Not so Open Borders

Observing immigration debates, particularly with the border issues over asylees currently. Something that occurs to me is there's a very poor public understanding of what "open borders" actually means and the propensity of any Americans to think it to be a good idea or ideal (there are few who do).

This is a typical canard faced by people who oppose nativist restrictionist policies intended to reduce legal immigration from current low levels, not just illegal immigration is this claim they favor an open borders policy. Sanders complained about this too, so it's not just Trump types that do it. The actual debate is something more like the following: We don't have open borders, or very open borders, and what we are mostly arguing about as a country is the level of how closed we wish them to be, whether it is closed or open enough and how or whether to adjust that. Not whether it should be thrown open entirely to allow for the most possible free movement of people.

The US has fairly restrictive immigration policies by comparison to the rest of the globe and has had them in place for a long time, going back at least a century, which make it difficult to move here and become a legal citizen or worker/resident, particularly from non-favored places on the globe. This restrictive approach didn't start with Trump or Obama, and wasn't undone by Reagan (or Obama). It started during the Arthur administration (if we don't want to go back further to restrictions on the Transatlantic slave trade as a means of reducing "immigrants" from certain places on the globe). Anti-immigrant fervor was for a time a major political movement of its own during the antebellum period, and existed throughout the early days of the American republic, but did not succeed in surging into broad and major legislative restrictions until the early 20th century.

We were explicit back in the Wilson administration when some of the first major and broad immigration restrictions were instituted that a significant goal was to severely reduce and strictly control immigration from, say, Poland or Russia or Japan, just as it is now sought to reduce and control it from Honduras or Nigeria or Syria. There is and was little reason to do any of this for the benefit of our residents and citizens, to keep people out from any particular nations or regions. It solely benefits nativist demands to reduce the need for their own assimilation to a more dynamic culture. Immigrants themselves tend to assimilate fine to the American system and ways of life; it's the nativists who don't keep up. This is evident by examining places with more dynamic economic growth (mostly places with more immigrants living there), or places that more strongly oppose immigration (mostly places with very few immigrants).

There are advantages to the overall US system, such as jus soli, that make it easier in certain ways for immigrants to get and stay here legally. But we actually receive fewer families as immigrants than even the supposed high-skilled worker-based immigration systems of Canada and Australia that (some) Trump type conservatives seem to want to emulate (other than Trump himself or Stephen Miller types). Those supposed advantages are being washed out by all the difficulties and impediments we throw up instead.

What seems needed to reform the situation in a more constructive manner, as a non-expert observing the issue.

- Understanding that the "illegal" immigration issue, such as this even matters, largely is one of people overstaying legally issued visas or coming in from Asia or Africa or Eastern Europe, and not anymore from Central America. Many people coming in from Central America at present getting much of the news attention are attempting to apply for asylum status. Almost none of this is anything like someone storming across the border with malevolent intent that it should require a harsh legal or military response as is being demanded.

- Walls are pointless to deal with those problems even if they are considered as seriously as issues related to these problems. Walls are a poor symbolism for a free democratic nation to use to boot as an additional reason to avoid them.

- Policies adopted by less democratic or less free nations with the intention of reducing the cultural, intellectual, ideological, and ethnic diversity of that nation are not to be emulated or considered a valid comparison as something we should wish to do. The very idea any number of Americans think it is a good idea to see what North Korea or Afghanistan or China does with people trying to cross their borders illegally and copy any elements of that, or to take a more representative example of actual policy, to look at what we did with Japanese Americans during WW2 and see that as an instructive and successful policy, is horrifying from a civic perspective.

- There should be a massive expansion of work visas in amounts and availability. These visas should be controlled by the workers themselves as much as possible so that companies can decide whether or not to employ someone without worrying about national origins or needing to apply and somehow justify that they need to hire someone from another country, and so workers can go from job to job relatively easily or start a company of their own if they wish/are able. Companies could sponsor specially talented workers as a means of generating loyalty among highly skilled employees, but otherwise should have to pay normal wages to everyone.

- Significant expansion of refugee/asylum programs should be undertaken. The global refugee population is at an all time high in the last decade. This is in part because of American policies; such as in Yemen or parts of Central America. Regardless of the blame we may ascribe to our policies abroad or domestically as they negatively impact other nations and people, we have a moral obligation as a rich country and people to help those in dire need. And we tend as a nation to benefit considerably by taking in refugees historically as a selfish reason to do this. There are no significant downsides to doing this. Other than that it annoys nativists who may elect more immigrant-restrictive public officials.

- Significantly easier citizenship applications and processes should be created. The cost and time involved is a significant impediment to making it easier for people to immigrate legally and become a permanent resident, if they wish. If it is easier to immigrate legally via citizenship or work status, it would be much easier to concentrate enforcement resources on those who continue to come with more dangerous and thereby illegal purposes than finding work or being with family and friends.

- As such, we should see reduced deportations of non-criminal immigrants, whether or "illegal" or not. If someone is not a terrorist, spy, or murderer/rapist, I'm not sure why it would be a useful exercise of the federal government's priorities or resources to deport them. Concurrent with that, abolishing checkpoints for immigration within a border zone, not at the border would be useful for US residents. Immigrants are not required to live in and are not necessarily concentrated in these zones anyway that monitoring visa status would be useful to do in this way. Such checkpoints appear to be mostly used for other dubiously legal purposes, such as checks on narcotics smuggling rather than arresting or detaining immigrants with dubious residential status

I side with

isidewith was an interesting attempt started back in 2012 to get some members of the public to think more about matching their policy interests and goals with political candidates who might better support those. I'm rather skeptical that this project is likely to have much fruitful action in and of itself, for reasons that have to do with how most people vote and why not having very much at all to do with policy goals, particularly in a polarized voting environment. But it was a laudable project at the time to try to get people to think about third parties and more rigorously evaluate their policy visions and compare them to something like the actual positions of candidates.

I'm less sure of its current development still fulfilling that mission, but I have other uses for it all the same.

*I don't really have a positive opinion of some of the methods of matching being used, and the site seems to have taken a somewhat more distinguishably liberal tone to some of its questions and answers rather than being more obviously neutral (I say this as someone who on many issues regards Democratic candidates as illiberal squishes rather than anyone invoking a liberal political and policy tradition). A further problem may be the online sampling is likely to skew younger than the overall population. This has implications on a variety of issues more likely to be popular among younger voters than older voters (note these are not necessarily predictable. Support for entitlement reform for instance tends to be greater among older voters than young people). What that may be suggesting is that some of these issues that are closer in appearance here may be possible for reform, but not for several more years as demographics shift to have fewer of the existing older voters still alive.

But there's still some interesting results in looking at the poll results on specific questions that I wanted to pull apart more.

Issues with general agreement of some kind across parties that might actually get something done in the next few years (and not totally annoy me). 

Welfare-work requirements: Pretty popular with both parties. About 3/4 of Democrats and 80% of Republicans are in favor. I think this would make a possible case for an expansion and better tax incidence smoothing of the EITC and other social welfare programs. But not something like a negative income tax (my favored solution instead of min wages and smoothing out transfer payments by eliminating many programs and consolidating them as a cash transfer.)

Paid family/sick leave: Popular with both parties (60-40 Republicans, 90-10 Democrats). I would prefer this be implemented by having the government pay for it, in a way that it operates like disability insurance of a sort, rather than risk providing distorted incentives for employers to fire or not hire people who are more likely to get sick or avoid hiring or promoting fertile aged women capable of reproducing. It is however an issue on which there appears to be some possibility for reforms, which is rare.

Universal background checks for guns: This gets almost 90% support from either party. One caveat to this is that the support for "more gun regulations" is highly split (80-20).

Euthanasia: There's a gap here, but both Republicans (55-45) and Democrats (90-10) supported this as an option.

Issues with odd divides or near uniformity that annoy me:
ISIS - declaration of war ends up being mostly pro. Democrats were split about 35-65. I could see some number of people suggesting a legal procedural problem of allowing the military and President to conduct a conflict without the input of a Congressional vote but this wasn't offered as a legitimizing feature in the "more options" categories. A very similar partisan split occurred in using "ground troops" however, suggesting that if there is some sort of legal procedural voting bloc, it isn't very big.

"Decrease the military budget" - Republicans were almost united in opposing any decrease, but even Democrats were about evenly split. This was utterly horrifying to me given how much money we expend on defense budgets annually and what little return we receive for it (even in reference to what the defense department receives, this is less than clear it is getting what it asked for in exchange for the money allocated).

Foreign aid - reliably, everyone hates this (across both parties). Also reliably, I expect pretty much no one knows how much we are spending and on what.

GMO labels. The only political group that opposed these in substantial numbers is libertarians (and then it was still about 50-50). Both Democrats and Republicans were at 80-20 margins.

Drug testing welfare recipients. Despite considerable evidence this is either unconstitutional or totally ineffective, both parties supported this. Republicans do so to an absurd degree (93-7). But Democrats do themselves no favors (58-42).

Farm subsidies: There's not much of a divide here. Democrats are marginally more supportive of them. Republicans are about 50/50. Again, libertarians were the only political group that opposed these in substantial numbers. There hasn't been a good economic case for these since the Progressive Era under Hoover. Which is to say there is not one.

Prosecuting bankers for the 2008 financial crisis attracted bipartisan support (more from Democrats, but it's about 60-40 from Republicans). I am unclear what good this would do and tends to be pretty hard to do.

