Pyrobrachiate Abuse and How to Stop It

    Pyrobrachiates, more commonly known as "Heat" or various other street names, were originally developed for use by the military to increase the combat effectiveness of soldiers. They are far superior to PCP ("Angel Dust") in this regard because they can be used for longer periods and (when applied correctly) do not interfere with the user's ability to follow orders. Most nations have approved pyrobrachiates for use by their armed forces; somewhat more controversially, many civilian law enforcement agencies are increasingly relying on them as well. But of growing concern to many is widespread pyrobrachiate abuse by members of the public.
    In addition to their primary effects on combat performance, pyrobrachiates are known to have a number of subtle and not-so-subtle effects on their users. Users report euphoric feelings of power, and a delusion of invulnerability. John Lennon, himself a victim of pyrobrachiate abuse, ironically described the feeling in a Beatles song: "When I hold you in my arms, I know nobody can do me no harm". Precisely because of this effect, people frequently self-medicate with pyrobrachiates to treat feelings of fear, anxiety and inadequacy, but such use is particularly dangerous and habit-forming. Such users typically become dependent on Heat, and many literally believe they will die without it. Long term users suffer alienation, severe paranoia and antisocial delusions, and can become a danger to themselves and others.
    Even among casual and recreational users (as distinct from addicts), pyrobrachiates carry significant risks. Pyrobrachiates can exacerbate depression; studies have established a link between the availability of pyrobrachiates and suicide rates. They also contribute to aggression, positively correlated with higher homicide rates. Accidental deaths are also more common where pyrobrachiates are widely available, and children are especially vulnerable.
    In many countries, pyrobrachiates are subject to strict legal controls, though in the United States it has been difficult to enact effective legislation, in part thanks to a powerful industry lobby; it is not illegal to manufacture or sell pyrobrachiates in the U.S., and in fact the U.S. is the world's largest exporter. Like alcohol and tobacco (which fall under the jurisdiction of the same federal agency), pyrobrachiates are not legally classified as drugs. The FDA has no authority over them, and unlike virtually every other product offered for sale in the U.S., there are no product safety regulations in place to protect consumers.
     How do deal with the problem? There may be no easy solutions. We have seen, with the War on Drugs, that the criminal law is not a particularly effective tool to address certain kinds of public health threats.
     Perhaps it is time to approach pyrobrachiate abuse as a health problem, rather than a criminal problem. A complete ban may not be workable or even desirable, because pyrobrachiates do have their legitimate uses for military and law enforcement personnel, and there is evidence that under carefully regulated conditions, even private recreational use can have positive benefits to gross and fine motor skill, self-discipline and confidence. But steps can be taken to reduce the harm of pyrobrachiate abuse and misuse.
     First, education. People need to understand the dangers associated with pyrobrachiate use, and to know how to use them responsibly. There is a great deal of misinformation and myth surrounding pyrobrachiate culture, in part due to the sometimes glamourous way Hollywood portrays it. Casual use can lead to addiction; proper education can break that cycle before it starts.
     Second, pyrobrachiate addicts must be given safe and effective alternatives to treat their underlying anxieties, so that they no longer need the rush of false security pyrobrachiates provide. Education can play an important role here, helping people to understand that the dangers they see in the world around them are not actually addressed by the sense of invulnerability they get from pyrobrachiates. And, of course, acting to reduce the source of those insecurities (crime, social alienation, poverty and gross inequalities of social power and influence) can't hurt.
     Third, the influence of moneyed interests, and in particular the pyrobrachiate lobby, must be reduced. Sensible attempts to regulate the trade in and use of pyrobrachiates have been stymied at every turn by this lobby. Where legislation does manage to get passed, the agencies responsible for enforcing it have had their budgets quietly cut.
     Most importantly, though, it's time to wake up and acknowledge that there really is a problem.

Gun Idolatry

Back in August I blogged about an argument against gun control that I thought was particularly silly. Unfortunately, I used up the title that I really wanted to use for this post, a critique of the old NRA slogan "Guns don't kill people; people kill people."

It's a brilliant piece of rhetoric, because on a moral level, it's absolutely true. People are blameworthy for the good or the evil they do, and guns only do evil as instruments at the direction of people. Of course we shouldn't blame guns, but the people who point them at other people.

(That's a little loaded in itself, appealing to our sense of justice in asking us not to blame the poor innocent guns for what people do with them. But by that very same token, guns don't have any rights to justice, and we don't need to care about treating them unfairly if we do blame them for violence. Even if their availability contributes just a little bit to elevated rates of violence, we could be justified in destroying them all, and we wouldn't have to apologize to the poor innocent guns at all. Their owners might have a moral claim, but guns themselves are just inanimate objects with no right not to be scapegoated for our sins.)

From a moral perspective, placing responsibility on human beings is absolutely appropriate, so it's hard to take issue with the slogan there. Indeed, I think this is a very important point often overlooked in the wake of tragedies like last week's horrific school shooting, as we make a deliberate effort to forget the shooter and remember the victims. Well-meaning as that is, and as repugnant as it seems to "reward" the pathetic loser by paying him the attention we presume he wanted, we should remember that our moral obligation is watch out to make sure we don't do bad things, and so we should always be alert to catch in ourselves the kind of error or psychosis or whatever it is that leads people to do bad things. To that end, alas, we really ought to try to understand how the shooter went astray, so we can better avoid taking the same path. Our moral obligations have to do with our role as potential villains, not as potential victims, and so it is the potential villain inside us we must be ever vigilant to identify.

I cannot fault the slogan for reminding us of this. As people, we need to remember that it's not our guns but ourselves we must blame. Guns don't kill people; WE kill people. And if that were the whole of the slogan's meaning, I'd be fine with it. But it's not.

See, there's another reading of the slogan, one that comes out if we read it not from the perspective of a potential villain, but as a potential victim. If you read it this way, it's much more terrifying, insidious, and destructive: Guns won't kill us; people will kill us. Those people, they're dangerous, be afraid of them. Arm yourself; you may need to shoot them.

That fear-soaked message is, I think, central to the gun psychosis of American society. I don't have a problem with people owning guns because they use them for hunting or they enjoy target shooting or they collect them or study them or just think guns are cool. It doesn't bother me that guns are designed to kill people; so are swords, and I have no problem keeping a sword in my house. No, I have a problem with people owning guns because they are afraid. Fear is the problem; frightened people are dangerous.

Why are people afraid, and what are they afraid of? Well, they think they're afraid of criminals or the government or the New World Order coming and imposing its will by force. And sure, these are things against which we should be on guard, of course. But underneath it all is an excessive, irrational and almost mystical terror of violence. Nothing is quite so terrifying, it seems, as the threat of violence. Dying in car accident? Well, yeah, it could happen, but everyone still drives. Lung cancer? Meh. If you gotta go, you gotta go, but don't take away my cigarettes. But somehow, if someone puts a gun to your head, you have to do what he says?

People talk about violence being glorified, but I'm not sure that's the right word. It's mystified, and thus made somehow supernaturally powerful. And so naturally, people who are afraid want to possess this power for themselves, perhaps thinking it will make them less afraid, though it doesn't really, since they know that other people also have guns. Frightened people are dangerous, but frightened people with guns even more so.

Okay, okay, maybe we can blame the occasional (well, appallingly frequent) gun death of an innocent on the twitchy trigger fingers of paranoids, but surely the losers responsible for mass public shootings aren't acting out of fear, are they? No, of course not. But they do often seem to be people who feel powerless in their daily lives, and in a society where guns represent power, what do you expect?

So I don't think the problem is, exactly, that Americans have too many guns. It's that they think they need them, and the very unwillingness to even discuss the possibility of putting stronger regulations in place is symptomatic of that profoundly unhealthy fear. Paradoxically, if they were able to talk about gun control, they wouldn't need to talk about gun control. 

Two 14-year-old Girls

     Not long after I wrote my last post on insulting the prophet, I heard a debate on the radio that raised my free-speech hackles a bit. One participant took the position that people should be criminally liable for speech or symbolic acts that they know are likely to result in violence, such as burning a copy of the Koran. She articulated the principle in terms of causality, which is what I found troubling, because it seems to me that to assign moral blame to the speaker for how an audience reacts is to deny (or at the very least dilute) the responsibility of audiences to react appropriately. Even if an inappropriate response is predictable, I am reluctant to blame the speaker, except in cases of fraud or deception.

