Category Archives: Politics

A little practical skepticism would be useful

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Just a quick thought:  it seems to me that our nation(s) would be in much better shape if we all accepted that no matter what we do, even our best solutions will always work imperfectly and will always have downsides.  We would do well to be skeptical of the promises of politics—not just politicians, but politics.  We would do better to be skeptical of plans and programs and ideas for improvement—even our own.  No matter what we do, this world will still be broken.  Some people will be poor, and some will be exploited, and some will be abused; some will be exploiters, and some will be abusers, and some will be just flat evil.  We need to set aside our technocratic assumption that these are problems to be fixed and realize that they are people to be faced.  We need to give up the naïve idea that these “problems” can be fixed, which is really just avoidance:  we don’t want to face these people.  We don’t want to meet them honestly in their mess, we want the promise of a quick, clean, antiseptic solution that will make the mess go away where it won’t bother us.  We ought to be deeply skeptical of such promises, and even more skeptical of the desire of our hearts to believe such promises.

We won’t solve the problem of human evil by passing laws.  We won’t stop gun violence by passing laws against guns—or laws in favor of guns, for that matter.  When someone is determined to break the law, what’s one more?  That’s the easy way out, the cheap way out, the coward’s way out.  We will only make a dent in the evil of this world the hard way:  one life at a time, by knowing our neighbors and loving them as ourselves.

 

William Holgarth, The Polling, 1755.

Thought experiment: on homosexuality and “discrimination”

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The big argument against the traditional definition of marriage these days is that it discriminates against those who want to marry someone of their own gender. Those of heterosexual preference can marry anyone they want, runs this line, while those of homosexual preference can’t; this, it is asserted, is discriminatory.

Leave aside that this isn’t necessarily so as a matter of fact (prohibitions on bigamy/polygamy, marriage of siblings, etc.), and let’s consider it as a matter of logic. Discrimination in law is generally understood to refer to situations in which the law is actually different for different groups. Pale-skinned people are allowed to vote, but people whose skin is dark, or who are known to be related to anybody whose skin is dark, are not allowed to vote. Male adults are allowed to vote, but female adults are not. People who have never been convicted of a felony are allowed to vote, while those who have a felony conviction are not. The law defines groups of people and explicitly extends rights/privileges to one which it denies to the other.

On this standard, is the traditional definition of marriage discriminatory? No. It does not define groups of people, nor is it applied unequally; it is one common standard which applies to everyone. The law does not say, for instance, that “straight people” can marry people of their own gender, but “gay people” can’t; that would be, inarguably, discrimination, because the marriage law would be different for different legally-defined groups. It simply says: this is marriage; within this definition, do what you will.

Why then the accusation of discrimination? Because the traditional legal definition of marriage forbids everyone to do what only some people want to do—thus the restriction is felt as a meaningful limitation by some people but not others. “You can do what you want to do, but I can’t, and that’s not fair.”

That may sound reasonable, but consider: that’s true of every law; by this standard, every law is discriminatory. Laws against drug use discriminate against addicts—I can put whatever substance I want into my body, since I have no desire to take anything illegal, but addicts can’t. Laws against polygamy discriminate against those who want to enter into multiple marriage—they don’t restrict me in any meaningful way, since I have no desire for more than one wife (I agree with Rich Mullins on that one), but those folks clearly aren’t free to marry whomever they want. Indeed, even laws against discrimination are discriminatory; I’m free to hire whomever I want, and I’d be free to rent to whomever I wanted if I had anyplace to rent out, but racists aren’t. It is the nature of laws to discriminate against those who want to break them.

Now, if that’s a form of discrimination, you need to realize that it’s a form which is not only defensible, but necessary—logically, intrinsically necessary, if there is to be any such thing as law at all. Laws draw lines, it’s just what they do. If you want to argue that a given line shouldn’t be where it is, by all means go ahead; but don’t argue that the mere existence of the line is unfair. When once you start doing that, you’ve started cutting a great road through the law just for the sake of getting your own way; and as Robert Bolt memorably had Sir Thomas More argue, that’s a really bad idea.

A new Day for the tax code?

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Before Stockwell Day was a screamingly ineffective campaigner for Prime Minister of Canada, he was the treasurer of Alberta; and back in those days, when I was a graduate student in BC, he came up with the simplest and best tax system I’ve yet run across.

Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day is proposing to de-link Alberta’s provincial tax system from its federal counterpart. Instead of Albertans paying provincial tax on a percentage of their federal tax payable, a tax on a tax, they will instead pay a single rate of 11% on their taxable income, a tax on income.

