I have to wonder whether the BBC was having a laugh when they wrote that sentence. (Of course, here in America, Congressional Democrats once held a special hearing so that Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek could testify on US farming policy.)

Ordinarily, I'd see no urgency in deposing the Australian monarch. As with Canada, the powers of the head-of-state are virtually ceremonial except under extraordinary circumstances, the de facto head of state is a Governor General, and the Governor General is in practice a countryman chosen by the Prime Minister.

However, the present Queen is almost 82 years old, and the heir apparent is, uhm, Charles. (Canada is perhaps stuck with Charles. Canada became distinctively defined in terms of a rejection of independence for the British North American colonies. Little remains of that rejection beyond having the same monarch as does the United Kingdom.) Then again, have the republics really done respectable jobs of selecting heads of state? There have been and are greater fools than Charles occupying Presidential offices.

In a protected entry, an LJ Friend linked to Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! by Rebecca Traister at Salon.com a couple of days ago. She didn't give her own assessment of the article, beyond saying that it was interesting. I've decided to make a few comments on it.

The principal thesis of the article seems to be that a significant source of support for Obama amongst social democratic (progressive) males is really founded in sexism. Now, I've seen plenty of hypocrisy amongst social democrats, but consider that Margaret Thatcher became the leader of the British Conservative Party in 1975 and their Prime Minister in 1979, and served until 1990. Do we really want to even suggest that sexism is going to be more of a determinant amongst Democratic voters in 2008 than it was amongst British Conservative voters in 1975, or than it was amongst Britons more generally in 1979?

There are a few revealing passages in the article that I think merit special attention:

Valenti continued, Because their friends were not being specifically sexist, or saying something that was tangibly misogynistic, they were having a hard time talking about the sexism of it. Valenti confirmed that this Feminine Mystique-y problem that has no name was familiar to her. I spoke to a guy friend who said, You're being ridiculous. I'm not not voting for her because she's a woman; I'm not voting for her because she's a bitch! He could not see the connection between the two things at all. Valenti said he explained away his comment by declaring, I mean a bitch in the sense that she's not good on this or that issue.

People use the word bitch to mean a number of things. But when Hillary's opponents call her a bitch, they don't typically mean that she is tough in a way with a peculiarly significant relationship to her sex (distinctive or inappropriate); they instead mean that she is sanctimonious, hypocritical, and vicious. (If you want a clear sense of these perceptions, then read The Tall Tale of Tuzla by Christopher Hitchens in Slate or the milder A Hillary Clinton Presidency by Carl Bernstein at CNN.)

A couple of paragraphs later,

Valenti continued, I pinpoint sexism for a living. You'd think I'd be able to find an example. And I hate to rely on this hokey notion that there's some woman's way of knowing, and that I just fucking know. But I do. I just know. When it comes to feminism, she continued, so much proof is required to convince someone that sexism exists, even when it's explicit and outrageous. So when it's subdued or subtle, you don't want to talk about it.

Note the epistemology here. She cannot produce any evidence, but she's insisting that the attitude of these men must be sexist. And she acts as if the reluctance of some people to accept even the plainest of evidence is an excuse for making a charge with no evidence. I would suggest that if Ms Valenti perceives a difference of opinion whose cause must be sexism, and she cannot produce evidence of sexism on one side, then perhaps she ought to be looking for it on the other side.

The article is very right about one thing: A great many social democrats — and a great many people who are not social democrats — have developed unreasonable expectations for Obama:

You already see this idealistic longing projected on Obama, Bruch said. People talk about him as a secular messiah who will bring us political salvation. There's no sense of what is plausible.

Unless McCain makes missteps extraordinary even for a Republican, he will win the general election. And the sorts of domestic programmes and foreign policy that Obama has been advocating would bear very bitter fruit, in some cases very quickly, causing the nation to lurch to the political right.

As I was showering to-night, I was thinking about hypotheses concerning sexual and gender orientation and environment, and wondering how they might be tested. Then it occurred to me that some of them would become far more testable if same-sex marriage were legalized, as it would effectively register a significant share of homosexuals and bisexuals as such.

At that point, a normative concern awoke: With the push to place homosexuality on equal footing, databases are being creäted that could later be used to facilitate persecution of homosexuality and of bisexuality.

