I was listening to Batya Ungar-Sargon on the Fifth Column the other day and realized we had fundamentally different models of how the modern American economy works. This post is exploration of how I think we ought to model the economy without much math.
Batya’s argument against immigration is that an influx of foreign workers increases the supply of labor, thereby driving down wages of the people already here. Her position singles out low-wage workers, suggesting that illegal immigrants take jobs from low-skilled domestic laborers, depressing their wages. However, this view is problematic for several reasons and fails to account for the nuances of the modern American economy.
First, as a side note, we could prioritize an immigration policy that tries to attract highly skilled instead of low-skilled workers! The Institute for Progress has a whole interactive tool on how to do this. But the last time there was a Republican President, Trump actually reduced legal high skilled immigration.
But more importantly, the American economy is not a fixed pie where low-skilled immigrants simply compete with Americans for a limited number of jobs. Consider a worker from Honduras. In their home country, employment opportunities may be limited, with jobs primarily in agriculture, local services, or perhaps managing a hotel catering to foreign tourists. However, if that same worker were to immigrate to the United States, their productivity would increase significantly, even if performing the same job.
The United States is an advanced, technologically sophisticated economy with a vast accumulation of capital and expertise across various sectors. By operating within this economic environment, workers gain access to cutting-edge technology, sophisticated management systems, and an abundance of resources that enhance their productivity. For instance, a hotel manager in the United States would likely oversee operations catering to business clients from major corporations, leveraging management software, efficient business processes, and integrated systems to optimize efficiency and service quality. Most American hotels require very few people to run them because there is so much automation already deployed. The same worker, performing the same role but within the context of the American economy, would become exponentially more productive due to the surrounding technological infrastructure and capital resources.
This phenomenon is not limited to the hospitality industry; it extends across the entire economy. The United States is a knowledge-based, service-oriented economy, where workers can be highly productive by leveraging the accumulated expertise, human capital, and technological advancements embedded within American companies and institutions.
You can see this dynamic if you take the Cobb-Douglas production function, which is a fairly simple model of outputs as a function of labor (L), Capital (K), and total factor productivity (A):
Total Factor Productivity or TFP represents technology, knowledge, and accumulated innovation that isn’t directly attributable to adding more labor or machines and buildings. In the US, TFP and capital components of this function are remarkably high, suggesting that the economy is labor-constrained. Adding even a small amount of labor can lead to substantial increases in productivity due to the abundance of capital and technological resources available.
And we see this concretely in the fact that Americans are paid so highly. Immigrants come to the US and see massive pay raises because they are now embedded in a economy with highly advanced knowledge, processes, technology, and automation. The American economy is adept at integrating labor and equipping workers with the knowledge and tools necessary to become highly productive contributors.
Furthermore, immigrants not only contribute to the labor supply but also represent a source of consumer demand. By purchasing housing, goods, and services, they stimulate economic activity and create opportunities for further businesses and workers across various sectors. Immigrants need to buy houses, groceries, haircuts, and cars too.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we should necessarily just throw open the gates to all immigration immediately; the fact that there are large benefits does not mean there are no costs. It takes time for new workers to be integrated into any economy and for their spending to be accounted for in new supply for everything they are buying. If new workers are concentrated in a specific industry, it can take time for that industry to expand to accommodate the new labor market. Thus, we can suggest specific policies that would lessen immigration impacts that are concentrated on specific people or industries.
For example, we should make the labor market as dynamic as possible. Hiring and firing should be relatively easy. Public sector unions that protect poor performers make it their services worse and make it harder to higher good talent. Also, healthcare should not be tied to your job. This would make any specific job relationship less critical for workers since switching jobs doesn’t mean switching providers. It also reduces the cost and overhead for employers to hire new workers, especially for low wage workers where healthcare would be a significant fraction of total compensation. We can also have regulations that require immigrants to live in different areas of the country. The US is a vast economy with 54 metro areas with over a million people, and over a 100 with populations over 500,000. That’s a lot of local economies we could spread immigrants out over to avoid huge shocks to the housing markets if immigrants concentrated on specific cities. As far as specific industries, many other countries have specific point based systems to target immigrants with key skills. The U.S. largely does not do this, and we ought to.
In summary, the belief that immigrants depress wages and displace native workers is the result of a direct failure to understand fundamentally the dynamic and efficiency of the American economy. The United States is a highly advanced, knowledge-based economy that can effectively leverage additional labor by integrating it with its vast capital resources and technological sophistication. Rather than viewing immigration as a threat to the working class, it should be recognized as a potential source of economic growth and productivity enhancement, particularly in a labor-constrained environment. When there are drawbacks, our goal is to figure out how best to minimize them in order to fuel the economy and make America grow.
But besides that, I’m having a hard time getting interested in the elections, and I don’t think it’s my normal libertarian neutrality either.
If you’ve got a partisan loyalty, most interesting political commentary is about how to strategically win elections. I don’t really consider myself a partisan, so my model is to ask which party or candidate is most willing to expend political capital to pass legislation that improves the world. The issues I find most important and impactful are:
Preparing for the next pandemic
Increasing immigration
Liberalizing housing construction
Protecting the rule of law
The problem I see with the midterms are that:
These issues aren’t prioritized by the parties, so even if there are differences in position, the actual differences on these issues would be small
The actual differences at stake in the election seem not that important
A few weeks ago, Dustin Moskovitz, the largest donor in the EA space answered a bunch of questions on Twitter, including one about US politics:
FWIW I think the truth is more complicated.
(I don't speak for EA here; no one does)
I think issues > parties, and most of my work is getting policymakers from both parties to pay attention to important but unsexy problems–e.g. preventing another pandemic.
Sam Bankman-Fried is the other major EA billionaire in the space. Let’s see if Moskovitz is right.
Republicans and Democrats on the Most Important Issues
Pandemics: There were several Biden plans for a significant chunk of future pandemic funding, but then Democrats jettisoned it in favor of other priorities. Republicans seem, if anything, worse, with some even opposing the vaccines we already have despite them clearly reducing mortality.
Immigration: The story is the same on immigration. Republicans do not seem interested in reforming the immigration process, only in border enforcement. I would have hoped Democrats would counter with better border funding in exchange for clearer legal immigration paths, but they’ve not done anything of the sort. Biden decided to spend political capital elsewhere.
Housing: The Biden admin has been alright on housing, as I noted here:
Housing is actually been the area the admin has done the best, but this is probably because the fed govt can't actually do much; it's a local policy issue. So there's a lot of limitations on what's doable https://t.co/px8chGpjsu
But still housing is mostly a local issue. The highest impacts I’ve seen were at the state level in California where YIMBY democrats have gotten several impressive victories. I just don’t see much at stake in the national midterms on this.
Rule of Law: Democrats have a clear edge. Although they’ve taken their time, it appears that the Electoral Count Reform Act could pass in the lame duck session this year, with bipartisan support, although many more Democratic votes than Republican. That would be a solid victory, and Democrats have been talking about threats to democracy, so I can’t fault them for not trying to draw the distinction here. The challenge is that they relegated democratic reforms to the lame duck session and haven’t proposed specific forward-looking legislative reforms they’d like to pass in order to protect the rule of law, or talked about bipartisan efforts with Republicans they are undertaking. While I give this one to Democrats, I wouldn’t expect any actual legislation if they retain the Senate.
What’s Actually at Stake
Matthew Yglesias has a post arguing what is actually at stake in the midterms isn’t what most voters seem to think; for example, Democrats aren’t going to restrict immigration and neither party will have enough votes to do anything on abortion.
He did seem to skip over the inflation question, where it seems plausible to me that a Republican House or Senate could force a reduction in spending from the Biden administration, which could be positive for inflation. However, Republicans have not put forward an inflation reduction plan they’d like to pass like e.g. repealing the Jones Act or ending the Trump tariffs. Republicans also killed Manchin’s permitting reform which would unambiguously help with inflation, but Yglesias thinks they’ll reconsider after the midterms regardless of outcome.
Yglesias maintains that the real difference will be debt ceiling games, possibly centered around entitlement changes, as well as government appointments.
Debt ceiling games seem legitimately bad; if we should not spend money, Congress should vote to stop spending money, rather than voting to spend money and then not let the Treasury pay for the thing they said we were going to pay for. Shutting down the government doesn’t actually reduce any spending whatsoever. However, it’s not clear to what extent Republicans actually want to have a fight over the debt ceiling. Kevin McCarthy explicitly said they didn’t want to use it in conjunction with the entitlement cuts.
Yglesias emphasizes that Republicans want to cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Now, his position is that this is bad political strategy and thus voters should reject Republicans because this is unpopular. However, I’m less concerned about good strategy and more concerned about who I would actually want to succeed. And right now, by default, Medicare will be undergoing automatic cuts in about 6 years because the trust fund will run out. Given that reality, getting ahead of the game sound like a good idea!
Finally, there’s government appointments. I also tend to think it’s bad that we can’t get government appointments completed when Congress disagrees with the president. We need people to run our government offices. If Republicans think an appointed position shouldn’t exist, they should pass legislation saying so! Not appointing people will come back to harm Republican presidents if they lose their midterms in the future, and we’d be at a much better spot if everyone agreed to pass each other’s appointments.
However, the judicial appointments game seems very zero-sum. If you’re a staunch conservative, stopping Biden appointments has some costs but a lot of upside. I tend to think conservative judges are better since they often act to restrain government power. Of course, I’d prefer if Republicans or Democrats actually passed legislation limiting government power directly since that seems like a much better and accountable system. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to live in a universe like that.
I think Democrats seem to be a bit better on the issue of the Rule of Law. I haven’t made a strong case on why the rule of law is good in this post, but if you’re interested, I’ve written about its importance in the past, critiquing both the Right and Left. Nonetheless, there aren’t many concrete policy promises apart from some Republicans denying Trump lost the 2020 election, which bodes ill for 2024.
Debt ceiling brinkmanship would be bad, and Republicans do seem to be talking about it, although perhaps not in relation to cutting entitlements. Of course, fixing/cutting entitlements is probably a good thing in my opinion.
Government appointment fights also seem to be a net negative for everyone. If you’re particularly conservative already, perhaps leaving lots of judicial appointments open is worth this particular cost.
Overall though, my takeaway is that I’d slightly favor the generic Democrat in most midterm races, although you should update based on the specific candidate, but I remain deeply disappointed that our political system has focused on less important issues, or indeed many issues where Congress simply doesn’t have jurisdiction.
I wrote this quickly to get it out before election day, so if you think I’m missing something, tweet at me, or leave a comment.
Bryan Caplan writes this week about life years lost due to COVID and in particular what he sees as an overreaction to the pandemic:
Well, we’ve now endured 8 months of COVID life. If that’s worth only 5/6ths as much as normal time, the average American has now lost 4/3rds of a month. Multiplying that by the total American population of 330M, the total loss comes to about 37 million years of life. That’s about 15 times the reported estimate of the direct cost of COVID.
Tyler Cowen has an important critique. Given very low government restrictions in the U.S. South, Sweden, and Brazil, we can see that even as a baseline, lots of anti-pandemic actions are actually taken by citizens voluntarily rather than by force of the state. If true, then there is little we can do to mitigate these costs even if Caplan is correct. And moreover, if we could change people’s behavior to pretend that everything was normal, then why wouldn’t we also change people’s behavior to perfectly isolate when necessary and wipe out the pandemic within a couple weeks?
Cowen argues that the best way to improve the situation if private citizens’ actions are in fact greatly damaging is to push for a vaccine as fast as possible. Robin Hanson has objections here, but putting all that aside, I wanted to look at Bryan Caplan’s numbers.
If Caplan is correct, I should change my behavior; I’ve been avoiding movie theaters and indoor restaurants and perhaps I shouldn’t. Caplan suggests 37 million QALYs lost due to “COVID” time being worse than normal time. However, this is based on a Twitter poll and Caplan points out that when asked personally about how to compared “COVID” time to normal time, his median follower says it’s almost even. But let’s take the 37 million figure at face value because it’s really the best we’ve got.
Caplan points out that what we are not comparing the 37 million QALYs to the total loss in QALYs we’ve had with COVID in this timeline, but rather a counterfactual one where we didn’t overreact.
You have to ask yourself: If normal life had continued unabated since March, how many additional life-years would have been lost? I can believe that the number would have been double what we observed, even though no country on Earth has done so poorly. With effort, I can imagine that the number would have been triple what we observed. There’s a tiny chance it could have been five times worse. But fifteen times? No way.
Actually, it’s pretty easy to imagine! Every country on Earth has had a strong reaction to COVID and that’s why it’s hard to imagine a doubling or tripling of QALYs. If people simply went about their business, or very nearly so, then there really is little to stop COVID from spreading exponentially. In all likelihood, we would have seen overwhelmed hospitals. Instead of the per infection death rate being 0.55%, it seems quite plausible to me it could be up around 1%, especially given we were worse at treating the disease towards the beginning of the pandemic.
Moreover, if lots of people got this disease, they’d have to deal with the aftereffects which can be remarkably unpleasant. Certainly there’s a guaranteed loss of quality of life for half a month to a month as you battle the virus. Many people then have extended loss of taste and smell, extended fatigue, difficulty breathing, and perhaps even cognitive effects.
If we taken Caplan’s citation that people who die from COVID on average lose 10 QALYs (I would guess higher if more people got it, but we’ll go with this number) and say people who survive COVID on average lose half a QALY from lingering issues, the formula for this calculation of QALY loss is:
[Total QALYs lost] = [US population] * [% who get COVID] * ([% who die] * [10 QALYs] + [% who don't die] * [.5 QALYs])
If we say two thirds of the country gets COVID under a “no change in behavior” scenario (again, this seems very conservative, I would think it’d be higher) and 1% of infected die, we get:
Notably, this is much higher than 37 million. Interestingly, the vast majority of the cost actually comes from the people who get the disease and survive. Perhaps I was too pessimistic on how difficult their lives are, after all, we are still uncertain. Let’s change it to a quarter of a QALY lost. Some people might have trouble breathing for years, but most people won’t, so perhaps this is a better estimate.
Again, bigger than 37 million. And it’s not close. In fact, even if you say it’s only one month QALY lost when contracting COVID (which seems way too low to me considering that’s pretty much the baseline of getting and recovering from the disease) that still gets you over 40 million QALYs in our model. Add back in that the two thirds assumption is definitely an underestimate, that 10 years of QALY loss per death might also be an underestimate, and 37 million is again completely unattainable.
In other words, I don’t think the consequentialist calculation recommends going to movie theaters or indoor dining.
I’ve discussed extensively the policy choices facing Americans in the 2020 presidential election and why I think Joe Biden’s policies would result in an improved world. However, I believe the best critique of Donald Trump’s candidacy doesn’t just dryly compare policy, but also takes into account all the “extracurriculars” that come with him.
