Why were we invited to that party again?

I'm having trouble understanding why libertarians are still marginally affiliated with Republicans/conservatives. These questions are not helpful for figuring that out.

"Since the 1950s, do you think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?

Conservatives: 23% better, 64% worse
Libertarians: 74% better, 12% worse."

There are better ways to tell the difference between these two, but pessimism will do if nothing else will. (These are all among a group of mostly millennials, not overall populations).

Immigration had a big split, but mostly because libertarians were 94% in favor of more immigration, and 86% opposed to a stupid wall. Conservatives were divided, nominally opposed to more immigration and in favor of a stupid wall. Another big gap existed over the NSA and defence cuts, and ground troops to fight ISIS.

And then there were these questions.

"Do you believe that identifying with a gender different from the gender assigned at birth is morally acceptable or morally wrong?

Conservatives: 64% wrong, 1% acceptable, 32% not a moral question
Libertarians: 13% wrong, 24% acceptable, 62% not a moral question

Recent killings of black men, including incidents in Minneapolis and Baton Rouge have sparked national protests of police treatment of black Americans that centered around the slogan #BlackLivesMatter. Do you support or oppose the goals of #BlackLivesMatter?

Conservatives: 21% support, 76% oppose
Libertarians: 64% support, 32% oppose

It is important for children to be brought up in a religion so they can learn good values

Conservatives: 88% agree, 8% disagree
Libertarians: 34% agree, 61% disagree

I am willing to give up some personal freedom and privacy for the sake of national security

Conservatives: 80% agree, 16% disagree
Libertarians: 24% agree, 70% disagree

Internet pornography is a public health crisis

Conservatives: 53% agree, 44% disagree
Libertarians: 10% agree, 84% disagree

The government needs to do more to combat the prescription painkiller addiction epidemic

Conservatives: 48% agree, 49% disagree
Libertarians: 25% agree, 70% disagree"

And these

"How concerned are you about the following issues?

Terrorism/national security

Conservatives: 89% very concerned
Libertarians: 29% very concerned

Abortion

Conservatives: 71% very concerned
Libertarians: 26% very concerned

Morality in society

Conservatives: 67% very concerned
Libertarians: 50% not concerned at all"

"Which of these best describes your religious preference?

Catholic

Conservatives 32%
Libertarians 8%

Evangelical

Conservatives: 32%
Libertarians: 6%

Non-religious

Conservatives: 3%
Libertarians: 40%"

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.

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.

Quiz it

There's a political quiz here: http://www.isidewith.com
Which appears designed to deal with the problems routinely found in an uninformed electorate voting wildly upon issues that they may or may not care much about for candidates that may or may not actually share those views or act to carry them into law.

I went through and took this. For the most part, I find that the questions lack enough sophistication for more nuanced positions, more radical positions, or more... unique positions.  I have some quibbles with the scoring system as well, but not many. They seemed for instance to properly identify Obama as a drug warrior rather than as a drug-reformer or drug-decriminalisation advocate as is sometimes claimed, nor as an anti-war candidate as was commonly believed during the 2008 election (see Afghanistan), and there doesn't appear to be much "socialist!" idiocy. I also quibble with the fact that there isn't much dealing with the Iraq war or the Libya incursion, at least directly, for foreign policy.

Going through, these would be my more specific responses. (And short version, they didn't get into monetary policy enough for me to greatly distinguish Ron Paul from Gary Johnson and that abortion and immigration had to be relied upon. But both of them crushed everyone else. This should not be surprising)

Foreign policy

Should the US intervene in the affairs of other countries? I picked the "only if it serves national security", which to me read as the proximate statement for "realist concerns benefiting a strong or vital national interest only". That does not include "humanitarian" missions employing military force use for the most part and definitely doesn't include regime changing occupation missions.

How should the US deal with Iran? I went with "Maintain diplomacy while discouraging the use of nuclear weapons" My actual position would be something akin to "continue to attempt to slow development if possible or practicable of actual weapons, and use international law/treaty and diplomacy to enforce non-proliferation rather than military force". I'm not sure what "discouraging the use of nuclear weapons" means in practical terms but it could mean providing a nuclear deterrent against their use (M.A.D style?), or it could mean arms reduction treaties to limit the scope and size of any possible nuclear wars along with disarmament or IAEA/NPT compliance for other countries. Given that there's a lot of preposterous fear mongering relating to Iran's technical capacities for missile launches and conventional payloads (both of which might at best represent threats to Israeli security, for which they are amply supplied to defend or counter by themselves, and neither of which represents any severe danger to American security), I'm guessing that only our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have prevented outright warfare by diminishing the public appetite for additional conflict.   

Should the US maintain a presence at the UN? "Yes". Generally speaking diplomacy is cheap, even if it doesn't always provide gains to us, and as a "great power", we have veto powers to prevent things that we perceive as against our interests from happening through diplomatic means (much as China and Russia do). As a realist, while I recognize the international community won't always function according to legal dictums, it serves our interests to a) appear to go through the motions such that when rare actual forceful actions are necessary, as they might appear to be motivated by more noble concerns and thus shared in by others (obviously this has not been the case in our choice of recent actions), b) to use the existing structure to preserve or achieve power by avoiding tedious and expensive wastes of conflict for our blood and treasure by securing interests in other ways, and c) to provide diplomatic channels to secure and demonstrate alliances of convenience to hegemonic power or to cushion the decrease in relative power to a multi-polar world.

Should the US end the war in Afghanistan? "Yes". I also went with a stronger constraint on the War Powers Act, such that wars should be declared more affirmatively by Congress and only carried out by the CINC powers of the Presidency. Drone warfare should be included in this, even if it has more vague powers of declaration associated with it. The idea that "military leaders" should be allowed to determine whether any political or national interests are served by continuing a conflict is totally ludicrous to me. They can tell us whether those missions of vital interest could be carried out, what resources are required, and engage in military discipline and strategic planning with some latitude, but deciding whether or not to stay in a country for us? Stupid.

Should the US continue to support Israel? "No". In so far as we should provide aid if they were attacked and invaded (foolishly) by a rival country, fine. I can see that argument, much as we might if Western Europe or Australia were attacked by some (largely fictional) enemy. Those scenarios are extremely unlikely given the relative power of any allied military to their enemies for possible invasion (even South Korea could win against North Korea rather handily, just the terribly high cost of civilian infrastructure and population in the South prevents such a conflict). I can see arguments for sharing intelligence on terrorist networks for global purposes also. In so far as we should unilaterally or even tacitly support whatever Israeli policies are internally, or projected into Palestinian occupied territories, no.

How should the US handle the genocide in Sudan? "Don't get involved". I'm not sure how our involvement would or could resolve the situation. See Kosovo or Somalia for how interventions don't work out. Or Libya for a more recent example. Sudan also sounds like less of a regime matter and more a local tribal conflict that the regime has exploited and expanded, and which would require a very considerable investment on our part to dial down successfully (essentially a large occupation/peacekeeping force positioned for an indefinite period and effectively supporting one or more of the rival factions). To boot, the US does not have substantial diplomatic ties with the current Sudanese government on which to carry any influential weight as it is in the Chinese or Russian sphere of influence. Official US policy should be non-intervention. Private citizens may lobby the Chinese if they want as was done with a modest success in the South Sudan situation.

