It is often asserted that the current President runs a continuous campaign; that, even now, when he can no longer be reëlected nor get a Congress more to his liking before his Administration ends, he campaigns.

Well, more generally, his Administration has been theatre. The apparent campaigning is a manifestation of that. And to-day I read that he has produced a trailer for his up-coming State of the Union Address. A trailer. It makes perfect sense, because the Address is theatre. It has long been theatre, but he does theatre as did no President before him.

He's been concerned to posture and to act in ways that he expects to be made to look good by to-day's mainstream media and by that bloc of historians who decided, even before he took office, that they would depict his Administration favorably almost without regard to whatever he ended-up doing.

The recent climate accord, for which there was so much build-up and from which nothing came but loose and unenforceable promises, was theatre. The negotiations with Iran, in which many meetings were held to agree that the United States would throw up its hands (something that it could more simply have done unilaterally) were theatre.

Even the Affordable Care Act has become theatre. As costs spiral out of control it approaches its implosion, but it will be portrayed as a Noble Effort, ruined by Republicans and by the inherent wickedness of market forces.

And it was theatre when the man who has killed so many children with his drone strikes wept for the murdered children of Sandy Hook.

Theatre. The cost of the ticket is very high.

My attention was drawn this morning to What Was Gary Becker's Biggest Mistake? by Alex Tabarrok, an article published at Marginal Revolution back in mid-September.

Anyone who's read my paper on indecision should understand that I reject the proposition that a quantification may be fit to the structure of preferences. I'm currently doing work that explores the idea (previously investigated by Keynes and by Koopman) of plausibility orderings to which quantifications cannot be fit. I'm not a supporter of the theory that human behavior is well-modelled as subjective expected-utility maximization, which is a guiding theory of mainstream economics. None-the-less, I am appalled by the ham-handed attacks on this theory by people who don't understand this very simple model. Tabarrok is amongst these attackers.

Let me try to explain the model. Each choice that a person might make is not really of an outcome; it is of an action, with multiple possible outcomes. We want these outcomes understood as states of the world, because the value of things is determined by their contexts. Perhaps more than one action might share possible outcomes, but typically the probability of a given outcome varies based upon which action we choose. So far, this should be quite uncontroversial. (Comment if you want to controvert.) A model of expected-utility maximization assumes that we can quantify the probability, and that there is a utility function u() that takes outcomes as its argument, and returns a quantified valuation (under the preferences of the person modelled) of that outcome. Subjective expected-utility maximization takes the probabilities in question to be judgments by the person modelled, rather than something purely objective. The expected utility of a given action a is the probability-weighted sum of the utility values of its possible outcomes; that is p₁(a)·u(o₁) + p₂(a)·u(o₂) + … + p_n(a)·u(o_n) where there are n possible outcomes (across all actions), o_i is the i-th possible outcome (from any action) and p_i(a) is the probability of that outcome given action a.[1] (When o_j is impossible under a, p_j(a) = 0. Were there really some action whose outcome was fully determinate, then all of the probabilites for other outcomes would be 0.) For some alternative action b the expected utility would be p₁(b)·u(o₁) + p₂(b)·u(o₂) + … + p_n(b)·u(o_n) and so forth. Expected-utility maximization is choosing that action with the highest expected utility.

Becker applied this model to dealing with crime. Becker argued that punishments could be escalated to reduce crime, until potential criminals implicitly regarded the expected utility of criminal action to be inferior to that of non-criminal action. If this is true, then when two otherwise similar crimes have different perceived rates of apprehension and conviction, the commission rate of the crime with the lower rate of apprehension and conviction can be lowered to that of the other crime by making its punishment worse. In other words, graver punishments can be substituted for higher perceived rates of apprehension and conviction, and for things that affect (or effect) the way in which people value successful commission of crime.

