me  : look I've been having this same conversation with 
me  : economically illiterate people for the last twenty years
me  : and if I have it any futher my mood today is going to suffer
me  : you don't have a say in any of these things
me  : so your opinion doesn't matter
me  : so don't worry about any of it
girl: ok, I get your point
girl: but you don't have to talk to me like that
me  : yeah yeah I know but it's frusrtrating
me  : you'll walk away believing nonsense
me  : and I really don't get paid enough to give these little lectures
girl: ahah
girl: if you think your opinion is important, why did you
girl: choose to be a fireman
girl: and not an economist?
me  : because. this is a better life
me  : and nobody cares what my opinion is
me  : not even you
girl: your a fucking idiot if you think that I don't care
girl: about your opinion
me  : you don't care in a way that matters
me  : you're not changing your mind because you've talked to me
me  : so who cares? I opt for the good life I have
me  : being a fireman
me  : not a professional blowhard
girl: so if you made your choice, why do you keep being so
girl: frustrated?
me  : haha
me  : because people keep asking me about this bullshit
me  : they say, ooh this person is smart and rhetorically
me  : talented I bet it would be fun to disagree with him
me  : and it starts all over again
me  : over and over

I think this is an insight that I hadn’t fully realized until yesterday. In college this sort of thing would happen often: I’d be at a party or whatever and some person who considers himself “aware” and “engaged” and etc. would approach me under flags of open-mindedness and curiosity. I didn’t react the same way to this kind of thing every time it happened, but I can generalize that, being taken with my view of myself as a public intellectual (in the context of that campus), I’d usually entertain these people. One such encounter stands out. We were having ourselves a champagne social at this mansion on Grand Blvd. (god bless the Rust Belt for making things like that possible). Some foppish lefty started hogging my time and on a few occasions I was like, you know this is supposed to be a party, but I let it happen anyway. And in hindsight it’s no surprise why: we were variously drawing an audience. Hey, it all seemed really appropriate—we were in formal wear drinking champagne like a bunch of British peers! Anyway of course the whole thing ended in hostility and frustration and, the next day, slander. This dude I’ve just met and don’t know from a hole in the wall is up on some soapbox in the student union denouncing me publicly. Now I think I finally get it. People judge themselves and each other by their enemies. It’s easy to disagree with dimwits, and therefore not rewarding at all. I suppose I should be flattered. In this girl’s case, it’s almost like, if she can weather the force of my rhetorical storms without changing her mind one little bit, well, she must be in a pretty sturdy shack after all! What futility!

girl: it's not fun
girl: it's interesting to have your point of view
me  : why?
girl: I never had that discussion with anyone else
me  : so you can be surer about your own afterward?
me  : you can be proud that yuou've taken the time to
me  : consider (but dismiss) another view?
me  : that's what it's about. that's why it is fun
me  : that's why most peopel should not think about these
me  : things. they should focus on cooking good food
girl: I'm never sure about anything
me  : playing sports
me  : and sex
me  : and the piano too
me  : and video games and taking care of one another
me  : FUN
me  : FUN STTTUUUFF
me  : hahah'
girl: wow, that sounds very sad
girl: and arrogant

It does? I don’t know what’s so bad about focusing on what’s in front of you, what you can see and feel and manipulate for yourself. It seems to me the direct opposite of the arrogance that a million would-be Napoleons exhibit in pursuit of their liberal do-gooder schemes. How about from now on every time a liberal thinks of some genius new thing the state should do for us, he goes out and does something nice for someone? Carry an old man’s package. Bring a slice of pizza to the bartender. Write to grandma. Whatever. Among the many personal rewards of liberal thinking is that it’s easier not to do these things.

me  : well
me  : you know me
girl: not that much
me  : people aren't complicated
me  : I'm not. you know as much as anyone about me
girl: yeah, because you don't want people to know you
me  : yeah yeah yeah
girl: am i wrong?
me  : yeah of course you're wrong
girl: think about it
girl: got to go now
me  : yeah ok
me  : not thinking about it
me  : busy with that other stuff I mentioned
me  : later
girl: (The stupid french girl has to cook good food and not think because,
girl: hey, she is a girl)

Hey you know what? I like it when girls cook for me (especially French), and I’m getting tired of hearing from them (especially American) within fifteen minutes of meeting that they can’t or won’t do it. It’s an admission that their basic affection functions are completely retarded and they don’t even know enough to hide it.

me  : yeahyeahyeah
me  : i never said you couldn't be an engineer
me  : being a good engineer takes a lot more thinking and a 
me  : lot more smarts than
me  : being wrong about politics
girl: I don't care
me  : I don't care if you don't care
girl: But you are wrong about something. It's not fun at all
girl:  disagreeing with you
girl: because you'll always be louder even if I'm in France 
girl: and you in NY
me  : yup
me  : that's right
me  : that's how you win
me  : that's what I learned in law school
me  : you don't win for being right
girl: That's why I hate law students and lawyers
me  : well I"m neither

Yup.

