John Stuart Mill Demolishes Libertarianism

John Stuart Mill, whose work I praised in my last post, is most famous for his book On Liberty, a spirited defense of the proposition that people not be coerced, either by legislation or by social pressure, in matters concerning only or primarily themselves. You might think that, if anyone would be included within the bounds of a word such as "libertarian," it would be the dude who wrote a book called On Liberty. Nope. Not by the modern sense of that word, anyway. This paragraph is so good it needs to be reproduced in block form:

Again, trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of goods to the public does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principle, comes within the jurisdiction of society; accordingly, it was once held to be the duty of governments, in all cases which were considered of importance, to fix prices and regulate the processes of manufacture. But it is now recognized, though not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality of commodities are most effectually provided for by leaving the producers and sellers perfectly free, under the sole check of equal freedom to the buyers for supplying themselves elsewhere. This is the so-called doctrine of "free trade," which rests on different grounds from, though equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this essay. Restrictions on trade, or on production for purposes of trade, are indeed restraints; and all restraint, qua restraint, is an evil; but the restraints in question affect only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them. As the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade [my emphasis], so neither is it in most of the questions which arise respecting the limits of that doctrine... Such questions involve considerations of liberty only in so far as leaving people to themselves is always better, caeteris paribus, than controlling them; but that they may be legitimately controlled for these ends is in practice undeniable."

As the principle of liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade. Yeah. Chew that one over, modern American libertarians. This is why one can be a liberal, which I think in its modern sense is first and foremost about devotion to pretty much Mill's exact ideas about individual liberty, without being a libertarian: those ideas simply don't tell us anything about the proper scope of economic regulation. Economic activity by one person, basically by definition, affects more than just that one person, and is therefore amenable to regulation where appropriate. It is an empirical question when such regulation will be appropriate, not one that can be settled by reference to grand philosophical first principles.

Earlier in the book, by the way, Mill also says that each individual is responsible to society for doing their share of the work of maintaining/defending society, a share which must be determined by some principle of equity. In modern society we choose the "progressive income tax" as the primary principle of equity, and it seems to me to be entirely within the scope of Mill's ideas of liberty. There really isn't much in this work that's inconsistent with anything in the modern American-liberal platform, and it's the definitive statement of the modern ideal of individual liberty.

John Stuart Mill Was Awesome

I have now moved on from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Approximately one-sixth of the way through the book, I've already encountered the following three seriously awesome lines. The first, on the tendencies of people who find themselves in conflict with dominant social norms in some particular:

"They preferred endeavoring to alter the feelings of mankind on the particular points on which they were themselves heretical rather than make common cause in defense of freedom with heretics generally."

The second, rather self-explanatory:

"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it."

The third, of a majority seeking to suppress a minority opinion with which it disagrees:

"To refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty."

The first is an incredibly astute observation and might be one of the first explicit avowals of a pro-hersey agenda. It also, I think, is less true now than when he wrote it in 1859: over the past century and a half, the cause of letting heretics be heretics in all walks of life has made tremendous progress. I'm not sure that Mill and his mentor, Jeremy Bentham, were the first major pro-fun philosophers, but they were certainly in the vanguard of the "let's have fun!" agenda that has revolutionized human society. The second is basically the foundation of modern (secular) moral philosophy, and its acceptance is wholly necessary for the flourishing of that pro-fun agenda. The third is an essentially complete statement of one of the many, many sufficient reasons for protecting freedom of speech. This guy knew what he was talking about. He and Bentham both are just such so refreshingly right about stuff compared to most of their contemporaries and predecessors.

Adam Smith, Subordination, and Democracy

I've just been reading the part of On the Wealth of Nations wherein Adam Smith starts talking about political theory as such, as opposed to economic theory. It's very interesting. The first section was a lengthy discussion about military readiness in various kinds of societies, which seemed astute though not really my favorite subject. Currently he's talking about the administration of justice, and the relationships of subordination which are implicit in the notion of civil government. (Yeah, I know, more on that later.) According to Smith, there are four criteria on the basis of which one man might have authority over another:

