Moore's Coda...

...is an excerpt from George Orwell's 1984, describing the division of the world into three totalitarian superstates, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, who remain in a constant state of war with one other, in order to maintain perpetual and total control over their populations, to the point of controlling historical memory. If this analogy is supposed to be apposite of anything, then Moore is suggesting that the USA, Iraq, and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent, and also the USA is already a totalitarianism or on its way to becoming one. These ideas belie themselves, so I won't comment on them any further.

I will say, however, that this use of Orwell is preposterous. That portion of 1984 is specifically not Orwell's own voice; it is first presented as the work of the dissident leader Emmanuel Goldstein (a stand-in for Trotsky), and later turns out to be a forgery composed by Oceania's Inner Party. At the end of the book, it's anyone's guess whether the world is as it's presented in those pages; in any case, The Book is a crude Trotskyist tract, containing none of the nuance that Orwell required in his own political writing. If Moore had read a bit more, he might have noticed that Orwell's main opponents were Western leftists who before WWII favored neutrality with fascism (as if such a thing were possible) and later contorted themselves to excuse the atrocities of Soviet communism. Notice that Orwell despised pacifism, because he suspected that outside certain small religious communities, it harbored a desire for the defeat of Western liberalism. If by chance Moore is aware of this, then his conscription of Orwell is a transparently cynical abuse of the man's legacy.

Celsius 9/11

Well, I saw Michael Moore's new film on Saturday. A few observations:

1) This is not a tightly woven movie. It alternates between old-style Moore (a la Roger & Me) stunts, like reading the Patriot Act on a Mr. Softee truck outside Congress, extended lunatic montages where Moore spews both far left and far right conspiracy theories, Riefenstahl-style cinematographic propaganda, and, to be fair, some powerful photo- and video- documentary moments. The panel at Cannes said this movie won the top prize purely on its cinematic merits. I say bullshit.

2) Michael Moore's voice becomes even more grating on one's ears when he's barely suppressing a sneer or a chuckle in the background.

3) It would have been a much, much better movie without narration. Maybe even a good movie. After a (cinematically) promising start, there's a 20-30 minute lull where Moore narrates a complicated web of hypotheses linking the Bush family and the U.S. government with the royal house of al-Saud and the bin Ladens. If you didn't recognize the voice and only saw that part of the movie, you would think it was the work of some demented kook who also thinks the CIA/aliens have installed mind control devices in the crowns of his teeth. The only thing like this I've ever seen in a professionally produced film is the scene in Dr. Strangelove where General Ripper tells Captain Mandrake that fluoridation of water is an insidious plot by the International Communist Conspiracy to corrupt our "precious bodily fluids."

4) Moore has a strange fascination with the facial tics of his enemies. There are frequent close-ups of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, and especially Bush jerking their heads off-camera or otherwise manipulating their features. In one scene, Moore catches Bush naughtily rolling his pupils to the corners of his eyes for a few seconds, and the effect is to make Bush look like a comic book villain. This sort of propaganda stinks to high heaven. It is an absolutely substance-less attack on Bush, an attempt to portray his apppearance as vaguely but perceptibly sinister. No one could rationally alter their opinion of Bush one way or another after seeing that. But the point is to make impressionable people get an intuitive whiff of sulfur and brimstone when they see Bush's visage. Very cheap stuff; refer to my comments about the Cannes judges above.

4a) The most gruesome of these moments is when he catches Paul Wolfowitz slobbering on a comb and then using it to part his hair. Okay, that is really unhygenic and nauseating. But what on earth does it have to do with criticism of Mr. Wolfowitz's job? Wolfowitz then stands there facing a camera, Moore slows down the speed of the film and closes in on Wolfowitz's face bearing a rather cruel looking grin, and as he flashes yellowed teeth all I could think about was how closely Moore was flirting with anti-Semitic iconography---he needed drawn-on horns. Moore closes the film with an excerpt from 1984 (more on that below); but the joke's on Moore---he has recreated graphically the two-minute hates of Emmanuel Goldstein.

