An Economist Supports the Gas-Tax Holiday

George Mason economist Bryan Caplan supports the temporary suspension of the gas-tax. Imagine my surprise. But here are his reasons;

1. "the tax holiday is a relatively cheap symbolic gesture that makes truly bad policies less likely." I.e., no price controls, windfall profits taxes, rationing, etc.

2. "even a 'giveaway' to the oil industry sets a positive course for the future. During the last crisis, the industry was a scapegoat for scarcity." That is, a gas-tax holiday is better than whipping up an anti-business frenzy.

So, notably, he doesn't support the gas-tax on its own terms, just as a clever political move that prevents even more stupid actions.

But I disagree with him, for two reasons. First, Hillary Clinton is proposing to use the windfall profts tax to ensure that businesses pay the tax, not consumers. So the windfall profits tax idea is on the table. Second, she is trying to make the oil industry the scapegoat, and point the finger at them.

I think the gas-tax suspension, while not a huge issue in its own right, will actually make more anti-free market actions more, rather than less likely, because it misdirects people from the real issue of scarcity, and encourages them to think that big bad business is the whole problem, and that there are easy political solutions.

When the gas-tax holiday fails to increase supplies and bring down prices to under $3 gallon, people will just demand the next stage of government intervention. With due respect to Caplan, he's a fine economist, but not a great political scientist.

Hillary's Snake-Oil Economics

Whether or not Clinton would have gotten much of the economist vote anyway is debatable, but she's certainly thrown it away now.

"I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

Of course economists are a pretty small demographic, and you can always pick up votes in the U.S. by being anti-intellectual (cough, George Bush, cough).

But it's not the pandering that bothers me. It's the pretense that economists would make people's lives worse, and that ignoring economic advice is the best way to help people. Because it's material well-being that she's talking about, and that's what economics is about--understanding how we can enhance humanity's material well-being. To wholly ignore economists when that is the question is no different than to ignore physicians when the subject is one's physical health, and to "put your lot in" with witchdoctors, herbalists, and faith-healers.

It's snake-oil economics, and it makes me angry because she will continue to blithely assume she cares more about people than economists do, while she actually harms them more than any reputable economist ever would.

She should take the time to look at Adam Smith, who showed us that free markets are for the benefit of consumers, not businessmen, or Alfred Marshall, who clearly saw that studying economics was the path to improving people's lives. As Todd Buchholz quotes Marshall in New Ideas from Dead Economists:

From metaphysics I went to Ethics, and thought that the justification of the existing condition of society was not easy. A friend, who had read a great deal of what are now called the Moral Sciences, constantly said, "Ah! If you understood Political Economy you would not say that. So I read Mill's Political Economy and got much excited about it. [Then] I visited the poorest quarters of several cities and walked through one street after another, looking at the faces of the poorest people. Next, I resolved to make as thorough a study as I could of Political Economy."

I began studying political science because I thought that was the science of human well-being. Later I realized it is actually the science of human conflict, and important and interesting in it's own right, but only when it is securely intertwined with economics--when it is political economy--can it honestly be about the well-being of humanity.

If only Hillary, or any of our presidential candidates, understood that.

How Should Superdelegates Vote?

There's been a lot of talk about how the Democratic Party's "superdelegates" should vote. Superdelegates are party bigwigs, rather than low-level functionaries chosen in primaries and caucuses, as the not-so-super delegates are.

It rarely matters how they vote, because the primaries and caucuses have, since they developed, always selected the candidate. But this time, with the race between Obama and Clinton so tight, it is possible that the superdelegates could make the difference.

Many folks are now saying they should vote for (a) whichever candidate has the most delegates, because that's obviously who the public really wants, or (b) whichever candidate has received the majority of the popular vote, because that's obviously who the public really wants. (Because of (a) the caucuses that some states hold, and (b) the different ways the states dole out the delegates, some in winner-take-all, some proportionally, and some by district, or a mix of these, having the most delegates may not coincide with having a majority of the popular vote. To all that confused mess I can only say, God bless American federalism.)

Both of these claims assume that the public ought to be the determining factor in selecting the party's candidate.

But that's a lot of nonsense. First of all, the superdelegates are individuals, and so they ought to vote their own conscience. Second, they have a better idea of the party's interests, and their conscience ought to lead each of them to vote for the candidate they think is best for the party.

In the bad old days, it actually was party leaders who selected presidential nominees, and while it was very undemocratic, it had two related advantages:

1. It resulted in more cohesive and responsible political parties;
2. It resulted in presidents who were constrained by those parties, rather than our current situation where presidents feel they are solely responsible to the public, and believe that gives them leeway to be nearly autonomous executives--after all, if the public is sovereign, anyone acting in their name is merely exercising sovereign power and ought not be constrained in any way.