The simplest model of a utility function is one in which utility itself increases linearly with a quantitative description of the outcome. So, for example, a person with $2 million dollars might be said to experience twice the utility of a person with $1 million dollars. Possession of such a utility function is known as risk-neutrality. For purposes of exposition, Becker explains his theory with reference to risk-neutral people. That doesn't mean that he believed that people truly are risk neutral. Tabarrok quotes a passage in which Becker explains himself by explicit reference to risk-neutrality, but Tabarrok misses the significance — because Tabarrok does not really understand the model, and confuses risk-neutrality with rationality — and proceeds as if Becker's claim hangs on a proposition that people are risk-neutral. It doesn't.

Becker's real thought doesn't even depend upon all those mathematical assumptions that allow the application of arithmetic to the issue. The real thought is simply that, for any contemplated rates of crime, we can escalate punishments to some point at which, even with very low rates of apprehension and conviction, commission will be driven below the contemplated rate. The model of people as maximizers of expected utility is here essentially a heuristic, to help us understand the active absurdity of the once fashionable claim that potential criminals are indifferent to incentives.

However, as a community shifts to relying upon punishment from relying upon other things (better policing, aid to children in developing enlightened self-interest, efforts at rehabilitation of criminals), the punishments must become increasingly … awful. And that is the moral reason that we are damned if we simply proceed as Becker said that we hypothetically could. A society of monsters licenses itself to do horrific things to people by lowering its commitment to other means of reducing crime.

[1] Another way of writing p_i(a) would be prob(o_i|a). We could write u_i for u(o_i) to and express the expected utility as p₁(a)·u₁ + p₂(a)·u₂ + … + p_n(a)·u_n but it's important here to be aware of the utility function as such.

When I was between my ninth and tenth birthday anniversaries, my father was transferred to an island in the middle of the Pacific;* my family went with him.

I was instructed to put the things that I wanted to go to the island in one box, and things to go into storage into another. I put my teddy bear into what I thought were the box for the island.

When we got to the island, the teddy bear was not amongst the things delivered there. I was very sorry to think that I'd put it in the wrong box, and that I would not see it until we moved back to America.

Two and two-thirds years later, we left the island. I was then twelve years old, but I looked forward to getting my teddy bear back.

Only, it wasn't in storage.

I'd put it in the box to go to the island. One of my parents thought it unsuitable for a boy of my age to still want a teddy bear. So my bear had been discarded.

*Kwajalein Island, in the Kwajalein Atoll, in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, in Micronesia.

While the word slavery gets used in many ways, its core meaning is that of a personal condition of being property of another person or of a group of persons

However, there are recurring attempts to redefine slavery, insisting that a person who reaped only subsistence from his or her labor were by definition a slave. Now, this proposed definition is really orthogonal to any proper definition.

• On the one hand, a person reaps only subsistence when living with a minimal technological infrastructure in a world of markèd scarcity. Much of humankind for most of history lived with little or no production above subsistence, regardless of whether someone else were making ownership claims against them.
• In some cases, people have had lives of relative material comfort, and yet would have been tortured or killed by their masters had they sought different employment.

(Compounding the problem with the redefinition, people who are consuming commodities far in excess of their needs for survival like to redefine subsist to include various comforts, such as electronic entertainment.)

Perhaps most of the people who abuse the world slave in this manner do so thoughtlessly; but it ties-together with an aspect of left-wing thought to afford them a significant evasion, deceiving others and deceiving themselves. That aspect is a resistence to acknowledging a relationship between wage-rates and the amount of labor employed in an economy.

One sees this failure in present support for an increase in statutory minimum wages. What these laws really say, to put things quite simply — yet perfectly truthfully — is that if an employer or would-be employer is unwilling or unable to employ a worker at or above the statutory minimum, then the employer must fire the worker, or not hire the worker in the first place. Most advocates presume that the employer will neither fire nor refrain from hiring, as if demand for labor were perfectly inflexible.

