That's All Folks

UPDATED, 09/05/09

That's the end of my stint at Blogspot, I should say. All of my new posts are at Politics & Prosperity. (Note to readers: This is a new location. Please change your bookmarks and feed links.)

But don't go away empty-handed. There are more than 2,000 posts here; you can't have read all of them (if you've read any). Check out "The Best of Liberty Corner," browse the archive, and explore the various categories linked in the sidebar.

A Huge "Welcome Back"...

...to "Feddie" of Southern Appeal.

This Is Too Much

What is? Eliezer Yudkowsky's post, "The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy," at Overcoming Bias. It is the nadir of tastelessness and offensiveness. Overcoming Bias is off the blogroll and off my list of RSS feeds.

Another One Goes off the Blogroll

This is paranoid bull-crap. Any blog that strays far from reality -- as Agoraphilia has, too many times -- cannot stay on my blogroll. Bye-bye.

Bum Dope

An econblogger whose posts I read regularly says:

At this website (WHOIS Search database), you can look up the real name of the owner of any website on the Internet.

Via Reason.

It doesn't work if a site's URL is xxx.blogspot.com, xxx.typepad.com, or the like. Nor does it work if the owner of a site has masked his or her identity.

Hillary Meets Cass

By which I mean that Hillary Clinton, who would control the blogosphere, is of a mind with Cass Sunstein, who would regulate speech in order to make it "more free."

"Resources" Updated

I have updated my list of reference links, to eliminate links that were broken or which pointed to the wrong page.

In the Pipeline

When I resumed blogging in earnest on July 1 -- after eight months in which I seldom posted anything of substance -- I had a backlog of about thirty posts in draft form. I have, since July 1, polished and published many of those drafts. I also have deleted a handful that seemed, in retrospect, not worth pursuing.

My backlog of draft posts now numbers nine:

The United Way or the Highway?

There Ain't No Such Thing as Free Health Care

Is America Resegregating? And So What If It Is?

Cell Phones and Driving, Once More

Creationism, Intelligent Design, Science, and Politics

Homosexuality and Other Gender Matters

The Folly of Contractual Libertarianism

Liberty, Harm, Nationalism, Federalism, and Individualism

A Summing Up

Will all see the light of day, in one form or another? Will I continue to blog after the nine have been published or purged? Stay tuned...

Friday's Best Reading

Links and excerpts:

"The Laffer Curve Straw Man," by Daniel Mitchell (Cato-at-Liberty)

The real issue is whether certain changes in tax policy will have some impact on economic activity. If an increase (decrease) in tax rates changes behavior and causes a reduction (increase) in taxable income, then revenues will not rise (fall) as much as “static” revenue-estimating models would predict. This is hardly a radical concept, and evidence of Laffer-Curve effects is very well established in the academic literature.

"Sociologists Discover Religion," by Heyecan Veziorglu (campusreportonline.net)

Associate Professor Dr. Jeffrey Ulmer from Pennsylvania State University examines the degree to which religiosity increases self-control. He points out that religious observance builds self-control and substance use is lower in stronger moral communities.

"Eminent Scientist Censored for Truth-Telling [about genes and IQ]," by John J. Ray (Tongue Tied 3)

...There is no inconsistency in saying that blacks as a whole are less intelligent while also acknowledging that some individual blacks are very intelligent. What is true of most need not be true of all.

Scientists have spent decades looking for holes in the evidence [Dr. James] Watson [of DNA fame] was referring to but all the proposed "holes" have been shown not to be so. There is NO argument against his conclusions that has not been meticulously examined by skeptics already. And all objections have been shown not to hold up. There is an introduction to the studies concerned here.

Some commentators have mentioned that old Marxist propagandist, Stephen Jay Gould, as refuting what Watson said. Here is just one comment pointing out what a klutz Gould was. And for an exhaustive scientific refutation of Gould by an expert in the field, see here. [Highly recommended: LC.] Gould's distortions of the facts really are quite breathtaking.

