A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

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Satanic Temple Sues Indiana Over Abortion Ban

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Tenet III – One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
Tenet V – Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.

I used to regard the Satanic Temple as sort of the merry pranksters of religious rights activism. They have produced things like the Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities and a giant statute of kids looking up to a seated Baphomet which they offer to state capitols that seek donations of religious statues. But reading their complaint and the attachment, what they’re doing seems a little less frivolous. With respect to Satan, they say, the Satanic Temple “venerates, but does not worship, the allegorical Satan described in the epic poem Paradise Lost – the defender of personal sovereignty against the dictates of religious authority.” They also cite their Tenets III and V in support what they describe as their “ritual of abortion.” Tenet III says, “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” Tenet V says, “Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.”

With respect to the “Satanic Abortion Ritual,” the attachment to their complaint says:

The Satanic Abortion Ritual is a destruction ritual that serves as a protective rite. Its purpose is to cast off notions of guilt, shame, and mental discomfort that a patient may be experiencing due to choosing to have a medically safe and legal abortion.

…

This ritual is intended to alleviate some of these stressors and empower the patient to be guided by the Third and Fifth Tenets when pursuing their decision. The purpose of the ritual is not to persuade someone to have an abortion if they are undecided. Instead, the ritual serves to assist in confirming their decision and to ward off the effects of unjust persecution, which can cause one to stray from the paths of scientific reasoning and free will that TST members strive to embody.

The ritual itself is described as consisting of looking at one’s reflection to remind the person of their personhood, reciting the third tenet prior to the abortion and reciting the fifth tenets.

The lawsuit is brought on behalf of unnamed “Involuntarily Pregnant Women” who seek to remain anonymous for fear of violent retribution from domestic terrorists motivated by animosity to proponents of abortion. The complaint describes zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses, and clarifies that Indiana law deviates from the medical literature by describing all of these as “fetuses.” It then challenges the law as an unconstitutional taking of the Involuntarily Pregnant Women’s property rights in their uteruses without just compensation.

The uterus of an Involuntarily Pregnant Woman is a tangible thing in which she has
property rights, including without limitation, the property right to:
A. Have her uterus removed for any purpose, including without limitation, changing
her sex; or
B. Rent it out to a third party as a gestational carrier; or
C. Retain any blastocyst, embryo, or nonviable fetus in her uterus; or
D. Exclude any blastocyst, embryo, or nonviable fetus from her uterus;
E. Remove any blastocyst, embryo, or nonviable fetus from her uterus.

Citing the commercial value of gestational surrogacy, it challenges Indiana’s abortion ban as involuntary servitude in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

I don’t expect those property/servitude arguments to fly. But the complaint gets more interesting when it states that Indiana’s abortion ban impermissibly discriminates between those who become pregnant by incest or rape versus those who become pregnant by accident.


73. All women have the fundamental right to use contraception and engage in sex just for the pleasure and intimacy it brings and without any purpose or intent to become pregnant (“Protected Sex”).

74. The Involuntarily Pregnant Women engaged in Protected Sex but became pregnant without their consent due to the failure of their Birth Control.

75. The Indiana Abortion Ban imposes criminal penalties on anyone who provides an abortion to an Involuntarily Pregnant Woman.

76. The Indiana Abortion Ban does not apply to anyone who provides an abortion in the first ten (10) weeks of EGA to a pregnant woman who is pregnant due to rape or incest. Indiana
Code § 16-34-2-1(A)(2)(a).

77. The Indiana Abortion Ban discriminates between two different classes of women who are pregnant without their consent – women who are pregnant by accident and women who are pregnant by rape or incest.

It also challenges the disparate treatment between women who become pregnant by protected sex versus those who are pregnant by in vitro fertilization, citing IC 16-34-1-0.5 as excluding in vitro fertilization from the Indiana Abortion Ban.

Finally, the complaint argues that the state’s abortion ban violates Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. (IC 34-13-9). (Unfortunately, later on – in paragraph 96 – they cite something other than the Indiana Code, section 73-401 et seq. A quick Google search suggests that this is a reference to Idaho’s RFRA.) Indiana’s RFRA is worded very broadly. Religious exercise is defined as “any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.” I don’t see that the chapter actually gets around to defining “religion.” I have not done a deep dive, but I don’t think Indiana courts have grappled directly with this question. And, I think federal courts have grappled with it to a degree, but mainly focused on whether the religious belief was “sincerely held.” When you get into it, today’s “religions” are yesterday’s “cults.” And courts have not thought it their place to police whether any particular person is correct about how they are practicing a religion. So, even if the thinkers and the leaders say that Religion X dictates one thing, they aren’t going to dismiss a practitioner who sincerely believes that Religion X dictates a different thing. And even if you can argue that the Satanic Temple started as something of a joke, the longer it sticks around the greater chance that some of the people who support it will be utterly sincere in embracing its tenets.

