Tag Archives: Politics

Congressman Markey still worries about U.S. natural gas exports

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Michael Giberson

A few weeks back Congressman Ed Markey asked the U.S. Department of Energy whether exports of natural gas might not be in the public interest (see prior note here, related note) as exports would tend to push U.S. gas prices higher.

The USDOE’s response apparently didn’t mitigate Markey’s concern; today the Congressman introduced two bills intended to impede the export of natural gas. (See here and here.) One bill would prevent the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from approving any new LNG export terminals until 2025. Another bill would require natural gas produced from federal lands be sold only to American consumers. (Shall we require hotels on federal lands to only rent to American consumers as well? Those foreign tourists visiting the Grand Canyon are just driving up the cost for American tourists, right Congressman?)

I’m neither for or against the prospect of exporting LNG, but I’m entirely for letting companies finding the best offer for their products. If the product is natural gas and the best offers come from customers outside the United States, then by all means I’d want them to export.

I continue to wonder why the Congressman from Massachusetts is singling out natural gas exports as an object of concern, since any big growth in such exports is a few years from reality and the United States remains a net importer of natural gas. At the same time, Massachusetts producers are exporting billions of dollars worth of goods and services each year – over $26 billion worth of goods and services in 2010 – which by the Congressman’s crabbed logic is contributing to higher prices for U.S. consumers and therefore harmful to the public interest.

Congressman, why are these Massachusetts exports okay, but natural gas exports are not?

The “Gary Johnson rule”, the political economy of election bias, and fundamental principles

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Lynne Kiesling

A cynical, but I think accurate, political economy analysis for a Friday afternoon: One of the declared presidential candidates in the Republican primary is a successful two-term Governor of a majority Democrat state who retains a positive rating in his home state. In that office this candidate improved the fiscal standing of the state government (including Medicare and Medicaid), and made the regulatory environment for business more transparent and certain, resulting in new economic activity in the state that consequently created jobs in the state. This candidate also started a successful business as a young man, and worked to grow that business to over 1,000 employees by creating economic value for his customers. It’s common knowledge that successful governors typically make good presidential candidates, so this candidate is doing well in the campaign, of course …

… or not. In the current climate with media corporations both conducting polls and co-sponsoring debates with state Republican Party branches, this candidate has only been invited to participate in two of the debates held in 2011. Every debate has different candidate inclusion rules, determined by the media corporation in conjunction with the state party. Conveniently, these rules seem always to exclude Gary Johnson.

Thus what has become known as the “Gary Johnson rule”, as articulated by Dave Weigel as he watched the inclusion rules evolve from August through October, excluding Johnson (and Buddy Roemer, also an experienced, serious person) each time.Here’s how Dave summarizes the remixed Gary Johnson rule for the October debate:

Let’s hand it to the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Dartmouth University: They have figured out a debate invite schematic that goes beyond polls to squeeze Gary Johnson and Buddy Roemer out of tomorrow’s debate. The rules:

     1) Received measurable popular support in a range of national polls.
     3) Is a legally qualified candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

Johnson has done both, and Roemer has at least done the second. Good so far.

     2) Campaign reported at least half a million dollars raised in its FEC filing through the 2011 second quarter reporting period.

Neither Johnson nor Roemer has done that. They’re out, no matter what else they do. Theoretically, sure, they could pass this fundraising marker for a future debate. How else to keep them barred?

     4) Participated in at least three nationally televised Republican presidential debates during the 2012 election cycle.

Brilliant! The proof that Johnson and Roemer shouldn’t share a stage with other Republicans is that they haven’t been invited to other debates. In Johnson’s case, he’s participated in two debates — he just misses the cut! Newt Gingrich, who has willed his campaign from “joke” to “interesting joke” simply on the strength of free media debate appearances, is calling for Johnson to be included. That won’t matter for tomorrow, but maybe it’s a break in this bizarre 2012 sideshow.

You don’t have to be a particularly astute or attentive campaign follower to see the Catch-22 of the system here — if you don’t poll well enough then you’re a fringe candidate and not worth including in debates, but if you aren’t included in debates then you won’t have the recognition and familiarity that could increase your polling, but because you haven’t polled well or been included in debates then the media corporations can choose to exclude you from their polls, and so on, and so on … Just this week, Johnson’s name has been excluded from the ballot for the Illinois straw poll that closes tomorrow, and he has been excluded from next week’s debate in Michigan co-sponsored by CNBC and the Michigan Republican Party.

