21st Century Schizoid Boy

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay,

Whereas, Europeans ignored the human rights pledges of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution,

Whereas, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments meant little more than empty words,

Therefore, Americans of European ancestry are guilty of great crimes against my ancestors and their progeny.

But, in the recognition Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent,

I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people.

Therefore, from this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.

Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to All Persons of European Descent, Walter E. Williams, Gracious and Generous Grantor, http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/gift.html.

Should people have the right to discriminate by race, sex, religion and other attributes? In a free society, I say yes. Let’s look at it. When I was selecting a marriage partner, I systematically discriminated against white women, Asian women and women of other ethnicities that I found less preferable. The Nation of Islam discriminates against white members. The Aryan Brotherhood discriminates against having black members. The Ku Klux Klan discriminates against having Catholic and Jewish members. The NFL discriminates against hiring female quarterbacks.

If places of public accommodation were free to racially discriminate, how much racial discrimination would there be? In answering that question, we should acknowledge that just because a person is free to do something, it doesn’t follow that he will find it in his interest to do so. An interesting example is found in an article by Dr. Jennifer Roback titled “The Political Economy of Segregation: The Case of Segregated Streetcars,” in Journal of Economic History (1986). During the late 1800s, private streetcar companies in Augusta, Houston, Jacksonville, Mobile, Montgomery and Memphis were not segregated, but by the early 1900s, they were. Why? City ordinances forced them to segregate black and white passengers. Numerous Jim Crow laws ruled the day throughout the South mandating segregation in public accommodations.

Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights represented government countering government-backed Jim Crow laws.

One does not have to be a racist to recognize that the federal government has no constitutional authority to prohibit racial or any other kind of discrimination by private parties. Moreover, the true test of one’s commitment to freedom of association doesn’t come when he permits people to associate in ways he deems appropriate. It comes when he permits people to voluntarily associate in ways he deems offensive.

The Right To Discriminate, Walter E. Williams, June 2, 2010, http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/10/TheRightToDiscriminate.htm.

As historical evidence amply demonstrates, racial preferences alone are not a sufficient condition for racial preferences to be effective. Preferences tell us what people would like to do; however, it is the constraints, income and prices that can tell us what they will find it in their interest to do. It took laws to facilitate racial preference indulgence and the common features of those laws is to restrict voluntary exchange and impede the operation of the market.

The Encyclopedia of Public Choice: Discrimination, Walter E. Williams, 2004, http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/recent/discrimination.pdf.

Whenever you choose, you reduce the opportunity set for somebody. Choosing requires discrimination… I like to define discrimination solely as the act of choice. That is when you choose, you discriminate. That is scarcity requires for us to choose. And scarcity is the cause of discrimination.

Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies [1–3] to the most modern molecular research [4,5]. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims [6–8]. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, John P. A. Ioannidis, PLoS Medicine, August 2005, http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/fetchObjectAttachment.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124&representation=PDF.

Despite being surrounded by evidence that the law is inherently political in nature, most people are nevertheless able to convince themselves that it is an embodiment of objective rules of justice which they have a moral obligation to obey. As in all cases of denial, people participate in this fiction because of the psychological comfort that can be gained by refusing to see the truth… Belief in the existence of an objective, non-ideological law enables average citizens to see those advocating legal positions inconsistent with their values as inappropriately manipulating the law for political purposes, while viewing their own position as neutrally capturing the plain meaning immanent within the law. The citizens’ faith in the rule of law allows them to hide from themselves both that their position is as politically motivated as is their opponents’ and that they are attempting to impose their values on their opponents as much as their opponents are attempting to impose their values on them. But, again, as in all cases of denial, the comfort gained comes at a price. For with the acceptance of the myth of the rule of law comes a blindness to the fact that laws are merely the commands of those with political power, and an increased willingness to submit oneself to the yoke of the state. Once one is truly convinced that the law is an impersonal, objective code of justice rather than an expression of the will of the powerful, one is likely to be willing not only to relinquish a large measure of one’s own freedom, but to enthusiastically support the state in the suppression of others’ freedom as well.

