EVEN IF I WEREN’T A (TEMPORARY) VEGAN, I’d think almond milk in my coffee was pretty delicious. It has about as many calories as 1% milk, it’s creamy–not like nasty soy or rice concoctions, which are good only for baking–and it tastes deliciously of almonds. A huge improvement over hyper-sweet syrups (and if you like it sweet, just add your own sugar or Splenda.) After Lent ends, this is one innovation I’ll keep.

I KNOW JUSTICE STEVENS WAS LESS FIXATED on the Supremacy Clause in Danforth v. Minnesota than was Chief Justice Roberts (who dissented). And, as I’ve said before, I think Justice Stevens got it right, but calling it “the Supremacy Clause in Article V” makes me feel a little sorry for it.

IN THE MAIL: Robert Bryce’s Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence. I agree that energy independence is a mirage, though energy security is a different question.

WHAT WOULD I DO WITHOUT HOWARD BASHMAN to keep me informed about the state of the law with respect to having sex with a dead deer in Wisconsin? I wrote about the case long ago — in a post called ” Is a burrito a sandwich? Is a dead animal an animal?” — and I promptly dumped it from memory. But Howard is always there, monitoring all things appellate.

KERRY HOWLEY has Fun With Singaporean National Archives:

I think the message here is that if you keep having children with empty, improbably round eye sockets, you should probably consider tubal ligation. On a more uplifting note, we really need more billboards reminding us that we’re just a few days removed from total annihilation.

Every time I hear someone refer to Singapore as quasi-Fascist, I kind of cringe and think “Do we really need to drop the F bomb here?” Then I see things like this, and I begin to think yes, yes we do . . .

LAST WEEK I argued that no one actually thinks their own taxes are too low. Laura at 11D says she’s willing to pay higher taxes:

Megan McArdle had a post up last week about whether or not people willingly pay taxes. (link when I’m not so tired). I’m willing to pay the higher taxes in New Jersey. I’m getting things for that money — better schools, a home that holds its value, access to better paying jobs, proximity to New York City, access to grandparents. Taxes aren’t always about money for other people; it’s also about services for you.

The first question is “higher than what?” New Jersey taxes are lower than those in New York City, which Laura moved out of. Higher than Alabama? Even if she weren’t particularly willing to pay them, she wouldn’t have much choice, because her husband’s job is tied to New York’s financial services industry. In that sense, I am willing to pay the higher taxes of the United States in order to avoid living as a stateless person in some refugee camp somewhere, but that’s not really a very helpful guide to how I feel about the general level of my taxes.

Does Laura think that her property taxes should be raised? Very few people do . . . and those who do seek an increase in their property taxes are almost always looking to fund large increases in spending on the services they use, like the schools, in the knowledge that many of the people who do not use them will be forced to kick in. This goes to the heart of the argument I heard over and over again: that it’s perfectly rational to think that you should pay higher taxes, but only if other people do, because taxation is somehow a collective action problem. A collective action problem, if you’re not familiar with the term, is one where there is a potential equilibrium that makes everyone better off, but it’s hard to get to because of incentives to defect. Think casual Fridays: most people prefer not to wear suits and ties, but unless there’s some sort of enforcement mechanism, the hyperambitious will ruin it for everyone by showing up in a suit. Next thing you know, everyone’s back in a Brooks Brothers sweat sack, because they don’t want to look less serious about their job than those around them. These problems generally require the creation of some enforcement mechanism–including, but not limited to, a formal law–to punish defectors.

Henry Farrell, for example, compared paying taxes to shopping at Wal-Mart. Far be it from me to criticize anyone who sends me free books, but this does not really work. Leave aside my questions about whether people really prefer downtowns to Wal-Marts, which is hard to agree upon empirically–I say I care deeply about poverty in Africa, but if that’s true, how come I bought a new iPod instead of sending the money to Chad? Collective action problems generally apply to situations where the outcome is binary: either you have a Wal-Mart nearby, or you don’t. Tax revenue is not binary–it’s an upward sloping line. Some of the things the government spends the money on are binary–but given the existing level of tax revenues, this is simply not a reasonable objection to sending the government additional money. People who say they want higher taxes on themselves generally think the government does not have enough money to do the things it is already doing; as long as you think the government has a better (in some moral sense) use for the money than you do, then you have a moral obligation to send it in.

