On San Bernardino

So this monstrosity rolled across my Facebook feed earlier this evening, and ended up triggering the first post in this space in several years:



Leaving aside the fact that the lawsuit isn't strictly related to the profiling or police investigation, and focuses instead on the subsequent public smear campaign orchestrated by the Irving city government and mayor's office against a middle school student, the comparison is inapt because Ahmed wasn't guilty of anything more than passing off a disassembled/reassembled clock as an original. Most of the time racial profiling is used in this manner, it ends up with results like that. Or a black female business executive reported by a concerned neighbor as breaking into her own apartment. 19 police officers showed up and removed her at gunpoint before she was able to prove she lived there. Or a dead Trayvon Martin, clutching his Arizona Iced Tea.

Racial profiling isn't a great idea because there end up being a lot more Trayvon Martins than there are Syed Farooks. Despite the fact that 84% of those detained in the NYPD stop-and-frisk program were black or Latino, they ended up being caught with weapons at half the rate of whites that were detained. They were a third less likely to be caught with contraband like narcotics. Twice as suspicious, but only half as guilty. It's a waste of resources, it's ineffective, and it's cruel and un-American.

And what did Farook's neighbor see anyway? As best as I can tell, it basically boiled down to "six Middle Eastern men [moving] onto the street" and "getting lots of package deliveries." If that was really all he saw, then reporting it to the police would be inappropriate racial profiling. Getting UPS deliveries while Middle Eastern isn't against the law. It's not like the other five men he saw getting suspicious deliveries are also under arrest or dead on the side of the road. But here's the thing: even had the neighbor called the cops and they had shown up, it's entirely believable they still wouldn't have found anything illegal.

You see, under American law, it is completely legal to amass a personal arsenal capable of mowing down a Christmas party in minutes. You can buy what some refer to as "assault weapons," with foregrips to allow better control when hip-firing at dispersed groups of people, retractable stocks to allow better concealment under clothing, and large capacity magazines so reloading can occur as conveniently as possible. You can buy ammunition, thousands upon thousands of rounds, hollow point rounds, armor-piercing rounds, and stockpile them in peace and without consequence. You can order tactical vests, boots, helmets, masks, and possibly protective armor, shipped in suspicious but legal Amazon boxes, free, with a Prime membership.

The bombs didn't have to be assembled until the last minute. And they didn't need or use bombs to assist in the carnage. Neither did Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Dear. Or Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook. None of them broke the law until they walked onto the property armed and with ill intent. If the "no more gun free zones" folks had their way, Farook and his wife wouldn't have broken the law until they pulled the trigger.

There is one other thing that bothers me. There is, right now, this weird Schrödinger's Cat kind of thing going on in San Bernardino. To some extent, it looks like what we classically refer to as "terrorism." They are Muslims. They had bombs. They went to Saudi Arabia. They may have been in contact with foreign terrorists. But a Postal Syndrome situation really does seem plausible too. The target is so strange and personal: a holiday party for county employees, for co-workers. Not the usual ISIS fare. There's the argument that allegedly took place, setting the scene. The fact that it appeared rushed, with most of the bombs left at home for the main event. And, after all, lots of Muslims aren't terrorists. People go to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. We won't know for sure until the investigation progresses further, if we ever know for sure. We're still waiting on a motive in Aurora.

There are many people who would say that the point is it doesn't matter what the point was. There is no difference in between the slaughter in Colorado Springs and the one in San Bernardino. Had the police shown up at Robert Dear's door the day before the Planned Parenthood shooting, they'd have left empty handed. Robert Dear wasn't breaking any laws. Neither was Syed Farook. He was an American citizen, born and raised, exercising his Second Amendment rights. They did, indeed, have to pry the gun from his cold, dead hands. These same people have had enough of Robert Dears, and they've had enough of Syed Farooks. They want it all to stop.

