Despotism in America

Count Alexis de Tocqueville on the (17th c.) Connecticut code of laws (Democracy in America vol. 1 ch. 2) [translation errors mostly mine]:

Among these memorials, we will particularly single out, as particularly characteristic, the code of laws given the little State of Connecticut in 1650.

The legislators of Connecticut begin with penal laws, and, for their composition, they conceive of the strange idea to borrow provisions from sacred texts:

“Whosoever shall worship any other God than the Lord,” says the preamble, “shall surely be put to death.”

This is followed by ten or twelve enactments of the same kind, copied verbatim from Deuteronomy, Exodus, and Leviticus.

Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, and rape were punished with death; an outrage offered by a son to his parents was to be punished similarly. The legislation of a rude and half-civilized people was thus transferred to an enlightened and morally mild community; the consequence was that the punishment of death was never more frequently prescribed by the statute, and never more rarely applied to the guilty.

Side note: I'm aware of the physical condition of many of the original pages, but Tocqueville is an eminently clear, vigorous writer. It is indeed a shame that so many English translations of DiA are prone to burdening his prose with extra baggage. If the original author writes clearly, a good translation should reflect that propensity, n'est ce pas?

Tocqueville was contrasting the character of the sons of the Puritans in New England with the more commercially-minded settlers in Virginia. His claim was that the character of the nation was as the character of a man: one might observe the traits of the adult in the behavior of the child. A nation forged by commerce is one likely to retain commercial virtues; a nation of browbeating harridans is likely to cling to petty despotism. The wonder of America, claims ol' Lexy, is that she is a land of both.

So there is, should you believe de Tocqueville, a curious bundle of predispositions in the United States. On the one hand, there is a deep and abiding appreciation for hard work, honesty, integrity, trust, professionalism, honor, and prudence. On the other hand, there is a deep skepticism about profligacy, ostentation, inequality, and aristocracy. We Americans appreciate the life of an honest yeoman, and revile the pomp of inherited privilege. Or so goes the predisposition anyway. The American mythology seems mostly consistent with that story, even if the actual experience says otherwise.

What, I wonder, might this tell us about the odd moral intuitions about commerce in America? The Connecticut anti-fops described above would doubtless appreciate Elizabethan sumptuary laws, and might find kinship with the petit paternalism flogged in the academy and on the campaign trail. The tight-buckled Capotain-doffing burgher might even see in this round's crop of insufferable presidential candidates something to love: here an authoritarian who promises to scour the land of undesirables, there another authoritarian who promises to purge ostentatious displays of illicit wealth.

I do wonder though. I wonder to what extent these national predispositions color our individual moral intuitions about the nature and extent of the market. Euvoluntary exchange is great, at least until it enriches someone enough that they start behaving boorishly? Exchange can't be euvoluntary if it violates the ancient legislation of a rude and half-civilized people? This presents a curious puzzle for those few of us not instinctively bound by the mores of either the Plymouth rockers or the Richmond rollers. How can you possibly argue convincingly against the crushing weight of four hundred years of national opinion? Reason is slave to the passions, nowhere so much as in the unexamined tabernacle of the poll.

Also, I had totally forgotten that de Tocqueville was nobility. I wonder why we don't include that little tidbit more often in class.

American Exceptionalism vs. The Precautionary Principle: Refugee Edition

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken

Among the many objections to more liberal immigration policy, one stands out as more difficult to debunk than others. On questions of immigrants bringing with them crime, dependency, disease, or Communism, the empirical evidence shows that these are unambiguously overblown concerns. If anything, ordinary immigrants on average tend to be more industrious, healthy, independent, and conscientious than native-born Americans, again on average. It should be immediately clear why with a little reflection. Uprooting to travel to a foreign land is ambitious. The timid, the callow, the craven, the risk-averse will be marginally more likely to accept a mediocre BATNA and stay home. Emigration is an act of courage, of hope. Under normal circumstances, that is.

