Ben Carson? A Mixed Review

As one of the three Outsiders who have dominated up to 50% or more of GOP Presidential candidate polls, Carson comes from a different background and perspective. Let me point out that Carson is not exactly a pro-liberty candidate and lacks public sector executive experience. Nevertheless, I could see myself voting for him as a protest vote against Trump or the Democratic nominee, likely Clinton vs. Sanders.

I have several differences with Carson, including but not restricted to:

• the 2008 tsunami. I was listening to Sunday talk soup, when Carson started waxing enthusiasm over Glass-Steagall  and blaming 1990's deregulation for the crisis. There are several reasons for the tsunami, but the idea that the cause had to do with blurring the lines between (highly regulated) commercial and investment banking was not one of them. We can look at fiscal and monetary policies which materially exacerbated the housing bubble--that is, the government was the chief cause of the tsunami.
• minimum wage policy. I heard him argue for raising the minimum wage and indexing it. This is particularly misguided. Minimum wages hurt lower-skilled/inexperienced/younger workers by pricing them out of the labor market, and it's inconsistent with his otherwise declared intent to let the free market work.
• anti-trade policy. Carson attacks the trade imbalance and talks tariffs, i.e., trade wars. Trade wars are counterproductive lose-lose policies. Don Boudreaux and others point out that outgoing dollars often make their way back to the US economy in terms of investment shoring up the US economy.
• opposition to citizenship path for unauthorized aliens. Whereas his support for guest worker programs is a step in the right direction of understanding the real cause behind unauthorized entry, I don't like blaming aliens for working around restrictive, bad immigration policy. Ultimately people who work here and pay taxes should have a say on political policy.
• interventionist foreign policy. Carson has a somewhat more nuanced position than your typical neocon, because he didn't support going into Iraq but he is concerned about ISIS, the Taliban, etc.

Let's do a lightning round on the issues (my views follow with respect to Carson's position):

