The Evolution of the Camera

Long ago when the world was young and cameras used film, there were two kinds. With a viewfinder camera, the human looked through the viewfinder, the camera looked through the lens, and the two views were different—significantly different for close-up shots. A single lens reflex camera (SLR), typically larger and more expensive, contained an elaborate internal mechanism to permit the human to view the scene through the same lens that the camera saw it through. To  take a picture, the mirror that was directing the image up to the prism that bent it to reach the human's eye swung up and out of the way, in order that the light could get to the film instead. (There is also evidence in the fossil record of a still earlier design known as a twin lens reflex).

After digital cameras came along and I started using them, it occurred to me that the image I was seeing on the view screen was the same image that would be recorded on the camera's memory—one of the advantages of using electronics instead of optics for the purpose. I was already looking through the camera's lens, so no need for a mirror and prism. Oddly enough, however, SLR's (called dSLR's since they were now digital) were still being made, were still large and expensive, still had an elaborate apparatus of moving mirror and prism, and were still regarded as what serious photographers used. 

They had two significant advantages over the less expensive sorts of digital cameras—interchangeable lenses and much larger imaging sensors, permitting them to take better pictures. They also had optical viewfinders that let you look through the camera's lens. The resolution perceivable by the human eye is higher than the resolution of a camera's viewscreen, so getting the image directly to the human was worth something—but, given the quality of the available screens, not very much. That, at least, was how I saw it—making the internal mirror and related apparatus the photographic equivalent of the human appendix.

It couldn't last—and, fortunately, didn't. It eventually occurred to someone in the industry that a camera with interchangeable lenses and a large sensor but without mirror, prism, and optical viewfinder could be very nearly as useful as a dSLR but considerably smaller and less expensive. 

My Sony NEX-3 arrived yesterday. It cost about half as much as a comparable dSLR—and has the same sized sensor. With the smaller of its two lenses it is not very much larger than the pocket camera it replaces.

Celtic Wanderings?

My current writing project is a book on legal systems very different from ours, based on a seminar I have taught for some years at SCU; my current chapter drafts are webbed for a workshop I am doing at George Mason this fall.

The legal systems I have done chapters on so far include ancient Irish law (c. 6th century) and traditional Somali law. Surprisingly enough, they have several features in common. In both, one consequence of injuring someone is the legal obligation to provide your victim with sick-maintainance—hospitality and medical services until he recovers. 

In the Irish system the kin-group called the fine, consisting of all descendants in the paternal line of a common great-grandfather,  is responsible for seeing that its members pay any fines or damage payments they owe or, if they don't, paying for them. In the Somali system the kin-group called the juffo, consisting of all descendants in the paternal line of a common great-grandfather,  is responsible for some but not all fines owed by its members, the rest being the responsibility of the jilib, a group of several related juffos.

All very suspicious. The Celts wandered pretty far but, so far as I know, they never made it to the horn of Africa. Looking at it from the other side there are people referred to as "black Irish," but I don't believe ...   .

Drones, Geneva Convention, and Other Ambiguous Goods

"Any development that makes war appear to be easier or cheaper is dangerous and morally troubling. It lowers the political threshold of war. It threatens to weaken the moral presumption against the use of armed force." David Cortwright, writing at CNN.com on drones.

It is a legitimate argument, but its application is wider than may be obvious. The Geneva Conventions, for instance, are designed to make war cheaper—not in dollars but in human costs. The pre-Napoleonic rules of parole, under which a prisoner of war could give his word not to try to escape and then spend his imprisonment in the town inn instead of the much less comfortable prison, or even give his word not to fight until exchanged and then be sent home, were designed to make war less costly. 

Any such change has two effects. One is to reduce the cost, the amount of damage to things that matter to human beings, including human beings themselves, of warfare, which is good. The other is to increase the amount of warfare, which is bad. There is no theoretical basis to say, in general, which effect is larger—it depends on  the elasticity of supply of war.

In my Law's Order, I discuss [search for the word "duress" in the chapter] the same issue in a different context—whether contracts made under duress ought to be enforceable. When the mugger threatens to kill you if you don't pay him a hundred dollars and you pay with a check,  should you be free to call up your bank and cancel payment once he is out of sight? Being able to pay  him means that when mugged you don't get killed for failure to offer your mugger enough to let you go. But it also means that mugging is more profitable, so more of it happens.

