Over the course of my writing here I have been asked why I focus so much on political issues and not so much on promoting a moral society. I think it’s a great question and I have thought much about it. The short answer is that my focus on this site is on the political system and how it impacts society as well as how we can have a positive effect on the system that is currently in place.

For some time now I have found myself falling back in private political discussions to the position that all the best efforts and intentions with regard to political activity are no more than a bandaid over the ills of society and that true progress and stability in society are utterly dependent on the underlying morality or righteousness of the society being governed. It is exactly the same with a wound: a bandaid can help keep it clean and impede further infection but real healing is an internal function of the body. From outside the body the most we can do is create an environment that is conducive to healing.

What does that mean with regard to political involvement? A couple of things:

The most important thing it means is that we must recognize that no matter how pure or even effective our political efforts may be they cannot finally solve any of the problems we face. We must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that actual solutions must begin and be rooted in the basic cells of society, our families. With that understanding we might be more careful in the laws that we support to make sure that we are supporting and enabling healthy families rather than passing out casts and crutches for the broken homes which we have in ever increasing abundance. (We should also recognize that “broken” homes include more than just the poor or single parent families that get so much public sympathy.)

The second thing that means is that we must recognize that even though we cannot force people to be righteous, or smart, or tolerant through legislation what we establish in law is a baseline of decency and goodness in society—in other words, what we legislate is what we can and should enforce as a society and the bare minimum of what we should adhere to as individuals. When we remove or alter existing legislation we should consider whether we are truly promoting liberty or whether we are aquiescing to the destructive forces operating on our society.

Third we need to recognize that the vast majority of those who wish to use legislation to do more for society than it can actually do, in other words those who would use legislation as a tool for social engineering, are good and honest in their intent even when they are misguided in their efforts. Those who recognize the natural limitations of political action must work to help them recognize those limitatons and also work to expose that small minority who are actually using the power of government under the guise of social justice who are not acting honestly but instead are seeking for their own power or for the destruction of that which supports a moral society.

In summary, political power can be used to define and enforce a social baseline for conduct and expectations but it cannot be used to make society good—even if we want it to—and those who seek to use political power for more than that generally do so out of ignorance or misunderstanding rather than out of malice.

I don’t think we should abandon partisanship, but we need to abandon incivility and mindless unfounded attacks. I don’t want conservatives or liberals to change their principles, or to compromise them to gain short-term political points. I want them to confront the many serious problems that we have in this country and articulate their proposed solutions. Instead of focusing on who is scoring points or who is ahead in the polling or who made the most recent boo-boo, let’s focus on policy ideas and substance.

Our media is unwilling to do its job. There are no serious long-term investigations, no serious analysis of policy ideas, and no holding of our elected officials to account (except for sexual misbehavior of course). All those things are too expensive and don’t bring in enough revenue. Having some partisan hack shouting down anyone opposed to him or inviting a parade of other partisan hacks to spout off incoherent, uninformed nonsense is both cheap to produce and profitable. It’s time “we the people” stopped listening to this. We have a political system to fix, an economy to fix, a pointless war machine to stop. We need to learn to work together not revel in transient “victories” over our political opponents.

If 60% of voters could come to believe this and act/vote accordingly our political culture would be healed almost overnight.

I sincerely hope that I can offer thoughts that others will find valuable even as I scale back the time and energy available for that purpose. At the least, those who are paying close enough attention to wonder at my relative silence will have an explanation – and may know what to expect going forward.

Jane Hamsher wrote about the 11 Dimensional Chess approach to health care legislation that the Obama administration tried. That sent me back to some earlier thoughts I had shared about how we visualize the political spectrum. The simplest way to view things is one dimensional. Like the opening image here it breaks down into a right/left, red/blue, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat, or another single-axis spectrum. Many people recognize how inadequate such a simplified view is and various people (including myself) have sought to devise two-dimensional representations of the political landscape.

Of the many maps out there I think the easiest to comprehend is this from the Worlds Smallest Political Quiz:

With an axis measuring personal freedom issues and an axis measuring economic freedom issues it is not difficult to grasp the lay of the land according to this graph. Unfortunately this two dimensional representation, like all other two-dimensional representations, falls short of accurately describing reality.

I don’t know how many distinct axis may usefully divide the political landscape to understand the many varied perspectives that play into our national political debate but I have identified at least one more axis besides the personal and economic freedom axis – there is the power axis that deserves to be considered. How much political power a person has seems to have a distinct influence on their political outlook. Unlike the personal and economic outlook axis, which are virtually independent of each other, the power axis tends to insert some biases into people. The more political power a person attains the more likely they are to gravitate towards some degree of Big Government statism. I’m not sure which is the cause and which is the effect (I suspect they are simply intertwined) but there definitely seems to be a correlation between rising power and rising acceptance of statism. (I wish I could come up with a visual representation for this.)