Marijuana legalisation: Still pretty opposed by Republicans (60-40). Democrats are up to about 90-10 in favor. I'm constantly annoyed this has not translated at the elite level very much at all. Few Democratic candidates are openly in favor. Drug decriminalisation more broadly (potentially including say, cocaine) has a similar split of around 70-30.

Patriot Act/NSA reforms, not supported very highly by either party. Republicans are more apt to back the existing architecture of the national security state. Libertarians of course hate these powers. The Apple-FBI fight has a similar split in support of demanding Apple hack phones for the government.

Social security. Both parties tended to have about 70-30 opposition to raising the retirement age for Social Security. I had other ideas on how best to fix the problems here (means test the benefits). Others would prefer raising the tax limit for it. But I can't really see a basis for leaving the age where it is either.

Term limits. Both parties support this at nearly 90%. I've never seen a good argument in favor of this idea. It's entirely populist nonsense. Fortunately nobody in office will do anything about it.

Campaign finance laws: both parties oppose the current Citizens United framework. I think the case against this is pretty weak and that greater funding transparency would be of sufficient fix for now. It misdiagnoses the problem as election laws rather than lobbying.

Voter ID laws: Both parties support these. Republicans are at extremely high rates but Democrats are still at around 2/3s. I find there's little or no basis for this form of voter fraud protection and that methods of suppressing or preventing individuals from voting are really poor ideas (even though I think many voters are poorly informed at best, and misinformed at worst).

Death penalty: Supported by both parties. Democrats around 2/3s. Republicans at 90-10. I can conceive of a moral case for killing certain people based on the severity of crimes and the possibility of rehabilitation, but the amount of burden of proof and expense, and the civil libertarian moral case for not killing people who might be innocent or may be otherwise "redeemable", and that there does not appear to be an effect of deterrence for the sort of crimes that we use it for, and the case that we are often using it for racist reasons, all weigh heavily against this being still a good and necessary idea in a modern state.

Issues with odd divides or near uniformity that may annoy partisan elites:

Cuba - There's a partisan split here but it's an odd one for the way Republican elites have been talking about it. Democrats almost universally support this change (95-5), while Republicans come out as almost a 50-50 split. I'm not sure there's much of a cohort available to them to pander toward (neoconservatives?) that it would actually be beneficial to reverse course on this policy trend toward normalizing relations with Cuba. It probably seems pretty clear to almost everyone what we were doing wasn't working.

Global Warming - big partisan split here too, but there's a cohort of Republicans that still favor doing things (about a third). Democrats are almost universally in support of doing something, but almost none of them favor taxing carbon emissions. Which is really disheartening. I think it's probably one of the simplest methods of attacking the problem.

TPP - Both parties voters were about 60-40 against. I have mixed impressions of this because of intellectual property rights law intersecting with the treaty in a way I find undesirable (strengthening and expanding the protections rather than reducing them to be more sensible).

NSA metadata collection - both parties seem to have about a 60-40 opposition to these programs. Further reform to squash them may be possible.

Issues with large partisan divides (things that we should expect to come up in the elections)

Syrian Refugees (accept or not) - For the record I answered this with "we should accept many more than 10k". I'm about as pro-refugee and asylum as someone gets, particularly given all the restrictions and system of checks involved in accepting such people as we already have making it difficult to accept and integrate as many people as we should.

This comes out as a near 50-50 split. But on partisan grounds both parties ended up closer to 80-20 or 20-80 splits. It's likely to be a sore point over which partisans will argue, but no middle ground can occur.

There isn't a cohort that broadly supports overthrowing Assad or preventing Russian support of Assad through their airstrikes. This seems to be a big disconnect between the public, particularly the conservative public, and most of their candidates (Voldemort seems to have tapped into this best, though it isn't a focal point of his blustery word salad presented as a campaign).

Iran - There's a big partisan split over attacking Iran though. Republicans favor airstrikes on nuclear facilities by an 80-20 margin. The polling there is older, but I doubt it has shifted very much since. (For the record, I wouldn't favor airstrikes even if I thought they were building a bomb. Which I do not think is or has been the case for some years now anyway).

College loans/college debt. There's a big partisan split over how to fund these. Sanders plan of a Wall St tax or raising taxes on rich people to fund colleges is very popular among Democrats and liberals. But nobody else likes it.

Immigration: Democrats on virtually any immigration question favored much broader admittance and acceptance. Republicans did not. There was a huge split over whether local law enforcement should detain people based on minor crimes (like traffic violations or other misdemeanors). This is likely because this is believed to be used (and has been shown to be used) for racial profiling purposes rather than immigration enforcement. There was another 80-20 split over birthright citizenship and over the restriction of Muslim immigrants. There was also a gap between Democrats (50-50) and Republicans (96-4) over "border security".

There was no real divide over "immigrants should be required to learn English". Which in practice makes sense, but in terms of the legal system does not.

Unions were regarded negatively by Republicans (70-30) and positively by Democrats (80-20). Which probably explains min wage discussions. Speaking of which, minimum wage increases were along a similar split (80-20 each).

Obamacare: huge partisan divide here. Democrats favored 85-15, Republicans 95-5 against. This essentially forecloses the ability to do either a) reforms to the existing system that make it work better or b) any substantive discussion of further liberal policy choices. It also limits the prospect of conservative policies being put forward instead as the existing system is essentially one put in place by moderate conservatives (Mitt Romney for instance).

Abortion: Remains a pretty strong partisan split. Republicans are "only" coming in at 70-30 "pro-life". Democrats at 90-10 pro-choice. Planned Parenthood funding achieves similar results as a proxy fight in this issue.

Gay marriage: Republicans come in 70-30 against still (Democrats are nearly universally in support).

on human migration

Couple things I noticed

- The persistence of the analogy being made to "letting someone in my house/family" as a property right type analogue for allowing people to migrate within borders. In this case, it's also variously described as letting anyone grab the microphone at a radio station or anyone try to play point guard for the Knicks. (The latter situation might be warranted anyway.)

The stupidity of this argument could be applied to, say, Ohioans moving to Michigan or vice versa. Or the people of the town of Shelbyville restricting access to the people of Springfield nearby. What is actually happening is not the same thing as some sort of uninvited personal guest making unreasonable demands that we are acceding to in order to let them come here. This is a terrible analogy. It's more like "I now have a new neighbour to ignore". Nobody is forced to give them a job. We do a fair amount to acculturate refugees and help them succeed, but no one is required to help them (there is a fairly modest amount of tax money to initially settle them and help fund the charitable groups that do the work of resettlement, but this is easily recouped by the economic contributions of refugees, and the associated tax receipts they generate, on average within a short time frame, no more than a few years).

This I think gets at the heart of the problem more closely is to say that most people opposed to (more) immigration believe they won't or don't or couldn't like their new neighbours. They therefore think it unreasonable that they should have such neighbours, or that their very existence is a demand upon their well-being (given we have a long history of redlining and housing segregation throughout the country, this should not be a surprising feature to discover might apply to migrants from other countries). People in support of it either don't care, or will even enjoy the new cooking or music that's now made more accessible to them from a new cultural heritage placed at their doorstep.

- The salience and overwhelming power of the economics arguments for more open migration is nearly universally accepted, I don't really see anyone pushing against it in this piece, and it's practically non-existent in mainstream economic literature simply because it so easily passes a cost-benefit curve.

But that is not the primary argument individuals disposed to be against immigration use (see above). Which means "arguing" over it doesn't really improve the moral arguments for allowing refugees and immigrants to come here. It's already part of the bedrock because it's become inarguable. What needs to be argued against is questions of culture, national identity, and security, all of which I would argue are strongly improved by having a more open policy toward both refugees and immigrants, or even migrant labourers.

- The position however that "libertarian economists" are the only ones in favor of open borders, or more open borders, or that the nation-state would disappear if such a state existed is nonsense. It's pointed out directly in the bit that the US and UK both had for decades, if not centuries, fairly open borders allowing virtually anyone to come and live and work there. Both of these are countries typically regarded as some of the most successful world powers in world history and have a strong coherent national identity as nation-states, complete with distinct legal and moral traditions to which these historical flows of immigrants have often made powerful contributions.

A few notes on the elections, next year

1) Walker and Perry bombing out wasn't a very big surprise. Perry probably wasn't to almost any observer. For some reason Walker was. I was surprised at how fast he flamed out (he was leading polls all the way back in July for some reason), but that he did so at all was not that disturbing or unpredictable and I was suggesting as much months ago. He was not a very skilled politician and very clearly did not have good instincts for national politics or foreign policy questions of the sort that do not trouble a Governor's campaign but will bedevil a Presidential campaign.

What he always reminded me of was Tim Pawlenty's failed run in 2012: he was a conservative governor from a state neighbouring Iowa. That's it. That was his selling point. That did not work out so well for Pawlenty. There was never much reason to think it would with Walker. Union-busting is a state issue. It doesn't have much relevance or resonance at the national level, even among conservative politicians and voters. Since that seems to be the only significant campaign story Walker felt he could run on, that isn't going to get him very far. Not surprisingly it flamed out and did not work.

