Tag Archives: John Maynard Keynes

The Dubious 1917 Redemption of Karl Marx

27 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Marxism

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Karl Marx has long been celebrated by the Left as a great intellectual, but the truth is that his legacy was destined to be of little significance until his writings were lauded, decades later, by the Bolsheviks during their savage October 1917 revolution in Russia. Vladimir Lenin and his murderous cadre promoted Marx and brought his ideas into prominence as political theory. That’s the conclusion of a fascinating article by Phil Magness and Michael Makovi (M&M) appearing in the Journal of Political Economy. The title: “The Mainstreaming of Marx: Measuring the Effect of the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx’s Influence“.

The idea that the early Soviet state and other brutal regimes in its mold were the main progenitors of Marxism is horrifying to its adherents today. That’s the embarrassing historical reality, however. It’s not really clear that Marx himself would have endorsed those regimes, though I hesitate to cut him too much slack.

A lengthy summary of the M&M paper is given by the authors in “Das Karl Marx Problem”. The “problem”, as M&M describe it, is in reconciling 1) the nearly complete and well-justified rejection of Marx’s economic theories during his life and in the 34 years after his death, with 2) the esteem in which he’s held today by so many so-called intellectuals. A key piece of the puzzle, noted by the authors, is that praise for Marx comes mainly from outside the economics profession. The vast majority of economists today recognize that Marx’s labor theory of value is incoherent as an explanation of the value created in production and exchange.

The theoretical rigors might be lost on many outside the profession, but a moments reflection should be adequate for almost anyone to realize that value is contributed by both labor and non-labor inputs to production. Of course, it might have dawned on communists over the years that mass graves can be dug more “efficiently” by combining labor with physical capital. On the other hand, you can bet they never paid market prices for any of the inputs to that grisly enterprise.

Marx never thought in terms of decisions made at the margin, the hallmark of the rational economic actor. That shortcoming in his framework led to mistaken conclusions. Second, and again, this should be obvious, prices of goods must incorporate (and reward) the value contributed by all inputs to production. That value ultimately depends on the judgement of buyers, but Marx’s theory left him unable to square the circle on all this. And not for lack of trying! It was a failed exercise, and M&M provide several pieces of testimony to that effect. Here’s one example:

“By the time Lenin came along in 1917, Marx’s economic theories were already considered outdated and impractical. No less a source than John Maynard Keynes would deem Marx’s Capital ‘an obsolete economic textbook . . . without interest or application for the modern world’ in a 1925 essay.”

Marxism, with its notion of a “workers’ paradise”, gets credit from intellectuals as a highly utopian form of socialism. In reality, it’s implementation usually takes the form of communism. The claim that Marxism is “scientific” socialism (despite the faulty science underlying Marx’s theories) is even more dangerous, because it offers a further rationale for authoritarian rule. A realistic transition to any sort of Marxist state necessarily involves massive expropriations of property and liberty. Violent resistance should be expected, but watch the carnage when the revolutionaries gain the upper hand.

What M&M demonstrate empirically is how lightly Marx was cited or mentioned in printed material up until 1917, both in English and German. Using Google’s Ngram tool, they follow a group of thinkers whose Ngram patterns were similar to Marx’s up to 1917. They use those records to construct an expected trajectory for Marx for 1917 forward and find an aberrant jump for Marx at that time, again both in English and in German material. But Ngram excludes newspaper mentions, so they also construct a database from Newspapers.com and their findings are the same: newspaper references to Marx spiked after 1917. There was nothing much different when the sample was confined to socialist writers, though M&M acknowledge that there were a couple of times prior to 1917 during which short-lived jumps in Marx citations occurred among socialists.

To be clear, however, Marx wasn’t unknown to economists during the 3+ decades following his death. His name was mentioned here and there in the writings of prominent economists of the day — just not in especially glowing terms.

“… absent the events of 1917, Marx would have continued to be an object of niche scholarly inquiry and radical labor activism. He likely would have continued to compete for attention in those same radical circles as the main thinker of one of its many factions. After the Soviet boost to Marx, he effectively crowded the other claimants out of [the] socialist-world.”