Others seem to see the events as profoundly different because of the differing motivations. Farook could have been caught if only we weren't so PC. Eric Harris, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza are all maniacs. The Robert Dears are always crazy, the Syed Farooks always perfectly sane. With one kind of mass shooting we throw our hands up and say that there is simply nothing to be done, that no curtailing of the right to bear arms can be tolerated, and with the other we demand the profiling of American citizens. The opening of internment camps. The conducting of warrentless wiretaps. We'll suspend all kinds of liberties in the defense of freedom, so long as those suspensions are targeted at the right people and the right liberties. You know: the expendable ones.

Political correctness didn't cause this massacre. Islam didn't cause this massacre. Ahmed Mohammed's clock didn't cause this massacre. Whatever was responsible for the University of Texas, Columbine, Sandy Hook, NIU, it was that same thing that was responsible for San Bernardino. They are the same thing. They're not special because Muslims were responsible. If we're going to do anything to stop this or at least slow it down, it's going to have to start with facing the fact that these events are all rooted in the same, exceptionally American problem, and that parsing them out based on who did what and for why, and who can score points with it and who has to offer only thoughts and prayers about it, we're going to have to keep facing these atrocities, one or more, every day.

Every day.

On the Minimum Wage: Mitch's Response

Below is Mitch's response to my post on the minimum wage. The only adjustment I have made is to delete parenthetical references to outside articles and replace them with in-body hyperlinks. I will, of course, be responding in due time.

I’m going to try to respond to particular points made throughout the blog post, so developing a linear narrative is going to be difficult. After the comments I will try to give a big-picture account that ties it all together.

First, I certainly wouldn’t offer up the article I posted as any sort of thorough or even remotely rigorous critique of minimum wage law. Nevertheless, I don’t think it is correct to portray the author as failing in intellectual honesty through a straw man fallacy. The point of the article is not to demolish minimum wage, but to give some passing remarks and illustrate a single (although crucial) point. That point is that the law harms members of the set of people it is purported to help. Although we may claim that minimum wage raises workers’ pay, and make it seem as if this is a true universal claim that applies to all workers at the bottom, this is not true. Nor is it necessarily true that we will be taking this extra pay from the employer. In fact, with laws such as this, some people win and some people lose, and those people are both from the low-skilled, low-experience, employee class, not the employer class. So, according to the goal of the proponents of minimum wage, the policy is self-defeating.

On the Minimum Wage

This post is in response to a continuing Facebook discussion regarding the minimum wage, initiated by my old friend Mitch Kaufman, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle. Mitch was always the smartest person I knew, even when he agreed with me. Over the last few years, he has gone from a left liberal to a right libertarian, putting us at odds, which has made him an even more valuable resource for gut checking my beliefs. I always prefer to have the most intelligent and informed debate opponents possible, and Mitch never fails to provide. The discussion evolved into something I could not respond to (for length reasons) within Facebook, and I hope people will follow it out onto the web.

IBD has MPD

Investor's Business Daily seems to have come down with a case multiple personality disorder recently. They published a piece on Wednesday noting that the U.S. deficit is actually shrinking at a faster clip than at any time since the demobilization at the end of the second world war. The argument that the article put forward is that since we are already shrinking the deficit at this time, the contraction caused by going over the so-called "fiscal cliff" would have a negative impact on economic growth, and that we should avoid this outcome at all costs. A sample:

If U.S. history offers any guide, we are already testing the speed limits of a fiscal consolidation that doesn't risk backfiring. That's why the best way to address the fiscal cliff likely is to postpone it.

While long-term deficit reduction is important and deficits remain very large by historical standards, the reality is that the government already has its foot on the brakes.

In this sense, the "fiscal cliff" metaphor is especially poor. The government doesn't need to apply the brakes with more force to avoid disaster. Rather the "cliff" is an artificial one that has sprung up because the two parties are able to agree on so little.

Hopefully, they will agree, as they did at the end of 2010, to embrace their disagreement for a bit longer. That seems a reasonably likely outcome of negotiations because the most likely alternative to a punt is a compromise (expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the top and the payroll tax cut, along with modest spending cuts) that could still push the economy into recession.

