Thinking Seriously About Coercion

Daniel Klein at CATO and Brian Doherty at Reason complain that, in Doherty's words, "You can't force economists to think seriously about coercion." Apparently you can't get libertarians to do it either. From Andrew Coulson, as part of his on-going war with Sara Mead:

The Ed Sector’s Sara Mead made a passing comment recently that, “yes, vouchers or tax expenditures in the form of tax credits are public funding.” The problem with this statement is not just that it’s wrong in general, or even that it has repeatedly been found to be wrong with specific regard to education tax credit programs, but that its wrongness has been a matter of court record for long enough that anyone working in education policy can reasonably be expected to be aware of it.

The most notable relevant case is Kotterman v. Killian, in which opponents of Arizona’s education tax credit program challenged it on the grounds that public money was being used to pay for religious instruction. Writing for the majority, Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas A. Zlaket observed that

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, “public money” is “[r]evenue received from federal, state, and local governments from taxes, fees, fines, etc.” …. As respondents note, however, no money ever enters the state’s control as a result of this tax credit. Nothing is deposited in the state treasury or other accounts under the management or possession of governmental agencies or public officials. Thus, under any common understanding of the words, we are not here dealing with “public money.”

I guess he's conceding the point about vouchers, but his counter-argument on tax credits is pretty weak sauce. What's supposed to be the difference, in terms of coercion, between the government garnishing a portion of your income upfront before cutting you a check to pay for school, and the government exempting a portion of your income from garnishment, but only on the condition that you use that exempted income to pay for school? Coulson's just bringing up the narrow issue of legal semantics, but law isn't ethics and I don't see a significant ethical objection to Mead's point.

Also, let's keep in mind that if education tax credit schemes are going to be universal, they're also going to have to be plainly redistributive. In 1999 - that's just the set of data I found most quickly - income tax filers with AGIs of $20K or less represented 35% of all filers and $16.8 billion in negative income tax liability. Millions of other filers paid less in income taxes than the cost of private school tuition (on average about $4,000 for a parochial school and upwards of $10,000 for a non-sectarian private school in 1999). Providing those people with an income tax "credit" just amounts to giving them extra money, presumably from the government's coffers. So even if Coulson was right about tax credits in general not being "public money", his distinction breaks down when we look at cases where a tax break per se wouldn't actually buy anybody an education. (These are federal tax figures; the situation is obviously different at the state level, but to the extent that the quantities of money changing hands through state or local taxation is less than at the federal level, Coulson's coercion problem becomes greater still. How many people pay enough in state income taxes - or even all state and local taxes combined - to cover the cost of a private school education?)

Update: Sara Mead has more along the same lines here, including the entertaining finding that CATO's former director of fiscal policy studies considers tax credits for companies making ethanol to be "subsidies" and "blatant corporate welfare".

Defining Wonkery Down

This post from the AFT's NCLBlog reminded me of something I found vaguely annoying about The Education Wonks back when I regularly read the site. My issue is this: no actual wonkery takes place there. There's just nothing wonkish about it, no evidence that the author is, in fact, a wonk of any kind. There is a lot of snide demagoguery, but I suppose "The Snide Education Demagogue" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

An illustrative contrast is with the other "eduwonk", Andrew Rotherham. He uses, like, charts and numbers and stuff.

Really? Both of you?

It's common among many socially progressive couples--different sex and same sex alike--to exclaim, when one member of the partnership is pregnant, that "we're" pregnant. "When we were pregnant, Ellen got horrible morning sickness." "We're pregnant right now, so Jen's feet are swollen."