The objection of which I speak is of culture. Not of superficial culture, like driving courtesy or a tolerance for spicy food, but rather the deep appreciation for Enlightenment ideals that somehow still sort of drags its gutshot corpse through a post-William Jennings Bryan America. Will immigrants help keep the torch of free speech alive? Will they maintain a healthy skepticism of centralized political authority? Will they resist the urge to flaccidly permit the quartering of troops in civilian homes? Will they insist on procedural due process? Will they cherish the precepts of strictly delineated federalized power? Specifically,, will they support and defend American constitutional jurisprudence at rates comparable with natives?

The good news, is that yes, they will! I'll spare you the econometrics, but there's no statistically significant difference between immigrants and natives on issues of censorship and firearm ownership rights. In fact, when you control for education and IQ, immigrants actually beat natives on these issues. (source: author's analysis of GSS data 1974-2012)

The bad news is that everyone, immigrants and natives alike show an almost shocking disregard for the foundations of our national claim to natural liberty. Given the choice, only one in four respondents would preserve the freedom of expression, written or spoken, across a mere four categories of potentially bilious speech. In other words, we have met the enemy of the first amendment, and he is us.

But this is for ordinary immigration, under ordinary circumstances. Normal immigration builds character in a healthy nation, inviting hale, hardworking, determined men and women to our shores to truck, barter, and exchange with us and create a better life for them and theirs. This arrangement is to the mutual benefit of immigrant and host alike. Refugees are unlike ordinary immigrants in that they are compelled to migration thanks to especially gruesome BATNA. Death squads, systematic rape, homes incinerated, and mass exile will stir even the lumpiest of lumpenprole to pack up the ol' bindle and hit the long road to salvation.

It's this group that is utterly out of sample. I urge you to be skeptical of claims one way or the other about the desirability of permanently hosting refugees with an eye towards assimilation and eventual citizenship. If you'll permit a bit of #gertruding, the morality of providing aid and succor to displaced resident of war-torn nations is plainly obvious: giving aid to the afflicted is an almost universally-recognized moral and ethical duty. However, this duty is unrelated to the economic and cultural benefits of routine peaceful immigration.

The Precautionary Principle would tell us to refuse refugees entry for two reasons:
1) There is no assurance that their entry would not irrevocably corrupt American culture and the institutions that arise from that culture.
2) It is impossible to credibly commit to policies that would maintain refugees as non-citizen residents. (bleg: what's your favorite quick-n-dirty intro to the folk theorem you like to use in your undergrad courses?)

Refugees present a difficult conundrum not forwarded by ordinary immigration. As with difficult conundrums of all stripes, the Mencken quote above applies. How to fulfill the humanitarian demands of charity and sanctuary without risking the golden goose eggs is an enormously thorny question. But it is one not made any easier by conflating it with an immigration debate. The two are only superficially related.

Apple Piety

On Monday, I advanced the proposition that gentlemen's clubs are a sort of "sacred space," that is, there's something special about the site and its purpose that renders it unfit for alternative purposes. Yesterday, at ST, I expanded on this idea a little bit: sacred spaces (under my ad hoc definition, anyway) are all around us—folks seem fond of fitting some places to a single purpose. Moreover, we're fond of training children in the rules of the sacred space. As the father of a toddler, I can assure you that teaching my kid to refrain from taking snacks into the bathroom is a lot closer to a catechism than it is to teaching her how to count to twenty.

And that catechism is the other side of the sacred space. After all, without the devoted, a church is naught but stone and mortar. If you'll indulge me a bit of an Augustinian digression, piety is the compound virtue that allows a sacred space to generate its rents. It's the demand side of the exchange, if you will. And recall that piety arises from the mixture of faith, hope, love, and temperance. Absent an Aristotelian mean, absent phronesis, piety slips into religiosity, fanaticism, or delirium. Since it is such a corruptible virtue, it is unlikely to arise naturally in any but the saintliest or most enlightened people. Luckily for the civilizations of the earth, there are thorough canonical works dedicated to cultivating virtuous piety, ranging from the Rig Veda to the Tao Te Ching to the notes of Maimonides to Aquinas's commentary on the New Testament. Or heck, even Paul's letters for that matter. Praying in the direction of Mecca five times a day instills piety via repetition, much the same way as memorizing passages from the Gospels, much the same way as spinning prayer wheels.

