Politics

Election Reform: a Modest Proposal

Warren Gibson Politics , , , , ,

Texas and other states have passed laws requiring voters to present valid ID at their polling place.  How could this be controversial?  These days we have to present ID to get on Amtrak, pick up mail at the post office, transact with a bank teller, etc., etc.  Is proper ID any less important for voting?  But a court recently struck down the Texas law saying it impacts minorities disproportionately.  Hummph.  If laws against aggravated assault affect minorities disproportionately should those be overturned also?

But why bother about this issue?  There surely is some voter fraud happening, but how much does it matter?  The real problem with democracy is simply the results.  The worst get on top, as Hayek put it, Exhibit A being, of course, the Sewer Rat in the White House.  As the electorate has broadened, starting with white male landowners at the Founding all the way down to today’s situation where anyone with a pulse who is at least 18 and claims to be a citizen can vote, and with direct election of senators in between, the quality of elected officials has gone steadily downhill.  Barack Obama!  Harry Reid!  Mike Huckabee!  Nancy Pelosi!  Compare this crew with George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson.  Are you sick at your stomach yet?

Herewith a modest reform proposal:

  1. Raise the voting age to 30
  2. Disqualify all government employees and all recipients of any government entitlement: social security, medicare, etc.
  3. Adopt a stiff qualification exam, to be re-taken every five years
  4. Mandate a poll tax sufficient to cover election expenses

Let’s now consider objections one by one:

Objection: people would feel disenfranchised. People who lost their vote would be bummed, no doubt, but they would still have the prospect of earning a vote to aspire to.  Voting would be seen as a privilege to be earned, and the quality of votes cast would skyrocket as would the quality of campaign rhetoric.

So as not to cause too much upset, the voting age could be raised gradually and the poll tax raised in steps.

Objection: corruption. It might be worthwhile for special interests to track down individual voters and offer them bribes or intimidation.  But if the voter roles were shrunk by a factor of a thousand, for the sake of argument, that would still leave a hundred thousand or so voters nationwide.  That leaves quite a bit of effort for lobbyists and other crooks to track them all down.

Besides, corruption is proportional to the amount of power that resides with government.  Regulation of lobbyists, campaign reform and all that will never mean anything as long as so much money and power are at the disposal of politicians.  My voter reform proposal will lead to a drastic shrinkage of government and thus drastically reduced rent-seeking opportunities and incentives.

Furthermore, as things stand with campaign promises.  How much worse would outright cash bribes be?

Objection: bias. Outcomes would be skewed toward the viewpoints of the eligible voters, which would not be representative of the general population.  Exactly!  The whole point is to restrict voting to an elite who can think and act rationally and not be swayed by the sort of demagogic appeals we hear from the aforementioned politicians and their ilk.

Is this idea likely to gain traction?  Not any time soon, but it’s fun to speculate.  An interesting alternative is Fred Foldvary’s “cellular democracy.”  Perhaps he’ll be moved to post that idea here.

Ron Paul’s Legacy

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , ,

Ron Paul will not get to speak at the GOP convention, but his legacy will hard to miss over the next decade of American politics. His son is now a Senator in Kentucky, and his Audit the Fed bills have lots of bi-partisan support (in the House anyway; Senators, for some strange reason, seem to like the Federal Reserve an awful lot).

His foreign policy, which initially attracted me to libertarian ideas, is the most important legacy, however. I can tell because the GOP loathes it so much that they won’t give Congressman Paul the time of day they know they need for his support.

From Foreign Policy: Continue reading →

From the Comments: Keynesian Economics and the Stimulus Bill

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events, Economics, Politics , ,

A recent brouhaha has erupted in the comments thread of Dr. Delacroix’s post on Obama’s bad economic policies. Now, to be sure, the bad economy cannot be put on Obama’s shoulders alone. All he did was sign the stimulus act into law, after all, and I doubt John McCain would have vetoed it.

Let us also not forget about the two foreign wars that George W. Bush charged to the republic’s credit card, either. With that being said, I thought another economic chart would do readers of this blog a favor. From AEI’s blog comes this:

Ta-dah! Utter economic failure.

