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Religious Liberty for Dummies

Posted by Thom Lambert on February 9, 2012

According to Senators Barbara Boxer, Jeanne Shaheen, and Patty Murray, the Catholic Church is the real bully in the fight over whether religious employers must include coverage for contraception in the insurance policies they offer their employees.  In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the three responded to, in their words, the “aggressive and misleading campaign” against this new Obamacare mandate.  They wrote:

Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim that it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true.  Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church’s doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form.  But the millions of American women who choose to use contraception should not be forced to follow religious doctrine, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.

The three Senators seem to believe that as long as the government doesn’t force Catholic women to use birth control and the morning after pill, religious liberty is protected.  They also believe that in praying to the Almighty One (not that Almighty One) for permission not to pay for a medical intervention that offends their deeply and sincerely held religious beliefs, Catholic officials are trying to force women to follow their religious doctrine.

That’s ridiculous, and it shows how desperate the defenders of President Obama’s intrusion on individual conscience have become.  In a world in which religious employers were exempt from paying for a measure that violates their sacred beliefs, any woman who didn’t share those beliefs would be perfectly free to obtain birth control.  The Catholic Church, after all, doesn’t have the power to overrule Griswold v. Connecticut.

By contrast, in the world of Mr. Obama’s contraception mandate, Catholic officials who choose to follow their consciences by refusing to subsidize interventions that violate their religious beliefs may ultimately be thrown in jail.  That, Honorable Senators, is a full-frontal assault on religious liberty.

[More on the deeply misguided contraception mandate here.]

Posted in constitutional law, First amendment, free to choose, health care reform debate, musings, politics, regulation | 9 Comments »

What if the Government Ordered the Human Rights Campaign to Cover Conversion Therapy for Gays?

Posted by Thom Lambert on January 23, 2012

A thought experiment:

It’s late January 2016.  Newt Gingrich is President.  The House of Representatives is solidly Republican, and there’s a slight Republican majority in the Senate.  Because Republicans lack a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) remains on the books.  (The reconciliation process, which allowed the law to be enacted without supermajority support in the Senate, could not be used to repeal the law.)  The Act continues to require employer-provided insurance to provide full coverage for all preventive care measures.

Secretary Rick Santorum of the Department of Health and Human Services has determined that conversion therapy for gay males will help prevent all sorts of costly health problems.  HIV and related health problems, it seems, are extremely costly to treat and are far more common among gay men than among straight men.  HHS has determined that the most modern conversion therapies can cheaply and successfully alter sexual orientation or, at a minimum, reduce homosexual impulses so that they can be managed by homosexually oriented patients who would prefer not to engage in homosexual activity.

President Gingrich and Secretary Santorum have therefore mandated that employer-provided health insurance policies cover gay conversion therapies.  Claiming to be sensitive to the concerns of gay groups, they have included a narrow exemption for employers who don’t employ or serve significant numbers of straight people.  In reality, though, none of the major gay and lesbian advocacy groups (e.g., the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD) or publishing organizations (e.g., The Advocate, OUT Magazine) could qualify for this exemption because all employ a great many gay-affirming straight people and include outreach to heterosexuals as one of their objectives.     

Can you imagine the howls from the New York Times, the television networks, and basically every other political commentator in America?  Andrew Sullivan might just explode.  And rightly so.  Forcing gay groups to pay for a procedure that so deeply offends their core principles would be beyond the pale in a liberal society that respects personal conscience and the right of individuals to associate in groups that share their values – a right that can exist only if groups are allowed to express those values and, to the extent they aren’t hurting others, order their affairs according to them.  

So why do President Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius get a pass when they order Catholic schools, hospitals, and social service agencies to cover birth control, sterilization, and the morning after pill?  The ridiculous “exemption” they created shows how little they know about what churches actually do:  Christ’s apostles themselves wouldn’t have qualified because they, like any church worth its salt, served multitudes of nonbelievers.  Providing an extra year to come into compliance does nothing to alleviate the fundamental problem (Is the doctrinal conflict going to disappear next year?) and is a transparent attempt to deflect media attention until after the 2012 election.  There are lots of Catholics in Ohio and Pennsylvania, after all.

One might say that my analogy fails because the science doesn’t show that gay conversion therapy actually works, and it therefore wouldn’t reduce total health care costs.  But that’s beside the point.  Even if there were a therapy that could cheaply and effectively make gay people straight (i.e., a pill or a quick surgical procedure) it would still be inappropriate to force groups whose central objective is to affirm gay people and fight anti-gay bias to provide coverage for such a therapy.

