Author: Michael

The Alternative to Trump

I’ve made a couple posts detailing that Trump’s populist ideology has no real ideas, and the ideas it has are pretty universally terrible. So how do we go about opposing Trump?

After Trump won the nomination, I thought I was going to have to write a big post about picking up the pieces on the right after Trump’s loss. Turns out, Hillary Clinton was a much worse candidate that even I suspected, and now it’s the left that needs to look at themselves. I’ve got some ideas that could help them (and at least one that advances my own agenda).

However, even I have to admit that the reality is not that dire for Democrats politically, nor progressives ideologically. At last count, Hillary was winning the popular vote by 2.5 million. It seems quite possible that if they had nominated someone who was more palatable to independents and moderate Republicans in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Democrats would have done fine. No platform overhaul necessary. In fact, had Obama been able to win a 3rd term, I’d bet a lot of money he’d have won it, were he facing Trump.

However, Democrats are doing poorly in most state-level races, including the House. In light of this, and since people are talking about refurbishing left-wing ideas anyway, it’s at least fun to discuss  ways to improve the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders stated that Democrats have to go beyond identity politics to focus on progressive ideas. I agree with this on its face, but I’m sure what Bernie really means is we should make the welfare state bigger and envelop not just retiree pensions and retiree healthcare, but universal healthcare, childcare, and free college-level education. He also seems to pair this with a strong regulatory state and reduction in some individual rights such as free speech connected to campaign financing. Rather than focusing on groups of people as representatives of ethnicities or genders, I think it’s fair to say Sanders thinks we should focus on wealth and socioeconomic status. In political coalition terms, Sanders wants to focus on revitalizing and expanding the New Deal Coalition, bringing back the white working class voters who supported Trump. This isn’t a crazy idea, but it does seem like trying to fight fire with fire, or rather, populism with populism.

Let’s take a look at a favorite libertarian tool, the Nolan chart:

The Nolan Chart splits the usual left-right spectrum into two separate political spectrums of economic and personal liberty. Theoretically, you could have as many axes as you want, with respective Nolan hypercubes.
The Nolan Chart splits the usual left-right spectrum into two separate political spectra of economic and personal liberty. Theoretically, you could have as many axes as you want, with respective Nolan hypercubes.

Sometimes this chart will be drawn with “Populism” instead of “Authoritarianism” in the bottom quadrant. “Personal freedom” and “economic freedom” are often more intertwined than this chart would like to admit, and both the left and the right can be all over this chart. When Ron Wyden argues against NSA spying and against harsher sentences for drug offenses, he’s definitely high on the personal liberty access on the left. But when Democrat Chuck Schumer supports the Patriot Act, the prohibition of aerial drones, and the banning of Bitcoin, he’s a lot lower on the personal liberty axis. Likewise, Republicans can vary from very libertarian leaning, high up on the right side (Ron Paul) to low down on the right side, ok with regulated markets and curtailing personal freedoms (Donald Trump). The problem with the new Bernie Sanders approach for the Democratic Party is that it challenges Trump for the lower middle of the Nolan chart, meeting him head-on, while ignoring the top middle of the chart. Even if there were enough voters just in that lower quadrant, The Economist points out that recently left-wing parties have struggled with populist victories, losing to right-wing populists in a litany of countries.

Rather than fighting populism with populism, I suggest a flanking maneuver for the left, countering a view of government solving most problems with a view of more personal freedom, more efficient markets, but also a government focused on solving market failures. A tolerant market welfare state, or a neoclassical liberalism.

 

I’m not the only one who has advocated something like this; Scott Alexander has an excellent Something Sort of Like Left-Libertarianism-ist Manifesto. I would really recommend reading his article on this, as the following arguments are just poor restatements of Scott’s more eloquent  points.

Markets convey valuable information and coordinate action across millions of actors with differing preferences. To quote from Hayek’s famous essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”:

The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

Markets are really good at solving this problem of distributed knowledge. They can then get the most efficient allocation of resources, and even direct future production towards the creation of goods most demanded by consumers.

But markets don’t solve every problem. They don’t solve the “initial” allocation of resources, when some market actors are endowed with few goods or capital. Thus, while it’s important to allow these people specifically to trade what resources they have (likely low-skilled labor hours) in the most lucrative way possible, they still won’t be able to end up with much since they didn’t start with much. In other words, some people aren’t highly skilled and may never be. Despite a nice efficient market, they might end up with few available resources. Markets also don’t solve (by definition) externalities where market transactions harm unseen third parties (pollution is the usual example).

A solution here is to create a welfare system that assists low productivity workers, while leaving as much of the market as untouched as possible. We can thus solve the problem and also continue to take advantage of the distributed knowledge and allocation abilities of markets. To be clear, most welfare programs are pretty good at giving assistance to the poor, but in the United States, they come with far too many market regulations and exceptions. Most of the most popular Bernie Sanders ideas emphatically do not leave the market untouched. His $15 minimum wage advocacy has little empirical support. Rather than punish companies for hiring low-productivity workers, we should be either subsidizing wages for low-income earners, or giving a small basic income. The cost would not then be forced upon companies that hire low-skilled workers (the opposite of what we want), but distributed among society generally (the whole point of the welfare state). The government negotiating for Medicare rates of specific procedures and the exclusive use of government bonds for the Social Security trust fund are two more examples of welfare that shun a market based approach.

Interestingly, this pro-market-and-pro-welfare approach is actually somewhat familiar in Bernie Sanders’ favored Nordic countries. While their budgets are larger than the US, in several measures, their regulatory burden is more favorable and laissez- aire, and some indices also give them stronger contract and property rights than America.

There are other benefits to this low regulation approach too. Specifically, rather than banning things we don’t like, such as the use of coal to produce electricity or drinking alcohol, we simply tax them to disincentivize their use. As Scott states, this leaves us more options. Obviously, there are some benefits to doing things the state wants to ban; otherwise people wouldn’t be doing them. Coal is burned because it’s so cheap. The problem is that its burning has externalities. If the state increases the cost born by those who burn it to better reflect the pollutants it releases, energy from coal could still be used, just not to the same extent. This is a good thing! We should encourage behavior when the benefits exceed the costs. If the state can help create better incentives, individuals will make better choices themselves without blunt bans from the government.

This neoclassical liberal approach also means an opposition to Trump’s (and Bernie’s) protectionism and anti-immigration stances. If workers are concerned about their situation in the information economy, we need to liberalize their education opportunities, or even subsidize low productivity wages. But we can’t respond with trade barriers and stifle technological progress. The defense of classical liberal values, like tolerance, the rule of law, privacy, and freedom of expression, is also fundamental to this political position, especially as all these values all under threat by Trump.

