BLM Protests Rest On A False Assumption

Stephen Kershnar

Falsity-Based Protests, Riots, and Looting

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

June 5, 2020

Two claims drive the recent protests, riots, looting, and white people prostrating themselves before black people. First, racism today is causing blacks to do poorly. Second, the criminal justice system is racist. Both are likely false.

Consider the first claim. Racism today is causing blacks to do poorly.

First, the evidence is thin for racism today being a major factor in explaining how blacks are doing compared to Asians, Hispanics, and whites. The racial pattern is noteworthy. On almost any of issues of group performance (for example, credit score, divorce, education, incarceration, out-of-wedlock children, and poverty), Asians do as well if not better than whites. Unless one thinks that Asian overperformance and black underperformance have entirely different sets of causes, it is likely that differences in education, family structure, and social capital explain much of the groups’ comparative performance.

For example, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald reports that black seniors in high school college read at the level of white eighth graders. And the latter’s reading ability is nothing to write home about. Via education, poor reading skills affect employment, income, etc.     

Consider, also, math SAT scores. A 2017 Brookings Institution study found that Asians and whites scored more than 100 points higher than blacks. This is not an issue of income. Mac Donald points out that in 2015, poor white students did better than upper class black students on the math SATs. Math ability affects education and, thus, employment, income, and wealth.

Even some of the some of the social scientists’ explanations of discrimination are falling apart. Too often, they have not been replicated or have been found to be invalid, unreliable, or poorly thought out. An experiment is replicated if other experiments with a different situation and subjects get the same basic finding as the original experiment. A psychological test is reliable if the same individual, taking the test multiple times, gets roughly the same score. A psychological test is valid if it measures what it claims to measure. Among the problematic models of racism are implicit bias (reliability and validity problems), micro-aggressions (validity and conceptual problems), and stereotype threat (replication and validity problems). The lack of evidence for real racism has led to pseudo-racism theory, including institutional racism and structural racism, that contaminates elite thinking.     

Second, black people are morally responsible for at least some of their difficulties. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution argues that if one does these three things, her chance of being in poverty is small (2%). The three things are finish high school, get a full-time job, and wait until age 21 to get married and have children. When the economy is not in the tank, this is not too much to ask. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, roughly half of people incarcerated in the U.S. committed crimes of force, fraud, or theft. Again, refraining from doing these is not too much to ask.    

Blacks consistently vote for candidates who ignore their problems. The biggest problems blacks face are the broken public-school system in the inner cities and the intertwined scourge of massive incarceration and overcriminalization. They bear part of the political blame if there is such a thing. The teachers’ unions own Democratic politicians. In the U.S., inner city education will not be improved without cutting the teachers’ unions down to size and reforming the education system (for example, more competition and less regulation).

Third, the notion that the criminal justice system is racist is not well-supported. The Sentencing Project found that in their lifetime, roughly one out of three young black men will be under the control of the criminal justice system. This is a damn disgrace. But it is a problem with too much of daily life being criminalized and too much incarceration, not a racial problem.

Heather Mac Donald  points out that in 2005, blacks were 7 times more likely than whites or Hispanics to commit murder (another study finds them 11 times more likely than whites to commit murder). The very controversial Edwin Rubenstein argues that blacks are not arrested at a disproportionate rate. This can be seen in that arrest patterns track victim and witness surveys.

Consider police shootings. Using numbers from a study by Michigan State University’s Joseph Cesario and University of Maryland’s David Johnson, once you control for factors such as violent criminal behavior, police shootings do not have a racist pattern. Here I sidestep Cesario and Johnson’s analysis. In fact, once you control for this and related factors, police are more likely to shoot a white person than a black person. Similarly, Harvard’s Roland Fryer found that police do not shoot blacks or Hispanics in disproportionate numbers, although he found that they are more likely to use force against them.

Consider interracial crime. Using government data, Rubenstein finds that a black in 2013 was 12 times more likely to murder someone of another race than to be murdered by someone of another race. He notes that in 2013, of the approximately 660,000 crimes of interracial violence that involved blacks and whites, blacks were the perpetrators 85% of the time. As a result, he claims, a black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa.

Fourth, some of the differential treatment that gets passed off as racism is a rational response to the above factors. It is prudent to consider facts about criminality, education, family structure, and finances when one decides whom to date, hire, or live near.   

           

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people admire and respect blacks. Black people are our family members, friends, and lovers. We love to watch them in movies and sports, we lust over them, and consider whether to vote for them. When they are criminals in office (see Barack Obama), they disappoint us. Other times, they inspire us.

In short, the protests, riots, looting, and kneeling rest on false claims. The protesters and those supporting them are embarrassing themselves. Shame on them.

