voluntaryXchange

Some Stats About Gun Violence In the U.S.

Kevin D. Williamson:

The United States has a homicide rate …  which is much higher than that of most Western European or Anglosphere countries …

Of course, it’s well-known that the U.S. has had higher homicide rates for centuries. Even so:

… the relationship between gun regulation and homicide is by no means straightforward: Gun-loving Switzerland has a lower rate of homicide than do more tightly regulated countries such as the United Kingdom and Sweden. Cuba, being a police state, has very strict gun laws, but it has a higher homicide rate than does the United States … 

But still, guns lead to deaths, right:

We hear a lot about “gun deaths” in the United States, but we hear less often the fact that the great majority of those deaths are suicides — more than two-thirds of them.

You know what’s a popular way to commit suicide in western Europe? Overdosing on acetaminophen. Thus, reasonable comparisons of gun death would include some information about other forms of unnatural death. E-mail me when you find that legacy media article comparing gun deaths to Tylenol deaths.

And we worry about money running everything in D.C. Hardly:

… perhaps you have heard that the National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful and feared lobbies on Capitol Hill. What you probably have not heard is that it is nowhere near the top of the list of Washington money-movers. In terms of campaign contributions, the NRA is not in the top five or top ten or top 100: It is No. 228.

For my part, a real sign of innumeracy is the inability to recognize the problematic scale of the numbers in Washington: we worry about lobbyists spending millions to influence votes on decisions about thousands of millions. Worrying about this demonstrates your functional innumeracy.

Read the whole thing in National Review Online.

Via Newmark’s Door.

Full Disclosure: I don’t own a gun. I fired them a few times in Boy Scouts. I’m not an NRA member, although I enjoy using the free stickers they send us once in a while. And … oh year … I’m not sure I believe in pressure cooker control either, but the argument for that is just as reasonable as that for gun control.

Technorati Tags: gun,violence,control,innumeracy

Taxing Internet Transactions Is Schizophrenic

I use schizophrenic metaphorically, as an adjective: we should recognize that the desire to tax internet transactions is bizarre behavior that should be corrected.

True schizophrenia has many features. For this metaphorical use I want to focus on just one: reversing the ordering of concepts of primary and secondary importance. We’re (metaphorically) schizophrenic about government finance because our priorities are backwards.

When we make purchases, why and what we buy are primary, while who and where and how are secondary.

For example, assume that no one would (reasonably) argue that buying broccoli is worse for you than buying Fritos. That's primary. How you pay for those is secondary, and shouldn't trump the primary decision: you're not better off with the Fritos because you paid cash for them while you charged the broccoli.

Yet this is exactly what we do when we think about government: we completely avoid the primary question of whether its spending is good or bad, and focus on the secondary choice of whether we finance that purchase out of tax revenue or bond sales.

(Now I'll digress and note that I'd prefer a consumption tax to an income tax, and so I'd be fine if they were going to delete some income tax to replace it with a tax on internet purchases. But, of course, that's not what they're doing.)

So if this goes through, it's a victory for bean-counting moralizers — who think they can improve the quality of government purchases by funding them with tax revenue — and a loss for people who do this funny thing called thinking.

Technorati Tags: internet,sales,tax,schizophrenic

Pithy Quotes from Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin thinks Benghazi was a bad sign. Me too, but in an unstimulating article I found two quotes I liked.

Here’s some antimetabole On Hilary:

… possibly the next president, comprehend this. Her record-air-mile tenure as secretary of state, in which restless ambition was the cause of unambitious restlessness, brought one of the most confused approaches to the international system ever foisted upon the long suffering Republic, unless you think donating Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood was Napoleonic genius. [emphasis added]

On the busy-bodiness of the Obama administrations military endeavors:

History and the present tell us unambiguously that we require vast reserves of strength used judiciously, sparingly where possible, overwhelmingly when appropriate, precisely, quickly, and effectively. Now we have vanishing and insufficient strength used injudiciously, promiscuously, slowly, and ineffectively.

Read the whole thing, entitled "Benghazi's Portent and the Decline of U.S. Military Strength" in the April 10 issue of The Wall Street Journal.

Technorati Tags: mark,helprin,quotes,benghazi,hilary,clinton,obama

Print a Gun, the Whole Gun, and …

The first (more or less) complete 3-D gun has been printed. That’s right: printed out of plastic with a rapid prototyper (aka 3D printer).

