Cassandra has a good, detailed post that explores the hypothetical primacy of international law over domestic law. There’s not much I can add to her post, other than I agree with her and hope that, when the time comes (if ever), it is approached by amending the Constitution, not imposed on us by our robed masters. It would take several decades of goodwill on the part of the rest of the world before I favored this. Even then, I would wait until right before death to say it out loud, so I don’t have to deal with the aftermath.

Cass’s post is a followup to an earlier post of mine. Be sure to wish her well as she takes a little time off from blogging. You’ll have to use a different post for that, as she’s closed comments on the linked post.

Jon Henke has an excellent post that I unfortunately don’t have the time to go into in detail. The issue is whether natural rights exist since they aren’t visible, and so forth. He makes, essentially, a utilitarian argument about rights—they exist because others agree that they exist. I’m not comfortable with this position because the “rights as social construct” concept leaves a lot of room for people to tamper with you for whatever reason they choose.

I’m an adherent to the natural rights view, but the only thing “natural” about them is that they create a moral case for the person whose rights are being violated to do whatever is necessary to secure them, including violence. Of course, there are trade-offs to be made. I live in Mississippi and there are certainly laws here (as with any state) that were cooked up by some tin-pot tyrant that have nothing to do with protecting anyone’s rights. They simply did it because they could. Is each of these worth fighting over? No.

I would like to say more, but time is short. Check out Jon’s post.

Tyler Cowen has an intriguing post on movies costing the same, regardless of popularity. As someone who’s been to literally thousands of movies, I have a couple of thoughts.

I think much of the reason for the lack of price differentials has to do with contracts from the studios. They are very protective of their profits, maybe to the point of not maximizing them, even. When the first Star Wars prequel came out six years ago, I read an article that Lucas’s contract stipulated that the movie must play in the four largest theaters (for a certain class of large multiplex) and for four consecutive weeks, regardless of attendance.

When I lived in Illinois, I frequently went to a huge multiplex and noticed that they had a number of theaters of differing sizes. I suspected then, as now, that they created the multiplexes with various theater sizes to allow some flexibility to compensate for the lack of price flexibility. That way movies like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” can run for months on end in a small theater and generate word of mouth. Similarly, popular movies can be moved to smaller theaters as their audience declines.

Another thing I read is that for the first four weeks of a movie’s run, the studio gets around 90% of the box office. This helps account for the outrageous cost of a Coke and popcorn. If the studios allowed the theaters to vary their prices, and share an even cut of the film’s box office over its run, I suspect much of this weirdness would go away and the obsession with blockbusters would disappear. I also suspect that more movies would be profitable if the prices were allowed to vary.

Currently listening to: "Up On Cripple Creek".

Seeing the juvenile death penalty overturned today was good in a number of ways—the reading of the constitution that says the 8th amendment is malleable is plausible to me—but the 5th amendment reading other people are putting forward is not. Already there are calls to overturn the death penalty altogether on constitutional grounds. These, however, are not plausible.

I should be happy with today’s ruling, but I’m not. Most of the people calling for a complete overturn of the death penalty have apparently not read the constitution:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The references to international law are a bit galling as well. I looked at the opinion and Kennedy did limit those references and stated that they had no legal weight. If so, why mention them? I'm with Scalia: if the Justices want to indulge their curiosity, fine. Just keep it out of their opinions.

Via Karen at Dark Bilious Vapors, there’s this item from David Brooks on how the U.S. uses soft power:

But if there is one soft-power gift America does possess, it is this tendency to imagine new worlds. As Malzahn goes on to note, “In a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. ... We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow.”

Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote an important essay for this page a few weeks ago, arguing that American diplomacy is often most effective when it pursues not an incrementalist but a “maximalist” agenda, leaping over allies and making the crude, bold, vantage-shifting proposal – like pushing for the reunification of Germany when most everyone else was trying to preserve the so-called stability of the Warsaw Pact.

As Sestanovich notes, and as we’ve seen in spades over the past two years in Iraq, this rashness – this tendency to leap before we look – has its downside. Things don’t come out wonderfully just because some fine person asks, Why not here?

But this is clearly the question the United States is destined to provoke. For the final thing that we’ve learned from the papers this week is how thoroughly the Bush agenda is dominating the globe. When Bush meets with Putin, democratization is the center of discussion. When politicians gather in Ramallah, democratization is a central theme. When there’s an atrocity in Beirut, the possibility of freedom leaps to people’s minds.