As a warning, this post will be more partisan than other things I’ve written. I’d like to catalog some of the outrageous things Trump has done or said because there is a nebulous concern with Trump’s presidency that pure policy discussions can’t convey. Again, I’ll be aiming towards a center-right audience because that’s who I need to convince, but I also can’t imagine I’ll be saying anything new; Trump is obnoxious, self-serving, and corrupt and this is well known. I admit, I’m not sure why that knowledge hasn’t convinced conservatives to dump Trump, but generally speaking I think it’s true that conservatives have stuck with the president. Thus, in my last post, I mostly ignored these more outrageous discussions in favor of more dry policy comparisons. Nonetheless, for my own sanity, I think it’s worth reiterating just a small fraction of what the president has done over the last four years. Maybe putting it all in one place will prove more convincing than hearing constant headlines for years.
Before I get to Trump, I should point out that the Left has its own nebulous darkness on the horizon. Nothing I say here should be construed to downplay that threat. Manifestations of these bad ideas on the Left include broad attacks on the culture of open discourse and free speech, advancement of racism and segregation, support for radical violence, and aggrandizement of proven failed policies of state control of the means of production.
The reason for my focus in this essay on Donald Trump despite these concerns about the Left is twofold. One is that Donald Trump is tied directly to the worst ideas on the Right. Joe Biden is not similarly bound to the above enumerated problems. Secondly, there is a strong pushback on the Left against these more radical ideas. For example, countervailing groups on the Left established the Neoliberal Project, wrote the Letter on Justice and Open Debate in Harper’s Magazine this year, and most directly, decisively elected Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in the primary.
On the Right however, conservatism has collapsed in the face of Trumpism. The Republican Party decided to forego writing a party platform this year in favor of stating they will “enthusiastically support the President’s America First agenda”. Meanwhile the Republican National Committee, the national organization that is responsible for electing Republican candidates up and down the ballot, merged its fundraising and spending with Trump’s reelection campaign, an unprecedented move reflecting Trump’s complete domination of the political Right.
Polarization
One of the first things that comes to mind about President Trump is his unpresidential behavior. He constantly interrupted Joe Biden during the first presidential debate, and Chris Wallace entered into several verbal altercations with the president, loudly pointing out that he had agreed to these rules he was constantly breaking. He spends press conferences with foreign leaders complaining about his own petty grievances instead of actually discussing the visit. He lies constantly and retweets conspiracy theories. Does any of this matter?
I would argue that one result is continued pressure on political polarization. At the same debate, Trump was asked to condemn white supremacy and seemed unwilling to denounce anyone who might support him. Joe Biden, on the other hand easily dealt with the issue by broadly condemning violence in any form, something he has done continually since May. Just after the debate, Trump criticized Representative Ilhan Omar, not for policy disagreements, but mostly based on where she was born despite her being an American citizen: “She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing?” Again, this pushes us further from actual policy discussions, discussions which we should be having.
In fact, last year, Donald Trump told several sitting congresswomen that they ought to “go back” to their countries and fix them before telling “us” how to run “our” country. I have been concerned with the overzealous accusations of racism coming from leftists, but despite their misuse of the accusation, prejudice is still wrong. Attacking people for qualities they do not control, like where they were born, rather than engaging with their ideas is immoral and weak. In fact, three of the representatives were born in the United States, and the last came to America when she was 12. But that doesn’t matter, these are American citizens, elected to represent other American citizens, and it’s disturbing that the president does not identify them as Americans because of what they look like.
This is polarizing and it is bad for our country. The policies and arguments put forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar are often terrible, and those policies ought to opposed. But when the president attacks them for where they were born or what they look like, it appears that the choices are bad socialist ideas or bigotry, which alienates Americans and forces a false choice.
I won’t go into more details on other incidents, but it’s worth noting the president’s polarizing behavior here isn’t unique. He said people in the suburbs won’t have “low income housing” built in their neighborhoods. He said John McCain was only a war hero because he got captured and he likes “people who weren’t captured”. He made no attempt to deny the QAnon conspiracy theory when asked about it and instead said he appreciated that they like him, and Trump continued to advocate for hydrochloroquine as a COVID treatment months after the FDA had cancelled clinical trials because of its ineffectiveness.
Trump’s polarizing actions should disqualify him from the presidency. We need to focus on open discussion and debate, not increasing tribalism. Trump is incapable of moving the country in that direction.
Authoritarianism
Donald Trump has authoritarian tendencies. He has praised Kim Jong-un, he’s commended Xi Jinping installing himself as Chinese leader for life, and he’s even publicly sided with Vladimir Putin over American intelligence over whether there was Russian intelligence operations during the 2016 election. Focusing on specific actions, Trump cleared peaceful protesters outside the White House with pepper spray and police in riot gear in order to get an absurd photo op of him holding a Bible outside a church. Police attacked an Australian journalist live on TV. He also attempted to fire Bob Mueller as special counsel when he was being investigated, but White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign and he backed down. Recently, Trump has urged Attorney General Bill Barr to go after his political enemies with the Justice Department.
Trump also has a poor relationship with democratic elections. He has repeatedly sought to undermine his own election in 2016 (the election he won!) claiming, without evidence as usual, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast. Trump established a commission to look into this fraud, which seemingly dissolved without issuing a report or finding any evidence. Looking ahead, Trump has called for the 2020 election to be delayed, and when asked about the election, he has repeatedly refused to say he will accept the results. Note Biden had no problems answering Chris Wallace’s softball question, stating he would wait to declare victory until the election was certified and would concede if he lost. This isn’t particularly difficult or controversial, unless you are Donald Trump! Apparently the rule of law simply does not apply to him. Before and since the debate, Trump has continued to undermine the legitimacy of the election and voting by mail in ballots, even though many states have been voting by mail for years. Given the circumstances of the pandemic and logistical challenges of rapidly expanding mail in voting, Trump ought to be taking steps to make sure the election is legitimate and transparent, yet he has completely failed to do so.
Refusing to accept the principles of the rule of law, peaceful transfers of power, and election legitimacy ought to disqualify Trump from the ballots of voters. These are authoritarian strongman tactics, and they ought to be harshly condemned.
Corruption
It’s hard to distinguish Trump’s corruption from his authoritarian tendencies. Unlike staunchly ideological leaders who might wield state power and abridge the rights of their citizens in the name of communism or ethnic nationalism, Trump seems more comfortable with simply wielding state power for his own personal gain. Regardless of where its categorized, Trump’s administration is deeply corrupt.
Trump has reserved his pardon power almost exclusively for his political allies. Roger Stone was pardoned after lying to investigators to cover for Trump (although his sentence was excessive). Trump also pardoned former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, one of the most abusive law enforcement officers in the country, who was in prison after ignoring many court orders about his inhuman treatment of inmates. Arpaio had endorsed Trump in 2016. Trump has also rewarded his family members with high-ranking offices in the West Wing. On the other hand, Trump fired Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland after he was acquitted from impeachment charges in February. Both testified against the president.
Speaking of impeachment, Trump was impeached for abusing his office. On a 2019 official diplomatic call, Donald Trump asked the president of Ukraine to look into a wild conspiracy theory about a company in Ukraine having a copy of Hillary Clinton’s email server. Trump also asked the president to look into Joe Biden, his political rival, for wrongdoing. At the same time, foreign aid appropriated by Congress had been held up, according to Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, specifically to put pressure on Ukraine to investigate this email server. Trump’s EU ambassador Gordon Sondlond also testified that a White House visit was offered to Ukraine in exchange for announcing an investigation into the Bidens, and apparently Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton were all aware. The Trump administration however, blocked all three from testifying.
I know that this became a highly political issue and Trump’s senate trial declined to hear any witnesses along party lines, but I have yet to hear any reason to excuse the president’s behavior. Trump’s own hand picked staff all agree that the president used the office of the president to achieve these self-serving political goals which had nothing to do with the the good of the country.
This is wrong, and this is corrupt. The president cannot use the powerful mechanisms of the state for his own personal ends; we must be a nation of laws where authority is strictly bound to rules that apply to all. When the Senate declined to even hear witnesses to discuss the obvious crimes that Trump had committed, they said this ought to be left up to the electorate. The results of this election ought to reflect our opinion of whether the president is above the law.
Incompetence
Trump isn’t great at accomplishing the things he actually wants to accomplish. Trump has over and over again apparently appointed terrible people to work for him who he is then forced to fire. Trump fired Michael Flynn when indicted for lying to the FBI, H.R. McMaster by tweet, Anthony Scaramucci after 10 days, former RNC chair Reince Priebus and retired General John Kelly as chiefs of staff, Omoraosa Manigault from the Public Liaison Office, and Steve Bannon as chief strategist. Gary Cohn resigned because of Trump’s protectionist policies, and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest of Trump’s foreign policy. Tom Price was forced to resign as HHS Secretary after criticism of his use of private charters and military aircraft for travel, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson was forced to resign when she didn’t stop accepting asylum seekers, Rex Tillerson was fired as Secretary of State after clashing with Trump’s policies for months, and Jeff Sessions was repeatedly abused by President Trump on Twitter for refusing to intervene in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference until Sessions resigned. Such absolute mayhem does not reflect well on the President’s ability to find the “best” people.
Consequently, despite having a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, Trump was unable to deliver on major pieces of policy like fixing Obamacare or cutting the deficit. Also, we should have a brief reminder of the constant bizarre behavior by the president these past four years. He didn’t have a single policy he could promise when Sean Hannity asked what his second term goals would be. He has also tweeted a conspiracy theory about TV personality Joe Scarborough being involved in a murder in 2001, and most recently that Obama had had Seal Team Six murdered. These do not seem like the actions of a competent leader. Regardless of all this chaos, the economy did fairly well until the biggest story of incompetence happened: COVID-19. Trump campaigned on being a good manager and private sector CEO. I’ve expressed in the past that I didn’t think management skills mattered much in politics compared to policy, but every now and then there’s a crisis that needs managing. We got one this year and Trump has abjectly failed.
200,000 Americans are dead directly from the pandemic and the CDC estimates 250k in excess mortality since February. Trump lied to Americans about what he knew about the virus and played it down instead of sounding the alarm. Trump’s CDC and FDA had major failures that delayed testing. Then, in the summer once cases had finally started to drop, instead of trying to continue that trend, he held and has continued to hold crowded rallies. He mocked people for wearing masks, and most importantly, claimed we only had rising case numbers because of better testing. Later, in August, Trump retweeted a claim that COVID had only killed 9,000 Americans. In an Axios interview in July, Trump literally couldn’t understand the reporter talking to him about rising U.S. deaths, simply declaring that you couldn’t use that metric. Not to mention, the White House held an event in the Rose Garden to promote Amy Coney Barrett as their new Supreme Court nominee without good precautions, infecting several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as the President himself. On Saturday, October 10, just two weeks later, a large rally was held on the White House lawn.
The level of incompetence here and the cost in human lives is simply unspeakable.
Future of Conservatism
Finally, returning to appeal more directly conservatives, the American Right is at a fork in the road. The Cold War anti-communist coalition of social conservatives, libertarians, business interests, and nationalists has completely fallen apart. This process has been long in the works, but the schism accelerated in the 2016 election, and now conservatives can choose to be on the side of individual liberty or authoritarianism.
Donald Trump has pulled the Republican Party towards authoritarian nationalism. He abhors the rule of law and the international liberal order, and he undermines the ideas of peaceful transitions of power or a separation of public and personal interest. The GOP party platform literally doesn’t exist. But these authoritarian ideas don’t stem from Trump alone; there are others working to maintain these ideas and platforms into the future, and it has resulted in some disturbing events. Right wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was praised by Trump and even endorsed by Representative Matt Gaetz despite her association with InfoWars as well as her openly wishing violence upon immigrants.
On the intellectual side, Adrian Vermuele argues in The Atlanticthat conservative legal theory ought not to focus on originalism, but instead read morality into the law along with respect for authority and the importance of social hierarchies since “…the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself.” This has long been a strain in conservative thought, but usually, at least in countries like the U.S. and U.K., conservative defense of institutions has often included individual rights and the market.
The Economist notes that what’s remarkable about Trump’s insurgent brand of “conservatism” is a complete trashing of institutions across the spectrum. The message has been to “beat” the Left at any cost, regardless of Trump’s flagrant disinterest of freedom or morality. I’m not here to say Adrian Vermuele is the future of conservatism, but rather that if the intellectual Right is abandoning individual liberty and limited government under Trump, there are people with actual bad ideas waiting to fill the vacuum. Rejecting Trump is a way to avoid going down that path.
And the stakes are high. The political Left, as I mentioned earlier, is undergoing some disturbing trends. Robert Tracinski writes in The Bulwarkthat if we take the threat of the Left seriously, this election may be the Anti-Flight 93 Election; it’s the last chance to kick out Trump and get the political Right’s house in order before the leftists come knocking. Now is the time to do this when the cost is relatively low with “sleepy” Joe Biden. We need the alternative to socialism to be a vibrant communicator who can articulate the importance of the rule of law and the free enterprise system; if we are stuck with a self-absorbed authoritarian strongman with no ideology or understanding of economics, the socialists will be ascendant. And moreover, a loss for Biden would be a signal to the radical Left that appeals to the middle are dead; a convincing Biden victory is a way for more moderate parts of the Democratic party to muscle out the Bernie bros.
Finally, I’m not alone in this thought. Conservative columnist George Will, former National Review writer David French, and former editor at National Review Jonah Goldberg are all prominent right wing thinkers who oppose Trump despite being staunchly opposed to the Left. I doubt they’ll vote for Biden, but they definitely won’t be voting for the president. The only path forward for a strong American Right is to reject Donald Trump.
Earlier this year I put together a list of most important policies that the U.S. federal government could implement which are actually discussed by candidates. The list takes into account impact both broad and deep. Also as part of my election year discussions, I’ve covered issues with our current electoral system and then, given those problems, whether it makes sense to spend time researching and voting in elections where you’re only one of many thousands or millions of voters. I conclude that in close elections where there are large differences between the major party candidates, it often makes sense to vote for one of the two candidates.
This post will take a look at this year’s presidential candidates based on their policies. I’m putting aside non-policy issues, like competence, corruption, and impact on democratic norms as I intend to cover them in my next blog post. I also think a policy-specific approach is useful to cut through tribal identities and focus on actual impacts in the real world. Extending the discussion from my last essay, I will be comparing Trump and Biden to see if there are large expected differences in their policy. As stated in that post, swing state voters should probably vote for one of these candidates since their expected value of voting would be high.
This post will be aimed slightly right of center since my policy analysis shows Trump doing very poorly compared to Biden. Based on purely policy grounds, I think swing state voters should vote for Biden, even if they are conservative. I will be taking inspiration from my previous post about important policies. If you want more background on why I think these policies are most important, I suggest skimming it first.
Great Power Relations
This is a newer issue that I wanted to focus on after reading The Precipice and its discussion of existential risk. I recommend that post, but in summary: an existential event is uniquely terrible because not only are there no humans left on earth, but any future human civilization ceases to exist. We are doing very little today to assess these risks or to plan and coordinate how we might deal with existential risks. Toby Ord estimates a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction this century. Even if that’s high, Metaculus suggests a 2% risk which is still completely intolerable when discussing the future of humanity.
Presidential politics isn’t really discussing existential risk directly, but the presidency has an outsized impact on great power relations, particularly between the U.S., China, and Russia, and catastrophic relations between them could significantly heighten existential risk. Indeed Toby Ord specifically discusses great power relations as a major risk factor in his book, and Trump’s own Defense Department notes the heightened nuclear landscape we find ourselves in their 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (Brookings Institute discussion). China and the U.S. have essentially incompatible views of liberalism, freedom, and human rights, and the world is better off with an America that promotes those ideas and thwarts China’s authoritarian ideology without resulting in dangerous tensions.
Conventional wisdom might suggest Trump was especially tough on China, but in reality he emphasized the exact wrong points at the expense of actual geopolitical power. He started a trade war, harming the U.S., which ultimately resulted in extracting Chinese promises to purchase additional American exports. While undertaking these trade negotiations, Trump refrained from criticizing China’s curtailing of the rights of seven and a half million residents of Hong Kong, and allegedly even encouraged Xi Jinping to construct Uyghur re-education camps. Chinese negotiators have stated they prefer Trump’s reelection because his goals are so transparently materialistic, and those goals are in areas where the CCP can compromise, unlike other American administrations’ focus on human rights. Trump also abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Pacific based broad trade agreement meant to specifically improve trading relations between the U.S. and major Chinese trading partners, isolating China. Biden is also not great on trade, but has emphasized that he will push China on human rights, not soybean purchases.
I’ve also mentioned in the past that a huge advantage the U.S. has over China is our ability to take in new immigrants and turn them into Americans, and this is doubly true for skilled Chinese immigrants who often attend American universities. Yet the Trump administration has attacked legal immigration (even more so during the pandemic), making it harder for America to exercise an important asset in any long term disagreements with China.
Comparatively, Joe Biden is simply not that extreme. He’s been a fairly middle-of-the-road Democrat since the Bronze Age. Of course, that does means he’s voted for the Iraq War and was part of the Obama administrations’ intervention in Libya, but Donald Trump also supported the Iraq War, although he only wanted to go into Libya “if we take the oil” (?). Donald Trump has notably strengthened relationships with Israel, but Israel has little sway over China and Russia. Meanwhile, traditional important allies have been shunned.
Donald Trump is dangerous. A cold war with China is not inevitable, and a military arms race with modern technology, AI, and advanced genetics added on top of nuclear weapons is a recipe for absolute disaster. Even a small percentage increase in this risk through mismanagement could be worth millions of lives. The U.S. needs to work with our allies to confront China where necessary and work with the Chinese government to improve transparency and understanding between our two nations, while promoting human rights. Being President of the United States should perfectly position someone to make the case for freedom, free markets, and democracy against an authoritarian regime, but Trump has failed to do so, and his bad policy here should disqualify conservatives from backing him.
COVID-19 and Catastrophic Risk
This is an expansion of risk assessment from the Great Power Relations section and from the discussion in May. Catastrophic risk management is underfunded and underprioritized. We should be preparing for the next pandemic, the next earthquake, and so on. Neither candidate has really called for comprehensive congressional action on establishing better risk management, so let’s focus on COVID-19, which remains a key issue.
The U.S. has worse per capita deaths than a wide cross section of developed countries including Italy, France, and the broad EU. Germany, Canada, and Japan have rates several times lower. The U.S. rate is similar to the U.K. but is on a much higher trajectory, similar to Mexico. At best, we’re average, at worst, we are the most advanced country to still have out of control cases.
Trump revamped his National Security Council, including removing several people who were part of pandemic preparedness, altering the pandemic response policy set up under Obama. John Bolton claimed this was a cost-saving measure and allowed for better implementation of policy. Whatever the case, there’s no one to blame except Trump; he reorganized his bureaucracy in the way he wanted, and this was the policy result we got. He is also ultimately in charge of the FDA and CDC and as we discussed in April, those agencies had colossal failures. Moreover, Trump publicly discussed how COVID was not a problem, saying in February the number of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” Meanwhile, he was telling reporter Carl Bernstein that this virus was extremely serious and deadly in February, and that he had purposefully played it down to avoid a panic. Regardless of morality, this is simply bad policy and cost American lives.
Trump should absolutely get credit for shutting down travel from China earlier than many people wanted. However, instead of acknowledging that any policy could only delay and not prevent a full outbreak, Trump then spent all of February downplaying the virus like it wasn’t a threat. Instead, given his apparent understanding of the challenge, he should have been issuing government guarantees to purchase masks, creating guidelines for how to reduce spread, encouraging indoor sporting events and concerts to consider cancelling, and more. We know much more about this virus now than we did in March. Delaying the peak from April to June or July could have saved literally thousands of lives.
As of September 28, the CDC estimates 208,000 – 274,000 excess deaths in the U.S. since February 1, with Metaculus estimating between 220,000 and 360,000 U.S. deaths from COVID this year. This is an unmitigated catastrophe. Not every death can be attributed to Trump’s policies, but we have plenty of evidence that his policies could be considerably better. Other developed countries have death rates a fraction of ours, and Trump has constantly made poor decisions, downplayed the virus compared to the flu, encouraged supporters not to wear masks. At this point, even small policy shifts that reduced the death toll by 10% would have saved 20,000 lives. Conservatives must hold the president accountable for failing to protect American lives.
Congressional vs Executive Power
The functionality of the U.S. government as a system for creating and executing policy affects every other policy. In particular is the glaring problems of congressional mismanagement and executive overreach. Unfortunately, both Trump and Biden have poor records, although Trump may be worse.
Conservatives ought to be concerned about the power of the executive and the reduced role Congress has played in policy-making. Moving away from a consensus building model in Congress to a winner-take-all super executive elected every four years to do anything they want is a bad idea for many reasons. For one this increases the stakes at every election and thus increased polarization. It also means more power concentrated more centrally, which conservatives should be quite skeptical of, and at least many were under Obama. And finally, there are specific things that conservatives want the government to do, like maintain a strong national defense. If we continue to pile responsibilities on the President without involving Congress or actual legislation, then our national defense relies solely on the whims of one person, who you might not trust.
I’ve criticized the Obama administration significantly on executive overreach, and Joe Biden was part of that administration. Obama invented the concept of unauthorized drone wars, complete with secret kill lists, including American citizens. Yet, Gene Healy details how Trump has essentially expanded on Obama’s work in every way, including civilian casualties, all under the guise of the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of 9/11, even nine years after Osama Bin Laden’s death. He also bombed Syria under a separate claim of pure executive war powers which has no constitutional basis, and this year unilaterally targeted a member of the Iranian government (and a bad person) without any congressional authority. This is an unprecedented use of presidential authority to wage war, and blatant disregard of the constitution. In an absolutely insane reversal, Trump vetoed the war powers resolution passed by congress to reign in his authority. No constitutional conservative can defend this action.
Healy does note that many of the more aggressive uses of Trump’s executive power can’t be categorized as “new” power grabs; Congress had largely ceded those powers to the president even if no other president had actually used them. For example, the Supreme Court upheld a later iteration of Trump’s travel ban (although earlier ones were ruled unconstitutional), and although “there’s ample ground for disputing the Court’s decision”, Congress allowed the president to interpret national security powers quite broadly.
However, on trade, Trump clearly expanded executive authority by lying about Canadian steel imports being a national security threat. This broad interpretation of the law was again unprecedented and means that tariff levels are likely solely controllable by the president, which is an absurd constitutional farce; Congress should have the sole ability to pass tax law. Trump also declared a national emergency in order to fund his border wall after Congress repeatedly refused to allocate money (partially struck down in court). Trump needed to lead on these issues, make broad appeals to the political center, and put pressure on Congress — which Republicans controlled for two years! Instead, he failed and fell back on executive orders which fly in the face of conservative small government beliefs.
For his part, Biden has not offered to fund a border wall through executive authority, so I guess point to him. On the other hand, Biden indicated he thought FEMA should be leveraged (and presumably a national emergency declared) to fund K-12 schools due to coronavirus challenges. Again, to be consistent, school funding from the federal government really ought to come from Congress, not executive authority.
Alright, now let’s touch on impeachment. If you want my full thoughts, read this post here. In summary, regardless of legality, Trump held up Congressionally authorized funds for political purposes, trying to get dirt on his enemies. From the perspective of concerns about executive power, this is wrong, and conservatives should be terrified of progressives getting into office and doing exactly what Trump did. We need to deescalate using the state as a political weapon; Trump is not deescalating.
Of course, no one is talking about what I actually wrote about in May, which was a resurgent Congress, not just a presidency that maybe didn’t quite expand executive authority as much as before. So I think overall the most important long term affects on congressional and executive power are worse with Trump, but they’re not night and day. Something like Trump gets an F and Biden gets a D.
Liberalizing Immigration
Conservatives and I may be far apart on this issue, but I think there is some common ground. The United States has perhaps the longest and most well known history of immigration of any nation on earth, and we all agree some immigration will continue to occur. Given that immigration will continue, we can also agree that an improved system is needed; current immigration rules favor family migration instead of merit and skill. We should change our immigration system to focus more on skilled immigrants, or on retaining students who pay to be educated at the best institutions and then seek to work in the most technologically advanced and dynamic large economy in the world.
Improving our immigration system to be more merit based would be a huge boon to our free market system, to our national security, to our global influence, and of course, would result in more Americans. We want the smartest people in the world to move here and innovate on the cutting edge. If we shut our doors, those people will go to other countries, and we will lose a massive advantage we have over places like China, which, as self declared ethno-states, simply cannot attract diverse talent from across the world.
Yet Donald Trump has slashed legal immigration and made it significantly harder for skilled immigrants to enter the country, or even apply for green cards. Both green card and temporary visa applications decreased 17% each between 2016 and 2019 while rules for granting green cards were narrowed. He even banned any new H-1B visas, which focus on high skilled, high earning immigrants (who are great for innovation) for the rest of this year through executive order. Given pandemic related issues are likely to continue into next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if this continued past December.
Given these extraordinary actions, particularly during the pandemic, I would estimate a Trump second term could see a million fewer legal immigrants than a Biden term. This would have long term negative effects on the U.S. economy, not to mention on those immigrants who literally want to be Americans. Trump has also shown no ability to work with Congress on reforming the immigration system, instead working through executive unilateral action.
Biden has planned to reverse most of Trump’s immigration policies. I’ve emphasized the horrific impact on high skilled immigration, but Biden focuses on more liberal talking points, particularly about children of illegal immigrants and refugees. Trump has absolutely crushed the number of refugees the U.S. has taken, thwarting a long standing Cold War era policy. While conservatives may be skeptical of the benefits of refugees (recent data shows they contribute positively to the economy), the geopolitical benefits of being a destination for refugees are clearly all positive. No refugee is picking Russia over the U.S., for example. Unfortunately, Trump has crippled that rhetorical win.
Finally on illegal immigration, I think it’s undeniable that Trump is harder on illegal immigration than Biden would be. However, I must stress that concerns about illegal immigration are often overblown by conservatives. Although caution is warranted, it’s likely that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native born Americans. Moreover, Trump has focused on things like building a border wall (which he claimed Mexico would pay for) which the OIG found did not utilize a “sound, well-documented methodology” for where the wall would actually be built. Also, many illegal immigrants cross the border at regular checkpoints and simply overstay their visa. Additionally, the administration spent lots of effort noticeably separating young children from their parents at the border rather than on improving the infrastructure in place for immigration courts, which would actually improve the rate at which the government could deport immigrants.
Trump’s policy of harsher, haphazard (and quite frankly idiotic) illegal immigration enforcement at the cost of harming legal immigration and thwarting the American economy’s ability to integrate foreign skilled labor is simply not worth the trade off.
Housing Policy
Deregulating housing policy, especially in “blue” cities like New York and San Francisco is a key measure needed to help grow the American economy. Housing is one of the largest expenses most Americans have, yet it wasn’t always the case. Restrictive zoning has made housing exceedingly unaffordable, and conservatives ought to defend the right of property owners to do what they want on their own property. Trump actually supported deregulation ideas early on in his presidency, and then this year abruptly switched tactics to favor stronger regulation. This is anti-free market and anti economic growth. These large cities have made it harder to build new housing, which causes housing costs to rise, homelessness to increase, and the young and poor to be priced out of good opportunities. Mobility is down across the country, companies are struggling to attract employees to these high cost areas, and many are leaving. Trump is supporting this.
Network effects mean more concentrated, dense cities are much better. For example, recreating the networks that made Silicon Valley in other places is quite difficult, but as regulations make it harder to live in the Bay Area, we are forced to rebuild the aspects of the Bay Area in other places, which wastes time and energy. The same applies to every expensive U.S. city, including Boston, DC, LA, and Miami. The costs involved are astronomical, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars in lost economic productivity over years.
Biden’s housing policy is actually remarkably thoughtful and deregulatory. He proposes improving the already existing federal rental housing assistance for low income families so that all who qualify can obtain it (right now it gives out money to families until a set amount is given out instead of to all who qualify). Then he pairs that with requirements on federal housing money where municipalities must reduce zoning rules that block new housing. Obviously it’s difficult to know to what extent these policies will be exactly implemented, but if a policy even close to what Biden has proposed were to be passed, it would be a solid boon to economic growth. Moreover, it stands a good chance as it’s moderate and compromising where Trump’s housing policy.…isn’t.
Additional Issues
These issues are either where the candidates differ little, or conservatives don’t often prioritize so I’ve kept them short. Nonetheless, Biden retains an edge on these issues.
Climate Change
Many conservatives are skeptical of climate change. I found a view articulated by Russ Roberts, host of EconTalk, to be illuminating. Like nuclear war or pandemics, climate change is a risk with unknown probability. Rather than binary choice of preparing for it or not, our climate policy should weight the various catastrophic effects with the probabilities. Even if conservatives find the most dire climate predictions unlikely, some action is likely warranted under standard economic theory; negative externalities like pollution ought to be taxed. And as we’ve seen this year, it’s bad policy to shirk preparations until the catastrophe is already upon you.
Carbon taxes with offsetting tax cuts seem pretty straightforward. The Paris Climate agreement also seemed like an easy win, with countries setting their own targets. Trump’s withdrawal from this agreement seems to involve no policy calculation whatsoever since the agreement wasn’t binding anyway.
