David D. Friedman's Blog, page 15

Obama and Catholic Voters

Just for a change from talking about my books ...  .
A recent story in the Wall Street Journal argues that Obama has made a catastrophic blunder, one likely to cost him the election, by requiring organizations run by the Catholic Church to provide their employees with health insurance that covers the cost of contraception. It's an interesting claim, and I wonder if it is true.
On the one hand, I suspect that many, probably a majority, of American Catholics do not  accept the church's position on contraception—are, for one thing, willing to use it themselves. One might expect them to accept the requirement, perhaps to approve of it. That might be what Obama is counting on.
On the other hand ...  . Human beings have a very strong aversion to being pushed around. I can easily imagine a Catholic who would be delighted if the church dropped its opposition to contraception, who is entirely willing to use contraception, but who is badly offended by having the U.S. government compel the church to pay for services that violate church doctrine.
One interesting thing about this question is that it will probably get answered. After the election, exit polls will provide fairly accurate information on how many Catholic voters supported Obama. If he does considerably worse with them than with voters in general, relative to his past performance, that will be reasonably good evidence that the Journal is right. If not, evidence that it was wrong.

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"Most of us never owned slaves and never expect to,
It takes money to buy a slave and we're most of us poor,
But we won't lie down and let the North walk over us
About slaves or anything else."

(from John Brown's Body, Steven Vincent Benét's book length poem on the Civil War)

No Plot Survives

contact with the characters.
That is one of the conclusions I reached from writing two novels. When I started writing Harald, I already had a complete outline, created in the process of telling the story to my daughter while putting her to bed. I had discovered in the past that she remembered my stories better than I did, which could lead to problems, as in "But Daddy, that magical device they got in the story you told me three months ago will get them out of this situation with no trouble at all." So this time, every evening after I finished telling her a chunk of the story, I went to my computer and outlined it.
Spoiler Alert for Harald























Despite which, someone who was only a minor character in the original version turned into a major character in the written version. Anne was originally the King's mistress who Harald used to feed his view of what was going on to the social set around the King, in order to put pressure on him. He did it by telling the story of how a lady of the Order had saved his life at considerable risk to her own in his first battle—and only revealing at the end that the lady was Leonora, now the lady commander of the Order, who the king had treacherously taken prisoner as part of his plan to take control of the Order. 
By the time the book was written, Anne had become the noblewoman the King was courting and a major influence in the plot. 
It may have occurred to some readers that the King was pretty stupid to fall into Harald's trap and end up his prisoner. The reason was not only that Harald was a much better general than the King. What I never explained but tried to hint at was that, at that point, the King did not much care whether he won or lost, lived or died. As he saw it, he was responsible, through treachery, for the death of a woman who had played a large part in defending his kingdom from its enemies for the past twenty years. The woman he was in love with had made it obvious that she thought he had behaved outrageously and was refusing to marry him. He was hoping that somehow, if he could capture Harald without killing him, he could put things back together, but it did not look likely.
Some of which was supposed to be signaled, for sufficiently perceptive readers, by:

The King sent a boy running for his captain. With luck, this time, …
And either way, at least it would be over.

 Which is why, when he is captured, the King's emotional state is nearer relief than despair. He no longer has to make any decisions.
What is supposed to finally signal what was going on between the King and Anne is a scene a little later, after the King has recognized his error and made his peace with Harald and Leonora, fortunately not dead after all. He encounters Anne:

Anne spoke, surprise in her voice: "You are at peace with Harald?" "With Harald and with the Lady Commander. In their debt. You were right; I was wrong." She spoke gravely. "Then if your question has not changed, my answer has." It was some time before they again noticed the two Ladies.

