Thanksgiving Means Carnage!

Well, actually, the original line was "Christmas means carnage!"

This year, it means the introduction of my nephew Ciaran Telge to the world. I hope he doesn't end up like this guy. I wonder if they'll make him sit at the kids table?

This year, I am particularly thankful that this woman accepted my proposal and agreed to marry me.

Ends Justifies the Means

This is an example of arguing for the ends as a justification of the means. I could never take someone like this seriously if they started demanding the enforcement of their constitutional rights. On the other hand, many of his detractors in the comments make even less sense.

I have to say that he doesn't appear to have read my argument, much less dealt with it. I'm not arguing that Roe should be overturned because it's Constitutionally correct (though I'm also saying that), I'm arguing that Democrats should overturn it in order to pick a fight which will emasculate the Evengelical Right. I would go further and say Congress has no more business in this state issue than the Supreme Court.

Ever seen The 13th Warrior or read the story on which it's based, Crichton's Eaters of the Dead? In it, a member of one of the two factions picks a fight with the other, pretends to be losing the fight, then kills his adversary. When the protagonist asks why he didn't just kill him outright, his mentor says, "Deception is the point! Any fool can calculate strength. That one has been doing it since we arrived. Now he has to calculate what he can't see." It's called stategy.

And, both my ends and means are justifiable.

On the other hand, one of my reasons for pursuing the strategy was to reinvigorate the Democratic Party's intellectual foundation. According to this interesting post, it was never dead.

The Genius of Bastiat

I suppose a greater part of the reluctance that people have for classical liberalism is the lack of a specific prescription for every ill in society. I think this arises from the failure to distinguish between What is seen and what is not seen. Bastiat's essay is chiefly famous for the Broken Window Fallacy, but the essay went further and pointed out how this failure to see the unseen can also distort a person's view of technology, change, rights, and especially public works projects (including the army).

If, for example, you were against the FDA because it prevents good medicine from getting on the market equally as it prevents bad, and possibly to greater detriment than if the bad were allowed, people don't understand how bad medicine would not come to dominate the market. "Who will protect us?" they will ask. Similarly, if there were no minimum wage, it is presumed that everyone would start paying $0.25 an hour. If there were no Medicaid, nobody making below $100k/year would have access to health care. Without a Department of Transportation, there would be no roads. Without a Department of Commerce, there would be no commerce, without a Department of Energy, there would be no energy suppliers, etc. Close military bases, and the unemployment rate will skyrocket. Stop the government provision of resource X, and X would no longer be supplied, whether X is "safe drugs", "flat roads", "parks", or whatever else you want to substitute for X.

Among the variety of arguments supplied for each of these, some will be at least partly true. There are market failures, but market failures are, by and large, the exception rather than the rule. Regardless of whether you agree with that last statement, it must be admitted that some of those market failures are created by the government, and government failure also exists. Examples of these include legal monopolies (monopoly created by the government), corporate welfare, log-rolling, rent-seeking, regulatory capture, tax distortion, and deadweight losses incurred in trying to avoid regulatory and tax burdens.

In many cases, it is true that if the government did not provide a given service, then it will not be provided. But it is not a binary situation: we must be careful to distinguish between services that should not be provided at all as well as between those that should be provided by the government, and those that should be provided privately. Do we really need a mohair subsidy? For that matter, do we need any farm subsidies? If the government stops providing illicit drug interdiction or sodomy law enforcement, does the private sector really need to pick those up?

I think it will be universally recognized that a serious problem with our mixed system is not government or business per se, but rather the nexus between them. People will take sides as to whether the limitations should be placed on government or on business to reduce the mischief arising from the nexus. Does Walmart "place a burden on taxpayers" by underpaying its staff and forcing them on welfare, or by relying on the road system? Or does the creation and enforcement of a myriad of rules and regulations prevent Walmart's employees from availing themselves of a free market in health care services, and does the creation of a publicly provided transportation system enable and encourage car-based enterprises like Walmart? There are strong arguments to be made both ways, but a richer understanding of history would allow a fairer examination of the limited government argument.

