Julian Assange, Public Servant

Wikileaks founder and international man of mystery Julian Assange has apparently been arrested in London on Swedish charges that he lied about whether he was using a condom.

This is a travesty of justice, quite figuratively. Under the pretense of prosecuting a sexual offense (and I won't even mention the absurdity of Sweden's he-said, she-said laws), the governments of the developed world are colluding to persecute a man who embarrassed them and broke the rules of the good-old-boys club. Why haven't they arrested him of espionage or something? Because he did not break any real laws. So while lawyers spend days finding some law in some country under which they can charge him, they want him safely held in a Swedish gaol.

This persecution is wrong on two counts, substance and form. In form, it mocks the systems of justice and fairness that underlie our societies. Global Review has long held that unenforced laws are nefarious, since they allow unscrupulous authorities pretext to arrest whomever they want. Thus in Assange's case. In substance, Assange should not be charged with a crime because he did the world a service. The soldier who gave him the documents should no doubt be court-martialed: he stole data and broke all kinds of professional codes. But Assange chose to release the data altogether at once, not using it as blackmail or to gain power. He published it responsibly, and did the world a service by showing what really goes on in diplomatic circles. The Arab governments fear Iran: everybody knew it, but now it's public, not an "open secret". And if the U.S. Department of State was used for illegal acts of espionage, that should be laid at the door of Secretary Hillary Clinton and her predecessors, who ordered the violations.

Transparency in government is vital for democracy. Assange should be applauded for presenting this valuable data in a transparent and straightforward way. If the governments of the world are so desperate to shut him down, we should ask: are they just angry at being caught, or do they really have something to hide?

Happy Turkey Day!

I hope all Global Review readers had a great turkey day... and have a wonderful Thanksgiving, too.

Girlymen

Samuel Eto'o and Bostjan Cesar compete with each other for the most girly foul and the most absurd overreaction. How is it that people root for these prima donnas? My love for soccer precludes a tolerance for antics like this (from the Serie A).

The Ben Bernank and the Quantitative Easing

Viral video on quantitative easing. Hilariously informative.



Like Landsburg I don't agree with everything they say, but it certainly puts the problems with the Fed starkly.

Solve the Deficit

...without leaving your chair. Absolutely awesome little game from NYTimes: you make the hard choices about which programs to cut or taxes to raise in order to solve the Federal deficits in 2015 and 2030.

This shows that solving the deficit is not as much hard as it is painful. It also highlights the magnitude of certain big programs - leaving Afghanistan and limiting Medicare and Social Security growth can account for 92% of the projected 2030 deficit. The biggest bopper on the tax side is to get rid of most deductions.

Check it out!

The Phelps Critique

Kudos to Sen. Bob Corker and Rep. Mike Pence for trying to apply the Phelps Critique to the Fed's mission. Better late than never!

Rational Stimulus?

David Brooks is way out of his depth writing about the divide among economists on how to respond to the recent recession. He claims:

The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs...

These models can be used to make highly specific projections. If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs. Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.

David Brooks doesn't, clearly, understand rationality. If $1 borrowed and spent by the government produces $1.50 in the economy, the government should borrow infinitely! This "regularity" is not reproduced in any rational-optimization model of which this economist is aware.

Moreover, within the discipline, those who believe in optimizing agents, intertemporal tradeoffs, and rationality typically are anti-stimulus. Those who are in favor of the stimulus and who have the ear of the Obama administration - Krugman, Stiglitz, Hall, etc - are typically more solicitous of 'heterodox' behavioral approaches. The Keynesian approach of the Obama administration is predicated on the famous concept of "Animal Spirits".

Brooks has it completely backwards: the administration and its 'technocrats' have relied on empirical regularities which lack theoretical underpinnings. What we need is exactly what November voters demanded: a return to rigor and reasonable intertemporal tradeoffs.