Bullied Pulpit

David Brooks wants Obama to... be Obama?

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:46:00 +0000

Brooks has a classic column pining for a centrist hero, a "market socialist." Like most of these columns, what he's actually describing is the Democratic party and President Obama. Here's his wishlist:

If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.

As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.

This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector. Don’t triangulate meekly toward the center; select bold policies from both ends. That’s what would help Maddie Parlier and millions like her.

Let's see if Obama has addressed these issues:
Simplify tax code: Check
Streamline regulation: Check
Immigration policy: (Brooks is very vague, but) Check
Balance budget long term: Check
Job training: Check
College/Employer coordination: I don't actually know what this means. And the second google result is Brooks' column. So... no?
Better superstar teacher treatment: Check
Child care options: Check
Early Childhood education: Check (Scroll down to the section "Focus on early childhood education")

Looks to me like the intrepid Mr Brooks really just needs to face reality and vote for Obama. No need for Americans Elect here. Your favored candidate is waiting for you, Mr Brooks. All you have to do is open your eyes.

Zoning, Uptown, and Meg Tuthill

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:30:00 +0000

I'm pretty sure my city council-member, Meg Tuthill, has almost the polar opposite view of zoning that I do:

I have worked in our neighborhood to protect our residential zoning where possible. We worked hard to downzone parts of the neighborhood to protect our limited historic housing stock. I will work to prevent erosion of zoning laws and to make sure that neighbors have a voice in zoning decisions.

I live in Uptown. My apartment has a walk score of 97, indicating a "Walker's Paradise." My neighborhood is 85% renters. The vacancy rate is around 2% right now and rents are rising, indicating high demand for rental housing that isn't being met. And what is Ms Tuthill concerned with? DOWN-zoning. If I could buy a dead-tree version of Ryan Avent's book I think I would send a copy to her office.

Uptown is a thriving neighborhood where many young people want to live. Not only are they young, but they're young professionals, the exact group every neighborhood wants more of. (The buses from Uptown to downtown are full of Target badges.) They have lots of disposable income to spend on neighborhood businesses. Throttling development is a great way to retard growth and keep Uptown from realizing its full potential.

SOPA and PIPA

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Today you may have noticed that quite a number of websites have special messages up and/or have gone completely dark. (Nerds everywhere are being far more productive since they can't access Reddit or Wikipedia.) They're doing so to protest two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, that are intended to fight online piracy. They go quite a bit farther than what many internet giants such as Google and Wikipedia believe is necessary. They could have a profound effect on the way the internet operates and even on free speech.

In my opinion, they're the work of content providers who refuse to enter the digital age. Instead they just want to use the power of the government to protect their outdated business models. This is all a long-winded way to say that all three people who still check this blog should call their congresspeople and tell them not to vote for SOPA or PIPA.

The (not so) Elusive Center

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000

The Economist falls prey to the classic pining for a centrist Messiah in last week's leader, "America's Missing Middle":

IT IS a year until Americans go to the polls, on November 6th 2012, to decide whether Barack Obama deserves another term. In January the Republicans start voting in their primaries, with the favourite, Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, facing fading competition from Herman Cain, a pizza tycoon, and Rick Perry, the governor of Texas. Already American politics has succumbed to election paralysis, with neither party interested in bipartisan solutions.
...
In other countries such a huge gap in the middle would see the creation of a third party to represent the alienated majority. Imagine a presidential candidate next year who spelled out the need for deep future cuts in spending on entitlements and defence, as well as the need to raise some revenue (largely by getting rid of deductions); who explained that the pain would be applied only after the recovery was solidly in place; who avoided class or culture wars; who discussed school reform without fear of the Democrats’ paymasters in the teachers’ unions. Better still, imagine a new centrist block in Congress, which might give that candidate (or for that matter a President Obama or Romney) something to work with in 2013.

As usual, these pieces tend to conflate the right with the left, blame both, then pine for a savior who represents "the alienated majority." That alienated majority, of course, shares all the writer's policy positions. One would think that if there really were a majority that shared those beliefs, the parties would reflect that.

As it happens, one party does largely share the positions laid out in this article: the mainstream Democratic party, led by President Obama. His position on deficit reduction all along and the position of most Democrats has been to accept deep cuts while insisting on revenues. True, we'll need more revenues than just taxing corporate jets, but Democrats are far closer to this centrist ideal than Grover Norquist's Republicans. Many Democrats (though not enough, I admit) are also willing to take on teacher's unions for school reform.

The article does admit that the right is "mostly to blame". So why are they asking for a centrist savior? The article would be closer to reality if it merely called on the right to stop being insanely intransigent and started working for solutions other than permanent, regressive, deficit-financed tax cuts.

