South Dakota Politics

Romney & Iowa

Every four years it's the same in Iowa. Stand in the court square of any small town and throw a tennis ball into the air. It will bounce off the skull of a journalist or anchor person. Iowa's privileged position as the first state to hold a nominating event is relatively recent (as are nominating events, if you mean by that primary elections and caucuses). Sooner or later we'll adopt a more rational calendar for the presidential election year, but for now Iowa gets its moment in the pale sun.

The MSM loves the Iowa caucus. It's a small state with cheap hotels that might determine the next occupant of a very expensive 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address. That is a very big might, but also a very potent one. The 2008 Iowa caucus was the moment that Barack Obama emerged as a real alternative to Hillary Clinton on his way to the White House and Mike Huckabee emerged as a possible alternative to John McCain on his way to a talk show gig.

This year the MSM has gone off the rails about Iowa. Tune the TV to any cable news show and toss a tennis ball at the screen. You'll hit poll numbers for Rick Santorum. The designated non-Romney has been the story for months. Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich all got to try on their uniforms only to be put back on the bench. Just right now Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are hoping to be the neo-Huckabees.

This is nonsense. If Mitt Romney wins or comes in a close second in Iowa, he is well on his way to a dance on the floor of the Republican National Convention. Yesterday I drove along I-29 through the Western edge of Iowa and I noticed a tiny Ron Paul sign in the grass at the edge of every underpass. Clever, but unconvincing. Ron Paul has no chance of being the nominee. Santorum has less of a chance. Gingrich is falling faster than pork bellies.

Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Republicans have a habit of nominating the next guy in line, and he's that guy. He also did what none of the other hopefuls did: he spent the last four years preparing for the next one. No Republican who might have given him a run for his money was willing to lay his money down.

If I am right, the next eight months are likely to be unusually boring for a presidential year, which is good for Mitt. Most Republicans will never love Mitt, but they will fall in line behind him. Things will only get interesting after the conventions. It may turn on the public perceptions of the economy next summer.

Meanwhile, I can't help noticing that President Obama's surge in the polls seems to have subsided, short of ever being more popular than not. Next year's campaign may be a race to the bottom.

The New York Times Lies About Gun Permits

The New York Times is addicted to a particular form of yellow journalism. In January of 2008 the Times ran a series of articles with this title: "Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles". The title implied what the article tried to prove: that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had "deadly echoes" at home. That is to say that our soldiers were bringing the violence back home, committing murders here because of their training and experiences abroad.

As this blog pointed out, the argument was fraudulent.

The stories are sad and no doubt some returning soldiers and veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but where's the context for this story? How does this report of a "cross-country trail of death and heartbreak" compare overall to the general United States and the murder rate of young men in this age group? Apparently, the Times didn't bother to ask themselves that question or refused to print the numbers. Marc Danziger checks the math and spots an obvious problem. Among returning soldiers, Danziger finds that the Times' 121 murders represent about a 7.08/100,000 rate. Turning to Department of Justice statistics, the US offender rate for homicide in the 18-24 year old range is 26.5/110,000 and for 25-24 its 13.5/100,000. Antimedia likewise crunches some numbers and finds that the rate is smaller than among the civilian population.

In other words, returning soldiers were less likely to commit homicide than their counterparts in the general population. The Times authors might have bothered to point this out, except that it would have refuted their case.

The Times is at it again. In "Guns in Public, and Out of Sight," Michael Luo makes the case the folks who have been issued concealed carry permits are a pretty murderous bunch, at least in North Carolina.

More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun.

Among them was Bobby Ray Bordeaux Jr., who had a concealed handgun permit despite a history of alcoholism, major depression and suicide attempts. In 2008, he shot two men with a .22-caliber revolver, killing one of them, during a fight outside a bar.

More than 200 permit holders were also convicted of gun- or weapon-related felonies or misdemeanors, including roughly 60 who committed weapon-related assaults.

In addition, nearly 900 permit holders were convicted of drunken driving, a potentially volatile circumstance given the link between drinking and violence.

I can't help pointing the absurd logical stretch in that last paragraph, but I'll focus on the main point. "More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period." That's 1% of the 240,000 persons who have been issued concealed carry permits in North Carolina, according to the Times. What percentage of North Carolinians have a conviction for a felony or misdemeanor? I don't have that figure, and the Luo doesn't offer one. Okay, so:

More than 200 [permit carriers] were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun.

Now we are getting somewhere. Of the 240,000 persons who were issued concealed carry permits, ten of them committed a murder in a five year period. Eight of them actually used a gun.

Robert VerBruggen points out at The National Review online that

North Carolina has a statewide murder rate of about 5 per 100,000. Even without counting manslaughter, that's 25 murders committed per 100,000 North Carolinians every five years. There are about 230,000 valid concealed-carry permits in North Carolina, so by pure chance, you'd expect these folks to be responsible for nearly 60 murders over five years.

That is the answer to the question that Luo was explicitly addressing.

The bedrock argument for [the concealed carry] movement is that permit holders are law-abiding citizens who should be able to carry guns in public to protect themselves. "These are people who have proven themselves to be among the most responsible and safe members of our community," the federal legislation's author, Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, said on the House floor. To assess that claim, The New York Times examined the permit program in North Carolina.

The claim is demonstrably true, according to the very evidence that Luo presents. The people who have been issued concealed carry permits are in fact safer (less likely to commit murder) than the population at large. Yet Luo bends all his force to present the opposite case.

The Times is a yellow rag, as this blog has often pointed out. I would go further here and say that the Times is a whore. It prostitutes its ancient prestige on behalf arguments that are manifestly fraudulent.

The Ghost of Communists Past

Merry Christmas to one and all! The season leads a lot of us to wax nostalgic about all kinds of things. Stephen Cohen, writing at The Nation, is still lamenting the death of the Soviet dream, two decades later.

