Saturday, September 7, 2013

Rogue Carrots


(Note:  This site this article was originally posted on is now defunct, so I felt need to reproduce it here.  Maybe I'll move it again later.)
At dinner last night, I noticed a stray carrot on top of the butter dish lid.  When I inquired as to its provenance, I was informed that it had rolled onto the floor.  The horror!  This carrot was not only a stray, but a rogue—dare I say a feral?—carrot!  This led to an intense discussion about the dangers that may be foisted on our family and the general public by feral carrots.  Not only are they unsightly, causing immense environmental damage to our carpets, but they pose a direct threat to any human life that may step on them and slip.  They also serve as a food source for other unwanted pests that spread disease, or they may grow mold that will release spores and make us sick.  It was resolved that Something must be done about this grave threat.
Rouge carrots have been an increasing threat in many parts of the country and state.  You probably haven’t noticed them, but they’re there.  How many rogue carrots can you spot in this picture?
Here’s another angle, a little closer:
They’re everywhere. 
Imagine all the damage they could do!
Some of them are quite grotesque, 



Luckily, it’s legal to shoot these guys on sight.


In order to eliminate the threat from rogue carrots, we decided that Daucus carota (which is not even native to North America) would no longer be allowed in the house.  (This doesn’t affect carrots that are actually living and reproducing in the wild, but we have to Do Something.)  Of course, we do not wish to discourage the consumption of the beta-carotene-rich Daucus sativus, so we felt the need to establish guidelines in telling the difference.

Daucus carota comes in many different shapes and sizes.  We will distinguish between the wild Daucus carota (or any offspring or genetic variation thereof) and the domesticated carrot by phenotype, or in other words its physical characteristics.

Roots: Daucus carota may exibit hairy roots.
Point coloration: Daucus carota may exhibit “points” or be darker colored along the ‘shoulder’.
Color: Daucus carota exibits a number of color combinations, ranging from pale yellow or white to dark purple.
Appearance: Daucus carota may have a long, slender body; or be short and squat.
Seeds: Daucus carota seeds may be ridged or wrinkled, with or without bristled coverings.  Hybrid seeds may or may not display any of these characteristics.  
Tops:  Daucus carota may have long, feathery, or ruffled leaves, or appear without any leaves.
Other characteristics that may be identified by the scientific community.
  
Update:
We informed our son (who plants everything:  he has avocado pits on the window sill, maple tree sprouts in cans on the porch, and cannot throw away an apple core without saving the seeds) that the growing of feral or wild carrots (as determined by phenotype, above) is no longer allowed in the house and he would have to remove the carrots from the windowsill or face severe punishment.  In order to be in compliance, it was determined that the bag of baby carrots in the fridge also had to be disposed of, even though it was remarked that they seemed to be secure in their bag and no one had ever seen a carrot escape from such an enclosure
 We were forced to shoot the baby carrots for the greater good.  Here is a shot of the carnage.
Most of the baby carrots were obliterated by the nine millimeter rounds, but you can see what is left of them, lying next to their mother whom we also dispatched.

Everyone satisfied?  After all, the only proper place for a carrot is on a state-approved monoculture factory farm, grown only from seeds that have been approved by the government (and their corporate sponsors).

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Civil Obedience


(Note:  throughout this posting I use the word “law” meaning “legislation”.  I acknowledge the term is wrong and that “law” has a much higher meaning that may or may not agree with legislative, judicial, or bureaucratic regulation, but in this instance I use it in the much lower sense of any legislation, regulation, or rule.)

I just read an article by Michael Munger, “The Thing Itself” in which he tells a story of an overzealous cop harassing a citizen who was breaking a stupid law.  Munger’s point (or my take-away, at least) was that the making of new laws for every conceivable case of unfairness or social rudeness is the problem.  The cop was doing her job, what she was hired to do.  She wasn’t hired to decide which laws were good or which of the people who broke those laws deserved punishment.  Her job was to arrest everyone who broke any law.  The problem is not the cop, it’s the law.  More specifically, the problem is the idea that a law can “rid the world of injustice, nuisance or inconvenience.”

