Donald Trump – Page 2

The Broken Electoral System: 2018 Edition

This blog voices a lot of frustrations with the American electoral system, and with election season coming up, it’s worth talking about again. The United States is a republic, but voters tend to significantly overestimate the importance and impact of their votes.

To reiterate some of what I said in 2016, your vote in November is unlikely to matter. Most Congressional elections are not close. There may be uncertainty in other, less well polled elections for lower offices, but there’s also a much higher cost to finding out who the candidates are and what they stand for. I consider myself pretty interested in the political process as I write about it often. Nonetheless, I know almost nothing about my state representative and state senator. I can (and will) look them up, and see where they stood on votes, as I can with my Congressional representatives, but this will also require looking up which state votes were important to the topics I care about, something which I may not be able to find out easily and which I’m sure other people do not have the time to do. Moreover, it’s pretty common at the federal level for legislators to try and avoid going on the record and opt instead for voice votes, and I suspect similar incentives dominate at the state level.

If I can find good information on their voting record which reflecting beliefs I find objectionable, it is not clear that I can find information on their electoral opponents. Party affiliation does help, but not every candidate from a party holds all party positions.

Additionally, even close elections that you can find information on do not necessarily map well onto issues you care about. I care about promoting free trade, liberalizing immigration and/or worker visas, ending the war on drugs, and addressing issues in the criminal justice system. Many politicians only side with me on some issues but not others, yet I only have two options for any election that is actually competitive (and again, most are not).

Moreover, most politicians not only don’t share all my positions on important issues, they have really terrible positions on other issues that weren’t even on my radar. Now I have to worry about Republican politicians looking to deport immigrants through abusive crackdowns of civil liberties. I’m also now concerned about Democratic promises to vastly expand Medicare, already the largest entitlement in the federal budget and contributor to runaway healthcare spending. I freely admit that many people do not feel this way; they feel that the “progressive” or “conservative” positions pair well on a wide range of issues, and they can identify with many others who share an overlapping set of beliefs. In this view, the inability for libertarians to find someone who shares their core issues is a function of libertarians having bad or unpopular ideas and that’s why they have no support.

I disagree for several reasons: one is that many people do not vote at all. They may not think much about politics, or if they do, perhaps they realize, as is my thesis here, that there is very little benefit to voting. It seems quite plausible that they hold ideas that differ from party orthodoxy and don’t see a reason to vote when you can only choose between party orthodoxy. Another is that a plurality of registered voters do not have a party affiliation, something that has only been true in the last ~20 years or so. It’s also true that when surveyed, many Americans express rather moderate views on a variety of issues. Finally, it’s worth noting that there is obvious intra-party tension and factionalism. There are serious groups of Republicans who do not like Trump. There are libertarian critics like Justin Amash and Mark Sanford, neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, as well as just stalwart conservatives like everyone at National Review. It also seems to me that there is some strong disagreement in the Democratic Party between neoliberals and progressives, and so it seems absurd that the political system only allows two parties when there is so much diversity of opinion and no way to express it electorally.

Worse still, our current two-headed system promotes partisanship and tribal extremism instead of nuance. I know several people that, when pressed, don’t really believe that the government would do a great job if we had a Medicare-for-all system or had government paid college. Yet these same people feel that if they don’t embrace these left-wing ideas, their only alternative is to be a fan of Trump, whom they reasonably despise. I’ve also experienced the reverse: conservatives that didn’t like Trump, but clearly preferred his tax policy to Hillary Clinton’s and figured Trump might not be so bad. Many now are so concerned at what they perceive as a “Trump Derangement Syndrome” takeover of the Democratic Party, they have nowhere to go but to embrace Trump. If we had a system that promoted the creation of several different groups and smaller parties, we’d have a much easier time finding a diversity of opinions and ideas.

Unfortunately, our current system also takes issues that many people generally agree are bad and just ignores them. There are policy positions I would consider to be completely disqualifying for any public servant, such as approval of a vast warrantless domestic spying program costing tens of billions of dollars a year or the murder of children through drone strikes by the president with no authorization of war from Congress. Nonetheless, there is no point to disqualify candidates from my support due to these issues because they have been widely ignored by all candidates in the major parties. Complaining about the two party system is the classic archetype of the crazy libertarian going off the rails again, but I hope others are genuinely saddened that our electoral system doesn’t offer a way to utilize our vote to oppose the murder of children by our government.

And for non-competitive elections, there may be competitive primaries, which aren’t really great systems either, as I’ve discussed before. If the primary is deciding the eventual winner of the election, it doesn’t make sense that a plurality of voters of a single party should determine the winner of a general election seat in a primary election where 90% of possible voters didn’t vote at all. For example, in the notable dethroning of high ranking Democrat Joe Crowley in NY-14, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won with less than 16,000 votes, in a district where some 690,000 people live, presumably with some 300,000 possible voters. PredictIt currently gives the Democrat a ~85% chance to win, although the market isn’t very liquid.

In less democratic countries, there is overt voter fraud and intimidation. The United States doesn’t really have that problem. It nonetheless does have odd echoes of a “rigged” electoral system like one you would find in low-trust corrupt authoritarian countries with poor rule of law. For example, having one side consistently win a landslide, non-competitive election (like most congressional seats) seems like something you’d find in a “fake” democracy. Having a “competitive” election between two candidates you didn’t pick and you don’t know well which doesn’t allow you to express dissatisfaction with important government programs sounds like a “fake” democracy too.

I should admit that I don’t love the idea of hyper direct democracy either. Even if voters had a reason to learn about the political system, I’m unsure if they would promote good ideas. In all honesty, I probably side with political elites over average voters on a lot of issues. That doesn’t mean I believe there is no room for reform. I’ve discussed many different possible ways to improve our system, and in fact a few weeks ago I mentioned the important opportunity Approval Voting is getting this year. Yet none of those ideas will be seriously discussed this election season.

To summarize, our election system has a variety of important and fundamental flaws. Candidates are picked in nonrepresentative primaries, many elections are noncompetitive, voter information is scarce, while voter choices are limited to two candidates who do not represent the broader electorate’s views on many issues. Other important issues are just broadly ignored while the system promotes discord and extremism. Yet there will be a significant amount of discussion about how important it is to vote in November. With these flaws I’ve outlined, I apologize in advance if I’m unimpressed by such claims.

If you believe that you see a large difference in a particular race for office that you think might be competitive, that’s great, and feel free to vote. But don’t feel bad if you believe voting is a waste of time. Maybe you don’t like Trump, but you also wish all the Democratic candidates weren’t just talking about deficit busting economic policies with poor fiscal outlooks. That’s fine because there are ways to engage politically that are more important than voting. That includes addressing our broken electoral system and raising awareness about how this doesn’t have to be the way things operate; approval voting offers a real alternative that’s being attempted right now. It’s also worth mentioning that Congress’ decline in power relative to the President means that partisan politics is now more infectious; only one of a very few competing ideologies can control the White House and the immense power it has been ceded. Meanwhile, a powerful Congress is made up of hundreds of individuals, allowing for diversity of opinion, broad coalitions, and compromise. Congress should be taking back power it has ceded to the executive branch; I would hope readers would want to make this the major election talking point it should be, instead of the libertarian-rant-footnote it is now.

In conclusion, civic engagement is important; political awareness is vital to a thriving democracy. Nonetheless our electoral system is broken in such a way that voting is not the vital civic duty it is often claimed to be. If you are concerned about the partisanship that created Trump, if you feel like a world where facts don’t matter ought to be changed, then voting isn’t enough to change these trends. That does not mean there is nothing to be done; on the contrary, reforms are needed on a more fundamental level, including changes to our voting system, primary system, and party system. Discussing and promoting those ideas is the best way forward.

Free Market Arguments from National Security

Libertarians are not fans of wars or government spending, often for overlapping reasons. Consequently, libertarians often remain uninterested in foreign policy, writing off the entire area of study as something not worth engaging in. Given the current administration has found a way to be both not interested in global affairs (“America First“), while also highly anti-market and pro-government spending (especially defense spending), I believe there might be an alternative that both retains a small government approach to the economy, as well as an important role for American leadership in the world.

The overarching theme here is that China is a rising power, whose outlook is distinct from that of the U.S. and the liberal world order generally. We might have expected China to continue its trajectory towards a freer economy and perhaps even a freer political ideology even 10 years ago, but no longer. Economic reforms touted by Xi Jinping have not materialized, and in fact the Chinese Communist Party and the state have strengthened their hold on the economy and the role of state owned enterprises within it. The Chinese state has maintained a highly nationalistic ideology; American foreign policy has created plenty of messes, but has also done some good in promoting free trade and at least stated goals democracy and respect for human rights. China is looking to offer an alternative to the current American-dominated world, and it is likely one that is worse for the world. American policymakers need to do better. Here are ways they could do so.