My point is not to defend the Catholic Church’s views on birth control (with which I disagree), to defend gay conversion therapy (which I think is a harmful crock), or to question the mission of gay rights organizations.  Instead, I mean to point out that governments in liberal societies do not force individuals or voluntary associations to violate their consciences where their conscience-following does not violate the rights of others.  Yet another example of Obamacare’s heavy hand.

Posted in free to choose, health care reform debate, musings, politics, regulation | 10 Comments »

Welcome Baby 7B!

Posted by Thom Lambert on October 31, 2011

According to the United Nations, sometime around Halloween a newborn baby will push the world’s population above seven billion people.  Welcome to our spectacular planet, Little One!

I should warn you that not everyone will greet your arrival as enthusiastically as I.  A great many smart folks on our planet—especially highly educated people in rich countries like my own—have fallen under the spell of this fellow named Malthus, who once warned that our planet was “overpopulated.”  Although Mr. Malthus’s ideas have been proven wrong time and again, his smart and influential disciples keep insisting that your arrival spells disaster, that this lonely planet just can’t support you. 

Now my own suspicion is that modern day Malthusians, who are smart enough to know that actual events have discredited their leader’s theories, continue to parrot Mr. Malthus’s ideas because they lend support to all manner of governmental intervention into private affairs.  (These smarty-pants Malthusians, who are well-aware of their own intelligence, tend to think they can arrange things better than the “men and women on the spot” and are constantly looking for reasons to go meddling in others’ business!)  Whatever their motivation, Mr. Malthus’s disciples just won’t shut up about how our planet is overpopulated.

You should know, though, that this simply isn’t true.  The first time you hear one of Mr. Malthus’s followers decrying your very existence by insisting that our planet is overpopulated, you should ask him or her:  “Overpopulated relative to what?”  Modern Malthusians can never give a good answer to that question, though they always try.

Sometimes they say “living space.”  But that’s plain silly.  Our planet is really pretty huge.  Indeed, if all seven billion people on the planet moved to the state ofAlaska, each person would have 2,300 square feet of living space!  Now I realize lots of cities get crowded, but that’s because people choose to live in those areas—they’ve decided that the benefits of enhanced economic opportunity in a densely populated area outweigh the costs of close confines.  If they really wanted extra living space, they could easily find it in our planet’s vast uninhabited (or sparsely inhabited) regions.

Sometimes modern day Malthusians say the planet is overpopulated relative to available food.  Wrong again.  In the nations of the world where institutions have evolved to allow people to profit from coming up with new ideas that enhance welfare, individuals have developed all sorts of ways to get more food from less land.  Accordingly, food production has always outpaced population growth.  Now, modern day Malthusians will probably tell you that food prices have been rising in recent years – a sign that food is getting scarcer relative to people’s demand for it.  But that’s because governments, beholden to powerful agricultural lobbyists, have been requiring that huge portions of agricultural output be diverted to fuel production even though the primary biofuel (ethanol) provides no environmental benefit.  As usual, it’s actually bad government policy, not population growth, that’s creating scarcity.

In recent days, Mr. Malthus’s disciples have insisted that the world is overpopulated relative to available resources.  Nothing new here.  Back in the 1970s, lots of smart folks contended that the earth was quickly running out of resources and that drastic measures were required to constrain continued population growth.  One of those smarty pants was Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, who, along with his wife Anne and President Obama’s science czar John Holdren, asked (in all seriousness): “Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”  (See Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich & John P. Holdren, Ecoscience 838 (1977).)  (Ehrlich also proclaimed, in his 1968 blockbuster The Population Bomb, that “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”)

In 1980, Prof. Ehrlich bet economist Julian Simon (a jolly fellow who would have welcomed your birth!) that the booming population would raise demand for resources so much that prices would skyrocket.  Mr. Simon thought otherwise and therefore allowed Prof. Ehrlich to pick five metals whose price he believed would rise over the next decade.  As it turns out, the five metals Prof. Ehrlich selected — chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten – fell in price as clever, profit-seeking humans discovered both how to extract more from the earth and how to substitute other, cheaper substances.  Mr. Simon was not at all surprised.  He recognized that the long-term price trend of most resources points downward, indicating that resources are becoming more plentiful, relative to human needs, over time.  (Modern Malthusians may point to some recent price trends showing rising prices for some resources, especially precious metals.  It’s likely, though, that those price increases are due to the fact that central banks all over the world have been creating lots and lots of money, thereby threatening inflation and causing investors to hold their wealth in the form of commodities.)