For example, The Progressive Era in American politics oversaw the vast expansion of the regulatory state not for consumers, but for the competitors. The quintessential example of the triumph of that era is the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, ostensibly passed in the wake of Upton Sinclair's hyperbolic The Jungle. The truth is that the Act had been desired by meat packagers for years in order to reduce competition from smaller competitors and enhance their image among foreign buyers, and the muckraking following the release of Sinclair's over-the-top fiction served as the moral cover they needed (see this NBER paper, for example). The same story replayed itself several times in the era: bankers wanted relief from risk and got the Federal Reserve, railroaders wanted relief from competition and got several laws which finally culminated in the establishment of a regulatory power to set minimum rates.

In the same era, the American Medical Association sought and won the establishment of state boards to control competition, and then won control of the medical education system to control entry to the profession. After that, they won the ability to be the sole gatekeepers to drugs and other therapies with the sole power to prescribe. In every case, they did so by concealing or downplaying the benefit to themselves, and sold the measures on the basis of how well they protected patients. Patients, apparently, needed to be protected from low prices, competition, and their own bad judgement.

It may be true that if I were king for a day, and did something radical like restore the authority of the federal government to the limited government described in the Constitution (as amended -- no need to falsely accuse me of favoring slavery or opposing universal suffrage), that the private provision of these services would not exist tomorrow. There are always two separate questions that we must answer: "What will it look like?" and "How do we get there?" The second is probably the harder. Unfortunately, since we classical liberals (what you might call "libertarians") must spend most of our time arguing against the expansion of the existing structure favored by both dominant parties, and a little time outlining the desired system, we rarely address the path between the two. Furthermore, since we generally believe in the creativity and competition of a mass of solution-providers, it is difficult and dangerous to try to describe a system that will emerge by evolution, not by conscious design. If it could be designed consciously, we might be more in favor of central planning, wouldn't we?

Our preferred solution to most of the problems described above is "the unseen". It's not that we don't care for the poor, the non-white, the female, it's just that we don't want government to solve their problems because we believe that most of the "solutions" actually lead to worse outcomes. We aren't even necessarily, universally, and consistently in favor of people having to solve their own problems, though obviously they are in the best position to identify, prioritize, and aggressively pursue the solutions when they have a choice. What we want is to ensure that their choices are not limited to prescriptions that are often short-sighted, feel-good, proven failures dictated from afar by an authority that doesn't know, care, or emphasize outcomes over inputs. The problems faced by the 3,000,000-strong federal workforce are worse than those faced by the largest corporations regarding the lack of information flow of problems and potential solutions between the front line and the rear echelon. At least everyone at GM knows what the goal is, there is consistency from one decade to the next, and they all have an incentive to achieve the intended goals rather than incentives not to.

Just to reflect on the problems noted above:

• FDA -- drug safety could be ensured by competition among several 3^rd party, reputation-driven providers like Consumer Reports, AMA, and CSPI. These are not seen because they are by law not allowed (you cannot make unapproved statements about drugs).

• Medicaid -- at the turn of the century, health care was privately provided by the workers themselves who participated in high rates in lodges and friendly societies. The emphasis was on avoiding destitution, and participation was in the 50% range (50% of everyone), but higher among the working poor. "Lodge practice evil", as it was known by the AMA, was strangled in the crib as the AMA sought to distance itself from the rest of society and establish themselves as a politically powerful craft guild. Given the advance of professional skills like finance and engineering, productivity advances in truly essential sectors like agriculture, and the general advance of income and therefore the affordability of housing and transport since 1900, we can only guess at how far advanced a truly free market medical would be by now. Instead, the capture of the regulatory body by the AMA, and then the distortion of the tax-driven third party payer system in the wake of WWII price controls, has led to measures designed to make health care an affordable right but which in reality have made health care markets distorted beyond belief. Successful low income health care measures like lodge practice are now unseen and impossible to establish under current laws.

• 97-98% of the workforce makes more than the minimum wage, now, with no laws requiring it. Of the few who make minimum, 2/3 are teenagers or non-household providers, and over 2/3 are advanced within a year with no laws requiring it. The unseen are those who have no skills and are unable to find work where they could develop them because they are prevented by law from doing so; they are counted among the "non-participants" and "unemployed" and are prevented by law from negotiating a mutually agreeable outcome.

• Private roads certainly existed before the creation of the DoT. See this collection of papers by Daniel Klein covering the era 1797-1860.

