Rasmusen Weblog
NEW ADDRESS (July 7, 2004):
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/
This weblog covers many topics, including, from
the archive, the topics of Law, Science,
and Economics, from the point of
view of a Christian conservative economist who has read a lot of history and
specializes in game theory and law. My weblog policies
are here. [Email:
Erasmusen@yahoo.com ]
07.05b. A Two-Line, Analog, Volume-Controlled,
Musical Instrument. We went to Saturday's harp concert
by Miss Dan
Yu (Chinese, thus the "Dan"), who won the 2001 International Harp
Competition. It was very good, and I realized that the harp may be unique in
allowing, like the piano, for two separate parts to be played simultaneously,
but by plucking strings. A violin can play chords, but one hand has to hold the
instrument and choose the notes while the other plays the notes. Since each
string of a harp is a separate note, each hand can pick and pluck a separate
note. But the harp is still digital, like the piano, rather than analog, like a
violin. ... [permalink:
04.07.05b.htm]
07.05c. A Christian Attitude Towards Suicide and
Birth Control; The Importance of Relationships. Oddly enough,
"Chapter IV.-Why the Christians Do Not Kill Themselves" of Justin's Second
Apology connects together suicide, birth control, and Pastor Mangrum's ECC
sermon of yesterday ... [permalink: 04.07.05c.htm]
07.04a. A Foreign Pastors' Speech; Partisan
Politics and Religion-- Christian Support for Bush because of His Anti-
Persecution Policy. Various people have noted that perhaps the
clearest indicator of Republican vs. Democrat now is Believer vs. Atheist--
stronger even, I think, than All Other vs. Single Women, and strengthened
further if we put aside the special case of the black vote, which is Believing
but Democrat. This makes me uncomfortable. I'm not sure why-- perhaps because it
makes me fear persecution under Democratic administrations. But the cause-and-
effect may be the other way-- that it is the increasing anti-religiosity of the
Democrats, plus their unconcern about things such as foreign persecution of
Christians, that has driven out the Believers. I thought about these things
on reading the following email. Suppose it is true and persecuted Christians
everywhere hope President Bush is re- elected. Should that determine the vote of
American Christians, or are other issues more important? ...
[permalink: 04.07.04a.htm]
07.04b. The Priorities of a State College
President Blatantly Ranked: 1. A Favored Ethnic Minority, 2. Students, Faculty,
and Staff, 3. The Citizens of His State; An Illustration of the Principal-Agent
Problem. From Gail Heriot: ... [permalink: 04.07.04b.htm]
07.04c. Satellite-Guided Bombs and B-52's. James Dunnigan
tells us that our fancy new bombers have been made obsolete by even fancier
and newer bombs. ... [permalink: 04.07.04c.htm]
07.04d. Ecumenicism vs. Denominationalism. It
is interesting why a Calvinist pastor would convert to Roman Catholicism Tim Bayly
discusses the topic, and suggests it is the desire for authority, for certainty.
Part of his post is on a different angle, though: disgust with the isolation in
individual congregations or denominations of many Protestants: ...
[permalink: 04.07.04d.htm]
07.03a. Pascal on God's Concealment of the Truth,
Contradictions, Hidden Meaning, and the Falsity of Islam. Reading
Pascal's Pensees last night, I came across a number of intriguing passages
... [permalink: 04.07.03a.htm]
07.03b. "Homosexual dominance of the legal system";
"Swedish pastor sentenced to one month's jail for offending homosexuals," How would we judge whether it is true or false that homosexuals dominate a
legal system? Eugene Volokh
says ... [permalink:
04.07.03b.htm]
07.02a. Divorce and Conservatives. I've
talked before about the abolition of heterosexual
marriage and divorce in natural vs. divine
law, and cited the excellent Touchstone article on the delinquency of the conservative churches on this issue. I just
came across the Williams list of
divorced prominent Republicans. I've modified it to get the list below: ...
[permalink: 04.07.02a.htm]
07.01d. Mencken on Making a Living in America.
Reading Professor Leiter's weblog on the philosophy job market a while back, I
thought of H. L. Mencken's analysis of the same market. From page 92 of
Prejudices: A Selection, from "On Being an American". ...
[permalink: 04.07.01d.htm]
07.01c. Yale Men and the Presidency. Chris
Atwood, a Harvard man, pointed me towards this National Review article and
wondered why I wasn't a contender ... [permalink: 04.07.01c.htm]
07.01b. Affirmative Action: Defining Blackness. By now the blogosphere has taken note of the New York Time article on
West Indians, Mulattoes, and Recent African Immigrants at Harvard. ...
[permalink: 04.07.01b.htm]
07.01a. James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale ; English Departments. This novel is entertaining, and I was
gratified to see reference to James Hogg's good novel, The True
Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which made it to my 2003 Christmas List. It
probably is grossly unfair to English departments. The exaggeration of
political correctness and the animus against white male heterosexuals is
probably legitimate exaggeration (it's a comic novel, after all), but I am
skeptical that English departments are really so hierarchical, unscholarly, and
full of petty disputes. Still, I like the passage below, ...
[permalink: 04.07.01a.htm]
06.30a. Thomas Sowell on Douglass and Education,
Optimal Terrorist Attacks, and Race Hustlers. Thomas Sowell
via Clayton Cramer. ... [permalink: 04.06.30a.htm]
06.30b. The Lack of Civic-Mindedness of Mexican-
Americans. Steve Sailer
points out a striking fact:
Walking around downtown Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me
that Ben Franklin started more civic institutions than have all three million
people of Mexican descent in Los Angeles County.
