photo credit: ThreadedThoughts

In a not-particularly-surprising move, Arizona passed a very strict law giving police broad powers to crack down on illegal immigration. Equally unsurprising is the backlash from those who worry that rights will get trampled in the enforcement of this law. The biggest complaint is against the provision allowing police to stop anyone they suspect of being here illegally and have them prove that they are legal residents.

I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that such authority would never be abused. More disturbingly to me, 60% of people favor this law despite the fact that 58% of people in the same poll believe that the rights of some citizens will be infringed upon by the enforcement of this law. If we assume that all 40% of people who do not favor this law are among the 58% who fear the rights of citizens will be infringed then there is almost 1 in 5 who is willing to infringe on the basic rights of citizens in order to enforce our essentially arbitrary immigration laws.

Continue Reading

photo credit: ThreadedThoughts

In a not-particularly-surprising move, Arizona passed a very strict law giving police broad powers to crack down on illegal immigration. Equally unsurprising is the backlash from those who worry that rights will get trampled in the enforcement of this law. The biggest complaint is against the provision allowing police to stop anyone they suspect of being here illegally and have them prove that they are legal residents.

I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that such authority would never be abused. More disturbingly to me, 60% of people favor this law despite the fact that 58% of people in the same poll believe that the rights of some citizens will be infringed upon by the enforcement of this law. If we assume that all 40% of people who do not favor this law are among the 58% who fear the rights of citizens will be infringed then there is almost 1 in 5 who is willing to infringe on the basic rights of citizens in order to enforce our essentially arbitrary immigration laws.

Continue Reading

It’s interesting to watch as nothing turns into a news story. Here’s the roundup of one such process from this week.

Holly Richardson writes about Tim Bridgewater’s momentum. When she talks about his fund raising she doesn’t mention that over 80% of it was a loan to himself. Tim likes the coverage (naturally) and the next day he posts her article on his RedState diary. Tim gave all the proper attribution and everything – I’m not trying to accuse him of plagiarism. The day after that Thomas Burr writes that “Holly Richardson is boosting Tim Bridgewater’s campaign” over at RedState. Whether it was an oversight or a calculated move is open for speculation, but the fact is that Holly didn’t promote Tim over at RedState – unless she did so under Tim’s name. Finally, Tim gets to tweet about the article by Thomas Burr which declares how beneficial Holly’s support is.

So with a couple of nudges from Tim this little game of Chinese whispers has produced, with a little invented fact here (Holly promoting Tim on RedState) and a little omitted fact there (Tim providing almost all his own campaign funding), almost a week’s worth of positive coverage.

The point here is not to accuse Tim of anything untoward – it is to illustrate the cycle of coverage growing in a vacuum. Tim did nothing this week (at least nothing to garner more coverage in those articles) and yet he got a four days of positive news from a topic (fund raising numbers) that seemed to have died before Holly’s post.
Originally published at Pursuit of Liberty.

David Brooks must have thought yesterday was April Fools Day – that or he thinks he’s getting old so he decided to pen a column painting a rosy picture for seniors by coming to a senile conclusion. In The Geezers’ Crusade he comes to this wildly impossible conclusion:

It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution — millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.

Continue Reading

photo credit: jasoneppink

Back in October I wrote about the dangers of a crisis mentality and tried to show that the abuse of crisis was not a one-party trait. I see that Will Wilkinson did a better job of showing that this month in Let the next crisis go to waste:

The Aughts began in crisis when the second plane hit the second tower on Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush administration, loath to let a serious crisis go to waste, managed to parlay the nation’s alarm and credulity into an ill-conceived invasion of an entirely unrelated country, wasting over a trillion dollars and many tens of thousands of lives, all while losing control of the fight in Afghanistan and failing utterly to bring down Osama bin Laden.

Bush’s botched attempts to capitalize on crisis—the ugly aftermath to which Obama is heir—might have made an alert leader wary. But instead, Obama set up shop in the Oval Office and proceeded immediately to use crisis as (Emanuel’s words again) “an opportunity to do things you’d think you could not do.”

Rather than acting as a prudent guardian of the public good in a time of economic turbulence and hardship, Obama and the Democratic Congress have hurried to check the boxes on their partisan wish list precisely when the nation most needed a restorative break from transformative ambition.

Continue Reading

photo credit: United Nations Development Programme

These days everybody wants to help the poor people of Haiti – and that’s obviously a good thing but when I think about Haiti it makes me wonder what the proper course of action is for outside nations to help that struggling country. I’m not talking about the proper course of action to help after the earthquake last week – that’s relatively simple to answer: get aid in supplies and personnel on the ground quickly to restore order and save lives (even though it’s not an easy task). I’m talking about the real fundamental problems that have been plaguing the nation of Haiti as demonstrated by their history of the last 20 years.