I have in the past asserted that the state ought to treat marriage as simply a contract. It's not that I think that marriage itself ought to be an ordinary contract, but that I don't think that its extraordinary aspects are the business of the state. I don't think that the state should be effecting marriage, nor promoting or shaping it beyond simply assuring that any contractual obligations creäted by marriage are met.

My basic reason for this position has been and remains that the state shouldn't be engaged in active social engineering, whether it be the sort dear to the political left or that championed by Focus on the Family. But I now see that there is some danger — albeït perhaps fairly small — that records creäted by this one sort of social engineering programme might be used for a far more dire programme later.

Let's say that we might make veeblefetzers, and we have three available processes:

Now, we have two questions:

• How many veeblefetzers should we make?
• Which process should we use to make veeblefetzers?

From our table we can answer part of the second question: If adamantium and vibranium are actually goods (rather than something otherwise harmful), then we just don't want to use process C; compared with process C, process A would save us some adamantium for other uses, and process B would save us some vibranium. So (again on the assumption that adamantium and vibranium are goods), technical considerations tell us not to use process C.

But it gets messier when we attempt to decide between process A and process B; we have to know whether we want adamantium more for other things than we want vibranium. And there's basically the same question in deciding whether to make veeblefetzers. Could the adamantium or the vibranium be put to better use than in making veeblefetzers? (It gets even more complicated if the processes don't simply scale linearly, so that doubling inputs doesn't double outputs, or new veeblefetzers get put to decreasingly important uses as we make increasing quantities, or we start to take adamantium or vibranium away from increasingly important things as we make more veeblefetzers.)

What we want are numbers or number-like things that are assigned to veeblefetzers, adamantium, and vibranium, so that we can compare those numbers or number-like things, and know whether it's better to save adamantium or vibranium, and whether the priority should be to make veeblefetzers or to do something else with the adamantium and vibranium. Those numbers or number-like things are prices. Market prices are prices assigned by a market process, but any prioritization implies a corresponding system of prices, explicit or implicit. Where there aren't any prices (explicit or implicit), there isn't a system of priorities.

If prices weren't and couldn't be set for us by a market process, then how should they be set? One student, when given a hypothetical example like this of veeblefetzers, adamantium, and vibranium, demanded to know why I didn't use familiar, real-world products and inputs. The answer is that we have a sense of how the world does price things such as watches, aluminium, and gold. Further, aluminium was once more precious than gold, and a decent watch was once unattainable. Relative priorities change, and with them prices. I wanted him to consider pricing from scratch.

In attempting to price adamantium and vibranium, part of what would obviously need to be considered would be the other uses to which one might put each. Were one going to price adamantium or vibranium rationally, then one would have to answer the same sorts of questions for those alternate uses as one wanted to answer for the production of veeblefetzers. In other words, one would have to price the alternative products, and the other inputs (besides adamantium and vibranium) in those other processes. That means looking at other products and processes for those inputs, with no direct involvement of veeblefetzers, of adamantium, or of vibranium. To price anything rationally, one would have to price everything rationally.

One might in theory construct tables of processes for other goods and services. In many cases, one could quickly discard some processes for the same reason that we discarded process C. And, were adamantium or vibranium itself something that must be produced, and not something that a consumer would want in and of itself, then perhaps one could replace it in one's calculations as a function of other inputs.

But the presumption that one could assemble all that technical information — and it must be assembled (not merely collected, but organized) before boffins and wonks can feed it to their super-computers — is truly heroïc, even if one assumes purely automated production. (More on that assumption in a bit.)

Even then, what would be produced would not be prices, but a system of equations and inequalities expressed in terms of unknowns, corresponding to relative valuations of consumer goods and services. One would need to know, at various levels of consumption, whether each participant would rather have a bit more water or a bit more warmth, a bit more warmth or a bit more clothing, and so forth, before one could compute prices rationally or (equivalently) allocate production and distribution rationally.

And, actually, this matter of human preferences cannot be postponed quite like that, because the assumption of complete automation is counterfactual. Human beings may not be factors of production in the making of veeblefetzers, but they are factors of production in quite a bit else. So, to describe production, not only would one have to know how many whoozits can be produced by a purely automated procedure; one also would have to know exactly how specific, real-world human beings (who are very much a part of real-world production) will respond to specific, real-world incentives.