 Later still, in her escape from the Imperial army, Anne demonstrates a very Harald-like level of ingenuity. 
All of which explains why I think of her as my stealth heroine.
Salamander was not outlined in advance, and the changes from my original plan were much more drastic. As originally conceived, there were three major characters, who I thought of as the good good mage (Durilil), the good bad mage (Coelus), and the bad bad mage (Maridon). The good bad mage invented the cascade for good reasons, not seeing its potential for misuse. The bad bad mage encouraged him, with the intention of taking control of it. The good good mage opposed both of them. The final scene, after the bad bad mage had been killed, was supposed to be a confrontation between the good bad mage, with the power of the Cascade, and the good good mage, with the power of the Salamander. The Salamander gave unlimited power but of a narrow sort; the good bad mage did not realize what he was facing and so kept trying to force his way through the magic of the opposing mage, and when he had completely exhausted his very large but not unlimited power the good good mage took over, reduced him back to a youth, eliminated his memory of everything since he had been young, and adopted him as his apprentice.
Which was an interesting idea, if a bit melodramatic, but not even close to how the plot actually turned out. 
Spoiler Alert for Salamander






















By the time I was done, the good good mage had been converted to a secondary character and his place as protagonist taken by his daughter, whose existence had been only a possibility when I started. The good bad mage had seen the error of his ways part way through the book and allied with the daughter, the bad bad mage had gotten burned up, and the remaining conflicts were with people of whose existence I had been entirely ignorant when I started.
Somewhere along the way, not one but two very different love stories managed to sneak in. One was between two highly intelligent intellectuals with limited social skills, one of whom manages to not notice that he is in love for a surprisingly long time, and the other between two sophisticated and socially adept aristocrats, fencing with each other all the way to their eventual engagement.

The Map from Salamander

The map of the College is now up. Not nearly as nice as the map for Harald, which was done for me by a generous professional, but at least it shows where everything is.

Salamander and Central Planning

The central planning fallacy is the plausible, but mistaken, idea that if only all the resources of a society were under the control of some sensible person, wonderful things could be done. It is mistaken for at least three reasons:
1. All those resources are already being used by their owners for their purposes. There is no obvious reason to think that shifting them to the planner's purposes would be an improvement, and some reason to suspect the opposite.
2. Figuring out how to best use the resources of a society is a much harder problem than it seems at first glance—perhaps an insoluble problem. This was the point of the winning side of the calculation controversy, the early 20th century dispute between socialist and anti-socialist economists.
3. Once the mechanisms for central control of resources are set up, there is no reason to believe that the people who end up in control of them will use them for benevolent purposes instead of for their own benefit.
[Spoiler Warning: If you plan to read Salamander, you might want to stop here until you do.]













My original idea for Salamander was a fantasy version of that fallacy. In my imagined world, magic exists but is weak, a frustrating situation for a mage who finds that most of the things he would like to do require more power than he has to do them with. Coelus, one of my protagonists and a brilliant theorist, comes up with a solution, a magical procedure that funnels the power of a large number of mages through one mage who can then use it to do things that no single mage could do before.
The first problem is pointed out by Ellen, his equally brilliant student, when he tries to enlist her in the project of developing the Cascade. She refuses, on the grounds that he will be seizing the power of  mages without their consent.

He looked at the girl in astonishment, felt for words to explain. "You don't understand. There is so much to be done, so little power to do it with. A river floods. With enough magery in the hands of a water mage with proper skills, we could divert the water to where it would be harmless. A plague kills hundreds, mothers and fathers"—his voice faltered—"leaving behind orphaned children. Enough power in the hands of a healer could see the plague when it first struck, cure everyone before the sickness spread farther. So much to do, and we are so weak.
"You are young, sheltered. If you had seen … . I cannot make you aid me. But consider the needless deaths and misery that might happen if you do not."
She shook her head. "My mother is a healer; I have seen sickness enough. Men with gaping wounds that she has closed. When you have seized her power to shift a flood, on whose hands will be the blood of those she cannot heal?"

The second point is never made explicitly, but I hint at it earlier in the same conversation when Coelus, explaining his idea, says:

"Think how much we could do with the pooled talent of fifty mages and five hundred, or five thousand, or fifty thousand ordinary people, each adding his trifle of talent to the pool, pouring it through a trained mage. Almost unlimited power to end a plague, to heal even someone at the point of death, to build a road or monument, to do things that no single mage, whatever his talent, could do before.