The fact is that there is no such thing as a government of law and not people. The law is an amalgam of contradictory rules and counter-rules expressed in inherently vague language that can yield a legitimate legal argument for any desired conclusion. For this reason, as long as the law remains a state monopoly, it will always reflect the political ideology of those invested with decision-making power. Like it or not, we are faced with only two choices. We can continue the ideological power struggle for control of the law in which the group that gains dominance is empowered to impose its will on the rest of society, or we can end the monopoly.

Our long-standing love affair with the myth of the rule of law has made us blind to the latter possibility… We cannot conceive of a society in which individuals may purchase the legal services they desire. The very idea of a free market in law makes us uncomfortable. But it is time for us to overcome this discomfort… We must recognize that our love for the rule of law is unrequited, and that, as so often happens in such cases, we have become enslaved to the object of our desire. No clearer example of this exists than the legal process by which our Constitution was transformed from a document creating a government of limited powers and guaranteed rights into one which provides the justification for the activities of the all-encompassing super-state of today. However heart-wrenching it may be, we must break off this one-sided affair. The time has come for those committed to individual liberty to realize that the establishment of a truly free society requires the abandonment of the myth of the rule of law.

The Myth of the Rule of Law, John Hasnas, Wisconsin Law Review, 1995, http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm.

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., April 16, 1963, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html.

In 2006, of the total estimated 1,140,900 firefighters across the country, 823,950 were volunteer (72%). Of the total 30,635 fire departments in the country, 21,449 were all volunteer (70%). [86% were at least mostly volunteer.] Services contributed by volunteer firefighters saved localities across the country an estimated $37.2 billion.

There are very few purely paid fire departments in the United States, but those that exist are primarily found in very urban areas.

In 2006, there were 24,470,000 calls for U.S. Fire Departments. Most of the increase [in calls] is attributed to a sharp increase in the number of emergency medical calls and false alarms. The number of fire calls has actually declined over the period [since 1986]. 68 of the 118 firefighters who died in the line of duty in 2007 were volunteers. The leading cause of death for on-duty firefighters was stress/overexertion, resulting in 55 deaths. Of these, 52 were caused by heart attack. The second leading cause of death was vehicle crashes, claiming 27 firefighters.

In 2007, there were 3,430 civilians that lost their lives as the result of fire. There were an estimated 1.6 million fires. Direct property loss due to fires was estimated at $14.6 billion.

Fact Sheet, National Volunteer Fire Council, October 23, 2008, http://www.nvfc.org/files/documents/NVFC_Stats_and_Facts_Sheet_10_08.pdf.

Somewhere in this world lives the best-looking, richest, smartest person who would settle for you. But this ideal match is hard to find, and you may die single if you insist on waiting for such a mate to show up. So you choose to set up house with the best person you have found so far.

Your mate has gone through the same reasoning, which leaves you both vulnerable. The law of averages says that someday one of you will meet an even more desirable person; maybe a newly single Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie will move in next door. If you are always going for the best you can get, at that point you will dump your partner pronto. But your partner would have invested time, child rearing and forgone opportunities in the relationship by that point. Anticipating this, your mate would have been foolish to enter the relationship in the first place, and the same is true for you. In this world of rational actors, neither of you could thus take the chance on the other. What could make you trust the other person enough to make that leap?

One answer is: Don’t accept a partner who wanted you for rational reasons to begin with. Look for someone who is emotionally committed to you because you are you. If the emotion moving that person is not triggered by your objective mate value, that emotion will not be alienated by someone who comes along with greater mate value than yours. And there should be signals that the emotion is not faked, showing that the person’s behavior is under the control of the involuntary parts of the brain–the ones in charge of heart rate, breathing, skin flushing and so on. Does this emotion sound familiar?

This explanation of infatuation was devised by the economist Robert Frank on the basis of the work of Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling. Social life is a series of promises, threats and bargains; in those games it sometimes pays to sacrifice your self-interest and control. An eco-protester who handcuffs himself to a tree guarantees that his threat to impede the logger is credible. The prospective home buyer who makes an unrecoverable deposit guarantees that her promise to buy the house is credible. And suitors who are uncontrollably smitten are in effect guaranteeing that their pledge of love is credible.

Crazy Love, Steven Pinker, Time Magazine, January 17, 2008, http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/Crazy%20Love%20–%20Printout%20–%20TIME.htm.

