Weekend Reading [Updated]

Ilya Somin at Volokh commenting on a recent article by Matt Yglesias, which complained that there should be less elected positions in State government and more appointed positions because it’s impossible to be an informed voter these days. In his words:

No real people are paying attention to what these different offices are, what the incumbents are doing, how they interact, who’s doing a good job, etc. Special interests who are able to hire professionals to monitor elected officials for them, by contrast, are able to make out like bandits.

I principally disagree for two reasons. First, the Internet makes it easier than ever before in world history to be an informed voter. I don’t buy the argument that it’s impossible to be an informed voter. To the extent a voter cares to be reasonably informed he/she can certainly inform him/herself as to the candidates and broad issues. With respect to Yglesias’ point that “[n]o real people are paying attention . . .” he may be correct. It does seem that the majority of citizens don’t pay enough attention, or simply don’t care, preferring to whine about the results of their apathy rather than cure it by taking an active interest in the institutions and people that govern them. Yglesias appears to prefer, as a matter of practicality, relieving the electorate of the political burden (voting) they clearly shirk by giving fewer elected candidates more authority to appoint more bureaucrats. My second objection is that if our collective apathy towards voting results in ineffective, corrupt, and grossly inefficient government then tough shit for us. Democracy (and civil liberty) is not without consequence. We suffer for our apathy. We should willingly bear those consequences, especially when we have at our fingertips the means to improve our democracy.

Ilya Somin makes a couple of different points:

I completely agree with Yglesias that most voters know little or nothing about these offices, and that this creates an opening for interest group influence. I have made similar arguments myself. The problem is exacerbated by the reality that for most voters, it is actually rational to devote little or no time to acquiring political information. It’s also rational for them to do a poor job of analyzing the political information they do know.

At the same time, I am skeptical of the solution that Yglesias implicitly seems to advocate: making these positions nonelected offices. If the Commissioner of the General Land Office becomes a bureaucratic position appointed by the governor, that doesn’t eliminate the problem of voter ignorance. It merely shifts it to a different election. Now, the question of who the governor is likely to choose as the next Commissioner is added to the long list of issues at stake in the gubernatorial election.

Next, Know Your Rights.  If you don’t think that’s important, I invite you to sit in on a criminal procedure class at my law school sometime and witness how federal courts have emasculated the Fourth Amendment.

[UPDATED 3/5/2010 @ 10:50 pm].  More here from Reason on the current administration’s frightening defenestration of civil liberty via the obliteration of the Fourth Amendment.

Re-read that last sentence again, and it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that any protestations on the Obama administration’s part that they have any respect for the 4th Amendment or privacy is utter bilge. I wrote on the government’s growing snooping powers in ye Moderne Age at theAmerican Conservative back in February.

Here’s a dated, but good read re: Paul Krugman.

Time after time, Krugman leaves me wide-eyed with wonder at how much economics he has to forget to write those [NY Times] columns.

Interview with an Austrian-school, Soviet economist who defected to the United States.

Yuri N. Maltsev received his MA in history and social sciences at Moscow State University and his PhD in economics at the Institute for Labor Research in Moscow. Some of his major achievements include consulting on Central and Eastern European economic, trade and political issues, as well as appearing on national television and radio programs. He currently is a professor of economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

What convinced you of the merits of the Austrian School of Economics over other schools of thought?
The Austrian School of Economics is economics of freedom, economics for free people, economics of human action, not of government design. It is the only school which accurately predicted the fate of the socialist experiment, which cost over 150 million lives last century. Ludwig von Mises showed with precise and irrefutable logic why socialism could never work.

Related: The confluence of classic liberalism and Austrian economics.

Classical liberalism — which we shall call here simply liberalism — is based on the conception of civil society as, by and large, self-regulating when its members are free to act within very wide bounds of their individual rights. Among these the right to private property, including freedom of contract and free disposition of one’s own labor, is given a very high priority. Historically, liberalism has manifested a hostility to state action, which, it insists, should be reduced to a minimum (Raico 1992, 1994).

Austrian economics is the name given to the school, or strand, of economic theory that began with Carl Menger (Kirzner 1987; Hayek 1968), and it has often been linked — both by adherents and opponents — to the liberal doctrine. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the connections that exist, or have been held to exist, between Austrian economics and liberalism.