A rather pure expression of this dissociation of wage-rates from labor employment is found in the economic model of Piero Sraffa.[1] Sraffa's work is utterly unknown to most lay-people, and unfamiliar to most economists, but to economists on the far left it is an important benchmark, exactly because it claims so much of what they want to claim. However, its persuasive success is largely a matter of subscribers failing to note or to acknowledge a great deal implicit in the model. Perhaps most remarkably, in his model, the very same amount of labor is produced and consumed with absolute disregard for the wage-rate. That is to say that workers deliver the same labor (imagined as a scalar quantity) whether they are offered literally nothing in return (not even subsistence), or all of production is given to them as wages (with the same wage-rate for each worker).

When I look at the Sraffan model, I see workers behaving as if they are slaves. When their wages provide them no more than sustenance, they are as miserable slaves; when their wages provide them less than sustenance, they are as dying slaves; when their wages provide them far more than sustenance, they are as materially comfortable slaves. What makes them seem to be slaves is that they never exercise, and thus appear not to have, any freedom of choice in where they work nor in how hard they work.

(In those states of the United States that allowed private ownership of slaves, slaves were expected to deliver some fixed quota to their owners. They were not typically offered rewards for exceeding these quotas; they were punished, sometimes horrifically, for failing to meet them. I know of no other way, in the real word, to get labor production of the sort that Sraffa describes.)

In Sraffa's model, whatever production does not go to workers, goes to the owners of the other productive resources — essentially to the capitalists.[2] If one embraces Sraffa's model or something very much like it, and if one waves-away the proper meaning of slavery and instead uses it to mean one who is paid no more than sustenance, then it is easy to insist that, in a system that most favors a distinct class of capitalists, workers would be slaves, whereäs alternatives decreasingly favorable to such capitalists move workers ever further away from slavery. And if one imagines the workers getting an ever greater share exactly as production is administrated on behalf of the worker, then the movement away from slavery is a movement towards socialism.

However, if one continues to accept a model along the lines of Sraffa, yet restores the proper meaning of slavery, then one begins to see one why it had been doubly convenient to redefine the term. Because, in imagining a world in which workers never, one way or another, exercise freedom of choice in labor regardless of how production is distributed, the left has come perilously close to suggesting that workers, under socialism, would be slaves.

The underlying truth is that labor is one of the means of production. If an economy is fully socialized, then the potential worker must be employed however and wherever the best interests of the community as a whole are served, and his or her interests count no more in this decision than do those of anyone else.

This grim principle has repeatedly been illustrated in communities that have attempted a very high degree of socialism. Sometimes the attempt has been hijacked by leaders with less than sincere interest in communal well-being, but these leaders were able to make the populace their slaves because socialism required slavery of the populace. Trotsky's observation that

The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.[3]

was true under Stalin because it or something like it would, as a practical matter, have been true under any fully realized socialism.

Meanwhile, as much as many people living in more market-oriented economies like to imagine themselves as slaves to their employers, they're fully aware that these employers cannot send agents to recapture them should they quit their jobs. To the extent that any group of persons other than ourselves exercises such ownership over us, that group is the state — the very institution usually entrusted to effect socialistic measures.

A movement towards socialism is a movement towards slavery, rather than away from it, and if one is going to bring the subject of slavery into an honest defense of socialism against all alternatives, then it is necessary somehow to make a case for slavery.

[1] The Production of Commodities by Commodities; Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory (1960).

[2] Note how advocates of higher statutory minimum wages point with outrage at those who amass great wealth while paying workers less that some proposed statutory minimum wage, as if there were a zero-sum game being played between employer and employee.

[3] The Revolution Betrayed, ch 11 Whither the Soviet Union? § 2 The Struggle of the Bureaucracy with the Class Enemy.

I've read that Anonymous has found the names of about a thousand members of the Ku Klux Klan, and is preparing to release them.

I'm hoping that none of the 10 other people in this nation with the same first and last name as I are members, because it could be Hell for the rest of us. I'm also hoping that Anonymous doesn't add names of people whom it dislikes, especially as I might be amongst them.

