Entropy and Income Inequality

The Mises Institute adjusted individual income to deduct taxes and then add back in what one receives in 'benefits' from one's government. The result:

Since Sweden is held up as a sort of promised land by American socialists, let's compare it first. We find that, if it were to join the US as a state, Sweden would be poorer than all but 12 states, with a median income of $27,167.

Median residents in states like Colorado ($35,830), Massachusetts ($37,626), Virginia ($39,291), Washington ($36,343), and Utah ($36,036) have considerably higher incomes than Sweden.

With the exception of Luxembourg ($38,502), Norway ($35,528), and Switzerland ($35,083), all countries shown would fail to rank as high-income states were they to become part of the United States. In fact, most would fare worse than Mississippi, the poorest state.

For example, Mississippi has a higher median income ($23,017) than 18 countries measured here. The Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom all have median income levels below $23,000 and are thus below every single US state. Not surprisingly, the poorest OECD members (Chile, Mexico, and Turkey) have median incomes far below Mississippi.

Germany, Europe's economic powerhouse, has a median income ($25,528) level below all but 9 US states. Finland ranks with Germany in this regard ($25,730), and France's median income ($24,233) is lower than both Germany and Finland. Denmark fares better and has a median income ($27,304) below all but 13 US states.

No surprises here, though: there's significant entropy involved in taxing and spending. If you make $10,000 and I make $110,000, our average income is $60,000. If the government takes $50,000 from me to distribute to you, it's going to have to pay taxmen and bureaucrats to administer the program. You'll probably only get $25,000 of the money, the rest being lost to the systematic entropy. Our average income will now only be $47,500.

That's what these societies are striving for -- a more level field of incomes. That doesn't come without a cost.

In Praise of James Comey

I certainly hope that the author is right about our top G-man.

The fiercely independent head of the FBI is directing the investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal email server and attendant issues raised during the Benghazi inquiry, which could lead to indictments of the former Secretary of State or her various aides....

Comey has shown a nettlesome tendency to stray off the Obama reservation. Most recently, he challenged White House orthodoxy by linking the rise of homicides around the country to stepped-up scrutiny of the police. In a speech at the University of Chicago Law School last week, Mr. Comey described the “YouTube” effect that has created a “chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year.” Police, he suggested, are so concerned about starring in a video that goes viral that they are attacking their job more tentatively to the detriment of law and order. The New York Times reported that Comey’s remarks “caught officials by surprise at the Justice Department, where his views are not shared at the top levels.”

Comey has also parted ways with Obama on the ‘Black Lives Matter’ controversy. In his speech in Chicago, the FBI director declared that “all lives matter” three times; at the White House, Obama was simultaneously defending the Black Lives Matter mantra while participating in a panel on criminal justice reform....

Comey has a reputation for integrity, a quality lauded by President Obama when he nominated the former Deputy Attorney General for his current post. Obama told how Comey prevented an ill Attorney General Ashcroft from being hoodwinked into reauthorizing a warrantless eavesdropping program, in the process standing up to President George W. Bush and putting his career on the line.

"He was prepared to give up the job he loved, rather than be a part of something that he felt was fundamentally wrong," Obama said.

All those qualities will be needed if he is to do the right thing here. No one expects it. The rule of law has collapsed so completely where the powerful -- or even the famous -- are concerned that there are pop-culture songs about how much you can get away with if you're a celebrity. Clinton is protected by both personal celebrity and deep ties to the rich and powerful among the ruling party. I doubt you could find three people in a hundred who really believe in their hearts that the government will call her to account for her casual, habitual violation of the laws governing classified information.

The author says "With James Comey leading the investigation, and unlikely to participate in any cover-up, [Republicans] should have faith in the system." It isn't just Republicans who doubt the system here. Democrats are also confident that she will face no charges. After the Justice Department long-investigated and then winked away Lois Lerner's moves at the IRS, nothing could be more plausible than that the law will go unenforced and the friends of the powerful will be protected from legal consequences. It would be eucastrophic if the FBI upheld its due and proper function in this case.

