The word "capitalism" hides a multitude of meanings. Marx and Engels, whose writings spawned the eponymous ideology of Marxism, while they didn't coin the term "capitalist" which they used in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (the first person we think of now as an economist to do so in the English language was David Ricardo, in his "Principles of Political Economy and Taxation" (1817)), probably did more than anyone else to popularize the notion that the prevailing economic order of their day was a capitalist one. Max Weber's book "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1904), in turn, is perhaps the defining moment in which apologists of the status quo that Marx critiqued took ownership of and embraced the label that he had given them.
In the Marxist sense, the essence of a capitalist economic system is that it is one in which what modern slang would call the One Percenters a.ka. the Bourgeois a.k.a. the Capitalists a.ka. the wealthy, run the economy, with the assitance of the Petite Bourgeois, a.k.a. the Upper Middle Class of managers, professionals and small business people, while subjecting everyone else, the Proletariat a.k.a. the working class, to wage slavery and/or poverty in a way exploiting them to generate the riches the Capitalists enjoy.
Of course, self-described supporters of capitalism don't generally see the oligarchy of the wealthy as the really essential component of the the economic systems that they support.
Instead, capitalists generally focus on the notion of a decentralized market based private sector economy, as opposed to one run by or owned by the state. The term "laissez-faire" emphasizes a lack of government regulation of eocnomic transactions, as does the term "free market."
A common way to operationalize a distinction between capitalism and communism on a continuum is to look at the percentage of the economy (for example, as a percentage of GDP or employment) that is in the governmental as opposed to the non-governmental sector. At one extreme is the fully market based economy in which everything is handled through a bare minimum of governmental institutions to the point of a libertarian or anarchist extreme, and at the other is a "command economy" in which everything is owned by the government and all economic decision making is made on the basis of central planning (like the military). In between are way stations like regulated capitalism, a "mixed economy", and democratic socialism.
Some of the varying definitions of capitalism sound good and well, until one starts trying to apply them to specific facts and finds that they start reaching different conclusions.
A Madisonian society in which Yeoman farmers with roughly equal holdings interact with each other and small business people, govern themselves via small, democratic political units, and cede power to centralized economic and political institutions only when absolutely necessary in a manner that retrains profits and control of the small enterprises at the bottom of the heap, could very well be a "free market" system without being "capitalist" in the Marxist sense of being dominated by wealthy members of a capitalist class.
In truth, many Americans who think of themselves as capitalists are just as suspicious of the concentration of economic power in the hands of a wealthy few as Marx was himself. While the Communist economic ideology built on a foundation of Marxist thought certainly didn't work well, or end well, if you read "The Communist Manifesto" in the frame that its original readers would have received it, without the historical gloss, it isn't hard to imagine its predictions about the inevitable demise of the capitalist order, and its observations of the ills of system in which wealth determines who makes decisions, producing an approach to addressing these ills that could have been far less bloody and far more workable in practice.
Indeed, one of the classic steps in the economic transition of a country from having a Third World economy, to a democratic capitalist economy, is to break the economic dominance of a narrow class of the superrich. It is notable in this regard that the political leaders of supposedly Communist China have far more personal wealth than the political leaders of supposedly the Capitalist United States. In the American South, the demise of the Plantation system of farming that the Civil War and Emanicipation provided a final death knell for, coincided almost immediately in the antebellum era with economic development and technological moderization for a region that had long lagged behind the rest of the nation.
When you look at examples, it pretty soon becomes clear that the market place choice emphasized by Milton Friedman is really more central to what makes those who embrace the idea of "Capitalism" (e.g. in his book "Capitalism and Freedom") than the distinction between the governmental and non-governmental sector.
Consider a couple of examples from contemporary Denver.
Denver has a system of "charter schools" (and several different flavored variants on the concept like magnet schools or magnet programs) which are autonomous public schools that students may choose in a structured "school choice" system, give rise to something much closer to the ideal of how firms ought to behave in a capitalist market economy, despite being formally within the governmental sector. Charter schools don't compete based on price, but there is a vigorous competition in the school choice system between each and every school, charter or otherwise, involved in the school choice process that has real world consequences for the competitors. Schools that are empty because nobody chooses them eventually get shut down, regardless of their formal character as a charter or magnet or neighborhood school. Improved school choice options and this competition have, in turn, dramatically increased the percentage of school aged children in Denver that choose to enroll in schools under the Denver Public Schools system school choice umbrella, while alternatives like Roman Catholic parochial schools in the private sector have seen their market share contract.
In contrast, while the emissions testing program in Colorado is operated by a private sector government contractor, this monopolist operation shows all of the characteristic pathologies we associate with government owned monopolies of particular types of economic activities, without any of the redeeming virtues of government bureaucracies: they don't even have ATM machines or take credit cards (unlike many state agencies in Colorado) and should you forget to bring cash or a checkbook, they are perfectly happy to futilely run a test twice on the same car in one day even though nothing in their contract prevents them from printing out test results the first time and then holding the results hostage until payment is made (since everybody is getting tested to get a piece of paperwork that establishes compliance with environmental laws, rather than to actually get the information that the testing provides), like any ordinary enterprise in a competitive situation where customer satisfaction matters would have done. They also have the long lines and indifference to customer wait times that are characteristic of governmental monopolies, since both have captive audiences of mandatory customers and no competition.
Freed of ideological baggage, people are often quite ardent in their support of government economic planning, for example, in the form of zoning codes that regulate real estate development under the watchful eye of a Planning Commission, and rather less supportive of a "lassiez-faire", free market approach to real estate development, even though many of the most loved features of urban land use emerged in the absence of meaningful zoning and land use regulation.
Likewise, some of the most die hard rhetorical opponents of command economies and government ownership of economic resources on the political scene think that the military's subculture is a real world utopia, aren't alarmed that top civilian and military executives are paid far less than comparable private sector executives, and can't imagine anything amiss in a monopsomy system of defense procurement that permits bids only from domestic companies in any case where there is any domestic company that can meet the military's needs, while considering government owned military manufacturing enterprises to be unthinkable.
A sizeable part of the grass roots Republican base consists of moralist big government conservatives with a populist bent, who have no real objections to taking 21st century capitalists, like GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, down a peg or two. It wasn't President Obama who called him, in a classic Marxist paradigm, a "vulture capitalist." In 2008, Mike Huckabee was also something of a big government populist candidate within the GOP, and Mitt Romney's closest rival, Rick Santorum, during his service in the U.S. Senate and on the campaign trail, has not been a friend of international free trade. Santorum's views on international trade are basically merchantalist, the very economic doctrine that Adam Smith, the patron saint and founding father of modern capitalist economic thought, put at the heart of his own critique of the economic status quo.
Does it matter that the essence of what we think of the essential elements of a modern, functional Western style economic system don't include a dominant role for people whose primary qualification is vast wealth? Should we care about the nuances of the terms we use now that they have acquired secondary meanings of their own that almost ignore the original meaning of Ricardo and Marx?
I think that it does. A word like capitalism almost inevitably has buried within it acceptance of the inherent natural supremacy of the titans of industry without whom the economy would shrivel assumed by Ayn Rand in "Atlas Shrugged" that there is little reason to believe is an empirically valid thought experiment in a context like the modern American economy, even if that notion may have been pretty valid in contexts like Zimbabwe, as illustrated by the catastrophe that land reform there created. Capitalists may be necessary in Third World economies where the number of people with the skill sets needed to operate the highly productive economic and reasonably just political institutions of a modern Western style political economy are in scarce supply. But, it is far less obvious that capitalists are really necessary in well educated, mature political economies where there are far more people competent to handle skilled managerial and technical responsibilities than there are opportunities that fully utilize those talents.
So long as we use "capitalism" to describe our economy, we are inherently legitimatizing the "divine right" of plutocrats to rule, rather than forcing them to justify their power in a utilitarian way, i.e. to earn it.
12 March 2012
07 March 2012
Colorado's Top Income Tax Rate Is Low
The Tax Foundation summarizes the state of U.S. state income taxes in the map above.
In general, one has to do some analysis of the local economic base and the alternate sources of revenue tapped by states on a case by case basis looking at each state as a coherent whole that has its own particular reasons for what it is doing, to make sense of the results in particular states.
Low State Income Tax States
Seven states have no state income tax (Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nevada, Washington and Alaska). New Hampshire (5%) and Tennessee (6%) have a flat income tax rates on interest and dividends, but not on other income.
Colorado's flat income tax rate is 4.63%, and it has no local income taxes. Three states have lower flat income tax rates (Michigan 4.35%, Indiana 3.4%, and Pennsylvania 3.07%), but also have local income taxes which probably push top marginal tax rates in much of each of those states above Colorado's flat marginal income tax rate.
Two states with graduated income tax rates have lower top marginal rates than Colorado's flat rate (Arizona 4.54%, North Dakota 3.99%).
Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch and all states have to provide certain levels of services, even though there is some room for variation from state to state in overall per capita government spending and some variation from state to state in the tax base available for taxation that drives what is necessary to raise revenues.
Dominant Industry Taxes
Low income tax rates are made possible in some states by revenues from the dominant industries in the state. In Nevada, gambling funds state government. In Alaska, oil revenues are so great relative to the state's population that the state actually passes out money to people who are willing to live there. I suspect, but do not know, that resource based revenues make low income tax rates possible in North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming, although a low cost of government in some or all of those states may help as well.
Repackaging
The outlier states simply have a different package of taxation that focuses on taxes at the business entity level rather than the individual income level.
New Hampshire's example in claiming to lack sales and income taxes, while technically true, is a bit deceptive. Some of the money it needs it secured with a state property tax (something very few other states have and that clearly isn't a sales or income tax), a 0.75% real estate transfer tax (which is a sort of sales tax), an 8.5% tax on "business profits" (not just corporate profits but profits from all businesses) and a 0.75% "business enterprise tax" computed on a tax base of all compensation (e.g. wages), interest and dividends received by a business. Throw in the 5% state tax on dividends and interest, which covers a lot of the income not captured by the business profits tax, the business enterprise tax, and the real estate transfer tax, and considering differences in income mix at the top and bottom of states with progressive marginal tax rate systems, and the sources of New Hampshire's taxes look less different from other states - New Hampshire's exceptionality has a healthy dose of marketing involved.
Washington State does something similar. It's business and occupations tax is imposed on gross revenues, rather than net revenues, with rates that vary by industry, reflecting different operating margins in different industries. Washington State also has fairly high combined state and local sales tax rates (7.0%-9.5%). Like New Hampshire, Washington State also has a state property tax and a real estate transfer tax.
Tennessee's business tax is quite similar in structure to the one in Washington State's business and occupation tax (and a gross receipts tax in other industries) They tax the gross with varying rates by industry to reflect different typical margins in different industries. Tennessee also has a franchise tax on the assessed value (at a 0.25% rate) on all business property (tangible and real), and a 6.5% excise tax on entity level taxable income for all forms of entities similar to New Hampshire's business profits tax. Tennessee also has a 5.5% sales tax on food which most states exempt from sales taxation.
A quick glance at Arizona's tax laws suggest that it follows a similar model to Washington State and Tennessee, but with a greater emphasis on natural resource severance taxation to supplement its fairly low marginal income tax rates.
Florida has a business profits tax on all business entities except sole proprietorships, of 5.5%. It also has fairly high sales taxes.
Retiree Driven Low State Income Taxes
I don't know what alternate revenue sources Florida uses to fund its lack of income taxes, and Arizona uses to fund its relatively low state income tax. But, one clear motive for Florida, Nevada and Arizona to keep income taxes low is to compete for relocating seniors who want to withdraw retirement funds accumulated in high tax states in states where those funds don't face state and local taxation.
Colorado's political environment may be the result of similar motives - resorts catering to the affluent are a key element of our economy and we want affluent people to relocate to them because taxing their incomes at 4.63% rates beats taxing no income at all if they don't relocate to Colorado, and has pretty low levels of state spending relative to its affluence on public services like education, as well as a fairly balanced mix of taxes with middling to high combined state and local sales taxes (Colorado is the exception in having more local than state sales taxation, which many localities have opted for in order to secure lower rates of property taxation).
Low And High Income Tax Rates Driven By Intrastate Federalism
Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania are all Rust Belt states who have hemorraged so much population and economic vitality, that they feel compelled to reduce taxes to try to attract jobs, even though this policy does not appear to have actually attracted jobs. Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania also have local income taxes, which suggests two things. First, income tax rates at the state level are low, in part, because some of that tax base has been ceded to localities in an instance of intrastate federalism. It also suggests that the economic incentives driving for income taxation are quite different in different parts of the state, with parts of the state fitting a low income tax profile (like Northern Michigan and Western Pennsylvania and rural Indiana) not having very high local income taxes and those with a high income tax profile (like Philadelphia and Oakland County and Indianapolis) having higher local income taxes.
Local income taxes in Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kentucky, none of which have particularly low top marginal rates in the state income tax, also mask even higher combined state and local income taxes.
In contrast, state income tax rates in California, Hawaii, Idaho (7.9%), Montana (6.9%), Minnesota (7.85%), Wisconsin (7.75%), Vermont (8.95%) and Maine (8.98%) look high in part because all state and local income taxes are consolidated in state government to the exclusion of local government.
Common Factors In High Income Tax Jurisdictions
In states with high top marginal income tax rates, in contrast, there does seem to be a common thread. Consider, by top tax rate, Hawaii (11%), California (10.3%), Oregon (9.9%), New York (8.82%), New Jersey (8.97%), and Washington D.C. (8.95%). What all of these states have in common is a significant number of high income workers for whom working outside the jurisdiction is simply not a viable option. If you are in an industry centered in New York City, or San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles or Washington D.C., you must, for all practical purposes, work in that state and subject yourself to that state's income tax rates. Top rates in Connecticut (6.7%), Delaware (6.75%), Rhode Island (5.99%), Virginia (5.75%), Maryland (5.5%), and Massachusetts (5.3% flat rate) aren't low either and have some of the same characteristics.