     As if to make that point clear, last week the Taliban attempted to assassinate a fourteen year old girl, Malala Yousufzai, for her audacious and heretical suggestion that girls should be educated. The Taliban have made it very clear that they intend to respond with violence to such advocacy; it was therefore reasonable to anticipate that if Malala were to continue speaking out in favour of girls' education, she would be targeted. And yet we view her (rightly in my mind) as blameless in this, and in fact we praise her for her courage. The blame, all of the blame, falls squarely on the shoulders of the ignorant zealots who tried to kill her. They did wrong, not she. 

     The same week, a successful attempt on the life of a different fourteen year old girl was made, unfortunately by someone less inept than the Taliban: Amanda Todd committed suicide after ruthless bullying. 

     The juxtaposition of these two girls and their circumstances leaves me greatly conflicted. On the one hand, I feel very strongly that Malala did nothing wrong, and that nothing she said justified any act of violence whatsoever. At the same time, though, I have great sadness and sympathy for Amanda, and anger at her abusers. And there's the conflict, because ultimately she was the one who decided to kill herself, in response to abuse which at its core was speech. (I know she had been punched and blackmailed, but I will go out on a limb and speculate that it was the insistent display of hatred and moral condemnation more than anything else that drove her to such misery.) Did I not just conclude, before being confronted with this case, that speakers are not to be held morally responsible for the inappropriate reactions of their audiences, even if they are predictable? If Malala was blameless for the attempt on her life, even though it was predictable that Taliban zealots would react with inappropriate violence, how do I still feel anger at Amanda's bullies, for her inappropriate reaction of self-directed violence?

     I've struggled with this, and for a while I thought I could explain it this way: The bullies are not to blame for her death, but for something very nearly as evil. They are to blame for treating her with such devastating cruelty as to make her miserable enough to want to die, and that's plenty blameworthy enough.

     But I'm not sure that rationalization really does the trick, either. After all, Malala's speech clearly caused great distress to the poor sensitive Taliban, hurting their delicate feelings or their religious sensibilities or whatever badly enough to provoke them to violence, and yet I have almost no sympathy whatsoever for them and their reaction, whereas I do have sympathy for Amanda.

     The real answer, I think, is uglier. I said above that only in the case of fraud or deception can we blame speakers for the actions of their audience, and I think we have all deceived Amanda and each other. Malala spoke truthfully and frankly; she said she believed girls deserve to be educated, and the Taliban assassins could have tried to reason with her and her audience, to explain why she was wrong and to convince us all that no, after all, girls ought not to be educated. But they didn't do that. They surrendered the moral high ground and shot her instead.

     In contrast, Amanda's bullies told her, through their words and actions, that she was worthless and bad and deserved to die. Some creep manipulated her into showing her bare chest to him online, but we told her, collectively, that was something for her to be ashamed of. We empowered him to blackmail and humiliate her, by making a federal case out of "wardrobe malfunctions", by making it a big deal, a grave moral concern. In short, we told her a lie that she believed, and on that basis killed herself. We've got to stop telling that lie, and I suppose the first step there is to stop believing it ourselves. 

Insulting the Prophet

What does it mean to insult someone?

We're all familiar with the basic schoolyard approach to insults.  They usually involve making some outrageous unflattering claim, often about the target's dietary or sexual practices, as a result of which presumably we are to hold the target in lower esteem. Personally, I was never much offended by the content of this sort of insult, nor much impressed by those who uttered them, perhaps because I have a tendency to interpret and analyze things literally. If someone alleges that I mate with iguanas, I'm more likely to be puzzled than offended: such a preposterous claim should reflect more on his credibility than my respectability.

Even in those instances where what was revealed about someone happened to be true, ("Billy's wearing green underwear!") it never made much sense to me that this should embarrass Billy. After all, we probably assumed he was wearing underwear, and it had to be some colour. I'd have thought it more embarrassing to be seen as having any interest in knowing the colour of Billy's underwear, and thus I always felt it was the insulter who should be embarrassed rather than the insulted. And I always felt just a little bit insulted as a member of the audience to such games, because the insulter who gleefully tells me the colour of Billy's underwear is implying through that speech act that I am expected to care.

That's the sort of thing that insults me. Not words, not statements of belief that I am unworthy, but clear demonstrations of that belief. You may say that you believe I am an idiot, and that's fine; you've presented a proposition which may be true or false, and put your own credibility on the line if I prove to be otherwise. But when you act in such a way that shows you fully expect me to behave like an idiot, when you tell me something obviously false and expect me to believe it or expect to convince me with a ridiculously flawed argument, that is something I can't help taking as an insult to my intelligence. When a grandmother's knitting needles are confiscated by airport security to protect me, it's an insult to my courage. When women are expected to dress modestly for fear their beauty will incite me to rape them, it's an insult to either my virility or my self-restraint or both. 

(Of course, if I am an idiot or a coward or an untrustworthy dangerous animal, it may be perfectly appropriate to treat me as such.)

And so what does it mean to insult Islam or its prophet or indeed any religion? Who or what should feel insulted, when someone makes a satirical film or a cartoon depicting the Prophet in an unflattering way? If what is said is false, well, does this not reflect poorly on the speaker more than it does upon the Prophet, and call for no more punishment than being revealed for a fool or a liar? And if what is said should be true, then it is either irrelevant and nobody's business (as in the case of Billy's underwear) or it is a relevant and legitimate criticism, in which case it is perfectly appropriate to act in accordance with it.

Actions speak louder than words. When, claiming to act on behalf of Islam, you storm an embassy and murder people because someone else thousands of miles away made a fool of himself, you demonstrate that you believe Mohammed to be an arrogant, vindictive and thin-skinned bully who resorts to violence rather than reason. If that belief is false, then it is you who insults the Prophet with your actions. And if it is true, then it is a perfectly legitimate basis upon which to criticize the religion.

Guns Don't, People Do.

     There are all sorts of arguments for and against legal restrictions on gun ownership, but one of the more disturbing arguments I hear from time to time is the one that certain Americans raise: that an armed populace is the best defence against a tyrannical government.

     Now, I don't mean to reject that entirely, because certainly there have been many tyrannical governments overthrown by force of arms throughout history. And there are instances where armed citizenry have made it difficult or even impossible for foreign powers to invade and occupy a country. A realist must recognize that there is a role for weapons and violence in this world, if only because others give them a role. I certainly understand the sentiment (misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) that it is better for government to fear the people than for people to fear the government, though I disagree very much: it is fearful governments that are the most dangerous to their people. (More on that in a later post, I expect; I've been meditating again on the nature of fear quite a bit since this Officer Wawra story broke.)

     But this whole approach to combatting government tyranny is doomed, because it buys into Mao's famous dictum that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and that view of power is at the core of tyranny. One can imagine (or at least fantasize about) a benevolent tyranny where those with a monopoly on lethal force wield it with benign restraint and only for our own good, but tyranny is tyranny is tyranny.

     No, the answer to tyranny is not force. The truly revolutionary development that has lead to the spread of liberty was not the idea of arming the populace. There was nothing at all new about that; weapons have existed in private hands far longer than we've even had governments. The really important change has been the growth of the rule of law, the idea that people have rights and that disputes should be settled according to generally accepted universal principles rather than the personal preferences of any individual.
     This is much more than simply an idea that people hear about; there's probably no society without at least the idea of rules. What matters for the rule of law to take root is for enough people to genuinely embrace the concept, and to agree to abide by rules even when it is not in their immediate interest to do so. And of particular importance is that the people with the guns firmly adhere to this principle. That's why the militaries of developed countries are ultimately under lawful civilian control, and have such strict disciplinary systems in place.

     It's a subtle idea, and while it's well-established here, its grip is always a bit tenuous. Sometimes it's counterintuitive, as when we extend legal protections and due process to the nastiest of criminals. Sometimes it's just inconvenient, like when we stop for a red light at 3:00 a.m. and there's no one else on the road. But the fact that most of us usually obey the law for no other reason than that it is the law is the core of what protects us against tyranny. A tyrant can only become a tyrant if people obey him, and in a rule-of-law society, unlawful commands tend not to be obeyed.

     So the thing to do is to be ever vigilant against attempts to shape the law to the purposes of the tyrant. That means engaging in the political process, arguing and advocating and talking and listening, and steadfastly rejecting coercion. In other words, guns don't protect us against tyranny; people protect us against tyranny.

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

     I just received an email from a friend of my parents with a political joke in it. Apologies for abridging it and spoiling the punchline, but the gist of it is this: A little girl calls her newborn kittens, whose eyes haven't opened yet, "Liberals", and later, when their eyes have opened, she calls them "Conservatives".

