Training may be "vital," but reading is fundamental

Waco Tribune-Herald editorial:  "Training is vital"

For instance, the right to carry a firearm is not “god-given” but comes from the Second Amendment — unfortunately, the most ambiguous of the Bill of Rights.

The editorial in Sunday’s paper lacked a signature, indicating it was drafted by the editor.  Any newspaper editor should at least be aware that rights don’t “come from” the Constitution or any Amendment.  The Constitution and the Bill of Rights simply protect rights that we already have.  If you don’t believe in a God, then “natural rights” or “human rights” works just as well as “God-given.”  What matters is that these rights are yours, by default, simply by virtue of being a human being.  Governments do not grant rights; they can only take rights away from you.  A government will either infringe your right to bear arms—as most governments do—or  respect and protect it, as ours does (at least some of the time).

The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to codify the rights we were known to have at the time of the drafting of the Constitution.  This creates a legal standard that the Courts can then use to uphold those rights.  The Ninth Amendment points out that not all existing rights were necessarily known as of that time of drafting.  This alone should indicate to you that the Constitution doesn’t grant them.  They are there already, some merely waiting to be discovered.

So the editor's chief failing in drafting this editorial was a lack of awareness of the Constitution's wording and intent.  I have to wonder whether he (Steve Bogg?  Bill Whitaker?) has even read the document.  

There is more to take issue with in the editorial than this, of course.  The wording is only "ambiguous" to those who haven't read it in the context of the times, in which the wording was a great deal more specific than folks today seem to think.

That pesky introductory clause about a “well-regulated militia” still divides scholars. 

It actually doesn't so much "divide scholars" as it does confuse those who don't understand the parlance of the time.  "Well-regulated" simply means "in good operating order."  It doesn't carry the connotation of "regulated" that today's conversation does (namely, that the government must provide the regulatory force).  A cursory examination of prose from the period bears this out, as the following samples provided by Brian T. Halonen indicate.  The quotes are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.

1709: "If a liberal Education has formed in us well-regulated Appetites and worthy Inclinations."

1714: "The practice of all well-regulated courts of justice in the world."

1812: "The equation of time ... is the adjustment of the difference of time as shown by a well-regulated clock and a true sun dial."

1848: "A remissness for which I am sure every well-regulated person will blame the Mayor."

1862: "It appeared to her well-regulated mind, like a clandestine proceeding."

1894: "The newspaper, a never wanting adjunct to every well-regulated American embryo city."

The Second Amendment doesn't require that the militia be "well-regulated" in the sense of having structure and restrictions imposed on it by government.  It simply requires that the militia be in good working order, and that requires the militia to be armed.  Furthermore, the wording of the Second Amendment itself is often misconstrued to imply a condition, whereas it's actually merely providing a reason.  Nothing in the Amendment requires that a militia exist.  The wording is thus:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

We can diagram this sentence to discern its true meaning, but it should actually only be necessary to dissect that initial clause.  "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" can be rewritten as "Because a militia is necessary to the security of a free state" without changing its meaning.  Try it yourself.  Then try changing the wording to "Only if a well-regulated militia exists" and juxtapose it with the remainder of the Amendment, as the pro-gun-control liberals do.  The meaning of the Amendment is profoundly changed...but only because the intent of that clause has been completely perverted.

We've all also frequently encountered the objection that a "militia" must exist at all in order for the clause, and therefore the Amendment, to hold true.  Well-regulated or otherwise, if there is no militia at all (so the argument goes), there is no purpose to the Amendment.  

False.

From Findlaw:  US Constitution - Second Amendment:  

However, the Supreme Court has now definitively held that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that weapon for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Moreover, this right applies not just to the federal government, but to states and municipalities as well.

As for what the militia is, that's pretty simple.  It's us.  All of us.

From the Constitution Society's discussion on the Second Amendment, some selected quotes from Founders (offered during and around the Constitutional Convention):

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."— George Mason

"The militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, ... all men capable of bearing arms;..."— "Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic", 1788 (either Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith).

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People."— Tench Coxe

That about covers my tear for today, which is limited pretty much to the editor's lame verbiage (indicative of a lame understanding of Constitutional considerations).  In a later column I'll discuss the pros and cons of gun control itself.

Reich is Wrong

Robert Reich's Facebook post on wealth inequality


As regards the first paragraph, I can let point 1 slide, because at the moment I've got no real objection to it.  Point 2, however, is a blatant untruth, and Point 3 misses the mark.  And nothing in his second paragraph is relevant to the wealth disparity.

The era of modern capitalism began circa 1500.  And wages have risen steadily throughout the developed world ever since.  Unions and regulations like minimum wage laws are very recent appendages, and the fact of the matter is that the greater part of the history of industrialization, and those wage increases, predates them.

The rise in wages tracks closely with improvements in worker productivity, and those improvements are due to improvements in the means of production.  Capital investment, in other words, is the main reason why living standards have improved throughout the industrialized world.  Additionally, at least throughout the 20th century, the increase in the demand for labor tracks closely with improvements in worker productivity (in accordance with the arguments of Lionel Robbins and Mises, among others).  Contrary to the union view of the impact of technology on labor, the demand curve for labor shifts to the right when labor becomes more productive.