Should the United States end its trade embargo and travel ban on Cuba? Generally I am opposed to embargoes on any country. The type of country which a trade ban or boycott or other restriction is likely to have useful effect is likely to be the sort of country we are unlikely to use such things against (that is: a country with a democratically accountable government and a large developed economy). There are types of embargoes that may more penalise the intended targets (such as by trying to track and freeze the assets of corrupt regime leaders when moved to foreign and aligned countries, which limits opportunities for investment and growth of those private assets), but wide scale embargoes accomplish little but to impoverish, even starve or otherwise endanger, the general public of a rival country at the expense of providing a cheap propaganda point on which a dictatorial leader may rally support against our initiatives. For no probable gain on our behalf. Eg, they are counter-productive. It is sensible that US interests may be served by limiting military technology or friendly espionage with rival countries, but this is not what the trade and travel bans intend. Trade and travel restrictions should really only be used during a time of active war and conflict.

Immigration

Should children of illegal immigrants be granted citizenship? I went with "yes if they were born here." In general I see citizenship as distinct from open borders policies for residency or trade and labour. People should want to definitively associate themselves as "Americans" to participate fully and for civic purposes in our society as citizens. But in so far as it would then be necessary to make distinctions from current American citizens being born here instead of just getting citizenship, I don't see any reason to make such a distinction to shut off immigrants receiving citizenship at birth in the same way that other residents do.


Should illegal immigrants be given access to paid health care? "Yes". Medical ethics demands this to some extent. I am not convinced that this is a substantial driver of costs (The "ER use" mythology is very powerful). Essentially I think the same arguments against immigrants being denied care would have to apply to any poor person or anyone who lacked insurance, etc.

Should illegal immigrants working in the US be granted temporary amnesty? Again, yes. I would prefer some combination of the following: auctioning off work visas to businesses rather than requiring businesses to prove need, increased allowances for entrance through this means, and especially a simplified means of accessing citizenship rather than extension hoop jumps we use now. We are generally enriched by immigration for cultural and economic reasons and I don't see a reason to reduce this enrichment by worrying about boot millions of people out of country.

Science

Do you support the Theory of Evolution? I suppose this is a proxy for other social conservative value assessments. (Eg, a way to provide additional emphasis to anti-gay or anti-abortion stances). Otherwise, I'm not sure what filtering value this question serves. Being anti-rational or anti-humanist isn't exactly an unpopular political view in the US, and is actually something that takes the format of being influenced by other political ideological views. Liberals end up being more likely to take views opposing GM foods or vaccinations or nuclear power with more seriousness because they hold anti-corporate views just as social conservatives take creationism and abortion and homosexuality with more seriousness than the science would indicate is deserved because of faith-based views. 

Should the federal government fund stem cell research? If the grant proposals involved in such research are very promising, I suppose a case can be made here. I'm skeptical that this is actually the case for much stem cell research that the government needs to be encouraging it in some special way that the private market doesn't have incentives to do already. The question here also simplifies the disparity between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells; which is where most social conservatives seem concerned, though for my purposes, it doesn't matter. I'm opposed to subsidizing this sort of thing not on moral grounds but on economic grounds. There are more promising or more directly practical lines of medical and genetic research available to lavish with public monies.

Should the US increase our space exploration efforts and budget? Other than satellite surveillance or communications, or things like GPS, I'm not convinced the US requires a public space programme. If private enterprise wants to do space tourism, exploration, or maintain orbital platforms for their own use, I'm fine with that. I don't think this should be a NASA centric effort and there are other ways to exhort Americans to take up the cause of science and mathematics in ways that they presently do not.


Health Care


Should marijuana be legalised in the US? Yes. With the additional requirements of a) a regulated open market, including possible medical uses for anyone and recreational use for adults and b) the reduction or elimination of criminal penalties for nonviolent offences associated with marijuana (or other narcotic substances).

Do you support the PPACA (Obamacare)? There really wasn't a good response here. My preference is a universal catastrophic coverage system provided by the government in exchange for taxes or mandated medical savings, basic subsidies for people who are poor or lower income or medically disabled, and then open it up from there to anyone who wants first dollar coverage or augmented elements to the private insurance market (which should be cheaper to provide if catastrophic care is augmented with government payments). This idea is some version of Singapore, Wyden-Bennett, and to some extent the Ryan plan. This also feeds into the next question...

Should we expand or dismantle our medicare programme? To which I would reply dismantle. It is an unsustainable economic model in the American polity to ask poorer working young people to pay for the health care of richer retired old people. Asking working people to pay for health care for poor people might be a justifiable system. Asking them to pay for the elderly on the basis of an arbitrary retirement age being reached is stupid. This idea should be phased out, starting with means testing benefits, then a general overhaul of medical insurance structure such that people when they retire ought to have some amount of funding available for their own needs privately held (eg, mandated HSA style accounts). This is but one example of vast transfers of wealth from poor to rich within our system (Home mortgage interest deductions are another), an idea which is both socially unjust and economically unsustainable.

Domestic policies 

Do you support increased gun control? I am opposed on some general liberties and Constitutional rights, and am agnostic about the efficacy of gun control setups that have been used. Some were genuinely bad and counterproductive, others seem to have at least "noble" goals and had minimal harm on the public they were enforced against (assault weapon bans for instance or constraints on ex-felons or mentally ill). I am however not all that fond of a social mindset that sees guns in the home and on one's person as essential. I just don't see that there are many sensible legal ways to restrict this attitude. Other than to make it less feel less essential (eg, make people aware that crime is rare, for instance, for most of us). So "no".

Do you support the Patriot Act? There are probably some provisions in there that were or are still of actual utility (some position of unified intelligence and intelligence sharing between various bureaus for example, if they were ever to use such a system might be beneficial. They do not appear to have done so very efficiently). But most of it read like a laundry list of law enforcement wants that exceeded Constitutional mandates, and offered little actual anti-terrorism effects. The general effect of security theater policies, especially in the formation of the Homeland Security cabinet position and the arbitrary methods of the TSA, does little to inspire confidence that other government provisions were of any necessity either. So "no".

Should the government regulate the internet to deter online piracy? Generally no. I am opposed to stronger intellectual property rights defenses, and support weakening of public domain laws and patent trolling powers. I do think that piracy of movies and music, along with video games, is a legitimate concern for those industries, but it does not appear to cause sufficient harm to their abilities to make creative works, distribute them, and to profit by them. Indeed, piracy itself seems heavily related to either a) distorted price controlled markets or b) items of considerable popularity. That is: something being pirated a lot ought to tell us that something is really, really popular already and is probably already making a lot of money. It would better if people weren't pirating it.. but the music industry finally seems to have twigged to resolving a partial solution by using digital distribution methods like itunes, and movies or TV shows will eventually concede to things like Netflix streaming or ala carte cable subscriptions as a method of generating revenues for consumption of their works. These methods do not eliminate piracy, but seem to alleviate it by offering ways to buy into the market and participate as a consumer without the old methods of having to consume entire albums, or to purchase on reserve copies of DVD/Blue-Rays for movies and shows that we may enjoy but probably don't want to own.

