Democrats for Life and the 95/10 Plan

When Colin Powell endorsed Barrack Obama, Rush Limbaugh had a convenient explanation, shouted into the microphone: “It was all about race.” Of course, the whole point of a program like Rush's is to provide his listeners with sound bites so that they won't have to think; thinking is hard and it is simply more efficient to farm the task out to people like Limbaugh. It's a division of labor sort of thing. But others proposed another explanation, namely that Powell was a Republican In Name Only (RINO) and so his endorsement was hardly a surprise.

The RINO argument, though more coherent, breaks down in the face of the slew of defections from the entire spectrum of the Republican Party. Christopher Buckley, Ken Adelman, Christopher Hitchens, Scott McClellan, Bill Ruckelshaus, William Weld, Lilibet Hagel (wife of Senator Chuck Hagel), Jeffrey Hart, C.C. Goldwater, and a host of other life-long Republicans have switched sides, calling the RINO argument into question. Even Bruce Bartlett has called for conservatives to “reach out to Obama.”

Only part of the problem can be laid at the feet of the McCain-Palin ticket. True, McCain continues the Cheney-Bush policies of replacing taxes with borrowing, expanding the federal government and especially the powers of the executive (the so-called “unitary executive” theory), foreign adventurism, and a slew of other policies that cannot be reconciled with the traditional Republican stance. Even on social issues, McCain is unreliable. As Tom Piatak points out in Chonicles Magazine:

Even on abortion, McCain is unreliable. On February 3, The Washington Post reported McCain's statement that 'it's not the social issues [that] I care about.' And on August 19, 1999, McCain told The San Francisco Chronicle, '[C]ertainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade which would then force X number of women in America to undergo illegal and dangerous operations.' I the same interview, McCain stated he would not have a 'litmus test' for judicial nominees. McCain's former senate colleague, Rick Santorum, an indefatigable champion of the unborn, has stated that McCain did his best behind the scenes to prevent pro-life legislation from coming to a vote on the floor. Robert Novak has reported that McCain has described Justice Samuel Alito as 'too conservative.' Novak has also reminded his readers that, back when Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords became an independent and began to caucus with the Democrats, McCain was in negotiations with the Senate Democrats to do the same thing. There is also McCain's support for federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR), which cannot be squared with principled belief in the pro-life cause. Indeed, McCain has recently launched an ad touting his support for more federal funding of stem-cell research, and his campaign spokesman, Brian Rogers, has stated that the ad, which does not distinguish between ESCR and other types of stem-cell research, is intended to reiterate McCain's support for ESCR.

If the problem is not that the defectors are RINO, nor entirely with ambiguous nature of McCain's policies and campaign, what is the problem? Let me suggest that the Republican Party itself that is Republican in Name Only. The Party long ago abandoned its core principles. The problem began early in the Reagan administration, when the tax cuts did not lead to a smaller government; indeed, Reagan merely substituted borrowing for taxing. But borrowing is taxing; it is merely a tax shifted from the current generation onto the next; it is taxing our children for benefits that we enjoy, a kind of inter-generational theft that is counter to everything a pro-family party ought to do.

The government did not shrink under Reagan, and under Bush “(even excluding post-9/11 “homeland security spending) [domestic spending] has grown faster than during the previous two decades of divided government, and the incidence of pork-barrel projects has reached an all time high,” according to Christopher DeMuth of The American Enterprise Institute.

In abandoning its conservative principles, the Republican Party did not really become more Liberal. What it has become is more Corporate. That is, the Party has become captive of Corporate America, and it is run more and more for their convenience and profit, a profit they do not share with the rest of the nation, and are, indeed, even unwilling to pay for. As James Galbraith points out, the political world has become...

...divided into two groups. There are those who praise the free market because to do so gives cover to themselves and their friends in raiding the public trough. These people call themselves “conservatives,” and one of the truly galling things for real conservatives is that they have both usurped the label and spoiled the reputation of the real thing.

At this point we can ask, “What does the Republican Party need to do to change, to recover its principles?” And the answer is clear: It needs to lose, and to lose big-time. A marginal loss won't be enough to force a self-examination. Only a clear and crushing defeat will allow the Party to begin the process of recovering the Party's principles. Alas, it often happens that only pain leads to self-examination, and only confession leads to healing. If the Republican Party is really to become an alternative to Democratic statism, rather than just a substitute for it, it needs time out of power to re-focus on principles and practical responses to real problems, qualities which have been in short supply for the Party for the last 20 years.

The first thing the Party needs to do is to send the former Trotskyites who call themselves “neocons” back to the liberal darkness from whence they came. The next thing the Party needs is to convert the anti-abortion movement into a true “Pro-life, Pro-Family” movement (See “Pro-Life or Just Anti-Abortion?”).

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I am adding my name to the list of defectors. To the chagrin of many of my conservative, Catholic friends, I am voting—have already voted—for Barrack Obama. Since in the current crises, the Republican Party has little to offer the country, voting for Obama can do little harm, and may do much good. At least he seems to recognize a point that has escaped the Republicans, namely that our economic problems require the healing of the “real” economy, the economy of making things. In this, he can do no worse and may do much better. Indeed, conservatism should be more concerned with the real economy than the merely financial one, and currently the Republicans don't seem to know the difference.

But I am also voting Democrat for the good of the Republican Party. Unless it loses—and loses big—it will not change. And if it doesn't change, conservatives will have no real home in American politics.

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McCain to Democracy: "Drop Dead"

Can't get the Congress to agree to the bailout? No problem, say John McCain, just have the treasure do it anyway, without congressional approval. Here is a video of him making this statement not once, but three times yesterday:



McCain seems to think that the Presidency is a dictatorship that may dispose of a Trillion dollars of the public's money without any public input or authorization. One wonders why this story hasn't gotten more play in the press.

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"Pro-Life" or Just "Anti-Abortion"?

Political debate is often a matter of controlling the terms, since the names we call things often dictate the way we feel about them. For example, those who support abortion want to be known as “pro-choice” rather than “pro-abortion.” The preference is interesting in that it reveals that, even among its supporters, abortion is not really something worthy of support. “Choice,” however, sounds a lot like “freedom,” and hence is worthy of our highest support. Of course, since the “choice” is the choice for abortion, there is not really a functional difference between the terms; it is merely a matter of marketing.

By the same token, the anti-abortion movement would prefer to be known as “pro-life.” Here the situation is completely different, because while being pro-life means being anti-abortion, being anti-abortion doesn't necessarily mean being pro-life; the different names really do designate different things. One can be anti-abortion on narrow moral grounds, on political grounds, or just out of a certain fastidiousness. But families do a lot more than just give birth, and life is more than just its beginning. A true pro-life movement could be—and should have been—the foundation of a new Catholic politics. This is crucial because after Vatican II, Catholic politics in America severely deteriorated. What had been a strong presence dwindled so that there was very little difference between the Catholic voter and the rest of the population. The strong pro-worker bias of Catholic politics became bifurcated into radical divergent wings and highly partisan. But a pro-life party could have found areas of agreement between the factions and become a true “centrist” movement.

What would a “pro-life” agenda look like? Mostly, it would be pro-family:

Pro-Family Wage. Wages have stagnated for 30 years; in fact, the median wage has declined in the face of vastly increased productivity. This has put pressure on women to enter the work force, limiting their freedom to be full time mothers and home-makers. The Just Wage is intrinsic to Catholic social teaching and a pro-family policy. Without it, you cannot be a pro-life party, and certainly not pro-family.

Pro-natalist. The bias of both law and policy should support families and particularly large families. American politics has been caught in the grip of a false Malthusian doctrine, one that is disproved in generation after generation, yet still holds sway in the culture. Further, the accepted neoclassical economic doctrines privilege capital over labor. This is a direct result of a Malthusian outlook which makes people problematic and wealth an end in itself. Capital is thought to be the true source of wealth, while labor is just a drag on profits. What the economy needs first of all is a supply of workers and consumers, and if we don't “produce” these ourselves, people will come across the border—legally and otherwise—to fill the spaces we have left vacant.

