Tag: elections

Should You Vote? And How?

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:

Net Utility = pB - c

  • 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:

Net Utility = \frac{K}{n}B - c

  • 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:

Net Utility = \frac{KN}{n}\alpha b - c

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. 

Net Utility = \frac{KN}{n}\alpha b - 300

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). 

Net Utility = 2.5b - 300
0 < 2.5b - 300
300 < 2.5b
120 < b

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. 

Net Utility = \frac{1}{400,000}Nb - 300
0 < \frac{1}{400,000}Nb - 300
300 < \frac{1}{400,000}Nb
120,000,000 < Nb

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:

Net Utility = \frac{1}{11,000,000}Nb - 300
0 < \frac{1}{11,000,000}Nb - 300
300 < \frac{1}{11,000,000}Nb
3,300,000,000 < Nb

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.

StatePredict It %538 %
PA2323
FL2224
WI1410.4
MN88.9
MI86.4
AZ75.3
NC63.7
NV42.8
OH32.7
Total: 9587.2

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:

Net Utility = \frac{Nb}{n}p_tp_m - c
  • 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:

Net Utility = \frac{Nb}{9,500,000}0.22*0.17 - 300
0 < \frac{Nb}{9,500,000}0.22*0.17 - 300
300 < \frac{Nb}{9,500,000}0.0374
2,850,000,000 < 0.0374Nb
76,203,000,000 < Nb

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.

Net Utility = \frac{KN}{n}\alpha b\frac{K_H}{n_H} - c

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.

Picture credit: League of Women Voters of California, licensed under CC-BY-2.0

Presidential Power Should Be A Top Election Issue

The midterm elections are a month away, and while I have expressed my feelings on voting and the electoral system generally, I have also made several posts trying to boost specific policy ideas that should be more discussed.  In the same vein, I’ve been thinking about which issues are top priority in this election, and whether any of them are actually as high impact as their popularity warrants.

The recent Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, which I think everyone agrees was pretty circus-like from start to finish regardless of political inclination, seems to have sparked more voter enthusiasm in the midterms. And while I’ll grant that Supreme Court nominations have grown in importance, it doesn’t follow that SCOTUS nominations should be a major issue in this election. The oldest justices are left-leaning, and so unlikely to retire in the next two years. Perhaps if there is a fear that Justices Ginsberg or Breyer (aged 85 and 80 respectively) will be forced into retirement due to medical problems, then this election would matter. But the chances of that seem less than 50%.

There are other issues, like immigration, that are highly impactful and also well discussed. If there was a decisive turnover from Republicans to Democrats in Congress, we’d expect some of that to be realized in immigration policy, but unfortunately not that much. Even if Democrats took both houses, this election is still largely being discussed in terms of being pro-Trump or anti-Trump.

This is a problem. Only one party can control the Presidency. Moreover, there are competing ideologies within parties, with many fiscal conservatives frustrated with George W. Bush, many neoconservatives frustrated with Trump, and yes, even some liberals frustrated with Obama on foreign policy. So really it should be said that only one ideology gets to control the White House as well. If the Presidency controls so much about policy, then this is disastrous for representative democracy. Depending on how ideological or political people are, the majority of people will not feel represented by the President, even if the President wins a majority of votes (something that has only happened 3 times in the last 8 presidential elections, going back 30 years).

The solution is clear, but we have no incentive to achieve it: Congress should be the most powerful branch of government. Its membership is large so as to draw from a wide range of views and geographical areas. When it acts, it must find compromises and alignments of interests, unlike the President which acts as a single unit. That was the design in the original constitution, and technically, if Congress worked to assert its control, it could retake such a position in government. However, congressmen have little incentive to do so; going on the record for votes and standing on specific principles is politically dangerous. Better instead to move questions of policy to the executive branch, and leave Congress to simply grandstand politically, never having to be tied down to specific votes.

For example: Barack Obama unilaterally decided to grant legal status and eligibility for federal benefits to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. I happen to think this was a good policy idea, but if the President can decide what laws to enforce and make his own laws with executive orders, then Congress is vestigial. President Trump actually took a pretty constitutional position and decided to end the DACA program and told Congress to pass the DREAM Act (would have crystallized the DACA program into law). He gave them six months, and they did not make the deadline, despite such action being pretty popular. This is unbelievable. Maybe too many people were playing politics. Maybe Donald Trump is incompetent in getting the legislation passed (he torpedoed a bipartisan bill), but that shouldn’t matter. Congress should be able to pass a bill that a majority of legislators agree with, but the will didn’t exist. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of the political divide of the Trump era, and so no bipartisanship could materialize, guaranteeing further partisanship in the future.

This cycle also delegitimizes Congress, making people look more often to the Presidency and to the courts. Congress is fundamentally tied to winning elections, so if people see Congress as unhelpful or unpopular, Senators and Representatives have even less incentive to do anything that might frustrate voters. That in turn also makes the courts increasingly important, which likely fuels additional democratic frustration, as the courts are still fairly removed from direct democratic influence. But if they are viewed as partisan extensions of the presidency, that just makes even more things rely on a single election where only a single ideology can win every four years.

I think there may be a way out of this mess if political parties made the midterms about Congressional vs Presidential Authority. It’s not always been true that Congress can only define itself in relation to the President, but it may be a useful way to couch constitutional authority in political terms. Reducing presidential power would be a concrete way to oppose Donald Trump, and perhaps even reach alleged small-government conservatives.

The Cato Institute lays out a platform for a resurgent Congress to run on: requiring votes on executive rule changes that will impose costs of $100 million on the economy (already introduced as the REINS Act), updating the Administrative Procedures Act to require courts to interpret administrative authority de novo or independent of the agency’s claimed interpretation (I’m horrified this isn’t already done), and require all fees and penalties collected by the government to be appropriated and spent by the Congress (right now, fees and profits are then spent by the collecting agency, with little oversight).

