Positive Liberty

Republicans Out of Power: I like them so much better that way — and I mean that as a compliment. Thus, the very day after the election, I give a link — and effusive praise — to something I found at The Corner. This Mike Pence guy’s really onto something:

After 1994, we were a majority committed to balanced federal budgets, entitlement reform and advancing the principles of limited government. In recent years, our majority voted to expand the federal government’s role in education, entitlements and pursued spending policies that created record deficits and national debt.

This was not in the Contract with America and Republican voters said, ‘enough is enough.’

Our opponents will say that the American people rejected our Republican vision. I say the American people didn’t quit on the Contract with America, we did. And in so doing, we severed the bonds of trust between our party and millions of our most ardent supporters.

I look forward to actions that will back up his words.

The Libertarian Spoiler: Thoughtful considerations on the much-neglected libertarian vote by Joshua Claybourn and Brian Doherty at Reason’s Hit & Run. Claybourn writes,

Clearly something more than the Iraq war is at play here, and it involves a disenchantment among true conservatives. The list of un-conservative policies from the current GOP establishment is endless:

* A massive $400 billion increase in Medicare spending over 10 years.
* Education reform, the cornerstone of which was more spending tied to more federal regulation. Bush got Sen. Ted Kennedy to co-author the bill just for good sport.
* Supporting a campaign finance law that protects the interests of incumbents by limiting free speech rights during elections.
* A willingness and desire to entangle the U.S. military with virtually any nation.
* The unbridled expansion of executive branch and government police powers.
* A promise to cut farm subsidies (twice), followed by two separate bills which significantly increased farm subsidies, at which point Bush signed and praised it.
* The decision to impose strict steel quotas in opposition to conservative free market principles as a means to pander to union workers (a tactic which certainly failed).
* Increased funding on a wide range of bloated government projects and departments, including, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts.
* General increases across the board on domestic infrastructure projects to a level not seen since President Johnson occupied the White House.
* Close attention to diversity and affirmative action concerns in executive appointment (see, for instance, Harriet Miers).
* Shunning the attractive, intelligent Republicans in favor of liberal incumbents, just because they’re incumbents (see, for instance, Rep. Pat Toomey in the 2004 Pennsylvania primary with Arlen Specter).
* A willingness to abandon any coherent or sensible immigration policy.

Bingo. Want to know why libertarians are leaving the Republican Party? Reread the above. With the exception of the last point, these are exactly the areas where libertarians have been let down by the recent GOP.

Claybourn’s list is a sign of just how much the Republican Party has changed lately; it reads as a list of reasons why I’d happily have voted… for Reagan. But it’s equally a list of reasons to vote against the current Republicans, which I admit I did. (Personally, I favor much easier immigration than most Republicans, but I’d gladly give that one up in the negotiations if it meant winning all the rest.)

The idea of a libertarian spoiler seems numerically justified in Montana by the Libertarian Party alone; with Virginia, it seems Montana will swing the Senate. The spoiler effect may be even more significant when we consider the number of small-l libertarians who voted outright for Democrats. Influential libertarian blogger Radley Balko repeatedly wrote in favor of Webb in the Virginia Senate race, for instance, and it’s no secret that many libertarians are thrilled at the prospect of divided government. As a further bit of evidence, consider the thrilling success of eminent domain referenda last night; not since California’s famous tax rebellion have the voters expressed such a clearly libertarian sentiment. I suspect that further analysis of exit polls in the coming days will reveal the magnitude of the libertarian spoiler trend, which I predict will be far greater than most people initially imagined.

Finally, much as I deeply disagree with Pieter Friedrich on a wide range of social issues, I think he is entirely right in his comment about the Libertarian Party: “[T]he LP did fairly well and if they ever get REALLY smart and focus on more state house and senate races, they could actually make some inroads.”

Let’s put it a bit more bluntly: If they were at all serious political outfit, the Libertarian Party would focus on local races and build up a core of experienced legislators at the city, county, and state levels. The success of libertarian policies would become self-evident after a few years of local deregulation, lower taxes, easy zoning rules, and strictly restrained use of eminent domain (in my mind it would, anyway), and this success would begin the ascent of the party to the national level.

Yet in the real world, a lot of energies are wasted in fighting over anarchism (a purely theoretical position unrelated to any serious political question), loony tax protesting schemes, and idiot conspiracy theories. Until they drop all this stuff, I will have
nothing to do with them.

Here’s their situation in one simple example: On my ballot, there was not a single candidate for any office running on the Libertarian ticket. And that’s why the LP hasn’t got a chance of capitalizing on the Republicans’ recent failures. In a better world, they’d have been building their networks throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and last night could well have been their night. Instead, we’ll just have to trust in divided government — and hope that Republicans, languishing on the sidelines in Congress, will choose candidates in 2008 that will be serious about fiscal restraint and deregulation.

Marriage: Well, for once it wasn’t a total defeat. Still, I don’t know how to take the results. It seems clear that America just wants gays to go away, to be nonentities who don’t have families, or children, or even stable relationships worthy of any consideration at all. Although it’s a clear denial of reality, it seems they’d rather we all just. . . disappeared.

Colorado in particular shattered the conventional wisdom which claimed that while voters disapproved of gay marriage, they would approve of civil unions if the question were only offered. In a trend elsewhere well known to pollsters, it now appears that voters will tell people that they support civil unions, since it is politically correct to speak favorably of minorities — but they will vote against civil unions when no one is looking, since this is how they truly feel about the issue.