     Ha ha. Cute.

     Yet I found it troubling, because it is part of perpetuating the myth that conservatives are somehow the hard-headed realists who know how the world really works, and everyone else is a naive idealist. And that's simply false.

     The source of the confusion, of course, is the word "conservative". By itself, it's a fine word, and it's conveys an admirable sense of caution and thrift. To be conservative is to avoid unnecessary risk and expense, and these are both things that we'd want in our leaders. It's natural to hope that this kind of conservatism (cautious and thrifty) is rooted in an understanding of how very wrong things can go if we're not careful, and it's natural to import this idea that conservatives' eyes are open to the harsh realities of the world.

     But there's a danger in that assumption, and all the more so because it's so seductively reasonable. If you buy into the idea that you are wise to the ways of the world, while others are naive and gullible, you become especially naive and gullible yourself. You become smug and complacent, and feel that you don't need to listen to the ideas of those naive and gullible idealists who have no idea what the real world is like. Their eyes are closed, and yours are open, so you can't be fooled. Heck, you know how things really are, so you don't even need to look anymore...

     And that, I fear, is exactly what's happened, as evidenced by the joke I referred to at the beginning of this post. Conservatives have become so confident in their superior expertise (and the utter worthlessness of any opinion that doesn't bear the label "conservative") that they are willing to barge on ahead with policies based entirely on idealistic visions of how the economy is supposed to work, or "common sense" ideas of how the criminal justice system is supposed to work, or how foreign governments ought to respond to our clearly superior morality.

     (Our own federal Conservatives have been systematically closing their eyes by slashing funding to Statistics Canada and a host of other government agencies and research programs intended to give government and Canadians the objective information needed to make sound decisions. Republicans in the United States have been doing much the same with not just budget cuts but also legislation like the Data Quality Act.)

     The scorn I sense from conservatives in expressing their opinions about things is palpable. They talk about how obvious it is that this or that policy is the right one, and how stupid anyone would have to be not to see it. Well, if everything true was obvious, and everything obvious were true, this would be a very different world. There are things which seem obvious but are in fact false, and truths which are very subtle and profoundly counterintuitive. You cannot hope to understand these things if you think you already do.

     I love the quote from The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." There is no surer way to keep your eyes closed than to convince yourself they're wide open.

Was the Apollo Mission a Waste of Money?

You are probably familiar with this photograph.

This very famous image of Earth was taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17. It has been seen by pretty much everybody, and has been used so much as to have become a cliché. And yet, it's still an amazingly beautiful and inspiring shot.

But was it worth all the money spent to go to the Moon? There were many people at the time who thought it was a waste, and people today still make that argument. Advocates of space exploration point out that the technologies developed as part of the Apollo program played an invaluable role in advancing our standard of living here on Earth, and there's truth to that, certainly. We have a lot of neat gadgets that we probably never would have developed had it not been for Apollo.

But I want to talk about something else. Look at that image again, and think of how often you've seen it before. It's appeared in books and magazines, T-shirts and posters, advertising campaigns... you name it. It's such a compelling image, it's used everywhere.

Now, copyright and piracy are very much on people's minds these days, and the RIAA in particular is complaining about losing staggering amounts of money to unauthorized copying. Whether their claims are accurate or not, we can agree that images like this photo have commercial value. So I'd like you to consider for a moment just how rich you'd expect to be from royalty payments if you owned the copyright to that iconic photo of the Earth.

Of course, if NASA charged royalties for the use of that photo, it probably wouldn't have been used by nearly so many people, and they almost certainly would have had the same problem that RIAA complains of when it comes to collecting from everyone who uses it. But that isn't really the point. What I want to argue is that if you were to sit down and put a dollar value on the intellectual property of that one, single photograph, taking into account how many people have used it for how many different purposes, the amount of value generated would be staggering. Now, think about these images:

NASA doesn't charge us royalties on using these images. They are part of our culture, and belong to all of us. We are richer for having them. I don't know what dollar value to put on them, but it's got to be pretty large, especially if we listen to RIAA and the film industry.

So forget about all the fancy technology we enjoy as a result of the Moon landings. I think we may even have turned a profit just on the intellectual property assets alone.

I Find Your Lack Of Faith Disturbing: Musing on the Invisible Hand

     A few months ago, a friend of mine told me of a question on an exam he took in an economics course. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like "Government  intervention can only harm the efficiency of the market: True or false?"  The "correct" answer was "true". Well, I found this troubling for a couple of reasons, most obviously because the underlying ideology (that government is bad for the economy) is so absurdly false.
     It's obviously false if you stop to think about it in any detail because there are forms of government interference without which most of our modern economy would be completely impossible. We have laws, police and courts not only to enforce the property rights that libertarians value so much, but also to enforce the contracts that make up the economy in the first place. Government also flagantly intervenes in the market by creating artificial forms of rights, such as intellectual property, that dramatically transform the economic landscape. And perhaps most pervasively, there is money. Money, a system of currency that enormously facilitates transactions by providing a simple, uniform unit of value, is a service created and provided by government, and it is almost impossible to describe how much that single piece of government intervention enhances the efficiency of the market.

     Okay, so maybe those kinds of government interventions in the economy are necessary, the laissez-faire ideologue might concede. But they're just to ensure the basic requirements of free trade. OTHER kinds of intervention, like taxes and regulations on who can do what with their property, those are always bad. Free markets have to be free, and any time you interfere with that freedom, you lose the benefit of the free market which always axiomatically produces the most efficient possible allocation of resources.

     Hey, I'm totally into that Invisible Hand thing. Free markets are, generally, the best way of finding prices for things, and they tend to produce efficient solutions to allocation problems. Markets adapt to changes in costs of production, availability of substitute goods, and all those unpredictable vicissitudes of  the real world. Price of oil goes up? Well, watch as ripples through the markets spread, and prices of everything else adjust to an optimum distribution given the new cost of energy. Oh look, the rising price of oil has made it economical to invest in that new form of solar energy! Solar electricity becomes cheaper, ripples spread through the market, and a new equilibrium forms.

    So when free market ideologues complain about how the government shouldn't interfere with the free market by imposing taxes on this vice or subsidizing that public good, for fear that it will distort the pure functioning of the Invisible Hand, I am baffled. The Invisible Hand isn't some fickle faerie who will only work its magic if we leave out the right kind of milk and cookies, and will run away and leave us helpless if we offend it. It's a powerful statistical principle, almost on the order of a Law Of Nature. Markets will be free, regardless of how hard we might try to constrain them, because markets are made up of independent individuals, some of whom exercise a great deal of creativity to find a way to exploit them. The Invisible Hand is far, far more powerful than conservatives give it credit for.

     Now, you can argue about whether or not a particular government policy is a good idea. If the government decides to impose a tax on pollution, for example, to try to internalize that externality (to use economist-speak), you can argue about whether or not the tax is the right amount or the best way to address the problem or even whether there's a problem at all. There's lots of valid reasons to favour or oppose any given government policy. But whenever someone starts talking about how it will interfere with the efficiency of the market, I wanna reach out and force-choke them.

Taxpayers' Money: an Idea Whose Time Should End

     Several years ago, I was involved in an argument on usenet (remember usenet?) with some fellow who was outraged that he was being forced to pay an "illegal religious tax". It seems he'd discovered that many food producers take steps to ensure their food is kosher, which involves having it certified by a rabbi, for which a fee changes hands. Never mind that the fee is tiny, and spread out over thousands upon thousands of bottles of ketchup or pickles or whatever the product happens to be, amounting to a fraction of a cent per unit. Never mind that, by making the food saleable to a larger market, it enables greater economies of scale and might even lower the ultimate retail price of the bottle. This fellow was upset that some of his hard-earned money was going to Jews.
     Now, try as I might, I couldn't persuade him of the difference between a tax (one feature of which is that it's usually imposed by the government, for a start) and a cost of production or marketing. To be sure, I don't think he was interested in rational argument; he just want to vent his antisemitism. But the argument stuck with me over the years as a particularly stupid one, and one I see in a disguised and less obviously stupid form quite commonly. That's why I bristle whenever I hear someone talk about spending "taxpayers' money".

