Poll spørgsmål #2

Jeg har nu blogget i over 3 år, og for ikke så længe siden prøvede jeg så at stoppe op og evaluere – hvilket vist i retrospekt var en lidt dum ide. Alligevel vil jeg nu sende bolden videre og sige: Nu er det læsernes tur!

Lige som det første spørgsmål vil dette her sikkert ikke være lige let for alle at svare på. Men når vi nu ikke kan stole på, at politikerne tager sig af de svære spørgsmål, så må vi jo øve os i at klare dem selv…

Kan du nævne et specifikt emne eller politikområde, hvor en eller flere posts her på econstudentlog-bloggen har været en primær årsag til, at du har ændret holdning på området?

Jeg har bevidst ikke lagt et link før sidst i posten, for det er nødvendigt at læse resten af posten, før du kan hoppe videre og svare. Spørgsmålet var for langt til at kunne bruges som poll-spørgsmål, så varianten i linket er i øvrigt bare: “Spoergsmaalet som formuleret paa bloggen”. Du behøver ikke uddybe, hvis svaret er ja (/eller nej, for den sags skyld…), selvom jeg selvfølgelig ville foretrække det. Yderligere kommentarer til svarmulighederne:

*Svarmulighed #1 er en ‘før var jeg overvejende for X, nu er jeg overvejende imod X’ svarmulighed, hvor X kan være Fogh; EU; stram terrorlovgivning; fri indvandring; synspunktet: ‘Gud findes og man bør ikke gøre grin med ham’; censur; topskat; CO2-lovgivning; narkotikalovgivning; ulandsbistand; arbejdsmiljølovgivning – og hvad der nu ellers måtte være. Det primære her er det forhold, at der har fundet et holdningsskifte sted.

*Svarmulighed #2 er ret straightforward; svaret er nej, du ville mene omtrent det samme om alting, hvis du aldrig havde læst bloggen.

*Svarmulighed #3 indikerer en mere ‘marginal effekt’ end den, der gør sig gældende i #1; hvis jeg ikke har fået dig til at ‘ændre holdning’, men du trods alt alligevel føler en eller flere af mine posts har haft indflydelse på dine politiske priors, så de har nærmet sig mine egne, selvom du stadig er uenig med mig, så skal du sætte kryds her (min holdning er Z på A-Z skalaen, hvis du er helt enig er du også på Z, hvis du er helt uenig befinder du dig på A. At springet i svaret er ‘fra C til J’ er et udtryk for, at det har været af en vis størrelse).

*Svarmulighed #4 drejer sig ligesom #3 om en marginal holdningsændring; denne svarmulighed bruges, hvis du i udgangspunktet var mere eller mindre enig med mig, og mine posts derfor ikke har fået dig til at ‘ændre holdning’, men at de derimod har (igen: kraftigt) styrket din tro på, at holdning X (eksempelvis ‘en EU-kritisk linje’/'topskatten skal væk’/ytringsfrihed er vigtig) er ‘korrekt’.

…

*Hvis både 3 og 4 gør sig gældende, foretrækker jeg man svarer i den rubrik, man finder ‘den væsentligste effekt’ befinder sig. Naturligvis ville også her en uddybning i kommentarsporet være at foretrække…

Her var linket til poll’en.

The Second Plane – September 11: Terror and boredom

So why single out Saddam [for military intervention]? It was explained that the North Korean matter was a diplomatic inconvenience, while Iraq’s non-disarmament remained a ‘crisis’. The reason was strategic: even without WMDs, North Korea could inflict a million casualties on its southern neighbor by flattening Seoul. Iraq couldn’t manage anything on this scale, so you could attack it. North Korea could, so you couldn’t. The imponderables of the proliferation age were becoming ponderable. Once a nation has done the risky and nauseous work of acquisition, it becomes unattackable. A single untested nuclear weapon may be a liability. But five or six constitute a deterrent.

The above quote is from the essay The Wrong War, from Martin Amis book, a birthdaypresent I’ve just started reading.

How to make sense of the financial mess

Arnold Kling talks with Will Wilkinson about it all (or most of it anyway) on bloggingheads here; this episode is one of the best bloggingheads episodes I’ve seen, it comes highly recommended. Will manages to ask a lot of good questions along the way.

Incidentally, Kling also has a long talk with Russ Roberts on the same subject here.

Petrov Day

Today it is 25 years since Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov chose not to do as he was supposed to do – thereby saving millions of lives.

Some good news

No bail-out deal, at least not for the time being.

Here you can find some different free market economists’ views on the bailout plan. They range from ’sub-optimal’ over ‘dreadful’ to ‘a Five Star Hotel of Horrors’.

Mike Munger on the bail-out

Things aren’t so bad that a panicked bunch of politicians can’t make it much, much worse.

Read the rest of his op ed here.