(h/t Steve Horwitz)

Obama’s Economic Policies: What’s Wrong, in a Nutshell

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Economics, Politics , ,

People are overwhelmed by the avalanche of bad news, and of news in general. It’s difficult to stop long enough to summarize objections to the new economic policies fostered by Presidents Obama and Pelosi.  Besides, if you tried, you might just strangle with horror and indignation. I made the effort. Here it is:

Pres Obama wants to re-distribute wealth when the amount of wealth available to re-distribute  is dwindling. It’s never happened, I think, in any democratic, market-oriented country before. Normally, you wait for a period when wealth is growing.

Pres Obama insists on an expensive stimulus package that will do, and has done little to stimulate the economy. Keynesian economics is largely wrong. This is Keynesian economics at its worst. It’s not even defensible by Keynesian standards.

Pres Obama choses a severe economic downturn to force us as a nation to try and do things we don’t know how to do. This includes switching from proven energy technologies such as coal and petroleum-based technologies to unproven ones such as air and wind technologies. It includes also constructing a satisfactory national health system, something no country has done. Normally, whenever you try something new, you make mistakes. You need a margin of error. You need to be reasonably rich. You don’t want to do it on a tight budget or when you are close to poverty.

Pres Obama is not evil. He has something I have seen hundreds of times in academia: He knows what he thinks he knows and he does not know anything else. He is narrow-minded and dogmatic. The more intelligent the person, the more stubborn in his narrow-mindedness and in his dogmatism. A less intelligent person would have the virtue of self-doubt, “Wait a minute, am I doing the right thing?”

Perplexing: There is an international media consensus  to the effect that the current global economic crisis was made in America. Yet, I detect no rise in anti–Americanism abroad. This would be a good time to be pissed off at us but, I don’t see it anywhere.

I wrote on this blog about “European Anti-Americanism.”  I suggested it was mainly based on envy. Perhaps, I was right: Others like us better when we are down and hurting. What do you think?

Recently, I mentioned the sentencing of a 75-year old woman to a whipping, in Saudi Arabia. I promised that I would check for indignant reactions on the part of Muslims. I have seen nothing on the website of the American Muslim Council and nothing of the website of the Islamic Society of North America.  I haven’t found anything either on French Muslim sites.

Of course, it’s disturbing. I would like it if someone told me that I am wrong and that I searched in the wrong places. I know I have Muslim readers. Get on your feet and do what’s right.

[Editor’s note: this essay first appeared on Dr. Delacroix’s blog, Bay Watch, on March 26th 2009]

Don’t Vote?

Brandon Christensen Politics , , ,

Philosopher Jason Brennan gives us a thought exercise concerning voting:

Imagine 12 people are serving on a jury in a murder case. The prosecution and defense present evidence and call witnesses. The court asks the jury to reach a verdict. They find the defendant guilty.

Suppose four of the jurors paid no attention during the trial. When asked to deliberate, they were ignorant of the details of the case. They decided more or less at random.

Suppose four of the jurors paid some attention to the evidence. However, they found the defendant guilty not on the basis of the evidence, but on wishful thinking and on bizarre conspiracy theories they happen to believe.

Suppose four of the jurors paid attention to the evidence. However, they found the defendant guilty because he is an atheist, while they are Christians. Like many Americans, the jurors trust atheists no more than they trust rapists.

Do read the whole thing to find out why voting in a mass democracy is not necessarily something that should be automatically assumed to be good (or to go to war over, for that matter).

Co-blogger Warren Gibson has a great take on voting as well.

Criticizing the Right

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics , ,

There has been lots of attention on this blog geared towards the hypocrisy of the Left, and I think that it is justified, but all too often we have been giving the Right a pass. I think this has to do with the fact that the Left holds the presidency, but I still think it’s appropriate to remind readers that libertarianism is of neither the Left nor the Right. Philosopher Jason Kuznicki does just this in a brilliant post:

Scrutinize your own side too. Take a hard look at cushy “privatization” deals that really just funnel power and money directly into private corporations’ hands. As a certain liberal recently observed, the way to privatize a prison isn’t to give imprisonment power to a corporation. It’s to stop imprisoning so many people, then sell off the property. About which more below […]

But other restrictions exist. Many of them bite even harder.