The fundamental mistake Mr. Malthus’s disciples make, Little One, is to assume that our planet is the ultimate source of resources.  That’s just not true.  Our planet does contain lots of useful “stuff,” but it’s human ingenuity – something only you and those like you can provide – that turns that stuff into “resources.”  Take oil, for instance.  For most of human history, messy crude oil was a source of annoyance for landowners.  It polluted their water and fouled their property.  But when whale oil prices started to rise in response to scarcity (or, put differently, when the world started to look “overpopulated” relative to whale oil), some clever, profit-seeking folks discovered how to turn that annoyance into kerosene, and eventually petroleum.  Voila!  A “resource” was created!

Just as people once worried about overpopulation relative to whale oil supplies, lots of folks now worry about overpopulation relative to crude oil.  Well I’m not that worried, and you shouldn’t be either.  As oil prices rise, more and more clever profit-seekers will turn their energies toward finding new ways to obtain oil (e.g., hydraulic facturing), new techniques for reducing oil requirements (e.g., enhanced efficiency), and new substitutes for oil (e.g., alternative fuels).  Mr. Malthus’s disciples will continue to fret about the limits to growth, but the historical record is clear on this one:  Human ingenuity – the ultimate resource – always outpaces the diminution in useful “stuff.”

And so, Little Resource, your arrival on our planet should be celebrated, not scorned!  As you and your fellow newborns flex your creative muscle, you’ll develop new sources of wealth for the world.  As you do so, birth rates will plummet, as they typically do when societies become wealthier, and the demand for a cleaner environment, demand that rises with wealth, will grow.  We therefore need not worry about “overpopulation.”

We do, though, need to ensure the survival of those institutions – property rights, free markets, the rule of law – that encourage resource-creating innovation.  I, for one, promise to do my best to defend those institutions so that you and your fellow newborns can add to our planet’s resource base.

Posted in economics, entrepreneurship, environment, food, free to choose, markets, musings, regulation, technology | 10 Comments »

Google, Vertical Integration, and Beer

Posted by Josh Wright on October 20, 2011

First, Google had the audacity to include a map in search queries suggesting a user wanted a map.  Consumers liked it.  Then came video.  Then, they came for the beer:

Google’s first attempt at brewing has resulted in a beer that taps ingredients from all across the globe. They teamed up with Delaware craft brewery Dogfish Head to make “URKontinent,” a Belgian Dubbel style beer with flavors from five different continents.

No word yet from the Google’s antitrust-wielding critics whether integration into beer will exclude rivals who vertical search engines who, without access to the beer, have no chance to compete.  Yes, there are specialized beer search sites if you must know (or local beer search).  Or small breweries who, because of Google’s market share in search, cannot compete against Dogfish Head’s newest product.  But before we start the new antitrust investigation, Google has offered some new facts to clarify matters:

Similarly, the project with Dogfish Head brewery was a Googler-driven project organized by a group of craftbrewery aficionados across the company. While our Googlers had fun advising on the creation of a beer recipe, we aren’t receiving any proceeds from the sale of the beer and we have no plans to enter the beer business.

Whew.  What a relief.  But, I’m sure the critics will be watching just in case to see if Dogfish Head jumps in the search rankings.  Donating time and energy to the creation of beer is really just a gateway to more serious exclusionary conduct, right?  And Section 5 of the FTC Act applies to incipient conduct in the beer market, clearly.  Or did the DOJ get beer-related Google activities in the clearance arrangement between the agencies?

Posted in alcohol, antitrust, beer, clearance, doj, federal trade commission, google, musings | 2 Comments »

Law Review Publishing Norms and Inefficient Performance

Posted by Thom Lambert on October 20, 2011

One of my colleagues recently accepted a publication offer on a law review article, only to receive a later publication offer from a much more prestigious journal.  This sort of occurrence is not uncommon in the legal academy, where scholars submitting articles for publication do not offer to publish their work in a journal but rather solicit publication offers from journals (and generally solicit multiple offers at the same time).  One may easily accept an inferior journal’s offer before receiving another from a preferred journal. 

