Man, Economy & Sport

Somehow I’ve lost my interest in blogging. It happens from time to time. Maybe I’ll be back someday. Maybe I won’t.

The Los Angeles Times sides with criminals over the innocent.

The Washington Post profiles a pair of racist, middle-class white women celebrating the ethnic cleansing of their neighborhood.

Early this morning, the Indy Racing League’s Indy Japan 300 ended with a–wait for it–”historic” victory by Danica Patrick, driving the #7 car for Andretti Green Racing. It didn’t take long for a member of the media to overreact, in this case Bruce Martin of Sports Illustrated:

She is now a person of sociological significance. She represents the same hope to female race drivers that Jackie Robinson represented to African-Americans when he broke the color-barrier in Major League Baseball.

I wonder: Who certifies “persons of sociological significance”? There must be some government agency for that.

But seriously, I’m going to black flag Martin for comparing Patrick to Robinson. As Martin himself acknowledges, Patrick was by no means the first woman to race professionally. Janet Guthrie, Lyn St. James and Sarah Fisher all preceded Patrick’s IRL debut. More importantly, Patrick did not face any of the abuse or harassment that Robinson faced–often from his own teammates–during his career. To the contrary, the media gave Patrick a disproportionate amount of positive coverage relative to her on-track success.

Let’s remember that this was Patrick’s 50th career IRL race. She races for a high-profile team in Andretti Green. She should be expected to win races and contend for championships by this point in her career. Keep in mind, Graham Rahal recently won his first-ever IRL race in St. Petersburg. In four full IRL seasons, Patrick has never finished higher then seventh (though she’s currently in third place with her Japan victory.)

And the circuit will only get tougher with the recent absorption of Champ Car. In fact, Japan was the last open-wheel race to take place on a split weekend, with Champ Car holding its final race today in Long Beach, California.

Martin’s lavish praise on Patrick reeks of sexism. Yeah, you heard me. He’s lavishing praise on Patrick for, in essence, meeting lowered expectations. No male driver would be declared a “person of sociological significance”–which, the more I think about it, makes Patrick sound like the subject of a research study–for winning a race in their fifth season. Especially given that she worked her way up the open-wheel development ladder like any other driver. (Again, Jackie Robinson had to play in a separate, “blacks-only” league prior to his Major League debut.)

Martin’s sexism of low expectations is brought to full force with yet another bad analogy:

Move over Maureen Connelly (sic) (first woman to win the tennis Grand Slam), Billy Jean King, Julie Krone (first jockey to win a Triple Crown race) and Pat Summitt because Patrick has just joined the Mount Rushmore of female sporting accomplishments.

Let’s take this woman-by-woman:

• Pat Summitt has won eight NCAA championships, not to mention more games than any other coach in her sport.
• Billy Jean King won 129 tournaments in her career, including 12 Grand Slam singles titles.
• Julie Krone has 3,704 wins as a jockey, including the 1993 Belmont Stakes.
• Maureen Connolly Brinker won nine Grand Slam singles titles–including all four titles in 1953–before the age of 19, when a leg injury ended her career.

Danica Patrick won a single race in her fifth full season of competition. And while Tokyo is a mainstay of the IRL schedule, it is not the equivalent of a “major” championship like Indianapolis.

The other problem with Martin’s “Mount Rushmore” comparison is that King and Brinker played tennis, a purely individual sport. Auto racing is a team sport, and Patrick is simply the most visible member of her team. But it took a whole lotta’ men to pull off the victory, too.

Another reason for people to hate the United States government:

A 40-year-old man from Jarfalla, Sweden pleaded guilty Thursday, April 10 to flying to Arlington with the intent of having a sexual relationship with a girl he believed to be 14-years-old.

Jesper Lundberg had a series of e-mail conversations and recorded phone calls with an undercover Arlington County Police officer he thought was a 14-year-old girl, according to U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg. During the conversations, he expressed his desire to have sex with the fictional 14-year-old for $400.

After flying from Sweden to the United States, Lundberg was arrested at a hotel in Arlington where he previously arranged to meet “the father and daughter,” according to Rosenberg.

U.S. District Court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee is scheduled to sentence Lundberg in June in Alexandria.

Lundberg faces 70-87 months in federal prison. He will remain under court supervision from five years to the rest of his life and will be required to register as a sex offender if he lives, works or attends school anywhere in the United States, according to Rosenberg.