Munger is right.  A law that police or other regulators have discretion in enforcing means that they will enforce the law when they want to:  someone they don’t like because of color or religion or politics or personality will be subject to laws that people the enforcer does like will not be subject to.

Several libertarian friends have been advocating changing our system through ignoring the law.  These civil disobedience advocates give examples like police who don’t believe in arresting people for “victimless crimes”, or “jury nullification” where juries refuse to convict, or “smoke-ins” because if we band together police can’t possibly arrest everyone.  I agree with their point that laws need to change, but a de facto change without a corresponding, or at least following, change in law will lead to tyranny.  I don’t like it. 

I’d like to suggest an alternative to civil disobedience.  I’ll call it “civil obedience”.  I submit that a strict adherence to the letter of the law can be a great way to get bad laws changed. 

My father-in-law, John, provides excellent examples of obeying a law in order to get it changed.  There used to be an anti-poaching law in Michigan prohibiting possessing meat out of season.  Individuals were allowed to keep venison for thirty days after hunting season ended.  After that, possession was a crime unless the hunter went down to the local DNR office and asked for a permit to keep the meat for an additional thirty days.  These permits were endlessly renewable for thirty days at a time.  This law was an unenforced regulation on the books for who-knows-how-long until some officer needed a pretext to arrest someone.  John asked all his buddies if they had ever heard of this law and most hadn’t.  “What does it matter?  They never enforce it.”  John decided to do something about it.  Hunting season ended January 1, so he organized his buddies to go stand in line at the end of January at the local DNR office and apply for the permit to keep their venison.  They went back at the end of February, March, etc., and made such a nuisance of themselves at the DNR, whose employees had never heard of this form and didn’t want to spend one day a month doing nothing but approving meat permits, that within a year the legislature had repealed the law.

John came by his philosophy as a prison guard.  It was a decent job: hard work, good pay.  Shortly after he started there were problems with riots, and guards were killed.  John and a buddy attended every one of the hearings that explored what went wrong and who was at fault in the deaths of his coworkers.  The result was a list of prison regulations that were extant on the books but had not been enforced in memory.  “Why didn’t the officers do this, and this, and this, according to regulation?”  The real answer was that no one ever followed those regulations and things normally went along just fine, but the fact that the officer died while not obeying regulations gave administration an out; it wasn’t their fault for prison conditions, or for being understaffed; there were regulations that hadn’t been followed.  John decided he was never going to be on the wrong side of the line.  He was going to obey every single regulation and policy, no matter how ridiculous, because they were never going to be able to pin the blame on him.

A regulation came down from above that handcuffs were not allowed to be hung on the outside of the belt where prisoners could grab them; guards could put them in their pockets or buy a case for them.  John thought that required equipment like handcuff cases should be provided by the employer, but management told him they didn't have to because he could keep them in his pocket.  So he did.  Most coworkers tried putting handcuffs in their pockets, but the hard handcuffs caused blisters through the thin cloth of pants pockets and most soon hung them back on their belt or bought their own cases or stopped carrying them.  Not John.  He was told to put his handcuffs in his pocket, so he did.  He got blisters.  Regulations said that all workplace injuries had to be reported to the prison doctor for documentation.  At the end of every shift, John stubbornly reported to the prison doctor to have his blisters looked at.  After the doc cleared him, he clocked out and went home.  After a month in which he received overtime every single day while waiting for Doc to document his “workplace injuries”, the prison issued $3 handcuff cases to every guard.

