In 2005 vultures in the form of trial lawyers not only circled, but drew a beady eye on their prey, drug company Merck, the makers of Vioxx. In the Dallas Morning News ads from law firms exhorting victims of Vioxx to contact them appeared and one even offered a free medical/legal seminar in case Vioxx patients needed coaching to formulate their maladies. This process was repeated in newspapers all across this broad land - and on television and the internet as well.
A dozen nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are available by prescription with the best known, because of extensive advertising, being Vioxx (rofecoxib) and Celebrex (celecoxib). Over-the-counter NSAID medications include aspirin (Bayer & Ecotrin), ibuprofen (Advil & Motrin), and naproxen (Aleve). Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is not technically an NSAID, but is considered an analgesic (pain reliever).
Why are these drugs called “nonsteroidal” and “anti-inflammatory?” Because they are not steroids which treat inflammation by suppressing the immune system; rather they inhibit the body’s ability to synthesize prostaglandins (fatty acids) which contribute to inflammation, pain, muscle cramps, and fever.
The main inflammatory diseases which are treated with these drugs are osteoarthritis (a degenerative joint disease) and rheumatoid arthritis (an autoimmune disease). Of the people who are treated for these diseases in the United States, circa 60% are women and 40% men. Rheumatoid arthritis occurs in about 1% of the U.S.A. population and is three times more prevalent in women than men. Perhaps some consolation for women can be extracted from knowing that a secondary disease, gout, which is treated with NSAIDs, mostly afflicts men.
Essentially what are the differences between the prescription and over-the-counter drugs used to treat arthritis? The answers are drug strength and price. To equal the potency of one tablet of one of the prescription drugs a person would have to take several of the over-the-counter drugs. An increased risk of heart attack or stroke seems to occur with long term (years or at least many months) use of either prescription or over-the-counter drugs.
Whether a person takes one of the prescription or several over-the-counter pills daily, long term, the health risks are the same. Therein lays the artificiality of the liability claims against Vioxx. Given that hundreds of millions of people in this country have taken aspirin or ibuprofen or naproxen over the many decades (aspirin has been around for more than 100 years) these drugs have been available it is practically a certainty there are and have been many people who have taken large doses for years and have suffered increased mortality or disability from heart attacks or strokes yet how many lawsuits have resulted? None that I know of – at least none that were successful. Perhaps Merck can be faulted for not making public sooner the measured long term risk of Vioxx. It appears that although the long term risk of Vioxx is low, it is twice the risk of people not taking the drug. Still who possesses such naiveté as not to believe that the birds-of-prey (lawyers) would not swoop down in a frenetic feeding fury even if Merck had been timelier in its disclosure?
It is interesting that in a speech during the 2004 presidential political campaign, the world renowned homeopathic physician Dr. Teresa Heinz-Kerry of Mozambique weighed in on the issue of treating osteoarthritis by the use of gin & raisins. Her formula, dating back to the era of old wives tales, is to soak nine white raisins (only white raisins; dark raisins simply will not do – even for an African) in a large glass of gin for two weeks then throw away the raisins and gulp down the gin or some such procedure. We should all take comfort in the knowledge that such an ingénue as Mrs. Heinz-Kerry is in the forefront of our political, social, scientific, and medical life.
As an aside, the reason for the past shortages of influenza vaccine can be largely attributable to these aforementioned rapacious trial lawyers of which Sen. John Edwards is an archetypical example. John Kerry even had the temerity to launch a jeremiad against George Bush, blaming him for the then flu vaccine shortage. If Kerry wants to assign culpability for the lack of flu vaccine he would do well to look at his partner in crime the egregiously greedy Johnny Edwards who compiled his fortune by foisting junk science arguments on gullible juries.
A generation ago there were a dozen pharmaceutical companies in the United States making flu vaccine – today there are only two or three. Why? The answer is tied up in the concept of capitalism. Manufacturing flu vaccine was never a highly profitable enterprise in the first place then when lawsuits were filed because there are always some bad reactions in any medical intervention the companies logically decided just to get out of the business.
For the uninformed who believe the answer to this problem is to have the federal government produce flu vaccines I would suggest the following: I made five trips to the old Soviet Union in 1990-91 and I saw what a socialist society wrought in the sphere of economics. They were a half century behind us in all sorts of consumer products and services and the people I talked to knew it. So for those Americans who would opt for government medical services I would paraphrase the words of John F. Kennedy from a speech on June 26, 1963 in West Berlin if it were possible to go backwards in time: “Let them come to the Soviet Union!”
Monday, March 17, 2008
Monday, February 11, 2008
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN – OR IS THIS A NIGHTMARE? 45
In his 2007 book What’s the Matter with California? Jack Cashill (author of the 2005 book Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture – see my essay Fools, Fakes & Frauds #15) has laid out an illuminating exposé of the modern incarnation of the Golden State. Kansan Cashill states that if someone from Kansas is asked what is the matter with Kansas the usual reply is: Why, is there something wrong with Kansas? If someone from California is asked what is the matter with California the common reply is: How much time do you have?
Do you know there is a parallel between the two Californians, O.J. Simpson and John Walker Lindh (the American Taliban)? One is black and the other is white, so that is not it. Both of their fathers divorced their mothers and left their families without any financial or social support. Unfortunately not too unusual, especially in California. What is a bit bizarre, even for California, is that they both left their wives and families and took up with another man. So far as I know John Walker Lindh’s father is still alive while O.J. Simpson’s father died from AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) or more correctly medically since people do not die directly from AIDS, he died because of an opportunistic disease brought on by a greatly compromised immune system. Still think California is not a bit weird? Read on.
In California, 1969 was a seminal year. It was the year the Crips gang was formed; the Tate – La Bianca murders by the Manson mob; and no fault divorce was passed. The prison population in California increased from 23,264 to 168,035 in the 25 years from 1969 to 1994. Was there a link between this much bigger incarceration increase than the population increase of the state and no fault divorce? The answer is an unqualified yes as I will justify later. For the moment consider that in 1970, the first full year of no fault divorce, the numbers of divorces was a record 112,942, a 38% increase from 1969 and was 60% higher than the nation as a whole. By 1980 California registered a new record 138,361 divorces which was more than twice as many as in 1966. What was the response of the politicians in California to the embarrassment of this accelerated divorce rate? Why, they simply stopped keeping or publishing statistics on divorce! Well, that would certainly ameliorate the problem of excessive divorces.
As related by Cashill, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) weighed in on the issue in 1999 with their program Sesame Street. In it, Kermit the Frog, as an inquiring reporter, asks one little bird where she lives. The perky baby bird coos that she lives part of the time in a nest in a tree with her mother and the rest of the time in another nest with her father. She cheerfully explains that they both love her. What PBS doesn’t explain is that this potentially traumatic and unnatural situation might cause some of the little birds to behave badly and a few to become sociopaths the way their human counterparts do. A mere trifle in the grand scheme of things PBS might rationalize.
Californian Susan Atkins’ mother died when Susan was 10 or 11 years old. Her father was a functional alcoholic when his wife was alive and a dysfunctional alcoholic when she died. This left Susan Atkins on her own when she was 15 years old and as a result she easily became emotionally dependent upon and under the spell of the malevolent Charles Manson. The story is similar for the other three people, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Tex Watson, who Manson dispatched to carry out the bloody business of the Tate – La Bianca murders as well as the 15 or so other young people, mostly women, who were lured into the Manson fold.
Charles “Charlie” Manson was a murderous monster – the very epitome of evil. Even far left loons might concede that he was worse than Joe McCarthy; or maybe not. Although he possibly was born a psychopath, Manson’s family background sure did not help his social development. Manson was born to an unwed mother. For a short time after his birth she was married to a laborer named William Manson. He never knew his biological father. His mother, a heavy drinker, once sold him to a childless waitress for a pitcher of beer. His uncle retrieved him a few days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a service station in 1939 (Manson was five years old) he was placed in the home of a very religious aunt and uncle. Unfortunately when his mother was paroled in 1942, Manson was returned to her. In 1947 his mother tried unsuccessfully to place him in a foster home. The court put him in a school for boys, but after 10 months he fled and returned to his mother. She rejected him. What a pretty, uplifting, and inspiring story this is.
Since the Crips gang was formed in 1969 (the Bloods were formed as an opposition to the Crips in 1971) circa 100,000 Californians have been murdered and not a small percentage of them by California gangs. There are four times as many black males in California prisons as in California colleges. Approximately one out of three young black males is in jail or prison, on probation or parole, or under pretrial release in the California criminal justice system. An African-American in California is four times as likely to be in prison as a Hispanic and seven times as likely as a white. A counter to the charge there is a racial component to the inequalities of these numbers is the fact that it is 20 times more likely for a black Californian male to be incarcerated than a Californian male of Asian descent. It is simply the case that so many African-Americans are incarcerated because they commit so much crime.
Unwittingly and with the best intentions (remember, the road to Hell is paved….) federal and California officials encouraged young men, especially minority ones, to abandon their kids. The Aid to Dependent Children program was expanded to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1960. Or, in reality, Aid to Moms with Dependent Children. A working dad at home did not fit the state definition of a family. In 1964 the federal government sweetened the pot for forsaken moms with food stamps and in 1965 with Medicaid. Shortly thereafter public housing switched from fixed rent to the ability to pay. Each additional financial improvement for single moms was a discouragement for working dads to be in the home supporting their families. Talk about unintended consequences.
In 2006 the Episcopal Church’s diocese of California, headquartered in the Grace Cathedral at the top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill, was tasked with the appointment of a new bishop for the first time in 27 years. What made the selection process newsworthy was that three of the seven finalists were openly gay or lesbian. Three years earlier the appointment of Eugene Robinson as the first openly homosexual bishop in New Hampshire had almost unraveled the church worldwide. The Episcopal Church had been hemorrhaging members for 40 years prior to the elevation of Robinson. In 1960 1.9% of Americans were Episcopalians and 0.8% were Mormons. By 2002 these figures were reversed; 0.8% were Episcopalians and 1.9% were Mormons. There is nothing like defying tradition and morality to alienate people and California has a haecceity for that.
There are 250 mass graves of children in the Evergreen Cemetery in the middle of Oakland, California. Who were they? Victims of the most horrendous one day murder of children in the nation’s history. They are the remains of the tragedy of Jonestown, Guyana. Gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk said: “More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than any other reason.” He could not have more mistaken in his assertion that religion was the cause, but he would not live to be corrected. He was shot and killed a week later by the termagant and disappointed former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White who killed the San Francisco mayor George Moscone for good measure. After a trial in which the infamous “Twinkie defense” was introduced, White was only convicted of manslaughter. A little more than a year after he was released from prison in 1985 he did the proper job himself by committing suicide. After the verdict the normally oh so liberal, against the death penalty, homosexual community was outraged and demanded that White be executed. Only in San Francisco.
The malefic Jim Jones was the architect of the Jonestown killing fields and he was no religious leader. He was a self-professed Marxist who used religion for his evil ends. Jones founded the Peoples Temple and as one of his henchmen said “We are not a church, but a social organization. We must pretend to be a church so we’re not taxed by the government.” Jones himself said “Those who remain drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought into enlightenment – with socialism.” Jones reflected near the end that “There wasn’t a person that attended any of my meetings that did not hear me say, at one time, that I was a communist.” In all 918 people died that day at Jonestown, only some of them voluntarily; 276 children and almost as many seniors. There are jokes to this day about Kool Aid drinkers, unmindful that three year olds do not commit suicide.
