Category: moral hazard

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Accountability general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

A Good Tragedy Not Wasted

Amtrak train derailed, Seattle, I-5, infrastructure, Donald Trump

No matter how “not as bad as we feared” President Donald Trump may be appearing, as we close out the year let’s remember why some of us did not trust him in the first place: his knee-jerk reactions are too often witlessly statist.

The speeding Amtrak train that derailed over I-5 in Washington State on Monday was a horror show, sure. And we have come to expect the President — any President, either party, all administrations — to provide words of comfort after such events. Trump conformed to expectations.

And, admittedly, his initial Tweet was all very proper. But his verbal response was . . . very . . . Old School. After mentioning the federal government’s role in handling the tragedy — “monitoring” and “coordinating with local authorities” — he used the event as an excuse to expound upon the idea that the event provides “all the more reason why we must start immediately fixing the infrastructure of the United States.”

This is bad, old-fashioned policy opportunism. The worst time to cook up “solutions” is right after a tragedy. That’s when emotions are highest and reason is lowest.

More importantly, the train was going through its initial run over newly upgraded infrastructure!

One could more reasonably surmise that the recent infrastructure upgrade was the cause of the derailment — though, let us be honest, it looks like the train was way above the stretch’s speed limit.

Note to Donald Trump: just because there’s a microphone in front of you doesn’t mean you are required to “make a point.” That’s not the President’s job.

Mister, we could use a man like . . . Calvin Coolidge again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling folly general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Leave Them Kids Alone

education, school, panic, hysteria, play, gun, toy, private, competition

This just in: oblivious little boys still play cops and robbers.

Just as in days of old.

Wait. Hold on. Breathe. Just breathe. This sociological fact doesn’t mean that we’re a nation of incipient international terrorists but for the galumphing grace of grumpy zero-tolerant schoolmasters.

Common sense says you don’t suspend toddlers from school for wiggling their fingers as if wielding a gun, or for sculpting a “gun” out of a slice of Wonder Bread or Freihofer’s. Yet evidence continues to mount that all too many teachers and administrators are immune to considerations of reasonableness when it comes to kids who misbehave. (Or “misbehave.”)

Such enemies of childhood innocence must be hindered. So let’s give two and a half cheers to Ohio lawmaker Peggy Lehner, who proposes to legislate an end in her state to suspending children in the third grade or younger who aren’t threatening anybody. (I’m not sure why kids in grades later than third can’t catch the same break.)

A new, probably imperfect government regulation is not the only way to counter blunderbuss government-school policies. The most fundamental alternative is the free market.

Ideally, no public-school monopoly plagued by mandatory insane rules would exist. Ideally, all K-12 (and university) educational offerings would be provided by an unregulated market economy, making it much easier for families to drop insane schools and patronize sane ones. The pressures of market competition would encourage school officials to become students of common sense.

We are not there yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

The Online Manipulation of Democracy

Google, search results, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, bias, influence, tampering, election, democracy

There exist many sneaky ways to get other people to do what you want, voluntarily — effectively blurring the line between legitimate persuasion and fraud.

When large, almost unavoidable private companies apply those techniques to targeted groups of voters, that blur might look something very much like election fraud.

Harvard psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein has been studying hidden online persuasion techniques. Interviewed by Tom Woods last Friday, the doctor explained several sub rosa persuasion techniques, especially the fascinating Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), which he says has been replicated in studies by other researchers. 

SEME, he argues, is a “genuinely new” way to manipulate masses of people — without them realizing it.

And it sports “one of the largest effects ever to be discovered in the behavioral sciences.” Google, it turns out, can influence voter and consumer behavior merely by ordering search results in specific ways. Going into his first study, he suspected he might discover a 2 percent influence on voter behavior. He got 48 percent, instead.

There is more: not only can Google do this, the behemoth does do this — Epstein has documented that Google did it in the last election. 

Supporting, or to the benefit of, Hillary Clinton.

Understandably, Epstein scoffs at the “fake news” panic as something insubstantial in comparison. The potential impact of this online manipulation dwarfs the allegations of Russian influence.

I wonder: Did Mrs. Clinton know that her very special high-tech friends were pressing their very big thumbs onto the scale of democracy?

It seems a very old tech — the Electoral College — effectively counteracted the manipulation.

