L'Esprit d'Escalier, Supreme Court Edition

It's French for "staircase wit," meaning all the clever remarks that occur to you immediately after you leave the party. Not being notably quick verbally, I can sympathize with Solicitor General Verrilli for sometimes having trouble, at the Supreme Court's recent health-care jamboree, fielding questions from out of right field. Herewith, some wittier answers.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Could you define the market -- everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.

CLARITAS: [All the law students listening to the audio have a drink at the first mention of broccoli. Some of them will end up under the table; the index to the transcripts lists eight occurrences of the word.] No, Justice Scalia, that would be a good analogy if the health care law said that people had to have heart transplants, but it doesn't.
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JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Verrilli, you could say that about buying a car. If people don't buy cars, the price that those who do buy cars pay will have to be higher. So, you could say in order to bring the price down, you're hurting these other people by not buying a car.

CLARITAS: No, we're saying that by not buying insurance, they're shifting costs onto other people, just like when a car doesn't have pollution control equipment. There's been an extraordinary amount of energy devoted to the claim that this law is completely unprecedented, that it's making people buy a product, that it's regulating "inactivity." Actually, it's no different from when the government makes drivers buy catalytic converters, which is clearly Constitutional. The only difference is that people can, in theory, choose not to drive, but everyone uses health care. 

It's also true that the problem is worsened by not allowing insurance companies to exclude people for preexisting conditions, which leads to higher prices, but it's hard to think of a car analogy there.
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GENERAL VERRILLI: No. It's because you're going -- in the health care market, you're going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social norms that allow -- that -- to which we've obligated ourselves so that people get health care.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don't obligate yourself to that. Why -- you know?

CLARITAS: Justice Scalia, since you've said you'll resign if there's ever any conflict between your duties as a justice and your Catholic faith, I hope it's not true that your best solution to this Constitutional question is, "Let 'em die!"
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JUSTICE SCALIA: An equally evident constitutional principle is the principle that the Federal Government is a government of enumerated powers and that the vast majority of powers remain in the States and do not belong to the Federal Government. Do you acknowledge that that's a principle?

CLARITAS: So what you're saying is that the Constitution reserves to the states the power to make people buy broccoli?

More Republican Contempt for Women

From The New York Times:

"This year, Mr. Adelson gave $10 million, along with his wife, to support Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign."

Thinking About Oil Prices

I talk often on this blog about how political debate would be much improved if people were acquainted with a few simple facts. But the discussion of oil prices requires even less: just the application of some thought.

1. Premise: Oil is sold in a free market. Therefore,

2. It will be sold wherever in the world the price (net of transportation) is the highest. Therefore,

3. Big disparities in price around the world cannot exist for long. Therefore,

4. There will be a single world price for oil. The price for Americans will be the same as the price for everyone else. Therefore,

5. Increased production and reduced consumption in the U.S. affect the price to Americans only to the extent that they affect the world price.

As logical as this is once you think about it, it's hard to give up the view that it's our oil, so if we pump more of it, we'll have more, and won't have to worry about what foreigners are doing. Alas, not true. Oil we pump becomes part of the world market, financially if not physically. That is, the oil will stay here only if prices here are as high (net of transportation) as prices elsewhere.  When world oil prices rise, prices here must rise as well. Therefore,

6. "Energy independence" is a myth. Even if the U.S. had no net imports, an increase in world oil prices would raise the price to Americans, hurting consumers and helping producers. Conversely, new production in Libya or the South China Sea has approximately the same effect on the U.S. price as new production in  the Gulf of Mexico.

So why all the brouhaha about increasing production in the Gulf of Mexico? Making production easier in the Gulf of Mexico certainly helps Americans. But it's a big help to the Americans involved in oil production, and hardly any help to those filling up at the pump.

Who Owns Our Debt?

I am constantly surprised by how much of the political discussion in this country is based on beliefs that are simply and demonstrably factually wrong. As a social scientist, I find it inexplicable that no one makes much effort to fix this, not even politicians (I'm looking at you, Mr. President) whose political interests would be served by people knowing the facts.

Take America's national debt, for example. We've heard a lot about how it's all borrowed from China, and how at any time they could decide to stop lending us money and then where would we be?