Change Status Quo: KSM trial probably occurring in Gitmo. I guess that means the White House thinks terror is more akin to war than crime, Terrorists are more akin to war-actors than criminals, and military tribunals are a more appropriate forum than civil courts in which to try them. Where’d they get that idea? I wonder what Neal Katyal, current Deputy Solicitor General, thinks about it, having made his name by arguing (successfully) Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which held that the Bush administration’s first iteration of military commissions to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay violate both the UCMJ and the four Geneva Conventions. I’m interested to hear Katyal explain what substantive changes the Obama administration has made to the Tribunals and why those changes now satisfy the arguments Kaytal ably posed against the prior version of military tribunals. More here.

Interesting read here by Timothy Garton Ash, whom I linked to in On Armenia and Genocide, about the challenges facing the EU’s monetary policies. Excerpt below is the end of Ash’s article:

Behind the monetary lurks the fiscal; behind the fiscal, the economic; behind the economic, the political; and behind the political, the historical. The deepest reality underlying this crisis is that the personal experiences and memories that have pushed European integration ahead for 65 years, since 1945, are losing their force. The personal memory of war, occupation, humiliation, European barbarism; fear of Germany, including Germany’s fear of itself; the Soviet threat, the cold war, the “return to Europe” as a guarantee of hard-won freedom; the hope of restored European greatness.

These were massive biographical motivators, which drove people like Mitterrand and Kohl even unto the euro. Can Europeans go on building Europe without such profound motivators? Are there new ones in sight?

Yesterday’s Pentagon attacker was a left-wing truther. Here’s some reasons why non-left wing, non-truthers shouldn’t try to make political hay out of it.

So, instead of playing the blame game so unapologetically employed by the Left when they feel they can spin things to their political advantage, I’m not going to say that Bedell’s actions at the Pentagon epitomize the leftist worldview. Rather, he was just crazy, as clearly indicated by his belief in the craziest of modern crazy conspiracy theories, 9/11 Truthism.

Are most Truthers leftists? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that all left-leaning Americans are thereby just as crazy as the most extreme among them; it simply indicates that when a leftist goes crazy in the post-9/11 era, he often gloms onto Truthism as his paranoia of choice.

Put it this way: Leftism fails as a coherent philosophy on its own terms. We shouldn’t try to wring significance from the delusional outburst of someone who just happened to be leftist. There are plenty of ways to logically disembowel Marxism and its numerous noxious contemporary offspring without having to resort to an unnecessary round of political “gotcha!”

Did you know that Willie Nelson smoked weed on the roof of the white house? Plus this on Nelson, from Reason’s 35 Heroes of Freedom.

One of the great crossover artists in popular music, the Texas legend pulled off a Martin Luther King Jr.-like achievement by uniting hippies and rednecks in a single audience.

The most plausible Republican fix to the fiscal mess . . . I’m still in the tank for Gary Johnson.

Finally, Reason’s Peter Suderman on the ‘jobs created or saved’ canard:

In selling the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—otherwise known as the economic stimulus—to the American public last year, the Obama administration promised that the massive spending package would serve as a sort of Keynesian Red Bull, allowing the tired economy to keep partying hard by pumping up GDP and trapping unemployment in single digits. Or, as the administration put it in January 2009, the bill was to create or save three to four million jobs over the next two years, with over 90 percent of those jobs in the private sector.

Instead, the economy reacted like it just downed a glass of whiskey and warm milk: Private sector output fell sharply, and last fall, the unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent. * * *

That still leaves us with a question: How many jobs did the stimulus actually create? The best answer to that question is not 1 million or 2.1 million or any of the other figures that have been batted around in recent months by the administration and its defenders. It’s not even a figure at all; instead it’s another question: Who knows?

But don’t take my word for it; take the CBO’s. Unlike the administration, the CBO is a nonpartisan entity without a particular interest in strengthening its claims further than they should. All the numbers it produces are estimates, and the agency devotes plenty of ink to explaining its methodology and the uncertainties it entails. Last month’s report cautioned that “considerable uncertainty exists about many of these economic relationships that are important in the modeling,” which is why many of its estimates come in rather wide ranges. And its December report noted that “it is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.”

In other words, don’t blame the CBO, which is merely doing its lawful duty to produce compliant estimates (a fact which it dryly makes clear in the introduction). Instead, blame the administration, the government-spending enthusiasts, the liberal pundits, and anyone else who treats these pre-cooked estimates as settled fact.

Gary Johnson, Law, Socio-Political