Mike Linksvayer

I’m fairly satisfied with the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses, though I wish the loathsome Edwards had done poorly enough to drop out. (By the way, although I stated my preference for Richardson and effectively for Obama a few days ago, I had forgotten that I already did the same back in March).

Far more important and satisfying is the launch of real money presidential decision markets today. Hooray for Peter McCluskey! I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about this.

There were play money presidential decision markets in 2004.

Copyright is and enables censorship. Lack of copyright enforcement enables free speech. Philip J. Cunningham writes:

I was browsing for DVDs on a cold winter afternoon in one of Beijing’s finer bootleg shops when I came upon three boxed sets of DVDs critical of communism. One of the pirated sets, produced by Turkish presenter Harun Yahya, promised to detail the horrors of communism from an Islamic perspective, another by an American producer chronicled the uncomfortably bloody rise of modern China and the third contained Tiananmen footage from BBC TV News. Presumably the DVD pirates were in it for the money, but were they also unwittingly making China a freer place?

The underground network and commercial resourcefulness of the pirates makes it technically possible for startling and truthful images to be sold more or less in the open in a less-than-open-society. In that sense, lax enforcement of intellectual copyright may inadvertently engender a kind of information freedom and even allow for the infiltration of revolutionary ideas.

If so, then the copyright zealots, mostly big US companies, with profit first and foremost on the mind, come down firmly on the side of information control and in that sense side firmly with the Beijing authorities. Subversive access of the sort I had just tapped into would dry up if US anti-piracy efforts were successful.

Read all of Banned and Bootlegged in Beijing.

This is why intellectual freedom is a crucial part of constructive engagement.

Via Against Monopoly.

I just learned that today is Public Domain Day — but unfortunately that Wikipedia link merely redirects to the January 1 article.

I have little to offer but past postings on the public domain.

Here’s to expanding the size and scope of the realm beyond lawsuit, regulation, and taxation!

I endorse Bill Richardson for temporary dictator of the U.S. jurisdiction. His positions on executive power seem acceptable, his overall domestic policies and record as governor of New Mexico are better than most politicians (i.e., not abominable), and his foreign policy is not insane. Regarding the last, Richardson outlines his principles in this video.

True, Ron Paul’s more radical foreign (and general) policy is mostly closer to my preferences than Richardson’s. However, in spirit and delivery, Richardson’s foreign policy is a viable and positive alternative to interventionism, approximately the Wright thing, in contrast to Dr. No’s.

And Richardson is in theory electable, while Paul is not. Traders are probably correct in giving Richardson essentially zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination at this point, but they are certifiably insane to give Paul even a smidgen of a chance of winning the GOP nomination (currently about 7%), let alone the dictatorship (4%).

I also think that to the extent the Paul campaign gives some libertarians (entirely false) hope of revolutionary change for the better through electoral politics, the campaign and whatever success it has is a bad thing. It makes me sad to see libertarians impoverish themselves by sending a “moneybomb” to a hopeless electoral campaign.

However, I probably would not have bothered to tack on this anti-endorsement of Paul had I not seen this excrement from his campaign.

Paul is also a religious kook (but then so is every candidate, of one sort or another). At least Barack Obama admits doubt, which I’d challenge any other candidate to do. As Richardson doesn’t have any chance of nomination, this post is effectively an Obama endorsement.

Via Freedom Democrats and Sheldon Richman.

In August I gave my one question for temporary dictator applicants:

What will you do to reduce the power of the presidency?

A candidate survey on executive power recently published by the Boston Globe comes as close to answering my question as I could hope. Each candidate was asked twelve questions. I rated each answer acceptable, marginal, or unacceptable and gave 1, 0.5, or 0 points for each. My ranking:

Giuliani (R) did not answer any of the questions, but issued a statement that indicates he’d compete with Romney for low score. Thompson (R) and Huckabee (R) did not reply at all.

