On the 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses on the Power of Indulgences,
consider a few about politics. After all,
selling political indulgences is not so different from selling spiritual
indulgences, but I'm not smart enough to think of 95 theses on politics,
and even if I could think of 95, I couldn't nail them to the church door;
my church has glass doors.
Whether Luther actually nailed his theses to any church door is uncertain,
but it makes a good story and many paintings and inspired
the longest footnote in American literature.
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Liberty and equality are antagonistic rather than complementary.
Maximizing one (anarchy or communist dictatorship)
minimizes the other. One essential aspect of a successful
democracy is keeping these two tendencies in a dynamic balance over time.
More
here
or search the web for a variety of viewpoints.
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Every mother would like her son to grow up to be President,
but no mother would like her son to grow up to be a politician.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of one of the President's chief roles.
Most other countries have a Head of State separate from Chief Politician.
America doesn't. That makes it harder to get rid of the Chief Politician.
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The two party system is as fundamental to our democracy as anything
in the Constitution.
Nothing in the Constitution mandates it; the founding fathers were suspicious
of partisan politics. The fundamental forcing function is laws in 48
states that award electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis.
Nothing requires that; it's just a tradition, and one that two states don't
observe. But the 48 that do reward candidates who can obtain majorities
in many parts of the country, and that is a force for stability.
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The only part of the electorate that matters is the 20% in the middle.
About 40% of the voters will reliably vote Democratic, and 40% Republican,
almost always. Elections are decided by the 20% who might vote either way
because they do not feel ideologically attached to either party.
Preaching to the choir is a luxury, not a strategy.
Only about 63 percent of Trump's supporters actually consider
themselves Republicans.
Almost all the rest do not affiliate with either party,
and these voters were crucial to Trump's success in decisive states.
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Ideological overlap between the major parties is [was] a feature, not a
bug.
In 1965, most people did not worry that the world would come to an end if
the other party obtained power for a while. There were liberal Republicans
and conservative Democrats. That changed permanently during the Nixon
years.
Now the parties are more like those in other countries, where there are
many political parties and not much movement between them by individuals.
The movement occurs in the formation and dissolution of governing coalitions
in parliamentary systems. The American Congress is not really set up
to support more than two parties; nominally independent legislators have to
decide which party to caucus with if they want to have any hope of influence
and committee assignments.
That's why Bernie Sanders caucuses with the Democrats.
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You can't [couldn't] tell in advance how a Supreme Court justice will
decide.
Nobody expected Hugo Black from Alabama to lead the liberal side of the Court.
Nowadays Supreme Court nominees are much more carefully vetted for political
beliefs.
One thing I learned in freshman economics in 1968:
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Nobody can defeat the business cycle.
Our hope and despair is that no matter who's running the government
and no matter what they do, the economy will wax, peak, wane, bottom,
and repeat.
Whoever is in charge will take the credit or get the blame for whatever
was bound to happen anyway.
Government action or inaction
can affect the timing and severity to only a limited extent.
Later conclusions
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It's immoral to make future generations pay for present consumption.
There's nothing wrong with investing for the future and letting the future
pay part of the bill. That's what prior generations did for us and to us.
But consumption is not investment.
Examples of present benefit and future cost:
- much of the national debt
- social security
- nuclear power
- resource extraction that leads to superfund sites
Reduce the Federal deficit to control trade deficits.
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The earth is limited.
Ponzi schemes always come to an end.
You can't win by doubling down - house limits make sure you won't.
The earth's resources are finite.
This means that populations can't increase indefinitely and fixed populations
can't increase their resource usage indefinitely. At some point
sustainability will be enforced. Humanity might be able to rationally
choose sustainability in advance of need; if not, the traditional
enforcers take care of the problem: war, famine, disease, ...
In particular, a positive population growth rate is not sustainable.
Modern medical technology, increasingly inexpensive and democratized,
enables more people to survive to maturity, but
does not guarantee them all a way to make a living as adults.
In fact many traditional occupations have disappeared due to modern automation
technology.
Military dictators, however, can find work for the people,
inventing reasons to believe that the little that our neighbors have
rightfully belongs to us. Modern information and communication technology
can be exploited to make sure that the people hear the message from the
leaders, and only that message.
Modern military technology, increasingly inexpensive and democratized,
will eventually result in zero population growth, usually by way
of negative population growth.
It's in the nature of positive feedback and
exponential growth that phenomena like climate change causality
only becomes obvious to casual observers when it's too late for easy solutions,
if there are any solutions at all.
In the case of global warming, Jupiter and Venus will eventually perturb
the earth's orbit enough to provide
a solution in the form of another ice age.
Wealthy western democracies are all facing a problem of aging populations
and falling birthrates. In order to maintain their previous standard of
living, they have to import workers by immigration. But eventually the
standard of living has to fall to a sustainable level, both for the aging
populations and the imported workers.
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Life is more complicated than in 1787.
Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had some understanding
of most of the topics that were discussed.
Nowadays almost nobody in Congress can prepare their own income tax returns,
repair their own cars, or reinstall their own operating systems.
