Enemies of Private Property

Many blogs have "Markets in Everything"-type posts; I instead will have "Enemies of Private Property" posts. If I come upon a more clever title, I'll use it.

My inaugural jerk of mankind is none other than Martin Luther King, Jr. I am absolutely tired of race-baiters such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, all the way down to "libertarians/conservatives" such as Glenn Beck and Mark Levin, praising this enemy of private property. King did not stop short of discouraging Jim Crow laws and segregation on state-owned grounds; on the contrary, King lobbied heavily for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which destroys the precious notion of private property probably most effectively in Title II:

"All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

Each of the following establishments which serves the public is a place of public accommodation... any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests... any restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, or other facility principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises... any motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium or other place of exhibition or entertainment."

I need not go any further with this analysis because it is obvious that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made absolute haste in destroying the definition of private and public property. The necessity of the ability to exclude others from privately-owned property is made perfectly clear when we realize that without this power, anybody could at any time rape our bodies, sleep in our beds, and drink our beer without reservation. State education has so baldly obfuscated this obvious point that to say anything negative about King is simply heresy.

King was also supportive of economic reparations and the idea of some form of "economic justice," which has long been popular amongst intellectuals and politicians. I need not talk about this because anybody not under the influence of heroine can point out the fallacies in such thinking.

Narcissism to the nth Degree

The more I study math, the more I come across theorems with special names, often indicating who came up with the theorem in the first place. Consider the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality or the Rao-Blackwell theorem, or even the notorious Pythagorean theorem (catchy, aren't they?). Econometrics is loaded with these oh-so-cleverly named theorems, and I'm sure the physical science world is, too.

Now, because these theorems are factual statements about the real world, which embody all available knowledge that we have about it at present, and since these theorems in no way changes the composition of reality, I conjecture that Rao, Blackwell, Cauchy, and the rest of the Harlem Globetrotters were likely a bunch of otherwise trifling and paltry dweebs in the social realm, whose only hope of losing their virginity was for a hefty fee at a whore house. Instead of possessing even a shred of modesty and prudery, these pretentious boobs were impelled to slap their name brands onto the math homework of every enervated senior math student across the globe. Let's get it straight: These are not "Newton's Laws," and Poisson the man was irrelevant to the existence of the actual distribution. That is, these factual statements and equalities exist independent of the men whom discover them, and so it's quite silly to me that anybody should name these observations after themselves.

So here's to the guys who just weren't good enough to leave their mark anywhere else in life, who couldn't even stop their mentally-retarded bed partners from aborting the one modest chance they had at passing on their last names. Now, I'm taking a break from reproductive success to memorize your 'glory.'

My Kind of Superhero

Incredibly cogent and compelling, Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas, serves up a brilliant riposte to the economic know-nothing governor of Michigan:



Mr. Wynn reminds me of my favorite superhero of 2009, Rorschach from the comic-turned-movie Watchmen:

Rorschach was the guy who had no qualms with doing whatever it took to uphold justice. He was no moderate, to say the least.

Inequality is a Great Thing

Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek makes an excellent point about income inequality:

If some persons are robbed of their property or are unfairly blocked from pursuing economic opportunities, that’s wrong and should be stopped. If some persons are so poor that they lack life’s barest necessities, they should be helped. (How best to help them is a different issue.) But neither of these problems has anything to do with income inequality. We would want to correct these problems even if doing so would make the income distribution more unequal.

He's exactly right that when a man should be helped is a separate issue from how he should be helped. 'Income equality' is a ruse (for many people, not all), because the desire to help those without basic amenities would still exist even within an egalitarian society. The whole notion of 'income equality' is an attempt to divorce cause from effect, the production of wealth from the earning of wealth.

I want to somehow incorporate the notion of the 'distribution of knowledge' in society, and how income inequality reflects it. But I'm not sure I can make it pithy enough.

Total income equality implies that all services in society are valued quantitatively, relative to money, the same by everybody. That means that water production, diamond production, Yuengling production, education, fine food, fast food, and on down the line, all of it is valued equally by everybody, thus rendering all producers of a product with equal incomes. This is obviously absurd because if I valued everything equally I wouldn't have much of any one thing to enjoy, because my income would be stretched so incredibly thin. If you could somehow partition people to value whole blocks of specific amenities all by themselves, so that they'll get greater amounts of homogeneous valuables, this would still be contradicted by the fact that all people still need water and food (thus ruining a partition scheme), and this demonstrates that some items will by the nature of being human be valued to a greater extent than other items.

In this way, income inequality reflects the vast unequal preferences of each and every member of society.

To deny this would consequently deny ourselves from enjoying our respectively unequal preferences.

Count your IQ, Instead

Mother Jones -- Good news for haters of the nanny state: New York City's new law requiring calorie counts on chain restaurant menu boards doesn't appear to be making any difference. In fact, it might be causing people to eat more.

