Politics

Last Tuesday Tom Coale announced that he’s running for the open House of Delegates seat in the newly-created District 9B in (parts of) Ellicott City. Unfortunately I was not able to attend the fundraiser in which Tom announced his campaign. Equally unfortunately I won’t be able to vote for Tom; I live just north of the boundary line of District 9B, in “Bates-Miller” territory. However the least I can do is to publish a blog post commenting on Tom’s platform and campaign. ...

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”: ...

Everyone who uses the Internet knows about “.com”: google.com, disney.com, even frankhecker.com. It’s one of the well-known suffixes for Internet domain names, along with “.org” (columbiaassociation.org) and “.gov” (howardcountymd.gov); the technical term for these suffixes is “top-level domains” or TLDs. You may have also seen domain names like bit.ly and t.co, for example as used in URL shortening schemes. Here the “.ly” and “.co” are actually two letter codes for Libya and Columbia (the country, not the city). (These are known as “country code top-level domains” or ccTLDs, and are more typically used for web sites outside the US, like www.gov.uk for the UK government.) But did you know that in future there may be top-level domains like “.hilton” or “.bmw” associated with individual companies, or more generic domains like “.blog” or “.book”? ...

I don’t usually comment on Maryland politics beyond Howard County, but this Washington Post story on Martin O’Malley’s approval rating reinforces an opinion I’ve held for a while: O’Malley seems to be frittering away his second term trying to make himself into a national figure, as opposed to actually doing the hard work of preparing Maryland for success in the 21st century. Maybe this is an unfair characterization; maybe (as with the college tuition and school funding issues mentioned in the article) he’s just had a problem “communicating his accomplishments.” ...

Over at Columbia Compass Bill Santos has written a great post that brought into focus some of my thoughts around the proposed Inner Arbor project for Symphony Woods. I really like what I’ve heard and seen of the project and I hope it comes to fruition. But. . . I live in Ellicott City, not in Columbia, and when Ian Kennedy asked people to sign a petition in support of the project I was at first hesitant to do so. After all, I’m not a Columbia property owner, I don’t vote for the Columbia Association board of directors, and whatever money CA chooses to spend in support of the Inner Arbor project is not going to come out of my pocket. Should I just stay out of the controversy and leave Columbia-related matters to the “real Columbians”? ...

For the most part I’ve stayed out of the debate over the “Inner Arbor” plan proposed for consideration by the Columbia Association Board of Directors. For the record, I think the idea of having an everyday “there there” in Symphony Woods (i.e., not just Merriweather Post Pavilion) is a good idea; I especially like the idea of building a new Central Branch library as part of an overall Symphony Woods cultural complex. Bottom line: I like the proposal, have signed the petition to support it, and encourage others to do so as well. ...

This week my theme is the urban-rural divide in US politics, both present and past: “The Real Republican Adversary? Population Density” (Dave Troy). A Baltimore entrepreneur looks at how population density is associated with (and influences?) Americans’ political choices and beliefs: “98% of the 50 most dense counties voted Obama. 98% of the 50 least dense counties voted for Romney. . . . At about 800 people per square mile, people switch from voting primarily Republican to voting primarily Democratic.” His conclusion: “Density is efficient. Density produces maximum economic output. An America that is not built fundamentally on density and efficiency is not competitive or sustainable. And a Republican party that requires America to grow inefficiently will become extinct.” See also Tim de Chant’s “How population density affected the 2012 presidential election” for (somewhat confusing) paired maps showing population density vs. Obama’s and Romney’s vote totals.1 “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities” (Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West). Providing some scientific underpinnings to Dave Troy’s arguments for cities and higher-density living, Geoffrey West and his colleagues claim that the growth of cities exhibits mathematical regularities and in particular that cities foster increases in innovation at a rate greater than would be expected by looking at their rate of population growth: “Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents, β, that fall into distinct universality classes. Quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation have β ≈1.2 >1 (increasing returns), whereas those accounting for infrastructure display β ≈0.8 <1 (economies of scale).” For a less math-heavy discussion of these ideas see the Edge interview with West. “Agenda 21 and You” [PDF] (John Birch Society). One present-day conservative response to calls for higher-density living and “sustainable development”: “The American dream of the beautiful house, big front and back yard, white picket fence, and one to two cars, is to be replaced with the United Nations’ Agenda 21 vision of living in small urban dwelling[s]. . . . As rural areas become less populated, they will become off-limits for people, but not animals and plants, such as weeds. Over time, plants and animals will move in and take over. Grass will grow uncut and grow creeping into sidewalks. . . . These once lively and prosperous communities will become ‘open space.’” “Cross of Gold” (William Jennings Bryan). In 1896 the soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee advocates on behalf of rural America: [We] say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic coast, but the hardy pioneers who have braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—the pioneers away out there [pointing to the west], who rear their children near to Nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their young, churches where they praise their Creator, and cemeteries where rest the ashes of their dead—these people, as we say, are as deserving of the consideration of our party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak. . . . I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”2 ...