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A multi-author blog with a range of opinions on news, culture, politics, beer, art, science, education, religion and life
by
Greg Krehbiel on
10 March 2010
I am not an economist. I’ve read a few books and lots of columns on economics over the years, and my job has always been very sensitive to the market. I know how to create new, profitable products, and I know from experience how costs, revenue, supply and demand work together.
But I don’t know all the stuff Paul Krugman knows. And I don’t know all the stuff Paul Krugman’s critics know. (See, for example, O’Krugman’s Keynesian Blarney.)
None of this stuff is rocket science, and I’m sure I could spend a few hours investigating it and have a much better sense of who’s right.
I’m not going to do that, and almost nobody else will either. We all have more interesting things to do with our time. And there are simply too many issues to study. We can’t all be policy wonks.
Which is a good thing, because there are some things that are so stupid you have to have studied a lot to believe them. Meaning, of course, that by studying you inevitably start to align yourself with a particular school of thought and paint yourself into an intellectual corner. You develop blind spots. It happens to everybody in every discipline.
Think of the ridiculous things that small groups of people do. Speech codes at universities. Moving abusive priests from parish to parish. Watergate. Hillary’s health care task force. New Coke.
That’s why we can’t let eggheads run things. Egg heads know a lot, but in the process of learning all that stuff they usually talk themselves out of some obvious, common-sense thing that everybody else knows.
A recent example — The State Department warned Reagan not to make a big deal out of the Berlin wall. Their heads were stuck in their “inside baseball” ideas about foreign policy and they had no idea what was really going on in the real world. Lee Atwater (I think it was him) did some research and found out what was really going on — with real people, not diplomats — and the rest is history.
The elite need the common people to compensate for their blind spots.
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2010-03-10 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Greg Krehbiel on
10 March 2010
When I was a kid the only time I drank tea was when I was sick, or maybe if I was coming in from the snow and didn’t feel like making hot chocolate.
We only had Lipton around the house, and it didn’t excite me.
Then one day John bought a tin of Twinings English Breakfast tea and he made me a cup of that. It was amazing. I loved it. It was “rich and robust” — just like it says on the package sitting here next to me.
But nowadays the black teas I buy don’t seem rich or robust or all that interesting. So … what changed?
About a year ago I was sitting next to a Brit at a conference. He was drinking coffee and I was drinking tea. I said that wasn’t right, and asked why he wasn’t drinking tea. He said American tea doesn’t taste right to him. It’s too weak.
I asked him what sort of tea he drinks in England, and he mentioned P.G. Tips. So I consulted the Omniscient Oracle and found a place where I could get some.
It is definitely stronger and has more flavor.
So now I wonder — did Twinings change their tea to accommodate American tastes? Or have my taste buds simply grown old?
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2010-03-10 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Greg Krehbiel on
9 March 2010
Influential Pakistani cleric issues fatwa against terrorism
Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri declared that terrorists and suicide bombers were unbelievers and that “terrorism is terrorism, violence is violence and it has no place in Islamic teaching and no justification can be provided for it, or any kind of excuses or ifs or buts.”
Sounds promising. The cynical side of me expects him to be assasinated this month, but … who knows? Maybe Islam can get past this.
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2010-03-09 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Greg Krehbiel on
8 March 2010
See Keep your laws off my body.
I joined the Libertarian Party in part because I tend in a libertarian direction, but mostly out of protest against the Republicans and Democrats. When the Republicans started their spending spree under Bush, I couldn’t associate with them any more. And I voted for Bob Barr in the last election simply because he wasn’t Obama or McCain.
But radical libertarians, like Stossel, seem to take a valid principle and go way too far with it. And sometimes their conclusions seem rather naive.
For example, it’s naive to think that prostitution is a victimless crime — where cute college girls can get some extra cash off middle aged men with no harm done.
Stossel’s operating assumption is that unless there’s some clear harm, adults should be able to do whatever they want — sell their bodies (or organs) for money, take drugs, etc.
There’s a lot to be said for that sort of an approach, and often I think Stossel pushes the conversation in the right direction (Why should my freedom be second-guessed by some idiot lawmaker?) even though he goes too far.
The basic answer is — as with so many other issues — separation of powers. You can’t give lawmakers too much power, but you can’t give individuals too much power either. It only takes one idiot to mess things up for everybody. The law helps to restrain him.
Stossel would undoubtedly reply that he’s only talking about situations where an individual’s decisions don’t hurt anybody else. But let’s look at one of his examples — prostitution.
If the man and the woman agree to terms, Stossel asks why the government should get in the way?
Well, there’s the wife, and the kids, for one thing, and the containment of disease, and the fact that — despite naive fantasies to the contrary — prostitution is very rarely voluntary.
If you start to take a Stossel approach to law, I think you would end up with a pretty uncivilized mess. Who is really harmed by public nakedness, for example? And if somebody freely chooses to work a 60-hour week, why should the government get in the way?
ISTM the libertarians miss two functions of law. The first is its teaching function. For example, public opinion on abortion changed dramatically after Roe v. Wade because people are influenced by the moral judgments of an authority. So laws shape public morality.
