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What am I mad about? Oh, God.

I’m mad about Bush receiving Michael Crichton in the White House, to be reassured that climate change is a hoax even as the Northwest Passage opens up for the first time in a few million years. I’m mad about the Democrats’ failure to capitalize on the Enron scandal, and particularly the infamous “Grandma Millie” tapes (having just watched the film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). I’m mad about Pius XII, the man who arm-twisted Germany’s 23 million Catholics into cooperating with the Nazis despite their initial opposition, being considered for sainthood (I’m in the middle of a book about it, Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell). I’m mad about my own procrastination in writing a popular article for Scientific American about the limits of quantum computing. I’m mad about a public school system that condemns any math or science tracking as “elitist,” while the football and basketball programs aren’t similarly condemned. I’m mad about people who declare that “a proof of P!=NP would be worthless, since what if there were an algorithm for SAT that took 1.0000001ⁿ steps?,” as if no one had ever had such a perceptive insight in the 50-year history of complexity theory.

But, as for the “not gonna take it anymore” part, one does have to restrict one’s focus a bit. So recently I decided to concentrate my anger on overpriced journal subscriptions — and in particular, on the gouging of university libraries by companies like Kluwer and Elsevier. I’ve just written a three-page polemic about this issue (technically a book review), which is going to appear in SIGACT News, possibly with a rebuttal and counter-rebuttal. I’d be grateful for comments. Note that what I write about scientists’ “peculiar anger deficiency” applies to many other issues, global warming being one obvious example. There comes a time when it’s no longer enough to be correct: you also have to be angry!

Thanks to Bill Gasarch, both for commissioning the review and for suggesting the title of this post.

Note: My diatribe is also available in HTML and postscript.

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Strong AI. The Turing Test. The Chinese room. As I’m sure you’ll agree, not nearly enough has been written about these topics. So when an anonymous commenter told me there’s a new polemic arguing that computers will never think — and that this polemic, by one Mark Halpern, is “being blogged about in a positive way (getting reviews like ‘thoughtful’ and ‘fascinating’)” — of course I had to read it immediately.

Halpern’s thesis, to oversimplify a bit, is that artificial intelligence research is a pile of shit. Like the fabled restaurant patron who complains that the food is terrible and the portions are too small, Halpern both denigrates a half-century of academic computer science for not producing a machine that can pass the Turing Test, and argues that, even if a machine did pass the Test, it wouldn’t really be “thinking.” After all, it’s just a machine!

(For readers with social lives: the Turing Test, introduced by Alan Turing in one of the most famous philosophy papers ever written, is a game where you type back and forth with an unknown entity in another room, and then have to decide whether you’re talking to a human or a machine. The details are less important than most people make them out to be. Turing says that the question “Can machines think?” is too meaningless to deserve discussion, and proposes that we instead ask whether a machine can be built that can’t be distinguished from human via a test such as his.)

If you haven’t read Halpern’s essay, the following excerpts should help you simulate a person who has.

Turing does not argue for the premise that the ability to convince an unspecified number of observers, of unspecified qualifications, for some unspecified length of time, and on an unspecified number of occasions, would justify the conclusion that the computer was thinking — he simply asserts it.

A conversation may allow us to judge the quality or depth of another’s thought, but not whether he is a thinking being at all; his membership in the species Homo sapiens settles that question — or rather, prevents it from even arising.

…the relationship of the AI community to Turing is much like that of adolescents to their parents: abject dependence alternating with embarrassed repudiation. For AI workers, to be able to present themselves as “Turing’s Men” is invaluable; his status is that of a von Neumann, Fermi, or Gell-Mann, just one step below that of immortals like Newton and Einstein. He is the one undoubted genius whose name is associated with the AI project … When members of the AI community need some illustrious forebear to lend dignity to their position, Turing’s name is regularly invoked, and his paper referred to as if holy writ. But when the specifics of that paper are brought up, and when critics ask why the Test has not yet been successfully performed, he is brushed aside as an early and rather unsophisticated enthusiast.

Apart from [the Turing test], no one has proposed any compelling alternative for judging the success or failure of AI, leaving the field in a state of utter confusion.

