Why Politics Can't Be Trusted With Important Matters
PolicyGuy thinks that, as a rule, market-based allocation of resources, and that local resolution of issues are better than national attempts at solutions. Politics is the art of taking money from people to solve an issue, and then spending it on other people, in ways that doesn't address the problem.

A good example is highway construction. Some of motorists' money finds its way to Washington DC, where it is allocated not on any "rational" plan of national needs, but on the basis of which congressional district is represented by the Congressman who has been in office for the longest time.

In National Review (or some call it, National Review On Dead Tree), Kate O'Beirne discusses the funding of "first responders" (fire departments, EMS squads, etc.) under the guise of "Homeland Security." Congress is dumping money on local authorities, who are sometimes unsure of what they will even use the funds for. The Steamship Authority, serving Martha's Vineyard (Massachusetts), is set to receive $900,000, for example. A spokesman says "Quite honestly, I don't know what we're going to do, but you don't turn down grant money."

Says Peter King, a liberal Republican from Long Island, "A lot of guys on both sides of the aisle care only about getting money for their districts. ... I understand pork-barrel spending. But this shouldn't be the case when it comes to national security." One congressional aide says "Members get no points for worrying about New York, they get points for worrying about Appalachia."

Nothing against Appalachia, but given the economic and demographic realities, we ought to be worry more about New York, Chicago, and other metro areas when it comes to allocating federal "homeland security" funds. But because funding is based on the political process, the results will of necessity be skewed.
(permalink)

How's Your Pig Latin?
As a child, I never much saw the usefulness of learning pig latin, but I did enjoy this line from the August 11 issue of National Review: Uday and Qusay are ead-day.
(permalink)

Pay the Teachers Well
Another item to pass along from the Cornfield Commentary. E.J. Dionne (of the Washington Post) discusses the proposal to introduce vouchers in the horribly expensive (and just plain horrible) Washington DC public schools. He wants ... you guess ... more money to "upgrade the quality of teaching" in schools.

David Hogberg does some quick calculations, and concludes that the DC schools already have plenty of money to attract good teachers--enough to pay then $67,500 a year--and still spend 85 percent of its money on other things. Question: Where's the rest of the money going?
(permalink)

Iowa Governor Vetoes Tax Cuts
Tom Vilsack, governor of Iowa, vetoed a tax cut proposed by the legislature. Writing over in the Cornfield Commentary, David Hogberg responds by refuting the claim--common in "high service, high tax" states--that loads of government services produce economic growth.
(permalink)

Prison Population Increases
Collectively, the states spend $40 billion a year on prison systems, according to a report issued by The Sentencing Project. Stateline.org reviews the report, which says that the prison population rose by 2.6 percent in 2002.

That could be bad news, or good news. The Sentencing Project tends to be skeptical of imprisonment, but for public safety, some people simply ought to be in prison. (On the other hand, the case for imprisonment for, say, minor drug offenses, is at best, questionable.)

Stateline quotes the head of the American Society of Criminology as saying that even in tough budget times, "There are many things that get cut before they cut public safety and corrections. There is a ‘public safety will not be compromised' attitude." I should hope so. This is not to say that the so-called corrections system is perfect; it clearly isn't. But if promoting public safety isn't the sine qua non of government, I'm not sure anything else.
(permalink)

Government Aid Carries a Stigma. Why is this a Problem?
Officials in Wisconsin think that too many people think there is a stigma associated with the term "food stamps." So the state is spending $10,000 on an attempt to come up with a new name. The state has had a rising number of people who are too ashamed to apply.

People are too proud to depend on the forced contributions of others. This is a problem? People who are in genuine need ought to get help--preferably from family members, then friends in churches or other voluntary associations, and then, only as a last resort, from the taxpayers.
(permalink)

Why Spend Twice?
The State of Michigan has made a 70-plus percent cut in its funding of adult education programs, reports the Detroit News.

One school's "associate superintendent" thinks the cuts are short-sighted, asking "How do you teach a child to read if you can't read?" Well. How is is that junior's parents can't read? One culprit, surely, are the government schools who failed the parents the first time around.
(permalink)

Want Money? Get Power
The Springfield (Ill.) Journal-Register has the lowdown on who got what among Illinois politicians. The news, not surprisingly, is that rank has its privileges. House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, raised more than $620,000 in political contributions during the first half of the year; his minority counterpart, Tom Cross (R-Oswego), pulled in less than half of that, or $294,000.

