Voting and Econ Lesson

One of the best pieces I’ve read recently is Mike Rowe, theDirty Jobs guy’s response to someone who encouraged him to use his platform to encourage voting—to Get Out the Vote.

Mike Rowe
image from here

I wrote a piece about whether to GOTV just before the 2012 election, which seems even more necessary this year. I’m in agreement with Mike Rowe. Here is part of his response:

Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it. I also share your concern for our country, and agree wholeheartedly that every vote counts. However, I’m afraid I can’t encourage millions of people whom I’ve never met to just run out and cast a ballot, simply because they have the right to vote. That would be like encouraging everyone to buy an AR-15, simply because they have the right to bear arms. I would need to know a few things about them before offering that kind of encouragement. For instance, do they know how to care for a weapon? Can they afford the cost of the weapon? Do they have a history of violence? Are they mentally stable? In short, are they responsible citizens?

And he continues:

Voting is a right, not a duty, and not a moral obligation. Like all rights, the right to vote comes with some responsibilities, but let’s face it—the bar is not set very high. If you believe aliens from another planet walk among us, you are welcome at the polls. If you believe the world is flat, and the moon landing was completely staged, you are invited to cast a ballot. Astrologists, racists, ghost-hunters, sexists, and people who rely upon a Magic 8 Ball to determine their daily wardrobe are all allowed to participate. In fact, and to your point, they’re encouraged.

The undeniable reality is this: our right to vote does not require any understanding of current events, or any awareness of how our government works. So, when a celebrity reminds the country that “everybody’s vote counts,” they are absolutely correct. But when they tell us that “everybody in the country should get out there and vote,” regardless of what they think or believe, I gotta wonder what they’re smoking.

What we need are better voters, so we don’t get the intolerable choices we got stuck with this election. He suggests:

I can’t personally encourage everyone in the country to run out and vote. I wouldn’t do it, even if I thought it would benefit my personal choice. Because the truth is, the country doesn’t need voters who have to be cajoled, enticed, or persuaded to cast a ballot. We need voters who wish to participate in the process. So if you really want me to say something political, how about this—read more.

Spend a few hours every week studying American history, human nature, and economic theory. Start with Economics in One Lesson. Then try Keynes. Then Hayek. Then Marx. Then Hegel. Develop a worldview that you can articulate as well as defend. Test your theory with people who disagree with you. Debate. Argue. Adjust your philosophy as necessary. Then, when the next election comes around, cast a vote for the candidate whose worldview seems most in line with your own.

He continues with a couple of paragraphs about the right and responsibility of informed voting. And then he concludes with this:

In the meantime, dig into Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt. It sounds like a snooze but it really is a page turner, and you can download it for free.

So, thank you, Mike Rowe, for using your celebrity to share wisdom, yet again.

That’s two mentions, in one short piece of Economics in One Lesson, which I happened to start ^th anniversary edition from 1996. The original was written in 1946. It’s amazing that words written 70 years ago seem so current today.

reading a couple of days earlier. I’m only a few chapters into it yet, but he’s right that it is quite readable, and under 200 pages. It has been on my list of stuff to read for several years—and actually on my shelf, waiting to be read for a few months. I have a used paperback, 50

There’s a premise the book makes early on, explaining why so many economic efforts go awry. This is from page 1:

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

In this lies the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

Here at the Spherical Model we have a similar saying about unintended consequences:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

I’m sure I’ll want to refer to Hazlitt’s book more as I read to the end, but I think this is going to be a main theme. And I want to quickly apply it to one example: Obamacare, or the inaptly named Affordable Care Act.

When the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments about whether the government had the power to compel citizens to buy a product or service, there was discussion about how healthy young people were getting away with lower costs, or going without insurance, which was unfair to older or chronically ill people. The only way to lower their costs was to bring in a lot of healthy people who would not need the coverage, to even out the risks, and the costs. There was an assumption that the government ought to have the power to even out life’s unfairness.

But, just as Hazlitt suggests, the group that needed lower cost insurance because they would make more use of it is only one group. If you focus only on the goal of solving their issue, you might end up doing harm to other—maybe every other—groups in society.

If there is a time for a person to choose to pay for health care out of pocket, it might be when that person is young and healthy. Such a person might still want catastrophic coverage, or might want to risk not having it. But if this young person is at the beginning of a career, and making only $15 an hour, he is probably not going to appreciate being forced to pay $1000 a month for coverage he doesn’t want or need, just because some older (and probably wealthier) person wants his coverage subsidized.

