Help!

I need some help. I really enjoyed this conversation between Justice Breyer and Justice Scalia on how to judge, their philosophies on how to interpret statutes and the Constitution. Naturally, as I'm of a more liberal bent, as well as being on the flexible and pragmatic side, I find Justice Breyer's philosophy more compelling. But Justice Scalia has some interesting things to say as well.

In fact, I enjoyed this debate so much I want to write a paper on it for my political science class. To do so, however, I'd like to have a complete transcript of the conversation. So far, I've completed the first three substantive chapters — I've skipped the Introductions chapter, and completed transcribing Holmes or Hand, Conflicting Ethics and Constraining Personal Views — and I'm working on chapter 5, Purpose.

It would be of tremendous value to me if anyone would help me transcribe the program. Please note who is speaking, and throw in some time tags, so readers can easily find the actual conversation in the video.

I'll offer the completed transcription first to the Federalist Society for inclusion on the website; if they permit it, I'll publish it here for strictly noncommercial use. I'll also email the complete transcript to each person who helps.

If you'd like to help, reserve a chapter in the comments here, transcribe it and mail your transcription to me at lrhamelin (at) gmail (dot) com or post it here in the comments. If you'd like individual credit, please let me know in the email whether and how you'd like credit. I'll also generically credit my readers.


Chapter Status

01: Introduction: skipped/available
02: Holmes or Hand: complete
03: Conflicting Ethics: complete
04: Constraining Personal Views: complete
05: Purpose: in progress: Larry
06: A Living Constitution
07: Conflicting Text of the Constitution
08: History
09: Active Liberty
10: School Voucher Case
11: Q
12: Q1 - Intent of Founders
13: Q2 - Pragmatism
14: Q3 - Activist Judges: in progress: Brian63
15: Q4 - Supreme Court Criticism
16: Q5 - More Unanimous Decisions
17: Q6 - Boldness
18: Q7 - Morrison v. Olsen
19: Q8 - A New Justice Makes a New Court

Eight reasons you won't persuade PZ Myers to believe in a god

Eight reasons you won't persuade me to believe in a god

Mankiw bullshits us on taxes

Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma [link fixed] have already weighed in on Greg Mankiw's whine about taxes [link fixed], but I thought I'd throw in my two cents.

What first struck me was this passage:

Suppose that some editor offered me $1,000 to write an article. If there were no taxes of any kind, this $1,000 of income would translate into $1,000 in extra saving. If I invested it in the stock of a company that earned, say, 8 percent a year on its capital, then 30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

Now let’s put taxes into the calculus. First, assuming that the Bush tax cuts expire, I would pay 39.6 percent in federal income taxes on that extra income. Beyond that, the phaseout of deductions adds 1.2 percentage points to my effective marginal tax rate. I also pay Medicare tax, which the recent health care bill is raising to 3.8 percent, starting in 2013. And in Massachusetts, I pay 5.3 percent in state income taxes, part of which I get back as a federal deduction. Putting all those taxes together, that $1,000 of pretax income becomes only $523 of saving.

And that saving no longer earns 8 percent. First, the corporation in which I have invested pays a 35 percent corporate tax on its earnings. So I get only 5.2 percent in dividends and capital gains. Then, on that income, I pay taxes at the federal and state level. As a result, I earn about 4 percent after taxes, and the $523 in saving grows to $1,700 after 30 years.

Then, when my children inherit the money, the estate tax will kick in. The marginal estate tax rate is scheduled to go as high as 55 percent next year, but Congress may reduce it a bit. Most likely, when that $1,700 enters my estate, my kids will get, at most, $1,000 of it.

HERE’S the bottom line: Without any taxes, accepting that editor’s assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With taxes, it yields only $1,000. In effect, once the entire tax system is taken into account, my family’s marginal tax rate is about 90 percent. [emphasis added]

First of all, why is Mankiw spending about a fourth of his precious column space on this elaborate calculation? The reason is because if he just talked about the actual marginal tax rate on income in excess of $250,000 per year, he would be whining that instead of taking $350 out of that $1,000 — to pay for stuff like roads, police, etc. that Mankiw presumably wants and benefits from — the mean ol' Obama administration would take out a whopping $396. I mean, gosh! that $46 bucks (and a buck or two more for higher Medicare costs) is what makes it worthwhile for poor Mr. Mankiw, who teaches at Harvard dontcha know, to get out of bed in the morning. Right? I don't think so. To make his objection plausible, he has to magnify the issue.