I don’t really expect Democrats or the left generally to take this approach, but perhaps I can convince a few here and there that it would make sense. Caring about what happens to the unfortunate in society is something libertarians don’t always do well, but markets still have a vital part to play in improving society. Ultimately though, over the next four years, libertarians and progressives will have to work together on some issues, such as defending civil liberties. Hopefully, progressives will realize that libertarians are allying with them for the very same reasons they opposed them during the Obama administration, and had they listened then, our problems would not be so dire now.

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Links 2016-12-2

Added the awesome Conor Friedersdorf and Megan McArdle to the Libertarian Web Directory.

First, all the Trump-related links:

I’ve been saying this for a while, but Robby Soave at Reason articulates why the left bears a lot of the blame for Trump due to their aggressive pushing of political correctness.

Slate Star Codex talks about similar problem on crying wolf about Trump.  Even mentioned in Episode 33 of The Fifth Column.

Tyler Cowen on why Trump’s plan to keep jobs in the US is pretty awful.

Nonetheless, also read why Bryan Caplan isn’t freaking out about Trump.

The Nerdwriter, on YouTube, makes the case that Trump is a magician, using the media to distract our attention from where it should be.  Maybe I should stop reading about him so much.

Now, other related political posts not explicitly about Trump:

Megan McArdle had a good piece talking about bridging the gap between the “right-wing media” and the regular “media”. If you want to bring conservatives back into the mainstream, you have to stop politicizing everything and only hiring left-leaning news reporters who only want to cover the local food movement and how evil Walmart is.

Related: Bryan Caplan discusses that if you just talk about how great cohesion is and despair at the political divisions we see, you’ll never get outgroups to come back in, because to them you sound like you’re telling them to conform. You have to actually unilaterally reach out to them and show them respect despite how much you dislike them.

Philosopher Nick Land argues that contrary to the notion that fascism as a societal system has been largely dead since WWII, in fact almost all political philosophies in the world today are largely rooted in fascism, including the major political philosophies of the United States, progressivism and conservatism.

What is the most prominent social science debate happening at Peking University today? The most prestigious university in the still-technically-communist-party-controlled China isn’t about Maoism vs Stalinism, it’s a planned economy vs markets.  

Scott Sumner has a hopeful take on fiscal policy and specifically reducing government budgets.

Here is a terrifying story about the unintended consequences of overcriminalization, and deference to state power. A woman with a previous arrest for prostitution, was picked up and charged with “loitering for the purposes of prostitution”. Loitering is not a criminal activity, but can be applied to anyone standing still. Loitering for the purpose of doing something else is quite speculative. Of course, prostitution itself is already a criminalization of a voluntary transaction, so now anyone who has been arrested for a voluntary interaction other people find distasteful cannot stand anywhere without being accused of a crime. In fact, if cops think women are dressed too lewdly, they can also be arrested for intent to prostitute themselves. Since this woman is relatively poor (thus the loitering for a ride outside of a trailer park), she’s forced to plead guilty to the charges and go to jail for 2 months.  

Related: Adam Ruins Everything this week is about how important prostitution was to settling the American west, and, interestingly, empowering women in that region of the country far before they had similar rights in the east.

Why build higher? This video takes a look at the history of skyscrapers, but also delves into important areas of urbanization and how humanity will live in the future. Cities are more and more important to human civilization, and improving urban areas to exploit efficiencies of concentrated living is one of the most important challenges we face.  

Crash Course has a 10 minute intro video for the philosophy of utilitarianism. Since that’s an important building block for many of the arguments on this blog, I would definitely recommend it.  

Finally, to wrap up the short videos category, Learn Liberty has a great 5 minute video on one of the most fundamental economic concepts: Opportunity Costs. Every choice we make has a hidden cost of what could have been done with those resources and time. Ignoring those opportunity costs can lead to paradoxical ideas like the Broken Window Fallacy.

For the best coverage of the death of the dictator Fidel Castro, this long piece at the Miami Herald is the most comprehensive take available.

Postlibertarian throwback: read about the politics of outrage back in 2014. Unfortunately we have…not fixed our focus on outrage yet. 2017 and the age of Trump isn’t looking so great either.

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The Election Doesn’t Change Trump’s Bad Policies

The Trump Issues

In the Trump election aftermath, many on the left have discussed how best to approach this new challenge. Many have talked about trying to understand the concerns of Trump voters. This is a worthwhile undertaking. The people who voted for Trump have several worries spanning cultural differences, economic hardship, and perhaps even existential fear for the country as a whole. First, let’s go over those concerns.

The first, and perhaps most important concern for Trump voters was that the alternative was Hillary Clinton. This blog had an extensive discussion on Hillary’s shortcoming including her flaunting of the law, her foreign policy, her defense of Obamacare, her tax increases, and her slant towards government power in every sphere. I would argue some of these flaws are also present in Trump, but many Trump voters could at least hope the Trump unknown would deliver something more to their liking than the known failure of a Hillary presidency.

Granting all of Hillary’s problems, why did they think a Trump unknown was worth risking? Broadly, one area we did know where Trump stood was on the culture wars, and for that he was initially hailed as a hero against the left. I think the left has to shoulder a huge part of the blame here, because people have been trying to tell progressives their culture is intolerant for years.  See: Scott Alexander on tribalism and tolerance in 2014, Clarkhat on Gamergate in 2014, this blog last year, another blog, and Robby Soave did a good job summing it up after the election. I don’t think there’s much to add here.

On economic hardship, the more stereotypical Trump supporters (Trump won older voters, rural voters, and uneducated voters) have something to complain about as well. If you want to be depressed, please read this ridiculously long piece called “Unnecessariat “ (or skim this American Conservative piece for some key points). The takeaway is that Trumpland is hurting because it has been economically abandoned, not just culturally isolated. With services dominating the economy, the prospects for those living outside of cities has diminished as well. We are seeing increased suicides, drug addiction, and hopelessness in these areas.

Finally, combine these worries with media that feeds panic about disasters and internet echo chambers, and you get stark existential panic about entirely separate threats.

Cracked had an interesting piece on Trumpism and how we got here, and what caught my eye was the idea of urban culture slowly making its way out to the country. Cracked claims that older, less educated, rural folks saw the abandonment of Christian traditional culture in these hedonistic wonderlands of coastal “liberal” cities and thought there would be dire consequences for the nation. Low and behold, they see: “Chaos…Blacks riot, Muslims set bombs, gays spread AIDS, Mexican cartels behead children, atheists tear down Christmas trees.”

The Trump Solutions

The problem is that many of these perceptions are just wrong. We are healthier, less likely to be murdered, and safer than ever before. Maybe we blame clickbait media, maybe we blame gullible people for believing it, but living in cities just isn’t that scary.

