The Challenge for Libertarian Activists

Image by Captain CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSS via Flickr

In "Libertarian Democraphobia," an article by Will Wilkinson on his site (May 4, 2009), I found these especially cogent thoughts about the problems facing libertarian activists.

"...[L]ibertarians have done a terrible job countering the widespread suspicion that it's a uselessly abstract ahistorical ideology for socially retarded adolescent white guys... If libertarians are going to shift the politics of the countries we live in, we've got to get it through our thick skulls that many people have considered libertarian ideas and have rejected them for all sorts of decent reasons. We've got to take those reasons, and those people, fully seriously and adequately address them. Otherwise, we should probably just accept that libertarianism is a niche creed for weird people and reconcile ourselves to impotent, self-righteous grousing.... For my part, I'm going to continue to try to convince people that free markets and limited government are better than they might have thought."

Well said. The libertarian challenge is, and has been, and will be for a very long time, to persuade people to take it seriously as (at some level) an attempt to address practically and pragmatically the problem of governance. At the level the Founders operated--and that certainly wasn't minarchism, though it probably seemed that way to some at the time--it was a practical alternative offered after long hard thought about the very real problems and risks of governance, and it still is.

That's one reason I like the Reason Foundation/Magazine so much -- they spend almost all their effort thinking and talking about how, as a practical matter, one can move closer (even if incrementally) to a more peaceful, prosperous, and free society, in specific situations such as garbage collection, police protection, air traffic control, highway congestion and maintenance, career licensing, and on and on -- just the kinds of things most people would think libertarians have no ideas about, and just the kinds of things most libertarians aren't interested in. In this, they follow Milton Friedman, whose entirely practical and sensible book, Free To Choose, created many a libertarian.

But since libertarianism tries to limit government power, its political arm has never figured out how to attract workers willing to invest time and money and energy in running for offices they will attempt to limit in scope and power -- the opposite of why people typically get into politics. So libertarianism attracts too many people who simply enjoy the arguments and ignore the question of how to move forward, which is why so many libertarians spend so much energy arguing among one another about who's more libertarian than the other. I remember one libertarian-minded pol whose reaction to someone who said "I like some of your positions, but I have problems with these other positions," was to focus on where they agreed, and build on that -- most libertarians will instantly jump on the area of disagreement and start an argument, which is dumb.

Sigh. Thank goodness there are a few free-market thinktanks pushing to convince voters and bureaucrats of the value of their ideas.

One thing I'd like to see pursued is the ideas of a 19th-century French politician who, in arguing against some socialist proposals, pointed out that a government that allows itself to be tasked with fixing every single problem put before it is a government setting itself up for failure. As hard as it is to keep peace and security among the citizens, it's got to be even harder to make them love one another, be happy, and have their many contradictory ways must surely be a formula for disaster. The US military, oddly enough, following Vietnam learned the lesson of failure, and until Iraq had dragged its feet about being sent off to pursue war -- they knew how easy it was to screw it up and then catch the blame. If only politicians could be so wise. If only we could encourage them to think so.

mac

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Interpreting the Constitution

“Let me put it this way; there are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution -- try to discern as best we can what the framers intended or make it up. No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless interpretive methodologies are tied to the original intent of the framers, they have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores. To be sure, even the most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as all methodologies and human institutions are; but at least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial.”

I agree with that. Apparently, nobody who either picks or votes on nominees for any courts at any level agree. They seem mostly to prefer justices who will come to the "right" conclusions, then figure out an argument to support that. Which is easy for lawyers to do, as they are trained in this art.

But another way to look at it is that the Founders tried to establish a Constitution on *principles* that would yield the "right" results.

They included the proviso that future generations could argue the point, and with the presumed wisdom of hindsight, amend the Constitution in light of new insights. They didn't make it easy to amend the Constitution, because they feared (from experience) the populist rush to judgement of political enthusiasms, especially ones inflated with the aid of political and partisan pressure.

We, those future generations, have turned out to be impatient with considered judgement, and keep finding ways around the Constitution instead. Interpretation in light of new insights is the most popular one currently. Simply ignoring the plain intent of the Constitution is often popular too -- just look at the First Amendment, which flatly says "Congress shall make NO LAWS," then haul out a hefty volume of Congressional restrictions, aids, controls, and interferences with the freedom of speech and of the press. All they needed was to invent mumbo jumbo about how radio, and later TV, were not covered under the Constitution because the airwaves were "owned" by "the people" and they were wide open to whatever mischief they wished. And that's just the First Amendment. Any libertarian could cite other examples now widely accepted as appropriate roles for a government that was, in the Constitution, apparently (per the words) but not actually (per the laws since passed) forbidden to engage, or not given the authority to meddle in.

