“Let me put it this way; there are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution -- try to discern as best we can what the framers intended or make it up. No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless interpretive methodologies are tied to the original intent of the framers, they have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores. To be sure, even the most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as all methodologies and human institutions are; but at least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial.”
I agree with that. Apparently, nobody who either picks or votes on nominees for any courts at any level agree. They seem mostly to prefer justices who will come to the "right" conclusions, then figure out an argument to support that. Which is easy for lawyers to do, as they are trained in this art.
But another way to look at it is that the Founders tried to establish a Constitution on *principles* that would yield the "right" results.
They included the proviso that future generations could argue the point, and with the presumed wisdom of hindsight, amend the Constitution in light of new insights. They didn't make it easy to amend the Constitution, because they feared (from experience) the populist rush to judgement of political enthusiasms, especially ones inflated with the aid of political and partisan pressure.
We, those future generations, have turned out to be impatient with considered judgement, and keep finding ways around the Constitution instead. Interpretation in light of new insights is the most popular one currently. Simply ignoring the plain intent of the Constitution is often popular too -- just look at the First Amendment, which flatly says "Congress shall make NO LAWS," then haul out a hefty volume of Congressional restrictions, aids, controls, and interferences with the freedom of speech and of the press. All they needed was to invent mumbo jumbo about how radio, and later TV, were not covered under the Constitution because the airwaves were "owned" by "the people" and they were wide open to whatever mischief they wished. And that's just the First Amendment. Any libertarian could cite other examples now widely accepted as appropriate roles for a government that was, in the Constitution, apparently (per the words) but not actually (per the laws since passed) forbidden to engage, or not given the authority to meddle in.
Got a Constitution that limits your power, Mr. Politician and Mr. Bureaucrat? Nooo problemo! All you need is excuses why the plain language of the Constitution doesn't apply, and you can exercise all the power you wish, in every aspect of the private lives of citizens! Power given you by -- you! No Constitution need apply!
It's an ongoing tragedy that Thomas, one of the best and wisest and most focussed Supreme Court justices we've ever had, continues to suffer from the calumnies and slanders of the past.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Get Government Out of the Marriage Business
I honestly don't think I'll ever buy another one of his books. When I find someone this disgusting, I don't want my money to line their pockets.
Disappointing.
http://www.mormontimes.com/mormon_voices/orson_scott_card/?id=1586
(in which author Orson Scott Card takes the arch-conservative position that gays can't be married).
My response:
..But not surprising. Card is a Mormon; he's echoing his church's position - which is also the Catholic Church's position. There are lots of people who feel this way. Changing the law won't change their minds; they'll just organize until, this being an approximate democracy, they change it back. And so it will go, back and forth, back and forth, as various faction seize government power to enforce their view.
The only intelligent thing Card says in his diatribe is this: "The laws concerning marriage did not create marriage, they merely attempted to solve problems in such areas as inheritance, property, paternity, divorce, adoption and so on." Actually, this is true, or it should be true. IMHO, the state should not "define" marriage, or otherwise involve itself in this fundamentally religious concept. It should only establish legal requirements, obligations, and rights among people who choose to engage in a union of this kind. Leave the arguments over "marriage" to the churches, for those who care so much about it.
This is just another area where the government should get itself out of religion; it cannot be resolved by law -- people's minds can't be changed by majority rule. Back in the before time, the religious busied themselves demanding the government take sides in deciding which was the True Religion, and which therefore deserved legal benefits denied other religions (or nonreligions) including tax support. This argument went on for centuries and was only resolved when the government got out of the business of religion. It's still a problem in other parts of the world where religious fanatics demand the government take sides. Preferably their side. We cannot win a war defined in this way; so we have to do what the Founders did: change the definition of the war.