As Gregory Rodriguez wrote in the Feb. 29 Los Angeles Times:
"For example, in Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the
U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery or broad-based
charity."
This bodes ill for the future of America, unless we can inculcate civic virtue
into our Mexican immigrants. I wonder if Mexican-Americans have founded
churches? That was a huge, little-noticed success of Roman Catholic immigrants
in earlier times. [permalink:
04.06.30a.htm]
06.30c. Chein v. Shumsky, , Perjury by
Expert Witnesses; Trial Lawyer Judges? I've wondered what it takes for an
expert witness to get prosecuted and convicted for perjury ever since reading of
Martha Nussbaum's testimony in Romer. It is hard to prove that a
witness is giving as his expert opinion something that he doesn't really
believe, but often do experts make statements of disprovable fact. On page 127
of Frances Wellman's wonderful The Art of Cross-Examination, he
tells of the lawyer who impeached the testimony of one doctor by asking him, ...
[permalink: 04.06.30c.htm]
06.30d. The Ryan Divorce Papers Disclosure; Court
Records and Publicity; Stigma. The Illinois Republican Senate candidate
has dropped
out after newspapers persuaded the judge to release some of his divorce
records: ... [permalink:
04.06.30d.htm]
06.29a. Matt Yglesias on the Immorality of
Conservatives; The Unconstrained Vision; Demonization of Opponents; Liberals on
Character. Last week, Matt
Yglesias unconsciously shows that liberals don't even know what "good
character" means: ... [permalink: 04.06.29a.htm]
06.29b. The Demonization of Rush Limbaugh Via
Instapundit,I found Instapunk
explaining something about Rush Limbaugh: ... [permalink: 04.06.29b.htm]
06.28a. Radical Left Humor: Nader on Michael Moore.
Via Instapundit, I learn that Ralph Nader thinks
Michael Moore, undoubtedly someone to the left of the Democrats (and perhaps
even to the left of Nader) has sold out to the Democrats. More surprisingly,
this leftwing site displays good writing and wit! Perhaps Christopher Hitchens
(my June 24 post) and I have been too negative
about socialist humor. ... [permalink: 04.06.28a.htm]
06.27a. Samuel Wesley the Elder: History of the Old
Testament in verse (1715). I came across this long poem in an IU
database ($) and am thinking of using it for a children's Bible. Here's a
sample-- Abraham and Isaac. ... [permalink: 04.06.27a.htm]
06.27b. North Carolina Judge Bans God from His
Courtrooms; Sheriffs Refuse to Obey. Via Via Christianity
Today, I learn of the Judge Honeycutt case of rebellion against a runaway judge:
... [permalink: 04.06.27b.htm]
06.27c. U.S. Army Refuses to Release Names of Dead
Soldiers to Someone Who Wishes to Honor Them, because He Uses Religious
Language. Via Christianity
Today, we learn of
anti-religious feeling in the U.S. Army brass: ...
[permalink: 04.06.27c.htm]
06.26a Takings for "Public Purposes"; Kau v. City & County. A reader sent me the depressing
court opinion, Kau v. City & County, No. 23674 (Haw. Sup. Ct. June 22, 2004),
which reiterates the Hawaiian judicial precedent that the government can seize
your property, if it pays the market price, and give it to someone else who
wants it and has more political power, even if there is no public purpose
involved. It is even worse than I'd thought, because the *supposed* public
purpose is to reduce land prices-- that is, pure redistribution, to hurt
landowners and benefit other people. ... [permalink: 04.06.26a.htm]
06.26b More on Sunstein and the Naturalness of
Property Rights. At
Catallarchy, Michael Yuri writes, re my Sunstein reply: ...
[permalink: 04.06.26b.htm]
06.26c The Gettier Counterexample to Knowledge as
True Justified Belief. Brian Leiter
tells an interesting story that shows the idea of knowledge as "true justified
belief" is more complicated than it seems. ... [permalink: 04.06.26c.htm]
06.26d Harvard Business School and Research. Harvard Business School has always been an anomaly because its student quality
is so much higher than its research quality, which is quite low per faculty
member. This is deliberate: they have had a policy of tenuring people for
writing cases rather than for publishing journal articles. Now it seems, they are
getting serious about scholarship, perhaps because of the influence of economist
President Larry Summers. [permalink: 04.06.26d.htm]
06.25a More on Pardons; Infectious Invalidity. On June 23 I discussed medieval law and
pardons. A reader commented that pardons are easily abused, as shown by the
Clinton Pardons of 2000. Nonetheless, I think they should be used more than they
are. Clinton was a lame duck who didn't care what happened to his policies or
party after he left office (no more than while he *was* in office-- it is a
mystery to me why the man who lost the Democratic Party their 30-year dominance
remains a hero to them). More often, an executive who issues corrupt pardons
will pay a political price. ... [permalink: 04.06.25a.htm]
06.25b Sir Austin Bradford Hill on Causation and
Correlation. I was just reading "The Environment and Disease:
Association or Causation?" By Sir Austin Bradford Hill CBE DSC FRCP(hon) FRS
(Professor Emeritus of Medical Statistics, University of London), a useful
article for teaching statistics, ... [permalink: 04.06.25b.htm]
06.25c "Point at a Deer and Say It's a Horse";
Rectification of Names; Orwell. On June 7 I talked about the Chinese story, "Point at a Deer and Say It's a Horse". A
reader commented on it, and that reminded me that the story should be read in
conjunction with Confucius on the Rectification of Names and the Five-Legged Dog
story from my February 18 post. This weblog is useful for helping me make ideas and facts cohere. So
much passes us by, known one month and forgotten the next. Orwell on
language, and his book, 1984, could also be brought in. ...
