Newspapers and agenda setting
25 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, economics, economics of media and culture, Public Choice Tags: media bias
@AntonyGreenABC priceless tweets on Australian upper house quotas
21 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, economics, politics - Australia Tags: bicameralism, proportional representation, Upper Houses
Left-wing governments are rare in Australia
21 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, economic history, politics - Australia, Public Choice Tags: Australian Labour Party, Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, left-wing governments, Paul Keating, Social Democrats
There have been one left-wing government in Australia since 1949. That was the Whitlam government elected between 1972 to 1975.
The Australian Labour Party defeated a tired and smelly Liberal National party government that had held office for 23 years. There was no landslide when it was time to throw out a 23 year government.
Gough Whitlam managed to beat dopey old Billy McMahon on a small swing and win a majority of 9 seats in 1972. That was later reduced to 7 in the 1974 election.
Hawke, Keating, Rudd and Gillard Labour governments were all social democratic governments. They were not left-wing governments.
@BernieSanders defence of #Castro did not help spread democracy
14 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, economic history, Marxist economics, politics - USA
An Economic Approach to School Integration: Public Choice with Tie-ins
12 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, constitutional political economy, discrimination, economics of education, economics of media and culture, rentseeking
Thomas Borcherding “An Economic Approach to School Integration: Public Choice with Tie-ins.” Public Choice, 1977, argues that a reason for racial or ethnic discrimination in the public sector is politics encourages the coercive transfer of income from the racial, religious or ethnic group to those with more political influence.
Race can be used as a means of organizing coalitions to lobby for fiscal and economic discrimination in favour of even a previously unprejudiced group.
Preferences of each group to locate in a common geography and the severe control over entry or exit from the group that such things as skin colour, language, caste, and religious dogma impose make the organization of racial or ethnic coalitions by political entrepreneurs fairly cheap and minimises free riding and defection.
Prejudice may reinforce the solidarity of each group and help to monitor via custom, mores, and folkways the behavior of those that would attempt to bring persons of other groups into the former coalition. Further, prejudice may also serve as a device to rationalize exploitation of another group by fiscal or other means.
Borcherding argues that integration, racial balancing, quotas, and busing of school children take on a new logic when income transfers can be tied to fairly immutable characteristics such as race.
Mixing of children by race reduces the ability of a white dominated school board to differentially favour its own partisans’ children and to discriminate against those of blacks.
This paper anticipated Becker’s point that the competition among pressure groups for political influence for looks for lower cost ways of redistributing wealth so as to as much as possible limits the largess as much as possible to the pressure groups that lobby for it and their allies.
Solution aversion and the anti-science Left
11 Mar 2016 1 Comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economics of regulation, energy economics, environmental economics, global warming, health economics, law and economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice Tags: antiscience left, climate alarmism, geo-engineering, GMOs, growth of knowledge, gun control, motivated reasoning, nuclear power, political persuasion, solar power, solution aversion, wind power
Climate science is the latest manifestation of solution aversion: denying a problem because it has a costly solution. The Right does this on climate science, the Left does it on gun control, GMOs, and plenty more. Cass Sunstein explains:
It is often said that people who don’t want to solve the problem of climate change reject the underlying science, and hence don’t think there’s any problem to solve.
But consider a different possibility: Because they reject the proposed solution, they dismiss the science. If this is right, our whole picture of the politics of climate change is off.
Some psychologists wasted grant money on lab experiments to show that people that think the solution to a problem is costly tend to rubbish every aspect of the argument. Any politician will tell you you do not concede anything. Sunstein again:
Campbell and Kay asked the participants whether they agreed with the IPCC. And in both, about 80 percent of Democrats did agree; the policy solutions made no difference.
Republicans, in contrast, were far more likely to agree with the IPCC when the proposed solution didn’t involve regulatory restrictions…
Here, then, is powerful evidence that many people (of course not all) who purport to be skeptical about climate science are motivated by their hostility to costly regulation.
