St. Maximos' Hut

There is a very thought provoking paper available on SSRN by David Skeel and William J. Stuntz with the above title.

I'm on the road, and so have limited connectability, and so have to keep this short. But here's an interesting point they raise (I'll have more to say about the paper later, when I get home):

Skeel and Stuntz set out an intriguing argument about the differences between divine law and human law. Human law, in a fallen world,

must play a double game: restraining the worst wrongs by the citizenry without empowering judges and prosecutors to do wrong themselves [through selective enforcement]. The key to playing that double game well is to limit law's reach. Only the most destructive and most readily verifiable wrongs are forbidden, because forbidding more would turn punishment over to the discretion of law enforcers.

God's law is not bound by those limits, because it plays no double game. The Lawmaker need not restrain Himself; He is not the problem. We are.

They go on to suggest that conservative evangelicals have more in common with libertarians than either thinks, because once this distinction is fully recognized and analyzed, there are powerful reasons to leave lots of morals-based laws to God and keep them out of the U.S. Code.

It's a really intriguing argument and an excellent paper.

I finally read Dracula and was struck by a variety of issues apropos this blog. {Spoiler alert -- for those of you that haven't gotten around to reading it yet.} One theme is the role of rational thought in combating an ancient evil. Dracula is portrayed as having child-like logical skills, in contrast to the modern 19th Century reasoning of Van Helsing and company. This helps them track him back to his Transylvanian castle, when a better course (it seems to me) for him would have been to go to ground (pun intended) just about anywhere else. Then all he would need to do is wait for Mina and the others to die, and then come back refreshed and ready for the next generation.

On the other hand, rational thought is not sufficient, and Van Helsing explicitly introduces this idea when first explaining to Dr. Seward the nature of Lucy's affliction. As he says, first you must forget the things that you believe you know. The men that give blood transfusions to Lucy do not do so as the result of careful cost-benefit analysis, and the dying smile of Quincey Morris is at least in part due to nonrational emotions, not just a careful calculus of one life for uncountable Un-Dead lives.

The link between rational thought and irrational thought is at the heart of economic analysis, with economists and psychologists probing what is possible for people to learn and decide. It is also at the heart of a Christian life. We must believe, but we are also charged to use all of our talents, including our rationality. The line between the two is everchanging. Given today's medical knowledge, I was shocked that the blood transfusions from 4 different men didn't kill Lucy -- surely at least one was not the same blood type. Actually, one wonders about the question of whether a vampire has to specialize in blood of a certain type, and whether how this would affect the population in a region. Presumably, if your local vampire is a type A, then the type B people have an advantage. Food for thought.

I was struck by a passage I read in an excellent history of oil price controls in the 1970s (and everyone thinks professors don't live glamorous lives!):

“Perhaps the most important result of the regulations [in the 1970s] was that they politicized oil price and supply decisions. Firms increasingly came to realize that their competitive position, and perhaps their survival, depended less on their efficiency or business acumen than on decisions reached by Federal regulators. Trade associations and individual companies rapidly increased their ‘presence’ in Washington through lobbying offices and law firms.”*

One of the perils of the regulatory state is just this - the diversion of resources into special interest lobbying. The firm that refrains from doing so suffers a disadvantage. The firms that do so further the destruction of the free market. If we made clear that such activity was immoral and that vigorous competition was the appropriate moral marketplace behavior, it might be possible to restrain some of this behavior. But, given self interest, we surely need strong constraints on government to keep us from doing the wrong thing.

* From William C. Lane, Jr., The Mandatory Petroleum Price and Allocation Regulations: A History and Analysis (American Petroleum Institute 1981), p. 50-51.

Don Boudreaux (of Cafe Hayek and the chair of George Mason's economics department) and I share the hobby of writing letters to the editor of various newspapers and other news organizations, pointing out flaws in their economic reasoning. Indeed, Don got me started on this hobby by his amazingly prolific letter writing, which he distributes by email.

We've decided to post our letters on a blog, named Market Correction, with a time lag, to give the papers a chance to confess error and publish them first. You can find Market Correction here. Come visit.

There's a great essay at Tech Central Station by Arnold Kling on why the Maryland Wal-Mart law is a bad idea from the point of view of helping Wal-Mart workers.

His conclusion:

Liberals see the market as an arena in which evil corporations inflict their greed on innocent victims. I wish you would see that motives matter less than consequences. I wish you could see that greed is at work when laws are passed that regulate markets, because regulations always produce winners and losers. I wish you could see that those winners and losers are often not who you think they are. I wish you could see that competitive behavior and free choice are forces that operate in the market as a check against greed. Finally, I wish you could see that greed is most difficult to restrain when it is exercised through the medium of government.

I'd say that makes it immoral too.

Fr. Michael (joined by Fr. Stephen Zit0n from St. George's Antiochian Church) blessed our house this evening - an annual event in the Orthodox tradition. (We'll see if we can get him to explain it in a post.) Our own tradition includes blessing the barn and horses and some really good tequila afterwards. Photos of the blessings (but not the tequila) here. (I don't think our house needed two priests to get the job done, but we enjoy Fr. Stephen and his family's company, so it never hurts to be sure.)


Fr. Michael and Fr. Stephen



Blessing the barn and steeds