Monthly Archive for August, 2011

Rick Perry has deftly (and quite tardily) positioned himself as the reigning champion of states’ rights and the so-called Tenther movement, which holds that most everything the federal government does is unconstitutional and should be left to the states. In his radical manifesto published last year, Fed Up, he reveals his antipathy to all sorts of federal functions: education spending, federal bank regulation, environmental regulation, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Of course all of these positions are contingent upon the demands of good ol’ political opportunism:

In one of his more well-publicized shifts, Mr. Perry proclaimed that gay marriage was an issue for individual states to decide, but backtracked in recent weeks and now says he supports a federal amendment banning gay marriage. He has also signaled support for various federal actions to restrict abortion rather than leaving the issue to states. And he used $17 billion in federal stimulus money to balance the state’s last two budgets.

But hypocrisy aside, I will attribute to him his stated maximalist position:

“From marriage to prayer, from zoning laws to tax policy, from our school systems to health care, and everything in between,” he wrote, “it is essential to our liberty that we be allowed to live as we see fit through the democratic process at the local and state level.”

But the question today is, is that really the essence of liberty? To be free to be coerced by your local and state government?

The Libertarian party does not think so. In its platform it does not distinguish between levels of government when it comes to encroachment on individual liberty:

[A]ll political parties other than our own grant to government the right to regulate the lives of individuals and seize the fruits of their labor without their consent.

We, on the contrary, deny the right of any government to do these things, and hold that where governments exist, they must not violate the rights of any individual….

In this view, there is the individual and arrayed against him and his inviolable liberty is government, period. There is nothing special or priviliged about the liberty one enjoys within arbitrary geographic and legal jurisdictions we call “states.” To Libertarians, the regulation of private lives and the seizing of fruits of labor are not made appreciably more tolerable or noble by the fact that it’s being done from Perry’s state house instead of the White House.

Perry is clearly no libertarian. His view, consistent with the Tenther cult, is that there is something necessarily odious and despotic about federal coercion, but something pure and patriotic about state and local coercion. So Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, but retirement pensions for Texas public employees, partially paid for by taxpayers, is fine. Likewise, the EPA is some kind of envirofascist hotbed, but the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality does all sorts of things, all of which are presumably ok with Rick Perry.

I understand the philosophical case made by the Libertarian party. I disagree with a bunch of it, but I understand it. They have an ideological committment to protect the natural rights of the individual as against all collectives. They are not out to discover best governing practices or to optimize the efficacy of public policy. Presumably they think that their societal scheme is superior to all others, but the principle of individual inviolabity ultimately overrides any questions of practicality or efficacy. Fine.

The purist Rick Perry/states’ rights view I do not understand. (Leaving aside, of course, those areas in which that purity falls risibly short.) They do not claim to be individual rights champions. They openly say that their conception of liberty is endowed and ensured by a collective, in this case, the thing we call states. Perry says “it is essential to our liberty that we be allowed to live as we see fit,” but he doesn’t stop there, for his type of liberty is only derived “through the democratic process at the local and state level.”

But surely one’s definition of liberty should be universal, right? It can’t possibly be limited to the existence of a certain type of sub-national governing mechanism. Singapore, for instance, has no meaningful sub-national governance. Does this mean Singaporeans can never hope to know the sweet essence of liberty?

If, like Perry, you’ve already admitted that divining the collective will is a necessary precondition for liberty, then how we define the size and scope of that collective should not be a matter of dogma, but of pragmatism and efficacy. To pick a highly contingent and arbitrarily-sized collective—a “state” or a “municipality”—and say that it’s not just the optimal unit of collective human governance but the only means by which an individual can obtain liberty, makes absolutely no sense to me. Once you say collectives are necessary, you should be agnostic on the question of which collectives are best able to deal with various policy problems. It seems beyond obvious to me that sometimes the state or local collective will innovate, incubate, and administer best practices, and sometimes the federal collective will be the place to turn for optimal outcomes, efficiencies of scale, etc. Why people are hostile to that basic idea is tough for me to understand. We can and should have big debates about where we think problems will be best dealt with, but to say the answer is “always the states” because, well, a state’s a state, doesn’t seem to me to be the best strategy.