Magness has acknowledged that he and Makovi aren’t the first to have noticed the boost given to Marx by the Bolsheviks. Here, Magness quotes Eric Hobsbawm’s take on the subject:

“This situation changed after the October Revolution – at all events, in the Communist Parties. … Following Lenin, all leaders were now supposed to be important theorists, since all political decisions were justified on grounds of Marxist analysis – or, more probably, by reference to textual authority of the ‘classics’: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and, in due course, Stalin. The publication and popular distribution of Marx’s and Engels’s texts therefore become far more central to the movement than they had been in the days of the Second International [1889 – 1914].”

Much to the chagrin of our latter day Marxists and socialists, it was the advent of the monstrous Soviet regime that led to Marx’s “mainstream” ascendency. Other brutal regimes arising later reinforced Marx’s stature. The tyrants listed by M&M include Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot, and they might have added several short-lived authoritarian regimes in Africa as well. Today’s Marxists continue to assure us that those cases are not representative of a Marxist state.

Perhaps it’s fair to say that Marx’s name was co-opted by thugs, but I posit something a little more consistent with the facts: it’s difficult to expropriate the “means of production” without a fight. Success requires massive takings of liberty and property. This is facilitated by means of a “class struggle” between social or economic strata, or it might reflect divisions based on other differences. Either way, groups are pitted against one another. As a consequence, we witness an “othering” of opponents on one basis or another. Marxists, no matter how “pure of heart”, find it impossible to take power without demanding ideological purity. Invariably, this requires “reeducation”, cleansing, and ultimately extermination of opponents.

Karl Marx had unsound ideas about how economic value manifests and where it should flow, and he used those ideas to describe what he thought was a more just form of social organization. The shortcomings of his theory were recognized within the economics profession of the day, and his writings might have lived on in relative obscurity were it not for the Bolshevik’s intellectual pretensions. Surely obscurity would have been better than a legacy shaped by butchers.

Inflation: The Leftist “Tax the Poor” Policy

23 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by in Deficits, Inflation, Redistribution

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Recent years have seen explosive growth in federal deficits along with growth rates in the money supply that would have made John Maynard Keynes blush. It’s no coincidence that a new school of thought has developed among certain “monetary economists”. But as someone trained in monetary economics, I wish I could make those quote marks larger. This new school of thought is known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and it asserts that the money spigot is a perfectly legitimate means of financing government spending and, furthermore, that it is not necessarily inflationary. Here is how Scott Sumner and Patrick Horan describe MMT:

“A central idea of MMT is that a government that issues its own fiat currency can pay its bills in that same currency. These governments need not worry about budget deficits when contemplating additional spending. Thus because the US government has a monopoly on money creation, our federal government does not need to raise all its revenue through tax or bond finance. A government with its own currency cannot go bankrupt because it can always issue more currency to cover any budget deficit. … MMT advocates argue that this why the US government can afford expensive programs such as a jobs guarantee and universal healthcare.”

Spend and Print

Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “social infrastructure” package would be just a start, but that’s likely to be more like $5.5T once the budget gimmicks are stripped out. We can be somewhat hopeful, because that initiative looks increasingly likely to fail in Congress, at least this time around. But the tax side of that bill was already $2.6T short of the latter spending figure, and the tax provisions keep shrinking. Now, it’s looking more like a shortfall of $3.5T would require financing. Moderate Democrats may not support this crazy bill in the end, but Dems from deep blue states want to reinstate state and local tax deductibility, which would cut the tax component still more. Well who cares? Print the money, say the brave MMT advocates.

Sumner gets to the heart of the problem in this piece. Progressives, with false assurance from MMT, want loose monetary policy to make their expansive programs “affordable”. As he explains, if this happens while the economy is near its production potential, inflation is a sure thing. These lessons were learned long ago, but have been conveniently forgotten by the political class (or they simply prefer to ignore them), instead jumping onto the MMT bandwagon.

Inflation Is Taxation

No conscientious observer of government finance should ever forget that inflation is a form of taxation. Assets whose values are either fixed or subject to some inertia are devalued by inflation in terms of purchasing power, or in real terms, as economists put it. Strictly speaking, this is true when inflation is unexpected… if it is expected, then lenders and borrowers can negotiate terms that will compensate for these changes in real value. But when inflation is unexpected, the losses to lenders are offset by gains to borrowers. Of course the federal government is a gigantic borrower, so inflation can represent a confiscation of wealth from the public.