"Hanson Joins Cult," by Robin Hanson (Overcoming Bias)

Rumors of a weird cult of "Straussians" obsessed with hidden meanings in classic texts have long amused me. Imagine my jaw-dropping surprise then to read an articulate and persuasive Straussian paper by Arthur Melzer in the November Journal of Politics:

Leo Strauss...argued that, prior to the rise of liberal regimes and freedom of thought in the nineteenth century, almost all great thinkers wrote esoterically: they placed their most important reflections "between the lines" of their writings, hidden behind a veneer of conventional pieties. They did so for one or more of the following reasons: to defend themselves from persecution, to protect society from harm, to promote some positive political scheme, and to increase the effectiveness of their philosophical pedagogy....

Melzer convinced me with data:

By now we have seen a good number of explicit statements by past thinkers acknowledging and praising the use of esoteric writing for pedagogical purposes. What is perhaps even more striking in this context is that I have been unable to find any statements, prior to the nineteenth century, criticizing esotericism for the aforementioned problem, or indeed for any other.

This great transition is my best bet for the essential change underlying the industrial revolution:

In The Flight from Ambiguity, the distinguished sociologist Donald Levine writes: "The movement against ambiguity led by Western intellectuals since the seventeenth century figures as a unique development in world history. There is nothing like it in any premodern culture known to me". This remarkable transformation of our intellectual culture was produced by a variety of factors, but most obviously by the rise of the modern scientific paradigm of knowledge which encouraged the view that, in all fields, intellectual progress required the wholesale reform of language and discourse, replacing ordinary parlance with an artificial, technical, univocal mode of communication

Modern growth began when enough intellectuals gained status not from ambiguity but from clarity, forming a network of specialists exchanging clear concise summaries of new insights.

Scratch Another One

I haven't found much of interest at QandO lately. Now Jon Henke wades in with this:

The Right likes to cast its leaders in the role of Churchill in 1938 - a visionary, warning the world of a gathering threat on the horizon. The US invaded Iraq because of an uncertain risk that we thought it important to guard against, spending thousands of US lives, tens/hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and around a trillion dollars so far.

Well, climate change - to some extent or another - is a far more certain threat to the world than was Iraq, and Gore is genuinely playing the role of Churchill to warn the public of the risk.

That's worse than boring; it's dead wrong. "Global warming" is a natural, short-run phenomenon, not a "threat" about which we can or should do anything -- unlike the possibility of an oil-rich Middle East under the thumb of Islamofascists.

A boring and wrong-headed blog: lethally trivial and not even worth a glance at the RSS feed.

Bye, bye, QandO.

Oxymoron at Work

Someone named Reihan is pinch-hitting for Ross Douthat. Reihan writes,

better to have a smart, coherent welfare system at the federal or at least state level than a patchwork that encourages the arbitrary and often harmful shifting around of the poor.

A politically designed, state-run "smart, coherent welfare system." There's an oxymoron, in spades. What does that say about Reihan? I report, you decide.

Hurry back, Ross.

Reasons Not to Read...

...Tyler Cowen and Megan McArdle any more. Not a word in either post about the most likely scenario: "Global warming" (i.e., the warm episode of the past 30-some years) is not caused by human activity.

If two of the (supposedly) brighter lights of blogdom can't even acknowledge that possibility, why should I bother reading their stuff? On the other hand (as economists are wont to say), one or the other of them occasionally offers up a gem or a link to a gem.

P.S. Thomas Sowell (on the other, other hand) never disappoints. Par example.

UPDATE (09/13/07): McArdle admits that she voted Democrat in 2006, and says that she'll vote either for Obama or an independent in 2008. Proof that I can no longer take her seriously. How can she mouth (mostly) free-market economics and then vote for those who would complete the destruction of free markets in this country? Perhaps she is voting with her hormones instead of her brain. Anyway, she's outta here, that is, off the blogroll and off the list of blogs that I follow via Bloglines.

A Telling Contrast

Two tenured professors of economics: the gentlemanly, rather conservative, well published N. Gregory Mankiw vs. the rancid, Leftist, seldom published J. Bradford DeLong.

Then there's Arthur Miller, the typical I love mankind, it's people I can't stand* kind of Leftist.
__________
* Linus van Pelt of Peanuts, circa 1963.

