Category Archives: ethics

Penn State and Duty

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My blog is supposed to be about economics, politics, and their intersection, so I was reluctant to write this piece.  And in truth, the subject sickens me.  But in the end, politics also is about the interaction of people with people, about duty, about responsibility.  But what higher duty, what higher responsibility does any person have—does any society have—than to the welfare of our children?

I’ll not recap the case; ample reports can be found here and here and here.  Instead, all I can do is ask questions.  I won’t address all the key players in this ugly charade; my point will be clear, though.

When Mike McQueary, ex-starting quarterback for Penn State, graduate assistant with Penn State at the time he saw  Sandusky in one of the acts, and now an assistant coach with Penn State’s football team, saw Sandusky having anal sex on the boy, did he not step in on the spot and intervene?  Of what was he so terrified?  Where was his sense of duty?  Why did he wait overnight even to report the matter—and then to Paterno, and not to the University authorities and the police?

Why did Joe Paterno, head coach of the Penn State football team, think it sufficient to buck the complaint—finally received from McQueary—up the University chain and then walk away from it?  Where was his follow up?  Where was his sense of duty to his players and his coaching staff?  Where was his sense of duty toward the children entrusted to the care of a member of his staff, now known to be abusing those children?

Where is the NCAA?  It’s been more than a week since the story broke, and the indictments made public, and the NCAA is still trying to see its way forward vis-à-vis Penn State and the tragedy its employees have created.  How is the NCAA’s duty unclear to them?  Boston College sports law professor Warren Zola makes this excuse for the NCAA:

No student-athletes are involved, for now, and nothing benefitted the teams or the institution for a competitive advantage.

Hmm….  Really?  A coach of student-athletes isn’t close enough?  Because, maybe, these student-athlete children had aged out of the threat zone?  No competitive advantage accrues from suppressing the child abuse, which then avoids the “distraction” of a criminal enforcement action?

NCAA President Mark Emmert did say, today, that the NCAA “will launch” its own investigation into the matter, albeit while staying out of the way of the criminal investigation that’s already underway.  When, exactly, is “will?”  Emmert also said he’ll watch developments and “decide whether NCAA rules were violated.”  The NCAA has no rules involving moral turpitude?  It has no rules concerning appropriate treatment by staff of the children in their charge?  There’s a question in Emmert’s mind beyond the legal one of whether Sandusky did the deeds for which he’s been charged?

College sports have become a professional business where winning is more important than honor.  Lost is the teaching aspect of college sports (and sports in K-12, but that’s a different thread): challenge, competition, teamwork, the mutual responsibility and mutual trust that underlie teamwork, the value to that teamwork of the individual standout who makes the rest of the team better, the excellence of the one that creates leadership.

Especially that mutual trust and mutual responsibility have been lost in our college professional sports industry.  As has the integrity of the concept of standout.

Education in America

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Here, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, are some alarming data that give insight into the state of today’s education system and the state of our pupils in it.

“Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.” the article says.  Further, “Students who drop out of science majors and professors who study the phenomenon say that introductory courses are often difficult and abstract.”

According to a study by Richard Arum (New York University) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia), college students spend all of 12-13 hours per week actually studying; students in the ’60s studied 24, or more, hours per week, the article went on.  And math and science students studied 3 hours per week more than did their non-science and -math classmates (that’s all of 25 minutes per day more, for you non-math graduates).

Students often start their college careers in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math track because they got the grades in high school.  However, then they switch out of STEM coursework because it turns out to be hard, and the easy grades are in the so-called soft studies.  And as often as not, it’s just a matter of giving up on themselves: “My ability level was just not there,” said Ms ____ about why she switched out of her original electrical and computer engineering major into a double major in psychology and policy management.  Plainly the ability is there; even in an American college, a double major is no easy path.

What does this mean, then?

In the beginning, our pupils are not being prepared for college in their K-12 careers—and so college cannot prepare them for life in the real world.  Yet without that foundational preparation, our children can only fall further behind—learning and knowledge accumulation proceed on an exponential curve.  Nor are they pushed to work, and so they shy away from work. They’re not pushed to compete, and so they learn to shy away from challenge.

There are a number of reasons for this failure, many of them legitimate.  We can’t fire bad teachers; the unions too often are in the way.  We don’t want to hold Johnny’s feet to the fire and demand that he actually meet serious standards—the effort is stressful; failure to meet them might hurt his self-esteem.  Our children have no work ethic.  And so on.  But if we don’t solve the fundamental problem, these reasons reduce to excuses.

In the end, the fundamental cause lies within us as their parents, and it becomes part of their attitude toward their own children.  We have to ask ourselves—and act on the answers—a number of questions.

Why are we willing to tolerate unions, or any system, that get in the way of terminating the bad apples?  It’s unfair to the bad teachers?  How unfair is it to our children?

