Free trade then and now, or still Manchester United

Liberal thinkers from the Enlightenment era onwards supported international free trade, on grounds that it promoted prosperity, peace, and mutual knowledge and tolerance among peoples. The argument was powerful and not merely theoretical. The Italian trading cities, the Dutch Golden Age, England in the free trade era, all were conspicuous for prosperity and tolerance in their time. Similarly, the US Constitution created a nationwide free-trading common market as the foundation for American economic success, and for American political and social solidarity as well. The association of free trade with greater prosperity has surely been demonstrated across the globe and through time: it is difficult or impossible to think of counter-examples. There has always been, however, a “complex critique” of free markets – and hence of free trade – “that has united traditionalist and revolutionary opponents of capitalism”. The neo-feudalist and radical critiques are often joined by economic interests who stand to lose from free trade, typically by losing their monopoly or semi-monopoly position. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the argument for free trade often carried the day: intellectually if not always practically. The question is whether the nineteenth and twentieth century case for international free trade has lost some or all of its force; or even if it hasn’t, whether other considerations, such as claims for “social justice”, now outweigh it. It is difficult to see how support for free trade based on its promoting overall prosperity has lost any of its force. Countries with freer trade are generally more prosperous than states with more restrictive trade policies. Moreover freer-trading societies tend to be more tolerant – religiously, intellectually, and in other ways – than economically more closed societies. Trade creates a practical incentive for travel, for acquiring knowledge about unfamiliar people and places, and for fostering relationships – at a minimum, actual or potential trading relationships – regardless of human differences. Today’s opposition to free trade is often couched, not as outright opposition to commerce, but as a call for more regulation: of wages, hours, and conditions for foreign workers or in behalf of environmental concerns. Two considerations, however, raise warnings about ambitious regulation of world trade, especially in the interests of social justice, even by comparison to regulation of domestic markets. The first, in the spirit of Hayek, is the problem of knowledge. Difficult as it may be for any one authority to know how best to allocate resources within a single country or society, it is all the more difficult to know what rules or even what principles would be best in many different countries and societies around the world. The second cause for wariness is that barriers in the name of international social justice are not open to democratic correction in the way that domestic over-regulation might be. When domestic markets are subjected to regulation, the losers as well as the winners are (usually) voters. But if regulations of foreign working conditions actually damage the interests of foreign workers, or if environmentalist restrictions turn out to bring on environmental damage or disproportionate cost to poor farmers, those workers and farmers have no effective way of objecting, and often the global law-givers will never learn of unintended consequences in far-off lands. This lack of democratic answerability promotes deception, or self-deception, about the nature of the restrictions. A trade barrier can be put forward in the name of social justice for foreign workers or peasants, but the real effect (and often the real motive) is to insulate a domestic industry or interest against foreign competition. The foreign workers or peasants who lose out on opportunity and a chance for better lives are in no position to make their objections known. Support for free trade does not preclude reasonable regulation: surely against force and fraud, perhaps for other social interests as well. But knowledge costs, and diminished democratic checks, make international trade especially vulnerable to stifling over-regulation, whether in behalf of special interests or in pursuit of ethical illusions. The insights of Enlightenment thinkers – on the symbiosis of free trade with prosperity, tolerance, and peace; and against the seductions of protectionism and autarky – still have great force, in our own day as in theirs

Do religious exemptions save?

Religious Americans, and many people sympathetic to them, have supported “special accommodations” or exemptions from otherwise applicable laws – unless there is a “compelling state interest” in not offering an exemption – when complying with these laws would violate religious obligation or belief. When the US Supreme Court held that the First Amendment does not usually require such exemptions, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993 by unanimous vote in the House (better than the Declaration of War after Pearl Harbor) and by almost unanimous vote in the Senate, and many state legislatures have done likewise. RFRA laws aroused little public or academic controversy until after 2012, when claims for exemption were invoked in behalf of conservative Christians. But support for religious exemptions now seems to be breaking down along ideological-political lines, as in the Hobby Lobby dispute over whether a private company should have to provide for contraceptive and arguably abortive drugs in violation of the employer’s religious beliefs. This article argues that there are important drawbacks to “special accommodation”, even from the point of view of religious Americans. First, while occasional exemptions for religious people could be accommodated fairly easily in past eras of comparatively modest government, any pleas for exemption will seem more of a threat, and will be resisted more vigorously, when government tries to regulate ever more, and ever more intimate, aspects of life. Second, perhaps more subtly, by offering exemptions to any and all religions, government may encourage the balkanization of religious life and a proliferation of sects and cults, with negative implications for both the religious and the public life of the country. Third, the idea of seeking special accommodations or exemptions – which often, and perhaps increasingly, might not be available anyhow – is apt to divert religious people from putting their political energy into modifying or defeating unjust or overreaching regulatory proposals altogether, rather than merely seeking special exemptions from them. Seeking frequent exemptions and accommodations puts religious people in the invidious position of demanding special privileges. This is never an appealing, or perhaps even a viable, demand: least of all in an egalitarian society, where a core idea is rejection of special privilege. It is not sustainable anyway, beyond a limited number of exemptions, for a limited number of religious bodies, in a modestly regulated society. In an ever-more-minutely regimented society, you cannot keep demanding exemptions; and they will not be granted. It is a well-known military axiom that armies in retreat are at their most vulnerable. Religious Americans need not retreat from robust political action, merely to plead for special indulgence. It will not avail them, or not for long, if they do

Action at a distance as a full-value solution of Maxwell equations: basis and application of separated potential's method

