Knowing Humans

GeoLibertarianism Squares Two Circles

2008-04-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/04/29/the-lp-loses-a-member/

Yes, JRE, geolibertarians say the right to vote is independent of whether one is a land monopolist and must therefore compensate community members for excluding them from the land one monopolizes. Read on to see how geolibertarianism solves two problems that no other school of libertarianism claims to solve.

The Wikipedia article gets one nuance slightly wrong. Geolibertarians don't necessarily believe that all land is an unownable commons. Rather, some of us simply take very literally the Lockean proviso that homesteading an unowned resource (e.g. virgin land) must leave "as much and as good" for others. So we say there would be zero land value tax on you if there is available to others "as much and as good" land as that which you monopolize -- or if you allow the community to use the land you squat on in the same way that you use it. The land value tax only kicks in when monopoly rents are earned due to the Lockean proviso being violated. Such rents are a violation of individual rights under the Lockean analysis, and are thus aggression. The geolibertarian land value "tax" is not really a "tax", but rather is reparations for this aggression. (A LVT does not tax site improvements like buildings etc.)

Geolibertarianism thus solves the central conundrum of minarchism: how to finance the protection of life, liberty, and property without initiating force. Its solution even offers an unanticipated bonus: a non-force-initiating libertarian safety net for the poor. Geolibertarianism points out that in the state of nature there is always marginal but productive land available for use by the destitute, and that faithful historical observation of the Lockean proviso (leaving "as much and as good") should have always ensured that this remained the case even to this day. To the extent that it is no longer the case, excluding people from access to the natural productive opportunities on what used to be the commons is unjust -- i.e. is aggression. Therefore, where land is scarce its "ground rent" should be considered part of the commons, with each individual having an equal claim on it.

Technically, "ground rent" is is the excess production obtained by using a site in its most productive use, compared to the production obtained by applying equivalent inputs of labor and capital at the most productive site where the application doesn't require (additional) payments for use of the site. In other words, ground rent is the advantage you get from exclusive use of a site compared to the most productive available site that is not in use.

For more information, see my site http://ecolibertarian.org/.

Vote By Your Principles, Not By Habit

2008-04-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

Jeff Dulgar complains in the UC Santa Barbara student paper Daily Nexus that "Unwanted Libertarians Crash the Party". He admits that the LP "has become that cool new fad", but says to LP members that "you’ve rebelled against conventional politics, but you have effectively tossed your vote aside" because they "choose to vote for a party that will never get elected".

Let's explore the infamous "Wasted Vote Syndrome". For a vote to be "wasted", it has to be cast in vain, without furthering the purpose for which it was cast. So what are the reasons for which people vote? Why do they even vote at all?

This is a surprisingly difficult question -- difficult enough that economists call it the "Paradox of Voting" (or Downs Paradox, after the seminal 1957 paper by Anthony Downs). They observe that the cost of voting is relatively high compared to its objective benefit to the voter. To vote you have to invest up to an hour of your precious time -- analyze your choices, travel to a polling place, stand in a line or two, enter your choices, and travel back. (Voting by mail only changes the time calculation a little.) Your payoff from voting has to be discounted by the probability that your vote will tip the outcome of the election. Even if you expect the outcome of an election to have a big effect on your life, the odds that your vote will change that outcome are usually vanishingly small. When you do the math, you see that the net expected personal benefit to you from adding your vote to your candidate's total is far less than the cost of the gas it takes to get to the polls -- or even the cost of the stamp to mail your ballot.

The standard explanation, then, is that voting yields some kind of psychological benefit, apart from any coldly calculated material return on the effort invested. One component of that psychological benefit is surely the basic primate need to line up with the winning side. For most of the millions of years of hominid evolutionary history, lining up with the winning faction in the tribe was often potentially a matter of life or death. Even today we're usually under social pressure not to keep our voting preference a secret. Humans have enjoyed the secret ballot for only a few centuries, and that's not nearly long enough for us to shake the feeling that we better back somebody with a decent chance of actually taking over our tribe.

The largest component of voting's psychological benefit, however, has optimistically been posited to be that voters derive "expressive" utility from voting -- they like to feel that they've stood up for their beliefs and principles. If this is indeed the reason for which you vote, then the truly "wasted" vote is the vote that doesn't accurately express your beliefs. A vote for one of the two incumbent parties is a vote that says "Take me for granted; I think you're doing a fine job, and keep up the good work." If that's not the message you want to send, then your vote is in fact "wasted" -- even if the candidate you vote for wins. That's why we Libertarians say: the only wasted vote is the one that doesn't express your principles.

A new theory was proposed in 2007 by Edlin, Gelman and Kaplan: Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote To Improve the Well-Being of Others. They contend that "for voters with ‘social’ preferences" -- i.e., preferences about how an election will affect people other than themselves -- "the expected utility of voting is approximately independent of the size of the electorate" because bigger elections can affect more people. For such voters, the expected utility from voting will be roughly the size of the benefit that the election might provide to the average citizen, because the number of people benefiting (N) is roughly balanced by the 1/N probability of tipping the election.

The problem with this new analysis is that it only considers one election in isolation. Even on its own terms, voting for the lesser of two evils to somehow maximize your "social preference" is subject to a dizzying regression called a Keynesian Beauty Contest. The concept was first applied to equity markets, pointing out that the price of a stock will not really be what investors think is its fundamental value, but rather will be what investors think other investors will think is that value. In the context of voting, that regression may not yield a single sensible equilibrium if voters are very unsure about what candidates have the best chances of winning.

But in fact we have detailed information about the probabilities of victory for various candidates and parties, and that information is the key to recognizing the Wasted Vote fallacy. First of all, polling data and historical data about "safe" districts can almost always combine to tell you that your one vote has no real chance of tipping the outcome in the district (or electoral college state) where it will be counted. Rather than depressing you, this should liberate you to vote your conscience. So even a believer in Wasted Vote logic should only vote for the lesser of two evils when the empirical data show that one evil leads the other only by a nose (or a horn or a hoof).

However, there is a consideration that makes even that strategy suspect. Again, the way we can anticipate how many votes that a candidate or party will attract in this election is to look at how many votes that (or similar) contestants attracted in past elections. When you realize this, you understand that in a very real sense your vote in this election will influence the outcome not only of this election, but all future elections run with a similar set of candidates and voters. So voting for your habitual incumbent party in this election sends the enduring message to future voters -- and to election-watching politicians -- that there is no danger you will stop voting by habit. You have to balance 1) the alleged benefit of tinkering at the margins of the present status quo with 2) the potential huge benefit of overturning the status quo in favor of the principles you actually believe in.

Thus the only truly wasted vote is to vote by your reflexes, and not by your principles.