[permalink: 04.06.25c.htm]
06.24a Democrats Hire Felons to Register Voters
Door-to- Door. That's the story. Apparently these felons are
so bad that the Missouri bureaucrats are scared to help the Democrats to get
them the jobs. ... [permalink:
04.06.24a.htm]
06.24b Insane Democrats: Krugman and Gore.
Bret Stephens
in the WSJ notes that many Democrats seem be literally insane, if they really
mean what they say. Paul Krugman is a sad case for we economists. Al Gore isn't
mentioned here, but as I noted May 27 he is sounding psychotic too. Why does mild-mannered, moderate
George W. Bush have this effect on people? Or is it the recoil from having had
to defend Clinton too many times, and losing touch with reality? ...
[permalink: 04.06.24b.htm]
06.24c Christopher Hitchens on Michael Moore and
Bias. In Slate,
Christopher Hitchens has a long and well-written critique of Michael Moore's
latest movie, a piece of obvious anti- American propaganda. ...
[permalink: 04.06.24c.htm]
06.24d House Report Condemning the CIA for
Incompetence. I've been wondering when someone in government would get
around to saying publicly that the CIA is incompetent. From CNN:
... [permalink:
04.06.24d.htm]
06.23d C.J.Brian on Bad Thoughts; The Use of
Pardons and Equity to Rescue Justice in the Middle Ages; Heinonline for Finding
Old Law Review PDF Files; Law vs. Equity and Specialization of Courts.
My research assistant Calin found a good new database, http://www.heinonline.org/ ($), which has law
reviews going way back. I can download as pdf, convert to JPG, and then use my
available OCR software to extract quotes. The opening quote of James Ames's
"Law and Morals", Harvard Law Review 22: 97-1`13 (1908- 09) makes me think of
Holmes's "bad man" in "The Path of the Law": ... [permalink:
04.06.23d.htm]
06.23a Dept. of Transportation Paean to Sodomy. Norman Mineta
, Secretary of Transportation, issued this proclamation of pride in his
department's perverse sexual activities. Will we next see a celebration of
alcoholics in government service, or philanderers, or cocaine sniffers? I'm
sure all are well represented, and many of them are valuable employees. ...
[permalink: 04.06.23a.htm]
06.23b Stigler on Economists and Lawyers,
Sympathy, Ethics, Justice, and Sellers as Victims (1972). I just read
a very good article by George J. Stigler "The Law and Economics of Public
Policy: A Plea to the Scholars," The Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1.
(January 1972), pp. 1-12. Here are some choice bits: ...
[permalink: 04.06.23b.htm]
06.23c Sunstein on Property as a Legal Construct.
Guest blogging over at Volokh Conspiracy, Cass Sunstein
says that property is not natural, but a creation of law. He's wrong,
except if we're using "property" as a legal term of art. But if we're using it
as a legal term of art, it's not surprising the term wouldn't exist except for
the law. ... [permalink:
04.06.23c.htm]
06.22b Reagan's Religion. I was too hard
on Ronald Reagan on June 7. Christianity Today
has some evidence that he actually was a true Christian: ...
[permalink: 04.06.22b.htm]
06.22a Corruption and Pederasty in the Catholic
Church in Los Angeles and Mexico. How can anyone remain a member of the
Roman Catholic Church? This Dallas Morning News series, mentioned by me on June 19, is truly shocking. Read this excerpt first,
and then see whether you agree with my inflammatory comments at the end--
remembering also my May 31 post on Cardinal Law's
reward for his scandalous behavior. What the Dallas Morning News has discovered,
in brief, is that the cardinals in Mexico City and Los Angeles conspired to
shuttle a pedophile priest back and forth across the border when things got too
hot for him, that they kept the police off his trail, that they blocked
prosecution in Mexico, and that they and the Mexican police and judges lie
shamelessly. ... [permalink:
04.06.22a.htm]
06.21a. Hiibel Case; Police Questioning; Self
Incrimination; USC 18-1001. A recent case, Hiibel, 542 U. S. ____
(2004), says that a state law requiring a person under suspicion to tell
a policeman his name is not unconstitutional. This is an example of a perfectly
reasonable law that no person reading the Constitution would possibly think was
prohibited by it. Moreover, someone who knew of the tremendously intrusive
questions the government is allowed to require people to answer for taxpaying,
the census, environmental regulation-- *any* regulatatory area, really--
registering to drive or to build a house or to do any perfectly normal
activity-- someone who knew of how intrusive our government is in these areas
would wonder why someone can refuse to tell a policeman his name-- especially if
the state legislature has passed a law specifically allowing that, and the state
governor has signed it, most likely with 90%+ support from voters ...
[permalink: 04.06.21a.htm]
06.21b. The First Day of Summer? No! This
is the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, and for astronomical
reasons it is conventionally known as the first day of summer. But that is
wrong. What makes the summer "summer"? Hot days and the long school vacation.
One good way to define summer is using the school vacation, though that, of
course, varies depending on the school. A more universal way (at least for the
northern hemisphere) is to say that summer lasts from June 1 to August 31, so
that June, July, and August are the summer months. That's what I think makes
sense. ... [permalink: 04.06.21b.htm
]
06.20a. Jonathan Edwards on Perceiving God's
Excellency. A very good sermon of Jonathan Edwards is his 1734 "A Divine
and Supernatural Light Immediately Imparted to the Soul, by the Spirit of God,
Shown to Be Both a Scriptural and Rational Doctrine". The central point is
that God's grace is the opening of a new sense, like opening somebody's eyes, a
sense which aids reason and the other senses in learning the truth.
