Overblown light bulbs at Reason [updated]

"Lights Out for America's Favorite Light Bulb," by Shawn Regan at Reason. This piece epitomizes the misinformation now spreading about the light bulb "ban." Notice how the word "halogen" shows up in there without explanation or elaboration, before the writer focuses laser-like on the downsides of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). We're told that the "traditional" incandescent has been "effectively" banned, but we're not given the rather crucial context that halogen bulbs are incandescent lamps--they're incandescent lamps that meet the new energy-efficiency standards (by using halogen gas to redeposit tungsten atoms on the filament).

Instead of buying a 60 watt "traditional" incandescent, you can now buy a 43 watt halogen incandescent. Instead of a 100 watt "traditional" incandescent you can buy a 72 watt halogen incandescent. Instead of a 40 watt "traditional" bulb, you can buy a 29 watt halogen incandescent. These new products are basically the same as the old products, except they are more efficient.

They also cost more--which is why it is wrong as well to suggest there are no costs or tradeoffs in the new regulations. You'll probably pay something like $1.50 for a halogen incandescent, compared to 50 cents or less for a "traditional" one. On the other hand, you'll be using less electricity, and you may be replacing bulbs less frequently. Whether you end up paying more or less will depend on your electricity rates and other factors. Also, there are many exemptions to the energy efficiency rules, for specialized types of incandescents (such as ones used in fridges, for instance). But consumers are not being forced to buy non-incandescent lamps such as CFLs or LEDs, which is the impression you'll take away if you put stock in articles like the one at Reason.

The Reason article also complains about the "baptists and bootleggers" coalition that backed the new rules when they were legislated in 2007 (pushed by the Bush administration). That charge of crony capitalism is, at best, an oversimplification, as some companies opposed the new rules and those that supported them did so seeking to forestall rules that would have been more onerous. In any case, once the rules were in place and companies had developed new products in response to them (an expensive process), repealing the "ban" would be of dubious effect. For the companies that stopped making "traditional" lamps to start those production lines up again is not exactly a cost-free proposition.

By the way, what kind of "tradition" are energy-inefficient bulbs? Was leaded gasoline also a "tradition"?

For my part, I think a carbon tax (with cuts in other taxes) would be a better way of dealing with energy efficiency (and getting at the key underlying problem: carbon emissions driving climate change) than lamp efficiency standards. But I'll settle for some second-best policies in preference to doing nothing.

UPDATE 1/10: And here's Nick Gillespie doing the same thing in a video format: complaining that the incandescent bulb has been "effectively banned" and replaced by halogen, CFLs and LEDs. Do the people at Reason not know that halogen lamps are incandescents, or do they just not care?



UPDATE 1/11: "Elegy for the Incandescent Bulb," by Tom Purcell at Townhall, offers the same red herring with half the wit. And adds this:

To be sure, you have been so successful, it took the government - not better lighting products - to kill you off. That's because, some argue, you are causing the Earth to warm. 

As electricity passes through your filament, you see, the filament gets white-hot. That is how light is created - but in the process, you also create a lot of heat, and heat is wasted energy.

Me: No more updates on this post.

The GOP does not need fewer debates

First, let me admit a bias: I love debates--including participating in them, watching them, and writing about them. So, I must acknowledge that my aversion to a recent push in the GOP for fewer primary debates next time around arises partly from concern about my personal entertainment in 2016. Still, there is more to be said about this than that. I bring up the topic in response to this Salon piece "Republicans' desperate plan to hide its clowns," by Alex Pareene. Opening:

Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, has told NBC and CNN that they will not be allowed to have any Republican presidential debates in 2016 if they go ahead and air planned films about Hillary Clinton, who will likely be the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. That is the reason he gave them, at least, but it is not really the actual reason Priebus wants to not have any debates on those two channels. The real reason, everyone knows and sort of acknowledges, is that debates were a disaster for the party in 2012, an endless circus made up entirely of clowns on a national tour of shame.