In that particular case, I am pretty sure that making the contract enforceable has, on net, negative consequences. But there is no good reason to suppose that the same is true for innovations, technological or otherwise, that make war less costly.

How to Lie With Statistics: Tax Rates

A good deal of the recent rhetoric in support of Democratic proposals for raising taxes is designed to make it sound as though rich people pay federal taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. That, as one can easily check by looking at the published figures from the Congressional Budget Office, is not only false but wildly false. Most people in the bottom half of the income distribution pay no federal income tax at all, although they do pay payroll taxes and, arguably, some of the cost of corporate income tax passed on in higher prices or lower wages. On the CBO calculations, the ratio of total federal tax paid to income rises pretty much monotonically with income.

The less extreme claim, which has been getting a good deal of press of late, is that a quarter of the households with an income of at least a million dollar a year pay taxes at a lower rate than the ten percent of those with incomes of under $100,000 who pay at the highest rate. 

I have not seen any detailed explanation of how those numbers are calculated, but presumably they are based on income and tax for a single year. If so, although the claim may be literally true, it is also highly misleading—an elegant example of how to lie while telling the truth.

Income and tax liability vary for each individual from year to year. If you take a large capital loss one year, part of it carries over to reduce your taxes, but not your income, in the next year. If you have a large capital gain in one year, your taxes go up for that year but your average tax rate goes down, since capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. 

Some of the 25% of high income taxpayers paying at the lowest rate are people who regularly pay less taxes than most, some are taxpayers who happen to be paying a lower rate than average this year. Some of the 10% of middle income taxpayers paying at the highest rate are people who regularly pay more taxes than most, some are people who happen to be paying a higher rate this year than most years. So the widely reported calculation overstates, by how much I have no way of knowing, the spread of both distributions, both the number of middle income taxpayers who on average, year after year, are taxed at a higher rate than the bottom 25% of high income taxpayers and the number of high income taxpayers who on average are taxed at a lower rate than the top 10% of middle income taxpayers.

If the logic is not clear, consider betting on the races. Each day, a significant fraction of the bettors—say a quarter—make money. A few of them make money because they really are much better than most at guessing which horse will win. Most of them make money because that was the day that they happened to be lucky. If you looked only at the day's results, you would conclude that the top quarter make money at the races. If you looked at the year's results, you would come up with a much smaller number.

Just as, if you looked at the tax rates paid by any group of taxpayers over a period of years, you would get fewer paying a rate that was unusually high or unusually low than if you look at them for a single year.

And for readers interested in a more general account of how to lie with statistics, I have a book to recommend.

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P.S.

Here are two summaries of federal tax incidence, one from the Tax Policy Center of Brookings and the Urban Institute, one showing the figures from the Congressional Research Service. The former shows figures for the top one percent and top tenth of a percent. At least by its calculation, the effective rate rises monatonically with income.

P.P.S.

I linked to the figure showing the Congressional Research Service numbers, which I found on Google+. That apparently didn't, or at least doesn't, work. Here is the figure:

Are the Amish Anarchists?

I have been reading up on the Amish for one chapter of the book on legal systems very different from ours that I'm currently working on. They provide an example of what I think of as an embedded legal system—a group that is under the authority of an external legal system, but also has its own legal system which it succeeds in enforcing on its members. Other examples are modern gypsies and Jewish communities during the diaspora, which were often given the right to impose Jewish law on their members by their gentile rulers.

It occurred to me that one could view the Amish as a working example of a form of anarchy. It is a very strange form, since the rules that the Amish are under are considerably more constraining—including rules on what styles of clothing they can wear, rules against owning automobiles or flying on airplanes, and much else—than the rules the rest of us are under. But those rules are all voluntarily accepted, and the system that generates them may reasonably be viewed as a competitive system of private law.

To expand on that, for readers not familiar with the Amish... . The only level of Amish "government" with any authority is the congregation, typically made up of about thirty to forty households. Its authority is over individuals who, as adults, have chosen to swear to accept its rules. The only punishment it can impose is shunning—the refusal of members of the congregation to associate in various ways with a member who has been excommunicated. Members, including excommunicated members, are free to resign from their congregation and join any other congregation that will accept them, or drop out of the Amish sect entirely.

The rules—the ordnung—vary from one congregation to another and change over time. In some settlements the congregations are, in effect, miniature territorial sovereigns, so if a member of one congregation wants to shift to another, perhaps because its rules are less (or more) strict than the rules of his current congregation, he has to physically move, although often not very far. In other settlements, especially ones where there are congregations with a considerable range of different versions of the Ordnung, congregations overlap, so you can switch congregations while remaining in the same location.

