WE'RE MOVING: On our one-year anniversary, we are moving to a fancier place with Movable Type and our own domain name. Check us out at http://www.cardinalcollective.com/.

Update your bookmarks. If we're on your blogroll, make sure to update it to our new address. And if you are reading this and we aren't on your blogroll - well, wouldn't this be a good time to fix that?

ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY: It's our one-year anniversary (at least as long as you count from the day the blog was agreed upon, not since the first post.) This blog has changed a lot in that year. At first, the concept was six Stanford and ex-Stanford students from all over the political spectrum having it out over politics and policy. Now, after people dropped out and moved on, the concept is commentary from Kenny on the left and me on the right. At first, we saw this as a forum for us to debate; today, we've had over 10,000 visits and started a few memes going in the blogosphere.

Thanks to the four of the original six who are no longer with us: Kate, Zach, Victor (who we also owe for setting up our webpage), and Pappus (whoever you are). Thanks also to Henry Towsner, who joined a month later and did an amazing job of posting until he graduated in June. Thank you too to Bo Cowgill for the advice, the ideas, and the links.

It's been a great year and we're looking forward to another great year - at our new location. (Keep reading.)

REPUBLICAN, NOT CONSERVATIVE: Via Popshot Magazine (a libertarian music blog), an explanation of South Park Republicans. Certainly a lot of appealing features to the group - I'm not sure how substantially they differ from metrocons except in terms of style.

DEAN AND BUSH: The latest meme going around seems to be playing up the similarities (perhaps in mirror image) between Dean and Bush. Here's the LA Times and here's the NY Times. Note that the NYTimes article was ostensibly one of a series describing the Democratic candidates individually, while the LATimes one is explicitly about this theme. I think the similarities of upbringing and education are probably overplayed here, but the similarities in terms of how riled up and partisan their supporters are is probably worth considering. Of course, in 2000, Bush really convinced people he would be a uniter, not a divider. In retrospect, his success in this area in Texas really shouldn't have meant any more than Dean's success in Vermont, because both parties are so far from the national center in both those states. If things in November shape up the way they're looking now, then 2004 will be an interesting counterpoint to 2000. In both cases there was a very evenly split electorate, but in 2000 everyone was trying to reach across the center to win a majority, while in 2004 it looks like there will be substantial centrifugal forces pulling both the candidates and the electorate as a whole away from the center. All I can say is, if it comes down to recounts and the courts this time, 2000 will look like a walk in the park.

LEAVING ON A JETPLANE: No more blogging for a while - I'm going back to Stanford from North Carolina (where I've been visiting my parents). Tomorrow I'll be on the plane and after that I'll be working on a major change to the way you view and find our blog... to be unveiled, with luck, on January 5th, the one-year anniversary of the Cardinal Collective.

No comment on whether I will unceremoniously break my blogging hiatus if something interesting comes up.

35 YEARS OF REASON: Reason magazine has a 35-year selection of quotes from articles. It's interesting to look at where the libertarian movement has come from and where it's gone.

My favorite quote:

Ostensibly pro-market conservatives are among the last ones to sell capitalism for what it is: a realm of groovy freedom filled with a dizzying and ever-expanding panoply of strange and wonderful and disturbing lifestyles and identities in which even the lousiest jobs can buy enormous amounts of leisure and the coolest movies, music, video games, and whatever else you want.

Both the right and the left are fully invested in a Puritan-work-ethic version of capitalism, no matter how at odds with reality such an approach is.
-- "Rage On," Brian Doherty

WELL, TOP THAT: And I thought guest-blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy was a good gig. Dan Drezner is now guest-blogging at AndrewSullivan.com. That's quite a step. Then again, Drezner is very, very good.

Andrew Sullivan is quite a good writer, and I've been a fan of his work since long before he started the Daily Dish (and I've been a reader of his blog from the very beginning). But he's gotten a lot more ideological in the years since 9/11, and I think it's hurt his writing - though it might be better for bringing in readers to his blog. I'll be interested to see what Drezner does with an audience that's substantially different from his own.

