A happy ten-year anniversary to the case people love to hate

01/09/202001/10/2020 Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics campaign finance, Citizens United, First Amendment

This month marks the ten-year anniversary of one of the most despised and misunderstood Supreme Court cases: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

I love Citizens United. It stands as perhaps the most important First Amendment decision of the last decade. Yet it’s come to symbolize the illicit marriage between money and power, while what actually happened in the case is largely an afterthought. I remember encountering an enraged signature-gatherer outside a Trader Joe’s a few years ago who was engaged in one of the many campaigns to amend the Constitution to put an end to Citizens United. I thought he might have a coronary when I told him that it was one of my favorite Supreme Court decisions. I deeply regret not asking him if he could rehearse for me the facts of the case. Maybe he would’ve surprised me.

So what did Citizens United actually say? The law at issue banned corporations from using general treasury funds for electioneering, with civil and criminal penalties for corporations that spent money to speak on pressing political issues of the day. The Supreme Court said that a small-time political organization (that happened to be incorporated), Citizens United, could not be banned from publishing a film critical of a presidential candidate. It’s hard to find speech of a higher order of significance than that.

Citizens United held that government cannot ban political expenditures just because people choose to speak through the corporate form. This is a classic example of an old rule–government cannot censor speech based on the identity of the speaker.

Much of the fury over Citizens United is premised on a guttural abhorrence for the corporation. But corporations are just groups of people who have chosen to organize through a particular structure. And most don’t realize that the law at issue in Citizens United also banned unions from using general treasury funds for electioneering communications.

Much of the popular criticism of the case that I’ve seen seems to believe that Citizens United was the first case to establish that corporations had First Amendment rights. It wasn’t. In fact, not even the dissenters in the case would’ve held that corporations lack such rights. That was an uncontroversial and settled matter. And it should be obvious as to why. If corporations don’t have First Amendment rights, then the New York Times doesn’t have First Amendment rights, along with many other media organizations. (I’ve heard the excuse that freedom of the press would still protect media organizations independently, which is a misunderstanding of the freedom of the press, which doesn’t offer greater speech protections to media than non-media).

Citizens United gets a bad break, and I wish it a happy anniversary.

Nightcap

01/08/202001/08/2020 Brandon Christensen Links British politics, economic development, Kurdistan, Russian culture

Russia’s brief encounter with the sexual revolution Daniel Kalder, UnHerd
The strange death of libertarian England Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
Did Iran’s missile attacks carry message for the Kurds? Dana Menmy, Al-Monitor
A happy family beach in Puerto Vallarta Jacques Delacroix, Liberty Unbound

My Back to the Land Movement

01/08/2020 Rick Weber Culture, Liberty internet, media

Of course there’s no such thing as a Golden Age–some forgotten time in the medium-past where things were unambiguously better. The past is full of backwards savages and hard living. And even so, you can’t go home.

But I’ve got this suspicion that back in my day the Internet was better. It didn’t take itself too seriously, and so was actually worth while. But at some point in the last decade (maybe earlier) things changed for the worse. The Internet, like all the rest of the world, just isn’t what it could be–what it should be!

I’m being at least a little hipstery here–it was cool before it was cool, but now it’s uncool because it’s popular. But the truth is, the crappiness that is Facebook is just a reflection of a large swath of consumers. And I’m allowed to opt out.

Sitting on the Internet at the start of 2020, I feel like I’m sure I would have in 1970. Everything is bullshit and I don’t want anything to do with it. I want to buy a school bus and drive to some part of the country nobody cares about and start a farm. Of course the truth is, I really have no business going back to the land. I’ve taken up gardening as a hobby and learned that it’s hard.

But I do have this imagined past on the Internet I can attempt to go back to. I’m going to make an effort to return to the Internet of the early 2000’s. The Internet that Craigslist (for example) still protects–simple, excellent, and not trying to eat the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to use the Big Corporate Internet. I’m only imagining my packets being sent via artisinal servers lovingly tended to by ye olde sysadmin.

What made the Small Internet great was the artisinal content. Weird stuff made and shared by weird people. That stuff is still out there. The Big Internet filters still capture it sometimes. But the marketers have gotten to the filters that used to serve us so well. Reddit just isn’t the same as a Conde Nast property.

One move I’ve made is to join MetaFilter, a social media site that goes back to 1999! So far it’s been a delightful place (without sucking me in the way Reddit used to). Hitting the random button brought me Where’s Wallace–an homage to The Wire, which is still worth re-watching. A more recent post introduced me to an excellent advent calendar that brought more new and weird things across my radar.

Why should this experiment matter?

