For many people, a world without zoning sounds like a dystopia.  Uninformed people often assume that zoning laws protect homeowners from the risk of ugly industrial plants being built right next door. In fact, there were rules against that sort of “public nuisance” even before the first zoning laws were enacted. The actual purpose of residential zoning laws is to restrict the supply of new housing.For those who are under the illusion that zoning is about protecting residential areas against industrial plants, check out the following tweet: That’s how much they hate new housing.  PS.  A few weeks ago California voters narrowly approved a $12 billion initiative to “help the homeless”.  Good luck with that. (0 COMMENTS)

American “lawmakers” and “policymakers” are responsible for the one million references to what people must do or may not do that are found in the Code of Federal Regulations. This does not include state and local regulations. The situation is not much different in other Western countries. How could economists be more useful to policymakers, asks Financial Times columnist Soumaya Keynes in “How Economists Could Make Themselves More Useful” (April 26, 2024). Ms. Keynes has some good ideas about the idiosyncrasies of academic economists. She emphasizes that she does not argue for directing all economic research toward answering the demands of policymakers. Yet, her readers risk getting the impression that economics exists more to counsel the Prince than to advise his subjects: But I do think that there is a gap between the supposedly policy relevant research supplied by academia and what decision makers actually want. And that it could be smaller. … Meanwhile, policy is more often tasked with fighting multiple distortions with limited legal tools. … When the Biden administration started asking how to deploy subsidies, the evidence base was lacking. … Academics are not rewarded if their work is cited by a government department or a regulator. … Researchers might also better appreciate the constraints policymakers face if there were easier routes from academia to government and back again. First, we should note that policymakers have spent most of their energies during the past century or so expanding their supposedly “limited legal tools.” It is difficult to miss that fact. And don’t most academic economists share the interventionist goals of contemporary democratic governments, even if perhaps less naively than other “social scientists”? If that is true, most economists are not too distant from policymakers, but on the contrary too compliant with their wishes. Perhaps we should distinguish two kinds of economists. As it developed since Adam Smith’s time, economics is, methodologically, not very pliable to what policymakers naturally want, which is interventionism and Colbertism. In the last half of the 20th century, what welfare economists and social choice theorists discovered amounts to saying that no scientific meaning can be given to such concepts as a non-arbitrary “social welfare function” or “the public interest.” In my view, economists who take economics seriously can only tell policymakers what the latter don’t want to hear given their incentives and their selection. James Buchanan, one of the main artisans of public choice economics, was also a major political philosopher. He persuasively argued that the possibility of an auto-regulated order where government direction is not constantly required is central to modern economics (see notably his 1979 book What Should Economists Do?). This idea, Buchanan wrote, “is in no way ‘natural’ to the human mind which, in innocence, is biased toward simplistic collectivism.” Economists must thus teach “a vision of economic process that is not natural to man’s ordinary ways of thinking.” They should try to teach these ideas to the public much more urgently than consult with politicians and bureaucrats, who benefit from simplistic collectivism. The economist who takes economics seriously cannot be a faithful adviser to a democratic Prince more than he can be coopted in the service of an authoritarian government. Professor Jean-Guy Prévost gives an interesting example by comparing economists and statisticians in fascist Italy (A Total Science: Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy [McGill-Queens University Press, 2009], p. 204): However, the theoretical content of statistics was not, contrary to that of orthodox political economy, structured around a nucleus of “established basic truths” on which history—if not logic—pinned a number of normative conclusions. … Statistics could therefore appear as the method appropriate to certain intellectual tasks that were required for the establishment of a totalitarian society. It is a dangerous recommendation that economists focus more on what politicians and bureaucrats want. The best the economist can do, as Buchanan argued, is to offer suggestions for widening the range of individual choice. To the extent that some policymakers (politicians and bureaucrats) are interested in hearing this argument, it is difficult to object that the economists who understand it talk to them. The other economists will alas, like statisticians under Mussolini, continue to tell policymakers what they want to hear. ****************************** DALL-E 4 was not very cooperative on this topic. I had to tell him that we love both God and the White House (universal love is the key to DALL-E’s silicon heart) before he was partly amenable to depict a sulking God who resents competing with lawmakers and policymakers about who is really our maker. God is sulking as he competes with policymakers to be recognized as the maker of mankind (0 COMMENTS)

