Pat Buchanan would get it

Randall Parker on the benefits of a higher minimum wage and his support for Ron Unz' California initiative:

The public health benefit: Since fast foods are harmful higher prices will discourage people from eating them. 

Smaller welfare state: People who make more money will qualify for fewer social welfare programs. We net taxpayers will save money. The Gray Lady's article actually mentioned this benefit. 

The immigration benefit: The average skill level of immigrants will go up when the supply of low skilled jobs suitable for low skilled immigrants gets radically curtailed by high prices. 

The innovation benefit: High prices for labor are a great incentive for innovation. Look at what manufacturing unions did to boost investments in equipment that raises productivity. 

Cheaper restaurants in the long run: The automation of food preparation will ultimately lead to cheaper restaurants (so, yes, the public health benefit will be transitory).

When I was in college, I used to unctuously argue that red state governments should ditch the trickle down argument and instead capitulate, admitting they are unable--and their constituents unwilling--to give the poor and downtrodden the legs up they need. Instead, they should use the meager funds they were squandering on such attempts to transport their impoverished populations to blue states where they could be more adequately coddled. It's how someone with a distinctly middle class background morally postures while simultaneously trying to demonstrate independent thought, which I naively thought at the time was something the college atmosphere was actually designed to foster. It made for decent undergraduate discussions at a state university, anyway!

Randall's support for the minimum wage is a variant on that thinking, and unlike urging red states to gift wrap their huddled masses and ship them to the coasts, his idea is practicable. Randall mentions some other western states that allow for ballot initiatives like California does. In addition to the golden state, he mentions Arizona, Oregon, and, worst of all, Colorado. If he had his way, lots more terminally poor immigrants would find low cost-of-living Kansas a reasonable destination. Zip it, Randy!

Contemporary political alignments in the US are such that there isn't one party that backs a bunch of policies that all have the real-world consequences of increasing (or decreasing) the total levels of human capital in the locales that adopt them, or at least not clearly so (ie, the left's support for environmental and other zoning restrictions on commercial and residential construction on one hand and its support for affirmative action hiring practices on the other, etc).

High minimum wages discourage illegal immigration because they negate the the major advantage illegals offer. If slavery still existed as an institution in the US, a mandated minimum wage would, principally, similarly damage it. What it didn't wipe out, it would at least push it underground. Indeed, an almost certain consequence of Ron Unz' initiative, if passed, will be an expansion in the size of the cash (or, more aptly referred to, underground) economy. It's an example of a putatively leftist cause that has the effect of increasing human capital.

Welfare benefits, on the other hand, encourage illegal immigration. This is still one of the biggest issues the left pushes (and the mainstream right opposes) and it has an effect on human capital opposite of what hiking the minimum wage has.

The traditional right needs to get behind artificially pushing up the wage floor while maintaining opposition to increases in social spending. A state that adopted this seemingly 'contradictory' set of policy initiatives, especially one with a large illegal immigrant population (Arizona being the most plausible trailblazer, as it has a heroic recent history when it comes to combating foreign settlement within its borders) could really see an exodus in illegal immigrants from said state as a consequence.

Not everything in life is muddled and befuddled

Ben Southwood left the following comment worth remarking upon in the thread on a previous post concerning feminism's War on Biology:

Mainly interesting and reasonably plausible, but the bit about female entry into the labour market and wages is almost certainly untrue, something I'd bet practically any economist could agree on. When a woman enters the labour force she adds to demand as well as supply. When this sort of argument comes from someone with other reasons they don't like women working, then it sounds very much like motivated reasoning.

Perhaps, though it seems nearly every economist professes to believe that immigration exerts no meaningful downward pressure on wages, too, and I'm unconvinced on that front as well!

In fact, I think there is a lot of overlap in the two fallacies. Adding wage earners will increase total consumer spending, but that's not what anyone outside of GMU cares about. The important issue is whether or not it raises per capita spending power. Annexing Mexico tomorrow would increase the United States' GDP by 8% in one fell swoop, but we'd be a poorer country as a consequence.

If the new wage earners earn more than the existing wage earners, then it is possible (though not necessarily the case) that income per wage earner will increase overall, but if the new wage earners earn less than the existing wage earners--as is overwhelming the case in the US with both women and immigrants--per capita wages are going to stagnate or even decline despite improvements in productivity. Additionally, a growing labor pool and the subsequent increase in competition among wage earners that larger labor pool brings with it, allows those who own the means of production to reap more benefit from productivity gains than those who work for them as employees do. That's been the story for decades now.

Women continue to earn less than men not because of irrational discrimination in the workplace--if that was the case, you or I could get rich tomorrow by starting a firm in an industry where such irrational discrimination is commonplace, overwhelmingly hire the qualified, underpaid women in the field who are getting snubbed, and watch the profits flow in... Okay, that's hyperbolic and oversimplified, and there is of course some level of irrationality in virtually all human affairs, but this sort of irrational discrimination is isolated and marginal in the contemporary scheme of things.