A few years ago, I challenged their attack on Stratfor. Stratfor was a journalistic enterprise, focussing on issues of global politics (including military action) and security, and publishing both free content and content that required a paid subscription. Some at Anonymous were sure that Stratfor were, effectively, a criminal undertaking because

• Stratfor communicated off-the-record with policy wonks and with state officials (as did and do almost every other major journalistic enterprise and many of the minor journalistic enterprises); and
• Stratfor expressed opinions with which Anonymous vehemently disagreed.

So Anonymous stole e.mail, e.mail addresses, and credit-card information from the Stratfor servers. If one had so much as subscribed to a free newsletter from Stratfor, then one's e.mail address was made public, and one was subjected to hoax e.mail from Anonymous. Many who had simply paid for something from Stratfor had their credit card information used to make contributions to charitable organizations (each of which then had to spend resources on returning the stolen money, at a net loss).

The e.mail itself was given to WikiLeaks, which processed it with the help of other journalistic institutions. Some of these institutions shamelessly used the stolen information to their own advantage, though it didn't provide evidence of wrong-doing by Stratfor. Indeed, after almost four years, no evidence of criminal wrong-doing has ever been presented. Stratfor's greatest sin was gross incompetence in the field of security.

None of the major media outlets has drawn attention to the point that the supposed end that was to justify Anonymous's means was not met. They have been virtually silent about this attack on journalistic freedom. That's because, as I suggested in my entry of some years ago, these outlets are themselves afraid of being attacked by Anonymous.

Journalists are fond of seeing their profession as brave. Well, there truly are some brave journalists in this world, but they're in a minority, and the rest don't deserve to see themselves as heroes for keeping company with that minority.

[This entry is a reworking of a less carefully written entry that I posted to Facebook on 26 March.]

A classic question is of whether goodness — in the sense of that which is moral or otherwise objectively to be desired — determines the will of G_d, or is determined by the will of G_d.[2]

The notion that whatever G_d wills is, ipso facto, good is called the Divine Command theory of goodness. A fair number of people profess to believe this theory, but few people actually do. One way of testing belief would be to ask, for various X, whether it would be bad for G_d to do X. For example, whether it would be bad for G_d to create innocent souls, and then, beginning immediately, to subject them to an eternity of unrelieved suffering. A person who reached for some theoretical greater good somehow achieved wouldn't be accepting that G_d's will were ipso facto good; a person who cried out that G_d would not do such a thing because it were evil wouldn't be accepting that G_d's will were ipso facto good. Only a person who could honestly declare that it would not be bad for G_d to do any X would accept the Divine Command theory.

Phil Robertson's infamous speech, in which he presents a hypothetical scenario within which ghastly things are done to an atheïst famly,[3] is an exemplar of an attempt to advance a Divine Command theory that violates the essential feature of that theory. Robertson presumes that atheïsm in turn implies moral nihilism. But he also presumes that none of the things done to the family could be good; that presumption implies that even G_d could not make them good. Robertson expects his audience — even the non-believers in his audience — to be able to see that these assaults are actively wrong. Indeed, he is apparently prepared to bet that, in spite of their unbelief, atheïsts undergoing such trials would form an opinion that something about this just ain’t right.

Well, if G_d cannot make a thing good merely by willing it to be good, then fundamental goodness is independent of the will of G_d. And if goodness is independent of the will of G_d, then the case for goodness is independent of the will of G_d. If G_d should not do things because they are evil, then men and women should not do them because they are evil, for pretty much the same reason as G_d should not, whatever that reason might be.

Possibly G_d might be more morally discerning than ordinary persons. But ordinary persons plainly have great difficulty recognizing whatever principles are communicated by G_d, which is why there is so much disagreement amongst theïsts about alleged communications. Faith is not a mechanism of discernment; it is guessing without the guidance of evidence, and a leap of Faith can carry one in any direction. If we are not to make uneducated guesses about morality, then we must hope that some human beings amongst us can make a case that does not itself rely in its foundations upon unproved assertions about what G_d declares — a case, thus, that can be made to atheïsts.