Institute Fiscal Discipline

The first point is that any potential policy that looks to achieve American goals vs Chinese goals will cost money. The U.S. government had a deficit of $665 billion last year. This year it will probably exceed $1 trillion. Entitlement spending will cost money, military R&D will cost money, cybersecurity will cost money, projecting power near China will cost money. Yet, we have passed a massive tax cut with no way to pay for it. From a libertarian perspective, unfunded tax cuts could be argued either way; they reduce the tax burden on citizens, but they crowd out investment, don’t actually change the amount of government interference in the economy, and they could lead to higher taxes later on. But from a national security perspective, this fiscal policy is terrifyingly irresponsible.

I find it uninteresting who owns the national debt. Much has been made of the fact that the Chinese government owns large portions of our debt. So what? They will receive future interest payments, but the federal government received cash from outside the U.S. economy it could spend immediately. That kept interest rates low in the U.S. while Chinese savings and taxes were taken by the U.S. government and used to pay for Medicare, Social Security, and the War in Iraq. This is just a trade and doesn’t even seem like a great investment from China’s perspective. China could dump its American debt holdings onto the market, pushing up interest rates in the U.S., but by flooding the market, they’d also be selling the debt at a discount, writing off the losses. Moreover, China only owns a bit over a trillion dollars of debt, compared to the national debt’s total size of almost $21 trillion.

China could have put that capital directly into infrastructure investment or education or buying off communist party officials to implement more complete market reforms or even malaria nets in sub-Saharan Africa! But instead they bought low yield American government bonds. Seems like a waste of capital in my opinion. Had China not purchased that debt, the federal government still would have issued it, but interest rates would have been higher. On the other hand, the fact that the treasury owes some of this debt to other entities in the government isn’t super comforting. Those government agencies need the cash too; if they aren’t paid, they won’t be functioning, and their employees won’t be working.

No matter who owns our debt, increases in interest payments, whether through interest rate rises or increases in the underlying total debt will make accomplishing any policy goals, including foreign policy, that much more difficult.

Stop Military Counter-Terrorist Interventions

Predictable point of any libertarian foreign policy critique? Yes, but it’s unfortunately unavoidable. The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are hard to calculate exactly. Direct appropriations costs were over $1 trillion, but the Afghanistan War remains ongoing (are you sick of winning?). Long term costs including veterans benefits will probably be more than double the direct costs.

The U.S. has a long history of Middle East interventions, and they just don’t have much to show. There are still almost no democracies, Libya, Syria, and Yemen are still divided states living under various governments, Iraq has been suffering under a war with the Islamic State which has cost a hundred thousand lives and displaced millions. The Iranian nuclear deal prevented a theocratic autocracy from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which was said to be only a couple years away. This would be one of the only bright spots in U.S. policy in the Middle East, yet the President has threatened to tear up the deal.

If China is to be the focus of an American foreign policy, we can no longer afford to sink resources into fighting small terrorist groups that kill 10 times fewer Americans per year than police officers. And despite Trump’s so-called “America First” approach, we are most certainly still wasting resources in the Middle East. The President has carried out operations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya. There are also U.S. forces apparently in Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. Perhaps it’s too late, and China’s expanding influence means the U.S. has to maintain a military presence in developing countries around the world to offer an alternative, but it would have been nice to save those expenditures in the intervening 30 years between the end of the Soviet Cold War and the ratcheting up of whatever this new one is. As it is now, these interventions have left American foreign policy broke.

Reform the Military Budget

As (grudgingly) stated earlier, we will need to fund the Department of Defense if our goal is to geopolitically confront China. Nonetheless, the DoD budget needs serious reform, and perhaps should be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. The Government Accountability Office (the best government office) has never been able to audit the DoD in over 20 years (see page 3). In 2010, Congress told the DoD it had seven years to get its act together and finances in order. It missed the deadline. This year, the Department will allegedly finally undergo an audit, the report to be released November 15. This is, of course, a step in the right direction, but we need so much more.

The procurement system in the DoD is a complete mess. The F-35 fighter is way behind schedule and already $400 billion in. Last year, Lockheed Martin produced 66 planes. This exposé from 2014 is deeply disturbing. When the military isn’t pouring money into contractors who are making out like bandits, or paying for tanks it no longer wants nor needs, or blowing up perfectly usable munitions because it can’t keep track of what is needed and where it should go, it dumps its extra assets, including leaving thousands of humvees in Iraq that were eventually captured by the Islamic State.

This military budget needs a reckoning and I’m unsure Trump is up to the task.

Promote Free Trade

China is jumping off the free market ride, and the U.S. needs to pick up the slack. The best way to expand the benefits of markets is to expand markets themselves through trade. More to the point of this post, countries that have a stake in global trade and free movement of goods are much more likely to have economic goals and values that align with the U.S. and its allies. During the Cold War, there was a strong alternative to capitalism and trade, and while most countries didn’t have a “choice”, many countries did exist outside of the free trade liberal market order pushed by the West. After the fall of the Soviet Union, that alternative largely dried up. Today, if you want to have a successful, rich country, freer trade and openness to foreign investment are vital steps to take.

China is much more open to trade and markets than the Soviet Union ever was. Nevertheless, any policies or goals where their motivations are less market oriented and more nationalistic would be exactly where they would differ with that of western values/free trade/liberal markets. This is evident in their extensive protection of Chinese industries and even in non-tariff barriers such as the Great Firewall. To the extent that China seeks to offer an alternative to the United States’ world order, they support protectionism and oppose free trade.

This means increasing trade and integration into the global economy of an allied (or possibly allied) country is the national security interest of the United States. A hypothetical Cuba that was highly integrated into the U.S. economy would be much less likely to be flirting (metaphorically I think) with Chinese dignitaries. The Trans-Pacific Partnership played exactly this geopolitical role, integrating Pacific countries’ economies with the U.S. and its allies, while leaving China on the outside. Yet Trump declared that we should leave the TPP as soon as he entered office, effectively siding against American national security and promoting China’s geopolitical goals.

Tying U.S. policy to free trade and global markets is powerful. It’s very difficult for a country to become rich and successful without at least selling their products on the global market. Access to the global market is thus in every country’s national interest. If U.S. policy is to have open trade, then the American economy will be highly integrated into the global market, meaning it is in the national interest of other countries to gain access to the American market. U.S. trade policy has been to offer access to the American market as part of bilateral and multi-lateral free trade agreements, thus offering foreign countries’ national interest goals if they conform with American goals of free trade and free markets. Integration with the U.S. economically necessitates geopolitical alignment with the U.S. That’s why it’s not just obviously economically stupid to oppose free trade (like crazy stupid), it’s against American national interests.

Allow More Immigration

All of these points have been critiques of the current administration. Some of these might also be critiques of conservative positions generally, but that will depend on to what extent current Republican positions are defined by historical conservative positions or by Donald Trump. This final point may still be the most difficult for conservatives to hear.

As a matter of national security, the U.S. needs more immigrants.

Immigrants are more entrepreneurial. Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. Economists widely agree that high skilled immigration would benefit the average American, and tend to believe that even low skilled immigration would benefit the average American (although they are more split on the second). If we are concerned about the political effect of immigrants, we should take Rush Limbaugh’s (fairly progressive) approach and allow immigrants to work and live in the U.S., but not vote for a long period of time. Perhaps that’s more politically difficult than I imagine, but it seems like a good compromise from a national security perspective (and voting is sort of worthless anyway). That’s also not the only solution; if today’s political climate means only highly skilled labor can be let in, then at least that should be done. This administration has instead made the H-1B visa process more arduous. Trump’s immigration allies in the Senate have also introduced a bill to reduce legal immigration, including high skilled immigrants.

Immigration is an important engine for economic growth, an engine that nationalistic Chinese policies will have a hard time replicating. America is better able to absorb and benefit from immigration than any nation on Earth; it should apply this strength.

The final point relates back to deficits; entitlement spending is projected to continue to grow and consume the federal budget. The ratio of workers to retirees is dropping. Immigration can help change that tide, keeping our working age population growing, when fewer Americans are entering the workforce, often because families are just having fewer children. It won’t be enough, entitlement reform is important as well, but immigration is tool that must be utilized.

Conclusion

I don’t know how much of a danger China really poses to the U.S. Xi Jinping’s recent power grab is a bad omen though, and a large highly nationalistic protectionist country led by a dictator is certainly worth keeping an eye on. But if Sino-American relations get worse in the next decade, U.S. policy is in a poor position to adapt. Trump has claimed to want to confront China, yet his policies are actively harming our national security.

2018 Predictions

Untestable knowledgeable cannot be scientific. To avoid the problems of retroactively placing events into your narrative of the world, predictions must be laid out before events happen. If you try to use your model of the world to create testable predictions, those predictions can be proven right or wrong, and you can actually learn something. Incorrect predictions can help update our models.