And, of course, as it turned out, you don’t get to keep your doctor; you don’t get to keep your coverage; and costs have skyrocketed—even for the group government was targeting to help in that SCOTUS conversation. (Michelle Malkin offer her personal experience in this piece.)

How did we get here? By electing leaders who get the attention of various factions by promising them things—and by voters who fall for it.

So, I’m with Mike Rowe: go vote, if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, stay away from the polls. If you want to get ready for future elections, read. Start with Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.

Electronic Ballot Security

There’s good news and bad news concerning ballot security—which can, unfortunately, affect the outcome of our elections.

But in Harris County, here in Houston, we can feel pretty good about certain aspects of election integrity. 

This past Saturday, at our local Tea Party meeting, we heard from Ed Johnson of the County Clerk’s Office concerning ballot security here. Specifically, he was talking about the eSlate machine used here, and how they protect its integrity.

Ed Johnson, Harris County Clerk's Office
photo: Cypress Texas Tea Party

Can it be hacked? If everyone involved colluded, then possibly. But with the bipartisan safeguards in place, no.

How did he convince us? He began with a story.

Back in 1996 Duane Bohac, his friend from their college fraternity days, told him he was going to run for state representative. He was running against a 20-year incumbent. The incumbent had 15 voters registered at his home (people who didn’t live there), plus six more in his garage. This voter fraud was reportable, and those illegal voters were removed from the rolls, which is good. But it shows the propensity of that Democrat to engage in illegal voting tactics.

Early vote tallies showed Bohac up by about 1000 votes. But there were four precincts that reported very late—not until around 1:00 in the morning. After they reported, Bohac lost by 75 votes. They found hundred of over votes in those precincts—votes that have more than one candidate marked on the paper ballot, so they are not counted.

In 1998 Bohac ran again. This time he got alternate judges (Republicans, when the presiding poll judge is a Democrat) and poll watchers to watch what happened. The poll watchers followed the judges as they drove the ballot boxes to the central location for counting. As in the previous election, all but four precincts reported in a timely manner. The poll watchers followed these four as they drove around the 610 Loop (the innermost freeway circling Houston) until 1:00 AM. They watched them shaking the ballot box. Early counts showed Bohac leading. But these four precincts showed 400 overvotes, and Bohac got zero votes from these precincts. (Bohac eventually tried again and won; he is my state representative.)

Paper ballots are easy to manipulate. Remember the 2000 election with its hanging chads? Suppose someone with a moment alone takes a long sharp device—like an unbent paper clip—and pokes it through a whole stack of punchcards through the punch hole of the candidate they favor? Any ballot already voting for that candidate is left unchanged, but any ballot for another candidate is now an overvote—or possibly a confusing one with a hanging chad, which pretty much never happens when punching only one card at a time. In that election there were also entire precincts with zero counted votes for Bush, which is statistically highly unlikely, especially when you consider these "safe" areas were the ones where Gore asked for the recount. [Johnson only mentioned the hanging chads. The rest of this paragraph is from what I remember of that history.]

In 2000 County Clerk Beverly Kaufman was faced with a problem. Harris County has the longest ballot in the country (some say LA has a longer one, but Johnson says he still feels confident in making the claim). Much of this is because we vote for judges, and it’s a very large county with a lot of district courts. Anyway, Kaufman couldn’t find a ballot long enough to handle all of the races. Within two years she found the Hart System, which makes the eSlate machine we still use here.

The Hart eSlate Machine
used in Harris County

Since the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, electronic voting has been required across the country. A federal commission must certify the equipment. The Election Assistance Commission was functioning well until Obama; he has refused to appoint anyone to the post, and it has gone defunct, so there have been no updates available, so it is still a slow and burdensome process.

Nevertheless, County Clerk Stan Stanart got our eSlate system to pass the federal regulations. The EAC test takes a year to complete, and costs the company $2 million. Then the system is submitted to states, which take another year for testing. Ours has passed both. HAVA gives money to the states to buy equipment that meets standards.

Johnson spent a fair amount of time going through the type of testing done. He used a number of detailed slides, so this report will only skim the surface, from my notes.

There is HASH testing, or code testing. They check to make sure no coding has been changed.

There is BOSS testing—Ballot Originator Software System. There is no connection to the internet, at any point. Ever.

There are two encryption keys between segments of the system. One is internal. One is external—on a thumb drive. The official (County Clerk) has to take it and plug it in. This is kept in a vault.