1. Personal qualities, either of the body or of the mind
2. Age
3. Wealth
4. Superiority of birth

Personal qualities of the body, he says, are rarely of much importance, since even the very strong can be overpowered by two or three ordinary men. Qualities of the mind may conceptually give one a great deal of power over a great many, but since they are invisible qualities, societies rarely use them as the basis for social hierarchies. Age is nice and objective, so when there's not much else to go on it becomes the tie-breaker of rank, and in a hunter-gatherer society where there isn't much wealth, it is often the chief determinant of rank. Wealth will almost always matter more than either personal qualities or age, so long as some have more of it than others, but for various reasons it will matter the most in a nomadic shepherding society, and less in a more advanced society where the favors doled out by a rich man are doled in return for money. Superiority of birth, meanwhile, is primarily the residue of the wealth of one's ancestors, and so will matter most in societies where wealth stays in families for a long time without being dissipated.

Now, as I said above, the notion that civil government implies subordination is somewhat undermined by that most wonderful invention, democracy. It isn't entirely destroyed, though, since most of the people in a democratic government, be they judges, police officers, or the legislature as a whole, have a fair amount of authority to tell other people what to do. What I think is interesting is that, in a certain sense, a democratic form of government is designed to allow personal qualities of the mind to matter in deciding who will get to wield the public authority. Electoral campaigns are largely about showing that one person or another has the best combination of ideas and mental capabilities. Appointment to administrative positions, or to judicial ones, is usually based primarily on the same qualities, if only because the public won't like it if incompetent people get appointed because of their wealth or nobility. Hiring for those positions in public service which interact directly with the public, like police officers, proceed as hiring for most jobs, with considerable attention paid to a person's ability to do the job.

Now, of course, politics is not a "meritocracy" in the sense in which that word is usually meant. But personal qualities of the mind do matter a lot in determining who gets to hold political power. They're not the only thing, but they are indisputably one of the things that matters. Not being an expert in non-democratic forms of government I wouldn't want to state this for certain, but democracy may well be the only form of government in which personal qualities of the mind do matter for allocating public authority. This is not the principal argument for democracy, but I think it's a non-trivial point in its favor.

The Underrated Mets

I was poking my way around the odds from Ladbrokes just now (mainly to see who they had favored to win the Honda Classic, the answer to which is Tiger Woods) when I noticed that the New York Mets are given just 100/1 odds of winning the World Series. That sounded a bit low, compared to the Baseball Prospectus odds I referenced in this earlier post. Turns out it's not that low; 100/1, obviously, projects to a roughly 1% chance of winning, while BP has the Mets at a 1.4% chance of winning it all. But the projections about the Mets odds of winning their division are another story. Ladbrokes puts them at 20/1. That implies roughly 5% chances of winning. They've got the Washington Nationals favored at 1/1, i.e. a 50% chance, followed by the Atlanta Braves at 23/10, roughly 30%; the Philadelphia Phillies at 27/10, roughly 27%; the 20-1 Mets; and the 50-1 Florida Marlins, circa 2%. Now, that adds up to about 114%, with the extra 14% obviously accounting for Ladbrokes' profits, so one would need to scale everything down a little bit to get real projected odds from this. But one can still see where they're relatively bearish or bullish compared to the BP odds. Answer: bearish on the Mets, bullish on the others.

Specifically, BP gives the Nationals a 52.1% chance of winning the NL East. That's roughly in line with the Ladbrokes odds, though given the scaling adjustment it means the bookies are slightly pessimistic about the Nationals. The Braves, though, are given just a 19.5% chance, and the Phillies just 14.7%. Between the two teams, the betting community is overrating by nearly 23%! They've got the Phillies with nearly twice the odds of winning that BP has, and the Braves with 150% of the Prospectus projection. BP Puts the Marlins at 0.7% chance to take the division, again quite a bit less than the 2% implied by the 50-1 odds. And then there's the Mets, who take home the remaining 13% of the Prospectus forecast, which does actually have to add up to 100%. Bettors, then, appear to be underrating the Mets. A lot. Like, by a 13:5 ratio, or actually by a bit more than that. Now, this is all conditional on our believing BP's projections reasonable, but they're not the only projection system that doesn't hate the Mets as much as the conventional wisdom does.

The moral of the story is, if for some reason you're interested in placing a bet on baseball at Ladbrokes, you probably shouldn't put your money on the Mets to win it all, but taking them to win the division, at 20-1, is probably not a bad proposition.