So how much of our national debt would you guess that China owns? Thirty percent? Fifty? Seventy?

Here are some figures (Table OFS-2):

Total debt, June 2011, in billions:
      14,343
  Owned by US govt.(incl. Fed. Reserve, Soc. Sec. Trust Fund)
       6,220     43.4%
  Privately held                                                                            
       8,123       56.6%
                  Foreign                                                                             
                       4,501      31.4%
                                  China                                                                           
                                     1,166        8.1 %


That's right, China owns 8 percent of our debt. Foreigners in total own just over thirty percent. And the U.S. government owns more than 40 percent.

Fake Libertarians

The MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell recently called Ron Paul a "fake libertarian" because of his stands on sex and abortion, evoking predictable outrage from Paul fans on the Internet. Now, I'm not totally convinced by O'Donnell: a libertarian who believes abortion is murder would surely favor outlawing it, and a moralistic prig can be a libertarian as long as he doesn't impose his views on anyone else.

Much more troubling is Paul's pretentiously named and ludicrously unconstitutional We the People Act, which among other things would bar federal courts (including the Supreme Court) from adjudicating any claim based on "the right of privacy, including issues of sexual practices, orientation, or reproduction."

The subtext here is not only Roe v. Wade, but also Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down the Texas law against sodomy and is still a sore point among Texas Republicans. But how can a libertarian be against a right to privacy? Paul's response is that such a right is not found in the Constitution.

This is an odd argument for a libertarian to make. The Ninth Amendment (part of the Bill of Rights,of course) says, in its entirety: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." One would think that this view of rights--that they inhere in the people, rather than being conferred by the government--would be popular with libertarians. So is Paul a fake libertarian? What's he after here?

The problem is not really that Paul is a fake, by the standards of American libertarianism. The problem is the fundamental phoniness of American libertarianism. It claims to stand for individual liberty and against government interference in our lives. But it sees no problem in state government interference in our lives. Libertarianism is much more about keeping the Federal government off the backs of the states than keeping the states off the backs of the people.

Take a look at the other things that Federal courts would be specifically barred from adjudicating under Paul's bill: "the right to marry without regard to sex or sexual orientation where based upon equal protection of the laws," and, of all things, "state or local laws, regulations, or policies concerning the free exercise or establishment of religion." In other words, keep your Federal hands off my city's hundred-foot cross. And its practice of reciting the Lord's Prayer in public schools. And if we want, we can declare Christianity the official religion of Texas, or outlaw the practice of Islam. Does that sound like individual liberty? More like collectivist tyranny.

Unfortunately, libertarianism has identified itself with the cause of states' rights, and to say the least that's not a cause that has ever been very friendly to liberty. Don't call them "libertarians." Call them "statists."

Note on Contraception

You've probably heard about the brouhaha and hoo-hah that followed the decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to require religiously-affiliated employers (but not churches) to cover contraception in the health insurance it offers to employees. The Catholic Church, as you might expect, is quite exercised about this; in fact, the bishops sent out a letter to be read at Mass denouncing it.

Without getting into a long discussion, let me just make a secondary point. It is simply incorrect to say, as right-wingers have been doing, that the "morning-after pill" is an "abortion pill". The morning-after pill works by the same mechanism as conventional birth-control pills. It prevents ovulation and fertilization. It may also prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. If you, like the Catholic Church, regard a fertilized egg as a fetus, then you could call it an "abortion-inducing drug" as the bishops' letter did, but only if you're willing to make the same statement about ordinary birth-control pills.  (The bishops' letter doesn't specify which drugs they're talking about.) The bishops are doubtless willing to say that birth-control pills should be illegal; is Rick Santorum?

And I know this isn't relevant to the moral and constitutional issues, but I do wish the journalist had asked that outraged Catholic woman that I saw on TV this question: "Studies say 98 percent of Catholic women have at some time used a method of birth control other than natural family planning. Are you among the 98 percent or the 2 percent?"

BTW, I've sent an e-mail to the public information office at the Archdiocese of Boston asking for some clarifications about the bishops' letter. They warn that they don't have time to answer all mail, and so far they haven't answered mine.

