattered not a whit because it was simply unreasonable, in that confused situation, to demand that he instantly take stock of what his intruders were doing.

By the same token, somebody who is asleep in his or her home, in an environment where a homeowner is entitled to feel safe and secure isn't in a great position to take stock of the situation when a door is broken down in hte middle of the night. People have the right to defend themselves and their homes from attack, and in America they exercise that right. Inevitably, some informants will be unreliable -- they're looking for drug dealers, after all, and most drug dealers don't hang out with schoolmarms and librarians. Inevitably, cops will write down the wrong address, or people will move out. And then, inevitably, some cops and some citizens will be killed. It's just one cost of the war on drugs. One of many.

Big Government Is Big Business

Radley Balko puts together a couple of interesting tidbits. First, you've got this, from Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute, showing that the number of federal subsidy programs has increased by about 25% since 2000. (Edwards notes the irony that there are now 1,776 such programs.)

And then Balko points to this from the Washington Post: an article about how lobbying is a big growth industry. Apparently, the number of lobbyists has nearly doubled since the year 2000, and they are raking in the bucks.

Balko uses this as an excuse to take a shot at Bush and the Republican Congress, and lord knows they deserve it. But, as I noted before in talking about agriculture regulations, the problem isn't bad people in power, or at least isn't just bad people. The problem is structural. The United States has a 13 trillion dollar economy. The federal government spends about 20% of that, and its policies greatly affect the other 80%. Try this experiement someday, if you can get Bill Gates to fund it for you: fill garbage cans with $100 bills and randomly leave them in Central Park. I suspect you won't have to wait long before people start hanging around in the park, trying to be there for your next money drop.

The same is true of the federal government. They have so much money to toss around and their rules and regulations have so much impact on the rest that people would be stupid not to hire lobbyists and influence peddlers. Want to get rid of it? Fine -- reduce the size and scope of the federal government. But, people being people, it's too much to expect that they won't respond to the incentives generated by a massive, intrusive, federal regulatory/welfare state.

Free the Small Farmers -- And Everybody Else, Too

Given the vitriolic nature of much left/right "debate" on the web, it's nice to see a civil exchange between people who nonetheless disagree quite fundamentally. So I want to congratulate Libby Spencer at Newshoggers and Jim Henley for the tone of a recent exchange that nonetheless nicely illustrates the differing mindset between those who instinctively support the modern liberal regulatory state and those who are more skeptical of it.

Spencer points to this Nation article, which focuses on the travails of one small Michigan farmer in dealing with overbearing regulators, but which discusses, more generally, the issues facing small farmers (often organice) who embrace a direct-to-consumer model. Reading this article in The Nation, I got the momentary sensation I was reading Reason instead. Witness this passage, for example:

But as the re-emergence of a farm-to-consumer economy draws increasing amounts of cash out of the mass-production factory system, the new movement is bumping up against suddenly energized regulators who claim they want to "protect" us from pathogens and other dangers.

Wow, I thought you had to be a libertarian to put "protect" in sneer quotes like that. Still, there is the inevitable swipe at big business and the "mass-production factory system" of agriculture. So it's The Nation after all. Spencer reads this article and concludes that reducing regulations will do nothing but "allow the corporations to more easily foist off bad food." But the regulations have to be done correctly, which, according to her means that "they need to be enforced against the commercial facilities they were designed to oversee, not wrongly used to destroy privately owned competition."

Jim Henley responds, in a post amusingly titled "Wishing for a Free Range, Organic -- Pony." Henley's argument is that this sort of thing is the inevitable result of the regulatory/farm welfare system we now have in place:

Three-quarters of a century of regulatory-state agriculture has left us with a system of subsidized corporate farms who deplete the soil, abuse animals and enjoy a coziness with state agents while the same state agents hassle independent operators and crusading eccentrics out of business. It’s as if, my man IOZ would say, there’s a pattern.

The pattern is that reforms are put in place to regulate evildoers, but the evildoers soon harness the regulatory agencies to reduce competition. There's even a term for that: it's called "regulatory capture." The classic example is the Interstate Commerce Commission, originally created to regulate railroads that quickly turned into a way for existing enterprises to restrict competition.

But Spencer doesn't see it that way. According to her it is all the fault of Big Bad Bush:

I'm not unaware that Bush didn't build the bureaucracy singlehandedly, but he stacked the agencies with industry cronies, putting them in charge of oversight. Under his administration, regulations have been relaxed from previous safety standards for everything from consumer goods to coal mining. Enforcement against corporate entities is practically nonexistent.

In other words, her view is that it's bad people enforcing the regulations, not the existence of the regulations themselves that causes the problem.

So who's right? Well, as a person who leans libertarian, I am naturally inclined to agree with Henley, but that could well be confirmation bias at work. And yet, I think that the evidence leads to that view. It may well be true that regulators have been unusually compliant under Bush -- I honestly don't know enough to make such a global judgment -- but as I noted earlier, the classic example of regulatory capture is the Interstate Commerce Commission, an agency created over 100 years ago. Nor is it limited to just the ICC -- it happens in basically every field when an all-encompassing regulatory agency takes over. The "bad people" explanation gets weaker and weaker when something happens over and over again.

