Bob Hayes Online

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part four of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College. Reason The Fourth: It Enhances The Power Of Minorities

The Electoral College enhances the voice of minority interests in the selection of the President. It isn’t just racial minorities - currently the main beneficiaries of this effect are Southern blacks, Mormons, and the we-like-whores-and-poker libertarians in Nevada. The geographical nature of this enhancement also means that members of a minority group have to take it pretty seriously in order to get the benefit; if the Mormons decide tomorrow that they don’t need to live in a special area and exodus all over the country, poof, there goes their political influence.

It is very easy to formulate a system that protects the influence of minorities, but such systems have the danger of leading to serious factionalism and infighting, as in the proportional-representation nightmares of many European governments. The electoral system provides a voice for these often-disenfranchised groups, while the geographical restriction ensures that the system does not degenerate into a hundred warring factions.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part two of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The Third: It Reduces The Incentive To Commit Vote Fraud

Many areas of the country are solidly in one political camp or another.  Texas is not in play this year.  Everyone knows what Massachusetts is going to do. 

When a place has one highly dominant party, that party naturally controls all of the voting machinery.  All of the voting judges are of that party; all of the ministerial jobs at the state level are held by people who are members of the party.  This makes voter fraud a lot easier than in a scenario where there the area is hotly contested, and people of both parties are in positions of authority.

Under a popular vote system, there would be a strong incentive for such one-party areas to run up the vote count through fraudulent means.  It’s easy to get away with, and there’s a return on the “investment” - all those lovely additional votes.

The Electoral College serves to check this tendency.  Once a state is in the bag for Candidate X, Candidate X’s partisans in the electoral machinery have no incentive to try and run up the count.  They can settle for their honest victory and not feel any pressure (from the national parties, for example) to come up with more votes somehow.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College.  Here is part two of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The Second:  It Requires Candidates To Make Their Pitch To Large Parts Of The Country

The EC forces candidates to craft policies that appeal to large sections of the country, not just to one or two cities.  It also forces them to visit large sections of the country.  If we had a popular vote system, candidates would quite logically spend all of their time in NY, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, LA, and Seattle.  They would do this for the same reason that you rake your leaves into one big pile before bagging them instead of wandering the yard with a sack, bending over to pick up each individual leaf:  transaction costs.  When people are grouped together, it is much easier, faster, and cheaper to pander to them.

Make one stop in NYC and you have access to 10 million voters.  To do the same in rural states you would have to make more like 100 stops, with large distances between each stop.  It’s a lot cheaper per-person to advertise in NYC than it is to advertise in a fifteen-state region.  The electoral college makes those 100 stops a lot more attractive to the candidates, because each stop represents a couple of electoral votes. 

Even if a state doesn’t have many electoral votes, the candidate generally tries to hit it at least once, because if his opponent wins, she gets a small but meaningful boost.  In a popular contest, no such incentive applies.  You don’t really care that your opponent got 90,000 votes in Rhode Island and you only got 80,000; you will make that up with one photo op in Greenwich Village.  The electoral system makes that 10,000 vote margin worth 3 EC votes, and you can’t really afford to just blow off any particular state.  It’s better to forget about running up the score in NYC and start bolstering your support in other parts of the nation.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College.  Here is part one of a to-be-ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The First: Because Otherwise We’d Have Another Civil War

If the voting was done on a direct popular basis, the rural areas of the United States would have no effective voice.  There would be no political point in them remaining in the Union, and they would secede again (and with considerably more justification this time); the cities wouldn’t be able or willing to let them go.  To avoid just that kind of sectionalism, secession, and war, the Founders (angel choir) decided to compromise with a system that gives major populaton centers a large voice, but not an overwhelming one. (And you’ll note that while the South went south anyway, under-representation in the Federal government was not the reason.  So the Founders weren’t perfect, sue ‘em.)

Let’s use one of my colorful homespun analogies.  This one has liquor and prostitutes, so pay attention.  Say you have two men running a boat.  Both of them have skills that are absolutely necessary to operate the boat, and that neither of them can do it alone.  One of them weighs 315 pounds, and the other weighs 85 pounds.  A case could be made that the shipping company should pay the fat man 315/400ths of the salary budget, and the skinny man 85/400ths, because the fat man has to buy a lot more food, his clothes are more expensive, he needs more bourbon to get liquored up, etc.  But if you did that, the skinny man would quit and go find work with another shipping company, and the boat would sink.  The fat man can’t leave; berths for 315-pound seamen are hard to find.  (They keep breaking hammocks.)  So if there’s to be “injustice”, measured by weight:dollar ratios, in the salary arrangement, it is going to end up being at the fat man’s expense.

