Raise your standards, don't lower them

From time to time, I find myself rereading Ken White's brilliant piece entitled "Ken's Law". It's about the idea that awfulness among ones opponents does not excuse awfulness among ones allies.

As I reread this four-year-old essay, I find myself struggling to live up to its lessons.

In modern debates, proving the hypocrisy of one's opponents is a cheap and easy way to feel that you've won a debate. It's very tempting to see political opponents whooping about a gaffe cast by your side and tell them that if their side did it they would be making excuses.

It's tempting alright, but we have to fight that primal urge. As Ken wrote:

We're conditioned by culture, both popular and political, to frame everything as white hats vs. black hats. This leads us into embarrassing contortions, hypocrisies, and violations of previously closely-held principles when we are called upon to defend Our Guy (or gal). He/she was provoked! The other side did much worse! Yes, he/she kicked a puppy, but nobody said anything when the other guy/girl killed a kitten! 

And yet we know, on some level, that this is a foolish way to look at life. We know it when we deal with our children — an apt comparison, as politicians and people who care about them are usually childish in a charming-sociopath-with-questionable-personal-hygiene sense. When one of the kids runs howling into my room at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday about what his/her brother/sister did, it is almost always the case that the howler did not have clean hands in the dispute. 

But somehow we go about acting as if One Guy Is In The Right, and that ifs, buts, nuances, and shared responsibility are signs of weakness, apostasy, and "concern trolling."

For a while, I told myself to stop trying to score political points by assuming that the other side would act hypocritically if the situation was reversed. What if my assumption was wrong? I swore off saying "If my guy was in that situation, would you act the same way?"

But after further thought, I've decided that this way of thinking is only half right. It is indeed wrong for someone to give an ally a pass for something they would condemn an opponent for, but it is only proper to ask an opponent to consider calling out their own kin for being in the wrong, and a good way to show them that is to ask what they would do if their own opponent behaved that way.

Think of a two by two matrix. There are good opponents, bad opponents, good allies and bad allies. In all cases we should all call out bad opponents and allies, and treat good allies and opponents with courtesy and the benefit of the doubt.

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Rational behavior and perfect information

Zach Weinersmith, author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, continues to pump out the best web comic for academic economic jokes. Not just jokes about economics, but occasionally jokes defending economics as a discipline.

This recent strip lampoons educated folks who insist economics is flawed because it assumes human beings are rational. Here's the link.

My usual response to this line is that human beings are indeed rational, but only up to a point. No one insists that human beings are perfectly rational, but at the same time they are not completely irrational.

For example, say you had a store that sold two similar types of food at similar prices and customers bought them at about the same rate, say $1 hamburgers and $1 hot dogs. If suddenly you raised the price on one of the items to be 100 times that of the other, you would expect a shift in sales. Sales of the inflated item would fall, perhaps to zero.

If you want to hold the view that humans are not rational, then you would have to believe that purchases habits would not be affected in any way by that large price increase. There is a rich discussion about whether economics deserves to be called a science or not, but when someone denies economics has any credibility at all they are assuming that half of those customers would eat $100 hamburgers instead of $1 hot dogs.

On a similar note, opponents of markets and mainstream economics claim that markets only function where there is perfect information. That's obviously false, as the important concept of price signals only makes sense in markets with imperfect information, but what is the alternative to markets? Government action, and all governments operate with imperfect information.

Yet, many anti-market advocates assume that the government will have perfect information.

Weinersmith's comic is not focused on economics, but it does visit the subject often. See here, here, here, here, here and here for a taste. The first time I read this one I thought the joke was at the expense of economists, but Mike Munger got me to consider that philosophers were the ones being ridiculed, and this earlier parallel comic on engineers proved it.

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We're all guilty when it comes to bad thinking

When we read about bias and critical thinking there is always the temptation to think of them in terms of other people. Straw men arguments are made by the people we disagree with because their real arguments are too weak. Our intellectual opponents are unable to consider evidence that challenge their world view. It's the wrong people who are blinded by their emotions.

That is completely missing the point. Bias and illogical thinking are the natural state for human beings, all human beings, and that includes you, yes you.

Ahem. That is to say, it includes me. Not merely you the reader, but me. I accept that I can never completely overcome my own biases, but I can chip away at them and catch myself when I slip into comforting thought processes.

