Marginalia

Those are the kinds of things you hear when families try to live communally, like modern monks. Read the whole LA Times story.

I took an online quiz from an organization called Glassbooth that asks about your policy preferences and tells you which candidate is the closest match. The quiz is done by a nonpartisan nonprofit, so I don’t think it’s biased, but I still think it got me wrong. It said that I was an 81% match for Ron Paul. While I don’t doubt that he and I share some libertarian views, xenophobic conspiracy theories make him a non-starter.

I’m not convinced that the president’s policies actually matter all that much. Their campaign promises certainly don’t. Contrary to popular belief, there’s not actually a lot the president can do to improve the economy, for example. Also, it’s very hard in the midst of an election to differentiate what candidates actually believe from what they say they believe, in order to get votes. I think that was one problem with the Glassbooth quiz.

So what do I think of the candidates? Here’s my rundown of the ones I’ve given any thought to:

• Barack Obama is an incredibly inspiring speaker. His having taught Constitutional Law at the prestigious University of Chicago law school earns him a lot of points. You don’t get there without being logically rigorous and incredibly intelligent. On the other hand, his protectionist and anti-market leanings worry me. Trade agreements are one of the areas where the president does have some influence.
• Hillary Clinton’s presidential run first seemed Pollyanna-ish to me. I remembered how unpopular she seemed when pushing her health care plan during her husband’s presidency, and couldn’t imagine her winning the general election. Now I’m not so sure, and despite some anti-trade noises from her, I suspect her economic policies wouldn’t be too far from those of her husband, who did help push through NAFTA, after all (and yes, to me that’s a good thing).
• John Edwards was the candidate that I liked the best for a while in the 2004 election. Then I heard him make some of the same anti-business, anti-market comments that all Democratic candidates seem obligated to make, and it turned me off him. I haven’t paid him much attention since.
• Mitt Romney is supposed to get my support just because he and I are both Mormon, right? Meh. I don’t like his nearly-rabid anti-immigration stance.
• Rudy Giuliani….. Hmm, guess I haven’t really given him much thought. I don’t know what kind of economic policy he espouses. He’s reputed to be the most liberal among the Republicans on social issues, though I don’t really care. I think his strategy of bypassing both Iowa and New Hampshire in favor of focusing on Florida is a bad one; I’m betting that a lot of Floridians who currently support him will melt away when they see other candidates walloping Giuliani in Iowa and New Hampshire.
• Mike Huckabee impressed me the first time I saw him on TV. Like Obama, he’s got a camera presence that radiates sincerity and authenticy, as opposed to Clinton and Romney, who seem much more stiff and scripted. The word is that he’s conservative socially but not economically. That’s kind of the opposite of me. (Not that I’m socially liberal, I just don’t care about social issues as much as economic ones, where I’m pretty conservative.) Lately, he’s been laying on the evangelical schtick so thickly that he’s starting to scare me.
• John McCain is the candidate who I think best represents my views on the things that I think are important. According to current polls, though, it doesn’t look like he’s got a prayer of winning the Republican nomination.

Here’s my problem: with the exception of McCain, none of the Republicans seems sane on the immigration issue. When they’re not trying to outdo each other with anti-illegal-immigration rhetoric, they’re trying to brand the others with a scarlet “A” for “amnesty”. On the Democrat side, the candidates are far too anti-market for my liking. So my choice comes down to the question, in which of those areas is a president more likely to do something drastically bad?

Despite all the anti-immigrant-baiting rhetoric the Republican candidates are spewing now, I’m convinced they know better, and they’ll tone things down considerably when it comes time to make law. A Republican president almost certainly won’t push a harsh anti-immigration bill that splits up illegal immigrant families or devastates the industries that depend on their labor, even though a lot of their constituents might want these things. Republicans are likely to throw more money at “strengthening the border” so they can write home to their constituents about how tough they are on illegal immigration, while not actually doing anything that will hurt the economy or destroy the lives of the illegal immigrants already here.