(Hypothetically, it might be proved that G_d were more morally discerning and had made some moral declaration the basis of which were not understood by other persons. Still, if that proof were not apprehensible to atheïsts, then it would not be a proof by which human beings could reasonably be guided. And I certainly haven't encountered such a proof.)[3.5]

That's not to say that the will of G_d would be irrelevant to a manifestation of ethical principles; the will of other persons can be important to such manifestations (as, for example, when I think myself morally required not to hurt the feelings of a child); and G_d would perhaps be the most important of persons. But the fundamentals would be prior to the desires of all persons.

Actually, those of us who believe that morals are prior to the will of anyone have a hard time seeing any real difference between taking morality to be no more than the commands of G_d and taking morality to be no more than the commands of some other powerful party of persons. For us, that looks like no morality at all, just the rule of a bully or of bullies.[4]

And, really, a belief in a morality greater than the demands of any person is what underlies the emotional commitment of so many atheïsts to their atheïsm. They believe that G_d would be good, and that G_d therefore could not cause nor allow certain things to happen; but they see those things happen, and so conclude that G_d is not there. It is an implicit and often unrecognized commitment to morality that makes these people atheïsts. (A potential counter-argument to this case for atheïsm might be found in claiming that some greater good were served by the ills observed.)

[1] For consider such as this: Is that which is hallowed loved by the gods because it is hallowed, or is it hallowed because it is loved by the gods?

[2] Of course, one may more generally write and speak in terms that allow for multiple gods (as did Platon). This allows for consideration of disagreement amongst gods, but otherwise adds nothing but verbal awkwardness and irrelevant discomfort for monotheïsts. Since I expect that a greater share of my readers will be monotheïsts rather than polytheïsts, I'll concern myself less with the discomfort of the latter.

[3] “I’ll make a bet with you. Two guys break into an atheist's home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him. And then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him. And then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn't it great that I don't have to worry about being judged? Isn't it great that there's nothing wrong with this? There's no right or wrong, now is it dude?’

“Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn't it be something if this was something wrong with this? But you're the one who says there is no God, there's no right, there's no wrong, so we're just having fun. We're sick in the head, have a nice day.’

“If it happened to them, they probably would say, ‘something about this just ain't right.’”

[3.5] This parenthetic note was inserted on 31 August 2015.

[4] See my entry of 20 February 2008 for discussion of the notion that rights are creäted by powerful parties. It is unsurprising that the typical response of classical liberals and the typical response of conservatives to atheïsm should differ one from the other, given that classical liberals and conservatives have very different notions about a need for bullies in human society.

The Veterans Health Administration is a con job. I'm sure that many of those working as part of it do not recognize it as a con job. I'm sure that some of those working for it recognize that it is a con job but believe that it can be something more and better, and have been struggling towards that goal. But it is a con job and it will remain a con job so long as it has anything much like its present form.

The declared purpose of the VHA[1] is to provide health-care to military veterans. This mission appeals to those voters who see veterans as deserving reward or compensation for their military service, and it appeals to those contemplating entering such service.

In theory, the provision of this health-care could be entirely by a voucher system, allowing veterans to acquire health-care at state expense but through a market of private producers. The reason that a voucher system is not used is because of its expense.

To control costs, provision has largely been by state-run facilities. Some people imagine that costs will be kept in check because of elimination of profit, because of technical efficiencies achieved through vertical integration, and because of recruitment of superior personnel willing to work for lower salaries. But the elimination of profit means the elimination of the profit-motive, which elimination in turn inhibits the search for new and better ways of doing things. Vertical integration might be able to exploit technical efficiencies, but a greater problem of economic calculation confronts any attempt to administrate a large-scale allocation programme. And the state is simply not very good at recruiting superior people on-the-cheap.