It's true, of course, that the Amish are under the rule of the U.S. (or, for a smaller number, Canadian) government. But they receive very few services from government, since they are unwilling to accept most of the conventional forms of government aid and, as pacifists, are unwilling to report crimes against themselves to the police or sue in the government courts to collect debts. Off hand, the only significant benefit I can think of that they get is protection against foreign invasion. And, on the other hand, governments at various levels imposes sizable costs on them, in the form of taxes that (with the exception of Social Security) they have to pay and regulations.

So I think they provide pretty good evidence of at least one form of (very structured) anarchy that works.

Mormons, Fundamentalists, and Critics

Various people of late have been going back and forth over claims that Mormons are a cult and are not Christians. What strikes me is how much better press Mormons get, in the political context, than evangelical fundamentalists. If you look at the actual beliefs of the two groups, the official doctrines of the Church of Latter Day Saints are at least as nutty as those of fundamentalist groups that deny evolution, believe humans and dinosaurs coexisted ten thousand years or so back, and get routinely mocked for those beliefs. 

The LDS claims that if you live a good life you will eventually become a god with a universe of your own to run, or that your ancestors can be converted post-mortem and so saved, are a bit odd, but there is no way of proving they are false, any more than one can prove false the beliefs of those who expect the second coming of Christ real soon now. But the belief that there was a lively civilization in the New World long before Columbus, and one that fits the description in LDS scripture, is inconsistent with what archaeology tells us about the relevant history. That surely ranks with the more direct versions of creationism as a denial of accepted scientific views.

The odd beliefs of fundamentalist Christians are an issue at the moment for Republican political candidates, many of whom sound as though they agree with them, raising the question of whether they actually believe or only pretend to. But I have not noticed any of the people who pick on candidates such as Palin or Bachmann for their religious views asking whether Romney and Huntsman really believe in the pre-Columbian "history" that their church proclaims or are being prudently silent on the subject.

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P.S. some days later. A British newspaper asks the same question.

Random Thoughts on Education

Part I: Marshall as Textbook

In a recent book review in The New Republic, Robert Solow writes:

"When I first studied economics in 1940, we were not given Marshall to read as a textbook; it would probably have been an improvement if we had."

Although I was not literally given Marshall to read as a textbook, I came pretty close. My first position as an economics professor was at VPI, and while there I ended up, over a period of years, teaching a wide range of courses. It occurred to me later that my doing so might have been, not an accident, but a deliberate policy by James Buchanan, who was the dominant figure in the department. I had never taken an economics course for credit, and teaching things is a good way of learning them.

One of the courses I taught was the history of economic thought, which I taught as economic thought not as history. As I put it later when teaching the same course at UCLA, I wanted the students to imagine that they were graduate students in economics getting ready for their prelim exams, the year was 1776, and The Wealth of Nations was the latest thing in the field.

I did not learn all that much economics from Smith, a brilliant writer and thinker but a somewhat muddled economic theorist. But the other two figures I focused on were David Ricardo and Alfred Marshall, and I learned quite a lot of economics from them. One result is that, to this day, I teach the concept of economic efficiency in terms of Marshall's version rather than the later, more fashionable, and (in my view) inferior approaches associated with Pareto, Hicks and Kaldor.

Part II: How Kids Learn to Write Nowadays

Talking with my younger son on the phone, he mentioned that he was planning to write and web an account of his recent playing of Rome: Total War, a computer game he is fond of—and do it as the work of a later historian describing the rise of whatever empire established itself as victor in the course of the game. His sister, as of a few years ago, spent a good deal of time writing up and webbing battle reports describing events in World of Warcraft. I don't think either of them has gotten into fanfic, the practice of writing stories set in the world of Star Trek, or Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, but a lot of other young people have. And quite a lot of the people I know online who write novels, including some who get them published, started out running role playing games.

All of which suggests to me that English classes, in high school and college, play a much smaller role in teaching this generation how to write than their teachers might suppose.

Donating to Both Sides: A Research Proposal

It is, I gather, fairly common for corporate donors to give money to both candidates in some two candidate races. Assuming that is correct, the question is why.

Both donations can't be intended to influence the outcome of the election, since they push it in opposite directions, so presumably the purpose is to buy influence with the winner. But doesn't the donation to the loser reduce the donor's influence with the winner, just balancing an equal donation to the winner?