5) Moore ends one of the conspiracy theory sequences by declaring that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had never threatened the USA, never killed an American, and never even attempted to kill an American citizen. Rr-ee-aa-ll-yy? We do know for a fact that Hussein tried to have George H.W. Bush assassinated. We also know that he was involved in the 1993 WTC bombing. We know that he had funded suicide terrorism in Israel and Palestine, which claimed American as well as Israeli (and Palestinian! lives). During the first Gulf War, he took American civilians hostage---not exactly a non-threatening gesture; and during that same war he launched scud missiles at Israel, endangering Israelis, Americans, and, it bears repeating, Palestinians. What sort of person wouldn't be keen to this sort of bullshit?

5a) And in another disgraceful sequence, he portrays Iraqi life before the war as a kind of Arabian Carnivale. Children are laughing and playing, grown-ups flash broad smiles, people are happy, there is general prosperity and leisure. . . and then the bombs start dropping and all of a sudden the entire Iraqi population is immolated. It's as if everyone had an uncle killed and an aunt maimed. If Moore were to document the atrocities of the Saddam Hussein regime, e.g. the gassing of Kurds at Halabja (a Hitler moment), the deliberate immiseration/starvation of the Marsh Arabs (a Stalin moment), the gulag prison system (a Hitler/Stalin institution), this would be a very different film indeed. One thing Michael Moore is definitely unconcerned with is truth.

6) But the film does have some better moments. Early on, he displays the famous photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. Not faked. Lots of people knew about it (or should have), and I was one of them, but this was the first time I'd actually seen the photo and it still had both a ghastly and a shocking effect. There is one superb gotcha moment where Moore is filming outside the Saudi Arabian embassy, and is approached and questioned by a Secret Service unit. To whom he asks, "Why is the Secret Service guarding a foreign embassy?" I'd like to know the answer to that one myself. Similarly, underneath the voice-over of the Saudi conspiracy segment, Moore shows Bush I and Bush II both being awfully chummy with that fat evil lizard, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, whom they have apparently nicknamed "Bandar Bush." Simply inexcusable. But once again, if Moore could have shut his mouth, it would have been more powerful.

7) He also does a good job portraying the casualties of war on both sides; those are images I think all publicly-minded citizens should see. But the effect of it is a lot more ambiguous than Moore intends. One could find similar images of German and Japanese civilians from WWII; does that mean we were wrong to go to war? The movie also follows around a mother who convinced several of her children to join the army, and watches her gradually break down following her son's death in a helicopter crash. Definitely worthy material for a documentary. But more ambiguous than Moore intends, and totally incongruous with the baby-killer montage earlier in the film.

8) There's a bit I'm leaving out, but this should get the point across. It's worth seeing for your own edification. If you sat through The Passion of the Christ either A) You liked it and I hate you. or B) Well-stomached, now watch this.

9) I'd be surprised if it affected the outcome of the election, which is Moore's avowed purpose.

Curiouser and Curiouser

We can't make this stuff up. Disturbing search keywords people have used to find this blog in the last month, grouped by category:

Vast:
Ghania companies contact e mails
gay marriage cake ornament
Craig the dog fased boy
foetus eating korea
Darwin car ornament
inexpensive kate spade bags
bill mahr animals university
french academy six presidents
punnishment for underage drinking in Texas
darwin turtle

Right:
libertarian dont get votes
anti right-winged
dick cheney iq
Yale Al Qaeda
the right-winged agenda
german right winged information
Security policies are boring and ineffective
Yale GESO rigged
yearbook picture Ann Coulter
free novels of world war II via free post mail

Winged:
catholic winged body
what is a right winged liberal
i didn t have six friends in high school i don t have six friends now
operation fortitude decoys
women 40s ears pierced
Tenet cia irresponsibility
destiny child The Writing on the walls
usa liquor retailers
mr. barnes raping babies

The right wing agenda is still looking for that yearbook picture of Ann Coulter. We're still sorry you don't have six friends, mister, but we hear Craig-the-dog-faced-boy is looking ...