Check his blog, though. He'll be talking about why he posts what he posts at AndrewSullivan.com. As he puts it:

Think of it as if VH1 did a Behind the Blog episode -- it would be just like Behind the Music without the groupies, bimbos, boy toys, massive drug use, fisticuffs, arrests, and downward arc to the narrative (I hope).

WHY GOOGLEBOMB?: Google bombing is probably not too effective at changing Google users' minds about Howard Dean or George W. Bush. So why Google bomb? Eric Rescorla has a pretty convincing answer: group bonding.

ENGINEERING AND PHILOSOPHY: I'm doing my quals reading in artificial intelligence, and found this passage in the textbook:

[...]Over time, researchers became interested in standardize knowledge representation formalisms and ontologies that could streamline the process of creating new expert systems. In so doing, they ventured into territory previously explored by philosophers of science and of language. The discipline imposed in AI by the need for one's theories to "work" has led to more rapid and deeper progress than was the case when these problems were the exclusive domain of philosophy (although it has at times also led to the repeated reinvention of the wheel).

It seems pretty plausible that when a non-experimental science (or philosophy, the queen of the sciences) is attached to an engineering discipline, it would make faster progress because it would be less likely to get caught in hair-splitting arguments. For instance, would economics make faster progress if there was an engineering discipline which focused on engineering solutions for rational agents? (My group is working on one...)

I wonder whether a philosopher would agree with the passage, though.

UPDATE: While I'm at it, I might as well mention this milestone in the history of computational logic:

Hayes was the first to prove that a bath with the plug in will eventually overflow if the tap keeps running and that a person who falls into a lake will get wet all over.

FOOTBALL OFFENSE: In Irvine, a Muslim football league (organized at a mosque) featured Muslim football teams named Mujahideen, Soldiers of Allah, and Intifada. When word got out, a firestorm of criticism forced Mujahideen and Soldiers of Allah to change their names, with critics linking these names to terrorism.

Those involved in the league said they never set out to upset or offend anyone. But critics say such names as Intifada and Mujahideen glorify terrorism.

Intifada, "uprising" in Arabic, is a term used by Palestinians for their revolts against Israeli occupation from 1987 to 1993 and over the past three years. Mujahideen, which means "holy warrior," is associated with several Islamic groups that are on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.

"The issue is these are words that are linked to real terrorists, real threats, real murders today," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

"There shouldn't be young Americans chanting the name Mujahideen as American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are put in danger and attacked daily," Cooper said. "As for Intifada, it has been a disaster for the Palestinians and the nearly 1,000 Israeli children and parents murdered by suicide bombers."

I think this is the time to call forth the distinction between rightly offended and wrongly offended and the similar distinctions between wisdom, kindness, and moral obligation. In other words, I think that, for the most part, the players did nothing wrong in naming their teams, and that, while they might have been wise and kind to change the names of their teams, they weren't morally required to do so. When judging someone's actions, what's important is the intent, and I think (except for one team) there was no wrong intent.

Are 'Mujahideen' and 'Soldiers of Allah' names which are linked to terrorism? Certainly, they are names used by several terrorist groups. But they also have long-standing meanings which do not relate to terrorism, and it was those meanings which the youth intended. If you find something offensive with Soldiers of Allah at a mosque football league, would you find something equally wrong with Soldiers of God at a church football league? Probably not. Not only that, but those two names have referents in history which are worth remembering, at least to that community. (And I think even non-Muslims should remember the struggle of the mujahideen in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation - a struggle which hastened the downfall of the Soviet Union and the freedom of millions.)

In other words, in these two cases, I think it is the critics who were wrong: the critics were wrongly offended. It's important to maintain the difference between right offense and wrong offense, or else we will find ourselves at the linguistic mercy of whatever group has the thinnest skin. A group does nothing wrong in continuing its long-standing usage even though other groups use the same phrases to denote different and objectionable things.