Are you in favor of decriminalising all drugs? Yes. As with marijuana, the problem is generally medical, not legal. It should be treated as such rather than as locking up addicts and providers with no other basis. I am skeptical that mere possession ought to be a basis for sending people off to drug treatment centres either (seems like a wasteful lack of filtering), but this is quite a bit better than locking such people up in prisons and jails and implementing invasive and aggressive police tactics to deal with non-violent criminals. If drug dealers are killing each other or their violence and aggression challenges a neighbourhood for other reasons, we should naturally be concerned. But just selling and possessing and using things ought not to automatically concern us.

Should we limit federal funds to public schools that do not meet performance standards? If we had some means of school choice, I should think this would be handled by parents and markets without need for federal decisions for implementing standards based testing that is probably counterproductive to providing a broad based general k-12 education and lacks effective enforcement methods at this time. I see several problems with this: one the current methods are ineffective, two, it's difficult to present what federal standards ought to be, or a basis for why they should override local or state standards, and three, who monitors these standards and how is a punitive method by reducing funds to a trapped school district a means of effectively improving the quality of education available to students and parents in that neighbourhood or city?

Do you support affirmative action programmes? "No, but we should offer social programmes to address poverty regardless of race or ethnicity". I see this as far more useful than automatic assistance to ethnic minorities. Given that there are disproportionately poor minorities, poverty based assistance would still provide substantial racial disparity in public benefits, without assisting people who have limited need of our public aid. The "sin of slavery" is an important historical reference point, but it should be possible to redress it by alleviating poverty and opportunity inequalities in occupation and education for all people.

Environmental issues


Is Global warming a threat to the environment? Yes. But I'm not sure what government plans would do much to help with it. The US already is among the largest reducers of CO2 reduction in the developed world for example by way of reducing CO2 intensity in our economy. Without much in the way of direct intervention and in spite of still substantial government largess for fossil fuel production (coal and oil) and use (highway subsidies rather than congestion pricing). There are existing government policies that should be abolished that may be exacerbating the problem as a result rather than a pressing need for additional government policy. A carbon tax or congestion pricing or gasoline tax would be probably sufficient if more action is necessary after those actions are taken (in exchange for reductions in other taxes at the federal or local level). A greater emphasis on densification rather than current policy favoring suburban settlement would also help (ideally we would do little to encourage either. Better schools and lawns provide incentives to live in the burbs, while access to culture, "public" transit, and other creative class benefits should provide incentives to live in cities).

Should we expand our offshore drilling? Generally speaking we should stop promoting it with additional support in the form of subsidies but other than basic regulation of environmental damage, I'm not sure we should be preventing it either. Without government support, it's possible these would still be economically useful to energy companies, but I'm not concerned if that were to be the case or not. The government should neither support nor oppose much offshore drilling.

Economic issues


Should the government raise the federal minimum wage? No, the federal government should abolish federal min wage standards altogether. These have the effect of depressing low skilled employment. Competition among such jobs would ensure that wages would not be "too low". What would be of greater importance is a general welfare reform that takes on the format of a universal basic income or negative income tax, such that people would receive transfer payments in cash rather than most in-kind forms of assistance for housing, food, and to some extent health care, etc. This would remove some of the inefficiencies in the design of these programmes such that they would not "phase out" when people cross income thresholds and allow people to earn additional income without fear of losing essential public benefits. 

Should Congress raise the debt ceiling? Yes. My preference is for Congress to reign in spending of all kinds and conduct an extensive tax reform. Since it won't do those things, I would prefer we not default on debts. Any ideas that we can cut spending without touching defence, and entitlements are absurd as is most "balanced budget amendment" talk. This is pandering rather than solutions. That money is already effectively spent and accounts for the overwhelming percentage of our expenses.

Should the US have bailed out the major banks during the financial crisis of 2008? Not as such. What should have been done was a NGDP target, or at least an inflation target that the Fed actually tried to hit, combined with a negative interest rate on reserves. This might have meant that some big banks would fail, or be broken up, but it would have discouraged hording of money by large institutions of all kinds (regular corporations for instance) at a time when the economy required liquidity and a higher velocity of money. Simply giving money to businesses that made very poor decisions does acknowledge some amount of government complicity in those decisions (eg, that they were encouraged to make them), but it doesn't do much to resolve the underlying problem that they were in fact poorly run institutions that made stupid decisions.

Do you agree with President Obama's 2009 stimulus plan? They probably should have provided more specifics here, but in general the answer was no. Things like unemployment compensation to some reasonable extent are uncontroversial in my view. And the sort of ad hoc manner that states would balance budgets by slashing payrolls in police or teaching would not be carried out in the most effective manner (by firing and retiring ineffective or abusive members of those institutions for example; partly because the methods of dismissing public employees are already fraught with legal complexity). But infrastructure spending is by now fraught with all manner of complicating and competing regulation fights that make it inefficient stimulus and to boot wasn't in most cases all that well designed to get projects of necessity off the ground. An ideal infrastructure stimulus programme involving infrastructure could have been to improve and maintain the already existing infrastructure rather than to supply incentives to produce more.  Of an often dubious utility. This would have had the advantages of more immediately providing work to people in a heavily displaced economic sector and providing some benefits in a more functional road network, efficient electrical grid, or updated water or sewer lines, some of which date to the 19th century, and so on without the need for boondoggle projects in high speed rail or subsidized clean energy.

Should the federal government subsidize farmers? Nope. Next question.

Should we keep or dismantle our Social Security programme? I think this can function as a mandatory retirement savings system if reformed. It is less economically insane than medicare for example that old people should draw an income in their retirement than that we should then also provide medical care for all such people. I am however very skeptical that it should be monopolized and run by the government to the exclusion of other options (in the same way that I do not think a monopoly on schools is satisfying to the public externality of providing a quality education). Some variety of asset distribution or private control would be preferred here. Arguments like "look what happened to the stock market" do not concern me much here. In general that bashed the public's retirement assets because people who are retired shouldn't have very much money left in stock anyway and the problem was financial illiteracy and complexity of financial instruments. That is a separate if related issue but one which isn't as easily resolved as the relative freedom to do with money as we see fit money which is designated to be our own at a later date. Note: that could include investment in public bonds or allowing the government to manage the money in exchange for a possibly lower return on investment.

