ka1igu1a's blog

What Progressive Majority?

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:17:17 -0700

Each are rather wieldy posts, resorting to plethora of statistics and charts to buttress their points, but we can summarize each argument thusly:

Open Left:

The country is currently at a peak of liberal policy preferences, not a centrist node. The country is becoming less Republican, and has not experienced a decline in Democratic self-identification since at least 1994 (and possibly since 1984). What these three trends point to, if anything, is the country becoming more progressive, liberal, leftist, or whatever you want to call it.

The Next Right:

This country has generally had a center-right governing majority for most of the past century, interrupted by some “hiccups” to the left, notably from 1932-1937 and from 1964-66. Power has moved back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats with some regularity, but in terms of “real change” in the governing philosophy of America, the swings have been overstated.

In other words, Obama is unlikely to manufacture a new progressive majority. Reagan didn’t, and even FDR didn’t. What those Presidents did was recognize an extant majority coalition for them, and give it life.

Personally, I find the Next Right argument more compelling. Progressive sites like Open Left are a bit too optimistic in their rush to conflate the decline of the Republican brand under Bush with the emergence of a new progressive majority.

One of the obvious errors Chris Bowers makes is not filtering out independent leaning voters from Party identification. If you filter out the "leaners," Democratic Party Identification is relatively unchanged from the time Bush took office. What has changed significantly is decline in partisan GOP identification, and the percentage of independent voters who now lean democratic.

Let's look at the raw numbers recently compiled by Pew Research.

Dem: 36%
GOP: 27%
IND: 37%

If we split the leaners from the Independent Group, with 15% going to the Dems, and 10% going to the GOP we end up with:

Dem: 51%
GOP: 37%
IND: 12%

The inclusion of "leaners" suddenly makes the Democratic majority seem impressive, but this can be a fleeting coalition. Back in 2004, this was the breakdown including leaners:

Dem: 44%
GOP: 41%
IND: 15%

Therefore, it's fairly easy to make the case that the current Democratic Majorities simply reflect a democratic leaning shift in an increasing Independent voting block, entirely at the expense of the GOP. However, this shift should be tempered by the extraordinary low opinion polling for the Democratic majority Congress and the fact that the Democratic Party itself has not seen any significant increase in it's positive opinion ratings. The likely scientific conclusion to draw is that this shift represents a "lesser of two evils" change in perception with respect to the 2 parties as opposed to a mandate for hardcore progressive government. In fact, the very type of progressive overreach advocated by Open Left, in taking advantage of the decline in GOP branding, is likely the very thing that would reverse democratic trends and revitalize the GOP brand. If the Democratic Party wants to retain it's majority, it also needs appeal to the libertarian vote, and would do well to avoid this addle-headed nonsense.

Chuck Todd on the Libertarian Vote

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:29:26 -0700

In a recent Meet the Press appearance, Chuck Todd credits the libertarian vote for swinging Democratic gains in the West.

Grover Norquist to attend Paul Minneapolis Rally...

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:56:35 -0700

Letter from Ron

This was predictable.

A Tale of Two Strategies...

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:42:49 -0700

Tarran over at The Liberty Papers nicely deconstructs McCain's latest National Defense policy drivel. In any event, it's fairly evident from reading that proposal that the McCain team is taking their policy cues straight from the Heritage Foundation playbook that views missile defense and substantial modernization of the US nuclear arsenal as essential strategy to counter the nuclear proliferation "threat" posed by China and Russia. Essentially it is a continuation of the Bush policy, but McCain threatens to put that policy on steroids.

Conn Hallinan, echoing the sentiments of George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, proposes that nuclear abolition offers a saner strategy, at the very least in terms of economics, than the costly strategy implied by a n-player nuclear proliferation game. As Hallinan points out, smaller countries have defected from the NPT because the larger powers defected from their disarmament obligations.

A long-term cooperation game depends upon the ability of the players to detect uncooperative behavior and to retaliate promptly. And while the US could play the lead role in a new NPT treaty resulting in substantial decrease in nuclear disarmaments among the major powers, total abolition is likely an elusive goal. The increasing marginal value of a dwindling nuclear arsenal A and the costs of enforcement of monitoring compliance as A --> 0 make total abolition unlikely. For example, eliminating 20,000 weapons from a stockpile of 40,000 is one thing, but the marginal value associated with, say, the last remaining 5 in the stockpile is quite another. And while monitoring resumption of a full-scale military nuclear weapons program is certainly possible, it would be quite difficult to monitor whether or not the US, China, or the Russians are sneaking in production of a new weapon here or there.