Pro (Marian-)Feminist. Secular feminism doesn't seem to differ much from anti-feminism, and leaves women in an ambiguous place in the society. But in such a masculinity culture such as ours, a real feminism would be a real gift; we affirm not merely the dignity of women, but even more we affirm that women do tend to have a different spiritual and psychological outlook. Thus women make a unique contribution, not only in birth but in every aspect of life, but they need freedom to make this contribution. And the first freedom that women need is the freedom to be mothers. Currently society makes this very difficult. Usually, they must be mothers in addition to all the burdens of wage-earners. Sarah Palin seems to be the modern model, where the needs of the family are subordinated to the needs of the career. This is not real feminism; women in this model must be like pit bulls (that is, like their male counterparts) with lipstick. Some women, I'm sure, will find that appealing. But others will not, and the current culture of death favors the pit-bull view.

Pro-education. The education system has failed in this country, and even the college-educated are often functional illiterates. A pro-education policy would include both public and private schools, and even (or especially) home schooling, since the primary authority and responsibility for education remains with the parents. But for this to be the case, the first three points in this list must also be true.

Pro Just War Doctrine. A Catholic party would not be pacifist, at least not when home and hearth were truly threatened. But it would be opposed to most of the wars we have actually fought. Nothing this side of divorce quite disrupts a family like sons and fathers (and increasingly today, mothers) marching off to war. This should only happen when the war can be unambiguously squared with the just war doctrine.

Pro-employment. A pro-family policy would not subordinate the needs of the economy to globalist doctrines. Families need work, and providing that work is the first duty of the economy and economic policy. We would make intelligent trade decisions that truly benefited both sides (the only kind of just agreement) and not merely imported poverty.

Other issues would be seen in a new light by a Catholic pro-family movement. For example, health care. Now, one may be for it or not, but surely a pro-natalist policy would ensure that every mother had access to pre-natal care and basic health care for her children, regardless of her economic status. A pro-family politics even sheds light on city planning. Is the vast separation of working, shopping, and living quarters really conducive to family life? Should the subsidies to such centripetal forces that spread cities out (subsidies such as the “freeways”) really just a hindrance to family life, a hindrance supported with public money?

A pro-life polity is not so much a group of programs as it is a new (and counter-cultural) was of looking at things. It allows us to work with a variety of people at different levels, and so bridge merely partisan differences in American politics. For example, we can work with Fundamentalists who may merely be anti-abortion, and with Evangelicals who are pro-family, and with Democrats who want to improve the worker's situation, and with Republicans who want to restore virtue in public life, etc. More importantly, it allows us to showcase the richness of Catholic Social Teaching, and is therefore a tool of evangelization. It allows us to display the love of Christ and say with St. Paul, “Look at these Christians, how they love one another.”

With all that in mind, we can ask, “Is the current pro-life movement really pro-life or just anti-abortion?” Before I answer that, let me relate the phone call which prompted these ruminations. A reader of this review called to say that his parish priest had told him that a vote for Obama was a mortal sin and put his soul at risk. Now, as a mere matter of canon law, the priest exceeded his authority; such pronouncements can only be made by competent authority, and that authority is not the parish priest. If the priest's bishop has made such a pronouncement, the priest may repeat. But he has no authority to make this ruling on his own. However, if the priest is right, if voting for a candidate who supports abortion is a mortal sin, then neither can one vote for John McCain, who supports abortion in cases of rape, incest, and when the mother's life is in danger. We know from past experience that these exceptions turn out to be nearly identical to abortion-on-demand. Further, McCain supports federal money being used for new lines of embryonic stem cell research, which not only requires abortions, but actually creates a market for aborted children. Perhaps the priest in question supports this because it will be a free market. Now, one may argue that McCain is slightly better on abortion and therefore deserves our vote, and that's fine. But surely the difference is not enough to compel our vote.

The priest in question is subverting the power of the confessional for purely partisan political purposes. This damages Church authority and violates canon law; Christians should be able to go to confession without receiving a political diatribe. At all times, the Church must speak out on particular issues and at some times must prohibit a vote for particular candidates. But this is function of competent authority, and not a priest subverting the confessional for partisan political purposes on hypocritical grounds.

But the incident does serve as a metaphor for the political wing of the anti-abortion movement. It has never been a pro-life movement, and has always subordinated the totality of Catholic Social Teaching to the needs of the Republican Party. This might even be justified on the grounds of pragmattic politics. But in fact, 35 years of slavish devotion to the Republican Party has produced very little in the way of results. They make a few statements, toss of few crumbs our way, but mostly treat us with contempt, the same kind of contempt that useful idiots and fellow-travelers deserve from their ideological masters. The truth is that the Republicans have appointed 70% or more of all the judges in this country, and if they had wanted to shut down Roe v. Wade, they could have done so a long time ago. But they do not and will not. I doubt if a single life has been saved by our political action, and many other parts of Catholic Social Teaching have been severely compromised on the political level. I do not know how the National Right to Life Committee is funded, and they do not publish a list of donors. But they certainly act as if they were a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fox News and Entertainment, with Rupert Murdoch as the sole proprietor.

This is not to say that people who actually work the issue have not been effective. Those who walk the picket, who pray for the mothers and babies, who counsel mothers facing difficulties, who adopt babies, who establish orphanages, and who show the love of Christ in a hundred over ways, have actually saved lives and won souls for Christ. But they are being betrayed by the NRLC.

The Republicans have not paid very much for the devotion given them by the pro-life voters, voters who usually provide their margin of victory in election after election. They are not even an anti-abortion party, much less a pro-life party. Rather, they are a “Big Tent” party, content to accept our support, especially when it is offered so cheaply and with so few conditions. Lip service is enough. Indeed, abortion was originally supported by the Republican Party under the Libertarian rhetoric of “get the government off my back and out of the bedroom!” Conservatives forget that before Roe v. Wade compelled the states to allow abortion, California did so voluntarily, and did so with the support and the signature of Governor Ronald Reagan. His conversion to the cause only came after he saw its political power to seduce a lot of Catholic voters. The result of giving our votes so cheaply is that we now have one-and-a-half pro-abortion parties and one-half an anti-abortion party.

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The End of Empire

All empires collapse. Some have a shorter shelf life than others, but all eventually share the same fate. The Roman empire survived in the East until 1453, and survived (at least in name, if not in fact) in the West until the 1806. But it collapsed. The Soviet Empire also collapsed, nearly instantaneously, by Roman standards. The United States has been around along time by modern standards. Our political regime is actually older than any other in the world right now. The British monarchy is older, but survives mostly as a living tourist attraction and drain on the public treasury, rather than as a real political regime. Despite being a "young" country, we actually the longest-running continuous political regime on the planet right now. Older than anybody. Can we continue? Empire is an expensive proposition, a hobby of the rich. Are we rich enough to maintain our empire?

Here is a truly interesting presentation by Dmitry Orlov about the comparisons between the collapse of the Soviet empire and the (rapidly approaching collapse) of the American empire. One does not need to agree with Mr. Orlov entirely, but his analysis is useful. It is at least amusing, and that's always worth something in an election season. His observation on American elections:

It is certainly more fun to watch two Capitalist parties go at each other than just having the one Communist party to vote for. The things they fight over in public are generally symbolic little tokens of social policy, chosen for ease of public posturing. The Communist party offered just one bitter pill. The two Capitalist parties offer a choice of two placebos. The latest innovation is the photo finish election, where each party buys 50% of the vote, and the result is pulled out of statistical noise, like a rabbit out of a hat.

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Swift-Boating Barry

Whatever one thinks of Hillary, Barrack, and the Democratic party, there is no question that yesterday was an milestone in America's history. The scene of first viable woman candidate for president in America's history calling for the nomination by acclamation of her rival, the first viable black candidate, was a touching moment, and there was weeping in the audience, not without reason. Tonight, the Democratic party celebrated in front of 70,000 cheering fans in a stadium and millions of the faithful on TV.

