Voting with one's feet

I was looking at the 2004 presidential election results, and remembering all the chatter about Democrats moving to Canada or France in its aftermath.

And I was struck that, Free State Project notwithstanding, I've never heard any real discussion in the U.S. of people deliberately moving to another state to affect political outcomes.

In 2004, California and New York alone had about two and a half million extra (surplus, Electoral-College-wasted) votes for Kerry. About 10,000 more Democratic votes in Iowa and 4,000 in New Mexico would have switched the election. Of the total Democratic voters in California and New York, it would have taken about one out of ten thousand relocating for a few months to switch things. How many (silly exaggeration ahead) Hollywood liberals complete with their entourages and hangers-on and staffs would have had to relocate to Iowa for three months to pull it off? Real estate in Des Moines can't be that expensive for short-term rentals...

I know, I know-- elections are dynamic. If the tactic had been noticed and gotten away with, Texas had 1.7 million surplus Republicans it could ship around, too-- or the Bush campaign could have moved around spending on campaign commercials when they saw Iowa tightening (if the newcomers let themselves get polled). It's an expensive, cumbersome attempt to switch votes, when there are very fluid and fast-responding ways to do so sitting in a campaign's bank account. But... after two successive misseditbythatmuch Electoral College elections, why did we see no equivalent of the Free State Project even trying to get some reverse-migration from California and New York to Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire? The Canadian immigration websites apparently spiked at over 100,000 hits per day for a little while after the 2004 election-- and while vanishingly close to none of those people did anything about it, why no spike in "Iowa rel estate" hits instead?

[Note: I'm not very good with the humor and the funny; this is meant to be silly, not a serious proposal for anyone to take any action of any sort. Just a few paragraphs out of a floating early-morning thought.]

In defense of divided government

Over at TNR, I've got a new essay up responding to John Judis' critique of divided government.

Just a friendly reminder...

that Sarah Palin's political resume does not only consist of service on the town council and in the mayor's office of Wasilla, plus her les-than-two-years as governor of Alaska.

In between the Wasilla years and the gubernatorial months (they're not yet "years") she served as a director of the [comically, almost-absurdly named] "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc," a Stevens-run 527.

Norman Barry, R.I.P.

The British political theorist and major contributor to the rejuvenation of classical liberal political thought has died. The University of Buckingham posts this obituary (via Brian Doherty).

Montreal and Quebec notes, October 29, 2008

A) On my way to work I saw a church that had a huge tacky banner on it from bearing the Quebec provincial logo (i.e. from some official governmental tourism agency) and the slogan "Notre patrimoine religieux, c’est sacré!"

Maybe it's been there for years, but it only registered on my eye today, and I'm dizzy with all the weirdness of it. I'm American enough to think:

1) That the government has no business telling us what's sacred, in an overtly religious setting.

2) That we don't need a tourist agency to inform us about the sacredness of houses of worship-- we can understand that just fine on our own.

3) That it's especially weird for churches to have to borrow the prestige of "patrimonie," which is what this amounts to-- trying to convince an increasingly secular population to put its old churches into the same category as the rest of the national (that is, Quebecois) inheritance and legacy and all that of which "je me souviens". The state is trying to convince us that churches are as sacred as other Quebec historical sites.

I simultaneously understand all of this and utterly fail to grok it.

B) This is not OK.

Multicultural Manners

Hither and yon:

I'll be presenting a new paper on "Multicultural Manners" Thursday, October 30th, 4-6 pm, at Concordia, as part of its
Political Science Speaker Series sponsored by the Political Science Student's Association. Hall Building, 1455 De Maisonneuve W., room 1220.

"Liberals and Libertarians: Common Cause or Separate Agendas?" Text fo remarks at Princeton

Before I had returned from my trip to Princeton for this event, the always-sage John Holbo wrote,

But here’s the main problem. It is obviously false that Obama ‘demonizes individualism’. I’ve read quite a bit of Croly and heard a lot of Obama speeches and they don’t sound like each other at all. They don’t have similar political philosophies. If you listen to Obama and hear Croly all that proves is that you need to get your hearing checked. Or your head checked.

Read the whole thing; John's epic-length posts are always worth it.

