Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • Ethics of Lotteries vs Casinos

    I live in Florida where we have a lottery that is supposed to provide money for education. At the same time we have a strong resistance to allowing casino gambling. Now I’m not a gambler, and don’t recommend it. Some do it for entertainment, and I don’t have a problem with that. For me it would be very expensive entertainment indeed!

    But I find this approval of gambling–what else is the lottery–for state purposes while opposing any form of casino gambling a bit puzzling. Over the years I have heard many, many ads for the Florida lottery, and they trouble me much more than casinos do. It has been said that lotteries are a tax on math illiteracy. In that case, the ads for the Florida lottery amount to aiding and abetting math illiteracy, as well as charging a penalty for it. I’m only going to comment on the ones I’ve heard here, though I suspect other lotteries must use similar methods.

    Gambling by nature operates on creating an illusion. Entertainment in general does the same thing, so that’s not a criticism. In the lottery, the illusion is that you’re doing a good thing by participating and you just might get rich. Of course, there is a need to convince people that the likelihood that they will get rich is higher than it really is. In the casino, I would maintain, this is a known and knowable part of the entertainment. People may get taken in, but they basically ask for it. But do they ask for it in ads on radio and television for a state-sponsored lottery?

    Let me give an example. One type of ad emphasizes the number of chances. For example, a certain ticket is advertised as having “more chances now than ever.” One ad a couple of years back announced that each ticket now provided five chances to win–a great boon to the players. Now anyone who knows probability realizes that the actual chance to win remains the same if you increase the chances to all the players. Your odds become 5 times what they were out of 5 times what the total was before–totally equal.

    I guess one could say that if you fall for that, you deserve to lose your money. In a casino, I might even say the same thing. If one spends more on entertainment than one can afford, one has only oneself to blame. When I was an airman on temporary duty in Panama I once took $50 with me into a casino and played until it was gone. My experience didn’t make me want to spend another $50, but not everyone likes the same type of entertainment.

    But should the state be sponsoring misleading advertising? Yes, the lottery is handled by a contractor, but it is still done for the state, and its purpose is education. I don’t see this. I particularly don’t see it as better than casino gambling. I think it would be much better for us to support education directly through taxes spent on the purpose. It’s not my purpose to examine the use of the lottery money here, but there are many who question whether the education spending from lottery money is not offset by cuts the legislature feels free to make based on the availability of the lottery money. I don’t have good numbers on this.

    (As an aside, we need to establish education as a valuable, profitable investment, not a simple expenditure. One thing that troubles me about many fiscal conservatives (and I am fiscally conservative) is the tendency to lump all expenditure together, and then talk directly about cuts and deficits. “Cuts across the board” are unlikely to be wise. The problem is that we don’t have the discipline to prioritize and make choices. Spending on defense, law enforcement, education, and highways, for example, is qualitatively different from expenditures on social safety net programs.)

    It seems to me that it is unethical for the government to participate in deception, and particularly a deception that tends to take money from those least able to afford it. They should be safe from such exploitation by their government.

  • Obama Campaign and Race

    I think Barack Obama has done a good job of keeping his campaign from being about race. I’m certain this hasn’t been easy. In reading this article from MSNBC.com I was struck that apparently the commentators are holding his campaign to a standard of perfection.

    In my view, whether he wins in the end or not, Barack Obama’s campaign has been very good for the country. I think he has paved the way for many people to give serious consideration to candidates irrespective of their race. There must be pioneers, and he is one. Readers of this blog probably know that I like him, and while I do have policy concerns, they are no greater than with any other candidate; in fact, they are considerably less in his case.

    The expectation that an African-American candidate could run without any signs of race showing up is ludicrous. Obama has done a good job with the options available.

  • Romney Suspending Campaign

    The Washington Post is reporting that Mitt Romney will suspend his campaign, and announce it this afternoon in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee.

    I do love the detail of these “leaks.” According to the story, Romney will say:

    “This is not an easy decision for me. I hate to lose. My family, my friends and our supporters… many of you right here in this room… have given a great deal to get me where I have a shot at becoming President. If this were only about me, I would go on. But I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America.”

    At least he still has his illusions.

    Update: I note that by the time I posted this, the speech had been given, so probably it was an advance copy rather than a detailed leak.