Now before you get your torches and pitchforks, hear me out. In many industries, but aviation in particular, a stellar safety record is a competitive advantage.  In High Reliability Organizations (HRO), such as airlines, safety is paramount to the success of the organization.  After all, a single accident, regardless of how rare an occurrence it is, could yield a catastrophic result, either in terms of cost of lives or liability.  Indeed, the primary, secondary, and tertiary victims are not the ones who made the unsafe decision but are left to bear the brunt of the result.  Airlines, manufacturers, and their labor representation groups spend millions of dollars each year researching and developing safety protocols and procedures.  This is frequently augmented by public sources such as military research, information released from regulator investigations, and publicly funded research projects.  With effective safety protocols so high on the list of things that affect an organization’s health, it would follow that they would be closely-guarded industrial secrets. Except they are not.   As the aviation industry becomes more technologically complex, the risks and consequences of safety systems’ failure increase.  Over the past century, safety science has evolved from a linear blame-the-operator type thinking into complex sociotechnical modeling whose goal is to determine both active and latent failures within an event.  To reflect this growth, and to better meet its goal of ensuring the most efficient and safe airspace in the world, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2015 altered its compliance philosophy from a strictly enforcement role to one that encourages collaboration in safety among its sponsors.  In administering their goal, the FAA has made available to the aviation community several safety programs, some mandated (such as internal Safety Management Systems), others voluntary, to better improve safety culture, sharing of best practices, and data gathering.   Industry participants, whether they are large commercial operators, general aviation providers such as private corporate flight departments or tour operators, or anywhere in between, have been quick to recognize the advantages of internal safety programs.  Aviation safety thinking was born out of the need for the civilian aviation industry to meet public demands for service in the post war years of WWI and WWII.  Advances in technology, human factors understanding, and procedures were a direct result of accident investigation and spurred increases in infrastructure and research.  Early safety processes focused on the outcome of an accident, but this reactive measure of thinking often arrived at recommendations dealing with the specific active failure (what specifically went wrong), rather than what latent or underlying factors (what contributed or aggravated to the failure) caused the failure.  Internal safety programs allowed organizations to capture safety-related information, standardize risk management processes, and proactively share resources regarding hazard identification and mitigation. To assist the aviation community in their development of safety programs, the FAA has issued Advisory Circulars (AC) that offer guidance on the development, implementation, and administration of safety programs.  Trade organizations and unions also have put forth standards for safety programs that, while voluntary, often become industry standards, sharing best practices and procedures as well as providing a clearing house for organizations which face similar hazards. One of the more commonly utilized safety programs available is the FAA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS).  The crash of TWA Flight 514 on December 1st 1974 drew widespread attention to the need for gathering safety information in aggregate and making it available to all parties. TWA flight 514 struck a small mountain 25 miles from Dulles International Airport, killing all on board.  The subsequent investigation found, amongst other causes, unclear charting and terminology in issuing the approach.  United Airlines had a similar mishap six weeks prior, narrowly avoiding the mountain, but their internal safety program flagged the mistake and sent out corrective action to their crews; TWA did not have access to that information.   Even prior to the official National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) probable cause evaluation, the FAA determined the need for a national safety information program with the intent to gather, analyze, and distribute information to users of the National Airspace System (NAS), as well as identify and mitigate hazards in the NAS.  Currently, the ASRS is available to all users of the NAS to submit safety-related information voluntarily and anonymously.  Administered by NASA, a non-regulatory organization, information is de-identified and analyzed; NASA’s role is to facilitate the gathering of information, as it ensures the non-punitive nature of submitting safety information in good faith, making the information more complete as submitters are not incentivized to hide details. Similar in practice to ASRS is the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), made available to employees certificate holders (airlines, manufacturers, Air Traffic Controllers, etc) who voluntarily engage in the program.  