I hadn't been sure whether to post my panel remarks here, but John's post settled it for me. He's having an argument with Jonah Goldberg about whether Obama is kin to the collectivist progressives of the turn of the twentieth century, and-- as you'll see below-- I think he's right and Goldberg's wrong. (I recognize I haven't provided an argument to that effect. Only had ten minutes to talk.)

Remarks:

The great economist Joseph Schumpeter, referring to the fortunes of the word ‘liberal,’ once commented that "as a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label." Many of my fellow libertarians, or classical liberals as we sometimes insist on calling ourselves, share that view; egalitarian liberals are enemies who stole our name. I think that it’s much more pithy than it is true, and that classical liberals and those who a century ago took the name of “new liberals” but who I’ll just call left-liberals share much that is morally and philosophically important and true, and that we’re ideological cousins sprung from common intellectual ancestry. We’re also sprung from a common class and cultural matrix. Liberals were not the party of the peasantry or the working class, neither were they the party of the aristocracy, the high clergy, and the military. They were the party of religious dissenters and minorities, smallholders, the petit bourgeoisie, merchants, and sometimes lawyers.

Now, the timing of our session is odd, for this argument. On the one hand, I have arguments I’ve been developing for many years about why libertarians belong not in a great fusionist alliance with conservatives but rather in common cause with our fellow liberals. I think that’s been an interestingly hard argument to make, but we meet at a time, a few weeks before an election, when I think the immediate conclusion to draw is boringly easy. No libertarian can hope to see the party of torture, denials of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without trial, and boundless unsupervised executive power returned to office. If our core root liberalism, if our roots in the struggles of common law against absolutist king or in John Locke or in Montesquieu or in the American Revolution mean anything at all, then it means a four percentage-point difference in marginal income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance seem kind of silly.

Conversely, I’ve had arguments as to why left-liberals should welcome us into common cause, and why they as well as we should be prepared to be changed by the alliance or the fusion. I think that the US Democratic Party ought to build on the accomplishments of the Clinton years, and extend and deepen the New Democratic agenda. To a libertarian, those years of trade deals completed and successfully ratified, market liberalization spreading around the world, and moderate budget restraint at home have to look something like a paradise—and it was a time that showed the progressive potential of market-led growth. But the paradise is lost, and we are in for not only a recession and a financial contraction but also for an era of bad policy responses and reactions. I have no illusions that Democrats are going to come shopping for market-oriented or neoliberal or deregulatory reform ideas in the next couple of years. Though I think it’s worth noting that Obama is from and of the market-friendly University of Chicago Law School, and that the Republican Party not only nominated the moralizing anti-market anti-bourgeois noblesse d’epee John McCain but is likely to face a Palin-Huckabee contest four years from now that will confirm a Republican turn toward a singularly unattractive populism.

But this moment will pass, and anyway I have little comparative advantage in talking about current events. Instead, I’d like to talk about political theory, about the divergence between classical and egalitarian liberalisms, and about what they can bring to each other today.

During the era when the so-called “new” or “social” liberalism self-consciously departed from its market-oriented predecessor, the new liberals often maintained that their core liberal values needed to find new institutional and policy outcomes in the wake of the industrial revolution—that a corporation as much as a state could threaten a person’s freedom, that the assembly line as much as censorship could stunt individual mental growth and development. In my view, unfortunately, they never did much more than establish those analogies. They didn’t do much interesting argumentative work on how old liberal premises and values plus new industrial circumstances yielded welfarist conclusions. In part this was because the major theorists of the turn in Britain, Thomas Green and Leonard Hobhouse, really didn’t share old liberal premises; Green had drunk too deeply at the well of Hegel and Hobhouse was too quick to reject the moral priority of individuals. I think that a great deal of the political movement of new liberalism was more continuous with the old—it drew from the same intellectual, cultural, and class circles, for example—but the theoretical turn to welfare liberalism got highly tied up with a generational intellectual turn to Hegelian idealism or to collectivism of various unattractive sorts. I think a similar story can be told in the U.S. around Woodrow Wilson and the mixing together of welfarist liberalism with progressivism, imperialism, and Jim Crow. In turn, I think that the classical liberals who lived through the 1910s to 1940s saw the development of egalitarian liberalism as being of a piece with the moral and intellectual crisis of those years—the flourishing of communism and fascism, the crisis and near collapse of liberal constitutionalism. And they thus made common cause with conservatives who they took to be on the right side of a great civilizational divide, no matter how many things they were wrong about. The liberal center did not hold; some liberals made common cause with social democrats who two generations before they had viewed as antagonists, and others made common cause with conservatives they had viewed as antagonists.