Forced COVID Vaccination: Against

Stephen Kershnar

Forcing COVID-19 Vaccination

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

May 24, 2020

In the next year, there might be a vaccine against COVID-19. Scientists are developing over 100 vaccine candidates. Five have reached the stage when they are tested in larger groups for effectiveness and safety. If a vaccine were to arrive, the country would have to decide whether to coerce people to take it.    

There is an anti-vaccine movement in the U.S. due to fear that various vaccines increase children’s risk of autism, damage their immune systems, cause schizophrenia, and so on. The scientific consensus is that vaccination poses no increased risk and, if were to do so, the risk would be greatly outweighed by its expected benefit. Vaccination proponents have argued that in the past, failure to vaccinate enough people resulted in outbreaks of measles, polio, smallpox, tetanus, and whooping cough.

As a legal matter, the government may coerce people into vaccination if necessary, whether via threat (for example, fine or imprisonment) or force (for example, strapping them down against their will and thrusting a needle into them). The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution permits the states to coerce people to be vaccinated. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), in the context of smallpox, the Court found that the states may compel vaccination through fine on the basis of the states’ police-power justification. On this justification, the Constitution permits states to regulate citizens’ behavior on the basis of health, safety, morals, and welfare. The Court’s decision did not rule out imprisonment or force.

The Supreme Court would likely hold that the federal government may also coerce people into being vaccinated. In the Selective Draft Law Cases [Arver v. United States (1918)], the Court found that the Constitution permits a military draft. Specifically, it found that the draft does not violate the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on slavery, involuntary servitude, or any other Constitutional right. The reasoning in the case was abysmal. Still, if the Court thinks that the Constitution permits the government to coerce young men into fighting and dying for their country, even in idiotic wars such as World War I, it would likely find that it may coerce these same men and others into being vaccinated.

Let us consider the moral issue. The University of Richmond’s Jessica Flanigan argues that the government has a moral right to coerce people into getting vaccinated. Her argument is that the failure to vaccinate infringes the right of innocents not to be exposed to undue risk of harm. She argues that not getting vaccinated is similar to firing a gun into the air to celebrate July 4^th. Both risk death or injury to innocents and do so for no good reason.

Flanigan further argues that the state may exclude those who are not vaccinated from public services (for example, public schools), restrict their employment, fine them, and make them liable for harm caused by their refusal to vaccinate themselves or their children. Her reasoning supports force or imprisonment, if necessary, as a way to make people get vaccinated.

Flanigan’s argument does not work. The balance of an activity’s costs and benefits determine whether it imposes an undue risk. This is an issue of economic efficiency. Our moral rights do not depend on economic efficiency. For example, it might be inefficient for people to drop out of high school, have children out of wedlock, or smoke, but they still have a right to do these things. Similarly, parents of immunosuppressed children have no right that children with colds or other minor diseases refrain from going to school even if it is efficient that they so refrain.  

If a cost-benefit analysis is used to set the threshold for a right against harm or risk of harm, then the state may ban a number of contagious behaviors. Studies show that divorce and obesity are contagious. Both are bad for children. If Flanigan’s argument were to succeed and the risk of harm were great enough, the state may restrict the divorced and obese in ways that would prevent them from influencing their peers and harming children. Perhaps this might be done via restricting their presence at schools and jobs. Alternatively, this might be done by fines or imprisonment. The state has no moral right to restrict, fine, or force divorced and obese people to isolate themselves.   

Other academics argue that in economic terms, vaccination is highly efficient. That is, its benefits far outweigh its cost. They argue that economic efficiency is a good reason for coercion. They argue that efficiency justifies speed limits, blood-alcohol ceilings, and safety-belt and motorcycle-helmet requirements. On this theory, the state’s way of regulating behavior - incentives, fines, imprisonment, or force - is also a matter of efficiency. Like Flanigan’s argument, this argument allows the state to do absurd things. Even if the military draft were efficient, this is not a good enough reason to enslave young men in order to make them fight our wars.

NYU’s Arthur Caplan argues that children have the right to the best available medical care, and this includes vaccines. If the parents will not voluntarily vaccinate them, the government should make them do so. In a legal parallel, a 2017 study found that in seven out of nine cases, courts found that parents who refused to vaccinate their children committed medical neglect. Apparently, similar reasoning does not apply to education and health neglect. For example, the law permits Amish children to leave school before entering high school. It does not fine or otherwise punish parents whose children are functionally illiterate, morbidly obese, or pregnant. 

In any case, the latest estimates indicate that the fatality rate for the Covid virus is surprisingly low (0.26%). This rests on Centers for Disease Control’s current best estimate of a 0.4% fatality rate for those who are infected and symptomatic with 35% of those infected being asymptomatic. Given this low rate, the empirical case for coerced vaccination weakens considerably, regardless of whether moral argument succeeds.