Markets establish prices by concurrent processing. Knowledge is left dispersed; private data, such as preferences, are expressed in the behaviour of individuals participating in the economy. When the price for a given good or service is below an equilibrium, would-be sellers withdraw or try to negotiate a higher price while would-be buyers pursue the good or service in frustration (showing would-be sellers that they might get a higher price) and perhaps offer a higher price; when the price is above an equilibrium, these rôles are largely reversed. So prices are being pushed towards the equilibrium of the moment. Meanwhile, the prices of each good and services is effecting how much people are attempting to buy or sell of other services.

A general equilibrium would never actually be obtained in a real world, because preferences are always in flux, and resources, including technology, change in ways that cannot be particularly well predicted. Still, a market would be in constant pursuit; the process of correction beginning immediately as new information were introduced. And a notable mathematical result is the Coase Theorem: If property rights were clearly defined and respected, then in the absence of transactions costs a market equilibrium would always be economically efficient.

Socialism — the doctrine or practice that the means of production should be owned by the community per se and administered for the over-all benefit of that community — is now-a-days primarily associated with claims about fairness, but in its heyday, and to some extent still to-day, it entailed a belief that technocratic planning could outperform the market by some combination of speed, accuracy, and the avoidance of transactions costs. In the context of production which is assumed to be dramatically more efficient, it becomes easier to talk about the relationship of workers to work changing, and about different patterns of distribution. But the problem here was and remains that socialists rarely recognize the problems of efficiency beyond technical efficiency. In effect, they presume that the differences between processes A and B must ultimately be no different from those between either and C. One often even finds socialists who deny the relevance of prices to socialist planning, betraying some failure to understand the general concept of price. The great problem for socialism is that it must price but, because pricing involves more than technological efficiency, has no sensible system for pricing in the absence of markets. In the absence of sensible pricing, rather than getting wildly more efficient production, one gets horrific chaos and waste.

In practice, socialisms that attempted to avoid having their own markets largely adopted the prices of the more market-oriented economies that they could observe. They had some sense of the present relative values of aluminium, of gold, and of watches because markets elsewhere had valued them. But those prices are prices appropriate to the context in which those markets prevailed; if markets had prevailed in the imitating community, then they would set different prices corresponding to that context. Further, the technocrats can't give the game away by fully imitating the prices of market economies — that would make their own economies more overtly caricatures of market economies. So pricing in communities without their own markets, while not typically being as awful as it might be, is still markedly worse than that in less socialistic nations.

There have long been some socialists who recognized the need for market prices, and such socialists started to become relatively common in the 1980s. The problem for these attempts to combine markets with socialism is that, to the extent that the resulting system behaves like a market, it behaves nothing like socialism; and, to the extent that it behaves like socialism, it behaves nothing like a real market — it doesn't coördinate private and dispersed knowledge to form prices.

(Neoclassical economics hasn't had a good handle on these issues, because it typically assumes-away the underlying problem of information being private and decentralized.)

That's not to say that markets should be used for all economic allocation. The real world involves transactions costs. Sometimes the transactions cost of markets are sufficiently high, and the transactions costs of alternative institutional relationship — contracts, firms, &c — are sufficiently low that the difference then more than off-sets the lost informational value of market prices. But one should remember that real-world alternative institutions do entail transactions costs, and indeed sometimes these are even higher than those associated with markets.

I see that Alan Greenspan has endorsed McCain. Back in January, Volcker endorsed Obama. This leaves no Fed Chairmen to endorse anyone else, as the present Chairman is supposed to stay out of it, and the other guys are dead.

Nobody much cares, but I am not endorsing anyone. I'm especially not endorsing Mike Gravel, who has joined the Libertarian Party and is seeking its nomination, nor the Libertarian Party, who have welcomed him. Mike Gravel has made plain where he stands on the issues, and it's plain that he's not a Libertarian.

Brought to my attention by the Woman of Interest:

Please hear the story of Guy Gabalon's heroic, effective, outside-of-the-box actions during World War II. Marine PFC Gabaldon is officially credited with single-handed capture of over 1500 Japanese during the struggle for Saipan in July 1944!

Then please sign the petition to give him, posthumously, the Medal of Honor that he was owed.

(There have been some grumblings about Gabalon being denied the medal because of his ethnicity. I suspect that the denial had far more to do with him having been incredibly successful using methods so alien to the military.)

Half a block from where I live is Bronx Pizza, which looks like a hole-in-the-wall place, but has a really great pesto pizza, usually available by the slice. One can get two large slices and a soft drink for US$6. (The soft drink choice isn't great, but it's passable.)