Beekeeping

John Cleese lists some of his favorite, but less-well known sketches from his career.

Budgetary Maneuvers

Exit question via Dan Foster: Would this budget deal have been this bad if Meadows and the Freedom Caucus hadn’t pushed Boehner out? The reason it’s two years instead of one and concedes so much to the Democrats is chiefly because Boehner no longer has any fear of reprisals from the right. He made a bad long-term deal in order to take this topic off the table for his protege, Ryan, when he replaces him as Speaker.

I think I'd like to know what the goals are for the maneuvers. I assume TEA Party advocates don't have a veto-proof majority on this issue either. There are two possible things that you could be after, then:

1) A better compromise on the budgetary concerns,

2) Losing the budget fight while winning a political "optics" fight.

There is little reason to compromise for either side of the fight. The President's minority party in Congress can rely on his veto to back them up. The majority party might be willing to compromise, but the TEA Party element of the right-wing coalition has drawn strength from driving out people who compromise. They're shifting the party rightwards just by winning conflicts like this one.

It sounds like (2) is what is going on, then: let Ryan vote against the deal, but let the deal pass, thus allowing him to assume the Speakership without being tainted by having compromised on the budget. It will, as they say, remove the issue for a couple of years -- an important couple of years, within the context of the 2016 elections. Voters hate government shutdowns, and tend to blame Republicans for them, so that makes some sense.

It does have the advantage of opening room for Paul Ryan to claim to be on the side of the TEA Party wing. For the TEA Party to have claimed the Speakership of the House -- symbolically if not actually -- is a major advance for a party that only got started in 2010, and which is not even officially independent. If Ryan elects to go along with them, it will raise their credibility in the eyes of ordinary voters who may not understand what is and is not symbolic. The budget gets settled ugly, but that is likely to happen anyway.

I'm Sorry I Missed the Irish Breakfast Special

Clicked a link on Instapundit that led to an online war between the White Moose Cafe and the worldwide cabal of vegans. It's a funny way to start your Tuesday.

Also, educational: I found out in the comments that "vegan" is an old Indian word for "bad hunter."

Winning Votes

The Clinton campaign has probably locked up the Democratic nomination already. Nevertheless, she continues to do damage to herself for the general. Most recently, it was this:



Leftists are in an outrage, because "Sander's record as a feminist is as good as Clinton's." Ok, if you say so. Frankly, I doubt the statement is true. I expect that Sanders would prove to be a better feminist than Clinton, whose work as a lawyer and a First Lady has undermined that cause. I also doubt it matters. 'Who's the better feminist' is chasing a majority among the 18% of Americans who think they are feminists. That's probably not the margin of victory in a Presidential election.

More to the point, though, Clinton has to win votes to win the election. She's already in something of a bind with working class voters, both black and white, because of the economics. She'll be running as the heir to the current administration, whose health care plans have largely determined that most working class Americans are chasing part-time jobs without benefits -- part time jobs that start off as "seasonal" so you don't even make minimum wage for a year or two -- in an environment where all new jobs statistically have gone to immigrants.

She's got to win a massive percentage of women to make up for the men she's losing with remarks like this. She's got to win a massive percentage of the gun-control advocates to make up for the fact that they're a small minority among American voters. She'll have a huge enthusiasm gap given that black voters can't view her pro-immigration policies as otherwise than depressing their access to jobs and the pay that those jobs offer. She won't have access to anything like the Obama coalition, nor does she deserve to.

Of course, a lot depends on who her opponents in the general turn out to be -- and whether there will be one, or two.

Saint Crispin's Day

"American Martial Culture"

Seth Barrett Tillman wonders if the decline of academic quality has something to do with the declining number of veterans in higher education.

Pre-World War II, this division between American civil and military society was less (perhaps, much less) of a problem. Then, the largest part of our (white male) population (of a certain age) was enrolled in our various state militias (or, their successors—the U.S. and state National Guards). Conscription, if not universal conscription, naturally flowed from actual congressionally declared wars. Likewise, a large swathe of Americans, across all social classes, could expect to see military service in war, including, unfortunately, Indian wars. (Lincoln and Davis both served in the Black Hawk War.)