There is the Mobile Ballot Box (MBB), the memory card upon which the ballot is backed up. Votes are also kept in three places in the system; cheating would require changing all three locations somehow, without leaving a trace. The memory card is loaded into the JBC (judge's booth controller) machine. A security code identifies the card for each machine. This is tracked throughout the process.

There is security of the election equipment. When you press “cast ballot” on the eSlate machine, your vote is saved in three locations—with the timing of that vote and other identifiers. It is virtually impossible to change votes on a memory card and the other two locations.

There is Login and Accuracy Testing required by law, that takes a week. It uses people of both parties. They create a spreadsheet that includes every possible combination of votes on the ballot. The testers input, physically, each of these voting combinations. The outcome must meet the spreadsheet. This shows there is no tabulating error. Harris County has always passed this test.

For early voting, supervisors set up the polls, with the machines showing zero votes on the screen. They print this zero report to start, and at the end of the day they do another report. Equipment is locked, resealed—all seals are labeled with codes, which must match, to show that there was no tampering overnight. At the end of early voting, the machine is sealed, again with a coded seal. A constable delivers the machine to the downtown office. Seals are validated, and the machines are locked in a vault with the memory card still inside it.

There’s a second Login and Accuracy Test done by members of each party. This takes three hours on election night, with a high amount of security. It is completed just prior to the polls closing. Early voting tallying begins, but no results are available—to anyone, including those involved in the counting—until after the polls have closed, so that early voting outcomes have no influence on voters who haven’t yet voted.

At the polling place, machines arrive sealed, with codes on the seals, which are recorded. The zero tape is printed, to show that there were no votes on the machine prior to the start of voting. Each voter must show eligibility (ID), sign into the polling book—plus their name is written by the clerk on a voter list. The voter is sent to the JBC machine to get a code. They take their code to the voting booth and enter their code on the eSlate machine. The machines have a dial, which prevents errors that can happen on touch screens. No helper (language assistant, for example) can touch the machine—only the voter. The voter presses “cast ballot,” and a flag on the screen indicates that the voter was successful in casting the ballot, and the voter can leave the booth.

There are some similar machines that can print cast ballots. This removes the safety of a secret ballot, and these machines have a lower accuracy rate. So Harris County does not use them.

The individual votes cast can be printed—and are printed, by a hard-to-read dot-matrix printer. Stan Stanart still uses this, although the state has recently allowed an alternative laser printer version. But, once an election process is underway, Stanart doesn’t make changes, so this election will still use the dot-matrix printer.

Every recount done in the county has come out the same as the original count; the electronic voting system has a zero% error rate.

There are seven vendors selling electronic voting equipment nationally. It is our County Clerk’s opinion—and Harris County has been ground zero in preventing election fraud—that the HART system is the best.

I have no personal expertise to know whether this is true, but I have been a poll watcher and poll worker here a number of times. And I am persuaded that electronic voting prevents fraud, and I’ve seen the security procedures followed carefully at the polling places.

Ed Johnson told us (though it wasn’t news to us) that Democrats hate electronic voting. In the national effort to “turn Harris County blue,” they have two goals: do away with photo ID, and get rid of electronic voting.

Unfortunately, electronic voting can prevent counting errors, but it can’t prevent all other versions of election fraud.

Picture a voting place with no alternate judge or poll watcher. There may be people on the rolls that haven’t voted yet. The judge can put the voter’s name on the list, print out a code, and hand it to a friend to cast a ballot. If the person comes in and signs the book later, they still get to vote, and, unless there is a recount, no one will notice that person’s name twice on the voter list.

Or the judge might print out the code and cast the extra vote without even bothering to put a name on the voter list. At the place I worked as a poll watcher in 2012, there were 20 additional votes at the end of the day that were not recorded on the voter list. The presiding judge made no attempt to reconcile the error; she just shrugged her shoulders and assumed the clerks had failed to write the names that many times. That’s possible, but I hadn’t witnessed any failures. The difference in the election nationwide was about 10 votes per precinct. 

I did file the discrepancy in my report, but voter fraud is notoriously hard to prove. In some of the most egregious cases, the only outcome is to prevent that judge from being hired again.

The best prevention is to have an alternate judge and poll watcher in every polling place. Harris County has a pretty good program to train and recruit towards this end, but it’s still a challenge. And it’s not being done in many voting places around the country.

