If, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain banned shipping and burned ports instead of simply attacking pirates, there would not be a world economy today.

I oppose H.R. 3261: Stop Online Piracy Act because the ultimate point of copyright law, according to our constitution, is pragmatic: we’d like to incentivize creativity as far as possible. This bill would go no further in terms of incentivizing creativity (and would do the opposite by drastically restricting the size of the market) and would do infinitely more harm than good. Everyone agrees that there is some benefit to be had by exposing more people to new ideas and by allowing free cross-cooperation. The risk to that value more than outweighs any benefit, if there is even any, by the severe punishment of those who aid violators of copyright.

A vote for this bill is an audacious repudiation of your job as a representative of a people that hates this legislation, and will virtually ensure that no one under the age of 30 will vote for you again.

Sincerely yours,
Jesse Eiseman

Scholarships/tuition as a system of taxation widens opportunity rather than redistributing wealth. Everyone but the most die-hard leftists should be happy.

There’s been somewhat of a backlash recently against the belief that it’s right for everyone to go to college, and until this line of thinking occurred to me I was sympathetic. And it’s true to the extent that higher education is useless and expensive. But it should get less expensive for the lower class (though not free on a massive scale, that’s asking for bubble, toil and trouble)–private universities should massively expand scholarships in the name of a capitalist ethic. Though I accept the general critique: scholarships should probably be given more towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics than towards humanities majors (especially in a university like ours, where STEM majors have to read Plato and Rawls, too, and therefore get a decent lesson in how to be a voter in a liberal democracy).

This seems like a reasonable position, certainly for a Republican. It shows a regard for efficient economics and a disregard for European culture. What’s not to love?

The problem is that I really do believe in local government. I don’t think that the rules that govern people’s lives should be promulgated from on high in Brussels by nameless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats. I think that people can govern themselves more effectively locally and that it minimizes the problem of minority voters (that the minority is, in a sense, being ruled against their will), when the Dutch get to rule themselves (shrinking the minority from the entire population of the Netherlands to Geert Wilders’ hair).

This raises an even bigger problem. Europe’s situation right now boils down to this: stay in a loose confederation and fail miserably to pay your debts, raise taxes or maintain a single currency. Or put greater power in a central government in the hope of keeping the entire disparate group of states together. In other words, join or die. It’s eerily similar to the situation that we faced in the 1780s, and I don’t like that my instinctive theoretical position would put me for the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution worked really well. It’s a brilliant document. But would I really have voted for increased centralization in the name of efficiency (my King’s College pedigree notwithstanding)?

It’s interesting that I get to analyze this thought experiment through with a real case (Europe). The only direction I can think of taking this so I can preserve my small government, liberty-loving values and my in-the-moment support of the United States of (Europe, America) is this: when government restricts freedom it should be as small as possible. But that’s not all that government does. Government also makes loans and creates currency. Neither of those violates anyone’s individual, negative liberties. Both provide very, very necessary services that would not arise as efficiently otherwise. (EconNerd Alert: I do not care that you have a model where money arises endogenously. I live in the real world, and it doesn’t.) In that case, it’s possible that government has a right (duty?) to be organized on a large scale.

But obviously, the EU does more than just create currency. It regulates trade, agriculture and business in ways that have huge effects on the day to day life of the average European. And it is exceedingly rare (note: I’m covering myself. I mean never.) that Europeans outside of politics get to vote on the details of these laws. What’s more, the Euro needs fiscal discipline to survive. That means that people like Draghi and Merkel are going to be able to dictate to the Greek and Italian peoples when they’re allowed to borrow and on what they’re allowed to spend. And you’d better believe that retirement age is coming up in those meetings. These are all things that should be determined as close to home as possible in varied ways in different countries, so that people get to tailor their laws to their lives, and so as few as possible are coerced by the state to follow laws they voted against.

Maybe the original referenda to constitute the Euro…but that’s Hobbesian nonsense, and it’s too far removed from the day to day logic of freedom to come close to resembling democracy.

Maybe a two-speed Europe, where culture differences are low enough so that conflict like this doesn’t arise, forcing one side to rule the other? That’s the solution in the USA, where states rights should effectively lead to a socialist periphery and a liberal center, so that one side doesn’t force socialist institutions on vast swaths of people who don’t want it. Until we elect a president who….never mind. But that still represents centralization, and the French and Germans aren’t really close enough to calm my doubts. And it would be abandoning the south to inflation and economic disaster.

So I’m torn.

He talks about a series of studies that show that overconfidence in CEOs can be disastrous, that the most awarded CEOs often underperform, and that they often become deluded about their own abilities. Fine—he also quotes research that says the stock market punishes these firms, a victory for the Efficient Markets Hypothesis if there ever was one. What caught my eye, though, was a stray line that mentioned that because of overconfidence effects, CEOs tend to take stupider, riskier decisions with their own money than they do when they’re playing with other people’s money.