And shame on you, Mr. Barnes.

Selective Processing

I missed this from a few weeks ago, but thought it was interesting in light of the continuing misconceptions about the role of pragmatism, compromise, and ancient history in politics. To wit:

"Ideology, properly understood, is a checklist of priorities and principles. And conservative ideology explicitly accepts that compromise is part of life, since this world can never be made as perfect as the next. Reagan left this world better than he found it because he never stopped being an ideologue when it mattered."

1) Properly defined, there is no place for pragmatism in politics. The fact that so many politicians today (hello, Connecticut) are opportunistic vote-mongers is a disgrace to the profession. Witness the decline: Reagan was no pragmatist. He switched from head of a labor union to the last warrior against communism based on a legitimate philosophical transformation, one that informed his stances on every issue and fundamentally altered his worldview. Bush, on the other hand, can be called a pragmatist with perfect reason. His concessions to buy out Democrats to support the war sell small-government advocating conservatives short (creating the Department of Homeland Security, pandering to steel workers with protective tariffs, issuing prescription-drug benefits, neglecting Social Security reform, the list continues).

We forget that Reagan, too, fought a war, which normally sucks legislative budgets dry--an international war, at that--without even the advantage of a majority-led Congress that Bush enjoys. Yet Reagan managed to cut the budgets of 8 of 15 government departments while in office, while Bush has cut no budgets and tossed an extra Cabinet Department in for good measure. His political wimpiness is deplorable.

2) That said, there is a difference between pragmatism and compromise. The political scene does not need any more pragmatists, but there is little place in politics for an extremist with such unwieldy ideologies that he cannot find room for compromise. Pragmatism is the hobgoblin of weak convictions, while compromise is a fervor for the realization of one's goals strong enough to merit patience and the careful, gradual laying of a lasting foundation instead of unstable, radical change.

3) Despite how often it is cited in accusations against pragmatic issue-wafflers, history is often irrelevant when compensated by what one gains in maturity. Neither Clinton's pot smoking nor Bush's low grades at Yale said much about their ability to be good Presidents. If anything, these character flaws may have worked in their favor--people tend to identify more with a slightly flawed yet effective leader than one who is inaccessibly perfect. But I emphasized "ancient" history for a reason. Certainly, as Rich Lowry proves, we cannot ignore a consistent history of failure.

But Bush is no Clinton. As much as liberals would like to pin onto Bush a track record of cheating and lying to the American public, his record is really more a series of ups and downs. The man has fought terrorism and is winning. His strong stances on social conservatism are music to the ears of those who respect tradition and the institutions that secure happiness. Let's not be too quick to judge. Sadly, in this day and age, the punctuated equilibrium of his pragmatic "compassionate conservatism" is all we have. That is no reason to throw our weight behind the abortion-supporting, Communion-seeking, divorced Catholic who constitutes our other option. Kerry's energy policy threatens jobs. His relation to "the common man" as a former buddy of JFK and a rich Yale graduate are just about as credible as unicorns.

Politics may never be perfect. Until it is, don't sell yourself short by buying into the slanted media to vote down the most maligned candidate. More likely than not, the other one is just as bad. Until we find a way to make Americans value ideological consistency again, we can only hope to choose the lesser of two evils.

Currently accepting ideas on the consistency-valuing thing. Check out the latest print issue for our Feature writers' takes on it.

Oh, Slate, how could you? (Warning: Read at work at your own risk.)

Hide and Seek

Jonah Goldberg sounds off on Clinton's virtuosity (or was it hubris?) at compartmentalization.

