Vera Verba

Since Sean posted so eloquently on not voting, I thought I’d make the opposite case.

Last time I took the Political Compass test, I came out at almost the same place as Sean. And, I’m in firm agreement with the points he makes. (I especially appreciated him talking about the Commerce Clause.) Yet… I will, occasionally, vote.

Here’s why:

I expect governments to be coercive and manipulative. They always have been and always will be. It’s the nature of the beast. But, there are differences between administrations. Not enough differences, to be sure, but the economics of Ronald Reagan, for example, were far superior to the economics of Franklin Roosevelt.

So, if I have some confidence that one side is actually less bad than the other, I might go vote for that side. Mind you, I seldom do this, but I have, and I may again. In doing this, I do not expect good to come of it, only less evil. I can never be sure that I’ll be right in these guesses (politicians not being especially reliable), but sometimes I will take a shot.

One important point: While I think my method of handling voting is sensible enough, Sean’s arguments against it are sound too. That means that I don’t think either Sean or I are completely, provably correct. We’re both looking at a very complex data set, and trying to weight the many factors. We may weigh the factors slightly differently and come to different conclusions.

As for this year? No decision as yet. I’m convinced that Ron Paul is significantly less bad than the others, so if he’s on a ballot near me, that might push me over the edge. I don’t agree with him on everything, but I wouldn’t be looking for perfection anyway - only “less bad.”

It’s not that I have never voted. I have gotten myself registered, and made it to the polls on a few rare occasions. But those times have usually been to vote “No” on some particularly heinous ballot proposition, and not because any particular political candidate seemed like a good choice to me. (Unfortunately, they don’t let you vote “No” on the issue of whether or not you want a given governmental position to be filled at all.)

When asked about voting, I usually answer with a joke. I say something like “Yes, I tried that once, but I didn’t inhale.” Or I tell the person that the first time I voted, all my candidates won but the world didn’t get any better - therefor I decided that I am no good at voting and will leave it to the professionals.

But there are real and serious reasons why I don’t usually vote.

The problem with voting for a given candidate, is that none of the “main stream” candidates ever come close to representing my political views. This leaves me either voting for “main stream” candidate that I think is the lessor of two evils (if I can even figure out which one that is), or voting for some candidate that more closely represents my views, but whom I know has zero chance of winning.

So just what is this “main stream” I speak of, and why am I so far off of it?

Well, take a look at the graph below that shows the current 2008 U.S. Presidential candidates, as well as a few historical political figures, and myself. Actually it doesn’t show all the presidential candidates, only those who are competing in the Democratic and Republican Party primaries. But no other party has won the US Presidency since 1850 (Millard Filmore - Whig Party) and even then it was a two party system as the Republican party was formed in 1854 and the Whig Party disbanded in 1856. So it seems safe to believe that one of these primary candidates will be our next president.

To find out where you fit in on this graph, take the test for yourself at:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/test

This graph charts two axes. The horizontal axis shows economic policy, with Left indicating greater government control over commerce and Right indicating greater economic freedom. The vertical axis represents government control in other areas of society, with up labeled “Authoritarian” and down “Libertarian.” It isn’t particularly scientific, there is no quantifiable relationship between one horizontal unit and one vertical unit, and the vertical axis could probably be broken up into additional axes. But having an easy to look at (two dimensional) picture of various political philosophies, rather than trying to use a single left/right designation, is still a useful qualitative tool.

It’s also fun.

What this graph IS particularly useful for is seeing why I don’t usually vote. Take a look in the bottom right hand quadrant, where you will find me all alone. With a score of approximately (7.5, -6.0), I am far far away from any of the primary candidates. I believe strongly in all freedoms, economic and otherwise, and among candidates for political office this belief is seen to be a significant aberration.

You will notice that the “main stream” candidates really do all appear to be in a single stream. Their positions almost all fall all along a diagonal line (my addition), indicating that for each freedom they believe in on one axis, they believe in greater control of something on the other. (Ron Paul is the notable exception here, and I will talk about him in a bit.)

This clustering along the diagonal line is not necessarily particularly surprising. These are all politicians aspiring to be government employees, and government is, as the name implies, about governing (that is controlling) people. So if there is any governing to be done, something must be fair game for control. If you don’t believe in controlling people in some way, why would you ever seek a political office? What would be the point of seeking power unless your political philosophy allows you to exercise that power?