The General Welfare Clause

2008-04-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

Madison wrote in Federalist 41 that "common defense and general welfare" is a reference to the subsequently enumerated powers:

Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity

The Butler decision that overturned this line of thinking said that the "general welfare" language means that "the powers of taxation and appropriation extend only to matters of national, as distinguished from local, welfare". The very next year in Helvering, the court effectively ceded all jurisdiction on this question:

The line must still be drawn between one welfare and another, between particular and general. Where this shall be placed cannot be known through a formula in advance of the event. There is a middle ground or certainly a penumbra in which discretion is at large. The discretion, however, is not confided to the courts. The discretion belongs to Congress, unless the choice is clearly wrong, a display of arbitrary power, not an exercise of judgment.

Madison held that the phrase "to pay the debts and provide ..." merely qualified the Clause 1 power to tax, and that the "provide" language is just a reference to the subsequently enumerated powers. Like the uniformity restriction that concludes Clause 1, the "provide" language is obviously just a restriction on the power to tax. Hamilton wanted the national government to have broader powers, and in fact at the Constitutional Convention the Hamiltonians tried to convert the comma after "excises" to a semicolon, so that the "to provide" infinitive would become a description of an independent Congressional power.

The Supreme Court agreed with Madison for almost a century and half, until Justice Roberts reversed this position in a passing comment in US v. Butler (1936). For my critique of Roberts' fatefully sloppy analysis, see below. The next year, a court coerced by FDR's court-packing threat hand-waved toward the Butler decision in order to uphold the Social Security Act. In that decision (Helvering v. Davis), Cordozo repeated Roberts' earlier pretense that the new interpretation of Clause 1 is too obvious to need actual explanation in a Supreme Court opinion.

The Butler Case

The court decided in passing in 1936 (US v. Butler, by Justice Roberts, http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Butler/) that Congress can spend for the general welfare:

They can never accomplish the objects for which they were collected, unless the power to appropriate is as broad as the power to tax.

Obviously false. For example, if the federal government wanted to reduce wine consumption, it could tax wine imports, but use the revenue to help finance e.g. the military.

The necessary implication from the terms of the grant is that the public funds may be appropriated 'to provide for the general welfare of the United States.' These words cannot be meaningless, else they would not have been used. [..]

The reasoning is obviously flawed. If any and all spending for "the general welfare" is already authorized, then much of the rest of Section 8 is redundant. The rest of Section 8 authorizes provision of the postal system, army, navy, and militia -- each of which the framers clearly considered as contributing to "the general welfare".

Here is the core of Roberts' argument:

Since the foundation of the nation, sharp differences of opinion have persisted as to the true interpretation of the phrase. Madison asserted it amounted to no more than a reference to the other powers enumerated in the subsequent clauses of the same section; that, as the United States is a government of limited and enumerated powers, the grant of power to tax and spend for the general national welfare must be confined to the enumerated legislative fields committed to the Congress. In this view the phrase is mere tautology, for taxation and appropriation are or may be necessary incidents of the exercise of any of the enumerated legislative powers. Hamilton, on the other hand, maintained the clause confers a power separate and distinct from those later enumerated is not restricted in meaning by the grant of them, and Congress consequently has a substantive power to tax and to appropriate, limited only by the requirement that it shall be exercised to provide for the general welfare of the United States. Each contention has had the support of those whose views are entitled to weight. This court has noticed the question, but has never found it necessary to decide which is the true construction. Mr. Justice Story, in his Commentaries, espouses the Hamiltonian position. We shall not review the writings of public men and commentators or discuss the legislative practice. Study of all these leads us to conclude that the reading advocated by Mr. Justice Story is the correct one. While, therefore, the power to tax is not unlimited, its confines are set in the clause which confers it, and not in those of section 8 which bestow and define the legislative powers of the Congress. It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.

So what is the sum total of Roberts' argument? 1) The general welfare phrase can't be meaningless. 2) Hamilton, Story, and unnamed others argued that it authorizes any spending that one could claim is for the general welfare. 3) The Court has "studied" their arguments, "shall not review" them, but found them "correct".

That's it. That's how the highest court in the land reversed the 147-year assumption that the federal powers of the purse are enumerated in Art. I Sec 8, and decided instead that they are limited only by the ability of politicians to declare expenditures as being for "the general welfare".

Roberts hilariously proceeds to put a fig leaf on his reasoning by pretending it's bold to draw a line against any spending that is not for the "general welfare":

Monroe, an advocate of Hamilton's doctrine, wrote: 'Have Congress a right to raise and appropriate the money to any and to every purpose according to their will and pleasure? They certainly have not.' Story says that if the tax be not proposed for the common defense or general welfare, but for other objects wholly extraneous, it would be wholly indefensible upon constitutional principles. And he makes it clear that the powers of taxation and appropriation extend only to matters of national, as distinguished from local, welfare.

As bad as the above reasoning is, the greater sin is exposed in what follows:

[..] we naturally require a showing that by no reasonable possibility can the challenged legislation fall within the wide range of discretion permitted to the Congress. How great is the extent of that range, when the subject is the promotion of the general welfare of the United States, we need hardly remark. But, despite the breadth of the legislative discretion, our duty to hear and to render judgment remains. If the statute plainly violates the stated principle of the Constitution we must so declare. We are not now required to ascertain the scope of the phrase 'general welfare of the United States' or to determine whether an appropriation in aid of agriculture falls within it. Wholly apart from that question, another principle embedded in our Constitution prohibits the enforcement of the Agricultural adjustment Act. [..]

Here Roberts blatantly violates the sacred principle that the Court should use the narrowest grounds to make its decisions. US v. Butler in fact overturned the Agriculture Adjustment Act on other grounds, and so what Roberts did was throw open the door to "general welfare" socialism merely via obiter dicta (i.e. "an opinion voiced by a judge that has only incidental bearing on the case in question and is therefore not binding.")

Nolan Space Is Contingent

2008-04-03T14:20:00.001-07:00

Nolan Space wasn't created by the 10 questions chosen for the WSPQ or any other quiz. Nolan Space is created by the objective facts that 1) the policy suites denoted by "Left" and "Right" are the dominant polarity in current and late-20th-century American politics, and 2) the main clusters of dissent from those suites (libertarian and populist) are defined by their disagreement with Left and Right over two sets of issues (viz., personal liberty vs. legislated morality, and economic liberty vs. legislated economic equality/security).

There is indeed nothing Platonic or a priori about the contingent affinities charted by Nolan Space. If relatively few Americans were populist we might talk instead of a David Nolan Triangle. If very few Americans were libertarian we might instead talk of a David Duke Triangle. Or if neither, then the conventional Left/Right 1-D spectrum would finally be apt. Or if the main kinds of systematic and consistent dissent from Left and Right were over franchise issues (animal rights, fetal rights, immigration, humanitarian intervention) and/or over technophobia/technophilia, we could have a 2-D or 3-D space where none of the axes were defined distinctly by economic liberty or personal liberty and instead the left-right axis invoked both.

