Welcome to Wanderland, my new Dispatch newsletter. ’ll be writing about my usual interests: culture, language, economics, policy, politics, overlooked stories, and people from those sometimes-forgotten parts of our country that are more than 60 miles away from the offices of the New York Times and more than an hour’s drive from the Washington Post. I hope you will enjoy it. Speaking of language, I’m not yet sure how my editors here feel about the word “bulls—” and whether that’s going to come through with asterisks or dashes or all the way spelled out, but our overriding goal here at the Dispatch is the scrupulous avoidance of bulls—, which is why we are mainly subscriber-supported rather than advertiser-supported, and to that end I would like to encourage you to click on the following link and subscribe to the Dispatch and then sign up to receive Wanderland in your in-box.
The Parkland Story Doesn’t Need Another Corpse
I have been writing against capital punishment—against putting people to death in the pursuit of justice—for a long time, and for a long time I have had the same problem: Just when I think I’ve really made peace with the issue, somebody comes along who so obviously deserves death, whose crimes all but demand it, that I think: “Except for that guy. That guy, I’d feel good about killing.”
I expect many of you have had the same struggle. The killer in the Parkland, Florida, school massacre, who has been sentenced to life in prison rather than to death, obviously deserves death. He deserves death as much as anybody I can think of. But the issue of what he deserves may be less illuminating than it seems at first: When people say, “Death is too good for him,” they are not being hyperbolic. The brutal murderer in question surely deserves the worst we could think to do to him: torture, humiliation, terror. You can go very far down a dark road very quickly—and go farther than you meant to—thinking about what such people deserve. We don’t generally prohibit torture because we think nobody deserves it—nobody really believes that—but because we want to defend ourselves and our institutions from the degradation that torture imposes on the torturers. Even if we did not care about the victims of torture at all, we would be loath to endorse the practice because we care about what it does to us. My argument against the death penalty has always been roughly the same: Of course there are people who deserve it, of course there are times when justice would not only countenance it but may demand it; but we live in a rich and free society with lots of resources, so we get to make choices, and one of the choices we might make—should make—is to forgo the temptation to pursue justice to the last inch.
Instead, we should choose to balance competing goods, in this case justice and mercy. And it is not mercy to forgo imposing the last and ultimate measure of vengeance on those who do not deserve it—that would only be simple justice, refusing to do what is positively unjust. Mercy consists in deciding to forgo imposing the last and ultimate measure of vengeance on those who do deserve it. To forgo the death penalty is only meaningful as mercy because some people absolutely do deserve it. The fact that they do deserve it is part of the reason not to do it.
A juror in the Parkland case told the Hill that deliberations about a possible death sentence were “very tense.” And, understandably, many of the parents of those dead children want the killer to be put to death. From the Hill:
“We are beyond disappointed with the outcome,” said Lori Alhadeff, , the mother of a 14-year-old murdered at the high school.
“This should have been the death penalty, 100% … I sent my daughter to school and she was shot eight times.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also condemned the decision, saying: “I just don’t think anything else is appropriate except a capital sentence.”
“Our justice system should have been used to punish this shooter to the fullest extent of the law,” he said.
Florida has three branches of government for the same reason the federal government does—Ron DeSantis, who wasn’t on the jury, should butt out, the executive branch already having had its say in the case.
But one must take into due consideration the nearly unbearable grief of the parents of those children as well as the way such horrifying acts deform the general community. Where we go wrong, I think, is in our belief in those magic words: resolution, closure, peace. There is no resolution to be had, and no way to make those families or that community whole again. There are problems that cannot be reversed, damage that cannot be undone, pain that cannot be relieved or reduced. And if we do acts of mercy, we do them mostly for ourselves—we should not fool ourselves into thinking that charity or forbearance is communicable to such a creature as the one who massacred those children in Parkland, that a good example is likely to bear fruit in this context. It is tempting to offer a platitude: “If we want that the killing should stop, then let it stop with us.” It is a pleasant sentiment, but the killing is not going to stop.
There is a hole in the heart of this nation, one that cannot be filled with money or celebrity or sex or blood, try as we might. The American proposition is a theological proposition—that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights—and the political order is a response to that theological proposition, upon which it depends entirely, and the moral propositions that follow from the theological proposition. The new altars we have erected will not serve our purpose, no matter how much blood we throw on them.
And perhaps that is the most important criticism of the death penalty: It creates the comforting and false sensation that we are doing something.
