Joshua Hedlund

Why Can’t We Have 32 Libertarians In Congress?

An Introduction to Proportional Representation

Six percent of Americans in a recent Reason poll identified as Libertarian. It’s hard to know how reliable that is, but there are a collection of other polls claiming anywhere from 2% to 15%, so that seems like a reasonable middle ground. Let’s say 6% of Americans really are libertarians. Now libertarians can vary in ideology as much as Republicans and Democrats, but let’s assume that if you call yourself a libertarian you are more aligned with the platform of the Libertarian Party than the Republican or Democratic parties. If libertarians were represented in Congress according to their numbers, the Libertarian Party could have 26 members in the House of Representatives and 6 in the Senate. Instead, there are zero.

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Ron Paul Wins Rescheduled St. Charles County, MO Caucus

Following last month’s turbulent attempted caucus, my county completed a successful GOP caucus last night, and slates of Ron Paul supporters won seats for all 147 delegates going to the party’s district and state conventions in Missouri.

The caucus was probably even less relevant to the actual 2012 nomination than it would have been a month ago. Santorum announced his campaign suspension hours before the event, all but erasing whatever feeble hopes remained that someone but Romney would come up with enough delegates to win the nomination.

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The Downside of “Made In China”

A few weeks ago my wife and I looked into buying a fire pit. We did some research and read reviews on websites like Amazon, Lowe’s, and Walmart, but eventually we got “reviewer fatigue” (pretty much all of them had lovers and haters) and just picked one that looked decent in our price range: The $79 Garden Treasures 35″ Black Steel Wood-Burning Fire Pit, made in China and sold at Lowe’s.

We brought it home, put it together, and immediately returned it.

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Friday Links

1. Supreme Court rules 5-4 to allow strip searches for any arrest. I haven’t seen much commentary on this, but it sounds pretty bad to me. The rationale is that you might need to strip someone before admitting them to jail to make sure they don’t have anything dangerous on them. But the whole case came before the Supreme Court because a guy was strip-searched after being mistakenly arrested. Apparently the Supreme Court didn’t want to “second-guess” correctional officers (if they won’t, who will?), so apparently if the police make a mistake about you, you’re no longer protected from them looking at you naked. Hmm.

2. America’s Most Important Anti-War Politician Is a Senate Republican. Good feature on Rand Paul.

3. Arctic polar bear levels not declining as predicted. In fact, they are most likely increasing: “…stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey… That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt…” I don’t know science well enough to know if pro-warming scientists are right or wrong in their understanding of greenhouse gases and Earth’s climate, but I’m increasingly skeptical of their forecasts every time another one is proven wrong.

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Can Technology Transform Local Politics?

Yesterday there were elections in my county. I found some sample ballots on my county’s website, but I couldn’t tell which one was mine and they had to do with school system board of directors and stuff like that. I didn’t know anything about the people running, so I didn’t vote.

It’s ironic that the elections we pay the least attention to are the ones where we could probably have the most impact. I know lots of people living in my county who have expressed opinions about President Obama and various Republican candidates. I know several people who attended our fraudulent caucus last month. But I don’t know a single person who even talked about yesterday’s local elections.

How many people in my county actually voted? Was it just a glorified high school popularity contest where people won if they knew the most people and got them to vote for them or if they got enough people to randomly check their box because of their cool sounding name or some signs they had seen by the road?

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What Makes Health Insurance Different From Broccoli?

When the Supreme Court heard arguments about Obamacare last week, one of the chief issues was whether or not the federal government has the authority to require people to purchase health insurance. The government believes it has this authority under the Commerce Clause.

But it’s one thing to say the government can regulate people already engaged in economic activities. It’s quite another to say that the government can force people on the sidelines to get involved. If the federal government can make people buy health insurance, what else can it make us buy? From the transcript:

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, then your question is whether or not there are any limits on the Commerce Clause. Can you identify for us some limits on the Commerce Clause?

Donald Verrilli and the justices argue this point for awhile, talking about why the government can’t also make you buy cars or cell phones or broccoli. The broccoli argument took center stage, showing up again later:

ANTONIN SCALIA: . . . could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food. Therefore, everybody’s in the market. Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.