But in a democracy, you have to get votes if you want the power - and few people are going to vote for someone who wants to completely control their lives. So for every aspect of people’s lives that the candidate believes in controlling strongly, there needs to be some other issue on which the candidate is pro-liberty. A Candidate will then receive votes from those who want more freedom in the areas that the candidate is not interested in controlling, provided they have a lifestyle that is not greatly impacted by the things the candidate does want to control. Furthermore, many voters actually like to see control exercised over other people in areas that do not affect them personally - or where they happen agree with the specific choices that the candidate wants to make for others.

If you are a person who believes strongly in liberty, not just in the areas that are convenient for your own life, but in all areas, and for all people, then there will never be a real candidate for you to vote for. The nature of those seeking power, combined with the nature of the democratic process, makes only those who are close to this diagonal line normally electable.

Now this year is a little different, because Ron Paul is up on the board as a Republican candidate. He is closer, although you will notice, not much closer, to my positions. He still isn’t even in the same quadrant as me, but he certainly is well off of the normal “liberty trade-off line” that all the other candidates tend to be close to - and in the right direction.

And Ron Paul may actually be closer to me than he actually appears (at least in regards to the other candidates) if the two axis are given different weight. As I mentioned above, there is no real link between one unit on the horizontal axis and one unit on the vertical axis. And if I had to weight them, I would definitely put a higher multiplier on the economic (horizontal) axis - I am just not sure how much that multiplier would be.

The reason I would give greater political weight to the economic, than to other liberties, is the way political control tends to be exercised in the United States. The country I was born in was founded by a very pro-liberty collection of people, and they created a constitution that strictly limited government powers. However, the loophole that has been used to subvert these liberties over the years has mostly been by extension of something called the “commerce clause,” which gave the Federal Government the power to regulate interstate commerce. Subsequently, with the blessings of the Supreme Court, a very weak argument has been legitimized finding that, since all human action *might* affect interstate commerce, virtually everything you can think of can be controlled by the Federal Government.

Clearly this was not the intended meaning when the Constitution was written, but this is the mechanism by which the United States government has overreached its powers. For example, restrictions on the substances U.S Citizens are allowed to put in their bodies were first enacted through taxes and control on who was allowed to sell those substances. Things that the government can not manage to control directly, it often controls indirectly through controls on related economic transactions. (See my post entitled “Drink Up” for more thoughts on this.)

So, because I have seen that loss of economic freedoms can lead to a loss of all other freedoms, I tend to feel that economic policy is of greater importance to liberty than specific policies on other issues. This makes any candidate’s willingness to try to control us through our exchanges of value a matter of the greatest priority to me in choosing a candidate to vote for.

Looking at the graph above, Hillary Clinton is abut 9 units away from me, John McCain is 10.5, and Ron Paul is 7.0, but if I weight the economic axis as double, then Hillary Clinton is about 11 units away, John McCain is 10.5, and Ron Paul is still 7. (Hint - use the Pythagorean theorem if you want to do this math for yourself) So while Ron Paul is approximately unchanged in my eyes by this re-weighting, you will notice, that it causes my (very slight) affections to switch from Conservative Democrats to Liberal Republicans. But is a 2x weighting the right number? I honestly have no idea, so I don’t know based on this chart (or by any other means I have been able to figure out) whether I should be voting democrat or Republican when offered only those two choices.

Of course Ron Paul would answer that question for me this year, if he were actually to be nominated by the Republicans. But that is not likely to actually happen. Therefor I will never get a chance to cast a vote for him unless he continues his run without a major party nomination. That is not too unlikely, as he is not really a good Republican candidate by any normal measure, and he did run for President previously as the Libertarian Party candidate. But even with him running as a semi-strong third party candidate, that leaves me right where I usually am - either voting for no one, or voting for someone who has no real chance of winning the election.

And that is why I don’t vote.

Last night I attended an event at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) where the writer James Bovard gave a talk entitled “Civil Liberties Under Attack in America.”

http://www.fee.org/events/detail.asp?id=6289&page=1&t=0

His talk detailed many of the reductions of our liberties that have occurred under the current Bush administration, as a result of the “War on Terror.” He said nothing that really surprised me, as I have kept somewhat abreast of the new rules suspending habeas corpus and allowing suspects to be tortured as long as no one actually calls it torture. What did surprise me was what happened in the Q&A period afterwards.

