Cushman contrasts government social services and private charity as if they were mutually exclusive. But of course they are not; there is need for both. Contribute to your favorite charities and support needed government social services too.

People who make charitable financial donations often target their favorite causes. While different people favor different causes, the causes that are most popular get most of the donations. But the amount of charitable donations a cause receives is not necessarily the best measure of the worthiness of that cause; charitable donations are made by people who generally don’t need the charity they contribute to while the worthiness of a charity is measured by the good the charity does to those who receive it. Given the possibility of a mismatch between voluntary donations and a receive-based need, there will likely be some needy causes that are not satisfied by charity. Why not have government step in to satisfy the needs that charity has missed?

Cushman says “Government payments are the result of anonymous people determining who should receive the benefit”. The payers of government payments may be anonymous but the causes that are funded are hardly anonymous; government social service funding is based on widely known available-to-all public laws and regulations made by Congress and the President (who are elected by we the people) and highly visible appointees of the President. Most donors to charitable foundations such as United Way or even the American Cancer Society have no more access to the specific details of the use of their charitable contributions than do taxpayers have of the details of the use of their tax dollars.

Cushman says “charitable acts involve interaction with the community and decisions regarding whom to give to”. They may or they may not. Lots of people donate to charity as an act of conscience but choose not to be directly involved in charity in any other way.

Clearly Cushman is generally right when she points out that giving to charity is voluntary and paying taxes is mandatory, although in certain environments, for examples where charities are solicited in the workplace, failure to contribute constitutes a serious risk and payments under such conditions is hardly voluntary. And there are a significant number of people who apparently think paying taxes are voluntary and choose not to volunteer to pay them --- those we call tax evaders.

Clearly Cushman is right when she points out that charitable contributions may not be merely financial, and participating in charitable activities offers social benefits to the participant not obtainable by paying taxes. Most people benefit from the time and financial assets they contribute to charity.

Cushman thinks small government is better than big government. But just what does she mean by big or small? I think government should be no bigger or no smaller than is needed to do what it is that government needs to do. And I take issue with her that government shouln’t meet the needs that charitable giving, on its own, fails to meet.

Prelutsky is an illustration of what is wrong with American politics.

Prelutsky says “There are major differences between liberals and conservatives, and that’s why I never know what people such as Barack Obama are talking about when they speak of bringing us all together”. Prelutshy confuses goals with means, or perhaps even worse, he has abandoned goals and replaced them with means. Liberals and Conservatives generally agree on what they want America to be like: prosperous and free.

Liberals and Conservatives have slightly different views of prosperity: Liberals seem to like a narrow distribution of individual prosperity around the average while Conservatives seem to prefer a wider distribution. But both agree that overall prosperity (economic wellbeing) is important.

Liberals and Conservatives have more differences when it comes how to achieve prosperity, but neither has the absolute answer for achieving it. Liberals (or the people that Prelutsky thinks of as Liberals) generally believe that government should take responsibility for everything that private enterprise has failed to achieve on its own while Conservatives (or the people that Prelutsky thinks of as Conservatives) generally believe that private enterprise should do everything (with few exceptions, mainly in the law and order arena). But no Liberal actually wants to buy toothpaste from a government monopoly (although they might favor government regulating what private enterprise can put into their toothpaste) and no Conservative actually thinks that private enterprise has the right to put poison in their commercial toothpaste and kill off their customers without interference from the government (police, courts, or whatever).

Liberals and Conservatives have slightly different views of freedom: Conservatives seem to see freedoms as active freedom (the freedom to do) while Liberals see the passive freedoms (freedom from) as an equally important class of freedoms. But both agree that active freedom is important.

Liberals and Conservatives have more differences when it comes how to achieve freedom, but neither has the absolute answer for achieving it. Liberals (or the people that Prelutsky thinks of as Liberals) generally believe that government is necessary to protect passive freedoms because without an impartial arbiter of conflicts between some people’s active freedoms and others’ passive freedoms, passive freedoms for the weak will be overcome by active freedoms of the strong. Conservatives (or the people that Prelutsky thinks of as Conservatives) generally believe that any action to protect passive freedom is a denial of their right to active freedom, and that either rights conflicts can not possibly occur or that the marketplace of a free people (rather than the government the free people select) is the best impartial arbiter of conflicting freedoms

Why Prelutsky thinks that people whose goals overlap cannot work together to achieve those goals in the overlap is beyond me.