The problem of economic calculation bites especially hard, and the VHA cannot actually get its costs down to those of private provision through the market. The VHA can, however, lower its evident pecuniary costs by reducing the quantity or the quality of the health-care that it provides. In other words, it can shift the cost to veterans, in the form of unmet promises; in the form of suffering and in the form of death. That is how the VHA can and does control costs.

When the VHA was launched, there was almost surely a sincere belief that it could deliver at a discount. However, there have since been many decades for state officials to observe that it has not; there has been ample time to recognize that it cannot. Yet instead of being forthright in explaining what it would take to provide veterans with the benefits that they were promised, and instead of preparing to meet the promises now being made to recruits, the deception continues. As failure continues to come to-light, there will be further reforms that fall short of what is actually needed to meet the promises, because fraud saves the state a considerable amount of money, and protects the mythology under which the state preserves and accumulates power more generally.

I have noted that health-care could be provided to veterans by way of a voucher system, but if one respected the sensibility and character of military veterans, and trusted the strength of voters, then a better thing to do would be simply to give veterans enough money that they could buy the same amount of health-care (in part by purchasing insurance), but to allow them to spend that money as they chose. At the margin, a bit more or less of something else may reasonably be more important to some veterans than a bit more or less of health-care.

If veterans are intelligent, economically rational, and of good character, then they will use the money appropriately. If they are stupid, irrational, or sociopathic, then they may spend the money inappropriately, and later seek a bail-out from the tax-payer in the event of an emergency, and voters might give that to them.

I leave each reader with responsibility for his or her judgment on that matter.

[1] The VHA is the best-known part of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, aka the Veterans Administration, to the point that VA usually refers to the VHA, and that VHA and Veterans Heath Administration aren't much used. None-the-less, I'll employ the more precise term and abbreviation hereïn.

[Every now-and-then, I'm provoked or otherwise prompted to explain the false economy of conscription. What prompts me to do so now is the ill health of James Earl Carter, since, after all, that alleged champion of human rights restarted registration for the military draft.]

There is a wide-spread belief that the burden of taxation is somehow reduced by conscripting service. Usually the service under consideration is military. The notion is that, with a conscripted force, one only has to pay an average soldier some amount M_C, whereas with a volunteer force, one has to pay an average soldier some greater amount M_V. So people think that there's a per-soldier savings of M_V - M_C This thinking is utterly wrong.

First of all, conscription involves its own peculiar costs of administration and of enforcement. Those are far more substantial than most people imagine, and even if we use an accountant's notion of cost, the difference between the annual cost of a volunteer army and that of a conscripted army would come to less than $30 per soldier.

But an accountant's notion of costs really misses the Big Picture here.

Imagine that the state got people into the service (army or whatever) by promising them M_V, but then, once they were enlisted, declared a surprise tax (peculiar to their pay) T = M_V - M_C That would be a tax exactly equal to the supposed savings. Defrauding them in this manner wouldn't have reduced the tax burden; rather, it would have enabled it.

If the state had used more overt force to get those same people to enlist — threatening them with imprisonment if they did not — the tax wouldn't be reduced; it would merely be disguised. Their financial loss would be just the same, M_V - M_C exactly that amount of tax that people mistakenly believe would be saved by using conscription. The supposed savings was no savings at all, just a tax that people failed to recognize as a tax.

However, in the real world, the draft doesn't end up getting the same people who would have been tricked by promising pay and then taxing some of it away. It draws from a larger population, some of whom might be making less money than they would in the service, but a great share of whom are making more even than M_V (the pay at which enough volunteers would be found). If someone is indifferent between her job in the private sector and the job that she has as a conscript, except for the pay, then the implicit tax that she pays is M_J - M_C where M_J was her private-sector pay. For example, if M_J was $60K and M_C is $15K, then she is paying an implicit tax of $45K.

Because of this sort of situation, even if we ignore the peculiar costs of administration and of enforcement that I mentioned earlier, the tax burden of conscription is greater than that of paying recruits enough for an all-volunteer service.