Now, there's a case to be made that taxation in general acts as a disincentive. And there's a case to be made that under certain specialized circumstances a system of taxation can have a profound effect on the overall opportunity costs of complicated series of transactions. But to characterize these effects as an effective marginal tax rate is just irresponsible. Macroeconomics 101 (which I'm actually taking now) tells us that money flows in an endless circle, and the government takes its cut (sometimes more than one) on each transaction around that circle. Follow a dollar around the circle long enough and you can make the "effective" tax rate any value you want. Mankiw is talking about at least six separate transactions:

1. The pay from the editor to him (and the income taxes he pays)
2. The decision to invest the money instead of consuming it immediately
3. The sales from consumers to the corporation he invests in
4. The distribution of dividends and capital gains
5. The reinvestment of those dividends
6. The transfer of this wealth to his children

And then he's compounding some of these transactions over 30 years.

I make about $10,000 per year in income. If I paid one fewer dollar in taxes, I could invest it at 8% for 30 years and, absent any taxes at all, I could pass on $10 to my kids. Indeed I could say that the tax system — just by taking $1 from me this year — is "in effect" taxing my great-great-great-great grandchildren a million dollars. What an injustice!

Also... where does this 8% come from? Investment is foregoing consumption in order to grow the economy. The economy (real GDP) grows at between 2% and 4% per year. Where does the expectation of 8% come from? What investment (without precognition or insider trading) consistently and predictably returns 8% per year for 30 years? If there were such an investment, perhaps we should put the Social Security surplus in that instead of Treasury Bills. Not only does Mankiw expect to invest to grow the economy, he wants to take double that growth as a premium.

I want to make it clear: taxation does indeed exert an enormous effect on compound interest over long periods of time. But Mankiw is blatantly bullshitting us with bogus statistics to characterize it as an effective marginal tax rate. The marginal federal income tax rate for income over $250,000 per year is 35% and may be raised to 39.6%. That's an extra $46 per $1,000 earned over $250,000. Period.

Mankiw then poses a rhetorical question:

Now you might not care if I supply less of my services to the marketplace — although, because you are reading this article, you are one of my customers. But I bet there are some high-income taxpayers whose services you enjoy.

Maybe you are looking forward to a particular actor’s next movie or a particular novelist’s next book. Perhaps you wish that your favorite singer would have a concert near where you live. Or, someday, you may need treatment from a highly trained surgeon, or your child may need braces from the local orthodontist. Like me, these individuals respond to incentives... As they face higher tax rates, their services will be in shorter supply.

Well, yes, but let's turn to page 4 of Mankiw's textbook on economics: the first principle of economics is that people face trade-offs. What are we giving up to have high-income taxpayers provide more services? What's the opportunity cost? Unless I know what I have to give up to squeeze an extra book, concert or New York Times column out of some high-income taxpayer, I don't know if it's actually worth it.

And there's not just one trade-off, but two. First, should we let these high-income taxpayers keep $46 more per $1,000 they earn over $250,000? (Presumably, they have no problem working — and spending — up to $250,000.) And second, should we allow them to compound this money by saving and investing? And it's the second trade-off that Mankiw is asking us to make.

First, Mankiw implies that saving for his children has lower marginal utility than supporting his family's upper-middle-class lifestyle. If it were not, he would sacrifice part of that lifestyle to increase his savings. So he's asking us to give up something (who knows what?) to support the least of his priorities.