I’m not optimistic that they’ll win this lawsuit, but it throws a bit more sand in the gears of the Indiana General Assembly’s efforts to take away the reproductive rights of Hoosier women and girls.

Update: People a lot more knowledgeable than me pointed toward an interesting law review article that’s relevant: “Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion.” (One of the people observed that, “enslaved women were *literally* the means of production of valuable assets, and part of the legislative history of the 13th Amendment is that it covers their forced pregnancies as forced servitude.”) And, look, I get it – the argument that pregnancy is slavery is jarring. But, as the author notes, that’s largely because we view pregnancy through the lens of women who want to be mothers. I doubt the argument that state compelled pregnancy amounts to involuntary servitude will carry the day, but it’s worth reading (if even only to reject it afterward) rather than simply rejecting the argument out of hand.

The author dismisses the argument that women assume the risk of pregnancy by engaging in sex by making the analogy to a worker who is subjected to compulsory service under the guise of a contract. “A contract for service (already a pretty strange characterization of her “consent”) is consistent with the Thirteenth Amendment only if the contractor ‘can elect at any time to break it, and no law or force compels performance or a continuance of the service.'” I was happy to see the author engaged with the critique that family obligations were not the same as economic obligations. He replied, in part, “Child support obligations do not raise Thirteenth Amendment concerns because they do not require specific bodily labor from anyone; one can raise the money any way one likes, just like any other contractual obligation.”

For my part, I see this argument lost in the same morass that makes the rest of the abortion debate challenging: when and why is human life entitled to greater moral consideration than other kinds of life? People can and have written books wrestling with these questions. I’m not even going to scratch the surface with a blog post. The closer the zygote, blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is to a self-sufficient child, the more likely it is that have some moral duty at least not to go out of our way to let it die. This is obviously in conflict with the compelling rights of the individual mother. Whatever you think of the textual grounding of Roe, its practical balancing of these interests on the trimester model was fairly sound.

Nostalgia and Cynicism Masquerading as Wisdom

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I made the mistake of reading the newspaper comment section, and it brought to mind a couple of themes. First is how nostalgia distorts things. The tragedies of today resonate way more than the statistics of yesterday. So, you have people who compare the slings and arrows they are currently experiencing or the fire hose of Bad News from around he world on the one hand with the sepia toned memories of yesteryear, relieved of the clutter, chaos, anxiety, and other negativity that accompanied yesteryear as it was actually happening. It’s like thinking that the music of [pick decade] was so much better than today’s music. You’re comparing every song you’re hearing today against only those songs from the 70s or 80s that survived. Sure, “Billie Jean” was pretty catchy, but 40 years later, it’s not all mixed in with Vandenberg’s “Burning Heart.” The latest murder or robbery is pretty disturbing, especially if it happened in town. And it doesn’t really become less disturbing if I quote statistics telling you that violent crime in the U.S. is about half as prevalent now as it was 30 years ago. Things can *feel* worse even when they are objectively better.

The second was what I call cynicism masquerading as wisdom. Culturally, I think we just regard people who perceive or predict gloom and doom as being more serious than people who point out the good or even the stable and mundane. If you predict dangers that don’t materialize, people mostly don’t remember or care. Better safe than sorry, I guess. If you predict sunshine and rainbows prior to a disaster, people will roast you for it. Also, there’s a certain dog-bites-man quality to things working. It’s just not news. Man-bites-dog, on the other hand, deserves a headline. Given that bias for novelty, it’s easy to get the sense that everything is collapsing.

I don’t know that there’s a lot of help for these things. But, the anxiety associated with thinking you live in Fallen Times compared to the good old days isn’t healthy for us. I think the best we can do is probably to be aware of these dynamics, calibrate for them, and adjust our filters accordingly. Also, take a walk and talk to your friends, family, and other real people.

We’re so rarely arguing about what we’re arguing about

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I was having a discussion on the WELL about the Indiana General Assembly’s latest veto override having to do with transgender women and girls participating in women’s sports. Before I got into the conversation, there had been a fair amount of discussion I regarded as being pretty deep in the weeds and/or a little too focused hypotheticals having to do with athletically gifted edge cases. Among other things, I wrote:

[R]eporting on the ground as someone with kids in Indiana’s schools: this is not an issue of practical importance for Hoosier athletes. It’s clearly a cultural proxy war. Focusing on the particulars of athletic competition is inevitably going to miss the mark because the argument is a pretext. The people voting for this legislation never showed anything like a burning concern
for women’s athletics in the past.

…
There are a couple of trans girls in my kids’ friend group. These kids are not what you’d call athletically gifted. They aren’t going to dominate any sport in any league, male or female. It’d be nice if they could just run around and have fun playing some sports without being turned into political footballs or abstract topics of debate.

