Quotulatiousness

December 12, 2012

Do Republicans believe in federalism?

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

Jacob Sullum on the rising tide of liberalization at the state level — gay marriage and marijuana legalization — and whether the Republicans will support federalism in these cases:

Nationwide support for marijuana legalization, like nationwide support for gay marriage, has increased dramatically, although not quite as swiftly, rising from 12 percent in a 1969 Gallup poll to a record 50 percent last year. While support for legalization dipped a bit during the anti-pot backlash of the Just Say No era, it began rising again in the 1990s. Public Policy Polling recently put it at 58 percent, the highest level ever recorded.

[. . .]

Just as an individual’s attitude toward gay people depends to a large extent on how many he knows (or, more to the point, realizes he knows), his attitude toward pot smokers (in particular, his opinion about whether they should be treated like criminals) is apt to be influenced by his personal experience with them. Americans younger than 65, even if they have never smoked pot, probably know people who have, and that kind of firsthand knowledge provides an important reality check on the government’s anti-pot propaganda.

Another clear pattern in both of these areas: Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to oppose legalizing gay marriage and marijuana. Yet Republicans are also more likely to oppose federal interference with state policy choices. In light of DOMA’s disregard for state marriage laws and the Obama administration’s threats to prevent Colorado and Washington from allowing marijuana sales, now is put-up-or-shut-up time for the GOP’s avowed federalists.

December 9, 2012

Frank Fleming asks why the Republicans are so down on Susan Rice

Filed under: Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

He’s genuinely puzzled at the Republican stance:

The Republicans’ opposition to Susan Rice’s potentially becoming the next secretary of state is pretty hard to understand.

It wasn’t long ago that Republicans were all for a different black woman named Condoleezza Rice taking the same job — is the GOP just bigoted about the name Susan?

Republicans’ stated objections to Rice make no sense. They complain that she’s “dishonest” and “incompetent,” to which she could easily respond, Well, duh, that’s why I work for the government.

[. . .]

This idea that President Obama should only appoint honest, competent people is really unfair. The guy is a Chicago politician; he’s probably never once met anyone like that.

Just look at his first Cabinet to see how out-of-the-blue this demand for competency is. He has a treasury secretary who couldn’t figure out how to pay his own taxes. His attorney general leads a Justice Department that somehow thought selling guns to Mexican drug cartels would have good results.

Then there are Obama’s secretaries of commerce, who were supposed to be promoting job creation and economic growth — who in the world knows what they’ve been up to these past four years?

Really, looking at the administration as a whole, Obama did better than we could have expected by appointing only one czar who was a Communist truther.

December 5, 2012

Humans are not as much rational as they are rationalizing creatures

Filed under: Politics, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

Ronald Bailey discusses a study which confirms what every con man already knew: smart people are easier to fool.

People reason chiefly to persuade others that they are right, not to find out what is true.

So claim Hugo Mercier, a postdoctoral fellow in economics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dan Sperber, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the Central European University, in their provocative 2010 article, “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Now a new study by the Yale Cultural Cognition Project finds that people also use reason to convince themselves, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that they and those on their side are right.

[. . .]

In addition, both liberals and conservatives displayed ideological bias when assessing the validity of the cognitive reflection test. When climate change skeptics were characterized as open-minded, Republicans thought the test was nifty. When skeptics were branded as close-minded, more Democrats found the test results convincing. Thus, the study finds that the experimental “results were more consistent with a finding of symmetry than one of asymmetry with respect to ideologically motivated reasoning.” Ideology distorts both left-wing and right-wing thinking.

Do higher scores on the reflective cognition test temper political polarization? To get at this question, the study compared both liberals and conservatives who scored low on the reflective cognition test (the 62 percent of subjects who got no answers right) with liberals and conservatives scored higher (those who got an average of 1.6 answers right putting them in between the 80th and 90th percentile of the sample). In short, the researchers found that the higher either conservatives or liberals scored on the cognitive reflection test the more likely they were to judge the test as valid when its results supposedly confirmed their ideological views about climate change skeptics and vice versa. People skilled at systematic reasoning use that capacity to justify their beliefs rather seek out truth.

Kahan notes in passing that social psychological research has found that political independents and libertarians score better on the cognitive reflection than do liberals or conservatives (check your answers below). But before we libertarians and independents start patting ourselves on our collective backs for being the better systematic reasoners, could this simply mean that we are especially good at justifying our beliefs to ourselves?

I got the answers to all three test questions right, which means I’m even more likely to “fool myself” than the average person (according to this study, anyway).

