If You're Not Into The Whole Brevity Thing

US Constitution: Article 1 §8.3:

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

 Though it's come to mean that the Congress has the requisite jurisdiction to establish agencies to oversee industry, the intent of the Commerce Clause (prior to the asinine, execrable decision in Schecter anyway) was to prevent petty trade wars across state lines. New Jersey's elite commercial interests should not be able to ply favors from the Governor's office that infringe on a New York firm's commerce across the bridge. The commerce clause is the trust-busting power in the constitution: it breaks the natural propensity for wealthy, powerful interests to collude in restraint of trade.

In a nation filled with artisan yeomen, it was a pretty good idea. In an industrial nation, it just means that the collusion happens at the national rather than the state level. Hm.

Anyway, some of the squawking over the recently-passed Indiana RFRA includes CT Governor Dan Malloy has "banned" state-funded travel to Indiana. Obviously, it's not a ban in the sense that he's shut down the borders or anything. He's merely directed that tax funds not subsidize travel to Indiana.

Put aside how this will imperil Connecticutters traveling to Indiana who must now drive from Chicago to Indianapolis rather than flying directly. Put aside the hypocrisy of the head of a state with a more robust religious freedom statute on the books trying to scold Democracy in Action™. Consider instead whether or not this sort of interference with another state's dominion will engage the old Commerce Clause jurisprudence. Wouldn't that be a hoot?

The greatest triumph of the oxcart era occurred when ruff-ringed commoner merchants amicably divorced their interests from those of the foppish, dilettante aristocracy. Exeunt politics from trade. The greatest shame of the modern era is to gaze upon this great achievement—the achievement that brought with is the greatest surge in material plenty that humanity has ever known—shrug its shoulders and bleat "meh." Politics mars commerce, tarnishes our ability to work towards mutual, peaceful cooperation. Punish iniquity if it so suits your tastes, but micturate upon the rug of Enlightenment constitutional jurisprudence at your peril. It really ties the country together, man.

Greed and Shortages

Remarkably, the shortage of milk that is shutting down Venezuela's famed ice cream shop is caused by greed.  And price-gouging.  And hoarding.  Hmmmm.....there is no international milk shortage.  And people have been greedy since...well, forever.  Something new must be at work.

Gosh, Pres. Maduro, you keep saying "greed causes shortages."  I don't think "cause" means what you think it means.  Self-interest is what supplied Coromoto with milk for all those years.  What causes shortages?  Socialism.

How to Hurt the Poor Every Day of the Year

I can't beat Jeff's Thanksgiving post from last year. Unfortunately, Heraclitus was right, and this year's Turkey Day is marred by hundreds-years'-old strife raised to a boil by events in Missouri. As such. the idea of a single day of commercial boycotting fades gently under the penumbra of rioting induced by the wretched systematic injustices of power-mad goons.

The goons I refer to are, of course, the ones elected or appointed to positions of nominal authority. They bear the seals of office, wear the badges of service, and enjoy all the prestige and protection that the "justice" system affords them. Which is quite a bit.

So what am I thankful for this year? I'm thankful first and foremost for my family and friends, their warm companionship and love, and the comfort they bring. But I'm also thankful that our society has [mostly] conquered hunger (unless you're homeless in Florida), violent crime (unless you live in a community hobbled by mandatory unemployment legislation aka minimum wage statutes), and the violent oppression of minorities (unless you have the keys to surplus war materiel courtesy of the DoD as well as carte blanche justification for the use of civil asset forfeiture). In other words, I'm privately, narrowly thankful for my privilege.

In a more just, more euvoluntary America, more residents, including those who move here freely from abroad would enjoy all the same privileges I do: the privilege to walk around without being molested or harassed by anyone, including cops and private citizens, the privilege to accept employment with whom I choose under mutually agreeable terms, the privilege to truck, barter, and exchange goods and services I find pleasing and to recompense my trading partner so as to encrease the opulence and joy of the both of us.