With all due respect, that's not right. After the Civil War, the United States military shrank to a very tiny size and remained that way until the First World War. The very brief Spanish American War (1898) aside, the main business of the Army was fighting unions, not fighting Indians -- the famous Indian wars were fought by Civil War veterans like Sheridan and Custer (who was one of Sherman's favorites). So it's not a new generation of fighting men, it's the same generation staying on in a much smaller army, fighting battles that were minor echoes of the great battles of their youth.

Military service was the exception rather than the rule for most of the 19th century, excepting the Civil War generation. It was again between the two World Wars. It is actually only after the two great wars -- the Civil War and WWII -- that we have had a very high percentage of veterans in American culture. You can see the effect of this by looking at this poll about the percentage of American men who are veterans. All the way to retirement age, the percentage hovers around twenty percent. It shoots up among the eldest among us, so that 80% of those 85-89 and 74% of those over ninety are veterans.

For women, too, we see the lingering effects of the draft because women were not drafted: overall, only 2% of women are veterans, compared with 24% of men, mostly in the older generations. That number is 14.5% currently, so the overarching importance of the WWII/Vietnam drafts is what is driving the percentage of female veterans down into the low single-digits.

Another way you can see the lingering effects of WWII and, to a lesser degree, Vietnam is in the chart on proportions of veterans by region. The numbers are fairly flat: overall 12.7%, with a low of 11.4% in the Middle Atlantic states and a high of 14.6% in the Southeast. That means we're talking about the bulk of these numbers coming from the draft eras: since the introduction of the All Volunteer Force, the military has been 40%+ from the South. The trend has only intensified since Heritage did that study in 2008: recent numbers show that it was 44% in 2013. People move around, of course, but the relatively flat percentage of veterans by region shows the lingering influence of the massive draft of WWII and the smaller but significant draft of Vietnam.

So really, if a culture is a way of life that one generation passes to the next, it doesn't make much sense to talk about an "American martial culture." There are some families, especially but not only in the South, where a culture of military service is passed from one generation to the next in the days of non-compulsory service. American culture overall has not been martial. For all but two generations, the bulk of Americans have not served in any military nor fought in any wars. The institutions have cultures, but American culture overall has been not much affected by them for most of our history.

The Dangers of Art

Powerline commends to our attention a terrific interview of Paul Cantor by Bill Kristol.  Normally I'm not a big fan of 90-minute interview videos and wish someone had just transcribed them, but this one's worth the time.  Cantor is a Shakespearean scholar who long ago turned his attention to American popular culture.  The whole thing is worth watching if only for the discussion of Hobbesian vs. Lockeian westerns.  And who can resist a guy, especially a grizzled old conservative, who liked the instantly forgotten "John of Cincinnati"?  At a dream dinner party, you'd be seated next to him.

One of Tex's Comrades

So, apparently this is how law is practiced in Texas?

Has the Elf King Stolen Our Children?

Instapundit sent me off on an interesting journey through an old-school role-playing gamer's blog via a novelist's.

The blogger at Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog spent a year reading the authors recommended by Gary Gygax, creator of D&D, in Appendix N of one of the rule books, and reports. A few of his more interesting conclusions are:

• ... Next to the giants of the thirties, just about everything looks tamed and watered down.
• It used to be normal for science fiction and fantasy fans to read books that were published between 1910 and 1977. There was a sense of canon in the seventies that has since been obliterated.
• Ideological diversity in science fiction and fantasy was a given in the seventies. We are hopelessly homogenistic in comparison to them.
• The program of political correctness of the past several decades has made even writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore all but unreadable to an entire generation. The conditioning is so strong, some people have almost physical reactions to the older stories now.
• The culture wars of the past forty years have largely consisted [of] an effort to reprogram peoples’ tastes for traditional notions of romance and heroism.

Author John C. Wright, of an older generation, read this and brought up the topic of how elves have changed in the popular mind.

