Steve Stockman won’t go away

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 162 Comments

A poll released today shows Steve Stockman potentially forcing a runoff in the Republican primary for the US Senate seat currently held by John Cornyn. This news is particularly stunning as Stockman has been almost entirely absent from the campaign trail.

These poll numbers are fairly consistent with the pattern David Dewhurst faced in his campaign against Ted Cruz two years ago. Very few Texas Republican primary voters are aware of Stockman, but they are pretty convinced that Cornyn, one of the Senate’s most far-right conservatives, is not crazy enough to represent them.

It remains unlikely that Stockman can find a way to win. He’s just as nutty as Ted Cruz, but he’s not half as competent. As I wrote after Stockman launched his campaign:

Though Cornyn’s poll numbers are very weak for an incumbent, it is unlikely that Stockman will do to Cornyn what Cruz did to David Dewhurst. Cruz may be a modern day Confederate, but he’s also a politically calculating Ivy Leaguer who knows which fork to use.

Stockman, on the other hand, is a walking disaster. He has earned his place in the political world as an opportunist with a talent for the political grift who is probably incapable of managing the most basic mechanics of a campaign on that scale. Stockman makes Ted Cruz look like a credible leadership figure.

These poll numbers almost certainly reflect the blind ‘throw the bums out’ logic of the Tea Party rather than any affection for Stockman. That said, like some sort of political herpes, Stockman just won’t go away.

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Posted in Election 2014, Republican Party

Notes from a Libertarian Paradise

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 167 Comments

sea and cloudsImagine a place where government plays a negligible role in public life. Taxes are almost non-existent. Businesses operate free from the burden of regulation or bureaucracy. People lean on each other to establish and enforce standards of public behavior. Imagine a place with no Obamacare, no insurance mandates, no mandates of almost any kind.

Libertarians are often derided as dreamers whose vision of the world could never be made real, but that is not true. All over the planet there are places where the Libertarian dream of hyper-limited government is played out in daily life. We can learn a lot about the merits and pitfalls of Libertarianism by examining the shape of life in the world’s Libertarian strongholds.

Belize is a stunningly beautiful nation of beaches, rainforests, and coral reefs at the southern end of the Yucatan Peninsula. A former British colony, it escaped the upheavals of Cold War politics in the Third World by being altogether too small (only about 300,000 citizens today), too remote, and too poor for anyone to notice their existence.

The country is a Libertarian paradise. The government is tiny and weak. Technically Belize imposes an income tax, but no one I encountered there seemed to know anything about it. Property taxes are laughably low. A couple I met from Dallas who own a beautiful $225,000 beachfront home in Belize pay an annual property tax of $40. Apart from entry and exit fees, those are the only taxes they pay to live there.

Property owners can more or less do as they please with their patch of land. Such rules as exist are loose and inconsistently enforced. The government lacks the resources to enforce any meaningful property restrictions even if they developed the will to impose them.

Why, then haven’t you heard of this country? If anything we have learned from Ted Cruz or Rand Paul is true, Belize must be an economic dynamo where the entrepreneurial energies of a free people are set loose from the stifling constraints of government.

It is not. Economic growth has been fairly stagnant in recent years, especially in comparison to other developing countries. GDP per person is a fairly reasonable $8,000, but that fails to reflect the concentration of the country’s resources in relatively few hands. Roughly half the national income flows into the hands of the country’s top 10%. Unemployment remains in double-digits and almost half of Belizeans live in poverty by local measures.

There does appear to be a remarkable degree of small scale entrepreneurship in Belize, just as you commonly find in other grindlingly poor countries. People have no choice. There is very little formal employment and no social safety net. Survival means investing enormous energy in an effort to find tonight’s meal.

What is unique about entrepreneurship in Belize is how little their efforts can accomplish. With no infrastructure, virtually no education system, and no access to global markets for knowledge work, Belizeans are almost universally hard-working, entrepreneurial, and poor.

That $40 property tax bill does not deliver an effective public school system. Belize offers nearly-free public primary school which allows most of the country to receive an education through junior high. About 80% of students complete the 5th grade. Almost 10% of boys under 14 are officially in the workforce.