Last year, I met an acquaintance who had grown up in a smaller town in the South, but was now moving to another state near a major urban center. He found out I had grown up in his destination city, and despite having just met 5 minutes prior, he peppered me with bizarre questions about whether I thought it was safe to live there. I assured him that it was a major metropolitan area where millions live and work without a problem every day. He made it seem like he was moving to Afghanistan. Look, I’m sure it was pretty hairy to live in New York/Miami/Chicago/LA in the 80s, but crime rates have collapsed over the last 25 years. The amount of people murdered in the first season of Daredevil in Hell’s Kitchen likely exceeds the total number of murders in all of Manhattan last year. Our perspective is all off. And if we are imagining that law and order is collapsing, our solution is going to vastly over-correct.

That’s part of a bigger point I’ve already made: Trump’s political victory doesn’t mean his supporters have any good ideas about improving the country, or even their own situations. It just means enough people thought there were enough problems for more voters to cast a ballot for Trump over Hillary in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. For instance, I think there is a real basis for complaining about the intolerant left-wing culture that has grown more bold over the last 10 years. But the Trump response has been his own version of intolerance, just copying the left and doing nothing to improve the situation.

On the economy, Trump’s plan is at best a mixed bag. Experts are mediocre at predicting economic growth, so figuring out the best economic policies to help growth may also be difficult. Trump and his supporters might blame globalism for their woes, but putting tariffs on imports and striving to shut down commerce with some of our largest trade partners will hit the poor the hardest. Price increases on low cost imported products will harm low income earners much more than upper middle class households with savings and easier means of substitution. Maybe in the long run this will spur some industrial investment, but I think it’s just as likely to speed up automation. In 4 years, many economic problems scaring Trump voters could easily be exacerbated.

More to the point, the government can’t reverse the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States. Short of seizing control of the economy via a 5 year plan, the world has changed. Manufacturing jobs peaked in the early 80s (BLS), and while globalization has accelerated the trend, it didn’t start it. Of course, “globalization” isn’t really an entity either; decisions that changed where firms do business were made by millions of individuals looking at cost-benefit analyses and comparing prices. The government didn’t say “move these factories to Mexico”, the government said “Technology is making it easier to communicate and do business in other countries, so we will reduce taxes and import quotas to make it easier for businesses and shareholders to do things they already want to do”. Trump can’t come back and order companies to make bad business decisions unless he wants a Soviet-style command economy with capital controls.

The United States has such a strong economy due to many factors, including its large, diverse, and skilled working populace, an abundance of natural resources, heavy investment in research and capital, and strong and interconnected financial markets. Our consumer market is the largest in the world, our trade dominates the globe in both goods and services. International economic institutions from the New York Stock Exchange to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are based in (and often dominated by) the United States.

Trump’s push to cut us off from strong trade ties will certainly harm the American centrality to the global economic system. Obviously, to many Trump fans, this is a bonus, not a problem. But long term decline in American trade would likely be connected to more sluggish growth as native industries are protected from competition; for example, Apple has pushed innovation in the smartphone market since 2007 which radically changed the status quo of what phones could do. It has had ripple effects throughout the economy as the spread of widely accessible powerful mobile computers has changed everything from transportation to social interaction to navigation and even shopping. But we should remember that the smartphone revolution was made possible by cheap global supply chains, and without them, we are likely to see stagnation.

And those older, rural, lesser educated Trump voters? No one is going to want to hire them unless the economy is clicking and demanding more workers. Sluggish growth with no competition bred by protectionist policies won’t help them.

Maybe Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation pushes will jumpstart the economy enough to overcome his bad trade polices. It’s possible, but I’m not betting on it. If it doesn’t work, in four years we will simply have the same economic problems just with tons more debt. That’s a big risk he’s taking. And it’s made more risky by Trump’s plan to expand the police state and start deporting at least two million people  (not to mention increasing military spending from the $500 billion a year we spend already).  The ACLU has gone into detail about the difficulties we face if Trump attempts to carry out his campaign promises. It’s very difficult to deport millions of people without doing away with probable cause; how do you find and arrest only the people here illegally? If they aren’t caught by the police while engaged in crime, then by necessity the police must come to them, requiring sweeps of entire residential areas, stopping people with no probable cause at all. At the very least this is grossly expensive, and more likely it will harass and catch thousands of innocent American citizens in a dragnet. And none of this even touches on registration of Muslims, continued mass surveillance, and use of torture.

In four years if the economy hasn’t improved much, debt has accumulated, and the police state has been vastly expanded, will Trump admit his policies haven’t worked? This seems unlikely as Trump has never really apologized for any stances he’s taken or mistakes he’s made. It seems far more likely that he’ll use this built up police state to harass his political enemies.

If Trump is willing to place trade barriers and dramatically reduce the world-leading $2.4 trillion worth of goods imported, how much will he be willing to use government subsidies to pay companies to “invest” in the United States? Does this sound like government direction of the economy? If things aren’t going well, will he seize more control of the economy?

I should note, I haven’t even brought up Trump’s extensive conflicts of interest, where representing American diplomatic interests may run counter to his profit-seeking ones. I also haven’t mentioned that someone who is extremely thin-skinned will be in charge of the nuclear launch codes. Many of the concerns of Trump voters don’t make much sense, many of the policy solutions of Trump and his voters are bad and would make things worse, and on top of that, Trump is irresponsible, incompetent, authoritarian, and many other things I’ve argued before. Continued opposition to Trump’s policies is vital over the next four years.

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Trump, Democracy, and Power

I’m working on a post about the political implications of Trump’s victory, but for now, let’s look at what Trump’s win tells us about democracy and government legitimacy.

I’ve seen some people on the left trying to reach out and understand the concerns of Trump voters. This is absolutely welcome, and in a future post I will talk about which of those concerns make sense, and which don’t. However, if you’re only considering other points of view because you lost an election, you may be thinking about politics and government all wrong. The goal of government policy shouldn’t be to cater to the whims and desires of the people who voted and supported the winning coalition, while crushing the unbelievers under a savage reign of public shaming and thought crime. Unfortunately, it feels like much of the social justice left adopted this mentality, and so we now might be forced under a right-wing government that has countered by taking this same governing strategy to heart. Policy should be about creating the best outcomes we can, which I think largely results from allowing individuals to make as many of their own decisions as possible with minimal government interference. That means allowing for a broad range of activities and types of commerce to occur, but it also means opposing expansion of government power.

Of course, the best way to do that right now is to point out that political victory doesn’t mean Trump supporters have any good ideas about improving the country, or even their own situations. The expansion of government action and government power Trump has promised are still terrible regardless of any democratic outcome.

I’m aware this is harsh, and it’s part of what Trump voters are complaining about when they say coastal elites are ignoring them, but I’m not (and have never) dismissed their concerns as racism and xenophobia; I tried to look at Trump’s policies themselves. The problem is that Trump never met me or anyone else on policy grounds. He has few ideas, and the ones he does have are pretty crappy. Against Trump acknowledged the left had done plenty of bad things, but Trump promised things at least as bad.