The creation of the primary system, which shifted presidents' allegiance from their party to the public (Woodrow Wilson's "small c constitution" approach to the presidency) has been one of the primary causes of our run-away imperial presidency.

I wouldn't be willing to bet it will happen, but the best outcome would be for the superdelegates to determine the Democratic nominee, and for them to act as a group in extracting pledges for restraint as a condition of throwing their support to one or the other.

Black Men vs. White Women--Round 147,384

The Detroit Free Press (aka, the Freep), has a front page article this morning on the split between white females and blacks in the Democratic Party. I was thinking about the same issue two days ago as I began work on a policy brief about the presidential election. In a nutshell, if Clinton gets the nomination, black Democrats might be angry because the black candidate got shoved out by a white person, and if Obama gets the nomination, white women Democrats might be angry because once again a women got shoved aside in favor of a man.

It's a real issue...maybe. Right now some folks on both sides are threatening to sit out the election if their favored candidate doesn't get it, which is pretty childish, and good evidence to support the Founding Fathers' distrust of the masses. The question is whether the threat is any more serious than the religious right's threat to sit out if the Republicans don't nominate a religious zealot. I suspect most of those Democrats will go to the polls anyway, the primary exceptions being those who don't normally vote anyway, but who got involved this year just because their favored candidate was representationally ideal for them.

But the complaining overlooks the really important point. Already crucial barriers have been broken. There have been only a couple of semi-serious women presidential candidates, Pat Schroeder for the Democrats, and Elizabeth Dole for the Republicans. The campaigns of each went exactly nowhere. There never has been a serious African-American candidate. The fact that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama quickly rose to the top of a field of mostly white men (with the partial exception of Bill Richardson, who is 1/2 Latino, although it's not clear most voters knew that), is itself an important statement. Especially notable is that neither did it by relying wholly on women (for Clinton) or whites (for Obama). It's been a huge breakthrough, although there are few, if any, obvious women and black candidates for the near future. Then again, who'd ever heard of Obama 5 years ago?

Resisting the Wave--Hillary Wins Again

With Obama having won 11 states in a row, many bloggers were all but calling the race for him, and some Democrats were calling for Clinton to step down to help build party unity. But Obama never had more than a handful more delegates than Clinton. According to CNN's count, count, he still does, even after Clinton's victories last night, but it's still neck-and-neck. The magic number for the nomination is 2,025 delegates: Clinton has 1365 to Obama's 1451. Mathematically, she's still in the hunt.

More importantly, she may have stopped the aura of inevitability the media (dear god, the media!) creates anytime someone goes on a win streak. I've said elsewhere that it's too soon to call the victor. Obama's mixed-message on NAFTA could hurt him. He keeps (foolishly) bashing it to the public, but it has been reported that his campaign had advised Canadian Ambassador Michael Wilson that Obama supported NAFTA. What Obama can't afford now is questions about his integrity--his appearance of integrity is his strength in this campaign. If that slips, Clinton is right behind (as odd as that sounds, since fewer people would rate her as highly on integrity).

Only a true gambler would wage money on the outcome right now. Speaking purely as a professional political scientist, I'd love to see it go to the convention. My colleagues who study campaigns and electios would have a field day. And while DNC Chair Howard Dean openly worries that a divided convention would make the Democrats look bad, it would also draw vast amounts of attention from the public, and the traditional post-convention bounce--provided the Dems end it on the right note, and keep the nasty bickering in the back rooms--could be huge for them, making the general election campaign an uphill battle for MCCain.

Edwards Drops Out

With any luck, we've heard the last of John Edwards, who just dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination. I've never liked him much, but I'm still surprised he managed to be a distant third behind a woman with a grating voice and a black man with no experience. We really have come a long way, because Edwards, a white guy, has barely any more experience than Obama (the black man, in case you didn't guess), and much less than the woman (you did guess, Clinton, right?)

Hopefully Edwards' plea for economic protectionism and regulation will die with his candidacy. He wants to take the U.S. back to the 1970s, when your only choice of cars (unless you were wealthy) was one over-priced badly-made American car or another, because of strict quotas on Japanese imports. When flying was a delightful experience, but only the well-off could afford to do it. When telecom regulation meant phone customers still rented their phones from Ma Bell.