2) Rubio still looks to me like the most likely GOP nominee. I would feel pretty confident betting on it at least. There is still a significant "anybody but a Bush" attitude that pervades the GOP base, in a strong way that was not the case with Romney 4 years ago. There is still ambiguity about the direction of the party and its ideological positioning on issues like immigration that I think there are risks. But those risks won't end up with Trump or Cruz or some such at the head of the class instead either. Unlike those two, Rubio actually has establishment support and will probably rally more of it with Walker out of the way. He also hasn't shriveled up, been incapable of answering questions, or seemed like a blithering idiot like most of his rivals (in particular Bush and Walker). I don't agree with very much of any of his policy agenda. But if I had to guess, that's still the guy I would bet would be the nominee next year.

3) Sanders percolates up now and again in my feed of social media still, in part because I know a lot of liberals it seems. I think I have identified why I just don't get him as being all that interesting.

a) a Presidential campaign that all but ignores foreign policy, to the point of being pretty actively dismissive of it as a topic in interviews, to me is really not a serious campaign. This is on top of Sanders' positions on trade being very retrograde (like dismissed 250 years ago, even though they keep popping up in far left political talks). I'd like to think Sanders has somewhat agreeable views on IR, but given how dismissive his campaign tends to be of the topic, I'm ambivalent that this is actually the case enough. A domestic centered agenda, particularly an economic one, just doesn't interest me as a voter because most of that will require action of Congress or the Supreme Court. And it seems extremely unlikely that Congress or the Supreme Court will be radically altered sufficiently to enact most or even any significant portion of a Sanders agenda. By contrast, US Presidents can do a lot on the foreign policy scene. I wish more Senators or voters took this as something worth considering, but if Sanders wants to run on a domestic agenda, he should really stay in the Senate. That's where he can do the most damage.

b) The biggest primary election problem Sanders has had is that non-white voters, which account for about half of the Democratic electorate nationally, aren't all that interested in him. It has always been possible he could fix this, but I do not think he's capable of it based on his primary election positions and campaign fervor. The main problem, which I tend to agree with, is that Sanders' explicitly addresses questions of inequality as in and of itself a problem which results in racism. Rather than racism being in and of itself a cause of inequality. Police officers are not beating up or shooting unarmed black kids because of inequality. There's a case that kids from poor neighborhoods cannot get through college because of inequality, but that case isn't resolved by making college free, which for whatever reason remains a popular campaign talking point for Sanders. That case is resolved by improving the K-12 environments in which many minorities are living, and also by resolving or addressing strongly the issues of criminal justice reform more broadly on which police brutality is merely the tip of several icebergs of our country's problems on these questions. Sanders, and importantly, many Sanders supporters, seem to want to focus on questions of economic inequality first as they impact the white middle class rather than deal with the lower end of the pie and why those slices are distributing oddly. This sort of focus can carry states like Vermont, New Hampshire, or Iowa. States where Democratic politics and the state as a whole are dominated by white middle class voters. It will do him no credit in Nevada or Colorado or Florida or South Carolina. These are separable problems, and they are problems which demand distinct attention if someone is going to address them. Feeling like the problems of non-white voters are second class status is not a way to interest those voters.

More to the point, most of the agenda of a movement like BLM can get reasonably far with the support of only a President, rather than a Congressional action being required, as they pertain to DoJ authority and various executive branch programs and agencies in some way. A President cannot and will not solve racism (or for that matter, economic inequality), but can do some things to hammer state and local police forces to behave by siccing lawyers and federal authorities and judges on them, conducting investigations, requiring reforms, and tying those reforms to federal dollars and funding that some local forces may rely upon. All of which are things liable to help the lives of people much, much sooner than long-term economic reforms with the problems many minorities experience when dealing with police and law enforcement in general. The lack of focus on this as an immediate priority to eliminate easy sources of human suffering and brutality and misconduct is not lost on those who are suffering. There are sound political reasons not to focus on these issues (eg, white middle class voters tend not to care about them), but that only makes the division worse and more evident.

c) Inequality in general is the main theme on which Sanders seems to dominate his focus. I don't share this focus, but if I did, I'm not sure I would diagnose what he has as methods to resolve it. Min wage law doesn't seem to have a significant impact in the empirical literature and if anything might actually be harmful. It could be helpful too, but in general probably won't do very much about the problem of "fat cats on Wall Street" or "greedy CEOs", which is where almost all of the inequality disparity in the US stems from, and won't do very much about the plight of the poor, or the income traps of the structure of our existing welfare and social safety nets (where marginal tax rates can exceed 100% and people on net lose money by making more). It is not a very exciting policy change to demand as a result. College education is largely still reasonably affordable, even as the cost has grown substantially (in part because of federal subsidies). Reforms to make it free to the public are largely a give away to the fairly well off people who privately gain from attaining a college education already and do little about the basis on which a college education has grown in importance over a mere high school diploma in the first place, namely that too many jobs have become credentialized and licensed to require one for no apparent reason, and that a K-12 education isn't seen as satisfactory for many jobs. One reason it is not is that it is sometimes not seen as satisfactory for many colleges either. And then the another focal point seems to have been campaign finance laws, with the suggestion being that rich people are buying elections. This may be true that rich people can spend somewhat more on elections, but one reason rich people are "buying" elections is that richer people will vote. A lot more often than poorer people. There are a lot of reasons for that. Most of them do not have to do with "rich people can buy elections" in general. That is not going to fix American democracy or voter turnout if those are perceived to be imperiled by the amount of money now being spent on national politics.

A generally middle class populist campaign that focuses on these, as well as some of the protectionist themes, marginally anti-rich/anti-capitalist rhetoric, etc is not likely to attract much interest from me in the first place. But if it comes away from a putative problem like inequality with bad solutions, or the wrong solutions, or solutions to problems we don't have, and so on, it is really not going to get my attention in a good way.

Vox populi

Mostly didn't hear very good answers. I see a couple points of agreement (carbon tax is simpler and better than cap and trade, but difficult to implement, GBI was good but he seems to be talking in multiple directions on that point that don't have much to do with basic income provisions that it's not focused enough to make sense to someone what that would involve).

He worries me on two points if I'm to define these, from what came up in the interview (there's a third point that I've been hammering on that didn't even come up, which I'm not sure if that's Sanders problem or Klein's or both).

1) IR. When he says "we are all realists", this to me says he doesn't know enough or care enough about the topic to discuss it seriously or rigorously. Realism is a specific IR school of thought*.  That's why Klein asked about it. If I'm voting for Presidential candidates, my number one concern is foreign policy and what sort of crazy and potentially damaging things this person might want to do or at least what kinds of basis they might have for doing something crazy. If they have little or no grounding for their positions on this, then they're likelier to give over control of the IR state to the existing interventionist bipartisan consensus (this is sort of what happened to Obama as his IR diagnosis seemed limited to "Iraq was bad", which was true, but wasn't a total critique of our current models of interventions by military force or a plan to use diplomatic efforts to get what you want done instead, etc). His answer does not give me some idea what his basis for interventions or warfare actually is, or what sorts of diplomatic engagement he would prefer, and his lack of seriousness with the question suggests he doesn't have one. Sanders doesn't strike me as crazy as most of the GOP candidates, but the fact that he doesn't seem to care much about IR bothers me.

This is by far the most power a President possesses under our current legal frame. Most of a President's domestic agenda relies on Congress, or even state and city governments, to get something done, while Congress has effectively abdicated its war powers in most respects. Sanders will have fairly limited, if any, power to enact most of what he suggests he wants to do as an overall agenda. Except on this question. And I don't have some idea what he thinks we should do here. That's not helpful.

*The initial reason I picked Sun Tzu as a nom de plume is my affinity for that school and its decline in American IR over the last 50 years or so I saw as a substantial problem causing us considerable dismay in reckless militarism and interventions without a clear and convincing strategic goal, with predictable results in disastrous and ineffectual wars and national security policies that resemble theater rather than structured responses to real (or imagined) problems. That Sanders dismissed it so casually I see as further evidence of this trend and a knock against him. He can dismiss it in the normative terms it has come to be used in public (for people who are generally neoconservatives) but the academic tree at its roots is still around and easily accessible and someone like Klein isn't asking about it in this way for his health. Klein's a smart cookie and could have pushed back against that kind of flippant response more than "I don't think they are".

2) It seems more important to demagogue the rich in his rhetoric than to describe policies that would deal with inequality or help the poor. That he brings up the boogeyman of the Kochs rather quickly was amusing but not enlightening. He doesn't seem to have any idea what policies the Koch's even support on immigration, and would rather describe more open borders policies as though they are a Koch brothers position as if this is a bad thing in and of itself. Paying people from Sub-Saharan Africa even this meager 2-3 dollars per hour he describes would be a massive boon to their economic welfare and probably more effective than sending millions of dollars of foreign aid. I'm not sure I see the same downside he does there and there are ways around this as a policy problem if it is one, such as guaranteed basic incomes. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I've seen the Kochs endorse an open borders policy in the first place or that it is a "right wing" position even if they had. Libertarians are pretty scattered on immigration but right-wingers are not in favor of it, even legal immigration. Bernie's position of having a pretty restrictive immigration system is probably more in line with "right-wingers" than he thinks it is based on this. "Getting jobs for people" isn't really a government policy for the most part. So I'm more than a little confused by this line of rhetoric.