November 30, 2012

Republicans widely expected to trade “no tax” pledge for promise of future spending cuts PLUS some awesome magic beans

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:45

Most of the conservative pundits seem to expect the Republicans to cave in almost immediately and give Obama the tax increases he’s asking for:

1. President Obama is convinced he will walk out of this crisis with an extremely sweet deal. [. . .]

2. Democrats are completely convinced that enough Republicans in Congress will cave and acquiesce to almost everything they want as the cliff approaches. They have some recent historical examples to provide encouragement in this belief.

3. Democrats are completely convinced that if no deal is reached, the Bush tax cuts expire, and sequestration takes effect, Republicans will get most of the blame. This is probably largely correct, but I think they’re whistling past the graveyard on the consequences to an Obama presidency if 2013 dawns with tax hikes, defense-spending cuts, and another recession.

[. . .]

4. For the GOP, a deal on Obama’s terms is probably worse than sequestration. The middle will not suddenly like the GOP a lot more because they embraced tax increases for the rich. Even if they did, it’s unlikely they would gain enough ground to offset the damage such a move will do among a betrayed and enraged party grassroots. As I said this morning, “Once the Republicans become the party of tax increases, why do we need them? They become indistinguishable from the Democrats.”

[. . .]

The biggest obstacle to all of the options for real deficit reduction and real entitlement reform is that the public doesn’t really think they’re necessary; they think a few tax hikes on the rich will do the trick. Perhaps it’s best to let taxes go up for everyone, from the highest earners to the lowest earners, and let the public see how little that changes the numbers.

November 18, 2012

Rand Paul versus Gary Johnson

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

The question is who will take on the role that Ron Paul is stepping down from — unofficial leader of the libertarian movement. Christopher McDaniel thinks that Gary Johnson is the right man for the job:

So who will take up the mantle for Ron Paul’s movement? Who is most likely to be the one that takes liberty to the next level? Conventional wisdom would say that his son, Senator Rand Paul (R-K.Y.) makes the most sense. He has maintained a voting record that is generally consistent with his father’s record. The main source of contention among Paul supporters, however, was Rand’s willingness to endorse Mitt Romney in the general election. While Rand’s decision was likely motivated by a promise to speak at the GOP Convention, and thus political exposure nationally, many of his father’s constituents feel like Rand deserted his father just when he was needed most. Despite his exposure from the convention, Rand has to deal with big stars in the GOP like Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. It seems unlikely to me that Rand Paul can make a serious run at the presidency from inside the GOP.

[. . .]

Gary Johnson is the one I see galvanizing the liberty contingent and make real inroads in the political system for the Libertarian Party. He managed to garner 1% of the popular vote in 2012 despite really only gaining traction in September and October. Gary has an excellent resume. He is a very successful businessman who won successive terms as governor of New Mexico, a decidedly Democrat heavy state, as a Republican. One of the more popular numbers that Johnson advocates like to point out is that he took a $500 million deficit in New Mexico and made it a billion dollar surplus by the time he left office. Unlike Paul and Amash, Johnson left the Republican Party and has committed to the Libertarian Party for the future. Johnson does not come without his detractors, however. Most notably, hardcore Republicans do not like the fact that he is pro-choice and for repeal of DOMA. However, as Johnson puts it, “I’m more liberal than Obama and more conservative than” Republicans. With his apparent commitment to running in 2016, it seems Gary Johnson plans to take the liberty movement and use it to turn the establishment upside down. Here’s to hoping he can do just that!

November 7, 2012

Rand Paul: Republicans gave up 150 electoral college votes before the campaign started

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

Published on Sep 15, 2012 by VitacoreVision

Rand Paul suggests if the GOP wants to win over places like California, they will need to support more freedom in social issues and embrace a more Libertarian stance.

H/T to Peter Jaworski (retweeting original Moose of Reason tweet) for the link.

No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

L. Neil Smith explains one of the most significant reasons that the most recent US election didn’t seem to offer much in the way of choice between the two major party candidates:

No matter how hard Productive Class folks may work at trying to put good people into office, people who respect the Bill of Rights, as well as our dignity as individuals, every single time, we end up with a non-choice between two sets of rapacious gangsters, government parasites and their corporate lookalikes who, differing only in the excuses they use to justify it, see us only as cattle, to be herded, branded, milked, and slaughtered. On the rare occasion that someone decent pokes his head up — Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul — it’s cut off by the socialist mass media, pack animals who give prostitution a bad name.

Beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, the game is rigged, with people who actually work for a living assigned the role of perpetual losers, expected to bow down to Authority no matter how ludicrous its demands, required to observe the letter and the spirit of the law no matter how often, or how outrageously it’s flouted by the insatiably power-hungry. Those who object — especially if they get together to air their grievances — are labeled rednecks, racists, or terrorists by the socialist mass media, depending on what’s in fashion at the time. The truth has no place in this process, only the virtual reality created by the socialist mass media at the behest of their thuggish clientele.

To make things even worse, members of the Productive Class find themselves in the role of shuttlecock in a game of political badminton that has been going on for two centuries. Fed up with the failures and excesses of, say, the Republicans, voters will replace them with Democrats, only to be reminded, in short order, that Democrats suffer failures and commit excesses of their own. Four years after that, experiencing political amnesia again, they put Republicans back in power, when what they ought to do is dump “both” major parties (which are really only one entity, the party of endless lies and coercion) altogether.

September 5, 2012

“What kind of Mormon is Mitt Romney?”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

L. Neil Smith says that — unlike most of the Mormons he’s met in real life — Mitt Romney “has the same respect for individual liberty and the Bill of Rights that a dog has for a fire hydrant.”

Now I asked jokingly a while back on FaceBook, what kind of Mormon is Mitt Romney? One side of his family let the United States Cavalry drive them into Mexico (despite the constraints of the First Amendment), rather than give up what they believed in. But if Romney was a Mormon like that, at his age, with his wealth, he’d have sixteen wives by now.

Instead, he’s the kind of Mormon who rolled over like an obedient cur and changed their customs so they could be a state. The irony is that, hating gun ownership as he does (the list of his crimes against the Second Amendment is as long as Brigham Young’s wagon train) and favoring abortion and government healthcare, as he has, he couldn’t get himself elected in Utah even throwing around the kind of money he has.

So, skipping Michigan, where he grew up, he went to the Massachusetts S.S.R, and began the sort of lying and cheating that recently got him his Presidential nomination. He claimed to have “fixed” the Olympics, but the numbers are in now, and the man’s a fraud. He couldn’t make the residence requirement in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts so he most likely bought his way around the ballot laws, as he buys his way around everything, exactly like a Kennedy.

The silliest, most dangerous thing in the world is a communist with money. Look at Michael Moore. Look at Bono. Look at Rosie O’Donnell. No, you don’t really have to. It was just a rhetorical exercise. Twenty years ago, I heard Cher admit on TV that she was a grown woman and married before she realized that Mount Rushmore is not a natural phenomenon. These people have the intellect of a boiled onion.

September 3, 2012

Volokh on the GOP “war on porn” platform plank

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:46

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh points out that aside from satisfying a checklist item for some constituencies, the GOP’s stated intention to crack down on pornography just doesn’t have a lot of benefits:

As we know, there’s lots of porn of all varieties out there on the Internet, including porn that might well be seen as offensive to “community standards” in at least one American state (the standard that would be applicable under the plurality view in Ashcroft v. ACLU (I) (2002), if prosecutors choose to bring a case in that state), or perhaps even under some “national community standard” (the alternative standard urged to varying extents by the other opinions in that case). In principle, the government might well be able to prosecute many American pornography producers and distributors under current obscenity laws.

[. . .]

So we have three possible outcomes:

(1) The U.S. spends who knows how many prosecutorial and technical resources going after U.S. pornographers. A bunch of them get imprisoned. U.S. consumers keep using the same amount of porn as before. Maybe they can’t get porn on cable channels or in hotel rooms any more, but that’s so twentieth century; instead, consumers will continue to be able to get more than they ever wanted on the Internet. Nor do I think that the crackdown will somehow subtly affect consumers’ attitudes about the morality of porn — it seems highly unlikely that potential porn consumers will decide to stop getting it because they hear that some porn producers are being prosecuted.

[. . .]

(2) The government gets understandably outraged by the “foreign smut loophole.” “Given all the millions that we’ve invested in going after the domestic porn industry, how can we tolerate all our work being undone by foreign filth-peddlers?,” pornography prosecutors and their political allies would ask. So they unveil the solution, in fact pretty much the only solution that will work: Nationwide filtering.

[. . .]

(3) Finally, the government can go after the users: Set up “honeypot” sites (seriously, that would be the technically correct name for them) that would look like normal offshore pornography sites. Draw people in to buy the stuff. Figure out who the buyers are. To do that, you’d also have to ban any anonymizer Web sites that might be used to hide such transactions, by setting up some sort of mandatory filtering such as what I described in option (2).

