If you'd like to submit your blog for membership in the Neolibertarian
Network, click here for the submission
guidelines. If you would like to submit an article or essay for consideration
in The New Libertarian, click
here for article submission guidelines.
I've been looking forward to a particular new book for a few years. It's had more than a couple changes of title since I first heard of it, and although I didn't always know the exact subject matter, I knew I had to have it. And why?
Because it's by Philip Bobbitt. Currently a constitutional law professor, he previously worked in government on issues of both strategy and law for decades. Having heard nothing about his work, I first found it completely by chance, spotting The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. It sounded interesting and I was in the mood for something... heavy enough to last me a little while — the book is over 900 pages.
It turned out that those pages are packed. It is the most thought-provoking book I've yet read; I lost count of the number of times I had to simply stop reading and digest the connections and implications swirling and crystallizing in my mind. One short section grew into my article in The New Libertarian almost on the spot. To my delight, in the years since I read it, I've seen several of my favorite bloggers — including (Adventures of) Chester, Bill Roggio, and Wretchard (at Belmont Club) — discuss the ideas in SoA on multiple occasions each and highly recommend it to readers. In an interview at Michael Yon's place two years ago, Roggio included SoA among six books that are "required reading in order for people to understand the world today." If you haven't read it yet, read it. I've also read some of his work on constitutional law, and while it's thick, it's good.
So I looked forward to Bobbitt's next book, which back in late 2005 was under the working title "Terror: Can We Win This War?" and seemed to be coming out in October weighing in at "only" 352 pages. Now it's called Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, at a healthy 688 pages, and as it is coming out in less than two weeks, I wanted to give our readers a heads-up.
I don't have an advance copy or anything, so this recommendation is based on my estimation of his previous works, but I think you'll be doing yourself a favor if you pick this book up.
Just got back from the Americans for Prosperity summit. My immediate reaction is that there ought to be more to it than enter-listen-leave. You have a room full of hundreds of like-minded individuals who all paid to be there on a Wednesday afternoon; don't just march them in, seat ten at a table, and speechify at them until it's time to march them all back out. Provide for some mingling. As AFP is just getting started in this state, it's important that their gatherings become places where people can form bonds and become a network for future activism. If you can't connect people when they're all in the same place at the same time, that's a missed opportunity for building exactly what the organization is supposed to be: grass-roots political activism. As it was, I had some contact with the people at my table directly before and after the event, and not much else.
I was also disappointed by the content, although some of that isn't their fault. They put this event together in ten days, after all, and the AFP chapter in California is brand new. But when they originally sold me on the event, they had a list of "Invited & Confirmed" speakers who, it turns out, were mostly invited and not confirmed. Of the presidential candidates still in the race, only Huckabee showed up; the others apparently didn't feel like reaching out to the small-government, anti-tax crowd. Perhaps the biggest disappointment, based on crowd reaction, was that California Republicans' favorite son, Tom McClintock, was called up to Sacramento on state business (unusual for a Wednesday); the same went for Jeff Denham. Also absent was Dennis Miller, to the disappointment of the people at my table. I had been looking forward to hearing from all three of them in particular.
As for the speeches, two stood out as the clearest, one of which was Mike Huckabee. Mike, of course, has been practicing this speech; the organizers of the event played a video including several GOP candidates as we waited for Huckabee to arrive, and one of his quips in the video made it untouched into the speech he gave five minutes later. I suppose that's to be expected, and it's a good line anyway: how Americans fear an IRS audit more than a mugging, because at least a mugger is done quickly and can only take what you have on your person. Mike talked up his plan to end the IRS and move to the FAIR Tax, and surrounded that with some general talk about how taxes stifle small business and how IRS audits are such a harrowing, nasty thing. Almost all present stood to applaud him on entrance and exit; somehow, the people at my table gathered that I wasn't the biggest Huckabee fan. It might have helped that we all expressed sadness that Fred Thompson had dropped out.
The other clear (and more compelling, IMO) speaker was Hugh Hewitt, who was about as cogent and crisp as could be, and talked about climate change, the upcoming changes in the Supreme Court, and the threat of radical Islam. For three topics as different as those, he managed to hold it together rather well, and didn't lose focus. Not bad. To finish he plugged Townhall, including the new Townhall Magazine (which, ironically, doesn't have its own website).
