Category: Political Science

First, I agree with Will Wilkinson that a seasteading community would likely evolve back to non-libertarian political visions. 

Second and more fundamentally, I am for the seasteading idea.  There are today many oil derricks, owned and run by energyl companies.  There are many cruise ships, with more or less autonomous legal governance.  More and bigger cruise ships would be better and if some of them moved more slowly that would be fine too.  But when I step on to a cruise ship (well, actually that's the sort of thing I don't do; personally I hate cruise ships), I don't feel I am moving from an inferior political order to a superior political order.

I've wondered whether I should retire on to a cruise ship of the future, but I'm not attracted per se by the "politics" I would get there.  I would expect more freedom in the Lockean sense but less of the positive freedom that comes from living in a larger, more diverse, and yes also a more stupid society.  I wouldn't live on the Mensa cruise ship either.  I'll take some of the stupidity of modern society (the landlubbing version) to get the diversity and the greater number of open niche spaces and free possibilities. 

On a smaller scale, I live under different kinds of corporate, non-profit and university governance all the time.  That's great, but I don't view their totalized extension as my preferred utopian path.

I'd like people to be smarter, more thoughtful, more tolerant, and more loving of liberty, yet in ways which do not drain away the diversity of the United States, which I feel is the best available foundation to build upon.  No matter how good a seasteading charter may sound, any given venture just can't be that credible until it has succeeded for a very long time.  History and precedent matter and by the way have you checked in on Estonia lately? 

Addendum: Here is Alex on seasteading.

Here is my latest column.  Excerpt:

It’s not that anyone is behaving illegally or unconstitutionally,
but rather that Congress seems to want to be circumvented and to
delegate more power to the executive branch as well as to the Fed, at
least temporarily.

While Congressional leaders are consulted on
the major policies, Congress is keeping its distance, perhaps to
minimize voter outrage. This way, Congress can claim credit if a
recovery comes, but deny responsibility if the price tag ends up higher
than advertised or if banks seem to be receiving unfair benefits from
the government.

The Fed and the FDIC have become the major tools for enhancing executive power and working around Congress:

The traditional division of labor among policy makers was that the Fed
determined the quantity of money in the economy – it set monetary
policy – and Congress decided precise government expenditures – it
handled fiscal policy. These new programs blur that distinction and, in
essence, the Fed is running some fiscal policy.

The FDIC issues guarantees under the expectation that Congress will have to ratify them ex post but ex ante the executive branch is calling the shots.

Is this all good or bad?  For any single choice, it is probably good.  Congress does not, in general, improve the quality of economic policy, relative to the executive branch.  But it is also a kind of deficit spending on the quality of future governance.  The more Congress is accustomed to being allowed to punt, the worse Congress will become in the longer run.  The executive branch will overreach more and also voters will apply successively more cynical standards to evaluating Congress, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

To put it more concretely, this Congress shies away from accepting responsibility for the various bailouts, yet we think it will somehow solve far tougher problems?  I, for one, am worried.

Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey (D-N.Y.) vowed to force the White House to accept delivery of a new
presidential helicopter Obama says he doesn't need and doesn't want.
The helicopter program, which cost $835 million this year, supports 800
jobs in Hinchey's district. "I do think there's a good chance we can
save it," he said.

Here is much more.  The Congressional Democrats don't like Obama's proposed "cuts" in spending.

To be sure, tourism to Mexico is devastated and the country will suffer many economic problems (yes, real business cycle theory still is relevant these days).  But is there any upside?

I hesitate to speak too soon but I'm actually somewhat impressed by how the Mexican government, at least at the national level, has responded.  There have been many failures of Mexican health care systems at local levels but keep a few things in mind: a) some of the problems lie with citizens who won't go see doctors, or who won't go see non-shaman doctors, b) too many Mexicans self-administer antibiotics, and c) when there is so much air pollution it is harder to discover flu cases, especially in the midst of flu season there.  Nonetheless Mexican reporting systems seem to have discovered an unusual flu fairly promptly.

Once the national government discovered what is going on, they acted decisively and without undue panic.  There has been very little denial, a common feature in the early stages of health crises (how long was it until the U.S. government acknowledged AIDS?).  No one is treating the Mexican federal government like a banana republic or a basket case or thinking that the Canadian government would have done so much better. 

Am I wrong?  Could this episode in the longer run bring Mexico closer to the community of developed nations?  Might Mexicans now be more likely to self-identify with a government that is at least partially competent?

Time will tell.