Now, the name 'Intifada' is a different case, because the article makes clear that it is a reference to the Palestinian uprising, and therefore a clear reference to terrorism. Although it might be possible to make a reference to some other intifada, at least according to the article, the team name was a direct reference to the Palestinian uprising. Naming your team 'Intifada' in honor of the Palestinian uprising is an approving reference to terrorism, and so it's right for onlookers to criticize it, because the intifada to which they were referring is terrorist, wrongfully executed, and worthy of criticism. What's telling is that, in this case, the criticism involved a real moral difference because both of them were referring to the same thing: the rabbi thinks that Palestinian terrorism against Israelis is wrong, while the football team thinks that it is, at least, justifiable.

There's also a second distinction here: between unwise actions and wrong actions. Naming your football team Mujahideen while there are terrorist groups also claiming that name is unwise, just as it's unwise for Buddhists to march through Skokie, Illinois, waving their Buddhist swastikas. It's also nice of them to change their team names afterwards, since there will always be some people who may be wrongly offended, but understandably so. (Just as in the case of the Buddhist swastikas.) It's somewhat ironic that the two teams who were misunderstood changed their names, while the team whose name actually was offensive kept it.

The case of the Muslim football league seems to me to be perfectly analogous to political correctness elsewhere, except that, in this case, it seems to be the majority which is wrongly offended at the actions of a minority, rather than the other way around. But, morally, it's all the same.

CONSERVATIVE MANICHAEISM: Now, I'm not acusing conservatives of being medieval heretics, but Joel Stein may be accusing them of sharing a certain black-and-white view of the world in Time magazine. I don't think I would say this about all conservatives, but it certainly seems endemic to Bush's thinking about the world, or at least the way he phrases things. This seems to be the case with idealists in general, whether they are the neo-conservative hawks who supposedly masterminded the Iraq war, or Fountainhead-thumping libertarians, or the Berkeley undergraduates that find more time to protest than go to class. For the hawks, people like Tom Daschle who criticize some aspect of the war are "treasonous" and "helping the terrorists", while for the libertarians, any sort of taxation is unjustifiable theft, and for the protestors, capitalism is synonymous with oppression. In each case, a very complex system is flattened into a single dichotomy. Unlike Joel Stein, I don't think this personality trait is unique to the political right, but I agree that in the public sphere at least, it currently seems to be more common there.

LIT-CRIT OBSCURITY: (From Brian Leiter.) Chun the Unavoidable recently made a post defending the incomprehensibility of talks at the MLA to outsiders, and John Holbo restated some of the complaints against it. In particular, the second comment, from someone named Carlos, crystallized many of these arguments in their clearest form.

As Carlos says, "The writing is complex even for a specialist endeavour, but it is supposed to relate to an everyday (if mysterious) activity that most people participate in and even have strong opinions about." The problem seems to be that people think 'I can understand literature, therefore I should be able to understand literary criticism'. But I believe that this assumption is unwarranted. People think that they understand well enough how the physical world around them works, but they're fine with the idea that things might actually be so complicated that it takes years of academic training to become a physicist. I think that a similar position with respect to literature is at least reasonable to take.

John Holbo attempts to turn this idea around in the following way: "Now it is true that writing good literary criticism is hard. ... Why should reading good literary criticism be hard?" It's true - just because a conclusion is difficult to arrive at doesn't mean it has to be difficult to explain. However, I don't think that critics of the MLA are generally just making fun of how hard it is to read the papers - they seem to claim that there is no intellectual depth to them, or that they don't really mean anything. In fact, the assumption seems to be 'if it's hard to read, it probably doesn't mean anything'. He gets at this point later on when he states, "If something appears to make no sense whatseover, proceed on the assumption that it probably makes no sense whatsoever. To the degree that the professional discourse is obscure, distrust it. It is by no means clear this is not a sane heuristic."