More limited in scope than the ASRS, ASAP’s goal is to give employees of eligible entities a way to bring safety-related information directly to an Event Resolution Committee made from FAA, company, and union representatives to identify precursors to accidents, unclear procedures or ineffective policies.  Reporters are given similar protections to ASRS, and the information is aggregated to identify potential hazards in the NAS. Beginning in 2008, the FAA and their industry sponsors developed a bi-annual convention known as InfoShare where airlines, labor groups, and industry participants share safety-related information openly and discuss high-risk events.  The primary purpose of these events is to share what information they have gathered about the hazards they face, as well as best practices for mitigating identified hazards.   Information sharing on this scale had to happen organically.  No amount of regulation could have forced it into existence, but the collaboration facilitated by the regulator (once they realized blunt force wasn’t working…go figure), allowed both the industry and the FAA to become more agile and proactive, rather than punitive and reactive.  Perhaps other industries and agencies could learn a lesson (looking at you, Health Care, with your notoriously high accident rates and draconian investigative methods).     Dennis Murphy is a professional airline pilot with a background in aviation safety, accident investigation, and causality. When he’s not flying 737s, he enjoys the company of his wife, their dogs, cats, and bees. (0 COMMENTS)

Warning: This post, like my previous post on the subject, will involve a discussion of plot points and spoilers for the Dune series. If you haven’t seen the movies or read the books and wish to avoid spoilers, feel free to skip this one.  I recently discussed what I take from the character arc of Paul Atreides in the books Dune and Dune Messiah. I see it as a story about how absolute power does not become less dangerous when wielded by a good person. As I said in that post, if there was ever anyone who could have been trusted to wield absolute power and use it to good effect, it should have been Paul Atreides. Yet, his reign unleashes devastation. This raises another interesting question – why was Paul’s reign so much more devastating than the previous regimes?  At first glance this might seem puzzling. And it’s not something that gets spelled out explicitly in the books. But I think there is a consistent, in-universe answer for that question. It requires understanding the world Frank Herbert built. The world of Dune describes a civilization with a very complex and sophisticated political system. A good summary of how this system was set up can be found in this video, but a few quick points can be made here. First, in the world of Dune, the Emperor was not all-powerful. The Imperial House was one part of a vast and complex system of organizations that all stood both in tension with each other, and also depended on each other to one degree or another. That is, it was a system of checks-and-balances, with dispersed power.  While the Imperial House Corrino was by far the most powerful individual House, there were a number of other Great Houses making up an organization called the Landsraad. The Great Houses of the Landsraad included House Atreides and House Harkonnen, along with scores of other Great Houses. The combined military strength of all of the Great Houses of the Landsraad would be enough to challenge House Corrino and their fearsome Sardaukar army – but it would take a truly unified effort to do so, and it would come at great cost. This served as a check on the Emperor, with the Landsraad ensuring each Great House was protected from the possibility of the Emperor picking them off one by one. Any attempt by the Emperor to do so would provide the Great Houses with motivation to rise up in unity against him.  Another important player was the Spacing Guild, which held total control over all interstellar travel. Without a Guild navigator to find safe pathways, interstellar travel would be all but impossible. Houses that got too ambitious or aggressive, or otherwise run afoul of the Spacing Guild, might find themselves suddenly isolated, unable to secure travel or engage in trade. Even the Emperor couldn’t afford to cross them. But at the same time, the Spacing Guild needed customers in order to survive as well, ensuring another system of checks and mutual dependency.  There was also CHOAM, which was essentially a giant corporation that oversaw all economic activity. Great Houses and the Imperial House, along with powerful political actors, all held shares in CHOAM to various degrees, and as shareholders all had some degree of vote and influence with CHOAM, but none of them could fully control it. The Imperial House held 25% of CHOAM shares – significant, but not controlling, and ensuring any economic changes the Imperial House might want would need cooperation and agreement from a wide range of supporters.  Lastly, there is the Sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit, a quasi-religious organization that often operates in a clandestine way to guide activities toward their own ends. Their behind-the-scenes manipulations included a breeding program where they selectively combined bloodlines over thousands of years with the goal of bringing about a superbeing – Paul Atreides gains his powers as a result of this program, although the Bene Gesserit fail to control Paul, as he was born a generation earlier than they intended.  