Here’s a good example. Matt Yglesias calls attention to one Cato scholar’s view that federal monitoring and tracking of hurricanes is illegitimate. Ok. So Matt wonders what the likely outcome would be if federal funding was eliminated for the National Weather Service and for all related weather-disaster entities. The abandoned functions, being really useful and important, would be picked up by someone else. Who?

Maybe the Gulf Coast states who are most often afflicted by hurricanes would form a consortium to do the monitoring and there would be constant disputes between the members about what constitutes a fair share of the budget to contribute. States further up the northeastern coast that are only rarely afflicted would try to free ride. Hurricanes asides, instead of having a single National Weather Service tracking the weather, maybe we’d have three or four private firms all reproducing each others’ data and selling it to clients. We’d have systematically higher costs and maybe (?) a slightly higher quality product.

I think the state-based or state consortium scenario is most likely. But would Louisiana or Mississippi’s weather monitoring system be prone to cutbacks during economic downturns? Would they stop monitoring after the threatening weather had passed their jurisdiction? Who would pay the overtime if Louisiana’s weather monitors had to stay late to keep New Jersey residents abreast of the latest data? Lots of collective action problems to sort out here.

When it comes to the question of whether hurricane monitoring should be a federal function or a state-based or private function, the relevant policy question isn’t “which view most comports with my philosophical biases or my idiosyncratic interpretation of the 10th amendment,” it’s, “which option will do the most reliable and cost-effective job at monitoring hurricanes.”  As Matt says, we have a well-functioning federal agency that does this, “it seems to work quite well and be useful to people, to municipalities, to states, etc. So why complain?” Why indeed.

Despite the current polls, I really don’t think Rick Perry will win the nomination. He hasn’t been a national politician long enough, and because he’s not very smart, he’ll blow it. But his Tenther legacy of irrational federal antipathy will surely live on.

Ross Douthat had a very astute column yesterday on something that’s been bothering me as well; how national politicians govern as if the dream of a permanant realignment of the electorate in their favor is always right around the corner:

This dream has hovered over national leaders from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. But it has loomed larger in the last decade, as our politics have grown more polarized and our country has suffered through a series of dislocations and disasters. Events like 9/11 and the Great Recession have persuaded partisans on both sides that a dramatic realignment is imminent; the breadth of the ideological divide has convinced them that it’s necessary. […]

Thus the assumption, on the left and right alike, that every presidential election is the most important in our lifetime — except for the next one, which will be more important still. […]

The dream of realignment has become the enemy of [political compromise]. It inspires politicians to claim sweeping mandates from highly contingent victories…. The losers, meanwhile, wax intransigent, while hoping for a realignment of their own. After all, why cut a deal today if tomorrow you might overthrow your rivals permanently? […]

None of this means that our parties need to give up their deep convictions, their grand plans, or their hopes of winning an enduring mandate.

But in the wake of the weekend’s downgrade, we need them to govern as though that final victory might never quite arrive.

This is good stuff. Washington is often accused of suffering from the dreaded “short-termism” with its inability to plan or focus on anything outside of a couple years’ time frame. Part of the reason of course is that we have a ton of elections every few years, and being a major officeholder seems to be enticing enough that no one really wants to give it up once they’ve got it. But most incumbents are in very safe seats so political survival can’t explain all of it.

No, I imagine Douthat is right that there is an apocalyptic tinge to the fevered anticipation and triumphalism of political operatives and officeholders. They really think that if they just play everything perfectly this time around, then the next election may just be the final decisive battle in the great partisan war for America’s soul. In their minds the zeitgeist is always forever on the brink of realizing that it was their party, all along, whom they really loved.