Steve Novella perfectly sums this up when he reminds us that the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't just for other people. If you're unfamiliar, the Dunning-Kruger effect shows that most people with low skills overestimate their ability in those specific realms, while people with the highest skills tend to underestimate their ability.

Think about some area in which you have a great deal of knowledge, in the expert to mastery level (or maybe just a special interest with above average knowledge). Now, think about how much the average person knows about your area of specialty. Not only do they know comparatively very little, they likely have no idea how little they know, and how much specialized knowledge even exists. 

Here comes the critical part – now realize that you are as ignorant as the average person is every other area of knowledge in which you are not expert... The Dunning-Kruger effect is not just about dumb people not realizing how dumb they are. It is about basic human psychology and cognitive biases. Dunning-Kruger applies to everyone.

Ponder that one and while you do, try to think of what subjects you have very little training in. How would you really score on a test on that general knowledge in that subject? For me, I can think of a few social sciences that I've commented on but have never really studied.
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Obama doesn't care about evidence

Today President Obama announced his list of 12 legislative recommendations and 23 executive actions for gun control measures to capitalize on the wave of enthusiasm following the Sandy Hook shooting. Some of the measures are ho-hum, such a call to nominate an ATF director and have the Consumer Product Safety Commission review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes.

But, of course, there was a lot of nonsense recommended by the president, such as a federal ammunition magazine cap at 10 rounds, a ban on so-called assault weapons and having the Centers for Disease Control conduct a $10 million study to answer a question we already know.

I'm reminded of a brilliant article David Bier wrote last week that questions the philosophy behind the gun-grabbers demand that we provide a reason why we should be allowed to possess semi-automatic rifles like an AR-15.

Free societies place the responsibility on those who would restrain the freedom of an individual to justify their action, not on the individual to justify his freedom. But the proponents of government action have completely inverted this premise - government power now requires little justification - it is presumed valid - and exercising liberty requires a great deal of justification.  

Russell's Teapot taught us the burden of proof is on the claim maker. If we apply this logic to government power, shouldn't it be up to the President Obama to show us the evidence that his policies will reduce the murders of innocent people?

Where is the evidence that restricting magazine sizes will stop or minimize mass shootings? The claims from the anti-gun folks are quite grand. Lawrence O’Donnell was ahead of the curve on this idea. Back in July MSNBC's he guaranteed that the Aurora movie theater massacre would have ended early if the shooter hadn't used a hundred-round drum magazine:

California has made the sale of hundred-round clips illegal. California restricts those magazines to ten bullets. And so, if you’re an aspiring mass murderer here in California, and you decide tonight to obtain your killing tools legally, as our most recent mass murderers have done, you will be forced to reload after your first ten bullets, and if you try doing that in a packed movie theater, I promise you, you will not finish reloading. You will be taken down by the freedom of the people in that theater to attack you the second you have to stop firing and reload. The ten-bullet clip is about the freedom to stop mass murderers after they’ve fired ten shots, instead of a hundred.

But that shooting never lasted 100 rounds. The shooter's gun jammed on him. No one tackled him. He simply switched to a second weapon, as most of these shooters have had the option to do. Reloading can take one to three seconds. O'Donnell's wild claim, peppered with confident statements like "I promise you" was a swirl of useless conjecture. Where is the hard evidence that this policy will make a difference?

Banning weapons that have certain non-essential features and labeling them "assault weapons" based on the stock or the grip is another useless move lacking evidence. The research ranges from showing the 1994 federal ban on so-called assault weapons failed to make a clear impact on gun violence to inconclusive. There is no reason to believe passing these feel-good laws will prevent violence.

I think the most telling recommendation President Obama made today was his effort to fund another study on video games hoping the conclusion will be different. From Joystiq:

Obama mentioned video games once during the conference, asking Congress to provide $10 million for the Centers for Disease Control and other scientific agencies to research the causes of gun violence. 

"While year after year, those who oppose even modest gun safety measures have threatened to defund scientific or medical research into the causes of gun violence, I will direct the Centers for Disease Control to go ahead and study the best ways to reduce it," Obama said. "And Congress should fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds. We don't benefit from ignorance. We don't benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of violence."

