The Liberal Order

A Lesson on Voting from Children

I voted this last election and it counted. No, my vote did not change the outcome of any election, but it was the first time that I actually believed that my personal benefit exceeded my personal cost of voting.

This year I took my two kids, ages 7 and 10, to the poll and let them vote. Yes, we went over the candidates and issues the day before and the day of the election, but I let them choose for whom and what they wanted to vote. I have to admit, I encouraged them heavily to vote no on Proposal 5, but  it didn't take much prodding from me; they both wanted to vote against it.

After casting their ballot I asked my daughter if I would ever have ever let her decide which car or television or lawnmower we should buy. Without hesitating she answered no. I then asked her, "Well, why would I let you decide for whom and for what I should vote?" She didn't have an answer. I then asked her, "If I make a mistake when purchasing a car or television, who bears the cost of my mistake?" She answered, "You do." I continued, "And if you just made a mistake when voting for me, who bears the cost of that mistake?" She replied, "Everyone." I then asked, "Would you predict that people make better choices  when deciding which car or television to buy or when voting in a political election?" Again, without hesitation, "Of course, when buying a car."

Her first lesson on the difference between private and public choices.

Not Voting Is Patriotic

Greg Mankiw has a nice post on why some people shouldn't vote. My only disagreement is with this comment:

If the ill-informed were all induced to vote, they would merely add random noise to the outcome.

This would be true if people closed their eyes and randomly pulled levers when voting for people or initiatives they know little about. But I believe Bryan Caplan to be correct in that voters, especially ill-informed and less educated voters, are systematically biased toward bigger government. Think of minimum wage laws, trade barriers, anti-immigration, and constitutional amendments defining marriage. This skews outcomes in favor of more inefficient and poorly reasoned government intervention.

Why the Libertarian Party is Marginalized

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Loretta Nall, the Libertarian Party's write-in candidate for governor of Alabama, is campaigning on her cleavage and hoping that voters will eventually focus on her platform.

``It started out as a joke, but it blew up into something huge,'' said Nall, a 32-year-old with dyed blond hair.

Her campaign is offering T-shirts and marijuana stash boxes adorned with a photo of her with a plunging neckline and the words: ``More of these boobs.'' Below that are pictures of other candidates for governor - including Republican incumbent Bob Riley and Democratic Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley - and the words: ``And less of these boobs.''

Story here.

Funny and cute, but politics is serious business, notwithstanding Libertarians' perceptions and/or disdain for government. This can only hurt candidates with legitimate platforms running under classical liberal principles.

George Will On the Battle for Conservatism

[T]he problem with claiming to have cornered the market on virtue is that people will get snippy when they spot vice in your ranks. This is one awkward aspect of what is supposed to have been the happy fusion between, but which involves unresolved tensions between, two flavors of conservatism -- Western and Southern.

The former is largely libertarian, holding that pruning big government will allow civil society -- and virtues nourished by it and by the responsibilities of freedom -- to flourish. The Southern, essentially religious, strand of conservatism is explained by Ryan Sager in his new book, "The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party":

"Whereas conservative Christian parents once thought it was inappropriate for public schools to teach their kids about sex, now they want the schools to preach abstinence to children. Whereas conservative Christians used to be unhappy with evolution being taught in public schools, now they want Intelligent Design taught instead (or at least in addition). Whereas conservative Christians used to want the federal government to leave them alone, now they demand that more and more federal funds be directed to local churches and religious groups through Bush's faith-based initiatives program."

Story here.

Sugar Quotas and the Corn Lobby

Alex Tabarrok notes:

The import quotas raise the US price of sugar well above the world price (~24 cents per pound compared to ~9 cents per pound) and encourage consumption of [high fructose corn syrup]. Reflecting this fact, the main defenders of the sugar quota are no longer Florida sugar growers but rather mid-West corn growers.

Archer Daniels Midland was the single biggest lobbyist for passage of the 1995 farm bill, which increased the quotas existing at that time. Fearing increased competition if NAFTA were to pass, the sugar lobby pushed to retain and to increase existing quotas. But it was ADM, the largest producer of corn syrup in the world, with the strongest lobbying presence.

I've heard that ADM's chief lobbyist is one of the most influential, yet unkown lobbyists in Washington. I wonder if he's as powerful and influential as Alfonso Fanjul?

And What About the Children?

One of the shortcomings of anarchy as a political philosophy is that it has little to say about protecting children from abusive and neglectful parents. Children are not competent enough developmentally to enter into contracts and protect themselves, which makes them wards of their parents. How, then, can we as a society be assured that they are being properly taken care of and not abused or neglected by their parents?  If a child is the ward of his or her parents, and the parents contract for private protection, who protects the children from abuse or neglect?

Here is a story illustrating the problem.

NORFOLK, Virginia (AP) -- A judge ruled Friday that a 16-year-old boy fighting to use alternative treatment for his cancer must report to a hospital by Tuesday and accept treatment that doctors deem necessary, the family's attorney said.

The judge also found that Starchild Abraham Cherrix's parents were neglectful for allowing him to pursue alternative treatment of a sugar-free, organic diet and herbal supplements supervised by a clinic in Mexico, lawyer John Stepanovich said.