At the beginning of Dune, this system has existed in a stable equilibrium for thousands of years. It’s not exactly anyone’s idea of a political paradise, but it is at least stable. When Paul Atreides rises to the Imperial Throne at the end of the first book, however, this system of dispersed power with its various checks-and-balances is shattered. The Bene Gesserit order was severely weakened. Paul Atreides managed to bring the Spacing Guild to heel under the threat of the destruction of spice production (spice being necessary for Guild navigators to chart safe passage though space). The shares in CHOAM held by Great Houses that were destroyed in the Fremen onslaught of the galaxy were taken over by the new Imperial House Atreides, leading to the Imperial House holding 51% of the shares and creating the first time any single entity had a controlling number of shares. And the devastation wrought by conflicts after Paul rises greatly weaken the strength of the Landsraad, reducing them as a check as well.  As a result of all of this, Paul Atreides replacing the previous Emperor Shaddam wasn’t simply replacing one ruling monarch with another. If that had been the only change, things might have gone better. All the advantages Paul had – his sense of justice, his Mentat mental abilities, his prescient sight into the future – could very well have led to better outcomes. But there wasn’t simply a replacing of one ruler with another. The system of checks-and-balances and dispersed power that existed before became a system of concentrated power lacking any real checks against it. And this, I believe, is why Paul’s seemingly superior qualities as a leader still couldn’t prevent devastation.  In the story of Dune, morally compromised people holding dispersed power and serving as checks against each other turns out to be better and more stable than a system of absolute and concentrated power led by a morally strong, superhumanly intelligent, and presciently foresighted leader. Tyranny isn’t prevented by ensuring that sufficiently well-intentioned, intelligent, and noble people are in power. The only effective check against tyranny is to ensure that no organization or institution holds a controlling power over civilization. And this lesson is just as true in the real world as it is in the story of Dune. (0 COMMENTS)

In recent years, there has been a large outflow of residents from California and New York to places such as Texas and Florida.  The concept of “revealed preference” suggests that these fast growing states might be the best places to live.  But there are actually two ways of thinking about the “best place”: 1. The best place judged purely on amenities that affect the quality of life. 2.  The best place accounting for both amenities and the cost of living. As an analogy, the best car might be a Rolls Royce.  But the best car in terms of value for the dollar might be a Toyota Camry.  If so, you’d expect most people to opt for the Camry, even though there is a sense in which the Rolls Royce is a better car.  In today’s post, I’d like to consider the best place to live in the Rolls Royce sense, not the Camry sense. Check out this headline and subhead in the OC Register: 20 least-affordable US cities to buy a home are all in California And 51% of Top 150! I was thrilled to see this story, as it suggests that I have chosen to live in the Rolls Royce of states.  The OC Register defines “unaffordable” based on the ratio of average home prices to income.  But obviously these places are not literally unaffordable, as 39 million people live in California.  Instead, think of that high ratio as reflecting a high degree of amenities.  People will pay more for the privilege of living in California.  As an analogy, a high P/E stock has intangible positive attributes that don’t show up in the usual metrics such as current profits. It might seem odd to claim that California is the best place to live, given its widely publicized problems such as over-regulation, traffic, crime and homelessness.  But given a choice between trusting the media and trusting the market, I’ll go with the market every time.  The market is telling us that California is a great place to live.  Even the homeless prefer to live here.  People aren’t leaving because California is a bad place, as less housing demand would lead to the sort of low home prices we see in Detroit.  People are leaving because of less housing supply; California refuses to build more homes.  California residents have decided that they simply don’t want more people.  (I disagree with that decision, but I’m in the minority.) If I’m right, then we might expect that within California the most unaffordable places are those that have fewer problems.  Orange County is not completely problem free, but it has less over-regulation, traffic, crime and homelessness than the rest of California.  Thus it’s worth noting that although Orange County contains less than 10% of California’s population, we have 10 of the top 25 California cities for unaffordability.  That suggests that Orange County might be the best county in America.  The most unaffordable place of all is Newport Beach, an upscale coastal community in OC. So to answer the question in the blog title:  Newport Beach is the best place to live in America, if not the entire world. There are two types of “revealed preference”.  The outflow of people from California suggests that we are not the Toyota Camry of states.  But revealed preference also shows up in home (land) prices.  The high price of California houses suggests that we are the Rolls Royce of states. PS.  I believe the OC Register list was limited to cities with more than 100,000 people.  Thus it’s possible that smaller places like Beverly Hills and Laguna Beach are even more unaffordable. (0 COMMENTS)

