Quotulatiousness

January 2, 2025

DOGE has a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Patrick Carroll selects some of the least-defendable ways the US government has been spending taxpayer money from Senator Rand Paul’s 2024 Festivus Report, including pickleball courts, $10B in unused office space, DEI initiatives for birdwatchers, crop fertilizer in foreign countries, and literal circus performances:

Rand Paul by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Why does such government waste persist year after year? A significant part of the explanation traces back to the concept of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Essentially, the beneficiaries tend to be a small, concentrated group, so they lobby hard for these outlays because they stand to gain a lot from them. Taxpayers, on the other hand, tend to be dispersed and only minimally affected by any single expense, so it’s not usually worth it for them to lobby against the spending, or even learn about it in the first place.

Economist Gordon Tullock famously illustrated this concept with his fictional Tullock Economic Development Plan. The plan “involves placing a dollar of additional tax on each income tax form in the United States and paying the resulting funds to Tullock, whose economy would develop rapidly”.

Think about the incentive Tullock would have to advocate for this plan, compared to the incentive that an ordinary taxpayer would have to look into it and voice their objections. With campaign contributions and votes to be gained from the special interest beneficiaries, is it any wonder politicians often go for these kinds of wealth transfers?

The ubiquity and stubborn persistence — year after year — of all this waste, combined with the economic theory that explains why it happens, suggests that there is a fundamental problem with the process of government as we know it. This is not, as many are itching to believe, a “Democrat” problem or a “Republican” problem. The degree of government waste changes very little with changing administrations. No, this is a problem with the government as such.

To solve this problem, we need to ask not just who should run the government, but what the government should be allowed to spend money on in the first place, given what we know about its entirely predictable and repeatedly demonstrated propensity for waste and dysfunction.

Milei has already started that conversation in Argentina. Let’s hope that with the new Trump administration and DOGE, that’s a conversation we can have here as well.

July 6, 2020

Time to end US military deployments to Afghanistan?

Filed under: Asia, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brad Polumbo reports on the split between Republican voters and Republican Senators on ending the US military involvement in Afghanistan:

Leopard 2A6M in Afghanistan

Applied to the Middle East, the America First framework is intuitive — our military misadventures in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have cost the U.S. tremendously yet failed to further our interests. Once the party of hawks and idealists, Republican voters are now firmly in the America First camp. According to The Intercept, 81% of 2016 Trump voters support removing troops from Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, this shift in views has not been represented in Congress. Most Senate Republicans just explicitly voted against ending the war in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday evening, Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican, introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have brought our troops home from Afghanistan, given those soldiers who served a bonus, and repealed the authorization of force Congress passed in 2001. But in a 60 to 33 vote, the Senate shot it down, with only three Republicans in addition to Paul — Sens. Mike Lee, Mike Braun, and Steve Daines — backing the amendment.

“Our amendment [would] finally and completely end the War in Afghanistan,” Paul said on the Senate floor. “Over 4,000 Americans have died in Afghanistan and over 20,000 have been wounded. It’s time to bring our soldiers home.”

“It is not sustainable to keep fighting in Afghanistan generation after generation,” he continued. “In fact, we now have soldiers who were born after 9/11 serving in Afghanistan.”

“We’ve been there for 20 years,” the senator said. “How can we characterize withdrawal after 20 years, after we defeated the enemy, as ‘precipitous’? It’s crazy. The American people say, ‘Come home,’ and this is your chance.”

“Afghanistan 2010 43” by david_axe is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

May 18, 2019

QotD: “Revenue neutral” tax cuts

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Real men (as well as pull-no-punches women) cut taxes. The lesser mortals that tend to inhabit Washington wring their hands and get all weak in the knees when it comes to cutting taxes. Rumors are President Trump will propose a real tax cut. I certainly hope so.

Once upon a time, most Republicans believed in tax cuts. Somewhere along the way, inside the beltway especially, Republicans forgot about the benefits of cutting taxes. Republicans became more concerned with government keeping “its” revenue than letting the people keep their money.

Too many Republican have become timid about tax cuts, often spouting the milquetoast line of “revenue neutral tax cuts.”