At http://libertarianmajority.net/libertarian-polling I've collected polling data from Gallup, Zogby, Rasmussen , the Pew Research Center, the American National Election Studies, and the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies. All these data sources validate the Nolan Chart's model of the American electorate. Studies using linear regression have confirmed the model for other Western countries, e..g. "Looking at Left and Right the Right Way: Multiple Dimensions and Electoral Outcomes" (Fesnic, 2004) The model doesn't apply globally, though, as suggested in this look at data from the World Values Survey: "Social Modernization and the End of Ideology Debate: Patterns of Ideological Polarization" (Dalton, 2005).

It was a crystallizing moment of my political/intellectual life when I first laid eyes on David Nolan's chart -- the invention/promotion of which will likely secure his place in history even more firmly than for founding the LP. I instantly and irrevocably recognized that I wasn't just an enlightened/tolerant Republican, and that I could never settle for being an economics-literate Democrat. I instantly realized that I would always be a libertarian, and politics just became a question of finding the party whose sweet spot -- or at least circle of tolerance -- was most inclusive of the spot I occupied in Nolan space.

An even stronger epiphany was c. 2001 when I first saw in a macroeconomics textbook the standard 4-cell table that defines public goods, club goods (aka natural monopolies), common goods, and private goods. (I reproduce the table at http://libertarianmajority.net/public-and-private-goods.) That table forever shrank the space of possible political theories that I could ever advocate. (The feeling was sort of like hearing for the first time in fifth grade about Special Relativity, and realizing that all the sci-fi about FTL travel and communication were in effect syntax errors if you want to think of this universe as Euclidean. I'd love to say that there was a promote-able reproducible epiphany involved in my becoming geolibertarian, but that took several years.)

Rand Did Not Solve the Is-Ought Problem

2008-04-03T00:13:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand is quoted:

AR) In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, (AR

The claim isn't that reality has no bearing on what values one should choose or how one should choose them. The claim is that reality does not constitute a completely objective determination of those values. The claim is that ethics is not reducible to biology in the same way that biology is reducible to chemistry. My own approach to the justification of values is summarized at http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Axiology.

AR) the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity *is*, determines what it *ought* to do. (AR

This is an instantiation (or at best a denial) of the naturalistic fallacy, not a solution to it. Yes, it's a fact that a certain category of goal-directed behaviors -- notably reproduction and self-preservation, or more generally, maximizing inclusive fitness for the relevant replicator-- tend to get selected for, and lead to phenomena that are far more interesting than any other kinds of behaviors that could be considered goal-directed. But nothing about that fact deterministically creates any truly normative truths for such behavers. Rather, it creates instrumental truths -- e.g. IF I am to increase my genes' inclusive fitness, THEN I need to take the following actions. For any purportedly fundamental goal, it can always be asked why that ought to be a fundamental goal. There of course is some explanatory insight in the answer "because any other goal decreases the inclusive fitness -- and perhaps even is incompatible with the existence of -- the goal-seeker". However, that insight hardly constitutes the universal normative leap from "is" to "ought" that is the holy grail of ethics. Rand's purported solution is refuted -- not confirmed -- by every suicide. The fact that there are more breeders and non-suiciders than there are non-breeders and suiciders is something that biologists can readily explain as the result of an interesting chain of mindless accidents and inexorable consequences. Such mindlessness and inexorableness no more yields normative truths than does the geometric inevitability of the paths of impacting billiard balls.

Rand's purported solution to the Is-Ought problem can be seen to be radically contingent on our universe's harsh laws of thermodynamics. If in our universe there were agents -- like Christianity's legendary Yahweh -- that were not constrained by thermodynamics to have inherited the usual suite of goals common to all living things, then Rand's allegedly objective value system would just be struck dumb, offering no compelling guidance to such an agent. I'm not impressed by an alleged solution to the Is-Ought problem that doesn't also solve the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma. Yes, I'm very sympathetic to the values that the primate Rand endorses, because as her fellow primate I'm pushed by the same evolutionary winds into accepting those values too. If Rand had been an intelligent eusocial insect instead of an intelligent primate, her methodology would have led her to endorse the opposite of her individualist values. She could I suppose claim that a deeper constant value is just being contextualized differently in the two cases. But again, the essence of the Naturalist Fallacy is to take everything that Is and put a Certified Ought sticker on it. That she does so consistently doesn't make it any less fallacious. (And that it's fallacious doesn't justify putting an Ought Not sticker on, either.)

Environmental Kuznets Curves and Pigovian Taxes

2008-03-25T21:19:00.001-07:00

There's just no question in the economic literature whether environmnental quality is what is called a "normal good" -- i.e., one that is demanded more as incomes grow. See e.g. Environmental Quality Is A Normal Good (2003) by a couple of Canadian economists. In fact, if you search on the phrase "environmental quality is a normal good", you find lots of papers by economists asserting this. The underlying phenomenon is called the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which is described in Wikipedia thus:

Another situation where Kuznets type curves appear is the environment. It is claimed that many environmental health indicators, such as water and air pollution, show the inverted U-shape: in the beginning of economic development, little weight is given to environmental concerns, raising pollution along with industrialization. After a threshold, when basic physical needs are met, interest in a clean environment rises, reversing the trend. Now society has the funds, as well as willingness to spend to reduce pollution. This relation holds most clearly true for a many pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, lead, DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, sewage, and many other chemicals previously released directly into the air or bodies of water.

PERC (a leading market-oriented environmental think tank) writes in The Environmental Kuznets Curve: A Primer:

Since 1991, when economists first reported a systematic relationship between income changes and environmental quality, this relationship, known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), has become standard fare in technical conversations about environmental policy (Grossman and Krueger 1991). When first unveiled, EKCs revealed a surprising outcome: Some important indicators of environmental quality such as the levels of sulfur dioxide and particulates in the air actually improved as incomes and levels of consumption went up.

Prior to the advent of EKCs, many well-informed people believed that richer economies damaged and even destroyed their natural resource endowments at a faster pace than poorer ones. They thought that environmental quality could only be achieved by escaping the clutches of industrialization and the desire for higher incomes. The EKC's paradoxical relationship cast doubt on this assumption.

We now know far more about the linkages between an economy and its environment than we did before 1991. This primer shares this knowledge. [...]

However, income growth without institutional reform is not likely to be enough. Improvement of the environment with income growth is not automatic but depends on policies and institutions. GDP growth creates the conditions for environmental improvement by raising the demand for improved environmental quality and makes the resources available for supplying it. Whether environmental quality improvements materialize or not, when, and how, depend critically on government policies, social institutions, and the completeness and functioning of markets.

Better policies, such as the removal of distorting subsidies, the introduction of more secure property rights over resources, and the imposition of pollution taxes to connect actions taken to prices paid will flatten the underlying EKC and perhaps achieve an earlier turning point. The effects of market-based policies on environmental quality are expected to be unambiguously positive.

All the mechanisms on Guy's list (posted on the private PlatCom forum) are just ways that higher-income societies seek to satisfy that demand for a cleaner environment. The only item on the list that argues against the validity of the basic point is the claim that higher-income societies can in effect export their pollution. This is called the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, and is discussed on pp. 14-17 of the full PDF of the PERC primer. The empirical data suggests that any such haven effect is swamped by the EKC effect of the rising income in the "haven" country.

