J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2132

She Is Called a "Rabbi," David...

Ioz writes:

Who Is IOZ?: Eli! Eli!: Washington D.C. is some kinda weird place.... David Brooks['s]... wide-eyed astonishment at the most basic principles of Jewish thought is actually incredible. Has no one ever taken this guy to shul before?.... A commenter notes, and la wiki confirms, that Brooks is, in fact a Jew. Well, Jew-ish. At this point, I really don't know what to say. This is like a Catholic expressing surprise at the trinity.

Let me second Ioz. It is remarkable--as if somebody got a Ph.D. in physics and then said with wonderment: "You know, you can make light go around corners if you force it through a narrow enough hole!" There is a strong sense of somebody having spent their life simply missing the point of something they were supposed to have understood before puberty...

David Brooks:

The Arduous Community: For the past few years, there has been a strange motif running through my social life. I’d go out with some writers, and they’d start gushing about someone named Erica Brown. “She has an inner light,” one of them once said. I’d be out with my wife and some of her friends, and they, too, would be raving about Erica Brown. “If she taught a course in making toast, I’d take it,” somebody remarked. This Brown woman was leading Torah study groups and teaching adult education classes in Jewish though.... I invited her to coffee, and it all became clear. Brown has what many people are looking for these days. In the first place, she has conviction. For her, Judaism isn’t a punch line or a source of neuroticism; it’s a path to self-confident and superior living. She didn’t seem hostile to the things that make up most coffee-table chatter — status, celebrity, policy, pop culture — she just didn’t show much interest. As one of her students e-mailed me: “Erica embodies Judaism’s stand against idol worship. It is actually true that she worships nothing other than God, which is particularly unusual in Washington.”

Then there is the matter of how she speaks. Somehow (and I’m not going to be able to capture this adequately), she combines extreme empathy with extreme tough-mindedness. In her classes and groups, she tries to create arduous countercultural communities. “We live in a relativistic culture,” she told me. Many people have no firm categories to organize their thinking. They find it hard to give a straight yes or no answer to tough moral questions. When they go in search of answers, they generally find people who offer them comfort and ways to ease their anxiety. Brown tries to do the opposite. Jewish learning, she says, isn’t about achieving tranquility. It’s about the struggle. “I try to make people uncomfortable.”

Brown will sometimes gather her students — who are accomplished adults — and tell them to turn off their cellphones in unison before class. She will have a Late Seat — a chair placed directly next to her for a student who didn’t manage to make it to class on time. She writes about the fear adults bring into the classroom: the fear of looking stupid; the fear of confessing how little they know about their religion; the fear teachers have of being unmasked in front of students. With prodding and love, she tries to exploit those fears and turn them into moments of insufficiency and learning.

Her classes are dialogues structured by ancient texts. She may begin with a topic: “When Jews Do Bad Things” or “Boredom Is So Interesting.” She will present a biblical text or a Talmudic teaching, and mix it with modern quotations. She may ask students to write down some initial reflections, then try to foment a fierce discussion. Brown seems to poke people with concepts that sit uncomfortably with the modern mind-set — submission and sin. She writes about disorienting situations: vengeance, scandal, group shame. During our coffee, she criticized the way some observers bury moral teaching under legal casuistry and the way some moderns try to explain away the unfashionable things the Torah clearly says. She pushes the highly successful. No, serving the poor for a few days a year isn’t enough. Yes, it is necessary to expose a friend’s adultery because his marriage is more important than your friendship.

All of this sounds hard, but Brown thinks as much about her students as her subject matter. “You can’t be Jewish alone” she told me. So learning is a way to create communities and relationships. I concluded that Brown’s impact stems from her ability to undermine the egos of the successful at the same time that she lovingly helps them build better lives. She offers a path out of the tyranny of the perpetually open mind by presenting authoritative traditions and teachings. Most educational institutions emphasize individual advancement. Brown nurtures the community and the group.

It’s interesting that her work happens in the world of adult education. Americans obsess about K-12 education. The country has plenty of religious institutions. But adult education is an orphan, an amorphous space in-between. This is a shame, but it also gives Brown the space to develop her method. This nation is probably full of people who’d be great adult educators, but there are few avenues to bring those teachers into contact with mature and hungry minds. Now you hear about such people by word of mouth.