Much the same way as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.

It occurred to me over dinner with Mrs. Spivonomist last night that the political elite has as much interest in generating secular piety for ordinary Humean reasons (i.e. to encrease the dominion of the sovereign). Witness the wailing and gnashing of teeth after the results of an especially decisive election outcome. Witness the style of language used in election season. Witness the devotion a committed partisan has towards her party. Such devotion is not the rational thinking of finding a first derivative; it is the glamour of the pulpit. And inculcating this sentiment is a lifelong affair, beginning with a daily prayer offered to the symbols of the state, its colors and its seals. And this bond of piety is cured in the sunlight of peer approval. When a muddy apostate dissolves this bond, he is shunned in polite society as surely as might be an atheist. What, after all, is the most common epithet against the anarchist? "Bomb-throwing" surely comes to mind. Does this accurately describe Lysander Spooner? G.K. Chesterton? Me?

Dear Apple, if you really want to generate expropriable sacred rents, you need to take a cue from the Roman Catholic Church or the "two"-party system: get 'em young, and cultivate their brand loyalty over a lifetime. use universal symbols, get them to repeat key phrases over and over again so that their piety comes as naturally as genuflection before the font. How else do you expect to generate an insurmountable BATNA disparity among your partisans?

Did They Vote? A Petty Rant.

You can take the boy out of Oregon, but you can't take the... actually no. You can take the Oregon out of the boy. Witness, dear friends, what hath wrought Representative Ben Unger, D-Hillsboro: https://didtheyvote.org/. Did they vote? And what does this charming wee application do for yon Oregonians away in yonder Oregonia? It links up voter records to Facebook profiles. You can hop on there, and as long as you're a registered voter in the Beaver State, you can browse the other Beavers on your friends list to see who's already cast a ballot this year.

It's difficult for me to articulate how much I condemn this. It isn't so much that it bears the stench of the totalitarian tactic of turning brother against brother or children against parents. It isn't even so much that the party ostensibly opposed to oppression and domination would turn to a crude tool of distributed shame to achieve their craven ends. It isn't even that the sort of low-information voting this is likely to spur will do little more than put extra noise into an already noisy processing. No, the thing that gets my goat is that it turns both voting and public shaming into a game. There are leader boards—MOTHERF***ING LEADER BOARDS—that display how many finger wags folks have sent to "delinquent" citizens.

Long time readers of EE will know how seldom I deploy the term "apoplectic." Perhaps it's because I've had a somewhat hectic week and my natural defenses are down, but this news trifle comes dang close to making me apoplectic. I take informed voting seriously, as should any responsible citizen in a democracy. By all means, vote if you're informed about the candidates, their positions, and the likely impact your vote will have on policy. Vote if the issues are salient to you. Vote if you're not alienated by the unspeakable things politicians spend your money on. Vote if you think it will make a meaningful difference in your life. But if you head to the polls because your Facebook friends sent you a PM, it's time to re-evaluate your relationship with your system of government. And if you're one of the goons sending messages, perhaps it's time to pause and give some meaningful consideration to the sort of leadership you want to see in the nation's capital. Is someone who cheerfully turns a social network into a petty Red, White, and Blue version of the Stasi really the sort of person you want to see wielding the riding crop of power?