[permalink: 04.06.20a.htm]
06.19a. A Good Economics Discussion. I
had a good weekly meeting with my graduate students yesterday. Like the law-and-
econ lunch of the previous day, it was true scholarly discussion. We talked
about the meaning of heteroskedasticity; its translation into Chinese ...
[permalink: 04.06.19a.htm]
06.19b. Racial Discrimination in Kidney
Transplants. On June 18 I reported on how an
aborigine criminal in Australia received a lower sentence because of his race. A
different odd sort of racial discrimination is going on in America: the rules
for who gets kidney transplants are being designed to give blacks an edge they
would not have if no racial lobbying was at work. A June 18, 2004 WSJ article
was titled: "In Kidney Quest, New Rules Boost Chances for Blacks; Reform Seeks
to Close Gap In Transplant Wait Times; Worries About a Downside" , but it
could as easily have been titled, "In Kidney Quest, New Rules Suppress Chances
for Whites and Asians; Politically- Motivated Regulations Seeks to Close Gap
In Transplant Wait Times; Unnecessary Deaths Will Result". ...
[permalink: 04.06.19b.htm]
06.19c. The Roman Catholic Pederast Priest
Scandal Goes to All Six Continents; The Dallas Morning News. An NPR
interview and a weblog link (Instapundit?) says that the Dallas Morning News has
found that shifting pederast priests to new, unwary congregations is Roman
Catholic practice worldwide, not just in Massachusetts. Here's more evidence
beyond my May 31 post on Cardinal Law's reward
for his scandalous behavior that the Vatican is not an institution to be
admired. ... [permalink: 04.06.19c.htm
]
06.19d. Newspaper Power Under McCain-Feingold.
Here is an early example of one of the biggest loopholes in the McCain-
Feingold campaign finance act: newspapers and TV stations can do as much free
advertising as they want to for a candidate. ... [permalink: 04.06.19d.htm ]
06.18e. Australian Prison Sentence Preferences
for Aborigines. Eugene Volokh
quotes an Australian newspaper ... [permalink: 04.06.18e.htm]
06.18a. Newfoundland's Voluntary Return to
Undemocratic Colonial Rule. The WSJ article, "Democracy Can Be Perverse,"
by David Hale, tells us of an example of a democracy that voluntarily, and
rightly, gave up its votes in exchange for money and good government: ... [permalink: 04.06.18a.htm]
06.18b. Midkiff, Takings Law, Rent-Seeking, Law
Lunch. Our law-and-econ lunch had a good discussion today of Midkiff, 467
US 229 (1984) and a Heller article arguing for private takings. We also
discussed soft budget constraints, and the profits of inframarginal firms, the
Poletown Case, the Good Shepherd Church Goat Farm situation, takings doctrine,
the effects good and bad of town subsidies to businesses, and whether such
subsidies are unconstitutional. Quite invigorating. Midkiff is a remarkable
case, as extreme in its own way as the 1930's Supreme Court decision that
someone who grew wheat for his own consumption was engaging in interstate
commerce and hence subject to federal regulation. The holding was that it is
okay for a state to require someone to sell his property to someone else at a
forced government price so long as the state claims the transfer has a public
purpose. ... [permalink: 04.06.18b.htm
]
06.18c. Chunnel Shareholders: "Le Petit Porteur de
Trou" The caption, "Le Petit Porteur de Trou", is translated, "The Little
Shareholder of the Hole", This is a nice pun, though, because "porteur" means
not just shareholder, but porter or carrier, and "hole' refers both to the
tunnel and to the financial deficits of the company. [permalink:
04.06.18c.htm]
06.18d. The Birthday Problem. Professor
Diaconis came to give a Patten Lecture here this spring, and I've been
referring to every since. One of his lectures took the birthday problem as a
starting point. Philip J. Erdelsky
has a good page on it, and he state its essence:
The probability that at least two of N people have the same birthday rises above
0.5 when N=23. [permalink:
04.06.18d.htm]
06.17a. Public Radio is Dropping Classical Music.
From The Weekly Standard ($)
... [permalink: 04.06.17a.htm]
06.17b. Should the Roman Catholic Church
Excommunicate All Democrats, Even Anti-Abortion Ones? I was just reading
Professor Thomas Smith's sensible remarks on abortion. He made
the usual point that if (a) the Roman Catholic church believes that abortion is
murder, and (b) a church member promotes abortion, then (c) the church has a
moral duty to expel that member. He made the correct analogy to what the church
should do if a member promoted the extermination of Jews and Gypsies, ... [permalink: 04.06.17b.htm]
06.16a. Student Evaluations of Professors. .Who
would have thought back in the 1960's that by 2000, professors would be denied
tenure based on casual evaluations by the students they were grading? Yet that
is the case today. At the end of the semester, after midterm grades but before
finals, IU policy is for professors to allocate 10 minutes of a class for
students to fill in a rather silly 20-question questionnaire to rate them on a
scale from 1 to 7. This is really the only way the University keeps track of
teaching quality. And it matters, for salary and for keeping one's job if one
does not yet have tenure. ... [permalink: 04.06.16a.htm]
06.16b. "Of the 112 Senate votes this year, Kerry
has voted just 14 times" Via Best of the Web, ...
[permalink: 04.06.16b.htm]
06.16c. General Janis Karpinski, the Woman
Commanding Abu Ghraib Prison. . Perhaps the biggest story from Abu Ghraib
Prison, and one involving higher-ups, is how the incompetent Jani Karpinski was
promoted to General and to command the prison, and to keep command after
problems started to be noticed (even before the abuse scandal). The likely
answer is feminism, and we now have a clear answer-- if the various problems
before were not enough-- to the question of whether women soldiers make the
army more effective. I'm still collecting information, but here is enough to
make it clear someone in the Pentagon should be fired. ...