We don’t have to limit this approach to libertarian wishlist items. Kevin Kosar in Politico details additional approaches (and adds many more words in National Affairs), including an improvement to the robustness of congressional staffing; the executive has armies of bureaucrats working to provide the best information (and sometimes self-aggrandizing propaganda) to the branch (the Executive Office of the President alone includes some 4000 people). Congress has seen shrinking staffing for its oversight and accountability offices like the GAO. Congress should be the most powerful branch and so it should have access to the data and expert information on how best to oversee the actual implementation of policy the executive branch undertakes. Instead what we often have is Congressional staffers directly trying to research regulatory agencies, who are providing their own oversight information to non-expert politicians who often defer to the self-interested agencies. Kosar’s suggestion of a Congressional Regulation Office is also intriguing.

However, just because there is a way to do this, there is no reason to believe Democrats ever had an intention to follow this path during this midterm election. Nor does it mean Republicans will consider it in 2022 if the tables are reversed. Neither have an incentive to discuss constitutional authority when culture war issues are more likely to encourage their base to turn out. Understanding these public choice incentives doesn’t mean we have to live with them though. There is a nebulous role for real ideas in democracy, and it starts with having a discussion about the state of our politics.

The Broken Electoral System: 2018 Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2018 Predictions

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

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

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

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

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

Now for predictions made at the beginning of the year:

World Events

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

Postlibertarian

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

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

In the other categories:

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

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

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

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

Predictions for 2018:

World Events

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

Postlibertarian

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

 

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

Leave a comment on reddit.

Russian Hacking and Divisive News Cycles

In 2014, the death of Michael Brown became the focal point of first the Ferguson protests and then the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. Just a couple months earlier, Eric Garner had been strangled to death on Staten Island by police on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, while everything was caught on film. Michael Brown’s death had not been caught on film, but there had been video evidence of him robbing a convenience store and assaulting the store clerk moments before his altercation with a police officer. A later Justice Department investigation also found no wrongdoing on the part of the police officer who killed Michael Brown.

So the question is, why did the Michael Brown case get so much more attention than the Eric Garner case? Even Bill O’Reilly thought what happened to Eric Garner was unfair. Scott Alexander suggests the most successful stories are those that are controversial. A story that only induces frustration in one side doesn’t foment much of a debate. But on a controversial or murky topic, one can signal their loyalty to their tribe much more strongly; you really care about police brutality if you criticize the police when there’s no video evidence in Ferguson. Criticizing the police when there’s clear evidence of an illegal chokehold on Eric Garner doesn’t get you points.

Of course, even if the Michael Brown case was a bad example, the general topic of police abuse is important. I can’t say the same for the continued interest in this Russian Hacking story. For those who don’t know, the Clinton campaign accused the Russian government of hacking into the DNC’s email server, during the campaign. Trump denied that we knew for sure it was Russian state-sponsored hacking. More recently, US intelligence agencies have claimed they have evidence of Russia being involved, including high level Russian officials. They have also claimed they cannot show this evidence to the public as it would compromise their intelligence.

From top to bottom, the entire story is just so boring to me. This “hack” was apparently just a spear-phishing attack, something that is fairly easily avoided by not clicking on the wrong links in your email. Or using two-factor authentication. People are hacked this way every day, but it’s reasonable to have slightly higher expectations for political officials. But again, these weren’t political officials in office, it was the DNC in an election year. What was hacked was also not particularly valuable; we saw a bunch of emails of DNC officials being politicians. Yes, it put the DNC in a bad light, looking like they were colluding with the Clinton campaign to have her win the primaries…but what exactly is the point of a political party if not to try and win political office? The DNC obviously thought Hillary had a better shot than Bernie. That’s not a crazy idea. Moreover, most of these emails came long after Bernie had fallen behind in the delegate count anyway.

The only people these emails could have surprised are those unfamiliar with politics or those not skeptical enough (and not this blog). It seems quite possible that Russia was indeed behind these attacks; they have the capabilities and the motivation as the Clinton State Department was quite annoying to Russian foreign interests. Trump has signaled a much more dovish approach to Russia, as well as an admiration for Putin’s strong man policies. There’s some uncertainty, but the Clinton campaign, Obama administration, and now US intelligence all insist Russia was involved and trying to “influence” the US election…by releasing accurate exact transcripts of emails of DNC officials. Ok.

What if these accusations are true? Suppose Russia did sponsor very simplistic attacks on the DNC email server and then released those emails to the public in order to make Clinton less popular. Who cares? Russia doing this doesn’t change the content of the emails; what if a whistleblower at the DNC had leaked them? It changes nothing.

And while we’re talking about changing nothing, I’m under the impression that these emails changed very little. Trump voters weren’t exactly huge DNC and Clinton fans before they read these emails; neither were Bernie supporters. I doubt this had much impact on the election.

Many on the left have been shocked Trump won’t admit Russia was behind this hack, but it’s such a low stakes thing, I can’t imagine it would much change his position towards Russia. Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly said much more heinous and horrific things, likely in the week prior to you reading this blog post.

To continue the absurdity, recently US intelligence agencies released a report detailing why they think Russia was behind the hack. The report is embarrassing. It has no details or evidence, and it spends the majority of its pages talking about the Russian state-sponsored news station RT and how it criticizes the US government. I’m still fairly confident that Russia is indeed behind this hack, but the report makes American intelligence look completely incompetent, and its evidence of the hack purely circumstantial.

Ok, I’m going to stop talking about this non-story. The problem is that this non-story has continued for weeks without my help. I bring it up only to show the truly insidious nature of a divided outrage news cycle. This debate being had on Russian hacking is based on little and has essentially no relevance to the very real challenges we face. The president-elect has continuously vowed to challenge free trade ideas which will seriously harm the global and domestic economy. He’s planned to use executive authority in insane ways to violate civil liberties, including torturing people, committing war crimes, and depriving people of due process. We ought to be talking about those issues and what Congress will be doing to thwart him, but instead we are caught up arguing about email phishing scams.