We are all in a very complicated society that involves many more decisions
than we can figure out for ourselves from first principles. We have to
organize society so we can survive without figuring out everything for
ourselves. An important part of that organization is government, to an
extent that wasn't necessary 200 years ago.
Parts of our lives are going to be governed by distant bureaucracies.
Who would expect an unelected Wall Street bureaucrat to serve you any better,
on average,
than an unelected Civil Service bureaucrat?
Jefferson realized that his ideal of agrarian democracy, in addition
to resting on an immoral foundation of slavery, was also threatened by
Hamilton's industrialization plans.
Hamilton wanted to make America great
enough to stand up to foreign powers, but that implied division of labor
and specialization of knowledge.
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The critical decision about public medical care happened a long time ago
.
In parts of the third world, poor people who show up at a hospital emergency
room and can't pay are thrown back out on the street to die. The
United States, along with most of the civilized world, went beyond that
many decades ago.
So instead of dying on the street,
poor people get treated for free in emergency rooms around the country,
regardless of
whether their conditions were due to bad luck, bad genes, or bad choices.
The only real questions are how to provide that free care as inexpensively
as possible (usually by treating conditions before they become emergencies),
and then how to pay for that free care.
The current solution, Obamacare, originated with
the conservative Heritage Foundation
and it was first put in practice under Gov. Mitt Romney as MassCare.
Whether the rest of the population
pays for that free indigent care by mandatory insurance or mandatory taxes is
a secondary question that will ultimately be resolved by a single-payer
system, as with most of the civilized world. In the meantime
there will be lots of debate about how quickly we will get there.
There are those - such as those who wrote the ACA repeal/replace bills -
that don't think billionaires should have to pay for medical care for
poor people. It will take a while to educate them or outvote them.
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Buyer-beware deregulation benefits profiteers, not consumers.
Deregulating savings and loans didn't help consumers in the Reagan
administration.
Deregulating banks didn't help consumers in the Bush administration.
(It will be interesting to see how Trump's financial deregulation
will not help consumers.)
Deregulating internet access won't help consumers in the Trump administration.
Deregulating mountain-top removal coal mining won't help the neighbors
if the sludge start to slide.
Deregulating airlines has been extremely unpleasant for consumers.
In all cases, ordinary consumers don't have the expertise to evaluate
and decide about
complicated technology or even to evaluate and decide about
private organizations claiming
to evaluate and advise about complicated technology.
The perpetrators take the money and run and start over,
or go bankrupt and run and start over.
If there's any compensation to the injured, it will be from the government
and the taxpayers. So what's so bad about having the government involved
in the first place to exercise a little prior restraint?
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The Law of Unintended Consequences
rules complex systems, both human and electromechanical.
Originally formulated as a
sociological thesis about laws and behavior,
it was soon recognized by technologists involved with complex
eletromechanical systems. Make a change in a complex system like
aircraft avionics or income taxation, and you elicit a legion of unintended
consequences - with no guarantee that the intended goal will be achieved.
Thus Republican Federal legislators
probably did not consider that Democratic California
legislators might
circumvent limitations on deductibility of state and local taxes
by making them into charitable contributions.
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Fresh and local is the way to go when possible.
There are still some things that we can do by ourselves, or at least
by people that we know somewhat. Local businesses, locally owned,
locally operated, locally regulated.
Think globally, act locally when you can - applies to politics too.
Applies to food politics, too!.
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Checks and balances on power have to be in scale.
The jurisprudence that American inherited from England is based
on the thesis that truth and justice is most likely to emerge from a vigorous
contest of opposing points of view.
For this contest to be meaningful, both sides need comparable power.
Small-scale organizations can be kept in check by other small-scale
organizations, but national organizations require national checks,
and global organizations require global checks.
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The free market, whether local, national, or global,
is constantly redistributing wealth
from some groups of people to others.
Wealth redistribution was not invented by leftist governments.
The moral problem is that even beneficial change benefits society as a whole,
by small amounts individually though large in the aggregate...
but the former workers and businesses involved have suffered by
large amounts individually, though small in the aggregate.
The political problem is maintaining the proper balance between
liberty and equality of opportunity.
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State and local government should be in the business of encouraging
voter registration and voting.
Republican legislatures particularly have tended to go out of their way to
discourage voter registration and participation. That's poisonous for
a democracy. Instead states should have positive incentives for voter
participation, such as Congressional representation and Federal funding
apportioned according to voter turnout rather than population.
However, Nathaniel Persily argues that
such a scheme would under-represent disenfranchised minorities.
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The TOTAL tax system in the United States is NOT really progressive - by
design.
The Federal and most state income tax systems are only nominally progressive
in that tax table rates increase with income. That's just a smokescreen -
the actual total tax burden - federal+state+local -
income+employment+sales+property+estate -
as a percentage of discretionary income is
at best flat on average,
and regressive for those who have the means and motivation - by design,
to punish the poor and reward the rich.
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Slavery remains the original sin of American politics.
Slavery begat segregation begat the Southern Strategy, which eventually
destroyed bipartisanship and led to the partisan gridlock we know today.