Antonin Scalia, Legislator from the Bench

It's not exactly news that the very same conservative jurists who love to accuse liberal judges of "legislating from the bench," i.e. making up justifications at the policy level for imposing a preferred outcome on society against the will of the legislature, often engage in exactly that activity. Indeed, I think they "legislate from the bench" a lot more than the liberals they're critiquing. Still, a recent trend in Antonin Scalia's jurisprudence takes this to terrifying new heights of literalness. During oral arguments about the Voting Rights Act today, apparently, Scalia questioned the idea that the 2006 VRA renewal's unanimous Senate passage vote was a point in its favor:

"I don’t think there is anything to gain by any senator by voting against this act. This is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress. They’re going to lose votes if they vote against the Voting Rights Act. Even the name is wonderful."

This is... odd. Specifically, it's odd in that it involves a kind of legislative psychoanalysis, trying to logic out various reasons why Congresspeople acted as they did (that obviously make those actions look good for Scalia's cause) or what they would have done in some alternate universe. It feels very similar to the passage from the health care cases dissent where, well, I assume it was Scalia, went off on some weird line of thinking about how the PPACA had been a "Christmas tree" bill with lots of only-slightly-related "ornamental" provisions dangled off the central trunk of the law. Therefore, he claimed, if the individual mandate had been eliminated from the bill as it made its way through Congress, the whole rest of the package would not have passed either. Now, the typical standard for severability is that the destruction of one element of the law would make the other elements function improperly in such a way that no rational legislator would want to pass the whole without the part. That's not what would have happened with the ACA: everything in that bill except for the central regulations/mandate/subsidies triumvirate was operationally independent from that central "trunk," so while it might be true that politically the ACA wouldn't have passed without its core, it certainly isn't true that the bill minus its core is nonsensical as policy.

In both cases, Scalia is refusing to take Congress at its word, or, rather, at its vote. Apparently, every Senator voted to renew the Voting Rights Act in 2006, including a good many Southern ones. Now, maybe that just doesn't count at all, if we're only interested in the constitutionality of this piece of legislation and not in what Congress thinks on the matter. (Although, from what I hear, the argument is that Section 5 is too narrow, i.e. punishes these 9 Southern states when they don't really have worse problems than anywhere else, and that therefore we have to strike it down. I'd think that on that question, which strikes me as absurd to begin with, the votes of Southern Senators might be relevant evidence.) But that's not what Scalia's saying. Rather, he's saying that those votes didn't count. Why? Because Antonin Scalia thinks that the motives behind them were other than pure. Oh, these were political votes? They voted for it because they thought it was popular? Because it had a nice-sounding name, implied by Scalia to be kind of Orwellian? Well then, I guess we can infer that all the Southern Senators voting for the VRA actually thought it was horrible and unconstitutional and unfairly targeting their states out of outdated prejudices, despite the fact that they then voted for it. All of them. It's the same as in the ACA case: the fact that Congress enacted all these "ornaments" into law doesn't matter, even though they're operationally independent of the central planks of the legislation, because Antonin Scalia doesn't think they would've passed without those planks.

But guess what, Scalia? You're not in Congress. You're not a legislator; you weren't the floor manager for the ACA or for the 2006 VRA. You don't know how Congress works, and as a Supreme Court judge, you're not supposed to care. When Congress passes stuff, by definition the United States Congress as an institution approves of that stuff. And while we might not want to pay much attention to legislative records on general principles, if we're going to care at all we sure as hell need to care about the actual record, not the hypothetical one Antonin Scalia makes up in his head. This is legislating from the bench, not just in the sense of second-guessing the legislature's policy choices on the merits but in the sense of second-guessing that the legislature has made the policy choices it has in fact made. Scalia has really gone off the deep end, and it would be kind of sad were he not in a position to do so much damage to the world.

(Oh, and for what it's worth, the arguments against the constitutionality of the VRA are insane, and seem to me to be window-dressing around the fact that conservatives don't like it when the federal government uses its powers to attack racism. And also the fact that overturning the VRA might give the Republicans a partisan advantage. These guys disgust me, and if Kennedy sides with them, he loses an awful lot of points. Points he doesn't have to lose.)

What Vegans Did To Republicans

Apparently the later national PublicPolicyPolling survey covered a bunch of issues related to food. One of those questions, apparently, was whether people liked or disliked vegans. According to a tweet from PPP:

On our food poll we found that Republicans have a negative opinion of vegans...not sure what vegans ever did to them...

