Like Chris, I can’t resist those silly internet quizzes, so I also took that Libertarian Purity Test that’s all the rage today.

The first time I took it, I answered all the questions yes or no, since there was no “undecided” option. I was able to answer a solid “no” to all the five point questions, a pretty solid “yes” to most of the one-pointers, and felt like I needed an essay-style format to answer the three-pointers, but I gave gut-level answers to all of them. I scored a 34, “your libertarian credentials are obvious.”

That’s hardly the stratospheric heights occupied by Will Baude, but that didn’t seem quite right. Apart from my support for drug legalization, I don’t think my libertarian credentials are at all obvious.

So I took the test again, refraining from answering most of the questions that I felt unsure about. I scored a 23, “soft-core libertarian,” putting me in the neighborhood of Amanda Butler, Josh Chafetz, and Matthew Yglesias, which seems about right.

Eugene Volokh notes yet another blackface incident at a college fraternity. This time it’s Pi Kappa Alpha at Georgia State University. Prof. Volokh notes that the university is considering punishing the students involved, and that the wearing of blackface is protected under the first amendment. He then asks:

Do the university officials not know the law? Or do they just not care?

Good question. But here’s the question I really want answered:

When are these idiots going to figure out that blackface costumes are deeply offensive?

It was only a matter of time until Juan Non-Volokh posted Rush lyrics in his “Sunday Song Lyric” series, and of course it was Rush’s Nietzschean anthem, “The Trees.”

Reading the lyrics, I’m remided of an old joke, which I’ve given an arboreal twist to fit the theme of the song.

Q: What’s the difference between a Southern Oak and a Northern Oak?

A: A Southern Oak doesn’t mind growing near Maples, as long they don’t get uppity. A Northern Oak doesn’t mind uppity Maples, as long as they don’t grow nearby.

Going off on a bit of a tangent, I’ve always thought that the Coolest Band Name Ever belonged to a band in my former home of Rochester, NY: the Pietzsche Nietzsches, pronounced “Peachy Neechies.”

WMPS 107.5, a.k.a. “The Pig,” has undergone a format transmogrification, becoming “Hit Radio Q107.5,” which is just as awful as it sounds.

The Pig was a breath of fresh air in the all-too-stale atmosphere of Memphis commercial radio. It was a station on which you could hear Johnny Cash and Peter Gabriel in the same set. A station where they’d dig up a slightly cheesy song with high nostalgia value from the 80s, like Men At Work’s “Land Down Under,” put it in the rotation for a few weeks, and then pull it before you had a chance to get sick of it. A station where the programming decisions seemed driven by love of music, not by marketing statistics.

But nothing lasts long in the Flinn Broadcasting empire.

Good-bye, Radio Pig. Memphis radio won't be the same without you.

UPDATE: Tim at Lean Left has almost exactly the same thoughts, except he pairs Peter Gabriel with Patsy Kline. It is more alliterative, I suppose.

The 2003 Chairman’s Letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway was released this morning, and Warren Buffett gets in a couple of subtle digs at the Bush administration. The best one was this one on page 19, regarding the opening of a new Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM) store in Kansas City:

“Victory,” President Kennedy told us after the Bay of Pigs disaster, “has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” At NFM, we knew we had a winner a month after the boffo opening in Kansas City, when our new store attracted an unexpected paternity claim. A speaker there, referring to the Blumkin family [the founders of NFM], asserted, “they had enough confidence and the policies of the Administration were working such that they were able to provide work for 1,000 of our fellow citizens.” The proud papa at the podium? President George W. Bush.

We'll see if the President ever speaks at a Berkshire-owned store again.

Apparently unsatisfied with wasting taxpayer dollars by insulting our intelligence with TV advertising, the Federal Drug Warriors are now planning to annoy the hell out of internet users in their quest for a drug-free America:

[ Drug Enforcement Administrator Karen]Tandy said the DEA plans online educational initiatives including Internet versions of Public Service Announcements and pop-up ads that will appear on the computer screens of individuals searching the Internet for drugs.

All the more reason to use Mozilla Firefox. You can block pop-ups and stick it to the Man!

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen has said the casino gambling is “not the solution” to Shelby County’s debt problem, and that he will oppose an amendment to the Tennessee Constitution to allow gambling in Shelby County.