Civil unions for all; marriage for the churches; peace and quiet for the rest of us.
mac
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_u0AraHXiHZxSJmYlMunYSRBbjym_JiLyBv1zjC6q1mF0opqCf_8RkZnltxlCstSbLEOMhDiE008rjjAFWt69XRjay0E3mhDa8M-0U9V2iLZCg8ah_zyXU_AZHJTuhwAPxvyqPwBwCIZfqr7_AsVLsX=s0-d)
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Does Regulation Prevent Financial Fraud? (or make it more likely?)
By Carl Close on Apr 20, 2009 in Money and Banking, Regulation
From The Independent Institute
Predictably, the Bernie Madoff financial scandal has prompted calls for stricter regulation of the investment industry, just as the collapse of the Manhattan Capital hedge fund led to calls, by the Securities and Exchange Commission and others, for new anti-fraud regulations in 2004. If those regulations reduced fraud significantly, they would seem to be a reasonable solution to a real problem, but at least two assumptions underlying the SEC’s proposal in 2004 were dead wrong, according to financial journalist Chidem Kurdas, writing in the lead article of the Winter 2009 issue of The Independent Review.
First, government regulators already possessed the ability to detect fraud at Manhattan Capital. Hence, the extra benefit of the SEC’s proposal was unclear. (Was the SEC engaging in a bureaucratic cover-up or trying to justify a larger budget?) Second, securities regulations themselves can increase the likelihood that an investment will turn sour: by lulling investors into thinking their funds are more secure than they really are, regulations reduce the incentive to closely monitor one’s investment.
Wishful thinking can undermine the diligence of investors and regulators alike, but there’s often a big difference in the consequences of their respective mistakes, Kurdas argues. When investors fail, everyone tends to learn from their mistakes; but when regulators fail, new regulations are proposed, and investors are not given stronger incentives to learn.
“The conventional response of boosting government watchdogs magnifies the impact of their mistakes while reducing both the watchdogs’ and the public’s incentive to learn,” writes Kurdas. “It creates a vicious spiral of more regulation, regulatory failure, and even more regulation.”
[You can follow Kurdas’s insights on mutual funds and hedge funds, respectively, at MutualFundSmarts.com and HedgeFundSmarts.com.]
From The Independent Institute
Predictably, the Bernie Madoff financial scandal has prompted calls for stricter regulation of the investment industry, just as the collapse of the Manhattan Capital hedge fund led to calls, by the Securities and Exchange Commission and others, for new anti-fraud regulations in 2004. If those regulations reduced fraud significantly, they would seem to be a reasonable solution to a real problem, but at least two assumptions underlying the SEC’s proposal in 2004 were dead wrong, according to financial journalist Chidem Kurdas, writing in the lead article of the Winter 2009 issue of The Independent Review.
First, government regulators already possessed the ability to detect fraud at Manhattan Capital. Hence, the extra benefit of the SEC’s proposal was unclear. (Was the SEC engaging in a bureaucratic cover-up or trying to justify a larger budget?) Second, securities regulations themselves can increase the likelihood that an investment will turn sour: by lulling investors into thinking their funds are more secure than they really are, regulations reduce the incentive to closely monitor one’s investment.
Wishful thinking can undermine the diligence of investors and regulators alike, but there’s often a big difference in the consequences of their respective mistakes, Kurdas argues. When investors fail, everyone tends to learn from their mistakes; but when regulators fail, new regulations are proposed, and investors are not given stronger incentives to learn.
“The conventional response of boosting government watchdogs magnifies the impact of their mistakes while reducing both the watchdogs’ and the public’s incentive to learn,” writes Kurdas. “It creates a vicious spiral of more regulation, regulatory failure, and even more regulation.”
[You can follow Kurdas’s insights on mutual funds and hedge funds, respectively, at MutualFundSmarts.com and HedgeFundSmarts.com.]
Friday, April 17, 2009
State Governments Have Themselves to Blame for Deficits
Reason Foundation's Adam Summers and Michael Flynn write:
"In the five years between 2002 and 2007, combined state general-fund revenue increased twice as fast as the rate of inflation, producing an excess $600 billion.
"If legislatures had chosen to be responsible, they could have maintained all current state services, increased spending to compensate for inflation and population growth, and still enacted a $500 billion tax cut.