[W]hen a machine does something “intelligent,” it is because some extraordinarily brilliant person or persons, sometime in the past, found a way to preserve some fragment of intelligent action in the form of an artifact. Computers are general-purpose algorithm executors, and their apparent intelligent activity is simply an illusion suffered by those who do not fully appreciate the way in which algorithms capture and preserve not intelligence itself but the fruits of intelligence.

Of course, Halpern never asks whether the brain’s apparent intelligence is merely a preserved fragment of its billion-year evolutionary past. That would be ridiculous! Indeed, Halpern seems to think that if human intelligence is open to question, then the Turing Test is meaningless:

One AI champion, Yorick Wilks … has questioned how we can even be sure that other humans think, and suggests that something like the Test is what we actually, if unconsciously, employ to reassure ourselves that they do. Wilks … offers us here a reductio ad absurdum: the Turing Test asks us to evaluate an unknown entity by comparing its performance, at least implicitly, with that of a known quantity, a human being. But if Wilks is to be believed, we have unknowns on both sides of the comparison; with what do we compare a human being to learn if he thinks?

I think Halpern is simply mistaken here. The correct analogy is not between computers and humans; it’s between computers and humans other than oneself. For example, I have no direct evidence that the commenters on this blog think. I assume they think, since they’re so darned witty and insightful, and my own experience leads me to believe that that requires thinking. So why should this conclusion change if it turns out that, say, Greg Kuperberg is a robot (the KuperBlogPoster3000)?

Turing himself put the point as well as anyone:

According to the most extreme form of [the argument from consciousness] the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe ‘A thinks but B does not’ whilst B believes ‘B thinks but A does not’. Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.

There’s a story that A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard in the 1920’s, wanted to impose a Jew quota because “Jews cheat.” When someone pointed out that non-Jews also cheat, Lowell replied: “You’re changing the subject. We’re talking about Jews.” Likewise, when one asks the strong-AI skeptic how a grayish-white clump of meat can think, the response often boils down to: “You’re changing the subject. We’re talking about computers.”

And this leads to my central thesis: that the Turing Test isn’t “really” about computers or consciousness or AI. Take away the futuristic trappings, and what you’re left with is a moral exhortation — a plea to judge others, not by their “inner essences” (which we can never presume to know), but by their relevant observed behavior.

It doesn’t take a hermeneutic acrobat to tease this out of Turing’s text. Consider the following passages:

The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous. Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic. What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e.g. to the difficulty of the same kind of friendliness occurring between man and machine as between white man and white man, or between black man and black man.

It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school with out the other children making excessive fun of it.

If you want to know why Turing is such a hero of mine (besides his invention of the Turing machine, his role in winning World War II, and so on), the second passage above contains the answer. Let others debate whether a robotic child would have “qualia” or “aboutness” — Turing is worried that the other kids would make fun of it at school.

Look, once you adopt the “moral” stance, this whole could-a-computer-think business is really not complicated. Let me lay it out for you, in convenient question-and-answer format.

Q. If a computer passed the Turing Test, would we be obligated to regard it as conscious?
A. Yes.
Q. But how would we know it was conscious?
A. How do I know you’re conscious?
Q. But how could a bunch of transistors be conscious?
A. How could a bunch of neurons be conscious?
Q. Why do you always answer a question with a question?
A. Why shouldn’t I?
Q. So you’re saying there’s no mystery about consciousness?
A. No, just that the mystery seems no different in the one case than the other.
Q. But you can’t just evade a mystery by pointing to something else that’s equally mysterious!
A. Clearly you’re not a theoretical computer scientist.

As most of you know, in 1952 — a decade after his contributions to breaking the U-boat Enigma saved the Battle of the Atlantic — Turing was convicted of “gross homosexual indecency,” stripped of his security clearance, and forced to take estrogen treatments that caused him to grow breasts (it was thought, paradoxically, that this would “cure” him of homosexuality). Two years later, at age 41, the founder of computer science killed himself by biting the infamous cyanide-laced apple.

I agree with what I take to be Turing’s basic moral principle: that we should judge others by their relevant words and actions, not by what they “really are” (as if the latter were knowable to us). But I fear that, like Turing, I don’t have any argument for this principle that isn’t ultimately circular. All I can do is assert it, and assert it, and assert it.