Prelutsky says “if I support the surge in Iraq and you insist on bringing the troops home by next Thursday, what’s our compromise? Bringing our troops only partway home? Say as far as the Canary Islands?”. If Prelutsky really supports the surge, then he expects at some time some of the troops to be withdrawn. So here are one compromise other than sending our Iraqi forces to the Canary Islands next Thursday: Agree that one year from Thursday (or by some other date) we evaluate our progress towards winning in Iraq based on criteria we can define now, and if we have no evidence then that we are closer to winning than we are now (based on that criteria), bring the troops home, otherwise establish a new date and criteria to measure the next benchmark toward victory. This is the standard for any project in business and government. Before you start, evaluate what the value of the gain might be in completing the project and the cost to do so. As you proceed (at predetermined points in the project called benchmarks), measure progress toward achieving the project goal and re-estimate the cost of achieving the goal. If the estimated cost of achievement exceeds the benefit of completion, drop the effort. Otherwise continue on to the next benchmark. The only difficulty with this model is that people begin to associate the project to something bigger than it is, and the projects continuation becomes a symbol of some political goal bigger than the original purpose of the project.

Unfortunately for us, we went into Iraq with a very poor understanding of what the goals of our intervention was (that’s why they changed as the war went on), what kind of effort was required , and how much that would cost and how long it would take. Many Conservatives and Liberals adopted the war as a symbol, and base their war strategy not on the realities of the war as a project (tool to achieve objectives) but as a symbolic statement of their political label. For those of us who see war as a tool, compromise is clearly a viable option. For those irrational Conservatives and Liberals for whom the war has become a symbol of their politics rather than a war, compromise is somewhat less appealing.

Prelutsky says “If you’re in favor of same-sex marriages and I happen to think the whole idea is a very silly joke, where’s our common ground? Doing away with opposite-sex marriages?” Perhaps choosing not to participate in same-sex marriage but letting other people choose to do so. How do two guys or two gals getting hitched interfere with any rights of a same-sex marriage opponent? It can interfere only with their right to avoid moral indignation, not exactly the kind of right our Founding Fathers fought to preserve.

Prelutsky says “If I believe in capital punishment and you don’t, what constitutes a midway point between our positions? Only executing convicted killers whose last names start with the letters between A and M?” Perhaps reducing the number of offenses to which capital punishment can apply by half, eliminating the less outrageous crimes and leaving only treason directly resulting in loss of multiple lives and repeated mass murders subject to the death penalty. It doesn’t satisfy people like me who favor the death penalty for ridding society of the expense of dealing with habitual criminals nor those who think that any taking of life is a sin. But I’ve got to admit that getting rid of the worst offenders is better than getting rid of none and many (but not all) opponents of capital punishment would see the lessening of the number of executions as a positive first step toward their long term goal. Of course, there will always be those selfish people who yell out their window “It’s my xxx, and I want it now”. Probably they also yell “Kill those who believe in capital punishment”

Prelutsky says “One of the most unpleasant things about liberals is the way they tend to place the politicians they endorse on pedestals. Frankly, I have never understood this phenomenon. How is it that so many people turn into besotted teenagers once they decide to vote for someone?” Does he really think Conservatives are not guilty of the same fault?

If Prelutsky really thinks politicians are any different from other human beings who work in the private sector, he’s woefully naïve. Most corporate employees are as far removed from the needs and expectations of their shareholders as politicians are from the people whose interests they are elected (or appointed) to represent. In fact, at the very highest levels of government (especially chief executives and legislators), politicians have more direct confrontation from their employers (the people who elect them) than to corporate CEO’s and board members, who get to pick who runs against them. I’ve done consulting for: federal government including the US Dept of Energy, Consumer Product Safety Administration, and the Corps of Engineers; local government including a county school system, the State of Maryland, Capital Parks and Planning Commission); large businesses including GE, Control Data, Baltimore Gas and Electric; and smaller businesses including Georges (an appliance chain, as I recall) and an IHOP franchise owner. And in my experience (mainly with middle management and lower) government provides as efficient and conscientious service as does private enterprise (but that isn’t saying much) with the federal government and large industry somewhat better than small business and state and local government.

Liberals do not “dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity”; they only recognize the existence of additional roles such as protection of individuals’ rights from the actions of others as well as the existence of immorality (in addition to moral integrity). Free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity is nice, but does Prelutsky suggest that voluntary cooperation (vigilante justice?) is a more reasonable defense against the free choice of a moral integrity lacking bank robber than our government based system of law and order?

