Year: 2017

A beautiful bit of small world mojo

Rick Weber Liberty , ,

The first time I went to Boston was to look for an apartment. On my last day I was hanging around Downtown crossing. Gmail confirms it was June 12th, 2010. I was having a polish sausage, and this guy approached me. I don’t remember what we talked about, but we chatted for a few minutes. Good town. That sort of thing is exactly what I’d expect in SLO (Central Coast California) or Santa Cruz… but this was in a place with a skyline! Anyways, he wasn’t in a cult and I didn’t get robbed.

Flash forward to some time that fall. I was in Inman Square and saw a chair left on the curb for anyone who needed a chair. I needed a chair. I lived in Union Square, but that was just the next neighborhood north (if I lived on Prospect Hill, there’s no way that chair would have made it, but I might have realized that before picking it up). So I pick up this chair and walk. Google Maps puts my route at 0.5 miles. I got a couple blocks short of that before I crap out. Fortunately I’ve got a place to sit down. So I’m sitting in an easy chair on the sidewalk, hauling it forward a few yards, and plopping down again.

Across the street, someone’s trying to get my attention. He comes over, and he’s the guy I’d randomly met months earlier. He lives across the street from me! And he helps me carry home my chair. We have a beer and chat.

Flash forward to Thanksgiving of that fall. I’m hanging out by myself. This is my first Thanksgiving alone. Neighbor guy knocks on my door and invites me over. Inside are a bunch of his musician friends, and this fantastic music is coming from one of the bedrooms. An impromptu jam session is playing the sort of dusty sounding blues I’m enamored with at the time. After they finish I mention that it sounds like this African blues guitarist, Ali Farka Toure. It turns out I pronounced his name right, because I’m immediately informed that his son was playing guitar just now!

Just now I was listening to Spotify, and a song reminds me of another song which led me to the song above from that album I’d bought when I lived in SLO and was trying to be worldly. Absolutely fantastic music, a mish-mash of cultural influences bouncing back and forth around the world, and I got to experience something of it first hand because of the grace and generosity of a fellow human.

But more than that, a mix of technology, globalization, and absolutely random chance created that beautiful memory and triggered it again just now. We live in a beautiful world.

On How Poor France Was in the 18th Century?

Vincent Geloso Liberty , , ,

I have recently completed a working paper which has now been submitted (thank you a great many scholars who provided comments notably Judy Stephenson and Mark Koyama). That paper basically went back modestly on one datapoint in the work of Robert Allen which was published in 2001 in Explorations in Economic History. 

Probably one of the greatest ten papers in the field of economic history for the last twenty-five years, Allen’s article has had a tremendous influence. It introduced a new method of comparing real wages at a time when very few goods were traded internationally and most prices were determined at the local level. In using what we now call “welfare ratios” (which are akin to poverty lines), Allen managed to compare many countries before the industrial revolution.

My entire research agenda has been to improve on this stupendous work and to increase the constellation of observations as part of an “uncoordinated” (many scholars are working on this separately) effort to map living standards prior to the mid 19th century. The main part of my agenda is to add Canada and devote more attention to the important issue of relative prices in comparing old world (high labor to land ratios) and new world (high land to labor ratios) economies. In the process of comparing parts of the world, I had to re-examine some data for some established countries. One of my reconsiderations was for Strasbourg in France where I found that Allen might have misclassified wages of skilled workers which included in-kind payments as unskilled workers receiving full compensation in money wages.

When I enacted corrections to the money wage rate, I found that the Alsace region where Strasbourg is located had living standards more or less in line with those observed in Paris (rather than living standards at less than half the level of Paris). If you’re interested, the note is available here.

Note: For those who are interested, I really recommend reading this short article in Cliometrica by Sharp and Weisdorf who also discuss comparisons between France and England (and how it may relate to topics like the French Revolution).

The Ottoman Empire and Libertarianism

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , , , , ,

Every so often libertarians ask, in a speculative mode, whether the re-establishment of the Ottoman Empire would not be a formula for peace in the troubled Middle East. The question is interesting on several counts, one of which is that the regions affected by the Islamic State today, Arab and Kurdish alike, plus all of southern Iraq, plus Kuwait, plus Jordan and Palestine (including the current Israel), plus, more loosely, all of the Arabian Peninsula, were more or less under Ottoman/Turkish control until the end of World War One.