Well, we do know the science here. In fact, the Supreme Court took that scientific fact into account back in 2011. We already have the answer to this question.

Imagine if the president said he wanted to fund a new study to determine if vaccines cause autism, or if George W. Bush was behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Try ending that request with "We don't benefit from ignorance."

The president does not practice an evidence-based approach to running this government. The list he produced today had some reasonable approaches, but he couldn't help himself from peppering it with dubious measures.

In an authoritarian world, all freedoms are restricted unless the government permits them. In a world of liberty, all freedoms are permitted unless the government restricts them.

I believe freedom should come first. There are times when it is needed for the government to restrict some of our freedoms, but the burden of proving the necessity of those restrictions falls on the government. If they want to take a right away it is up to them to prove to us why they should be allowed to. We shouldn't have to come up with a compelling reason for why we deserve each and every freedom we get to keep.
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The opposite of a lynch mob

Patrick from Popehat linked an amazing piece this week about the American public's role in the aftermath of the My Lai massacre. After a six-member jury of military officers sentenced Lt. William Calley to life imprisonment for killing 22 civilians, the American public demanded his release and politicians like Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and George Wallace came to his aid, eventually freeing him.

How would you feel if officials from throughout your state came to the aid and support of someone who did the same thing today in Iraq or Afghanistan? Remember, the 6 men who sentenced Calley were all senior officers, all had previously served as Lieutenants in their younger days, and 5/6 of them were combat veterans. They deliberated a long time and based their decision, presumably, on both the facts, any and all aggravation, mitigation, and extenuation while juxtaposing the whole shebang upon their own experiences as junior officers.

The author shared a story when he was in military school as a lieutenant and one of those six officers who served on the jury came in as a guest speaker. While banging the podium for emphasis, he told the class:

Listen Lieutenants. I want to make one thing clear, William Calley is a convicted MUR-DER-ER!

The author went on to question the assumption that collective beliefs are logically and ethically pure. In this case, a half-dozen well-informed men reached one careful conclusion and the general public misunderstood the situation and undid everything.

So should I take this example as an assault on my political beliefs or an excuse to reinforce them?

I believe our constitutional republic is a superior system to direct democracy because it shields decisions from the whims of the public and tells voters there are some things they simply can't do. That mechanism failed here and the ignorance of the public set a guilty man free.

On the other hand, I believe there is no guarantee that the people the government puts into place are going to be the wisest or most qualified. Political connections will play a much larger role than merit. While justice should never be decided democratically, I don't think the experts entrusted with power should be revered uncritically.

While decision making for individuals should be decided by those individuals, and not by the collective, this was not an example of people making choices about their own lives. This was a case of the ignorant collective deciding something for the entire nation, and it turned out, they got it completely wrong. Collective justice usually takes the form of a lynch mob. In this case, it was the complete opposite.
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What recovery were you watching?

I've been looking through some of President Obama's various speeches and interviews, but I can't seem to find the one where he said  the country is too damaged for him to save, but he'll keep it from getting worse.

I hear the president's supporters speak about this concept all the time when they defend his first three years in office, but I can only find candidate Obama promising swift changes and improvements upon his election. They have even gone so far lately as to say the 2012 economy shows his policies have been a success.

Really? What nation are they talking about.

In all fairness, the president's role in determining the rate the economy chugs along is minor. President Obama did not ruin the economy, nor has he actively sabotaged it's recovery. But his defenders commit a fallacy when they point to any reduction in unemployment levels as proof that his policies work.

First of all, the improvements are incredibly modest when compared to what his administration projected with the stimulus bill. The Heritage Foundation was kind enough to plot the recorded unemployment rates on the most recent update of this famous chart:

We're doing nowhere near as well as President Obama said we would. We're actually doing worse than the projections for a hands-off approach. He also famously said that if the economy doesn't turn around in three years he will not expect voters to return him to office:

I am not saying his boast means voters are duty-bound to make his prophecy come true. I am simply showing that his policies were supposed to make big gains that never materialized.

There is a big Post Hoc fallacy in attributing the gains the economy has made over the last year to the president's policies. I don't think the average person understands that economists believe without Keynesian stimulus, an economy will still slowly recover. The public's view seems to be that once it falters, it stays there until someone can fix it with policy changes.