Interestingly, some of the states which have high state income taxes also have local income taxation: Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Oregon all have local income taxes, which suggests that the necessity of working not just in a particular state, but in a particular locality is quite great.
Iowa whose top marginal income tax rate is 8.98% and also has local income taxes is something of a puzzle. Perhaps, its economy is so far driven that its high income farmer citizens too are bound to the land and can't escape state income taxes while maintaining their livelihoods, although it is not obvious how Iowa differs from other farm states in that respect.
06 March 2012
Super Tuesday Recap: Gingrich Fool or Tool?
Newt "Moonbase" Gingrich continues to verge on delusional in his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination, failing to land 50% of the vote in his home state of Georgia, not making it onto the ballot in either Virginia or Vermont, and not even winning states like Tennessee or Oklahoma that one needs in a "Southern strategy" to win the nomination. Also, unlike Ron Paul, who is in it to push an ideology rather than to win, for Gingrich it is all about him. Gingrich remained utterly oblivious to reality after tonight's results, at least for this evening's victory speech celebrating his win in Georgia. Maybe he will sober up in the morning.
Colorado will declare deep sea fishing and surfing to be the state's official sports before Gingrich comes anywhere close to winning the GOP nomination at this point, and yet he seems intent on casting doubt on his sanity and intelligence, in addition his already blackened ethical reputation.
Gingrich may have no shot at winning, but he is effectively serving as a spoiler for Rick Santorum, who would otherwise be handily defeating Mitt Romney all over the map. The Gingrich plus Santorum vote frequently significantly exceeds the Romney vote, and often enough, for example, in Ohio, the Gingrich plus Santorum vote exceeds the Romney plus Paul vote.
As a result of the spoiler effects flowing from the fact that Gingrich is still running, Romney has a big lead in the delegate count as the long meandering Presidential primary process, with its hodge podge of different rules in every state, works its way thought the nation. Santorum needs almost 60% of the remaining delegate to win the primary, while Romney needs less than 45% of the remaining delegates to win, and Romney would still realistically win the nomination even if he fell a few delegates short of an absolute majority in the first round.
Indeed, the only way one can understand Gingrich to be anything other than demented is if he is deliberately trying to be a tool whose goal is really to advance Romney's candidacy with an expectation of getting something in return (e.g. a Vice Presidency if he can deny Romney a majority of the delegates needed to win outright). I'm more inclined to think that Gingrich is just terminally narcissistic, but a more conspiratorially inclined person who has more respect for Gingrich's mental capacities might disagree.
Ron Paul, of course, has yet to pick up a first place finish in any state, although he might have an outside shot at prevailing in Alaska's preference poll. Paul's only second place finishes this evening so far have been in states where he was the only candidate other than Romney on the ballot who is still running (Vermont and Virginia). The fact that Paul's stances on policy issues are only remotely similar to those of the Republican party whose nomination he is seeking might have something to do with that fact.
The voting patterns generally track the meme that Romney is winning in areas that are more liberal and urban, while Santorum is winning in places that are more conservative and rural. Some trends are boring and expected and this is one of them.
Colorado will declare deep sea fishing and surfing to be the state's official sports before Gingrich comes anywhere close to winning the GOP nomination at this point, and yet he seems intent on casting doubt on his sanity and intelligence, in addition his already blackened ethical reputation.
Gingrich may have no shot at winning, but he is effectively serving as a spoiler for Rick Santorum, who would otherwise be handily defeating Mitt Romney all over the map. The Gingrich plus Santorum vote frequently significantly exceeds the Romney vote, and often enough, for example, in Ohio, the Gingrich plus Santorum vote exceeds the Romney plus Paul vote.
As a result of the spoiler effects flowing from the fact that Gingrich is still running, Romney has a big lead in the delegate count as the long meandering Presidential primary process, with its hodge podge of different rules in every state, works its way thought the nation. Santorum needs almost 60% of the remaining delegate to win the primary, while Romney needs less than 45% of the remaining delegates to win, and Romney would still realistically win the nomination even if he fell a few delegates short of an absolute majority in the first round.
Indeed, the only way one can understand Gingrich to be anything other than demented is if he is deliberately trying to be a tool whose goal is really to advance Romney's candidacy with an expectation of getting something in return (e.g. a Vice Presidency if he can deny Romney a majority of the delegates needed to win outright). I'm more inclined to think that Gingrich is just terminally narcissistic, but a more conspiratorially inclined person who has more respect for Gingrich's mental capacities might disagree.
Ron Paul, of course, has yet to pick up a first place finish in any state, although he might have an outside shot at prevailing in Alaska's preference poll. Paul's only second place finishes this evening so far have been in states where he was the only candidate other than Romney on the ballot who is still running (Vermont and Virginia). The fact that Paul's stances on policy issues are only remotely similar to those of the Republican party whose nomination he is seeking might have something to do with that fact.
The voting patterns generally track the meme that Romney is winning in areas that are more liberal and urban, while Santorum is winning in places that are more conservative and rural. Some trends are boring and expected and this is one of them.
Caucus Day For Democrats In Colorado
Democrats in Colorado have precinct caucuses today (check in starting at 6:30 p.m., proceedings start at 7 p.m.), the first held in the newly redistricted boundaries based on the 2010 census. Republicans have their non-Presidential caucuses later.
A Dull Caucus Year For Most Denver Dems
I reviewed the races in Denver previously, and have made some updates in the comments since then. Most notably, Mitch Morrissey is running for re-election as DA in Denver for his third (and last) term, probably unopposed or not seriously contested. I had mistakenly believed that he might be prevented from running by term limits in the previous post.
There are live intraparty contests in both House District 1 (Labuda), which the incumbent is favored, and in House District 9 (open since the incumbent Joe Miklosi is running for Congress) where Rosenthal is favored.
Bottom line for me: At no point in the caucus process will I or anyone I nominate have to deal with a contested intraparty nomination race. I'm not aware of any Democratic Party internal issues of consequence brewing to be decided down the line either, but might be missing something.
Electing precinct committee people for Precinct 223 will be the extent of exciting decision making for me this evening.
Realistically, moreover, in the general election in November this year, the only close and interesting partisan candidate races for Denver voters are likely to be the Presidental race and state ballot initiative
Colorado Ballot Issues 2012
Initiatives
There are also no currently pending ballot issues at the City and County of Denver level at this time, although there are a few at the state level.
A majijuana legalization constitutional amendment is on the ballot. Three more state ballot measures are collecting signatures: "personhood", "Colorado Peace Day" and a statutory amendment to remove immigration requirements for driver's licenses. A same sex marriage constitutional amendment has had a title approved last fall but has further steps to clear before initiatives can be circulated and it can appear on the ballot; it may have been abandoned by its proponents to focus on a legislative civil unions measure instead (I'm just speculating). The personhood measure will very likely make the ballot (similar measures have made it onto the ballot before only to be defeated on election day by very wide margins). It is harder to tell if backers of any of the other measures have the resources to mount a successful petition drive in time to get onto the ballot.
The past experience from personhoood initiatives in Colorado make it likely to fail this year as well. The polling as of December 2011 on marijuana legalization in Colorado, in general, shows support that is probably too tepid (49% for, 40% against before a measure is on the ballot and before an Obama Administration crackdown on certain medical marijuana policies) to pass either. Measures with less than 50% affirmative support almost never pass, even if more support than oppose a measure in early polling, and support for ballot measures generally erodes significantly between their introduction and election day.
The last day for new citizen's initiatives at the state level to have their title approved for the November 2012 election is April 18, 2012, and April 6, 2012 is the last day to propose new initiatives for the 2012 election. A proposed measure relating to campaign finance is the only other measure in the initiative process right now that has not cleared the title board at this time that looks like it might yet make it onto the ballot.
Referrendums
Some ballot issues may be added later by the Colorado General Assembly or other public entities (e.g. school boards and RTD tax measures).
The Colorado General Assembly has a constitutional amendment referrendum to reform the state personnel system pending (HCR12-001), although it isn't clear if it will get enough support from legislators to make it onto the ballot. HRC 1 hasn't even cleared committee in the House yet, although there is still plenty of time left in the legislative session. There probably won't be any other state referrendums proposed this year.
If the personnel measure does make it onto the ballot, its fate is hard to predict. Referrendums have surprisingly low success rates for measures that have already received two-thirds support in both the state house and state senate (and hence have some level of bipartisan support). Its odds of passage if it makes it onto the ballot might be 65% or so.
RTD will probably ask for a sales tax extension/increase. Other local governments could also propose ballot issues.
A Dull Caucus Year For Most Denver Dems
I reviewed the races in Denver previously, and have made some updates in the comments since then. Most notably, Mitch Morrissey is running for re-election as DA in Denver for his third (and last) term, probably unopposed or not seriously contested. I had mistakenly believed that he might be prevented from running by term limits in the previous post.
There are live intraparty contests in both House District 1 (Labuda), which the incumbent is favored, and in House District 9 (open since the incumbent Joe Miklosi is running for Congress) where Rosenthal is favored.
Bottom line for me: At no point in the caucus process will I or anyone I nominate have to deal with a contested intraparty nomination race. I'm not aware of any Democratic Party internal issues of consequence brewing to be decided down the line either, but might be missing something.
Electing precinct committee people for Precinct 223 will be the extent of exciting decision making for me this evening.
Realistically, moreover, in the general election in November this year, the only close and interesting partisan candidate races for Denver voters are likely to be the Presidental race and state ballot initiative
Colorado Ballot Issues 2012
Initiatives
There are also no currently pending ballot issues at the City and County of Denver level at this time, although there are a few at the state level.
A majijuana legalization constitutional amendment is on the ballot. Three more state ballot measures are collecting signatures: "personhood", "Colorado Peace Day" and a statutory amendment to remove immigration requirements for driver's licenses. A same sex marriage constitutional amendment has had a title approved last fall but has further steps to clear before initiatives can be circulated and it can appear on the ballot; it may have been abandoned by its proponents to focus on a legislative civil unions measure instead (I'm just speculating). The personhood measure will very likely make the ballot (similar measures have made it onto the ballot before only to be defeated on election day by very wide margins). It is harder to tell if backers of any of the other measures have the resources to mount a successful petition drive in time to get onto the ballot.
The past experience from personhoood initiatives in Colorado make it likely to fail this year as well. The polling as of December 2011 on marijuana legalization in Colorado, in general, shows support that is probably too tepid (49% for, 40% against before a measure is on the ballot and before an Obama Administration crackdown on certain medical marijuana policies) to pass either. Measures with less than 50% affirmative support almost never pass, even if more support than oppose a measure in early polling, and support for ballot measures generally erodes significantly between their introduction and election day.
The last day for new citizen's initiatives at the state level to have their title approved for the November 2012 election is April 18, 2012, and April 6, 2012 is the last day to propose new initiatives for the 2012 election. A proposed measure relating to campaign finance is the only other measure in the initiative process right now that has not cleared the title board at this time that looks like it might yet make it onto the ballot.
Referrendums
Some ballot issues may be added later by the Colorado General Assembly or other public entities (e.g. school boards and RTD tax measures).
The Colorado General Assembly has a constitutional amendment referrendum to reform the state personnel system pending (HCR12-001), although it isn't clear if it will get enough support from legislators to make it onto the ballot. HRC 1 hasn't even cleared committee in the House yet, although there is still plenty of time left in the legislative session. There probably won't be any other state referrendums proposed this year.
If the personnel measure does make it onto the ballot, its fate is hard to predict. Referrendums have surprisingly low success rates for measures that have already received two-thirds support in both the state house and state senate (and hence have some level of bipartisan support). Its odds of passage if it makes it onto the ballot might be 65% or so.
RTD will probably ask for a sales tax extension/increase. Other local governments could also propose ballot issues.
U.K. Mulls More Managerial Liability In Banks
A banking law reform bill in the U.K. would impose strict unlimited liability on members of the boards of directors of banks, require them to be bonded, and require that bank employee bonuses in the form of what we would call non-qualified deferred compensation with a Rabbi's trust for five years before being disbursed. In other words, the bonuses must be held in a trust subject to the general liabilities of the bank for five years before being distributed.
A link at Marginal Revolution calls it "unlimited liabilty" but it really isn't. The idea of subjecting someone who is a mere shareholder in a corporation with no involvement in the business of the company to liability beyond the investment is long dead. But, expanding the scope of liability for managers and directors of enterprises is a flourishing trend on both sides of the pond, after reaching a low point probably sometime around the early 1980s, although this bill is exceptional for imposing strict liability, rather than liability based on serious fault based grounds on directors, and because it likewise subjects employee bonuses to strict liability.
The bill also provides that banks can't have more than 97% leverage, creates a fast track bankruptcy process for insolvent banks, and devotes additional resources to enforcing banking laws.
Of course, the bill may just discourage rich people from serving on the corporate boards of banks and shift bank compensation from a heavily bonus based system to one based upon high current compensation.
A link at Marginal Revolution calls it "unlimited liabilty" but it really isn't. The idea of subjecting someone who is a mere shareholder in a corporation with no involvement in the business of the company to liability beyond the investment is long dead. But, expanding the scope of liability for managers and directors of enterprises is a flourishing trend on both sides of the pond, after reaching a low point probably sometime around the early 1980s, although this bill is exceptional for imposing strict liability, rather than liability based on serious fault based grounds on directors, and because it likewise subjects employee bonuses to strict liability.
The bill also provides that banks can't have more than 97% leverage, creates a fast track bankruptcy process for insolvent banks, and devotes additional resources to enforcing banking laws.