Libertarians allude to the “millet” system under which many different ethnic or national groups co-habitated peacefully for several centuries. Those are pretty much the same groups that have been eviscerating one another for several years and pretty much every time a strong and dictatorial leader does not clamp down on them. There is one large fault in this happy vision: the attempted genocide of the Armenians begun under full Ottoman power in 1895 and nearly completed as the empire was falling apart during World War One.

The millet system of governance should be of interest to libertarians who generally wish for less government, less expensive government, more responsive government and, especially, less intrusive government. Under the millet system, at least when it was fully functional, the Ottoman governor of say, the province of the empire that now encompasses Lebanon and Western Syria would summon yearly the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church. He would address him as follows:

“Your Eminence is well I trust, and his family, and I hope that his sons are brave a wise. I am happy to hear that Almighty God has blessed Your Eminence with many grandchildren. And I am told your community is thriving. Now, based on the figures your office gave me and based on my own information, I think that the Greek Orthodox community must deliver to our master the Sultan, one hundred pounds of gold and three hundred fit young men of military age this year. Agreed? Thank you for your visit and may you and your community, Your Eminence, continue to prosper under the benign, enlightened and fair rule of our great sultan.”

Then, the governor would ask over the main Ayatollah of the Shiite Muslims and deliver himself of a similar oration. And so on.

But I must pause for a confession. The quote marks around the above monologue are metaphorical. I am not reproducing a real monologue. Something like the monologue above must have been delivered thousands of times but I must admit I was not present to hear any of them. (On the other hand, I spent time in Turkey on vacation ten years ago and I regularly drink coffee with Turks. And, I like Turks in general.)

Again, the millet system is a good historical example of extreme decentralization and of minimally intrusive government. It was also very inexpensive to administer. It had little permanent bureaucracy to speak of that could grow upon itself and reproduce itself endlessly thus forever shrinking the area of individual autonomy. At the same time as the comparable Hapsburg Empire was developing a large bureaucracy, at the time when territorially much smaller France was perfecting the art of centralized bureaucracy, at the time when the small Kingdom of Prussia was developing the very model of modern bureaucracy that was to become a model for the whole world, the millet system endured in the Ottoman Empire. In general, the Ottoman government was small and it seemed to be treading lightly on the land, you might say. It sounded a little like a sort of libertarian dream.

But, wait a minute, I need to complete significantly the imaginary monologue of the Ottoman governor above. On parting, the governor would have probably added: “Enjoy life and enrich yourselves. Everything will be fine unless I hear too much about you. If I do, bad things will happen to your community.” Or, he did not even need to utter the words. Everyone knew about the bad things that would happen if disorder arose. Some of these bad things were community leaders’ heads on a spike in village centers.

The Ottoman Empire that relied on the light, non-invasive, decentralized millet system was also famous for the fierceness of its repression. And this haven of diversity disintegrated swiftly throughout the 19th century with a speed that must give pause.

The unraveling of the Ottoman Empire began around 1805 when the large and important Egyptian subdivision gained all but nominal independence through an armed revolt and even waged successful war on the Empire. During the rest of the 19th century, the areas of the Empire now comprising Greece, Bulgaria and Romania decisively seceded. In the meantime, much of the rest of the officially defined Empire drifted away, such as Libya and Tunisia. Later, during World War One, the British (Lawrence) and the French did not have much trouble talking the remaining Arab areas of the empire into open rebellion. And yes, there was an attempted massive genocide of Armenians, in two phases. The first phase was under full Ottoman power in the 1890s; the second, much larger step occurred during the waning days of Ottoman rule starting in 1915.

Now, one can argue – and historians routinely do – that the spectacular disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was due to external pressures from the rising, fast industrializing European powers. Yet, the fact that national (ethnic) entities took up every opportunity to leave the Empire does not speak well of the effectiveness of Ottoman administration. The fact that they sometimes did it a a cost of great bloodshed, the Greeks in particular, does not strengthen the idea of contentment of the administered. The fact is that the subject people of the Ottoman Empire including the many governed through the millet system described above seem to have left as soon as the opportunity arose.

The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire poses a conceptual problem: Did it fall apart in spite of the admirable millet system of government or because of it? Was internal peace maintained in the Empire for a long time because of the virtues of the millet system or because of the ever-present threat of a large and fierce army facing a divided and unarmed populace?

Was the Ottoman Empire taken apart from within, and also from without, because the administrative principles behind the millet system impeded the supply of the means of self-preservation?

Beyond this lies an even graver question for anyone with libertarian aspirations: Do systems of administration that share the main features of the millet system, decentralization, low cost, and low-level invasiveness contain the seeds of their own destruction? Does administrative lightness actually nurture violent intervention from above and/or from outside?