The Left is equally prone to motivated readings. For example, it was found that those on the left are much more concerned about home invasions when gun control can reduce them rather than increase them.
The Left picks and chooses which scientific consensus as it accepts. The overwhelming consensus among researchers is biotech crops are safe for humans and the environment. This is a conclusion that is rejected by the very environmentalist organisations that loudly insist on the policy relevance of the scientific consensus on global warming.
Previously the precautionary principle was used to introduce doubt when there was no doubt. But when climate science turned in their favour, environmentalists wanted public policy to be based on the latest science.
The Right is welcoming of the science of nuclear energy or geo-engineering. The Left rejects it point-blank. Their refusal to consider nuclear energy as a solution to global warming is a classic example of solution aversion. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
#TPPA CTU @FairnessNZ appeals to secretive @ILO committee to challenge NZ sovereignty over employment law
09 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, international economic law, International law, law and economics, unions Tags: Left-wing hypocrisy, union power
The unions are very much against investor state dispute settlement provisions of trade agreements, but are happy to be serial complainants to secretive International Labour Organisation (ILO) committees about employment law amendments they do not like. A fair defeat in the floor of parliament was not good enough for them.
As far back as 1993 the Council of Trade Unions has complained to secretive ILO committees about labour market deregulation in New Zealand. These secretive committees are formed under ILO conventions in New Zealand signed decades go.
The competence of these ILO committees are clearly in question if they hear an appeal under a convention New Zealand has not ratified. Imagine the outrage if an investor state dispute settlement panel heard on appeal despite New Zealand having a carve-out for the topic concerned. An example would be tobacco regulation.
Justice Scalia has a fine critique of those who believe in activist judges and living constitutions that applies just as well as to activist international adjudicators and living international treaties:
You think there ought to be a right to abortion? No problem. The Constitution says nothing about it. Create it the way most rights are created in a democratic society. Pass a law. And that law, unlike a Constitutional right to abortion created by a court can compromise. It can…I was going to say it can split the baby! …A Constitution is not meant to facilitate change. It is meant to impede change, to make it difficult to change.
Rather than use normal democratic means – trying to persuade each other and elections – the union movement threatened to go to a secretive ILO committee made up of members of uncertain competence and impartiality over the recent laws on collective bargaining.
The union movement was outraged at the fact that New Zealand laws it likes could be questioned at international forums. It said this in a recent submission to the Health Select Committee of Parliament.
The unions were equally outraged about dispute settlement procedures in the recent free trade agreement with Korea. The unions were absolutely affronted at the idea that the sovereignty of the New Zealand Parliament could be challenged at a foreign forum.
Source: Submission of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Select Committee on the Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea, Wellington 24 April 2015.
These protestations of the union movement would have much more credibility if union did not run off to a UN or ILO committee every time they were on the losing side of a vote in parliament. The unions are happy with those parts of international economic law that serve its interests but behave hypocritical about the other parts that do not. As United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said
The virtue of a democratic system [with a constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so and to change their laws accordingly.
Nothing stirs up the impassioned (and most other people as well) more than depriving them of their right to support or oppose what is important to them through political campaigns and at an election.
The losing side, and we all end up on the losing side at one time or another, are much more likely to accept an outcome if they had their say and simply lost the vote at the election or in Parliament. Power to the people as long as I am on the winning side instead is the motto of the union movement.
The unions losing on labour market deregulation is no different from any other political difference within New Zealand. Both sides passionately but respectfully attempt to persuade their fellow citizens to accept their views.
Win or lose, advocates for today’s losing causes can continued pressing their cases, secure in the knowledge that an electoral loss today can be negated by a later electoral win, which is democracy in action as Justice Kennedy explained recently in the US context:
…a democracy has the capacity—and the duty—to learn from its past mistakes; to discover and confront persisting biases; and by respectful, rationale deliberation to rise above those flaws and injustices…
It is demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this sensitivity on decent and rational grounds.
