Well, you could lower your prices. Or you could work on providing better service. Or you could send over a couple of guys who are really good at convincing people it’s not in their interest to compete with you.

Or say you run a personnel company that brings foreign workers into the United States. And say you’re worried about competitors who cross the border without your help. One option is to try doing a better job. Another is to send over about 1500 guys with unmanned aerial vehicles, new forwarding operating bases and $14 million in new communications equipment to tamp down the flow.

President Obama, with support from both sides of the political aisle, will be signing a bill today that allocates $600 million for “border security”. According to CNN, “The bill is funded in part by higher fees on personnel companies that bring foreign workers into the United States”.

I imagine the personnel companies will consider it money well spent. Let’s not lose sight of how ugly this is.

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So why the singular focus on teachers? The answer, of course, is that unlike plumbers or cab drivers or pharmaceutical workers or computer programmers, teachers, through their unions, were major contributors to the Obama campaign.

All victorious politicians engage in the unsavory practice of diverting spoils to their most vigorous supporters at everyone else’s expense. In this, the current administration may be no more blameworthy than any other. But I’m pretty sure that sending out the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to defend these political payoffs marks a new sort of low. Traditionally, the Council is composed of first-rate academics whose job is to give good counsel and remain above the political fray. Shame on the President for debasing that noble mission, and shame on Christy Romer for going along with it.

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The number of “unauthorized aliens” in Arizona at any given moment is estimated as just under a half million—about the same as the number of Jews in New Jersey. Over half the text of the Arizona law is devoted to penalizing employers who hire these people. Now suppose for a moment that the New Jersey legislature were to pass a bill penalizing anyone who hires a Jew. Would Professor Kobach defend this law, as he does Arizona’s, by pointing out that it doesn’t require anyone to carry a driver’s license?

The anti-immigration hysterics keep warning us that foreigners want to come over here and exploit our welfare system. The insincerity of that stance is exposed whenever, as in Arizona, its proponents set out to prevent those very same foreigners from coming here and working.

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You’d never know it from DeLong’s selective summary, but Rizzo’s post is dense with interesting (if elementary) economics. A key point is that when you think you’re tipping a New York cab driver, you’re really tipping the medallion owner. (A medallion is a license to drive a cab; medallions are in fixed supply and currently trade for a price of about three quarters of a million dollars. Your driver is probably leasing his medallion from its owner.) If we all started tipping, say, an extra $2 per ride, then medallion owners would demand another $2 per ride in rental fares—effectively claiming all the additional tips for themselves. (Click here for a slightly longer explanation.)

Likewise, Professor Rizzo and others like him can make life harder for cab drivers in the short run, but not for long. Eventually, low tippers force medallion owners to accept lower rental fees, so that drivers are made whole again. (In brief: With tipping down, some cabbies are disheartened and unwilling to continue driving unless rental fees come down; medallion owners must comply or lose their rental income altogether.) So in the very short run, he’s hurting cab drivers but in the longer run he’s hurting medallion owners and striking a blow for what he considers a desirable change in social norms.

Personally, I don’t mind tipping but I found a lot to chew on in Professor Rizzo’s post. DeLong, true to form, ignored the content and jeered like a third grade bully. Most sadly, whenever he indulges this habit, DeLong sacrifices a chance to teach a little economics. Fortunately, the web is a big place and there are plenty of alternatives for readers who care about ideas.

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Edited to add: I don’t always read Krugman’s column, but since Don’s link sent me there today, I can’t resist noting one more outrage: Krugman thinks that extending estate tax relief to the top .25% of estates is a policy “on behalf of” that .25% of the population, as opposed to a policy on behalf of everyone who benefits from capital accumulation, higher wages and economic growth.

Or more precisesly, he doesn’t think that. But he says it.

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The book in question is The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court by the Israeli law professor Dr. Karin N. Calvo-Goller. According to the reviewer the main part of the book “simply restates the…relevant parts of the ICC Statute.” This rehashing, he adds, is particularly unproductive since a large part of the volume consists of a reprint of the Statute itself.

The author, Dr. Calvo-Goller, disagrees, and has instigated a case of criminal libel against the editor, Professor Weiler. According to Dr. Calvo-Goller:

[The] review…contains false factual statements which the author of the review, a professor of criminal law, could not reasonably believe to be true. Professor Weigend’s review is libellous. It may cause harm to my professional reputation and academic promotion.