There certainly is a case to be made here, but I seemed to recall a very different tone coming from the same publication in the relatively recent past. Here's IBD in August talking about Obama's level of success vis-a-vis deficit reduction:

Remember when President Obama promised he'd cut the deficit in half in his first term? Well, the results are in, and red ink will once again top $1 trillion. Calling this an epic failure isn't enough.

Here's another opinion piece dressed up as "reporting" looking at Obama's handling of debt (ominously titled "Obama Let America's Debt and Deficit Cancer Spread"), this one from the middle of October:

During his first 44 months in office, President Obama's policies added $122 billion a month to the U.S. taxpayer burden. At the same time, those policies added only $40 billion a month to the tax base.

This is Obamanomics at work — an extremely rapid rise in outstanding Treasury debt compared to nominal GDP. U.S. taxpayer liabilities increased by a factor of three times as fast as the tax base during his leadership as president.

Finally, there is an article from five days before the deficit shrinking piece, which references AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka's statement that, "all the deficit chatter has distracted us from our real crisis — the immediate crisis of 23 million unemployed or underemployed workers," and then compares this to the dire (austerity induced) fiscal straights that Spain and Greece are weathering:

In short, Trumka is arguing that there's no such thing as too much government spending, that deficits don't matter and that entitlements cannot be cut. Such denialist thinking is beyond irresponsible in the face of a $16 trillion debt, highest on global record and a sign of an irrational agenda often followed by would-be tyrants...This is the kind of irresponsible thinking that has triggered riots in Greece and Spain — a belief that the money is there and only the meanness of austerity is keeping the common man from his share.

Investor's Business Daily seems to have come quite a ways in the last five days on this topic. It couldn't have anything to do with the increasingly obvious fact that the President's re-election and the mechanics of the fiscal cliff give him the lion's share of leverage in the negotiations, which look increasingly likely to end with the GOP grudgingly allowing the upper income tax cuts to expire...could it?

You Can't Miss the Bear!

Below is a screen cap from Drudge this morning, which I presume is a shot across the bow in response to Governor Chrisitie's kind words for the President's Hurricane Sandy disaster aid, his much publicized congratulatory call to Obama upon re-election (coupled with a mere email to Romney), and his dismissal of Romney's "gifts" theory for his loss:

While I can certainly understand wanting to keep someone like Chris Christie in line, I can imagine this kind of adversarial approach backfiring when applied to someone of Christie's...energy. The best way to incite the kind of civil war within the GOP that many are predicting would be to create a leader among the currently disorganized moderates. And maybe the best way to do that would be to radicalize a popular and moderate figure like Governor Christie. Bottom line, if you go after the bear, make sure you don't miss.

Examining the Obama Coalition

There has been significant insinuation from the right, most clearly on display in Governor Romney's post-election "gifts to minorities" explanation for his loss, that Obama was able to eke out a victory due to his reliance on the old Democratic stratagem of identity politics. Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard has a more (read: slightly more) academic take on this theory available here. The idea is that Obama, taking advantage of demographic shifts in the landscape of America, made enough micro-targeted promises to minority groups  to earn him their lopsided support, barely besting Romney's broad-based coalition of real Americans.

Election Wrap-up II: All Hail the Great Nate Silver

One of the prominent themes of the final weeks of the campaign was the exponential increase in visibility of New York Times writer and FiveThirtyEight Blog editor Nate Silver. As pundit after pundit crowed about the imminence of a Romney victory (Andrew Sullivan has a good round-up), they were increasingly forced to push back against Silver's prediction of a fairly hefty Obama victory. They did this in various ways and for various reasons.

When Jonah Goldberg called Silver's model a "numbers racket," or when former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough referred to Silver as an "ideologue" and a "joke," one could safely assume that this was just right-leaning pundits keeping the hope alive and trying to stave off negative press on their guy. Then there are the non-partisan pundits like Politico's Dylan Byers, who wrote the following: