Politics

Un Menteur bien français

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , ,

Les Français, les habitants de mon pays natal, ne sont pas assez soucieux de vérité. Ils ont tendance à raconter un peu n’importe quoi, à ne pas corriger les mensonges , et à occulter par omission leurs crime collectifs (tel que le massacre de manifestants Algériens pacifiques à Paris, le_____ )

Par ailleurs, il y a des Europeens pour qui l’anti-Américanisme sert de philosophie politique. Il n’est plus nécessaire de s’emmerder à étudier les difficiles textes sacrés du Marxisme comme au bon vieux temps. Le “bon vieux temps”, c’était quand il n’y avait guère que deux intellectuels français qui ne se déclaraient pas – d’une façon ou d’une autre – “Marxistes”. Aujourd’hui, il suffit de hair l’Amérique. C’est cool, même si on est obligé de l’exprimer dans la langue de l’enemi car les Russes, aussi bien que les Chinois -ainsi que les Albanais d’ailleurs – usent du même mot: “cool”. (Les Albanais sont les habitants de ce grand pays communiste qui avait déclarél’Union Soviétique, puis la Chine, “déviationistes” – pas assez Marxiste-Léniniste -dans les années soixante-dix!)

Je regarde souvent TV5. Il s’agit de la chaine internationale francophone. Il y a des informations internationales en Français cinq ou six fois par jour sur TV5. J’ignore le nom du présentateur principal des informations. C’est un homme (de visage européen) alors que la plupart de ses collègues sont des femmes. D’après sa diction et son accent, je suis 96% sur qu’il est français. Il a une quarantaine d’années ou un peu moins. Ce n’est pas un jeunot. Pourtant, il dit souvent des conneries, très souvent même. Parfois, c’est pire que des conneries parce-qu’il ne s’agit pas d’ignorance ordinaire mais de préjugés bêtes et méchants. Continue reading →

Bush’s War

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics, Religion , , , , ,

“Since March 1996, Iraq has  systematically sought to deny weapons inspectors from the United Nations Special on Iraq Commission (UNSCOM) access to key facilities and documents, has on several occasions endangered the safe operation of UNSCOM helicopters transporting UNSCOM personnel in Iraq, and has persisted in a pattern of deception and concealment  regarding the history of its weapons of mass destruction programs […]

On August 14 — the President signed Public Law 105-235, which declared that “the  Government of Iraq  is in material and unacceptable breach  of its international obligations” and urged the President to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligation […]

It should be he policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of  a democratic government to replace that regime.”

The first paragraph is from the Iraq Liberation Act of ___  .

The second and third paragraphs are from  Public-Law 105-235.

The president who signed both items was ___________?

This is lifted from the Wall Street Journal of 3/19/13. The bolding is mine.

Both pieces of legislation were enacted in 1998.

The primary reason given by the Bush administration for the attack on Hussein’s Iraq was to search there for weapons of mass destruction. We now know there were no such weapons on any significant scale. I keep arguing on this blog that:

  1. There were many other reasons to destroy the Hussein regime and,
  2. There were very good reasons for any reasonable person to be misled about the existence of such weapons in Iraq.

Mostly, it was that the Hussein regime sabotaged the inspection process to which it had agreed as a condition of peace following the first Gulf War. It would be hard to understand the high risks taken to hide things by one who had in fact nothing to hide! (Read this sentence again.)

The important persons and organization who were fooled into believing in the existence of the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were numerous and varied. They included several western intelligence services and many important politicians.

In 1998, a prominent member of one of the two main American political parties (prominent then and prominent now) said the following,

“Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.”

I am not faulting the politician who said this for blindness then but for irresponsible, dishonest amnesia now.

The politician in question is __________________________

(Answer below as a “Comment.”)

The quote is lifted from the Wall Street Journal editorial on 3/20/13.

