Ticket Prices Pay For The Whole Seat, But You'll Just Need The EDGE

The chamber is sparsely, yet tastefully appointed. The lone orchid is in bloom, shrouded from the glassy-eyed gaze of the man in the chair, partly obscured by the shadow cast by the naked bulb incongruously dangling from a plain black wire and partly obscured by the thick rawhide strap fastening his head to the sturdy oaken top rail.

The silence is broken by the sharp, staccato click of steel-shrouded heels on blood-red tile. The woman is carrying a cage that John Hurt or George Orwell fans will immediately recognize. At one end is a military-grade OBA facemask with the window removed. Secured to that is a wire mesh tunnel, perhaps eighteen inches long with deadfall gates at each end. At the other end is a tiny tin shack, roof rusted, housing a hillbilly rat famished from a sparse diet of millet crumbs.

The woman quickly, professionally, and wordlessly attaches the contraption first to the dedicated bracket emerging from the top of the chair, then with a fluid motion that suggests a journeyman's familiarity with shipboard firefighting gear, strapped the repurposed breathing mask to the man's sweat-soaked face. The involuntary whine that escaped his lips did precisely nothing to deter either her resolve or her efficiency of motion.

The comically large gold-plated key in his right hand was leaving an impression in his flesh, even as he strained vainly against his restraints. He didn't notice as she glided out of view behind him and began releasing the first safety catch on the deadfall nearest the snaggletoothed rodent snuffling at the far end of the cage. He did notice as the deadfall fell and the rat cautiously advanced down the tunnel, its claws raking against the wire mesh in the most awful symphony he could imagine.

As her elegantly manicured fingernail stretches toward the next catch, his whine escalates rapidly through a keen, then a wail, finally landing on an eardrum-shattering shriek. His hand flies open and before the prop key can even clatter to the floor, the device is whisked from his trembling head and is being spirited away by a dedicated assistant. The leather bonds on his head, arms, and legs are released, and he slumps to the floor, weeping in the sort of ecstatic bliss that only a brush with the deepest of fears can evoke.

I invite you to draw your attention to the woman. If she were in possession of a psychiatry degree and the room were part of her professional offices, this would be called "aversion therapy" and would be perfectly legal. If, contrarily, her job were unlicensed and she used the professional title of "dominatrix," the session described above would be called "edgeplay" and would be illegal, at least if money changed hands.

Consider the possibility that emotional therapy is a vocation, and that the wisdom embedded in the heuristics employed by seasoned professional doms is as good (if not better in some cases) than the classroom education obtained in graduate school. If paid licensed therapy is euvoluntary, why isn't paid BDSM?

End prohibition now. Therapy is not a crime.

Turning Aretaic

VA House candidate (and economist) Dave Brat is a fan of Deirdre McCloskey. Oh my. Oh me oh my. People, if stuff like this can happen, why do we even have an AEA at all?

Madison knew something about Democracy (big D for the system rather than for the everyday practice) that might perhaps have eluded more populist thinkers: pure majority rule can be as tyrannical as the worst despot who ever sat on a throne. His prophylactic against public tyranny was constitutional republican constraints on the authority of the US sovereign. I kindly suggest to you that this is insufficient.

Tradeoffs abound, including in politics. The typical high-level tradeoff is between rules and discretion. The Constitution needs to provide a framework for a functioning rule of law, but it must be amendable. The dilemma should be obvious: given enough time and effort, an ambitious sovereign can erode its constitutional fetters enough to get back to the serious business of encreasing its dominion (Hume, of Commerce).

So if in a democracy, the government is us, and we want to gird ourselves against our own propensity for tyranny, what shall we do?

I return to Plato's Divine Maxim: never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. If the citizen is sovereign, this antique, forgotten little gem of jurisprudence is the spoonful of sugar that can help the medicine of citizen governance go down. In Jim Buchanan's terms, it wrings the romance right out of politics. It's delightfully sobering to force yourself to ask "would I be willing to fine, imprison, or execute my parents for this infraction?" And of course, sometimes the answer will be "yes", and of course, people will still disagree on important issues, but this tiny heuristic obliges voters to rid themselves of the many far-mode biases they carry, at least when they enter the voting booth.

So here's my dilemma, closely related to Andrea's Question: knowing this, what should I do? I know from studying economics that the deadweight costs of rent-seeking brought on by ignoring Plato's Divine Maxim erode folks' capacity to cooperate peacefully on their own terms. But I also know that Plato's Divine Maxim is massively unpopular. Scorned, even. I might encourage some of my friends and colleagues to bring it up when they get to the voter preferences part of their Public Choice courses. I might even prod my fellows in the land of PPE to write more about it. But I think the best chance I have of actually convincing another human for realsy-dealsies is to teach my daughter why I think it's a good, low-cost tool for evaluating policy and politicians. And that's the problem. That's exactly the problem.

Imagine if you will the tableau where a precocious middle school girl holds forth on forgotten antique jurisprudence in her civics class. No interpretation of government, progressive, conservative, whiggish, or otherwise (not even mainstream libertarian) hews to this doctrine. It's perhaps classically liberal, as Adam Smith sang of Solon's virtue in TMS, but classical liberalism is a fossil, and it's in neither my self-interest nor my daughter's to have her rile up her teachers or fail her classes.

Then again, if that's what I'm worried about, perhaps I need to learn to exercise another of the classical virtues: courage. The vitality of the Republic may just depend on such small gestures.