This isn’t a bash-Bryan-Caplan-because-he’s-a-ninny post. I’m just really confused what the first part of this post adds to the picture. The pith: “the poor deviate from neoclassical assumptions to an unusually large degree.” This alone is enough to make me wonder if Caplan understands the purpose of those assumptions, even though I know he’s good at math and values economic reasoning. I have no idea what this sentence adds to his or anybody’s view of behavior among the poor. Caplan’s own view seems to be that, when the price of illegitimacy, profligacy, et cetera, went down, the poor bought more of it. What about this “deviate[s] from neoclassical assumptions?” It’s a little confusing because Caplan and I (and for that matter, this guy) seem to agree squarely about the problem here, and to agree also that most of the solutions journalists and various economically illiterate types come up with are bogus (you know, “education” and “awareness” and of course more payments and in-kind transfers).

addendum: Here, from another blogger at the same site, is what I think is a better way of looking at things.

Well I’m trying to tell you that I’m not having it. I’m not going to be your fetish, and I’m not going to be the fool in your fools-why-can’t-they-see ritual. I know your high estimate of my intelligence makes my dissent all the more galling, and I’m glad for that. That’s right: smart people disagree with you. If you want to stay friends with me you’d better stop scowling and accept it.

Aren’t I just as disappointed in your rhetoric as you are in mine? I guess, but I’m used to it. I’ve been in a hostile intellectual environment since puberty, or before depending on how you look at it, and I’ve not had available to me the comfortable notion that anyone who doesn’t see it my way is just plain stupid. I’m twenty-seven years old, and I know that even well in to the 99th percentile for intelligence and rhetorical ability the number of people in whom I’ve inspired philosophical sea changes can be counted on one hand. My dad’s softball team had a better record, and they were called “The Not Well Men” (“Our record? 7-15: seven wins in fifteen years.”) I know that I switched from studying something real, something you can’t fake (biochem), to studying econ in order to bolster my philosophizing. That it did, but so what? I’m not wasting my time anymore. Those rhetorical pissing contests used to get me laid back in the university dorms (with a reprise in law school), but fending you off isn’t doing that—there are never any girls around.

And that last point really cinches it. You want to keep waving that patriotic FDR greater good crap around, waxing rhapsodic about “participation,” go ahead. It’s all a status game anyway, in your case especially an ego-internalized one. Nobody cares what we think, nobody who actually gets to decide anything, anyway. If this is how you think about who you are, if it gets you up and going in the morning, I’m thrilled for you. But you’re still wrong about everything and it’s not my job to listen to it every time I see you.

[You know, I think I already wrote this post, inspired by the same friend, years ago. I don't know if I ever went ahead and published it; I'm trying to find it now.]

I have some problems with this. The first is the abandonment of what is called the "rule of law," which includes the principle that criminal liability arises only when objective proscriptions are objectively violated. I’ll talk about this in connection with the fifteen-count indictment that Dharun Ravi faced, and the likelihood that Zimmerman will get a fair trial where irrelevant evidence about his attitude toward race is kept away from the jury. This wholesale abandonment of objective criminal liability is related through the anarcho-tyranny principle to another fact: It is normal to be homophobic, it’s normal to be racist, and that’s what these two are in prison for.

[Background material: The New Yorker had an in-depth piece about Dharun Ravi a few months ago. You might need a subscription or a fee to read it, but it actually says what happened instead of just loosely summarizing the facts and then braying about homophobia. I've just re-read it and it's actually a really interesting piece for a number of reasons (for instance the online dimension to these interactions) and a credit to the author, Ian Parker. For the Zimmerman case I go to Steve Sailer. Obviously he is a racist and therefore not credible and I should choose another source, but I don't get paid enough to worry about that and anyway Sailer is nothing but reserved and judicious in his coverage and saves his scorn for the press and government officials.]

So first I guess I have to establish that these two really are on trial for the crimes of having a normal attitude about homosexuality and having a normal attitude about race, respectively. The first clue in the Ravi case is the fifteen-count indictment against him. Break it down thus: four counts of invasion of privacy, four of bias intimidation, and seven of tampering with physical evidence or hindering apprehension or prosecution. Consistent with the anarco-tyranny principle, we now have so many statutes on the books that prosecutors can indict you for being someone the state disapproves of. One aspect of a fifteen-count indictment is that it looks to a jury more like a menu from which they’d feel rude not ordering, than a serious accusation of something that normal, decent people actually regard as a crime for which someone should be locked in a cage.