This is the second in my series of posts on the social costs of drug prohibition. You can read the first post here. In 1878, Congress passed Title 18 U.S.C. §1385, commonly known as the Posse Comitatus Act, to address the question of using the military for the purposes of civilian law enforcement. Previous uses of the military, such as to quell rioters during the Whiskey Rebellion (1791 – 1794), ended in disaster, prompting legislators to ban the use of military personnel to enforce domestic law, except in defined circumstances. The underlying issue with using the military for such purposes lies in its function; because soldiers are trained to neutralize or eliminate the problem, matters of due process or civil liberties are not their paramount concern (Marsh, 1991). In enforcing domestic law, civilian police departments ostensibly must safeguard civil liberties while enforcing the law. However, these lines have become increasingly blurred in the prosecution of the War on Drugs™.  In 1981, the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act (MCLE) was passed to allow the military to cooperate with local law enforcement to more vigorously pursue the interdiction of traffickers. MCLE allowed the military to extend police access to military bases, research, and equipment, as well as provide training on the use of military equipment (Cooper, 2015).  Clinton’s 1997 expansion of transfers to local departments in the form of the 1033 program gave preference to departments engaged in counter-drugs and counterterrorism activities. Subsequent laws, such as the Defense Drug Interdiction Assistance Act of 2011 provided for even more assistance from – and cooperation between – the military and local law enforcement in the name of resolving the transmission, sale, and use of prohibited drugs.   Not only have state and local law enforcement availed themselves of equipment and intelligence, but they have also adopted the mannerisms and techniques of battle operations via the formation of elite paramilitary Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT), Special Response Teams (SRT) and Police Paramilitary Units (PPU) units. These units were once an outlier, with their roots in incidents such as the Watts riots and the Texas Bell Tower shootings in the late 1960s (MacDonnell, 2016). The idea behind these units was for them to act as a force of last resort in situations where normal units would be incapable of responding, especially instances in which suspected criminals were likely to be heavily armed. While the original SWAT team formed by Los Angeles Police under the leadership of Officer John Nelson and future police chief Inspector Daryl Gates captured the public imagination, they largely remained an anomaly prior to 1973. The declaration of war against drugs created a confluence of interests that incentivized these paramilitary police units. Now, not only are they a staple of major metropolitan police departments, but many smaller departments also employ them as well. At least 90% of departments serving population of at least 50,000 citizens have established some sort of SWAT or PPU unit. It’s not all that surprising, as the will to divert enforcement resources to align with Washington’s mission to eliminate drugs results in a windfall of free-to-low-cost equipment, training, and information sharing. As an added bonus, this paradigm is self-perpetuating; the less effective interdiction and community cleansing efforts are, the greater the justification to spend more redoubling these efforts.  It must be noted that despite the vast number of resources afforded these units, only a small number of officers receive this training and become part of them, and many that do eventually rotate back to regular duty. Therein lies the problem; as these officers who have been trained to see traffickers, suppliers and users as enemies to be defeated on the hostile terrain that is their communities blend back into regular units, their perspective has been observed to greatly influence their fellow officers. Williams and Westall (2003) found that despite the difference in the likelihood of suspect violence between calls for SWAT and non-SWAT officers, the difference in use of lethal force between the two groups is negligible. In this manner, policing has veered away from the model of crime prevention to one of arrest maximization. With keeping the peace having given way to seeking out confrontation, avenues to create this confrontation have expanded, from “no-knock” home raids to traffic stops targeting potential drivers carrying large amounts of cash. This confrontational approach, quite naturally, escalates the likelihood of violence, a subject that will be covered in greater detail later.  Some scholars estimate that SWAT units are deployed at a conservative estimate of 60,000 time per year, with 62% of those deployments executing warrants related to drug offenses, often using techniques such as no-knock raids. Paramilitary police units have also been used patrol high-crime areas in full riot gear, exacerbating the image of communities under siege. In my next post, I will turn to the issue of civil asset forfeiture.   Tarnell Brown is an Atlanta based economist and public policy analyst. (0 COMMENTS)