For all of that, Barrack has a big problem. The image of the Republican Party is tarnished by eight years of falling incomes, war, debt, and economic uncertainty. Yet Barrack barely leads in the polls, and sometimes trails. Why can't he “close the deal”? One reason may have to do with a conversation I recently had. It went something like this:

“I think that Barrack Obama is secretly a terrorist,” my friend said.
“A terrorist? That's a pretty strong charge. Why do you think that?” I asked.
“I am not saying,” he replied, “that all Muslims are terrorists, but I am saying that all terrorists are Muslims.”
“But Obama is a Christian.”
“Well,” he replied, “his father was a Muslim, and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.”
“How about Timothy McVeigh?” I asked. “Was he a Muslim?”
“He had many ties with the Muslims.”

Asked about where this information came from, my friend admitted that he got his news mainly from right-wing web sites. Now, my friend is not an unintelligent person. He is a successful businessman, one who happens to do business with many Muslims. The right-wing sites are indeed pushing an Obama-Muslim connection, usually spoken of in terms of terrorism. And there are even those sites that will claim a connection between McVeigh and the Muslims. Since their story is that all terrorists are Muslims, McVeigh must be made into a latter-day Mohammedan to complete the logical circuit. But why should anyone believe these stories, particularly anyone as intelligent as my friend? The truth about humans is that stories are what they always believe; they do not believe in something called “facts,” they must have stories around which any set of “facts” can be organized. Indeed, there are no facts apart from the stories that connect them, as any good author or trial lawyer knows instinctively.

The truth about Barrack's story, however, is far more interesting than any of the stories written about him by either friend or foe. The product of Kansas and Kenya, black and white, Indonesia and Hawaii, given a first name that is odd to English ears, a middle name that is common in the Arabic world, common enough to be attached to our opponent in Iraq, and a last name similar to that of the world's greatest terrorist. His Kenyan father was raised as a Muslim but became an atheist. After his Kenyan father abandoned his family, his Indonesian step-father moved him to the other side of the world, where he attended both Muslim and Catholic schools, neither of which are likely to mollify the fundamentalists. When Indonesia didn't work out, he was raised by his white grandparents and spent his formative years in Hawaii. During that time he was known as “Barry.”

And that is the interesting thing about Barrack: he could have been Barrack or Barry. From the diverse materials of his youth, he had to choose his cultural identity. He had no driving tradition behind him to accept or reject. Rather, from a racial and cultural grab-bag he had to construct his own identity. And his choice is interesting. A Harvard-trained lawyer, with the whole world open to him, he chose to move to Chicago, a city to which he had no ties and no knowledge, and become an organizer on the famous (or infamous) South Side of that city. Obama is not an American Black in the same way that the people on the South Side of Chicago are. Barrack had to “integrate” into that community; he was not really part of it, but had to make it his own. He did, not by history but by choice. He joined the Black church, with a radical brand of liberation theology. He stayed there until it became politically untenable. He chose neither his father's atheism nor his stepfather's religious indifference. And whether he chose his religion out of theological conviction or cultural necessity, we cannot know and perhaps have no right to ask. We can only know that his choice was unforced, not dictated by his history. And he joined the church as Barrack rather than Barry. Barrack is the Arabic and Swahili form of “Baruch,” Hebrew for “blessed”; Barry is the American form of an indeterminate name with no particular meaning at all. He chose meaning over anonymity.

All of this gives Barrack both a certain chosen intimacy and a certain inherited distance from the American project. And to really understand anything about the world, one has to have both an intimacy and a distance. One has to be the intimate outsider to really see a people or a place. This is why young people often have to leave home in order to come back and find it again. Only the prodigal son who had traveled the world really knew his father; the dutiful son stood outside the tent in anger, not knowing that he too could have had a party whenever he wanted. Always living with his father, he did not know him. Only seeing the alternatives grants real knowledge.

But the question is, can the American people accept such an intimate outsider? The same historical materials that Barry used to become Barrack can be used by political operatives to make Barrack into whatever they like. It is hardly necessary to swift-boat Barrack with lies; his own history makes nearly any story plausible. What stories will the public believe? As of this moment, they have not made up their mind. Next week, the Republicans will start to construct their story of Barry, and sell it to the public. But the real work will be through other channels, shadowy but well-funded channels. These channels have already reached my well-heeled friend. How far into the public subconscious will they extend? I do not know, but I suspect they can be made very effective. Any good trial lawyer can make either a credible defense or prosecution from these same materials.

I always thought Barrack was too young, and likely to end up as another Carter, earnest but ineffective. But he will at least be interesting, in the way that outsiders are always interesting. I do not know if he will be a great president, or even a good one. But he will be interesting. Perhaps much too interesting ever to become president.

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Obama: The Black Kerry?

It is a bedrock belief in certain circles that the higher the incentives, the better the results. So for example, if you want more business growth, cut the taxes on capital gains and so increase the incentive to invest. Or, if you want more oil, give the oil companies higher and higher incentives by cutting their taxes, giving away valuable leases for free, granting generous depletion allowances, etc. Of course, there are excellent arguments for cutting capital gains taxes. The problem is that they are exactly the same arguments for cutting income and payroll taxes. This is not what the holders of large amounts of capital want. They want preferential treatment and the shifting of more of the tax burden to labor. Apparently, incentives stop at the assembly line.

The arguments for the view that more incentives lead to more production would seem to be intuitive. A glance at any supply/demand chart shows that the supply of any commodity increases with an increase in the price (its “incentive.”) However, things are never that simple. It turns out that there is an equally intuitive law called The Law of Diminishing Returns which works in the opposite direction; this law means, simply stated, that there is a limit to the effectiveness of incentives, or any other number in economics. “Diminishing returns” simply means that you can only throw so many “inputs” at a problem before the output starts to level off and then actually decline.

Because of the law of diminishing returns, all supply/demand curves are “backward bending,” although one never sees them drawn that way in the textbooks. In other words, that at some point, a higher price will actually bring forth less production, not more. At that point, the higher price becomes a “perverse incentive.” A perverse incentive is an inducement to “do the wrong thing.”

The sub-prime mess is a prime example of how perverse incentives work. Banks used to make their money lending money to borrowers who they felt could repay the loans. But they discovered that they could make even more money in a market composed of naïve borrowers by merely “originating” the loans, jacking up the loan fees, and selling the loans to investors. The virtuous incentives to be careful with the depositors money became a perverse incentive to be as reckless as possible. Then, as the market collapsed and the investors would no longer buy the suspect loans, the government, in an effort to “save” the housing market, shoved Fannie Mae into the gap. I never saw “moral hazard” work so fast. The mortgage companies kept on writing—and still write—the same bad loans that caused this mess. Now Fannie Mae needs to be bailed out, and the taxpayer will foot the bill. No one has a clue as to how big that bill will be. The bad loan practices continue to this day. Nothing has changed, except that the suckers buying these loans are now the taxpayers.

Another example of a perverse incentive is unfolding in the debate over off-shore drilling. The debate has a certain air of unreality to it because the oil companies already have leases on 34 billion barrels of oil and they could drill tomorrow, without so much as a nod to congress or anybody else. That is more oil than the leases under debate (about 18 billion barrels.)

So why the big push to get the leases in place before Cheney and Bush leave office? And why not punch a hole in the ground and take the oil out right now? Because the high price for oil is a perverse incentive not to drill, so long as they can be assured that they control the leases so that nobody else can drill either. $120/barrel oil is an example of the backward-bending supply curve. So long as they can be assured that some wildcatter or start-up outfit won't start sucking the oil out of the ground before big oil is ready to, there is no reason to drill now. With profits this high, punching more holes in the ground would only raise the supply and lower the price. Why do that? The oil is not going anywhere, and they can drill it as their present fields begin to run out, thereby keeping the prices sky-high for the foreseeable future. Since alternative energy sources won't be significant for at least a decade, if then, there is simply no reason to reduce their own return to investment by drilling more wells.

And the returns are impressive. Oil costs maybe $10-20/barrel to bring to the surface, but sells for more than $100. The oil companies advertise widely that they are only making 9%, but that is a highly deceptive number; in fact, if it were true, they could not get anybody to invest in the oil business. The truth is, their drilling operations earn closer to 50% return on investment, and even that is likely understated. If they can control all the leases, they can keep this up for years to come.

