Category: Political Science

The cause of classical liberalism as a really existing possibility for
political reform has been harmed by bundling free markets with a ban on
transfers. This package deal has influenced people who think justice
requires transfers to eschew free markets. If we had spent the last
forty years hammering away at liberal fundamentals like transparency
and generality instead of the natural right to not be taxed, our
society would now be closer to the free market, limited government
ideal.

That is from Will Wilkinson, commenting on Asymmetrical Information.  I am personally a bigger fan of transparency than generality, noting that the two often conflict.  What if only some people need helping?  The best policy response won’t be perfectly general, nor should we force it to be. 

Many fiscal conservatives argue that Medicare should be a welfare program and not for all old people.  If you wish to argue that it must be universal to be adequately funded, you are giving up on transparency but holding on to generality.   

Will’s paragraph makes me wonder whether value of transparency is, or ever can be, transparent.

I’ve read through the new Davis, Murphy, and Topel paper on the Iraq War.  They conclude that if you account for the future dangers of a Saddam-led Iraq, the war might make sense in cost-benefit terms, and yes that does count dead Iraqis.  Most of all, this paper takes seriously the costs of future containment efforts that might have been needed against Saddam.

This is serious work and it deserves more attention than it will likely receive at this point.  On one side, I very much doubt their assumption that a Saddam-led Iraq "raises the probability of a major terrorist attack by 4 percentage points in any given year…"  On the other side, perhaps the current civil war might have occurred, sooner or later, if we had stayed out.  It is also hard to estimate the costs from skepticism about U.S. WMD intelligence the next time around.  As you might expect, the most important variables are the most difficult to quantify.  File this one under The Policy Will be Judged by its Absolute, Not Relative, Consequences.

Bush is asking for this authority, but it is unlikely to constrain spending.  Read this (JSTOR) paper "Line-Item Veto: Where Is Thy Sting?".  Excerpt: "Curiously, there exists little empirical support for the presumption that item-veto authority is important."

Or here is Robert Reischauer:

The crux of my message is that the item veto would have little effect on total spending and the deficit. I will buttress this conclusion by making three points. First, since the veto would apply only to discretionary spending, its potential usefulness in reducing the deficit or controlling spending is necessarily limited. Second, evidence from studies of the states’ use of the item veto indicates that it has not resulted in decreased spending; state governors have instead used it to shift states’ spending priorities. Third, a Presidential item veto would probably have little or no effect on overall discretionary spending, but it could substitute Presidential priorities for Congressional ones [TC: Hmm…].

Reischauer cites work by Douglas Holtz-Eakin:

Governors in 43 states [circa 1992] have the power to remove or reduce particular items that are enacted by state legislatures. The evidence from studies of the use of the item veto by the states, however, indicates no support for the assertion that it has been used to reduce state spending.

I have one simple model in mind: the legislature comes up with more individual pieces of pork in the first place.  Can you think of others?

There were two kinds of rapists.  Some took the girls and used them as wives until the end, even on the flight to Congo; they took advantage of the situation to sleep with prettified Tutsis and in exchange showed them a little bit of consideration.  Others caught them just to fool around with, for having sex and drinking; they raped for a little while and then handed them over to be killed right afterward.  There were no orders from the authorities.  The two kinds were free to do as they pleased.

Of course a great number didn’t do that, had no taste for it or respect for such misbehaving.  Most said it was not proper, to mix together fooling around and killing.

That is from Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak.  Here is my previous post about the book.

During that killing season we rose earlier than usual to eat lots of meat, and we went up to the soccer field at around nine or ten o’clock.  The leaders would grumble about latecomers, and we would go off on the attack.  Rule number one was to kill.  There was no rule number two.  It was an organization without complications.

That is from Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak.  I will post more about this remarkable book soon.  Here is one good review of the book.

I once wrote:

Some time ago, [Mancur] Olson started work on the fruitful distinction between a stationary and a roving bandit. A stationary bandit has some incentive to invest in improvements, because he will reap some return from those improvements. A roving bandit will confiscate wealth with little regard for the future. Olson then used this distinction to help explain the evolution of dictatorship in the twentieth century, and going back some bit in time, the rise of Western capitalism.

I have never found this approach fully convincing. Is the stationary bandit really so much better than the roving bandit? Much of Olson’s argument assumes that the stationary bandit is akin to a profit-maximizer. In reality, stationary bandits, such as Stalin and Mao, may have been maximizing personal power or perhaps something even more idiosyncratic. Second, the stationary bandit might be keener to keep control over the population, given how much is at stake. He may oppose liberalization more vehemently, for fear that a wealthier and freer society will overthrow him.

Here is more.  I had forgotten I had written that review, so I must thank Arnold Kling for the pointer.

From Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing Blog:

A CBS undercover reporting team went into 38 police stations in Miami-Dade and
Broward Counties in Florida, asking for a set of forms they could use to
complain about inappropriate police behavior. In all but three of the stations,
the police refused to give them forms. Some of the cops threatened them (on
hidden camera, no less) — one of them even touched his gun.

officer: Where do you live? Where do you live? You have to tell me
where you live, what your name is, or anything like that.

tester: For a complaint? I mean, like, if I have —

officer: Are you on medications?

tester: Why would you ask me something like that?

officer: Because you’re not answering any of my questions.

tester: Am I on medications?

officer: I asked you. It’s a free country. I can ask you that.

tester: Okay, you’re right.

officer: So you’re not going to tell me who you are, you’re not going to tell
me what the problem is.You’re not going to identify yourself.

tester: All I asked you was, like, how do I contact —

officer: You said you have a complaint. You say my officers are acting in an
inappropriate manner.

officer: So leave now. Leave now. Leave now.