Those who argue that personal morality and political skill have nothing to do with one another should also concede that there is no such thing as a consistent personality, nor any sort of tangible shared quality in human nature. But that is patently false. He who litters in the park will probably also litter in the office, so long as no one is looking in both places. There is a very fine line between the public and private realms, and no one should take this fundamental truth more seriously than the Leader of the Free World. To take on this office and expect the nation to shut its eyes and ears to his life requires the highest insolence imaginable. As the old proverb goes, you can never tell more about a man than by studying him when no one is watching.

Who knows? Maybe Bubba thought he would not get caught. Maybe he tried a little harder to conceal his cheating on the state than he did to hide his cheating on his wife. Either way, he failed at both. Scum is scum and the truth will always out.

Instead of blaming an expansive conspiracy for nosing into his business, Americans should thank their lucky stars we found out the truth about the President when we did, and that our Constitution provides us the ability to kick a trashbag like him out of office.

For those interested, I am taking bets on what pitymongering stunt is next on Clinton's radar. Remember those patches we sewed to our backpacks with the three monkeys on them that said, "See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil..."? Smells like time for a revival.

Don't worry, Billy. If you pretend not to notice it, it didn't really happen. That's how the game of politics works, isn't it?

Right of Way

Gene hits the nail on the head. Extending FDR's legal philosophy to its rightful (pun intended) conclusion leads to life-hatred, a conclusion that welfare-state policy in his wake has reinforced again and again. But this really begs a more thorny question--one both sides have yet to address sufficiently--of whether rights talk has any meaning in the first place.

Historically, the idea of every man being born with inalienable rights is relatively recent. Gene points out that our Constitution, their foremost guarantor, could not exist if man's inalienable rights did not predate it. If rights did not exist prior to the state, it would not make sense to design a state whose citizens reserve the prerogative to revolt any time their rights are not being protected. But it is interesting that pre-Enlightenment thinkers, though they lacked rights rhetoric, sought many of the same values--the pursuit of happiness in particular--as those the Constitution seeks to uphold. Man has always striven to discover how to lead the Good Life, and, the occasional anarchist aside, has looked to the state to help him do so. Though democracy certainly has its share of imperfections, most people would agree that once rights talk was introduced, the search for the Good Life met with greater success than ever before. Every capitalism aficionado has seen graph after countless graph showing that the increases in individual liberty unique to representative democracy consistently improve quality of life: life expectancy goes up, medical care improves, and access to luxuries increases in direct correlation with expansions of freedom in society.

What is so special, then, about the seemingly-arbitrary three rights that the Framers chose to protect? Locke said all men are entitled to "life, liberty, and property," and Madison echoed him in the Constitution. This was partially inconsistent with the Declaration of Independence, however, in which Jefferson had used "property" instead of "the pursuit of happpiness." These choices seem haphazard.

One illustrative example of the confusion that rights-talk causes is that the government reserves the right to resolve property rights when ownership is ambiguous. Ronald Coase [scroll to "A Comparative Example"] pointed out that if a laundromat and a factory operate on the same street and the factory's pollution causes the laundromat to lose $1000 of sales every year, the laundromat can appeal to the government and ask the state legitimately to repeal the factory's right to operate on that street, thus depriving it of its property because of the other party's complaint. Moreover, Coase stated that it did not really matter in whose favor the state resolves the dispute between the laundromat and the factory, because the individual property owners would resolve the dispute via voluntary exchange of rights to operate. If they are thus transferable, property rights are not actually inalienable, and even if they are, we treat them inconsistently.

Do we just shrug our shoulders at this point and sigh that human relations are complex and our justice system is imperfect? Or can we find resolution by sorting through the jungle of rights speak that plagues post-Enlightenment politics?

No one can blame politicians for failing to try. Conservatives argue that the right to life extends to protect private gun ownership, national defense, and the illegitimacy of aborting the lives of unborn children. Liberals stretch the rubber band of rights-talk even further, throwing into their political grab-bag every American's right to adequate healthcare, a college education, gourmet cuisine, middle-class wages, and a whole host of other pragmatic goodies. Where do we draw the line, and upon what principle?