Paulson’s letter to the American people

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully
Minister of Treasury Paulson

HT: Sandmonkey

Of course, Congress still have some measure of control over this, and the Plan is not yet enacted. It’s a big relief that they might still be able to correct some of the, flaws, in the Plan. I feel very confident they know what they are doing, and that everything will turn out just fine. After all, only a Fool would claim that they, or the financial experts dealing with this crisis, are “in over their heads without realizing it“.

Oh yeah, and if you haven’t heard about the concept of ’sarcasm’ before, here’s the link.

New feature: Polls!

Jeg regner med, at det bliver et tilbagevendende tema, men hvis ingen gider svare, kan det jo være at jeg ændrer holdning. Hvis jeg stadig bloggede på min blogger-account ville det være en smal sag at embedde poll’en; og jeg vil ikke lægge skjul på her, at WordPress for mig virker til at være Blogger underlegent når det kommer til customization mv., for jeg har ikke været i stand til at finde ud af, hvordan jeg kan indsætte poll-koden. Anyways, her er linket til den første poll, og herunder kan du så læse om det er din tid værd at deltage (men selvfølgelig er det da det…):

Ugens (?) spørgsmål: Hvem ville du stemme paa hvis der var valg i morgen?

Venstre?
Konservative?
DF?
Liberal Alliance?
Radikale?
S, SF eller Enhedslisten?
Jeg ville blive hjemme?

Og som jeg (eller rettere: Ulla Nørtoft, men stadig…) har sagt før: Blanke stemmer interesserer mig ikke! Det er ikke et tilfælde den mulighed ikke er med i poll’en!

Quote of the day

There’s a popular historical legend that goes like this: Once upon a time (for this is how stories of this kind should begin), back in the 19th century, the United States economy was almost completely unregulated and laissez-faire. But then there arose a movement to subject business to regulatory restraint in the interests of workers and consumers, a movement that culminated in the presidencies of Wilson and the two Roosevelts.

This story comes in both left-wing and right-wing versions, depending on whether the government is seen as heroically rescuing the poor and weak from the rapacious clutches of unrestrained corporate power, or as unfairly imposing burdensome socialistic fetters on peaceful and productive enterprise. But both versions agree on the central narrative: a century of laissez-faire, followed by a flurry of anti-business legislation.

Every part of this story is false.

…

Roderick Long, via Will Wilkinson. Read the whole thing.

Incidentally, I see now that I forgot to summarize my reading experience in the Solzhenitsyn-posts. So did I even like the book I quoted at such length? Of course I did, if I didn’t there would not have been a post mentioning the book on this blog, you can be quite sure of that. I liked the book very much, and even if it is quite long (my version has 713 pages), it never feels ‘longish’. If you think a part-fiction, part-historical narrative of the first horrible month of Russian warfare during the Great War might interest you, you should go for it. If your favourite book is Jane Eyre, stay away from it.

August 1914 (II)

Ok, so now I’ve finished the book. Some more quotes:

“You must realize that the grand-duke is simply waiting for the arrival of the telegram announcing the capture of Lvov. They’re all waiting for that telegram,” Svechin went on insistently, unsmilingly, with irrefutable logic, his eyes glaring ferociously as he pressed the point home. “And that telegram will simply be used to obliterate the whole Samsonov affair. They’ll set the bells ringing all over Russia to celebrate our own incompetence – because the truth is we had the Austrian army in the grip of a pincer movement and let it go, so that when we captured Lvov it was empty.” [...] “Russia is doomed to be governed by fools; she knows no other way. I know what I’m talking about.” …

Most of the book describes the actions of the military, however there are also parts of the book that takes place very far from the front. One of these is the following passage, which I shall quote at some length, from a dinner-conversation between a middle-aged engineer and ex-revolutionary (Obodovsky) and two young arts students (Naum, Sonya). Words in bold are words that were emphasized in the original text:

Obodovsky smiled gently. “What is an exploiter?”
Naum shrugged his shoulders. “To my mind, it’s only too obvious. You ought to be ashamed to ask a question like that.”
“No one who earns his living in industry is ashamed to ask such a question, young man. The person who sits with his arms folded and pronounces judgment from afar is the one who ought to be ashamed. Today, for instance, we were looking at a grain elevator where not long ago there was nothing but long grass growing, and then we looked at a modern mill. I can’t begin to convey to you how much intelligence, education, foresight, experience and organization have gone into that mill. Do you know what it all costs? It costs ninety percent of the future earnings! The labor of the workers who laid the bricks and hauled the machines costs ten percent – and even that could have been largely replaced by cranes. And they got their ten percent. But then along come some young men, art students … You are reading the arts, aren’t you?”
“What difference does it make? well, yes.”
“Along comes a bunch of art students and they explain to the workers that they are earning too little, and that that little engineer over there in spectacles is earning God knows how much, and that it’s sheer bribery. And these simple, uneducated people believe it and they are indignant: They can understand the value of their own work, but they’re incapable of understanding or putting a price on somebody else’s.”
“But why should Paramonov, the mill owner, make all that profit?” Sonya shouted.
“He doesn’t get it all for nothing, believe me. Remember, I said ‘organization’. He works for his share too. And if anybody does get something for doing nothing, then we must gradually see to it that that money is channeled elsewhere, by rational political measures. We mustn’t try to take it away by throwing bombs, as we did.”
He could not have expressed his backsliding and apostacy more openly. Naum gave a scornful sneer and exchanged glances with Sonya. “Does that mean you have rejected revolutionary methods forever?”