So far all that I have written is rather tenebrous and caliginous (grim and gloomy), but I will conclude with a bipolar vignette which gives a ray or two of hope for California and therefore for the nation.
When Dr. Ben Chavis, a Lumbee Indian himself, although a genetic mixture of American Indian, black, and white dating back many generations, became principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA the school’s Academic Performance Index (API) score (the minimum being 200 and the maximum 1000) was 436 for the academic year 2000-2001. Under his leadership steady progress was made so that by 2005-2006 the API had reached 920. What was he doing right to achieve such dramatic success? Chavis said “The students were playing Indian when I got there despite the fact that the student body was almost equally divided into African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian. The school was in total chaos.”
Chavis replaced every teacher he inherited when he came to the school. Using the personnel freedom inherent in the charter system he replaced them with smart, ambitious teachers who did not have an education degree. Given the sorry state of teacher training in California he considered this a liability. He also paid his teachers $5000 per year more than they would get in other public school in California and saved money by avoiding all of the trainers, consultants, and assistant what-nots that clutter up public school payrolls.
Every class, every day begins with 90 minutes of no-nonsense language arts. The math is just as serious and intense. Even the special-ed kids take algebra. Chavis says “I have high expectations. I don’t want excuses.” Chavis believes strongly in punctuality and attendance. A student who arrives even one minute late gets detention, but a student who completes a year without missing a single day gets a monetary reward. The classic carrot and stick approach. Many students at the school go the entire year without missing a day. The daily absentee rate is 0.33% while other intercity public schools boast of a daily 8% absentee rate. There is a sign on Chavis’ office door with 16 posted rules. One says “Squawkers, multicultural specialists, self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers, and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best efforts will be booted out.” Another says “Our staff does not subscribe to the black swamp logic of minority students as victims. We will plow through such cornfield philosophy with common sense and hard work.” Chavis does not adumbrate his teaching philosophy. The school building is leased from a church next door and still has a large cross on the front. Asked how he is able to get away with that, Chavis answers “I tell the authorities that it represents the four directions of the wind and I haven’t gotten around to putting feathers on it.” Of course only an Indian could keep the PC police at bay in this topsy-turvy politically correct environment.
A second school success story is that of the Oakland Charter School. When Jorge Lopez took over the 92% Hispanic school in 2004 it was failing just as badly as the American Indian Public Charter School had been and for the same reasons. Lopez observed that the school was forcing “culture crap” on the students and mixing in enough “liberal jargon” to turn the kids against their parents. He fired the entire staff down to the janitors and started over with the Chavis model. “Culture is the job of the parents, my job is to educate the kids” said Lopez. In 2006 with 100% of the students taking the API test, Oakland Charter scored 875, second only in Oakland to Chavis’ school.
Do you know there is a parallel between the two Californians, O.J. Simpson and John Walker Lindh (the American Taliban)? One is black and the other is white, so that is not it. Both of their fathers divorced their mothers and left their families without any financial or social support. Unfortunately not too unusual, especially in California. What is a bit bizarre, even for California, is that they both left their wives and families and took up with another man. So far as I know John Walker Lindh’s father is still alive while O.J. Simpson’s father died from AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) or more correctly medically since people do not die directly from AIDS, he died because of an opportunistic disease brought on by a greatly compromised immune system. Still think California is not a bit weird? Read on.
In California, 1969 was a seminal year. It was the year the Crips gang was formed; the Tate – La Bianca murders by the Manson mob; and no fault divorce was passed. The prison population in California increased from 23,264 to 168,035 in the 25 years from 1969 to 1994. Was there a link between this much bigger incarceration increase than the population increase of the state and no fault divorce? The answer is an unqualified yes as I will justify later. For the moment consider that in 1970, the first full year of no fault divorce, the numbers of divorces was a record 112,942, a 38% increase from 1969 and was 60% higher than the nation as a whole. By 1980 California registered a new record 138,361 divorces which was more than twice as many as in 1966. What was the response of the politicians in California to the embarrassment of this accelerated divorce rate? Why, they simply stopped keeping or publishing statistics on divorce! Well, that would certainly ameliorate the problem of excessive divorces.
As related by Cashill, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) weighed in on the issue in 1999 with their program Sesame Street. In it, Kermit the Frog, as an inquiring reporter, asks one little bird where she lives. The perky baby bird coos that she lives part of the time in a nest in a tree with her mother and the rest of the time in another nest with her father. She cheerfully explains that they both love her. What PBS doesn’t explain is that this potentially traumatic and unnatural situation might cause some of the little birds to behave badly and a few to become sociopaths the way their human counterparts do. A mere trifle in the grand scheme of things PBS might rationalize.
Californian Susan Atkins’ mother died when Susan was 10 or 11 years old. Her father was a functional alcoholic when his wife was alive and a dysfunctional alcoholic when she died. This left Susan Atkins on her own when she was 15 years old and as a result she easily became emotionally dependent upon and under the spell of the malevolent Charles Manson. The story is similar for the other three people, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Tex Watson, who Manson dispatched to carry out the bloody business of the Tate – La Bianca murders as well as the 15 or so other young people, mostly women, who were lured into the Manson fold.
Charles “Charlie” Manson was a murderous monster – the very epitome of evil. Even far left loons might concede that he was worse than Joe McCarthy; or maybe not. Although he possibly was born a psychopath, Manson’s family background sure did not help his social development. Manson was born to an unwed mother. For a short time after his birth she was married to a laborer named William Manson. He never knew his biological father. His mother, a heavy drinker, once sold him to a childless waitress for a pitcher of beer. His uncle retrieved him a few days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a service station in 1939 (Manson was five years old) he was placed in the home of a very religious aunt and uncle. Unfortunately when his mother was paroled in 1942, Manson was returned to her. In 1947 his mother tried unsuccessfully to place him in a foster home. The court put him in a school for boys, but after 10 months he fled and returned to his mother. She rejected him. What a pretty, uplifting, and inspiring story this is.
Since the Crips gang was formed in 1969 (the Bloods were formed as an opposition to the Crips in 1971) circa 100,000 Californians have been murdered and not a small percentage of them by California gangs. There are four times as many black males in California prisons as in California colleges. Approximately one out of three young black males is in jail or prison, on probation or parole, or under pretrial release in the California criminal justice system. An African-American in California is four times as likely to be in prison as a Hispanic and seven times as likely as a white. A counter to the charge there is a racial component to the inequalities of these numbers is the fact that it is 20 times more likely for a black Californian male to be incarcerated than a Californian male of Asian descent. It is simply the case that so many African-Americans are incarcerated because they commit so much crime.
Unwittingly and with the best intentions (remember, the road to Hell is paved….) federal and California officials encouraged young men, especially minority ones, to abandon their kids. The Aid to Dependent Children program was expanded to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1960. Or, in reality, Aid to Moms with Dependent Children. A working dad at home did not fit the state definition of a family. In 1964 the federal government sweetened the pot for forsaken moms with food stamps and in 1965 with Medicaid. Shortly thereafter public housing switched from fixed rent to the ability to pay. Each additional financial improvement for single moms was a discouragement for working dads to be in the home supporting their families. Talk about unintended consequences.
In 2006 the Episcopal Church’s diocese of California, headquartered in the Grace Cathedral at the top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill, was tasked with the appointment of a new bishop for the first time in 27 years. What made the selection process newsworthy was that three of the seven finalists were openly gay or lesbian. Three years earlier the appointment of Eugene Robinson as the first openly homosexual bishop in New Hampshire had almost unraveled the church worldwide. The Episcopal Church had been hemorrhaging members for 40 years prior to the elevation of Robinson. In 1960 1.9% of Americans were Episcopalians and 0.8% were Mormons. By 2002 these figures were reversed; 0.8% were Episcopalians and 1.9% were Mormons. There is nothing like defying tradition and morality to alienate people and California has a haecceity for that.
There are 250 mass graves of children in the Evergreen Cemetery in the middle of Oakland, California. Who were they? Victims of the most horrendous one day murder of children in the nation’s history. They are the remains of the tragedy of Jonestown, Guyana. Gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk said: “More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than any other reason.” He could not have more mistaken in his assertion that religion was the cause, but he would not live to be corrected. He was shot and killed a week later by the termagant and disappointed former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White who killed the San Francisco mayor George Moscone for good measure. After a trial in which the infamous “Twinkie defense” was introduced, White was only convicted of manslaughter. A little more than a year after he was released from prison in 1985 he did the proper job himself by committing suicide. After the verdict the normally oh so liberal, against the death penalty, homosexual community was outraged and demanded that White be executed. Only in San Francisco.
The malefic Jim Jones was the architect of the Jonestown killing fields and he was no religious leader. He was a self-professed Marxist who used religion for his evil ends. Jones founded the Peoples Temple and as one of his henchmen said “We are not a church, but a social organization. We must pretend to be a church so we’re not taxed by the government.” Jones himself said “Those who remain drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought into enlightenment – with socialism.” Jones reflected near the end that “There wasn’t a person that attended any of my meetings that did not hear me say, at one time, that I was a communist.” In all 918 people died that day at Jonestown, only some of them voluntarily; 276 children and almost as many seniors. There are jokes to this day about Kool Aid drinkers, unmindful that three year olds do not commit suicide.
So far all that I have written is rather tenebrous and caliginous (grim and gloomy), but I will conclude with a bipolar vignette which gives a ray or two of hope for California and therefore for the nation.
When Dr. Ben Chavis, a Lumbee Indian himself, although a genetic mixture of American Indian, black, and white dating back many generations, became principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA the school’s Academic Performance Index (API) score (the minimum being 200 and the maximum 1000) was 436 for the academic year 2000-2001. Under his leadership steady progress was made so that by 2005-2006 the API had reached 920. What was he doing right to achieve such dramatic success? Chavis said “The students were playing Indian when I got there despite the fact that the student body was almost equally divided into African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian. The school was in total chaos.”
Chavis replaced every teacher he inherited when he came to the school. Using the personnel freedom inherent in the charter system he replaced them with smart, ambitious teachers who did not have an education degree. Given the sorry state of teacher training in California he considered this a liability. He also paid his teachers $5000 per year more than they would get in other public school in California and saved money by avoiding all of the trainers, consultants, and assistant what-nots that clutter up public school payrolls.
Every class, every day begins with 90 minutes of no-nonsense language arts. The math is just as serious and intense. Even the special-ed kids take algebra. Chavis says “I have high expectations. I don’t want excuses.” Chavis believes strongly in punctuality and attendance. A student who arrives even one minute late gets detention, but a student who completes a year without missing a single day gets a monetary reward. The classic carrot and stick approach. Many students at the school go the entire year without missing a day. The daily absentee rate is 0.33% while other intercity public schools boast of a daily 8% absentee rate. There is a sign on Chavis’ office door with 16 posted rules. One says “Squawkers, multicultural specialists, self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers, and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best efforts will be booted out.” Another says “Our staff does not subscribe to the black swamp logic of minority students as victims. We will plow through such cornfield philosophy with common sense and hard work.” Chavis does not adumbrate his teaching philosophy. The school building is leased from a church next door and still has a large cross on the front. Asked how he is able to get away with that, Chavis answers “I tell the authorities that it represents the four directions of the wind and I haven’t gotten around to putting feathers on it.” Of course only an Indian could keep the PC police at bay in this topsy-turvy politically correct environment.