Biden’s plan is a bit aggressive for my take. It goes beyond taxing externalities and into specific government spending. Of course, Donald Trump has spent boatloads of money and would likely continue that trend. Biden spending money on green energy doesn’t seem any worse than Trump spending money on…everything. Donald Trump’s plan to do nothing about climate change seems more negative.
Fed Independence
This hasn’t turned out to be much of an issue as the Fed has been extremely active this year and we have yet to see inflation rise. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s continued insistence that the Fed cut interest rates even as the economy was well below 5% unemployment was clearly political rather than based on any actual economic theory. This should be condemned as bad policy. Central banking should remain independent and not subject to the whims of populist rulers unless you want to be Venezuela.
Trade
Trade can have large positive impacts on the world, although trade barriers had been pretty low. The highest impact policies would be to use trade to improve relations with liberal countries and tie economic success of the U.S. to a broad liberal coalition to counter China. This is what the TPP and TTIP were, both abandoned by Trump. This is bad, free market conservatives should oppose Trump here, but Biden is not particularly free trade either.
Criminal Justice and the War on Drugs
I listed this as a large and important issue in May. However, the extent to which Trump and Biden differ on drug legalization is small. Both have expressed some interest in decriminalizing marijuana. I’m slightly more inclined to believe Biden as he has stayed with the median of the democratic party, which has largely embraced the issue, meanwhile Trump has been president for four years and done little. In overall criminal justice, democrats have as slight edge. Biden has expressed moderate views in the face of radical segments of his party, calling for reform, but also opposing calls to defund the police. Trump’s rhetoric has been rather aggressively anti-reform, but his actual policy actions seem to be small.
Counterpoints
Taxes
Joe Biden wants higher taxes than Trump. I’m against this. But I remain more positive on Biden than on Trump because of the relative weight of issue impacts. Joe Biden is not suggesting a systemic reinvention of taxation where billionaires are banned, but rather a higher level of taxation than before. I don’t know the exact details, but I would guess this would cost the American economy hundreds of billions, possibly a trillion dollars over four years. That’s pretty bad, but in a moment I’ll do a cost-benefit analysis and see how it compares.
Healthcare
I think conservatives have a strong case that Trump is better than Biden on healthcare policy, given conservative policy preferences. However, the differences are small. Trump had the opportunity to overhaul the healthcare system with a united Republican government in 2017. He provided no leadership and accomplished nothing except the repeal of the individual mandate on people who did not purchase insurance; that’s fine, but the problems in American healthcare are systemic and remain.
Joe Biden would not institute the aggressive Medicare-for-all plans of Bernie Sanders, but instead wants to create a public option. This is not a free market approach, but could actually be a good starting point to disentangle healthcare from employment. A Republican compromise that added a public option for people to buy while also reducing the mandates on what coverage employers have to provide to employees could get more people covered while also reducing reliance on employment for healthcare (which never made any sense anyway and distorts the labor market). Nonetheless, Trump could obviously try and make headway on such a system without the public option and without Biden as president, but he hasn’t. He’s mostly ignored this issue for several years.
Overall, for conservatives, I think the options are either doing nothing with a currently broken system, or see slightly worse reforms that tend to go in the wrong direction, but won’t be the end of the world. Compared to the vast differences in foreign policy, COVID-19 management, immigration, and housing policy, this just doesn’t make a dent on the enormous lead Biden has on Trump.
Justices
This is likely Trump’s biggest strength compared to Biden, however, there are some mitigating circumstances. The major one is that there are no conservative justices poised to retire soon. Clarence Thomas is 72, but many justices retire after 80. Another is that Supreme Court justices aren’t nearly as partisan as other members of the government. Many cases are decided unanimously, and many justices commonly rule against their “party” to uphold precedent. When justices do split, it’s not always clear what the lines will be. Gorsuch and Sotomayor are both strong proponents of 4th Amendment protections despite being appointed by different parties. Anthony Kennedy, despite being appointed by Reagan, was part of the majority in Kelo v New London. This ruled that state governments could seize private property and give it to private developers, which, and I can’t emphasize this enough, was outrageous. 45 states eventually passed legislation banning Kelo-like eminent domain seizures.
Which brings up another point: Congress can make laws. Remember all the debate about the Supreme Court ruling whether the President could implement his immigration bans in 2017? None of that would have mattered if Congress had simply clarified the law, and Republicans held both chambers! The level of intensity we have dedicated to Supreme Court appointments is encouraged by Congress’ inaction. We can either respond by pushing harder on court appointments, or we can respond by focusing on Congress!
Yes, appointing good justices matters, and Neil Gorsuch is an excellent justice! But we overemphasize the importance in Supreme Court nominations, and compared to the other issues that are costing thousands of American lives, this issue isn’t enough for Trump.
The Big Picture
When it comes down to it, Biden’s tax policy is not what I want, but it’s not going to have a lasting impact on the economy. Future Republican presidents can come in and fix marginal tax rates. Trump’s housing policy will cause long term harm relative to Biden’s. The reduction in cost of living for Americans if we can properly regulate construction of new homes in cities far outweighs any tax cut and brings in network effects on American cities. Cities are the currency of the economy. To see how behind we are, look at Tokyo where in 2018 more housing units were added than in New York, Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles combined. Trump wants that trend to continue, Biden doesn’t.
Add in Trump’s growth-crushing legal immigration policy, and the choice is even more stark.
Healthcare is another area where I don’t endorse Biden’s policy. But as stated, Trump has essentially nothing to offer here despite being president for four years. From a conservative perspective, at worst, Biden could implement a public option. Note however, this leaves private insurance completely intact. There is simply not a systemic risk conservatives should worry about. U.S. healthcare already has tons of government interventions and increasing government spending in healthcare 20% isn’t good, but it’s not going to be the end of America. It will put a strain on federal government finances, but Trump has consistently demonstrated that he does not care about that issue at all.
On the other hand, Trump’s actual policy when it comes to an actual pandemic has literally resulted in 200,000 dead Americans. Again, not all of this is on Trump, but it seems plausible that his downplaying of the virus, his bungling of agency responses, and his actual rallies during the pandemic has resulted in avoidable deaths. We cannot risk another catastrophe.
Finally, there’s the question of justices. To me this seems most comparable to the long term future concerns from the Greater Power Relations section. Both issues are concerning because of their impact on the trajectory of the long term future, but one is simply much higher stakes than the other. How the U.S. manages our relationship with China determines the course of human history in this century. If we screw it up badly, millions of lives are on the line. On the other hand, if Biden is elected, he might replace Stephen Breyer with another liberal leaning justice, and as stated previously, the overall impact here is smaller than most conservatives make it out to be.
I’ve detailed the importance of how we manage geopolitics and the dangers inherent on the global stage today as they impact the long term future. Arms races are extraordinarily dangerous, and in the future humanity’s weapons will only get more powerful. Trump has not managed geopolitics well. When the COVID-19 catastrophe hit, he was again subpar and his policy was not up the task of protecting Americans. Add in his poor economic policy on housing and immigration, throw in even a fleeting concern about climate change, and the evidence against Trump’s policies in favor of Biden’s is overwhelming.
Of course, I haven’t even got to some of the most devastating critiques of Trump, since I specifically tried to avoid discussions outside of policy. However, next post, I do want to cover, if it’s even possible, all of the Trump administration’s vast corruption, gross incompetence, authoritarian acts, and his divisive and polarizing approach to politics. I think much of this “extracurricular” activity matters a great deal even though some Trump supporters may brush it aside as trolling or just politics. But even if I’m wrong, Trump’s policy record is terrible enough on its own.
A Note on the LP Candidate
I didn’t want to take too much away from the more outcome oriented discussion of the Trump and Biden, one of whom is going to win the November election. However, as I noted in my last post, many readers will not be voting in a swing state, and so may be interested in the Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen.
Her policies do reasonably well on my list of issues (not very surprising on a blog about libertarianism and politics), and since non-swing state voters have essentially no chance to impact the election, libertarian leaning voters could cast their ballot for someone they actually like without worrying about electing the worse major party candidate. Very briefly, she hasn’t impressed on the issues of great power relations and catastrophic risks, two important issues. These tend not be libertarian strengths, so that makes sense, although I maintain they are key to the long term future of the world and the U.S.
On executive power, immigration, trade, criminal justice, and taxes, Jorgensen is reiterating the standard LP positions, which are generally pretty good as far as this libertarian leaning blog is concerned. I am surprised by her lack of discussion of housing deregulation (at least I couldn’t find anything) given it’s such a key issue, as standard libertarian positions should be positive here. On healthcare, I would take more incremental steps than she would. Overall, if you’re libertarian leaning and you don’t live in a swing state, I think voting for Jorgensen or Biden are defensible positions. If you want to learn more about Jorgensen’s positions, check out her ISideWith page and website.
This post is a discussion of the U.S. voting system and the implications for strategic voting. The general conclusions are:
You should vote if the election is competitive
You should spend time researching candidates in competitive elections
In competitive elections, identified differences in policies between major party candidates makes it worth voting for a major party and not a third party
This includes smaller elections, but may not include voting for president as many states are uncompetitive
Soon I will be discussing in depth specific presidential candidates, but this post does not contain any endorsements and instead contains all the other information you might want to consider before actually researching and ranking candidates.
There’s a lot of extensive calculations doing the cost-benefit analysis, so it may be more interesting to skip around to the sections you find most interesting.
Why Do We Vote?
Harder and Krosnick (2008) suggest a variety of reasons people vote, some of which take into account cost-benefit analysis elements like the ease of registering to vote, strong differences in preferences of candidates, and the closeness of elections. They also identify many other qualities associated with voting which seem to be unrelated to the actual election, like voter demographics (education level, age, race, marital status), feelings of duty, and civic organization membership.
Generally speaking, I think most people vote by trying to select the “best” candidate through their personal lens, and they often ignore strategic voting. In contrast, I would like to cautiously advocate thinking about voting more in terms of a cost-benefit or “rational” approach.
I think voting analysis should be done in a more rigorous, forward-looking way because this approach forces a much deeper interaction with the democratic system (and the problems inherent with it). If we keep our interaction with the system relatively shallow and devoid of analysis, we can’t fix major problems that govern the voting rules themselves. It can also lead to tribalism and groupthink when actual solutions require significant problem solving and nuance.
I was inspired to think about this recently when a friend asked who I planned to cast my presidential vote for, especially since I’ve talked about third parties in the past. I responded that I hadn’t thought much about who I’d personally vote for, since I live in an extremely uncompetitive state. She surprisingly disregarded this point, and asked more pointedly who I was going to vote for. The implication seemed to largely be tribal signalling; what mattered is that we’re all on the right side, not whether our actions are actually effective.
I think this way of viewing the political system is relatively common and generally bad. Everyone has nuanced views shaped by their perspective, experience, background, etc. We should strive to create a political system with robust voting (like approval voting or score voting!) that is able to capture lots of information from voters, instead of what it currently does which is allow many ballots to be purely signalling.
However, in this blog post, I’ll be taking our troubled electoral system as is, and assume that I am unlikely to change it today, or to convince many other people to change their thinking about the electoral system. Given what we know about how ballots will be cast, what should I (and my relatively small base of readers) do to strategically maximize the payoffs in this nationwide election?
Should you vote at all?
I detailed a lot of issues with the American electoral system in the last post: uncompetitive elections, bad voting systems, gerrymandering, etc. Given all of that, whether to vote at all is an important question! Voting requires time and effort, time that could be spent in other ways that improve the world. Many libertarians don’t vote, pointing out that the chances of your vote deciding an election are minuscule. But this excellent paper (Edlin, Gelman, Kaplan 2007) makes a rigorous case for why they should.
The “waste of time” argument can be compared to arguments against playing the lottery. Yes, the payoffs if you were to cast the deciding vote in a tied election are huge, just like winning the lottery could be life-changing. Yet, you are unlikely to win the lottery. Edlin et al take this argument head on, modeling it using this equation:
Utility is the term we’re using to describe whether voting is worth it
p is the probability of changing the election outcome
B is the benefit from voting
c is the cost of voting
Basically, if the benefit of deciding the election (i.e. winning the lottery) times the chance of changing the election (the election is tied until you vote) is higher than the cost of voting, we should vote. Unfortunately, p is absurdly small. It’s proportional to the total number of voters, and it’s not uncommon for many of our elections to include hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters. There’s also the issue that many elections are uncompetitive. Thus this modified equation from the paper:
n is the total number of voters
K is based on the closeness of the election (it’s the inverse of the expected percentage margin of victory). It reflects what fraction of the vote is actually “swing voters”.
More on K, for most competitive elections where we expect our candidate to get between 45-55% of the vote, K would be about 10. It is inverse to how close we expect the spread to be, so if polling indicates the candidates are within the margin of error (the closest possible election we could measure), we expect K to peak at around 25 (indicating a 4% margin of error). As elections become more of a blowout, K trends towards 1. But even if the election is close, and you estimate thousands of dollars difference in payoff between the candidates, the number of voters, n is a major problem as it quickly erases any chance of you actually affecting the outcome. Note if you add in the benefits of your family or future children, it’s not going to help much as this number is fixed and small, while the total number of voters is often in the millions.
Ok, so now the good news: the paper points out that the vast majority of voters care about what happens to the country, not just themselves. It is true that for voters completely uninterested in everyone else’s well-being, there is no reason to vote in most cases. But if you take into account the wider social benefits, then voting is often beneficial:
Here, we’ve exchanged capital B for Nɑb, where:
B was the total benefit
b is the benefit per person
ɑ is the amount you discount others’ benefits compared to your own
N is the total population of the jurisdiction of the election
N is usually a lot larger than the actual number of voters n, but the ratio of N/n depends on the jurisdiction versus the voters. For a gubernatorial election, it’s probably ~2.5, but for a congressional election, N is the whole country, while n is only your state or district. This is looking pretty good now.
There’s not much guidance of ɑ since it’s really up to the person, although the paper uses an example of ɑ = 0.1. How valuable is it to you that random strangers are $100 better off? Most people give some to charity and so clearly ɑ is something, but intuitively it doesn’t seem to be 1 since that would imply you’re indifferent between keeping all your money and giving it to a stranger. Sometimes there are “matching” charity drives, but those don’t necessarily seem more successful than regular charity, so that might imply ɑ < 0.5. The the rest of this post, we’ll use 0.1 and K=10, since those seem like reasonable assumptions and so that these terms will cancel out. Feel free to recalculate with your own values.
The Close Elections Assumption
Close elections are doing a lot of heavy lifting in this model. For the remainder of the post, I’ll be assuming that the election being discussed is close, but I should note, this actually isn’t that common. Most incumbents are handily reelected, and 34 states are at 90% or higher to vote for one presidential candidate or another a couple months before the election. There are a variety of ways to check if an individual election is actually close, and this should always be the first step before even checking out the costs and benefits of an election. They include prediction markets like PredictIt or Betfair. We’ll discuss the electoral college more directly, including swing states, later in this post, but larger elections for senator and governor might have prediction markets which can tell you when to expect a blowout. For House races, there are some prediction markets for very competitive races, but another good resource is the Cook Political Report which categorizes House races as “solid”, “likely”, “leans”, and “tossups”.