It seems logical to turn to our founding documents for the answers, but they, too, provide no comfort. Why is there no agreement between the Constitution and Declaration of Independence on the right to property? One answer is that the Declaration is not a legally-binding document. Again, this begs the question. If rights predate the state and have their origin in our very humanity, why is it that we still cannot agree on what they are?

I contend that either we turn to God as ultimate guarantor of these rights (but why does He guarantee *these* rights in particular?) or we must abandon rights theory altogether and seek something more fundamental.

Property Haiku

Prof. Cass Sunstein of U-Chicago Law has been guest-blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy and makes an interesting exegesis (and apparent defense) of Oliver Wendell Holmes and FDR in his first swing. While I have no formal training in law and Constitutional Theory, I have a number of objections to make to FDR's and by extension, Sunstein's argument:

What Holmes is saying here is that even though property is exchangeable, it doesn't arise from value; it's a creation of law. And that's simply a matter of fact. With these sixteen words, Holmes captured much of the legal realist critique of laissez-faire -- and a key part of legal thinking between 1890 and 1930. A system of free markets isn't law-free; it depends on law. Property rights, as we enjoy and live them, are a creation of law; they don't predate law.

I agree with this analysis. But, can this not be said of any of the other rights we hold as pretty much absolute? Did people have the right to life before there was any law? I would hold that the answer is no unless one is to believe in natural rights. But if one is to argue this, one would also have to accept the claim of the laissez-faire crowd that the same Being who granted us the right to life also granted us the right to keep and hold possession of the fruits of our labor and fate -- or what we now call the right to property.

Before law, in the same way that man had no restraints to not steal from his fellow man, there was no restraint from not killing or not enslaving. In a lawless world when one tribe or group attacked another, they not only stole from, but also killed memebers of the other tribe (or enslaved them). So, basing rights on the lack of restraint other than under a legal system gets one nowhere fast and debases the right to life.

So the argument boils down to either believing in natural rights granted to us by God or not believing in natural rights. In the first case, we have the right to life. But we can then also claim a pre-legal right to property with pretty good justification from various moral and religious contexts (see for example the commandment against covetting another's wife). In the second case, any concept of right is given to us by law since pre-moral man had no compulsion to either not steal or not kill. So, singling out property rights as something that is prior to law is itself because one does not believe in laissez-faire, not the other way around as Sunstein claims.

I would like to hear more from Prof. Sunstein regarding FDR/Holmes' justification for an absolute right to life or right to not be enslaved. I think that I agree with much of their analysis on property, but disagree with what conclusions that means for law. It seems that no rights are based on anything but law. And so, without a state there can be no right to property or to life. So, just as arbitrarily as Holmes and FDR felt justified to trample on property rights, one can decide to trample on the right to life as well.

UPDATE: Prof. Sunstein writes in an email:

Thanks so much. Excellent points and questions! -- You're certainly right to say that the right to life requires a governmental presence too. The right not to be enslaved doesn't if slavery is defined as a legal status -- but if it's defined as including enslavement through purely private power, then we need law to prevent slavery. -- What the legal realists thought wasn't that government can alter whatever arrangements it has created; they firmly believed in private property and freedom of contract. But they thought that some alterations of these, and even abridgements (eg maximum hour laws), didn't offend prepolitical rights, and would be defensible if they promoted human freedom and well-being. -- Going beyond the realists to my own views: An absolute right to be free from slavery is justified on multiple different accounts (eg rooted in autonomy or utility); I'm not sure what a right to life is, but if it means a right not to be murdered, then that an absolute right to life is also justified on multiple different accounts. But the right to private property can't plausibly be understood as absolute. For example, almost everyone agrees that property owners don't have a right to hold rock concerts at 3 am on their property, or to build nuclear power plants. The precise nature of the limitations requires a lot of thought, and the realists aren't helpful there. They simply wanted to produce that thought, and to eliminate question-begging answers that spoke to the absoluteness of property rights. Hope that's a helpful start at least!