Partly this is an act of civil society. It’s not all markets and government out there. We’ve got this space to share and improve our public spaces. The Internet is one of those spaces and my Small Internet project is sort of like making an effort to walk through my neighborhood instead of just going back and forth from the freeway.

It’s also an exercise in questioning implicit assumptions in how I engage with this part of the world.

I like Stephen Wolfram‘s notion of exploring the computational universe for useful programs. You don’t even need to take a metaphorical leap in applying the idea to media consumption habits. There’s a lot more “content” (facts, opinions, entertainment, editorial judgement, comments sections, provocations, etc.) out there than I can (or want to) deal with. So I have to choose some sort of filter. Once upon a time, Facebook was a great filter, then Reddit, but now I want to try something different.

I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for yet. But I’m going to wander off into the computational universe in search of a better Internet, less encumbered with the interests of behemoths and more closely tied with serendipity, good humor, and those weird human things that made the back-in-my-day-Internet so much better.

A Lesson in Inventing Your Own Statistics

01/08/202001/08/2020 Joakim Book Economics, Philosophy Facts Matter, housing bubble, statistics, statistics and lies

Nothing makes me happier than pointing out when someone is wrong.

I admit, that’s a pretty sad life. And for some unfathomable reason that doesn’t endear me to the person who uttered the incorrect statement – which it really should as I’m correcting some mistaken belief of theirs, assisting them on the path to truth.

Perhaps, as Jonathan Haidt teaches us, my endeavour is a hopeless one as approaching truth is forever clouded by confirmation bias. Polarization runs rampant and scientific disciplines are scarred by replication crises and publication bias.

I don’t take issue with any of those points: reduce my ambitions to “a little less wrong” and what follows still holds.

A few days after the Riksbank had upped its interest rate to 0% last month, Daniel Lacalle, a Spanish economist, author and fund manager – and whose musings are usually quite insightful – decided to vent his (questionable) objections to central banks and negative interest rates (NIRP) in a very strange way:

Deliver a bunch of vague one-liners about monetary policy and unsustainable capital markets.
Make shit up about Sweden and Swedish capital markets.

Obviously, I don’t mind too much the rhetoric of those who vehemently oppose central banks, but I do mind people pulling numbers out of their behinds and just inventing things about the world that clearly are not true.

So let’s do some fact-checking.

Ok, @dlacalle_IA what are you doing? You can't just invent things because you like how they sound – what, you a #bitcoiner?

I’m glad you want to write about Sweden and monetary policy – I just wish you did it much better. @mises https://t.co/QvzvybKvIL 1/

— Joakim Book (@joakimbook) January 7, 2020

It’s apparently really bad for governments to have public debt – and negative interest rates allegedly work like crack-cocaine for politicians in their endless desire for more and more and more underfunded expenditures. Spend away, minister!

Except that many (non-crisis) countries such as Sweden aren’t borrowing. In fact, Sweden’s debt-to-GDP ratio is at its lowest point since 2012 and has been dropping like a stone since about the time that the Riksbank first lowered its policy rate to below 0%. In fact, as the Riksbank sits on over 35% of the outstanding government debt, there’s been quite a scramble among commercial banks to meet their capital requirements; there aren’t enough bonds to go around. The big macro debate in Sweden right now is over how much more the government ought to spend given that the debt is so small.

My favorite part is when Lacalle starts inventing numbers to support his case. Strangely enough, he’s arguing that NIRP fuels an unsustainable boom such that increasing share prices and property prices (things that most of us individually tend to think are good or at least harmless) are, in Lacalle’s mind, actually evidence of how bad life is.

Ye, I too hate it when my retirement fund or house go up in value.

Sweden’s “Real estate price index has increased 50 percent (from 160 points to 240).”

The official statistics agency, Statistics Sweden, reports a +17 increase in broad real estate indices since early 2015, but they only include data until late-2018. The index is also on a completely different level, suggesting that Lacalle used some other source.

Using numbers from Ekonomifakta we find house price increases of 9% and 19% across various regions from Q1 2015 (when the Riksbank NIRP policy began) to Q3 2019. Again, wrong index numbers so couldn’t have been Lacalle’s source.

But maybe house prices have increased some in the last few months such that Lacalle’s 50% number is correct? No, they’ve been flat, reports the realtor industry organization Svensk Mäklarstatistik.

Searching high and low for a Swedish house price index that conforms to Lacalle’s peculiar range (160 to 240), I finally found a promising one at Trading Economics:

Trading econ Sweden House Price Index.png

Interestingly enough, Lacalle seems to have misread the chart; the index value for Feb 2015 is around 190 – not 160 – producing a much more reasonable +26% increase over the last five years. Even that, as we’ve seen with the more reputable sources above, might be tad exaggerated.