Someone writes this article just about every day. And every day they bend over backward to avoid giving Democrats credit for actually being the centrists for which the writer pines. Sure they're not perfect, but they're far more likely to make a positive impact than a hypothetical third party. The Economist's "alienated majority" and $2.99 will get you a McRib.

Jumbled thoughts on the contradictions of modern liberalism

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:00:00 +0000

My thoughts aren't really well sorted on this right now, but I want to get the basic idea down on paper while it's fresh in my head.

Liberals need to make a choice. Do government services exist solely to cost-effectively provide services to the public that enhance the general welfare? Or is an essential part of public service enhancing the welfare of those employed by the government, even if that can detract from the effectiveness of that service to the general public?

There are examples of both! In some countries (Saudi Arabia, for example, I believe) the government actively employs people for the sake of employing people. In other words, the services rendered aren't the desired end, merely the gainful employment of the citizens. In others, the services rendered are the end and the government employs citizens merely as a means to that end.

Right now, we have a schizophrenic view on the left. Liberals want the government to provide effective efficient services to the public. But at the same time, they are willing to go to bat for higher-than-market total compensation (pensions are important!) and generous work rules for (particularly low-skill) government workers.

I think these two desires are in conflict with each other. I understand where the impulse to push for both comes from. Many conservatives advocate cutting spending on social programs dramatically not because they think the programs are inefficient but because they are ideologically opposed to such programs. In that case, it is understandable that liberals put a premium on defending every dollar, even if some of them are wasteful or inefficient. After all, the alternative isn't more efficient programs but rather woefully deficient programs.

Now here's where I'm going to make my fellow liberals even more angry. I think it would be very silly to deny that the influence of unions, particularly in the public sector, are part of the reason this schizophrenia exists. It is in the best interests of those unions, who are HUGE backers of the Democratic Party, to extract as much compensation and as generous work rules as possible. But that has an effect on the broader liberal project. By putting so much emphasis on protecting the incumbent workers, we are failing to provide the best services possible to the broader public who are badly in need of such services. (I have a half-written essay on how transit unions can and do make it harder to provide cheap and effective public transit. I'll finish it some day, I promise.) Right now, public sector unions are making it more difficult to provide efficient public services.

Liberals need to make a choice. Is it more important to provide generous pensions and work rules (which are far more important, in my opinion, than cash compensation) to those incumbent bus drivers, bureaucrats, teachers, etc or to provide public services at low cost that have dramatic effects on the lives of tens of millions of those who are vulnerable, unemployed, and working poor?

I know, I phrased that in a way that is rather tilted toward my view. But if we really want to help the working poor have a higher standard of living, there are better ways than piecemeal efforts through improving the compensation of public workers. Beef up the Earned Income Tax credit, which is the most important piece of poverty-fighting legislation on the books. Increase cash transfers of other kinds (things like General Assistance in Minnesota pay only $203/month). These are broad-based ways to increase income rather than ones that affect only those working for public agencies.

I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to argue that we should impoverish bus drivers. What I am arguing is that we should spend as much money on CASH compensation as is necessary to get the workers we need. In some places, I'm sure that means spending more. But at the same time, let's reform pensions and work rules. In exchange for higher up front compensation, take away some job security. Make it easier for public agencies to keep talent and fire those who can't cut it. And move to a defined contribution system of pensions that won't leave public budgets on the hook for decades the way defined benefit plans can.

Clearly there will be many public workers who are worse off because of this. Again, this is why it's important to beef up cash transfers such as the EITC. Again, I want to make benefits as broad-based as possible. If a bus driver loses some income and schedule flexibility, I want to make sure there are cash transfers to help them out. But I want that same safety net to apply to a person working at McDonald's for minimum wage.

I know this is a little jumbled at the moment. And it probably sounds pretty hostile to a lot of my liberal friends. I tried to make it as clear as possible that my goal is to further the goals of broad-based prosperity that are the core of the liberal project. In my opinion there are other parts of the current liberal agenda that are problematic when trying to reach that goal. Let me know what you think. What am I missing?

Edit to add: Matt Yglesias uses an NYPD story as a hook for a very similar thesis in a post today.

Edit 2: Ross Douthat's column in the NYT touches on similar ideas:

It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.