I don’t know the answers to these serious questions. I think libertarians of all feathers don’t discuss these and related issues nearly enough. I suspect libertarian circles harbor their own form of political correctness that paralyzes such essential inquiries. I do what I can. I know it’s not much.

Free lunch: college edition

Rick Weber Economics, Liberty , , , , ,

Andrew Cuomo recently proposed making college free taxpayer funded for middle class New Yorkers. He argues that college is a “mandatory step if you really want to be a success.” For the sake of argument, let’s assume that he’s making adequate adjustments for vocational training.

As a SUNY employee, I’m not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it means an increased demand for my services. On the other hand, it means increased pressure to keep costs down, which could mean a fall in my future earnings potential. Increased admissions pressure means I might have easier to teach students, but also probably means less chances for the low-income students coming from the worst public schools.

At best, we’re looking at a middle-class to middle-class transfer that will trade off the benefits of market pressure against the benefits (to families paying for school) of not having to think too hard about how to manage a large expense.

I won’t go into the issue of signaling (see Bryan Caplan), or the sheer wastefulness of having people get bachelor’s degrees for jobs that don’t need them (see Dick Vedder… esp. table 1). These are important points, because they get at the root problem Cuomo is misdiagnosing. College is mandatory because of subsidies and subsidies will only make it worse. But we don’t even need to be that sophisticated to understand why this plan is a problem.

Here’s my basic problem with “free” college tuition: it’s too good to be true. I get the desire to help out poor people, but the average household in NY makes just under $60K/year and this plan is for all households making less than $125K. That’s “free” tuition to a lot of households that would be sending their kids to school anyways. That money has to come from somewhere. The people paying for this program will largely overlap with the people benefiting from it.

If everyone thinks their kids should go to school, then what’s the point in taking away their money to send their kids to school?! We all like burritos, so give me your money and I’ll buy us all the burritos we want. Doesn’t make sense! Giving up control of your spending can only make you worse off, so this will ultimately be a bad thing for the middle class. And that lack of control from middle class helicopter parents will likely be a bad thing for the working poor people who could have been net beneficiaries (hopefully… I’m not certain this won’t back fire on net). Even if subsidizing higher-ed were a good idea, this is almost certainly a terrible way to go about it.

Public Support for OReGO: Preliminary Results

Michelangelo Landgrave Culture, Politics , , , , , ,

tldr version;

Road pricing can be a useful means of addressing infrastructure fiscal issues, reducing congestion, and improving environmental quality and it has a chance of being implemented if advocates focus on mobilizing urban voters.

Thanks to all respondents.

This post is a quick detour from the NoL Foreign Policy Survey posts.

Among other projects I am working on, I am tinkering with a public opinion project aimed at the OReGO project. The OReGO is a pilot program operated by the State of Oregon to experiment with an alternative to the existing gasoline tax. Currently Oregonians pay 30 cents per gallon of gasoline, on top of the federal 18.4 cent per gallon tax. Volunteer participants of OReGO instead pay a charge of 1.5 cents per mile driven on state roads.

orego

The primary goal of the program is to find a better way to fund the state’s infrastructure. The current system is inadequate because automobiles are becoming increasingly more fuel efficient and so, on a per mile basis, pay less for road use. Despite paying less these automobiles still rack up costs in road damage.

Advocates of OReGO, and other road pricing schemes, also hope that the program will serve as a means of combating congestion by making drivers more conscious of the marginal cost of their driving and encouraging them to avoid excess driving. The gasoline tax does this already, but very crudely in comparison.

Some advocates also hope to use road pricing as a means of improving local environmental quality and addressing climate change. Automobiles are a significant source of pollution and so reducing their use would yield environmental benefits. Even if the program kept the same number of cars on the road it could reap benefits if it reduced stop and go traffic; automobiles pollute more in stop and go traffic than free flow.

There is quite a bit of research from economists and urban planners on the issue, but public opinion research on it is relatively rare. What research exists tends to focus on either toll roads or in foreign regions. The reason for the gap in the literature is simple enough to explain – no jurisdiction in the United States has adopted road pricing. There have been a few small scale experiments, but they were largely engineering tests and surveyed only the opinion of participants. I hope to fill this gap in the literature by (eventually) conducting a large scale public opinion study of Oregonians.