Not all weeks will be as happy as this one. Despite the suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq, the thought contagion is spreading. Why not here?

Victor Davis Hanson does a good job of describing how we should respond to the EU in the future: dial down the rhetoric, wish them well, all the while severing our ties to them. On every major issue in recent years—going back decades, really—we’ve differed with them. We’ve also been subsidizing their defense and providing them a perch from which to snipe at us.

Rather than wishing them ill, we should disentangle ourselves from them and allow them to stand on their own two feet, and live with the consequences of their decisions:

The United States should ignore all this ankle-biting, praise the EU to the skies, but not take very seriously their views on the world until we learn exactly what is going on inside Europe during these years of its uncertainty. America is watching enormous historical forces being unleashed on the continent from its own depopulation, new anti-Semitism, and rising Islamicism to Turkish demands for EU membership and further expansion of the EU into the backwaters of Eastern Europe that will bring it to the doorstep of Russia. Whether its politics and economy will evolve to embrace more personal freedom, its popular culture will integrate its minorities, and its military will step up to protect Western values and visions is unclear. But what is certain is that the U.S. cannot remain a true ally of a militarily weak but shrill Europe should its politics grow even more resentful and neutralist, always nursing old wounds and new conspiracies, amoral in its inability to act, quite ready to preach to those who do.

We keep assuming that Europeans are like Britain and Japan when in fact long ago they devolved more into a Switzerland and Sweden—friendly neutrals but no longer real allies. In the meantime, let us Americans keep much more quiet, wait, and watch—even as we carry a far bigger stick.

There are several good posts at Opinio Juris about the “legality” of the Iraqi war. For me the issue is rather simple: our constitution has an enumerated power that allows Congress to declare war for whatever reason they choose, and no treaty would change that (it would amount to amending the constitution via treaty).

Being international lawyers, the people at Opinio Juris take a more nuanced view. Julian Ku has a couple of posts (here and here). Chris Borgen responds here.

One point they touch on is the legality of the war in Kosovo. This strikes me as a good point to raise: the Kosovo war was popular among many people that oppose the current war in Iraq and they justify it through a fig leaf of multilateralism via Nato. This seems very dishonest to me, since we’ve heard all of the garbage from the transnationalists that the UN is the only body that can “authorize” war, though they never authorized the actions in Kosovo.

James Joyner has a great post on the “valedictorian” that planned to assassinate President Bush. The AP neglected to mention that he graduated from a Saudi-backed Islamist school. I think I’ve heard of those before….

Fortunately, I’m blessed with not having to live in Europe and face the possibility of living under a constitution that exceeds 500 pages. Here’s a review from the Telegraph:

George W. Bush is a good Protestant, but I doubt if he has read the European Constitution. Why should he, indeed, since he is lucky enough to live in a country that will not be ruled by it? No reason at all, unless, as is rumoured, early drafts of the speech he will make in Brussels next week commit him to saying what a wonderful thing it is.

It is natural for Americans to like the sound of the word “constitution”. They have the best one ever written in a single document. It consists, in the copy I have before me, of 12 pages, 11 if you exclude the list of the men who signed it. There are also amendments added over the past two centuries: they amount to another nine pages. If President Bush tucked himself up with it at his famously early bedtime of 9.30, he could finish it well before 10.

I should be surprised if the State Department, the Washington faction keenest on turning Mr Bush into a Euro-enthusiast, has encouraged him to go to bed with a copy of the European Constitution. My copy, published by TSO (note that the former name Her Majesty’s Stationery Office has quietly been relegated), is 511 pages long. I do not claim it would keep Mr Bush up all night – in fact, I guarantee that, if he tried to read it, he would still be asleep by 10 – but it would wake him and the First Lady up with a start as it slipped from his nerveless hands and crashed, all 2lb 8oz of it, on the floor.

If he did spend 20 minutes with the document, however, the President would see that it was not what is normally meant by a constitution. Rather than confining itself to the division of powers by which a country should be governed – head of state, parliament, judiciary, what’s local and what’s national – it lays out scores of pages telling people how to run their lives. It supports positive discrimination, outlaws the death penalty in all circumstances, commits itself to high public spending, compulsory consultation with trade unions about changes at work, “the exchange of youth workers”, “fat-free breakfasts”, “distance education” and “the physical and moral integrity of sportsmen and sportswomen” (I made one of these up). And it imposes all these on nations that have their own governments and electorates.