This move to flatter taxation is to be applauded and Mr. Day has ensured that the move is beneficial to all income groups. [Part and parcel] with the planned move to the single rate tax is a substantive increase in the provincial basic personal exemption and spousal exemption to $11,620 up from $7,131 and $6,055 respectively. And Mr. Day has pledged to index the exemption to inflation to ensure that the hidden tax increase known as “bracket creep” is vanquished from the Alberta landscape. . . .

Alberta has now ensured that those with incomes under 11,620 pay a rate of 0% and everyone else pays 11% on their income above the basic personal exemption. So the effective provincial rate on someone earning $30,000 is 6.7% and the effective rate on someone at $100,000 is 9.7%.

Tweak the numbers to fit the current American situation, but the basic idea is right on: put all income into one bowl, exempt the first $X per person, and tax all the rest at the same rate. Cut the tax form down to a page, make the tax code transparent, drastically reduce the IRS payroll (and trim a lot of corporate bureaucracies as well) . . . what’s not to like?

Oh, yeah, and boost the economy, too.

 

Photo © 2006 Thorfinn Stainforth.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Not quite irrelevant

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Jennifer Rubin does us all a small service this morning over on Commentary’s “Contentions” blog in pointing out that at this stage, polls of GOP 2012 presidential contenders are basically meaningless. Interestingly, though, if you look closely at what she says, you realize they’re not quite as meaningless as they would normally be:

They are a function of name identification. The field is not set, the candidates have not yet engaged, and the inevitable unflattering revelations haven’t come.

While it remains true that there is much to happen between now and the 2012 primary season, that we don’t actually know who will be running, and that as Rubin says, “You actually have to see how the candidates perform and who cannabalizes whose voters,” there’s one partial exception to her argument: Sarah Palin. For Gov. Palin, those inevitable unflattering revelations have come, and been rehashed, and been beaten to death, along with a whole host of attempts to invent additional ones; there’s nothing left for enemies to dig up, it’s all out there.

Those who would marginalize her like to talk about her “baggage,” but the truth is, Gov. Palin doesn’t really have baggage. Change the metaphor, think of the sort of revelations Rubin is talking about as a political plague, and there’s a much more apt way to describe her situation: Gov. Palin has been inoculated. She’s already had that plague and survived. Yes, that has lingering effects, and yes, that will be a particular challenge for her to overcome—but the upside to that is a degree of immunity that will make it hard for rivals to take her down. The polling on them (at least most of them) is indeed before the “inevitable unflattering revelations” that will wipe some of them out and cripple others; hers is after, and well after. That is no small advantage.

You will know people best by how they handle defeat

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and as Jennifer Rubin pointed out recently, on the whole, the Right has a better record on this one lately than the Left:

Some liberal commentators assure us they mean “no disrespect.” Others don’t even bother. They tell us Americans are confused or crazy, racist or irrational. Maybe all of these. The left punditocracy is in full meltdown, irate at the voters and annoyed at Obama. The contrast to the aftermath of the 2008 election is instructive.

After the across-the-board defeats in 2008, conservative pundits didn’t rail at the voters. You didn’t see the right blogosphere go after the voters as irrational (How could they elect someone so unqualified? They’ve gone bonkers!) with the venom that the left now displays. Instead, there was a healthy debate—what was wrong with the Republican Party and with the conservative movement more generally?

There hasn’t been enough soul-searching and self-criticism on the Right to make me comfortable with the thought of the Republican Party apparatchiki back in power so soon, but at least there’s been enough to make a real difference; and the Tea Party taking a big broom to the party establishment has helped, too. For the sake of the good of the country, I hope we see something similar on the Left if November does in fact turn out to be the electoral tsunami it looks like being.

Barack Obama, Manichaeus, and the Pharisees

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President Obama’s Rolling Stone interview is deeply troubling to me, for reasons that Commentary’s Peter Wehner captures quite well. As Wehner says, Rolling Stone

paints a portrait of a president under siege and lashing out.

For example, the Tea Party is, according to Obama, the tool of “very powerful, special-interest lobbies”—except for those in the Tea Party whose motivations are “a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president.”Fox News, the president informs us, “is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

Then there are the Republicans, who don’t oppose Obama on philosophical grounds but decided they were “better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve problems.” Now there are exceptions—those two or three GOPers who Obama has been able to “pick off” and, by virtue of supporting Obama, “wanted to do the right thing”—meaning that the rest of the GOP wants to do the wrong thing.