To-day, I was there to get dinner. At a near-by table sat three blue-collar guys, my age or older. They looked as have white blue-collar guys for most or all of my life. But they were talking sincerely and unaffectedly about fighting a problem of sexism and racism at the place at which one of them worked, with the victim of the sexism being a woman. That's not the sort of conversation that such men would have had in my childhood.

The sun was going down, but my day brightened a bit.

I can offer a few theories as to why Ralph Nader has announced that he will once again run for President.

The first, and that to which I subscribe, is that he takes some sort of perverse pleasure in functioning as a spoiler. Whatever were his intentions in 2000, he was a spoiler for Gore, which resulted in the election of George Walker Bush. Nader had less of a chance to spoil things for the Democrats in 2004, and certainly less of a chance to move the Democratic Party to the political left, but he could and did spoil things for the Green Party, destroying them by running against their candidate. In 2008, Nader doesn't have a good chance of spoiling things for the Democratic nominee, but it's better than were his chances in 2004; McCain is not as loathed by the left as was Bush.

An alternate theory would be that Nader is trying to give Obama some center cred, on the presumption that Obama will indeed be the nominee. Seeking first the nomination of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton and Obama have each positioned themselves significantly to the left of where the last successful Democratic Presidential nominee, William Jefferson Clinton, did when he was running. McCain is a war-hawk, and a conservative on some issues, but he is a centrist or even to the left of center on other issues. To win the election, the Democratic nominee will have to seem more centrist than presently does Obama or Hillary Clinton. On top of some rhetorical restyling by the candidate, it could help if Nader provided apparent contrast.

Of course, Nader is more likely to function as a spoiler if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, because she has at times been a war-hawk, and there is less expectation that she would withdraw troops aggressively from Iraq than that Obama would do this. So it is possible that Nader has announced when he has in order to further weaken the Clinton campaign. In that case, we have Nader acting as a spoiler of some sort for Clinton (and possibly for the Democratic Party), and positioning himself to make Obama look more centrist should he gain the nomination.

I've been pondering ideological taxonomy again.

As a classical liberal, I believe that there is a right-or-wrong prior to any actual human choice or action. A standard term for this preëxisting morality is natural law. Classical liberals typically test their notions of natural law by pondering how they would work in a state of nature — that is to say in a hypothetical environment when social institutions have been zeroed-out.

But what I've been pondering lately isn't classical liberalism per se, but conservatism — how it proceeds from a different foundational model, and how that that model affects (or effects) the politics of to-day.

Some conservatives have explained the essential difference between conservatism and liberalism (by which they may mean classical liberalism, or the social democratism that absconded with the name liberal in the 20th Century, or both) in that liberals did not believe in Original Sin. What one perhaps first sees here is a rejection of human perfectability; but there's something darker here.

There's a famous poem by Charles M. Province, It Is the Soldier, which declares that our freedoms and rights are not given to us by ministers, by reporters, by poets, by campus organizers, by lawyers, or by politicians, but by soldiers. The declaration is not merely that the front-line of defense of these rights is provided by the soldier, but that these rights are literally given to us by the soldier. In what sort of framework does the soldier give these rights to us?

Thomas Hobbes wrote of a state of nature in which rights as most of us now conceptuälize them did not exists. Hobbes indeed uses the word right, but it doesn't refer to anything that morally constrains others; rather, it is an obligation of some sort binding its possessor, and in this case binding him to follow a lex naturalis which is of every man for himself:

The right of nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing anything which, in his own judgement and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto. By liberty is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of external impediments; which impediments may oft take away part of a man's power to do what he would, but cannot hinder him from using the power left him according as his judgement and reason shall dictate to him. A law of nature, lex naturalis, is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it may be best preserved. For though they that speak of this subject use to confound jus and lex, right and law, yet they ought to be distinguished, because right consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbear; whereas law determineth and bindeth to one of them: so that law and right differ as much as obligation and liberty, which in one and the same matter are inconsistent.

And because the condition of man (as hath been declared in the precedent chapter) is a condition of war of every one against every one, in which case every one is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule containeth the first and fundamental law of nature, which is: to seek peace and follow it. The second, the sum of the right of nature, which is: by all means we can to defend ourselves.

Now, Hobbes would still be interesting if we discarded the famous stuff about life in a state of nature being nasty, brutish, and short — he'd got hold of the notion of sub-optimal Cournot-Nash equilibria being overcome by introduction of a commitment mechanism — but that business of life being thus wasn't simply grim speculation of how things would be, but an interpretation of how things had been; and, hence, on a deeper level, of how things were and always will be.