I will admit that civil obedience has limited application in repealing most laws, but there are a few cases that are directly analogous.  Take campus carry laws.  Michigan disallows CPL holders from carrying into classrooms or dorm rooms (or stadiums), but allows someone walking through campus to carry a gun.  Students at the local university are not allowed to possess anything on campus capable of firing a projectile of any kind, including nerf guns, water pistols, slingshots, bows, or physics demonstrations.  So, visitors can be armed, but not students?  Hunting is very popular in the area and students are allowed to bring legal guns to school with them but must check them in at the Public Safety office and are not allowed to bring them on campus.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could get ten or twenty concealed pistol license holders (or any legal gun owners—open carry is legal in Michigan, just not common) on each campus to bring their guns to school with them every day, check them into Public Safety, go to class, and then check them out again?  Once it became commonplace to check the guns in and out the scariness factor would go down, and universities would get tired of hiring extra personnel for the check-in procedure.

Another way that enforcement changes the law is through the court system.  Relying on judges to use the constitution to overturn bad legislation is an iffy business, but it is how we got Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and Lawrence v. Texas. 

Back to Munger’s story about the overzealous cop, I submit that if every cop was that vehement in his or her duty that there would soon be a large public outcry to get rid of the stupid laws that the public had hired the cops to enforce in the first place.

Or maybe not.  The US already has a higher incarceration rate than any civilized or semi-civilized (or uncivilized—it takes a lot of civilization to be rich enough to incarcerate that many people) nation and no one seems to mind yet.  But if we enforced drug laws against white college students as harshly as we do against stereotyped black inner-city gang members, the public might notice more.


Thursday, September 13, 2012

Euvoluntary Exchange


I participated in a webinar by Mike Munger yesterday.  He spoke on “euvoluntary exchange”.  It was very interesting.

The concept is pretty basic in economics that voluntary trade creates wealth because all parties in a trade would not have participated unless they expected to be made better off than before they started.  Any trade that actually occurs must then make all parties better off, absent mistakes or regret. 

Munger formalizes the concept of voluntary exchanges by stipulating five rules.  First, the items to be exchanged must be subject to some form of ownership and second, this ownership must be transferable.  He stipulates in a voluntary transaction not only that there must be no force or coercion compelling the sale, but that all parties are satisfied after-the-fact and that there are no uncompensated externalities to third parties.  All trades that satisfy these five criteria of a voluntary transaction make all parties to the trade better off than they otherwise would be. 

The question is, why are there so many voluntary transactions that are stigmatized or even outlawed?  Why do people want to stifle wealth creation?  Munger posits a sixth, intuitive deontological, rule for “good”, or “eu”voluntary exchanges: that neither party be “coerced” by circumstances into accepting the deal.  He used the concept of the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA), to explain why people feel that otherwise voluntary exchanges are looked upon as exploitative. 

I’ll give an example of a lawyer.  A lawyer may have many clients and many cases at any one time.  Losing any one case is unlikely to bankrupt him.  The client, on the other hand, may invest a significant part of his net worth in hopes of winning one particular case and would be devastated by having to start over with a new lawyer.  In this circumstance, the lawyer’s BATNA (or result of losing the deal) may be having to buy a Mercedes instead of a Lexus, but having time for an extra round of golf.  The client’s BATNA may be bankruptcy and/or jail time.  This wild disparity in BATNA’s reflects the state of the underlying reality.  We can see that the lawyer has a negotiating advantage and we hate him because it looks unfair. 

Munger’s point is that life is unfair.  Non-euvoluntary trades, as unfair as they may look, can still be just because, when they are voluntary, they make life less unfair. 

We, as humans, seem to have an instinctive revulsion towards non-euvoluntary transactions.  We want life to be fair.  We can believe that the evil capitalists exploit workers; and the poorer and more in need of employment the worker is, the more we hate the man who hires him.  The “moral smugness” that lets us hate the employer in lieu of the difficult circumstances that make the worker need the employment so desperately can only hurt the worker.  When we punish the employer for “exploiting” the workers, we are condemning the workers to remain in poverty.  Preventing non-euvoluntary exchanges hurts the worst-off.

So, how can we overcome this moral smugness in order to help people?  There’s always charity, but charity is less efficient than the market (wrong incentives).  The more voluntary exchange we allow, the more euvoluntary trade will become possible because the poorest and most needy will have more options.


Good luck convincing policy makers of this.