Resources for local elections for state legislature are harder to come by. Historical data can be helpful to lookup an incumbent, but sometimes this information just isn’t available. If anyone has any good advice on how to gather information for local elections, please send it to me on Twitter or leave a comment. I would love to expand this section.
K means we still shouldn’t vote in blowout elections, N/n we will address at each election, and now we just need to calculate b and c.
Costs
This isn’t straightforward, but we can estimate the cost c based on a few variables, resulting in a range for most people from an hour to a few hours. If we take the median U.S. wage of ~$20, that’s $20-$60, although since I would hope that my readership would have really high time valuations (OTOH the length of this post clearly indicates I have too much free time), that might push this range more like $50-$150. This cost of voting includes the time and effort to register to vote, research the candidates, and fill out the ballot.
Registration time costs can vary wildly. You might already be registered as most DMVs will ask if you want to register while you’re there. But if you’ve moved since your last DMV visit, you often have to fill out a form and mail it in. Finding the forms, filling it out, mailing it, etc is going to cost some time, although if you don’t move again before the next election, you can split that cost across several election cycles. If you don’t have an ID at all because you don’t drive, your state might require an entire trip to the DMV (although voter ID laws vary). I’d estimate such a situation would likely triple the cost of just voting and research time. Next, research is essential if we are going to count the social benefits b towards reasons we should vote. Obviously, we all approach politics with our own biases and viewpoints. However, I think I can still advocate for a systematic approach, trying to find the issues that have the broadest impact on the world and then comparing the candidates on those specific issues. Voting itself doesn’t take too long especially if you can request an absentee ballot which I would have recommended even before the pandemic.
Candidate research has challenges; it can be difficult to track down candidate positions. If candidates haven’t held office before, they have no record to look up, and you’re left sifting through their vague campaign websites, tweets, or speeches. You could rely on party affiliation, but that may not map well onto issues you care about. Even if you do generally prefer generic Republicans over Democrats or vice versa, a cursory lookup of each candidate is vital, as you never know when an extremist or controversial candidate could slip by, trying to ride party affiliation to office.
National or statewide races tend to be less costly in research terms since you might already be somewhat familiar with the candidates and any differences they have, so I would expect this model to support voting in more prominent races more unambiguously. This is a change from how I thought about voting in the past.
For the rest of the post, I’m going to use $300 as the cost for voting because it seems likely to be far higher than the actual cost for most people; if we can show voting (in close elections) makes sense at this cost, we’ll have shown it for the vast majority of readers.
Benefits
That covers the costs of voting, what about the payoffs? The bottom line is that the government in the U.S. is pretty large. With a fiscal budget of trillions of dollars, even small changes can have large payoffs. This means that for most (competitive) federal elections, it’s almost always worth it to vote. State officials depend on the state budget and impact of state laws, but they too are often worth voting in.
There is, of course, uncertainty in this model. For single executive positions like President and Governor, we can be reasonably sure of policy differences which we might be able to quantify. For example, Trump has significantly reduced legal immigration into the country, while Biden has opposed this move. Legal immigrants are quite likely to start businesses and pay taxes, and so the order of magnitude difference in benefits from this Biden policy over Trump is at least in the tens of billions of dollars. Of course, immigrants can start major companies that have huge impacts on the country, like Google, eBay, and Tesla. These second order effects start to complicate how long it takes us to research candidates and compare across many issues, and with the higher research costs, the higher the benefits have to be to justify all this work.
So we’ve got uncertainty in how well we can quantify any specific policy issue, but we also are uncertain about which policies will be important; most people didn’t know terrorism was going to be presidential issue a year after the 2000 election, nor pandemics four years after the 2016 election.
Nonetheless, the following sections explore best estimates we can make about prospective candidates and incumbents to see if voting is worth the effort, given some reasonable assumptions. Moreover, with the cost of voting we calculated of $300, we only have to believe there is a difference in payoff between candidates of a few hundred dollars per capita for voting to be clearly worth it. These sections are pretty dense showing the work, so feel free to read as much or as little as seems interesting before moving on to the section about uncompetitive elections.
Governor
We can reach the $300 threshold most simply for gubernatorial elections. As stated earlier, to calculate the benefits side of the equation we can cancel out K and ɑ, leaving us N*b/n. Gubernatorial elections are simpler because N is the population of the state and n is the number of voters of a state (in e.g. Senate elections N is the whole county while n depends on each state so the ratio varies widely). The ratio of population to voters is between two and three for governor races, so I’m calling it 2.5. With c=$300, dividing that by 2.5 yields b>$120 for Net Utility to be positive. Meaning we only have to see a difference of $120 in expected per capita benefit between gubernatorial candidates for it to make sense to vote (and probably that’s too high).
Can we do that? Here is a list of U.S. states with their accompanying budgets, including per capita budgets. $120 per capita is lower than 6% of the budget of all states. I suspect different governors can result in 6% of the budget going to different places. Additionally, state governments also pass plenty of non-fiscal legislation which won’t show up on our budgetary calculations, but is likely a major part of whatever gubernatorial candidates run on. I’d argue that reaching a $120 per person difference in expected outcomes between two candidates is pretty doable if the election is competitive.
Finally, note that similar logic applies to all state officials that run in statewide races.
House
For legislative elections, uncertainty becomes much worse, as there is additional complications introduced when legislators are part of a much larger body.
If we take the cost of voting as conservatively high at $300, then we just need the benefits of voting to be higher than that, even if figuring out the actual benefits is hard. Again this is down to Nb/n. N here is the whole country, so it’s easier to combine it with b to create the full benefit for the whole country of one House candidate winning over the other. That’s what we’re trying to find out. n is the number of voters in a House district. It varies, but is usually between 200,000 and 400,000. Worst case scenario is 400,000. In this worst case then, Nb, the total benefit of a candidate winning has to be greater than $120 million.
Can we convince ourselves that a House seat is worth more than that? I think we can do a clever lower bound estimate on how valuable a House seat is by looking at single-margin House votes over a two year period since that’s the length of a term.
Thinking through this problem: half the time a close vote goes the way you want, and half the time it doesn’t. Additionally, ties count as failures to pass, so changing a two-vote bill passage to a tie counts as a flip, but a two-vote defeated bill that turns into a tie is still defeated. You can take a look at my data and script here, but it’s not an exact science. I’m not checking whether these votes are actual final passage, discussions of House rules, rules of debate, or even if it’s actually a 3/5 vote that just happens to fail with a tie. In fact, the data source I’m using called voteview seems to have some inaccurate data compared to the House website, so any conclusions we take should be ballpark estimates. Nonetheless, since 1991, I find we would only expect a flipped House seat to change a couple votes a year. In a two year term, we’ll call it one to four votes. Maybe there are a few more that are simply not seen in this data set, but I would be surprised if there were more than say…10 per term.
So what does this mean? The sheer size of the federal budget means even small changes can have large payoffs; even a hundredth of a percent of the federal budget would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Individual legislators can submit amendments to fiscal bills which could change a hundredth of a percent of the budget. But since the amendments process is strongly controlled by House leadership, it’s hard to say how much power there really is at the individual legislator level. There are also non-fiscal bills whose fate is much more in the balance; a single failed vote could mean they never pass at all (examples might include Obamacare or free trade agreements).
Essentially, this is a fat-tailed scenario (the average is dominated by outliers). Most of the time, I’d guess your representative doesn’t cast deciding votes, and those deciding votes aren’t on interesting things. But every once in a while, they likely stick in an amendment or pass a bill that has a massively outsized impact that far exceeds the $120 million threshold. Still, I should admit that this is tricky .
Obviously, if the House majority were in the balance, that would pretty quickly explode the benefits of a House election, as your vote for your representative would contribute to your preferred party holding the House, assuming you prefer one party over the other. For full calculations, check Footnote 1, but it would significantly outweigh the costs discussed if the House were in the balance (this year it appears it is not).
There’s a lot of uncertainty. Quantification of policies is hazy at best, and it’s also very difficult to predict individual candidate’s actual votes or which votes will actually happen. I think future research in this area should explore situations where important issues are entirely ignored by candidates (or by Congress), as reasoning here is hard. Nonetheless, important policy differences likely exist and so it makes sense to undertake the cost of researching candidates in close House elections.
Related: I would really appreciate a website that lists every close vote so voters can look up their representative and see (A) if these votes were important and (B) whether they agree with the way in which their representative voted.
I am least confident in this section’s calculations, but assuming risk aversion of outlier scenarios (or the House being in the balance), I think we’ve gathered enough evidence that the better candidate winning would result in more than $120 million dollar difference.
Senate
Similar “close votes” logic can be applied to the Senate, although it’s complicated with the Vice President who can break ties. You can see some of the methodology discussion in Footnote 2.
Again, the methodology is rough, and I haven’t been able to count cloture votes which are often important, as well the fact that we are overcounting actual close votes, since some of these are listed as 51-49 when in reality they were cloture votes which needed 60 ayes and they weren’t close at all. I count something like ~6 votes flipped per year if you flip a Senate seat. At 6 year terms, that’s ~36 votes flipped per election, but again, this is an overestimate of close votes, but an underestimate of cloture votes. At best this gives us an order of magnitude estimate. There is another source of uncertainty when senators vote against their party, which I found slightly more common in the Senate than the House, so keep that in mind as well (538 has some data on that here).
Looking up close votes, it’s clear they vary a lot in importance. The latest roll call vote I could actually find that was a single vote victory (roll call 51) was an amendment adding boilerplate language to the joint resolution to prevent the US from attacking Iran without congressional authorization. Flipping this vote seems like it’d have no impact on anyone’s life. Roll call 30 is much more interesting. In it, 47 democrats, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney voted to subpoena John Bolton for the senate trial of the president. The vote failed as 51 Republicans voted against it. Here, clearly an additional democratic vote would have been large in revealing whatever John Bolton would have said, although likely would have remained far short of the 67 votes needed to remove him from office.
Generally speaking, I think we can say there are more close votes in the Senate due to being a smaller chamber and having six year terms instead of two. Additionally the Senate also has more responsibility in major appointments. I estimate 4-10x as many close votes and more important votes. However, the number of voters in a Senate race varies massively since districts are not population adjusted like in the House. For example, the 2018 California Senate election had 11 million votes, while the Wyoming Senate election had only 200,000, basically equivalent to a House district. Of course, we should note that the Wyoming Senate election wasn’t close and the California senate seat wasn’t that close either, and even then it was between two Democrats so the difference in payoff was likely smaller than between a Republican and Democrat. Here’s a worst case scenario for Senate benefits in California. Again, were looking for Nb as that’s the benefit to the entire country of a Senate seat flipping:
That’s $3.3 billion. Can we find that in close Senate votes over six years? I think so. Unlike highly variable and rare House votes, we can usually guarantee at least one close vote will happen on an important topic. $3.3billion is less than a percent of non-military discretionary spending, so this seems plausible.
Our conclusions are similar to the House elections. In close elections, it makes a lot of sense to vote even though there is going to be a lot of uncertainty in what votes elected officials will actually face and even what their position could be. Voters in smaller states with close Senate elections have the largest expected payoffs. If you’re uncertain about which candidate is better because of previously mentioned issues with candidates ignoring your primary issues or split among important ones, close Senate elections in small states are probably worth the time to sit down and try and do some estimations of each candidate and policy payoffs.
The Electoral College
I wrote about the implications of the electoral college for third parties in 2016. This year’s post on strategic voting is an elaboration on that model, so even though I’ve taken a slightly different editorial position, the implications for president are similar. It all comes down to the K variable we’ve been using. I’ve had to preface every recommendation with the fact that the election must be close, because even Edlin at al don’t say there’s a positive payoff to vote if the election is already decided.
This most often asserts itself in the presidential election with the electoral college. The way to think about this idea is the “Tipping Point Jurisdiction”. If we listed every state in order by (Trump percentage) – (Biden percentage), and then added up the number of electoral votes, the state that puts either one above 270 is the tipping point. In 2016, this was Wisconsin. Even though Michigan was closer in percentage points, Clinton would have needed to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and then Wisconsin to get 270 electoral votes. In 2000, this was famously Florida. Your vote for president is only decisive if cast in the Tipping Point Jurisdiction.
Here is a prediction market for chances of any state becoming the Tipping Point state. Because of PredictIt’s fee structure, these probabilities are slightly inflated, and I wouldn’t trust much in a market below 5% to reflect what bettors actually thought. Additionally, it’s still relatively early in the election cycle, so we’d expect more certainty as we get closer to election day.
This isn’t meant to be a projection, but just a snapshot that we can use. Even today, two months before the election we’re 90% sure that one of these states will be the tipping point state. The payoff equation for these swing states is pretty clear:
Nb is again going to be the full benefit to the country (actually, I guess the world?) if one candidate is president compared to another.
n is the number of voters in your swing state
pt is going to be the chance your state is the tipping point jurisdiction, which is what table above shows
pm is the probability that the margin of the electoral college ends up being less than the electoral votes in your state.
These ideas are taken from this paper by Gelman, Silver, and Edlin. To get a rough estimate, we can use this prediction market, which suggests for most states pm is probably only 10-20%, although that could change as we get closer to election. We probably need a full table of probabilities, but here’s Florida’s calculations:
So if there’s a difference in the world of Biden being president over Trump of $76 billion, it’d be worth it to vote in Florida, although it’d be good to redo the calculations with updated numbers closer to election day. Can we get to that number by comparing Biden and Trump? I think so, but you’ll have to wait until my next blog post for the full discussion.
Additional Offices
I don’t have much to add here because advice becomes exceedingly hard to give. The math suggests that state legislator elections will actually scale marginally well since you have a much smaller pool of voters and thus your vote is worth more, precisely outweighing the loss of stakes when switching from federal to state elections. You can try to do the same trick I did earlier with small vote margins in state legislatures, and I’d be curious what you find. Many states are dominated by one party and so I can imagine fewer close votes, but I don’t know. However, as mentioned earlier, the costs to obtain good information might be much harder. Single office elections like Mayor seem much more likely to be easier to calculate benefits and compare candidates.
But What If It’s Not Close?
The short answer is: don’t worry about uncompetitive elections.
The longer answer is: there might be a couple marginal reasons to vote. For example, in presidential elections, ballot access for third parties often depends on small thresholds for third party votes, like 2% or 5%. These might be achievable if you prefer third parties and live in a non-swing state. This is likely what I will personally do, as I live in an uncompetitive state, and tend to favor libertarian candidates.