These debates were on TV, people watched (and mocked) them, and the real candidates, the ones the money people were counting on to win the stupid race, were forced to say unacceptable things to appeal to raging loons. Furthermore, the serious candidates looked less serious simply by sharing a stage with Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain. So: Fewer debates, next time, is the plan, and these Hillary movies are a convenient reason to cancel on two of the big networks. (Do you know how I know that the Hillary Clinton movies aren’t the real reason? Media Matters’ David Brock would also like the networks to cancel these movies, because let’s be honest they probably won’t be entirely flattering.)

Me: It seems quite plausible that Priebus's motive here is indeed to reduce the numbers of debates, and that this stems from a perception that the events are damaging to the party's electoral chances. In my opinion, that perception is wrong. Consider two points:

1. Whatever effect the debates had in foregrounding "non-serious" candidates, the events also had a winnowing effect in helping remove from the race candidates whose views, rhetoric and preparation could not hold up under scrutiny. The obvious example here is Rick Perry, who showed himself in debate to be a low-information candidate (a conclusion not exclusively dependent on his "oops" moment). Whatever benefits Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann got from the attention high of the debates (future speaking fees? talk radio gigs?) were more than counterbalanced by their inability to appear as serious candidates on a stage. (By the way, Pareene is unfair in lumping Newt Gingrich in with the fringe candidates. I have shown that I'm no Gingrich fan, but a former speaker of the House who once led the party to vast political gains ought not to be dismissed with an empty snort.)

2. The debates gave Mitt Romney practice, helping him be a better debater. This was glaringly obvious in his first debate with Barack Obama, who was clearly badly out of practice himself. Was it enough? Obviously, no. Obama regained his stride in subsequent debates, and of course debates were not the only factors shaping the Election Day outcome. But woe betide the Republican Party if it concludes that sheltering its candidates from debates is the key to future electoral success.

My true-life libertarian story

At FrumForum, I review The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America and offer some further thoughts on Reason magazine and libertarianism. Opening:

Last fall, I wrote for FrumForum about “How I Joined the Vast RINO Conspiracy,” tracing how I, a longtime self-described “libertarian conservative,” got out of step with the right as the right moved further right and as I moved toward the center. Some readers applauded my independent thinking and others invited me to drag my backside out of the Republican Party (something I’ve declined to do).

A new book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, respectively the editors of Reason.tv and Reason magazine, has given me much to contemplate, on how libertarianism fits into American politics, how Reason fits into libertarianism, and why I, a onetime fairly regular contributor to that magazine, eventually failed to fit in at Reason.

Whole thing here.

UPDATE 6/19: Nick Gillespie has some kind words about my "respectful though mixed" review.

The feds vs Reason

I've written for Reason magazine, and had my disagreements with Reason magazine. I retain considerable sympathy for the magazine's philosophy, but even if I didn't, I would be appalled by the federal government's actions in response to some obnoxious comments by readers at the magazine's website. Read the story by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch: "How Government Stifled Reason's Free Speech."

Foreign policy update

I read this Robert Kagan piece "America's Dangerous Aversion to Conflict" with initial interest, followed by growing boredom. Analogies to the 1930s are such a stock part of conservative foreign policy rhetoric that it's a wonder there's no app for them. Some wording about Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy being "fatalistic" also struck a tinny note. (That policy was in fact quite activist and creative, which is basically the opposite of fatalistic.) I recently expressed my disagreements with the ill-considered and poorly argued non-interventionism at Reason, but Kagan's essay is a good reminder that neoconservatism has its own formidable blinkers, as Jacob Heilbrunn points out.

What the U.S. needs is to be smarter than its enemies, or at least not manifestly dumber, and to have what's sometimes called, a bit pretentiously, "grand strategy." That strategy should include, sometimes, making common cause with enemies, against worse or more pressing enemies, and thus making judgments about which enemies can potentially be given a more benevolent status. Insofar as the U.S. is now working with Iran, or will do so, that reflects a belated recognition that sometimes governments that hate each other still have reason to work together. In the aftermath of 9/11, that recognition went by the wayside, with unfortunate consequences spilling down to the present.