As Conor Friedersdorf said in June when he wrote about CNN’s exclusion of Johnson from the debate they co-sponsored, “[t]he cable network is substituting opinion polls for judgment, and preventing voters from getting to know the former two-term governor .” In fact, Friedersdorf (who has written about Johnson frequently at The Atlantic), Weigel, and a variety of writers at Reason are the bulk of the national media coverage his campaign has received. For additional in-depth and well-written articles on Johnson and his campaign, I also recommend this Outside magazine article from November 2011 (Outside’s journalism is underappreciated) and this GQ article, also from November 2011.

Johnson’s policy positions also play a prominent rule in this story about exclusion from corporate media debates and polls. His economic policy positions are consistently fiscally responsible. While he supports the Fair Tax proposal and I can make a lot of criticisms of it, if he were to introduce the Fair Tax into the tax reform debate that will have to happen in Washington in 2012 and beyond, it would improve the ideas likely to be on the table and perhaps improve the ultimate outcome.

But what really distinguishes Johnson, even from Ron Paul, are his social policy positions: drug legalization to reduce domestic and international gang violence and reduce the social disruption and fiscal expense of prison, pro-immigration, anti-war, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage. Johnson is no social conservative; in fact, I take a page from the 18th-century Enlightenment book and claim that Johnson is a model of the kind of toleration that was a bedrock principle on which the United States was founded.

This combination of economic prudence and social toleration makes Johnson the kind of candidate that could fit the Buckley rule: nominate a Republican candidate who is conservative but can still win the general election. If you look at American culture (including the recent Gallup poll showing that a majority of the population supports marijuana legalization), our current political upheavals, and our history, that combination of economic prudence and social toleration is what can be a winner for Republicans (and, in full disclosure, would induce me to vote Republican in a presidential election for the first time in my long life). If that’s true and the ultimate objective is to win the general election, why isn’t a candidate with these traits receiving establishment support?

My hypothesis on that question has two parts:

  • The media: Corporate media operate with a simplistic, static, binary, didactic model — good/bad, red/blue, R/D, conservative/liberal, economic/social, rich/poor. They can’t fit Johnson in a box that makes sense to them in that model, and the Catch-22 described above absolves them of any responsibility or accountability for trying to understand and communicate his combination of policy positions.
  • The Republican establishment: neither the Republican National Committee nor the state-level party committees can see beyond the “fire up the base” strategy because their perspective is so strongly determined by a small group of large donors, which leads them to concentrate on social conservatism even though it does not necessarily reflect either the broader Republican Party or the priority of issues facing the electorate as a whole in 2012.

First, the media. The flawed binary lens through which they see the world is more the culprit here than “media bias”, because if there is indeed liberal media bias, Johnson’s social policy positions should be attractive to them, no? I think they see politics as a set of caricatures or, if I’m being generous, a set of “ideal types” in the tradition of Max Weber. Smooth-talking middle-of-the-road guy, check. Kind of wacky social conservative woman, check. Experienced establishment politician, check check check check check. Maverick business guy with no professional governance experience, check. Anti-war libertarian conservative, check. Oh, wait, we’ve already put Ron Paul in that box, sorry Gary, we don’t need you to fill that role in our constructed narrative.

And the sad and pathetic thing about this? We the American public let the corporate media get away with this naive, simplistic crap. To paraphrase Mencken, we get the politicians we deserve and the media we deserve, good and hard.

I’m not the first to make that claim, but what about this claim about the RNC, state committees, and the agenda-setting power of large donors? Again, this is not original to me, but is rather a variation on a standard public choice model of regulation and lobbying and agenda-setting. The RNC (and the DNC for the Democrats) establishes rules and regulations; party members have incentives to donate, lobby, and act in other ways to influence those rules and regulations to reflect their personal interests. Those large donors set the agenda.