The cultural proxy war aspect made me stop and think though. So often what we’re arguing about, with respect to all kinds of subjects, is a stand in for something else. Abortion often really isn’t about abortion, it has as much to do with gender roles and sexual morality. So, when you offer ways to reduce abortion, they often get ignored because they don’t reinforce old notions about gender roles and sexual morality. Gun control gets complicated because the weapon isn’t a tool for hunting or self-defense or whatever the stated purpose; rather it has become a cultural identifier – a shibboleth, I suppose – and, so, regulations that might enhance safety and might not, on a completely practical level, be objectionable become non-starters if they’re seen as impairing a person’s cultural identity or being imposed someone outside of the culture.

Deep thought: People often do not speak plainly

A lot of talk about racism and sexism are really about power and control, and so approaches that superficially confront the stated concerns about race or sex but don’t shift the balance on power or control will be seen as inadequately. On the flip side, requests for superficially inconsequential changes that do indicate a shift in power and control will generate outsize controversy. (Team and building names come to mind for this one.)

And it’s not just the big issues of the day where this happens. Complaints about how a spouse loads the dishwasher could be a stand-in for issues over unequal workloads around the house. Complaints about sex could be more about attention, respect, status, or a multitude of other things. Complaints about “kids these days” are really just nostalgia and unhappiness about aging.

Another small-time example: our local school board politics seem to involve a lot of talk about “transparency” and the various mechanisms for board meetings lately. But the people making these arguments seem mostly not to like that particular decision-makers are in positions where they get to make the decisions. And this dislike very often seems to stem from specific grievances — e.g., someone didn’t keep a position of employment they like, someone else’s kid didn’t get the particular services they wanted, someone else didn’t get to control a school-related working group, a school board member was in the minority as to their preferred choice of a superintendent, etc.. But, these specific grievances wouldn’t have a lot of resonance in the larger community. So, you get these process oriented complaints that are largely divorced from the substance. Addressing the stated process complaints don’t really fix anything because the underlying grievances weren’t at their heart, about the process.

As a lawyer, I’ve come to understand that the law often just a big bundle of abstractions that we’re using as tools for managing conflict. The law itself is what one writer called “potential violence.” When we’re talking about a law, we’re really talking about if, when, where, why, and how the government will cause people with guns to come and use force against you. You hit me with a car. I complain to the government via its courts. I want money from you. If I’m successful in convincing the government that I ought to have your money, the court will enter a judgment to that effect. And, if you don’t turn over your money to me, as ordered, eventually we’ll get to the point where the people with guns extract it for me. But I never say, “Government, I want you to use your employees with guns to take his money and give it to me.” Instead, I’ll spend a lot of time talking about “negligence.”

There are probably a bunch of sociologists I’ve never heard of who have spilled a lot of ink discussing why we argue in this fashion. It’s likely easier to persuade a group when problems are abstracted because they might identify with concerns that are related but not quite as specific as what’s really motivating and individual. And direct appeals based on selfish motivations that highlight the precise winners and losers along with any force that might be necessary to maintain or alter the status quo are likely more off-putting than indirect appeals that obscure motivations that leave the uglier parts unstated.

Thank you for attending my TED talk.

Portugal Part VI: Last Day in Porto

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Part VI: Last Day in Porto

It was the last day. It was the best day.

Up the winding stairway.

We began the morning waiting in line for the Livraria Lello. This is a Porto bookstore that’s associated with J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. Rowling asserts that she had never heard of the place while she was in Porto. It’s easy enough to believe that the book store didn’t inspire anything about Harry Potter, but I’m skeptical of her claim that she’d never heard of it at all. In any case, it’s become enough of a tourist attraction that it charges admission. We wanted to get there early in hopes of avoiding a line. We weren’t successful in that, but it was a cool, sunny morning and the line moved pretty quickly. There were two different buskers on nearby corners competing for our attention and making the scene lively. The store itself is interesting and was packed. Its main feature is a sort of colorful, split spiral staircase. It’s a two floor book store with open space in the middle allowing you to look down on the ground floor from the upper floor. It has classic titles in a lot of different languages. Fairly small, very cramped.  I liked it well enough that I felt compelled to buy a book. For some reason, I was thinking of Orwell’s “1984,” but I couldn’t locate a copy in English. Eventually, I went with a copy of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne. It’s a colorful, hardbound copy with one of those little ribbons attached that serves as a bookmark.

Following the bookstore, we grabbed some snacks and a bathroom break at the Paderia Ribero which we’d been introduced to on our first night there. (Technically, I used the bathroom at the nearby Steak n’ Shake. The rest of our group avoided the chain restaurant!) I also got a beer, because vacation.