Last election the Democratic party took over the majority status in the senate--for the first time in a decade. As the paper dryly notes, the party is "suddenly popular with donors." The Democratic senate fund has, in the first six months of this year, garnered $813,000, two times its take at a comparable time two years ago. Now that Emil Jones (D-Chicago) is Senate President, his contributions this year are almost three times what they were two years ago.

Whenever numbers like this come out, good government groups tut tut, and call for restrictions on free speech (campaign finance reform) and welfare for politicians (public finance of campaigns). As a professor at the University of Illinois puts it, however, the increase in donations to certain pols is understandable: "If you're a winner, it's easier to raise money from people who want to keep you in power and people who just want to be friends with whoever is in power."

Campaign donors are buying two things: protection against government interference in their own affairs, and the ability to get the government to interfere in the affairs of their business competitors. Of course, if the state wasn't so overbearing and active, there'd be no perceived need for this kind of spending. As it is, money does not corrupt politics; politics, rather, corrupts money.
(permalink)

Illinois Freeloads off Pharmacists
Here's another reason why Medicaid needs reforming: it's gotten to large that it is threatening the livelihood of small business owners.

According to the Springfield Journal-Register, the state of Illinois has $2 billion-plus in outstanding Medicaid bills, going back to March. The Journal-Register tells the story of a Springfield-area pharmacist, John Watt, who has been an unwilling banker to the state. The state is now in arrears to the tune of $200,000. He has had to take out loans and even a second mortage on his house to keep his business afloat--now that he's floating money to the state--and has had to stop taking new Medicaid patients.

Drug chain giant Walgreens, meanwhile, says that the state owes that company "tens and tens of millions of dollars."

(Thanks to Greg Blankenship of A New Can of Worms for the pointer.)
(permalink)

In the Land of Tax-and-Spenders
The National Conference of State Legislators is a group of state legislators across the country. It's also the home of spend-happy legislators, as David Hogberg relates in his travelogue to the group's annual meeting last week. Fiscal problems were discussed as a "revenue problem," not a "spending problem," even though, during the last fiscal year, state spending increased 1.7 percent--outstripping revenue growth of 0.7 percent. Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, was, according to Hogberg, booed and hissed when he suggested that states cut spending. And we call these people "honorable"?
(permalink)

Schools Slowly Responding to Education Reporting Requirements
Under the federal No Child Left Behind act, states are supposed to prepare lists of how well (or not) their schools are doing in helping students achive educational targets. Many schools have yet to submit data, but the results so far aren't pretty. In California, 70 percent of schools will not make "adequately yearly progress." Education, by constitutional rights, should not be a concern of the federal government. But perhaps some good can come out of this law yet if it highlights the inadequacies of the current government-operated monopoly system and paves the way for increased school choice.

(permalink)

Some People LIKE Spam
Some people like Spam--especially the inhabitants of Austin, Minnesota, the home of the Hormel company, which makes the meat product known as Spam (capitalize that S!). Hormel is suing a software company that uses the word "spam" in its name.
(permalink)

Milwaukee Mayor May Take Over Schools
A candidate for Milwaukee's mayoral office thinks that the next mayor ought to take over the Milwaukee Public Schools. Advocates cite the experience of Chicago. (Detroit had a state takeover a few years ago.) The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, by the way, cautions policy makers to not over-estimate the benefits of mayoral takeover. In brief, they find that the financial progress of the mayoral takeover has been significant, but educational progress has not. In other words, changing one government office for another may improve fiscal performance, but won't change the fundamental problem of having a government monopoly.
(permalink)

Moving to Downtown Detroit?
Yes, it's true, people are moving to downtown Detroit--that once-great city that has turned into in recent decades, with middle-class flight, a race-baiting and corrupt Coleman administration, dismal public schools, and shoddy public services.

The numbers aren't great--roughly 7,000 people live in downtown Detroit, short of the 10,000 generally required to support a shopping mall. The Detroit News highlights new residences in the city (mostly lofts), but there are less than 500 so far this year. Still, for Detroit, that's pretty good. The city is using low-interest loans to attract developers. An even better approach would be to curb its unions (get workers to actually ... work), adopt an aggressive crime-fighting strategy (along the lines of NYC under Guiliani), free up money (perhaps through increased use of privatization and load-shedding) to repair its crumbling infrastructure, and press the state to allow a voucher system for education to attract families with children.