Fortunately, I think that Hegelianism, collectivism, and progressivism have been substantially unwound from welfare liberalism, certainly in the U.S. since no later than Rawls and the Warren Court. An egalitarian liberalism that is committed to the priority of liberty, to the defense of civil liberties, to the social diversity characteristic of the post-60s and 70s West, and to the anti-authoritarianism of the New Left—that’s a liberalism worthy of the name. And libertarians in Will’s and my generation, while we learned from people who learned from people who were shaped by the long crisis of the first half of the twentieth century, we inhabit a different world from the one in which the fusionist alliance with the Right made sense. National Greatness conservatism, the conservatism of Irving Kristol and John McCain that says let us have a war or a crisis just so that we may have national unity and a moral cause greater than our private lives—that’s the kind of thing that characterized progressivism and New Liberalism at their worst, but it’s effectively absent from egalitarian liberalism today.

I mean to close with a few words about what egalitarian and classical liberals can learn from each other, and what their common cause is.

From the classical liberal, the egalitarian liberal has learned one huge lesson and ought to learn three more. The huge lesson is the productive and progressive power of markets. While economic discourse will turn anti-market for a while, we are not going to return to the 1970s or the 1940s or the 1930s. Egalitarian liberals may overestimate the number of tweaks and twists and limits they can give the market with no ill effects—but they’re not going to aspire to replace the market, or complain about how awful it is that economic activity is so disorganized and uncoordinated. The three lessons they ought to learn are: first, remember that the choice is never between the existing market and the ideal regulation or the ideal intervention. It’s between the existing market and the politically likely regulation or intervention. Second, remember that egalitarianism’s moral force ought to be global, and therefore that the egalitarian has the most reason to favor openness to trade and immigration. Free trade is, along with religious freedom and the rule of law, one of liberalism’s three founding commitments, and classical liberals can help call our egalitarian friends back to their best selves by reminding them of that. And, third, remember that the exercise of coercive power tends not to be done in the interest or for the benefit of the powerless, and that often limiting state power is the most progressive policy. The American War on Drugs and the resultant criminalization of vast portions of America’s poor is the most dramatic of examples.

From the egalitarian liberal, the classical liberal has probably not yet learned any of the necessary big lessons. But I will focus on two. The first is that where distributive effects from deliberately enacted policies are inevitable, and they often are, it is better that those effects be progressive rather than regressive. At any given level of spending, we have moral reason to prefer that the spending alleviate poverty and suffering rather than that it be wasted. The view of the big-government right has been that spending on the rich didn’t count as spending, and that state-corporatism could still claim the mantle of the market. The Bush administration’s drug benefit is a spectacular example—huge government spending, but so long as it’s arranged to subsidize a corporate sector rather than to alleviate need among the poor, it doesn’t really count. Classical liberals need to be able to say that there is principled reason to prefer progressivity to regressivity and corporatism, alongside the principled reasons to favor smaller government over larger. We will not always be able to have a government that is both smaller and more progressive—but we will sometimes, as we have for the past eight years, have government that is neither, and that suggests that it’s possible to make some pareto improvements from the joint perspective of egalitarian and libertarian liberals.

For the second, I’ll note that Friedrich Hayek considered the rule of law to be such an attractive and foundationally liberal concept that he attempted to subsume most of his political theory under its rubric. I think he was right about some of that, though not all of it. But the analogical extension of the rule of law to cover questions of economic policy depend on the conceptual core of the rule of law being intact: the separation of powers, constraints on executive authority, due process, and all the rest that Hayek wrote a marvelous history of in the middle of Constitution of Liberty. This allows me to draw the theoretical point back toward the contemporary moral point with which I began. The rule of law, the subjection of the executive to law, and the protections of the due process of law—these are accomplishments that it is easy to take for granted but that are always fragile. Their defense and vindication is the common cause of liberals of whatever stripe.

That's the first time in a while...

that there hasn't been even one political theory article in an issue of the American Political Science Review, at least to the best of my recollection. Flukes happen; I just hope a fluke is all it is.

Update: the thinness of the issue overall and the editors' note confirm that it's a fluky issue all around-- odd effects of the transition in editorial teams.

