Merry Christmas

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given;

And the government will be upon His shoulder.

And his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end,

Upon the throne of David and over His kingdom,

To order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever.

The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

The Bailout: Coming to Automakers Near You!

To the tune of $17.4B. Oh yeah, and those union concessions? In the by and by.

From the Fox Fact Sheet:

Viability Requirement: The firms must use these funds to become financially viable. Taxpayers will not be asked to provide financing for firms that do not become viable. If the firms have not attained viability by March 31, 2009, the loan will be called and all funds returned to the Treasury.

Definition of Viability: A firm will only be deemed viable if it has a positive net present value, taking into account all current and future costs, and can fully repay the government loan.

Help me out here: is "positive net present value" the same thing as "profitable?" I think that a company must be profitable if the difference between its expected earnings earnings and its expected liabilities, discounted to the present, is positive. But who knows what the future holds? This sounds like a number begging to be gamed. I'd have preferred something like actually earning more in sales than in spends. Actually, I still would have preferred no bailout.

Let the record reflect that Φ has lost patience with the Bush Administration.

UPDATE: In the comments, Bobvis explains that, yep, "net present value" can indeed be gamed:

A firm can certainly be unprofitable and still have a positive expected net present value. A company that loses $1000 every year for the next 100 years and makes $100,000,000 the year after that and closes will have a positive net present value despite ceasing operations and being unprofitable less than 1% of the time.

Of course it's hard to say what 2108 will look like though. That is why some poor financial analyst will be sitting in the administration next year under tremendous psychological and social pressures to make rosy assumptions of the far off future to justify additional loans today.

Parental Consent Laws Reduce STDs

Via Bobvis, an article in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization by Klick and Stratman: "Abortion Access and Risky Sex Among Teens: Parental Involvement Laws and Sexually Transmitted Diseases". The conclusion is that, whatever affect they have on abortion rates, parental notification/consent laws reduce "risky sexual activity" among teens as measured by the STD rate.

I particularly appreciated Bobvis' observation:

You might object that states with such laws are more likely to be conservative. However, (1) if that makes a difference, then obviously teenager behavior is manipulable by something, either these laws or by societal conservatism. Also, (2) they controlled for such societal effects using adult gonorrhea rates. It is unlikely that conservatism in a states affects teens, but not the broader society.

Filibuster Eric Holder?

So, Clinton retread Eric Holder will be nominated for Attorney General. Now it's time to draw the line in the sand.

Nevermind Holder's role, such as it was, in Clinton's farewell pardons of Marc Rich and the FALN terrorists. During the campaign, Obama promised (albeit in his have-it-all-ways manner) that he supported an individual right to keep and bear arms in general, and the Heller decision in particular. Yet his prospective attorney general signed an amicus brief to the case denying an individual right, and criticised the decision when it was issued.

Whatever the fantasies of Handgun Control, Inc., the American people did NOT vote against the 2nd Amendment this November. As I have written before, this is the opportunity for Republicans to win back some political capital.

Eric Holder should have no place in the Department of Justice. Obama should be held to the substance of his campaign pledge, and every senator who even pretends to care about our rights under the Constitution should be required to vote against him.

"Reaching Across the Ideological Divide"?

So, it appears that Rick Warren will deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration.

This was a smart move on Obama's part. It will buy him a lot of a lot of goodwill with the Christian center-right, as indeed it should. But we center-rightists often confuse goodwill with credibility -- see, for instance, our support for Dubya. These are not the same thing, and we should keep in mind that an invocation is, policy-wise, pretty meaningless.

Playing into Obama's hands here are the Human Rights Campaign and People for the American Way. Their criticism of Obama's selection actually increases the potency of Obama's cross-ideological feint. He can count on us to say, "Wow, those guys are angry at Obama, so I guess we can go back to sleep for the next eight years knowing Obama won't do much we won't like!" Meanwhile, David Axelrod is quietly assuring the gay lobby that they will really like Obama's judicial nominees.

Understanding Inequality

Our pastor told the following story in church this week:

An elementary school had what was called a "hunger banquet" intended to "raise awareness of world hunger," [or something]. They took the students and divided them among three tables. The students at the first table were served plenty of pastries and fruit. Those at the second table received a doughnut and a juice box. The third table had only saltine crackers and water.

The teachers/experimenters solicited feedback from the students, and reported two reactions in particular. A student at the fruit-and-pastry table said she enjoyed her food, but felt bad for the students at the other tables. Meanwhile, a student at the saltine table asserted, "Everybody should get the same food."

What to make of this?

I would speculate that few if any of the students would assert that all students should get the same grades. Many would like to receive, and may think they deserve, higher grades than they actually do, but few would quarrel with the proposition that grades ought to reflect what a student learns in class and demonstrates on tests and homework.

So which -- school or the table experiment -- is a more appropriate metaphor for understanding inequality?

This is not an attempt to assert some kind of metaphysical justice in inequality. On the contrary, even academic performance is front loaded with all kinds of differentials well beyond an individual student's control. To start with, nobody deserves credit for having been born with intelligence, or good health, or energy. No student deserves credit for having attentive parents who set high expectations, who solicit feedback from teachers and monitor progress, and who create a home environment conducive to education. I would argue that these have far more to do with what a student learns that his own disembodied sovereign will. But at the end of the day, some students have learned more than others, and nobody thinks that grades oughtn't reflect these differentials.

