Maverick Philosopher

I Must Not be a Serious Blogger

On the Typepad start-up page, there is the following come-on:

Are You a Serious Blogger? Prove it. Put ads on your blog to get paid for your hard work and give it a more professional look.

The underlying assumption is curious:  an activity is serious if it makes make money and because it makes money; the very same activity is unserious if it does not.  I expand on this theme in Work, Money, Living and Livelihood.  You will have guessed that I reject the assumption.

Not that I have anything against money or its (ordinate) pursuit.  Nor do I have anything against economic inequality. If your talent and hard work and good fortune have led you by legal means to a net worth  thousands of times greater than mine, then I salute you.  The notion that a legitimate function of government is wealth redistribution is a socialist abomination and of late an 'Obamination.'   I fail to see any good reason to accept John Rawl's Difference Principle, the thesis that socioeconomic inequalities are justified only if they make the worse off better off than they would have been without the inequalities.  There is no problem with economic inequality as such. 'Economic justice' is a junk phrase on a par with 'social justice.'

So my objection to the above assumption does not stem from any aversion to the lean green or its unequal distribution.  What I object to is a conceit found as much on the Left as on the Right, namely, that 'seriousness' and 'success' are spelled with dollar signs, that the only value is economic value.

Finally, the notion that ads give a blog a more professional look is absurd.  They are just so much distracting clutter.  And if they move,  it is even worse.  Ads are gimmicks to turn a buck; they make a site appear less professional and less serious.

The Fiscal Irresponsibility of Liberals in the United States of Ponzi

Paul Krugman as case in point, here:

There’s been some hysteria about the administration’s new estimate that the cumulative deficit will be $9 trillion over the next decade. Don’t get me wrong: this is bad. But it’s being treated as an inconceivable sum, far beyond anything that could possibly be handled. And it isn’t.

What you have to bear in mind is that the economy — and hence the federal tax base — is enormous, too.

Please note the typical leftist tactic of imputing mental instability to those who dissent from liberal-left ideas: you are 'hysterical' if you question the wisdom of running massive debt and thinking that we can spend our way out of it.  To take a second example, if you point out the very real threat of radical Islam, the leftist will call you an 'Islamaphobe' which of course implies that your concern is not rational but simply an irrational fear.  Examples can be multiplied.  Oppose the morality of homosexual practices and you are a 'homophobe.'  Obama treats criticism of his socialized medicine proposals as fear-mongering.  This shows what little respect liberals and leftists have for their fellow citizens.  It is a  sign of  profound disrespect for one's interlocutor when one treats his thoughts and utterances as mere symptoms of an underlying psychological malaise.  But that's the Left for you.  They are elitists.  They don't respect you, but they want to control you.

Note also Krugman's point about the size of the federal tax base.  The Feds have plenty of opportunity to fleece the taxpayer.  And that is what they will do.

Now read something from an economist with his head screwed on properly, Nouriel Roubini, The United States of Ponzi:

A government that will issue trillions of dollars of new debt to pay for this severe recession and socialize private losses may risk becoming a Ponzi government if--in the medium term--it does not return to fiscal discipline and debt sustainability.

A country that has--for over 25 years--spent more than income and thus run an endless string of current account deficit--and has thus become the largest net foreign debtor in the world (with net foreign liabilities that are likely to be over $3 trillion by the end of this year)--is also a Ponzi country that may eventually default on its foreign debt if it does not, over time, tighten its belt and start running smaller current account deficits and actual trade surpluses.

Advertising and the Lure of the Lucre

I received an e-mail from a fellow who offered me $35 to run an ad on the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms page of this site for a alcoholism/drug addiction resource. I declined the offer for the same reason I don't display any money-making gimmicks such as 'tip jars.' The work I do on this site is a labor of love and an end in itself. To commercialize it would be to sully it. Of course, I have no objection to someone else turning a buck from his online work. If you need money, go ahead and try to earn some by any legitimate means and if this involves cluttering your site with advertising and such, it's a free country. But if you have enough of the lean green, then why not be content with what you have and turn your mind to the nonutilitarian?

"But what if he offered you $3,500?" Well, if I don't need $35, why would I need $3,500 or $35,000?

They say every man has his price. Suppose you were offered $1,000 to kill a defenseless old lady who lives by herself in an outlying area. You wouldn't do it, would you? But what if you were offered a million or ten million? Suppose she is near death, of no use to herself or anyone else, and no one cares whether she lives or dies. Suppose not even she cares whether she lives or dies. Upon hearing such an offer, a typical human brain would go into rationalization overdrive. But again, if you don't need a thousand why do you need a million?

Money, like sex, has an astonishing delusive power, a power to corrupt and distort, so much so that many think it the root of all evil. That cannot be right, of course, as a little thought will show: the most one can say is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evils. See Money, Sex, Power, and Fame and Radix Omnium Malorum. Nevertheless, money makes people crazy and they have a hard time thinking clearly about it. They think it will buy them happiness when at the most it will buy them the absence of certain forms of misery. Just as absurd is the notion promoted in the silliest song of all time, John Lennon's Imagine, that the abolition of money is the way to human flourishing:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

It says something that this asinine exercise in the utopian  is considered one of the greatest songs of all time. I am referring to the lyrics, not the music, which is not bad. 