However, in the real world, people are not indifferent between jobs (except for pay). Some people are willing to take a pay cut to defend their country; and, obviously, those people might pay a lower implicit tax (if conscripted).[1] But other people wouldn't choose to go into certain lines of work — such as soldiering — for all the wealth in the world. The only thing that gets them into the conscript force is the fact that the certainty of being punished by their state is an even worse fate in their eyes. So let M_W be the wealth of the whole world; the tax paid by each of these conscripts is something greater than M_W - M_C In some cases, it can be summarized thus ∞ And that, folks, is the actual tax cost of conscription.

Registration for military service was reïntroduced by James Earl Carter in an attempt to seem efficacious after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Early in his campaign, Ronald Wilson Reagan was saying that he would end that registration; but, as it became plain that he could win the election without maintaining that promise, he walked away from it. William Jefferson Clinton, who had dodged the draft as a young man, decided that young men during his Administration should none-the-less be required to register.

[1] I say might because a revulsion towards the conscription itself could subvert that willingness.

The subject of bumble bees arose yester-day, reminding me of the time, many years ago, that I bathed one.

Bumble bees burn a huge amount of energy; they're always rather close to starvation. Seeing a bumble bee, and thinking of their energy demands, I was curious as to how she would reäct to refined honey from a honey bee; so I got a spoonful of the stuff to offer to the bumble bee.

The bee and I did not handle it gracefully, and she fell into the honey. Now the bee was covered with sticky stuff, which was drying in the sun. She would probably starve to death, caked with food; and it would be my fault.

I carefully put the bee on a fence-post, and then got some cotton swabs, some tepid water, and a tooth-pick. I periodically dipped the tooth-pick into the honey (still in the spoon), and then daubed the bee's mouth-parts with it. In between, I swabbed her with the tepid water.

It took a long time to clean that bee. She endured the whole process rather well; I don't recall her ever acting agitated. Eventually, she was clean and dry and flew away.

Now, when I told this story in the 'blog that I once had on LiveJournal, someone responded as if my cleaning the bee were an act of charity; I didn't and don't see it as such. I had actively brought disaster upon a benign creature. If I had not subsequently cleaned that bee, then I would have been its killer; there is no counting me as its saviour for having set things right.

But I do enjoy the thought that, with all that honey in her, she were probably buzzed.

In the eyes of the law, a corporation is itself a person. This effects two sorts of things.

The first comes into play when the corporation is shared amongst multiple owners or ownership changes. Because the corporation may enter into contracts as a legal person, may be sued as a legal person, and may bring suit as a legal person, it is typically unnecessary to identify all the owners for purposes of contracts or of suits, and shares may be traded without explicit and complex contracts reässigning rights or responsibilities.

The second thing effected is limited liability. When a corporation is found to be at fault in some way, typically no more may be seized to satisfy its responsibilities than that assets of the corporation; other assets held by the owners are insulated from confiscation. (And when corporations are themselves permitted to file for protection as bankrupt, there may even be insulation of the corporate assets.)

It is largely because of this insulation that corporations are sometimes created to be owned by single persons, who have no intention of selling shares. (And those owners may be merely legal persons — corporations most of whose assets are now insulated by a layering of incorporation.) Unlimited liability presents some potentially enormous difficulties for the law when a company has many and variable owners; but, if such limitation is to be granted at all, any sort of minimum number to qualify for that limitation would seem to be arbitrary.

In the case of liabilities to second parties — those who have chosen to do business with the corporation — there is really no problem of morality nor otherwise of economics in limiting those liabilities. The limitations are essentially contractual conditions. (And, historically, some firms have avoided incorporation exactly to get the volume of business and to be able to charge the sorts of prices that a corporation within their industry could not.)

But liabilities to third parties — those who have not contracted with the corporation — are another matter.

An example of a liability to third parties would be a case where an airplane crashed into a residential neighborhood. The owners or residents entered into no agreement waiving damages, but if the assets of the corporation are not sufficient to make those victims whole, typically the other assets of the owners of the corporation are out-of-reach.