Most Russians do not share the nearly unanimous Western view that the Soviet Union's "collapse" was "inevitable" because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good empirical reasons, that three "subjective" factors broke it up: the unduly rapid and radical way—not too slowly and cautiously, as is said in the West—Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev, and to occupy the Kremlin; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in "privatizing" the state's enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it.

In addition, a growing number of Russian intellectuals have come to believe that something essential was tragically lost—a historic opportunity, thwarted for centuries, to achieve the nation's political and economic modernization by continuing, with or without Gorbachev, his Soviet reformation. While the Soviet breakup led American specialists back to cold war–era concepts of historical inevitability, it convinced many of their Russian counterparts that "there are always alternatives in history" and that a Soviet reformation had been one of the "lost alternatives"—a chance to democratize and marketize Russia by methods more gradualist, consensual and less traumatic, and thus more fruitful and less costly, than those adopted after 1991.

It's hard to think of anything more hopeless than defending the possibility that, twenty years ago, things might have gone better.

The life of Vaclav Havel is not something that puts Neil Clark at the Guardian in any mood to celebrate.

No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.

Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Actually, the question that needs to be asked is whether Clark's piece fills the Guardian's moron quota or if more noxious numbskullery like this is required.

One can only wish that Christopher Hitchens, whom Clark apparently distasted, were still around to skewer this nonsense. Again, Merry Christmas.

Pythia on the Potomac

My apologies for no previous warning, but I am mostly out of Wi-Fi range right now. I am presently sitting in a Hastings bookstore. Anyway, I have been doing some reading. You will want to check out Robert Samuelson's piece on the submarine that is called the Affordable Care Act, or more popularly ObamaCare. His specific topic is the process whereby "acceptable" health insurance is defined.

Defining essential health benefits poses a basic conflict. On one hand, everyone wants broad coverage; on the other, the broader the coverage, the more expensive policies will be -- pushing government spending up (because government pays for the subsidies) and wages down (because employers will shift compensation from wages to fringe benefits).

Sebelius ducked this question by requiring each state to define essential health benefits based on existing policies in that state. Almost no one anticipated this. The ACA does not suggest it. Sebelius asked for advice from the nonpartisan Institute of Medicine (IOM). Its report talks of a national standard for essential health benefits, although it also notes that the ACA allows the secretary to provide state-by-state waivers beginning in 2017.

Contrary to Nancy Pelosi's famous remark that we had to pass ACA to find out what's in it, one now wonders whether there was anything in it beyond an a vague grant of enormous powers. Almost every action the Administration has taken so far has been to defer or delay any decisions or clarifications. Go figure.

What was Secretary Sebelius' motive for this surprising step?

Medicare -- the government's largest health program -- is national. The uniformity allows economies of scale. If Medicare, hypothetically, varied by state, its already huge costs would almost certainly be higher. The advantages of using existing plans may also be exaggerated, because the ACA mandates that some benefits not routinely included in most plans -- eye care and dentistry for children, and mental health and substance abuse -- be covered.

The larger problem is that Sebelius doesn't deal with exploding health care spending. She ignored the report from the Institute of Medicine, which recommended that she define the essential health benefits package in a way that puts a ceiling on its costs. Sebelius delegated that unpopular choice to the states.

Whatever one thinks of the ACA, it is one more sign that there is as yet no possibility of any responsible action on health care costs.

No Confidence

I have argued that President Obama's reelection strategy is playing to his weaknesses rather than any strength he might have. Current polls back me up. It is remarkable that, while the President is campaigning full time, he hasn't bothered to tell us what he plans to do with four more years. What policies will he pursue? What problems face the nation for the rest of this decade? Maybe he will get around to this, but you might think that he would give us at least a hint?

It's pretty clear that the President does not intend to sell himself. He will run as the alternative to a demonized opposition. The primary theme so far has been what the Republicans call "class warfare" and the Democrats call "inequality." Vote for Obama because the other side will favor the 1% over you guys in the 99%. How's that workin' out?

Not so well. Oddly, perhaps, Americans are much less likely now to see their society as divided into the haves and the have nots. Consider this chart from Gallup:

That is a rather dramatic turnaround in public opinion. At the risk of over interpreting it, it may be that a sense of national peril has renewed our tendency to think that we are all in this together.

Democrats generally and the Obama Campaign in particular want to talk about inequality. That's not small potatoes, but inequality is a relationship not a state of ill or well-being, let alone does it make a job or not. What do you care about more: the statistical gap between the rich and the poor, or whether you get or keep a job? Most Americans, sensibly enough, care more about the latter. Again from Gallup:

What we want from the Federal Government are policies that will promote economic growth and opportunity. We are much less concerned how much richer someone else is.

That may help to explain why the flood of fairness talk issuing from the President's campaign isn't lifting his boat. An AP poll has this, from Real Clear Politics:

Obama's approval rating on his handling of the economy overall remains stagnant: 39 percent approve and 60 percent disapprove.

We can all see that the President is talking a lot about fairness but is doing nothing about the economy. He has no policy for job growth. He isn't working with Congress to produce one. Gradual improvements in job growth may help, but only if we think that the President had something to do with them. We don't.

For the first time, the poll found that a majority of adults, 52 percent, said Obama should be voted out of office while 43 percent said he deserves another term. The numbers mark a reversal since last May, when 53 percent said Obama should be re-elected while 43 percent said he didn't deserve four more years.

Obama's overall job approval stands at a new low: 44 percent approve while 54 percent disapprove. The president's standing among independents is worse: 38 percent approve while 59 percent disapprove.