A Conservative

henrymoore History, Politics , , , , , , , , ,

Why I Am One

The bizarre bohemian bilge that plagues conventionally left-wing schools of thought, whether from Marx or Rawls or Chomsky, is just not for me. For the most part anyways. Since I’ve become more (this is an understatement; I have gone much farther than, say, Glenn Beck) of a libertarian (a classical liberal while socialists are usually just reverse reactionaries), I’ve learned to make some exceptions. This has tended to be more on the level of semi-reluctant tolerance than on that of open-armed embrace.

As you can see, therefore, I am a conservative because my cultural values and my outlook on life are certainly not (socially) liberal. I find that the libertinism and relativism of most left-wing ideologies, to say nothing of the economic ignorance and denial that accompanies them, were they commonplace, are incompatible with the maintenance of a free society. Generally, the only commendable quality I find in left-wing ideologies is compassion. And then only where it is sincere and/or reasonable, the latter being far more rare than the former. A moral people, as per conservatism, and yet a compassionate people, as per liberalism, is what is needed in order to establish and then preserve a free society. That is not to say that immoral or indifferent people should be given less rights or that they should be driven forth into the wastelands (although, and I think Hans-Hermann Hoppe is absolutely correct on this, they could be excluded from covenant communities without violating anyone’s rights).

Why I Am Not One

Conservatism is about conserving things. But what if the thing being conserved is a tradition of liberalism? Can not then a conservative also be a liberal? Liberalism is about freedom of thought and action. But what if the thoughts or actions are conservative? Can not then a liberal also be a conservative? The dichotomy and at times mutual exclusivity between the two is merely the result of certain factions that were never interested in (or at least not consistent in their solutions towards) conserving freedom or the freedom to conserve in the first place, but because they had one or two important (and perhaps only at the specific point in history that certain factions coalesced) things in common, the labels were adopted. This was then compounded by certain pseudo-liberals falsely characterizing all conservatives as illiberal or intolerant, and certain pseudo-conservatives falsely characterizing all liberals as intemperate or nihilistic. In the United States this was made even worse, at least for the realm of national politics, by the electoral college, which mathematically favors a two-party system because having three or more major parties would necessarily prevent presidential nominees from garnering the 271 electors necessary to win. Continue reading →

Lies and Untruths – Part Two

Jacques Delacroix Law, Politics , , , , , ,

This is the second part of a two-part mini-essay. See part one here.

The first common untruthful practice I observe among liberals consists in turning factual decisions into moral ones.

The second mendacious practice I catch frequently among liberals is related to the first but it’s more egregious. It consists in shutting off debate in the name of compassion. Dorothy Rabinowitz, the wisest commentator in the Wall Street Journal, gives a wonderful and blood-curdling example on 1/15/10.

As everyone knows now, the race for the seat of the late Senator Kennedy has turned into a referendum on the Democratic health care reform project. The Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, is the standing Attorney General of Massachusetts. Earlier in her career, when she became a District Attorney, she had to make a decision about an appeal by a convicted child molester, a Gerard Amirault. The man had been convicted among other beauts, of sodomizing a five-year old with the blade of a butcher knife. There was never any physical evidence. (Read this sentence again because you may have missed its stark, clean meaning.) The whole trial had been of the same ilk. Judges wanted to reverse the decision. Ms Coakley declined to help and instead, went into high gear to prevent Mr Amirault ( and his sister and his old mother) from ever going out free and clear. Continue reading →

Socialism as an insurance policy for the wealthy

muricaderp Economics, Politics

I’d like to very briefly expand on one of the recurrent themes here at Notes: complaints about the posh backgrounds and attitudes of socialists, or, as Brandon often puts it, their tendency to “only care about the rich.”

There’s no shortage of paradoxical examples of wealthy socialist politicians and activists, socialism being most vigorous in the wealthiest parts of a given country, etc. These paradoxes became a lot less baffling to me once I started considering what the wealthy stand to lose in the event of disaffection among the poor. They stand to lose more than the middle classes, and certainly much more than the poor. Conversely, the wealthy stand to gain more than the middling or the poor from a stable, prosperous society. A great example of this is the lengthy vacation allotments for employees in much of Europe, which poorer beneficiaries often spend at modest vacation spots within a few hours’ drive of home but wealthier beneficiaries often spend at much more luxurious establishments in Asia or the Americas.