Inasmuch as we do live in a period remotely similar to the 1930s, that's all the more reason why we need to be building up alliances, de facto and de jure, including in some cases with traditional enemies. If there's anything that's "fatalistic," it's assuming that this can't be done.

UPDATE: "Obama Should Play Nixon and Go to Iran."

UPDATE: "2014 Is Not 1931," though it is true, as has been noted, that Chamberlain wasn't PM in 1931 either.

Monkey Shakespeare

Back in 1999, in my Reason article "Is God in the Details?" criticizing claims by conservatives and others that science had uncovered a cosmic design, I wrote this (emphasis added):

Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of Bork, Will, or other conservatives who have discovered evidence of design in the laws of physics. In many cases, however, there is plenty of reason to doubt their knowledge. Bork and Will make sweeping statements about the universe based on a cursory reading of popular accounts. The Wall Street Journal's and The Washington Times' reviewers of [Patrick] Glynn's book accept at face value his misleading definition of the anthropic principle. Glynn devotes four pages to a puerile analogy about monkeys with typewriters. (Yes, if the monkeys are assumed to be unchanging beings with limited capacities, they would never type Shakespeare. It does not follow that the universe is subject to similar constraints.)

Now, the monkey/Shakespeare issue is back, based on a software exploration of it, and it seems that monkeys not only wouldn't type Shakespeare but aren't a good example of anything other than monkeys.

A 2002 experiment ran into a different problem: Real monkeys aren't random-number generators. Arts students and faculty from Plymouth University in Devon, England, set six monkeys loose on an iMac in the nearby Paignton Zoo. They learned that the primates had favorite keys, with thousands of instances of the letter 'S' but none of 'E,' 'I,' 'O' or 'T' in a selection of the monkeys' musings the research group published.

So even if chained to a computer, the monkeys might never generate words, let alone classic passages. The rules of probability don't apply in the same way they do to the theoretical or software monkeys, because these primates had their own preferences. "It questions the whole idea of animals as random generators," says Mike Phillips, professor of interdisciplinary arts at Plymouth, who led the research. "I think Shakespeare might be species-specific."

So now we can move on to other topics.

Reason and skepticism

Reason magazine has a blog post on Michael Moynihan's recent Newsweek piece on skepticism. I made a few critical comments on Twitter about the Moynihan piece when it came out, noting its lack of engagement with the turmoil over sexual misconduct claims now roiling the skeptics' movement. The comments section at the Reason post gives some glimpses into the frictions between two movements--skepticism and libertarianism--that historically have had some overlap but at present seem mostly at odds. (Note, for instance, the complaints that the skeptics believe in anthropogenic global warming.)

Fine tune this

I've criticized various aspects of Reason magazine under its current editors. (See here and here, for example.) One thing I haven't gotten around to criticizing until now is the lame or nonexistent copy editing of its website. Consider this gibberish:

Victor J. Stenger ha
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195126645/reasonmagazineA/">The Life of the Cosmos. In this theory, our universe emerged from a black hole in a previous universe; moreover, each black hole in our universe (and other universes) generates yet another universe. Universes that produce lots of black holes therefore have more "progeny" than universes that don't. The laws of physics are reshuffled slightly with each black hole, and increasingly the multiverse is dominated by universes whose laws are "fine-tuned" to produce black holes.

That's how my July 1999 piece "Is God in the Details?" currently opens in its Reason web page, after a few thousand words have been omitted or garbled. There's a bit of an irony there in that part of what's been excised has to do with misbegotten analogies involving monkeys and typewriters. For an accurate rendition of the piece, see here.

This article, by the way, seemed to me after it first appeared to have had some success in deflating the boomlet of spurious anthropic reasoning in media and especially conservative-media circles. But the debate continues, even though as Jim Manzi notes, it's much ado about nothing.

UPDATE 9/3/04: At some point, the Reason piece got fixed. Thanks, guys.