Of course, the bill may just discourage rich people from serving on the corporate boards of banks and shift bank compensation from a heavily bonus based system to one based upon high current compensation.
05 March 2012
Delaware Judges As Minor Prophets
Usually, when I post here about Bainbridge, I'm trashing him. But, I have to say that his recent post on the similarities between Delaware Chancery Court judges (who are the primary referees of corporate disputes in American big businesses) and minor Biblical prophets did strike a cord. Basically, he argues that the vivid language that they use to call out executives who are behaving badly molds social norms that have a powerful impact on how big business elites behave, well beyond their power in setting precedents or enforcing liability and property rules.
Proof That Reading Privacy Policies Is Stupid
Transparency has its virtues, but in practice, you deal with so many different institutions, each with its own privacy policy, that it is a practical impossibility to read them all. A better course might be to standardize so that instead of taking ten minutes to read and the wisdom to catch the subtleties, you could look at one or two characters that would be a bit like urban zoning classification and tell you what kind of privacy policy there was with a particular institution in a glance.
K-12 Math Textbooks Still Suck
So says John Hawks citing Chronic Sense and attributing the issue to text book purchasing (and writing) by committee.
Some of the all time greats of mathematics (e.g. Euler) also wrote high school/undergraduate college level textbooks. Now, they're written by corporations that are heavy on graphic design talent and light on mathematical acuteness.
FWIW, mathematics textbooks are hardly the only, or even necessarily even the worst, offenders. They are less prone to outright snafus than science textbooks, and more resistant to the latest educational politics trends than the social sciences and humanities. One of the more depressing gafs from the middle of the source post is this one:
It sounds so much like the worst parts of my stint in for profit higher education its cringeworthy. Textbook writing is right up there on the list of activities that big, for profit businesses do poorly.
It is a bit odd really, considering that on the whole, books have not been at the epicenter of areas where capitalism and copyright have just stopped working the way they are supposed to work. Book publishers look superficially like their in the land of peaches and honey compared to record companies and movie studios to hear the folks in the respective industries talk, without actually confirming the facts (although retail book stores are in a rather less blissful state).
One of the big trends in math textbook writing, that I see in the Denver Public Schools curriculum is the dreadful trend of fragmentary cycling - spreading out a topic over a tiny part of the year over many yeras (with lots of repetition) rather than doing a whole subject, mastering it effeciently, and then moving on to something else that builds on it. (And then, there is the dreaded "lattice method"!) There is also way too much teaching down to grade level standards rather than pushing kids, and way too much of a learn a year, recover a year, learn a year pattern.
It is possible to write good textbooks. I still have my wonderful high school geometry textbook, the first that I tought myself from, ignoring what was going on in class. But, somehow, as the author of the linked posts note, you have to develop a purchasing end of the system that rewards excellence rather than mediocrity. Maybe we need to migrate to the system that is in place in higher education, where individual teachers are trusted to pick their own textbooks and text book companies court them relentlessly. Somehow, I'm not hopeful on that score.
Some of the all time greats of mathematics (e.g. Euler) also wrote high school/undergraduate college level textbooks. Now, they're written by corporations that are heavy on graphic design talent and light on mathematical acuteness.
FWIW, mathematics textbooks are hardly the only, or even necessarily even the worst, offenders. They are less prone to outright snafus than science textbooks, and more resistant to the latest educational politics trends than the social sciences and humanities. One of the more depressing gafs from the middle of the source post is this one:
When I point out critical errors in content to a developer’s project manager, there’s generally a pause at the other end of the phone. I’m ruining their day, handing them a problem they don’t want, can’t possibly address given their resources and time. Some do their best; they’ll ask me to make corrections and bump up my rate a bit. Some will ask me to make notes so that they can fix the errors and do the rewrites themselves on their own time. Others will simply sigh, “The publisher knows it’s bad. Just do the best you can.” The publisher knows it’s bad. And yet, it doesn’t seem to matter. That’s because the sales and marketing team is already at work developing videos, brochures, webinars, catalog copy, and whatever else their bloated budgets will allow in order to sell what doesn’t actually exist—a quality product. . . .
A more recent math project I was hired to edit was not only full of content errors, the books were so peculiar in the execution of math concepts and instruction that I hadn’t seen anything like it in all my 20+ years of experience. I asked the project manager if she’d ever seen math approached in this manner. She gave a resigned groan and said no, but this was what the publisher wanted. The books in question were a series of supplemental products designed for struggling students, which is sadly ironic because students of all abilities will indeed struggle to complete the lessons in these books. How could this happen, you might ask? Well, the books were published by a company that was reorganized a few years ago in order to boost profits. That’s when the bulk of the product development staff was let go and the budget for their department slashed. Meanwhile, the marketing and sales departments swelled, as did their budgets. And though many of those in charge now have lofty MBAs, few have little, if any, experience in publishing of any kind, never taught in a classroom, and haven’t the first clue of how to build a coherent educational book from start to finish. The lust for the bottom line—that is how this happens.
It sounds so much like the worst parts of my stint in for profit higher education its cringeworthy. Textbook writing is right up there on the list of activities that big, for profit businesses do poorly.
It is a bit odd really, considering that on the whole, books have not been at the epicenter of areas where capitalism and copyright have just stopped working the way they are supposed to work. Book publishers look superficially like their in the land of peaches and honey compared to record companies and movie studios to hear the folks in the respective industries talk, without actually confirming the facts (although retail book stores are in a rather less blissful state).
One of the big trends in math textbook writing, that I see in the Denver Public Schools curriculum is the dreadful trend of fragmentary cycling - spreading out a topic over a tiny part of the year over many yeras (with lots of repetition) rather than doing a whole subject, mastering it effeciently, and then moving on to something else that builds on it. (And then, there is the dreaded "lattice method"!) There is also way too much teaching down to grade level standards rather than pushing kids, and way too much of a learn a year, recover a year, learn a year pattern.
It is possible to write good textbooks. I still have my wonderful high school geometry textbook, the first that I tought myself from, ignoring what was going on in class. But, somehow, as the author of the linked posts note, you have to develop a purchasing end of the system that rewards excellence rather than mediocrity. Maybe we need to migrate to the system that is in place in higher education, where individual teachers are trusted to pick their own textbooks and text book companies court them relentlessly. Somehow, I'm not hopeful on that score.
04 March 2012
The Death of Marriage
Kate Bolick at the Atlantic, last November offered upon a comprehensive and personal assessment of the changing nature of marriage and its causes. Much of it would be familiar to regular readers of this blog or the literature on the subject in general. She starts out, early on, looking at the issue of the reduced economic dependence of women and establishing that the institution of marriage has changed dramatically in recent t imes. But, a particularly interesting part of the analysis pertained to gender ratios.
When men outnumber women, women are valued. When women outnumber men, women are willing to make big compromises in their pursuit of men. In Siberia, there is such a shortfall of men that there is a grassroots campaign to legalize polygamy.
And, it isn't just society wide gender ratios that matter. What matters are the gender ratios in particular pools of people who see each other as marriagable.
To that end, "Whether the sexual double standard is cultural or biological, it’s finding traction in the increasingly lopsided sexual marketplace that is the American college campus, where women outnumber men, 57 percent to 43 percent." In contrast, people with only a high school education (or less) are more often men.
This goes a long way towards explaining the disparate marriage trends in the two groups, with marriages of college graduates lasting longer and those of high school educated men becoming more fragile. A college educated woman lucky enough to marry a college educated man may have a hard time replacing him with another college educated man. A high school educated woman married to a high school educated man may have a much easier time replacing him with another man with at least as much of an education. Many women, as a result, have given up on the "traditional" economically dependent woman making sacrifices for her man in exchange for loyal support model entirely.
Then, in the extreme of this trend which has been prophet in the past, there is the state of black marriage.
There had been no racial disparity in marriage rates in 1950, when 64% of black women were married.
(As an aside, the dramatic change is Exhibit A in the case that Bell Curve style population genetic disparities, or "Roots" style ancient cultural legacies, aren't a good fit to explaining this change. Black women and black men have virtually the same genetic endowment, and the change in the nature of black marriage largely followed the Civil Right Movement from a status quo ante that wasn't racialized.)
But, the bottom line, is that it is all very complicated. Theory gets you only so far. You have to know a lot of nitty gritty detail of the situation that people encounter in their lives to make sense of what is happening. Even if you do know, that doesn't mean that the best social response to these trends is at all obvious.
One footnote: the "missing women" issue in many developing countries may have a lot more to do with disease mortality rate transitions, and a lot less to do with selective abortion, infanticide and short changing of young girls in families than we is conventionally believed.
When men outnumber women, women are valued. When women outnumber men, women are willing to make big compromises in their pursuit of men. In Siberia, there is such a shortfall of men that there is a grassroots campaign to legalize polygamy.
And, it isn't just society wide gender ratios that matter. What matters are the gender ratios in particular pools of people who see each other as marriagable.
To that end, "Whether the sexual double standard is cultural or biological, it’s finding traction in the increasingly lopsided sexual marketplace that is the American college campus, where women outnumber men, 57 percent to 43 percent." In contrast, people with only a high school education (or less) are more often men.
This goes a long way towards explaining the disparate marriage trends in the two groups, with marriages of college graduates lasting longer and those of high school educated men becoming more fragile. A college educated woman lucky enough to marry a college educated man may have a hard time replacing him with another college educated man. A high school educated woman married to a high school educated man may have a much easier time replacing him with another man with at least as much of an education. Many women, as a result, have given up on the "traditional" economically dependent woman making sacrifices for her man in exchange for loyal support model entirely.
Then, in the extreme of this trend which has been prophet in the past, there is the state of black marriage.
70 percent of black women are unmarried, and they are more than twice as likely as white women to remain that way. Those black women who do marry are more likely than any other group of women to “marry down.” This is often chalked up to high incarceration rates—in 2009, of the nearly 1.5 million men in prison, 39 percent were black—but it’s more than that. Across all income levels, black men have dropped far behind black women professionally and educationally; women with college degrees outnumber men 2-to-1. In August, the unemployment rate among black men age 20 or older exceeded 17 percent.
There had been no racial disparity in marriage rates in 1950, when 64% of black women were married.
(As an aside, the dramatic change is Exhibit A in the case that Bell Curve style population genetic disparities, or "Roots" style ancient cultural legacies, aren't a good fit to explaining this change. Black women and black men have virtually the same genetic endowment, and the change in the nature of black marriage largely followed the Civil Right Movement from a status quo ante that wasn't racialized.)
But, the bottom line, is that it is all very complicated. Theory gets you only so far. You have to know a lot of nitty gritty detail of the situation that people encounter in their lives to make sense of what is happening. Even if you do know, that doesn't mean that the best social response to these trends is at all obvious.
One footnote: the "missing women" issue in many developing countries may have a lot more to do with disease mortality rate transitions, and a lot less to do with selective abortion, infanticide and short changing of young girls in families than we is conventionally believed.
Americans Don't Trust The Poor
About 85% of American means tested benefits (i.e. welfare benefits) are now "in kind", like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance. This is a huge surge from that of the late 1960s, when much more welfare was in the form of cash assistance.
A lot of that is due to the same qualitative assistance via Medicaid costing more than it did then (or the rise of Medicaid as a nursing home subsidy program for the lower middle class, as opposed to a health care program for low income non-seniors). The percentage isn't quite as great is unemployment benefits are included, but still greatly increased. It also doesn't really account for the deceased federal tax burden on the poor, working class and middle class.
The measure doesn't included education, which is a major source of "in-kind" non-means tested government assistance at the K-12 level, that is more flexible than it used to be with the rise of school choice. And, it doesn't measure the trend towards decliing non-means tested higher education subsidies through low state tuitions, in favor of scholarships and student loan assistance.
But, the basic trend away from cash benefits still reflects a reduced amount of trust that the poor are just people who lack money, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, as opposed to people who can be trusted to manage the money that they have available to them.
A lot of that is due to the same qualitative assistance via Medicaid costing more than it did then (or the rise of Medicaid as a nursing home subsidy program for the lower middle class, as opposed to a health care program for low income non-seniors). The percentage isn't quite as great is unemployment benefits are included, but still greatly increased. It also doesn't really account for the deceased federal tax burden on the poor, working class and middle class.
The measure doesn't included education, which is a major source of "in-kind" non-means tested government assistance at the K-12 level, that is more flexible than it used to be with the rise of school choice. And, it doesn't measure the trend towards decliing non-means tested higher education subsidies through low state tuitions, in favor of scholarships and student loan assistance.
But, the basic trend away from cash benefits still reflects a reduced amount of trust that the poor are just people who lack money, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, as opposed to people who can be trusted to manage the money that they have available to them.
Economic Policy Relevant To Unemployment
If there were any place you'd expect economics to be indifferent to national boundaries, it would be within the Eurozone of the European Union where there is free immigration and there are no customs stations between neighboring member countries, where there is a single currency, where there have been efforts to harmonize economic and monetary policy for half a century.
You would, however, be wrong.
The GDP per capita in Germany is almost identical to the GDP per capita in France, and has been continously almost identical since before 2005. Unsurprisingly, given their common currency, they have had almost the same inflation rates in that time period. But, since 2005, Germany's unemployment rate has fallen from about 12% to about 6%, while France's unemployment rate which started at 9%, quite a bit better off than Germany, wobbled down to about 7% in 2008 and has drifted up to about 10%.
France's economy has been able to buffer itself much better from the financial crisis, at the costs of continuously medicore unemployment rates, while Germany's unemployment rate has behaved as if the financial crisis never happened and the last six years have been one long economic boom.
Language is a barrier to labor mobility, even though immigration laws are not, so Europe's labor market is still not as barrier free as the domestic labor market of the United States, for example.