Pulling the Right Levers

Honestly, why is there so much political ineptitude in the world? Note to anti-Assad Syrians living abroad (none of whom are reading this, I imagine): do not take a couple dozen of your fellow citizens, break into the Syrian embassy and set fire to it, or even demonstrate peacefully outside it. This will have absolutely no effect on the situation in Syria.

Here's something that might: Gather a few thousand people and demonstrate outside the Russian and Chinese embassies.  Carry signs. Chant slogans ("Hey, hey, Hu Jintao, how many kids are you killing now?"). Burn a few flags. Invite journalists, especially Arabic-language TV stations.

Think about whom you're trying to influence and what your levers are. It's not rocket science.

Postcript February 10: Well, Syrians in Syria get it, so perhaps those abroad will catch on. From today's New York Times:

Activists said seven people were also killed in the city when troops fired on anti-government demonstrators drawn to the streets to protest Russia’s support of President Bashar al-Assad. Protesters said the theme of Friday’s demonstrations, which they hoped to stage nationwide, was “Russia is killing our children.”

Letter to an Expat in Newt Country

A friend writes:

 "Could you please write a blog about how it isn't actually the 'entitlement' programs for the poor that  have gotten us into a recession. I could use some good information to quote down here in conservative FL. "

Wow, where to begin?

1. The Recession

Entitlements had nothing to do with the recession. The recession was caused by a bubble in housing prices (see, for example, Tampa and Miami in the chart), in which banks made loans to people who couldn't afford them on the assumption that housing prices would continue to go up. When prices stopped going up, and then started going down (around 2007), banks were left with a lot of bad loans. To make matters worse, a lot of those loans had been bundled into packages and sold to other banks, so nobody was sure exactly what each bank had. So banks didn't want to lend each other money, for fear that the other bank would go bankrupt. So nobody could get loans, so businesses started having trouble paying employees and ordering new inventory, so people got laid off. Which made everyone cut back on their buying, etc.

Republicans want to believe all this couldn't be the fault of the private sector, so they've got a story involving how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are "government-sponsored" although privately owned.... oh, forget it. The so-called subprime mortgages, which were mortgage loans to people who couldn't really afford them, were made by the private sector.

2. Entitlements

This is pretty much a scam. Entitlements are basically any program that doesn't require an explicit appropriation by Congress. Everyone says, "We have to do something about entitlements," Mitt Romney runs around  talking about the "entitlement society", and then after the election they say, "You knew we were talking about Social Security and Medicare, right?"

Here are some rough figures:

2010 Federal Spending

Social Security 
$701 billion
Medicare
  520 billion
Medicaid
 273 billion
"Food Stamps" (SNAP)
   70 billion
"Welfare" (TANF)
   17 billion

Something does have to be done about Medicare and Medicaid, because their costs are going up very fast, but that's because medical costs are going up very fast. The Democratic solution to this is to try to control medical costs. The Republican solution is to accuse Democrats of "raiding Medicare" (because they show smaller cost increases), do nothing about medical costs, and then cap how much Medicare will pay. They thus remove the problem from the Federal budget by shifting it onto recipients. This is known as the "Ryan plan", and its fundamental cynicism is compounded by making it only applicable to people under 55, in the hope that they won't pay attention the way people 55 and over would, and that people 55 and over don't mean it when they talk about their concern about future generations.

3. Other

On the allegedly crushing burden of future debt, don't forget that Ronald Reagan doubled the national debt, and that around 60 percent of the current debt was incurred under the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations.

If you find yourself getting into arguments with libertarians, try this.

Some Remarks About the Florida Primary

1. In case you somehow missed the exit-polling results for Florida, here are are a few results I found interesting:

• Gingrich ran eight percentage points worse among women than among men.  "The Daily Show" had a "focus group" of women before the primary, in which it turned out that divorced women hated Gingrich, while married trophy wives liked him.
• A pretty clear demographic picture: Ron Paul got a remarkable 25% of the under-30 vote (versus 3% of those 65 and over) and almost twice as many males as females. No word on what fraction of Ayn Rand readers he got.
• The vote for Paul steadily decreased with voter age, while the vote for Newt steadily increased.
• Romney's remarks about "self-deporting" and Newt calling him anti-immigrant seem to have made no difference among Republicans. He got more than twice as many votes as Gingrich among non-Cuban Hispanics. His margin  among those who thought that illegal immigrants working in the US should be offered a chance to apply for citizenship was about the same (big) as among those who thought they should be deported. (To my surprise, there were more of the former than the latter.)
• Inexplicably, Romney not only got 72% of those who thought Gingrich's positions were too conservative, he also got 52% of those who thought Gingrich's positions were not conservative enough. Poor Rick Santorum.
• Romney did better among Catholics than the two Catholic candidates combined.

