Archive for November, 2007

This might be a little unfair, but it made me laugh. Enjoy:

Yes, I’m posting twice in a matter of 24 hours, and yes, that means there is an important Legal Research & Writing assignment I should be doing right now.

There are times in the Democratic primary when I think John Edwards makes the most sense of any of the candidates and has effectively coupled a seriousness of purpose with an appropriate sense of outrage at the status quo. Then there are other times where I find him just plain annoying. Two recent moves by Edwards fall in the latter category.

The first is his refusal to promise to support Hillary if she becomes the nominee. When asked about this, he said, “I’m not willing to talk about that at this point.”

This is profoundly irritating. There is an extent to which both Edwards and Obama ought to be going after Hillary, but it falls far, far short of the point that you start questioning whether you will support the Democratic nominee. Not only does this make the Democratic Party look far more divided than it actually is or should be, but it makes Edwards look incredibly petty.

My second issue with him is more significant, however. Recently Edwards put out this ad:

In it, he says that he will tell Congress that “if you don’t pass universal health care by July of 2009 – in six months – I’m going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you.”

First of all, this is just plain unconstitutional. The 27th Amendment says, “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

But beyond that, Edwards is advocating the exact sort of expansion of executive power that he and every other Democrat have been rightfully criticizing Bush for engaging in. To suggest that the President ought to be able to threaten cutting the pay or benefits of members of Congress in order to get them to sign on to legislation might sound appealing to liberals when it comes to pushing health care reform, but it should be abundantly obvious that such a tactic is a dangerous breach of the separation of powers that could be used by a president of either party to achieve nefarious objectives.

Democratic candidates should be smarter than this. Democratic voters, hopefully, are smarter than this. And any slight hope Edwards had of winning my vote will go out the window if this becomes a central part of his campaign.

According to this article, Americans need to rethink our concepts of privacy.

Assumption: By the year 2016, the word secret is meaningless. A recording of every second of everyone’s life is available through a search engine similar to Google if you know the proper keywords to reference it. The recordings cannot be blocked or faked and anyone can access them.

What are the likely political results of this change?

Name three totally new professions that will be created to deal with this new way of life.

How will this impact economics?

Tom

I was sitting in class today and we were discussing property rights. During the discussion a few thoughts and more questions came to mind that I thought I’d share.

Okay, so we have this thing called property. What does that mean? What does it really mean to “own” property. Oh I know the legal definition and the bundle of rights that are legally enforceable on a given piece of property, but I’m asking in the conceptual sense. Does owning property mean that I can do absolutely anything I want to on it? Could I, for instance have ten dogs on my half acre residential lot that bark all night? Does it matter what my neighbors think? Somehow I get the feeling that even some of the more ardent of libertarians would probably say no, there are reasonable limitations to how an individual can use their property. People can do what they want so long as it doesn’t harm another person or interfere with their rights to enjoy their property.

The old saying goes “your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins” and that’s generally a sound principle. It’s in balancing your right to swing against my right to not be hit that government generally comes in (and I swear Tom if you talk about God granting property rights or government being evil I’m bursting a vein, this isn’t about government) as an intermediary and we have that messy court stuff. At the founding of this country private property rights were generally understood in the negative; property was the ability to stop others from interfering in your enjoyment and use of it. Today that’s not quite so true. Granted a good number of us think this way, but that’s not the way things work. If that were true we wouldn’t have industrial pig farms because the stench is so overpowering that it makes the areas nearby virtually uninhabitable.

The problems of “do no harm” compound when we are talking about things that are not land or even the long term health of land. Land can be damaged pretty badly by poor management or short-term thinking. Iowa has a good 50 years or so of topsoil left – but then what? What about rivers, air, lakes, the ocean? We don’t really have property rights to air and water, but if we did what would that look like? How do you own water or air rights? How would we remedy harms to those rights? I could just imagine a polluter having to buy the right to pollute from millions of property owners from Illinois down to Indiana to have a source of pollution in Wisconsin. This sounds a bit extreme, but we currently (and into the future will) reside somewhere between absolute unregulation and this extreme uberprivatization. What’s the right line? What about multi-source pollution? If there are millions of cars in LA that produce smog and my kid gets asthma complications that can be fairly traced to the smog to whom do I turn for redress?

I’m perfectly serious here, we have a certain conception of property rights and that influences all of the questions I’ve posed. A lot of these questions are directed towards the more libertarian-oriented here, but they’re generally open. I’m not really trying to push a value judgment, but rather asking where the balance should fall. Basically what is property and how does it apply to some of the hypothetical scenarios I’ve tossed up?

*Updated below*

Tom brought this subject up in the comments under the previous post, and I thought it was a topic worth a discussion on its own. Most of our readers will have heard that Ron Paul raised over $4 million yesterday, which is the greatest one-day fundraising of any Republican in the campaign, and second only to Hillary Clinton’s June 30th $6.2 million collection for the Democrats.

It’s anybody’s guess what this means for this particular primary campaign, though it’s not unreasonable to guess that he will be able to do surprisingly well in New Hampshire. In any case, it will almost certainly serve to embolden Paul and perhaps encourage him to mount a third-party campaign as the candidate of the Libertarian or some other party. If he were to mount such a campaign, he would certainly do at least some damage to the Republican candidate’s already diminished chances, and if that damage is severe enough, it could cause a more serious schism in the Republican Party than it has ever seen. At the conclusion of such an election, the GOP could become almost irreparably fractured: neoconservatives, religious conservatives, Buchanan-style nativists, and libertarians (who themselves are by no means a homogeneous group). What, then, will happen to this party?

I have suggested in the past, to be greeted with enthusiastic agreement from Tom, that the future of American politics is going to rest on the division between those who believe in a small government and those who believe in a strong national government that provides for social welfare. The rise of Ron Paul could perhaps be the beginnings of this major shift in our political discourse.

I have to run to class, but hopefully this provides a good starting point to discuss the significance and implications of Ron Paul.

Update (5:37 pm): It’s been pointed out in the comments that Ron Paul has pledged not to run as a third party candidate. I don’t know to what extent such a pledge can be trusted at this point in the campaign, but another thing I recently learned is that it probably doesn’t matter whether he means it or not. Several states, including Paul’s home state of Texas, have passed so-called “sore loser” laws, which prohibit, either expressly or implicitly, a candidate who loses a party’s nomination in a primary campaign from placing his name on the ballot to run as a candidate of another party. First of all: how totally fucking crazy is it that these laws exist? Second of all: this obviously makes it very difficult for a Ron Paul third-party campaign to be particularly influential, even if he wanted to go back on his pledge. So that needs to be taken into consideration when talking about the effect of his candidacy.

I still think Paul’s candidacy, particularly if he makes a splash in New Hampshire, could have a significant effect on America’s political future. His loss will subsequently turn a lot of libertarians off, particularly if the Republican nominee is Giuliani. Republican turnout could as a result fall rather dramatically, serving the same basic purpose that a Paul third-party run would. None of this means that after the 2008 election that the GOP will reform itself overnight, of course, but I do think it could push the GOP in the direction of becoming more libertarian.