The economists' idea is that as people lose their jobs and buy less, raw materials will fall in price. They will be cheaper to purchase and you eventually get to a point (after a lot of misery) where they become cheap enough for people to start buying them and creating businesses. This is what solves recessions and depressions and the stimulus solution is a theoretical way to speed it up.

I am not arguing that the natural suffering model is a superior choice among two workable options. As someone who spent two years on unemployment during this crisis, I know exactly how miserable and hopeless it felt. Instead, I am saying a natural recovery is what's chipping away at unemployment, and the presidents supporters are making fools of themselves for trying to credit him with these minor gains.
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Why I tolerate homophobes

Nick, the Narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, opened the book with this unforgettable remark:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had."

Just as Nick couldn't let go of that advice, I too have kept it in mind over the years, especially when I encounter people who are intolerant of gays.

I grew up in the 1990's when it was still acceptable to say "fag" in casual conversation. It wasn't out of malice; it's something we said without a second though. There wasn't something evil or sinister about my generation, or those that came before us. It's just how things were when we grew up.

Until middle school I was opposed to gays in purely hypothetical terms, since I hadn't met anyone who was openly gay. It was a combination of watching The Kids in the Hall episodes over and over and realizing I was on the same side of an issue as the Ku Klux Klan that caused me to abandon my position and accept gays.

Opposing gays was the default position when I was growing up. That's not the case any more and the younger generations have done a great job of being open and accepting. However, if they had been born in the 1970's or 1980's, a lot of those individuals would have been on the other side.

Some young people today still grow up in communities that treat gays cruelly. However, I feel the proper way to deal with these unfortunate people is with understanding, not hate. The way some social conservatives talks about gays is truly awful and I would never defend their statements.

But at the same time, I am not as willing to condemn the person along with the statements. A lot of those people didn't have the same advantages when they grew up, and their contempt for gays is a product of their upbringing and lack of exposure to critical thinking.

For example, the working title for the Beastie Boy's amazing album License to Ill was "Don't Be A Faggot." That was 1986, and the group has rewritten a lot of their own lyrics since then as they started to "get it."

Just like the Beastie Boys, I was born at a time where I got to be on both sides of the gay rights cause. I had an unthinking aversion to gays as a child and was the token straight guy at my first college's gay-straight alliance. We are all products of our environments.

Earlier tonight I was listening to a pop-rock YouTube play list and came across this song high school student Jarrod Matthew sang to what appears to be a far-away romance. He changed some of the lyrics to be about Sunny, his beloved. It is absolutely sweet, endearing and heartwarming.



When I realized that Sunny was a boy, it didn't change a thing about how this video made me feel. It was no less tender or romantic.

Yet, I know there are people* out there who would have shut it off the second they realized what was happening. I don't want to sound condescending, but how can you feel anything but pity for people who can't take joy in witnessing beautiful acts like this because they were brought up intolerant?

As Nick's father said, whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

*Granted, few of them would want to listen to a Hellogoodbye cover song.
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President George W. Obama

I have a lot of fun mocking the dishonest, loony left like Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and Cynthia McKinney. I also think it's important to give back occasionally and honor members of the left who are fair, intelligent and thought provoking, such as Matthew Yglesias.

Let me add another name to the list of honest outspoken leftists and reveal my respect for Rachel Maddow. Just look at this clip from last month where she took President Obama to task for his embrace of imprisoning people without due process:



Psychologically, it's very difficult for people to distance themselves from an idea, cause or politician once embraced. With all the broken promises of the current administration, I can see the people who vote for in 2012 divided into two camps.

The first camp is people who believe the Republicans are worse. They like a few things he's done or stands for and have some major reservations about some of his other actions, but think a republican president would make worse mistakes. I don't agree with these people, but I respect them.

The other is people who still look at him like it's 2008. They can easily be identified when they make excuses for his failures like "he inherited a mess."

He did indeed inherit a mess, but can anyone find the speech where candidate Obama said the country is too screwed up to turn it around in the next few years? I've never heard this speech, but a lot of his supports reference it a lot.

