While I'm here, an omnibus politics post...
(inspired by Matt -- "I'm a tad confused," Tuesday, July 23)
It's unclear where I would have begun defining my politics from scratch. (Actually it's crystal clear. "Life, liberty, and property." But the prose that followed from that would have been unbearably pompous.) Instead I'll use Matt's template.
I think spending on defense is necessary, but not necessarily at the levels we have in the recent past.
I think the key is what we spend it on. For pure libertarian doctrine, I'm always tempted to lapse into supporting big defense cuts. Then I remember September 11, or read about -- or talk to -- people who lived in the old Soviet Union. I think our military is a fantastically well-developed entity that should get whatever money it takes to do its job right. I'll readily admit extreme ignorance on how best to run a military -- actually not just any military, but an
American one, more on that point later. For that reason I'm extremely deferential to people who know what they're doing and who demonstrably get results.
Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell are perfect for this. I'm glad they disagree so much because in general it means they'll have to work together, sometimes agree to disagree, but generally find the right path between their approaches.
Some defense-related things I'm decidedly NOT in favor of:
1. Spending money just for the sake of spending it. Itemize it. Follow a plan. Tell the Congressmen who want defense pork for their districts to stuff it. Don't waste money on things the Pentagon
doesn't even want; it knows what it's doing.
2. The military as a federal make-work program. Every time the Pentagon decides to streamline and close some bases, the communities affected by this throw a hissy fit. The relevant Congressmen grandstand, and the closings don't actually happen, and so installations with little or no value (actually negative value, accounting for opportunity cost) stay open as an economic prop.
3. The military as a social-policy guinea pig. This applies to women in the military: I'm all for it but I bristle when people gender-norm the physical standards for different positions. I imagine that for the best possible performance, in any given military unit some of the most labor-intensive or strength-intensive jobs will be male-dominated. That's just how it goes. I guess it also applies (used to apply?) to gays in the military but the less official opposition I hear and the more I hear servicemen themselves come out in favor of it, the more my instinctive deference to the Pentagon fades away. Just end the controversy already. Let 'em in, stop dancing around it or tolerating the blackmail and the bashing. Give the executive order and in a year's time nobody will care anymore.
Getting back to general issues -- stop and think a minute about just how many U.S. troops are in different places around the world. It's breathtaking. We're doing so much right now, and yet by most accounts U.S. military people are
really really well-behaved. If you'd found out 100 years ago that one country would have such a far-flung military presence, you'd probably naturally assume a fair amount of atrocities. Don't get me wrong, anything above zero is intolerable (the ones convicted of rape in Okinawa should probably be hanged, ditto the airman who caused the Italian ski lift accident), but our record is still pretty exemplary. I love the fact that we're portrayed as amiable, almost bumbling (here I have particular Berlin tourist traps in mind), yet still combine incredible benevolence with incredible competence, almost complacency. U.S. troops are
just that good, and all-volunteer at that. Stop me before I fawn again.
Anyway...
I'd rather spend money on education, advancement of the arts, public broadcasting, health care, affordable housing, and just about any other thing that might enrich someone's life.
To me the crucial difference here is having the money be spent (passive voice) versus having Uncle Sam spend it (active voice). To be pedantic, the quoted sentence is active-voice:
I'd rather spend money. Most of the things on that list are things that the federal government probably shouldn't be doing and definitely hasn't been able to do well.
I'll single out "advancement of the arts" as something that the feds should especially stay away from, since it implies value judgments that the feds have no business making. Defending our country is something that the feds are uniquely suited for, one of the very reasons the national government even exists. I don't think anarcho-capitalists could carry out military operations worth jack, but you'd be surprised at how good they are at providing for people's quality of life.
I don't think the government should dictate "private" matters, or even have a serious opinion, on things like homosexuality, gay marriage, etc.
Whole-hearted agreement here. I want governments to recognize gay marriage but what I'd really like to see is marriage itself
lose a lot of its special legal status. This is where my roommate and I have a deep disagreement: We both agree that marriage is an extremely important institution to many religions that the government shouldn't be corrupting. In my opinion, the best way for the government not to corrupt it is for the government to
not be the official arbiter.
I'm a strong beliver in the constitution, even the parts I don't necessarily think work well today...
