Conscription in Lithuania

Reinstating of conscription in Lithuania is our contribution to collective defence. #NATO #security
— Linas Linkevicius (@LinkeviciusL) February 25, 2015

On January 13th, 1991, not all long after the long-suffering citizens of the Baltic Republics joined hands in the Balijos kelias, thirteen people were slain at the Vilnius TV tower by the last remnants of the collapsing Soviet putsch.

Tyranny never sleeps, people. Sure, you can burn it all to the ground. You can plow it under and salt the earth, but this wickedest of all weeds has roots too deep to destroy. Twenty five years haven't passed and the lessons learned in throwing off the yoke of state-sponsored oppression are forgotten.

On the bright side, it hasn't been easier for peaceful East Europeans to flee the grasp of an ambitious sovereign in recent memory. I'd imagine that the EU has some sort of repatriation for conscription, but Checkpoint Charlie is gone for good.

I harbor no ill will towards courageous Lithuanians who seek to defend the homeland against foreign aggression. I have a dog in that fight, but it's on a long leash. I do harbor ill will towards craven politicians who have so little faith in the courage of their people that they feel that compelled service is the only way they can rouse the martial spirit of the trys milijonai.

As an aside, my own experience serving in the American armed forces informs me that while conscripts can be as courageous and competent as a force of all volunteers, it is much more challenging to maintain the same commitment to the mission with a bayonet at your back. Unit effectiveness is enhanced by shared vision.

Military service may not always be euvoluntary, but for the sake of the integrity of the nation, it should at least be voluntary. What do the people gain if they should save their sovereignty at the cost of their very souls?

Death Star is better than Exit is better than Voice

I like rules that generalize. That is to say that I place some special value on non-discrimination in Law. If there must be boundaries on human behavior, then the boundaries must apply equally to everyone in society. No one, no matter their birth nor station should enjoy exemption from the Law. If I'm not allowed to park in front of a fire hydrant, neither shall the Emperor of the Han.

I am the first to admit that this meta-value is idiosyncratic. It comes to me partly from social norms carried over from childhood (fair play on the playground), partly from an affinity I have for the Aristotelian tradition (proportionality uber alles), and partly from a curious American disdain I retain for hereditary political elites (boo titles, boo emoluments of state). Moral intuitions like this are just another turtle: somewhere down the rabbit hole, even the most exacting rationalist is obliged to resort to an aesthetic preference.

To be consistent, shouldn't I extend my fondness for universality to the aesthetics underlying others' meta-values? If someone genuinely believes that a particular few European families have been specially selected by God to enjoy privileges not afforded commoners, or that police should be exempt from the laws they enforce, or that people have no presumption to life or liberty if they happen to be born in another country, by my governing meta-principles, how do I gainsay that? What if a fellow constituent wholly rejects the Original Position thought experiment altogether? What if the set of shared values is null?

When pondering an exchange, non-transaction is perfectly euvoluntary. I wouldn't, for example, purchase a horse saddle at any price: I get no benefit from such a thing and it would take up valuable space in my house. At the tack shop, a gracious "no thank you" is as mutually agreeable as a "yes, please." Politics happens exactly where "no thank you" is not permissible. The closest thing we might imagine to a euvoluntary state would be ruled by unanimity. Such a state would probably be either very small, or very very federalist, neither of which are stable options when the median constituent seeks to consolidate political authority. In theory, I can imagine euvoluntary politics. In practice, my dreams fail me.

When humanity starts to colonize space, it won't be because we seek to live harmoniously among the twinkling stars; it'll be because we're fed up living with these assholes over here. SpaceX: the next best alternative to a Buchanan-Tullock Utopia.

Coercion by Biological Abnormality

You don't have to believe in a everyone-is-a-special-snowflake theory of human nature to acknowledge the following observations:
a) human morphology roughly adheres to a normal distribution along most dimensions (height, weight, length of limb, circumference of torso, etc.)
b) normal distributions have outliers

Economies of scale in (inter alia) textile production mean that making, say, men's trousers inside the 95% interval for waist/leg size combinations will be cheaper for manufacturers. They don't have to cut new patterns or rig up new workstations or anything. They just crank out the same ol', same ol' again and again. Ditto automobile bucket seats, ditto kitchen counters, ditto pork pie hats. Ditto just about anything where the product interfaces with the human body.

Including brassieres.

I might find a more eloquent or subtle way of saying this, but I elect not too. Boobs are getting bigger. The mean bra size has gone from 34B to 34DD over the past couple decades. And it's come to my attention lately that some of my more ample female friends have a difficult time shopping for well-fitted, attractive brassieres in many of the more common retail outlets. And when they do find one that fits and doesn't look like a replica costume piece from Zardoz, they often pay out the nose for the garment. I cannot imagine the circumstances that would lead me to pay fifty bucks for a pair of drawers.