The crowd at FEE is very much pro-liberty. They are a mix of Libertarians and “Goldwater Republicans” - much as one might expect from an organization focused on economic knowledge. They may not all be strongly libertarian persons - but they certainly are not, for the most part, neo-cons.

The first question was something like “Would you be in favor of torture if the suspect knew something that could save the life of your own wife and child.” Mr. Bovard didn’t really answer the question. Instead he did what politicians and other media interview savvy people always do. He just re-stated his case - talking about the bad things that can and have happened because of torture.

What surprised me was the reaction of the crowd. Now some of them might have just been jumping on him because their strong sense of proper rhetoric balked at his ducking any direct response to the posed question. However, I got the feeling that many of them were actually pro-torture in some cases - that they found this rhetorical question compelling - believed that it pointed to justification for torture in some cases.

Now my own feeling was that torture is about as bad as it can get. What do we cringe from when we examine the atrocities of authoritarian states past, if not the thumbscrews, hot irons, and other implements of pain that have been used to elicit false confessions and implicate innocent people? Yet here was a collection of what I would guess to be, on average, strongly pro-liberty people, and some reasonably large fraction of them seemed as if they might be conceding that torture had some good uses.

So I put my judgment on hold and decided to reconsider the issue - at least sleep on it. It is part of my personal philosophy that I should always be willing to reconsider anything. This includes even items of high emotional impact, with a lot of past bad examples, like the idea of giving over the power of torture to our government.

Upon consideration, I came to some interesting conclusions. No, I did not decide that giving our government the power to torture people was a good idea. But I decided that the “what if your family was involved” question is not really the red herring I had previously thought. It is actually a gateway into examining the way in which our personal and public value judgments compliment each other.

I realized that the big problem with the usual arguments against torture is the fact that torture absolutely can and does work in some situations. There is no denying that if someone knows something, and you start pulling out their fingernails, they will tell you what you want to know. (At least very probably.)

The usual anti-torture argument says, yes people will talk, but you will get bad information. If the subject doesn’t know what you want - he will tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear - not necessarily the truth. If the people conducting the torture want something to be true that is not, it is guaranteed that they will have their expectations confirmed by the all too willing subject of the torture session.

These arguments certainly point out the down side of torture, but unless they can actually prove that the costs of torture ALWAYS outweigh benefits of the situation - they can not be completely convincing. This is something that they can never do. Some hypothetical scenario can always be set up in which the cost benefit analysis will end up justifying torture.

When I ask myself the question, “If your wife’s life were involved would you be ok with torture?” I must honestly answer “yes, torture the bastard.” But does this make torture something I should condone - something that I should allow my government to do? After thinking this through I am now quite confident that the answer is “No - we should never, as a society, condone torture.”

Is this hypocritical? I don’t think so, and I will show you why.

Lets look at it as a problem as an economic valuation (Something that people who attend a function at FEE should appreciate.)

Economically, the ideal policy on torture would be one that prevented torture when the expected loss of value was greater then the expected gain, and allowed torture when the expected gain was greater than the expected loss. This perfect solution would mean that in the hypothetical “ticking atom bomb” problem, where torturing one good suspect might save millions of lives, that the torture would happen, but that torture would not happen with low probability suspects where the rewards would be low, and that torture would never happen regularly enough to warp our society into one of where a paranoid government propped up its conspiracy theories with false confessions.

This means that the ideal policy would indeed have torture happen in some cases.

However, I would argue that the closest we can come to this perfect solution is a public policy that prohibits torture and strongly punishes anyone that does it. In fact, I believe that punishment should be commensurate to the crime. Those responsible for torture should expect to personally receive a proportional loss of value to that they cause to their torture subject(s).

The reason this works, is because when the stakes are high enough - for example, when someone in our military or police, who is sworn to protect us, believes that torture can truly save millions - they will do it even knowing that they will be later punished. Good men will sometimes break good rules with full expectation that they will be punished. They will break those rules when their own well being is less important to them that the possible bad they might prevent through their personal sacrifice.

The punishment should increase as the harm increases because this provides effective economic signaling . If people who are willing to break a rule are always punished to the level that the rule is broken, they will be willing to do harm only as much as they feel is warranted by the probability that it will actually help. I will concede that the correct level of punishment need not necessarily exactly equal the harm done - the signaling works as long as punishment scales proportionately to harm - but an eye for an eye certainly has emotional appeal.