The other speakers all stressed the general anti-tax message, but there weren't any fireworks, just boilerplate stuff: third-party spending (i.e., someone else spending your money on someone else) is wasteful spending, more taxes is less freedom, taxes are bad for growth, and that at some not-very-high point, taxation becomes theft. Oh, and an overt hostility to our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Which is all fine and good; at a basic level, that's what AFP is about. But that's that; on to the debate, I guess.
As scooped earlier in the day, he's officially out. As South Carolina began to look doubtful, speculation really started brewing, including questions of whether he would seek the vice presidency or who he would endorse (his buddy McCain? Romney?). Jim Geraghty had just this morning reported a "source close to Thompson" saying that Fred will neither seek the VP spot nor endorse another candidate.
At one point, I asked this source if the attitude was, 'if you can't be Reagan, be Goldwater,' and the source responded, "exactly."
I'll probably have more to say later, but for now, a few short postmortem comments:
I've seen a good number of Fred supporters claim that they won't vote for anybody but Fred (something I haven't seen from supporters of any other candidate except Ron Paul), and at least as many other commenters dismissing those claims out of hand. "Come November, you'll vote for the Republican on the ticket. You know you will." Don't be so sure.
Sure, many of them will—most will probably settle for Romney*, so look for his numbers to bump up a bit—but some simply won't do it. It's not as if the people supporting Fred, at this stage of his campaign, were doing so because he was the flavor of the week; he had their attention because he, far more than any other candidate, represented the greatest overlap of the old fusionist coalition (or the so-called "three-legged stool" of hawks, limited-government types and social cons). He was selling the "consistent conservative" brand and not much else.
On the bright side, the drumbeat of insipid "fire in the belly" comments should finally peter out.
* Deacon at PowerLine thinks Fred's supporters will split "fairly evenly" between McCain, Romney, and (in the South) Huckabee. I don't understand the McCain attraction myself, but Huckabee did take numbers out of Fred's hide in SC on his rise and vice versa on his slide. My impression, though, is that Huckabee's slide is happening for more fundamental reasons and will continue.
Wishing all a joyful holiday, here's something to listen to this Christmas Eve night. This is "O Holy Night," sung in a perfect tenor in Swedish, by Jussi Björling.
"O Helga Natt"
Gives me chills every time. I had to share it. Merry Christmas to all our readers and commenters.
Today, Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation finished the show with this observation:
[T]his front-loaded presidential campaign has taken us from just commercializing to politicizing the season, and brought with it the newest marketing device, the Christmas campaign commercial.
From Huckabee and his now-famous floating cross to warm and fuzzy Giuliani, to those cute Obama kids and Mrs. Clinton's gifts beneath the tree, and on and on, in the campaign states the candidates are hooking their sleighs to Christmas.
"Season's greetings" to all of them, but frankly, I prefer Christmas carols at Christmas time.
Decorating campaign commercials with Christmas ornaments really doesn't do it for me.
In this season when people of all faiths come together to celebrate the warmth and joy of family and friends, our heart goes out to those who cannot be with their families, especially those who risk their lives in far-off places for the rest of us.
Let us remember them at this season - and forget campaign commercials.
Curiously absent from the commercials shown on screen was the one that traded the gift wrap and ornaments for a message celebrating and thanking "those who risk their lives in far-off places for the rest of us."
Peter Clothier doesn’t does believe in self-defense
Posted by: Bryan Pick
Over at the Huffington Post, Peter Clothier has this to say in an article ominously entitled, "Do You Need a Gun?":
I myself am enough in tune with Buddhist teachings to believe that the taking of life is wrong in any circumstance—and, yes, that includes the saving of my own. I'm not naïve enough to believe that I wouldn't resort to violence in order to preserve my life, but I would not prepare for that contingency with the purchase of a gun.
To that I respond with another quote, this one from Thomas Fuller (I hope I'm getting the wording right):
He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.
