Who are the prominent liberal crazies?

I've noticed recently that many of my conservative friends spend a lot of time disavowing beliefs commonly associated with the extremes of their party--creationism, Obama birthplace conspiracies, and the gold standard being particularly common examples.  I've noticed, however, that though these ideas are pretty clearly wrong if you care to look at "facts" or "the world" or "logic" they tend to enjoy support from fairly prominent Republicans.  Sarah Palin is a creationist. Ron Paul is all about the gold standard, and despite the release and vetting of every form of birth certificate known to man, Obama's birthplace is still treated as suspect by many Republican lawmakers.

In the interest of balance, I was trying to figure out what the extremist ideas on the liberal side of the spectrum were, and who was giving them voice.  But I can't find anything even close to comparable.  Is this my bias, or are Dem's just more grounded in reality?

Why does the religious right hate the social safety net?

Okay, so here are the arguments I hear most often:

1. Wealth redistribution is "unjust"
2. Welfare, unemployment insurance, medicaid and other programs that help the needy introduce "moral hazard"
3. Charity shouldn't be "forced"

Right, now, I'm a Catholic and I don't have a whole lot of access to protestant theology but I hear they use a Bible that, while not exactly the same, bears a marked resemblance to mine.  Let's look at these arguments by the numbers.

deregulation, tax reform, capital gains cuts, and corporate tax cuts

For those of you just joining American Politics, the title describes the "conservative" "solution" to the economy (not just our current economic problems, but all economic problems at all times).  Now, I have varying feelings about the items in this list.  I basically think that capital gains should be treated as regular income, which couldn't be farther from the conservative position.  By way of contrast, I think that certain kinds of tax reform (mostly in terms of loophole removal) would be awesome for both corporations and people, and I think that the government could do a lot of good by removing regulations created to protect incumbent businesses from entrepreneurial competition.  But! I think it is crystal clear that none of these things are solutions to the current economic crisis.  In case you disagree with me, I did a little research and made some charts.

Politics and fundamental values

I think this is an important point.  Your political views don't just represent your judgments on key policy debates; they also reflect deep valuations of fundamental principles. This site does a very interesting job of showing how things break down (edit: You'll want the very first survey on the list).

Green is me, red is Republican, blue is Democrat.

Basically, liberals care a lot about leveling the playing field and avoiding harmful consequences.  Conservatives care about those things too, but they put a lot more emphasis on loyalty, authority, and purity.  Challenge for my conservative readers: why should we build public policy around these things?

Double Blind Politics

One of the consequences of uninformed and partisan politics is an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance.  Examples like the ones below make me wonder a lot how different things would be if we voted on policies rather than politicians.  No names and no parties attached to any proposal, just a list of ideas for voters to yay or nay. Just a couple examples of doublethink below the break:

Sad Day for my Constitutional Debates

The Debt Ceiling is constitutional, demands massive inflation after August 2nd if we don't fix it, and I am a fail at thinking.

Unfortunately, when considering the legal options for making payments on our obligations I made a rookie mistake.  Brad DeLong cleared things up for me, with help from Yglesias. I forgot that the United States Government is not anything like businesses or households with respect to its finances.  It holds debt in a currency that it has the legal authority to print.  Sadly, this deeply undermines all of my earlier arguments re: constitutionality:

1. Because we can print the money that our debt is in, we need not ever default on our debts.  We can simply print money to satisfy them.  Therefore, the debt limit does not specify a mandatory legal point of default, but instead specifies a mandatory legal point of printing money to pay for things.
2. Because of 1, there is no reason to believe that in passing laws of a certain cost, congress intended to pay for it through borrowing rather than money printing, ergo, making a decision to borrow rather than print money seems clearly to be out of the powers of the presidency.

To add insult to injury, all this implies that there IS a legal way out of this mess if we don't raise the debt ceiling, and since it's the only way I can figure out that doesn't require us to either default (unconstitutional), fail to pay our obligations (illegal), or borrow more money (illegal), we actually have to do it.  Unfortunately, that way is to cause massive inflation and behave like a banana republics or a failed state.

Now, lots of smart people think a little inflation might be nice for our economy right now, but somehow I don't think a shot of a couple trillion new dollars straight into the pockets of real people doing actual spending (rather than, say, giant and growing uninvested bank reserves ala QE1&2) is the safest way to do it.  Either way, I can't imagine our creditors will be thrilled with the whole "let me print you some money for that bill" strategy, so it would probably do bad things to our borrowing ability in the future, but it seems like the only legal way out.  THIS IS STUPID.  

Dear Congressional Republicans, I fire you.  Love, Rory.

P.S.  On an Ironic note, the Gold Bug Anti-Inflation Hawk Republican Congress may be forcing us to adopt highly inflationary policies.  I love politics.

Signs of Sanity (even on RedState)

For those of you who don't know, RedState is the foaming at the mouth conservative blog that manages to occasionally include some form of evidence or (more rarely) reason in their discussions.  I like to highlight these moments as a matter of principle.  Here's one in which they admit that the debt ceiling absolutely has to be raised and that it was stupid to use it to do the deficit reduction thing.   Now, the post has some weird ideas about government spending.  For instance, this line:

The underlying politics is as follows: the American people are sick and tired of deficit spending. The pundits are completely wrong when they downplay this issue, because deficits are FAR worse now than they ever have been in peacetime (10+% of GDP). And they got far worse at almost the exact moment Obama was elected president.