[...]

He gave his concluding reply: “I would rather put it differently. Before, I was most concerned with how to distribute everything that other people had created without my help. Now my main preoccupation is how to create. The best brains and hands in the country should concentrate on doing that; we can safely leave distribution to the second-raters.”

[...]

“How impatient you are for this revolution! Of course it’s easier to shout and it’s more fun to make a revolution than to build Russia up. That’s too much like hard work. If you were older and could remember 1905 and how it all looked at the time…” [...] A reasonable man cannot be in favour of revolution, because revolution is a long and insane process of destruction. Above all, no revolution ever strengthens a country: It tears it apart, and for a long, long time. What’s more, the bloodier and more long-drawn-out it is and the dearer the country pays for it – the more likely the revolution is to be dubbed ‘great’”.

August 1914

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy… Solzhenitsyn!

A few excerpts from the book:

Although every officer was supposed to have a map of the area on his map board, no one in their company did; and Grokholets was the only officer in the battalion to have one. Even this was a reprint of a German map; the place names were barely legible and it was inaccurate. Among the platoon commanders, Yaroslav was the one who hovered closest to Grokholets to take every opportunity to have a look at his map. The Germans had burned all the signposts, and as the names of villages were passed orally from officer to officer, they became more and more distorted…

…

[English general Alfred...] Knox showed particular interest in VI army Corps on the right flank, because this corps had driven deeper than any other into enemy territory and was now not much farther from the Baltic Sea than the distance which it had already covered.
Yes, VI Army Corps should have occupied Bischofsburg yesterday, and by today it was probably already farther north.
It was shown on the map as being in that position, and for the Englishman’s sake, Samsomov had to pretend that it really was there; he could not admit to his Allied colleague that Russians marked their maps with information they did not really possess, that not all radio signals reached their destination, and that apart from radio there were no means of communication except dispatch riders, who were highly insecure since they were sent out unescorted across enemy territory. Blagoveshchensky’s corps had, in fact, strayed so far over to the right that it had ceased to act as a flank guard at all; it was no longer performing a screening role but had become a detached, independent corps, the victim of a quarrel…

[...]

What could he tell this uninvited guest? That all his units were under-strenght, and that XXIII Army Corps was still not mustered? That the force under his command was an army only on paper, that in reality it consisted of no more than two and a half army corps in the center, toward which he was now driving? And that he was not even sure of their positions either?
Knox was now interrogating him ad nauseam about the center corps. Where were they?
Samsomov pointed at the map with his large finger. ‘XIII Corps is here … approximately there … It is moving northward in roughly this direction, between these two lakes …’
‘Moving northward?’
‘Yes, it’s advancing northward … toward Allenstein. It should take Allenstein today.’ (it should have taken Allenstein yesterday, but had been too slow.)
‘And what about XV Corps?’
‘Well, XV Corps should be level with XIII Corps and also moving northward. Yesterday it should have taken Hohenstein.’ (Had it?) ‘And today it should have moved far beyond Hohenstein.’ …

Quote of the day

I think many of the problems with social organization result from the application of monkey methods and monkey brains to very non-monkey problems. Voting for leaders is a perfect example.

Patri Friedman, in a comment here.

From a game…

A position that came about in a slow game (20+0) I played earlier today:

As white, I naturally played Rd7-d6, with a double attack on the f-pawn and the knight. Black made pretty much the worst possible response to my rook move, he played Rb8-c8. Here’s what happened afterwards:

32.Nb6…Rc7,
33.Nd5…Rc8,
34.Rxc6! … resigned, 1-0

Love those knight-forks!

A few links

To all the stuff that’s been going on the last few days:

i) If you don’t know what that ’systemic risk’ everybody’s talking about at the moment is, Arnold Kling explains it very well here.

ii) This post is good too, do follow the link in point 3.

iii) Tyler Cowen has recycled an old post written by ‘Mindless Dreck’, Megan McArdle’s former co-blogger, on marginalrevolution. It’s definitely worth reading (again). His point is one that Arnold Kling also has voiced quite a few times recently: Government can’t outlaw risky behaviour, and the politicians’ll most likely mess things up if they attempt to do so anyway:

regulation and/or accounting rules are the most fertile breeding ground for derivatives and synthetic or packaged securities. Regulations and accounting rule-inspired transactions describe the bulk of the well known derivative-related blow-ups of the last two decades. Proscriptive regulation and the derivative trade have a symbiotic relationship.