Over at the Detroit Free Press, Tom Walsh reminds us of how far the city has fallen. From 1970 to 2000, the city lost 37 percent of its population, the percentage of residents filing city income tax returns dropped even more -- by over half -- meaning that a shrinking population was increasingly filled with non-workers (income tax? No wonder why people are leaving.)

By the way, Urban Futures, a project of the Reason Public Policy Institute, is a great place to get ideas for making urban areas more liveable.
(permalink)

I Can't Confess to Drunk Driving; I'm too Drunk
Some criminal convictions come from confessions, but sometimes the confession itself is the source of a legal finding of not guilty. Today's OpinionJournal.Com tells this bizarre story from norway:

An Oslo man picked up for drunk driving had a blood-alcohol level of 2.59. (The legal limit in most U.S. states is 0.8 or 1.0, but in Norway it's a shockingly low 0.2.) "A level of 2.0," note the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, "is reckoned to be when signs of alcohol poisoning arise, and the subject exhibits a total loss of control."

It should have been an open-and-shut case, especially since the guy confessed to driving drunk. But he told a newspaper: "I was both drunk and hung over when I was questioned. I signed a confession to get out of an uncomfortable situation. Later I withdrew the confession." A court threw out the charges, agreeing with the man that his confession to drunk driving was invalid because he was too drunk to make it. A defense like this would never fly in Saudi Arabia.

Though the Journal labels this story "Not Guilty by Reason of Intoxication," an alternative title may be "I'm too drunk to confess to drunk driving."
(permalink)

Is a Drivers License Without a Photo the Real Thing?
Doubtless you've read about the Florida woman who wants to get a drivers license with a photo that shows only her eyes peeking out from behind a face covering. Apparently it's still up in the air in Minnesota, where officials want--and got tentative approval--to put the expiration date of foreign visas on licenses.
(permalink)

Medical Malpractice Reform
According to Stateline.org, 34 state's legislures have debated medical malpractice reform this year.

Says one analyst, "Doctors were bailing out, trauma centers were closing, OB-GYNs stopped accepting new patients in certain parts of the country and women couldn’t find a doctor to deliver their babies." Proponents of reform want to enact something similar to a California provision that limits the amount of damages that can be awarded for "pain and suffering."

Overlawyered.com, meanwhile, reports that medical malpractice insurance rates have risen largely as a result of rising legal jackpots. For further reading on the issue, read that site's bad medicine archive.
(permalink)

Mental Health Treatment--or Jail?
Macomb County, Michigan (near Detroit) will start screening its jail population for the mentally ill. The idea is to get them into treatment instead of jail. Could be worth trying elsewhere, if they go forward with this.
(permalink)

Lead Paint Poisoning: The Latest Fishing Expedition
The City of Milwaukee blames two companies for poisoning children, and wants $85 milion from them to pay for cleanup. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Timothy G. Dugan has dismissed the city's lawsuit. Dugan agreed with the contention of the defendents, who argued that the city failed to show that their products had caused the damage--or was even applied to any of the houses that the city has treated.

The federal government banned lead in paint in 1978, and most companies stopped using it by 1955. But as Steven Malanga has written, you've got to follow the money--to the trial attorneys--to find the origins of lead lawsuits.
(permalink)

Turning Air Traffic Controll over to Private Companies
The Chicago-area Daily Herald, "U.S. House and Senate negotiators have agreed on language that would allow about 70 smaller airports nationwide - including DuPage, Palwaukee and Aurora - to hire private air traffic controllers." (DuPage county airport, and perhaps the others as well, is a case of wasteful public spending, but that's another day.) The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (the union of federal employees who do most of the air traffic control work) are, of course, alarmed. Meanwhile, Robert Poole of the Reason Public Policy Institute, observes that other countries have successfully used privatization, and encourages the U.S. to do the same.
(permalink)

The Mentally Ill are the Most Free. Or maybe not.
Over the last 40 years, we've seen various restrictions on freedoms, such as seatbelt laws, the almost complete dissolution of freedom of association, and restrictions on property use, to name a few. (A large area in which freedom has increased greatly--and not always profitably--has been in areas involving sex. Divorce, despite its devastating effects on children, is commonplace, and unstigmatized; abortion is a form of family planning.)