Star Trek and the War on Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:17:00 +0000

On the recommendation of a few friends, I've been going through the back episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There have already been several episodes that take on civil liberties, war, and terrorism, but the episode I watched today had an exchange that is as perfect a commentary on the War on Terror as you can find. And it aired in 1996! The video is at the link, but here's a transcript:

Changeling: Let me ask you a question. How many Changelings do you think are here on Earth right at this moment?
Captain Sisko: I'm not going to play any guessing games with you.
Changeling: Ah. What if I were to tell you that there are only four on this entire planet? Huh? Not counting Constable Odo, of course. Think of it - just four of us. And look at the havoc we've wrought.
Captain Sisko: How do I know you're telling me the truth?
Changeling: Oh, four is more than enough. We're smarter than solids, we're better than you. And most importantly, we do not fear you the way you fear us. In the end, it's your fear that will destroy you.

Now just replace "changeling" with "member of Al Qaeda" and "solids" with "Americans." The whole episode is about a group of Star Fleet officers who are willing to turn Earth and the Federation into a police state, complete with a military-led coup d'etat, in order to stave off this threat from just a few terrorists/changelings. Sound familiar? Luckily, plucky Captain Sisko realizes the folly of this and thwarts their plans.

Unfortunately, our plucky Captain Sisko hasn't materialized (no nerdy pun intended). We thought it could be Obama, but he has been an abject disappointment on the civil liberties front. Instead writers like Adam Serwer, Conor Friedersdorf and Glenn Greenwald scream from the sidelines while policymakers continue to erode civil liberties in the name of unattainable absolute security. Star Trek's writers, half a decade before 9/11, had a better grasp on these issues than today's policymakers. Frankly, it almost certainly helped that the episode was written before 9/11. We hadn't experienced the horror of such a major attack. The Star Trek writers had clear minds. If only our policymakers were able to think as clearly.

Freedom is just another word for sociopathy

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:00:00 +0000

This is deeply disturbing. I don't know what else to say.

On guilty pleasures and NASCAR

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:02:00 +0000

There's an interesting thread going at the Dish about guilty pleasures, and one reader's contribution seemed rather familiar to me:

A reader sends a classic NSFW video and explains, "Chris Rock beautifully illustrates a guilty pleasure when he says he loves rap but he's tired of defending it."

Yeah, that sounds right. In my case, I like watching NASCAR, but I'm incredibly sick of being told that it's boring as hell every time I mention it. Surprisingly, my group of young cosmopolitan liberal friends aren't huge NASCAR fans! I don't even bother trying to explain or defend it anymore. It's not worth my time or theirs.

On a different note, I actually regret my days of music snobbery. I used to trash anything that I didn't think met my standards of musical talent or whatever. Now that a typical day for me includes a group of artists as eclectic as Fall Out Boy, Kanye West, Pain of Salvation, the 4onthefloor, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, I have no music snobbery leg to stand on. And I like it this way!

Adventures in cognitive dissonance (II)

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:07:00 +0000

Via Dave Weigel, Rick Perry is trying to have it both ways on sexual freedom, too!

"The radical homosexual movement seeks societal normalization of their sexual activity," [Perry] wrote. "I respect their right to engage in the individual business of their choosing, but they must respect the right of millions in society to refuse to normalize their behavior."

Got that? He respects the rights of homosexuals to "engage in the individual business of their choosing", which I presume is his way of saying "icky gay sex," but he also wants the heterosexual majority to have the "right" to deprive homosexuals of their rights by a show of hands.

Class act. And again, trying to split the difference between social conservatives and libertarian-leaning (and younger) GOP voters.

Adventures in cognitive dissonance

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:35:00 +0000

Via Dan Drezner, an excerpt from Rick Perry's speech at the VFW:

In the dangerous world we live in today, our enemies often don't wear a uniform or swear allegiance to a particular flag, but instead to an ideology of hatred.

As the tenth anniversary of the attacks of 9-11 approaches, we must renew our commitment to taking the fight to the enemy, wherever they are, before they strike at home.

I do not believe America should fall subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism.

We should only risk shedding American blood and spending American treasure when our vital interests are threatened.

The emphasis is mine, but notice that there are no ellipses in that quote. That is how the lines were delivered. So apparently Rick Perry thinks we should strike at nameless, generalized terrorists anywhere in the world, but we shouldn't "fall subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism". Just what the hell IS adventurism in Rick Perry's world? Because I think he said in the previous sentence that adventurism is his preferred form of foreign policy.

I get it, he's trying to appeal to the neoconservatives AND the libertarian isolationists in the GOP base. Everyone rags on Romney for changing his positions at the wave of a hat. Rick Perry is trying to have two positions at once. What a joke.

Faith in government

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:17:00 +0000

Dave Weigel:

What does it mean that Democrats want to believe [the 14th amendment or platinum coin loophole], or that articles about double-secret debt solution loopholes are so popular? It's sort of ominous. Not making a one-to-one comparison here, but it puts me in mind of the Tea Party-inspired Republican efforts of 2009-today to prove that this or that program they don't like can be magicked out of existence by putting the Consitution in a black hat and reading it with special glasses. The collapse of faith and trust in the way government works is mutating with every crisis, every bit showdown on a bill.