The same perverse incentives hold true in the refining business. The oil companies have not built a new refinery since the Ford administration. They like to claim that this is because of “regulations,” but that claim doesn't pass the smell test, for two reasons. One, most dangerous chemical plants operate under similarly strict regulations, but they have managed to keep up with demand for the past 30 years. And two, Big oil has actually bought out the smaller companies and closed their refineries. That's how perverse incentives work.

It is clear in this election that on this issue and many others, McCain is holding a pair of deuces against Obama's full house. Yet, McCain may be able to bluff his way into the White House. Obama is turning out to be a black Kerry, unable to respond to even the crudest charges. Kerry, a decorated veteran, was unable to respond to the scurrilous charges of a draft-dodger. Barrack seems similarly unable to respond to an empty but aggressive campaign. Obama is getting himself into a position where he will have to say that he voted against off-shore drilling before he voted for it. We already know how well that line of argument works.

Of course, the response is easy. Just tell the McCain-oil conglomerate that they can have a lease anywhere they like. But the lease has an expiration date. They must start sucking the oil out in five years, or the lease is automatically canceled and all lease payments forfeited. Further, the same rules apply to the leases they already have. Use 'em or lose 'em! Not only will there not be one single bid, but McCain will be instructed to quietly drop the whole issue, lest he endanger their control on the 34 billion barrels they already have but don't use. The Democrats have every natural advantage in this election, but that itself can be a perverse incentive to lose it. And so far, they are doing their best to do just that.

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Eyes on the Prize

It is, of course, the silly season, or rather the silly year. That is, leap year, when the presidential campaigns make the year seem longer than the one extra day might otherwise indicate. It is a year when candidates try to display their care and concern for whatever concerns the public at that particular moment. They advance “ideas” (I use the term advisedly) whose purpose is not so much to be serious policy proposals as to be markers for their empathy with the voters. Most of these “ideas” do not survive until inauguration day, and that's probably for the best, at least in most cases. The “ideas” were only campaign ploys and most do not—and should not—survive the campaign. Since the major concern du jour is gas prices, candidates have to come up with something that indicates their solidarity with the suffering public, even if the idea makes no sense. Certainly, Obama's support of ethanol falls in this category, although it also has to do with his pandering to corn state voters. McCain's “gas tax holiday” is a bit of silliness designed mainly to use a few billion dollars of public money to buy votes, with no discernible benefit to the public.

But occasionally, candidates come up with something that actually could be a good idea and do touch on real issues. This is probably accidental, nevertheless, we take good ideas where we find them. And McCain's proposal for a $300 million prize for a new auto-battery could be a good idea, depending on what McCain actually means. Now, it is likely that the candidate has no idea of what he means; it was likely just a publicity stunt to begin with. In its present undefined form it is somewhat useless. Whoever comes up with such a battery will get a patent that will be worth a lot of money, maybe even $300M. In that case, the “prize” is of no effect whatever, and will just be an additional payment for what somebody was going to do anyway. There is a tremendous amount of research in this area, and pretty soon someone will break the code and find the answer, regardless of what the govmint does.

However, if McCain means that the government will buy the patent for the new battery in behalf of the people of the United States, this could be a very good idea indeed. The whole idea of a patent is to ensure that those who come up with new ideas will reap an economic reward. The theory is that this will both encourage and fund new research, to the betterment of all. The problem with patents, however, is that they create monopolies and spread economic inefficiency throughout the economy. Further, they are not necessary for funding new inventions. They could easily be replaced with licenses. Inventors could be required to license their ideas to however can pay the license fee and meet the manufacturing standards required for the product. This means that the inventor will receive a proper revenue stream to fund new discoveries, while providing multiple firms the right to make the product and thereby eliminate monopoly pricing while encouraging competition.

We see the effects of monopoly pricing most prominently in drug prices, where products that cost a few cents to manufacture cost $10's, or $100's, or even $1000's per dosage, depending on what the market will bear. Big pharma claims they need these high prices to pay the costs of research, but the claim is dubious. Actually the high prices mostly fund high marketing expenses. A good portion of our health care problems can be traced to the current system of patents. But the problem is not just with drugs; patents spread monopoly pricing throughout the economy in many areas. Wherever you see a product with a patent, you are probably looking at at least some economic inefficiency in the pricing of that product.

Now, if McCain wants to buy the patent and license it to firms making both the battery and the car on American soil with American workers, this could be a very good idea, and $300M would be a small price to pay. If he merely means to give an additional wad of taxpayer money to a monopolist, then it is just a publicity stunt, and an extra expense for the taxpayers. We will just have to see what McCain means. Most likely, McCain will have to see what McCain means. I suspect he has not thought this thing through and hasn't the faintest idea of the relationship between patents and monopolies. It is not one of the things he seems to think much about. But I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and see how this plays out.

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Are We Bitter?

The moderators of the recent Democratic debate have received much criticism for questions that seemed to be peripheral to the campaign, questions like lapel pins and campaign gaffes, questions which the critics consider irrelevant. They should have concentrated, the critics say, on the “issues.” But there are at least three problems with this critique: One, in respect to the “issues,” there is very little difference between the candidates, and much less worth debating; two, the issues they are discussing are not the real issues which face us, and; three, we are not ruled by “issues,” but by persons, and it is important to know what kind of persons we are electing. The moderators' questions did go to the subject of character and attitudes, and therefore cannot be characterized as irrelevant.

Concerning the first point, the candidates share the same approach to the problems, and there is little to discuss. Concerning the second point, the “issues” they do discuss are not always the real issues, or are not properly connected to the real problems that face us. For example, universal health care is certainly a real issue, but how is one to accomplish this without wrecking the system we have and driving us further into debt? This has not been addressed by any candidate in either party. It is clear that if we make health care a universal right, then we must also increase the supply of medicines, medical practitioners, and hospitals and clinics. None of the current plans do this, and hence all are doomed to failure. My own thoughts on this problem can be found at Sicko-phancy!

As to the real issues, they have to do with questions like how we can reduce the power of an imperial presidency, pay off our debts, rebuild our industrial base (without which the debts cannot be repaid), meet our staggering Social Security obligations, rebuild a broken army, and fix an educational system which has simply failed most people, and without which we cannot do all the other things. My own list of issues can be found here. Your list may vary from mine, but I suspect it will also vary from the list the candidates are offering us.

That leaves the third set of concerns, concerns about character, and here I think it is legitimate to ask whether Hillary's memory is a bit too convenient, her style too strident; whether Obama's attitude is a bit too condescending, his answers a bit too facile. The question of the lapel pin certainly seems frivolous, yet what is revealing here is not the question, but the answer. Symbols are important; language itself is nothing more than symbols, and without language we cannot really be human. Indeed, all creation is in and through The Word, and all history revolves around The Word made flesh. Hence we cannot ignore symbols, but even more importantly, we cannot ignore how they are manipulated and subverted. The proper answer to the question involves this subversion of the symbol. The lapel pin has become the symbol, not of national unity and ideals, but of the chicken-hawks: no one more insists on displaying the flag than those who refused to fight for it when they had the chance. When there were real battles, their biggest battles were for deferments, or for places in the National Guard. Now, like so many Dukes of Plaza-Toro, the lead their regiments from behind, and from the safety of suburban castles order men and women to their deaths. They are the people who have taken the flag-pin and made it a badge of shame, a symbol of cowardice. Every candidate must be willing to point to this hypocrisy, and if he or she doesn't then they end up joining the hypocrites.

Then we come to the more serious issue of Obama's comments suggesting that clinging to God and guns is a sign of lower-class bitterness. His statement is, of course, a product of a rationalist mentality, which holds that religious belief has to have a material cause, because transcendent causes are excluded from the outset. Now, I am more than willing to accept the Senator's explanation that this was a gaffe, a clumsy statement to state a real thing. And while it is wrong to exclude transcendent causes, it is equally wrong to ignore material ones. There is nothing wrong, per se, with attempting to connect deeply held beliefs to our material circumstances; there is only something wrong with attempting to reduce those beliefs to circumstance. And in truth, when beliefs are under attack, believers often respond by clinging to those beliefs more strongly. That is, we come to the defense of Holy Mother the Church for the same reasons we might come to the defense of any other lady enduring such assaults. And we defend her with the same sense of indignation and anger that we would (as gentleman) display towards any cad we find attacking a lady.