Also, a quick note on personal enjoyment; some people really like voting. I’ve eschewed psychological reasoning in the rest of this post, but we can’t ignore that a sense of duty or tribal fervor could also be a benefit you get that outweighs the cost of waiting in line or filling out registration forms. The reason I only include those benefits in this section is that unlike benefits from policy, these psychological benefits do not accrue to your fellow citizens. In close elections what should motivate our actions is what would actually improve the world.
When it comes to Donald Trump, there have been predictions and accusation by Obama and Trump of election engineering that could occur during this election. This is concerning. If you strongly support or oppose Donald Trump, it may be worth it to vote even in uncompetitive states to push the popular vote total in your direction in the hopes of making the vote such a rout that a constitutional crisis is impossible. I’m unsure to what extent this will matter in the case of a contested election compared to election results in swing states, but The Economist thinks a decisive popular vote could assure an uneventful transition of power. In swing states, I recommend voting for a major party anyway.
Third Parties in Close Elections
In perhaps a disappointment for my libertarian skewing readership, it only makes sense to vote for third parties in elections that aren’t close. For good or bad, there are tons of uncompetitive elections, and I think third parties, and the Libertarian Party in particular should continue to target those elections. In gerrymandered districts where single party rule dominates, they have a chance to become a real “second party”. The payoff of who is in government is actually really high, and so on expectation, it makes sense to choose a specific major party candidates when both have a chance to win.
That doesn’t mean you can’t advocate for voting reform (reminder that approval voting is on the ballot in St. Louis this year!), or call your senator, or donate money to libertarian causes, it just means that some elections matter and you can have real impact by deciding the winner.
Footnotes
Footnote 1: House majority calculations. If you see strong differences between Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy deciding which legislation is brought to the floor, that could potentially be worth tens of billions of dollars, maybe even $100 billion. I’m doubtful it would be worth much more than that though, as this is only one chamber of one branch of government. And of course, if you’re a libertarian who disagrees with much of what both Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy believe, then such differences in majority control are smaller. The analysis here would be like a second order election on top of your vote for local congressman. Assuming House majority control is in the balance in the election (this year, it doesn’t appear to be), you’d need to add another term to our equations to account for smaller probability of your representative casting the deciding vote for Speaker. We’d thus multiply by an additional K/n where K=10 and n=435 for all House members.
We’ll cancel out K and α, Nb is the full benefit of a certain party being in control, n= between 200,000-400,000 for most House districts. The second fraction KH/nH = 0.023. Overall, this works out to ~$5000 ballpark estimate for a $50B difference in majority control. Obviously, this would make it worth it to vote in House elections, although again, that’s not likely to be on the table in this election.
Footnote 2: Senate calculations. The Vice president acts like an extra Senator. So if the VP is someone you agree with, you can take that into account (or vice versa). But if there’s uncertainty (for example, we don’t know who will be Vice President in 2021), you can estimate that half the time the VP votes in your interests. The other half of the time your “side”, however you define that, loses the vote. An extra senator would flip those votes because the tie would be broken before the VP votes (i.e. the VP could break a tie against your side if it’s 50-50, but doesn’t get a chance to if the vote is 51-49). I downloaded Senate vote data here and looked at votes from 1991 on. You can find my code and data here.
This is the first post in a series on the 2020 U.S. election. The next post will likely be on strategic voting in the U.S. electoral system. But before we get there, this is a short biennial plea to remind you that the current way the U.S. conducts elections and government is not the only way. While you may not always be able to reform the electoral system while you are voting from inside it, sometimes opportunities can arise, and it should always be in the back of our mind.
All democracies have drawbacks of some kind, but the American electoral system seems to have a lot of issues, many of them fixable. I’ve had a lot to say about the issue (and more, and even more).
I’m not just talking about the electoral college, although yes, that is a problem (some good critiques here). Our use of first past the post voting is the worst of all possible voting systems. I’ve often advocated Approval Voting but there are many good alternatives. Nonetheless, all voting systems will trend towards two parties under winner-take-all single member districts like we have today. We might consider multi-member districts, although discussion about such an idea is essentially nonexistent. Worse still, House districts are gerrymandered to create uncompetitive elections. Perhaps you’d hope other parties might be able to enter into uncompetitive elections, but ballot access laws place barriers to entry to alternative parties, sometimes costing thousands of dollars to obtain signatures just to get on the ballot, while requirements are waived for Republicans and Democrats. This also makes it generally more difficult for alternative voting coalitions to arise.
Unfortunately, many general election races are already decided before you even consider who to vote for in November. So perhaps we should focus on voting in primaries as the way to exercise your right to vote? Sadly, primaries themselves have many issues: they also use first past the post, they have an extremely narrow electorate, and their structure incentivizes ignoring moderates because they either can’t vote or are split between the primaries of the two parties. Even if you know of a competitive primary in a state where the general won’t be close (for example, Republicans usually win in the deep south, but the Republican primary might be competitive), in many states you have to either be registered with that party (or sometimes independent) in order to vote in that party’s primary. That often means you have to spend time changing your voter registration while predicting ahead of time whether the primary will be close. Each state is different, so this can be a major headache trying to cast an actual decisive vote. Note, that there are plenty of good primary reform ideas as well; St. Louis Approves is campaigning for a simple blanket primary with approval voting, with the top vote-getters going on the general election.
So far we’ve covered a lot of voting issues and possible reforms, but I want to also emphasize that there are important democratic channels outside of pure voting. For example, voting provides no feedback for specific legislation, so representatives don’t receive direct electoral feedback about how they are voting. A better way to express opinions here would be to call legislators’ offices and complain directly. Note legislators will probably only care if you are a voter, but not that you spent any actual time and effort to research who you were voting for. We’ll revisit that in the next post.
Legislative institutions also have major impact on how policy becomes law, and they have their own problems. Representatives in the House have very little ability to offer amendments on most legislation, which is instead crafted by House leadership from the top down. This discourages broadly popular coalitions in favor of partisan priorities. Moreover, Congress has continually ceded power to the president, which hypercharges the importance of the imperial presidency. This results in division and every presidential election being a winner-take-all high stakes competition. If Congress was powerful and moderate, much less would ride on every presidential election..
In conclusion: the median American voter this year will vote in a uncompetitive non-swing state in the electoral college, have an uncompetitive Senate and House election, and have uncompetitive state legislative elections about which they know very little. This is not great.
While most of us won’t have a chance yet to vote to improve our election system, it does seem like improvements are possible. And look out for my next post discussing more in depth the electoral landscape we will be facing this year.
It’s election season so it’s time to start talking electoral politics again. The Trump administration has been particularly successful in ignoring policy discussions in favor of political point scoring. This isn’t too surprising given Trump’s lack of consistent ideology, apart from perhaps opposition to free trade and immigration. Impeachment has also helped focus attention on Trump’s political situation rather than his policies or lack thereof. Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a strong non-policy case against Trump, and I think in particular Congressman Justin Amash has done an excellent job in articulating why Trump’s behavior is concerning.
However, I think there is also a policy-based critique of Trump. In order to properly make that case and compare Trump’s policies to Biden’s or other candidates, we must establish a foundation declaring which problems are most important, and what policies could be used to implement them. Criteria for these policy ideals include some utilitarian calculus, i.e., how to improve the lives of the most people in the largest way. Thus, the first of these policies is actually a meta-policy, a way to improve congressional power to pass laws and run the state. Changing the way we make policy can affect all of our future policy making.
Countering this interest in utilitarian idealism is a preference for some political feasibility; in other words, while I might prefer to emphasize revolutionary changes that significantly improve the country (changing all of our voting systems to approval voting or quadratic voting or switching taxation to be based on land value), I’ve left them off this list because they are not just unpopular, but in fact virtually never discussed. If you find a particular policy interesting, please follow the links in that section for additional policy discussion and details.
Finally, there is uncertainty here, and I’ll mention other policies that didn’t make this list at the end. Trying to filter major talking points out of a broader range of political ideas is difficult. Policies and political philosophies are interconnected, and where I’m drawing boundaries must be arbitrary. Nonetheless, these ideas should form a good basis for uniformly judging candidate policies.
Congressional Power
Any policy platform has to address the fact that our current system for governance, for crafting and enacting policy, is deeply flawed. We have uncompetitive and broken elections, we have bad ways of choosing candidates, and we have too much power in the executive branch. Executive authority compounds our problems by making each election a stark singular choice between polarized sides instead of a well rounded government built on a legislature with many interests represented. I can’t fix all of these in this policy platform, so improving the balance between the president and Congress seems like a good place to start.
The entire budget for the legislative branch, including congressional staff, offices, and congressional agencies like the GAO and CBO, is about $5 billion. Congress is then responsible for oversight and legislative action for the entire $5 trillion federal government. The CBO has a mere 250 person staff, and it can’t even research and score all Congressional bills. This is absolute insanity.
Congress needs to be able to wield its muscle. It should not be relying on executive branch bureaucracies as unbiased experts evaluating their own performance. It should have a better staffed research arm which can oversee all aspects of the massive American bureaucracy. Congressmen also need to have more and more policy-focused positions on their own staff, along with fewer committee assignments. National Affairs has an excellent in depth discussion of the thinking behind this brief overview. Legislators are currently underpaid amateurs who spend half their time outside of Washington focused on other things besides governance. This does not allow for knowledgeable congressional oversight of the federal government.
Cato also has some excellent ideas for strengthening Congress such as having a standing committee to review executive overreaches from statutory law, and forcing votes on major rules as implemented by regulators or bureaucrats. Other ideas include expanding the congressional calendar, making a new Congressional Regulatory Service to oversee the regulations made by independent and executive agencies, and requiring all civil asset forfeitures to be deposited into the Treasury to be spent by Congress, not the executive.
Unfortunately, even despite a recent impeachment trial this is simply not a major political issue in this year’s campaign, and no candidate is running with strengthening Congress as a priority. In fact, there are essentially no meta-policy ideas being floated. Yet ideas are not hard to come by!
Liberalizing Immigration
The U.S. immigration system is terrible (see section 8 here). It is esoteric, slow, and requires a complete overhaul. It should have a focus on a merit-based system rather than nation-of-origin and family ties as it does now. It should be simpler for high-skilled workers to be hired by American companies and it should definitely be easier for young workers, educated at excellent American colleges, to be hired by American companies and remain in the United States where they can pay tax dollars for decades.
Why is this so high up on the list?
This is a matter of national security. China is a growing power, but crucially, it cannot expand its influence or economy through immigration. The Chinese state has largely decided that ethnicity matters, and China is not seeking to create a multicultural amalgamation to improve the world, but rather a nationalist state. The U.S. isn’t restricted in this way; anyone can be an American. Immigrants are also more likely to start businesses and take risks. That means the most creative and ambitious people in the world can come to the United States and contribute to our culture, knowledge, technology, and wealth. Moreover, these remarkable people already want to come here. Increased dynamism and economic growth also makes the rest of our geopolitical challenges easier; it means the national debt is less of a burden, and national defense spending can be higher in absolute terms while costing less of a percentage of GDP.
This is also perhaps the best and simplest way to improve the world quickly. It’s extremely difficult to improve nations with poor institutions, yet people who struggle in developing nations can be immediately more productive if they are transplanted to the U.S. And of course many are quite willing to do so, uprooting their entire lives for a chance at the American Dream. We can pursue limitations on their access to public money, or a simple tax upon immigrating, but nonetheless we should be voting to improve the world in the most altruistic and nationalistic way possible: expanding legal immigration in order to make more Americans!
Federal Incentives to Build More Housing in U.S. Cities
This is a specific policy taken from the Niskanen Center’s Will Wilkinson. Cited on this blog before, he suggests giving federal money to urban areas that add large amounts of new housing stock. Why? Because American cities are absurdly expensive to live in, yet new housing is extremely difficult to develop due to overregulation and zoning laws.
The impact of our poor housing policy is enormous. Economists suggest housing constraints have lowered U.S. GDP by as much as a third over the last 50 years. Think about that. We could be missing a third of GDP because millions of people who wanted to move somewhere for a better job couldn’t find a place to live. It’s clear that the most productive areas in the U.S., especially cities like New York and San Francisco, are prohibitively expensive, keeping out potential new productive workers.
Wilkinson’s suggestion isn’t the only possible policy solution; another is to change zoning to be hyper local, composed by residents of a single street or city block. This would allow experimentation and innovation, instead of immovable local land interests which keep out future non-residents who can’t vote in today’s elections.
While the viable solutions are still up for the debate, the impact is clear: the lack of housing development in U.S. cities due to overregulation may be the single greatest barrier to economic growth, thus earning its inclusion on this short list of policies.
Decriminalization of All Drugs
Ever since Pete Buttigieg announced his support for this policy, I’ve had it circled for inclusion on this list. The War on Drugs has been a colossal failure, has not reduced drug use, and has radically increased prison populations. There have been extraordinary costs to the taxpayer in both civil liberties and assets. Massive application of state force has helped to give a monopoly in funding to the most bloodthirsty and gruesome organized criminal elements in the world, including terrorists. There have even been spillover effects as governments crack down on prescription pain killers, leaving patients in agony.
This policy is wrong morally, practically, and economically. It is not the place of the state to determine what substances informed adults can consume or inject. It is also abundantly clear the state has zero capability to halt the trade or consumption of drugs. Rather, enforcement of drug laws have bolstered a black market where information is asymmetric and scarce, endangering all involved. The only thing the state has succeeded in doing is making organized crime more financially viable. The resulting conflict in Mexico has killed over 150,000 people, making it one of the largest conflicts of the 21st century behind only the Iraq War, Syrian Civil War, and Darfur. It is this monstrous loss of human life as a result of changeable government policy that places this item so high on this list.
And of course it goes without saying that this massive assistance to organized crime is occurring at great financial cost. Estimates for enforcement, prosecution, incarceration, and military interventions are as high as $50 billion a year. State prohibition of private mutually consensual transactions also requires erosion of our rights in ways that frustrate measures of concrete financial cost. The ACLU notes extensive surveillance has been justified under the guise of drug enforcement while increasingly militarized police forces have abused their power to break into homes unannounced or preemptively shoot victims all in the name of stopping transactions among consenting adults. It’s time to end this failed policy.
Catastrophic Risk
It’s clear today that the federal government does not respond well to large disasters. Perhaps too much relies upon the whims of the executive who happens to be in power, but it seems likely that we could institutionalize better responses to catastrophic events. Yes, this includes pandemics, but also major earthquakes, solar flares, artificial intelligence, and even plans for averting nuclear war (for a more detailed analysis, read Toby Ord’s recent book, The Precipice).