DeSantis and the ‘Fullest Extent’
Gov. DeSantis is under pressure from Democrats—which means that it is very light pressure as he experiences it—to offer a blanket pardon to Floridians convicted of “simple possession” marijuana crimes. DeSantis has so far shown no sign that he is inclined to offer such a blanket pardon, and he should not.
Pardons are meant for discrete situations and particular individuals—they are not a proper legislative instrument. Marijuana should be legalized in Florida, but it has not been, and the responsibility for making law in Florida belongs to Florida lawmakers—the legislature, not the governor. We already invest far too much power in executives—in governors and, especially, in presidents—at the expense of the lawmaking bodies. If the U.S. Congress were to rediscover its institutional self-respect and start doing its job, the resulting earthquake would amount to a miniature revolution in American politics and government. But, until that blessed day should come to pass, we should encourage the states to model the virtues that the federal government—a government that was created by the states—is meant to practice.
By all means, change Florida’s marijuana laws—by changing Florida’s marijuana laws.
Economics for English Majors: Scarcity
I hope you have been enjoying my E4EM essays, which so far have covered comparative advantage, Say’s Law, and opportunity costs. Now that Wanderland is officially launching in newsletter form, I’m going to fold E4EM into it, which will force me to be more … economical. Space is scarce, and so is time.
And the whole reason for being economical about anything is scarcity.
Scarcity is the fundamental problem in economics. The word “economics” itself comes from a Greek word (οἰκονομία, Romanized “oikonomia”) meaning “stewardship” or “household management,” making the most out of limited resources.
Why do we have scarcity at all? Some people think scarcity is an outmoded idea. The British leftist journalist Aaron Bastani argues for what he calls, amusingly, “fully automated luxury communism,” his vision for a world in which technology and social planning have overcome material scarcity, calling for an economics of abundance rather than an economics of scarcity. And there is something—just a little something—to the idea. We aren’t living in a Star Trek world of replicators making us endless, cost-free cups of Earl Grey tea, but we aren’t living in a world in which the great challenge facing mankind is producing enough bread so that everybody may eat, either.
But scarcity is not only—or even mainly—an issue of physical limitations.
Every idea has three ideas behind it, and one of the concepts needed to understand scarcity is rivalrousness. A good is rivalrous if one person’s consumption of one unit of it leaves one fewer unit to be consumed by somebody else: If Daniel Plainview drinks the milkshake, then Eli Sunday can’t drink the milkshake—it is gone.
Scarcity is relatively straightforward when it comes to consumer goods. (Relatively!) We are pretty good at figuring out how to produce in-demand stuff efficiently and distributing it widely. And we even have a pretty good way for dealing with helping poor people get their hands on consumer goods they can’t afford—we give them money or money substitutes such as food stamps (we still call them food stamps—language takes time to catch up) or housing vouchers or school vouchers or whatever. If all we had to worry about were consumer goods, then that fully automated luxury communism might be an idea with a real future.
The problem, as alluded to in the earlier entry on opportunity cost, is that the means of production are rivalrous, too, and limited by scarcity. The capital and labor you use to build a tire factory can’t be used to build a battery factory; 10,000 acres of affordable housing is 10,000 acres you can’t use to plant asparagus or cotton or quinoa. The problem central planners run into isn’t making sure that all of the shoes and all of the loaves of bread are rationally distributed (whatever definition of “rational” they decide on) but deciding which scarce resources to send to the cordwainers (cordwainers make shoes; cobblers repair them) and which to use for baking bread. And, of course, you can’t just decide which resources to use for baking bread, because baking bread means planting, harvesting, and processing wheat; making all the equipment and facilities used for that; training workers for those tasks rather than other tasks; building roads and other infrastructure suitable for wheat farming, flour making, and bread-baking rather than infrastructure suited to investment banking or manufacturing solar panels, etc. Markets deal with those complexities by having billions of people make billions upon billions of small decisions about the things closest to them; central plans try to supplant those billions of people and their local knowledge with committees and studies and simulations, and always and everywhere fail.
But the problem persists even with action outside of markets. Even “public goods” (and I’ll do a separate entry on those at some point), which are defined by the fact that they are non-rivalrous and non-excludable in consumption (if there’s clean air, it’s clean for you and clean for me, and if one of us gets clean air all of us do), are rivalrous and constrained by scarcity on the back end: If you want to avoid the greenhouse-gas emissions that come from burning coal, then you have to do without the electricity, too, and all the things that coal-fired electricity would have produced. Resources invested in missile defense (a very important public good in these dangerous times) can’t be invested in nanotechnology research or early childhood education.