Sometimes the rich deserve some scorn, but I'm rather less happy about someone who doesn't seem to have another note to play than someone who points out something more difficult to describe than "rich people are evil". Describing the Nordic/Western European welfare states as an ideal is all well and good as they have some interesting policies. But it leaves out that most of those countries possess a strong market ethos (people can start businesses pretty easily for example, easier than here, and school choice has been reasonably popular in Sweden or the UK). Denmark is routinely rated as "more free" economically than the United States despite having a large welfare state even by the pro-market groups that do such ratings. Most of the others are not far behind. More to the point, most of these countries have scaled back or reformed some elements of their welfare state over the last couple of decades. Suggesting that the sustainability of these as policies is dependent on the public's willingness to pay for them in some respect. Most European states actually have less progressive systems of taxation than the US wherein the middle class actually pays quite a lot. This is tolerated because they receive quite a bit back in the form of services offered or benefits (such as generous paid family leave policies). It's possible that is a bargain Americans are willing to make, but it is not clear that anyone offers it. Few people mention that Medicare currently pays out about 3 dollars to every one it takes in so the public believes it is getting what it paid for rather than getting what someone else has paid for. In Europe, the model is probably closer to cost-benefit where many people are getting what they themselves have paid for.

There are also demographic reasons why such states have supported these policies. Other than Germany they're all pretty small. In most cases they have fewer people living there than live in the Chicago metropolitan area. Netherlands is the only country that might fall out of this category. Iceland has fewer people than the area I live in. This means that normative behavior is generally easier to enforce and scale into policy than it can be for a country of 300 million (plus). Most of the European countries have a fairly homogeneous population ethnically as well. It does not seem to be a big deal for people to give assistance and aid to other people who they assume are very much like them for physical and cultural reasons. When it comes to giving aid and assistance to other people who are, in appearance or customs, not like them, most people say "not so much", even these supposedly enlightened Europeans. This is a difficult impediment for getting Americans to go along with a more robust welfare state. Indeed, I'm fairly sure it's a basis point for the ill-fated "drug test people on welfare" idea I discussed the other day. Americans would rather make welfare harder to access based on this logic rather than increase its stability or simplify the processes of providing assistance to the poor because it is perceived, by a substantial majority of people, as giving money to undeserving "others". This is not a casual problem that can be dismissed and the policies implemented anyway over these objections. The racism implied in it is quite real.

European democratic socialists also often possess different political systems (again, Germany might be an exception), where the central governments are often not as limited by jurisprudence and Constitutional law. So ultimately what this doesn't tell me is pretty vast. It doesn't tell me how such policies would be implemented here, rather than how they are used over there, who would carry them out (at what level of governance), and which ideas are or are not good from markets. His response to this question "What is the underlying principle there? What are the situations where you look at a given area of the economy and say, "That's something we should turn over to the market," or, 'That's something we should possibly federalize'?" wasn't helpful as he didn't offer some softball things that could be turned over to markets (because the model countries he likes did so). All he did was point to things on the other end of the lever which I'm not all that fond of. This doesn't offer a model for what he thinks markets are good for, just what he thinks they are ill-disposed for. I'm not necessarily opposed to these ideas, for example I think a universal health care system would have been better than what we have or what the ACA provided. I'm not just not sure I follow why these are big deals or why they would have to be implemented in the way he seems to be describing and how they would help us fight inequality as a social ill. Health care alone as a universal system has a number of options ranging from the UK to Switzerland to Singapore. It doesn't have to be just the one way he seems to prefer.

I'm really not clear on how or why "free college" is a good and necessary reform. College educations still generally pay for themselves, and are generally pursued by people who are coming from relatively well-off socioeconomic status already. While the cost and debt load has risen (the cost in particular), the benefit in post-graduated income and access to the job market readily pays it off such that it's basically like having a really expensive car loan that you can pay off in the time it takes to pay off a house, with income that generally does so. The skill sets are pretty specific and specialised in most cases, which feeds further into a career path that benefits the person paying for it. This means that most of the benefit accrues privately, whereas a K-12 education is intended to provide both a basis for people to jump off to go to college and a set of basic skill sets that everyone benefits from by having a moderately educated population (or workforce). The debt involved is more like individual capital investment (that usually pays off). There are ways we could alleviate this debt load or provide alternative methods of paying it off well before "everyone can go for free" that would resolve this as an economic problem and free up college educated persons to make alternative career decisions to improve economic mobility further. In any case making it "free" doesn't do anything about the basic reasons American colleges have risen in the tuition costs on its own, just as Medicare did not do much about the cost of health care, meaning it potentially adds a substantial cost to the taxpayer without a clear social benefit that accrues to the taxpayers. It looks more like rent seeking behavior to pander to the recent college graduate class (younger and mostly white voters) than a sensible economic proposal as a result. I'm not seeing this as a major social reform that is needed.

Despite college being "free", Germans still graduate fewer people from college than the US does. Suggesting they're doing something else instead to provide for the economic welfare of people than sending more people to college, as "free college" should have to imply to be a good policy (otherwise it is just a handout to relatively well off and well educated people). What seems a better question of higher priority is why our K-12 education doesn't pay for itself anymore as that's where the college pay gap has emerged. "College" pay hasn't risen so much as graduating high school has collapsed as being economically viable on its own. Or perhaps look at what the Germans do that provides for people who don't get into college (eg, better use of apprenticeships, fewer occupational license laws, somewhat more unionization, etc). Another better question might be what we could do to raise the college graduation rates, or look at why or how students wash out, or what we could do to provide for people who must work while attending school to help pay for it with more generous loans or other social welfare changes that have less to do with college, or do things like expand access to accredited online resources or local community colleges that offer (only) basic courses such that students moving on to a four year program or degree can take these basic courses cheaply and then proceed on to these more rigorous demands that only a more specialized program supposedly could offer.

One of the basic questions of economics to me is "why are there people who are prosperous" as the natural state of human beings is scarcity and poverty. Sanders seems to have implicitly answered this question in a way that doesn't interest me very much. To me the answer to that question is not something like a zero sum game where the rich are taking something from everyone else. The model Sanders proposes is the system of economics for capitalist or market society, and which I admit does exist on some level in the US in the form of crony capitalism or rent seeking behavior, is not a model for sustained prosperity (the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and the ongoing struggles in Russia or Greece should demonstrate a reason why, and if you think the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were about something other than poverty and economic structures of cronyism enriching the few, I'm here to tell you are completely wrong). I think it is possible there are kernels of what Sanders says on these questions that move toward an idea that is not zero sum and is a way that the perceived imbalances of worker and corporation can be redressed in the political sphere if not the economic one, but most of the policies he seems to prefer are either not likely to be enacted or not likely to do much about it (indeed, I see the "free college" idea as suggestive of something moving away from this ideal he envisions rather than toward it). The basic problem of the "use government to solve the problem of markets behaving badly" is that it requires governments behave correctly too, and that it may be easy for governments to become co-opted by these nefarious forces they are intended to be policing. That doesn't mean it cannot be done, but it does suggest there is a rather substantial obstacle to dismantling and reforming the structures of power that Sanders believes are impediments to growth and prosperity, much less in the directions he proposes doing so. If something as a agenda is impractical and doesn't seem to be addressing the problems, I'm likely to be not interested and dismiss it as populist nonsense. As I generally have done with Sanders.

3) He barely touches on race or racism as a problem. Klein sort of asks about it, but mostly softballs it. This has been a major problem with his campaign is that the types of policies he talks the most about, for the most part, do not generally help poor minorities in the same way they might help lower middle class or working class whites. The needs of minorities in policy terms are more concrete and immediate, such as better relations with police, or because of this commonly poor relationship, access to job markets that are either which can more easily ignore (often unjust) criminal records. For instance occupational licensing often prevents people from obtaining a license and starting a business or just getting a job. This intersects poorly with the forms of unionization that Sanders tends to want to promote as it is often police unions and police union reps standing up loudly to thwart reforms in the criminal justice system or opposing and reversing penalties for bad apple cops who have done egregious things to people in the communities they work in (it is also often the largely white governing bodies of cities that oppose criminal justice reforms, but not every city or jurisdiction is controlled by majority white governments, and there are emerging trends for reform supported on certain issues regardless, like mandatory minimums or winding down portions of the drug war). Or it is unions that have helped enacted occupational licensing laws in the first place, to obstruct competition or to collude with businesses that provide themselves (but not others) employment. The idea that unions are inherently good market actors that do not rent seek at the expense of the public or even that they are good social actors is not a necessary truth and includes a rather ugly racial history that I suspect some minority voters are not all that happy about still. His positions on immigration and trade likewise have struck too often at poor people in Malaysia or Mexico in a way that is not likely to appeal to minorities either, even if his intention was to complain about rich business owners supposedly exploiting cheap labor.

I suspect he has downplayed this as a problem too much because it interferes with the economic populism message he wants to run with instead. It would have been interesting if Klein had pointed at this harder to see how he would have responded.

Some thoughts on public policy, global warming edition

I've been fairly well persuaded over the years that this is a) a serious problem for the flourishing and survival of future human generations, b) a serious problem for which human action is both responsible and possibly needed to ameliorate if not reduce or prevent it and c) a political problem.

What I am finding from discourse is that it often seems that many of the people capable of explaining and understanding the science involved very quickly assume that strong central government controls will be needed to resolve this, and that this agenda is often, let's say, poorly received and reflects upon the capacity of people to accept the underlying scientific information. One problem I think that's involved here is that many scientists are not public policy experts. They do not study economics. They do not study political movements. They just see a (very large) collective action problem and assume a certain set of policy interventions must be needed. It's possible they may be correct in some elements, but they've overlooked something: politics is messy. People disagree and rent seeking interests can easily prevail over disparate action needs. We ended up with corn ethanol subsidies and sugar import restrictions as a consequence of politics. Both of those are net contributors to the problem rather than sources of resolution. We could very well, by relying on the political process solely or largely, end up with something much worse, or much less efficient than what we have now even. I worry about this as a probable effect given what we have seen so far as a response at the policy level is often not encouraging.