So what the hell are we supposed to do with this pyramid, now that it's not good enough for the UofM Tigers to play basketball in?

It didn’t surprise me that the President today endorsed enshrining anti-gay bigotry into the United States Constitution. What surprised me was that my already low opinion of the President would sink even lower when he did what I knew he would eventually do.

I have no call to feel betrayed. Only insulted that the President has publicly declared that the loving relationships of several of my friends and family members are worthless – loving relationships that are a lot more meaningful than many straight marriages I’ve seen come and go. But Andrew Sullivan does feel betrayed, and he has every right to feel that way.

The President has given the finger to Sullivan and to every gay American. America deserves a better President than this.

Eugene Volokh and David Bernstein bring our attention to a bizarre anti-semitic screed in AdBusters magazine.

I admit I’ve been pretty skeptical of claims that “neo-conservative” is just a new code word for “Jew,” but AdBusters has proved to me that, at least for some, it is.

Could anti-semitism become the kind of cultural cancer for the left that racism and anti-gay bigotry are for the right? Liberals, among whose number I count myself, should take the lead in denouncing this. We shouldn’t leave it up to the conservatives and libertarians.

The Volokh Conspiracy has added trackback links, courtesy of Technorati.

It’s about time. No matter how much I dislike some of the individual conspirators (or guest conspirators), the Volokh Conspiracy remains one of my favorite blogs. And trackback links are to me the innovation that sets blogging apart from other media. I frequently find that following trackback links is more enlightening than the forward links that bloggers themselves provide, and it's a great way to find blogs that you didn't know about before. For some reason, I'm much more likely to enjoy a previously unknown Blog B that comments on Blog A, which I already read and enjoy, than I am to enjoy an unknown Blog C that Blog A comments on.

Another thought on state subsidies for higher education: state support of higher education may be a rational investment by the state in it's own tax base. Insofar as students tend to stay in the state where they go to school, and insofar as people with degrees make (and spend) more money, a state university will increase the size of a state's tax base, whether through preventing "brain drain" of its own smart kids, or through "poaching" smart kids from out of state. Just as investing in a child's education may provide returns to the parents when the grateful child helps them financially in their old age, an educated population may be well a "private good" for the state itself.

Following up on a post of mine from December, Gregg Easterbrook has an good article on SUV safety at TNR online. Choice quote:

Georgetown University professor Ted Gayer, writing in the March issue of the technical publication Journal of Risk and Uncertainty—which is edited by W. Kip Viscusi of Harvard, who is one of the nation’s leading academic conservatives—finds that having lots of SUVs and pickup trucks on the road increases total fatalities, by causing more deaths not just in regular cars but more deaths inside the SUVs and pickup trucks, too.

And just in case you don’t trust that scurrilous Gregg Easterbrook, here are a few quotes from the number two result from Google for “auto insurance rates suvs,” at esurance.com:

With larger cars on the road, drivers of small cars are at risk when they’re involved in a side-impact collision with pickups or SUVs. SUVs and pickups are generally heavier and higher riding so their bumpers can be deadly to smaller cars on impact.

Minivans don’t pose as much of a threat because they don’t weigh as much as SUVs. Their bumpers are often the same height as many smaller sized cars.

Since SUVs, minivans, and light trucks can be hard to handle and can cause more damage in the event of an auto insurance claim, auto insurance rates for these vehicles tends to be higher than for smaller cars.

If you want to know whether a vehicle is safe, ask the auto insurance companies. It’s their business to know.

Tyler Cowen, whose blogging at Marginal Revolution I generally admire, is apparently trying to prove that economists really are nothing more than shills for the wealthy. He quotes vapid blowhard George F. Will, who really is nothing more than a shill for the weathly, and asks

In 1979 the top 1 percent of earners paid 19.75 percent of income taxes. Today they pay 36.3 percent. How much is enough?

This is supposed to be some sort of appeal to fairness, I suppose. “It’s just so unfair that the top 1% of the income distibution bear 36% of the cost of the federal government.”

Let’s just set aside the fact that Will and Cowen are focusing solely on federal income tax, and ignoring the regressive federal payroll tax and state sales taxes, both of which raise the bottom 99 percent’s share of the overall tax burden.