• My statement regarding the Department of Commerce was meant to be humorous. Many of the functions, such as NOAA and NIST comply with the Constitution's "Weights and Measures" clause and are largely public goods. I don't really have a problem with those. However, the recent attempt by Senator Rick Santorum, R-PA, to restrict free public access to data from the National Weather Service because it competes unfairly with private weather services serves as both a warning and an example. It is a warning about the potential for abuse that arises from the private-public nexus, in this case a Senator is going to bat for a constituent in order to make life easier for them (rent-seeking). It is also an example of that which is not seen and normally held to be impossible by those who claim that public goods are a market failure and should therefore always be provided by the government, in this case the actual existence of private weather forecasting in the shadow of competition from "free" public service.

• Electricity generation is considered to be a "natural monopoly": an industry in which it is actually less efficient and therefore impossible for true competition to arise. The telephone industry was treated the same way for 70 years: AT&T was granted a monopoly in 1914, it began to fall apart in 1984 when a judge ordered the breakup in the face of competition from MCI and McCaw Cellular, and what was left of AT&T was recently swallowed up by Cingular in their competition with Verizon, Nextel, and others – surprising outcome for a "natural monopoly". The first hydroelectric plant was built by the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), and Westinghouse, Edison, and Tesla were all actively building and competing long before we accepted the burden of the Department of Energy. Since the rise of the regulatory state and the Natural Monopoly theory, energy companies have largely worked hand-in-glove with the states and federal government to defend the status quo. What is not seen is what advantage a fragmented, decentralized system would hold for smaller generators like solar and windpower. FDR's Rural Electrification Administration saw to it that farmers got subsidized, high-cost electricity, leading to the demise of the nascent wind-generation industry.

I'm sensitive to critiques of classical liberal thinking. It is too easy to get blind-sided by the holes in your chosen paradigm and to be guilty of confirmation bias; there may even be a genetic reason for it. It is, however, not unique to libertarian thought that the programs we favor lead to a series of choices and bad outcomes up to and including death. By that, I am sure that the implication is that if government services were done away with tomorrow, that the replacement institutions would either be slow in coming, or would be insufficient in any period of time. I concede that may be true, though not as true as thought by people who don't look for "that which is unseen."

However, the same is true of any political philosophy of which utopia is not an explicit and practical outcome. I am willing to concede that it might be possible to devise a government and society that effectively and fairly took everything above $100k/family and distributed it among the poor, and that might be hunky-dory. However, even in that system, it must be recognized that you would give something up, like the pace of technological advance or total wealth creation. Furthermore, there would be certain undesirable responses to the incentives by those on the receiving end. Both of those are the case in the maternalist countries of Europe. Compared to the US, they all have lower GDP growth; higher rates of unemployment and use of sick leave; many of the deaths in the 2003 heatwave were due to people leaving their elders in the care of "free" but understaffed institutions; the health care systems free-ride off of the drug development machine in the US (some 50-75% of all new chemical entitites and drugs are discovered, introduced, and accepted in the US); few private companies in Sweden hire females because of the generous mandates for family leave, so 75% of the females in the Swedish workforce work in the government, etc. The sum total result of those choices will be fewer deaths now but more in future periods. Paraphrasing MarginalRevolution, after 50 more years of 1% lower growth, won't there be a substantially lower quality of life in Sweden than in the US? And by lower quality of life, I mean, also, more people dying at younger ages?

And I would go further and say that since the tradeoff is an explicit choice of voters in the present who either deny or refuse to see that which is not seen (future deaths), that they are more guilty of picking and choosing who dies than those of us who would rather see people have at least some influence through their own actions on their own destiny.

I accept that luck, genetics, family, gender, and other uncontrollable factors influence a person's ability to control their own destiny. I cannot figure out how to devise a system that fairly accounts for them all. Heck, I can't even list them all. When a black woman from an upper-middle class background is competing against a poor white guy from West Virginia, who should get the advantage? That isn't a likely competition (not because there are no poor white men - there are in fact more poor white people - but because there are few rich black women), but it is a possible one. What about a lower-middle class black woman against a poor, Asian lesbian? A society simply cannot rank all of the attributes that may influence a person's life in order. A central government is no more likely to succeed than a society, but is more likely to come under pressure to use these programs to influence competition, especially if the measures are costly and differentiate large or profitable from small or marginally profitable businesses. Therefore, some such measures designed to help poor people may in fact harm them. That is why I am against them, not because I am against the government doing helpful things.