Either it is wrong to use violence to defend one's own life, or it is right. If it is right, then it is not always wrong to take life... unless Clothier would only resort to violence short of killing his attacker, in which case he's chosen a rather roundabout way of saying so.
Clothier seems to know, even consciously, what his beliefs boil down to when the rubber meets the road. He would defend himself. He would believe its virtue well enough to do it. He just can't bring himself to be prepared for it. Because owning and knowing how to use a gun, even with the certain knowledge that he only intended to use it toward a proper end, would signal... something bad, I'm sure.
This was Romney's element, and he delivered. Though he sounded about as scripted as he usually is (especially in his first several answers), there was much less back-and-forth between candidates, so this was the ideal format in which to get away with that. The "reaction" audience at Fox overwhelmingly thought he won, although half immediately admitted that they thought his answers sounded canned. He was probably helped by the fact that he didn't get the opportunity to attack or be attacked — excepting some light-hearted ribbing between him and Fred. Speaking of whom...
Fred hit his stride, no doubt about it. Over at The Corner, the emails asking why the National Review hadn't endorsed Thompson started to pick up, and as if in answer, NRO's Jim Geraghty asked, "Where the hell has this Fred been for the past few weeks? This guy looks like he could eat most of the rest of the field for lunch" — and later called Fred the winner. The "straight shooter" came out today and won bonus points by stuffing the universally-despised moderator.
Losers -
Huckabee had an opportunity to keep the surge going, but that would have required that he really shine, and he didn't do himself any favors today. His performance didn't stand out at all, except insofar as his answers were a slightly muddled embarrassment. Some are saying that, since the opportunity to attack him up and down the stage passed quietly, he came out all right. I disagree. There wasn't much room in the debate format for piling on, but it became unnecessary. It was a lackluster performance stuffed with platitudes at a time when he's running on little more than momentum.
One could be forgiven for wondering whether Giuliani and McCain showed up this afternoon. For Rudy, the only answer that received any real response was his, er, ambitious plans for his first year in office.
Des Moines Register / Iowa Public Television, and especially Carolyn Washburn. If there's anyone out there who wasn't irritated by the handling and format of this debate, I haven't seen him. When people get nostalgic for the screw-ups of the YouTube debate, you know it's a fiasco. Actually, this deserves more than a bullet point...
If I hadn't been so pleased with who had good and poor showings, respectively, I would have considered the debate an unmitigated disaster. Bringing in an ninth candidate in Alan Keyes, at a point in the race when we should have fewer candidates on stage, was absurd, and Keyes rewarded them by being unbelievably obnoxious. Tancredo and Hunter, if they were going to be contenders, would have made more of an impression by this point, and should have been kept off the stage to allow the candidates more than a string of 30-second remarks and a hand-raising session. At this late date in the campaign, we need to hear longer, thoughtful answers, and you can only split 90 minutes so many ways. As it is, we heard nothing new from the also-rans, which is strange considering that this debate was explicitly not supposed to be about illegal immigration.
And while nobody expects the Register's production values to match CNN's, the quality of the candidate videos was third-rate. Which is especially tragic, given that they were entirely unnecessary. I don't know how many people felt compelled to point out that the candidates were on stage, on live TV.
Finally, running the debate in the late morning/early afternoon was a surefire way to make the event less "seismic," even if it is the last debate before the first primaries. They did it to make it easier on the Register's reporters to make deadline, but they also made it a debate that most employed people would have to go out of their way to watch.
Quite a day for the Ron Paul campaign. An independent website, ThisNovember5th.com, urged Ron Paul supporters to participate in a fund-raising drive themed around Guy Fawkes Day, which was recently depicted in the movie V for Vendetta as a day of (individual, then popular) revolution against an oppressive state. According to ABC News, this effort "received the tacit endorsement of Paul on the stump this week."
It's been something of a success. If my arithmetic is right, the Ron Paul campaign pulled in about $3.6 million in the 21 hours since midnight Eastern time (Edit: some of that, around a quarter-million, may be recent offline contributions that were added today), a one-day record for any candidate. Already, this drive puts Ron Paul over his $5.1 million haul for last quarter, which ended September 30. He seemed to be gaining money fast during that time, too: in about 20 minutes, the numbers at the campaign website jumped over $100,000.