It is a helpful start. But it still puts us right back where we started in trying to divine what limitations on each right are acceptable. And those who do want to put limitations on property rights to the extent FDR did are already starting from the assumption that property rights can be trampled on quite extensively and then proceding from there, rather than the other way around. In other words, FDR did not ponder the nature of rights, conclude that the right to property is a special right only conferred by government (whereas life and liberty are not such rights), and then decide that it is fine to limit those rights extensively . He was hostile to property rights altogether.

Prof. Sunstein's response is the reason why I am not a rights-based libertarian, because without government there can be no rights. But for efficiency reasons, I would argue that a more libertarian system is preferable to a less libertarian one.

Revamping the Currency

Grover Norquist, who wants to replace Alexander Hamilton's face on the $10 bill with Ronald Reagan's, justifies removing the nascent republic's first Treasury Secretary and co-author of the Federalist Papers, on the grounds that he is "the only non-president on our currency."

A) As the Daily Show's Lewis Black put it, "Really? I'll bet you $100."

B) Norquist has it exactly wrong. We should have more non-presidents on currency, not fewer. There is simply no excuse for the JFK half-dollar. And William McKinley, genial though he might have been, doesn't deserve whatever super-high denomination he's been given. Who to commemorate first: Albert Einstein, a Jewish refugee turned citizen who happened to be the greatest scientist that ever lived. I expect to see his face on the next double-eagle. . . .

Unfairenheit 9/11
Check out Christopher Hitchens' takedown of Michael Moore's pompous new "documentary."

What everyone should get out of school. Godspeed, Dean Broadhead. We sure will miss you.

Off We Go, into the Wild Blue Yonder...

History is in the making. Aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, once famed for designing the circumnavigating Voyager airplane and for sporting some truly righteous sideburns, is clawing his way back into the news with the launch of SpaceShipOne only an hour ago. His craft is said to be capable of reaching the 62.5-mile altitude mark dividing atmosphere and space. Should today’s flight succeed, he will be well ahead of the pack when it comes to winning the coveted Ansari X-Prize, which will give $10 million and accolades aplenty to the first private entrepreneurs to reach space.

Needless to say, we libertarian, science-fiction-reading types are ecstatic. Check back once the YFP’s print archives are up, for a link to my article on the privatization of NASA. With luck, demonstrations like Rutan’s will show the world what we libertarians already knew: you don’t need the government to get into space. The next time we get to the moon, it won't be with a NASA craft. And next time, we're not leaving.

The Subtle Smell of Surrender

Charles Krauthammer over at The Washington Post seems to think peace in the Middle East is not too far away. Something tells me, though, that a moral defeat is not going to make Arafat break out the white flags.

May I Take Your Order?
Basic Austrian Economics and Some Food for Thought

In his libertarian treatise Law, Legislation and Liberty: Rules and Order, Friedrich A. Hayek has an interesting essay entitled "Cosmos and Taxis," exploring the notion of spontaneous order. In a rather technical exploration of Adam Smith's concept of the "invisible hand," Hayek makes the following distinctions.

"Order" is "a state of affairs in which a multiplicity of elements of various kinds are so related to each other that we may learn from our acquaintance with some spatial or temporal part of the whole to form correct expectations concerning the rest, or at least expectations which have a good chance of proving correct."

"Cosmos" is spontaneous order, a seeming oxymoron since "order" seems to imply the existence of a single entity implicated in its design. Cosmos is "self-generating," endogenous, and arises as "the product of the action of many men but ... not the result of human design."

By contrast, "taxis" is a made order engineered by artificial design or human construction, an exogenous order that is limited in its ability to react directly to changes in the internal elements of which it is comprised.

[Originally, in classical Greek, 'taxis' referred, for example, to orders of battle, while 'kosmos' referred to "'a right order in a state or a community.'"]