The key word is "monument." Along with achieving things that are arguably more important than what mages are currently using their power for, he includes one that might be impressive but is pretty clearly less important. The point is suggested again a little later, when Coelus repeats Ellen's argument to Maridon, the one colleague who knows about his project and supports it. Maridon's reply:

"So they stop killing off bedbugs for rich innkeepers, or healing sick cattle. You know as well as I do that most mages outside the College aren't doing anything that really matters—not to mention those inside. With this pooled power, we can do things that do matter.  

The arrogance of "things that do matter," meaning things that matter to Maridon, suggests the problem. When Coelus attempts the first full scale trial of the spell, Maridon seizes control of it—demonstrating the third point. Fortunately for Coelus and the world he lives in, something unexpected goes wrong. The Cascade taps an enormous source of fire of whose existence he is unaware, and Maridon burns up.
Coelus' experiments come to the ears of Prince Kieron, the royal official in charge of dealing with magery—himself a mage, as well as the brother and heir of the king. He sees the dangers in what Coelus has invented, both the fact that a mage, using it, might be able to kill the king and seize the throne, and the danger of its use by an enemy army. He concludes that it might be better if the spell had never been invented, but the knowledge at this point will be hard to keep secret, so best to perfect it under royal authority and keep it available just in case it is ever needed. 
By this time, however, Coelus has been convinced, by Ellen's arguments and Maridon's betrayal, that inventing the Cascade was a mistake. He refuses to cooperate in perfecting it. That sets up a conflict between the Prince on one side and Coelus and Ellen on the other. At this point the plot is reflecting a different set of issues, having to do with the dangers of scientific progress; it is not entirely accidental that the Cascade itself involves a sort of chain reaction. 
The Prince's concern, and his conclusion, are not unreasonable ones. That sets up a theme that had not occurred to me when I started writing the book, the question of to what degree the ends justify the means. In some sense, they must—with enough at stake, a reasonable person will be willing to use means that under other circumstances would be considered unacceptable. Kieron, who is fundamentally an honest man, makes that point explicitly in a conversation with Ellen's friend Mari, at a point when he is looking for Ellen as part of his attempt to keep word of the Cascade from getting out.

"If you could get a message to her, asking her to come here and assuring her of safety, would she believe you?"
"Perhaps. Would it be true?"
Another long silence, again ended by the Prince. "No. She sounds an admirable person, and one who might in time prove useful to the Kingdom; I would prefer to do her no harm. But I have obligations to my brother and to the kingdom he rules. If it turns out that the only way of keeping our enemies from learning magery that could be our ruin is to kill a charming young lady, or two, or three, I will do it."

And he makes a similar point to Ellen herself later in the story. Later still, he uses quite unscrupulous means to try to force Ellen and Coelus to cooperate in perfecting the Cascade, in order that it can be used without again killing the mage who is the focus.
The Prince is an antagonist but not a villain, a good person who finds himself trapped in a situation where he honestly believes that he is obligated to do bad things to prevent much worse things. His mistake is being too willing to take it for granted that his judgement of what needs to be done is better than that of Coelus and Ellen, even though he knows that they know more about the subject, at least the magical end of it, than he does. Arrogance not wickedness. As Ellen remarks later: "I do not think Kieron is a bad man, but he is too used to having his way."
One  side issue in the story  is related, not exactly to economics, but to my legal interests. There are traditional bounds on what mages should or should not do with their power—love potions, for instance, more generally compulsion spells of any sort, are banned. 
The traditional enforcement mechanism is a decentralized one. A mage convicted of violating the bounds by a jury of all the mages locally available is banned from the use of magic; if he violates the ban any mage may kill him. This mechanism is in the process of being gradually replaced by a centralized system under royal control, with court trials. 
One of the mages working for the Prince is caught by Ellen using a compulsion spell on her, and charged with violation of the bounds. He assumes that, since the Prince is the one in charge of enforcement under the newer system, he will be let off. The Prince explains to him that the gradual replacement of the old system by the new depends on the mages respecting the verdicts of his courts, and so having no reason to try to apply the traditional approach instead, hence he will be tried and, in all probability, convicted and banned.
At one level, the theme of the book is progress and its perils. The Cascade is made possible by a scientific breakthrough some forty years earlier that represented the first step in converting magery from a craft to a science. The shift from decentralized to centralized enforcement of the bounds is another sort of progress, possibly desirable, possibly not, probably, in the long run, inevitable. The kingdom where it is all set is post-feudal, but with feudal remnants.
One question. I have a map of the College, which is where much of book is set. Would people who have read the book like me to web it?