Leave a comment on the reddit discussion thread.

Trump, Democracy, and Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Comment on the official reddit thread.

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

Against Trump

In my last post, I made the case for why voting for a main party was far more likely to be a wasted vote than a vote for third party.  I made this argument on the basis of the presidential voting system itself, regardless of any voter’s actual policy preferences.

Nonetheless, if you think Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have the best policies or ideology, at best my argument should make you indifferent between voting for one of those candidates or leaving it blank (I advocated that one should still vote because of the often overlooked importance of local elections). If you prefer Donald Trump, this post will be my argument for why you shouldn’t. This is not an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, and I hope to write a post against her candidacy next. But there is a third option. I’ve already laid out the case for why it is more practical to vote for a third party rather than waste your vote on the Democrats and Republicans, but this post will show why you should prefer Gary Johnson’s moderate-limited-government-libertarianism to Trump.

Trump: The Troll

The most basic foundation of Trump’s appeal is his fervent opposition to the cultural left, especially the social justice movement and political correctness. In some sense, it doesn’t matter what he says; because he has said ridiculous and outrageous things, he has provided a “safe space” for people who can’t stand the recent domination, real or perceived, of left-wing outrage politics. The cultural left has created a tough situation for their opponents: if you don’t agree with them, they label you as a misogynist, fascist, and white supremacist. The alt-right was a fairly typical human response: they took the insults as a badge of honor.

So what has the left done about Donald Trump? A pretty common response (New York Times, Huffington Post, Vox) is to call him racist! Take a look at these accusations from that Huffington Post article:

  • He attacked Muslim Gold Star parents Khizr Khan and Ghazala Khan. His attack didn’t address their criticism, but suggested Mrs. Khan didn’t speak because of her religion.
  • The Justice Department sued his company in 1973 for not renting to black applicants, and there are stories from employees alleging that he was racist
  • He didn’t condemn David Duke’s support until the next day
  • He questions whether Obama was born in the US
  • He tweeted a picture of him eating a taco bowl to show he loves Hispanics
  • He condoned the attack by his supporters of a Black Lives Matter heckler at a campaign event
  • He claimed Judge Gonzalo Curiel was biased because of his Mexican heritage (Curiel was born in Boston).

These are all awful, insensitive, and moronic actions, but calling them racist or Trump a racist for doing them tries to equate Trump to the level of the KKK. If Trump is fundamentally appealing because he doesn’t back down from outrage tactics, and his supporters are tired of the left screaming that every deviation from progressive orthodoxy is white supremacy, then calling Trump racist is the worst thing you can do. And honestly on many of these issues, Trump is professionally trolling, going just over the line on what is acceptable to draw the outrage.

For example, Trump says he responded to the Khans because they criticized him first, which is true. His response was characterized by an attack on Ghazala Khan and an assumption about her actions due to her faith. This isn’t directly saying that Muslims are inferior, even though there is an implication. But if we just call this out as being “racist”, we really lose out on our argument demonstrating just how awful this episode was for Trump. In fact, Trump supporters can point out that many Islamic countries treat their women poorly and so this is worth questioning. By doing this, we let Trump deflect just how abysmally he managed that political catastrophe; instead, we should be discussing that Trump had no actual response to Khan’s accusations of his unconstitutional policies, and instead had to resort to unfounded assumptions and speculation. He would rather make up things about a family whose son died serving this country because he felt insulted than suck it up and avoid any more fallout. The sheer political incompetence is unspeakable, and the unconstitutionality of many of Trump’s policies remain unanswered.

Many other examples I listed also let Trump get away with absurd positions by jumping immediately to racism. His run-in with the Justice Department is important, but was also over 40 years ago. Was it his fault or his company’s, and does he still have those opinions? The idea of a government agency forcing him into a settlement on allegations of racism is also exactly the conspiracy narrative Trump wants. It seems likely he knows who David Duke is, but I’ve continually overestimated Trump’s abilities in other areas. And just having terrible people endorse you doesn’t automatically make you a bad person too. Trump likely supported the story Obama was born in Kenya because Obama’s father was originally a Kenyan national. It seems pretty easy for Trump supporters to argue he would have demanded a birth certificate of any person whose parentage was outside the US. Calling this racist really lets Trump change the subject to how PC culture is bad, when really we should be focusing on how much of an idiot you have to be to waste so much political capital on a conspiracy theory that was obviously wrong. There were plenty of grounds to criticize Obama’s policies, yet Trump decided to focus on discrediting his legitimacy through a conspiracy theory rather than actual ideas.

Calling it racist when Trump condoned an attack on a protester at his event is sort of the epitome of political correctness gone wrong: it implies that as long he condones violence against protesters of all races at his campaign events, it’s ok. The problem is not the race of the victim, the problem is that he’s condoning violence against people who disagree with him.  His statement against Judge Gonzalo Curiel is almost blatantly racist, as even Paul Ryan states, yet Trump could have easily cited Sonia Sotomayer’s “wise Latina” quote as evidence for why he believed a judge’s ethnicity could influence their opinions. If we get outraged about this, we fuel the perception that social justice not only has a monopoly on outrage politics, but that when the exact ideas that are promoted by the left are used by the right/conservatives/whatever-Trump-supporters-are, only they are attacked. It seems to be targeting of tribes, not even of ideas.

And that’s the point. Trump engages in a motte-and-bailey doctrine where he says things that obviously imply bigotry or outright harming non-Americans, but then if you call him on it, he deflects or calls it a joke. This is an annoying tribalistic tactic (often employed by social justice warriors and also Ann Coulter) where a group will make a ridiculous claim, but really support a weaker version of that claim (see part IV here). As Scott Alexander says, social justice warriors seem to imply ridiculous things like “men can’t be part of a discussion on gender”, but when challenged, they state more defensible positions like “men shouldn’t interject into safe spaces for women”.  Trump says some Mexicans coming over the border are rapists, with the implication being that the average illegal immigrant is a violent criminal. But if you call him on it, he’ll say that he also said “many of them are good people!” which is technically true. He also didn’t say 2nd amendment supporters should shoot Hillary Clinton, but he left it open.