I also have to wonder whether Ms. Spencer read the article in The Nation with sufficient care. The farmer who is highlighted, Greg Niewendorp, had problems not with the federal bureaucrats appointed by the Evil Bush, but instead had difficulties with the Michigan Department of Agriculture, a state regulatory agency. And, as the article highlights, the regulatory difficulties of these independent producers involve both state and federal regulators. Which, again, suggests a more structural problem, rather than the "bad people" explanation that Spencer seems to favor.

And there is at least some irony here. Niewendorp, the farmer whose plight was highlighted by the article in The Nation, objected to a program which is supposed to test cattle for bovine tuberculosis. In general, I am not a huge fan of government regulation, but as health-and-safety regulations go, requiring that beef critters be tested for communicable diseases doesn't strike me as being that onerous or unjustified. Now, Niewendorp's claim is that he's just a small-scale producer and that his customers trust his practices. As somebody with libertarian procilities, I am more willing than a lot of people to let people assume this sort of risk. However, if you are the sort of person who believes in the case for lots of government regulation generally, I don't see how you can say that the guy ought not have his cattle tested.

Likewise, the article talks about small-scale producers who do their own butchering, and sellers of raw milk and cider:

Federal and state agriculture and health authorities say farmers are violating all kinds of regulations to meet fast-growing consumer demand, such as slaughtering their own hogs and cattle instead of using state and federally inspected facilities, and selling unpasteurized dairy products and cider without the proper permits.

Raw milk is a matter of huge controversy. Personally, I don't enjoy throwing up all that much, and as a result I am a big fan of of pasteurization. Silly me, but I think Louis was onto something with this whole "germ theory" thing. That said, I think that if people want to purchase clearly-labeled raw milk, they ought to be free to do so. Likewise, I think that if people want to purchase cows or pigs that were slaughtered by the farmer in his barn, rather than in a government-inspected slaughterhouse, you ought to be free to do so, so long as there is full disclosure. But if you are the sort of person who read The Jungle and who believes generally in the case for government-inspected slaughterhouses, I am not sure why you ought to make an exception for "local, organic" farmers.

Why (This) Libertarian Hates Unions

Why do some libertarians hate unions? Megan McArdle says that liberals believe that libertarians hate unions because "they raise wages and improve working conditions for their workers at the expense of profits." Citing this article on tollbooths and the adoption of technology like the EZ-Pass, Megan says that the "the central problem with unions, to the extent that there is a problem, is not that they demand higher wages, but that they reflexively oppose productivity enhancing change." And she cites a couple of examples -- the dockworkers' strike and the Big Three autoworkers who sit around being paid to do nothing.

Megan is right that one problem with unions is that they tend to oppose productivity-enhancing innovation, and this is indeed a good reason to hate unions. But, from a libertarian perspective, the central problem with unions is that they depend on the coercive power of the state. Property rights and freedom of contract are fundamental rights. Under current law, if 51% of the workers at company X vote to join a union, the employer is legally required to contract with that union. (The Democrats want to change this to require compulsory contracting if 51% of the workers can be persuaded or intimidated into signing a card.) The employer cannot refuse to contract with that group, contract individually with the other 49%, offer payment to workers in exchange for an agreement not to join a union, or seek employees willing to give a better deal. Every private sector union contract in force today exists in part because a people with guns say "bargain with them, or else."

Under libertarian rules, workers would, of course, be free to form unions or join existing ones. They would be free to seek a favorable contract from their employer. By the same token, the employer would be allowed to bargain individually with people who chose not to join a union, to refuse to bargain with the union, or to offer contracts which forbade unionization. I am not a big fan of unions, but that is largely because, under current rules, they have the heavy hand of the state behind them.

Still More on Torture

This is a continuation of my ongoing dialogue with a conservative Catholic friend, whom I have dubbed "CC" for purposes of this discussion. In my first post on this matter, I outlined my basic anti-torture position. My second post was a reply to CC's emailed response. CC has taken the time to e-mail additional thoughts, and this post continues our dialogue. I am here quoting both some of my own prior statements and CC's response to them:

Well, as a religious believer it seems to me that you probably ought to apply a categorical command against torture. You do, after all, believe that Christ (whom you consider to be a manifestation of God, right?) was tortured by the Romans. This ought to lead you to a certain sympathy for the victims of torture, regardless of whether it works.

Response: There you go again. The word "torture" is inherently ambiguous. I agree that the Romans inflicted pain on Jesus of Nazareth and killed him. Christ's suffering serves as inspiration to me inspires a "certain sympathy" for all persons who suffer pain at the hands of any government, including our own. Jesus taught us to love our enemies and to turn the other cheek, and so, as a Christian, I try to live up to these ideals. It is not easy, however, to love terrorists who, if they could, would kill every man, woman, and child in the United States. But, Jesus calls us to do so, so those of us who are Christians must strive to do so. On the other hand, Jesus did not call anyone to be suicidal, nor did he suggest that worldly notions of justice should be abolished with his dying on the cross.