Based on the above, it seems civil libertarians ought to be rooting for an Obama vs. McCain general election. It’s ok to root for Paul or Biden, but they have near zero chances of winning their parties’ nominations. (My overall preference is for Richardson vs. Paul, but alas, neither willl be nominated. My hope is for Paul to do better than he’s polling — he will never meet the expectations of his supporters, and for Richardson to get the Democrat VP nomination.)

Glenn Greenwald comments on the survey, in particular Romney’s pursuit of tyrannical power.

I recommend Guests in the Machine: Guest worker programs may be the best hope many of the world’s poorest people have for improving their lives.

If guest worker programs are the most feasible weakening of international apartheid in the immediate future, they should be pursued with gusto. To the extent they appear exploitive or corrosive, the problem is not with the guest worker program, but the underlying birth-based system of restrictions on movement and ability to work and live. Toward the abolition of international apartheid!

Addendum 20071227: The author of Guests in the Machine has two great posts on the subject the last two days. Please read  The Migration Package Deal and The Myth of the Migrant.

The dispute between the U.S. and Antigua jurisdictions over the former’s stupid campaign against online gambling is one of the most interesting happenings of the past few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for about that long but haven’t had much more to say than what you see in the post title. Antigua correctly sees the U.S. as restraining trade and has obtained favorable rulings at the World Trade Organization.

Antigua (actually the jurisdiction of Antigua and Barbuda) is seeking the right to suspend enforcement of U.S. copyrights as an alternative remedy. Unfortunately this sounds way more interesting than it is, except possibly for its precedent. The latest ruling only allows the suspension of US$21 million worth of intellectual protectionist obligations, a trivial amount that will itself be subject to radically different interpretations considering how difficult and arbitrary the valuation of nonrival goods can be (the RIAA’s ridiculous valuation of shared audio files is exactly a case in point). Even had Antigua’s request for US$3.44 billion not been cut down by about 99.4% the result would have been largely academic.

I have sub-golf level interest in horse racing, poker, or other gaming-oriented gambling activities. So why is this case so interesting? There is The Mouse That Roared or David vs. Goliath aspect, but mostly I really want to see U.S. gambling prohibitions go down in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of prediction markets.

The world will route around this U.S. stupidity, but at great loss, not least to Americans.

The incredibly productive Kragen Sitaker, in Exegesis of “Re: [FoRK] Calling [redacted] and all the ships at sea.”:

The major political issue of today [0] is that music distribution companies based on obsolete physical-media-distribution models (”record labels”) are trying to force owners of new distribution mechanisms, mostly built on the internet, to pay them for the privilege of competing with them; the musical group “The Grateful Dead” used to permit their fans to distribute their music by making copies of taped performances, and most of the money the Dead made came from these performances; it is traditional for performances not to send any revenue to the record label. Long compares the record labels to buggy-whip manufacturers, who are the standard historical symbol for companies who went out of business because of technological change.

This clearly relates to the passage the footnote is attached to, which is about the parallel between Adam Smith’s economic “invisible hand” and the somewhat more visible hand that wrote the king’s doom on the wall in Daniel; in this case, the invisible hand has written the doom of the record companies on the wall, and their tears will not wash out a word of it. What this has to do with Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition on seeking symbolism or morals in the book, I don’t know, although clearly Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition relates to mortals hiding messages in texts.

[0] Yes, this means I think this is more important than the struggle over energy, or the International Criminal Court, or global warming, or nuclear proliferation — the issue is whether people should be permitted to control the machines they use to communicate with one another, in short, whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. (Sorry my politics intrude into this message, but I thought “the major political issue of today” required some justification, but needs to be there to explain the context to people reading this message who don’t know about it.)

That will probably seem a pretty incredible claim, but I often agree, and think Sitaker understates the case. Music distribution companies are only one of the forces for control and censorship. The long term issue is bigger than whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. The issue is whether individuals of the later 21st-century will have self-ownership.

A recent article in The Economist includes the following chart:

At a glance (apologies for a complete lack of rigor), two perceived traits set the two currently leading candidates (Clinton and Giuliani) apart from the rest: “strong leadership” and lack of “morality”. In other words, voters want an abominable person as their temporary dictator. If I could only ratchet down my cynicism, I would be disappointed and fearful.