The Crew with a View

Properly fortified, we began to stroll Porto. We found ourselves headed generally downhill, toward the river,  by way of the Escaladas de Vitoria – the Stairs of Victory which, I must say, weren’t as imposing as the Escaladas de Verdades we faced on Friday. There’s something profound about Victory being easier than Truth, I suppose.  I was glad to find the statue of Prince Henry the Navigator at a little park called Jardim do Infante. Though, I will say that people at that park seemed to have trouble cleaning up after their dogs. There wasn’t much to it, but the statue was big and one of my favorite areas of history is the Age of Discovery, so it made me happy. Near there, we came across the Igrejas e Museu de Sao Francisco. Primarily, we were in it for the catacombs which Harper obviously loved.  As I mentioned with respect to a church on an earlier day, its style was very busy and I can see why the Puritan reaction was toward very simple, unadorned churches. The catacombs were, unsurprisingly, a little creepy. There was a transparent section with an archeological dig. And you were walking on a bunch of panels framed into a lattice work, kind of like being on top of a drop ceiling – where there were crypts underneath each panel.

Hole in the Wall

Escaping the crypts, we found our way to a literal hole in the wall for lunch. One of the things I loved about Porto and Lisbon were these small restaurants and stores crammed into twisting alleys. This one was close to the Douro River but not right on the riverfront which, I think, dialed down the tourist factor just a bit. Though the family at the table next to us was French – so clearly tourists are a big factor in the place’s existence. (When the owner got the French family to relocate so she could squeeze five of us into the same table – like I said, this place was tiny – I think the French father was trying to joke to me about buying their drinks; but the language barrier was a little too high for me to know for sure.) I had a daily special involving tripe which was pretty good, but it mostly tasted like a bean stew or maybe red beans and rice. Harper was the big winner with her order. I think the translation was shellfish and rice, and she got a pretty impressive variety of shellfish.

 

8 fruits!

After lunch, we crossed over to the south side of the Douro River, this time using the lower level of the Dom Luis I Bridge. We arrived ahead of the other crew and sat on the shore watching the boat traffic. There were some guys having a great time on jet skis. (Not that you often see people having a *bad* time on jet skis.) Our port tasting and tour was at the Calem winery. It started in a room with some screens and videos telling you about the Douro Valley, the soil, the process of wine making and whatnot. From there, we went into a cellar with huge barrels. There was a mark pretty high up on the wall showing where one particularly nasty flood had reached. The tour wasn’t bad, but I’m not sure any of us was particularly engaged in the lecture. Upstairs from the cellar was a nice tasting room with long tables where they’d set out small glasses of port for us to sample. Poor Harper got a juice box. According to the label, it had “8 fruits!” Port is just a little sweet for me, and I don’t love it. But I drank it! My college years kind of toughened up my palate. Cole drank his, and despite having 8 fruits, Harper sampled a bit of the port as well.

Waiting on the sunset

Not far from Calem was “World of Wine!” Great name, but we didn’t get any wine there. The places in Porto and Lisbon where we’d toured tended to be areas where space was at a premium. Like I said, lots of small shops and restaurants seemed to be the rule. So, the facility where “World of Wine” was located was a bit of an eye opener. It is a fairly sprawling commercial building with bars, restaurants, and places with several “experiences:” the Pink Palace Experience, Planet Cork, the Wine Experience, and so forth. I’m not sure what all these experiences entailed, but the general feel of the venue was “mall cinema.” As luck would have it, this facility had a COVID testing site which we needed to board our flights the next day. The testing was in some cramped office spaces tucked into a corner. There was one woman working the office at the end of her shift, and we hit her with eight people. She took us 2 and 3 at a time. Their tests were of the “brain probe” variety. The range of reactions among our crew went from “super easy, barely an inconvenience” to “you’ve given me a lobotomy” with violent sneezing and watering eyes. Good news. We were all negative.

By this time, it was getting near sunset, and we hadn’t caught one in Portugal yet. We’d been told that Portuguese love their sunsets. We were still at river level and we needed a good vantage point, so that meant there would be a lot of climbing. And climb we did (oddly passing our food tour guide from two days earlier en route). Up roads, alleys, and stairs to Jardim do Morro. This is a park on the south side of the river with a fairly steep hillside that looks out over a small road on its edge and, beyond that, a commanding view of the river flowing away to the west. It’s a great place to watch the sun go down. And everybody in town seems to know it. There were a pair of guitar players working together, providing entertainment to the folks on the hill, playing on a path just past the road. It was a festive atmosphere. The guy in front of us just had his own bottle of wine that he uncorked periodically to take a slug. The hillside was full of people lounging. There was a trailer selling beer and wine. Kenza managed to find cotton candy.

Sultans of Swing. Dancing. Sunset.

At one point, a young woman wearing a grape costume happened by the guitarists and started to dance. This prompted a little girl to join in. Eventually the grape woman was dancing with an older woman. As the sun set, the guitarists were playing an extended version of “Sultans of Swing.” I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved this moment. The weather was clear, calm, and comfortable. I’m in a beautiful, far away place surrounded by happy people. Sharing the moment with Amy, Cole, and Harper. There’s music. Dancing. The moment was simple. Human. Joyful.