Liveblogging World War II: December 21, 1940

Eleanor Roosevelt:

December 21, 1940: A short time ago, I talked to a French woman and an American woman who have lately been in Lisbon. They led me to think along the following lines.

There was a time when this country of ours felt strong enough in its devotion to democracy to accept political refugees, just as they accepted the immigration of large groups of people for the economic development of the country. Gradually, as the need for labor has decreased, we have looked over more carefully the people whom we wished to accept, for one reason or another, as future citizens and workers in our nation.

We have not shut ourselves off from accepting all new blood. We know there are people it is worth our while to acquire as citizens of the future, because of their value from the economic standpoint as well as the racial. In the case of people who come to our shores, not for economic reasons but because their ideas, intellectual or political, have clashed with those of the rulers of the country in which they lived, it has also become more complicated.

For one reason, democracy has become more complicated, fewer people understand it. Fewer people really know what they want democracy to mean in their nation. Until we clarify our own minds again, so that there is no question of what the majority of our people want, it is well not to complicate matters by bringing in too many conflicting elements.

However, just as new blood is important from the racial and economic standpoint, new blood is important from the intellectual and political standpoint. We have today a very great opportunity. People who have been known and recognized in the world as great scientists, educators, writers and sociologists are all seeking new homes. It will be short-sighted indeed on our part, if we do not continue the policy which has worked so well in the past— to enrich our own land by inviting into our midst these people who have a contribution to make to civilization.

Worst American Ever Contest: The Nomination of Lawrence Keitt

Dave Noon tells us that:

Happy Secession Day! : Lawyers, Guns & Money: Jamie Malanowski offers one of the great wedding-crasher stories in US history, featuring one of the least remembered Worst Americans Ever.

There was one party, however, that would not be postponed, that of the wedding of John Bouligny, the popular congressman from Louisiana and one of the very few officials from the deep South who opposed secession, to Mary Parker, daughter of Washington’s wealthiest grocer. The bride’s father had produced a magnificent spectacle, filling his large home with roses and lilies and illuminated fountains. The president came, joined by his niece Harriet Lane, and was the first to kiss the bride. It was a happy event in a beautiful setting, reminiscent of so many other happy events and beautiful settings the president had enjoyed in his younger days as a diplomat in Russia and Great Britain. But soon the mood was broken by a commotion instigated by the entrance of Lawrence Keitt, the brash, bombastic, recently resigned congressman of South Carolina. Jumping, bellowing, waving a piece of paper over his head, he shouted “Thank God!’’ again and again. Finally he elaborated. “South Carolina has seceded! Here’s the telegram! I feel like a boy let out of school.’’

And Dave continues:

Lawrence Keitt ranked among the finer B-list Slave Power deacons of his era. When Preston Brooks was clubbing Charles Sumner half to death in early May 1856, it was a liquor-fortified Keitt who — wielding a pistol or a cane of his own, depending on the account — helped prevent anyone from intervening on behalf of the Massachusetts Senator.  After being censured by the House for his role in the assault, Keitt resigned and immediately stood for re-election; two years after being returned to his seat, he initiated a brawl on the House floor when he attacked Pennsylvania congressman Galusha Grow, a former free-soil Democrat who had joined the Republican party at roughly the same moment that Keitt was abetting the attack on Sumner.  When the party of Grow and Sumner elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860s, Keitt joined the congressional fire-eaters and abandoned his office for the second time in five years.  His wife Susanna — also a piece of work — justified her husband’s (and her state’s) disunionism by characterizing the “Black Republicans” as “a motley throng of Sans culottes and Dames de Halles, Infidels and freelovers, interspersed by Bloomer women, fugitive slaves, and amalgamationists.”

Keitt went on to organize the 20th South Carolina Infantry Regiment, which eventually joined Lee at Cold Harbor in late May 1864.  On May 31, Keitt wrote to Susanna, to whom he expressed a wish that she could “see the confidence of our troops,” whom he believed were being “led by the hand of providence.”  Several days later, fused with and placed in charge of another South Carolina unit, Keitt led an ill-advised cavalry charge across an open field near Beulah Church; his men were easily shredded by Union fire while the 1st New York Dragoons brass band serenaded them with renditions of “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia,” with a round of “Dixie” adding to the humiliation.  Keitt himself, badly wounded, was retrieved from the field and hauled on a litter to a crowded farmhouse, where doctors administered whiskey and morphine until he died the next morning.

