I'm sorry, not buying it. The act the court found applied, applied to all 'business establishments'. The court essentially found that the club had grown so large, engaged in so many business transactions and had so much turnover in members it was essentially a business establishment rather than a private social club.

Note true private clubs are free to this day to discriminate. Trying to tie this to buying cakes doesn't fly. By definition 'selling cakes' is a business, in contrast to a private non-business entity that may occassionally do things like sell cakes as only tangentally related to its purpose (say for a fund raiser).

That ruling essentially said that given the Rotary Club's size, rate of turnover, and extensive activities it was more public business than private club. OK so then what's the problem?

They are a private club.

Yep

Doesn't matter if it is or isn't, you're not required to have any particular product. You're free to say to the KKK guy you may buy a cake with a burning building and firetruck, you may buy a cake with a big Easter Cross but I don't 'mix' the two decoration styles.

Whose compelling anything? The idea is you are not allowed to discriminate in certain respects if you're running a public business. No one is required to have a public business.

Are cakes with burning crosses part of your normal lineup?

Note discirmination laws are usually limited to a predefined set of characteristics; race, religion, orientation, vetern status. That would mean you're free to put up a sign saying "No Republicans need apply here" while a "No Irish" sign would be a problem. Discriminating based on viewpoint may allow the cake shop to get away with it.

1. Is it unreasonable to have suspected? if you feel very strongly that some marriages are valid and others are invalid and you're in the wedding business certainly you should consider that you may encounter marriages you don't feel good about...even before SSM came along.

2. Discrimination laws addressed a systemic problem but also non-systemic problems. For example, whites have charged discrimination and won. It's certainly not the case that it was ever very common for a white person to have trouble being served because they were white, but discrimination laws applied not just to the more common types of discrimination but also eccentric ones.

So here's the test I propose. Think of the most odious discrimination you can imagine. Would it be ok? If so then allow it.

So imagine the bakery with a big sign "No cakes for Jews" or "No Blacks allowed!". That's not going to fly with me. But imagine someone in an Amish community who only bakes for other Amish members....or a person baking for their friends out of their own kitchen...I'd be good with it.

What if the bakery owner said "I think the Jewish religion is misguided, anything that lends credibility to it just makes it harder for people to find Christ and save their souls. I can't in good conscience bake cakes for Jewish services. Every moment lost puts souls at risk!" I'd say I respect that you have such strong beliefs but YOU pay the cost of them. That means you're going to have to get out of the public bakery business. Let the downtown storefront be occupied by some business that serves everyone.

Let me put forth an absurd case. Google's star programmer converts to Amish. He tells his employer he will continue to work for them, but with the following conditions:

* He will submit code handwritten on paper, he will not actually compose any digital files.

* He will not accept email, Google must print out any email and send it to him as paper correspondence.

* He will not participate in teleconferences, instand message meetings etc. Any meetings held after sundown must be in a room with candle lights.

Google will likely say no. He claims his newfound religious beliefs require him to avoid using computers. Who wins?

Google does. Why? Well what if Google didn't? Google would have to hire admins to retype the guys code, print out emails, work around his 'daylight schedule' etc. In other words, Google's customers and shareholders would pay the cost of his religious beliefs.

Therein lies the key to the matter. Funding your religious beliefs are your problem, not mine. Your Kosher beliefs are so strong that not only won't you eat a cheeseburger, you feel you can't even cook one. Well you're not getting a job at McDonalds. You feel it's immorally immodest to expose your chest. Hooters doesn't have to hire you as a waitress in a burka.

Society can make some special exemptions. For example maybe nurses working in public hospitals don't have to participate in abortions. OK. How about the guy at the electric company? Can he declare he won't work on any grid that has an abortionist as a customer? Again the principle is your belief, your cost, your issue. If you feel it's immoral to work on supplying electricity if any of it is going towards sin, then that's your business. Abide by that if you wish. But at your dime. That may mean you can only be a small-time electrician who hand picks his customers while your less religious counterpart enjoys the option to work for large power companies. Not our problem.

We can say that when accomodation is not a serious cost, say when a business can reasonably accomodate religious requirements (i.e. wearing a small cross that doesn't clash with the uniform, taking Sunday's off when there's plenty of coverage) but that's not a requirement of religious freedom. That's a nice thing, not an entitlement, not something 'owed'.

So I can go either way on the cake. I think if you're a private baker, no storefront, you take on your clients one at a time, you should be able to choose whoever you want. Likewise if your baking is exclusive to a religious venue, again I think you should be able to discriminate based on your customers. But if you're publically operating a storefront, a 'public accomodation' then the answer is no, you don't get to pick your customers anymore than you can open a coffee shop that doesn't serve blacks.

Did they propose to increase your taxes $16,000?  If not it isn't exactly handing anyone 'your tax money' is it?