Salamander: Magic and Physics

I originally mentioned the economic element in Salamander , but one commenter asked about the relation of the magic to physics.
Part of what I was doing in the book was trying to sketch an original, interesting, and plausible version of magic. Since the story was largely set in a college training mages, I wanted something that sounded as though it had a deep enough theoretical background to be interesting.
What I came up with was modeled on the mathematics underlying quantum mechanics. As readers familiar with the subject will know, the same particle may be described by a superposition of states of exact momentum or a superposition of states of exact position. At the extremes, a particle with precisely known momentum can be represented either as a certainty of one eigenstate of momentum or as a superposition of eigenstates of position spread across the universe—hence, as per the uncertainty principle, if its momentum is known perfectly its position is entirely unknown—and similarly the other way around.
For an example of the same logic that does not depend on quantum mechanics, consider polarized light. The polarization of a beam of light can be described as a mix of vertically polarized and horizontally polarized. The same beam can be equally well described as a mix of left handed circularly polarized light and right handed circularly polarized light. In particular, vertically polarized light can be described as a mix of left and right handed with one phase relation, and horizontally as a similar mix with a different phase relation, and similarly the other way around.
That was the set of ideas on which my system of magic was based. In my back story, magic was originally thought of as based on the elements: earth, air, fire and water. What Olver, the Newton equivalent in my world who set off the shift of magic from a craft to a science, worked out, was that the elements were merely one basis star, a set of four things which could be combined in ways that describe all magic. But there are lots of other basis stars, each of which can also provide a complete description, and one point of any one star can be described as some mix of the points of any other star--just as a momentum eigenstate can be described as a mix of position eigenstates, or vertical polarization as a mix of circular polarizations. That gave me a structure sufficiently counterintuitive but coherent to work for my  purposes.
I should confess that I did not work out the whole system. In particular, while there is one throwaway reference to "phase," I don't actually know how it fits in. My objective was only to get the description deep enough into the system to be convincing, to look as though there was a real theoretical science there.
One thing that came up in writing the book was the question of how the theoretical structure got figured out. The answer was that two mages, for their own purposes, had put together a very large collection of spells.

"Then Olver showed up, and what he had been looking for was sitting in the library waiting for him. Olver didn't need powerful spells. What he needed were multiple spells doing the same thing in different ways, using different talents. If you could banish horseflies with a spell of fire and air and get exactly the same result with a spell built only on heat, that meant that in some fashion heat was fire plus air. How the spell was constructed let you figure out just how the air and fire were put together. Olver started with more than forty multiples—two or more spells that did the same thing in different ways. When he was finished he had the science of magic as we now know it—the different basis stars, the central paradox that any one star spans all of magery, and the rest. That was the first big breakthrough in three hundred years, since the Dorayans worked out the basic principles by trial and error. "If he had a spell that used warmth he could make one using air and fire, so mages were no longer limited to using only spells that fit their particular talents. Jon is right; the library came first. The theory of magic was built on the library; the College was built on the theory of magic. The talented came here because it was the only place in the world where they could learn not only what worked but why."

In my next post I plan to explain the link to economics—the Cascade as the magical equivalent of the central planning fallacy.

More on Harald

Having received a gratifyingly positive response to my previous post, I thought I would say a little more about  my first novel, then do another post on my second. 
There are a couple of places in Harald where I mention tactics my protagonist is using to solve the problem of raising an army. One is a scene where he mentions having captured the Emperor's tent, presumably after defeating an Imperial army that the Emperor was accompanying. He talked some of his people into lugging the tent over the mountain pass that separates Kaerlia, where the battle was, from the Vales, and sets it up in his back pasture. One of the people he is telling the story to responds:

"Just what every meadow needs."

