I love our national parks as much as the next guy (probably more, having visited every major one and dozens of smaller ones, and loving every minute of nearly every visit), but can someone tell me why the federal government owns so much of our country? Some maps tell the story. See here and here. Now comes news from the Obama administration that there are plans to make more land off limits to economic uses. See here. I understand the temptation to think of nature as benign, aesthetically valuable, and like a piece of antiquity to be preserved, but I think we go too far when we sacrifice economic progress for desert plants, tall trees, fish, and other nonhuman things. Fundamentally the claims of favoring these things for some abstract goals of perservation are antihuman. They are also often ways for politicians to serve their own interests and those of favored constituents over the general welfare.

The examples of hypocrisy from politicians on this subject are innumerable. The Obama administration favors more solar power, but Senator Feinstein wants to make sure it doesn’t happen in “her” desert. See here. The Kennedy family favors non-fossil fuels for energy, but not if it spoils their view. See here. Everyone is in favor of less reliance on foreign oil, but we don’t drill off the coast of California, so Jennifer Aniston can avoid seeing oil platforms from her Malibu mansion, and in Alaska, so caribou are not offended by our presence and the tundra is “preserved.”

Would our world really be worse off if the federal government sold all federal lands, except a limited number of areas for national parks and essential military facilities? Is it really true that the government does a better job of balancing the tradeoff between economic returns from land and preservation of land? It is time to get the government out of the business of issuing mining permits, oil drilling permits, logging permits, and on and on. There used to be a time when corporate charters were passed out by the state in this way, and the result was a disaster of exploitation, bribery of public officials, and reduced economic efficiency. One of the most important legal innovations of the past century was getting the government out of the business of telling people what business organizations they could form.

In that spirit, we should sell nearly all of the 60% of this country owned by the federal government, and use the vast sums such sales would generate to pay down some of our massive debt. Private property is not a recipe for spoliation but our best hope to get everything we can from our resources, including recreation, preserving natural beauty, minerals, and everything else the Earth has to offer. It is time to put people, all people, not just the rich ones who can afford to visit the wild places, first.

I just love the Olympics. Exhibit A for me was the face of American skier Lindsey Vonn in the starting gate last night before her gold-medal-winning race. Vonn was the overwhelming favorite, having proved herself the greatest skier in the world for the past few years. She was, however, plagued by a nasty shin injury and was only able to ski because the weather gods delayed her race by several days. She was also preceded by several near-tragic crashes of her competitors. The look on Vonn’s face was pure intensity. She embodied the human spirit of accomplish and excellence in that moment.

Exhibit B was Shaun White’s second run in the halfpipe competition. White had already won the gold before his last run, and instead of taking it easy, he pushed the envelope of human capabilities. He proceeded to perform the greatest halfpipe run of all time, doing a trick that have never been done, and, if I’d seen it on YouTube, would have been convinced it was a trick of editing.

But the Olympics got me thinking about the odd role that political history plays on the competition. Take my favorite sport of ice hockey. What would the competition look like if the Cold War was still going on? Imagine the Czechs and the Slovaks, who had an epic battle against each other last night, playing for the same team? Or how about reuniting all the Soviet republics? Or giving Finland back to Sweden (sorry to my Finish colleague Anu Bradford for even suggesting this)?How about a combined American-Canadian team, say based on an American victory in the war of 1812? We can imagine a few mighty teams had history been not that much different, but would the competition be better? Is a tournament better with a few great teams or a larger number of nearly great ones?

Compare the US and Europe. These regions have a similar number of people, similar GDP, and similar living standards. And yet the fact that we 50 are 1, and their 27 are 27, means that they send more athletes and win many more medals than we do. In fact, one European state, Germany, will likely win as many medals as the US will. We could imagine instead an Olympics with US states competing individually, say as the territories of the United Kingdom do (e.g., England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, etc.). Minnesota, California, and New York, which send most of our winter Olympians would do well, but would they do better if they competed as states? In other words, would American medal totals be higher with our states competing individually, as in Europe, or as a union?

We might expect state-based teams to produce more athletes but lose a bit of enthusiasm — who wants to hear the state anthem of Illinois (do we have one?) on the podium? We might expect more innovation in techniques, styles, coaching, and technology, but perhaps a centralized body like the USOC does a good job of learning and implementing the best of the world. It is unlikely we will ever know how many medals Americans would win on state teams, but someday we may have a competition between America and Europe on equal geographic terms. Until then, I’ll enjoy watching how incredible we humans are, no matter how trivial the goals we pursue. I’ll also continue cheering for strangers just because they live nearer to me than those they compete against, and I’ll keep getting choked up watching the Stars & Stripes fly high over the medal stand.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Jeffrey Anderson offers an alternative to Obamacare (or should we call it Pelosireidcare?). The seven provisions in the “Small Bill” seem sensible to this nonexpert. Allowing insurance to be sold interstate is likely to bring down costs and improve service — wouldn’t some competition from Geico Health Insurance be a good thing? I can already imagine the commercials. Another proposal is to cap noneconomic damages in medical malpractice suits. Again, this seems like a no-brainer.

