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James Madison Archive

Wednesday

11

July 2012

1

COMMENTS

We All Lie, Cheat and Steal

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society, Government Meddling, Liberty & Limited Government

That’s the gist of a TIME piece from last month. And I’m inclined to agree.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who teaches at Duke University, is known as one of the most original designers of experiments in social science. Not surprisingly, the best-selling author’s creativity is evident throughout his latest book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. A lively tour through the impulses that cause many of us to cheat, the book offers especially keen insights into the ways in which we cut corners while still thinking of ourselves as moral people.

…“A student told me a story about a locksmith he met when he locked himself out of the house. This student was amazed at how easily the locksmith picked his lock, but the locksmith explained that locks were really there to keep honest people from stealing. His view was that 1% of people would never steal, another 1% would always try to steal, and the rest of us are honest as long as we’re not easily tempted. Locks remove temptation for most people. And that’s good, because in our research over many years, we’ve found that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everybody is at some point or another.”

Human nature is what it is. Yet some of the greatest philosophical differences between the various political ideologies are rooted in differing views of human nature. Utopian ideologies tend to start from a conception of man that is either good or improvable through social tinkering. Turn of the century movements on both sides of the Atlantic, Progressivism and Fascism, shared this central idea that human nature could be corrected through government manipulation. Classical liberalism, based on Lockean theorizing (which in turn drew from the Hobbesian conception of human nature as violent and competitive) rejected this view. While Locke saw the state as necessary to protect fundamental rights, it is also posed a threat of its own. It would be, after all, run by the same flawed individuals.

Which brings me to this passage from the article:

“People are able to cheat more when they cheat for other people. In some experiments, people cheated the most when they didn’t benefit at all. This makes sense if our ability to be dishonest is increased by the ability to rationalize our behavior. If you’re cheating for the benefit of another entity, your ability to rationalize is enhanced. So yes, it’s easier for an accountant to see fudging on clients’ tax returns as something other than dishonesty. And it’s a concern within companies, since people’s altruistic tendencies allow them to cheat more when it benefits team members.”

With this understanding, is it any surprise that government’s are full of liars and cheats?

This reminded me of a quote from James Madison in Federalist #51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

It seems as if the left often stops after the first sentence. Men are bad, so we need government. But what about our government of men? The “auxiliary precautions” of which Madison speaks are exactly the restraints on political power which the left has worked so consistently to erode. In expanding the Commerce Clause into meaninglessness, and turning on its head the Constitutional idea of enumerated powers, today’s government has plenty of control of the governed, but little if anything left in place to oblige it to control itself.

Friday

20

May 2011

2

COMMENTS

Should We Weight Votes Toward the Least Productive in Society?

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Taxes

This is what a terrible idea looks like:

America should implement weighted voting to make voting more objective and fair, and give the young more power, because the consequences of political decisions will affect them the longest. Weighted voting would restore power to twenty and thirty year olds, where it resided before the advent of medical science. With the aid of computers, it would be easy to give everyone a Voting Score, just like we all have a credit score.

Yes, let’s give the most ignorant, inexperienced and disengaged voting bloc extra political power. That sounds like an excellent idea.

Ezra Klein also highlighted the idea, though was careful to note that he did not endorse it, instead pointing out that we weight by other factors such as geography. We do this for a reason, as states are recognized as constituents with independent interests. Unlike voters, they have issues of sovereignty and their own rightful political authority to protect from federal encroachment. And we’ve seen what has happened with the erosion of their political input at the federal level by moving to direct elections for Senators, as the federal government has all but assimilated the states into administrative bodies which exist for no other purpose than to do its bidding.

The young, on the other hand, do not have an independent interest that is different from any other individual voter, they just have a longer time horizon. But does that necessarily mean they are more impacted by political decisions, as implied by the “decisions will affect them the longest” reasoning? I don’t think so.

As the government has become more and more an instrument of redistribution, I’d say it is taxpayers who are most impacted by political decisions, regardless of how much longer they have to live. As such, if we insist on mucking with voting weights, I agree with the suggestion of John Hawkins to weight by total taxes paid.