The good news, then, is that people in favor of free and fair elections are getting better technology to accomplish that. But the bad news is that people against free and fair elections will continue to find ways to disenfranchise the voters who disagree with them.

What Freedom Looks Like

It seems natural to me that people would want to enjoy freedom. I don’t mean leisure time activities, or having great wealth so you don’t have to work. I mean freedom to make decisions about your own life and how you’ll spend it.

So I am puzzled by the large numbers of the population who choose less freedom. What is it they believe they are getting?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But I am always looking for better ways to explain the Spherical Model goals of freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Back in January I wrote a post defining freedom, liberty, and some related words. It included a quote from Lincoln, showing he had thought about the definition of freedom, well enough to look at all sides and come to a conclusion based on principle. That truth was known in 1864, so it ought to still be known today.

I recently came across a piece written by Frenchman Benjamin Constant in 1816. This was in the decades following the American Revolution, the French Revolution and their various attempts at self-rule, and British movement toward a more representative parliamentary rule. The whole of the piece was on comparing the then-modern definition of liberty to the ideas used in ancient societies, which excluded individual rights. In the piece he has a description of liberty—a synonym for freedom—that I think we can still find useful.

I have used only Benjamin Constant’s words, but I turned it into a bullet-point list to make it easier to grasp:

First ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a French-man, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word “liberty.” For each of them

·         it is the right to be subjected only to the laws,

·         and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals.

·         It is the right of everyone to express their opinion,

·         choose a profession and practice it,

·         to dispose of property, and even to abuse it;

·         to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings.

·         It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer,

·         or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations or whims.

·         Finally it is everyone’s right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed.

If that is freedom, which we mainly agree we want, then why do so many people want government that will take, by force, wealth from some and arbitrarily give it to others?

Why are there speech codes to prevent free speech on school and college campuses?

Why are there unelected government officials deciding how a person can use his own property, if a puddle gets called a wetland, or a particular creature is found upon the property?

Why are people compelled to buy insurance, at ever higher rates, regardless of their health or willingness to pay for care out-of-pocket?

Why are business owners being compelled to violate their own religious practices, or else be forced out of business?

Why did my school district get threatened with a lawsuit (by someone not even in the district) for having an opening prayer at its board meetings?

Why are people blacklisted, or have their property defaced, for supporting one particular candidate or another, or for belonging to a particular party, or holding the beliefs that our country was founded upon?

Why are people being forced to share bathroom or locker room spaces with people of the opposite sex?

Why are certain officials allowed to break the law with impunity while the rest of us are prosecuted?

Why is there so much indoctrination and enforcement in education, at such high cost for such poor results?

Why are states being forced by a bare majority of unelected judges to redefine marriage away from what it has been for all the millennia of recorded history?

Why is government outlawing entry-level jobs that bring in less than $15 in value per hour?

The questions could go on. On one side of the spectrum—the liberal elite, the progressives, the socialists, or whatever you want to call them—people are in favor of coercion, manipulation, and tyranny. In Spherical Model language, they are all for southern hemisphere tyranny and against freedom—although they are often just fine with libertine licentiousness.

On the other side of the spectrum—the Constitutional conservatives—people are in favor of northern hemisphere freedom, prosperity, and civilization, based on principles.

There is no point to compromise. Example: Say you have a very bad house guest who is found with the good silverware, falling out of his sleeve as he says goodbye at the door. Instead of returning it, he unabashedly keeps all the pieces still awkwardly up his sleeve and says, “I’ll just take this fork, and you can keep that knife.” When someone is taking our freedom, that is what compromise looks like. It’s not acceptable.

The appropriate response would be to detain the guest, recover all of your silverware, warn all of your friends—and possibly call the police to prevent the guy from stealing from others. In order to do that, you have to have a concept of what is right, what you own, and what civilized behavior requires of guests. For most people, that’s pretty clear.

So, with recovering our freedom, maybe we could use some righteous indignation. Maybe we need to speak up and remind everyone what freedoms God endowed us with--and stop giving in to that thief pretending to be your guest, who requires even more of you after you notice the thieving.

The Separation of School from State

There’s more going on this fall than the presidential election. Some of it is closer to home, and with more immediate effect on our families. Here in Texas it’s time to gear up for the upcoming bi-annual legislative session, from mid-January to early June. Some bills start getting preliminary bill numbers in a month or so. If we can get the attention of our legislators early, we may be able to persuade them to work on the legislation we’re interested in.

