Bob Hayes Online

I think that libertarians are 100% right on governance issues.  It would be WONDERFUL if we had a libertarian population and a libertarian state, running around enforcing contracts between private individuals, killing terrorists and communists, upholding laws against force and fraud to let the markets work optimally, and otherwise butting out of American life.  It would be so great, I would consider it my own version of earthly utopia.

But it isn’t going to happen. It’s so far from happening that it isn’t even funny.

Accepting that, and comprehending it, what should be my course of action?  My first choice - libertarian world - isn’t on the table. That being the case, to what end should I place my own political energy? Well, it seems to me, I should place my political energy towards ensuring that the meddling state at least meddle in ways that I find congenial. I’d rather have a non-meddling state, but if the majority of my fellow citizens won’t accept a non-meddling state, then I want the state to meddle on my behalf and in a way reflective of my own values.

My second choice, in other words, is to work for a conservative world where my preferences have the force of law.

That being the case, it is irrational for me to care about federalism, or civil rights, or the Constitution, other than as tools to get what I want. Those things are oriented towards the libertarian world, where we are all, or most of us, committed to limiting the power of the state. I can’t get that, so I want the power of the state to be my slave. My political opponents don’t care about federalism et al, other than as a tool to implement THEIR desire to have the power of the state as a slave; they’re on the right track.

I want to roll around in big piles of money confiscated from people whose political opinions I find distasteful; there will be a $1,000,000 tax on each liberal expression of opinion by Hollywood stars, paid directly to me. I want my religious values enshrined as the law of the land. I want the countries whose existence I disapprove of to be reduced to smoking ash with an American flag planted in the ruins of their capital. I want the state to massively subsidize art and entertainment I find palatable, and ban art and entertainment I find disgusting. I want government agents to jail people whose familial choices I find incorrect, confiscate their property, and give it to me.

That’s my second choice. My first choice, frankly, would be better for everyone - people who believe differently than I do could go about their business unmolested by the state, the government would bow out of cultural considerations and let us each find our own path, people could form whatever kind of families they wanted too, free of the intefering nose of the busybody state. Apparently other people insist on having a powerful state, however, and if we’re going to have a powerful state, I want it to act in my interest, not in the interest of other people.

Am I wrong?

There is a psychological quirk that we seem to have as a species that has implications for how we relate to our governments.

When people get a service or a product from a business, they are generally aware that the business is not helping them out of kindness.  Most of us have a pretty good grasp of the concept that the people at Nordstrom’s treat us better than the people at Sears, and that we’re paying for the difference (as well as everything else).  You get what you pay for; sometimes you get less than you pay for, but you very rarely get more.

When it comes to government, we don’t seem to have that wired in as well.  We think of benefits or services that the government gives us as being entitlements; I’m entitled to this payment, or this tax credit, or this service.  It’s just something that happens, out of the ether.  This is true of everyone, rich and poor, young and old.  Welfare moms and businessmen receiving fat subsidies, people driving on the well-maintained roads or stopping at the “free” clinic - there is, at best, only an intellectual understanding that this largesse flows from us paying money for it.  Usually there isn’t even that much awareness - it’s the “government” paying for it.

Of course, this causes a number of problems.  For one thing, it creates conflict.  We are somewhat better able to understand the nature of the transaction when we aren’t benefiting directly and we all have a tendency to want to shut down the subsidies flowing to other people; darn those welfare moms/fatcat agribusinesses/overpaid bureaucrats.

More importantly, however, it creates a false dichotomy in how we think about our resources.  We think of things the government provides as being “free”, whereas things we have to provide for ourselves cost money.  I don’t need to allocate resources to paying for the roads; someone else has that covered.  I don’t need to save for retirement; the government is going to take care of that for me.  This causes us to incorrectly allocate resources on the personal level, and it also causes a perfectly natural desire to move more things to the “free” column.  If the government is paying for it, I don’t have to!

As a result of this natural process, we end up with larger and larger government.  Libertarians have proposed a number of approaches for reversing this trend, but nothing seems to work.  I have an idea that I think would turn the tide quite handily:

Restrict the voting franchise to people whose households do not receive any substantial direct payments from government.

In the military, or a dependent of same?  No vote for you.  Schoolteacher at a public school?  Sorry.  Welfare recipient?  Nope.  Retiree?  Back to the shuffleboard court, non-voter.  Employee or stockholder of a company getting federal jobs?  Go on back to your cubicle.  I lose my franchise, of course - I’m a college student getting aid AND my spouse gets a military retirement payment.

There would be some fiddling, of course, mainly around the question of what constitutes “substantial”.  Is having one share of stock in Halliburton going to disqualify you?  If you have a contract with the local schools to do $100 of work, is that the end of your franchise?  I don’t know.  The political process is the place to hammer out those questions, I think.

Some people will protest that this restriction would end up disqualifying huge numbers of people.  That’s true - it would.  However, that disqualification would not long persist.  The relatively small number of people actually paying their own freight would very quickly vote to reduce the number of federal contracts, the number of public schoolteachers (replacing them with private schools, of course), and the size and scope of government contract work.  As these government expenditures convert back into the private sector, the people formerly disenfranchised by their association with the government would be reinstated to the voter rolls.  The economy would explode, as bloated and inefficient government work is transferred steadily to the dynamic private sector.