Moreover, the left (and maybe even the right) shouldn’t be saying “I live in a democracy, so apparently Trump’s ideas are legitimate because he won an election”. They should be saying “Maybe democracy is dangerous if it legitimizes tyranny, and maybe we should limit the power of the state to reduce the risks democracy poses”. In fact, they probably should have been saying this for the last eight years.

Being skeptical of democracy isn’t so bad. Democracies don’t always come to good solutions to problems. Supposing a majority of voters have elected one candidate over another, it’s several steps of logic to then say that a single rejection of one candidate in an election of dozens of issues then constitutes that the winning candidate’s stance on a particular issues is (A) popular and (B) effective. Add in that Trump did not actually win the popular vote, and, the fact that Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem states that there is no knowable community preference on any issue which had 3 or more possible stances to choose from.  And even if voters could all agree on a single popular issues, there’s no reason their favorite policy would actually work.

What I’m trying to say is that despite whatever concerns Trump voters have, what matters are the actions he takes. The problem is that the last two administrations have massively expanded the executive power of the president and increased regulatory involvement in many areas of the economy. The Department of Defense has compiled a massive database and is spying on American citizens and foreign nationals without warrants. That data is shared with federal law enforcement agencies again without oversight. The president has the power to strip you of your rights and hold you indefinitely if you are investigated in connection to terrorism. He even apparently has the ability to kill you without a trial. Trump has promised further abuses of power, including deportations of millions of people that cannot be done without racial profiling and gross abuses of due process. 

Maybe Trump won’t seize executive authority or scoff at the Constitution at all, and 90% of his campaign promises will turn out to be hyperbole. But I doubt it. Maybe he’ll try to accomplish things and be thwarted by checks from the other branches of government and the Constitution like Madison imagined. I maintain that what matters is policy, and if his policies are not that bad, I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong. But the fact that many are worried anyway indicates that we all understand to some extent or another that we have created an imperial presidency. It’s concerning that over 60 million people voted for a stated authoritarian who has advocated war crimes including killing of terrorists’ families; it’s also concerning that almost 61 million voted for someone who advocated a war in Libya without Congressional approval, who supported and continues to support warrantless spying on Americans, and condoned drone attacks that actually killed families of terrorists. The fact that 60 million votes is enough to make us fear for our rights means our troubles started a long time ago.

Yes, Trump’s presidency will likely be worse than anything we’ve ever seen, but as a state skeptic, it’s helpful when a politician just comes out and says how horrible they are rather than everyone pretending that the Obama and Bush imperial presidencies were normal and acceptable uses of executive authority. It makes the case against state power much more straightforward. Progressives need to realize is that Trump is worse only as a matter of degree; this blog post would have been written had Hillary won on Tuesday, it just wouldn’t have had a president-elect that cared so little about his reputation.

 

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Picture Credit: Replica Oval Office by George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

Against Hillary: Government Power and Criminal Justice

This is the fifth and final post in my series opposing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. See the introduction in Part 1 here. Read my opposition to Trump here. Read why you should mathematically vote for a third party here.

Government Power and Criminal Justice

I could go on critiquing many more topics where progressives and libertarians disagree. I’m not sure that would help, so I’ll conclude with this broad section on government power. The fundamental problem we should all have with Hillary Clinton is that she trusts the government to fix every problem we face. But the government has no competition, is slow to change, is slow to respond, and wields a massive police state. Moreover, she also seems to believe government officials should always be trusted to act in the public interest. This seems to govern her position on her mishandling classified information, on her foreign interventions and wars, on healthcare, on government spending, on our right to know that our government is spying on us, and even on the right for people to publish books and movies critical of candidates near elections.

Let’s go back to some points I made in my Against Trump post. As noted by Conor Friedersdorf, the powers of the president apparently include ordering the execution of American citizens with drone strikes (something it seems Hillary Clinton implicitly approved of), detaining Americans suspected of terrorism indefinitely, and spying on millions of Americans with unconstitutional general warrants. Quoting me from the Trump piece:

The enormous amount of statutes on the books means it’s almost certain average people break laws every single day, and so these law enforcement agencies can always find probable cause to arrest you. Then they can stack up charges to force a plea deal, all at the discretion of prosecutors.  As it stands right now, there’s a strong case that the criminal justice system is biased, slow, and unfair, and that it deprives individuals of their rights. But now imagine Trump in charge of the DEA, FBI, intelligence services, and the military.

I later compare Trump to Nixon. My intention was to show that bad presidents have existed and they did terrible damage. Of course, Nixon and Trump in reality have little in common; Nixon was an unlikeable, calculating, politically successful military interventionist who also expanded the size and scope of the regulatory state and federal government while using his power to cover up his aggressive use of the state to fight his political rivals. In other words, he was literally Hillary Clinton in 2016. Imagine putting Richard Nixon in charge of the government today where he would have access to unprecendented surveillance, secret courts, and undeclared wars. This is what we face in a Clinton presidency.

One of the biggest issues in 2016 has been the way police interact with citizens, especially people of color. The trust Hillary Clinton has in the state is simply incompatible with the reality of police abuses. Libertarians, on the other hand, have been talking about police abuse for quite some time. Some of those ideas have been adopted by Clinton including an opposition to mandatory minimums, a prioritization of violent crime over drug crimes, and better police accountability. But Clinton’s positions are mixed at best: harsher sentences in the 90s that helped create the massive prison population we see today weren’t just introduced for drug possession, but also firearm possession. Clinton hasn’t discussed liberalization of firearm ownership, and in fact has called for the suspension of 2nd amendment rights for people placed on the unaccountable and discriminatory terrorist watch list. Her support for the Patriot Act and NSA spying doesn’t really imply a worldview that wants to reduce the police powers of the state. Indeed, her stances in all sorts of areas from undeclared wars to videogames reflect a fundamental belief in civilian deference to state power. Yet as countless examples have shown, including Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and more, deferring to a powerful police state allows harm to come to innocents.

The more power the state has, the more likely there will be confrontations between actors of the state and citizens, and confrontations where there is a power imbalance leads to abuses. Even if we could end racism today, we would not be solving the problem; police that still abuse their power, just against people of all races equally are still immoral. Whether it’s the justice system broadly, government surveillance, regulatory powers, or foreign interventions Hillary Clinton does not offer a fundamental change from simply trusting in the state to fix the problem. Our military has been involved in trillion dollar middle eastern wars over the past 16 years. The justice system is so broken that prosecutors can force 95% of defendants to accept plea bargains. We are outraged at the power the police are wielding without oversight. Yet we are making the problem worse by putting a reincarnation of Richard Nixon into the White House, after she has already brazenly broken the law and gotten away with it. This is simply the wrong answer.

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Picture Credit: Public Domain Image, from National Archives and Records Administration.