So, how about it? Are ladies who clock in north of a double-D being exploited? Good old price theory would say "probably not": if there has been a shift in the distribution of breast size, a natural arbitrage opportunity has arisen, meaning that entrepreneurs should be able to fill in the lacuna in demand (this holds for changes in both the first and second statistical moments). If that's not happening, there are some frictions in the market.

And it's possible that EE can help point us to one important friction: substitution. If busty women simply buy brassieres less frequently, taking greater care of them, or wearing them a bit past the point of destruction, this will mask a right-tail boob size increase. Slow sales are slow sales, whether it's because of consumer behavior or because of underlying demand characteristics.

So what's the remedy? In this case, it's difficult to tell from a distance whether or not there are other barriers to entrepreneurship (like challenges in the design or manufacturing process) that immutably contribute to production costs, but busty women and the companies they frequent owe it to each other (remember, this is a reciprocal arrangement) to communicate better. Bra markets would be more efficient if large-breasted women would be more vocal about their challenges in finding the products they seek. A decent PR firm should be able to make a few bucks off this. Bug in your ears, y'all.

Hume on Coercion

Essays; Moral, Political, and Literary Part II, Essay XII: "Of the Original Contract"

I shall venture to affirm, That both these systems [divine right of the sovereign and the social contract] are just; though not in the sense, intended by the parties: And, That both the schemes of practical consequences are prudent; though not in the extremes, to which each party, in opposition to the other, has commonly endeavoured to carry them.

Emphasis in original.

 It's quite an essay. Here's a nice little passage: "[Philosophers] affirm, that all men are still born equal, and owe allegiance to no prince or government, unless bound by the obligation and sanction of a promise." Again, emphasis in original. Just prior to this he forwarded a particularly lovely style of historicism, both presaging Strauss and writing with prudent Straussian elision. So here, the social contractarians are right, but only so long as the terms of the contract are met. Unwritten is men owe no allegiance to a prince who upturns the terms of trade, so to speak. A sovereign who breaks the agreement no longer retains legitimate authority.

Likewise, "a sovereign cannot, properly speaking, be called [the Deity's] vice-regent, in any other sense than every power or force, being derived from him, may be said to act by his commission." Again, a Straussian call to revolt when the sovereign ceases to act in accordance with the Will of the Divine. You can almost hear him snickering into his sleeve here.

A little later on though, we find the following (keep in mind this was written in 1748, fifty years before M. Guillotine began his bloody rampage): "In reality, there is not a more terrible event, than a total dissolution of government, which gives liberty to the multitude, and makes the determination or choice of a new establishment depend upon a number, which nearly approaches to that of the body of the people: For it never comes entirely to the whole body of them." If you're reading Buchanan into that, you're not alone. Heck, if you're reading Caplan into that, you're not alone. Hume was mightily skeptical of the ability of regular folk to re-design from whole cloth either the terms of a social contract or to re-interpret the Word of God.

Of course, in practice, the post-Enlightenment revolutions tended to be based on the principles of "reason" or "science" or some such nonsense. They also tended to be rather bloody and messy. Being proven right in this case seems little cause for joy.

At any rate, the whole essay is great fun, and if you'll indulge me, there's one more passage in there that answers the question Hayek asks by way of Munger's post below:

Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.

Hard coercion by untenable alternatives. QED. Take it from a guy who's lived in a place where he knows no foreign language or manners, and lived from day to day, by the small wages which he acquired.

Meta-EE and the Constitution Part 19: Twenty-Third Amendment

Section 1. The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct: A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

When I first moved to the DC area, I was struck with a giggling fit when I saw the license plate tagline: "Taxation without Representation". I still find it risible, but the gobsmack has since grown a fuzzy patina.

Here's sort of what I think: exit and voice are complements. The ability to complain about policy is as useless as <bosoms> on a warthog without the ability to signal the salience of your disapproval by hiking up your trouser legs and finding new digs. For the contiguous US as a whole, this is pretty dang tough to do all else equal which I think is one reason libertarians of a certain stripe tend to favor so-called "states rights".

But for the DC Metro area? Constituent please.

Does the 23rd make us more euvoluntary, all else equal? Not nearly as much as the ability to move to Maryland.

Of course, the cynical analyst might conclude that efforts by district residents to gain House seats (and Senate too, if I recall correctly) in a bid to mix more blue into the Capitol. But that's just cynical, people.

GDP vs. EE, Macro Policy Edition

Macro is hard. Remaining circumspect while you're doing it is harder yet. The peer-reviewed theoretical literature (or at least the papers I'm familiar with) seems eerily divorced from the agents under scrutiny, and the empirical work is a glass crowbar: nice to look at, but when you try to use it to move stuff around, it has a tendency to break. Perhaps more frustrating for regular folks, the public debate is esoteric, weirdly partisan, and boring as all get-out (with the occasional exception for rap videos).