A second school success story is that of the Oakland Charter School. When Jorge Lopez took over the 92% Hispanic school in 2004 it was failing just as badly as the American Indian Public Charter School had been and for the same reasons. Lopez observed that the school was forcing “culture crap” on the students and mixing in enough “liberal jargon” to turn the kids against their parents. He fired the entire staff down to the janitors and started over with the Chavis model. “Culture is the job of the parents, my job is to educate the kids” said Lopez. In 2006 with 100% of the students taking the API test, Oakland Charter scored 875, second only in Oakland to Chavis’ school.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
FEDERAL INCOME TAXES 44
With the sempiternal Democrat/Republican debate over federal income tax increases or cuts, now or any time seems an opportune occasion to weigh in on the issue. The Democrats claim that tax cuts favor the rich and they are right. The Republicans counter that after all it is the rich who pay the overwhelming bulk of taxes and they are right. What then is ‘fair’?
Federal income tax distributions for the year 2000 show two interesting and important factors. (1) Higher income people pay a greatly disproportionate amount of federal income taxes – and naturally the higher their income the more they pay. (2) Despite the notion widely held (correctly I believe) that this is a country of middle class people, there is a mal-distribution of income. The top 1% of income, almost 1.3 million taxpayers, have an avg. Adjusted Gross Income of $1,042,725 and pay an average of $286,216 in taxes while the bottom 50% of taxpayers (more than 64 million) have an avg. AGI of $13,012 and pay an average of $598 in taxes. And the average income for lower income people as represented by the AGI figure as well as the tax paid figure may be overstated because there is a large but unreported number of people outside this IRS report who, because of their low income, do not pay taxes and are not required to file income tax statements. On the other hand there may be significant unreported cash transactions which would cause the income figure to increase.
What is the answer to the question of what is ‘fair’? My answer is to forget about what is ‘fair’. Fairness is (1) impossible to define, and (2) its perception is in the mind of the disputant. Better in my opinion to turn to an objective analysis of federal taxes as explained by the 1940’s to 1970’s economist, Abba Learner, who in 1959 - 1965 taught economics at Michigan State University. According to Prof. Learner, except for relatively minor taxes e.g., the so called ‘sin’ taxes - tax on alcohol and tobacco to discourage consumption, there are two reasons for federal taxes. (1) To redistribute income and (2) take money out of circulation to keep too many dollars from chasing too few goods and services - in other words to keep inflation under control. No, federal taxes are not levied to pay for government spending per se (see Everybody’s Business: A Re-examination of Current Assumptions in Economics and Public Policy by Abba P. Lerner). That is why the current claim, mostly by Democrats, that tax cuts should not be enacted now or at the very most should be minimal since we have an ever growing federal deficit is bogus. The economy needs the stimulus that tax cuts would provide and the bigger the better so long as this does not reignite inflation. We have been in a period of relative low inflation although currently inflation is becoming a greater risk. Forget the deficit so long as inflation is low. We are not saddling future generations with our debt. Just who are these government obligations called bills, notes and bonds owed to? Some foreigners it is true, especially the Chinese, but for the most part owed to Americans - like me for instance. In Lerner’s words: “We owe the deficit to ourselves.”
What is the best way to frame the tax cut debate? First thing is not to turn it into class warfare rhetoric the way some Democrat politicians, especially John Edwards, are doing. Across the board cuts for all taxpayers should be made and since higher income people pay the most in taxes, they should get the higher cuts – not in percentage necessarily, but in amount. To be bluntly candid about it, to varying degrees, people in descending order of tax payments are being subsidized by those who pay more tax to the point that those who pay no federal income taxes are given a free ride and those who even collect money via the so called, ‘Earned Income Credit’ are paid to ride. That is the way it is, which is not to say it is fiscally, socially, or morally wrong, but the reality of it should be recognized and admitted.
The issue of whether there should be such a big disparity in income is a different subject. Some incomes are skewed from a pure free marketplace determination by tax policies which affect enterprises such as professional sports for example. Without businesses being able to expense ticket and sponsorship fees and thereby being able to lower their own taxes, salaries for professional athletes probably would not be quite as high as they are. A major problem in this regard would to decide what are to be allowed as expense items and what are not. In fits and starts, there have been efforts made that discriminate in what is allowable and what is not. Remember the ‘three martini lunch’ brouhaha of the Carter presidential years? Then there is the issue of people who spend many years of sacrifice and depredation to eventually arrive in high income levels only to be ‘punished’ for their efforts by high taxes. Indeed making judgments on who ‘deserves’ high income and who does not is something best left to socialists and communists and other adherents of failed economic systems. To even ask the question of whether, for example, Ray Romano of the hit television show, Everybody Loves Raymond, deserved his $1.8 million fee for each ½ hour program is to exhibit a profound ignorance of free enterprise economics. He deserved it if the marketplace supported it and it seemed to.
Recently the increasingly pixilated Warren Buffett has stated that the top 10% or so of U.S.A. taxpayers should pay more and our tax structure is unfair because his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does. Let’s analyze this latter assertion. His secretary draws a salary so, apodictically, she pays at the putative income tax rate. Buffett draws no salary so let us say he derives all of his income from long term capital gains. The capital gains rate in the U.S.A. is currently 15% (5% for people in the lowest two income tax brackets). Buffett’s net wealth is estimated at $55 billion or so. With the financial market downturn so far this year (2008) let us round that down to $50 billion and supposing a realized capital gains withdrawal of .1% from all of his assets he would have a pre-tax income of $50 million and a post- tax income of $50 x .85 = $42 ½ million. I could live on that. Incidentally the long term capital gains rate in Belgium, Germany, and Hong Kong, exempli grātiā is zero and in the idyllic country of Iceland (it was rated the best country in which to live in 2007) the C.G. rate is 10%. Wouldn’t you know that the C.G. rate in socialistic Sweden is 30% so perhaps Buffett should move to Stockholm.
If Buffett feels guilty for not paying more federal tax I would like to assure him that he may give the IRS as much money as he desires and they will accept it so long as he makes clear he is voluntarily over paying his taxes.
Buffett is a bit eldritch in other aspects as well. He married his wife Susan in 1952 when he was 22 years old. She died of a stroke (she also had cancer) in 2004. In 2006 when he was 76 he married 60 year old Astrid Menks, from Latvia who had been his assistant and companion for 20 years. What about his wife? They had lived apart since 1977 and allegedly did not disapprove of her husband’s liaison with his paramour.
As an addendum consider the following facts: In 2006 the bottom 50% of federal income tax payers (65 million) paid $27 billion in taxes - 3.5% of all income taxes paid. The ExxonMobil corporation paid $41 billion worldwide in taxes that year. In other words, ExxonMobil paid $14 billion more in taxes than 65 million U.S. tax payers.
Federal income tax distributions for the year 2000 show two interesting and important factors. (1) Higher income people pay a greatly disproportionate amount of federal income taxes – and naturally the higher their income the more they pay. (2) Despite the notion widely held (correctly I believe) that this is a country of middle class people, there is a mal-distribution of income. The top 1% of income, almost 1.3 million taxpayers, have an avg. Adjusted Gross Income of $1,042,725 and pay an average of $286,216 in taxes while the bottom 50% of taxpayers (more than 64 million) have an avg. AGI of $13,012 and pay an average of $598 in taxes. And the average income for lower income people as represented by the AGI figure as well as the tax paid figure may be overstated because there is a large but unreported number of people outside this IRS report who, because of their low income, do not pay taxes and are not required to file income tax statements. On the other hand there may be significant unreported cash transactions which would cause the income figure to increase.
What is the answer to the question of what is ‘fair’? My answer is to forget about what is ‘fair’. Fairness is (1) impossible to define, and (2) its perception is in the mind of the disputant. Better in my opinion to turn to an objective analysis of federal taxes as explained by the 1940’s to 1970’s economist, Abba Learner, who in 1959 - 1965 taught economics at Michigan State University. According to Prof. Learner, except for relatively minor taxes e.g., the so called ‘sin’ taxes - tax on alcohol and tobacco to discourage consumption, there are two reasons for federal taxes. (1) To redistribute income and (2) take money out of circulation to keep too many dollars from chasing too few goods and services - in other words to keep inflation under control. No, federal taxes are not levied to pay for government spending per se (see Everybody’s Business: A Re-examination of Current Assumptions in Economics and Public Policy by Abba P. Lerner). That is why the current claim, mostly by Democrats, that tax cuts should not be enacted now or at the very most should be minimal since we have an ever growing federal deficit is bogus. The economy needs the stimulus that tax cuts would provide and the bigger the better so long as this does not reignite inflation. We have been in a period of relative low inflation although currently inflation is becoming a greater risk. Forget the deficit so long as inflation is low. We are not saddling future generations with our debt. Just who are these government obligations called bills, notes and bonds owed to? Some foreigners it is true, especially the Chinese, but for the most part owed to Americans - like me for instance. In Lerner’s words: “We owe the deficit to ourselves.”
What is the best way to frame the tax cut debate? First thing is not to turn it into class warfare rhetoric the way some Democrat politicians, especially John Edwards, are doing. Across the board cuts for all taxpayers should be made and since higher income people pay the most in taxes, they should get the higher cuts – not in percentage necessarily, but in amount. To be bluntly candid about it, to varying degrees, people in descending order of tax payments are being subsidized by those who pay more tax to the point that those who pay no federal income taxes are given a free ride and those who even collect money via the so called, ‘Earned Income Credit’ are paid to ride. That is the way it is, which is not to say it is fiscally, socially, or morally wrong, but the reality of it should be recognized and admitted.
The issue of whether there should be such a big disparity in income is a different subject. Some incomes are skewed from a pure free marketplace determination by tax policies which affect enterprises such as professional sports for example. Without businesses being able to expense ticket and sponsorship fees and thereby being able to lower their own taxes, salaries for professional athletes probably would not be quite as high as they are. A major problem in this regard would to decide what are to be allowed as expense items and what are not. In fits and starts, there have been efforts made that discriminate in what is allowable and what is not. Remember the ‘three martini lunch’ brouhaha of the Carter presidential years? Then there is the issue of people who spend many years of sacrifice and depredation to eventually arrive in high income levels only to be ‘punished’ for their efforts by high taxes. Indeed making judgments on who ‘deserves’ high income and who does not is something best left to socialists and communists and other adherents of failed economic systems. To even ask the question of whether, for example, Ray Romano of the hit television show, Everybody Loves Raymond, deserved his $1.8 million fee for each ½ hour program is to exhibit a profound ignorance of free enterprise economics. He deserved it if the marketplace supported it and it seemed to.