Just as a Republican president is unlikely to actually expel all the illegal immigrants, a Democratic president is unlikely to repudiate existing trade agreements or drastically raise tariffs. But I think a Democrat would be likely to stop pursuing new agreements, or to give them poison pill stipulations that the partner country reach American labor and environmental standards before any deal can be struck.

I wish McCain were a more viable candidate. He and I match up pretty well. Maybe Giuliani does too, but for some reason he annoys me. Among the serious contenders, I like what I know of Hillary’s policies the best, though I still enjoy hearing Obama speak. I don’t know if there’s enough time between now and the California primary to get registered at my new address. I suppose it’s just as well, since I’m still not sure who I’d vote for.

So Sarah and I have moved to San Jose. We signed a lease yesterday, and should move in tomorrow. We decided to make the move a couple months ago. I hadn’t had much luck finding the kind of law job I wanted in LA, and thought Silicon Valley might be a better fit. We talked about it, and eventually decided we’d both look for jobs here, and move as soon as one of us got one. Well, Sarah got hers first, while I’m still looking. Her new employers actually wanted her to start December 17, but that was only 5 days after the day she got the job offer, so she pushed it back to Jan 2. We packed up the Uhaul on Monday, stayed in a motel in central California that night, and here we are. (A word of advice: don’t try to do your apartment hunting over the holidays.)

One of my favorite things about living in LA is discovering the cool things that they don’t show you on TV. One of the best is Santee Alley, a seedy, extremely busy street market in the Fashion District in downtown LA. We went there a few months ago to find a knockoff designer handbag that Sarah wanted to give as a gift to her sister. I took the opportunity to take some photos, so now you get a chance to come along. A word of caution: because these pictures have sat on my camera for so long, my memory of the context surrounding some of them is a little hazy. But don’t fret. Where I can’t remember, I’ll make stuff up.

Being willing to park a few blocks away, we paid only $3 for parking. That’s pretty good in LA. Closer to Santee Alley, you’d typically pay 5 or 6 bucks for valet parking (much more common in LA than back in Utah), though they adjust the price on the fly depending on demand. When we took my mom to Santee Alley a couple months after to this visit, the price was $5 as we drove in, but had risen to $7 by the time we had walked out of the parking lot.

The east side of LA is full of suppliers for things that you probably never thought “Hey, I wonder if there’s a guy out there who just sells that, wholesale, and nothing else.” A bit further east from where we are here, there’s a huge warehouse from which they ship nothing but hangers.

While still a block or two from the main shopping area, we spied a shop that looked promising. There were a bunch of handbag shops clustered together in this area, though we soon found out that they had mostly the same stuff.

We gave up on that store. Though they had lots of bags, they weren’t the kind of fake Prada or Gucci bags we were looking for. Most of the shops nearby also wouldn’t sell to us because we weren’t “wholesalers” (someone who has a business license and is buying at least 12 bags).

Moving on, we passed a clothing shop with ridiculously round-bottomed half mannequins. These are everywhere in the Santee Alley neighborhood.

Santee street, about half a block from our destination, Santee Alley.

There are two kinds of ice cream men in LA (and yes, they always seem to be men). There are the trucks that drive around the residential neighborhoods (they like to blare their jangling music on my street in particular), and the hand-pushed carts like this, which you’ll find anywhere a crowd gathers.

Finally, we got to the Alley. There’s lots of cheap stuff here. Most of it’s junk, and lots of the stores have the exact same things. You’d think they would try to diversify their products and stand out from the crowd of similar stores around them, but they don’t. Are they just bad businesspeople, or is there something going on that I don’t understand, that makes it economically rational to have the exact same crappy product line as dozens of other stores nearby? My gut says that it’s more likely the latter, but I can’t figure out the reason.

Here are some of the things you’ll find in Santee Alley, starting with (drumroll please) bootleg CDs and DVDs! I had Sarah pretend to pose for a picture as I surreptitiously turned to snag this photo, so as to minimize suspicions that I was some undercover inspector from the FBI or RIAA. They had Spiderman 3! It had just hit the theaters at the time.