I agree that there is some inherent ambiguity in the term "torture," but I also think that the tactics which appear to have been utilized by the United States government fall well outside of any possible grey area.

As for the religious implications, my only point is that it seems odd to me that Christian conservatives appear to have so enthusiastically embraced harsh interrogation techniques, when in fact their theology cuts in the opposite direction. As a non-believer, I feel no particular obligation to even try to love terrorists. I'd be all in favor of torturing terrorists were it not for two things. The first is the risk of error, of torturing people who are not, in fact, terrorists. This isn't just a fantasy, it appears to have actually happened to a man named Khalid El-Masri, who was kidnapped by the CIA, flown to Afghanistan, and tortured. Or at least he so alleges. (He recently lost in his attempt to sue the United States, but not on the merits of his claim.) On TV, they always get the right guy, but life isn't a TV show, and we are talking about fallible government agents, here.

The other reason is that I don't trust the government to have the power to torture people. I think that if the 20th century shows anything, that power will be expanded, abused, and applied against the innocent. It's not about them -- it's about us.

That said, I agree that torture ought to be subjected to a largely utilitarian calculation. However, I think that the resolution of those calculations is actually pretty easy. Torture is an information-gathering technique which may or may not even work, and if it does work produces information which may or may not be particularly reliable. Its benefits are dubious and relatively short-term.

Response: Again, if one eliminates all forms of ineffective coercive interrogation techniques, what is left? Anything? Your position seems to be this: certain effective coercive interrogation techniques are should be permitted -- so long as the coercion does not exceed your "mild discomfort" standard; but other effective coercion techniques should be prohibited because they involved "torture," which apparently is more excessive coercion than "mild discomfort."

To begin with, "mild discomfort" was probably a poor choice of words. As I have tried to explain, my use of that language was intended to convey the fact that I'm not one of those who believe that any distress or discomfort constitutes torture. Nor do I believe that people captured on the battlefield need to be given Miranda warnings or the like. In my first post of this conversation, I cited this article about a study which says there's no evidence harsh interrogation techniqes work and these reports which suggest the same. I propose we use the techniques that past interrogators claim actually worked: learn their culture and language and talk to them. It's not as satisfying as waterboarding, but it may be more effective in actually protecting our loved ones.

But let me be clear on this: even if torture worked, I would be against it, for all of the Libertarian reasons I've outlined. I think that letting agents of the state get used to having this power is a Bad Idea. And that the state is far more dangerous, in the long run, than terrorists could ever be.

The immediate cost is a loss of credibility of the United States, a massively-reduced level of soft-power and ability to exercise moral leadership. It means we have a far more difficult time complaining if our own people or our allies' people are mistreated by an enemy. I'm not a huge fan of the Bush/Clinton notion of war as social work, but if the idea is to remake Afghanistan and Iraq into liberal democracies, might not our own conduct have a certain teaching function? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" isn't exactly the lesson we were trying to impart. In addition, while you may not think that the pain inflicted on terrorists or their sympathizers ought to count, the torture inflicted upon innocent people tortured by mistake certainly ought to count. And then there is the psychological cost borne by the torturers who have to live with what they've done in subsequent years.

Response: I agree that the reasons cited above weigh against "torture." But your analysis assumes that there are no benefits to aggressive interrogation techniques, and continues to avoid defining exactly what is "torture."

Given the lack of evidence that there is any up-side that cannot be achieved through other means, I think it more than weighs against it -- I think it's dispositive. As for the definition issue: "the deliberate infliction of severe physical or psychological distress."

CC and I actually agree at this point that that nuclear terrorism is fairly unlikely:

First, the danger of terrorists getting a nuke, "suitcase" or otherwise, is pretty small, for the reasons articulated by Gregory Cochran in his 2 Blowhards interview. And if we are worried about that, the best way to prevent it is not to go around torturing terrorists; it's to work with the Russians and the Chinese to keep the supply of nuclear weapons bottled up tight.

Response: I thought I sent a follow-up e-mail that acknowledged that the chances of terrorists obtaining a nuke is pretty small.

CC did indeed send such a follow-up, and I was in error to not acknowledge it.

That leaves "conventional" suicide terrorism. And he's right that terrorists can indeed kill a lot of people if they are so inclined. In fact, we can imagine all sorts of low-tech things that terrorists could do that are almost impossible to stop -- drive around medium-sized cities lobbing Molotov cocktails out the window of their vehicle, for example. But the number of people who are actually willing to do that seems to be fairly small. The chances of CC's kids, or my Main Squeeze being killed by conventional criminals is a lot greater than the chances they'll be killed by terrorists. The off-chance that a terror plot that would kill a lot of people will be foiled by torture isn't worth the very real costs associated with institutionalizing the practice.

Response: I generally agree, but the difficulty with making a risk assessment here is that we are not privy to confidential information in the hands of the government.