[permalink: 04.06.16c.htm]
06.16d. Jim Bennett: "Three Pro-War British
parties take 67% of vote, push anti-war party to fourth place" versus "British
voters punishing Blair over Iraq" . Jim Bennett notes that
though the British EU election results are interpreted by the media as voters
rejecting the Iraq War, they actually show the exact opposite-- or else, that
many voters hate the European Union, another fact that liberals like to conceal.
... [permalink: 04.06.16d.htm]
06.15a. Steyn on CIA Defects as Shown in the
August 6, 2001 Presidential Briefing. . Mark Steyn in The Telegraph writes ...
[permalink: 04.06.15a.htm]
06.15b. The Tenure Case of Economist James Smith at
Smith College. . There are few enough cases of real-world politics
affecting tenure cases in economics that I want to record this one. His vita
shows not much research, but this is a college, not a university, and he is one
of only two professors in the department with a website (the chaired professor,
Prof. Zimbalist, is the other), so it seems likely he is ahead of his
colleagues. ... [permalink:
04.06.15b.htm]
06.15c. The Smoking of Orthodox Jews and Pre-
Written Drug Confessions. . I was just reading " A Model of Dysfunctional
Urges and Addiction, " Feb 20, 2004 draft, by Andrew Weiss and Jacob Glazer.
They say that:
(1) There are orthodox Jews who smoke heavily except on the Sabbath.
(2) In some treatment programs clients write confession letters to be mailed if
they fail drug tests. [permalink:
04.06.15c.htm]
06.15d. I like this picture of buffalos. .
06.14a. "We Don't Want You to Share Your Missile
Defense System. We Want You to Share Your Women." . That's the caption to
a good cartoon from the June 26, 2003 Weekly Standard. It captures a crucial
idea: conflicts are ultimately not over the means, but over the ends. The
barbarian wants the bourgeois women; he is not concerned with being able to
defend himself against bourgeois wars of aggression. [permalink:
04.06.14a.htm]
06.14b. What if America Had Not Entered World War
I? . A good question. I suppose the part of the German 1918 offensive that
hit the French would have gone a bit further (the Americans were not involved
in the attack on the British). It still would have failed, even if it conquered
twice as much territory as it did. The Allied 1918 offensive would have been
slower, and probably the war wouldn't have ended till 1919. But Bulgaria,
Turkey, and Russia would still have been knocked out in 1918. And the Allied
blockade would still have created a crisis in Germany in 1918. So the Americans
were not all that important. Nor were we important in the peace. Wilson held out
for the League of Nations and for calling the conquered colonies "mandates",
neither of which had any importance. Did he have any other impact?
[permalink: 04.06.14b.htm]
06.14c. Charles Graner, Abu Ghraib, and the Folly
of Blaming Rumsfeld. . Richard Lowry
has this good comment on Abu Ghraib, based on looking at what happened there
rather than what documents said about policy in general: ...
[permalink: 04.06.14c.htm]
06.14d. John Moore's Spleen and Fiduciary Duty. . John Moore's spleen was removed by his doctor, who then made millions for
himself and his university by using the spleen to patent a useful cell line.
The doctor did not tell Mr. Moore he was doing this, or get any kind of
permission, though he did try to trick Moore into signing away his rights (which
Moore did not do, and which made Moore suspicious enough to investigate). ...
[permalink: 04.06.14d.htm]
06.13d. A Piece Rate Minimum Wage in British
Columbia. . The picture above shows the schedule for piece-rate minimum
wage in British Columbia. Click here if
you want a bigger version (though how it will look depends on your computer)
06.13c. The African Church, Principle, and Money.
. The chairman of The Council of
Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA) said in April that he will not accept
money from apostate American churches. ... [permalink: 04.06.13c.htm]
06.13b. Mark Steyn on "The Day After Tomorrow"
movie. . Mark
Steyn is typically optimistic about what would happen if the silly scenario
in this movie were true and millions died of sudden cold. ...
[permalink: 04.06.13b.htm]
06.13a. Don Feder on the Liberal Media: A
Definitive Article. . Don Feder has
written the best analysis of the liberal near-monopoly on news and publishing
that I've seen. It simply notes facts, the most powerful mode of argument when
one is speaking to thinking people (admittedly, a very special case): ... [permalink: 04.06.13a.htm]
06.12b. Pope: "Vice is a monster of so frightful
mien". . Alexander Pope makes a good argument for not talking too much about
vice, even to condemn it, as Pastor Timothy Bayly said to me at lunch yesterday
at Noodle Town. From World of Quotes
is a good website for quotes because it sometimes gives sources (so few people
appreciate the importance of this!), and Pope's, Essay on Man (ep. II, l. 217)
(1733): ... [permalink: 04.06.12b.htm
]
06.12a. Mark Steyn on the Multicultural View of
the State. . Mark
Steyn, in an essay on Canada, captures a big American problem, what he call
the "Clintonian view of the state", "as arbiter and distributor of largesse".
This, by the way, is the class ethnic city machine view-- the government is a
pot of money to be divided amongst one's friends and allies. ...