Macro policy itself is not an exchange in the same sense as buying a taco or swapping credit default risk. Instead, it influences the environment in which these exchanges are made. Stimulus programs are passed under the justification that the government spending will ignite consumer spending, taking some slack out of idle resources. FOMC transactions put more current assets into circulation, lowering interest rates, which reduces borrowing costs, which I suppose is meant to make investment decisions more attractive? I'm not entirely clear on this point. Firms that make decisions underpinned by cheap paper strike me as imprudent, much the same way that families buying more housing than they can reasonably afford are imprudent. Also, TANSTAAFL: cheap credit is an intertemporal transfer.

So that's some of the baggage I bring with me. I'm a phantomweight in the macro arena though, scarcely in the audience let alone in the debate itself. I have no dog in the fight, so to speak. I am interested in marginal euvoluntary exchange though. And I'm interested in pedestrian intuitions. I assume that my regular reader(s) are too, else you wouldn't waste your time by reading me.

So how about it then? Let's assume that there is a chunk of commerce that does occur because and only because of government spending. The DoT plops down $26B on road construction that wouldn't have otherwise happened. Or the DoE pushes $15B into "Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Recovery," funding that otherwise would have sat idle, rusting in a field somewhere while discouraged workers' human capital depreciates on the couch watching daytime TV. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that proponents are right and the Broken Window Fallacy does not apply with fallow resources. Are these exchanges euvoluntary?

Maybe this question is misguided. Maybe the right answer is "it depends." How would you approach the question? What's the role of time, of discovery, of risk, of opportunity? When do cyclical effects become structural? When does the short term become the long term? Most importantly, how are ordinary citizens supposed to keep track of these questions when they're alienated from the discussion by dint of education, inept reporting, and strident disagreement between even the top echelon experts in the subject?

When the rule of law is working well, it gives regular folks a bit of certainty in a chaotic world. Rules closely observed serve ordinary people in their ordinary lives. The abrogation thereof serves whom exactly?

Procrustean GDP pursuit may well be oversold. Caveat subfragator. These are important questions, don't hesitate to ask them.

Meta-EE and the Constitution Part 15: Nineteenth Amendment

Few Constitutional amendments highlight the contrast between deontology and consequentialism as the 19th. To understand why, I have to take you on a quick tour through some political theory. Because I'm not always intentionally cruel, I'll keep it simple. If you're interested in closer detail, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Hinich and Munger's indispensable Analytical Politics.

Prelude: the text:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Act I: you Kant just disenfranchise people.

 Both fairness and justice demands that any citizen of sound mind and good standing should be eligible to participate in the democratic process. To the modern mind, disenfranchisement is pretty close to a mild form of slavery. Political voice, at least in modern democratic polity, is something of a birthright. The 19th was a hard-won amendment, a ringing victory for women everywhere, not just in the United States, eroding the general legitimacy of patriarchal paternalism the world round.

Act II: franchise and dimensionality

What are the consequences of increased franchise? In a word, indeterminate. In game theory, we've got this result called (of all things) the Folk Theorem. The skinny on the Folk Theorem is that in repeated play, all bets are off and any equilibrium result can be sustained. So, with only white landowning males able to vote, you can wind up with a heavyhanded tyranny just as you can wind up with a sharply constrained market-preserving federal system. Ditto for universal franchise. What ends up important is the median voter.



How does adding women to the mix change the position of the median voter? That's a thorny empirical question. It's important, but close to impossible to know the direction of the arrow of causality leading between ideas and policies here. Could a rising tide of dignity for everyone have both pushed for the 19th and for the civil rights revolution that followed? In other words, to pick out the specific (consequential!) effect that women's suffrage had on the scope and scale of the state, you'd need to isolate the correct counterfactual. That is, to be generous, challenging.

And in light of this analytical challenge, I can't really say whether or not universal franchise is meta-euvoluntary or not. There are still piles upon piles of gender-specific legislation that deals with trades on the margins of euvoluntarity like access to birth control (and I mean for-real access, not just subsidies), sex education, abortion, prostitution, pornography, adoption, marriage, & lots of al. If it's the case that women help draft exchanges like these into the realm of the euvoluntary by way of direct participation, then there we go.

Of course, the nettle of the Folk Theorem still stings both ways: the counterfactual median voter could still cut ice in favor of greater restrictions on trade. I don't pretend to know what the alternative actually is. Beware folks who claim they do.

Is the 19th meta-EE? Indeterminate. Is it still normatively good? Unless you're some kind of misogynist, then yes, of course.