This is, of course, the basis for the scientific method, and generally increasing our understanding of the world. Making predictions is also important for making us more humble; we don’t know everything and so putting our beliefs to the test requires us to reduce our certainty until we’ve researched a subject before making baseless claims. Confidence levels are an important part of predictions, as they force us to think in the context of value and betting: a 90% confidence level means I would take a $100 bet that required me to put up anything less that $90. Moreover, it’s not just a good idea to make predictions to help increase your knowledge; people who have opinions but refuse to predict things with accompanying confidence levels, and therefore refuse to subject their theories to scrutiny and testability, must be classified as more fraudulent and intellectually dishonest.

Before I take a look at how I did this past year, and see if my calibration levels were correct, I should look at some hard fork predictions I made in July:

There will be a Bitcoin Cash block mined before 12 AM August 2, US Eastern time: 80%
The price of Bitcoin Cash at 12 AM August 2, US Eastern time will be <10% of Bitcoin’s price: 70%
The price of Bitcoin Cash on August 5 will be < 10% of Bitcoin’s price: 90%
~~The price of Bitcoin Cash on September 1 will be < 10% of Bitcoin’s price: 90%~~
~~The value of all transactions of Bitcoin Cash around September 1 (maybe averaged over a week?) will be < 10% of the value of all transactions in Bitcoin: 95%~~

I did not predict that Bitcoin Cash would have long term staying power. In retrospect, I should have had more confidence that it would be similar to Ethereum Classic, which has remained for over a year now.

Now for predictions made at the beginning of the year:

World Events

Trump Approval Rating end of June <50% (Reuters or Gallup): 60%
Trump Approval Rating end of year <50% (Reuters or Gallup): 80%
Trump Approval Rating end of year <45% (Reuters or Gallup): 60%
Trump 2017 Average Approval Rating (Gallup) <50%: 70% (reference)
~~ISIS to still exist as a fighting force in Palmyra, Mosul, or Al-Raqqah: 60%~~
ISIS to kill < 100 Americans: 80%
US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 60%
No terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 90% (reference)
France will not vote to leave to the EU: 80%
The UK will trigger Article 50 this year: 70% (reference)
The UK will not fully leave the EU this year: 99%
No country will leave the Euro (adopt another currency as their national currency): 80%
S&P 500 2017 >10% growth: 60%
S&P 500 will be between 2000 and 2850: 80% (80% confidence interval)
Unemployment rate December 2017 < 6% : 70%
WTI Crude Oil price > $60 : 70%
Price of Bitcoin > $750: 60%
~~Price of Bitcoin < $1000: 50%~~
~~Price of Bitcoin < $2000: 80%~~
~~There will not be another cryptocurrency with market cap above $1B: 80%~~
~~There will not be another cryptocurrency with market cap above $500M: 50%~~
Sentient General AI will not be created this year: 99%
Self-driving cars will not be available this year for general purchase: 90%
Self-driving cars will not be available this year to purchase / legally operate for < $100k: 99%
I will not be able to buy trips on self-driving cars from Uber/Lyft in a location I am living: 80%
I will not be able to buy a trip on a self-driving car from Uber/Lyft without a backup employee in the car anywhere in the US: 90%
Humans will not land on moon by end of 2017: 95%
~~SpaceX will bring humans to low earth orbit: 50%~~
SpaceX successfully launches a reused rocket: 60%
No SpaceX rockets explode without launching their payload to orbit: 60%
Actual wall on Mexican border not built: 99%
Some increased spending on immigration through expanding CBP, ICE, or the border fence: 80%
~~Corporate Tax Rate will be cut to 20% or below: 50%~~ (it was 21%)
Obamacare (at least mandate, community pricing, pre-existing conditions) not reversed: 80%
~~Budget deficit will increase: 90%~~ (Not if you go by National Debt increase January to January)
Increase in spending or action on Drug War (e.g. raiding marijuana dispensaries, increased spending on DEA, etc): 70% (hard to say: Rohrbacher Amendment, FY2018 DoJ changes)
Some tariffs raised: 90% (reference)
The US will not significantly change its relationship to NAFTA: 60%
~~Federal government institutes some interference with state level legal marijuana: 60%~~
At least one instance where the executive branch violates a citable civil liberties court case: 70% (I made this too broad as I can cite Berger v New York and the NSA violates it every day)
Trump administration does not file a lawsuit against any news organization for defamation: 60%
Trump not impeached (also no Trump resignation): 95%

Postlibertarian

~~Postlibertarian.com to have >15 more blog posts by July 1, 2017: 80%~~
~~Postlibertarian.com to have >30 blog posts by end of year: 70%~~
Postlibertarian.com to have fewer hits than last year (no election): 60%
Postlibertarian Twitter account to have <300 followers: 90%
~~Postlibertarian Twitter account to have >270 followers: 60%~~
Postlibertarian Subreddit to have <100 subscribers: 90%

I missed all the ones I marked as 50% confident, but I’ve realized this category conveys no mathematical information. I could have also listed the predictions as simultaneously saying that there was a 50% chance the exact opposite of the statement occurred, so actually, I got exactly half of them right, and I will always get exactly half of them right. This makes the category completely useless, and so I have decided to avoid posting any predictions of exactly 50% accuracy for next year.

In the other categories:

Of items I marked as 60% confident, 10 were correct out of 13.
Of items I marked as 70% confident, 5 were correct out of 7.
Of items I marked as 80% confident, 9 were correct out of 12.
Of items I marked as 90% confident, 7 were correct out of 9.
Of items I marked as 95% confident, 2 were correct out of 3.
Of items I marked as 99% confident, 4 were correct out of 4.

This may not look great, but is better than last year. Additionally, the big problem is the 95% predictions, which was severely hurt by my poor decision to make predictions about the Bitcoin hard fork, an event which hadn’t really happened before. Ignoring those predictions made in July would change my scores to:

Of items I marked as 60% confident, 10 were correct out of 13.
Of items I marked as 70% confident, 4 were correct out of 6.
Of items I marked as 80% confident, 8 were correct out of 11.
Of items I marked as 90% confident, 6 were correct out of 7.
Of items I marked as 95% confident, 2 were correct out of 2.
Of items I marked as 99% confident, 4 were correct out of 4.

That’s actually remarkably well, with perhaps some 60% predictions that needed more confidence. Moreover, it’s clear I had no business making predictions about Bitcoin with such high confidence, nor did anyone this year. I will definitely be dialing back my confidence levels in Bitcoin price predictions next year, and I’ve focused a bit more of whether Drivechain will be adopted.

Predictions for 2018:

World Events

Trump Approval Rating end of year <50% (Gallup): 95%
Trump Approval Rating end of year <45% (Gallup): 90%
Trump Approval Rating end of year < 40% (Gallup): 80%
US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 60%
No single terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 95%
The UK will not fully leave the EU this year: 99%
No country will leave the Euro (adopt another currency as their national currency): 80%
North Korea will still be controlled by the Kim dynasty: 95%
North Korea will conduct a nuclear test this year: 70%
North Korea will conduct a missile test this year: 95%
Yemeni civil war will still be happening: 70%
S&P 500 2018 >10% growth: 60%
S&P 500 will be between 2500 and 3200: 80% (80% confidence interval)
Unemployment rate December 2018 < 6%: 80%
Unemployment rate December 2018 < 5%: 60%
WTI Crude Oil price up by 10%: 60%
Price of Bitcoin > $10,000: 70%
Price of Bitcoin < $30,000: 60%
Price of Bitcoin < $100,000: 70%
Lightning Network available (I can complete a transaction on LN): 80%
Drivechain development “complete”: 70%
Drivechain opcodes not soft-forked into Bitcoin: 70%
No drivechains soft-forked into existence: 95%
US government does not make Bitcoin ownership or exchange illegal: 90%
Self-driving cars will not be available this year for general purchase: 95%
Self-driving cars will not be available this year to purchase / legally operate for < $100k: 99%
I will not be able to buy trips on self-driving cars from Uber/Lyft in a location I am living: 95%
I will not be able to buy a trip on a self-driving car from Uber/Lyft without a backup employee in the car anywhere in the US: 90%
Humans will not be in lunar orbit in 2018: 95%
SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will attempt to launch this year (can fail on launch): 95%
SpaceX will not bring humans to low earth orbit: 60%
No SpaceX rockets explode without launching their payload to orbit: 60%
Mexican government does not pay for wall: 99%
Border wall construction not complete by end of 2018: 99%
Some increased spending on immigration through expanding CBP, ICE, or the border fence: 80%
No full year US government budget will be passed (only several months spending): 90%
US National Debt to increase by more than 2017 increase (~$500B): 70%
Increase in spending or action on Drug War (e.g. raiding marijuana dispensaries, increased spending on DEA, etc): 70%
Some tariffs raised: 90%
The US will not significantly change its relationship to NAFTA: 70%
Federal government institutes some interference with state level legal marijuana: 70%
Trump administration does not file a lawsuit against any news organization for defamation: 90%
Mexican government does not pay for wall 99%
Trump not removed from office (also no Trump resignation): 95%
Democrats do not win control of Senate: 60%
Democrats win control of House: 60%

Postlibertarian

postlibertarian.com to have 10 new posts by July 1, 2018: 80%
postlibertarian.com to have 20 new posts this year: 80%
Postlibertarian to have more hits than last year: 70%

*I modified prediction #31 on January 24th from 70% positive to 60% negative. This feels early enough that I can still call it a prediction, and I’m not sure why I was so confident in December when I wrote these.

