The Liberal Order

What happens when the chicken hawks guard the henhouse without discipline.

The Post's Charles Lane has an interesting story of how AFSCME lobbied for, and won, passage of the "Correctional Officer's Bill of Rights," which greatly hindered disciplining rogue corrections officers. The results were not unpredictable.   

Advertised as much-needed procedural protection against unfair accusations of brutality, COBR established elaborate rules — including a guaranteed appeal hearing in front of a three-member board of fellow officers — for correctional officers suspected of wrongdoing. The bill says that prison managers can’t even “threaten” prosecution, transfer, dismissal or disciplinary action during questioning.

It passed the House of Delegates unanimously and the Senate 44 to 2. Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signed it into law on May 4, 2010.

In the union’s view, prison administrators had “pulled the trigger too quickly” on discipline in the past, as AFSCME spokesman Jeff Pittman put it.

But according to an FBI special agent’s affidavit attached to the Baltimore indictment, COBR has all but disarmed managers at the Baltimore jail. Discipline “has proven to be very difficult,” the agent wrote, and “the internal review process set up by COBR is ineffective as a deterrent to [correctional officers] smuggling contraband or getting sexually involved with BGF gang members.”

 

A Johnston County teen brings a gun to school . . . so what's next?

Here are a few reasons why someone may have a gun on campus:

1. They intentionally want to murder innocent students, teachers, and staff
2. They want to protect themself from an immediate threat, which then threatens innocent bystanders
3. They forgot to keep it at home after a weekend of hunting

The problem is that ex-ante we cannot know the intent or the reason why the person bringing the gun to school did so, therefore make possessing a gun on school property a per se violation punishable by expulsion or at least a long suspension. If we cannot know the intent of the gun toter before any shots are fired, then punish a gun toter for the simple act of brining a gun to school.

Now, in the case of David Cole Withrow of Johnston County, North Carolina, he realized that he had accidently brought the gun to school with him after a weekend of hunting and immediately went to school officials to inform them of his mistake and to ask their permission to take it home.

Mr. Withrow appears to be a clean-cut kid, and Johnston County is certainly known for hunting, with all those Jim-Bobs and Skeeters living in the woods over yonder, so having a hunting rifle in your vehicle is not out of the oridinary. Maybe reason should have prevailed and the school official grant him permission to take the gun home, with a warning that the next time will be treated as a violation of the gun policy. But no, school officials immediately called the police, Withrow was suspended, and he is currently being told that he will not graduate with his classmates.

If you want kids who accidentally bring guns to school to never reveal their error, and in fact to possibly compound the problem by hiding the gun on their person or in an unsecured place where someone with evil intent can get to it, proceed to harshly punish Mr. Withrow and make sure that reason will never prevail when a bright and otherwise cooperative student attempts to rectify a mistake.

Oh, whatever happened to the good ol' days.

What about the jobs?

Stephen Colbert interviews libertarian and Reason.com's editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie on efforts to legalize marijuana use. At about the 3:50 mark Colbert comments (yes, in jest):

If we stop making it illegal, what happens to our private prison industry? Because those prisons are filled with pot users and those are good incarceration jobs.

Enough to make a good Keynesian proud.

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Jon Stewart Responds to Bill O'Reilly

I once attended a talk given by Richard Pipes. During the Q&A afterward, someone spent about five minutes going on a rant about how private property was immoral and that all things belong to God, so it's even sinful to say that my yard is mine and not accessible to any one of God's creatures who wants to use it.

Pipes sat there patiently listening to this member of the audience have his say and then ask how he responds to this argument. Pipes politely and respectfully answered the questioner (I thought beautifully and using real world examples of the human atrocities that resulted under political systems where property was collectively owned.), not once raising his voice or getting defensive. It was a lesson in how a master responds to criticism of his work. 

I often get frustrated listening to Jon Stewart for his one-sided remarks and sometime petty attacks, but I give him credit for the way he handled Bill O'Reilly in this clip. It reminds me of Richard Pipes and offers a great lesson on listening and mirroring back what your critic is arguing as a way of making your own point.