The important point is this: statistics about the percentage of the tax burden born by a given segment of the income distribution are utterly meaningless in absence of data about what percentage of overall income (or wealth, or whatever you think is fair to tax) that segment controls. Even if we instituted a perfectly flat income tax, the top 1% would pay a greater portion of the tax burden than people at the bottom of the income distribution, for the simple reason that they have more income.

The reason that the top 1% pay a heavier share of the federal income tax burden now than they did in 1979 is not that the federal income tax has become more progressive. On the contrary, federal income tax has become flatter since 1979. The rich pay a higher share now because the rich have seen sharper gains than the rest of the population. By and large, most people have gotten richer in the past two decades, especially during the 90s, but the rich have gotten more richer than the rest of us.

My opinion as a utilitarian: Fairness is a useful concept for dividing splitting the cost of pizza between friends, but worthless when trying to determine what share of the tax burden an individual should bear. Economist can tell us about the effects of various tax schemes on economic efficiency, i.e. the total size of the economic pie as measured in dollars, euros, or what have you. But any gains in efficiency brought about by making the tax system less progressive may be offset by the diminishing marginal utility of money. If we shift $100 dollars of the tax burden from Bill Gates to some pauper, there’s a net loss in utility, because that $100 was worth more to the pauper than to Bill Gates, who could afford to wipe his ass with $100 bills if he wanted to. Somewhere in the middle lies the perfect tax system that maximizes utility, but we’re not going to find it by bloviating about fairness.

My opinion as a snarky blogger: You're supposed to post your insightful stuff at Marginal Revolution, Tyler, and post crap like this over at the Volokh Conspiracy, where it fits in well with crap by Barnett and Bernstein.

UPDATE: Dan Chak makes pretty much the same point I do, and then fills in the missing data.

Alex Tabarrok continues his insightful criticism of Democratic rhetoric on free trade.

Let me take this opportunity to say that the one thing likely to make me push the Libertarian button on the Shouptronic machine in November is continued protectionist demagoguery from whoever the Democrats nominate: and all of the remaining candidates are guilty of this to some degree.

(This, of course, assumes that the Libertarians manage to nominate someone who isn’t a total crackpot, which is not guaranteed.)

I’m not a single-issue voter in the usual sense. Free trade vs. protectionism is not the biggest issue facing this country. But it is a good issue for determining whether a candidate is more interested in policy or politics (or, as I suspect of Gephardt, whether he’s totally ignorant of basic economics). Our current president is clearly more interested in politics.

The presumptive nominee, John Kerry, deserves credit for voting in favor of NAFTA. I hope he has the courage to stick by what he knows is true: that tariffs and other protectionist measures do more harm to the country than good.

Len at Musings of a Philosophical Scrivener notes that the Disney theme parks have stopped providing special assistance passes for handicapped guests. Why? The passes were being abused by able-bodied individuals who, for the price of a wheelchair rental, found they could skip to the front of long lines.

There was one family with many kids we kept seeing waiting near us at several rides to get on without standing in the line. We quietly observed that the kid in the wheelchair looked like he was perfectly mobile, but who knows? Perhaps he had a heart problem or more trouble walking than we could detect. Well, our questions were answered as they left a ride and the mother asked, “Who wants to sit in the wheelchair next?”

If I'm a member of Generation X, and today's crop of college students are in Generation Y, are the kids currently in kindergarden members of Generation Z?

And more importantly, what will call the generation after that? Do we roll back around to the beginning of the alphabet, making them Generation A? Or perhaps they'll be Generation Yuzz.

If you live in the Memphis area, and would be willing to teach a beginner (i.e. me) how to play Go, please contact me.

Here’s a short poem I wrote in grad school.

I gave my love an emerose
Upon a summer day,
While all around us in the grove
The gavagai did play.

“I’ve never seen a hue so green,”
My love did say to me.
“My dear,” I said, “it’s shmolored gred,
Just green until time t.”

Apologies to Nelson Goodman, Joseph Ullian, and W. V. Quine.