Got a Constitution that limits your power, Mr. Politician and Mr. Bureaucrat? Nooo problemo! All you need is excuses why the plain language of the Constitution doesn't apply, and you can exercise all the power you wish, in every aspect of the private lives of citizens! Power given you by -- you! No Constitution need apply!

It's an ongoing tragedy that Thomas, one of the best and wisest and most focussed Supreme Court justices we've ever had, continues to suffer from the calumnies and slanders of the past.

Get Government Out of the Marriage Business

Image via Wikipedia

A friend sent this email:

I honestly don't think I'll ever buy another one of his books. When I find someone this disgusting, I don't want my money to line their pockets.

Disappointing.

http://www.mormontimes.com/mormon_voices/orson_scott_card/?id=1586

(in which author Orson Scott Card takes the arch-conservative position that gays can't be married).

My response:

..But not surprising. Card is a Mormon; he's echoing his church's position - which is also the Catholic Church's position. There are lots of people who feel this way. Changing the law won't change their minds; they'll just organize until, this being an approximate democracy, they change it back. And so it will go, back and forth, back and forth, as various faction seize government power to enforce their view.

Image via Wikipedia Jewish marriage contract specifying duties of each partner

The only intelligent thing Card says in his diatribe is this: "The laws concerning marriage did not create marriage, they merely attempted to solve problems in such areas as inheritance, property, paternity, divorce, adoption and so on." Actually, this is true, or it should be true. IMHO, the state should not "define" marriage, or otherwise involve itself in this fundamentally religious concept. It should only establish legal requirements, obligations, and rights among people who choose to engage in a union of this kind. Leave the arguments over "marriage" to the churches, for those who care so much about it.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This is just another area where the government should get itself out of religion; it cannot be resolved by law -- people's minds can't be changed by majority rule. Back in the before time, the religious busied themselves demanding the government take sides in deciding which was the True Religion, and which therefore deserved legal benefits denied other religions (or nonreligions) including tax support. This argument went on for centuries and was only resolved when the government got out of the business of religion. It's still a problem in other parts of the world where religious fanatics demand the government take sides. Preferably their side. We cannot win a war defined in this way; so we have to do what the Founders did: change the definition of the war.

Image via Wikipedia

Civil unions for all; marriage for the churches; peace and quiet for the rest of us.

mac

Does Regulation Prevent Financial Fraud? (or make it more likely?)

By Carl Close on Apr 20, 2009 in Money and Banking, Regulation

From The Independent Institute

Predictably, the Bernie Madoff financial scandal has prompted calls for stricter regulation of the investment industry, just as the collapse of the Manhattan Capital hedge fund led to calls, by the Securities and Exchange Commission and others, for new anti-fraud regulations in 2004. If those regulations reduced fraud significantly, they would seem to be a reasonable solution to a real problem, but at least two assumptions underlying the SEC’s proposal in 2004 were dead wrong, according to financial journalist Chidem Kurdas, writing in the lead article of the Winter 2009 issue of The Independent Review.

First, government regulators already possessed the ability to detect fraud at Manhattan Capital. Hence, the extra benefit of the SEC’s proposal was unclear. (Was the SEC engaging in a bureaucratic cover-up or trying to justify a larger budget?) Second, securities regulations themselves can increase the likelihood that an investment will turn sour: by lulling investors into thinking their funds are more secure than they really are, regulations reduce the incentive to closely monitor one’s investment.

Wishful thinking can undermine the diligence of investors and regulators alike, but there’s often a big difference in the consequences of their respective mistakes, Kurdas argues. When investors fail, everyone tends to learn from their mistakes; but when regulators fail, new regulations are proposed, and investors are not given stronger incentives to learn.

“The conventional response of boosting government watchdogs magnifies the impact of their mistakes while reducing both the watchdogs’ and the public’s incentive to learn,” writes Kurdas. “It creates a vicious spiral of more regulation, regulatory failure, and even more regulation.”

[You can follow Kurdas’s insights on mutual funds and hedge funds, respectively, at MutualFundSmarts.com and HedgeFundSmarts.com.]

State Governments Have Themselves to Blame for Deficits

Reason Foundation's Adam Summers and Michael Flynn write:

"In the five years between 2002 and 2007, combined state general-fund revenue increased twice as fast as the rate of inflation, producing an excess $600 billion.