This calculus gets much more compelling when one considers government measures to nurture a broad middle class as an insurance policy against social unrest. That’s really too kind a term for the rioting, assault and retaliatory murder to which a badly mistreated working class can be provoked, to say nothing of the much nastier behavior of goons under the auspices of the demagogic governments that take root in destabilized societies. The Nazis controlled most of Western Europe within living memory, so the threat of war and genocide as a response to bad economic conditions is less of an abstraction to the average European than it is to the average American, sheltered as the United States has been from domestic warfare for over a century.

War, no matter its magnitude or duration, is not something to be romanticized or celebrated as something worthy in its own right. It is a necessary evil, one that is absolutely hellish for all but the most sadistic. For the purpose of not getting people traumatized, maimed and killed, rioting, vigilantism and the like should be regarded as tantamount to warfare; they’re certainly precursors, and they’re certainly dangerous and destructive. These truths are all too easily lost on people who have not lived through civil unrest or war, and on those who choose to live in atavistic fantasy worlds. These segments of the population have a huge overlap, and both are very widespread in the United States.

Offhand, I’d say that privation in some form or other has been the most common trigger for unrest throughout human history. Astute leaders recognize this, as Otto von Bismarck and Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when they implemented social insurance programs that were unprecedented in their countries. Other leaders, however, assume that they’ll always be able to beat the proles into submission. In a good decade, such leaders keep their heads; in a bad decade, ask Marie Antoinette.

The United States has more than its share of the latter sort of leader, which has a long history of questioning the patriotism of the former sort among its compatriots. The bareknuckle robber barons assume that if they hire enough Pinkertons, none of their number will end up with his head in a basket on the town square, but history has disproved this assumption on a number of occasions. Sure, it’s the history of other countries, but Europeans were aghast to see the United States, that beacon of peace and freedom, descend into internecine bloodletting in 1861. These things are unimaginable until they happen, or until one comes across some imagination, and maybe some humility. We aren’t that special as a people. In the right conditions, those we’ve mistreated can really do us harm.

Or, as Abraham Lincoln said, “I’d like to have God on my side, but I need Kentucky.”

Homosexual Marriage

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics, Religion , , , , , , ,

I don’t care much if homosexuals, a small percentage of the population, gain the right to marry. (The right to marry? What kind of a right is this?) In general, I don’t like the idea that an activist minority can use the armed power of the state to force a cultural change at all, on a well identified majority. (Why no thave a court decree that lies are now included under the definition of “truth,” subject to fines and even to jail terms for recidivism?) I also don’t get all that agitated by the realization that civil union contracts can achieve the same objective, concrete ends, as marriage without hurting deeply the many.

At the same time, I think that both fear of the new and a simplistic reading of the Bible motivates many opponents of homosexual marriage. (By the way, given the California large majority vote on Proposition Eight, it has to include many Democrats, not just Republicans.) I am no theologian but I have trouble imagining a God who loses sleep over the fact that some men love men (and act upon it) or that some women love women (and act upon it). After all, that was His indifferent design that did it.

I am not much concerned either about the example it will set if the right to homosexual marriage becomes the law in the whole country as it is already in several states. I don’t think we are on the eve of seeing a woman marry her two Chihuahuas, one male, one female, for example. The spread of polygamy is a greater possibility. One form, polygeny, might turn out to be OK because there is a shortage of functioning males, I hear. I do believe in slippery slopes though. I have to because I am a three-times former smoker.

Whichever way the Supreme Court decision comes down, I will easily live with it. My friendship for the homosexuals of both sexes I have known and who care about the decision makes this acceptance even easier. (That’s the way it is: Principles regarding abstractions tend to melt a little in contact with the warmth of flesh and blood of real people.) Homosexual activists are not, however making friends with me by their insistence of having the Court (or the courts) overturn the results of a well established democratic process. I mean California Proposition Eight (against which I voted).

Deep inside my brain, there is also a vague notion that the issue does not reduce to morality or to tolerance. It has to do with some very basic structures of human thought based on dualities. I don’t have a good grasp of this. I will wait until I do to discuss the topic (unlike some visitors on this blog who will say anything twenty seconds after it comes to mind.)