  

We might soon be saying goodbye to catching a fly ball at a baseball game.

At least if Bud wins his case.

Bud Rountree was at a Boise Hawks game in 2008 when a foul ball smacked him in the face. He had left his seat and was talking to someone, according to reports, when he heard the crowd cheer, turned back toward the field and got plunked. The resulting injury eventually cost him his eye.

Rountree then sued the Hawks, a Single-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs. Five years later, after various appeals, it turns out his case will go to a jury. Twelve people — not "The Baseball Rule"— will decide whether the team was negligent in Rountree's injury.

Ultimately, the Idaho Supreme Court wrote in its ruling, "[E]ven though the court may have the power to adopt a rule, such as the Baseball Rule ... we find no compelling public policy requiring us to do so." 

All right, so there are certain things that are such a big part of the game that by participating you assume liability for harm caused to you by someone else who is acting as part of the game. By purchasing a ticket to a baseball game—in which part of the enjoyment is catching a foul or homerun ball if you are lucky enough to have one come your way—you assume the liability of being hit by a ball or bat. You have to be vigilant and watch for those things because you know they happen. The same is true of driving near a golf course or driving range, or living on a golf course. It's true for baseball players who get spiked by a player sliding into second attempting to take the defensive player out. And it's true for most things in life. We cannot eradicate all potential harms without significantly changing how we enjoy something, so while participating you have to take the necessary precautions to protect yourself.

This does not mean that the offender has free reign to act negligently, but that if they are acting within the normal expected behavior of the game, you assume the liability for harms you experience as a participant or a spectator of that game. If you don't want the liability, don't participate or watch.  

How will baseball react if Bud is successful in his suit? By substantially changing the experience of the game. This may be necessary—it may be long overdue—but the game will change substantially. 

Imagine what would happen if "The Baseball Rule" fell out of favor. Would stadiums and team owners move fans away from the action? Or play games in a glass bubble, separating players from fans? Would fans start suing for other, less serious injuries? Or even the mental anguish of a line drive whizzing past their face? Yes, these are purposely extreme scenarios, but make no mistake, the fear of litigation could be a paralyzing precedent.

A more realistic scenario is separating the stands from the field with netting that prevents flyballs from leaving the field of play. For many, that's part of the enjoyment of going to the game.

Cutting law school requirements? Are you serious?

Colleges are realizing that many students are just not realizing the value of spending tens of thousands on undergraduate and professional studies. Law schools are now catching on.

Maybe instead of just cutting the third year, law schools should simply adopt what many dental schools adopted years ago, which is two years of undergrad and then three years of dental school. Better yet, for law schools, two years of undegrad and two years of law school. 

Accounting CPA requirements, you're next.

Beware of doctors and hospitals!

Of errors that may have led to patient deaths, 18 occurred in ICUs and 92 in non-ICU areas of the hospital. In ICUs and non-ICUs, errors of omission — failing to give a patient the medication — were most common. Harmful errors most often involved devices such as intravenous lines and mistakes in calculating medication dosages.

Story here, but that's not the disturbing part. This is:

“And the patient and/or their family is immediately informed when an error occurs barely two percent of the time, despite literature supporting full disclosure and their desire to be promptly informed,” Latif said.

A Woman vs. Her HOA

It's easy to read a story like this and jump to the conclusion that another overzealous HOA is abusing its power and legal authority. Unfortunately, too many HOA leaders meet Hayek's theory of why the worst get on top and are run by overzealous tyrants with a penchant for control. Still, as we learn in both Public Choice and Law & Economics, rules are necessary to restrain certain behavior to promote more efficient outcomes.

Gloria Daniel received a city permit to build the two-story staircase at the back of her Karlbrook Lane home in the Stowecroft neighborhood off Buffaloe Road. But she didn't follow the subdivision's covenants, which required her to get approval from the HOA first.

The Stowecroft Owners Association Inc. sent Daniel letter after letter telling her to tear the staircase down. She refused, saying she spent thousands of dollars on it.