It is customary when splitting the collarbone of the turkey to make a wish. If I get the better part of the wishbone this year, I wish for an end to the systematic injustice that still plagues the beautiful country I love so dearly.

A happy Thanksgiving to you all, or at least as happy as you can manage in these bleak times.

Not The Onion: Bottled Water Edition

Via T-Gill, Western Washington University to ban bottled water on campus.

Bottled water and water privatization is detrimental to the environment, to human rights to water and simply doesn't make sense in a region where we have clean, amazing tap water,” said Carolyn Bowie, a member of Students for Sustainable Water at Western. “When WWU implements this change, we will proudly support our local water source, Lake Whatcom, and be a leader in standing up against water privatization in the United States and around the world.​ This change is important because it means upholding Western's values in sustainability and social justice.

Water in bottles is not euvoluntary because... sustainability?

I often wonder what people who have not studied economics imagine the role of price is. Surely they have something in mind. I can't for the life of me fathom what it might be.

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.

Labor is not Euvoluntary: Orphanarium Edition

From Delfi.lt, a story I can't find an English translation for. And the online translator isn't working for me. My Lithuanian readers won't have any trouble, but the other two of you might. Here's the skinny: temporary Lithuanian workers in Norway are having their kids taken into state custody on the grounds that they're living in unacceptably poor conditions.

Never mind that they're there of their own free will or that they've made the express, rational decision to save on material comforts in exchange for a higher standard of living back home in the future or that they're making remittance payments to relatives living in squalor back home. No, it's important that everyone is equal, and if that's not the case, the Norweigan Barnevern (CPS) will relocate your children as one of the delightful public services they offer.

How enlightened.

Bastiat squirmed.

Euvoluntary Discrimination

Seen from the lens of correcting historical injustices, authors of anti-discrimination statutes intend to restore justice. Granted, it's some sort of statistical justice, conflating individuals across generations, but justice all the same.

Interestingly, concerns about discrimination are limited to a subset of statistical classes and restricted in their application to instances of BATNA disparity (eg lending, employment, higher ed access). I'm free as a bird now to limit my friendships and romantic entanglements to MA Icelandic redheads with Aleutian huskys between the ages of 25 and 37 should it so suit my fancy.

But woe be to me if I elect to organize. Suppose I wanted to create the Fraternal Order of MA Icelandic Redheads with Aleutian huskys between the ages of 25 and 37. All of a sudden, the moral intuition changes. Why? Why did Augusta's race and gender restrictions so deeply offend people? What's so offensive about a heterosexual-only rule in the Boy Scouts? What is the BATNA to membership at a prestigious golf course? To wearing fabulous neckerchiefs and plenty of flair?

Is it unseemly to ask for elaboration? Is it not enough that a disparity, an injustice exists?

It tends to occur to me that there is genuine injustice in discrimination coupled with coercion. Jim Crow legislation was abominable because it forced segregation on unwilling participants. Fraternal orders involve no explicit coercion. Same for lending. A bank that refrains from making a loan based on irrelevancies like complexion loses valuable business. Ditto employers.

But I don't think the absence of coercion mollifies the moral instincts of the modern median voter. Perhaps BATNA disparity has something to do with it, but even something as terribly competitive as the entire labor market there doesn't seem to be much of a BATNA argument to make, especially for low-skilled labor.

Or maybe the institutional game theory is wrong and it really is pretty easy to sustain a long-lived conspiracy among legion business elites over the course of decades, if not centuries. OPEC can't do it with fewer than a dozen members for more than a few years and without the threat of military invasion, but the whole stinking Chambers of Commerce have no problem over the arc of all capitalism. What probability should I assign this?

At any rate, identifying a problem is a lot different than actually solving it. It's nice that instead of jumping on the trampoline of having the state intervene in the BSA, folks are using the morally superior tactic of shame. It's interesting to me why shame isn't more widely employed in disciplining wayward organizations.

Fair yet Unjust

I enjoy a blessedly short commute. On a bad day, it takes me twenty minutes to get to work. One of the upshots of this is that I infrequently have to test my patience when I accidentally tune in to politicians being interviewed.