FDR, Uncle Fred, and the NRPB

Warren Gibson Economics, History, Law, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged, government officials regulate the economy through something called the Bureau of Economic Planning and Natural Resources. She clearly chose that name to reflect their belief that productive people were bound to produce just because of their “conditioning” and could therefore be treated pretty much like coal in the ground—as resources ripe for exploitation.

One wonders whether she had ever heard of the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB). The NRPB was a real agency, part of the kaleidoscope of bureaus that formed the New Deal. Its history is in some ways as dry as dust, but a closer look reveals some interesting and timeless insights into the planning mentality and the role of personalities in shaping history.

The philosophy underlying Roosevelt’s New Deal, if one can call it that, was to try something and if it didn’t work, try something else. In that same spirit the NRPB mission changed frequently; even its name changed four times before it was killed in 1943. It had been authorized as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, but that program was ruled unconstitutional in 1935, leaving the National Planning Board, as it was called then, in danger of extinction. It was quickly rescued by FDR, however, and established as an independent agency. Casting about for a new name, one planner suggested “natural resources,” whereupon another commented that human beings were America’s most important resource. “National Resources” was suggested. The President chewed the phrase over a few times, then, pleased with its sound, grinned and announced, “That’s it. Get that down, boys, because that’s settled.” Continue reading →

Liblogic

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

Again (AGAIN) the Midwest is trying to operate in spite of a major snowfall. Its’ a snowfall of extraordinary magnitude for the season according to many of those who know.  And, I have not heard or read any meteorologist arguing that, on the contrary, it’s a normal snowfall for the first week of Spring.

Snow is cold. This cold wave is yet another proof of the reality of a global warming trend that threatens civilization and, beyond it, Earth itself. Of course, this trend is the result of noxious human activities. It’s a done deal that there cannot be any other cause.

If you don’t see that the more industry and cars, the more cold, and the more cold, the more  warming, you are just uneducated or stubborn, or both.

By the same reasoning, the unseasonal cold makes fuels, including natural gas, less essential to human happiness. The president, served by the supine press, must see the current snow storm in the Midwest  as a signal to  redouble its efforts to prevent the rational utilization of America’s abundant fuel resources.

Got it?

There is a pleasant-looking guy in his forties  who often suns himself close to my coffee shop at the beach. He admires my grand-daughter. Of course, I took this to imply that he is a man of taste and discernment. We fell into casual conversation recently about a book I was holding. The conversation quickly turned casually political.

He is an Obama supporter. This being the People Socialist Green Republic of Santa Cruz, it would be surprising if he were not. So, I pried a little.

It took my beach acquaintance a few minutes to fold to the default option that President Obama at least looked presidential. He couldn’t name a single Obama achievement of which he was proud or satisfied. (I had unfairly deprived him of the opportunity to mention Obamacare by designating it  a Pelosi victory.) This is not the fist time I hear Obamites refer to the president’s looks. It’s not clear how you turn such people around. Update: I don’t mean that I hope to turn all, or many around, just a small percentage would do, pehraps 3%..

Suntan Joe was seething with hatred of President Bush. This is remarkable five years later. Curiously, it did not seem to be about the Iraq War. I sense that the antipathy runs deeper, that it’s akin to what some chimps feel about a designated other chimp with an unusual facial expression perhaps. That is also hard to beat.

Since the Republican defeat last November, I have been perplexed by the post-mortem analyses of people I usually trust. I feel that they are off the mark because they are too obvious perhaps, too logical. I am not doing better myself.

A Free Market in Medical Services

Fred Foldvary Economics, Law, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

There are two directions for the reform of the U.S. medical services systems. One is towards welfare statism, the control of the medical system by the federal government, and the other is towards economic freedom, providing individuals and families a free choice in medical care.

Economic theory points to a pure free market providing the most productive and equitable economy and therefore medical services. Central planners lack the knowledge to efficiently allocate resources, and politics skews the outcome towards special interests.