Do you believe the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 should be extended? They should really also be called the Bush tax cuts of 2010 and, probably 2012. But okay. The answer is I don't care about the Bush tax cuts one way or the other. My real concern with the tax code is that it should be simplified and greatly reformed. A general tax structure in my ideal world would include any or all of the following:
A huge reduction or elimination in all federal corporate taxation combined with both
A relative increase in the rate of capital gains and dividend earnings taxation to be closer to that of regular wage income (retaining the same sort of progressivity, and thus ending the private equity trader exclusions of carried interest also and the absurd manner in which middle class stock earnings can be taxed at regular rates while actual investment income is not)
And elimination of most forms of corporate welfare

An overall shift toward consumption taxation, possibly with a graduated effect from earnings potential (again, including capital gains type earnings) and income excluded from taxation for basic needs. This might include a VAT, carbon or gasoline taxes, other excise taxation (alcohol, narcotics, expensive first dollar health care insurance, etc). It could also included a heavily modified (less regressive scale) version of the Fair Tax proposals generally replacing income taxation of any kind.

Abolition of many tax exclusions like home mortgage deductions combined with a roughly flatter and lower overall tax rate on the increased base of money available to be taxed (this is essentially what was done during the Reagan years but not during the Bush years and also during the Kennedy and Coolidge administrations). 

No tax proposal is going to actually abolish the IRS. A bureau will exist to enforce tax laws and collect revenues. It might be smaller, and it might have very different mandates to carry out, perhaps against different sectors of the economy than the manner of taxing income. But the tax men are still going to exist. Sorry to disappoint.

Social issues.

Should abortion be outlawed in the US? No. I am persuaded that varieties of birth control access (making it OTC for example would help in addition to subsidies or cash transfers for the poor), more comprehensive sex ed, streamlined adoption methods, and other social services could actually help achieve the purported goal of reducing the likelihood and frequency of abortions. Bans would also reduce these but at the cost of increasing risks to women's health through illegal markets for provision of abortion and decreased ability to carry out medically necessary abortive procedures for the preservation of a woman's life as well as carrying enforcement costs, probably through invasive and insensitive police tactics made necessary to insure things like miscarriages are not actually abortions, etc. If the goal is actually to reduce abortions, there are better ways than by imposing enormous limitations on the liberty of women to conduct their health and sexuality (with no such restrictions imposed upon men), both for personal liberty and economic reasons I oppose bans even before entering into other moral arguments. There I favour allowing people to make complicated moral decisions themselves without fear of penalty so long as the harms committed to other human beings are limited. I am further persuaded that there is little moral certainty or clarity  that fetal and embryonic development is a "person" endowed with unalienable rights and much scientific evidence to suggest otherwise through the persistence of pregnancy difficulties in other formats, like miscarriages and failures to implant fertilized embryos in the uterine walls, to suggest that nearly any time frame of "person" prior to birth is inherently arbitrary. Positions of viability are possibly instructive as providing points of limitation and restrictive access, but not total bans.

Should gay marriage be allowed in the US?  Yes. Federal policy should be amended to provide federal legal benefits in accordance with state laws and licensing at the very least. It is also possible that federal policy should need to be amended under equal protection clauses in the 14th amendment such that ALL states would need to legalise such arrangements but I am content that demographic change on this issue will suffice to provide it in the near future to enough US residents and citizens as to make it universally approved.

Should the government require health insurance companies to provide free birth control? In general I oppose the government mandating what insurers must provide. I think the government's role here would be to provide sound scientific or transparent evidence that provision of particular methods, medications, etc is medically sound and reasonably cost effective such that insurers ought to do this. But I don't see why, say, a woman in her 50s should be receiving an insurance plan that automatically covers birth control (maybe there's some medical reasons, but it wouldn't be what we traditionally associate with the drugs and devices) simply because the government has decided that insurance companies need to provide it. I also disagree with first dollar insurance for health care more broadly anyway and think of things that are usually only modestly expensive and regular expenses (check-ups, birth control, etc) to be things that we ought to simply budget for yearly rather than to expect anyone else to pay for us. It ought to be reasonable socially or culturally to expect men and women to share the costs of provision while in a regular sexual relationship also. As an additional step, birth control of many varieties could be made OTC, which would render it cheaper and more accessible to millions of women, men, and their families or significant or occasional others by eliminating a largely extraneous step of seeing a doctor to obtain it. Women with specific and significant health risks could be filtered out by pharmacists issuing the drugs, prior consultations with doctors,etc (and the primary risks of note are "do you smoke?") without imposing costs on the vast majority of the population.

Where this became an issue politically was not mentioned in the question. The problem is that many Americans receive their insurance through their employers and employers then get to exercise their own moralising impulses upon their employees types of plans. I do not see a basis for preventing people from opting out of mandates of this kind (as opposed to more general mandates for health care provision of any kind), nor for preventing them from accessing types of care and coverage that they find perfectly acceptable when they work with or for people who do not feel likewise. The problem is more the employer provision in my view here and less the mandates.

Life Lesson #5360

I should really not debate conscription with people who are or have been in the military. It will only succeed in making me
a) angry
b) believe people in the military are being trained to be stupid and not think.

Really, this should be expanded to become mandatory military service for all rather than a non-existent draft? And this would accomplish what? Multiply the defence budget by 10 for no apparent reason?

The apparent claim was not the foreign policy wonk position about the public's perceived indifference to the suffering of troops in an all professional army and the emotional impact of military service on conscripts and their take away from the horrors of war as garnering both a level of respect for military service and a level of opposition to casual militarism and foreign policy adventuring (ie, a level of isolationism). No it was something about a lack of responsibility and accountability within the general public and that somehow this failing was only going to be resolved by making everyone line up and conduct drills in uniform. Never mind that people who "lack responsibility or accountability" tend not to be terribly well rewarded in most professions (with the possible exceptions of people who make our policy decisions, particularly in foreign policy or economic regulations, or the people who provide "objective" commentary on such people and their actions). And that people who lack them therefore have very clear signals to go attain some. Never mind that some who are aware they lack for it join the military voluntarily. And never mind that most people who lack these senses find ways to attain it without joining the military in their entire lives. Nope, we need everyone to involuntarily serve in the military. Because that's the only way people truly learn about teamwork and responsibility and other important values (and certainly not through schools, churches, sports teams, jobs, college, marriages, friendships, relationships, raising children, volunteering, teaching, learning, babysitting, having pets, credit cards, mortgages, bills, etc)

It reminds me of the twisted attempts for people to get me to believe that the only way one can be moral and good and decent is to become a member of whatever version of religion they have to sell me on. Nope, there is no way for human beings to become responsible adults without rigid authoritarian discipline and training imposed against their will and at someone else's expense. Clearly.

realistically speaking, realism says really?

Milling about political forums online and Afghanistan came up, as things like this often do, and I was asked to explain what the logical problem that Obama created by campaigning on the "good war" theory of Afghanistan and why this shouldn't be so surprising to his supporters.


---- If I agreed that this war was necessary for our national security and interests, yes it would mean that (...support more troops..). I don't. So I would be leaving Afghanistan yesterday if that were possible.