     It's such a common expression, and so apparently uncontroversial, you might be wondering why it should bother me at all. After all, tax money comes from taxpayers, so it makes some intuitive sense to call it taxpayers' money. And people use the expression as a way of emphasizing who that money comes from and why the government has a duty to spend it wisely on their behalf. What's wrong with talking this way, then?
     What's wrong is that it's simply inaccurate. Taxpayers' money no longer belongs to the taxpayers, just like the money you spend on a bottle of ketchup no longer belongs to you. My antisemitic adversary seemed to think that he was entitled to a say as to how Heinz or Kraft spent its revenue, but he was wrong. Of course, if he happened to be a shareholder in a ketchup company, he might have some say in how the company allocated resources, but in his capacity as a customer, no. He got his bottle of ketchup, and that's that. What Heinz spends its money on is none of his business.
     In the same way, as a taxpayer, your money stops being your money when you pay it over to the revenue agency. You have no further claim to it, at least not in your capacity as a taxpayer. You are, in a sense, a shareholder in the collective enterprise of the State, and so yes, in your capacity as a citizen you do have some claim as to how it spends its revenue. But that's as a citizen, not as a taxpayer.

     It may seem like I'm making a big thing out of a minor quibble here, but it is important, because it distorts public discourse in a couple of ways. In large part, this is because we're mistaken on the nature of the tax transaction. We tend to think of it as being forced to pay for roads, schools, hospitals, courts, police, the military and so forth; in other words, we fall into the trap of thinking we're buying these things as taxpayers. We're not. We should not think of the act of paying taxes as a kind of purchase, where we get something in exchange. That imports all sorts of thinking about getting value for your money, which is just inappropriate in the context of taxation, especially since we're used to being able to pick and choose the things we want to buy, and it feels wrong to have to pay for services you never use.
     Well, taxes are not a purchase, at least not in that sense. If they're a purchase of anything, they're a purchase of the privilege of living in a democratic society under the rule of law, and sure, we might not all pay the same dollar cost for that privilege, but we're all subject to the obligation to contribute via taxes in some way. And that is the end of it. You pay your taxes, and the money you pay is no longer yours. It belongs to all of us collectively, and you have one vote as to how we collectively ought to spend it.
      It's perfectly valid to opine, as a citizen, that we ought not to spend so much on this, and we ought to spend more on that, but the arguments to use there should be limited to whether a given expenditure represents a cost-effective allocation of society's scarce resources. Citizens are equal shareholders, and that is how our discourse should proceed. Taxpayers' contributions are not equal, and we should not allow our democratic values to be eroded further in the direction of one dollar, one vote. I'd like to see the word "taxpayer" removed entirely from democratic discourse.

     The "taxpayers' money" argument is simply invalid wherever it appears. Should a pacifist be forced to pay taxes to support the military? Should a vegetarian be forced to pay taxes to support beef inspection? Should stupid people be forced to pay taxes to support schools and libraries? Should criminals be forced to pay taxes to support police? Absolutely any expense that government pays will have someone who opposes it. So what? Opposition is valid, but it should be democratic in nature, not rooted in property claims to money that isn't yours anymore. Don't complain to me about how your money is being spent; persuade me instead that I should be upset about how our money is being spent.

Loyalty vs. Obedience

     A recurring theme on this blog might be distinctions between easily confused concepts. I started out with a post about the difference between faith and belief and I've also written on the difference between theory and fact. Yesterday the CBC reported on a letter sent to Parks Canada employees warning them not to criticize the government and "reminding them of their duty of loyalty". The author of the letter is confusing loyalty with obedience.

     This isn't a new confusion. Shakespeare addressed it very well in King Lear, where the aging king rewarded his daughters Goneril and Regan for their fawning and empty praise, and condemned as disloyal his daughter Cordelia who alone was willing to tell him that his actions would lead to his downfall. It is soon revealed, of course, that Cordelia was the only genuinely loyal daughter Lear had.

     King Lear illustrates very well the difference between loyalty and obedience. Loyalty, whether to a person or an institution, involves more than simply doing what the object of loyalty might desire or demand; it is a genuine concern for the welfare of that person or institution, a commitment to act in their best interests, including providing needed (but perhaps unwanted) counsel. Obedience, in contrast, is simply carrying out instructions.
   
     So what the government is demanding from its employees is not loyalty but obedience. It orders them not to criticize its policies, and expects them to obey. It doesn't care about the reasons for criticism; like King Lear, it just wants to hear what it wants to hear. (We see this also with the Conservatives' systematic removal of any sort of non-partisan information-gathering or expert advisors from the federal budget. They know what they want to do, and have no interest in anyone suggesting what they ought to do.)
     Demanding obedience of public servants is entirely appropriate. The elected government must be able to implement policy by directing public employees to carry it out. That's not controversial at all, and in fact is central to all employment relationships; within the scope of one's employment, one is obliged to obey one's employer's directions. But only within the scope of that employment.

     It's not always a clear line, of course. If you're employed as a commercial airline pilot, your job is flying planes and what you do or say on your own time is generally your own business so long as it doesn't impact on your ability to fly planes safely and on time, but if you publicly badmouth your airline and negatively affect ticket sales, even on your own time, you can expect to be fired.
     That's the argument that the Conservative government is trying to use in justifying its attempts to exert greater control over the speech of public servants, and superficially it seems reasonable. But there's a crucial difference. Government is not a business, at least not in the sense of a competitive market enterprise pursuing profit. An airline can lose market share and thus profits if its reputation suffers. Government cannot. Government is government, regardless of who happens to form it. A political party can certainly be harmed by damage to its reputation, but so what? No civil servant is obliged to help a party get or stay elected.

     Civil servants owe a limited duty of obedience to whatever political party happens to form the government, but if they owe a duty of loyalty it is to the nation and its citizens, not to the political party. Loyalty to the nation demands providing honest counsel, engaging in the democratic process, and saying what one thinks needs to be said. Sometimes that will be at odds with what the party in power wants us to hear. Too bad. We the people don't always have access to all the information we need to make informed decisions around election time, and so it's vital that we hear from everyone who might know something relevant. IT IS NOT for government to control that dialogue!

LARP Ethics and Why Linda Gibbons' Case Isn't Inflaming the Passions of Civil Liberty Groups

     The other day, a friend called my attention to the case of Linda Gibbons, who has spent a great deal of time in jail in connection with picketing abortion clinics. My friend was concerned about what he sees as hypocrisy among civil liberty groups who have not rallied to defend Ms. Gibbon's free speech, apparently because it's speech that goes against the right to have an abortion which civil liberty groups support.

     I was troubled by this as well at first, and still am to some extent. My own view is that freedom of speech is the most basic, most fundamental, most indispensable right in any society that aspires to being in any way just. I've long held that the proper approach to things like hate speech is to counter it forcefully with intelligent and persuasive criticism, rather than to attempt to silence it through censorship. So my gut feeling is that people ought to be permitted to peacefully express their opinions anywhere and at any time, and my instinct is that injunctions against peaceful protest had better have very, very good reasons or they shouldn't be granted.
     The problem for me is that I don't really know if the injunctions in this case were really warranted. On the one hand, there's the freedom of speech point, which militates very strongly against any such injunction. Yet at the same time, we have to remember the situation on the ground in the access to abortion issue; it's not always easy to draw the line between legitimate, peaceful demonstration and intimidation which has no place in a free society.
     Intimidation, real menacing intimidation, can be quite subtle, and depends very much upon context. Let's consider the circumstances. First, genuine violence has been carried out against abortion clinics, their staffs and patients. Moreover, not all involvement in violence is direct; there have been (and for all I know still are) websites that publish the names and home addresses of abortion providers with the implied intention of facilitating harming them. So the act of peacefully standing by an abortion clinic, expressing your disapproval, isn't necessarily going to be interpreted that way; there's also the unavoidable unspoken message: "I see you, I know what you're doing, and I think you're a murderer."
     Second, consider the demographics of the targets of protests: women with unwanted pregnancies. A significant number are likely alone, feeling especially vulnerable and struggling with a very difficult life choice, and especially in need of privacy. Some may have parents or friends or family from whom they wish to keep this decision. In that context, even a genuinely peaceful protest can be especially intimidating.