(As an aside, I am afraid that Henry made a common mistake in referring to me as an economist. I am but a lowly MBA, and have never claimed otherwise, but for some reason a lot of my readers are confused.)

But most people do not appear to think that the government (or anyone else) has a morally salient better use for their money than they do; otherwise, they would give that money to the government (which will take it even if there is no “tax me more” fund) or charity. Perhaps you’ll argue that people’s norms about fairness are so strong that they will not give away their money unless other people do. My response would be to ask: is the unfairness of your paying more than other similarly affluent people greater or smaller than the distributional unfairness that you want the government to rectify? Nor is it plausible to believe that you can, by withholding your extra contribution, force other people to kick into the kitty; your contribution is a drop in the budget of any political entity to which you belong.

[Gotcha! You cry. My money alone won’t make a difference! Sorry, but if that were true then you’d be morally justified in cheating on your taxes. The small sum you send them is spent on something you presumably think we need more of.]

Or you might argue that since money is a positional good, it’s not reasonable to ask you to reduce your income unless everyone else at the same level does, too. So now positional goods races are an acceptable way to spend your life? So important that they should override your moral concerns about distributional justice?

Perhaps you claim that you don’t want to send the government extra money because God knows what they’ll spend it on. Well, welcome to the libertarian movement. Your subscription to Reason should arrive in four to six weeks.

No, I simply cannot grant that people really believe that they pay too little in taxes. It seems more like they think the government has a better use for everyone else’s money, and should therefore take it. They believe this so strongly that if they have to pay some of their own money to rectify the situation, they will do so. In other words, they don’t so much want higher taxes on themselves, as to purchase the good “State coercion of other affluent people”. That is not the same moral intuition as “I have too much money, and the government should take it away”, however much nicer it would be if that were true.

These objections might hold if we were attempting to establish a tax system from scratch, against a background of no previous taxation. If the number of potential taxpayers were small enough, you might then convincingly argue that you need to withhold your taxes until everyone else pays in in order to avoid the free rider problem. But against the background of our current, already extremely large and well-funded tax system, no one who actually thinks that their taxes are too low has much of an excuse for refusing to fork over.

PUT DOWN THOSE STAGE PROP GUNS! Because you know if you want to avert campus shooting sprees, you want to start with the hard-working theater kids who rehearsed their hearts out to put on a big show. Yes, the show is about presidential assassins, but it’s Sondheim. It’s high class. The bright side of this is: Because it’s high-class musical theater that’s getting censored, even the usual prissy anti-gun types should get pissed off.

Via Nick Gillespie, who hates the musical “Assassins” (“godawful in its original conception and execution back in 1990 (and naturally, retardedly well-received in its 2004 Broadway revival)”). I’ve never seen the show, but I loved Sarah Vowell’s description of it in her cool book “Assassination Vacation”:

“It’s the Stephen Sondheim musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president.”

“Oh,” remarks Mr. Connecticut. “How was it?”

“Oh my god,” I gush. “Even though the actors were mostly college kids, I thought it was great! The orange-haired guy who played the man who wanted to fly a plane into Nixon was hilarious. And I found myself strangely smitten with John Wilkes Booth; every time he looked in my direction I could feel myself blush.” Apparently, talking about going to the Museum of Television and Radio is “too personal,” but I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.

I THINK YOU CAN BE SURE that question won’t be repeated. Wouldn’t be fair.