The below pilot study had 220 respondents recruited through various Oregon sub-reddits (e.g. Portland, Eugene, and Salem). Respondents were obviously not representative of Oregon at large. The sample size was also small for an academic study of Oregon and there is a lot of noise. Most of the results presented are statistically insignificant. As a convenience sample though this survey was nonetheless useful. My goal in this survey was more about testing the survey before fielding it more broadly.

I thank all respondents to the survey – you’ve all helped the progress of science.

Survey Experiment Results:

The survey had a survey experiment. The purpose of survey experiments is to see how changes in phrasing, or other survey elements, influences response.

The experiment was in how OReGO was presented. Respondents were split into three sub-groups and received slightly different explanations of the program. In the base scenario they were told the program was simply a funding mechanism. In the congestion scenario they were also told about its possible congestion benefits. In the final they were additionally told about its possible environmental benefits.

OReGo is a pilot program currently being operated by the Oregon Department of Transportation. Participating drivers are being given the opportunity to pay 1.5 cents per mile they drive on public roads instead of the current 30 cent per gallon tax that the state of Oregon currently charges.

Advocates of OReGO, and similar road pricing schemes, argue that the program serves as a more dependable means of funding infrastructure than the current gasoline tax. They point out that as vehicles become more fuel efficient the amount that drivers pay per mile is decreasing, but costs associated due to road damage are not similarly decreasing. This means that in the long term the current gasoline tax will be unable to cover infrastructure costs. (/End of Base Scenario)

Advocates of OReGO also point out that the program can help reduce congestion by discouraging excessive driving and encourage the use of alternative means of transportation such as bicycling, walking, or transit. Although drivers currently pay for their automobile use in the form of the gasoline tax, many view it as a fixed payment. OReGO, which is charged on a per mile basis, may serve to make drivers more conscious of the marginal cost of their driving. (/End of Congestion Scenario)

OReGO could lead not only to reduced congestion, but could also serve to improve local air quality. One of the major sources of air pollution is automobiles, especially in stop and go traffic. (/End of Environmental Scenario)

Looking at support for adopting OReGO within five years the different treatments are little different from one another. The congestion treatment received a decline in support, but it is pushed back up in the environmental treatment.

I regret not adding a fourth group where respondents are told about the base option and the environmental benefits, but congestion is not added. As it is, it is hard to tell if the decline in support for OReGO in the congestion treatment is because people don’t care about ways to address congestion, or they dislike attempts at social engineering.

favororegobytreatment

When we look at treatment effects among only those who identified living in an urban area the effects get more interesting. Urban voters were very responsive to the idea of environmental benefits and increased support for OReGO by over 10 percentage points.

FavorOregobyTreatmentUrban.png

 

favororegobyurban

What seems to be driving the difference in support for OReGO is inter-regional differences in perceived local air quality. Those who perceive local air quality to be ‘very good’ are least likely to support OReGO. This finding is exaggerated when looking at only urban respondents.

I played around to see if this was a statistical artifact from the above treatment; i.e. it is possible those who lived in ‘very good’ air quality regions received the ‘environmental treatment’  and I am picking up the latter effect. This was not the case.

favororegobylocalair

favororegobylocalairurban

Is this a simple case of those living in high quality areas having no interest in improving the region? A “I have mines” attitude. No. When I look at support for OReGO by how respondents judged local air quality had changed in the past five years, those who thought their local air quality was improving also had the highest support for OReGO.

There is a definite relationship here between support for OReGO and perception of one’s local air quality. I can’t put my finger on it just yet.

favororegobychangeairurban

Bonus result: daily bicyclists are those most supportive of OReGO.

favororegobybikefreq

Libertarians on Climate Change

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty , , , ,

This post is part of the preliminary results of the NoL Foreign Policy Survey 2017 Pilot. I will be posting results throughout the week as I play around with the data. As always, I strongly emphasize that this is a pilot survey and these are just preliminary results. 

Are libertarians climate change deniers? No. The majority agree that it is occurring, caused by human activity, and that it is harmful. They do not however support unilateral action by the United States government. At least not the average libertarian respondent.

climatechange

Note that the last question, asking about supporting unilateral action, is on a different scale from the other three.

 

When you drill down by type of libertarian though you start to see stark differences. Left-libertarians agree much more strongly that climate change is occurring, caused by human activity, and harmful. They are also much more in support of unilateral action to prevent climate change.

climatechangell

 

What is driving the differences between type of libertarian? Part of the story seems to be that those who think climate change is harmful are more willing to act to address it, but I suspect a large part of the story is also that some libertarians, particularly market anarchists, simply do not trust the government. Market anarchists are less likely to believe climate change is harmful or caused by humans compared to libertarians at large, but the big difference in opinion is whether the government should act on it.

