Dear Ultra-Rich Man : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Dear Ultra-Rich Man : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

You probably don’t know me, but unlike you, I am one of the 99 percent, a proud and unapologetic advocate of free and open markets. I’m writing you because your letter to other rich guys has gone viral. Each time I saw it, I thought, “Somebody should respond to this guy.” I got tired of waiting. So I hope you’ll read this. I leave your prose in italics so I can address your major points in turn.
You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist.I admit I’m already suspicious. If you were a proud and unapologetic capitalist, I doubt you’d write the things you did. Now, maybe you’re an apologetic investor, or even an entrepreneur. But to my mind, a capitalist is one who understands and advocates for a system of free and open markets—as opposed to other economic systems—such as State capitalism, crony capitalism, mercantilism, or Keynesian interventionism. If by capitalist, you mean, “guy who likes to make money in business,” then great. I just want to make sure we’re not talking past each other.
I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc.Did you create something of value for people, or make it possible for people to get something of value in return? Did they willingly hand over what economist Walter Williams calls “certificates of performance”? Or did you take subsidies or lobby the government for competitive advantages? If the former, I certainly don’t begrudge you your airplane. If the latter, then you are a crony capitalist (crapitalist), or rent-seeker. There is a big difference.
I was so excited by the potential of the web that I told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time. It just happened that the second Jeff—Bezos—called me back first to take up my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online idea; people just weren’t yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don’t vary in quality—Bezos’ great insight). Cybershop didn’t make it, just another dot-com bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht.What if the other Jeff had called first? You might be living next door to me. The point is not that you were successful, but rather that—at that time—the capital you gave to either Jeff could not be used for any other purpose. As it happens, Jeff Bezos was a good steward of your capital. He has created value for hundreds of millions of people, so both you and he have since been rewarded for being good stewards of capital. Without either of you, there would have been no Amazon (and thus no Amazon Prime, which lets me watch good TV cheaper than cable).
What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks.We might quibble about the essence of entrepreneurship. You get it partially right, at least. But if you see pitchforks, it’s only because egalitarian ideologues are spreading bad economic ideas and fomenting the worst instincts in people: cruder emotions such as envy. Yet the poorest quintile of Americans is wealthier and healthier than two-thirds of the entire world. We should not be brandishing pitchforks at you. We should keep on sending you our certificates of performance—if, that is, you keep satisfying our wants and needs, and solving our problems.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind.Guess what? I, too, am thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history! Later, in this very letter, you admit that on the things that matter, there isn’t really much of a gap between us at all. You write, “I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men.” Looks to me like we’re pretty equal where it counts. Because when it comes to consumption power, we little guys also have it made, yachts notwithstanding. (You’re more likely to find me on a pontoon boat. That’s okay.) You leave those surpluses to be used as capital—hopefully by other able entrepreneurs.
The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.Accepting this statement on its face: So what? These statistical abstractions tell us nothing about how well people live today compared with the past. The more important questions are: Compared to 1980, is any one of us more likely to have greater access to the goods and services we need to live a decent life? Can plebs like me get mobile devices we couldn’t in 1980? Are we living longer than in 1980? Can we buy food, shelter, pants, TVs, transportation—on a website? Is total compensation (including non-wage benefits) more than it was in 1980? (Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.)
Now, might any of this have to do with entrepreneurs and investors directing capital to productive uses?
According to Michael Shermer, writing in Scientific American of all places, the American dream is not dead.
The top-fifth income earners in the U.S. increased their share of the national income from 43 percent in 1979 to 48 percent in 2010, and the top 1 percent increased their share of the pie from 8 percent in 1979 to 13 percent in 2010. But note what has not happened: the rest have not gotten poorer. They’ve gotten richer: the income of the other quintiles increased by 49, 37, 36 and 45 percent, respectively.
Not only that, but all quintiles have access to Netflix, Trader Joe’s, and mobile devices.
Now, there are desperately poor people out there. But worrying about what the desperately poor lack is very different from worrying about what the ultra-rich have. Surely guys like you can find creative solutions to helping the least advantaged without making them dependent on State largess, or without placing any more burdens on business.
Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.This could be true, but not for the reasons you think. Again, there is a big difference between those who lobby politicians to transfer resources into their coffers through subsidies, regulations, and other political means and those who actually serve customers in order to make their lives better. The former should be called “crapitalists,” and there are way too many of them in the world. But crapitalism is a consequence of too much government power, power that ends up on auction. Such was the case in Rome, Paris, and Saint Petersburg. As long as poor people aren’t systematically excluded from entrepreneurial opportunities, the pitchforks will pitch hay.
(Note: Minimum wage laws can exclude poor people from opportunities.)
In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.Sure there are counterexamples: Singapore. Hong Kong. Switzerland. These days the pitchforks are coming out in societies where the poor don’t have access to real property, collateral, and low-cost legal institutions that help them become upwardly mobile—places like Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey. (See the work of Hernando de Soto). The pitchforks come out not when there is inequality of outcomes, but when political power is being sold to the highest bidder, or put differently, where political powers pick winners and losers and where business and government collude unfairly to become a “monstrous hybrid.” Pitchforks come out when the welfare well runs dry, as in Greece.
Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I agree. We are certainly not immune to populist uprisings. But this is no justification for wealth redistribution or minimum wage hikes, which are likely—revolution or no—to make those with the pitchforks worse off than they would otherwise have been. "People don’t like that other people have gotten rich" is not an argument for confiscating wealth.
The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts. What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.Wait, didn’t you say you were “rewarded obscenely”? Looks to me like your customer base is doing just fine. Do you really want to use the “company town” as the model for the good society? Good luck with that. Now, if we’re being charitable in interpreting you, we might point to companies like Costco that pay more for labor. It works for them. If it works for you, then what’s stopping you? If any such model works so splendidly, people will replicate it.
Finally, don’t you think it’s a bit rich (no pun) to call “trickle-down” policies “idiotic” and then propose them in the same breath? What’s more “trickle-down,” after all, than the notion that raining free money from on high—whether via fiat wages or welfare checks—will “stimulate” a middle class to burgeon? If anything, it will stimulate them to do more of less. These tired Keynesian nostra only end up in perfectly good capital being misallocated. (Burning planks from a ship at sea might keep you warm for a night, but it won’t get your ship to port.)
It’s when I realized this that I decided I had to leave my insulated world of the super-rich and get involved in politics.Why not help people with charity? Why not create better-faster-cheaper goods? Politics, at its root, is just some group compelling other people with the threat of violence to try to refashion the world as they see it in their minds. If that’s not inequality, I don’t know what is. But more importantly, you have already demonstrated that you can make the world a better place. It is better with Amazon than without. People are employed. I buy products and services from you that enrich my life. Thank you. Now, if you have more money than you can spend, why not build more businesses that solve more human problems? Why not engage in superphilanthropy instead of amateur economics?