The present study examined the neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ten women and 7 men married an average of 21.4 years underwent fMRI while viewing facial images of their partner. Control images included a highly familiar acquaintance; a close, long-term friend; and a low-familiar person. Effects specific to the intensely loved, long-term partner were found in: (i) areas of the dopamine-rich reward and basal ganglia system, such as the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and dorsal striatum, consistent with results from early-stage romantic love studies; and (ii) several regions implicated in maternal attachment, such as the globus pallidus (GP), substantia nigra, Raphe nucleus, thalamus, insular cortex, anterior cingulate and posterior cingulate. Correlations of neural activity in regions of interest with widely used questionnaires showed: (i) VTA and caudate responses correlated with romantic love scores and inclusion of other in the self; (ii) GP responses correlated with friendship-based love scores; (iii) hypothalamus and posterior hippocampus responses correlated with sexual frequency; and (iv) caudate, septum/fornix, posterior cingulate and posterior hippocampus responses correlated with obsession. Overall, results suggest that for some individuals the reward-value associated with a long-term partner may be sustained, similar to new love, but also involves brain systems implicated in attachment and pair-bonding.

http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/01/05/scan.nsq092

It is estimated that roughly 30 to 60% of all married individuals (in the United States) will engage in infidelity at some point during their marriage.

Research consistently shows that 2 to 3% of all children are the product of infidelity.

http://www.truthaboutdeception.com/cheating-and-infidelity/stats-about-infidelity.html

With one tenth – well, 11% — of the twenty-first century now consigned to history, what is the verdict so far? A terrorist mass murder, two long wars, a financial crisis and a deep recession: not great. So perhaps it would surprise you to learn that, according to respectively Steven Pinker of Harvard University and Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia University, the last decade saw the lowest number of global deaths in war since records began in 1945 and the fastest ever reduction in global income inequality.

The economic growth of the past decade took a century to achieve in 1810 and took a millennium to achieve in 810. That acceleration shows no signs of stopping, indeed it may be about to redouble. The root cause of economic growth is the mixing of ideas: ideas on how to recombine the atoms and electrons of the world in such a way as to supply people’s needs and wants more efficiently. Bring down barriers to the mixing of ideas (barriers in trade, energy, communication and education) and you will cause faster growth whether you want to or not. Nothing has brought down barriers to the mixing of ideas faster than the internet.

What is growth? It means fulfilling more needs and more wants with a smaller amount of work. A kilowatt-hour of electricity cost an hour of work in 1900 for somebody on the average wage; it costs five minutes of work today.

What is more, this process generates virtue. The essence of virtue is co-operation: pro-social rather than anti-social behaviour. Study after study confirms that immersing people in commerce makes them nicer: le doux commerce, Montesquieu called it. Growth comes about through people working for each other. Self sufficiency is poverty; prosperity is mutual exchange and specialisation. The more you specialise in doing one thing for strangers and they each specialise in doing one thing for you, the better your productivity and the greater your standard of living. Millions of people you will never meet contributed to making for you each of the objects you use in your everyday life. Far from being a selfish creed, economic growth spreads collaboration.

Moreover, with growth come other non-material benefits. As people get richer so they demand that more money and attention be paid to what were once luxuries like clean water, clean air, clean energy and biodiversity. So it is not just child mortality and family size that fall rapidly with wealth; pollution and habitat destruction come tumbling down once incomes pass a level of about $8,000 a head. More and more countries are passing that threshold right now.

Not everything will go right. Because we are human, there will be wars, bubbles, recessions, disasters and superstitions, but just as the recent crisis failed to derail world growth, so it is unlikely that the great existential threats that each generation so warmly clutches to its pessimistic bosom will blow away this inexorable boom. Doom after doom, from eugenic deterioration of the race to the collapse of computers at the millennium, has turned out to be a mirage. Population growth is slowing, and will halt altogether around 2070. Both theoretically and empirically, climate change looks set to continue to happen too slowly to reach a dangerous pace, absent some implausible feedback or tipping point mechanism. Fossil fuels, especially gas, far from running out, will prove sufficiently abundant to fuel even the super-prosperity of this century, before giving way to cheaper forms of energy as scarcity eventually drives up their price. Great plagues, mega-volcanoes, asteroids and vengeful superintelligent computers are all possible, but improbable.