To change behavior you have to change incentives watch, continued

In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans.

See prior installment here.

Today: Jon Elster and Marie-Claude Smouts at 50th Anniversary of Political Science Department at Université de Montréal

Science politique a 50 ans

Les célébrations du 50e anniversaire auront lieu les 22 et 23 octobre 2008. Nous avons invité des sommités mondiales de notre discipline pour les entendre et discuter avec elles des nouvelles frontières et des idées provocantes que soulève la recherche de pointe en science politique. Programme du 22 octobre: Marie-Claude Smouts CERI, Paris "Les idées dangeureuses en science politique: l'exemple des études postcoloniales " Jon Elster Columbia University "La rationalité en politique" 1

4h à 17h, salle JAB-1035, Pavillon J.-Armand-Bombardier

Espressotarianism

I've made pretty plain that I'm not voting Libertarian in this presidential election, though I wish Barr and the LP well and wish them many votes. I've voted Libertarian for President several times, and will vote Libertarian downticket when possible this year. I'd be thrilled to see Barr win 49.9% of the vote and crush McCain for second place. But I don't will that Barr be elected president, and that prevents me from voting for him.

But this sure does warm the cockles of my heart, and is the sort of thing that couldn't be allowed to go unnoticed on this blog.

He is fifty-nine but has the stamina of a college freshman—he consumes up to fifteen shots of espresso a day, typically in five-shot installments.

By contrast, the guy I'm actually voting for sometimes smokes cigarettes. If I were voting with the "people who remind me of me" standard that, for example, people invoke when explaining their support of Sarah Palin, then the fact that Obama and I have both taught courses at Chicago Law might well be trumped by the difference between cigarettes and 15 shots of espresso per day.

(At some point I'd like someone to ask some voter who invokes the "people who remind me of me" standard about the arrogance and narcissism of it-- what makes you so great that similitude to you is a relevant criterion for the presidency? I know that there are answers to the question and defensible reasons for identity-politics voting: "people who remind me of me are more likely to take the interests of people like me into account, and I think people like me are unjustly neglected by a system dominated by liberal elites/ whites/ Christians/ the professional class/ etc." But even when those reasons are adequate ones, there's often also a level of narcissism that goes unexamined. But now I've wandered far off-topic.)

How to paint yourself into a corner

Draft of an introductory paragraph for remarks to the "liberal and libertarians: common cause or separate agendas?" panel at Princeton.

Now, the timing of our session is odd, for this argument. On the one hand, I have arguments I’ve been developing for many years about why libertarians belong not in a great fusionist alliance with conservatives but rather in common cause with our fellow liberals. I think that’s been an interestingly hard argument to make, but we meet at a time, a few weeks before an election, when I think the immediate conclusion to draw is boringly easy. No libertarian can hope to see the party of torture, denials of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without trial, and boundless unsupervised executive power returned to office. If our core root liberalism, if our roots in the struggles of common law against absolutist king or in John Locke or in Montesquieu or in the American Revolution mean anything at all, then it means a four percentage-point difference in marginal income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance seem kind of silly.

"Therefore, I now sit down and thank you for your attention"? Doesn't seem quite satisfactory.

Hither and yon: "Liberals and Libertarians" at Princeton

"Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?"

"Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?" will be the subject of a panel discussion at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 23, held at the Woodrow Wilson School in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall, on the Princeton University campus.

Panelists will include a mix of self-described liberals and libertarians, including:

-- Douglas Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Woodrow Wilson School;
-- Paul Starr, the School’s Stuart Professor of Communications and a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs; and
-- Jacob T. Levy *99, the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University;
-- Brink Lindsey ’84, Vice President for Research at the Cato Institute; and
-- Will Wilkinson, Cato Research Fellow and Managing Editor of Cato Unbound.

Two “undeclared” scholars will join the discussion: Paul DiMaggio, a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the School, and John Tomasi, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University

Unfortunately, it appears that we're scheduled against Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

State size follow-up

I speculated last week that the way the financial crisis swamped Iceland and seems to show the need for deep pockets and deep capital reserves within a financial system ("seems"-- I have no view about whether that's an economically true lesson to draw) probably did some damage to small-nation secessionists such as Quebec or Scottish nationalists.