I can see two possible answers. One is that the information is not always public, so the winner may not know about the donation to the loser. I don't think that's been possible in recent elections, but I'm far from expert on the subject.

The other possibility is that the money isn't intended to be spent on the election. It's my understanding (those who know more are welcome to correct me) that, under some circumstances, a candidate who retires is allowed to keep the balance of past campaign donations. If so, one would expect the pattern of donating to both candidates to be most common when at least one of them is near the end of his career. 

Which suggests some interesting possibilities for research.

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P.S. A commenter informs me that my fact is not a fact, that what is actually happening is that donations by employees of a firm, some of whom support one candidate and some another, are being misinterpreted as donations by the firm.

Should We Hope for a Republican Sweep?

Like many other people unhappy with the administration, I have been worried by the apparent inability of the Republicans to find a candidate who is both electable and likely to make a significant improvement, and worried that they may end up losing an election that they ought to win. Thinking about it this evening, it occurred to me that perhaps that isn't such a bad outcome.

Suppose the Republicans convert Obama's current unpopularity into majorities in both House and Senate, but manage to lose the presidential election. Would that outcome be obviously worse than one in which they won everything?

There is much to be said for divided government. Consider what happened the last time the Republicans had both Congress and the White House.

Or, for that matter, the last time the Democrats did.

Could There Be a European War?

There are lots of things that the supporters of the Euro, and the Common Market, and the broader project of which both are a part, hope to get from increased European unification. But the one big thing is future peace. The first half of the 20th century featured two horrific wars, originating in and largely fought in Europe, largely between European states. Behind all the talk about the convenience of a common currency or the advantages of free trade within the EU is that memory, and a burning desire that it not happen again.

Which raises two interesting questions, to neither of which I can offer a confident answer:

1. If the EU dissolves, with countries going back to separate currencies and separate trade policies, is there any significant risk of a third major European war within, say, the next fifty years? My gut reaction is that there is not, but I do not have any real support for it.

2. If the EU is maintained and European integration increased, perhaps along the lines that the supporters of the Euro have been urging as necessary to save Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Spain, is there any significant risk of a third major European war within, say, the next fifty years? 

Before dismissing the possibility out of hand, it is worth considering what came out of the "integration" of the American states. I am not sure how much of a stretch it is to imagine a future where some of the countries, such as Germany, feel that they are being outvoted and exploited by others, such as Greece and Italy, through the institutions of a United States of Europe, with the tension eventually exploding into civil war. Each side would, of course, start out confident that once it was clear they were willing to fight the other would back down.

(Might make an interesting sf plot.)

Which suggests a third question: Does European integration make a major European war less likely, or more?

Comments welcome.

3D printing of clothing

At least, sort of 3D.

My wife, as usual, has been complaining about the difficulty of finding dresses that meet her requirements, which include fitting her, looking reasonably attractive, being washable, and pockets. Having read a number of things recently about 3D printing, it occurred to me to wonder if something along similar lines would, or soon will be, practical for clothing.

It requires an accurate model of the customer's body, which I'm not sure you could get from photos, although it's possible that smart software could manage it. But for a less demanding version, imagine something like a phone booth in a shopping mall. You go in, shut the door, take off your clothes—if Clark Kent could do it, so can you. The sensors in the booth take a 3 dimensional picture of you. Perhaps you move around a little and they take more pictures, since how your shape changes as you move is relevant to getting clothing that will be comfortable. The description of your body shape is uploaded to the firm that put the booth there.

You go to the firm's web site, select fabric, color, style. The web page displays what the resulting dress will look like. If you like it, automatic machinery produces the dress for you. 

Custom tailoring for the masses.

If customers are worried that their naked pictures will get ogled by someone in the cloud, the booth delivers its data directly to the customer, perhaps on a flash disk. The customer downloads the relevant software, plugs in the flash disk, connects to the web site for availability of fabrics, colors, and styles.

Is it doable? Is it being done? It seems like an easier problem than full scale 3D printing, since clothing is made from 2D shapes joined together. The quality of the material should be at least as good as with conventional clothing, since it's the same cloth. And the fit a good deal better.

Anything I'm missing? Any ambitious entrepreneurs out there?

D. Friedman vs D. Brin

[Here's a link to Brin's post and the comments, including mine, courtesy of Chris Hibbert]

I've been having an exchange on Google+ with David Brin, started by a post of his that began:

Is it "class war" to reset tax levels to the levels of the prosperous 1990s?