I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics. It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.So far neither you nor Mr. Liu have demonstrated anything to suggest you understand the nature of the economy as an ecosystem. You seem to be selling the same old ideas that brought us mechanistic economics like “priming the pump” or “fixing” the economy with economic stimulus, fiscal transfers, and price controls—none of which takes into account effects on real flesh-and-blood people involved in that complex ecosystem, and instead reduces them to macroeconomic abstractions. (I’m bracing for more Keynesianism from you, Mr. Hanauer.)
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.Ah, more magical thinking from Keynes. First, it’s simply a myth that the American middle class is disappearing. And  Mr. Hanauer: You get things entirely wrong about the sources of prosperity. Most of the planet is poor, in fact, though it’s getting richer all the time.
The question we have to ask ourselves—inequality notwithstanding—is: Why did the rich countries get rich to start with? If we go by your logic, all we have to do to make sub-Saharan Africa rich is transfer massive amounts of wealth there until a “middle class” has enough money to go buy stuff. (Oh yeah, that didn't work.) But the arrow of causation doesn’t run that way. Instead, wealth originates from people like the pillow makers in your family—perhaps starting small—operating within stable rules, creating goods and services that people value enough to trade their time and labor for it—that is, if they have nothing else to trade. Economies of scale and specialization kick in. Then, like a great coral reef, the economic ecosystem emerges through distributed processes of interdependency that flow from within simple rules (such as property, prices, and profit-or-loss).
Of course, time and labor are not enough to make society wealthier. If they were, then we really could dig ditches and fill them up again, as Keynes suggested, to become rich. Yes, entrepreneurs figure into a wider economic ecosystem that includes consumers. But Hong Kong did not become the richest rock on earth because of wealth transfers. It became rich because entrepreneurs and investors did not squander capital, but rather used it in wildly diverse ways to expand the base of capital goods so entrepreneurs could produce consumer goods and services—better, faster, and more cheaply. It started with little sweatshops and ended up with megacompanies. But this required savings, investment, ideas, innovation and entrepreneurship. Lather, rinse, repeat. You can try to shortcut this process with Keynesian manna. But rich guys have to get rich by creating wealth first.
So, without Henry Ford, no company town. Without a stable business environment, no Henry Ford. Yes, the open market is a virtuous ecosystem, but it is not improved by zero-sum (or negative sum) wealth transfers like you’re proposing. The ecosystem is seeded with ideas that make people more productive. More productivity creates surpluses that end up as investment in more capital goods or more consumption goods—all of which feeds better ideas that make people more productive and create further surpluses. Creative entrepreneurs, willing to take risks, get the ball rolling (not the other way around). They are the prime movers.
On June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.” Forbes labeled it “Nick Hanauer’s near insane” proposal. Forbes was right. I’m sorry. But it is near insane. Price controls don’t work in the energy markets. Price controls don’t work in healthcare. Why would price controls work in labor markets? Your proposal amounts to nothing more than price controls. But prices are information signals wrapped in incentives. When you try to control prices, you’re distorting both the information and the incentives.
You go on to brag that your idea saw implementation in Seattle. I’m surprised a businessman of your caliber would do that. You see, we have to look at outcomes, not inputs. I know, you said you left business to go into “politics.” And politics is that bottomless well of aspirations in which people reward themselves for good intentions—that is, for getting things passed. But what are the effects of a policy?
Back in the business world, people have to live with the consequences of politics. And so far, the minimum wage in Seattle has already resulted in perverse effects. As businesses are forced to adapt—cutting back labor, hours, and substituting labor for technology—your policy hastens this process. You may think you’re making big companies pay their “fair share,” but you’re hurting small businesses: restaurateurs with slim margins, someone opening a little child care center, maybe a guy who runs a body shop. And more importantly, you’re depriving people of opportunities. When you raise the minimum wage by 25 percent, you are raising the costs of hiring a minority teenager by 25 percent. If the minimum wage makes it too costly to open another store, the business owner won’t open another store.
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.This doesn’t sound like a sentence written by a businessperson at all. Labor, like any other market phenomenon, has a market value. That may sound crass. But it’s true. If it weren’t true, we could set the minimum wage to $150 per hour. Now, it may be that some companies want to pay their workforces more than comparable wages in an area—perhaps in exchange for loyalty, or so that they’ll spend more at the company store. Maybe they attract better, more reliable workers. For some employers, it’s worth it: They value the labor that much based on their particular circumstances. In North Dakota, Walmart employees are being offered $17 per hour. Why? Labor supply and demand. For other companies, it might be a form of charity. But the truth is, we don’t know from one company to the next. One thing we do know, however, is that blanket policies don’t do a good job of determining which companies have which circumstances.
Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.The most comprehensive study of minimum wages is by Neumark and Wascher (and you can buy it on Amazon). These scholars have determined that the net effects of minimum wage laws over the years have been primarily deleterious. (And predictably so.) Treating an employee “better” may or may not have positive effects for a given business. But the thing about entrepreneurs is they are highly attuned to such opportunities. And if such opportunities are a win-win, they will pursue them. But the net effect of assuming you or anyone else knows what’s best for all companies has been shown to be negative in theory and in practice.
Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk. But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet? $9.32 versus $15.00? That’s a big difference. Normally politicians set minimum wages right around where they might otherwise be—say in a large, gentrified area like Seattle—and so the ill effects go away pretty quickly as companies adapt, if they need to at all. Politicians do this to create the illusion that they are making things better with policy, when actually they are getting out in front of a trend in order to take credit for it. But if entry-level wages are hovering around $9 in Seattle or San Francisco, they aren’t in Stockton (where the unemployment rate is 14 percent). Indeed, no one should believe for a second that a jump of more than 50 percent is going to be easy for companies to adapt to, and won’t require wrenching ill effects. Again, the labor pool and conditions are heterogeneous, so blanket policies are ill-advised. Remember, you said yourself the economy is like an ecosystem, not a machine. Wage rates can’t be set by a single rheostat.
The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Raise it to $15 tomorrow and you’ll slam on the brakes. Or you’ll see lots of small businesses with fewer employees or just the owners.
Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage? San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. My sources show my home city Austin is the fastest growing, despite a minimum wage of $7.25. Other major Texas cities—sucking in Californians by the day—have similar minimum wages. But let’s not facts get in the way of your hypothesis.
Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us. It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass.Did I mention I live in Austin, one of four Texas cities among the 10 fastest growing? How is this kicking our ass? While San Francisco’s unemployment rate may be low and its small start-ups doing okay for now, the rest of the state is a mess. You’ll have to look at other factors besides wage rates to see why.
It makes perfect sense if you think about it: If a worker earns $7.25 an hour, which is now the national minimum wage, what proportion of that person’s income do you think ends up in the cash registers of local small businesses? Hardly any.It would make perfect sense if there weren’t so many counterexample cities that completely belie your claim—many here in Texas. But what’s what’s more, the United States already has an income support system called the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). That means rich people like you already subsidize wages for workers under a certain income threshold. So it’s not clear to me why shifting the burden directly onto individual businesses is going to create some sort of magic. If your argument is that there should be a bigger EITC, that’s a separate discussion.