"They say they're going to fine me $100 every day, and if I don't pay, they're going to foreclose on my home," she said recently. "When they say 'foreclosure,' I was so sad. These people are going to foreclose on my home just for building some steps."

Even though the city governmet where she lived approved her design, it does not subvert the authority of the HOA to limit what Ms. Daniel does to her home. Prior to buying and moving into her home, Ms. Daniel voluntarily agreed to restict her behavior (i.e., she won't paint the home pink and kelly green, nor will she put appliances in her yard or cars on blocks in the driveway, and she won't alter the outside of her home or yard without approval from the homeowner's association) in consideration of her neighbors agreeing to restrict their behavior by not doing the same. In doing so, the neighborhood maintains higher property values.

But now when it comes time to build what Ms. Daniel wants, she cannot just ignore the agreement that she and all other homeowners signed. The other neighbors supposedly maintained the agreement that they signed, now Ms. Daniel must do the same.

In addition, although HOAs sometime act like formal governments in that they collect association dues, establish rules and enforce them, they are not formal governments. One important difference is that an HOA cannot selectively enforce its rules like a formal government can.  (Notice that cops don't have to pull over everyone who is speeding in order to issue you a speeding ticket.) Years ago all the neighbors in my cul-de-sac purchased the exact same model storm door for our front doors. All of our doors matched and the colors of our storm doors matched the color of our existing doors. Nevertheless, we all received citations telling us that we had to go through the formal approval process or remove the doors.

I found this insulting and stupid, but was informed by a nearby neighbor on the Architectural Review Board that if they ignore the changes that we made to our doors, they have to ignore changes made by other people to their doors, changes that may not maintain the relatively same appearance to our existing doors that our storm doors did. (I did subsequently convince the ARB to establish guidelines that restrict the style and color of a storm door, but that allows homeowners to install a storm door without having to go through the formal review process.)

So later in life, after you purchase your first home and recieve a letter by your HOA telling you that your structure does not comply with their rules, remember that a) you can always buy a home outside of an HOA (though fewer and fewer are being built outside HOAs), and b) your HOA agreement is like an ex-ante constitution to which you voluntarily agreed to abide. It's a failure on your part if you ignore what you agreed to do and not do, not the failure on the part of the HOA.  

Why Women Earn Less Than Men

The best strategy for negotiating, either as a buyer or as a seller, is being willing to walk away from a deal. But being willing to walk away from a deal also means being able to walk away from a deal.

For example, if you are negotiating the purchase of a new car and are indifferent between the one about which you are negotiating and another or others, you have bargaining leverage since you can walk. If you're dead set on that car, be willing to pay a premium.

The same applies to the seller. If the seller of the car has more than one prospective buyer, she has leverage since she can walk away. If there are no other potential buyers, she better begin accepting lower offers.

In yesterday's New York Times, Jessica Bennet explains a primary reason for why women earn less than men.

For years, legislators and women’s advocates have been seeking solutions. In many ways, the wage gap is a complicated problem tied to culture, tradition and politics. But one part of it can be traced to a simple fact: many women just don’t negotiate, or are penalized if they do. In fact, they are one-quarter as likely as men to do so, according to statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. So rather than wax academic about the issue, couldn’t we simply teach women some negotiation skills?

So one remedy for the wage gap is simply to teach women how to be better negotiators.

At Mount St. Vincent, the Smart Start workshop is broken into sections: understanding the wage gap, learning one’s worth on the market, and practical negotiation, in which students use role-playing in job-offer situations.

Women learn never to name a salary figure first, and to provide a range, not a number, if they’re pressed about it. They are coached not to offer up a figure from their last job, unless explicitly asked. The use of terms like “initial offer” — it’s not final! — is pounded into them. And, perhaps most important, they learn never, ever, to say yes to an offer immediately.

“I can’t tell you how many times I hear stories of women who go into a negotiation saying, ‘Oh my gosh, thank you so much, I’ll take it!’” says Ms. Houle, noting that one student she coached even hugged her boss. “Here these women are, more educated than ever, incurring incredible debt to get that education, and they’re going to take whatever they’re offered. It’s like, ‘No, no, no!’ “

This, along with other reasons, explains much of the gender wage inequality we observe in this country. But there are still other reasons that lead to women earning less than men, none of them having anything to do with discrimination against females. 