[permalink: 04.06.12a.htm]
06.11a. Fishy Prosecutorial Dropping of Charges
in a Monroe County Drunk Driving Case. . This case shows the power of the
county prosecutor, and how if he can't get a judge to approve a plea bargain, he
can just reduce the charges anyway. It also is an example of a judge so
disgusted with this that he refuses to hear any case at all-- probably against
the rules. From "Angry judge rejects plea bargain Prosecutor's office agreed to
drop felony charge against man who had .22 blood-alcohol content," by Katy
Murphy, Bloomngton Herald-Times, May 21, 2004: ... [permalink:
04.06.11a.htm]
06.11b. G8 Protesters at Indiana. . Indiana
University had an international economics conference around the time of the G8
government meetings, and protesters showed up. From the Bloomington Herald-
Times, June 5, 2004. ... [permalink: 04.06.11b.htm ]
06.10a France Fines Brigitte Bardot for
Criticizing Islam. . Via Drudge, we find that France has fined Brigitte Bardot for
political speech, as a matter of routine: ... [permalink: 04.06.10a.htm]
06.10b Suicide Bombings: Samson. . Samson's
death is an example of a laudable suicide, and something very like a suicide
bombing-- though in a regular war, and with considerable provocation. Here is
the story, from Judges 16: 21-30. ... [permalink: 04.06.10b.htm]
06.09d Murders as Professors; Manchester's Paul
Agutter. . On
September 28, 2003 I commented that a professor who was a despicable
murderer in the distant past was not thereby disqualified from teaching
unrelated subjects. A much harder case is this one, ...
[permalink: 04.06.09d.htm]
06.09c Bush's Success in Iraq, and Comparison
with Vietnam. . Instapundit on March 4, 2004 quotes two
emails he received, one on the astounding success of the Bush Administration's
anti-terror policy, so successful that people have forgotten the problem
(doesn't it remind you of Bush Senior's astounding success in Gulf War I?), and
the other comparing it to the lack of success in Vietnam: ...
[permalink: 04.06.09c.htm]
06.09a Just Links, for Lack of Time to
Comment. .
Wahabi destruction of quasi-pagan sites, and Saudi destruction
of historic mosques in Medina.
Indices of Corruption, via my brother, Andrew.
UN Ambulances Are
Routinely Used to Transport Terrorists
"What We
Don�t Know Can Hurt Us," ,Heather Mac Donald, on hysterical opposition to
government use of commercial data for monitoring terrorists.
06.09b "The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna,"
by Charles Wolfe. . John
Derbyshire has good thoughts, plus a good poem, "The Burial of Sir John
Moore at Corunna," by Charles Wolfe: ... [permalink: 04.06.09b.htm]
06.08b Putting a Murdered Corpse in a Rental
Storage Unit-- Game Theory. . I think I might have heard about this crime
story from the WSJ's Best of the Web. ... [permalink: 04.06.08b.htm]
06.08a The Patriot Act. . Brian Leiter
recently reported on two supposed
Patriot Act outrages. Even if both are outrages, neither seems to have been
caused by the Patriot Act. ... [permalink: 04.06.08a.htm]
06.07d Joke List: How to Lower Gas Prices. .
Via Marginal Revolution, here is
"How to Lower Gas Prices" a list of joke suggestions. These would be useful
for teaching economics. ... [permalink: 04.06.07d.htm ]
06.07c "Point at a Deer and Say It's a Horse";
False Preferences; Asch Experiment. . My student Yan Meng give me this
translation (slightly modified by me) of the Zhi Lu Wei Ma ("point at a deer and
say it's a horse") story, ... [permalink: 04.06.07c.htm]
06.07b Dignity, Purpose, and Rank-- Remains of
the Day. . In Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day,
the narrator- butler, Mr. Stevens, tells how in a country village a certain Mr.
Harry Smith said that it was important to dignity to voice opinions on the great
issues of the day. That made him think of an episode when a guest of his
employer, Mr. Spencer, called him in and asked him for his opinions on various
questions of economics and international politics, to make the point that
someone like a butler was too uneducated to have a right to an opinion. ...
[permalink: 04.06.07b.htm ]
06.07a Ronald Reagan. I do think
Reagan was a good president, but it's always puzzled me how conservatives
adulate him when it wasn't clear that he was any more conservative than George
W. Bush and it was clear that his conservatism was less deep. Since I see all
kinds of comments on his good points, let me see if I can list some bad points:
... [permalink: 04.06.07a.htm]
06.05a Partisan Democrat Anti-Nader Bias in the
Liberal News Media, a Lexis-Nexis Search. It's interesting to find
evidence that the media bias is not just liberal, but partisan Democrat. The
Weekly Standard tells us, ... [permalink: 04.06.05a.htm]
06.05b A Test for Spiritualists and Purported ESP
Adepts. Spiritualists and ESP adepts commonly fail to achieve any
supernatural results when in the presence of magicians-- people expert in
sleight of hand and tricks generally. Martin Gardner wrote often on this point.