Second, we are — according to many economists — in a global savings glut; we have excess productive capacity. If Mankiw were to tell us that he would buy fewer hamburgers or Armani suits because of the tax increase, there would be a much better case for letting him keep the money. But it is precisely because Mankiw intends to save and invest what we would otherwise tax him that we want to take the money away from him. We don't need savings and investment right now; we have too much savings and investment. We need spending. (Well, we really need a revolution to change the fundamental character of our economic system, but I have my "capitalist" hat on for this post.) So when Mankiw asks to be allowed to keep this money to invest it is akin to asking that he be allowed to keep his gun so he can hunt bald eagles.

Sorry Greg. I wouldn't buy this bullshit for a quarter. Let me call the waaaaaaaaaaahmbulance.

15 Things Christine O'Donnell Will Probably Say Next

15 Things Christine O'Donnell Will Probably Say Next

My view of communism

I call myself a communist — I believe I must call myself a communist — because I believe that we should socialize all capital, i.e. we should socialize all the means of production, financial and physical. We cannot afford the individual ownership of capital any more than we can afford the individual ownership of coercive governmental power of non-democratic governments.

But just because I call myself a communist does not mean I therefore agree with everything anyone — or even just the famous anyones — ever said about communism, even the parts that contradict the other parts.

I do not believe, for example, that we should implement a fully planned, pure command economy. We must have some social planning (and even now we have some social planning in capitalist economies, both by the government and the capitalist ruling class as a whole) but there is a very important role for markets. Properly designed, markets are proven to do the complicated and difficult tasks that Marx himself saw in the Labor Theory of Value: measuring and making concrete the "socially necessary" and "abstract" components of socially necessary abstract labor time. I do not, of course, hold the view that just because you call something a market means you're calling it good; neither, however, do I believe that just because you call something a market you're calling it bad. A market is not an end; it is a tool, a means.

I do not believe, for example, that a communist party or some analog should exercise absolute or near-absolute political power "on behalf" of the workers. One important lesson of dialectical materialism is that no ideal — no level of ideological rigor and completeness — can allow a group to "escape" the material dialectic of opposing classes, interest groups and individuals. No group can ever rule on the basis of its ideology, at least not ultimately to the benefit of anyone outside its membership or those who control its membership. I believe the lesson of history is that it would be better to have "bad" communism with democracy — real democracy, not the half-assed bullshit republicanism of the United States — than "good" communism with autocracy.

I do not believe, for example, that the good of society should outweigh the individual good. I don't believe this construction is false; it is, rather, incoherent. There is no such thing as the "good of society" independent of individual good: the good of society is some statistical, abstract property of everyone's individual good. In every society we ask or demand that some individuals — criminals, soldiers, construction workers, taxi drivers* — sacrifice their own good for the good of other individuals, but the whole point of civilization itself is working out ways of structuring these sacrifices in socially legitimate ways. Communism is no different in this respect from any other system of political economy that actually is a political economy.

*IIRC, construction workers and taxi drivers have a higher per capita job-related mortality rate than soldiers, policemen and firefighters.

I do not believe, for example, that to implement communism we must create a better species of human being. I like human beings just the way we are. Of course, we learn, grow and change as individuals, as cultures and as a species, but growth is a collaborative process: it cannot (never mind should not) be imposed from above by the sword, the pen, or the Skinner Box. I think human beings just the way they are are capable of implementing a communist society that has no more (probably considerably less) coercion than modern republican capitalism. (Sadly just because we are capable of something doesn't mean we will actually choose to do it.)

I do not believe, for example, that to implement communism we must do everything that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro or anyone else actually did. The United States is not Russia, China or Cuba; the 21st century is not the 20th. The material conditions — social, political, economic, technological, scientific — of the modern world are very different from the material conditions of the world just a decade ago, much less a century or fifteen decades ago. We have much to learn from history and we must learn it; only those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

I believe what I "choose" to believe, what I do my best to rationally determine according to the evidence I've seen what would be in my own best interest and the best interest of humanity. I may be wrong or mistaken — I don't know everything — and one need only point out arguments or evidence I've not yet considered for me to honestly reconsider any of my positions. But if you think I believe what I manifestly and explicitly do not believe, then fuck you. If you think I'm not a "true" communist because I don't believe what you think I ought to believe, then fuck you.