So the fat man of the cities gets boned in the ear, to an extent, but he IS getting paid, so he doesn’t quit.  He just grumbles once in a while that he’s spending an awful lot of his salary on crates of Snack Ramen while his skinny rural coworker nibbles the occasional sandwich and has a lot more for dockside whoring expenses.  It isn’t FAIR, but it works.  The “fair” alternative wouldn’t.

The likelihood of a civil war scenario may be low, but the costs of it are very high. 

Leftists and some center-leftist “good government” types, in cooperation with some quasi-conservatives, have, successfully, used campaign finance laws to somewhat impede “big money” in politics.  The changes were widely predicted to be unlikely to happen (by me - wrong!), and if they did happen, certain to be routed around by the clever moneymen of the big factions (again me, again - wrong!). 

So sue me.

There does seem to be some friction.  There does seem to be some slowing down and some sluggishness from both parties; some cowboy elements seem to have a lot more control.  The good government types and leftists,  theoretically, should be happy about this, but I’ve about given up trying to completely understand their motivations in this arena.

This has created a market space for genuinely independent advocacy groups to get their message out.  Primarily using the Internet as an incubator for an idea or a cause, these groups can leverage the initial rush into an ongoing voice in the debate.  Swift Boats for Truth is one such, albeit a disreputable example.  (Yes, the people supporting it are ideologues.  This is one thing that ideologues do.)  There are lots of Democratic groups, some more reputable than others.  There are other conservative and libertarian groups.

In time, I would expect that this grassroots-type movement will greatly increase the amount of direct democracy that this country, er, enjoys.  Liberals thinks this will be a good thing for them; I am not nearly so sure.

There are a lot of conservative blogs out there.  There are quite a few liberal ones, too, but the conservative ones seem to have a serious edge in meatiness.  It’s entirely possible that’s just a wishful bias on my part.  This country is not really used to hearing conservative voices in the numbers that our representation in the population would seem to indicate,  (OK, to forestall some objections from the very far left element, it is true that some Americans would consider the current MSM to be “conservative” in many senses.  You are free to think that.  And yeah, there’s Rush.) 

One thing about political voices is this: when you don’t hear the voice of people you perceive to be like you, you tend to hush up about politics.  When you’re the solitary liberal in the sales team, you might feel a little out of place, and reluctant to speak up.  It seems to be true for conservatives as well; the center-right economy prof feels something of an outsider in her circle.  The more voices in your own key that you hear, the better you feel about piping up and singing.  This doesn’t have to automatically be a cacophony between the voices of the different sides; it could be a harmonic experience. 

That said, there are a lot of conservative voices warming up, and their words are true and sweet.  Are we right about everything?  No.  No political philosophy yet conceived on this earth doesn’t contribute something to the debate, however small; no mortal philosophy ever devised will encompass all truth.  Are we right about many things?  Oh my, yes. 

Culture and civic virtue.  A properly and humanely martial tradition, outlook, and bearing.  A respect for education - and a strong belief in its essentially private and family-value-based nature.  A genuine belief in the spiritual, moral, and legal equality of humankind - and compassion for all of humanity.  A belief in the vibrant and vigorous exercise of liberty under law - the idea that freedom is a powerful gift, whose truest expression comes in its voluntary restraint.  At bottom, the idea that a human being is a self-motivated entity - that you can pick yourself up and do with yourself what you will.  Work, think, learn, play - on your own hook, by your own crook.  We believe in a helping hand to people who have fallen down, and need help to get back up.  We believe in a kindly hand to people who have served well, and reached their time of quiet and reflection.  We believe in a culture of life.

Perhaps most importantly - so important that it is rarely said and rarely articulated - we believe that the proper exercise of power in the human sphere is as low as can be accommodated to reality.  That individuals should yield power only grudgingly to communities, communities only grudgingly to regions, and so on.  This does not preclude reaching a state of satisfaction with a particular balance; sometimes a state or a nation is the place where the power should and must be.  We agree that the nation is the proper place for the final investiture of sovereign power; we aggressively disbelieve that larger entities should take this pride of place.  Thus far, and no farther.

If you are unhappy with the state of politics, if, regardless of partisanship or party you despair - then you might take comfort in having some of these things, at least, in common with your compatriots across the aisle.  These aren’t, alas, all consensus values…but some of them are, and all of them are very strongly represented in the literate common population of the United States.