Maybe the Republican nominee will prove so unpalatable to the electorate that even this guy seems best to stick with. That's a pitiful election strategy. It is Obama's strategy. It would be better for the Democrats if it fails miserably. If the Republicans should emerge a year from January with control of the White House and Congress, they will have to govern with no one to blame but themselves.

It's not as if Republicans have nothing to worry about. Congress's approval rating is so low you wonder if any incumbent's mom is going to vote for him or her. The one thing that Republicans in Congress have going for them is that they aren't Dubya or any other President around their necks.

Anti-Science @ the NIH

Everyone likes science except when they don't. Bush had objections to stem cell research. Now the Obama Administration seems to be about to close off a different avenue of research. From the New York Times:

The National Institutes of Health on Thursday suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimpanzees and accepted the first uniform criteria for assessing the necessity of such research. Those guidelines require that the research be necessary for human health, and that there be no other way to accomplish it.

In making the announcement, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the N.I.H., said that chimps, as the closest human relatives, deserve "special consideration and respect" and that the agency was accepting the recommendations released earlier in the day by an expert committee of the Institute of Medicine, which concluded that most research on chimpanzees was unnecessary.

This may be the right policy or not, but it is surly a case of the triumph of politics over science. Concern for chimpanzees as our closest relatives is not a scientific principle. Dr. Francis Collins may think that most chimpanzee research is unnecessary, but the scientist applying for grants most likely have scientific reasons for believing otherwise.

I think this policy may be another example of a bridge too far. A case can be made for ending biomedical research on chimpanzees. These animals are our closest relatives. Look at a chimpanzee and you are looking at a very distant cousin. Somewhere in the dim past, there was two-legged animal who was the pater familias of both of you. Of course, the same is true of you and pretty much any other living organism, from house cats to house plants. How close a relative does an animal have to be to qualify for special consideration and respect?

I do not know how valuable biomedical research on chimpanzees might be, but I understand that it is very expensive. They don't breed like rabbits and they eat a lot more. Maybe this is a good place to draw the line and say we won't use chimps for biomedical research unless we really think we need to, which is what the NIH seems to be saying.

Behavioral research is another barrel of apes. Experiments employing chimpanzees in problem solving contexts have been vital to our understanding of human and other primate behavior. I have posted on this recently. Here is what the NIH proposes:

For behavioral and genomic experiments, the report recommended that the research should be done on chimps only if the animals are cooperative, and in a way that minimizes pain and distress. It also said that the studies should "provide otherwise unattainable insight into comparative genomics, normal and abnormal behavior, mental health, emotion or cognition."

The report also recommended that chimpanzees be housed in conditions that are behaviorally, socially and physically appropriate. All United States primate research centers are already accredited by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care, and Dr. Kahn said that this accreditation meets the committee's recommendation.

Now I am all for minimizing pain and distress for chimpanzees under human supervision, and I might be in favor of housing them in "conditions that are behaviorally, socially and physically appropriate" if, and this is a big if, those terms mean something. But what could it possible mean to say that "research should be done on chimps only if the animals are cooperative"? Do the chimps have to sign a waiver?

This is a nutty standard. Experiments with primates are useful only if the context can be tightly controlled by the researchers. Chimpanzee behavioral research has been vital precisely because the chimp is our closest relative. Determining how much they are like us and how much they are not tells us a lot about what kind of creatures we are. This kind of research is not aimed at human health, it is aimed at understanding. The NIH standard threatens to close off one of the most basic avenues of research into human nature.

If you thought that Bush's stem cell policy was anti-science, you would be right. It was humanitarian. The NIH policy is no less anti-science, without any pretense of being humanitarian. It subordinates science to political concerns and technological agendas. It has no time for the human desire to know.

Keystone Copout Outmaneuvered

A lot of his supporters thought that President Obama had promised to veto the bill extending the payroll tax cut if it contained language expediting a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. It does and he won't. The House passed a bill containing such language and Senate leaders have apparently agreed to move the bill. The President has indicated he will sign it.

For most of the drama over this issue, the Democrats held the upper hand. Republicans would have to agree to extend the "tax holiday" or otherwise run for reelection after raising taxes on 160 million hardworking Americans. At the last moment, the Republicans turned the tables and got Keystone XL back on the table for this coming year. From the Washington Post:

Under the agreement, Congress would approve language requiring that a construction permit be issued for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days unless the president determined the pipeline was not in the national interest.

The President still has options. He can reject the pipeline on the grounds that the State Department can't complete its review in the allotted time. That, however, will force him to make a real decision about the pipeline before the election, precisely what he wanted to avoid when he recently extended the State Department's review until after the election.

The State Department was supposed to issue a report and the Administration was supposed to make a decision this month. The problem is that the pipeline question splits his constituencies. Environmentalists are vehemently opposed to the pipeline. The unions, by contrast, would really like the work. To put it mildly, the larger electorate is likely to come down on the side of jobs.

I don't know how this one will come out, but Keystone XL is clearly back on the table. The President has all but abandoned governing in favor of campaigning. Every serious player realizes that the President's decision to defer a decision on Keystone had nothing to with policy analysis and everything to do with November 2012. The Republicans have forced his hand and that is pretty good politics.

I think the Keystone XL project is clearly in the national interest. We might be about to get it because the Democrats were outmaneuvered in a battle over tax policy. Or we might see the President kill the pipeline for that same reason. If you think that is a ridiculous way to make policy, you're right. It is also the only way to make policy. Welcome to the last three centuries of political history.

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

As Vanity Fair ruefully reports, Christopher Hitchens has died.  This is a great loss, not just for modern civilization but for the very idea of civilization. Hitchens was the  embodiment of liberalism, in the classical sense of that word. He was a ferocious defender of the freedom of the mind and an equally ferocious opponent of its every enemy. He despised tyranny and political violence in all its forms, including especially the incipient tyranny of all terrorists.