Also, the two economies starkly uncut the notion that unemployment rates are fundamentally linked to GDP growth. Steven Erlanger at the New York Times accounts for some of the leading reasons experts give for the difference, mostly related to differences in the fundamental makeup of the German and French economies and to how they have made different policy choices about how to organize their labor markets:
Culture may also be at work. One German employment bureaucrat cites the usual cliche: “The French work to live and the Germans live to work.”
The U.S., with a population nearly as great as the European Union, has a huge, largely open internal labor market that is linguistically united, and also has a common currency.
Unemployment benefits have been extended to almost two years in the U.S., like the more generous French benefits, but qualifying for unemployment benefits at all in the U.S. is far more difficult than in Germany or France, and the benefits one does receive in the U.S. are more meager.
Also, unemployment in the U.S. means more sacrifices for famillies in the U.S. in terms of access to health care and higher education. The French and Germans have quite different health care systems, but they are both effectively universal, and the financial contributions families have to make to send their kids to college in either of those countries is trivial compared to that of U.S. families, even for kids attending public colleges. In the U.S., a lost job can mean lost lifelong economic prospects for your children and permanent sacrifices to your health. In Europe, the burdens of unemployment are temporary.
(The universal health care system doesn't come at the expense of quality. Both France and Germany pay far less for health care, with better results, than the U.S., per capita. The French universal health care system is more statist. The German system looks a lot like "Obamacare" and "Romneycare". The quality of higher education in Germany and France probably isn't as outstanding at the high end, although but countries have some prestigious and functional enough universities.)
For an unemployed U.S. worker nearing retirement age, a lost job combined with a weak economy may mean dipping into retirement funds to pay current expenses like a mortgage that would be catastrophic not to pay, at your investments' low point, paying taxes and tax penalties upon withdrawing those funds, and realistically, having to spend more years in the work force at a job for which you are overqualified that pays less than the job you lost.
In France and Germany, private sector workers have government or union sponsored retirement plans that look more like the defined benefit retirement plans of public sector workers and unionized industrial workers in the U.S., and of course, a signficantly greater share of the work force is in the public sector.
Vocational education and apprenticeships are, if anything, more anemic and looked down upon in the U.S. than in France, let alone Germany. The U.S. has perhaps the weakest unions in the developed world, and certainly its unions are far weaker than those of either France or Germany. It also has a labor market less regulated than either France or Germany, and while it has a national minimum wage, it isn't generous compared to that in any particular place in France or Germany.
The U.S. unemployment rate is between Germany's and France's right now, but the U.S. has an exceptionally high share of people who are long term unemployed, and has many people who who are part-time for economic reasons or discouraged workers who have no reason to be out of the labor force but have given up and thus aren't counted as unemployed. The U.S. economy is more like France's than Germany's, it has deindustrialized and imports more than it exports.
U.S. workers work more hours per year than their peers in either Germany or France, the U.S. has fairly comparable labor force participation by women to Germany and France, and overall the U.S. probably has more children per worker on average than either Germany or France (a trend driven significantly by immigration, as native born fertility has plunged in the U.S. just as it has in Europe). The overall foreign born labor pool in the U.S. is also probably larger as a percentage of the labor force than in either Germany or France, even though Germany has many non-citizen workers from Turkey and France has many immigrant workers from its many former colonies, particularly in Africa.
Unlike either Germany or France, the unemployment trends in the U.S. have consistently been a lagging indicator of the business cycle that is strongly linked to the business cycle. The U.S. has cut civilian public sector employment considerably since 2005 at all levels of government and is poised to do so in the military as well; these public sector labor force cuts have offset employment gains in the private sector.
The German economy looks good now, but it didn't look so hot in 2005 or even 2007 compared to France or the U.S. And, nobody is complaining about rising salaries in France. The U.S. has seen considerable economic growth, but almost all of the salary gains in the U.S. have been captured by those at the top of the economic pyramid, while in France, everyone but those of that very top have made more salary gains than their economic counterparts in the U.S. and members of the German and French middle and working class have levels of economic security unimaginable to the their American counterparts.
The two big mysteries of the Germany economy that don't seem to involve tradeoffs of one good thing for another (and hence which might be reproducible and worth reproducing), are the succcess of its apprenticeship track, and the health of its industrial sector. It is hard to tell if the former is mostly just a product of the latter, if the industrial sector owed a lot of its success to apprenticeship programs, or if the two points have little to do with each other.
American supporters of "reindustrialization", both Democrats including President Obama and people on the right like Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, tend to favor getting their by what amounts to merchantalist economic policies. But, those kinds of policies do little to explain why Germany still have a thriving industrial sector, while France has a much more anemic one.
Reindustrialization advocated who bemoan our declining manufacturing sector, rarely question the fact that the vast majority of high schools in the United States offer the vast majority of students whose academic records make it clear that they are unlikely to graduate college with a four year liberal arts degree, essentially a watered down version of the college prepatory curriculum that serves high school students who have a realistic shot of being admitted to college and graduating given their past academic successes. It is not at all obvious that this makes any sense. But, God forbid that we deny any kid on track to take 8th grade math in his senior year in the bottom half of his class in GPA who has twenty unexcused absenses a year and is a regular in detention a shot at going to Harvard or medical school or a chance to run for President. That would be the bigotry of low expectations, right?
UPDATE 3-5-2012: More on apprenticeship options in Germany as a model here.
You would, however, be wrong.
Emmendingen, a German town of 27,000 that is only slightly larger than Sélestat[, France] and barely 20 miles away, has an unemployment rate of under 3 percent. Among those under 25 years of age, the unemployment rate in Sélestat is 23 percent; in Emmendingen, it is 7 percent.
The GDP per capita in Germany is almost identical to the GDP per capita in France, and has been continously almost identical since before 2005. Unsurprisingly, given their common currency, they have had almost the same inflation rates in that time period. But, since 2005, Germany's unemployment rate has fallen from about 12% to about 6%, while France's unemployment rate which started at 9%, quite a bit better off than Germany, wobbled down to about 7% in 2008 and has drifted up to about 10%.
France's economy has been able to buffer itself much better from the financial crisis, at the costs of continuously medicore unemployment rates, while Germany's unemployment rate has behaved as if the financial crisis never happened and the last six years have been one long economic boom.
Language is a barrier to labor mobility, even though immigration laws are not, so Europe's labor market is still not as barrier free as the domestic labor market of the United States, for example.
Also, the two economies starkly uncut the notion that unemployment rates are fundamentally linked to GDP growth. Steven Erlanger at the New York Times accounts for some of the leading reasons experts give for the difference, mostly related to differences in the fundamental makeup of the German and French economies and to how they have made different policy choices about how to organize their labor markets:
Germany has maintained its industrial base and competitive edge, both technologically and in terms of cost, while France lacks a large sector of medium-size industrial enterprises and depends much more on services. The French share of global exports has steadily fallen, while the German share has steadily risen.
French salaries have increased in real terms while German salaries have fallen, making French workers more expensive and thus less productive and competitive. French social protections for the unemployed are also much more lavish, especially after the Germans pushed through the so-called Hartz reforms, which largely limited unemployment benefits to 12 months. In France, the duration is 23 months for those under 50 and three years for those over 50, many of whom never work again.
In part to pay for those benefits, the cost to business of an hour’s labor is 11 percent higher in France. But there is less job security in Germany, and more Germans do part-time work. The Germans do not have a centrally fixed minimum wage, as the French do. . . .
Salaries on the German side are higher for similar work, goods are cheaper, the cost of hiring a full-time employee is lower and the relationship between German workers and their bosses is more supple and flexible, freer of the centralized regulations, ministries and unions characteristic of France. . . . [T]he French have more children than the Germans and more women are in the work force, which swells the numbers looking for work. . . .
Many labor experts single out the German apprenticeship system as a major competitive advantage. It takes young people out of the university track at 16 and trains them in industrial skills, as they simultaneously study for a technical degree and work for a salary. They often get full-time jobs with companies that have invested in training. . . . Many French parents and their children still regard a vocational degree or apprenticeship — instead of a university degree — as a sign of stupidity or failure[.]
Culture may also be at work. One German employment bureaucrat cites the usual cliche: “The French work to live and the Germans live to work.”
The U.S., with a population nearly as great as the European Union, has a huge, largely open internal labor market that is linguistically united, and also has a common currency.
Unemployment benefits have been extended to almost two years in the U.S., like the more generous French benefits, but qualifying for unemployment benefits at all in the U.S. is far more difficult than in Germany or France, and the benefits one does receive in the U.S. are more meager.
Also, unemployment in the U.S. means more sacrifices for famillies in the U.S. in terms of access to health care and higher education. The French and Germans have quite different health care systems, but they are both effectively universal, and the financial contributions families have to make to send their kids to college in either of those countries is trivial compared to that of U.S. families, even for kids attending public colleges. In the U.S., a lost job can mean lost lifelong economic prospects for your children and permanent sacrifices to your health. In Europe, the burdens of unemployment are temporary.
(The universal health care system doesn't come at the expense of quality. Both France and Germany pay far less for health care, with better results, than the U.S., per capita. The French universal health care system is more statist. The German system looks a lot like "Obamacare" and "Romneycare". The quality of higher education in Germany and France probably isn't as outstanding at the high end, although but countries have some prestigious and functional enough universities.)
For an unemployed U.S. worker nearing retirement age, a lost job combined with a weak economy may mean dipping into retirement funds to pay current expenses like a mortgage that would be catastrophic not to pay, at your investments' low point, paying taxes and tax penalties upon withdrawing those funds, and realistically, having to spend more years in the work force at a job for which you are overqualified that pays less than the job you lost.
In France and Germany, private sector workers have government or union sponsored retirement plans that look more like the defined benefit retirement plans of public sector workers and unionized industrial workers in the U.S., and of course, a signficantly greater share of the work force is in the public sector.
Vocational education and apprenticeships are, if anything, more anemic and looked down upon in the U.S. than in France, let alone Germany. The U.S. has perhaps the weakest unions in the developed world, and certainly its unions are far weaker than those of either France or Germany. It also has a labor market less regulated than either France or Germany, and while it has a national minimum wage, it isn't generous compared to that in any particular place in France or Germany.
The U.S. unemployment rate is between Germany's and France's right now, but the U.S. has an exceptionally high share of people who are long term unemployed, and has many people who who are part-time for economic reasons or discouraged workers who have no reason to be out of the labor force but have given up and thus aren't counted as unemployed. The U.S. economy is more like France's than Germany's, it has deindustrialized and imports more than it exports.
U.S. workers work more hours per year than their peers in either Germany or France, the U.S. has fairly comparable labor force participation by women to Germany and France, and overall the U.S. probably has more children per worker on average than either Germany or France (a trend driven significantly by immigration, as native born fertility has plunged in the U.S. just as it has in Europe). The overall foreign born labor pool in the U.S. is also probably larger as a percentage of the labor force than in either Germany or France, even though Germany has many non-citizen workers from Turkey and France has many immigrant workers from its many former colonies, particularly in Africa.
Unlike either Germany or France, the unemployment trends in the U.S. have consistently been a lagging indicator of the business cycle that is strongly linked to the business cycle. The U.S. has cut civilian public sector employment considerably since 2005 at all levels of government and is poised to do so in the military as well; these public sector labor force cuts have offset employment gains in the private sector.
The German economy looks good now, but it didn't look so hot in 2005 or even 2007 compared to France or the U.S. And, nobody is complaining about rising salaries in France. The U.S. has seen considerable economic growth, but almost all of the salary gains in the U.S. have been captured by those at the top of the economic pyramid, while in France, everyone but those of that very top have made more salary gains than their economic counterparts in the U.S. and members of the German and French middle and working class have levels of economic security unimaginable to the their American counterparts.
The two big mysteries of the Germany economy that don't seem to involve tradeoffs of one good thing for another (and hence which might be reproducible and worth reproducing), are the succcess of its apprenticeship track, and the health of its industrial sector. It is hard to tell if the former is mostly just a product of the latter, if the industrial sector owed a lot of its success to apprenticeship programs, or if the two points have little to do with each other.
American supporters of "reindustrialization", both Democrats including President Obama and people on the right like Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, tend to favor getting their by what amounts to merchantalist economic policies. But, those kinds of policies do little to explain why Germany still have a thriving industrial sector, while France has a much more anemic one.
Reindustrialization advocated who bemoan our declining manufacturing sector, rarely question the fact that the vast majority of high schools in the United States offer the vast majority of students whose academic records make it clear that they are unlikely to graduate college with a four year liberal arts degree, essentially a watered down version of the college prepatory curriculum that serves high school students who have a realistic shot of being admitted to college and graduating given their past academic successes. It is not at all obvious that this makes any sense. But, God forbid that we deny any kid on track to take 8th grade math in his senior year in the bottom half of his class in GPA who has twenty unexcused absenses a year and is a regular in detention a shot at going to Harvard or medical school or a chance to run for President. That would be the bigotry of low expectations, right?
UPDATE 3-5-2012: More on apprenticeship options in Germany as a model here.
Tech I Want: A Megakindle
The Kindle is a nice device in that it is simple, thin, has a very low battery life, and allows a certain amount of annotation of texts.
One of the main reasons that I print documents is because they have formating that doesn't translate to a computer screen and because it is easier on the eyes and easier on a person's ability to scan text to see it on paper. A Kindle would address many of the reasons I print documents rather than viewing them on a screen, but it is too small of the purposes that I print documents and doesn't have a stylus interface for easy proof reading.
I would love to have (although I might not be able to afford it) a Kindle-like electronic device, integrated with my office's computer system, with a screen the size of a legal sized piece of paper and a stylus which which I could mark up documents on that screen. Call it the "Megakindle." It would also facilitate an ability for people to review legal documents like Wills and real estate closing documents in electronic form, initialing and signing them manually, without actually printing them out - eliminating the need for people distant from each other to Fed Ex or scan or fax documents, or the need to have documents signed by multiple people signed in counterparts, without a complicated user interface.
