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Dinner With Charles Murray
My husband and I were seated next to Charles Murray at dinner recently and had an interesting conversation. I first asked him if his Madison Fund has gotten off the ground. It hasn’t, because Murray is a public intellectual, not an organizer of funds, but investors have expressed interest, and I think it looks like an opportunity for a business-savvy Ricochet member!
For those of you who haven’t read his latest book, By the People, the Madison Fund is intended to fight the crippling the excesses of the administrative state. The idea is that the fund will act like insurance against regulatory overreach, and that Madison Fund lawyers will take on cases that fight silly — as opposed to reasonable — regulation in order to make it unenforceable.
Murray believes that the administrative state is very incestuous (with a single agency often playing the role of police, prosecutor, and judge) but thinly-spread. He thinks that with the help of an organization like the Madison Fund — or collection of them — businesses can challenge regulatory rules without risking their very existence. Currently, businesses tend to just ignore many regulations that cost a lot but don’t serve any sensible purpose, though this opens them to the risk of enormous penalties and legal fees should they come under scrutiny.
The Madison Fund — or Madison Funds — would take cases knowing full well that they will lose, since the business is technically in violation. However, this would drive-up the costs of enforcement and they Fund would publicize the heck out of the cases, showing how antithetical to both safety and business many regulations are. In the process, they will name names of regulatory administrators who not only put such regulations in place, but are willing to put people out of business for ridiculous reasons. Such petty administrators love to control people, but hate the limelight because they don’t want to be publicly exposed for the unelected tyrants they often are. In other words, the idea is to use regulatory agencies’ tactics against them — to put fear in their Grinchy little hearts — because they do not actually have the resources to regularly fight this kind of civil disobedience.
So there you go, smart business Ricochetti! Write up a business plan for the Madison Fund and send it along to Charles Murray! Perhaps he can put you in touch with investors and the fund will be off and running!
Published in Domestic Policy
Then why all the exclamation points? ;-)
But my point is that when he makes sense I like what he says. And he personally is a very likable person. He doesn’t strike me as a purist type of libertarian, but rather a practical person. I’ll indicate in my next post where I think he is not seeing the whole picture, but I also really like many of the points he makes in Coming apart, which I think have the virtue of being true. I’m actually rather confused that you would wonder why I like much of what he says. Maybe I don’t understand what your question is. BTW, I think you are a sensible person too in most ways, and like a lot of what you say. And you too strike me as a genial, likable person.
Because I’m saying something nice about myself and they indicate that I recognize that some might not agree.
I would love to know what you have to do to make it onto either category of the Merina Smith Naughty/Nice list. :)
I think I just said–be nice/genial and sensible. But truthfully, there aren’t very many people that I don’t like, scary as I apparently am here.
Ah yes, SoDoSoPa in Shi T’pa Town.
I love C Murray but can’t get past his IQ obsession. As I’ve written before the single smart thing the progressives did was to ditch their investment in IQ razzmatazz (along with comparative cranial measurements for convicts, etc). Now conservatives have picked it up and are running with it much to my disgust (I know, nobody cares about my disgust)…different peoples at different times in history appear smart or dumb accordingly…why don’t we grade ‘races’ by numbers of murders…1) Chinese under Mao, 2) Russians under Stalin; 3) Germans under Hitler; 4) Cambodians under Pol Pot, etc…Conservatives, give up your IQ rankings — it’s all bogus….well, not all…it’s good for culling math and physics brains but otherwise…
Are conservatives obsessed with IQ? News to me.
Merina, you might be one of the few not obsessed with IQ. Try an experiment here at Ricochet: make an IQ post in the Member Feed; you will be swamped with Ricochet members swearing fealty to IQ studies. It is totally bogus science — until they find the genes connecting intelligence and melanin; they can’t, they won’t; sooner global warming proved to be true…
Well, yes, I know – This is a subset of my larger argument that we are all doomed, doomed, anyway.
Is it really a “totally bogus science” in the sense that there’s no provable correlation between IQ and certain achievement rates in society? This isn’t a gotcha question–I honestly don’t know for sure.
My immediate reaction is that those “swearing fealty” are tired of lefty attempts to undermine forms of testing because of alleged “cultural” biases.
Hoyacon, I don’t know either. We can test for aptitude, quickness of answer, complexity and pattern recognition; the tests seem to be at their most useful in sorting out who is good at math and geometry; but I have doubts about the correlation of race — which comes down to skin color and facial shapes and hair types — and this thing called intelligence. Genetic mapping is pretty far along — show me how really tight dark curly hair and melanin genes diminish or otherwise overpower or wipe out the math genes…
I’m no fan of lefty gobbledygook but the so called conservative ‘race realists’ think they represent daring or advanced knowledge by advocating the marriage of IQ and racial studies; in reality they are regurgitating 100 year old leftist (or progressive) tropes from the discredited eugenics movement…
You’re back on this hobby horse again, Dex?
Tell me: How many winners of the Fields Medal have been of African descent? Why do SAT scores (and other stand-ins for IQ) and college GPA tend to correlate with higher incomes?
I don’t think that any of these things are some sort of racist conspiracy – I think that what these phenomena are telling us is that IQ and other measures of intelligence are something real, and that they have a huge impact upon the outcomes of peoples’ lives.
It should come as no shock that a person with an IQ of 140+ and is gifted with the ability to do math is going to have an easier time finding a job earning six figures as an engineer than a person with an IQ of 90.
My personal theory is that ethnic blacks in this country let their intellectual capital lay fallow and the results simply follow. When the value of education is minimized because of short time preference and compromised family structure, developing the skill to do calculus is out of the question.
First, compliments appreciated.