First, for women who do work—and this has increased considerably since the 1950s—they have typically been the secondary income earners for their families. This means that a wife has a more inelastic supply curve for her labor services relative to her working husband. This exacerbates the problem of women being poor negotiators. For example, a married man may seek a new job and, since moving anywhere is usually an option for him while searching, he has many companies from around the U.S., and even the world, bidding for his services. Once he chooses a job and moves his family to that location, the wife is now limited in her job search to that geographical location. She has fewer companies competing for her services relative to her husband. 

Second, and very important, women are gender-typed from a young age into adopting roles and skills that are not necessarily desired in labor markets. I explain this here. It is also demonstrated in a different way by these commercials. What this does is encourage women into self-selecting careers that typically pay less than careers where risk-taking and discovery and innovation are desired.

The solution is not to impose more legislation, which simply makes it less attractive for firms to hire women, especially the least skilled women. Instead, we must do a better job of socializing females, from a very young age, into adopting roles that have high labor market potential. 

Evolutionary Social Order and the Polarization of Our Political System

In the first instance, it is probably true that in general the higher the education and intelligence of individuals becomes, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values. It is a corollary of this that if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and ‘common’ instincts and tastes prevail.

 F. A. Hayek. The Road to Serfdom. London, 1944: page 102

There is a lot of talk that over the past decades we in the U.S. have become more polarized politically. For example, Kevin Drum makes that argument here, and Edward Luce does so here. And you can read through a whole lot more here.

I don't buy the argument that we're becoming more polarized; we've always been polarized. It's just now we disagree greatly along different margins and principles. For example, here is historian Richard Rehn discussing the election of 1800: 

"While the Federalist press accused the Republicans of being 'filthy Jacobins' and 'monsters of sedition,' the Republican press denounced the Federalists for being 'Tory monarchists' and 'British-loving aristocrats' and the president for being 'a mock Monarch' who was 'blind, bald, toothless, querulous' and 'a ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind.' By the late 1790s both President John Adams and Vice-President Thomas Jefferson came to believe that they had become the victims, in Adams's words, of 'the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fish-woman scurrility, and the most palpable lies' that had ever been leveled against any public official."

The issues over which they were discussing might seem a bit trite now, but the tone was as vitriolic then as we perceive our tone to be today. What's changed is that our preferences and ideals differ from that of 1800. So in a sense we perceive it as more vitriolic today, but I doubt it.

Our disagreements today might not enjoy as wide a consensus as in times past, but that's not because we're less willing to cooperate and compromise today relative to times past. What's happening is that today we have new preferences and ideals over which we are arguing, and as Hayek noted in the quote above, these differences today are of a higher order and are therefore likely to find less agreement.

After millennia of argument and debate, humankind came to agree a lot on the most basic of social laws that we accept as "natural" today — "[We] shall not steal," and "[We] shall not murder," we better appreciate and understand the importance of property rights. But that only occurred over time, and as we've further evolved socially, new issues arise and our wants and preferences further evolve. What they fought over in, say, 1800 is largely settled and we're now debating along different margins. The divergence of ideals and opinions today may seem greater than in times past, but those arguments back then were likely just as vicious. It's just that today we've come to accept the outcomes of those previous debates and are now debating new issues.

And this is such an important thing to keep in mind when discussing any social order. At no time did someone rationally construct the rules and institutions needed for a peaceful and prosperous social order. Such rules and institutions evolved over time and emerged out of vicious debate, much like what we in this country are experiencing today. The debates have high stakes, but maybe not so much today as in times past; I don't know. What we do know is that societies that choose well go on to secure largely peaceful and prosperous orders, while those that don't languish in poverty and strife and disorder. So far, those living in the developed world benefit from people in the past choosing well. People living in the latter never evolved to accept the basic rules and institutions to which those living in the developed and advancing countries already adhere and largely take for granted.