Pun Salad

■ It's time to start looking for (or imagining) Proverbial advice for the upcoming new year. So let's check out Proverbs 17:19:

¹⁹ Whoever loves a quarrel loves sin;
    whoever builds a high gate invites destruction.

… so that would be a "no". Good all-weather advice for Donald Trump though.

Oh, wait. Do I love a quarrel? Probably more than I should. Mea Culpa, Proverbialist!

■ @kevinNR looks at discrimination laws, an upcoming Supreme Court decision, and makes the call: Masterpiece Cakeshop: The Slope Is, in Fact, Slippery. It's a good history of how Government at all levels has slipped its regulatory tentacles into our privates the private sphere.

It is not the case that discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. Telling a black man that he may not work in your bank because he is black is in reality a very different thing from telling a gay couple that you’d be happy to sell them cupcakes or cookies or pecan pies but you do not bake cakes for same-sex weddings — however much the principle of the thing may seem superficially similar. If the public sphere is infinite, then the private sphere does not exist, and neither does private life. Having a bakery with doors open to the public does not make your business, contra Justice Harlan, an agent of the state. A bakery is not the Commerce Department or the local public high school.

Sure, bakery customers may travel there on public roads. But tell me: Isn’t that EPA-regulated air you’re breathing?

The "Justice Harlan" reference is to an 1883 Supreme Court decision striking down the 1876 Civil Rights Act, Harlan dissenting.

■ Pun Salad fave Mitch Daniels writes in the WaPo: Avoiding GMOs isn’t just anti-science. It’s immoral.

Of the several claims of “anti-science” that clutter our national debates these days, none can be more flagrantly clear than the campaign against modern agricultural technology, most specifically the use of molecular techniques to create genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Here, there are no credibly conflicting studies, no arguments about the validity of computer models, no disruption of an ecosystem nor any adverse human health or even digestive problems, after 5 billion acres have been cultivated cumulatively and trillions of meals consumed.

And yet a concerted, deep-pockets campaign, as relentless as it is baseless, has persuaded a high percentage of Americans and Europeans to avoid GMO products, and to pay premium prices for “non-GMO” or “organic” foods that may in some cases be less safe and less nutritious. Thank goodness the toothpaste makers of the past weren’t cowed so easily; the tubes would have said “No fluoride inside!” and we’d all have many more cavities.

■ The link to Mitch's op-ed via Ron Bailey at Reason who recalls his proposed journal-essay debate with anti-GMO statistician Nassim Taleb. Bailey submitted his initial effort to the the journal, but…

After reading my essay Taleb withdrew from the debate and, for good measure, called me an "idiot."

Ouch. Well, you can read the essay, and Taleb's response, for yourself. For my part: I read a book by Taleb back in 2005. But I wasn't motivated to read anything else, and given what I judge to be dishonesty, bullying, and fundamental cowardice, I won't be reading anything by him in the future.

■ I nearly always restrict myself to quoting only a few paragraphs of linked articles, but I'm quoting the entirety of Greg Mankiw's Quick Quiz:

According to the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, before the recent change in the tax law, taxpayers earning more than $1 million a year were scheduled to pay 19.3 percent of all federal taxes in 2019. What impact does the new tax law have on this percentage?

(a) It falls to 17.8 percent.
(b) It falls to 18.7 percent.
(c) It stays the same.
(d) It rises to 19.8 percent.

Find the answer here

The answer may shock you! Or not.

■ Bryan Caplan deals with arguments that contain the phrase "Only the Rich":

The government gives an excludable good away for free: roads, parks, education, medicine, whatever.  Then some economist advocates privatization of one of these freebies.  Technocrats may offer some technical objections to privatization.  Normal people, however, will respond with a disgusted rhetorical question: "So only the rich should have roads/parks/education/medicine/whatever."

Caplan notes the honest counterargument involves details of costs, benefits, probability, and the like. Are such sober arguments effective against demagoguery? Not as often as we'd like.