Most Popular Post

A disproportionate fraction of visitors to Liberty Corner (18 of the last 100, for example) are drawn by "IQ and Personality," a post that is now three and-a-half years old. Does that make it old enough to be a classic?

Sunday Reading

UPDATED, BELOW

I'm working on a blockbuster post, but it won't be ready for another day or two. In the meantime, check out these blog bits:

Greg Mankiw points to a column by one of his Harvard colleagues, Kenneth Rogoff, who warns that

Healthcare pressures may cause the trend towards free-market capitalism to reverse, with a large chunk of the economy reverting to a socialist system.

I like Arnold Kling's prescription for dealing with spam-scams:

Perhaps instead of trying to attack the problem by going after spammers, what we should be doing is going after the woodheads. It is almost impossible to enforce a law against sending spam. So we should try to pass a law against responding to spam.

What I propose is that any American who makes a purchase based on unsolicited email be fined $10,000 and jailed for 30 days. The law would be enforced by undertaking random audits of companies that are successful at attracting business by using spam. The law would be highly publicized by internet service providers and corporate CIO's, who have a strong interest in reducing the volume of spam. Thus, everyone with an Internet account would be on notice that purchasing from a spammer can get you in trouble.

If we can deter Americans from responding to spam, then spammers will stop routing spam to domains in the U.S. That's my solution.

Remind me again why (it is alleged) so many people fear warming. Tyler Cowen points to "Extreme Weather Events, Mortality, and Migration," by Olivier Deschenes and Enrico Moretti. The authors write:

We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US. This effect is even larger in low income areas. Because the U.S. population has been moving from cold Northeastern states to the warmer Southwestern states, our findings have implications for understanding the causes of long-term increases in life expectancy. We calculate that every year, 5,400 deaths are delayed by changes in exposure to cold temperature induced by mobility. These longevity gains associated with long term trends in geographical mobility account for 8%-15% of the total gains in life expectancy experienced by the US population over the past 30 years.

Finally, Jonathan Adler weighs in on the issue of abstinence-only education. Adler and the authors of the studies that he cites are simply barking up the wrong type of abstinence education. Such education, to be effective, must begin at home, must begin around the onset of puberty, and must be reinforced constantly -- at home. It is unsurprising, therefore, to learn that formal, government-sponsored abstinence-only programs are ineffective.

UPDATE (9:30 p.m.): Greg Mankiw offers this:

Perhaps the skills that make a good economist are, for some reason, negatively correlated with the attributes associated with being an agreeable human being. That is, economics may attract people with a particular set of personality attributes, and perhaps these attributes are not the same set of attributes you might choose for your next dinner party.

This is not entirely conjecture on my part. For example, this study

explores the relationship between student's personality types, as measured by the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, and their performance in introductory economics. We find that students with the personality types ENTP, ESTP, and ENFP do significantly worse in Principles of Macroeconomics than identical students with the personality type ISTJ.

What is this personality type ISTJ that excels in economics class? Check out this description, which says in part:

The ISTJ is not naturally in tune with their own feelings and the feelings of others.

Sounds like any economist you know?

Yes, most of them. As in INTJ economist who has suffered many an ISTJ economist, I should know.

Categories

You may in the past have tried, unsuccessfully, to see the posts in one (or more) of the categories listed in the sidebar. I have fixed the glitch, partly. By clicking on a category you can now see the twenty most recent posts in that category. But it seems that Blogger will not display more than the twenty most recent posts in a category. Boo! Hiss!

UPDATE: Well, Blogger might display all of the posts in a category if I customize my template. It's too late for that, today. Demain, peut-être.

UPDATE 2 (07/18/07): Done, except for some fine-tuning of the sidebar.

Who Visits Liberty Corner?

According to my Sitemeter stats, most visitors to Liberty Corner arrive via a search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc.). So, although I'm pleased that some of you arrive via Bloglines, other RSS readers, and the occasional link from another blog, I'm especially pleased that web searches often point to Liberty Corner.

P.S. A standard Google search on "Liberty Corner" yields this result (as of a few minutes ago):

Results 1 - 100 of about 2,500,000 for liberty corner. (0.13 seconds)

Liberty Corner Church - Welcome!