But here’s the problem, both for the establishment RNC folks and for the Johnson campaign given the current reality: the candidate traits that appeal to those large donors and the candidate traits that appeal to the vast legion of disaffected independents who either voted for Obama in 2008 or voted third party or didn’t vote are not.the.same.traits. In other words, the RNC has a classic Mancur Olson concentrated benefits + diffuse costs => wrong policy choice situation. The kind of voter I have in mind here is the one who voted for Obama in 2008, would vote for Johnson (or Paul) in 2012, but if Romney is the Republican nominee would either not vote or would vote third party. The RNC and DNC party establishments do not place any weight on those voters, and I suggest to you that they don’t place any weight on those voters because they can’t monetize those voters, even though if they put up a candidate that would attract those voters they could see a higher probability of success in the general election.

I do think that the RNC leadership and the state leaders want to see a Republican win in 2012, but through a combination of their own political philosophies and the philosophies of the major donors they look at the Buckley Rule through the lens of wanting to relinquish as little social conservatism as possible and still do that. I think technology might surprise them, though, because even though they can partner with the corporate media to control inclusion and the media narrative, they cannot control social media. They cannot stop Gary Johnson from doing as he did in June, when he posted a video on YouTube of him answering all of the questions from the New Hampshire debate from which he was excluded.

On a more philosophical note, I find this combination of corporate media and donor-driven national party exclusion of candidates like Johnson and Roemer extremely disturbing, and inconsistent with the bedrock principles of freedom, inclusion, representation, and toleration that are the hallmarks of the United States. It’s deeply unjust. At least it comes at a time when we have communication channels and media substitutes for corporate media, and when we have a justifiable deep skepticism and distrust regarding our established political party structures. Even if Johnson doesn’t get included in more debates and doesn’t win the nomination, if his candidacy can help tear down this particular example of crony corporatism, he will have made the world a better place.

Gasoline price gouging complaints spur Kentucky, Maryland attorneys general into action

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Michael Giberson

Kentucky: Attorney General Jack Conway filed a motion last week seeking a temporary injunction to force Marathon Petroleum Co. to return its gasoline prices to April 26 levels, the date the state’s Governor declared a state of emergency due to flooding. From WLKY.com:

Attorney General Jack Conway accused Marathon of illegally raising the price of wholesale gasoline during a state of emergency due to flooding.

 ”The governor issued his emergency order on April 26 which put into place Kentucky’s price gouging law that says you can’t gouge on building supplies, you can’t gouge on hotel rooms and you can’t gouge on gas prices. Specifically we’re alleging they’re charging prices not based on their costs but instead based on their speculation,” Conway said.

… Conway wants an order forcing Marathon to roll back its wholesaler price to what it was before the emergency declaration.

On Monday a Kentucky judge declined to issue a restraining order against Marathon, saying he needed additional information. A hearing is scheduled for today. The motion was filed in Kentucky’s on-going price gouging case against Marathon, initiated in 2007 in response to gasoline pricing complaints post-Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in late 2005.

Kentucky law prohibits selling certain goods and services, including fuels, “for a price which is grossly in excess of the price prior to the declaration [of a state of emergency] and unrelated to any increased cost to the seller.”

Marathon claimed politics, as Tuesday this week was the state’s primary election and AG Conway was on the ballot; Conway dismissed the claim, saying he was unopposed in the Democratic primary. (Marathon noted that the 2007 case was filed by then Attorney General Greg Stumbo less than two weeks before the 2007 primary election in which Stumbo was seeking the Democratic nomination for Lt. Governor.)

In addition to the price gouging claims, the AG’s office has been pursuing an anti-trust investigation of Marathon. Coincidently, reports WHAS11 news, “Also Friday, the Kentucky Attorney General’s office announced it has completed its three year investigation of the 1996 merger of Marathon Petroleum with Ashland Oil.   Kentucky will forward the findings to the U.S. Justice Department.”

The Kentucky price is the green line in the chart above. More from LEX18.com, from WAVE3.com.

Maryland: Attorney General Douglas Gansler said Monday this week that he was “investigating a Rockville gasoline distributor after prices at the pump jumped 25 cents overnight last week.” Gansler noted, “Because Maryland lacks a price-gouging law… his office can do little beyond questioning distributors under consumer protection and antitrust law.” He doesn’t have price control authority, but he wants it:

Gansler said a state probe into gasoline prices could be stronger if Maryland had a tough price-gouging law. Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have passed such laws; efforts to pass one in Maryland have failed in recent years.