Liberals, like Conservatives, believe that “individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic” are important human attributes but Liberals also believe that blindly ignoring that people (especially the immoral ones) may interpret “personal appeal” and “talent” in such prejudicial terms that they may actively deny some individuals their just rewards. Liberals also believe that to allow inequality of opportunity (based on these false prejudices) to fester would be just as bad an error imposing “economic and social equality on the population”, an imposition that, by the way, no Liberal suggests (but some other leftist philosophies do) 

Liberals do not want to “create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state”, nor would the policies they back create such an environment. Conservatives may think that any regulation is over-regulation and any taxation is over-taxation, but Liberals believe there is a point between 0% and 100% regulation and between 0% and 100% taxation (closer to 0% than 100%) that is fair and does much more good than harm. Liberals also don’t want to reduce anyone “to wards of the state” but recognize that due to no fault of their own, some people are unable to care for themselves or find care from family or friends and should be wards of the state. Liberals also realize that helping such people does have it’s risks in character corruption, but that having no wards of the state and having everyone a ward of the state are not the only two options, and that having deserving wards of the state is a feasible alternative to the two extremes.

Prelutsky apparently thinks that the “liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization”, but that is a gross overstatement. Does he think that Conservative agenda preys on feelings of superiority in the population to reinforce a system where victimization of the weak by the strong is considered an entitlement?

Prelutsky apparently believes that “When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious”. Should we conclude that Prelutsky denies the existence of real villains and their real victims, and thinks that anyone who should dare try to stop the real villains from running (and ruining) the lives of their real victims demonstrates a neurosis? And Liberals do not want to run anyone’s life, they just want to stop people from running (without their consent) other people’s lives.

Prelutsky clearly won’t admit that what he calls Conservatives and what he calls Liberals together don’t amount to much of a portion of the real American society. The majority of American’s see reality as being somewhere between where Prelutsky’s Conservatives and Liberals are, but that majority is hard pressed to escape the limited choices imposed by the Prelutsky’s of the world to be either with him at one extreme of the political spectra or against him at the other end. Reject the “pure” philosophy of all the extremists! Reject their false characterization of anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with them! And defend the middle ground from the knee-jerk extremists! Keep the Prelutsky’s of the world at the margin where they belong!

Re: Project 21 of the National Center for Public Policy Research New Visions – 3/29/2008 – “Property Rights Going Up in Smoke” – Sean Turner

Turner says “A property right is the exclusive authority to determine how a resource is used - whether its' a car, house, business or any other resource of which one is the owner.  Additionally, private property rights confer an exclusive right to the services of the resource - as well as the right to delegate, sell or rent any portion of the rights by exchange or gift based on mutually agreeable terms“. If this is an accurate description of what property rights are, property rights never have existed (and hopefully never will exist).

Property rights are only one class of rights among many. Other rights classes include the right to life and the right to pursue happiness--- at least that’s what our Founding Fathers thought. In the Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers said “to secure these rights [including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] Governments are instituted among Men”. In the Preamble to the Constitution, our Founding Fathers said “in order to … secure the blessings of liberty … do ordain and establish this Constitution” and then proceeded to establish the structure of government which, among other things, provides a structure for arbitrating the conflict of rights between its citizens.

Can gun ownership, for example, really provide the “exclusive authority to determine how a resource is used” for the gun owner? That would include the right to shoot people for any reason including no reason what-so-ever! Of course not; that particular “property right” conflicts with another right (right to life) of others. Thus the exercise of any “right” can never be an exclusive right if it interferes with the rights of others. That is why property and all other civil rights can not be “absolute” in the physical sense but only exist within the reasonable constraints of law.

Even if you have the right to fire guns on your own property, do you have the right to fire them in such a manner that the bullet crosses your property boundary and kills a neighbor on their own property? Do you have the right to shoot someone on your property without warning after you invite them onto it? Do you have the right to shoot someone on your property who is there without your permission but with authorization of law, such as a policeman (with warrant) responding to a suspected criminal activity, or a fireman trying to put out a fire? What about the right to shoot a postman because you are upset with the mail he/she delivered yesterday? What about the right to shoot your spouse because he/she cooked a lousy dinner or left the dishes dirty? I’d say offhand that nobody’s property rights entitles them to take any of the above-listed actions.