So a new NPT treaty, while laudable, isn't going to solve the "nuclear proliferation" problem, especially if the major powers beef up their conventional forces as means of compensation.

This all underscores an essential fact that it's quite difficult to "uninvent" something that already exists. It's likely that the Nation-State model won't survive a n-player nuclear proliferation game. As Tarron pointed out, McCain's proposal, which is essentially the Heritage Foundation proposal, is not economically feasible and consumes way too much wealth in achieving a goal of "stability."

So, how do you therefore efficiently solve this n-player nuclear proliferation game? If n is a subset of N, where N=set of all nations, you efficiently reduce n by reducing the cardinality of N. That is to say, you move toward World Government. "Country First," indeed....

Libertarian Surge in North Carolina?

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 21:11:13 -0700

Public Policy Polling, a NC-based polling firm, summarizes the surprising polling numbers of a number of Libertarian candidates in NC.

Now, Elizabeth Dole's own internal polling shows that Libertarian Senate Candidate Chris Cole is pulling in 6%.

That someone like Chris Cole is registering at 6% in a state wide poll, when he really has no business breaking 1%, is fairly demonstrative that Barr and Munger are raising the tide for all Libertarian candidate boats in NC. Outside of Barr, Munger--who chairs the political science department at Duke--may be the most credible libertarian candidate in the country. It also worth mentioning, of course, that BJ Lawson, the GOP candidate in NC's 4th district, is probably the most credible candidate to emerge out of the r3VOLution.

As a NC resident, I can flatly say that the state LP has been hampered by oppressive ballot access laws through the years that the system and the 2-party duopoly are in no hurry to remedy. If either Barr or Munger can get 2% in November, the NC LP will be spared from having to repeat the arduous exercise of re-qualifying for ballot access(in 2010 and 2012), which is just a a drain on time and resources. Instead the NC LP could concentrate on recruiting a stable of capable candidates, a process made much easier when you already have guaranteed ballot access and Party ID registration.

From a libertarian political perspective, North Carolina is going to be an interesting laboratory of sorts to keep an eye on come this fall.

Er, never mind, nix that...The New Barr Strategy--Debates or Bust

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:12:55 -0700

Concerning that Barr Global Warming Strategy I posted about a couple of months ago, well forget that.

I give strategic credit to Barr, the guy can flip-flop with the best of them. And it's not too difficult to discern the motivation behind the change of strategy. The last month, there has been quite a bit of flip-flopping occurring on both sides of the isle in terms of domestic drilling, driven by record gas prices. Mccain has since flipped on both domestic drilling and cap-and trade. The political calculus has since changed on this issue.

With Al Gore publicly stating that voices such as Barr should be included in the public debate vis a vis Climate Change public policy, and Barr then immediately calling for himself to be included in a serious debate with the other 2 major candidates on the serious issue of "climate change," it's pretty clear now what the Barr strategy is. Get in a debate, any debate, whatever the means, with Obama and Mccain. There is even scuttlebutt that the Barr Campaign is actively going to try to leverage Barr's FISA position with the progressive community to somehow create a blogosphere buzz for Barr's inclusion in the debates.

I give credit to the Barr Campaign, they are at least trying...

UPDATE:

Barr crashes Netroots Nation

Robert Novak is reporting that GOP strategists are now privately conceding that Barr could cost McCain Georgia

Goldwater wouldn't shop at Sam's Club

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:03:17 -0700

Former Congressman Mickey Edwards and Ross Douthat recently appeared together on Bill Moyer's Journal to dissect the sorry state of conservatism. Edwards is one of the founding conservative movement figures and an old-line Goldwaterite. It's good intellectual theatre to watch old-school and new-school not exactly seeing eye-to-eye even while both are taking critical pot-shots at the GOP establishment. Edwards in particular is harsh in pointing the finger of blame at the likes of Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay. Edwards also more or less assigns additional blame to the religious right for corrupting "conservative principles."

During the course of the interview, when Edwards trashed Robert Bork as an idiot and typed him as the sort of judicial despot the likes of Patrick Henry historically warned about, I could help but think that someone like Edwards, who is socially liberal/libertarian, would never get elected today as a Republican. To the extent that he wishes to resurrect that type of conservatism in the Republican party, he likely only represents a movement of one, himself.