• unrestricted abortion: strongly opposes. AGREED. The preborn child has an unalienable right to live. However, this should not be a federal issue. Police powers reside with the states by the tenth amendment.
• compelling women/minority hiring: opposed. AGREED. This policy violates the rule of law. Constitutionally government must not enact or enforce discriminatory policy. The private sector, which operates by voluntary association, can handle related issues through the social context. Companies that do not treat employees or customers fairly earn a bad reputation
• State-defined gay marriage: opposed. AGREED. Carson is more worried about the unintended consequences of public policy intervening in the social context. I might point out this has traditionally been a state, not federal responsibility by the Tenth Amendment. I would prefer to hear him argue for privatization of marriage.
• God in the public sphere: supports. DISAGREE. I think if and when religion is co-opted by the State, religion loses its moral authority. However, I don't believe in unconstitutional censorship of religious speech in the public sector, and I'm opposed to the State policies that infringe on religious/moral freedom (e.g., the ObamaCare mandate, an obligation to service gay weddings, etc.) I think for the most part Carson and I agree. I have to wince on his demagoguery on the question of a Muslim Presidency. In my lifetime, JFK and Mitt Romney had to deal with religious discrimination in their Presidential runs. I would not have gone there.
• Expand ObamaCare: opposed. AGREED. Carson here has some nuances I don't agree with, including a concept of health insurance as regulated nonprofits, and he seems to endorse government-run catastrophic insurance, which I oppose on free market grounds.
• Privatize social security: opposed/transform. DISAGREE. Whereas adjusting retirement and/or converting it into a Ryan-like supplemental program are serious, long-overdue reforms, they are a poor substitute to ending an unsustainable morally hazardous policy. I recognize, of course, that there are expectations based on lifetimes of paying into the system and there would need to be some sort of transition period, but ultimately young people need to be vested in their own retirement dollars.
• Vouchers for school choice: strongly supports. DISAGREE. I believe we both have a problem with federal meddling with traditional local/state responsibilities. I agree with promoting school choice, but I see privatization as a more comprehensive approach without subsidizing consumer decisions; I see charity playing as more of a role in need supplementation. Obviously, on the local front, I believe that parents should have more control over the expenditure of their own school tax dollars.
• EPA regulations are too restrictive: opposes. DISAGREE. I would eliminate the EPA; in a liberalized system, polluters, etc., would be sued for relevant damages, plus transparency on the causes of pollution would be damaging to the reputation of those businesses.
• Stricter punishment reduces crime: opposes. AGREE.  Mandatory/three-strikes policies result in unjust consequences and can be counterproductive. We need to distinguish between violent and other types of crime; we already have one of the most incarcerated nations on earth.
• Absolute right to gun ownership: supports. AGREE. Everybody has a natural right to self-defense,
• Higher taxes on the wealthy: strongly opposes. AGREE. Carson favors low, flat taxation rates, opposes redistributive programs. I would like to hear him talk about more of a balance between income (counterproductive) and consumption.
• Pathway to citizenship for unauthorized aliens: opposes. DISAGREE. See above.
• Support and expand free trade: strongly opposes. DISAGREE. I would argue we are talking more managed trade than free trade, but I see it as a step in the right direction. See above.
• Supports American exceptionalism: supports. AGREE. My position is somewhat nuanced: I am opposed to multilateral authoritarianism,  but I disagree with the idea of being the world's policeman and imposing our values on others.
• Expand the military: supports. DISAGREE. We outspend something like the next 10 nations put together. I think we need a more streamlined, less interventionist agenda. I do support modernizing the military, but I'm wary of the military-industrial complex.
• Easier voter registration: opposes. AGREE. It's often easier to vote or register than to cash a check at the bank (e.g., it's often just a check mark when you process paperwork at the DMV, which I've done during two recent moves); this raises a serious issue of voter fraud, which Democrats, typically the beneficiary of these effort, deny, despite overwhelming evidence. No one is talking about denying a citizen of the right to vote.
• Avoid foreign entanglements: oppose/nuanced. DISAGREE. He does talk about energy independence as a preventive measure on war making; this seems to buy into the polemical leftist talking point that wars are over oil. He does talk about opposing going into Iraq, but he has fewer qualms taking on ISIS. I am far more skeptical about military adventures, particularly half a world away.
• Prioritize green energy: oppose. AGREE. The market should decide winners and losers, not the State. I'm particularly concerned about crony capitalists profiting from politicized special interest environmentalism.
• Marijuana is a gateway drug: oppose. AGREE. I personally think marijuana use is a mistake, particularly with the still developing brains of children and young adults, but I haven't seen compelling evidence of a causal link between the use of marijuana and harder drugs. As someone who has never smoked or used recreational drugs (and I took almost no prescribed pain pills after an outpatient procedure over 6 years back) and have hardly purchased any alcoholic beverages for years (I did buy a beer at a farewell dinner for a business colleague earlier this year) [I'm not a teetotaler, but I might limit myself to a beer or glass of wine on social occasions or visit home: I have liked an occasional shot of Harvey's Bristol Cream, which I was introduced to when I went caroling back in my UH grad school years]), I don't believe in counterproductive prohibition public policy, of prosecuting victimless crimes. Technically, Carson has a more nuanced position; he is more accepting of medicinal marijuana, and I don't think I've heard him make more of a Tenth Amendment argument as to regulation of marijuana.
• Stimulus vs. market-led recovery; strongly oppose. AGREE. The idea that politically motivated spending is somehow intrinsically virtuous is self-serving hubris.

I would have selected other items in a list of 20 questions to differentiate candidates, e.g., devolvement of domestic programs and regulatory authority to the states; business/territorial taxation; the second Federal Reserve (full employment) mandate; privatization of various government services (e.g., federal insurance, the USPS, mortgages and student loans, etc.); electoral reforms (non contiguous legislative terms, single-term President, recall of legislators and the President, 20-year caps on federal employment, including judges); structural budget reforms, requiring a balanced budget and explicit reserves for currently unfunded liabilities; privacy and other individual rights, etc.