"If legislatures had chosen to be responsible, they could have maintained all current state services, increased spending to compensate for inflation and population growth, and still enacted a $500 billion tax cut.

"Instead, lawmakers spent the windfall.

"From 2002 to 2007, overall spending rose 50 percent faster than inflation. Education spending increased almost 70 percent faster than inflation, even though the relative school-age population was falling. Medicaid and salaries for state workers rose almost twice as fast as inflation."

Think of this the next time your state government demands more money. And p.s. the next time your school officials demand more more and cry over having to cut any spending at all. And your local governments too, don't think they aren't doing the same thing to you taxpayers!

Pet Peeve: Mixed Math Metaphors in News Stories

Pet peeve: News articles citing data in ways that make easy comparisons harder. They'll say, as a recent news article about birth rates among immigrants did, that 16% of one group was doing this, while "1 in 5" was doing that. So the reader has to mentally convert 1 in 5 to 20% to be able easily to compare it to the earlier 16% figure.

The reporter did this twice more in the same article -- used percentages at one end of a sentence, and some other form of proportions at the other end.

There is no useful news-information reason for doing this. It is done so commonly because writers learn not to be repetitive in the ways they express things. So saying "16% did this while more than 25% did that" seems dull to them. So they switch math metaphors midstream.

Another reason to work this way is that the reporter may have an exact-seeming figure -- 16% -- but his other piece of data isn't presented to him as "25%" but as an approximation -- "one in five" is a very general number, so comparing 16% to 25% implies a higher degree of precision in the latter number than is really there. That sounds reasonable -- but this is a bad workaround because it makes the reader work harder to do the comparison -- and too many readers are marginally innumerate as it is. A better solution would have been "16% of this, versus about 25% of that."

No, this happens far too often for any other explanation than writing style triumphant over clear, useful writing.

Another sin is using various kinds of numbers in various places in ways that, if you try to compare the numbers and do some basic math on them, they just don't make sense. I remember an article in Newsweek many years ago -- one of the then-common studies of the poor, underearning farmer in America -- where the data presented about the number of farmers and their revenues and government grants seemed to add up to a million dollars a year in earnings. If there was a reason this made them poor, the article didn't bother to justify its numbers. And when I complained in a letter to Newsweek -- this was back in the postal-letter days -- I got a snippy, unhelpful reply that made it clear the editor had no idea what I was talking about. My conclusion: Newsweek, like so many other journals, was using data simply for decorative purposes. This is why graphs showing rises and falls in something are truncated to emphasize the variance. They're not trying to show true degree of change, they're trying to dramatize it. Which is, I'm sorry, simply bad journalism.

A final related problem is data dumps that make it clear that journalists themselves include sufferers from innumeracy, or maybe math laziness. This week's Computerworld (Apr 13, 2009) has editor Frank Hayes look closer at a study released by an outfit called The Alliance to Save Energy saying if the nation's 108 million PCs (half of them corporate PCs) were shut off at nights and weekends instead of being left on (as is common in corporate environments), the country could save $2.8 billion a year in energ costs. Hayes did the math that the reporters who wrote up this study for general release obviously failed to do, or it wouldn't have gotten much press: It works out to $26 savings per PC per year -- or 50 cents a week. Or: Trivial; "less than the cost of the two minutes of a typical employee's time each week, not to mention the four or five minutes waiting for the PC to turn back on each morning.

That may still be a useful savings in your mind, when you think about it, but you don't get to think about it because the reporter of the original study didn't bother doing the math, and therefore didn't present the story in a way that would let you think about the implications. He just carried water for the Alliance to Save Energy At All Costs. Bad reporter--bad!

Instead of Stimulus Pork--Stop Withholding for a Year!

Here's a wild, radical, yet somehow enormously appealing alternative to the multi-trillion-dollar stimulus packages being spent by Washington D.C.: Suspend the personal income tax for a year -- stop tax withholding from paychecks.

Crazy? Not really. The amount raised by personal income taxes each year is right around what the stimulus package will cost us. Instead of going to favored (or unfavored-by-the-market) industries with political pull -- the money would go into the pockets of every taxpayer in the country. Or, rather -- *stay* in our pockets.

Talk about a stimulus! Imagine if the 20% of so now withheld from your paycheck every payday were put back into your paycheck. That would help you and every neighbor you have, and right now, not months from now.

Check this out;