This time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom government transparency ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

No Joking Matter

encryption, freedom, Chen Sho Uli, China, Chinese, Orwell, repression

He thought he was just horsing around.

Using the popular app WeChat, a Chinese construction worker supervisor Chen Sho Uli made a gossipy joke about government officials while chatting in a chat group. But being too casual about what you say — and where — can be dangerous in China. For his sin Chen was incarcerated for several days.

“Picking quarrels” is another no-no in the country.

In lieu of Orwell’s telescreen in every room, modern Internet technology enables repressive governments to punish citizens for thoughtcrime that becomes app-speech crime. If the Chinese government can spy on you, it will. And penalize you for remarks it deems offensive to the dignity of the state.

Because of such repression, blogger Stephen Green observes that “strong encryption is everybody’s friend — except the tyrant’s.”

Agreed. Encryption is an important line of defense.

But some societies require this more than others, because harmless, incidental communications are not equally attacked by government, from country to country. Which means that encryption is actually a second line of defense.

The first is a cultural and political tradition respecting individual rights.

For one thing, robust encryption helps only those who engage in hyper-careful private discourse, or hyper-careful anonymous public discourse. Encryption won’t help thinkers of controversial thoughts who wish to express those thoughts publicly and under their own name. Everywhere we can, then, we must strengthen both the technological and cultural defenses of open discourse — recognizing that the latter is the more crucial and fundamental.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism responsibility

The Common School Agenda

Evergreen, students, protest, Heying, Weinstein

The rise of campus radicalism, write Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein in the “Washington Examiner, appears to “validate every fantasy the Right ever had about the Left.”*

Heying and Weinstein, who have resigned their positions at Washington State’s public liberal arts college, Evergreen, detail what went wrong at the college they “loved.”

A sociologist was hired as college president, and he systematically bred an activist movement reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. That’s how our two extremely popular professors found themselves defending free speech and non-compliance against angry crowds of students spurred on by college administrators and “equity” officers.

Heying and Weinstein plausibly assert that these protests arise directly from the “‘equity and inclusion’ movement, cloaked in words that sound benevolent and honorable” but serve as little more than “a bludgeon.” And definitely “not like protests many readers will remember from their own college days.”

But are they really that surprising?

Government-run and -funded education hit these United States in a big way with the 19th century’s Common School movement. And not primarily to ensure “proper education.” The rationale was political . . . to more-than-nudge immigrant children to assimilate to our republican way of life.

The political element from our schools never left — and became more Left with each and every “revolution” in educational methods, and each increase in government involvement.

So, does training students to become violent mob activists bent on suppressing ideas they don’t approve of seem out of place?

It certainly is expensive. In more than one way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* And note that this piece did not appear in the left-of-center Washington Post — echoing the hesitance the mainstream and leftstream press have shown towards Bret Weinstein’s story in the first place.

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Accountability folly general freedom local leaders media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Another Election “Against”

Doug Jones, Alabama, Roy Moore, election

As I write, Democratic candidate Doug Jones has just taken the stage to declare himself the winner of the Alabama Senate race, the one in which Roy Moore became more infamous than famous, and better known for the worst kind of reasons.

The final counts are not in, and I suppose there could be a turnaround at the last moment, but it doesn’t look like it. It looks like Republicans lost the seat. Hillary Clinton is already crowing that this is a sign of more Democratic victories to come.

Maybe.

Too soon to tell.

Meanwhile, what to make of it all? Jones has declared that “This entire race has been about dignity and respect. This campaign has been about the rule of law.” And I am not certain that is a good description. It seemed to me what the campaign turned into was a referendum on whether voting for a man accused of sexual assault and statutory rape was a good idea.

There were also Republicans thankful that Moore lost. “Decency wins” is what Senator Jeff Flake tweeted; “Suck it, Bannon,” is Meghan McCain’s eloquent taunt. (Steve Bannon had backed Moore.) Reason’s Scott Shackford probably put it best, writing that “Polls have closed in Alabama as voters there decide between controversial former judge Roy Moore and … um … not Roy Moore.”

The modern American political process is now firmly a matter of reiterating this pattern: voting against more than for.

A horrible development? Well, there sure is a lot more to be against in American politics, than for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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