Low on bling? You’ve come to the right place! Guaranteed to turn your skin green in 24 hours or your money back.

Lots of the Alley’s shops sell underpants in big piles and racks like this (sorry for the blur). Cheap lacy thongs are mixed right in with Underoos.

The sign clearly says “Don’t Touch.” Nonetheless, that unambiguous command was insufficient to overcome the force of the “Touch Me” rays emitted from the silky little girls’ dress with the embroidered flowers. I had to physically lift Sarah’s hand from it.

Most fruit stands in LA are a little more elaborate than these, with glass chests full of small chunks of ice to keep the fruit cool. My guess is that you need a license to run one of those, while the guys in this picture are more off the books.

Let’s pause now for a moment of silence for the loss of bacon-wrapped hot dog vendors in the Fashion District. Cooked on a cookie sheet with onions and peppers, these bacon-wrapped hot dogs were the highlight of any trip to the area. On the trip subsequent to the one during which these pictures were taken, I learned that vendors like the one in this picture had all been shut down by the LA health department. I guess they think that the hot dogs’ yumminess isn’t worth the risk of people getting sick from this open air cooking method. I wish they’d let me make that judgment call, instead of making it for me.

After walking up the Alley and back down, we had found a couple of things that were close to what we wanted, but nothing that was just right. We had almost given up hope when we took a detour into a sidestreet and found a shop with just the thing.

Eureka! Thanks to Santee Alley, the little sister now wears (fake) Prada.

At least when it comes to dating. That’s one of the findings of a cool speed dating study done at Columbia, as reported in this Slate article.

On a completely different note, this is my first post since April? Wow, I knew it had been a while but not that long.

I decided to try out Google Reader today. And I realized that I don’t keep up with the blogs I like as well as i thought. For example, I completely missed this fascinating post on the Freedom to Tinker blog about the fight between AT&T and a company called Freeconference. The story’s got it all - law, technology, economics, and in the end, the real bad guy is government regulation.

Today the EMI music label announced that it would begin offering versions all of its digital music without DRM. This is a serious crack in the music industry’s previous position that digital music should only be sold with copy protections installed.

For me, it’s especially good news because I run Linux, which can’t run the programs you need to play DRMed music, like iTunes or Windows Media Player. So now I can buy EMI’s iTunes tracks and play them in Linux with the software of my choice. For the moment, the purchasing of the tracks would have to be done in Windows, and the tracks then transferred over to my Linux system. But I won’t be at all surprised if today’s announcement triggered renewed development in programs like SharpMusique, which allow Linux users to buy songs from iTunes. (SharpMusique has been broken since mid 2006, when Apple made substantial changes to iTunes’ network protocols.)

Unlike a locked-down iTunes track, I could use one of the unlocked ones to make a mashup, or set it over a wedding video, or stream it to my laptop over the internet. Most importantly, I can play it in the music player software of my choice. DRM breaks all of those things.

So I’m resolved to buy music from EMI now, and encourage you to do the same. Of course, people generally don’t buy music because of the label. They do it because they like the group. Here is a list of EMI artists. A few of my favorites on that list are Gorillaz, Lily Allen, Robbie Williams, Joss Stone, and Queen. Who are your favorite EMI artists?

I’m not going to boycott non-EMI artists, but when I’m debating where to spend money, the scales are going to be heavily tipped in favor of tracks that I can play in Linux without having to resort to breaking the law.

Some analysts and newspapers covering the story are playing down the importance of this move by pointing out that digital downloads are only a small fraction of the music market at the moment. And the number of people running up against DRM incompatibility problems is only a small fraction of those in the digital music market. What these analysts and journalists fail to see is that there’s a “chicken or the egg” problem. Incompatibility isn’t just a barrier to geeks like me who want to move their music between incompatible systems. It’s also a barrier to the creation of new products and services. The problem for the journalists is that they don’t know how many great products and services we’re missing because DRM made them infeasible. And the lack of those innovative products and services holds back the music download market as a whole. I think that EMI’s change in policy is a big deal. Especially if it makes the other labels follow suit.