The investigation was conducted by the Arlington County Police Department, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the FBI.

Wow. Three government agencies worked together to manufacture a non-existent crime and lure a man across the ocean just so they could imprison him at U.S. taxpayer expense. Thank God for the internet, or there’d be no way to pull a scam like that off.

If I was the Swedish government, I’d respond to this nonsense by pulling a random American off my streets–or better yet someone who works at the U.S. embassy–and imprisoning him until the U.S. authorities release my citizen. You can’t negotiate with violent, predatory criminals.
Just one other question: Were there no actual cases of pedophilia for the Arlington police, U.S. immigration and the FBI to investigate? If not, then perhaps we don’t need these three agencies.

Mark Cuban and Paul Allen were the only two NBA owners to vote against the proposed relocation of the Seattle Sonics to Oklahoma City. Allen, who owns the Portland Trail Blazers and the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, declined to explain his vote. Cuban said one reason he voted no was that it made little economic sense to move a team to a smaller market.

In a disagreement between Cuban and the other NBA owners (not to mention Commissioner David Stern), I’d tend to side with Cuban. Cuban’s a businessman. Stern’s a politician. He’s taking a hard-line against a city with the temerity to suggest that taxpayers should not subsidize billionaire and millionaire NBA owners. That violates Stern’s basic ethical code, which holds that he’s entitled to steal as much money as he wants in the name of professional basketball.

Karen DeCoster illustrates a point I made in my last post regarding the rationalization (even among libertarians) of certain forms of physical assault against human beings:

While California legislators continue in their attempt to criminalize the home education of your child, they also want to equate spanking your child with child abuse. From the Home School Legal defense Foundation:

Assembly Member Sally Lieber has reintroduced her “anti-spanking” bill with a new number—A.B. 2943. Last year she attempted to push her bill, A.B. 755, through the legislature, and it was officially stopped on January 31, 2008, when it failed to be passed out of the Assembly. Identical to her failed A.B. 755, A.B. 2943 would have the practical effect of making a non-injurious spanking with an object such as a ruler, folded newspaper, small paddle, etc. illegal. After being arrested, charged, and tried in a criminal court, parents could receive up to one year in jail and lose custody of their children. When Lieber claims that her bill only deals with child abuse, remember that she has stated repeatedly that all spanking, by definition, is child abuse. Her strategy in A.B. 2943 is to treat all spanking with an object as criminal child abuse. She has deliberately failed to make any distinction between spanking as a method of discipline and true child abuse.

It’s interesting to note that while governments are consistently promoting crazed decrees that would criminalize home discipline measures such as spanking, they continue to load up the prison cells for smaller crimes, white-collar crimes, and non-crimes.

If physically violating a human being’s body with a hand or an object is “home discipline” when applied by a parent to a child, then why not by a husband to a wife? Or an employer to an employee? There’s no reason physical violence should only be allowed in relationships where there’s already a major physical disparity between the attacker and the victim.There is no “distinction between spanking as a method of discipline and true child abuse,” as HSLDA maintains. That’s just as a redress of the “just war” nonsense that Objectivists and some libertarians like to maintain. Violence is violence, period. But I concede that there’s no rational means of convincing folks like DeCoster of what should be a simple ethical principle. So I’ll just link to one of the better anti-child violence websites.I’m especially amused at DeCoster’s argument that the government is hypocritical for imprisoning individuals for “smaller crimes, white-collar crimes, and non-crimes.” After all, aren’t those just cases of the state “disciplining” its unruly citizenry? Surely violence will deter future misconduct and encourage good behavior. It’s inconceivable that a person punished for non-criminal acts (say price-fixing or failing to eat one’s vegetables) would feel anger, resentment and humiliation, among other things, which might lead to later behavioral problems. Just as long as loving parents the government doesn’t leave any physical signs of abuse, we should just look the other way and allow the beatings to continue.

UPDATE: Predictably, I received an irate e-mail from DeCoster. I choose not to reprint her pro-child abuse propaganda here, but needless to say it reads like a sad confessional from someone who’s hit a child or two in her day.

FINAL UPDATE: De Coster and I exchanged some nasty followup emails. I called her a “child-beating whore.” She declared me “insane.” There’s really nowhere to go with this argument after that.

