Had a nice glass of wine last night, and re-read one of my favorite
essays, by one of my most favoritest lefties….Sandy
Levinson, of the UT-Austin Law School.

Here is the essay: The Embarrassing 2nd Amendment.

Sandy (whom I got to know down at UT-Austin when I was there) is honest.
He does not like the 2nd Amendment. But he believes in the rule of
law, and so feels obliged to point out two things.

First, the
words in the 2nd Amendment have meaning. They appear to mean that there
is an individual right to keep and bear arms. Subject to regulation,
not an absolute right, all that’s true. BUT. SOME. INDIVIDUAL. RIGHT.

Second,
we can’t pick and choose which amendments to enforce. If the Bill of
Rights is important, if the Constitution cannot be violated, then we
have to enforce all of it. If you don’t like the 2nd Amendment, then
amend the Constitution.

I enjoyed re-reading the piece, as I
said, given the events of this week. I particularly liked these
passages:

To put it mildly, the
Second Amendment is not at the forefront of constitutional discussion,
at least as registered in what the academy regards as the venues for
such discussion — law reviews, casebooks, and other scholarly legal
publications. As Professor Larue has recently written, “the second
amendment is not taken seriously by most scholars.”

…I cannot
help but suspect that the best explanation for the absence of the Second
Amendment from the legal consciousness of the elite bar, including that
component found in the legal academy, is derived from a mixture of
sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the
perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even
“winning,” interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real
hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation. Thus the title of this essay — The
Embarrassing Second Amendment — for I want to suggest that the Amendment
may be profoundly embarrassing to many who both support such regulation
and view themselves as committed to zealous adherence to the Bill of
Rights (such as most members of the ACLU). Indeed, one sometimes
discovers members of the NRA who are equally committed members of the
ACLU, differing with the latter only on the issue of the Second
Amendment but otherwise genuinely sharing the libertarian viewpoint of
the ACLU.

Give Sandy credit: that is an honest portrayal
of the problem. He at least realized that he should be embarrassed.
And he was.

For two decades, I have been given at best a
condescending hearing when I have claimed that the 2nd Amendment clearly
confers at least a limited individual right to bear arms. And since
these same super-silly-ass folks also claim to believe the Constitution
says what the Supreme Court says it says….well, I love America.

Harold Meyerson makes an argument that will be familiar to readers of this blog: stimulus doesn’t work the way it used to. Workers have more skills, which makes it harder to create jobs to soak up an untapped labor pool–even if we did create large numbers of jobs swinging pickaxes, many unemployed Americans wouldn’t take them.

Meyerson identifies a lot of the procedural barriers that I frequently talk about–the bidding and environmental safeguards that make federal projects very slow to get off the ground. But perhaps unsurprisingly, he doesn’t really explore a huge barrier to a WPA-type jobs program: public sector unions. They are not going to let you hire a bunch of cheap workers and run crews without civil service protections.

There’s something ironic in the fact that the legacy of the New Deal is the inability to reproduce it. On the other hand, it’s not so necessary, either. People are richer now, and though it isn’t perfect, our financial regulation is better. We’re not at much risk of people starving to death. So there’s no urgent need to create low-skilled jobs for them to fill.

heller|5.10.10 @ 6:08PM|#

Which hubris is larger?

I know enough to make decisions for myself

or

I know enough to make decisions for everyone

The basic problem with the interpretation above is that it limits “innate” influences to “genetic” ones. Just because some trait is not genetic does not mean it is not innate. If we are talking about how the brain gets wired, any number of prenatal environmental factors are known to have large effects. More interestingly, however, and probably a greater source of variance across the population, is intrinsic developmental variation. Wiring the brain is a highly complex procedure, reliant on cellular processes that are, in engineering terms, inherently “noisy”. Running the programme from the same starting point (a specific genotype) does not generate exactly the same output (the phenotype) every time. The effects of this noise are readily apparent at the anatomical level, when examining the impact of specific mutations, for example. In many cases, the phenotypic consequences are quite variable between genetically identical organisms, or even on two sides of the same brain. (If you want to see direct evidence of such developmental variation, take a directly face-on photograph of yourself, cut it in half and make mirror-image copies of the left and right sides. You will be amazed how different the two resultant faces are).