Consider immigrants. In particular, if our free market is so great, why do you work so hard to exclude immigrants from it? Is the immigrant laborer less a moral self-fashioner than the Wall Street banker? I wouldn’t say so. He’s clearly at least as motivated. If the immigrant wants to make a life in America — why not let him?

Mr. Ryan recently proclaimed that the United States is the only nation founded on an idea. It’s a common conservative theme, and even if it’s not 100% accurate, I’m certainly sympathetic to it. But we are founded on an idea if and only if our borders remain open to all who share that idea. The moment we start checking for purity of blood, we become a tribalist nation-state just like so many others. Not founded on an idea, but on accidents of birth—and in fact standing squarely against the idea that all people should be the authors of their own lives.

You can read the rest here.

Again, I suspect that much of the vitriol aimed at the Left on this blog (mostly by myself and Dr. Delacroix and something that probably has to do with our previous, sovereign associations with that side of the aisle) is due to the fact that it currently occupies the White House, but it’s nice to remind readers that the Right is very hypocritical as well.

For more on immigration, see Hermanos* and Immigrants: A Story Pregnant with Deep Meaning.

For more on “privatization”, see Who Stole Our Trillions? and An Ominous Expansion of Eminent Domain.

For more criticism of the Right, see Ugly Conservative Sacred Cows and Blissful Ignorance….

From the Comments: The Climate Change Cult

Jacques Delacroix Comments, Current Events, Politics , , ,

I reread your paragraph, Travis:

“I can see Delacroix’s point that a few un-peer-reviewed sources make one question what other sources are also un-reviewed, but it seems absurd to me to throw out all the information in all of the chapters of the IPCC report because it contains one un-peer-reviewed source. The chapter-leads who ultimately allowed the un-reviewed source to enter the IPCC report are not in charge of other chapters, which are essentially independent manuscripts, so why arbitrarily distrust them as well?”

You seem to say that the process by which papers (peer-reviewed papers, another issue discussed above) are compiled within each chapter of the IPCC reports is like  Wikipedia’s process for each of its entries.

Would you say that IPCC is as open to revision as Wikipedia is? I mean only revision by means of serious peer-reviewed papers. Suppose someone produced a study using good methods and trustworthy data and had it peer-reviewed (say on Mars). Suppose further the study concluded that there has been no real appreciable global warming since 1780. Do you think that there is a likelihood that the new study would be incorporated into the next IPCC report? What likelihood: 100%, 75%, 50%, 5%?

This is a real question for Travis . I don’t know if Travis is listening so, anyone besides Travis should feel free to answer it.

[Editor’s note: you can find the context of this post in discussions found here and here]

Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand: What’s the Connection?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links, Politics , , , , ,

I will admit up front that the only Ayn Rand novel I’ve read (so far) has been Anthem. I liked it. It reminded me of Brave New World and 1984. A lot of books came out at around the same time as Anthem that had themes of the struggle between totalitarianism and the individual. Recent commentary has focused on Rep. Ryan’s connections with the late, great author, though, and Will Wilkinson does a great job of summing them all up in a post over the Economist. An excerpt:

In practice, arguments like Mr Black’s and Ms Walsh’s tend to come to the silly idea that one’s ideological opponents are duty-bound (by their own lights!) to either unilaterally disarm or shut up. Heads, I win; tails, you lose. It’s a cheap trick. The argument as usually deployed also depends on a combination of lazy partisan Manichaeism and the naive practice of taking politicians at their word. Paul Ryan is an elected official whose views therefore fall squarely within the ambit of conventional political wisdom. Despite his professed admiration for Ayn Rand, and the ardent wishes of his admirers and detractors alike, Mr Ryan is far from a laissez faire radical.

Indeed. Do read the rest of the post here.

What are your thoughts on Ryan as Romney’s VP? Longtime reader Hank has shared his thoughts here. Personally, I agree with Hank and I don’t think the nomination matters all that much, and I share libertarian sentiments that Rep. Ryan is hardly a fiscal conservative, but I am also curious as to what you think.