How stressful will it be for our children, what will be the impact on their self-esteem, when as adults they’re failures in the market because they’re unemployable or can find only dreary, unsatisfying work?  How stressful and damaging to their self-esteem will it be for them to be citizens of a failing, second rate nation because our economy no longer can compete because we don’t have an educated work force anymore?

Our children are not lazy.  They work as hard as they’ve been taught to work.  They shy away from challenges to take the easy path because they’ve been taught that’s acceptable.

GPS Tracking, Privacy, and the Government

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Today, the Supreme Court began hearing a case, United States v Jones, concerning among other things, whether the police need a warrant to plant a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car: is doing so without a warrant a violation of the suspect’s 4th Amendment rights? Is even the mere use of such a device a violation of the suspect’s 4th Amendment rights?

The government makes the following arguments, among others:

the device “did not meaningfully interfere” with Jones’s property rights, because it didn’t affect the Jeep’s gas mileage, drivability or other characteristics.

and

using technology to enhance surveillance, without a warrant, was condoned in the 1983 case United States v. Knotts, a case in which police hid a beeper in a vehicle to track a suspect.

These arguments seem deficient to me.  With regard to the first, it’s disingenuous. A telephone wiretap placed on a person’s telephone system doesn’t “meaningfully interfere” with a person’s property rights, because it doesn’t affect the telephone’s clarity of speech communication, dialability or other characteristics, either, yet a warrant is required.

On the other hand, requiring a warrant to place a GPS tracker on a person’s car won’t meaningfully interfere with the government’s investigation any more than the warrant does in placing a tap on a person’s telephone.

The second argument is equally disingenuous; it’s just a Brandeis-ian excuse to perpetuate judicial error and the ensuing injustice.  Further, the argument is nothing more than a cynical red herring.  The government knew, in Jones, that a warrant would be necessary for this sort of surveillance; they had, in fact, gotten one.  They’d just let it expire before they acted on it, and then the GPS tracker was planted outside the warrant’s jurisdiction: in a Maryland parking lot, rather than in DC, where the warrant had been issued.

The Court, on the other hand, asks these questions.

How does technology change traditional law enforcement?

and

Could [police] get the same information from 30 deputies [devoted to surveillance]?  What you’re saying is police have to use the most inefficient methods.

and

…how are peoples’ privacy expectations [changing] as technology changes….  Technology is changing people’s expectation of privacy.

The answer to the first question is clear: it does not change it at all.  The Constitutional limits and authorities concerning police surveillance and investigation remain entirely intact.  All that changes is police’s capability to operate—still within those traditional limits and authorities.

As to the second question, no, we’re not.  We’re saying get a warrant for the activity, and then (properly) use the most efficient methods at your disposal.  The need for a warrant to do these things is both unchanged and technology agnostic.  Just execute it without the idle delays that led to the original warrant, in Jones, for instance, expiring before the surveillance was carried out.  As I noted above, getting the warrant only interferes with the police’s “methods” if the investigation isn’t…warranted…in the first place.

Additionally, the convenience of the government is not an excuse for abridging individual liberties.  The convenience of the government is limited by our Constitution to 17 enumerated powers, and nothing else.  Just to saucer and blow this, our Constitution also notes that the contents of that “nothing else” are explicitly reserved to the States and to the People.

As to the third question, it shows a misunderstanding of privacy.  Privacy remains the property and the business of the individual, independently of the technology available with which to penetrate that privacy.  Most especially, privacy is not something our government will choose to allow according to its convenience and magnanimity.  Indeed, the fact that there is an ongoing hue and cry over the abuses of our privacy by the various social media and the various cell phone software providers demonstrates that, even in today’s technologically-driven openness capability, we still demand our individual privacy be respected.

What Can We Learn from Europe?

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Between 1995 and 2008, which is prior to the onset of the current Panic, goods prices inflated by 67% on average in Greece, and by 56%, 47%, and 41% in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, respectively, in that same period.  German prices inflated by 9% over those years.  The difference between the PIGS and Germany centered on the nations’ domestic policies.

The Germans went through social, tax, and spending policy reforms which, among other things, limited the amount of money in their economy that didn’t have savings or goods to absorb.  The PIGS spent their money, and they also freely spent other people’s money which they borrowed, without regard for the amount of goods available from their domestic production, or from foreign imports, to absorb their money.  Indeed, as domestic prices rose, the PIGS spent more, tautologically from those increasing prices, and via printing and borrowing more in order to spend more in absolute terms in the face of those rising prices.  An additional result from those increasing prices is that the PIGS’ own production lost competitiveness in the international markets (including the rest of the EU), and so they couldn’t earn money from trade to cover their spending.

Hmm….

I suggest that there is a lesson for us, here in the US.  More money in our economy from government spending, whether fueled by borrowing or printing or both, will produce rapid inflation as our economy attempts to recover if there aren’t production increases to keep the growth in the supply of goods for sale in step with the growth of the money available with which to buy those goods.