Please, please stop insisting that if we pay low-wage workers more, unemployment will skyrocket and it will destroy the economy. A $15 per hour wage is not likely to destroy the economy. It will certainly destroy prospects for groups like African-American teens, whose unemployment rate currently hovers around 40 percent. Minimum wages don’t destroy the economy, they remove the bottom rungs of the income ladder for people who need to gain skills and experience to be upwardly mobile. And they often raise prices for consumers, including those making low wages.
The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics isn’t believing that if the rich get richer, it’s good for the economy. It’s believing that if the poor get richer, it’s bad for the economy.It depends upon which straw man you’re beating up here, Mr. Hanauer, but neither of your “trickle down” claims is true. The rich getting richer is an effect, not a cause. The poor getting richer is an effect, not a cause. If all groups are becoming better off—as they have been (I refer you to the Shermer citation above) then the causes of those improvements across quintiles are good for the economy.
Indeed, what is good for the economy—and human well-being—is when people get richer due to becoming more productive, solving more problems, and satisfying more wants and needs. The value of a worker’s effort is determined according to the subjective valuations of individual entrepreneurs in unique circumstances. You can’t possibly know these circumstances, Mr. Hanauer, because you are not treating the economy like a complex ecosystem. How do I know? Because you say…
In order for us to have an economy that works for everyone, we should compel all retailers to pay living wages—not just ask politely.But again, a “living wage” is a numerical abstraction—detached from any real economic ecosystem. If we were to view the economy as an ecosystem, we would have to reckon with its complexity and heterogeneity. Price controls treat the economy as a static thing that can be jump-started by edicts from a central committee.
[Instead of buying stuff…] I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good. What makes you think your savings don’t do the country much good? If it’s gaining interest at all, then it most certainly is doing the country good. You seem to be laboring under the mistaken notion that consumption drives production. But consider for a moment that Lord Keynes was wrong. When you save, somebody is going to use that money for something (unless the Fed has other ideas). Now, if you’re just letting it sit in a zero-interest account, or you’re bathing in dollars, I would encourage you to diversify and/or use your savvy to create more wealth for both yourself and the country. If you’re a true capitalist, you know more interest/income is a signal that you’re doing something right—that you’re making the world a better place, even if you’re just leaving your money in the bank.
Bottom line: If you don’t agree, you can always give it away. One wonders why you haven’t.
So forget all that rhetoric about how America is great because of people like you and me and Steve Jobs. You know the truth even if you won’t admit it: If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we’d be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It’s not that Somalia and Congo don’t have good entrepreneurs. It’s just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that’s all their customers can afford.If this were true, Hong Kong would be a backwater, poor as it was 100 years ago. As Nobel Laureate Douglass North said in his prize speech:
The organizations that come into existence will reflect the opportunities provided by the institutional matrix. That is, if the institutional framework rewards piracy then piratical organizations will come into existence; and if the institutional framework rewards productive activities then organizations—firms—will come into existence to engage in productive activities.
And entrepreneurs start firms. In the Congo, piratical organization is rewarded by the institutional matrix. It’s been a corrupt dictatorship for years, so people who take bribes and join the army get the rewards. Make no mistake: Changes to Congo’s institutional matrix—along with the entrepreneurial culture—will give rise to dramatic changes in living standards, as they did in Hong Kong. There are 75 million potential customers in the Congo.
So why not talk about a different kind of New Deal for the American people, one that could appeal to the right as well as left—to libertarians as well as liberals? Edge of my seat.
If people are getting $15 an hour or more, they don’t need food stamps. They don’t need rent assistance. They don’t need you and me to pay for their medical care. Raising the minimum wage is effectively no different than raising the corporate tax for welfare benefits for assistance, except that one has greater potential to harm businesses. In both cases, people are getting something for nothing.
If the consumer middle class is back, buying and shopping, then it stands to reason you won’t need as large a welfare state. How’s that? If fewer poor people are being hired—a la Neumark and Wascher—more poor people will require assistance.
And at the same time, revenues from payroll and sales taxes would rise, reducing the deficit.If all these positive effects were to come about, how does this address the so-called “problem” of inequality? If you’re correct that all this crazy consumption is going sustainably to push up company revenues (which I doubt), aren’t guys like you still going to get richer under your theory?
There are three main problems with any proposal to raise the minimum wage in lieu of welfare:
First, there are better, more pragmatic proposals out there for a minimum income, including the negative income tax (i.e., expanding the EITC and getting rid of welfare). Charles Murray’s In Our Hands is a good start, though his numbers might need updating. That proposal reduces the direct burden on companies compared with your proposal, because it redistributes after profits rather than before. Minimum wage laws are indifferent to whether a firm is profitable, which makes them dangerous by degree.
Second, any policy that simply transfers wealth can have incentive effects that discourage upward mobility. That being said, I will grant that your proposal would help people avoid “welfare traps” if there were no negative effects on employment. But if your government-set wage rates are pricing people out of the labor market, there will be just as many unemployed workers, if not more.
Third, any such grand compromise ideas about minimum income—as much as we might like to think about them—are very likely not to be implemented. How do you plan to combat the welfare-industrial complex? There are armies of vested interests in the welfare bureaucracy. They will be extremely difficult to send packing.
Capitalism, when well-managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. I think you might be confused about what capitalism is. If by capitalism, you mean crapitalism, then you’re right. It’s not sustainable. And only checking the State’s power to assist cronies will we rein in the excesses of crapitalism. If by capitalism, you mean free and open markets, then you are simply mistaken. In competitive environments, it’s very difficult for firms to hold on to market dominance for very long. Firms have to consistently deliver on quality and price. Almost all monopolies and cartels are created and shored up by corporate-State collusion. And corporate-State collusion almost always starts with the State trying to “manage” capitalists. Regulation is inherently anticompetitive.
Now there will be resource concentrations in a free and open market, as with any natural system, but they too are difficult to maintain over time. In other words, there is incredible churn at the top—because only the best stewards of capital can stay there.
My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. You may feel guilty about this. After all, your forebears were real value creators. Maybe you inherited a fortune and got lucky knowing Jeff Bezos. Maybe you really aren’t that good at predicting the future, identifying trends, etc.—just lucky. Maybe Bezos just called you first and you simply rode the wave. Still, we shouldn’t begrudge you your fortune, any more than we should pity a guy who loses at the tables.
Things get tight for me and my family. We’re trying to figure out how to fix the fender on my car (my fault) and renovate the old house we just bought. But at least we’ve got a car to fix. We’ve got a house to fix up. We eat nutritious food. My son has a Kindle Fire. And my wife and kid are about the best family a guy could have. We don’t have much, but we have enough to make Louis XVI positively green.
Yeah, you might be lucky, Mr. Hanauer. But so am I.
Max Borders is author of Superwealth: Why we should stop worrying about the gap between rich and poor, which you can buy for your Kindle at Amazon.