But I'd also say that observing the more quasi-libertarian response, if it even takes this seriously as a problem (which is itself a problem), we aren't going to get very far that way either. Suppose we say that if we removed government and its distorting subsidies, we could get reasonably cheap and cleaner sugar-ethanol instead of burning corn, we could stop subsidizing coal and oil production and infrastructure production (more roads), or make it easier to set up smaller scale hydroelectric power or nuclear, or stop subsidizing water for agricultural production in what amounts to deserts (in California or Arizona or Nebraska), and push agriculture into more water friendly arable parts of the country (the SE for example). Many of the more-free market approaches have an undeniable appeal toward pushing toward cleaner energy production because there are still costs associated with fossil fuels (pollution for example) that aren't associated with wind or solar in the same way. But all of these approaches still rely on fixing the existing political process first or at least the political process associated with these interests. This seems unlikely. Popular support for agricultural subsidies is still overall around 50%, much less industry support with a concentrated political voice. We are not going to succeed in sweeping away these problems as theoretical concerns when the arrayed interests are against it. A cost needs to be imposed to make those interests less concentrated and action more possible.

Where I think we are probably better served as a model is, strangely enough, observing how the rights of homosexuals have dramatically and swiftly been altered. It was barely a decade ago that it was legal to criminalize private sexual behavior at the state level and to invasively police such conduct. Now not only is that legal, but the rights of consenting adults who wish to do so with an intimate partner can have this recognized if they wish to do so as marriage, complete with the variety of set rights available to "ordinary" marriages. This change did not in fact happen in just a decade. It happened over many decades. And it had a number of cultural markers and markets in which to compete over time to change hardened minds, make it easier for same sex couples to announce their affections to each other and to family and friends, no longer have this treated as a form of psychological deviancy, and so on. Almost none of those changes involved changes to underlying and easily available empirical information on the nature of homosexuality in human beings. Almost all of these changes were perception changes, and necessary steps to make other changes available later. They snowballed into an avalanche of social change to the point that a majority of the country now recognizes that civil same-sex marriage should just be "marriage", not a distinct civil institution. This culminated in a series of civil actions and court rulings recognizing this change, and a few ballot initiatives that were supportive in a very short period of time.

For global warming policy advocates, this suggests that there's a path forward for change, but it's unfortunately slower. That there are lot of individualist appeals to conservation and charity that should be made and which will appeal to many Americans but that people may have to learn to speak in a slightly different language to make what governmental changes are needed palatable and possible. Information should still be communicated, but also an understanding of what can be done at the local or personal level.

For more free-market advocates, what I think this highlights is the improbability of using the "get government out of the way" mantra as a club for defeating arguments of what government is or is not doing. For the case of marriage rights, a popular argument often circulated that "government should get out of marriage". At a practical level however, marriage doesn't exist without government. At least not as most people understand it with the complications of immigration status, medical visitation and living will rights, inheritance and tax policy, and so on. Each of these rights and benefits extended to marriage contracts by governments would have to be argued down and eliminated as a casual default benefit rather than a simple "get government out of it" arrangement as is commonly argued. The problem for such arguments in climate change policy is to say "there is a problem, and government isn't helping by making it worse", and to then focus attention on places where government policy should be abolished or diminished in making it worse. This is even easier if such policies have other distorting effects.

With that in mind I would propose a few policy and cultural priorities

1) Phase out the home mortgage interest deduction. This is heavily distorting to the housing market, mostly flows to upper-middle class incomes and realtors (by inflating housing prices), adds a level of decreased mobility to residents of cities and metropolitan areas alike, and is an inefficient way to help poorer people to provide themselves with either income mobility or housing, and even distorts K-12 education and policing strategies (more aggressive in poorer more isolated communities). That's before getting to the global warming problems: it is anti-densification (dense urban areas would be more efficient to power and provide with water and food than suburban and exurban sprawl promoted by the HMID), does not help public transit, helps fund inefficient highway construction, wastes time and fuel on commuting, increases production of automobiles needed for said commuting, and so on. There's not much support for this as a policy measure, but I'm not sure there isn't a more damaging environmental policy we conduct presently as Americans and it comes with a complete package of other fucked up effects. It must end as a result for us to continue to flourish as a country.

2) Push for more recycling or food waste collection methods. Ideally push for less waste generation (especially with food), but start with these. There are many otherwise cultural conservative people where this has a certain appeal, crunchy cons or granola conservatives so to speak, who accept the general notion of leaving the Earth in better or no worse condition for their children and grandchildren as a steward of the planet argument even if they don't accept the science of global warming. One problem here is waste disposal. In dense urban areas, probably the most efficient method available right now is incinerating garbage. This is probably not something we'd like people to be doing from an environmental perspective, but it's almost certainly better than the alternatives that are being used (trucking or shipping garbage hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to landfills in other states or countries). Convincing environmentalists to get people to accept marginal improvements rather than total scorched earth improvements is also a problem here as it is typically environmentalists that oppose building garbage incinerators on the theory that "people must recycle" instead. They could do both.

I'd also advise doing things like cleaning up the "Pacific garbage patch" (the massive floating island of garbage in the central Pacific Ocean). This is a collective action problem with a variety of solutions (including innovative technical research and private market actors) that will provide a good model for other more severe problems with the environment.

3) Avoid pushing mostly localvore solutions. These are typically less environmentally friendly than buying cheaply produced groceries from halfway around the world. Chief among some of the environmentalist movements problems is that it often gets wrapped up (by opponents) as anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist. If you want this to be resolved, you're not going to get there by alienating powerful elites who depend upon on globalisation and capitalism for wealth and prosperity. Where you have to annoy such people, it should be because the methods being promoted would actually improve the environmental situation unequivocally (such as by increasing the price of burning coal or gasoline, say). And not by doing things that make the situation worse by forcing agricultural production in less than productive areas of the globe. This would also mean endorsing and supporting at least some forms of GMO production for agriculture for similar reasons. This too is a too common environmentalist rant is to oppose scientific tinkering with the food supplies. "Organic" and "natural" are useful marketing terms but their automatic relevance and connection to environmentalist causes seems suspect at best. Gardening is a recreational hobby that can be encouraged, but large scale farming for local purpose seems unlikely to be a positive net gain for the environmental problems we are facing. GMOs offer another way out of that problem.

4) Push for broader immigration reforms. One of the problems is that we will probably encounter a number of amelioration needs even under optimal policy responses. Since we aren't getting optimal policy responses, more aggressive ameliorating methods will be needed. One of these will be the ability of people to flee countries where the effects of drought, flooding, coastal sea water rises, and general poverty or inability to respond to such problems are most severe. Providing aid and assistance if it will buy time and ease suffering in the meantime through charity and foreign aid is certainly advisable also. But some number of countries and their residents and citizens are basically fucked if we do nothing, or even if we do the barest minimum to help them in the meantime. They will have to be able to pick up and leave to go somewhere better off if they wish. This will be vastly cheaper than making them stay where they are because of a national boundary. The US in particular should be prepared to accept as many as 100 million immigrants over the next 50 years (~2M/year), if not more. EU should be in a similar circumstance, and Australia or Canada should probably look forward to potentially doubling its population. Developed countries have the resources to provide some levels of adaptation and accommodation with environmental problems that extremely poor countries do not. There are hundreds of millions of people at risk here therefore living in places that may not functionally exist as countries (much less landmass) in 100 years and something will need to be done about that. Ideally peacefully.

5) Allow for some amount of geo-engineering tests, particularly by the scientific community to examine these as options. These are potentially problematic in that they would produce their own negative effects and may conceal problems rather than solve them. But if they will help buy time until more effective policy and market solutions come online, and we may need time for such things to happen, we should endorse it as a short-term solution.

6) Push for phasing in a basic carbon/energy tax. This could be done in a "net zero" fashion to encourage both businesses and individuals to reduce coal or gasoline consumption and also make the price of solar or wind (or nuclear) power more attractive without distorting subsidies. I'd also favor doing this over regulatory schemes (which could be overturned by unfavorable court rulings or blocked by Congressional action, or receive inefficient carve-outs), a carbon trading scheme (sources of carbon are difficult to price in the way most industrial pollutants are and don't seem to produce a favorable reduction over general energy reforms), fuel efficiency standards for automobiles (fuel efficiency will rise if low efficiency cars are less popular because the costs of fuel are too high), and so on. This would also require more monitoring of things like fracking, to determine any leakage of carbon fuels for example.

7) Push for more market prices on water. A basic water allowance for living needs could be made, but this would increase the price of water use in agriculture, or lawn care, such that irrigation and water forcing to shift water hundreds of miles would be more and most costly and less and less profitable. There is no automatic reason that farmers and farming interests in California should be producing rice, cotton, almonds, broccoli and so on in large amounts. Parts of the state this may be more viable than others. Some parts however, not so much. There's similarly little reason that people living in West Texas or various parts of the American Southwest should demand lawns and pools and other extravagances. If they can afford them fine, but the price of water should reflect its relative scarcity. It would remain pretty cheap in the Eastern part of the country. It's pretty dry in much of the west however.