I don't know why people keep forgetting that we are AT WAR, and that this is the first war in American History that wasn't paid for with higher taxes.  Maybe I got the direction of that wrong; people keep forgetting that we are at war because we have neglected to pay for the two we are in.   And as for the "got far worse at almost the exact moment Obama was elected president" thing, that is completely true, which sort of highlights the fact that he couldn't possibly have been at fault for it.  I mean, if we want to talk about deficit spending... the only president who didn't do it in recent memory has been Clinton.  I'm really not sure why that would give us the idea that Democrats are the ones who don't care about fiscal responsibility, but that sure seems to be the popular opinion.

The other strange thing about the article is that it starts with the premise that the debt ceiling was a bad place to raise the issue, and ends with the conclusion that Republicans should use the debt ceiling to raise the issue, but consistency is maybe too much to ask for.  Still, my complaints about this post have to do with its mission, not its sanity, and I greatly prefer that so kudos to Francis Cianfrocca.

I am sad now

Dear Politicians,

It has come to my attention that you are more or less incapable of doing anything in America at the moment.  Please quit mucking about and do something useful.  A couple basic guidelines:

1. Evidence - please use it, and please present it in context.  Large numbers are scary, but large numbers when compared to other historical or projected large numbers are much less so.
2. Consistency - I know it is bad politics to hold logically consistent beliefs, but I think that maybe if you don't someone should call you on it, and in a public easy to understand way, not in the clever but not terribly accessible way my favorite bloggers do.

Point 1 is for the pragmatists.  If you care about the impact of your legislation, and not terribly much on the abstract values behind the way it works, then you should be a slave to Evidence.  For those of you who are primarily interested in a legislative enactment of some value-system, you should be checking to make sure your enactment doesn't undermine your values by its effects.

Point 2 is for values-politicians.  If you're holding a core set of beliefs and want to enshrine them in law, then you should at the very least make sure that they don't contradict each other.  For pragmatists, this might not matter as much in your implementation, but you should be watching the aggregate effects to make sure they still do what you hope they will.

I know this is a hopeless and empty plea, but I'm burnt out on real world politics and needed to get that off my chest.  Expect more bounds on taxation and other abstract policy discussions in the near future.

Love,
Rory

Good Conservative Blogs Follow Up

So a while ago I asked after some good conservative blogs in order to balance out my reading material.  I also spent quite a lot of time searching on my own and here's my conclusion: there are no good conservative blogs.  

Basically, the closest you can get is mises libertarian stuff where maybe one in four or five articles has some intellectual merit, but even there we only get a tiny amount of evidence based information... maybe one in 20 articles actually uses real world numbers to support its points.  As far as actual main stream republicanism goes, there does not appear to be a SINGLE intelligent thinker in the entire blogosphere.  I am eager to be proven wrong here, and have spent quite a lot of my time and resources attempting to prove myself wrong, but I'm convinced.

Dear Republican party, I would like to know about the deep thinking behind your sound bytes.  If I cannot find any evidence in support of that thinking anywhere, I am inclined to believe that there is none.

Democrats V. Republicans

I've been thinking about what divides the Republican and Democratic parties and here's basically my take on it.

The general goal of the Republican party is to enact a set of laws which codify their party's shared values.  They want a flat tax because they think it is fair or just.  They want to end welfare because it allows people who don't work to benefit from the labor of those who do.  They want to make gay marriage illegal because they think it's wrong for people with the same combination of sex chromosomes to sex each other.  By contrast, it seems that the Democratic party generally attempts to enact legislation in order to achieve explicit goals, such as reducing the negative effects of poverty, providing people with healthcare, &c.

This naturally throws up an obstacle to useful political discourse.  Republicans tend to look bad when asked what their programs will do because they didn't come to their policy ideas based on studies, but rather came to the studies based on their policy ideas (informed by evaluations of those policies with respect to the moral code they want to enact).  Democrats look bad when asked to justify the moral legitimacy of their policies because, well, they were too busy thinking about what they wanted to do.

I think that both parties are being stupid.  In order to have a meaningful discussion you need shared assumptions.  In this case we need to have candid political discussions about what our shared values are, and the nature of our disagreements.  Some values might be hard and non-negotiable.  Differences in the abortion debate spring to mind.  Others might be more flexible.  Many people are willing to budge on completely equal treatment in order to get more equal results, even if they value both kinds of equality.  Many are willing to sacrifice some freedoms for increased security.

Issues controlled by hard values need to be decided by the voters and when it comes down to it that means that the most important thing is to recognize the value judgment, describe it accurately, and have both sides of the issue make their arguments to the people.  It might even be most appropriate for such issues to be decided by referendum.  For just about everything else, we should be agreeing on goals for the nation (informed by our values) and then asking experts for the most effective means towards achieving those goals.  We should then recognize what values might be impacted by the most effective means and weigh those values explicitly against the values we were pursuing when considering the end goal of the law.  But the most important thing to remember in those sorts of debates is that the process started with agreement that the end goal of the law was worth pursuing.  If one particular method looks to infringe too deeply on some values, other methods need to be considered.

I'd like to mention that this is basically a rehashing of my constitutional anarchy ideas within the context of our current political situation.  I'd love to add a clause to the constitution that requires a nationwide referendum on any law codifying a value.