Radley Balko and I didn’t have to wait long to disagree over another legal/moral issue. In a post about the Texas polygamy raid, Balko asked this general question:

Should we allow parents to give consent for a child under 18 to marry, or to have sexual relations? If 18 is that state’s age of consent, I think I’d be inclined to argue that we shouldn’t.

In his comments section, I replied:

Who’s the “we” you’re talking about? I know I don’t have the right to stop someone from having consensual sex or enter into a marital contract, regardless of biological age. And I certainly don’t have the right to require or forbid parental “consent” to such acts.

Radley’s rebuttal:

If a 40-year-old man is having sex with a 10-year-old girl–with or without her parents’ permission–yes, I’m not only okay with the government interfering to stop it, I’d want them too. I would think that even an anarchist would feel a moral obligation to help someone who was being harmed by a third party, if not the state then a third party.

Is your argument that there is no such obligation, or that a 10-year-old who has sex with a grown man isn’t being harmed?

Before I answer Radley’s questions, keep this question in the back of your mind: Is there an obligation to stop a parent from hitting (”spanking”) a child? I’ll get back to that later.

At the outset, let’s establish some parameters for third-party intervention. Luckily, Wendy McElroy did this in one of her own posts about the Texas case:

A real act of violence must either be occurring or clearly imminent.

The victim must wish to be assisted. It may well be valid to assume that a victim wants your assistance even if no explicit request is made but if the ‘victim’ indicates that your assistance is unwanted, you have no right to impose it upon her. For example, if you discover the back alley rape is really a form of kinky consensual sex and the woman screams for you to “stop!”…then you must do so.

Your use of violence must be limited to the perpetrator. By which I mean, you have no right to shove an elderly woman onto the sidewalk or run someone down with your car in order to get to where the rape is occurring.

I agree with these standards. Accordingly, it’s virtually impossible to construct a scenario where government intervention is justified. Even conceding that the 40-year-old man harms the 10-year-old girl, meeting the first two tests, the government’s intervention will inevitably violates the rights of various third parties: Taxpayers forced to pay for the trial and punishment of the 40-year-old man, individuals conscripted to serve as jurors, et cetera.

This confines the discussion to private action. And the thereshhold question, I think Radley would agree, is whether a ten-year-old could ever consent to sexual intercourse with a 40-year-old man. Radley says it’s definitely no. I would say it’s probably no, though it’s not self-evident.

Let’s make the example even more disgusting: A 40-year-old man having sex with a three-year-old toddler. Here there’s no question. A toddler per se cannot consent to sex. He lacks the mental and physical capacity for sex, ergo any sexual contact is by definition assault.

On the other hand, the state-mandated age of consent is not necessarily a valid proxy for determining when a person has the capacity for sex–and, consequently, to consent to sex. The most obvious proxy, of course, is puberty itself. Sexual maturity must carry a presumption of capacity to consent to sexual activity. In contrast, the government tends to reject biological norms of human behavior and the natural course of individual rights, instead embracing the views of those who would prefer to retard human development for collectivist purposes.

Returning to Radley’s question, it’s doubtful that any 10-year-old has reached a level of biological development where sexual capacity and consent must be presumed. So, yes, I’d conclude that the 40-year-old man is committing assault, and thus violating the rights of the 10-year-old girl.

(I would note here that Radley says the child is “harmed,” but this word can include a broad set of actions that don’t necessarily violate one’s rights; teen sex may be harmful in many aspects, but it does not necessarily constitute assault.)

This leaves us with what to do about the hypothetical assault. Radley asks if a person is morally obligated to intervene. It’s a basic question of ethics, and my answer is a qualified yes. A moral person, as I see it, must uphold justice whenever he is capable of doing so. If someone is being assaulted, and I have the means and opportunity to do so, I would intervene. However, I cannot intervene in such a way as to violate the rights of another person, as Wendy explained, nor am I obligated to harm myself to aid a third-party.

Now let’s return to the initial question that prompted my comment: “Should we allow parents to give consent for a child under 18 to marry, or to have sexual relations? If 18 is that state’s age of consent, I think I’d be inclined to argue that we shouldn’t.” My original objections to this phrasing stand. “We” don’t have the authority that Radley claims. If one lacks the capacity and thus the ability to consent to sexual activity, then certainly the person’s guardian (or even the government) cannot give such consent, because there’s nothing to give consent to. It’s like asking if a parent should be allowed to give their child consent to fly.