Despite waging a ceaseless campaign against evil, he somehow, apparently, managed to read everything. He was a devoted and loving, if frequently unforgiving, critic of literature. It is impossible to read his criticism without wanting to read everything he read and that is a tall order. His literary writing is not, however, something added to his political passions; it was part and parcel of the same passion. He believed in truth and beauty and decency. He did not believe that any of these things could be appreciated, let alone practiced and defended, without a courageous and aggressive spirit armed with wit. He once said that his mother could forgive anything except being boring. Her son was less forgiving than that, but he inherited the sentiment.

I scarcely agreed with Hitchens about everything. I think his strident atheism was unpersuasive and unhelpful to his other causes. He wrote a scathing critique of Thomas Jefferson that was, in my view, unfair. Jefferson was no terrorist or promoter of terrorism, as Hitchens made him out to be. Still, Jefferson's rhetoric did open itself up to that critique. I am not convinced, as Hitchens was, that Henry Kissinger deserved to be tried as a war criminal.

Hitchens was heroic. He didn't give a rat's ass what his friends or allies or anyone else thought of him so long as he didn't bore them. He never did. He lost a lot of friends over his support for the second Iraq war. He ceased to be, in many respects, a man of the left because he remained true to principles that the left no longer had time for. He regarded any sensitivity toward Muslim militancy as moral corruption. What virtues Hitchens acknowledged he exemplified and sensitivity was not one of them.

Christopher Hitchens' life was the life of the mind and the life of letters. He knew what to do with the pen and the English tongue. I don't have a really good sample of his wit at hand, so let this one suffice. From Letters To A Young Contrarian:

Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.

It did not prolong it nearly long enough.

POSTSCRIPT:

My opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time, and anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass. 

It's hard not to love a man like that. 

Corporate Personhood 3

Reader Bill F. has done some serious thinking about corporate personhood. He has a lot of interesting things to say, but here is the most interesting one:

Rather than debating whether or not a corporation is a "natural" person, our argument centered on whether a corporation had natural, inalienable rights. These rights, of course predicate the protection (and/or limitation and abridgment) of them by law. My contention is that since a corporation is a legal abstraction of a "person" it is granted only such rights as the law allows when it comes into being. Our opponent maintains that because the corporation is owned by real "natural" people, it retains some (but not all) of those person's natural, inalienable rights.

Bill presents two positions. His is that corporations possess only such rights as they are granted by law. His opponent thinks that corporations have natural rights derivable from those of the natural persons that own them.

At the risk of shocking everyone, I am more in agreement with Bill here. Natural rights are those that belong to human beings by nature. Bill and I have the rights to life, liberty, and property, because we are morally responsible creatures. Corporations are obviously not natural creatures and so cannot directly enjoy natural rights.

I wouldn't rule Bill's opponent entirely out of contention here. The right to free exercise of religion might well mean a right to incorporate a church, and the right of a church to own property. We would only have to resort to natural rights in such a case if Bill is correct that all corporate rights are granted by ordinary legislation.

The question here, however, is not whether corporations enjoy natural rights but whether they enjoy constitutional rights. The fact that a relationship is created by the state does not tell us what powers the state has over that relationship. Marriage is such a relationship. Can the state dissolve a marriage at its whim? Corporations are artificial persons that exist in so far as they are recognized in law. Yet corporations are parties to contracts. Do they not then enjoy protection under the Contract Clause of the Constitution? Can a state government arbitrarily seize the assets of the Sierra Club or Pizza Hut simply because these entities are artificial? I would be interested to learn of any ground for that in law.

Private corporations, for profit or otherwise, have obligations and can be sued. I guess that Bill does not object to this. I hold that such obligations logically imply rights which must be respected by the governments that hold them to their obligations. Otherwise, corporations could not really exist.

The question, then, is not whether corporations enjoy constitutional rights but which rights they enjoy. I think Bill and I agree that corporations do not enjoy all the rights of individual citizens. The New York Times posted a very helpful editorial on this question. I quote:

The courts have long treated corporations as persons in limited ways for some legal purposes. They may own property and have limited rights to free speech. They can sue and be sued. They have the right to enter into contracts and advertise their products. But corporations cannot and should not be allowed to vote, run for office or bear arms. Since 1907, Congress has banned them from contributing to federal political campaigns — a ban the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld.

It is settled law that corporations enjoy some constitutional rights. The Times does not mention this one, but I have done so and I do again here: the freedom of the press.

Who enjoys this right? If you claim that only natural persons enjoy rights under the Constitution, the novel doctrine that some of my interlocutors seem to be proposing, then only someone who owns a printing press would have it. Almost all newspapers, or TV and radio stations, or today major internet venues, are corporate owned and for-profit. Does the Constitutional freedom of the press protect these corporations, or not?

I have asked this question repeatedly and so far gotten no answer. Could the federal government prohibit the New York Times from publishing the quoted editorial because the Times is an artificial person, existing because it is recognized by governments? Or does the New York Times enjoy protection under the First Amendment? I answer that of course it does, both in reason and in law.

Without constitutional protections for for-profit corporations, the First Amendment freedom of the press would be all but abolished. That is the logical consequence of my interlocutor's view that corporations enjoy no constitutional rights but only such rights as the states graciously agree to lend them. Is that really where they want to go?

Corporate Personhood 2

My last post encouraged some vigorous discussion on the topic of corporate personhood. I thought it important enough to reply as a separate post.

A legal person is a bearer of rights and obligations. A natural person is an individual human being. A corporate person, or corporation, is formed when a group of people forms a collective body which is recognized by the law as an individual, distinct from its members.

Intrepid reader Donald says this:

Corporate personhood is a fiction, so this entity cannot have the rights of a natural person. Corporate speech cannot ever be equated with speech because a corporation is comprised of several or many natural persons, some of whom or many of whom are usually at odds in what should be said or what should be printed.