2. Sweden’s stock market is up “more than 20%”

Next up: the stock market – always a grateful subject for unsubstantiated rants.

“more than 20%” is cheating as technically anything above “20%” would work. Curiously enough, no index for the Swedish stock market shows those numbers between Feb 18, 2015, and today:

OMXS30, a commonly quoted index that does not include dividends, is up 8% since then.
Using indices that do account for (reinvested) dividends, OMXSPI shows 27.5% gain since NIRP was introduced;
OMXS30GI shows a 30.5% gain;
and OMXSCAPGI reports a 52% return.

Then again, if gradually increasing stock markets are a bad thing, then why didn’t Lacalle go with the highest, most inflated number he could find?

3. “Average residential index” is apparently up 27%

Not a statistics I’m familiar with, but I refer the reader to (1) above for sources on property prices.

4. “nonreplicable assets have risen between 30 and 70 percent”

First: that’s quite a range, Sir.
Second: ye, I’ve never heard that term before (let alone something to measure it) – and neither, it seems, has Google. I suspect Lacalle invented some more numbers to complement his already fake-y statistics.

Tl;dr – don’t just make shit up, kids. Do look into your claims before you mindless utter them. You may be entitled to your own opinion (actually not really), but you can’t just believe whatever you want, making shit up along the way.

Nightcap

01/07/202001/07/2020 Brandon Christensen Links Brexit, Iran, Morocco, sanctions

War with Iran: the target package Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
A century of sanctions Benjamin Coates, Origins
The tragedy of the liberal middle class Jonathan Rutherford, New Statesman
The novel Morocco had to ban Adam Shatz, NYRB

A blatant campaign-finance boondoggle

01/07/2020 Ethan Blevins Law, Liberty, Politics campaign finance, First Amendment

The City of Seattle is poised to pass a plainly unconstitutional campaign-finance law later this month. The bill would limit contributions to political action committees that are not controlled by or connected to a candidate to $5000 per election cycle. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which would govern the outcome of any litigation, has already said several times that limiting contributions to independent PACs (meaning independent of a candidate’s campaign) violates the First Amendment.

The rationale is pretty straightforward. Any limit on political spending is a limit on speech, so it must satisfy the First Amendment. In Buckley v. Valeo, the United States Supreme Court said that contribution limits directly to candidates are usually okay because they (arguably) reduce the likelihood of corrupt quid pro quo exchanges between candidates and donors. But Buckley struck down limits on independent expenditures (meaning expenditures that aren’t donated to a candidate but speak independently for or against a candidate). Independent expenditures, unlike direct contributions, are not coordinated or controlled by the candidate, so there is less of a risk that an independent expenditure is actually an illicit quid pro quo. Since limits on independent expenditures restrict speech without actually doing anything to prevent corruption, they violate the First Amendment.

Contributions to PACs that engage in independent expenditures are basically the same as independent expenditures–there isn’t a direct connection to a candidate, so there simply is no genuine risk of corruption. The City of Seattle probably knows this, and they either don’t care or they hope to change the state of the law. I look forward to the forthcoming judicial rebuke.

Really, I find the entire premise behind limits on either contributions or expenditures to be highly dubious. While there are no doubt a few instances where a contribution to a candidate is given in direct exchange for some future favor once the candidate wins office, the vast majority of contributions are not that. They’re donations to support a candidate because his platform reflects the donor’s policy preferences. Most corrupt exchanges of money, when they do occur, almost certainly occur under the table and outside the context of highly regulated campaign contributions. Thus, contribution limits penalize a wide range of legitimate political speech to get at a vanishingly small (and unknowable) number of malefactors.

Defenders of campaign-finance laws tend to emphasize the huge amount of political spending as per se evidence of the need for reform. (When you compare the amount of political spending to other spending in the economy, it becomes quite clear that the amount of money in electoral politics simply isn’t that much). This claim that money in elections is fundamentally bad has always struck me as bizarre. That money is spent by both sides on political speech that informs the public. Why should we assume that this is a bad thing? Of course all political speech has a partisan aim–to convince voters to vote for so-and-so. But the information hardly compels voters to do so. At the end of the day, it seems much better to have a public informed by politically motivated communications than to have less information.

Campaign-finance advocates also like to point out that candidates who receive the most money tend to win. Again, it isn’t obvious why this is a bad thing. It seems rather obvious that popular candidates will attract both dollars and votes, not because they get lots of money, but because they’re popular. This is a classic failure to acknowledge the difference between correlation and causation. To date, no significant evidence has surfaced demonstrating that dollars cause votes.