Non-voting at Reason

I've written elsewhere about my checkered history with Reason magazine. I won't rehearse that here, but will add I'm underwhelmed by Katherine Mangu-Ward's November cover story "Your Vote Doesn't Count: Why (almost) everyone should stay home on Election Day." It focuses on the idea that it is extremely unlikely your vote will provide the margin of difference in any election, so why bother? (As opposed to the idea, also espoused in libertarian circles, that voting is bad because it legitimizes government.)

But that same logic could be applied to any activity in which you're contributing to a collective outcome, and these are not all analogous to being the 101st shooter in a firing squad. Consider, for example, contributing money to Reason magazine. It is extremely unlikely that your donation will make the difference between the magazine staying in business or not, hiring a person or not, or running any article or not. (Unless perhaps you're very generous.) So, why bother?

The answer is because donating money, like voting, is similar to being a construction worker adding bricks to a huge wall. If you don't do it, someone else may do it. If enough people don't do it, it won't get done. How high or solid the wall is, as well as whether it exists at all, are outcomes that depend on numerous people doing their part. The outcomes will differ depending on who does (or doesn't) participate.

Ayn Rand: great, tragic

And now I'll add a few drops to the current torrent of commentary about Ayn Rand. I've read one of the two new bios, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and am likely to read the other, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. But her life story can be a bit depressing, so I prefer to space these readings out a bit.

Rand elicits fervent admiration from some, intense loathing from others, and ambivalence from those who think some of her ideas interesting and valuable, others objectionable. Mark me down in the ambivalent category, and note that Rand herself had little use for those expressing partial agreement.

Her profile tends to rise at times of stepped-up government overreaching -- times such as the present and the Great Society florescence of the 1960s. Her ideas become a rallying cry of the opposition, as with recent talk about people putatively or potentially “going Galt” (i.e., withdrawing their talents from a government-dominated society, like her Atlas Shrugged hero John Galt).

Hers was a no-compromise philosophy and style. She championed “full laissez-faire capitalism”; the mixed economy was an abomination, regardless of the portions in the mix. Thus, her influence tends to give some backbone to the anti-big-government forces, but also tends to be self-limiting. Not many people want “full laissez-faire capitalism,” a fact Rand would regard as profound moral corruption but which is better explained as a healthy skepticism toward radicalism, utopianism and abstract ideology.

Rand thought her political stance followed inexorably from deeper principles. "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason,” she wrote. “If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.”

Rand’s emphasis on rationality was and is a bracing tonic against the conservative tendency to fall back upon religious faith in formulating political arguments. But Rand’s view of reason was idiosyncratic, strongly emphasizing the a priori over the empirical. She disregarded the health risks of smoking, for instance, on the grounds that statistics were epistemologically unreliable. Similarly, she pronounced that physics had been corrupted by bad philosophy, without knowing much of anything about physics.

She had a healthy contempt for the “anarchocapitalists” who followed her thinking to what they saw as its logical conclusion in their advocacy of a stateless society. She thought, plausibly, that government is needed to defend against aggression and adjudicate disputes. But given her black-and-white dogmatism, it is unsurprising that some of her onetime adherents went out looking for further extremes to embrace.

The greatness of Ayn Rand is that she presented thought-provoking ideas in a powerful way. The tragedy is not that some of her ideas were wrong, but that her philosophy was designed to deny that possibility.

Toy regulation follies

Some 10 years ago, I pitched a story idea about radon regulation to the Weekly Standard. They turned it down, one of the editors telling me on the phone that for now they were only interested in (I kid you not) the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I subsequently wrote the story for Reason magazine, which at the time made a point of covering unsexy but important regulatory issues.

Now, here's Virginia Postrel (who was then editor of Reason) pointing out a dreadful regulatory development in the toy industry that's gotten almost zero attention from right-wing blogs and magazines. One sign of the right's health will be whether it can overcome its boredom and attention deficit problems to grapple with the grim new era of regulatory overreach.