  • Reasons -> Intentions -> Actions

    When I was near the end of my first four year enlistment in the United States Air Force, I had already made a firm decision to separate at four years, which I proclaimed quite vigorously. But during the last few weeks I read some things about decision making–I can’t recall where–and I decided to rationally examine my decision. I regarded this as a fairly safe thing to do, because I was quite certain that I was separating from the Air Force for highly rational reasons in pursuit of my goals.

    I sat down with pad and paper, and began listing goals, what I needed to do in order to accomplish them, and then I put these under headings as to whether another four or six years in the Air Force would advance my goals or hinder them. I even included my dislike of military structure and formality into the list as a reason against. I did my best not to weight these in favor of one conclusion or another. I then weighted the various factors to the best of my ability and totaled the scores. I don’t recall the numbers, but it was a substantial balance in favor of another term of service. By my best factoring of the decision, I would be much further along toward my personal goals in six years were I to re-enlist than I would be if I separated and used educational benefits immediately.

    There were two really hard things in this for me. First, I had to admit that I had been terribly wrong in a decision I thought I had made quite rationally. Second, I had to admit that and go sign papers. But could a reasonably rational person do otherwise? Well, I did all that, severed the additional six, and then separated, and I have never regretted it, nor have I regretted separating at the ten year mark. (At that point it was either plan for 20+ or get out.)

    A few years after this a psychologist told me that people do not generally make decisions for the reasons they profess. Rather, they make decisions emotionally and then rationalize them. He said this isn’t universal, that there are varying amounts of rationality that are pre-decision, but that it is very common. I don’t know how right he is, but I was immediately reminded of my reenlistment, and while I have rarely put a decision to that kind of testing, I know there are other times when I feel very strongly that I want to do X while I know that rationally the best choice is Y. I have also observed many friends who will express one decision, but based on every expression they have made themselves, it appears that they would make a different choice if they thought the decision through in terms of their goals. (Neither of these have the faintest bit of scientific pretensions–they are absolutely personal and anecdotal and should be taken as such.)

    Of course, the follow up to making a decision or forming an intention is action. I’ll illustrate with myself again. I frequently forget things. Just about anything I am doing becomes my current total focus, and I’ll forget anything else. For example, had I promised my wife to be at lunch in five minutes just before I started writing this post, it is unlikely that I would remember that promise until I finished the post. Do note here that having thought about that issue, I know that my wife is at her work, and I’m here in my home office, thus while I may have forgotten many things, that is not one of them!

    Several people have informed me that the things I forget must not have very much priority to me, otherwise I wouldn’t forget them. I have put that to the test recently since at the persuasion of wife and many friends, when I recently replaced my cell phone I replaced it with a PDA. This thing lets me easily enter lists, and it rings alarms when things are due. It’s easy enough for me to enter data so that I generally don’t forget to put stuff in the phone. (My previous phone had a simple scheduler, but it was clumsy to use.) The other evening I had completely forgotten about a meeting I wanted to attend. It was Monday night. In church on Sunday the pastor mentioned a meeting at the church. It was something I would want to be at. I wrote a note on a slip of paper and put it in the PDA after church. The PDA dinged Monday night giving me about a half an hour to get to the meeting. Using my memory, I would have missed that meeting and I would have regretted it. Despite my dislike for sudden shifts of direction, I attended. The PDA helped me carry out my actual intentions based on what I hope was a rational assessment of where I should be.

    My point here is that intentions, even quite firm intentions are not always easy to put into action. It’s not that I want to miss lunch or dinner when I tell my wife I’ll be back in 10 minutes and wind up engrossed in some piece of writing an hour later. I do recognize that the human body must eat. But other factors intervene.

    My overall point is that between our perceiving reasons for action and the action we actually carry out there can be a considerable gap, so much so that we might not even recognize the connections if they didn’t happen right in our own brains, and sometimes not even then.

    Politically, this apparently extends to opinion polls and voting. CQ Politics has an interesting article, Polls: Can’t Always Trust Them, But Can’t Live Without Them, that discusses something very similar in voting. How well do voters know their own intentions? Do they know for sure whether they are going to vote? Do they really know how likely it is that they will change their minds? I would add that the less each decision is based on conscious, rational factors, the more likely the voter might either be wrong, or might be swayed by similar non-rational or irrational factors.