A peaceful society is one that invites. Embroidered on the stoop mat in front of a shop is a single, warm word: "welcome." You are welcome to come in and browse our wares. Find what you like, and we shall exchange value for value. In front of Congress is no such felicitous invitation. The Congress is by necessity an authoritarian assembly. Its pronouncements carry the weight of law and are each ultimately punishable by death. Using the cute little tricks (naming, shaming, gaming) of the marketplace in a fatal arena is a grotesque misapplication of scope, an unjust abuse of power, and a dishonorable act by any reasonable standard of conduct for free citizens in a democratic society.

If anything should be tenderly protected as a euvoluntary act in a system of representative government, it should be the ordinary act of of voting.

"What do you say, Angus?"

"People, if crap like this can happen, why do we even have a Federal Elections Commission at all?"

The Enigma of Ford

Rob Ford, the "disgraced" mayor of Toronto, still enjoys an order of magnitude more public approval than the US Congress (I know, I know, apples to oranges). This despite rock-solid evidence that he's smoked crack while in office.

There was, in Tudor England, a habit of old that on the Twelfth Night (as popularized by Shakespeare's eponymous play) of Christmas, the night before Epiphany, peasants and nobility would swap roles, the former dining on... well, I'll let Dan D'Amico explain:


If you get the baby (or the bean, or whatever local variant you like), you get to pretend to be a lord until sunup. @danarchism's right on the money; cultural, social... human capital is the name of the game. This festive celebration obliged feudal constituents to adopt some variant on the very sort of sympathy championed by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. If only for a day, the (un?)lucky peasant would have to don the pantaloons of the lord of the manor and hear the petitions of the governed. It was a great, rollicking joke with a great rollicking punchline and a great rollicking serious message embedded within. Using my Pete Leeson spectacles, Twelfth Night was an institution that, as cheaply as contemporary political technology allowed, permitted greater social stability.

And then there's this guy:



The gentleman behind the wheel is Deadmau5. He is a musical whiz, a Giorgio Moroder for the opening act of the 21st century. And he puts up a 30 minute video of him tooling around with his crack-smoking mayor.

Rob Ford governs as if every night were Twelfth Night. AND THE WORLD IS A BETTER PLACE FOR IT.

Politics minus governance equals politainment (plus ζ, some residual). Three cheers for the City of Toronto to have the courage to admit that politainment is valuable. The grimmest moments in human history were characterized by politics taken too seriously.

I'm none too fond of transactional theories of the state. The analytical fiction of the social contract suffers from Arrovian impossibility problems, and no written constitution can ever hope to bind an active sovereign ruling a clamorous constituency. Despite my reserves, I do still believe that voters basically get what they ask for, within a standard deviation or so. And in Toronto, they've asked for some non-standard deviance. And it seems they've gotten exactly what they want.

Long live the king.

In EE terms, this tests Toronto's Ford on the Shughart/Thomas scale, and I think it finds in favor of euvoluntary institutions. If anything coercion flows in the opposite direction. Conventional morality, conventional politics would have this guy (or Marion Barry before him) out on his ear. Yet buoyed by popular support, he thrives in office. Huzzah!

A Sociotropical Vacation

Picture this if you will. A brisk October morning, sun glimmering above the horizon as our bleary-eyed protagonist putters patiently at a red light on the way to work. Off his starboard bow, a fellow workaday commuter methodically devours a fast food breakfast sandwich five feet in front of a rear window whose glass has vacated its appointed watchstation. In its place sits a shabbily duct-taped section of opaque garbage can liner. And what to my wondering eyes did appear but a pair of bumper stickers that read "save second base" and "save the ta-tas".

To recap, on my way to work I saw someone driving an unsafe car in an unsafe manner advocating for breast cancer research. The part of me that I call "economist" puzzled at these misplaced margins. Surely if the goal here was to minimize harm, step one would be to put the Egg McMuffin away till the car is safely parked and step two is to then promptly schedule an appointment with an auto glass repair shop.

But Sam, aren't the bumper stickers are a sunk cost at this point? Aren't the relevant marginal decisions about a) the utility of eating now rather than later vs. Pr(accident)*MC(accident) and b) MB(seeing clearly out of the back) vs. MC(fixing the window)? How are some yellowed bumper stickers relevant? Isn't general equilibrium a theory of price equalization rather than a guide for individual behavior?