Against Hillary: Fiscal Policy and Taxation

This is the fourth post in my series opposing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. See the introduction in Part 1 here. Read my opposition to Trump here. Read why you should mathematically vote for a third party here.

Taxation

I won’t spend a huge amount of time on this section because there’s another fundamental ideological argument here, but I want to emphasize a few key points. One is that government taxation and spending is inherently distortionary in an economic sense. Therefore, we should be biased against government policies that transfer money unless we can definitively show the benefits are significantly larger than the costs. Relatedly, the tax code should be as simple and as non-distortionary as possible. Gary Johnson has a pretty good idea here on replacing the income tax with a similarly progressive consumption tax. Similar tax holes would likely be carved out over time, but throwing out the current system in favor of one that does not discourage income earning, but only spending, would have some clear benefits. This idea is popular among libertarians, progressives, and even Bill Gates. It is not a perfect plan, especially when taking into account transition costs, but the current tax code does not have much going for it: it’s complex and creates bad incentives everywhere. Needless to say, Donald Trump’s fiscal policy may not raise taxes, but excessive government borrowing can have big costs as well, and at some point in the future distortionary taxes will need to pay for all of Trump’s out of control spending ideas.

Spending

The second point is that if we assume luck is an inherent part of wealth, then using government as a form of social insurance is pretty reasonable, even from a libertarian standpoint. But most government spending is not focused on giving money to the poor. A huge chunk is spent on the elderly in the form of social security and medicare, even though many are solidly middle class. Taxes for the programs are also fairly regressive. Other major spending categories are overseas military operations, defense spending generally, veterans spending (which we will see more of if Hillary is elected), and interest on the national debt. Together these make up a lot more than 60% of the federal budget. And that’s not even going into the costs of the war on drugs, corporate subsidies, and so on, which are a bit harder to calculate, but are nonetheless real costs which are not remotely focused on helping the poor. The problem is that Hillary isn’t really talking about reforming these areas. If anything, she’s talked about expanding them and introducing new spending areas. Again, this isn’t even mentioning the unknown costs of her future foreign policy blunders.

Free college tuition is really the most egregious. We already live in a world where college graduates are forced to take jobs that they are overqualified for. The reason is partially because government already offers huge subsidies for college tuition; as a result, colleges have little price competition. They just increase the prices, and the state just keeps paying it. Increasing the amount of subsidies in order to fix a high price doesn’t work for tulips (seriously, read it), and it doesn’t work for college. Spending lots of money to educate someone on a subject that is not in demand, whether it’s a B.A. in psychology or skills in coding fortran, is very expensive to society. That cost should be born out by the person learning the skill with no market, not by society. Incentives would then push people to either learn skills that are in demand (so they can pay back the cost of education), or to forego college and begin earning immediately without huge upfront costs. Both of these would be better for society at large. Yes, we should help those with little wealth with government support, but those receiving help should ultimately decide what to do with additional funds that will best help them. The government should not interfere with the relative opportunity cost faced by prospective applicants to college. Reducing, not increasing college subsidies is the only way to control the rising cost of college and fix the overqualification and saturation of college degrees in the job marketplace.

Finally, paying for this with higher taxes on the wealthy is a bit wishful. Firstly, the arithmetic doesn’t quite add up; the New York Times estimates higher taxes would raise only $100 billion to $200 billion depending on how broad and steep the tax increases are. This isn’t enough to cover current annual payments on the national debt. It would likely cover public college tuition today, before additional cost growth and the large influx of students that free tuition would bring. There wouldn’t be much room for a new war in Syria or an expansion of social security. Secondly, federal tax revenues have basically never exceeded 20% of GDP. It’s not that higher taxes wouldn’t raise revenue; they just wouldn’t beyond a certain level. A Clinton presidency would not be as fiscally irresponsible as a Trump presidency, but it is a bit worrisome considering the returns of this spending seem to be to get middle class votes more than to help the poor.

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Against Hillary: Healthcare

This is the third post in my series opposing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. See the introduction in Part 1 here. Read my opposition to Trump here. Read why you should mathematically vote for a third party here.

Healthcare

Now we’re turning to a subject where there may be an unavoidable Fundamental Ideological Disagreement. Nonetheless, I think there may be some agreement that the current healthcare system has many problems.

In 2009, the Democrats had complete control of the presidency, the House, and even had a super-majority in the Senate. Their priority was healthcare reform: the American system was prohibitively expensive, spent too much money even when patients were covered, tied your healthcare to your job, denied coverage to people with preexisting conditions and others who could not pay, and did not properly align preventative care incentives. They took a fundamentally left-leaning, centralized, top-down approach to solving these problems. The Obama administration specifically stayed out of the legislative process allowing much of the law to be patched together through Congress. They solved some of the problems in the American health system (and those steps are to be commended), some they tried to solve, but didn’t, and some they ignored altogether. Ironically, for a piece of legislation often called the “Affordable Care Act”, one of the problems Obamacare largely didn’t touch was the lack of market forces and pricing pressures on healthcare, guaranteeing the price problem would worsen.

When it comes to allocating resources, incentivizing cost saving and innovation, and producing the best quality goods for the lowest possible prices, there is no better system than a competitive free market with unregulated prices. Sellers seek to provide the best product at the lowest cost so that buyers will want to purchase them.  I’d hesitate to even call it a system, since, apart from pricing systems and private property, everything is driven by individuals making decisions, according to their own priorities and needs. Markets do have problems, but the biggest one is that poor people won’t have the money to get the product (i.e. healthcare) they need. Unfortunately, instead of just fixing that problem by giving government healthcare subsidies to the poor, Obamacare tried to solve all the problems of the entire healthcare system through legislation. Obama had an unprecedented opportunity to encourage both market reforms and increased coverage for the poor, but instead opted for the (politically easier) increased regulation on a system already heavily strained by bad rules.

Instead of making it easier to purchase healthcare as an individual, Obamacare cemented the relationship between employment and healthcare. Instead of allowing consumers and doctors to figure out some prices with high deductible insurance plans, Obamacare mandated many more items be specifically covered by insurance plans, thus hiding their costs from patients. Instead of allowing insurance and consumers to follow their own incentives to promote preventive care, Obamacare mandates one-size fits all preventative care regulations which encode waste into the system. For more critiques of the system, check out this review in the Cato Journal.

The result is a system that solved the problem of coverage for the poor and people with preexisting conditions, but did not fundamentally solve the lack of market pricing and bad incentives. The mandates on insurance companies and hospitals (besides creating waste) increased the cost of providing care. The increased cost was supposed to be alleviated by subsidies and more young people entering the system, but the costs have been higher than expected and thus fewer people have signed up than had hoped. Perhaps more subsidies would get more people to sign up, but that doesn’t really solve the fundamental issues, just puts the burden of cost onto the taxpayer instead of healthy consumers. As a result of a lack of healthy young people in the system, insurance companies are raising premiums, despite downsloping demand curves (you drop prices to bring people in, not raise them). Clearly, the problems will only continue, and we’re stuck in a political situation where some parts of Obamacare are popular and now can’t be politically taken back, despite them being unsustainable.