I would argue that while this may be reasonable for truly obscure discourse, it's not true for just ordinarily difficult or jargon-filled discourse. For example the sentence

Every strongly compact cardinal is measurable, but not every measurable cardinal is strongly compact (although it is consistent that there is exactly one measurable cardinal which is also strongly compact).

from Thomas Jech's "Set Theory" will most likely make almost no sense to a non-mathematician, or even to a mathematician who doesn't know what it means for a cardinal to be measurable or strongly compact, and even the technical set theory idea of what it means to be consistent. But I take it that in context, most readers would assume that this is a perfectly true, well-justified, and most importantly, meaningful sentence. This just seems like the sort of ordinary courtesy non-specialists ought to extend academics writing technical material in their own discipline. Of course, if it's material that one has relevant expertise with, then it should be clear whether or not the discourse is meaningful. The difficulty with this sentence is primarily one of jargon - and this jargon is essential to making the desired point. Obscurity seems to be more a function of bad grammar, unclear clause division, and unnecessarily long sentences, but such things are common in many academic disciplines. (Just ask any math grad student who had to use Shafarevich's Algebraic Geometry text.)

John Holbo's implicit complaint seems to be that literary criticism just doesn't have a technical vocabulary, though it pretends to do so, and thus any difficulty in reading is just intentional obscurity. "If one has high hopes for achieving technicality eventually ... that is still no reason to pretend to have achieved it yet." I think this is an unfair criticism of a whole academic discipline. Certainly, terms like 'interpellate', 'intertextual', 'deconstruct', etc. have technical meanings that I don't pretend to really understand. I'm fairly confident that most people engaged in relevant fields of academic study do understand these terms in a fairly specialized way and use them relatively accurately in constructing theories. Since people are willing to accept that mathematicians have specialized meanings for words like 'measurable', 'cardinal', 'strongly compact', and 'consistent', I think some sort of principle of charity encourages us to assume that unfamiliar words in any academic writing are actually technical terms with fairly specific meanings. (Of course, these precise meanings may often be subject to debate, but that doesn't prevent each author from using the word in an internally consistent manner.) Thus, I think Holbo's main criticism comes down to the distinction between obscurity and mere difficulty.

The clearest manifestation of what might be called obscurity is the complicated punctuation and punning parodied in the original Chronicle of Higher Education article. Some of this is undoubtedly just inexcusably bad writing, of the sort that goes on in every academic discipline. Sometimes a paper has such good ideas that it even becomes a classic in the field, despite being poorly written and hard to understand. (I believe Russell's paper "On Denoting" is one such article - I don't have a copy with me right now, but I recall a large portion of it being just a restatement of ideas from Frege's "On Sense and Reference" phrased in a less comprehensible way than the translations I've seen. But the combination with Russell's theory of definite descriptions makes the paper essential to modern analytic philosophy.) But in the case of literary criticism, the problem seems to be more endemic.

I think in large part, this is due to a point reiterated by Wittgenstein throughout his work. Sometimes there just isn't any language in which a point can be satisfactorily made. Whether this is due to a current lack of vocabulary, or possibly to some nature of this point that can't be captured in language, writers sometimes have to deal with it. As a result, it often pays to demonstrate one's ideas through one's use of language, rather than attempt to explicitly state them. Of course, some sort of hybrid strategy is at work in all the parentheses, slashes, and puns made by presenters at the MLA, but I am willing to believe that in at least some cases, a point can be more effectively made by both stating and demonstrating it at the same time. (In this way, literary criticism may be more akin to art than scholarship.) Because these scholars are working in the disciplines most concerned with explaining the ways language is used, it makes sense that they would appeal to these techniques more than academics in other disciplines.

Of course, it's plausible as well that at least some of these papers really are just empty posturing and don't have anything interesting to say, but I don't think journalists from the Chronicle of Higher Education are necessarily in a position to decide which articles are which, unless they happen to be specialists in the appropriate disciplines. To deride the entire discipline because at least some papers are intellectually empty and they all look the same to the journalist seems to be on a par with mocking all contemporary abstract art because it's all indistinguishable from accidental paint spills to an inexperienced viewer.