I’ve been in my colleague’s unfortunate position three times: once when I was trying to become a professor, once during my first semester of teaching, and once in the semester before I went up for tenure.  Each time, breaching my initial publication contract and accepting the later-received offer from the more prestigious journal would have benefited me by an amount far greater than the harm caused to the jilted journal.  Accordingly, the welfare-maximizing outcome would have been for me to breach my initial publication agreement and to pay the put-upon journal an amount equal to the damage caused by my breach.  Such a move would have been Pareto-improving:  I would have been better off, and the original publisher, the breach “victim,” would have been as well off as before I breached.  

As all first-year law students learn (or should learn!), the law of contracts is loaded with doctrines designed to encourage efficient breach and discourage inefficient performance.  Most notable among these is the rule precluding punitive damages for breach of contract:  If a breaching party were required to pay such damages, in addition to the so-called “expectancy” damages necessary to compensate the breach victim for her loss, then promisors contemplating breach might perform even though doing so would cost more than the value of the performance to the promisee.  Such performance would be wasteful.

So why didn’t I — a contracts professor who knows that a promisor’s contract duty is always disjunctive: “perform or pay” — breach my initial publication agreements and offer the jilted journal editors some amount of settlement (say, $1,000 for an epic staff party — an amount far less than the incremental value to me of going with the higher-ranked journal)?  Because of a silly social norm frowning upon such conduct as indicative of a flawed character.  When I was looking for a teaching job, I was informed that breaching a publication agreement is a definite no-no and might impair my job prospects.  After I became a professor, I learned that members of my faculty had threatened to vote against the tenure of professors who breached publication agreements.  To be fair, I’m not sure those faculty members would do so if the breaching professor compensated the jilted journal, effectively “buying himself out” of his contract.  But who would run that risk?

So I empathize with my colleague who now feels stuck publishing in the less prestigious journal.  And, while I recognize the difference between a legal and moral obligation, I would commend the following wise words to those law professors who would imbue law review publishing contracts with “mystic significance”:

Nowhere is the confusion between legal and moral ideas more manifest than in the law of contract.  Among other things, here again the so-called primary rights and duties are invested with a mystic significance beyond what can be assigned and explained.  The duty to keep a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it — and nothing else.  If you commit a tort, you are liable to pay a compensatory sum.  If you commit a contract, you are liable to pay a compensatory sum unless the promised event comes to pass, and that is all the difference.  But such a mode of looking at the matter stinks in the nostrils of those who think it advantageous to get as much ethics into the law as they can.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457 (1897).  

Posted in contracts, law school, musings | 2 Comments »

Undermining Community for Specious Public Health Benefits

Posted by Thom Lambert on August 28, 2011

We classical liberals are often criticized for undermining communitarian values by emphasizing individual liberties.  In reality, though, a liberal society (in the classical sense, not the welfare-state sense) fosters community by allowing people to associate in ways they find most meaningful.  Indeed, one of the great things about a liberal, live-and-let-live city is that it can accommodate so many communities that cater to different preferences and values:  Orthodox Jews, devout Muslims, evangelical Protestants, gays and lesbians, and various ethnic groups can create their own little communities to foster shared values.  As long as nobody injures the person or property of another, folks are free to commune as they will.

Unfortunately, the sort of liberalism that fosters the spontaneous formation of community groups can be tough to maintain, especially when governments create regulatory bodies charged with “protecting” people from improvident choices.  Those regulators, under constant pressure to “do something” in order to protect their turf, often impose rules that prevent people from communing as they will, even when they’re not hurting anybody else.

I was reminded of this point yesterday when I read that the Bloomberg administration, in the name of “public health,” is cracking down on bars that allow dogs (even in outdoor areas).  How sad for New York City.  Nothing builds community better than a collection of spaces — bars, coffeshops, diners, etc. — where neighbors can go to relax, converse, and share their lives.  And nothing is more likely to keep people coming back and to get them talking to each other than to allow them to bring their dogs.  If you don’t believe me, head down to your local dog park and watch people interact.  Nobody’s a stranger at the dog park. 

Of course, there are lots of people who are scared of dogs, or don’t like them, or believe that their mere presence renders a place unsanitary (even though millions of Americans have dogs in their homes – often in their beds – and seem to suffer no ill-effects).  Such dog phobes needn’t worry.  Profit-seeking entrepreneurs will cater to their preferences by creating dog-free spaces.  The rest of us, then, can head down to our canine-friendly pubs and bond with our fellow dog lovers.