     I think what made me sensitive to this issue was thinking about a question in LARP ethics, of all things, several years ago. The question arose: is it ever okay to roleplay a rape scene? (I am assuming that the roleplayed scene would be described rather than physically acted out.) In general, I see LARP (when it's done well, that is) as an expressive medium, a legitimate form of theater in which no subject matter should be off-limits. However, one always needs to be sensitive to one's audience, and especially so in LARP where one's audience may be just one person. If I and a female player are off in the woods ostensibly seeking the lair of some ogre, and then when no one else is around I suddenly turn on my partner and roleplay an assault, I had better be very sure she knows and trusts me very well, and understands the artistic legitimacy of what my character is doing and why, because otherwise the unintended message she receives could be "Oh look. We're along in the woods, I'm bigger than you, and the thought of raping you just crossed my mind. Of course, it doesn't have to be rape..." That is absolutely not a message you want to send, and so I reluctantly concluded that, in some contexts, it's legitimate to limit certain kinds of speech, even when the intent is perfectly innocent.
     I'm not entirely comfortable with that, but I can live with it, in part because other contexts exist where it is safe to discuss the same themes without realistic fear of being misunderstood. (Some people will misunderstand you no matter what, of course, but that can't be helped.) If one can't responsibly address issues of rape in a LARP, one can still write novels, essays, and discuss the topic in safe environments where no threat can reasonably be inferred.

     And so the same seems to me to be true of the injunctions Ms. Gibbons violated. It does seem extreme, on the face of it, to prevent all protesting within a certain distance of the abortion clinic, and so I'm not fully comfortable with that. At the same time, I can see arguments for why such an injunction might well be reasonable, and of course she is still free to express her views anywhere else.

      (I feel a need to contrast this with other so-called "free speech zones", by the way, where authorities prohibit any demonstration or expression of certain views within a certain distance of a motorcade route or conference site. I am steadfastly against those sorts of limits, and the difference there is about who has the power, and who gets to control the message. A lone young woman going to terminate a pregnancy has virtually no power, and is very vulnerable. The President of the United States giving a speech to campaign contributors doesn't fall into that category, and his purpose in clearing the streets of signs and t-shirts of contrary messages isn't to be shielded from intimidation, but to control the image: he looks better on TV when he appears in front of crowds of enthusiastic supporters than if there are signs of dissent.)

     But as I said, I'm not really sure where I stand on this one, because I'm not fully convinced the original injunctions were fully reasonable. I can see reasons why they might be, but I'm uncomfortable about any limits on free speech. And that, at least, I think explains why there hasn't been as much of an outcry from civil liberty groups about Ms. Gibbons' case. Two important civil liberties are in conflict here, the right to seek lawful medical intervention without being intimidated, against the right to free speech. The case is nuanced, and it's not immediately clear which side someone who values both liberties should take.

Why I'm Against the Death Penalty

     The other day, I mentioned parenthetically that I would get to my reasons for opposing capital punishment in another post. Ere I forget, I'm writing that another post now. I have two main reasons for my position. One is moral/philosophical, and I might get to that in another post. The other is legal, and that's what I'm going to talk about in this article.

     There are two kinds of rights we have in our legal system, substantive and procedural. Substantive rights include what we usually think of as basic human rights (rights not to be tortured, to worship or believe what one will, to vote in elections, and so forth) but also can include special rights such as those gained under a contract or by statute; under a contract, if you do your part, you have a right to what the other party promised. Substantive rights can be disputed at times, and won or lost under various circumstances.
     This is where procedural rights come into play. Procedural rights are rights to a fair process (hence the name) by which substantive rights can be determined. So, for example, you have a procedural right to a fair trial to decide whether or not you lose your substantive right not to be imprisoned.
     Procedural rights are interesting because although we usually speak of them as belonging to the accused (in criminal matters) or to the litigants themselves in civil matters, they are actually more diffusely owned by society as a whole. That is, we all have an interest in procedural fairness, and we all lose if our procedures become unfair (even if some of us happen to benefit from the unfairness). It's just that the parties to the dispute are the ones most immediately concerned with the process, and thus most likely to zealously assert those procedural rights. Besides, if one party should choose to waive those rights in a given case, no one else is in a position to complain about unfairness.
     Now, while substantive rights can be won or lost, procedural rights ought to be absolute, in part because they don't just belong to the accused. There is no crime so heinous that we would want to say you lose your right to a fair trial; no matter what you're accused of, you have a right to insist that the state prove its case against you before it can mete out punishment. And society also has a right to insist this as well, because (1) none of the rest of us want the state to be able to punish us without proof, and (2) society has an interest in making sure that we've got the right guy; it wouldn't do to convict you while the real culprit goes free.
     My legal problem with capital punishment, then, is not that it takes away substantive rights, but that it extinguishes all rights, substantive and procedural, absolutely and irrevocably. Once someone is executed, there is no possibility that new evidence can exonerate them, or that the law on sentencing could be changed, or that the Crown might grant a pardon. While I have considerable trust in the legal system in principle, part of that trust derives from the fact that it includes so many error-correction mechanisms, such as appeals, Acts of Parliament, and Crown prerogatives. Capital punishment deprives society of the opportunity to correct its errors.

You'd feel differently if...

     Yesterday I wrote about the idea of using convicted criminals for medical experiments, prompted by a Facebook status/share/chainletter thingy. Reading through the comments in support of this barbaric idea, I saw a few people who spoke out against it on basically humanitarian grounds, and the responses to these typically took the form of this argument: "You wouldn't say that if you or someone you loved were a victim of these monsters!"

    This is a very common argument, although I rarely see it in any context outside of crime and punishment. I happen to be opposed to the death penalty (for reasons I'll get to in another post), and nearly every time I get into a debate with someone who's in favour, they bring it up. It's easy to understand why: it's a very emotionally powerful argument, and what's more, it appears to be very effective at bringing out a contradiction in the position of the one arguing against capital punishment. How hypocritical, you might say, that I would oppose the death penalty in general but favour it for someone who had killed one of my loved ones. How hypocritical that I might oppose torture for molesters of other people's children while calling for the torture of anyone who molested my own.

     But there's a reason why we don't see this form of argument in other contexts: it's because it's actually a pretty stupid argument, when you stop to think about it carefully. Yes, it's true that I'd probably strongly desire the death of someone who murdered someone I loved. So what? Since when does powerful emotional trauma make someone a better judge of what is to be done? Is it not widely accepted in most other contexts that a strong emotional investment in an issue usually disqualifies one from making rational, objective decisions? We require judges to recuse themselves from hearing cases where they have close connections to one or both parties, and it's generally better if your surgeon isn't also your lover. Likewise, decisions concerning penal policy probably ought not to be made by those with an overwhelming personal agenda.

     It goes farther than that, though. Let's suppose we accepted the idea that overwhelming emotional desires made people better qualified to make policy decisions. It'd be hard to argue against a policy whereby the government provided free heroin to everyone on demand; after all, you'd feel differently if you were addicted to heroin and going through withdrawals!
     Indeed, this is where the argument finally becomes self-defeating. After all, it relies in large part on our shared sense of moral outrage against pedophiles and violent criminals; we want to say that we are entitled to judge these people's actions as wrong. Yet much of the time, probably most of the time, what they do is driven by overwhelming emotional desires. "Don't tell me not to molest children," one might tell us, "You'd feel differently if you were subject to powerful pedophiliac urges!" Well, yeah, I would feel differently. But I'm entitled to say I'd still be wrong to act on those urges, even if I had them.

     And so, by the same reasoning, I can say that while I might desperately want the state to execute someone who'd murdered someone I loved, it'd still be bad policy and bad for society at large to indulge that desire. It's natural, and perhaps even healthy, to want things that are ultimately bad for us. It's also right and proper to refuse to satisfy those wants.

On Using Prisoners for Medical Experiments

     This morning, one of my friends on Facebook shared an image which was basically just the following text: "Why test on Animals when we have Prisons full of Pedophiles?"

     It's an attractive idea. The the posting from which it was shared has, as of this moment, 44,463 shares and 3,169 likes. Of the hundred or so comments I skimmed through, a significant majority were enthusiastic approval, and only a tiny handful expressed reservations. Of those, all of them were based on a vague notion that cruelty and revenge are barbaric, and those were invariably criticized with almost as much venom as that directed against the pedophiles themselves.
     But as viscerally appealing as it might be to try to extract some positive benefit to society from people who do so much harm, it's a terribly dangerous idea, and so much more so because the danger is so subtle. I mean, on the face of it, what's not to like? Evil people suffer, good people benefit with medical cures.

     What's not to like is the insidious corrupting effect this idea will inevitably have on the administration of justice. The only consideration in finding someone guilty or not guilty of a crime should be whether or not the evidence points beyond a reasonable doubt towards guilt. A person should never be found guilty for reasons other than actually being guilty, and the danger of turning convicted criminals into any kind of valuable resource, whether it be labour, medical test subjects, or organ donors, is that someone will have an interest in seeing people convicted in order to realize the benefits of that resource.