And what about the concern over undue influence? Of course, politicians may be responsive to high-dollar donors. But again, this is a correlation issue. The NRA gives money to candidates who support the NRA’s policy preferences. When the candidate reaches office and fights gun control, is it because of the NRA’s support, or was the NRA’s support prompted by the candidate’s pre-existing policy platform? Over and over, the deeply felt convictions of campaign-finance advocates seem to rest on a house of cards.

In any case, even if risk of quid pro quo corruption is a valid reason to restrict speech, Seattle’s bill goes well beyond that rationale. PACs engage in core political speech, as do the individuals who donate to them. That speech merits protection.

Nightcap

01/06/202001/06/2020 Brandon Christensen Links Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, Iran, Qassem Soleimani

The sneaky rise of “common wisdom” in Middle East studies Peter Henne, Duck of Minerva
War with Iran is not inevitable Hussein Ibish, Bloomberg
The Soleimani killing leaves Iran with few options Ali Mamouri, Al-Monitor
Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, facts, ideology, and the Middle East Notes On Liberty

Small thought on calls for societal discussions on the ethics of cryptosystems

01/05/202001/11/2020 Chhay Lin Lim Current Events, Liberty cryptocurrency

When people say that we should involve society in discussing the ethics of cryptosystems and blockchain, we should ask ourselves why society is suddenly paying attention to the strides we’re making in the cryptospace. Where does this attention come from?

Back in 2011, society was considering us weird and misinformed. Encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments were spoken about openly in the cryptospace and no one paid much attention.

6-7 years later, after Bitcoin has shown it’s not just a fad, some groups within society have particularly paid close attention to cryptosystems and are now leading the discourse of what they call “discussions for society’s sake”. Who are they and what are their interests? Banks, central banks and national governments. They’re trying to shape the discourse around cryptosystems, because (a) banks are afraid of becoming obsolete by cryptosystems, (b) central banks are afraid of losing control over monetary policy, and (c) governments are afraid that their national currencies will be outcompeted by cryptocurrencies and their inability to tax and trace crypto payments. When they call for societal discussions about the ethics and consequences of cryptosystems, they thus enter the discussions from a position of fear. Can we then really have substantial discussions with them?

Or will they enter the discussions already motivated to overregulate cryptosystems – spoiling everything beautiful about cryptosystems so that their operations are not threatened?

My main point: be careful of those who say we need more public discussions on cryptosystems. Their calls sound noble, but they may have hidden agendas and don’t enter discussions with an open mind to learn about the beauty of cryptosystems.

Example case of this: Benjamin Lawsky and BitLicense.

Nightcap

01/05/202001/05/2020 Brandon Christensen Links assimilation, Iran, Kama muta, state capacity

Becoming “white”: the much-maligned notion of assimilation Peter Skerry, CRB
Kama muta: a new term for that warm, fuzzy feeling we all get Alan Fiske, Aeon
Moral blackmail and salvation by faith (Iran) Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
Should libertarians heart state capacity? Arnold Kling, askblog

Sunday Poetry: Halal Cookery by the SS

01/05/202001/05/2020 Alexander Albrecht Books, Culture, History, Liberty David Motadel, Halal, History, Islam, Nazi Germany, poetry, SS, Sunday, Wehrmacht

First of all: Happy New Year Peeps!

I am trying my best to get some routine in blogging by sticking to this series. However, I do not know if I can still pull it off during the upcoming finals. We will see.

This week’s Poetry is less poetic yet very much informative (at least to me). David Motadel in his book “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War” reconstructs the bizarre relationship between Nazi Germany and Islam (and thus sheds light on another Myth of the Nazi Regime). What sounded completely counterintuitive to me, was this short passage on the halal cookery courses organized by the SS:

“In the end, both the Wehrmacht and the SS also took Islamic food regulations into consideration. In his instructions of 1942, Niedermayer ordered to ensure that the dietary requirements of Muslim soldiers, especially the ban on pork, were respected. Similar instructions were issued for Arab Wehrmacht soldiers. The SS went even further here. In July 1943, Himmler personally instructed Berger to find out “what Islam prescribes to its soldiers with regard to food” and added that he wanted to ensure that religious rules were observed. Shortly afterwards, Berger informed Himmler that the soldiers were not allowed to eat pork or drink alcohol. The Reichsführer-SS reacted promptly and ordered: “All Islamic members of the Waffen-SS and the police are granted as an unbreakable special right that, in accordance with their religious rules, they are never given pork as well as sausage containing pork and never alcohol to drink. An equally valuable diet is guaranteed in any case.” The SS even organized halal cookery courses near Graz.”

I wish you all a pleasant Sunday.