What really bothers me here isn’t the irony (which Wehner notes) of this kind of calumny coming from a man who promised our country, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.” What bothers me is the blind, unshakeable conviction that anyone who disagrees with him must be doing so for nefarious motives. It simply isn’t possible, in his worldview as he presents it, that anyone could disagree with him for reasons which are as honorable and as sincerely concerned with the good of our nation as his own; no, anyone who opposes him must be by virtue of that fact evil, incompetent, a deluded tool of dark forces, or some combination thereof.

Wehner goes on from this point to argue that “President Obama is a man of unusual vanity and self-regard,” and that people close to him need to stage an intervention before things get out of hand. That may be true or it may not be—I’m a preacher, not a telepathic shrink, so I won’t claim to know. But as a preacher, I am at least somewhat trained as a diagnostician of human sin, and I will say that one thing I think I see here is an awful lot of self-righteousness, to a degree that looks a lot like Jesus’ enemies among the Pharisees. It’s a degree of arrogant certainty about one’s own rightness and rectitude that leaves no room for the concept of honest differences of opinion; any disagreement or opposition has to be malignant, is perceived as personal, and thus must be destroyed.

Now, I hasten to add, this is by no means unique to the President, or to liberals; rather, to my way of thinking, this kind of Manichaean self-righteousness is the great blight in American political discourse these days, at every point on the spectrum of beliefs. Among the prominent voices, I think it’s more prevalent on the left, but that’s not much more than comparing pot and kettle either way, and certainly I’ve heard some ugly comments of this nature from conservative friends, relatives, and acquaintances. But still, to have this kind of language coming from our nation’s chief executive is an order of magnitude worse than to hear it even from prominent figures in the media and culture. When Candidate Obama said we needed to get beyond the ugly partisan spirit in our politics, this was the root of the problem at which he was pointing; to have President Obama exacerbating it instead of seeking to make it better is deeply dispiriting.

Update: Jay Cost has a great piece on this on the Weekly Standard website this morning; he makes the argument, I think correctly, that this is really the first time Barack Obama has actually had to deal in any meaningful way with actual conservatives. On that analysis, what we’re seeing is a reaction driven by disappointment (and fury?) that conservatives are not in fact proto-liberals who just need the right presentation to convince them. It’s rather like Martin Luther’s reaction when he realized that the Jews were Jews because they believed in Judaism, not because the Roman church had done such a bad job in presenting Christianity.

America needs more people like Jim DeMint

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The junior Senator from the state of South Carolina is an ordinary barbarian loose in the corridors of power; here’s hoping he stays that way, and that his efforts to bring others along with him find great success.

DeMint is a most unlikely political crusader. For the vast majority of his life, he had little interest in politics. “I’m a normal guy,” he says with the grin that often crosses his face. He was a family man—a husband and father of four children. He owned a business in his native Greenville, S.C. He was a leader in his church. At various points he served on something like a dozen community boards because to him volunteerism was a way of life.

His profession was marketing, which led him to a career as a consultant. His clients included regional businesses, schools, and hospitals. In his work, he came to see top-down bureaucracy as the enemy of organizational success. And what worked? Empowering front-line employees.

But time would prompt him to see Washington in the same way, as an increasingly bossy and centralized bureaucracy. Complex federal regulations and taxation and expanding government programs were changing America—creating a society of dependents. When DeMint speaks, you hear echoes of the long-ago anti-big government commentaries of Ronald Reagan. . . .

When he arrived in Washington to assume his House seat, no one would have pegged him as a troublemaker. He was elected president of his House class and regularly attended seminars given by the House GOP leadership.

But something happened to DeMint in these leadership seminars that would change the course of his life. The gatherings were entirely focused on the means for concentrating and preserving political power: How to milk K Street lobbyists for political contributions; how to place earmarks into appropriations bills so they would be deemed essential to the folks back home.

One day, DeMint had had enough. He rose up in a seminar to question why representatives of the party of smaller government were so focused on earmarks and political fundraising. Why aren’t we talking about reforming the federal tax code or addressing the health care mess?

Midst laughter, someone shouted, “You’ll catch on to the system, DeMint.” But DeMint never did. . . .

Many of DeMint’s colleagues dismissed his concern over earmarks, arguing they were nickel-and-dime manifestations of traditional politics. But taking a page from the late Robert Novak, DeMint believed that the appropriations system, and the power of appropriators, was the key to runaway spending and taxation and regulation in this country. (Novak likened appropriators to the Vatican’s College of Cardinals.) Without serious appropriations reform, i.e., term limits for appropriators and full transparency for earmarks, there would be no serious tax and spending reform.

