Bob Hayes Online

Weapon systems are, in the end, about one of two things:

1) Creating a capability for your side, or extending a capability that already exists;

or

2) Removing or degrading a capability that the other side has.

It is possible for a weapon system to fill multiple slots in this capabilities analysis; submarines, for example, create a capability of sudden surprise strikes, while also degrading the enemy’s capability to send surface shipping without military escort. 

We can currently remove any dictator in the world by invading his country, marching to and encircling his capitol, and smashing his military to flinders - then it’s just a matter of finding the spider hole.  However, this form of combat is very intensive in terms of logistical deployments, in terms of straining alliances and diplomatic relations with other countries, in terms of time expended, and in terms of human lives lost.  If the only goal of the war in Iraq had been to capture or kill Saddam Hussein, we could have done that - but it would have cost a couple hundred American and who knows how many thousand Iraqi lives.

Bunker-busters create a powerful capability for US forces.  They will permit us to remove enemy leadership - bypassing his conventional military - without having to engage in ground combat.  They permit us to strike rapidly, without a costly and vulnerable military build-up.  They permit us to strike unilaterally, without begging the permission of neighboring countries to use their territory for staging.

They also remove a powerful enemy capability, albeit not one that is purely military.  Right now, tyrants like North Korean’s Kim Jong Il have the ability to hide behind their civilians.  We could eliminate him in a week, after the necessary deployments; the cost would be horrific.  Five or six South Korean or Japanese cities A-bombed during the lengthy buildup, thousands of American and South Korean soldiers killed in huge battles - it would not be pretty.  It wouldn’t be pretty to drop a bunker-buster on him, either, but it would be a lot better for Seoul and Tokyo.

More important than the use of such a weapon is the credible threat of its use.  Right now, Kim Jong Il knows that we cannot remove him without unacceptably high collateral casualties, and so his diplomatic position is accordingly intransigent.  With buster-bunkers in our arsenal, however, and a President who has shown that he will not flinch from military action, Kim’s ability to bluster and stonewall are massively reduced. 

In short, nuclear buster-bunker bombs add powerful capabilities to our arsenal, and greatly degrade the ability of our enemies to defy us.  There is no reason not to avidly pursue their development.

This is a big and messy issue for many people (it’s small and clear-cut only for a few on either side). Proponents of homogamy are right when they say that the rational arguments against gay marriage are lame. That’s largely because this is not a primarily rational debate. It’s an emotional discussion largely (but not entirely) centered on the question of whether American society is going to normalize homosexuality, or whether it will merely be tolerated. (Happily, the kill-them-all contingent, while it exists, is out of the debate.)

Marriage is a shorthand for normalization. State recognition of marriages is a shorthand for social acceptance thereof. I think that part of the intolerance for the anti-marriage position stems from people’s membership in communities where homosexuality is already normalized and already socially accepted; people living in liberal urban centers don’t seen that there any costs imposed on Iowa by adopting the values of New York, because those costs have already been paid where they live. (Kind of like millionaires lecturing Wal-Mart clerks about the importance of putting aside 30% of their paycheck for retirement.)

The argument for the civil right of marriage, as being indisputably obvious, fails. It fails because (most of) the people advancing it acknowledge that the state may limit marriages for other reasons (age, consanguinity); they merely wish to move the goalposts to put “gender” in the irrelevant column. That then is not an indisputably obvious civil rights claim that everyone has the right to marry anyone; it’s one that has to be mediated and decided by society.

Which then moves us to the question of who should make this determination. Should it be the voters directly, their legislative representatives, the state governments, the federal legislature, the media, Ralph Nader, the judiciary, or what? That’s what the FMA was really about; it’s one side’s argument that the state judiciary should not be allowed to make this decision, born out of fear that they are about to (probably true, as far as I can see.)

I would prefer to see the judiciary bow out. Gay marriage is something that should come to pass, if it comes to pass, because a significant and permanent majority of people want it to happen, and go to the trouble of pressuring their legislatures to enact it.

Otherwise it will turn out to be abortion all over again - judicial fiat overriding democratic debate, and creating a permanently festering wound in the body politic. Since it is clear that the judiciary will NOT bow out, then I favor tying their hands. The FMA was a bad idea, because it took power away from the states; jurisdiction stripping leaves power in the state legislatures (and the populace, in states with the referendum) while cutting the courts out of the equation.

Jails and prisons are largely useless, and most should be closed.

