Cheaters Never Prosper

Adultery-facilitating website Ashley Madison has had its user data stolen. 37 million users, many of them presumably real people, are now at risk of extortion, identity theft, and that old-timey blackmail.

You can read Avid Life Media Inc's statement here.

I know what you might be thinking: the only site that deserves it more is maybe Gawker. And while I'm sure that law enforcement will be working diligently to find the culprits and bring them to justice, I might expect most citizens hearing the news will sniff and mutter, "they had it coming." Degeneracy like adultery deserves some sort of cosmic justice, and occasionally justice arrives in a chariot driven by a team of hackers (in this case, amusingly and appropriately named "The Impact Team"). 

I have my doubts that Ashley Madison has 37 million unique active users. But that is an upper bound estimate. 37 million already-shaky marriages further threatened by vigilante hackers is a heck of a lot of mischief. There are probably a heck of a lot of people waking up to a heck of a lot of fresh regret this morning. 

I sure hope if you're reading this, you're not one of them. If you are, godspeed. For you have an awkward, difficult conversation with your spouse to conduct, one that I hope I wouldn't wish on even a miserable moral wretch.

Of course, the first-order harm is the infidelity itself. Exposing it is a comparatively minor evil. Right? It seems that way. I think this might be an interesting enough question to explore in my ongoing altfic at Sweet Talk. Stay tuned.

Uber, but for Police Harassment

It's a bad day to be gullible on the Internet, so accept the possibility that this is a finely scripted prank.

Wars on multiple fronts are difficult to coordinate. This is as true for culture wars as for ground campaigns. Here, we evidently see crossfire from multiple battlefields. An interesting artifact.

Uber is not euvoluntary. Neither is immigration. Neither is the contract between the agents of the sovereign and the constituency.

This machine produces outrage and its effluvium is death. Or maybe the other way round. It can be hard to tell at times.

Public Choice Economics in Action, Caveat Venditor Edition

Via A-Tab, a dog-bites-man story remarkable not for its content, but for its Straussian content.

Staples offered a deep discount on a few items to entice the State of New York to use them as exclusive vendor. To their astonishment, they found that demand curves slope downward. Now there are relatively small bureau offices with minor warehousing problems as they've stuffed their cabinets with more tissue paper than they're likely to need in a month of Sundays.

Big deal, right? Totally predictable if you're taken even a high school level economics class (or, yes, even no economics courses whatsoever).

But look at what it shows: government employees are ordinary people. They respond to incentives just the same as everyone else. There is no mystical alchemy that transforms the clay of humanity into a godhead of divine public service. Assuming away problems of agency or self-interest, dismissing or ignoring human foibles, hand-waving intractable organizational issues detracts from the rigor of analysis. This incident should be yet more evidence in support of the hypothesis that good intentions are insufficient to secure good outcomes.

But is it exploitation? One powerful organization took clear advantage of the letter of the contract, while obviously violating the spirit. Is there a moral duty to refrain from plundering an obvious unintentional loophole? Or must people who write words down on paper be held strictly accountable for the exact content of those words?

NB, as of the time of the publication of this post, Halbig hasn't yet advanced to SCOTUS to the best of my knowledge.

Offer and Acceptance

One of the things I miss about living in the Pacific Northwest is that most august publication, The Stranger. In its pulpy folds can be found some of the finest examples of what appears to seamlessly transition between performance art, human perversion, and Old Media trolling. And the locus for all this hilarity? The personals section. Specifically, the "Other" sub-section.

The best example I recall is from ca. 1994, and it ran a little something like this:

Tired of the same old B&D and S&M? I want you to feed me like a baby pelican. I provide the adult diaper and raw herring, you provide the strap-on beak. Serious inquiries only please. No weirdos.

Of course, anything that dead tree media can do, Craigslist can supercharge and strap on some booster rockets. Witness:

Assume this contract was legitimate and that it was struck. Could this be euvoluntary? And if not, who would be exploiting whom? Economics tells us de gustibus non est disputandum, so as long as $175 is worth more to the person accepting this offer, she'll be better off...

So many questions. Are we talking dollar-store ramen here, or some quality noodles? And is it proper ramen, which is actually a highly refined piece of Japanese cuisine? "Seasoning the sauce" isn't an accurate description of how ramen is traditionally made. And is the tub all the way full? How does one person dispose of a tub full of noodles? How does this guy cook all of them? By the kettleful?

The moral dimension engaged here is a way toned-down version of the same one we looked at in the Armin Meiwes case: disgust. This is kinda gross, but in a juvenile way rather than a horrifying way. Idle perversions may sort of shock the sensibilities of the puritanical among us, but I think the natural reaction here is to snicker rather than to outlaw. But I urge my readers to be sensitive about and take seriously Stigler and Becker. Second-guessing folks' peculiar tastes, no matter how alien or outre is besieged by Pareto-destructive risk. It is indeed hard to make folks better off by denying them alternatives.

Even if those alternatives are to whip up a fresh batch of human-flavored ramen.

There Is No Arizona. No Painted Desert, No Sedona.