President Obama is in over his head. He did not know what he was getting in to and has had to abandon a lot of his positions and goals, and that has lead him to make the same decisions George W. Bush made. Kudos to lefties like Maddow for not turning a blind eye.
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Jim Crow and the minimum wage

I was rereading one of Dylan's post on racial issues over at Blindsight 20/20 and I got to thinking about how any legislature that impacts blacks negatively more than other groups - crack-cocaine punishments, welfare reform, public housing cuts, etc. - are presented as racist in nature and motivation.

Under Jim Crow laws, this was absolutely the case. Legislation that said in order to vote, you must ace a difficult voting test unless your grandfather was a voter was designed to target blacks without actually mentioning them.

Jim Crow laws were a horrible blight on our record, which makes it politically convenient for some lefties to invoke them to smear modern laws that would impact blacks more than whites.

So with that template in mind, shouldn't minimum wage laws fall under the 21st century Jim Crow umbrella?

I've added emphasis to the minimum wage entry on the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

At current U.S. wage levels, estimates of job losses suggest that a 10 percent in crease in the minimum wage would decrease employment of low-skilled workers by 1 or 2 percent. The job losses for black U.S. teenagers have been found to be even greater, presumably because, on average, they have fewer skills. As liberal economist Paul A. Samuelson wrote in 1973, “What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2.00 per hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?”

This has been well-understood for a long time. The white labor unions in South Africa under apartheid pushed for minimum wages to push blacks out of jobs. It doesn't matter that the proponents today are no longer motivated by racism when the results are identical.

If one is in the habit of calling racism on any legislation that makes things difficult for minority members more than anyone else, than they should see the minimum wage as nothing less than a Jim Crow law.
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"Foods miles" are the thin edge of the wedge

Yesterday economist Steve Landsburg wrote a critical post about Stephen Budiansky's recent piece in the New York Times demolishing the concept of food miles, the same piece I praised last week. Landsburg overstated his case and while absolutely correct in his larger point, he completely misread Budiansky's tactics.

Landsburg made the argument that the price of a product is an accurate measurement of all the resources that went into it, instead of into competing needs, then added:

Budiansky ignores all that to focus strictly on energy consumption. But the quality of our lives depends on a lot more than energy consumption, so Budiansky’s narrow-minded computations are strictly loco.

That's unfair to say. A focus can be narrow without being narrow-minded.

Budiansky wrote a piece blasting the myth of food miles, sending shrapnel to non-local places with its bold thrust. He directly confronted the activists on one of their major claims and showed they have it backwards.

Landsburg, on the other hand, made a claim someone like myself will find convincing, but will bounce off the noggins of localists because they distrust economics. In Landsburg's own words:

Markets are not perfect, so the price of a tomato does not, with 100% accuracy, reflect the social cost of acquiring that tomato. But in most circumstances it comes damn close, and in virtually all circumstances it comes a lot closer than Budiansky’s sort of crabbed accounting.

That's the flaw. The localists will simply reject his argument with a wave of their hand, as they do to all other market-based explanations. They will simply say that the price fails to capture negative externalities and will overemphasize the impact of agricultural subsidies. Those arguments are very wrong, but they will cram them into the thin gap Landsburg left open and go about their merry way. It doesn't matter that local production has negative externalities too, or may receive subsidies. The opposition is not a pool of critical thinkers.

There's nothing wrong with criticizing people on the same side of an issue for making a poor argument. I have done it here too, and I see no virtue in establishing solidarity to resist localism.

But the "buy local" argument is so vast, with so many flaws, that I've spent more than a year blogging about it and I still have plenty of ideas that I haven't written yet. Budiansky never claimed to write the definitive critical essay of localism. Neither have I, and I don't think it can be done in less space than an entire book.

Until that book is written, people like me will continue to poke holes in the sides of this issue with the goal of winning people over to our side.

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The myth of the puppet resistance

I put a lot of work into demonstrating respect for the people I disagree with. Most of that work is fighting human nature and biases that tend to brush aside challenging views without really listening.

I've written before that people can disagree without one side being stupid, or evil.

But what about one side being a front?

There's a very strong sense of paranoia in some groups. The basic idea is that they are absolutely right, and no one actually disagrees with them. When people do speak up with intelligent, rational arguments to the contrary, it is because they were paid to say them.

This overlaps a lot with the post about evil opponents, and I'm going to recycle Penn Jillette's quote from 2008 about Democrats who believe:

"If you boil it all down, that Bush and McCain and Palin agree with the Democrats 100 percent on everything, and are then doing the opposite. They do not believe there is a disagreement. They do not believe that Bush is a person trying to do the best he can do, who is wrong."