[...]

[Frank] Partnoy is a former derivatives salesperson, and he clearly suggests that regulation is often the derivative salesman’s best friend. Complicated rules encourage complex transactions that seek to conceal or re-shape their true nature. Regulated entities create demand for complex derivatives that substitute proscribed risks for admitted risks. If a new risk is identified and prohibited, the market starts inventing instruments that get around it. There is no end to this process. Regulators have always had this perversely symbiotic relationship with Wall Street.

Even if people don’t seem to be able to figure out what the proper question to be asking right now is, more regulation certainly is not the answer.

I am Barack Obama, and I approve of this message…

Just loved that part of the video!

Anyways, I can’t figure out how to embed it, so I’ll just throw you guys a link to the video from theonion, HT: Greg Mankiw.

Dagens citat

Den danske folkeskole elsker samarbejde. Den elsker møder, aftaler og fælles indsatser. Ethvert tænkeligt aspekt af barnets liv er genstand for folkeskolens interesse. Den aflægger hjemmebesøg, den ringer og skriver om småting, og den sprøjter glad allehånde opfordringer og anbefalinger ud i familierne om det “fælles” barn. Der er ikke en småsten i barnets sko, der er irrelevant for folkeskolen. Til gengæld har den ikke en eneste opgave, som den selv tager ansvaret for.

Doktrinet om samarbejde kom ind i folkeskoleloven i 1975. Hvor folkeskolen hidtil havde formuleret sin bestemmelse med stor værdighed og selvbevidsthed, blev der nu indført en basal hjælpeløshed, ansvarsløshed og opgivenhed i folkeskolens formålsparagraf. Den lagde konsekvent ansvaret fra sig og lovede nu kun “i samarbejde med forældrene” at give eleven “mulighed” for at lære noget. Man kunne lige så godt skrive 7-9-13 i formålsparagraffen, og den tankegang har den danske folkeskole aldrig siden overvundet.

I én bevægelse invaderede folkeskolen familiernes private rum gennem en voldsomt øget interesse for personlige, sociale og politiske forhold samtidig med, at forældrene blev trukket ind i skolens rum som aktører og medansvarlige i den nye “fælles” skole. Nu, godt 30 år efter, er der ikke længere nogen, der kan huske en folkeskole, der anerkendte grænsen mellem offentligt og privat. Ingen kan huske den folkeskole, der selv tog det fulde ansvar for at uddanne børnene på velafgrænsede, faglige felter. Vor tids forældre er selv børn af 70′er-loven og ser det som en selvfølge, at skolen vrøvler rundt i ting, der ikke bør interesse den, samtidig med at den sløser med sit egentlige formål.

Den altid læseværdige ex-blogger Ulla Nørtoft Thomsen i 180 graders weekendklumme. Læs resten af klummen her.

Stoffer…

Nogle løse betragtninger i anledning af Westy’s indlæg.

i) I min verden er narkotika normal goods. Når prisen på stof X stiger i forhold til den vilkårlige alternative varekurv Y, ja så falder efterspørgslen på X. Og nej, det betyder ikke, at der bliver solgt mere billig hash end dyr hash, det betyder at når du sætter prisen op på en af delene, vil der blive solgt relativt mindre af det. Og tilsvarende, at når du sætter prisen ned på en af delene, vil der blive solgt relativt mere af det. Analysen herunder vil tage udgangspunkt i denne antagelse.

ii) Westy skriver i sit indlæg at [polikerne vælger] konsekvent at føre en politik, der ingen indvirkning har på antallet af narkomaner.

I relation til pris/mængde kombinationen kan der logisk set ske 9 ting efter en deregulering af narkotika-markedet (ikke alle giver lige meget mening i forhold til økonomisk teori):

a) P falder og Q falder
b) P falder og Q er uændret
c) P falder og Q stiger
d) P er uændret og Q falder
e) P er uændret og Q er uændret
f) P er uændret og Q stiger
g) P stiger og Q falder
h) P stiger og Q er uændret
i) P stiger og Q stiger

Jeg stemmer på c som det mest sandsynlige udfald. Niels lader i sit indlæg til at være overbevist om, at scenario b er det korrekte, enten det eller e. Jeg skal være ærlig: Jeg kan ikke rigtig se hvorfor. Hovedeffekterne af en deregulering ville i mine øjne være to: i) efterspørgslen forskydes mod nordøst (legalisering svarer for forbrugeren til et fald i transaktionsomkostningerne, så den effekt gør sig gældende uanset om ‘unge tror nu at stoffer er helt i orden, så de tager flere end før, for stofferne er ikke forbudt’-vinklen har nogen betydning eller ej), og ii) udbudskurven forskydes mod sydøst, sidstnævnte drevet dels af lavere produktions(/distributions-)omkostninger, dels øget konkurrence (ansatte i lovlige, regulerede sektorer som McDonald’s og Burgerking slipper ikke godt fra at skyde hinanden ned på åben gade, så der er næppe tvivl om, at antallet af udbydere vil gå op efter en legalisering. Dette medgiver Westy også i indlægget, og han understreger selv, at dette vil have en positiv effekt på både de udbudte produkters pris og kvalitet, blandt andet fordi det ikke primært er pris og kvalitet man konkurrerer om på markedet lige for tiden).