[. . .]

So, supporters of that plank of the platform, which do you prefer — #1, #2, or #3? Note that I’m not asking whether porn is bad, or whether porn should be constitutionally protected. I’m certainly not asking whether we’d be better off in some hypothetical porn-free world (just like no sensible debate about alcohol, drug, or gun policy should ask whether we’d be better off in some hypothetical alcohol-, drug-, or gun-free world).

I’m asking: How can the government’s policy possibly achieve its stated goals, without creating an unprecedentedly intrusive censorship machinery, one that’s far, far beyond what any mainstream political figures are talking about right now?

August 21, 2012

The critical message of this election cycle

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

A. Barton Hinkle distills all the campaign wisdom down into one easy-to-understand message: The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win:

The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins.

No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies.

Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People.

The Other Side also has been hammering away at My Side to release certain documents that have nothing to do with anything, and making all sorts of outrageous accusations about what might be in them. Meanwhile, the Other Side has stonewalled perfectly reasonable requests to release its own documents that would expose some very embarrassing details if anybody ever found out what was in them. This just shows you what a bunch of hypocrites they are.

Rinse, repeat.

August 14, 2012

Brian Doherty on the Ron Paul Revolution

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

An excerpt from Brian Doherty’s new book Ron Paul’s Revolution in the National Post:

Paul is a remarkably successful politician made of contradictions. Though a longtime Republican congressman, he’s built his reputation on such wildly liberal stances as ending the drug war, halting wars in the Middle East and scuttling the Patriot Act. Despite this, in 2010 and 2011 he’s won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the seedbed of young right-wing activists.

He’s got traditional conservative bona fides, too. He’s for ending the income tax and killing the Internal Revenue Service, and for stopping illegal immigration; he also thinks abortion should be illegal. Despite this, right-wing politicians and thought leaders from Giuliani to Bill O’Reilly to the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol deride and despise him.

Paul’s appeal is a curious mixture of populist and intellectual. He attacks the elite masters of money, banking and high finance at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. But his philosophy on politics and economics was forged through decades of self-driven study of abstruse libertarian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and the Nobel Prize–winning F. A. Hayek.

He’s a staggeringly successful politician by some measures — the only congressman to win a seat as a nonincumbent three separate times. He continues to be re-elected to the House election after election, almost always by a higher margin than the time before. He does this while violating most traditional rules of politics. He doesn’t strive to bring home the bacon. His 14th District in Texas is highly agricultural, rife with rice and cattle farmers, but he always votes against federal agriculture subsidies. In a district with 675 miles of coastline, struck violently in 2008 by Hurricane Ike, he votes against flood aid and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — even calling for the latter’s abolition on national TV. He vows to never vote for any bill for which he doesn’t see clear constitutional justification. Yet by some people’s standards of a “successful legislator” he’s a bust — nearly every bill he introduces never even makes it out of committee.

August 1, 2012

It’s not congressional gridlock: it’s abdication of responsibility

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:23

We’ve all seen journalists refer to the situation in the US congress as being “gridlocked”: the Democrats and Republicans just can’t manage to get along at all, leaving the system constipated and unable to function. Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy in The Hill point out that this is letting the members of congress off far too lightly:

Many observers and participants — including the entire GOP and Democratic leadership — are quick to cry gridlock and to blame inaction on some new awful hyper-partisan or ideological era.

But there isn’t gridlock, which usually results from Democrats and Republicans sharing power and clashing over alternative positions. Gridlock slows things down — almost always a good thing — but it doesn’t stop serious legislation from happening. Welfare reform, balanced budgets, defense cuts and capital-gains tax rate cuts in the 1990s were all the product of gridlock that slowly gave way to consensus.

And today’s Congress is more than happy to pass legislation when it suits members’ interests. In just the past few months, for instance, the ostensibly gridlocked Congress reauthorized the Export-Import Bank program that gives money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods; extended sharply reduced rates for government-subsidized student loans; re-upped the Essential Air Service program that subsidizes airline service to rural communities; and voted against ending the 1705 loan-guarantee program that gave rise to green-tech boondoggles such as Solyndra and Abound. None of these were party-line votes — all enjoyed hearty support from both Democrats and Republicans.

[. . .]

What we’re actually witnessing — and have been for years now — is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility by Congress and the president for performing the most basic responsibilities of government. Despite the fiscal crisis that Washington knows will occur if it fails to deal with unsustainable spending and debt, it hasn’t managed to produce a federal budget in more than three years.