And this:

Corporations are not mentioned anywhere in the constitution. All references in the constitution refer to natural persons. The rights guaranteed in the constitution do not apply to corporations.

These extraordinary claims would make for a great dissertation, were there any evidence to support them. If it were true, then a Church could not exist and hold property except at the leave of the state. That would be a novel doctrine. I would be very surprised to learn that the founders disagreed with the judgment of Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. See Book 1, Chapter 18: Of Corporations.

We have hitherto considered persons in their natural capacities, and have treated of their rights and duties. But, as all personal rights die with the person; and, as the necessary forms of investing a series of individuals, one after another, with the same identical rights, would be very inconvenient, if not impracticable; it has been found necessary, when it is for the advantage of the public to have any particular rights kept on foot and continued, to constitute artificial persons, who may maintain a perpetual succession, and enjoy a kind of legal immortality.

These artificial persons are called bodies politic, bodies corporate, (corpora corporata,) or corporations: of which there is a great variety subsisting, for the advancement of religion, of learning, and of commerce; in order to preserve entire and forever those rights and immunities, which, if they were granted only to those individuals of which the body corporate is composed, would upon their death be utterly lost and extinct.

A corporation is then, according to Blackstone, precisely what Donald says it is not: it is an artificial person that can speak for and represent a number of persons and bear rights.

Was this view adopted by American courts? We have Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819). In the penultimate paragraph, Justice Marshall announces that the Court is of the opinion

on general principles that, in these private eleemosynary institutions, the body corporate, as possessing the whole legal and equitable interest and completely representing the donors for the purpose of executing the trust, has rights which are protected by the Constitution.

The question in this case was precisely whether Dartmouth College was a state institution or a private institution. If the latter, which the Court concludes it was, then it is protected against the power of the State of New Hampshire to alter its structure. If Donald's novel view had been the view of the Court, then New Hampshire or any state could at a whim abolish or reorganize any private college or any other corporate person, including the ACLU or the NAACP for that matter. That is the power that Donald is arguing for.

Subsequent courts would substantially reduce the power of the contract clause. To my knowledge, no court has ever ruled that corporations have no rights under the Constitution. To do so would really make corporations a fiction, as Donald says they are. That would overturn centuries of law. It would severely limit not only free enterprise but the ability of citizens to organize against their respective state governments or the federal government. Thankfully, the Court never imagined what Donald imagines.

I will reply to reader Bill tomorrow.

A Modest Proposal to Abolish Freedom of the Press

Eugene Volokh at the Volokah Conspiracy alerts us to a bit of noxious numbskullery in Congress. Reps. Theodore Deutch, Peter DeFazo, Alcee Hastings, and Jim McDermott, have proposed an amendment to the Constitution denying constitutional rights to for-profit corporations. Bernie Sanders has proposed something similar in the Senate. Here is the text:

`Section 1. The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability companies, or other private entities established for business purposes or to promote business interests under the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

`Section 2. Such corporate and other private entities established under law are subject to regulation by the people through the legislative process so long as such regulations are consistent with the powers of Congress and the States and do not limit the freedom of the press.

`Section 3. Such corporate and other private entities shall be prohibited from making contributions or expenditures in any election of any candidate for public office or the vote upon any ballot measure submitted to the people.

`Section 4. Congress and the States shall have the power to regulate and set limits on all election contributions and expenditures, including a candidate's own spending, and to authorize the establishment of political committees to receive, spend, and publicly disclose the sources of those contributions and expenditures.'.

It would be charitable to assume that the authors of this amendment intended only to make a point rather than a serious proposal; otherwise, one would have to suspect both stupidity and perverse intentions. Consider the first part of section one:

The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons…

Read by itself, that would mean that only individual human beings (natural persons) have constitutional rights. The courts would then have to decide whether non-natural but not-for-profit corporations like American Postal Workers Union or the Sierra Club have any rights under the constitution, including freedoms of speech or of the press. Could Congress prohibit the ACLU from expressing its opposition to anti-abortion legislation under this brave, new Constitution? It certainly could, if natural persons alone have constitutional rights.

The courts might well conclude that the rest of section limits the restriction of constitutional rights to natural persons and denies these rights only to for-profit corporations. But as Volokh points out, almost all newspapers, television and radio stations, and other media venues are owned by corporations that are in business for profit. An unsigned editorial published in the New York Times represents the opinion of a for-profit corporate person. Section 1 would strip such an expression of any and all constitutional protections.

Section 2 tries to avoid the above complications with the proviso:

so long as such regulations… do not limit the freedom of the press.

That would be meaningless, however, since under section 1 the New York Times would not enjoy any constitutional freedom of the press. No regulations could run afoul of section 2 since it would be impossible to limit freedoms the Times does not have.

Sections 1 and 2 seem designed to give Congress control over the speech of business corporations while exempting Unions and public interest groups. As I have shown, these sections fail even at that. Unions are not natural persons. That is a small point, however, since these sections would effectively neuter the freedom of the press.

Sections 3 and 4 are designed to give Congress control over all spending on elections. No doubt 535 incumbents would use that power fairly. This is noxious numbskullery of the highest order. One can only thank God and James Madison that the Constitution is very difficult to amend.

Rick Perry’s Execrable Ad

My friend and blogosphere colleage, Cory Heidelberger, drew my attention back to an ad run by Rick Perry.  While Cory is guilty of a lot of silliness, I agree altogether with the substance of his post. 

Rick Perry very probably took himself out of contention for the Republican nomination when he demonstrated in the debates that he can barely construct a sentence or remember his own positions on any issue. However, following the old rule that it is not enough to be thought a fool when one can remove all doubt, he has produced this campaign ad:

That is a piece of work. It manages to be both execrable and stupid in almost equal measures. Let's start with the stupid. When a President has offered as many easy targets as Barack Obama, the worst thing a Republican can do is make a new accusation that almost no one will take seriously and one which the President can easily refute.