As for guns, we cling to them for another reason, a reason that his little to do with the arguments about the second amendment, arguments which few of us really understand, least of all myself. No, we cling to them precisely because the know-it-alls tell us not to. We live in an age when “experts” give us no end of good advice on subjects that are none of their business, and when each new day brings new headlines about what we should or should not be doing. Be it cholesterol or sex, God or guns, children or politics, there are endless experts to tell us what we are doing wrong. These professional naggers really have our best interests at heart, and the more so the more removed they are from us.

But if we really wanted to be nagged, we would call our mothers more often. Nagging in itself isn't a bad thing. “All civilization,” says George Will, “depends on two things: education and nagging.” Children who are not nagged to clean their rooms and finish their homework tend to grow up to lead dissolute lives; they may even become nanny-state liberals. This is the real problem with liberal naggers: they reject the nagging authority of mothers but insist on the nagging authority of the state. It takes a village, says Hillary Clinton, to raise a child, but when she says “village,” she really means “The State.” Indeed, between the state and the corporation, villages have been pretty much abolished. And as Chesterton noted, those who reject legitimate authority, like the authority of mothers, do not end up rejecting all authority, but rather subject themselves to every fraudulent authority; their liberation from real authority enslaves them to every passing authority. And that's fine for them; they must live as they must, and I wish them well. But they would insist that we live as they do, and would enlist both social scorn and state power to make us do so. At this point, we might become bitter, and cling more firmly to both God and guns.

The real reason we cling to guns is that they are ours. And even more, they were our fathers. Ownership of guns is something that distinguished the New World from the Old. In the decadent aristocracies of Europe, guns were largely for the landowners, and “poaching” was punishable by flogging or worse. In the New World, every frontiersman had a gun, and it was an essential part of feeding his family and declaring his liberty. We no longer need to feed our families by hunting, but we still need to assert our liberty, and especially our liberty from the army of experts who claim to know what is best for us.

Senator Obama comes from a Church were the language of bitterness was part of the regular rhetoric. And I am not inclined to hold his gaffe too much against him. But I think it does reveal the problems of a “liberal” populism, two terms which are almost a contradiction in terms. For the liberal always knows what is best for you, while the populist asserts that we know best for ourselves; we are content to run our own lives in our own ways, even if they are deemed to be inferior ways. And any effort to tell us how to run our lives is likely to make us resist all the more.

Indeed, it may even make us bitter.

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Ron Paul: Selling His Birthright

He was never expected to win. That is not the problem. He was expected to articulate a vision of free men and free markets that would at least have some influence on American politics. It was to be an exercise in public education rather than political power; its purpose was (or should have been) to increase the sentiment for liberty. This is important because politics begins in public sentiment for certain perceived common goods, and requires an education in practical reason on the best methods and policies for reaching those goods. From that standpoint, a campaign like Ron Paul's could have been very valuable, in much the same way that the populist campaigns of “Fighting Bob” La Follette was a success; although the candidate lost, the campaign won in that his major causes became part and parcel of American politics. Ron Paul is not likely to have that kind of success, neither for himself nor for his cause.

It is not that other candidates do not use the rhetoric of liberty. Mitt Romney, for example, claimed to be a champion of the “free market,” and then proposed giving the automakers $20 billion. McCain opposed the Cheney/Bush “tax cuts,” and then insists on making them permanent. (I put “tax cuts” in quotes because there were no such cuts; there was a tax shift. Borrowing is taxing as well, but merely a tax you shift to the next generation.) And Huckabee wants to slap us all with a 30% sales tax and massive tax increases at the state and local level. And all of them—except Ron Paul—actively support an illegal and pointless war. They all use the rhetoric of constitutional liberty, but in reality they all support the torture state, the imperial presidency, the bankrupt government, and foreign adventures. A Ron Paul campaign that at least broke into double digits would have served as a warning to political leaders of both the right and the left that there remains in this country a significant sentiment for freedom and constitutional government.

Alas, I think the Ron Paul campaign has been counter-productive. It could be argued from his poor results that such sentiments are confined to a fringe group and need not be taken seriously in political calculations. He has demonstrated that you can ignore the reality of freedom so long as you pay homage to the rhetoric. Paul himself was never able to get beyond that rhetoric to articulate a coherent vision and practical policies. Indeed, clicking on the “issues” button on his own website gives only the most superficial discussion of the issues. Comparing all the candidates' web sites, Paul has, if anything, the most superficial discussions. Had Paul been consistently able to break even into the 10-15% range, he might have had a great influence on American politics; he might have established himself as the leader of a group that the Republican Party could not afford to ignore. As it is, he only demonstrated their impotence.

It is not that he did not have the money to do the job. Indeed, he has been successful in fundraising. But he has been less successful in finding useful ways to spend the money. He was no better than Romney or Giuliani at using his political funding wisely. And he turned out to be both a poor campaigner and poor debater. Well, there is not much he can do about his naturally whiny voice, but at least he was willing to defend the Constitution against all comers. Or so I thought. But in his latest ad, he is using all that money he raised not to defend the Constitution, but to attack one of its bedrock principles; he is as willing to abandon the Constitution for political advantage as is any of his rivals, Republican or Democrat. The principle that Ron Paul is now attacking is that of birthright citizenship. (see the ad here.)

Of course the ad plays to the immigration issue, and does so in the standard fear-mongering terms that might be expected from nearly any other campaign; he does not use the opportunity to articulate a “libertarian” view, but a purely nationalistic and even xenophobic one. Nevertheless, that is an issue that can be argued either way, and I do not here argue it one way or the other. His particular view is not where the problem comes in. Rather, the problem is that in the course of this ad, he calls for an end to a bedrock constitutional principle, that of “Birthright citizenship.” This has been a part of American tradition since the founding and part of the Constitution since the 14^th amendment. Ending it would require repeal of at least part of the 14^th amendment. This is a strange “defense” of the Constitution. Even that's okay; after all, the Constitution is not holy writ and has a mechanism for change. But should this principle be abandoned? Can it be overturned without great harm to our understanding of citizenship and the role of government?

Birthright makes citizenship an “act of God,” as it were. Repealing the 14^th amendment would make the granting of citizenship purely an act of some government department or other. We would all become, in effect, “naturalized” citizens, whose membership in the body politic was in the gift of the bureaucracy. At a time of the torture state and the imperial presidency, in a time when the government seeks the power to declare some citizens “enemy combatants” (whatever that means) and to strip them of all rights before bringing them to trial, this is a dangerous idea. And whatever one thinks of this idea, one cannot really call it a “libertarian” idea. Indeed, making citizenship a gift of government seems to me to be the opposite of libertarianism, because what the bureaucracy gives, the bureaucracy may take away.

I am not a libertarian, for reasons I have laid out before (see Why I am not a Libertarian.) Nevertheless, I wish the libertarians well, and I believe a Distributist state would resemble the libertarian ideal more than it would resemble anything else. Further, I believe that libertarianism is impossible without well-distributed property. So I had good reasons for wishing Ron Paul well. I am truly saddened to see him sell out his principles for a few votes. As it is, he is not likely to get those votes; he sold his birthright and didn't even get what Esau got: a mess of porridge. It is, I think, a sad ending to a promising campaign.

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Coulter Backs Clinton!

Really!

No, I mean really. IF John McCain wins the Republican nomination (and that is more than possible) Ann Coulter will "vote for Hillary," "campaign for Hillary" as the most conservative candidate. See it here.

Of course, Coulter's endorsement could be a stake in the heart of the Clinton campaign; Obama certainly must be chuckling.

Maybe we're all chuckling.

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Mitt's Millions: Contributions?