Who Are Your Peers?

Should you be accused of a crime, you are guaranteed a trial by a jury of your peers. What does that mean, exactly? We get the rule from Magna Carta, where it meant that a baron accused by the king was entitled to be tried by others of similar independence of rank and station -- and not, say, by several of the king's lackeys. The independence of the jurors is meant to prevent you from being railroaded by a system of closed power.

The American system usually thinks that all citizens are peers, being free men or free women. A judge in Louisville thinks that isn't sufficient:

Unhappy with the number of potential black jurors called to his court last week, Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Olu Stevens halted a drug trial and dismissed the entire jury panel, asking for a new group to be sent up.

“The concern is that the panel is not representative of the community,” said Stevens, who brought in a new group of jurors despite objections from both the defense and prosecutor....

“There is not a single African-American on this jury and (the defendant) is an African-American man,” Stevens said, according to a video of the trial. “I cannot in good conscious go forward with this jury.”

I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, it's a tremendously bad decision insofar as it seeks to further enshrine race as a category of thought (and, even, of law). On the other hand, pragmatically rather than philosophically speaking, the judge is probably right that it makes a huge difference to the defendant's likely outcomes at trial. So while there is a bad legal principle at work, it is conceivable that the defendant would get a fairer trial if race were taken into account. The particular trial is about the particular defendant, who either is or is not guilty of the offenses with which he is charged. The business of the particular trial is to come to a fair and, hopefully, correct decision about that -- not to display grand legal principles, but to set a man free if he is not guilty of the crime with which he is charged. That's why we have trials by jury at all: we could enforce the law without them, as long as we weren't worried about whether the state was accurate in the charges it filed.

It'll be interesting to see what the state Supreme Court says. My guess is that they will come down against him, if only because it would open the state to having to re-consider goodness knows how many earlier cases in which black men were convicted by all-white juries. Indeed, presumably every black man convicted previously could file an appeal on those grounds, since we wouldn't have necessarily kept a record of the race of jurors.

Mirror Images -- Two CIA Action Flicks

Recently I watched the movies Erased and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. The movies themselves are good, secret agent / underworld action flicks in the tradition of the Bourne series or Taken, though not quite as suspenseful or compelling.

What I found interesting was the sociopolitical viewpoints of the two movies, which mirror each other. First I have to say that the social and political aspects in these films are minimal. Regardless of what one thinks about the US or its intelligence agencies, they are enjoyable because they are mostly fighting, chasing, and solving mysteries. However, in those few places where background is given, Erased assumes the US is part of the problem, while Jack Ryan assumes the US is one of the good guys.

I think one example from each movie is enough here. In Erased, the hero is a highly trained warrior whose motivation for leaving a US intelligence agency is that he "grew a conscience." In Jack Ryan, the hero is a former USMC officer who was severely wounded in Afghanistan and given a medical discharge. He gets a Ph.D. and joins an American intelligence agency as an analyst because he still wants to serve his country.

These little differences interest me. The stories a culture tells about itself are important. I don't think one movie is very important. But I think the themes that are repeated in movie after movie do have an impact on how that culture sees itself.

If You Like Your Plan...

Yeah, you know the rest.

As of this week, nine of the law’s 23 state co-ops — nonprofit health-insurance companies set up to help people enroll in Obamacare — have collapsed. Over 600,000 people who enrolled in co-op health plans will lose their insurance at the end of this year. Many of them were forced into the co-ops to begin with when Obamacare canceled their private insurance policies in 2013, meaning they will have lost their health insurance twice because of the law.

Rest in Peace, Maureen O'Hara

She lived to be ninety-five, which is a fine old age to have attained. She is perhaps most famous for playing opposite John Wayne to such powerful effect in John Ford films like Rio Grande and The Quiet Man. She also was in the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. Though born in Ireland, she became an American citizen and will be buried at Arlington, beside her husband US Navy pilot General Charles Blair.

We are as a civilization enriched by her works.

Patriarchy? Paternalism?