To the powerbrokers of Washington, this is political heresy—and makes DeMint a menace. This is why DeMint gives so much credit to Sarah Palin for challenging the machine of the late senator Ted Stevens, because his earmarks​—most notoriously the $400 million bridge-to-nowhere​—symbolized a political system rotten to the core.

Balance the budget—make the feds pay their taxes

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OK, not quite—but not too far off, either:

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along—unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

Read the rest of Andrew Malcolm’s piece for the gory details. Granted, $1 billion is a small percentage of the deficit we’re running these days, but that’s still a lot of money—and a lot of hypocrisy.

Looking at this, I can’t help thinking that one big place to start reining in spending is the federal payroll. If you were to downsize all non-military federal departments, agencies, etc. (excluding specific cases like the membership of Congress and the Supreme Court) by 10% at every level, then cut salary and benefits of all non-military federal employees who make more than, let’s say, 200% of the poverty line by 10%, I wonder how much that would save? (I exclude the military because they’ve been dealing with cutbacks while the rest of the federal government has not.)

A Democratic loss is not exactly a Republican victory

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As the indispensable Jay Cost has been pointing out—no longer at Real Clear Politics, though, as he’s moved on to write for the Weekly Standard, where among other things he’s doing a column every weekday morning called “Morning Jay”—the polling numbers for President Obama and the Democrats (and doesn’t that sound like a ’50s rock band?) are bad and getting worse, to the point where the party is starting to throw incumbents overboard. In fact, it’s gotten so bad for the Dems that expectations are starting to become a problem for the GOP, prompting some Republicans to start trying to deflate them.

And for good reason, because as big as the bullseye is across the Democrats’ collective back, the electorate isn’t really any happier with the Republicans. As Cost notes,

There is great turmoil that the two political parties have been (so far) incapable of handling, and the public is still casting about in search of competent leadership. I think something similar happened between 1974 and 1982. The country is unsatisfied with the state of the nation and has so far disapproved of both parties’ performances. But in a two party system, there is no choice but to swing back and forth until folks finds leaders who are up to the job.

In other words, the folks who are saying that this is about an essentially conservative country coming back to the party that better represents it aren’t really on the point. I do think the US tilts right of center, but not by a whole lot, and the electorate we’re seeing isn’t pro-Republican—it’s anti-both-parties and anti-government. Any Republican politicians who are looking forward to getting back in power and going back to business as usual should think long and hard about this warning from Scott Rasmussen:

Voters are ready to deliver the same message in 2010 that they delivered in 2006 and 2008 as they prepare to vote against the party in power for the third straight election. These results suggest a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

In other words, as I’ve been saying, this isn’t really about one party versus the other, it’s about people across the ideological spectrum versus the parties. That cracking, booming sound you’re hearing is the sound of the fissure widening between our rulers and the rest of us—which in our system means that they won’t keep being our rulers much longer if they don’t wise up. Which they probably won’t . . .

Our rat-infested politics

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In the list of abuses of power by our government and its members, this doesn’t rank high for size—but it’s telling:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Congress members from both parties have been abusing their per diem—funds accorded them to cover travel expenses, including meals. When their expenses are picked up by other people, such as foreign government officials or U.S. ambassadors, they are expected to return the unused funds, which ultimately belong to you, the taxpayer.

In many cases, however, they don’t. Some spend the leftover cash on gifts or use it to cover their spouses’ travel expenses. Others merely put the extra money in their pocket. Not that the cash, which can add up to as much as $1,000, is exactly pocket change by most Americans’ reckoning. . . .

Among the most flagrant offenders are Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), former Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC). In an ironic twist, Rep. Butterfield is—get ready for it—a member of the House ethics committee. . . .

Perhaps the cake taker among the above-named Congress members is Robert Aderholt, who claims he isn’t sure if he keeps the money because doesn’t retain receipts.

Again, the biggest division in our politics isn’t between left and right—it’s between “we the people” and our governing elite—and our biggest political challenge is reclaiming our government so that it will once again truly be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We on the Right don’t need to “take back our country” from the Left, just as they didn’t need to take it back from us—it’s the country of the whole political spectrum, and will be for as long as it endures. But we the people, conservatives and liberals alike, do have the right and the need to take it back from those who are not truly representative of us. The unlamented Mark Souder is on that list; is it too much to ask that the U. S. Representative from northeastern Indiana should be a man of Indiana, not of the Beltway?