Likewise for economic inequality. We should get little personal credit for having been lucky enough to be born to a people who, for reasons not fully accounted, evolved the ability to build the civilization we have inherited. A civilization that protects property and enforces contracts. A civilization that nurtures discovery, industry, cooperation, and enterprise. A civilization that, by the hard work and self-discipline of our forbears, left us huge reserves of capital: physical, social, moral and intellectual. This is the world to which we Americans have been born.

But there is no fruit-and-pastry-dispenser-in-the-sky who sets more food before some than others. The people of some nations grow more food, produce more value, generate more wealth than the people of other nations. These productivity differentials drive the differentials in living standards. This doesn't require that the less fortunate suffer a character flaw. On the contrary, a third-world subsistence farmer may labor much harder than his American counterpart, but his tools -- physical, mental and social -- are much, much weaker.

It is on this ground that the fruit-and-cracker lesson comes up short. The students contributed nothing to the meal in front of them, but life doesn't usually work like that. I can think of several improvements to the exercise. For instance, what if the students at the "rich" table had to slice the fruit and bake the pastries? Yes, they would get better food, but they would have to work for it. What if all the ingredients were distributed equally, but only the rich table was given appliances and utensils. Or only the rich table received the recipe. Or maybe (not that a public school would or should actually do this) the "poor" table had to work with the short bus riders who set about wrecking the work of others. Now we would be closer to teaching the real causes of wealth and poverty.

As it happened, the topic came up again during Sunday School. Our class had signed up to "do Christmas" for a poor family in the city (the real city, not Φ's lily-white little burg) through a charity that puts churches in touch with such families that apply to it. We generally thought this meant gifts for the children and Christmasy food items; we pitched in with a ham, for instance. Anyway, for reasons not here important, we were asked to also consider a second family. Two things stood out about this family's application (I mean, other than an evident history of sexual incontinence, which almost goes without saying). First, the children were older. And second, under "needs", the family had listed some expensive electronics (XBox) and -- get this -- "gift cards."

Let me take a stab at what was off-putting about this. In theory, gift cards are a way of avoiding the risk that the gifts we bring are things the family doesn't want or can't use, and they don't have quite the level of condescension as cash. But some of the families in our class are going through a lean stretch; as one mother pointed out, she didn't buy much in the way of new stuff for her own children. And even I don't have an XBox. But also, while I'm happy to bring a little Christmas cheer to young children who can't help what their parents are, teenagers really ought to begin to feel the sting of their circumstances. Maybe, it will help them evaluate their choices in life a little more wisely.

So how do you draw the line between "helping" and "enabling"?

As Ross once pointed out, the reason rich people give millions of dollars to rich universities is because real charity is hard work. At least a university will put your name on the building. But you can drop millions of dollars into poverty with nothing to show for it but more poverty. Really helping people requires knowing them up close. Knowing, for instance, that they have a car that needs a working solenoid so that they can get to work, or which child has worn out her shoes, or that they're behind in their utility payment this winter because of a layoff, even though they keep the thermostat way down. It's about knowing enough not to be gamed, and that's not even getting into the developmental issue of how to get someone beyond needing help. It means getting close to people from whom we are seperated, not just by race or income or class, but by a whole range of moral and character factors that govern how we make important decisions. It means getting to know some deeply, deeply dysfunctional people with whom we have almost no common frame of reference.

What Counts as Pro-Life Policy?

Ross nails it:

[J]ust because it seems intuitive - to liberals, at least - that Planned Parenthood's efforts at making contraception available and affordable dramatically reduce the abortion rate doesn't necessarily make it so. Here I'd refer you to the extended, years-old argument between Megan (then "Jane Galt," of course) and Peter Northrup on contraception and abortion . . . . [A] quick gloss on the state-level data from the 1990s that Megan cited in her debate with Northrup would seem to suggest that the best way to reduce your abortion rate is to straightforwardly make abortions harder to get, through legal restrictions and cultural pressure.

[snip]

Now of course correlation isn't causation, and there are presumably many other factors at work in these state-level numbers than just the legal and cultural climate - racial and ethnic disparities, urban and rural differences, and so forth. But at the very least I'd like to see a lot more rigorous, data-rich analysis on this subject before I'd even concede that Planned Parenthood's preventive efforts do have a bigger impact on the abortion rate than legal and cultural efforts to restrict abortion, let alone that they trim the rate of unintended pregnancies sufficiently to outweigh the organization's efforts to make the procedure as cheap and easy to obtain as possible.

But the deeper point is this: The interaction between public policy and social trends is highly complex, and very difficult to predict, and thus there are any number of policy choices that can be plausibly said [to] bear on the abortion rate, for good or ill. The distribution of contraception is just a small part of the pantomime. Which means that once you take the legal debate over the rights of the unborn out of the picture, and start redefining being pro-life as "pursuing lower abortion rates through policy choices," almost any policy preference can be re-cast as "pro-life" . . . . If the definition of being pro-life is "desiring the sort of circumstances that tend to reduce the abortion rate," than almost everybody is pro-life, because almost everybody thinks that their favored positions on trade, government spending, tax policy, the minimum wage and so forth will lead to better socioeconomic outcomes overall - and better socioeconomic outcomes overall will probably lead to fewer women seeking abortions. Now I'm obviously happy to have broad debates about public policy, and I certainly think that pro-lifers should be interested in crafting a broadly pro-family politics in addition to seeking a more pro-life legal regime. But the pro-life cause is primarily about issues of law, morality and justice, and if pro-lifers treat the broader pursuit of socioeconomic progress as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, the pursuit of legal protections for the unborn, then they've given up on their movement's raison d'etre to no good effect.

Read the whole thing.