Apologies and Reaffirmations

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events, Politics , , ,

My co-blogger Dr. Gibson alerted me to the rudeness of my tone regarding Dr. Delacroix in a previous post. Dr. Gibson rightly admonished me for three things:

  1. Using the term “Dr. J” instead of the formal Dr. Delacroix
  2. My insinuation that anybody who disagrees with my observations is insane or irrational
  3. My accusation of demagoguery on Dr. Delacroix’s part

I am guilty of all three of course. I referred to Dr. Delacroix as Dr. J because it is a self-administered nickname he gave himself on his other blog, Facts Matter (it’s on the right-hand side under “links”), and he has not objected to me using it before. I took Dr. Gibson’s critiques in stride and have made the corrections. I apologize again.

On point number two I shouldn’t have discounted the arguments in favor of imperialism or interventionism so brusquely. I again apologize and have altered the text accordingly.

On point number three, though, I feel like I hit the nail on the head. Check out the following three posts by Dr. Delacroix and tell me if I went too far by labeling his arguments demagogic:

In these three posts Dr. Delacroix insinuates that all who disagree with him are anti-Semitic (knowingly or otherwise), immoral, and cowardly. What do you guys think?

I Am Bored So Here Is A Story

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , ,

I am not yet mentally ready to face squarely the fact that the Obama administration is going to do all the wrong things about our dire economy. Let me say again that Pres.-elect Obama is not the Anti-Christ. It’s just that you can’t implement policies the existence of which you don’t even suspect. Obama is a recognizable type. He is a Social-Democrat, European-style, circa 1970.

I am bored with current events. One more time, the Democratic Party has to deal with corruption in its Illinois branch. Reminder: a former Governor of Illinois is currently in jail. Gov. Blago was caught with his hand close to the cookie jar, not even inside. Big deal! The Democratic Party does not want to risk a special election to fill Obama’s Senate seat because of the tiny chance that a Republican might win. Makes me yawn.

The West Europeans are suffering from heating gas delivery cuts in the middle of the winter. Russia is cutting them off. My only reaction: It told you so, in the nineties!

The mayhem is continuing in Gaza. That’s boring too: Some Palestinian group gets up on a hill, pounds its chest, shoots in the direction of Israel with a .22, and promises aloud to obliterate the Zionist entity and to kill many Zionists. The Israelis get pissed off, they return fire with an M16. They kill hundreds of Palestinians; a handful of Israelis die. Then, anti-Semites worldwide join hands with mindless do-gooding tender-hearts and force Israel to stop. Everyone goes home until next time.

Hamas, lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood, with two broken legs, a skull fracture, and one eye missing declares victory. The Arab world cheers!

A question lazy journalists don’t ask: The current death rate of Gaza residents at the hands of Israel is comparable to the homicide rate of what country? (Relevant blog: Nationamasterblog.)

As I said, I am bored. I don’t seem to be the only one. Today at noon, every major television network showed us an empty room awaiting impeached Gov. Blago to arrive to make a meaningless declaration instead of broadcasting Gaza and surroundings.

You may be bored too so, here is a completely unrelated story. Continue reading →

Anti-Americanism: Lesson One, Europeans

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Politics , , , , , , , , , ,

Hostile liberal members of the American media have been repeating for years that the Bush presidency caused the prestige of the US in the world to decline sharply. In addition, they whine endlessly that the US is disliked pretty much more than it ever has been. I think tender-hearted liberal commentators are confusing several issues, some of which have nothing to do with Pres. G.W. Bush or with any of his policies.

As a person with a very good knowledge of another society and culture (France) and a pretty good understanding of several others (most of Latin America plus Spain), I may be able to help disentangle the impressions they are giving the general American public concerning their country’s popularity in the world. I also have better than average access to Germany and to Russia thanks to several long-term friendships.