5 Scientific Reasons Powerful People Will Always Suck

5 Scientific Reasons Powerful People Will Always Suck:

1. Feelings of Power Trigger a Lack of Compassion
2. Power Gives You a False Belief in Your Abilities
3. Experiments Show Power and Hypocrisy Are Linked in the Brain
4. Feeling Powerful Makes It Easier to Lie
5. Power and Self-Absorption Go Hand in Hand

The Stupid! It Burns! (autistic edition)

Poking Fun at Militant Atheists

Ridiculing the less intellectually endowed is rather small-minded and cruel, not to mention a sign of insecurity. Skewering those who routinely dismiss those with whom they disagree as stupid is fair game.

[The remainder of the post consists of quotations from commenters on this thread; I've omitted the attributions.]

[Richard Dawkins is] "the intellectual equivalent of the college freshman who ended up getting a C in his philosophy class because he kept being a smart ass." ...

"I find atheism to be a perfectly acceptable religion for the average adolescent male. No responsibility, no inconvenient connection between one’s observations of reality and metaphysics, no attempt at a large connection between ethics and origins. But, unless one has an arrested intellectual, emotional, or spiritual development, one must eventually grow up." ...

"Folks who have illogical hate for religion latch on to any moron that has the gumption to 'take on' organized religion... Since most folks have decided not to bother to learn how to think, some ignoramus who can use big words and pseudo-science becomes their idol."

"Whoever wants to know what the serious objections to Christianity are should ask us. The unbeliever makes only stupid objections."

The best description of these so called New Atheists has been to call them 'social autisitics.' They simply have no clue that what they are saying is laughable, has been said much better a thousand times before, and that it is all demonstrably false."

Yet another irony meter bites the dust.

Money: a weird idea

In Promise Merchants, Noni Mausa writes:

Let me remind you what a very weird idea money is.

The IOU is a simple idea. Money is like an IOU, but carried beyond the boundary of reason into an entirely different and peculiar territory.

If I write an IOU, it has my name on it, your name, perhaps a date, and some indication of the future services which are owed between us. It's a minimalist contract, easy for anyone to understand.

But money is an IOU, a promise, with no names. The future benefit is merely an abstract number whose value is not defined. A dollar does not equal a loaf of bread, or an hour of babysitting, but is determined by the usage of all the people who accept it.

This is almost theological in its weirdness.

Almost theological, but not quite. Money is basically a debt against everyone, a promise made by the whole society to each other as individuals, i.e. as they individually hold money. That individuals actually do physically own commodities, and can physically provide them on demand. Money doesn't have intrinsic or objective value, but we do have sophisticated social institutions (governments, banks, the Fed etc.) to ensure that we can have reasonable and consistent expectations about how many loaves of bread or hours of babysitting a dollar will buy, now and in the future.

Mausa notes that "An economy built on promises -- a capitalist economy -- only functions when these promises are enforced, and enforced multilaterally on all participants." I have no objection if she's using capitalism here as an example of an economy built on promises, but I would definitely object if she were defining capitalism as an economy built on promises. Every economy is built on promises, even a pure direct barter economy: there has to be some promise that I can physically enter the marketplace without my goods being forcibly expropriated.

Her fundamental point is still sound: however the promises are structured, they have to be enforced and they have to be enforced on everyone. I would add that there are as well constraints on the structure of promises, i.e. what kinds of promises are enforceable and under what circumstances. A structure of promises can be enforced, and — in theory — multilaterally enforced, and still be just as exploitative and oppressive as a society where promises are differentially enforced. As Anatole France famously quipped, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." The notion of universal enforcement is a perfect example of a partial "bourgeois right", a right that is necessary but not sufficient to create an equitable society.

This point is the crux of Lenin's observation in The State and Revolution that no government can stand "outside" society to enforce promises on everyone or structure the promises to be equitable. Government is part of society; one more arena in which individuals and classes struggle for advantage. The notion that a government can do the right thing just because it is in some abstract sense the "right" thing to do is just as inept as the notion that a corporation, responsible to its stockholders, can do so. Every government acts according to its own interests: the interests of its members and the interests of those who control its membership. I would add too that it is equally impossible for the press to stand "outside" society: Like any other group the members of the press act in their own interests and the interests of those who control its membership.