As much as I hate to say it, the French are sometimes right.

Posted in food, markets, musings, regulation | 9 Comments »

The Economics of Gang Colors

Posted by Josh Wright on August 3, 2011

Here.  The article highlights an a paper stressing the role of gang colors as a commitment device to ensure higher quality criminals.  The mechanism works, the authors contend, because gang colors are a handicap that increases the probability of detection and thus, low quality criminals are less likely to be able to “afford” wearing them.  Here’s the WSJ description:

Like certain ostentatious displays by males in the animal kingdom, gang colors serve as a handicap, Mell argues: Yes, they make it more likely that the person wearing them will be caught. Yet they semaphore the following message: If I’m still willing to commit crimes when I have this handicap, I must be pretty good at evading the police. Incompetent criminals couldn’t get away with wearing gang colors.

Or from the paper:

In our model this brazen behavior is a solution to an enforcement problem. The central idea is that less able criminals see lower gains from continued participation in crime because they will be caught and punished more often. Lower future gains imply that reputational concerns will be less effective at enforcing honesty. Only dealing with brazen criminals will become a good way to avoid dealing with incompetent criminals, because they cannot afford to mimic the brazen behavior. The principle is similar to the selection for a handicap in evolutionary biology.

Interesting stuff.  The authors more general research question involves actions that appear to increase the probability of detection for criminals.  With respect to the specific example of gang colors, my initial reaction is that I’m skeptical that this mechanism is the dominant explanation for gang colors given their widespread use among teenagers and others who are unlikely to be highly skilled criminals and other open and notorious displays gang members take to reduce the probability of detection (e.g., wearing masks to prevent identification, use of “community” guns that reduce police ability to attribute ownership to any individual member of the gang, etc.).  Instead, I suspect that open display of gang membership, e.g. through signaling membership, is a combination of signaling status and a commitment to bear the costs of actions taken by the rest of the gang which weeds out the non-loyal by forcing prospective members to get some “skin the game.”

Posted in economics, musings | 1 Comment »

P.J. Hill — Teacher, Scholar, Mentor

Posted by Thom Lambert on April 28, 2011

My first economics professor, P.J. Hill, is retiring tomorrow after forty or so years of teaching at Wheaton College.  I wanted to take a few minutes to publicly thank him for all he did for me and for the thousands of other students who had the great fortune to sit at his feet in Wheaton’s Blanchard Hall.

I stumbled into P.J.’s Principles of Microeconomics class as a sophomore philosophy major looking to check off my gen-ed social science requirement.  From the first class session, I was hooked.  P.J.’s “economic way of thinking” (which was also the name of our terrific textbook, to which I still regularly refer) made so much sense to me.  And P.J. made sure we really understood the material.  I still remember some of the “Microthemes” he had us write.  One was a response to a kid who was embarrassed because his commodities trader father, unlike his friends’ dads, didn’t “make” anything.  I was happy to reassure the kid that his father did, in fact, make something quite important:  information.  I thought about that Microtheme when I drafted this blog post.

I also remember the day P.J. curiously began to eat a ripe, juicy apple in the middle of his lecture.  I and the other students in the front row were a little put off when he sprayed us with apple juice and blew bits of pulp on our desks.  We settled down, though, when he finally got around to the day’s topic: negative externalities.  We left class with a pretty good understanding of the concept.

The other two courses I took from P.J. – Environmental Economics and Public Choice – were similarly terrific.  In the former, I learned how an absence of property rights can create environmental degradation, while the existence of clearly defined, enforceable and transferable property rights helps accommodate both conservation and appropriate resource exploitation.  Again, the object lessons stick out – like the time P.J. had four students “fish” for paper clips (by picking them up off the floor).  The paper clips, which were redeemable for ten cents each, would be worth a quarter each in 30 seconds.  Sadly, one student figured he’d do best to jump the gun and swoop up the “fish” before they could mature.  His competitors dove to the floor after him, and the fish were quickly “caught.”  We got a different outcome when P.J. made an X on the floor with masking tape and gave each fisherman a property right to the fish in his or her quadrant.  That time around, everyone waited for the fish to mature.  Tragedy of the Commons, anyone?