It remains in our interest to combat al Qaeda physically where possible. But I don't see how we couldn't deter the Taliban from allowing institutional support via an international terrorist group without occupying the country(s) that they hold political sway in. The argument that we need to play whack a mole with countries who harbor terrorists has never been persuasive to me (whacking actual terrorists themselves, rather than resistance to occupation forces, is a different issue than their influence over governments and public support within different regions). The argument that we could, in the process of that, introduce "democracy" and that this would improve our national security and international standing is even less impressive. I'm quite sure nobody has instituted democracy and its traditions of human rights protections at the point of a gun in the entire history of the world. The one possible exception is the American Civil War, and one can glance at textbooks written by Southerners glossing over Reconstruction's benefits as oppressive intrusions and the subsequent periods of violent resistance and Jim Crow law to see that even that failed in large measure.

Bottom line conclusion: cut the losses and get the hell out because we should never have stayed in the first place. There was no greater national security interest (or any other sort of state interests, with the possible exception of cornering the opium market, certainly not the fighting of a "drug war") once Bin Laden escaped for the military to stay in the country. Period. We have special operations units and the FBI/CIA/NSA and everybody knows it. I don't see how that isn't or wasn't enough and that wars of empire and outright aggression are needed instead. Fund the necessary intelligence and black operations needed to kill or detain people who actually need killing or detaining because they are threats to international and national security. Moreover, if deterring countries that harbor and fund terrorism was our real and governing issue, then Pakistan and Saudi Arabia would have been among our primary targets back in 2001-03. It looks to me like deterring a particular variety of terrorism is more important, which is hypocritical and hence a valuable recruiting tool for our enemies.

If you assume, as I do, that much of the underlying problem is a sectarian/religious conflict within the Islamic world, then picking sides within that is probably not in our interest. Nudging the winning side toward something like liberal human rights, sure. Making sure it doesn't spillover into wider regional conflicts, sure. Bombing and occupying Muslim countries on the "wrong" side, no. That just paints a target on us.

There's also the matter of the percentage of private contractors being used as "troops". It's higher in Afghanistan than it was in Iraq. I'd rather just pay the actual troops more if we needed more of them. Apparently the evasion of rules of engagement and rule of law are more important still than troop levels. To me that suggests we have bigger problems with our strategy than we could resolve by putting more actual troops in.

The real problem for most people (particularly Obama supporters) is not that we're over there still, or even committing to be over there for longer. It's that this wasn't exactly a surprise but has become so. He addressed the Afghanistan/Pakistan status versus Iraq deliberately and at multiple occasions during his endless campaign stretch. Apparently people were not listening? I am not sure what his logic was of equating "not Iraq then or now" with "more Afghanistan today". I think I can buy the argument that "not Iraq" would have helped "more Afghanistan" 7 or 8 years ago. I didn't understand how that situation, where we were using special operations and air power to annihilate or capture targets of interest and/or support Afghani rebels and ground troops against a militant regime with minimal ability to rally the public to resist, equates to the situation now, where we are using ground forces to occupy a nation and drone strikes to attack positions of interest in a low intensity war setting fought against people who are now capable of being rallied by militant regimes because of years of occupation and the local corruption we replaced the militancy with. Really, the only way this was a winnable and "just cause" is if there was a legitimate regime installed and supported by public considerations freely that is being repressed by militant forces of terrorism (from either within or without the country, Pakistan is a better analogy for this than Afghanistan). Since it is an illegitimate regime supported by us or narco-terrorist dollars, it's not a winnable scenario.

The next domino is that we're now again subscribers to the domino theory. That somehow abandoning Afghanistan, even the limited half-assed solution Obama is using of timetables, abandons Pakistan (or more importantly Pakistan's nuclear arsenal) to the fate of being overthrown by militant Islamists. I don't follow how that argument made any sense in the 1950s and 60s when it was used to get us in and then keep us in Vietnam for a decade. It really makes no sense with a government that has a modernized army and a modestly powerful central government that it wouldn't fight back or accept assistance to fight back against attempts to overthrow it. If Canada were suddenly overthrown by French-Canadian separatists and lets say the population of parts of Louisiana started making noises and throwing molotov cocktails at the rest of us, we wouldn't fight back? Seems to me like the realistic scenario is to tell Pakistan to deal with its own problems and get its own house in order and then ask what, if any, support it needs from us to do that. It doesn't seem insensible that they would want us to stay in Afghanistan (except that their military doesn't really want us to put more troops in any more than the American public did), but this is because it serves THEIR national interests by shifting the responsibility for fighting to OUR military.

Therefore, the best case scenario is to leave Afghanistan, let the Pakistanis deal with their own internal security problems, lean on them and India to inch closer to some settlements over Kashmir and their other regional differences to give them some breathing room in which to do so, and return militarily to the region only if the Taliban again becomes an internationalist problem by supporting terrorist organisations (which we could then target over the Taliban itself). We can certainly make strong statements about human rights abuses and offer whatever means we find appropriate to nudge the extremist philosophy they use to govern toward the modern world (be that threats or money/aid with very big strings attached to it, like for example information on militant terrorist groups operating in or near Afghanistan). The problem is not Afghanistan. It's international terrorism. Until, or unless, this understanding becomes a central feature in our national strategies, we'll keep having these endless commitments of troops in places that they can do no good for safekeeping our national security and sovereignty.

The full problem for Americans, especially those that supported Obama last year more fully than I, is that they didn't ever hear him explain what the justification for military operations in Afghanistan was and nobody could be bothered to ask. "Not Iraq" is no longer good enough.

(I include myself in those who didn't bother to ask, Afghanistan was not nearly as important an issue for 1 as the general global economy/trade or the terrorism issue more generally simply because whether we are there or not people will be there killing each other in various forms and ill-conceived purposes for violence and 2, I personally didn't expect that whatever the real reason given was, we would be leaving anytime soon either. "Tough on crime" laws are more likely to be overturned than the US leaving a war like this mid-battle)

a serious debate of a one-sided nature

Along with a long-standing series of battles over things like abortion or evolutionary theory, I've now started fighting a running debate over my support for something like excise taxes on tobacco or alcohol (something I detailed in a rather lengthy essay on health care sometime back). The principle opposition I am encountering at the moment (it's actually a popular idea, for once, that I'm pushing), is instead to establish a requirement that people receiving public assistance are screened in a mandatory fashion for tobacco, drug, or alcohol use and if they fail these tests, they don't receive payments or food stamps (SNAPs) or whatever it was, or at least that such aid cannot be used on "non-necessities". I've gathered that the principle objection to welfare state policies is something like "poverty should suck", but this is bordering on ridiculous.

I'm just going to post the series of back and forth on this here. At one point the subject is attempted to be changed to "but people are cheating the system and getting money they don't deserve!", which 1)doesn't have anything to do with how they spend aid once they receive it and 2) isn't something I would disagree needs better management or deserves penalties for the fraud it propagates. What people do with the money is a separate issue entirely and should have remained the subject of discourse. Other person's name will be simply be "them", one because I don't think anybody would care who they are and two because it's in my experience a common enough mindset that they are representing that it should be plurally argued. It's strongly related to the sort of anti-intellectualism of religious fanatics, only with a more secularised tone. I did at least clean up his grammar and spelling errors to give an appearance of fairness to the debate (apparently necessities is spelled with two 'c's...and obviously I use a lot of words that spell check doesn't even know "externalities" "surveil"? seriously Firefox, I don't know what you've been doing without me...).