Since I’m reading a book about decision theory, I decided to think this piece of data through. It seems  to contradict a founding staple of classically liberal thought: that people make smarter decisions when the risks are higher for them, and that the reason government is so inefficient is because they’re playing with other people’s money. Is it possible that government spending could actually be more efficient than private investing, because bureaucrats are insulated from personal responsibility? (Yes, I’ve read Hannah Arendt. I’m well aware that bureaucracy’s void where individual responsibility should be causes ethical problems. This is a hypothetical.)

The first possibility I thought about had to do with the distinction between wealthy and middle class investors. It doesn’t seem to be correct, and if it is, then the leftist case for soaking the rich gets stronger. I haven’t really thought it through yet—though I would instinctively say that the effects are dominated by the myriad other determinants of risk-taking behavior and government inefficiencies.

On reflection, however, it occurs to me that this is an obvious observation, and that it brings out one of my favorite things about American culture. Of course the government is more conservative as an investor than the average CEO (it’s also wildly inefficient, since risk can be efficient, too). The mistake was assuming that we want all of the investment in the country to go to things that are safe and likely to succeed. We don’t.

It is risk, the risk of failure and the possibility of a major breakthrough, that keeps our economy progressing. It is the risk that Mark Zuckerberg took dropping out of school, or that our ancestors took crossing the ocean to get here (don’t get me on the PC stuff. All of our ancestors crossed oceans to get here—we’re not in Mozambique.) The reason we need a robust private sector is to allow us to take risks, because the government sure as hell shouldn’t. Some of those risks will flower, most won’t, and people will lose money. But only from risk-taking can good things happen.

This is also the thinking that forms the foundation of our concept of freedom of speech, religion and conscience.  We don’t know who is right about the great questions. It could very well be the minority, the one, loner, crazy voice. If we could prove that there was no value to his speech, there’d be less of a reason to let him be heard. But we can’t. The state of uncertainty and the possibility of massive reward (eternal truth) put us in a position where we should invest societal resources (living with the crazy, actually listening to other points of view) on the off chance that we’re hearing the words of the next Jesus, Socrates or Joan of Arc.

But if risk-taking is such a social good, shouldn’t we insulate risk-takers from their mistakes so to encourage more investment? Obviously not (though that would be an interesting justification for bank bailouts—we don’t want them to stop trying to make the markets safer through clever diversification. We’d just rather it worked.). The threat of punishment is what prevents recklessness and drives money towards investments that we actually believe are being made by visionaries and not cranks. But this is where personal responsibility enters the nexus of decision making. It is easy to make a moral argument about personal responsibility here, but it comes from my a priori belief in humanity. I genuinely don’t see that it comes up endogenously to this discussion.

My final hypothesis: I think Democrats have an inherent dislike of risk. Risk, they might say, disproportionally hurts those who cannot afford to fail. It also hurts those against whom the deck is rigged (black, immigrant, poor, gay, female, etc.) But the unfairness of risk is not the only argument against, and it can be solved by policies directly targeted at the problem rather than at the market. In general, though, the world would be a nicer place if we could engineer it to in allow no risk, or only very small ones. Our experts can. Why shouldn’t we?

The Republican is not so risk averse. We’re an optimistic bunch: the market is a game, and every American has a world to gain. I would respond to the Democrat: Because risk drives investment, investment funds innovation, innovation creates progress, and we have a duty to the next generation and to ourselves to keep the great engine of progress running along.

“America or China?”

“America, as the ideals of freedom, human rights, democracy, and private entrepreneurship, at least for me, still stand stronger and more important as opposed to marvelous Chinese achievements of economic growth, discipline, and stability.”

-Srdja Popovic, activist who helped bring down Milosevic and provided a practical and pragmatic inspiration for the Arab Spring.

It’s our ideal of freedom they respect abroad. Let’s not dilute that with a Leviathan state and a cynical foreign policy. We are still a light unto the nations.

One of the big undiscussed fault lines lying between the left and the right in the United States is the concept of rights. The left tends to think of rights as socially constructed. It underpins their thoughts on abortion, for example, where passing the magical arbitrary boundary is the line between “life” and “basically being a tumor growing inside the woman.” The same goes for the amount of interference in things like food choice. There are philosophies of social class determinism and the importance of your surroundings that justify some of the social democratic measures the left loves–it’s because of the belief in the overriding power of social construction. In academia, this becomes explicit statements about the nature of the family, freedom and individuality itself. It also justifies society’s playing fast and lose with those rights in order to make society as a whole better, because that’s what the rights were given for in the first place.

On the other hand, most of the right tends to see rights in a somewhat absolutist way. The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are absolute, pre-exist government and society, operate on the level of the individual. It is wrong, a crime against humanity and nature, to interfere with a person’s freedom unless absolutely necessary. They at least incline to view rights this way. In order for rights to have this strength against the machinations of bureaucrats, they need to be imposed from outside, from above, the system. And in order to be sacred…

Why is the Bible the first thing in a Republican philosophy list?

“In the image of God He created them.” is the ultimate statement of the source of our rights.