The question of property rights vs smoking at home may be addressed in only one logical way. Does smoking in your home cause sufficient harm to others to warrant the abridgement of your right to smoke? If it does not, you have the right to smoke on your own property. If it does, you do not have the right to smoke on your own property.

In my opinion, the harm smoking on your own property does to others does not merit the interfering with your right to smoke provided the smoke is sufficiently diluted by the time it leaves your property and that your property is not used to provide public conveniences incompatible with smoking. I’d also question the right of to smoke on “your” own property when that property is jointly (which would require the concurrence of the other owners so you wouldn’t be interfering with their right to forbid smoking on their property), or if a legal resident on the property (especially a minor for whom one of the property owners is a guardian) is likely to suffer from the smoking.

The right to smoke at home cannot not justified on a purely property rights argument.

Gallagher just doesn’t understand what’s really wrong with the legal ramifications of the way airlines treat their passengers.

Consider a restaurant in which you order your meal, pay for it, and are then served. You go into the restaurant and order their “Shore Dinner” (clam chowder, shrimp cocktail, steamed clams, broiled lobster, fries, 2 vegis, beverage and desert). You pay and are seated. Your server comes to your table and says “Sorry, we ran out of potatoes. You’ll have to stay at your table hungry until we can prepare you a full shore dinner”. Indignantly you request a refund. The server tells you that you are not entitled to a refund because what you really paid for was a seat at the table where you would be served your meal, and once you were seated you had no right to a refund as long as you eventually got served if you waited long enough. You ask the server to provide you the rest of the meal without the fries. “No”, says the server, “you paid for the fries as part of the meal and that’s what you’re going to get”. “Then I’ll just leave”, you say, “because I have an important meeting coming up that I can’t miss”. “Oh no, you can’t do that”, your server tells you. “Leaving without eating would be disruptive to food service, and besides nobody is getting served because every meal has fries, and to insure that you all get what you paid for we are locking the doors (and the restrooms which provide an incentive to get up from your table creating a commotion) and nobody will be able to leave until we serve them the full meal they ordered”. Don’t know about you, but at that point I’d pick up my cell phone (if I had one) and call the police saying that I’m being held hostage against my will.

So the Feds think that when I’m in an airplane, I have no right to deplane a parked plane regardless of treatment. If the plane is in flight, allowing passengers to deplane at will would surely be disruptive (to say the least). But while the plane is sitting idle on the ground?

If airlines want to hold passengers in parked planes against their will because to allow them to temporarily deplane would be disruptive to their operations, let them be required to provide at least basic humane services such bathroom facilities that the airlines are required to provide in flight. While the plane is engaged in interstate commerce the Feds have the right to define those requirements. But when the plane is on the tarmac, it’s not involved in interstate anything and the states should have the right to set their own reasonable requirements

Strom is right about the inability of our government to afford the welfare it has promised to us, but he gives too much credit to government for inventing the problem or to private enterprise’s ability to fix the problem.

Long before Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other current federal entitlement programs, our corporations instituted defined benefit retirement programs (if not for their low wage employee, at least for their executives) without much real thought as to the effects of the financial burden on their long term cost structure. Just recently have corporations faced this issue, many by converting their pension programs to defined contribution programs and by increasing worker out-of-pocket cost sharing but generally taking executive benefits out of the hide of corporate ownership. Some companies (in the auto and steel industry, for example) have disappeared or have had their dominance fade because of the impossible cost of financing retiree and current worker corporate entitlements.

If Strom were more constructive, he might suggest that government might take a businesslike strategy to deal with entitlements, such as by financing future benefits with current tax contributions instead of a pay-as-you-go financing strategy, and by adjusting entitlement payouts to financial returns from the entitlement fund.

But Strom’s “blame it on the government and let private enterprise fix it” is absurd. Private enterprise invented defined benefit retirement entitlements in the first place, took far too long to recognize the financial consequences, and solved their problem at least partly by dumping their past obligations back on the government and partly by refusing to recognize the benefit obligations they promises to their past and present workers. And neither of those corporate methods are acceptable solutions for our government’s problems.

Tucker quotes Schumer as saying “When there is a crisis in confidence of credit, you need the federal government to do things to re-assure people that things will get better”. In this case, Schumer is mostly right. The root cause of the current financial crisis was a short-term change in asset values that led to a lack of confidence in the quality of the assets backing credit issuers, and a short term reaction to the long-term projections of the short-term problems. Reestablishing confidence in the credit system would indeed lessen the severity of the crisis in the short-term while the long-term problems would likely resolve themselves in time.