"Instead, lawmakers spent the windfall.
"From 2002 to 2007, overall spending rose 50 percent faster than inflation. Education spending increased almost 70 percent faster than inflation, even though the relative school-age population was falling. Medicaid and salaries for state workers rose almost twice as fast as inflation."
Think of this the next time your state government demands more money. And p.s. the next time your school officials demand more more and cry over having to cut any spending at all. And your local governments too, don't think they aren't doing the same thing to you taxpayers!
"In the five years between 2002 and 2007, combined state general-fund revenue increased twice as fast as the rate of inflation, producing an excess $600 billion.
"If legislatures had chosen to be responsible, they could have maintained all current state services, increased spending to compensate for inflation and population growth, and still enacted a $500 billion tax cut.
"Instead, lawmakers spent the windfall.
"From 2002 to 2007, overall spending rose 50 percent faster than inflation. Education spending increased almost 70 percent faster than inflation, even though the relative school-age population was falling. Medicaid and salaries for state workers rose almost twice as fast as inflation."
Think of this the next time your state government demands more money. And p.s. the next time your school officials demand more more and cry over having to cut any spending at all. And your local governments too, don't think they aren't doing the same thing to you taxpayers!
Pet Peeve: Mixed Math Metaphors in News Stories
Pet peeve: News articles citing data in ways that make easy comparisons harder. They'll say, as a recent news article about birth rates among immigrants did, that 16% of one group was doing this, while "1 in 5" was doing that. So the reader has to mentally convert 1 in 5 to 20% to be able easily to compare it to the earlier 16% figure.
The reporter did this twice more in the same article -- used percentages at one end of a sentence, and some other form of proportions at the other end.
There is no useful news-information reason for doing this. It is done so commonly because writers learn not to be repetitive in the ways they express things. So saying "16% did this while more than 25% did that" seems dull to them. So they switch math metaphors midstream.
Another reason to work this way is that the reporter may have an exact-seeming figure -- 16% -- but his other piece of data isn't presented to him as "25%" but as an approximation -- "one in five" is a very general number, so comparing 16% to 25% implies a higher degree of precision in the latter number than is really there. That sounds reasonable -- but this is a bad workaround because it makes the reader work harder to do the comparison -- and too many readers are marginally innumerate as it is. A better solution would have been "16% of this, versus about 25% of that."
No, this happens far too often for any other explanation than writing style triumphant over clear, useful writing.
Another sin is using various kinds of numbers in various places in ways that, if you try to compare the numbers and do some basic math on them, they just don't make sense. I remember an article in Newsweek many years ago -- one of the then-common studies of the poor, underearning farmer in America -- where the data presented about the number of farmers and their revenues and government grants seemed to add up to a million dollars a year in earnings. If there was a reason this made them poor, the article didn't bother to justify its numbers. And when I complained in a letter to Newsweek -- this was back in the postal-letter days -- I got a snippy, unhelpful reply that made it clear the editor had no idea what I was talking about. My conclusion: Newsweek, like so many other journals, was using data simply for decorative purposes. This is why graphs showing rises and falls in something are truncated to emphasize the variance. They're not trying to show true degree of change, they're trying to dramatize it. Which is, I'm sorry, simply bad journalism.
A final related problem is data dumps that make it clear that journalists themselves include sufferers from innumeracy, or maybe math laziness. This week's Computerworld (Apr 13, 2009) has editor Frank Hayes look closer at a study released by an outfit called The Alliance to Save Energy saying if the nation's 108 million PCs (half of them corporate PCs) were shut off at nights and weekends instead of being left on (as is common in corporate environments), the country could save $2.8 billion a year in energ costs. Hayes did the math that the reporters who wrote up this study for general release obviously failed to do, or it wouldn't have gotten much press: It works out to $26 savings per PC per year -- or 50 cents a week. Or: Trivial; "less than the cost of the two minutes of a typical employee's time each week, not to mention the four or five minutes waiting for the PC to turn back on each morning.