A more convincing argument may have been the Sokal Hoax, in which a physicist wrote a bogus article and got it published in a humanities journal. I'm not terribly familiar with the details of the case, but if Alan Sokal managed to show that the specialists reviewing papers for the journal were unable to tell his paper apart from a supposedly meaningful one, then it seems plausible that even the meaningful ones don't communicate anything to anyone. But I have some faith that even if this was the case, the journal may have been exceptional and the editors pressed for time.

DOWN HOME CENSORSHIP: I caught this item in Reason's brickbats, about the censorship of a song in Wilmington, NC, which is the big city near Southport, NC, where I'm visiting my parents.

Whatever Happened to the Cotton-Eye Joe? (4/15)
The University of North Carolina at Wilmington has banned the group Rednex's techno version of the minstrel song "Cotton-Eye Joe" because of some controversial lyrics. But the lyrics apparently aren't even in the song. Linda Upperman Smith, a university trustee, says some versions of the song contain references to slavery. And though she insists that the Rednex version does too, the Wilmington Star could find no such words. Anyway, it's irrelevant, since two top university officials say the song's minstrel roots alone could offend blacks. Meanwhile, the university is set to host a concert by rapper Ludacris, whose lyrics feature racial slurs. "Even though I'm not a fan of Ludacris, I respect the artist," Vice Chancellor Michelle Howard-Vital told the Wilmington Star. "I don't object to his coming here because the university is a place to exchange a variety of ideas." When the paper asked why that exchange of ideas couldn't include "Cotton-Eye Joe," Howard-Vital replied that the issue was too complex to explain.

Technically, it's probably bad form to steal a magazine's entire entry. I'm sure the copyright-skeptical Reason people don't care, but it makes me feel like I should maybe renew my subscription...

OPEN SOURCE CAMPAIGNS: I've often thought of Howard Dean's campaign as something like an "open source campaign" because of how much it's driven by peer-to-peer meetings, small donations, and word-of-mouth enthusiasm. At any rate, Daily Kos reports that both the Clark and Dean campaigns have large open source components to their software. This sort of thing is the largest reason why I favor Dean over anyone else - because he is willing to let this sort of social model run his campaign.

In general, I'm in favor of things like open source, peer-to-peer filesharing, and free speech in a participatory democracy for the same sorts of reasons: they allow local good ideas to be spread widely, and allow different people to experiment with different systems until they find things that others are willing to adopt as well. Of course, open source software and peer-to-peer filesharing are more sophisticated and (I would argue) successful at these sorts of things than democracy traditionally has been, and I want to encourage more productive societal uses of these new technologies of social organization. The fact that people are generally willing to freely donate most of the effort that goes into producing the fruits of these technologies makes them even more desirable from the standpoint of a liberal, because they're generally free of any price rationing at all. Of course, computers still have to be procured somewhere, and most musicians haven't moved back to a primarily concert-driven revenue system either, but at least some aspects of distribution have become less expensive.

Because I saw his campaign as a model of openness, I've become very suspicious of what Dean's sealed papers mean for his presidential bid. Does it signal that he's running an old-fashioned closed political system that happens to be parasitic on an open network? Or is it just a rare holdover? While the campaign allowed donors to vote on whether or not to accept federal funding and spending limits, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't find running donation totals anywhere. I suppose the numbers might be misused by other campaigns, but it seems to me that allowing everyone to see an approximate running total of how much Dean has raised could only help his media buzz.

MAD COW DISEASE: If you've been following the mad cow disease stories, you might be interested in this e-mail from a friend of mine who knows the owners of the original mad cow personally:

I'd bet that this case is not the first Mad Cow ever to be slaughtered in the US - this was only the first one to be detected (considering only 1 in 20 cows are actually tested for BSE). The Mad Cow was from a dairy about 2 miles from our farm so there are so many news vehicles coming on our property to ask us questions. I know the owners personally - they are absolutely devastated. It's a surprise that their farm had a Mad Cow since I have known them to run everything by the book (leads me to believe that this case might be spontaneous, however unlikely). I had a juicy steak and a hamburger the day after so I urge everyone not to worry about our beef supply unless you eat cow brains as a delicacy. The media is just trying to scare everyone to boost their ratings.