A growing, bible-based, family-oriented 1100+ member church in Liberty Corner, NJ. www.libertycorner.org/ - 30k - Jul 3, 2007 - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Liberty Corner <>

Yahoo! reviewed these sites and found them related to New Jersey > Liberty Corner. dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/New_Jersey/Cities/Liberty_Corner/ - 7k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Travel and Transportation < Liberty Corner <>...

Yahoo! reviewed these sites and found them related to New Jersey > Liberty Corner > Travel and Transportation. dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/New_Jersey/Cities/Liberty_Corner/Travel_and_Transportation/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

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See results for: liberty corner hedge fund

Refco's Empty Requiem
Bennett's subterfuge allegedly included a series of $335 million loans made by
Refco Capital Markets to Liberty Corner. The hedge fund then turned around ...
www.thestreet.com/_tscs/markets/matthewgoldstein/10247702.html

New Focus in Refco Inquiry
In the early days of the scandal, investigators suspected that other hedge funds
may have been employed in the debt-hiding scheme besides Liberty Corner. ...
www.thestreet.com/pf/stocks/brokerages/10277682.html

InvestmentSeek.com - Investment Managers > Hedge Fund > Fixed ...
Liberty Corner Asset Management. QVT Financial. Did we miss a fixed income
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www.investmentseek.com/Investment_Managers/Hedge_Fund/fia.htm

Also see liberty corner capital

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Liberty Corner

The rational person's guide to politics, economics, and culture. libertycorner.blogspot.com/ - 147k - Jul 5, 2007 - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Liberty Corner

Liberty Corner. Acts deemed harmless by an individual are not harmless if they subvert social norms and, thus, the mutual trust and self-restraint upon ... libertycorner.blogspot.com/2005/11/substantive-due-process-liberty-of.html - 40k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this [ More results from libertycorner.blogspot.com ]

Etc. Pretty close to the top, wouldn't you say?

Then there's the advanced search on "Liberty Corner" as an exact phrase:

Results 1 - 100 of about 278,000 for "liberty corner". (0.21 seconds)

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Liberty Corner Church - Welcome!

A growing, bible-based, family-oriented 1100+ member church in Liberty Corner, NJ. www.libertycorner.org/ - 30k - Jul 3, 2007 - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Liberty Corner <>

Yahoo! reviewed these sites and found them related to New Jersey > Liberty Corner. dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/New_Jersey/Cities/Liberty_Corner/ - 7k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Travel and Transportation < Liberty Corner <>...

Yahoo! reviewed these sites and found them related to New Jersey > Liberty Corner > Travel and Transportation. dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/New_Jersey/Cities/Liberty_Corner/Travel_and_Transportation/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Liberty Corner

The rational person's guide to politics, economics, and culture. libertycorner.blogspot.com/ - 147k - Jul 5, 2007 - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Liberty Corner

Liberty Corner. Acts deemed harmless by an individual are not harmless if they subvert social norms and, thus, the mutual trust and self-restraint upon ...
libertycorner.blogspot.com/2005/11/substantive-due-process-liberty-of.html - 40k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
[ More results from libertycorner.blogspot.com ]

Etc. Even closer to the top.

Both outcomes indicate the frequency with which searches on a wide range of topics yield hits for Liberty Corner (the blog).

About This Blog

Liberty Corner (1 March 2004 - 19 July 2008) is the work of a practical libertarian, one who believes in the kind of limited, accountable state envisioned by the Framers of the Constitution, in which individuals are free to choose that locality that best suits them -- socially and economically -- under the aegis of a central government of limited powers. (The impractical alternative is an anarchistic "utopia" in which atomistic cooperation improbably averts the rise of unaccountable warlords and despots.) Liberty Corner is, therefore, predominantly about politics and economics -- as seen through the eyes of a seasoned skeptic.

But there is more to life than the political and economic framework in which it is lived. There is life itself: humanity (in all its dignity and disarray) and the enjoyment of nature, the arts (musical, dramatic, and representational), sports (especially baseball), and so on; there are science and religion, and their implications for the meaning of life. Liberty Corner gives much attention to those subjects, as well to politics and economics.