"Don't laugh. Silk hangings, tent poles banded with gold. By the time the story spread a bit, every highborn in the Imperial army had gold tent poles and chests full of silver and jewels. Made it easy to raise troops the next time."

 The other is a bit more complicated. Harald forces a large body of cavalry loyal to Iskander, one of the two princes who are competing to be their father's heir, or possibly to replace him, to surrender, and auctions off their horses to the local plains nomads. In a later campaign, he defeats a different cavalry force, loyal to the Emperor. His nomad allies return home with the horses captured in that battle—and offer to sell them to Iskander. The bargaining is between one of Harald's sons and Iskander's son Kiron, who earlier spent some time as a guest/hostage at Haraldhold.

"Name Kiron. Speak for Commander, Governor. Know you Valestalk, Tengu?"
"Getting better, but I still speak your language better than you speak mine."
A long pause.
"Niall?"
"In the flesh. Got bored with rabbits."
"This is your army?"
Niall shook his head:
"My brother Donal is war leader for Fox Clan at the moment, four hundred clan brothers. Eagle, Bear, half this end of the plains sent someone along for the ride. Some day you try to get a couple thousand Westkin, fourteen clans, all moving in the same direction. Make running the Empire feel like a vacation."
"And you came along to … "
"Just now, to sell some horses. Thought your father might be interested; heard he was a few short. Cavalry mounts. Trained. Even have the right brand."
"How many horses--trained cavalry mounts with the Imperial brand--are you prepared to sell us? Assuming we can agree on a price."
Niall looked at him, considered.
"Sure you want to know?"
Kiron nodded.
"Four thousand. Don't expect you'll want all of them. Give you a good price, though. Market, this end of the plains, not what it used to be." It occurred to Kiron that raising and supplying an army off the resources of a mountain farm presented difficulties to which Harald, being Harald, found his own unique answers. This one had a certain wild logic to it.

There is another feature central to the novel which is not exactly economics, although I think it is related both to my being an economist and to my being a libertarian. The central problem of the first half of the book is the attempt by a new and inexperienced king, badly advised, to convert his father's allies into subjects. Part of the reason is that he sees political structures in terms of a table of organization, a formal hierarchy, and is afraid that anyone not in allegiance to him cannot, in the long run, be relied on. 
He is opposed by Harald, the leader of one of the allies, who sees political structures in terms of personal relationships. The alliance was put together by the previous king, who first dropped his father's unenforceable claim to rule the Vales then did everything he could to help the Vales when they were faced with a famine. In the wars with the Empire, he put Harald in charge of the allied army not because Harald had any particular rank but because he was the best commander available. And the alliance was held together in part by the close personal friendship between the king, Harald, and the Lady Commander of the Order. 

During the conflict between Harald and the new king, it becomes clear that one of the most powerful of the provincial lords, the feudal level just below the king, is a de facto ally of Harald's even though nominally obedient to the king. And part of the point of the first half of the book is that Harald's real objective is not to defeat the king but to educate him, and so to recreate the old alliance.
Incidentally, for anyone interested, the book can be bought on Amazon, downloaded free from the Baen free library, or downloaded free as podcasts from the book web page. 