MORE MATT MILLER: Did I mention that The 2% Solution was a good book? I'll blog about his ideas for health care vouchers and his "workable compromise" on school vouchers soon.

WAGE SUBSIDIES: Matt Miller picks up an idea by Edmund Phelps, an economist at Columbia, for wage subsidies (see previous post). Suppose you want every worker to be paid at least $10/hour. A minimum wage would just destroy jobs for people with productivity less than $10/hour. Wage subsidies won't, because the government pays the difference between the market wage and $10/hour.

The idea of a wage subsidy is that if an employer pays a worker a $5/hour salary, the government will give that employer a $5/hour subsidy which it would then pass on to the worker. The worker ends up making $10/hour, but the employer pays only $5/hour, so that it's still worth it to the employer to hire the worker and the job is not destroyed. The wage subsidies are phased out on a sliding scale, so that there's no cut-off effects.

In other words, this seems like a way to implement the goal of living-wage campaigns, without destroying jobs or economic efficiency. And, in a way, it's fair: if there are social benefits from higher wages, it makes sense that society as a whole should have to pay them (through taxes), rather than private companies. This is the best way to help the poor that I have heard of yet. It provides a basic minimum while encouraging work (which is the only way to end poverty) and making crime not pay.

Now there's one objection that I should talk about. Suppose the wage subsidy was set to start at $5/hour but then very gradually wind down to $0 around $15/hour. One could object that employers who now pay workers $10/hour would drop their wages to $5/hour and then apply for $5 of subsidies. The worker would still be paid the market wage of $10/hour, but the government would end up subsidizing the business by $5/hour. Thus the government would end up subsidizing employers instead of workers.

This objection doesn't hold, though, because it's based on a static analysis. Basically, the market will bid up the worker's wage to whatever an employer can gain by employing him. If a worker's productivity is $10/hour and his wage subsidy at $10/hour is $3, an employer can get $13/hour from employing him. So the market will bid his wages up to $13/hour and the employers won't benefit from the subsidies - it will all be passed through to the worker.

The main drawback with this idea is its cost: it would also cost $85 billion to make the "living wage" $9 an hour, according to Matthew Miller (though he combines it with making the minimum wage $6 an hour, which should make this idea both cheaper and less effective.) A lot of that can be found by reducing welfare, housing assistance, foodstamps, and the EITC, however.

The real benefit of this idea, I think, is not to begin an argument over how much the living wage should be set at and how much money should be spent to raise the standard of living for poor people. What it does is that it says that, if you plan to spend $X to alleviate poverty among able-bodied people, you should spend it in a wage subsidy, not on welfare or targeted assistance. I think, after welfare reform, an enterprising state might be able to do this already with federal welfare monies. And since that money is actually helping people, I wouldn't mind spending more on it than I would on welfare.

UPDATE: In the comments, Aziz asked why coupling the wage subsidy with a higher minimum wage would be cheaper than having the living wage alone. Suppose you have the living wage at $10 and the minimum wage at $6. Then the amount of the wage subsidy is at most $4. Suppose now the minimum wage was lowered to $5. The wage subsidy could now be as large as $5, for all those jobs with market wages around $5. In the long run, of course, those jobs at a wage of $5 would not have existed with a minimum wage of $6 (since a wage of $5 implies a productivity of $5.) Effectively, in the long run, a higher minimum wage should destroy low-wage jobs, so the government would save money because it didn't have to pay the wage subsidy for those jobs. That's why a high minimum wage coupled with wage subsidies would be cheaper and less effective than wage subsidies alone.

BTW, I should mention that this discussion of how minimum wages interact with wage subsidies depends on what happens in the long run. In the short run, before wages equal productivity, there's no question that wage subsidies would suffer substantial leakage to employers. This is another example of the fact that lots of stuff can happen before the long run arrives. But it's wiser to make policy with good effects in the long run and expensive effects in the short run than vice versa.