P.J.’s Public Choice course helped me understand that individuals don’t cease to be rational self-interest maximizers when they enter “public service.”  That implies that a market failure is not a sufficient condition for a government fix.  One must always ask whether the governmental solution, limited by the planners’ imperfect knowledge and tendency to act self-interestedly, is likely to improve things.  You can see the influence of P.J.’s Public Choice course in these posts.

In all of his classes, P.J. peppered lectures with examples and insights from his own research.  He is a first-rate economic historian, and his written extensively, often with Terry Anderson (and once with Nobel laureate Douglass North), on the evolution of property rights.  We students would hang onto every word as he would describe, say, how the Wild West was tamer than you’d think or how the advent of barbed wire transformed property rights in the West.                

In addition to teaching me lots of stuff, P.J. helped set me on the path I now tread.  The weekend of my college graduation, he told me about a research position at the Center for the Study of American Business (now the Murray Weidenbaum Center) at Washington University in St. Louis.  When I expressed interest, he recommended me to Murray Weidenbaum, CSAB’s director and the former chairman of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.  I ended up getting the job.

At Wash U, I met some law professors who seemed to have pretty enviable jobs.  I also had the opportunity to delve into environmental policy and test the waters of academia.  P.J. had me out to Bozeman, Montana to give a presentation at the Political Economy Research Center (now Property and Environment Research Center), with which he is affiliated.  The research I presented was the basis for a couple of articles, one in The Public Interest and the other in the Yale Journal on Regulation.  Publishing those articles helped get me into law school, and into a clerkship, and into law teaching.  So, were it not for P.J., I would not be doing what I’m doing.

More importantly, though, I would not be who I am.  P.J.’s courses turned me on to the economic way of thinking.  His passion for learning lit a scholarly fire within me.  The clarity with which he communicated sophisticated ideas disabused me of the notion that “rigorous” means “inscrutable.”  The way he wove his own scholarship into classroom presentations – sort of inviting students to join him on his own intellectual journey – helped me see that there’s no dichotomy between teaching and scholarship, that the best teachers are scholars, and the best scholars, teachers.  His integration of his Christian faith with his teaching and scholarship helped me view teaching as a divine calling, a perspective that makes a sweet profession that much sweeter.  I am, in short, a product of P.J. Hill.  And I am grateful.

Posted in economics, Education, musings | 3 Comments »

Penn Law’s Wolff on Labor Issues and the Gay Community

Posted by Thom Lambert on April 5, 2011

University of Pennsylvania law professor Tobias Wolff says that if you’re gay, you should support expansive collective bargaining rights for labor unions. Writing at the Huffington Post, he recently identified the promotion of labor unions as “one of the most important priorities for our community at this moment,” and he urged gay people “to contribute our voices, our efforts and our resources to the existential struggle that the labor movement is currently waging against the Republican forces seeking to cripple the right of workers to collectively bargain and roll back workplace protections.”

According to Professor Wolff, there are “three basic reasons” why gay people should “be putting feet on the streets and money on the table to support labor.”

He first contends that “labor rights is an LGBT issue” because “LGBT Americans come from the same economic and demographic origins as all Americans.” Presumably he means that since lots of Americans benefit from unions’ expansive collective bargaining rights, and since there’s no reason to believe gay people will be underrepresented among those beneficiaries, solidarity with organized labor should be a priority for gays.

Next, he notes that “labor unions have been showing up for years on the issue of LGBT equality.” As an example, he points to the website of the public employee union AFSCME, which “reiterates AFSCME’s commitment to LGBT equality and offers a clearinghouse of online resources and a link to a sign-up sheet for the AFSCME Pride network.” In light of these sorts of affirmations, he says, support for expansive labor union rights is simply a matter of “reciprocal obligation.”

Finally, he contends that gay people should jump on the pro-labor bandwagon in order to win political favor. “[T]his urgent fight over the future of labor and workers’ rights is where the energy in American politics is today,” he asserts. Although the gays do like to keep up with the latest trends (and how!), Wolff’s argument ultimately appeals to more than just a desire to stay trendy: “We need to be visibly showing up and contributing our efforts, so that our allies in labor, in state legislatures, and in political parties and organizing committees around the country will know that we were there when it mattered.”

I must respectfully disagree with Prof. Wolff.  Support for the rights of organized labor unions should not be, as he says, “one of the highest priorities of the LGBT community today — fully on a par with the effort to secure … relationship rights.”