The results were pretty dismal: only about half the respondents even noticed the calorie counts and only 15% said they influenced their choice. But the receipts told an even more dismal story: overall, people actually purchased more calories after the law went into effect.

The second time I went to NY is the time I really despised it, in no small part due to fast-food calorie counts by every item required by its legislators. I assumed it to be damaging in the long run to smaller businesses that can't afford such requirements, and either way, its subtly-fashioned tyranny at its best. More so, I figured it wouldn't do any good because we already have calorie counts on the back of chip bags and cereal boxes in the super market, and if you haven't noticed lately, chips have their own aisle, as well as soda. Obviously, people don't care about calories as much as the satraps in Washington would like them to.

Anyway, this post killed two birds, in that it relates to my last post about condoms. Though not statistically significant, the results of this study found that consumption actually increased. Who'da thought? Now, because of the absence of statistical significance, I wouldn't go around saying it's a done deal, but just like the condom issue, we cannot a priori assume that what we do, even in totally fiat ways, will get the job done. In fact, we'll often find that government fiat actually encouraged the opposite kinds of behavior!

Now, will the bureaucrats running NY pull the calorie requirement off the table? Ask me if I like public schools, instead. This runs with my theory (which I can't really call it mine because I know other people have written about it [Hayek, but I did pioneer my brain into it before I read Hayek]) that governments have extremely poor feedback mechanisms. Hot issues take center stage often just one time, and no matter what the effects specific legislation actually procured after-the-fact, we are more often than not stuck with it.

'Condoms' in Society, Not 'Knowledge'

Though my interests lie mainly with political economy, I do have those nerdy economic thoughts popping into my head from time to time. Now, I'm sure research has been done on what I'm about to propose, but either way, I know of no research.

Let's assume that condoms encourage more sex in society, because the use of condoms decreases the odds that one will knock somebody up or come down with the bug, which people consider bad, and generally seek to avoid these conditions. This may or may not be an accurate assumption, for one could counter that people are going to have sex just as much, with or without protection. True as that might be, it is an empirical question that I won't consider here.

Now, because people have more sex because of the existence of condoms, can we a priori say that societies using condoms will have lower incidences of STD contractions and unwanted pregnancies?

I think not.

Consider that a) condoms break, b) condoms possess a small margin of error without breaking, i.e., they don't prevent STDs and unwanted pregnancies sometimes, albeit a very small percentage of the time.

It comes down to an empirical question about the society at hand. Do the members of a particular society have so much more extra sex as to make the 'small percentage of the time' quite large in absolute numbers? That is, does the presence of condoms actually increase the frequency of STD contractions and unwanted pregnancies?

There are idiosyncratic situations that may or may not be considered significant, such as the scenario of the guy who thought he had a condom in his wallet, but found out he was wrong when it came to go-time, and said, "Screw it."(pun intended) This certainly does happen, but does it happen frequently relative to being right about having a condom?

Taking a guess, I would say that the presence of condoms in society generally gets the job done, considering the population growth of 3rd vs. 1st world countries, blaze blaze. But this issue isn't why I pose the question.

Instead, I'm questioning automatic assumptions that people have, regardless of having any evidence to support what they believe. Indeed, I've never looked into the effects that condoms have on societies, but I've always carried the notion that they generally decrease the rate of unwanted pregnancies and disease.

This is kind of like how people automatically assume that the government can do what it sets out to do, with the right satraps. Or, that industrialization or Splenda is inherently pernicious to human health. These two, in my opinion, are the easy fallacies to catch. But what other assumptions do we carry that are totally false? Is this phenomenon prevalent?

Alright, OK, what I'm really asking is, What assumptions do I carry that are totally false?

This question has been asked in many different forms, and it is often what economic research is all about. I don't think there is any uniform answer. But it is food for thought.

Took the GRE

What a joke. I say it because I took multiple practice tests and at one point I earned a 790 (math), and at another I missed half of the test (don't know the score equivalent). On the real deal, I earned a 750 (math) and a 590 (verbal). But I could just as easily have earned lower on both (or higher), considering that I was nervous as hell and hated the whole process.

It's funny how graduate schools have you take a test that doesn't reflect anything you've learned during your undergrad years. I understand that it's one measure of many that admissions folks look at, but sheesh. I hated the whole thing.

Totally didn't study for the verbal, with the exception of vocabulary flashcards. I figured, "I know english, and I know big words, so I will do well!" Wrong. But I also knew that GMU and NYU econ programs don't look too much at the verbal.

I wonder if you can retake the GRE piecewise? That'd be great, but I doubt it. It's meant to be an enduring (3 hour) process for a reason, I suppose.

All in all, a valuable lesson learned in what is my first step into the inanity that is graduate school.