Even when she’s right on the larger point about President Bush’s appointment of minorities, she’s so intolerable in the way she states it that it physically hurts me to agree on the larger point. If she didn’t have a nice rack there would be a bounty on her head.

Back from an unofficial hiatus, I ran across an excellent article from The Economist ($) that goes into some detail on anti-Americanism:

So what explains France’s reputation for anti-Americanism? The main answer is that it is proclaimed bombastically by so many of those in France who strike political attitudes. They do this partly because of the rivalry between France and America, based on their remarkably similar self-images: the two countries both think they invented the rights of man, have a unique calling to spread liberty round the world and hold a variety of other attributes that make them utterly and admirably exceptional. Jealousy also plays a part. America is often better than France at activities that the French take great pride in, such as making movies or even cooking—at least if popular taste is the judge. And French politicians are not blind to the value of criticising someone else in order to divert attention from their own failures: French anti-Americanism tends to rise when France has just suffered a setback of some kind, whether defeat at the hands of the Germans, a drubbing in Algeria or the breakdown of the Fourth Republic.

Not many countries share all these characteristics, but several have some of them. Take Iran, where political diatribes, religious sermons, rent-a-mob demonstrations and heroic graffiti regularly denounce the Great Satan and all his doings. Anti-Americanism is central to the ideology of Iran’s ruling Shia clerics. Yet Iranians at large, like the French, are not noticeably hostile to America. The young in particular seem thoroughly pro-American, revelling in America’s popular culture, yearning for its sexual freedoms, some even hoping for an American deliverance from their oppression. Whether the affection runs deep is another matter: pro-Americanism among the young is a form of anti-regime defiance that might evaporate quickly if their country were attacked.

Yet why should the clerics bang on so relentlessly about the United States when the British were just as deeply involved in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s regime in 1953, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed a much greater threat, and when, recently at least, America has shown itself ready to get rid of the Baathists next door and pave the way for a Shia-led government in Iraq? The main explanation, as in France, is rivalry. Iran’s theocratic regime has clear ambitions to be a leader not just of the Middle East but of the entire Muslim world. America, now avowedly bent on spreading democracy across the region, is in the way.

The points about Iran are well-taken. If we go after Iran, some day, it had better be articulated as something that’s in our self-interest, rather than flowery rhetoric about spreading democracy. I support the flowery rhetoric, but it’s not enough to sell an invasion on. We need to go in expecting that we will get little or no gratitude for liberating a people, and that we are likely to receive bile instead. The cause may be humiliation due to needing an outside power to free them, or it might be because Europe is allied against us again. Either way, I doubt gratitude will be forthcoming in the short term. A couple of decades, maybe.

Steve Verdon has a good post on power supply problems in Texas. I added a few comments, taken from memory after being out of the power industry for several years. Take them for what they’re worth. The blog is free, isn’t it?:

I’ve been out of the power industry for six years now, but, based on what I knew then, Texas has even more problems. Every time I heard about Texas during the deregulation of generation during the 90s, it was always followed with a comment about them not being hooked into the national grid. If still accurate, they have prevented themselves from benefiting from surplus capacity in other states. Extraordinarily dumb, not unlike California limiting their grid operators to the day ahead market and making long-term purchasing agreements illegal.

This post at BTD reminded me of a few news stories recently. There are cautionary attempts to get rid of license plates that say things like “Protect Life” with a picture of a baby next to it. If opponents of the plates succeed in getting rid of them, can we also get rid of the damned manatee plates on similar grounds? I don’t see any real difference in the two; both are value judgments (wholly normative) and equally objectionable, if either is objectionable.

Apologies for the light blogging of late. I’ve been prairie-doggin’ it lately, due to an avalanche of school work.

The anarchist Emma Goldman said much the same thing in a 1917 essay, "The Psychology of Political Violence." It is "the despair millions of people are daily made to endure" that drives some of them to acts of terror. "Can one question the tremendous, revolutionizing effect on human character exerted by great social iniquities?" She quotes a pamphlet from British-ruled India: "Terrorism … is inevitable as long as tyranny continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed, but the tyrants who are responsible for it."

Bush does not say that tyranny excuses terrorism. But he does say that tyranny explains terrorism. This is new.

No, it’s not. Alan Kreuger did a study for the NBER more than two years ago showing that poverty is not correlated to terrorism. While that doesn’t tell us what causes terrorism, it does tell us that, absent errors in the data, poverty is not a cause of terrorism. Kreuger goes on to show correlation between political oppression and terror, though I don’t think he establishes causality.