We are getting sloppy with our terms here.  The economy can be summed up in the equation:

MV = PQ

Basically money times its velocity must equal price times the quantity of things produced.  PQ is the 'real' economy meaning the actual goods and services produced by the economy, MV is the nominal ecnomy measured in money.  "More money chasing fewer goods" can only mean that M has gone up but V and Q cannot go up.  That means P must increase which is inflation.

But if the economy is not at full employment then by definition Q is free to increase.  That would be, in essence, a 'free lunch' in the sense that more money gets printed but prices don't rise and unemployment falls...happy times.  On the fiscal side stimulus is roughly equal to keeping M steady but increasing V.  How is that done?  Gov't is borrowing money that otherwise isn't getting spent (low V) and spending it directly (roads) or putting it in the hands of people who will spend it quickly (unemployment benefits, lower payroll taxes, aid for states, etc.)  Again the fact is if Q is not at its max., then it can increase which means you're moving towards a full employment economy.

The question of 'at whose expense' misses the point.  The expense is born not by becoming fully employed but by NOT being fully employed.  The rest is mere accounting.

OK so we are going to talk about stimulus without really talking about real life stimulus.  And we are going to accomplish what exactly by doing that?

The nice thing about stimulus is that it is NOT economic management.  Sure if you have some worthy projects sitting on the table, go ahead and do them.  For example, take road resurfacing.  Unless you have a road that's going to be put out of commission, you're going to have to resurface it so go ahead and do it now if you're below full employment.

But you don't need to figure this out, if you're below full employment boost up demand.  That's it.  The stimulus package was nice in that it was broad based demand stimulation.  If you were working you got some tax cuts, unemployed got extensions and the poor got food stamps and finally the states got a time out on their budget crunches.  What that demand actually demands, though, is up to the market.  If you're recession is really bad, there's no cost to any demand boost so even digging holes and filling them up is better than nothing.

This makes sense only if you buy into the classical assumption that the economy *must* always be at full employment or if deviations from full employment serve some higher good (for example, to put some Wall Street quants on the unemployment line for a few years until they find their math Phds are better put to use modelling fusion reactions or analyzing cancer clusters).   This assumption, becomes pretty implausible to maintain in the face of an economy wide recession or depression like the one we are in now.  It might be more plausible to apply to the relatively shallow recessions one sees after investment bubble pops like the dot-com crash of the early 2000's.

Distribution issues I can accept.  I don't accept that you can claim benefits are coming at 'anyone's expense' unless you can demonstrate the economy is at full employment (in which case stimulus can be seen to increase inflation and/or real interest rates) or you can point to some plausible method to 'transmit' the cost of the stimulus on to anyone in the economy.  But yes stimulus probably can't be designed to benefit everyone equally.   Naturally the guy who owns a sub shop right next to a big infrastructure project is going to benefit more than the woman running a dance school.  But then recessions don't distribute their hardships evenly throughout the economy either.  In this one there are many people who've barely felt anything while others have lost nearly everything.  Unless you want to put forth some form of idealized socialism, we should do what we can to improve people's lots...esp. if the cost is little or nothing.

Still, the quantity of “net costs” does not subsume any and all questions of costs. Both borrowing and printing money have distributive consequences, in that they benefit some people at the expense of others...

I can agree that there's distributive consequences in that some may benefit more than others, but I disagree you can say its at anyone's 'expense' unless you can identify a clear mechanism that imposes that expense.  There is no inflation being caused by 'money printing', for example, in the last 3 years.  Hence there's no expense...

What price supports on housing?

No its not made up at all, but I'm just going with the hard math.  Look it up.  Most of the stimulus package was tax cuts, income support (food stamps, unemployment extensions etc.) and aid to the states for Medicaid...not building bridges and roads.  Yes that was highly visible since you see road work every day and its easy to put a big orange sign on it in ways you don't see signs on your local hospital, doctor's parks, or people shopping at a store....but the math is the math.

<I>Borrowing or printing money each have costs associated with them.</I>

Actually no they don't, not here.  The only thing that has a cost, a real cost, is wasting time.  The bridge workers sit around not doing anything, the cranes sit rusting in their yards not doing anything.  The bridge, which could provide benefit for years and decades to come, does not come into existence.  The money aspect of the whole affair is just the accounting that the system uses to transmitt these changes and make them intelligeable.

So let's break this in two:

Borrowing -  There is no net cost to society.  Yes the gov't takes on a liability and in the future pays off the bonds it issues with interest.  But in the immediate period workers and capital owners get income equal to the bond that is issued and savers get the asset of the bond.  The total cost is literally zero if the interest rate is zero or at worst whatever the interest cost is.  If the economy is in a true depression that's likely zero or even negative but if its less dramatic than that then all you need to care is that whatever project you're having done has at least a tiny benefit to offset the interest cost you incur.

Printing money - Same deal here.  The 'cost' might be inflation but at the end of the day inflation can only be 'too much money chasing to few goods'.  IF you have unemployed resources then you can add goods, there will be no inflation hence no cost. 