Note that the EKC effect needs smart policy like pollution taxes in order to work. Pollution taxes (aka Pigovian taxes) are almost universally regarded as a no-brainer in the literature of market-oriented environmentalism, and there is even a "Pigou Club" of famous economists who are petitioning for this policy. Such anti-aggression taxes are supported by several of us on PlatCom, but the LP's radical thought police make such policies verboten in the LP Platform. So what we have here is 1) a top-of-mind voter issue, combined with 2) a consensus market-oriented solution for the issue that is accepted by economists of all ideologies, and that 3) is not embraced by any of the LP's competing parties. So is the LP jumping all over this policy position? Of course not! What do you think we are? A party that advocates the leading market-based solutions? Nope.

I'll close by applauding Rob Power's recent comments about Mary Ruwart on the Outright forum:

her only arguments on pollution are regarding the point source type, e.g., a factory dumping mercury into the river, to which her answer is that the people downstream sue the factory into oblivion. http://www.ruwart.com/environ2.lpn.wpd.html This well-reasoned argument was fine for 30 years ago when urban rivers were flammable, but it simply doesn't work for modern non-point-source pollution that every living thing contributes to. This has been a concern of mine for a long time. She has a few topics on which she offers nothing more than hand-waving arguments, which only works in a room full of friendly libertarians -- it easily gets torn apart by non-libertarians.

I'd like to ask people who dismiss Platform reformers as "Republican lite": can one advocate taxing environmental aggression and still be considered a real libertarian?

Re: Palo Alto School Bond Debate

2008-03-20T15:43:00.001-07:00

Your questions below are good ones. For 1-3, the short answer is in this language I've proposed to the LPUS Platform Committee as an Education plank:

Parents, not government, should have the responsibility and the authority to decide what moral values their children develop through education. Government should not dictate to schools, teachers, or parents how or what children should be taught. Consumer choice, not government, should decide which schools and teachers are succeeding or failing, and thus which schools and teachers should get more resources or less. Parents should be free to choose who educates their children, and any funds for a child's education should follow the child to the chosen school or teacher. We advocate the government returning both control of and responsibility for education funding to parents. The government should no more own and operate schools than it should own and operate grocery stores.

The longer answer is in this 2006 blog posting.

For question 4, the answer is: I'm a parent who is doing what he can to make sure his three little girls enjoy both a better education and more freedom than what the current nanny state provides. I'm doing what I can both to reform our local schools and to reform the national Libertarian Party. I might not accomplish much toward either goal, but I'm guaranteed to accomplish neither if I don't try, and my conscience doesn't really allow me any other choice.

-----Original Message-----

Brian,

Not to put you on the spot, but, out of curiousity:

How will you rebut:

1) It's for the children, and
2) We need this investment in our schools, and
3) Only the mean-spirited would oppose supporting children and maintaining schools, and
4) You, sir, are a libertarian, which we all know is little short of being an anarchist. Who are you to even get involved in this?

Home Security and Automation

2008-03-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

I'm taking another look at home security/automation, and wondering what you would recommend.

For security, almost any decent multi-zone system with callout to a monitoring service (like SmartHome's $9/mo service) would satisfy Melisse. I've got some tougher requirements though, as I want:

>20 zones with per-zone speech announcements e.g. "motion in basement", "motion at north gate"
Volume-adjustable speakers in multiple rooms to play the announcements

Ability to separately set any zone to 1) silent, 2) event announcement, 3) alarm

Multiple wall/bedside keypads to do the above setting

http://www.smarthome.com/73903w.html comes close to handling the above, except for playing announcements in multiple rooms. A gold-plated solution would be to include whole-property audio as part of the requirements, but it would add thousands of dollars to hardwire speakers into the required rooms (LR, 2 bedrooms, basement), especially if you add more bedrooms and intercom capability (because it would be silly to wire half the bedrooms with speakers, and none with microphones). And once we're running new conduits, we'd want to pull ethernet and maybe coax to many of them too.

But I already have a decent whole-property audio hack: my FM pirate radio station. I could allocate one of my $100 FM stations to broadcast the security announcements throughout the property, which would even tell us when someone's at the door while we're out playing in the back yard.

And for an intercom system, I think the best answer is to wait until something like http://www.engenius-durafon.com/ becomes available as a home system. Uniden's phones are almost there, except they can only do a voice announcement to all handsets from the base, and not from an arbitrary handset.

We'll also be wanting to upgrade our exterior security lighting, but I don't have a hard requirement that the security lighting has to be integrated with the security system. Similarly, I want to change about half of our interior light switches to have a motion-sensing option, but I don't require scripting or central control of them. It sounds like Insteon would be the best technology for such integration, but I worry that our 1963-vintage wiring would just lead to flakiness that would frustrate Melisse.

Speaking of Insteon, an alternative approach to a consumer security console would be to use a software package like Girder or ECS on a PC. That would be cheaper, more flexible, more fun for me to tweak, and more future-proof, but it probably wouldn't be as Melisse-friendly in terms of easy-to-use keypads and keychain fobs.

As much as I hate looking at all the old sensors and four consoles from our 20-year-old dead unsalvageable inherited security system, I can't justify giving $4000 to an installer guy to replace it with one that will end up the same way in a decade or two. I think wireless is the way to go in a house this old and with such inadequate crawl spaces.

Any advice?

A Libertarian Safety Net

2008-03-18T07:51:00.001-07:00

Geolibertarianism includes an excellent solution here. Geolibertarianism points out that in the state of nature there is always marginal but productive land available for use, and that observation of the Lockean proviso (leaving "as much and as good") should have ensured that this remained the case. To the extent that it is no longer the case, excluding people from access to the natural productive opportunities on what used to be the commons is unjust. Therefore, the "ground rent" of land should be considered part of the commons, with each individual having an equal claim on it. Technically, ground rent is is the excess production obtained by using a site in its most productive use, compared to the production obtained by applying equivalent inputs of labor and capital at the most productive site where the application doesn't require (additional) payments for use of the site. In other words, ground rent is the advantage you get from exclusive use of a site compared to the most productive available site that is not in use.

In practice, this could be implement with a land value tax that funds a citizen's dividend. My site http://ecolibertarian.org/ gives more references, and my draft EcoLibertarian manifesto is an attempt to use geolibertarianism to find common ground (literally) between greens and libertarians. It can be summarized as:

Outlaw only fraud and force initiation. Tax only land rent and polluting/ congesting/ consuming the commons. Provide only network natural monopolies and protection of life and liberty. Do it all decentrally, democratically, with due process and never discrimination.