Not bad for a candidate who's been written off about as insistently as one can. Not bad for a candidate, period.
Update: As of midnight Eastern time, Ron Paul had $7.1 million, making for about $4.3 million in 24 hours. We'll see what he has at midnight Pacific time, especially since much of his support is in the west.
Update 2: Ron Paul 2008 is saying they raised over $3.8 million, and that the best day of fund-raising ever was John Kerry pulling in $5.7 million — on the day he accepted the Democrat nomination. The NYT, though, is saying that Paul's campaign raked in over $4.07 million, and says that Hillary raised $6.2 million in one day in June. I wonder why the discrepancy; my own numbers are based off of ABC News's report that Paul had $2.77 million at midnight last night, and on Ron Paul 2008's front page number at midnight tonight. If you subtract the quarter-mil that came in offline, my number is the same as the NYT's.
One of our commenters, Tito, recently said, "I think the vast majorities of voters actually vote against the other guy far more than they vote for their candidate. Most of the people I talk to who voted for Bush in 04 really voted against Kerry... and the same on the other side. I think it [is] just a matter of which wing-nuts you are more scared of having power."
Incidentally, I was already writing an expansive post starting on that very subject. I recently read, from the Claremont Institute, this review of Our Undemocratic Constitution (read the whole thing for a nice complement to the recent discussion here at QandO of democracy and majoritarianism). In it, Randy E. Barnett argues:
[Our Constitution] is counter-majoritarian by design. Precisely because the founders feared majoritarian fecklessness and abuse, they inserted the veto points to which Levinson objects. Most people today—whether left, right, or libertarian—still fear majoritarian rule. They believe they have more to fear from their political opponents gaining power than they have to gain from putting their friends in office. Indeed, many Americans revere the Constitution precisely because of its counter-majoritarianism-the checks and balances adopted by the founders.
I mostly agree with his assessment, but I don't know if most people consistently connect their fear of The Other Guys™ with a preference for counter-majoritarian government. They seem to remember their fear of majoritarianism when The Other Guys™ are in office, and conveniently forget about it when they win an election. When Your Side™ is filibustering, they're just protecting the minority from the predations of the other 51 percent, but when The Other Guys™ are filibustering, it's unacceptable obstructionism, holding up the regular operation of government and stifling the clear mandate that brought Your Side™ to power.
I'd like for Barnett to be right about it all. I'd like it if Americans had all absorbed the lessons of The Federalist No. 51. James Madison argued then that "A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions" and that "[i]t is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure." Madison believed that a properly conceived government could channel those competing interests against each other in an orderly way that would benefit the strong as well as the weak, but I'll return to that later.
Do most Americans really fear majoritarianism, in principle? That hasn't always been true—the Seventeenth Amendment comes to mind*—and those checks and balances that Madison and the other framers put in place have broken down a great deal between then and now. Michael M. Uhlmann illustrates the point nicely with another article in the same publication, "Taming Big Government," which is about the breakdown in the separation of powers during the twentieth century. I suggest you read the whole thing, as there's too much there to excerpt in this one post, but before you do so, read No. 51. Really. After all, it was titled, "The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments," so it's pretty relevant; you simply must understand the intentions and the principles that formed the separation of powers to appreciate what has happened and why.
The framers knew, as Uhlmann points out, that "government powers differ not only in degree, but in kind." To properly balance the parts of government against each other, they had to have distinct and rival powers so that the parts would "keep[] each other in their proper places." Madison had warned:
In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others.
If, conversely, they regularly participated directly in each other's affairs, and shared powers, they would have a common interest in growing those powers at the expense of liberty, because rights and powers delineate each other. And that's exactly what Uhlmann argues has happened, and he outlines the path to the resulting, unwieldy and seemingly unlimited "administrative state."
He traces it back to Woodrow Wilson. First, understand: Madison calculated that
... the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.