N.B. The gun contains a metal firing pin, only because the law says all guns must have some metal in them to be legal.

N.B. The gun hasn’t been publically tested yet.

Some of the issues this will raise were discussed here at vX about 8 months ago.

What do you want to bet that society has done essentially zero to address any of them, while technology moves forward and obviates them.

UPDATE: So the gun was tested, the plans were uploaded, 100K people downloaded them in the U.S., the plans are now on servers hosted outside the U.S. and have had about a million downloads … and then the government objected. Do we need more evidence that bureaucrats are controlling reactionaries? This bit of news has been brewing for months … so if you believe banning this is a good idea, the government has just proved they’re willing to provide you with the appearance of doing something rather than the reality. I hope you find that satisfying.

Technorati Tags: plastic,gun,printed,3D

Obama Is Having His Cake and Eating It and Having It and Eating It and Having It

The Obama administration bemoans the cuts made by the sequester.

Time to put on our thinking caps. These are the facts about the process in May 2013:

• Presidents propose budgets.
• Congress passes, and the President signs, budgets that are often larger (and always different) than what the President proposes.
• The sequester of 2013 went into effect in March. It was based on the continuation of the 2012 budget, because …
• Obama didn’t propose his budget until April, and …
• As if May 5, 2013, Congress has yet to pass a budget for 2013.

Which leads to this awesome little turn of events: there are some programs that are receiving higher funding after the sequestration of their budgets than Obama has proposed.

That’s right:

• He’s actively complaining about budget cuts, that
• Were passively imposed due to past budget rules,
• Originally proposed by the Obama administration in summer 2011, while
• Actively proposing bigger budget cuts, that are irrelevant because
• The office of President is fairly passive in the process.

This is like “having your cake and eating too” (if the meaning is unclear, read the second paragraph here).

Except that it’s having your cake, and eating it, and having it, and eating it, and having it too.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Technorati Tags: obama,sequester,budget

No Peer Review?

Kevin Grier, writing at Cherokee Gothic brings up a huge point: none of the the three Rogoff/Reinhart papers that have been in the news the last month were peer-reviewed.

By now, the whole sad Rogoff & Reinhart story is well-known and well-hashed. But there’s one important point that I don’t see many people making.

There are three RR papers on debt and growth. Their NBER working paper, their American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings paper of the same name, and their Journal of Economic Perspectives paper that adds Vince Reinhart as a third author.

What do all these have in common that has been neglected?

NONE OF THEM ARE PEER-REVIEWED!

I am not making this up.

While the American Economic Review is the flagship journal of our profession, the annual papers and proceedings issue, is made up of very short pieces that do not undergo peer review. Rogoff has this piece listed on his webpage simply as AER, which is very un-needed bit of resume padding.

Similarly, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, is a publication designed to provide popular presentations of research questions. On its webpage it states, “Articles appearing in the journal are normally solicited by the editors and associate editors.”

And, NBER working papers are not peer reviewed at all.

Everyone inside the economics profession knows this. Either R&R did not seek to publish their results in a peer reviewed journal, or no peer reviewed journal would accept them.

I think there’s one poorly written sentence here: “Everyone inside the economics profession knows this.” When I read that, I think Kevin is referring to everyone know Rogoff and Reinhart pulled a fast one. I think what he means is that everyone knows those 3 outlets are not peer-reviewed. But, for my part, I never put it together that they went 3 for 3.

Meanwhile, out here in the hinterlands, I don’t count anything I do as serious unless it’s peer-reviewed.

Technorati Tags: rogoff,reinhart,peer,review,debt,growth

What You Can See from Space In My Neck of the Woods

The FLDS polygamist sect was based about a hundred miles southeast of here (before leader Warren Jeffs decamped for Texas, and then prison).

The former compound of Jeffs was auctioned off the other day. The winner was a former bodyguard who’d been awarded a $30M judgment because the FLDS community ruined his business after he went apostate.

Here it is, covering a large city block (perhaps about 6 acres), on Google Maps:

View Larger Map

Google Maps isn’t always cooperative: the compound is about half on the bottom of your screen, and you’ll have to scroll just a bit.

It’ll be great fun for those of you who can’t imagine living in God-forsaken wilderness to zoom out on the town.