I’m working on a list. One of the main big issues is education. This week I happened upon a couple of inputs to my thinking. One is a video called “It’s Time for School Choice in Texas.” It’s only about 8 minutes, so worth watching in full. But here are some of the details.

Texas spends an average of $12,761 per student, for 4.8 million students. Education makes up 52.7% of the state’s general budget. After you watch the video, we’ll talk about it some more.

Data may not mean much without some context. So I did some research. The Cato Institute has come up with a different way of looking at the numbers. Instead of an annual cost per student, they look at the total cost of educating a student K-12, and use inflation-adjusted dollars.

Image from Cato Institute with more detail here

This chart takes us only through 2012. Nationally, and also in Texas, there has been some slowdown, and even decrease, in the annual cost per student during 2010-2015. Nevertheless, total cost per student over time has grown exponentially, while results have remained flat.

In economic terms, when the cost for a service has grown exponentially and offers no additional value, we don't purchase that service. Because we have a choice in how to spend our money.

But in government-run education, we do not have a choice. So we are forced to make the purchase regardless of the bad service.

The video talks about several ways of moving toward school choice, summarized as,

Let the money follow the students. And let students and families decide how best to educate their kids.

Whatever we do, choice needs to lead away from publicly funded education. Because wherever government goes beyond its proper role, there will be unintended negative consequences, usually exactly the opposite of the stated goal.

So, if government says the goal is to educate the populace, and particularly to offer education as a way out of permanent poverty, you can expect that government education will be less effective at educating the populace than the other options, and will particularly fail those in poverty.

That means—if you care about the education of your children and the rest of the children in society, you should be against government education.

That is a radical idea today. But a century ago it was still a mainstream thought. Go back 150 years or so, and the idea of government taking over education was crazy radical.

If we need an educated populace—people who are as well-educated as the founding fathers—we need people who avoid the institutionalized indoctrination factories that have been foisted upon us. Especially in this day when so many other educational avenues are available.

Another resource I came across this week was a free ebook by Tom Woods, Education without the State.  He’s a Libertarian, so there are areas where I will disagree with him, but education is not one of them. The first few chapters of the book (the part I’ve read so far) are transcriptions of interviews he has done with people working on educational choice.

Woods begins by pointing out that education is one of the stiffest stumbling blocks against Libertarianism. As Woods says in his introduction, “Public schooling is as close to the official religion of the United States as any institution is ever likely to be. And if you are reading this eBook, you are likely a heretic.”

So, yes, I recognize that I am a heretic. Since I homeschooled my kids for a decade, I already knew that.

About funding, Woods and Sheldon Richman, author of Separating School and State, discuss the usual arguments about budgets:

WOODS: Just about everyone agrees that there are problems with the government-run schools, and the kids aren’t learning what they should be learning, but then come the excuses: this is because the schools have been deprived of funds, and we don’t have the right priorities, and we favor basketball players over scholars. If only we could change this, we could get our act together. Why would you think the solution would instead involve getting rid of the whole system, root and branch?

RICHMAN: Well, the idea that they haven’t spent enough money is laughable. They’ve been spending amazing amounts of money year after year for twenty or so years, in increasing amounts. They haven’t shown any results. There’s no improvement.

The other thing is that the worst districts in the country have the highest per-capita spending. In Detroit, or Chicago, inner-city schools, Washington, D.C., they are spending $10,000 or more per student, and they have worse results even than other public school districts, government school districts, that spend less per capita. There is no correlation between the amount of money spent and the performance of the children. So that is not the problem.[i]

One of the larger arguments is about educating the poor. Without government schools, wouldn’t poor kids be stuck in poverty? Richman addresses that:

Government produces many obstacles to individual self-advancement economically. And one of the biggest obstacles is its schools. If you look at the inner-city schools, they are just sabotaging generation after generation. If you set out to ruin generations of kids, you could not design a better system than the one we have. So that’s one reason alone that parents don’t seem to have enough money to educate their kids.[ii]

The next chapter hits that idea even harder. Woods interviews Pauline Dixon, who has been doing research into private schools for the poor. She has been to very poor, slum areas, in Africa, China, and India, places identified by UNESCO or the World Bank as very poor. And they found low-cost private schools in all of these areas. Here’s part of their discussion:

WOODS: I think what surprised me the most about your talk was the very existence of the low-cost private schools that you were finding in these various places. That runs contrary to the expectations of many people. It runs contrary to the expectations of certain economic models that hold education to be a public good, which will therefore be underfunded on the market. So what’s going on here? Tell us something about the types of schools that you encountered and how it’s possible that they were, from the West’s point of view, anyway, more or less under the radar all this time.