I appreciate the sentiment behind this choice of words, especially in heterosexual couples where, for logistical reasons, any attempt to equally divide the duty of pregnancy would be impossible. Namely, the couple is trying to verbally indicate that both members are invested in the creation, outcome, and, most saliently, backbreaking work associated with a pregnancy. It's nice when the man in the partnership steps out of the customary male role and contributes to the pregnancy, too, which usually means taking care of all the other miserable work (driving the future mom to doctor visits, shopping for tiny footsie pajamas, sending baby shower invites, all the usual housework) that pregnant women usually are expected to perform in addition to carrying around a 30-pound parasite with foreign genetic material for nine months. Usually the "we" designation indicates that, contrary to tradition, both mom and dad will play active roles in rearing the child-to-be. Further, exclusively referring to the pregnancy as "hers" comes off as dismissive, disinterested, or unwilling to absorb the duties that you formerly divided equally. "Oh, that's her shoe rack; I have nothing to do with that. Oh, that's her pregnancy; I'm sure glad I don't have to help out with that mess!"

On the other hand, any semantical attempt at equality aside, men simply can't get pregnant (yet!), and it's absurd and insulting to imply that the burden of pregnancy can shared equally between both partners. Sorry, bub, but you're not the one peeing on a stick, putting on weight, getting stretch marks, enduring strange hormonal shifts, passing a basketball through your vagina, getting stitched up, breast feeding, and potentially suffering severe depression as a result of this pregnancy.

This isn't to say that good future fathers don't have to do extra work when their partners are pregnant. Even soon-to-be older siblings have to pick up the slack when Mom isn't able to do all the work she normally does. But the concept of mutual pregnancy justifies related phenomena such as "sympathy weight," or the idea that PMS hurts men as much as it huts women ("She gets so irritable when she's about to start her period; it affects me, too!"). Yes, women's issues are everyone's issues, but there's no comparing being a male in solidarity to actually being a woman. (I might also accuse men who "suffer" from PMS of just being wimpy. Brother, if you had any idea how bad it actually is...)

The greater implications of a "shared" pregnancy, though no one who uses "we" has this in mind, is that ownership of the pregnancy shifts from the pregnant woman to both members of the partnership. A major tenet of abortion rights is that the pregnancy, fetus, and choice to carry the pregnancy to term belong solely to the pregnant woman, not her husband, boyfriend, father, mother, community, or local legislators. Of course the progressive men who refer to "our" pregnancy probably don't question this philosophical foundation of abortion rights. I fear, though, that many anti-feminists and anti-abortion proponents have a knack for co-opting feminist and socially progressive terminology or ideals and insidiously twisting them beyond recognition. A popular example is, "Feminists say they want to have sex as freely as men do, so it's feminists' faults when college men rape their woman classmates. These poor boys are getting mixed messages from those sex-crazed feminists!" That's not far from, "If the pregnancy is both of yours, then the fetus belongs to both of you, too. If feminists want to share the pregnancy, then men should have to approve it before their wives and girlfriends get abortions!"

Admittedly, I'm being a bit of a worry wart, and will label myself as such. In the meantime, when I get pregnant, I'll let my partner spend all the time he wants decorating for our baby shower.

What the hell is a moderate?

I have a thing against moderates, in part because I don't understand how one could be anything other than a flaming liberal, but in larger part because I don't know what a moderate actually is.

Perhaps most predominantly, self-described moderates see themselves as free thinkers, unbound by a political party and its dogmatic platform. Is a moderate anyone who devises opinions on individual issues independent of a party? That makes me a moderate, which is like saying Liberace was on the fence about his sexuality. No one with a brain agrees entirely with one party's platform.

Are moderates people with both "left" and "right" views? I'm one of those, too, then, to a minor extent. (Don't get me started on immigration policy.)

Does a moderate look at what Democrats say, look at what Republicans say, and choose to agree with one party half the time and the other party the other half? Or does he hold an opinion on each issue that's a square compromise of both parties' platforms? Is that even possible?

Along those lines, can we use "moderate" and "centrist" interchangibly? Of course I would argue that the political spectrum is in fact a political Cartesian plane or even a three-dimensional (or eight-dimensional) political sphere, so there is no such thing as a center position, thus no such thing as a centrist. So I'll ask this, too: What the hell is a centrist?