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Given my public role as zookeeper, blogger, and jester, you might expect that I’d get a lot of strange email: from would-be Ramanujans who’ve proved or disproved P!=NP, stoners with bold new insights about string theory and consciousness, and complexity groupies who wanna collapse my hierarchy. And you’d be right, at least about the first two. But once in a while I’m graced with a missive so sublime — so perfect — that there’s nothing to do but post it here in its entirety.

RE: HYPERFRACTALS — SHORTCUTS TO QUANTUM COMPUTING

Don’t let scientists intimidate you — quantum mechanics is simple. If you can read a hyperfractal, then all you need is common sense and an inquiring mind.

You don’t even need any math. Just follow the hyperfractal wiring diagram and figure it out for yourself. Real-life quantum applications are all around you waiting to be solved by you, your friends, relatives and co-workers. Together you can dig into all of the “unknowables” of academic science and discover that nature is logical and you own the keys to unlocking the future for your own benefit. There are faster, simpler, easier, stronger, cheaper ways to improve the world around you. The hyperfractal is your diagnostic tool for probing the quantum world and making it work — without scientific credentials.

For instance. On Sunday, February 26th the University of Illinois released a press statement concerning “A Strange Computer is Both On an Off.” Odd concept: The experiment could aid in understanding quantum computing. The bizarre realm of quantum mechanics — the physics theory that stumped even Albert Einstein — tiny things like electrons and packets of light often seen to be in two places at once in total violation of common sense. The newspaper article says that the tightest codes used in banking transactions that would take 100 million serial computers a thousand years to decipher can be solved by quantum computers in minutes. Scientists are hyperventilating and reeling in shock.

Actually, the hidebound computer research scientists are sixteen years overdue for recognizing quantum computing that operates on nature’s universal hyperfractal architecture. So far, it’s only encryption and decoding that has them terrified of the change from serial computers to serial/parallel quantum computing. However, to scientists, the scariest of all is the prospect of losing their authoritative power and prestige to the masses — the ordinary people who have common sense, a difficult problem to solve and the means to achieve their goals using their knowledge of nature as it really is — without academic indoctrination programs.

Cleaning up the environment by putting all the oil/coal/gas/nuclear power plants into functional obsolescence will take decades if the government, corporate or academic scientists try to use force to make nature obey orders — but only weeks or months to spread the word that natural energy is free energy and we can harness the unlimited spectrum of energy — it’s ours. Let’s take advantage.

Take charge of your own future — trailblazers can popularize quantum mechanics for the end users — the public. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nature is a friend — not an adversary. Quantum mechanics is simple. Peer-to-peer groups can debunk the Energy Shortage and demonstrate how ordinary people can overcome stale, restrictive, authoritarian thinking if we put our creative minds to it. You’ll need a hyperfractal diagnostic tool — on request I’ll send you a hyperfractal wiring diagram. Can we talk about it peer-to-peer?

Carla Hein
President/Coordinator
The DoubleParadox Network, P2P

Ms. Hein actually sent this gem to my colleague Alex Russell, but thoughtfully cc’ed it to me. Of course I wrote back to request the hyperfractal wiring diagram (assuming I’m included in her offer). I’ll let you know if she sends it.

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Lars Johansson asks me to comment on a press release entitled “Quantum computer solves problem, without running.” Alright, what have we got this time?

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — By combining quantum computation and quantum interrogation, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found an exotic way of determining an answer to an algorithm — without ever running the algorithm.

Using an optical-based quantum computer, a research team led by physicist Paul Kwiat has presented the first demonstration of “counterfactual computation,” inferring information about an answer, even though the computer did not run.

Readers, my sole ambition in life, outside the purely personal, is to prevent stuff like this from being spouted.

I’m serious. You see, I have no “philosophy” to offer the world, no unifying theory, no startling new idea. All I have is a long howl of rage, which admittedly tends to take the form of STOC/FOCS papers. But if you read those papers, you’ll see that almost every one of them was born when I came across some specific claim and said, “No. Dammit. No. That can’t possibly be right.”

Look — if you tell a layperson that a computer has solved a problem without ever having been switched on, then not only have you not explained anything, you haven’t even asserted anything. All you’ve done is pose a question: namely, “what’s the catch?”