Weigel said "mutating." I might have said "collapsing faster than Tim Pawlenty's presidential hopes." But it's a great point regardless. It's also another sign of congress' complete inability to face the challenges that the country faces. As congress turns into more and more of a joke and continues to abdicate their responsibilities, the executive branch will continue to hoover up more power and responsibility.

As someone who does actually think separation of powers is a good thing, this is an unwelcome development. But nothing can really be done to reverse this trend until congress gets its collective head out of its collective ass.

Gleaning insight from the fine print

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:30:00 +0000

From my renter's insurance policy, under "Losses not insured":

e. War, including any undeclared war, civil war, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, warlike act by a military force or military personnel, destruction or seizure or use for a military purpose, and including any consequence of any of these. Discharge of a nuclear weapon shall be deemed a warlike act even if accidental.

Contrast this with the War Powers Resolution:

(1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances;
(2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair, or training of such forces; or
(3) in numbers which substantially enlarge United States Armed Forces equipped for combat already located in a foreign nation;

Hey, Obama administration, would my apartment still be insured if it were in Libya? I think congress could use some writing tips from State Farm Insurance.

(In unrelated news, this blog now has a mobile site. I guess I need to actually update this blog more often for it to be relevant.)

Post 9/11 America

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sat, 07 May 2011 17:58:00 +0000

I outsource the writing of this post to the Economist's Lexington:

At home, a new generation is coming of age with little memory of the more open and trusting America of ten years ago. The new America keeps looking over its shoulder. It is permanently vigilant and relentlessly intrusive. Few people complain about the security-inspired hassles that have infected everyday activities, from boarding an airliner to applying for some required government document. Safety first is, understandably, the order of the day in a world in which killers hide bombs in their shoes and underpants. But the cumulative result of all these precautions is a wretched thing. A culture of suspicion, and its accompanying bureaucracy, take away trust in your fellow man. A less tolerant America, whose prosperity was built on openness to the world, has shut down its borders and locked out many of the skilled and eager immigrants whose help it could dearly use.

How much of this can be reversed? A lot depends on whether people and their politicians see the value in trying. Early excesses in the war on terrorism, such as waterboarding, warrantless wiretapping and “extraordinary renditions”, have been stopped or rolled back. America’s strong Bill of Rights, respect for the law and tradition of liberty have helped to hold the goons and snoopers at bay. But fear, and the awful deeds that fear inspires, are hard to uproot. Americans are already quarrelling about whether it was waterboarding, now banned, that produced the tip that led the CIA to Abbottabad. With Mr bin Laden in his watery grave, a chapter may close. But the country he attacked faces a long road home to the more innocent place it was ten years ago.

This is what Balko means when he says that Bin Laden won. I'm just barely old enough to appreciate these changes, though I think I would qualify as part of the post 9/11 generation. I have lived my entire adult life under the shadow of Bin Laden and the threat of terrorism. It would be nice for that threat to no longer dominate the conversation. Bin Laden's death would be a great excuse to start that healing process.

False Equivalences

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Wed, 04 May 2011 22:03:00 +0000

In an otherwise excellent leader in this week's Economist, the editors make this comment while talking about budget difficulties:

The bad news—and the second reason for gloom about what the politicians are up to—is that neither party is prepared to make the basic compromises that are essential to a deal. Republicans refuse to accept that taxes will have to rise, Democrats that spending on “entitlements” such as health care and pensions must fall.

This sort of false equivalence is extremely common in the mainstream press, but I am very disappointed to see it show up in the usually sharp Economist.

If it helps the editors at the economist, I can point them to quite a few attack ads from the 2010 election hitting Democrats for cutting 500bn from Medicare. Last I checked, Medicare was an entitlement program. Those cuts were in the context of a bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, that is scored to reduce the deficit by over a trillion dollars over the next two decades.

Democrats have been very willing to look at entitlements. Almost too willing. Kent Conrad has spoken repeatedly about raising the retirement age, as have many Democrats. I think this is a bad idea, but since raising the retirement age was advocated on the cover of the Economist a couple weeks ago, you would think they might have noticed.

On the other hand, the GOP worships at the alter of Grover Norquist and his pledge to never raise taxes. Tom Coburn is the only one even willing to look at eliminating tax expenditures, and he's facing a lot of criticism for it. The GOP won't raise taxes, period. The Democrats, on the other hand, have already taken a whack at entitlements with Obamacare, and they're showing plenty of willingness to do more. In its effort to look fair and balanced, the Economist has perpetuated a trope that is flatly untrue. On deficits, the two parties are not equal. And that's the story nobody likes to tell.

