Your kids: one reason libertarianism matters

Here’s the thing. I don’t like a lot of the things you do. I can pretty much guarantee that. You let your kids play outside too long. You let them jump on the trampoline and scream for hours — usually from around 5:30, when I get home (if I’m lucky), until around 9 or 9:30 — and worse than that, they bring their friends over.

Another thing: you have weird beliefs that make absolutely no sense at all to me, which maybe I wouldn’t mind, if I were willing to mind my own business, except that you come knocking on my door when I’m trying to take a nap so you can tell me about it.

To make matters worse, you teach these weird beliefs to  your kids, and if their teachers — who also do all sorts of things I don’t like — don’t bring those things up in class, the kids are sure to try to start some club to do it.

Or something.

In the line at the grocery store, you hold the rest of us up forever. I mean, really, you didn’t know you were going to need some form of money until after the clerk rang everything up and had it almost all bagged? Why couldn’t you have the money ready before then, instead of waiting to start counting it when the clerk put out his or her hand? And we might not have minded the wait as much if it weren’t for all the pennies.

But what bothers me more than that is you also don’t eat right. And I don’t mean just that you eat foods that are bad for you — although I couldn’t help notice what you were buying when you held me up in that line — watching you eat at a restaurant makes my stomach turn. You talk with your mouth full, which sometimes causes you to spray chewed-up food, instead of swallowing it. I mean, you’re a pig.

Speaking of being a pig, you dress funny. Who the heck told you I — or anyone else — wanted to see a 250-pound woman in Spandex with the words “YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT” emblazoned across the very ample ass? I assure you, not only do I not want it. I don’t even want to see it. Think of what it does to the children.

The children. That’s the most important thing. It’s not just, as I said above, that you let them play outside and bother me. But there are all kinds of other ways you teach them things and do things around them that I just totally disapprove of. Because I’m better than you. I’m smarter than you. I know more than you.

Aren’t you glad there’s at least still a shred of libertarianism left in America?

I was reminded of this while reading a discussion — I’m ashamed to say it included relatives of mine — on Facebook yesterday. The conversation involved an apparent dislike for the fact that some kids were outside, unattended. If you accept the statements made, the kids were playing near a busy street at 9:30 at night. I’ve no real idea what that means: where they playing “chicken” with the cars coming down the road? Does “near” mean “closer to that street than they were to the inside of their house, where I think they belonged at that hour?”

A chorus arose: “Call the police! Call CPS!” The intertwining melody of some: “I hope they take their children away. They don’t deserve to have children!”

At one point, one of the busybodies admitted, “I want to call the police, but I don’t really think there is anything they can do.” Another noted that it was not yet “curfew” and suggested calling the police if they were still out after curfew.

Well, what do you know. If you’re able to recognize that the police probably couldn’t do anything and that it was legal, even in a town that is anti-freedom enough to have a law about when people can be outside, then you should be able to recognize that this is apparently a difference of opinion between you and other people as to how children should be raised.

I popped into the conversation and pointed out my own mom’s ignorance and malfeasance for having allowed us to play outside when we were kids (and there was a street right in front of our house!), sometimes, although not often, even after it was dark. In fact, I distinctly remember that it was always more fun to play “hide-and-seek” after dark; it made hiding in plain sight a little easier.

Someone agreed with me, apparently having had a similarly-bad mother, and added that we didn’t even have cell phones then. My sister argued against me reminding me that one time when we played outside unattended, she got hurt and needed stitches (I told you my mom was a bad person!), adding,

You never had children being snatched by strangers, or shot at by rival gangs. The child molesters didn’t live in the neighborhood, they were in jail, other children didn’t rape and murder younger ones. It’s not the same place we knew.

Another busybody joined that chorus: the world was different then.

You got me. The world was different then. One difference was that we had actual news programs at night, instead of infomercials for law enforcement, trumpeting all the latest crimes to scare the crap out of us and ensure we won’t try to cut funding for “public safety,” despite the fact that the biggest threat to public safety comes from the police. Nobody is safe from the police. Not even other police.

And today’s courts not only don’t care, they endorse the behavior.

So you got me, busybodies, there is a difference. The difference is people with attitudes like those of the people urging that the police and CPS be called would have been laughed off by the police. But today, the cops are all about control.

You’re wrong about the crime, though. You know who the biggest threat to children is?

Not strangers, unless you are talking about cops, it’s their families.