Alas, Deleted From Wikipedia

2008-03-10T15:58:00.001-07:00

Wikipedia just keeps getting better and better. A couple years ago an Internet Christian apologist created a Wikipedia entry for me as he set about to somewhat systematically answer my criticisms of Christianity. It seems that in January the Wikicops finally caught up to him, and deleted the article due to my blatant lack of "notability". Here is how my entry looked, as currently mirrored on answers.com:

Brian Holtz is an American software engineer, blogger, webmaster, and was the Libertarian running for the United States Congress on November 7, 2006 against eight-term incumbent Anna Eshoo in Silicon Valley. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science (University of S. Mississippi Honors College, 1987) and M.S. in Computer Science (University of Michigan, 1990). He worked with Sun Microsystems for 11 years and is now employed by Yahoo.

Views

Politically, Holtz espouses a view called Market Liberalism, which in his words “says the government should prevent coercion and fraud, provide a safety net for the poor, protect the environment, regulate basic infrastructure; but otherwise recognize the freedom and responsibility of peaceful honest adults to control their own bodies, actions, speech, and property, and work and play together as they see fit.”

Holtz, an anti-Christian atheist who was once Roman Catholic, is sympathetic to autocosmology. Autocosmology is a synthesis of metaphysical naturalism, ontological materialism, epistemological empiricism and positivism, mental functionalism, theological atheism, axiological extropianism, political libertarianism, economic capitalism, constitutional federalism, biological evolutionism, evolutionary psychology, and technological optimism.

Works

Holtz is the author of ‘‘Human Knowledge: Foundations and Limits’’, an extensive paper which attempts to answer life’s big questions regarding philosophy (ontology, theology, axiology), mathematics, natural science (physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and geoscience), technology, social science, and futurology, among other fields. Holtz wrote two distributed editors: ShrEdit and CoEd. In addition, he designed an artificial life simulator called Vita. Holtz also participates in debates on theism, politics, the Iraq War, futurology, and more. He has contributed several articles to Internet Infidels.

External links

Healthcare entitlements, stupid

2008-03-07T16:47:00.001-08:00

At http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/03/07/can-raimondo-come-out-for-bob-barr/ Justin Raimondo is quoted: "We simply can’t afford to police the world, and we’re going bankrupt in the attempt."

What is annual federal spending on Homeland Security and the so-called "War on Terror" (including Iraq)? $170 billion.

How much does that figure go up if one claims that fully half of the REST of the DoD budget is for "policing the world"? $240 billion.

What is annual federal spending on entitlements and "human services"? $1.6 trillion. (Apportioning federal debt service only tilts the needle more toward the welfare state and away from the warfare state, given the recent spike in world-policing costs.)

What is the unfunded liability for the current path of federal entitlement spending? $50 to $100 TRILLION dollars.

So who does Raimondo say is the remaining candidate who can save America from going "bankrupt"? Why, the one who advocates making our healthcare system even more socialized than it already is.

Healthcare entitlements will still be pushing America toward bankruptcy in 10, 20, and 30 years, but in that timeframe our spending on Bush's wars will be comparable to the current levels of spending on Clinton's Balkan war (remember it?) that Raimondo founded antiwar.com to oppose. Justin needs a t-shirt that says: "I surfed an antiwar movement that crested with the Sunni-Shia fighting of 2006, and all I got was socialized medicine."

American public finance over the next few decades will be about one issue: healthcare entitlements, stupid.

Platform Survey Rebukes Silence and Length

2008-02-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

The results of the PlatCom Chair Alicia Mattson's Platform survey are in. LP radicals are complaining the questions were slanted, but in fact the results rebuke reformer advocates of the "short A/B" style of platform as well as radicals and their 2004 Squyres-format platform. Here are the results (from likely delegates) compared to my predictions:

Question	Result	Prediction	Comment
1. Market to voters, not guide our candidates	72%	60%	rebukes radicals
2. Educate the public, not appeal to our sympathizers	70%	might get more, but close	rebukes short A/B
3. Short platform on fewer issues, not longer on more	71%	probably get more	rebukes 2004
4. Emphasize benefits over complaints	87%	will win handily	duh
5. Emphasize benefits over moral justifications	68%	should edge	rebukes radicals
6. Clean slate, not amend existing language	59%	should get a majority	rebukes 2004
7. Silence on schisms, or compromise langauge	51%	will probably win	inconsequential
8. Little to no implementation detail, not comprehensive detail	77%	will win convincingly	supports Pure Principles
9. Emphasize topics appealing to voters, not internal constituencies	83%	will win due to phrasing	inconsequential
10. Emphasize direction (next few years) over destination	62%	eke out a majority	rebukes radicals
11. State our positions even if most voters disagree	76%	will be close	rebukes short A/B

The two questions where my predictions were least accurate (2 and 11) showed that I had somewhat over-estimated the potential appeal of a top-N-issues Short A/B style of platform. The survey generally confirms that likely delegates want a platform that neither hides our principles nor buries them under implementation details.

In Alicia's survey, questions 3, 6, 8, and maybe 10 can be taken as a referendum on the 2004 "Atlanta" format. The vote against the Atlanta style by respondents who are likely delegates was (respectively) 71%, 59%, 77%, and 62%. I predicted that #8 would win "convincingly" while the other three would get majorities, but I was still surprised at how lop-sided these results were. To me the crucial question was 8, in which 77% of likely delegates chose "little to no implementation detail" over "comprehensive details". The only criticism of the Pure Principles draft from serious radicals like David Nolan, Henry Haller, and Starchild (who all otherwise praise it) is that it's short on implementation detail. Alicia's survey shows that this criticism is not a deal-breaker, and in fact helps the draft's chances.

The survey was obviously not designed to support the reformers' Pure Principles draft, and only question 8 can be considered a referendum on the Pure Principles approach. Questions 3/6/10 were aimed squarely at the Atlanta format, which failed miserably on each of them. Questions 4 and 9 were inconsequential softball questions, as almost nobody was going to favor a negative Platform or a focus on internal constiuencies. The even split on question 7 (silence vs. compromise language) is meaningless because it doesn't reveal how few people support the Platform taking a stand against the LP's minority views. Question 1 fairly rebuffed the radicals' idea that the Platform should not be about internal candidate guidance, but if question 11 was rigged then it backfired, showing that we should embrace libertarian positions even if mainstream voters don't. Question 2 could be seen as similarly backfiring, since it rejects the idea (inherent in the old LRC Short A/B platforms) that we should cherry-pick areas of agreement with mainstream voters. Question 5 was a fair referendum on moralistic vs. utilitarian outreach, and the radicals' position lost convincingly 68 to 32.

In the end, the survey did a fair job of discrediting

the Atlanta style of detailed Platform,
the radical ideas of internal education and emphasizing morality over utility, and
the reformer idea of cherry-picking issues with mainstream support.

The survey confirmed the potential support for the Pure Principles approach, and suggested that its real problem might be not its lack of implementation detail, but rather its lack of marketing and vouching for the benefits of our positions. However, it's easy to make the case that marketing is the job of our candidates, and that making empirical arguments for the prospective benefits of our principles is the job of both candidates and white papers.

Again, the job of the Platform is to proclaim what our principles mean across the spectrum of policy issues. Its purpose is not to be a marketing brochure or a concatenation of policy white papers. We already have plenty of both. Writing "LP Platform" on the cover of any of them is no magic bullet.