America was last "great at the time when families were united -
even though we had slavery" - Roy Moore.
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There is no alien conspiracy behind the mess in Washington (or Sacramento).
Conspiracy theories are an ancient ruse that opportunistic politicians
use to justify their rise to power and then explain their inability to
perform as promised.
The seductiveness of conspiracy theories is that they appeal to our imaginations.
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No single person can clean up the mess in Washington (or Sacramento).
The cause of the mess is voters that elect candidates who promise simple
solutions to complex problems. Those candidates fail once elected
and may blame somebody else, but might get replaced by other candidates who
make the same promises and suffer the same failure and misplace the same blame.
That's the true conspiracy theory - politicians of all stripes tell voters
what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear, because that's what
it takes to get elected.
Voters conspire against themselves -
and blame politicians for doing whatever it takes to get elected.
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Modern technology enhances capabilities to do good and evil.
The information age is also the disinformation age.
Ubiquitous automatic servants can serve in both directions:
There is no privacy on the internet.
Spyware is getting to be big business, a real job creation machine.
Although the basic internet protocol was designed to be robust in the event
of a nuclear war, in the event of natural or artificial disaster,
the technology stack above IP
is so complicated that it is easily disrupted -
can you survive without reliable GPS?
Can your
specmarks
survive
without prefetch?.
The effect of
Meltdown and Spectre might be more noticeable than first thought.
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The force multiplier effect of modern technology requires
prior restraint.
Small investments
of money or effort can produce vastly larger damages than the investor's
resources, so the damages can't be recovered by the damaged parties.
Such prior restraints were not necessary two hundred years ago because
force multipliers were smaller.
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Simpler and more verifiable are better than fairer.
Sometimes - as in congressional redistricting and tax code provisions -
complicated features that experts might argue are fairer in some metric
are not as good for democracy as simpler features that ordinary people
might hope to understand. In democracy, fairness that is
undetectably obscure is suspected of obscuring fundamental unfairness.
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Some political problems can't be solved at a particular time.
Afghanistan will never be stable as long as Kashmir is unresolved, as
India and Pakistan compete for influence in Afghanistan.
But Kashmir is
unresolvable - I once read a story about a State Dept veteran interviewing
new college grad job applicants. He asked what they'd do about Kashmir -
and the only correct answer was silence. If they said anything at all,
they failed that test.
Israel/Palestine is a similar problem. North Korea is another.
To solve refractory problems like these requires a rare coincidence:
leaders on both sides have to WANT a solution, and they must have the
political capital to negotiate a solution even against their own muscular
internal opposition. The current leaders of India and Pakistan do not
want a solution. The current leaders of Israel and Palestine do not have
the political capital to negotiate a solution.
The net result is that no third party can negotiate a solution for them.
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The golden rule is a good guide for domestic politics and international
relations.
When you're ahead,
don't lead by example in a direction that you would not want to follow
when things are not going your way.
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There is hardly an issue in modern politics that wasn't evident
when our country was founded.
Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington
would be astonished by technological advances,
it is true, but also by the lack of advances in fundamental democratic political
processes and the
persistence of movements to undo most of their best ideas.
Listening to
Chernow's biography of Hamilton
one might be amazed at how little we've progressed from
the Alien and Sedition acts: Federalists saw their way of life was threatened by
an immigrant invasion of natural republicans,
intent on importing its destructive alien values from their wrecked homelands,
abetted by a treasonous Lugenpresse.
Not long after, Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase was condemned by
most of the Federalists (but not Hamilton)
as an unconstitutional executive usurpation -
because they foresaw that much of the new frontier would
become agrarian slave states opposed to the industrializing northeast.
One might also be amazed at how well President Trump encompasses all the
private shortcomings of Adams and Hamilton,
without any of the compensating public virtues of either.
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The next edition of
Profiles in Courage
needs to be about journalists, not senators.
But first the journalists need to earn it.
And a few words about personal finance
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There is no such thing as high return with low risk.
If there were, why would anybody invest in T-bills or technology startups?
In contrast, it's easy to find low return with high risk - just check
any massively advertised scheme claiming high return with low risk.
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Investment for most people can be very simple.
Invest
directly - not through brokers -
in no-load target-date mutual funds in equal amounts every
month, then throw away the monthly statements. No-load to increase return,
equal amounts each month to insure that you are buying more shares at low
prices than high, and most important, target-date so the first decision you
have to make is when you want the money, because that determines the acceptable
risk, and that determines the maximum return. Throw away the statements
when the target date is far away,
so you don't panic yourself into selling at the bottom.
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If you own a house in California, you need a living trust
and a pour-over will that puts your non-trust assets into your trust upon
your death.
It's probably a fair generalization, no matter where you live,
if you have enough assets to put your estate in probate
($90,000 in California).
If you have the simplest possible situation - one house, one marriage, one kid
as beneficiary, competent to act as trustee -
all in the same state, and in no danger of Federal Estate Tax -
you might be able to get away with a canned
living trust program. What you pay the lawyer the big bucks for is to
force you to answer the hard what-if questions about numerous situations
that are individually unlikely but collectively common enough to complicate
most estate plans.