I read "Fair Play" by Steven Landsburg this weekend for my upcoming Micro Theory II class with Bryan Caplan. Landsburg spends a lot of time discussing the implications of economic growth and how future generations ride the coat tails of the past. He attributes ideas and innovation as the force for economic growth. He goes on to explain the messy logic promoted by conservationsists who call for protecting present wealth and resources for future generations. Its silly to protect valuable scarce resources that could be productively used today, when future generations standards of living will be proportionately larger than ours. Like if your grandparents who paid nickels to see movies, scrimped and saved to give you a hundred bucks on your thirtieth birthday, but low and behold you were making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. This made me think of my biology course while at Loyola. The professor made very serious implications that forests were infinitely valuable and should be protected at all costs. I'd highly recomend this book to anyone taking natural sciences classes this semester and wants to understand the economics of conservation. Its a quick read and light-hearted. My representation here doesn't do justice to Landsburg's masterful prose, its quick enough you should just go read it for yourself.

   Often times the argument put forth against criminalizing abortion rests on the assumption that a state of liberty is more desirable than one of coercion.  Hence, the pro-abortion rights movement gave themselves the "pro-choice" name.  These individuals make strong claims about freedom as their source of inspiration and legitimacy.  They appear the most coherent while defending the right to abortion like it's the right to self-ownership itself.  Moreover, pro-choice idealists contend these two rights can't exist without each other.  The right to abortion is a necessary component for the existence of individual freedom. 
   Such an assertion reminds me of the water-diamond paradox.  The apparent problem addressed here is why diamonds have a far higher exchange value than water, when humans could easily do without the former but would perish in absence of the latter.  At first glance, it seems that people should be willing to forego far more to consume water than diamonds. 
   One can quickly resolve this paradox by considering the marginal nature of human action.  Decisions are made on the margin, meaning we choose subjectively according to the next--or marginal--unit of a good.  In the case of the water-diamond paradox the explanation then for why diamonds have a far higher exchange rate is that individuals are never in the position to choose between all of the diamonds and all of the water in the world.  If this were the case, reasonable people would choose water over diamonds.  Fortunately, however, we are not confronted with such an ultimatum and demand exponentially more in exchange for a cubic foot of diamonds than for most other commodities essential to our continued sustenance. 
   In terms of the abortion argument, to imply that we either choose between all rights or no rights betrays the same concept of marginality.  Such a betrayal is irresponsible and misleading.  We don't decide according to whether we want all rights or no rights.  (I would even argue that people, if forced to decide between the two, would choose to have interminable freedom from external constraint than it's opposite.)  Humans demand rights on the basis of the next unit of freedom (lack of freedom).  We are willing to forego some freedoms and some rights as dictated by our tastes and preferences without abandoning the entire framework of liberty itself.  It is on this frontier of our rights that we should think about the path of common law.                