A snapshot of the left-right fight over science

At The Federalist, David Harsanyi has a list: "Here Are The ‘Science’ Questions Reporters Should Ask Politicians." The piece is in keeping with a theme voiced by many conservatives that the recent questioning of Scott Walker about evolution was tendentious "gotcha" journalism (which it was), and that liberal/progressive journalists and politicians who hector the right about science are often ill-informed about science themselves (which is true).

I've written (a lot) about skewed science on left and right, and concluded provisionally that there's plenty wrong with the left on this score and--at the present time--even more wrong with the right. To glean some of both side's deficiencies, I recommend scrolling through recent tweets by Harsanyi's Federalist colleague Sean M. Davis, who responded to journalists' derision of Walker by pressing them about what they know about punctuated equilibrium and other topics involving evolution. Fair enough--but: Davis's amusing screed also included some statements that are misleading at best:

Literally everyone believes in microevolution. Even creationists. But macroevolution is complicated/controversial w/in sci. community.
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 12, 2015

Me: Macroevolution is commonly defined as evolution at or above the species level, and there is debate about questions such as whether the mechanisms of microevolution (change within species) are sufficient by themselves to account for change of one species to another, and the relative importance of the mechanisms. Complicated, certainly. Controversial? Only if one means the details of how macroevolution happens. That it happens--more specifically, that  new species arise from earlier ones-- is not controversial within the scientific community. At all. Davis's implication that there is some raging scientific debate about the existence of speciation is false. Plus, using the distinction between micro- and macroevolution spuriously is a tactic from the creationist playbook.

If you really want to stump a bottom-rung j-schooler, ask him to explain how gradualism's improbability led directly to multiverse theory.
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 11, 2015

Me:  I never went to j-school, but I have written about both the multiverse and evolution on many occasions. And to the best of my knowledge, Davis's claim here, that multiverse theories developed because of problems with Darwinian gradualism, is false. I say "to the best of my knowledge" because there's no way to rule out that some scientist somewhere may have thought along such lines, but if so that certainly was not typical of how ideas about the multiverse arose.

In saying this, let me make clear that I think one motivation--among others--for receptiveness to the multiverse (the idea that there are many universes) was to bat away a particular strand of thinking that the laws of physics give evidence of an intelligent "fine tuning." There were other and I suspect more important motivations, particularly that theories of cosmic inflation (and also cosmological natural selection) inherently imply that the creation of new universes would happen more than once; there's no clear reason why the needed conditions wouldn't happen again and again.

But even agreeing (as I do) that some scientists like the idea of a multiverse because it weakens certain claims for design, let me be clear that the claims in question are not those of Darwinian gradualism but rather those of fine-tuning (e.g., that life could not have evolved if say the strength of gravity or mass of the proton were slightly different). Importantly, the more fine-tuning in physics you have, the less reason you have to doubt that biological evolution would occur. Fine-tuning means a life-friendly universe, whereas standard creationist/Intelligent Design arguments against evolution rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the idea that the universe is not life-friendly enough for biological evolution to occur. If you're someone who (a) wants evolution to be true and (b) is worried that gradualism is improbable, positing a multiverse is at best a change in subject.

Sean M. Davis's statements about macroevolution being controversial, and about the multiverse being a response to Darwinian gradualism's improbability, suggest a weak grasp of evolution and cosmology alike, and that his perspectives on these matters are heavily influenced by creationist/Intelligent Design critiques from far outside the scientific mainstream.

Now, as I mentioned at the outset, David Harsanyi has a list of questions for politicians. Their import, I think, is that Democratic politicians will stumble over these, out of ignorance and/or a desire to not offend the liberal base by stating scientific facts that the base doesn't know or doesn't want to accept. But if the point is to denounce tendentious questions by giving examples of some, Harsanyi certainly has done so. For example:

Is nuclear power the safest energy in the world? According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, around 70 percent of scientists support nuclear power development because it is. Yet large number of liberals oppose and stand in the way of science.