It’s not small potatoes. Currently, about $22T of U.S. Treasury debt is held by the public, and its average maturity is more than 5 years. If the Federal Reserve engineers an unexpected 1% jump in the rate of inflation, it shaves over $1T off the real value of that debt before it’s repaid, and it reduces the real interest cost of that debt as well. Of course, the holders of that debt will suffer an immediate loss if they are forced to sell prior to maturity for any reason, since new buyers will be demanding higher yields to compensate for higher inflation if it is expected to persist.

The Poor Losers

Inflation causes redistributions to take place, especially when it is unexpected inflation. We’ve already discussed lenders and borrowers, but similar considerations apply to anyone entering into fixed price contracts for goods or labor. Here’s what Claudio Bario of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) has to say about these shifts:

“Inflation shifts income and wealth away from those who are least aware of it, or least able to protect against it. These segments of the population often coincide with lower-income groups, which explains why inflation has often been portrayed as a most regressive form of tax. The ‘inflation tax’ takes its toll through the erosion of the value of financial assets and contracts fixed in nominal terms.”

Inflation is a regressive tax! In this respect, economist Noah Smith echos Bario in a recent op-ed in which he discusses “money illusion”, or the confusion of real and nominal income:

“Workers … who are slow to perceive the rise in prices they pay for goods like cars and groceries, won’t realize this, and will be happy with their unusually large raises. But companies, whose accountants and managers certainly know the true inflation rate, will also be happy, because they know they’re not actually paying more for labor.

That information asymmetry between workers and employers may be exactly what keeps wages from rising faster than inflation. If workers take a year to realize how much prices have gone up, they may be satisfied with the raises they got during the time of high inflation — even if that inflation ultimately turns out to be transitory. By then, it might be too late to negotiate for a real, inflation-adjusted raise.”

Inflation taxes and redistributions become more acute at higher rates of inflation, but any unexpected escalation in the rate of inflation will take a toll on the poor. Bario elaborates on the mechanisms by which inflation inflicts budgetary pain on the those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

“As regards wealth distribution, the financial assets that are most vulnerable to inflation are cash and bank accounts – the typical savings vehicles held by the poorest segments of the population. This is mostly because the poorest have access only to limited investment options to protect their savings. …

… wages and pensions – the main sources of income for a large majority of households and even more so for the poorest half of the population – are typically fixed in nominal terms and hence vulnerable to inflation. Indexation mechanisms, such as those adopted in many [advanced economies] in the 1970s, are no panacea: they may fail to keep pace as inflation accelerates; …”

In addition to the inflationary gains reaped by government, it’s clear that inflation gives rise to redistributions between private parties: generally from those with lower incomes and wealth to their employers, producers, financial institutions, and pension payers (businesses, state and local governments). An exception is some low income debtors might benefit if they owe long term obligations at fixed interest rates, but low income individuals are often constrained from obtaining this form of credit.

Causing, Then Exploiting, Inequality

Another especially galling aspect of the Left’s focus on money finance is how its consequences fly in the face of their concerns about income and wealth inequality. Inflation is typically manifested in rising equity prices: nominal stock values tend to escalate in an inflationary environment, protecting their owners from losses to the real value of their investments. Stocks are generally a good inflation hedge. Yet we know that stocks are disproportionately owned by those in the highest strata of the income and wealth distributions. Later, of course, the Left will seek to level the burgeoning inequality wrought by their own policies by “taxing the rich”! Apparently, for the Left, consistency is never considered a virtue. This is not unlike another trick, which is to blame “greedy corporations” for the inflation wrought by Leftist policies.

It’s a great irony that the Left, which purports to support the poor and working people, would propose a form of government finance that is so regressive in its effects. To be generous, perhaps it’s just another case of “progressives” unknowingly hurting the ones they love. The expansive programs they advocate will confer government benefits to many individuals in higher income brackets, not just the poor, but those government alms will help to compensate for higher inflation. But this too takes advantage of money illusion, because those benefits might well buy progressives the loyalty of beneficiaries unable to recognize the ongoing erosion in their standard of living, and who are unwilling to come to grips with their increasing dependency.