My priority for any candidate is to reduce the power of the presidency — i.e., constrain an abominable person in the office.

The chart above in conjunction with the YouGov survey data it is based on make for great fodder for those who believe “the media” is suppressing Ron Paul: he is the only candidate in the relevant part of the survey not presented in the chart.

The Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution that is a step toward Wikipedia migrating to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I have an uninteresting interest in this due to working at Creative Commons (I do not represent them on this blog), but as someone who wants to see free knowledge “win” and achieve revolutionary impact, I declare this an important step forward. The current fragmentation of the universe of free content along the lines of legally incompatible but similar in spirit copyleft licenses delays and endangers the point at which that universe reaches critical mass — when any given project decides to use a copyleft license merely because then being able to include content from the free copyleft universe makes that decision make sense. This has worked fairly well in the software world with the GPL as the copyleft license.

Copyleft was and is a great hack, and useful in many cases. But practically it is a major barrier to collaboration in some contexts and politically it is still based on censorship. So I’m always extremely pleased by any expansion of the public domain. There could hardly be a more welcome expansion than Daniel J. Bernstein’s release of his code (most notably qmail) into the public domain. Most of the practical benefit (including his code in free software distributions) could have been achieved by released under any free software license, including the GPL. But politically, check out this two minute video of Bernstein pointing out some of the problems of copyright and announcing that his code is in the public domain.

Bernstein (usually referred to as ‘djb’) also recently doubled the reward for finding a security hole in qmail to US$1,000. I highly recommend his Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0, also available as something approximating slides (also see an interesting discussion of the paper on cap-talk).

Charles Johnson’s post of a couple weeks ago titled Sin Fronteras:

Perhaps the only consolation is that Sensible Liberals’ attempts to intervene in the debate and shift the rhetoric towards moderation have been so completely ineffectual. This controversy, like the debate over slavery, like the debate over abortion, and like all other controversies over simple moral issues, is and should be a debate between extremists, not a case for middle-of-the-roader rhetoric or halfway-house solutions. It is immoral for the government to stop, harass, restrain, confine, and exile peaceful people from their current homes, solely on the basis of their nationality. It is criminal that even one refugee cannot immediately escape from danger, or must live even one day longer penned up in a refugee concentration camp, simply because governments in the U.S. and Western Europe continue to enforce the SS St. Louis immigration policy. It is inexcusable that even one undocumented worker should have to live in fear of emergency workers, neighbors, or her boss, simply because she failed to get a signed permission slip from the federal government before she set out to make a living.

Read the whole thing. I link to it because it is a fine essay, but also because it ends with a link to the most excellent Manifesto of the Abolition of International Apartheid, which now has its own domain (and at this point, a mediocre website). The first of many times I have and will promote the Manifesto.

What Does Iraq Cost? Even More Than You Think. by Tyler Cowen cites sources putting the direct financial cost to the U.S. government at over $1 trillion, though Cowen’s point is that taking into account opportunity costs, the price is higher.

I don’t believe I’ve posted about this trillion dollar fraud since January 2006. I just have to point out yet again that there’s nothing unusual about Iraq: advocates of war routinely underestimate the costs by a factor of ten (which makes such estimates fraudulent, in my estimation).

Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency from the Mercatus Center looks like a reasonable exhortation for the U.S. jurisdiction government to publish data in open formats so that government activities may be more easily scrutinized. The paper’s first paragraph:

The federal government makes an overwhelming amount of data publicly available each year. Laws ranging from the Administrative Procedure Act to the Paperwork Reduction Act require these disclosures in the name of transparency and accountability. However, the data are often only nominally publicly available. First, this is the case because it is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the data that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. If government information was made public online and in standard open formats, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the transparency and accountability that is the reason for making information public in the first place.