Strong agreement in theory. In practice I think there's a lot of pragmatism (I used to hate that), resulting in a lot of bad but some good. The harder anyone pushes for doctrinal purity, the more likely we are unwittingly to lose the stability that kept everyone peaceful and sane.
I don't mind paying taxes if I think the money will go to better use than what I'd do with it...
And yet, almost by definition, it won't. The idea that the government can spend our money better than we can is insulting to me, even if occasionally true.
I think graduated income tax is the dumbest thing going. Institute a national sales tax, like Britain.
The first sentence is true; the second sentence I can't go along with because it's way too regressive. I would replace the graduated income tax with a flat rate. It's intuitively fair: If you make (say) $20,000, you owe (say) $5,000. If you make $200,000, you owe $50,000. Even at a "flat"
percentage rate, you'll note that $50,000 is quite a lot more than $5,000.
One thing about this is that it eliminates the need for either a marriage bonus or marriage penalty. The tax code can finally treat us all as individuals. And -- so long as the revenue intake is reasonable -- we can dispense with taxation as a social policy enforcer. Well, not
totally, since someone will point out cases where taxes correct for the effect of externalities. It's far better to take on those externalities directly if you can, since marketwise two wrongs don't make a right, but still.
Tax policy is fun in theory, since the paradox early on was that so many complications in tax law (really more in tax
jurisprudence) arose from attempts to
close loopholes, and to account for transactions transparently enough and similarly enough that you didn't give people artificial incentive to account for things any given way.
In practice it got really dry after the intro semester and became a matter of memorizing a lot of things that you could use for maximum exploitation of the system.
I'm pro-choice, if only because it makes more sense to me to humanely kill a small, unaware person than to subject a larger, aware person to a lifetime of punishment, poverty, and other pain and suffering.
I'm strongly opposed to this very reasoning, mainly because it presupposes that the person in question is permanently bound to the poverty and suffering. There's such a thing as social mobility in the U.S. It's part of what makes this country great. The opportunity is there and always will be.
Beyond that, if you know me or read this site then you know full well what I think of abortion. What you might not realize is that I'm well aware that abortion won't become illegal any time soon and in fact probably shouldn't.
At the very least the sooner people who think the way I think admit -- proclaim -- that current abortion laws won't/shouldn't change, the sooner the various pro-choice scam artists can stop bilking impressionable young women through those asinine fundraising letters.
(Fundraising letters on most issues are asinine, but I'll put it to you that the pro-choice ones are the worst, mainly for the manner in which they smear people who feel the way I'd feel. You'd think we were all religious freaks, out there doing our part to bomb the clincs and what-not.)
Aside from what the law is, I'm extremely interested in spending some of my free time (or money) on programs that result in more woman making what I believe to be the uniquely correct choice in their situation. The trick seems to be making the pregnancy affordable, reassuring them, where necessary making the adoption as hassle-free as possible.
I don't mind the death penalty, but have a sinking feeling it isn't applied fairly across the board. Still, not enough reason to scrap the whole idea yet. (Given this with the above bullet, I realize I may have a smaller respect for life than I would have otherwise admitted. A tad unsettling.)
When I edited Harvard's "conservative" newspaper (actually by far the more moderate of the two that aspired to this title, but our right-wing adversaries were far more interested in getting cheap publicity than in bothering to publish more than once or twice a year), this guy a worked with a year behind me loved to call himself "pro-death" because of his positions on those issues.
I'm conceptually opposed to the death penalty but I have an awfully hard time building up much sympathy for some of the worst offenders whom it affects. I also strongly approve of the Dogbert theory on why the death penalty is
obviously a deterrent. Think of your favorite executed serial killer. Ask yourself how many rapes or murders he's committed lately.
But enough about life and death, let's get back to tax policy! You know what I despise? When politicians decide to give either tax breaks or government perks to some favored interest of theirs. This is specially blatant with pro sports facilities. It's such a grandstanding thing to do, and yet it
doesn't even work. If you want to create a climate favorable to business and spur economic development,
lower taxes for everybody. Of course, this results in an aggregation of so many little gains here and there that no scheming, ambitious politician can latch on to one particular photo-op of a success story and take credit for it.
Politicians want to achieve great things instead of stepping aside and just enabling us to achieve those things ourselves. If I could turn that into a pithy sentence railing against it, then maybe I'd have a motto.