A story about child abduction noted that in 2002, 800,000 children were reported abducted. As the story points out, though:

It’s true that 797,500 people under 18 were reported missing in a one-year period, according to a 2002 study. But of those cases, 203,900 were family abductions, 58,200 were nonfamily abductions, and only 115 were “stereotypical kidnappings,” defined in one study as “a nonfamily abduction perpetrated by a slight acquaintance or stranger in which a child is detained overnight, transported at least 50 miles, held for ransom or abducted with the intent to keep the child permanently, or killed.”

And child abductions did occur in the old days — they weren’t so different as people would like to believe. Take the story of Charles Hatcher, for example:

Upon his release for a child abduction conviction in the mid-1960’s, Hatcher began a crime spree of abductions, molestations, and murders involving young children. Along the way, he was arrested many times but always avoided serious punishment, once being forced only to stay in a mental hospital for one year after the attempted murder of a boy, and on another occasion he was only held briefly because of his deteriorated mental state after sodomising another boy.

According to a legend in Huntsville, Alabama, there was a rash of child abductions in the 1960s there, as well.

Oh, noes! My momma was letting me go outside and play in the mid-sixties!

“Well, there you have it,” says one of the busybodies on Facebook. “Parents weren’t aware of the dangers back then as they are now, they weren’t expected to be as careful.” She went on in a follow-up comment to point out that we didn’t used to know smoking causes cancer, but now we know better, so people are expected to be more careful.

Although in discussing the children playing outside, she was a strong advocate for calling the cops — “and if it continues, call every time you see it” — she didn’t mention if she also calls the cops every time she sees someone smoking.

Because they’re expected to be more careful.

I could go on about the inanity of the comments in that discussion. Without a doubt those “ladies” did not approve of how the other family was raising their children.

This, my friends, is just one more reason why libertarianism matters: you each get the right to scar, or not scar, your children in whichever way you see fit.

At least for now.

How are we doing so far?

Since we launched this new blog, I’ve been trying to avoid obsessing over the traffic stats. Other than occasionally checking the average daily visitor count — currently hovering around 50-60 — I have been steadfastly ignoring the reports. Today, however, I finally gave into temptation, and here are some of the results for the month of May:

Nobody’s Business had 1399 visits from 766 unique visitors, each of whom looked at 1.4 pages. 89% of these visits came from the United States, and about two thirds of the rest came from other English-speak countries, with Canada and the U.K. tied for top honors.

Almost half of our visitors were first-timers, which means that the other half were people who had seen us before and decided to come back. That’s pretty good. Advertising-driven sites are often obsessed with the raw number of visitors regardless of source, but for a blog, I pay more attention to the figures for returning visitors. That’s our readership. (Hi everyone!)

This is reflected in the fact that 41% of our visitors arrive directly, and 50% arrive from referring sites. The top referring site is Rogier’s original Nobody’s Business blog, which sent us 38% of our visitors, presumably from his last post, which tells his readers about us.

Randazza’s Legal Satyricon sent us about 9% of our traffic, presumably due to this mention of Rogier’s post about how much the war on terror sucks, which is also the single most visited post on Nobody’s Business.

My own pimping at Windypundit acounts for another 8% of our traffic. Popehat‘s main page accounts for 5%, as does Fred Humbolt’s shoutout. Our automated Facebook announcements account for another 5%. Only 122 visits come from search engine traffic, with no particular search terms standing out.

I’d love for us to have ten times this much traffic, but we’re actually doing pretty good for a blog that started without a big advertising splash. One thing that’s hurting us is Google’s unwillingness to trust our site with a PageRank. Too many people were trying to game Google by setting up fake sites full of links, so Google’s ranking algorithms are now officially suspicious of all new sites. Once we’ve been around a little longer, I hope to see that change.

Professor Levitt’s “Daughter Test”

Economist Steven Levitt said something dumb, and I’m not sure whether to be amused or disappointed. He wants online poker to be legal, but he draws the line at cocaine and prostitution. Here’s his explanation:

Levitt says he doesn’t usually get riled up over such issues, but then he realized why he got so angry: his daughter.

“It’s what I call the Daughter Test,” he says. “If the prohibited activity is something I’d think that would actually be good for my daughter to be able to do, then I am in favor of it being legal. But if the activity is something that I would feel terrible if my daughter did, then I would want it to be illegal.”