Things Could Be Worse than Our Senate...

It is hard to believe, but they could be:

In Convention, Saturday July 14, 1787:

Mr. L. MARTIN: called for the question on the whole report, including the parts relating to the origination of money bills, and the equality of votes in the 2d. branch.

Mr. GERRY: wished before the question should be put, that the attention of the House might be turned to the dangers apprehended from Western States. He was for admitting them on liberal terms, but not for putting ourselves into their hands. They will if they acquire power like all men, abuse it. They will oppress commerce, and drain our wealth into the Western Country. To guard agst. these consequences, he thought it necessary to limit the number of new States to be admitted into the Union, in such a manner, that they should never be able to outnumber the Atlantic States. He accordingly moved "that in order to secure the liberties of the States already confederated, the number of Representatives in the 1st. branch, of the States which shall hereafter be established, shall never exceed in number, the Representatives from such of the States as shall accede to this confederation.

Mr. KING: seconded the motion.

Mr. SHERMAN: thought there was no probability that the number of future States would exceed that of the Existing States. If the event should ever happen, it was too remote to be taken into consideration at this time. Besides We are providing for our posterity, for our children & our grand Children, who would be as likely to be citizens of new Western States, as of the old States. On this consideration alone, we ought to make no such discrimination as was proposed by the motion.

Mr. GERRY: If some of our children should remove, others will stay behind, and he thought it incumbent on us to provide for their interests. There was a rage for emigration from the Eastern States to the Western Country, and he did not wish those remaining behind to be at the mercy of the Emigrants. Besides foreigners are resorting to that country, and it is uncertain what turn things may take there.

On the question for agreeing to the Motion of Mr. Gerry, it passed in the negative.

Mas. ay.


Cont. ay.


N.J. no.


Pa. divd.


Del ay.


Md. ay.


Va. no.


N.C. no.


S.C. no.


Geo.no.

The vote was 4-5-1. The motion to guarantee the original thirteen states a permanent majority in the House of Representatives failed by one vote.

Felix Salmon on This Year's Winners--Wallison, Holtz-Eaken, Hennessy, and Thomas--of Stupidest Economists Alive

Felix Salmon:

Beef of the day: [Wallison] is silly: if Wallison had smoking-gun documents proving Frannie’s culpability in the crisis, I’m pretty sure we’d've seen them by now. Nocera and his co-author, Bethany McLean, have done a lot of digging into Frannie, and for the time being I’ll trust Nocera that such documents simply don’t exist.

But Wallison isn’t giving up, and has responded today with a blog post entitled “Joe Nocera’s Hypocritical Attack.” He adduces no hypocrisy in what Nocera writes. But he does repeat that he has a super-secret stash of documents which will back up his case:

The primer that I and three of my Republican colleagues signed sought to outline the major issues that we thought the Commission should address. It was not a reply to or a dissent from the report of the Democratic majority, which is still a work in progress. It was issued on December 15 because that was the date on which, under the law that established the Commission, its report was supposed to be issued, and the primer was released in recognition of this statutory deadline.... In our conversation as he was writing this article, he told me that his reporting “has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac simply followed Wall Street” into buying subprime and other risky loans. I told him this was wrong—that as part of the Commission’s work I have seen internal documents from Fannie and Freddie that show this particular mantra of the left to be a myth. For a reporter, that would have been a signal to hold his fire—a warning that there were facts out there of which he was unaware. I was telling him he should wait and see what I might write in connection with the Commission’s report.

This isn’t even internally consistent. If Wallison wanted to release his report in time for the December 15 deadline, why wait until January, long after that deadline passes, to reveal these facts? More to the point, Nocera has researched the financial crisis in detail—to the point of publishing an entire book about it—and has a job, as a newspaper columnist, where he’s meant to publish his opinions on the causes of the crisis. There’s no way that he should hold off on doing so just because a Republican hack like Wallison hints that he might have new information.

