Still fixated on that, huh? Look, I'm sure you have no problem whatsoever with Jews, as long as they have the decency not to make any more money than you.
Heh. "The Butterfly Effect" is the term I use to ridicule the idea that the Constitution gives the government the power to regulate anything which might conceivably have an effect on interstate commerce, when in reality it only states that Congress has the power to regulate those things which actually are interstate commerce.
It's fascinating to see it being used non-ironically by a proponent of that interpretation.
Also, it's interesting that they pushed the Stolen Valor Act back to Congress even though it could be theoretically rewritten to be constitutional, yet rather than doing the same with Obamacare, they did the rewriting themselves.
It seems to me that the weakness of the taxation argument for upholding this law is exactly the same as the weakness of the commerce clause argument: It gives Congress carte-blanche power to do anything it wants, as long as it creates a pretextual tax for window dressing. Why acknowledge limits on the commerce clause, only to render them utterly moot?
Not really. It oversteps Congress's Article I, Section 8 bounds left and right. It's just that all the other ways it overreaches have been getting rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court for several decades now.
This is actually a legitimate problem with one of the arguments for hate crime legislation: That a hate crime is worse than a regular crime because it terrorizes a certain group of people. The problem, of course, is that regular crime terrorizes everyone.
And Louis CK's argument reminds me of David Friedman's argument for why capital punishment for crimes other than murder is problematic.
It's worth keeping in mind that violent crime was at the highest level in living memory, and that the worst of it was concentrated in black neighborhoods. Attributing all these problems to crack was misguided (it had been on the rise since 1960), but there really was a lot of legitimately scary stuff going on.
Still… After WWII and the Nazis, even if done at the point of the gun, Germans realized that the government killing Jews, even if justifiable, would be very troubling.
Honestly, this strikes me as a complete non sequitur. The Nazis' killing of the Jews was wrong precisely because it was unjustified. The execution of a murderer for the crime of murder is entirely different from genocide. These things really aren't comparable in any meaningful sense. Furthermore, the Nazis aren't in power anymore.
I suspect that this really sounds profound if you're opposed to the death penalty anyway---otherwise it just comes off as silly.
Or, think about it this way: You know what else the Nazis did with the Jews? They put them in concentration camps. Big prisons, basically. Is it troubling that the modern German government puts criminals---Jewish criminals, no less!---in prison?
The Nazis also stole money and valuables from the Jews. Do you therefore find Germany's high taxes troubling? What if it turns out that they tax Jews disproportionately because they have above-average incomes*?
*I'm actually not sure whether that's true. American Jews do, but I can't find statistics on German Jews.
If you’re right, it may only be because most murders are intra-racial, and those who kill whites are more likely to receive the death penalty.
It's likely that this is to some extent due to the fact that a higher percentage of white murder victims (30%) than black murder victims (15%) are female. Women make more sympathetic victims. Not saying that that explains everything, of course, but it almost certainly does explain some of the racial discrepancy.
Hm. You may be right about that. I'm still working my way through that paper.
That said, it seems to me that eliminating this bias would result in executing proportionately more blacks. Personally, I'm fine with that. Those who kill black victims deserve to die just as much as those who kill white victims. But on paper it would look worse.
I'm sure that in certain localities blacks are overrepresented among those sentenced to death, possibly due to bias, and possibly due purely to chance. I'm not sure that "Death penalties handed down in Philadelphia between 1983 and 1993" denotes a sample size large enough to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Administration of the death penalty is, however, extremely lopsided when it comes to sex. A man who commits murder is about ten times more likely to be executed than a woman who commits murder.
Nobody cares about this, though, because conservatives aren't looking for ammunition against the death penalty, and leftists aren't interested in that kind of sexism.
There can be “positive sum” interactions in society. However, there are many “positive sum” interactions that disproportionately allocate the benefit of the positive increase.
This is true, but you're completely wrong about which side gets the greater benefit. Most corporations operate on fairly thin profit margins. Consider Verizon, for example. For the last three years, they've had revenues in the $100B ballpark, with profits ranging from $2.4B to $4.8B.
Let's take the high end and say that Verizon's producer surplus runs around 5% on a typical transaction. So what about consumer surplus? What's the most you'd be willing to pay for what Verizon's giving you, if they had no competitors? If, like most people, it's more than 5% greater than what you're actually paying, you're getting the long end of the stick.
In the vast majority of transactions, the consumer gets the lion's share of the surplus.