Electoral Reform Fantasies

It’s been a particularly divisive…month? year? presidency? Maybe you could even argue this last decade or so has been increasingly polarizing. Last election cycle specifically was unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern political era in terms of highly unpopular candidates running against each other, just look at the numbers:

Trump won with the lowest popular vote percentage of any president since Bill Clinton in 1992, when Ross Perot ran as a third party candidate getting 19% of the vote. In fact, Trump won the lowest percentage of any president in US history when no third party got more than 5% of the vote. Actually, we can go further; every case in which a US president was elected with less than Trump’s 46.1% had a third party getting over 8% of the vote that year. Except 2016.

Thus, we should first acknowledge that political frustration with political parties is nothing new in American politics. The only difference is that this time, there are no other parties to turn to.

This is a problem. Organizations acquire rules and absorb ideas over time. Sometimes those ideas are toxic to the organization, and it is out-competed. I’m mostly imagining the creative destruction of the market, but the same logic can apply to religions, non-profits, and political parties. However, the Republican and Democratic parties have constructed excellent barriers to entry, helped along by American electoral rules. Perhaps these barriers to entry have always existed, but they seem particularly effective at present.

I believe this lack of competition has resulted in two parties that are having difficulty providing a platform for new political ideas or approaches. Without competitive pressures, there is a lack of popular outlet and political advocacy, resulting in frustration. With only two political parties to work with, the idea of a political dichotomy seems inescapable, with every single culture battle melding together to become one gargantuan struggle between two fiercely divided tribes.

This is by no means the only problem we face: sluggish postindustrial economic growth, cost disease, shrinking populations, etc, are all issues. However, it’s quite possible our outdated political system may be stifling any solutions. Thus, I’d like to provide some ideas to fix the way we run our democracy.

Primaries

Presidential primaries seem to be the toughest to fix, but primaries themselves would become much less important with other reforms. Primaries today tend to favor more extremist candidates, while general elections (and, by definition, most people) favor more centrist ones.

One way to solve this is with an open primary, which some states have. California even has an “open blanket” primary, where the top two vote-getters in the primary are on the ballot in the general election, regardless of party. Of course, California does not use such a system for president (Donald Trump would have likely not been on the ballot if they had). There are drawbacks here, as theoretically several centrist candidates could split the “centrist” vote and leave two extremists running in the general election.

One possible way to help improve the presidential primaries might be to rotate the order in which states are the “first” primary. Iowa has often been the first state, but New Hampshire actually has a law that it must be the first presidential primary by a week (Iowa has caucuses, so New Hampshire has decided those don’t count). New Hampshire isn’t a great bellwether: going back to 1980, in election years where a candidate won a competitive primary and then won the presidency (i.e. not 2012, 2004, 1996, 1984 when a sitting president was re-elected), New Hampshire got Donald Trump in 2016, George H. W. Bush in 1988, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. It wrongly selected Hillary Clinton over Obama in 2008, John McCain over George W. Bush in 2000, and Paul Tsongas over Bill Clinton in 1992.

Iowa isn’t any better. It selected Obama in 2008 and George W. Bush in 2000. And it wrongly selected Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in 2016, Tom Harkin over Bill Clinton in 1992 (Harkin was from Iowa, but Paul Tsongas came in second, not Clinton), Bob Dole over George H. W. Bush in 1988, and George H. W. Bush over Reagan in 1980.

So in our first two primary states over the last 30+ years are 3/6 and 2/6 respectively when picking a president from a competitive field. Not great.

There’s some merit to simply holding a national primary all at once. The argument against it is that this may bias the primary system against discovering good lesser known candidates who can campaign in small states more easily than a national stage. However, there’s no evidence indicating such a system of candidate discovery functions with the small states at present. Maybe we need other states that better represent a microcosm of the country. Maybe such states don’t exist.

Ballot Access

Did you wonder why there wasn’t a well-known centrist Republican candidate running as a third party in the race last year? It seemed to be the perfect storm. A significant minority of Republicans were not a fan of the party’s nominee; the party’s previous nominee had called out Trump in an aggressive speech earlier in the year, and the Democrats had nominated a fairly progressive, well known candidate that most conservatives disliked.

Well, it turns out there was one, Evan McMullin, but he was only on the ballot in 11 states, accounting for 84 possible electoral votes. Why? Because it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to get onto the ballot in most states. The Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was the only third party candidate on the ballot in all 50 states. In fact, he was the first third party nominee to be on all 50 ballots since 1996. Johnson did better than previous Libertarian Party candidates, and so the LP will not have to spend as much money for ballot access in the coming cycle…yet they are still looking to raise $130,000 this year just for ballot access costs.

This needs to change. There can be no serious competition to the current parties without fixing the ballot access problem.

Take a look at the Wikipedia article on the topic for a good overview. One problem is that major political parties are often exempted from ballot access requirements entirely. Other times, parties that get over a certain percentage of the vote are not required to gather signatures. The signatures are often rejected, so in reality the signature requirements are really 20-30% higher than actually stated. Ohio is an interesting example, as it requires a candidate to file in March, before they are actually nominated at their party’s convention. To get around this, the LP of Ohio filed a placeholder candidate in 2016, and then changed it to Gary Johnson later in the year. Of course, he had to file as an independent candidate since Ohio’s independent requirements are much less burdensome than trying to get the Libertarian Party be recognized as a state political party.

A possible solution would be to at least even the playing field by having a federal law forcing all qualification rules to apply to all parties running for federal office, including the Republican and Democratic parties. This would require them to waste resources on gathering signatures as well. Of course, the major parties could handle large numbers of signatures more easily since they have more resources available, but it still might be difficult enough to push them to reduce the total number of signatures to more practical levels.

More direct reductions in the ballot access requirements would be great as well, but perhaps not as directives from the federal government for the sake of federalism. Of course, none of this will happen, as there are no third party members in office at the national level, and thus no interest in reforming third party access at the state level.

House of Representatives – Single Transferable Vote

This one is totally crazy I know. It would definitely require a change in law, as it’s currently against the rules to have more than one representative from a district. However, I don’t suspect it would be unconstitutional, as each state creates their own districts and runs their own elections.

An STV system is unambiguously better than our current system. Single Transferable Vote is a voting system where you rank several candidates in a multi-member district. The candidates that reach a threshold of support (something like 33% for a three seat district, 25% for a four seat district, etc) are elected. If not enough candidates reach the threshold, unpopular candidates are eliminated with voters’ next choices receiving their votes instead, until all seats are filled. This helps achieve a proportional representation while maintaining local legislators. Currently all Representatives are elected in single member plurality elections, also known as First Past The Post (FPTP). For an easily digestible explanation of STV, watch CGP Grey’s video on the system.

STV systems do well when there are many seats available in a single district. Ireland has used as many as six seats in a single district, Tasmania has used as many as seven. Given the US population of 320 million, the average congressman represents over 700,000 people, with the median being even higher. However, many Americans live in cities much larger than 700,000, and so there are many cities that could support single citywide districts with five or ten congressional seats filled by STV. These could much better reflect the diverse viewpoints of those living in cities. Of course, cities wouldn’t be the only ones who benefit from this, as gerrymandering can also be done to disenfranchise rural voters depending on who’s drawing the boundaries.

Gerrymandering is itself much harder with STV multi-member districts. This itself is an indication that an STV system is better than what we have now. Even if STV is poorly implemented with districts that only have three or four seats, it would be a vast improvement in representation and political competition than what we have today.

This reform is certainly the most important reform for third parties. I don’t think third parties will solve all our problems; other countries have plenty of third parties with little to show. But it’s certainly a necessary step in providing alternatives to the duopoly people are obviously very sick of. Moreover, even if third parties aren’t super successful, the threat of competition will force the two major parties to react. We need a diversity of opinions and new ideas, and without third parties, everything has to be filtered through a party system with vested interests and previous baggage.

President – Approval Voting

The electoral college system is supposed to select a candidate from a wide range of possible candidates, with the college of electors itself imagined as acting as a bulwark against the excesses of democracy. This didn’t really pan out the way the founders of the United States might have hoped. Instead, several elections have resulted in presidents being elected despite other candidates actually receiving a plurality of the popular vote.

Those were:

1824, when Andrew Jackson won 41% of the vote in a split election that was thrown to the House of Representatives since no one had an electoral college majority. The House picked John Quincy Adams, who lost in 1828 to Andrew Jackson. This one is less concerning because there was no clear majority, so while Jackson didn’t like it, the system “worked”.
1876, when Samuel Tilden handily won an outright majority of the popular vote, and probably won the electoral college, but a “bipartisan” commission gave 15 “disputed” electoral votes to Rutherford Hayes instead. I’m still bitter.
1888, when sitting President Grover Cleveland won a close popular vote victory, but lost in the electoral college to Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland would win the rematch (both popular vote and electoral college) in 1892.
2000, when Al Gore won a plurality of the vote, but lost Florida by a few hundred votes, and so George W. Bush became president.
2016, when Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote, but Donald Trump won the electoral college.