The problem is that Radley presumes the state’s age of consent is valid; I do not. And in cases where individuals under the “legal age” have the capacity for sex, their consent is all that is required. In such cases, neither the government nor the parents may usurp the individual’s right to consent.

(I’ve ignored the consent to marriage argument to this point. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll stipulate that a marital contract, even in an anarchist sense, presumes the capacity for sexual relations–a non-consummated marriage is a common law ground for annulment–and thus I’d incorporate the above discussion to include consent to marriage.)

Finally, I asked at the start of my post whether there exists “an obligation to stop a parent from hitting (’spanking’) a child.” I raise this point because while it’s easy to make blanket arguments against child rape, many if not most folks are unwilling to condemn other categories of assault against children. I know I’ve been out dozens of times in places where parents hit, slap or otherwise violate their child’s body in public, supposedly to “discipline” them. And the truth is, most of us accept that under the nonsensical heading of “parental rights.” It would be nice, I think, to see some more libertarian outrage over these more common forms of child abuse.

Cleaning up the Aliza Shvarts mess:

1. To callback my earlier post today on “academic freedom,” you have to wonder about the Yale faculty members who approved Shvarts’ “creative fiction” project.

2. This comment posted on the Yale Daily News website interested me:

you have single-handedly trivialized not only an entire generation and a half’s fight to gain and retain the right to choose, through harassment and against massive odds, but also history of women’s struggles, not only politically, but with the emotional, moral, and spiritual impacts of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. you also spit upon every couple who has tried, and failed, sometimes repeatedly, to have children.

A more eloquent version of Radley Balko’s argument, for sure. But I challenge the notion that Shvarts could single-handedly “trivialize” the abortion rights movement or “spit upon” couples who cannot conceive children. She’s a college senior who perpetuated a creepy hoax. It doesn’t alter the nation’s socio-political landscape. Statements like these, it seems to me, only reinforces the narcissistic tendencies of “artists” like Shvarts. I don’t know why you’d give such a woman power like that over your mind.

3. It doesn’t speak well of the vaunted Yale Daily News that they ran this story without bothering to verify whether it was a hoax. I suspect Rory Gilmore would not have so easily fooled.

Heh. Apparently she made it all up:

A Yale student’s bizarre art project in which she claimed to have repeatedly impregnated and induced abortions in herself is a work of “creative fiction,” the university said in a statement this afternoon.

The Yale Daily News reported this morning that Aliza Shvarts’s senior project, set to go on display next week, included video of her bleeding in her bathtub, as well as plastic sheeting layered with a mixture of Vaseline and the post-abortion blood.

“Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art,” a Yale spokeswoman, Helaine Klasky, said. “She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.”

So I guess we can forgo the hyperbolic assault session.

Antitrust can make anything better!

Reps. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) and Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) are introducing a resolution rejecting the oft-criticized bowl system as an illegal restriction on trade because only the largest universities compete in most of the major bowl games. The resolution would require Justice’s antitrust division to investigate whether the system violates federal law.

The measure would also put Congress on record as supporting a college football playoff.

“Who elected these NCAA people? Who are they to decide who competes for the championship?” Abercrombie said at a press conference Thursday on Capitol Hill, gripping a souvenir Hawaii football.

There’s a funny clause in the Constitution that says Congress can’t pass a “bill of attainder,” which is 18th century-speak for laws that declare individuals guilty of crimes without trial. Seems to me that the Abercrombine-Westmoreland resolution travels dangerously close to that line. But that’s neither here nor there.

The really strange thing here is Abercrombie’s “Who elected these NCAA people?” argument. Um, the schools that voluntarily joined the NCAA and elects their leadership. And, incidentally, who elected the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division?

And don’t assume antitrust intervention would lead to a playoff. (To the contrary, a playoff might violate the antitrust laws, as I’ve explained before.) The only thing that’s guaranteed is that DOJ lawyers would assume for themselves the power to govern college football’s postseason. They might actually design a system that’s less popular than the current BCS. And since it would be a DOJ-mandated system, there’d be no redress for NCAA members or college football fans who dissent.

Radley Balko responds:

Skip — That was an example of hyperbole for effect.

I thought this would be sorta’ self-evident, but no, I’m not actually advocating she be locked in a room so tens of thousands of infertile women can queue up for the opportunity to smack her around.