Such interactions generally flow from faux-voluntary, coerced arrangements that result from a number of factors including:
And then you go on to list a mix of things that involve actual coercion that you don't like and things that involve the absence of the kind of coercion that you do like. And that's the basic problem with your argument: You conflate genuinely coercive transactions with transactions whose terms you simply don't approve of.
I’m pretty sure that if the stupidly hybridized health care delivery system the US currently had were actually rationalized in either the market or the socialized model BOTH would require substantial cost cutting measures to make the costs commensurate with the results.
That's a fair point, Nob. One of the silver linings of Medicare Part D is that it acts as a subsidy to the successful development of marketable drugs.
That said, I think that with single-payer the cuts would be focused far more heavily on pharmaceuticals than they would with a more market-oriented approach. Cutting back benefits is impolitic, obviously, as is cutting back payments to doctors and nurses. But imposing price controls on pharmaceuticals has great optics. People hate drug companies, and they don't understand the price we'll have to pay for cheap drugs. I think Jesse's and M.A.'s comments are fairly representative of how this sort of thing would play with the median voter.
but a large chunk of my supporters are assholes who beat women, I should probably look into why that is.
But this is silly. Goldwater opposed the CRA because it involved a huge infringement on property rights and freedom of association. Racists liked it because they opposed the CRA for other reasons. Should Goldwater have changed his mind because making racists mad is more important than property rights and freedom of association?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Big Thursday Announcements”
Still fixated on that, huh? Look, I'm sure you have no problem whatsoever with Jews, as long as they have the decency not to make any more money than you.
On “On Roberts: Not a Fan of the Butterfly Effect”
Heh. "The Butterfly Effect" is the term I use to ridicule the idea that the Constitution gives the government the power to regulate anything which might conceivably have an effect on interstate commerce, when in reality it only states that Congress has the power to regulate those things which actually are interstate commerce.
It's fascinating to see it being used non-ironically by a proponent of that interpretation.
On “Big Thursday Announcements”
Also, it's interesting that they pushed the Stolen Valor Act back to Congress even though it could be theoretically rewritten to be constitutional, yet rather than doing the same with Obamacare, they did the rewriting themselves.
"
We're all breathing, aren't we?
"
It seems to me that the weakness of the taxation argument for upholding this law is exactly the same as the weakness of the commerce clause argument: It gives Congress carte-blanche power to do anything it wants, as long as it creates a pretextual tax for window dressing. Why acknowledge limits on the commerce clause, only to render them utterly moot?
"
Scratch that. Not right-wing. Still reminds me of you, though.
"
It's like a right-wing version of you!
"
Obomneycare passed Constitutional muster.
Not really. It oversteps Congress's Article I, Section 8 bounds left and right. It's just that all the other ways it overreaches have been getting rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court for several decades now.
"
In celebration of the court respecting the constitution
Ha! The Court hasn't respected the Constitution since the Switch in Time.
"
It's something of a tradition for Republican-appointed judges.
On “I see Racists everywhere…either I’m in the South, or I’m a Liberal…”
Of course, I didn't do that. The analogy I made was:
Genocide : Capital Punishment :: Exprorpriation : Taxation.
"
This is actually a legitimate problem with one of the arguments for hate crime legislation: That a hate crime is worse than a regular crime because it terrorizes a certain group of people. The problem, of course, is that regular crime terrorizes everyone.
And Louis CK's argument reminds me of David Friedman's argument for why capital punishment for crimes other than murder is problematic.
"
It's worth keeping in mind that violent crime was at the highest level in living memory, and that the worst of it was concentrated in black neighborhoods. Attributing all these problems to crack was misguided (it had been on the rise since 1960), but there really was a lot of legitimately scary stuff going on.
"
Still… After WWII and the Nazis, even if done at the point of the gun, Germans realized that the government killing Jews, even if justifiable, would be very troubling.
Honestly, this strikes me as a complete non sequitur. The Nazis' killing of the Jews was wrong precisely because it was unjustified. The execution of a murderer for the crime of murder is entirely different from genocide. These things really aren't comparable in any meaningful sense. Furthermore, the Nazis aren't in power anymore.
I suspect that this really sounds profound if you're opposed to the death penalty anyway---otherwise it just comes off as silly.
Or, think about it this way: You know what else the Nazis did with the Jews? They put them in concentration camps. Big prisons, basically. Is it troubling that the modern German government puts criminals---Jewish criminals, no less!---in prison?