Begin rambling debate

them: "I don't believe in telling people what to do that's why I kind of have a problem with this. If this is costing working class families billions of dollars because they are paying to treat themselves that's one thing, but I really start to have a problem with the whole system when working class families are paying for this treatment on lower income people. I know its a whole different argument but people on public aid should be required to take a piss test a couple times a year, they should not be drinking, smoking, or snorting , just to get us started."

Me: "You're missing the point. It's costing US billions of dollars, not THEM (the actual users of tobacco). We are subsidising their behavior by covering some of the actual cost of their decisions. Taxing that behavior recovers the cost.

Similarly, not having any money go into low-income health care costs us something as well, if for no other reason than it deprives us of their possible productive labour inputs when maintained by basic health care or for the more pressing "personal" reason that we would have to pay for the written off costs of free health care provided by doctors bound by non-market based medical oaths to tend to the sick and dying, that's why we have that social welfare program in the first place.

And if you're saying you don't believe in telling people what to do then your solution of drug testing everyone is far, far, far worse than simply levying a tax which is ultimately voluntary. A mandatory piss test is an involuntary intrusion. An employer MAY have a valid reason not to have employees who are inebriated working for them (I am not sure that this claim is necessarily granted for any or all employers or for all substances, including substances that often are not tested for, such as alcohol), but I don't see why the government needs to make that distinction when it can use less privacy-invasive means to recapture the costs."

them: "When I was talking about the drug test I was talking about people on public aid. The way I see it its kind of like living in my moms house you live by her rules or get the hell out. If you want to smoke weed, cigs, and get drunk fine, but its not gonna happen on the tax payer dime because at that point you are not a "free man" anyway. If a regular joe schmoe wants to do his thing and is responsible for his actions and accepts the consequences for his actions that is a completely different ballgame. We need to start holding people more responsible for their actions in this country and stop making excuses for everyone's individual unique boo hoo sob story. Sometimes I wish they (lawmakers) would just come out and admit it "we want cigarettes illegal" because with all these laws it seems we are all but there."

me: "I understood what you were talking about. And it's still far worse than simply taxing the damn things to recover the societal costs of use or abuse that are amassed. There isn't any reason to treat poverty like it is prison."

them:"I not talking about poor people, I am talking about people on public aid you don't have to be poor to be on public aid. A good way to get people off that crutch would be to make them as uncomfortable in that situation as possible. I'm not saying starve them to death I am saying limit benefits only to life's necessities. No one should have to pay for an alcoholic to be on welfare."

me: "Precisely what sort of public aid are you talking about?

Roads? Schools? Tuition assistance?

You don't end up on welfare or medicare or SNAPs or SSI for disability if you have money.

I might agree the benefits of social welfare systems could be restructured, but I would prefer that we do so by removing the transfer payment portions and replace them with cash transfers. If they want to blow the money on booze and blow, by all means. But then don't expect us, the tax payers to help out on the rent payment. I think you'd see a much better, more palatable decision making process if it included actual cash flow management instead of payments in kind and this sort of system allows people to actually make decisions that increase their income naturally without having to sacrifice state welfare along the way."

them: "Public aid like, welfare, food stamps, wic, and link ect, these sorts of programs. As for your third sentence, you are severely misinformed, people with a very livable wage work the system all the time. I work with one of them, I also have a friend in the business and sees it all the time, but because she is more liberal, she pretends not to see it. and its not just people with money, perfectly able to work collect these bennifits also. I live in an area with a high concentration of white trash I see it all the time, esspecially with the business I am in.I know it may be easier said then done but in the long run it could be far cheeper. But I would like to see some kind of audit system, where you do have random drug tests. In this day and age of computers, it should be easy to turn away purchases at the store when they use cards such as no beer, soda, cookies,candy, fancy butchered cuts of meat, and everything should be generic, If its good enough for me its good enough for them. This is all just a start though you could really expand on all of this."

me: ""work the system" --- That's called fraud, not public aid. This sort of fraud is factored in (I am not "misinformed").

It would not be prevented by the sort of thing you're talking about doing either and to my mind is a much larger problem than worrying about what people use public assistance for. It's a much worse thing that they abuse it when they don't need it.

And you really should think carefully on that last sentence. "really could expand on this". That's the primary reason I am adamantly opposed to your proposal. You can of course "really expand" a tax system instead, but any excise tax is ultimately voluntary. Direct control and constraint of the sort you are proposing is not."

them: Maybe I need to be a little more clearer with my thoughts, I don't think I am projecting them to you clearly enough. I was referring to people working the system who are on public aid, I understand that is fraud But I am not calling "work the system" Public aid. I used the misinformed comment in relation to a previous statement you made "you don't end up on welfare or medicare or SNAPs or SSI for disability if you don't have money". People with money do end up on these programs, sorry man I hate that I am right but its the truth, I know them and I know of them, it happens. We do agree though about an abuse of the system being a problem, I was just putting an idea out there how to crack down an abuses. Right now the system goes largely unchecked, I was on unemployment once and had to show I was actively seeking work do people on these programs have to do that? Yes excise taxes are voluntary, but in my mind someone spending your money and my money needs severe limits and restraints on the money they spend. I don't mind people who are truly in need, buying the necessities for life,( key words truly and necessities), until they get up on their own two feet. But we need to stop and get a handle on the people committing "Fraud" and wasting away on taxpayer money. Like I have said before ( I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said something like it first) the only way to get people off gov dependency it to make them uncomfortable in their current situation.

me: "You are projecting your thoughts quite clearly. I just don't think they make any rational sense if your object is a small government, as I do. Your object is apparently to use government as a punitive force. I can accept that as your rationale, but no matter how many times you say it I will not accept it as justified logic, especially in this instance with better alternatives available (such as manipulating the price mechanism to capture externalities caused only by those directly using substances and not providing a guilty until innocent accusation on everyone else for something that usually isn't even illegal in the first place: buying alcohol, tobacco or junk food...)

It's fine to punish fraudulent behavior and abuse of public aid, I think anybody would agree to that, but I don't see how your proposed solution would have anything to do with reduction of fraud. That's basically a totally different and unrelated problem to what you're discussing with people, in your mind, mis-allocating public aid that they actually need rather than people who don't need it abusing the system by taking aid when they do not need it. I really don't see how it's necessary to tell people on what to spend it, something we already do by issuing public aid in the form of in kind payments and subsidies rather than straight cash (like a negative income tax). Quite simply, no matter how many times you rephrase your statement, it comes across to me as "I'm going to engineer it to punish people for being poor". Apparently you think that's a sensible idea. I do not and I am not moved by your arguments, nor will I be.