Hmm. What exactly was the intended “effect”? There are a lot of ways you could criticize Aliza Shvarts without employing violent, misogynistic imagery. He never attempted to explain his specific moral objections–although I suppose he thinks that’s also self-evident–and instead he goes right for anger and righteous indignation. Essentially, Balko’s post was designed to inflame readers without providing even a pretext of rational analysis. Kind of like Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly. And I really think Balko is better than those two.

Here’s the thing: Suppose Shvarts was simply a promiscuous woman who had lots of unprotected sex and simply used abortion as a form of birth control. I don’t think Balko would have responded with the “hyperbole” that he used in his post.

Now, the counterargument is that Shvarts deliberately created human life so she could destroy and display it as art. But compared to the promiscuous woman, we’re really taking about degree rather than basic morality. A woman who voluntarily has unprotected sex assumes the risk of pregnancy. If she decides to deal with that risk by having an abortion in the event of pregnancy, she has still created a human life with the intent to destroy it. You can certainly say that the woman in this example is reckless, while Shvarts actions bordered on the sociopathic, but I don’t see how you can morally condemn Shvarts while absolving the woman who simply had unprotected sex.

If anything, Shvarts’ production publicizes the consequences of abortion in the most stark manner possible. I won’t go so far as to say she should be applauded for that, but I do see the artistic value in what she did.

Radley Balko of Reason says Yale student Aliza Shvarts is a “wretched excuse for a human being.” So what was her crime? Turning abortion into art.

Shvarts says she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” in order to become pregnant and self-induced an abortion with the dangerous RU 486 drug.

Shvarts, a senior art major, would intentionally cause the death of the babies with the abortion drug.

Afterwards, she would save her blood and the blood from each of the babies she killed to create an art display.

The display consists of a cube with video footage she took of the miscarriages on either side and a canvas in the middle with paintings created from the blood.

Shvarts mixed Vaseline with the blood to prevent it from drying and placed the blood between sheets of plastic wrapped around the cube that hung from the ceiling.

In a statement, Shvarts wouldn’t reveal how many abortions she had over the nine month period in order to create the art project but it appears at least two abortions were necessary to complete the art display.

So to repeat my earlier, rhetorical question: What was her crime? Artificial insemination is legal. RU-486 is legal. There’s no indication that Shvarts stole any sperm or funds to produce her art, so what’s Radley so pissed off about?

Balko says Shvarts should be locked in a room for five minutes with “all of the women in American who badly want a child but can’t.” Does that apply to all women who have abortions or just Shvarts? I can’t really follow Balko’s moral outrage here. It’s not Shvarts’ fault that some women can’t conceive chidlren. And I don’t see why she should be subject to violent attacks–as Balko implies–for exercising the right to use her own body, even in the pursuit of a bizarre artistic production.

Wendy McElroy takes some folks out to the woodshed:

Do you need to apply for government benefits or work a government job that (as a libertarian) you know is paid with stolen money? Do you have to be one of the loot-raking thugs? And, yes, this question is directed at every so-called libertarian professor who works at a state-funded university. How can you look yourself in the mirror while skimming the cream of stolen goods that you yourself denounce as immoral? I can find it in my heart to fully and roundly denounce anyone who knowingly accepts stolen property for the sole purpose of enhancing their career. One so-called libertarian I know says that he cannot work in physics without getting on the public dole (which he receives twice as both a grant recipient and a prof.)…and physics is his passion — so what choice does he have? The same choice of decency or not that all of us confront! Damn his soul for calling himself a libertarian. Whatever he claims to believe, his actions say that it is just fine in his world for his passion to be funded by money taken out of the mouths of taxpayers’ children.

This dovetails nicely with my last post on “academic freedom.” As I implied below, academic freedom does not really exist, because it relies on the notion that others are obligated to provide a forum for a tenured elite. Whether a university is “public” or “private” is largely, ahem, academic, since many professors at nominally private schools accept government grants. (And virtually all private universities accept government-subsidized student loan and grants.)

Some say University of California (Boalt Hall) law professor John Yoo should be fired–tenure be damned–because, while on leave to serve in the Bush Justice Department, he authored some memos purporting to justify torture. Others say “academic freedom” protects Yoo’s work and the UC would be out of line to discipline him. Still others say that Yoo is a really bad guy, but it doesn’t help to scapegoat him while letting his former superiors in the DOJ and the White House off the hook.