I guess I’ll have to figure out exactly where Hildale is first, but the Merry Wives Cafe, the subject of a Deseret News article today, seems too cool to miss.

Could this be the beginning of the polygamist town becoming a tourist attraction? If the public can get past Warren Jeffs and there aren’t any more child bride scandals, could Utah polygamist country become like Pennsylvania Dutch country or Amish country? Weird.

Browsing the blogroll at SLCSpin yesterday, I came across Mullentown, a blog by Holly Mullen, former Salt Lake Tribune columnist, and apparently wife to former Salt Lake mayor Ted Wilson (when did that happen?). The blog was pretty good in general, but one post talking about a new law in Virginia triggered some new thinking for me on an issue that I’ve been stewing on for a while: mandatory vaccination of schoolgirls for human papilloma virus (HPV).

Before we go any further, a few facts about HPV, from the Centers for Disease Control (here, here, and here):

1. HPV is spread through sexual contact.
2. It’s very common, infecting both men and women. The CDC statistics are a little confusing on exactly how common, however: “At least 50 percent of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in their lives. By age 50, at least 80 percent of women will have acquired genital HPV infection.” (If 50% of all people get it in their lives, and 80% of women get it by age 50, it seems like it must be more common in women than men. Is it safe to guess that only about 20% of men get it? That seems weird. Could 20% of the men out there be infecting 80% of the women?)
3. In both genders, it can, but does not always, cause genital warts. Lots of people without any symptoms don’t know they’re carrying it.
4. In women, it can also cause cervical cancer. It generally does not have a corresponding risk for men.
5. There is a vaccine for HPV. Its safety and efficacy have been tested and demonstrated in women from 9 to 26 years of age. It is most effective if administered before the woman has acquired any of the four strains of HPV covered by the vaccine. So it’s best to administer it before the woman becomes sexually active.
6. Because the vaccine doesn’t cover all strains of HPV, about 30% of cases of cervical cancer will not be prevented by the vaccine.

I first started thinking about the topic when I saw a Jane Galt/Megan McArdle post on the subject, asking why mandatory vaccinations of schoolgirls aren’t a no-brainer. The cost of the vaccine is relatively small compared to the benefit of preventing a lot of women from getting cancer, and since “[w]e’re already sticking the little darlings for everything from measles to chicken pox; they’ll hardly notice one more needle.” It’s rare for me to disagree with Jane/Megan, and I couldn’t think of a good reason to disagree at the time, but I was still uneasy about the idea of mandatory HPV vaccination. Maybe Megan and I differ because I place a higher value on the right of people to say “no” to unwanted needle pricks, but I couldn’t say for sure.

Mandatory vaccination in general is one of those issues that pits the bases of my philosophy and politics against each other. I start from the position that government needs to have a really good reason before forcing people to be injected with anything. And the good of the individual isn’t a good enough reason to inoculate someone against his or her will. I typically trust people (or in the case of children, their parents) to make their own decisions about the costs and benefits of their own medical care. In the case of vaccinations, however, there are more than individual interests at stake. If Alice doesn’t get vaccinated for measles, for example, then she could hurt not only herself, but also Bob, by spreading the disease to him. If enough people refuse vaccination, then serious costs will be imposed not only on those who refused, but also on society at large. On the other hand, if you can get enough people vaccinated, then you provide protection for everyone, even those who slip through the cracks or can’t be vaccinated for some reason. It’s this argument that tips the scales for me. When my refusal is likely to harm not only myself, but also others, then the state is justified in requiring the vaccination. In this case, the pragmatic, utilitarian side of me beats the reflexive, government-shouldn’t-be-poking-people side. That doesn’t mean that the utilitarian side doesn’t care about people’s desire not to be poked. A person’s being forced to do something against their will, especially something intrusive like an injection, is a serious cost. It’s just outweighed by the benefit of essentially eliminating a disease.

