Paul M. Jones

In what appears to be a slap in the face for gender equality, the report found the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

“What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled “Equality in the Home”.

The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said.

“One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,” he said.

The figures clearly show that “the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” he went on.

It's science! You can't argue with science. Via Couples who share the housework are more likely to divorce, study finds - Telegraph.

According to a national poll last week, 79% of Americans think that all Americans should pay income tax, regardless of their incomes. That includes 85% of Republicans and 83% of independents. Even Democrats agree, by an overwhelming majority: 71%. Politicians should take note: these are huge margins.

These Americans understand instinctively what a recent report from the Tax Foundation said: "Aside from the revenue impact of not having 58 million Americans pay income taxes, economists worry about the social and political effects of having so many people disconnected from the cost of government -- a phenomenon known as fiscal illusion. The concern is that when people perceive the cost of government to be cheaper than it really is, they will demand ever more government benefits because they either don't feel the cost directly or believe that others will be paying those costs. Indeed,when one takes into account those who do not file, about half of all households pay no federal income tax, making the situation particularly worrisome in a majority-rule democracy."

Emphasis mine. Of course, if we move to the Fair Tax then it's easier to see the cost of government every single day. Via Column: With liberty and taxes for all.

A jury is responsible for reaching a verdict the case, but it is also responsible for reaching a verdict on the law itself. As a juror, you have a responsibility to veto laws you find unjust.

Technically, Alvin was guilty of breaking the laws in question, even though the laws are totally ridiculous and unjust.  Luckily this jury was informed about the process of jury nullification, and their legal right to rule in favor of the accused for breaking unjust laws.

According to Iloilo Jones, director of the Fully Informed Jury Association “Minnesota has long had highly visible FIJA Activists volunteering their time and efforts to educate every potential juror in Minnesota about the right of the people to veto bad laws through the use of the Juror Veto, or, as it is commonly called, Jury Nullification. As laws become more and more invasive, punitive, and draconian, prison populations become more and more peopled by harmless, productive people, who have harmed no other person. Jurors can stop the enforcement of bad laws. Jurors have stopped bad laws since freedom of religion was defended by jurors, and by later jurors who refused to enforce slavery. We, the owners of all government, retain the peaceful, lawful right to refuse to enforce bad laws made by some judge or politician. Courageous jurors have always stood firm--for the human rights of their families and neighbors--by refusing to sanction bad laws. The right of the People to drink the milk of their choice, and to feed their children healthy foods, is a human right.”

This news comes just weeks after a jury in New Hampshire dropped felony marijuana cultivation charges against a Rastafarian man because they believed that punishing him for the offense would be unjust. Hopefully what we are seeing is a trend, and as more people become informed about jury nullification there will be less nonviolent people put in cages for breaking unjust laws.

via Raw Milk Co-Op Farmer Acquitted Through Jury Nullification » Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance || Good Vibes Promotions.

Gilens compiles a massive data set of public opinion surveys and subsequent policy outcomes, and reaches a shocking conclusion: Democracy has a strong tendency to simply supply the policies favored by the rich.  When the poor, the middle class, and the rich disagree, American democracy largely ignores the poor and the middle class. 

To avoid misinterpretation, this does not mean that American democracy has a strong tendency to supply the policies that most materially benefit the rich.  It doesn't.  Gilens, like all well-informed political scientists, knows that self-interest has little effect on public opinion.  Neither does this mean that Americans strongly object to the policy status quo.  They don't, because poor, middle class, and rich tend to agree.  Gilens' key conclusion is simply that when rich and poor happen to disagree, the rich generally get their way.

...

Both left and right are likely to misread Gilens.  The left will probably imagine that he's saying that American democracy is a vast conspiracy to promote the material interests of the rich.  To repeat, Gilens explicitly disavows this conclusion: His claim is not that American democracy primarily **benefits** the rich, but that it primarily **listens** to the rich. 

The right, on the other hand, will angrily reject Gilens' findings as rehashed Marxism in statistical garb.  (To quote The Communist Manifesto, "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.")  If you read the whole book, though, you'll be amazed by how many leftist oxen he gores.  Most shockingly: Gilens concludes that the president most responsive to all Americans regardless of income was... George W. Bush!

...

I find Gilens' results not only intellectually satisfying, but hopeful.  If his results hold up, we know another important reason why policy is less statist than expected: Democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich.  And since I think that statist policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes, my sincere reaction is to say, "Thank goodness."  Democracy as we know it is bad enough.  Democracy that really listened to all the people would be an authoritarian nightmare.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing. Via Why Is Democracy Tolerable? Evidence from Affluence and Influence, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

The authors are arguing that, yes, the evidence suggests that having a limited amount of patent protection makes countries slightly more innovative, presumably by encouraging inventors to cash in on their great ideas without fear of being ripped off. But patent protections never stay small and tidy. Instead, entrenched players like intellectual property lawyers who make their living filing lawsuits and old, established corporations that want to keep new players out of their markets lobby to expand the breadth of patent rights. And as patent rights get stronger, they take a serious toll on the economy, including our ability to innovate. 

via The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them) - Business - The Atlantic.

