I knew Dennis Lane only slightly: I occasionally commented on his blog, he commented on mine once or twice, and I met and talked to him several times at Howard County blogger meetups and other events. I can’t speak to his life as a private person and how he came to a violent end, and even if I could I wouldn’t: I don’t blog about my own private and family life, and won’t do so about others. However I did want to say a few words to mark his death. ...
One political faction obtains a solid majority and uses it to push through a far-reaching initiative, only to have their dominance threatened in a subsequent election marked by newly-energized opposition and relatively low turnout. The 2010 mid-term victories of the Republican party? No, it’s the “Pioneers strike back” victories in the just-concluded elections for the Columbia Association Board of Directors. Tom Coale has already done a good wrap-up, so I’ll confine myself to a couple of thoughts continuing the analogy above. First, what I’ll call the “anti-Arbor” faction faces a decision on strategy similar to that of the anti-Obamacare GOP post-2010: They apparently don’t have the votes to reverse the decision outright, so they face a choice between trying to shape the Inner Arbor plan more to their liking, making compromises where they can find them, or throwing sand in the gears of CA governance to try to delay things until they can re-take a board majority and kill the plan then. ...
Recently the Mercatus Center at George Mason University released its latest “Freedom in the 50 States” index ranking US states by their overall levels of personal and economic freedom. I happened to see it via a post on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, but it’s been referenced in a number of places. I won’t rehash the comments of others, many of which criticize the way the various types of freedom are measured. Rather I had a somewhat different question, namely whether the measures of freedom in this report, particularly those for economic freedom, actually tell us anything useful. ...
Here’s another in an intermittent series of posts on articles I found interesting; this one focuses on issues related to wealth, politics, and how they interact in various ways. “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans” (Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright). An intriguing glimpse into the political preferences of the 1% and above, based on a survey of wealthy individuals in the Chicago area. The results reinforce stereotypes for the most part: Compared to Americans in general, the wealthy put a higher priority on reducing budget deficits, and favor cutting social spending like Social Security, reducing regulations on business, lowering taxes, and so on; they are less supportive of public education and taxpayer-funded national health insurance. However they are in fact concerned about levels of economic inequality and supportive of better wages for lower income Americans, they just don’t believe government can or should do anything about this. The authors conclude: “On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy.” (Note that I found this paper via a post on the political science blog The Monkey Cage.) “Why the Rich Don’t Give to Charity” (Ken Stern). Summarizes some studies on charitable giving by the wealthy: The bottom 20% by income give at a rate more than double that of the top 20% by income, despite receiving little or no tax benefits from charitable giving. Wealthy people also give relatively more to universities, arts organizations, and the like: “Of the 50 largest individual gifts to public charities in 2012, . . . [not] a single one . . . went to a social-service organization or to a charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed.” This not necessarily a function of the wealthy being more stingy or less empathetic by nature; some of the difference appears to be driven by the wealthy not having close exposure to the problems of those at the lower end of the income scale: “Wealthy people who lived in homogeneously affluent areas . . . were less generous than comparably wealthy people who lived in more socioeconomically diverse surroundings. It seems that insulation from people in need may dampen the charitable impulse.” (Note that Stern has written a book on US charities, With Charity for All: Why Charities Are Failing and a Better Way to Give. See also my past post on the question of balancing charitable giving with perceived need.) “Is Capitalism Moral” (Steven Pearlstein). The core thesis: The recent financial crisis and long-tern trends in income, employment, etc., “are forcing free-market advocates and their allies in the Republican Party to pursue a new strategy. Instead of arguing that free markets are good for you, they’re saying that they’re good—mounting a moral defense of free-market capitalism.” Although it’s an opinion piece, the article is somewhat in the “view from nowhere” mode of critiquing arguments on both sides of the question and urging advocates to do better. Pearlstein’s conclusion: “In our current debate over capitalism, too much attention is focused on whether, how or how much to redistribute the incomes that markets have produced, with too little focus on the institutional arrangements that determine how that income is divided up in the first place.” “The Administrative State vs. the Social Insurance State (Jason Brennan). Speaking of institutional arrangements, here’s what seems to be an emerging theme among some people libertarian by nature but also sensitive to considerations of social justice: “We could imagine a political-economic regime in which there is a completely or largely unregulated free market but in which the government taxes people to provide social insurance and some other welfare benefits. On its face, this regime seem much congenial to classical liberalism than a regime that provides no welfare benefits, but which regulates most enterprises, sets prices, controls entry into markets, and imposes licensing rules.” Real-world examples cited include Canada, Denmark, and others that have European-style social welfare and insurance systems but score better than the US on many measures of economic freedom. “Return of the Oppressed” (Peter Turchin). A physicist turned social scientist and advocate of “cliodynamics” looks at the history of economic inequality in the US and elsewhere, and sees it being driven by long-term cycles: “Upward trends in variables (for example, economic inequality) alternate with downward trends. And most importantly, the ways in which other parts of the system move can tell us why certain trends periodically reverse themselves. . . . Unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political instability. Governing elites . . . realise that they need to . . . switch to a more co-operative way of governing, if they are to have any hope of preserving the social order.” Turchin sees the present trend in economic inequality peaking around 2020, along with other trends relating to political and social stability: “In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval.” I usually just post these articles with a minimum of editorial comment, but this time I thought it was worth adding a few of my own thoughts: ...
This is part 1 of a projected four-part series, of which the only other part I’ve completed is the first half of part 2. A while back I read the essays in the online symposium on John Tomasi’s book Free Market Fairness at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians group blog. I’ve previously noted why I think the book and its topic are important. But what exactly is “free market fairness”? It is Tomasi’s particular take on a broader concept he calls “market democracy”: ...