Wilson short-circuited that, because he had a different view of presidential interest. Wilson saw a way to make his ambition and that of Congress compatible. He would sell out the independence of the presidency in exchange for policy-making initiative and prestige. The setup, as Uhlmann sees it:
After flirting with the idea of grafting a parliamentary system onto the American constitutional structure, Wilson made a virtue of necessity by reconceiving the Office of the President. The nation's chief executive would defeat the original Constitution's structural obstacles by, so to speak, rising above them. Wilson's chosen instrument for this purpose was party government, which would breach the parchment barriers dividing president and Congress and unite both through a common policy agenda initiated by the president. The president would make the case for policy innovation directly to the people. Once armed with plebiscitary legitimacy, he might more easily prod an otherwise parochial Congress to address national needs. Madisonian fears about the mischiefs of faction would be overcome by separating politics and administration: Congress and the president would jointly settle upon the desired policy agenda, but its details, both in design and execution, would rely on non-partisan expert administrators' special insight and technical skill, operating under the president's general direction and control.
But, illustrating the iron law of unintended consequences, it didn't go exactly as planned. As the executive bureaucracy expanded in size and complexity beyond any president's ability to control, congressmen found that they could use their influence over administrative agencies and commissions to deliver the goods to favored interest groups and their own constituents. The federal bureaucracy, nominally part of the executive branch, became effectively independent of the president (but not necessarily independent of patron congressional committes) and took on the full range of government power at the same time. For a perfect example, Uhlmann quotes law professor Gary Lawson on the Federal Trade Commission:
The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission's rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission's findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission's complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters both of fact and of law.
Isn't that nice? Uhlmann says this "typifies the workings of the system as a whole." Believe it.
With these powerful tools at their disposal, Congress had (and has) every incentive to expand government even to unmanageable size at the expense of the executive's ability to direct it. To an Enlightenment thinker like Madison, this was like clockwork; to a Progressive politician with a glittering vision, it must have looked like bad luck.
The punchline is,
The arguments that once supported the ideas of federalism and limited government have fallen into desuetude: state power today is exercised largely at the national government's sufferance, and if there is a subject or activity now beyond federal reach, one would be hard-pressed to say what it might be. As for the separation of powers, while the branches remain institutionally separate, the lines between legislative, executive, and judicial power have become increasingly blurred. The idea that government power ought to be differentiated according to function has given way to the concept that power is more or less fungible. The dominant understanding of separated powers today [...] is that the branches of government compete with one another for market share.
The incentives are lined up, in the very process of government today, to keep government big and beyond the comprehension of any man or committee, beyond the scope of the common man's imagination or the length of his attention span. If one wants to shrink government today, then, it will take a colossal effort to fight it head-on, attacking each agency or piece of legislation on its own (de)merits. The administrative state must be understood as the Hydra it is. The most critical battle for liberty, besides nurturing a widespread respect for it, is the battle over process, over structure; and undoing "what Wilson wrought" will require an understanding of the logic that produced it. Start by looking to Madison.
* Another gem of Madison's wisdom in No. 51:
[I]t is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit.
There is also sadness today, a feeling of loss that you're leaving Harvard forever. Well, let me assure you that you never really leave Harvard. The Harvard Fundraising Committee will be on your ass until the day you die. Right now, a member of the Alumni Association is at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery, shaking down the corpse of Henry Adams. They heard he had a brass toe ring, and they aims to get it. Imagine: These people just raised 2.5 billion dollars, and they only got through the B's in the alumni directory. Here's how it works. Your phone rings, usually after a big meal, when you're tired and most vulnerable. A voice asks you for money. Knowing they just raised 2.5 billion dollars you ask, "What do you need it for?" Then there's a long pause and the voice on the other end of the line says, "We don't need it, we just want it." It's chilling.
Harvard's endowment is now $34.9 billion, or close to $2 million for every student, including those at the graduate and professional schools. At the beginning of the fiscal year 2007, Harvard's endowment was $29.2 billion, and it spent somewhere around $1.1 billion in income from the endowment on financing programs during that fiscal year —about 4 percent of the beginning principal, and perhaps 3.5 percent of the average principal during the year. If Harvard had spent 5 percent of its endowment principal (as required of non-university foundations), and if it had devoted the added spending to reducing tuition, fees, and room and board charges, all such charges could have been eliminated for all students attending Harvard College.