That’s great. But if peer produced (a more general and less inflammatory term than crowdsourced; I recommend it) scrutiny of government is great, why not of think tanks? Let’s rewrite that paragraph:

Think tanks produce an overwhelming number of analyses and policy recommendations each year. It is in the interest of the public and the think thanks that these recommendations be of high quality. However, the the data and methodology used to produce these positions are often not publicly available. First, this is the case because the data is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the analysis that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. Third, nearly everything published by think tanks is copyrighted. If think tank data and analysis was made public online in standard open formats and under open licenses, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the quality and public benefit of the policy recommendations that are the think tanks’ reason for existing in the first place.

Think tanks should lead by example, and improve their product to boot. Note the third point above: unlike U.S. government produced works, the output of think tanks (and everyone else) is restricted by copyright. So think tanks need to take an extra step to ensure openness.

(Actually think tanks only need to lead in their domain of political economy — by following the trails blazed by the Open Access movement in scientific publishing.)

This is only the beginning of leading by example for think tanks. When has a pro-market think tank ever subjected its policy recommendations to market evaluation?

Via Reason.

I’ve been enjoying Tim Lee’s post on international apartheid and mostly pro-apartheid and weak responses and am happy to see that the Free Exchange post cited by Lee calls ending international apartheid “perhaps the biggest and most controversial idea in development circles.”

The most interesting, anti-apartheid, and strong response came from Kerry Howley in Reason, throwing throwing cold water on the idea that the option to leave is bad for poor areas:

Health care workers who immigrate to the United States may never have acquired those skills were immigration not an option.

Exactly. As I’m fond of saying, brain drain means increased returns to education.

Howley’s post makes another nice analogy:

Applied domestically, the alternate policy would be rather like forcing people to stay in undeveloped inner city ghettos. It would mean telling the children of poor parents that they could never leave the economically backward neighborhood they happened to be born in, even if that neighborhood offered no education or employment opportunities. It would entail prohibiting suburbanites from inviting inner city residents onto their property to perform an economic service.

However, my favorite recent post on this subject falls outside the above conversation — Nathan Smith on The Hawley-Smoot Border Policy:

One factor in the downturn has been little noted: immigration. The Feds have, alas, been getting nasty lately, sending out letters to employers warning them about “no match” Social Security numbers. That started in August. Lower immigration expectations naturally reduce house prices, since part of the price of a house comes from capitalized expectations of its future value, which is a function of demand, which is a function of, among other things, immigration. Rising house prices have done much to sustain the boom in recent years, as people’s rising net worth has spurred them to spend. Current house prices probably reflect the market pricing in immigration expectations. In that sense it could be justified; but an immigration crackdown could turn it into a bubble and deflate it. Falling net worth could create more credit crises, and would surely reduce spending.

Now, there’s a certain justice in people who agitated for deportation seeing their home prices collapse, or — still better — for getting evicted. What they have desired to do to others has been done to them. But here’s the problem: lots of people who are innocent of animosity against immigrants are being punished too. That’s the problem with big government programs: we’re all in the same boat, and wise dissenters have to pay for the stupidity and wickedness of others.

The general economic disruption caused by apartheid enforcement goes well beyond housing, even ignoring (as usual) the direct and tragic loss of utility suffered by enforcement targets.

Like the acknowledgement of copyright as censorship on the Google Policy Blog a few months ago, William Patry’s Copyright is always Government Intervention is too nice to pass up, though Patry is only criticizing copyright maximalists’ selective accusation of government intervention and the Google Policy Blog said that copyright is a justifiable reason for censorship.

Speaking of copyright as a tool for censorship, Techdirt points out that the Russian government is cracking down on software piracy — by dissidents.

Also at today’s Singularity Summit, Jamais Cascio spoke about Openness and the Metaverse Singularity. The metaverse (and other scenarios) portion seemed to be merely a lead into a call for a democratic singularity. Cascio rightly said that we probably don’t know what that means, but he has a prescription that I’m all for:

My preferred pathway would be to “open source” the singularity, to bring in the eyes and minds of millions of collaborators to examine and co-create the relevant software and models, seeking out flaws and making the code more broadly reflective of a variety of interests.

