Is STL prolife ad racist?

Over at Angry Black Beeyotch there is outrage to spare over a putatively racist prolife ad in North City. The latest rant reads like one of those really bad spoken-word poems.

The ad in question declares that "The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the Womb," citing the figure that, though black folks make up 12% of the population, they account for 37% of Missouri's abortions.

In response, any number of fancy terms are deployed at ABB, including my personal favorite, "agency." "The only way this campaign works," she decalres, "is if people accept that black women are the most wretched of creatures." It is an attack on the very "humanity" of black women. (The humanity of black fetuses is entirely another matter and is, of course, not up for debate, since it would constitute ... racism?)

Of course, the terms as used mean nothing and everything. Argue that your "humanity" necessitates you have the prerogative to terminate another human life, and you may as well argue that your "humanity" necessitates you have the prerogative to own another human life. In effect, of course, to terminate another human life is to claim you own it.

Aren't the dusty remains of the slaveholders sorry they didn't have terms like "agency" and "humanity" to use in defense of the prerogatives they claimed over other human lives?

And I fear what it would do to black women's agency if anybody mentioned that Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood with the expressed goal (among others) of causing there to be fewer black people.

Science and Mr. Shriver

Adam Shriver discusses the earnings tax over at the 'Hub, and doubts whether its negative effect on cities has been adequately proven:

So if one wanted to honestly study such a phenomenon he or she might begin with some research before performing analysis. How many cities have earnings taxes in the U.S.? answer 14 states and the district of Columbia a list encompassing hundreds of cities. Has there ever been a documented scientific study that demonstrates that employers avoid such cities? In truth I do not know.

The Sun King visits the Academy of
Sciences--but where are the marginal
value model equations?

He doesn't specify what he means by "scientific study," but I suspect he has in mind something like this: an empirical study demonstrating a correlation between cities employers avoid and earnings taxes. In the physical sciences, where work is done by isolating variables and demonstrating causation, such an approach can be quite productive.

But human societies cannot be readily reduced to controlled laboratory conditions -- which is why the constant reminder about statistics is that correlation does not necessarily prove causation. Say Portland enacted an earnings tax and didn't see any avoidance on the part of employers. Hypothesis demolished, right? But hold on -- we don't know what else Portland is doing. Are its other taxes (or wages!) attractively low? Does it ply potential employers with tax breaks? Is it the only game in town for certain industries, which allows it to extract (in an essentially monopolistic way) its earnings tax?

Such messy variables are the reason Austrian economists, for example, reject statistical studies of correlation as a valid basis for economic inquiry. Instead, economics must seek to understand the commonsense principles all human action is based on (what Mises called "praxeology"), and then derive economic conclusions from those principles. Such commonsense principles intuitively include the idea that, if I can do the same business in Clayton I can do in the City of St. Louis, but have less of my earnings taken away from me, then, all other things being equal, that's where I'm going to go!

Now, we can call that analysis "scientific" in the sense that it's pretty obviously true, but my suspicions are that Mr. Shriver wants something with charts and graphs. There are excellent reasons to think, though, that human diversity is more obscured than clarified by attempting to reduce it to colored bars and pie sections.

Gems from Joel Salatin's Library

Author: Dabdiputs

A couple of years ago, my wife and I got a chance to see Joel Salatin speak at Webster University, and it was an inspiring experience for both of us. He gave a detailed presentation on how things worked on his farm, especially the synergistic ways he uses cows, chickens and pigs as a part of one well-integrated system. He sparked our curiosity, and played a big role in inspiring us to go on our WWOOFing adventures. He had first come to my attention, as I imagine he had to many, from Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Salatin is fascinatingly difficult to pigeonhole. He is one of the superstars of the organic/sustainable farming world, yet he is refreshingly free of any whiff of patchouli, free of the hollow twang of kumbaya around the campfire or any of the hippy-dippy trappings of many organic enthusiasts. When, after all, was the last time you heard about an organic farmer who graduated from Bob Jones University or refers to the Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression"?

Salatin prioritizes efficiency and (gasp!) profitability as much as any CEO, and evokes in his personality the charisma of the self-made entrepreneur like Franklin or Ford, rather than the long-haired commune-dwelling back-to-the-land radical.

One of the great resources on the Polyface Farms website is a list of recommended books, which I have been trying to work through here and there. Bill Mollison's Permaculture: a Designer's Manual, through quite difficult to obtain (used copies appear to be going for $100 minimum), is, as Salatin bills it, a "compendium" of design info for agriculture and even home design. Mollison is the father of permaculture, a philosophy of agriculture which is difficult to summarize -- except to say it emphasizes perennials and a judicious employment of livestock, not only as sources of product, but as fellow-workers in farming!

Permaculture presents an interesting challenge to modern farming -- not only conventional, but organic. A lot of the modern mega-CSAs, for instance (150+ shares) are as heavily reliant on annuals and tillage as conventional farmers, and sometimes even more so, since conventional no-till agriculture is in some ways more widely accepted than organic no-till. The long-term impact of even organic tillage on the soil, especially in intensive plantings, remains to be seen.

Salatin's model is, as you might guess, heavily influenced by permaculture. Since his main crop is grass to feed his cows (and, more indirectly, his chickens), he can rely on a perennial, no-till, no-seed crop which is cultivated and manured by the animals themselves (the "animals as co-workers" concept in action).

Gene Logsdon's The Contrary Farmer, a book I have not yet had the chance to read, is also present on the list. Though I haven't read it, I have read much of Logsdon's writing with pleasure, and his blog, also called The Contrary Farmer, is a must-read. His emphasis on small-scale farming for pleasure more than profit makes him a rich source of information on bygone traditions and old-fangled pleasures. His book Small-Scale Grain Raising is also still the definitive work on raising your own grains for food and animal forage.

Another book on Salatin's list that I picked up recently and was a little surprised I enjoyed so much is Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I have a healthy suspicion of books of the "self-help" genre, actually for reasons that Covey explains quite well. According to him, most recent self-help lit is based on the "personality" paradigm of success: success is caused by possessing the right techniques for greasing the social wheels, irrespective of personal character. Covey, on the other hand, is focused on the principles and especially habits (as the title implies) that make people successful (readers of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's seminal After Virtue may notice a certain similarity in thesis).

I'm still working through the book, so no final judgments yet, but so far it is living up to  Salatin's recommendation as the "the book which, next to the Bible, everybody ought to read." (In his article in ACRES USA on Family Friendly Farming.)

Another book from the recommended list I have read and would heartily commend as well is Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions. It is probably my single favorite cookbook; in fact, more than a cookbook, it would more appropriately be described as a complete gastronomic philosophy, one which often goes against the grain of conventional wisdom, but always deliciously so.

One which I haven't read, but am very curious about, is James Davidson's The Sovereign Individual. The description by Publishers' Weekly on Amazon sounds pretty mind-boggling:

The computer revolution, in the authors' dire scenario, will subvert and destroy the nation-state as globalized cybercommerce, lubricated by cybercurrency, drastically limits governments' powers to tax. They further predict that the next millennium will see an enormous decline in the influence of politicians, lobbyists, labor unions and regulated professions as new information technologies democratize talent and innovation and decentralize the workplace.

Something tells me that it doesn't seem so dire to the man who wrote a book titled Everything I Want to Do is Illegal!