James Q. Wilson says yes:

It has been suggested that congressional polarization is exacerbated by new districting arrangements that make each House seat safe for either a Democratic or a Republican incumbent. If only these seats were truly competitive, it is said, more centrist legislators would be elected. That seems plausible, but David C. King of Harvard has shown that it is wrong: in the House, the more competitive the district, the more extreme the views of the winner. This odd finding is apparently the consequence of a nomination process dominated by party activists. In primary races, where turnout is low (and seems to be getting lower), the ideologically motivated tend to exercise a preponderance of influence.

Thanks to Eric Rasmusen for the pointer, comments are open.  The implication, of course, is that electoral competition is overrated.  If we think of more moderate outcomes as better on average (debatable, admittedly), we can view the problem of politics in a new way.  Do aggregation mechanisms produce better decisions when individuals feel that less is on the line?  Is this the opposite of everything we learned from Anthony Downs?

If I were in charge of the budget, we would massively reform entitlements, transforming Social Security into a system of forced savings combined with a means-tested fallback for those too poor to save, or whose investments tanked at the wrong time. We would kill the whole Medicare/Medicaid debacle, along with the tax deduction for corporate-provided health care benefits, replacing it all with catastrophic federal insurance for those whose medical bills exceed 15-20% of gross income (phasing out for those whose incomes put them in, say, the top .1% of earners) and another means-tested benefit for those who genuinely cannot afford to spend 15% of gross income on health care benefits. I would combine this with the Jane Galt Tax Plan to save the government a whole mess o’ money, while making the economy more efficient, and increasing the incentives for everyone, rich and poor alike, to create value for society. Forget Win-Win . . . that’s like Win^win!

Here is the link; there is much more.  Elsewhere in the blogosphere, it is also worth reading Dan Drezner on Asian exports.

If you want to argue for optimism, try the following:

Iranian nukes will create an Israeli-Iranian alignment of political interests.  Iran is more hated by the Arab states than is often let on.  Iranian nukes increase the chance that Arab terrorism will be directed against Teheran rather than Tel Aviv or Manhattan. 

Iran with nukes will carve out a greater sphere of influence, in part at the expense of Israel and America.  But it will seek to stabilize that sphere, and "Israel" and "stability" likely will be seen as complements.  Iran won’t want Iraq under the control of al Qaeda.  Israel and Iran would work together, albeit covertly, to limit further proliferation in the region.

Some of the Arab nations would find themselves forced into a de facto alliance with israel, if only to resist Iranian power.  This is not obviously a bad outcome.

Most politicians — whether religious fanatics or not — are pragmatic.  The status of a nuke could be a substitute for the status earned by Iran from supporting terrorism and bashing Israel.  More importantly, nuclear powers do not generally want to transfer much power to decentralized, hard-to-deter terrorists. 

Iran tends to be ruled by councils rather than lone maniacs, a’la North Korea, a far more worrying example.  Groups are conservative by their nature.  I am aware that the Iranian president sometimes sounds like Hitler, but the talk could be geared to appeal to the Iranian public. 

Yes I do fear nuclear proliferation — greatly in fact — but Iran getting nukes is neither a) a fact which causes me to up my priors on how bad proliferation will be (which is very bad), nor b) an undeterrable nukeholder.  They are a big fat sitting duck, and their history is to seek regional power against Arabs and into central Asia.

Let me sum up the underlying theoretical reasons for relative optimism: 1) the quest for status is often quite local in nature, 2) Arabs and Iranians often distrust each other, 3) it is not all about us; often the U.S., or Israel for that matter, is a symbolic token in local struggles rather than the real target, 4) politicians tend to be pragmatic, and 5) international political coalitions are often more fluid than the rhetoric of politicians would suggest.

Here is Thomas Schelling on Iranian nukes.

But if you wanted to argue it the other way, I would suggest the following:

1. Iran will face another civil war and the losers might lob a nuke at Israel as a kind of going-away present.

2. Israel feels secure with its current nuclear deterrent only because it knows that no hostile country has a counter deterrent against Tel Aviv.  If Israel felt less free to use its nuclear weapons, it would feel less secure.  It would be subject to repeated regional military taunts, which would eventually lead to war, nuclear or otherwise.  The new book The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What It Means for the World — highly recommended by the way — is excellent on this issue.

3. Western crazies will someday sneak a small nuke into Teheran, leading to Iranian retaliation.

4. Iranian early warning systems may be unreliable, or subject to manipulation, and erroneously report an Israeli first strike.

Here is a send-up of the latest French attempt to play Tocqueville and dissect the United States.

Here is more MRI evidence.  Apparently we get little squibs of pleasure from rejecting evidence contradictory to our views.  Here is my earlier paper on political self-deception.