We agree? What's the fun in that.

I do agree it would be nice to have information now in the hands of the government. But the problem with relying on "trust us, we know what we are doing" is that government officials always have an incentive to increase their own power and cover up mistakes. At the end of the day, I don't trust the government to have this power, and that applies regardless of which party or person happens to be in office.

Free Gonzo Stross

Ann Althouse links to this story about a Michigan artist named Ed "Gonzo" Stross who faces a jail term for painting a mural on the wall of his own studio. Background: "In 1997, Stross got permission from the city to paint the 1,100-square-foot mural on an outside wall of Gonzo Fine Arts Studio at Gratiot and Utica roads, but with conditions: no letters, no genitalia and regular maintenance of the artwork." He then proceeded to paint a mural on the wall based on Michalangelo's "The Creation of Man" which -- gasp -- shows one of Eve's breasts. The city claimed that the breast was barred under the agreement, and brought him up on charges of some sort. A jury agreed with the city, and he's been ordered to serve 30 days in jail, pay a $500 fine, and serve two years probation.

His lawyer from the ACLU is, of course, focusing on the bluenosery of the whole thing:

Marlinga said the sentence is absurd given the fact that the mural is based on artwork in the Sistine Chapel and that the part some say is offensive is minimal.

“You would have to be a puritan out of the 16th Century with a magnifying glass in order to spot Eve’s nipples,” Marlinga said.

Yeah, yeah. And as Ann Althouse observed, breasts aren't genitals, at least not if we are talking about humans.

Of course that is all true, but it seems like they're focusing on the piddly stuff. Sure, it's based on a famous painting, but so what? Would it really be any less outrageous if the artwork were wholly original? And sure, only a prude could get all outraged about Eve's boob, but even if it were a giant size picture of Bambi the Stripper with enormous breasts, the case would still be outrageous.

First of all, why the hell is this a criminal case? If he violated an ordinance or broke his agreement, why not bring a civil case, ordering him to paint over the offending mural, or modify it -- paint pasties on Eve's nipples, or the like. Even if you assume that the city has the right to control how people paint their own property, there is no justification at all for criminalizing offending murals.

But I am not willing to make that assumption. I realize that the whole concept of defending property rights is anathema to the ACLU, but it's his own damned building. He should be able to paint it however he wants. Art, advertising, political advocacy, bright garish colors. The government has no business telling people how they decorate the outside of their own buildings.

Maybe you could convince me to allow government restriction of flat out raunchy porn on the wall. But this notion that the local government should be making aesthetic judgments about how people paint their property is just ridiculous. People should be able to do what they want with their own property without getting permission from some idiot bureaucrat.

Oh, and there has to be more to this story. He first got permission in 1997. That means the mural has been up for ten years now. If Eve's boob were that offensive, they'd have noticed it before then. There has to be some new reason the local authoritarians decided to go after this guy now. Some other grievance they have against him.

Cops Complain of Speeding Tickets

Thoreau over at Unqualified Offerings links to this bizarre site, in which, believe it or not, cops complain about getting speeding tickets from other cops.

Now, to be fair, the site claims it's about "officers getting traffic tickets that ANY normal civilian could get a warning on, verbal or written." In fact, I think you could make a case enforcing traffic laws more strictly against off-duty police officers. After all, they don't need "warning," because they are presumably already aware of the law. Moreover, one might argue they should be traffic-code moral exemplars for the rest of us. Still, I don't favor giving anybody -- even cops -- tickets for going three miles per hour over the speed limit. (Speed limits are set way too low anyway.)

But, in fact, if you read the site, it's not about cops griping about getting rinky-dink tickets for stuff that civilians would get off for. Nope -- it's about cops griping about getting any tickets at all. The accounts show this incredible sense of entitlement. An entitlement to not be ticketed out of a sense of professional solidarity with other cops. I'm not naive enough to be surprised that such attitudes exist. What makes me a bit shocked is that the cops who demand this sort of treatment exhibit their demands in such a brazen and public way.

One guy complained because the Illinois State Police ticketed him for going 84.9 miles per hour. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm being holier-than-thou -- I have to admit I've driven 85. But if I were pulled over, I wouldn't gripe that much about getting a ticket.

Or read this complaint:

I am an active police officer in the NYPD and was driving down to Florida on March 4th 2007 which was the first time I have driven to Florida, not realizing in time the sign changed 65 to 45 i was slowing down and was nailed doing 61 in a 45 by Officer Brown 2416 (the summons copy is light) of LAWTEY PD Bradford County FL. I had to pay $185 which I didn't have on this avoidable summons. This officer could have cared less that he was writing another active police officer, I go out of my way to take care of other cops no matter where you may be visiting from.

I suspect that the reason the abrupt change from 65 to 45 is what is known as a "speed trap," and that there's s a reason why cops lurk there. I object, in in principle, to such tactics, but if the rest of us are going to get nailed for this sort of thing, well, I don't see why the NYPD should be immune. Likewise, I think it's abhorent that the NYPD officer admits to going out of his way to "take care of other cops."