There are two things we can do with someone who violates social norms by committing crimes. If the crimes are sufficiently vile that society can never re-accept the individual, then the individual has to go away. That can be death or life imprisonment or exile. In any case, there is no need for rehabilitation; society is rejecting and expelling the person, not trying to fix them. If we decide not to kill these people (I can’t imagine why we would make that decision, but apparently other people feel differently), then we will need to keep some prisons around to warehouse them until they die of natural causes.

Those folks are a fairly small minority of all criminals, of course. For the people whose crimes are of a lesser magnitude, we want to do five things. First, we want to provide a disincentive for that particular individual to engage in the same act. Secondly, we want to deter other people who may think that engaging in that act is a rational course of action. Third, we want to be as fair as possible in measuring the severity of the punishment to the severity of the crime. Fourth, we want to rehabilitate the offender - to convince them to change the course of their life. Fifth, we want to satisfy the sense of justice of the community so that they continue to buy in to the social order we have established. If they don’t feel justice is done, they will withdraw their support for the instrumentalities of justice and simply take care of business themselves. That’s not an entirely undesirable outcome (direct democracy!) but we have collectively decided that it’s better to have cops and courts than lynch mobs.

Prison is not entirely worthless at these tasks, but it is not very good at them. It often fails the first two tests - it is not a strong disincentive or deterrent. Being in prison isn’t fun and games but it is often not much worse than the offender’s basic milieu. When you live in purgatory, a trip to Hell isn’t something you tremble at. Prison almost always fails the fairness test. Prison rape, gang violence, all the rest of it - these things make the actual prison experience brutally unfair. You go in for burglary and you get sodomized daily for three years and you emerge a broken shell; you go in for mass murder and your gang buddies lionize you and you emerge meaner and more antisocial than you entered.

Prison utterly fails the rehabilitative test; there are plenty of individual exceptions but in general a coerced, violent and thuggish environment is the worst possible background for education or counseling. About the only thing prison does even slightly well is the sense of justice; “he’s rotting in that hellhole and that’s where he should be” is satisfying to enough people to maintain support for the system.

So the prison system is not very good overall at its job for the non-expelled-from-society felons. What could we replace it with?

I would suggest the whipping post and the lash. Consider: direct physical pain is a profound disincentive for most people, soccer moms and gang-bangers alike; living in a rundown slum is no vaccine against getting the hell beat out of you. Seeing your friends come off the post weeping is a lot more of a deterrence than seeing them strut out of jail with new gang contacts and three squares. It would be much fairer and much easier to fine-tune punishments to crimes; three stripes is three stripes, and you aren’t going to be buggered as part of the bargain. The lash would satisfy the sense of justice of the community at least as well as jail.

It provides no direct rehabilitation, of course - but it does trigger the very powerful and natural human tendency to avoid behavior which is known to generate direct pain. If the tree-huggers insist, we could use the money freed up by closing most of the jails on rehabilitation centers which the offender would be free to use after their punishment - centers that would lack coercive mechanisms and would have to rely on actually convincing people to change to get results.

Summary: prison fails every test of its utility except for one. The lash passes every test except for one, and moving to the lash frees up resources that could be used to make genuine rehabilitation available to people who could live free, productive lives with a little help.

Bring back the lash! Its time has come again.

Should colleges offer a service guarantee for the product they provide?  Most schools offer no particular guarantee or service warranty for the educational services they provide. If this were to change, it could increase school enrollments by reducing the perceived risk of first-time college entrants, thus increasing their willingness to give college a try.

Although a service guarantee for a university education may seem novel, higher education is profoundly suitable for such a guarantee. Service marketers use the following criteria for appropriateness of a service guarantee:

1) The price for the service is high. Almost all higher education is expensive in both absolute and relative terms, particularly when books, supplies, and the opportunity cost of lost time spent in a classroom are factored in.

2) The negative impact of unsolved problems is high. A negative experience in a class can result in having to take the class over again (doubling the original purchase price), a perceived need to change majors (incurring great costs to the individual as formerly-valid prerequisite classes become useless), and even a perceived need to drop out of or change school (transaction costs for the consumer, major impacts on the school).

3) The customer’s ego is on the line. A negative experience with a class in a university setting is often perceived by the customer as being the result of their stupidity or their mistakes. While this may be true in some instances, providing a solution that ameliorates this perception would be highly valuable.

4) Buyer resistance is high. This is not always the case. Many students are highly motivated to attend school and have little or no resistance. However, there are a number of marginal consumers who could be persuaded to attend college, and their resistance is fairly high. A service guarantee could lower that resistance and bring in many additional students.

5) Customer expertise with the service is low. Some students have attended other schools before transferring to a new school, but for many students, college is a one-stop experience - they go to one school and that’s that.

6) The industry has a bad image for service quality. The higher education industry as a whole has a growing negative reputation – diploma mill, “they just want your money”, etc.

