There is a passage[1] in Locke's Essay Concerning Humane Understanding of which I took special note from the first time that I read it:

5. That men should keep their compacts is certainly a great and undeniable rule in morality. But yet, if a Christian, who has the view of happiness and misery in another life, be asked why a man must keep his word, he will give this as a reason:—Because God, who has the power of eternal life and death, requires it of us. But if a Hobbist be asked why? he will answer:—Because the public requires it, and the Leviathan will punish you if you do not. And if one of the old philosophers had been asked, he would have answered:—Because it was dishonest, below the dignity of a man, and opposite to virtue, the highest perfection of human nature, to do otherwise.

The reason that this passage stood-out and stands-out for me is that it contains a fundamentally sympathetic statement of a godless morality, and indeed fairly clearly exhibits the parallel between the might of G_d making ostensible right for the Christian, and the might of the State making ostensible right for the Hobbsean.[2] Locke's philosophy, epistemological and ethical, is heavily informed by a belief in a loving G_d, yet here Locke seems to reveal sufficient subtlety to do rather well without that G_d.

There's another striking passage[3] in that same work:

50. If we look upon those superior beings above us, who enjoy perfect happiness, we shall have reason to judge that they are more steadily determined in their choice of good than we; and yet we have no reason to think they are less happy, or less free, than we are. And if it were fit for such poor finite creatures as we are to pronounce what infinite wisdom and goodness could do, I think we might say, that God himself cannot choose what is not good; the freedom of the Almighty hinders not his being determined by what is best.

51. A constant determination to a pursuit of happiness no abridgment of liberty. But to give a right view of this mistaken part of liberty let me ask,—Would any one be a changeling, because he is less determined by wise considerations than a wise man? Is it worth the name of freedom to be at liberty to play the fool, and draw shame and misery upon a man's self? If to break loose from the conduct of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worse, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen: but yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already. The constant desire of happiness, and the constraint it puts upon us to act for it, nobody, I think, accounts an abridgment of liberty, or at least an abridgment of liberty to be complained of. God Almighty himself is under the necessity of being happy; and the more any intelligent being is so, the nearer is its approach to infinite perfection and happiness. That, in this state of ignorance, we short-sighted creatures might not mistake true felicity, we are endowed with a power to suspend any particular desire, and keep it from determining the will, and engaging us in action. This is standing still, where we are not sufficiently assured of the way: examination is consulting a guide. The determination of the will upon inquiry, is following the direction of that guide: and he that has a power to act or not to act, according as such determination directs, is a free agent: such determination abridges not that power wherein liberty consists. He that has his chains knocked off, and the prison doors set open to him, is perfectly at liberty, because he may either go or stay, as he best likes; though his preference be determined to stay, by the darkness of the night, or illness of the weather, or want of other lodging. He ceases not to be free; though the desire of some convenience to be had there absolutely determines his preference, and makes him stay in his prison.

Now, regardless of whether we agree that a being can be free and yet determined by something (not, as I believe, a contradiction if that something is internalized in the determined being), the fact remains that a G_d of this sort is more law-driven than many would conceive G_d to be.

Anyway, what brings all this to mind is that, lately, I have been reading (albeït in somewhat desultory manner) The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart. Chapter 15 (The Haunting) contains a section entitled Stopping Locke, which ends thus

Locke's vague conjecture that matter might be able to think, of course, is Spinoza's avowed doctrine. […] Leibniz's magesterial refutation of the founder of British empiricism, in brief, is a covert assault [Spinoza]. Furthermore, [in Leibniz's mind] Locke — like Descartes before him — is really just a feeble imitation of Spinoza: he leaves in doubt that which his dark master pitilessly destroys.

[…]

Leibniz's unstated intuition that Locke was something of a Spinozist, incidentally, is probably more insightful than is generally allowed in modern interpretations of the great empiricist's work. Locke wrote much of his Essay while living in exile in Holland from 1683 to 1688, during which time he purchased all of Spinoza's works and mingled in circles that included some suspiciously freethinking characters. Furthermore, the parallels between his work and that of Spinoza extend well beyond those suggested by Leibniz. To be sure, as a conciliation-minded member of the Christian establishment, Locke toned down or obfuscated some of the more radical implications of his Spinozism — a task for which his inimitably wobbly prose was particularly well suited.

