Food Alarmism

Apparently, Chinese food is unhealthy. Hmmm...so I guess that would mean that people that eat a lot of Chinese food wouldn't live as long as people who didn't eat a lot of Chinese food. So, let's look at two countries with fairly similar economic systems, one where the average person probably eats Chinese food a couple times a month (at best), and one where the average person eats Chinese food just about every day (source: CIA Factbook):

UK life expectancy
total population: 78.54 years
male: 76.09 years
female: 81.13 years (2006 est.)

Hong Kong life expectancy
total population: 81.59 years
male: 78.9 years
female: 84.5 years (2006 est.)

Hmmm....

UPDATE: For comments, see the original blog post here.

Capitalism: the Antithesis of Social Darwinism

Okay, so the following comment in response to Julian Sanchez’s phrase “the progressive version of the intelligent design fallacy” got me all riled up, and I’ve already criticized it here.

If you want to make an evolutionary argument, you have to realize that the way evolution by random mutation works is by failure. Trial and error. Lots and lots of error. Millions of kids lives would be ruined, society would collapse, and a new society billions of years from now would have evolved the innate capacity to build properly functioning schools for their multi-tentacled offspring. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is that if you want progress you can find in the newspaper rather than in the fossil record, you need intelligence.

Julian was advocating for school choice (i.e. vouchers), so I assume that this commenter is an opponent of school choice, and probably of capitalism in general. Who knows...The point is, a lot of people commit the fallacy of associating capitalism with evolution, or more specifically, Social Darwinism.

What's the easiest (and intellectually laziest) way to attack a person advocating capitalism and free markets? Accuse him of supporting Social Darwinism. Of course, such an attack is misguided at best, and actually couldn’t be further from the truth.

In a market-based system, wealth is created through innovation. In evolution/Social Darwinism, wealth is transferred to the biggest bully. Sure, at any given instance, the competition between two businesses vying for the same thing (access to some resource or customer or money) might resemble an encounter between a snake and a mongoose, but the customer ends up winning in either case because the winner of the battle must do something (such as inventing a new product that makes life easier) to win the battle for the resource.

In fact, communism—the polar opposite of capitalism—more accurately resembles Social Darwinism; the lack of incentives for innovators results in a fixed amount of wealth being fought over instead of new wealth being created (through the innovation that capitalism so uniquely fosters). Carl Milsted sums it up nicely here:

Another notorious metaphor [to capitalism] is “Social Darwinism.” It implies a tougher fight for survival in a market system. Ironically, when traditional societies become more free market based, populations tend to explode, until parents realize that their children are likely to live long lives. As far as people are concerned, capitalism is anti-Darwinian. A good case could be made that our descendants will be stupider and less hearty because capitalism has made life too easy.

There is an evolutionary aspect to capitalism, but it applies to businesses, not the people they serve. Businesses that fail to provide good service do get weeded out by competition with better businesses. But the evolutionary process is not entirely Darwinian: businesses learn. Lamarkian evolution is the norm.

Anyway, the point is this: in a market-based school system, some schools would fail, while others would succeed. But just as the consumers win when Target matches Wal-Mart’s prices and provides a more comfortable and attractive shopping environment (while other competitors like K-mart fall by the wayside), the students and parents would win if schools were pitted against each other. Sure, some schools would be closed (i.e. go out of businesses), and (gasp!) some teachers would lose their jobs. But I want bad schools to close, and I want bad teachers to lose their jobs. After all, I’m not all that concerned about the schools and the teachers; I’m concerned about the students!

The Progressive Version of the Intelligent Design Fallacy

Julian Sanchez describes what he calls the "progressive version of the intelligent design fallacy" in this post. Here's the excerpt:

This is the progressive version of the intelligent design fallacy—the implicit belief that complex results must be consciously aimed at to be achieved...