In last night's Republican debate, Mitt Romney declined to say how much money he had contributed to his own campaign. This is certainly his privilege, and he can certainly claim that it is strategic information that would give an advantage to his opponents. He is required to reveal that number in the quaterly filings that are required of candidates, and I imagine he will do so at that time. However, I believe that I already know the exact amount of money, to the penny, that Romney has "contributed" to his own campaign. That number is precisely zero. Rather Romney has lent the money to his campaign, $17 million as of last quarters filings, and possibly as much as $40 million by the next filing. Who knows how much he will lend himself before this is all over.

Is there a difference between "contributing" money to your own campaign and lending it? Or at least, is there a difference that the public ought to care about? Well, yes, there is a big difference, one that will make a big difference in governing should Romney win. The difference is this: contributions are lost forever, whether the candidate wins or loses. But loans can be repaid by the campaign, and likely will be if the candidate wins. You see, there are a large number of people (let's call them "lobbyists") who like to bet on the race after the horses have crossed the finish line. What lending money to your campaign does is set up a legal conduit for "campaign contributions" to go directly to the candidate after the election.

Romney likes to boast that his self-financed campaign makes him independent of the lobbyists; in fact, the opposite is true. Further, it sets up a perverse incentive to overspend. If he spends $40 million and loses, he loses everything; but if he can improve his chances by lending himself $80 million, he can easily recover it. In other words, the bigger the loans, the better the chances, and the larger the conduit to "legal" personal contributions from lobbyists.

If Romney is serious about lowering the involvement of lobbyists, then he ought to convert the "loans" to contributions. This will announce to the world that he has no intention of collecting them from lobbyists after the election. If he refuses to do so, it will be as much as an admission that he intends to be repaid, and the lobbyists will have a field day, most likely at the expense of the public.

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Mitt Romney's Planet

Am I the only one who noticed this? I couldn't believe it when I heard it. I was sure I must have mis-understood what he was saying. And when I didn't see the spin doctors and the bloggers and pundits pick-up on the point, then I had to assume that I was wrong. Surely, a statement like the one I thought I heard would have produced headlines. So I must be wrong.

Hence, I waited for the transcripts to come out. And according to the transcripts, I did hear him right. I heard him right, but what I heard was so astonishingly wrong that I still am having difficulty understanding one, how anybody could say such a thing, and two, how he could get away with it without it causing a storm of protest. But here is the transcript from the New Hampshire Republican Debate of an exchange between Mitt Romney and John McCain on health care:

MCCAIN: Both the attorney general of South Carolina -- I don't know why I mention South Carolina...

GIBSON: Because there's a primary there.

... and the attorney general of Iowa -- and I don't -- well, anyway...

GIBSON: That's too late.

MCCAIN: ... have sued the pharmaceutical companies because of overcharging of millions of dollars of Medicaid costs to their patients. How could that happen? How could pharmaceutical companies be able to cover up the cost to the point where nobody knows? Why shouldn't we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?

It's because of the power of the pharmaceutical companies. We should have pharmaceutical companies competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients.

ROMNEY: OK, don't leave me. Don't send the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys.

MCCAIN: Well, they are.

ROMNEY: No, actually they're trying to create products to make us well and make us better, and they're doing the work of the free market.

And are there excesses? I'm sure there are, and we should go after excesses. But they're an important industry to this country.

But let me note something else, and that is the market will work. And the reason health care isn't working like a market right now is you have 47 million people that are saying, "I'm not going to play. I'm just going to get free care paid for by everybody else." That doesn't work.

Number two, the buyer doesn't have information about what the cost or quality is, or different choices they could have. If you take the government out of it to a much greater extent, you'd get it to work like a market and it will rein in cost.

Okay, here's what I find astounding, and I would like to know if anybody agrees with me. Apparently, Mitt Romney believes that 47 million Americans go uninsured because they are “freeloaders,” that they willfully game the system. The idea that health care (and consequently, health insurance) is priced out of the reach of far too many people has not occurred to the governor. Romney reveals himself to be so disconnected from the reality of most Americans lives, that you wonder where he has spent his adult life. Well, I know where he has spent most of his life; more of this in a moment. But first, his statement also reveals an incredible ignorance both about the “free market” and about the nature of insurance.

Concerning the “free market,” a market that depends on licenses and patents cannot be a free market. A patent allows one to charge monopoly prices, not free market prices. Now, Romney would be right in asserting that if we took the government out of it, there could be no patents, and hence no monopoly pricing, but that is not what he means. In fact, he means the opposite, namely that what few restrictions there are on the monopolists ought to be removed. In other words, he means exactly the opposite of a free market. Nor is this system necessary to fund research and development, which could be done at a far lower cost (see Sicko-phancy).

Further, Romney does not seem to understand insurance. Insurance can only be cost-averaging; some must pay too much so that others can pay too little. We take the risk that we are paying too much because we balance that against the risk of not being able to pay if we have a major loss. And since it is just cost-averaging, we seek the lowest risk-pool we can. If you are a bad driver with lots of tickets and accidents, you will be placed in a high-risk pool and your costs will be averaged with other high-risk drivers. If you are a safe driver with few accidents and no tickets, you will be placed in a lower risk-pool and will pay a lower average cost. When you go for health insurance, the same thing happens; if you have a bum ticker, you will get a bum price on the insurance, perhaps more than you can afford. Now, if we mandate insurance, we will force people to buy what they cannot afford. If we put everybody in the same risk-pool and mandate the insurance, it will be exactly like a tax. And if we mandate that people buy insurance, and put them in the same risk-pool, and subsidize those who can't afford it, what we will have is the most inefficient possible system of socialized medicine, one where care is delivered by government subsidy and tax (mandated insurance) but with the proviso that a tribute has to be paid to private insurance companies, for no particular reason. The insurance companies will have no incentive to manage costs, will be free of most marketing expenses, and no matter what the cost, they can rely on the government to make up the difference. Of all possible health care worlds, Romney has designed the worst, the most inefficient. He has combined the worst features of a predatory market and outright socialism. Quite a trick, when you think about it.

How could Mitt Romney, a very rich man, be so wrong about basic economics, the free market, and health care? Romney made his fortune as a hedge-fund manager, and his company Bain Capital, made its money by closing American factories and moving the jobs overseas. On Romney's planet, this is called “the free market.” Well, free for some, less free for others. On Romney's planet, freedom is maintained because the people thrown out of work could simply have moved to Bangladesh and taken the jobs he offered. But Romney's planet is not our planet, is not Mother Earth, our temporary home in this vale of tears, and now one should be allowed to make it more tear-full than it already is.

Mitt is free to live on any planet he likes, and he is certainly rich enough to buy his own planet. But he should not be allowed to buy his own country, particularly not my country.

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Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Moyers

This evening, Bill Moyers held excellent interviews with Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, two candidates who have been more or less excluded from serious coverage by the mainstream media. Ron Paul, in fact, has been excluded from the next Fox News debate, despite his respectable 10% showing in Iowa, while Kuinich has been “dis-invited” by ABC as well as being excluded from the Des Moines Register debate (which even had Alan Keys, for crying out loud). Both candidates conducted themselves well, especially Ron Paul. Bill himself did a good job; in largely sympathetic interviews, he nevertheless challenged the candidates on some of their more problematic points. Moyers pointed out to Ron Paul that it is the private media, and not the federal government, that has excluded him. I don't think Paul had a good answer on this point, because libertarians generally don't. Libertarians generally don't like to acknowledge the fact that private owners, when they become too rich, can raise barriers to free markets just as effectively as the government can. The point that my libertarian friends never get is that free markets are created by regulation of a certain sort, just as they are destroyed by regulation of another sort. It is important to be able to tell one sort from the other.

Kucinich was taken to task for his rather odd “endorsement” of Barack Obama in Iowa, bypassing some candidates that may have more affinity with his point of view. In any case, they were very good interviews, much better than what one usually on television. The interview with Ron Paul can be seen here and the one with Dennis Kucinich here.

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The Left and Ron Paul

Can a liberal vote for Ron Paul?

Click here.

