[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.

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[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.

I've not been in the proper frame-of-mind to work upon the articles that previously occupied me, so I've instead been working on a paper that I'd been meaning to write for years. Its working title is The Begged Questions in Mr. Sraffa's Theory of Price.

Piero Sraffa is notable for a number of things. He was a formidable critic of Marshallian economic theory. He identified serious problems in the formulation of von Hayek's original presentation of capital theory, at a pivotal juncture during the struggle between the Austrian School and Lord Keynes. Sraffa later identified a significant error in the capital theory of the mainstream of American Keynesianism. He was a behind-the-scenes influence upon the thinking of various economists such as Joan Robinson, and of Wittgenstein. He edited the critical edition of the works of David Ricardo.

He also wrote a short book, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities; Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory, that attempted to restore the position of pre-marginalist, anti-subjectivist thinking on political economy. He and his close followers are known as neo-Ricardian because their work has so much of the flavor of Ricardo and of his followers.

Neo-Ricardian thinking heavily influences the so-called Post-Keynesians (one of many different flavors of economic thought that draw upon some interpretation of Keynes's work) and many Marxists look to Sraffa's work as a serious challenge or as a source for revision of Marxian economic theory.

Sraffa's book has been out-of-print in the United Kingdom and in the United States for many years; the most recent printing of which I know was in 1983. However, copies command a significant premium, and new, expensive books about his book or otherwise about Sraffa's economic theories come out fairly often. So, though the size of Sraffa's following doesn't seem to be much growing, it also doesn't seem to be much shrinking.

But, well, his theory of price determination doesn't simply go off the rails; it is never on them. For any decent economist, it would be easy to identify where Sraffa is begging essential questions, or otherwise making unacknowledged assumptions. In particular, he doesn't eliminate the subjective element from his theory of price; instead, he merely hides it, while making presumptions about it (and about production functions) that are bizarre.

Yet I don't think that I've encountered an article that has exposed these problems. The set of decent economists and the set of those who have published articles about Production of Commodities seem not to have intersected.

(I have encountered an article written by a general-equilibrium theorist, who writes like a general-equilibrium theorist. I'll eventually want to return to it to see whether, using the obscure symbolism of his people, he has in fact pointed to any of the essential problems of Sraffa's theory.)

A number of visitors have pinned images from this site to their boards at Pinterest. These actions wouldn't bother me, except that I am very offended with the way that Pinterest attempts to compel visitors to log-into their site to look at boards, and to register an account even to contact them over an issue. Pinterest throws a mask between their content and a visitor (and have tweaked the coding of the mask to prevent its blocking).

I used to have a Pinterest account, but I walked away from it over the demand that I be logged-in to see what my then-girlfriend had pinned to her boards. I find now that Pinterest has the chutzpah to mask the specific set of images from this site pinned to the boards of various of their users.

(Pinterest can drive visits to a site. But I don't allow such concerns to determine the management of this site.)

In order to obstruct the pinning of images from this site to Pinterest, I have added the tag

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

to the headers of this 'blog. This obstruction is imperfect, but Pinterest uses Amazon Web Services, and I don't want to block everything else that does. Nor do I want the code for this 'blog to test each visit to see whether the Pinterest client is attempting to effect a pinning.

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.

This morning, I discovered that a number of attempts in 2012, in '13, and in '14 to breach the security of this 'blog came from an IP number assigned to the Federal Reserve Board (132.200.32.34).

No, I don't think that Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen wanted to crack my site. Rather, I'm pretty sure that a Fed computer was itself cracked, and was operating as a 'bot, for years. 'Cause that's how our government rolls.

On 15 July, there was a slip in my mailbox from the letter carrier, declaring that 71¢ postage were due on an item, which could be redeemed and retrieved at the post office after 09:00 on the next day. I was explicitly named on the slip.

Had this been an item that I'd allegedly sent without sufficient postage then, instead of my just receiving a slip, the item would have been physically returned, with a demand for more postage; so it was something sent to me.

USPS rates for First-Class mail are 49¢ for the first ounce, and 22¢ for each ounce thereafter. So, if someone were to misjudge the weight of an item, then it would be expected to have some integer-multiple of 22¢ too little (or too much) postage. To be 71¢ short, it would most likely have been dropped in the mails unstamped, or had all of its stamps stripped by postal machinery; in the latter case, one expects the stripping to occur sooner rather than later.