I would hardly agree that Locke's prose were wobbly, let alone that it were inimitably so; in fact, I don't think that a person given to wobbly writing would be capable of the sort of perspicacious thinking that got Locke as far along as his did. But the point remains that some of what I noted in Locke, such as in the two paragraphs of the Essay that I quoted, demonstrates that Locke represented some of the same tendencies as did Spinoza. Any notion that Locke borrowed heavily from Spinoza would have to confront what was already indicated by Locke's background and writings before he fled to Holland (and, earlier, before Spinoza had published anything); none-the-less, it would hardly be surprising if Leibniz indeed feared that Locke were in effect an agent of Spinoza's philosophy.

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[1] Book I Chapter II ¶5, in the 1894 edition edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser (which is the edition that I read).

[2] The Hobbsean will assert that the State makes possible a manner of living whose goodness is not itself derived from the dictates of the State. Many Christians would want to make a similar claim for the goodness of the manner of living made possible by G_d. However, if pressed, most of them would not answer as did Ευθύφρων in the fable by the old philosopher Πλάτων; rather, they would feel compelled to hold that not simply instances of goodness but the distinction of goodness were creäted by the power of G_d. But Locke himself proves an apparent exception to my characterization. (See above.)

[3] Book II Chapter XXI ¶50-1.

While Franken has at times resorted to worse intellectual dishonesty than in this case he exposes, here he is right on the mark. As Franken's line of questioning and the answer that it elicts show, the statistic in question tells us virtually nothing about whether the outcomes of arbitration would be considered equally or more favorable to employees than are the outcomes of litigation. It is, in other words, a garbage statistic.

Firms are entitled to require arbitration as a condition of doing business with them, but those who deal with these firms are likewise entitled to require that there be no such imposition as their own condition of doing business.

I recently read someone defending socialism on the ground that socialism has the same root as does society. Well, I don't object to society. And I venture to guess that she doesn't object to fathers, yet I go further to guess that she does object to what's called patriarchy. One mustn't over-reach with etymology, with dear old dad, nor with society.

I've previous explained the economic calculation problem of socialism: Rational allocation of resources requires trade-off signals that reflect as much relevant information as practicable. Most of the relevant information is highly decentralized, and some of it (such as the expectations and preferences of participants) is intrinsically so. A market brings that information into play by way of prices (trade-off signals) developed by the give-and-take of would-be consumers and of would-be sellers. Socialists haven't developed an alternative; they correct the market only at the cost of over-all misallocations with their own costs in human welfare.

This point is as true in the delivery of health care as anywhere else. Almost everyone agrees that American health-care delivery is in appalling shape, but there are those who ignore that the problems have grown as state interventions have increased. Commentators frequently note that costs have exploded in the last fourteen years, but then most of these commentators are silent on the fact that the period followed upon the last round of reforms. Of course, the period before those reforms wasn't itself some sort of golden age; the reforms were effected because many things were seen to be worse than once they were, and getting worse still. But, again, due attention was not paid to the rôle of prior state intervention in effecting that worsening. This routine of blaming what remains of a market for the mounting problems of an increasingly state-controlled system began well before I was born.

Many people, even defenders of socialized medicine for the United States, admit that the socialized systems elsewhere have some dramatic flaws. The belief of the defenders is that the United States can develop a better system, perhaps in part by learning from the problems of other states. But the deep problem is, again, that of trade-off signals. And one of the seldom-recognized implications of that is that greater state control here has led and will lead to a worsening of systems elsewhere. A state-controlled system can somewhat compensate for its own inability to formulate rational trade-off signals by being guided (directly or indirectly) by prices generated elsewhere. (This solution is imperfect because the prices of one region cannot be expected to be ideal for another; and, if they were, using them fully would generate exactly the same out-comes as would be effected by a free market, rendering the socialism absurd.) Implicitly, production and distribution of health care in the industrialized nations with more socialized medicine has been significantly guided by the choices made in the United States. To the extent that our prices as well continue to become the guesses of bureaucrats rather that the outcomes of interaction between free consumers and free producers, socialized medicine everywhere will be shooting in an ever-growing darkness.

Even assuming that morality can somehow ignore such practical problems, the morality of the claims for socialized medicine strikes me as utterly bogus. Many people declare health care to be a fundamental right, but that's plainly incoherent as one could exercise any fundamental right without the presence and assistance of other people. There have been very few attempts to build ground-up cases for a moral entitlement to health care — identifying some actual fundamental right from which a right to health care is derived in a social context — and every one with which I'm familiar has been exploded on logical grounds. Mostly people just confuse the appealing proposition that it would be a very fine thing if no one was denied health care for simple lack of resources with there being a right to health care. There are a great many hypotheticals that would be very fine things. I know people such that it would be a very fine thing if they had the companionship of someone of the desired sex, and such that they would like that even more than access to medical care; I hardly think that we should force someone else to provide that companionship though.