In the last 20 years there have been four regular elections – the winner of all four has alternated between Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his good friend René Préval. As far as I understand they never ran against each other so this is not a matter of oscillating between political parties. Both times that Aristide was elected he was later exiled. The first time he was eventually returned to power thanks to U.S. intervention – the second time it was the U.S. that sent him into exile. Hence my question – what is to be done for Haiti?

Continue Reading

photo credit: Cambodia Trust

I drove in to work later than usual today and caught a bit of Glenn Beck. Like many conservative talk radio hosts I have heard he was promoting the value of gold as an investment. What caught my attention was the way he started out. I’m going to paraphrase here but essentially he started out by saying:

I don’t know what the future holds for this nation, nobody does. I don’t know what you should be investing in right now.

My immediate reaction was to say to myself that I know exactly what the vast majority of people should be investing in right now – they should each invest in themselves. To his credit Glenn said that gold was not the right investment for everyone and suggested that before investing in gold people should invest in food storage, paying down debt, and having some cash reserves. I think that’s a great start but investing in yourself is more than that.

Continue Reading

photo credit: taberandrew

A post entitled The New Robber Barons got me thinking about what happens when public and private enterprises compete in a marketplace. Thinking about that led to some interesting observations. The first of which is that progressives are right in their assertion that public and private enterprises can compete without eradicating each other. The problem is that the progressives don’t seem to recognize that this only works in limited cases. They like to point to the post office as an example – let’s go explore that.

Continue Reading

I read what must be the most succinct summary of the term limit debate over at Utah Policy. LaVarr Webb said:

I am a big fan of congressional term limits if they are applied across the board. It would be foolish, however, for Utah to unilaterally impose term limits.

As long as power in Congress is amassed in its most senior members, Utah needs to play that game or be badly disadvantaged.

But term limits for all makes sense.

The response from trgrant:

I don’t agree in a legislated term limit.  There are people you will want to keep in office for longer than a certain term.

I would respond to trgrant by asking a question inspired by someone who had previously opposed term limits. How many hundreds of incumbent get reelected after “a certain term” despite widespread dissatisfaction with their service – now compare that to the number of people who you would really want to keep in after that time. I would bet the benefits of term limits in terms of removing entrenched and undesirable incumbents would outweigh the loss of established and desirable incumbents by at least 100 to 1. Besides that, of those who you wish to keep in, how much of the reason for keeping them is based mainly on seniority rather than irreplaceability?

To LaVarr Webb I would ask – if Congressional term limits are good, why not set the example by imposing term limits at the state legislature so that voters can begin to see the benefit locally and have more inclination to implement it federally.
Originally published at Pursuit of Liberty.

Conservatives, for right reasons and wrong reasons, are united in opposition to the current health care reform legislation. Unfortunately many liberals are falling into the trap of “stand by our guys” that already landed us in NCLB, Medicare Part D, and Iraq during the last administration (for which I apologize to all my liberal friends even though I opposed all of those). Of course liberals have little reason to listen to a conservative like me so rather than make my own argument today I’ll share the conclusion from Fire Dog Lake:

The Senate bill isn’t a “starter home,” it’s a sink hole. It needs to die so something else can take its place. It doesn’t matter whether people are on the right or the left — once they understand the con job that’s about to be foist upon them, they agree. That’s why Harry Reid and President Obama are trying to jam it through as fast as they can, before people get wise. So email the list to your friends and family, tweet it and spread the word.

I was going to add my own perspective when I first started reading that, but it is too well done to be condensed. Go read all 10 Reasons to Kill the Senate Bill.

Many people, liberal and conservative, seem ready to give up because the Senate already cleared their first 60-vote hurdle. That’s exactly what Reid and his company of non-representative public officials would love to see. Please don’t give up yet or settle for this poor excuse for reform. We may not agree on all the right directions, but almost everyone who’s paying attention knows that this legislation is not anything close to what we need. Let’s not allow the Senate to pass this just so they and the president can say they passed something – that is simply not a good enough reason.
Originally published at Pursuit of Liberty.

Over at Fire Dog Lake, Jon Walker challenges those with the “we can fix it later” mentality (which may or may not include enough senators to pass this bill) to hold the individual mandate out of the bill as a hostage to ensure that Congress will have leverage to come back and replace all the things they have compromised away in this bill already.

Progressives should make the rallying cry of “no public option, no mandate” an unmovable demand, now and in the future. Progressives in Congress should refuse to support the individual mandate until it is accompanied by the government guarantee of a decent, cost-effective public health insurance option.

To me that sounds like killing two birds with one stone – we could get a bill without a public option as the Republicans have worked so hard to remove already and we could get a bill without an individual mandate which is the most serious infraction contained in the bill (more serious than the public option ever was).