Here are the reforms need to have a really free market in medical services: Continue reading →

Unemployment: What’s To Be Done?

Warren Gibson Economics, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them.

There have been huge advances in technology and substantial declines in trade barriers in recent years. While these developments have raised living standards they have been hard on people whose skills were rendered obsolete or uncompetitive. When changes evolve gradually, as when so many people left farming in the last century, the disruption is not so great. Changes are now coming faster and are extending to some high-paid professional jobs. Automated systems can now handle at least the routine aspects of some legal research and medical diagnosis.

Time and time again new doors have opened to workers as old doors closed. Machines replace workers, but they raise productivity and produce new employment opportunities. We can expect this pattern to continue for a long time to come. Still, it is within the realm of possibility that robots and computers could take over so much work that the demand for human workers would shrink drastically. But those very machines would mean higher productivity and thus higher living standards.

A great deal of work can be now be done remotely, providing an advantage to areas with low living costs. Substantial outsourcing of such jobs to foreign countries has occurred (though that trend may be reversing as low-cost areas of the United States become competitive and as customer dissatisfaction and problems with managing offshore workers come up). The benefits of outsourcing and other productivity enhancements are spread across all consumers, but the job losses are concentrated among small and sometimes vocal minorities. Continue reading →

Afghanistan, Conservatives and Libertarians. Telling off the King.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

There is an upsurge of hostility to the war in Afghanistan in conservative circles. Thus, the Independent Institute, an organization I have been supporting modestly but faithfully for years has a spate of statements against our anti-Taliban operations there. It’s understandable but disappointing.

Part of the reason for some conservative reserve is simply childish tit-for-tat: “You libs berated Bush about his war, in Iraq; the shoe is on the other foot and we will berate you about Obama’s war in Afghanistan.” It matters not to this mindset that it’s only Obama’s war in the trivial sense that he is not using his powers to withdraw.

The main cause of the upsurge of hostility comes from the strong libertarian component in our midst. Libertarians, by definition, dislike big government. They observe, correctly, that every war enlarges the importance and the power of government in relation to civil society, to society in general. They assert further that the taxation capability governments acquires in war time – largely with the help of the suspension of criticality occasioned by patriotism – is seldom rolled back. Thus, war means irreversible growth of the state and a corresponding shrinking of individual liberties. Hence, libertarians tend to be reflexively isolationists.

Of course, I think this is all true. However, this is only part of the story. It’s futile to ignore the concrete, short-term questions facing this country with respect to its involvement in Afghanistan. Here are three: Continue reading →

Unemployment: What Is It?

Warren Gibson Current Events, Economics, Liberty, Politics , , ,

Unemployment has regained center stage now that the debt crisis has receded from that position, at least for a time. Unless things change dramatically over the next year unemployment will be the number one issue in the forthcoming presidential election. Hardly any proposal will escape being labeled “job-killing” or “job-creating” or both.

To begin with some basics, what is work and what is a job? For economists, work is any activity that we would not perform without tangible compensation, usually money. In our work lives almost all of us are also motivated by nonmonetary considerations, and to the extent we diverge from the most remunerative activity available to us, we are blending work and leisure. A retired person who takes up college lecturing may do the work primarily for the satisfaction it brings. If his salary were withdrawn and he continued to teach, he would be enjoying leisure.

The goal of all economic activity is consumption, which to economists means not just mundane goods like faster cars but also “noble” ends like cathedrals. Jobs are therefore not ends in themselves, as much as public discussion would suggest otherwise. They are means to acquire income to be used for consumption and saving, in addition to personal satisfaction, learning opportunities, or socializing.

A person who lacks a job is unemployed if he or she wants work, has suitable skills, and has realistic expectations about compensation. These are vague terms; they make unemployment a murky concept. That goes double for underemployment, though both remain very real phenomena. Continue reading →

Some introductory links

muricaderp Law, Links, Politics , , , ,

It’s a great privilege and honor to be invited to write at Notes On Liberty. Brandon’s invitation for me to join the team actually came as something of a pleasant surprise, since my economic politics tend to fall pretty far to the left of the consensus here. I cast a straight libertarian ticket in the 2000 general election (the first election in which I was eligible to vote) and I voted for Gary Johnson last year, but I much more often vote for Democrats, generally because I find the social and civil liberties policies advanced by their Republican opponents absolutely frightening and the economic policies advanced by their Libertarian opponents naive, unduly dogmatic and hence unfeasible.