I see the primary reason to be concerned with economic theory as the ability of a society to best use its resources to alleviate that condition of poverty. I do recommend that we do so as often as possible with a mission of mercy and dignity, and do so as often as possible without government programs or direct government controls over the nature of aid (such as by providing education or job training rather than restricting access to consumer goods). Your idea has nothing to do with the alleviation of poverty but rather your own personal dissatisfaction of it. As a result, it does not appeal to me to follow through with as a public program. In the particular instance, to my point of view, given the rates of addiction and substance abuse and their strong correlation with a condition poverty (either as a cause of or a result of, depending on the psychology), it makes more sense to subsidise treatment or foster addiction moderation through the price mechanism than it does to punish people for a what is often a medical problem.

And it makes no sense to effectively punish and monitor people who have not committed any transgression whatsoever (who don't smoke, dope, or drink to excess) for example by requiring them to submit to regular testing. You're talking about a police state. Something, even strictly applied, I cannot accept as a functional mandate. As you said "you could really expand on all of this". I strongly encourage you to think very carefully on that statement. That's precisely the sort of problem with any government monitoring program, not just this one. Remember the furor kicked up when it is revealed that HSA/DoJ was watching right-wing organisations (not that they hadn't been before under W) as a result of the PATRIOT act and its broad power to surveil people, that's precisely the sort of abuse this idea is prone to. You're better off not surrendering such control to government in the first place rather than supposing your specific end is the only means it would be applied.

I do not see the logic in having a mandated GOVERNMENT controlled measure on what people may spend their money on and deciding for them what their priorities must be, even if the money is public assistance. It's bad enough that we tried to ban alcohol and do ban narcotics from my perspective. People who are not on such things are just as wasteful and unproductive with their spending in other ways, and we are not engaged in trimming such inefficiencies from their lives either, and this is true regardless of income (as if poverty was somehow a cause of fiscal irresponsibility). Why is it then necessary to use public aid as a means of exerting control?"

brick walls

So my attempt to measure popular support for abolishing the VP has run straight into the brick wall of idiocy.

Here are some of the common attempts at defence

"The Constitution should not be open to reinterpretation"

Never mind the fact that it has been reinterpreted 27 times (including the Bill of Rights, which was not included in the original document) and has a legally defined process for doing it. :slams head into wall:

"a Vice President is necessary"
This is partly due to the fact that it's hard to outline a means of replacing the VP in a short question that says we should get rid of it. I haven't yet seen a reason that the VP is "necessary". They usually see that we have one now and that's simpler for them to understand than using any alternative means of selecting a replacement in the event we need one. This has come up with a statement like "he's plan B". Maybe so, but it looks to me like a shitty plan B.

This is also met tangentially with something like this problem

"If Biden goes away, then NANCY PELOSI is next in line for the executive office." - Somewhat unsurprisingly the primary opponent for such a radical reform is "conservatives". Because they seem to think that the present line of succession is what we would use and that naturally causes a good deal of pause. I'm not sure my current alternative would be met with any less caution right now, considering it would put Hillary Clinton in charge, at least temporarily, if Obama dies in office or had some major ailment preventing his full faculty to the nation. But in historical perspective, I think the alternative I proposed is far superior to leaving the line of succession running into the legislature and at least in terms of candidates marginally better than the alternative we're using right now.

Nobody has yet addressed the problem that we no actually longer vote for the Vice President either. Lazy intellectual work on my part for not being able to posit this problem in the question I guess. This is indirectly addressed with something like "Biden's an idiot but...". I'm not sure most people can get there with me that we don't actually need to even be worried that Biden's an idiot or not.

"Who would break ties in the Senate?".
-- Easy. The President. How often does this really happen? Cheney had 8 ties, mostly in the first 2 years when the Senate was most closely divided on party lines. The top 5 VP occasions to break ties were all back in the early 19th century. And in most every case, the VP cast the vote in the way the President would have anyway as any loyal party functionary might.

Most promising is largely the stance taken by other "moderates", who seemed to be at least marginally accepting of such a reform. Unfortunately, "moderates" actually make up very little of a self-defined liberal-conservative polling sector.

more activity

This one is the Frankenstein type idea. The last one was my own.

It is likely that with a voucher type system (I'd prefer a tax credit system rather than a voucher, the tax credit is more individually flexible and evades the goofy problems of private schools often being parochial, for now), that competitive schools would emerge to challenge the public school monopoly. Right now with tax dollars forced to go to one location, there are no feasible economic reasons to create additional/different schools to meet a prospective demand for such. Only those parents capable of meeting through their own independent means fund their demand for a higher standard of education, hence only two private schools (the back and forth responses indicated there are only two private schools in the other fella's home state). If indeed we are speaking of collections of people so small that a demand would not be economically viable, then there is a problem. There are few such communities left. The answer is not to get better teachers only in public schools, but to have better teachers available period and have parents/students able to select them through a market process rather than through a (union controlled) license system.

This was unsurprisingly met with the resistance that is deserved for supporting vouchers even partially. "When vouchers have been implemented, it has been shown it works as a tax cut for the people already going to private school. The problem is they can accept any one they want. They can not let in poor people or minorities or any kids that achieve at a low level. This would cause the public schools to be the schools of last resort and only house the lowest achieving children, and no teachers would want to go there. This downward spiral, i fear, would create a illiterate class in our society, something much worse than the status quo." So I had to defend my actual position: tax credits used to create a totally private market for education. My position is unfortunately too radical to be popular (much like privatizing OASI), but I have no problems with that.

There are several fundamental problems with this, but since many of them are caused by my previous vague preferences, I must be more clear: I very much prefer a tax credit system to a voucher program. A voucher leaves in place the current problems and places at their side an option which doesn't really offer much. A tax credit does more what I want; kill off the public school system monopoly and create a marketplace for education.

For my purposes the essential problems are that there are 'government/public schools' and 'private schools'. My interest is that there should be 'a school' or 'a better school', or 'an affordable school'. There should be no "public school system" at all. This is not to say that there would not be (extensive) public subsidy involved, but my preference would be that the subsidy of education is actually executed by the free choice of individuals given tax credit by government(s) for spending money to foster educational growth in others. No preference should be exercised for a state monopoly on education as this severely limits the ability of individuals to supply education for their progeny.

1) The current status quo you are defending is precisely the spiraling scenario you are afraid of. Some public school districts are ALREADY a school of last resort whose students are generally poorly educated (if they are still attending) and whose districts are generally composed of the poor or minorities. In strict terms, families are stuck there because they cannot execute the choices available to them to improve the education of their children. They cannot afford a private school, even with a voucher system, and they cannot afford to move to a more affluent neighborhood with a genuinely useful public school system because the property values are much too high. Their children must suffer with what they have, and in many cases, suffer they do. Under a non-monopoly system, there would be options available to them to spend whatever funds they can desire to do so for education and a basic requirement that those funds afford for their children at least a minimally competent education (most essentially issues like basic math and literacy along with a smattering of civic awareness, but certainly there are many other issues which might be considered of value to the public utility of education). There is no accountability in the present system owing to the government monopoly over school systems in many locations and we should expect no responsiveness, adaptivity, or improvements so long as a monopoly remains firmly in education.