That may still be a useful savings in your mind, when you think about it, but you don't get to think about it because the reporter of the original study didn't bother doing the math, and therefore didn't present the story in a way that would let you think about the implications. He just carried water for the Alliance to Save Energy At All Costs. Bad reporter--bad!
The reporter did this twice more in the same article -- used percentages at one end of a sentence, and some other form of proportions at the other end.
There is no useful news-information reason for doing this. It is done so commonly because writers learn not to be repetitive in the ways they express things. So saying "16% did this while more than 25% did that" seems dull to them. So they switch math metaphors midstream.
Another reason to work this way is that the reporter may have an exact-seeming figure -- 16% -- but his other piece of data isn't presented to him as "25%" but as an approximation -- "one in five" is a very general number, so comparing 16% to 25% implies a higher degree of precision in the latter number than is really there. That sounds reasonable -- but this is a bad workaround because it makes the reader work harder to do the comparison -- and too many readers are marginally innumerate as it is. A better solution would have been "16% of this, versus about 25% of that."
No, this happens far too often for any other explanation than writing style triumphant over clear, useful writing.
Another sin is using various kinds of numbers in various places in ways that, if you try to compare the numbers and do some basic math on them, they just don't make sense. I remember an article in Newsweek many years ago -- one of the then-common studies of the poor, underearning farmer in America -- where the data presented about the number of farmers and their revenues and government grants seemed to add up to a million dollars a year in earnings. If there was a reason this made them poor, the article didn't bother to justify its numbers. And when I complained in a letter to Newsweek -- this was back in the postal-letter days -- I got a snippy, unhelpful reply that made it clear the editor had no idea what I was talking about. My conclusion: Newsweek, like so many other journals, was using data simply for decorative purposes. This is why graphs showing rises and falls in something are truncated to emphasize the variance. They're not trying to show true degree of change, they're trying to dramatize it. Which is, I'm sorry, simply bad journalism.
A final related problem is data dumps that make it clear that journalists themselves include sufferers from innumeracy, or maybe math laziness. This week's Computerworld (Apr 13, 2009) has editor Frank Hayes look closer at a study released by an outfit called The Alliance to Save Energy saying if the nation's 108 million PCs (half of them corporate PCs) were shut off at nights and weekends instead of being left on (as is common in corporate environments), the country could save $2.8 billion a year in energ costs. Hayes did the math that the reporters who wrote up this study for general release obviously failed to do, or it wouldn't have gotten much press: It works out to $26 savings per PC per year -- or 50 cents a week. Or: Trivial; "less than the cost of the two minutes of a typical employee's time each week, not to mention the four or five minutes waiting for the PC to turn back on each morning.
That may still be a useful savings in your mind, when you think about it, but you don't get to think about it because the reporter of the original study didn't bother doing the math, and therefore didn't present the story in a way that would let you think about the implications. He just carried water for the Alliance to Save Energy At All Costs. Bad reporter--bad!
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Instead of Stimulus Pork--Stop Withholding for a Year!
Here's a wild, radical, yet somehow enormously appealing alternative to the multi-trillion-dollar stimulus packages being spent by Washington D.C.: Suspend the personal income tax for a year -- stop tax withholding from paychecks.
Crazy? Not really. The amount raised by personal income taxes each year is right around what the stimulus package will cost us. Instead of going to favored (or unfavored-by-the-market) industries with political pull -- the money would go into the pockets of every taxpayer in the country. Or, rather -- *stay* in our pockets.
Talk about a stimulus! Imagine if the 20% of so now withheld from your paycheck every payday were put back into your paycheck. That would help you and every neighbor you have, and right now, not months from now.
Check this out;
Crazy? Not really. The amount raised by personal income taxes each year is right around what the stimulus package will cost us. Instead of going to favored (or unfavored-by-the-market) industries with political pull -- the money would go into the pockets of every taxpayer in the country. Or, rather -- *stay* in our pockets.
Talk about a stimulus! Imagine if the 20% of so now withheld from your paycheck every payday were put back into your paycheck. That would help you and every neighbor you have, and right now, not months from now.