The Futures Market is the Price-Discovery Mechanism for Oil

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:40:46 -0700

Following up on my previous post mocking the Political Class' assertion that greedy speculation is at the root of high oil prices, I also must critique the other end of the opinion continuum that assigns trivial influence of future expectations on spot pricing.

Writes Michael S. Rozeff:

The fact of the matter is that the futures price is connected to the current spot price for immediate delivery. It is impossible for the futures price to get too far above spot. It cannot get above it by more than the cost of carry. Otherwise traders will buy spot and carry the commodity while selling the futures contract. This will lock in an arbitrage profit.

Technically, quite true, but Rozeff has the tail wagging the dog, assuming that the Spot market is the price discovery mechanism for oil and treating Futures Contracts as mere Forward Contracts. However, the actual fact is that the Futures market long ago supplanted the spot market as the price discovery mechanism for oil, and Rozeff's explanation of arbitrage only demonstrates why the spot prices align with expectations. This isn't conjecture but a matter of common knowledge. OPEC and the other petroleum exporting countries for some time have relied on the Futures Markets for price signaling (e.g., IPE Brent Weighted Average) after deeming spot market exchanges too illiquid and prone to manipulation. You can argue whether expectations are rational or not, but expectations nonetheless drive spot prices.

From 2000- 2005, OPEC used Expected Prices (i.e., price signaling from the Futures Markets) to set production level output to maintain a price range zone. However, after 2005, OPEC essentially lost it's ability to manage/counter expectations via production output because of increase in excess supply capacity utilization(that is, a very tight market with low spare capacity) and increased uncertainty (risk premium) in expected prices. The US invasion of Iraq served to exacerbate the former (invading Iraq in already tightening market and subsequently taking Iraqi production offline) and is the primary contributor to the latter.

Is McCain Senile?

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:42:48 -0700

The last 2 days, I've seen McCain harping on talking points concerning Russian policy toward Czechoslovakia. Of course, the latter no longer exists, having split into 2 separate sovereign states, Czech Republic and Slovakia, more than 15 years ago in the aftermath of the USSR dissolution. Either the McCain campaign team is utterly incompetent or McCain is just flat out bordering on senility. I'm going with the latter, and given McCain apparently doesn't even have the mental capacity to adapt to learn how to operate a personal computer, it's just flat out scary to think this "National Greatness" mental midget could be Emperor of the World.

Time Magazine: The (Not So) Lunatic Fringe

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:17:47 -0700

I just read Time Magazine's article, The (Not So) Lunatic Fringe, that will included in the July 21st Newsstand edition of the magazine. Time's thesis: Voters alienated by a calcified 2-party system may finally be ready for a "mainstream" Libertarian Party. However, I must note the article's lack of congruence in suggesting a future model for the LP. The first part seemed to invoke a sort of Ron Paul meets Ralph Nader model of the party, uniting rugged paleos and anti-WTO progressives into a protest movement against modernism. Then, suddenly, shifting gears, the latter part of the article latches onto Wayne Allyn Root's anti-Nanny State suburbanarianism as the future model for mainstream growth.

I suppose which version of Public Choice Theory you subscribe to would dictate the correct strategy the LP should adopt. If we accept the Mises/Caplan interpretation of Public Choice theory that asserts the Political Class more or less reflects the wishes of the irrational voter, then the 2-party "calcification" only reflects the apparent will of the voter for a middle class welfare State. What is this "Sam Club Republicanism" I keep reading about other than an embrace of a socially conservative middle-class welfare state. The necessary by-product of the middle class welfare state is the Nanny State. Therefore, "anti-Nanny State suburbanarianism" would likely garner little traction, suggesting a counter LP strategy of uniting each asymptotic end of the right-left spectrum. This interpretation also suggests that the "Ron Paul Republicans" will eventually tire of banging their heads against the GOP establishment and will eventually move over to the LP, reshaping the party along more radical lines.

If,however, we accept the more traditional interpretation of Public Choice theory--that the Political Class subverts the will of the rational voter--then there will be a revolt against this 2-party "calcification," certainly suggesting that "anti-Nanny State suburbanarianism" would be a viable model for tapping into voter discontent. The rational strategy for the LP to take therefore would be to run a ticket like Barr/Root, with the objective specifically being to gather a sufficient percentage to ensure ballot access during the next cycle, and rather than having to waste resources re-establishing ballot access for the next cycle, instead productively use such resources to tap in voter discontent with the 2-party duopoly by advocating proportional voting reform. Libertarians rarely can win in a 2-way or even a 3-way race, but in a proportional voting 4-way race, the odds become much more favorable.