Think Upside The Box

2008-01-23T09:01:00.000-08:00

Vote Libertarian - Win A Free Country

World's Smallerest Political Platform

2008-01-22T23:15:00.000-08:00

It may seem like this post is piling on, when the World's Smallest Political Platform petition is stalled at 13 signatories and Tom Knapp is trying to resuscitate (from spambot hell) his Boston Tea Party without fixing its irrevocable commitment to the buggy WSPP 1.0. However, the WSPP is a good candidate for fixing the LP Pledge, and taking it seriously helps keep the formidable Mr. Knapp from working for the dark side (Restore04, who made a forum-spamming effort this week to get their own petition unstuck from from the 160 neighborhood). Also, it's an interesting intellectual challenge to try to reduce my geolibertarian principles to a size that could fit in an LP radical's, um, bumper sticker. And the world title was just sitting there waiting to be taken...

As a reminder, the Platform Formerly Known As World's Smallest says:

[X] supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose.

The new reigning champion says:

Outlaw only fraud and force initiation. Tax only land rent and polluting/ congesting/ consuming the commons. Provide only network natural monopolies and protection of life and liberty.

It's smaller by word count, byte count, and space on the page. However, I don't want the tarnished WSPP trophy, which could obviously be taken away by a determined contender. For now I'll just call this beta draft the World's Smallerest Political Platform (aka WSrPP), since that sounds better than The Three Geolibertarian Commandments.

I won't in this posting elaborate on all its obvious and subtle advantages over the PFKAWS. Instead I'll just note that if space had allowed, the next Commandment might be this alliterative one: "Do it all decentrally, democratically, with due process and never discrimination." You can think of these four Commandments as the stone table summary of my draft 33 EcoLibertarian Theses. An even shorter version might be

What you do or make is fully yours, but what you take or spoil is not.

Tax Bads and Untax Goods With a Green Tax Shift

2008-01-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

Santa Clara U. economist and LP member Fred Foldvary has written an article that is the best thing I've ever read on libertarian public policy. Period.

The brand-new article below is a clear and powerful explanation of why the LP needs to embrace the Green Tax Shift. The economic theory underlying the Green Tax Shift lets even the most mild-mannered minarchists join the LP's wildest radicals in proclaiming that income taxes should be forever abolished.

FYI, here is novel Platform language that has already been proposed on the basis of Foldvary's writings on this topic:

We favor including in market prices the measurable costs that products and actions demonstrably and physically impose on non-consenting third parties.

All persons are entitled to keep the fruits of their labor, and it is unjust to tax people in order to finance benefits for other people. We oppose any such tax, as distinct from taxes that serve as fees for pollution, congestion, consumption of unowned resources, or government services not yet privatized.

Kudos to LP radical and Question Earthority editor Tom Knapp for inspiring Foldvary to write an article aimed precisely at this topic!

Tax bads and untax goods with a green tax shift

by Fred E. Foldvary

The tax reform that would best promote liberty, the environment, and prosperity is to tax bad things instead of good things. Labor, entrepreneurship, and wanted products are good things, yet these get taxed as though they were crimes that need to be punished. Pollution and congestion are bad things, yet these are in effect subsidized as though we wanted more of them. The forced redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich is usually considered a bad thing, yet government makes this transfer with taxes and subsidies.

Good products and activities are those that are voluntary, not just for the buyer and seller, but also for others who may be affected. Generally, production, trade, and consumption are good things, as they provide the goods that people want. Bad products and activities are those that are not voluntary, as they coercively harm others. The prime examples of bads are pollution and congestion. Economists call these “negative externalities,” since they impose costs on others. For example, each extra car on a crowded road slows down the traffic for the other cars.

A free market maximizes social well being. Any tax on voluntary enterprise reduces social well being, but also, any subsidy reduces social welfare. In a pure free market, all economic activity is voluntary, and those who impose costs on others are obligated to compensate the victims.

Taxes on wages, business profits, goods, and exchanges impose two types of costs on the parties. The first cost is the tax burden, the funds the taxed people have to pay to the government. This is a burden to the taxpayers, but it is not a cost to the economy, as the funds represent resources transferred from taxpayers to the recipients.

The second cost is called the “excess burden” or “deadweight loss” caused by the tax. Suppose you are buying a car for $20,000 and there is a ten percent sales tax. The total cost is $22,000 and if you borrow the funds to pay with, you need to borrow an extra $2000, and pay interest on that extra amount. Those who would just barely be willing to buy the car at $20,000 will not do so at the higher cost, so the purchase and production of cars gets reduced. Even those who do pay the higher cost get less net benefit, as the difference from the most they are willing to pay and what they actually pay gets reduced, reducing their benefits from the goods.

The excess burden is even worse than that for some products. For example, for goods such as books that have a global market, the seller can’t raise the price, and the tax eats into the profit, and in many cases, that type of enterprise ceases to function, and is replaced by one which can bear the tax but possibly creates less output and employs fewer workers. Any intervention in the market that drives out some enterprises will replace them with less-valued enterprises, since otherwise those replacements would have been there in the first place.

Taxes on wages, business profits, buildings, and trade all have such a deadweight loss. The total deadweight loss from taxation in the U.S.A. has been estimated to be over ten percent of total income. This is a sheer waste of resources, and the loss is much greater over time, as the economy could have grown faster if not for this drag on productivity.

Subsidies also have a deadweight loss, since the burden of the tax is greater than the benefits to those who are subsidized. That’s because the subsidy gets some people to buy products at a lower price, but the extra benefit these people get from those goods is less than if they had bought the products they would have gotten if not for the subsidy. For example, suppose the government subsidizes pizza so consumers only pay a dime per slice. More folks would buy the cheap pizzas, but the value to them of the last extra slices is less than the cost of production, so this is really a waste of resources. With both punitive taxes and the handout of subsidies, resources are not allocated to where they are most wanted by those who would cover the costs.

The green tax shift would eliminate such excess burdens. It shifts public revenue to bad things and activities. When pollution crosses the owner’s property and enters the property of others, including people’s bodies, this is a trespass and a violation of others’ property rights. When there are only a few people or firms involved, they can negotiate a settlement, or the victim should be able to sue for damages. But when there are thousands, even millions, of people involved, lawsuits become impractical. In that case, an on-going pollution charge can compensate society for the damages. If the government levies the charge, it can take the form of a tax, but in substance, it is restitution and compensation for damages. In form, the pollution charge is a tax on a bad activity, committing aggression against others by polluting.

Why not just prohibit the pollution? Because, the products have social benefits, which would be lost if the goods are not allowed to be produced. A pollution charge equal to the damages will reduce the output to the optimal amount, where the harm and benefit are balanced, along with compensating society for that pollution emitted.

Regulations are less effective than pollution charges, because regulations do not let firms and individuals adjust their activities according to their own costs and benefits. With pollution levies, firms and individuals have the choice of reducing pollution or paying the charge, and they will do whichever of these is less costly.