Let me translate that little bit of Washington-speak for you. “Revenue neutral” tax cuts aren’t really tax cuts. It’s more like tax shifting. Some will pay more. Some will pay less. And the net effect will be that government will collect the same amount of taxes.

If revenue neutral tax shifting is what Republicans stand for, maybe it’s time we re-evaluated what we really stand for.

What will “revenue neutral” tax cut mean to your business? Well, that may depend on how expensive your lobbyist is. Which side of the “revenue-neutral” ledger you wind up on may depend on how well the skids are greased, hardly, a pleasant scenario to anticipate.

I believe as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did, that the best way to stimulate our economy, promote job growth, and give our ailing middle class a raise is to cut taxes for all.

Rand Paul, “Real Men Cut Taxes”, Breitbart.com, 2016-04-25.

February 20, 2017

Rand Paul – “McCain’s been wrong on just about everything over the last four decades”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Sunday, Rand Paul got some media coverage for his criticism of Senator John McCain:

Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) ripped fellow Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) on Sunday after McCain criticized President Trump’s escalating war of words with the media.

He argued that the nation is “very lucky” that Trump is president and not McCain, who won the 2008 GOP nomination but lost to Barack Obama in the general election.

Paul said that McCain’s recent criticisms of Trump are driven by his “personal dispute” with the president over foreign policy.

He added that McCain and Trump are at odds because McCain supports the wide deployment of U.S. troops to protect and promote American interests abroad while he characterized Trump’s views as closer to a realpolitik approach to foreign policy.
“Everything that he says about the president is colored by his own personal dispute he’s got running with President Trump and it should be taken with a grain of salt because John McCain’s the guy who’s advocated for war everywhere,” Paul said on ABC’s This Week.

“He would bankrupt the nation. We’re very lucky John McCain’s not in charge because I think we’d be in perpetual war,” Paul added.

November 17, 2016

Deregulation’s return

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

I rarely say nice things about Jimmy Carter’s term as president, but he should get more credit for the deregulation that happened under his administration — the lifting of restrictive and obsolete rules over things like railroads, long-distance trucking, and (most important to drinkers) enabling the rebirth of craft brewing — many of the economic benefits were later attributed to Reagan, but Carter did the heavy lifting on several important issues. It’s a hopeful sign that S.A. Miller says Congress and the Senate may be in a deregulatory mode after Trump’s inauguration:

Sen. Rand Paul said Wednesday that he expects a flurry of repeals of Present Obama’s regulations by the next Congress and President-elect Donald Trump.

“You’re gong to find that we are going to repeal a half dozen or more regulations in the first week of Congress, and I’m excited about it because I think the regulations have been killing our jobs and making us less competitive with the world,” the Kentucky Republican said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program.

Mr. Trump, whose surprise win over Democrat Hillary Clinton sent shock waves across the Washington political establishment, pledged on the campaign trail to tackle over-regulation by the Obama administration.

The federal government has imposed more than 600 major regulations costing Americans roughly $740 billion since Mr. Obama took office in 2009.

Mr. Paul said he viewed many of the regulations under Mr. Obama to be unconstitutional because they were issued without Congress’ approval.

January 31, 2016

The odd role of Iowa in the 2016 election

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Colby Cosh on the notion that the “typical state” of Iowa is being weirded by its unusual prominence every four years in the election cycle:

Iowa’s prominent place in the party primary system is often justified on the grounds that it is a highly typical U.S. state, a perfect measurement sample of middle American values. (No one ever works the word “white” in there when discussing Iowa or its partner, New Hampshire. That part is left implicit, just like the extra political power our Senate gives to the paler Canadian provinces.) But every student of physics knows that the act of measurement influences the experiment, and one can’t help suspecting that Iowa’s position in the American political process may actually be making the state weirder.

If you have watched the Iowa caucuses unfold live on C-Span, you know they reward fervour as much as organizational ability. A few people with fringe beliefs and free time may count for as much as a hundred names on a mailing list. As Santorum and Huckabee remind us, right-wing candidates who shrivel like vampires in the sun of other states often do well in Iowa.