Thoughts? Tomorrow I will be posting the demographics of those who took the survey.

climatechangema

Update: Updated graphs; minor coding error.

French Expatriates and Foreign Francophiles

Jacques Delacroix Culture , , , , ,

First, a definition: an expatriate is someone who lives outside the country of his birth on a more or less permanent basis. I am dealing here with French expatriates specifically, a fairly rare breed in relation to the size of the French population, rarer than English and American expatriates, for example.

The French expatriates often land in a particular town of a particular country at a particular time for no particular reason. They may have been heading somewhere else and gotten stuck along the way. They always include wives and former wives of natives who may have divorced them, or died. Coming from different epochs (such as before and after the establishment of French social democracy in the 1980s), they form historical strata. Each stratum remembers a different France, and the strata may entertain disparate and often incompatible visions of the fatherland.

They have developed new habits in the country where they live and, without knowing it, they have drifted far from their culture of origin. Many disseminate patently false notions about the country where they were raised; they do it more or less innocently because myth-making and absence go well together. Their French self is forever a young person, or even a child. Their own children are simply natives of their land of residence with a smattering of the French language and no real curiosity, forever strangers to their parents.

The Francophiles are yet another story. They are people who don’t have the luck to have been born French but who love what they imagine is French culture with a degree of repressed hysteria. No part of the world is free of them. I have bumped into them everywhere I have been; they have victimized me everywhere with their undeserved love. Many but by no means all are also francophone to some extent. Some gain standing in their own mind via their real or imagined mastery of what they have decided is a superior national culture.

They are usually very parochial, doubly so because they are fixated on France and on their own country, to the exclusion of knowledge of any other part of the world. Others are teachers of French who feel professionally obligated to revere that which they teach and, by extension, everything French. Often, they don’t even know the language very well, limited as they are by the cramped discourse of textbooks, without awareness of the vigor, of the colorfulness, and, especially, of the frequent crudeness of the real French language of both literature and everyday life. (“Cul-de-sac,” for example, means “ass of a bag.”)

Once, a long time ago, in Bolivia of all places, I observed that the two groups mixed well. It was at a Bastille Day celebration at the French consulate. The French expats and the Francophiles shared the rudimentary popular imagery of the 1789 French revolution, that beheaded a king for the sake of “public salvation,” and his pretty, frivolous young queen, just in case. (That was after storming a prison-fortress, the Bastille, that was largely undefended.)

Think of reading my book: I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography. It’s available from Amazon, under my name. I need the bucks. Please!

Minimum wage and length of poverty spells

Vincent Geloso Economics , , , , ,

I had a pre-programmed blog post on the issue of the minimum wage and poverty which was preempted by Mark Koyama (a blogger here at Notes on Liberty). The tweet is below and it has forced me to adjust the post.

Mark is absolutely right! Let me explain why with my own spin on it.

First of all, the demand curve slopes downwards – always. However, the method of adjusting to price changes (wages are a price and the minimum wage is a price control) is not an empirical constant.  I am unlikely to fire workers for a 1% in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage. Firing workers implies transaction costs that are dependent of context (for example, if I am friend with my employee, this is a transaction cost in the form of a lost friendship), firm size (I won’t fire my only employee which represents 50% of my output for a 1% hike in MW) laws (firing and hiring regulations), institutions (social institutions, reputation, norms), my clientele (how elastic is their demand) and technological alternatives. For a 1% increase, I am likely to reduce work hours or cut marginal benefits (no free soup for you). For a 10% increase, I am more likely to consider the option of firing a worker or I may shift to a new technological set that reduces my demand for labor.  It may happen rapidly or take some time, but there will eventually be an adjustment.

In any case, the minimum wage will imply some losses with a deadweight loss. Only the method by which it materializes is debatable.  By definition, some people will be hurt and generally and even if supply is super-elastic (doubtful), some suppliers (workers)  will be ejected from the market (or the quantity of labor they can supply will be ulitmately reduced). Since the minimum wage generally tends to fall on unskilled workers, this must be correlated with workers close to the poverty line.

Ideally, we’d need a measure of the minimum wage to be compared with the “at-risk” population over a long period of time in order to encapsulate all the effects of the minimum wage. The perfect measure is the “length of poverty spell” variable which has been emerging progressively from the BLS. The problem is that it is not broken down by state. Fortunately, Canada has that variable (well, a low-income variable which is a relatie poverty measure) for provinces. Inside the Survey of Labor and Income Dynamics (affectionally known as the SLID), this longitudinal variable has a span of eight years. Basically, we can know if a person has been below the low-income threshold for up to eight years. Let’s take that extreme measure and plot it against the minimum wage divided by the average wage.