Pollution permits that can be bought and sold are more effective than regulations, but the gain from a higher permit price goes to the permit holder. The advantage of pollution taxes is that the revenue from these charges can be used to replace punitive taxes, those with deadweight losses. If pollution taxes raise $500 billion in government revenue, and are used to, say, reduce income taxes, and they replace regulations, there is a double dividend: a cleaner environment, and greater productivity.

The same can be done with congestion. Tolls on crowded highways and streets, just high enough to let the traffic flow, put a charge on a bad activity, congestion, which eliminates it. Such tols can now be implemented with electronic devices that automatically record the charge without the car having to stop.

Congestion tolls would replace taxes such as on gasoline. Gasoline is good - it makes our cars go. Transportation is a good thing, and as such should not be taxed. What is bad is the outputs - pollution and congestion, not the input, gasoline. Those who drive clean cars on uncongested roads do no harm and should not be taxed. Moreover, the efficiency of gasoline use should be nobody’s business except the buyer. Why is it my problem if you waste resources you paid for? It’s your problem.

Cash subsidies to special interests such as farmers are obvious, but other subsidies are just as real and costly to society. Quotas that restrict imports raise the price of goods such as sugar, and are in effect a tax on consumers. The greatest subsidy of all is the implicit transfer of wealth from workers to landowners.

When government provides public works and civic services - such as streets, transit, parks, security, fire protection, and schools - these increase the productivity and benefits of the locations served, and increase the demand to be located there. That generates higher rents and real estate values. If, as is usually the case, most of the funds come from taxes on wages, in effect worker tenants get double billed. A worker-tenant pays a higher rent because of the territorial services, and then he has to pay taxes to finance them. The landowners get subsidized by getting rent and land value paid for by the taxes on wages, goods, and business profits. Since landowners tend to be wealthier than renters, taxing wages to pay for civic goods amounts to a forced redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Subsidies are bads, so a tax on land value or land rent is a tax on a bad. In substance, it is a payment for services that generate rent and land value. Unlike taxes on production, a tax on land value has no deadweight loss, since the land will not flee, shrink, or hide when taxed. If a landlord was already charging the market rent, a higher tax on land will not be passed onto the tenant, since that would create vacancies.

The supply of land area is fixed, and land has no cost of production, so the rent is a pure surplus that can be tapped for public revenue with no ill effect. It can even have a beneficial effect if lazy landowners were not putting their land to its most productive use, since the land-value tax is based on the highest and best use of the land as determined by the market prices of the neighborhood. After the tax is in place, a new land owner would have no tax burden, since the price of land would fall, and what the owner pays in the land tax, he saves in not having to pay mortgage interest.

Of course the same effect can take place if public works and civic services are privatized, as they are with condominiums, homeowner associations, and proprietary communities such as apartments and shopping centers. Members of condominiums pay a monthly assessment based on their membership and property rather than on their income or purchase of goods.

A complete green-tax shift would abolish taxes on wages, interest, dividends, transactions, and buildings, and replace these with charges for pollution, tolls on congested roads and streets, and the public collection of land rent. The pollution levy would also replace regulations and pollution permits. The economy would prosper from the elimination of the deadweight losses from both taxation and regulation.

Advocates of free markets should enthusiastically support the green tax shift, as this enhances liberty along with greater prosperity. There would be no more intrusive tax audits and no snooping into private financial affairs. There would be no tax evasion, since land cannot hide, and pollution levies are based on measured pollution. The penalty for refusal to pay the levy would be a loss of property, not prison. Entrepreneurship would be completely unshackled, and market prices and profits would no longer be distorted by taxes and subsidies, since levies on pollution and land value make users pay for the costs of their production and consumption.

Even if human activity is not contributing to global warming, the green tax shift is good for liberty and the economy. If pollution is causing climate change, then the reduction of harmful global warming would be a bonus.

Freedom is green, and the best environmental policy is a pure free market, since an inefficient use of resources needlessly destroys the environment. The promotion of a green tax shift would put the free market movement at the vanguard of the environmental and move it away form its current propensity to favor market-hampering regulation. With the green tax shift, environmentalists and free-marketeers will find common ground.

—–
Dr. Fred Foldvary teaches economics at Santa Clara University and is the author of several books including The Soul of Liberty, Public Goods and Private Communities, and the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics.

Reformer Brief on LP Presidential Candidates

2008-01-11T09:05:00.000-08:00

I still think the odds for the LP nomination are Kubby 35% Phillies 25% Root 25% Smith 5%, with the remaining 10% for the chance that Ron Paul would stoop to re-run his 1988 LP race. The Libertarian Reform Caucus doesn't endorse internal candidates, but here is my personal reformer take on them.

With his made-for-TV brand of moderate libertarianism, Root is likely to get the most reformer votes in Denver. However, I caution against tying the reform cause to his candidacy, which has initially seemed more about Wayne Root than about libertarianism or the LP. I don't know of any interest shown by Root so far in the holy trinity of reformer issues: Platform, Pledge, and Purpose. Aside from Ron Paul, Root would probably have the most appeal among voters generally and LP members particularly, but his support among NatCon delegates (who will vote on the trinity) will be disproportionately lower. I'm going to support whatever candidate is best equipped to enduringly expand the varieties of principled libertarianism that the LP officially tolerates, and Root doesn't seem interested in being that candidate.

Like Root, Phillies has apparently decided not to sign the Restore04 petition to rescuscitate the extremist and verbose 2004 Platform, which Phillies aptly calls "abysmally repetitive". Phillies' commitment to LP activism is unquestionable -- head and shoulders above the rest of the field. On substance, Phillies has shown an open mind about deviating from the extremism of the pre-Portland Platform, and has been attacked for it by the self-described radical Kubby campaign. All of this would make Phillies my default choice, except that I'm disturbed by his tendency to personally attack libertarians who disagree with him on policy and (especially) on LP administration. He viciously criticized Ron Paul as a "homophobic bigot" for his policy stand on defederalizing gay rights, well before the recent revelations about old Ron Paul newsletters (ghost-written by Lew Rockwell?). He also has joined anti-reform conspiracy theorist Christine Smith in calling for a complete purge of the reform-friendly LNC because of how it has responded to the overwhelming support for Ron Paul among the LP rank and file. George has a history as a hard-working and unflinching gadfly and investigator of the alleged scandals in recent LP history, and so it's not clear he has the personality or inclination to unite a Big Tent LP. However, in the unlikely event of the Ron Paul campaign completely discrediting itself in the libertarian movement, George will be well-positioned to say "I told you so".