While it is important for us to recognize that third dimension, perhaps another important insight can be gained from simply accepting the existence of any new axis – our perspective can be deceptive as to the view of others. From whatever your vantage point in the political universe your understanding of other viewpoints will be greatly enhanced anytime you are able to acquire a description of the other viewpoint from a vantage point that is not substantially the same as your own. Without that different perspective your view is reduced to two dimensions or less and you may fail to discern where others differ in their perspectives, or you may fail to recognize the significance when two people (perhaps as different as Ms. Hamsher and myself) agree on a particular point.

For some time I have been internally conflicted on the issue of congressional earmarking. Many people, including such diverse characters as President Obama and Congressman Chaffetz, have been vocal about calling for an end to earmarks. Others such as my own Congressman, Rob Bishop, reply that earmarks are not an addition to the total size of our federal expenditures – but simply a direction regarding the spending of money already appropriated. Believers in small government who make that argument say that our focus should be on reducing total expenditures rather than shutting down the earmarking process. Personally, I would like to see an end to earmarking and a significant reduction in total spending. (Earmarks alone are an insignificant portion of our spending.)

Almost 10 months ago I attended a town hall meeting for Rob Bishop in which the issue of earmarks was raised. Afterwards I wrote to Rep. Bishop asking these two questions:

1. If we get rid of earmarks won’t that allow us to focus on the size of the pile of money?
2. While I might prefer that Congress set the priorities for government appropriations rather than the administration, why should the priorities be set at the federal level at all? (except on truly federal priorities like defense spending) Wouldn’t it be better to just appropriate money and direct how much should go to various states and then let the states and municipalities decide which projects deserve the funding?

Apparently my questions were not even worthy of a form letter – I received no acknowledgment, let alone an answer.

In his State of the Union address last week President Obama (once again) called for greater transparency in the earmarking process. In response, Senator Jim DeMint rightly reminded us that:

We can see earmarks as plain as day now, but big spending politicians are unashamed. . . We should permanently end the earmark favor factory, but if the President won’t do that, he should at least impose a moratorium on this waste until we balance the budget.

Putting all that together I realize the truth that the primary problem small-government proponents want to address with earmarks is total spending and that while transparency is generally a good way to keep things running more appropriately even sunlight does little to deter earmarking – because it is considered an appropriate method to ensure you “get your fair share.”

Somehow after reading Sen. DeMint’s response the whole issue crystallized in my mind and I understand what’s really going on and what needs to be done.

Earmarks are not a large portion of the budget. Removing the amount of money spent on earmarks from the budget while allowing the earmarking process to continue would do virtually no good. Worse than that, it’s impossible because there is more to the earmarking process than the amount of money that gets earmarked out of the overall budget appropriation. Earmarks are a catalyst that changes the way our society looks at government spending.

The first and most repulsive change of thought is demonstrated by the lobbyists who are lobbying not for ideas, but for funding. These are the lobbyists who aim to get kickbacks from Congress for their clients. With earmarking in place it is possible to go directly to Congress and convince people far removed from the project to spend money from other taxpayers on a specific priority. This may be in contradiction of the desires of the local population but even if it is not it is never beneficial to the nation at large – even though the nation at large is footing the bill.

The second and more damaging (in the long term) change of thought that the  earmarking process promotes is that it encourages the perception that the Federal government should be involved in local decision making – even when those local decisions have little or no impact on the nation at large. Suddenly the people in New York and California have almost as much influence as the people of Pleasant Grove, Utah when it comes to making decisions about what will be displayed in a city park in Pleasant Grove, a city that few of the residents of other states would even be able to find on a map – let alone ever visit. This change of perspective reduces states and cities to nothing more than administrative subdivisions of the federal government. This is a fundamental shift away from the federalism envisioned by the founders of our nation and, in my opinion, is a very dangerous shift to perpetuate.

While abolishing earmarks will not immediately reverse these two changes it would remove the catalyst for them and greatly improve the chances of countering their influence. Without earmarks there would  be a massive reduction in the value of many lobbyists. Those who are promoting ideas would still be around, but none could come promising a financial return on investment in the form of appropriations from Congress. Without the constant influence of such lobbyists there would be a chance to reduce federal expenditures – especially in local projects. This in turn would make it possible for people to stop trying to inflate local interests into items of national consequence.

(I’m probably not the first to figure this out, but we need to articulate it better.)