Bin Laden

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Wed, 04 May 2011 21:34:00 +0000

First things first. I stand in awe of the utter fearlessness and straight-up badassery of the soldiers and airmen in the 160th SOAR and SEAL Team Six. And, of course, the much maligned CIA really did a hell of a job finding him and running the mission. And yes, I am one of those people who poured a scotch when I heard the news. I will not apologize for feeling relief and deep satisfaction at the death of Osama bin Laden. More than anyone else, he's responsible for the deaths of thousands on 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror that has caused the deaths of thousands more. As a symbol and as catharsis for America, his death is very important.

But in many ways, this changes nothing. Al Qaeda won't go away now. Anwar al Awlaki is still hanging out in Yemen with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Taliban isn't going to stop fighting in Afghanistan. The insurgents in Iraq won't stop fomenting violence. And Americans don't seem eager to stop willingly giving up their civil liberties in the name of security. In some sense, as Radley Balko points out, Bin Laden had already won. The most depressing part is that not only did we let him, we helped him. Bin Laden provided the spark, but we willingly fanned the flames.

In some ways, it almost seems wrong to put this much significance on bin Laden's death. After all, the overblown significance attributed to his life and his goals caused many of the instances of overreach in the name of security. As Ross Douthat's very good column from Monday puts it: bin Laden was always weak. Where we erred was in not realizing that.

So will his death cause policymakers to rethink the choices we've made over the last decade? Will we stop taking away civil liberties in ways that do little to make us safer? Right now, the signs point to no. Unsurprisingly, bin Laden's death is being taken as vindication for whatever position politicians held before. Torture supporters want to bring back waterboarding. Anti-war advocates want us out of Afghanistan. This event does not seem to have changed anyone's mind.

To me, and others, this seems like the perfect time to declare victory in the War on Terror and go home. Maybe soldiers can stop dying in a fruitless quest to bring Western democracy to Afghanistan. Maybe we can start dismantling the massive industry that has grown up around this misguided "war." Maybe we can get some of our rights back. Maybe the defense budget can stop growing and start shrinking. Maybe we can stop taking our damn shoes off when we go through security.

Hey, I can dream, can't I?

UPDATE: Douthat writes to dissent from Balko's piece, but I think they're arguing different things. Balko isn't laying American economic decline at Bin Laden's feet, he's laying the steady erosion of civil liberties over the last decade at his feet. Balko is an ardent civil libertarian and in his mind these measures are antithetical to the principles underlying the great project that is American democracy.

Ezra Klein is the one Ross should be arguing with, as he seems far more willing to lay a large amount of the economic problems of the last few years at the feet of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. I don't find that argument as convincing, but there is some merit to it. Douthat's erstwhile co-author, Reihan Salam, just spent much of a blog post emphasizing the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in an attempt to downplay the effects of the Bush tax cuts on our fiscal problems.

In the end, there's no way to resolve these arguments. But I firmly believe that from a civil liberties standpoint, Bin Laden did serious damage to America. In that, I definitely agree with Balko.

What Star Wars teaches us about power projection

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Overthinking It has a fantastic discussion on the economics of the Star Wars universe and the Death Star in particular. One tangential point stuck out to me, however:

For the Empire to actually exist as an institution, it needs to have the mechanisms in place to exist – namely, donks like Queen Amidala and Senator Jar Jar Binks who basically just sit around and handle boring government work. And you also need people everywhere. Like, if the Emperor controls everything, he needs to make sure every Speeder Registry office in every settlement on Tattooine has somebody working the counter except during major Imperial holidays. ...

To maintain order, the Emperor would generally need a MASSIVE, MASSIVE bureaucracy.
[...]
So, the Emperor and Tarkin focus on making one really huge, high-impact investment: The Death Star. They throw in Alderaan as part of that investment. This doomsday weapon will supposedly free up their resources to spend less on administration, personnel and infrastructure, and continue to function without a Senate. It seems like a big investment until you realize how much they save by not actually having a functioning government.

This is an attractive option even today, as politicians look to pay for tax cuts and handouts to core constituencies by laying off or cutting salaries and benefits for bureaucrats and government workers, as well as by skimping on infrastructure.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t work. The underpaid, undermotivated, poorly managed stormtroopers can’t even track down the Empire’s most wanted fugitive androids in an extremely sparsely populated area where they have undisputed control. If Tatooine still had meaningful senatorial representation and local government, Luke never would have gotten off the planet. Whole systems just break away and form not just a resistance, but a giant frickin’ fleet of spaceships that destroy not one, but two death stars. The failure of leadership is so total and complete that Tarkin is killed in his own fortress and the Emperor is murdered in his own office by his own right-hand man.