(On a sidenote, I’m amazed at the science behind vaccines. To my mind, vaccines are matched only by antibiotics as the greatest medical advance of all time. Our ability to game the machinery of our own immune systems to almost completely prevent or eliminate diseases that are often fatal (smallpox) and/or debilitating (polio) is astoundingly cool, and has immeasurably improved the lives of countless people.)

While some arguments for mandatory HPV vaccination of girls are paternalistic, others are based on the more persuasive (to me) “herd immunity” concept discussed above. The herd immunity argument is more complex in the HPV context than it is for other diseases. Basically, it says that we should vaccinate Alice against HPV, even against her will, because she might spread the virus to Bob (who won’t be harmed by it), who might then spread it to Carol (who we can’t vaccinate, for some reason). The interposition of Bob between the person we’re vaccinating (Alice) and the person we’re protecting (Carol) attenuates Alice’s responsibility for Carol’s infection, because Bob shares some of the blame. More, in fact, than Alice. So why don’t we vaccinate Bob? Two reasons: 1) Bob isn’t at risk of getting cancer from HPV, and 2) the vaccine has not been tested and approved for use in males.

(Interesting sidenote: For sexually transmitted diseases, the majority of transmissions are likely to happen between people of different genders. If all transmissions were cross-gender, then we could theoretically provide the same amount of protection by inoculating either gender, and save money by leaving the other one unvaccinated. In the case of HPV, it makes sense to pick women, because they’re the ones who get cervical cancer.)

Another way in which HPV is different from, say, measles, is the amount of control that individuals have over whether they contract the disease. The more easily the disease passes from one person to another, the stronger the case for mandatory vaccination, because the risk from an unvaccinated individual is corresponsingly greater. Mandatory vaccinations for a disease that can be transmitted by merely talking to someone have a stronger case than mandatory vaccinations for diseases that can more easily be avoided. Another way to frame this issue is one of assumption of risk: there is a stronger case to say that someone having sex with me is assuming the risk of catching HPV from me than say, a bank teller is assuming the risk of getting measles from me.

Additionally, for measles, polio, and other easily-communicable diseases that we currently vaccinate for, there’s a crystal clear link between mandatory education and mandatory vaccination. Without a mandatory vaccination program, mandatory education would be a death sentence for some children, who would inevitably contract disease as they are forced to be in close proximity to lots of other kids for significant periods of time. When the subject changes to sexually transmitted diseases, that link disappears. Instead of forcing kids into situations where they’ll share the disease, we tend to think that kids ought not to be having sex, and in fact take some measures to stop them (as when boys and girls were banned from each others hotel rooms on my high school choir trip to Washington DC).

The final difference between HPV and the diseases for which we already mandate vaccination is the effectiveness of the vaccine itself. Unlike the highly effective vaccines that we currently require, the current HPV vaccine would not help against a significant portion of cancer-causing HPV strains, leaving about 30% of HPV-caused cervical cancer cases unprevented by the vaccine.

Something that bothers me about this debate is the lack of respect paid by the left to the concerns of those not ready to endorse mandatory vaccination. It was Holly Mullen’s spiteful criticisms of mandatory vaccination opponents that really got this issue stuck in my mind, calling them “reactionary, anti-science, anti-intellectual forces who argue that requiring the shots is a license for pubescent promiscuity.” You don’t have to be anti-science to question whether the costs of this program outweigh the benefits. There are concerns over this program about which reasonable minds can differ.