Recently the increasingly pixilated Warren Buffett has stated that the top 10% or so of U.S.A. taxpayers should pay more and our tax structure is unfair because his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does. Let’s analyze this latter assertion. His secretary draws a salary so, apodictically, she pays at the putative income tax rate. Buffett draws no salary so let us say he derives all of his income from long term capital gains. The capital gains rate in the U.S.A. is currently 15% (5% for people in the lowest two income tax brackets). Buffett’s net wealth is estimated at $55 billion or so. With the financial market downturn so far this year (2008) let us round that down to $50 billion and supposing a realized capital gains withdrawal of .1% from all of his assets he would have a pre-tax income of $50 million and a post- tax income of $50 x .85 = $42 ½ million. I could live on that. Incidentally the long term capital gains rate in Belgium, Germany, and Hong Kong, exempli grātiā is zero and in the idyllic country of Iceland (it was rated the best country in which to live in 2007) the C.G. rate is 10%. Wouldn’t you know that the C.G. rate in socialistic Sweden is 30% so perhaps Buffett should move to Stockholm.
If Buffett feels guilty for not paying more federal tax I would like to assure him that he may give the IRS as much money as he desires and they will accept it so long as he makes clear he is voluntarily over paying his taxes.
Buffett is a bit eldritch in other aspects as well. He married his wife Susan in 1952 when he was 22 years old. She died of a stroke (she also had cancer) in 2004. In 2006 when he was 76 he married 60 year old Astrid Menks, from Latvia who had been his assistant and companion for 20 years. What about his wife? They had lived apart since 1977 and allegedly did not disapprove of her husband’s liaison with his paramour.
As an addendum consider the following facts: In 2006 the bottom 50% of federal income tax payers (65 million) paid $27 billion in taxes - 3.5% of all income taxes paid. The ExxonMobil corporation paid $41 billion worldwide in taxes that year. In other words, ExxonMobil paid $14 billion more in taxes than 65 million U.S. tax payers.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
MARBURY V. MADISON 43
One of the most important Supreme Court decisions was Marbury v. Madison in 1803. I knew what it was, but did not know the story behind it. Perhaps you did, if not however, you may be interested to read about it now.
John Adams, a New Englander from Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson, a Southerner from Virginia were revolutionary period colleagues and friends during the founding of the Republic even though they could not have been more different in personalities, temperament, and politics. It was perhaps inevitable they would have a falling out. Jefferson was the Vice-President of the United States when Adams was President from 1797-1801 on the basis of Jefferson receiving the second most electoral votes even though they belong to different political parties. When Jefferson challenged Adams for the presidency and won in 1801 not only was the rupture in their friendship complete, they became bitter enemies.
During the last days of Adams’s one presidential term the majority Federalist Party in congress passed legislation greatly expanding the number of federal judges including justices-of-the-peace. Adams proceeded to name people of his political persuasion to these positions. A few weeks before Adams had named his Secretary of State and 2nd cousin of Thomas Jefferson, Virginian John Marshall as Chief Justice of the then six-man US Supreme Court (the court was increased to the present number of nine in 1869). Marshall thus became the 4th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing President Washington appointed Oliver Ellsworth (John Jay of course was the 1st).
Adams was literally still writing out the names of the people he appointed as judges on his last day in office. As Secretary of State, John Marshall had the task to deliver these written commissions to each individual. Because he simply did not have time to deliver all of them he gave half to his brother James to deliver. His brother, apparently being less conscientious or less industrious, did not deliver all of them. When the new administration came in President Jefferson told his Secretary of State, James Madison, not to deliver the remaining 17 commissions.
Ten months later William Marbury who had been appointed Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia took his case to the Supreme Court. The Jefferson dominated congress passed a law canceling the next session of the Supreme Court. When the court finally convened 14 months later the first case it took up was Marbury v. Madison. Marshall, being an astute lawyer, realized this was an important case for the nascent court to consider. He knew if he refused to take the case the court would look weak, but if he took it and ruled in favor of Marbury he also knew that the Jefferson administration would simply ignore the court’s order in which case the court would likewise appear weak and ineffectual. So what to do. Marshall formulated a strategy to strengthen the court at a time when it was very much the weakest and least respected part of government relative to the legislative and executive branches. His solution defined the genius of John Marshall and set the Supreme Court on the path to becoming an equal to the legislative and executive branches.
In the court’s long and detailed decision Marshall scolded the Jefferson administration by writing that Marbury had been treated very badly by having his commission illegally withheld and he should be given it now. It looked like Marbury had won and the Jefferson administration had lost. But wait; there was more to the decision. Marshall also ruled that the court did not have jurisdiction in this case - then came the key to the ingenuity of the decision. Marshall wrote that the law expanding the judiciary was unconstitutional thus establishing the precedent of judicial review by the Supreme Court. Article I section 7 of the constitution clearly gave the president power to veto legislation and the congress power to override a presidential veto. It was John Marshall who gave the Supreme Court power to invalidate laws passed by congress and the president by implicit, not explicit, language in the constitution. Not article III which authorized the Supreme Court nor in any other place in the constitution is the power of judicial review mentioned.
When the decision came down, some of the Jeffersonians thought they had won. Thomas Jefferson however quickly realized that in fact he had not won, but was caught on the horns of a dilemma. He did not want it to appear he had been dragooned by the court into giving Marbury his commission and besides he did not want more Federalists on the bench with lifetime appointments, but by not granting the commission he was implicitly conceding the court the power of judicial review. He did his best by seemingly ignoring the ruling; however a precedent had been set which would be built upon in future court decisions. It is instructive though that John Marshall, who the longest serving (34 years) Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, never again declared a law passed by congress and the president unconstitutional. He had extricated the court from a difficult position in Marbury v. Madison and he did not want to press his luck.
John Adams, a New Englander from Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson, a Southerner from Virginia were revolutionary period colleagues and friends during the founding of the Republic even though they could not have been more different in personalities, temperament, and politics. It was perhaps inevitable they would have a falling out. Jefferson was the Vice-President of the United States when Adams was President from 1797-1801 on the basis of Jefferson receiving the second most electoral votes even though they belong to different political parties. When Jefferson challenged Adams for the presidency and won in 1801 not only was the rupture in their friendship complete, they became bitter enemies.
During the last days of Adams’s one presidential term the majority Federalist Party in congress passed legislation greatly expanding the number of federal judges including justices-of-the-peace. Adams proceeded to name people of his political persuasion to these positions. A few weeks before Adams had named his Secretary of State and 2nd cousin of Thomas Jefferson, Virginian John Marshall as Chief Justice of the then six-man US Supreme Court (the court was increased to the present number of nine in 1869). Marshall thus became the 4th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing President Washington appointed Oliver Ellsworth (John Jay of course was the 1st).
Adams was literally still writing out the names of the people he appointed as judges on his last day in office. As Secretary of State, John Marshall had the task to deliver these written commissions to each individual. Because he simply did not have time to deliver all of them he gave half to his brother James to deliver. His brother, apparently being less conscientious or less industrious, did not deliver all of them. When the new administration came in President Jefferson told his Secretary of State, James Madison, not to deliver the remaining 17 commissions.
Ten months later William Marbury who had been appointed Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia took his case to the Supreme Court. The Jefferson dominated congress passed a law canceling the next session of the Supreme Court. When the court finally convened 14 months later the first case it took up was Marbury v. Madison. Marshall, being an astute lawyer, realized this was an important case for the nascent court to consider. He knew if he refused to take the case the court would look weak, but if he took it and ruled in favor of Marbury he also knew that the Jefferson administration would simply ignore the court’s order in which case the court would likewise appear weak and ineffectual. So what to do. Marshall formulated a strategy to strengthen the court at a time when it was very much the weakest and least respected part of government relative to the legislative and executive branches. His solution defined the genius of John Marshall and set the Supreme Court on the path to becoming an equal to the legislative and executive branches.
In the court’s long and detailed decision Marshall scolded the Jefferson administration by writing that Marbury had been treated very badly by having his commission illegally withheld and he should be given it now. It looked like Marbury had won and the Jefferson administration had lost. But wait; there was more to the decision. Marshall also ruled that the court did not have jurisdiction in this case - then came the key to the ingenuity of the decision. Marshall wrote that the law expanding the judiciary was unconstitutional thus establishing the precedent of judicial review by the Supreme Court. Article I section 7 of the constitution clearly gave the president power to veto legislation and the congress power to override a presidential veto. It was John Marshall who gave the Supreme Court power to invalidate laws passed by congress and the president by implicit, not explicit, language in the constitution. Not article III which authorized the Supreme Court nor in any other place in the constitution is the power of judicial review mentioned.
When the decision came down, some of the Jeffersonians thought they had won. Thomas Jefferson however quickly realized that in fact he had not won, but was caught on the horns of a dilemma. He did not want it to appear he had been dragooned by the court into giving Marbury his commission and besides he did not want more Federalists on the bench with lifetime appointments, but by not granting the commission he was implicitly conceding the court the power of judicial review. He did his best by seemingly ignoring the ruling; however a precedent had been set which would be built upon in future court decisions. It is instructive though that John Marshall, who the longest serving (34 years) Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, never again declared a law passed by congress and the president unconstitutional. He had extricated the court from a difficult position in Marbury v. Madison and he did not want to press his luck.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
BLACK SWANS 42
This essay is based on the 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960 - ). It is hardly an obscure tome, having been on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. Before I get to the essence of this essay I believe explaining what the term “Black Swan” means and saying a few words about the author would be in order.
It was once thought in the Old World that only white swans existed. Then from Australia came the realization that there were black swans. And no, they were not white swans made black by bootblack or any other artificial coloring medium. After millennia of observations in the West of millions of white swans, the sighting of one black swan was enough to invalidate this long and firmly held belief. In a broader sense then A Black Swan is a sudden, monumental, and completely unexpected event. WWI, WWII, and 9/11 were Black Swans. If one were to win a multi-million dollars lottery that would be a personal Black Swan (Black Swans are not all negative, although given the troubles experienced by some of these huge lottery winners, this might also be negative).
But a Black Swan is more than this – it goes to the heart of and challenges the putative acceptance of Gaussian probabilities. Least you think Gaussian or bell shaped probability functions are theoretical only and not important in real life, then consider that not only mathematics, but engineering, medicine, social sciences, economomics, the insurance industry, Wall Street, and other fields of science and the arts use Gaussian probabilities in their calculations and predictions. I will get much deeper into this later in the essay.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an odd name to the Western ear. In fact he grew up in a family from the Greco-Syrian community from what was the last Byzantine outpost in northern Syria and which was incorporated into the country of Lebanon after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This part of the Middle East was relatively stable until the last quarter of the 20th century. The mosaic of cultures and religions in this region consisted of Christians of all varieties – Maronites (The father of the reputed richest man in the world, Mexican Carlos Slim Helú, was a Maronite Christian who emigrated from Lebanon to Mexico), Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, Byzantine Catholics, in addition to a few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades; Muslims (Shiites and Sunnis); Druzes; and a few Jews. The Taleb family had been successful for generations. On his mother’s side both his grandfather and great-grandfather were deputy prime ministers of Lebanon and on his father’s side (his father was an oncologist) his grandfather was a Supreme Court Justice. In 1861 his four times great grandfather was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous province of Mount Lebanon.
The Civil War between Christians and Muslims which began in 1975 came completely out of the blue and, although Taleb did not realize it at the time, would later contribute to his philosophy of the Black Swan. At that time people would say with seeming confidence that the war would last at most just a few weeks. It went on for 15 years.
Taleb holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D in management science from the University of Paris.