If we set aside 1824, which I think is reasonable, we have 4 elections out of 58 total in American history in which the electoral college has selected against the popular vote winner, despite only two major candidates in those elections. This is an error rate of 6.9%.

But how to fix this? There have been several times when the electoral college was helpful in sorting out a multi-candidate election. In 1860, Lincoln won a plurality with only 39.8% of the vote, but the electoral college gave him a majority. From a voting system perspective, this may not be seen as a victory, as Lincoln’s election was so divisive, it precipitated southern secession. However, in 1912, Woodrow Wilson won the electoral college with only 41.8% of the vote in a three way race. 1968 and 1992 may also be considered elections where the electoral college helped establish a winner when the plurality winner only had vote totals in the low 40s.

Moreover, any debate about the electoral college, especially after this most recent election must necessarily have political implications. Nonetheless, I believe I have a system that is strictly better than our current system, preserving any usefulness it has. The proposal is as follows.

Ballots for president will ask two questions, one asking the voter to select all candidates which they will be ok with being president (approval voting) and one asking voters to select their single favorite candidate (first past the post/ our current voting system).

The president will be chosen based on who receives the highest percentage in the approval voting ballots, as long as the percent total is above a threshold. Here I’m recommending 55%. In the case of no candidate receiving above 55% of the vote, the system simply defaults back to the electoral college system using the second, first past the post / favorite candidate vote.

I suspect this would encourage much more positive campaigns, as candidates try to attract as many voters as possible rather than scare voters away from voting from their opponents. It would also make third party campaigns much more useful, as there is less strategic voting with approval voting. If a popular centrist party had a candidate with broad appeal across the spectrum, they could get votes without causing right or left wing voters to fear their votes are “wasted”. Moreover any candidate that wins the approval vote would have a strong mandate with a super-majority of voters supporting them. This is what the electoral college was supposed to bring us, a wide base of support for the president, but this system will guarantee it outright.

In the worst case scenario, if I am wrong about these predictions, the system is simply what we have right now, today. There is no way for it to do worse than our current system since it’s fall back is our current system. In this way, it is also conservative and gradual in its reform, in ways other voting systems are not.

Conclusion

These reforms are likely long shots, but I think it’s undeniable that our current system of government is deeply flawed. These are just my current best ideas, so if you read this and have some voting systems that you think would be more politically palatable or mathematically accurate, be sure to let me know on Twitter, Reddit, or email.

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Picture Credit: Vote here, vote aqui. Erik Hersman. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Twitter Distractions

The U.S. military launched drone strikes on Libya on Friday, the first in Libya since January. Trump has yet to mention these airstrikes as he’s been too busy fighting with professional athletes about how they protest. If I’m counting correctly, there have been six Middle Eastern countries Trump has authorized military strikes in despite no authorization from Congress (and seven if you include Somalia): Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Not to mention Trump has praised Saudi Arabia, a state that directly funds Wahhabism and an oppressive war in Yemen that does nothing to reduce radicalization.

Important criticisms of Hillary Clinton last year included her foundation receiving millions of dollars of support from the human rights disaster Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But I’m not sure which is worse: taking bad people’s money or actively praising them. In fact, in what meaningful way is Trump’s Middle Eastern policy different from Clinton’s? Clinton was for a two state solution, while Trump didn’t seem to know what that meant–is that it?

Trump’s foreign policy has been pretty incompetent in other areas outside the Middle East. He’s failed to provide appointments for many ambassador positions, including South Korea. Speaking of which, Trump said he would control North Korea, but the DPRK has conducted more missile tests during his presidency (that’s 7 months) than any presidency in history. Even by using his own stated (terrible) goals of renegotiating NAFTA, tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, and reducing sanctions on Russia, he has failed to do what he said he would. In the case of Russia sanctions, this came at the hands of his own party overruling him in Congress.

Trump is a loud, robust failure in foreign policy. And rather than spend any energy actually trying to end military involvements like he said he would, or even do routine things like appoint ambassadors, he is igniting culture wars on Twitter. I think he prefers these to actual policy because there are no metrics to success when engaging in a cultural flame war online. It’s just “our tribe” vs “their tribe”, and no one can win because we’re not actually discussing anything. I think there are nuances to be had in this week’s particular flare up with the NFL and the national anthem, but they’re not worth teasing out because it’s so easy to get bogged down in an emotional fight.

So rather than engage with Trump’s culture war cage match this week, I think it’s more productive to point out that there are real issues he’s supposed to be dealing with, and he’s failing miserably. We’ve been at war for 16 years now. Soon, recruits will be traveling to battlefields that Americans have been fighting in since before these soldiers were born. But Trump would rather tweet about football players protesting.

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Trump Junior and Russia

This weeks’ Fifth Column Podcast had an excellent discussion of Donald Trump Jr. and his attempt to get opposition research from the Russian government.

I have been pretty skeptical that the Trump administration and campaign actually did anything wrong with regard to Russia. I thought Trump was a poor candidate because he seemed very comfortable with authoritarians like Putin, which together with many positions he’s taken made me concerned about authoritarian policies he’d implement. Some of that concern has been well founded (e.g. appointing Jeff Sessions, removing an FBI Director he didn’t like), but in other places it has not. Trump seems to be bothered by criticism and a free press, but it’s clear the press is as robust and independent as ever.

I also thought Trump surrounded himself with really bad people, some of them with obvious terrible connections to the Russian government, like Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn (all of whom were fired). Again, this points to his friendliness with authoritarians and perhaps his incompetence with whom he surrounds himself with, not that he’s had contact with the Russian government itself.

I thought the intense media scrutiny over Russia wouldn’t provide anything, and it was dragging on for far too long. I thought the worst thing we would find would be that Trump fired FBI Director Comey for investigating his ties to Russia, not for any connections to Russia itself. But I was wrong. The New York Times reporting on this was so impressive that Donald Trump Jr., the target of the Times‘ article actually felt it would be better if he published these emails himself!

Thus, I’m literally typing these word for word from Trump Jr.’s twitter account. He got an email saying “…and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”

Trump Jr’s response: “…if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”.

I don’t know if this is illegal, as Trump Jr. has some amorphous relationship with the Trump campaign and allegedly isn’t involved in the administration at all, despite regularly going on TV to defend the administration. However, it’s at the very least unpatriotic and seems pretty unethical. If agents of a foreign government are reaching out to you to attack political opponents, your response should be to forward it to the FBI, not to set up a meeting as soon as possible. Trump was elected to “drain the swamp”. I thought that meant that many legislators are too close to special interests or are lobbied by large companies to pass favorable legislation. This is certainly problematic, but actively trying to get help from foreign governments to get into office seems at least as bad. Donald Trump Jr. is a swamp monster if ever there was such a thing.

Additionally, just like Hillary Clinton lied constantly about her email scandal (she didn’t have a private server; ok she did but there was nothing classified; ok it was classified but it was secure…), it turns out Trump Jr. and many other campaign members just straight up lied about having pursued Russian opposition research. Trump Jr. stated in a March interview that he had met people that were Russian but not meetings “…that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.” Here’s a full timeline, it’s pretty damning. This is the undermining of democracy that I thought Trump supporters claimed he was there to fight.

I wish all presidents were subjected to this sort of scrutiny. We had wall to wall media coverage for months with very few real stories until this week. The Obama administration crushed leakers and transparency, blocking FISA requests in an unprecedented manner. They brought government secrecy to a new level, while waging wars in several middle eastern countries without Congressional approval. Trump has only been in office for 6 months, and so it’s not hard to argue that the Obama administration was much worse in terms of doing illegal things, murdering civilians, spying on Americans and journalists, etc. Yet, media coverage has been much more aggressive on Trump (at least from the left, while the right-leaning media has often been at least as sycophantic as anything we saw under Obama on the left). I guess it’s better late than never, but the media needs to be far more adversarial in the future long after Trump is gone.

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Unpopular Net Neutrality Opinions

Net neutrality has benefits, and regulation has a role in ensuring its continuing existence, but there are several problems inherent in FCC telecom policy and the debate about net neutrality.

History

The new FCC chair (and Trump appointee) Ajit Pai has proposed reclassifying internet service providers as not “common carriers” under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, thus reducing the available regulatory options for the FCC.

Net neutrality is the concept that all internet traffic should be treated identically by Internet Service Providers (like cable companies) or governments regardless of content, protocol, users, destination, sources, etc. It means that loading a webpage from this blog would not cost you more than loading a webpage from a large company, assuming the content size is similar.