   A tragic event near Detroit stoked the already volatile debate on abortion this past week.  After conceiving an unwanted child together, two teenage parents took to barbaric measures to kill the fetus and circumvent the cumbersome red-tape of Michigan's abortion laws for minors.  The young father contributed to the miscarriage by hitting the pregnant girl's stomach with a baseball bat on a daily basis.  This past Tuesday, the Macomb Country prosecutor charged the 16 year old boy with intentionally causing miscarriage or stillbirth under the 1999 Prenatal Protection Act.  
   Pro-choice proponents have cast the brutality of this incident as the vicious product of the hurdles that flummox women's ability to legally abort a fetus.  They argue that only by easing the laws for such a procedure can we avoid such gruesomeness.  Laura Berman, for example, chastises "Michigan's abortion obstacle course for minors."  Like many other so-called supporters of free choice, she believes that the restrictions on underage abortions are the the problem here.   According to her thick allusions, such laws induced the girl to undergo routine beatings with a bat instead of the routine of judicial bypass necessary for a state sanctioned abortion.
   Should we ease up on abortion laws for minors?  For one thing, it will certainly cut down the number of cases where a baseball bat is used.  The risk of getting an abortion will fall drastically without the threat of legal coercion, thereby, increasing the demand for abortions among those whose particular threshold of risk aversion had previously prevented them from obtaining one but no longer does so. The heightened demand will encourage a greater, more efficient supply of doctors willing to perform the operation.  Competition among abortion clinics will likely lead to the development of cleaner and safer surgeries.  The cost of abortion will fall additionally due to the rivalrous process among clinics.  Further legalization will lower the psychic cost as the procedure develops into the status quo and loses some of it's cultural stigma.  Isn't this a good thing?  Shouldn't we try to minimize such costs?  Don't we want abortions become more palatable than the bloody alternative exhibited in Michigan?   
   Not if you consider abortion to be a form of murder.  (For the sake of brevity and this particular argument, I'll merely say that my opinion on whether the act of abortion should be protected or prosecuted in terms of individual liberty leans heavily towards the latter legal arrangement.)    Indeed, easing such restrictions will increase the efficiency and volume of abortions, but only at the cost of our most precious values: human worth and freedom.  Lowering the cost of aborting a fetus yields a result far more socially disturbing, albeit one with less gore per incident.  Fetus' won't be killed with baseball bats in somebody's backyard but in a relatively less unsettling environment.  The enterprise of mass murder will blossom.  Further diminishing the physical and psychic costs of abortion will increase the quantity of fetus' destroyed. 

   Martin Luther King Jr. certainly deserves a holiday to honor his spirit and message.  He fought the noble fight.  King Jr. embodied the goods he desired for all American people.  He followed his dreams with courageous confidence.  This lead is a beacon of virtuous action.
   But what exactly does this guidance entail?  In spite of the distortions of King's legacy by political interests as rallying points for affirmative action and/or racially progressive income taxes, Dr. King followed followed a road much higher.   This American idol led a movement according to the highest principles of the classical liberal tradition: freedom and equality.  In this sense, I think it not inappropriate to view him as a hero in the libertarian tradition.
   The fact that Dr. King struggled on behalf of freedom is undeniable.  He valued liberty as the highest political end, much like Lord Acton.  Largely influenced by his Christian sense of ethics, Dr. King viewed free choice as a necessity for moral action and the absence of such a freedom to choose as an infringement upon the inalienable rights of man.  He was truly a champion of freedom. 
   But Dr. King never advocated coercive means to achieve the end of Negro emancipation.  He advocated only voluntary, non-aggressive acts to restore the rights of self-ownership and dignity to oppressed races of people.  In stark contrast from someone like Rev. Jesse Jackson, who lobbies government to pass coercive laws benefiting African Americans in the form of affirmative action, Dr. King sought peaceful means to ameliorate America's racist legal precedence.  In his I Have a Dream speech, Martin Luther King warned, "In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred."   
   Indeed, Dr. King never believed two wrongs could make a right.  He didn't think that de jure or de facto racial discrimination ever legitimizes more racial discrimination in the opposite direction.  When he was stabbed in New York City, Dr. King never called for the blood of his assailant nor espouse hateful words for the white race.  Instead, he remained steadfast in his commitment to non-aggression.  Such a model we should honor and emulate.  
   The country of his dreams did not include any legal distinction according to race.  He employed non-invasive means to change the minds of Americans' voluntarily  He envisioned a country bound together by their compassion for freedom, equality and justice, not statutory privilege.  The legal system would be blind to arbitrary discrimination of the minority.  He sought equality under the law for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, class, etc.   This legacy of liberal virtue should not be lost on us or confused with any form of race-based coercion.  
      