8) Take into account adverse regulatory effects. I do not mean just the cost of enforcing and complying with a regulation, though that may be a concern. I rather mean that if a state or local government applies a certain regulation, business or local concerns wishing to construct something will probably take their money (and pollution/energy/water demands) elsewhere rather than nowhere if it's otherwise a productive economic venture. If people want to build a lot of stuff in California to make cars or computer chips, or to live in homes there, let them, within reasonable strictures. California's mild climate is pretty good for that. West Texas or Arizona is not. Forcing people to move their interests into environmentally unfriendly or undesirable areas is not a good idea. I say "forcing" not because the regulatory compliance costs are too high, but because often there's a court ruling saying they can't build it there at all in NIMBY fashion, and a concern or housing development gets built somewhere else instead. Pyrrhic victories are not helping.

9) Make individual signaling about the environment more efficient. Example. People often buy solar panels and display them on the street side of their homes even if that does not receive much sunlight. Make it easier to signal that you are doing really cheap environmentally friendly things: installing insulation, designing a home that provides for good air circulation for heating and cooling, buying energy efficient appliances or automobiles, etc. One of the problems I think is that many individuals seem to be presuming that this is or has to be a collective action problem, but that the actions are mostly to be undertaken by other people. Make it easier for local communities to find ways to compete to reduce waste or energy consumption or suburban sprawl into forests or wetlands and signal and casually enforce these as communal values.

Filed under situation normal

all fucked up

Most of these are questions that people who have studied voter habits and biases/prejudices have known about for years. They are systematic biases (against foreigners, against the economy having grown, etc). Most of them make no sense except in the light of some variety of prejudicial thinking (the probable population of immigrants or Muslims being absurdly high in most countries). The most interesting part for most people would be the absurdly high numbers of some of the actual statistics (Spain's unemployment rate, South Korea's life expectancy).

Still I found a couple of these interesting because they're not part of typical voter bias statistics versus just a general knowledge of demographic data. The voter bias research shows that usually people can estimate general knowledge data closer than understanding expert fields like economics or international trade. But these sorts of particular knowledge upset even that comfortable bias toward random and meaningless errors because they are fueled by additional bias concerns.

The teen pregnancy rate. 
I suspect people don't actually understand what the birth rate is and how to calculate it as one problem with asking people to calculate this figure. Such a figure is typically very low. Most women are not giving birth in a given year of life, and fewer still are doing so as teenagers. If people but reflected back on it for a moment, what's the probable number of girls they went to high school with who were pregnant while they were in a given school year. That figure, per year, could be very high at some high schools, and very low at others. But it wouldn't be a quarter of each year's class. Or a fifth. Or maybe even a tenth at the very "worst" cases. It would be amazing if it were more than one or two girls per classroom (say a "room" of 30). So it would be maybe 5% at most, and most probably less. That's how people should estimate it. They don't have this heuristic ready at hand to think about it. Further, since
a) people believe this figure is going up (it's not, it's going down) and
b) people hear about this as a problem or as parents worry about this as a problem, they imagine it must be very common in the way that we inflate all things we worry about as likely risks.
c) We're also bad with estimating low probability events generally. We like to tack on to those with media attention and fear (school shootings, terrorists, etc).
It's likely that the number gets inflated in the minds of those guesstimating it.

Parents should be taking some precautions that their teenage children should take some precautions against these unplanned events, but parents should also know it isn't very common that every 4th daughter out there is getting knocked up. Actually getting and staying pregnant is not that simple, on top of that teenagers (while they certainly talk a game otherwise), are probably not having sex all the time. Many aren't having sex at all, or not until their late teens. Birth control itself moving forward will be easier to use (IUDs) or easier to come by (condoms and access through health insurance, or perhaps OTC).

Religion percentages.

This is well known by people who aren't religious apparently how many people are of some religious sect or that, or not at all. But yes, the US is no danger of becoming a secular-atheist-Muslim-satanist country anytime soon. Most all of you Americans are Christian or some derivation there of (including that "spiritual but not religious" component, which is mostly "Christians who don't like going to their church" as far as I'm concerned. I can't say I blame them).

A big percentage of you apparently don't know that and apparently many of those confused souls think they are Muslims instead. Or perhaps secret Muslims are a thing after all. I realize that whole Jesus-Mohammed worship must be awfully confusing, but I think they're distinct enough for most people to tell the difference and know which one they might be trying to pretend they are following some of what they said with some seriousness.

No other religious group makes up more than 1-2% of the American population. Jews are common in a few cities. Muslims are common in a few cities. Buddhists are common in a few cities. Mormons are in Utah. Atheists or nones are kind of all over, but they're not anywhere near as common as people like to think. Either atheist/nones or Christians. Still, 15-20% isn't bad.

I draw attention to these two because Americans are particularly bad at estimating both. Canada is a little worse on the Muslim question (same with France and Belgium).

I would also draw attention to the immigration question. This is pretty predictable as an expressed bias of voters. Voters have an anti-foreigner bias built into to their ideological narratives. Either as "immigrants are dirty, noisy, lazy, criminals", with maybe an exception for certain Asian or European countries depending. Or as "people in those other countries are stealing our jobs", either through outsourcing/trade or as coming here to work dirt cheap. To be honest 13% seemed actually pretty high to me. That's almost 40 million American residents. For a country that doesn't make it easy to come and live here if you aren't born here. It seems possible, but seemed very high given the obstacles. Witness Australia or Canada's much higher percentages, countries with somewhat more sensible and lessened obstacles.

The net effect of this kind of research is that politicians and people covering or writing for politicians probably cannot go broke if they keep betting against the American public being well educated and informed on a given subject. And they all know this. The question mark is who these people are and whether they vote. Many of the ill-informed do not. But on questions like these, there are fewer and fewer people who are not ill-informed, indeed, the plebs could be said to express views which are not only wrong, but support ideological holdings and demand policies opposite to those fueled by an informed reality. All getting and encouraging more people to vote does in those circumstances is further deepen the divide between reality and imagination. The crisis isn't participation (again, roughly 2/3s of us are showing up to vote). It's information.

People think there are legions of immigrants, and that they hold some "foreign" and "dangerous" faiths.
People think crime is going up, by leaps and bounds in some cases.
People think the economy isn't growing, or that inflation or unemployment are absurdly high.
People think foreign aid makes up an absurd portion of our government spending (or, worse, that Medicare and Social Security do not).

In some cases they think these things because they are actively misinformed by others. The media runs a lot of crime stories, or covers immigration or the economy a lot, and perhaps on these issues it is to blame for misleading the public. In most cases though the public think these things because that's what they want to think. One of the misinterpretations of a lot of "Faux News viewers are more poorly informed than others" is that the problem is necessarily Faux News. The problem is probably in large part the type of person who wants to consume Faux News as a legitimate news organisation in the first place as their primary source of information. That type of person believes a certain set of things, and doesn't want to hear that their comfortable assumptions about the doom of our time coming from non-existent Muslim immigrants crossing the Rio Grande, having sex with their daughters, and shooting at our schools. The problem with that type of person isn't that someone feeds them their demands. The news have always done this service for the body public.

The problem is how we dissuade them of those demands in the first place.

More words, in furious languor.

There appears to be much going on signifying sound and fury in the world of late. But it is mostly empty.

We have an "immigration" crisis. Except we've had an immigration problem that needed to be addressed for 90 years. Ever since we started closing off our borders to foreign populations and placing onerous restrictions on how and when someone may become a citizen if they wished to live here and raise a family and do the things that human beings tend to do when they live and work and play in a place for a long time. They want to call it home. Like some relentless wheel, this just cycles around again and again as a new crop of nativist biases that either do not make a coherent philosophical point or are factually wrong. Fortunately, it appears there isn't actually a strong support for kicking millions of people out of the country who want to stay here somehow. Unfortunately nobody in Congress appears to be paying attention to that because there's a very loud and politically active group of people wandering around pretending we are being invaded and who does want to kick people out, and which nobody else wants to antagonize but doesn't want to be seen talking to either. Which leaves us within a middle ground position that even fewer people want (things like guest worker programmes).

All this tells me is that we haven't bothered to fix the existing immigration system, and what bills have been proposed primarily don't either. They focus entirely too much on borders and how people get in. That's not the "problem". The issue is how people can stay, if they would like to, and how difficult or onerous we make it to become a citizen, a problem for which I have seen no bill address in a serious way. Huge numbers of people who are residents illegally in the country came here in a perfectly legal way, as students, tourists, or workers and no amount of "border control" is likely to create an environment which catches them and restricts their presence. Large numbers more of people abroad probably would come here and stay if we had a simple system for allowing people to emigrate from their homes. The demands for armed troops on the borders have little resemblance to a solution to the problem. If anything that only amplifies the humanitarian problems by increasing the price and danger of migration across borders, and makes it more difficult for people to leave when they do come here for a temporary basis, thus further discouraging such behavior as say, seasonal labourers who migrate across borders following available work.

