Moral Outrage

I was alive, though young, during the so-called Vietnam Era. The ranks of the Left were swelled by the aging Baby Boomers at this time as that enormous mass of population reached voting age. Like most young people, they looked for a way to find their adult identity by taking views opposite from their parents. Since their parents had come of age during WWII (when Nazism was defeated through overseas intervention) and the opening years of the Cold War (when the spread of communism was halted through armed conflict in Korea), the BB’s were almost compelled to embrace many lefty causes and parties. And the more radical and outrageous the better since it would provide a greater cry of outrage from shocked parents. (Sort of like the role that piercings and tattoos fill today.)

The stance that many of these kids took was simple enough to be easily understood, yet nuanced enough to lend the lie that they were deep thinkers. Foreign intervention was bad, particularly in the 3rd World countries being used by the superpowers as proxy battlegrounds. Communism was good, and any reports of massacres and mass graves were dismissed as right-wing propaganda while the tales of the excesses of anti-communist dictators were repeated ad nauseum in coffee houses and campus dorm rooms.

This would pretty much have resulted in nothing more than a few elections where the Democrat candidates had an advantage, if it wasn’t for the Vietnam War. Here was a case of a bungled proxy war on foreign soil, mishandled and mismanaged from the first, providing ample grist for the Left’s media machine. Many of these young BB’s had their first taste of adult responsibility when they marched in mass protests and risked arrest. These were heady times for young people.

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Educated Fools

Glenn Reynolds links to this Reason Online discussion in which journalists and mainly-libertarian intellectual types discuss whom they’re voting for and why.

Some of these people, including Reynolds himself, seem mature and reasonable. But quite a few of the others come across as frivolous, apathetic, foolish or all of the above. Michael Shermer thinks it’s important that Kerry is a bicyclist. Richard Epstein doesn’t remember for whom he voted in 2000, thinks the major parties are essentially identical and won’t vote for either of them in 2004. And the guy from The Independent Institute doesn’t want to soil his hands by voting. (Somehow his attitude doesn’t surprise me — see here and here for some background on an exchange I had with another guy from The Independent Institute.)

So, with some notable exceptions, these extremely bright people, many of whom spend a lot of time giving the rest of us advice on how to make decisions about public affairs, are a bunch of idiots in their personal voting behavior. Yeah, I know: most individuals’ votes are not decisive, voters are rationally ignorant, the major parties are effectively a cartel, etc. These objections are narrowly true but miss the big picture. Voting should be treated as a civic sacrament, because on the margin our system can live or die depending on how carefully the voters vote, and they are more likely to take voting seriously if intellectuals don’t denigrate it as an activity. This is especially true now, when the main issue of the day is of overwhelming importance and the major-party candidates have profoundly different approaches to that issue.

One shouldn’t over-intellectualize this stuff, but I think it’s valuable to look at what people think is important enough to spend their own time on. If ordinary people in places like Afghanistan appreciate how important elections are, both symbolically and practically, even when none of the candidates is perfect, why do so many smart people here miss the point?

Maybe we should skip elections altogether, and appoint leaders randomly (with strictly limited terms, of course) from the telephone book. That might work better than decisionmaking by what Thomas Sowell called “articulated rationality” — the main decisionmaking method used by the people interviewed in the Reason forum. Certainly they sound impressive, but do they make better decisions than does the typical voter? Experience, and now disclosure, suggest not.

More on Manipulated Markets

In a previous post I speculated about politically driven manipulation of online political futures markets. As I noted then, other bloggers also thought something was amiss.

Today’s Intrade press release acknowledges attempts at manipulation:

A wave of heavy selling hit the George Bush re-election contract on
Intrade Friday driving the market down to all time lows before recovering.

“Our exchange operations staff continuously monitors our markets and
reported that a very large sell order hit the Bush Presidential contract at
approximately 1:30 pm EST on Friday October 15th”, said Chief Executive
Officer John Delaney.