High school is tuition-funded at rates comparable to a US junior college. Very few Belizeans receive a high school education and a tiny percentage attend any college.

Tourism revenue has been increasing as travelers discover the beauty of this off-the-grid destination. Despite the promise of this new revenue source, infrastructure to develop higher earnings has been nearly impossible to develop. The tiny international airport struggles to meet demand. The country has few paved roads and most of which become impassible for lengthy periods in the rainy season. Poor environmental protections mean private businesses and landowners must constantly struggle to keep beaches and reefs clean.

All this “liberty” means that the impressive work ethic and entrepreneurial energy of Belizeans earns them a very meager return. Using a government to pool resources allows a country to develop infrastructure that moves a population up a chain of value creation.

The people in Belize are no different from Americans. However, no one in Belize is building the next Google because they are still trying to get reliable access to the Internet. There are stark limits to what private entrepreneurial activity can accomplish without the power of an effective government.

Governments can potentially interfere with property rights in ways that dampen economic growth and harm liberty. That’s a reason for care and involvement, not a justification to destroy them. Ideology is minimally useful as a guide to solving political and economic problems. Making a complex political structure work requires a willingness to engage reality and prioritize results over purity.

Fortunately, for those who insist on having their absolute personal liberty unadulterated by other interests, there are still some beautiful places that will welcome them. Coincidentally, they’re all very cheap. Drink bottled water, use lots of bug spray and plan extra time to get through the airport.

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Posted in Economics, Libertarian

Olympic artistic competitions are bullshit

Posted on February 15, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 68 Comments

Someone is going to win an Olympic gold medal this year for figure skating. The winner will score a fractionally higher “score,” as granted by a panel of judges, than the runner-ups. Sure, a few people will fall down or something, making it fairly easy to stack-rank them toward the bottom, but there will be negligible technical differences among the top seven or eight competitors.

The difference in scores will come from the “artistic” elements of their program. Imagine for a moment that the Cowboys got extra points in each game for the elegance of their passing routes, high quality touchdown celebrations, or the jaunty manner in which they wore their pink breast cancer towels.

Or, perhaps you might picture Picasso, Rembrandt and Jasper Johns sitting nervously with their coaches, waiting to see what score they received from the notoriously corrupt French judge. The announcer explains that, “’Guernica’ was a flawless technical performance, but it just didn’t strike the right chord with this audience.”

That’s why Olympic artistic competitions, from ice-skating to gymnastics, are complete bullshit.

Don’t talk to me about the “technical” elements of the scoring. Look closely enough and you’ll find that Da Vinci smudged a brushstroke here and there. Van Gogh used the wrong ochre for some of his sunflowers. The absurd pretense that there is a “winner” in this these competitions makes them intolerably phony and anything but “artistic.”

As the world grows more tightly integrated and cultures more deeply influenced by commoditization, the performances themselves are harder and harder to distinguish from one another. Thirty years ago you could tell at a glance which country the performers were representing. Top performers now train internationally with coaches from all over the globe in front of crowds used to seeing a similar product. Artistic distinctions are breaking down, pushing performers into more and more outlandish stunts to establish any uniqueness.

Those same factors are driving the games more generally away from any emphasis on athletics. Savvy athletes use the games as a platform for more lucrative pursuits. Olympic competition is a marketing ploy, like competing for the Republican Presidential nomination.

When Olympic snowboarder (think about that phrase for a minute) Shaun White failed to medal in Sochi, the first thing anyone thought about was the impact to his growing business empire. Slovenian downhill skier, Tina Maze, has parlayed success on the slopes into a career as a pop star, model and blogger. Back home her win in Sochi should place her within striking distance of becoming dictator for life.

