Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

This phrase from the Declaration of Independence has been widely cited in my lifetime as the essence of what freedom in the United States is all about.  It seems to me we all should contemplate this phrase from the declaration of independence when deciding on the proper role of Government.


There is an inherent tension in applying the phrase to an entire country  - what if my pursuit of happiness impinges on the life, liberty or happiness of some other person?  So a fundamental assumption that precedes all government action should be that Government has no power over individual behavior until individual behavior starts impinging on others.  The more direct the impact on others, the more power government has to control behavior.


Many of our current laws don't meet this standard.  Drug use is a primary example of conduct that is almost entirely personal.  If I decide I want to spend my life sitting on my porch smoking marijuana I raise in my backyard, my conduct has no direct impact on anyone else.  But as a society we seem to have great difficulty accepting that freedom must include the freedom to make dumb personal decisions.  So for nearly a century we have waged a war on marijuana consumption that has had little discernible impact on consumption but has taken an enormous toll in money and disruption of peoples lives. 


We tend to err in the other direction with economics and commerce.  Virtually no economic activity takes place that doesn't involve people interacting.  If you go up on the hillside and chop down some tree's there are fewer tree's available for the other residents of the community.   If you manufacture, you need workers, retail requires customers.  Economics should be an area of life where government is actively mediating between competing interests, but our history has been a long struggle between those seeking to find a proper balance of regulation and market anarchists who believe government should stay out of economic affairs.

Bain Capital

The Democrats are making Bain Capital a focus in their efforts to undermine Mitt Romney's credibility on his economic policy, and the Republican's are pushing back hard to distance Bain Capital from the discussion.  Here is a link to an excellent summary of what private equity companies do by Robert Reich.   http://robertreich.org/post/20930554256

Here is why I think Bain Capital is extremely pertinent.  Mitt Romneys economic plan is rooted in his claim he will create jobs by protecting the wealthy from new taxes and cutting the size of the Federal deficit by cutting government jobs.

It is a variation on the strategy that Romney employed very successfully at Bain Capital to make lots of money.  But success in the private sector is measured differently than success in government.  Businesses can lay off lots of people to improve their profitability, and the people they lay off are not their problem.  If the economy is good many of them will find a job with some business that is hiring, if the economy is not good - well - its not Bain Capitals problem if they made some peoples lifes incredibily hard.  For the broader economy allowing business to act callously in general works because the private sector is composed of lots of businesses, so even as some are laying people off, normally others are hiring.

But there is only one government.  Economic studies that looked at 70 + governments that have downsized in the last 40 years or so found they always experienced both a decline in GDP and a rise in unemployment (except in high interest rate environments when Government was sucking up all the capital - definitely not our current situation).  Is that really what we want to accomplish as we try to climb out of the economic collapse of a couple years ago.  We can't go on expanding government forever, but the time to trim is in a good economy (like during the Republican administrations early in the last decade that became famous for running up the deficit with earmarks and handouts to rich people).

But beyond the pragmatic economics, government shouldn't be about profitability for the select few rich and powerful - that is exactly the historical problem democracy's were created to address.  That was Ghadaffi's Libya, or now, Putin's Russian.  Governments primary justification is to protect people from one another by mediating to ensure everyone has a fair shot in life.  When government downsizes, particularly in an economic downturn, it is consigning a big group of it's citizens to a difficult period of life, and undermining social stability, to protect the well off from a little inconvenience.

Bain Capital is extremely instructive as the apparent reason an intelligent guy like Romney seems to truly believe cutting government will improve the economy in the face of history that says otherwise.  After all, downsizing companies by firing people worked very well for Bain.

Our obsession with 1/2 of Free market theory

The last decade or so the media is constantly talking about entrepreneurs, and how the free market rewards people who do things better or more efficiently.  The economists buzz word is competitive advantage.

But there are many other ways to succeed in a free market.  The South's competitive advantage in their cotton based economy in the first 80 years of our countries existence was slavery.  They had very low labor costs because they used slaves.

