In support of Ronald A. Lindsay

Ronald A. Lindsay, president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, gave the opening address at his organization's Women in Secularism conference this weekend. During a section of that talk he criticized people who automatically bleat "check your privilege" as a way to avoid discussions.

It's the same point I made last year, and we both included the caveat that privilege is a legitimate concept that is being abused by some feminists.

Well, surprise surprise some people freaked out and distorted what Lindsay said and are making him the witch of the week.

Lindsay is doing a great job defending himself and doesn't need my help. The one thing he could use is more support and I'm glad to lend my voice to that end. Please consider doing the same.
Read more...

Settle down, Stevens

Does anyone know what is up with Vsauce host Michael Stevens? The guy's face is always shifting around and he sways like a wavy tube man when he's on camera. He does some great research on some very interesting subjects, but he mugs the camera so much I have to turn it off or hide the window.



Read more...

Elizabeth Warren thinks you're stupid

...Because she couldn't possibly be that dense

Senator Warren has introduced her first bill, the Randian-named Bank on Student Loans Fairness Act, which pegs the interest rate of Stafford Loans to the Federal Reserve's discount window, which is currently at 0.75 percent.

I'd like to introduce the concept I call "Fellow's Law" after blogger Nathan Fellows, where any bill with the word "fair" in the title must be met with mockery. Warren makes it simple when she backs it up with populist jibber-jabber:

According to Warren, the federal government makes an average of 36 cents for every dollar it lends to students. As a result, this year, the government will make some $34 billion from students making payments. “We shouldn’t be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt, while giving a great deal to the banks,” she said. “That’s just wrong.”

Warren is banking on the ignorance of young people with her message. She wants people to believe that banks come to the FED for long-term loans and walk out with a tiny interest rate because of corruption. In fact, that scenario involves a different, higher interest rate. The discount window that she's talking about is when banks need to balance their books and borrow money overnight only to repay it the next morning. It's barely even a loan, it's more like holding someone's place in line.

People who aren't ignorant on these matters have been roasting Warren for her purposely-misleading rhetoric. The best so far came from Megan McArdle:

It's probably true that some say banks need low interest rates to keep the economy growing. But no one except possibly a lunatic has told Elizabeth Warren that banks are getting 0.75% at the discount window as a thank you for all the hard work they're doing helping the economy. Discount window loans are cheap for three reasons: the borrowers have assets and income that are easy to seize, the loans are quite short term, and the banks are required to put up collateral... 

Students, on the other hand, are borrowing for a decade, and the only thing they're putting up as a guarantee is their character. How good a collateral is their character? In 2011, 9.1% of borrowers had defaulted on their student loan within the first two years of the payment period.

The interest paid by the folks who don't default is the only thing keeping this program from hemorrhaging money.

Does Warren really think that someone could make it to Washington and attempt to change government policy on financial matters if they don't know what the FED's discount window is? Well... yeah. There's Rep. Maxine Waters.


Read more...

No national abortion regulation debate

For the last few years my favorite example of politically-opportunistic regulation has been safety regulation legislature for abortion clinics, which are always promoted by pro-life Republicans.

It never occurred to me that they might be worth doing.

Now that the Dr. Kermitt Gosnell case has become a national story and he has been sentenced to prison for illegally killing just-born children with scissors at his abortion clinic, a reasonable person might consider supporting some of those regulations.

Yet, that option isn't on the table the same way gun control was on the table following the Sandy Hook shooting.

Plenty has already been written about the media's reluctance to cover this story, and how much of the subsequent focus has been on the media itself and not the actual case. I found Megan McArdle's explanation for the lack of coverage to be the most compelling:

...I understand why my readers suspect me, and other pro-choice mainstream journalists, of being selective—of not wanting to cover the story because it showcased the ugliest possibilities of abortion rights. The truth is that most of us tend to be less interested in sick-making stories—if the sick-making was done by "our side."

...If I think about it for a moment, there are obviously lots of policy implications of Gosnell's baby charnel house. How the hell did this clinic operate for seventeen years without health inspectors discovering his brutal crimes? Are there major holes in our medical regulatory system? More to the point, are those holes created, in part, by the pressure to go easy on abortion clinics, or more charitably, the fear of getting tangled in a hot-button political issue? These have clear implications for abortion access, and abortion politics.