It is the nature of demand and of production that the former can, and does, turn on a dime, while production can only increase slowly as plant is ramped up and as workers are hired and trained (with training an especially large problem today, given the length of time today’s used-to-be-experienced work force has been unemployed), and production can only decrease quickly at the expense of jobs.

Today’s American economy has already accumulated a vast overhang of funds (in the trillions of dollars) from Federal Reserve Bank printing and government spending and from subsequent funds retention by businesses and families in the face of ongoing economic uncertainty.  We are thus at severe risk of a burst of potentially ruinous inflation as those funds come out of their personal and business piggy banks to be spent on production that cannot meet that demand as the economy tries to begin a recovery.  That inflation will threaten what should be a robust post-recession growth period.  Some of this money, to be sure, is being absorbed by businesses and families paying down their own accumulated debt, but the present “stimulus” spending, borrowing, and money printing greatly outstrip absorption through private debt reduction.  And in the end, private debt reduction doesn’t reduce the overhang; it just changes the overhang’s location.  Further, this overhang shift is exacerbated by the current lack of employment in our economy.

This situation is made worse by repeated bouts of government spending.  Under present conditions, the overhang only increases: the money is simply sequestered in those business and personal accounts against future spending needs, rather than used for current spending, in anticipation of continued unemployment.  That unemployment and associated uncertainty about the future puts a premium on having savings with which to pay the mortgage or to buy food, since there is no income with which to pay for these things.

This is an important lesson in its own right.  But underlying all of this is the fact that the economic crisis faced by the United States and the European Union (of which Greece is only a present example) is at bottom a debt crisis, not an “ordinary” cyclic (if unusually deep) recession/spending crisis.  Solving the spending/inflation problem, important as it is, will do little to solve the debt crises; these can be solved only through actually paying down the debts or by going through default and bankruptcy.

The spending question can feed into debt crisis resolution in an important way, though: reducing spending below revenues, more than eliminating budget deficits, produces budget surpluses that then can go directly to paying the debts.  And reducing spending below revenues by reducing spending rather than by raising tax rates leaves more money in the hands of the individual citizens and their businesses, who are far better equipped to make spending—and debt repayment—decisions than any government has shown itself to be.

Are the Republicans Panicking?

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It’s beginning to look like the Republicans are losing their nerve and starting to duck away from the fight that must be fought for our nation’s soul.

House Speaker John Boehner looks like he’s beginning to bend on the matter of tax increases; he’s conceding that a final deal, from the super committee or in Congress, could include revenue increases; although he maintains that “there clearly is a limit.”  Additionally, 100 Representatives, including 40 Republicans, have signed a letter to the super committee that insists that “all options for mandatory and discretionary spending and revenues” be considered.  Unfortunately, we know what the limit invariably is, once the camel’s nose is in the tent.

Senator Jim DeMint (R, SC), while professing general optimism, notes that one of the reasons he’s not endorsing any of the present Republican candidates for President is that he wants to focus on getting a greater number of conservative Republicans elected to the Senate in 2012.  He’s already seen in the past week, for instance, 32 of his colleagues side with Senate Democrats to block an amendment offered by Senator Tom Coburn (R, OK) that would have cut spending by $1 billion through reducing funding for the Rural Development Agency.  In the same week, 11 Republican Senators, together with the Democratic Party, couldn’t even figure out how to cut $6 million from the Small Community Air Service Development Program.  Senator DeMint has been forced to take a different route than he did in 2008 when he endorsed then-candidate Mitt Romney:

I want to do better for our next president than we did for George Bush. [He] had a Congress that wanted to spend money, and if he wanted anything done, he had to agree to that spending….”

Apparently too many Republicans, in the Senate, at least, have lost their stomach for this fight to reduce government and cut spending.

We cut our deficit and our debt by cutting spending.  Period.  This isn’t rocket science.  The government has too much money, already; there’s no need to raise taxes.  Eliminate loopholes—starting with the energy subsidies, both oil and gas and “green” energy subsidies—absolutely, and this will raise revenue sufficient to Boehner’s “revenue increases,” but it does so without raising taxes, without raising tax rates.  The surest way to increase government revenue, and the most economically sound way, the most moral way, is to get government out of the way of our economy, out of the way of our businesses, and let our economy recover and our citizens get back to work.  This demands, as a first step, spending reductions.  This requires cutting wherever the opportunities arise.  This requires forcing the Democrats—alone—onto the record as voting for spending increases.

If we need to alter our taxes, and we do, we need to do so by reforming our present system by replacing it in its entirety with a flat tax that has no subsidies, no credits, no loopholes, and that has everyone paying something.  Ten percent of Americans paying 70% of the nation’s income tax, while 50% of us pay 3%-4%, is a system that cries out for wholesale replacement.

The Republicans need to find their…sticking-place…and rescrew their courage to it.  One sitting Senator understands this need.