A complimentary technology to the Megakindle would be a secure repository in the cloud for executed legal documents that could be called up with a url and some sort of security code or personal ID (for example, a finger print reader integrated into the Megakindle). Indeed, biometric verification of identity would be better than the authentication role served by notarization, in addition to the narrowing the universe of documents that a user of a Megakindle would have to choose from in a cloud environment, and would also eliminate the hassle of user names and passwords. There are consumer grade biometric identifiers out there (24 Fitness, for example, has that option in lieu of a pass card), but they aren't very widely used.
This would also be a good general purpose device to substitute for a dedicated credit card electronic signature unit, or PDAs used by delivery services, for small businesses like law firms and process servers. The credit card receipt, or proof of delivery document, could show up on the screeen and be signed like any other legal document at any location where the consumer had one available, even if it wasn't where the person generating the credit card sale was located.
One of the main reasons that I print documents is because they have formating that doesn't translate to a computer screen and because it is easier on the eyes and easier on a person's ability to scan text to see it on paper. A Kindle would address many of the reasons I print documents rather than viewing them on a screen, but it is too small of the purposes that I print documents and doesn't have a stylus interface for easy proof reading.
I would love to have (although I might not be able to afford it) a Kindle-like electronic device, integrated with my office's computer system, with a screen the size of a legal sized piece of paper and a stylus which which I could mark up documents on that screen. Call it the "Megakindle." It would also facilitate an ability for people to review legal documents like Wills and real estate closing documents in electronic form, initialing and signing them manually, without actually printing them out - eliminating the need for people distant from each other to Fed Ex or scan or fax documents, or the need to have documents signed by multiple people signed in counterparts, without a complicated user interface.
A complimentary technology to the Megakindle would be a secure repository in the cloud for executed legal documents that could be called up with a url and some sort of security code or personal ID (for example, a finger print reader integrated into the Megakindle). Indeed, biometric verification of identity would be better than the authentication role served by notarization, in addition to the narrowing the universe of documents that a user of a Megakindle would have to choose from in a cloud environment, and would also eliminate the hassle of user names and passwords. There are consumer grade biometric identifiers out there (24 Fitness, for example, has that option in lieu of a pass card), but they aren't very widely used.
This would also be a good general purpose device to substitute for a dedicated credit card electronic signature unit, or PDAs used by delivery services, for small businesses like law firms and process servers. The credit card receipt, or proof of delivery document, could show up on the screeen and be signed like any other legal document at any location where the consumer had one available, even if it wasn't where the person generating the credit card sale was located.
29 February 2012
Democrats In Denver Have Precinct Caucuses On March 6, 2012
Didn't that already happen? No.
Colorado Republicans have a Presidential race caucus earlier this February, but the plain vanilla, choose precinct committee people, propose party platform plank, start the process of nominating partisan candidates for political office caucuses for Democrats in Denver, at least, will be held on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, with sign in starting at 6:30 p.m. and the precinct caucuses themselves beginning at 7:00 p.m.
Honestly, for Democrats in Denver, this year's caucus process is going to be more about networking than exercising the power that comes from showing up.
The only serious intraparty nomination fight in 2012 for Democrats in Denver this primary season is likely to involve the people who want to be Denver's next District Attorney. I don't know at this time who is even in the running, although I'm sure I'll learn more at the caucus on Tuesday. There is also an open seat in House District 9 since Joe Miklosi is running for Congress, with Rosenthal fetted as the strongest of the two identified candidates seeking the Democratic party nomination in that race.
For that matter, the only interesting general election partisan candidate races that Denver voters are likely to consider in 2012 are the races for the U.S. President and University of Colorado Regent At Large, for which the Democrats will running the incumbents in both cases, and the race for the open position of Denver District Attorney, which could conceivably give rise to a meaningful partisan contest in Denver if Republicans run a credible moderate candidate for the post.
So, unless you have stong feelings about who should be our next district attorney or want to get your foot in the door of Denver's Democratic Party machine as a precinct committee person (who also has a say in any vacancy committee elections for a candidate who represents their precinct that are held over the next two years), you can be excuses for skipping the caucuses, and even the primary election this year in Denver. Just please, show up to the polls in November.
Local Offices In Denver
As usual, most of the local offices that appear before Denver voters are non-partisan, and as a result, Denver's political parties aren't involved in the nomination process for any of these offices and there are no primary elections for these races.
In Denver, we have a non-partisan Mayor, Auditor, Clerk and Recorder, and City Council, all of who are elected in odd number years with first round elections held in the spring. Regional Transporation District (RTD) directorship elections and Denver School Board elections are held in November, but are also non-partisan.
Judicial retention elections held in November (in which voters are asked to "retain" or "not retain" a long list of sitting judges who were appointed based on reviews compiled by a state agency) are non-partisan.
There is a partisan election for District Attorney (officially a state government position, but elected by voters from local judicial district and funded by the counties in the judicial district) in Denver this year in which the political parties are involved in nominating and supporting candidates. The incumbent in Denver's Second Judicial District (which includes all of the City and County of Denver and no other territory) is Democrat Mitch Morrissey, who was first elected in 2004 and was re-elected in 2008. Colorado has the somewhat odd process of letting voters in each of the twenty-two judicial districts (most have multiple counties) each set their own term limits. As of August 2011, six Colorado judicial districts had extended the term limit for District Attorneys to three terms rather than the default of two terms, and the judicial district that includes the City of Pueblo had abolished term limits for District Attorneys all together.
To the best of my knowledge, Denver is not among the judicial districts that have increased term limits for the District Attorney (although it is surprisingly hard to easily find a list of those term limits in one place), so Morrissey cannot run for re-election in 2012. This leaves an open race for this powerful post that could lead to the most interesting non-Presidential political race in Denver this year. It is also probably the only partisan race in Denver in which the Republicans, if the were to offer up a suitably qualified and moderate candidate, would have any real shot at winning, because it is an executive branch position where the person running matters more than their political party.
Federal Offices
Obviously, the big event this year will be the Presidential election. But, on the Democratic side, President Obama is uncontested and the Republicans in Colorado have already had their say in the Presidential primary and caucus process this year and have to wait until the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August to have either Romney or Santorum annointed as their nominee and to select a Vice Presidential running mate. President Obama could choose a new Vice President at the Democratic National Convention this summer, or could keep Joe Biden, but Democratic party voters will have essentially no input on that decision.
Each state has two Senators who each serve six year terms. Thus, each state goes without an election for U.S. Senator every six years. In Colorado, 2012 is the cycle we get a break of U.S. Senate races.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives face re-election every two years in partisan, single member district races and this year will be the first year that Colorado's seven member delegation is selected from new Congressional districts based on the 2010 Census. In some races, like the 6th Congressional District race where incumbent Republican Mike Coffman will have a much more politically moderate district that he has had in previous elections that Democrats Joe Milklosi (the incumbent state representative from House District 9) and Perry Haney are facing off in the causus and primary process for the privilege of fighting him starting Tuesday, it could be very exciting indeed. But, in Denver, where many term incumbent Diana DeGette's 1st Congressional District remains a predominantly Denver based district that is safely Democratic, neither a primary challenger nor a serious general election challenger has emerged.
U.S. Representaties and U.S. Senators, of course, are not subject to term limits, despite the unconstitutional efforts of Colorado voters to impose them on its delegation.
State Government
Elections for state level executive branch posts: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State and State Treasurer are held in even numbered years when there aren't Presidential elections, so none of those posts are up for consideration.
There are a few state and local partisan positions that will be on the ballot in Denver in 2012, and there will be a bit of confusion as voters find themselves in newly drawn districts for various political offices. Also, all partisan state and local offices in Colorado have some kind of term limits.
All state representatives face partisan elections every two years and this will be their first elections with redrawn state house districts. Roughly half of the members of the state senate face re-election every two years to four year terms. In each case, there are eight year term limits, so there is often a fair amount of term limit induced turnover even in districts that are safe for one political party or the other.
None of incumbents state representatives from the nine house districts that were at least partially in Denver in 2010, all of whom are Democrats, are term limited this year, so there is every reason to expect that all of the nine, except Joe Miklosi, will run again, and will not face any serious challengers in the caucus process or at a primary this summer, and will for the most part, cruise to comfortable re-election in the general election in November from their generally fairly safe Democratic party leaning districts. Joe Miklosi's seat in House District 9, discussed above, has attracted two announced contenders so far, so this race will be a rare intraparty contest for Democrats this year.
The state senate situation is a bit more complicated. There were five state senate districts with significant portions in Denver, each with a Democrat as an incumbent, prior to redistricting: Senate Districts 31 (Pat Steadman), 32 (Irene Aguilar), 33 (Michael Johnston), 34 (Lucia Guzman) and 35 (Joyce Foster). Three of these are on the Presidential election year cycle: Senate Districts 31, 33 and 35, while Senate Districts 32 and 34 have their next elections in 2014. None of these five incumbents will be barred from running again at the next election. But, each of them represent a somewhat different district than the one in which they took office. Steadman, Johnston and Foster are all likely to seek re-election this year unopposed and are reasonably safe in the general election.
Each of the seven seats on the partisan Colorado Board of Education is identical to the corresponding newly drawn congressional districts. These seats filled for staggered six year terms with only some districts holding elections each two years. In 2012, voters in the First Congressional District, which is made up predominantly of Denver, won't have a Colorado School Board election. Denver's incumbent in the posts, Democrat Elaine Berman's seat isn't before voters until 2014. Term limits for the Colorado School Board are twelve years.
Seven of the nine seats on the elected from Congressional districts on the partisan University of Colorado Board of Regents, with the other two spots are "at large", and they serve for staggered six year terms. All Colorado voter will cast ballots for the at large position currently held by Democrat Stephen Ludwig. But, the next election for the 1st Congressional District CU Regent spot held by Michael Carrigan isn't until 2016. Term limits for the University of Colorado Regents are twelve years. Ludgwig won his first six year term in 2006 and there is ever reason to expect that he will be uncontested within the Democratic party in a bid to seek re-election.
Colorado Republicans have a Presidential race caucus earlier this February, but the plain vanilla, choose precinct committee people, propose party platform plank, start the process of nominating partisan candidates for political office caucuses for Democrats in Denver, at least, will be held on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, with sign in starting at 6:30 p.m. and the precinct caucuses themselves beginning at 7:00 p.m.
Honestly, for Democrats in Denver, this year's caucus process is going to be more about networking than exercising the power that comes from showing up.
The only serious intraparty nomination fight in 2012 for Democrats in Denver this primary season is likely to involve the people who want to be Denver's next District Attorney. I don't know at this time who is even in the running, although I'm sure I'll learn more at the caucus on Tuesday. There is also an open seat in House District 9 since Joe Miklosi is running for Congress, with Rosenthal fetted as the strongest of the two identified candidates seeking the Democratic party nomination in that race.
For that matter, the only interesting general election partisan candidate races that Denver voters are likely to consider in 2012 are the races for the U.S. President and University of Colorado Regent At Large, for which the Democrats will running the incumbents in both cases, and the race for the open position of Denver District Attorney, which could conceivably give rise to a meaningful partisan contest in Denver if Republicans run a credible moderate candidate for the post.
So, unless you have stong feelings about who should be our next district attorney or want to get your foot in the door of Denver's Democratic Party machine as a precinct committee person (who also has a say in any vacancy committee elections for a candidate who represents their precinct that are held over the next two years), you can be excuses for skipping the caucuses, and even the primary election this year in Denver. Just please, show up to the polls in November.
Local Offices In Denver
As usual, most of the local offices that appear before Denver voters are non-partisan, and as a result, Denver's political parties aren't involved in the nomination process for any of these offices and there are no primary elections for these races.
In Denver, we have a non-partisan Mayor, Auditor, Clerk and Recorder, and City Council, all of who are elected in odd number years with first round elections held in the spring. Regional Transporation District (RTD) directorship elections and Denver School Board elections are held in November, but are also non-partisan.
Judicial retention elections held in November (in which voters are asked to "retain" or "not retain" a long list of sitting judges who were appointed based on reviews compiled by a state agency) are non-partisan.
There is a partisan election for District Attorney (officially a state government position, but elected by voters from local judicial district and funded by the counties in the judicial district) in Denver this year in which the political parties are involved in nominating and supporting candidates. The incumbent in Denver's Second Judicial District (which includes all of the City and County of Denver and no other territory) is Democrat Mitch Morrissey, who was first elected in 2004 and was re-elected in 2008. Colorado has the somewhat odd process of letting voters in each of the twenty-two judicial districts (most have multiple counties) each set their own term limits. As of August 2011, six Colorado judicial districts had extended the term limit for District Attorneys to three terms rather than the default of two terms, and the judicial district that includes the City of Pueblo had abolished term limits for District Attorneys all together.
To the best of my knowledge, Denver is not among the judicial districts that have increased term limits for the District Attorney (although it is surprisingly hard to easily find a list of those term limits in one place), so Morrissey cannot run for re-election in 2012. This leaves an open race for this powerful post that could lead to the most interesting non-Presidential political race in Denver this year. It is also probably the only partisan race in Denver in which the Republicans, if the were to offer up a suitably qualified and moderate candidate, would have any real shot at winning, because it is an executive branch position where the person running matters more than their political party.
Federal Offices
Obviously, the big event this year will be the Presidential election. But, on the Democratic side, President Obama is uncontested and the Republicans in Colorado have already had their say in the Presidential primary and caucus process this year and have to wait until the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August to have either Romney or Santorum annointed as their nominee and to select a Vice Presidential running mate. President Obama could choose a new Vice President at the Democratic National Convention this summer, or could keep Joe Biden, but Democratic party voters will have essentially no input on that decision.