Is it not self-evident that the elimination of state-sponsored discrimination — bans on gay adoptions, the Defense of Marriage Act’s denial of 1,100 federal benefits to legally wed same-sex couples, denials by states of various rights afforded to married couples, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which is still in effect), etc. — are way more important to gay people than the right of public sector unions to engage in collective bargaining over pensions and termination provisions?  That the matters are not “fully on a par”?  Not to Prof. Wolff, apparently.

The three reasons he articulates for equating labor union rights with relationship rights are far from convincing.  The first — the fact that “LGBT Americans come from the same economic and demographic origins as all Americans” – proves too much.  If gay people are really representative of all Americans, then some gays — say, public school teachers – benefit from expansive rights for public sector unions, and other gays — say, business executives in high tax brackets — are harmed by them.  To be fair, Wolff does suggest that gay people may be disproportionately impacted by reduced employment benefits because they lack various legal protections affored to others, but doesn’t that suggest that the real problem, the place where gays should focus their energies, is the lack of equal protection?  Moreover, one could make a strong argument that gay people, who have fewer dependents on average than straight people, have less need for lucrative employee benefits.  In any event, Wolff’s initial argument is hardly compelling.

Neither is his second argument.  Surely the fact that a group expresses support for gay equality and offers gay people various resources does not create a “reciprocal obligation” on the part of gay people to support all that group stands for.  Does Wolff think gay people have an obligation:

  • to support Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup in their opposition to derivatives regulation? 
  • to support Monsanto’s efforts to avoid regulation of genetically modified organisms and rBST? 
  • to support Aetna’s opposition to various mandates under Obamacare? 
  • to encourage additional financial support for AIG? 
  • to endorse a BP plan to limit liability for oil spills? 
  • to call their congressmen to echo requests by Chevron and Shell to increase offshore oil drilling? 
  • to join Bristol Myers Squibb and GlaxoSmithKline in their efforts to prevent the illegal production of patented AIDS drugs in Africa? 
  • to support AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile? 
  • to back a plan by Waste Management, Inc. to streamline the permitting process for landfills?  

I doubt he would call on gay people to take any of these stances.  But each of the listed companies — Goldman, B of A, Citigroup, Monsanto, Aetna, AIG, BP, Chevron, Shell, Bristol Myers, GSK, AT&T, and Waste Management — is included on the Human Rights Campaign’s list of the “top businesses that support equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees.”  If an expression of support for gay rights and the provision of benefits to gays were enough to create a “reciprocal obligation” to provide support, gay people would have to spend all their time pushing causes!

This brings us to Wolff’s last, undoubtedly most important, argument: that gay people should support organized labor now so that organized labor feels compelled return the favor when the gays have an issue to push.

Here, I depart from Prof. Wolff — and from the herd of independent minds comprising the leadership of the gay community — on a most fundamental level.  At this point in American history, I believe the best way for gay people to make equality gains is via a bottom-up, not a top-down, approach.  Gays should stop running to the government for additional protections from private actors (though they should vigorously oppose state-sponsored discrimination), and should instead concentrate on changing the hearts and minds of their friends and neighbors. 

And guess how you do that?  By being yourself.  By going through your workaday life, being your “best self” and expressing your own beliefs and convictions — religious, political, or otherwise — because they’re yours, not because someone dictated that you must, by virtue of your sexual orientation, hold them.

So, if you’re a gay person and you think collective bargaining by public sector unions is bankrupting state and local governments while fattening the civil service class, go gripe about it to your Republican neighbor over a beer.  In doing so, you’ll be promoting the sort of social change that will ensure real equality for gay people in the future.

Posted in musings, politics | 7 Comments »

What search bias would really look like

Posted by Geoffrey Manne on April 4, 2011

A friend sent me a link to this Simon Rich “Shouts and Murmurs” from the New Yorker last year.  Somehow I missed it at the time.  It’s pretty funny.  A taste:

My favorite Google feature is Google Dictionary. Whenever I need a word defined, I just type it into the search box and the meaning pops right up. It’s really convenient, but sometimes the definitions can be strange. For example, here are some words I looked up recently on Google Dictionary.

* * *

Jesus Christ: A guy who made people’s lives much easier and then was crucified. Sound familiar?

* * *

Thank You: A thing it wouldn’t kill people to say.

Posted in google, musings | 1 Comment »

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