Some very fine things become very vile things when delivered by virtue of confiscations, regardless of whether we imagine that the confiscation is effected by society, or recognize that it is by a state or by a gang or by a mob.

To Hell with NFL Commissioner Goodell and his utterly bogus indefinite suspension of Vick, which was only in effect when Vick couldn't play anyway; to Hell with the owners of the Philadelphia Eagles; and to Hell with anyone who would now buy tickets to their games.

When you read or hear some writer or speaker — especially a journalist or a politician — asserting

Economists say X.

ask yourself two questions:

• Is this all economists or most economists or just some economists?
• Why has this writer or speaker chosen not to specify whether it is some, most, or all?

The same point applies to other areas of expertise. A bald climatologists or scientists or health experts or historians or philosophers should get one to ask the analogous questions. But, right now, I am provoked by yet another article about what economists say.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Thus begins Adam Smith's first book, in its editions of 1759, 1761, 1767, 1774, 1781, and 1790. In other words, he was saying this both before and after his more famous work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776, 1778, 1784, 1786, & 1789). At some point, I may write a lengthier entry on what Smith was doing with the Wealth of Nations, but I wanted to make the point that Smith didn't make his case for a free market based upon a personal belief that one only cared for others based upon their effects on one's own material well-being. Rather, he made his case (in the Wealth of Nations) for the optimality of a free market without availing himself of the proposition that people otherwise gave a d_mn about each other. Then, as now, many opponents of a free society held that an economy without extensive state control could work only if people had more fellow-feeling than they actually do.

I have posted one entry to this 'blog that made reference to Cournot-Nash equilibria, and I expect to write another soon. I'm going to use this entry to explain the concept of a Cournot-Nash equilibrium, without resorting to mathematical formulæ.

First, let me give my favorite example of the idea, the behavior of prairie dog mothers in at least some towns. Prairie dogs are omnivores; they are primarily herbivorous, but will also consume small animals such as insects. If a prairie dog mother stays away from her litter of pups, they are liable to be eaten by something, so she will prefer food that is close at-hand — such as the pups of another mother who is away from her burrow. In fact, in some towns, when pups are eaten, it is usually by mothers trying to get home before their own pups are eaten. If any one prairie dog were to stop eating pups while the others continued, then her own pups would more likely be eaten because she'd be away from home for longer or more frequent periods. They eat each other's babies because they eat each other's babies.

Some of you may be thinking of the Prisoners' Dilemma, which, under classic assumptions, results in a similar mess. It too is an example of a Cournot-Nash equilibrium.

The essence of a Cournot-Nash equilibrium is that each participant has no incentive to change behavior unless other players change behavior, so each — and thus every — participant sticks with his or her established behavior. Although the prairie dog example and the classic telling of the Prisoners' Dilemma are sub-optimal equilibria, it could be the case that an equilibrium were the best-possible equilibrium, and no one had an incentive to change his or her behavior so long as no one else changed his or her behavior; so it's important to distinguish optimal Cournot-Nash equilibria from sub-optimal Cournot-Nash equlibria.

The Nash to whom the name refers is John Forbes Nash jr, whose life and work were grossly misrepresented in the movie A Beautiful Mind (2001). Nash's most famous accomplishment was explicitly generalizing and formalizing the idea of a Cournot-Nash equilibrium, which some simply call a Nash equilibrium. But there were famous antecedent uses of the idea, the best-known of which was by Antoine Augustin Cournot, in an 1838 model of oligopolistic competition.[1]

A less-often recognized antecedent use was by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651). Hobbes famously proposes that, in the absence of a State, life will be nasty, brutish, and short. More specifically, he said

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.[2]

According to Hobbes, without the State, production is subject to predation, so potential producers have less incentive to produce and everyone has incentive to prey upon everyone else.