7) The company depends on frequent customer purchases. All colleges rely on a high retention rate; they expect and plan for students to return semester after semester.

The company’s business is affected deeply by word of mouth. While schools vary in the amount of out-of-state and Internet recruiting they do, it is inevitable that prospective students will place a high value on first-hand reports from former or current students.

How should such a guarantee be structured?

Although it is tempting to offer a guarantee on the basis of content or knowledge, such a guarantee would be very difficult to objectively define. One person might believe the knowledge they gained in a particular class to be useless hokum, while another might find it highly useful. Such considerations would also be deeply personal; for example, I am learning nothing new in my intro finance course, while other members of the class are struggling to absorb all the new material. This isn’t because I’m such a genius, it’s because I’ve been exposed to this material before and other students haven’t.  A content-based guarantee could not be unconditional and would be difficult to understand and communicate.

I believe a more productive approach would be to offer a credit refund at the individual class level. A student who was dissatisfied with a particular class could, for any reason, request a credit. The class would remain on their transcript but would not apply towards their degree program. The amount of the tuition and fees for that class would be applied towards the next semester as a credit, so there would be no cash outlay to the university. A student would be limited to, say, three credit hours worth of refund per year of full-time attendance to reduce the potential for abuse.

This policy would be unconditional, within the broad limit of three credit hours per year. It would be easy to understand and communicate to students, as part of the ordinary communication as to policies and procedures that occurs every year. It is meaningful – when a student is unhappy with a class, they know that they can won’t have to pay for it. It produces an incentive to the service provider, in that professors who regularly have students applying for refunds are likely to be examined closely by the appropriate dean. It is easy to invoke – just fill out a form online or in the registrar’s office. It is easy to collect, since the university just creates a credit for the student on the next term’s bill.

I think such a guarantee could go a long way towards moving today’s inefficient schools towards a more market-driven, customer-satisfying approach.

A lot of people seem to get really worked up about the fact that young people don’t vote.

I’m not worked up.  I’m glad.

Hypothetical situation: Every single eligible person votes.

Now change it: the individual voter who has the fewest years of experience with the political system, the least life experience, the least experience with exercising responsibility, the fewest years of education, and the fewest years of work experience, decides not to show up.

Does the decision that gets made improve in quality, or decrease in quality?

Now generalize to broad social groups of ignorant, inexperienced, irresponsible and uneducated people. They decide en masse not to show up. Better decision? Or worse?

Personally I hold it as highly encouraging that large numbers of younger voters refrain from inflicting their politics on the nation. I went to college with the Future of Our Nation ™.  Bright kids.  Nicer bunch of young people you’ll never find.  Some of them were really very wise - a lot wiser than I was, mumblety mumble years ago when I was a first-time undergraduate instead of a third-time undergraduate.

But as a group, I wouldn’t trust them with a puppy, much less the nation.

If the Constitution grants some broad, overarching, powerful “you can marry who you please” right, then it does so across the board. Polygamists, people who want to marry their siblings, all the rest of it. You can maybe carve out an exception for categorization based on age - but there is no way to have a broad right that doesn’t encompass pretty much all the grownups - whether or not that makes life difficult for legislatures and tax professionals, whether or not the relationship being solemnified offends the moral principles of the community.

If, on the other hand, the Constitution only provides a narrow right - “the following specific categories of people can marry, and nobody else” - then it’s perfectly legitimate to pick and choose which categories of people have the right. White people can marry, but not interracial couples. No gays allowed. Christian virgins between the ages of 18 and 34 - whatever the Constitution specifies. And if the courts find that the Constitution actually includes some new narrow group (gay couples, for example), then fine, they’re on the list.

Here’s the problem. The Constitution doesn’t do EITHER of those things. It doesn’t create a broad right for everyone to marry who they want, and it doesn’t create a narrow right for only certain privileged groups. It’s silent on the question - it’s left to the legislature.

That’s the problem I have when folks like DBB say “ooh, yay, the Constitution says there’s a right to marry!” The Constitution says no such thing, and when you ask where it says that, there’s no answer. It’s simply a court privileging its own narrow, provincial view over the narrow, provincial view of the legislature.

If there is a RIGHT to gay marriage (somehow, magically, implicitly in the text), then there is equally a right to polygamous marriage, equally a right to (consensually) incestuous marriage, and so forth. If there is a RIGHT to marriage in there, somewhere, then it applies to everyone - Mike and Mark, Jim and Jane and Jerry and Jen, EVERYONE.