The context that it's used in is to attack how opponents of school choice seem to operate on the presumption that central planning is required to produce a good product. I love the concept that Julian has coined, but I don’t love the term he’s given to it. I think it will lead to a lot of confusion and straw man arguments that conflate market-based systems and capitalism with evolution. For example, a commenter attacks Julian's verbiage with this comment:

If you want to make an evolutionary argument, you have to realize that the way evolution by random mutation works is by failure. Trial and error. Lots and lots of error. Millions of kids lives would be ruined, society would collapse, and a new society billions of years from now would have evolved the innate capacity to build properly functioning schools for their multi-tentacled offspring. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is that if you want progress you can find in the newspaper rather than in the fossil record, you need intelligence.

Nevermind the commenter’s conflation of evolution with market-based systems (see this post for my thoughts on that fallacy). What really freaks me out about this guy’s comment is that he seems to be willing to completely ignore the obvious evidence that markets work, and more specifically that people (in their current state of evolutionary existence) function optimally in market-based systems. It won’t take millions of years of evolution for people to adjust to a market-based school system, just as it won’t take millions of years of evolution for people to adjust to a market-based food distribution system (or any other subsystem of the overall capitalist/market-based economy). NEWSFLASH! We already have those systems! A market-based school system isn’t any different!

Yes, you need intelligence, but not from a central planning perspective. You need intelligence (insofar as being able to tell the difference between a failure and a success) at the level of the consumer, or in the case of school choice, the parent. And we already have that! Would anyone ever really suggest that people are so stupid that, without millions more years of evolution, they can’t tell the difference between a success and a failure?

Anyway, to avoid the confusion that Julian’s comment cause in this commenter, as well as to avoid the conflation of evolution (i.e. Social Darwinism) with capitalism, I’d like to suggest a new term to describe this fallacy that many people assume to be true. How about simply, the “central planner fallacy?”

UPDATE: For comments, see the original blog post here.

School Choice

This post was originally a comment in response to this post on AngryBlog, but I liked it so much I'm posting it here:

Potential reasons for opposition to school-choice:
1.) Public funding of religious schools
2.) An erosion of the sense of “community” that comes with geography-based schools
3.) Fear of treating children like commodities to be shuffled around to school after school to prove a political point
Point #1 is a valid concern, but as long as there’s nothing in the allocation formula regarding religion (or the lack thereof) I think that this concern goes away.
Point #2 is not a valid concern because it relies on the false assumption that geography-based schools have the potential to foster a greater sense of community than performance-based schools.
Point #3 is valid, but as Tim points out, it can’t get any worse than it already is. We’ve been carrying out the progressive experiment with education for a long time now, and inner-city kids are the victims of “progressive dogmatism.”
The progressive system isn’t working (and in fact isn’t all that progressive). It’s time to try something else.

Liberty Mutual's "Responsibility" Site

After calling Liberty Mutual to ask about a bill, I decided to go online to pay it. The image/question on the right side of the page caught my attention. It asked, "Should the government regulate the use of trans fats in restaurants?"



My interest was piqued! "OF COURSE NOT!" I thought to myself, my rage at the recent action by the New York City city council to ban trans fats being quickly recalled. So I clicked on the image and found this site, which has a huge list of "yes/no" survey questions that have been featured in weeks past. Much to my surprise the questions actually address the concept of liberty/personal responsibility vs. government mandates rather directly.



Besides the trans fat question that's currently up, they also ask about motorcycle helmet laws, airport security, even whether people without children should have to pay "school taxes" (their words). In most cases, the survey respondents [predictably] err on the side of more government action (and less liberty). Most respondents think the government should ban trans fats, most think the government should have motorcycle helmet laws, most think the minimum driving age should be raised, etc. But the "yeses" don't usually win by very much, showing that there is a healthy amount of people that believe the government should stay out issues revolving around personal choice and responsibility.



Even better, the comments that those opposed to government action write tend to be along the lines of liberty and the government's taking of freedom. The do-gooders keep trying to bring the question back to whether helmets saves lives or whether trans fats are healthy, but the opposition doesn't fall for that straw man, instead recentering the debate to government action vs. individual liberty and personal responsibility.