And that's after this "minor setback". On second thought, maybe that's why they do need it.
I'll gladly be the third to say something commemorating this day.
Back in February, I joined in on the Observations podcast with Bruce and Dale to introduce myself and talk about, among other things, the piece I'd written about climate change. I must admit that, even after having been invited to the blog and getting positive comments about the article, I was nervous. Part of that was the way I had looked at QandO for the previous two-plus years.
I know exactly what Billy's talking about when he says, "And I found a site that I felt... at home, I guess." That's the same thing I told Dale and Bruce in that podcast: "it was like coming home." But unlike Billy, I didn't have a long history of considering myself a libertarian, much less a particular kind of libertarian. So why did it feel like home? I can think of a few plausible reasons, although it's hard to recapture exactly what I was thinking back then.
Though I had thrown myself avidly into reading and debate, and gobbled up information from policy papers and op-eds and commenters of every political persuasion, I found at QandO that some of the formative ideas and observations bouncing around in my mind were crystallized and expanded upon by the bloggers here, as well as by a number of the commentariat. When they outlined neolibertarianism, I could see that I fit comfortably under that tent. Finding that reasoned voice in three different people who could openly and respectfully disagree with one another even while remaining committed to many of the same things... that was probably the hook. Jon, Dale and Bruce commenting on one another's posts, engaging commenters with aplomb, and yet always remaining independent thinkers, was (and is) electric; there's no substitute for the intellectual energy that comes from debate and enthusiastic interaction.
I don't remember the very first time I read Questions and Observations, as it was then called, but over time, I was pulled in more and more. I think I started commenting in late 2004 and gradually frequented the comment section more after that. When the guys launched The New Libertarian in mid-2005, I quickly found myself volunteering to proofread and contribute. When I went to study in DC in early 2006, I was happy to be invited to meet up with Jon, which I did that summer. Early this year, of course, I was surprised to be invited to blog at QandO, and in the spring, I had the pleasure of meeting up again with Jon and also meeting Bruce at the Milblogger Conference. Along the way, I met Wulf from AtlasBlogged and Michael Wade of A Second Hand Conjecture, both veteran QandO commenters.
So, to my pleasure, my participation here at QandO has gradually grown, although unfortunately, I haven't been contributing nearly as much as I've wanted to so far this year. I know some part of me was nervous on that podcast, and has been hesitant to post any old thought of mine here, for a reason: it's quite a thing to have been invited to contribute in the same place as people who have been so consistently entertaining and provocative, who I've been reading for so long, who have given so much to me already. They set a high bar. On this fourth "blogoversary," though, I look fondly back on QandO as I've experienced it and look forward to continuing to participate even more at this unique blog.
...Some people choose to go without health insurance. One of our commenters, FA, recently said,
The actual number of uninsured is far lower than universal health care supporters would have everyone think (about 20% of the population, IIRC). Of this number, this vast majority choose not to elect insurance coverage.
Why? They don't get sick very often! Isn't this a choice healthy people should be able to make, and doesn't it encourage better behavior?
Regarding FA's first point, yes, the figures bandied about by Democrats about how many people "lack coverage" are often snapshots of how many people are going without insurance for an arbitrary period of time. Some people go without insurance for short periods, but are counted in statistics as if they're part of a permanent uncovered underclass. And what Democrats don't often mention is how many people go without coverage because the company they worked for was providing their insurance—another reason to go with the portability recommendation Dale made in his recent post and in the July 2005 issue of The New Libertarian (PDF, 1.1 MB), which has a few detailed essays about health care.
But on to FA's main point. When, in "progressive" company, I make the claim that some people choose to go without health insurance, and it's not a matter of "lacking access," they often return a skeptical glance. So then I say, "For example... me."
I'm healthy; I eat well, I exercise regularly, I'm fit enough to run several miles whenever the urge strikes me. I don't take many of the health risks others do. Over the last two years, my health worries have amounted to three headaches and a flu that my immune system broke in about 24 hours. So I'm not interested in buying health insurance. I have a pretty good idea of what it would cost, and I can imagine many (unlikely) scenarios in which insurance might come in handy. I understand the concept of managing "risk of ruin." Just so nobody's confused: this is called managing my own risk. Oddly, this doesn't stop other people from using me as a statistic to advocate saving me from my own choices.