Incorporation confiscates the property of third parties. At the least, the right to be compensated in the event of injury is abridged.

Economic efficiency would require that an activity be avoided unless its expected value — that is to say its value accounting for possible outcomes and the various plausibilities of those outcomes — were greater than alternatives. For that to obtain, the activity must be fully insured (either self-insured or by the purchase of insurance through an agency); but, if a party is insulated from liability, then that party has a natural incentive to over-consume risk as a productive factor.

And let us be clear that corporations are a deviation from laissez-faire; free-market corporation is a contradiction-in-terms. Incorporation may be on behalf of some private party, but it is not itself a private act. It is the state that creates corporations. In exchange for registration fees and perhaps for special taxes, the state implicitly confiscates the property of third parties, and enables the owners of the corporation to over-consume risk. Where the sums extracted by the state are less than the cost of full insurance, there is more incentive to incorporate, especially in the cases where the firm is to be owned by a single individual or by a small and stable group of people. And corporate taxes are not indexed to risk. When third parties are injured, officials of the state may present themselves as rescuers or as champions of the victims, but those officials are actually amongst the victimizers. And, since over-all the monies got from registration fees and corporate taxes are less than the corresponding aggregate cost of full insurance, either some third parties injured by corporations must go uncompensated, or taxpayers of some other sort must make good the difference.

When there's an argument over whether corporations are people, oftentimes each side is simply talking past the other.

Those who insist that corporations are people are not typically expressing a position on whether the law should create such legal persons; rather, they are usually trying to communicate that the burdens imposed upon corporations are ultimately imposed upon people — that nothing that the corporation is compelled to do can be done except that it be done by human beings, and that nothing taken from a corporation is not taken from its ultimate owners, who are people.

Those who insist that corporations are not people are typically arguing that the legal fiction that a firm is a distinct person is unwarranted.

But many of those who assert that corporations are not people go on to insist that, because corporations are not persons, they may be compelled to do things that persons should not be compelled to do, and may be restrained in ways that persons should not be restrained. However, it's one thing to argue that a corporation as such is not itself a person outside of law and should not be one in the eyes of the law, and entirely another to argue that the acts of corporations are not the acts of any person and that constraints on corporations are not constraints on any people. With the corporation stripped of distinct personhood, the actual persons of the corporation are revealed, not hidden. A willful blindness is then required if they are not seen.

In the face of decisions to which he objected about what was allowed and disallowed for corporations, Bernie Sanders asserted that Ben Cohen were a person and that Jerry Greenfield were a person, but that Ben & Jerry's Homemade Holdings, Inc., were not a person. But if, while Messrs Cohen And Greenfield still owned that corporation, the law had forbidden the corporation's doing such things as hiring the homeless or required it to do such things as to devote a percentage of its capacity to the manufacture of munitions, then this imposition would have forbidden them to do these desired things or required them to do these repulsive things, and they would surely have taken that quite personally. Ben & Jerry's Homemade Holdings was not and is not a person (outside of legal fiction), but it was and is persons and the property of persons. Mr Sanders is willfully blind or a demagogue or both.

They and Mr Sanders might be quite sure that what they wanted to do were right, and that what they didn't want to do were wrong, but so are the owners of corporations who want to support political candidates or who object to paying for abortifacients. Liberty isn't simply for those who agree with some of us; it wouldn't be liberty if it were.

It might be argued that the various constraints placed upon corporations are none-the-less perfectly legitimate, as incorporation were voluntary. But if incorporation creätes a relative advantage for those who incorporate in some industry, then it ipso facto creätes a relative disadvantage for those who do not. Incorporation may then be voluntary only in the sense that participation in that industry in the first place is voluntary. In such a context, insisting that those who incorporate have voluntarily surrendered various rights would be analogous to claiming that carpenters have voluntarily surrendered those same rights.