I pointed out that, according to the CBO figures, the top quintile of the income distribution was paying a slightly higher average federal tax rate in 2007, the last year for which I could find CBO data, than in 1990, while the bottom quintile was paying about half the rate in 2007 it was paying in 1990, and asked him if what he was proposing was doubling the taxes on low income taxpayers.

My point, of course, was that although there is lots of rhetoric about the rich paying low taxes, what actually happened over the past twenty years was a sharp cut in federal taxes for the lower half of the income distribution.

Brin responded with:

Quintiles are utterly utterly misleading. 90% of the people in the topmost quintile still earn most of their income from wages, not dividends or capital gains. Try the top 5% and 1% and 0.1% and include shelters overseas (estimated.) This is exactly the kind of razzle dazzle switcheroo you should be wary of and have spotted for yourself.

To which I replied by quoting his post, followed by:

I don't think I'm the one offering razzle-dazzle--and I note that while you ask me to look up data, you don't actually offer any.

As you could easily have discovered if you looked up the numbers yourself, the CBO figures for 2007 show the top 1% paying an effective federal tax rate of 29.5%. The figure for 1990 is 28.8%.

The bottom quintile, on the other hand, paid an effective rate of 8.9% in 1990. In 2007, it was 4.0%.

So you have your facts backwards, at least so far as I can tell from the CBO figures--if you have something better, feel free to offer it. The effective rate on the bottom quintile has been cut in half since 1990, on the top 1% it has increased a little. I have no idea, and you don't say, what your source is for "shelters overseas (estimated)," but I suspect it's bluff--do you have figures showing that the top 1% is sheltering much more of its income now than in the 1990's? That's what your argument requires.

Let me repeat my question, since you didn't answer it the first time. You suggest rolling back tax levels to what they were in the 1990's. Does that mean that you want to double taxes on low income taxpayers, to get them back to where they were then? That's the big change, after all.

My figures are only up to 2007, since that's all I could readily find from the CBO; my guess is that the 2010 figures, if I could find them, would show a lower tax rate than in 2007 for all groups, since the current Administration has financed its budget largely with borrowing. But the big change from 1990 would still be the sharp drop in the effective tax rates paid by the lower part of the income distribution. For some reason neither you nor Obama seems to have noticed that--or at least let it interfere with your rhetoric.

Brin has so far not responded. I'm waiting to see if he will support his claims, concede error, or simply leave the argument unanswered. The fact that his response to my first post was, so far as I can tell, pure bluff--no data, just the implication that if one looked at the data it would support his beliefs--is disturbing. 

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David Henderson has a link to a piece that goes into much more detail than I have and finds that the tax system has been becoming pretty steadily more progressive over the past fifteen years, under both Democrats and Republicans.

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The argument continues. For those who don't want to follow the link at the top of this and then search through the comments, here is my most recent response (to two of his):

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David B. writes:

“In fact I agree that taxes for everybody are lower now than they were in the 1990s.”

Because current spending is financed by borrowing. Which, absent a default, will eventually have to be paid for by higher taxes.

That was not however the point of my comments. My point was that taxation has become more progressive since the 1990’s, when you and lots of other people, including Obama, want to claim it has become less. Do you agree with that? If so, why have you gone to so much trouble, with your handwaving about the top 1% and tax shelters, to deny it?

“Put this in the context of 6000 years of history …”

More evasion. If I can’t get you to face demonstrable facts about taxation in the U.S. over the past few decades, I doubt that arguing with you about the past 6000 years of history would be very useful.

You keep trying to make this an argument about whether one supports or opposes the policies of the Bush administration. I didn’t vote for Bush, didn’t approve of his policies at the time, and don’t approve of their continuation by Obama, so you can have that argument with someone else. I’m simply trying to get you to face the fact that the federal tax system has gotten more progressive over time, not less.

And when I point you at evidence that that’s true, your response isn’t to try to rebut it, or even to understand it, but to talk about “you guys” and try to change the subject to your grand theories about America. If I’m going to argue about grand theories, I would prefer to do it with people who care whether the facts they use in their arguments are true or not.

“You even seem to implicitly say that tax rates SHOULD be progressive. Of course they aren't. Look closely.”

I have said nothing at all about whether tax rates should or shouldn’t be progressive. I’ve merely been trying to establish what they are, and how they have changed over time.