     Imagine, for instance, that you are a judge or juror in a system where those convicted of serious crimes are executed and harvested for organ transplants. Imagine also that you have a child who will die without a liver transplant in the next month or so. The case before you is a man accused of a particularly nasty violent crime, and the evidence suggests that he's the most likely suspect. How much doubt is reasonable, when that doubt potentially costs your child a liver?

     That sounds like an extreme case, and we don't (yet) harvest criminals for organs in North America. (In Canada, we don't even execute them, so it's less likely to be a problem here unless we reinstate the death penalty.) And sure, the potential benefit from a cure found by experimentation on a single accused is so remote that it shouldn't influence the decision making in a single case, right?
     Well, not necessarily. The beneficiaries of a policy that made convicted pedophiles into test subjects wouldn't immediately be the patients whose diseases might one day be cured, but the pharmaceutical (or cosmetics?) companies looking for test subjects. There's value in that, monetary value. Profit. And where there's profit as an incentive, it'll find a way to grow.
     Consider the case of Mark Ciavarella, a judge in Pennsylvania recently convicted of receiving around a million dollars in "finders fees" from a for-profit detention center. This organization receives a fee from the state for every person committed to its care, which is how it earns its revenue and hence profits. Evidently they considered it a worthwhile investment to provide Mr. Ciavarella with a financial incentive to find juveniles guilty and sentence them to terms in its facility; more teens in care meant more profits, so up the conviction rate.

     Oh, but that's outrageous corruption, you might say. Obviously, judges who do that sort of thing should be charged and convicted, and just because someone does something illegal doesn't mean the system is bad when it's run by people who obey the law, right?
     Well, no, but there are lots of ways money can influence the system when it has an incentive to do so. And if it's in the financial interests of anyone, whether they be pharmaceutical companies or private prison operators, to increase the conviction rate then they will do so by whatever means is most cost effective, including lobbying for "tougher" laws to make it easier to find an accused guilty, relaxing the evidentiary standards for guilt, removing funding for things like Legal Aid intended to give the accused adequate legal representation, and so on. All of these things we see happening, in the U.S. and also, perhaps, in Canada. (The Conservatives haven't made public any plans for privately operated prisons so far, but they haven't really been very forthcoming about much of anything, and the way they've sold their crime omnibus bill certainly is consistent with such an agenda.)

     Crime is bad. That's something I think we can all agree on, and it's something we all ought to agree on. It follows from crime being bad that we'd all want to reduce it, so there's as little crime as possible. Who could possibly say it would be good to have more crime?
     I'll tell you who. Anyone who profits from it. And turning criminals into a resource for anyone's benefit creates people who profit from it.

Paying for Crime

"Fiat justitia, ruat caelum."  

     In a previous post, I criticized the Conservative government's Bill C-10, the omnibus crime bill sold as "getting tough on crime". I find it astonishing that there is any support at all for this, given how well we know that it won't work, from the examples of Texas and California, which are both regretting adopting similarly "tough" approaches. I'm also amazed at the continued push for "abstinence-only" sex education in  certain U.S. states, despite the well-documented consequences of higher teenage pregnancy and STD rates. I just naturally assumed that we all believed that rates of crime, teenage pregnancy and STDs were things we'd want to keep as low as possible. So how can people continue to support such demonstrably ineffective policies with such enthusiasm?
    For a while I just assumed that they didn't understand the problem, and genuinely held to the simplistic belief that these policies would work. To some extent, of course, that is the case; I have heard people argue with great sincerity that tougher penalties are sure to deter crime more effectively, and it's certainly true that abstinence is terribly effective at preventing pregnancy (even if preaching abstinence to teens isn't actually the best way to get them to practice it).
     But lately I've begun to wonder if maybe there isn't something else at play here. One thing I have noticed is that many of the people who advocate these policies tend to be very concerned about sin. They speak in terms of justice, and seem to find it profoundly disturbing that a wrongdoer might get away without appropriate punishment. Which brings me to the legal maxim quoted above:  "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall." 
     The maxim is perhaps most famous for its use in 1772 by Lord Mansfield in Somersett's Case, in which slavery was found to be illegal in England and Wales. Several thousand slaves were in the country at the time, many (like James Somersett himself) accompanying their masters from the American colonies, and Lord Mansfield was urged to consider the mayhem that would ensue from a judgment suddenly and radically changing the legal status of these thousands of slaves. Quite rightly, the judge considered those consequences to be irrelevant; slavery is an unlawful injustice, and cannot be perpetuated just to avoid inconvenience.
     And so it is a noble sentiment, that we should be willing to endure great cost and inconvenience to see to it that justice is finally done. We tend to admire as a hero Inigo Montoya for devoting his life to avenging his father's murder by the six-fingered man, enduring great hardship and sacrifice to bring a killer to justice.
     So I begin to think that perhaps some of those who favor moralistic policies like Bill C-10, abstinence-only education, and many other clearly ineffective but simple approaches, aren't actually concerned with results. What matters to them more is being morally righteous, and if the cost of harshly punished criminals is more crime, well, so be it; we'll just punish them harshly, too. It's almost as if it crime doesn't matter so long as it's "paid for" (and such people very often do speak of "making criminals pay", another unfortunate memetic pathology). If the cost of righteously teaching teenagers to wait until they're married before having sex is that, unfortunately, more of them won't wait, well, too bad; at least we haven't polluted ourselves by implying that premarital sex is okay.

     The trouble with this attitude is that, in the big picture (which is what policymakers are supposed to be considering), it ends up being paradoxically inconsistent with itself. On an individual case basis, we might well praise the diligent prosecutor who spares no expense to bring a particularly nasty wrongdoer to justice. From the perspective of the system as a whole, however, cost-effectiveness needs to be considered; spending the department's entire budget to imprison a single criminal means there are no resources left to go after all the others. At this level, the decision to focus on one criminal is also a decision to let all the others go unpunished.
     It gets worse. The decision to spend a disproportionate amount of resources on punishing a few criminals means fewer resources available to spend on crime prevention. Indeed, for many offenders, we know that rehabilitative programs through conditional sentences have a much better success rate at reducing recidivism than prison terms do; living in prison with hardened criminals is like going to crime school. So an excessive focus on punishment actually leads to higher repeat offender rates.
     Think about what that means. The policymaker who decides to implement a criminal justice system emphasizing punishment is creating a situation in which more crimes are committed than would be under an alternative system. There are people victimized by crime who would not have been so victimized, but for the decision of the policymaker. In other words, the policymaker has chosen a higher crime rate. An argument could be made that the conscious choice to have a higher crime rate makes the policymaker himself morally culpable for that rise in crime. And as one advocating for harsh punishment and against forgiveness, he'd really have little right to expect leniency himself.

     I don't think I'd want to go quite that far. The decision to implement a policy is not the same as the decision to commit an individual crime, and ought not to be assessed on the same moral scale. At the policy level, there will always be individual crimes or other unwanted consequences that follow from a particular policy that might not have followed from a different policy (which would have its own unique unwanted consequences). It's a question of balancing, deciding which policy produces the fewest and lease severe unwanted consequences.

     But in a democracy, it's also a question for us, the people, when we go to the polls. Do we want to be safer from crime, or are we so eager to see criminals punished that we're willing to bear a higher risk of being victimized by crime ourselves?
     I can't imagine how we could sensibly choose the latter. Criminals simply do not "pay for their crimes" by being punished. No amount of suffering inflicted upon a criminal can ever make whole the victim of his crimes, and so the victims of crimes are always worse off than they would have been had the crime never been committed. (Oddly, that's as it should be; we really wouldn't want a world in which people actively sought to be victimized by criminals.) The best thing policymakers can do for victims is ensure they never become victims in the first place.

Give Your Children a Voice in the Election

    A municipal election is upon us, and again, my son will be prevented from voting on the grounds that he is under 18 years of age.  Just about everywhere there are government elections, there is a minimum voting age. In most places it’s 18, though there are a few countries where it’s 21, and some where it’s as low as 16. The usual reason for imposing a minimum age is that younger people are deemed not to have the experience, wisdom or maturity necessary to cast a ballot responsibly. 

     Does it work? It isn’t hard to find someone who will complain about the foolishness of the majority of adult voters; almost anyone who voted for a losing candidate will do that. In any event, it is difficult to be sure that the quality of electoral results is better than it would be if we allowed minors to vote.