“It would allow an attorney general to issue subpoenas or issue inquiries to find out whether the price rise was justified or not,” and see what was behind it, he said.

My guess is that Maryland consumers are better off without state politicians having any ability or responsibility for deciding whether price increases are justified or not. (Note that Maryland does use it’s law enforcement powers to force gasoline prices higher when a store seems to be pricing too low.)

The Maryland price is in blue in the chart above. More on Maryland, from WJLA.com.

Elsewhere: In neighboring Washington, DC, “D.C. attorney general investigates gas station mogul” in response to allegations of anticompetitive practices. The DC AG said, “We have received allegations both from consumers and operators of stations that they are required to purchase at prices that are set on an anti-competitive basis…”

In New York, “A.G. Schneiderman Announces Comprehensive Review Of Gas Prices In Western New York.” The news release said:

Prices at the pump have led to an increase in consumer complaints to the Attorney General’s office, and Schneiderman has directed his staff to compile data on the prices charged by gas retailers, as well as information on the chain of distribution, to determine the cause behind the continued increases. Schneiderman cautioned that there may not be wrongdoing behind the price spikes, but said that if there is, he will take all appropriate action.

Another news release the same day said, “Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has been selected to serve on the federal Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group, joining a national team in monitoring the costs of energy commodities for consumer abuses.”

Elsewhere, price gouging enforcement Hugo Chavez style: “Venezuelan officials and soldiers inspected a warehouse of U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill Inc.  on Wednesday as part of a crackdown on alleged hoarding and price-gouging with foodstuffs. … Chavez over the weekend urged ministers to hunt speculators and said he would have no hesitation in expropriating any companies found guilty.”

Government shutdown: shouldn’t we be asking some deeper questions?

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Lynne Kiesling

As we contemplate an impending federal government shutdown and the restriction of government activities to “essential” services, shouldn’t we be asking deeper questions like why we spend so much taxpayer money on “nonessential” services? Jacob Sullum asks that question in Reason and provides some arguments for reducing spending (and thereby the future deficit) on such nonessential services.

But even some services that we deem essential, such as air traffic control, are performed by private firms and employees in other countries (such as Canada). Demagoguery and posturing are cheap and easy, and have probably become reflexive for our federal politicians. By choosing the rhetorical path of least resistance, the members of Congress have given up a chance to enable a substantive conversation about how we provide and pay for essential services, and why we spend so many resources on nonessential services.

The geography of ethanol’s support in Congress

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Michael Giberson

The House of Representatives budget battle has produced a few shots at the ethanol industry, including “Sullivan of Oklahoma Amendment No. 94,” a proposal to prevent the EPA from taking steps to encourage the sale of gasoline with higher ethanol content for use in newer cars. The amendment succeeded, 285-136 (12 not voting), and the resulting map of yeas and nays is so predictable, unsurprising, and boring that even as I am posting it I wonder why I bother.

Anyway, here is the map of the vote (blue is a vote opposing ethanol, red a vote favoring ethanol), followed by a USDA map showing corn production and ethanol plants:

Vote on amendment to stop EPA from implementing E15 waiver.
Blue is anti-ethanol, red is pro-ethanol.
(Click image for more details on vote)

U.S. Ethanol Capacity as of April 2007; USDA and Renewable Fuels Association data

U.S. Ethanol Capacity as of April 2007 (Link to USDA article on ethanol industry growth.)

If you are among those few people who still believe U.S. ethanol policy is driven by something other than the demands of the U.S. ethanol industry, then you might be surprised. For the rest of us: no surprises here.

Bootleggers and Baptists alert: RIAA and radio broadcasters

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Lynne Kiesling

Bruce Yandle, call your office — it’s another bootleggers and Baptists alert! This time it’s RIAA and radio broadcasters, who usually are at loggerheads over things like song royalties but have found common cause and joined forces to lobby the FCC to mandate that all mobile devices have an FM receiver implanted in them.