Work, Money, Living and Livelihood

Prevalent attitudes toward work and money are curious. People tend to value work in terms of money: an occupation has value if and only if it makes money, and the measure of its value is how much money it makes. If what you do makes money, then it has value regardless of what it is you do.  And if what you do does not make money, then it lacks value regardless of what it is.

 

A man stands on a street corner, Bible in hand, and preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ. Passersby regard him as of no account, as a loser, a bum, a fanatic. They give him a wide berth and would be embarrassed to be seen associating with him. But let the fellow clean himself up, get himself admitted to a divinity school, earn a degree and become an assistant pastor somewhere, and suddenly he has social status of sorts. For now his preaching is a livelihood, a means of attaining a comfortable living standard, and he is now a serious and productive member of society. He is now of account and is known to be such at the local bank. He amounts to something in the economic and social currency of the realm. As the Danish Socrates might have said, he has learned how to make a living from the fact that another man was crucified.  The allusion, of course, is to Kierkegaard.

A novelist sits in her garret and scribbles away day by day. Her relatives and acquaintances think her a failure despite two published novels. You see, they fell stillborn from the press and she barely covered the costs of writing them. When she explains that she lives for her art, some smile indulgently, others display demeanors that run from quizzical to scornful, but all mock her behind her back. For it is clear to them that she is wasting her time on a lot of nonsense. But let the novelist hit paydirt, and all changes. Now she is of account. Scorn turns to envy. She is on her way to becoming a person of substance in one of the more crass senses of this irridescent word. For now she has found a way to turn a buck from her writing, and that confers value upon it.

Suppose there were no way to make a living from philosophy, or that one’s chances of making a living from it were about as good as a chess player’s from chess. Suppose, in other words, that philosophy had no place in university curricula and that there were no teaching jobs. How much philosophy would be published? How many journals and presses would go under? How many introductory texts would see the light of day? What would become of the professional organizations, the conferences and congresses and the rest of all that philosophically marginal busy-ness? How many ‘philosophers’ would abandon philosophy and end up in real estate?

Would it be a bad thing if there were no way to live from philosophy? The answer is not obvious and indeed depends on one’s conception of philosophy. Consider a related question: Would it be a bad thing if no one were able to make a living from religion? In thinking about these questions, you may want to consider the examples of Paul the tentmaker, Spinoza the lensgrinder, and Thoreau the surveyor.

What they lived for, and what they lived from, were kept distinct. An exemplary modus vivendi if you want my opinion.

A Further Thought on State-Run Lotteries: The Morality of Accepting a Payout

In Good Societies and Good Lives I argued against the morality of state-run lotteries. Now let's consider the morality of accepting a payout. Suppose you win big, in the millions. Chances are excellent that this will ruin you for the rest of your life, but that is not my present point. Suppose you can handle the windfall, the onslaught of long-lost cousins, the openly-displayed envious hatred of your 'friends,' the army of 'financial planners' and tax advisors who will beat a path to your door, etc. Aren't the winnings ill-gotten gains?

The Irrationality of Playing the Lottery

I have posted several times over the years on the irrationality of playing the lottery and on the immorality of state sponsorship and promotion (via deceptive advertising) of lotteries.  The following e-mail, however, raises an interesting question that gives me pause:

As I was reading this story of an impoverished young rancher who won $88 million net with a Powerball ticket, I was wondering whether you'd allow that a case could be made for the rationality of his gamble. The young man and his whole family were in desperate financial circumstances with no way to cover back taxes, livestock loans, etc. They faced foreclosures, eviction, etc. The young man bought one ticket. He was not a chronic heavy lotto-gambler. The one ticket did not make his situation worse. Arguably, the lottery gamble was his only hope of salvaging his situation. If you have only ONE way to save yourself, the odds don't really matter.

Actually, according to the account linked to above, the cowboy bought $15 worth of tickets.  So he bought more than one ticket.  But no matter.  Let us assume that this $15 was the only money he ever spent on the lottery.  And let's also assume that the cowpoke was at the end of his rope -- pun intended -- facing foreclosure and imminent residency on Skid Row.  We may also safely assume that the young man will never again play the lottery.  (For he seems resolved not to fritter away his winnings  on loose women and fast cars.) The question is whether it was rational for him in his precise circumstances to spend $15 on lottery tickets.

 

Now one question to ask is whether the rationality of a decision can be judged ex post facto.  I would say not.  A rational agent agent is one who chooses means that he has good reason to believe are conducive to the ends he has in view.  A rational decision is one made calmly and deliberately and with 'due diligence' on the basis of the best information the agent has available to him within the limited time he has at his disposal for acquiring information.  A rational decision cannot be rendered irrational by a bad outcome, and an irrational decision cannot be rendered rational by a good outcome.

 

So I am inclined to say that our cowboy made an irrational decison when he decide to spend $15 on a chance to win millions.  The fact that, against all odds, he won is irrelevant to the rationality of his decision. The decision was irrational because the chances of winning anything significant were astronomically small, whereas the value of  $15 to someone who is down to his last $15 is substantial. 