The most likely thing would be that this item were without stamps very early in process. And, in that case, it would have been delivered to the return address, with a demand for more postage, if there were a return address; so I guessed that there weren't. That had me curious.

Very shortly after 09:00 on 16 July, I was at the post office, with the slip. But the postal clerk was unable to find the item, and the carrier was not available. (He or she was probably already out, making deliveries.) The clerk insisted that she would take care of the postage due — I suspect that there were no provision for me to pay postage due on a lost item! — and have the carrier deliver the item.

However, it was not in my box on 17 July, nor on 18 July; it would seem still to be mislaid. So I'm left to conjecture.

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On 10 September, there was another slip in my box, declaring 71¢ postage due. While it might have been for yet another item, my guess was that it were for the same piece, having resurfaced. I had reason to go to the post office anyway, as some registered mail was there waiting for my signature.

When I attempted to pay for and collect the mail with postage due, it was again declared to be lost. The fellow behind the counter angrily resented my angry resentment, and I demanded to speak to his manager. The manager found the mail, which was lost as one more aspect of not following normal procedures.

The item was, as it happened, indeed the same item, and something that I had mailed. My scale had said that it were one ounce; apparently theirs said that it were two.[1] So it should either have been sent on to the addressee, with a demand for 22¢ more postage, or returned to my box with that demand, instead of my having been summoned to the post office with a demand for 71¢.

Instead of arguing about 41¢; I just decided to take the thing home, and not to resend it. There is no love lost between the intended recipient and me; and I consider him to be the primary victim of the USPS in this case.

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[1] Some day, I plan to invest in a one-pound weight of the quality used by Bureaus of Weights and Measures, and visit various post offices, testing the scales of their automated dispensers. My guess is that almost every one will overstated the weight. I don't expect that I'll have an opportunity to test the other scales, but I'd bet the innacuracies to be coördinated.

I believe that I last wrote here about what became the Affordable Care Act — aka Obamacare — in an entry posted on 28 July 2008. I've been meaning to write about it since, but I paused to await the outcome of NIFB v Seleblius, and then again to await the outcome of King v Burwell.

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To understand what really drove the Democratic Party to pass the Affordable Care Act, one may look at the experience of the Social Security Act (1935).

The programme of old-age benefits — which is what most Americans have in mind when they refer to Social Security — is one that had been failing slowly over the many decades of its existence. Population growth has slowed strikingly, and life-spans have been extended significantly, so that the number of people paying into the system has declined dramatically relative to the number of people to whom payments have been made. At the same time, in various ways the typical payment per individual has been allowed to climb. The tax used to fund it has never collected enough revenue to do so indefinitely. At times, revenues have been much greater than benefits; but, none-the-less, there has never been a moment over the last 50 years or more when the demographics did not show that, within the expected lifetime of a young person, promised benefits would exceed revenues and exhaust whatever had been saved under the revised programme.

Congress did not plan for the old-age benefits programme to fail, slowly or otherwise. Congress simply didn't take a careful look at the future. The immediate concerns of Congress were to exploit the political gains to be had from promising a pension programme, and to short-circuit political support for the ruinous Townsend Plan.[1] But this slow failure has proved to be hugely rewarding to the party most responsible for effecting the programme.

Because the programme has failed slowly, there was sufficient time for a large share of Americans to become dependent upon it. It was even, for a while, said to be the third rail of American politics — analogous to the rail delivering current to an electrically powered train, in the sense that touching it would prove fatal. As failure has recurringly loomed, Republicans (having increasingly become the party of opposition to the New Deal Coälition) struggled with how to respond to the failure of a programme with such broad support, while the Democratic Party has been able to position itself as rescuer. The slow failure of their creature has been an important part of the success of their party.

Although supporters of the programme often speak and write as if opponents would simply and abruptly withdraw benefits from all recipients, a more common suggestion has been to phase-out the present programme in favor of an overt poverty-relief programme. Thus, for example, those born after some point in time would received reduced benefits — perhaps in some cases no benefits — if they had income or wealth measured above some levels. This idea meets resistance not only from those who would lose benefits, but from those who would then find themselves on welfare.

Younger people, looking at a future tax burden, and perhaps doubtful that the next major reforms will prove sufficient to maintain the programme through their own retirements, are most often open to suggestions of reform. But, as time passes and they age, they find themselves having paid much of the tax that they might earlier have hoped to avoid, so that the principal pecuniary result of a phasing-out would be either to deny them benefits or to place them on welfare. Additionally, as they age, so do their parents, who go from being perhaps middle-aged to being elderly.