State of Arizona Senate Bill 1062 passed yesterday, amending sections 41‑1493 & 41‑1493.01, Arizona revised statutes; relating to the free exercise of religion.

ATSRTWT

Deletions to the existing statute are in red strikeout and additions in blue allcaps.

The substance of the edits (and presumably why this is being hailed as an anti-gay bill) is that it affords secular organizations the same rights of refusal of association that were previously strictly limited to religious assemblies or institutions. So if someone offends your "religious" sensibilities, you don't have to be on hallowed ground anymore to tell them to pack sand.

Opponents of legislation like this understand (correctly) that "religion" in this instance is a worm-chewed fig leaf under which turgid bigotry swells. Hate the sin, love the sinner  and all that (even though "sin" is theologically improper in the case of homosexuality; "abomination" is the ordinary translation, but even that is misleading).

It occurs to me that there are two sorts of problems here: bigoted beliefs and discriminatory practices. Legislation aims to curb the latter for one side and one side only of commercial transactions. It's still perfectly legal for customers to discriminate to their curdled hearts' content; not so for vendors.

Do the EE conditions help understand the moral intuition here? When an ordinary citizen not in the role of running an organization makes the decision to withhold business, with whom lies the BATNA disparity? I suspect our imagination leads us to put the burden of asymmetry on the back of the business owner: failure to exchange is one trifling sale among many for a firm, but is of relatively greater import for the consumer. Naturally, this heuristic is upturned for boutique businesses or personal services, but this reversal may not be salient enough to worry about too much. Caveat venditor. You should have known better than to get into business in this market, right?

Underlying discriminatory practices of all stripes are bigoted beliefs (values?). Often draped in religious or nationalistic kayfabe, these are the proto-tribal instincts exploited by elites that in turn exploit out-groups for scurrilous ends. Discriminatory behavior is a symptom of bigoted belief. Legislation that obliges vendors (and vendors only) to refrain from discrimination (and only for enumerated classes, mind you) addresses symptoms without necessarily obviating the malady that gives rise to a certain desiccation of the marketplace.

Unfortunately, voters cannot legislate moral sentiments. That's the purview of suasion, of rhetoric. That's a task much more challenging than picking up a pen or making a phone call.

Fortunately, it's a task that appears to be proceeding apace. Public opinion seems to be shifting in the direction of LGBT tolerance and acceptance. So I suppose the analytical upshot of Arizona's legislation is that researchers will be able now to determine whether or not the ability of vendors to indulge bigotry will actually result in more instances of discrimination.

I Retract My Apology

Hello occupational licensing, my old friend. From Reason TV, via the Girl Poet:

I won't rehash arguments about how licensing has morphed from a consumer protection initiative into the institutionalized banditry you see above. That road is well-trod. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the point the video makes about CA state officials posting video on YouTube.

You can imagine the steam rising from HL Mencken's ears, can't you?

Put on your libertarian shoes for a moment and think about this. Step 1) Otherwise honest people want to make a (as far as I can tell) purely euvoluntary deal about landscaping or housepainting or something. Step 2) State enforcement agents step in and turn these people into criminals. Step 3) These same state officials, under the belief that they act in the public interest, share with the public footage of their activity. Step 5) From the public, crickets. There is no step four.

You don't have to be a staunch Nozickian to find this appalling. Indeed, I suspect you'd have to be well-blinkered to fail to characterize this as anything but above-board thuggery. And they're proud of it. I... I don't even have the words, people. Didn't the radical left of the 60's rail against The Man? This is The Man, on full display, grinningly showcasing its TheMannery for the wide world to see.

I'm not even sure whom to be ashamed of.

Okay, with this story, I now have to grudgingly admit that the looking-glass threshold has been well and crossed. The snout of the state has well and truly snuffled into the trough of euvoluntary exchange and there it browses, proudly showcasing its bedswerving flanks. I was wrong to apologize. Things really are as crazy as they seem.

Here are highlights from the original video:

Freedom or Unity

VT B&B settles discrimination suit. Story goes like this: the owners of a quaint Vermont bed and breakfast object to same sex marriage. They refused to rent their place out for the wedding of two women. They were sued on the grounds of Vermont's Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act.

ATSRTWT

Whenever the boundaries of conventional ownership are shifted, there will be disruptions, even when the change is just. It's up to careful analysis to determine appropriate actions. To me, this case exposes injustice in the VT statute that holds property owners to popularly-determined moral standards. Yes, all competent adults should have the right to marry, but all competent property owners should also have the right to decide to whom to provide their services. Coercion is a thick club. We must use caution when swinging it.

Euvoluntary Exchange: Caveat Venditor?

If the owner of a painting says he has a Renoir for sale, and charges $50,000, and it turns out to be a Munger paint-by-number painting, that would be fraud.  It would violate condition #3, no regret.

But what about if the seller is unaware that a painting is a Renoir, and the buyer does know?  Something like this, in other words.

Would SELLER regret make an exchange non-euvoluntary, in other words?

I think the answer is "yes," but that doesn't mean it should be legally actionable.  Caveat venditor is a reasonable policy.

Still....ouch.