May 16, 2012

The real reason for Ron Paul’s surprising announcement

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:52

Edward Morrissey thinks the reason Ron Paul won’t be contesting any more primaries is that he’s already achieved his real aim:

On Monday, the Republican nomination fight finally got reduced to a single candidate. This might surprise people who believed that the departure of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum had already made Mitt Romney the official nominee. But until Monday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) had continued to raise funds and campaign in upcoming primary states.

That changed with a statement from the candidate himself — or at least it changed somewhat. Unlike Santorum and Gingrich, who suspended their campaigns entirely, Paul has instead decided not to contest any more states. Paul explained that his efforts in the rest of the nomination process would focus on consolidating his delegate gains in states that had already held their contests. “Our campaign will continue to work in the state convention process,” Paul explained in his message. “We will continue to take leadership positions, win delegates, and carry a strong message to the Republican National Convention that Liberty is the way of the future.”

[. . .]

So what is the real endgame? Some wonder whether Paul wants to stage a demonstration at the Republican convention, which he adamantly denied last week. Rumors have also circulated that Paul would flex his muscle to get the rules changed and unbind all delegates at the convention, but he doesn’t have that kind of muscle, and it wouldn’t result in a Paul nomination even if he did. Paul’s delegates will have an impact on the party platform, which most believe is the object of Paul’s strategy, but party platforms don’t really have that much practical impact. Few people read them, and even fewer candidates feel bound to them.

Most people miss the fact that Paul has already achieved his end game, or is within a few weeks of its conclusion. The aim for Paul isn’t the convention, which is a mainly meaningless but entertaining exercise in American politics. The real goal was to seize control of party apparatuses in states that rely on caucuses. With that in hand, Paul’s organization can direct party funds and operations to recruit and support candidates that follow Paul’s platform, and in that way exert some influence on the national Republican Party as well, potentially for years to come. Paul hasn’t won every battle in that fight, but Minnesota will probably end up being more the rule than the exception.

May 3, 2012

Reason.tv: Brian Doherty on Ron Paul’s Revolution

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

“Ron Paul invented the notion of a populist, activist, modern movement thats transpartisan” says Reason’s Brian Doherty

Brian Doherty sat down with ReasonTV to talk about his new book and how Ron Paul has changed politics in America. Doherty wrote about the evolution of the libertarian movement in his 2007 book “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement”. He has been following and writing about Ron Paul and his movement since then. Doherty examines Ron Paul’s influence in a new book out May 15, “Ron Paul’s rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired”.

May 1, 2012

A second Obama term might be better for the Republicans

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Shikha Dalmia explains why a Mitt Romney presidency is far from the best outcome for the Republican party:

One: Smart folks are betting that the Supreme Court will outlaw the individual mandate but leave the rest of ObamaCare to Congress. Hence, one conservative argument for a Romney victory is that, combined with a GOP-controlled Congress, it’ll offer the last hope for repealing the law. But repeal is not an end in itself. The question is, can the GOP replace ObamaCare with sensible market-based reforms?

[. . .]

Two: Commentators like Michael Gerson maintain that precisely because Romney has been a serial flipper previously, he’ll be less likely to flop now on conservative issues. But Romney’s desperation to establish his street cred with the base is not a blessing when it comes to government spending.

[. . .]

Three: Both the left and the right, according to the polls, are troubled by the fact that America is becoming a land of crony capitalism. No doubt that’s why Romney has been mouthing clumsy platitudes about how “you’ve got to stop the spread of crony capitalism” and striking a brave pose against the auto bailout.

But, tellingly, the financial bailout was just fine with him. That’s no coincidence. He is, after all, the ultimate Wall Street insider, receiving millions of dollars in subsidies and government handouts for companies he was trying to rescue as CEO of Bain Capital. He might not be running with the intention of helping his corporate pals, but it is inevitable that they’ll have his ear. Their interests and needs are far more comprehensible to him than, say, those of consumers

[. . .]

Four: If Romney wins this election, odds are he’ll automatically be the Republican nominee in 2016. Regardless of whether he wins then, this will effectively kill all prospects for putting a more serious Republican reformer (such as Wisconsin’s Rep. Paul Ryan) in the White House until 2020 or 2024. It might be far better to swallow hard and accept another Obama term to keep the path clear for a Republican more likely to deal with our fiscal and political dysfunction, rather than elect President Romney and block that possibility for another generation.

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