The recent move towards using zip codes rather than gender or race seems like a better affirmative action solution to me. It was not, however, the result of a federal mandate. It was a unilateral decision that arose in competition at a local level. Had the Supreme Court shot it down in favor of the dominant, "seen", paradigm, it would be another example of a better solution that was "not seen."

Fifty-one point three!

I got 51.3 mpg on the last tank - and I was afraid I would never approach the record of 52.4.

Sorry, I know it's a terribly geeky thing to get excited about, but it's certainly a lot more exciting at $2.859/gallon than at $1.50. Meanwhile, "my" senator, old Budget Hawk Pete, they used to call him when he chaired the Senate Finance Committee in the hard-spending Reagan years, is busy calling in Jed and asking him why his customers keep buying fuel and cursing him for selling it to them. Apparently, no amount of reason will keep politicians from being politicians.

technorati tag: gouging

[UPDATE] And this coming just a few weeks after Pete and his buddies passed a landmark pork bill for the oil industry.

Counterpoint to Sweatshop Thinking

From the Mutualist Blog, another viewpoint. First you have the anti-sweatshop activists and scholars. Then the anti-anti-sweatshop scholars and hangers-on. Now, anti-anti-anti-sweatshop scholarship from Ellenita Muetze Hellmer. JLS editor Roderick Long writes this about her article (not free, as of this writing):

In "Establishing Government Accountability in the Anti-Sweatshop Campaign: Toward a Logical, Activist Approach to Improving the Working Conditions of the Poor," Ellenita Muetze Hellmer questions the logic of this response, given the fact in many of these cases the employment is not truly chosen voluntarily -- either because the government literally and directly forces people to work at certain jobs, or else because government policies that displace farmers from their land leave sweatshop labor as their only alternative. Where multinational corporations are the beneficiaries of state-mandated slave labor or something close to it -- Hellmer cites instances from Burma, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador -- the libertarian impulse to defend sweatshops is no longer valid. In such cases, Hellmer argues, it is a mistake to think that boycotts and embargoes hurt the workers, since most of the "wages" from such schemes are going to government officials rather than the workers anyway, and disinvestment could have the salutary effect of discouraging these tyrannical policies, or of weakening oppressive regimes by reducing their revenue. Hence Hellmer recommends, not abandoning the anti-sweatshop campaign, but rather reorienting it so as to focus on genuinely coercive arrangements.

I am forced to adjust my definition of a sweatshop, justified here:

Any factory where the workers are legally prevented from quitting, striking, or organizing, and/or where the employers have perpetrated a fraud upon the workers by successfully misrepresenting the conditions of work, and/or where the workers were forced out of their (now) second-best choice of work by government policy.

Kathleen gave me another way of thinking about this; workers should control the condition of their employment, specifically whether or not they can quit at will. I will read the Hellmer article when it becomes free (yeah, I'm that cheap), as I think it adds another wrinkle to this debate.

technorati tags: sweatshop

Lean and the Project Triangle

If you've been an engineer for any appreciable amount of time, you've seen the Project Triangle. You are given three constraints, as pictured, but told that you can only pick any two. This gives you three choices:

• Fast and Good, but not Cheap. Designing and building something fast and having it come out good will cost lots of money.
• Fast and Cheap, but not Good. You can have something built fast and be cheap, but with a sacrifice of quality.
• Good and Cheap, but not Fast. You can have something built well and at a reasonable price, but it will take longer to think it through.

But this is short term thinking. In the longer run, technology tends to push the parameters closer to the center, allowing you to have Fast and Good, cheaper; Fast and Cheap, better; or Good and Cheap, faster. Instead of thinking in terms of what two features you can choose, think in terms of the maximum area of the circle you are allowed to draw with given resources. Technology allows you to capture more of each feature in a given sized circle.

The other thing that can push all three parameters closer together is Lean Production. Toyota's secret is that their processes are fast, they are error free, and both of these together cost less money. In Natural Capitalism, the authors talk about "tunneling through" the cost barrier. Besides their babbling about how this violates the thinking of "economists" (or at least their straw substitute for economists), it gives the wrong impression of how this kind of thing works. Upon closer inspection, their example is economy of scale.