Bootleggers and Baptists is one of the most robust political economy models of rent seeking around, and it’s a topic of perpetual interest here at KP. RIAA and radio doing joint lobbying to impose a technology mandate on everyone is a classic example; what would be a seemingly small cost per device could generate a lot of profit for them … concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, IF we actually listen to the radio and radio can sell advertising and pay royalties to RIAA artists. In my experience, that’s an increasingly big IF.

But, as the Wired post indicates, perhaps we have bilateral monopoly in federal regulatory rent-seeking, because the CEA is committed to fighting technology mandates for consumer devices.

When there’s bilateral monopoly in rent-seeking, only the politicians win.

Complexity essay question from Megan McArdle

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Lynne Kiesling

Megan McArdle offers an essay assignment:

Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry has an essay question:

Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex–agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive–each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output–but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake–”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

Please write an essay describing whether and how Tainter’s thesis applies to welfare states undergoing demographic slide. You have four hours.

Answer: sounds exactly like the subject of Mancur Olson’s outstanding book about institutionalized, bureaucratic, economic sclerosis, The Rise and Decline of Nations. I’m sure he spent more than four hours writing it, and you’re likely to spend more than four hours reading it, but it’s well worth the investment.

A disgusting display of bureaucratic force from the Chicago Department of Public Health

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Lynne Kiesling

This is so vile, so disgusting that I am literally nauseated at my desk as I write. One of the ways that independent chefs, caterers and confectioners economize on their substantial fixed costs is by sharing kitchens. In Chicago, the business license treatment of such kitchens from the Chicago Department of Public Health has been uncertain: does the kitchen owner have to be the one with the license, or does each user of the kitchen have to have a separate license?

Last night, due to a paperwork miscommunication and Kafkaesque bureaucratic process of trying to sort this out, the Chicago Department of Public Health destroyed organic fruit purées that Flora Lazar of Flora’s Confections prepared over the summer and preserved to use in her much-touted and anticipated Valentine’s Day confections. These officials tore open the bags and bleached the food so that it could not be put to any use. I’m going to quote Chicago Tribune reporter Monica Eng here at length, because she was there, and her post illustrates exactly how senseless and appalling this destructive CDPH behavior is, but there is more at her post, including a depressing video of the CDPH officials destroying the food, so please do go read more there.

In a sad struggle that unfolded in a West Town kitchen Thursday night, Department of Health inspectors seized, slashed open and poured bleach over thousands of dollars of local peaches, pears, raspberry and plum purees owned by pastry chef Flora Lazar. She’d purchased the fruit from Green City Market farmers last summer and had planned to use it to make local fruit gelees for her business, Flora Confections.

More than $1,000 of food owned by the Sunday Dinner Club caterers was also destroyed by health department inspectors.

Inspectors cited no health problems with any of the food. They even encouraged Lazar’s son to eat the confiscated granola bars from Sunday Dinner Club. They only said the food was prepared by chefs who didn’t have the proper business licenses to prepare and sell it. …

The destruction of organic artisanal granola bars and local fruit from Klug Farm and Hillside Orchards is heartbreaking to any local food advocate. But for Flora Lazar, this setback, the week before Valentine’s Day is devastating.

“This puts me out of business for six months,” a despondent Lazar said. “I have done everything by the rules. Instead of making the food at home, which I could easily do, I sought out and rented space in a licensed kitchen. When they finally said we could apply for a separate license, I did that. I paid my $600 and invited the inspectors here today.”

If Lazar had been less transparent and left her cooler in her car during the inspection, she would probably be cooking today. Inspectors were mostly destroying food that had been prepared before their arrival. But she estimates that her honesty and attempt play by the rules just cost her $6,000 in revenue. She says the fruit purees, harvested at the peak of Midwest ripeness, are “irreplaceable.” …

But until recently the city had no clear policy regarding shared use kitchens, says Kitchen Chicago owner Alexis Levering. When she secured her latest space she said she confirmed with the Department of Licensing that it was zoned for shared use. The department further assured her that as the licenseholder, she would be responsible for any food safety issues associated with her clients, she says.

Later, though, Licensing said her clients would all need to apply for their own licenses, and with each application they’d need to get a new health inspection, giving the little niche kitchen exponentially more inspections than the busiest restaurants in Chicago.