But Tut, Tut, They Say

Advocates of MMT, in combination with expansive government, also have a tendency to deny that inflation has ever been a consequence of such policies. As Sumner points out, they have forgotten historical episodes that run contrary to the theory, and most “popular” advocates of MMT fail to recognize the important role played by limits on the economy’s production potential. When money growth outruns the economy’s ability to produce real goods and services, the prices of goods will rise.

Enduring A Dead-Weight Dominion

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Big Government, Macroeconomics

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government-intervention

If you hope for government to solve economic problems, try to maintain some perspective: the state has unique abilities to botch it, and its power to distort and degrade the economy in the process of “helping” is vast. Government spending at all levels copped about 18% of the U.S.  economy’s final output in 2014, but the public sector’s impact is far more pervasive than that suggests. Private fixed investment in new structures and equipment accounted for only about 16% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP); the nonresidential portion of fixed investment was less than 13% of GDP. I highlight these two components of GDP because no one doubts the importance of capital investment as a determinant of the economy’s productive capacity. But government is a larger share of spending, it can divert saving away from investment, and it creates a host of other impediments to productivity and efficient resource allocation.

The private economy is remarkable in its capacity to satisfy human wants. The market is a manifestation of spontaneous order, lacking the conscious design of any supreme authority. It is able to adjust to dynamic shifts in desires and resource constraints; it provides reliable feedback in the form of changing prices to modulate and guide the responses of participants through all stages of production. Most forms of government activity, however, are not guided by these signals. Instead, the state imposes binding and sometimes immediate constraints on the decisions of market participants. The interference takes a number of forms, including price controls, but they all have the power to damage the performance and outcomes of markets.

The productive base at each stage of the market process is a consequence of the interplay of perceived business opportunities and acts of saving or deferred consumption. The available flow of saving depends on its rewards, which are heavily influenced by taxes and government intervention in financial markets. It’s worth noting here that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world, as well as double taxation of corporate income paid out to owners. In addition, the tax system is used as a tool to manipulate the allocation of resources, drawing them into uses that are politically favored and punishing those in disfavor. The damaging impact is compounded by the fact that changes in taxes are often unknown ex ante. This adds a degree of political risk to any investment decision, thus discouraging capital spending and growth in the economy’s productive base.

The government is also a massive and growing regulator of economic activity. Over 100,000 new regulatory restrictions were added to the Code of Federal Regulations between 2008 and 2012. Regulation can have prohibitive compliance costs and may forbid certain efficiencies, often based on flimsy or nonexistent cost/benefit comparisons. It therefore damages the value and returns on embedded capital and discourages new investment. It is usually uneven in its effects across industries and it typically reduces the level of competition in markets because small firms are less capable of surviving the costs it imposes. Innovation is stifled and prices are higher as a result.

From a philosophical perspective, even the best cost/benefit comparisons are suspect as tools for evaluating government intervention. Don Boudreaux quotes Anthony de Jasay’s The State on this point:

“What could be more innocuous, more unexceptional than to refrain from intervening unless the cost-benefit comparison is favourable? Yet it treats the balancing of benefits and costs, good and bad consequences, as if the logical status of such balancing were a settled matter, as if it were technically perhaps demanding but philosophically straightforward. Costs and benefits, however, stretch into the future (problems of predictability) and benefits do not normally or exclusively accrue to the same persons who bear the costs (problems of externality). … Treating it as a pragmatic question of factual analysis, one of information and measurement, is tacitly taking the prior and much larger questions as having been somehow, somewhere resolved. Only they have not been.“

Poorly-executed and inappropriate stabilization policy is another way in which government distorts decisions at all stages of production. There are many reasons why these policies tend to be ineffective and potentially destructive, especially in the long run. Keynesian economics, based on ideas articulated by John Maynard Keynes, offers prescriptions for government action during times of instability. That means “expansionary” policy when the economy is weak and “contractionary” policy when it is strong.  At least that is the intent. This framework relies on the notion that components of aggregate demand determine the economy’s output, prices and employment.

The major components of GDP in the National Income and Product Accounts are consumer spending, private investment, government spending, and net foreign spending. In a Keynesian world, these are treated as four distinct parts of aggregate “demand”, and each is governed by particular kinds of assumed behavior. Supply effects are treated with little rigor, if at all, and earlier stages of production are considered only to the extent that their value added is included, and that the finished value of  investment (including new inventories) is one of the components of aggregate demand.