Confessions of a Computer Modeler - WSJ

Confessions of a Computer Modeler - WSJ

After earning a master's degree in environmental engineering in 1982, I spent most of the next 10 years building large-scale environmental computer models. My first job was as a consultant to the Environmental Protection Agency. I was hired to build a model to assess the impact of its Construction Grants Program, a nationwide effort in the 1970s and 1980s to upgrade sewer-treatment plants.
The computer model was huge—it analyzed every river, sewer treatment plant and drinking-water intake (the places in rivers where municipalities draw their water) in the country. I'll spare you the details, but the model showed huge gains from the program as water quality improved dramatically. By the late 1980s, however, any gains from upgrading sewer treatments would be offset by the additional pollution load coming from people who moved from on-site septic tanks to public sewers, which dump the waste into rivers. Basically the model said we had hit the point of diminishing returns.
When I presented the results to the EPA official in charge, he said that I should go back and "sharpen my pencil." I did. I reviewed assumptions, tweaked coefficients and recalibrated data. But when I reran everything the numbers didn't change much. At our next meeting he told me to run the numbers again.
After three iterations I finally blurted out, "What number are you looking for?" He didn't miss a beat: He told me that he needed to show $2 billion of benefits to get the program renewed. I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy.
Was the EPA official asking me to lie? I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he believed in the value of continuing the program. (Congress ended the grants in 1990.) He certainly didn't give any indications otherwise. I also assume he understood the inherent inaccuracies of these types of models. There are no exact values for the coefficients in models such as these. There are only ranges of potential values. By moving a bunch of these parameters to one side or the other you can usually get very different results, often (surprise) in line with your initial beliefs.
I realized that my work for the EPA wasn't that of a scientist, at least in the popular imagination of what a scientist does. It was more like that of a lawyer. My job, as a modeler, was to build the best case for my client's position. The opposition will build its best case for the counter argument and ultimately the truth should prevail.
If opponents don't like what I did with the coefficients, then they should challenge them. And during my decade as an environmental consultant, I was often hired to do just that to someone else's model. But there is no denying that anyone who makes a living building computer models likely does so for the cause of advocacy, not the search for truth.
Surely the scientific community wouldn't succumb to these pressures like us money-grabbing consultants. Aren't they laboring for knowledge instead of profit? If you believe that, boy do I have a computer model to sell you.
The academic community competes for grants, tenure and recognition; consultants compete for clients. And you should understand that the lines between academia and consultancy are very blurry as many professors moonlight as consultants, authors, talking heads, etc.
Let's be clear: I am not saying this is a bad thing. The legal system is adversarial and for the most part functions well. The same is true for science. So here is my advice: Those who are convinced that humans are drastically changing the climate for the worse and those who aren't should accept and welcome a vibrant, robust back-and-forth. Let each side make its best case and trust that the truth will emerge.
Those who do believe that humans are driving climate change retort that the science is "settled" and those who don't agree are "deniers" and "flat-earthers." Even the president mocks anyone who disagrees. But I have been doing this for a long time, and the one thing I have learned is how hard it is to convince people with a computer model. The vast majority of your audience will never, ever understand the math behind it. This does not mean people are dumb. They usually have great BS detectors, and when they see one side of a debate trying to shut down the other side, they will most likely assume it has something to hide, has the weaker argument, or both.