Go to the site now and voice your opinion!

Corn-Based Ethanol - Not A Panacea

This article, which is a summary of findings of a University of Minnesota study, is a good summary of why corn-based ethanol is anything but a panacea for solving energy problems. Here are the five main reasons offered:

1. Ethanol production requires almost as much energy as it yields. This is a common argument, but the Minnesota study found that the net energy yield from corn based ethanol is 25%.
2. It isn’t easy being “green” when growing corn. Corn is not a hassle-free crop, and to get high yields you need a lot of fertilizer. I can't imagine too much organically-grown corn is going to go into ethanol production.
3. Corn crowds out wildlife. Basically, more corn = less wildlife. However, another potential source of ethanol--prairie grass--is essentially wildlife in the sense that it fosters an ecosystem native to the region in which it grows.
4. Corn ethanol doesn’t cut enough greenhouse gases. It's not much better than regular old gasoline, and in some respects it's worse.
5. We can’t grow enough corn. This goes back to the "more corn = less wildlife" idea; the energy yield of corn just isn't enough for us to "grow" our way to energy independence. Sorry, corn.

The authors of the study correctly conclude, in my opinion, that corn-based ethanol subsidies should be discontinued. I'd go a step further and say that all energy subsidies (especially those for oil!) should be discontinued, but that's a discussion for another day. In any case, let's leave the corn for food (and maybe biodegradable plastic) and start developing ethanol sources that are actually worth pursuing.

Good Strategy for Promoting Liberty

I think Radley Balko is onto a great strategy to promote liberty. It's basically the same strategy non-libertarians (statists, alarmists, public healthists, public safetyists, etc.) have been using for years. The strategy? Focus on the personal victims of whatever evil you're trying to expose. Think about it...for smoking ban advocates, it's stories about the poor single-mom waitress who has lung cancer despite never smoking a day in her life after working at a restaurant (where smoking is allowed) for 30 years. For the MADD crowd, nothing's more effective than the infamous "Happy Birthday" commercials where a home video of a child's birthday party is shown while a narrator informs viewers that the child was killed by a drunk driver. For food safety alarmists, it's not the fact that 15 out of 300 million people got sick from eating bad spinach, it's that the old man is in critical condition at a local hospital after eating a salad.

Libertarians and free market advocates know they're right in the grand scheme of things. It's not even close. Look at things like global standards of living, then look at levels of economic, social, and press freedom. On the macro level, it's clear that greater liberty equals a better society for all. On the macro level, the few people who actually care enough to objectively consider the macro-level generally accept this idea.

But on the micro level, where most of the people (most of the voters!!) make their decisions, the non-libertarians dominate. When was the last time you saw a local (or even national) news story that focused on the abuse of power by government and/or how government hurts people's lives. Rarely. And if there is such a story, it's usually couched in terms that make the government's co-conspirators (such as a money-hungry corporation) look worse than the government. What's far more likely is a story about how some business or landlord is ripping people off, how someone died because of "gun violence," or some victim-laden story about the "digital divide" or the growing gap between rich and poor. And almost inevitably the stated or implied solution to such problems is more government action.

Anyway, back to the lecture at hand. "If it bleeds, it leads." That's the de facto axiom of news broadcasts. Why? Because people sympathize with personal stories. It doesn't even really matter what the story is; if there's a personal story with a likable person as a victim, it's perfect for the news.

And I think that libertarians are finally realizing this. Radley Balko is leading the charge at using personal stories to illustrate how government policies and government corruption can ruin the life of a real, actual person with a face and a name. Finally libertarians are understanding that what sells are personal stories on the micro level. You can talk all you want about how increased economic liberty will lead to a better society for all, but that point gets lost on most of the audience. What really gets people are real-world examples of individual victims.

Design For Not Needing To Be Fixed

I finally fixed the door knob for the door going between the garage and my house (for the last couple of months I had just taped the latching mechanism opened so that I wouldn't have to deal with it), and I discovered that the door knob has a really obvious design flaw. But first some background.