    Of course this doesn’t aim at any particular group of voters. We’re all capable of such rationalization or failure to carry through both in politics and in the rest of our lives. I just think it is both interesting and valuable to think about how we think.

  • Numbers and Context

    This is way out of my field, but I want to link to it because it illustrates the way in which numbers can be used deceptively. I still heartily recommend the book How to Lie with Statistics from which the title is derived.

    I’m no economist, but I remember a fine discussion in a class “Public Policy toward Business” in which we were debating excess profits, and trying to define the word “excess.” One class member was busily arguing using a definition of profit as “sales – cost of goods sold,” which made the numbers substantially different. The problem is that when the public sees figures such as are used in Ben Stein’s article, they don’t know the definitions involved. They just see someone who supposedly either knows, or knows people who knows, throwing around large numbers. Propagandists in turn realize that most people won’t even remember the numbers themselves. They’ll just remember that they were big.

    If there is any one thing I would like to see journalists work on it is taking things like this apart and showing the public how it works. I know the arguments–the public won’t read that, they aren’t specialists and they don’t need to know. But if they’re being fed the propaganda, they also need to know how to understand it. Numbers don’t mean anything apart from the context and the definitions, yet spokesmen for various positions get by with point out that one number is much bigger than another, and then draw a conclusion, and people left with the impression that the numbers proved the point.

    If journalists want to truly be useful, they need to learn how to handle the information, and also how to relay it in human language to the non-specialists. C. S. Lewis once commented that every ministerial candidate needed to learn how to translate a serious work of theology into language understandable by the common people. I’m certain many who have to listen to sermons would agree! Journalists, as opposed to mere parrots for media relations folks, should know how to take a complex subject, find the lies, and clarify them to the public.

    (HT: The Panda’s Thumb)

  • CT Interviews Barack Obama

    He’s a Christian and has been for 20 years. This quote struck me:

    I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful. . . .

    Amen!

    Read the whole article on Christianity Today.

  • Israel and United Methodist Whoredom

    I’ve always regarded myself as substantially pro-Israel, and often resolutions by the United Methodist Church on this issue trouble me a bit. (For those who don’t know, I am a member of a United Methodist congregation–quite a fine congregation too!) But apparently some people are troubled a great deal more than “a bit,” and can get quite enraged on the issue. The United Methodist Portal responds to this commentary on WorldNetDaily by Joseph Farah.

    Now Joseph Farah gets to what I think is his major point–and if it’s not, it’s my major point about him–when he says:

    This is no longer a church; it is an organization of misguided political activism. This is no longer a house of God; it is a mad house. This is no longer part of the bride of Christ; it is a whore to the world. [Emphasis mine]

    I have to note here, of course, that I might say similar things about an organization like WorldNetDaily, which seems to have made overreaction a way of life. But I haven’t, and I’m not planning to. They can overreact all they like, and I’ll criticize them article by article as I see fit. I have not yet seen fit to read them out of the body of Christ, but perhaps the problem is that I have “lost [my] moral bearings” and am far too tolerant of arrogant windbags.

    (more…)

  • A Liberating Theology

    Liberation theology gets improperly defined and beaten up on a regular basis. Some complain that it ignores the spiritual element, ignores Jesus as savior, and tries to ignore sin. It’s fairly easy to make this case out of the Bible. There is, after all, Romans 13, in which Paul tells Christians to submit to the authorities, or the experience of Peter as he is told to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s (Matthew 22:21). Generally interpreters miss the irony in that one.

    They also miss the pure politics of Romans 13. In this case Christians are hoping for the protection of Rome. The Roman authorities are the ones who are more favorable to Christians. We tend to think of them strictly as persecutors, but at the time the letter to the Romans was written, Rome was the best hope of Christians for protection.

    On the other side, it would be easy to point out the many cases in the Bible in which people refuse to obey the authorities. Slavery, for example, was clearly Egyptian law when the Israelites left under Moses. The Israelites than entered Canaan as illegal immigrants and began a crime spree, or so I imagine the Canaanite perspective might be. But the higher powers all over were very annoyed by what God’s people did.

    While David respected the person of Saul as God’s anointed, he wasn’t at all opposed to violated all kinds of laws and customs, and was even prepared to fight for his Philistine masters. Prophet after prophet stood up to power and some of them died for it. The apostles, when told not to preach, were not subject to the higher powers. Instead, they told the authorities that they should obey God rather than man.