[T]he whole teaching structure of a university is based upon the medieval expense of books. No individual student could possibly hope to afford even one book directly, let alone the small library required to read all around a subject. Thus the form of tuition of the lecture, where the Master reads to the assembled from the text.

This lives on in our current universities in the lecture: almost wholly a waste of time as far as I can see.  Reading the set text is faster for each of the individual 500 students entrapped and the Master (now the Professor) probably wrote the text and she really doesn’t need to read it out loud again. Even a video of a decent lecturer would work better than insisting that everyone turn up at the same time in the same place.

Further, with books now at $2.99 each, heck, almost all of the canon of literature is available in e-book format for nothing, we really have got past that scarcity problem that led to this form of instruction in the first place. Given that we are not so technologically limited then perhaps we really shouldn’t be using this technology any more.

I can see two places left for universities. The first is for graduate degrees. This is when you actually do get the individual attention of your professors and when it’s actually important to do so. Plus of course those professors who do research will need to have somewhere to research from plus a paycheck to do so on. But colleges as factories for teaching what anyone can now get out of a book seem archaic enough that we should probably stop using them to do such.

The second is that some subjects require a much more hands on approach. No one’s going to learn much chemistry without a lab, astronomy requires a rather better telescope than WalMart sells and so on. So there’s still a point to collective endeavour on one site for some subjects.

via Should We Abolish Liberal Arts Degrees? Quite Possibly, Yes - Forbes.

We often hear a lot, especially from those who want to tear them down, about the top 1 percent. We don't hear nearly as much about the bottom 1 percent. Who are they? Where are they? Why are they in the bottom 1 percent? And what should we do about them?

It turns out that about two thirds of the people in the bottom 1 percent are in U.S. prisons. And of these people, a few hundred thousand are there for victimless crimes. Letting them out would help them and save us taxpayer money. That’s a win-win.

via The Bottom One Percent, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

[M]y interpretation of Rand’s core principle has always been “Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you” (Hitchens 2001: 140).  I know neither if Randians agree with my interpretation of her nor if Hitchens, were he still among us, would appreciate me interpreting his words as expressing a foundational principle endorsed both in the Bible and in Rand’s philosophy.

And note that even if many adults are eager – even when taking a long-run perspective – to enter with other adults into a pact of mutual slavery (“I’ll live to sacrifice myself for you if you live to sacrifice yourself for me”), this fact does not morally require those of us who don’t wish to live to sacrifice ourselves for others to follow in the footsteps of these mutual enslavers.  Hitchens’s – and the Bible’s – wise moral advice is followed by those of us who do not wish to sacrifice ourselves for others if we simply and consistently do not expect or force others to sacrifice themselves for us - and by our resisting, in every prudent way possible, attempts by the mutual enslavers to draft us into their pact of mutual sacrifice, as well as resist their efforts to portray us as immoral because we refuse to be enchanted by their collectivist creed.

via Quotation of the Day….

I am not a purist. There is no such thing as a perfect political party, or a president who governs in accordance with one's every ethical judgment. But some actions are so ruinous to human rights, so destructive of the Constitution, and so contrary to basic morals that they are disqualifying. Most of you will go that far with me. If two candidates favored a return to slavery, or wanted to stone adulterers, you wouldn't cast your ballot for the one with the better position on health care. I am not equating President Obama with a slavery apologist or an Islamic fundamentalist. On one issue, torture, he issued an executive order against an immoral policy undertaken by his predecessor, and while torture opponents hoped for more, that is no small thing.    

What I am saying is that Obama has done things that, while not comparable to a historic evil like chattel slavery, go far beyond my moral comfort zone. Everyone must define their own deal-breakers. Doing so is no easy task in this broken world. But this year isn't a close call for me.

He says if he votes at all, it will be for Gary Johnson. Please read the whole thing. Via Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic.

If a Republican physically attacked a Democrat, or a Democrat a Republican, after one said something with which the other strongly disagreed, would it be any defense for the attacker to say, “He knew perfectly well that I detested his views”? Freedom of expression requires not so much the exercise of self-control in what is said as its exercise in reaction to what is said. I can hardly look at a book these days without taking offense at something that it contains, but if I smash a window in annoyance, the blame is only mine--even if the author knows perfectly well that what he wrote will offend many such as I.

via Freedom of Expression, Without the Expression by Theodore Dalrymple - City Journal.