The FCC has broadly promoted net neutrality in the past. Around 2008, the FCC blocked Comcast from slowing the speed of its users who were utilizing BitTorrent to download videos. Comcast appealed and won, with an appellate court ruling that the FCC did not have the anciliatory jurisdiction over Comcast’s network (Comcast v FCC). The FCC next tried to issue an Open Internet Order in 2010, but in Verizon v FCC, that order was largely vacated, as the same appellate court ruled that the FCC could not regulate ISPs unless it classified them as common carriers under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. In 2015, the FCC classified ISPs as common carriers under Title II and enforced net neutrality rules.

Problems with Title II

A big problem with Title II is that it was written in 1934, 21 years before Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, was born. In fact, the vast majority of Title II is so useless that when Tom Wheeler proposed ISPs be classified as common carrier, he said that of the 61 Title II sections, the FCC would forebear from applying the entire title except six sections (201, 202, 208, 222, 254, and 255).

One question I cannot answer without more specific legal expertise is whether Wheeler’s rule only allows the application of those sections, or if in the future the FCC can unilaterally decide (without a vote) to apply other sections of Title II, now that ISPs are seen as common carriers. For example, Section 224 of Title II relates to pole attachments. Can the future FCC regulate broadband providers’ pole attachments if they wanted to under Wheeler’s rule? Even if they cannot, they can certainly write a new rule that applies all of Title II with a full vote of the commission.

Perhaps a better solution would be for Congress to pass a new law allowing the FCC to regulate net neutrality, but bar the FCC from regulating ISPs under Title II otherwise. This would narrow the FCC’s focus officially to what consumers care about. Of course, that would require nuanced Congressional action which is likely impossible given the many competing interests in both houses.

Is Title II regulation overwhelming and innovation killing? Ajit Pai has argued so. The New York Times editorial board disagrees, but their argument seems quite lacking. They dismiss Pai’s claim that broadband capital investment declined since Title II classification as “alternative facts”, but a simple Google search reveals why they found numbers that conflict with Pai. The source, the Free State Foundation, calculated a trend line of broadband capital expenditures since 2003. They calculated the expected expenditures after the Title II regulation as compared with the actual. So while capital expenditures actually increased after the regulation, they increased less than the trend line indicates they should have.

Is it misleading for Pai to say capital expenditures decreased? Yes, or at the very least it’s imprecise. Is it misleading for Title II proponents to say there has been no effect? Probably, although trend lines are tricky. Additionally, the Times argues that the pattern of increased consolidation in the telecoms industry is a symptom of a healthy economic sector. This is a non sequitur. Mergers and acquisitions could be symptoms of profitable or unprofitable companies, depending on who is buying who, but ultimately to me it seems more indicative that economies of scale exist. One possible explanation for recent increase in economies of scale could be an increased regulatory burden. I don’t know if that’s the case, but to suggest that Charter’s purchase of Time Warner is a symptom of a healthy telecoms sector is the Times projecting their own political views onto market actions.

Problems with Net Neutrality

Ajit Pai has argued (in this Reason interview) that ISPs were not favoring some internet traffic over others. This seems incorrect. Comcast v. FCC was specifically about Comcast reducing the speed of some types of traffic. John Oliver points out that Google Wallet was not allowed to function on phones on the networks of AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint since it competed with a joint electronic wallet venture of those companies. On the other hand, Google Wallet still out-competed the networks’ own payment system despite being banned on those platforms. Consumer response was so positive on other networks that the consumers demanded it on AT&T and Verizon. Eventually the joint venture folded and got absorbed by Google Wallet/Android Pay.

Moreover, a few phone networks have run afoul of net neutrality rules by giving consumers free data for certain services, e.g. T-Mobile allowing streaming music to not count against a customers’ data cap. If the service provided by the content producer is so profitable that it can afford to pay for its own bandwidth, is it wrong to give that bandwidth to customers free of charge?

The economics here is complicated. In a perfectly competitive market, content producers could only charge for the marginal cost of producing more content while ISPs could only charge the marginal cost of additional bandwidth. Consumers would pay each company for their respective consumption of their products.

But we don’t have a competitive market, either for content producers (only HBO has Game of Thrones, only Netflix has Stranger Things) and especially not for ISPs. Since cable ISPs are state granted monopolies, there is a solid argument for regulating them, as they have leverage over content producers. That argument does disappear though when there is competition, such as in the case of wireless broadband.

It is also worth pointing out that the importance of “neutrality” towards content is only narrowly valid. For example, bandwidth at certain times is more valuable. The Economist has suggested electric power be charged at different rates when used at different times. Similar arguments could be used for internet usage. It is also undeniable that some internet traffic really is more important, and consumers would be willing to pay more to have their bank notifications or business calls come through faster than YouTube videos, which they might be ok with allowing to buffer. Certainly we would want consumers making this decision and not ISPs, especially when there is little ISP competition for most end users. Additionally, such prioritization could be done by software on the consumer/LAN side of the router, and ISPs should likely just be dumb pipes that deliver what we tell them to.

Finally, we should be cautious about locking in rules even if they make sense today. Markets change over time, and there is a possibility that past rules will restrict innovation in the future. Since competition itself can defend against bad ISP behavior (perhaps even better than the FCC), having the FCC focus on increasing competition seems at least as vital as net neutrality. Interestingly, this is what Ajit Pai has argued for (see Reason interview above).

Conclusion

Today it seems likely that a policy of net neutrality by cable ISPs is more beneficial than not. It also seems likely that to protect that idea today, some form of regulation is needed on cable companies that are state granted monopolies in a given area. Such regulation is not as clearly necessary in wireless providers, and we should always be reviewing the importance of FCC regulations in order to avoid a curtailment of innovation. Additionally, any regulation should come from new Congressional legislation, not a law written 80 years ago. However, the benefits of net neutrality should not be taken as given. Variations in the consumer value of content priority as well as bandwidth scarcity during peak hours are perfectly acceptable ways to prioritize internet traffic. The problem arises when monopoly ISPs are doing the prioritizing rather than consumers.

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Flynn and the Deep State

I was listening to the most recent Reason podcast with Nick Gillespie interviewing Eli Lake about Michael Flynn’s ouster as National Security Adviser. I had a couple thoughts on it.

Flynn talking to the Russians about sanctions as lame duck Obama imposes sanctions. This just isn’t that scary to me. Maybe it’s a violation of the Logan Act, but maybe that’s another reason the Logan Act is dumb, not a reason Flynn is bad.
Flynn lying to Mike Pence about what was discussed. This seems pretty bad. However, they must have had transcripts of the conversations, so who knew what and when? Did the President know they had discussed sanctions when Pence told the press they had not? Did Pence know? Flynn took the fall, but he may not have been the real problem. Certainly at some point the President found out and waited until the story was public before sacking Flynn.
Intelligence agencies using information they gathered while spying to conduct political activity and attack political enemies. Really, really bad. This is basically the worst case scenario for how mass surveillance can be misused. Yes, in this case, the spying was done on a line most people would know is tapped, but these intelligence agencies are operating without oversight. Sure, it was nice of them to leak information that Trump was keeping from the public, but what’s to stop them from leaking information on the personal activities of political enemies of the FBI, NSA, and others? Was their interest in the public good or their own political objectives? It seems that a better system where whistleblowers could reach out to (as an example) members of Congress without retribution would be much better, assuring only information relevant to public discourse is released.

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Only One President Has Defied the Courts

It’s not Trump.

Or, I should say, it’s not Trump yet. However, given this administration’s…broad view of executive power, it’s worth looking at how past presidents have interacted with a court system that opposed them. Most presidents, as you would expect, reacted to an unfavorable court ruling by obeying the courts’ directive, with only a few real exceptions.

From history class, I recalled that Chief Justice John Marshall had ruled against Andrew Jackson’s interest in dealing with the Native American populations. But upon further inspection, it appears that despite the famous quote of Jackson’s “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”, the ruling in Worcester v Georgia was actually not a constitutional crisis. The quote itself seems apocryphal.

Marshall ruled that Georgia did not have the ability to regulate the interaction between Georgians and the Cherokee; instead, only the federal government has that power. Georgia complied and they freed the plaintiff, Worcester, eventually, but Andrew Jackson had nothing to enforce, since the federal government was not a party to the suit. Moreover, the Indian Removal Act had already been passed, and so the removal of native tribes on the Trail of Tears continued, with Marshall’s ruling changing nothing.

In 1942, German sabateurs were captured on American soil. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order declaring they would be tried by a military tribunal, and they appealed that the President could not try them under a military tribunal, and they petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus under the 1866 decision Ex parte Milligan which stated that civilians in the U.S. could not be denied habeas corpus and their right to trial. In Ex parte Quirin, the Supreme Court ruled against the Germans, siding with the President. Pretty straightforward, except according to Newt Gingrich (couldn’t find it anywhere else), Roosevelt threatened the Court that he would ignore their ruling and refuse to issue a writ of habeas corpus if the justices decided against him. So not a constitutional crisis, just the threat of one.