It is difficult to define the métier of Taleb. Clearly he is a polymath. He has worked as a securities analysis on Wall Street, a Visiting Professor of Marketing at the London Business School, the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center. He previously authored a best selling book titled Fooled by Randomness which has been published in 20 languages.
Predicting the future based upon the past is universally done, yet there are pitfalls in this. Consider the turkey which has been fed for 1000 consecutive days. This avian creature has no logical reason to believe this pattern will not continue indefinitely. Think of the surprise awaiting the hapless bird when on Wednesday, day 1001, the process starts for making the turkey the center of attraction for the feast the next day. Sacre blu!
Explaining historical events in hindsight is facile and far from convincing since, for the most part, nobody could or does predict what eventually unfolds beforehand. In a very general way there may be some basis for assigning cause and effect to certain events. One may reasonably hold that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 contributed to WWI which in turn led to WWII. The Prussians won that 1870 war, temporarily occupied Paris, extracted a billion dollars in reparations, and expropriated previously held French territory. After being on the winning side of WWI, the French imposed onerous conditions on the Germans at least partially because of what happened to them in 1870. In WWII the Germans reacted to what had happened to them after WWI with a fury that was unjustified, to say the least, yet without the dour economic conditions which occurred in Germany after WWI, WWII may not have happened.
Even so, after the Napoleonic conflicts, except for the 1870 Franco-Prussian casus belli, the European continent experienced a period of peace that would belie any anticipation of the carnage that would result in WWI, The Great War of 1914-19, that would be the deadliest conflict, until then, in the history of mankind.
In the summer of 1982 large American banks lost many billions of dollars as countries in South and Central America defaulted at the same time on loans made by these banks. The early 1990’s brought the now defunct savings and loan industry meltdown which required a taxpayer funded bailout of close to half a trillion dollars. Now in 2007 it is the turn of the home mortgage lenders and lendees in what is called the “sub-prime” market, to require many billions of dollars in another bailout. There are obviously serious problems with standard Gaussian risk assessment tools employed by the people in these industries.
With the following example many people would get it wrong: A town has one large hospital and one small one. On a given day in one of the hospitals 60% of the births were boys. Which one was it likely to be? The correct answer is that the smaller hospital would more likely have the bigger difference in parity of births because the sampling would more likely be smaller and therefore more prone to deviate from the average.
An acronym used in medical literature is NED (No Evidence of Disease). There is no such thing as END (Evidence of No Disease), yet Taleb related that during a routine cancer examination he was told by the doctor that “There is evidence of no cancer.” When Taleb asked him how he knew he said, “The scan is negative.” I have never heard a scientist or even a medical doctor make a claim that observational absence of something was evidence that it did not exist, yet who am I to say that Taleb remembered incorrectly?
We see the obvious and visible consequences of certain actions, not invisible and less obvious ones. When Islamic terrorists flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, flew an airplane into the Pentagon, and caused an airplane to crashed in Pennsylvania, approximately 3000 people died. In the final three months or so of that year an estimated 1000 people also died as a result of the terrorist attack. How so? These were the people who, out of fear of flying, chose to drive on the country’s highways and because of the much higher mortality rate versus flying became additional casualties.
There are drugs which can prolong people’s lives, yet occasionally someone will have a fatal reaction to that drug. When this risk is known will doctors still prescribe this drug to their patients? Many will not because of the threat of lawsuits by the few thereby claiming invisible victims for the many.
A coin which we are told is “fair”, that is to say, it has an equal probability of either being heads or tails, is flipped and comes up heads 99 times in a row. What is the probability of it being heads on the 100th flip? Theoretically the odds would be 50%, but what would the practical answer be? Given that the coin has come up the same 99 times in a row it would be far more likely that the given initial conditions are wrong, i.e. the coin is not “fair” and therefore the probability of it being heads again is far more likely.
Three relatively recent technologies that have had the most impact on the world today are the computer, the internet, and the laser. They were all unpredicted, unplanned, and unappreciated – they were all Black Swans. In fact, in terms of their anticipation and utility, almost all of the great discoveries in the world were Black Swans. Occasionally there is a discovery which was predicted, although its use not even close to being fully realized. After the invention of the wireless (radio), in 1908 someone predicted that people would be able to carry around a device, a portable telephone, to communicate with each other over wide ranges of distances. That was remarkable insight given that earth satellites and microwave towers were not even dreamed of. It was the rare exception. It was what might be called a White Swan.
In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed that one of his bacteria plates which had been contaminated with a mold had the odd effect of clearing a zone around itself in which the bacteria did not grow. He assigned so little importance to it that he turned to the then popular investigation of sulfa as an anti-bacterial drug. It wasn’t until years later that Fleming got interested in the strange properties of the mold. He received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945 for his contribution in the discovery of penicillin.
One of philospher Karl Popper’s central insights is that in order to predict historical events you need to anticipate technological innovation which is fundamentally unpredictable.
Henri Poincaré was one of the first mathematicians/philosphers to formulate the limits unlinearities put on forecasting.
Predicting the first impact of billiard balls on a table is not difficult given the initial state of the billiard balls, the table, and the impact of the cue. In predicting the 56th impact every single elementary particle in the universe needs to be accounted for in the calculations.
In the 1960’s an MIT meteorologist produced a computer model of weather dymanics that ran a simulation projecting a weather system a fews days in advance. Later he tried to repeat the same simulation with the same model and what he thought were the same input data. He got wildly different results. He initially thought he had a computer bug or a calculation error. Subsequently he realized the different results were caused by small roundings in the input parameters. This became known as the “butterfly effect” since a butterfly moving its wings in India could cause a hurricane in New York two years later.
In 1931 Belgian Roman Catholic priest/cosmologist, Georges Lemaître, postulated that the universe started as a primeval atom. Astronomer George Gamow expanded upon this idea and predicted in 1948 there should be background radiation left over from the Big Bang (The term was coined sardonically by Fred Hoyle who believed in the steady-state theory of the universe). In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow of Bell Telephone Laboratories were working on a radiometer to be used in radio astronomy and satellite communications. They kept getting an anomalous background noise which was of the same intensity wherever it was pointed in the sky. It turned out they had inadvertantly discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang. It was a Black Swan. In 1978 they received the Nobel Prize in physics.
Our intuition about nonlinear multiplicative effects is rather weak. According to the story (possibly apocryphal), the inventor of the chessboard requested the following compensation for his invention: one grain of rice for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on. The king granted his request thinking he was asking for a mere pittance. The king was outsmarted because the total amount of rice was more than all of the possible rice reserves in the world (2 to the 63rd power = 9.2234….times 10 to the 18 power + 2 to the 62nd power = 4.6117….times 10 to the 18th power, etc.)!
The empirical methods of the Greeks of two millennia ago are being revived. Before the role of bacteria in disease was known, doctors distained hand washing because it made no sense to them despite the evidence of a meaningful decrease in hospital deaths when hygienic methods were used. Similarly it may not “make sense” that acupuncture works, but if pushing a needle into someone’s toe systematically produce relief from pain then it could be there are functions too complicated for us to understand, so why not do it while we keep an open mind on the subject.
The notion of asymmetric outcomes is central to the alternative of Gaussian probability. The unknown will always be by definition unknown. However one can guess how it might affect them and therefore base one’s decisions on that.
The mathematician and philospher Blasé Pascal proposed the following: I do not whether God exists, but I have nothing to gain by being an atheist if God does not exist, whereas I have a great deal to lose if He does exist. Hence this justifies my belief in God. Theologically this makes no sense because God would surely know if someone’s belief in Him were so contrived and self-serving. Outside of theology it makes a great deal of sense. It eliminates the need to understand the probabilities of a rare event; rather we can concentrate on the payoffs and benefits of an event if it takes place. The probabilities of very rare events are not computable; the effects of an event on us are considerably easier for us to ascertain. We can have a clear idea of the consequences of an event, even if we do not know how likely it is to occur. We don’t know the odds of an earthquake, but we can imagine the effects it would have on San Francisco.
Before the currency was replaced by the euro, the German 10 deutschmark bill contained a portrait of Carl Friedrich Gauss and a representation of his Gaussian bell shaped curve. There is irony here because the reichmark, as it was then called, went from four per dollar to four trillion per dollar in just a few years in the 1920’s. In the random fluctuations of currencies there is no possible accounting for such a colossal deviation from the norm with Gaussian probability distributions.
Casino owners understand the principle of not relying on Gaussian probability distributions by limiting the size of the bets for each gambler. They will take limited bets from many individuals while rejecting very large bets from a few. No casino is going to lose a billion dollars on a single bet.
Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin and Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, was blessed with no mathematical baggage, but he had a rare obsession with measurement. Galton applied the bell curve to areas like genetics and heredity, in which its use was justified. But his enthusiasm helped thrust nascent statistical methods into social issues.
Galileo Galilei said that the Great Book of Nature is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Taleb asks: “Was Galileo legally blind? Mountains are not triangles or pyramids; trees are not circles; straight lines are almost never seen anywhere.” I ask, how could such a normally perceptive and original thinker as Galileo be so self-deluded?
The problem of the circularity of statistics is as follows: How can we tell if we have enough data to put forth a hypothesis? From the probability distribution. If it is a Gaussian bell curve then a few points will suffice. And how do we know the distribution is Gaussian? Well, from the data. So we need the data to tell us what the probability distribution is, and a probability distribution to tell us how many data we need.
As measured by the S&P 500, by removing the 10 biggest one-day moves in the stock market in the last 50 years there is a huge difference in returns – and yet conventional financial analysis interprets these one-day jumps as mere anomalies. Similarly if the top 40 best single market days were missed in the last 10 years one’s market returns would be greatly reduced even though 21 of those days came during the brutal 2000-2002 bear market. The equities market is too dominated by Black Swans to allow successful market timing.
The entire statistical business confuses absence of proof with proof of absence. You need only one single observation to reject the Gaussian, but millions of observations will not fully confirm the validity of a Gaussian distribution. Why? Because the Gaussian bell curve disallows large deviations, but non-Gaussian distributions, the alternative, do not disallow long quiet periods.
“Forget everything you have ever heard in college statistics or probability theory. If you never took such a class, even better. Let us start from the very beginning.”
“If you ever took a (dull) statistics class in college, did not understand much of what the professor was excited about, and wondered what “standard deviation” meant, there is nothing to worry about. The notion of standard deviation is meaningless…..”
“Standard deviations do not exist outside the Guassian, or if they do exist they do not matter and do not explain much. But it gets worse. The Guassian family (which includes various friends and relatives, such as the Poisson Law) are the only class of distributions that the standard deviation (and average) is sufficient to describe. You need nothing else. The bell curve satisfies the reductionism of the deluded.”
“This monstrosity called the Gaussian bell curve is not Gauss’s doing. Although he worked on it, he was a mathematician dealing with a theoretical point, not making claims about the structure of reality like statistical-minded scientists. The bell curve was mainly the concoction of a gambler, Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754), a French Calvinist refugee who spent much of his life in London, though speaking heavily accented English.”
These are the words of Taleb. He has a point, but in my opinion he goes a bit too far in rejecting Gaussian probability functions. Where there are extreme deviations from the normal as in the examples of currency inflation or in single day stock market moves clearly Gaussian distributions are useless, but if, for example, one would measure the length of squirrel tails, there would be a standard bell shaped Gaussian curve. Nature does not always reject Gaussian distributions. However, Taleb is certainly correct in aserting that overwhelmingly most monumental events are Black Swans.