Obviously, this has a domestic focus, but I think we can draw lessons on national security from it as well. When you're reading through this explanation of the importance of good government even in imperial systems, one notes some parallels to today's American operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

The defense budget is many times the size of the budgets of the State Department and USAID combined. A lot of that money goes towards troops, but a lot also goes toward carrier battle groups, hideously expensive submarines, and shiny new fighter jets like the F-35. None of that helps us build the infrastructure necessary for the three aforementioned nations to become functioning states. Similar to how the Death Star wasn't able to build the bureaucratic infrastructure necessary for effective governance in Tatooine, the USS Gerald R. Ford will not be able to provide effective governance in the Korengal Valley.

It's true that troops can help create the conditions necessary for local governance to be possible. But troops are also being pressed into duty as arbitrators and de facto local leaders. (Remember the scenes in Restrepo of Captain Kearney trying to settle disputes with the local village elders. That's not something usually taught at West Point.) Even current Secretary of Defense Bob Gates is worried about the increasing militarization of US foreign relations. Certainly the ideal situation is for local governments to step in and provide the government necessary, but in the interim, it would be far better for civilians to be doing the work of setting up local government. There was lots of talk of a "civilian surge" in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but an overstretched diplomatic and development corps has a hard time fulfilling that promise. And, of course, they're being targeted for budget cuts in the current austerity craze.

Going forward, US policymakers need to avoid looking at flashy big projects and pay attention to the nitty gritty of good governance both at home and abroad. You can't win the future with the Death Star, but you can with effective governance from top to bottom.

(Clearly I'm not the only one who made this connection.)

1937

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 18:21:00 +0000

The economy was recovering from a financial crisis, but things still weren't all rainbows and unicorns. Unemployment hadn't recovered fully, and growth and investment weren't quite as high as they should have been. But Very Serious People insisted that right now the Most Important Thing was to reduce the deficit. Sound familiar? I'm talking about 1937. But I could easily be talking about 2011. As the graph above shows, FDR's budget cutting didn't "win the future." It put the US back into recession. With the last minute budget deal, Serious People, including the President, are congratulating themselves for contractionary fiscal policy. The Fed can't even bail them out. Interest rates can't go lower than 0, and they're not likely to try a third round of Quantitative Easing after the gold-bug hysteria that resulted from QE2.

Buckle up.

Justice Grover Norquist

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000

Andrew Cohen's very good piece on Justice Kagan's blistering dissent in a recent case buries the lede. Grover Norquist's tax philosophy, that tax expenditures are not spending, has made it into case law at the Supreme Court of the United States. Watch as Justice Kennedy tries to explain why tax breaks to religious institutions are not the same as handing them a check:

It is easy to see that tax credits and governmental expenditures can have similar economic consequences, at least for beneficiaries whose tax liability is sufficiently large to take full advantage of the credit. Yet tax credits and governmental expenditures do not both implicate individual taxpayers in sectarian activities. A dissenter whose tax dollars are "extracted and spent" knows that he has in some small measure been made to contribute to an establishment in violation of conscience. In that instance the taxpayer's direct and particular connection with the establishment does not depend oneconomic speculation or political conjecture. The connection would exist even if the conscientious dissenter's tax liability were unaffected or reduced. When the government declines to impose a tax, by contrast, there is no such connection between dissenting taxpayer and alleged establishment. Any financial injury remains speculative. And awarding some citizens a tax credit allows other citizens to retain control over their own funds in accordance with their own conscience.

Got that? It only affects you if your taxes are higher because a check is being cut to "an establishment". If your taxes are higher because that same establishment is getting a refund on their taxes (which we might often call "getting cut a check"), you're not being affected. In this case, it means that you can't object that your taxes are higher because of government support of religious institutions.

As Kagan (and Avi Schick of Slate) point out, Kennedy had to ignore five previous cases that found no distinction in order to made his weak argument:

As Justice Kagan points out in her powerful dissent, since creating the Flast exception, the Supreme Court has been presented with five separate challenges to tax-benefit programs by plaintiffs who invoked taxpayer standing. In each of those five cases, the court reached the merits of the claim even though the challenged program did not involve any direct government expenditure. Kennedy's rather weak retort is to note that while standing may have been assumed in each of those cases, the question wasn't explicitly addressed in any of them. His implication is that in five hard-fought Establishment Clause cases argued over a period of many years, the court, the parties and the solicitor general all somehow failed to notice the plaintiff's lack of standing to even bring the lawsuit.