The difference here is that this time people are supposedly lying not because they have evil plans, but because they have been bribed.

I encounter this all the time with the "Buy Local" crowd. The supporters are enthusiastic, but some are downright fanatical and reveal a lot of paranoia when their views are challenged. Just look at the comment section whenever the Freakonomics Blog posts a legitimate intellectual disagreement from an academic that pokes holes in the localist philosophy. It got so bad the first time that Stephen Dubner wrote:

"A blog post from a few months ago — titled “Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores?” — upset many eat-local fans. Among the many sins I committed were... being the kind of grump who hates all good things including nature, children, puppies, etc. (Believe that if you must; I hope it is not true.)"

But the comments in response to William A. Master's remarks about a realistic sustainable food system that uses industrial technology weren't just mad; they were accusations of fraud:

"I want to know who funds his research."

There there was:

"After reading his speech one of two things must be at play

"1) he is a robot and doesn’t required actual food that humans eat (or hasn’t ever actually tasted food, local or industrial)

"2) is paid by Monsanto / Cargill / etc…."

Three weeks after the post went up, this gem was added to the comments section:

"You know we are in trouble when sophistry is used to convince the public that what we all know is true from first hand experience is, actually, false. War is peace, hate is love, and if you just look deeper you are told that only highly concentrated industrial agriculture holds the key to health, happiness, economic prosperity, and the salvation of all mankind. Just eliminate common sense – and you will know the truth? I think Monsanto should spray our air with chemicals – since their air will be safer than the natural air we breathe. Then charge us for it."

Two out of the three named the scapegoat agricultural company Monsanto. If you swap "Monsanto" out for "The Devil" or "The CIA" whenever it appears in food Luddite literature, you end up with a text indistinguishable from doomsday prophecies or wild conspiracy theories.

It's very easy to reinforce a cherished belief by automatically rejecting all opposing views as a plant by a big corporation or the government. What these people need to ask themselves is, what if you are wrong and someone sincere tried to tell you so? How would you know the difference?

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Are political opponents evil people?

Listening to conservative talk radio lately, there's an ongoing theme with certain callers about how Obama is handling economic issues. The concept is the following:

"Obama is making decisions that will hurt the economy and give the government more power. Obama is also a smart guy, so he can't be doing this out of ignorance. Therefore, he is purposely ruining the country to make himself a dictator."

Good grief, and usually the host agrees with them.

This has become the norm in the hostile political climate today. People don't seem to understand that the other side could have a reasonable position. As Penn Jillette said in 2008 on the same subject, there are Democrats who believe:

"If you boil it all down, that Bush and McCain and Palin agree with the Democrats 100 percent on everything, and are then doing the opposite. They do not believe there is a disagreement. They do not believe that Bush is a person trying to do the best he can do, who is wrong."

I recently wrote about people assuming that the other side disagrees with them because they are all stupid. This is the opposite of that view. Instead, this group thinks that no one could possibly disagree with their political views, and any intellectual disagreement is a mask to justify malicious intent.

For example, I spent the first 25 years of my life only hearing anti-sweatshop arguments, with no idea there was another side to the issue. It was presented as a simple good versus evil story: There are poor people in other countries who work awful jobs for little pay just to save greedy corporations labor costs. No one talked about how these factories do more good for individual poor people than foreign aid.

Since I've learned more about the issue, I've found everyone I've talked to about it has had one of two responses: They are either completely - although uncomfortably - converted to the pro-sweatshop side, or they plug their ears and say it's all a big lie to justify corporate profits. I've never heard someone say they just don't find the evidence compelling for the trade-offs.

By making complex issues into simplistic good-versus-evil struggles, we degrade political discussion. As Greg Mankiw wrote on the health care debate:

"One thing I have been struck by in watching this debate is how strident it has been, among both proponents and opponents of the legislation. As a weak-willed eclectic, I can see arguments on both sides. Life is full of tradeoffs, and so most issues strike me as involving shades of gray rather than being black and white. As a result, I find it hard to envision the people I disagree with as demons."