Me: No. The linked poll asks whether scientists support nuclear power, not whether it's the "safest" source of energy. It would be difficult to make a scientific case that nuclear is "safest" compared to say solar or windpower (birds notwithstanding), but far more plausible to say that nuclear is or with proper regulation can be a good idea, given its risks and benefits.

The Harsanyi list is filled with questions that make little sense. Do you believe carbon dioxide is detrimental to human existence? fails to acknowledge the obvious distinction between something being detrimental in a general, let alone absolute, sense and something being detrimental at certain levels or in certain ways; it also blurs whether something is detrimental in a direct way or indirectly. But I am not entirely clear whether Harsanyi thinks Democratic politicians would stumble because these questions are so probing or because the questions are so dumb (or both). I find the questions more dumb than probing.

I'm all for pointing out when liberal/progressive/Democratic pundits and politicians purport to be "sciencey" without foundation. But in doing so, conservative writers should have a firmer grasp of the subjects they're talking about than is evident in the Harsanyi/Davis responses to the Walker kerfluffle.

Cosmic fine-tuning update

There's an absorbing piece in Aeon magazine on "The Calibrated Cosmos," subtitled "Is our universe fine-tuned for life, or does it just look that way from where we're sitting?" It's by Tim Maudlin, a physics-oriented philosopher at NYU, and deals with a topic that I wrote about in several articles over the years. Excerpt from Maudlin:

The problem of cosmological fine-tuning is never straightforward. It is not clear, in the first place, when it is legitimate to complain that a physical theory treats some phenomenon as a highly contingent ‘product of chance’. Where the complaint is legitimate, the cosmologist has several different means of recourse. The inflationary Big Bang illustrates how a change in dynamics can convert delicate dependence on initial conditions to a robust independence from the initial state. The bubble universe scenario demonstrates how low individual probabilities can be overcome by multiplying the number of chances. And homeostasis provides a mechanism for variable quantities to naturally evolve to special unchanging values that could easily be mistaken for constants of nature.

Me: I think he's right--it's not straightforward. Back in 1999 I first delved into this topic, in a cover story for Reason magazine (I link to a PDF since the article as currently posted on Reason's website has an editorial glitch) and my focus was on rebutting claims from journalists and conservatives that science had "found God" via supposed fine-tuning in physics. I returned to the subject in subsequent years including here and here. While I continued (and continue) to think the religion-from-physics case is weak, I also came to see some skeptics seeking to bat away the religious pitch as themselves being a bit too cocksure, about multiple universes and other cosmic speculations that bolstered their atheism. My 1999 article, I think, did a decent job of suggesting how little we know, cosmically.

My original piece, though, is a bit dated in that some of the physics has been added to or superseded. Maudlin has a good discussion about Alan Guth's inflationary model (which I'd cited) and the uncertainties that have developed about what it does or does not indicate about fine-tuning.

Finally, take a look at the chart below. It doesn't show a physics phenomenon but actually is what I got from Google's Ngram viewer (which tracks book mentions) when I plugged in "anthropic principle" for the years 1970 to 2008 (the most recent data). As you'll see, mentions of that phrase declined in the first decade of the 21st century. I suspect that's because the debate over whether physics had "found God" cooled down and the term lost some of its hot-button appeal. If so, I like to think I helped push the discussion into a less polemical and overwrought place. (If you have trouble viewing the chart, mea culpa and click here.)

Robot overlords, etc.

Via Justin Green, here's Kevin Drum on machine intelligence. Excerpt:

This is a story about the future. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

And, Drum argues, while they may not try to kill or enslave us, they will cause massive unemployment. His piece is less lurid than some predictions, but I'm inclined to think there's a lot we don't know about intelligence, and replicating it is not going to follow the exponential path he aptly illustrates. A few of my relevant pieces from over the years:

"Are We Just Really Smart Robots?" Reason.

"Searching for Bobby Fischer's Platonic Form." TCS Daily.

"Masters of the Universe." Reason.