Schick spends a lot of time on the hypocrisy of liberals and conservatives in this case and others like the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. I think I've been consistent in arguing that tax breaks are spending. In any case, Kennedy's acrobatics to make his case are now putting into case law a meaningless distinction between types of government expenditure.

War, American-style

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:47:00 +0000

It looks like the US, with a small assist from the UK, dropped over a hundred cruise missiles into Libya to soften up the air defenses for the coming no-fly-zone. Reports of coalition partners taking point seem to be wildly exaggerated. As always, the US has the assets and takes on the lion's share of the fighting/shooting/bombing.

Panning back a bit, I want to point to Marc Lynch's excellent piece on the passage of the UNSC resolution:

One might think that the disastrous post-war trajectories of Iraq and Afghanistan would have forever ended such an approach to military interventions, but here we are. Has anyone really seriously thought through the role the U.S. or international community might be expected to play should Qaddafi fall? Or what steps will follow should the No Fly Zone and indirect intervention not succeed in driving Qaddafi from power? No, there's no time for that... there never is. For now, I will be hoping, deeply and fervently, that the Libyan regime quickly crumbles in the face of the international community's actions.

Marc was an early, though cautious, advocate of the US and/or international community taking a role in Libya. But his questions are sobering, and I'm still unconvinced that the US has answers.

War

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:12:00 +0000

NYTimes:

The United Nations Security Council approved a measure on Thursday authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians from harm at the hands of forces loyal to Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi.

The measure allows not only a no-fly zone but effectively any measures short of a ground invasion to halt attacks that might result in civilian fatalities.

As Sully says, the run-up to this makes Iraq look well-deliberated. On the plus side, it's multilateral, and there have been rumblings that the US is pressing for other countries, including those in the Arab League, to play a real role here. This won't be all America. I hope it will be mostly foreign, but I doubt it. We inevitably end up taking on the lion's share of these operations. Where does our "responsibility" end? How far will the inevitable mission creep take us?

I don't really know what to say here. I'm deeply skeptical of this course of action. I am deeply pessimistic about possible outcomes. I hope I'm wrong. I fear I'm right.

No Fly Zone? No thanks. (II)

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:37:00 +0000

Ross Douthat has been absolutely nailing it with his writing on intervention in Libya. From his latest blog post:

Still, [National Review's editors] continue, “if we can’t establish a no-fly zone over Libya and stop Qaddafi’s drive toward Benghazi, we really are tapped out as a world power.” But surely a true world power doesn’t need to embark on ill-considered military intervention just to prove that it isn’t yet “tapped out.” (I have every confidence that we can stop Qaddafi’s drive toward Benghazi. Indeed, I’m so confident that I don’t think we need to go the trouble of proving it.)

Besides, the lesson of Iraq isn’t that we can’t execute a tactically-successfu military intervention. It’s that even the greatest power in the world needs to think long and hard about what happens after the intervention. And National Review’s preferred course promises a very, very long “after” for America in Libya.

Emphasis mine. And yet, there's a whole lot of overlap between the people who got us into the clusterfuck in Iraq and the people signing a letter to the President urging military intervention in Libya. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then I think I can safely label Kristol and rest "batshit insane."

What civil liberties?

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:24:00 +0000

CNN is reporting that State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has resigned as a result of his critical comments regarding the inhumane treatment of accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning. This incident is yet another that reflects badly on the moral compass of the Obama administration. Civil liberties seem to be out of style in the world of the governing elite of both parties. I shouldn't have to point out just how right Crowley is about this:

But Crowley has told friends that he is deeply concerned that mistreatment of Manning could undermine the legitimate prosecution of the young private. Crowley has also made clear he has the Obama administration's best interests at heart because he thinks any mistreatment of Manning could be damaging around the world to President Obama, who has tried to end the perception that the U.S. tortures prisoners.

That puts aside the obvious moral problems with treating a prisoner who stands accused of something but convicted of nothing in such an inhumane way. This isn't a dangerous killer or child molestor, this is a guy who put some documents on a CD and handed them to Julian Assange. Now, to be sure, he broke the law, and he should be held accountable. But right now he's in holding until he goes on trial. His conditions are perilously close to what many people would term "torture." This is not the way America should treat prisoners of any kind.

Yglesias calls it a "perversion of justice." I like Kevin Drum's reaction: "Jesus Christ." David Frum tweeted: "Crowley firing: one more demonstration of my rule: Republican pols fear their base, Dem pols despise it." Glenn Greenwald is unsurprisingly incensed.