Background
A couple of months ago, I attempted to open the door going to the garage from inside the house. To my surprise, the knob turned, but the door didn't open. I kept turning the knob, and nothing happened...I quickly deduced that the knob wasn't mechanically coupled to the latching mechanism, so turning the knob would do no good. Since the only other way into the garage was through the garage door openers inside the cars that were parked inside the garage, the only way I could get into the garage would be to somehow open the door. Luckily, after a couple of attempts, I was able to pry the latch open by wedging a butter knife in-between the latch and the slot in the door frame into which the latch moves, and I got the door open. Since I was in a hurry, I simply put a piece of tape over the latch to prevent it from going back into the slot when the door closed.

Later, when I removed the entire door knob assembly, I figured out that the way the knob was coupled to the latch was with a simple square (square in cross-section) bar. As the diagram below shows, the Square Slot (in which the Square Bar resides) in the Internal Door Knob has an extra little feature that the Square Bar press-fits into. The square bar travels through the Door, through the Latching Mechanism, and into the External Door Knob. Turn either knob, and the square bar to which the knob is rigidly fixed turns the latching mechanism and just like that, the door unlatches.

Figure 1 - How it's supposed to work

After looking at all the parts of the door knob assembly, I realized that to fix it, I'd simply have to re-rigidly-fix the square bar to one of the door knobs. This was easy enough, and in just a couple of minutes the door knob was back on the door, fully functional.

The design flaw
So what's the big deal? Well, this whole charade could easily have been avoided if the door knob were better designed. The following diagram shows what the door knob system looked like when it was broken.

Figure 2 - How it broke

As stated above, the problem is that the Square Bar had become de-coupled from the Press-fit Insert in the Square Slot in the Internal Door Knob. But what really made matters worse is the fact that the Square Bar was too short! As the above diagram shows, since the Square Bar was so short, once it became detached from the Press-fit Insert it was able to float freely, and eventually it moved such that turning the Internal Door Knob would no longer actuate the Square Bar. Plus, the fact that the only way the Square Bar can be coupled to the Internal Door Knob end of the Square Slot is via a press-fit, there's no way the Square Bar, once loose, would ever incidentally fall back into the Internal Door Knob.

The solution
The solution to all of this madness would simply be to make the Square Bar longer. In fact, it should be almost as long as the entire Square Slot. This would alleviate the need for the extra Press-fit Insert, plus there would be no way for the Square Bar to become decoupled from either the Internal or External Door Knobs. The following diagram shows the proposed solution.

Figure 3 - How to really solve the problem

Simple is better.

Nice rant

Mark Frauenfelder, the "small l libertarian" contributor to Boing Boing, has a nice rant about the incidental War on Allergy Sufferers, an unlikely child of the War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs:

For one thing, I'm one of those crazy (small l) libertarians who thinks drug laws, on the whole, hurt society more than they help society, so I don't like this law. It's a shame that some people ruin their lives and their families' lives by using meth and other drugs, but the innocent people killed by muggers who need money to buy expensive drugs, the enrichment of street gangs and organized crime rings that sell illegal drugs, the corruption of government officials who take bribes from smugglers, the people who are falsely arrested on trumped up drug charges, the people who are killed by crazed bounty hunters and police raiding the wrong houses, the seizure of property belonging to people who didn't know there were drugs on their property, and the imprisonment of non-violent drug users amount to a bigger problem, I think. I am in favor of abolishing all drug laws.

Well said.

New Market for the Liberty Dollar?

I thought of something the other day. How might the recent ban on financial transactions for internet gambling affect using Liberty Dollars to pay for such services? After all, if the Liberty Dollar is not legal tender (PDF), can it really be covered under a ban on financial transactions? Isn't it just a fancy form of bartering?

Imagine...Liberty Dollars becoming the de facto standard currency for a fun activity that adults choose to participate in but that busybody politicians seek to prohibit...It's a perfect match!

UPDATE: For comments, see the original blog post here.