Ways That True Conservatives Will Cut Spending

Conservatives in Congress in the past few years have claimed to be deficit-driven, and have been elected on such platforms. And this is excellent. If we have to put our nickel down on possible reasons the United States wouldn't be around in a century, near the top of the list is our inability to control our spending or match it to our revenues. This can't go on forever. China will only loan us so much money. The inability of smaller municipalities to control themselves highlights this problem, but at least the poor bastards in San Bernardino (and many other cities) can move, and still be in their home country.

We need some grown-ups to make some cuts, and hurt some people. Conservatives, we need you to recognize that when you make these cuts, you will hurt some people, and some of them will be in your district. Otherwise you will never really make any cuts, and we will either find other grown-ups, or the country will fail.

We voters can be forgiven for thinking that conservatives aren't serious about this, because even when they're given the chance to do it, they don't. (As a voter, I very much want them to.) Sure, they're good at stunts, but somehow that doesn't translate into the serious work of cutting individual programs piecemeal, if that's the only option open.

Put another way: we hear a lot from supposed fiscal conservatives about government pork, until it's in their district; and when we try to cut those, well, that's hurting America. (Or whatever you have to say to conceal that you're never really going to cut anything.) Yes, we all know this happens, conservatives, because all those pork dollars go to the big donors who, in turn, are the source of your campaign contributions. But we voters are sick of hearing "conservatives" repeat "cut spending" and then doing nothing, and this basic fact is getting harder to hide from. You're either going to have to actually do something, or admit that you're just a spender who pretends to be a fiscal conservative for votes.

What are some things that grown-up non-hypocrite fiscal conservatives can cut?

- Make the military budget cost less by auditing the DoD. The savings here make non-medical entitlement reform look like the drop in a bucket it is. In some cases even after the Army said it didn't want tanks, it was forced to take them by Congress. Way to go conservatives!

- End the drug war, and tax the proceeds. You're paying to keep a lot of people in prison and out of productive jobs. You're paying cops with big pensions. You're paying for border security, that has to be there as long as drug money is flowing south into Mexico, along with the weapons that money buys down there. Don't wait for the drug/police complex to ask you to spend less money on them. It's the police and the cartels that benefit from our tax dollars. If you refuse to do this, you're again showing us you're not serious about cutting spending.

- Stop farm subsidies. This is the most egregious, and the one that there's no good reason for, other than you have friends back home. Any legislator who renews farm subsidies does not believe in the free market.

- Add expiration dates to regulations. Regulations cost business money and become obsolete, but industries spring up around these regulations and fight to avoid having them changed or removed. Unless what you're really doing is supporting your friends back home, you should support this proposal, which has been around for awhile now with a lot of conservative intellectual firepower behind it.

- Measure legislator effectiveness. Unless conservatives think the other guys are more accountable than you, conservatives should ask for projections to be put on bills - how much will this cost? How much will it save? How long will it take? - and then have there be some effect if the actual result is way out of bounds. We penalize contractors who screw up (I hope), why not stupid lawmakers? Don't you expect that they're on the other side of the aisle anyway?

Emperors and Constitutions: Illusions of Continuity?

A quirk of Japanese history is the survival of the Emperor, for over two thousand years. This, despite multiple violently-ascendant governments in that interval, most of which relegated the Emperor to a figurehead who spent his days in a pleasant court in Kyoto writing poetry while the military rulers ran the country. This seems strange to just about everybody outside of Japan. If you take over a country, the first thing you do is stamp out all vestiges of the old order, right? Especially the figureheads of the old authority!

There may have been a method to their madness. Once the institution of the Emperor had survived one or two of these changes of the guard, keeping the Emperor around - with no power or ability to muster forces of his own - might make sense. It gives a false sense of stability by presenting a continuous succession of figureheads, giving the new government immediate legitimacy.

A cynical view of the longevity of the United States Constitution might stir similar thoughts. The democracies of the world frequently throw out their previous constitutions and write new ones even without violence, often multiple times per century. In fact, imagine for a moment that there is a European country that has kept the same document, unchanged, since the eighteenth century. Certainly this would seem curious; and the government in question, dishonest about how they're executing this ancient parchment, or (more charitably) maybe they're just a rural backwater where nothing much has changed. Certainly this latter situation does not obtain in the U.S. It might be the case then that the true function of the Supreme Court is to interpret challenges to the U.S. Constitution in whatever ways create the fewest ripples with respect to modern sensibilities. Activist judges or not, it would seem that "living documents" guarantee a certain amount of non-elected legislating.

A related question would be the relationship of currency stability (say, month-to-month fluctuations) over time relative to constitutional turnover. Do countries that explode their parliaments or set up new governments have less predictable currency values over time?

New Call to Regulate Drones: from Google Head Eric Schmidt

This is cross-posted at my technology blog, Speculative Nonfiction.

Article here. There's a clear motivation for governments and the enforcer class to have a monopoly on this technology, and Frank Fukuyama among others had predicted some time ago that governments would start creating this monopoly shortly (is this why Chris Squire put down his capital investment of a drone manufacturing facility across the border in Mexico?), but why from the private sector? I'm not sure what Schmidt is doing here. Is he just going on record stating his discomfort with drones so Google can distance itself from perceived vague connections to sure-to-come abuses of technology?

In any event, if you're uncomfortable with your neighbor having a drone, I'm ten times as nervous when the police are allowed to have drones but the rest of us are not.