Steve Forbes ran a very strong second there to G.W. Bush in 2000; the downright bizarre Alan Keyes finished third. Pat Robertson took 25 per cent of the votes in ’88. Ron Paul, outsider of outsiders, finished a bare smidgen behind Santorum. That bodes well for Donald Trump (and it offers hope to Ron Paul’s son Rand, who barely qualified for the main Fox News debate but brought the loudest following to the hall).

And on the “Trump as mass hypnotist” theme promulgated by Scott Adams:

It’s a strange election season, all right. Scott Adams, best known as the creator of Dilbert, has carved out a niche on his weblog as the leading expositor of Trumpian strategy. Adams believes Trump is literally hypnotizing the American public, using an arcana of powerful persuasion methods. The cartoonist disavows any claim to support Trump per se, but he has remained bullish even as other commentators predicted disaster after every grandiose halfwittery or scornful bon (?) mot.

Adams’ Trump-as-Master-Persuader schtick is becoming tacitly influential, I think, among chastened journalists who thought Trump would crash months ago. When the revered psephologist Nate Silver did a dramatic U-turn last week and admitted that he had harmed his prophetic bona fides by underestimating Trump, one could not help thinking of it as a surrender — could not help envisioning the sudden cinematic crumbling of a mighty fortification built out of Excel spreadsheets and wishful thinking. Silver almost seemed … relieved.

The problem with Adams’ analysis is that he never gets too specific about what Trump’s secret techniques actually are. In practice it seems to boil down to “Develop the conviction that you are a winner, whatever the evidence actually suggests, and pour that conviction into every word, gesture, and manoeuvre.”

That certainly accounts for much of Trump’s appeal to the American public. (As George S. Patton said, Americans love a winner.) Trump also infuriates the “right” people, and that will automatically attract a certain following. He has a starry-eyed following among neo-fascists and conspiracy theorists of various flavours, who would never otherwise venerate a billionaire advocate of single-payer medicare and corporate bailouts. They like him for explosively expanding the possibilities for what can be said out loud in politics.

A while back, it was becoming generally acknowledged that Trump had managed the unusual trick of moving the Overton Window well to the right. It’s probably now safe to say that he’s actually blown a huge hole in the wall where that window used to be: like it or hate it, a much wider range of topics are open for discussion than in any election campaign in generations.

October 23, 2015

Apologies may harm a politician’s reputation more than standing firm

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the Washington Post, Richard Hanania conducted an experiment to find out how an apology from a politician affects the public’s perception of that politician:

I recruited a sample of 511 individuals and had them read two texts. First, they read about Rand Paul’s 2011 comments suggesting that he disagreed with parts of the Civil Rights Act. Paul had said that while he denounced racist behavior, part of his definition of freedom meant the right to discriminate on private property. About half of the participants read a conclusion to the story that made Paul seem apologetic, while the rest were led to believe that he stuck firm to his comments. (In actuality, Paul never apologized for his statements, but began to deny that he ever questioned the Civil Rights Act.)

Respondents then read about the suggestion by then-Harvard President Larry Summers in 2005 that genetic factors help to explain the lack of high-performing female scientists and engineers at top universities. After reading the comments and hearing about the outcry, half the participants were told that Summers defended himself by saying he believed that “raising questions, discussing multiple factors that may explain a difficult problem, and seeking to understand how they interrelate is vitally important.” The rest learned that he had apologized and read a brief statement Summers made expressing regret for his comments and reflecting on the damage that they had caused.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, neither Summers nor Paul was helped by an apology. Among respondents who read that Paul was apologetic, 63 percent said that the controversy made them less likely to vote for Paul. Among those who didn’t read about any apology, 61 percent said they were less likely to vote for him — a statistically insignificant difference.

The results for the Summers controversy were even more surprising. Of those who read about his apology, 64 percent said that he “definitely” or “probably” should have faced negative consequences for his statements about women. However, that number dropped to 56 percent when respondents were led to believe that Summers stood firm in his position. Moreover, the surprisingly negative effect of Summers’ apology was even larger among the groups that arguably should have appreciated the apology: women and liberals.