Yes Barnabas, those are good points. Judged solely by prudence, it's utterly insane to champion marginal contributions to a cause that's probably over-represented anyway while at the same time driving like a fool. But talk is cheap, Barnabas, bumper sticker talk cheaper still. A bumper sticker is a tweet someone else wrote in a feed you didn't choose.

And that's exactly the problem. Specifically, that's exactly the problem with direct majority-rule democracy. The rules that govern individual rational behavior when deciding whether or not to text while driving bind even less while voting. People who put off replacing shattered rear car windows are somehow competent to determine public policy wisely? Please.

But you already knew this Barnabas. You've studied Buchanan and Tullock. What I want you to do is think about this tableau in the shoes of the earthbound spectator. Randomly select an ordinary passerby and ask her if she'd think that driver a hypocrite. I'd give you 10:1 odds that the answer would be a solid, ringing "nope". I don't believe that folks are at all interested in equivocating self-interest and public-interest. In fact, I think most folks would be offended if you tried to compare the two. Think again of Adam Smith's Chinese Earthquake parable. Public policy is ever a matter of the plight of the distant affected, be they earthquake-ravaged Chinese or cancer-ravaged breasts. Breakfast is a matter of right here, right now.

So Barnabas, when you and Gary hear guys like me and Mungo bellyaching about erosions of federalism, about the metastasis of state authority, it's less a matter of the watchdog coming inside of its own volition to watch TV and eat your Doritos, it's more a problem that your indolent teenage son threw the kitchen door open and invited him inside. Constitutional constraints are non-binding unless the median voter insists on them.

Distracted driving isn't euvoluntary. Distracted voting even less so.

Meta-EE and the Constitution Part 13: Seventeenth Amendment

"Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?"

"A Republic, if you can keep it."

-Ben Franklin

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

The point of a bicameral legislature is precisely to guard against  the excesses of unchecked simple majoritarian democracy. Prior to 1913, if you wanted a gig as a Senator, you'd get it through the political elites in your state. After W.J. Bryan's triumph, you have to petition the people directly.

What effect does this have on the institutions that support euvoluntary exchange? It's tough to say exactly. The median constituent didn't change, but the temporal buffer sure did. The Senate is now marginally more exposed to the whims of the public, for whatever that means. It's sort of difficult to posit a counterfactual America where the 17th never happened. I think it's fair to say that a lot of the Congressional activity that's happened in the interim would have been at least delayed a bit, if not outright nixed.

But flights of fancy aren't particularly convincing. It's kind of tough to lay the arrogance of the FDA's efficacy requirement at the feet of the method by which Senators are elected. In this case, I think I'd simply say that the 17th represents a step away from a Constitutional Republic and a step towards a Popular Democracy. As a Public Choice student, that makes me nervous, but as a Euvoluntary Exchange thinker, I'd have to say that the effects are probably on the slim-to-none side.

Probably.

Meta-EE and the Constitution Part 9: Twelfth Amendment

Why are the forms of elections important?

The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and all persons voted for as Vice-President and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. 

The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.

The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. 

The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

Why bother with all this weirdness? Why not just have direct popular elections? What's so great about the electoral college?

In a pair of words, minority protection. You may be tempted laugh off the caricature that democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, but to do so is to reject theory and evidence of systematic voter bias. And that's okay, provided you don't find the literature convincing. But to fuss about the electoral college for the simple reason that democracy is inherently good without carefully considering criticisms of this claim is at least a little irresponsible.

Could the electoral process be better? Probably. The best way I can think of to improve it is to make it irrelevant. The mere fact that elections are important suggest that an unacceptably large chunk of civil society has migrated out of the bounds of peaceful, even euvoluntary exchange into the realm of politics, where coercion dwells.