Save America - give up your vote.

Many conservatives are innately suspicious of any body wielding worldwide authority. (US military hyperpower is theoretically equally suspect, but since other countries COULD balance us, they just choose not to spend the money, it isn’t such a big deal.)

The problem with worldwide authority is that it loses the constraint of people being able to opt out. If the US becomes a Mormon theocracy, you can move to Mexico. If California goes communist, my in-laws can come to Colorado. If Modesto goes Nazi, they can go to Stockton. When power is local, people can opt out of that power, and that very fact tends to curb abuse of authority - the Temple Police will continue to be powerless outside of Salt Lake City, California can’t afford to go Communist because all the taxpayers will move, and Modesto is too busy creating photogenic sex crimes so they can get on the news to bother with the goosestepping and the bookburning mmmGLAVin.

Whereas if the UN has real power, and chooses to abuse it - where you gonna go? Mars is too cold. That’s one major reason why we hate the UN. The fact that it is a haven for thugs and kleptocrats and has committed more evil than good in its history is relevant, but not the key issue.

Liberals often think of the UN as representing the peoples of the world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t - it represents the GOVERNMENTS of the world. And most governments, most of the time, suck. It’s frankly amazing that the UN hasn’t sucked more.

Is it acceptable for Christian Scientists (for example) to deny their children life-giving medications?

I think it is.  We don’t force Amish people to have telephones to summon LifeFlight helicopters, and people die as a result of that, including children.  Is that reasonable of the Amish?

I would argue it is.  The Amish have decided to live a certain way, a way that happens to foreclose using certain kinds of technology.  That way of life is different than the choices that other people would make.  However, our freedom to choose is predicated on extending that right to other people.  Christian Scientists have also decided to live in a certain way, a way that forecloses certain other kinds of technology.

A reasonable interlocutor might ask, “what if you have a religion that prescribes some objectionable behavior, like beating your child with ropes every day?”  Should the government ban that kind of thing?  I think it should.

Prohibiting certain actions may infringe on people’s rights, which is sometimes necessary for the state to do.  It is a big leap from prohibiting negative actions to compelling positive ones.  Prohibiting actions is authoritarianism; compelling actions is totalitarianism.  I prefer not to have either, but I recognize that authoritarianism is sometimes required of the state.  Military defense and civil order are not maintained by state actors making polite requests.

I think part of the intellectual discomfort many of us have with allowing people the freedom to choose their own actions when we know those actions will have bad consequences comes from the visible and discrete nature of the suffering.  If a Christian Scientists denies her son penicillin and he dies, we see that right away.  We say “this act led to this death; I object!”

But, for example, millions of parents underemphasize the importance of good nutrition to their children, and as a result, there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of premature deaths later in life.  People are acting irresponsibly and there is a terrible toll, but it isn’t obviously the result of the irresponsibility; it’s distant in time and space.  We might get irked when you see a mother giving her baby Froot Loops instead of fruit, but we don’t say “she should be compelled to act the way I think sensible and proper!”

Indeed, if George Bush were to come out and say that the Federal government was planning to compel all parents to give their children fresh fruit each day, and teach them a certain set of defensive driving techniques, and make them brush their teeth twice daily, and exercise for thirty minutes every afternoon, I imagine that many people who object to Christian Scientists’ medical beliefs would think it the biggest fascist plot since Iran-Contra.

And yet, the sufferering and death caused by bad parenting in the areas of nutrition, safety, hygiene and exercise is at least a thousandfold greater than the suffering and death caused by the occasional religious nut who doesn’t approve of sulfa drugs.  It’s just that the religious nut is a little more obvious and a little more direct in their bad effect.

Freedom is not a costless good.  Letting people run their own lives means that quite often they will do a bad job of it.  That’s something that libertarians, and liberal societies in general, just have to accept as part of the cost of doing business.

I used to work in university administration, and I once intended to become a faculty member as part of my ongoing plan to avoid doing any real work.

What should university faculties look like?  Here’s my vision.

If I were designing a university, I would have an open pool of faculty. Certain favored professors - the ones bringing in fat research grants and attracting best-and-brightest students - would receive a salary and benefits. Those instructors, as well as the common pool, would then get a cut of the tuition each semester, prorated by credit hours they actually taught. No starving grad students getting crumbs, no senior profs getting six figures for doing nothing - everybody gets paid for work in the form of teaching.

I have fond memories of the first typewriter I ever owned.

My parents purchased an Olivetti electric for me as a birthday present (I was a weird kid). It was COOL. It had a little LCD window which could display about thirty characters at a time, and it had MEMORY! (2K, as I recall) And you could buy special memory cartridges from Olivetti which would store pages and pages of text in them. You could program macro keys with boilerplate text (I’m sure the law offices loved them). And it had auto-correct and a really slick key feel and it was wonderful. It was really a state of the art machine; kind of like owning the best buggy whip ever crafted.