This blog is not a journal; it is a compendium of my considered views on a wide range of topics. Some of those views evolved during my blogging lifetime. In particular, my views about the nature of liberty and the conditions under which it is possible, matured from knee-jerk anti-statism to Burkean-Hayekian conservatism. (See, for example, "On Liberty in the sidebar.)

I remain anonymous because, like Ebenezer Scrooge, I wish to be left alone. I am not anonymous for the purpose of feigning unwarranted expertise; my credentials are fully on view at "About the Author." The merits of my writings can be judged by their empirical and logical validity, and have nothing to do with my identity.

I have left a blogroll in place, but have pared it to those 46 blogs and syndicators whose feeds I would read were I still reading feeds. But keeping abreast of blogdom, like blogging, is in my past.

I thank Postmodern Conservative for his contributions to this blog, especially in the months following my final substantive post. Now that he has retired from the fray, it is time for me to say adieu.

Don't Marry a Career Woman

Michael Noer, writing at Forbes.com, says "Don't Marry a Career Woman." Here's a career woman who exemplifies the wisdom of Noer's advice.

P.S. A related post is here. There's another one here.

Carnival of Links

I collect interesting links, group them by topic, and dump each related set of links into a draft post. Then, using the links as a starting point, I convert the draft to a full-blown post, as I have time.

I still have many interesting links in my collection that I probably won't build into full-blown posts. Rather than hoard or discard those links, I present them here, organized by topic and with brief descriptions.

Liberty and the State

Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard: Agree or not with the author's premises and conclusions, it's an informative comparison of the two main schools of libertarianism.

Anarchism: Further Thoughts: An analysis of the varieties of anarchism and the faults of each.

Tax Rates Around the World: A brief post about the disincentivizing effects of high tax rates.

Paternalism and Psychology: A different look at the wrongness of "libertarian paternalism."

Principles and Pragmatism: Why one libertarian blogger prefers idealism to pragmatism.

Lochner v. New York: A Centennial Perspective: (go to download link for full paper) The author of this long paper suggests that Lochner's much reviled "substantive due process" holding is in fact the basis for key Supreme Court decisons (e.g., Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence v. Texas).

Terrorism, War, and Related Matters

Apply the Golden Rule to Al Qaeda?: Why it makes no sense to apply Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to terrorist detainees.

Captain Ed's archive on Saddam's Documents: A collection of posts about Saddam's WMDs and terrorist ties.

The ACLU and Airport Security: How the ACLU is trying to depict behavior profiling as racial profiling.

Infinite Hatred: Considers and rejects the idea that it is futile to kill terrorists.

They, the People: An essay that parses the degrees of conflict and suggests that all-out war is the best way to change the hearts and minds of the enemy.

The Brink of Madness: A Familiar Place and The Mideast's Munich: War with the Mullahs Is Coming: Two persuasive arguments that the West's present mindset is like that which prevailed at the time of the Munich Agreement in 1938.

Sustaining Our Resolve: A sober but upbeat assessment of the prospects for the Middle East and the war on terror, by George P. Schultz.

Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?: An analysis by Norman Podhoretz.

Code Red: In which the writer tackles several anti-war and anti-anti-terror shibboleths.

Presidential Signing Statements

Bush's Tactic of Refusing Laws Is Probed: An article about a panel of the American Bar Association's so-called probe of Bush's signing statements. (This WaPo article is anti-Bush, of course, but it sets the stage for the next two links.)

Enforcing the Constitution: A brief post defending signing statements.

The Problem with Presidential Signing Statements: A longer analysis of signing statements that also defends them.

Ideas

The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century: A distinguished panel of libertarian-conservatives compiles a list of the worst and best. The lists of worsts seems about right. The list of bests includes too many boring "classics."

"Fake but Accurate?" Science: A scathing indictment of the "hockey stick" curve -- which purports to show that global warming is only a recent phenomenon -- its author, and its coterie of defenders.

The Problem of the Accuracy of Economic Data: An exposition of the spurious precision of economic statistics and analyses based on them.