Given these results, why would politicians apologize at all? It may be simply out of habit or because they are following a script that has for the most part gone unquestioned. To be sure, my experiments certainly don’t suggest that it is always inadvisable to apologize. Nor can my findings speak directly to Trump.

September 3, 2015

Neil Peart recants his early Ayn Rand infatuation

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last month, Reason‘s Brian Doherty found four prominent Ayn Rand fans who’ve eventually thrown off the yoke of Objectivism (or Objectivism-fellow-traveller-ism) and now don’t want to be in any way associated with their former guru, including Neil Peart:

Peart, drummer and lyricist for rock band Rush, would clearly rather not be asked about his early-career loud enthusiasm for Rand and her ideas. The well-reviewed 2010 documentary on the band, Beyond the Lighted Stage, mentions her barely at all. (I recall not at all but am using less certain language as I don’t have a full transcript to consult.) Rand’s importance is ignored by the film, though she was central to one of the core conundrums of Rush history: why did rock intellectuals and tastemakers hate on this excellent band so much and for so long?

After years of Peart’s lyrics dissing metaphorical arboreal labor unions, declaring his mind is not for rent to any God or government (Rand’s top two villains), and hat-tipping explicitly in the liner notes to the concept LP 2112 to the “genius of Ayn Rand,” he felt the albatross of 18-minute prog suites and silly ’70s stage garbs was enough for one poor percussionist to bear, and decided to drop the burden of Rand.

Peart most recently tried to distance himself from Randian libertarianism in a Rolling Stone profile of the band, as discussed here by Matt Welch, who quoted the core of Peart’s apostasy:

    Rush’s earlier musical take on Rand, 1975’s unimaginatively titled “Anthem,” is more problematic [than 2112], railing against the kind of generosity that Peart now routinely practices: “Begging hands and bleeding hearts will/Only cry out for more.” And “The Trees,” an allegorical power ballad about maples dooming a forest by agitating for “equal rights” with lofty oaks, was strident enough to convince a young Rand Paul that he had finally found a right-wing rock band.

    Peart outgrew his Ayn Rand phase years ago, and now describes himself as a “bleeding-heart libertarian,” citing his trips to Africa as transformative. He claims to stand by the message of “The Trees,” but other than that, his bleeding-heart side seems dominant. Peart just became a U.S. citizen, and he is unlikely to vote for Rand Paul, or any Republican. Peart says that it’s “very obvious” that Paul “hates women and brown people” — and Rush sent a cease-and-desist order to get Paul to stop quoting “The Trees” in his speeches.

    “For a person of my sensibility, you’re only left with the Democratic party,” says Peart, who also calls George W. Bush “an instrument of evil.” “If you’re a compassionate person at all. The whole health-care thing — denying mercy to suffering people? What? This is Christian?”

“Outgrew” is the closest thing to an explanation, and there is no explanation at all for his reasoning that libertarianoid Rand Paul (whose name is no relation to Ms. Rand’s) is anti-woman and anti-brown people, or what about his “sensibility” matches the Democrats.

Peart clearly vibed with a general anti-authoritarianism he saw in Rand, and with her objection to enforced equality. But a more nuanced attempt to distance himself from Randian libertarianism in an interview Peart did for a feature in the libertarian magazine Liberty in 1997 (by the Institute for Justice’s Scott Bullock) made it clear that Peart’s attraction to Rand was more about her underlying sense of individualism and the nobility of the artist and his intentions than it was about all the complicated policy implications that Rand, and her libertarian fans, drew from her philosophy.

Bullock skillfully teases out the fact that Rand’s morality implied a belief in free markets as well as a general individualist sense of “freedom” seemed to have never quite been embedded in Peart’s DNA. And indeed Fountainhead‘s individualist message is largely that the creative artist can and ought to follow his own whims and spirit no matter what markets do (while never suggesting anyone should be forced to support a great artist, or prevented by force from supporting mediocre ones).