As one can see from the scatter plot below, there is a more or less clear relationship between the minimum wage as a share of the average wage and the length of poverty spells. What is more impressive is that this graph is not a regression. More precisely, the provinces with the highest minimum wages (like my own province of Quebec and the province of Nova Scotia) also have the most extensive social welfare nets. Alberta,  a province with the lowest minimum wage ratio and one of the least “generous” social welfare net in Canada, is at the very bottom of the pack in terms of the persistence of poverty.

minimumwagepoverty

I think this graph acts in very modest (but clear) support to Mark’s point (which is also the point of Burkhauser, Sabia, MaCurdy and many others)

NoL Foreign Policy Results: Preliminary

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty, Politics , ,

tldr version; Libertarians are not isolationists in their foreign policy. Left-libertarians in particular are more supportive of things like NATO. Left-libertarians are also more supportive of acting on migration and climate change issues.

These are the preliminary results of the NoL Foreign Policy Survey 2017 Pilot. I will release the raw data and more results in the coming days. I am still in the process of cleaning things up.

The survey targeted self-identified libertarians through online libertarians communities (e.g. the Ron Paul Forums, reddit subreddits, facebook groups, etc.). The survey aimed to better understand the foreign policy views of self-identified libertarians based in the United States. The survey was conducted between December 23rd 2016 and January 1st 2017 and received over 600 replies.

Warning: This survey was a pilot and I discourage trying to generalize its results to the wider libertarian movement with any high degree of certainty.

Methodology:

The survey uses a survey experiment where respondents were placed into one of four alternative scenarios. Each scenario received similar questions, but had slight wording differences in two questions:

(1) whether the respondent supported providing military aid to a US ally and
(2) whether the respondent supported allowing in refugees from that country

The four scenarios were:

(1) A US ally being attacked by a neighbor – the base scenario
(2) The Baltic republics being attacked by Russia
(3) Afghanistan being attacked by Russia
(4) Taiwan ROC being attacked by China PRC

The survey can divided roughly into four parts:

(1) Military policy
(2) Migration policy
(3) Climate change policy and
(4) Trade policy

Results:
supportmilitaryaidbyattackedcountry

In the base scenario libertarians we find that the majority of libertarians favor providing military aid to a generic US ally. However that support goes down substantially when details are provided. If Afghanistan, a non-NATO major ally, were attacked it would receive support from less than 10 percent of respondents.

supportrefugee

Likewise support for allowing refugees in from the attacked country is high in the base scenario, but drops for Afghanistan. Support for allowing refugees from Taiwan or the Baltic republics is not statistically different from the base scenario.

unilateral

In the above graphs we see respondents’ support for unilateral action in free trade (“remove all trade barriers”), open borders, and addressing climate change. Support for unilateral action is almost twice as high for free trade than either support for open borders or climate change.

unilateral2

When I dig further into type of libertarian we see that left-libertarians are more willing to act on open borders and climate change than their counterparts. Almost 100 percent of market anarchists are in favor of abolishing all trade barriers.

int

Respondents are split on support for international groups like NAFTA or NATO. If we look at sub-groups within the libertarian movement (i.e. libertarians, left-libertarians, and market anarchists) we see that left-libertarians are more supportive and market anarchists are less supportive of international action.

int2

Our Daily Bread and a Horse’s Ass

Jacques Delacroix Culture , , ,

Below is an excerpt from my book I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography. You can buy it on amazon here.

A little later, the old man harnessed his plow horse to the cart. The women climbed with great caution onto the wooden benches in the back, all three in their Sunday best, including hats, and leather shoes instead of the usual wooden clogs. The old man motioned me to the seat near him, up front. While this seemed the normal place for a boy, I was suspicious because he kept cackling unnaturally and his wife reprimanded him in dialect several times from the back of the cart. Before we had gone a hundred feet, the horse started blowing powerful and odoriferous farts right into my face. It never let off until we reached the church. The old man had deliberately fed him a breakfast of oats to which the beast was unaccustomed. Everyone thought that was a good joke but the old lady was concerned about my big city sensitivities. I just thought it was the old man who was the horse’s ass but his precise planning and his foresight impressed me all the same, not to mention his control over the animal’s gut.