“Most of these right wing "studies" incorporate corporate taxes INTO the recipient's claim of taxes paid, under the bizarre incantation that this envelopes what the call "double taxation."”

Does that include the “right wing studies” by the Congressional Budget Office? Have you looked at their figures on the federal income tax alone? That by itself is highly progressive. That plus payroll taxes—which they treat as entirely a tax on the employee—is still progressive, although not as progressive.

How progressivity has changed over time requires a little effort to determine, and you would rather demagogue than make that effort. To see that the federal tax system is progressive, under any plausible assumption about incidence, requires only the ability to read and do arithmetic. But it apparently doesn’t fit your current ideology, whatever that may be.

I am curious, however, as to who you believe pays corporate income tax, since you think the notion that it comes out of money that would otherwise go to dividends and capital gains is bizarre. Is it just manna from heaven?

What's Wrong With Gestational Surrogacy?

Gestational surrogacy is the arrangement by which a couple arrange to fertilize the woman's egg with the man's sperm, then have the fertilized ovum implanted and gestated in another woman's womb. In the U.S. the practice is regulated by state law, illegal in some states, legal in others, which means that in practice it is legal, since the couple can arrange to do it in a state where it is legal. 

I gather, however, from a conversation with someone who has been researching the subject, that in most of western Europe it is illegal, and that while it is legal de jure to arrange to have it done abroad—India and the Ukraine are apparently the favored destinations—it is made difficult de facto by administrative obstacles put in the way of bringing the resulting infant back to its parents' home country. The U.K. is a partial exception; gestational surrogacy is legal, but only if it is altruistic, which is to say, only if the host mother is not paid for undergoing the inconvenience and risk of bearing another woman's child.

Which raises an obvious question: Why would anyone be against the arrangement? In many cases, it makes it possible for a couple to have a child—their own child—when they otherwise could not. Even in those cases where the biological mother could bear her own child, why should anyone else object if she can find another woman willing to do it for her on mutually acceptable terms?

There are, I think, a number of possible answers, although none that in my view justify the restrictions. One is that the decision to be a host mother is not freely made since it is "compelled" by poverty. This sort of argument is common in a variety of contexts, but I find it hard to make any sense of it. Put in its simplest terms, the claim is that if the potential host mother does not accept the offer she will starve to death, hence accepting the offer is not really a free choice, hence she should not be permitted to make it. Which, if the starting point is correct, means that out of our generous concern for a poor woman we will compel her to starve to death.

A second possibility, following a line of argument originated (I think) in the context of prostitution by professor Margaret Radin of Stanford Law School, is that by permitting a woman to rent out the use of her womb (body) we "commodify" motherhood (sex), cause people to think of it as something to be bought and sold, and so cheapen the human experience. Restated, the claim is that the  transaction of buying sex or renting a womb is  both an exchange and a statement. The exchange is one that, in Radin's view, should be permitted, since the woman owns her own body and so is entitled to decide how it is employed. But the statement, because of its effect on other people's view of their lives, is one that ought not to be made, hence the transaction may, arguably should, be prohibited.

What is bizarre about this argument is that it was made by an American law professor. The American constitution, as routinely interpreted by judges and law professors, contains a very strong protection for freedom of speech, making it a violation of the constitution to prohibit an act, such as flag burning, which is also speech. Following out that principle, Radin's argument ought to imply that even if there were good reasons to prohibit surrogacy or prostitution, the fact that both are speech as well as acts ought to protect them. She, along with those who accept her argument, reaches precisely the opposite conclusion.

A somewhat better argument that might be made against surrogacy is that permitting a couple to produce a child when they otherwise could not means that they will have no need to adopt, hence prohibiting surrogacy benefits children in need of parents. There is some logic to the argument, but its morality is questionable. Surely a legislator willing to forbid a couple from producing their own child in the only way they can in order that they will have to adopt someone else's ought at least to feel obligated to refrain from producing any children of his own until he has adopted at least one.

Finally there comes what I suspect is the real reason. Natural is good, and surrogacy (like IVF before it, and many other things as well) is unnatural. Our grandparents didn't do it, our pre-human ancestors didn't do it, so there must be something wrong with it, something wicked, sinful. Icky. 

And worse still if done for money.

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On the principle of full disclosure, I should mention that my granddaughter Iselle might not have come into existence were it not for surrogacy. A hard argument to rebut (see below).