You can construe, with enough intellectual lubricant, a universalist right to marriage, which of course includes gay people. What you can’t have is a universalist right to marriage which includes gay people but somehow conveniently excludes all the other categories of people who would also like state solemnification of their unions.

I think that libertarians are 100% right on governance issues.  It would be WONDERFUL if we had a libertarian population and a libertarian state, running around enforcing contracts between private individuals, killing terrorists and communists, upholding laws against force and fraud to let the markets work optimally, and otherwise butting out of American life.  It would be so great, I would consider it my own version of earthly utopia.

But it isn’t going to happen. It’s so far from happening that it isn’t even funny.

Accepting that, and comprehending it, what should be my course of action?  My first choice - libertarian world - isn’t on the table. That being the case, to what end should I place my own political energy? Well, it seems to me, I should place my political energy towards ensuring that the meddling state at least meddle in ways that I find congenial. I’d rather have a non-meddling state, but if the majority of my fellow citizens won’t accept a non-meddling state, then I want the state to meddle on my behalf and in a way reflective of my own values.

My second choice, in other words, is to work for a conservative world where my preferences have the force of law.

That being the case, it is irrational for me to care about federalism, or civil rights, or the Constitution, other than as tools to get what I want. Those things are oriented towards the libertarian world, where we are all, or most of us, committed to limiting the power of the state. I can’t get that, so I want the power of the state to be my slave. My political opponents don’t care about federalism et al, other than as a tool to implement THEIR desire to have the power of the state as a slave; they’re on the right track.

I want to roll around in big piles of money confiscated from people whose political opinions I find distasteful; there will be a $1,000,000 tax on each liberal expression of opinion by Hollywood stars, paid directly to me. I want my religious values enshrined as the law of the land. I want the countries whose existence I disapprove of to be reduced to smoking ash with an American flag planted in the ruins of their capital. I want the state to massively subsidize art and entertainment I find palatable, and ban art and entertainment I find disgusting. I want government agents to jail people whose familial choices I find incorrect, confiscate their property, and give it to me.

That’s my second choice. My first choice, frankly, would be better for everyone - people who believe differently than I do could go about their business unmolested by the state, the government would bow out of cultural considerations and let us each find our own path, people could form whatever kind of families they wanted too, free of the intefering nose of the busybody state. Apparently other people insist on having a powerful state, however, and if we’re going to have a powerful state, I want it to act in my interest, not in the interest of other people.

Am I wrong?

There is a psychological quirk that we seem to have as a species that has implications for how we relate to our governments.

When people get a service or a product from a business, they are generally aware that the business is not helping them out of kindness.  Most of us have a pretty good grasp of the concept that the people at Nordstrom’s treat us better than the people at Sears, and that we’re paying for the difference (as well as everything else).  You get what you pay for; sometimes you get less than you pay for, but you very rarely get more.

When it comes to government, we don’t seem to have that wired in as well.  We think of benefits or services that the government gives us as being entitlements; I’m entitled to this payment, or this tax credit, or this service.  It’s just something that happens, out of the ether.  This is true of everyone, rich and poor, young and old.  Welfare moms and businessmen receiving fat subsidies, people driving on the well-maintained roads or stopping at the “free” clinic - there is, at best, only an intellectual understanding that this largesse flows from us paying money for it.  Usually there isn’t even that much awareness - it’s the “government” paying for it.

Of course, this causes a number of problems.  For one thing, it creates conflict.  We are somewhat better able to understand the nature of the transaction when we aren’t benefiting directly and we all have a tendency to want to shut down the subsidies flowing to other people; darn those welfare moms/fatcat agribusinesses/overpaid bureaucrats.

More importantly, however, it creates a false dichotomy in how we think about our resources.  We think of things the government provides as being “free”, whereas things we have to provide for ourselves cost money.  I don’t need to allocate resources to paying for the roads; someone else has that covered.  I don’t need to save for retirement; the government is going to take care of that for me.  This causes us to incorrectly allocate resources on the personal level, and it also causes a perfectly natural desire to move more things to the “free” column.  If the government is paying for it, I don’t have to!

As a result of this natural process, we end up with larger and larger government.  Libertarians have proposed a number of approaches for reversing this trend, but nothing seems to work.  I have an idea that I think would turn the tide quite handily:

Restrict the voting franchise to people whose households do not receive any substantial direct payments from government.

In the military, or a dependent of same?  No vote for you.  Schoolteacher at a public school?  Sorry.  Welfare recipient?  Nope.  Retiree?  Back to the shuffleboard court, non-voter.  Employee or stockholder of a company getting federal jobs?  Go on back to your cubicle.  I lose my franchise, of course - I’m a college student getting aid AND my spouse gets a military retirement payment.