In this case, the catch is simple. Say you’ve got two programs, Dif and Doof, running in the Windows taskbar. Dif is performing some enormous calculation, while Doof (being a Doof) is doing nothing. If Dif’s calculation returns any answer other than 5, then Dif closes Doof. You come back to your computer and find that Doof is still running. Even though Doof didn’t calculate anything, and even though Dif never did anything to Doof, you can immediately conclude — from Doof alone — that the answer you wanted was 5. Mindblowing! Unbelievable!

Now let Dif and Doof run, not in different windows, but in different branches of the wavefunction — that is, in quantum superposition. And instead of Dif using an operating system to close Doof, have Dif’s branch of the wavefunction interfere destructively with Doof’s branch, thereby preventing Doof’s branch from being observed. That’s the idea of counterfactual quantum computing.

I suppose this is “mysterious,” in the same way that a dog claiming to hate doggie-treats would be mysterious. In the former case, the mystery is quantum mechanics. In the latter case, the mystery is a talking dog.

Having said that, the original paper by Jozsa and Mitchison is actually lovely and well worth reading. It proves some nontrivial results about limits of counterfactual computing, and it also gives a good introduction to the Vaidman bomb (which I think of as a precursor to Grover’s algorithm).

I’ll end with the clearest account of counterfactual computing I’ve seen, courtesy of one Homer J. Simpson.

Dear Lord, the gods have been good to me. As an offering, I present these milk and cookies. If you wish me to eat them instead, please give me no sign whatsoever.

…

Thy will be done (munch munch munch).

Update (3/1): Paul Kwiat has written in to the comments section with some helpful clarifications.

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Over at Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit pans “Down the Rabbit Hole,” a movie about quantum mechanics, paranormal phenomena, and the deep imaginary connection between the two that’s setting the pseudoscience world on fire. (Don’t worry — the fire is harmless to those who have balanced their chakras.)

“Rabbit Hole” is a rehash of the 2004 film “What the Bleep Do We Know!?”; apparently the new version is longer and includes more crackpots, but the basic howlers are the same. (Woit’s summary: “entanglement=we are all connected, superposition=anything you want to be true is true.”)

I suppose I’ll eventually have to don a fake mustache, clothespin my nose, and go endure this movie, since people often bring it up when I tell them what I do for a living:

ME: …so, at least in the black-box model that we can analyze, my result implies that the quantum speedup for breaking cryptographic hash functions is only a polynomial one, as opposed to the exponential speedup of Shor’s factoring algorithm.

PERSON AT COCKTAIL PARTY: How interesting! It’s just like they were saying in the movie: reality is merely a construct of our minds.

But if I do jump down the Rabbit Hole, my worry is that I won’t make it through:

“Sir, if you don’t stop causing a disturbance, we’ll have to escort you out of the movie theater…”

“BUT YOU CAN’T USE QUANTUM MECHANICS TO CHANNEL DEAD PEOPLE! IT’S A LINEAR THEORY! POSTSELECTION’S NOT ALLOWED!”

“Alright, come with us, sir.”

“LINEAR, I TELL YOU! AND THE MEASUREMENTS OBEY THE |Ψ|² RULE! WHAT THE %*#()$*$ DO THESE IDIOTS KNOW!? I’M BEGGING YOU, STOP THE PROJECTOR!”

Since this hasn’t yet happened, what inspired the present post was not the movie itself, but its title graphic:

Staring at this image, I came up with something that I call the Cringeometer: a quick way for anyone, scientist or not, to predict whether a given popular depiction of science will cause scientists to cringe. To use the Cringeometer, you don’t have to make any decisions about technical accuracy. All you have to do is look for mathematical symbols such as Σ, ε, and π, and then ask yourself two questions:

1. Are the symbols used to create an aura of profundity and unintelligibility, without regard for their meaning — more or less like Christmas tree ornaments?
2. If so, is the effect humorous?

The results should be self-explanatory — but just in case they aren’t, I’ll end with three sample applications of the Cringeometer.

• “What the Bleep?” explodes the Cringeometer even before the movie has started.

• NUMB3RS also sets the Cringeometer off, even though it probably does more good than harm for public math appreciation. This illustrates that the Cringeometer can’t predict scientists’ detailed opinions — only the involuntary, physical reaction of cringing.

• “The Far Side” cartoons never set the Cringeometer off.