Today was a curious exception.

Here was the sentiment, paraphrased: we (our government) can't grant amnesty to undocumented workers (or whatever the euphemism of the day might be) because it wouldn't be fair to the immigrants who waited 18 years or more to get here through the "proper" channels.

We here at EE (well, I do anyway) like to try to estimate the moral intuitions behind folks' willingness to interfere in the peaceful transactions of others. The fairness heuristic comes up pretty often. Egalitarian instincts are pretty useful in a lot of instances. For example, suppose four fleshy, florid foragers find fifty four figs. Three of them theatrically throw the thankless thane thirty figs. This leaves half a dozen each for the gathering party. Obeisance to the elite leaves them destitute. A fairness norm helps all of them fend off starvation. Fairness conquers the hardscrapple brutality imposed by Ma Nature. But is the scarcity imposed by the conditions of nature the same in kind to the scarcity imposed by legislation?

Immigration visas don't grow on trees. The fruit of a tree is limited by the strength of its branches, the fecundity of its soil, the bounty of the rain, the vigor of the sun. The flux of migrants is limited by the caprice of the elected official, the clench of the border authority, the ire of the electorate, the swerve of the lobby. It is a false equivocation to apply the same fairness calculus to each case. Heaping injustice on the heads of peaceful people for the reason injustice has already been piled on the heads of similar people is a perversion of the notion of fairness and an insult to the sensible moral prescription that two wrongs don't make a right.

Immigration isn't euvoluntary. Punishing people for the crime of trying to improve their lot in life is an awfully peculiar way of reacting to a non-euvoluntary situation.

Social Justice and Euvoluntary Exchange

In another excellent Learn Liberty video, Matt Zwoliniski revisits an old ethical conundrum: how can a series of voluntary transactions result in unjust patterns of wealth and income? It's a good question and one that needs to be asked, but there may be more to the story than meets the eye.


Specifically, what if the series of trades that produces the inequitable patterns of wealth and income leaned away from the euvoluntary end of the spectrum? What if the baseball factory pays its Haitian workers a pittance and has them working 75 hour work-weeks on a floor with no ventilation? What if a Wall Street hotshot makes his first million by hawking financial snake oil? What if the executives of a polluting industry pull down eight figures upstream of an inflammable river? What if wealth inequality is built on the back of non-euvoluntary trade? Is such inequality still morally tolerable?

I think I'd agree with Zwolinski that this sort of question is still a little incoherent. Wealth and income inequality is still a symptom of some underlying mechanics even in a highly non-euvoluntary world. Moreover, attempts to bolster the authority of political elites to ameliorate these symptoms may only worsen the dysfunction of the non-euvoluntary production and trade.

It's probably worth asking if we could expect to see inequality even in a purely euvoluntary world. Would an entirely I, Pencil economy produce income inequality? If every single transaction in Read's essay were completely euvoluntary, I'd be comfortable claiming that it's a trivial observation that scale economies can produce significant income and wealth differences even under entirely euvoluntary conditions. Consider the pencil magnate: she runs the pencil business, meaning that even if the producer surplus is a small fraction of total surplus per sale (let's say it's a penny per unit over a total surplus of a dime), the mere fact that she sells ten billion pencils a year means she'll soon be able to comfortably afford a custom-made replica of the Batmobile. Every girl's dream.

So what would a rational policy response be to non-euvoluntary exchanges that give rise to income or wealth inequality? At a first approximation, it seems reasonable that treating underlying causes is probably more useful than treating symptoms. If we have coercion by circumstance, clearing institutional barriers seems wise. For example, voters might want to reconsider whether it's particularly wise to throw parents into the penitentiary for choosing to use recreational drugs. If we're looking at a lot of ex-post regret, a functional common law system is an enviably useful institution.

At any rate, I suspect there's a decent case to be made that some sort of social justice is a laudable project. I would caution that the choice of metrics is important. Selecting gross measures like income and wealth can be highly misleading and can produce policy choices that may lead to attenuated economic development, structural frictions and generational impoverishment.