Liberal economists complain: why isn't the government doing what we know they "ought" to be doing? Why is the press generally failing — egregiously — to accurately and truthfully report our true economic and political situation? Their questions were answered 150 years ago by Marx and amplified a century ago by Lenin: The government and the press are part of the material dialectic of history; they cannot in any sense stand "outside" it and act without regard to their own material interests. It is of course equally true that a Communist Party cannot stand outside society; a Communist Party is just as much as any government guided by its own interests. Nobody gets to stand outside society; nobody gets to escape dialectical materialism; nobody will ever do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do.

What is to be done then? No one cannot stand outside society, so we always have to work within society. Hence the original communist ideal that the workers act as a class within society for their own interests against the interests of the capitalist class. A communist party, a communist intelligentsia, cannot therefore not substitute for the working class, or try to act directly in the interests of the working class. A communist intelligentsia must subordinate itself to the working class, in much the same sense that the present-day academic intelligentsia subordinates itself to the capitalist ruling class (or the upper levels of the professional-managerial class, which periodically struggles — sometimes successfully — directly with the capitalist class).

The problem — as yet unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable — is how to get the working class and the masses of humanity to want to take power.

Abandoning religion

Peter Wall continues the conversation. Money quote: "Many atheists go wrong, I think, by construing most of the world in terms of belief: If your belief in God is defective, as I have shown, then your religion must be abandoned."

But really, who says this? Even a glance at the mainstream atheist literature reveals a more robust criticism of religion than Wall suggests here. Consider Christopher Hitchens' contribution to the New Atheist canon, God is Not Great. Hitchens most emphatically does not say that religion should be abandoned just because it rests on a false belief, regardless of the other characteristics of religion. Rather, the religious are doing so many egregiously bad things: the oppression of women and gays, abuse of children and protecting those abusers, undermining science, waging unnecessary and unnecessarily violent wars. Yes, we're all very pleased that most religious people do a lot of good things (although we're skeptical of many of the claims; see especially The Missionary Position, Hitchens' devastating condemnation of Mother Teresa), but that's not really the point: all the good works in the world do not excuse or permit even the smallest evil... and the evils attributed to religion are hardly small. We attribute these evils and especially their persistence directly to the supernaturalism of religion: we probably won't remove evil from the world, but we remove one of the most compelling and prevalent justifications for evil: that a supernatural god (or His priestly spokesmodels) demands we do evil.

The criticism of the religious "moderates" and "liberals" is likewise more nuanced than Wall would suggest. A lot of religious people are entirely good (more-or-less; it cannot be the case that the support for denying ordinary civil rights to homosexuals is limited entirely to Christian "fundamentalists"). The New Atheists might look askance at the supernatural justification of those beliefs, but beyond a few mutterings and quotations from Diderot, it is not the supernaturalism per se that earns our criticism. We criticize, rather, the accommodationist and religious "moderate" demand that we not criticize the supernatural justification of the fundamentalists precisely because that criticism equally undermines the moderates' own supernatural justification. We criticize the moderates because in defending the pillar of their own good, they must defend the pillar of the fundamentalists' evils: necessarily so, for it is, in our judgment, the same pillar.

Our criticism and condemnation might, of course, be mistaken. The New Atheists have no more than the religious any direct line to Cosmic Truths. But we are making the subtle and nuanced arguments in considerable depth and breadth. If you're going to criticize us, criticize us for the content we actually offer. It's just dishonest to ignore 90% of the content and then accuse us of being facile and thin.

The Stupid! It Burns! (don't argue with me edition)

Why You Should Not Argue With Atheists

In fact, let me go a step further and suggest you avoid arguing atheists altogether, in any forum.

I’ll tell you why: atheism is an indefensible superstition.

It is a flamboyantly false belief clung to desperately by only the least imaginative and the most emotionally partitioned of people. ...

Atheism is only, and ever was, an emotional argument.