Enjoy the Olympics for the spectacle and the performances, but some parts of it are just too ridiculous to accept at face value. For those who love a classic, timeless performance, I present the greatest skating routing in history.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the incomparable Chaz Michael Michaels:

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Posted in Uncategorized

How Liberals Ruined the Civil Rights Movement

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 301 Comments

As a child of the bus wars, Slate’s new series of articles on the late Civil Rights Movement rings painfully true. Once the Civil Rights campaign progressed beyond equal access and voting rights, it began to take on a harder tone, wavering between condescending elitism and vengefulness. The headlong rush to build a utopian post-racial order required cracking a few eggs. The brunt of the impact was felt by working class whites, both North and South, who lacked the money or political clout to escape the devastating consequences of liberal ambitions.

Whether the old Dixiecrats would shift en masse and intact from the Democratic Party to the GOP was still an open question in the early 70’s. Heavy-handed measures pushed by national Democrats that destroyed local districts finished the job. Forced busing, more than any other measure, finished the story. It gave the old racial coalition a legitimate plank on which to build its continued existence. Along the way it reminded the public at large of the danger of liberal social engineering and the advantages of more organic change promoted by traditional conservatives.

Here’s the Slate series.

Here’s an old GOPLifer piece on the bus wars in Beaumont.

And an excellent book covering the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on working class whites.

 

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Posted in Civil Rights

Race and America’s Lousy Infrastructure

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 268 Comments

Good analysis from the Noahpinion blog on America’s persistent problems delivering quality public infrastructure. From roads to schools to health to communications and beyond, the world’s richest and most powerful nation looks pretty rickety to those who have spent time in Europe or East Asia. Why?:

At least since the 1970s, the Republican party has successfully raised opposition to government spending among large numbers of white people, especially in the South and in rural areas, by convincing them that government spending is mostly racial redistribution from whites to blacks. Talk to a Republican voter about government spending, and this idea will come out pretty quickly. If you don’t believe me, just do a Google search for “racial redistribution”.

It’s not really true, of course; white people receive about the same number of dollars in benefits that they pay in taxes. But the meme persists, and it looks uncomfortably like the kind of thing that Easterly and Alesina document. Interestingly, many Republicans also seem to think that government shifts money from whites to Hispanics, when actually the reverse is probably true. The negative attitude that America’s right-wing minority has toward blacks has partially spilled over into their attitude toward Hispanics. That’s bad news.

How much this effect contributes to problems delivering infrastructure is debatable, but for those old enough to remember public pools being filled with dirt to defeat desegregation it certainly rings true. Try to build a commuter rail line in a Southern city and listen carefully to the objections being raised.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

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Posted in Civil Rights

What it means to be a GOPLifer

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 215 Comments

Untitled-blank2Over the years this blog has been deeply, sometimes sharply critical of the Republican Party inspiring many to wonder about its title. Why would a dedicated, lifelong Republican be so unhappy and if so, why stick around?

You don’t become a GOPLifer because of your mindless enthusiasm for our team or your unflinching hostility toward the opposition. The term “lifer” is borrowed from prison slang. A lifer has no place else to go. Being a GOPLifer doesn’t reflect any particular sense of commitment. It comes from a lack of options.

I became a Republican in a forgotten era in which the party stood for urban, commercial, business values. When I was first learning about politics, Republicans still campaigned in cities. The inner suburbs of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Los Angeles were the party’s core. Some of the country’s most powerful Republican Senators came from California and the Northeast.

The center-right Republican coalition that took shape in the ‘60’s after William F. Buckley chased off the Tea Party of his era stood for the power of markets, the vital importance of personal liberty, and the need for American global leadership. Those values were tempered by an interest in tangible outcomes that rises from authentic patriotism and hard-headed business pragmatism. The insufferable drama queens who staged a phony debt ceiling crisis last year would have been kicked swiftly to the curb by the GOP in the ‘80’s. Once upon a time, ideology was secondary to results.

For two decades that vision led the Republican Party to the White House in five out of six elections. It edged the whole country and our culture toward the right and made the party competitive again at the national level.

An emphasis on the value of markets, trade, and a confident, assertive American presence in the world gave us the richer, freer, far more peaceful planet we now enjoy. Markets are not perfect. Business is not altruistic. The pursuit of personal greed does not always lead to optimal outcomes. American military force is not necessarily a force for stability in every case. However, the Republicans of the late 20th Century re-opened possibilities for American enterprise and power that had previously been closed.