Lean is an economy of scale with respect to transaction costs within a factory. Information is valuable and finding it incurs cost. Lean is a better way of signaling between workers and their peers, and between workers and management. A kanban is a signal that you are ready for more raw materials (raw to your process). A poka-yoke is a signal to the worker that something is wrong; it doesn't even require someone to initiate the signal, if done perfectly. A kaizen is a focused discussion involving workers, managers, engineers, and designers to perfect a system. A culture that encompasses all of those things uses economy of scale in communication between the various functional divisions within an organization.

This is the kind of thing my wife and I enjoy discussing, which is one reason why she gets a link as the smartest woman I know.

technorati tags: lean, kaizen, kanban, pokayoke, project

Why Democrats Should Abandon Roe v. Wade

I'm totally serious about this. This isn't one of those oh-so-clever bits where the author purports to be speaking to Democrats, but it's only a clever ruse to get them in and insult them, e.g., "You should vote for George Bush because he has succeeded in doing what Democrats have failed at for 30 years: ruining the economy." This blog is not about gratuitous insults. I don't generally do red meat politics issues. They bore me. This is a serious proposal, though it may get off track a few times. Please stick it out.

And for those of you who are going to go straight into knee-jerk ad hominem-land, let me say this, too: I used to belong to NARAL. After a while, I got out not because I had changed my mind but because they wanted to enlist my support in 10,000 unrelated causes. I still get mail from them. I don't think a tough Senatorial campaign for some Democratic candidate deserves an Action Alert.

Let me be clear: I think abortion is generally wrong, but it's one of, if not the, most difficult question of rights, and I'm not comfortable telling women what to do on the issue. The nonsense coming from both sides of that argument is just not constructive, principled, or serious. Take for example the argument from the right that (A) a fetus is a person with full rights, and (B) that abortion should be totally banned except in cases of rape and abortion. If a fetus is a person, what difference does the identity or intent of the father make? Or take the argument from the left that (A) a fetus up until the moment of birth is not a person and hence deserves no protection, and (B) the child of a single, destitute mother is worthy of every protection that the nation can afford. Such a transformation simply by moving "the being" from "in there" to "out here" defies logic. We should drop the irrelevant, "you can decide when you have a uterus" unless you specify that you will yield your abortion rights if a majority of women votes against it. I am satisfied with a simple and symmetrically beautiful rule using brain activity as a sign of sentience much as at the other end of the span of life. Abortion should be legal prior to, but not legal after the onset of brain activity, which occurs at about 10 weeks (almost coincident with the first trimester).

But that point isn't critical to my main point. Argue it both ways, I'm not particular as long as both the mother and fetus/child/puppy are given due consideration.

Here is what is critical: overturning Roe v. Wade does not mean returning to back alley abortions. Roe v. Wade was a decision by the Supreme Court that effectively said, "We don't care what you states think, abortion is legal in the United States, and that's that, end of discussion." Look around: the discussion not only did not end there, but that decision awakened a previously latent and, in my opinion, dangerous constituency.

Prior to 1962, therapeutic abortion was not legal for a variety of reasons including received Common Law and the beliefs of the American Medical Association. After 1962, and the introduction of the Model Penal Code, several states liberalized their abortion laws. By 1970, abortion was legal in four states (Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington), and thirteen others had reformed their abortion laws but not completely repealed them (California, Oregon, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware). I know you all want to run off and find arguments to prove me wrong on this: let me save you the time. One great resource is the Guttmacher Institute, especially this presentation, which contradicts some of the claims made in this essay (see especially the decline in deaths prior to Roe). Also, we have the brief history from The Abortion Law Homepage linked at the beginning of this paragraph, and two relevant entries at Wikipedia: Roe v. Wade and Abortion Law.