Final spending on goods and services (GDP) may be convenient because it corresponds to GDP, but that is simply an accounting identity. In fact, GDP represents less than 45% of all transactions. (See the end note below.) In other words, intermediate transactions for raw materials, business-to-business (B2B) exchange of services and goods in a partly fabricated state, and payments for distributional services are not counted, but they exceed GDP. They are also more variable than GDP over the course of the business cycle. Income is generated and value is added at each stage of production, not only in final transactions. To say that “value-added” is counted across all stages is a restatement of the accounting identity. It does not mean that those stages are treated behaviorally. Technology, capital, employees, and complex decision-making are required at each stage to meet demands in competitive markets. Aggregation at the final goods level glosses over all this detail.

The focus of the media and government policymakers in a weak economy is usually on “underconsumption”. The claim is often heard that consumer spending represents “over two-thirds of the economy”, but it is only about one-third of total transactions at all levels. It is therefore not as powerful an engine as many analysts assert. Government efforts to stimulate consumption are often thwarted by consumers themselves, who behave in ways that are difficult for models to capture accurately.

Government spending to combat weakness is another typical prescription, but such efforts are usually ill-timed and are difficult to reverse as the economy regains strength. The value of most government “output” is not tested in markets and it is not subject to competitive pressure, so as the government absorbs additional resources, the ability of the economy to grow is compromised. Programmatic ratcheting is always a risk when transfer payments are expanded. (Fixed programs that act as “automatic stabilizers”, and that are fiscally neutral over the business cycle, are less objectionable on these grounds, but only to the extent that they are not manipulated by politicians or subject to fraud.) Furthermore, any measure that adds to government deficits creates competition for the savings available for private capital investment. Thus, deficits can reduce the private economy’s productive capacity.

Government investment in infrastructure is a common refrain, but infrastructure spending should be tied to actual needs, not to the business cycle. Using public infrastructure spending for stabilization policy creates severe problems of timing. Few projects are ever “shovel-ready”, and rushing into them is a prescription for poor management, cost overruns and low quality.

Historically, economic instability has often been a consequence of poorly-timed monetary policy actions. Excessive money growth engineered by the Federal Reserve has stimulated excessive booms and inflation in the prices of goods and assets. These boom episodes were followed by market busts and recessions when the Fed attempted to course-correct by restraining money growth. Booms tend to foster misjudgments about risk that end in over-investment in certain assets. This is especially true when government encourages risk-taking via implicit “guarantees” (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and “too-big-to-fail” promises, or among individuals who can least afford it, such as low-income homebuyers.

Given a boom-and-bust cycle inflicted by monetary mismanagement, attempts to stimulate demand are usually the wrong prescription for a weak economy. Unemployed resources during recessions are a direct consequence of the earlier malinvestment. It is better to let asset prices and wages adjust to bring them into line with reality, while assisting those who must transition to new employment. The best prescription for instability is a neutral stance toward market risks combined with stable policy, not more badly-timed countercyclical efforts. The best prescription for economic growth is to shrink government’s absorption of resources, restoring their availability to those with incentives to use them optimally.

The more that central authorities attempt to guide the economy, the worse it gets. The torpid recovery from the last recession, despite great efforts at stimulus, demonstrates the futility of demand-side stabilization policy. The sluggishness of the current expansion also bears witness to the counterproductive nature of government activism. It’s a great credit to the private market that it is so resilient in the face of long-standing government economic and regulatory mismanagement. A bureaucracy employing a large cadre of technocrats is a “luxury” that only a productive, dynamic economy can afford. Or can it?

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A Note On Output Measures

More complete aggregations of economic activity than GDP are gross output (GO) and gross domestic expenditures (GDE). These were developed in detail by economist Mark Skousen in his book “The Structure of Production“, published in 1990. GO includes all final transactions plus business-to-business (B2B) transactions, while GDE adds the costs of wholesale and retail distribution to GO. Or as Skousen says in this paper:

“GDE is defined as the value of all transactions (sales) in the production of new goods and services, both finished and unfinished, at all stages of production inside a country during a calendar year.“

GO and GDE show the dominance of business transactions in economic activity. GDE is more than twice as large as GDP, and B2B transactions plus business investment are twice the size of consumer spending. According to Skousen, GDE varies with the business cycle much more than GDP. Many economic indicators focus on statistics at earlier stages of production, yet real final spending is often assumed to be the only measure of transactions that matters.