Men hvis b-scenariet, eller e-scenariet for den sags skyld, skal holde, ja så må der være noget galt med mine antagelser om enten effekt i) eller ii). For der findes ikke nogen måde at kombinere øget udbud og øget efterspørgsel med konstant forbrug og lavere priser, eller konstant forbrug og konstante priser. Hvis flere udbyder et produkt/der udbydes mere af det, og folk vil betale mere for det, end de ville før, ja så skal forbruget altså rykke mod højre. Westy må være uenig med mig om enten i) eller ii), eller begge. Her mener jeg det er Westy, der har til opgave at forsvare sit resultat, ikke mig. Hvorfor vil en legalisering ikke føre til øget efterspørgsel efter stoffer (især efter de farligste af dem er luget ud af markedet, en dereguleringseffekt Westy selv påpeger)? Hvorfor vil salget, og forbruget, ikke stige?

Han antager det, og han refererer med løst håndled til Holland, som har legaliseret hash, men ikke hårde stoffer, sidstnævnte om hvilke vi faktisk intet ved om de praktiske konsekvenser af en legalisering, eftersom ingen lande med et sammenligneligt indkomst-niveau og -kultur har nogen erfaringer dermed. De lande der har liberal lovgivning når det kommer til hårde stoffer, i teori eller (mere ofte) praksis, er som oftest producentlande, og deres erfaringer, og antal misbrugere, taler bestemt ikke for en legalisering, tværtimod.

De fleste af dem, som har svært ved at sluge kamelen med et frit marked for stoffer, mig selv inklusiv, har svært ved at kapere at Q vil øges i forlængelse af en reform. Det er et punkt dem som ønsker at liberalisere sjældent adresserer. Jeg er ikke glad for den nuværende politik på området, og selvfølgelig så jeg gerne tingene blev gjort anderledes. Jeg synes ligesom Westy det er en ualmindelig dårlig ide at ‘erklære stoffer krig’, og slå ned med hård hånd fra politiets side når folk ryger en joint, eller hvad det nu måtte være. Men når det er sagt, så ser jeg også helst, at Q ikke vokser. Ikke af paternalistiske årsager. Men pga. de negative eksternaliteter stofmisbrugeren pålægger sine omgivelser, eksternaliteter som markedet ikke synes at kunne håndtere (de kan det i hvert fald ikke nu). Folk der tager stoffer har svært ved at beholde et arbejde, og selvom politikerne lader til at tro noget andet, er det faktisk muligt at få for mange mennesker permanent parkeret på offentlige ydelser. Kriminalitet mv. spiller selvfølgelig også ind, narkomaner og berigelseskriminalitet er som jordbær og mælk. Jeg kan i den sammenhæng ikke undlade at bemærke, at dem der oftest har det med at nedtone disse effekter, formodentligt blandt andet gør det fordi effekterne er dem ubekendte, da de oftest selv, af gode grunde, har mange kilometers afstand til de mest belastede kvarterer. En del af årsagen til, at berigelseskriminaliteten er ‘nødvendig’ for misbrugeren, er naturligvis den gældende lovgivning som gør stofferne så dyre, men så kommer vi igen tilbage til det forhold, at hvis vi sænker prisen, øger vi forbruget.