Tucker responds “But history should warn us that when the federal government gets involved, things usually get worse”. Tucker has reversed cause with effect. He should have said “But history should warn us that the federal government gets involved when things get worse”. In fact, history teaches us that with or without government intervention, things get better or worse, but that governments are most likely to intervene in intolerable situations rooted in causes prior to the intervention. I would like to add that never in modern history has a major nation had a government that never intervened in its economy, if for no other reason than setting and maintaining the rules of orderly commerce is one of the major functions of government. And since time is monotonic we never really do get a chance to try both intervention and non-intervention for any particular economic situation to find out which would really be better. Thus any blanket conclusions about the success or failure of intervention compared to non-intervention is faith based and such claims are just (scientifically) unjustifiable opinions.

Yes, government interventions may be associated with unintended consequences (the list is quite long), but so are government failures to intervene. And in many cases of government interventions, the benefits of the interventions (compared to the projected non-intervention results) greatly outweigh the unintended consequences.

The problem with proposals like a 5-year freeze on adjustable mortgage rates is not that it is a government intervention, but that it is a bad intervention. However, the value to the loaner of an affordable fixed rate mortgage is much higher than a defaulting variable rate mortgage at a much higher interest rate. I imagine there are actions the government might take to get otherwise solvent lenders to recognize the loss on their defaulting variable rate mortgages, refinance then with affordable fixed rate mortgages, and in exchange, provide some government assurance that short term credit crunch resulting from the losses on the defaulting variable rate mortgages would be covered for a fixed length of time with short term government loans.

There is nothing wrong with providing $5 billion to help troubled homeowners, provided that the help is limited to where it can make an effective contribution to stabilizing the run on mortgage debt and avoids rewarding those whose reckless behavior caused the financial crisis in the first place, such as by explicitly not covering liar-loans, real estate speculation loans, etc.

Tucker says “One reason gas prices are so high is that oil is priced in dollars, so as the greenback loses value, oil becomes more expensive. In the long run, high gas prices will harm the economy by driving up the cost of just about everything”. Tucker again has things backwards. Our dollars are weak because we import oil and use it inefficiently, earning us less return on our use of oil than we pay for it, and thus have a huge negative trade balance. Since the demand/price curve is super-linear, as oil becomes more expensive we will presumably increase our oil use efficiency and actually improve out balance of payment situation, thus increasing the strength of the dollar.

There is no constitutional right for home schooling (or private schooling) as a replacement for public schooling, at least in the strict constructionist sense. Every parent has the right and duty to educate their children, but that right does not imply the right to also keep their children out of public schools if their state (or under the authority of the state, whatever school district they are in) requires their children to participate in public education.

Most states allow home or private schooling in place of public schooling, but states do this because for some families it is a reasonable and desirable thing to allow. But it is within the power of the states to insure that all the child citizens meet some standard level of education, and if in the opinion of the states that includes certification of all teachers and curriculum (public, private, or home school), then in my opinion, parents do not have the right to exclusively home school without proving they meet the minimum standards set by the state. If a state choose to certify only public instruction, that is within the state’s domain of authority under the Constitution but in my opinion not in the best interest of their citizens. But the Constitution deals with constraining governmental process, and does not insure a particular result of the process results. And since our Constitution says nothing about education, presumably the regulation of education is reserved to the states and the people to figure how and if to do it on their own.

I repeat: all parents have the constitutional right to home school their children and/or educate them in private institutions. But there is no constitutional right to avoid state laws that require a given amount of state certified education. The choice between state certified education and state uncertified home schooling is not an either or choice. Parents have the right to home school their children (even if they are not certified as educators) but do not have the right to exempt their children from state laws requiring education from state certified teachers.

Adams cannot understand why any academic institution would not support his debate on “Which worldview requires more faith; a) Christianity or b) Atheism?” May I provide three such reasons?

The first reason is that Atheism and the belief in God (not just belief in the Christian God) should be the focus of the debate because Atheism is the denial of God, not the denial of Christ. Either/or debates make sense only if the alternatives are complete (cover the domain of possible perspectives).

The second reason is that debate excludes the point of view that belief in God (or Christianity) and Atheism require the same amount of faith. The assumption that A> B or B > A without allowing for A = B is just sloppy thinking.