Trump is in part successful (and especially appealing to the alt-right) because he meets social justice warriors with their own methods, and it’s hard to pin him down on anything because his entire presidential run is a giant troll. Of course, I really dislike many of the tactics of the social justice movement and the outrage tactics of internet culture wars. I’ve gone on the record about why I think their ideas and methods are bad. I understand the appeal of fighting fire with fire. But it won’t solve our problems. All of the criticisms aimed at the social justice movement still apply to Trump. We should be trying to elevate our society and discussions, not give in to the temptation to debase them. Collectivism is evil in all its forms, left-wing, right-wing, and bi-partisan.

Many Trump supporters have bought into his campaign as the only way to fight the social justice left. They are wrong on many levels; trolling can’t beat trolling, flip-flopping and incompetence can’t beat Hillary’s political machine, protectionism can’t beat markets, and nationalism and authoritarianism can’t beat freedom. In fact, by allowing Hillary Clinton, one of the weakest presidential candidates in recent history, to continue to dominate this election, Trump has handed the left one of their biggest political victories and squelched one of the biggest opportunities for American conservatives.

And Trump is not the only way to fight back against the worst methods and ideas of blue tribalism. One can oppose collectivism without sacrificing principles or lowering the level of dialogue. As I go through the following deep flaws that Trump has, keep in mind that Gary Johnson has none of them.

The Unknown

What does Trump actually believe? It’s almost impossible to know. These are just the positions I could find so far. I don’t think this list is comprehensive, but I want it recorded somewhere. Many of these are from this ABC news post, this CNN article, and this extensive NBC news article if they’re not otherwise cited.

  • He used to think pretty highly of Hillary Clinton and even invited the Clintons to his wedding, and now apparently thinks they are terrible.
  • Trump declared that he thought Obama was the founder of ISIS, and when pressed on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, he doubled down. Then after a full day of focusing on this point, he abruptly tweeted that it was sarcasm.
  • Trump was going to self-fund his campaign and not fund raise. But he’s gone back on that promise and is now taking money from whomever will give it to him. He was so short on money, he hadn’t even bought TV ads until the last week of August.
  • Trump started out ok with taking Syrian refugees, and then reversed his position and now wants to send them back.
  • Trump initially stated that Japan and South Korea should defend themselves, including with nuclear weapons. Now he says that’s preposterous and he never said that. How do you suffer amnesia about advocating the biggest change in US nuclear policy in history?
  • Trump has relentlessly hammered Clinton for supporting the Iraq War in 2003. It turns out in 2002, he backed the Iraq War too. Also, when asked about Mike Pence’s support of the war, he said it didn’t matter to him. But it still matters that Clinton backed it.
  • Trump made headlines stating he wanted to be a “neutral guy” in the Israel-Palestine conference (a big change from US policy which has held a strong alliance with Israel), and then said Israel was being treated like a second-class citizen later on.
  • Trump has also called the Libyan intervention a total disaster, but he in fact backed this intervention as well. When shown a video of his previous support, he acknowledges it and says he only wanted a “surgical” strike.
  • Trump was originally pro-choice and is now pro-life and even advocated that there should be “punishment” for women who get abortions. Admittedly in that interview, Chris Matthews did a good job of cornering Trump and not letting him get away with dodging the question, so maybe Trump doesn’t actually believe that. But that’s my point: we have no idea what this guy is going to do.
  • Trump advocated the use of torture especially against ISIS and suspected terrorists. When dozens of military advisers pointed out he would effectively be telling people to commit illegal acts, he stated “if I say do it, they’re gonna do it.” The next day Trump said he would be bound by laws just like any president, and then proceeded to call for waterboarding and torture in subsequent speeches.
  • Like abortion, Trump used to have a very different view on gun laws and actually supported an assault weapons ban. Now he’s a strong 2nd amendment supporter. Except in classrooms. Unless it’s a teacher in a classroom. What?
  • Trump was against raising the minimum wage, then for it, then said he wanted to leave it to the states, now says it should be over $10 and left to the states.
  • Trump has been for a single-payer system in the past and has praised Canada’s and Scotland’s system. But he hates Obamacare. But maybe he still likes the mandate. But he doesn’t know what he’d replace it with. His current website’s plan is a pretty good free market approach, but what would he actually pursue?
  • Trump was going to increase taxes on the rich, then said he would cut everyone’s taxes by huge amounts in an online proposal (that this blog looked at), then reduced the amount he would cut, and now it’s a pretty standard small income tax cut with an additional tax break for childcare
  • Trump seems to have called for a renegotiating of U.S. public debt similar to a debt restructuring for an insolvent firm. He seemed to have no idea that U.S. treasuries are so cheap to borrow with because they are never defaulted on. He even indicated that the U.S. can always print more money. Then he seemed to walk it back and say he wouldn’t renegotiate the American debt.
  • Last December Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” In May, this changed to a “suggestion”. Then he added the idea of banning people from places with a “history of terrorism”, then added there would be “extreme vetting” (so not an outright ban?). Trump and his people also added that there had been “no change” in their policy since December.
  • Trump has stated that he would deport 11 million people currently residing in the US illegally. This is significantly larger than the current population of New York City. Then he said he would deport them all, but bring back the “good ones” legally. Buzzfeed even reported that Trump stated off-the-record that deporting all 11 million is just a starting point for negotiations. Just a couple week’s ago, Trump seemed to abandon deportations altogether. Now it seems they are in full force again.