Instead, it is because they are less interested in and less devoted to their careers than men are for obvious biological and cultural reasons--reasons that the vast majority of people instinctively understand. Additionally, they aren't as adept men in industries that pay exceptionally well--primarily those requiring lots of high level math, like engineering and physics.

Parenthetically, immigrants in the US earn less than natives because they tend to be less educated, less intelligent, and less entrepreneurial than indigenous Americans are, and the gap doesn't close even after multiple generations of their descendants have been in the country.

The 41 nations more migrant than this 'nation of immigrants'

Since the phrase "nation of immigrants" was first used in reference to the United States 80 years ago, it's regularly been invoked by politicians, chambers of commerce, journalists, charities, and ethnic activist groups as the most vitally important aspect of our collective national character.

Here is a list of countries who put us to shame by outdoing America and its Dreamers by boasting higher shares of immigrants in their contemporary populations than we do: Andorra, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Monaco, Kuwait, Macau, Palestine, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Jordan, Nauru, Israel, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Brunei, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Switzerland, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Latvia, Canada, Gabon, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Gambia, Estonia, Belize, Palau, Austria, the Ukraine, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Norway, the Ivory Coast, and Moldova.

I wonder if Bryan Caplan is more troubled by how far down we are on this list or how far down we are in the PISA rankings, because going up in one means going down in the other. As the economist well knows, life is about trade offs, after all.

The culture war rages on

Watch this video and then take your best stab at what religious tradition these guys hail from:



Yep, that's their idea of shaking things up. Still unsure? A few hints: They are less likely to see the US as "structurally unjust" than other Americans are, they express high levels of contentment with the communities they live in; their younger members are actually more politically conservative than their older members are; they are more likely than members of any other (ir)religious tradition in the US to express support for a smaller government providing fewer services and opposition to a larger government providing more services; they find abortion, drinking, and sex outside of marriage all more off-putting than members of any other (ir)religious tradition do; their reproductive tendencies are uniquely eugenic; and when their tradition is singled out for mockery, rather than issuing death threats in response, they playfully use the derision as an impetus for others to gain a deeper understanding of their worldview.

These hidebound archaics, of course, contrast starkly with today's chic groups, like the shrieking, violent feminist harpies (via Mangan's):



And their somewhat overlapping allies, the puerile, immodest LGBTXQRBUGGERYJIMOAIDSRYWers:

Since members of the West's greatest last hope won't unsheathe their swords and go for the jugulars of modernity's degenerates, allow this willing assassin from the ranks of the darkly enlightened to do so in their stead. First, borrowing from the inestimable Phyllis Schlafly:

 And then with an AE original:

Most people know blacks more violent than non-blacks

The GSS is a gift that keeps on giving. I was unaware of a series of questions the survey put to respondents in 1990 and again in 2000 about the perceived proneness to violence among members of different racial groups. Inexcusable on my part, really, as that sort of thing is this blog's bread and butter. Better late than never, though. For contemporary relevance and because of the finer racial distinctions among participants that are possible in the data from 2000-onward than from before the turn of the millennium, the following comes from the later results.

Despite the Cathedral's intentional obfuscation of disparities in violence and criminality--and, when it's adherents think they can get away with it, blatant inversion of reality--people still tend to believe their own lying eyes rather than their mendacious overlords. The following graph shows the perceived proneness to violence by members of the four conventionally major 'racial' groupings in the US. The higher the score, the more violent the group is perceived to be*:

Blacks are perceived as the most violent, followed by Hispanics, then whites, and finally Asians. Irrational racism or racial realism? The data overwhelmingly support the latter, of course.

Although in a few short decades it will cease to be the case, non-Hispanic whites still form a majority in the US. Surely it is the oppressive majority's anti-NAM and pro-yellow biases that are skewing overall perceptions of racial differences in propensities for violence! Well, let's take a look.

Bear with me, the following graph is a bit difficult to comprehend at first blush. The racial categories along the x-axis (the horizontal line along the bottom) depict groups of survey respondents while the colored bars that run parallel to the y-axis (vertical line) illustrate how each category of survey respondents perceive each racial group's tendencies towards violence. So the first cluster shows how whites view each of the four groups, the second cluster shows how blacks view each of the groups, etc:

It's not only whites who correctly perceive the associations between race and violence. Hispanics and Asians do as well. Blacks present the only stark contrast with reality, perceiving whites and blacks to be (essentially) equally violent, with Hispanics and Asians less so. Grievance peddling race hustlers and their allies in the Media are relentless in their attempts to recast reality in such a way that it actually becomes blacks who need to be weary of whites rather than the other way around, and their efforts appear to be most successful among blacks, many of whom are more than happy to blame whitey for their problems.