MercatorNet: What the Supreme Court did (and didn’t do) to religious freedom last week

MercatorNet: What the Supreme Court did (and didn’t do) to religious freedom last week

In Hobby Lobby, the Court ruled that a federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), applied to the case, and that it covered “any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.” The only question that government could consider was not the truth or reasonableness or centrality of the religious belief, but only whether the belief were sincere, which was not doubted in the case of these companies. Interestingly, RFRA had passed in 1993 by overwhelming majorities of both houses of Congress. This is because religious freedom, like free speech, is a vital part of our legal heritage and until recently, viewed as axiomatic.
The Court said that companies were legal persons within the meaning of RFRA, an unexceptional view dating back to the Middle Ages, when the Church, as the Body or Corpus of Christ, was viewed as a corporation with legal personality. Citing William Blackstone, the authoritative expounder of the common law at the time of the American founding, the Court recognized that there were two types of corporations, ecclesiastical and lay, and that lay corporations could also have eleemosynary and religious purposes. (The amicus brief I filed in support of Hobby Lobby for four non-profit corporations made the same point, also citing Blackstone.)
Because of the political firestorm that erupted several years ago when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of corporate free-speech rights in the Citizens United case, which President Obama had denounced in his State of the Union address, this question of the First Amendment rights of corporations, and specifically whether for-profit corporations were legal persons, has become politicized. Even so, two of the liberal justices, Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan, did not join that part of Ginsburg’s dissent that said that for-profit corporations were not legal persons.
As Justice Alito pointed out for the majority, “it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction [that corporations are legal ‘persons’] is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form of organizations used by human beings to achieve desired ends … When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people.”
Since corporations, or at least closely-held family-run companies, can claim to exercise religion, the law requires that if their religious exercise is substantially burdened, then the government must show both that it is seeking to achieve compelling government interests, and that it is doing so in the least religiously restrictive way possible: a demanding ends and means test. If the government passes the test, the matter belongs to Caesar. If not, then it belongs to God and the religious conscience of believers.
Justice Kennedy concurred by saying that while free contraceptives for women was a compelling government interest, the government had a lesser restrictive alternative in that it could either provide the contraceptive coverage itself or extend the accommodation HHS was already giving religions non-profits, to for-profit closely-held companies with religious objections. Because he was the swing vote, the majority had to assume for the sake of argument that there was a compelling interest in free contraceptives, though the prevalence of exceptions in the regulation for grandfathered companies, companies with less than 50 employees, and Churches and other religious organizations, makes that very questionable. If it’s so important to government, then why is it handing out exemptions like party favors to all those except for-profit companies with religious objections?
And so the majority ruled that the huge fines the families faced for not covering the abortifacient contraceptives did constitute a substantial burden on their religious practice, and that even assuming a compelling government interest in support of the regulation, the government had failed to show that cost-free access to these contraceptives was the least-restrictive means of achieving its desired goal. Either the government could assume the cost itself, or extend the accommodation it already was giving non-profit employers with religious objections to the mandate.
The Court went on to say that its ruling did not necessarily apply to vaccinations or blood transfusions, not did it provide a shield to employers illegally discriminating on religious grounds. Those matters will have to wait for another day.

I was struck by how over-the-top much reaction to the Hobby Lobby case was, as if, all of a sudden, applying a law intended to protect religious freedom to the facts of a particular case were a threat to civil liberties.
Justice Ginsburg, for example, calls it a “decision of startling breadth,” and demonstrates that she is opposed to RFRA, in spite of the careful hedging of the majority’s opinion. In front of the Supreme Court building the Monday that the decision was issued, there were contending demonstrators. The pro-government contingent had a slogan, “My birth control is none of your business.” Precisely. That’s what the companies were saying: Get your hand out of my pocket.
As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s full-page ad in the New York Times asserted, quoting retired Justice John Paul Stevens, “Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.” Taranto retorted: “Then shut up.” But of course corporations, like the people who comprise them, can be hypocritical too.

No, the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision is not based upon a scientific mistake - The Washington Post

No, the Supreme Court’s <em>Hobby Lobby</em> decision is not based upon a scientific mistake - The Washington Post

There are reasonable arguments to be made against the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, but the charge that the decision is based on science fiction is not among them.  The scientific soundness of a religious objector’s beliefs is not at issue in religious liberty cases and, even if it were, there was a reasonable (if not uncontroversial) basis for the specific factual claims upon which Hobby Lobby’s claim was based.