The economist provides an example: cocaine. Although he says the U.S. is better off legalizing and then regulating the drug, the thought of his daughter becoming an addict is enough for him to side with his paternal instincts.

Elsewhere he explains the Daughter Test:

If the answer is that I wouldn’t want my daughter to do it, then I don’t mind the government passing a law against it. I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a cocaine addict or a prostitute, so in spite of the fact that it would probably be more economically efficient to legalize drugs and prostitution subject to heavy regulation/taxation, I don’t mind those activities being illegal.

If Levitt is just telling a story about how his personal feelings conflict with his economic theory, then this is a harmless and amusing anecdote. But if he’s actually proposing this as some sort of test, he’s just not thinking very clearly.

First of all, Levitt’s daughter is only about seven years old, so let’s make it clear right now that no libertarian advocate of legalizing drugs and prostitution wants to make either of those things legal for children. If we’re talking about making these things legal for Levitt’s daughter, we’re talking about making them legal when she’s an adult.

Looking at it the other way around, Levitt is talking about making it illegal for his adult daughter to take drugs or become a prostitute. But why is he the only one who gets to decide these things? For example, maybe she’ll grow up to be really hot, and lots of guys will want to have sex with her. Why shouldn’t those guys be able to make it legal for Levitt’s daughter to sell herself to them?

For that matter, if Levitt is justified in using the coercive power of government to forcibly stop her from becoming a prostitute, why aren’t the guys who want to bang her justified in using the coercive power of government to force her to become a prostitute? Or a sex slave? These are the kinds of things you should think about before advocating that the government be allowed to control your daughter’s sexual behavior.

(You could argue that Levitt is in a special position with regard to his daughter and so his desires should trump those of the cads who want to bed her. That’s probably a good point, but remember that he also wants to apply this law to all the other women who are not his daughter.)

Remember too, that the law is not a magic spell. Criminalizing drugs and prostitution doesn’t make them go away, it just sets the stage for the government to capture and imprison prostitutes and drug users. If Levitt doesn’t want his daughter to be a drug addict or prostitute, how does he feel about her being a prisoner? (If you thought it was far-fetched of me to suggest that the government could force Levitt’s daughter into sexual slavery, keep in mind that prisons are rough places, and it’s not unheard of for the guards to rape the women.) At least if she were a prostitute or a drug user, she could stop whenever she wanted to. Prisoners are not so lucky.

Along those lines, here’s an alternative “Daughter Test”: If Levitt thinks that cocaine and prostitution should be illegal, would he be willing to see his own daughter thrown in prison for breaking those laws?

Also, to borrow a phrase from Hayek, Levitt has not realized how little he really knows about what he imagines he can design. He’s imagining his daughter as that little girl he sees across the breakfast table every morning. He’s imagining that she might someday want to become a professor or a lawyer or a doctor or a hooker, and he’d like to take that last choice off the list. But his daughter’s life might not turn out the way he wants it to. She might not have that many choices.

Levitt could die, along with his wife and everyone else in their families, except for his little girl. She could grow up alone in a system of state homes, destitute and alone. And then maybe she’ll meet some charming psychopath who beds her and knocks her up, then moves in, steals all her money, and beats her every weekend when he gets drunk.

Then one day, about the time her boyfriend starts looking at their daughter in a disturbing way, a friend might offer to hook her up with an escort service in another town. With that kind of money, she could get away and get her daughter away. If those are her only two choices — violently abusive boyfriend or prostitution — maybe prostitution is the lesser of evils.

I’m probably being a little too harsh about Levitt’s wish for his daughter to have a happy life. I certainly don’t begrudge him his feelings. But what about the other daughters in the world who aren’t lucky enough to have Professor Levitt as a father? What about daughters who are poor or uneducated and have few other job prospects? What about the daughters whose fathers rape them? What about the women who are are born in dreadful families — or dreadful nations — and seek to finance their escape through prostitution?

We don’t have to imagine such dire scenarios, though. What if his daughter simply likes cocaine? What if  she likes being a prostitute? Why is that not enough? It may not be what he wants for his daughter, but why should his desires be enshrined in law while hers are outlawed?

What it really comes down to is not what’s best for Professor Levitt’s daughter, but who should have the power to decide on her behalf. I presume he knows what’s best for himself, and I suppose it’s possible he knows what’s best for his daughter, but how dare he claim to know what’s best for everyone.