The process of public discourse and political debate should not be foreclosed even if there is a risk that during a public campaign there will be those, on both sides, who seek to use racial division and discord to their own political advantage.
An informed public can, and must, rise above this. The idea of democracy is that it can, and must, mature. Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to determine how best to form a consensus to shape the destiny of the Nation and its people. These First Amendment dynamics would be disserved if this Court were to say that the question here at issue is beyond the capacity of the voters to debate and then to determine.
How Michael Bloomberg thought he would go against Sanders, Trump and Clinton
08 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, politics - USA
Directors’ Law vindicated again – the American middle class think there are undervalued
06 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
Why did communism fall in the USSR?
05 Mar 2016 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, Public Choice, rentseeking
I find many explanations of the fall of the USSR disappointing because many want to believe in people power and popular rebellions.
The rise and fall of mercantilism view of the USSR put forward by Pete Boettke will be the foundation of better explanations. By analysing communism as a rent-seeking society, the process of social and political evolution can be embedded into the history of the rise and fall of mercantilism.
More freedom in Russia and China came as an unintended by-product of a constitutional struggle over who would control the rules under which the economy prospered (or failed to prosper) and the sharing within the elite.
After the death of Stalin, the Soviet Nomenklatura used both co-option and political repression to encourage loyalty to the communist regime. As Grossman noted:
Under Stalin’s leadership the nomenklatura, after initially emphasizing a strategy of co-option, then experimented with political repression as a substitute for co-option, and finally, in response to the threats posed by German militarism and the onset of the Cold War, employed a combination of intense political repression and co-option. As a result, membership in the CPSU increased rapidly, then decreased sharply, before increasing rapidly again. After Stalin was gone the nomenklatura, having learned the cost of Stalin’s repressive excesses, adopted a policy that combined more co-option with less intense political repression. As a result, membership in the CPSU increased steadily, then levelled off, until the rapprochement between the United States and China, the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism, and the escalation of the cold war arms race resulted in yet more co-option and in the final episode of growth in party membership.
More and more of the general public in Russia and China were co-opted into the winning circle through peacefully adaptations when threats of revolution were minimal.
The cost of co-opting people into the Communist Party was a decrease in the standard of living of members of the Nomenklatura, whereas the cost of political repression was the danger that members of the Nomenklatura would themselves be victimized.
These successive minor reforms were mutual beneficial constitutional exchanges as suggested by Roger Congleton’s brilliant recent book on his king-and-council template and in Herschel Grossman’s earlier paper on co-option in the communist party from 1953 to 1989.
The USSR broke apart as the result of an internal power struggle within a new generation of leaders who grew up in a climate of corruption and high living.
Perestroika and glasnost should be viewed as nothing much more than the usual system reforms and rotations of patronage that were launched after the appointment of all previous Soviet leaders. As Anderson and Boettke explain
…upon closer examination, the succession of Gorbachev in general and the perestroika/glasnost “reform” program in particular bear a close resemblance to other, earlier Soviet government policy adjustments which followed shifts in the top leadership. Gorbachev’s behaviour as a “reformer” over the period 1985 to 1989 can be explained by reference to the incentives facing the dictator of a socialist state based on the distribution of economic privilege and political patronage… Gorbachev’s period of “reform” was not an extraordinary example of the role of ideology or vision in human affairs, but a more routine episode of rent-seeking in action.
Political and economic power was devolved to the 15 republics in the old USSR because this is the only way to operate a mercantilist state.
These local leaders formed their own alliances and declared succession from the USSR when the centre was too weak to fight. Local military units defected with them to a new rent-seeking coalition.
The fall of soviet communism led to a drawn out struggle for access to patronage and state monopolies and a new and better paid manifestation of the old mercantilism but ex-KGB owned and run under Putin.
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