Each state has two Senators who each serve six year terms. Thus, each state goes without an election for U.S. Senator every six years. In Colorado, 2012 is the cycle we get a break of U.S. Senate races.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives face re-election every two years in partisan, single member district races and this year will be the first year that Colorado's seven member delegation is selected from new Congressional districts based on the 2010 Census. In some races, like the 6th Congressional District race where incumbent Republican Mike Coffman will have a much more politically moderate district that he has had in previous elections that Democrats Joe Milklosi (the incumbent state representative from House District 9) and Perry Haney are facing off in the causus and primary process for the privilege of fighting him starting Tuesday, it could be very exciting indeed. But, in Denver, where many term incumbent Diana DeGette's 1st Congressional District remains a predominantly Denver based district that is safely Democratic, neither a primary challenger nor a serious general election challenger has emerged.
U.S. Representaties and U.S. Senators, of course, are not subject to term limits, despite the unconstitutional efforts of Colorado voters to impose them on its delegation.
State Government
Elections for state level executive branch posts: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State and State Treasurer are held in even numbered years when there aren't Presidential elections, so none of those posts are up for consideration.
There are a few state and local partisan positions that will be on the ballot in Denver in 2012, and there will be a bit of confusion as voters find themselves in newly drawn districts for various political offices. Also, all partisan state and local offices in Colorado have some kind of term limits.
All state representatives face partisan elections every two years and this will be their first elections with redrawn state house districts. Roughly half of the members of the state senate face re-election every two years to four year terms. In each case, there are eight year term limits, so there is often a fair amount of term limit induced turnover even in districts that are safe for one political party or the other.
None of incumbents state representatives from the nine house districts that were at least partially in Denver in 2010, all of whom are Democrats, are term limited this year, so there is every reason to expect that all of the nine, except Joe Miklosi, will run again, and will not face any serious challengers in the caucus process or at a primary this summer, and will for the most part, cruise to comfortable re-election in the general election in November from their generally fairly safe Democratic party leaning districts. Joe Miklosi's seat in House District 9, discussed above, has attracted two announced contenders so far, so this race will be a rare intraparty contest for Democrats this year.
The state senate situation is a bit more complicated. There were five state senate districts with significant portions in Denver, each with a Democrat as an incumbent, prior to redistricting: Senate Districts 31 (Pat Steadman), 32 (Irene Aguilar), 33 (Michael Johnston), 34 (Lucia Guzman) and 35 (Joyce Foster). Three of these are on the Presidential election year cycle: Senate Districts 31, 33 and 35, while Senate Districts 32 and 34 have their next elections in 2014. None of these five incumbents will be barred from running again at the next election. But, each of them represent a somewhat different district than the one in which they took office. Steadman, Johnston and Foster are all likely to seek re-election this year unopposed and are reasonably safe in the general election.
Each of the seven seats on the partisan Colorado Board of Education is identical to the corresponding newly drawn congressional districts. These seats filled for staggered six year terms with only some districts holding elections each two years. In 2012, voters in the First Congressional District, which is made up predominantly of Denver, won't have a Colorado School Board election. Denver's incumbent in the posts, Democrat Elaine Berman's seat isn't before voters until 2014. Term limits for the Colorado School Board are twelve years.
Seven of the nine seats on the elected from Congressional districts on the partisan University of Colorado Board of Regents, with the other two spots are "at large", and they serve for staggered six year terms. All Colorado voter will cast ballots for the at large position currently held by Democrat Stephen Ludwig. But, the next election for the 1st Congressional District CU Regent spot held by Michael Carrigan isn't until 2016. Term limits for the University of Colorado Regents are twelve years. Ludgwig won his first six year term in 2006 and there is ever reason to expect that he will be uncontested within the Democratic party in a bid to seek re-election.
28 February 2012
Olympia Snowe To Leave Senate And More
Olympia Snowe, the U.S. Senator from Maine and one of the few remaining moderate Republicans in Congress has announced that she is not running for re-election. Snowe's decision not to run turns a fairly safe Republican seat into one that is attainable for Democrats in an open race, improving Democrats odds of retaining control of the U.S. Senate in 2012.
Early rumors and polling put Romney and Santorum neck and neck in today's Michigan, where Romney grew up, while strongly favoring Romney in today's Arizona primary. The states have similar numbers of Republican national convention delegates. Prior GOP primary results are summarize here. Any good news for Santorum tends to strength Democratic's odds in the Presidential race, as Romney is the more moderate general election candidate. With tonight's results Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich have effectively faded to irrelevance in the GOP Presidential nomination race. Any likely result from tonight will still leave Romney with an absolute majority of the Republican delegates allocated to date for the GOP national convention in Tampa, Florida, but will disturb his momentum and solidify Santorum as a viable "not Romney" candidate in the primary.
The early, wildly premature results from Michigan are that "With 1% of precincts reporting in Michigan, Santorum leads with 41%, followed by Romney's 37%, Paul's 12% and Gingrich's 7%." Michigan is not a winner take all state, instead its delegates are mostly divided by Congressional district, so each man could easily take close to half of Michigan's delegates, helping Romney in a war of attrition, but not momentum, going into Super Tuesday.
UPDATE: With about 1/7th of the vote in, the results of similar. Late results are likely to be from more conservative parts of Michigan. Also, about 40% if Michigan Republican primary voters aren't Republicans, which artificially elevates the performan of Ron Paul and Romney (although an 2008 op-ed from Romney saying that Detroit should go bankrupt probably doesn't help him in Michigan).
If Santorum can knock Gingrich out this week, he would go into Super Tuesday as a much more formidable opponent.
Early rumors and polling put Romney and Santorum neck and neck in today's Michigan, where Romney grew up, while strongly favoring Romney in today's Arizona primary. The states have similar numbers of Republican national convention delegates. Prior GOP primary results are summarize here. Any good news for Santorum tends to strength Democratic's odds in the Presidential race, as Romney is the more moderate general election candidate. With tonight's results Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich have effectively faded to irrelevance in the GOP Presidential nomination race. Any likely result from tonight will still leave Romney with an absolute majority of the Republican delegates allocated to date for the GOP national convention in Tampa, Florida, but will disturb his momentum and solidify Santorum as a viable "not Romney" candidate in the primary.
The early, wildly premature results from Michigan are that "With 1% of precincts reporting in Michigan, Santorum leads with 41%, followed by Romney's 37%, Paul's 12% and Gingrich's 7%." Michigan is not a winner take all state, instead its delegates are mostly divided by Congressional district, so each man could easily take close to half of Michigan's delegates, helping Romney in a war of attrition, but not momentum, going into Super Tuesday.
UPDATE: With about 1/7th of the vote in, the results of similar. Late results are likely to be from more conservative parts of Michigan. Also, about 40% if Michigan Republican primary voters aren't Republicans, which artificially elevates the performan of Ron Paul and Romney (although an 2008 op-ed from Romney saying that Detroit should go bankrupt probably doesn't help him in Michigan).
If Santorum can knock Gingrich out this week, he would go into Super Tuesday as a much more formidable opponent.
Statistical Analysis of Authorship
Statistical analysis of authorship styles support a number of interesting conclusions.
In the case of the anonymously published Federalist papers, most of the papers are attributed to Hamilton (51), Madison (14), John Jay (5), or a collaboration of Hamilton and Madison (3), but twelve have disputed authorship. Statistical analysis of the linguistic features of those texts favors a Madisonian authorship of all the papers of disputed authorship.
Analysis of the verses in the Torah support an authorship distinction between Priestly and Non-Priestly sources that matches the scholarly consensus developed over centuries (where one existed at all) more than 90% of the time. The algorhythm was trained using a learning experiment in which the tool distinguished verses belong to the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel respectively.
Efforts to statistically distinguish Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare's corpus produce an ambiguous result with several of the seven works in the corpus of Marlowe identified as early Shakespearian instead. There are also several other historical figures who are serious candidates to have been alternate authors of Shakespeare's plays. Computational linguistic methods have seen much greater similarities between Marlowe and Shakespeare than Sir Francis Bacon or the "Oxfordian theory."
In a set of 100,000 blogs including two thousand blogs that also have a co-authored blog of two blogs outside the set, a statistical analysis matched just three posts from a blog outside the set of 100,000 to its co-authored match within the set of 100,000 as the single most likely match about 20% of time, compared to an expected 0.001% success rate predicted by random chance. Identifying information such as author names were removed from by the source and the comparison sets. With more data and less insistence on accuracy one can do better. Specifically:
Moreover, this was done with just a quick and dirty search alogrithm published itself in a blog post ("The good news for authors who would like to protect themselves against deanonymization, it appears that manually changing one’s style is enough to throw off these attacks.") that could be refined with experience and by using data that would be considered "cheating" in the statistical authorship analysis conducted.
All of this goes to show that in individual's writing style, while not quite as distinctive as their DNA or fingerprints, is still quite distinctive and a fairly accurately measure of authorships. It also suggests that privacy on the Internet, as a result of latent features to track authorship, may be even more illusory than it seems.
In the case of the anonymously published Federalist papers, most of the papers are attributed to Hamilton (51), Madison (14), John Jay (5), or a collaboration of Hamilton and Madison (3), but twelve have disputed authorship. Statistical analysis of the linguistic features of those texts favors a Madisonian authorship of all the papers of disputed authorship.
Analysis of the verses in the Torah support an authorship distinction between Priestly and Non-Priestly sources that matches the scholarly consensus developed over centuries (where one existed at all) more than 90% of the time. The algorhythm was trained using a learning experiment in which the tool distinguished verses belong to the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel respectively.
Efforts to statistically distinguish Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare's corpus produce an ambiguous result with several of the seven works in the corpus of Marlowe identified as early Shakespearian instead. There are also several other historical figures who are serious candidates to have been alternate authors of Shakespeare's plays. Computational linguistic methods have seen much greater similarities between Marlowe and Shakespeare than Sir Francis Bacon or the "Oxfordian theory."
In a set of 100,000 blogs including two thousand blogs that also have a co-authored blog of two blogs outside the set, a statistical analysis matched just three posts from a blog outside the set of 100,000 to its co-authored match within the set of 100,000 as the single most likely match about 20% of time, compared to an expected 0.001% success rate predicted by random chance. Identifying information such as author names were removed from by the source and the comparison sets. With more data and less insistence on accuracy one can do better. Specifically:
This means that when our algorithm uses three anonymously published blog posts to rank the possible authors in descending order of probability, the top guess is correct 20% of the time.
But it gets better from there. In 35% of cases, the correct author is one of the top 20 guesses. Why does this matter? Because in practice, algorithmic analysis probably won’t be the only step in authorship recognition, and will instead be used to produce a shortlist for further investigation. A manual examination may incorporate several characteristics that the automated analysis does not, such as choice of topic (our algorithms are scrupulously “topic-free”). Location is another signal that can be used: for example, if we were trying to identify the author of the once-anonymous blog Washingtonienne we’d know that she almost certainly resides in or around Washington, D.C. Alternately, a powerful adversary such as law enforcement may require Blogger, WordPress, or another popular blog host to reveal the login times of the top suspects, which could be correlated with the timing of posts on the anonymous blog to confirm a match.
We can also improve the accuracy significantly over the baseline of 20% for authors for whom we have more than an average number of labeled or unlabeled blog posts. For example, with 40–50 labeled posts to work with (the average is 20 posts per author), the accuracy goes up to 30–35%. . . . [with tweaks in the formula] the algorithm does not always attempt to identify an author, but when it does, it finds the right author 80% of the time.
Moreover, this was done with just a quick and dirty search alogrithm published itself in a blog post ("The good news for authors who would like to protect themselves against deanonymization, it appears that manually changing one’s style is enough to throw off these attacks.") that could be refined with experience and by using data that would be considered "cheating" in the statistical authorship analysis conducted.
All of this goes to show that in individual's writing style, while not quite as distinctive as their DNA or fingerprints, is still quite distinctive and a fairly accurately measure of authorships. It also suggests that privacy on the Internet, as a result of latent features to track authorship, may be even more illusory than it seems.
Ignoring Star Wars Episode I
A lengthy post here notes that Episode I (the fourth movie made) of the Star Wars saga is almost entirely superfluous to the story arc of the other five movies.
While the fact that this is the case is more or less irrelevant, since Star Wars fans will watch them all sooner or later anyway and probably already have done so.
I point the post out mostly because while Episode I wasn't canned by George Lucas who had immense financial backing due to the success of his first three movies and his ongoing support of the project in other media formats, a high level editorial choice to cut that much material from a multi-episode series of books, movies, or TV shows, or in cutting a novel down to another format that allows for less content like a movie, is actually almost the norm, rather than the exception. It tightens the story arc, it reduces the cost budget exposure of whoever if financing the deal, and it reduces subsequent episode attrition in the number of people who consumer the product. If you see an opportunity to do it in advance, you can fix the minor rough spots of the kind noted in the blog post linked that emerge in the overall story when you remove a large chunk of superfluous to the story arc material with relative ease. The lack of tight editing used to be the norm in the publishing industry (ever read Moby Dick or a Dickens novel?), but now tends to be the exception. It is one of those places where creative skill in the editing process has substantial, direct dollars and cents economic impact on the project itself. Rookie writers are particular prone to writing material succeptible to large scale wholesale editorial purging of unnecessary parts of the stories, as they have particular difficulty transitioning from short forms they can get published before they really establish themselves to the beginning, middle and end with more elaboration found in full length works.
This kind of big picture editing, which is incredibly painful, even if you feel better about the finished product afterwards, is every bit as common and necessary in most forms of non-fiction writing as it is in fiction writing.