The third reason is that there is no reasonable way to quantify faith, and even assuming their faith could be quantified, there still would be no known way to relate a faith metric to a Christian or Atheist faith requirement. Adam’s proposed debate makes no more sense that debating how many abstractions can fit on the head of a pin.

If Adams wants open academic discourse on Atheism, he ought to propose one that has real academic merit.

Adams then goes on to propose “a simple list of things I think Christians at UNCW are entitled to expect”.

First on his list is “In courses raising the controversial topic of religion the professor has every right to assign readings arguing that Christians and religious folks in general are stupid. But the professor should also make some effort to assign readings that reflect a contrary view”. I am not familiar with the course offerings at UNCW, but where I was on faculty (Seattle University) there were extensive course offerings on religion. Could I interpret Adams’ first item on his list to imply he thinks that Seattle University should require consideration of anti-Christian views of non-Christian religions and Atheism (and perhaps agnosticism as well) in all those courses?

Second on his list is “When professors are either unwilling or unable to abide by #1, they should be willing to defend their views in a debate or on a panel – especially one that equally represents both sides”. Does Adams really think that professors of other disciplines should waste their time defending their course content from everyone who takes exception to it. Should biologists spend huge amounts of time defending evolution from creationalists or physicists spend time defending quantum mechanics from those who believe “God does not play craps”? Just what does Adams think academic freedom means? And if Adams wishes academic debate, why isn’t he satisfied doing it in the traditional academic way, with well-researched scholarly articles published in academic journals.

Third on his list is ”When professors are unwilling or unable to abide by #1 or #2, the university should not compound the problem by engaging in violations of the requirement that they exercise viewpoint neutrality in the management of public forums”. While I understand Adam’s frustration, a university has certain academic goals, and that it is within the authority (and the duty) of the university to manage public forms in a way that supports (and does not hinder) the success in meeting those goals. Academic viewpoint neutrality has meaning within the constraint of academic mission satisfaction. I’m not sure why UNCW believed a debate on “The issue of faith in Religion and Atheism” might not fit the university’s academic mission, but if the university feels the debate is of no academic value, it is certainly within the rights and responsibilities of the university not to support the debate.

As a one-time (long ago) Atheist myself, I can assert that I was never “very angry at the God [I claimed did] not exist”, but I was at times very angry at those who tried to stuff their God down my throat. Especially annoying were ascertains that those who do not believe in Christianity (or any other religion) cannot lead a moral life because the Christian God (or any other God) is the source of all morality so no matter what their lifestyle, non-Christians (or people who believe in any other God) must be immoral --- something Adams implies when he projects his own pre-Christian moral weaknesses onto all Atheists.

Perhaps Adam’s misconstrued visions of Atheists is the real reason Atheists have no interest in participating in (and the university has no interest in sponsoring) his proposed debate.

Re: TownHall.com – 3/6/2008 – “The Planning Fallacy” – David Strom

While it is certainly true that the free market has proven to be a much better judge of customer desires than any planners (government or corporate), the free market has also been proven to be a notoriously poor allocator of scarce commodities and, ironically, the free market is also notoriously inefficient in allocating “free” (non-monetized) items. While I would not want to replace the free market with “experts”, I welcome the attempt of those same experts to fully monetize costs so the free market can make even wiser allocations of economic resources.

If the future costs of fueling inefficient automobiles were adequately understood by consumers in the past, they would have been buying more of the most efficient vehicles and less of the gas-guzzlers (like I have) --- of course, that’s just my opinion, but one that is supported by the increasing efficiency of autos offered and selling on the free market. Unfortunately, market hysteresis makes for violent swings in supply and demand when purchase decisions are made based on current conditions rather than over the expected lifetime of the item purchased.

One way in which monetization would greatly assist the free market in improving healthcare is recognizing and making public the real cost of providing and not providing adequate healthcare to people with insufficient financial resources to purchase the care on the free market. Lost productivity is one obvious cost of not providing such health care, but there are others including negative effects on the productivity of family members saddled with providing “free” care, and the long term productivity of children hurt by the family’s social and financial hardships due to untreated medical conditions. Replacing health payment incentives for business with health payment incentives for individuals would be a start. Requiring government drop a “promise now, worry later” healthcare payment system with one with some balance between health care financial benefits and the finances to supply the benefits over the long term would also help.