DIXON: Exactly right. The main reason parents are voting with their feet away from the state sector is that the state sector is failing them. These parents don’t read World Bank reports. They don’t wait around for governments to actually do something for them, because their governments aren’t going to do something for them. So these parents have to do something for themselves. And what happened in India, for example, was that entrepreneurs within certain areas were finding that government schools were teaching only in Hindi or the local language, and that’s not what parents wanted. Parents wanted schools that were what’s called English Medium. That means that their children were going to read and write in English. So local entrepreneurs, because these schools grow organically within the communities themselves, started off what we call low-cost private schools in order to satisfy parental demand.

What happened, for example in India, is that parents started moving away from the government schools. What you tend to think is that a government school would be provided free, but there are always these hidden costs. Parents still have to buy a uniform. They have to buy books. There’s transport to schools and so on. And the local private schools weren’t actually that much more costly for the parent than sending your child to a government school. A low-cost private school costs maybe $4, $5, $6 per month per child, which is about six percent of a worker’s daily wage. So in India, for example, what we found was that these low-cost private schools have sprung up because parents wanted English Medium. That’s the main thing. But also because the government schools were failing.[iii]

In the next chapter Woods interviews James Tooley, author of The Beautiful Tree, about these unlikely private schools. Tooley says,

I’ve been recently in Liberia, south Sudan, and Sierra Leone, and the same phenomenon exists. You talk to people in government or NGOs, non-government organizations, or middle-class people, and even they don’t know about it. So it is extraordinary. The poor are doing something for themselves all over the world, and yet somehow people refuse to accept that they are doing it.[iv]

What I would like to assert is that parents have the role of seeing to the care and education of their own children. When they love their children, they sense this responsibility and act on it. I know I did. Whatever the cost in time and effort, within the limits of our financial means, I would do it. I’m middle class and not on the verge of starvation, but I did have to stand up against some pretty strong social forces to do what I knew was better for my children. 

That is what good parents do, regardless of their circumstances.

In the video above, there’s this quote from economist Milton Friedman:

As long as the schools are governmental, as long as they are financed and administered by public entities, they are a source of political power.

Friedman was actually one of the first proponents of the voucher system, an attempt to move choice from government to parents. School lobbies fight it tooth vouchers tooth and nail. As a homeschooling parent, while I wasn’t against the voucher movement, I was very wary of anything that might give government control over what I was doing in my private school with my kids. Woods and Richman have a discussion about that, worth reading.[v] I think Richman may be right that it isn’t even a step in the right direction.

But the concept of school choice is the right direction, however we accomplish it. The above video suggests a list, some of which I could argue for:

·         Education Savings Accounts

·         Scholarship Tax Credits

·         Expand Charter Schools

·         Better Parent Trigger Laws

·         Home-Rule School Districts

·         School Finance Reform

I’m particularly interested in Education Savings Accounts, and I’ll be bringing this idea to legislators this session. I’m uncertain of the details on several of the other suggestions. For now, I’m favoring ESAs, because there’s so much in control of the parents, and such a wide array of options. But ESAs have to be implemented without government interference into content/indoctrination.

If we succeed in returning people to recognizing education as a family responsibility, instead of a government “service,” we can also return to the idea of using charitable donations from businesses and individuals to offer support to the poor, so that every student willing to learn gets to learn.

---

[i] Tom Woods, Education without the State,  p. 4.

[ii] Ibid. p. 5.

[iii] Ibid. p. 12-13.

[iv] Ibid, p. 19.

[v] Ibid, p. 7.

More on Wealth, Poverty, and Politics

image from Amazon

Economist Thomas Sowell has a new edition of his classic book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, and talked about it in the latest Uncommon Knowledge interview.

Peter Robinson starts the interview with a quote from the book, which serves as a theme:

It is not the origins of poverty which need to be explained. What requires explaining are the things that created and sustained higher standards of living.

In explaining what he means by that, Dr. Sowell says,

There are actually books with titles and subtitles about the origins of poverty. Well, the entire human species began in poverty. So I don’t know why we say, what is the origin? Perhaps the Garden of Eden or someplace. But more than that, you’re trying to explain why some countries are poor rather than trying to explain why other countries are more prosperous. There’s no explanation needed for poverty. The species began in poverty. So what you really need to know are what are those things that enable some countries, and some groups within countries, to become prosperous.