But I’m still a little confused by your negative assessment of libertarianism but admiration for the person and policy proposals of one of its leadings figures. The two seem in tension.
Do you ever like specific policy proposals from someone whose overall ideology you don’t agree with? Besides, Murray is a moderate libertarian and more than anything else a statistician, and to my mind a creative, sensible (for the most part) and creative thinker. Maybe today I’ll get that post written about the disagreements in our conversation at dinner.
Absolutely. But given that this is what Murray’s putting all his energy into, how consistent it is with libertarian policy, and the positive tone of your post, it didn’t seem to fit well with your general skepticism of libertarianism.
I’m not so sure about that; Murray’s libertarianism is very nearly unimpeachable, which isn’t to say that there aren’t libertarians who disagree with him on issues. But unless we’re presenting anarcho-capitalism as the baseline for libertarian thinking, I don’t think this holds.
The sense I’m getting here is that you’re not so much opposed to libertarianism as to its applications in some arenas (specifically, regarding family law).
I get the impression Merina is more worried about unrestrained hedonism being the baseline for libertarian thinking than anarcho-capitalism. Or possibly a materialistic, mechanistic worldview. The worry that libertarians want to somehow deny the sacredness of human life seems a more common worry among SoCons than the worry that libertarians might deny the legitimacy of the State entirely.
I think there is also a fear that a Stateless society would necessarily be a morally nihilistic one, but I’d say Statelessness is feared not so much for itself, but for the moral nihilism that many fear must inevitably accompany it.
All of the above Midge. And Tom, I don’t think the harm principle makes a lick of sense when you really dig into it, so there’ s that. But what you’re describing is actually the elusive divide between Socons and libertarians. We think we should get along fabulously, but since Socons have a far more concrete sense of what the basis of society is–and yes that does relate to marriage and family–but also to the rule of law, the needs of children and how society must to be structured to allow freedom within order, the divide will seem ever so close but will be always a chasm. When it comes to specific policy proposals like Murray’s as he lays it out in By the People, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t support it. It doesn’t seem to me like a hardcore libertarian plan.
By contrast, Coming Apart is more a diagnosis than a prescription IMHO, but he has diagnosed the problem rather well. And for the record, Murray actually told me in the course of our conversation that he considers himself a moderate libertarian, and he told me that he hasn’t thought all that much about marriage, except statistically as he uses it in Coming Apart. I found it rather charming that he would admit this to a Socon.
Interesting. I would dispute, of course, that a philosophically mature libertarianism can ever have much truck with unrestrained hedonism, since there is too much overlap between libertarian and economic ideas, like the value of deferred gratification, the importance of stable agreements, and so on. Or, as I said in another thread, “A world of incomplete knowledge, transaction costs, and finite resources simply doesn’t allow for realizing all desires. Those libertarians who refuse to acknowledge that this is the world we live in are also being poor libertarians.”
Callow youths mistake libertarianism as an excuse for libertinism, but more mature libertarians, and the SoCons who engage them, really shouldn’t. Being a libertarian doesn’t mean saying Burke was wrong. Ultimately, it must mean prioritizing the restraints within which fend off the imposition of restraints without, with the hope that fewer restraints without teach people to have more restraints within.
By concrete, I take it you mean specific, as in not abstracting too far from certain concrete examples? Like, “I don’t have to know how to master cooking pot roast generally. My mom’s pot roast was good, and as long as I follow what my mom did, I will make good pot roast, too.”
Midge, you see all of these types of libertarians. I know those here tend to be the more mature type. And of course, Socons believe that restraints within are essential and the basis of free will. But we also think it is fine to have legal restraints that help teach people internal restraint, and give a guide to what those restraints should be, particularly because the law is a teacher, to both children and adults alike. So the form of marriage tells us a great many things about adult responsibilities, what is best for children and the like. When drugs are illegal, it tells us that drugs are bad for you. Socons think these kinds of laws are good and desirable. That is where the chasm exists with libertarians.
Careful. The infiltration marketing is coming off pretty heavy-handed.
Possibly, some people are just more prone to saying what they really believe when they’ve got bad colds.
Ah-Choo!
Well, you know how I take offense at direct talk.
Yes Majestyk, I’ve never left this hobby horse – nothing to get back on. I think the tight embrace of IQ by the conservative movement is a bad thing – nothing good will come of it. My own stance about IQ and race or ethnicity is very scientific: I don’t know. Greeks of 2500 years ago gave us the cornerstones of intellectual thought across all disciplines; today, among the European nations they can’t seem to do anything right. Tell me about the gene migration from smart to stupid over the short span of 2500 years – back it up with science: you can’t , you won’t.
Claims of ignorance don’t replace or stand in for actual knowledge.
The case of the Ashkenazi Jews is instructive: due to their habit of marrying largely within their own population they do seem to have a statistically significant difference in average intelligence compared to the population at large.
This fits entirely within the paradigm of a genetically isolated population specializing and having their genes drift; Genes for intelligence are up to 40% heritable, but when considering the fact that you are starting out with a higher average IQ population, regression to the mean will be somewhat dampened.
Surely you realize that I could equally accuse you boarding the Left’s deterministic train that says we’re all somehow equal and the only thing that separates us is a set of repressive social constructs?
I just think you’re giving this short shrift.
Double post – Max, certainly we should have the ability to delete posts, right? :(
Dang it… Ricochet killed my post!
Long story short: If we were to ignore cognitive differences between kids (and people) and simply insist that they all get the same, one-size-fits-all education, we would likely default to a less cognitively demanding curriculum which would do a huge disservice to the cognitively gifted and massive damage to us as a people, when those people are unable to excel and thrive.
Cutting off the blossoms because they shame the trunk of your tree is a good way to starve.
Ask and ye shall receive…