Nu er der selvfølgelig forskel på at øge forbruget af narko og øge antallet af misbrugere. Måske forbruger de eksisterende misbrugere bare mere under det nye regimente med bedre og mere sikre stoffer? Det vil de i hvert fald gøre, hvis konsekvensen af deregulering er et prisfald. Jeg har dog svært ved at købe ideen om, at legalisering ikke også vil påvirke markedsstørrelsen. Stofkøb i dag er risikoadfærd, det kan virkeligt gå galt, hvis man er uheldig (eller dum, afhængig af hvem du spørger). ‘Bad trips’, risiko for overdosis, infektionsrisiko forbundet med injektionssår, HIV… Mange ting kan gå galt. Disse ting holder mange mennesker væk fra markedet, og de vælger så i stedet at slukke deres eventyrlyst i øl. At den umiddelbare risiko er relativt lav forbundet med hash (jeg mener at huske at have læst et sted, at det var i praksis umuligt at dø af en cannabisrelateret overdosis) er nok en af forklaringerne på, at det er et relativt populært alternativ til (for eksempel) alkohol. Pointen er naturligvis her, at stofkøb ‘under ordnede forhold’ ikke i samme grad vil være ‘fringe’ eller risikosøgende adfærd, og kombiner det forhold med generel risikoaversion og du får som resultat, at en effekt af mere liberal lovgivning formodentligt vil være, at mange af dem, der hidtil var for skræmte til at prøve, nu beslutter sig for at give det en chance (den grimme version: …og mange af de riskseekers, der før tog stoffer for at ‘opleve noget’, går nu væk fra den sikre ’stats(/godkendte)narko’ og prøver den voldsomme nye ecstacy variant, der ikke er godkendt af myndighederne, fordi den slår hver femte ihjel (…eller de kører druk-rally i midtbyen… whatever, der er utvivlsomt et utal af substitutionsmuligheder…). Vi har for øvrigt allerede en begrænset statsnarko-model, i form af metadon-behandling, men metadon giver som bekendt ikke noget ’sus’, så det er kun et dårligt substitut for eksempelvis den heroinafhængige). Disse bemærkninger bærer ikke helt så stor vægt såfremt staten træder helt ud af narkotika-markedet, det er rigtigt, men det ser jeg bare ikke ske (at staten stadig ville fungere som højeste instans, når det gælder kontrakthåndhævelse, selv efter al specifik narkotikalovgivning var fjernet, er et udtryk for, at den stadig ville have en implicit indflydelse på, hvordan tingene udviklede sig, selv efter politikken var væk) – og indvendingerne gælder stadig, bare i mere begrænset form.

Ovenstående bemærkninger skal ikke forstås således, at en reform ikke vil kunne lede til bedre resultater end den nuværende situation, igen, det er bestemt muligt, og sandsynligheden for at modeller i denne retning leder til bedre resultater, end politibetjente med maskinpistoler som stormer narko-reder med jævne mellemrum, er tæt på 1 – men vi må også bare holde os for øje, at man altså ikke kan forbyde almindelig menneskelig dumhed, og at det ville være dumt at ignorere nogle af de naturlige effekter, man kunne forvente ville følge i reformens kølvand.

En sidste bemærkning omkring invandrerbanderne Westy’s indlæg jo tog sit udgangspunkt i: Hvad nu hvis alternativet til en tilværelse som narko-kurer er et medlemsskab i HUT? Sagt på en anden måde: Selv hvis nogle af den danske underklasses medlemmer kan komme på fode igen med en anden narkopolitik, så ser jeg ikke det ske for den importerede samme. Det er for sent for dem, og illusionen om at alt vil kunne rettes op af den rigtige politik, er naiv. Narko eller ej, jeg tror indvandrerbanderne er kommet for at blive.

Beskyt menneskerettighederne

…Stop Durban II

Spændende initiativ, her er linket, og HT til UriasKim.

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Tyler Cowen har for øvrigt postet en del om alt det her med AIG-affæren. Han summerer en af sine posts om nationaliseringen af AIG op således:

I’d like to stress again that I remain worried about the rule of law in all these events. First, the referee is on the playing field. Second, while Dodd and others are on board, basically we have the executive branch of our government — the Treasury — operating without formal checks and balances. (Does that sound familiar? Would this administration do that?) That’s why it is all being done through the Fed. Fortunately the Fed is also a competent technocracy (as is the current Treasury) but the broader implications here are very worrying, both for governance and for the future of the Fed itself.

Maybe there is no better alternative, but these developments are a sign of just how dysfunctional American government has become.

Det er et stort ‘maybe’, men det er en anden diskussion. Det jeg ville bemærke her er: Jeg ville ikke have brugt ordet ’sign’ i ovenstående sætning. Jeg ville have brugt ordet ’symbol’. Det her er simpelthen Bush-regeringen i en nøddeskal. I Bush har vi i efterhånde nogle år for alvor haft en politiker, som har gjort alt hvad der overhovedet var menneskeligt muligt, for at fortælle os, klart og tydeligt, at han ikke bryder sig om alle de begrænsninger der pålægges hans magtudøvelse, og at han vil gøre nærmest hvad som helst for at omgå dem for sig og sine. Demokratisk kontrol er sådan noget irriterende noget, især hvis ens modstandere er i flertal. Hvorfor skulle man dog ændre på denne indstiling, og på de metoder den leder til, nu, bare fordi der er lidt knas på linjen på de finansielle markeder?

‘Interesting times’ ahead

The day before yesterday Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. In case you’d missed it, yesterday things took a turn from bad to worse.

Follow the finance/economics blogs closely for the next few days…

It’s not the politicians I’m afraid of…

(warning, long post)

And yes, intriguing post title, I know. Anyway, I haven’t had a stroke and turned communist overnight (lack of oxygen to the brain can do that to you, or so I’d like to believe), don’t worry, do read on, there’s a perfectly good explanation…

Whiteberg wrote in a comment here:

Unfortunately, governments already know how much damage they can do, they’re just waiting for the right moment to do it. China has been leading they way and has been exporting its expertise to countries like Iran and others. I’m sure the EU would like to follow suit to make sure that none of that evil “hate-speech” finds its way to the net. Wouldn’t the world be such a nicer place if everyone agreed on everything?