Steve Kubby was the 5th signer of the Restore04 petition, and he and his communications director Tom Knapp position Kubby as the most authentically radical candidate. Kubby disparages what he calls efforts to water down the Platform, and claims to be a "plumbline" (i.e. Rothbardian) radical. However, he is an ardent supporter of Ron Paul despite Paul's many heresies against Rothbardianism, and echoes Paul's reverance for the Constitution (which should be reviled by any good Rothbardian anarchist). Indeed, on Steve's webradio show I recently got him to admit that for him, the Constitution trumps zero-aggression absolutism, and that is why he supports the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to compel innocent third parties via subpoena. Kubby seems much more willing than Phillies or Smith to give fellow libertarians the benefit of the doubt for the sincerity of their libertarianism, and George would do well to adopt some of that open-mindedness.

Among these top-tier candidates, Christine Smith is by far the most willing to pander to LP radicals. Not to be out-radical'd, the Kubby campaign attacked Smith for coming to her radicalism only lately. Smith routinely says the LP has been "infiltrated" by people who care more about their own power than about America's liberty -- which if true would be good news to reformers who wish the LP had any power to be grabbed in the first place. Smith says she is a fan of Ron Paul and the Constitution, but opposes all taxation and says the constitutional functions of government could be funded by voluntary contributions.

Unless Ron Paul's past conspiracy-theory kookiness catches up to him, the LP nomination will still be his for the asking in May. Paul would likely ignore reform issues like the Platform, and would only be interested in the LP's ballot access. I think reformers should trumpet the many moderate libertarian positions of the Paul campaign, but studiously avoid building a personality cult around this seriously flawed candidate. (I recently listened to a couple hours of interviews and debates of Ed Clark from his 1978 and 1980 campaigns, and concluded that he was far and away the best libertarian candidate that our movement has ever produced, including Ron Paul.)

None of these candidates have had anything explicit to say so far about the Pure Principles Platform that is emerging from the Platform Committee. Each candidate has weaknesses, and only one seems to want to disqualify herself from potential support by reformers. The good news is that all of these candidates implicitly reject anarchism and explicitly endorse the idea of limited constitutional government, even if they are vague about how that government would finance itself or maintain its monopoly on force without ever initiating it.

Handicapping the PlatCom Survey

2008-01-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

Platform Committee Chair Alicia Mattson has sent an email out through official LP channels asking party members to take a survey about the purpose and scope of the Platform. Presumably to avoid having to get a majority of PlatCom to agree to its content, she apparently (and perhaps wisely) did not seek input from any other PlatCom members. Here are the substantive questions, along with my answers and predictions about results.

1. Platforms serve both internal and external purposes. &Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about what should be the principal purpose of our party platform?
a) Our platform should be more of an externally-focused document to market our party to voters.
b) Our platform should be more of an internally-focused document to guide our candidates.

I voted (b), even though it's apparently designed to be the radical choice. Our platform should be a statement of our common principles. It should guide our candidates and marketers, not replace them or dictate to them. I bet about 60% of NatCon delegates would vote (a).

2. Our platform will be read by those who are familiar with our ideas and those who are not. Who do you believe should be our principal target?
a) We should target individuals unfamiliar with (or even opposed to) our ideas so we can educate them on the merits of libertarianism.
b) We should target individuals already sympathetic with our ideas to convince them to vote for our candidates.

I think I voted (a). I don't like either choice. Our principle target should be anyone who wonders what the LP stands for. (a) might get more votes, but it will be close as I doubt many will love either choice.

3. Shorter documents are more likely to be read, while longer documents are more likely to be comprehensive. If you had to select only one, which one of the following more closely represents your opinion about the optimal length of our platform?
a) A short platform covering fewer issues.
b) A long platform covering more issues.

I voted for the radical (b) choice, even though what I prefer is a short platform covering more issues. This clearly shows that Alicia was not trying to rig the quiz to favor the short Pure Principles draft that PlatCom is moving toward. (a) will probably get more votes.

4. Our platform uses a combination of negative and positive phrasing, i.e. what we oppose and what we champion. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to the language phrasing that should be used mostly in our platform?
a) We should emphasize what we oppose in government and the harm it causes.
b) We should emphasize what we favor in a free society and the benefits this brings.

Another blatantly non-rigged question. I reluctantly voted for the less-radical (b), even though I oppose filling the Platform with marketing fluff that vouches for the benefits of our principles. (b) will win handily, but the result won't support our Pure Principles draft as much as another question might have.

5. We know that libertarianism is both morally right and improves the lives of the greatest number of people. &Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to the language phrasing that should be used mostly in our platform?
a) We should emphasize the moral justification for our views.
b) We should emphasize the utilitarian benefits of our positions to the reader.

Yet another non-rigged question! I reluctantly voted for the radical (a) choice, but the Pure Principles draft eschews both philosophical justifications and utilitarian vouching. (b) should edge (a).

6. Some people believe our existing platform language can be repaired through a series of amendments. Others believe that we need to delete the old language and start anew. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how to better fix our platform?
a) We should amend the existing language.
b) We should delete the old planks and start from a clean slate.

I voted for (b), which should get a majority, but some will interpret this as support for writing a marketing brochure instead of adopting the Pure Principles draft. Sigh.

7. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how we should address controversial issues where there is not the bylaws-required 2/3 support among our delegates to state one position or another in our platform?
a) The platform should be silent on such issues, only emphasizing areas of internal party agreement.
b) To generate 2/3 support and avoid being silent on such issues, compromise language for the platform should be crafted that acknowledges there is more than one acceptable position.

Radicals will not like either choice, but I don't have a clear favorite. I voted for (b), but my preference is to state the core of agreement whenever possible -- which includes pretty much every issue except abortion, the death penalty, and some miscellaneous ones like intellectual property. (a) will probably win.

8. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how much implementation detail should be included in our platform planks?
a) We should include very little to no implementation detail. State only the general principles and leave it to our candidates to address how to implement them.
b) We should provide comprehensive details on how to implement each plank.

Finally, a question that can help the Pure Principles draft. :-) I voted for (a), which will win convincingly.

9. Some topics are included in a platform because they satisfy an internal party constituency. Some topics are included in a platform because they will appeal to voters. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about the types of topics that should be emphasized in the platform?
a) We should emphasize topics that are appealing to voters.
b) We should emphasize topics that appeal to internal party constituencies.

I reluctantly voted for the radical (b), because I oppose the brochure intent underlying (a) -- which will win due to the phrasing.

10. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to how far-reaching plank language should be?
a) We should be destination oriented, describing how we want society to ultimately appear.
b) We should be directionally oriented, emphasizing what Libertarian officeholders can reasonably achieve over the next few years.

I reluctantly voted for (b), even though I oppose the "next few years" part. The idea of the Pure Principles draft is "timeless directional principles", emphasizing neither destination nor near-term transition. (b) will eke out a majority, and this will be yet another part of the quiz that rekindles the hopes of exuberant moderates who think that in Denver we can pass a Platform written as a brochure or a Contract With America. We can't, and we shouldn't try.

11. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to how we should handle subjects for which mainstream Libertarian thought is at odds with what most voters want?
a) We should be silent on those issues.
b) We should state our positions on those issues.

I reluctantly voted for the more radical (b), only because of the qualifier "mainstream". This vote will be close.