Re: TownHall.com – 3/10/2008 – “Secession? Yes. From Those Who Would Destroy America” – Douglas MacKinnon

I believe that no agreement requested by any territory and agreed to by Congress while granting that territory statehood may override the Constitution. If, as MacKinnon claims, Montana believes it got assurances from the Feds that as a condition of its statehood it got the right to interpret the meaning of the 2^nd Amendment in place of the Supreme Court, then I say Montana has a very confused appreciation of the process of granting statehood and the legal powers of Federal Government under the Constitution.

I believe that MacKinnon’s lack of respect of everyone who disagrees with him says a lot more about MacKinnon than it says about those who disagree with him.

I believe that if MacKennon wants to secede from the union, he should feel free to do so. Just have him leave Montana behind for those of us who love and respect our Constitution.

Re: TownHall.com – 3/8/2008 – “On Those Oil Profits” – Robert Murphy

Murphy says of raising oil company taxes “it won’t provide meaningful relief revenue, but will certainly raise the price at the pump”. Duh … that’s exactly why taxes on the oil companies should be raised! As prices go up, demand goes down. And most of our current economic problems, excluding our current credit crisis, rise from our inefficient use of petroleum based fuels, especially foreign oil. Oil will not be used efficiently unless it is expensive --- our domestic oil consumption problem is not that oil is too expensive but that it is too cheap. If oil was more expensive we’d use much less of it. Clearly, too high taxes on oil companies can have extremely unfortunate consequences. But tax levels in Europe indicate that there’s a lot of tax revenue available in oil pricing that we could extract without damaging either our economy or the oil companies.

Although some people want to “punish” the oil industry for their success, I am not one of those people. I’d be perfectly happy to redirect the revenue back into the energy industry for research and development in oil extraction and refining efficiency and alternate energy development. Some might claim that government actions encouraging reinvestment in one area instead of another by tax policy is unwise. But we do it all the time, especially for the oil extraction industry, as with depletion deductions. There was a time where expediting the finding and extraction of oil reserves made really good economic sense --- the amount of undiscovered and undeveloped oil sources was huge compared to available supply and demand. But times have changed. There’s much less undiscovered and undeveloped sources of oil now (the undiscovered oil that were there before, less the oil we have discovered and developed since then) and demand in not only much larger, but still growing at a fanatic pace. Perhaps the time has come where more oil can be made available by increasing efficiency (using 1 barrel to do the work of 2 in effect is the same as finding an extra barrel of oil) and where other energy sources are price competitive with oil. Our tax policy should reflect this current situation (or probable future situation) rather than the situation 50 years ago.

Re: TownHall.com – 3/6/2008 – “Listen Up: Should the Telecoms be Punished for Helping Protect You from Terrorists” – Cliff May

What a dumb question. Of course the Telecoms should not be punished for helping to protect us all from terrorists. But they should be punished for breaking the law, just like any other lawbreaker should.

I find it ironic that the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has so little faith in that which he purports to defend that he thinks that democracies can be defended only by violating the rule of law. 

Am I accusing him of being a fear-monger? Not at all. I just question the strength of his faith in democracy.

Re” RownHall.com – 3/6/2008 – “Judging Gun Rights: Are They Inalienable?” – Ken Blackwell

Blackwell and Froman greatly oversimplify the legal issues involved here. The Supreme Court has many options including:

(1) Completely ignore the “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” prefix to the 2^nd Amendment, the specific provisions of control of the militia in the Constitution itself, the discussions in the Federalist Papers on the militia, and the noticeable scarcity of constitutional-era writing relating the 2^nd amendment to issues other than the militia and conclude that the 2^nd Amendment was a fundamental (rather than derived) individual right reserved to the people individually and that any regulation of arms violates the 2^nd Amendment. Under such an interpretation, the statement “The government has the power to regulate X”, where X is a weapon, is false, even if X = “atomic bomb”.

(2) Hold that firearms are beyond regulation but that ammunition is not, and that requiring guns to be kept and carried unloaded was not unconstitutional --- even strict constructionalist justices could (but probably would not) claim that if the Founding Fathers wanted ammo to be a protected right, they would have said “the right of the people to keep and bear arms and ammunition” or “the right of the people to keep and bear loaded arms” instead.

(3) Hold that the 2^nd Amendment refers to the rights of individuals but that reasonable regulation on firearms (and imposition of sale and property taxes on firearms) need not be construed as infringing on the “right of the people to keep and bear arms”.