Seems to me there’s a more basic problem here. As I understand it, Yoo was a professor at Boalt Hall, got tenure, and then took a sabbatical to work at the DOJ. This is a fairly common practice among university faculty. It doesn’t make much sense to me. One of the arguments for tenure is that it helps retain talented faculty. So why give them an effective lifetime guarantee of employment if they’re going to leave for extended periods to work at another job? To offer an indirect analogy, when Michael Chertoff became secretary of Homeland Security, he had to resign his tenured federal judgeship. He was not allowed to take a “sabbatical” with the promise of returning to the bench whenever the hell he felt like it. I don’t see why a similar principle shouldn’t apply to tenured faculty: If you leave for another job, you have to forfeit your tenure and start over if and when you return.

Secondly, if you allow a revolving door between academia and government, you have to consider the government work as part of the academic record. You can’t say, for example, that a law professor working as a government lawyer was merely “representing his client” when he wrote a particular memo. We’re not talking about some pro bono work for an indigent client.

This principle doesn’t just apply to folks like Yoo who take full-time jobs. It also should apply to academics who serve as paid “experts” in government prosecutions. I recall an FTC case where the Commission paid an engineering professor thousands of dollars for expert testimony that was ultimately deemed unreliable by the administrative law judge. That’s precisely the sort of thing that should be considered part of the professor’s academic record. If professors leverage their positions to sell their expertise to the government–or even private clients, for that matter–then the university should have every right to hold it over their heads.

Now, the ultimate problem is that most universities are unowned non-profit organizations. So it’s impossible to hold anyone accountable. There’s an aphorism that freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns the press. Nobody ever thinks to apply this rule to the academy. Instead we’re left with “academic freedom,” which creates taxpayer-subsidized forums for professors and other folks who couldn’t get jobs on the free market.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal echoes a point I made yesterday about the airlines–antitrust is getting in the way:

Airlines live in a different regulatory world today, but airline executives are straining after similar solutions when they propose mergers or “code-sharing” agreements. Mergers, alas, won’t deliver an oligopoly capable of filling the empty core – more likely they will just create new layers of overhead on which airlines can lose money. Intellectual revolution though it would require, the real fix would be some kind of code-sharing “safe harbor” to which airlines could repair in times of financial stress. Crudely, when profits are scarce, carriers would be free to collude over fares and routes in order to maintain service levels without bleeding each other to death.

Delta’s then-President Fred Reid dared to broach just such a proposal at an industry conference several years ago. The same crazy idea also appears in a growing body of academic work by people like Kenneth Button at George Mason University and Embry-Riddle’s Jayathi Raghavan and Vedapuri Raghavan. To most Congressmen, it’s safe to say, the concept is sadly unthinkable – most Congressmen being unaware that Congress has permitted such behavior on the high seas for nearly 100 years.

Antitrust, of course, prizes competition to the exclusion of cooperation, but society needs both. Washington may wish it had this larger principle handy if it now faces a flurry of mergers confronting regulators with a choice between airline oligopoly and industry bankruptcy.

The problem with antitrust regulators is that they seek instant gratification in the form of lower short-term prices. Since regulators aren’t owners or investors, it’s irrelevant to them if the firm producing the product or service is viable in the long term. That’s why the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has traditionally “chosen” bankruptcy for the airlines over oligopoly or collusion. In a legal regime predicated on “consumer rights,” shareholders and investors–the folks who provide the capital necessary to produce goods and services–simply don’t exist.

Will Wilkinson, prompted by Radley Balko, cites Governur Morris as his favorite Founding Father. Even if you’re not a Morris fan, Wilkinson says you should be ABJ–Anyone But Jefferson. This prompted a comment by Stephan Kinsella about the Pope of Libertarianism:

And in a weird twist, we have ultra-PC, [Timothy] Sandefur, who finds racism under any rock and attacks federalists and decentralist as know-nothing neo-confederate yahoos, saying he loves Jefferson: “Jefferson is the person in history I most admire.” Despite Jefferson’s ownership of slaves and his extreme federalism (e.g. the Kentucky Resolution), which normally calls down the righteous, smug, sanctimonous wrath of PC Sandefur.

I’m actually a neutral here, since I dislike both Pope Tim and Kinsella. I don’t really understand how the “politically correct” label applies to His Holiness. Kinsella seems to think it’s an all-purpose insult. Personally, I’m reminded of Homer Simpson’s reply when his daughter complained that she’d been called a PC thug by her teacher: “I’ve been called a greasy thug, too. It never stops hurting.”