   The great educational value of PJ O'Rourke's Eat the Rich, in my opinion, rests in the author's position as an outsider to the common stock of professional economists.  He never took formal economics classes and approaches the subject with a virginal common sense free of the tenuous assumptions and convoluted equations that cloud the minds of most of the so-called experts.  Fortunately, O'Rourke's understanding of economics developed apart from the trodden formulas of Samuelson's textbooks.   This distance permits the author to play the role of the Wizard of Oz's Toto and pull back the curtain of dense econometrics revealing that the neo-classical, Keynesian wizardry is nothing more than a body of ideas that have succeeded in fooling most.  
   The author has a simple approach: he observes and states the obvious.  With a solid grasp of fundamental economic principles like opportunity costs and incentive structures, O'Rourke travels to countries with sharply contrasting degrees of economic wealth to learn why people in Cuba, Albania, and Russia have a lot less on their plate than those in the United States.  It becomes quite obvious from this investigation that economic freedom--not the emotionally benevolent intentions of statists--makes the vast majority vastly better off.  He doesn't use complex algorithims nor need to.  The empirical evidence glaringly testifies to the fact that socialism, not the freedom of capitalism, leads to the excessive waste and exploitation of our natural, capital, and human resources.  
   The stunning use of sense by O'Rourke exposes mainstream wisdom for what it really is: wisdom du jour based upon ideas that have grown into a skeleton of deceit.  Faulty arguments build on each other and stray so far away from reality and comprehensibility that they become essentially useless for solving economic problems.  By divorcing the study of economics from the nature of human action and scarcity, the misplacement of theory from truth occludes the positive and normative benefits of critical thinking.  Instead, the study of economics becomes a device of the corrupt to further satiate their wants at the expense of academic virtue.
   As O'Rourke recognizes, the totalitarian inclination implicit in socialist forms of government constitute the fountainhead for the intellectual and material degradation of a society.  Statists have a powerful incentive to support enterprises that benefit them.  Thus, when the Depression hit and politicians looked for answers to the cycle they sided with Keynes' theory of underemployment over the Austrian malinvestment theory.  Keynes thought government needed to spend more while Libertarians like von Mises saw government as the cause of the unemployment.  Statists found it far more agreeable to promulgate the pro-state Keynesianism not because it withstood the test of reason, but because it seemed to justify giving them more power.         
   Hayek makes a similar (and far more succinct) commentary in the Road to Serfdom:

 "Facts and theories must thus become no less the object of an official doctrine than views about values.  And the whole apparatus for spreading knowledge--the schools and the press, radio and motion picture--will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld.  The probable effect on the people's loyalty to the system becomes the only criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be published or suppressed.  The situation in a totalitarian state is permanently and in all fields the same that it is elsewhere in some fields in wartime.  Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people.  The basis of unfavorable comparisons with conditions elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions--all will be suppressed.  There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced."

In case you experience withdrawal from the potent intellectual pharmacology of the economics club during the winter break, we have assigned three books for you to read and discuss on the blog.  The books include:
P.J. O'Rourke "Eat the Rich"
Walter Block "Defending the Undefendable"
Thomas DiLorenzo "How Capitalism Saved America"
If you don't already own them, you can purchase O'Rourke and DiLorenzo's books online at amazon.com or find them at your local bookstores.  The econ club officers will  be selling Defending the Undefendable for $15 until the 17th of December.  Find one of us on campus or email me at jfianell@loyno.edu if you would like to purchase a copy.  A portion of the proceeds from the book will go to bringing more speakers to Loyola next semester. 
After reading one of the books, feel free to start discussing the books either by adding comments to this post or authoring a new post.  If you are not a registered with our blog, email me and I will invite you to be an official author--a very prestigious distinction.
I look forward to your input.
James