I also dislike Edwards because he thinks the president's primary responsibility is for domestic policy. Read the second article of the U.S. Constitution carefully, and compare the presidency's domestic policy responsibilities (few, and all in concordance with Congress), and its foreign policy responsibilities. I'm not sure Edwards has read it. After less than 2 years in the Senate, he felt qualified to be the leader of the free world, and began his campaign for the presidency. Over the succeeding 4 years he spent so much time campaigning that he probably didn't gain any real experience even from being in the Senate. Is he ready to deal with North Korea, Iran, China and Russia?

If you doubt foreign policy is a president's real task, look at George W. Bush. He had one big issue in his first campaign, cutting taxes. He knew nothing about foreign policy and didn't want to focus on it (e.g., his cutting off of talks with N. Korea), but his presidency will be defined by the war in Iraq. Or look at Jimmy Carter: he wanted to save the environment, but got bogged down by the Iran hostage crisis. He also brokered the still-strong peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, but that just reinforces the point--a president will be defined by foreign affairs.

That's my criticism of Obama, as well. The difference is, I like Obama. I lived in Illinois when he won his Senate seat, and I remember thinking, "this is the kind of person the Democratic Party needs to reach church-going Americans again." I thought he might make a great presidential candidate in about 10 years--not 3! Depending on who the Republican nominee is, I could consider voting for Obama, but mostly to be on the right side of history, so to speak. I don't mean I would do it for affirmative action, but that I think Romney is no more qualified, and is in many ways more repugnant, so if I have to choose between two unqualified persons, any other criteria is good enough grounds to choose. But since I usually vote Libertarian, my only reason for departure from voting for a certain loser yet again would be to make the statement that it's ok to elect a non-white to the oval office.

I like Hillary far less than Obama, but am more supportive of her for President. Despite her failed national health-care fiasco--actually, because of it--she clearly learned a lot about being president in her 8 years as first lady, and in the Senate she has served on the Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She's smart enough to have learned a lot that a president needs to know. I would also vote for her over Romney, for much the same reasons I would vote for Obama.

But I still favor McCain, because I don't care about a president's stand on taxes, abortion, or campaign finance reform (McCain is the author of the First Amendment gutting McCain-Feingold law, for which I will never forgive him). A president's job is to deal with other countries, and I don't see any other candidate remotely as qualified for that task as John McCain.

Stupid Newsies

I just read an opinion piece from an Indiana high school teacher in which he claims,

because of my own ignorance about national politics, I feel eminently qualified to offer some opinions."

Geez, no wonder my college students come out of high school knowing jack shit.

But the guy also said,

I know as much about national politics as I do global economics. Both subjects have their own gaggle of experts, and they don’t seem to know much, either.

Now this is pure stupidity, too, but I know where it's coming from. The fact is, there are experts in global economics, and they do know what they're talking about--this guy just doesn't know who they are. The same is true of experts in national politics. So who is he really referring to? I think it's the talking heads who dominate the political chat shows, most of whom are like high school students, not knowing Jack Shit.

For example, here's the repeated theme from the New Hampshire Primary--"Clinton, coming off a disappointing third-place finish in Iowa, rebounded to first place...", or "Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire Democratic primary, overcoming a third-place finish in Iowa"

OK, for the newsie who's brain has been overheated by too much time in front of a blow dryer, let's clarify this.

1. John Edwards had 30%, Hillary Clinton had 29%. That's called a statistical dead-heat, or a virtual tie for second. A tie for second place ain't that devestating folks.
2. According to CNN, Obama won 16 delegates in Iowa, Edwards won 14, and Clinton won 15! It might seem counterintuitive that Clinton could get more delegates than Edwards, with less of the vote, but here's how it can work: Assume a state with 5 equal size precincts: Candidate A wins 3 precincts with 51% of the vote in each, while candidate B wins 2 precincts with 90% of the vote each. If you just total up all the votes from the state, B appears to have won, but because the delegates are selected from precincts, B has actually lost. In the end, it's not what percentage of the vote any candidate gets, but how many delegates, and on that scorecard, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards finished in a virtual tie for first.
3. There's no reason to think that New Hampshire voters take their cues from Iowa voters. To listen to the media tell it, everyone except Obama might as well have given up after Iowa. Like this already obsolete jewell from teh L.A. Times, "The results were a serious setback for Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton." Hell, why bother with the whole primary schedule? Let's just let that 10 or 20% of Iowans dedicated enough to participate in the caucus choose the parties' nominees.

So just because the talking heads chatter about national politics, and just because someone is introduced as the network's political analyst, that doesn't mean they're actually an expert--they just play one on TV.