"Dear Posthumans." TCS Daily.

"Only Posthuman." Sciam Mind.

Book note: Time Reborn

I see that Lee Smolin has a new book coming out: Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. I haven't followed physics in recent years as closely as I used to (and may again) but I'm confident this will be a highly interesting book. Smolin is an excellent writer and an intriguing, independent thinker on physics and more. I interviewed him back in 1999 for a Reason article and reviewed his book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, also for Reason, in 2007.

Selective memory

Matt Welch:

As Reason repeatedly pointed out in 2008, both Obama and the Democrats writ large came to the cusp of reclaiming Washington by rejecting '90s-style "New Democrat" economic Clintonism. And Obama's double-talk at this point should be no surprise.

As I recall, the burning questions at Reason last year were whether to vote for Obama or Bob Barr or nobody (because voting is bad), how to tout someone's anti-McCain book, and how to distance the magazine from post-newsletter scandal Ron Paul without losing its Pauliac readers.

Libertarians and the GOP

In Reason magazine, Ryan Sager asks: Have libertarians been driven out of the GOP? His answer: Yes.

Two years ago, I wrote a book imploring the Republican Party not to follow its worst elements off a cliff—not to evolve, in short, into an insular party with little-to-no appeal outside of the rural, the southern, the Evangelical. As the McCain campaign flames out in a ball of Rovian disgrace, scorching the center in an attempt to fire up the base, it's difficult to reach any other conclusion than that the battle for the soul of the Republican Party has been lost.

I think it's more complicated than that. The soul of libertarianism has been deeply damaged in 2008. That's the result of the Ron Paul phenomenon -- socially conservative and conspiracy-minded -- which was touted, far more than not, by Reason magazine (and deplored by Sager). Now, Ryan falls back on the definition of libertarianism as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal." But that's a dwindling segment of what passes for libertarianism these days. Ron Paul and Bob Barr, whatever their fallings out, are libertarianism's most prominent figures now.

So, I'm not an admirer of the Rovian politics and social conservatism that Sager decries. But if libertarians are no longer at home in the GOP, then I (who have long called myself a libertarian and still wear the label, however uncomfortably, now) say that has a lot to do with where libertarianism has been going, and not just where the GOP has gone.

Space mining update

Recommended: "Mining in the Last Frontier," by Glenn Reynolds, about a bill now under consideration, known as the Asteroids Act. Excerpts:

The Asteroids Act is short and simple. After instructing the president and all agencies of the U.S. government to use their powers to facilitate space exploration and exploitation, it provides that "Any resources obtained in outer space from an asteroid are the property of the entity that obtained such resources, which shall be entitled to all property rights thereto, consistent with applicable provisions of federal law." In other words, if you mine it, you own it.

...

Things here on Earth aren't going so well at the moment, but we're actually in the midst of tremendous progress — most of it by private companies — with regard to human activity in outer space. The Asteroids Act is a significant step in taking things to the next level. I hope that Congress passes it.

Me: Here's hoping. I've been interested in this sort of thing for a long time, since well before this Reason piece I wrote in 1998. Sooner or later some broader framework will be needed (as I sketched out in Reason), when it comes time for, say, building hotels on the moon or other things that are not just about extraction and asteroids. Still, the Asteroids Act is a good step in the right direction (up).

UPDATE: For a different perspective (though not specifically about the Asteroids Act), see "Moon First—Mine the Asteroids Later," by Paul D. Spudis.

Contemplating foreign policy at Reason

I've been reading the non-interventionists at Reason magazine, trying to assess what their preferred non-interventionist foreign policy would actually consist of. Here's Sheldon Richman: "Let's Have Some Honesty and Realism at the NATO Conference," explaining that the fault for the Ukraine crisis belongs to the U.S. and the West for having expanded NATO years ago, and concluding:

Yet another manufactured crisis — costing over 2,000 lives. It could be brought to a speedy end if Barack Obama would give the word.