Hillary Clinton wants to keep much of this situation intact. This is a terrible policy. We need real market reforms or this cost growth will continue. This isn’t even to suggest that an insurance mandate would be bad policy, or that the poor shouldn’t be able to get healthcare subsidies; but if there is no price competition, no ability for consumers to choose their healthcare provider, then there are no ramifications for patient or doctor’s actions that are inefficient or unnecessary. The costs are just socialized by the system and the problems never fixed. And it’s not like we are out of ideas for fixing the healthcare system: ending healthcare ties to your employer, allowing for more widespread use of HSAs, scaling, split benefits, and reforming scope of practice laws are just some of those. Over the last 15 years, American middle class wages haven’t improved much. Yet healthcare costs (and spending as a part of GDP) has gone way up. Perhaps if these costs were better controlled (and not paid by employers), more of the productivity gains would return to middle class incomes. But we’ll never find out when Hillary is president.

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Against Hillary: Foreign Policy and Trade

This is the second post in my series opposing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. See the introduction in Part 1 here. Read my opposition to Trump here. Read why you should mathematically vote for a third party here.

Foreign Policy

Media coverage might make you think that Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson’s weakest point in comparison to Hillary Clinton is foreign policy. On the contrary, foreign policy is by far the the most important policy reason voters should reject Hillary Clinton, especially in favor of Johnson. News stories might seem to indicate that Johnson knows nothing about foreign policy, but in fact he has an excellent nuanced approach to foreign affairs. Libertarians have a reputation for isolationism, and indeed an important part of Johnson’s policy is a reduction in American military involvement in the middle east. But he is still a proponent of American diplomacy and defending American obligations in NATO. He’s also the only proponent of free trade in this election, a policy which has systematically broken down geopolitical opponents by integrating their economies into global markets and intertwining their economic success with ours. Let’s contrast this with Hillary Clinton’s policies.

The American consensus on the 2003 Iraq War is certainly negative, and I’d go as far as to say that most agree it was a mistake, especially on the left. Hillary Clinton voted to support that war, but so did many politicians on both sides of the aisle (including 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry). Of course, even some blame for a war that had several hundred thousand deaths of civilians and combatants is pretty awful. 4,507 Americans died in the Iraq war. This is significantly higher than the amount of people who died in the September 11th attacks. These are real people that likely would be alive today if not for the actions of American politicians. Yes, Hillary Clinton was not the only person who voted for this war, so perhaps she is only responsible for a fraction of this mistake. But is it that great to be responsible for the deaths of only 100 Americans who died for a mistake? What about the thousands of Iraqi Security Forces who died in the insurgency? What about the estimated five million Iraqi orphans caused by the war, or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died?

In 2004, Hillary said she had no regrets her Iraq War vote. In 2008, she didn’t want to be flip-flopping and so did not apologize, but she nonetheless lost the nomination to Obama, with the Iraq War support being one of several factors. In her 2014 book, she finally admitted that she regrets her vote backing the Iraq War. Yet, as The Atlantic points out, she was quite sincere in her vote in 2002; this was not simply a political ploy to look strong on national security. And if indeed she has had a change of heart, one would think she would treat future policy decisions differently.

In 2011 as Secretary of State, she faced another policy decision in Libya…and again decided to push for intervention. During a Democratic primary debate a year ago when asked about the intervention, Hillary Clinton began her defense of American involvement in Libya by labeling it as “smart power at its best”. Connor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic harshly criticized Clinton’s full answer stating that her upbeat portrayal of Libya was:

…about as misleading as summarizing the Iraq War by saying that the Iraqis had a terrible leader; they had a free election after the war; and they voted for moderates. It elides massive suffering and security threats that have occurred in postwar Libya.

Also worth noting, as Friedersdorf points out, this war was not declared, and not only violated the War Powers Resolution, but went against the expressed opposition of a Libya intervention Congressional vote. Moreover, the New York Times discusses in-depth how Obama was hesitant to get involved in Libya until Clinton convinced him it was a worthwhile endeavor. This is her war, and it left Libya a failed state.

Clinton’s support of military interventions in the middle east should be very concerning to everyone. Essentially all military interventions she has supported in the middle east have been failures: Libya is most prominently hers; she voted to go to war in Iraq which was a foreign policy disaster; she also supported the Afghanistan surge in 2009 and drone bombing in Pakistan during the first Obama term. Seven years after the surge in Afghanistan, there are still thousands of American soldiers and several times that many contractors in Afghanistan today. The Pakistan drone strikes have been severely criticized, with estimates of civilian casualties varying between 250 to over 900 civilians killed.

Of course, the US hasn’t really had a successful military intervention in the middle east since the Gulf War. Yet Hillary Clinton has continued to favor aggressive hawkish interventions. Her widely touted “experience” during her husband’s administration, as a Senator, and as a member of the Obama administration seems to have created systemic bias towards intervention in her approach to foreign affairs. In the Times piece, Clinton adviser Anne-Marie Slaughter states:

“Mrs. Clinton repeatedly speaks of wanting to be ‘caught trying.’ In other words, she would rather be criticized for what she has done than for having done nothing at all.”

This may sound noble, but it should disturb anyone considering voting for Clinton. The implication that “trying” is always better than “not trying” ignores the possibility that American policy could ever accidentally cause bad outcomes. This isn’t just possible, it’s quite likely, as demonstrated specifically by Iraq and Libya. Now Clinton is proposing additional intervention in Syria, beyond what the Obama administration has pursued. This includes no-fly zones and troops on the ground to create safe zones for refugees.

You might say that Syria is different from Iraq in that the situation literally couldn’t be worse, so perhaps intervention only risks improving one of the bloodiest wars in the last decade. Yet no-fly zones would demand a confrontation with Russia (they are the ones flying the planes) and would require the US to shoot down Russian military aircraft. This is escalation, and thus it’s quite easy for imprecise or incorrect policy to actually make Syria become even worse under Clinton’s policy. A Johnson/libertarian hands-off approach has inherently less risk because there would be no soldiers involved and little to no risk of escalation with Russia. Johnson has specifically advocated working with Russia, which is also basically the policy the Obama administration is taking. Nonetheless, we should acknowledge this approach has done little to end the war in Syria.

But if anything, that’s another point to Johnson: if Clinton’s ideas are so great, it seems that the Obama administration would have already implemented them and succeeded. The implication then is that Clinton differs significantly from Obama in Syria policy. Specifically, she is willing to commit more than pure air support. This sounds suspiciously like a traditional middle eastern military intervention championed by neoconservatives/right-wing hawks. Johnson’s Syria policy is suspiciously similar to Obama’s. So the question is why would Democrats and progressives side with Clinton when the Clinton vs Johnson policies are really right-wing vs Obama Syria policies. It seems siding with Clinton over Johnson in this area means abandoning the left’s positions, including that of the sitting Democratic president.