I wish to begin by stating that I believe popularity is considerably overstated as a geopolitical resource. Governments do what they do largely on the basis of their calculated self-interest. Love of another country probably plays little role in the tactical alliances they form. (I must say that I could be talked into believing that there exists a sort of solidarity of kinship linking Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia with this country. This solidarity may contribute to making the public opinion of those democratic countries more tolerant of policies they don’t especially like than they would be absent the felt kinship.)  Continue reading →

Why Blog?

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

Blogging is very time consuming. It’s cutting seriously into the life of leisure for which I am so obviously gifted. I am certainly not trying to achieve fame. I renounced that particular kind of folly many years ago: It’s not worth it because you are likely to fail. It’s not even worth it when you succeed according to many tabloid stories.

I can’t even say I am terribly successful in terms of effect achieved.

Only 26 people at most read my most recent ambitious posting, “Fascism Explained”. Writing it took me the better part of two or three half-days. Its sequel, “How about Communism?” captured only a little less of my free time and it was read by the same small number of people at best.

My two biggest hits ever, “The Inauguration; the Hamas Victory” and “Advice to Pres. Obama on Manhood” were each read by 56 people maximum.

Why am I alienating my free time that way? Why this fairly futile effort on my part? I could be on my pretty boat on Monterey Bay catching suicidal and cognitively challenged fish. Or, I could simply be reading one of the books I have been wanting to read for weeks. I might even rub my wife’s feet instead. (She is a talented artist and a conservative who thinks Attila the Hun was kind of a girlie man. The only thing that reaches her nowadays is hard foot massaging.)

There is an answer to this multiply-worded single question above:  Continue reading →

The Minimum Wage and Stupid National Public Radio

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , ,

Two things on my mind this Bastille Day 2012. The first is who is more stupid, French leftists or American liberals? I have life-long knowledge of both tribes. At this point, I think French leftists are smarter but more dishonest that their American cousins. In general, there is a certain artlessness about deception in ordinary Americans. The French are often artful; can’t take that away from them.

The second matter on my mind is that constant struggle to avoid using nasty epithets in connection with liberals’ statements. One that keeps coming up is the simple “stupid.” I scrupulously avoid the word on this blog and in my other writings. Yet, there are informational events that sort of self-label with no escape possible. Here is one, below.

It’s shortly after 5 pm on Sunday July 10th 2012. I am in my pick-up truck listening to National Public Radio. (I know the combination is jarring.) There an in-depth discussion of the minimum wage. That’s always interesting. Conservatives make an apparently impeccable theoretical argument against: Minimum wage laws create unemployment among the most vulnerable categories of the work force. Liberals sometimes make sophisticated arguments for the minimum wage. Behind those, however, I always find the usual combination of mindless jeremiads of “sad” and “unfair.” But, it seems to me that the empirical evidence supporting the conservative position against minimum wages is on the thin side. Listening to a relaxed radio show from the Left could be a good way to find out more. Continue reading →

Liberal Authoritarianism: Independence Day, the Sequel

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , ,

This is Part Two of a report on my American Independence Day (Part one is “An Eventful American Independence Night.” It was posted on July 5th 2012.)

The best beach in Santa Cruz was cordoned off for the evening with plastic netting, and illuminated by powerful projectors. There were only a small number of narrow entry points where beach-goers were inspected individually for contraband. I don’t know if anyone was frisked but younger people were intimidated into answering questions they should not have to answer routinely according to my understanding of the Constitution. (I think law enforcement officers may not stop you at all without cause or probable cause.)

There were two kinds of contraband, possibly three. The first was obviously alcohol. Alcohol is outlawed on that beach at all times. I regret to admit that I think it’s a good policy. In the days before the prohibition, I had the feeling that the same beach was more dangerous to children. The “maybe” contraband would be weapons although I don’t understand by what authority a quasi-municipality, the harbor, and a county could jointly or separately restrict the citizens’ right to bear arms. Incredibly, it being the Fourth of July, Independence Day, the second kind of contraband was… fireworks.