Labor unions exist in several different forms, operating in different ways, but what they tend to have in common is a way of inflating wages by artificially boosting the demand for labor.  ("Demand enhancement" through lobbying, for instance, or reducing the supply of labor, as in the craft union model.)  One way this was accomplished was by union support for "child labor reform," which effectively removed two million competing laborers from the market.  You'll also find all manner of "make work" or "featherbedding" practices, such as the way labor is divided by unions in Hollywood movie production.

What it all amounts to is that the "wage gains" promoted by unions are illusory in that they don't reflect a true market equilibrium.  Nor do such gains benefit the entire population the same way that improvements in productivity do.

Reich is also incorrect about the taxation of the postwar period.  Like soooo many progressives, socialists and Keynesians, he confuses the top marginal tax rate with the top effective rate.  The top income earners didn't pay more than 50% (and by some analyses, no more than 30%) during the period through Eisenhower.

There are four predominant market models found in a capitalist economy, ranging from "unfettered capitalism" (pure competition) to pure monopoly.  Without going into too deep detail here, I will just point out that the primary functional distinction between these models is the profundity of barriers to entry (and exit).  In pure competition, there are no real barriers to entry or exit.

It's necessary at this point to distinguish the two kinds of profit:  "normal profit," or the cost of maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit at the firm, and "economic profit," which is what's left over from revenues after all costs are subtracted.  The salient point is that normal profit is a cost.  In a software development shop such as those I've worked at, it's what goes into employee bonuses, holiday parties, video games for the break rooms, etc.  It's what is used, above and beyond wages and benefits, to keep the producers happy.  Economic profit, or just "profit" in regular parlance, is what goes back to the shareholders.

In a pure competition market, there are are only short-run economic profits.  Competition enforces efficiency by making the consumer sovereign as regards price.  Any firm that charges more than its competitors will lose business.  Any firm that charges less than its competitors will either lose normal profit or draw the competitors down to the same price.  The equilibrium in such a market is defined by a double equivalence:  P = MC and P = min ATC.  Price equals marginal cost, and price equals minimum average total costs.  Because no one firm can influence the price to any great degree, firms in a competitive market are "price takers."

When both of these equivalences are in effect, a condition called "economic efficiency" exists, consisting of "productive efficiency" (the firm is using all its resources properly to produce its output) and "allocative efficiency" (society is getting what it wants, and how much, at the price it demands).  This means that society is benefiting fully from the use of those resources.  You can neither improve society's benefit by reducing, nor by increasing, the price.

The upshot is that in a competitive market, there are no long run economic profits.  This means that there is no upward distribution of wealth.

None of these conditions hold true in an imperfect competition, and they're the furthest from the mark in a pure monopoly.  As you move from monopolistic competition through oligopoly to pure monopoly, economic profit margins become ever-wider, meaning that in each successive model, there is more and more upward redistribution of wealth.

Again, what distinguishes these models from each other is barriers to entry.  And most barriers are imposed by government, in the form of regulation.  Regulation, then, is the primary reason for the wealth concentration.  It stands to reason, actually, when you consider that much regulation is actually crafted by public-sector unions and representatives in response to lobbying on the part of the very industries and firms that benefit most from it.  Regulation is used to tilt the market in favor of the larger players, those which can best exploit economies of scale.

And this can be confirmed easily by simply tracking the wage disparity as it has widened over the course of the 20th century.  It has increased in lockstep with the regulatory burden.

If you follow the trend in wage increases over the latter part of the 20th century, you'll see that for decades, the rate of increase was similar for all three socioeconomic classes.  There were gaps between the wage bands, to be sure, but the slopes of the curves were essentially identical.  Then, in the mid-to-late 70s, we encountered Keynesian meddling in the wake of the oil shocks, and Stagflation hit.  As a result, the wage curves for the lower and middle classes flattened, while the curve for the upper class kept on trending upward.  During the Reaganomics era, that topmost curve also flattened, and the two lower curves began climbing again, but the disparity had nonetheless been profoundly widened, and it's still wide today.

It's also worth pointing out that over the course of the 20th century, federal revenues do not track closely with top marginal tax rates. It's not necessary to inflict punitive tax rates on the citizenry in order to raise revenues; throughout the 1920s, for instance, Andrew Mellon, as Secretary of the Treasurer, kept bringing rates down, and revenues kept increasing. (See: Laffer Curve.)

On the subject of poverty itself, let's take a look at the War on Poverty and its impact. The Great Society programs began taking effect in 1964, and we just had the 50th anniversary last year. The federal government began tracking poverty in detail in 1959. In the five-year span between 1959 and 1964, the size of the population comprising those under the poverty line declined by some 4.6%. We can round that up and say nearly 5% in five years. That's what the market accomplished, on its own, unaided by government.

In the fifty years since the WoP began, the size of that population has diminished by only another 5%. This tells me that the anti-poverty programs have slowed the rate of decline by a factor of 10.