READING THE 2% SOLUTION AGAIN: I have to say again that Matthew Miller's written a very interesting book. Before I blogged about his proposal for campaign finance vouchers and his use of Rawls. Today I'm going to blog about what seems to be his very interesting proposal to augment (but should be to replace) the minimum wage with "wage subsidies."

First, I'll put in a note about why a libertarian like me might be interested in these ideas. A lot of libertarians and conservatives are very concerned about poverty, but are convinced that the government is powerless to do much about it. And if you look at the catastrophic compounding failures of welfare and housing projects, it's easy to see why that's so. Nearly all of the classic liberal ideas from the New Deal and the Great Society about how to deal with poverty ended up increasing poverty in the long run, through self-destructive dependency or through lost jobs. (I'll make the case for why minimum wages hurt the poor below; see Charles Murray's Losing Ground for other arguments.) In fact, I'd say that welfare reform - spearheaded by conservatives - was one of the great poverty-fighting achievements of the 1990s. Nonetheless, if a liberal came along with a government proposal that actually did help poor people, a lot of moderate libertarians and most conservatives would support it, though they might argue about how much money should be spent alleviating poverty.

I think Matthew Miller is that liberal.

Now, on to why higher wages are the best way to help poor people. Poverty occurs when market wages (which are ultimately set by individual productivity) are too low for people to support themselves. If we wish to have a society where everyone gets a minimum standard of living, we could give people money for not working (welfare). This has the problem that it encourages people not to work, which leads to crime, dependency, and long-term poverty. Alternatively, we could give working people money based on need (earned-income tax credit). This is actually pretty good, but it neglects single males and the childless (who aren't "needy" by the EITC standards), but who are likely to turn to crime if market wages are too low.

The minimum wage avoids both these problems. In theory, it allows people to make enough money to live well by working, and by raising wages it discourages crime even for single males. Unfortunately, minimum wages destroy jobs. If the minimum wage is $6 an hour and an employee can only produce $5 an hour at current conditions, that employee won't be able to find a job. And let's notice that the people who are the least productive are those most in need of jobs, like welfare mothers, dropouts, and recovering addicts. These are precisely the people who won't be able to find jobs under a minimum wage.

If that argument doesn't convince you as to why the minimum wage hurts the poorest amongst us, think about it with a minimum wage of $40 an hour instead of $5 an hour, and see if it's any more convincing.

In the next post, I'll talk about Matt Miller's proposal: wage subsidies.

DEAN EMPHASIZES HIS CHRISTIANITY: Josh Chafetz points out a Boston Globe story run on Christmas. I think he got the memo.

UPDATE: Bo says it's time for Republicans to do something about this.

COME ON, GUYS, BUSH REALLY DID WIN: Eric Alterman, in an otherwise unremarkable column about how the Democratic establishment isn't a fan of Dean, says

Will this election be about turningout your base, or winning over swing voters? Gore did the latter but not the former. He won the election, but, thanks to Ralph Nader's megalomania (with an assist from the SCLM--So-Called Liberal Media--and Gore's own crappy campaign), not by enough to prevent the Supreme Court from handing it to Bush.

Look, that sort of thing was excusable for a little while after the recount, but let's get this straight: Bush really did win the 2000 election.

1. He won according to the established rules of the game, as arbitrated by the established players, the courts.
   
2. He won in the first count.
   
3. He won in the first recount.
   
4. Even if the Supreme Court hadn't stopped the new recounts that the Florida Supreme Court wanted, he would have won those, too. (As shown by the media recounts.)
   

So, really, he won. The only thing that Gore could be said to actually have won was the popular vote, but, let's face it, that wasn't the game they were playing. Nor would Eric Alterman have said that Bush "really won" had he won the popular vote and Gore taken the electoral college.

It's nearly 2004. It's time for the self-delusion about the 2000 elections to end.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

JUSTICE IN IRAQ: An article from the Economist that has it right:

Nobody emerges with much credit from the saga of Iraq. The future may be more hopeful.

TROUBLING NEWS: This Christmas break the most troubling thing happened: when I saw my grandmother, she didn't tell me how underfed I looked.

Guess I should go on a diet.