That said, I believe I’m what one of my favorite bloggers, Fabius Maximus, usually regards less as an accurate self-description than as a self-serving pretension: a true nonpartisan. Fabius occasionally posts survey data indicating that the incidence of nonpartisanship in the electorate is exaggerated, an exaggeration that he attributes largely to voters’ desire to be hip. By contrast, one of my most common reactions to the two major US political parties (probably to the annoyance of many of my Facebook friends) is that they’re both overdue for the federal death penalty, and that there’s room for both of them on the prison van to Terre Haute. There’s a certain facetiousness and poetic license to my peddling of this imagery, but it does not exaggerate the disgust and exasperation that I all too often have with the behavior of both parties, and especially that of their leaders.

I’ll probably have more on that theme in future posts. Tonight, however, I’m going to devote the rest of this post to links that I’ve found inspirational, resonant, or too ghoulish to resist, from various corners of the internet. The only caveat is that the links are going to have a more disjointed appearance than they would in a standard list format; I like to provide some context for links that I include in my writing, especially since the links themselves can be longer than some readers have time to read, so tonight I’ll be providing a synopsis for each.

Fabius Maximus

Fabius Maximus is the pseudonym of a geopolitics blogger who, as far as I can tell, is based in the Washington, DC area and employed in something pertinent to the federal government, although he is extremely coy about himself. His tone can be authoritative and brash, rather like a less screechy literary version of John McLaughlin, and he can be very cynical. But cynicism, I’d say, is warranted in times such as ours, particularly as an antidote to the saccharine earnestness that many mainstream journalists and commentators seem to regard as the only appropriate approach to the world.

The liberty of local bullies

This piece by Noah Smith is one of the most provocative broadsides on Ron Paul and libertarianism that I’ve found. It takes a more strident tone than I’d be inclined to take, but I have to support any essay that includes the phrase “my freedom to punch you in the face curtails quite a number of your freedoms.” That’s a pretty succinct articulation of one of my longstanding critiques of the libertarian movement and likeminded classically liberal movements abroad: that they all too often ally themselves with thieves and other unsavory, predatory characters. These unholy alliances strike me as a big reason that libertarianism has such trouble gaining popular traction as an alternative to the two-party status quo, manifested by the tendency of Libertarian Party candidates to win less than five percent of the vote in three-way contests. This is a very unfortunate situation, if for no other reason because libertarians are damn near the only people willing to take a serious stand against the erosion of civil liberties in the United States.

The Lazarus File

A Case So Cold It Was Blue

Dateline NBC, formerly a respectable news magazine, has taken to devoting Friday nights to lengthy reviews of sordid murders, a great thing for those of us who find that Keith Morrison’s hushed tones and ever more skeletal face appeal to our dubiously maudlin tastes. I don’t see why I shouldn’t do the same, especially for a case involving Brandon’s fellow Bruin, LAPD Detective Stephanie Lazarus.