A couple of days ago I heard Jason Lewis on the radio talking about how socialism does not create wealth (after Obama’s “where opportunity is absent government must create it” comment it’s obvious that some people just don’t understand that fact) and that the only way that socialism can seem to work is if there are people in society selfishly creating wealth to be redistributed. While Jason started going on about how much better natural self interest is for society than synthetic altruism (my terms, not his) I began thinking that the right to be charitable is one that we must each earn in life.

As an example,  I cannot donate a million dollars to help the relief efforts of Haiti. No matter how much I might want to I simply don’t have the money. There are other people who, through some combination of hard work and chance, have amassed a million dollars or more of money they don’t need for themselves and they can choose to donate that much money to help in Haiti. They have earned the right to make a decision about whether they will do something that generous, but I have not earned that right.

As I thought about it I realized that  while we must earn any goods we might wish to be charitable with the choice to be charitable is one that anyone may make with whatever quantity of goods and skills they have acquired, whether they are objectively wealthy or not. The real catch between socialists and capitalists is that, unlike capitalists, socialists believe that it is possible for some person or group of people besides me to decide how charitable I should be with my goods. The socialists believe that the force of government should be used to enforce a minimum level of charity from each person in society whereas the capitalists think that each person in society should be free to make their own decisions about how charitable they should be with their possessions. Interestingly it is that capitalists that give more to charity than the socialists.

I had some interesting thoughts this morning after reading an article I would normally not bother to read. It was talking about a specific historical flag, but my thoughts were turned to the flag generally and then to the Pledge of Allegiance. Here’s the statement that got my brain moving:

The flag is an American flag — 13 stripes, a blue square canton with 13 white stars surrounding an American bald eagle. So far, this flag isn’t strange for its day. In the 19th century, almost anything goes in handmade national flags. (emphasis added)

Suddenly I am released from the idea of a standardized flag and considering the flag more abstractly as a representation of something to believe in. The nation represented by all those handmade national flags was the same, and the symbolism of that nation was consistent across flags (stars, stripes, red, white, and blue), but people felt free to add things to the flag that helped represent their feelings regarding the nation (an American bald eagle in the field of blue being an apparently common addition back then).

If the flag need not be universally orthodox then a pledge of allegiance to the flag makes less sense. I’ve discussed my thoughts on that previously and been surprised at how many people would wish to change one thing or another in the pledge. We all know about people who wish to have the words “under God” stricken from the pledge but there are others who would remove the assertion that the nation is indivisible. While I very much appreciate the fact that our current pledge is not directed at a party, or political leader my new perspective on flags makes me echo the sentiment of Connor:

I’ve never understood why we pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth.

If we are not going to direct our allegiance at a piece of cloth, a political party, or an administration, I wonder where we would direct our allegiance, and what a pledge would look like. While I am not suggesting we make any efforts to reform our pledge, my thoughts this morning led me to this (and I would love to hear what others think about it):

I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America and to the republic it defined, a nation dedicated under God to the promise of liberty and justice for all.

I drove in to work later than usual today and caught a bit of Glenn Beck. Like many conservative talk radio hosts I have heard he was promoting the value of gold as an investment. What caught my attention was the way he started out. I’m going to paraphrase here but essentially he started out by saying:

I don’t know what the future holds for this nation, nobody does. I don’t know what you should be investing in right now.

My immediate reaction was to say to myself that I know exactly what the vast majority of people should be investing in right now – they should each invest in themselves. To his credit Glenn said that gold was not the right investment for everyone and suggested that before investing in gold people should invest in food storage, paying down debt, and having some cash reserves. I think that’s a great start but investing in yourself is more than that.

Surely when I say that most people would immediately assume that I am thinking of increasing your education as an investment in yourself. Of course getting an education is an investment in yourself, but what I had in mind was personal independence, investing in yourself to make yourself less dependent on our economic system and institutions. In other words I talking about making the investment of time and energy to produce your own food and other necessities as much as you are able. Food storage is good, but if you don’t know how to cook it you’ll get less out of it when you need it most. Knowing how to use your storage is good, but storing a lifetime of food is impossible unless you have the means to produce food supplies from what you have in storage. Some may suggest that storing a lifetime of food is ridiculous and unnecessary but I would ask – how much is enough? If two years is enough, how can you be sure that your need will not exceed two years?