Maybe "moderate" has been confused with "willing to work toward bipartisanship." Somehow the ability to compromise has been construed into its own set of political beliefs.

Or maybe moderates just, more often than not, adhere to inoffensive beliefs. That's why everyone wants to pretend to be one.

Though I don't have any substantial evidence to support my hunch, I sometimes feel that moderates go out of their way to be moderate; they enjoy moderation for moderation's sake. They might agree with a more radically-leaning view at first, but, just to be a good sport, they give that cozy middle a test drive instead.

The biggest problem with moderatism, though, is that, rather than breaking down the partisanism and devisiveness of the extremes, it simply accepts that there are two sides to every story, and that both sides probably have some merit. What this attitude fails to address is that seeing the world as a dichotomous polarity is both inaccurate and ineffecient. Instead of refusing to recognize the value of radicalism, it validates it by sitting smugly in the middle and pretending to satisfy both sides. It seems a little counter-productive.

Ultimately the word "moderate" is substantively meaningless and usually an attractive cover for being apolitical, nonconfrontational, or a panderer.

You tell me the morning after

The big news in uteruses everywhere is that the FDA is considering approving OTC sale of emergency contraceptives (e.g., Plan B) for 18-year-old women. Amusingly, most media coverage of this story focuses on the suspicious timing of this announcement right before the Senate confirmation hearing of Andrew von Eschenbach as permanent head of the FDA rather than on the controversy surrounding the morning after pill itself. Apparently questioning someone's integrity is more interesting than whether women have the right to prevent zygote implantation without doctor approval. It's a relief not reading to the same predictable pro-life/pro-choice debate every time reproductive choice is a topic in the news.

But why do I find that incessant debate so pointless and boring to begin with? I realized that it's not the content of the controversy that puts me to sleep; in fact, considering the legal relationship between the state, women, and their fetuses is fanscinating. Rather, what bores me to tears about the abortion debate is that the prevailing arguments used on either side are so rhetorically useless.

None of the names assigned by a side's opponents-- pro-abortion, anti-choice, and so on--is actually true, and none of the self-assigned terms--pro-life, pro-choice, and so on--is unique to that side.

Honestly, do "pro-abortion" supporters actually round up women, put them on a shuttle to the nearest Planned Parenthood, and encourage them to get abortions? Do members of the "anti-choice" camp intervene when someone is waffling between a latte and a mocha, insisting that she isn't allowed to choose? Alternately, since when do "pro-lifers" have the monopoly on thinking that death is a bad thing? I'm obligated, of course, to bring up the irony of how the "pro-life" constituency usually also supports war the death penalty, and vice versa.

When pro-choicers accuse their adversaries of being universally sexist and ignorant of basic scientific fact, do they really mean that? More ridiculously, when pro-lifers claim that "abortionists" (as if it were an ideology) are murderers with no regard for human life, have they bothered to look up "murder" first? Why are phrases like "unborn child," which is oxymoronic, even allowed into the debate?

This disregard for semantic accuracy is as effective as calling George W. Bush a terrorist. Yes, we get it; W. is a horrible human being. But he's not literally a terrorist, and calling him one accomplishes nothing.

Making exaggerated claims with overblown or inaccurate terminology clouds the real argument about the legal and ethical grounds that need to be considered when granting women access to abortion. It's much easier, of course, to call Planned Parenthood a Nazi-like death machine than to actually argue about why fetuses should be granted certain legal protections. But it doesn't get us anywhere. I'm more swayed by science and rhetoric than picket signs and name-calling.

Science is especially important when considering drugs like Plan B. Knowing exactly what emergency contraceptives do and being able to clearly identify why your do or do not oppose these medical processes makes arguments on the topic so much more productive and interesting.

This could be my bias as a coathanger-weilding pro-abortionist, but I think the pro-life side has a larger arsenal of meaningless phrases and groundless invective than does the pro-choice side.