Some of these values are not shared by fairly large groups of people, or they pay lip service to them.  These are not organized groups; it isn’t the Huguenots or the Templars or the Jews scheming to conquer the world.  It’s just some people who don’t share these values.  Some of them are evil, some of them are misguided, some of them are just dumb, some of them are decent people who have taken, from our point of view, a wrong turn.

That’s what politics is for; to hammer out these things without, hopefully, having to kill one another.  Killing one another is boring.  Bullets get pock-marks in the library steps, and you know who’s going to end up paying for it the next time they raise the assessment.  When we despair of politicians, it might do to remember one thing:

As rulers go, they’re a lot better than generals.

We’ve decided to have government run the schools. The education of young people is intimately tied into the transmission of values. This leads us to a serious conflict with the way we have chosen to order our society.

Drug reimportation is a hot idea these days.  It doesn’t work.  Here’s why.

Say you are a textbook publisher.  You have a line of college textbooks that you produce.  This is a complex and expensive process; you hire high-level scientists and academics to write the books, editors to fix their dreadful writing, fact-checkers to make sure it doesn’t say “e=mc³“, artists to create the thousands of diagrams and charts and pictures.  You pay for printing and warehousing and distributing.  You pay IT companies big bucks to maintain your catalog and run your online order system.  In short, every textbook represents quite a large investment of resources on your part.

You sell these books for $65 apiece to university bookstores across America.  You make decent money; some years you lose a little, most years you make a nice profit.  All is well.

Then one day you get a call from a university in Australia.  They’ve heard about your line of textbooks, which it turns out are better than the textbooks that they can print in Australia.  The university wants to buy books from you.  Hooray, you think.  Now, the problem arises that the Aussies don’t have as much money sloshing around their public university system as we do.  There’s no way, in fact, that they can afford to spend $65 per book.  They can give you $30 per book, no more than that.  You talk things over with your accounting folks, and they tell you:  good news.  It turns out that the marginal cost of producing another textbook and shipping it to Australia is $27.50.  Selling books to Australia won’t make you a fortune, but it will improve your bottom line somewhat without hurting your core business.  Everybody wins, and so the freighters loaded with copies of “Sociology And You” start steaming for Perth.

Until one day you come into your office and on your computer screen there appears a web ad offering copies of “Sociology And You” for $45.  You click on the ad, and it’s a company in Australia that is buying the books from you wholesale, and then reselling them to American college students over the Internet retail. 

Is this a problem?  Well, it’s not much of a problem if these folks are moving 10 books a week.  It’s a huge problem if they’re selling 10,000 copies a day.  As you’re preparing to address this problem, you turn on the TV and hear presidential candidates saying that the high cost of textbooks in America is an outrage, and that what we need to do is reimport these books from Australia, where they’re cheap.

But they’re only cheap in Australia because you are selling them to Australia as a marginal, peripheral business.  The main market for your product is the one subsidizing all the fixed costs of book production; those Aussie dollars are just a little bit of icing on the cake. 

So what happens if the government follows through on its promise of cheap textbooks for everyone?  Well, they pass a law making it legal and easy to reimport these books directly without tiresome Internet runarounds.  Eager wholesalers line up to make a fortune on this book bonanza…only to discover that there aren’t any books available from Australia.  Why are there no books available from Australia?

Because you, not being a complete idiot, have stopped selling Australia textbooks for $30 apiece.  Every book you sold to Australia would end up costing you a sale here in the US, and the US sales are where you make your margin.  Since the Australian sales are jettisonable from the point of view of your core business, you jettison them to save what’s important, the U.S. market. 

Drug reimportation works the same way.  The issues about safety and provenance are purely side issues.  The core of the problem is an economic question:  what does it cost to get this particular product?  It may be that the price is different in one place than another.  Price differentials do create a potential for arbitrage, but they don’t create a reality that the lower price is somehow the right price, or that everyone can get the lower price.  Attempts by government to get the lower price for everyone will simply end up removing the lower price option for the people who had it before.

All drug reimportation laws can do is hurt the availability of American pharmaceuticals in other countries.  You won’t sell textbooks to Australia when those textbooks are destroying your profit center in America; Pfizer isn’t going to sell drugs to Canada if the Canadian drugs are going to destroy their profits here.  It’s as simple as that.

An acquaintance of mine asked me why I was so knee-jerk in my opposition to government regulation.  Upon reflection, I decided that it was because knee-jerk anti-regulationism is the rational position.