     In fact, there is something a little disturbing about any rule aimed at limiting the vote to only those we judge to be wise enough. Most modern democracies seem to have abandoned other competency tests for voting rights, and for good reason: it is very difficult to design a literacy test that does not include some form of political or cultural bias, and that would undermine the whole purpose of a free and fair election. 

     Whether or not they succeed in ensuring responsible choices at the ballot box, age limits do prevent young people from participating fully in the democratic process, which has its own drawbacks beyond simply depriving them of a voice. In countries where voting is not mandatory, voters in their twenties have historically poor turnout on election day, and the young are often seen as politically apathetic. But why would we expect anything else, when we’ve given them 18 or more years to get into the habit of not voting?

     In my household, we’ve adopted a simple solution to allow our son to participate, at least until he is old enough legally to vote himself. The three of us hold a miniature election around the kitchen table, and my wife and I agree to cast our ballots for whichever candidate wins a majority of our household votes. In principle, our house is like one of the states in the electoral college system for U.S. presidential elections; whoever wins a majority in the state gets all of the electoral college votes for that state.

     Since there are three of us in our household, and at least two of us are likely to agree on any given issue, we rarely have to worry about what to do in case of a tie. In practice, we discuss our choices well in advance of actually voting, and thus usually reach a consensus. Still, in Canada we have several major political parties, so the possibility of a three-way deadlock at our household election is quite real. It has never happened in our household, but if it does, one possible way to resolve it would be the single transferrable vote (STV).

     Most elections run on a simple “first-past-the-post” system, which means that whoever gets the most votes wins. If there are more than two candidates, you don’t need a majority; you only need more votes than any other one candidate. So in a three way race where candidate A gets 40% of the vote while B and C get 30% each, A wins even though 60% of the voters voted against him. 

     With the STV, voters do not simply choose the one candidate they prefer, but rather to choose as many as they like, and rank them in order of preference. If your favorite candidate doesn’t get enough votes overall to be electable, then your vote shifts to your second choice candidate, and so on. Ultimately the candidate left with the majority of the votes is the winner.

     Such a system is also handy for resolving the three-way tie that could result in our household. If I vote for A with my second choice as B, my wife votes for B with her second choice as C, and my son votes for C with his second choice as B, then B wins as the compromise we can all accept. Of course, there will always be the possibility of an unresolvable tie, but there is less chance of it with the STV system than with first-past-the-post. In fact, STV can even resolve many deadlocks in a two-voter household.

     It seems likely that age limits on voting will be with us for a long time. A baby born today will likely be old enough to vote under the current rules before any major reforms are implemented. Those of us who wish to involve our children in the democratic process need not wait until they are adults. By sharing our own votes with them, we can get them started towards becoming engaged, responsible citizens.

Pro-Business versus Pro-Business: Mistaking Universals for Particulars

     One of the ways in which our thoughts often seem to go astray is in the ambiguity of how we can use nouns in English. If I say, for example, "I believe in the rights of the individual to freedom of speech and belief," you might reasonably ask (particularly if you're not a native English speaker), "Which individual?"
     Of course, that's a pretty obvious one, and just about everyone knows that in that kind of context, speaking of "the individual" really refers to all individuals. Yet I think that sometimes it's dangerously easy to slip into that trap, and to mistake the particular for the universal and vice versa.
     In particular, I'm thinking of how often politicians fall into the trap of thinking that if they help a particular business or even a particular industry sector, they're "pro-business" in the abstract universal sense, rather than just being pro-that-business. I used to think, when I was younger and even more cynical, that it was simply corruption, that the politicians were deliberately helping their cronies and disingenuously proclaiming themselves as pro-business or pro-free-enterprise. But now I'm not so sure, and even if that is the case, I feel obliged in good faith to charitably assume it's a subtle (and corrigible) cognitive error, perhaps the very one I'm describing here.
     It's not that far-fetched, after all. The arguments that implementing policies to benefit a particularly important employer in the community will create jobs and bring prosperity can be pretty persuasive, and may actually be true in many cases. It might well be the case sometimes that keeping a particular factory or mine open is in the general interest of a community. And so it can be very easy to slide into the ambiguity of thinking, without any deliberate corruption or cronyism, that being (generally) pro-business actually means helping out particular companies or businesses, even awarding them monopolies at the expense of other businesses.
     Of course, that's not what it means at all, or it's not what it is supposed to mean. Being pro-business in terms of policy means fostering an environment in which businesses generally can flourish, not simply where one particular business is better off. But I can understand, now, how one could make that honest mistake.
     It's even easier to make that mistake when a well-organized business interest lobbies for some concession or handout and manages to present itself as representing the entire industry, or a majority of the community. This is a common tactic whenever a professional sports team asks for a new stadium; they play up how popular it'll be with all the sports fans (and of course every respectable politician is a loyal fan of the home team, right?) and how many jobs will be created and how local businesses will benefit. It's not always true, but it gets a lot of momentum and it becomes hard to challenge the conventional wisdom established: new arena = boost to local business generally.
     I think we're seeing the same thing right now with the music and film recording industries, and their aggressive lobbying for reforms to copyright law. They present themselves as representing artists, and of course it's true they do represent some artists, but by no means all and in fact, only a rather tiny minority of artists, generally those who have enjoyed some degree of commercial success. Those who don't have a contract with a label, or roles in Hollywood establishment films, are simply not included.
     Here's an example of how measures intended to help "artists" can end up harming artists. Years ago, when I was in a garage band, we set out to make a demo tape. (In those days, the late 80's or so, we actually used tape.) Since we were going to be renting a high-quality reel-to-reel unit, rather than an ordinary old cassette, we had to go buy a proper reel of tape for it. We were a little surprised to discover that there was a surtax to be paid on such recording media, to go towards paying royalties to the established artists whose work would presumably be pirated onto some of the recording media sold.
     Now, think about that for a moment. I'm not insensitive to the plight of recording artists who lose sales of their music to piracy, but look who was paying for it! Here we were, wanting to record our own performance of our own original compositions, and we were being forced to pay good money to musicians (or perhaps more accurately, their recording companies) who were already established and commercially successful. It was a regressive tax that rewarded established musicians for their past success, while discouraging new creative talent from even getting started.
     Yet I don't doubt for a minute that the politicians who passed that law sincerely felt that they were really helping artists generally, even though they were helping some particular artists at the expense of a great many more. And they were able to think that, in part, because our language has an inherent ambiguity between particulars and universals: "the artist" can mean "this artist" or "all artists", just as "the individual" or "business" can be arbitrarily extended or narrowed by context.

     So, I suppose, the point of today's sermon is this: Be wary whenever someone (including you) speaks in apparent generalities, and if there's any doubt, insist on clarification. Are you really talking about all artists, or all businesses, or all citizens, or only a particular subset? It's okay to speak for just the subset, of course, but just be clear about it.

Rights of Victims and Rights of Criminals: It's not Either-Or

     Among the rhetoric surrounding the Conservative's Bill C-10, the misleadingly named "Safe Streets and Communities Act", is the following sentiment (quoted without permission or attribution from an email I received yesterday):

"For too many years, our criminal justice system was going in the wrong direction -- it focussed more on the rights of criminals than the rights of victims."

     (Never mind that for all of those "too many years", Canadian crime rates have been consistently headed in a downward direction, which seems kind of like the right direction to me.)

     The rhetoric here is lovely. Of course we should care more about victims than criminals. Who would disagree with that? But unfortunately, the thinking is rather dangerously wrong, in two ways.

     To begin with, what are we talking about when we refer to the "rights of victims"? There are two ways we can answer this. First, there are the rights which everyone has but that were violated by the crime that made them victims in the first place. Second, there are additional rights that may have been gained as a result of having been victimized, such as rights to reparations and so forth.

     The first set of rights are important, but calling them victim's rights rather misses the point, at least with respect to the criminal justice system. It's simply too late to protect a victim's rights once they've already been victimized. The best we can do for these rights is to adopt policies that will reduce crime, so that the rights of people not to be victims are protected. In an ideally law-abiding society, there would be no victim's rights because there would be no victims.