Questioning Outrage

1) News flash: people asking for money on the street are sometimes lying. When you give a beggar money, part of the deal is lack of accountability. You don't know what s/he will spend it on; you don't know if s/he is actually a millionaire on a lark. Expecting that a stranger to whom you give money is telling the truth is stupid, and being outraged by this man's behavior is frankly bizarre. That said, his fake speech impediment gives him away. He talks like someone with a brain injury, but his grammatical lapses are out of place.




2) What is the penalty for making damaging accusations? It's certainly the case that more rapes go unreported, than false rape accusations are made. But the case of a serial rape-false-accuser who is getting jail time is now prompting people to ask questions: since there is clearly an irreversible cost of (rape accusations, molestation accusations, etc.) what is the cost to the accuser in cases where it turns out to be false? Another bizarre legal inconsistency is that it's contempt of court to lie under oath, but then a defendant pleading innocent and found guilty does not automatically earn an additional contempt charge.

Tool to Search State Legislative Activities

This is a massive step forward in forcing government transparency and letting us evaluate the performance of our legislators. Without good information, we have no idea what or how they're doing - which of course is what they prefer. You can track specific legislators and bills. Visit OPENSTATES.ORG.

Peter Thiel on Automating Law

An excellent article by Thiel that converges on some of the same ideas here, regarding automating legislation and constitutions in a legal programming language that has to compile before it's considered in effect.  It seems this is the ideal if we're serious about government being of laws and not of men.

Measuring Congress

A benefit of easy access to computation and publication tools is that public figures can be more easily made accountable to their performance, whatever their domain of endeavor, and then have their status affected appropriately.  Of course not just primates but many social animals track past behavior and reciprocation albeit sloppily, and we humans started doing this more rigorously by applying integers to one measure of exchangeable liquid utility in the Middle East fifty centuries or so ago (money).  But there were often ways to opacify performance and game the system.  I am optimistic that technology means this is changing for the better.  Impressively, after this U.S. election cycle, even Dick Morris had to explain himself on FOX. 

So why don't we measure and track legislators, in terms of the effectiveness of the laws they write?

It would be nice to hear people in bars talking about averages for legislators or entire Congresses instead of yards rushing. "Remember that 114th Congress? They had a term average of point eight nine. Those were the glory days. Not like these bums now, they haven't been above point seven oh any single week."

The first thing that's terrifying to contemplate about the legislative process is that the feedback loop (between writing good bills and re-election of the writer) is not just broken, it basically never existed.  Imagine if a company were run like this!  Think about it:  one or a few legislators (out of 435 in the House) write a bill, in committee, invariably with lobbyists "advising" them.  The bill goes to the floor for a vote, which in the U.S. at least will usually be along party lines regardless of the bill's content.  And voters do not reward or punish the legislators who wrote the bill - because voters ignore bills (whether they were good or bad) and decide who to vote for based on what tribal loyalty noises the politician makes during the election, and whether jobs were gained or lost during the last term, which usually has nothing to do with anything the legislator did.  Occasionally a bill will become known for its extreme unpopularity, and for this reason there's every reason to avoid association with laws passed, and few reasons to be associated with them in the minds of voters.  In very rare cases, a bill later becomes very popular, in which case at election time it was their idea all along, and we see five hundred thirty-some gruesome examples of the free rider problem. 

It is truly amazing any law ever gets passed.

(On the complexity of modern government in general and how this breaks the feedback loop, see Steven Teles on "kludgeocracy":  "[it is] hard for Americans to attribute responsibility when things go wrong, thus leading blame to be spread over government in general, rather than affixed precisely, where such blame could do some good. The consequence of complexity, then, is diffuse cynicism, which is the opposite of the habit needed for good democratic citizenship...The complexity that makes so much of American public policy vexing and wasteful for ordinary citizens and governments, however, is also what makes it so easy for organized interests to profit off the state's largesse." Additional emphasis by Salam here.)

This is a problem in medicine, where it's hard to think of a way to put one number on a physician that measures their performance.  Consequently, we use the burdernsome approach of looking individually at every condition they see and procedure they do, and compare them to national averages.  In legislation the problem is worse, because laws are (in theory) solutions to problems that are not just unique but only recently appeared, which is why they now require laws.

A related question to problem #2 is that legislator effectiveness should not be measured just by number of laws produced.  The number of laws sponsored or co-sponsored is in large point dependent on the legislators' committee seats and seniority; and beyond that, just because someone is producing lots of laws,  doesn't mean those are good laws.  In fact part of the measure of legislator effectiveness could be how many laws (and regulations!) they retire, or subsume within new laws.  (A constitution and legal system written in a consistent programming language, requiring the full set of laws to be compiled every time the session ended, would be one way to decrease redundancy and legislative sclerosis.)  It may be appropriate that in a more complex time, we have more laws than we did a hundred years ago, but resignation to this type of legal sediment accumulation is unlikely to produce an optimal government.

One solution to the difficulty of how to measure individual laws would be not allowing a bill unless legislators made a concrete prediction about its effect - and then tracking whether they were right.  The legislators' effectiveness would be some combination of their accuracy, and their effect on a concrete metric - money, jobs, happiness in their district, etc.  No one cares that you were 10 for 10 on declarations that the sun would keep rising in the east, but if you miss a few while increasing quality of life years in your district, maybe you're a keeper.  This of course is a version of futarchy, applied to legislators.  It might actually be easier to install it in a legislature first, before it's installed among the general electorate, since many people are likely to recoil at the suggestion that voting be counted differently for different people for any reason.  But sticking it to Congress, well now you have something!