But I was most interested in proposal #3:

Cut costs by allowing lower premiums for healthier lifestyles.  Federal regulations ban companies from offering more than a 20 percent discount to those who eat and drink in moderation, exercise, or don’t smoke.  Such regulations handcuff private cost-cutting efforts and should be eliminated.  (No increase in government spending.*)

I’ve written about this in an article forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review. You can find a version of the paper here. Based on my review of corporate nannyism, I fully endorse proposal #3 of the Small Bill.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Alan Greenspan, who was at the helm of the Fed during the relevant time period, tells us (surprise!) it wasn’t the Fed’s fault. Greenspan notes that short-term interest rates, which the Fed controls, are only loosely correlated with long-term interest rates, which are most relevant to real estate investing (think, 30-year mortgages). Therefore, the Fed (read: Greenspan) can’t be to blame.

So what caused the drop in long-term interest rates? Greenspan blames, well, capitalism. He writes:

[T]he presumptive cause of the world-wide decline in long-term rates was the tectonic shift in the early 1990s by much of the developing world from heavy emphasis on central planning to increasingly dynamic, export-led market competition.

In other words, China and others abandoned idiotic political control of markets, and the resulting flood of wealth created needed somewhere to go. It went to invest in US houses. Ergo, the lowering of rates and the rise in values.

This certainly sounds plausible, but why did China invest in my mortgage instead of Google? I’m not an economist, although sometimes I pretend, but it seems like Fed rates, which made T-bills less attractive on the margin, and silly policies about housing, such as forced lending to poor people and guarantees of Fannie and Freddie bonds, made the latter much more attractive. If Chinese investors could only get 2% return on T-bills (guaranteed by the full faith and credit of our government) but could get 8% return on investments in housing (guaranteed by the full faith and credit of our government), then why would they ever choose the former?

So I think it is probably unfair to blame the Fed or Mr. Greenspan for the crisis. It was not loose monetary policy alone that led to the state we are in. A combination of factors led to the boom and the bust. We will probably never know exactly what the relative weight of them was in causing the crisis, but they all have one thing in common — bad government policy. Sure the market acted greedily, selfishly, narrowly, and all the other ways that humans act, but that is to be expected in all states of the world. But for bad government policies, including Mr. Greenspan’s loose money policies, we wouldn’t be where we are today. The real trick is to find ways to harness the good and bad instincts of the market, something that we utterly failed to do given political pressures at home to force people to live a particular vision of the “American dream,” and given the fundamental changes in the global economy. Until we rethink the role of government in our lives, we are as likely to get this wrong as we are right.

I have the pleasure of co-leading a seminar this quarter with distinguished philosopher Brian Leiter. The seminar, entitled “Capitalism: For and Against,” (take a guess which side I’m on), meets periodically at either my home or Brian’s. About 12 students join us to discuss a reading. So far, we’ve read “A Communist Manifesto,” (how could such a silly book have caused such widespread destruction?), and “The Road to Serfdom.” For the next session, we are reading G.A. Cohen’s “Why Not Socialism?”

As it happens, my night-stand reading at the moment is Ursula Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed.” A particular idea mentioned in the novel in last night’s reading coincided with an idea from Cohen — we should care about the motives behind conduct that is subjectively and objectively desirable. Le Guin’s protagonist, Shevek, who inhabits a world of socialist anarchy, is visiting another world that resembles Earth. On his home world, there is no money, no property, and life is barren but, Shevek leads us to believe, deeply meaningful. Behind the eyes of the inhabitants of this world, plain as they are, we are told is a deep warmth of humanity. When Shevek visits the Earth-like world, he is flabbergasted at all of the bounty (think of an East German entering a West German grocery store), but disgusted by the fact that it is generated by such unclean motives, as profit and greed. After buying a coffee, which is itself a despicable act, and being treated more politely than he has ever been treated on his home world, Shevek wonders whether it is the profit that is generates the politeness, and therefore discounts it.

Cohen writes in a similar vein. He believes greed is an illegitimate and morally disgusting motive for anything: “The market is intrinsically repugnant…Every market . . .is a system of predation.”

Assuming politeness, bounty, equal treatment, and so on are products of well-functioning markets, should we care whether the underlying motives are ones that when examined in depth are philosophically troubling to us? I love my wife. I love my children. I would do anything to protect them. That is a good thing. Should we look deeply beneath that for the motives: an insecurity about being alone, a lust for the pleasures of the flesh, a desire for intellectual companionship, a gene-driven greed for perpetuating my DNA, etc. are all possible, even likely motives. But who cares? The issue is not unpacking the true reasons for why I act the way I do, but simply to look at what flows from my actions. This is, as most else is, just Adam Smith: we owe our daily bread not to benevolence but to greed. As long as getting bread is good, why should it matter whether it is because the baker loves me or sees me as purely instrumental to his own happiness?

Of course, society sometimes cares about motives — mens rea and scienter are common considerations in legal matters. But there is a limit to how much we should care about motives. When people do bad things, it may help us sort between those truly deserving of punishment and those who should escape sanction; but when people do good things, we should generally not ask why. Asking why is like looking for a subatomic answer for why there is love – the answer is that it serves human welfare. That should be enough.