The tricksters often respond that the presence of magicians, or skeptics
generally, makes them too nervous, disturbs the spirits, and suchlike. The
solution to both problems is as follows. ... [permalink: 04.06.05b.htm]
06.04a Cowen on Cheese and Pepper and Bad
Regulation; George Mason Chinese Restaurant. Tyler Cowen had a very
good February 2004 weblog entry at
Marginal Revolution, : ... [permalink: 04.06.04a.htm]
06.03a A May 27 Wall Street Journal article
is titled, "Early
Years Belie Kerry's Patrician Image" ... [permalink: 04.06.03a.htm]
06.02c Former NYTimes Editor, Libel Bush on
National Guard Service, Recommends That Kerry Lie to the Voters, Wrong on
History. Via
Best of the Web, via Capt ain's
Quarters, I found a Howell Raines Manchester Guardian article in which the former editor of the New
York Times, Howell Raines, manages to combine libel, historical mistake, and an
admission that he thinks liberals should tell the public lies, for the
good of society. ... [permalink: 04.06.02c.htm]
06.02a Joseph Wilson Confirms Iraq-Niger
Connection. I blogged last year on Iraq,
Bush and Uranium from Niger. In John Derbyshire's "Third
Way in Iraq", ... [permalink: 04.06.02a.htm ]
06.02b FBI Director's Freeh's Computerphobia and
Incompetence on Terrorism in the Clinton Years. I commented last year on
FBI Iincompetence in the Sibel Edmonds case of
the Turkish spy. Now I learn about two more problems-- poor computer
systems and a Clinton FBI that was more worried about abortion protesters than
about Islamic terrorists. ... [permalink: 04.06.02b.htm]
06.01a PhD Student Placement in Philosophy and
Economics; Rookie Publishing; The MIT Economics Class Entering in 1980; Frank
Fisher's Retirement Book. I'll collect various thoughts on PhD Programs in
this entry. I've been reading Brian Leiter's May 31 and e
arlier posts on placement of Philosophy PhDs, which links to the very
complete
Michigan data. Quality of placement has been an issue at my own university.
A while back, the Dean cut the size of the business school PhD program in half.
I'm sure the real reason was to save money and to turn faculty attention away
from research and onto teaching MBA students, but the purported reason was
that Indiana was not placing its students at comparable institutions. That's a
silly argument, ... [permalink:
04.05.01a.htm]
05.31b George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln in 2000
and 1864. The parallels between the political situations of Abraham
Lincoln in Summer 1864 and George W. Bush in Summer 2004 are remarkable. ...
[permalink: 04.05.31b.htm]
05.31a Cardinal Law's Promotion; The Roman
Catholic Church's Toleration of Pedophilia. Cardinal
Law, the disgraced former Archbishop of Boston, has just been given a
promotion by the Vatican. Pope John Paul has his good points, but he shows by
this that he feels early retirement is too harsh a penalty for a bishop guilty
of large-scale facilitation of priestly pedophilia. Cardinal Law showed that
his first principle was "Look after the clergy," and Pope John Paul apparently
shares that principle. ... [permalink: 04.05.31a.htm]
05.30c Updates. The Wall Street Journal
has posted an article I mentioned on May 27, John
Yoo's "Terrorists
Have No Geneva Rights".
A reader referred me to Chuc k Missler
on the names in Genesis, as prophetic, in connection with my May 23 post on the subject.
05.30b Questions at Sermons; Normal vs.
Abnormal vs. Subnormal; Being Filled with the Spirit. Pastor Don Kouwe
preached today at ECC. He has a pleasantly professorial style, using an overhead
projector and asking for questions at the end since he had a little extra time.
Two good quotes were Mr. Chafer's
It is not a matter of acquiring more of the the Spirit, but of the Spirit
acquiring more of us.
and Vance Havner's
Most of are so subnormal that if we ever became normal we could be
considered abnormal.
[ 04.05.30b.htm]
05.30a Homosexuality, Pride, and Crossing Lines;
Suicide. There at the same time seems to be too much, and too little,
attention to homosexuality and condemnation of it by the Church-- by which I
mean true Christians as individuals, congregations, and parachurch
organizations. ... [permalink:
04.05.30a.htm]
05.29a Clayton Cramer on Increasing Prison
Populations; "Life" Sentences of 29 Years in Prison; African-American Crimes
Rates. A recent government report on prison statistics has attracted
some comment, and I did a bit of websurfing on it. The table above comes from "State Rates
of Incarceration by Race," The Sentencing Project, 2004, and I'll return to
it later. Clayton Cramer has useful things to say about why a one-
time change to stricter sentencing will cause the prison population to keep
rising even if crime rates fall as a result: ... [permalink: 04.05.29a.htm]
05.28a Just Links, for Lack of Time to Comment.
A blatant, libellous, Michael Moore lie.
Volokh on Slate
magazine's mocking of Bush for shaking the artificial hand of a Saddam
victim.
Dunnigan on
Iraq
T he
Chinese Thirteen Classics
A Rasmusse n
Reports survey found that 64% of voters believe that American society is
generally fair and decent. Additionally, 62% believe the world would be a better
place if other countries became more like the United States.
Clayton Cramer on "the world's first DVD player that can seamlessly skip over violence,
swearing, nudity and other potentially offensive movie content..." and
objections to the legality of the device.
05.27c Trust and Reputation and Self-Fulfilling
Distrust. At the Law Lunch today, Professor Stake was talking about various
interesting papers from the Grutter Biology and Law conference he just attended.
The subject of Self-Fulfilling Distrust came up. Somebody had a paper on the
optimal level of tax enforcement. But here is how I think that it would make
sense that greater enforcement could lead to increased bad behavior. ...
[permalink: 04.05.27c.htm]
05.27a The Geneva Conventions; Reciprocity;
Protests Against John Yoo; Morality vs. Law; Substance vs. Process.
How ironic! John Yoo finishes his tour of duty in Washington and returns to
Berkeley, no doubt thinking that now he has left the sphere of public glare and
rabid partisans who jump on a scholar's every clear and honest word. And when
he gets to Berkeley students immediately start protesting his technical legal
writings and calling him a war criminal! ... [permalink: 04.05.27a.htm]
05.27b George Bush's Honesty; Al Gore's Sanity.