But one group of people has seen a dramatic increase in personal freedom: the severely mentally ill. Sally Satel & Mary Zdanowicz review the recently published report of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, and find much lacking.

Satel and Zdanowicz are dissatisfied with public policy's treatment--or lack of treatment--of those people who don't admit they need treatment. Many of them need institutional treatment, but institutionalization was thrown out the window when "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" came along (if not before). Federal monies that would normally flow to hospitals, for example, are not available for hospitals with a large number of mental patients.

Freedom is wonderful, but as the authors point out, severely mentally ill people are not free people. If there was ever a case for state-sponsored coercion, this is it. The authors note that treatment, when ordered by a civil court, can do wonders for the ill, and society as well. "For instance, in New York, of those placed in six months of assisted outpatient treatment, 77 percent fewer were hospitalized, 85 percent fewer experienced homelessness, 83 percent fewer were arrested, and 85 percent fewer were incarcerated."

Instead, however, mental health policy has pursued an almost-total path towards deinstitutionalization--something appropriate for many patients, but not all. The deinstitutionalization of the most severely ill has not done them any good, and it hasn't helped the cause of mental health treatment either. For as Satel and Zdanowicz argue, it is the dangerous and hallucinating people on the street--turned out of treatment by the dogma of deinstitutionalization--who present the picture of mental illness to the public. Given that public face, no wonder why the mentally ill as a whole are underserved.

By the way, a more extended treatment of the subject, read Failing the Mentally Ill from City Journal, one of the finest public policy magazines around.
(permalink)

A Free-Market Case for Drug Importation?
Ed Crane and Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute make an argument that free markets would be advanced by lifting the ban on re-importation of prescription drugs. In their scenario, pharmaceutical companies would have to respond by raising prices in Europe, giving governments the choice between having no drugs at all, or raising prices. Facing that choice, Crane and Pilon believe, governments in Europe (which have been freeriding off of American consumers) will destroy their own price controls.

I'm not convinced, but I am glad to see that there may be some good out of this yet.
(permalink)

Sierra Club Takes Aim at Consumer Choice
The Sierra Club has launched a campaign against General Motor's Hummer. I wouldn't want to spend that much money on a vehicle that large. But apparently, there's money to be made by ridiculing the choices that other people make.
(permalink)

Malianged Merchandiser Brings Jobs, Choices to Distressed Neighborhood
Wal-Mart has, in the words of the suburban Chicago Daily Herald, been attacked by critics who allege that it "drives local stores out of business, brings in low-paying jobs, and eats up green space." (Here is but one web site that comes up when you google "Stop Wal-Mart")

The giant retailer has announced plans to create a 150,000 square foot store on the west side of Chicago. Currently, the site is home of an empty factory. The store, which will sell general merchandise but not groceries, should bring 100 to 200 construction jobs, and 250 retail ones.

So what does the local politician have to say about this? Is she worried about the big box store "invading" her neighborhood? Hardly.

Emma Mitts, the city council representative for the area, said Wal-Mart would bring in much-needed shopping options and jobs for her constituents.

She dismissed concerns about Wal-Mart driving out other businesses and taking away jobs.

"That's unlikely if we don't have jobs for them to take away," she said in a telephone interview. "So many of our young and seniors who want to work aren't able to find employment."

A big box store may not be your ideal place to shop (and I usually find other stores more appealing than Wal-Mart). But as I have written for the Illinois Policy Institute, government should grant no favors to these stores--nor put any special impediments in their way. Let the shopping public vote with its dollars.
(permalink)

Prisoners Feel the Heat
Prison isn't always the nicest place to be--it is meant to be punishment, after all. (It's also a social service ward and other things as well, several of them contradictory). But outside of Phoenix, being in jail means living in tents and going without air conditioning. Here's a story about life on the hot cots, which compares life under the law and life in the military.

About 2,000 inmates living in a barbed-wire-surrounded tent encampment at the Maricopa County Jail have been given permission to strip down to their government-issued pink boxer shorts.

On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing boxers were either curled up on their bunk beds or chatted in the tents, which reached 138 degrees inside the week before. Many were also swathed in wet, pink towels as sweat collected on their chests and dripped down to their pink socks.