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On Tuesday Judge John Jones III released a landmark 139-page decision, which finds that the Dover school board violated the Establishment Clause by endorsing intelligent design. Why is that a setback for science? Because I spent hours reading the decision instead of doing actual work, and so should everyone else.

In a case like this, of course, it’s not science that’s on trial but the legal system itself. Can it distinguish a real idea from a sham, in the same way that a FOCS program committee would reject a paper claiming Grover search in O(log N) queries, no matter how well-written it was? This time, the system came through. Judge Jones — despite being a Republican appointed by Bush — proved himself capable of the following insight:

Because we are able to recognize design of artifacts and objects, according to Professor Behe, that same reasoning can be employed to determine biological design. Professor Behe testified that the strength of the analogy depends upon the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions; however, if this is the test, ID completely fails.

Unlike biological systems, human artifacts do not live and reproduce over time. They are non-replicable, they do not undergo genetic recombination, and they are not driven by natural selection. For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires… (p. 80-81)

(Is one allowed to make that sort of argument in an official capacity? Strange thing, the Establishment Clause.)

But the section where Judge Jones rises from cogency to furious eloquence is the “Purpose Inquiry” (p. 90-132), where he shows that the Dover school board members were even bigger jokers than is directly inferrable from their decision. Here’s William Buckingham, Chair of the Curriculum Committee, at a June 14, 2004 school board meeting:

“Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state … I challenge you [the audience] to trace your roots to the monkey you came from … 2,000 years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?” (p. 105)

(For readers who don’t “grok” this allusion: while many people were crucified by the Romans around that time, Buckingham is most likely referring to Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean Jewish preacher postulated by many ID proponents to be related to, or even identical with, the intelligent designer of their theory.)

Here’s another gem:

At the June 2004 meeting, Spahr asked Buckingham where he had received a picture of the evolution mural that had been torn down and incinerated. Jen Miller testified that Buckingham responded: “I gleefully watched it burn.” … Burning the evolutionary mural was apparently insufficient for Buckingham, however. Instead, he demanded that the teachers agree that there would never again be a mural depicting evolution in any of the classrooms and in exchange, Buckingham would agree to support the purchase of the biology textbook in need by the students. (Judge Jones’s emphasis; p. 108)

The school board members took up a collection at a church to pay for the creationist book Of Pandas and People, then lied about it under oath (p. 114-115). They also testified at the trial that they didn’t understand the substance of the curriculum change that, over the science teachers’ objections, they voted for (p. 121). In short, the plaintiffs couldn’t have asked for better allies.

Admittedly, to anyone who’s ever attended an American school board meeting, the Dover shenanigans won’t come as much surprise. Mark Twain, as often, said it best:

“First God created idiots, this was for practice. Then He made School Boards.”

Part II of this post will appear after I’ve returned to Pennsylvania (“The Genius School Board State”) later “today,” having completed my trip around the globe and gained a 2πi phase in the process. Hey — judging from the number of comments on my previous evolution post, you people seem to like this issue. In a blogosphere with finitely many readers, only the fittest topics will survive.

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Sorry for the delay! I was procrastinating all week by doing real work, but I’ve finally put my foot down and resolved that blogging must come first.

I lost a lot of respect for Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams after flipping through this compilation, which offers a tedious and redundant explanation for every cartoon. But, not content to rest on his laurels, Adams has recently come out as “undecided” on the question of Darwinism versus ID.

Whenever I encounter an online mudfight about this issue, I’m struck by how few commenters — even the ones on “our” side — really grasp the crucial point: that ID is scientifically worthless, not because it’s religiously-motivated, or unfalsifiable, or even necessarily wrong, but rather because it’s boring.

Among elephant seals, 4% of the males account for 88% of the copulations. The other 96%, the ones without harems, almost never get laid. This is puzzling: why do the seals bother to produce all those males who tax the community’s food supply, yet who are destined to become the seal equivalents of computer science grad students?