A student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest issued a statement quoted by the Wall Street Journal (“New York Mayor Says Conflict at Columbia Must End as Police Amass Nearby,” April 30, 2024): “Do not incite another Kent or Jackson State by bringing soldiers and police officers with weapons to our campus,” the group said, referring to deadly shootings amid campus unrest at the universities in 1970. “Students’ blood will be on your hands.” I don’t know why “student blood” should be special–blue blood?–but let’s ignore this detail. They are young and still have to learn about life, history and, hopefully, evaluating ideas. I hope they do learn something in their “higher education” institutions. And we should certainly hope that the National Guard is not called in and that the police will act with wisdom and restraint. The idea that the armed men of political authorities should not enter a university must have been inspired by the self-governing universities in Medieval cities of Europe. Autonomous universities were part of the polycentric political system of the High Middle Ages which, according to Alexander Salter and Andrew Young, provided a foundation for the decentralized power that characterized Western modernity in the 18th and 19th centuries (see their book The Medieval Constitution of Liberty, and my forthcoming review in Regulation). I don’t know when the idea of quasi-untouchable universities died in practice, but I suspect that, while it was alive, it would not have prevented university leaders from calling in armed men to expel other armed men (either a neighboring lord or a mob armed with batons and fists) invading it. The autonomy of universities was meant to prevent bullies from interfering with their functioning, not to allow them to do it. This reminds us of James Buchanan’s concern about the undermining of the “ordered anarchy” of university campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. This spontaneous order rested on rules of free inquiry and free speech in an atmosphere of quiet studies and civility. Once enough participants break the rules maintaining it, a spontaneous order collapses, and bullies rule. Reestablishing ordered anarchy instead of resorting to authority may be difficult. Can we hope that the blatant contradiction between identity groups pursuing “safe spaces” and fighting “micro-aggressions” on the one hand and, on the other hand, the same crowd espousing ideologies of forcible exclusion will ring the end of their domination in universities? ****************************** I instructed DALL-E to imagine a counterfactual historical scene: the Mongols invading the University of Paris in the 13th century (in reality they did not dare go further than the East of Europe). I don’t vouch for the historical details of the image, but it clearly suggests that the Mongols would not have been concerned with micro-aggressions in Women’s Studies classes. Counterfactual: Mongols invading the Sorbonne in the 13th century (by DALL-E and Pierre Lemieux) (0 COMMENTS)

Last month, I posted on some of the intellectual contributions of economic and business historian Robert Hessen, who died on  April 15. At the time, I didn’t have access to his contribution to Ayn Rand’s book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. But I got a copy from the library and found his essay. It’s titled, “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children.” My view now is that it’s quite good. My view when I first read it, at age 17, was that it was incredibly good. Why the change in my views? Because I now know more of the literature and so his reasoning and conclusions, which I still think are sound, don’t come as a surprise to me. But back then, they did. I was not particularly a reader, except in spurts, and much of my reading was fiction. So if you had asked me whether the industrial revolution was good or bad for women and children, I would have answered what people around me were saying: it was bad. Bob Hessen’s calm reasoning came at me like a thunderclap. He patiently worked through the effects of the industrial revolution on child mortality (it dropped), on women’s opportunities and income (they increased), and on women’s independence (it increased.) He also answered the major critics of the Industrial Revolution. Everything he said made sense: it’s just that I had never thought about these issues. Here’s an excerpt from near the start of his essay. One cannot evaluate the phenomenon of child labor in England during the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century unless one realizes that the introduction of the factory system offered a livelihood, a means of survival, to tens of thousands of children who would not have lived to be youths in the pre-capitalist eras. The factory system led to a rise in the general standard of living, to rapidly falling urban death rates and decreasing infant mortality–and produced an unprecedented population explosion. In 1750, England’s population was six million; it was nine million in 1800 and twelve million in 1820, a rate of increase without precedent in any era. The age distribution of the population shifted enormously; the proportion of children and youths increased sharply. “The proportion of those born in London dying before five years of age” fell from 74.5 percent in 1730-49 to 31.8 percent in 1810-29. [His quote is from Mabel C. Buer, Health, Wealth, and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1815.] P.S. Here’s Clark Nardinelli’s take, in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, on how quickly wages grew during the Industrial Revolution. P.P.S. In March 2020, I posted on Robert Hessen’s work uncovering Charles Lindbergh’s heroic role in reporting on the German war effort in airplane manufacture before World War II. (0 COMMENTS)