Whatever President Obama has doing over the last four years, he hasn't been waging a war against religion. If anything, he has been far too solicitous of religious sentiment in his foreign policy, going so far as to support the criminalization of blasphemy in other countries. Even if you think that Obama is a closet Muslim or Marxist, his opinions on religion just aren't what the voters are interested in or should be interested in right now. This kind of attack leaves the President stronger rather than weaker and Republicans can thank their lucky stars that Perry is too far below the radar screen for this to attract a lot of notice.

As for the execrable, let's return to the text:

I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

A reasonable person can conclude that allowing openly homosexual persons to serve in the military is bad policy. I disagree and I have said so on this blog, but I know such reasonable persons. Stating a policy position is not what Perry is doing in the above quote.

He is setting "our kids" against those "gays." He is appealing, he hopes, to a widely shared, visceral animosity towards homosexual persons. That is inexcusable. Rick Perry ought to be ashamed that he is a Christian if he is going to talk like that. I have read all of the New Testament pretty closely. There are certainly grounds there for believing that homosexuality is a sin. As for drawing a circle around a group of people for the purpose of despising them, that is as contrary to the Gospel as anything can be.

Perry's statement is unchristian and un-American. Whatever one thinks about gays in the military or gay marriage, demonizing a group of citizens for what they are is not what America is about.

This ad was a stupid and execrable piece of work. If Republicans are tempted to look for an alternative to Gingrich and Romney, they must look elsewhere than Perry.

More Bad Numbers for Obama

Almost all political scientists are, privately or otherwise, partisans. Whether we recognize it or not, we lean toward one party or the other more heavily than most voters do. That's true of almost anyone who pays a lot of attention to politics. Political scientists have one advantage over other partisans: whether or not the trends are going our way, we are always entertained.

This political year is more entertaining than usual. Newt Gingrich has opened up a sizeable lead over Mitt Romney in several key states and nationally. Gingrich is polling twice as well as Romney and Paul in Iowa. He is leading Romney by 23 points in South Carolina and Florida. Past history suggests that Newt will fade before or after he screams in Iowa, but I ain't puttin' any money on anyone. This isn't the field I would have picked out, but it is entertaining.

Obama can take some comfort in the few head to head polls pitting him against Mitt and Newt. However, his own approval rating is stuck deep in negative territory. Compared to post-war Presidents, he leads only Jimmy Carter in his 3^rd year November approval ratings, 42% over 40%, with a disapproval rating of 51%. This number looks to be settling in. The electorate has taken its measure of the President and is unlikely to revise it much, short of some October surprise.

The worse news for Obama in particular and Democrats in general is the trends in a very real number: voter registration. From the National Journal:

President Obama and his re-election team have prided themselves on their well-oiled get-out-the-vote effort. But a new study from the centrist think tank Third Way suggests Democrats are losing ground organizationally in nearly all of the key battleground states in the general election.

The group's analysis found that, in the eight politically-pivotal states that register voters by party, a significant number have left the Democratic party since 2008, with many choosing to register as independents. Over 825,000 registered Democrats in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have departed the party rolls since President Obama's election in 2008, a much more significant share than the number of Republicans (378,000) who have done the same. Meanwhile, the number of registered independents has ticked upwards by 254,000.

That is doubly bad news for the elder party. Both parties have seen a lot of voters depart, but more than twice as many have left the Democrats. Registered independents have increased by a significant number in this eight state survey. The Democrats are doing very poorly among independent voters in nearly every election since 2008. These are more substantial numbers than can be had in opinion surveys, but the latter tend to confirm the trend.

It gets worse.

The Democratic decline is especially stark in Iowa and Florida, two early Republican primary states where Democrats have lost significant ground. In Iowa, the number of registered Democrats has declined 7.9 percent since 2008, while the number of registered Republicans has increased by two percent. In the Sunshine State, Democratic registration decreased by five percent, while Republican registration dipped 2.2 percent.

In New Hampshire, Democratic registration plummeted a whopping 14.6 percent, with Republican registration declining a similarly significant 13.5 percent.

In every one of the eight battleground states, Democrats lost ground to Republicans. (In Colorado, Republicans saw a larger rate of growth in voter registration than Democrats, 1.8 to 0.9 percent.)

The report underscores how much different 2012 will be for Obama than 2008. Back then, it was commonplace to hear how many new voters the Obama campaign was registering. Now, it looks like some of those voters, newly disenchanted, are leaving the party rolls.

The Republican Party is hardly surging in registered voters, but it is doing rather better than the opposition. If current trends hold up, Republicans who reregister as independents will continue to vote for the GOP.

If Republicans are good at anything, it is snatching awful defeat from the very jaws of victory. I certainly wouldn't put it past Romney or Gingrich to lose under these promising circumstances. We should not, however, overestimate their competence. They may not be capable of losing this one.

Bill Due for Welfare State

Democracy, Winston Churchill observed, is the worst form of government—except for all the others. That is one way of making the points that democracy is the best form of government, but that it cannot change the underlying realities that any government has to reckon with.

Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 made possible a big increase in the American military machine. That may have changed the world. It certainly had big consequences over time. Reagan did not, however, make conservative changes to the welfare state. He couldn't do so because the welfare state remained solidly popular among solid voting blocks.

The Democratic surge in 2008 made possible the passage of ObamaCare. That is likely to have more than marginal consequences. It does not change the underlying economic and institutional realities. Not only is the growth of the welfare state over, it cannot be sustained in its present form. Regardless of what happens in Washington or Brussels, the welfare state is going to contract in ways that Reganites could hardly have dreamed of.