Or consider this account:

On June 22, 2007 I was heading up US59 in Houston to go do my quarterly firearms qualification. Unfortunately, I was running late and was pulled over by Officer J.W. Harris, traffic enforcement, with Houston Police Department. I immediately pulled over and gave him my license and insurance. Officer Harris asked why I was speeding and I informed him that I was late for a range day and that I understood he was doing his job. I then showed him my credentials since I had my weapon on me. Officer Harris then checked to make sure that my inspection and registration were up to date and went back to his car.

Officer Harris took approximately ten minutes so I figured he was going show some professional courtesy and only make me “wait” awhile longer instead of stroking me a ticket. That wasn’t the case. Officer Harris ticketed me even after I identified myself as a law enforcement officer. I am currently working under cover in a Federal position and informed him that I too had previously been a police officer in both Houston and Dallas, Texas and had pulled over multitudes of Houston Police officers while working radar and had always shown them professional courtesy and sent them on their way.

What, the rest of us aren't in a hurry, either? If I'm pulled over because I'm late to something, and I explained that as the reason, the cop would be quite justified in responding "you should have left earlier." Apparently, "professional courtesy" is a euphemism for "cops get to break the law. All I can say is, good for you, Officer J.W. Harris.

Nobody tell Balko about this. His head might explode.

UPDATE; Mr. Balko found the site, and he seems to have survived. Just to be clear, this is one instance where I stand in solidarity with Radley Balko and my libertarian friends.

So, Why, Again, Do You Want Government Running Everything?

Over at Kleilman's, Michael O'Hare links to this article about a musician and musicologist named Nalani Ghuman who has had her visa revoked and been excluded from the United States for reasons utterly inexplicable to, well, anybody. Ghuman had been a legal resident of the United States for ten years, and there was no indication whatsoever that she was any sort of threat.

In reading the article, O'Hare's conclusion seems pretty apt: some moron at the State Department decided, for stupid and arbitrary reasons, to exclude her, and no individual is willing to take responsibility for saying "this decision was moronic and she should be allowed back in."

Yes, this decision seems to be both stupid and inexplicable. I suppose it's possible that Ghuman is a terrorist mastermind when she's not playing the violin, but it seems unlikely. Rather, this seems to be an example of one of those "stupid government tricks." Somebody in government does something stupid, and other government people continue the stupidity. Yes, apply pressure and let this poor girl in.

But beyond that, one lesson that might be learned is that government people do stupid things, and getting them to correct them can be a royal pain. Which is one reason I lean libertarian: I think that government in general does things badly, and so I want to limits its functions as much as possible. Now, I suppose it's possible that if the "right people" were put in charge, they wouldn't do stupid things any more, but honestly this seems pretty unlikely.

Enemies of Reason, Part 2

Part 2 of Richard Dawkins' The Enemies of Reason can be found here on Google Video. I am watching it now; it looks good so far. Part 2 is mostly about quackery and weird health claims.

UPDATE: I think it's pretty good. My only wish is that Dawkins would turn his skeptical eye toward big government. For the life of me, I just don't understand big-government-atheists. The same mindset that led me to reject the idea of faith in god led me to an understanding of the limits of government.

Mechanical or Intuitive Medicine?

Megan McArdle links to this Charles Lambdin review of the book, How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman. Now, I have not read Groopman's book, and it is intellectually irresponsible to comment on books you haven't read, but what the heck -- I'm just a D-List blogger, after all.

Lambdin's main criticism of Groopman's book is focused on Groopman's hostility toward "evidence-based medicine." Silly me, I thought all medical science was supposed to be evidence-based -- I thought that was what distinguished Western Medicine from accupuncture and homeopathy and the rest of the woo-woo stuff. But apparently not, and, at least if you believe Lamdbin, Groopman is on the side of the woo-woos. Groopman apparently admits that doctors, like all of us, have a whole array of cognitive biases, that they are inconsistent over time, and that such inconsistency affects their diagnostic accuracy. Yet, despite that, Groopman objects to attempts to make medical diagnoses more accurate through the use of statistical aids:

Groopman tells us he is troubled that new doctors seem to be trained to “think like computers,” that they rely on diagnostic decision aids and some seductive “boiler-plate scheme” called evidence-based medicine. Groopman’s position, when his various arguments are gathered and assembled, becomes untenable. He admits doctors suffer from innumerable biases that diminish the accuracy of diagnosis, reducing many diagnoses to idiosyncratic responses fueled by mood, whether the patient is liked or disliked, advertisements recently seen, etc. Thus Groopman agrees with decision scientists’ diagnosis of doctor decision making; but then he goes on to wantonly dismiss what many of the very same researchers claim is the best (and perhaps only) remedy, the way to “debias” diagnosis: evidence-based medicine and the use of decision aids. In place of statistics what does Groopman suggest doctors rely on? Clinical intuition of course, the very source of the cognitive biases he pays lip service to throughout his book.