Consider the pre-feudal period in Western Europe, and feudalism in theory. Outside of the major cities, the central Roman state provided ever-weakening protection against raiders. (Indeed, to the extent that the state acted upon the country side, it was as itself a looter of a sort.) Those with sufficient resources and leadership abilities put together their own gangs (perhaps cobbled-together from the remains of the state). These gangs might themselves function as no more than local protection rackets, seizing tribute in exchange for protecting weaker people from nothing other than worse seizures by the gang itself, while protecting only themselves from other raiders. But in theory what the local gang did was to hold back those raiders, in exchange for goods or services from those who were subordinates of the leader of the gang.

As it evolved, the ideology of feudalism didn't present the gang simply as providing service-for-hire. Rather, the gang-leader was presented as himself the owner of the land and of what it produced. He granted use of this property, in exchange for stewardship.

Look at this model of the world. The community is under constant menace from external raiders. The warrior holds back those raiders; by virtue of this, he makes the community possible. All rights within the community are thus creäted by him, and any rights possessed by others have thus been granted by him — It is the Soldier.

Aside from ostensibly protecting the locals, the other engagement of the lord was in, well, raiding some other community. In fact, even when feudalism was operating according to theory, the immediate reason that each community needed a lord was that other communities had lords of their own. But, within this framework of rights being creäted by the soldier, there is nothing wrong with this — after all, the rights of the other community ostensibly were brought into existence by warriors to whom the raiders owe nothing! (And savages, who do not have a proper leader, are especially regarded as fair game, for they have no rights from anyone.)

Conservatisms emerge from and are informed by various things, including a respect for subtleties of social evolution. But I think that this model of civilization as carved-out of barbarism and always threatened by barbarism plays much the same rôle for most of them as do the thought-experiments of the classical liberals for them. The classical liberal begins with a perhaps romanticized model of the state of nature, to think about natural law, and adds barbarians (if at all) as a complication of the model; the conservative begins by imagining barbarism, and subsequently perhaps romanticizes the warriors who carve territories from it.

Even if I am wrong in this belief about conservatism, I think that a useful taxonomy could classify ideologies by what thought, if any, they gave to states of nature.

I have a conservative friend whose take on Dirty Harry was significantly different from my own. He saw men such as Callahan as dirty because such men must be, in order that there be civilization for the rest of us. In hindsight, I reälize that it was natural for my friend, qua conservative, to read things thus — it's a variation on the theme of barbarians (the Scorpio Killer) and of warriors (Callahan) who are required and thus empowered to do terrible things to stop them, though these warriors may be sickened by what they are doing.

(Though I have left him here unnamed, in justice I should draw attention to the point that my conservative friend indeed saw Callahan as dirty; my friend would by no means join and worship in a cult of the military. He speaks of soldiers wanting to be honored with parades every day, in what I take to be a metaphor for their propensity to mistake an essential contribution for a uniquely essential contribution.)

Almost every war-time Presidential Administration has tapped into the presumption that war suspends the ordinary rules. (That is, after all, why war is declared by these and by other administrations on things such as poverty.) But now-a-days, we've seen a resurgence, partly fostered by the present Administration, of a world-view in which barbarians are naturally and persistently at-the-gates, held back by warriors of various sorts (some apparently fighting in offices, armored in Loro Piana wool), who are the creätors and maintainers of civilization and thus (like Hobbes' Leviathan) not truly bound by the rules of civilization (though it is admitted that it is generally good policy for them to conform to those rules most of the time). And, within this ideology, it is not just in dealing directly with the barbarian (the enemy combatant) that the warrior is licensed — It is the Soldier, not the lawyer / Who has given us the right to a fair trial. The Soldier giveth, and the Soldier taketh away.

And, of course, as in the Middle Ages, those who have claimed the prerogatives that this ideology would grant to the warrior needn't actually have held back barbarians, or even tried to do so. They may, in fact, be more concerned to exploit the local population.

This mythology is also very much playing into the on-going Presidential election. The Republican nomination has been won by a man whose political career was founded upon military service, and who continues to be widely considered first-and-foremost as a soldier. Some conservatives have made it plain that they cannot abide by this man, but virtually all for reasons distinct from his performance as a soldier.