Now, I have read the Constitution from cover to cover, and I can't find any mention of "abortion". Yes, I know, I can't find any mention of the "Air Force", either, but remember that they used to be called the Army Air Corps, so it's easy to see how they made that interpretation and could do so again if someone wanted to force that game of semantics. The convoluted arguments behind Roe v. Wade are astounding; they squeezed blood from the turnip. Now, I know you Dems are fond of saying that it's a "living" document, but you should remember that your justifications can easily be turned on you when the other party is in power. Uh, ... like now! Just about every aspect of the Patriot Act was at one time the policy of the Clinton Administration, including detaining aliens without a trial on secret evidence (al-Najjar, Haddam, Ahmed), electronic surveillance (remember Carnivore? Echelon?), and so on. Those chickens have come home to roost, and I hold you partly responsible for it. You all - both Republicans and Democrats - have extremely short memories and/or nearsightedness when it comes to your own party's shenanigans, and then you act surprised when the other guy turns your weapon on you. You should keep in mind this exchange from Robert Bolt's A Man for all Seasons

Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

But I'll forgive you - and you, me if you'll just stick with this until the end.

Because if Roe v. Wade is overturned, it will mean the rebirth of the Democratic Party.

When Roe was decided in 1973, Republicans were a mixture of unprincipled anti-communists like Nixon, principled liberals like Goldwater (I still use the classical meaning of "liberal"), a few bankers, Wall Street tycoons, and a few Country Club members (I know you like to stereotype them as mostly of this variety, but that would hardly give them enough members to vote in Nixon twice, would it?). After Watergate, Republicans were in decline, with only a few Sagebrush Rebels in the West trying to fight the national government and save what was left of federalism. But Roe had ignited a fire among the scariest group of voters ever to unite: the Evangelists. Together with the Sagebrushers, they began fighting in the state rotundas and eventually carried Ronald Reagan to the White House just when it seemed that Republicans would never be seen in that place again.

Yes, Roe v. Wade reinvigorated the Scattered Right, but birthed the evengelical wing at the same time. From Nixon's "Silent Majority" to Falwell's "Moral Majority" all within a decade, and today with an evangelical President who picks Supreme Court Justices on the basis of their second birth, the Evangelical Right has moved from the wings of the party to center stage. Roe is the Bogeyman they trot out to solidify the base and maintain their power. This is the pad from which they launched the New Crusades. It has to stop. You have to stop it. By abandoning Roe v. Wade.

I can't believe nobody else has seen this. I mean, it seems so simple.

With Roe no longer the "law of the land", states will be able to choose for themselves what level of abortion law they want. Y'know, with democracy and stuff, just like they do it in Europe, where abortion is mostly legal, and not nearly as contentious. That's the really scary part about the love affair with Roe: it requires the adoption of an elitist, anti-democracy tendency to which Hannah Arendt showed both sides of the political spectrum can succumb. That's not good. It's time for you to return to your roots, at least on this subject. We'll take up mandatory sentencing guidelines for gasoline price-gougers another day.

When the burden gets thrust back upon the states, I think we can easily surmise what will happen in the first round. The coasts and Illinois will opt for abortion on demand up to delivery, and the flyover states will try to ban it. Or will they?

See, this is the interesting part of this. You all seem to be forgetting that the evangelists are just barely tolerated by the other wings, the "small is beautiful" government reformers, the tax cutters, the pork barrel auctioneers, the anti-terrorist hawks. Just look at how quickly the others abandoned the President's Evangelical pick, Harriet Miers. The fight in the states will shatter the heretofore solid coalition. Furthermore, you are going to have to wage an intellectual battle that will reinvigorate the Democratic Party at the grassroots level.