Groopman, though, is not alone. Many doctors don't like "mechanical" evidence-based approaches:

Most doctors do not like decision aids. They rob them of much of their power and prestige. Why go through medical school and accrue a six-figure debt if you’re simply going to use a computer to make diagnoses? One study famously showed that a successful predictive instrument for acute ischemic heart disease (which reduced the false positive rate from 71% to 0) was, after its use in randomized trials, all but discarded by doctors (only 2.8% of the sample continued to use it). It is no secret many doctors despise evidence-based medicine. It is impersonal “cookbook medicine.” It is “dehumanizing,” treating people like statistics.

The reason why "treating people like statistics" is better is that it works.

I've been to Vegas a time or two, and somehow I end up seated at a blackjack table. When I find myself in such a situation, I play something called "basic strategy" -- a set of mechanical rules for how to play based upon my cards and the dealer's cards. Now, I wish I could say that basic strategy results in my beating the house, but the truth is that all it does is reduce the house edge to about 1% and means I lose my money at a relatively slow rate.

Sometimes I've been seated next to somebody utterly convinced his or her intuitions or hunches are better than playing the odds. Sometimes they really do get a five when the they hit sixteen and the dealer has a six up. You can be sure they notice every instance in which a deviation from basic strategy pays off. But they don't notice all the times their "hunches" cause them to get hammered. Apply the same woo-woo approach in medicine, and you get crap like this, bleating on about the wonders of intuition. Playing the odds still works better. That's why they are the odds.

As Megan observes, it's natural to resist the idea of using a formula, even when the formula works:

Every profession resists being told that there is a standard way to do things, that a cookie cutter can cut better than their skilled hand. Journalists famously hate the "inverted U" style of writing a news story, even though it really does seem to work better than anything else; it's boring to write, and leaves no room for individual style. Teachers don't like "teaching to the test" or rigidly programmed phonics curricula, even though the latter produces measurably better results than all but the very best teachers. Unfortunately, for many of us, it may be time to welcome our new robot overlords.

All Hail the Robot Overlords!

The point that neither Megan nor Lambdin makes, however, is that this ties in with health care regulations. It's quite possible that a system of mechanically-trained nurse practitioners armed with expert systems and a few doctors in the loop to handle genuinely difficult problems would work better than the current system of state-licensed High Priests. But the current system of compulsory licensure laws prevents any such competing model from emerging.

I do grant that there is some consumer-protective component, that quacks and weirdos and undoubtedly-sincere homeopaths and natural-food junkies are, to some degree, deterred by current compulsory licensure laws. But it also creates barriers to entry for anybody proposing a radically new model, even if such a model might work better.

More Libertarian "Edge" Cases

In response to my post on animal rights, commenter Jeff asks a good question:

I do have a question regarding marginal cases. Do all 'innocent' humans have a right to life? For instance, why would a severely mentally retarded person (with mental capabilities similar to a dog), have a right to life, and the dog not?

Good question, Jeff. Any other questions?

Note that we are talking about somebody who is super-retarded. Not somebody who will learn to talk and read a little bit and maybe get a job cleaning up at McDonald's or bagging groceries. But somebody who doesn't have the cognitive capacity to speak, to understand more than a few words, to tell time, or probably even dress himself.

In principle, I think that Society Girl has a valid point when she says that "The libertarian principles that I have read on this blog and elsewhere, taken to there ultimate conclusion, should lead Cheerful to say the answer is 'a severely mentally retarded person has less rights.'"

Well, of course such a person has "less rights." An individual so limited is never going to learn to drive or live independently. Left to his own devices, like a normal adult, he will die in the streets. The question is whether he has more rights than a dog or other animal of equivalent mental capacity. As a first approximation, I think that Society Girl has a point. My conception of rights is based on mental capacity, and a severely retarded person with the mental capacity of a dog should, you could argue, have the same rights as the animal.

But libertarianism -- my version, at least -- is also a political theory, a theory about the rules necessary to govern the state. I would argue that all members of the species homo sapiens should have the right not to be killed, even if, in individual cases, they fall below the threshold of sapience. The reason I argue that is that I don't trust government officials to accurately make a determination that somebody really only has the mental capacity of a dog. In general I think we should err on giving more rights to the mentally retarded, because I don't trust the government to make accurate determinations in individual cases.

I will add that I think that if we ever manage to genetically engineer more intelligent chimps or gorillas, as in David Brin's "Uplift" novels, I do think they should have the same rights as humans. Likewise aliens of equivalent intelligence, or sapient artificial life forms.

Let me also respond to anonymous commenter who seems shocked by the whole discussion:

Yipes! If Libertarians have not worked out for themselves why (or whether) we ought not to torture animals for pleasure or profit it seems that some remedial homework is in order.

Well, I have worked it out for myself -- personally I refrain from torturing animals for pleasure or profit. Largely because it doesn't bring me any pleasure, and I have yet to come up with a way to make it pay. I suspect that very few libertarians actually favor animal torture. The question is whether the power of the state ought to be used to prevent it, and I honestly think that is a hard question.