I should also note that Trump said he would call Bill Gates and get him to shut down the internet if need be. I didn’t list that here because I don’t think he ever repudiated that position so it’s not a “flip-flop”.  Trump also suggested Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Even on Trump’s most common talking point, his “wall” on the border with Mexico is obviously not true because, as John Oliver points out, it will cost far more than Trump says it will, and there is no way we can force Mexico to pay for it. Adding a tariff on Mexican imports does not force Mexico to pay for anything, it forces American consumers to fund the wall.

This is related to questions of Trump’s temperament; it appears that on many of these interviews, Trump has either never thought about the issue presented to him, lied about his position last time so he can’t remember what his position was, or just honestly changes his position because he’s not smart enough to have foreseen the objection, but wants to appear knowledgeable and so says that was his position the whole time.  The bottom line is that on virtually every issue, even the core issues he’s maintained, we have no idea what he will do.  On top of all this, Trump is capricious and easily offended. He has consistently filed lawsuits against press organizations that have criticized him, regardless of their ineffectiveness and potential attack on free speech. Do we want someone who has no principles, who has no idea where he stands on issues, and can be easily manipulated by his political enemies (“I don’t have thin skin”) to be in charge of our country’s national defense? The Supreme Court is an important issue in this election, but what makes us think we can trust Trump to actually pick from among the names he has mentioned before when he has changed his mind on everything else?

On many issues, he has taken positions not just worse than Gary Johnson or Hillary Clinton, but positions worse than any president in history. Will these be the positions he takes or will they change? Will any of his positions that sound reasonable stick around once he is president? We don’t know.

The Incompetence

Trump has a record of questionable business acumen as well as straight-up fraud. He certainly has done well in the real estate market, but in other ventures he’s been mostly a flop.  He has also widely exaggerated his net worth by constantly trying to tout his own brand. And, by admission of its own employees, Trump University had no interest in teaching any of its customers, only in selling them the most expensive seminars it could.

His political campaign has also been questionable. We will get to policy in the next section, but for now let’s just talk about Trump’s job as a politician, which is to get people to vote for you.  As I noted in May, Trump was one of the worst candidates the Republicans have had as far as political appeal.  He won the Republican presidential primary with only 45% of the vote. By itself, a number that low isn’t unprecedented, but when combined with the fact that most of his primary opponents have decided against endorsing him, he was one of the least liked Republican candidates among Republicans in recent memory.  He’s also only averaged above 40% in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average and above 44% in RealClearPolitics’ average for a couple weeks in July. He has never really pivoted to the general electorate. Trump has had several changes in his campaign management due to apparent incompetence. He will be the first presidential candidate since Nixon to not release his tax returns, and he has just started airing TV ads. That’s correct, Gary Johnson was outspending Trump on TV time until September.

Trump’s response to his abysmal appeal has been to suggest that all polls that don’t show him winning are rigged. In fact, Politico even published a column entitled “What if Trump doesn’t accept defeat?”  As already mentioned in this piece, he got into a very public spat with the parents of a Gold Star soldier who had given his life in 2004. He also said that “there must be some form of punishment” for women who get abortions, and then Ben Carson said that Trump wasn’t expecting that question. Trump wasn’t prepared for a question about abortion in a political event while running for President? You cannot be serious.

What is Trump’s plan in office when foreign heads of state ask him obvious questions he should know the answer to? What is he going to do when people don’t automatically like what he has to say? He has failed in essentially every venture that wasn’t real estate or a reality TV show. The inability to make changes for a better long-term strategy combined with the need to retaliate over every perceived insult disqualify Trump from being Commander-in-Chief.

The Policy

As I’ve stated, it’s hard to nail down what Trump believes on anything.  It often appears like he has never thought about policies or the implications of policies until objections are brought up to him.

One aspect that had been central to Trump was a hardline stance on immigration and deporting illegal immigrants. As of a couple weeks ago, he appears to have flipped on that and now flipped back, but his website still has language that appears to indicate serious criminal charges for anyone living here illegally. Even if Trump has become less focused on deportations, his immigration policy comes with absolutely massive costs, both fiscal and legal. As noted by John Oliver, his “wall” on the Mexican border will likely cost several times as much as he’s claimed, not to mention the hidden costs of wasting construction time and resources on building a concrete wall literally in the middle of nowhere.  If this project ever does happen (which it won’t), it will cause the cost of construction and related services to go up as resources are pulled into a giant wasteful wall. Moreover, as Trump’s website acknowledges, most illegal immigrants don’t sneak over the border; they cross with legal visas and overstay them, and so this wall will do almost nothing to stop illegal immigration.

There are also effects on American citizens as well who are forced to deal with questionably constitutional Border Patrol stops where people are pulled over with no reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Trump has also focused on crime caused by illegal immigrants, despite the fact that crime rates are much lower among this segment of the population than among American citizens. Terrorism, as noted by this blog, is so unlikely that the threat of terrorism via immigration is not even worth addressing.

Moreover, there is a self-evident free market argument for immigration; if the economy would work more efficiently without immigrants, they wouldn’t be coming. Specifically in the United States, immigration helps to expand our workforce while European economies shudder under high levels of retirees and low birthrates.  The OECD has also found that because immigrants come to work, they are productive enough to pay more in taxes than benefits they get out. Trump’s arguments for making H1-B visas harder to give out and more expensive just creates an incentive to ship jobs overseas rather than keep them here. Overall, it seems better for Americans (and likely the global economy) to keep immigrants coming here than to ship the jobs overseas.

There is certainly an argument that we haven’t seen this level of immigration in the United States in a while, even on a percentage scale. Immigrants now make up 13% of the population, but that’s still less than was common during the late 19th century. There’s also the true point that most immigration prior to the ending of national origin quotas in 1965 was from Europe.  Yet, since this is essentially a cultural and not an economic argument, at best this still argues that we should have open immigration–just from some countries and not others. It also doesn’t offer resistance to other forms of open immigration, such as for advanced degree holders (especially graduates of American universities).