“The sell order caused the market to trade at new lows before
recovering to earlier levels. The exchange has more than 40,000 members,
after assessing there was no news to cause the decline, traders quickly
started buying and within 3 minutes the market fully recovered to price
levels seen prior to the sell order being executed” says Delaney.

Some question if the market can be manipulated with such heavy selling
or buying.

“All emerging markets will experience volatility, we are gratified
that the market recovered so quickly and without any intervention on our
part. This demonstrates the market’s resiliency, that the Intrade exchange
is the destination for serious traders in political contracts and that the
utility of the market as a price discovery mechanism is firmly intact” says
Delaney.

Post-debate sell off hits Bush contract

The Intrade Bush contract has become the battle ground of wills between
a cadre of large, well financed rogue traders seemingly bent on driving down
the Bush re-election contract and a growing list of financial traders who
think they can predict the outcome of this election.

Some question if George Soros is behind these market moves.

[. . .]

And Don Luskin further develops his argument.

I have an increasingly strong feeling that Bush will win overwhelmingly.

(Related posts: Here, Here and Here)

Shifting the Blame

I submit another reason to vote against our friends on the left, including their current presidential candidate John Kerry.

Those guys have a long-standing habit of shifting the blame for their own mistakes, failures, and disasters onto their victims and innocent bystanders. This behavior has been going on for more than 70 years.

(Sure, there are claims that Bush is shifting the blame for his own failures in Iraq to… someone else. But I’m not about to fault him for refusing to accept the blame for the actions of our enemies, especially when he told us forthrightly, repeatedly, from the very beginning that we would need much more time to destroy them than we have spent so far.)

A couple of recent examples should suffice.

Some time ago Congress passed a law providing free health care for some of our population. Some of the beneficiaries were damaging their own health and driving up the cost to be covered by the government by smoking cigarettes. Congress made no provision limiting the liability of the government in cases where the recipients of medical aid damaged their own health in this way.

According to the Clinton Administration, this was all somehow the fault of the tobacco companies – they were alleged to be responsible for costs incurred by a program passed by Congress with no input whatsoever from the tobacco companies. The administration proceeded to extort large sums of money, ostensibly to repay this cost, and the states ended up following suit.

More recently, Wal-Mart stands accused of transferring costs onto the government – because of welfare payments made to some of their lower-paid employees according to laws passed by Congress, again without input from Wal-Mart. Apparently, if you hire people that make less than the welfare threshold, it somehow becomes your fault that the government is giving them welfare payments, and never mind that they’d be getting even more welfare payments if you didn’t hire them. Extensive punitive action has not yet occured, but if this “logic” doesn’t soon get the ridicule it deserves, it’s only a matter of time.

This kind of outrageous dishonesty should not be rewarded at the ballot box.

Bashing Kerry

One of the things that has always frustrated me is the way that some individuals will place the blame for a traumatic event on someone who really has no responsibility for said event.

Case in point is this post from today’s Strategypage.com. (Post from October 18, 2004.) It would seem that Haiti’s current civil war is heating up, with more violence breaking out between the government and supporters of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But the real news is who the UN thinks is to blame.

The commander of the UN peacekeepers blames U.S. senator John Kerry for much of violence, because earlier this year Kerry said that if he were president he would have sent American troops to protect Aristide. This, the UN commander believes, encouraged Aristide’s followers to start fighting.

I really don’t agree with this at all. I doubt many people involved with the street fighting in Haiti have a great deal of interest in what a candidate for the US Presidency has to say in a speech in Iowa. The UN commander is probably just trying to lay the groundwork when someone inevitably blames him for not doing something. (Not that any UN commander in recent history has been able to do any real peacekeeping without the Anglosphere doing the heavy lifting.)

In related news, CNN reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has urged US voters to mark their ballots for President Bush this election.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says terrorist attacks in Iraq are aimed at preventing the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush and that a Bush defeat “could lead to the spread of terrorism to other parts of the world.”

While I don’t agree with the comments from the UN, I have to admit that the Russian President makes a great deal of sense.

(Now I’m agreeing with the Russians! How the world has changed in a few short years.)