The Nazis also stole money and valuables from the Jews. Do you therefore find Germany's high taxes troubling? What if it turns out that they tax Jews disproportionately because they have above-average incomes*?
*I'm actually not sure whether that's true. American Jews do, but I can't find statistics on German Jews.
"
Forgot the link to the source.
"
If you’re right, it may only be because most murders are intra-racial, and those who kill whites are more likely to receive the death penalty.
It's likely that this is to some extent due to the fact that a higher percentage of white murder victims (30%) than black murder victims (15%) are female. Women make more sympathetic victims. Not saying that that explains everything, of course, but it almost certainly does explain some of the racial discrepancy.
"
I'm not sure what DensityDuck is talking about, but the US hasn't actually executed anyone for a crime other than homicide for nearly fifty years.
"
Hm. You may be right about that. I'm still working my way through that paper.
That said, it seems to me that eliminating this bias would result in executing proportionately more blacks. Personally, I'm fine with that. Those who kill black victims deserve to die just as much as those who kill white victims. But on paper it would look worse.
"
Nationwide, a slight majority of homicides are committed by blacks. Nationwide, a slight majority of prisoners who have been executed were white.
I'm sure that in certain localities blacks are overrepresented among those sentenced to death, possibly due to bias, and possibly due purely to chance. I'm not sure that "Death penalties handed down in Philadelphia between 1983 and 1993" denotes a sample size large enough to draw any meaningful conclusions.
"
Administration of the death penalty is, however, extremely lopsided when it comes to sex. A man who commits murder is about ten times more likely to be executed than a woman who commits murder.
Nobody cares about this, though, because conservatives aren't looking for ammunition against the death penalty, and leftists aren't interested in that kind of sexism.
"
If Germany had the death penalty and executed a disproportionate number of Jews, it’d raise just about everyone’s eyebrows.
We actually don't execute a disproportionate number of blacks. At least, not disproportionate to the rate at which they commit murder.
On “Cato Lives!”
There can be “positive sum” interactions in society. However, there are many “positive sum” interactions that disproportionately allocate the benefit of the positive increase.
This is true, but you're completely wrong about which side gets the greater benefit. Most corporations operate on fairly thin profit margins. Consider Verizon, for example. For the last three years, they've had revenues in the $100B ballpark, with profits ranging from $2.4B to $4.8B.
Let's take the high end and say that Verizon's producer surplus runs around 5% on a typical transaction. So what about consumer surplus? What's the most you'd be willing to pay for what Verizon's giving you, if they had no competitors? If, like most people, it's more than 5% greater than what you're actually paying, you're getting the long end of the stick.
In the vast majority of transactions, the consumer gets the lion's share of the surplus.
Such interactions generally flow from faux-voluntary, coerced arrangements that result from a number of factors including:
And then you go on to list a mix of things that involve actual coercion that you don't like and things that involve the absence of the kind of coercion that you do like. And that's the basic problem with your argument: You conflate genuinely coercive transactions with transactions whose terms you simply don't approve of.
On “The Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short Libertarian Life”
I’m pretty sure that if the stupidly hybridized health care delivery system the US currently had were actually rationalized in either the market or the socialized model BOTH would require substantial cost cutting measures to make the costs commensurate with the results.
That's a fair point, Nob. One of the silver linings of Medicare Part D is that it acts as a subsidy to the successful development of marketable drugs.
That said, I think that with single-payer the cuts would be focused far more heavily on pharmaceuticals than they would with a more market-oriented approach. Cutting back benefits is impolitic, obviously, as is cutting back payments to doctors and nurses. But imposing price controls on pharmaceuticals has great optics. People hate drug companies, and they don't understand the price we'll have to pay for cheap drugs. I think Jesse's and M.A.'s comments are fairly representative of how this sort of thing would play with the median voter.
On “Cato Lives!”
They offer considerably more economic regulation than the Republicans, while offering only marginally more social liberty.
Democrats basically play the fortune cookie game with libertarianism.
"
If I’m not an asshole who beats women
When did you stop?
but a large chunk of my supporters are assholes who beat women, I should probably look into why that is.
But this is silly. Goldwater opposed the CRA because it involved a huge infringement on property rights and freedom of association. Racists liked it because they opposed the CRA for other reasons. Should Goldwater have changed his mind because making racists mad is more important than property rights and freedom of association?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.