From yesterday's Washington Post:

The massive bailout of banks has been widely received as welcome and necessary across the United Kingdom. But it has not been lost on Scots that the largest shareholder in Scotland's two largest banks is now the British government.

[...]

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a native Scot but an outspoken advocate of keeping Scotland in the U.K. fold, seemed to go out of his way Tuesday to tweak advocates of independence, especially the SNP.

Brown said the $65 billion bailout of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the bank formed by the merger of Lloyds TSB and the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) proved that the United Kingdom was "stronger together."

"We were able to act decisively with 37 billion pounds; that would not have been possible for a Scottish administration," said Brown, whose own political fortunes have been boosted by his handling of the crisis.

Others have pointed out that the bailout for eight major British banks -- including capital for banks and government loan guarantees -- is worth a total of almost $700 billion, which is about five times Scotland's annual gross domestic product.

Brown particularly seemed to taunt Alex Salmond, the SNP chief and head of the Scottish government, who has said he wants an independent Scotland to be part of an "arc of prosperity" stretching from Iceland to Ireland to Norway.

The SNP Web site speaks admiringly of Iceland as "the sixth most prosperous country in the world," words that were written before last week's massive banking and economic crash, which nearly bankrupted the country.

"We've seen the problems in Iceland; we've seen the problems in Ireland. We were able to put the whole strength of the United Kingdom's resources behind these two banks" in Scotland, Brown said, provoking an irritated response from Salmond. [...]

Things not to say...

when you're debating a law professor who's much, much better than you are at packing a lot of information into a 90-second answer:

"All of the details need to be known."

Obama clearly had his Ayers and ACORN monologues memorized, but McCain set them up with a helluva softball straight line. "We need to hear the full extent." "All of the details need to be known."

However many minutes later, Obama looked like the opposite of someone engaged in a cover-up. Rattling off the resumes of the Annenberg Board was a nice touch.

More generally, as Matt Yglesias notes here,

McCain had some okay jabs at Obama that I think impressed some of the CNN panelists and, especially, got the conservative ones jazzed up. But he used a lot of right-wing echo-chamber jargon, never explaining what he meant about trial lawyers and scare-quote “health” and so forth.

As a result, we sometimes had the very weird dynamic of McCain sputtering out an attack that the average voter didn't understand at all, because it was all phrased in conservative-political-insider shorthand, and then Obama giving one of his dense information-packed answers in which he first had to explain to the audience what the hell McCain was talking about before rebutting it. The CNN pundits, in their down-on-Obama period before the poll results came in and told them to be up-on-Obama, kept using "professorial" as an insult. (Compare also: McCain's use during the debate of "eloquent" as an insult.) Now, I recognize all the ways in which "professorial" isn't the ideal mode for political discourse. You wouldn't want a lecture as an inaugural address. But Obama's ability to pack every sixty- or ninety-second unit full of information and explanation, compared with McCain's almost Palin-like or Bush-like repetition of the two or three keywords he had for any answer ("spread the wealth!") was professorial, and, I thought, devastatingly effective.

Canadian Conservatives and Quebec secession

I don't think I say anything that's not pretty obvious, but for what it's wort, I take part in a colloquy with Ilya Somin and others chez Volokh about why the Tories don't support the secession of a province thatseems so determined to keep them out of a governing majority.

Libertarians for Obama, continued

Dan Drezner.

If markets are supposed to let failures fail — not the trendiest idea right now, I know — then the Republicans have no right to be rewarded for their performance over the past eight years. Let the GOP have its comeuppance and come back under new management.

Blog-quotes of the day

Brad DeLong:

So what to do? We don't want to let the banking sector collapse into bankruptcy--Lehman Brothers was bad enough, and we don't want to replicate the Great Depression. But we also don't want to repeat Japan's mistakes of the 1990s, with zombie banks neither alive nor dead failing to do their job for the economy as they focused on getting back above water to create some value for shareholders and executives.

And here is my worry about the current plan to buy preferred rather than common stock of the banks. Preferred stock runs a risk of creating zombies--if shareholders and executives conclude that the preferred has all the equity value if they continue business as usual, then they will not continue business as usual but will instead start behaving like the Japanese banks of the 1990s. And we don't want that.