The broccoli argument is such a big deal because 87% of Americans think a broccoli mandate would be unconstitutional (8% Constitutional, 5% Don’t Know/Refused).

Let’s ignore the fact that there are apparently millions of Americans, presumably with the right to vote, who believe that forcing Americans to buy broccoli would actually be constitutional. The vast majority of Americans reject such a notion, so proponents of Obamacare have a vested interest in explaining why broccoli is different from health insurance. Meanwhile, opponents of Obamacare (such as myself) have a vested interested in explaining why they are the same, and that the broccoli argument is just a more obvious example of the underlying reasons that make Obamacare wrong, too.

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Hey Everyone! You Are Not Qualified To Have An Opinion About Trayvon Martin

Or George Zimmerman.

By now we all know that Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. I don’t have an opinion about this yet because there’s still way too many missing and contradictory facts out there. But that hasn’t stopped people all over from letting selective facts and rumors combine with their biases into predictable outrage.

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Taxes and the Slow War on Law-Abiding Citizens

I finished my taxes last week. By “finished,” I mean I completed the steps on the H&R Block website and accurately checked boxes and filled inputs to the best of my ability based on my understanding of the terms presented. But it sure is complicated, especially now that there’s a house involved; good thing vehicle property taxes don’t start for us until next year.

But it’s not just getting worse for me as I get older; it’s getting worse for everyone. This graphic about the length of federal tax law was going around the Internet the other day:

Federal Tax Law Pages That’s a stunning growth rate (even with the inconsistent Y-axis), and every year around this time we hear calls for tax reform. Fareed Zakaria had a good post on CNN the other day:

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Markets at work: Pink Slime

Several months ago the Internet got excited about “pink slime,” something the meat industry makes from leftover cow parts to get more meat out of cows. Videos like this one began circulating the web and getting mixed up with gross pictures like this one (which seems to actually be chicken nugget slime – as best I can tell, beef “pink slime” stole the name from chicken “pink slime,” which is actually slimy, whereas the beef “slime” just looks like solid little meat trimmings.)

Anyway, food activists like Jamie Oliver started raising awareness about the facts that 70% of beef in America contains these leftover parts, originally fit for dog food but treated with ammonia to make them edible for humans, and the FDA says they don’t have to list ammonia as an ingredient because it’s a processing element or whatever. They use ammonia to kill the E. coli that’s more likely to be found in the leftover meat, but the ammonia smells bad, and as they try to find a good balance there have been some E. coli outbreaks in recent years. Caught between ammonia and E. coli, we’re supposed to be scared of these unsafe trimmings and stop eating them and get industries to stop using them.

Well, all that activism has begun paying off. In January 2012, McDonald’s announced they would stop using the pink slime in their beef. Lots of links say Taco Bell and Burger King are stopping, too, though I can’t find any good sources on that. But the activists were rejoicing.

Then a few days ago, a bunch of supermarkets announced they would stop using the slime too, including Safeway, SUPERVALU, and Food Lion. On Thursday, the biggest chain, Kroger, joined in. All over the food industry, pink slime is dropping faster than government revenue during a recession.

Is pink slime really that much worse than other kinds of meat? Maybe not. Some in the industry are fighting back against what they see as misinformation with websites like PinkSlimeIsAMyth.com. I don’t know how dangerous the stuff really is, but let’s not lose sight of what is happening here: consumers are demanding better quality meat, and businesses are responding!

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Supreme Court Unanimously Rebukes EPA Overreach

Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands… if property owners begin to construct a home on a lot that the agency thinks possesses the requisite wetness, the property owners are at the agency’s mercy… If the owners do not do the EPA’s bidding, they may be fined up to $75,000 per day… Until the EPA sues them, they are blocked from access to the courts, and the EPA may wait as long as it wants before deciding to sue. By that time, the potential fines may easily have reached the millions. In a nation that values due process, not to mention private property, such treatment is unthinkable.

Sound like the words of a paranoid libertarian blogger? It was actually Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito rebuking the Environmental Protection Agency for an excessive attack on American citizens. Yes, we do still have some checks and balances in the federal government – barely.

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