I would be perfectly content, if the bill passes now without either of those provisions, to never come back and “fix the bill” (at least the way he is thinking of it). But I’d rather gain a temporary victory against the individual mandate and have to come fight against it again in the future, than have the individual mandate pass and face the prospect of having to try and reverse it later.
Originally published at Pursuit of Liberty.

photo credit: Trypode

This question is framed in terms of employer sponsored health care benefits, but it really applies to any employer/employee interaction. Are you working with your employer, or are you competing with your employer? To put it another way, is your employer working with you, or simply working you?

I ask this because in the health care debate there are two groups of people who have opposing views on this. One group argues that employer sponsored health care as the dominant source of health insurance coverage is destructive because it distorts the health insurance market by locking people into few if any options for insurance and locks them out of the economic decisions about what plans they want. They also argue that everything your employer spends sponsoring health care coverage is money out of the employees paycheck. The other group argues that employer sponsored health care is a good thing because that is the only way most people can afford coverage and if the employer were to drop coverage the money they save would not go back into paychecks, but would simply pad their bottom line.

The second group obviously views the employer and employee as competitors. These are the people who favor unions because the employee’s need to band together in order to stand up to their employers. This adversarial relationship dampens production and hampers progress. Before anyone gets too upset with this analysis let me just say that there have been situations where unions were necessary but they are no panacea.

Let me explain why I think the first perspective is more accurate based on my own experience.

Continue Reading

photo credit: the queen of subtle

When I saw that Jim DeMint had written an article titled Our Health Care Mess Is a Symptom of a Much Bigger Problem my interest was piqued partly because I like DeMint as a senator and partly because I had just been saying the same thing in a series of comments with a reader from New York. It was exactly as DeMint predicted in his final paragraph:

The current debate over health care reform is a symptom of a bigger problem in Washington. But it can be the catalyst for a wider debate about the proper role of government in our lives.

The comments I was receiving demonstrated exactly what DeMint was talking about when he said:

All of these things have happened because we’ve stopped asking, “Should government attempt to solve this problem?” Instead, we start by asking, “How should government fix the problem?” It’s now considered a sign of admirable restraint to occasionally ask, “How much should we spend?” And somehow we started thinking that anything less than a trillion dollars is a bargain. (emphasis mine)

We can’t expect to come up with the right answer when we start by asking the wrong question. For too long we have been asking only how the government should fix our problems and not if the government has any business fixing those problems. Obviously there are some problems that the government should fix, but there are many that it should not address.

Because er have been asking ourselves the wrong question we find ourselves as a nation in this situation:

There’s not a word in the Constitution about the government deciding what medical tests private health insurers should pay for. Nothing about the government deciding how much executives on Wall Street should earn, or what kind of light bulbs and cars we should buy. There’s nothing about the thousands of parochial earmarks that fund local bridges to nowhere, golf courses, bike paths, sewer plants, and tea pot museums.

There’s nothing about these or many other things in the Constitution because they have nothing to do with the proper role of a federal government in a free society. But these are exactly the kinds of things our government spends its time and money on, and we don’t even question anymore why that is.

As the length of that list indicates we have had many opportunities to ask the right question. Hopefully health care will be the issue where we finally step back and ask the right question. Once we ask the right question we will begin to understand the truth that:

It matters because every time we give a job to the government, we take away some control that people have over their lives, and we take away a little bit more of their freedom. In return for letting government try its hand at solving a problem, we as citizens cede our ability to try for ourselves to find a better way.

It’s awkward to admit it, but my colleagues in Congress have led this country into the woods despite our oath of office. We swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and to bear true faith and allegiance to it. The Constitution prescribes a very limited role for the federal government. There is not a word in our oath, or in the Constitution, about most of what we do. As we’ve wandered off the path of liberty, there are few crumbs left of the Constitution in the halls of Congress to lead us out of the woods. (emphasis mine)

If we honestly ask the right question we will undoubtedly reach some uncomfortable conclusions such as the fact that the government has already overstepped its bounds with things we would rather not alter, like Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, but if we continue to shut our eyes to that primary question there will be no way to reverse our downward spiral, the best we could ever manage to do is quit digging the hole deeper.
Originally published at Pursuit of Liberty.

photo credit: Stowe Boyd

By “too rich to go bankrupt” I don’t mean someone so rich that they never will go bankrupt. What I mean by that is someone so rich that them going bankrupt would destabilize our economy and thus they deserve a bailout if bankruptcy ever threatens them. (Think Bill Gates plus Warren Buffett plus everyone who gets a paycheck from Google.) More on that later . . .