Indeed, Wallison’s language here shows just how weak his smoking gun is likely to prove: note that he talks about “what I might write in connection with the Commission’s report.” The word “might” is weaselly enough; the word “I” is the biggest giveaway, however — since if there really were compelling new information here, “we” would surely be writing it up in the main body of the report, instead of shoving it off into a Wallison-penned addendum.

Still, it’ll be interesting to keep an eye on Wallison’s blog after the FCIC report is published. Maybe then he’ll come clean, and point out exactly what information he thinks will change Nocera’s mind.

Delong Smackdown Watch: Health Care/Jason Kuznicki Edition

Jason writes:

Economic Commands are Different from Political Commands or Taxes: I don’t disagree in the least the Congress is permitted to regulate the health insurance industry. I think it should regulate that industry, that our Constitution permits it, and that Congress even has quite a bit of discretion about which regulations it may constitutionally adopt. What I do disagree with is the claim that health insurance regulation may include a direct command by Congress to individuals to buy a product or service from private providers. This crosses a line that hasn’t been crossed before. Other examples of direct commands to individuals all stem from far more explicit provisions of the Constitution, as for example with the military draft or compliance with the census.

The latter two are also distinguishable from the command to buy health insurance in another way. Both military service and the census are necessary to the functioning of the government.... They are political commands, made necessary by the fact that we have a government of a particular type and wish to keep it....

Commands set dangerous precedents, in ways that prohibitions do not.... [T]here are plenty of restrictions on the government written into the Constitution, but none of them are written from the understanding that the government otherwise has the plenary power to command us directly. The Constitution doesn’t contain restrictions on the power to command citizens — because that’s not a power Congress was supposed to have at all...

Two points:

First: May I say that I don't find a "command" to pay for the medical care I will receive by buying health insurance rather than trying to free-ride and get somebody else to pay for my treatment to be an infringement on my liberty at all, but rather part of the necessary scheme of regulation needed for the market to function well--like the government's "command" that I use honest scales. I am much more worried about the military draft in time of peace: it is not clear to me how congress's power to "raise and support armies" gets generalized to the power to command what Milton Friedman used to call "an army of slaves" absent the most dire and immediate military necessity, which we in this country have never seen since the days of Valley Forge.[1]

I am more worried about the census than I am about the health care individual mandate/tax.

Second: It is not a question of me "favoring" mercantilism. It is a question of whether the Constitution was in its origins a "mercantilist" document--whether Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce was originally thought to be a narrow or a broad one. (This is, I should add, a separate question from what a constitutional provision means to us now: the answer to that question requires that we understand why we have not amended it--and it is clear to me that if we had maintained a narrow reading of the commerce clause power we would have amended it in the 1930s.)

Me? I find my great-great uncle Abbott's argument in the 1931 American Economic Review that classical liberalism and laissez faire as we know it did not emerge and does not predate Nassau Senior and the anti-Corn Law League of the 1820s to be conclusive. And I also find Jefferson's "Embargo Act" in time of peace conclusive evidence as well that Congress's interstate economic regulation power was thought to be very broad.

And do note that the text of the Fifth Amendment strongly suggests that somebody thought that Congress's raw commerce clause power extended to eminent domain without compensation...

[1] Indeed, even Thomas Hobbes thought that his Leviathan's just powers did not extend to a military draft:

[A] man that is commanded as a soldier to fight against his enemy... may nevertheless in many cases refuse, without injustice; as when he substituteth a sufficient soldier in his place: for in this case he deserteth not the service of the Commonwealth. And there is allowance to be made for natural timorousness, not only to women... but also to men of feminine courage. When armies fight, there is on one side, or both, a running away; yet when they do it not out of treachery, but fear, they are not esteemed to do it unjustly, but dishonorably. For the same reason, to avoid battle is not injustice, but cowardice...

except in the case of the most dire necessity:

when the defence of the Commonwealth requireth at once the help of all that are able to bear arms, every one is obliged; because otherwise the institution of the Commonwealth... was in vain...

The Law of One Price Does Not Hold

From Amazon.ca:

From Google Books:

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes Does Not Know How To Do His Job Department

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

A correspondent emails:

Kroft says the states have spent a half trillion more than they took in since the recession began.... [T]he National Income and Product Accounts (Table 3.3) have a line for 'net lending or borrowing (-).' From 2007Q4 to 2010Q3 the total is $344 billion, not $500 billion. Over the same period there is over a trillion in gross investment for state and local governments, much of which ought to be financed by borrowing. The NIPA entry for the gap between revenues and operating expenses sums to minus $49 billion. Kroft is off by a factor of ten.