You might wonder why I would write this on a politically oriented site. The answer is that an understanding of independence is fundamental to the ability to make informed choices about preserving independence. We as a nation are dependent on other nations to buy our debt and produce far too many of our goods. Too many of us are so dependent on others for all that we consume that we cannot even conceive of taking care of ourselves in an extended period of trouble (and by extended I am thinking in terms of weeks). Of course there are circumstances where we cannot be truly independent, a person who needs dialysis is going to be dependent on some source of electricity over any extended period of time, but the majority of people should consider how dependent they are on others and make some decisions about what they can and should do to be more self-reliant. The fact is that if a person is truly independent they can afford to be wrong in their more traditional investments and they can also pass up more risky investments for the more dependable ones.

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a long time and can’t really contain my thoughts, but I think I’ll revisit the topic of personal independence and explore what it means.

photo credit: taberandrew

A post entitled The New Robber Barons got me thinking about what happens when public and private enterprises compete in a marketplace. Thinking about that led to some interesting observations. The first of which is that progressives are right in their assertion that public and private enterprises can compete without eradicating each other. The problem is that the progressives don’t seem to recognize that this only works in limited cases. They like to point to the post office as an example – let’s go explore that.

Once upon a time there was a little thing called The Constitution which established a new government in a fledgling country. Among the provisions of the Constitution was a mandate that this new government provide a service in the nation that was not largely available, namely a postal system so that people in this relatively (geographically) large nation could communicate effectively (making it more likely that the nation could be successfully governed). This postal system functioned essentially in isolation, making use of private enterprises such as stage coaches to help provide the service they had been tasked to provide. As time and technology changed so did the postal system, adopting a pony express for example, to continue meeting the demands of communication over an expanding territory with a growing population.

One day a private enterprise began offering a similar service directly competing with the government option. They took nothing from the postal service but tried to offer a better service that citizens could freely choose over the government version – they found ways to operate for less, deliver faster services, and allow more options (not necessarily all three at once, but you get the idea) to their customers. Today we have many private companies (UPS, FedEx, DHL) competing with the USPS. This worked out because the government system existed before any effective private system and could not gain a monopoly position in the market by simply employing government practices such as subsidizing themselves to starve out their competition. This is a market that started out public in which private entities have found ways to compete and excel.

Now lets look at what happens in this country when the government begins to compete in an established private market rather than filling its designated role as referee.

In this country the majority of people believe in the value of private property and private enterprise. They believe in human ingenuity and so they are not inclined to abolish a private industry, even one that is not performing very well. This makes it impossible for government to cleanly step into a private market without adversely affecting the system. Because of the basic belief in the value of private markets government does not abolish competing private enterprises, it tends instead to work with those it claims to be competing with. This leads to perverse incentives where private enterprises find it more profitable to secure government funding through political connections than to find innovative ways to be more competitive in their industry. Even companies that might dislike being leeches on society realize that they cannot compete with companies who can secure lucrative government contracts without doing the difficult work of actually improving their product or process.

In short, we are unable to have a public service come in and compete in an industry in which private enterprises are already offering widespread service. We are incapable of getting positive results when the government tries to provide a service that is already being served (even poorly served) through private competition. The “best” we can hope for is something like the health care reform bill that just got passed in the Senate last week.

My startling conclusion was that if we truly feel that our health care system, our automobile manufacturing industry, or even our financial industry are unable to meet the needs of the nation the only viable government solution is to abandon the idea of a partnership or a public option and instead have the government take over the industry outright – leaving the option for private enterprise to come in and compete with the government once the industry has been stabilized.

My two question are – do we really believe that any of these industries are performing so poorly that they should be abolished outright and how many progressives have the stomach to directly promote replacing the private industry rather than “competing” with it.

I read what must be the most succinct summary of the term limit debate over at Utah Policy. LaVarr Webb said:

I am a big fan of congressional term limits if they are applied across the board. It would be foolish, however, for Utah to unilaterally impose term limits.

As long as power in Congress is amassed in its most senior members, Utah needs to play that game or be badly disadvantaged.

But term limits for all makes sense.

The response from trgrant:

I don’t agree in a legislated term limit.  There are people you will want to keep in office for longer than a certain term.

I would respond to trgrant by asking a question inspired by someone who had previously opposed term limits. How many hundreds of incumbent get reelected after “a certain term” despite widespread dissatisfaction with their service – now compare that to the number of people who you would really want to keep in after that time. I would bet the benefits of term limits in terms of removing entrenched and undesirable incumbents would outweigh the loss of established and desirable incumbents by at least 100 to 1. Besides that, of those who you wish to keep in, how much of the reason for keeping them is based mainly on seniority rather than irreplaceability?

To LaVarr Webb I would ask – if Congressional term limits are good, why not set the example by imposing term limits at the state legislature so that voters can begin to see the benefit locally and have more inclination to implement it federally.