But when Kitchen Chicago users went to the department, they were told again that they couldn’t apply for the license because it was at the same address as Levering’s license. The confusion continued for months until recently, Levering said, a department representative told her that now he would make sure that renters could apply for the licenses. He further told her, however, that any violations committed by one chef would mean a ticket for every cook who rents space in the facility, meaning possibly thousands of dollars reaped by the city for a minor infraction by one cook the others might have never met.

“That’s like giving everyone in the car their own ticket when a driver is stopped by the police,” she said.

This week, it seemed as if the kitchen was finally making progress with the department and, indeed, two of the businesses, Sunday Dinner Club and Flora Confections, had their license applications accepted, paid their fees and were told the inspectors would come Thursday.

The inspectors arrived at 9:30 a.m. and didn’t leave until nearly 5 p.m., when their final act was to destroy hundreds of pounds of local, organic, often unopened cheese, cassoulets, granola bars, frozen fruit purees, baking ingredients and more with a gallon of bleach.

Officials never said that the food posed a health risk. At best it was a victim of paper work confusion among city bureaucrats who couldn’t agree on a policy. But since no one at the city will comment on the situation, part of the story remains unclear.

Francis Guichard who is the CDPH food protection director called this morning to say that her inspectors could not allow the food to move from the building because they could not ensure where it was going. Licensing has still not commented on the issue.

At one point, one of the cooks suggested that the unopened food at least go to the Greater Chicago Food Depository rather than being destroyed. That request was denied. Watching the destruction of all of this perfectly edible food, you’d never know we live in a state where one out of 10 households doesn’t have enough food to eat.

The Health Department inspectors are expected back at the kitchen today to destroy the rest of the food they deem unlicensed.

These so-called “protectors of public health” destroy the inputs into an entrepreneur’s business in her busiest season, despite acknowledging that the destroyed food poses no health risk. These so-called “protectors of public health” destroy perfectly healthy food instead of even giving to hungry, needy people. On what grounds can these so-called protectors of public health have any legitimate claim to be doing valuable work on behalf of the people of Chicago? And I pay how many thousands of dollars in taxes every year to support this kind of wasteful, counter-productive, aggressive, megalomaniacal activity?

If these City of Chicago employees are indicative (and I think they are) of the attitude of city government toward entrepreneurship and toward the value of meaningless bureaucratic gestures that keep income out of the pockets of entrepreneurs and food out of the mouths of people, then I am truly ashamed and embarrassed to call this my home. It adds insult to injury that I pay such high taxes for the privilege of living in such a despotic city. Yes, I mean despotic; we Chicagoans know that there are many dimensions in which such a word is not hyperbole.

I also sympathize with the first commenter on Monica’s post:

And the Government still doesn’t think the Revolution is coming?

Left-right political model “obscures more than it reveals”

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Lynne Kiesling

I don’t really have an opinion about Tucker Carlson’s new online journalism enterprise The Daily Caller. I do, though, really like what Arianna Huffington said in her guest column there today about the uselessness of the left-right political model, and how the media do themselves and us a disservice by leaving on those left-right blinders:

… the binary division of the debate into right vs. left obscures more than it reveals.

John McCain and Maria Cantwell are joining forces to bring back Glass-Steagall-type banking regulations. Ron Paul and Alan Grayson are pushing through legislation to audit the Fed. George Will agrees with Russ Feingold that we should not escalate in Afghanistan. Howard Dean and Michael Bloomberg are both down on the health care bill. And on and on it goes.

The outrageous news last week that the New York Fed under Tim Geithner told AIG to withhold from the public key details about payments that put billions of dollars into the coffers of major Wall Street players, including Goldman Sachs, offers a perfect example of just how archaic the right vs. left framing is.

Many progressives, including me, have been very critical of the administration’s coddling of Wall Street.  Indeed, I called for Geithner’s resignation back in March.  But, as of late, the loudest calls for further investigation of the AIG bailout — and Geithner’s role in it — have come from Republican lawmakers including Rep. Darrell Issa (who blogged about it on HuffPost) and Sen. Charles Grassley.

Yet, afflicted with a kind of mental Tourette’s, the traditional media just can’t help shouting “Right!” or “Left!” any time a contentious issue arises.

Eternal truths about those who are attracted to politics

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Lynne Kiesling

Over the past week there’s been an interesting online conversation with the participants discussing one of the eternal tautological conundrums: why does politics attract power-hungry narcissists?