Kroft acknowledges the recession caused revenues to tank but says this "exposed" bad spending practices and habits. When it comes to putting a number on the disfavored spending, Kroft throws around unfunded liabilities--references to "gold-plated" benefits for retirement, but no numbers. The health benefits of state and local government retirees are entirely "unfunded" and much larger than the pension bill--but the GAO recently found that S&L retirees' health costs over the next fifty years are projected to rise by only 2% of state revenues. But saying that would not soon good on teevee.

Kroft focuses on Meredith Whitney, who claims the state and local municipal-bond market will be the next blow-up. She predicts 50-100 "big defaults" within the next 12 months. Kroft should revisit this prediction when 2011 winds to a close. Little defaults--defaults on debt by local governments on project bonds backed by dedicated revenue streams that the government is not obliged to supplement--do not count, as such are not rare even in boom times...

I Think That Jason Kuznicki Does Not Understand the History...

Jason writes:

What Can’t Congress Do Now?: If the federal government can force you to buy health insurance merely for being alive — on the theory that your inaction, while stubbornly remaining alive, has indirect effects on interstate commerce — then what can’t the federal government force you to do? It’s a question I noted Randy Barnett asking a couple months ago, with some added salience now that a federal judge has ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional. Others have been asking similar questions, including Megan McArdle and Radley Balko. The American left would like very much to find good answers...

It is a simple fact that health care is big commerce today--one out of every six dollars we spend is spent on health care. And it is a simple fact that all commerce these days is interstate commerce--that is the inevitable consequence of the invention of the railroad. This means that congress's enumerated power:

To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States...

is a plenary power to regulate the health care sector. You are going to be paying somebody something for health care during your life. Congress has the power to regulate when, how, to whom, and how much. That is simply what the Constitution says.

Jason Kuznicki wishes that the Constitution says otherwise: he thinks that a constitutional grant of plenary power to regulate--and thus control--all commercial activity that affects interstate commerce produces a government that is much too powerful. It may well be. That is why there have been repeated attempts to read the Fifth Amendment:

nor shall any person be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...

as a protection of private economic property from government regulation rather than as what it is: a declaration that you cannot be executed, imprisoned, or fined by the government save through proper legal procedures (a declaration that now appears to be a dead letter--but that is a topic for another day).

The fact is that the founders were not classical liberals.

They did not believe in the free market.

They were, most of them and most of the time, mercantilists of one form or another--taking for granted that governments had broad powers to regulate economic commerce for the public benefit.

This was brought home to me once when I was on a panel with Richard Epstein, who began talking about the eighteenth-century classical-liberal foundations of America's constitutional order--as if the theorists of laissez-faire had written in the mid-eighteenth rather than the mid-nineteenth century.

They did not.

And because they did not, most of the founders most of the time took it for granted that of course the government could channel the use you made of your property as it wished.

Indeed, even the nineteenth-century theorists of laissez-faire were not, by our lights, theorists of laissez-faire. Consider Frederic Bastiat, who writes things like:

Let's turn the microphone over to Frederic Bastiat:

(1) There is an article in the Constitution which states: "Society assists and encourages the development of labor.... through the establishment by the state, the departments, and the municipalities, of appropriate public works to employ idle hands..." As a temporary measure in a time of crisis, during a severe winter, this intervention on the part of the taxpayer could have good effects... as insurance. It adds nothing to the number of jobs nor to total wages, but it takes labor and wages from ordinary times and doles them out, at a loss it is true, in difficult times...

(2) For a nation, security is the greatest of blessings. If, to acquire it, a hundred thousand men must be mobilized, and a hundred million francs spent, I have nothing to say. It is an enjoyment bought at the price of a sacrifice...

(3) It is quite true that often, nearly always if you will, the government official renders an equivalent service to James Goodfellow. In this case there is... only an exchange... my argument is not in any way concerned with useful functions. I say this: If you wish to create a government office, prove its usefulness.... When James Goodfellow gives a hundred sous to a government official for a really useful service, this is exactly the same as when he gives a hundred sous to a shoemaker for a pair of shoes. It's a case of give-and-take, and the score is even...