Warning: There will be spoilers in this post for the plot of Dune, including plot points from the second book that will serve as the basis for the as-yet unmade third movie.  The recently released Dune: Part 2 has been a big box-office success, as was the first movie. These two movies were based on the first book in the series, and it’s been confirmed that the second book, Dune Messiah, will serve as the basis for a third movie. I first read Dune in my early teen years and have re-read it several times since then. I also re-read the book prior to watching each of the two most recent movies, to maximize my ability to notice and be annoyed by everything the movie changes from the book. (Don’t ask me why I do this to myself, I don’t fully understand it either!) I’ve also recently re-read Dune Messiah, even though the third movie won’t arrive for at least a few years. There has also been a lot of online discussion about a key element of the Dune story – is Paul Atreides the hero of the story, or is he a villain? To briefly summarize, with the secret assistance of the Emperor and his feared Sardaukar army, House Harkonnen launches a massive attack that all but wipes out House Atreides. Paul, the son of Duke Leto Atreides, and his mother, the Lady Jessica, narrowly escape and are taken in by the Fremen, a civilization that has lived natively on the harsh desert planet of Arrakis for thousands of years. The Bene Gesserit, an all-female religious order to which Lady Jessica belongs, had implanted among the Fremen (as well as other civilizations through the galaxy) the seeds of legends and prophecies to help make those populations more susceptible to control. The wing of the Bene Gesserit responsible for this process, the Missionaria Protectiva, puts these superstitions in place to ensure that if any member of the Bene Gesserit is trapped among these societies, they can leverage the implanted beliefs to put themselves in a position of authority and ensure their own security. The Fremen come to see Paul as a savior fulfilling one of these manufactured prophecies, and he quickly ascends to a position of authority among the Fremen. The Fremen, having spent generations living and surviving in the harshest conditions in the galaxy, become a fighting force that outmatches even the Emperor’s seemingly invincible Sardaukar army. The first book (and second film) end with Paul ascending to the Imperial throne, deposing the Emperor and bringing about the downfall of House Harkonnen. In the second book (and presumably in the third movie) we learn some of the consequences of Paul’s ascendancy to the throne.  With Paul’s reign, the Fremen are set out on the galaxy determined to spread the religion of Muad’Dib (Paul’s Fremen name). By the time all is said and done, over sixty-one billion people have been killed, ninety planets have been rendered sterile and over five hundred others devastated, and the followers of over forty other religions have been completely wiped out. Paul estimates his reign has brought about more destruction than any before and any that will follow, and that the galaxy will spend a hundred generations recovering. Paul’s regime is despotic, bloodthirsty, and brings about devastation.  The author, Frank Herbert, considered the story of Paul Atreides (and the Dune series more generally) to be a cautionary tale against the idea of messiahs, strong leaders, and so-called “great men.” Paul became a messiah and an icon of devotion, and this only precipitates an unprecedented wave of destruction. And some people interpret the story of Paul Atreides as the rise of a villain – perhaps the literary embodiment of Lord Acton’s dictum that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But I interpret things differently.  I don’t see the story of Paul Atreides as an example of a good person corrupted by power. (To be clear, I do think power is corrupting even of good people, but that’s not what I take from the story of Dune.) Instead, I see it as a critique of the idea that power becomes less dangerous if it’s wielded by good people. Paul comes to power as good person and continues to be a good person even after taking power. But nonetheless, he cannot wield this power to do good – he finds, to his despair, that every path he takes leads to tragedy and devastation. Paul Atreides does not seek to bring about the atrocities that come about as a result of his reign. On the contrary, he desperately wishes to prevent things from happening the way they do. Paul is a good and noble person, motivated by a strong sense of justice. He has been raised with Mentat training, which gives a person superhuman mental abilities akin to a living supercomputer. He becomes the first male to fully gain the powers and abilities of the Bene Gesserit, and gains prescient abilities allowing him to see how possible futures and timelines unfold. And even in the first book, he begins to glimpse the future that awaits him: Somewhere ahead of him on this path, the fanatic hordes cut their gory path across the universe in his name. The green and black Atreides banner would become a symbol of terror. Wild legions would charge into battle screaming their war cry: “Muad’Dib!” It must not be, he thought. I cannot let it happen.  