So is the 12th Amendment meta-euvoluntary? Sure, but much more so when the scope of government activity is limited to those activities it has a comparative advantage in. Otherwise, it's just a para-legal two-step.

Pygmalion Shrugged

Cypriot depositors set to "pay" a "surprise tax" on bank holdings (more here) are being offered a curious incentive to keep their cash in Cyprus: equity in future revenues from gas.

As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the general equilibrium.

Take Cyprus as a small-scale experiment. Suppose it works as the political elite predict and they grab the €5.8B they're after, forking out enough IOUs to placate customers. Suppose further that tax-pinched sovereignties elsewhere discover this gravid cash heifer and heave-to a-milkin'. Would a worldwide confiscation of wealth expose the itchy truth that modern money and banking isn't particularly euvoluntary?

The fiat currencies in use today are popular because they beat the pants off the alternatives. As I've pointed out before, not-unforced barter is for children and the destitute, and truck is a dirty word burned into a cracked shingle under the awning of  BATNA disparity. Gold as currency has been pronounced verboten by diktat, and electronic currencies are still in the "adorable curiosity" stage. Sure, some international firm might be able to credibly issue good private scrip that would run parallel to national currencies, but really, without the good faith of government backing, it's awfully hard to imagine a big issuer not facing a substantial expropriation threat, even in relatively free zones like the UK or the US. The collapse of Bretton-Woods (and heck, the hijinks of John Law and Louis XIV while we're at it) should be all the alarum bells we need to mind what happens when political elites catch whiff of what they can do with all the guns at their disposal.

The alternatives to banking often offend. If you want capital-intensive production (and yes, this includes modern agriculture, which is pretty much the only way possible to feed a planet of seven billion people), you can't get there with money stuffed into a mattress. If you want commercial, home, student, auto, or whatever loans, you're limited to a healthy banking sector, some sort of public option, or subterranean lending.

Western governments have sworn constituents a galaxy of promises that may be challenging to keep. Judging by the tone of the political kayfabe, they seem to be fond of making many more such promises. As Cyprus is busy showing us, the risk of expropriation may be quite severe indeed. Banking is not euvoluntary, which is exactly why politicians must take great pains to avoid threatening deposits: the consequences are too awful to tolerate.

This Is the Dawning of the Age of Majority

Declare 'var' variable string() /*default NULL*/

While var in (tax, education, agriculture, currency, road subsidy, law enforcement, drug, intellectual property,  energy, occupational safety, environmental protection, wage, housing, fishery management, near-earth object monitoring, climate, seismic event protection, medical, banking, monetary, fiscal, common law, et al)

begin
What is the ideal [var] policy zone?
end

Each one of the items in my variable list above is the object of state provision or regulation. I am confident that any of my readers could easily add to the list. What I find curious is in matters of scale. I think there's a good case to be made that corrective action should match the scale of the problem. Maybe I have an odd sense of justice, but I find it inappropriate to punish the whole class when one kid sticks his chewing gum under the desk or when the police attempt to seize a motel because they suspect that marijuana was sold on the premises at some point. Similarly, it strikes me as erroneous that existential threats like (catastrophic) meteorite strikes or super-volcanoes are completely ignored by international orgs like the UN.

How about the age of majority? Different ages of majority exist even within the same policy zone. In the US, citizens [men] can be conscripted for military service at age 18, tried for violent offenses in grown-up court as young as 10 (in Kansas and Vermont), can't legally purchase alcohol until 21, must generally remain in school until 16, and can't operate a motor vehicle on public roads under the age of 15 (there seems to be no statutory age restrictions on airplane pilot licenses in the US). The American political process still seems to be willing to grant at least a little discretion to smaller organizations on the details of raising children (compared to some European countries, anyway). Are these different standards evidence that the "age of majority", such as it is, has partitionable optimal policy zones? Do political elites understand that there might be some variation in kids' ability to estimate the euvoluntarity of particular types of transactions? If so, why do they seem unwilling to grant that there might be variation in learning ability or educational desire? I can't recall major party political commentary on education in the past quarter century that didn't bemoan relative STEM performance or talk about "standards", as if education were comparable to the missile gap charts used to scare Americans at the height of the Cold War. It's almost as if nations' relative rankings in educational performance was some sort of bizarre international contest.