By mighty spells the Head Voodoo Priest Henry Paulson has raised the corpses of America's biggest banks from the graves to which the financial crisis was consigning them, but has he restored them to life, or just to zombiehood? Will they do their job for the economy, or will they begin wreaking destruction, all the while crying out: "BBRRAAIINNS! BBRRAAIINNSS!"

[NB: That's a funnier way of expressing my point below about changing forward-looking behavior. I'd rather hear that my worries are the uninformed results of undereducation in economics, but I still like hearing from Brad DeLong that I've kind of understood something relevant to the current mess correctly..]

Julian Sanchez:

And certainly it’s got to be much easier, much more comfortable, to give your self-selecting audience precisely what they want to hear and bask in their accolades. I don’t know if I’ve named it here before, but I’ve long observed a phenomenon in the blogosphere I call “audience capture,” where a once-interesting writer becomes rather dull and predictable, each post another jab at the lever, predictably rewarded with a tasty pellet.

For what it's worth, that phenomenon is one reason why I've never turned comments on. I do think that comments sections sometimes provide all the wrong kinds of feedback to a blogger.

Sentences that scare me

“The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it,” Mr. Paulson said, who offered some details of the plan along with the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila C. Bair. [sic-- should be "said Mr. Paulson, who..."]

If the bailout were working properly, no exhortation or bully pulpit would be required-- right? The banks would think that it was again in their interest to make short-term commercial loans. This has been one of my worries for a while now-- that we were deploying backward-looking tools to solve a problem of forward-looking incentives. If the banks say, "thanks for the new funds; they'll look lovely on our balance sheet!" then nothing productive has happened; the taxpayers have just propped up the stock price of financial firms.

I'm enjoying...

the tributes to new Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman from libertarian and libertarianish economists. Some sharply distinguish the pre-NYT real economics Krugman did from the post-NYT public commentary. Others count Krugman's ability to explain things to a lay audience as one of his virtues-- which is of course appropriate given that they remember it as one of Milton Friedman's virtues, too.

See: Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, and of course Tyler Cowen. Note that the plaudits for Krugman's new trade theory/ economic geography contributions themselves have to be based on a genuine admiration for their intellectual importance, since those contributions were traditionally taken as being unfriendly to free trade, insofar as they showed at least the theoretical possibility of productivity-enhancing protectionism. (Krugman understands the difference between that possibility result and any likelihood that actually-adopted protectionism would be of the right sort.)

Autumn in Montreal

Being my very first experiment in multimedia on this here blog; but I hear that the interwebs are now capable of handling things that aren't even text. (In my day, we browsed the interwebs on lynx in UNIX and read e-mail on Pine and we liked it!)

Anyway: two previous autumns in Montreal and 21 in New England and I've still never seen anything like this year's color.

Brettschneider reading group at Public Reason

Following up on last year's very successful Estlund reading group, Public Reason is hosting a reading group on Corey Brettschneider's Democratic Rights.

On the other hand...

I've linked (approvingly) to several posts elsewhere about why libertarians and classical liberals ought to be supporting Obama, however reluctantly, this election. And I've by and large failed to link to stuff (including by my friend Todd Seavey on the other side. But I do feel compelled to point to this Ilya Somin post.

My core reasons for preferring any Democrat to any Republican this election are backward-looking. After the catastrophic (in policy terms and in moral terms) Bush Administration, the Republican Party needs to go to the penalty box, for its health and for the health of American democracy. A party must not be able to run eight years of policy-failing, power-grabbing, deficit-ballooning, separation-of-powers-shredding, torturing, detaining-without-charge government without consequence or punishment-- and, since presidents are term-limited out, the punishment must be partisan.

But I am deeply worried, in a forward-looking way, about the new historical moment the financial crisis brings about, and Ilya hits some important forward-looking worries. I've never been persuaded by the scare-tactic view that says Obama is, deep in his heart, some kind of nutty socialist. But that's not what Ilya stresses-- it's that a Democratic President, an expanded majority Democratic Congreess, and an economic crisis coinciding could lead to much longer-term damage to economic liberalism than libertarians-for-Obama like me are comfortable admitting.

I'm not changing my mind-- but I'm also not denying that I share some of his worries.