 

But I can understand how intuitions might differ.  Suppose we alter the example by supposing that the man will die and knows that he will die if he does not win today's lottery.  Suppose he has exactly $15 to spend and he spends it on lottery tickets.  He now has nothing to lose by spending the money.  It is perhaps arguable that, in these precise circumstances, it is prudentially if not theoretically rational for the cowpoke to blow his last $15 on lotto tickets.

 

Just what is rationality anyway?

 

Good Societies and Good Lives: On State-Run Lotteries

Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. Here I discuss just one such feature, state lotteries.

 

Any government that promotes lotteries is promoting behavior that is harmful to many and positively good for none, not even the few winners who are morally if not economically undermined by them.  Sufficiently disciplined people can of course gamble without harming themselves economically. They gamble for diversion and they know when to stop. They have no illusions about it and they appreciate that in the long run it is a losing proposition. But even these people are not doing themselves much good by gambling: they are wasting time that could otherwise be used in some productive way. The undisciplined, however, positively harm themselves, and not only by going into debt. They wallow in irrationality and ‘innumeracy’ (the mathematical analog of illiteracy). How many gamblers could explain the Gambler’s Fallacy? They associate with people who are likely to have a bad influence on them. Since the virtues and vices tend to come in clusters, the gambler is likely to become a drinker, a glutton, and so on. In the words of an old Mose Allison tune: "Drinkin’ and gamblin’, stayin’ out all night; . . . livin’ in a fool’s paradise."

I am not saying that gambling should be illegal; nor am I saying that it is immoral. Some gamble for relaxation, and no ill comes of it. I am saying that gambling ought not be state-sponsored. Government should cause no harm. Some will respond by pointing to the supplemental revenue that state lotteries generate, revenue that can be put to good uses. The tacit assumption seems to be that, if X is a source of supplemental revenue, then X is a good thing.

This assumption is false. State-sponsored prostitution would be an excellent source of revenue — there would be no lack of eager customers — but prostituion is not something a state should sponsor. If it is wrong for the government to promote prostitution, the use of tobacco products, the drinking of alcohol, and the taking of drugs, then it is wrong for the government to support gambling in the form of lotteries.

One can argue with some show of plausibility that governments should permit the aforementioned activities; but I cannot see how any rational person could argue that governments should support or promote them.

Companion post:  The Lottery Player

On Tipping

Here, in no particular order, are my maxims concerning the practice of tipping.

1. He who is too cheap to leave a tip in a restaurant should cook for himself. That being said, there is no legal obligation to tip, nor should there be. Is there a moral obligation? Perhaps. Rather than argue that there is I will just state that tipping is the morally decent thing to do, ceteris paribus. And it doesn't matter whether you will be returning to the restaurant. No doubt a good part of the motivation for tipping is prudential: if one plans on coming back then it is prudent to establish good relations with the people one is likely to encounter again. But given a social arrangement in which waiters and waitresses depend on tips to earn a decent wage, one ought always tip for good service.

Taxation and Liberty

On 17 April I wrote:

Taxation, then, is a liberty issue before it is a 'green eyeshade' issue: the more the government takes, the less concrete liberty you have. Without money you can't get your kids out of a shitty public school system that liberals have destroyed with their tolerate-anything mentality; without money you cannot live in a decent and secure neighborhood.

But I just now found something over at Jim Ryan's Philosoblog that gives me reason to think that I blundered.  Ryan writes:

As Isaiah Berlin said, echoing the Bishop Butler, "Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice...." Unjustly high taxation is unfairness, injustice, and theft. It is not a violation of liberty rights. The price for ignoring this fact is that we let the verbal trap stand and you lose the basis for dismissing out of hand the leftist's argument for redistribution of wealth. There is plenty of reason to indict unjustly high taxation. There is no need to resort to verbal trickery. Leave the verbal trickery to the leftist, isolate it, and expose it.

Although Ryan was not responding to me when he wrote this, he could say to me, Your talk of 'concrete liberty' being lessened by high taxation smacks of the very sort of thinking that you presumably oppose in leftists.  Liberty is liberty.  There is no such thing as concrete liberty.  As opposed to what? Abstract liberty?  You would agree that justice is justice and that there is no such thing as social justice or economic justice.  Similarly with liberty.  It is what it is and not some other thing.  The argument against high taxation is not that it violates or lessens your liberty.  It doesn't. The problem with it is that it is unjust.  High taxes don't violate yout liberty; at most they impede the exercise of your liberty, which is something different.

I need to think further about this.

Their Name Says it All

Checkmate Payday Loans. Avail yourself of this 'service' and you are well on your way to financial checkmate.

The Lottery Player

The lottery player, unable to think clearly about money, both overvalues and undervalues it.

He overvalues it inasmuch as he thinks that a big win would be a wonderful thing even though it would probably not be, and won't occur in any case for the vast majority of players. There are plenty of examples, some reported here, of people who have been destroyed by a sudden huge windfall. For instance,