In manufacturing a companies competitive advantage could be skimping on public safety by dumping hazardous chemicals.  Or worker safety.  Or they may lie about the quality or nature of their products in their advertising.

Yet in our political dialogue anyone who addresses the negative ways to obtain competitive advantage is always accused of being anti-business.  It would be helpful if politicians talked more about the negative characteristics of free markets rather than celebrating the positives and painting the negatives as unrelated to free markets.

Questions to people who support banning abortion

I am soliciting responses, but I ask that you read all the questions and think about them a bit before you respond.

1.  Is your goal to reduce abortions?

If so, how do you explain the fact abortions have fallen consistently in the United States ever since Roe v. Wade made abortions legal in 1973?

How do you explain the fact the United Nations study from a couple years ago that looked at abortion in scores of different countries found a consistent correlation between tolerant abortion laws and low abortion levels, and tough abortion laws and high levels of abortion?

2.  Why would a women want to abort her fetus that will grow into a child?  Could it be because her fear outweighs love?

Could it be economic fear - that she won't be able to support the child?

Could it be relationshipship fear - that she doesn't have people in her life she can rely on to help her raise the child?

Could it be lifestyle fear - fear that a child will force her to change their lifestyle?

How does passing laws forcing her to have the child address any of these fears?

Could it be that a society that is tolerant and loving alleviates fear better than a society that is strict and demanding?

3.  Does cutting the budget for social programs that help people in need alleviate or aggravate fear of pregnancy?

4.  If you are Christian and build your life around the teachings of Jesus, what do his teachings tell you about whether you should chose loving guidance or strict laws enforced by authorities?

IDP - Questions for those who think Creative design is an alternative theory

1.  Who wrote Genesis?
     Did they know the earth was one of a number of planets revolving around the sun?
     Did they know the sun was just one small star among a galaxy of stars?
     Did they know what DNA is?
     Did they know the Western Hemisphere, or Europe or Asia existed?

2.  Are we intelligently designed?
    Why to we have cavities in our teeth, or clogged arteries?
    Why are children born with birth defects?  Design defect?

3. How were we designed and built?
   Where is God's workshop where he built the earth?
   What tools did he use?
   How do you know evolution isn't the tool God used?  God gave us a brain, don't you think he wants us to use it?

GDP doesn't reflect reality?

People are always throwing GDP around as a measurement of growth.  But as near as I can tell in computing GDP economists don't take into account borrowing.  So if government (or some private business) borrows a lot of money to produce things GDP jumps.  But that seems to me to artificial growth.  GDP should not take into account the amount of production (or consumption) that was in fact funded by borrrowing from future income.

Anybody out there know if GDP Computation takes into account borrowing?

Politicians and Madison Avenue

Business Republicans generally approach government the same way they approach business, assuming the two can be managed the same way.  One of the unfortunate side effects of this approach is they lose sight of the differences between images and reality.

In business focusing on image can produce good results for long periods of time (although it almost always leads to a loss of competitiveness eventually).  American car manufacturers have a long history of focusing on marketing and neglecting quality, because their marketing skills enabled them to sell lots of cars by manipulating consumer perceptions.  Eventually management groupthink gets so confident of their ability to manipulate consumers they ignore new challenges on the horizon.

But eventually some change in circumstances will turn the tables and consumers will no longer be as amendable to being controlled by an image that doesn't reflect reality and the company will probably end up in bankruptcy or disappear because they can't provide what consumers want.

Politicians have also leaned more and more on image and marketing rather than hard headed decisions about good policies.  The Republican party in particular has been pretty successful marketing themselves the last 30 years and as a result they have become seriously infected by ideology built on the images they seek to project rather than the insights of data or history.  Unfortunately when politicians focus to on image rather than reality, and sink into group think, we all suffer.

We as consumers and voters need to constantly strive to inoculate ourselves from image based reality by constant reference to history and valid data.