Check this out;
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Really Obeying the Bible? Or Not?
I suppose I shouldn't mix religion and politics -- but this is hard to resist.
Some supposedly Christian site posted a picture of a superhero beach ball where the air valve happens to have landed in the crotch of the Wolverine comic character -- clearly a plot by the gay lobby to promote homosexual behavior in young boys. (Apparently young girls don't blow up beach balls.) This funny link has been going around, but better are the comments -- here's my favorite:
---
GayChristian says:
March 4, 2009 at 9:51 am
THANK you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him or her that Leviticus 18:22 clearly state it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to follow them. My important Biblically based questions are listed below. I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to the Irish, but not English people. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own some Englishmen?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is: my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I do not agree. Can you settle this? Are there ‘degrees’ of abomination?
7. Lev.21:20 state that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wriggle-room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
---
In a later comment, he continues that when he was 'talking to God' recently,
"[God] also seemed really pissed that he’s credited with the writing of the bible at all. I guess he wrote a version but the editors... ruined it completely. He promised that for the second coming he’ll make sure to retain creative rights over the entire project."
This guy is fun!
A bigger point (you should excuse the expression), beyond the amusement for the average real Christian in this country (USA), is a less comfortable one, as pointed out by the philosopher Sam Harris in his book, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason," is that modernity (and the ability to function well in a modern society) requires the religious to pick and choose their religious instructions and requirements: A strict reading of the Bible, for example, would make it almost impossible for the average citizen to function today. We find ourselves having to 'interpret' the wilder commands in order to soften or even to set them aside, because as time goes by, as a society we better grasp which primitive strictures and commandments make better sense, and which simply don't work for anybody who's no longer an illiterate, Stone-Age sheepherder living in a desert. The above list is just a short set of highlights of such irrelevant and even dangerously obsolete religious instructions we have all learned to live without.
When radical coreligionists come along demanding that we give equal serious attention to every command and constraint, we find ourselves unable to respond in a way that convinces them to lighten up. It's the modern tragedy of religion, unfortunately.
Some supposedly Christian site posted a picture of a superhero beach ball where the air valve happens to have landed in the crotch of the Wolverine comic character -- clearly a plot by the gay lobby to promote homosexual behavior in young boys. (Apparently young girls don't blow up beach balls.) This funny link has been going around, but better are the comments -- here's my favorite:
---
GayChristian says:
March 4, 2009 at 9:51 am
THANK you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him or her that Leviticus 18:22 clearly state it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to follow them. My important Biblically based questions are listed below. I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to the Irish, but not English people. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own some Englishmen?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is: my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I do not agree. Can you settle this? Are there ‘degrees’ of abomination?
7. Lev.21:20 state that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wriggle-room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
---
In a later comment, he continues that when he was 'talking to God' recently,
"[God] also seemed really pissed that he’s credited with the writing of the bible at all. I guess he wrote a version but the editors... ruined it completely. He promised that for the second coming he’ll make sure to retain creative rights over the entire project."
This guy is fun!
A bigger point (you should excuse the expression), beyond the amusement for the average real Christian in this country (USA), is a less comfortable one, as pointed out by the philosopher Sam Harris in his book, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason," is that modernity (and the ability to function well in a modern society) requires the religious to pick and choose their religious instructions and requirements: A strict reading of the Bible, for example, would make it almost impossible for the average citizen to function today. We find ourselves having to 'interpret' the wilder commands in order to soften or even to set them aside, because as time goes by, as a society we better grasp which primitive strictures and commandments make better sense, and which simply don't work for anybody who's no longer an illiterate, Stone-Age sheepherder living in a desert. The above list is just a short set of highlights of such irrelevant and even dangerously obsolete religious instructions we have all learned to live without.
When radical coreligionists come along demanding that we give equal serious attention to every command and constraint, we find ourselves unable to respond in a way that convinces them to lighten up. It's the modern tragedy of religion, unfortunately.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)