In 1952 there was a famous case of Truman seizing control of steel mills during the Korean War. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Supreme Court ruled against Truman, stating that the powers the president claimed to have under the Taft-Hartley Act were not present. One of the concurring opinions was that of Justice Robert Jackson who divided presidential power into three categories: (1) Powers explicitly granted or implied by Congress, (2) Powers that Congress has not stated a position on, and (3) Powers that Congress has explicitly or implicitly rejected from giving to the president. This has become the standard way of analyzing presidential versus congressional power. Of course, at the conclusion of the case, Truman immediately returned control of the steel mills to their owners. Again, the Court’s decision was respected.

Perhaps the most famous case of executive action gone overboard is the Watergate scandal. A special prosecutor obtained a subpoena ordering Nixon to turn over certain conversations he had recorded. Nixon argued that the special prosecutor had not proven the tapes were important to the investigation, that the courts did not have jurisdiction over this “internal” executive branch matter, and that the President has absolute executive privilege of communications between high government officials. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him on all three counts. However, in United States v Nixon, Nixon did comply and turn over the tapes, despite it likely ending his presidency. This was a major moment, as I detailed in “Against Trump“, several months ago. If he had refused, would the court have been able to hold him in contempt and have U.S. Marshals arrest him? Technically, the marshals are part of the Justice Department, so that seems problematic, as the Justice Department answers to the President. Regardless, we have gone through almost all the famous cases, and the President has basically never gone against an explicit court decision.

Going further back than any of these presidents, it’s possible that Jefferson was the first to have actually defied the courts. In 1807, Thomas Jefferson signed the Embargo Act which was meant to punish Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars for their attacks on American shipping. It was a pretty miserable failure, and apparently in Gilchrist vs Collector of Charleston, Justice William Johnson ruled against the government’s authority (although this was a congressional action, not just executive action). The New Yorker says that despite this ruling, the policy remained in place until 1809, but it was so early on in American history that I’m having trouble finding any sources to validate that claim.

But we can do better than an alleged delayed repeal of an unconstitutional act of Congress from 200 years ago! The best example of defiance on record belongs to Abraham Lincoln in the aftermath of Ex parte Merryman, and it is quite unrepentant.

In 1861, Chief Justice Taney (in the capacity of a Circuit Court) ruled that President Abraham Lincoln had unconstitutionally suspended the right to the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War. The court ruled only Congress has that power. Lincoln and the army defied the order. Their argument was hilariously reminiscent of Trump, stating that Taney had not actually ordered them to release Merryman. Of course, they didn’t stop there as several newspaper owners and editors were also detained by the federal government, as well as eventually the Baltimore police chief, the Baltimore mayor, and even 30 members of the state legislature! A Maryland state judge was not only arrested, but beaten unconscious by federal troops, and then held without being charged for six months.

Even after the judge’s ruling, Congress did not vote to authorize Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, until two years later, in the 1863 Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.

So what are the takeaways? One is that it’s fairly common for presidents to claim they have more power than they do. Obama, for example, lost in the Supreme Court more often than any modern president. It is, however, highly uncommon for presidents to actually defy the courts and continue to use their claimed powers when the courts have ruled against them. If Trump were to do so, by my estimate he would be the only person to do so not during a civil war.

Another interesting point is that in terms of abuse of power and constitutional crises, Trump has done nothing in comparison to Lincoln. Certainly President Lincoln faced extenuating circumstances and a secession crisis that may have made further constitutional crises seem minuscule in comparison. Nonetheless, it seems clear in hindsight that suspending habeas corpus did not improve support for the Union in Maryland, nor was jailing critical members of the press really necessary for victory. Interestingly, according to author Marc Neely, Lincoln was able to get away with these civil liberties abuses because they were largely aimed at three groups with little political power: residents of southern states who had been stuck on the wrong side of the border when war broke out, residents of border states where Lincoln had little political backing anyway, and foreigners.

Of course, if anyone was justified in taking extreme actions on civil liberties, it would be the president during the civil war, but unfortunately, every executive targets politically vulnerable groups and justifies it under national security reasoning (Adams, Wilson, FDR, Nixon, George W. Bush). And as you’d expect, Lincoln’s actions have become a precedent for other abuses. This essay from the Heritage Foundation in 2004 cites Lincoln’s actions in justifying President Bush’s holding of “enemy combatants” without a trial, equating the war on terror with the dangers of the Civil War. Trump has used related ~~rhetoric~~ words to describe threats from immigration. Were he to ignore a court order in the future, it’s virtually certain to be under national security justifications.

Finally, regardless of Lincoln’s accomplishments, we should be very concerned with any presidents who cite Lincoln’s extreme wartime actions as justification for their policies. Lincoln’s circumstances were extreme, and even then I would argue his defiance of court rulings was questionable. Any test for when it is acceptable to suspend civil liberties should be equally extreme in rigor. For example, unless states have actually seceded and there currently exists a newly elected second president of those seceded states, Congress should not even consider curtailing civil liberties, much less the President alone. Nonetheless, the long history of executive overreach by American presidents is likely to continue under Trump. We can only hope it never reaches the unprecedented event of peacetime court defiance.

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The Obama Presidency Was Bad

We’re already caught up in how terrible the Trump presidency is, but over the next four years, it will be important to remember just how bad the Obama presidency was. When overcome with frustration at the current administration, I would urge readers to come back to this post and remember that the last president was also quite terrible. In his farewell speech, Obama tried to make the argument for his presidency’s accomplishments, but many of them were simply court cases that were decided while he was president, or decisions that were nice but had little real policy impact.

There have been plenty of reflections on the Obama presidency, but I think a high level overview of everything Obama did would put in perspective just how awful he’s been, especially as we experience the incompetency and horrible policy decisions of the current administration. I’ve done this by letter grades A through F.

The A’s

Iran Nuclear Deal

So…there was only one thing I could give an A to. Even this A is very hesitant. We did give up a lot for this deal–the Iranian government is pretty awful and by unfreezing their assets, they got access to very large amounts of money. However, I don’t think there was much else to do. Unless Republicans actually wanted to declare war on Iran, this seems like the only way to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon. Iran’s nuclear program will be prohibited from refining any uranium for 15 years, and this was accomplished without any military intervention whatsoever. That’s pretty excellent. Moreover, the average citizens of Iran matter as well and it is somewhat unfair to punish them with high inflation and economic hardship because their authoritarian government is irresponsible. Cato expands more here.

The B’s

Trade

One of the most important accomplishments is that Obama’s administration worked to pass several free trade agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama. He also tried to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Free Trade Area, although he could have really pushed harder on these initiatives. Obama didn’t do a great job making the case for free trade and his signature deal was ultimately a failure; honestly, a B is generous here, and is more of a function of the importance of free trade more so than Obama’s actual impact. Also worth noting is that his rhetoric while campaigning was pretty vigorously anti-trade, so he should be commended for changing his mind on this.

Gay Rights

Obama ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but was still on the record as anti-gay marriage as late as 2012. Sure, public opinion on gay marriage shifted rapidly, but Obama basically waited until it was 50-50 to switch to the right side on this; the Libertarian Party has been on board with gay marriage since the 70s. He should also be applauded for essentially not getting in the way of the court case. I know that’s a low bar, but he could have fought it and tried to keep the DOMA. The other issue is that while this is excellent, the impact of gay marriage legalization is somewhat limited to people who can take advantage of it.

Cuba

The Cuban embargo was imposed over 50 years ago in a bid to quickly end Castro’s dictatorship on the island. It failed. 25 years after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, a president finally spent some political capital to remove an outdated institution. Trade embargoes harm populations, and trade embargoes on a country that has been crushed by horrific socialist economic policies are even more harmful. The president cannot remove the embargo, but everything he can do without Congress, Obama has done on this issue. Trade can bring countries together, and Obama took steps to build those bridges. If he had actually gotten the embargo lifted, this would be an A.

The C’s

Marijuana Legalization

And that’s it for the entirely positive! Marijuana’s big progress had basically nothing to do with Obama, and Obama actually started out fighting it, performing more federal raids on state legal marijuana dispensaries in his first term than Bush. Eventually the administration did make the decision not to continue attempts to enforce marijuana laws with federal police forces. While kind of obvious and not very impressive, this may turn out to be something we remember fondly during the long night of the Jeff Sessions era.

Healthcare

As an incredibly brief overview, the ACA is flawed because it does nothing to address the fundamental problem with the healthcare system: a lack of market forces. The laws of supply and demand create incentives for lower cost and higher quality care. Plastic surgery and lasik are not covered by insurance and thus must compete on price and quality and over time these areas have seen remarkable improvement with prices remaining the same or even dropping.

Our insurance system insulates both consumers and providers of healthcare from the market prices; consumers don’t pay for care, they don’t pay different prices at different places, and they often don’t even buy the insurance that does pay for care. Instead their employers pay for the thing that pays for their healthcare. And sometimes, if you go to a hospital, the insurance doesn’t really pay for care either, it pays the hospital in obfuscated and arcane ways, which in turn provides the doctors and actual equipment needed to provide care. It’s a complete mess.