Libertarianism and Animal Rights

Perhaps inspired by current events, Jim Henley has issued a challenge to libertarians: come up with a theory regarding of animal-cruelty laws. A distinctively libertarian theory, I might add.

"Bob," commenting over at Megan McArdle's new home, lays down a libertarian marker:

No matter how awful the things he did to his dogs might have been, the fact remains that they were HIS DOGS. Why should Vick lose 18 to 36 months of freedom because he mistreated that specific class of property, when the law would not punish him at all for mistreatment (or destruction) of other items of his property?

In other words, Bob (and his fellow libertarian purists) would argue that, while killing dogs might be disgusting and cruel and barbaric and even immoral, well, if they're your dogs, the state can't use its coercive power to prevent you from so doing. Julian Sanchez initially takes such a line as well, at least tentatively, but then takes it back, saying he needs to think about it some more.

Now, I can think of arguments in favor of laws against torturing puppies. Certainly if I came upon somebody torturing a puppy, I would be prepared to use force to stop such torture, at least if I could do so without exposing myself to undue danger. So if I feel justified in using coercive force on my own, well, the state can do it? Right?

One could argue, for example, that knowing that animals are being tortured by somebody else creates a sort of moral externality. That is, the knowledge creates disutility in those of us who have to watch such cruelty, or even know of its existence. Or you could argue that engaging in cruelty to animals cultivates certain cruel instincts and behaviors, and makes people more likely to engage in violence toward persons. (All those serial killer TV shows claim that torturing animals leads to being a serial killer, after all.)

The problems is that libertarians decisively reject such arguments in other contexts. For example, somebody might feel great distress in knowing that others are viewing pornography, or engaging in homosexual behavior, or even eating ice cream cones. But libertarians are pretty insistent that A's distress at B's private conduct doesn't count as grounds for state intervention, so long as B doesn't interfere with anybody else's rights. (And "anybody else's rights" are defined as the right not to be assaulted or have one's property taken or damaged, not the right not to be offended by gay sex.) Likewise, libertarians tend to be skeptical of the claim that something might lead you to do bad or illegal things justifies government intervention. Even if pornography (involving consenting adults, etc.) does increase the risk that one will engage rape, most libertarians would say it ought not be illegal.

To many libertarians, political theory is like geometry: there are certain first principles -- "the non-initiation-of-force" principle, for example -- and from those first principles all else follows. You can see that sort of structure in Bob's argument: animals are property. Property-owners can do what they want with their property. Q.E.D

I have to admit that, in my younger days, I found this sort of knife-edged categorical reasoning quite attractive. (Don't tell anybody, but I even went through an objectivist phase, although I am now fully recovered, and anybody who says differently is a mooching mystic.) In general, libertarianism doesn't tend to do well with intermediate cases: animals, children, the mentally retarded or insane. For example, suppose a mentally retarded or insane person won't refrain from wandering out into busy streets. Should the state coerce him in some way, or should it just let him be run over? Or what about children? Should twelve-year-olds be allowed to leave home? Enter into binding contracts? Consent to sex? And if they can't, well, are they their parents' property?

Megan argues for a non-binary conception of rights:

As with abortion, there's no inherently libertarian answer to that question. But Julian and some of Jim's commenters seem to be taking a fairly hard line: rights are binary (you have them or you don't); and animals, which don't have agency, cannot have rights.

I'd say that there are different classes of rights-holders; babies are persons, but they can't vote, and they do have the right to be supported by the state. (Of course, some libertarians would disagree with that latter, but I'm pretty firm that they do.) So it seems plausible to me that animals could have limited rights--a right not to suffer for our pleasure, say--even though none of them will ever master the lute.

I find myself being drawn to this sort of intermediate position for all the cases that I have mentioned: children, insane people, retarded people, animals, etc. The problem, from a libertarian perspective, is that it seems to lead to a lot of ad hoc judgments. and part of the whole fun of libertarianism is that you avoid judgments and instead have a clear rule for every case. Once you say "there are different classes of rights," you invite people to come along and say "well, what about this?"

And with animals you have the whole "give 'em an inch they will take a mile" problem with animal rightsers. They want meat-eating to be banned, and any concession will just fuel the demand for more concession. Consider commenter "Gordon Lightfoot, who sanctimoniously tells Megan that: "Until you stop eating animals and pretending to yourself that it's okay because they lived happy productive animal lives all the way up to the moment they were slaughtered to fill your belly, any argument you make on behalf of the animals that you feast upon will ring hollow." Michael Vick is an unappealing character, but I rather prefer him to Gordon.

I won't claim to have a libertarian "theory" to justify my somewhat-conflicted intuitions I suppose if I were feeling clever I could gin one up, but most "theories" like this are just elaborate rationalizations for one's intuitions anyway.