Moreover, for Clinton’s policies to succeed, she would need to win a middle eastern conflict by building a coalition among international actors who are geopolitically opposed. This war would need to be won against both a strong dictator and a large insurgency, the latter being something the United States has failed at essentially every time in the middle east. These plans are unreasonable, unprecedented, and unlikely to work.

Voting to approve of Clinton’s continual push for war and intervention is to agree not to hold her responsible for her repeated foreign policy mistakes which have lost countless lives. It’s to agree that we can afford to spend another several hundred billion dollars on another middle east intervention. It’s to put faith in a person who has learned nothing, who is hoping her intentions in solving the Syrian conflict will overcome the reality of the middle eastern politics.

Free Trade

Trade is next due to its role in the dynamics of geopolitical relationships. Again, despite the consensus that foreign relations is Hillary’s strong point, this is the second foreign policy area where she is on the wrong side. When it comes to trade, economists are in astounding agreement that free trade is a good thing. The benefits of freer international markets are clear and the results are all around us; today we have global supply chains that reduce the cost and increase the availability of goods of all types. Integration of developing economies has raised the productivity of the global poor and allowed for sustainable, incentivized growth to pull literally billions out of poverty, a feat which government and charities have never come close. The burden is on free trade opponents to explain their position, and in this election, those opponents are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Gary Johnson is the only candidate running this year who is on the right side of perhaps the most important issue when it comes to the degree and number of people helped.

Hillary Clinton may say in private that she supports free trade, but at best then we are hoping she is lying publicly. Unfortunately, whatever political calculations she is making may not necessarily change after election day. At the very least, it seems reasonable to suggest free trade will not be a top priority of the Clinton administration given she is running as far as possible from the TPP. As an aside, the TPP itself has many non-free trade components, including extensive increases in intellectual property protections. But our president should be someone who makes the case to the American people and the to the world of the benefits of trade, cooperation, and commercial interaction (I can’t believe I’m defending Obama). The current presidential administration has created many bad policies, but in foreign affairs, both in war and trade, Clinton is somehow huge steps backwards from where we are today.

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Against Hillary: The Rule of Law

This post is the latest in a series this year covering the 2016 election. In May, I took a look at all candidates that had run for the Democratic and Republican nominations and noted that most were flawed. I restricted much of my analysis to the candidates’ political electability, regardless of my agreement with their ideology. Obviously much of that post focused on the failures of the Republican Party to nominate someone better than Trump, but I noted that already Hillary Clinton was demonstrating some serious popularity issues. In fact, I’m pretty sure her vulnerability (and high likelihood of being the Democratic nominee) was the primary reason for so many Republicans entering the race. That notion has proven correct as the Huffington Post favorability ratings put Hillary at 43% favorable / 54% unfavorable. In comparison at this time of the race, Mitt Romney was about 46% favorable / 48% unfavorable and Obama was 45% favorable / 50% unfavorable. Against an average Republican presidential candidate, I’d bet she’d be losing badly.

But she’s not facing an average Republican, she’s facing Donald Trump, perhaps the worst major party candidate in memory. I’ve gone into extensive detail about the problems with a Trump presidency, and I’ve recommended voting for Gary Johnson (twice), or any third party, if the election isn’t close or you don’t live in a swing state. I define swing state very narrowly as states with a serious chance of their outcome determining the outcome of the election. Indeed, with only a week to go, betting markets have Clinton at over 70% chance to win the election.

However, even if my mathematical arguments make sense to you, if you are a self-identified Democrat or progressive, you might still prefer voting for a mainstream Democrat like Hillary Clinton rather than a third party just because she seems to fit your ideology better; sure, your vote likely won’t count, but perhaps you just don’t see much appeal in the third parties anyway so you might as well state your preference for a candidate you like. This post, at the very least, will lay out the case for why a Clinton presidency would be mediocre, and at best this post will persuade you to vote for Gary Johnson over Hillary Clinton. Again, this implies that there is no real chance of having a decisive vote.

Indeed, it is overwhelmingly likely that Hillary Clinton will be the 45th president of the United States no matter how you vote. While it is nice that Donald Trump will not be president, we must remember that Hillary Clinton’s victory is simply the final act in an election where our political system utterly failed.

One of the reasons I wanted to write Against Trump first was that there are so many faults you can have with Trump without encountering any Fundamental Ideological Disagreements. By Fundamental Ideological Disagreements, I mean that sometimes you encounter people where you don’t have anything close to the same goals in mind due to virtually irreconcilable ideology. A classic example of irreconcilable differences is abortion: some people believe that life begins at conception, and some people believe a fetus only gains rights once it is viable outside the womb. You can’t really get to one place from the other since each has fundamental ideological assumptions about whether an unborn fetus has rights.

Fundamental Ideological Disagreements are part of the reason I favor consequentialism; if we can at least agree on what our goals are, now it’s theoretically just an empirical disagreement on the best way to get there. With Trump, there’s a lot to dislike without considering ideology: he trolls, he flip-flops, he’s unintelligent and incompetent. Regardless of whether we agree with what a perfectly competent Trump would do, it’s apparent, through stupidity or flip-flopping, many of his promises are empty.

Hillary Clinton is not nearly as unknown. She’s done her own share of flip-flopping, but we generally know where she stands on big issues: she favors American military intervention, she favors government involvement and expansion of an expensive welfare state, she favors a regulated economy with higher taxes on the wealthy, and she favors curtailing individual liberties in the name of national security, redistribution, and social justice. To oppose Clinton is to confront these ideological differences which may be impossible to change in a blog post. But there are some critiques that virtually everyone can agree are quite concerning.

The Rule of Law

The biggest issue is the double standard of the law as applied to Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information with her private email server. FBI Director James Comey indicated that because there was no intentional mishandling of information, any case against Clinton would fail despite clear violations of the law. Yet, as Glenn Greenwald points out, this is not how low-level government employees who accidentally mishandle classified information are normally treated. In fact, according to Greenwald, the Obama administration has prosecuted “more individuals under the Espionage Act of 1917 for improperly handling classified information than all previous administrations combined.”

This includes some crazy examples Greenwald lists:

NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, for instance, faced years in prison, and ultimately had his career destroyed, based on the Obama DOJ’s claims that he “mishandled” classified information (it included information that was not formally classified at the time but was retroactively decreed to be such). Less than two weeks ago, “a Naval reservist was convicted and sentenced for mishandling classified military materials” despite no “evidence he intended to distribute them.” Last year, a Naval officer was convicted of mishandling classified information also in the absence of any intent to distribute it.