One obvious concern, ridiculed by Mullen, is that mandating a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease will send the signal to teenagers that we don’t really expect them to keep their pants on. I can imagine my future daughter thinking “You say that I should wait until marriage to have sex, and you say that you trust me to do that, so why are you forcing me to get this vaccination that I’ll only need if I’m not worthy of that trust?” In a religiously conservative state like Utah, this concern will obviously be very acute. On one hand, I’m sympathetic to this concern. Some teens will see HPV vaccination not as a “license for pubescent promiscuity,” but as a weakening of the official stance from their parents that teens are expected to wait until marriage to have sex. As a parent, I wouldn’t want the state sending messages that undermine the moral lessons that I’m trying to teach my children. On the other hand, I’m not sure how many teens will actually go through that thought process, or how strong the signal will actually be to them. I think that once something becomes routine, it loses most of its ability to send these kinds of signals. Even though polio is spread through the “fecal-oral” route, I don’t see mandatory polio vaccination as sending the signal that kids can start throwing their poo around, or even as an insult to their personal hygiene. If my wife visits the gynecologist and gets a pap smear, I don’t see it as casting aspersions on our fidelity, despite the fact that the only way she would be getting cervical cancer from HPV is if one of us were cheating on the other.

Others may be concerned about possible health effects of the vaccine. For me, these concerns are addressed by the vaccine’s having been through widespread clinical trials. Furthermore, I get kind of annoyed with the anti-vaccine hysterics of some people.

Another possible concern with mandatory vaccination, depending on the age at which you vaccinate, is the sexualization of childhood. I wouldn’t like to have to explain to my future nine year old daughter that the reason she has to go get a shot is to keep her from getting cancer after having sex with boys. If the vaccination happens at a later age, these concerns diminish.

A lot of the disparity between the right and the left on this issue comes from differing expectations about sexual activity among teenagers. Among my high school friends in Salt Lake City, sex before marriage was, in fact, very rare. I know that Utah is a uniquely religious and conservative place (it has one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates), but it’s a difference of degree, not of kind. Everywhere you go, there are at least some people who not only believe in chastity before marriage and fidelity afterwards, but actually practice it. In this sense, it would make sense to leave the question of mandatory HPV vaccination up to each community. In a religious conservative community where sex before marriage is rare, the risk of teenage HPV infection is lower than elsewhere, and the cost of mandatory vaccination (in terms of offending the community’s moral sensibilities) is higher. Such an approach would enable a better fit between the values and policies of each community, but it would seriously undermine the herd immunity effect. Though my circle of friends in high school was not sexually active, there were plenty of other kids who were, some of whom came from families just as religious and conservative as mine.

I realize that the idea of some high school kids abstaining from sex sounds surprising, silly, or even stupid to a lot of people. Through conversations with my law school friends, my impression is that almost none of them waited until marriage to have sex. Most probably started in high school or college. When that’s the background you’re coming from, I can see how silly an elective vaccination program sounds, as opposed to a mandatory one; if all the kids at the high school are having sex, and of course none of them are telling their parents about it, then nobody’s going to get the vaccine before having sex. Almost no girls are going to say to their parents, “Hey, I’m going to start having sex. Will you take me to the doctor’s office so I can get a shot?” A mandatory system solves this problem; if all the girls have to be vaccinated, then none of them have to face the shame or embarrassment of asking for the vaccine.

Importantly, some proponents misstate the strength of the herd immunity argument in the HPV context. Though she linked the CDC Fact Sheet on the HPV vaccine, former-journalist Holly Mullen grossly overstated the vaccine’s effectiveness, calling it “nearly 100 percent effective in preventing human papillomavirus-caused genital warts that can eventually lead to cancer.” The fact is that while it is nearly 100% effective against the four strains of HPV it’s built for, those strains account for only 70% of HPV-caused cervical cancer. Furthermore, the herd immunity argument gets a lot weaker when we’re talking about a state law, as opposed to a national one. In order for unvaccinated Carol to be protected by the immunity of the herd, she needs to have sex only with men who have only had sex with women in her state. Given how often people move around, there are going to be lots and lots of times when this isn’t true. The lower the likelihood of herd immunity gets, the less case there is for a mandatory program.

