Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

The votes are cast, the results are coming in. There’s not much more to do on the political front, other than wait for the final results. While I’m waiting for that to happen, a few remarks on a conversation that I recently saw too late to comment on.

The question was why is it so hard to get third party candidates on the ballot (e.g., libertarians, greens, etc.)? One person noted that even the Iraqis and Afghanis have more choices than we do in the U.S. where you have to decide between the Democratic and Republican parties.

I think that the major issue is structural. Iraq and Afghanistan are parliamentary systems. In a parliamentary system, people vote for a party. The party is given a number of seats in parliament based on the percentage of the vote they received in the election. Once the seats are assigned, the different parties have to create a majority coalition. This coalition then goes on to select the prime minister and govern the country.

In the U.S., we don’t have a parliamentary system. The constitution gives each state two senate seats and apportions the house seats every ten years based on the census population data. What the constitution does not stipulate is how the representatives or senators will be elected.

In most states, representatives and senators are elected by either majority or plurality of the vote. The result is that it is difficult for a third party to be elected. In a parliamentary system, all issues can have their own political party and still have a reasonable expectation of being represented in the government. In our system, we have to work out our coalition of issues in advance and all of these issues run as a party.

There is no, necessary, reason that all of the issues that are currently bundled under the Democratic or Republican parties need to be there. For example, Republicans currently comprise three main groups: religious voters, free market/big business supporters, and defense/nationalist voters. There is no natural reason that these constituencies need to be a part of the same party. Likewise, the Democratic party includes: environmentalists, social safety net supporters, women’s rights supporters, labor supporters, etc.

Arguably, there are segments of each party that have more affinity for each other than for the others in their own party. For example, you could imagine a religious, social safety net and environmental party. The key is that the party needs to have roughly have the electorate in order to be viable. A coalition that only has 30% of the vote will never be elected.

Reading the federalist papers and other early documents gives you the strong impression that the founders never imagined such collective parties. They primarily thought that people would vote for candidates and not for parties. However, political parties coalesced by the first real election between Adams and Jefferson. As far as I can tell, having two (and only two) viable parties a structural artifact of our political system.

Given a choice between our system and a parliamentary system, I would have to go with ours. We just have to deal with the fact that there will always only be two real choices. If you want to affect the choices, change the platform of the parties – but not too far or your party will be out of power.

as always, just a few thoughts, take ’em with a large grain of salt – preferably wrapped around a lime and taken with tequila.

I’ve never understood why the separation of church and state is still debated in this country. I have an even harder time understanding why people would try to undermine the separation of church and state, but as this article in the New York Times shows, they do.

Keeping religion out of politics and politics out of religion has a long history in this country. Our first amendment has a clause which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This clearly states that congress may not create a national religion. But, may congress write laws with respect to a religion? Can congress financially support or encourage a religion? Supporters of the separation of church and state say, “no,” while many religious advocates say “yes.”

The only way to really answer the question is to look at the debate surrounding the first amendment and its prohibition of laws repecting an establishment of religion. This clause in the first amendment was strongly supported by Thomas Jefferson, who considered it a flaw that the consititution did not include such a statement. He had strongly argued for such language in the constitution of Virginia (where it was adopted) and in the US consititution (where it was not initially). Inaddition to coining the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state,” his subsequent actions tell us that he was clearly against the support of religion by the government.

Jefferson, as president, refused to declare national days of prayer or thanksgiving regarding them as unconsititutional under the Bill of Rights. Moreover, he argued against the use of public funds to pay for divinity professors at state supported schools. He was strongly supportive of the right to the freedom of conscious and regarded monetary payments to one religion as a quasi-endorsement by the government which penalized other religions.

Beyond the founder’s intent, we can also look at the pragmatic benefits of keeping the church and the state apart. de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that he was amazed by the religious vitality in the US – far greater than what he observed in Europe in the 19th century. In conversations with a number of religious leaders, de Tocqueville was repeatedly told that the success of religion in the US was due to the separation of religion and government.

In Europe, most countries had established, national religions. As governments rose and fell, the established religions would change. Churches began to equate the survival of the state with their own survival and participated in attrocities that were not in accordance with their goal of caring for men’s souls. This resulted in the people becoming disillusioned with religious leaders and then disillusioned with religion itself. Such disillusionment resulted in the largely secular Europe we have today.

In contrast, the US pursued a model of keeping religion out of politics. In fact, de Tocqueville points out that many of the original 13 states had consitutions which barred religious leaders from holding public office. Separating the rights of concious from the laws of man inspired the people to maintain faith in their religions allowing religion to thrive.

Finally, de Tocqueville cautioned that as governments became more stable, religious leaders would forget the benefits of maintaining a distance from political power and would seek to establish special privileges for their churches. The New York Times article linked above shows exactly that trend. Where are the limits if we have laws and regulations that govern enterprise, but have exemptions carved out for religions engaged in such enterprises? We have obviously established some limits – after all, churches have to pay social security taxes for their employees. But why is the line drawn there? Why should a church have more benefits under the law than any other non-profit?