One interesting linguistic distinction Hayek makes is that our language for order has roots in the language of biology. For example, we call constructed groups of order in business "organizations," which has the same root as "organism." Thus, humans originally came to understand their interactions in the world in the same way they understood their own bodies -- as something that orders itself naturally, without much conscious tinkering. Furthermore, a look at nature tells you most things are spontaneously ordered -- without getting into the theological argument from design, it is reasonable to conclude that, as Hayek puts it, "There are in the physical world many instances of complex orders which we could bring about only by availing ourselves of the known forces which tend to lead to their formation, and never by deliberately placing each element in the appropriate position." For example, one could never stick every atom appropriately into place in order (no pun intended) to form a crystal, but we could find out the necessary conditions and prerequisites necessary for the spontaneous order to arise, and ensure that those criteria are met to the best of our ability.

This means that humans are best adapted to function in a system of spontaneous order at large, including in the economy and government. The market works best when we allow people to exercise as much autonomy as possible, and empirical analysis tells us that in liberty-respecting market economies, both profit and quality of people's lives are maximized. If the government leaves well enough alone, according to this theory, the right kinds of decisions will "get made" and people will be better off than if a centralized authority feigns omnipotence and makes decisions by literally guessing the way an infinite number of factors will interact to produce future results. It is the type of pre-emptive action which no one can successfully undertake, precisely because 'cosmos' "will always be an adaptation to a large number of particular facts which will not be known in their totality to anyone."

I generally agree that granting freedom for the forces of human nature to do their thing is a good idea. The market is our best tool at answering questions like, "What is the best price for oranges at which the maximum number of consumers will want to buy oranges, and the maximum number of producers will want to grow and sell oranges?" I am not convinced, however, that the market knows what kind of questions to ask. While spontaneous order may get us useful answers to the questions which the market is suited to answer, it is up to the citizens of that order to decide whether the market addresses all necessary concerns which we ought to consider.

Here are some common such "market failures" which people cite. Chew on them and tell us what you think.

1) Monopoly: Is it the government's role to keep big companies from eating up the economy? Is it part of the natural order that certain enterprises get a large share? Even under deregulated systems, spontaneous monopolies will arise. Will such "natural monopolies" keep prices appropriately low in the long run? If they do not, what tools can the government use, besides sheer trial and error, to determine thresholds at which monopolies do exist and set prices at which they ought to operate?

2) Externalities: Are there certain goods which the market has inherent no ability to regulate? For example, some people claim that the profit-maximizing motive which drives the market leads to higher pollution. What many people do not realize is that there exist market-based means of restoring the balance of order, such as having corporations run competitions among their employees to make the most environmentally-sound technology. Other ideas?

3) Public goods: There are certain goods which the market cannot regulate effectively, namely those which are non-rival (they do not lend themselves effectively to competition) and non-exclusive (providers of the good cannot exclude those who do not pay for use of the good from enjoying it). National defense is a good example of such a good. How can the market answer questions about the order of public goods? It is possible that this falls into the realm of taxis, but it is also possible that we are too quick to judge many issues as unsolvable via market incentives, and we too easily cede our autonomy on these matters to government control. For example, is it really the government's business what candy children should eat in schools? The New York State Legislature contended that it is just last week, but this ruling sends a very insulting message to parents, telling them that they have raised children who cannot be trusted to make the right snacking decisions.

4) Imperfect information: Even the market does not know everything. Producers are always guessing what wages they will have to pay once living conditions change in a few months, or what prices their supplies will cost; consumers are always guessing how much disposable income they will have available to spend on goods and how much they can invest in savings. Unpredictable cost shocks such as oil shortages can spoil everyone's best predictions.

There is no real solution to this last problem. There is nothing inherent to government officials which makes them any better at guessing trends within these fundamentally un-knowable variables until they actually happen. Government officials are just as human, and therefore fallible, as are any given set of consumers and producers. When fore-knowledge is lacking, we have no better recourse than spontaneous order to determine the appropriate interplay of unknown variables, because it limits the amount of guesswork necessary to achieve a desired outcome.