The funny thing is the extent to which “democracy” and open source, open access, and transparency are conflated. Voting was not mentioned in the talk. Which is fine by me — I suspect that such forms of openness do much to promote freedom and other liberal values, which are themselves often conflated with democracy. (The most interesting parts of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks concern how peer production facilitates liberal values. I’ll blog a review in the fullness of time.)

However, in Q&A Cascio expressed some preference for representative democracy — or rather that’s the sense I got — the question prompting the expression had a lot of baggage, which I won’t try to describe here.

My unwarranted extrapolation: the ideal of free software has some potential to substitute for the dominant ideal (representative democracy), but cannot compete directly, yet.

Update 20070912: Baggage-laden question mentioned above explained.

“What will you do to reduce the power of the presidency?”

The disappointing answers I’d expect, in decreasing order of lameness:

• George Bush exercised power irresponsibly, I will do so benevolently — expected from many Democratic and some Republican candidates. Ignore history and put your trust in the candidate and his successors.
• Congress needs to get a backbone — expected from many Democratic candidates. Likely the candidate is a current or recent member of congress, hmm.
• Cut back government and the president has less power to exercise — expected from Ron Paul. I’m all for this, but it’s really a version of the first answer. Coming from anyone other than Paul, it is merely a particularly insincere version of the first answer.
• We need a strong president to lead the terror war — expected from many Republican candidates. This view may be more immediately dangerous than all of the above, but it isn’t nearly as lame.

I’m afraid I’d have a hard time providing a specific non-lame (and not pie-in-the-sky) answer myself, but what I’d want to hear are specific structural and cultural changes that would make it more difficult for the president to act in an unchecked manner. Every semi-viable candidate has plenty of paid wonks and fans to come up with a non-lame answer that fits their ideology.

One cultural change any candidate could effect right now would be to act like a job applicant rather than a contestant for temporary dictator — answer hypotheticals directly and express deference rather than refusing to answer or providing non-answers and demanding deference.

Last month in an editoral titled Free people movement is the way to global prosperity, Mirko Bagaric makes the obvious case that most are oblivious to: birth jurisdiction is a bogus moral category and all of the usual objections to open borders are highly suspect. Go read the column, but I want to call out one interesting claim:

For most of human history there have been few migration limits. Now we are moving to an age of “anti-migration”. In 1976 only about 7 per cent of UN members had restrictive immigration policies. This rose to 40 per cent in the early part of the 21st century. Advanced (western) economies are at the forefront of this regrettable trend.

The first sentence really annoys me, as it is difficult to make non-glib historical comparisons, in this case as in many others. The last sentence seems highly suspect–I have not heard of poor jurisdictions with liberal immigration policies and I have heard of many with illiberal policies.

The figures in the middle are rather interesting, and probably come from the World Economic and Social Survey 2004, Chapter III on International migration policies (pdf), page 75 (as numbered; 7 in the pdf) which says that in

1976 when few Governments had explicit policies to modify migration flows; 7 per cent had a policy to lower immigration

while in 2003

some 40 per cent wish to lower immigration.

which says very little about whether legal barriers to migration and their enforcement have actually increased.

If you read the chapter it appears that migration is a policy issue for many more jurisdictions than in the past and the overall policy mix has become much more complex, except that explicitly race-based policies have mostly disappeared.

It is too bad Bagaric felt it necessary to ruin an otherwise excellent column with unfounded things-are-increasingly-bad rhetoric.

I found the aforementioned column via Nathan Smith’s well-titled End World Apartheid post. I agree with Smith that South Africa is a useful analogue to the world:

South Africa is an interesting country because about 15 years ago it was a microcosm of the world. Like the world, it was about 15% white, the rest African and Asian. Like the world, the whites were segregated from the non-whites by law (of course the West does have some blacks and Asians, but it segregates the vast majority of them). The whites lived in prosperity, the blacks in poverty, their opportunities severely restricted by laws that were supposed to shut them up in “sovereign” native states, against their will.

South African apartheid has been abolished; world apartheid remains. But the end of South African apartheid has caused a surge in crime. So it’s a legitimate concern.