To borrow an idea from Robin Hanson, I think it’s useful to think about political conflict in terms of valorized figures. On the right, you see a lot of valorization of businessmen. On the left, you see a lot of valorization of pushy activists who want to do something businessmen don’t like. Formally, the right is committed to ideas about free markets and the left is committed to ideas about economic equality. But in practice, political conflict much more commonly breaks down around “some stuff some businessmen want to do” vs “some stuff businessmen hate” rather than anything about markets or property rights per se. Consequently, on the left people sometimes fall into the trap of being patsies for rent-seeking mom & pop operators when poor people would benefit more from competition from a corporate bohemoth.

I’m now finishing up a new introduction for a reissue of Eugen Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future. In writing it, I identified three distinct answers to the question: “How could a movement founded to liberate workers from capitalist oppression end up shooting them in the back when they tried to flee the Workers’ Paradise?”

1. The Actonian “power corrupts” story

2. The Hayekian “worst get on top” story

3. The Richterian “born bad” story

Here’s my summary:

Lord Acton and F.A. Hayek have inspired the two most popular explanations for the crimes of actually-existing socialism. While Acton never lived to see socialists gain power, their behavior seems to perfectly illustrate his aphorism that, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For all their idealism, even socialists will do bad things if left unchecked. Hayek, with the benefit of hindsight, suggested a slightly different explanation: Under socialism, “the worst get on top.” On this theory, the idealistic founders of socialism were gradually pushed out by brutal cynics as their movement’s power increased.

Richter’s novel advances a very different explanation for socialism’s “moral decay”: The movement was born bad. While the early socialists were indeed “idealists,” their ideal was totalitarian. Their overriding goals were to engineer a new society and a New Socialist Man. If this meant treating workers like slaves – depriving them of the freedom to choose their occupation or location, forbidding them to quit, splitting up families without their consent, and imposing draconian punishments on dissenters – so be it.

On Thursday, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick’s insurance regulators announced that they had rejected 235 of 274 insurer requests for premium increases for individuals and small businesses over the coming year. This power has been on the books since 1977 but never used, and Mr. Patrick announced in February that he was dusting it off as an opening bid for rate-setting for hospitals, doctors and all other providers as well. The state’s health costs have risen to the nation’s highest since Beacon Hill passed the ObamaCare prototype that was supposed to reduce health costs.

The premium increases were “excessive and unreasonable,” Mr. Patrick said in a statement, though his insurance division issued no actuarial analysis to justify its decision. “Now, the big insurance companies will criticize this action,” he said. “But the fact is that for three years now, both they and health-care providers have sat around the table talking the issue of excessive cost to death and coming up with no solutions.” In other words, price controls are supposedly the only option.

Yet campaigns against the insurance industry are always the first political resort, as Mr. Obama’s assault on Anthem Blue Cross of California showed. In Massachusetts, however, the major insurers—Blue Cross Blue Shield, Harvard Pilgrim, Tufts Health Plan—are all nonprofits. The state itself calculates that they spend at least 88 cents of every premium dollar on the underlying costs of medical care, often more.

It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe
generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises
entropy. This is the force we call gravity.
.
.
.
It also relates gravity to quantum information for the first time. Over recent years many results in quantum mechanics have pointed to the increasingly important role that information appears to play in the Universe.

Makes for a fair amount of disagreement.

That decrementally cost-effective innovations are so rarely described in the health-care literature suggests that medicine is distinct from most other markets, in which cost-decreasing, quality-reducing products are continuously being introduced—think IKEA, Walmart and the Tata car. Several reasons may explain this “medical exceptionalism.” First, there is fundamentally a lack of incentives both for physicians to control costs, especially under a fee-for-service regime, and for patients to demand less expensive treatment when insurance shields them from the direct costs of care. Second, medical “bargains” frequently come with health risks, and trading health for money strikes some as vulgar, regardless of ratio. The inherent ethical unease that decrementally cost-effective innovations can elicit poses a serious public relations and marketing challenge.