Local government entities routinely ban fireworks for the Fourth of July. They ban fireworks in the towns were many houses are made of wood. They ban fireworks in brush and forest areas, reasonably enough. They also ban fireworks in the sand and on the water. Public safety specialists in the Santa Cruz area apparently believe that sand can burn and that the sea can go up in flames. Note that even the most fanatical local greenie will no affirm that the local seawater is so polluted that it will catch fire. (In fact, it ‘s not polluted at all, except very segmentally and only by concentrations of seabird shit. Bird dropping being natural, greenies should love them and not fear breathing them while swimming or swallowing them accidentally. But I digress in the most disgustingly self-indulgent manner!)

The local prohibition of fireworks makes me wonder how thousands of French villages, many quite a bit smaller than Santa Cruz, manage to offer a beautiful, complex fireworks to their citizens on Bastille Day, year after year. It makes me wonder why France has not yet been burned down to the tree roots and French beaches sand melted into glass. Of course, the French often have their fire department take charge of fireworks, even volunteer fire department. The system seems to work for everyone.

Someone will object that involving fire departments would cost money and that this is not a good time given that so many local entities are in dire financial straights. I don’t know about that. They did not rely on that obvious situation when they thought, and we thought, they were rich. And I don’t believe paying locally employed law enforcement officers time and half or more is economical. That’s not counting the private security employees hired for the occasion of this every labor-intensive endeavor. Why does the uncharitable thought cross my mind that providing overtime for public employees is one of the motivation behind the fireworks ban, possibly not a conscious one?

Later in the evening, leaving the scene in my truck was like moving across a city under martial law. There were law enforcement officers in the fog under the street lights at every crossroad directing traffic into unnatural patterns. One sent me into an eternal loop I could only escape by cheating. The police occupation continued much after the crowds had left the area.

A harbor guy I won’t name because it would be bad for this career confided to me that the real issue occasioning this vast deployment of armed force was concerns with possible mass rioting. I know a little the guy who said this. He strikes me as a reasonable person. He was not putting me on. This raises the question: Who would riot?

Santa Cruz is Silicon Valley’s beach town. Directly as my informer stopped talking I conceive visions of hordes of rowdy India-born hoodlums descending on my city, their pocket protectors bristling with non-pens pens of unknown usage. I could just see them in my mind’s eye sowing wi-fi havoc on our rudimentary 2010 !phones.

Or, maybe, just maybe, political correctness being what it is in this left-liberal region, this bastion of 1970s political culture, another fear underlaid the ban and the security measures. I don’t know that what came to my mind is true. It may just be speculation. Is it possible that the local authorities are afraid that the gangs from nearby towns such as Watsonville and Salinas would seize the opportunity of lose revelry to transform the beaches into battlefield where to continue their deadly wars ? Is it possible the same local authorities don’t have the internal fortitude to name the object of their fears? The problem is that upward of 99% of violent gang members seem to have Spanish surnames. Could it be that stating that they, the authorities close the beaches to contain gangs would be considered the sin of sins, racial profiling?

PS I like Santa Cruz Harbor a great deal. It’s this extreme rarity: a public entity with quasi-municipal powers that does not rely on taxes. It’s long overdue for my complimentary essay.

Chicken Fascism

Warren Gibson Culture, Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics , , , , ,

If anyone hadn’t yet gotten the message, the flap over Chick-fil-A ought to make it crystal clear that contemporary “progressives” are fascists, plain and simple.

The issue, of course, is the CEO’s statement in opposition to gay marriage, which has prompted a backlash across the country.  San Francisco’s mayor tweeted “Very disappointed #ChickFilA doesn’t share San Francisco’s values & strong commitment to equality for everyone” followed by “Closest #ChickFilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”

Wow. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to substitute “Closest Jews are 40 miles away and I strongly recommend they not try to come any closer.”  Mayor Lee would have fit right into 1930’s Nazi Germany.

The proper response to those who take offense at the CEO’s statement is a boycott, which just might work if Chick-fil-A were to set up shop in San Francisco.  It’s a totally different story when a mayor, backed by the armed might of the police, issues veiled threats against people who hold unpopular views.  This is a huge demonstration of our descent into fascism, right in front of our eyes.

By the way, do I recall correctly that the majority of California voters in 2008 approved Proposition 8 which banned gay marriage?