I remember Republicans and pundits confidently assert that the Bush victory in 2004 heralded an evangelical awakening that signalled a new normal in American politics. Four years later that was over of course, and the Democrats’ decisive triumph of the White House and Congress was the dawning of a new liberal age, buttressed by permanent ethnic demographic shifts and the newly-emboldened  youth vote. Well, that’s kind of over with as well.

Now we’re back to the trenches, with the White House and all of Congress up for grabs next year. We’ve learned that evangelicals can’t move elections on their own; and on the other side, while hispanic demographics are to some extent destiny, and young attitudes on various social issues will be dispositive, it’s not always easy to predict how all the spoils will be distributed.

I think one of the most recent examples of fatal short-termism was in 2009, when Republicans famously refused to negotiate or compromise during the health care reform debate. They calculated that total opposition and obstruction would help them in the upcoming midterms. They were certainly right about that, but in return for their sweeping House victory they got a comprehensive universal health law which they had no hand in influencing or shaping. Why did they trade seemingly transitory gains in one midterm election for a major defeat on a historic piece of substantive policy?

I think it’s because Ross is right: they never, ever believe the gains are transitory. They genuinely think there is a zero-sum struggle out there, and if they just accumulate enough points they’ll be crowned champion of the public square for good, their political enemies having gone the way of the Whigs. No one ever comes into power thinking that they’ve just inherited a very contingent, unsteady majority that is just as likely as not to be coughed up in a couple years.

Here’s a graph showing political party control in Congress and the White House: 

The presidency is very volatile. In Congress there are some sustained periods of party domination (I did not realize that the Democrats controlled the House and Senate for a quarter century beginning in 1955), but, whatever caused that prolonged stability is clearly not operative any longer (and this chart ends in 2007).

It’s just a fact that a first-past-the-post voting system militates toward a two-party consolidation, and in the long run, the parties adapt their platforms such that something near a 50-50 split is likely. As Ross notes, true permanent transformative shifts are quite rare; and in any event, the presidency seems to be exempt from them. What a party assumes is a historical realignment is most likely a very temporary triumph which will be stifled and attenuated by powerful veto points thoughout the rest of the system. I don’t know how to get politicians to govern as if this were the case; as long as they still have visions of permanent revolution and ultimate triumph, there isn’t much reason to be optimistic about the political system’s ability to forge collective action on big problems.

Now that the debt-ceiling nonsense is behind us (for three months or so), it’s a fine time to recall that no matter if federal spending be increased or slashed, taxes be hiked or cut, Democrats or Republicans comprise the majority, the nation commit itself to one war, two wars, three wars, al-Qaida be ascendant or irrelevant; through political paralysis, economic stagnation, military impasse…

Through it all, the Domestic Surveillance State abides, grows ever larger, ever more intrusive, the one-way ratchet forever tightens, peddling phantom protection and security at the bargain price of round-the-clock invigilation, our privacy monitored, mined, collated, stored; and we don’t much notice, and when we do, we don’t much care:

If Congress had to name laws honestly, it would be called the "Forcing Your Internet Provider to Spy On You Just In Case You’re a Criminal Act of 2011" — a costly, invasive mandate that even the co-author of the Patriot Act, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), says "runs roughshod over the rights of people who use the Internet."

But because it’s disguised as the "Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act," the House Judiciary Committee approved it last week by a wide margin — even though it’s got little to do with child porn and won’t do much to protect kids.

The centerpiece of this ill-conceived law is a sweeping requirement that commercial Internet providers retain a one-year log of all the temporary Internet Protocol addresses they assign to their users, along with customer-identification information. The Justice Department says this will help track down child-porn peddlers by linking online activity and real-world identities. But the government would be able to access that sensitive data for all kinds of investigations, most of which would have nothing to do with child porn.

Traditionally, citizens in a free society are presumed innocent. If the police want to look through your computer files, the Fourth Amendment requires them to show a judge that there’s "probable cause" to suspect wrongdoing. The PCIPA turns that assumption on its head, treating every Internet user as a presumptive criminal and exploiting a serious Fourth Amendment loophole.

Read the rest here.