We also have to acknowledge that there really are serious obstacles for potential immigrants right now…which has only resulted in illegal immigration. Trump acknowledges the economic burden of an over-regulated economy, but then proposes tons of new regulations on immigration. Using the state to pick winners and losers in the economy is a dangerous thing to do.

Trade is the other area Trump has been most outspoken on. Here, unlike immigration, there is no cultural argument, there is only economics. And it’s clear that when it comes to trade economics, Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. He would add tariffs to goods, making them more expensive for average Americans and cutting into middle-class purchasing power. He would start trade wars with China, and attempt to reverse foreign governments subsidizing their own exports which directly deposits foreign tax revenues into the pockets of American consumers. The protectionism he advocates is essentially an argument for the global economy to leave the US behind and to ensure that new technology and innovation is happening elsewhere while our economy stagnates and our lack of dynamism and competition gets even worse.

Why is Trump suggesting this? Bryan Caplan points out in The Myth of the Rational Voter that voters are subject to many biases, most of which you can find in Trump’s policies. This includes, among others, an anti-market bias and an anti-foreign bias, where voters tend to underestimate the benefits of market systems as well as underestimate the benefits of interacting with foreigners. But despite these biases, free trade is immensely good for the economy. Tariffs being some of the most regressive taxes we have, freer trade is also a big tax break for poor Americans relative to the rich.  Trade, along with immigration, is one of the best areas in which American policy can directly improve the world.

The Authoritarianism

Let’s take a quick history detour: in 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the DNC’s Headquarters in the Watergate Complex. They had been sent by the Nixon reelection committee, and the Nixon administration immediately sought to cover up their involvement. Nixon actually ordered the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the burglary, claiming national security issues.  The administration hoped that would prevent any further prying, but as more details came out, a Senate select committee was established in February 1973 to investigate a possible cover-up, and a special independent investigator was appointed by the attorney general.

When a Senate hearing uncovered that there were tapes of all Oval Office conversations, the Senate and special prosecutor subpoenaed the tapes, which Nixon refused to turn over, citing executive privilege. When the prosecutor persisted, Nixon actually ordered the attorney general to fire him, and the attorney general resigned in protest. Solicitor General Robert Bork eventually complied, but under political pressure, Nixon appointed a new special prosecutor. Edited transcripts were released in early 1974, which showed Nixon in a poor light, although they did not fully incriminate him. The new special prosecutor subpoenaed specific tapes which Nixon again refused to turn over. The case went to the Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that Nixon had no unqualified privilege of immunity from investigation, and that he had to turn over the tapes. Nixon did. They revealed clear wrongdoing on his part, and the House Judiciary committee recommended impeachment on several counts. Knowing he would soon be impeached and likely removed by the Senate, Nixon resigned.

There was a backlash against the office of the presidency after Nixon, but we have fully reversed that trend today. The Bush and Obama administrations have undertaken naked power grabs that have helped create an imperial presidency beyond anything Nixon ever dreamed of. Many libertarians have been warning about these massive power expansions for years. Now in the face of the Trump administration, we’ve created all the tools a tyrant would need to run amok.

As Conor Friedersdorf notes in The Atlantic:

  • The president can order American citizens killed in secret.
  • The president can detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial.
  • The president can order drone strikes at will in countries against which no war has been declared.
  • The president can start a torture program with impunity.
  • The president can conduct warrantless surveillance on tens of millions of Americans.

To that I would also add that if deemed a troublemaker, the government has plenty of options to attack you without disappearing you. We know at least the DEA and IRS have used NSA information gained through mass surveillance of Americans, and then obscured this source by finding another stated reason to stop a suspect. The enormous amount of statutes on the books means it’s almost certain average people break laws every single day, and so these law enforcement agencies can always find probable cause to arrest you. Then they can stack up charges to force a plea deal, all at the discretion of prosecutors.  As it stands right now, there’s a strong case that the criminal justice system is biased, slow, and unfair, and that it deprives individuals of their rights. But now imagine Trump in charge of the DEA, FBI, intelligence services, and the military.

Trump administration could be even worse than Nixon; given Trump’s continual flip-flopping, his trolling, his total unpreparedness for obvious challenges, and his terrible policy ideas, we don’t actually know if Trump understands how government works. Many of his fantastical policy ideas on his website go beyond the usual politicians’ wishlists; it’s unclear whether he would even try to sell his agenda to Congress, or just try to implement it with executive authority, or indeed if he would understand the difference.

For example, nestled in his immigration policy is a call to end birthright citizenship. Does Trump acknowledge what that would require? As Rand Paul has noted, the 1898 case US v Wong Kim Ark declared that children of legal immigrants were automatically citizens. It seems that Trump wants to overturn this case, which would require a constitutional amendment. It’s possible Trump wants only to stop birthright citizenship of illegal immigrants (he keeps changing his positions on everything), but does he want to do this with a law, or a legal battle? Does he realize that the president can’t pass laws unilaterally? It’s also worth wondering what Trump believes he can actually do on abortion. We’ve already discussed his bewildering stance that women should be punished for getting an abortion, a position basically no one else has ever advocated for. But does he realize that he would need to pass a constitutional amendment to achieve that goal?

Another example, he declared on a debate stage that if he told the military to commit war crimes they would do it. That’s not only against US law, that’s against international law. If he thinks that he can do things as president that are already illegal, what makes us think he would be waiting for Congress to do anything? How about shutting down parts of the internet? In Trump’s own words: “Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.” How about banning people based on their religion? Do we think Trump will wait for Congressional approval of obviously unconstitutional ideas? Or will he just order that they be done without thinking, just like everything else in his campaign?

The ACLU has released a 27 page memo on things Trump has said that are blatantly unconstitutional. It makes an excellent legal case against Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the country as well as his mass deportation of illegal immigrants. The magnitude of individual rights violations from deportations specifically would be staggering, as there is no way to arrest millions of immigrants without also arresting regular American citizens and legal residents as there is no way to tell them apart. Arrests would have to be done without probable cause and largely based on racial profiling with likely hundreds of thousands of law abiding people caught up in the dragnet. The police state necessary to accomplish such an action is likely beyond even the secret police organizations of former communist nations.