This is a highly neglected problem and thus one of the highest impact policies we could undertake (climate change could go here, but it has not been quite as neglected a topic as other risks, so I’ve detailed it later). At the beginning of 2020, I would not have included this in the list of top policies, not because it was low impact, but simply due to the fact that it was not discussed as a major political issue. The failings of the federal government to respond to a deadly virus have pushed catastrophic risks into the mainstream. While the likelihood of any given catastrophe is low, it is the enormous impact of the tail-risk that should concern us; preparing now will mean the difference between devastation and mere hardship.
We should look to create public commissions to investigate our preparedness for various catastrophic events, identify what can be done now for relatively small budgets with larger payoffs when a disaster comes, and then pass legislation that enshrines this knowledge institutionally in ways that do not rely on the whims and competence of whomever happens to be president. It is vital that any commissions include our preparedness for other challenges besides pandemics; preparedness for unexpected events is not selected through democratic pressures, and perhaps this has resulted in our current difficult situation with COVID-19. It would be wise to use this opportunity to prepare not just for the next viral outbreak, but for other unlikely events as well.
Other Topics
There are arguments for inclusion of a lot more policies. I’ll run through several more quickly.
It matters a lot who the president appoints to the Federal Reserve, and that they are extensively qualified and independent. I’ve left it off of this list mostly because we’ve lucked out and it seems Trump’s appointments haven’t been that different from normal. When odd choices were floated, they were largely quashed. Independence is obviously still at risk with the president tweeting criticism of his own appointees, so this issue shouldn’t be overlooked, but given that I treat it like a pass/fail grade, we can reasonably hope this will be a “pass” for all candidates in 2020. I wish I could say that more definitively, but I can’t.
Healthcare is a huge part of the federal budget and has an outsized impact on the economy. We also don’t have great solutions, but this is another issue that could easily have made the list. The most important aspects are stopping reliance on employers providing health insurance (which makes it much harder for workers to take risks and switch jobs), and expanding coverage for the least well-off. How we do that is difficult to answer in such a small space, but I’m wary of radical changes that seek to quickly re-imagine the U.S. healthcare industry from the top down.
Climate change is a potentially expensive disaster waiting to happen. If the past months have taught us anything, waiting for disasters to happen is not the correct strategy. Instituting a small carbon tax seems like a good place to start. It can be refunded to taxpayers equally, or even made to incentivize carbon sequestration programs with refundable tax credits for carbon taken from the atmosphere.
Free trade has had a massive impact on reducing poverty worldwide, while also improving the economies of all countries around the world. There’s also some evidence for reduced chances of wars between important trading partners. Aligning American and Chinese commercial interests through trade will be a vital part of avoiding a war between these world powers. Free trade is also a vital vehicle for continuing the pattern of global poverty reduction seen in the last 30 years.
U.S. interventions in the Middle East have been one of the largest contributors to excess deaths from U.S. policy. Obviously there is high uncertainty over whether many conflicts would have continued even without American intervention, but that seems unlikely in at least a couple large instances (the Iraq War being the biggest one). U.S. support of regimes like Saudi Arabia also seems to show negative payoffs from a humanitarian calculus. It also does not seem that larger 21st century goals like opposing authoritarianism in China and avoiding large scale wars are served through Middle Eastern interventions.
Candidates’ Priorities Matter Too
While this is a nice policy platform, ultimately the goal is to judge candidates by their relationship with these policies.
A major problem for this approach of separating out policies isn’t that most people running for office oppose these positions, but that they might be indifferent or even positive on these high impact policies while still focusing on other completely radical ideas. Elizabeth Warren’s many proposals come to mind here. There are some meritorious critiques in Warren’s proposals; competition is vital to a well functioning market, and some of her ideas could enhance competition. But many are far more radical with, at best, unknown effects on competition and the economy generally. These include the eradication of private equity, the changing of corporate boards, and an unprecedentedly large wealth tax which could significantly curtail investment. If Warren scored highly on the top policies put forward here (she does alright on immigration, housing, and drug policy), how do we balance that with the relatively radical (and I’d argue unhelpful) economic proposals she made the centerpiece of her campaign?
Unfortunately, we have to take those points seriously and note that while I have tried to rank these policies in a somewhat utilitarian, impact- centered way (policies within the Overton Window that help the most people by the greatest amount), radical policies that backfire could have very high impacts that shove aside the ideas proposed here.
There is a lot of uncertainty that remains; some of these policies could be higher on the list, and I’ve likely excluded some that are high impact that have not yet occurred to me. Major policies could matter in the future that we just haven’t encountered. And of course these are only policy preferences; as noted in my last post, simple competency is an important factor as well. Despite all of these caveats, this an important step in laying a foundation of policy discussion and analysis against which we can measure candidates. Electoral politics is messy and tribal; discussions confound concise and consistent frameworks, but when they do swerve towards policy, these points should help form the questions that need to be asked.
Tyler Cowen kicked off this year with a heavily discussed blog post defining what he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism“.
I didn’t get it.
Cowen described a moderate libertarianism while adding the nebulous concept of “state capacity”, in particular noting that a capable or powerful state was different from a tyrannical state. I read the words, but I assumed he was describing a “left libertarianism“, where a typical position might be to push for the government to collect efficient taxes, and then distribute those to everyone via a basic income, and avoid otherwise messing in the economy. I’m open to engaging with something like that, but I didn’t grok how Cowen’s take was different or what this view offered.
And then there was the worst pandemic we’ve seen in the 21st century. Huge swaths of the American economy have been shut down, and this disease is still likely to kill the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of influenza fatalities in a single month. Pandemics are an obvious market failure scenario, with difficult to control externalities, and thus we have state institutions to deal with this and pick up the slack. They failed.
Policy Failures
I looked up my first tweet about COVID-19 (back then it was just novel coronavirus or nCoV). It was on January 30 in a reply to Robert Wiblin. My first standalone tweet was a few days later:
Interesting that @metaculus median predictions for total cases of 2019-nCoV by year end doubled over the last few days with no real new information. https://t.co/DBmjuXb0eJ
Now, I wasn’t warning people that this would be bad or telling people to start prepping. But it was certainly something occupying my mind, as I tweeted about it a dozen times in February. I did start mildly stockpiling food and household items starting in mid-February. Ultimately, I consider my actions to be a failure. I didn’t short the market (although I didn’t buy any index funds either), I didn’t warn enough of my close friends and family to start gathering supplies, and I didn’t advocate loudly for changes in government policy. I was partially concerned about looking alarmist, which in retrospect was a really silly thing to be concerned about.
Nonetheless, this blog is a hobby. I have a day job which isn’t concerned about government policy. My question is about the people whose day job is pandemic preparedness. If an anonymous blogger with a few hundred twitter followers can be concerned about a possible pandemic, then where were the people who are paid specifically to deal with this eventuality?
Why didn’t the CDC and FDA start a program to quickly approve new COVID testing in mid-February instead of mid-March? In an exponential growth situation, that is a long time. Why didn’t they start pushing hospitals to create new isolation wards in February? Why didn’t the CDC start putting together lists of events it strongly urged local governments to cancel when the first case appeared at local hospitals? Why did the NBA have to unilaterally suspend its season only after a player was diagnosed in March? Why was there confusion between who was in charge and what steps should be taken?
Beyond lack of distancing and lockdowns, there were several other failures. Firstly, the CDC created their own test which differed from previously used ones in the world. It was shipped to public labs around the country and…didn’t work. The FDA compounded the problem, disallowing any tests except the one the CDC had created. The University of Washington virology lab was able to create their own test and applied to the FDA for approval. The FDA said it couldn’t approve the test until the lab had demonstrated it wouldn’t return false positives for other dangerous coronaviruses. Perhaps this would be a good idea in more normal circumstances, but it was an asinine requirement if you were trying to head off a pandemic where every day saw exponential growth in a virus spreading across the country. The lab started using the test through a research loophole, but the story gets crazier:
Still, Greninger complied. He called the CDC to inquire about getting some genetic material from a sample of SARS. The CDC, Greninger says, politely turned him down: the genetic material of the extremely contagious and deadly SARS virus was highly restricted.
“That’s when I thought, ‘Huh, maybe the FDA and the CDC haven’t talked about this at all,’” […] “I realized, Oh, wow, this is going to take a while, it’s going to take several weeks.”
By this point, there were already over 50 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and still, nobody but the CDC was permitted to conduct testing.
It was on February 28th, a full 8 days after the UW virology lab had applied for their test to the FDA, that the agency finally allowed other tests besides the CDC’s. Of course, most other labs hadn’t started making a test yet. What a disaster.
What’s interesting to me about the testing fiasco was its independence from President Trump. I think Trump is a bad leader, incompetent, unintelligent, a bad judge of character, and has terrible policies, but ultimately the point of a capable bureaucracy would be to have experts on hand with the proper plans in place to implement them regardless of political leaders. We shouldn’t have to recreate all the accumulated knowledge of the government every time there is a new president. Here, Congress had created agencies to oversee health and pandemic responses, the scenario arose…and then those agencies actively made things worse.
Of course, we can’t allow President Trump off the hook. He decided to dismantle the NSC pandemic response team which Susan Rice had set up, combining it into a single directorate with arms control, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health. The president is entitled to manage the National Security Council bureaucracy as he wants, as it’s part of the EOP. It was claimed that there was too much bloat leftover from Obama’s NSC, and so this should have streamlined communication, which may have sounded reasonable. Nonetheless, whatever changes Trump implemented were a colossal failure. Managing the CDC, FDA, FEMA, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to coordinate in a pandemic is crucial, and it did not occur until weeks after it should have. We should ask if the NSC, which varies from president to president, should even have this coordination power or if Congress should implement a more permanent response hierarchy.
Moreover, the president himself downplayed concerns about the virus the entire month of February, and even promised that 15 cases would soon be down to “close to zero”. This is an idiotic statement but is not unexpected. Trump has long ignored expert advice, lied to the public, and spoken erratically about how his administration will execute at hisdirection. The difference is that while the first 3 years of his presidency had few crises that weren’t self created, a pandemic actually requires decision making and policy implementation. Trump claimed that he would surround himself with good managers, and yet his White House has been plagued with scandals, including one that resulted in his impeachment. Ultimately, Trump is responsible for the leaders of the agencies that failed so spectacularly to manage this crisis. When asked about the testing fiasco, Trump said “I don’t take responsibility at all”.
Finally, the Obama administration had even created a “pandemic playbook”, a 69 page document you can review at this link which details decision making rubrics, key agencies that need to be consulted, and which questions need to be asked. It’s apparently unclear if senior leaders at government agencies even knew the playbook existed.
“State Capacity”
The typical consequentialist libertarian critique runs something like “the government doing things is bad because the state has poor incentives”. However, with this pandemic, we have instances where the state did too much, like where the FDA got in the way of scaling life-saving testing, but also where the state did too little, like coordinating responses of expert state agencies, or providing guidelines to local governments. A consequentialist libertarian critique would have a hard time dealing with these two failure types, and as somewhat of a consequentialist libertarian, I didn’t understand Cowen’s “state capacity libertarianism” until I was faced with these current government failures.
In a pandemic, every individual and company wants to continue working and consuming as much as possible, but each action also endangers non-parties to the transaction (e.g. other grocery shoppers or attendees at a basketball game). Here was a role for government to play, and yet it completely failed in that role. While a more typical libertarianism might treat the state as a necessary evil from which helpful action is capricious and rare, state capacity libertarianism suggests there is an expected duty for the state to play where there are negative externalities like the spread of a pandemic. The government’s failure here should thus be taken more seriously under state capacity libertarianism.
This also opens up a discussion about “state management” that previously I have often avoided. For example, it’s quite onerous to file taxes in the United States. Some libertarians argue that this is actually a good thing, and in fact making these state interactions difficult helps to convey to citizens how useless the state is, and they will thus be supportive in making the state smaller. Other libertarians might argue that added difficulty in the form of coerced taxation is adding additional rights violations on top of an already immoral action. A state capacity libertarian approach wouldn’t have this confusion; in this view, taxes ought to be collected in the most economically efficient way possible (land value tax or Pigouvian externality taxes would be a good start), and that method should be carried out competently and easily by the state. The IRS would just calculate your Pigouvian externality tax and send you a bill without requiring each citizen to compile their own information, spend hundreds on tax advice and then be punished when the amount is incorrect.
Relatedly, the management ability of electoral candidates sometimes comes up, and I think I may have even argued in the past that if congress or the president are less capable, then they would pass fewer laws. If most laws are net negative, then perhaps this incompetence would be good. However, elected officials do not just pass laws, they impact how government services are carried out. When a high risk, externality-laden scenario arises, like a pandemic, the management aspect of governance rises in importance.
Many presidents, especially Trump, have campaigned on the idea that they are good managers. Until now, I mostly shrugged at these claims, since governing is most often about policy and posturing than actual management. Yet the rare scenarios where management is required have outsized impacts; having fire insurance doesn’t matter until you actually have a fire, but then it matters a great deal. If we are concerned about catastrophic risk, then government management is a vital skill to be evaluated. State capacity libertarianism strongly favors evaluating this skill.
Libertarian Critiques Remain
Finally, we should quickly cover that a strong libertarian critique of government intervention into markets remains. Private property based markets with competition have much better incentives for rapid development and innovation. The FDA’s intervention to thwart testing probably killed thousands, especially compared to an alternate world where additional testing kits were explicitly allowed beginning in mid-February. Libertarians have been criticizing FDA policy on slow drug approval for decades though, and COVID patients will not be the FDA’s only victims this year.
And that’s not the only place where the state is dangerous: the War on Drugs, for example, has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands as prohibition empowers organized crime, makes drugs more dangerous, incarcerates people for non-violent crimes, creates more violent interactions between citizens and police forces, and on and on. U.S. government policy has also resulted in long-lasting deadly wars in the Middle East with little to no concrete benefits for the U.S. globally, and I’m sure your local libertarian could continue on with a verylonglist.
This pandemic places into stark realization that government both needs to get out of the way in some areas to save lives, and also competently carry out the tasks only it can do. A Cowenian marriage of state capacity and libertarianism is the way forward.
Impeachment is a highly political process. I want to walk through the impeachment process and trial and try to articulate my own thinking.
The Transcript
Let’s start with the phone call on July 26th. Trump released a transcript of himself asking the head of state of another country to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine has a copy of a server of Hilary Clinton’s emails. The intelligence community believes this is Russian propaganda and National Security Council official Fiona Hill testified to this under oath. Trump also brought up a political rival during an official call with the head of state of another country, and asked President Zelensky to investigate them.
There’s a lot to discuss here. Apart from the intelligence community’s views of the Ukrainian server conspiracy theory, I think it reflects poorly on Trump’s…mental state? priorities? that he is still trying to investigate theories around Hillary Clinton’s emails four years after his own election, which he won! It doesn’t seem like he is prioritizing implementation of American policy, but rather stuck in the irrelevant past.