He further explains that there are unstated assumptions about income inequality that are false, but are left unexamined. To use another quote from the book,

One of the key implicit assumptions of our time is that many economic and social outcomes would tend to be either even or random, if left to the natural course of events, so that the strikingly uneven and non-random outcomes so often observed in the real world imply some adverse human intervention.

So, there’s this idea being promulgated that, because people are equal, their outcomes should be equal. But people aren’t equal. They are equal before the law—no class of humans more deserving of justice than any other—but people are different in intellect, drive, learning, creativity, desires, preferences, and circumstances.

Dr. Thomas Sowell
image from Uncommon Knowledge

And people are located in different places. Dr. Sowell talked about the Zaire River in Africa, which carries more water than the Mississippi. But it is full of falls and cascades that make it mostly non-navigable, while the Mississippi smoothly changes elevation by only about four inches per mile. People living by the Mississippi, then, have a water route that people living by the Zaire River do not.

He also talked about isolation, such as caused by mountains. People living in isolated Afghan mountain villages live at approximately the same level of poverty as people in isolated Appalachian mountain villages. And people who live discovered on isolated islands are found living very little different from stone age people. Isolation means less trade, less learning from others, less benefiting from others.

So it isn’t some rich person taking away from a poor person; it is a rich person doing what it takes to escape from poverty.

We basically know what those things are. One of the main sources of wealth is human capital. Here’s another quote from the book:

The welfare state reduces the incentives to develop human capital. And receiving the products of other people’s human capital is by no means as fundamental as developing one’s own human capital.” [18:30]

Following the quote, Peter Robinson asks “What is human capital, and why does the welfare state suppress the incentives to develop it?” Dr. Sowell answers, “Well, human capital is the ability to create the material things that constitute wealth.”

A classic example. In the 1970s, Uganda decided that the Gujaratis of India were just too wealthy and controlled too much of the economy. They sent them out, and they wouldn’t let them take their wealth with them. So the Gujaratis arrived mostly in England, destitute. And the Ugandan government has taken over all this material stuff. Over a period of a relatively few years, the Gujaratis were prosperous in England, and the Ugandan economy collapsed, because they didn’t have people who could do what the Gujaratis were doing. And so they no longer had the same production.

It's also one of the problems with trying to solve things by confiscating the wealth of the wealthy. All you can confiscate is the material wealth. You cannot confiscate the human capital.

Confiscating wealth from those who created it and giving it to those who didn’t create it only moves things around, not wealth-generating capabilities.

And income redistribution is wrong-headed in other ways. Talking about the concern that the top 10% have undue influence over society, Dr. Sowell says,

TS: 53% of American households are going to be in the top 10% at some point or other in their lives. You talk about these percentages as if these are ongoing, the same set of people in this bracket, and that bracket. Most Americans do not stay in the same 20% bracket for more than one decade.

PR: So it’s largely a life cycle: you’re poor when you’re young, and doing well when you’re old.

TS: Yes. And there’s nothing mysterious about that. Probably most people in this country, when they started out at entry level jobs were not making what they’re making when they’re forty years old. Heaven knows, I was making $2 a day to deliver groceries, and depended on tips for the rest. [17:20]

He later added,

Somebody said the other day that they want to ease the pain of people in poverty. The pain of poverty is what got many people out of poverty. [35:23]

Peter Robinson ended the interview by having Dr. Sowell read a passage from the book, which summarizes the fallacy of economic equality as a goal:

It is by no means obvious why we should prefer trying to equalize income to putting our efforts into increasing output. People in general, and the poor in particular, seem to vote with their feet, by moving to where there is greater prosperity, rather than where there is greater economic equality.

Rising standards of living, especially for those at the bottom economically, have resulted not so much from changing the relative sizes of different slices of the economic pie as from increasing the size of the pie itself, which has largely been accomplished without requiring heady rhetoric, fierce emotions, or bloodshed.