(4) [L]ast year I was on the Finance Committee. Each time that one of our colleagues spoke of fixing at a moderate figure the salaries of the President of the Republic, of cabinet ministers, and of ambassadors, he would be told: "For the good of the service, we must surround certain offices with an aura of prestige and dignity. That is the way to attract to them men of merit.... A certain amount of ostentation in the ministerial and diplomatic salons is part of the machinery of constitutional governments, etc., etc..." Whether or not such arguments can be controverted, they certainly deserve serious scrutiny. They are based on the public interest, rightly or wrongly estimated; and, personally, I can make more of a case for them than many of our Catos, moved by a narrow spirit of niggardliness or jealousy...

(5) Should the state subsidize the arts?... [A]rts broaden, elevate, and poetize the soul of a nation; that they draw it away from material preoccupations, giving it a feeling for the beautiful, and thus react favorably on its manners, its customs, its morals, and even on its industry. One can ask where music would be in France without the Théâtre-Italien and the Conservatory; dramatic art without the Théâtre-Français... ask whether, without the centralization and consequently the subsidizing of the fine arts, there would have developed that exquisite taste which is the noble endowment of French labor and sends its products out over the whole world.... To these reasons and many others, whose power I do not contest, one can oppose many no less cogent. There is... a question of distributive justice. Do the rights of the legislator go so far as to allow him to dip into the wages of the artisan in order to supplement the profits of the artist?... I confess that I am one of those who think that the choice... should come from below, not from above, from the citizens, not from the legislator.... Returning to the fine arts, one can, I repeat, allege weighty reasons for and against the system of subsidization... in... this essay, I have no need either to set forth these reasons or to decide between them.... When it is a question of taxes [and subsidies], gentlemen, prove their usefulness by reasons with some foundation, but not with that lamentable assertion: "Public spending keeps the working class alive"...

(6) When a public expenditure is proposed, it must be examined on its own merits... a presumption of economic benefit is never appropriate for expenditures made by way of taxation. Why?... In the first place, justice always suffers from it somewhat. Since James Goodfellow has sweated to earn his hundred-sou piece... he is irritated... that the tax intervenes to take this satisfaction away from him and give it to someone else.... [I]t is up to those who levy the tax to give some good reasons for it.... If the state says to him: "I shall take a hundred sous from you to pay the policemen who relieve you of the necessity for guarding your own security, to pave the street you traverse every day, to pay the magistrate who sees to it that your property and your liberty are respected, to feed the soldier who defends our frontiers," James Goodfellow will pay without saying a word...

(7) Another species of spoilation is commercial fraud, a term which seems to me too limited... [when restricted to] the tradesman who changes his weights and measures... [it should also apply to] the physician who receives a fee for evil counsel, the lawyer who promotes litigation, etc...

So Frederic Bastiat is in favor of:

Stimulative expansionary fiscal policy to fight depressions,
large public expenditures for national security,
government provision of services that government can provide as cheaply and effectively as the private sector,
high salaries for public officials to attract workers of talent and energy and also to boost the prestige and dignity of the government,
subsidies for the arts to the extent that public subsidies properly elevate taste and aesthetic values,
public provision of police, justice, defense, transportation, and other infrastructure,
public regulations of professional practice a la the FDA in order to avoid "spoilation" by doctors and pharmaceutical companies that receive "a fee for evil counsel."

Let us be very clear: The key for Frederic Bastiat is whether Jacques Bonhomme receives good value in the government expenditures that are financed by his taxes and for the results of the mandates the governmetn imposes on him.

Bastiat does not care whether or not Jacques Bonhomme is "coerced" when he is taxed to pay for public schools, public roads, public theatres, government-run courts, government-paid police officers, government armies.

He cares about whether the goods and services that the government provides are valuable ones, whether receives good value for his private purchases--and if not whether and how government "coercion" can get him better value.

And a government that has the power to regulate the economy whenever and however doing so will promote the general welfare is indeed a government that can, in economic matters, pretty much command that you do anything. And that is the default position of even the most liberal of eighteenth and nineteenth century thinkers...

This Is Disturbing...

Metafilter claims that I was the first person to write: "The cossacks work for the czar."

Surely not?