This same principal could be applied to many questions about whether harm is justified for the greater good. The answer is the same - the harm may indeed sometimes be justified, but should still be strongly punished. The punishment guarantees that the person committing the offending action really believes that the ends justify the means. They demonstrate this clearly by being personally willing to pay the costs associated with those means.

If the person making this decision is correct, and the harm that they inflict does in fact lead to a greater good, the temptation is that the punishment not be applied. However, for the price signaling to work correctly, it must always be believed that the punishment will happen - therefore it must happen.

You are not a hypocrite for both demanding that torture be prohibited and punished, while at the same time being willing to use it to save the life of your family - at least not if you are willing to sit down in that same chair after you are done with your victim, and let him go to work on you. (Or suffer some other punishment that amounts to similar loss of value.)

I would certainly be willing to subject myself to torture, if I thought it would prevent that ticking bomb from killing a large number of people. I believe that most people would. Anything less will always be a judgment call based on how much pain would be involved and how much harm might be prevented, but the solution to that economic equation should, on average, produce positive value when the person making the choice is willing to personally pay the given price.

The ends may well sometimes justify the means - but punishing those who are willing to go to those ends is the only way of assuring that this is likely to be the case.

I think Mr. Bovard would find it pleasing to note that this conclusion indicates that George W. Bush should still be punished for crimes committed, regardless of any argument that the things he has done are necessary evils.

December 5th is the anniversary of the ratification of the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution which served to repeal the 18th amendment. The 18th amendment, as you probably know, brought the prohibition of Alcohol to the federal level. Previous to the 18th amendment there had been some dry states, but between January 16, 1920 and December 5th, 1933, the United States of America was a dry country.

Prohibition has been called the “Noble Experiment,” and what this experiment demonstrated (pretty convincingly) was a that you just can’t legislate away a product or service while market demand still exists. The basic economics of the equation is that efforts spent on reducing supply just increase the potential rewards for meeting the additional untapped demand.

Every black market supplier you put in jail reduces competition in the field. Every container of product confiscated (or theatrically destroyed for the press) increases the market value. All of this makes it more appealing for new bootleggers to enter the market - to figure out new and better ways to produce and supply the product.

Many people have drawn parallels between this prohibition of alcohol and the current “War on Drugs,” and the George Santayana quote “those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is often thrown around. And rightly so of course. What is the point of having such a noble (as well as costly) experiment if you don’t learn anything from it?

But what is more interesting to me is how the parallels between early 19th century alcohol prohibition and modern scheduled drug prohibition highlight the disappearance of our constitutional rights. If I were a “glass half full” or “every cloud has a silver lining” type, I might say that the similarities between the two situations offers us a lucky opportunity to really take notice of the things that have changed - perhaps even give us some insight that we might never have gleaned had we not all been condemned to repeat this (certainly not as noble the second time around) experiment.

In 1919 it was clearly understood by everyone that the Federal Government could not say “Boo” about what substances you chose to put in your own body, nor what you could buy or sell as long as you were doing business with someone in the same State. That is why a constitutional amendment was required before Congress could pass the Volstead act and prohibit alcohol sale and consumption.

It’s also why, when that amendment was repealed, it was understood that these laws were no longer constitutional. Prohibition stopped being enforced immediately, without the need for a test case to go to the Supreme Court to overturn the law. That is how clearly it was understood by everyone that the constitution protected us from laws regulating what we choose to eat, drink, snort or inject directly into our veins.

Today almost none of the people who understood this are alive - and somehow we again have pretty much the exact same sort of prohibition going on.

The constitution must have lost its power to protect us from these sort of laws sometime in the past 75 years. But when did this happen? Our government is built on the concept that we extend it power only by our consent - and that we can only lose constitutional protections by our consent. The only mechanism the Constitution provides by which our constitutional rights can be reduced (or increased) is the passing of a new amendment by a two thirds majority vote of our representatives.

There have been only six new amendments ratified since the 21st amendment returned to us our constitutional protection against prohibition type laws. They are:

• 22 - Presidential Term Limits
• 23 - Presidential Vote for District of Columbia
• 24 - Poll Taxes Barred
• 25 - Presidential Disability and Succession Rules
• 26 - Voting Age Set to 18
• 27 - Limit on Congressional Pay Increases

None of these has anything to do with prohibition or its like.