August 20, 2015

It’s safe to come out now … the “libertarian moment” is over

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Well, that’s what the Washington Post says anyway. Reason‘s Nick Gillespie disagrees:

There’s no question that Rand Paul’s presidential campaign has hit a soft patch. He got the least amount of air time in the first GOP debate and his numbers have been slipping for a long time. I’ve been critical of some of his positions over the past few months but Weigel quotes me this way:

    “It’s a mistake to conflate Rand Paul’s electoral success with that of the libertarian moment,” said Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason.com. (Disclosure: I worked for Reason from 2006 to 2008.) “Rand Paul’s high visibility is better understood as a consequence of the libertarian moment than its cause. There’s a reason why he’s been at his most electrifying and popular precisely when he is at his most libertarian: calling out the surveillance state, for instance, and leading the charge against reckless interventions in Syria and Libya.”

Libertarians such as Lawson Bader, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and David Boaz, vice president of The Cato Institute, note that on fronts such as gay marriage, pot legalization, gun rights, criminal justice reform, general distrust of government, and more, things are going in the libertarian direction.

Full Weigel/Post piece here.

More important, broad indicators that Americans prefer social tolerance and fiscal responsibility continue to grow:

    According to a composite index of libertarian views on social and economic issues developed by pollsters at CNN, something clearly is afoot. The pollsters look at whether people believe that government is trying to do too many things individuals should be doing and whether or not people think government should enforce a particular set of morals. In 1992, the index of libertarian belief stood at 92 points. It’s now at 113 points. Virtually all surveys show trends of people thinking the government is doing too much, is incompetent or untrustworthy, or represents a larger threat to the future than big labor or big business.

As Matt Welch and I argued in The Declaration of Independents, politics is and always will be a “crippled, lagging indicator” of where the country is trendng.

It certainly doesn’t help that the American political scene has been rigged in so many different ways to be a duopoly of the two major parties … very few political issues are binary, yet that is the only way American voters are presented with a “choice” every election. Vote for the Red Faction of the Boot-on-your-neck party … or vote for the Blue Faction of the Boot-on-your-neck party. No matter who you choose, the government always gets in.

April 23, 2015

Rand Paul against the machine

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Timothy Carney says that the “war on Washington” that keynotes Rand Paul’s nomination campaign is “the fight America needs”:

Rand Paul launched his presidential campaign Tuesday, skewering the “special interests that use Washington D.C. as their own private piggy bank.” His campaign home page blared the headline “Defeat the Washington Machine.”

This sort of campaign against Washington is a cliché these days, but for Paul, it’s a real thing. He’s been fighting this fight since he entered politics. And that’s why the Republican Party needs him today.

Recall how Paul won his first political race: Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had handpicked Secretary of State Trey Grayson for Kentucky’s open Senate seat in 2010. Eighteen Republican senators funded Grayson in the primary. Only one funded Paul. Grayson raised half a million dollars from PACs in the primary — 20 times what Paul raised from them. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed Grayson in the primary. Paul attacked Grayson for the “AIG Lobbyists” who threw fundraisers for him, which were swarming with lobbyists.

This was the K Street/GOP Machine. Rand Paul demolished it, beating Grayson by 23 points. That victory, on May 18, 2010, was the day the dam broke in the Tea Party flood.

Since he’s come to Washington, it’s been the same story: Rand Paul against the machine.

April 19, 2015

We must reject Rand Paul for his lack of libertarian consistency

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

No matter what, we must ensure that Rand Paul does not get support from small-L libertarians because he has not sufficiently supported large-L libertarian issues! Purity above all electoral considerations!

Rand Paul is the Republican son of a longtime Republican House member, but let it never be said that he is not open-minded. In 2013, he confided to Sean Hannity, “I’ve been kind of disappointed, because honestly there were certain aspects of President Obama that I wanted to like.”

I know how he feels. That’s how I feel about Rand Paul.

My old friend David Boaz, author of the excellent new book The Libertarian Mind, told NPR that Paul is “the most libertarian major presidential candidate that I can remember seeing.” I’m a more moderate libertarian than Boaz — or a squishier one — but my general framework is the same. I have a strong preference for free markets, civil liberties, personal autonomy, limited government and a foreign policy of restraint.