It was once thought in the Old World that only white swans existed. Then from Australia came the realization that there were black swans. And no, they were not white swans made black by bootblack or any other artificial coloring medium. After millennia of observations in the West of millions of white swans, the sighting of one black swan was enough to invalidate this long and firmly held belief. In a broader sense then A Black Swan is a sudden, monumental, and completely unexpected event. WWI, WWII, and 9/11 were Black Swans. If one were to win a multi-million dollars lottery that would be a personal Black Swan (Black Swans are not all negative, although given the troubles experienced by some of these huge lottery winners, this might also be negative).
But a Black Swan is more than this – it goes to the heart of and challenges the putative acceptance of Gaussian probabilities. Least you think Gaussian or bell shaped probability functions are theoretical only and not important in real life, then consider that not only mathematics, but engineering, medicine, social sciences, economomics, the insurance industry, Wall Street, and other fields of science and the arts use Gaussian probabilities in their calculations and predictions. I will get much deeper into this later in the essay.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an odd name to the Western ear. In fact he grew up in a family from the Greco-Syrian community from what was the last Byzantine outpost in northern Syria and which was incorporated into the country of Lebanon after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This part of the Middle East was relatively stable until the last quarter of the 20th century. The mosaic of cultures and religions in this region consisted of Christians of all varieties – Maronites (The father of the reputed richest man in the world, Mexican Carlos Slim Helú, was a Maronite Christian who emigrated from Lebanon to Mexico), Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, Byzantine Catholics, in addition to a few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades; Muslims (Shiites and Sunnis); Druzes; and a few Jews. The Taleb family had been successful for generations. On his mother’s side both his grandfather and great-grandfather were deputy prime ministers of Lebanon and on his father’s side (his father was an oncologist) his grandfather was a Supreme Court Justice. In 1861 his four times great grandfather was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous province of Mount Lebanon.
The Civil War between Christians and Muslims which began in 1975 came completely out of the blue and, although Taleb did not realize it at the time, would later contribute to his philosophy of the Black Swan. At that time people would say with seeming confidence that the war would last at most just a few weeks. It went on for 15 years.
Taleb holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D in management science from the University of Paris.
It is difficult to define the métier of Taleb. Clearly he is a polymath. He has worked as a securities analysis on Wall Street, a Visiting Professor of Marketing at the London Business School, the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center. He previously authored a best selling book titled Fooled by Randomness which has been published in 20 languages.
Predicting the future based upon the past is universally done, yet there are pitfalls in this. Consider the turkey which has been fed for 1000 consecutive days. This avian creature has no logical reason to believe this pattern will not continue indefinitely. Think of the surprise awaiting the hapless bird when on Wednesday, day 1001, the process starts for making the turkey the center of attraction for the feast the next day. Sacre blu!
Explaining historical events in hindsight is facile and far from convincing since, for the most part, nobody could or does predict what eventually unfolds beforehand. In a very general way there may be some basis for assigning cause and effect to certain events. One may reasonably hold that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 contributed to WWI which in turn led to WWII. The Prussians won that 1870 war, temporarily occupied Paris, extracted a billion dollars in reparations, and expropriated previously held French territory. After being on the winning side of WWI, the French imposed onerous conditions on the Germans at least partially because of what happened to them in 1870. In WWII the Germans reacted to what had happened to them after WWI with a fury that was unjustified, to say the least, yet without the dour economic conditions which occurred in Germany after WWI, WWII may not have happened.
Even so, after the Napoleonic conflicts, except for the 1870 Franco-Prussian casus belli, the European continent experienced a period of peace that would belie any anticipation of the carnage that would result in WWI, The Great War of 1914-19, that would be the deadliest conflict, until then, in the history of mankind.
In the summer of 1982 large American banks lost many billions of dollars as countries in South and Central America defaulted at the same time on loans made by these banks. The early 1990’s brought the now defunct savings and loan industry meltdown which required a taxpayer funded bailout of close to half a trillion dollars. Now in 2007 it is the turn of the home mortgage lenders and lendees in what is called the “sub-prime” market, to require many billions of dollars in another bailout. There are obviously serious problems with standard Gaussian risk assessment tools employed by the people in these industries.
With the following example many people would get it wrong: A town has one large hospital and one small one. On a given day in one of the hospitals 60% of the births were boys. Which one was it likely to be? The correct answer is that the smaller hospital would more likely have the bigger difference in parity of births because the sampling would more likely be smaller and therefore more prone to deviate from the average.
An acronym used in medical literature is NED (No Evidence of Disease). There is no such thing as END (Evidence of No Disease), yet Taleb related that during a routine cancer examination he was told by the doctor that “There is evidence of no cancer.” When Taleb asked him how he knew he said, “The scan is negative.” I have never heard a scientist or even a medical doctor make a claim that observational absence of something was evidence that it did not exist, yet who am I to say that Taleb remembered incorrectly?
We see the obvious and visible consequences of certain actions, not invisible and less obvious ones. When Islamic terrorists flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, flew an airplane into the Pentagon, and caused an airplane to crashed in Pennsylvania, approximately 3000 people died. In the final three months or so of that year an estimated 1000 people also died as a result of the terrorist attack. How so? These were the people who, out of fear of flying, chose to drive on the country’s highways and because of the much higher mortality rate versus flying became additional casualties.
There are drugs which can prolong people’s lives, yet occasionally someone will have a fatal reaction to that drug. When this risk is known will doctors still prescribe this drug to their patients? Many will not because of the threat of lawsuits by the few thereby claiming invisible victims for the many.
A coin which we are told is “fair”, that is to say, it has an equal probability of either being heads or tails, is flipped and comes up heads 99 times in a row. What is the probability of it being heads on the 100th flip? Theoretically the odds would be 50%, but what would the practical answer be? Given that the coin has come up the same 99 times in a row it would be far more likely that the given initial conditions are wrong, i.e. the coin is not “fair” and therefore the probability of it being heads again is far more likely.
Three relatively recent technologies that have had the most impact on the world today are the computer, the internet, and the laser. They were all unpredicted, unplanned, and unappreciated – they were all Black Swans. In fact, in terms of their anticipation and utility, almost all of the great discoveries in the world were Black Swans. Occasionally there is a discovery which was predicted, although its use not even close to being fully realized. After the invention of the wireless (radio), in 1908 someone predicted that people would be able to carry around a device, a portable telephone, to communicate with each other over wide ranges of distances. That was remarkable insight given that earth satellites and microwave towers were not even dreamed of. It was the rare exception. It was what might be called a White Swan.
In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed that one of his bacteria plates which had been contaminated with a mold had the odd effect of clearing a zone around itself in which the bacteria did not grow. He assigned so little importance to it that he turned to the then popular investigation of sulfa as an anti-bacterial drug. It wasn’t until years later that Fleming got interested in the strange properties of the mold. He received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945 for his contribution in the discovery of penicillin.
One of philospher Karl Popper’s central insights is that in order to predict historical events you need to anticipate technological innovation which is fundamentally unpredictable.
Henri Poincaré was one of the first mathematicians/philosphers to formulate the limits unlinearities put on forecasting.
Predicting the first impact of billiard balls on a table is not difficult given the initial state of the billiard balls, the table, and the impact of the cue. In predicting the 56th impact every single elementary particle in the universe needs to be accounted for in the calculations.
In the 1960’s an MIT meteorologist produced a computer model of weather dymanics that ran a simulation projecting a weather system a fews days in advance. Later he tried to repeat the same simulation with the same model and what he thought were the same input data. He got wildly different results. He initially thought he had a computer bug or a calculation error. Subsequently he realized the different results were caused by small roundings in the input parameters. This became known as the “butterfly effect” since a butterfly moving its wings in India could cause a hurricane in New York two years later.
In 1931 Belgian Roman Catholic priest/cosmologist, Georges Lemaître, postulated that the universe started as a primeval atom. Astronomer George Gamow expanded upon this idea and predicted in 1948 there should be background radiation left over from the Big Bang (The term was coined sardonically by Fred Hoyle who believed in the steady-state theory of the universe). In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow of Bell Telephone Laboratories were working on a radiometer to be used in radio astronomy and satellite communications. They kept getting an anomalous background noise which was of the same intensity wherever it was pointed in the sky. It turned out they had inadvertantly discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang. It was a Black Swan. In 1978 they received the Nobel Prize in physics.
Our intuition about nonlinear multiplicative effects is rather weak. According to the story (possibly apocryphal), the inventor of the chessboard requested the following compensation for his invention: one grain of rice for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on. The king granted his request thinking he was asking for a mere pittance. The king was outsmarted because the total amount of rice was more than all of the possible rice reserves in the world (2 to the 63rd power = 9.2234….times 10 to the 18 power + 2 to the 62nd power = 4.6117….times 10 to the 18th power, etc.)!
The empirical methods of the Greeks of two millennia ago are being revived. Before the role of bacteria in disease was known, doctors distained hand washing because it made no sense to them despite the evidence of a meaningful decrease in hospital deaths when hygienic methods were used. Similarly it may not “make sense” that acupuncture works, but if pushing a needle into someone’s toe systematically produce relief from pain then it could be there are functions too complicated for us to understand, so why not do it while we keep an open mind on the subject.
The notion of asymmetric outcomes is central to the alternative of Gaussian probability. The unknown will always be by definition unknown. However one can guess how it might affect them and therefore base one’s decisions on that.
The mathematician and philospher Blasé Pascal proposed the following: I do not whether God exists, but I have nothing to gain by being an atheist if God does not exist, whereas I have a great deal to lose if He does exist. Hence this justifies my belief in God. Theologically this makes no sense because God would surely know if someone’s belief in Him were so contrived and self-serving. Outside of theology it makes a great deal of sense. It eliminates the need to understand the probabilities of a rare event; rather we can concentrate on the payoffs and benefits of an event if it takes place. The probabilities of very rare events are not computable; the effects of an event on us are considerably easier for us to ascertain. We can have a clear idea of the consequences of an event, even if we do not know how likely it is to occur. We don’t know the odds of an earthquake, but we can imagine the effects it would have on San Francisco.
Before the currency was replaced by the euro, the German 10 deutschmark bill contained a portrait of Carl Friedrich Gauss and a representation of his Gaussian bell shaped curve. There is irony here because the reichmark, as it was then called, went from four per dollar to four trillion per dollar in just a few years in the 1920’s. In the random fluctuations of currencies there is no possible accounting for such a colossal deviation from the norm with Gaussian probability distributions.
Casino owners understand the principle of not relying on Gaussian probability distributions by limiting the size of the bets for each gambler. They will take limited bets from many individuals while rejecting very large bets from a few. No casino is going to lose a billion dollars on a single bet.
Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin and Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, was blessed with no mathematical baggage, but he had a rare obsession with measurement. Galton applied the bell curve to areas like genetics and heredity, in which its use was justified. But his enthusiasm helped thrust nascent statistical methods into social issues.
Galileo Galilei said that the Great Book of Nature is written in mathematical language and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Taleb asks: “Was Galileo legally blind? Mountains are not triangles or pyramids; trees are not circles; straight lines are almost never seen anywhere.” I ask, how could such a normally perceptive and original thinker as Galileo be so self-deluded?