The ACLU memo also makes an important point concerning Trump’s promise to “open up the libel laws”: there are no federal libel statutes. What exactly Trump would do were he to be president and then find out that there are only state libel laws, I have no clue. But imagine the powers of the Justice Department in the hands of someone who has a history of abusing eminent domain and using the power of the justice system to silence critics. He has already blacklisted media outlets he doesn’t like and banned them from his campaign events. As Damon Root of Reason notes: “Just like a crybaby advocate of political correctness, Trump wants to hollow out the First Amendment in order to make a ‘safe space’ for himself.”

It’s not hard to see the abuses of the Nixon administration repeated under a hypothetical Trump one. But in 1974, when Nixon lost his appeal to the Supreme Court, he still turned over the tapes. I don’t know if we realize how vulnerable our constitution was in this moment. Constitutional power is not something physical; as Abraham Lincoln proved, the Supreme Court has no enforcement arm. In retrospect, if Nixon had just wanted to maximize his political power, it seems that his best plan would have been to not release the tapes and accept whatever political fallout that was. Maybe he would have been forced to resign, maybe not, but he only risked being in the same situation that actually happened. Trump has arguably already promised to do more unconstitutional things than Nixon ever did, and he’s less popular than Nixon ever was before Watergate. If in a similar situation, would Trump comply with the Supreme Court? With Congress? He’s already calling the election rigged before it’s even happened, and he doesn’t seem to believe polls that report him far behind Clinton (which he is). If he found himself thwarted by the other branches of government, would Trump allow the rule of law to occur, or subvert it using his executive authority? Would he even care that his actions were unpopular given how unpopular he already is?

Most of the problems in this section also apply to Hillary Clinton, and it is likely she would continue to abuse government power just like the Bush and Obama administrations. But while Trump may be running against Hillary, I’ve already made the case that your only decision in voting is whether to waste your vote on a main party, or help get a third party better ballot access. Gary Johnson specifically has been an outspoken critic of the advances of government power and the growing authoritarianism centralized in the presidency. If you want to stand against the increasing authoritarianism of the federal government, there is no way to justify voting for Trump over Gary Johnson.

Trump has many problems as a candidate: he is inconsistent, incompetent, and he reduces our ability to have real discussions. His policies are bad, but his authoritarian threats should give us the greatest pause. Would you vote for Richard Nixon today if Nixon told you he was going to abuse executive authority to preserver his own power? If he continuously attacked free speech and criticism, if he promised to arrest millions of people living in the US, do you think voting for him would be a good idea? Well, it’s not a hypothetical, all of these policies are literal quotations from Trump himself. You shouldn’t vote for Nixon, and you shouldn’t vote for Trump.

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Picture credit: Gage Skidmore, modified by postlibertarian.com (grayscale), licensed under BY-SA-2.0.

Links 2016-5-30

Gary Johnson selected former Republican Massachusetts Governor William Weld  to be his running mate. This was pretty surprising for Libertarians considering Weld isn’t really a well-known libertarian guy.  Obviously, the Johnson campaign hoped not to repeat the failings of Jim Gray who was essentially unknown to the national media. During the Libertarian Party convention this weekend, the delegates selected both Gary Johnson and Bill Weld opting for pragmatism rather than party purity.  This is some election year when the libertarians are more reasonable than the Republicans and Democrats.

With 2 former Republican governors on the ticket, the Libertarian Party is now poised to be a real third party alternative. This could be a huge year for them, even if they don’t win. Remember, from our archives, if you reach 5% of the popular vote in a presidential election, you are entitled to real money in the next cycle (the irony of Libertarians accepting Federal handouts not withstanding).

Nicholas Kristof has a follow up to his column “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance” where he condemned the intolerance of progressives especially in the university. Apparently, the left universally scoffed at the thought of tolerating conservatives…which essentially confirmed his point.

The EFF is shutting down their canary watch program after a year. I have previously discussed the importance and usefulness of warrant canaries. It seems the EFF has decided it isn’t worth the effort to keep track of all the notices because they seem to change too much from post to post.  These aren’t bad reasons, but it is a little concerning. It seems likely that you’ll just have to stick to the default that any website you visit has received national security letters asking for information.

Jason Brennan at Bleeding Heart Libertarians on the difference between Ignorance, Misinformation, and Irrationality in democracies.  Essentially ignorance isn’t exactly the problem in democracies, since if everyone is equally ignorant, then the non-ignorant people will be able to make rational decisions; there is no bias for the ignorant people since they have no opinion. Misinformation can be a problem though, if most people are misinformed, they will make poor decisions. But even if people are misinformed, having a deliberative discussion will help as rational logic should triumph. But irrationality is a serious problem, since even discussions would just spread more misinformation. This relates to the thesis of Bryan Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Wikipedia, full text for free).  I look forward to reading Brennan’s new book, iconoclastically titled Against Democracy.

Tangentially related: John Oliver has a segment on the flaws of the primary system. Unfortunately, he sort of glosses over the assumption that they need to be more democratic, but do they? He says this time we “got lucky” in that the candidates with the most votes were the ones actually chosen, but we need to change things in the future. I disagree; the candidates we did choose are awful. If the system is working now, making it work better won’t help anything. Check out my previous post for more on this, and forward it to John Oliver if you get a chance. Better than reforming the primary system, let’s try making more parties more viable with some proportional representation in the House of Representatives!

Why Bernie doesn’t quit: Polisci 101 analysis of Bernie Sanders’ intentions. Basically, he wants to stop Hillary from turning towards the center, since he wants the Democratic party to be very a progressive Social Democrat party. This is also the reason that anyone who’s not a Social Democrat wants Bernie out of the race.