With feet planted firmly in reality and a willingness to examine our failures we could have continued the momentum away from the straightjacket of big central government toward an ownership society. We could have made American power a lasting force for liberty, stability, and prosperity in the world. Twenty years ago we had every reason to expect that a generation of Republican dominance would build a new order at home and abroad, expanding personal freedom and opportunity.

Those who once embraced that dream are still around, but there is no political party for us to call home. We began in the Republican Party and traces of this heritage are still apparent in the party’s foundations. But today there is no major national political force that still embraces this optimistic view of American economic and diplomatic power.

To be a GOPLifer means clinging stubbornly to a vision of what might be, in spite of what you see all around you. After all, this lost dream of a Republican agenda remains in some sense its inevitable future.

Fear is to politics what meth is to truck driving. It will help you deliver in a pinch, but the more you come to depend on it the more dangerous your next run becomes. And then your teeth fall out.

That older, more practical, optimistic version of the Republican Party is still hanging in the air, waiting to be refined for a new era. As the party’s fear-binge approaches its inevitable conclusion, perhaps sometime in the near future there may once again be a meaningful place in the Republican Party for a GOPLifer.

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Posted in Republican Party, Uncategorized

Americans retiring abroad: Discuss…

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 156 Comments

Just thought I’d take a moment during that brief gap in the day between coffee and tequila to share an update.

So far the food is amazing. Here’s a picture from the food court across the street from the main airport in Belize:

airport food tents1

I recommend the curry chicken, though I wish I’d had a chance to try the beef and okra.

Running across a surprising number of middle-ish income Americans and Brits who have chosen to retire or semi-retire in Belize. It’s an interesting proposition, but I’m not sure I would ever do it. Thoughts?

 

Posted in Uncategorized

I’m leaving

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 37 Comments

I’m leaving. I do intend to come back, but I’m not making any promises.

It will probably be quiet around here next week. We’re taking the kids someplace warm to remind them what the sun looks like. While I’m at it, I may take a stab at the kind of travel or food writing that I’d so rather be doing.

We’ll be changing planes in Houston. I’ll wave to you.

Ya’ll be good. See you again soon.

Posted in Uncategorized

A new political consensus is emerging

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 35 Comments

Michael Lind’s latest article for Policy Network, Beyond Reaganism and Clintonism: the emerging political order in the US, may have rendered this blog irrelevant. He has managed to summarize in a single, condensed article the entire political transformation I’ve been struggling to describe for years. It’s a humbling and slightly depressing read.

He describes 5 big trends that are closing the 20th century political order and ushering in something new. If he’s right, and his analysis is very persuasive, the emerging shape of the American political order is a sobering wakeup call for those of us who once dreamed of an “ownership society.” The factors he describes:

1) The collapse of conservatism

The Soviets were, ironically, the glue held the many disparate factions of American Conservatism together. No new logic or purpose has emerged to give conservatives a purpose after the demise of global communism.

The catastrophic hubris of the “War on Terror” destroyed the neo-conservative movement. The authoritarian tendencies of religious conservatives have rendered them deeply unpopular in an increasingly diverse and secular culture. Business and commercial interests have proven too out of step with the changing political landscape to advocated anything more effective or persuasive than laissez faire. Their influence has been blunted by the second major development in US politics.

2) The rise of the paranoid fringe

The old conservative order was mostly successful in suppressing the crazies. William F. Buckley managed to force Goldwater to repudiate the Tea Party of their time, cauterizing the GOP’s wacky right flank so that the party could go on to win five of the next six Presidential elections. With the conservative center compromised, the nutjobs are on the loose. From Lind’s article:

As fusionist conservatism has decayed, the paranoid and libertarian strains have come to define the emergent right in the US. It has become routine even for mainstream Republican conservatives to denounce progressive and centrist Democrats as “socialists,” while conspiracy theories about socialist and Muslim plots flourish among right-wing activists.

Now Buckley’s venerable National Review has turned loose loons like Mark Steyn to write material so utterly removed from reality that they may ultimately be finished off by a libel suit.