The problem of the circularity of statistics is as follows: How can we tell if we have enough data to put forth a hypothesis? From the probability distribution. If it is a Gaussian bell curve then a few points will suffice. And how do we know the distribution is Gaussian? Well, from the data. So we need the data to tell us what the probability distribution is, and a probability distribution to tell us how many data we need.
As measured by the S&P 500, by removing the 10 biggest one-day moves in the stock market in the last 50 years there is a huge difference in returns – and yet conventional financial analysis interprets these one-day jumps as mere anomalies. Similarly if the top 40 best single market days were missed in the last 10 years one’s market returns would be greatly reduced even though 21 of those days came during the brutal 2000-2002 bear market. The equities market is too dominated by Black Swans to allow successful market timing.
The entire statistical business confuses absence of proof with proof of absence. You need only one single observation to reject the Gaussian, but millions of observations will not fully confirm the validity of a Gaussian distribution. Why? Because the Gaussian bell curve disallows large deviations, but non-Gaussian distributions, the alternative, do not disallow long quiet periods.
“Forget everything you have ever heard in college statistics or probability theory. If you never took such a class, even better. Let us start from the very beginning.”
“If you ever took a (dull) statistics class in college, did not understand much of what the professor was excited about, and wondered what “standard deviation” meant, there is nothing to worry about. The notion of standard deviation is meaningless…..”
“Standard deviations do not exist outside the Guassian, or if they do exist they do not matter and do not explain much. But it gets worse. The Guassian family (which includes various friends and relatives, such as the Poisson Law) are the only class of distributions that the standard deviation (and average) is sufficient to describe. You need nothing else. The bell curve satisfies the reductionism of the deluded.”
“This monstrosity called the Gaussian bell curve is not Gauss’s doing. Although he worked on it, he was a mathematician dealing with a theoretical point, not making claims about the structure of reality like statistical-minded scientists. The bell curve was mainly the concoction of a gambler, Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754), a French Calvinist refugee who spent much of his life in London, though speaking heavily accented English.”
These are the words of Taleb. He has a point, but in my opinion he goes a bit too far in rejecting Gaussian probability functions. Where there are extreme deviations from the normal as in the examples of currency inflation or in single day stock market moves clearly Gaussian distributions are useless, but if, for example, one would measure the length of squirrel tails, there would be a standard bell shaped Gaussian curve. Nature does not always reject Gaussian distributions. However, Taleb is certainly correct in aserting that overwhelmingly most monumental events are Black Swans.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Free Speech – Free For Whom? 41
In the wake of the inane and insane writings of the beyond egregious University of Colorado professor, the ersatz American Indian, Ward Churchill, the issue of “free speech” has been freely, so to speak, bandied about by commentators on the right, left, and in the middle. Interestingly, although this story had been all over talk radio, the internet, Fox News, and in many newspapers, there was only one brief mention on ABC television and none at all on CBS and NBC. To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson: The mainstream news media have an absolute talent separating wheat from chaff, then throwing away the wheat and planting the chaff.
Fact is there is no such thing as “free speech”, nor should there be. A rather provocative statement would you not say? Especially for one who thankfully and appreciatively lives in a representative democratic society – the greatest one on earth in my opinion. Yet, it is a statement I think I can rationally and logically defend. I must say I agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said, “There is not a truth I fear or wish unknown to the world.”
For openers let’s consider the U.S. Constitution. That is the basis for our freedom of speech is it not? Well, what does the constitution actually say? The 1st Amendment to the Constitution (the first ten amendments were ratified in 1791 and are called the Bill of Rights) states, “Congress shall make no law…….abridging the freedom of speech…….” Congress is defined as the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. There is no mention in the Constitution about states, counties, municipalities, businesses, associations, universities, etcetera being circumscribed in limiting someone’s speech.
As a matter of course most of us, as a society, tend to ignore the constitution when it suits our purpose. For example, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: “Congress shall have power to declare War…..” The United States has fought the Korean War, Vietnam War, First Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and now Second Iraq War, yet Congress has not declared war since December 8, 1941 ( the vote was unanimous except for pacifist Representative Jeannette Rankin [1880-1973] of Montana who was the first woman elected to Congress). Representative from Texas Dr. Ron Paul (obstetrics/gynecology) is the only current member to object to Congress having abrogated its authority to declare war to the president. And I don’t see people demonstrating in the streets over this issue the way the Ukrainians did when their democratic election for prime minister was in the process of being stolen.
At other times some people invoke what they perceive to be in the Constitution when it is convenient for them whether it is done ipse dixit or not. Unfortunately and importantly many of these people are judges; especially federal judges.
For those who still insist there are practically, short of endangering public safety, no limits on speech without consequence, even if it is only implicit in the Constitution, you should consider the sanctions and/or contumely which were imposed or heaped on the following: Trent Lott, Robert Byrd, Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Don Imus, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Andy Rooney, Bill Maher, and Larry Summers (It is notable there is nary a woman on the list. An amalgam of Al Campanis and Larry Summers might say women lack the “necessities” to be top notch mathematicians or physicists, but I would say when it comes to discretion and good sense in speech women apparently have a distinct advantage over Neanderthals; that is to say men). There was no deus ex machina to save these men from discomfiture and embarrassment and I for one do not believe they were treated too harshly, possibly excepting Trent Lott. Even he may have deserved it on the basis of stupidity – after all he is a professional and long time politician and decidedly should have known better.
Then there is the aphorism spoken by former four term governor of New York and unsuccessful 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, Al Smith, “There ain’t no free lunch.” There might be a lesson in there as applied to speech.
By all means indulge yourself in the exercise of free speech. Your lot might be to gather scorn and pejorative comment. Still, consider it a fair bargain for the sheer joy of saying what you want, however dopy or misguided. What curmudgeonly lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson had to say on the subject seems a bit harsh, yet may be realistic: “Every man [person] has the right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man [person] has a right to knock him down for it.”
Fact is there is no such thing as “free speech”, nor should there be. A rather provocative statement would you not say? Especially for one who thankfully and appreciatively lives in a representative democratic society – the greatest one on earth in my opinion. Yet, it is a statement I think I can rationally and logically defend. I must say I agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said, “There is not a truth I fear or wish unknown to the world.”
For openers let’s consider the U.S. Constitution. That is the basis for our freedom of speech is it not? Well, what does the constitution actually say? The 1st Amendment to the Constitution (the first ten amendments were ratified in 1791 and are called the Bill of Rights) states, “Congress shall make no law…….abridging the freedom of speech…….” Congress is defined as the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. There is no mention in the Constitution about states, counties, municipalities, businesses, associations, universities, etcetera being circumscribed in limiting someone’s speech.
As a matter of course most of us, as a society, tend to ignore the constitution when it suits our purpose. For example, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: “Congress shall have power to declare War…..” The United States has fought the Korean War, Vietnam War, First Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and now Second Iraq War, yet Congress has not declared war since December 8, 1941 ( the vote was unanimous except for pacifist Representative Jeannette Rankin [1880-1973] of Montana who was the first woman elected to Congress). Representative from Texas Dr. Ron Paul (obstetrics/gynecology) is the only current member to object to Congress having abrogated its authority to declare war to the president. And I don’t see people demonstrating in the streets over this issue the way the Ukrainians did when their democratic election for prime minister was in the process of being stolen.
At other times some people invoke what they perceive to be in the Constitution when it is convenient for them whether it is done ipse dixit or not. Unfortunately and importantly many of these people are judges; especially federal judges.
For those who still insist there are practically, short of endangering public safety, no limits on speech without consequence, even if it is only implicit in the Constitution, you should consider the sanctions and/or contumely which were imposed or heaped on the following: Trent Lott, Robert Byrd, Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Don Imus, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Andy Rooney, Bill Maher, and Larry Summers (It is notable there is nary a woman on the list. An amalgam of Al Campanis and Larry Summers might say women lack the “necessities” to be top notch mathematicians or physicists, but I would say when it comes to discretion and good sense in speech women apparently have a distinct advantage over Neanderthals; that is to say men). There was no deus ex machina to save these men from discomfiture and embarrassment and I for one do not believe they were treated too harshly, possibly excepting Trent Lott. Even he may have deserved it on the basis of stupidity – after all he is a professional and long time politician and decidedly should have known better.
Then there is the aphorism spoken by former four term governor of New York and unsuccessful 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, Al Smith, “There ain’t no free lunch.” There might be a lesson in there as applied to speech.
By all means indulge yourself in the exercise of free speech. Your lot might be to gather scorn and pejorative comment. Still, consider it a fair bargain for the sheer joy of saying what you want, however dopy or misguided. What curmudgeonly lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson had to say on the subject seems a bit harsh, yet may be realistic: “Every man [person] has the right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man [person] has a right to knock him down for it.”
Friday, November 9, 2007
Too Much Freedom? You Bet! 40
At the start I want to make it clear that I am talking about the West and especially the good old USA, not countries in general, especially Islamic or other totalitarian societies where there are indeed deficiencies of freedoms.
And let’s dispose of the mantras where security/safety and freedom are positioned as polar opposites. An example is the aphorism attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Liberals might posit it advantageous that absolute freedom was preserved for everyone, including the brigands who would dispatch them to the “undiscovered country”, but I would think it a poor bargain. Give me not “liberty or death”; give me life and a little less liberty for those who would do us ill.
Liars (sorry, I mean lawyers, I seem to frequently confuse those two words – I wonder why?) who claim their clients were innocent yesterday, are innocent today, and will certainly be innocent tomorrow are not doing the law abiding, decent, and considerate rest of us any favors. We pay in treasure and blood when criminals are either not convicted or subjected to shorter incarceration than they deserve and which is not conducive for the non commission of crime.
How many people are actually assaulted, restrained, or even incommoded by law enforcement other than felons and malefactors? I have been on this planet for more than four score minus ten years and not only have I not been harassed or harangued by the gendarme, but I do not know anyone who was unjustly subjected to same. The ones who seem to suffer or feign suffering the most in regard to what they interpret as overzealous laws and law enforcement are the lachrymose, hand wringing, hysterical social liberals. For witnessing such an entertaining spectacle as these posturing wimps I would almost, but not quite, be willing to endure a really overly aggressive or even repressive regime.
In 2004 there were approximately 16,500 people murdered in the United States. That does not include the hundred of thousands who were senselessly and unjustifiably beaten and crippled by criminal cretins. True, some of those were miscreants who received proper punishment; still the large majority was innocent men, women, and children who were blameless and tragic victims. Does anyone seriously doubt that with fewer nonsensical restraints on law enforcement and indeed on individuals in their own or someone else’s defense these numbers would be reduced? I thank God I live in Texas where one may dispatch to inferno home intruders intent on larceny and mayhem. There are some states where, as difficult as it is to believe, the home occupants are first legally required to try to flee rather than confront these vandals and villains before attempting to send them to perdition. How do you like them apples? From the foregoing one might conclude that I am advocating for more freedom not less. Yes, more freedom in defense of life, limb, and property, but certainly less freedom and fewer rights for the criminally inclined. Least you think I am exaggerating on this point about criminals being emboldened by lax laws and insufficient law enforcement then let me relate the following stories which were in the news in 2006: (1) In London, England there are gangs of juvenile punks, called “hoodies” because they wear hooded sweatshirts, who rampage through suburban parks destroying property, knocking down bike riders, and threatening picnickers. On buses they laugh while punching passengers in the face and recording the attack on their mobile phones. In some cases they were imitating such extreme-stunt shows as MTV’s Jackass. They beat a 16 year old girl unconscious while recording the attack on a mobile phone and messaging it to their friends. A 41 year old man who had fallen asleep at a bus stop was permanently disfigured and burned over 22% of his body when these punks set him on fire. A 5 year old boy escaped death after being lured from his yard by these teen age cretins who placed a noose around his neck and attempted to hang him. A 49 year old man was left brain damaged and in a coma after he challenged the gang youths who were throwing stones at his car. A Manchester schoolteacher used a pellet gun to fire warning shots at teens that had repeatedly harassed her family and were vandalizing her son’s car. The schoolteacher was fired from her job which she had held for 25 years and received a 6 month prison sentence for the illegal use of a firearm! Is this an “Alice in Wonderland” reality or what?