Right now, a google search for the word "capitalism" brings up 19,900,000 hits. To get a sense of the flavor of the discussion, 7,500,000 of them - more than a third - also contain the word "Hitler."

Obama is making his presidential decisions with good intentions, not evil ones. I imagine if I was thrust into his office there would be some compromises I would have to make that are invisible to me right now. I have no reason to believe that he is motivated by anything other than running the country the best way he knows how. I can say he's wrong, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.

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Where will lottery profits come from?

Stop the presses - it looks like Maine is going to be getting in on another multi-state lottery game after yesterday's unanimous approval by the Legislative Appropriations Committee.

"[Senator Bill] Diamond said the hope is to start the Mega Millions game in May so some revenue is gained in the current budget year. He said that while the move does not generate a lot of revenue — about $1.5 million in its first full year of operation — it will help as the panel tries to finish work on the budget this month."

Usually the word "revenue" is a code for taxes, but in this case it really can be thought of as the state making a profit. The only problem is that number will not be as high as $1.5 million.

Apparently, our elected representatives think Mainers are burning bales of money on a regular basis, and offering this lottery will convince us to burn $1.5 million less.

Dan Gwadosky, the state lottery director, gets partial credit for saying the lottery sales will "cannibalize" some existing state gambling profits, like scratch tickets and the state Megabucks lottery. What he failed to mention is that this $1.5 million was not really going to be set on fire, but would have been spent on other things - like restaurant meals, new tires or bottles of maple syrup. The state would have collected some of that money in the form of sales tax.

Some of it would have gone out of state - to Amazon.com or maybe a bed and breakfast in Connecticut. It doesn't matter exactly what it would have been spent on; we could expect some of it to return in the form of slightly-wealthier tourists.

While I support legalizing gambling and realize a lot of that $1.5 million would come from poor people who aren't good at calculating the odds, my real concern is the slopping arithmetic. Resources are simply being displaced, not created. We will see state jobs created at the expense of private jobs. We will see the lottery sales go up at the cost of the other sectors of the economy. Some of those losses will be in the form of tax revenues.

Whatever total the Mega Millions brings in for the state, it will only be part of the equation.

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Be cautious of anyone introduced as a journalist

I'm working on an entry about a proposal to preserve the newspaper industry with subsidies, and I couldn't help but notice that one of speakers was simply introduced as a "journalist."

Unlike a doctor or lawyer, there is no accreditation process for journalists. Anyone with a keyboard and a habit of speaking loudly can call himself a journalist. It doesn't mean they work for a media company like a newspaper or broadcast station.

The "journalist" label implies a sense of fair-handedness and impartiality, but that doesn't describe a lot of the people introduced as journalist today.

The popular definition of "journalist" is so broad and open-ended that it includes anyone who collects and presents information. I've seen a lot of cases where social activists introduce themselves as journalists. Social activists work to promote a specific world view, and it's dishonest to present them as anything else.

Even politically biased news sources, like MSNBC and Fox News, employ actual journalists who put real effort into presenting the different sides of an issue fairly. They don't always succeed, but it's a world apart from some of the stories published in the activist press.

There's no reason someone can't be both an activist and do reporting, but they should be upfront and honest about what they represent. Instead of being introduced as a journalist, why not try try "journalist from The Nation" or "journalist with the Socialist Party USA" to give a clue about what sort or organization they are associated with.

I was all set to give Naomi Klein partial credit for labeling herself as an activist and a journalist, instead of just a journalist. However, I checked the bio on her web site and found it simply fit the formula.

"Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the New York Times and #1 international bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."

Anyone who's even vaguely familiar with Klein knows she's an anti-globalization activist. There's no reason to believe that she sets out to present what multiple sides of an issue really believe. In fact, she does the opposite.

There is a better way to introduce these people. The profile page for Huffington Post contributor Jesse Larner* does not introduce him as a journalist, but as a writer on politics and culture. This is the correct way to go about these things, as there's no implication that Larner is shielding his own perspective, biases, opinions and beliefs.

Beware when someone is interviewed and you see that lone little "journalist" tag under their name with no media company attached. That doesn't mean they're lying or distorting details, but it does mean that you should Google their name to see what their real credentials and allegiances are.



*Larner shared the Cato Institute link in the previous paragraph during an e-mail exchange, so feel free to criticize me if I sound like his publicist here.

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