But he could feel the demanding race consciousness within him, his own terrible purpose, and he knew that no small thing could deflect the juggernaut. It was gathering weight and momentum. If he died this instant, the thing would go on through his mother and his unborn sister. Nothing less that the deaths of all the troops gathered here and now – himself and his mother included – could stop the thing. Of course, Paul cannot spontaneously manufacture the deaths of himself, his mother, and an entire Fremen army on the spot. And thus, the terror unfolds. In the minds of some people, great power can serve great good, as long as the power is in the hands of the right kind of person. But in Herbert’s saga, this turns out to be false. Paul Atreides is not corrupted by the power he gains, nor does not crave power for its own sake. If ever anyone could be trusted with absolute power and to bring about good results with it, it should be Paul Atreides. Here we have someone who is sincere, well-intentioned, harboring a strong sense of justice, and who has the benefits of superhuman mental abilities and prescient foresight. And yet, in the story of Dune, even someone like Paul Atreides can’t wield absolute power without devastating results. The problem isn’t that power corrupts good people – the problem is with power itself.  (0 COMMENTS)

Perhaps as a sequel of mankind’s long tribal history, people apparently need scapegoats to shed the weight of sins and responsibilities from their shoulders. In democratic countries, “unelected officials” figure among the favorite scapegoats. It is an easy path to follow under the sun of simple beliefs, and I confess I once found it tempting. Elon Musk also seems to walk into this cul-de-sac in his otherwise worthy resistance to the Australian government’s censorship (“Elon Musk Criticizes Australia for Ordering Removal of Stabbing Video,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2024): “Should the eSafety commissar (an unelected official) in Australia have authority over all countries on Earth?” he posted, using a disapproving nickname to refer to the eSafety commissioner. What difference would it make if the commissar were an elected official? It is elected officials who have adopted the laws requiring the hiring of bureaucrats to enforce these very laws. Indeed, the Australian prime minister himself, arguably the ne plus ultra of elected officials in that country, supported his bureaucrat against Musk’s social media. It is true that, without any non-elected official, the power of elected ones would be reduced to the vanishing point. But this is not an argument for the whims of elected officials to replace any power they have delegated to bureaucrats. Power, whoever exercises it, needs to be constrained by the rule of law, and we can trust politicians to respect this limit even less than bureaucrats. Any individual or company, except for cronies, faces a more perilous situation if an elected official can rule by his whims. Consider the following example. Imagine what would happen if Donald Trump could, as it is being debated among his would-be advisers, run the Federal Reserve (see “Trump Allies Draw Up Plans to Blunt Fed’s Independence,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2024). The creation of money at the call of American presidents in the 1960s and 1970s generated inflation that, at the end of the period, grew to more than 10% per year, higher than what we experienced over the past three years as a consequence of the Trump and Biden deficits. In the early 1980s, two recessions were needed to tame inflation. Good reasons exist to believe that central banks are not only useless but detrimental. We have good reasons to believe that truly private money and banking would be more efficient. But there is little doubt that monetary policy would be more capricious and dangerous if it were wielded by some elected czar. The outcome would likely be more monetization of government deficits up to hyperinflation. Back to our general topic. Elected officials have too much power, which allowed them, in fact obliged them, to delegate some of it to the administrative state. Thankfully, laws constrained the latter, even if imperfectly, to follow some general rules. The problem is power, not how it is shared within the state (even if the sharing can limit it to a certain extent). It would be much worse if power were concentrated in politicians, especially under a czarist presidency. The same argument would apply to Joe Biden or any other glorified politician. Of course, the more ignorant the elected official is, the higher the probability of dumb errors. Elections do not provide the needed constraint. The typical voter remains rationally ignorant because his vote does not change the result of an election and he has therefore no incentive to spend time and resources gathering information on political platforms, public policies, and their likely consequences. Most voters know little about how “their” government works. Ask a voter chosen at random to tell you what the money supply is composed of, or what were the annual deficits under Trump and Biden, and he will not even know where to find the answer. If he does find correct information with the help of Google, he will likely not understand the methodology and significance of the numbers. Public choice economics strongly suggests that the democratic glorification of “elected officials” is no less dangerous (and, I would say, likely more dangerous) than the mystique of the disinterested bureaucrats. But through their working under rules, as they are expected to, bureaucrats can at least dampen the whims of politicians. ****************************** A government bureaucrat turned into a scapegoat for enforcing the laws adopted by elected officials (DALL-E under the influence of Pierre Lemieux) (0 COMMENTS)