    Law and custom has repeatedly been used in opposition to liberation. One could point out in the early 19th century that slavery was according to the law, but liberators chose not to obey the law–they obeyed God rather than human beings. During the civil rights movements there were many laws and customs that were discriminatory and just plain wrong. The folks who brought liberty were not the ones who said, “It’s the law.” They were the ones who said, “The law is wrong.” They proceeded to break those immoral laws.

    When Jesus spoke in Nazareth and quoted Isaiah 61:1-2 “liberty to the captives” (Luke 4:16-21). Generally, established governments don’t like it much when you liberate their captives. They think their captives are captive for a reason. Those who preach liberty and mean it are often not popular with the powers that be, because they are preaching liberty to people that government thinks should be captive.

    Liberation theology was sometimes abused. It is easy to become a liberator with no theology, to free men’s bodies and forget about their souls. If the church becomes that kind of liberator, then we’re merely another social organization, except that we carry a lot more baggage. We can also become stupid in the way in which we liberate. Many would-be liberators either become oppressors themselves or enable actual oppressors through their lack of good sense. A number of left-wing liberators have fallen into that trap.

    But Christianity has a much greater tendency, I believe, to fall into the trap of becoming an arm of the government. We like the status quo, and we produce theology that helps keep it established. And unless the laws we support are so absolutely just that they deserve the backing of a divine mandate, tragedy often results. In the same way when a truly moral crusade receives the backing of state force, it will often go astray.

    In America I think we have tied both the gospel and its liberating power far too much to a particular political process. We should comment on politics, we should be a prophetic conscience for our politicians, but we should not allow ourselves, as a church body (in the broadest sense) to become identified with particular parties and institutions. Our consciences cannot be in the pay of established power.

    A liberating theology, in my view, provides a divine mandate to hold everyone’s feet to the fire and demand that they live a life worthy of the gospel. When torture happens, we should be like the ten plagues on Egypt, until people are let go, are treated with dignity and respect. When we see oppression, we should be there to proclaim liberty. Our theology should continually challenge our society to be better than it is.

    I think that is what Martin Luther King did to us in the 50s and 60s, and it is what the church needs to do today. No person, no society is so right and so good that it does not need the annoyance of a sensitive conscience, speaking to it prophetically.

  • Bypass the Electoral College?

    Wayward Fundamentalist Christian has a post about a movement by some states to bypass the Electoral College. This would be accomplished by a simple expedient that I had never thought of–state laws awarding their electoral college delegates to the winner of the national popular vote. (Here’s a NYT reference for those who may prefer that source to the WorldNetDaily.)

    I hate to imagine the legal activity that would take place were enough states to vote this particular change, especially if we had a candidate who won the college, while another candidate won the popular vote. The Supreme Court would be stuck deciding who would be the next president.

    I am a great fan of the electoral college, as it was intended to function and as it functioned–once, if I recall correctly. After that it has deteriorated. The original purpose, in part, was this, according to Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #68:

    It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.[Source: Alexander Hamilton Defends the Electoral College in Federalist No. 68]

    There was also the intent of blunting somewhat the power of very populous states and increasing the power of less populous states. The framers of the constitution were not much in love with popular majority. They wanted a government with a basis in the people, but they also included limits on the power of a simple majority of the people.

    At this point, the idea of the electoral college as a deliberative body that chooses a well-qualified president is dead. With delegates committed to particular candidates by the popular vote in their states, the only chance there would be for the electoral college to actually do its job would be if nobody got a majority. They could do some negotiating to see if they could keep from sending the election to congress.

    As for the route of bypassing, I’ll have to say I’m against this approach. I think it could easily put the presidency in a dangerous state of uncertainty in a future election. It would be much better–I think nearly essential–to change the electoral college through the appropriate means of amending the constitution. Personally, I fail to see the need and wouldn’t support such a change, but if it was done by constitutional amendment, at least there would be no conflict following an election under those rules.

  • Freedom Not to Invite

    I think the Nevada Supreme Court got this one right. Freedom of the press must include full freedom to invite or not to invite. I often support candidates with very low ratings at the polls, but there is no legal basis to force their inclusion in any televised debate.