   At the Economics Club meeting last week, Dr. Barnett argued against the feasibility of anarchism in a free society.   He claimed anarchy cannot be implemented and sustained essentially because the enterprise of law has not existed for prolonged periods of time, our conditioned minds find it hard to imagine the evolution of common law precedence in anarchical societies, and because of a blind premonition that anarchy will never become a reality for civil cooperation.  In my opinion, such assertions pong of socialist-reared chauvinism.
   Dr. Barnett commits the ad ignorantiam fallacy as he argues that a proposition (government is not necessary for the fruitful existence of mankind) is false simply because it has not been proved true.  However, we realize on reflection that many false propositions have not yet been proved false, and many true propostions have not yet been proved true--and thus our ignorance of how to prove or disprove a proposition does not establish either truth or falsehood.  
  The ad ignorantiam fallacy has a rich history within the physical and social sciences.  It was the famous criticism of Galileo when he showed leading astronomers of his time the mountains and valleys of the moon through a telescope.  Most scholars of that age, absolutely convinced by the prevailing theological and Aristotelian instruction, argued against Galileo that the moon is a perfect sphere because all of the apparent irregularities seen in the telescope are filled with an invisible crystalline substance.  Of course, Galileo could not prove this true or false, nor could his adversaries.  Instead of attempting this futile task, Galileo put forward an equally probably and unprovable hypothesis that rising up from those invisible crystalline envelopes were even greater mountain peaks made of crystal and thus invisible.  The fallacy was exposed.  
   Mark Lamb also committed the fallacy of ad ignorantiam in a Maroon article last year.  Mr. Lamb claimed we need government to direct the allocation of resources because without such intervention we would not have parks, trash collection, roads, and many of the other services of apparent demand within society.  In this assertion, Lamb's imagination is limited to the seen.  He neglects to consider the other side of the coin without these government provisions.  Markets could also supply such amenities to meet consumers' demand--and they could do so with far lower costs. 
   Similarly, Dr. Barnett does not sufficiently consider the unseen.  He dismisses what he cannot imagine in the future because it has no precedent in the past.  As successful anarchical governing institutions cannot be found in history books, according to Dr. Barnett, therefore we will never find them in the future.         
   We should not accept the argument against anarchy on the ground that a society free of government has not yet been proved workable.  This contention is impossible to advance.  It is persuasive, however, as it appeals to our mortal frailties of ignorance mixed with fear.  We should actively seek to transcend such bonds of intellectual timidity, stagnation, and sophism.      
   I don't think any person can definitively discount the potentials of human order in the future given the feeble nature of the human mind. On the other hand, I think we should work to expand the parameters of human freedom and opportunity.  To empower individuals with free choice categorically, thereby maximizing their capacity to act as moral agents, is one of the most noble endeavors I can imagine.  This is the so-called high road.  
   It is irresponsible and quite pretentious of us to insist that institutions of cooperation and coordination cannot change beyond what we presently intuit.  We ought to use our creative minds to humbly elaborate the frontiers of a free society, not set absolute and unsubstantiated limits.  The road paved with the bricks of experience and mortar of liberty will never lead us astray from the truth, regardless of where it brings us on earth.    
          

   Are Americans really as dumb as politicians make them out to be?  I’m not adopting the Democratic commentary insulting those who voted for George W.  Instead, I’m referring to the latest stimulus of outrage produced by the federal government:  the $388 billion spending package that awaits President Bush’s likely signature. 

   Don’t mind the fact that such spending clearly lies outside of the federal government’s constitutionally enumerated powers, or that we’re running an increasingly cumbersome and dangerous government deficit, or that we’re spending atrocious amounts of money in Iraq, or that the looming Social Security and Medicare obligations grow increasingly impossible to finance by the day.  At least, Americans should recognize the corrupt nature of pork barrel politics when it squeals in our face. 

   The latest spending package is plainly filled with politicians' swine.  It doles out $4 million for an Alabama fertilizer development center, $1 million for a Norwegian American Foundation in Seattle, and another $1 million for a Wild American Shrimp Initiative, along with more, much more. 

   The politicians responsible for the spending bill brim with glee about their contributions to the bill.  They want everyone within their constituency to know how they brought millions of federal dollars to benefit home-district projects.  Considering how such projects sow good will among constituents and consequently lead to electoral victories for their purveyors, these politicians have reason to be happy.

   Unfortunately, the majority of Americans do not stand to reap such benefits and hold good reason to be upset.  Pork barrel politics constitutes a shifty means for lawmakers to slip favored projects into various spending bills.  $350,000 for improvements to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; $2.3 million for an animal waste management research lab in Bowling Green; $443,000 to develop salmon-fortified baby food in Alaska.  Before long, this adds up to real money.