Matt Yglesias kicked it off with what I think is a pretty naive query about the degree of cynicism and immorality in politics. Such cynicism and immorality is neither new nor confined solely to republican democracies, but we certainly do seem to be swirling in it now, don’t we? And while I characterize as naive his asking about what I see as almost a tautology (power attracts those who like power and have a heightened sense of self importance), it is a valid and valuable question when probed more deeply, and as such has provoked interesting response and discussion.

For example, our erstwhile Free Exchange blogger states the problem as

I think that this dynamic can be easily oversold, but it’s definitely one of the main reasons we have the legislators we have; powerful positions attract people who are interested in getting and maintaining power.

Arnold Kling points out that

… the growth in concentrated political power in this country leads to a system that selects for leaders with exaggerated senses of self-importance and a remarkable lack of perspective on their own foibles (think of Elliot Spitzer or Mark Sanford or John Edwards). One of the problems with large-scale politics and large-scale capitalism is that there is this tendency to select the most overconfident, driven, and aggressive men for leadership positions.

While I think he’s correct to say “men”, that’s as a central tendency, not as a description of the whole politician population — we have our Nancy Pelosis and Barbara Boxers too. And, to be fair, Arnold is generalizing the point to encompass CEOs, not just politicians, which I think has some justification.

Ilya Somin at Volokh posits a selection-based hypothesis, which in part is a formal way of restating my tautological form above:

The key explanation is selection effects. A politician willing to do anything to take and hold on to power will have a crucial edge over an opponent who imperils his chances of getting elected in order to advance the public interest. The former type is likely to prevail over the latter far more often than not. This is especially true in a political environment where most voters are often ignorant and irrational about government and public policy. Candidates have strong incentives to pander to this ignorance and exploit it in order to win elections.

As Ilya notes in his post, the scenario here is one in which the short-term interests of a constituency and the long-term “public interest” are not aligned, but this long-term “public interest” is in keeping with the representative’s stated principles, and the cynicism of the craven politician induces him/her to vote according to the desires of his/her constituency instead of voting for the “public interest”. There are a lot of issues with this scenario — isn’t the representative doing what s/he was elected to do by voting the constituency’s interest? Is there really such a thing as a monolithic “public interest”? Even if s/he wants to “do good”, the only way to do so is longevity in office, so how do we untangle motives from tactics that are needed to satisfy those motives?

One reason this discussion caught my eye is that I have despaired about this eternal truth — political processes as attractors for power-hungry narcissists — for most of my intellectual life; in fact, it’s one of the first consciously small-l-liberal thoughts I can remember having as a child. If the other tautology is true — that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others — then is there a way to cultivate representatives who are not power-hungry narcissists? I continue to come up empty with respect to that question.

One might hope that public choice economics, by treating politicians as rational agents and analyzing political economy processes such as lobbying and rent-seeking, could yield some insights. But Will Wilkinson’s foray into this discussion is not particularly sanguine; in fact, he contends that by treating politicians as rational agents, public choice economics is too generous to politicians:

By insisting that politicians are motivated by considerations no different than businessmen or anybody else, public choice economists have helped slay the pernicious myth that politicians are generally warmly other-regarding public servants. But the economist’s assumption of motivational uniformity fails to capture that politicians do in fact seem to be really odd people who don’t seem to be primarily motivated by the same considerations that motivate most of us most of the time. The incentives of the political process create a kind of filter that selects for individuals extraordinarily fixated on power and status and extraordinarily motivated to keep it. If this is right (anyone know of personality studies of politicans?), then the problem with standard public choice is that it gives too much credit to politicians by assuming they’re like everyone else and therefore it fails to capture just how exceptionally prone politicians are to narcissism, motivated cognition, self-deception, and brazen lying.

I think Will’s got it about right, and that his remark starts us down the road of developing a behavioral public choice model of politician decision-making, kind of an analogue to Bryan Caplan’s behavioral public choice model of voter decision-making. Will’s insight is also consistent with Ilya’s selection effects hypothesis, and is succinctly summed up by one of the commenters on Ilya’s post:

The most conservative senator and the most liberal senator have more in common with each other than they have in common with either you or me.