In essence, stimulus is just a response to the signals that the market is sending.  The market is saying "print more money" and "increase spending by borrowing"!  What other way would you read deflation and zero interest rates (or negative real ones)?  So the question isn't what is the cost of responding to the market but what is the cost of NOT responding to the market, the cost of ignoring the market's signals.

Well what does Wal-Mart do?  Does Wal-Mart refrain from opening any stores unless and until it believes it has entirely eliminated any risk of shoplifting by customers or theft by employees?  No it tries to put good controls in place to limit both these things.  If the level starts to increase, though, at some point they may say something like there's no point having a store here because the benefit of the additional sales will get swamped by the cost of the stuff that gets stolen.

At some point corruption in some projects such as getting a bridge built, road resurfaced, or NASA sending a man to Mars may raise the cost so much that the benefit starts to get swamped.  But that in itself has nothing to do with stimulus.  If we can't build a bridge to cross the Hudson river because corrupt construction companies have such a lock on the process that its not worth it to build....well that's a problem but stimulus doesn't create that problem.  It would be just as much a problem in a full employment economy....moreso in fact because the full employment economy lacks the 'free lunch' aspect of the depressed economy.

BTW, what exactly do we do as part of this club?  Will there be a special URL to visit as we explore each section of the book or will the posts be intermingled with other ordinary-gentlemen posts?

Well there is a 'free lunch' in the sense that if you have a lot of people and resources sitting around doing nothing, you can 'do something' (like make lunch) without having to add any other people or capital.

The classical assumption is that the economy is always at full employment.  If you hire some people and some machines to build a bridge, those people would have otherwise been building something else so the cost ends up being whatever that other project you pulled them off would have been.  The <I>transmission mechanism</I> for that is prices in the economy.  Wages for construction workers gets bidded up so maybe other firms scale back some of their projects.  Interest rates for investment goods go up so maybe companies take the cash from those forgone construction projects, put it in savings accounts to banks which lend the money to construction firms that buy cranes and othe rmachines on credit to handle the big gov't contract.    So the question is has the bridge that you just built provided more value to the economy than all those other projects which got cancelled or scalled back? 

But again this assumes recessions are impossible.  They aren't and when you have one you have unemployed resources.  You have construction workers sitting around unemployed, you have businesses that took out loans to buy cranes and other equipment that sits in the yard collecting rust.  Then the bridge is, in fact, a 'free lunch' because the only thing you really, at the end of the day, spend to build it is giving up the 'free time' that those unemployed resources had.

The classical orientated economists respond by arguing because reality doesn't seem to fit their theory, something must be wrong with reality.  Hence you get really strange counter-arguments such as what Paul Krugman derided as the 'Great Vacation' theory.....that unemployment has suddenly spiked up to 9% because workers, for some sudden reason, just decided in 2007 to refuse jobs for a given level of income because they suddenly decided its more fun to spend time at home (usually broke or near broke) rather than collecting a paycheck.

Any organization with a budget,  private or public, almost always ranks its spending in terms of 'risks and opportunities' which means that it is able to quickly add or delete projects as needed if there's a sudden change in money during the year.  The stimulus bill had no serious problem with finding 'shovel ready' projects because only a small fraction of it went to infrastructure.  The bulk of it went to individual's pocketbooks in the form of things like tax cuts, unemployment extensions and so on. 

If you told me tomorrow we were going to triple infrastructure spending (or military spending or NASA spending or science spending) I'd say its a legitimate concern that the organization may not be able to quickly find, bid out and award contracts for that many projects that quickly and as a result the money would either go unspent or waste and corruption would increase as organizations feel pressure to 'just get the budget all spent'.

The 'shovel ready' thing is a red herring.  Very little of the stimulus was targetted spending on 'shovel ready' projects to begin with.  First off, most of the stimulus happens/happened outside of the actual stimulus bill.  these are the 'automatic stabilizers' you learn about in Intro to Macro Economics.  These are things like Medicaid/Medicare spending increasing when the economy goes sour because laid off people start collecting gov't health benefits.  Unemployment insurance.  Welfare, food stamps and even income taxes itself (your income tax spending automatically drops as your income does).  Second even in the stimulus bill, nearly half of it was some types of tax cuts directly to individuals and more than half direct payments to individuals such as extended unemployment, help with COBRA etc.  There's no 'shovel ready' issue there unless you want us to believe that individuals can't figure out what to spend their unemployment check on.  Even on the spending side, a lot of the stimulus was helping state gov't asorb the increase in Medicaid which again is not a 'shovel ready' issue.  

While road work and such is more visible and is kind of the classic textbook illustration of 'stimulus spending', it was actually a very tiny part of it.

Count me in, I started reading this series over a year or so ago and I've been disappointed that it seems so few other people are into it.  Now there's a book club!