"It feels like you are in a furnace," said James Zanzo't, an inmate who has lived in the tents for 1 1/2 years. "It's inhumane."

Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago started making his prisoners wear pink, is not sympathetic. He said Wednesday that he told the inmates: "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths."

Thanks to OpinionJournal for the link.
(permalink)

Fewer Choices=More Choices. I guess.
U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wants the U.S. government to get more deeply involved in marketing decisions involving automobiles. (He wants the CAFE standards from 27mpg to 40, by law, by the year 2015.) If that makes any sense, consider the following. William McNary, co-director of something called "Citizen Action Illinois," praised the proposal--which will force Americans into smaller, lighter, and less powerful vehicles--by saying "We will give American consumers more and better choices (in vehicles)." As Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, CAFE kills. And as I pointed out in an essay for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, increased energy efficiency does nothing to decrease actual energy--in this case, petroleum--use.
(permalink)

News Flash! Imprisoned Criminals Can't Victimize Society
The Washington Post comes out with this headline: "Number Of Prisoners Rises as Crime Drops." How about, oh, "Crime Drops as Number of Prisoners Rise"?

Just thinking about it.
(permalink)

Drugs on the Mind
In my junior high "health" class, we were, in those pre-DARE days, warned that drugs could cause damage to the body and mind. You could get hurt, for example, if you were around someone who, after sniffing glue, started feeling a bit punchy, literally.

Fast forward through the years, and we find that drugs, again, are causing trouble. Except this time it's not speed, pot, or heroin that are causing trouble, it's lipitor, vioxx, and a host of other drugs sold by America's pharmaceutical companies. It's causing people to be inconsistent, and ask for unjustified demands.

To take just one example, Congress is considering a bill that would allow pharmacies, wholesalers, and individuals import prescription drugs from 25 countries. The main sponsor, Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.), says that "If we're going to have a prescription-drug benefit [in Medicare] we ought to have a way to control these outrageous prices."

Controlling prices ... This is something you would expect to hear from a statist such as Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) Yet Gutknecht is no statist. His lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is 95 percent. From the far-left Americans for Democratic Action, Gutknecht received a 0 percentage rating in 2002.

Gutknecht claims that his measure is all about harnessing the power of markets to make drugs more affordable. This is false on several levels. He claims that a ban on importation of prescription drugs is an anti-market measure that needs to be lifted. But prescription drugs would hardly be a free marketplace should imports be allowed. FDA approval is required, costing years and millions of dollars of lawyering--and this on top of the normal costs of research and development.

And of course, Canada and other countries that proponents of importation look to are hardly champions of free markets. They practice price controls. Gutknecht denies this, saying that "Other countries do not have price controls. They set reimbursement rates. Manufacturers can set the retail price higher if they wish. Which they do as often as they do not. " But for countries that have, for the most part, one purchaser of health care, the result is a monopoly purchasing situation. And when that buyer is the government, the result is ... price controls.

Price controls have decimated the pharmaceutical industry in Europe. Why would we want to follow that example? Getting healthy can be expensive, granted. But as the old saying goes, consider the alternative.

Health care requires a lot of fixing. Back-door price controls (letting Canada et al. set prices for drugs that Americans payu) is not a way of fixing it.
(permalink)

Costs of "Smart Growth" Measures
Citing the costs of both money and local authority, a group of legislators in Wisconsin are trying to enact a repeal of that state's "Smart Growth" laws. This bears watching. "Planning" is a good thing, especially if done by individuals or companies. But planning for an entire state or town is foolish. Not only does it sound bad ("five years plans" were the tradition of the Soviet Union), but it's impossible to anticipate the wants and needs of thousands or millions of citizens.

Businesses make their plans are the peril of their employees and stockholders, but would-be customers can always refuse to cooperate. It's harder to not cooperate with government planners, though.

Business planners can recognize the errors of their ways and change tracks; it's much harder to undo harmful government plans. (Think of all those "temporary" tax increases out there.)

Finally, business planners who make mistakes can be removed from office, making it unlikely they will cause damage to their company again. Government planners, however, seldom lose their jobs or offices, thus reducing the cost (to the planners) of unwise plans.