What about SWPLs? Don't they see blacks with rose-colored tints and whites, uh, a little more darkly? Than conservative whites, yes, but reality even shakes this more pious contingent's faith in the Narrative. The following graph compares and contrasts the perceptions of liberal and conservative whites:

Less racial variance detected by leftists than by conservatives, but the general pattern is accurate perceived by both. While some credit is due, there is (faux^) ethnomasochism evident among white leftists worth remarking upon as well. Compared to their conservative co-racialists, liberal whites see blacks, Hispanics, and Asians as relatively pacific. When it comes to whites, however, liberals shelve some of their belief in the goodness of mankind and judge whites more harshly than conservatives do. Conservative whites, on the other hand, should come in for a bit of criticism for perhaps being too forgiving when it comes to whites vis-a-vis Asians.

Honest whites--even SWPLs--are having conversations with their children that are similar to the one prescribed by the Derb that subsequently led to his termination from the Cathedral's journalistic equivalent of the Washington Generals.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000), POLVIEWS(1-2)(5-6), RACECEN1(1)(2)(4-10)(15-16), VIOLWHTS, VIOLBLKS, VIOLHSPS, VIOLASNS

** To facilitate viewing, I've inverted the GSS' scale, for which higher numbers illustrate less proneness to violence.

^ The qualifier here serving as a note that SWPLs are probably mostly thinking of the wrong kind of whites rather than of themselves when passing judgment on the violent tendencies of whites in general. They voted for Barack Obama and all that.

Slippery soaps and slippery slopes

It was only a matter of time before those arguing that expanding the definition of marriage to include members of the same sex would merely be the first of many assaults on the institution's integrity rather than a one-time update would be proven correct. Despite the shrill cries of harpies and their eunuch hangers-on that such a faux argument was nothing more than a thin veil disguising the blatant homophobia of those holding traditional retrograde values, a district judge in Utah has struck down the state's law forbidding polygamy on exactly those grounds:

In a game-changer for the legal fight over same-sex marriage that gives credence to opponents’ “slippery slope” arguments, a federal judge has now ruled that the legal reasoning for same-sex marriage means that laws against polygamy are likewise unconstitutional.

Casting both the supercilious mendacity of the Cathedral and the usual arguments against polygamy aside, the chickadee has meticulously demonstrated another reason that the judge's ruling is an imprudent idea--polygamy leads to less genetic diversity since its application leads to fewer men contributing to the next generation without any corresponding increase in the number of women procreating. In this context, reduced genetic diversity means more clannishness, which is where the chickadee comes in. To pithily oversimplify years' worth of work on her part, a takeaway messages has been that inbred societies = bad; outbred societies = good.

Give me the republic or give me death

Watching the two-season HBO series Rome was an enjoyable experience for this amateur interested in the history of the republic and later empire. The juxtaposition of stoicism and epicureanism in the two historically insignificant protagonists, the skillful crafting of a narrative in a world that is in some ways strikingly similar to our own but in others utterly alien to it, the immensely satisfying casting--combine for one hell of a historically fictional ride.

On that last point regarding the casting, though, a couple of the portrayals bugged me. Octavia, not for aesthetic reasons, but because in the series she's an irresponsible hedonist when the historical consensus seems to be that she pulled off quite the balancing act, managing to remain loyal, faithful, and contemporarily dignified both to her brother Augustus and her husband Mark Antony even after the two most powerful men in the moribund republic were on a seemingly inevitable path to war.

The other is Cato (the Younger), the unflinching Republican who uncompromisingly opposed Julius Caesar, and, in so doing, helped prod Pompey into forcing Caesar to march on Rome. I find affinity for the historical Cato to come easily, but the series tests that by portraying him as a bit of a stammering, quixotic buffoon.

Randall Parker's recent post entitled "Cato of the Republic was a fool", however, makes the HBO perspective more easily comprehensible:

Cato was one of the leaders in the Roman Republic who maneuvered Julius Caesar into a position where his only choices were to either get convicted of a crime by the Senate (thereby losing all power, possibly his life, and with his best outcome a life in exile) or to overthrow the Republic. Caesar's decision was not surprising. His ability to execute on his decision was also not surprising. Caesar was an incredible dynamo, a great leader of men who inspired intense loyalty and devotion in those he led. Cato, by contrast, was a fool. He helped accelerate the death of the Republic. 

... 

Cato serves as an inspiration for the modern day Libertarians at the Cato Institute. They look up to a guy who overplayed his hand in a Rome where few deeply shared his principles and views. Cato's views found even less support among the native peoples in most of the conquered lands which the Romans ruled. Does this sound familiar? 

Why are open borders Libertarians wrong on immigration? For reasons similar to why Cato was wrong about Caesar: a refusal to acknowledge that pursuit of unachievable ideals can result in worse outcomes.

With all the caveats about enormous differences in time and place, one might make the argument that Ron Paul is a sort of Cato of our times. However, it is such incorrigibility that allows inspiration to survive two millenia and a transcontinental journey across the Atlantic.

Like Cicero, posterity might remember David Brooks as more effectual among his contemporaries than Cato then or Paul now, but history's great moderates lack the appeal that history's more committed giants do. What modern think tank takes its namesake from Cicero? What Christian denomination from Erasmus?