So after prohibition was repealed, we were clearly once again constitutionally protected from all substance prohibiting laws. And none of the amendments passed since then have removed that protection. And passing such an amendment is the only constitutionally valid way for us to lose such protections from our own government. Logic would then dictate that all such laws MUST still be unconstitutional.

How then is it that this is not the current understanding of our politicians, our police, and our courts?

The mechanism by which we have been slowly stripped of our constitutional rights without our consent is based on the Supreme Courts power of judicial review. As you may already know, the Supreme Court claims the right to interpret the language of the constitution, and there is no control on this power. They can re-interpret the constitution to mean whatever they choose. Interestingly, this is not a power that the Constitution grants to the Supreme Court, but one that it simply claimed for itself.

The power to interpret the Constitution is not specifically delegated to any branch of the government, and the 10th amendment reserves all such unmentioned powers to the states/people. However, this did not stop Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall from claiming in his opinion of the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison that, since courts routinely interpret law, and since the Constitution is the highest law of the land, that the highest court of the land should have the power to interpret it - and that this is what the he interpreted the Constitution to say.

John Marshall’s circular logic bootstrapping of the Supreme Court’s power created a means by which our rights can be removed without our consent. It gets around the difficult to obtain, but constitutionally required, two thirds majority vote by our legislatures. And it has lead to many changes to (almost exclusively reductions of) our Constitutional protections over the past 200 years.

This slowly creeping increase of government power, as the Supreme Court re-interprets the Constitution, prompted David Friedman to write in his excellent book “The Machinery of Freedom”:

It took about 150 years, starting with a Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed to your own hogs is interstate commerce and can be regulated by Congress.

Now, I am not saying that the mechanism by which the Supreme Court decides cases and interprets the constitution is necessarily a bad one. There has to be some mechanism by which unconstitutional laws can be struck down. However, each majority opinion that is handed down has, in theory, the power to change our country and affect our rights as much as any constitutional amendment. Therefore, I believe that the people should ( and are even constitutionally entitled to) have a greater voice in these decisions.

This problem of the Supreme Court re-interpreting our rights away is further exacerbated by the ever growing willingness for our congress to pass (and the executive branch to enforce) laws that they all know are unconstitutional. There is no down side for them to do this. Even if the Supreme court agrees to hear a relevant case, the law will still be enforced for many years before it can be struck down, and can theoretically just be passed again in a slightly different form. Additionally, every unconstitutional law passed is a chance for congress to play the power lottery - the Supreme Court might just re-interpret the constitution, allowing the law to stand and thus increasing congressional power.

So how do we correct this problem? How do we reclaim the power to control our constitutional protections? How do we prevent congress from deliberately passing laws to test just how far the current Supreme Court will allow constitution can be bent?

One solution might be a new amendment to the Constitution to add “checks and balances” limiting this otherwise unlimited power to re-interpret the Constitution. It would assert our right to be involved in any change to the Constitution, and it would spell out a punishment for those who would attempt to take away our rights without following the correct procedure for amending the Constitution. It might read something like this:

1. No supreme court decision shall be considered valid until it can first put to a vote by the state legislatures.

2. Votes may be cast for any opinion generated by the court. A simple majority of states is required to ratify the courts majority/plurality opinion. A two thirds majority of states is required to ratify a minority opinion. State legislatures that fail to put the matter to a vote in their next session immediately after the courts decision shall be counted as abstaining.

3. If no court opinion is ratified, the court must decide to either return to deliberations and issue new (or the same) opinions, or let the matter rest as if they had never chosen to hear the case.

4. U.S. Congressmen will receive a sentence of 1 year in a federal correctional facility for each yes vote that was recorded on a law that is subsequently struck down as unconstitutional by supreme court decision.

(Please Note that I have no rigorously logical reason to believe that the specific amendment I am suggesting here would do the job - I just know that some mechanism giving people back the control the Constitution promised us over guarding our own rights is sorely needed. Without some solution to this problem, things seem very likely to just continue to get worse.)

So what do you think? Does this amendment solve all our problems?

Maybe it will sound better after you’ve had a few drinks…

Go ahead… Drink up… it’s still legal.