Yes, some planning should take place--anticipating where the next road should be, for example--but "smart growth" plans are too often not an attempt to react to anticipated public choices, but to shape them into what they "should" be.
(permalink)

Community Colleges to Raise Fees, Cut Expenses
The Detroit News reports that budget cuts from the state government budget mean that many of Michigan's community colleges will have to raise tuition and cut spending. One way to improve the operating budgets of community colleges would be to improve K-12 education; remedial education costs the country at least $16 billion a year. In Michigan (and probably other states as well), one-third of the students who graduate from high school have deficient skills in basic academic subjects--meaning that they will need to be tended to in colleges, especially community colleges.
(permalink)

Goldberg on Berkeley Study of Conservatives
Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, has a cranky response to Berkeley study that, among other things, lumps together Reagan, Hitler, and Mussilini as "right wing conservatives."

The authors of the study say they are building on a literature of research into the psychology of conservativism, and that similar studies of liberalism are few and far between. What is strange is what gets studied--"there's very little data on people who like to have cereal and orange juice in the morning," but plenty of studies on sociopaths, for example. So the implication of all those studies on conservatism, Goldberg infers, is that conservatives are just plain nuts.

Another charge that Goldberg levies is that the study doesn't tell us much unique about conservatives after all.

Virtually all of the characteristics the authors attribute to the right can be equally laid at the feet of the left. If you think left-wingers have a high tolerance for ambiguity, tell one it's not clear that Head Start does any good at all. ... I've just watched my wife spend a year debating Title IX please don't tell me that feminists have a rich love of exchange and a gift for understanding nuance.

"Fear and aggression," allegedly qualities of the right, are found in the un-conservative campaigns against genetically-modified foods, and globalization. And of course, it's "liberalism" that is "conservative" in this country, fighting off attempts to update the current methods of funding education (taxpayer-paid, government-operated local school monopolies), retirement (the current generation-to-retired generation transfer scheme of social security), and health care (third-party payers), among other policy areas.

Finally, conservatism, as a motivating political force, has very different agendas throughout the world. For example, "A Saudi conservative wants to maintain State control of the economy, scoffs at civil liberties and wants to spread Wahhabbi Islam around the globe." When was the last time you head an American conservative call for women to be denied the right to drive?

There's plenty more to say on this, but for now I will close with a final thought from Goldberg: "So, yes, conservatism is a temperament, but it is also an ideology. And that ideology is not dependent on the need for "cognitive closure" or a "fear of ambiguity" at all. In fact, most conservative thinkers see their project completely differently. The threat they see is from a statist elite which seeks to impose uniformity and cookie-cutter banality across the society. Conservatism, as Russell Kirk noted, is marked by an "Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence." Indeed, if these authors had spent a bit more time reading Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, they wouldn't have bollixed up their own depiction of the conservative mind so badly."
(permalink)

"Corner" Readers on the Berkeley Study of Conservatives
National Review was done this weekend, so I wasn't able to collect some thoughts from there. Now that it's working again, here are some items I have pulled from "The Corner," the group blog of the magazine.

A grad student in social cognition argues that the context-dependent nature of "conservatism" (is means different things in different countries and times) makes it a poor candidate for meta-analysis. He blames, appropriately enough, a psychological concept for the researcher's inability to accept this fact.

conservative. This fallacy is natural enough. Social psychology speaks of an outgroup homogeneity effect, whereby people think that the members of their own group (the 'ingroup') are different from each other but that people in an outgroup are similar. E.g., 'there is variability among us gentiles, but jews are all the same.'

Dr. Carole Bandy, a professor who studies social cognition--and who, presumably, has tenure--attacks the validity of the study.

The Berkeley authors have started from the work of Adorno in the 1950s on authoritarianism. This work has been heavily criticized, as the authors admit on the first page, as being heavily value-laden. Validity is the chief difficulty with value-laden research and it is not an incidental side issue in research. It is the very foundation.

She then goes on to say that the Berkeley researchers use weak methods, and in her concluding remarks, asserts that the actual scale items used in the study have an obvious bias.

Finally, a newly minted Ph.D. in clinical psychology takes up the atmosphere of academic psychology rather than the Berkeley study itself. In his field, the writer tells National Review, "conservatism is indeed viewed as synonymous with "mean-spirited, homophobic, misogynist, hate-mongering troglodyte."

In my own experience with academics who have studied foreign leaders through the lens of social psychology, leaders who viewed the world "simplistically"--a bad thing, by the way--were overwhelmingly "conservative."
(permalink)