So. Crimes are classified and sentenced by "degree" in New Jersey law. The highest crime with which Ravi was charged is second degree "Bias Intimidation," which carries a sentence of five to ten years imprisonment. The bias intimidation statutes are not an original source of criminal liability: they attach to primary offenses, in this case the invasion of privacy charges. What this means is that you can literally be given a jail sentence twice as long as it would have been because of the "why" of your actions. (I just read the statute and it specifically makes the bias crime charge one degree more severe than the underlying offense.) "Right-thinking" people scoff when you call this thoughtcrime, making me wonder just what was the point of making everyone read Orwell’s books in high school. In fact, New Jersey’s bias statute really covers all its bases. The state has to prove that you had the purpose of indimidating a member of a protected class OR that you should have known it would so intimidate the victim OR that the victim reasonably felt intimidated. Any of these will suffice. No statutory definition is given of ‘intimidation.’ Probably something like "feels yucky."

Of course in order for the bias charge to stick you need at least one underlying offense to hang it on. That’s the invasion of privacy offense. And let’s just suppose that it’s a pretty reasonable statute. It makes it a crime of the fourth degree to spy on people having sex, and a crime of the third degree to record them. Let’s suppose for the sake of this discussion that this statute is a just way of protecting people from voyeurs, blackmailers, and so on. The third-degree flavor can get you up to five years in prison; so can’t we just call this whole Ravi case a close approximation of that and not get worked up about the bias angle? I don’t think so. Nobody really thinks that prosecutors would have pursued this case if instead of being gay, Clementi were, for example, an awkward virgin who killed himself after his roommate recorded him masturbating—even though under the law that would be a third-degree offense punishible by three to five years in prison. In fact I guarantee that that offense happens a thousand times every weekend in colleges across the country. "Invasion of privacy" in the context of a university dorm is a silly thing that the state authorities usually leave alone for the campus authorities to deal with (most universities in this country require first-year students to reside in dormitories. Reap what you sow). This is classic selective enforcement consistent with the theory of anarcho-tyranny, and at the end of the day, Ravi is going to jail for being a homophobe.

But what’s wrong with that? Isn’t homophobia evil? Well, if it is almost everybody, or at least straight males, is guilty of it. Homosexuality, like all paraphilias, causes anxiety in normal males. That’s life, that’s nature, and in America, that’s a crime. Ravi was jailed because his act revealed a kind of anxious fascination (disgust and fascination are related, and why else would he volunteer to watch Clementi and his date fool around that first time?) with homosexuality. If that’s a crime, they’d better make room in the prisons for most of the nation.

George Zimmerman stands accused of second-degree murder. His justification is self-defense. The only thing that is, or ought to be, relevant to his fate is what happened between him and Travon Martin. Police questioned Zimmerman for hours, in consultation with local prosecutors, and then released him. So what’s the story here? The prosecutor and all the cops are so racist and so thrilled over this dead black teenager that they interrogate Zimmerman for hours and then let him go? (Why not just skip the questioning?) Cops love making arrests, and prosecutors love murder trials. These are the things you sign up for.

So the national race machine picked up the case and now we have a federal investigation in the works. I know I only got through five semesters of law school but I would love to hear someone explain how a neighborhood shooting has invoked federal jurisdiction. Oh wait: that doesn’t matter: the feds do what they like. In Zimmerman’s case we don’t as far as I know see this laundry-list indictment, and in theory, a trial is supposed to distill the evidence (the relevant evidence) and get to the facts, with a presumption of innocence and a high burden of proof. But ask yourself, if you’re George Zimmerman and you really did act in self-defense: how are you sleeping these days?

Summary: local police and prosecutors had a homicide on their hands, and an assertion of self-defense. They explained that they didn’t arrest Zimmerman because they didn’t even have probable cause to arrest Zimmerman; the lead investigator apparently wanted to charge him but the prosecutors said there wasn’t enough evidence on which to base a conviction. That is exactly what prosecutors are supposed to do—not just indict everyone in sight, but only those they think are actually provably guilty.

Is there any doubt that the case would have ended then and there if not for the race of the dead guy? Now that there will be a trial, the question is whether completely irrelevant evidence about Zimmerman’s attitudes toward race will be kept away from the jury. Outside the courtroom, a lynch mob of national proportions froths for his blood.

Zimmerman carried a gun and attempted to protect his parents’ neighborhood from real actual crime. This used to be expected of every able-bodied man. Now it’s a crime.