Ben Carlson, as one of the top two rivals for the GOP nomination, has been getting increasingly involved in news kerfuffles, e.g., Muslim Presidents, pyramids, a violent streak as a kid, the retake of a psychology class final, and the claim he turned down a scholarship to West Point. (I've commented elsewhere on the last story and concluded it was an innocuous oversimplification; he was led to believe that he stood a good chance of being appointed to West Point, but he never applied for nomination because the military commitment would put his med school dream on hold.)  For me, more troubling were the no-Muslim-President kerfuffle, which is not a valid constitutional consideration for the Office and blatantly prejudicial in my point of view, and the discussion of drone military strikes defending the southern border. I don't have an issue with the Border Patrol using drones for surveillance purposes, to facilitate effective deployment of agents on the ground, etc., but given Posse Comitatus Act restrictions on domestic operations by the military (police power is maintained by the states (Tenth Amendment)), it's jarring to hear Carson talk, short of a foreign invasion, discuss drone strikes in the US (in particular, the unthinkable idea of collateral damage including American civilian casualties). (For a good understanding of Posse Comitatus constraints, consider the role of the National Guard in assisting border security.) I have been a persistent critic of Obama's illegal expanding drone wars, and Rand Paul filibustered a few years back trying to get answers to US drone activities in the US. I'm not sure why Carson would even go there, unless he wanted to show he is as tough as Trump is on unauthorized immigrants in a populist appeal.

The source for the lightning round questions classifies Carson as a libertarian-conservative. As a libertarian-conservative, I don't think so. I see him as more  a populist conservative with some notable exceptions to orthodoxy, e.g., the minimum wage, tariffs, Glass-Steagall, etc. On the other hand, he is highly intelligent and has an unflappable nature. Trump has accused Carson of being too "low energy"; as Jeffrey Tucker recently said, if we have to have a President, it would be better having a low energy one: primum non nocere. I would feel more comfortable with his having more executive experience and policy expertise. Rand Paul is still my first choice, but of the 3 outsiders, he's the best choice and infinitely better than any of the Democrats.

Miscellany: 6/07/14

Quote of the Day

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more.
Kin Hubbard

Did Obama Reach an All-Time High of Employment With This Month's Figures?

From Reason:

All in all, more Americans went to work in May than ever before. An additional 217,000 payroll jobs pushes U.S. employment to 138.5 million—a record high. The Washington Examiner 's Joseph Lawler cautions.
The U.S. remains 7.1 million short of the number of jobs it would have if employment kept up with population growth, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute's analysis. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's more conservative estimate places that number at 5.5-6 million.
Interestingly, the new BLS job numbers are at odds with labor statistics reported Wednesday by payroll company Automatic Data Processing (ADP). ADP publishes a monthly jobs snapshot based on actual transactional payroll data.According to ADP's figures, the private sector added only 179,000 jobs in May. 

The column goes on to point out that BLS has layers of estimates whereas ADP tends to provide a more comprehensive snapshot, the implication being that we are likely to see the official numbers adjust downward over the weeks to come.

So the question is: does Obama deserve credit? First of all, let's point out that the declining official unemployment has more to do with frustrated jobless workers leaving the official labor force pool, and we still have near-decades low labor force participation rate. I see struggling households, Food Stamp Nation, pockets of sky-high unemployment particularly with some urban minority-group classes, a housing market which has shifted into a landlord's market, despite historically low mortgage rates, income levels barely keeping up with cost of living increases in food and energy... Despite unprecedented Fed Reserve intervention, many people are still underwater on their mortgages, and many middle-age couples find themselves drifting close to retirement with virtually no retirement savings, dependent on grossly underfunded social security and Medicare programs, which if run as much by the private sector, would have long ago been shut down as illegal, fraudulent Ponzi schemes.