Terrors of the managed economy: Taxicabs

Reason‘s A. Barton Hinkle has a nice piece about one of the clearest examples of what goes wrong when the government steps in to manage a market that should be free:

A decade or so ago, Minneapolis (population 300,000-plus) allowed a grand total of 343 taxis to operate until Luis Paucar, an immigrant, filed suit. The city council decided to allow another 45 cabs. Then the existing cab companies sued, using the creative legal theory that they had a constitutional right not to face competition. (They lost.)

Now it’s the District of Columbia’s turn. Four members of the D.C. City Council have introduced a bill that would create a medallion system for the nation’s capital. Medallion prices would start at $250 for the most established taxi companies and, for the newer entrants, run as high as $10,000. At least initially. As time wore on, it’s likely that the price of a medallion would go up for everyone. That’s what has happened in places such as New York, where a government permission slip to drive a cab costs about $600,000. In Boston, which initially capped medallions at 1,525 in the 1930s—and more than a half-century later had added only 250 more—a medallion will cost you $400,000.

The medallions are so valuable because they create artificial restrictions on competition, allowing their owners to rake in huge profits. The medallion owners aren’t the cab drivers, of course. Sometimes they aren’t even the cab companies any more: They’re investors who bought medallions so they could rent them out to the people who do all the actual work. And of course they lobby heavily to keep it that way, which is why cities that have medallion systems stay stuck that way for decades.

Read the whole thing.

Government and unions — the nutshell version

The United States Postal Service is billions and billions in the red, so much so that complete insolvency looms. Budget hawks have proposed deep cuts — but, says Businessweek, with Democrats receiving the bulk of the postal unions’ political contributions, such measures are unlikely under the current administration.

Not only won’t the 275,000-member National Association of Letter Carriers agree to cuts, the union believes the USPS should expand. Why? To fight — wait for it — terrorists.

[NALC president] Fredric V. Rolando doesn’t sound like he’s interested in making major concessions. He argues the agency should be increasing rather than cutting its services. One of his ideas is to outfit postal trucks with sensors so mail carriers can thwart possible biological terrorist attacks. “They can work with Homeland Security to detect things that are in the air,” Rolando says.

Apparently, neither sleet nor snow nor laughable, opportunistic hubris will stop the Postal Service’s insanity.

Branches of government

Does the government, at any level, care exactly how you trim your trees? You’d better believe it.

Every two to three years, Eddie Sales trims and prunes the crape myrtles at his church, Albemarle Road Presbyterian Church. But this year, the city of Charlotte, NC, cited the church for improperly pruning its trees. “We always keep our trees trimmed back because you don’t want to worry about them hanging down in the way,” said Sales, a church member. The church was fined $100 per branch cut for excessive pruning, bringing the violation to $4,000. “I just couldn’t believe it when I heard about it,” Sales said. “We trim our trees back every three years all over our property, and this is the first time we have been fined.”

Is there nothing Mr. Sales can do? Will the city offer him an olive branch, if you’ll pardon the punnery? Oh, sure it will. With Southern gentility, Mr. Sales and his church have been informed that there’s a simple alternative to paying up:

The fine will be dropped if the church replaces each of the improperly pruned trees, said Tom Johnson, senior urban forester for city of Charlotte Land Development Division.

Video: the war on photography

As a libertarian-leaning photographer, this brand new Reason production is close to my heart.

For an ongoing chronicle of police harassing and arresting photographers and videographers (usually with absolutely no legal justification and yet with zero consequences for the officers’ careers), see Carlos Miller’s important blog site, Photography is Not a Crime.

Belgium perishes due to lack of government

Just kidding.

I decided on a whim to check into Belgium’s health today, because it dawned on me that I hadn’t heard anything lately about how the country was going to hell in a hand basket without a government. The Belgians, you see, have had no functioning national leaders for many a moon now. To be precise, it’s been 347 days. Sure, the country has high debt, and that worries investors and speculators (just as they are spooked by Irish and Greek balance sheets), but that factor largely predates the record gridlock that has rendered Belgium’s politicians powerless — and harmless too.

How are Belgium’s citizens coping? No worries. According to a recent Time article, life is pretty much exactly the same. Trash gets picked up as before. Firefighters extinguish blazes as before. Scofflaws are arrested and tried as before. Teachers get paid to educate students as before. That’s because all those tasks are in the hands of provinces and municipalities that require no urgent input from the parliament in Brussels.

Lots of people seem to be kind of enjoying the dearth of national leadership — and poking fun at the whole thing.