Here’s the big house:

Lotsa’ room for sister wives, eh? Here’s an article about what was revealed inside, and here’s a second with video.

The entire compound was built with volunteer labor after Jeffs was sent to prison. He never lived here.

FWIW: For all of you that don’t have the misfortune of seeing polygamist women and children in Wal-Mart every week … it ain’t all it’s made outto be on reality TV.

Technorati Tags: warren,jeffs,flds,polygamy,compound,auction

Democratic Kudos for Dubya’

Jimmy Carter:

Carter delivered a genuine tribute that was both warm and substantive. He told of importuning Bush at his 2001 inauguration--where, he recalled, "my wife and I were the only volunteer Democrats on the platform"--to do something about the Sudanese civil war. Carter said he asked for a meeting with the secretary of state and national security adviser; Bush followed through soon after Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had assumed their positions. Result: "In January of 2005, there was a peace treaty between north and south Sudan that ended a war that had been going on for 20 years. George W. Bush is responsible for that."

Donna Brazile:

Bush understood the need for civility. I joined him despite my frustration because the need was too great for finger-pointing and blame-making. He flew to New Orleans and addressed the nation: "Tonight I also offer this pledge to the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."

George W. Bush was good as his word. He visited the Gulf states 17 times; went 13 times to New Orleans. Laura Bush made 24 trips. Bush saw that $126 billion in aid was sent to the Gulf's residents, as some members of his own party in Congress balked.

Bush put a special emphasis on rebuilding schools and universities. He didn't forget African-Americans: Bush provided $400 million to the historically black colleges, now integrated, that remain a pride, and magnet for African-American students. Laura Bush, a librarian, saw to it that thousands of books ruined by the floods were replaced. To this day, there are many local libraries with tributes devoted to her efforts.

Not exactly the black hat stuff we’re used to.

Technorati Tags: george,bush,jimmy,carter,donna,brazile,library

An Unasked Question About the Boston Bombers

Does it bug anyone else that Tamerlan Tsarnaev 1) didn’t like Americans, 2) was on the radar of Homeland Security, and 3) had the opportunity (and some motivation) to move with his family to a country which he might have preferred … and he didn’t?

What should we make out of this?

One obvious one may be that possession of documents that allowed him to freely return were valuable to terrorist groups that supported him. Except that there isn’t evidence of those (yet).

Dismissing that, what do my three points leave us with?

One idea is that he actively sought out the people he didn’t like so that he could harm them. Thus, he was a sociopath.

A second idea is that Homeland Security is not quite as thorough and intimidating as our government makes it out to be. Thus, either we’re fools to believe that, or he wasn’t intimidated because … he was a sociopath. The latter is supported by the intimation that he was on the radar screen of the much more frightening Russian authorities too.

A third idea is that he wouldn’t have liked Dagestan because — as an economically marginal place, at best — ostensibly friendly people there would have identified him (as his uncle did) as a loser with weird ideas … a sociopath.

In asking this, I’m not driving at the point that we ought to view terrorists as mentally ill.

What I am driving at is that the mentally ill will attach themselves to groups that don’t weed them out, or that can otherwise make them useful. And it sure helps if the only interest of the mentally ill person is already interpersonal violence (like boxing).

Perhaps we should focus a bit more on reducing the exposure of everyone to negative cultures, and when we identify someone as a loser maybe we should work on diversions for them into inclusive bodies with a more positive outlook.

FWIW: mark my words … it’s going to come out that he was a good but not great boxer, who gave up because he got beaten and someone told him he needed to work harder at it.

Technorati Tags: tamerlan,tsarnaev,boxing,bomb,boston,sociopath,loser

Exceptionally Provocative

Discussing the manhunt in Boston, David Henderson points out a bunch of things you may not have thought of:

• Centralized decision-making placed residents of Boston under something tantamount to martial law,
• Centralized action by the government did not find the second bomber,
• After centralized control was relaxed it took only minutes for routine decentralized behavior to find the second bomber, and
• Dunkin’ Doughnuts was specifically exempted from the lock-down order to support the centralizers.

Do note that the last item could be construed as a violation of the 13th Amendment.

I’m not sure I agree with the tenor of the argument, but these implications are … not unusual to libertarians.

Technorati Tags: boston,marathon,search,tsarnaev,boat