The Sage of Knoxville has a column in USA Today that says that 'feminism works in the West because patriarchy is dead -- but it might not stay that way.' His point is that the fact of feminism shows that people care about the opinions of women, and even their more minor discomforts, and that this is a necessary condition of feminism existing at all. But this will all go away, he says, because of the admission of mass immigration from genuinely patriarchal nations, where women are subjugated and treated like dirt (or, rather, like women according to these cultures' lights).

We often speak of a government as acting in a fatherly capacity if it cares for the needs and concerns of its people. This concept is usually given as "Paternalism," rather than "Patriarchy," but actually they mean almost the same thing: both of them mean that fathers should lead, but the former word suggests that they should lead in the manner of fathers. It seems to me that Paternalism is exactly what left-leaning feminist usually want: they want a government that will take care of the needs of women in the way that a father should care for his daughters. He should provide for their medical care, for their birth control expenses, for the protection of their independence, and so forth. It's the Julia concept of what government is for.

One proof of this is the aggressive nature of feminist protesters. They clearly expect to be protected. Code Pink -- and, in Europe, Femen -- operates aggressively in complete faith that policemen or even just passersby will keep them from harm in spite of their provocations. It worked out well most times, except where Vladimir Putin (who had encountered them in 2013) sent a Cossack militia armed with whips to put down a similar protest at the Sochi Olympics in 2014. There's a patriarch for you.

You don't get that here, because we who consider ourselves men in the West are in favor of women leading decent lives. We take them seriously even where our interests strongly diverge, out of love. But we also hold them to certain standards, also out of love, because to violate those standards would be to fall.

So I don't think that feminism works in the West because 'leadership by fathers' is dead. I think it works because the leadership in the West is exercised in love. What Glenn Reynolds is advocating for is men-against-women, rather than men-for-women. What I think I'd like to see more of is women-for-men rather than women-against-men, and that combined with men-for-women. Speaking as a husband and father, that dynamic of friendship and reinforcement has been of tremendous importance to me.

Of course, I don't want a paternalistic government -- no more, and perhaps less, than a patriarchal one. It might be well, though, if our civil society better embodied the idea of love and friendship across the sex divide. We ought to take care of each other, and lift each other up.

Quiz for Fun

What historic military leader are you most like?

I got Gustavus Adolphus.

Oh, Canada.

Canada's newly elected Prime Minister 'issues a challenge' to the United States: “We’re Ending Wars and Legalizing Pot.”

Uh-huh. One can only "end" a war by winning it or surrendering it, unless you've found a way to shake hands with the people calling for a new Holocaust. You can ask the ghost of Joe Stalin how well it worked out when he thought he had a deal with the guy calling for the last Holocaust.

Otherwise, you're just running away. You can have all the pot you like if it makes you feel better, but in the end they'll just follow the smoke trail back to you. And when they do, as they have done before, it will be men like this man who save you:

Even he couldn't "end" your war. He just ended one battle.

But I know: you think they'll leave you alone now. If only you concede enough, you'll be left in peace. Our President seems to believe the same thing.

Speaking of detachment

Hillary Clinton is some kind of humanoid, chuckling over Chris Stevens' adorable sense of humor as he tried to pick up barricades for his embassy at fire-sales, while everyone else was getting out of Dodge.  She admired his entrepreneurial spirit, so that's nice.

Hillary Clinton Had No State Department Computer?

Powerline wonders if she was ever really Secretary of State:

Given her detachment from official means of communication, one wonders whether Hillary was ever really Secretary of State at all. Did she make any decisions? If so, what were they? We know that she plotted politically to make the overthrow of Qaddafi the centerpiece of her tenure at State, but we only know this because of her enraptured, off-the-record correspondence with Sidney Blumenthal and other sycophants.

If she ever had a strategy, if she ever engaged in diplomacy, if she ever made a decision, it seems to have left no trace. Maybe she didn’t need a State Department computer because she was never really Secretary of State at all. Maybe she thought the position was honorary, like being First Lady. Just one more rung on her ladder to the top.