A sense may often be retained that they would have been better-off had the programme been phased-out when they were younger,[2] and that those now young would be better-off if the programme were phased-out now. There is, thus, something of the flavor of a sub-optimal Cournot-Nash equilibrium to it all. A lot of people would admit that the programme ought not to have been instituted; but, since it was, and since they would personally be hurt by an attempt to end the programme, they will not assist in an unwinding, and may even actively oppose an unwinding.

And, so, they are increasingly inclined to support the Democratic Party, which continues to promise to do whatever is necessary to keep the programme going.

---

The Affordable Care Act was intended to creäte another slowly failing programme with a large number of people dependent upon it. There was no illusion on the part of most of those who voted for the Act that this programme would be the one exception in the history of large state programmes. They might not know the core reason that such programmes perform so badly, but they've had plenty of observations of failures. As with the Social Security old-age benefits, each time that failure loomed for Obamacare, the Democratic Party could position themselves as rescuers of the programme and thus of the people dependent upon it in order to receive medical treatment. And the Republican Party would again be forced to choose between protecting their brand and protecting their jobs. The public might perhaps conclude that they would have been better-off had the programme not been brought into existence in the first place, but they'd see themselves now being made still worse-off in any unwinding, however an unwinding might benefit later cohorts.

Indeed, when the President acted to preserve the programme by ignoring the plain wording of the law, a large part of the defense of his action was that a substantial number of people had become dependent upon the programme. Even a great many people who had been insured, at lower cost, previous to the programme could have suddenly found themselves uninsured, and the programme was defended on the basis of a dependency that it had induced amongst those people. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, though returned to power largely because of voter discontent with the programme, has been widely criticized for not agreeing upon some view as to how health care ought to be allocated, and then presenting that view to the public. Many Republicans essentially propose adopting a position they are just stuck with Obamacare, since the Supreme Court has twice now refused to stop it.

However, Obamacare is not a slowly failing programme; it is a rapidly failing programme.

In my entry of 28 July 2008, I explained that the programme was effectively to tax the insurance policies of the healthy in order to subsidize the unhealthy; and that, in the absence of compulsion, the healthy would not insure, causing premia to spiral upward.

In order to make passage of the law politically palatable, the compulsion was relatively weak. The annual penalty for failure to buy insurance is well less than the cost of insurance, and the IRS is forbidden to attempt to collect the penalty (if not paid voluntarily) except by reducing the annual tax refunds of those against whom it is charged. I suspect that the Democratic leadership had some awareness that this penalty structure was going to be inadequate, but were thinking of this weak compulsion as the camel's nose — they planned to get the rest of the beast into the tent in some later session, with higher penalties and more freedom of action for the IRS. They didn't understand that they'd lose control of one chamber in the very next election.

So, indeed, many of the relatively healthy chose not to buy insurance, despite repeated extensions of the buying period. And, as a consequence, premia are going to rise by more than 10%. This increase makes insurance a bad buy for an even larger group of people, who will choose not to buy insurance next year. That will cause a further rise in premia. And so forth. Premia should be expected to increase by more than 10% every year, until the programme implodes as affordable insurance moves out of reach for a huge share of people. (With annual increases of more than 10%, premia would more than double over just eight years, but I do not expect the programme to survive to a doubling of premia!)

There was talk of how, if King v Burwell were decided against the President, Obamacare would go into a death spiral. In fact it was already in a death spiral. King v Burwell could have accelerated that sharply; if the spiral were faster, then the health-care system would have been less distorted by Obamacare, and the unwinding would thus be injurious to fewer people.

The sooner that it were admitted that Obamacare were in a death spiral, the sooner that a drum might be beaten for toughening penalties upon those who refuse to buy insurance. (Or for kicking the insurance companies to the curb, and establishing a more explicitly socialistic system.) But the President is not a man to admit to mistakes, nor do supporters want to admit to yet more deep problems in a programme that has already had many embarassments, as such an admission would increase skepticism. Further, the elected Republicans are unlikely to alienate their base by acting to pull Obamacare out of a death spiral any time soon, though most of them might do so from expediency were Obamacare to last-out a decade.