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Making a List; Checking it Twice

I used to believe that it made very little difference for whom we voted. Indeed, the choice between a Bush and a Gore did not strike me as that important; each took most of his money and all of his ideology from the same sources and were as like as not to have the same results, in a merely slightly different version, one a bit more left-ward, the other a bit to the right. And so I usually turned in a blank ballot or voted for a third-party candidate. The last seven years have revealed to me my mistake and my naivety. I could not have imagined the naked grab for power by the executive branch, the fiscal irresponsibility, the constant wars waged for ambiguous reasons, the huge debts, the complete indifference to growing inequality, the waste of the environment, the “free” trade agreements that drain the nation's wealth and industrial base, and all the other horrors perpetrated on the people by Dick Cheney and what's-his-name. Who could have foreseen in the year 2000, for example, that in a few years torture would be something seriously debated in American politics? It is a sign of how low the people have sunk and how high the government has risen. High enough, I believe to lord it over the people, and more than high enough to threaten our most basic liberties.

In truth, I have discovered the obvious (since it is the obvious that takes the longest to learn): that even small differences are still real differences and can have large results. Indeed, I believe that we are being frog-marched to a fascist dictatorship with the mere trappings of a republic. It is not that I am looking for a distributist hero, or the quick conversion of the land to something approaching sanity, if not Christianity. Rather, I would like to see someone capable of addressing the major problems and doing at least something about them.

And so, here is my list. It is a pragmatic list; that is to say, these are the issues that are, in my opinion, the most pressing and immediate; other issues are important for a longer term, but I don't think we can begin to address them unless we give the Republic some breathing room. The object is not to get to utopia in a day—or ever—but to hold the Republic together for another day until a better day comes with better politics.

1. Repudiate the illegal powers seized by the President. The past seven years has seen hundreds of “signing statements” (promises to break the law), the suborning of the justice department into a political apparatus, the open flouting of the courts (even the already impotent FISA court), the use of torture, the illegal rendition to third-world death camps, the illegal surveillance of citizens, and an hundred other violations of the Constitution and common sense. The great temptation by the next president is that he (or she) will say, “Yes, Cheney and what's-his-name used these powers for evil, but I will use them for good.” But that way lies madness. The temptations of power can prove irresistible. The powers must be repudiated from the start. The candidates should be specific about what they plan to do, and should be held to account by both the public and the public's representatives. I could wish that the founders, in their wisdom, had left the appointment of the Attorney General (and all the judges as well) in the hands of the Senate rather than in the Presidential gift. But as things are, we must rely on the Senate to be vigorous in vetting the next Attorney General to look after the interests of justice, and not just the interests of a particular political party.

2. Restore Fiscal Responsibility. Promises of tax cuts will fill the airwaves, but “cuts” financed by borrowing are not “tax-cuts” at all; they are tax-shifting, a moving of the burdens of this generation onto the shoulders of the next. Borrowing is simply another form of taxation, and the one with the least representation, since the generation that has to pay has, as yet, no voice and no vote. I am more interested in a balanced budget than in cuts which are not cuts. First finance the government (which will mean, in the current situation, cutting off all the illegitimate uses of tax funds) and then cut the taxes if you can.

3. Inter-generational Justice. There is, of course, another reason for not burdening the next generation with more debt, since we have already burdened them with debts that they cannot pay. I refer of course to the Social Security and Medicare messes. Justice here is tricky, and I don't have any real answers. The “baby boomers” have, since the Reagan “reforms,” paid far more into the system than was necessary to support its payouts. That would have been okay, had the money been sequestered and invested in something other than Government IOU's. But it wasn't. It was treated as ordinary income to defray the day to day expenditures of the government and to hide the true size of the deficits (see Social Insecurity.) Now, it is justice that the young support the elderly, because once the elderly supported the young. The obligations here are mutual. However, the situation is totally out of hand, and some way through this thicket will have to be found, and that right soon.

4. End the “Free-Trade” dogma. America is the most productive country in the world with the most productive work-force in the world, and has little to fear (and much to gain) from trade that is both free and fair. But the current trading regime is neither. We trade against an artificially price Yuan; we trade against laborers in so-call “free-trade zones” which are actually “justice-free zones” paying slave wages (see Battling the Swooshtika.) If our industrial base disappears, then America has no future, because the only real way to prosperity is to actually make things. We will learn what is is like to live in a third-world country, because we will become the world's largest “banana republic.”

5. Address the Income Gap. This may strike some as a purely “moral” problem but it is in fact supremely practical. What characterizes poor nations is a permanent gap between the wealthy and the poor. In fact, that gap is what makes a country poor. When capital over-accumulates at the top, it cannot find profitable investments, and so begins to take absurd risks, or to invest overseas (which also entails certain risks).

6. Return the Abortion Question to the States. Some will criticize me for putting this so far down on the list, but in truth we have made this the single-issue for 35 years and have almost nothing to show for our efforts; they have taken our votes and sneered at our cause. By lowering the intensity, we may actually accomplish more. A Constitutional Amendment is likely out of the question. But in fact this is not a federal issue, and never should have been. The congress has the power to return this issue to the states, and should. We can win at this level in most states.

7. Address the Environment. Yes, Virginia, time is running out. The costs of pollution must be charged back to the polluters. The full costs.

8. Address the Health-care mess. We pay twice what any other industrialized nation pays on a per patient basis, but get results that are far worse.

This is the list I will use to evaluate the candidates. You are welcome to correct me on any one of these, or all of them, or to suggest items I should add or delete.

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Ron Paul and Hilaire Belloc

The Democratic Party is jubilant just now because, among other things, they are awash in cash. The millions of dollars in corporate cash that flowed to the Republican Party during the heyday of Karl Rove is now flowing to the Democrats. Now, it is just possible that Corporate America has experienced a mass conversion, a change of heart than has resulted a change of contributions.

This is possible, but I doubt it. Rather, the money flows on what might be called the “Vicar of Bray” principle, namely that “whatsoever king shall reign,” the corporations will still retain their power and influence. It is power, and not principle, the directs the flow of cash. The corporations treat these lobbying and political expenses like any other investment; they expect (and get) a high return on their dollars. These returns come in the form of favorable tax treatment, friendly “regulations,” subsidies, and an endless stream of the kinds of “goodies” that only a beneficent government can provide. Government becomes a contest of competing oligarchs and the will of the people—the foundation of a democracy—becomes the will of those with lots of cash.

The great enabler of this form of oligarchic government is the Party System and especially the two-party system. This system is not constitutional, but it might as well be, since it is written into the laws of every state and of the federal government as well. The two parties enjoy a position in government that is sanctioned by positive law, and in practice no candidate can run—or even get on the ballot—without their sanction. But the parties themselves stand as mere proxies, not for real principles, but for principalities and powers.

None of this is news, of course. Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton noted all these problems as far back as 1911 in their book, The Party System. Belloc was, of course, a member of Parliament who resigned, calling Parliament noting more than “secret government by the rich.” Well, the secrets out, and has been out for a long time. But with power vested in the parties, the people seem to have little power to change things.

IHS Press will issue a new edition of The Party System with a foreword by Ron Paul. This is appropriate, since Congressman Paul does not quite fit into the standard political categories dictated by the two-party system. Actually, few of us do, but all of us find ourselves forced to hold our noses and vote, usually for the best of a bad lot. But Ron Paul has chosen the deliberate path of the rebel, much as Belloc and Chesterton did.

Now, I am not a libertarian, for reasons I have outlined previously (“Why I am not a Libertarian”). I do not think it is a complete theory. Nevertheless, I believe that a distributist state would more resemble the libertarian ideal than it would resemble anything else. Hence, I have a certain sympathy for certain forms of libertarianism. And I have a certain sympathy for a candidate who has read at least one book of Belloc's. And mostly, I have a great deal of sympathy for a candidate who stands on principle. So I will likely vote for Ron Paul, even though I am not in complete agreement with him.

Paul does understand that the solution is in our power, and more to the point, in our constitution. As he notes:

the United States Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate the time, place, and manner of federal elections. Ballot access is one of the few areas where Congress has explicit constitutional authority to establish national standards. So we have no excuse for not having taken care of this problem.