(2) There is a video game called Grand Theft Auto which has sold 35 million copies and grossed $2 billion worldwide to date. The objective of this interactive “game” is to commit as much virtual murder, mayhem, robbery, and violent anti-social acts as possible. Included in the interactive activities are forcibly stealing cars; decapitating people, complete with simulated squiring blood; beating people to a pulp; and shooting gaping holes in cops. One virtual scene is a police station where the “fun” is to kill as many cops as are encountered and then escaping by stealing a police cruiser. The defense the producers of these abominable videos games fall back on is the claim that it does not cause people to actually commit these acts in real life. What is beyond dispute is that kids with other at-risk factors, e.g. being from dysfunctional families, absent parents, delinquent friends with the same background, and the offspring of criminals, among other risks, are negatively influenced by repeatedly playing this video. There are examples of kids who after being arrested admitted they were influenced by this video game.
(3) Young male motorcyclists travel at high speeds and perform acrobatic stunts on public highways while being video taped by their friends. The videos or DVD’s are then sold. Incredibly there seems to be a market for this insane and criminal spectacle. Often these stunts are done in traffic, putting motorists at high risk and scaring the hell out of them as any sensible person would be. Additionally these motorcyclists challenge the police in their police cars. At times with the motorcyclists traveling well over 100 miles per hour, sometimes the police abandon the chase because not to do so would not only put their own lives at risk, but other motorists as well. In an interview with a television journalist one of these lame-brained motorcycle morons allowed as how he thought, if one could call it thinking, that nobody had the right to set speed limits on public highways. And he said that he didn’t believe any motorist would get hurt when a motorcycle occasionally got out of control. Of course there are motorists who have gotten killed or seriously injured when the motorcycles sans rider have gone careening and careering out of control, but that idiot could not or would not admit it.
(4) In 2006 the US Supreme Court voided two death penalty convictions – one in Texas. There was never any doubt about the guilt of these two murderers. The court ruled that they did not receive a “fair” trial. These decisions were widely applauded by liberals. Neither they nor the court commented on whether the murdered victims received a “fair” hearing from their vicious murders. At the risk of sounding highly provocative and perhaps to some even unhinged, I must say I do not give a damn whether anyone gets a “fair” trial so long as there is no rational and reasonable doubt as to their guilt.
In 2007 the US Supreme Court, in effect, put a hold on executions until it could render a decision on whether the method of execution by states using fatal chemical injection was “cruel and inhumane.” As could be expected, one of the plaintiffs in this case was the ACLU (American Criminal Liberties Union). No decision has yet been made, but I wonder if whether the victims of these heinous criminals were treated in a “cruel and inhumane” manner will be considered.
Whether the robbers barons Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom; John Rigas & son of Adelphia; Gary Winnick of Global Crossing; and Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow of Enron had “fair” trials troubles me not a whit. These crooks have stolen from and caused equity prices of their companies to decrease by billions of dollars inflicting financial pain and woe on hundreds of thousands of employees and shareholders. I am an unaffected and impartial bystander, yet I would punish them with the maximum fines and prison sentences possible by law. The 80 year old cancer patient John Rigas was given 15 years by the judge with the proviso that if, at any point, medical authorities told the judge that Rigas had only 3 months or so to live he might be released from prison. I would have given that old bastard 30 years in the slammer and if he said he could not do it because of his advanced age and ill health I would have told him then he must do as much as he can.
If anyone wants to disagree with my thesis that we in the West have too much rather than too little freedom or I am engaging in a bit too much Sturm und Drang, then by all means respond with your arguments. The only caveat I would make is that your response be well reasoned with valid examples.
And let’s dispose of the mantras where security/safety and freedom are positioned as polar opposites. An example is the aphorism attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Liberals might posit it advantageous that absolute freedom was preserved for everyone, including the brigands who would dispatch them to the “undiscovered country”, but I would think it a poor bargain. Give me not “liberty or death”; give me life and a little less liberty for those who would do us ill.
Liars (sorry, I mean lawyers, I seem to frequently confuse those two words – I wonder why?) who claim their clients were innocent yesterday, are innocent today, and will certainly be innocent tomorrow are not doing the law abiding, decent, and considerate rest of us any favors. We pay in treasure and blood when criminals are either not convicted or subjected to shorter incarceration than they deserve and which is not conducive for the non commission of crime.
How many people are actually assaulted, restrained, or even incommoded by law enforcement other than felons and malefactors? I have been on this planet for more than four score minus ten years and not only have I not been harassed or harangued by the gendarme, but I do not know anyone who was unjustly subjected to same. The ones who seem to suffer or feign suffering the most in regard to what they interpret as overzealous laws and law enforcement are the lachrymose, hand wringing, hysterical social liberals. For witnessing such an entertaining spectacle as these posturing wimps I would almost, but not quite, be willing to endure a really overly aggressive or even repressive regime.
In 2004 there were approximately 16,500 people murdered in the United States. That does not include the hundred of thousands who were senselessly and unjustifiably beaten and crippled by criminal cretins. True, some of those were miscreants who received proper punishment; still the large majority was innocent men, women, and children who were blameless and tragic victims. Does anyone seriously doubt that with fewer nonsensical restraints on law enforcement and indeed on individuals in their own or someone else’s defense these numbers would be reduced? I thank God I live in Texas where one may dispatch to inferno home intruders intent on larceny and mayhem. There are some states where, as difficult as it is to believe, the home occupants are first legally required to try to flee rather than confront these vandals and villains before attempting to send them to perdition. How do you like them apples? From the foregoing one might conclude that I am advocating for more freedom not less. Yes, more freedom in defense of life, limb, and property, but certainly less freedom and fewer rights for the criminally inclined. Least you think I am exaggerating on this point about criminals being emboldened by lax laws and insufficient law enforcement then let me relate the following stories which were in the news in 2006: (1) In London, England there are gangs of juvenile punks, called “hoodies” because they wear hooded sweatshirts, who rampage through suburban parks destroying property, knocking down bike riders, and threatening picnickers. On buses they laugh while punching passengers in the face and recording the attack on their mobile phones. In some cases they were imitating such extreme-stunt shows as MTV’s Jackass. They beat a 16 year old girl unconscious while recording the attack on a mobile phone and messaging it to their friends. A 41 year old man who had fallen asleep at a bus stop was permanently disfigured and burned over 22% of his body when these punks set him on fire. A 5 year old boy escaped death after being lured from his yard by these teen age cretins who placed a noose around his neck and attempted to hang him. A 49 year old man was left brain damaged and in a coma after he challenged the gang youths who were throwing stones at his car. A Manchester schoolteacher used a pellet gun to fire warning shots at teens that had repeatedly harassed her family and were vandalizing her son’s car. The schoolteacher was fired from her job which she had held for 25 years and received a 6 month prison sentence for the illegal use of a firearm! Is this an “Alice in Wonderland” reality or what?
(2) There is a video game called Grand Theft Auto which has sold 35 million copies and grossed $2 billion worldwide to date. The objective of this interactive “game” is to commit as much virtual murder, mayhem, robbery, and violent anti-social acts as possible. Included in the interactive activities are forcibly stealing cars; decapitating people, complete with simulated squiring blood; beating people to a pulp; and shooting gaping holes in cops. One virtual scene is a police station where the “fun” is to kill as many cops as are encountered and then escaping by stealing a police cruiser. The defense the producers of these abominable videos games fall back on is the claim that it does not cause people to actually commit these acts in real life. What is beyond dispute is that kids with other at-risk factors, e.g. being from dysfunctional families, absent parents, delinquent friends with the same background, and the offspring of criminals, among other risks, are negatively influenced by repeatedly playing this video. There are examples of kids who after being arrested admitted they were influenced by this video game.
(3) Young male motorcyclists travel at high speeds and perform acrobatic stunts on public highways while being video taped by their friends. The videos or DVD’s are then sold. Incredibly there seems to be a market for this insane and criminal spectacle. Often these stunts are done in traffic, putting motorists at high risk and scaring the hell out of them as any sensible person would be. Additionally these motorcyclists challenge the police in their police cars. At times with the motorcyclists traveling well over 100 miles per hour, sometimes the police abandon the chase because not to do so would not only put their own lives at risk, but other motorists as well. In an interview with a television journalist one of these lame-brained motorcycle morons allowed as how he thought, if one could call it thinking, that nobody had the right to set speed limits on public highways. And he said that he didn’t believe any motorist would get hurt when a motorcycle occasionally got out of control. Of course there are motorists who have gotten killed or seriously injured when the motorcycles sans rider have gone careening and careering out of control, but that idiot could not or would not admit it.
(4) In 2006 the US Supreme Court voided two death penalty convictions – one in Texas. There was never any doubt about the guilt of these two murderers. The court ruled that they did not receive a “fair” trial. These decisions were widely applauded by liberals. Neither they nor the court commented on whether the murdered victims received a “fair” hearing from their vicious murders. At the risk of sounding highly provocative and perhaps to some even unhinged, I must say I do not give a damn whether anyone gets a “fair” trial so long as there is no rational and reasonable doubt as to their guilt.
In 2007 the US Supreme Court, in effect, put a hold on executions until it could render a decision on whether the method of execution by states using fatal chemical injection was “cruel and inhumane.” As could be expected, one of the plaintiffs in this case was the ACLU (American Criminal Liberties Union). No decision has yet been made, but I wonder if whether the victims of these heinous criminals were treated in a “cruel and inhumane” manner will be considered.
Whether the robbers barons Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom; John Rigas & son of Adelphia; Gary Winnick of Global Crossing; and Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow of Enron had “fair” trials troubles me not a whit. These crooks have stolen from and caused equity prices of their companies to decrease by billions of dollars inflicting financial pain and woe on hundreds of thousands of employees and shareholders. I am an unaffected and impartial bystander, yet I would punish them with the maximum fines and prison sentences possible by law. The 80 year old cancer patient John Rigas was given 15 years by the judge with the proviso that if, at any point, medical authorities told the judge that Rigas had only 3 months or so to live he might be released from prison. I would have given that old bastard 30 years in the slammer and if he said he could not do it because of his advanced age and ill health I would have told him then he must do as much as he can.
If anyone wants to disagree with my thesis that we in the West have too much rather than too little freedom or I am engaging in a bit too much Sturm und Drang, then by all means respond with your arguments. The only caveat I would make is that your response be well reasoned with valid examples.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