Belgians have already held events across the country to mark the occasion. In Leuven, in Dutch-speaking Flanders, locals handed out free French fries, while in Louvain-la-Neuve, in French-speaking Wallonia, free beer was on offer. (…) “By and large, everything still works. We get paid, buses run, schools are open,” says Marc De Vos, a professor at Ghent University and the general director of Itinera, a Brussels-based policy institute. “We can free ride for a while yet.”

After noting these facts, however, Time (a bit reflexively perhaps) takes a dim view of Belgium’s lack of government.

Most Belgians shrug at the deadlock, not caring much so long as they can still have a beer with their friends after work. And this means that even after Belgium’s politicians finally agree on a coalition, it may be too late to engage the people, says Marco Martiniello, a politics lecturer at the University of Liège. “The delays will distance people from politics,” he says. “This will have a negative impact on democracy and reinforce the gap between government and citizens. I already see a growing sense of apathy amongst my students.”

Yes, just imagine the crisis of confidence if people begin to understand — nay, experience — that a comparatively huge national (federal) government is not at all necessary for their continued wellbeing. Imagine the horror of Belgians not being sufficiently enthusiastic about their high-taxing, scandal–ridden representatives in Brussels.

I love the Belgian people, their excellent beer and food, their beautiful countryside, their easy-going attitude. Allez, mes amis, and goed zo, vrienden: I wish you many more years of gridlocked, shackled, impotent national governments.

How the American people are like a 10-dollar whore

My wife and daughters are flying today and we know what happens to them in the name of safety.

And now I have a related question to ask of you.

Should the government spend up to 600 million dollars to protect one person from terrorists?

Maybe the President, you say, right?

Yeah well, I’m not talking about the President. I’m talking about you. And me. And my wife and kids. And about the guy who bags my groceries. And about the nurse who lives across the street from you. And about every college professor, truck driver, cop, entrepreneur, journalist, hobo, and blogger.

Go to WalMart, or visit a cineplex. Look around you. Pick any one person. Then let it truly sink in. His or her safekeeping from Islamist jihadis costs somewhere between 64 million and 600 million dollars.

Actually, that’s only the Department of Homeland Security’s part of the pie, and that money goes mostly to the so-called safety of air travelers (you’re welcome, TSA). Add in anti-terrorism efforts by our armed forces and by the whole spectrum of government acronyms — the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the ATF, the Secret Service (I thought it best not to abbreviate the latter) — and the numbers are … incomprehensible on every level. It wouldn’t surprise me if the dollar amount per “life saved” turns out to be one to two billion dollars.

That’s not a national-security plan. That’s an economic suicide mission.

Here’s the story in a nutshell.

For most government agencies, cost-benefit analysis is key in justifying taxpayer expenditures for certain federal regulations. If the cost of a regulation far outweighs the benefit citizens receive from it, then funds are generally funnelled toward solving other problems. Except, two researchers discovered, when it comes to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Mark G. Stewart, a professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and John Mueller of Ohio State University, found that since the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) inception in 2001, a real cost-benefit analysis hasn’t been conducted to evaluate the DHS’s or the TSA’s expenditures, despite strong recommendations for one in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report. What Stewart and Mueller found is staggering: they estimate that the DHS, of which the TSA is a part, spends between $64 million and $600 million to save just one life from domestic terrorism — 60 times the $1 million to $10 million per-life goal set by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The chance of being hit by lighting is one in 500,000. The chance of dying in a domestic terrorist attack is one in 25 million. It’s basically more likely that you’ll be ass-raped by a nonagenarian circus clown on Main Street between the hours of 2 and 2:17 p.m. next Monday, than that you’ll die in a terrorist bloodbath. So what’s with the irrational overspending?

Look, I trust that Osama Bin Laden’s death was horrible and bloody and painful (albeit not nearly drawn-out enough), and I hope that I will never eat a fish or a crustacean that contains even one molecule of that vile, mass-murdering thug — my stomach might not be able to take it.

But the maddening truth is, yes, he won. He turned my America — our America, surely — into a nation of mewling pussies who insist that Big Brother must keep us all safe no matter what the cost to our liberties and to our wallets. I’d call that an unqualified victory. Bin Laden and his nineteen 9/11 henchmen even got the U.S. government to be their eager abettor. With one day of pandemonium, ten years ago, he and his ragtag band of sub-human scum burrowed so deep into the American psyche that we screeched for protection like frightened little girls, and collectively gave up our virtue like a ten-dollar whore.