As Dwight Eisenhower famously observed in his “Cross of Iron” speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.[end block]
Scarcity is not about trying to equitably divide 10 pieces of candy among 11 children; it is a way of talking about the fact that our decision-making is always and everywhere constrained. Honest and mature policymakers acknowledge those constraints, and the other kind insists that a $5 trillion infrastructure package will somehow magically “pay for itself.”
If you don’t start with scarcity, you are going to go wrong.
The Wordy Part: ‘Maleficent’
Charles Blow, writing in the New York Times, fantasizes about Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, sharing “maleficent chuckles.” I have some thoughts about that: For one thing, if you’ve ever heard Justice Thomas laugh, it is difficult to imagine him emitting an evil chuckle. He laughs big, so big you might think he’s putting you on at first, until you realize he isn’t, that his laugh is an event. Maybe you think Clarence Thomas is the Antichrist—there are those who hold the opinion—but wicked little chuckles aren’t his thing.
Now, about “maleficent.” “Maleficent” isn’t often seen as an adjective in our time—the more common word Blow might have reached for would have been “malevolent.” “Maleficent” most often appears now as a noun, and a proper noun at that: She is the wicked witch from Sleeping Beauty, a character later played by Angelina Jolie in the eponymous Disney film.
But it is a legitimate adjective. “Maleficent” shows up in English in the late 17th century as a back-formation from “maleficence,” meaning “an evil deed.”
Perhaps Blow was picturing the Thomases with devil horns like the ones Angelina Jolie wore in Maleficent. But it would be unlike Blow to choose a morally complex image: Malificent, after all, turns out to be not a simple villain but a kind of complicated antihero who attempts to bring a moral reckoning to a dismally corrupt kingdom. I don’t have much time for these January 6 crackpots and election-conspiracy loons, but it doesn’t take a great deal of moral imagination to understand that however meritless her complaint, Ginni Thomas sees herself as the heroine of the story, not as the villain.
In fact, we don’t have many genuinely maleficent figures in our political life: Roger Stone leans into the role of cartoon villain and absolutely is capable of a maleficent chuckle—it comes naturally to a maleficent chucklehead.
In the case of Charles Blow’s description of Clarence Thomas, maleficent is a word, but I do not think it is the word.
(Full disclosure and all that: I have met Clarence and Ginni Thomas, and they are friends of friends. I don’t think that is muchly relevant to the word-choice question above, but, if you are the type to shout, “Aha! I knew it! It’s a cabal!” then go ahead and get that out of your system. Better? Excellent.)
Divers & Sundry
From The Dispatch:
If you listen to talk radio or watch cable news, you know about Home Title Lock. It’s not the only company of its kind, but it’s the best-known. Political TV and radio are absolute cavalcades of baloney, avalanches of quacktastical ads for miracle doggie vitamins and dehydrated vegetables in capsule form, fish oil supplements infused with botanicals, and sundry pills and powders and potions and gold coins and real-estate seminars to make you independently wealthy. The message is always a variation on the themes of pain and fear. Get your life back. Take control. Protect yourself. David Foster Wallace described the goal of advertising as to “create an anxiety relievable by purchase.” It’s a strategy cable news and talk radio take seriously, even when they have to invent or exaggerate a source of anxiety.
3. If you are inclined to listen to Jonah and me talk about the New Deal, authoritarianism, and our formerly au courant but currently declining technology chops, you can listen here.
4. On that subject: My new Dispatch podcast, Communiqué, will be starting up soon.
Elsewhere
I sometimes write for other publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Commentary, and, of course, I have a 15-year archive at National Review. I’ll keep you apprised in this space of any away games.
Some Context
The news is never really new:
All nations shall say, Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger?
Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt:
For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them.
On this day … in 1483, Tomás de Torquemada was appointed inquisitor general; in 1740, Ivan VI was installed as the Russian emperor; in 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Torquemada and Mother Teresa you know. What about Ivan? Ivan VI was not the Ivan known as “the Terrible,” who came 200 years before. In fact, Ivan VI was only two months old when he was made emperor. He was quickly deposed, spent the rest of his short life in captivity, and was murdered by his guards at the age of 23. Don’t let anybody tell you that politics has never been more brutal.
Please note that we at The Dispatch hold ourselves, our work, and our commenters to a higher standard than other places on the internet. We welcome comments that foster genuine debate or discussion—including comments critical of us or our work—but responses that include ad hominem attacks on fellow Dispatch members or are intended to stoke fear and anger may be moderated.