2. You may have been wondering why Gingrich was nattering on about Saul Alinsky. Most people know as much about Saul Alinsky as they do about, say, Sarbanes-Oxley. But if you're one of those people, you're not part of Newt's key demographic: those who live in the Glenn Beck looniverse. The latter is an alternate reality where America faces threats not only from Saul Alinsky, but from Sigmund Freud, Cass Sunstein, George Soros, Frances Fox Piven, and the coming Caliphate.

BTW, notice anything these people have in common? Hint: it begins with a "J". OK, except for the Caliphate.

Krzyzewskiville: A Quick Policy Analysis

The New York Times recently ran a story partly devoted to describing a place I was unfamiliar with, Krzyzewski​ville. Named after the Duke University basketball coach (and also known, not surprisingly, as K-ville), it is a tent city that forms as Duke students line up early for admission to the big basketball game against UNC. K-ville has developed a surprisingly rule-governed culture. No tents are allowed before January 15--the big game is on March 3--and tenters are allowed to sleep indoors when the temperature is below 20 degrees F (heaters are banned). At all other times there are middle-of-the-night tent checks.

Let's leave aside the bigger questions that concerned the Times, about how even good universities have been sucked into the vortex of big-time athletics, and look at K-ville as a policy. The first question: why put students through this? Granted that K-ville is now a tradition and has a social aspect, it imposes pretty big costs on students. And those costs are what is known in economics as a deadweight loss: the loss to them is not a gain to anyone else. No one benefits from having students sleeping outdoors.

Why not, then, give away seats by lottery? This avoids the deadweight loss of six weeks in an unheated tent. But there is a slightly more subtle cost: a lottery does not ensure that the seats go to those who value them the most. Since there is little cost to signing up for the lottery, even those with a very modest desire to see the game will sign up, and some of them will get seats instead of more committed fans. From the standpoint of utilitarian philosophy, this is bad because it means that the allocation of seats will not produce as much total happiness as it could. And my guess is that it would be regarded as unfair by the hard-core fans.

So isn't there some way we can select those who really, really want to see the game, without making them waste huge amounts of time? For most goods, of course, there is such a mechanism: money.  Duke could sell tickets at a high price; only those who place a high value on tickets will end up buying them. And there is no waste because what is a cost to the students is revenue to the university (unlike the camping case, where the cost to the students is not a benefit to anyone).

This is the approach generally taken with alumni, businesses, and so on, but it would undoubtedly provoke outrage if applied to students. The problem is that students start with different endowments of money, and we tend to think that the key elements of the college experience--classes, dorms, extracurricular activities--ought  to be available to all regardless of parents' income. Most people would say that cheering for sports teams is one of those elements.

One solution would be to equalize the initial endowments, by giving all entering students artificial scrip money (call it, say, "ducats") that they can use for various things on campus. Students could then choose how to spend their ducats, and those who really, really want to see Duke and UNC play basketball could save up and spend all their ducats on that. Unfortunately, it's hard to think of what other possible uses for ducats could compete with The Game, and those that I can think of (pizza? mixers?) all end up costing the administration money.

My preferred solution goes in another direction: why not take the time now spent waiting in line and use it productively? Announce that any student who wants a seat at the Duke-UNC game must first spend, say, 100 hours (the number could be fine-tuned over time) doing pre-approved volunteer work. This not only separates the wheat from the chaff in terms of interest in the game, but also produces a hundred thousand hours a year of, for example, tutoring for disadvantaged kids in Raleigh and Durham and Greensboro. The program would also broaden the horizons of Duke students, give them an extra line for their resumes that looks a lot better than "Camped out on a patch of grass", send a message to students about what the University considers important, and polish the somewhat tarnished public image of Duke.

Sounds good to me, Duke. Get cracking.