My favorite economist, Robert Samuelson, explains why.

Government expansion was one of the 20th century's great transformations. Wealthy nations adopted programs for education, health care, unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, public housing and income redistribution. "Public spending for these activities had been almost nonexistent at the beginning of the 20th century," writes economist Vito Tanzi in his book "Government versus Markets."

The numbers -- to those who don't know them -- are astonishing. In 1870, all government spending was 7.3 percent of national income in the United States, 9.4 percent in Britain, 10 percent in Germany and 12.6 percent in France. By 2007, the figures were 36.6 percent for the United States, 44.6 percent for Britain, 43.9 percent for Germany and 52.6 percent for France. Military costs once dominated budgets; now, social spending does.

Conservatives like to focus on the dark side of the welfare state and it has a dark side. It was nonetheless irresistible because it made hundreds of millions of people more comfortable than they would have been or could imagine that they would have been without it.

Unfortunately for its advocates and now for pretty much everyone, conservatives were right about one thing. It was unsustainable.

To flourish, the welfare state requires favorable economics and demographics: rapid economic growth to pay for social benefits; and young populations to support the old. Both economics and demographics have moved adversely.

The great expansion of Europe's welfare states started in the 1950s and 1960s, when annual economic growth for its rich nations averaged 4.5 percent compared with a historical rate since 1820 of 2.1 percent, notes Eichengreen. This sort of growth, it was assumed, would continue indefinitely. Not so. From 1973 to 2000, growth settled back to 2.1 percent. More recently, it's been lower.

Demographics shifted, too. In 2000, Italy's 65-and-over population was already 18 percent of the total; in 2010, it was 21 percent, and the projection for 2050 is 34 percent. Figures for the European Union's 27 countries are 16 percent, 18 percent and 29 percent.

Until the financial crisis, the welfare state existed in a shaky equilibrium with sluggish economic growth. The crisis destroyed that equilibrium. Economic growth slowed. Debt -- already high -- rose. Government bonds once considered ultra-safe became risky.

There are exactly two things you can do with economic production: invest it or consume it. The welfare state works its magic by shifting every larger shares of production toward consumption. As long as developed economies were growing at an unusually high rate and population growth was contributing to that growth, the welfare state could expand without choking off investment in future growth. We may call this the happy time.

The happy time is over. Sorry. The consumption underwritten by the welfare state is now on the point of eating up all the wealth available for investment in new growth. That is the equivalent of eating your seed corn. The folks made comfortable by the welfare state may feel that they earned their benefits by working, but one thing they didn't do was have enough children to take care of them in their old age.

Short of some unlooked for miracle, the welfare state is going to contract, massively, regardless of who wins the next ten elections in America or any European nation. The task now is to manage that contraction. The sooner we recognize reality and take responsible steps, the less painful it will be.

I am not optimistic. Too much of our political culture is invested in protecting the welfare state at all costs. If we go down that road far enough, we are looking at something very dark.

The New York Times’ Blind Side on Public Employment

Well, the New York Times is finally worried about the real victim class in America. In the face of dismal job growth, they sound the alarm on behalf of beleaguered public workers.

Buried in the relatively positive numbers contained in the November jobs report was some very bad news for those who work in the public sector. There were 20,000 government workers laid off last month, by far the largest drop for any sector of the economy, mostly from states, counties and cities.

That continues a troubling trend that's been building for years, one that has had a particularly harsh effect on black workers. While the private sector has been adding jobs since the end of 2009, more than half a million government positions have been lost since the recession.

In most cases, states and cities had to lay off workers because of declining tax revenues, or reduced federal aid because of Washington's inexplicable decision to focus more on the deficit in the near term than on jobs.

There is a glaring omission in the Times' list of causes. It focuses entirely on declining revenues, as if expenses and especially rising expenses were no part of the accounting.

That bit about focusing "more on the deficit in the near term than on jobs" means, of course, that the Times subscribes to the Krugman school of we are not spending nearly enough trillions that we don't have. The argument is that you can't cut spending during a recession (or depression) without slowing economic growth.

Okay, but isn't the biggest problem for state and municipal governments the fact that expenses are rising precipitously? Isn't one of the biggest causes of that rise the exploding costs of guaranteed benefits for public workers? The answer is obviously yes to both questions, but the Times ignores it.

One could take the Times' argument for stimulus spending during a downturn more seriously if one could possibly believe that they have ever been or ever will be in favor of fiscal responsibility during periods of economic recovery.

The Times reminds me of a joke made at my expense. One day a man visited his friend in Arkansas. It was raining furiously when he entered the modest mountain shack, and he noticed that water was pouring in through a hole in the roof. "Why don't you fix that hole?" he asked his buddy. "Well, I can't fix it now. It's rainin' too hard," came the reply. The next day the sun was shining bright and the visitor said: "why don't we fix that hole?" The Arkansan replied "don't need to. It ain't rainin' no more." The New York Times editorial board is apparently from the Ozarks. Come rain or shine, it is never time to fix the fiscal holes.

Right now, though, the cost of benefits for public employees is everywhere eating into the revenue available to hire or maintain newer workers and to maintain services. The time that we could ignore this is passed.

The Sub-Wonderful Jobs Report

The unemployment rate dropped below 9% in the latest report, to 8.6%. This is not without significance. Eight point anything looks a lot better than nine point something else. The economy added 120,000 jobs, which is nothing to sneeze at. To see a valiant attempt to squeeze every last bit of political juice out of that for the Administration, see Stephen Gandel's piece at Time/CNN.

Just when we were expecting the economy to go boom it went zoom. The unemployment rate in November dropped faster than it has in more than 11 years. You have to go back to September 2000 to get a quicker decline.