The idea that the FBI couldn’t get a case together when Clinton insecurely stored documents far more sensitive than those mishandled by low level government workers is absurd. Of course, I’m not suggesting that Clinton necessarily did something immoral; it’s also true that the American government vastly over-classifies everything and is far too zealous about prosecuting people who mishandle information. So called “classified” documents may be classified simply because bureaucrats are playing it safe and covering everything as broadly as possible to avoid any problems. They may even be classified when national security is not in danger but rather because it is simply politically expedient to do so.

But it’s clear that Clinton broke the law and was not prosecuted due to who she is. It’s also true that she repeatedly lied (or didn’t know) about breaking these laws. The stories about her include brazen lifting of NSA classified intelligence sent to unsecured email servers simply because she didn’t want to access email like a regular employee. Against a real opponent, this would be damning.

Moreover, as Scott Shackford at Reason points out, Hillary herself has specifically criticized people who released classified information, even if that information significantly changed the national debate on a topic and led to courts ruling programs unconstitutional:

We’re also talking about a woman who thinks Edward Snowden didn’t go through “proper channels” before leaking information about mass domestic surveillance to the public and should face legal consequences, though the whistleblowing channels she refers to probably wouldn’t have applied in Snowden’s situation. Despite deliberately not managing communications appropriately to make sure everything goes through “proper channels” with correct level of security, she wants to be treated differently.

Again, given Hillary will likely be the president anyway, there are plenty of alternative candidates who have never mishandled classified information that voters can and should cast their ballot for. Voting to state you disapprove of a president using this double standard seems like a worthy undertaking in its own right. At the very least, it is hugely troubling that the likely-president has already avoided the law due to political stature. The fact that our political system gave us a choice between an unpopular, incompetent, flip-flopping authoritarian and someone who couldn’t even follow the laws on classified information as a cabinet secretary is a huge indictment on the system. And any system that allows a president to win when they’ve already demonstrated the law doesn’t apply to them is dangerous. A vote for Hillary is an approval of that system.

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Picture Credit: Marc Nozell, Hillary Clinton in Nashua, NH licensed under CC-BY-2.0

Links 2016-10-12

I’ve added Andrew Gelman’s blog to the blogroll. Really great blog on statistical analysis. I also moved the Cato Institute’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project to the Libertarian Web Directory under Issue Organizations instead of in the blogroll.

Comment on Slate Star Codex about evolutionary complexity and politics. There’s a limit to how much useful information we can get from elections, and building more complex institutions on such little information may be dangerous.

John Cochrane on Basic Income and its benefits, along with its large political problems.

So the DEA has taken the massive failure of the War on Drugs and decided the lesson to draw was to add another drug to Schedule 1, the most prohibited category (and more tightly controlled than cocaine). Kratom, a drug used for opioid withdrawal treatment has been added to the list. The 15 deaths cited by the DEA over the last 2 years are sure to bump up as users’ legal alternative to illegal opioids is removed.

Classic example of regulation making it more difficult for simple economic transactions. This manifests in higher prices for compliance which ends up hurting the poor disproportionately. Seattle used to be the leading place for “micro-housing”, but it’s being regulated out of existence to the tune of hundreds of affordable dwellings a year.

The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International are launching a campaign to pardon Edward Snowden. I’ve gone on the record predicting that the Obama administration will not pardon Snowden, but I hope I’m wrong. Also, watch this excellent Reason TV interview with the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Gary Johnson: WIRED should have endorsed me for president.

Related: Donald Trump has received no major newspaper endorsements, and many newspapers who have endorsed Republicans for decades, even centuries, are either endorsing Clinton, Johnson, or simply endorsing anyone but Trump. Some newspapers who don’t usually endorse anyone are doing so, such as the Atlantic, USA Today, and actually WIRED had never issued an endorsement. A redditor collected all the information into a nice post.

I’m not a Ross Douthat fan, but I do like this column. There’s a real sense of being surrounded that non-progressives feel. And when surrounded with no hope of making it out alive, soldiers fight to the death because they have nothing to lose. Not a great situation.

Heard through Alex Tabbarok at Marginal Revolution: apparently an author at the Telegraph isn’t happy about Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to eradicate all disease. She’s apparently afraid of the impacts of overpopulation. And she published it. In a real newspaper. So if you’re not optimizing for the “most good” in the world or most “human happiness”, what exactly are you optimizing for? If the author is so concerned about human population, does that mean she’s generally pro-war? Is she pro-Ebola? Anti-CDC? What are her feelings on ISIS? Does she have suicidal thoughts? I just have so many questions.

Seen through Slate Star Codex, the Brookings Institution has a report on charter schools in Massachusetts: “There is a deep well of rigorous, relevant research on the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts…This research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes. The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores. In marked contrast, we find that the effects of charters in the suburbs and rural areas of Massachusetts are not positive.” I’d guess this is because in the suburbs, the schools are already pretty good and must compete with expensive private schools anyway.

Forget moving to New Hampshire, the new mayor of Johannesburg is a self-proclaimed libertarian.

Why are American airports so crappy compared to international ones? Well it’s partially because most American airports cater to domestic flights and are not international travel hubs. Airports that focus on similar levels of domestic travel resemble LAX more than Dubai, LaGuardia more than Singapore.

Scott Sumner asks some interesting questions about a possible decline in materialism and how it relates to GDP growth and measurement. If everything you want to do can be done online, can you measure that economic improvement?

Jacob Levy at Bleeding Heart Libertarians writes that if you look at the polling numbers, Johnson doesn’t draw more from Clinton, and having him on the ticket actually helps her.

Obviously this election cycle has been particularly divisive and nasty. But did you know there are people working on fixing this? Check out the National Institute for Civil Discourse’s Standards of Conducts for Debates. Can you imagine if the political debates were actually like this? I might even want to watch them.

Megan McArdle on How to End the Death Penalty for Good. There’s an interesting point about how abortion laws were on the decline and probably would have quietly died except for the Supreme Court stepping in and making the decision themselves. This galvanized social conservatives into organizing themselves and mobilizing to protect their interests against perceived undemocratic justices. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but it’s certainly true that “judicial activism” has been reviled by the American Right for a while now.

A good rundown by Reason of their staffers and many prominent libertarians on who they will be voting for. Dave Barry’s response is by far my favorite.

There is a storm brewing in the Libertarian Party. Gary Johnson will likely meet the 5% threshold set by the FEC on who qualifies as a minor party. That means the LP will be eligible to get taxpayer provided funding for its candidate in 2020. There are two problem. One is that Libertarians are fundamentally opposed to this practice, and taking the money would make them look like hypocrites. The other is that neither party seems to take matching funds anymore as it also puts a cap on how much you can raise. That cap scales, so the cap itself may limit the LP in the 2020 election. 

Postlibertaian throwback: World Wars Per Century. Only since 2014 have we been living in an age where only a single world war was started in the preceding 100 years.

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