 

Would Heterosexuals Select For Gay Genes?

26 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by in Biotechnology, Progressivism

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Selection-conundrum-cartoon

Economic and social planning by the state can mean many things, but a planned society is always held in some form as a progressive goal. This is at the very heart of  “statism”. As Hayek noted, the fascination with planning is rooted in a belief that conscious, central direction is necessary in order for society to advance. This stands in stark contrast to the abysmal failure and monstrous cruelty of social planning historically, and the unmatched success of markets and a free, spontaneous social order at improving human welfare.

The faith in central direction has always been conjoined with a belief in the ability of scientific methods to address social issues. This line of thinking is flawed in many respects, but 80 to 100 years ago, an extremely perverse manifestation of this statist philosophy was a fascination with eugenics, or the intentional selection and rejection of various traits in offspring at the state’s direction. Sterilization of the “unfit”, and selective breeding of the most fit, were weirdly popular notions among progressives in that era. In 2012, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian called eugenics “the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left’s closet”.

“Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that ‘the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man’, even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a ‘lethal chamber’. …

According to Dennis Sewell, whose book The Political Gene charts the impact of Darwinian ideas on politics, the eugenics movement’s definition of ‘unfit’ was not limited to the physically or mentally impaired. It held, he writes, ‘that most of the behavioural traits that led to poverty were inherited. In short, that the poor were genetically inferior to the educated middle class.’ It was not poverty that had to be reduced or even eliminated: it was the poor.

Hence the enthusiasm of John Maynard Keynes, director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, for contraception, essential because the working class was too ‘drunken and ignorant’ to keep its numbers down.“

This post on the historical allure of eugenics to progressives is also informative. Of course, the National Socialists in Germany took the idea and ran with it, which ultimately led to a rejection of eugenics in the West. Yet the idea lives on today through various mechanisms, such as sex-selective abortion and screening for certain genetic disorders. Of course there is a widespread insistence on abortion as a “woman’s right” on the progressive left, but certain questions are seldom asked. For example, does that include women who wish not to bear children with disorders such as Down’s Syndrome? There is less unanimity on that issue.

Bruce Carroll, aka, The Gay Patriot, asks a different question: “What Happens When Science Allows Us to Abort A Baby If It Has the ‘Gay Gene’?” The mapping of the human genome has advanced to the point that it might be possible to identify the precise genetics determining certain social and personality characteristics. There is some research suggesting that regions on two different chromosomes might allow geneticists to home-in on the identification of specific “gay genes”.

The first question this raises is whether a woman (or a couple) has the right to know everything predicted about a child from its pre-natal genetic testing. I assume that all test results are private. Should the information about sexual-preference genes be off-limits to a parent? Information about gender is not off-limits, and you can be certain that even in the U.S., an occasional woman or couple decides to terminate a pregnancy for reasons of gender, whatever the motive. If the sexual preference genes are off-limits, then the inescapable conclusion is that sexual preference is “protected” in the womb by society, but gender and a whole range of disabilities are not protected. Really? Carroll takes a dim view of the LGBT politics on this matter:

“I wonder if gay activists realize that their slobbering devotion to pro-abortion political organizations, and the multi-million dollar abortion industry itself, may ultimately lead to the destruction of LGBT babies before they are born within my lifetime. It truly is Sophie’s Choice for the progressive gay activists; thus far, they wave off the question with derision.“

The question can be put in less drastic terms, if genetic selection can really ever be less drastic. Technologies to create “designer babies” through genetic selection are already here. That implies both positive selection and deselection of various traits. Obviously, this is not a simple subject from a either a scientific or ethical standpoint, but to zero in on our hypothetical question, I assume for now, for the sake of argument, that parents are legally empowered “to give their children the best start possible“. That would be the “best start” in the parents’ opinion, not the state’s! One wonders how the LGBT community, and the Left in general, would react to a service allowing couples, or a mother, to select for heterosexual genes in their “designer offspring”, consequently selecting against gay genes. Should such options be “off the table” as a matter of public policy? But again, if so, then what about gender? What about disabilities?

Involving the state in these decisions will lead to either bizarre contradictions or restrictions on autonomy that both Left and Right might find unacceptable.