What is the ideal age of majority policy zone? Given that there's not a lot about being a child that could be considered euvoluntary, how much individual sovereignty should children retain? How much sovereignty should parents retain? Extended families? Voluntary associations? Local districts? Why has the median voter consistently answered "less" on each of these over the past couple decades? Why is Franklin K. Beltway now assumed to know what's better for Jimmy F. Cornhusker than his parents are? What's changed? Has being a kid suddenly become less euvoluntary than it was before NCLB was signed?

Meta EE and the Constitution Part 1: First Amendment

James Buchanan argues clearly and convincingly for the importance of constitutions to bind political elites. If you haven't already done so, I urge you to read Buchanan and Tullock's watershed The Calculus of Consent (available online here from the Library of Economics and Liberty). If you find the entirety of the work to be a little on the daunting side, don't fret. Chapter six is the kernel of the book and it contains the following quote that captures the idea of meta-euvoluntarity I've been peddling the past few months:

The individual will, of course, recognize that any restriction on his private freedom of action will, in certain cases, impose costs on him. Each individual will in the course of time, if allowed unrestricted freedom within the limits of the legal structure, impose certain costs on other parties; and, insofar as his own position taken alone is concerned, he will prefer to remain perfectly free to impose costs on others when he desires. On the other hand, he will recognize also that he will, on many occasions, be affected negatively by the actions of others over whom he can exert no direct control and from whom he cannot legitimately demand compensation. Knowing that he will more often be in the second situation than in the first, the fully rational individual will explore the possibility of contractual arrangements designed to protect him from external cost along with constitutional processes and provisions that may remove actions from the realm of private decision and place them within the realm of public choice.

Absent binding constraints, people will, according to Buchanan and Tullock (and Hobbes and Rousseau) revert to predation. If the person who reverts to predation happens to wield political authority, the extent of the costs imposed could be great, indeed. Constitutions muzzle predatory elites.

But do they really? I've gone back a forth a few times with GMU Professors Boettke, Leeson and Coyne on this topic as well as many of my colleagues on campus and I can't find a good way to refute the claim that elites will adhere to constitutional constraints as long as they remain expedient, but for no longer. If constitutional provisions retain binding power, it seems likely to me that credit ought be due to their meta-euvoluntaric outcomes.

The language of the First Amendment is pretty simple:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

As you can plainly see, the language singles out Congress. "Congress shall make no law..." This is a terribly curious provision in a democracy. Democracy benefits most when voters consume high-quality information. Are any of my readers willing to defend an assertion that journalism wrought from the fights between Pulitzer and Hearst could be characterized as "high quality"? Does MTV contribute material that forwards the Republic? You could reasonably claim that much of the content found in the press can be accurately described as political or cultural pollution. It reinforces false beliefs, confirms biases, and permits unscrupulous elites to indulge in the worst kind of political kayfabe. Further, to the extent that popular entertainment or news coverage contributes to the frequency of rare, high-profile events like massacre shootings (and I suspect that the partial derivative is pretty small, but that's an unsettled empirical matter), a free press may regularly and routinely generate ex post regret.

The counterfactual to this is intolerable. State-controlled media is the shieldmaiden of tyranny and totalitarianism. What better way to spread political pollution than to grant political elites direct control over the dissemination of their own lies, distortions and partial truths? The First Amendment is meta-euvoluntary in the sense that it refuses to sacrifice a durable contract with free constituents for the fleeting comfort of selective censorship.

Is speech euvoluntary? Nope. Is it meta-euvoluntary? You bet your ass it is. Pardon my speech.

