What DID you think anonymity was for?

According to Arianna Huffington:

Freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they’re saying and who are not hiding behind anonymity

Is that the sound of Publius turning in their graves?

Wait, I Thought That Wasn’t My Money!

Tags

government, taxation, usps

I don’t really care to defend Mr. Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal, but this news about him being asked to return some taxpayer money his team received hits me as strange, because as I recall, all through the bail-out-USPS buzz last year, the USPS people kept claiming that they never took taxpayer money.

A Good Count of “Intrinsic Goods” Anyone?

Tags

free-will, reason

RE: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/12/14/patrick-lee/say-no-to-physician-assisted-suicide/

According to Lee:

“Morality centrally concerns how our choices bear on the intrinsic goods of human persons—such goods as life and health, knowledge, friendship, and others. We ought to care for every person, and that means helping them to attain or preserve these intrinsic goods. Since these goods are the aspects of persons, to act directly against any of them is to act against the person herself.”

Once the word “OTHERS” has been used to cover “the rest of the intrinsic goods I might have missed”, Lee can no longer reach his conclusion logically by asserting on “ANY of them”.  For instance, what about free will?  Is it one of the “intrinsic goods of human persons”? If so, helping a dying person implementing her choice by her own free will to kill herself is hardly “to act directly against the person herself.”

Tax, Baby, Tax!

Tags

debt, euro-crisis, government-spending, taxation

RE: http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/11/25/tax-evasion-costs-the-world-3-1-trillion-a-year-more-than-5-of-world-gdp/

Tax evasion causes government to lose revenue, and in turn aggravates any public debt situation. However, whether it can be asserted that tax evasion is the major cause of the major debt situations such as the one going in Europe, in my opinion, is quite debatable.

To begin with, it would be an over simplification to derive the loss of revenue by multiplying together the size of shadow economy and the average tax rate, which assumes that the “shadow” transactions would have happened anyway even if they had been taxed upon.  With taxes as added transaction costs, I find such an assumption hard to hold.  The record industry sometimes likes to multiply the number of illegal downloads with the price of some copyrighted works, and go “ta-da, that’s how much money we’ve lost to piracy!” If that sounds absurd, well, it’s just as absurd in the tax revenue scenario.

I’m also not convinced that, had the European governments suffered less tax losses, they would not be in these debt situations now.  Sure, if somehow some alien super-beings suddenly showed up now, miraculously recovered a couple trillions of lost tax revenue, and dropped it right into the Europeans’ collective laps, yeah, it would help tremendously. But that is different from if they had the however many trillions from the get go, because evidently their politicians didn’t go by “don’t spend the Euro you don’t have” – or they wouldn’t have driven these countries into deep debts in the first place. The game they have been playing is more like “spend x percent of GDP/tax revenue/future tax revenue”, where x seems to always get bigger and bigger and eventually over 100.  So I’m not sure it would have been different now, had they had those extra trillions. They would more likely have spent it all anyway, and then some.

On a side note, this report puts China’s shadow economy size at 12% of GDP. For a country where cash transactions still absolutely dominate the economy, I somehow find that hard to believe.

Electability Is A Self-fulfilling Prophecy

Tags

elections, libertarianism, politics

RE: http://www.volokh.com/2012/10/15/gary-johnsons-libertarian-candidacy/

In my mind, this is how democracy works for libertarians, or whoever don’t agree with either major candidate – if we vote for what/who we believe in, they don’t necessarily win, but if we don’t, they necessarily won’t win. So an LP candidate’s electability – or the “effectiveness” of libertarians voting for an LP candidate as Mr. Somin put it – is more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy.

While I agree with Mr. Somin that it is unlikely any LP candidate will make it to the White House anytime soon, that doesn’t necessarily mean that voting for one is ineffective in advancing the cause. Take recent presidential debates for example, the CPD refused to invite Gary Johnson or any other third party candidates to the debates, on the ground that they didn’t meet “the 15% threshold”. When being polled, did every libertarian, everybody who isn’t happy with either major candidate, give the candiate’s name whom they agree the most with? Or did they follow the same practical reasoning as Mr. Somin did, and picked “the lesser evil?”  If 50.1% appears such an insurmountable goal to libertarians for now, 15% should certainly have been something much more tangible.

Talk About Tall Expectations

Tags

education, equality, racism

RE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/08/23/virginia-new-achievement-based-on-race_n_1826624.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/10/12/echoing-virginia-florida-_n_1959151.html

Despite the state officials’ clarifications that those goals are all statistical and system-wide, it’s obvious that a higher statistical goal is going to translate to higher pressure on individual students.  Schools and teachers will tend to push Asian kids harder because they have more statistical “quota” to deliver.  That will be especially true when combined with recent push to take test scores into consideration when measuring teacher performance (which I actually support by the way).