I think Megan has it mostly right, and maybe it's just a semantic difference, but I would put it somewhat differently than she does: instead of thinking of different classes of rights, I would argue for a sliding scale. The closer a being is to a fully-sapient human with all its faculties, the more rights it should have. A lobster, for example, is clearly alive but has almost no nervous system -- it's basically a big sea-living insect. So I don't have a problem with steaming it alive or plunging it into a pot of boiling water. Comparatively more intelligent creatures, like pigs and dogs, deserve more consideration, and I think that banning certain types of animal husbandry practices or dogfighting could be justified under this framework.

In the case of animals closer to us -- chimps and gorillas, for example, I think there might be an even stronger claim for rights, including perhaps a right not to be eaten, or even kept in zoos. Retarded and insane people are people too, and so have the right (for example) not to be beaten or raped or killed, but maybe some limited coercion is justified. Likewise children -- I would argue that children can be coerced in some moderate ways, but not abused or neglected. And I'm fine with having an arbitrary cutoff age at which children become adults --18 is fine. But I also think that a procedure for "emancipation" is a pretty good idea.

I don't know if that will satsify the terms of Jim's challenge, but at least it's first whack at it.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the comment by Grumpy Realist, who suggests a rather interesting argument in favor of treating the animals well: "If we ever do run into aliens, our fittness to join the greater galaxy out there may be judged by what we have done to those weaker than us and in our power."

I know I mark myself as a geek, but this rather reminded me of the (new) Twilight Zone episode "A Small Talent For War." In it, an emissary from an alien race (which planted life on Earth) shows up at the UN and announces that we are set for destruction because of humanity's "small talent for war." He gives the Earthlings one day to fix the problem. Well, the diplomats scramble, and, highly-motivated, every single geopolitical issue on Earth is resolved. When the Alien returns, he's told that, for the first time, all the Earth is at peace. The Alien Emissary gets a good laugh at that -- it seems when he said we had a "small talent for war," he meant we weren't warlike enough, and deep down we really want peace. The aliens were breeding us to be warriors to fight for them, you see, and we just didn't make the grade. So Grumpy Realist, maybe the aliens will refuse to let us in to the Galactic Federation because we don't have enough dogfights, and we are too nice to our food animals.

This Just In: George W. Bush Is No Libertarian

Mathew Yglesias pushes this TimesDelete column by Paul Krugman which is apparently -- surprise! -- bashing Bush. I say "apparently" because I don't subscribe to TimesDelete, and I'm not sure why Yglesias bothers to link to columns behind the wall.

In any case, their thesis seems to be that Bush's supposedly anti-government agenda is furthered by his incompetent administration of government programs:

Unfortunately, the public opinion data does tend to suggest that Bush's staggering achievements in the field of maladministration have, in fact, boosted public skepticism of government capacity to do anything at all to some extent.

One way of thinking about what the country's experienced since the fall of 2001 is just large-scale consequences of perverse incentives. We have a president whose ideological goals on the domestic front are, on some level, advanced every time he screws up, with his own failures, his own corruption, providing evidence for the correctness of his ideology.

Yglesias (and, I assume, Krugman) seem to assume that Bush's ideology is skeptical toward government -- that it has some libertarian core. It's true that the Republican coaltion had a libertarian element to it from, say 1964 until the mid 90s, but I have yet to see any evidence of libertarian ideology in Bush-Rove Republicanism. After all, we are talking about a guy whose two major domestic initiatives were the creation of a new entitlement program and a dramatic expansion of the federal government's role in education.

I'm not sure that President George W. Bush has a discernable ideology -- in order to have an ideology you have to be capable of systematic thought, and I have yet to see any evidence of that. But if he does have an ideology, then surely limited governemnt isn't an element of it.

This is not a new meme on the left -- statists have been tooting this particular horn for a while. Here is David Bernstein's response to Tim F's claim over at Balloon Juice that "people who don’t believe in government do a crappy job when they try to run it:"

Here are two major problems with this thesis: (1) The Bush Administration is not exactly full of libertarians; exactly who in the Bush Administration "don't believe in government"? Given that government spending during this administration has increased at rates not seen since Lyndon Johnson, the better lesson would appear to be that "throwing government money at problems doesn't make them go away." (2) We have plenty of examples of people who surely did believe in government that didn't do a very good job running it. Anyone for the late and unlamented Mayor John Lindsay of New York? The kibbutzim of Israel, which survived for decades on government subsidies, before finally abandoning their model when the Likud reduced these subsidies? On a completely different level, the commisars of the former USSR?

Bernstein is, of course, correct. Bush's failure as a President doesn't undermine the case for putting people who believe in smaller government in elected office. Now it is possible to argue that government programs have been incomptently administered under George W. Bush, and that some (presumably Democratic) successor would do a better job. But the case for limited government isn't based on individual examples of incompetence or corruption. The case for limited government has to do with knowledge problems and moral hazard, and, yes, perverse incentives.

Big government doesn't fail because George W. Bush or his appointees sabotage it. Big government fails even when smart people with Ivy League educations who earnestly and sincirely believe in the wonders of government -- people like Mathew Yglesias, in other words -- are put in charge. And when George W. Bush is long gone, the case for smaller government will be as strong as ever.