The answer is that a 50-50 sex ratio is the only evolutionarily stable strategy. Think about it: if every child gets half its genes from a mother and half from a father, then males and females must pass on the same total number of genes, even if the variance is higher for males. So if you’re a female elephant seal, then you can either play it safe by having a daughter, or shoot for the genetic jackpot by having a son. In expectation, both strategies will do equally well. But if there were more girls than guys in the population, then the expected number of grandchildren per son would become greater than the expected number of grandchildren per daughter. So the advantage would shift in favor of having a son, and would continue to do so until a 50-50 equilibrium was reestablished. Mystery solved. (The example comes from Dawkins, one of the few writers who consistently presents Darwinism as a way to actually explain things. The explanation itself comes from Fisher.)

On the airplane of science, nontrivial explanations are not the beverage cart or the in-flight movie — they’re the wings. If you think something was designed, but can’t explain why the designer chose to make it one way rather than some other way, then it doesn’t matter if you’re right or not: you don’t have a result. There’s no STOC/FOCS paper.

This, I suspect, is what underlies the disconnect between scientists and almost everyone else on this issue. The business of judging ideas by their explanatory power, and rejecting the ones that don’t have any, is remarkably new in human history. Even in the hard sciences, it wasn’t until Galileo that it really caught on. So maybe it shouldn’t surprise anyone that, in K-12 science education, it’s still a bizarre and heretical idea.

Why do things fall? Because gravity makes them fall.

How does a car work? By using energy.

Why do we need to sleep? To rest ourselves.

Who designed us? A designer did.

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This morning I got an email from Eric Klien of the Lifeboat Foundation, an organization that advocates building a “space ark” as an insurance policy in case out-of-control nanorobots destroy all life on Earth. Klien was inviting me to join the foundation’s scientific advisory board, which includes such notables as Ray Kurzweil. I thought readers of this blog might be interested in my response.

Dear Eric,

I’m honored (and surprised) that you would consider me for your board. But I’m afraid I’m going to decline, for the following reasons:

(1) I’m generally skeptical of predictions about specific future technologies, especially when those predictions are exactly the sort of thing that a science fiction writer would imagine. In particular, I consider the risk of self-replicating nanobots converting our entire planet into gray goo to be a small one.

(2) Once we’re dealing with such unlikely events, I don’t think we can say with confidence what protective measures would be effective. For all we know, any measures we undertake will actually increase the risk of catastrophe. For example, maybe if humanity launches a space ark, that will tip off a hostile alien civilization to our existence. And maybe the Earth will then be besieged by alien warships, which can only be destroyed using gray goo — the development of which was outlawed as a protective measure. I’m not claiming that this scenario is likely, only that I have no idea whether it’s more or less likely than the scenarios you’re considering.

(3) There are several risks to humanity that I consider more pressing than that of nanotechnology run amok. These include climate change, the loss of forests and freshwater supplies, and nuclear proliferation.

Best regards,
Scott Aaronson

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Forgive me if this post isn’t particularly timely — I just started blogging, so I’m still clearing out my cognitive backlog.

A month ago, the economist Steven Landsburg wrote a Slate column arguing that we shouldn’t help Hurricane Katrina victims too much. His reasoning? Presumably, the hurricane risk in New Orleans and surrounding areas was already reflected in property values being lower than what they would have been were there no such risk. So if the US spends federal tax dollars on hurricane relief, then it’s artificially subsidizing people who choose to live in hurricane-prone areas — thereby

1. raising taxes for everyone, including those who live in “safe” areas, and
2. raising property values in the hurricane-prone areas, which limits people’s freedom to select cheap but risky housing over expensive but safer housing.

I’d had some pleasant correspondence with Landsburg in the past, so I emailed him to say that, while I could find no flaw in his logic, I was confused as to why he didn’t take the argument even further. For example, what are fire departments, if not an artificial subsidy for people who choose to live in wooden houses rather than stone ones? And police departments? Clearly a lose-lose proposition. If you have a personal bodyguard, then you’re forced to pay for protection you don’t need. And if you don’t have a bodyguard, then you’re deprived of the freedom to choose lower taxes in exchange for having no one to call if you get stabbed.

See, in my view, if you’re going to be a radical libertarian, then you might as well go all the way. For — just like the denial of relief to hurricane victims — such consistency makes all parties better off than otherwise. Those willing to follow you all the way into Galt’s Gulch get the genuine Ayn Rand experience, with no wussy collectivist compromises. And for others, you’re all the more valuable as a walking, talking reductio ad absurdum.

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