Me: What word? What is Richman asking Obama to do? It's only implied, but apparently the answer is to expel Eastern European countries from NATO. Or is it to disband NATO altogether? (The latter would effectively follow from the former at this point anyway.) And if that means more countries would fall under the domination of an aggressive dictatorship, we should be willing to accept that, because--libertarianism. But how come a piece demanding honesty avoids saying any of that?

Also, here's Jacob Sullum complaining--rightly--that Rand Paul has flip-flopped on confronting ISIS. True enough, and one of the many dispiriting things about a Rand Paul presidency would be watching him engage in endless cartwheels between his father's positions (on domestic and foreign policy alike) and political expediency or, I would argue in some cases, sanity. Sullum states plaintively: "Paul still has not explained why the problem of ISIS is one the U.S. has to solve."

What exactly would have been involved in the U.S. deciding it wasn't going to participate in a response to that problem? (It's a strawman to complain the U.S. is trying to solve that problem singlehandedly, though admittedly some hawkish rhetoric plays into that misconception.) Let's see. In early August, the U.S. could have done nothing to help the Yazidis, beseiged and starving on a mountaintop, or to arm the Kurds, whom ISIS was attacking, or to prevent ISIS from controlling the Mosul Dam (and breaking it to cause a massive flood if they so chose). Humanitarian disaster on a vast and growing scale? Not our problem, because--libertarianism.

If that policy had been followed, perhaps ISIS would've been too busy slaughtering its local enemies to turn its attention to the U.S. anytime soon. Perhaps they would have refrained from murdering two U.S. journalists who were already in its captivity. Why is murdering Americans even a casus belli?, Sullum asks. I would suggest that every U.S. administration since that of George Washington, who warned against "entangling alliances," would regard it as such, though it is true that not every murder by some despicable group begets a U.S. military response. Some contextual thinking is required.

In this case, for example, we are talking about a terrorist group and rapidly growing self-declared state that is an even more brutal offshoot of a terrorist group that has already attacked the U.S.; and which controls a large swath of territory and has major funding, including oil revenues; and exerts an ideological appeal over alienated Western thugs and sociopaths and attracts recruits with each battlefield success. Imagine if, say, in 1944 some new Nazi movement had arisen, dismissive of Hitler as not aggressive enough, and retaken the Germany-France borderland after our troops had moved through. Would that have been not our fight?

And here's Nick Gillespie a few days ago:

Despite the claims of hawks and ISIL itself, the terrorist group is hardly an existential threat to the West any more than al Qaeda was. It can and should be contained and squeezed down everywhere as much as possible (this is not something that mandates either an interventionist foreign policy or expansive security state at home).

Me: How do you contain them and squeeze them down? The non-interventionist way of doing that remains unclear to me. And if they're not an "existential threat," are they some other kind of threat? And if they become a larger threat--with say multiple cells in the U.S.--will we then be hearing it's too late to do anything about it?

Anti-McCain overkill

Over at Reason, Matt Welch is now explaining that John McCain took no political risks in supporting the surge in 2007 as he headed into the Republican primaries:

Second and more interestingly, at the time of the surge, there was zero political cost to McCain supporting the surge. He was running in a Republican primary, and not particularly well, so his ironclad support for troop escalation was largely seen by many Republican stalwarts (in a season where the only anti-war candidate was being treated like a leper) as one of the best things going for the guy, given his various transgressions on other counts.

Here's a report on some polling from June 2007, as the surge troops moved in:

Thirty percent of Americans polled say they favor the war, the lowest level of support on record. Two-thirds are opposed.

Anti-war sentiment among Republican poll respondents has suddenly increased with 38 percent of Republicans now saying they oppose the war.

Moreover, 63 percent of Americans are ready to withdraw at least some troops from Iraq. Forty-two percent of Republicans agree.

Forty-two percent of Republicans were ready to withdraw some troops, which would suggest less than overwhelming support in the party for putting more troops in. And the trend at that time was toward more opposition. Not exactly zero political risk, it seems to me.

More on Reason here.