And speaking of whores: The Patriot Act is probably hours from being renewed, its broad political support on Capitol Hill an odd but entirely predictable reversal from ten years ago; this time, a few lone Republicans, including Rand Paul, are sounding the alarm, while Democrats can’t push through the assorted nastiness fast or far enough. So there’s that.

Hell, there even appears to be a shadow Patriot Act (a stealthy reimagining of the original one) that We The People are not supposed to know about. Wired has the story. So there’s that, too.

Maybe I’m just in a sad, sour mood. When I step into the suddenly-balmy Maine spring air, and take in the fragrance of the apple tree blossoming in my yard combined with the salty aroma that surrounds my old seaside farmhouse, I feel appreciative of all that I have, material and immaterial. I really do. But I also feel deflated, mournful. The sad truth is, I’ve just about given up on the America of Jefferson, the America of law and liberty, the America of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It was lovely while it lasted.

And by the way, I don’t think I’m abandoning it as much as it is abandoning me.

If America was once that shining city on the hill, a beacon for those who aspire to freedom, I can only perceive, powerlessly, that its light grows dimmer with each passing week. Ten years ago, America was brought to its knees by ululating medieval moralists with boxcutters, and by the Senators and Congressmen — talk about dim bulbs! — who subsequently played straight into their hand. So I look at the wounded, anemic creature — so much smaller in stature than I thought I remembered it — and an eighties’ TV commercial for LifeCall plays through my mind:

It’s fallen and it can’t get up.

There it lies, still-blustering but badly broken. And soon broke, if it continues to stave off the terrorist boogeymen to the tune of a billion or more dollars per U.S. life saved.

If only there was LifeCall for moribund superpowers.

Check out Radley Balko’s new digs

Radley Balko, whom I think I can safely say is admired by everyone at Nobody’s Business, is now posting at his new digs at HuffPo. His first post is the infuriating story of how the the Pima County, Arizona SWAT team that shot a U.S. Marine named Jose Guerena during a drug raid that didn’t find any drugs and then left him to die for an hour before the paramedics were allowed to see him.

It’s a pretty ugly story, and Radley really takes apart the BS and CYA coming out of the Sheriff’s Department.

It’s also a good first story for Radley at HuffPo, since I’ve heard that some of the readers there were worried about a “right-wing” guy like Radley getting a column. I don’t think too many people on the left are in favor of random police shootings.

Explaining things, Part 3 – Compassion

A couple of weeks ago over at the Agitator, guest blogger Peter Moskos asked libertarians to explain a few things to him. The Agitatortots answered him in the comments, but I thought answering him here would make for a good intro to libertarianism. First I addressed the way he framed his question, explaining why calling libertarianism an ideology isn’t helpful and why less government is so often the solution. Today I’m finally going to address his actual specific question:

Here’s my real question: What is the libertarian answer to society’s f*ck ups? What about people who — through their own ineptitude, stupidity, laziness, or drug abuse — simply fail? What do we do about the undeserving poor?

Probably the best place to start is that most free-market libertarians believe that people will respond to incentives. In particular, when you protect people from the natural consequences of bad behavior, you encourage more bad behavior. Of the behaviors that Moskos lists, two of them — laziness and drug abuse — are clearly voluntary behaviors, so it’s a pretty good bet that people will stop them if given enough incentive to do so. (Ineptitude is also voluntary, in that it can be cured through education and practice. Stupidity may be another matter entirely)

The key insight is that people who live on social welfare programs instead of getting jobs aren’t doing it because they are lazy or irresponsible. They’re doing it because they are smart enough to get what they want. They’ve figured out a way to achieve an acceptable lifestyle without having to work for it.

In economic terms, on the margin, they prefer more leisure time over greater income. And the social programs we’ve put in place around them are essentially a subsidy for leisure time. Take away that subsidy, and they’ll have to find jobs.

I don’t want to see people starve in the streets. I certainly don’t want desperate people to mug me. At some point, in a rich and civilized society, don’t we just have to be compassionate… even to people who don’t “deserve” it? Isn’t that what government is for? Isn’t it cheaper than prison?

Well, the short answer to the poor-people-starving-in-the-streets issues is that we don’t have to be that libertarian. We can choose a more gradual path to smaller government that will be less likely to harm the vulnerable in society.