Regulation is an evil in and of itself. It may be a required evil, under a certain circumstance. For example, it is a good thing that we have homicide laws. But we are engaging in a trade-off:  we accept the costs of that regulation (including the promotion of moral decrepitude intrinsic to externalizing the regulation instead of expecting everyone to carry “thou shalt not kill” as an internal moral requirement) because of the anticipated higher cost of not having such a regulation (family vendettas, mass slaughter, blood in the streets).

Other times it’s a bit more of a gray area. Is it a good thing to restrict business activity through anti-trust laws? There are arguments to be made on both sides. Whichever side you come down on, there’s still a trade-off being made.

And then there’s the vast area of regulation which are simply a favored group’s use of state power to impose their preferences on others, with no compelling rationale. There is no objective reason to prefer dense-pack housing to sprawled-out housing; some people would prefer to live in dense pack and others would prefer to live in inexpensive tract homes. If environmentalists grab control of the reins of the state they can make developing the latter impossible through regulation, and that kind of regulation is intrinsically evil.  If developers grab control, they can shift the cost of developing infrastructure onto the city; that is also evil.

The essence of the conflict between personal freedom and socialism: if there is no socialism, then people can be largely free to do whatever they want without their fellow citizens, in the person of the state, getting all hincty about it. No skin off my nose if you want to skydive in a hurricane.

There’s no getting around this; he who pays the piper, calls the tune.

When should drugs be illegal?

Truly hardcore libertarians would say never; everything should be legal, there should never be any legal controls on pretty much anything that doesn’t directly kill people, there’s nothing wrong with a crack house next to a school, etc.

I’ve gotten pretty close to that position myself, at times. It has a lot of intellectual appeal, but of course that appeal fades when one sees actual crack houses near actual schools, and the effects on the kids who go to those schools.

I divide drugs and other pharmaceutical substances into three categories, and of course all right-thinking people agree with me. (About the three categories, not necessarily about which drugs go where. That’s a question for the political process to determine.)

Category One: Drugs which are so incredibly and obviously destructive that the state should probably step in, if the populace wants it to, and devote police resources to trying to stamp them out. I would put heroin, amphetamines, and crack cocaine into this category.

Category Two: Drugs that some people have very destructive relationships with, that other people are able to handle reasonably well, and that some people can completely take or leave with impunity. I would put alcohol, pot, tobacco, quaaludes, prescription downers, and most “recreational” drugs into this category.

Category Three: Drugs that most everyone can handle reasonably well, and that hardly anyone has a major life-threatening problem with. I put caffeine, chocolate, and other “food” drugs in this category.

With Category Three drugs, there is never any justification for state intervention. Suck down all the Jolt Colas you want. Have some more M&Ms.

With Category One drugs, if the populace agrees that a drug is that destructive, then there should be a full-fledged civil-rights-infringing, door-breaking-down, drug-interdiction-boat “War On Drugs” for those substances.

With Category Two drugs, such state intervention is incredibly dumb. But at the same time, there is that population of people for whom the particular drug in question really is highly problematic. The pothead who is never not high (with all the concomitant lovely lifestyle issues that this tends to correlate with); the wino living in the gutter because she can’t get off the sauce long enough to get a shower and a job; the five-pack-a-day smoker committing suicide on the installment plan.

As a libertarian, I don’t think it’s the state’s business to force these people into making better lifestyle choices. However, as a humanitarian, I think it is legitimate for the state to help these people make better lifestyle choices if they want it to.

I propose a voluntary prohibition on certain substances. If you know that you’re an alcoholic, you can go register with the state, and the state will harshly penalize anyone who sells you liquor. When you show your ID at the liquor store or the restaurant or the bar, the computer flashes the big “No” sign, and the clerk politely but firmly reminds you that you’re not allowed to drink. The grocery store checkout lady tells you sorry, ma’am, you’re on the do-not-sell-cigarettes list. Pot and other Category Two drugs being legalized, the same thing happens for those substances. You can revoke your banned status during an open disenrollment period held periodically, to prevent people in the throes of withdrawal from slipping back in a moment of weakness.

I think it is a legitimate use of state power to help police people who are asking to be policed. This system would avoid the wasteful foolishness of productive, otherwise law-abiding members of society going to jail for smoking a joint once in a while. At the same time, it would let the people with serious drug problems who want to change get tough-love type support from the government. As an added bonus, private charities could use the no-sell registries to more strongly enforce their own policies - “of course you can stay in our homeless shelter, friend - but we don’t permit you to drink, and you will have to go on the no-drinking register for us to be able to help you.”

Comments and suggestions are welcome.