Kenza stayed with us, but the other crew headed for home. We savored the evening a little longer as sunset turned to dusk. Eventually, we got up and headed back to the north side of the river, crossing the Douro River on the top deck of the Dom Luis I Bridge. At that moment, from that vantage point, it was impossible to take a bad picture.

Impossible to take a bad picture

Realizing that our time was coming to an end, I hit a souvenir shop and picked up a “Super Bock” shirt. We walked to the Majestic. The Majestic is an ornate (art nouveau, I’m told) café on Rua Santa Catarina, an extremely walkable outdoor mall full of restaurants and shops. The Majestic is famous for its architecture as well as for being, historically, a place where writers frequented, J.K. Rowling among them. It was nice to see, but we made a mistake trying to eat there. Nothing looked all that appealing. It was wildly overpriced and mediocre.

In the Majestic

We got drinks and a basket of bread, paid out the nose, and got out of there. Amy and Kenza wanted francesinhas. The Majestic experience pushed the kids and I over the edge into wanting food that was cheap, fast, and unchallenging. “Mr. Pizza” was calling our name. The line at Café Santiago (where we’d eaten lunch the day before) was long. Amy and Kenza settled in. Cole, Harper, and I headed up the street to Mr. Pizza. In no time flat, we had 6 slices that they were practically giving away. We ate in the park where Amy had left her sweatshirt the day before. I’m not going to say the pizza was “good,” but it definitely scratched an itch. Greasy pizza-by-the-slice a few blocks from a college campus. You know the type. After we ate, Harper needed a bathroom, so we headed back to “Mr. Pizza.” Harper used the facilities, and Cole and I got more pizza. We headed back to the park to wait while Amy and Kenza worked their way through dinner. They gave up on Café Santiago and went to another francesinha restaurant in the area.

 

What we didn’t know when we sat down on the bench in the park is that our “Mr. Pizza” dinner was going to come with a show! We took to calling this guy “Il Borracho.” Total nonsense. We were butchering the words for “The Drunk” in Spanish. Not even close to that meaning in Portuguese. This guy was very active. He carried a portable barricade into the street, smashed a bottle, emptied trash, sat in the street in a swivel chair that he found god knows where. He generally rode the razor’s edge between being merely annoying and actually doing harm. He looked like he was going to pee in the streets several times. We joked that, in America, the cops would’ve shot him by now. Here, when the authorities actually showed, they were pretty tolerant. Eventually, Amy and Kenza came out and watched the show. After a while, we had to call it a night. We’d milked about as much as we could out of the day. We got gelato on the way home just to stretch it out a bit more. Fantastic day.

Il Borracho

The Trip Home

We woke up at 7 and packed. For the life of me, I couldn’t find where the Airbnb instructions were telling us to put the trash. So, we left it bagged up in the apartment. We called an Uber at 7:30. The first crew got theirs with no incident. Ours just didn’t show. Amy had used her app, so I summoned one on my app. We watched our phones and neither of them materialized. They were either sitting still or getting further away. Amy used a different cab app trying to call one of those. Nothing. We got anxious, then desperate, then resigned. We knew that there were two trains getting to Lisbon before our flight. We’d booked the early one because the late one would be cutting it close. We were hopeful that we could get new tickets on the second train. As we’d become pretty sure there was no way to make the train, the icons on our apps started moving. Two of the cars arrived at exactly the same time. We irritated one by sending him away. Apparently we picked the right one because he got us to the train station pretty quickly. Grabbed our bags without even closing the doors on the Uber. Apologized to our driver as we were literally running to the station. Matt had texted us the platform number so we didn’t have to look around. The doors to the train were closed. We got mildly scolded by the conductors, but they let us on without any time at all to spare. We hadn’t gotten to our seats or put our bags up before the train started pulling away.

That got our hearts racing in the morning! We had coffee and snacks to calm down. In Lisbon, we had some time to kill and contemplated storing our bags in a locker and doing some exploring. But, the weather had turned cold and gross, so we just took the metro from the train station to the airport. In the airport, we spent frivolously at the duty free shop to burn the spare Euros we had in our pockets. Then, because we have a fancy pants travel credit card, we get into a number of airport lounges around the world. Lisbon, it turns out, has a pretty nice one. Plenty of seating. TVs with soccer on. A buffet. And a fridge stocked with Super Bock mini-bottles. Score!