A subsequent study (þ: OTB) showed the same thing.

Similarly, President Bush issued the National Security Strategy of 2002 in September of that year and he's been using the rhetoric of freedom as a defense against terror for at least as long. Kinsley can act like the association of tyranny and terrorism is something new and take a poke at the President, but it’s not new and the President is probably right.

One of Austin Bay’s commenters notes a historical “Rule of 72” and figures that we can expect the UN’s death around 2018 (72 years after its 1946 founding). I can’t say I’ll be disappointed since the UN stands in the way of creating a meaningful alternative, like a coalition of liberal democracies.

With regard to “Bulgegate” that had the left side of the blogosphere worked up last Fall, the NYT explains why they couldn’t run with the story: it was all speculation. TalkLeft has the details, yet seems somewhat disappointed in the outcome.

Chris and I would differ on this, and both of us would differ with Spoons. I’m pretty sure he’s wed to a Windows box, though Chris would recommend a Linux machine and I would recommend a Mac.

I went for an end-of-night stroll around the internet looking for a quote that I used years ago as an email signature. Apparently Oklahoma has had issues with cockfighting for decades, even up to the present. Here’s the quote I was looking for:

In every country the Communists have taken over, the first thing they do is outlaw cockfighting.
– John Monks, Oklahoma state representative, arguing against a bill that would make cockfighting illegal in his state

I also found this via The Professor, about The Professor:

10)He dresses as Santa Claus and pretends to have a heart attack in front of small groups of children.

6)He has to kill hobos to get an erection.

As a recovering Randroid—well, it was a phase of mine about fifteen years ago and it lasted less than a year—I thought I should comment on all of the recent attention that’s been given to Rand. Cass has a good post that explores it, and she even mentions my love of Rush!!

First on Rand. Cass has asked if the world we live in now—the values we claim to hold—is Rand or Rand-lite. Definitely Rand-lite, as I see it. Rand considered things as mundane, and necessary, as taxation to be slavery of one to another. If I recall correctly, she was trying to come up with a way for the government to operate without taxes, such as charging people for access to the courts and police protection. Similarly, she was quite dogmatic about, well, everything. She considered self-sacrifice repulsive, even though Cass gives the matter a more thoughtful reading. One passage I recall is her trying to figure out if one should risk his life to save another’s. I believe she used the lifeboat scenario and concluded that in an emergency, self-sacrifice might be appropriate.

Ultimately, what turned me off of Rand was the coldness of her philosophy. Her philosophy could be taken straight out of the Declaration of Independence, but she takes it to an extreme that is unsatisfying. Don’t get me wrong: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a very basic, even foundational, description of liberty and one which I whole-heartedly endorse. In fact, The Declaration is as close to a holy book as I have. However, I see it more as defining the role of government than telling me how to live my life.

Now to Rush. My love for them pre-dates the Randroid period by seven or eight years. My first exposure to them was through the album Moving Pictures and if you listen to the lyrics to Tom Sawyer, it’s pretty clear that they were influenced by Rand. One blurb: “his mind is not for rent; to any God or government”. Sounds like her to me.

The other songs that I can think of, off the top of my head, that were influenced by her include Free Will and all of the album 2112. The title song is several things, one of which is a rant against totalitarianism and is also about human aspirations. IIRC, the first words are “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”, though the meaning isn’t the same as the Bible. In fact, it means the opposite. The meek will be trapped on Earth while the brave and adventurous will capture the solar system, though they will have to continue their battle against totalitarianism.

Lately, though, my favorite Rush song has been Red Sector A. It’s a story about the horrors of gulags, or concentration camps, and is quite moving. I can still remember the arguments about Rush starting to use synthesizers in their music (it happened a few years before Grace Under Pressure, which has Red Sector A, but I was a bit young to appreciate Rush when they made the switch; I was still hung up on Blondie and Rapper’s Delight).

Rush is still my favorite group, though Rand has been replaced by Hayek and Friedman.

See also these posts (here and here) at Marginal Revolution.

OTB Traffic Jam

Via Glenn, here’s a good analysis of the Democrats:

There was a time when the Republicans had a similar problem with irresponsible people on the right-wing being the face of their party—John Birchers, isolationists, and old-fashioned racists. But responsible Republicans and leading conservatives like William F. Buckley ran those people out of the party and the movement.

There are a few Sandbox dwellers left on the Right, but the fringe Right is tiny and powerless compared with the Sandbox Left, which is neither.