Will writes:

My quick take is that this sucks, because the more choke points in the policymaking process the better. That said, it probably doesn’t change all that much unless Senate Dems can muster reliable intraparty unanimity. A few things that wouldn’t have passed will, and those could be an important few things, but most final votes won’t be different. The one way this hurts the Dems is that it makes a narrative of GOP obstruction less plausible, and if various things go south by the mid-terms, the Republicans can more plausibly say that all of it’s the other guy’s fault.

If the guy is willing to switch parties, he was already in the first place willing to switch policies (if indeed he needed to change his mind at all).  He's suddenly lost of a lot of bargaining power (he had to hold off Pat Toomey, who presumably would have beaten him in the primary) and some of that power has been redistributed to the most conservative Democrats in the coalition.  That could be an improvement.

Note also that Democratic Senators may find it harder to oppose Obama once a policy initiative is announced, so they may work harder behind the scenes, and well in advance, to shape legislation in their preferred directions or simply just kill it off.  In contrast, a Republican veto-voice will be more reactive ex post.

On the marketing side, maybe now the Republicans, being denied the filibuster, will have to come up with some ideas that are actually appealing to voters outside their core constituencies. 

Addendum: Here is Matt's analysis.  And here is the academic evidence that voting behavior changes, following a party switch.

Here is the source article.  Here is an interesting article about judging creditworthiness by a person's looks.  How different would the politics be if Geithner looked like Scarlett Johansson?  Would that make the case against bank nationalization more persuasive?

Here is a sample of pictures.  This, I think, is the least nervous-looking one.

If you wait in the line in the post office (well, at least the one branch I visited) in Lisbon, they take advantage of your time.  They have out on display books and CDs as overpriced "impulse buys."  We bought one.

Here is one (American) rumination on waiting in line at the post office.

The appointment of the three envoys comes a year after Doraemon, a
rotund blue cartoon cat with no ears, was named a special ambassador.

Here is the article, interesting throughout and focused on the idea of the ambassador in Japanese culture.

From Matt Yglesias:

The question here is what would Adam Posen have done if he had Tim
Geithner’s job? And based on Posen’s analysis, I think the only
conclusion you can reach is that he’d have done more-or-less the same
thing. Talking about a different issue last week, I heard Tyler Cowen
forcefully make the point that you have to think of the political
constraints as a real policy consideration. Suppose Geithner had asked Congress to appropriate $1 trillion to implement a program of bank
nationalization, asset writedowns, and loan guarantees–what would that
have accomplished? It certainly wouldn’t have gotten Congress to
appropriate $1 trillion to implement a program of bank nationalization,
asset writedowns, and loan guarantees. It might have derailed the
budget and thrown the political momentum on the Hill to proponents of a
neo-Hooverite spending freeze program. It might have caused panic. And
it certainly would have undermined the credibility of the inevitable
effort by Geithner to do the most he can with the authority he already
has.

One thing I like about Bryan Caplan's book is an interpretation which he will probably hate.  The truly decisive actors are people directly in the political process.  Maybe the "libertarians" who are or have been in politics are not just "sell outs."  Rather they are implementing the net-liberty-enhancing policies that a real libertarian would favor if he or she were truly a decisive agent.

Call me silly but I think about questions like this.  It's a big state with only about 1.5 million people, even though it is the only place with six pointed star garnets (refined here).  Much of the state is beautiful.

Imagine the counterfactual that, in 1846, when the U.S. and Great Britain resolved the border, one part of the area went its own way.  Today an independent Idaho would probably a) be more "right wing" than the U.S. as a whole, and b) free ride upon U.S.-provided public goods, such as national defense.  A federal Idaho government might be more concerned with boosting tax revenues (it would be full residual claimant) than is the current state-level government.  All those factors would militate in favor of population increase.  Most of all, I have the odd (Bayesian?) notion that since it would look and feel like an underpopulated country, more people would flow in.

On the other hand Idaho would face the risk of trade barriers and its legal order might be less secure than for the U.S. as a whole.  The prospect of mobility barriers could either keep people in the area or out of it.

Would the place still be called "Idaho"?  I doubt it.  Might the town of Nampa — #2 in the state — be much better known to the world at large?  I think so.

Does EU accession add or drain people from its smaller units, such as Slovakia and Estonia?  There's much at stake here, yet governments sign on to many agreements without thinking about the long-term consequences for their populations, whether pro or con.

Note: The comments section on this post is not for rehashing standard debates over immigration.