We killed time in the lounge and then headed through customs. Amy was impressed and mildly shocked by Kenza taking a beer through passport control. We ended up on a flight home packed with guys from the North Dakota State soccer team. Some guy a couple of seats back had a nasty cough that was pretty steady for the entire eight hour flight home. Getting out of Chicago went just about as smoothly as you could hope. The guy driving the shuttle to long term parking wasn’t all that good at his job. It was constant gas/brake/gas/brake. He dropped a couple of buddies or co-workers off at a spot that definitely wasn’t a stop. And, I’m pretty sure he scraped a car in the lot when he didn’t make a turn as sharply as he should have. But, we got into our car at around midnight and headed for West Lafayette without much in the way of traffic. The moon was amazing. We got home at about 2 a.m. The puppies were glad to see us, and we were happy to see them. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

The Full Series:

Part I: Travel to Lisbon

Part II: Lisbon – Castelo de São Jorge, Belém, and Food Tour

Part III: Sintra and Roaming Lisbon

Part IV: Travel and Food Tour of Porto

Part V: Porto, Francesinhas, Harry Potter, and a Birthday

Part VI: Last Day in Porto

Things Can Always Get So, So Much Worse

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Sheila Kennedy has a good post (but, of course she does!) entitled “Who Are We?” She discusses a Brett Stephens column (so, I’m at least a third level of abstraction here) and concludes:

The pertinent question is the one Stephens first identified: who are we? And the answer is, we are a country with sound and valuable ideals–granted, a country that often falls short of those ideals–a country with a majority of citizens who are devoted to those ideals, but who are currently demoralized by a loud and angry tribal minority that is working to abandon the principles the rest of us struggle to achieve.

Ukraine is fighting Russia. We are fighting the enemy within.

I’d suggest there are a good number of tribal factions demoralizing us, but otherwise fully agree with her point. Our media landscape is structured to reward content that draws attention, and the most reliable way to draw attention is to make people angry. Negative partisanship, in turn, is a reliable way to provoke anger. Cable news wants you to tune in and stay tuned through the commercials. Its programming is a means to that end. Twitter and Facebook want you to click and keep scrolling. Loud voices telling you to hate the Other or to be afraid because They are trying to get you are a good way to keep you plugged in. The relentless negativity begins to seep in and even people who have things pretty good begin to resent the world in which they live and take for granted or even vilify institutions which they really ought to appreciate.

In my mind, the Russia-Ukraine situation really underscores that latter point. Hobbes observed that life in a state of nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The institutions we have created – our military, courts, banks, government, transportation and communication infrastructure, etc. – are designed to insulate us from that state of nature. When they are insulating us properly, we can take them for granted and focus narrowly on their shortcomings. And, to be sure, there are shortcomings. But when an asshole with enough firepower undertakes to take them all away, it becomes easier to appreciate some of the things our predecessors have built and left us with.

It’s ridiculous to think that a megalomaniac in Canada or Mexico would some day be rolling into the U.S. precisely because we have grotesquely overspent on our military. It’s less ridiculous to fear that we would do that to others because of our own checkered past when it comes to respecting the sovereignty of other nations. We should teach that history and learn from it without whitewashing it; but, at the same time, we need not resign ourselves to the idea that these misdeeds constitute our essence. And if the military could not protect us from a neighboring megalomaniac, how would we react when the banks no longer functioned, when the courts were no longer available and individual violence was the only way to resolve disputes, and when government offices are abandoned or populated with foreign puppets? Or maybe the banks collapse and currency is no longer reliable? Rather than annoyingly slow during construction season, roads are cratered and impassable and the only remotely trustworthy news you can gather comes from whatever you can gather off of shortwave radio when the sun goes down and the signal gets stronger.

I suppose this is just a periodic reminder – to myself as well as anyone who happens to read – that there is also joy in the world. Improvements to the status quo should always be welcome, but don’t fail to appreciate what you have and know that, if history is any guide, things can always get so, so much worse.

Larry DeBoer on inflation and local government finance

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Larry DeBoer, Everybody’s Favorite Economist (TM), has a good post on the subject of how inflation might impact local government finance in Indiana. If inflation caused property values, assessed values, income, and permitted levies to all increase at the same time, it wouldn’t be that much of a problem. But the system isn’t structured to allow that to happen. There is a lag between properties increasing in value, the properties being assessed for that increased value, and the increased assessment hitting the tax bill. Permissible tax levies are allowed to increase by the state’s growth quotient which takes into consideration the previous 6 years, so low inflation years prior to a high inflation year will limit the inflationary effect on the growth quotient. There’s also a 6% limit on the increase in maximum levies, so such levies could not catch up to inflation that exceeds 6%.

Larry explains the issues better and in more depth than I do, so his post is definitely worth checking out directly.

SB 62: Tax Sale Properties to Non-Profits for Low and Moderate Income Housing

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Sen. Young has introduced SB 62 which permits properties listed for tax sale to be sold (prior to the tax sale) to non-profits for the purpose of developing low and moderate income housing. As I read the bill, I think he has Habitat for Humanity as well as community development corporations in mind. I haven’t bothered to do the additional research, but I think the provisions of the chapter this new section is in would require the non-profit to pay the amount of the delinquent taxes to acquire the property, but by selling it prior to the tax sale, it would avoid the likelihood of the price being driven up by bidding. Not more than 10% of the tax sale properties listed could be sold in this fashion.