Also of note, Trump brings up Viktor Shokin, who, as far as I can tell was widely believed to be corrupt, yet Trump seems to think his dismissal was unfair. There’s also the discussion of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. Hunter seems to be a screw up and a bad human being. Yet, as Senator Romney pointed out, there was no evidence that the Bidens’ actions were criminal although certainly morally questionable. In particular, Joe Biden had a conflict of interest, but I don’t think anyone can argue Viktor Shokin should have remained in office…except Trump.
Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of national security or indeed foreign policy that Joe Biden be investigated by the Ukrainian government even if he were directly implicated in a crime. Instead, I would expect the FBI would just investigate him for wrongdoing. That seems much more effective if you wanted to get to the bottom of it. Moreover, looking at the testimony presented by Trump’s defense, it doesn’t seem like a crime was committed.
Yes, when making a public announcement about Ukrainian prosecutors, the Vice President should acknowledge all conflicts of interest. He didn’t, and that seems bad. While it isn’t a violation of a particular law (the respective law would have to be pretty specific), it reflects pretty poorly. In fact, there are many parallels to Trump’s actions. I’d go so far as to say that it’s inconsistent for one to believe that Joe Biden’s actions are wrong while saying Trump’s are not. They are almost identical.
Both are accused of undertaking policy decisions that they claim are in the national interest while appearing to have personal conflicts. The differences are that (1) Trump is currently in office, while Biden is not, and (2) the House of Representatives seems like the correct place to investigate whether Trump had a conflict of interest, while the Ukrainian government absolutely should not be in charge of investigating Biden. And it definitely shouldn’t be incentivized with U.S. taxpayer funded military aid; it should be done by a law enforcement agency. Finally, I would be remiss not to mention that Trump has an even closer parallel with the Hunter Biden situation: his own children, in particular his son-in-law who was given a prominent position in the west wing. If Hunter Biden’s actions in Ukraine are worth using the office of presidency in such a way, what are we to make of Trump’s own nepotism?
Returning to the call, the Trump defense team pointed out that no quid pro quo was mentioned in this phone call. This is true, and also seems irrelevant. The use of the office of the president to encourage foreign governments to investigate political rivals and conspiracy theories is most certainly an abuse of office, regardless of whether a quid pro quo occurred. Whether this is grounds for removal from office we can address later.
Witnesses and Evidence
More circumstantial evidence for this being a political abuse of office include testimony from several witnesses. Most interesting is from Gordon Sondland who stated that a quid pro quo did exist offering the President of Ukraine a White House visit in exchange for an announcement of investigations into the Bidens. He also stated that John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence were all aware.
Although not a witness, Mick Mulvaney gave a press conference confirming that military aid authorized by Congress was held up in order to get Ukraine to investigate the DNC server.
Also of note is that the White House released the aid to Ukraine on September 11, only days after Congress announces an inquiry into Rudy Giuliani’s involvement in Ukraine and possible interference with US policy. No one has made any attempt to explain what particular evidence of the Ukrainian government fighting corruption came to light on that day which made the White House approve the aid.
Finally, the House asked (not subpoenaed) John Bolton to testify which could have turned the circumstantial evidence into specific testimony against Trump, at least according to the testimony of Gordon Sondland. The Trump administration blocked those witnesses from testifying, citing executive privilege. The Constitution gives the House the sole power of impeachment, not the executive the power to overrule their investigation. The House could definitely have taken this to the courts with an official subpoena, but they decided not to, I suspect because they felt that impeachment was somewhat politically toxic given the President’s support in the Senate. That’s a political calculation. I think the political case against Trump would have been stronger if both the House and the courts sided against the President. They decided not to the and I think the case against Trump for obstruction was weaker because of this procedural choice. Nonetheless, I can’t see any legal argument that would side with the President; if so, the House’s impeachment power is useless. Therefore, the obstruction of Congress charge certainly seems appropriate.
However, I need to take the Democrats down a peg; the stated reason for not taking the subpoena to court was that Trump presented an immediate threat to our democracy because of his election interference attempts. Democratic impeachment managers argued Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and Trump had encouraged this. I find this completely unconvincing. Russia favored a Trump victory over Hilary Clinton, and I’m sure they spent a bunch of money trying to achieve this, but I have never bought into the narrative that Russia can control the outcome of U.S. elections through Facebook ads. It’s ludicrous. Democracy is powerful because it utilizes disparate information from voters; if you think voters have to be shielded from information, even misinformation, then you don’t believe democracy is a force for good in the world. You instead prefer some sort of government where gatekeepers determine what information voters receive and then voters are allowed to vote with that limited information.
Trump’s attempts to use the Ukrainian government to help him win reelection seem to be an abuse of office. But I don’t think he is a threat to a fair election. The biggest threat to a fair election is our entireelectoral system.
Senate Trial
Trump maintained that the impeachment inquiry was a “witch hunt” and a “hoax”. Under this view, it’s not surprising that he opposed John Bolton testifying at his Senate trial. Of course, the President’s claims do not address the significant (although circumstantial) evidence gathered against him. Moreover, Bolton supposedly implicates Trump in his new book. The only real explanations for the President’s behavior is either that there was a vast conspiracy, including many witnesses, his own handpicked ambassador to the EU and massive donor Gordon Sondlond, his own handpicked National Security Adviser John Bolton, his own handpicked Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and presumably his own Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (although he wasn’t asked to testify). Or, Trump is guilty of doing some pretty shady stuff that he doesn’t want people to testify to. The President maintained that it is the first scenario. This seems to be quite unlikely given the circumstantial evidence.
But there’s an easy way to check, just have the Senate ask Bolton to testify. Senate Republicans declined to do this. I have a hard time explaining this in a good faith way. Some maintained that the evidence presented by the prosecution was inadequate. Unless Gordon Sondlond and Mick Mulvaney just spontaneously made up the same story despite being integral parts of the Trump’s administration, this seems hard to believe. John Bolton is a well-respected lifelong Republican, serving in the Bush and Trump White Houses. He is a strong opponent of the Obama backed nuclear deal with Iran, a defining Republican foreign policy position in the last election. Any attempt to say Bolton is a left-wing sympathizer is bizarre, and yet virtually no Republicans voted to hear his testimony.
I believe what is actually happening is that there is significant political pressure from Republican voters to end the impeachment process. Even if a Republican Senator believed Trump to be guilty, to stay in office, they must survive a primary challenge from a pro-Trump challenger, which would surely win in a Republican primary against someone who voted against Trump in impeachment. One could easily argue that the Senators are doing the democratic thing by following their voters’ interests, but it would not mean that Trump was innocent of these charges. It would simply shift blame from the Senators to our current democratic system, which is apparently unable to deal with a president who abuses the powers of his office.
Other senators, like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee stated that the prosecution made a compelling case of misbehavior, but that it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment. We will get to this defense in a minute.
Non Defense Arguments
It’s worth taking a minute to discuss some points I have heard often, but are not actual defenses of President Trump. The first is the critique of hypocrisy, which is pretty common in these partisan times. Hypocrisy is an excellent way to impugn the motives of your political opponents, but it doesn’t address the object-level arguments. The way I’ve heard this phrased is that presidents have been expanding executive authority for decades, and now Democrats are only calling out Trump’s abuses of power because they don’t like his tribal affiliation, which is more than the usual Right-Left divide. In other words, Trump is a jerk to his political enemies and that’s the reason the House impeached him. Reason Editor Nick Gillespie has espoused something like this view, and tied it in with a libertarian point which is that Democrats don’t actually care about executive authority, they just don’t like Trump. This is a double standard other presidents have not been held to.
Closely tied with this critique is that House Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump from the beginning and were just waiting for a chance they could exploit. Note, neither of these related points address whether Trump actually abused his office. I think it’s absolutely true that Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump, but that doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not he did bad enough acts that he should be removed from office. This argument would be equivalent to Al Copone’s lawyers arguing that the prosecution had been wanting to catch him for a long time and so it’s irrelevant that he broke the law. This is not an argument. The only thing that matters is what Trump did, and the evidence isn’t good.
Returning to the abuse of executive power, I fail to see how continued abuse and concentration of executive authority over time means we should continue allowing abuse of authority. This view basically says that if one government official gets away with abuse, then we have no standing to ever challenge their successors abuses again. This makes no sense to me.
I’ve written prettyextensively about the problem with increased executive authority that’s accrued to the president. A thousand wrongs don’t make the next wrong a right. Instead, trying to restore some of the rule of law one piece at a time sounds like a good idea. And we should be using this opportunity to recruit more who didn’t use to care about executive authority into the tent.
Allowing unchecked executive power to own the libs is a dumb strategy.
Finally, there’s a lot of talk about the whistleblower who wrote a letter that helped to start this investigation. According to Republicans, this whistleblower was a partisan who didn’t like Trump. I have to admit, I have no idea how this argument is supposed to work or how it could possibly be relevant, but it seems so common, I have to include it. However the House finds out about presidential abuse, they have the sole authority of impeachment, meaning they can call witnesses and investigate wrongdoing. They’ve done so, and the witnesses have implicated Trump in abusing his office. The whistleblower’s testimony isn’t necessary. Why Rand Paul keeps talking about the whistleblower seems to just be a distraction from the evidence of Trumps wrongdoing.
Defenses
To summarize, apparently Trump sent his personal lawyer to Ukraine with intention to dig up dirt on his political opponent and even met with Ukrainian officials to achieve this end. Trump then used his office and capacity as president to directly bring up his political goals with the Ukrainian president on an official call. Witnesses and Mick Mulvaney say that military aid and a White House visit were conditioned on investigations into a discredited conspiracy theory about the DNC servers (which are not a matter of national security) and also an investigation of his political rival’s son from several years ago (also doesn’t seem to be a matter of massive national security importance).
This seems pretty bad.
I have a low tolerance of abuse of power. I think Obama was horrendous in his abuse of the office of the presidency including when the IRS targeted conservative groups, and when the administration targeted journalists with the Espionage Act. I think these could pretty easily be classified as impeachable. In that light, I don’t see how the evidence against Trump is much different.
We’ve already covered how the disinterest in the Senate on hearing from John Bolton is pretty suspect. But let’s talk about the actual defenses given by the president’s legal team. There are quite a few.
Some seem pretty specific and weak; Ukrainian President Zelensky said he was not pressured to investigate the Bidens or Crowdstrike. Of course, if your entire presidency is based on opposing Russia and you need U.S. help to maintain that stance, and the Senate is entirely controlled by Republicans, why would you risk antagonizing Trump who viciously attacks his own officials if they ever cross him (see Jeff Sessions, Gordon Sondlond was fired). If Trump was removed, it’s certain that Zelensky could quickly make friends with any future Democratic president regardless of his current positions, and so it makes sense that he would offer to support Trump publicly. This public position seems to count for little compared to actual testimony of American witnesses under oath.
More interesting I think was the argument that there could be no impeachment without a statutory crime. This could be promising, but as Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy points out, holding up Congressionally approved funds is a violation of federal law. Moreover, if you had to pass a law specifying every possible way that the president should be constrained then we would have no limits on the presidency.
Returning now to Senator Lamar Alexander, who argued against subpoenaing John Bolton by saying the President acted inappropriately but his actions didn’t rise to the level of impeachment. Supposing what the President did was not impeachable, why would this preclude getting more information from a witness? Senator Alexander didn’t know the extent of Trump’s actions prior to the House investigation and the testimony of witnesses. He says Trump’s actions were inappropriate, then it would seem judicious to get additional information to make sure no further wrongdoing had occurred. The Senator’s position is completely incoherent. Moreover, his beliefs about the world don’t explain what we see happening: Gordon Sondland was fired from his position as ambassador to the EU. If Alexander is correct and Trump did some things wrong but nothing impeachable, why was Sondland fired?
Trump maintains everything was a vast conspiracy. I’ve noted before, this is bizarre and would mean that everyone Trump happens to hand-select for prominent positions in his administration turned on him with the exact same beliefs about how his administration operates, supported by tons of circumstantial evidence, including Trump’s own phone calls. However, if you wanted to maintain such a narrative, you’d fire everyone who was in on this conspiracy, including Gordon Sondland, who testified to the existence of a quid pro. Of course, you might also act this way if you were actually guilty of abusing your office. Perhaps only John Bolton could have told us the difference. One thing that does not explain this evidence is Senator Alexander’s position: “Trump did things but they weren’t that bad”. If so, why purge the administration? If the actions revealed by Sondland weren’t a big deal (and honestly I kind of thought Sondland thought this) then what did he do wrong from Trump’s perspective? I don’t think Senator Alexander can explain this, and thus I think his position makes little internal sense.
Moreover, I think he’s wrong on the object level as well. The actions undertaken by Trump are serious. He held up Congressionally authorized aid for personal political reasons. Separation of powers is a vital part of our limited government. If the executive can simply kidnap funds authorized by Congress, then we have no limits on government power. We are no longer a limited Republic where the rights of individuals and the minority are defended against an overzealous majority. Instead we are simply electing a despot every four years who will terrorize his political enemies. If what Trump did was an acceptable use of the office of the president, can the president just deny funding for things until people do his political bidding? Could Obama have denied highway funding to red states until they agreed to drop lawsuits against Obamacare? Could he have held up funds until Congress authorized his strikes in Libya? If Trump could do the same for Ukrainian aid, I’m not sure what the difference is, or how any of this could be called limited government or separation of powers.
Finally, there is the argument that this matter should be left to the voters. It is, by definition, a very democratic argument. Clearly, of course, such an argument could not always make intuitive sense; if a president decided that he had the power to cancel elections and declare himself permanent dictator, then the voters can no longer give any input. This is the tact the Democratic impeachment managers took. I’ve already stated my skepticism about it.
However, we do not have to go there; the Constitution doesn’t indicate that impeachment can only be used if the president endangers elections. Instead it states that he can be impeached for treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors. It is clear that Congress can remove a president who misbehaves, not just about election endangerment. And this makes sense; the separation of powers in our Constitution means that both the president and Congress can claim separate democratic mandates, even conflicting ones. The president isn’t elected dictator for four years, but given limited powers and told to work in conjunction with Congress to exercise authority. If the president misuses that power, it’s clear Congress has the authority to remove him, even in an election year. To believe otherwise is to believe that there are no limits on presidential authority.
Conclusion
It seems clear to me that congressional Republicans are backing Trump due to political expediency rather than the facts as they appear. Yes, it’s true, we don’t have much in the way of direct testimony of what Trump knew and when. But we have ample circumstantial evidence to warrant taking a closer look. Republicans failed to do so, declining to hear from literal Republican heroes like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney. I understand the reality of their politics but I don’t understand why Republican voters aren’t concerned about the massive power abuses going on in the White House and what that could mean when the other party gets into power. I’ve searched hard for another explanation for the current state of affairs, even looking at Trump’s own defense team, and I found them entirely unconvincing.
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