I actually don’t remember whether I’ve ever seen a Dateline NBC special on Lazarus or just saw the 48 Hours version, but the pieces above, in the Atlantic and Vanity Fair, respectively, are better in any event. (I can’t exactly recommend my own television viewing habits.) The Lazarus case wasn’t spectacular just because the suspect (since convicted and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison) was a highly regarded police detective. The intricacy and sensitivity of the investigation were also far beyond what I’ve ever seen a broadcast account do justice. The investigation was started by a cold case squad at the Van Nuys Division (in the provinces by LAPD standards) before being reassigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division, the elite squad at LAPD headquarters that is responsible for high-profile murder investigations. That posed an even touchier problem: Stephanie Lazarus worked across the hall from RHD at Parker Center and was friendly with many of the division’s detectives. The detectives ultimately chosen for the case, Dan Jaramillo and Greg Stearns, were in effect chosen because they were out of the loop socially. (Judging from their portrait in Vanity Fair, Det. Stearns is also out of the loop sartorially, and proudly so. The portrait suggests that those two are classics, and know it.) On the morning of the arrest, teams were posted in Simi Valley, Lazarus’ hometown, with sealed envelopes instructing them to execute search warrants on her house and car. One of their colleagues surreptitiously trailed Lazarus downtown on a Metrolink train. It was the LAPD at its best, in contrast to the original investigation of Sherri Rae Rasmussen’s murder, which was the LAPD at its most incompetent. Lyle Mayer, the lead detective in the original investigation, will be forever remembered as the idiot who let a murderer stick around at the LAPD for another 23 years after telling her victim’s father that he watched too much TV. (Unless he was crooked. Reasonable people disagree on this point.)

Government and Governance

Fred Foldvary Law, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Policy debates typically center around the role of markets versus the role of governments. But this is a misleading distinction. Human society always has governance. Private organizations such as corporations and clubs have management, rules, and financial administration similar in function to those of government. The difference is that private governance is voluntary, while state-based government is coercively imposed on the people within some jurisdiction. So a central question is not whether the market or the government can best accomplish some task, but whether the governance shall be voluntary or coercive.

The Market-Failure Doctrine

Most economists would agree that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. But the doctrine of market failure found in most economics textbooks fails to distinguish between consensual and coercive governance as correctives. The prevailing theory asserts that while markets might provide private goods efficiently in a competitive economy, markets fail to provide the collective goods that people want. There are two basic reasons offered as to why markets are not sufficient. Markets can easily determine the demand for private goods, but how can we tell how much each individual wants of a collective good? We could ask people how much they are willing to pay, but how do we get a truthful answer? Free riders also are a problem. Once the collective good is provided, folks can use it whether they pay or not, so why pay?

So, the market-failure story goes, markets fail to deliver collective goods. Entrepreneurs lack incentive because they can’t get their customers to pay for the service the way they can get people to pay for individually consumed private goods. Continue reading →

Rebirth of Competitive Federalism

ryancgorham Comments, Current Events, Liberty, Politics

Before I begin I have a confession, I am a Party man. That being said, I have ties to the Liberty movement beginning when I was at Florida State and I am well-versed in Libertarian Theory and the Austrian School. I believe in a concept, which was termed recently “Competitive Federalism”. I first heard the term used by former Senator Jim DeMint at a Gala for the James Madison Institute on Wednesday (March 13th). The Liberty Foundation recently released a report outlining the idea, written by Opportunity Ohio President Matt Mayer, linked above. Senator DeMint described the idea by discussing the on-going competition between Governors Rick Scott and Rick Perry over the State-level Job Creation numbers, working to create a business-friendly regulatory environment (history here and here). This healthy State versus State competition is what our Country needs to revitalize the economy and clean up the statutory mess at both the Federal and State level.

This idea has been something that I have been thinking about for a long time, through my search to define for myself where I stood on the political spectrum. Through college, there seemed to be a constant need for those politically involved or politically interested to define themselves with labels. What I discovered is my views aren’t all that hard to pin down, but there is no true label for them. Personally, I am conservative, but I don’t believe everyone must live their life how I choose to live mine. I espouse the belief that competitive federalism should guide our policy debate; as for many, I believe the Constitution is the guideline for which we were meant to restrain our Federal Government, and I believe the Federal level is not the place for the Social battles unless absolutely necessary.

Some battles are meant to be fought at the State level; if California as a State decides to vote for one issue and I don’t agree with it, I should have the ability to vote with my feet. This would create a much more hospitable environment in the movement as a whole, and open up the floor for the other issues looming over our heads. Winning the battles over these pertinent issues is the only way to move the National Discourse forward. While Social issues are vital to how we live our lives day-to-day, moving them back to the States where possible allows us to build a true coalition for issues such as Tax Reform, Governmental Spending, Education, Transportation, and Trade.

Look for more posts in my series on Labels and defining political views in a changing landscape in the coming weeks.