Finding Redeeming Value in Modern Art, New York Jewish Style

Before leaving the Northeast for the summer, I had a chance to visit the current exhibit at The Jewish Museum in Manhattan: "Modigliani: Beyond the Myth." Coming in, I had never seen Modigliani's work and knew only that he was an Italian Jew who experimented with cubism and other new forms along with Picasso and his bohemian crowd in Paris, during the early 20th century.

According to the Jewish Museum's biography of Amedeo Modigliani: "An anomaly among the many foreign Jewish artists who lived in Paris during the early 1900s, Modigliani remained independent of any movement or style, and was known primarily for his reclining nudes and portraits with elegantly elongated features." Yes, it is true that he did paint a lot of long faces (you can see an example on the website). But I certainly would not call them elegant. In fact, much to the dismay of my three-hour-admission-line-conquering mother, I initially found Modigliani completely uncompelling. It seemed that a three-year old could have drawn a long face with filled-in eyes (his trademark was solid-colored eyes with no pupils or whites) and performed much the same artistic work. There had to be some merit to the repetitive rooms upon rooms of these long faces in different poses if people were willing to wait three hours to see them, however, and I was determined to find it.

Artists workin in the midst of Parisian bohemia in the 1910s and 20s were struggling with the fundamental problem of how to define themselves uniquely against the backdrop of centuries of tradition. They were searching for new forms of representation that would bring something new and memorable to the movement. In one sense, I can sympathize. Perhaps, had they stuck to traditional forms and drawn beautifully realistic or even Impressionistic scenes of fancily-clad people in their Sunday best, they would have dropped rather quickly into oblivion. That had all been done. The times -- they were a-changing.

I am not sure what it was about the 20th century that made it so much more ripe for radical change in art and literature than any other before it. Perhaps it was a product of having to forge a wholly new way of understanding human nature in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. Whatever its cause, the impulse for radical change was powerful. The pioneers of modernity were brave in that regard. Some of them, too, were lucky to be in the right place at the right time and to hit upon an idea that lasted and gained followers. Experimentation, luck, hallucinogenic drugs, idealism, and disillusionment with the past -- it was probably a mix of all those things.

Regardless, here we are, stuck with these works lauded by so many art critics as great products of modernity, and it is important not to ignore the power of that movement. Though much of modern art is -- how to put it? -- aesthetically displeasing, much can be gained by trying to familiarize ourselves with the artistic climate of those times and glean from it whatever valuable philosophical insights we can.

The interesting message that can be gleaned from Modigliani's work is that aesthetics work in funny ways. When we meet someone, the first impression by which we judge them is often largely looks-based, if for no other reason than that we store images of faces in our memories by which to tie together all our other knowledge about those people. As we get to know people more deeply, however, a lot of the initial impression falls away, and we grow to see beyond their appearance. A plain-looking person with a vibrant personality suddenly becomes beautiful. Vice versa, when we imagine the face of a beautiful person who turns out to be mean-spirited, our mind may transform them into someone uglier than they are in reality.

Modigliani was trying to draw people as they appeared in his mind's eye, not as they appear to the world, and this comes across very well in some of his better paintings. For example, he had one image of a man who was described in the caption as a very shrewd and well-liked businessman, and the face Modigliani depicted looked like someone with a wonderfully quirky, raised-eyebrow, hiding-a-curious-little-something-under-his-sleeve disposition. Though it still did not make my three-hour tour of long faces with different eye colors seem that much more enjoyable (mostly because the compelling portrait I described was pretty rare in the bunch), this afterthought did redeem Modigliani in my mind at least a little. My mind's image of the struggling artist grew a little more dignified.

The question all of this begs, of course, is how one should measure the quality of a work of art. Is an aesthetically pleasing portrayal of a person enough to make me appreciate a work, or must it also suggest a compelling message? And is it possible to create great art that only fulfills one of the two criteria?

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