I am not all that impressed with liberal solutions either. They can't do very much without Congress acting, but I keep hearing "decriminalizing drugs" coming up. The likely reason for that term is that there's little or no public support for the legalisation of drugs other than marijuana. Decriminalizing, say, heroin does not destroy black markets of the drug, as a major flaw in this arrangement. That does construct the legal arrangement so the users of drugs are not punished (or sellers with small quantities), or at least are not sent to jail and prison, which is a great social victory in its own right. But it does nothing about the establishing of legal markets where sellers of these products can use the legal system for protection of property rights and to arbitrate grievances peacefully through the courts and other forms of mediation. Without that option, the violence remains a significant and sometimes essential component of the existing black markets for goods that are merely "decriminalized". Decriminalization would be better than arresting thousands of people for consensual vices, but it would not solve this problem of an illicit market with artificially inflated profit margins and through which there are considerable issues of gang violence in foreign countries (like the countries the current wave of children are fleeing). Legalisation of marijuana likewise may help some, if it occurs on a broader scale, but will not remove the problem. Consider that some clever Central American drug cartels have branched out into protection rackets for farms, for ordinary domestic crops as limes or avocados and this becomes an even more elaborate problem to disentangle than how our legal system treats the recreational ingestion of mind-altering chemicals as a means to reduce the violence.

And now for something completely different.
A brief digression to rant about (other) silly things.
- This would all be much easier, apparently, if we publicly expended time discussing genital naming conventions from 90 years ago. Fortunately, "Jerry" had already taken on a somewhat darker turn from a cheeky British affiliation as a nickname for evil Nazis or we could be at risk of a wave of named phallic features, similar to the wave of names from characters of popular fantasy novels (Khaleesi, Katniss, etc). Let's just move on. Penis jokes are not too hard.

- If someone else makes a movie about how humans only use 10% of their brains, we may want to consider an investigation if this is an actual problem that there are people employed in Hollywood who somehow only use 10% of their brains. I like science fiction, but the prospect of someone getting suddenly smarter relies on some tricks about consciousness that we don't yet have solid neuroscience to explain, or a mental disorder that is treated (depression being a common example). Honestly all being able to access 100% would mean (probably) isn't that someone would get instantly superhuman powers, but that they'd be aware of ordinarily sub-conscious processes like breathing or sensory perceptions that we filter out most of the time. Maybe memory recall would be better. And that in turn risks a lot of solipsism rather than someone running amok with god-like powers. I realize that people with superior mental recall and eidetic memories are perceived as "superhuman", or that people with very good perceptive abilities (excellent eyesight or distinguishing palettes for foods) are. But we don't need to make a superhero/supervillain movie to sell those and it probably isn't because they "use more of their brain."

A note on writing
- All writers are writing about themselves. A very good writer is writing in such a way that, while their reader will know this, has constructed an imaginative reality in which the reader may escape, or clever and well-supported arguments in which they may engage and nod or shake the head vigorously in agreement or anger. But writers are really writing to put down the words about themselves. What I believe a very good writer possesses is not necessarily a command of the language in which they compose words (though the well-placed 5 dollar word helps at times). Instead it is a command of perspective-taking that is possessed. Writers see things as best they can as someone else, be they a character or an interlocutor, and can better convince us that these others are the ones speaking to us on the page and not the man behind the curtains.

This is not the same as "If I were in his/her place". That's a weak sauce to pour over the question of what someone else would or should think. Anyone can do that and it requires no imagination. It is "If I were them in his/her place" that we're after. Assuming a new identity for a brief while, not presuming an identity for ourselves. History as a field of study requires this practice when done properly. It is this skill that it should instruct and impart and not the memorization of trivial dates and names assembled into the proper order.

Migration patterns of the not so rich and not so famous

Uh... This sentence: "There's a persistent belief in Washington that there's an easy "compromise" on the question of what to do with America's 11 million unauthorized immigrants: give them legal status instead of deporting them, but don't allow them to pursue citizenship." - is directly contradicted by this one: "76 percent of Americans who think unauthorized immigrants should be eligible for citizenship at some point."

Perhaps, and I know this will be shocking, Washington's persistent beliefs are stupid on this point. The "middle ground" is fixing the existing immigration and citizenship laws to provide a path to citizenship, because that's what most people want in some form. Even most conservatives support such measures. There is no need for a plan which somehow rejects citizenship as an option, or a plan which removes many millions of people. Because that's not actually what most people want. The latter does have a constituency, but it doesn't appear to be a very big one.

For the record I don't even think we should be doing much to keep track of the borders. Basically a lethal pandemic disease is about the only reason I can think of to be all that worried about who comes and goes as a systematic measure of border controls. If you're worried about terrorism border control isn't going to help you, better and more focused intelligence functions are to identify and track potential threats for terrorist acts, plus there are plenty of legal citizen status or native born Americans who do things we could otherwise regard as "terrorism".

As a result much of the problem with this debate is a belief about the borders at all being a point of contention when most of the people who immigrated have been here for years because we have an ineffectual immigration system for turning such people into citizens if they want to be. This probably why there's also a large constituency who demands mass deportations despite the futility, expense, and lack of any plausible benefit to doing so, and who is rarely heard from except during Republican primaries it seems. How this expensive and questionably moral project becomes a demand for a futile and wastefully expensive border control measure also I am less clear on.

SoTU

"One measure of a truly free society is the vigor with which it protects the liberties of its individual citizens. As technology has advanced in America, it has increasingly encroached on one of those liberties—what I term the right of personal privacy. Modern information systems, data banks, credit records, mailing list abuses, electronic snooping, the collection of personal data for one purpose that may be used for another—all these have left millions of Americans deeply concerned by the privacy they cherish.

And the time has come, therefore, for a major initiative to define the nature and extent of the basic rights of privacy and to erect new safeguards to ensure that those rights are respected.

I shall launch such an effort this year at the highest levels of the Administration, and I look forward again to working with this Congress in establishing a new set of standards that respect the legitimate needs of society, but that also recognize personal privacy as a cardinal principle of American liberty." 

- Richard Nixon 1974 (note: Nixon also talked more about health care in that speech than Obama did last night). 

It's great that Obama keeps saying he's going to reform the surveillance state, but unless he actually starts doing things that don't remind me of Richard Nixon, then he's just as full of shit as Tricky Dick was. Mostly I found his brief mention of the surveillance debate to be highly misleading. He's spent most of the time explicitly rejecting the recommendations of his own executive branch critics, to say nothing of civil libertarian objections and Congressional opposition and general popular confusion and disdain. 

The same deal applies to the comments on drones and the general IR agenda. He talked about things happening... but didn't outline a general responsible approach for his administration that could be easily and clearly implemented. It was not encouraging that a Libya repeat isn't in the cards. And probably the biggest thing going on overseas that might be a cause for concern for Americans (other than negotiations with Iran maybe, nobody cares about Syrians fighting) is the China-Japan spat over some rocks in the Pacific carrying out the argument with ships in close proximity at times. I don't think that was mentioned at all. 

And how about that Drug War, Mr President? Nice of you to mention there's some problem with it in passing a week ago and ignore it here in the context of remarks broadly in favor of taking executive action without consulting Congress. Which the drug war is somewhat firmly an executive project already (President can change the schedule status of drugs with some leeway, can pardon and reduce sentences, issue directives to the DoJ not to enforce or pursue minimum sentencing statutes, etc). 

About the only things I liked in the speech:

1) Iran. It's probable that I'm far closer to Obama than most of Congress on this issue, in that I really don't see the point of further sanctions when sanctions have "worked" to bring about the prospect of an agreement on nuclear proliferation issues. Actually, I do see the point of such sanctions, in that they're intended to prevent negotiation and haste the prospect of an attack. But since I think an attack is counterproductive and likely to be ineffective at advancing our goal and interests here, I don't follow the point. Talking and side actions are more likely to be useful than attempting to change the government of Iran by external means of force. 

2) Mention of climate change was encouraging. I'm not sure there's much agreement between Obama and someone like me on what we should do about it, but it's at least good it comes up as a topic. It's a little more pressing than what kind of health care plan I could buy, although I'm certainly not that pleased with that either. I'd prefer more debate ongoing here but Republicans seem... less useful. It might help though if every time there's this thing called "winter", so many people didn't run around saying "what global warming?". Yes. Still cold out there. I get it. Still winter. I remember a March with 90 degree temperatures here in Ohio not that long ago and a summer that was persistently near or over 100 degrees. I think that's a little more prominent than whether or not there is snow and ice on the ground in January. There's supposed to be snow and ice on the ground in January; that's the climate here in the Great Lakes/Rust Belt region of the country. The climate isn't supposed to be setting record high temperatures for weeks in a row. One of these things is not like the other. 

3) Immigration. I'd favor them doing something on this, but by "something" I would mean "open the border already", rather than "put in billions of dollars of defence contractor pork for border security", which mostly won't work anyway. I am not optimistic that in an off-year election anything will be passed on this even if Boehner thinks something will and Obama wants something to sign. But if something is, it will take a form much too similar to the bill that was proposed and eventually died last year with such handouts and excessive fortifications as a key selling point. It will have to. Too much of the Republican (and Democratic) base is opposed not just to a more open borders society with large amounts of migration as an option, but even to the relatively free and open borders we have right now for anything else to be passed. 

The general focus on inequality is nice, but mostly it seems was inaccurate. The causes and factors and vectors here are much more complicated than "let's raise the minimum wage", which is almost entirely useless for that project, or "increase the set of intellectual property rights", which is mostly a boon to existing infrastructure rather than a job creation system (indeed, it's probably an economic suppressor rather than a necessary protection of innovation). 