I suppose the owners who are delinquent in paying their taxes that this artificially lowers the amount their property would receive at tax sale. (The owners are entitled to the tax sale surplus after delinquent taxes and some other fees are paid.) But, even if that’s a valid complaint, there would still be a redemption period during which the owner could get the property back from the tax sale purchaser — the owner has to pay the delinquent tax amount plus 10% or something which goes to the tax sale purchaser (in this case the non-profit.)

Someone’s ox is always getting gored with legislation, but on its face, this strikes me as a positive initiative.

Friday Night Lights

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Friday Night in West Lafayette

My growing disinterest in politics as an on-line game is spilling over into the real world. Last night, Bernie Sanders came to town. He was speaking less than two miles away from where I live. On the other hand, my kids were playing in the marching band at the high school football game less than one mile away. I don’t have any particularly negative feelings about Sanders himself and, politically, he very accurately identifies some of our problems, and I’m on board with many of his solutions. That said, I’m still pretty raw about the comportment of a number of his followers. During the 2020 primaries, I was mostly supportive of Pete Buttigieg. Too many of Sanders supporters — not Sanders himself — would’ve had me believe that Mayor Pete was a racist corporate stooge who controlled the price of bread and wasn’t that smart, actually. I didn’t see much of this from other candidates’ supporters, so it wasn’t just a generic primary fight issue. It was a strategic, scorched-earth choice on someone’s part — probably more prevalent online than on the ground.

But, truth be told, my lack of interest in the Sanders event didn’t have much to do with the scars of the primary. I actively wanted to be at the football game. I like football, and I love the community. Schools are the heart beat of a community, and this is part of why that is. There’s just something I love about gathering in the stands with people I know, cheering the good guys and booing the bad guys (and eating slightly stale, over salted popcorn from the concession stand). These are people I mostly don’t know well, but who I know well enough. Many of us have been bumping into each other at school events for a decade now. When Twitter and Facebook got going a dozen or so years ago, one of the things they promoted was referred to as “ambient intimacy.” You don’t see that so much any more once the algorithms took hold and the chronological timelines were obliterated. But, it used to be, you’d get a lightweight look into the lives of friends and acquaintances. These people would never call you up to tell you that their six year old did a cool tumble at gymnastics, but you’d see it in passing online and, if you ever did bump into them, you’d know that they had an elementary school kid who was into gymnastics. You get some of that in real life with the crowd you see at the football games. (Yeah, I know, there are people laughing at my framing real life as a spin-off of online life here when the reality should be the opposite.)

Also, let me take a moment to gush about my kids & the marching band. My son is a senior in high school and my daughter is a junior. The band community has become central to their adolescence. When they’re not studying, their primary extracurricular activities revolve around the band. They march, they play at games, their band mates make up their social circle. It’s pretty common for a crew of 10-12 of them to gather in our back yard after football games. (The fun went on past midnight last night). The band parents are a pretty fantastic group — almost all nice people, friendly and dedicated to their kids; they tend to be joiners and volunteers, happy to pitch in for a cause. The whole thing – seeing them wail on their instruments, shouting support to the team, goofing around with their friends – it’s all a source of joy and community. These are the things that bring us together and help make a place good to live in. I’m just thankful to have the opportunity to participate.

Oh, and you’ll all be happy to know that West Side beat McCutcheon 30-7.

Pretextual Arguments are Cultural Proxy Wars

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I had this thought when I was reading a thread about whether masks work to reduce transmission. I fully believe they do. More importantly, smarter people who study such things believe they do. But the reality of the situation is beside the point. When I read the back and forth in this thread, it occurred to me that, while the anti-maskers in that particular thread were arguing about the various statistics, it wouldn’t matter what the numbers were. The truth of the matter was beside the point. The point was mainly for conservatives* to disagree with liberals.** (*Conservatives are those who are not liberals. **Liberals are those who are not conservatives. They need one another to maintain their respective identities.)

This is not a one sided affair. I’ve seen discussions of, for example, alleged police brutality cases where, as more facts came out, the context showed the use of force was reasonable. That didn’t change anyone’s minds about who the good guys and the bad guys were.

In these situations, people aren’t really arguing about what they’re arguing about. They’re not necessarily worried about the specific case. Rather, they chose the specific case as ammunition (or found themselves on the receiving end of that ammunition) in a larger argument. When that’s the case, getting into the weeds about the details of the specific case isn’t likely to be productive because the bigger issue is simply reflexive antagonism toward the other side.

If someone is arguing in good faith, by all means engage with them. But if they’re just entertaining themselves and will move the goal posts if the argument doesn’t go in their favor, then why bother? (Other than to entertain yourself if you’re into such things.)

The Free Market Begins with a Fence

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This was part of an even longer post I wrote a few years back. I stumbled across it again recently and thought it was worth a re-post.