With better planning Lucas might have done Episode I, if he did it at all, as a pre-pre-prequel and improved the reputation of the overall Star Wars brand in the process, or might have devoted a more or less stand alone sixth episode in the same world that would be more accessible to viewers new to the series that explored parts of the saga explored in other Star Wars properties with proven track records of success promoting cross-selling of Star Wars properties outside the story arc of the core movies.
While the fact that this is the case is more or less irrelevant, since Star Wars fans will watch them all sooner or later anyway and probably already have done so.
I point the post out mostly because while Episode I wasn't canned by George Lucas who had immense financial backing due to the success of his first three movies and his ongoing support of the project in other media formats, a high level editorial choice to cut that much material from a multi-episode series of books, movies, or TV shows, or in cutting a novel down to another format that allows for less content like a movie, is actually almost the norm, rather than the exception. It tightens the story arc, it reduces the cost budget exposure of whoever if financing the deal, and it reduces subsequent episode attrition in the number of people who consumer the product. If you see an opportunity to do it in advance, you can fix the minor rough spots of the kind noted in the blog post linked that emerge in the overall story when you remove a large chunk of superfluous to the story arc material with relative ease. The lack of tight editing used to be the norm in the publishing industry (ever read Moby Dick or a Dickens novel?), but now tends to be the exception. It is one of those places where creative skill in the editing process has substantial, direct dollars and cents economic impact on the project itself. Rookie writers are particular prone to writing material succeptible to large scale wholesale editorial purging of unnecessary parts of the stories, as they have particular difficulty transitioning from short forms they can get published before they really establish themselves to the beginning, middle and end with more elaboration found in full length works.
This kind of big picture editing, which is incredibly painful, even if you feel better about the finished product afterwards, is every bit as common and necessary in most forms of non-fiction writing as it is in fiction writing.
With better planning Lucas might have done Episode I, if he did it at all, as a pre-pre-prequel and improved the reputation of the overall Star Wars brand in the process, or might have devoted a more or less stand alone sixth episode in the same world that would be more accessible to viewers new to the series that explored parts of the saga explored in other Star Wars properties with proven track records of success promoting cross-selling of Star Wars properties outside the story arc of the core movies.
Tone Deaf Academic of the Day
The draft law review article, "Prisons, Privatization and the Elusive Employee-Contractor Distinction," by Alexander Volokh at the Emory University School of Law, previewed here and here has to rank as one of the most tone deaf, ill conceived, poorly written law review articles I read in several years, and I probably read thirty to fifty law review articles a year. The author is just so blinded by ideology and too clever by half rhetoric about conceivable possibility that trump all reality, that any legitimate point the article tries to make is drowned. Comment from the author in the two blog posts linked give a flavor of that attitude.
The writing style in the draft is dismal. It is too conversational for the format, too choppy to express extended ideas, and too afraid to really dig into and engage any particular idea. The use of the first person in this argument, when the writing style is so snarky, also perhaps unfairly undermines the article by opening it up to self-inflicted ad hominem attacks on the validity of the argument. When your article contains phrases like "And I have no basic problem with the general idea of the state action doctrine," it invites the natural response, "why should I give a shit what you think?" When you write like that you shoot yourself in the foot. A law review article is not the place for a transcript of your bull session at two in the morning over beer.
Similarly, when the Israeli Supreme Court says the private prisons are inherently unconstitutional, the right way to make sense of that reality is not to say that:
"The Court’s opinion does note a few tangible, non-question begging differences between the Israel Prison Service and private firms, but these are hardly central to the argument; nor do they succeed in distinguishing public and private prisons as a philosophical matter."
Sorry kid. When the Israeli Surpeme Court rules on a question and they have the last word, the succeeded and your argument didn't. Deal.
An example of a much better written article with somewhat similar stylistic leanings that are better executed and a somewhat similar style of argument, can be found, for example, here.
Honestly, who in their right mind hires somebody so obtuse who is such a poor academic writer to be a law professor?
The writing style in the draft is dismal. It is too conversational for the format, too choppy to express extended ideas, and too afraid to really dig into and engage any particular idea. The use of the first person in this argument, when the writing style is so snarky, also perhaps unfairly undermines the article by opening it up to self-inflicted ad hominem attacks on the validity of the argument. When your article contains phrases like "And I have no basic problem with the general idea of the state action doctrine," it invites the natural response, "why should I give a shit what you think?" When you write like that you shoot yourself in the foot. A law review article is not the place for a transcript of your bull session at two in the morning over beer.
Similarly, when the Israeli Supreme Court says the private prisons are inherently unconstitutional, the right way to make sense of that reality is not to say that:
"The Court’s opinion does note a few tangible, non-question begging differences between the Israel Prison Service and private firms, but these are hardly central to the argument; nor do they succeed in distinguishing public and private prisons as a philosophical matter."
Sorry kid. When the Israeli Surpeme Court rules on a question and they have the last word, the succeeded and your argument didn't. Deal.
An example of a much better written article with somewhat similar stylistic leanings that are better executed and a somewhat similar style of argument, can be found, for example, here.
Honestly, who in their right mind hires somebody so obtuse who is such a poor academic writer to be a law professor?
27 February 2012
The Various Stigmas Of Various Mental Illnesses
There is a stigma of schizophrenia, and there's a stigma of depression, etc. but they're not the same stigma. We're told it's a myth that "the mentally ill are violent" - [but] no-one thinks depressed or anorexic people are violent. They think (roughly) that people with psychosis are. They have other equally silly opinions about each diagnosis, but there's no monolithic "stigma of mental illness".
From Neuroskeptic.
Authorizing Private Violence
Strictly speaking a Fatwa is opinion letter on a question of Islamic law issued by a Islamic law scholar. The popular media accounts of this kind of instrument, however, focuses on the subtype of Fatwa in which opinion letters on Islamic law authorize some sort of extra-governmental self-help action by a representative of the victim or members of the general public to punish someone for a violation of Islamic law in a partular way for particular conduct. In short, some Fatwa's authorize private violence since Islamic law, which isn't statist and isn't united in a bureacratic hiearchy that derives its power from a sovereign, doesn't have the capacity to compel state action to enforce its edicts. Islamic law when used in this manner goes almost beyond libertarian visions of the role of government in securing legal justice to a basically anarchist theory of the state (which is not to say that there isn't a role in Islamic political theory for a state - indeed a state in which church and state are unified).
This kind of activity isn't as alien as it seems. Medieval Iceland has a period of time when it had courts that likewise authorized private individuals to carry out judgments, but had no enforcement mechanism of their own. The Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code authorizes creditors who comply with a certain set of requirements to seize and dispose of collateral for their loans through private action, without resort to the courts, so long as this can be accomplished without a "breach of the peace." U.S. Presidents have long been entitled, in fact, even if the law has sometimes been muddy, to authorize the use of military force in the furtherance of a variety of ill defined national security ends, such as the recently exercised authority to authorize the assassination of a particular U.S. citizen abroad without any court process, in furtherance of the authorization for the use of military force that is the legal basis for the war in Afghanistan and the "war on terror." The U.S. Constitution makes provision for the issuance of Letters of Marque and Reprisal (i.e. authorization for the owner of a private vessel to capture enemy vessels and goods on the high seas, a Congressional right abrogated in the Declaration of Paris in 1856, but which could be overturned by a simple statute passed by Congress). Bailbondsmen have extraordinary authority to take actions that would constitute kidnapping and certain other crimes if committed by someone else, to produce the persons whom they have posted bond for in court. Legislative authority to engage in self-help hacking targeted at suspected hackers (e.g. intentionally sending computer viruses to their computers) is a regular subject of debate in Congress today, and the self-help remedy of the non-judicially authorized "take down notices" to Internet institutions like You Tube, have become a part of every day life in the 21st century.
Historically, the right to use force to discipline and control one's children or one's spouse or one's slave or one's indentured servant or one's military subordinate, and to force those people to return to you if they ran away, was another large domain in which the private use of force was authorized and supported by state authority, but this right is now much diminished in theory as well as practice. As Pinkerton has noted in his recent book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," support for corporal punishment of children is greatly diminished. Legal toleration of domestic violence has dramatically declined within my own lifetime. Reforms in the military justice system and in how military discipline is maintained generally in the last seventy years or so have greatly reduced the caprice of force directed at military subordinates in the U.S. military (some countries, like Russia, have lagged further behind in this regard). History views the fugitive slave act as an instance of historic, collective shame. Government authorities still help parents recover their runaway children, but the cutting edge of modern social criticism is increasingly calling attention to the fact that even runaway children may have good justification for running away even though that means rejecting the parental economic support that they rely on for all of their economic needs.
Many countries authorize trial in absentia for crimes, although under U.S. law this is pretty much limited to cases where a criminal defendant absconds during the course of a trial already commenced in the defendant's presence. U.S. law certainly authorizes default judgments, however, which in cases where the object of the case is property rather than a civil judgment (a.k.a. a license to steal under the watchful eyes of sheriffs and/or courts), can sometimes issue without actual notice that a case is pending to a defendant. Closely related is the somewhat obscure and perhaps misunderstood concept of "wanted dead or alive" bounties.
Of course, the private use of violence for self-defense has been recognized since ancient times and is frequently considered a form of natural justice, although debates on the requirements for invoking the privilege of self-defense, for example, to defend a business when retreating from the business would have been a viable alterantive, is an issue being debated by Colorado's state legislature in 2012. For about a century, combat by agreement (i.e. dueling) was a defense to charges of murder and assault, a defense only removed by constitutional amendment in many states.
Louisiana recently considered (and rejected in a 54-39 state house vote) a law that would have reduced the criminal penalties available in the case of assaults directed as someone who is burning an American flag to $25. The idea has a lot in common with the notion that "heat of passion" murders (e.g. of a spouse or "other man" found engaged in the act of adultery by a husband) are less culpable than premediated murders.
A ruling in a Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania case by Judge Mark Martin in which assault charges were dismissed against a man caught on videotape attacking an atheist Halloween parader dressed up in a way that mocked the Prophet Muhammed in a ruling that breated the parader for being offensive raise the specter of the harm that can be done not with state action, but with state inaction in the face of what would otherwise be illegal private violence that would usually be (and in this case was) prosecuted and would usually result in criminal punishment for the person engaging in intentional private violence.
In general, in U.S. law, unlike German law, for example, there is also no per se duty of the state to enforce criminal laws for the benefit of citizens who have been victims of crime. The political structure of U.S. law enforcement and criminal prosecutions ensures that usually law enforcement officials errs on the side of overkill in trying to enforce criminal laws, and federalism in the U.S. means that there are usually there are several officials who have the independent authority to bring criminal charges arising from a particularly instance of criminal conduct. But, absent an almost impossible to prove case of discrimination on the basis of race or some similarly prohibited reason, prosecutors and law enforcement have no legally enforceable duty to attempt to protect citizens from crimes or to prosecute crimes they know to have taken place no matter how solid the case, even in the face of state law authorized and court issued restraining orders that purport to create such an obligation (see Castle Rock v. Gonzales).
As I've noted before, this lack of duty to use the criminal justice system and law enforcement to protect people from private violence is perhaps the strongest policy argument for an individual right to bear arms for self-defense under the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitutional scheme. If people can't rely on the state to defend them, they must be allowed adequate means to defend themselves through self-help. U.S. law also generally allows suits for civil damages arising from most kinds of common law crimes committed against an individual by an alleged victim of the crime or their heirs even in the face of an acquittal of the same charges in a trial by jury (the most prominent such case being the O.J. Simpson civil case for wrongfully causing the death of his wife).
There are times when we don't often do so, when authorizing private violence, i.e. making someone a stranger to the protections of the law, might make a certain amount of sense in foreign policy settings, as an intermediate step between making only diplomatic protests to some actions in a foreign state, and directing our own covert agents and military to themselves use force against that state. For example, one could imagine Congress or the U.N. Security Council, declaring that anyone or any country or any organization who kills specified leaders of the regime in Syria that is raining down artillery on its own citizens indiscriminately in violation of international human rights standards, or sabatogues that regime, may do so with impunity notwithstanding international laws that normally afford the highest levels of respect to sitting sovereigns. To some extent, this already happens through consultations between intelligence agencies of various foreign governments.
Still, on balance, I am inclined to think the the lack of limitations in the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions in the United States, laws that have the effective of authorizing or minimizing private violence without compelling justifications for that authorization, are a defect born of the short sightedness of Founding Fathers whose political theory was so concerned about active abuses of state power, that the more more subtle theat of abuses of state power through inaction were simply overlooked. The Founding Fathers did not have fresh in their minds as they drafted the Bill of Rights, the experience of institutions like informally state sanctioned death squads of Latin America, the Lynch Mobs of the Reconstruction South, the full fledged Middle Eastern institution of honor killing, or the organized brownshirt organizations of the Third Reich through which private citizens carried out state encouraged private violence to inform their deliberations.
Our system of criminal justice is based on the bedrock assumption that prosecutors and law enforcement will make their best efforts given their practical limits in resources and likelihood of conviction to prosecute cases where they have bona fide probable cause to believe that crimes have been committed. When that assumption is absent, legal due process protections for criminal defendants can look like rules that simply further the end of official corruption and abuse of power. The only institution in American law, other than political incentives and federalism (including federalism within states) that limits this kind of problem is the rarely invoked notion of a "special prosecutor" appointed in cases where the person with official authority to act may have a conflict of interest (for example, in the case of crimes committed personally by an elected district attorney such as the case Colorado recently saw in Montrose County). But, that doesn't cover cases where there is not a personally self-interested kind of conflict of interest involved.
There are a couple of distinct problems with private violence authorized by Fatwa-like authority that are in theory distinguishable.