On page W5 of today's Wall Street Journal there's a full-page adversitement for Suunto, which makes "wristop computers," i.e. geeky watches that tell you the temperature, stock quotes, and your GPS coordinates. From the first paragraph of the ad copy:

Even remotely superstitious people tend to be a little suspicious around Friday the 13th. Actually, studies do show that the number of accidents can increase by, like, 52.4% on this particular date.

Studies also show that, like, 63.7% of all cited statistics are just made up.

Many conservative and libertarian bloggers have positioned themselves

in favor of a constitutional amendment mandating “federalism” with regard to gay marriage. Such an amendment would allow any state to recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions, but would prohibit courts to force other states to recognize those marriages via the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution. There’s some disagreement about whether the proposed “Federal Marriage Amendment” is such an amendment. Ramesh Ponnuru thinks it is. Eugene Volokh thinks it isn’t. But the only person I’ve read so far to propose a concrete alternative to the FMA is Keith Burgess-Jackson, who proposes the following Constitutional amendment:

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to require that a state recognize or give legal effect to marriages other than those between one man and one woman.

But if one’s sole motive to amend the Constitution is principled federalism, and not vile anti-gay bigotry, why the exception for marriages "between one man and one woman"? Why not the following Constitutional amendment?

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to require that a state recognize or give legal effect to marriages performed outside that state.

(Anti-miscengenation laws would presumably remain unconstitutional under the 14th amendment, so this amendment would not overturn Loving v. Virginia.)

According to this website, first cousins can legally marry in Massachusetts and seventeen other states (if I’m counting correctly). If the state of Kansas, for example, which does not permit first cousins to marry, is not required to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in Massachusetts, why should it have to recognize a cousin-marriage performed in Massachusetts?

And according to this website, people as young as age 14 can marry in several states, including Massachusetts. But in Nebraska, you have to be at least 17. If Nebraska is not required to recognize the marriage of two men from Massachusetts, why should it have to recognize the marriage of two 14-year-olds from Massachusetts?

If the proponents of federalism regarding marriage will endorse an amendment like this, I’ll not question their sincerity. (And if they’ll add a clause to the amendment stating the the Federal government will recognize any marriage performed in any state, overturning the odious "Defense of Marriage Act," I’ll even join them in endorsing it.) Until then, I’ll remain of the opinion that these proposals to amend the Constitution in response to the Goodridge decision have the stink of bigotry about them.

Andrew Sullivan thinks that the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment would ban even legislatively enacted civil union statutes, such as Vermont’s.

Keith Burgess-Jackson accuses Sullivan of hysteria:

Andrew Sullivan has lost his bloody mind. In today’s blog (see here), he gives a hysterical misreading of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, then chastises The New York Times for not misreading it the same way.

How Sullivan could misread this simply worded amendment boggles my mind. His lack of legal training may explain some of it (does he not have legally trained friends?), but I think there’s more going on. His otherwise sound intellect fails him repeatedly when it comes to homosexual marriage (or homosexuality generally). Please, Andrew, get a grip. You’re embarrassing yourself.

Prof. Burgess-Jackson may want to take note that Eugene Volokh thinks the FMA admits just such a reading:

And if courts do treat the ambiguous phrase “incidents of marriage” as referring to the benefits, burdens, and practices that have traditionally accompanied marriage, then legislative civil union statutes may well become unconstitutional or at least unenforceable: As I said before, government officials would be prohibited from construing the statute according to its literal text, as providing some of the traditional benefits of marriage to unmarried couples. And if someone goes to court to challenge the official’s refusal to provide such benefits, then the court court would likewise be forbidden from construing the statute according to its literal text.

So is Prof. Volokh being "hysterical" as well? Has he too "lost his bloody mind"? Is his "otherwise sound intellect failing him"? Or maybe it’s Prof. Volokh’s "lack of legal training"?

UPDATE: Prof. Burgess-Jackson's Mea Culpa.

My neighbor Tom Bailey, a reporter at the Commercial Appeal, is doing some road-blogging on the CA’s web site.

My co-blogger has expressed skepticism about the Commercial Appeal’s in-house blogs in the past, although I can’t find the post. I can’t say anything bad about Tom’s blog, though, because he knows where I live. So let me just say “Prove him wrong, Tom!”