The failure of imagination here — the failure to find any place at all for gays and lesbians in American society — is disappointing. And troubling. What are we gay people to do? We cannot, in fact, disappear, no matter how much the electorate would seem to like it.

It would be nice to say the following: We’re going to go right on having families, and children, and stable relationships. We will ask at every turn for the same considerations routinely granted to all other families, and children, and stable relationships in society. We will go right on asking and asking and asking, until finally we get justice.

Sounds great, I know. But I’m not even sure there’s a point to it anymore. Except for a handful of states, we’ve lost. The battle’s over, and there is virtually no point in asking anymore.

Sure, Santorum is out of the Senate, but it doesn’t matter. The day is not likely to come when my partner and I can travel the United States with an adopted child and not face the threat that we will be legally separated from one another during an emergency. With varying degrees of explicitness, these threats have been written into twenty-six state constitutions. It is unlikely that we will outlive any of them, and it is virtually certain that others are on the way.

If we do adopt — and recent elections have seriously given me pause — then we will forever be a family constrained, destined to avoid certain areas of the country for fear that our child might not fully be ours in the eyes of the law, and that our parental authority might be removed from us at the very time when it matters most.

Now all of this is quite necessary, the electorate tells us, to protect the sanctity of the family. Far be it from me to question the wisdom of the electorate. Yet even while I cannot expect an answer, I would still like to ask the voters: Just how exactly do you expect us to live our lives? Must our families be subjected to constant inconvenience, indignity, and threat — all so that you may avoid a remote and hypothetical danger? At what point does that moral calculus fail?

We want only the same things that you want, the same things that you take for granted every day. How would you live your lives, and raise your families, if you faced the civil disabilities that we now face? I doubt that you would be so tolerant, so understanding, so dignified in defeat, as America’s gays and lesbians have been.

Prediction markets: Marginal Revolution discusses the performance of prediction markets in yesterday’s election. Curiously, the markets seem to have called every single Senate and House race correctly — yet in the aggregate, traders thought that the Senate would remain under Republican control, a set of results that are mutually exclusive. A commenter nails it:

To Masse’s point that if Virginia and Montana go Democratic, then the prediction markets called every race correctly. That is strange, still, because the contract on GOP keeping the Senate was calling it a Rep win at high probability, but Masse’s saying the individual contracts on the races were saying something different. Why didn’t someone arbitrage that away - if the states were in aggregate moving Dems, then I don’t see why the larger contract on the entire outcome wouldn’t have been traded away. Lots of money left on the table sounds like.

As I understand it, most forms of the efficient markets hypothesis would have called for this difference to be arbitraged down to almost nothing. I’ve long been a skeptic about predictions markets. I think I said it best when I wrote,

…a futures market in a political event does not serve as a good aggregator of information because it lacks the iterative quality of a genuine commodity market. In real markets, the same goods are traded again and again from day to day. Unlike wheat or oil, there is only one election for pope that is ever going to resemble the current one. The “futures” in the various candidates are unique goods in a one-time market.

Where commodities traders accumulate market knowledge continuously–and have to live with the consequences of their trades from day to day–futures markets in political events can seldom make use of information gathered through the successes or failures of past trades in the same market. Previous elections have only a distant relation to the one at hand, and it is a notoriously bad political strategy to re-fight the last election.

So while the prices of shares may follow the smart money in both commodities markets and political events futures, the “smart money” in the latter is never very far ahead of the rest. And why should we expect it to be? In a market that only iterates once, there is no way for traders to improve their performance.

…The presence of real information, of iteration, and of at least roughly standardized conditions all seem crucial to how the market aggregates information. But even when everything works properly, the real knowledge product of a market is not a specific datum, like the name of the next pope. Instead, it is know-how: It is the elusive, hard-to-communicate property that separates expert traders from novices. Know-how is not necessarily going to produce any one specific insight on the market even when it exists abundantly.

And, On a Lighter Note: Why do conservatives hate America? Some highlights from the commentariat at Little Green Footballs:

I quite. [sic] I not going to vote again. [sic] It’s time I gave up on this political bullshit. I just hope the nuke attack comes soon. Let it be on the East Coast where it belongs.

and

Maybe a divided government is not a bad thing. They can’t do anything to screw us up anymore than we already are. We just need to weather the nuclear attack when it happens and we will be okay. Let the military take over. I advocate a military coup.

and

Bush is losing precisely because he has took the high road after 9/11 instead of Zyclon B-ing [sic] most of the muslim world after attacking our shores as they have been doing to our shipping since 1800.

This is a world war and not a tea party for the Yale/Harvard clique…

Islam must have a boot smashing into its face forever until it becomes a grown up religion not bent on murdering everyone on the planet…

Bush cannot comprehend this or the Donks even less…they do not have the intestinal fortitude for it…

The next attack after we lose a million (since each attack seems to square or cube the casualty rate), nothing will stop the rage in the streets…..

Gee thanks, guys. So nice to see you standing up for your country. I’d quibble that the death rate from terrorist attacks since 9/11 has actually been trending downward (which suggests that many things are actually being done correctly), but… well… I guess I just don’t have the intestinal fortitude.

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