And I find it ironic that the same "progressive" crowd that's trying to force me to buy health insurance—or force others to buy something for me that I don't want—also chants, "My body, my choice" when it's convenient to their orthodoxy. For that matter, many of them would also prevent me from purchasing organs to save my life.
I choose to manage my health more directly. I choose to spend my money on other things, things I expect to benefit me more than insurance coverage that is very likely a losing bet. So, to all the people who want to use me as a statistic to force people to buy things for me that I don't want: kindly mind your own business, and I'll mind my own, as I have so far done to my satisfaction.
"I am going to take whatever I have left, and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children, and try to regain some of what I have lost." — Cindy Sheehan, May 28, 2007
Six weeks after announcing her departure from the peace movement, Cindy Sheehan said Sunday that she plans to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unless she introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush in the next two weeks.
When she was considering running against Senator Dianne Feinstein last year, she didn't think she had a chance, but Sheehan says she would give Pelosi "a run for her money." The 8th District has given Pelosi about 80% of the vote in the last few elections, so I doubt the Speaker's shaking in her pumps, but Cindy might have convinced herself that thorough dissatisfaction with the Congressional Democrats (below 30% job approval for the last month) could translate into a victory in the Democratic People's Republic of San Francisco.
Go for it, Cindy. For those thirty-something days, the anti-war movement just wasn't the same.
Dale beat me to the punch yesterday with a post about recordings of police officers. Radley Balko's article immediately reminded me of a non-fiction book I enjoyed by David Brin called The Transparent Society (subtitle: "Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?").
In his book, published back in 1998, Brin envisions a scene in which a police officer pulls over a young man for a traffic violation, and the officer is videotaping the event (as is increasingly common). He arrives at the car and asks the young man to exit the car, and the young man, suspicious of the heat, brings his own little camera to bear on the officer. Sound familiar?
Brin's scene doesn't end with the camera being confiscated and six more police officers showing up in an apparent attempt to intimidate the suspect. Instead, there's a sort of "video standoff" in which both parties are acutely aware that their actions are being recorded. The young man looks at the officer's badge and says, "Well, hello, Officer... 56467. What seems to be the problem?" The officer's video is transmitted straight to the precinct, and the young man's video is transmitted straight home to be recorded on his computer.
Place your bets about how the two parties will behave in this situation. You think the officer is going to overstep his bounds, or go by the book? Do you think the young man is going to do something stupid? If either of them do, what are the odds of getting away with it? And if other nearby citizens have their own cameras turned on the scene?
The point is, the presence of video cameras helps create mutual accountability. Police officers who conduct themselves properly will be vindicated by evidence of their professionalism if they're ever challenged, while bullies in uniform will be constrained by the ever-watchful eyes of video recorders. And with the arrival of smaller, cheaper, and higher-resolution cameras, this is going to be more and more common, so it's important that cases like this allow citizens to defend themselves and create that accountability for our public servants.
I could go on about the benefit of video cameras, but I'll just conclude by saying, perhaps you're not familiar with Witness, which arms human rights groups with video cameras to document abuses. Check it out.
How many times have you heard the statistic that women are paid some percentage of what men make? These days, the most commonly cited statistic is that women working full-time make 81 percent of what their male counterparts do. This statistic (or slight variations, depending on whence the data) is usually accompanied by claims that, even when accounting for other factors, a disparity still exists, and of course, that discrimination is responsible for the gap. This is the justification for the Fair Pay Act of 2007 and for the Paycheck Equality Act, which is mostly based on the idea that women are performing jobs that are of "comparable worth" to jobs performed by men, but are not equally compensated in the form of wages, and would address this by forcing employers to "provide equal pay for jobs that are comparable in skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions." And the acts are specifically designed to force comparisons of completely different jobs in different industries: a typical example is comparing what nurses (who are usually female) make in comparison to truck drivers (usually men).