I find it ironic that people keep citing the statistical differences between races, while most if not all of them would agree that the differences couldn’t have been caused genetically.  In other words, they know that there is only correlation but no causality between intellectual performance and race. Yet they still choose to divide students into racial groups and set different goals for them. It’s mental sloppiness at its worst. They would have done better, both morally and logically, had they chosen to create the divisions along, say, different income levels.

So in 50 years, this country has managed to go from “separate but equal” to “integrated but unequal?”   Better? I think not.

The “Who Did What” Talk

Tags

economy, government

Let’s not nitpick on what exactly the President meant when he said “you didn’t build that.” Assume that he was referring to the infrastructures that every business has to be built upon. His, and Elizabeth Warren’s, point still makes little sense once we have thought it through.

The success, and perhaps the mere survival, of any business owes it to things that fall into three categories:

1. Those that can be purchased in the market – raw materials, man power, etc. They have been paid for. If the market is open and free, the business doesn’t owe anything to anyone once the transaction is concluded. If the market is not entirely a free one, and the price is artificially suppressed by some government policies for political reasons, then obviously the solution ought to be to break the suppression, instead of asking whoever happens to benefit from such suppression while still keeping it going.

For instance, one might argue that the huge success of Netflix’ business model owes it in no small portion to the infrastructure provided by the USPS. On the surface that combined with the fact that the USPS has been run so poorly as to require taxpayer bailouts, it would seem that Netflix indirectly owes the taxpayers. However, the real problem in the situation is not Netflix taking advantage of the taxpayers, but that the USPS did not price its services to compensate its cost, and as stakeholders, the taxpayers failed to protect their own interest by fixing the poor operational situation of the USPS.

2. Those that are provided by the government with taxes, and their usage can be charged for quantitatively. For instance, a tolled highway, or a government service with fees on per-consumption basis. Despite the apparent monolithic nature of the things in this category, they work out to the same conclusion as in the first category: the consumer of the infrastructure will have paid the price squarely.

It is also unfair to say that “someone else” built the roads on which the successful business transport the goods, since part of the upkeep of the roads come out of the taxes the business pays, proportional to its profit.

3. Finally, there are the things that could not have emerged out of any open market and must be provided by the government. Well, if the demand of something cannot grow organically out of a free market, that should be a big red flag that it might be some kind of snake oil invented by the government to begin with. One good example might be the SEC and CFTC. There is very little in what these agencies do that cannot be done by an accounting firm. On top of that, these agencies’ flat fee operating model basically penalizes good businesses whose books take less time to scrutinize and regulate, and reward the shady ones.

It’s a Phone Call Though

Tags

constitution, freedom-of-speech

RE: Crime to Call a Juror to Make Her Feel Sorry About Her Vote?

I’m not quite sure… is a private phone call protected by the 1st Amendment as much as, say, if Baker had put out a newspaper ads? If I understand correctly, Freedom of Speech only goes so far as letting us say things we want to say, but not necessarily to whoever we wish. Just like Freedom of Speech doesn’t give me the right to spam your email inbox or cell phone.

Talk About Leveling The Field

Tags

elections

President Obama spent a lot of time during a news conference at the NATO summit on trading attacks with Romney.  I understand that it was in response to a question, but a concise answer or deferral is one thing, delving into a lengthy rebuttal speech at a public policy forum on completely irrelevant topics is another altogether.

Is it appropriate for an incumbent official to leverage such opportunities as the NATO summit which arise solely out of their official capacities for their reelection campaign effort? Is it fair to the challenger? If we are so obsessed with capping the amount of money all the candidates can spend, in the name of “leveling the field”, shouldn’t there also be some laws that prohibit an incumbent from campaigning in their official capacities?

So This Is How Demagogy Is Done

Tags

government, health-care, politics

Here’s President Obama trying to put some pressure on the justices:

“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Let’s ignore the demagogue in those words for a second and focus on the facts – the health care bill was passed by the House 219-212, which is hardly a “strong majority”. Sure, it cleared the Senate with a supermajority of 60-39. Keep in mind though, since we are talking about “democracy” here, the House is supposed to be the “truer” (however you want to define that) representative of the American People. And, if President Obama was actually referring to the supermajority in the Senate, what would he have to say about the fact that the law suite he was commenting on was brought on by 26 states – as in, more than half of the states?