Automatic (Withholding) For The People

My masochistic streak compels me to browse through the General Social Survey every now and again to remind myself what folks' attitudes are towards government spending. If, like me, you're skeptical of surveys thanks to the wonders of signaling theory or experimenter effects, try to take heart that the GSS gauges opinion rather than reports of activity. The voting process really isn't all that different, except perhaps that voters appear to be influenced even more strongly by the personality of candidates than they are by anonymous survey researchers. So perhaps it's wise to temper the interpretation of GSS data, but we probably needn't disregard it completely.

Anyway, you can browse government spending variables for the 2006 survey here. With a few exceptions (and the partisan bias is strong, often swamping race, gender, SES and age variables in regressions), respondents overwhelmingly favor either current or higher levels of government spending. We've also known for some time that the median survey respondent (in the GSS and other surveys) systematically errs about the size and the distribution of federal budget. I encourage you to review your copy of Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter and remind yourself that respondents believe foreign aid to be a significant portion of the federal budget. I also encourage you to ask friends and family to a) explain the differences between the budget deficit, the current account deficit and the national debt and b) describe the difference between "mandatory" and "discretionary" spending and to estimate the relative proportion between the two in a typical fiscal year. Unless the people you know make a living working with this stuff, their answers may surprise you.

You might also be surprised that most folks don't know offhand what their tax burden is. I'm not talking about tax incidence here, since even professional economists can only provide statistically-generated estimates of labor supply elasticities; no, I mean the tax burden in the plain accounting sense. Try this: ask your friends and family what their tax bill is and watch the mental cartwheels. Most folks I've talked to know very well what their bi-weekly take-home pay is and they know their gross annual salary, but they've got to unthread their navel fluff to get at their actual tax obligation. One of the chief architects or automatic withholding and perhaps the most famous economist of the 20th Century Milton Friedman recognized this and in a 1995 interview with Reason remarked: "I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn't found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now." He understood the dangers of a functionally absent price system: voters could get a bunch of goodies from politicians without ever having to closely examine the price tag. If you want a way to get the public to sign on to higher levels of government spending, I can't imagine a more effective strategy.

This is important for euvoluntarists because it may be plausible that voters feel as if they're making something that walks and quacks a bit like a euvoluntary trade when they back spendthrifty candidates, but they may be doing so under terribly warped pretenses. Abolishing automatic withholding may not fully restore a rational cost calculus to the median voter, but it's probably a good step in the right direction. It might even be a good idea for voters to have to cut separate checks for each department they're financing. And to knock it off with the peacetime deficit financing.

Debts and deficits are symptoms.

Laws 1 and 2 of public finance: Deficits are future taxes; given enough time, all spending is discretionary. If Ricardian equivalence were an empirical phenomenon, economists would never have to point these out. Taxation and government spending are never euvoluntary, but good, sensible policy can steer us more in that direction. What a pity there are no political incentives to make it so.

Pay for Say

In most of the secular West, buying votes violates statute legislation. Quite apart from being an unenforceable contract, it is a baldly unethical agreement. It's also one of those rules that rubs the natural law the wrong way. Folks have strong moral intuitions that buying votes is just wrong. Voting represents pure civic-minded ideals, uncorrupted by the vices of the market.

Now, you may or may not be sympathetic to the suggestion that it is the overlap between governmental authority and the functions of trade that seem to generate the most corruption, but I think you'd have to admit that the fairy tale of democratic participation is a cornerstone of Western Civilization.

So why the moral outrage? What's so all-fired corrupt about vote-buying? Suppose you've got a fair chunk of the population that's basically indifferent between Candidate A and Candidate B. Why not just pay them directly to basically flip a coin instead of usurping their scarce attention with political advertising? Yes, all else equal, the wealthier candidate wins, but how is that all that different than what we've got now? Politicians all but bribe the public with promises over the disposition of their own money anyway, so how is this any different? Under what precepts are campaign promises more euvoluntary than vote-buying?