The free market begins with a fence

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

Part of the resistance to making different choices about the free market and the various priorities given to property rights is a denial that choices have been made in the first place. “Property isn’t a choice. It’s a ‘natural’ right.” With all due respect to John Locke and the Founding Fathers, property does not exist in a state of nature. Without human-made laws and a government to back them up, you don’t have property. You have an opinion. Where there is a difference of opinion, in the state of nature with no government, the person who can bring the most force to bear is going to win the argument. (And, I might mention, that it really grinds people’s gears when I point out that there is no property without government. They think they hate government, and they love the idea of property rights. The idea that property rights are dependent on government seems to create a cognitive dissonance that must be really uncomfortable.)

In a state of nature, land belongs to everyone and no one. That changes when you can separate your land with a fence provided that you can also have government employees with guns convince the rest of the world to respect your fence as something more than a flimsy barrier. Having established ownership to the land, you can claim rights to the crops grown there and the minerals underneath the land. You can demand compensation for these things. You can withhold them from others altogether. Where once people could theoretically live off the land without your say-so, now they are forced to go elsewhere, pay you, or do work for you in order to use that land. And then we’re off to the races – a system of property laws, contract laws, courts, and police enforcing those laws form a structure without which markets would not work.

And none of this is inherently bad. Let me repeat for the benefit of those who might think my intent is to savage property rights: I like property rights. Property rights and the markets that they allow have done a great deal of good. Why bother working, creating, or taking risks if you cannot lay claim to the fruits of those endeavors? But, striking the appropriate balance can be tricky. When people work collaboratively to create value, how do you allocate the profits from that effort? The Panglossian view is that “the market” will magically allocate profits to people according to their worth. We can rest assured that, if the market is allowed to work without government interference, money acquired is money earned. But the existence of markets is a product of government interference. No government means no property and, therefore, no market. So, as the joke goes, we’ve already established what you are, now we’re haggling over the price. The market doesn’t reward value, it rewards leverage. Bringing more value to the common endeavor is a form of leverage. But so are property rights. Being able to keep your labor or machines or product on the sidelines until prices rise — without worrying about how you’re going to feed your family — is another form of leverage.

We can adopt policies that alter the leverage various people have in a transaction and alter the allocation of profits from economic activity. Some options could definitely lead us to a worse place – the Soviet Union and Venezuela are flamboyant examples (although, I guess I’ve seen some stats that suggest the lot of your average Russian peasant actually improved under Soviet policies, so your starting point matters). What do I have in mind? An increased minimum wage, stronger rights for unions, single-payer health care, better public transportation, more walkable neighborhoods, and increased spending on schools and particularly paying teachers more and giving them more control over teaching, incentives or laws for fewer hours worked and improved benefits, better unemployment benefits and family leave benefits, maybe even a Universal Basic Income. How are we going to pay for this? Taxes obviously.

And, I guess there are three basic reasons why I’m o.k. with this: first, there are some instances where we get more bang for our buck spending through the government than we do going through the private market; second, I’m o.k. having less money if I end up happier; and third, there’s wealth disparity that could stand to be redistributed. (See above, wealth acquired isn’t necessarily wealth earned).

Contrary to conservative dogma, sometimes the government is more efficient than the private market. The big example I have in mind is healthcare. Other countries with significant government regulation of healthcare markets get the same or better healthcare results for their people than the U.S. does. There isn’t an example in the world of a less regulated healthcare system that delivers better results for less. My tiny example is in-house printing at the Legislative Services Agency. LSA used to hire out printing of the General Assembly’s bills. When they attempted to bring it in-house, they met stiff resistance from a conservative Senator who took it as a matter of faith that having government employees do the work would raise the price. It saved millions with a two-thirds reduction in printing appropriations. I’m not, by any means, suggesting that the government is always more efficient than private spending; but sometimes it is. So, we should dismiss it out of hand. If I’m paying money out in taxes rather than paying it out in insurance premiums, I don’t mind the higher taxes. It’s all the same to me if I’m getting health care. I’m delighted if I’m getting more and better health care services.

Second, I also don’t mind higher taxes if I end up poorer but happier. I might be an outlier here, but if I have less spending money, but my community is healthier, happier, better educated, and generally more functional, I think I’m going to be happier. Not because of any excessive altruism on my part, but because living in such a place ultimately brings me more joy than I’d get from having those extra tax dollars in my pocket.

Third, the wealthy are just hoarding a lot of the wealth. I don’t think having that extra money to flow to them has a lot of social utility. If everyone gets paid the same regardless of effort or output, then the economy is going to flounder. Why bother working, investing, or creating? But there has to be a point of diminishing returns. Is a guy really going to work harder for a billion than he does for a hundred million? If not, then you’ve wasted $900 million which could probably be put to better use elsewhere. There’s some fat we can trim here.

I could be wrong, of course. But there is a fair amount of evidence, both historically and internationally, that what we have now is not inevitable and is not the best of all possible worlds. We need to look at what’s working elsewhere and cultivate our garden.