Gandel argues that the numbers are really better than that, perhaps as good as 300,000 more persons employed. He asks, hopefully, whether this might be a game changer.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of asterisks after that "zoom". The most talked about qualification is that the drop in the unemployment rate owes more to people giving up looking for jobs than it does to job creation. The report includes 315,000 people who stopped looking for work. That's more than twice the number of jobs created, enough to eat up the speculative gains that Gandel argues for and then some.

Bill Galston, a Brookings guru and one of the genuinely independent thinkers on the liberal side of the ledger, points out how depressing the zoom really is. At The New Republic:

First: Despite the growth of the working-age population over the past four years, the labor force (roughly, the sum of those employed plus job-seekers) has not expanded. For various reasons, more and more Americans have been dropping out of the labor force…

Second: Despite the modest economic recovery since the recession ended in mid-2009, total employment remains more than 5.5 million below the level of 2007 and about 1.6 million below where it was when President Obama took office.

Third: To regain full employment (5 percent, which happens to be the same as the level when the recession began) with the pre-recessionary labor force participation rate, we would need 150.7 million jobs—10.1 million more than we have today. That's a reasonable measure of the hole we're still in, two and a half years since the official end of the recession.

As John Hinderaker puts it at Powerline:

This means that labor force participation is down to 64 percent, almost two percent lower than when President Obama took office and the lowest figure in nearly 30 years.

Does President Obama have to take the blame for this? Politically speaking, yes. Taking the blame is one of the constitutional duties of a President. In terms of causation, of course not. Most of the recent job loss came before Obama took office. Events outside the U.S. and beyond the President's control are no doubt a real factor. If you are inclined to shift the blame, be my guest.

We are in fact in a deep hole, as Galston says. At the present rate of job creation, it will take more than twenty five years to get back to pre-recession employment rates, and that is assuming that the present rates continue.

The question, as always, is what to do about it. Paul Krugman knows! To save Europe, the northern countries have to spend like they were Greeks. To save America, Washington has to do the same.

Okay, but that is what we have been doing: injecting trillions of dollars of stimulus spending into the economy since before Obama took the oath. Maybe, just maybe, it isn't working and we are only delaying the recovery. Maybe businesses aren't investing because they know that any increase in the productive output of the economy will be soaked up by the deficit spending without denting the public debt. Perhaps they aren't hiring because they have no faith in a government that can't pass a damned budget, let alone deal with the long range fiscal problems facing the country.

The real problem underlying the European crisis and our own is a general loss of confidence in government. Until and unless that is restored, nobody's jobs bill is likely to work.

The Will to Believe in Global Warming

In his justly famous essay, "The Will to Believe", William James argued that we believe scientific ideas for the same reason that we do or do not believe religious ideas: because we invest them with prestige. We believe as our passions direct us to believe, and our passions depend on what kind of people we want to be and what groups of people we want to be a part of. James' point was that religious beliefs were no less rational than scientific ones and so one could, as he apparently did, reasonably subscribe to both.

I think that James' analysis of belief is incomplete. One may want to know the truth about the nature of things even if that truth puts one at odds with everyone; and if the desire for truth is nonetheless a passion, it is a passion that can resist the desire for prestige and self-esteem.

Still, there is a great deal of truth to what James says. To put it mildly, most liberals are strongly inclined to believe in global warming and most conservatives are strongly inclined to be skeptical. No doubt folks on both sides were swayed by their social and political passions. I alone seem to be perfectly unmoved by anything other than the truth. If you believe that, I have this bridge…

I have had no trouble believing that the world warmed measurably since the end of the 19^th century. I am not convinced that human activity is a significant cause, though I regard this as what James would call a "live hypothesis." I am doubtful that models of climate change are really very reliable, and I have new reason to doubt. A study published in the prestigious journal Science suggests that global warming may be less severe than previously estimated. Here's the abstract:

Assessing impacts of future anthropogenic carbon emissions is currently impeded by uncertainties in our knowledge of equilibrium climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide doubling. Previous studies suggest 3 K as best estimate, 2 to 4.5 K as the 66% probability range, and nonzero probabilities for much higher values, the latter implying a small but significant chance of high-impact climate changes that would be difficult to avoid. Here, combining extensive sea and land surface temperature reconstructions from the Last Glacial Maximum with climate model simulations, we estimate a lower median (2.3 K) and reduced uncertainty (1.7 to 2.6 K 66% probability). Assuming paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future as predicted by our model, these results imply lower probability of imminent extreme climatic change than previously thought.

Whereas the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a rise in temperature between 2 and 4.5⁰ C, the new study predicts a lower range of 1.7 to 2.6°C. The lower range is significant, but not catastrophic.

Ron Bailey at Reason does an excellent job of explaining how the new study was conducted and he provides all the proper caveats. Here is my list of the latter. It's just one study, and needs to be confirmed. It involves a different estimate of how cold it was during the Last Glacial Maximum than the IPCC numbers were based on. It is an awesome task to include all the feedback mechanisms which any reliable project must (but cannot) include.

Contrary to William James, science does provide a real corrective to our will to believe. In accord with James, our will to believe is still a powerful factor in our judgment of science and everything else. I certainly don't know what the climate will do over the next century and I am sure that no one else knows.

I have a pretty good idea what will be possible politically over the next several decades. We (I mean the global "we") just aren't going to hobble our economic growth on the basis of these kinds of studies. Climate science will continue to have a marginal effect on politics. Nothing we do will have an appreciable effect on our global carbon footprint. Maybe this is a great tragedy in the making, but believing that or wanting to believe it makes no difference.

The German Environment Minister believes that "Our Lifestyle Has Revolved Around a Dangerous Egotism." Does he believe this because of what he thinks he knows about climate change, or is it the other way round? I am inclined to side with James on that one.