There would be some fiddling, of course, mainly around the question of what constitutes “substantial”.  Is having one share of stock in Halliburton going to disqualify you?  If you have a contract with the local schools to do $100 of work, is that the end of your franchise?  I don’t know.  The political process is the place to hammer out those questions, I think.

Some people will protest that this restriction would end up disqualifying huge numbers of people.  That’s true - it would.  However, that disqualification would not long persist.  The relatively small number of people actually paying their own freight would very quickly vote to reduce the number of federal contracts, the number of public schoolteachers (replacing them with private schools, of course), and the size and scope of government contract work.  As these government expenditures convert back into the private sector, the people formerly disenfranchised by their association with the government would be reinstated to the voter rolls.  The economy would explode, as bloated and inefficient government work is transferred steadily to the dynamic private sector.

Save America - give up your vote.

Many conservatives are innately suspicious of any body wielding worldwide authority. (US military hyperpower is theoretically equally suspect, but since other countries COULD balance us, they just choose not to spend the money, it isn’t such a big deal.)

The problem with worldwide authority is that it loses the constraint of people being able to opt out. If the US becomes a Mormon theocracy, you can move to Mexico. If California goes communist, my in-laws can come to Colorado. If Modesto goes Nazi, they can go to Stockton. When power is local, people can opt out of that power, and that very fact tends to curb abuse of authority - the Temple Police will continue to be powerless outside of Salt Lake City, California can’t afford to go Communist because all the taxpayers will move, and Modesto is too busy creating photogenic sex crimes so they can get on the news to bother with the goosestepping and the bookburning mmmGLAVin.

Whereas if the UN has real power, and chooses to abuse it - where you gonna go? Mars is too cold. That’s one major reason why we hate the UN. The fact that it is a haven for thugs and kleptocrats and has committed more evil than good in its history is relevant, but not the key issue.

Liberals often think of the UN as representing the peoples of the world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t - it represents the GOVERNMENTS of the world. And most governments, most of the time, suck. It’s frankly amazing that the UN hasn’t sucked more.

Is it acceptable for Christian Scientists (for example) to deny their children life-giving medications?

I think it is.  We don’t force Amish people to have telephones to summon LifeFlight helicopters, and people die as a result of that, including children.  Is that reasonable of the Amish?

I would argue it is.  The Amish have decided to live a certain way, a way that happens to foreclose using certain kinds of technology.  That way of life is different than the choices that other people would make.  However, our freedom to choose is predicated on extending that right to other people.  Christian Scientists have also decided to live in a certain way, a way that forecloses certain other kinds of technology.

A reasonable interlocutor might ask, “what if you have a religion that prescribes some objectionable behavior, like beating your child with ropes every day?”  Should the government ban that kind of thing?  I think it should.

Prohibiting certain actions may infringe on people’s rights, which is sometimes necessary for the state to do.  It is a big leap from prohibiting negative actions to compelling positive ones.  Prohibiting actions is authoritarianism; compelling actions is totalitarianism.  I prefer not to have either, but I recognize that authoritarianism is sometimes required of the state.  Military defense and civil order are not maintained by state actors making polite requests.

I think part of the intellectual discomfort many of us have with allowing people the freedom to choose their own actions when we know those actions will have bad consequences comes from the visible and discrete nature of the suffering.  If a Christian Scientists denies her son penicillin and he dies, we see that right away.  We say “this act led to this death; I object!”

But, for example, millions of parents underemphasize the importance of good nutrition to their children, and as a result, there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of premature deaths later in life.  People are acting irresponsibly and there is a terrible toll, but it isn’t obviously the result of the irresponsibility; it’s distant in time and space.  We might get irked when you see a mother giving her baby Froot Loops instead of fruit, but we don’t say “she should be compelled to act the way I think sensible and proper!”

Indeed, if George Bush were to come out and say that the Federal government was planning to compel all parents to give their children fresh fruit each day, and teach them a certain set of defensive driving techniques, and make them brush their teeth twice daily, and exercise for thirty minutes every afternoon, I imagine that many people who object to Christian Scientists’ medical beliefs would think it the biggest fascist plot since Iran-Contra.

And yet, the sufferering and death caused by bad parenting in the areas of nutrition, safety, hygiene and exercise is at least a thousandfold greater than the suffering and death caused by the occasional religious nut who doesn’t approve of sulfa drugs.  It’s just that the religious nut is a little more obvious and a little more direct in their bad effect.

Freedom is not a costless good.  Letting people run their own lives means that quite often they will do a bad job of it.  That’s something that libertarians, and liberal societies in general, just have to accept as part of the cost of doing business.