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[1] The Townsend Plan, advanced by Francis Everett Townsend beginning in 1933, was that each person in the United States over the age of 60 years were to be given a monthly pension of $200, conditional upon a requirement that the entire $200 be spent within a month. The theory was that this spending would result in an increase in economic activity that would, in turn, effectively pay for the pensions.

I won't endorse simply claiming that, since the CPI is now about 30 times that in 1933, $200 then would be equivalent to about $6 000 to-day. (Comparisons of so-called price levels becomes increasingly problematic as time-spans become longer.) None-the-less, one should see that a $200 monthly pension would have been rather breath-taking.

The Townsend Plan was supported by a very large number of people, and was especially popular amongst those over or approaching the age of 60 years, and amongst those economically responsible for the support of older people.

[2] This sense will be especially acute amongst those who understand that the Social Security old-age benefits crowd-out investment-savings for retirement. With reduced investment, the economy grows at a diminished rate.

It seems as if most economists do not know how to handle death.

What I here mean is not that they don't cope well with the deaths of loved ones or with their own mortality — though I suspect that they don't. What I mean is that their models of the very long-run are over-simply conceived and poorly interpretted when it comes to life-spans.

In the typical economic model of the very long-run, agents either live forever, or they live some fixed span of time, and then die. Often, economists find that a model begins to fit the real world better if they change it from assuming that people live that fixed amount of time to assuming that people live forever, and some economists then conclude that people are irrationally assuming their own immortality.

Here's a better thought. In the now, people are quite sure that they are alive. They are less sure about the next instant, and still less sure about the instant after that. The further that they think into the future, the less their expectation of being alive … but there is no time at which most people are dead certain that their lives will have ended. (If I asked you, the reader, how it might be possible for you to be alive in a thousand years, chances are that you could come up with some scenario.)

On the assumption that personalistic probabilities may be quantified, then, imputed probabilities of being alive, graphed against time, would approach some minimum asymptotically. My presumption would be that the value thus approached would be 0 — that most people would have almost no expectation of being alive after some span of years. But it would never quite be zero.

While I'm sure that some models will only work on the assumption that people impute absolute certainty to being alive forever, I suspect that an awful lot of models will work simply by accepting that most people embrace neither that madness nor the madness of absolute certainty that they will be dead at some specific time. Other models may need a more detailed description of the probability function.

As I've perhaps said or implied somewhere in this 'blog; I don't think that real-life probabilities are usually quantified; I would therefore be inclined to resist adopting a model with quantified probabilities, though such toys can be very useful heuristics. The weaker notion that probabilities are an incomplete preördering would correspond to some weaker notion than an asymptotic approach, but I haven't given much thought to what it would be.

Imagine a nation containing two jurisdictions, A and B. Imagine further that the population of jurisdiction A divides neatly into two groups: 51%, who oppose and do not receive transfer benefits from the federal state; and 49%, who receive such benefits (whatever their expressed beliefs). Imagine also that the population of jurisdiction B divides neatly into two groups: 67%, who support but do not do not receive transfer benefits from the federal state; and 33%, who receive such benefits (whatever their expressed beliefs).

The majority in jurisdiction A oppose transfer benefits; yet a higher share of people in that jurisdiction draw benefits than in jurisdiction B, where a majority support such programmes. None-the-less, these figures provide no evidence of hypocrisy in jurisdiction A. Possibly no one there who draws benefits speaks out against them or works to prevent others from receiving them.

In the real world, things are messier. (There'd be six relevant types of people.) But I sometimes see it argued that the people of certain jurisdictions are hypocrites simply on the basis that a majority there oppose some set of entitlement programmes, while at the same time a higher share of the population in that district (than of populations in other districts) draw benefits from that set. The hypothetical case above illustrates the fallacy of that argument.

If we had just one jurisdiction, in which a majority opposed some set of benefits yet a large share of people drew those benefits, the idea that there were some sort of hypocrisy wouldn't naturally arise, unless it were suggested that a majority drew those same benefits. Knowing about other jurisdictions doesn't tell one what one needs to know about that one jurisdiction. But many people get befuddled by the multiplicity, especially when the narrator tells them what they are predisposed to believe.

(There's here also another, perhaps more important fallacy, which I discussed in an entry more than five years ago. People who do not believe that some order should prevail can participate in that order without being hypocrites. It is when they deliberately act to sustain an order against which they express themselves that they are acting as hypocrites.)