For many years, I was attracted to libertarian principles.  Laissez-faire economics makes sense, and stands up to real-world testing, where other economic theories fall apart.  However, critics of libertarianism argue that the resulting society is going to be incredibly cruel for the poor and for those people who (because of history, ignorance, stupidity, or whatever other factor) cannot take care of themselves.  This critique struck me as being highly valid, and prevented me from fully embracing libertarianism.  It’s not a wonderful society if you have to step over the bodies of people dying in the streets.

After many years of contemplation, I have arrived at the conclusion that libertarian principles of small government, limited government power, and individual freedom can only result in a decent society if a strong majority of the people living under such a system are genuinely and sincerely religious.  In the West, that means most variations of Christianity or Judaism or certain flavors of Islam.  For practical purposes in the United States, that means Christian.

With a social matrix made up of people who actually believe that God requires that they take care of the needy and act decently toward one another, the government can be kept on a tight leash.  We don’t need Federal welfare programs if every community is stuffed full of churches fighting over the privilege of feeding and caring for the poor.  We can afford to have a government with limited powers if people take care of their neighbors instead of expecting the state to do it.

Secularists hate this vision of America, and for good reason.  In a Christian country of libertarian principles, the answer to social problems comes in individual spiritual redemption and the pursuit of salvation - not from academic think tanks or political lobbying groups.  It should be acknowledged that such a society would impose costs on non-believers, who would probably feel excluded from the social matrix.  This feeling would be genuine, and based in reality.

It is axiomatic that taxing something reduces the supply of that something. Accordingly, if a lottery is a tax on stupid people and/or people who are bad at math, then the existence of the lottery should have the effect of reducing the numbers of those people.

Since both stupid people and people who are bad at math inflict many external costs on the rest of us, it follows that it is in our interest to reduce their numbers as much as possible. Accordingly, I propose we facilitate lottery play to the greatest possible extent.

Removing the monopoly on lottery games from the states would be a good start; if anyone can run a numbers game, then presumably more numbers games will come into existence, and the evolutionary process will be hastened.

A utopia of smart, mathematically-competent people awaits us…if we but have the courage to embrace it!

Colorado has a wonderful law called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR. TABOR does two things:

a) it caps the state’s budget increases at the level of population growth plus inflation, and

b) if an economic downturn causes tax revenues to fall, then the budget allowance falls too.

So, for example, when sales tax revenue dropped during the recent recession, the state budget was obliged to drop as well - and it can’t increase again any faster than population + inflation, no matter what the economy does.

Democrats, redistributionists, state bureaucrats, and educators all hate TABOR. Some of these people are very nice people indeed, and when I worked with them I was always careful not to be disrespectful of their opinion that TABOR was an emanation from Hell.

People who pay more taxes than they get back from the state, however, love TABOR. I think we need something like it on the national stage. The eternal peril of the Federal budget process is that both parties are very happy to use tax revenues to buy votes. (A large part of the animosity towards President Bush is that he is spending money that the Democrats want to spend when they’re next in power.)

That, of course, is not what the Founding Fathers (angel choir) had in mind. The idea is that the Federal government be as small as possible. This represents my primary disagreement with the modern Republican party. The strategy (buy votes with Federal money, thus preventing the Democrats from being able to next time around the political cycle) is sound; it’s just alien to the role I think the government should play. Something like TABOR might level the playing field by making it impossible for either party to create expensive new entitlements without clearing the decks of old spending programs first.

Why are our health costs so high? In part, because people spend large amounts of money on futile care - care for someone who has no chance of recovering, or only a very small chance. (For example, when someone is told they only have a few weeks to live and that there is essentially zero chance of recovery. There COULD be a miracle, though.)

It usually makes emotional and spiritual sense for individual people to make that spending decision. The emotional cost of not doing so would be far higher than the fiscal cost of going to the limit. However, this is not a policy that we can put in place for everyone, because the emotional calculus is different. I will mortgage my future and sell my soul to gamble on keeping my baby alive; I will not do so to gamble on an abstract group of strangers. Neither will anyone else; although levels of altruism will vary, and some people will cut deeper than others for strangers’ welfare, few-approaching-none will make the sacrifices for strangers that they will make for kin.

From a humanitarian point of view, then, it seems logical for decisions about such extreme measures to be left in the hands of individuals. Resources being equal, more sacrifices will be made and more care will be provided in desperate cases when decisions are made closest to the patient. This is undoubtedly a major component of why our health care costs are systemically higher than those of nations with single-payer or nationalized health care; Britain’s NHS isn’t spending a million dollars trying to keep Grandma alive, but in the US, Grandma’s kids are.

At the other level of care, I think the decision calculus might actually work the other way. Some individuals show a reluctance to rationally budget for preventative and maintenance-type healthcare; members of a more distant group, aware that they have a good chance of being stuck with the eventual enormous bill when Joe keeps skipping the physical exams (”that shooting pain in my left arm will go away if I just have another beer”), are probably more willing to pay for Joe’s doctor visit than Joe is.

On that humanitarian basis, I’d probably be more receptive to a public health policy that supported preventative and maintenance-type care, and left big-ticket items up to individuals to deal with.