READERS who have questions about the Times’ McCain story–like “Huh?”–can apparently email them to the editors:

A recent New York Times article examined a number of decisions by Senator John McCain that raised questions about his judgment over potential conflicts of interest. The article included reporting on Mr. McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee led by Mr. McCain. Since publication of the article, The Times has received over 2,000 comments, many of them criticizing the handling of the article. Editors and reporters who worked on the article will be answering questions on Friday. Please send yours to .

Thanks to Tom Maguire for the tip.

SNOW IN NEW YORK CITY. I just got back from Madison, Wisconsin, where this winter we’ve had the most snow ever recorded. But there’s been barely a dusting here in my alternate home… until today.

Though I’ve heard some car wheels spinning, it looks very pretty from my vantage point.

ADDED: At ground level:

NOT THOROUGHLY TIRED OF DEBATE-BLOGGING YET? Well, for all two of you, Divided We Stand has live-blogged the live-bloggers.

MCCAIN WANTS OUT OF THE CAMPAIGN FINANCE SYSTEM he’s responsible for and finds it’s not so easy. Amusingly, McCain is arguing that he has a constitutional right to get out.

MORE: “‘We never claimed that the matching funds were collateral for the loan,’ says McCain lawyer Trevor Potter. ‘This was all a hypothetical future transaction.’ (We wish we could get bank loans like that.)” The WSJ is aptly smirky: “We suppose we can’t blame Mr. McCain for trying to make the finance rules work for him, but it’d be nice if he finally admitted their embarrassing folly.”

MORE “PLAGIARISM.” Wow, Hillary really set herself up for this. I think that if your candidacy is going to be about accusations of unoriginality, then you’d better be sure that you’ve always used your own words…

SPEAKING OF PLAGIARISM, there’s this too. Hillary rips off John Edwards. (Via Metafilter.)

WHO YOU CALLING A PLAGIARIST? During the debate, Dan Drezner suggested to me over IM that Hillary Clinton was plagiarizing Primary Colors. He backs it up on his own blog:

Hillary Clinton, February 21, 2008 debate with Barack Obama: “You know, lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.”

Hillary Clinton, later on in the same debate: “You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country.”

Jack Stanton speech, in Primary Colors (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 162: “Y’know, I’ve taken some hits in this campaign. It hasn’t been easy for me, or my family. It hasn’t been fair, but it hasn’t been anything compared to the hits a lot of you take every day.”

Meanwhile, Chris Beam at Slate picks up on another instance:

Hillary, however, pivots in a way that evokes, of all things, her Diner Sob. Only this time, she sets herself up: “People often ask me, ‘How do you do it? How do you keep going?’ ” That’s the exact same question asked by Marianne Pernold Young at the Café Espresso in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on the eve of the primary. Clinton then goes into a colorful anecdote about a medical center filled with people injured in Iraq. She doesn’t exactly tear up, but it’s a deliberately emotional moment. (We see Chelsea looking teary afterwards.)

At the very end, she borrows a line that John Edwards used toward the end of his campaign. “We’re going to be fine,” she said, referring to herself and Obama. (Edwards always said it about himself and Elizabeth.) “I just hope we can say the same thing about the American people.”

HILLARY CLINTON’S FAREWELL ADDRESS

The emerging consensus: this was a good debate for Hillary Clinton . . . but not good enough. I think she probably picked up a lot of votes with that closing speech, but getting more votes in Ohio and Texas will not be enough; she needs to get nearly all of them.

Obviously, I’m not a Hillary supporter. But now I have that feeling of sympathy that often wells up when an opponent is defeated; once we can afford to be generous once they are no longer much of a threat. And one can hang one’s hat on the fact that she was possibly undone simply by bad timing. Not having been much of a primary hound the last time around, I’ve been repeatedly struck by how path dependent this all seems to be. If the primaries had been run in a different order, mightn’t she have emerged as the front runner . . . and wouldn’t that be a pretty bitter thought for any of us to live with?

Ask Dr. Helen: Is Male Bashing Curable?