I’ve voted for several Libertarian presidential candidates. The biggest single influence on my policy views is Milton Friedman. I absorbed Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand in college. My columns appear regularly on the website of Reason, the nation’s premier libertarian publication.

So I should not be a tough sell for Paul. He sounds pretty libertarian when he says, in reference to the National Security Agency, “the phone records of law-abiding citizens are none of their damn business.” He shows a refreshing open-mindedness on criminal justice by envisioning an America where “any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed.”

Libertarians are their own worst enemies when it comes to actual political campaigns. Rand Paul probably wouldn’t win the US Libertarian Party’s nomination as he’s not “pure” enough (and his chances of winning the Republican Party nomination are thin enough as it is). Yet he’s the most prominent enunciator and exemplar of the small-L libertarian vision in the current electoral cycle. And libertarians are already denouncing him for his deviationism. Remind me again why we bother with election campaigns if appealing to a wider voting base with more freedom-oriented issues is somehow “anti-libertarian”? Rand Paul probably won’t win the Republican nomination — this isn’t exactly news. Even if he did win, the establishment GOP would probably do to Rand Paul what they did to Barry Goldwater. The raison d’etre of the party hierarchy is to ensure that the “fringe elements” don’t raise too much of a ruckus or (far worse) get their own candidates on the ballot.

I’m not an American, but given the choice of voting for Barack Obama or John McCain, I’d have voted for Obama without hesitation … McCain was almost the perfect anti-libertarian candidate for that electoral cycle. In the next presidential election, could the GOP have come up with a more inappropriate candidate than Romney? I don’t think so, unless they’d somehow nominated a Grand Dragon of the KKK (and I think Senator Byrd was dead by that point). And who does the establishment want as their presidential candidate this coming election? Jeb Bush? Ugh!

April 13, 2015

Will it be principle or will it be power?

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson looks at the Rand Paul campaign:

The question before Senator Rand Paul is whether Republican primary voters — and voters in the general electorate, if it should come to that — are in the market for libertarianism by the bushel or measured out with coffee spoons.

For those seeking a general validation of libertarian principle as the guiding light of the Republican party and the conservative movement, there’s no improving on a man called “Rand” who launched his campaign at a hotel called “Galt.” But the fact that there is no improving on him is no guarantee that Senator Paul can count on the enthusiastic support of doctrinaire libertarians, who are a cranky bunch, extraordinarily particular and already grumbling that the gentleman from Kentucky is not ready to go the full Rothbard — or even as far as his cult-figure father did.

There are several reasons for Senator Paul’s moderation — or deviation, as the hardliners would have it, from the pure faith of his father. One is that he is not a crank; another is that he does not want to finish in third place, well behind Rick Santorum; a third is that he can tell a windmill from a marauding giant; a fourth is that he understands that in the context of a democratic republic a leader leads and is led in turn.

When my friend Ramesh Ponnuru writes that the senator seems to be “of two minds” about judicial power — and when similar, more worrisome criticisms are made of Senator Paul’s foreign-policy views — that seems to me correct, but as a purely political matter not necessarily a bad thing. The American public is of two minds about a great many things, too, and has rarely punished a candidate for lack of absolute intellectual consistency. Pandering and flip-flopping? That’s one way to put it. But only the most hopeless sort of ideologue refuses to accommodate the fact that there is a limited real range for effective political action, and that range is defined by what the electorate is willing to accept. There is much to be done, and one can hardly blame Senator Paul for fishing where they’re biting.

November 25, 2014

QotD: Rand Paul and the war on drugs

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I’ll do everything to end the war on drugs. … The war on drugs has become the most racially disparate outcome that you have in the entire country. Our prisons are full of black and brown kids. Three-fourths of the people in prison are black or brown, and white kids are using drugs, Bill, as you know … at the same rate as these other kids. But kids who have less means, less money, kids who are in areas where police are patrolling … Police are given monetary incentives to make arrests, monetary incentives for their own departments. So I want to end the war on drugs because it’s wrong for everybody, but particularly because poor people are caught up in this, and their lives are ruined by it.

Rand Paul, speaking to Bill Maher, 2014-11-15.