Update: Here is another sad story of parental abuse.

Also, edited for clarity.

The Daily Show Effect on Young People's Voting Habits

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

Story here. Here's a link to the paper (PDF file).

This paper simply reinforces the obvious: that when people perceive of democracy's failures they become skeptics. When politicians are portrayed as self-interested bumbling boobs who know few limits to their crass and egocentric behavior people become jaded by democracy. Seems like a good argument for limiting democracy.

FEMA Funds Fraudsters

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that $1.4 billion (yes, that's billions of dollars) of aid paid to aid recipients of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was undeserved. Undeserved is too good a word. Here are some examples.

In one case, a man stayed more than two months on the government tab at a hotel in Hawaii that cost more than $100 a night. At the same time, he was getting $2,358 in government rent assistance, even though he had not been living in the property he claimed was damaged in the storm.

Emergency aid was used to pay for football tickets, the bill at a Hooters in San Antonio, a $200 bottle of Dom Perignon, "Girls Gone Wild" videos (MS: I can only guess that because Wal-Mart showed FEMA up aid recipients were barred from purchasing Women of Wal-Mart videos.), even an all-inclusive weeklong Caribbean vacation, the report says. More than $5 million went to people who had provided cemeteries or post office boxes as the addresses of their damaged property.

FEMA also provided cash or housing assistance to more than 1,000 prison inmates, totaling millions of dollars; one inmate used a post office box to collect $20,000. Some of the inmates may in fact have owned property that was damaged, but most should not have been eligible for the aid.

In another case, 24 payments, totaling $109,708, were sent to a single apartment, where eight people each submitted requests for aid eight times, each time using their own Social Security numbers.

Another person collected 26 payments using 13 different Social Security numbers — a total of $139,000 — even though public records show the individual did not live at any of the addresses reported as damaged.

Government always suffers from incentive and information problems. Even if FEMA had all the relevant information regarding the need for assistance, which they didn't, what incentive do they have to get it right? As stated, you can almost always exit a bad market outcome; you can almost never exit a bad government outcome.

Political Corruption

While in grad school, a fellow student was traveling to Pakistan for the first time. Her family was from Pakistan, though she had never been. The day before she left I asked if she would have to pay bribes to get through customs, to which she replied, definitely.

She went on to explain how her father had to give up a video camera and a few other items in order to enter Pakistan the year before. I then asked if it angered her that she'd be required to do this. At just that time it hit me that it's really no different than what we do here, except that we concentrate the process such that the recipients (of bribes) are restricted to politicians, and access (to pay bribes) is limited to  professional lobbyist. We ostensibly have a more efficient system of graft.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution links to this disturbing story that personifies my point, albeit to an egregioius extent.

More on Limited Government

The following letter was published in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

In his Jan. 31 editorial-page piece "Libertarian Orphans," David Boaz asked "What's a libertarian to do?" This Republican's first response was to change my Republican Party voter registration to Libertarian Party. After 37 years as a loyal Republican, I was rewarded with 14,000 earmarks by a Republican-controlled House, the Alaskan bridge to nowhere by the Republican-controlled Senate, and a Republican president who is unaware of his veto power. It's time for those who think like libertarians to act like Libertarians by no longer voting for the porkers who control today's Republican Party. Orphans, unite!

The gist of Boaz's argument can be summed up with this comment of his.

So where are the libertarians in politics and the media? Since the Clinton impeachment and the Florida recount, there's been a polarization: Congressmen and TV pundits define themselves as red/blue, pro-/anti-Bush, partisan Democrat/Republican, and take rigid liberal/conservative positions on Iraq, tax cuts, Social Security reform, gay marriage, abortion. But polls tell us that Americans aren't quite so partisan.

Bryan Caplan will soon have a lot more to say on this and illuminate better the problems of collective decision making. But arguments like the above are all too common: If only we had better people in government we'd have better, smaller, more responsive, [add your special belief here}, government.

This type of thinking presupposes that the problems of collective decision making are procedural rather than systemic. As I've noted before (I should make a few edits to this), and contrary to the letter writer's belief noted above, you can fill the government with libertarians and they, too, will become big government spenders. If they don't they won't remain in office. Despite their claims to the contrary, voters do want big government, at least for them. Get rid of all of your subsidies and tax breaks but keep mine; it's the quintessential prisoner's dilemma game. And I don't see it breaking anytime soon; special interests have become far more pervasive, effective and efficient. 

It's the principle of Hayek's, "Why the Worst Get on Top." You have to be willing to sell out your principles and do the bidding of special interest groups to win votes, and few people with unwavering principles for limits on what we can acheive collectively through government are likely to succeed, much less even try. Our newly elected politicians swear that they're going to Washington to clean up a cesspool, yet very soon realize that it's a hot tub . . . for them. The problem is systemic and not likely to be solved with a constitution or a constitutional amendment. In fact, the problem itself is democracy in action. From this last linked paper is this quote by Sir Alex Fraser Tytler:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

“The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.”

Limited government is great. Good luck convincing the people.