Could I establish the “Church of Christ the Consumer?” We could declare Walmarts and Targets to be holy sites for our communion and thereby earn tax exempt status for these businesses. That sounds far fetched, but given the role of churches in creating day cares, and other businesses, it is not entirely implausible.

Update: turns out I was somewhat wrong.  Churches don’t pay social security taxes for pastors (not certain about other employees), they are considered self-employed and have to pay the full amount themselves.  However, as this article discusses, pastors may opt out of social security entirely.  The problem being that when they retire in poverty, someone has to provide a social safety net for them and their former churches often seem to decline.

One last point brought up in today’s NY Times article is that any legal exemption for a church or other religious organization requires that the state make a determination of what is a valid religion (see my question about the Church of Christ  the Consumer).  Making this determination is an establishment of religion by the very fact that it has to identify criteria for recognizing an organization as a religion.

Brad DeLong discussing why we like diversity and identitity notes that in addition to prefering to discuss diversity because it is easier than tackling the hard problem of a lack of equality in opportunity, we like identity and diversity because they are inherently a good thing:

Now normally–in my usual mind–I am an enthusiastic supporter of what I take to be Walter Benn Michaels’s central point: that we have collectively gotten ourselves off balance because we are responding to the fact that celebrating diversity is easy and doing something about upward mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of economic and social inequality is hard.

When I am in my usual mind I grumble that the $400,000 a year that we at Berkeley are about to start spending on an Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity would be better spent hiring ten full-time outreach coordinators and on-campus tutors to make the idea of equality of opportunity less of a joke, and to make the population that does attend Berkeley a little bit more like the population that could benefit from attending Berkeley–if only things had broken right for them before they reached college age.

But I must be outside my usual mind. Because my reaction right now is that we love identity not just because we don’t like to think about economic and social class, but because loving identity is a genuinely good thing in a diverse world, especially for America and Americans if we are to become who we are.

I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but I think that it’s also important to note that we like diversity and identity because we’ve evolved as a tribal species. Before we developed civilization, we lived in family bands. We then developed from families to tribes to cities to states to nations. In a modern society, we have to work with people from a variety of nations, backgrounds, cultures, etc. However, not too deep down, just under the veneer of civilization, we are still very tribal. We still prefer to interact with people that are “like us.” I suspect that this is why we like to discuss identity and diversity.

As I read the newspaper this morning, I came across Charles Krauthammer’s latest piece on how Iran is in the crosshairs of a U.S. decision. In the opinion piece, he lays out the costs of action and the costs of inaction and concludes that the U.S. has less than a year to decide how to handle Iran.

Leave aside the callousness of someone whose costs do not include tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. The thing that struck me most is why do we let this man write a column at all?! He been wrong about everything he’s written in the past five years. He’s been wrong about how to fight terrorism, he’s been wrong about the war in Iraq. He hasn’t gotten a thing right in all the years I’ve seen him in the paper.

If I was that wrong and that incompetent in my own job, my boss would have fired me by now. I know I work at a university, but we have this little thing called accountability and people who are consistantly wrong or consistantly fail to do their jobs properly get fired. Why can’t someone fire Krauthammer?

All credible sources tell us that Iran is a decade away from a nuclear weapon – assuming that it is pursuing one. It also doesn’t have a missile that can reach outside of the local region. Finally, it has not been demonstrated that Iran is in violtation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty which allows for the peaceful use of nuclear technology.

Given all of this, does Krauthammer have any reason for thinking that Iran is a serious threat in the next year? Only that he’s a warmongering loon. But apparently, if you are a columnist, that’s okay. Unlike those of us who work for a living, there is no accountability.

Okay, I’m a bigger nerd than I thought.  The latest book that I’m dying to get when it comes out on Monday… “The State of Working America” from the Economic Policy Institute.  350+ pages of analysis on wages, health care, wealth and productivity in America.  How can you resist.

If that doesn’t sound appealing, at least read the executive summary.  It’s only 14 pages, it’s online, and it’s free.

An article today in the New York Times titled “Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity” takes a look at how wages have risen, or more to the point failed to rise, during the most recent economic expansion.  At a time when productivity (the monetary value of an hour of labor) has risen dramatically, increasing corporate profits, employee wages are basically falling.  If you include benefits such as health insurance, they are rising – but nowhere near as fast as productivity.

The most compelling paragraph in my opinion:

Average family income, adjusted for inflation, has continued to advance at a good clip, a fact Mr. Bush has cited when speaking about the economy. But these gains are a result mainly of increases at the top of the income spectrum that pull up the overall numbers. Even for workers at the 90th percentile of earners — making about $80,000 a year — inflation has outpaced their pay increases over the last three years, according to the Labor Department.

Think about it.  If the average wage is rising, but the wages for the bottom 90+% of workers are decreasing, then that top earners are doing quite well for themselves.  But even looking at the 90th percentile doesn’t fully explain what’s going on.  Wage increases are similarly skewed within the top 10% with the top 1% having dramatically higher wage increases than do the 90th to 99th percentiles.