     The second set of rights are somewhat less clearly established in criminal law. The right to be made whole again, or to have the harm from the crime undone as much as possible, is already a part of civil tort law, and victims of crime are usually free to sue the offenders for damages, so it's kind of a red herring to complain that the criminal justice system fails to protect these victim's rights. Even so, Canadian criminal courts do sometimes dabble in restorative justice, and judges are generally free to craft conditional sentences that encourage reconciliation and healing. (Or at least, they are for now; Bill C-10 places greater limits on a judge's flexibility and eliminates conditional sentences as an option in many cases, just one of many reasons I think this legislation is a Very Bad Idea.)
     But there are other rights we might say a victim has in virtue of being a victim, such as a right to see wrongdoers punished, or a right to be heard on the matter of sentencing. Canadian courts already provide victims with the opportunity to provide a victim impact statement to be considered in sentencing, but they do not recognize victims as having a special right to see those who have wronged them punished. Nor should they; the purposes of sentencing in Canada are generally to prevent future crimes (whether by deterring would-be offenders with a credible threat of punishment, or by locking those declared as Dangerous Offenders away where they can do no more harm), to facilitate rehabilitation of offenders, and to convey society's disapproval of the criminal act. Vengeance is simply not a legal consideration, however much a victim may wish it.
     Should vengeance on behalf of the victim be one of the functions of sentencing, though? I rather strongly think it should not. For one thing, I'm not sure there's a meaningful moral distinction between wanting to see someone suffer because they've legally wronged you and wanting to see someone suffer because you have some other reason for not liking them (perhaps they've harmed you in a perfectly lawful fashion), and even if such a distinction exists, I'm not convinced that the state owes it to its citizens to act upon such wishes, however well-founded those wishes might be. Indeed, I think the state owes it to its citizens not to favour personal wishes of harm against other citizens for any reason whatsoever. That the state ought to be scrupulously impartial in the administration of justice is something I'd hope everyone would agree.
     Moreover, as sympathetic as I am to the suffering of a victim, I do not subscribe to the idea that victims are somehow a better judge of what an offender deserves than impartial non-victims. When debating capital punishment, for example, which I oppose, I often hear people say, "Well, I bet you'd feel differently if someone you loved was murdered!" Indeed I probably would, but I'm under no illusions that my judgment would be especially sound after so traumatic experience. People often make very bad decisions in such a state, and I happen to think it's a good thing we do not base sentencing on what the victim thinks the offender deserves.

     So, the special rights of victims as victims are not, I think, something that the criminal justice system really needs to focus on at all, since there already exists a well-developed tort law system that serves this purpose, and there is no legal right to vengeance per se. If there are victims' rights that our system needs to focus on, then, it's the right not to be a victim in the first place.

     And that is exactly why our criminal justice system focusses so much attention on the rights of the accused. The criminal justice system is concerned with what to do to people accused of crimes; it is not concerned with what is to be done to victims. In other words, the system need not worry about the rights of the victim, because it is for the most part not even in a position to infringe on those rights. (True, being compelled to testify as a witness may be a hardship, but that's a problem for all witnesses and not just victims, and the courts do try to balance the rights of witnesses with the evidentiary needs of the court.) In contrast, the system is in a position to intrude upon the rights of the accused in a very severe way, and so it's entirely appropriate that the rights of the accused be treated with the utmost respect.

     I've practiced criminal law (and expect to practice again soon, once this chemotherapy nonsense is out of the way), and I frequently find myself having to explain both to clients and to the general public that my job as a lawyer is not to let criminals get away with crimes. Rather, it's to prevent the state itself from becoming a criminal. The state may only imprison or otherwise punish someone if it can prove beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of the accused, and this is something we insist upon for the benefit of all citizens, not merely those who happen to be guilty of crimes. It is not only the guilty who are accused of crimes, after all, and while it may be the case that the majority of those accused are in fact guilty, there's a reason why this is so: the Crown knows that it must prove its case, and so it generally doesn't try to charge people it doesn't expect to be able to convict. If we relaxed that standard, if the courts didn't insist on proof someone is guilty before administering punishment, there would be a lot more innocent people charged.

     So the quote I started this posting with is absolutely dead wrong. It isn't a question of favouring criminals' rights over those of victims, because the rights of the accused are the rights of victims. They are the rights of each of us not to be made into victims of injustice.

A Short Thought on the Economics of Health Care

I've read arguments from those opposed to socialized medicine, who point out that as price for a good or service drops, demand rises, and at a price of zero, demand can be very high indeed.

I never really bought this argument, and I'm less convinced than ever, owing to my recent health issues. In June of this past year, I was diagnosed with colon cancer, and underwent surgery to have a tumour removed in July. I'm now nearing the end of about six months of chemotherapy "just to make sure". It's been interesting in its own way, and I do feel intellectually richer for having experienced it first hand (notwithstanding that what they call chemo-brain may have impaired my ability to learn as much as I might have hoped), but realistically, I'd really rather have learned all this stuff from a book. And it's true what they say about chemotherapy being a generally unpleasant ordeal, although the precise details vary greatly from patient to patient.

I only bring this up because it drove home to me just how ridiculous the idea of cost influencing demand for things like this is. You could lower my out-of-pocket expenses for this treatment to well below zero, offering to pay me to go through this, and it wouldn't increase my demand for the service one bit. Well, unless you offered to pay me an awful lot, and I mean a lot.


(I don't even want to bother addressing the patently obvious but morally obscene observation that as you raise the price, "demand" drops. That's just a bloodless way of saying that as you raise the price, people who can't pay for the treatment won't get it, regardless of how desperately they might need it. That's not really a drop in "demand" except in the technical sense used by economists, but unfortunately, expressing the idea in terms of demand curves allows us to import the unfounded inference that people who can't afford a treatment just don't really want it as badly as those who can afford it.)

Now, it is true that free health care does tend to encourage people to use more of it for non-essential purposes. People go to the doctor more for minor things that they might otherwise have stayed home and treated themselves. I'm not convinced this is necessarily a bad thing; while it certainly increases the work load and wait times on the front lines, it also may help to identify and perhaps prevent minor conditions from escalating into to something most serious and thus more costly to treat.

But let's suppose that overutilization of non-essential health care services is, on balance, a problem to be addressed. Yes, one way to reduce that utilization might be to raise prices, though I'm concerned that this might deter people from getting something looked at that might really need to be looked at. (It wasn't the price that deterred me, but I really wish I had got that colonoscopy five years earlier.) However, maybe it's not exactly the price that's the problem.

Or more accurately, maybe it's the whole economic paradigm that's the problem. When you pay for something, you're the customer. We have strongly ingrained attitudes about customer-seller relationships, as evidenced by trite sayings like "The customer is always right." But health care doesn't work that way, or rather, it shouldn't. A patient has a complaint, and concerns that need to be addressed, and of course there's the whole issue of informed consent and patient autonomy, but it's the expertise of the physician that is critical; the patient is not always right about what needs to be done.

I suspect that our habit of thinking in terms of serving customers may be responsible for a lot of inefficiencies in the medical system. We already know that antibiotics tend to be overprescribed, in part because physicians sometimes find it easier to write a prescription because that's what the customer expects, rather than to give advice about how to deal with a common cold virus (against which antibiotics are useless). I realize that may be more a matter of trying to make the patient feel better because they can go home with something tangible, but I wonder how much of it has to do with unconscious assumptions about the role of the customer leaking over into our expectations as patients.

So while it may be true that free health care leads to certain inefficiencies, raising prices to lower demand may not be the best way to address those inefficiencies. In fact, it might well make them worse, by reinforcing the idea of the patient as customer. When you're a paying customer, you're more likely to demand "value for your money", and just being told to go home and rest for a couple of days doesn't seem like good value (even if it is sound professional advice for your condition).

I'm not sure what the solution is, but part of it at least might be for all of us potential patients to remember that a doctor is an expert to whose judgment we should have considerable deference, and if the advice is to go home and sleep it off, then that's probably what's best for us. It's also necessary for some doctors to be more aware that a major part of their role is to advise and educate patients about their health, not merely to provide treatment.

I understand that's especially challenging when you have a big caseload, and it takes a lot of time to explain to a patient why, for example, antibiotics are useless for viral infections. As a lawyer, I've felt myself subject to the same sort of pressures to do something more than simply advise, but to do something. Very often, though, the best legal advice I can give someone is to how to resolve a dispute amicably so as to avoid the need to involve a lawyer at all. It's good advice, and well worth the hourly fee to someone who needs it, but it doesn't seem like what you'd expect to pay a lawyer to do for you. Even so, one serves one's clients better by giving them what they actually need, rather than just what they expect. This is true of all professionals, and it's something that patients/clients should respect as well.