According to Al
Gore, George Bush ... [permalink: 04.05.27b.htm ]
05.26a Are Advertisements and Posted Prices
Contract Offers? This came up in our law and economics lunch a while
back. A grocery store has labelled a can of beans $.59. When I take it to the
cash register, can the store refuse to sell it to me at that price? The
Curmudgeonly Clerk recently addressed a similar question, ... [permalink: 04.05.26a.htm]
05.26b Gingrich on the Rogue State Department;
Multilateralism vs. Unilateralism; Process vs. Substance. Newt Gingrich
has a very good article, "Rogue State Department," Foreign Policy, p.
42 (July/August 2003). It's not on the web, but a related, inferior, speech of
his is
"Transforming the State Department". In the Foreign Policy article
... [permalink: 04.05.26b.htm]
05.26c Business School Objectives. Business
schools pay too much attention to keeping MBA students happy. To be sure, that
is worthy goal, but it is not important in itself, nor is it important
indirectly because it is profitable, unless the means employed are cheap. As The Economist writes, ... [permalink:
04.05.26c.htm]
05.25a The Duties of a President-Judge;
Easterbrook, Amelia, and Elizabeth at ALEA; Running Conferences. One
morning at the American Law and Economics Association conference I brought my
two girls-- Amelia, aged five, and Elizabeth, three-- to Northwestern Law
School to see where I'd been spending my time while we were visiting Chicago. As
we came in, we passed Frank Easterbrook, ... [permalink: 04.05.25a.htm]
05.25b Just Links, for Lack of Time to Comment.
Sasha Issenberg's destruction of David Brooks's credibility.
The If Microsoft Made Cars
joke.
The requirement of various state Democratic Party's requirement that a certain
fraction of their delegates be
homosexuals-- 10% for California, for example.
Derbyshire on homosexuality
The Curmudgeonly Clerk, very clearly and in great detail, on how
liberals criticize Scalia but no other judge for the same kind of conduct.
05.24a The Philosophic Underpinnings of
Conservatism and Liberalism. At the Volok h
Conspiracy and elsewhere, Jacob Levy, Steve Postrel, Jonah Goldberg,
Matt Yglesias and others have been discussing the topic of the philosophic roots
of conservatism and of liberalism. It's a bit dismaying to me, because I realize
that neither of them have really clear philosophic roots, and I'm not sure
whether I do myself. ... [permalink: 04.05.24a.htm]
05.24b Jobs as a Stupid Goal of Government Policy.
Something that probably needs a chapter in my Economic Regulation and
Social Regulation book is the stupidity of job creation as a social goal.
This is one of those things on which all economists are agreed, but nobody else
understands. The conventional wisdom is that one of government's most important
goals, whether at the local, state, or national levels, is to create jobs. ...
[permalink: 04.05.24b.htm]
05.23a The Meaning of Bible Names. The sermon
at ECC today, by Pastor Mangrum, was on Genesis 3. He talked about pain and our
desire to avoid both its harmful and beneficial effects (note how Cain expressed
no regret for Abel's death, only fear that he himself would be murdered), but I
happened to think that it would be good to compile a list of the meanings of
names. Here is a start, ... [permalink: 04.05.23a.htm]
05.23b Costs versus Prices in Ethics. A
basic point in economics is that cost and prices are different. I might pay a
price of $50 for a meal that only cost $20 to produce, even though the economic
definition of cost-- the value of resources used to produce something-- includes
a return to capital. An implication is that although the individual buying the
meal will look at the $50 price, the loss in resources to society from the meal
is only $30, because the other $20 is merely a transfer, the restaurant gaining
what the diner pays, rather than being a social cost. In looking at whether the
transaction is efficient or not, the economist asks whether the benefit is
greater than the cost, not whether it is greater than the price. Thus, if the
diner's benefit from the meal is $40, it was efficient for him to eat it, even
though from a personal point of view he has made a mistake. ...
[permalink: 04.05.23b.htm]
05.23c Our Nights Out; Music for the Fall of
Constantinople. We do lead an odd life. Typical Rasmusen date nights:
Last week: eat at one of the two or three Tibetan restaurants in town, go to
an art gallery featuring a cake decorating exhibit, and end up looking at the
giant new Target buying diapers. This week: go to the Canada House to see how
various designers show their stuff in renovating the Japanese garden and hobbit-
style underground mansion with castle tower lost by a Lilly heiress who
squandered her fortune, have a rushed supper at a Chinese noodle house, and go
to the BLEMF opening concert, commemmorating the 551st anniversary of the Fall
of Constantinople on May 29, 1453. ... [permalink: 04.05.23c.htm]
05.22a Commas; Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots &
Leaves. "The use of commas cannot be learned by rule," says Sir
Ernest Gowers, as quote by Lynne Truss on page 82 of Eats, Shoots & Leaves
(where does he say it? She doesn't give a citation! She ought to, on the book website at least, and so I
will tell her by email.) I came across one of the controversial situations this
past week in reading over the copyedits of my "The Economics of Agency Law and
Contract Formation," for the American Law and Economics Review. ...
[permalink: 04.05.22a.htm]
05.21a A Sad Story of Palestinian Atrocities: The
Murder of the Four Hatuel Girls. This is a sad story worth
keeping in mind when we think about the enemies of America and about those who
criticize American actions. ... [permalink: 04.05.21a.htm]
My archives are available in two forms. A list of post titles arranged by
subject is at
http://www.rasmusen.org/w/archive.htm. The older dates of the file you
are reading now, arranged by date, is at
http://www.rasmusen.org/w/a.htm. You can also use the search engine at the
top of this page.
Eric Rasmusen, Bloomington, Indiana. Comments: Erasmusen@Yahoo.com. Address: http://www.rasmusen.org/w/0.htm.