Can we be honest? The Left hasn't had a concrete, useful idea since Johnson left office. I'm not saying the Republican's ideas have all been good ones, or that the execution has been good, but at least they have new ones. Carter was a smart but ineffective leader; he barely survived his one term. Clinton? I know you're all going to trot out the nonsense about how "he ran the longest peacetime expansion" but when I ask what exactly he did, I get some mumbo-jumbo about balancing the budget. Look folks: check your history. Remember the shutdown in 1995? What was that about? Gingrich wanted to balance the budget in __ years, Clinton wanted to balance it in __ years, it actually became "balanced" in __ years if you don't count the money they were stealing borrowing from Social Security (answers at the bottom). It should be obvious that while both sides claimed victory, neither was responsible, both were lucky, and we should have credited Alan Greenspan, Andy Groves, and Bill Gates for the expansion. Clinton's one major and potentially transforming idea was universal health care, but the proposed mechanism was so bad that even his own constituency abandoned him. Since then, it's all been, "tax cuts for the rich", "no blood for oil", "Bush lied, millions died", but not one concrete, substantial policy proposal. There were a couple of insubstantial ideas. Daschle thought he would thwart the tax cuts by suggesting the rebates, but that didn't work (although Bush took the heat and the credit for it). Then Lieberman suggested federalizing airport security, and then rolling up a bunch of agencies into the Homeland Security Dept. Both terrible wastes of resources, but Bush takes both the blame and credit for them. Other than that, you guys are out of ideas for anything except how to rhyme things in a clever Bush-bashing way. Social Security is going to go bankrupt, everyone knows it, Gore even ran his campaign on the issue, and yet when someone proposes reform, you claim that there is no crisis, that we can deal with that if and when it becomes a crisis. Are you willing to tolerate the same logical process regarding global warming? Apparently, when it's a crisis that matters to you, then we need to get right on it before it becomes a crisis, but when it's a crisis whose solution might benefit the other party, we should "wait and see". You have become the party of nit-picking, fearmongering, and condescension.

The fight over abortion in the state legislatures is going to reinvigorate your party. But, perhaps equally important, it is going to shatter the evangelical grip on the Republican Party. You don't believe me? You think they're all evangelicals? Consider these famous Republicans with a pro-choice record:

• Rudi Giuliani
• John McCain
• Condoleezza Rice
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Ronald Reagan

Ronald Freakin' Reagan?!

Well, ... before he wrote a book outlining his stance against abortion, Ron was governor of California, 1967-1975. As you will recall, that was the period during which California loosened its abortion laws. Guess who signed the law? It was only after the resulting surge in abortions that he changed his mind.

I suspect there are more, and they would come out of the closet if only they thought they could stand up to the evangelicals. The coastal states are the easy pickings. But what about the rest?

I think you need to disregard the hype from the extremists like NARAL. Prior to Roe, deaths due to abortions had already been declining for several years, from 200 per year in 1965 to less than 40 in 1973. The abortion rate peaked in the 1980s and is likely to continue to decline. The real problem is how women with less access to resources are going to fare.

Most abortions are obtained by white women, but their proportion is decreasing. White women in the general population tend to be more affluent, on average, than minority women, on average, but the subgroup of white women who obtain abortions is probably lower income than the general population of white women. The black women probably mostly live near the coasts; they are going to be safest. The hispanic women are in mostly Democratic states except for the wildcard Arizona and the safely Republican Texas. The white abortion-seeking women are probably mostly in rural areas, where they are only at risk in the Midwest. 80% of counties have no abortion provider now; 33% of all women live in a county with no provider. I wish I had more detailed statistics, because those last two are potentially misleading. For example, it is a different type of problem for a woman living in Montana as opposed to Connecticut if the nearest provider is in the next county, so counting "by county" is different than counting "by distance from the nearest provider." Also, it is worth considering the socioeconomic factors involved. Not having a provider in Lancaster County is a different magnitude of problem than a lack in New York City, or in a rural county in West Virginia because of the familial and other support systems available. Japanese laws are restrictive, but rape is virtually unknown in Japan.

Your battleground seems to me to be Utah, Texas, and those Midwestern states that will likely ban or at least restrict abortion. If you can mount an intellectual assault effective enough to win there, you will have created something worth reckoning with.

This seems so likely to work, that I can't believe it hasn't been suggested before. Perhaps the Miers nomination makes it easy to point to a concrete example of what the Evangelicals really want? Or perhaps it comes from a frustration of having to listen to this single issue as if it were the only thing facing the Supreme Court? When you drop your support for Roe v. Wade, it will be easier to take you seriously when you complain about Bush's assault on the Constitution. It also makes it difficult to think of Democrats as the "party of the people" when you keep nominating Old Money. Returning the policy-making power to the legislature, where it belongs, will return you to your democratic roots and force you to pick up the fight in the states and win it. I genuinely hope you take this challenge up; it will reinvigorate your party and shatter the evangelistic grip on the Republican party and the nation.

Answers: 7, 10, 2

Technorati tags: abortion, Supreme Court, Bush, Republicans, Roe v Wade,