3) The new Neo-Confederate Right

Out of the tangled wreckage of the old conservative order has emerged a quasi-libertarian political wing. Through the Dixiecrats they brought into the GOP in the post Civil Rights Era, they are channeling an Antebellum, pre-Capitalist vision that is a dead letter at the national level. They are converting the GOP from the party of commerce and nationalism into regional rejectionist party with no purpose but to stop any and all Federal action, as they did in the 1850’s.

4) The death of the New Democrats

The collapse of the conservative movement is leaving Clintonian Democrats politically isolated. As wingnut rabble renders the “conservative” brand increasingly unpalatable, business friendly Democrats are finding themselves in much the same position as the old commercial wing of the Republican Party. They are both relatively popular with general election voters and well-funded, but neither has the ground presence required to exercise any grassroots influence in their party. They are being crushed between raving paranoids on the right and an increasingly uncompromising big-government left.

5) Rise of the liberal Left

The entire Democratic establishment is beginning to shift back to the left. Despite all the Republican “Obamacare” hysteria, we may look back on the Affordable Care Act as the last legislative achievement of 20th century conservatism.

“Obamacare” was conceived by the Heritage Foundation, promoted by Republican Congressmen in the ’90’s, first implemented by a Republican Governor, and forced onto more Progressive Democratic politicians as a centrist compromise. With the power of the conservative movement shattered, there is little force in either party to blunt the future ambitions of the progressive left and they are starting to flex their long-atrophied muscles.

From the article:

The left-right divide in the years and decades ahead may be defined more by economic differences between increasingly assertive social democratic progressives and a more libertarian, anti-statist right. Like Richard Nixon, whose election marked a transition between the New Deal era of Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower and the conservative era of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama may prove to be a transitional figure, marking the divide between one era in American politics and the next.

We came out of the Reagan Era with a solid center-right bloc that dominated American politics. Twenty years of shrill, self-righteous battles to limit sexual freedom and protect an outdated white cultural bloc has left the Republican Party deflated.

The emerging new rivalry seems to pit left wing progressives against 19th century “Libertarians.” There is no major political bloc remaining to promote capitalism or the stabilizing influence of American global power. It’s amazing and depressing how badly things can turn out after you “win.”

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Posted in Political Theory

The iPhone, Poverty, and the Middle Class

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Chris Ladd — 11 Comments

We often hear that incomes at the middle and lower tiers have been stagnant since the 70’s. It is true, but that statistic misses some important nuances. We can measure incomes and compare them to an inflation rate, but that is a deeply flawed measure of relative well-being.

I’ve touched on this problem before, but an article in the Washington Post today raises it in an interesting way:

Buffalo writer Steve Cichon dug up an old Radio Shack ad, offering a variety of what were then cutting-edge gadgets. There are 15 items listed on the page, and Cichon points out that all but two of them — the exceptions are a radar detector and a set of speakers — do jobs that can now be performed with a modern iPhone.

The other 13 items, including a desktop computer, a camcorder, a CD player and a mobile phone, have a combined price of $3,071.21. The unsubsidized price of an iPhone is $549. And, of course, your iPhone is superior to these devices in many respects. The VHS camcorder, for example, captured video at a quality vastly inferior to the crystal-clear 1080p video an iPhone can record. That $1,599 Tandy computer would have struggled to browse the Web of the 1990s, to say nothing of the sophisticated Web sites iPhones access today. The CD player only lets you carry a few albums worth of music at a time; an iPhone can hold thousands of songs. And of course, the iPhone fits in your pocket.

Measuring relative incomes completely misses the most radical and amazing transformation that has occurred in our time. The rise of global capitalism over the past two generations has triggered a collapse in the real cost of almost everything. The happy exception to this deflationary spiral is the cost of human expertise, reflected in the price of things like education and medical care.

Almost everyone in the stable corners of the world is, as I’ve written before, rich beyond the wildest imaginings of anyone living in 1975. It is certainly true that income distribution has been growing wildly more unequal over the past few decades, but understanding the differences in lifestyle for ordinary people that have accompanied that change is an important part of the equation that we often overlook.

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Posted in Economics, Ownership Society
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