2) As previously discussed, a person without cannot make these choices. But to put it quite plainly, a person with means can already perfectly execute the system you are describing as happening only under a voucher or tax credit system. They can, if they choose, send their children to 'a better school' by moving to an affluent district or paying for private schooling. If it is their wish, and unfortunately this is still true of many, they can send their children to a school with very little in the way of minority attendance (and that very often more or less only Asians, depending on local demographics). A monopoly is naturally more discriminatory than a free market as it imposes fewer internal costs on discrimination (of any prejudicial format), where as the market imposes the costs of discrimination directly. A system which allows favorable preferences to be expressed for higher values placed on education ONLY by people of means is necessarily unfair for everyone else, as is a system which naturally excludes minorities. Such systems impose a social cost of vigilance against that minority or illiterate underclass and deprivation of the diverse contributions and scholarship potentially provided by such. Education in its pure ability can become a meritocracy where people can achieve through their innate ability or interest, regardless of means or race. Right now it does not achieve this end. I propose that it would most nearly do so under a responsive market circumstance and propose to abolish the state monopoly, not merely place alongside it an attractive option for people already able to manipulate it to their advantage.

3) I am not sure that I understand the significance of objection to accepting or rejecting 'low achievement'. The issue of education should be one of supply and demand. The demand of parents is for their children to get an education, generally speaking, and a supply will be made to meet it. Even low achievement students will therefore have options, such as schools or teachers which specialize in such 'problem students' or special needs (a name which should really apply both to students of minimal or exceptional ability). As undesirable as these options are in the present circumstances, they can be accounted for. Teachers might expect (and receive) better pay and have better administrative support in exchange for tackling these problems. I would also presume that the necessary involvement of parents could improve where they are more responsible for the decisions of where their children will attend and where they are aware of the immediate costs of that attendance (even if they are re-compensated). This factor can be overvalued but is of some consequence. Right now it is of no significance.

Or alternatively/alongside we could have more practical educational options combined with a re-accessible education system all along its length, at least beyond primary education, which should probably be mandated to about 7th grade. Either high school or the first two years of college are a joke, and many people shouldn't be doing both. Nor am I at all ready to be convinced that a high school diploma is somehow essential. In any event, academic achievement is often, by itself, useless except to other academics. The assumption that all students should be at least adequate academics is a value judgment which isn't realistic. Not everyone likes reading Shakespeare or studying WWII while commenting on politics, as I do. If we assume that they should be competent in such things in order to be considered literate or educated, then I have to suggest a functional disagreement with what the aims of education should be. Namely that it should provide a desire and ability to learn, provide some basic tools to do so, then to help feed whatever hunger for knowledge and wisdom that creates. Naturally some subjects will be disagreeable to the individual or their ability and they may be of low achievement in these arenas. I'm not how sure that's the state's problem to resolve to the exclusion of other agencies and, more importantly, without the option of choice by the individual and their parents on how to resolve it.

activity responses

Since I've been busy lately arguing over some various political questions I'll re-post some ideas I sketched out. One of them is actually mine, one is basically my adaptation of several old ideas.

"Should the government become the spender of last resort and have a massive stimulus to boost the economy?" -- Further clarification of this relies on the idea that the government could just buy up cars or TVs, or whatever in order to inject spending in the system. A direct stimulus check to the public it is argued would go into savings or debt, or mortgages and wouldn't cycle as much as spending does. There's a lot of problem with the idea that we should be spending (even though not spending is what causes recessions in part..and it means I've been spending because everything is so damn cheap). I was also very worried that this sort of idea was basically a soft price floor which price controls are generally a horrid economic idea.


I'd propose something a little different if his (Blankley's) idea is to have government buy stuff. Take people who are currently filing for unemployment and ask them if they'd like to have something to do for a little extra cash. Tell them it doesn't involve bombs or guns (which may dismay some). Give them a mission to go out and purchase a car or TV, or whatever it is the government wants them to buy on their behalf with a pre-paid credit card. If they spend less than the amount necessary to get the item(s), then they get a commission on the difference and still collect unemployment as usual. If they spend the amount or more, they get unemployment (and I guess the difference), but nothing else. They should have plenty of time to bargain hunt. If they spend the credit card on strippers or whatever, it's gone (they don't have to repay it), but they get nothing. They forfeit unemployment benefits and obviously no commissions. It should be spent on the requested item(s) only. That gets around the price floor from negotiated government spending, gives unemployed people something to do in the 'make work' tradition of FDR (and I'd have no problem extending unemployment out for a reasonable time of service in this task), and it still injects some money into the economy by force feeding spending. I'm not fully in favor of this idea either, but I find it much preferred to a price control system created by massive non-defense government purchases in consumer arenas.

I'm not seeing a reason to use a price floor as consumers won't buy below their market price which merely encourages more people not to produce (or adds to the inventory surpluses of manufacturers/retailers, which would create a massive price war between MSRP and retail except for the Supreme court's decision last year). Consumer spending makes up something like 70% of GDP, not the government's budget. If they don't buy, there is no way the government can make up the difference. That's many trillions of dollars we're talking about.

response to corporate lobbying confusion

"...saying that a lot of government regulation is actually cozy to corporations and is suppressive of new and innovative businesses"


Most of it is. A considerable amount of legislation is written by the lobbying groups. Basic opposition to de-regulation often comes from large corporations who have significant competitive advantages (relative to other companies/small business start-ups). These relative advantages are valued to the cost of consumers and market competition (and possibly to the cost of the corporations themselves at times). The basic idea that regulation is intended to punish corporations is horribly flawed. It can in the short term or will be used to punish specific corporate entities (usually at the behest of a competitor). Think of it this way, a vast percentage of funding of political campaigns comes from lobbyists. A large percentage of lobbying funding comes from corporations seeking to protect large market shares or extract additional markets. Why exactly would politicians seeking re-election endanger their campaign funding to impose punitive regulations. Instead they adopt regulations with marginal or temporary punishments to appease voters while usually exacting some marginal advantage for their specific campaign donors. As examples: Sugar is priced here at three times the world market value because American taxpayers subsidize the purchase of sugar by American producers (and have a tariff on imported sugar). Toyota is specifically written out of the hybrid purchase tax rebate. GM and Ford wanted it that way (because they aren't as competitive with fuel efficient cars). The new regulations on fuel economy supposedly mandate US auto fleet economies by some future date. The regulations are not mandated to increase over time as we approach that date and can even be extended further out into the future at the request of the major auto makers, which they quite obviously will if there's no timetable to incentivize their efforts (reading the fine print on laws rather than listening to the talking heads/politicians helps here). I'm not sure what punitive measures were suggested if they somehow fail to request that additional time that they don't really need, but the point is that our government is often complicit in the failure of a market economy and hasn't been able to make corrective actions to its policies in recent times. In some cases we'd be better off if it got out of the way. In others, we'd benefit from some injections of infrastructural/research funding to boost some obviously useful industries..and then getting out of the way once the barriers are reduced by government.