How a libertarian is not in the Tea Party, and probably doesn't want to be included in the first place

I've long maintained that the Tea Party is essentially a movement of social conservatives/strong conservative Republicans who reacted rather late to the anti-Bush portions of the initial wave of Paul-ite types opposing the expansive state and executive powers and woke up to these issues upon the ascension of an opposing political figure (Obama) rather than out of some principled conscience. It has always reminded me of a costumed Halloween-Constitution Day theme that has gone on way too long rather than some vibrant anti-statist community that re-assures me I have fellow travelers wishing for a smaller or less invasive state as a broad goal.

Evidence to this effect has been presented in polls for a long time, that the core of the movement holds very strong socially conservative views, and that it is, for the most part, rather anti-libertarian, even sometimes on economic issues for which it is painted as stridently so.

This kind of poll is devastating to that effect. 

I will raise a number of points here (and then raise a few derivations on atheism too, since that concerns me as well).

1) Libertarians have very opposed views on social issues from the Tea Party or Republican party in general. They're virtually the opposite on legalising marijuana (71% for, compared to ~60% opposed), a higher rate than even Democrats and many liberals. They're about as pro-choice as everyone else rather than restrictive on abortion access and rights, and they're much more supportive of physician assisted suicide even than most people, much less conservatives. And finally they're opposed to restrictions on pornography (on the internet in particular). This suggests that candidates who have highlighted such conservative attitudes will not garner much libertarian support or enthusiasm, if not gain outright opposition. This is true regardless of whether the candidate has a D or an R next to them as many Democrats are pro-drug war or will support various restrictions on abortion, for example.

2) Gay marriage remained an outlier to this (roughly 60% opposed, less than Republicans/Tea Party types but much less support than other issues).

I have less of a philosophical appreciation for why this might be, since I am broadly supportive of gay marriage personally. Naturally I am bothered by this polling result and how it reflects upon "my" politics.

I have encountered fairly libertarian-leaning people who have implied that the state shouldn't be involved in marriage in the first place, as yet one more intervention they think is unnecessary. Philosophically there's a great deal of merit to that claim to avoid the state's interventions where ever possible, but practically and legally, it is absurd. Marriage is already defined by the state in too many ways through common law and legal codes to eliminate it in a broad stroke, and is so defined in ways that differ widely from "traditional" notions already (such as the easier availability of divorce) that concerns over protecting "traditional" marriages make little sense to me.

By contrast, similar private contracts made by homosexual couples (such as wills or custody assignments) are often violated or voided by states rather than upheld as the wishes and private arrangements of their citizens. This is a great injustice committed by the state, arguably greater than the injustice of having the state involved in marriage laws in the first place since all that does is standardize contracts which can still be easily amended for particular demands (but not all, since taxation and legal residency status aren't property rights individuals confer by right upon each other as individuals in contract). It might be better if we were to start from scratch avoiding the state interventions in a new system, that argument can be made. That's not the world we live in, where most of those interventions are broadly popular and will not be practically simple to divorce from the powers of the state. It does not impress me as a reason to oppose extending these same legal rights to homosexuals. I would be much more impressed by this argument if a) people making it were to describe specific or particular types of powers in marriage laws that they would prefer to see abolished, including some of those that benefit themselves, b) they would accede to a method of enforcement of these contracts that was less arbitrary in the first place as a means of acknowledging that their own arrangements would likely be respected and favorably treated while other people's might not be so honored, and c) how this method would differ from having the state enforce marriage contracts as it does already. And along with any of that, some evidence that the general public could be persuaded to support such amendments to the structure of marriage contracts or enforcements or already supports such changes. Mostly I just see this expressed as a platitude that the state shouldn't be doing it rather than as a course of action on how it would cease. Which is perhaps philosophically and rhetorically appealing but isn't an objection to amending the status quo arrangement in some modest way.

3) Libertarians seem to identify at least marginally with the Republican party anyway. I suspect this is from some affinity to economic rhetoric which is less hostile to markets and more hostile to regulation and taxes.

I'm not sure it has borne out much fruits however as Republicans have repeatedly and whole-heartedly embraced some foolishly anti-market or anti-economically sensible business-corporate handouts while in office, and have persisted in these habits (see the agriculture bill or transportation votes earlier this year) even as these supposedly anarchistic Tea Party representatives have taken offices. Some have more principled positions (Mike Lee's proposal on transportation and gasoline taxes is not terrible for example) but these are still the minority amongst both Tea Party types and Republicans in general. Other than keeping taxes relatively low but mostly incoherent, I'm not sure what policy victories Republicans can claim here. Opposition to the ACA/ObamaCare is related to this however and may be considered as a major issue of shared concern (given the overwhelming percentage of libertarians who supported a notion that much more health care should be devolved to the individual's economic concern and planning rather than existing as a basic right as liberals or communitarians might claim).

The main questions this raises for me are as follows:
a) Why do libertarians perceive Democrats as poorly as they do. Is this from the hostility of liberal commenters and editorials to libertarian politics and objections as a tribal affiliation (something which many conservatives, particularly social conservatives, often adopt as well)? Or is this from hostility to Democratic policy choices and preferences? Or from ignorance of the similarities of the two parties and their supporters on many issues?
b) It appears libertarians and Tea Party types generally see both Republicans and Democrats as being far more liberal than they actually are. I see both as much less liberal than they are believed to be by others of less libertarian persuasion, curiously. I'm left wondering why there isn't very much of a left-libertarian lean available in expression.
c) Why do libertarians not bow out entirely from Republican politics or, perhaps alternatively, take alliances of convenience with the "most" libertarian candidate running, regardless of whether this is a D or R candidacy, whoever promotes particularly liberty-based preferences in the most categories of importance to the individual voter and can thereby be worked with to advance those into policy changes or the abolition of existing policy. The assumption of both parties seems to be that people voting for libertarians are doing so out of a disaffection with Republicans or conservatives rather than to express a particular strain of policy desires. While that might be accurate for now, as Republicans are increasingly seen as old-white guys, and libertarians are mostly drawing from younger white guys, that may come to a change in the party's stance on some key issues or may come to an abandonment of the party in favor of Democrats who are more flexible on economic concerns or third party candidates who are often more inflexible but much closer to ideological policy preferences.

4) Libertarians had a very unfavorable view overall of immigration and immigrants. Since most of the libertarian leaning scholarship I encounter personally and libertarian leaning commentary on the subject of immigration I consume has a very, very positive view of immigration, both economically and personally/culturally/historically. Perhaps since I came up in a rather diverse group of friends and classmates, descended from recent immigrants in many cases my own views are less suspicious of "others". I suspect this overall trend has to do with the near-universal whiteness of libertarians and some sort of racial hostility to Latinos or Africans, and to a lesser extent various Asian migrants. What confuses is me though is that it is a much stronger hostility than is expressed by even Tea Party constituencies. I do not communicate much with the Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell types but they seem much stronger than I had thought amongst libertarian perspectives. This was disconcerting as it was one of the few negatives that was stronger among libertarians than conservatives.

5) Religion plays a big part in why Tea Party types and Republicans in general differ from libertarians. There's a huge percentage of both evangelicals AND unaffiliated "nones" involved versus the more communitarian Catholic population, but there are still fewer evangelicals than are affiliated with Republicans or the Tea Party. These means that while there are still plenty of "religious right" affiliated types within a given libertarian population, it's very different from the Tea Party or social conservative constituencies that make up larger portions of Republican voter blocs where most such persons see themselves as far right religious voters. This may also reflect the distinctions on social issues being a hands-off from government approach rather than a strict legal regime, a greater tolerance for "good-without-god" morality (than even the general population provides), and a generally less religious outlook governing their politics or perhaps even individual lives.

6) In a less related point, but one which I've raised before here. The population of Americans who express belief in a "personal god" in this poll is over 60%. While this percentage is perhaps lowered to a more tolerable level by excluding evangelical Protestants, it is still much higher than many European secular Democracies or the views of many theological scholars for that matter. Atheists are often told that this belief is limited to the outlandish worldview of the religious right, but this ignores that:
a) the religious right is a very large and substantial portion of the American population, and exerts considerable control over the politics and the subsequent laws and regulations of many states, or within states to the city/town/county level, and up to federal representatives via its ability to mobilize over activism on particular causes and issues and to attempt to hold elected officials to particular mandates over these causes and concerns. It is not an insubstantial percentage of people who really don't matter who are being argued with by atheists on the application of these beliefs to political policies, much less the application of scientific reasoning or empirical deductions about the problems that are faced by individuals and the institutions and social groups they construct (like nation-states). They are quite real and they are quite numerous and they are quite busy.
b) It is not so limited to only crazy-right-wingers as indeed many people guided by communitarian left-wing politics express similar attitudes. That population is probably still significantly larger than the population of libertarians or atheists taken as a whole and still expresses sentiments or broad philosophical agreement with many state interventions based upon religious beliefs. Even if they might oppose some of the more strident objects taken up by the religious right (like legal opposition to gay marriage or abortion say) they may take up often paternalistic sentiments about health or provisions to the poor in kind rather as a raw cash transfer on the basis that some god-figure wants them to set up the state thus instead of out of some empirical assessment that this or that approach could best help the poor or the sick.

I think much of this is that most religious people who hold a more modest or vague view when pressed either lie about holding this view but are far more comfortable with the notion of a personal entity as a deity in their daily lives or just don't hang out that often among more literal Biblical types who take this personal entity far more seriously and assume that they are a rarer commodity in the general public. This second explanation is fairly likely as many people are uncomfortable holding religious conversations anyway and are not extensively skilled in debating theological points or consistently applying them as a practice of their faith.