Reasons to be cheerful, Matt Ridley, January 1, 2011, http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/reasons-be-cheerful.

The modern era of state and class relations in Europe had its origins in the first few centuries after the disintegration of the Roman Empire between 337 and 476 A.D. The institution of private property developed in the context of a system of numerous small, weak states that struggled along in the territory previously dominated by the militarized Roman state. This economic development was made possible by the “normative pacification” provided by the Catholic Church, which increased greatly in its power, and by the predominance of military techniques that rendered armored knights on horseback ascendant over serfs and peasants (Mann, 1986, pp. 376-378, 390-391).

In this context, it is important to note, feudal lords did not need “states” to protect their private property and increase the exploitation of producing classes. They dominated the peasantry through their own military capabilities in a context where religion played a role in sustaining and justifying hierarchy. Moreover, the weakness of the many small states was one factor that allowed the system of private property to take deeper root without the danger of state appropriation, and for an independent merchant class to develop. The result was a growing independence for the economic network in general: “By the time trade was really buoyant (1150 to 1250 A.D.),” claims Mann (1986, p. 397), “it was accompanied by merchant and artisan institutions with an autonomy unparalleled in other civilizations.”…

During Europe’s Middle Ages, to repeat, the state had very few functions. It consisted primarily of the king and his retainers, and the bulk of its revenues came from the king’s own lands and judicial fees. It tried to guard its borders and control armies in its territory, and it had a role in settling some types of disputes within its confines, but it was not a major player. Strikingly, any increases in its budget were directly tied to warfare and war debts. That continued to be the case even after the state began to gain some importance as a regulator of economic activity within its boundaries (Mann, 1986, pp. 486, 511) and to supplant the Church as the primary means of normative pacification. As late as 1505, the powers of the state were minimal… almost certainly involved less than one percent of national wealth and were marginal to the lives of most of the state’s subjects. (Mann, 1986, p. 452.)

Although private property and the first stages of capitalism developed without strong states, the situation began to change in the 12th and 13th centuries for a number of reasons. As markets grew within state boundaries, there was more and more need for state regulation. As merchants increased the scope of their trade into larger and larger territories, they needed more protection against bandits and the petty rulers of small territories (Mann, 1986, pp. 423-424, 431-32). Merchants also developed an interest in aggressive wars that would widen the territory in which they could operate: “From now on commercial motivations, the conquest of markets as well as land, were to play a part in wars” (Mann, 1986, p. 432). Merchants thus quietly encouraged the growth of the state, lending it the money necessary to raise a larger army.

Moreover, dramatic — and, of course, unanticipated — developments in the military network also triggered changes in the relationship between private property and the state. The sudden emergence of the disciplined military phalanx, that is, spear-armed infantry in close formation, quickly led to the defeat of nobles on horseback in a series of dramatic battles between 1302 and 1315 (Mann, 1986, pp. 18-19, 428). In this new context, the nobility had to turn increasingly to the state to raise a standing army of full-time foot soldiers to protect its lands. Now it started to be the case that the state was an “instrument of domination” in the service of the economic elites in general.

There soon followed a series of technological innovations that added up to a “military revolution” (Mann, 1986, pp. 453-454). In particular, large artillery guns made it possible to destroy castles. The arms race among states was on. It didn’t begin after World War II ended in 1945. To the contrary, there have been few peaceful interludes between 1300 and the present. Only states with large armies could survive, and only states that could gain the loyalty of lords and merchants could afford large armies.

So, from that point forward capitalism and the nation-state gradually grew powerful together because they needed and aided each other. As the alliance between these two power networks solidified, they subordinated the previously independent ideological and military networks. States now began to fit the usual sociological definition: the organization that controls the military and police within a given geographical area. And when a state extended its regulatory powers over a new territory, so too did capitalism diffuse more fully into that territory. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that classes and states are antagonistic, they became closely intertwined in Western history.

Much of Western history from this time forward is about the deadly bickering between economic and political elites, with an occasional time-out to deal with peasants or artisans who tried to take advantage of the divisions in elite circles.