And let’s not overlook Wilkinson’s original critique of Jefferson, which is littered with mean-sounding words:

The more I read about the guy, the more I dislike him. He was without doubt a man of incandescent brilliance. But he also seems to have been sly, creepy, and an insufferable snob, in addition to having been a racist, slaveholding, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-commercial, Jacobin utopian.

Coincidentally, I think Pope Tim has used those same words to describe Kinsella.

And for the record, my favorite founder was Aaron Burr. He took on Jefferson in the courtroom and Hamilton on the dueling field. Easily the most badass vice president in U.S. history.

Nick Gillespie of Reason on the looming Delta-Northwest merger:

I like mergers and I don’t fear bigger companies that result from them, even if mergers typically fail when it comes most measures of success. Airline deregulation in terms of pricing of tickets has been an absolutely great thing, though it was never extended to airports and air traffic control, which creates all sorts of problems. The troubles with the airline industry are due to a lack of free markets (including the prohibition on foreign ownership of “domestic” carriers), not their presence. Bailed out after the 9/11 attacks, expect the ailing airline industry to keep going back for more at the government teat on a regular basis. The airline industry is one of the worst when it comes to pushing “free markets” when it benefits them, then crying for government protection/intervention when that will help them out.

I’d add that antitrust intervention prohibits firms from entering into temporary alliances–aka “cartels”–that might make more economic sense than outright mergers. The logic of antitrust is very odd if you think about it. It’s a criminal violation to restrain trade temporarily through a cartel, but only a civil offense if you permanently eliminate a competitor through merger.

Now here’s another example of insane antitrust troll logic from Charlie Sorrel of Wired. The subject here is Apple’s effort to squash an apparent Mac clone. The licensing agreement for OS X states the user may not install the software on non-Apple hardware. Sorrel addressed arguments made by Psystar, which tried to market a Mac clone that runs OS X:

A spokesman for Psystar, named Robert (no surname given), told Information Week that his company believes Apple is committing some imagined anti-trust offense and violating US monopoly laws. Lets take a look at the arguments.

What if Honda said that, after you buy their car, you could only drive it on the roads they said you could?

Then don’t buy it. This is a straw man argument. Apple’s EULA might forbid the use of its OS on third party hardware, but would never chase individuals who do this. The clause is aimed at corporations loading OS X onto machines and selling them, a practice which would cut into Apple’s hardware revenue. So Robert might better ask: “What if Honda said that it won’t allow other car makers to put its proprietary self-parking software in their cars?” In this case, Honda surely wouldn’t care if a lone hacker ported the system to an old Chevy Nova, but if Ford ripped it off wholesale, Honda would sue.

Robert also asks “What if Microsoft said you could only install Windows on Dell computers?”. There would be an outcry, of course, as this would be a clear case of collusion between two companies – which sell different but compatible products – to attempt to tie up the market and exclude competition.

Apple, on the other hand, owns the whole kit and caboodle. It makes the software and the box it runs on, and can do what the hell it likes. Apple might not let anyone else make and sell Macs, but, to return to the previous argument, Honda doesn’t let anyone else make and sell Hondas. The Mac is a combination of hardware and software: one product, not two. You might be able to buy a Leopard DVD in a store, but it is sold as an upgrade, not a standalone product.

But isn’t Apple just a form of “collusion” among the people who work there and produce the Mac? How is it economically significant if there is cooperation among people working under one artificial corporate name or two? It’s not, of course. The antitrust distinction is purely political.

Like the criminalization of cartels, the antitrust reasoning seems backwards here. Apple has always been far more “anti-competitive” than Microsoft when it comes to bundling software and hardware, yet contemporary antitrust intervention has dogmatically condemned Microsoft while giving Apple a free pass. (And I say this as a happy Mac user.) Remember, Microsoft got punished merely for bundling Internet Explorer into its existing Windows system–combining software and software. Apple is bundling hardware and software, which are more distinct products.

Again, this isn’t some call for Apple’s head. There are plenty of good reasons for their business model. But it’s ludicrous that antitrust intervention–which assumes the cloak of economic superiority–would arbitrarily allow one form of market structure and not another.

This morning I heard a sports talk radio host applaud the voters in Seattle for rejecting a taxpayer-funded arena for the Seattle Sonics. Of course, the same host turned right around and applauded politicians in Washington, DC–the host’s home market–for approving a taxpayer-funded stadium for the Washington Nationals. The Nationals stadium was okay, reasoned the host, because it will bring economic development to a bad part of the city.