In Hobby Lobby, the Greens and the Hahns (the owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, respectively) claimed that providing insurance coverage for four forms of contraception would violate their religious beliefs.  They claimed that this is because they believe the four forms of contraception at issue (“Plan B,” Ella, and two types of IUD) are capable of terminating a pregnancy.  In making this claim, the Greens and the Hahns embraced the view that a pregnancy begins at conception, rather than at implantation (which is how pregnancy is defined by most medical authorities and under federal law).  This is not relevant, however.  They could have also claimed that pregnancy begins when a woman is visited by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that the challenged forms of contraception chase the Spaghetti Monster away.  Under RFRA, a religious adherent’s beliefs are taken as a given precisely because many religious claims will strike non-believers as strange or incredible.  There’s no scientific evidence for transubstantiation, but that would hardly matter to a RFRA claim that imposed a substantial burden on those who wish to partake in communion.

As Bagley notes further, the federal government accepted the plaintiffs’ characterization of the scientific evidence, if not their conclusion that preventing implantation of an egg is the equivalent of an abortion.  The Food & Drug Administration’s website notes that all four forms of disputed contraception may prevent implantation, as do the FDA-approved labels (as noted in footnote 4 of the government’s brief).  An amicus brief submitted at the certiorari stage on behalf of medical organizations disputes whether it is proper to label these contraceptive methods as “abortifacients,” insofar as they all act before the start of a pregnancy (implantation). Yet, as Ed Whelan notes, the brief also concedes the possibility that these contraceptive methods may prevent implantation.
Assuming, as the weight of current scientific evidence suggests, that it is exceedingly rare for any of these methods to prevent implantation or otherwise cause the termination of a fertilized egg, it is not unscientific to adopt a more precautionary position due to religious or moral concerns, and it is hardly “anti-science” for the courts to accept such a religious belief when evaluating a RFRA claim.  The plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby advanced a claim based on religious belief, and that is how all nine justices on the Court treated it.
Science retains substantial authority in our political discourse.  This makes it appealing to tar one’s political opponents with an “anti-science” brush. Yet in their zeal to affix the “anti-science” label to the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby critics have gotten ahead of themselves.  Whatever the merits of other critiques of the Hobby Lobby opinion, this one falls apart.

Things Progressives Know That Just Aren't So, Part I - Greed [WeirdDave]

Things Progressives Know That Just Aren't So, Part I - Greed [WeirdDave]

This is the first in a series of occasional posts in which I will muse upon things that our progressive brothers and sisters take as a given, and why they are so wrong.
Greed. This is one of the big arrows in the prog's ad hominem quiver. "Why are you conservatives so greedy?". "Corporations are greedy.". "The greed of the 1% keeps us sterling OWS 99%ers poor! Wah!". And so on, and so on, and so on. Let's examine this, shall we?
Conservatives are far more greedy than progressives Really? The core of our philosophy is the right of the individual to keep the fruits of their labors. We're not the ones who seek to take more and more money from other people in order to "do good". We don't think that it's right to redistribute wealth by force in the name of "social justice". Conservatives believe "Keep it, you earned it" while progressives say "Gimmie, I can use it better than you can, you don't deserve it, I do". Conservatism is a philosophy of greed while progressives are altruists? In a pig's eye. Greedy conservatives even give more to charity than kind hearted progressives. Which philosophy encourages greed again?
Greed is good? Good old Gordon Gecko. The famous "Greed is good" diatribe, liberal Hollywood's distortion of the words of Milton Friedman, deployed to make the business community look like heartless bastards. The thing is, most conservatives, listening to that speech, find it hard to discount it completely, because it comes so close to expressing the core principles that we believe. Seeing our hesitation, the prog pounces: "HA! You DO think greed is good! Greedy right wing bastard!" and then uses this straw man to dismiss our arguments. Greed is not "good", because greed implies the desire to possess something not earned, something that one is not entitled to. In the climactic paragraph, Gecko says "greed-for lack of a better word-is good". Well, I have a better word, several in fact. If billionaire Gecko could have spent $4.95 on a thesaurus, he might have come out with something that every conservative would embrace and defend without hesitation. Try this:
"Ambition is right. Desire works. Drive clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. An individual's desire to better them self, in all of its forms -- in life, financially, in love, in knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And that drive -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA."
Same basic speech, same basic words, but now it's a clear statement of conservative principle that I would be proud to claim as my own. This is tactic # 5 in the progressive playbook: Distort the clear meaning of words to muddy the argument. So, if greed is not good, what is it?
Greed is natural Greed is part of the flawed human condition. Everyone is greedy to a greater or lesser extent. Some people are greedy for money. Some for power. Some for love, some for recognition, some for fame, some for Hummel figurines. Some for all of these things, some for none. The fact of the matter is that greed lives in the human heart, and all of the wailing and moaning in the world won't change that one simple fact. Even progs recognize this, though they're loath to admit it, which brings us to the final point on our journey.
Greed must be constrained And here's where the prog goes completely off the rails, although he winds up in the
same place he always does. His solution to containing greed is to empower the government. More rules, more laws, more regulations. Tighter and tighter control. Gotta reign in those evil conservatives, those nasty corporations, those distasteful free thinking individuals. Tighten the screws, lock down the hatches, Mr. Spock, we need governmentwarp factor 10! You can blow this all out of the water with one simple question, and in so doing the only answer left to the prog is the same sad one that's been repeated throughout human history. "Mr. Prog", you will ask, "What makes you think that people in government are any less greedy that people outside of government?"
Stammering will ensue, but if he's real hard core, he'll give you the only answer left to him: Well, government can train greed out of people. Yup, all we need is total control, we'll teach children not to be greedy, we'll stigmatize greed right out of the human condition. In other words, the solution is to create the New Soviet Man, again. As soon as humans stop being human, why, it'll be Nirvana. Anyone who has studied history knows how that ends.
The conservative knows that in order to constrain greed, we need a system that does it naturally. Fortunately, we have just such a system: The free market. Corporations and governments may both be inclined towards greed, but the market naturally punishes corporations for indulging. How long would Wal-Mart stay in business if it made a habit of screwing its customers, priced its goods exorbitantly or really abused its employees the way leftists want you to believe that it does? Not long. Everybody would go to Target. The market naturally restrains greed. Government, on the other hand, protects greed. Over 1000 vets died so that government workers in Phoenix could get their bonus checks. Nobody went to jail, nobody has even lost their job. Can you honestly say that a corporation that callously killed 1000 folks would walk away unscathed? Of course not. That corporation would be out of business (spare me cigarette companies please, they provide something that an individual uses to kill himself. Different situation altogether. Guns too), people would stop patronizing them. Let me say it again: The market naturally restrains greed. Government, on the other hand, protects greed. Progs believe the opposite.
And that right there is what progs know about greed that just isn't so.