In discussing the role of the federal government in an economic recovery Ronald Hunt and Charles D. brought up the issue of the role of corporations. Charles was good enough to provide links to a 2-part article by Richard Grossman from 1998 (Part 1, Part 2) that did a good job of discussing how corporations have turned into very unwieldy masters over “we the people.” I was amazed when I first realized that these articles, which are so pertinent to our situation of bailing out “too big to fail” institutions was written more than a decade before our massive Bush bailouts.

I especially enjoyed a couple of quotes from the second part of the article:

the Supreme Court of Georgia, in Railroad Co. v. Collins, wrote: “All experience has shown that large accumulations of property in hands likely to keep it intact for a long period are dangerous to the public weal. Having perpetual succession, any kind of corporation has peculiar facilities for such accumulations . . .” (emphasis mine)

And from the end of the first part:

In Richardson v. Buhl, the Nebraska Supreme Court in the late 19th century declared: “Indeed, it is doubtful if free government can long exist in a country where such enormous amounts of money are… accumulated in the vaults of corporations, to be used at discretion in controlling the property and business of the country against the interest of the public and that of the people, for the personal gain and aggrandizement of a few individuals.” (emphasis mine)

Continue Reading

My post on fundamental assumptions generated some good discussion which began waxing economic in flavor. As part of that discussion I had a new idea about a more reasonable approach the federal government could take to soften economic hard times without outright manipulating our expectations of reality as they do now.

I should start by clarifying my perspective on what the federal government does and what is economically realistic. Economic realism insists that we recognize the inevitability of economic downturns. They are going to happen. Unfortunately the assumption at the federal level seems to be that we must strive for perpetual economic growth – we might tolerate one or two quarters of a mild contraction but anything beyond that is unacceptable. As proven by our significant and now two year old recession sometimes the economy needs to undergo a much harsher adjustment – especially after the government has been pumping the supposedly healthy market with perpetual stimulus for years. (I know, they have not called anything they did stimulus until the stimulus bill in early 2008.)

Personally I think a better approach to the federal government smoothing the rough spots out would be to establish a baseline – let’s say 5% unemployment – where any state meeting that baseline would not receive any federal economic assistance to combat unemployment. Then they would look a the spread between the unemployment rate of various states and be allowed to give economic aid to any state with at least 5% higher unemployment than the state with the lowest unemployment. The upper limit of that aid would be equal to 1/3 of the difference in unemployment between the higher of 5% and the unemployment rate of the state with the lowest unemployment with the limitation that government aid cannot help one state leapfrog another. Let’s show what that would mean with current (October 2009) numbers.

The state with the lowest unemployment is North Dakota at 4.2% so any state with more than 9.2% unemployment could get aid from the federal government to help lower their unemployment. For the October 2009 numbers that would mean that only 21 states could get any federal assistance rather than having the federal government trying to jump start the economies of all 50 states. Of those 21 states Arizona, Missouri, and Washington (at 9.3% unemployment) could receive aid equal to 0.3% of their respective economies (they would not be allowed to leapfrog Idaho and new York which have 9% unemployment and cannot receive this federal aid because they are within 5% unemployment of North Dakota’s unemployment rate). In fact, 12 of the 21 states would receive enough aid to bring them equal to the 9% unemployment rate of Idaho and New York because that would be less than 1/3 of the difference between their actual unemployment rates and the magical 5% unemployment. At the other end of the scale Michigan, with the highest unemployment would have their rate cut below 12% from their current 15.1%.

If every state had unemployment rates over 5% the new benchmark would be the lowest unemployment rate of any state. If we imagine that lowest unemployment rate was 6.5% (adjusting all states up to 6.5% and leaving states with higher unemployment where they are) only states with unemployment over 11.5% would receive aid, six states in all, and only Michigan would get the full 1/3 of the difference between their rate and the base rate of 6.5% (leaving them with 12.2% unemployment).

If all states were below 5% unemployment or if they were all clustered between 3.5% and 8.5% unemployment then the federal government would not give unemployment assistance to any of the states. If anyone is curious to see them, I have all my numbers in a spreadsheet that you can download.

The fact is that of the economy of the entire nation is slumping then no government program can provide a solid foundation to real economic growth – all it can do is produce the illusion of economic stability. Real economic growth can only be build on fundamental economic change, not on the illusion of stability provided by printing money and manipulating interest rates. While committed free marketers would likely hate my proposal just like they hate the current government intrusions in the economy and while those who don’t object to socialism will find my suggestions very harsh on downtrodden regions of the nation, I think that my idea is much better at providing a cushion for the hardest hit areas while allowing the economy to shrink or grow towards whatever the realities of our national economy are which the government tries so hard to mask right now as if our perceptions were the only economic reality worth considering.

Originally published at Pursuit of Liberty.