The ACA did do some nice things like allow people with pre-existing conditions and people who didn’t get their healthcare through their employees and poor people to get health insurance. This is great, and any healthcare reform should strive to do that. However, by not addressing the price issue, they doomed these reforms. Things have sputtered along, but healthcare costs have kept rising, and now insurers are stuck with a disproportionate amount of sick people, needing to raise prices, which only drives away more healthy people. The death spiral was a predictable consequence (and indeed I did predict this in 2010 in a blog attached to my real name and thus will not be linking to here). Obamacare was not a poorly intended bill, but it was an incredible missed opportunity to actually fix the healthcare system. The only reason I didn’t give it a lower grade was because the system was so bad already, it’s hard to argue it was made that much worse.

Global Warming

Obama took steps to reduce climate change. Even if you’re not concerned about the most dire predictions of global warming, that’s probably a net benefit. He also was able to get China to sign onto the Paris Agreement. While not having legal punishments for countries who break their promises, it’s a solid negotiating achievement. However, Obama also implemented, largely by executive order, regulations on coal plants in the US that will have very little impact on carbon emissions. It’s also not at all market oriented, and therefore not particularly economically efficient. Additionally, in his first year in office, Obama had a chance to try and pass a more economically efficient carbon credit trading bill. Assuming climate change is as dire a threat as many say it is (I’m admittedly less worried), it seems to be a poor decision to spend political capital on other bills that did pass, especially something that was as flawed as Obamacare.

The Economy

The employment rate is lower than it has been in a long time, but the problem is this graph. Labor force participation has plummeted from 65% in the depths of the recession to around 62% now. The last time it was this low was before 1980. Since the current labor is around 160 million people, and we are at 62% participation, that means the cohort of the working age population is about 258 million. In 2009, unemployment was around 9%. With a labor force of 155 million people, that’s almost 14 million unemployed. Today with an unemployment rate of 4.7%, that’s only 7.5 million unemployed. However, looking at the people not in the labor force in 2009 there were 83.5 million not working but not unemployed. In 2017, there are 98 million not working but not unemployed. so unemployment dropped by almost 7 million, yet more than twice that many more people were staying out of the labor force entirely. The economy isn’t in free fall, but it’s not knocking it out of the park either, and this is 8 years after the recession. This isn’t entirely Obama’s fault, as the Federal Reserve is much more responsible for economic success overall, but the things Obama did have control over were abject failures: fiscal restraint, entitlement reform, and deregulation.

Immigration

Obama’s legacy on immigration liberalization is mixed. Unfortunately, as this is one of the more important issues in improving the world, a mixed record is disappointing. Obama deported more people than George Bush and he failed to pass any sort of comprehensive reform bill. Obviously, he couldn’t pass bills on everything, but this would have been a pretty important area to do so. Obama did however create an executive order delaying deportations for millions of illegal immigrants. This was a bit odd constitutionally, but with so many illegal immigrants in the United States, it would be impossible to deport them all anyway. Obama’s order simply prioritizes some over others, protecting children and parents of American citizens. This was certainly a good policy, but unfortunately Obama’s legacy in this area should have been so much better.

The D’s

Endless Wars

Obama is the first president to be at war for every day of his presidency. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, to undeclared wars and bombings in Yemen and Pakistan, we have entered a new era of endless war. Libya is specifically horrifying: Obama chose to involve the American military in Libya unilaterally. He explicitly did not get authorization from Congress, and in fact Congress explicitly voted against a resolution to authorize his military involvement after the fact. That is a terrifying precedent to give Donald Trump.

The only reason this category is not an F is because of Obama’s continued reluctance to expand the US involvement in Syria. Of course, he did this in the worst possible way, by drawing a line in the sand and then backing down from it but it’s undeniable that a larger American role in Syria would have involved the US in one of the largest, bloodiest civil wars of the last decade. Of course, we have not even touched the fact that American troops are in Iraq 14 years after the invasion, and many US contractors remain in Afghanistan 16 years after that invasion. Obama has still institutionalized war in way never before seen.

The F’s

Surveillance

I mean wow. How did we get here? If you want all the citatations, this Mashable article is a good start. The United States government engages in broad sweeps of Americans’ phone records through unconstitutional general warrants issued via a secret court that had no defense team, no oversight, and has only rejected a handful of warrants in its entire history. The NSA also had a program for collecting data on foreigners and Americans from major technology companies, as well as a massive database storing all of that information for later search. Every available method of siphoning data is apparently being used. The NSA also invested heavily in ways to break internet encryption standards. They even paid $10 million to RSA to get them to set their default encryption algorithm to one that was fundamentally broken in one of their products. Most impressively, it turns out that the big phone record collection the NSA was conducting in total secret, that had no oversight and Senators couldn’t even talk about, it’s illegal according to a federal appellate court.

It was such a disaster that Congress eventually tried to pass a reform bill to fix Section 215 of the Patriot Act which is what the courts cited as the justification for these general warrants. Yet in the end, that bill was watered down to the point of uselessness, with Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and Rand Paul all voting against it due to its lack of real power. In fact, the bill extended the Patriot Act for several years. Obama’s legacy in this area is a total disaster, and he leaves an out of control intelligence agency with no oversight in the hands of a petty authoritarian. The NSA (and all agencies they share information with) knows intimate details about all of our lives, our communication patterns, and our digital existences. As we’ve written before, this is not good.

Transparency

Reason does a good job tearing the Obama administration apart over the “most transparent administration in history” line. Again, this area is such a disaster there are too many things to cover. We can start by discussing how just a month or two prior to the Edward Snowden revealing everything we talked about in the last section, DNI Clapper blatantly lied to a Senate committee about the government’s spying capability. Obama himself has hardly given any interviews to the press. His administration has had more than double the Espionage Act charges against whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Which is especially concerning since none of these were acts of espionage! These were legitimate problems that were hidden from view from the public, brought to light by people doing the right thing. But the secrecy was pervasive throughout the administration; regular employees were banned from talking with reporters, a record number of FOIA requests were denied and at least 1 in 3 were denied improperly (which was only ever found out if challenged), and, of course, the government had a secret extrajudicial kill list.

Drone Strikes

Conor Friedersdorf writes that in Obama’s first year in office, his administration conducted over 100 drone strikes…in Pakistan. Quick recap: Congress voted for an Authorization of the Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 Attacks, which allowed the government to invade Afghanistan. Congress also voted to go into Iraq. Pakistan is not one of these countries, yet apparently Obama was carrying out an entire proxy war via drone strikes. In 2010, those strikes only intensified, yet it was worse than that; to cloud the truth, the Obama administration counted all military age males in the vicinity of these strikes as combatants, regardless if they were civilians or not. There were eventually reforms to this process, and the number of civilian casualties per strikes started to go down, but this is but the smallest of victories. In waging these undeclared wars in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, the Obama administration concocted an absurd “legal” process to target specific individuals without a trial, including American citizens. We are talking about a logistically planned and funded protocol for murdering American citizens overseen only by the President. This process eventually ended up killing a civilian by accident, a 16 year old American. This is unjustifiable. No one was ever held accountable for these lawless actions, and the president retains power to murder at will, which he has promptly done, murdering the deceased teenager’s sister this past week. Someone get this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.

Executive Power

This section condenses much of what Gene Healy says in his excellent piece “Goodbye, Obama”. The powers the Obama administration seized and expanded are vast. While initially running against “dumb wars” and unauthorized wars, Obama became the first president to be at war for every day of his presidency. He undertook drone strikes in countries where he had authorization to be in, he even undertook an entire military action in Libya when Congress had expressly voted against supporting it. He continued to use the 2001 AUMF six years after the death of Osama bin Laden and against a group (the Islamic State) that essentially didn’t exist on 9/11. And the Trump administration has continued this justification. His drone strikes have killed hundreds of civilians, and even American citizens. He has created a secret kill list with no oversight from courts or Congress. He has ascended to new heights of secrecy and prosecution of whistleblowers, and he has thwarted attempts at transparency at every turn. Without public knowledge, the ultimate oversight of the democratic process is destroyed as well. And none of this is even touching areas outside national security where Obama also took unilateral presidential orders to new and creative areas. These include instituting new immigration law by executive order when it was bogged down in Congress, creating new overtime labor rules, adding new environmental regulations on power plants, national school curriculum requirements, and even unilaterally amending Obamacare. Healy writes “More than any recent president, Obama has embraced and, to some extent, legitimized the anti-constitutional theory that congressional inaction is a legitimate source of presidential power.”

Obama’s legacy is the Imperial Presidency. Simply by occupying the same office as Obama, Donald Trump inherits vast powers, legislative, military, and judicial. Americans’ private information is available, their lives at risk without the need for due process, the very laws of the country can be changed via the presidential pen. Barack Obama has accomplished much during his presidency, but most of his important projects have ended in utter disaster, and the manner of their attempted accomplishment has greatly imperiled the separation of powers and constitutional restraint. While itg is quite possible, even likely, that the Trump presidency will be worse still, we cannot forget the incredible cost and horrific events of the Obama legacy.

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