Does it not matter if the hungry are fed, if slums are replaced by decent and air conditioned housing? If infant mortality rates are reduced to a tenth of what they were before? Are invidious gaps and disparities all that matter? In a world where we are all beneficiaries of enormous windfall gains that our forebears never had, are we to tear the society that created all this apart because some people’s windfall gains are greater or less than some other people’s windfall gains? [40:34]

Thomas Sowell always offers up truth with good humor and common sense. So even when he says what he has said before, we enjoy it. Let’s summarize with a couple of basic economic principles:

·         Thou shalt not covet. [I wrote about this April 26, 2013]

·         Live the principles that build social capital. [I wrote about this February 24, 2012]

Debate Aftermath

It was the most-watched political event in the history of television, but I didn’t watch the presidential debate last night. I was traveling. But I probably wouldn’t have watched it anyway. I have only a peripheral interest, since the constitutional republic of the United States of America is not what these two candidates wish to preside over. One wants to rule over the United Socialist States of America—a country and concept I do not agree to be ruled by. One wants to rule over the National Dictatorship of America, which will be great, and yuge, believe it—except I don’t believe it.

Trump and Clinton first debate 2016
Image from here

I learned one thing during this past eight years: don’t listen to the speeches. I read, instead of watch or listen.  With Obama, it has had to do with his tone. I hear condescension, and disdain for me and people who believe as I do, because we are a hindrance to him and his anti-constitutional intentions. And there are the grating verbal tics—the ubiquitous ums and uhs, the use of “folks” that never sounds real, the use of a long a when the indefinite article a comes before a consonant, even though none of us talk that way normally, which means it’s an affectation or a teleprompter-reading problem. So even the little things grate. Listening is not only hard on me, it makes me harder on the speaker than I would be without the additional auditory and visual input.

And last night we had two of the most grating voices America could come up with. Hillary sounds like she is always yelling. She sounds stiff, stilted, and annoyed—as if it is beneath her to condescend to do this talking to the public that a campaign requires. The term harpy seems to have been created for such a voice. If she were saying things that were valuable to our constitutional republic, the voice would be something we would just have to be tolerant and forgiving of. But, in her case, the voice comes with lies, deceptions, and power-mongering. I think we’re justified in hating that voice.

Then comes the carnival barker voice of Donald Trump. Like a used car salesman, he hides the details and just says, “Believe me,” when he has provided nothing beyond is over-bloated personal opinion to go on. It is an unseemly voice, often speaking unseemly and anti-constitutional things. Some people find that voice entertaining on a reality TV show; it was unappealing to me even when that is all it was.

So, I did not watch. But I will be looking at transcripts. And I offer that as a better tool for judging how the debate went, if you care.

So that you can experience the debate without the talking over one another, and without the tonal problems, here is the full transcript.

Here is a partial transcript interspersed with an NPR attempt to fact check (so consider the source). 

I am beyond believing any presidential choice this year can get us out of tyranny, back up to northern hemisphere freedom. I am interested in what I can do to make my community, my state, and then my nation a place of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. 

This debate offers me no option for my vote. But if a future debate includes independent candidate Evan McMullin and, possibly, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (who is not on my list to possibly get my vote, but who should be in on the debate), I might be willing to tune in. 

Random Quotes

My quote file continues to grow. I add a quote every few days. Over eight years or so, that adds up. It’s the length of a short book. I don’t think I’ve done a post straight from the quote file since last November. So maybe it’s time for another sample.

I thought I’d offer up the last several. As always, they are somewhat random. Not so random that some are on cooking or cleaning. But random while related to The Spherical Model somehow, which covers the political, economic, and social spheres, so that covers a lot of ground. I collect them so I can read and think through these thoughts again. I hope you find them worth reading, and maybe keeping, as well.

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”—James Madison, Federalist 51

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”—C.S. Lewis

“Truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”—Frank S. Meyer

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."—John Adams

“How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively. Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; Apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the Talisman of moral people.”—Walter E. Williams

“[T]he whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”—Henry Hazlitt

"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."—Will Rogers

“Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government—in pursuit of good intentions—tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the costs come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.”—Milton Friedman

“The Constitution is not a living organism. It’s a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.”—Justice Antonin Scalia

One doesn't fight only when one is optimistic. One fights because it is the right thing to do, and because America remains, as Lincoln said, "the last best hope of earth."—Dennis Prager, “A Dark Time in America,” May 3, 2016

It’s easy to be an American liberal. All that is required are hypocrisy and ignorance.

Ignorance is an absolute must, but especially ignorance of three things: economics, human nature and all of recorded history.—Matt Patterson, American Thinker, 9-5-2016 “How to Be a Liberal”

“Who in their right mind looks at the Internet and says ‘You know what we need? We need Russia, China, and Iran to have more control over this.’”—Ted Cruz

“Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”—Walter Williams

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what happened once in 6,000 years may not happen again.”—Daniel Webster

“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.”—Samuel Adams (1776)