But Hobbes has also identified a special case of one solution to what would otherwise be a sub-optimal Cournot-Nash equilibrium. In Leviathan, men end the war amongst them by explicitly agreeing to the creätion of an institution (the State) which will change the equilibrium. More generally, agreements need not be explicit or conscious, and the transforming institution could be a code of conduct. For example, the classic statement of the Prisoners' Dilemma treats the game as played in a social vacuum of a sort. In real life, people build reputations, reward desired behaviors, and punish the behaviors to which they object. Commitment mechanisms don't necessarily free us from every possible sub-optimal Cournot-Nash equlibrium, but naïve game theory too often fails to consider their possibility. (There was some perverse gloating in A Beautiful Mind about how Nash had somehow refuted Adam Smith, but the liberal order of which Smith wrote is filled with commitment mechanisms. Private property itself is an example of such a mechanism.)

Perhaps, in time, even the prairie dogs will evolve a mechanism such that eating each other's pups is no longer an equilibrium.

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[1] Recherches sur les principes mathématiques de la théorie des richesses, Ch 7.

[2] Chapter XIII ¶ 8-9.

Yester-day, I again encountered the slogan No Blood for Oil!, made popular in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

I greatly doubt that the people who embrace this slogan have much thought about what it would really mean to forswear the use of violence over economic resources. Only a tiny minority are truly prepared to do that.

This proposition should be obvious in the case of those who want the State to actively participate in decisions about the allocation of resources. The point in having the State determine what quantities will be produced or to whom or to what production will go, or at what prices goods or services will be sold is to use violence or a threat of violence, effected by police and by prison guards. Were the economic administration to be by friendly persuasion, it could be done without the State.

Removing the State as an active participant doesn't utterly remove violence from the equation. If one believes that individuals or communities may forceably defend acquisition, retention, or distribution of goods or of services, then one accepts the use of violence over economic resources. It doesn't matter whether the forceable defense is provided by the State, by private protection agencies, by mobs, or by rugged individualists.

So if one believes that the state should provide the poor with home heating oil, or control gasoline prices, or if one believes in forceably defendable private property in petroleum or in forceably defendable anarcho-socialistic management of petroleum, then one believes in trading blood for oil.

In order to genuinely reject such an exchange, one would have to be truly and utterly pacifistic about petroleum, as are the Amish (albeït that a petroleum pacifist might be violent about other things).

Now, I surely don't claim that the United States should ever use its military in an attempt to secure foreign sources of goods or of services. (We can set aside debate over what the actual relationship were of the invasion of Iraq to American dependence upon Middle Eastern petroleum.) But simple-minded slogans and ad hoc moralizations don't typically propel discourse or move convictions in a humane direction.

Years ago, a friend of mine used to regularly listen to right-wing talk radio. (I imagine that he still does.) I was often a passenger in his car, and there usually had to listen to this programming as well. What I heard drove me up a wall. These commentators didn't usually target people with whose views I agreed, but they routinely misrepresented the arguments that were used by their opponents, made ridiculous universalizations or near-universalizations about the motivations of these opponents, and pretended that the only alternatives to the views of the political left were those of the political right. And the abiding emotion was hate.

For the past few days, I have been visiting my parents. Nearly every evening, they watch MSNBC, and I catch some of it whenever I visit them. What I hear drives me up a wall. The commentators of MSNBC don't usually target people with whose views I agree, but they routinely misrepresent the arguments that have been used by their opponents, make ridiculous universalizations or near-universalizations about the motivations of these opponents, and pretend that the only alternative to the views of the political right are those of the political left. And the abiding emotion is hate.

For example, during this latest visit, I heard Rachel Maddow mocking William Kristol as ostensibly claiming a few weeks into the invasion of Iraq that the war was won, when what Kristol had actually said was that every battle had been decisively won. Were I now to claim that, a few weeks into the American Civil War, every battle had been decisively won by the Confederacy, I would plainly not be claiming that the Confederacy had won the war.

(Maddow was more generally concerned to pretend that the neoconservatives were trying to reposition and to repackage themselves as supporters of the war policy of the Obama Administration. The truth is that, in actual practice, this policy far more closely resembles that of the later Bush Administration than it does the policy described during the Obama candidacy. The neoconservatives, then, don't have to reposition much, though they plainly need to repackage if they are to regain active influence, since their persons and past organizations are anathematized.)

On top of being bothered by all this hate and misrepresentation in-and-of-itself, I am bothered that my father seems to be at least amused by this rubbish, and that my mother sort-of waves-away the fact that there's a stream of misrepresentation, and refuses to acknowledge that the hate is on a par with that of right-wing talk radio.

I end-up closing myself into the principal guest room, away from the television but also then away from my parents.

Amendment (2009:04/10): My father stated, last night, that while my mother likes Rachel Maddow, he finds Maddow unpleasant. Now, if only he would reject some of the other folk on MSNBC.