My final concern is that lobbying by Merck , the maker of the vaccine, may have tipped the cost/benefit scales in legislatures looking at this issue. I’m suspicious that they’re just trying to get their product built into state law, to ensure themselves healthy sales of their new $140/dose vaccine.

Most of my concerns are addressed in the mandatory HPV vaccination bill recently passed in Virginia. For example, it requires vaccination for girls at age 12, late enough to assuage any concerns I might have had about sexualizing childhood (I think 12 years old is about the right time for kids to be learning about sex). Most importantly, it allows parents to opt out of the requirement for any reason.

While I’m sure an opt-out provision will seem unfair to twelve year old girls (”Why do I have to get vaccinated when Carol doesn’t?”), having an opt-out provision is not necessarily inconsistent with the herd immunity rationale for mandating vaccination in the first place. The mathematics of herd immunity allow a certain percentage of the population to remain unvaccinated, yet still protected. Therefore, a mandatory program could allow for objectors to remain unvaccinated, so long as their percentage of the population does not exceed the “critical immunization threshold” for the disease. Perversely, this is most likely to happen in the most conservative, religious places. In California, the number of objectors might be too small to make a significant impact on the herd effect. But I would expect to see lots of objectors in religiously conservative Utah, if such a bill were passed there (it won’t be). On the other hand, a girl who’s not having sex is as good as one who’s been vaccinated, from a herd immunity perspective. So as long as objectors are practicing what they preach, we should be okay.

I started this blog entry thinking that I would probably come down against mandatory HPV vaccination. I didn’t feel like those pushing for it had addressed my concerns. After thinking it through here, I am in favor of it, but only if there’s a “no questions asked” opt-out provision like Virginia’s. Otherwise, the intrusiveness of mandatory vaccination, combined with the weakened herd immunity argument in the HPV context, would make me come out the other way. This entry took me two days to write, because I kept thinking of new wrinkles in the problem. Looking at this problem made me take a closer look at my own values, and weigh them against each other where they conflicted, before I really knew where I stood. I’m not sure how many people on either side of this debate, or any debate, have done that. I wish more of them would.

The other day, Marginal Revolution poined me to an excellent essay by Virginia Postrel at Cato Unbound. In it, she delineates four cultural and intellectual traditions that we typically lump together under the umbrella of “libertarianism.” Briefly and inadequately paraphrased, they are:

1. Natural Liberty. According to Postrel, this is the group with the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me,” and concerned with gun rights. In fact, my position on gun control is emblematic of my relationship to this libertarian tradition: I’m pulled both ways. If responsible, law-abiding people want to shoot guns for sport, I’m entirely okay with that. On the other hand, I think Utah’s “Keep Schools Safe for Guns” crowd is a little crazy.
2. Live and Let Live. Postrel says that this tradition is embodied in the biblical prophecy “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid,” and the phrase “Follow Your Bliss.” I align more closely with this philosophy than the first.
3. The Deductive Tradition. I haven’t read anything by Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard, so I can’t claim to be a follower of this school of thought. And from how Postrel describes them, I don’t think I would be a very good fit with this group. I think that people need government to provide some things that individuals can’t provide very well as individuals, such as national defense, roads, parks, and schools. I’m willing to accept the idea that the government can make better use of some of my money than I can. I probably define the category of worthy goals more narrowly than most, and distrust government’s ability to meet those goals more than most, but I don’t go nearly so far as the crowd saying that “taxation is theft.”
4. The Empiricist Tradition. I am an aspiring devotee of this “non-utopian, empiricist” approach that, in Postrel’s words, is characterized by “[i]ts distrust of grand plans and refusal to embrace the one best way.” While I think that a free market should be the default policy in matters of economic regulation, I know that markets can fail in lots of ways that justify the government stepping in.

If you think you might be libertarian, or are even just curious how you might define one, you should go read Postrel’s essay now. It certainly helped me to parse out why I believe some of the things I do, and to see where the bases for those beliefs might conflict with one another.