I think the rub is in the details; I can only speak for myself, but I have found my own professional opportunities have been very limited under the Bush/Obama economic policies of easy credit, no budget discipline, uncompetitive business tax rates, mounting, costly, unsustainable regulatory regimes (particularly environmental, financial and healthcare), interventionist policies (e.g., stimulus and TARP) and morally hazardous domestic social welfare policies. I have had to move to find professional opportunities twice over the past decade (at my own expense), for lower-paid positions. I would like to see more longitudinal data about the nature of jobs (e.g., people settling for lower-paid opportunites simply because they have to pay their living expenses); I know of at least one household that had to give up their upper middle-class home for a small apartment: the breadwinner, who had been in middle-management, tried to start an Internet business (it didn't go into debt but failed to yield adequate income) and eventually settled for a part-time hourly job.

No, if the past 5.5 years prove anything, it's the fact that the resiliency of the US economy can withstand even a hopelessly economic illiterate, incompetent President ideologically fixated on a self-defeating Politics of Envy, environmental special-interest attacks on our natural resource sector, and a tax-regulatory regimen that impedes innovarion and capital formation.

What would a Guillemette Administration do?

• I would implement unilateral free trade and open borders
• I would radically flatten the tax code and eliminate special-interest exceptions, deductions, credits, and subsidies, shifting to a more economically-efficient tax system, e.g., supplier/consumption layered VAT, which favors savings and investment and is less vulnerable to accounting gimmicks
• I would shift domestic programs to the states in accordance with the principle of Subsidiarity
• I would shift healthcare policy towards reinsuring catastrophic coverage, including decentralization of any government programs to the state/local level, with the ultimate goal of privatization
• I would shift the social security/Medicare systems into more of a means-tested poverty supplemental assistance program with an emphasis on reinforcing traditional familial support mechanisms; transition to privitization of retirement planning
• I would ban public union activity, reform pensions into means-tested, capped supplemental income programs and transition into privatized 401K type arrangements, and radically streamline, flatten and/or outsource government agencies 
• I would radically downsize/reform our military and foreign policy to eliminate morally hazardous obligations and promote regional stability
• I would streamline, downsize and decentralize the regulatory regime with a bias towards economic liberalization, sunsetting the regulatory/anti-competitive burden
• I would end the Fed, deposit insurance, etc., outlaw activist monetary policy and restore an asset-based currency
• I would demand an end to the war on victimless crimes and engage in federal sentencing reforms.
• I would require Constitutional reforms to pay down government debt, limit tax authority and constrain spending to a percentage of GDP, demand accounting reforms to reflect a measure of unfunded liabilities, require a super-majority vote to approve a material federal deficit or engage in sustained military operations not involving a direct, unprovoked military attack and explicit Congressional approval of any interim, undeclared military activities, and term limits for any public service employment, for any of the 3 branches of government, including single terms for President, and the ability of citizens to recall any elected or confirmed official after 2 years and/or to recall federal legislation. I also want to see explicit Constitutional protections for economic liberty and privacy along with reforms against eminent domain or asset forfeiture abuse, to eliminate anti-competitive/mercantilistic federal/state regulations impeding interstate competition or business formation.

Have I been specific enough? I don't pretend that this list is exhaustive but constitutes which I consider a good starting point.

What You Won't Hear in Harry Reid's Unethical Attacks on the Koch Brothers

This interview, among other things, points out that there are 4 brothers, not just Charles and David, and the current business conglomerate of Koch Industries was not an inherited empire but relentlessly expanded in its own right by talented sibling businessmen. The Mother Jones' (left-wing) author points out that the Koch brothers, far from being crony capitalists, strenuously oppose government subsidies, including corporate welfare, in principle, and far from being socially conservative warhawks often associated with the GOP, actually favor "gay marriage" and are anti-war; they were libertarian long before Ron Paul's 2008 and 2012 Presidential campaigns caught fire with young voters.



The Movies Meet the Tragedy of the Commons



How Do Fed Money Printers Fool Entrepreneurs?