Ilya Shapiro at the Cato Institute, who knows his stuff pretty well, called Donald Trump’s list for replacing Justice Scalia’s SCOTUS seat “exceptional”. This is good news in that a Trump presidency would at least have this going for it. I don’t know if all this would make him a better choice than Clinton, but it is a big deal, at least to me.  Doubtful if this alone would be enough to unite all Republicans around him.

Nick Gillespie has two solid blog posts. One is a great overview of a recent Foreign Relations Committee Hearing and the constrasting views of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.  Paul, we should note, won his primary to stand for reelection for his Kentucky Senate seat. This should largely guarantee his victory (PredictIt doesn’t have a market yet but PredictWise has it at 90% Republican).  The other post discusses how Obama’s new overtime regulations are going to harm workers by reducing hours, workers, or both.

Meta-blog post. Do you need more economics blogs? Here is a giant list of them. They’re vaguely ordered by popularity, and you shouldn’t just dismiss it because Paul Krugman is first; there’s a lot of good blogs I didn’t know about.

Dylan Matthews at Vox makes the case for getting rid of the TSA. Doesn’t even mention the financial cost savings (their budget is $8 billion, and cost of time is at least that).

Scott Sumner on the problems with government policy responses to crises. Scott also did a much better job predicting the economy than the Fed. Takeaway: please, please institute prediction markets for the basic macroeconomic indicators.

Cool YouTube video on computational complexity and the P vs NP problem.

Short summary of one of the best essays on markets: Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

What are the components of airline ticket prices? Great YouTube video explanation.

All the Scott Alexander: Apparently good kindergarden teachers have massive effects on income decades later, but no lasting effect on test scores. There really bizarre studies and all I can tell is that education research is hard.

As part of his ongoing philosophy of niceness and tolerance in society, and relating to my post on tolerance, Scott discusses more on tolerance and coordinated vs uncoordinated meanness.

Scott also has a great post on his experience in the Irish health system, related to the UK junior doctors’ strike.  There are serious barriers to entry to the US medical system because the benefits are so high if you become a doctor. In UK, this is not true, since the state regulates how much doctors can make, so of course many doctors are leaving the UK and Ireland for places where the pay is less regulated. Scott says he’s not sure how to solve labor disputes, but if you have a freer market in hiring and payment, you don’t end up having labor disputes. The American system has problems as well, and if the barriers to entry could be reduced

And finally: Scott Alexander’s review of Albion’s Seed, and his analysis of the importance of culture in determining beliefs.

Apparently non-technical people don’t know this, but Craig Wright isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. He had an “exclusive” interview with several media outlets discussing how he was really the inventor of Bitcoin. But if you read the story pretty quickly, you notice he doesn’t provide a signature with Satoshi’s private key (the reddit and Hacker News threads found he stole a signature from a transaction in one of the early blocks), and he doesn’t move any of Satoshi’s money to a publicly declared account. Those are very easy ways to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and he didn’t do them, instead relying on some weird demonstration directly to a journalist. I would have guessed most people would have figured he was lying (he has a weird history as well), especially because Satoshi Nakamoto has gone to great lengths to protect his identity, and this guy is clearly trying to get attention. But several news outlets printed it as true. Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of Bitcoin, has declared that he has seen proof, but he hasn’t told us what the proof is.  But you shouldn’t need a really famous person to vouch for someone’s identity, that’s the whole point of Bitcoin; decentralized proof is easy and clear.

From Ars Technica: Death by GPS.

Bryan Caplan on global warming cost-benefit analyses.

The Fourth Amendment apparently no longer applies to the federal government. The FBI can access any data gathered from general warrants issued under the FISA court to the NSA, which is only supposed to be targeting foreign nationals, but which we know just grabs all data a company has.

Marginal Revolution discusses the issue of public bathrooms in context on North Carolina’s recent law.

Your Candidate Sucks: Democracy Troubles

Now that we basically have our two major candidates, let’s do a retrospective look at some of the political candidates our system was able to produce, reject, or approve over this election cycle.  Let’s start with Republicans.

In early 2015, the prevailing wisdom was that Hillary Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee.  She looked like a strong candidate but one with a low ceiling; she had great name recognition and experience, but also was (and is) tied to the Obama administration, especially its foreign policy. I’d argue she’s appeared even weaker over the course of the primaries than she did in 2015 as big swaths of Democrats have shown hesitation to embrace her candidacy. Given this situation, Republicans should have been able to come up with candidates that played well against Hillary; what they got is someone who (as of May 2016), isn’t very competitive. If only there had been someone else to pick from!

Wikipedia counts 17 Republican candidates. We won’t spend lots of time on all of them, but it’s worth seeing some of the candidates that were rejected. Continue reading Your Candidate Sucks: Democracy Troubles

Voting Rights Schmoting Rights

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“If you don’t feel like voting, don’t bother. It won’t matter. The statistical odds of your vote making any difference at all are infinitesimal.” These are the words of Megan McArdle in a sad, but amusing, piece telling you not to vote. And she’s right: your vote, at least in federal elections, is pretty worthless. Even in smaller House elections, over 80% of incumbents win.

But she’s not the only person that’s been talking about voting recently. The Left has been quite upset over new voter ID laws being implemented around the country. John Oliver even did a long segment on it.

I like John Oliver as a political commentator (and in Community). His sharp wit combines biting commentary with excellent humor, and the format of his show allows a deep dive on interesting issues. I try to watch as many of those segments as possible (they are available for free on YouTube) despite the vast differences in the way he and I view the world.  Oliver’s analysis provides great starting points for discussion, and he helps me understand many critiques of issues that I would never have thought of.

While I don’t really disagree with him on the basic issue of voter ID laws, I feel like he’s missed the more profound problem about American democracy: voting is just a gimmick.

How can this be? Voting is a fundamental right!  America was founded as a grand experiment in democracy! Yes, voting is very important to Americans, but why?  In fact, what is a voting right? Continue reading Voting Rights Schmoting Rights