Today, the Democratic Party must follow the lead of William F. Buckley. For the good of their party—and the country—they must remove consideration of the Sandbox Left from their political calculations, and demand that their side grow up and abandon ridiculous conspiracy theories and irresponsible historical comparisons.

The process will be painful and time-consuming. But if they don’t engage, Democrats (and real, responsible liberals) are heading for a very long dry spell—not unlike the one the GOP endured after Herbert Hoover’s administration—led by those selling the rhetorical equivalent of shiny silver pails and big yellow rubber spoons.

I should add, too, that Evan Bayh’s vote against Condi is leading me to question his judgment as well. I could easily imagine voting for him in 2008 over just about any Republican, but his willingness to pander tarnishes my otherwise good view of him.

Just a helpful hint for Gmail users: if you catch a spammer in the act of “phishing”, you can open the email and choose “Show Options” to report it. This seems like a good thing to do. I suspect that one of the reasons that spam filters are better in recent years is that people mark items as spam and the email providers can use the information to improve their algorithms. Similar network effects should be useful in fighting phishing.

Chris’s earlier entry on nuclear power got me thinking. I spent a few years in the industry and got to witness it change from a horribly inefficient industry to one that is quite competitive—after deregulation of generation, of course. The time is certainly ripe for new plants, since the existing fleet’s licenses begin to expire in the next few years.

My guess is that with a simplified design and a simple licensing process, new plants would be built in short order. Deregulation is something that worked amazingly well. Indeed, far better than this capitalist oppressor ever imagined. When I started in the industry, fresh out of college, I had pretty much taken it for granted that power generation—just like the power lines themselves—was a natural monopoly.

Once deregulation was in place, though, peoples’ thinking seemed to change. Before deregulation, the nuclear plants seemed to compete to see who could stay offline the longest. The plant operators were quick to take a plant offline to demonstrate their commitment to safety. Somewhere during the transition to a competitive generating environment, both the regulators and the plant operators figured out that the best run plants were also the ones that were the safest. In other words, the NRC and operators started asking why a shutdown was required. Why didn’t we know that the conditions requiring a shutdown were emerging, and how can we claim to know how to run the plant if we can’t see these things? In short, incentives matter.

As long as they can be run safely and economically, I would love to see some new plants come online. The issue of dealing with spent fuel is another problem—it’s a huge unrecognized liability and it’s unclear to this day whether Yucca Mountain will ever be available as a permanent repository for spent fuel. Even so, having nuclear power as a continuing alternative for energy needs is a great idea as I see it.

Hmm. It seems that the German feudal system that suppressed Carl Menger’s work is only now dying (link may require subscription):

PUT five economists in a room, on Winston Churchill’s arithmetic, and you get five opinions—unless one is Keynes, when you get six. In Germany the sums have usually been simpler: you get just two opinions, with four economists sharing one point of view, and the fifth a token Keynesian, sent by the trade unions. Yet German economists are becoming more like their peers abroad. The typical specimen is becoming more empirical, pragmatic and ready for controversy, after a period when he was usually long on theory and reluctant to criticise colleagues.

This change has now reached the pinnacle of Germany’s “five wise men”, the country’s council of economic experts. Earlier this month, a public dispute erupted among the five (actually they are four men and one woman). What is more, they are likely to pick as their next chairman Bert Rürup, a hands-on, down-to-earth academic. This could have an influence on policy, for the underlying row among the five wise men was really about how to get the economy growing again. One of them, Peter Bofinger, even called for wage increases in line with productivity growth.

German economists have long had the knack of going their own way. Until the second world war, they hailed mostly from the “historical school”, which held that there was no such thing as economic rationality. In contrast, most are now wedded to neoclassicism, declaring that macroeconomic policy is ineffective and preferring to focus on supply-side issues. Labels such as “Keynesian” or even “pragmatist” have been insults. This partly reflects Germany’s cultural fondness for consensus, not a competition of ideas. Michael Burda, an American economist at Berlin’s Humboldt University, argues that German economics is only just escaping the middle ages.

The more I look at the rest of the world, the more I think we should not involve ourselves in it. Instead, we should just keep tariffs low (or nonexistent) and let them live their own history. After we’re finished with Iraq, of course.

By the way, just because the rest of the world disagrees with us doesn’t make them right.

Bill Quick has a good post on the drug war and its costs. My earlier thoughts are here. Hat tip to a reader.