Personally, my own take, is that I think voters (and humans in general) are boundedly-rational, being neither irrational nor purely rational. I will say, however, that the Mises interpretation that voters/humans are systematically biased in their beliefs against free-market economics sort of necessarily implies that libertarianism itself is DOA. In pop culture terms, this is The Matrix view of reality.

Bounded-rationality, from an evolutionary game standpoint, can more or less be re-interpreted from a rational choice theory perspective if we replace current utility maximization with reproductive success. No evolutionary population can survive into the next generations if you have a majority aging previous generation leeching off a current generation that cannot afford to repopulate. All things being equal, this alone--the gentrification of the Political Class--will eventually break the State. Ultimately, this is where libertarianism can win out, the argument that the State has proven itself to be an evolutionary dead end, an impediment to reproductive success as opposed to being a facilitator of such.

If Spot Crude Prices are being Driven by Speculation, will Congress bail out the Speculators

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:14:57 -0700

when the oil futures markets inevitably crash? Why not, this congress is apparently bailing everyone else out. Seriously, at times the Political class operates at ruthless efficiency in pursuing it's objectives and other times it seems like a collection of buffoons. With respect to oil prices, it's definitely the latter case. Whether passing legislation to "subject" OPEC to US anti-trust regulations or imposing trading restrictions in NY and London to curb "speculation," these nimrods are Austrian textbook example of acting like lab rats in a maze.

A fact that is typically overlooked is that oil prices in today's dollars are not that much higher than they were in the late 70s, early 80s, which at the time prompted a change in behavior in west in terms of oil consumption habits, actually resulting temporarily in decreased oil consumption in terms of barrels/day. Oil prices subsequently crashed by 2/3 by the mid 80s. This time, because of Industrialization of countries like China and India, a replay of behavioral change habits in terms of US and western consumption won't result in a repeat of the mid 80s oil glut, but nevertheless such behavorial changes along with other factors will likely result in a stabilization of prices and a likely fairly substantial drop in the not too distant future.

The surge in oil prices can likely be explained by the following factors: Increased demand (e.g, China and India), increase in excess supply capacity utilization of OPEC, decline of the dollar, and the risk premium associated with further instability in the Persian Gulf.

Our 6 year and counting occupation of Iraq directly contributes to 3 of those factors. The sooner we get out of Iraq and stop threatening to essentially take Iran offline as well (as we did with Iraq in 2003, which, not coincidently, is when the baseline jump in OPEC excess supply capacity utilization occured), the sooner we will see price stabilization settle in for oil prices. I'm not a Peak Oil subscriber, at least not yet. True, the era of cheap oil is over, but the marginal cost of increased oil extraction is still plenty cheap enough for the excess supply to come online and to begin exerting downward pressure on prices. To be sure, prices will still be high enough to motivate alternative fuel research, which is why now would be a good time for the State to get out of the picking winners business. End all energy subsidies, including biofuel subsidies. Eliminate the tariffs on sugar imports. If the State must be involved, then offering incentives such as prize money should replace picking the winners beforehand via subsidization.

RIP 4th Amendment, Dec. 15th, 1791-July 9th, 2008

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:20:49 -0700

Not a single Republican Nay. I hereby re-christian the Republican party as the National Surveillance American War Party.

Zogby 50 State Poll

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:11:17 -0700

Interesting Breakdown. A mild surprise is that Barr is polling between 5-10% in virtually every state and is killing McCain in the swing Western States.

Conservative Defection from the Drug War?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:17:26 -0700

H/T to Radley Balko for linking to this post on Pajamas Media indicating that some conservatives are finally figuring out that the War on Drugs is undermining the US occupation efforts in Afghanistan, a theme I addressed in this post a few weeks ago. However, the general WOD v WOT meme is something I addressed in this 3 year old post back in the day of my former incarnation as a Chicago School Libertarian.

FISA Money Bomb

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 07:29:03 -0700

Glenn Greenwald reports that the Strange Bedfellows money bomb has been planned for August 8th, the 34th anniversary of Nixon's resignation.