In a sense, he’s right. A taxpayer-subsidized stadium often brings new businesses to the area around the stadium. But it’s not because of the stadium. It’s because the local government has effectively prohibited economic development in the past through taxes, business licensing, zoning, “historic preservation,” and other violations of private property rights. Once the city has depressed development, it then builds a stadium and “allows” new development to take place, creating the illusion that the stadium (and the politicians who supported its construction) are responsible for growth. But the development would have occurred much earlier–and without taxpayer subsidy–if the local government hadn’t prohibited it in the first place.

I thought NBC couldn’t sink any lower than “To Catch a Predator.” I was wrong:

NBC’s upcoming reality series “The Baby Borrowers” is an intriguing new social experiment based on the hit British program that asks five diverse teenage couples — ages 18-20 — to fast-track to adulthood by setting up a home, getting a job and becoming caring parents first to babies, toddlers, pre-teens and their pets, teenagers and senior citizens — all over the course of three weeks.

As the social experiment begins, the five young volunteer couples are asked to literally grow up overnight when they are each given a home in a quiet cul-de-sac outside Boise, Idaho and attend pre-natal classes as each “mother” wears a simulated “empathy” belly to prepare them for the arrival of their “baby.”

When a real baby (all aged six-11 months old) appears at their door — courtesy of five pairs of real volunteer parents (some of whom were teen parents themselves) who entrust their infants to one of the couples — the nervous, fumbling teens are in for three long, arduous days that make chilling out a distant memory. They must stick to rigid routines, handle the feeding chores, diaper duty and crying jags that might be shared by baby and teens — all the while under 24-hour supervision by nannies and the real parents who are stationed next door, watching via monitor, and able to step in at any time. Plus, one teen from each of the couples must start a job, ranging from working in a local vet’s office to a lumberyard, leaving the other alone as caregiver for the day.

After three surprising, intense days, each teen couple will bid bye-bye to the baby and receive a toddler as their fast-forward adult life progresses. They will have to cope with typical “terrible twos” behavior, including pouty tantrums, potty training and other messes.

So, did anyone at NBC ask how this “experiment” would affect, I dunno, the infants and toddlers who are forced to participate? Dr. Jan Hunt, a child psychologist and founder of the Natural Child project, blasted NBC’s plans to air the series:

Sudden removal from their parents and placement with strangers for long periods of time is from a baby’s point of view no different than a kidnapping. It has been well-established that babies who suddenly lose their primary caregiver can quickly go into mourning and emotional depression. They have no sense of time and no way to know that they will ever be returned to the only family they have known. They will inevitably express their fear and confusion in the only way they can, with tears, screams, and regressive behavior. Will their cries and behavior be understood and respected by teenagers with little or no experience with babies and their critical need for compassion and reassurance? I fear not, because anyone who understands the potential for the lifelong repercussions of such a situation would never participate in this type of show.

Babies do not have the mental capacity to anticipate the return of a mother who has gone; they cannot use imagination or project into the future. Research consistently shows that babies separated from their mothers have skyrocketing cortisol levels. This is neurotoxic, damaging brain tissue in the prefrontal lobe areas that regulate emotion, leading to a lifetime vulnerability. When cortisol is produced due to emotional stress, the next stressful experience creates an even larger surge of cortisol. By the time a stressed child reaches adulthood, he is likely to overreact to all stressful situations, making it harder to cope with life’s challenges. For all these reasons, babies and young children should be kept as stress-free as possible, to protect their future psychological and physical health.

As traumatic as this experience will surely be for these babies and children, the effects will not end when they return home. Will their parents then understand and empathize with their inevitable sadness and regressed behavior? Probably not, because few parents are aware of the critical importance of early childhood experiences. There is every reason to believe that this kind of trauma will have long-term effects, making it harder for these children to trust their parents or indeed, anyone else. This kind of emotional trauma can have lifelong effects, limiting their ability to have mutually fulfilling relationships with others in adulthood. Nothing is more precious than one’s ability to love and trust others fully.

It’s notable that NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series ensnares people into fake acts of child abuse (by having adults pose as willing underage sexual partners) while this new NBC series commits actual child abuse. Of course, the babies and toddlers can’t talk or give consent, so that makes it okay.