“But people’s moral opinions shouldn’t be influenced by law,” someone might say. Yes, but there is this difficult thing called reality.
“And who says the government is a moral authority,” some might say. Uh … they do create these things called “laws,” which makes them a moral authority.
The second function of the law the libertarians miss is its social force. Many laws are designed to prevent clear, obvious harm — like loss of life or property. But other laws are designed to set boundaries on social behavior. You can’t turn your front lawn into a junk yard, you can’t pee in public, etc.
Those kinds of laws are the ones we argue over the most, because it’s those kinds of laws that address the kind of a society we want to be. For example, not one where people need to work 60-hour weeks or where husbands are spending the kids’ college money on a night with a college girl.
I agree with Stossel that those sorts of laws can get silly and oppressive at times, but I don’t think the solution is to eliminate them altogether.
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2010-03-08 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Greg Krehbiel on
7 March 2010
I’ve heard stories that in various places around the country students are being enlisted to write letters about how upset they are about budget cuts, and how it will affect their schools.
I hate it when schools use their captive audience like this. It’s clearly unethical. It’s especially weird when you consider that the government runs the school system.
If teachers really wanted to teach kids what’s going on, this is what they should do.
Let’s say there are 32 kids in the class. The teacher should divide the class into 5 groups (yes, they’ll be unequal in size), buy five pies, and give one pie to each group. The kids should cut up the pie, eat it, and write an essay about the experience.
The next day the teacher should do the same, except only buy four pies, and ask the kids what to do.
The kids will recommend reshuffling into 4 groups of eight, which means each kid will still get a decent piece of pie.
The teacher should explain that reshuffling into 4 groups is the same as closing down one school. Again, the kids should write an essay about this.
The next day the teacher should buy 3 pies and invite the kids from the next class over to join them, then see what happens and ask them to write an essay about that.
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2010-03-07 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Greg Krehbiel on
5 March 2010
You may or may not have noticed that the HuffPost has added a new religion section. I had assumed that this would be about as useful as the “On Faith” section in the WaPo. IOW, useless.
But I may be wrong, if this article is any indication.
A Little Matter of Science, Superiority, and Racism: New Atheism’s Dangerous Waters
Here’s a quote.
Bluntly, the culture from which modern atheism has sprung — science and academia — has a long history of distorted claims of superiority that well-meaning atheists would do best to avoid.
Read the whole article. It’s pretty good.
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2010-03-05 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Greg Krehbiel on
5 March 2010
Spock famously said that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few … or the one.” Which begs the question — what are the “needs of the many”?
Someone could use Spock’s dictum as justification for all kinds of nasty things. If the “needs of the many” include economic prosperity and good health care, those ends might best be achieved by sacrificing the “needs of the few” — i.e., those who use up lots of resources with no hope of recovery.
Getting rid of the old, the infirm, the insane, and so on, is undoubtedly of great benefit to “the many” from a certain perspective. Who’s to say it’s wrong? What justifies spending all these resources on people who will not recover, will never “contribute to society,” and are a huge economic drag?
But just for fun, let’s reason the other way. Let’s assume that it’s right and proper to take care of the less fortunate — even at great cost and inconvenience — and see where that leads.
It leads, I think, to the conclusion that the “needs of the many” are not nice houses, good jobs, a strong economy and a new car, but compassion, kindness, love and respect.
From that perspective, it is precisely the “needs of the many” — their need to learn kindness and self-sacrifice — that lead us to spend a lot of money on kids who will never get better, on old people who use up lots of health care resources and don’t “contribute anything,” and on finding cures for rare but horrible diseases.
They say that tough times teach us what “really matters.” And that’s not new cars and lots of material things. It usually involves taking care of people.
Having that attitude towards life is “the need of the many.”
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2010-03-05 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Craig Gibson on
5 March 2010
David Brooks has a fascinating article, saying the Tea Party folk today employ the same tactics and attitudes as the New Left movement from the 60’s. See WallMart hippies.
For this reason, both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.
I agree with a lot of what the Tea Parties are mad about – runaway federal spending, our massive debts, and suffocating federal regulations and programs that squeeze innovation out of the American marketplace. At some point, deconstructing the current power structures and dismantling a lot of the federal presence in our lives (through legal, constitutional means) is what is called for, so I’m not sure how much dedication to the establishment, whatever that is, the Tea Party needs. But to get what they want, they have to get elected in sufficient majorities to pass their programs and legislation. This is where they might be short-sighted. If they have any hope of long-term political success, they will have to organize into a political party.
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2010-03-05 ::
Craig Gibson
by
Greg Krehbiel on
4 March 2010
Science, Reason, and Catholic Faith
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2010-03-04 ::
Greg Krehbiel
by
Greg Krehbiel on
3 March 2010
Did you see Sarah Palin’s stand-up? There are clips here and there.
Here’s a bit of it, along with some very interesting commentary from those geniuses on The View.
Pay attention to what they’re saying about women and confidence. It’s quite interesting.
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2010-03-03 ::
Greg Krehbiel