Hobby Lobby wins before the Supreme Court - The Washington Post

Hobby Lobby wins before the Supreme Court - The Washington Post

Text of the decision

Hobby Lobby: The Left Is Weeping Hot, Bitter Tears, and It Should | National Review Online

Hobby Lobby: The Left Is Weeping Hot, Bitter Tears, and It Should | National Review Online

Andrew’s and Molly’s post reflecting the hysterical reaction on the Left to theHobby Lobby decision makes for both entertaining and instructive reading. It’s entertaining because — regarding the issue they claim to care most about, access to contraceptives — the decision blocks exactly no one from obtaining the drugs they choose to purchase. There’s just slightly less free stuff on the market. This is hardlyHandmaid’s Tale territory.
It’s instructive because it demonstrates the extent to which the Left is emotionally and ideologically committed to the power of the regulatory state. For some time, the Left has been selling the public and the courts on the notion that somehow the act of forming a corporation and opening for business operates as an effective waiver of your most basic liberties, including free speech, free exercise of religion, and virtually the entire panoply of property rights. In effect, your business is not “your” business at all, but instead all aspects of its operations exist at the whim of the state, and if the state wants to draft you into its child-killing abortion crusade — or wants to muzzle you during political campaigns – then you best salute and fall in line.
By holding that RFRA protects closely-held businesses, the Supreme Court upheld not just the plain meaning of federal statutes but also common sense.

Dear Emptyheaded Left Wing Writers

Dear Emptyheaded Left Wing Writers

Please stop saying that a corporation is a "fictitious person" as part of your case in chief against the Hobby Lobby decision.
For one thing, you sound stupid. Not because this is untrue, but rather because it is obviously true, and 90% of all literate people not only know "corporations are fictitious people" but in fact have known this since long before you apparently did.

Secondly, and here I fear I will lose you completely because this is going to get slightly abstract and logical, the fact that "corporations are fictitious persons" actually destroys your arguments, rather than strengthens them, which, if you'd bother to have read the Hobby Lobby case, which you have not and will not, ever, you'd already know.
See, a corporation is a fictitious person. It is a made-up designation, created by state law, to permit business concerns to live longer than the lifespan of a natural person.
It is a fictitious person. It is not a real person. Fictitious -- an imaginary construct of the law.
Think about what that means.
This means that in a closely-held corporation -- where five or fewer people control the majority of shares (and in fact usually control all of it) -- the "corporation" does not exist in any real way, except for its listing in the tax records of a state.
In a small closely-held corporation, "the corporation" only means "these five guys right here."
The Supreme Court did not acknowledge that corporations quacorporations (look up "qua" on your own time, idiots) have "religious freedoms." Rather, it recognized the obvious -- that in the case of a closely-held corporation, the corporation being a fictitious entity and all, an imposition of a duty on "the corporation" is in reality just an imposition of a duty on the five or fewer people (often one or two) who own it.Thus, when we say the Hobby Lobby corporation must provide abortifacient drugs to its employees, this is precisely the same as laying this responsibility on the five or fewer individual persons (who definitely have the right to religious freedom) to provide abortifacient drugs to their employees.Given that the corporation is a fictitious entity of no tangible presence (something you seem so delighted to have recently learned), forcing the corporation to provide abortions is precisely the same as forcing the family who owns Hobby Lobby to provide them.
You see? You see what your problem is here?
I mean, one of your problems. You have many, beginning with the facts that 1 you are not terribly well educated and 2 you seem to believe you are extremely well educated.
Now, in a very large corporation, what we call a "publicly traded" corporation, wherein many thousands (or even millions) of persons might have shares and thus ownership interests in this fictitious person, one could very easily make the case that each individual shareholder is so attenuated from actual control of the corporation that to impose a duty on the corporation does not implicate the individual shareholder at all, or implicates him so slightly, so trivially, that we can round down and simply say "Forcing Exxon to provide abortion drugs should not offend the conscience of Exxon's thousands of owners."
We could say in that case that an imposition on the corporation has no real implication for the individual owner. He would own, what, one thousand shares out of over ten million shares of the decision to provide abortion services?
A very diffuse responsibility indeed.
But you cannot make this claim when a family of four owns almost all of the stock in a corporation. In that case, the burdens placed on this fictitious entity are actually burdens on the people -- Unless you idiots want to make the case that this fictitious entity that has so mesmerized you actually has the tangible quality of being areal person whose actions do not implicate its real-person owners.But then in that case you shouldn't keep saying it's a fictitious person-- you should be arguing it's close enough to a real person to be treated as such.You should be arguing that a corporation is so close to real that we should say a burden on it means nothing at all to its owners-- who are just third-parties with barely anything at all to do with the real person being burdened. The real person being burdened (in this argument) is the corporation, which is basically a totes real person, and no other people are burdened at all.