(4) Hold that the Founding Fathers used “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” prefix to the 2^nd Amendment because they saw the right to keep and bear arms as a derived right (as opposed to such fundamental rights as religion, speech, press, association, and petition), and that in a conflict between firearm regulation and other more fundamental individual rights or government responsibilities under the Constitution, those other rights and/or responsibilities, being more fundamental, should take precedence. Only lacking such a conflict would the 2^nd Amendment holds absolutely.

The Supreme Court, based 2^nd Amendment interpretations #2, #3, or #4 presented above could conclude that the D.C. law as unreasonable regulation (which is what it sounds like to me) and is unconstitutional under the 2^nd Amendment on that ground.

The Blackwell and Froman understanding of strict vs living constructionalism is oversimplified as well. The words of the Constitution are not completely unambiguous. As one example, Article II Section 2 #1 makes the President “commander in chief of the army and navy” while Article I Section 8 #12-14 gives Congress the power to raise, support, provide, maintain, and regulate the army/land and naval forces. Notice that these two constitute two of our armed services; noticeably missing are the marines and the air force, not to mention the coast guard. Strictly constructed, the Constitution might justify the marines (surely we could fit it in somewhere as a land force) and the coast guard (as a naval force). To justify the air force, however, strict constructionalists must argue that the army and navy (or land and naval) forces were meant be taken together to mean the armed forces and not the army/land or naval forces separately, and thus the Founding Fathers actually intended to include all future armed forces beyond land and sea including air, outer space, cyberspace, etc. Another good example of constitutional ambiguity is the 2^nd Amendment. To me, it looks like a sentence in the form “X is true, therefore Y is true” where X = “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” and Y = “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”. I find it hard to imagine what other purpose the “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” serves in the 2^nd Amendment, and I must conclude on linguistic grounds that strict 2^nd Amendment supporters have no viable alternate explanation. And in logic, X→Y says absolutely nothing about Y when X is NOT true.

From a practical (but not a legal) stance, I see the right of keeping and bearing of arms subject to reasonable regulation dependent on context --- that is, arms for protecting home from forcible invasion, livestock from predators, crops from grazers, and arms for hunt in areas so designated, etc, should be much less regulated than bearing arms on city streets, in schools, national parks closed to hunting, etc.

I am a firm believer where ever and no matter what regulation, keepers and bearers of arms be subject to the strictest liability for any harm arising our of their keeping or bearing arms, regardless if the harm came from accident or design --- the act of bearing arms implies the bearers understand and assume all risk for their choice of bearing arms.

Re: TownHall.com – 2/29/2008 – “The Freedom to Lobby” – Charles Krauthammer

The real problem with lobbying is not with the concept of lobbying itself, nor with the content of the proposals that get lobbied, but with some of the tactics that are used in lobbying.

It’s hard to argue constitutional law against the right to lobby.

But the way in which lobbying can be carried out is not protected in the Constitution. Certainly anyone is free to petition Congress to remove a President from office by impeachment. But the act of physically attacking the President as a symbolic gesture to Congress of your displeasure with the President is not protected under the right to petition. Clearly Congress has the right (and duty) to define reasonable limits on the methods of lobbyists, namely to restrict lobbying methods that otherwise violate laws implemented under Congress’ enumerated powers.

It’s not that lobbying is a notch below waterboarding. Lobbying, like intelligence gathering, is legal and necessary. But waterboarding is not intelligence gathering but a method of intelligence gathering. One may argue convincingly that waterboarding ought to be an illegal method of gathering intelligence and one would have little ground to stand on to claim that waterboarding is a Constitutionally protected method of information gathering since Congress has the authority to regulate methods of intelligence gathering under Article 1, Section 8 #14 and thus may regulate wateerboarding out of existence if it so chooses.

No, the problem with lobbying is some of the methods of lobbying are a notch below waterboarding, and Congress has both the right and duty to see that such methods of lobbying are illegal.

Re: TownHall.com – 3/19/2008 – “Forget about revisionist history; lets finish the job” – Douglas MacKinnon

Now that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and no Saddam Hussein, just what of the original job is left? Perhaps to force a form of government we like down the throats of the Iraqis that the Iraqis clearly refuse to rally around. Perhaps the only way to finish the job we set out to do is to get out of the way of the Iraqi people and let them form whatever form of government they wish.