Thankfully, most of the important name servers, the heart of the internet, are in the United States and governed by US law, which still has some regard for freedom of expression. But probably not much longer. Isn’t it ironic that the great freedom of the interenet could turn into the greatest control mechanism the world has ever seen?

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This is a long post, as I have been looking around in my drafts to conjure up a little something to start up with again. So this is not directly an answer to the comment above, however most of it will be at least tangentially related. In specific, some of the post will take a closer look at the ‘government’ part of the quote above. A lot of libertarians tend to mix it all together in one big bag, ‘the evil government’, I know I do, and sometimes forget some of the lessons taught us by Public Choice theory. I think it is a mistake to state that the present danger against freedom of speech comes from the ‘government’, without qualifying that statement further, which is some of what I shall be doing in this post (this is not meant as a criticism of Whiteberg’s comment, ‘limited time/space/ect.’/'it was a comment, not a dissertation’… I know all that! And thanks for the comment…). Yes, I know that what I shall call ‘bureaucrats’ in the following are not the only ones in action threatening freedom of speech these days, some of the followers of the ‘religion of peace’ plays a big role too, but I shall not deal much with this part of the equation in this post.

Before I go further I shall have to state that I disagree with Whiteberg when he states that they’re just waiting for the right moment. That’s a faulty view of the way this process takes place. ‘The right moment’ is right now, the ‘right moment’ is all the time, and they’re not waiting at all. They are working very hard right now too, don’t you worry about that.

The point is, freedom of speech is not a binary variable, it can take on all kinds of values between 0 and 1. If 1 is total freedom of speech and 0 is total government censorship, we’re probably ‘objectively’ at 0.9 now, although it depends on whether you include in the valuation the potential of the laws we have, or just the current judicial praxis. My view of the current situation is that some people are working very hard right now to make that number drop to 0. They know it will be a long haul, but expect it to be worth their while. You don’t just either have freedom of speech or not, there are a lot of things in between, and if we fail to realize this, and realize that the people trying to end our freedom of speech will try to take it in small steps, then we will loose a lot of our freedom without ever noticing it. What they are ‘waiting for’ is ‘the right moment’ to pass the next law restricting freedom of speech for a specific group or related to a specific area of debate (most likely religion), they’re not in any way expecting to take it all away at once. That’s not how things work. The only way they could get away with taking it all at once, judging from the historical context, is by means of an ‘emergency’ of some sort (usually war-related), and right now we don’t have any of those. Do by the way remember this fact the next time Muslims riot in the streets because they are offended we still have the right to tell them, well, pretty much whatever the hell we want.

Now, I have, as some of you may know, followed the development in Canada wrt. freedom of speech, in particular the Ezra Levant case, quite closely for some time now. Something that seems very clear to me is that the development in Canada was in no way driven primarily by the politicians, even if they have their share of the responsibility. To tell the truth, most of them until quite recently didn’t even have a clue what was going on, and – the latter being something I find very frightening, even if it is actually quite unsurprising when you think a little further – also really couldn’t care less. What I think happened in Alberta is this: A group of government bureaucrats and quasi-governmental committees decided that they didn’t want all that ‘hate speech’ around. It’s much nicer when people just agree on everything, so of course there should be a law to that effect. Also, it would be really nice to be the one that would tell people when they were out of line – first of all, you can’t really trust someone else to do that now, can you? (incidentally, when contemplating a situation where freedom of speech is to be limited, most people actually tend to see themselves in the role of the censor, not in the role of the subject, something I find a little odd. Even if this is a non sequitur, most people think that if they agree with the censor, they should agree with the law. See also The Drunk Brit on (among other things) this subject here) – and besides, power’s always nice. So they told some of the politicians they knew about this, and apparently they made a very convincing argument as the no doubt very reasonable politicians decided that they might as well just pass a law. After all, why not, that’s what politicians do, isn’t it? When the law was passed, the politicians’ job was over, and they all pretty much forgot about the whole thing not long after. Or so I’d like to believe, there’s certainly a lot of things that point in that direction. The law was a bit problematic though, as people were to find out later on. It wasn’t that it criminalized the mere ‘intention to discriminate’ (which is of course very easy to prove/disprove, right?) And it wasn’t that the law had very harch penalties (even if it did), or that the politicians that had passed the law had formulated it in a way that was deliberately meant to hurt and punish their political opponents (even if they had, and even if it did). No, the main problem with the law was that the purpose of the law was to give petty bureaucrats pretty much completely outside of governmental control the power they had always dreamt of, and nothing else. A law with that kind of motivation behind it will always end up with some really ugly consequenses. I couldn’t have made a law that was much worse even if I tried. The law gave the bureaucrats exactly what they wanted, and what almost no one else would ever want them to have, including incidentally the spineless politicians most of whom probably didn’t really care much at all one way or the other: Power they had until then only dreamt about. One part of the law was so unspecific, and yielded so much power to the bureaucrats, in whose minds you were guilty until proven otherwise, that for more than 10 years it had a 100% conviction rate. Nobody knew or cared much about it, until finally one day the bureaucrats chose the wrong target, and then things started happening…