And it seems to me if the courts had ruled that a corporation is a legal human being, it would be illegal to own one.

#12 – "I Prefer Security to Freedom" : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

#12 – "I Prefer Security to Freedom" : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Summary

• True security is an outgrowth of freedom, not an alternative to it.
• Being dependent, instead of being independent, is a move away from true security.
• Read’s observation more than half a century ago that increasing reliance on a welfare state for security would produce financial problems seems positively prescient today. Consider our $17.5 trillion national debt as evidence.
• The real choice is not between freedom and security but between security and insecurity.
• For further information, see these articles:

“Victims of Social Leveling” by Leonard E. Read: http://www.fee.org/files/docLib/SocialLeveling.pdf

“Big Government—Big Risk” by David R. Henderson: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/big-government-big-risk

“Freedom vs. Security: The False Alternative” by Noah Stahl: http://theundercurrent.org/freedom-versus-security-the-false-alternative/

“Liberty or Security?” by Bas Van Der Vossen:http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/06/liberty-or-security/

The Hobby Lobby majority, summarized in (relatively) plain English - The Washington Post

The Hobby Lobby majority, summarized in (relatively) plain English - The Washington Post

1. Congress has decided that religious objectors may go to court to demand religious exemptions from federal laws, when the law makes them do things that they view as religiously forbidden. That’s not required as a constitutional matter under the Free Exercise Clause; the Court decided that in Employment Division v. Smith (1990). But in enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), Congress chose to give religious objectors a statutory right to such exemptions, at least in many cases:

Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion

even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, …

[unless the Government] demonstrates that application of the burden to the person …

is the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.

2. RFRA doesn’t exclude laws which impose a burden on closely held religious corporations. To be sure, a corporation is a legal fiction; it cannot itself practice religion, or for that matter do anything else. It acts only through people.

But — precisely because a corporation is just a legal fiction — when a law requires such a corporation to do something that its owners believe to be religiously forbidden, it burdens the religious freedom of those real owners, and not just of the fictional corporation itself. “[P]rotecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby … protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.”

3. The owners of Hobby Lobby sincerely believe that it’s wrong for them to buy their employees insurance plans that they see as supporting abortion. They have no objection to contraception as such, but they view contraceptives that prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg as tantamount to abortion drugs.

The government acknowledges that its regulations require businesses to pay for such contraceptives (on pain of substantial monetary penalties). Therefore the law substantially burdens the owners’ religious practices, by requiring them to do something they think religiously forbidden.

To be sure, the law doesn’t require the employers to personally get abortions or perform abortions. But the employers sincerely believe that even buying insurance policies that pay for such abortions is religiously forbidden complicity in abortion.

It’s not for courts to second-guess the reasonableness of such judgments about how to define religiously forbidden complicity. “[T]he Hahns and Greens and their companies sincerely believe that providing the insurance coverage demanded by the HHS regulations lies on the forbidden side of the line, and it is not for us to say that their religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial.”

4. Of course, the legal system has many rules that require people to do what they think religiously wrong (or, the legal equivalent, to not do what they think religiously required). Not all religious exemptions can be granted. RFRA provides that, if denying the exemption is really the least restrictive means of serving a compelling government interest, a court should indeed deny the exemption.

But “[t]he least-restrictive-means standard is exceptionally demanding.” Under RFRA, if the government can — even by changing the way its programs operate, and at some cost to taxpayers — both adequately serve its compelling interests and provide an exemption to religious objectors, then it must do so.

And here, the government can indeed both provide free contraceptives (as the regulations under the Congressionally enacted Affordable Care Act provide) and exempt religious objectors (as the Congressionally enacted Religious Freedom Restoration Act provides).

First, the government could pay for the contraceptives directly. Though that would cost taxpayer money, religious exemptions sometimes do cost money, and the extra cost would be a tiny fraction of the ACA’s $130 billion expense per year. Indeed, RFRA’s sister statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, provides that it “may require a government to incur expenses in its own operations to avoid imposing a substantial burden on religious exercise.”

Second, the government has already exempted some religious nonprofits from the law. Under this exemption, insurers would (1) exclude contraceptive coverage from the employer-paid health plan, and (2) separately pay for contraceptive coverage that the insurer would provide directly to the employees. (The government has concluded this is fair to insurers because the cost to them of contraceptives would be balanced by the savings from lower pregnancy costs and other health costs.) A similar plan is available for self-insured religious nonprofits.

These exemptions could easily be extended to for-profit religious objectors such as Hobby Lobby. Such an extension would mean the government can still ensure that contraceptives are provided at no cost to patients, but Hobby Lobby and similar objectors wouldn’t be required to do what they think their religions forbid.

5. This sort of accommodation is what Congress has mandated. When both the government’s compelling interests and religious objectors’ religious beliefs can be adequately accommodated, Congress said (in enacting RFRA) that they should be accommodated.

But Congress also said that these decisions must turn on the facts of each exemption request, and the options available for accommodating such accommodation requests. In future cases — for instance, ones involving race discrimination in employment, or insurance coverage for vaccination or blood transfusions — the result might be different.

It might not be possible in those cases (as it is in this case) to adequately accommodate both the government interests and the religious objections. If that’s so, then those religious exemptions would not have to be granted. Wisely or not, Congress has required courts to sort through religious exemption requests, granting some and denying others. This is what the Supreme Court has done here.