In light of the German cannibalism case, Will Baude ponders the public policy implications of irrational preferences, such as the desire to be killed and eaten. Will writes:

Anyway, my own inclination is to say that it’s a bad idea to pretend that such people held preferences other than the ones they actually do have, a bad idea, therefore, to keep them from harming themselves if that’s what they want to do. Even if the preference is irrational, it’s still a preference.

This is probably a topic way to big to be treated effectively in one blog post. I’m sure philosophers have written entire books on the topic. But let me throw out a suggestion. One key to determining whether a preference is irrational, and hence whether there is a legitimate paternalistic interest in suppressing the fullfillment of that preference through public policy, is whether those who have that preference also have a second-order preference not to have that preference. (This is neither a necessary or sufficient condition. At best, it is one disjunct of a sufficient condition.) We can no longer ask the poor, err, victim in the German cannibalism case whether he would prefer not to have a death wish, but he well might have said yes. Similarly, it seems to me from talking to smokers, that many of them not desire to smoke, but they would prefer not to have that desire: hence their usually futile attempts to quit.

It seems to me there are three sorts of reasons that one might have a second-order preference not to have have a given preference.

1. A person might prefer not to have a desire because she knows the desire will go unfulfilled, and this lack of fulfillment causes mental anguish. One might desire to have sex with some movie star, but knowing this lust is certain to be unrequited, one would prefer not to have this desire. I don’t see much scope for paternalistic public policy in solving the problems created by these sorts of desires. And I wouldn’t call these desires irrational.
   
2. A person might prefer not to have a desire merely because of public policy itself, whether formally written into law or as part of informal societal mores. A gay man might prefer not to have the desire to have sex with other men, not because of anything inherently bad about gay sex, but because of the potential for being arrested (pre-Lawrence), or because of widespread bigotry against gays. In this case, public policy is the problem, and so there is no excuse for paternalism. Nor would I call these desires irrational.
   
3. A person might prefer not to have a desire because the desired entity is intrisically bad, i.e. it conflicts with other more strongly held prefernces, out of physical necessity. The German cannibalism victim might have desired to have a comfortable retirement sailing about the Mediterranean, but he could not fulfill both this desire and his desire to be killed and eaten. Many smokers wish to have a long life, but their desire to smoke is in conflict with this. It is in this category that we find the truly irrational desires.
   

Only when the unwanted desires are of the third type is there a prima facie case to be made for paternalistic public policy. In the third case, the public policy might actually be helping the weak-willed person fulfill their second order desire, thus resulting in greater utility (if we define utility in terms of satisfied preferences, or use satisfied preferences as a proxy for utility).

There’s an excellent factual article over at The Motley Fool on the 2003 tax cuts, much of which is devoted to helping you figure out how much you saved on Federal income tax vs. the year 2002. According to the article, I paid about $450 less this year than I would have given the 2002 tax tables.

Of course, I don’t really count it as a tax cut, given the profligate spending of the Republican Congress and admininistration. I figure I’ll be paying for it one way or another eventually.

Chris has already commented on Drezner's post about low retention rates at graduate school, but as a bona-fide grad-school dropout myself (ABD in philosophy, 1997, University of Rochester), I just have to put my two cents in.

I dropped because after five years my funding ran out, my dissertation on Kant's Theory of Substance was going nowhere, and the job market was looking awful. Why put myself through it anymore, when the newly-minted PhDs I saw were teaching multiple part-time gigs at Monroe Community College and St. John Fisher, and making less than I was making as a TA? So I ditched it all to become a computer geek, and seven years later, I’m doing better financially than I would have teaching. I’m making an upper middle-class income according to the Calpundit scale, and I’m living in a city that I like where there’s very little snow.

I’m not bitter, and I have no regrets except for not shooting higher in terms of what schools I applied to. I had the chance to study with a brilliant metaphysician, who was also an excellent teacher, and even got two footnotes in his book. (Even if, due to a typo, one of them reads “Sider (1997)” instead of “Sides (1997).” Grrrr.)

I could have spent 1992–1997 working some job I hated, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Grad school was a fun way to kill some time, and it’s better to drop out of grad school with very little debt than graduate from law school with a huge mountain of debt, only to discover you hate practicing law.

So go on and go to grad school. But don’t get your hopes up about a career in academia. Have a back up plan.