Federalism, parties, and institutional support for decentralization

I've had occasion to argue that federalism provides an institutional weight to decentralization in a polity, and that Canadian federalism in particular is well-anchored by the dynamic of Quebec seeking greater decentralization, then other provinces seeking to keep up with Quebec. This helps prevent the dynamic of one or another party of the ethnocultural majority being unrelentingly centralist-- even anti-Quebec animus gets channeled into the protection of other provinces rather than into support for a stronger center. The entrenched character of federalism, the way in which it creates provincial-level sites for politics and parties, gives decentralization an institutional weight that helps to stabilize a constitutional order.

From today's Globe & Mail:

ANDREW STEELE

Globe and Mail Update

October 7, 2008 at 11:27 PM EDT

Miles' Law states that "where you stand depends on where you sit."

Nothing could be truer for Canada's premiers. Each is grappling with the federal election based on their local political dynamic, rather than partisan labels. And those individual political calculations will have a profound impact on the next federal government, regardless of who wins.

Let's start in the West.

Facing the voters in eight months and tied in the polls, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell has kept his powder dry.

While the Liberal label of his party might make one think he should support Stephane Dion automatically, the B.C. Liberals in fact draw support from both the federal Tories and Grits. Getting into a scuffle with either federal party's leader would divide Mr. Campbell's own house.[...]

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has been playing defence. He feels a re-elected Conservative government is best for his jurisdiction, but also wants to avoid a Ralph Klein-style interjection that helps the Liberals with their "hidden agenda" attacks on Mr. Harper.

Mr. Stelmach took a swing at NDP leader Jack Layton when the tar sands came under direct attack, but mostly he is leaving it to others to do the heavy lifting. [...]

Ontario's Dalton McGuinty is playing a careful game. Despite his own brother running for re-election as a federal Liberal MP, Mr. McGuinty has avoided any endorsement of the Mr. Dion's Liberals.[...]

Despite the brand name, Jean Charest's Quebec Liberal Party is made up of supporters of every federalist party: Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green. Attacking one at the expense of another only divides his coalition and diminishes his chances in an election that could be held on a moment's notice. Instead, he has played a more traditional role for a Quebec premier, attacking policy elements that threaten to intrude on the province's jurisdiction.[...]

Then there is Danny Williams of Newfoundland and Labrador - a Conservative who legally registered his "Anyone But Conservative" campaign with Elections Canada, calls the Conservative Prime Minister "intolerant" and predicts a "dark age" if the Conservatives get a majority.

Degenerate federalism happens when the provinces are captured by the center and become local sites for patronage and corruption-- pillars of the majority at the center rather than potential bulwarks against it. (Mexico for most of the 20the century or Moscow under Putin, for example.) Canada is about as far from that outcome as it's plausible to be.

Too clever by 31%

Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper won enactment of a bill moving Canada to a fixed term for Parliament, unless the Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence. This ostensibly limited the Prime Minister's ability to call an election just to grab a favorable moment on the political calendar.

Then he called an election for this fall, explaining that the restriction didn't apply to minority governments, which is what he has. (Explanation for Americans: Harper's party has a plurality but not a majority of seats in the House. This means that all of his proposals require at least the acquiescence if not the active support of at least one opposition party in order to become law.) He was widely thought to have timed this both to grab a moment of personal popularity and to come before the U.S. election, lest pro-Obama, pro-left, pro-"change" sentiment spread north of the border and doom him in two years' time. At the beginning of the abbreviated campaign, he seemed likely to finally get his wish and be re-elected with a parliamentary majority.

Now: Not so much. As Matt Yglesias has been discussing, an economic crisis has a funny tendency to sweep all the bums (of whatever political complexion) out of office, and perhaps to entrench a prejudice in favor of the other party just because it's there when things return to normal. Yglesias quotes Larry Bartels:

Considering America’s Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to “throwing the bums out” than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter.

On one hand, it's of course not Harper's fault that the financial systems of the world are in a tailspin-- and indeed Canada has yet to be hit hard by the results (notwithstanding a very rapid decline in the value of the loonie as currency traders indulge the perverse 'flight to safety' that means rushing into the US dollar even when it's the US that's leading the way off the cliff). On the other hand, it certainly is his fault that he's standing for re-election right now. If he'd waited until the election due date prescribed in his own legislation, he wouldn't be fighting to save even his minority government against the headwinds of [what we can only hope will turn out to be] a Schumpeterian "gale of creative destruction." Now, with less than a week before the election, he's at 31% in the polls and falling, with the Liberals at 27% and rising. So much for cleverly gaming the system...