However, it is a far from perfect analogue. Bryan Caplan cites evidence that immigrants to the U.S. commit crimes at a far lower rate than U.S. citizens. There is a case to be made that extraordinarily high crime rates in South Africa are the result of Apartheid and its antecedents, not its end. For an example of this case, see Human Rights and Policing in South Africa: A Historical Perspective by Gary Kynock (pdf; abstract only, let me know if you find the full paper):

In other words, violence in South Africa is considered a post-conflict phenomenon.

This popular analysis is limited by its failure to consider the longer term dimensions of the prevailing crisis. This paper investigates the historical origins of South Africa’s pervasive criminal violence, suggesting that it was produced by a unique combination of a longstanding culture of violence interacting with large-scale political hostilities. While acknowledging that the politically driven violence of the past two decades has contributed to contemporary South Africa’s critical situation, I argue that these conflicts did not create a culture of violence. A historically grounded analysis clearly demonstrates that the political rivalries found fertile ground for escalation partially because a culture of violence was already ingrained in township society. This position is supported by a comparison between South Africa and other post-conflict societies. Many countries recovering from horrific civil conflicts have been relatively untroubled by criminal violence. Lebanon, Mozambique, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Congo-Brazzaville are but a few examples. Beirut, Maputo, Sarajevo and Brazzaville are all much safer cities than Johannesburg. What differentiates Johannesburg is the level of violence township residents experienced before the outbreak of political hostilities. South Africa’s endemic violence, in other words, is not a “post-conflict” affair, but rather a continuation of pre-existing township violence.

Organised criminal violence dates back to the establishment of the Johannesburg townships in the 1880s and I argue that policing, criminal gang activity and vigilantism were critical factors in determining the patterns of violence over several generations of political, economic and social change. The poverty, social dislocation, and institutionalised racism that were a direct result of state policies governing African urbanisation undoubtedly created conditions that encouraged violence. However, we need to probe more deeply to understand the forces that shaped and sustained a culture of violence in the townships and the ways that different segments of township communities coped with the violence. The nature of township policing encouraged both criminal gang activity and the emergence of a vigilante culture. These three particular dynamics became inextricably intertwined over the years and were a driving force behind the culture of violence that developed in the townships.

This paper concentrates on the historical role of the South African police and discusses why the police have failed to become more effective and accountable in the post-apartheid era.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

When first he opens his eyes, an infant ought to see the fatherland, and up to the day of his death he ought never to see anything else. Every true republican has drunk in love of country, that is to say love of law and liberty, along with his mother’s milk. This love is his whole existence; he sees nothing but the fatherland, he lives for it alone; when he is solitary, he is nothing; when he has ceased to have a fatherland, he no longer exists; and if he is not dead, he is worse than dead.

Bryan Caplan:

If you’re going to love whatever country you’re born in, it’s hard to see the point of fighting to make a new one.

Any number of world histories could follow from the American colonies not gaining independence in the early 1780s. But is it not plausible that slavery would have ended much sooner and less violently and Pax Britannica been more pervasive and lasted longer, perhaps even to this day?

The British Empire was not something to aspire to, but pragmatically, suppression, avoidance, or delay of the 20th century’s bloodletting would be nothing to sneeze at. Probably even worth celebrating with firecrackers. (No, the current U.S. jurisdiction cannot hope to replicate this imagined peace through empire, with or without partners, as explained by Nick Szabo — make sure you follow the link to his Book Consciousness post too.)

Rousseau quote is via Why, when, and how to abolish the United States, which does not propose fighting but is rather funny.

Will Wilkinson nicely sums up one response to those who argue that out of jurisdiction movers will destroy the neighborhoodculture:

[O]pponents of liberal migration and labor policies too often confuse dynamic cultural change for cultural erosion. I more afraid that fat, tenured Americans will become too risk averse and insurance-minded than that hungry, entrepreneurial new entrants will undermine the very institutions they came to benefit from. Why not think that, on the one hand, our institutions transform newcomers culturally more than they transform our institutions, while, on the other hand, newcomers keep our institutions vital and growth-minded, rather than moribund and insurance-mided?