After all, when ostensibly neutral local regulations threaten to restrict abortion access--as with Virginia's recent moves to require stricter regulatory standards for abortion clinics, and ultrasounds for women seeking abortions--the national media thinks that this is worthy of remark. If local governments are being too lax on abortion clinics, surely that is also worthy of note.

Moreover, surely those of us who are pro-choice must worry that this will restrict access to abortion: that a crackdown on abortion clinics will follow, with onerous white-glove inspections; that a revolted public will demand more restrictions on late-term abortions; or that women will be too afraid of Gosnell-style crimes to seek a medically necessary abortion.

I have never considered that abortion clinics actually need more regulation before this, but as McArdle said 17 years of Gosnell's unsanitary, brutal practice implies it should be considered.

While we should expect the pro-choice crowd to have this conversation in their own sphere, shouldn't we also have a national conversation about increasing health standards for abortion clinics? Why isn't the media leading that charge now that they cat is out of the bag? I submit it is because they are afraid of where it would lead.
Read more...

Another knight for our round table

I just discovered the YouTube channel of Bailey Norwood, an agricultural economics professor at Oklahoma State University. He also takes in interest the economic arguments of the "Buy Local" movement

And man on man does he put them out to pasture.



I'm always interested in seeing what approach other people make when they tackle this issue. The "transfer of wealth" focus is a solid tactic, as a major trade fallacy is that wealth is being lost in exchange for nothing when people trade. In fact, the amount of wealth on average stays the same and it is the form of wealth that is exchanged.
Read more...

Strong start, weak finish

I was excited to when I stumbled across the BBC's Masters of Money miniseries that presented a trio of one-hour documentaries on economists John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Marx, all available free online. Sadly, that enjoyment turned to annoyance and resentment when I watched the series and it unraveled from educational material into a slanted, ill-informed personal opinion piece.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first piece on John Maynard Keynes, which I felt was a celebration of his ideas wrapped in a detailed biography of his personal life. Keynes is a great subject and it's a shame his legacy hasn't soaked into the broader culture the way Albert Einstein's visage has extended beyond physics.

I anticipated a similar treatment of Friedrich Hayek, but never received it. Instead, I saw Hayek treated as a flawed extension of Keynes, the way Ptolemy would be presented in a documentary on Copernicus. What irked me the most is how they were shown as bitter rivals when in fact Keynes and Hayek became good friends despite being the leaders of opposing camps.

Host Stephanie Flanders really went off the deep end with the third piece on Karl Marx, who she gave way more credit than deserved. Flanders is hard to take seriously when she endorses Marx's criticism of capitalism. She does not endorse socialism or communism and the piece made a great point of showing that Marx never adequately fleshed those ideas out - something that irks the hollow-headed Stalinists of our generation. As Brad DeLong said, Marx's real contribution to economics was presenting the best arguments for modern mainstream economists to combat, not for advancing any sort of alternative.

The series constantly flouts The Open University tie in on the BBC website which promised several cartoon shorts on basic economic concepts. I thought most of them were garbled and visually ugly. Worse of all, the short on comparative advantage makes the cliche outsider argument that the concept is outdated and irrelevant, something Paul Krugman demonstrated has been happening for ages as a form of intellectual hipsterism.
Read more...

It doesn't work that way

Two years ago I wrote about attempted "food sovereignty" municipal ordinances in Maine. While I support their goal of deregulating food, even if it's only small-scale production, I said the approach was doomed for failure.

Well, the update is obvious. The courts reminded them that state and federal legislation trumps municipal ordinances.

A [Maine] Superior Court ruling against a Blue Hill farmer who has been selling unlabeled, unlicensed raw milk will have farmers in several Maine towns wondering about the future of local “food sovereignty” ordinances that seek to exempt them from state oversight.

Sorry kids, but a strong top-down federal government prevents natural experiments in local government. It's a shame, although an obvious one, as there was never a reason to believe this plan would work in the long term.
Read more...