September 30, 2014

Implementing libertarian principles in practical politics

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

P.J. O’Rourke talks to Senator Rand Paul:

The Senator smiled and shrugged. “I never really felt like it was a problem explaining libertarian principles in practical politics. Republicans are champions of economic liberty. Democrats are champions of personal liberty. Bring the two back together.”

The Senator said, “The problem is mostly how people characterize libertarianism. But that’s changing. Libertarian has gone from being something scary to something people like as a label for themselves.”

He said, “There are different ways to get where we want to go.” And gave an example of going nowhere. “Nothing good has come out of the war on drugs.”

“What’s a different way?” I asked.

“I like the unenumerated powers.”

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. The Tenth Right in the Bill of Rights keeps us from having just nine rights.

“In The Federalist Papers,” I said, “Hamilton argued against the Bill of Rights on the grounds that government even mentioning rights like free speech implied government had some power over those rights.”

“But it’s a good thing we did write them down,” the Senator said, “otherwise we’d have nothing left.”

Senator Paul asked, not quite rhetorically, “Is this the ‘Libertarian Moment’? If so, it probably won’t come from a third party. Probably it will come from within a party.”

“From within the Democratic Party?” He didn’t seem to think it was inconceivable. “In New Hampshire,” he said, “even Democrats are against state income and sales taxes.”

But he didn’t seem to think it was likely either. “Republicans are an ideological coalition,” he said. “Democrats are a coalition of ideologies. The only thing Democrats agree on is income redistribution.”

Sen. Paul said, “Republicans have tradition on their side. It’s the American revolution versus the French Revolution.”

This was a switch – a flip-flop if you will – from Thomas Paine’s radical liberty de facto to Edmund Burke’s traditional liberty de jure. But I don’t fault the Senator. No friend of liberty can avoid the tumble back and forth between Burke and Paine.

“Tradition is a good thing,” the Senator said. “Ninety percent of Americans don’t break the law, not because there’s a law against it, but because they have a tradition of conscience. Republicans are traditional. But tradition can be boring. Libertarianism spices things up. Republicans have to either adapt, evolve, or die. They either have to water [down] their message — or extend liberty.”

September 12, 2014

When the government steals, they call it “civil forfeiture”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

In Forbes, Jacob Sullum explains the amazingly lenient rules in most states for the government to steal your property:

Three key features of civil forfeiture law give cops this license to steal:

The government does not have to charge you with a crime, let alone convict you, to take your property. Under federal law and the laws of many states, a forfeiture is justified if the government can show, by a preponderance of the evidence, that it is connected to a crime, typically a drug offense. That standard, which amounts to any probability greater than 50 percent, is much easier to satisfy than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard for a criminal trial. Some states allow forfeiture based on probable cause, a standard even weaker than preponderance of the evidence.

The burden of proof is on you. Innocent owners like Mandrel Stuart have to prove their innocence, a reversal of the rule in criminal cases. Meanwhile, the government hangs onto the money, which puts financial stress on the owner and makes it harder for him to challenge the forfeiture.

Cops keep the loot. Local cops and prosecutors who pursue forfeiture under federal law, which is what happened in Stuart’s case, receive up to 80 percent of the proceeds. Some states are even more generous, but others give law enforcement agencies a smaller cut, making federal forfeiture under the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program a tempting alternative. The fact that police have a direct financial interest in forfeitures creates an incentive for pretextual traffic stops aimed at finding money or other property to seize. The Post found that “298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.”

There’s at least some awareness in the Senate that the civil forfeiture rules are being abused:

The Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in July, addresses each of these issues. The FAIR Act changes the standard of proof in federal forfeiture cases from “preponderance of the evidence” to “clear and convincing evidence.” That change does not go as far as the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that has been fighting forfeiture abuse for years, would like. I.J. argues that civil forfeiture should be abolished, meaning that a criminal conviction, based on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, would be required for the government to take property allegedly connected to a crime. But Paul’s reform would make it harder for the government to prevail if a forfeiture case goes to trial, which might deter seizures of large sums in situations where the evidence is weak.

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