The inadequacy of Li\'{e}nard-Wiechert potentials is demonstrated as one of the examples related to the inconsistency of the conventional classical electrodynamics. The insufficiency of the Faraday-Maxwell concept to describe the whole electromagnetic phenomena and the incompleteness of a set of solutions of Maxwell equations are discussed and mathematically proved. Reasons of the introduction of the so-called ``electrodynamics dualism concept" (simultaneous coexistence of instantaneous Newton long-range and Faraday-Maxwell short-range interactions) have been displayed. It is strictly shown that the new concept presents itself as the direct consequence of the complete set of Maxwell equations and makes it possible to consider classical electrodynamics as a self-consistent and complete theory, devoid of inward contradictions. In the framework of the new approach, all main concepts of classical electrodynamics are reconsidered. In particular, a limited class of motion is revealed when accelerated charges do not radiate electromagnetic field.Comment: ReVTeX file, 24pp. Small corrections which do not have influence results of the paper. Journal reference is adde

Calibrating the Mixing Length Parameter for a Red Giant Envelope

Two-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations were made to calibrate the mixing length parameter for modeling red giant's convective envelope. As was briefly reported in Asida & Tuchman (97), a comparison of simulations starting with models integrated with different values of the mixing length parameter, has been made. In this paper more results are presented, including tests of the spatial resolution and Large Eddy Simulation terms used by the numerical code. The consistent value of the mixing length parameter was found to be 1.4, for a red giant of mass 1.2 solar-mass, core mass of 0.96 solar-mass, luminosity of 200 solar-luminosities, and metallicity Z=0.001.Comment: 18 pages, 1 table, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap.

Physical Acceptability of Isolated, Static, Spherically Symmetric, Perfect Fluid Solutions of Einstein's Equations

We ask the following question: Of the exact solutions to Einstein's equations extant in the literature, how many could represent the field associated with an isolated static spherically symmetric perfect fluid source? The candidate solutions were subjected to the following elementary tests: i) isotropy of the pressure, ii) regularity at the origin, iii) positive definiteness of the energy density and pressure at the origin, iv) vanishing of the pressure at some finite radius, v) monotonic decrease of the energy density and pressure with increasing radius, and vi) subluminal sound speed. A total of 127 candidate solutions were found. Only 16 of these passed all the tests. Of these 16, only 9 have a sound speed which monotonically decreases with radius. The analysis was facilitated by use of the computer algebra system GRTensorII.Comment: 25 pages. To appear in Computer Physics Communications Thematic Issue on "Computer Algebra in Physics Research

Acoustic Correlates of Information Structure.

This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing three questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark information structure prosodically, and, to the extent they do; (2) what are the acoustic features associated with different aspects of information structure; and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this information from the signal? The information structure of subject-verb-object sentences was manipulated via the questions preceding those sentences: elements in the target sentences were either focused (i.e., the answer to a wh-question) or given (i.e., mentioned in prior discourse); furthermore, focused elements had either an implicit or an explicit contrast set in the discourse; finally, either only the object was focused (narrow object focus) or the entire event was focused (wide focus). The results across all three experiments demonstrated that people reliably mark (1) focus location (subject, verb, or object) using greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0, and (2) focus breadth, such that narrow object focus is marked with greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0 on the object than wide focus. Furthermore, when participants are made aware of prosodic ambiguity present across different information structures, they reliably mark focus type, so that contrastively focused elements are produced with greater intensity, longer duration, and lower mean and maximum F0 than noncontrastively focused elements. In addition to having important theoretical consequences for accounts of semantics and prosody, these experiments demonstrate that linear residualisation successfully removes individual differences in people's productions thereby revealing cross-speaker generalisations. Furthermore, discriminant modelling allows us to objectively determine the acoustic features that underlie meaning differences

What We Can Learn About Nucleon Spin Structure From Recent Data

We have used recent polarized deep-inelastic scattering data from CERN and SLAC to extract information about nucleon spin structure. We find that the SMC proton data, the E142 neutron data and the deuteron data from SMC and E143 give different results for fractions of the spin carried by each of the constituents. These appear to lead to two different and incompatible models for the polarized strange sea. The polarized gluon distribution occuring in the gluon anomaly does not have to be large in order to be consistent with either set of experimental data. However, it appears that the discrepancies in the implications of these data cannot be resolved with any simple theoretical arguments. We conclude that more experiments must be performed in order to adequately determine the fraction of spin carried by each of the nucleon constituents.Comment: 23 page

A unified semantics for the Japanese Q-particle `ka' in indefinites, questions and disjunctions

This paper provides a compositional semantics for the Japanese Q-particle 'ka 'that properly accounts for its use in questions, indefinites and disjunctions in a unified fashion. Adopting the two-tier alternative semantics (Rooth 1985; Beck 2006), I will propose that the role of the 'ka'-particle is 'always 'to project a set of alternatives introduced by the 'wh'-item in the alternative-semantic dimension to the ordinary-semantic dimension (Kotek 2014). Unlike in previous analyses, I will adopt this semantics for the Q-particle not only for its clause-'final 'use, but also for clause-'internal 'use. Combining this with the cross-categorial existential closure, the analysis accounts for how the interpretation of a 'ka'-ending phrase is conditioned by its syntactic environments. This mechanism enables an account of the previously unexplained parallelism between 'wh'+'ka 'and 'ka'-disjunctions in their variability in interpretations

Stephen Schwarzschild Papers

Correspondence, religious notes, drafts of his The Story of a Failure, the Marquis de Morès, reprints of articles by Schwarzschild, and newspaper clippings