Further, he understands the major effect of this problem:

The sad fact is that if we today have allowed a decline in our vigilance and watchfulness over our precious freedom, our independence, and our right to manage our affairs for ourselves – such that we feel today that government is simply not responsive to the wishes of the average man and woman – the reality is that this divorce between the will of the people and the workings of the “democratic machine” happened a long time ago, and it did so in a country that we can rightly call the nursery of our own democracy: England.

Finally, Ron Paul takes his goal directly from Hilaire and Cecil:

An “Executive responsible to the representative assembly” is what Belloc and Chesterton have set forward as the ideal, and yet how many unconstitutional wars, unauthorized wiretaps, signing statements, and foreign renditions do we have to have before this representative body – the Congress – flexes its muscle and takes a stand upon matters of law and our Constitution?

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ABC News "Spikes" Ron Paul Interview

ABC News has apparently decided that Ron Paul is not quite ready for prime time. His interview with John Stossel will not be aired, and has been relegated to the Web. See the story here.

Who's "up" and who's "down" has a lot to do with media decisions about who they will cover. With control of the media shrinking, (see Roy Moore's article on this) so does the range of "valid" opinion. Control of the public space passes to a few private hands, who then control what the rest of us can know.

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The "Fair-Tax" Fraud

The “I-heart-Huckabee” folks have indeed taken heart in recent weeks, with their hero’s recent rise in the polls. It seems as if Huckabee now has a realistic chance of becoming the nominee of the party. Part of this is due to the failure of the “major” candidates to catch on with the Republican base. Another part must be due to revelations about Rudy’s love affairs and doubts about Romney’s religion. But a big part has to do with Huckabee’s support of the so-called “Fair Tax.” FairTax.org has organized in Iowa in behalf of Huckabee, and their message has great appeal: repealing the “unfair” income tax and replacing it with a “fair” tax. Now, who can object to replacing the unfair with the fair? It certainly is a winning message. The problem is, it wins only as long as people do not understand the tax. The fair tax propaganda is a network of lies, and lies that are easily exposed. The fair tax people have had a free run up until now, because little public attention has been paid to their proposal. But once this becomes a major issue, a spotlight will be turned on this, one that will send the roaches scurrying for cover. And there are lots of bugs in this proposal. I outline just a few of the major problems.

The Name

The fair tax is not a tax on fairs, or even a tax on affairs (which would at least be interesting, especially for Rudy Guilliani), but a national sales tax. When people give you a “marketing name” for something, rather than a simple descriptive name, you know they are trying to put a sales job on you.

The Tax Rate

The fair tax folk advertise this as a 23% tax; the actual tax is 30%. They get the 23% rate by stating the “tax-inclusive” price. For example, under this proposal, an item that costs $100 would have a $30 tax on it, for a total price of $130. Since 30/130=0.23, they state the rate at 23%. But most people would regard it as a 30% rate, because that’s what it is. Why this rather obvious fraud in stating the rate? Because their own polling data shows that support for the proposal drops dramatically as the rate goes over 23%. As people understand the true tax rate, support for the tax will evaporate.

Everything is Taxed

People are familiar with sales taxes already, but not with a sales tax that covers every single purchase: food, medicine, doctor’s, home sales, car sales, interest on credit card payments—everything. Just think about buying a house, say a $200,000 home, and paying a $60,000 sales tax on it. Do you think that might impact the market somewhat? Or think about needing a medical procedure that costs $10,000 only to get a bill for $13,000. Who is going to pay the extra $3,000? If the patient, he may not be able to afford the operation; if the insurance company, rates will skyrocket. You can apply this to each and every market affected by this tax.

Revenue Neutral?

The 30% rate is supposed to be revenue-neutral. However, The President’s Tax Advisory Council—and every other neutral observer—disagrees. They calculate the revenue neutral rate at 34%, while the Brookings Institute calculates it at 39%. Part of the problem is that the fair tax people do not allow for the possibility of cheating. But a more likely result is that fraud will be massive. With such a high rate—whether 30% or 39%—the incentives to cheat will be irresistible. From people selling from the back of their cars, to off-shore web sites, the average citizen will be given a lot of help in avoiding the tax.

Further, to include the revenue neutral calculation, they include government purchases. Therefore, a tank costing $1 million will now cost $1.3 million. But this means that government budgets must rise by an equivalent amount. So either we increase, for example, the military purchases budget by 30% (in which case, the proposal is no longer “neutral”) or we purchase 30% fewer items (in which case, the proposal is no longer “neutral.”)

Regressive

For people who must convert all of their income into consumption, there is no difference between an income tax and and a universal sales tax—100% of the income is taxed either way. In other words, for people who must spend all of their income to get by, this is equivalent to a 30% income tax—with no deductions—far in excess of what most people now pay. People with excess income avoid the tax by saving rather than purchasing. But people with high incomes already save; those at the top simply cannot convert all of their income to purchasing. That saved portion of their incomes will simply be tax free. Sales taxes are inherently regressive, falling more heavily on those who must spend all of their incomes.

The fair tax people address this problem by proposing to give a “pre-bate” to everybody. The prebate is a monthly check given to each citizen to cover the cost of the tax up to the poverty level. The cost of this prebate will be somewhere between $485 billion and $600 billion, not counting fraud, which will be massive. Can you imagine the market in phony birth certificates? But even this ploy will not make the tax progressive. The false assumption is made that all income is converted to purchase, but it is not. The very rich spend a much lower percentage of their incomes. The real effect is a tax cut for the rich, and a tax increase for everybody else. Indeed, the fair tax people promise the mathematically impossible: they promise lower taxes for everybody and revenue neutrality. At best, they can deliver one or the other, but not both, and possible neither. If you lower the taxes for one, you must raise them for another, or abandon the claim of neutrality. That's simple math.

Dubious Assumptions

Throughout their proposals, the fair tax people advance rosy scenarios about the effects of the tax on wages, interest rates, productivity, etc. However, all of these scenarios are based on dubious assumptions that have weak theoretical foundations and no empirical base at all. Yet, without these assumptions, the whole thing is a dangerous experiment that could bankrupt the country (even more so than it already is). Such radical plans ought to have a better base. This plan has nothing behind it but wishful thinking.

Comparing the Plans

I have merely scratched the surface of the problems with a national sales tax. To look at it in more detail, you can examine their plan at fairtax.org. To see an excellent critique of the plan, check out the Fact Check site. Also, Bruce Bartlett has an excellent analysis at the Wall Street Journal site.

The Democrats Rejoice

The Democrats are holding their fire, hoping against hope that the Republicans will be dumb enough to propose a 30% tax on home purchases, new cars, medicine, and everything else. Those of them who pray are praying, “Please God, let the Republicans nominate a National Sales Tax candidate.” Even the Democratic Party—famous for blowing easy elections—couldn't possible lose under such conditions. The party looks forward to a summer and fall where each time a citizen purchases something, anything, he gets to contemplate the effect of a 30% (39%?) sales tax on that item. The present system, with all of its obvious faults and flaws, will seem to him to be a bargain. Every time a mother buys milk and bread for her family, every time someone checks in with their doctor for a checkup, and every time a family thinks about buying a home, they will have occassion to think about the National Sales Tax. Every checkout counter will be an advertisement for the Democratic candidate, no matter who (or how bad) that candidate happens to be.

As for Huckabee, he is certainly a sincere and genial man, one that people could easily take to heart. I do not think that he is capable of consciously participating in a fraud. But his performance to date leads me to believe that he is simply incapable of evaluating policy proposals on a practical basis. He is, if I may put it this way, a kind of Republican Jimmy Carter—and I mean that as a compliment. Jimmy made such a poor president, but an excellent ex-president. Like Jimmy, he means well, but, also like Jimmy, he has difficulty weighing the pros and cons of things.

My suggestion to the Republican Party is that they simply designate Huckabee as “Honorary ex-President” and get on with the business of finding someone a little bit better at evaluating policy proposals.

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