Facebook Corner

(Cato Institute). Jefferson’s words point to a fundamental truth, which has been demonstrated in Afghanistan, says Prof. Steve Hanke: http://bit.ly/1usZdpu
The Afghan war was just in that the goal was to destroy Al Queda. However, it's clear that the U.S. cannot do nation-building in Muslim areas. Therefore, we simply have to strike terrorist bases, anywhere, at random times to keep them off balance, and not worry about the idiotic foreign governments.
No. Al Qaeda was a stateless group that operated across the region, and we have no moral authority to attack another country without a declaration of war. As far as Afghanistan, the Taliban were not responsible for the 9/11 attacks; moreover, the Northern Alliance swept the Taliban out of power and the remnants of Al Qaeda were on the run--there was no rationale for our occupying the country.

(Cato Institute). "In 2013 just 9,244 workers out of a civilian federal workforce of 1.87 million were fired for poor performance or misconduct,...That is a rate of just 0.49 percent, or 1 in 200 a year."
 From a 2011 USA Today article:

"The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn't lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce." [Note: 3 times more likely to die than to be fired...]

"Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance, says John Palguta"

"San Francisco State University management professor John Sullivan, an expert on employee turnover, says the low departure rates show a failure to release poor performers and those with obsolete skills. "Rather than indicating something positive, rates below 1% in the firing and layoff components would indicate a serious management problem," he says."

(Cato Institute). "Washington DC has proposed an anti-auto transportation plan that is ironically called 'MoveDC' when its real goal is to reduce the mobility of DC residents."
Heaven forbid that spontaneous order, congestion-based tolling, or worker flextime and telecommunication policies should preempt a centrally planned solution in search of a poorly defined problem. Let me guess their projected cost will quadruple over current projections...

(Drudge Report). FEDS SHIP HUNDREDS MORE ILLEGALS TO AZ
The story doesn't point out that around 2000 children are also being housed at military facilities in Texas and California; hundreds are also living with sponsors or relatives. We need to address the core issues, including a dysfunctional War on Drugs exacerbating violence in the region, a family reunification immigration policy and liberalized trade throughout Central America. In the meanwhile, we need to approach a humanitarian crisis in a manner that reflects the best of the American character and the compassion and understanding of our fellow citizens.
(in response to a naturalized citizen whom points out he was once an illegal but now a productive member of American society) But unlike you the majority of illegals stay illegal, live in poverty and as most are Catholic, they refrain from using birth control (fir themselves or their dogs)and tend have more kids than they can afford to feed, which means we, the tax paying public , end up paying for them... We won't even get into the identity theft issue
Oh my God, this reply is so anti-Catholic and bigoted that someone from the Know Nothing Party could have written it. Shameful! "The minors flooding over the border are often teenagers leaving behind poverty or violence in Mexico and other parts of Central America such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They are sometimes seeking to reunite with a parent who is already in the United States, also without documentation. " What we need is a federal policy that addresses the core problems, not the symptoms. This is a humanitarian problem which tests the character of our country and fellow citizens. And quite frankly, I wish we would deport most of the people writing on this topic and keep the kids instead.

The Finale (For Now) of the Proposal Series

I'm sure there are proposals I haven't seen (e.g., military), but I'm finding that Youtube-recommended videos are repeats of videos I've already presented. I've been quietly reinforcing my support of the traditional institutions of marriage and family, which have recently been challenged by Statist politically correct interventions against state/local community standards. I have a more nuanced, authentic libertarian approach to issues like "gay marriage"; I believe in "live and let live" gay communities, their right to celebrate their own customs, religions and institutions; I think documented personal associations, inheritances, etc. should be respected by hospitals, etc as a reflection of individual rights. However, I do not agree with State intervention on behalf of politically favored special interest groups against the norms of the greater community.



This has to be the most traumatic proposal ever....






Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Townhall

Musical Interlude: My iPod Shuffle Series

The Four Tops, "Indestructible"