Dr. Calvo-Goller also contends that the review is an insult to those who took the time to read and comment on earlier drafts of her book. And she notes that the very same book received a positive review from Judge Kai Ambos, who, she pointedly observes, she has never met.

Dr. Calvo-Goller (who is, after all a law professor) concedes in a letter to Professor Weiler that she is aware of the extent of freedom of expression under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. (Professor Weiler teaches at NYU, well within the boundaries of that country.) However, she notes, “the extent of that freedom ends where its exercise damages the reputation of an individual.”

Professor Weiler responded at great length to Dr. Calvo-Goller’s letter, and to a follow-up letter, defending the good faith and integrity of the reviewer, rejecting the notion that a critical book review constitutes an insult to advance readers, observing that it is not uncommon for a single book to receive both negative and positive reviews, and suggesting that the question of what constitutes a “rehash” might be a matter at least partly of opinion and not of clearcut fact. He invited Dr. Calvo-Goller to respond on the website and passed on her objections to the original reviewer with an invitation to read them and modify his review, an invitation which was not accepted. A year later, Professor Weiler was summoned to appear before a French Examining Judge, and his criminal trial was set for June 25.

Professor Weiler has invited letters of indignation and support to be sent to EJIL.academicfreedom@gmail.com, preferably via attachments on letterhead indicating your affiliation. He has also requested scanned or digital copies of book reviews which are at least as critical as the one in question so as to illustrate that this kind of thing happens all the time.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the book review I’m about to scan.

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More striking even than Cohen’s characteristic “ethics by pronouncement”, refusing to acknowledge, let alone address, the underlying issues, is that he doesn’t even seem to notice that these questions have something in common. He treats them as two separate reader inquiries, from two separate and non-overlapping universes. Thus it’s okay for the doctor to turn away a patient because “You cannot be forced to practice medicine” and because the patient can always find another doctor. One might wonder, then, in the case of the employer, why it’s not true/relevant/dispositive that “You cannot be forced to provide employment” and/or that the candidate can always find another job.

That’s not to say that the situations are identical. In the cases before Judge Cohen, the employer has partners who don’t share his politics; maybe there’s a relevant obligation to those partners. That thought, however, seems not to have popped into Cohen’s head during the five minutes he devoted to thinking about this column.

As I said the last time I blogged about this bozo, it’s not his conclusions I’m objecting to. It’s his apparent belief that “No you may not” is a substitute for logical analysis based on clearly stated principles that are at least stable enough to be maintained for the length of a newspaper column.

It is possible to do this stuff right. I claim to have done so in, for example, Chapter 18 of The Big Questions. More to the point, Tim Harford does it on a regular basis in his “Dear Economist” column, as my reader Jon Shea noted in comments here on this blog last week:

Contrast Cohen’s “The Ethicist” with Tom Harford’s “Dear Economist” in the Financial Times. Harford frequently sources both classic and new research papers. He also uses named economic theories to help explain his answer. As a result “Dear Economist” doesn’t feel like just an Anne Landers style advice column. When I read Harford I don’t feel like I’m getting a stranger’s opinion, but instead I feel like a trained economist is applying his skills and knowledge in a way I might not think to.

Hear, hear.

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You’re redesigning a website and you want to include a photo of a generic customer. The client does not want the generic customer to be African-American, partly because he has never had an African-American customer and thinks it unlikely that he ever will. Is this okay?

My objection is not to Cohen’s answer (which is “no”) but to the way it’s dispensed, as if from an oracle, with no attempt at a derivation from clearly stated principles.

Here’s the best he has to offer:

Race may be a factor in selecting this photograph only if race is germane to the product or service the franchise provides. For instance, if the company sold hair-care products used almost exclusively by African-Americans, then you could rightly indicate as much through the photo you post on the Web site.

Well, okay. But why? Cohen doesn’t tell us.

Nor does he test his policy against the hard cases. Race, he says, may be a factor if it’s germane to the product or service. What if this is a product or service that African-Americans rarely purchase? Does that make race germane? Does it matter why they never purchase it? What if all—or most—African-Americans had a genetic aversion to this product? Is a race-correlated aversion morally equivalent to a race-correlated hair type? What if all—or most—African-Americans had a culturally induced aversion to this product? Is that morally equivalent to a genetic aversion? Why or why not?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but that’s partly why I don’t call myself “The Ethicist”.

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