Samuel Francis defined anarcho-tyranny thus: "We refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny)."¹ I have a hard time putting it better than Jerry Pournelle did:

We do not live by rule of law, because no one can possibly go a day without breaking one or another of the goofy laws that have been imposed on us over the years. No one even knows all the laws that apply to almost anything we do now. We live in a time of selective enforcement of law.²

What these cases, Ravi’s and Zimmerman’s, add is the punishment of utterly normal feelings and beliefs. (Even yuppie cartoon musical Avenue Q features a song called "Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist," as though that’s a revelation.) Even worse than the oppression of some innocent group, say, smokers, is the oppression of everyone who is a normal human being. The managerial state casts its evil eye on normal people with normal attitudes toward race and sex and whatever else, and we all feel the shame. We are made to display our tolerance papers on demand, and the effect is, I believe, end up being internalized. People begin to hate themselves under conditions of oppression—which is the whole idea. I sense that some people react to these things by going in the other direction; by clinging to pointless bigotries, by for example emphasizing and cultivating the racism or the homophobia that they and most normal people harbor, because psychically it seems a better option than giving in to the shame we’re told to feel over it. There’s nothing sillier than a man bragging about how much he hates people that really aren’t much of a threat to him, bragging about how much he hates fags or hates minorities that he doesn’t even come into much contact with, and I suspect we’d see less of that among middle-class Americans if we didn’t have a class of cognitive overlords who basically hate us.

Hahaahaha file this under “Democratization of sluttishness.” It’s like 4chan gone mainstream.

What a complete victory. According to his publicist, Max’s goals were to write down his tax burden and promote his new book. He’s accomplished both of those without enriching the bitches at PP. While he was at it, he made PP look like the vicious fools they are: again according to his publicist, Max was personally driving to the Dallas PP office to finalize what he thought was a done deal when they telephoned him to rebuff. There’s a transcript at the link of him clowning the PP rep on the phone, presumably from somewhere on I-35 between Austin and Dallas.

So then there’s this bitch telling us how this all actually makes sense. Guess what, sweetie: sluts and the guys who bang them are natural allies here. Tucker Max is one of PP’s number-one constituents, whether you like it or not. But hey, I guess you can be picky when the government forces us all to fund you anyway.

Here’s Max’s post on the matter.

Whoops.

Ok here is the exchange. My initial comment to this post at EconLog.

Does Caplan think that being a weenie makes him more credible, insightful, or superior? I’ve never seen someone brag this much about being effeminate. It’s distasteful, to understate the point.

This was rejected by Lauren, the moderator:

Hi, ladderff. Your EconLog comment, quoted below, is too rude and has been rejected for publication. Commenters are required to be civil. Disagreeing with the points of view of the bloggers and commenters is fine. You will notice that many of the comments in the thread are in disagreement. However, rudeness–including calling someone a “weenie”–is not acceptable on EconLog. Please read about EconLog policies here: http://www.econlib.org/library/faqEconLog.html#commentbans Your future comments are precluded until we hear from you indicating that you have read and will abide by our civility policies. We appreciate your comments and interest in EconLog, and we look forward to hearing from you so that we may reinstate your comment privileges.

No shock there. I replied thus:

Hi, Lauren, I think you have been too hasty this time. I readily admit that “weenie” is not the politest term—but it is not without descriptive power. I’ve been a libertarian for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never quite understood the hostility that we receive from most quarters until I read Bryan Caplan. His weightlifting post was pretty far outside the umbra of economics/ethical theory, such that I feel I should have been given some more latitude to raise this issue of the psychological tension among libertarians. I refer you to http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/murrays_wsj_sol.html, in which Caplan describes men who are not like him (some of them probably even lift weights) as “dysfunctional” and “macho.” I assure you that these are not laudatory terms. Chucking standard assumptions about self-interested behavior in order to let everyone know how superior you are is, well, rude. I still think he’s a weenie, and that through his writing he has put the issue of what a weenie he is squarely on the table.

Lauren is not swayed:

I’m restoring your future comment privileges. Thanks for your prompt response My decision to not publish your particular comment still stands. You may not call someone names. That Bryan used words such as “dysfunctional” and “macho” to convey general descriptions is not the same as your calling an individual person a weenie. I think the distinction between descriptive characterizations and individual name-calling is clear.

Oh well. Me again:

Thanks. And thanks for the prompt and thoughtful response. I checked out Econlib’s “About” page—you have an interesting background! And I can appreciate a clear distinction as much as anybody. Just consider the next time someone gets personal with Bryan (perhaps without resort to words like “weenie”) that he asks for it. He quite literally touts his self-regard as a methodological innovation. I should have found a more civil way to point that out. Anyway thanks again for your time and attention; I hope you don’t consider it wasted.