The Four Networks Theory of Power: A Theoretical Home for Power Structure Research, G. William Domhoff, April 2005, http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/theory/four_networks.html.

In 2009, 95% of hourly paid workers earned more than the Federal minimum wage.

The proportion of hourly-paid workers earning the prevailing Federal minimum wage or less in 2009, at nearly 5 percent…

Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2009, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 1, 2010, http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2009.htm.

Labor economists who had studied past wage hikes warned that higher wages were not a free lunch; there would be a price to pay. Decades of prior research established a basic economic truth: When forced to hire and train unskilled new employees at increased wages, employers search for ways to offset that cost. Sometimes, it translates to higher prices for customers; other times, it translates to fewer hours and fewer jobs for less-experienced employees.

This study found that the federal minimum wage hikes that drove the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 between July 2007 and July 2009 led to significant employment losses for teens. In the 19 states where the effective minimum wage was increased by $2.10, we estimate that teen employment dropped by 6.9 percent, and approximately 98,000 jobs were lost. For the teen population with less than 12 years of education completed, teen employment dropped by 12.4 percent, and approximately 82,000 jobs were lost. These estimates are fairly conservative in the sense that they do not account for lagged effects of minimum wage hikes.

The Teen Employment Crisis: The Effects of the 2007-2009 Federal Minimum Wage Increases on Teen Employment, The Employment Policies Institute, July, 2010, http://epionline.org/studies/even_07-2010.pdf.

The statistical record proves that the minimum-wage law creates teenage unemployment, especially among minorities. For example, in 1948, when the effective minimum wage rate was much lower, white teenage unemployment was 10.2 percent, while black unemployment was 9.4 percent. Today, white youth unemployment is 13.9 percent, whereas black is 33.4 percent.

The Minimum Wage, James M. Liebler, December 1995, http://www.fff.org/freedom/1295d.asp.

Americans gave more than $307.75 billion to their favorite causes despite the economic conditions in 2009.

[74%], or $227.41 billion, was given by individuals or household donors.

Total estimated giving for 2009 was 2.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), based on data available in spring 2010. As of 2009, there were 1,238,201 501(c)(3) non profits.

Giving Statistics, U.S. National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/partnerships/fundraising_individuals_statistics.htm; The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2009, Giving USA 2010, http://www.cshco.com/pub/docs/GivingUSA_2010_ExecSummary_Print.pdf.

Somalia has lacked a national government since the fall of Siad Barre’s dictatorship in 1991. Rival factions immediately plunged the country into civil war in failed attempts to install themselves as the new national government. U.S. and UN humanitarian and military intervention from 1993 through 1995 failed to restore peace.

Although all data from Somalia must be treated with some caution, when looking at these 13 measures of living standards, the overall picture seems clear. Somalia may be very poor, but the loss of its government does not appear to have harmed standards of living. On many measures Somalia compares favorably with the other 42 Sub-Saharan countries. Since losing its central government, we find that Somalia improved measures of well being both in absolute terms and relative to other African states.

At a minimum, laws that protect person and property, a dispute settlement process, and a currency are needed. People often assume that these are public goods that the government must provide. But the Somalis have managed to provide forms of all of these without a national government… When the Somali state collapsed, much of the population returned to their traditional legal system.

When a dispute arises between two members of different clans, their clan elders must reach a compromise. If they are unable to do so, they appoint an elder from another clan to settle the dispute. After a verdict is reached, the criminal must compensate his victim the appropriate amount. If he is unable or unwilling, his extended family must pay the compensation. Every Somali is born into an insurance group based on their lineage to a common great-grandfather. Out of their own self-interest these insurance groups help enforce the judgment on wrongdoers.

Although the interpretation of the law stems from clan elders, the clans are not de facto governments. Upon becoming an adult, individuals are free to choose new insurance groups and elders. In addition, individual clans are not geographic monopolies.

Far from chaos and economic collapse, we find that Somalia is generally doing better than when it had a state.

Somalia After State Collapse: Chaos or Improvement?, Benjamin Powell, Ryan Ford, Alex Nowrasteh, The Independent Institute, November 30, 2006, http://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/64_somalia.pdf.