This would have the benefit of solving what is perhaps the biggest political problem of the day: the ability of non-tax payers to vote themselves benefits at the expense of an ever narrowing tax base. Voters are more likely to vote themselves benefits if they are not contributing to the costs.The burdens then fall on fewer and fewer productive members of society, which both reduces their productivity (and thus the funds available for such redistributions) but it also means a growing population of moochers. It’s a vicious, teat-suckling cycle. This is why James Madison warned of a need for “protecting the minority of the opulent.” His answer was the Senate.

Madison was not talking merely of the super-wealthy routinely attacked by leftists and redistributionists today, but of the productive sector in general, which we can largely equate to today as those who pay income tax. The point of his argument was to protect the minority interests against the majority that would abuse them. And when those who pay for and sustain government are the minority, while those who mooch off their largess are a majority, the end result can be only fiscal calamity. As younger people are less productive and carry less than the average burden of government, weighting in their favor would exacerbate this problem and hasten our headlong rush into national insolvency.

Wednesday

25

February 2009

10

COMMENTS

The Stimulus Marks The Death Of Federalism

Written by , Posted in Liberty & Limited Government

If federalism wasn’t dead already, the “stimulus” killed it. That is, the relationship between the federal government and the states has become so distorted compared to the original conception held by our founders that it would make little practical difference if we just went ahead and abolished the concept of states altogether.

The Constitution designed a system in which the states share sovereignty with a federal government. According to Madison, the powers of the federal government were to be “few and defined,” while those remaining with the states would be “numerous and indefinite.” This is no longer so.

The federal government now has the final say in most areas which used to be the sole responsibility of the states. Criminal law, an area left exclusively to the respective states, is becoming ever more federalized. Obeying the laws of California and growing pot for medical use is no protection from federal agents. Whatever one might think of this behavior, it’s the voters of California who should get the final say.

A fifty-five mph speed limit, promptly ignored by most motorists, was dictated to the states by passage of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act.  Although the national speed limit was later repealed in 1995, numerous federal standards remain, such as the minimum ages for drinking and smoking. The federal government has largely accomplished this power grab by opening the spigot of federal dollars, then threatening to cut off any state that doesn’t kowtow to Washington’s demands.

So when a number of governors of both parties balked at taking federal money for unemployment insurance, knowing that they would be stuck with the bill of an expanded government welfare mandate when the federal funds expired, it should come as no surprise that the beltway response was to attempt to denigrate and browbeat the rogue states into compliance. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer responded to their rejection of federal funds by admonishing governors for playing “political games,” then boldly declared, “whether the governors want to or not, they can be forced to take the whole thing.” This astonishing declaration strikes at the heart of our federalist system. Even the race card has been played to shame governors into accepting the dictates of Washington, such as when democratic House member James Clyburn shamelessly alleged that any rejection of stimulus money, and the strings that came with it, amounts to “a slap in the face of African-Americans.” Not all states have the foresight to resist such federal encroachments. State financial shortfalls and a narrow view of state interest leads some, such as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, to turn to Washington hat in hand.

Aside from the eventual subjugation of state authority, funneling federal dollars into the states also leads to significant waste. No longer dependent on their constituents for financial support, the states become rent-seekers looking to game the federal system. This is why 250,000 Washington State residents recently received a $1 check in the mail.  As a reward for this wasteful spending, the federal government will pump into the state millions in new welfare funds. This seemingly irrational and grossly wasteful spending is encouraged by the present system, where states have financial incentives to meet federal bureaucratic rules that allow them to qualify for more funding.  The impact on the taxpayer is simply not important to the state in this calculus.

Alexander Hamilton described the balance between national and state governments as one of “utmost importance” that should be “dwelt on with peculiar attention.” Yet hardly a thought was given by Congress to this fundamental principle when it hastily passed almost $1 trillion in new federal spending, $144 billion of which has been designated for state consumption. And so we must now repeat in vain Thomas Jefferson’s wish “never to see all offices transferred to Washington.”