Now, the answer to this could be that Republicans are associating vegans with the kind of people who commit illegal acts, mostly crimes against property, with an animal-rights-y agenda. It's fair enough to dislike the latter, I'd say, though insofar as they avoid violence against people I think it's also fair enough not to dislike them. But I don't think this is the impetus behind Republican dislike of vegans.

Rather, I think it's that they, and we vegetarians as well, make them feel bad. Very few Republicans are vegans or vegetarians. Most Republicans like to eat meat. And I think that, for many or most of them, that isn't just because they like how it tastes or whatever. They positively like the fact that they're eating the remains of a formerly living animal. It makes them feel powerful, like they have dominion over the earth. And vegans make Republicans feel bad about this. Sometimes this is through explicit criticism in conversation, or whatever, but it doesn't even need to be. Simply by adhering to a moral code that considers something these people do on a regular basis to be wrong, vegans and vegetarians by our very being imply that these meat-eating Republicans are doing something wrong. We're the worst possible manifestation of the liberal tendency to want to control everything about a person's life: we want to control what you can eat. And that's not even wrong, entirely, though I do know some vegans who'll tell you that what you eat is a personal choice (something I don't believe, on this particular issue). And we invade the natural social-conservative terrain of moralizing (though of course, if we get into the philosophical weeds, I could say that the vegan/vegetarian moralizing is consequentialist, while the typical Republican variety is deontological, so they're very different things). Basically, simply by being vegans or vegetarians we offend the Republican idea that the right kind of people, at least, can stomp around the world doing whatever they want, and making other people feel bad for doing the wrong things. So they dislike us: it's not surprising.

Match Play Is Awesome

Right now it's snowing (at certain altitudes) in Marana, Arizona. Marana, Arizona happens to be the place where the PGA Tour is right now. And they're not exactly playing right now, since there's snow accumulating on the greens (!), but if the precipitation turns into, say, a nasty wintry sleet, they'd be able to squeegee the snow off the greens and they would then start play. There are probably some tournaments where wintry mix would get them to stop playing, but this week is match play, and the great thing about match play is that you can get away with murder in terms of the conditions. Since the only thing that matters is who of two players gets a better score on a given hole, playing it at the same time, concepts of "fairness" don't apply. That usually just applies to the course set-up; for instance, I remember one year back when this was held at La Costa Resort & Spa when the fairway of some par-4 was flooded, so they moved the tees forward and played it as a par-3. Obviously, that's sort of a combination of conditions and course set-up, but the key point is that you could never just wantonly play a par-4 as a par-3 some given day in a stroke play tournament. Why not? I'm not sure; after all, everyone has to play the same course as everyone else. Nevertheless, you couldn't do that; there's some ethos against it. Likewise, when you get things like the 1974 Massacre at Winged Foot, people call it unfair, and when you get things like the 2011 U.S. Open at Congressional, where Jason Day posted a score that would have won almost any Open in history but finished eight shots behind Rory McIlroy, well, it's not called unfair exactly but it makes people start thinking about how these scores need to be reigned in.

In other words, people care about the score in stroke play, and they don't just care about relative scores, but absolute ones as well. Turning a par-4 into a par-3 would mean that the scores from that day were "wrong" somehow. Excessively hard or excessively easy conditions make the absolute scores look like they're calibrated wrong. Playing in snow will artificially inflate everyone's scores, and is particularly bad because it hits some people and not others. But in match play, you don't have to worry about any of that. Everyone's making birdies? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with birdies, or won with eagles. The course is mangling the field? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with bogeys, or won with pars. The first half of the field played in sleet, and then the clouds parted and the second half of the field played in warm sunshine? Great! Basically, because competition is broken up into tiny discrete units that don't communicate with one another, the world gets much simpler. Each unit of competition is the same as each other one: here are two people, here's a tee, a few hundred years that-a-way is a hole, let's see who gets there quicker. It's almost impossible for anything to alter the competitive nature of that concept. This makes match play much more flexible than stroke play, in practice, both in terms of what kinds of courses it can be played over and in terms of how wild the conditions can tolerably get. It's just one more reason why today, assuming they ever start playing again, is one of the most fun days in the golf year.