Yes, it was the politicians that passed the law and made it possible. But the politicians voting for the law were not the primary drivers of this development. People like Shirlene McGovern were. The bureaucrats got what they wanted in part because people just did not care enough or know enough about what was going on, to make it rational for the politicians to care enough not to pass a law. If people don’t tell their politicians that there are votes in freedom of speech, and bureacrats keep bugging them to give them what they want, the politicians are bound to yield eventually.

The thing I find particularly scary when it comes to the European situation is this: No one I know has any idea what’s going on in Brussels right now. The Humphrey Applebys of the EU might already have convinced the Jim Hackers down there that it’s about time to end that stupid freedom of speech everybody keeps talking about; or that would be how it would play out if the EU had a marginally less horrible institutional setup, where the power of politicians could actually trumph the power of unelected bureaucrats. At the moment however, what ‘people’ think don’t matter the slightest in the EU, in the EU the bureaucrats are running the show. And they know what they want; power. With the institutional setup of the EU as of now, it doesn’t make much sense to even include a Jim Hacker in the equation at all; when I think of the situation, I like to include the ‘elected politicians’ in the EU in my ‘bureaucrats’ box too, as I do not suffer from the delusion that I might have any influence whatsoever about anything that goes on down there. When you don’t know what’s going on, it gets bloody hard to oppose it. The lack of knowledge on part of the general population is a big part of the explanation of how things could go so wrong in Canada, and it is a quite common method for people in power to obtain yet more of it; by not telling people what they are doing. And to mention the words ‘transparency’ and ‘EU’ in the same sentence is to deliberately construct an oxymoron.

So this is what happens: Even if, on our own, we in Denmark could withstand the pressure by telling our politicians that we don’t like what we hear, that we prefer free speech to censorship, the EU will put pressure on ‘us’ until ‘we’ break. The Danish politicians will acquiesce eventually, I have no doubt about that, they will do as they are told, because, that’s what they do, and well, basically because it’s just too much damn trouble not to do so. Besides, the most powerful ones, that is the ones who are telling all the other politicians what to think, would probably like a job down there at some point in time; after all, it’s a pretty fine job, the pay is higher and the workload is pretty much as big as you want it to be not too big. In short, it’s not in the interest of the national politicians to ‘tell them no’ or to leave the Union. Not now, not ever. If anything, the interdependence of the national and international political institutions of Europe will increase over time, as this is the way things have been going pretty much since the end of the War. Another point also related, but less directly, to the interests of national politicians, is that in a matter of time the EU won’t even let us go, even if we threaten them; I think it is only a matter of time before the secession of Denmark from the EU will be almost as unthinkable as the secession of Als from the rest of Denmark. It gets less likely to happen the more time passes, and the fact that to a lot of politicians we’re pretty much already at this point, makes it quite clear that a secession is not going to happen.

To sum up, I’m not afraid of the politicians because the politicians seem at the moment to be mere pawns in this figth, tools that the enemies of liberty have realized they can use to achieve their ends. Most politicians are rather passive in this fight, they are not the ones driving this development as the damage they do, they do because of the fact that they give in to external pressure, not because they have taken an initiative on their own to end free speech. After all, they know very well they aren’t going to be the powerful censors anyway, they are far too busy passing new laws telling people what to do. As a matter of fact, in Canada where things have turned really bad, the politicians pretty much completely lost control over the situation a long time ago, and in my mind it’s not until the politicians lose control that we know it will get really serious, because that’s he moment where a change in the public opinion might not be enough to turn the development around.

Those who are in control, or are likely to become so in due course, those who wants to tell me what I can and can’t say and are likely to succeed, they are the ones I am afraid of. Some people would say I shouldn’t fear someone like McGovern or Sowahardy, I should ridicule them, because they are such pathetic nobodys. Well, when a pathetic little nobody gets a lot of power, I get scared. I can’t help that, and these days, I do feel scared about where we are heading and what these people have in store for us.

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As to the US and their role in all this: In my youth, I thought of the US as ‘the land of the free’. Then, among a lot of other things, they passed a law called the Patriot Act. I don’t trust the Americans or their institutions to protect freedom of speech. Over time, the US will look more like the EU. Not the other way around.

One last thing. Please do remember that relative to the total utility derived from freedom of expression across all individuals, the open and explicit support for it will always be in extremely low supply.