This is target practice for libertarians and anyone remotely familiar with economics. "Comparable worth," now re-branded as "pay equity," is supported by a pile of fallacies about statistics and economics, and predictably resorts to centralized, third party decision-making as the "solution."
Seatbelt laws are as much a timeless libertarian bugaboo cliché as anything, joining bike helmet laws, trans fat bans and a thousand other instances of well-intentioned meddling. So why tread old water?
So why didn't a brave cop give Dubya a ticket for driving around his "ranch" without wearing the seatbelt? It's simple! If you are super rich, you just buy up all the land and then it's "private property" and you can do whatever you want!
Oh, Wonkette! How your satire delights me. (It was satire... right?)
And though it was topical, even then I wasn't worked up over it. Then I saw the electronic billboards. You've seen them: the ones that say "Click It or Ticket." I noticed several of them as I took a trip through Maryland and Delaware. I saw them when United Airlines stranded me for a day in Chicago. I saw a few on the way home from the airport. Then they were all over the freeways around LA; I counted half a dozen in one day on a 20-mile stretch. And I can't help but wonder how many of my fellow drivers resent the rankly overt threats as much as I do.
Maybe you've heard the arguments for seatbelt laws, each a longer stretch than the last. If you don't accept the argument that it's good for you to be punished for not looking out for your own health, there's always the argument that people who don't wear seatbelts end up splattered on the asphalt and the state has to spend everyone else's money scraping them up—the costs of one state job justifying the costs of another. That line of reasoning, while we're at it, can be extended to every action that even occasionally carries a health risk, as long as the state cleans up any kind of mess. Digest the implications of that for a minute; does it sound appealing yet?
And keep in mind that this vigilant enforcement comes with a cost. The attention of police officers can only be divided so many ways, and time spent searching for and punishing violation of seatbelt laws is time not spent protecting roads from people who are actually endangering other drivers. Taxpayers are spending money on enforcement against voluntary activity that is very rarely dangerous to third parties. (I admit that I see a better argument for more heavily punishing reckless drivers who don't buckle up their children.) And as long as we're on questions of total cost, lend your ear to arguments that mandated safety device usage encourages risk-taking behavior that offsets savings and may actually increase casualties for back-seat passengers, cyclists and pedestrians.
If you're still not enamored of the idea that you'll be fined for failing to take that extra precaution while driving in the middle of nowhereat an ungodly hour, there's always the contention that driving without a seatbelt poses a risk to others: if you're thrown from a car in a collision, your flying body might hurt somebody. Seriously. That justifies a $200 fine, see.
Take a look at those official campaign posters. What could be more comforting than, "Buckle up day & night or the cops will find you"? That's exactly the kind of protection from myself I need: the kind that hunts me everywhere and at all hours. The kind that's applied with stern-faced, condescendingdisregard. The kind that announces its eagerness to lower my quality of life for my own good. (While we're at it, may I suggest a variation on that theme? How about baby formula? Or a little orange bottle of prescription medicine?)
We would much rather write a thousand tickets than have to knock on one family's door with the news that their loved one didn't survive a crash because they weren't wearing their safety belt.
I, too, would much rather receive hundreds of thousands of dollars than inform someone of a significant other's death, but I'd be less easy about the collection method.
I'm curious: is the irony of this lost on anyone? "[The seatbelt] not only protects you. It protects your wallet." That is, the government is taxing you to purchase ad space for the consoling message that wearing the seatbelt that the government requires your car manufacturer to equip protects you from the government taking away your money. Who but the government could get away with that?
The killing of the top Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah, a one-legged fighter who orchestrated suicide attacks, beheadings and an ethnic massacre, marks a major victory for the U.S. campaign at a time of flagging Afghan support over civilian killings.
As victims of Dadullah's brutality celebrated his death Sunday, analysts called the killing the most significant Taliban loss since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. But even NATO acknowledged that Dadullah, who directed some of the Taliban's most notorious violence, would soon be replaced.
The reporter leans back and forth between the fact that he will be succeeded and the possibility that he's not entirely "replaceable." ("Well, it's scarcely a replacement then, is it?")