   The kicker is that this real money is YOUR money, whether you want to protect North Dakota’s sunflowers from blackbirds or not.  The government forcefully seizes the money you have earned by creating a product of value to others and uses it to develop more ways to seize your money.  Now that is what I call sinister.    

   Pork spending rose to around $14.5 billion for the second session of the 104^th Congress, a 16 percent increase over the first session and the highest level of pork spending identified since 1990, the first year watchdog groups began scouring Congress’ 13 annual appropriations bills.

   The widespread bi-partisan support for pork barrel spending discourages any hopes for halting the declivitous growth of pet project expenditures.  The prefix “big government” applies equally well to both the Democratic and Republican parties.  Democrats merely admit to favoring public spending while Republicans do not.    

   Oh the irony!  The Republican Party is presently far more responsible for pork barrel spending than the Democrats.  When President Bush campaigned and took office in 2000, he vowed to cut pet projects from the federal budget, but the president has yet to veto a single spending bill.  He is expected to sign the new plan as well. 

   The Bush administration, aided by a Republican congress, increased spending more in the three years than the previous administration did in eight.  Federal spending has grown by more than 25% since President Bush took office. The federal government now spends roughly $21,000 per household every year, up from $16,000 just 4 years ago.  How much of that $21,000 could you spend that would produce better results for you and this country?

   The one spark of reason within the federal spending process came from the lone dissent of Arizona Senator John McCain.  The consistent critic of pork barrel spending spoke for 30 minutes against passing the bill and asked, “why do we need $1 million for [the wild shrimp cultivation program]—are American shrimp unruly and lacking initiative?”

   Hopefully, American citizens will find it irrational to remain ignorant to the excessive federal government expenditures.  Sooner of later the lack of accountability over where politicians spend our tax dollars will force us to pay attention.  As we continue to neglect the pork filling federal bills, however, the worse our predicament of government spending grows.  When George Bush signs the spending package in the next few days, Americans ought to hold the US government accountable for such political transgressions instead of turning a blind eye. 

   Last night I was fortunate enough to eat dinner with Dr. Rita Simon, wife of the late Dr. Julian Simon. I initially did not know who she was but pieced things together after she mentioned her husband taught economics at Maryland.  Of course, I talked to her about the infamous bet. She knew all about it and I could tell she was still very frustrated Paul Ehrlich refused to up the ante. 
   She was very suprised that I knew who her husband was. She said Julian Simon died thinking that he made little impact on the worlds of economics and academia. This clearly is not true. Especially after taking Environmental Economics this semester and reading some things from the Cato Institute, I think Julian Simon left behind some very relevant and important insights. I made sure to let her know this.
   I spoke with Rita Simon for a couple of hours about her past. She told stories about debating Gloria Steinem over feminism in the 1970s, debating the NAACP over the issue of interracial adoption, and about her involvement with the University of Chicago Law School's jury project.  Needless to say, she has a very impressive history within the classical liberal tradition. Dr. Simon is one of the pioneers of women's issues within the tradition also. She was the first woman to do a sociological study on women and crime and women as substantive beneficiaries from laissez-fare market systems. I remember at one point she said that, "there's no better place to be a woman than in America, and the so-called pro-women groups only work to undermine such an envrionment."
   Look her up on the web. She's written 52 books. The last book she contributed to was Dr. Julian Simon's autobiography, which she will be sending me once she gets back to Washington D.C.  I might donate this book to the Monroe library, but am afraid it will get lost in the stacks, never to be seen again. 
   I'm thinking of inviting her next semester to speak at Loyola. This is wishful thinking as of now but Dr. Simon said she would love to come to Loyola and give a presentation. Hopefully, other groups like the women's studies department, will appreciate her life's work as relevant to Loyola's student body and co-sponsor the event. Let me know what you think.