As pissed as I am about all this, I don't know what I can do about it. Right now this country has two parties that are both complicit in perpetuating civil liberties violations. I don't really know what leverage those of us who care about civil liberties really have. I am still certain that this support for torture and indefinite detention will eventually be looked upon the way the Alien and Sedition Acts are now. For now, however, the arc of history is still bending away from justice, to paraphrase the president.

Wanted: Local political parties

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Recently Matthew Yglesias has been talking about the failure of partisan elections in cities and local government. Cities are so heavily democratic that the current parties tell you nothing. Non-partisan elections (as in Chicago) would seem like a good idea, but for low-information voters, they just end up being name-recognition contests with a huge incumbency advantage.

This strikes a chord with me, since my current city council member seems intent on pushing pointless city ordnances that restrict development and nightlife for very little reason. But how are we supposed to know what candidates for local office favor? Sure, local officials are responsive to their constituents, but not everyone has the time/inclination to do a Q&A with their city council member's staff. Local issues are very different from national ones, and they don't break easily on the usual party lines.

What we need are local parties that focus on local issues. For example, if I were to run for city council, I would run as a member of the "Density and Transit Party" or whatever. My party platform would be mostly about promoting transit, removing subsidies for cars and parking, and relaxing the zoning and density restrictions to promote new development. Perhaps my opponent would be running as the "Preserve our city" party that tries to enact ever harsher historical districts and height restrictions in order to prevent new buildings from changing the character of the city.

These parties could even be national, but the partisan breakdown would be odd. There are plenty of conservatives who would agree with my party's goal of removing barriers to development and market-distorting subsidies. There are plenty of liberals who would support the idea that cities should be preserved, not developed. New parties would allow low-information voters to tell at a glance what each candidate stood for.

Doctors hold all the cards

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:04:00 +0000

Smart conservatives like to point to solutions to our current dysfunctional health care system that empower consumers to make choices that will lower costs. In many contexts, I like this idea. I do generally prefer market-based solutions to top-down regulatory solutions. But Ezra Klein neatly distills just why I'm not sold on this being a workable solution to skyrocketing health care costs:

Patients are in awe of [doctors], because they are sick and scared and desperate for the help of anyone who seems to know how to make them better.
4) For that reason, cost control theories that rely on the patient to become more sensitive to costs or the insurers to become more aggressive on costs will fail. The only thing that will work is giving doctors the information and incentives that allow them to practice medicine in a way that controls costs.

I do think there's room for organizations like HMOs to come up with ways to ration care in ways that allow for lower costs. It will take radical differences in premiums for consumers to opt in to a restrictive HMO over a more relaxed PPO plan in numbers that will move the needle. Will that happen? I don't know. (For the record, rationing is happening now and will continue to happen in the future. Let's stop treating it like a four-letter word. "Ration" has six letters, people!)

I do not have very much confidence that a person with a serious illness is able or willing to shop around for the most cost-effective treatment. Doctors, however, can. Bundled payments will help doctors try to find the most cost-effective treatments to maximize their payout from treating patients. Also included in the PPACA is money for comparative effectiveness research to help doctors make these decisions. It turns out that most of the information doctors have currently comes from the marketing of the products they use. Giving doctors access to high-quality information about cost-effectiveness and the incentives to use that information seems to be a good way to reduce costs. I remain skeptical that consumers are capable of making such judgments.

Blaming the Baby Boomers

noreply@blogger.com (Bullied Pulpit) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 23:32:00 +0000

After a couple years of watching the baby boomer generation turn out to Tea Party rallies on Medicare-provided scooters to protest Democrats' attempt to provide health insurance to people who don't have the benefits of single-payer government health insurance, it's pretty easy to be angry at the boomers. But Aaron Renn gave me another reason:

I don’t see any signs of the older generations getting through the grieving process [for the Rust Belt cities of old] and moving on. This makes me think that for us to fully embrace a true urban policy, even in city government itself, it is going to take generational turnover. The baby boomers are already starting to age, but they’ll be with us a lot longer. Alas, they have historically been the most suburban generation, and not shy about imposing their values, so I suspect we’ll be dealing with that legacy for a while.

I think this does cast something of a shadow over the recent resurgence of urbanism in the US. As we saw clearly through the rise of the Tea Parties over the last couple years, old white people are more than willing to get out and protest (and vote!) when they care about something. In this case, that something will be any attempt at a reversal of the large system of subsidies and regulations that overwhelmingly benefit the suburban middle-class over poorer urban dwellers.

It does make me wonder what will happen as these suburban boomers age to the point where the suburban lifestyle is no longer feasible. At some age, driving is no longer a good idea, or even possible. In the suburbs, driving is the only option, however. There are going to be some serious problems in aging car-oriented suburbs. It will be interesting to see how they are addressed.