However, if we were cold-hearted enough to let the undeserving poor starve, it would be a hell of an incentive for them to get off their asses. I’m not suggesting we do that, but the point is that if we did do that, the problems of poverty would immediately become a lot more severe, but fear of those problems would quickly make poverty a lot less widespread. When we take away the safety nets people will become more responsible for their own safety. So perhaps a little less safety could lead to a bit more responsibility.

Also, in the absence of government compassion, we can encourage private compassion. As Moskos points out, we are a rich and civilized people. Private charity has always been part of our makeup. Since government taxation is a drag on our economy, it reduces the amount of wealth available for all uses, including for altruistic purposes. If we can reduce that drag by cutting public social programs, it will increase our aggregate wealth, which will make private charity easier.

However, if we really want to sneak compassion into libertarianism, the traditional approach is via Rawls and his veil of ignorance. It goes like this: Imagine that you could be pulled out of your current life in such a way that you know everything you currently know now about human society, but you are ignorant of your own place in it. You could be rich, you could be poor, or you could be somewhere in the middle. You have no idea.

Now, hidden behind this veil of ignorance, what social policies would you devise to care for poor people at the expense of wealthier people, given that you could be either one when the veil is lifted?

Chances are, you would want to buy yourself some insurance. That is, you would be willing to give up a small amount of your wealth should you turn out reasonably wealthy, in exchange for a financial safety net if you turn out to be among the desperately poor. You would want to live in a society that pays a small wealth premium in order to protect those who suffer a calamity.

There is no veil of ignorance, of course. We all know where we stand. Which means that the free market cannot make such social insurance available to us, even though we would almost certainly buy some if we could. But why should we let that stop us? We can achieve the same outcome by agreeing to tax wealthier people to protect the less wealthy against misfortune.

Economists are sure we’d want such insurance because they know we buy lots of other kinds of insurance. Why would we accept the behind-the-veil risk of lifetime impoverishment when we’re unwilling to accept more than a few hundred dollars in damage when a tornado hits our house? Figuring out exactly how much insurance we’d want is a lot harder, however, and it depends on estimates of how much more poverty we’d get by making it less painful. (Somewhere, econometricians are working on this problem.)

Finally, in keeping with the spirit of gradualism, there are a lot of existing social programs that are so poorly designed or implemented that we could find a way to make them both smaller and better at the same time, usually by applying free market principles.

In fact, just the wide variety of programs to help the poor is a cause for libertarian suspicion. For example, poor people can get food stamps under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which cost about $35 billion in 2008. But then there’s the National School Lunch Program, which cost about $9.8 billion. Do we really need separate programs to feed families at home and children at school?

The obvious libertarian-leaning solution is to combine all of these programs into a single aid-to-the-poor program which gives poor families some extra cash. Let them figure out how best to spend it.

Linkavaganza

• If you’d like to qualify for a low-rate loan, it helps to be a celebrity, a lawmaker, or a judge:

The three major agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, keep a V.I.P. list of sorts, according to consumer lawyers and legal documents, consisting of celebrities, politicians, judges and other influential people.

V.I.P.-listers who detect errors on their credit reports are said to get special and immediate help fixing the problems, unlike us plebeians who must sometimes struggle for years to get mistakes corrected.

• After a two-year investigation failed to yield useful evidence, U.S. prosecutors drop charges against Florida headshops, avoiding another fiasco à la the widely ridiculed Operation Pipe Dreams.

• Florida cop Kevin Kilpatrick was fired twice, but won his job back on appeal. He hasn’t worked in seven years but got paid the entire time (currently $80K a year), and he got raises too. Now he’s returning to a desk job (for which he’ll receive more taxpayer-funded education), but only for two years and nine months, after which he’ll retire with a really nice police pension.

• FBI uses magnetic GPS devices to track activists and others who are deemed troublemakers.

It’s going to take years before we have a Supreme Court ruling on this. Meanwhile, the unchecked abuse of the Fourth Amendment continues.

• The TSA frisks a baby. Next up (probably): Baby-frisking in utero, a logical extension of the agency’s enthusiasm for finger-banging attractive young women.

• In an effort to combat the TSA’s vile patdowns — lawlessness masquerading as security — the Texas House of Representatives unanimously passed 138-0 H.B. 1937, which would ban “intrusive touching of persons seeking access to public buildings and transportation.” It’s a start.

• You won’t believe which new demographic Big Tobacco is trying to hook now. And sadly, it’s working.

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