One is a due process concern. U.S. criminal law generally requires in person participation by defendants in cases that invoke criminal-like punishments, and a Fatwa-like process (not at all specific to Islamic law as I have illustrated above) makes it possible to go through the motions without the level of due process secured by in person participation in key events of the process combined with a right to counsel if one can't afford it. These concerns can be just as great when the President authorizes an assassination or airstrike that will likely lead to civilian casulaties as it is when an Islamic scholar in Pakistan or Iran declares that it is acceptable to murder a Scandinavian cartoonist, although the concern that there might be multiple conflicting rulings by people with equal authority is much greater in the latter case than the former one. In many cases, self-help remedies put someone in the position of being the judge of their own case, a fundamental prohibition of ordinary judicial proceedings.
The second is the concern associated with lack of state involvement in the carrying out of the remedy. The idealized basic bargain of Western political theory is that the state has a monopoly on the use of violence (or any breach of property rights as well) that comes with a duty to use that monopoly to suppress private violence against those who are under the protection of the state, a duty to protect those who are under its protection from violence from foreign sovereigns, and a duty to dispense justice so that self-help not supported by sovereign authority is unnecessary or at least undesirable. Exceptions to this basic bargain delegate the state's monopoly on the use of force to private individuals in cases where the state is incapable of fulfilling its duty (e.g. self-defense or a posse), and only in cases justified and provoked by someone else's actions that themselves abridge the state monopoly on the use of force. Citizens are, in turn, protected from state abuses of its monopoly by the rule of law, and by violations of their rights under the color of law, with a set of rights enforceable against the state in the event that its agents deviate from the requirements of the rule of law (e.g. in a civil rights action). The idea of this political theory is to create a utopia where non-consentual activity by private parties is rare, violence is minimized, and both private and public interests are tamed so that they act on the basis of consent and rational, well informed decision making processes.
This second concern isn't deeply implicated in cases where due process concerns are for some reason associated with the scope of a particular grant of self-help authority are minimial, remedies for misuse of the authority to engage in self-help activities are ample where it occurs, and the force in question would in reality have been little different had it been carried out with perfunctory state supervision or where the private parties carrying it out as deputized as "officers of the court" or the "public trustee" some such quasi-public title with corresponding obligations associated with acting under color of state law (which to be clear, U.S. law generally often doesn't actually treat as such for purposes of civil rights lawsuits).
But, this political theory breaks down most severely when the state authorizes private individuals the right to use force in circumstances when it would not have been authorized to use force itself (and hence cannot be said to be delegating to private individuals), or establishes punishments that are mitigated on grounds that it would be improper and contrary to the rule of law for it to considerate itself. This concern gets to the heart of the legal prohibition on vigilantism beyond the delegations of power to private citizens to use force for the defense of others, or to make a "citizen's arrest" for a range of offenses much narrower than those which a law enforcement officer may make absent very special circumstances.
Fortunately, legislators, jealous of their monopoly on the use of force and intuitively understanding the grand bargain of the Western political and constitutional system even when it isn't expressly stated, generally don't authorize private individuals to use force or act non-consentually in circumstances when the state couldn't jusifiably do so. This doesn't mean, however, that sometimes they might do just that, because partisan policy agendas frequently trump larger process concerns based in political theory in the political process when courts don't restrain them.
This kind of activity isn't as alien as it seems. Medieval Iceland has a period of time when it had courts that likewise authorized private individuals to carry out judgments, but had no enforcement mechanism of their own. The Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code authorizes creditors who comply with a certain set of requirements to seize and dispose of collateral for their loans through private action, without resort to the courts, so long as this can be accomplished without a "breach of the peace." U.S. Presidents have long been entitled, in fact, even if the law has sometimes been muddy, to authorize the use of military force in the furtherance of a variety of ill defined national security ends, such as the recently exercised authority to authorize the assassination of a particular U.S. citizen abroad without any court process, in furtherance of the authorization for the use of military force that is the legal basis for the war in Afghanistan and the "war on terror." The U.S. Constitution makes provision for the issuance of Letters of Marque and Reprisal (i.e. authorization for the owner of a private vessel to capture enemy vessels and goods on the high seas, a Congressional right abrogated in the Declaration of Paris in 1856, but which could be overturned by a simple statute passed by Congress). Bailbondsmen have extraordinary authority to take actions that would constitute kidnapping and certain other crimes if committed by someone else, to produce the persons whom they have posted bond for in court. Legislative authority to engage in self-help hacking targeted at suspected hackers (e.g. intentionally sending computer viruses to their computers) is a regular subject of debate in Congress today, and the self-help remedy of the non-judicially authorized "take down notices" to Internet institutions like You Tube, have become a part of every day life in the 21st century.
Historically, the right to use force to discipline and control one's children or one's spouse or one's slave or one's indentured servant or one's military subordinate, and to force those people to return to you if they ran away, was another large domain in which the private use of force was authorized and supported by state authority, but this right is now much diminished in theory as well as practice. As Pinkerton has noted in his recent book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," support for corporal punishment of children is greatly diminished. Legal toleration of domestic violence has dramatically declined within my own lifetime. Reforms in the military justice system and in how military discipline is maintained generally in the last seventy years or so have greatly reduced the caprice of force directed at military subordinates in the U.S. military (some countries, like Russia, have lagged further behind in this regard). History views the fugitive slave act as an instance of historic, collective shame. Government authorities still help parents recover their runaway children, but the cutting edge of modern social criticism is increasingly calling attention to the fact that even runaway children may have good justification for running away even though that means rejecting the parental economic support that they rely on for all of their economic needs.
Many countries authorize trial in absentia for crimes, although under U.S. law this is pretty much limited to cases where a criminal defendant absconds during the course of a trial already commenced in the defendant's presence. U.S. law certainly authorizes default judgments, however, which in cases where the object of the case is property rather than a civil judgment (a.k.a. a license to steal under the watchful eyes of sheriffs and/or courts), can sometimes issue without actual notice that a case is pending to a defendant. Closely related is the somewhat obscure and perhaps misunderstood concept of "wanted dead or alive" bounties.
Of course, the private use of violence for self-defense has been recognized since ancient times and is frequently considered a form of natural justice, although debates on the requirements for invoking the privilege of self-defense, for example, to defend a business when retreating from the business would have been a viable alterantive, is an issue being debated by Colorado's state legislature in 2012. For about a century, combat by agreement (i.e. dueling) was a defense to charges of murder and assault, a defense only removed by constitutional amendment in many states.
Louisiana recently considered (and rejected in a 54-39 state house vote) a law that would have reduced the criminal penalties available in the case of assaults directed as someone who is burning an American flag to $25. The idea has a lot in common with the notion that "heat of passion" murders (e.g. of a spouse or "other man" found engaged in the act of adultery by a husband) are less culpable than premediated murders.
A ruling in a Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania case by Judge Mark Martin in which assault charges were dismissed against a man caught on videotape attacking an atheist Halloween parader dressed up in a way that mocked the Prophet Muhammed in a ruling that breated the parader for being offensive raise the specter of the harm that can be done not with state action, but with state inaction in the face of what would otherwise be illegal private violence that would usually be (and in this case was) prosecuted and would usually result in criminal punishment for the person engaging in intentional private violence.
In general, in U.S. law, unlike German law, for example, there is also no per se duty of the state to enforce criminal laws for the benefit of citizens who have been victims of crime. The political structure of U.S. law enforcement and criminal prosecutions ensures that usually law enforcement officials errs on the side of overkill in trying to enforce criminal laws, and federalism in the U.S. means that there are usually there are several officials who have the independent authority to bring criminal charges arising from a particularly instance of criminal conduct. But, absent an almost impossible to prove case of discrimination on the basis of race or some similarly prohibited reason, prosecutors and law enforcement have no legally enforceable duty to attempt to protect citizens from crimes or to prosecute crimes they know to have taken place no matter how solid the case, even in the face of state law authorized and court issued restraining orders that purport to create such an obligation (see Castle Rock v. Gonzales).
As I've noted before, this lack of duty to use the criminal justice system and law enforcement to protect people from private violence is perhaps the strongest policy argument for an individual right to bear arms for self-defense under the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitutional scheme. If people can't rely on the state to defend them, they must be allowed adequate means to defend themselves through self-help. U.S. law also generally allows suits for civil damages arising from most kinds of common law crimes committed against an individual by an alleged victim of the crime or their heirs even in the face of an acquittal of the same charges in a trial by jury (the most prominent such case being the O.J. Simpson civil case for wrongfully causing the death of his wife).
There are times when we don't often do so, when authorizing private violence, i.e. making someone a stranger to the protections of the law, might make a certain amount of sense in foreign policy settings, as an intermediate step between making only diplomatic protests to some actions in a foreign state, and directing our own covert agents and military to themselves use force against that state. For example, one could imagine Congress or the U.N. Security Council, declaring that anyone or any country or any organization who kills specified leaders of the regime in Syria that is raining down artillery on its own citizens indiscriminately in violation of international human rights standards, or sabatogues that regime, may do so with impunity notwithstanding international laws that normally afford the highest levels of respect to sitting sovereigns. To some extent, this already happens through consultations between intelligence agencies of various foreign governments.
Still, on balance, I am inclined to think the the lack of limitations in the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions in the United States, laws that have the effective of authorizing or minimizing private violence without compelling justifications for that authorization, are a defect born of the short sightedness of Founding Fathers whose political theory was so concerned about active abuses of state power, that the more more subtle theat of abuses of state power through inaction were simply overlooked. The Founding Fathers did not have fresh in their minds as they drafted the Bill of Rights, the experience of institutions like informally state sanctioned death squads of Latin America, the Lynch Mobs of the Reconstruction South, the full fledged Middle Eastern institution of honor killing, or the organized brownshirt organizations of the Third Reich through which private citizens carried out state encouraged private violence to inform their deliberations.
Our system of criminal justice is based on the bedrock assumption that prosecutors and law enforcement will make their best efforts given their practical limits in resources and likelihood of conviction to prosecute cases where they have bona fide probable cause to believe that crimes have been committed. When that assumption is absent, legal due process protections for criminal defendants can look like rules that simply further the end of official corruption and abuse of power. The only institution in American law, other than political incentives and federalism (including federalism within states) that limits this kind of problem is the rarely invoked notion of a "special prosecutor" appointed in cases where the person with official authority to act may have a conflict of interest (for example, in the case of crimes committed personally by an elected district attorney such as the case Colorado recently saw in Montrose County). But, that doesn't cover cases where there is not a personally self-interested kind of conflict of interest involved.
There are a couple of distinct problems with private violence authorized by Fatwa-like authority that are in theory distinguishable.
One is a due process concern. U.S. criminal law generally requires in person participation by defendants in cases that invoke criminal-like punishments, and a Fatwa-like process (not at all specific to Islamic law as I have illustrated above) makes it possible to go through the motions without the level of due process secured by in person participation in key events of the process combined with a right to counsel if one can't afford it. These concerns can be just as great when the President authorizes an assassination or airstrike that will likely lead to civilian casulaties as it is when an Islamic scholar in Pakistan or Iran declares that it is acceptable to murder a Scandinavian cartoonist, although the concern that there might be multiple conflicting rulings by people with equal authority is much greater in the latter case than the former one. In many cases, self-help remedies put someone in the position of being the judge of their own case, a fundamental prohibition of ordinary judicial proceedings.
The second is the concern associated with lack of state involvement in the carrying out of the remedy. The idealized basic bargain of Western political theory is that the state has a monopoly on the use of violence (or any breach of property rights as well) that comes with a duty to use that monopoly to suppress private violence against those who are under the protection of the state, a duty to protect those who are under its protection from violence from foreign sovereigns, and a duty to dispense justice so that self-help not supported by sovereign authority is unnecessary or at least undesirable. Exceptions to this basic bargain delegate the state's monopoly on the use of force to private individuals in cases where the state is incapable of fulfilling its duty (e.g. self-defense or a posse), and only in cases justified and provoked by someone else's actions that themselves abridge the state monopoly on the use of force. Citizens are, in turn, protected from state abuses of its monopoly by the rule of law, and by violations of their rights under the color of law, with a set of rights enforceable against the state in the event that its agents deviate from the requirements of the rule of law (e.g. in a civil rights action). The idea of this political theory is to create a utopia where non-consentual activity by private parties is rare, violence is minimized, and both private and public interests are tamed so that they act on the basis of consent and rational, well informed decision making processes.
This second concern isn't deeply implicated in cases where due process concerns are for some reason associated with the scope of a particular grant of self-help authority are minimial, remedies for misuse of the authority to engage in self-help activities are ample where it occurs, and the force in question would in reality have been little different had it been carried out with perfunctory state supervision or where the private parties carrying it out as deputized as "officers of the court" or the "public trustee" some such quasi-public title with corresponding obligations associated with acting under color of state law (which to be clear, U.S. law generally often doesn't actually treat as such for purposes of civil rights lawsuits).
But, this political theory breaks down most severely when the state authorizes private individuals the right to use force in circumstances when it would not have been authorized to use force itself (and hence cannot be said to be delegating to private individuals), or establishes punishments that are mitigated on grounds that it would be improper and contrary to the rule of law for it to considerate itself. This concern gets to the heart of the legal prohibition on vigilantism beyond the delegations of power to private citizens to use force for the defense of others, or to make a "citizen's arrest" for a range of offenses much narrower than those which a law enforcement officer may make absent very special circumstances.
Fortunately, legislators, jealous of their monopoly on the use of force and intuitively understanding the grand bargain of the Western political and constitutional system even when it isn't expressly stated, generally don't authorize private individuals to use force or act non-consentually in circumstances when the state couldn't jusifiably do so. This doesn't mean, however, that sometimes they might do just that, because partisan policy agendas frequently trump larger process concerns based in political theory in the political process when courts don't restrain them.
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