Economics in my Fiction

A correspondent points me at a blog post with the intriguing title "Sci-fi needs economists." Neither of my novels is science fiction, but both of them are speculative fiction—sf, of which sci-fi is a subset. And both of them reflect, in varying ways, the fact that they were written by an economist. It occurred to me that some readers of this blog might be interested in how.
The protagonist of Harald is a leading figure in the Vales, a semi-stateless society loosely based on saga period Iceland. The Vales are allied with the kingdom of Kaerlia, from which they were settled a few centuries back, and with a third, non-geographical polity, the Order, a female military order very loosely based on the Templars. I do not find an order of women warriors terribly plausible from a historical standpoint, but I like it as a plot device. The three are allied against the Empire, a larger, expansionist power loosely based on Roman, Byzantine, and Abbasid models.
One form in which economics appears is the central problem that Harald faces—how to raise and support an army without either taxation to hire troops or a feudal system with liegemen obliged to fight for him. Although his purpose is defensive warfare, the model I was thinking of was offensive—the Norse armies that ravaged Britain. As best I can tell they were, in large part, not national armies but entrepreneurial projects. Harald is not in a position to offer his people land, but he can offer them loot—loot captured from Imperial forces he defeats and, more important, ransom paid by the Empire to get back their captive soldiers. That, plus excitement, glory, the opportunity to train under the best general around, and a patriotic desire not to have their homeland conquered, have to suffice.
One implication is that Harald has to be very stingy with the lives of his men; if too many of them get killed or injured in this campaign, nobody may show up for the next one. Hence he specializes in what his daughter refers to as "Father's set piece battles—everything important settled five minutes before it starts." The objective, always, is to put the opposing force in a position where it will have to surrender; his favorite method is logistical, creating a situation where if the enemy do not surrender they will die of hunger or thirst.
The same issues arise on the other side, although not quite as obviously. The Emperor has legionaries who are professional soldiers paid by taxes, and auxilia, mercenary forces from inside or outside the empire to fill roles that the legionaries do not. From the standpoint of each individual commander, it is the legions, the elite heavy infantry, that really matter. While losing auxilia is a bad thing, you can always hire more; as long as the legions get safely home, the army has not been defeated.
The problem, as becomes clear in the final campaign, is that you cannot always hire more. Having gotten quite a lot of auxilia killed in earlier campaigns, the Empire finds mercenaries in short supply, not because most of them have been killed but because the ones who are alive would prefer to stay that way. The economic constraint.
My second novel, unlike the first, is an actual fantasy with magic. Its initial theme was the fantasy equivalent of the central planning fallacy. If readers are interested, let me know and I will be happy to expand on that. I am a little worried that, like many authors, I may be more interested in talking about my books than other people are in hearing about them.

Genetic Testing and Insurance: One Datum

Reductions in the cost of genetic testing and improvements in what we know about what it tells us produce obvious benefits; if you know you are  likely to have some particular medical problem, you may be able to take precautions against it. But they also have at least one potential downside. The more is known about the chance of bad things happening to us, the less able we will be to insure against them.
A solution to this problem that is sometimes proposed is to permit individuals to have their genes tested but forbid insurance companies to require testing as a condition of insurance or to use the information it produces. The problem with that is adverse selection. If the customer knows his risk and the insurance company doesn't, high risk and low risk customers are charged the same price, making insurance a good deal for the former and a bad deal for the latter. Insurance companies, realizing that most of those who choose to buy their insurance are bad risks, will charge accordingly, driving more of the low or average risk customers out of the market. In the limiting case, insurance is bought only by high risk customers, at a high risk price. A famous description of the problem is Akerlof's article "The Market for Lemons."
If we allow both insurance companies and their customers to make use of genetic information, then both high risk and low risk customers can buy insurance, but at different prices. The risk of having genetic variants that make you more likely to suffer some expensive medical problem is uninsurable, although you can still insure against the risk that, given those genes, the problem will actually appear.
The theoretical analysis of the problem is straightforward; interested readers can find one version in Chapter 6 of my Law's Order. But the theory does not tell us how large the problem is. That depends on empirical facts, in particular on how much the information provided by genetic testing affects the expected cost of insuring someone.
As it happens, I recently came across a datum relevant to that question, as a result of having my own genes tested by 23andMe, a company that does mail order genetic testing. It turned out that I had a genetic variant that implied a moderately increased risk of meningioma, the second most common type of brain tumor.
The information came a little late to be useful. Last summer, while I was part of a group on World of Warfare, one of the other players noticed that I had stopped responding. He called the house. My son took the call, came into my office, and found me half conscious on the floor. The diagnosis at the local hospital was meningioma, a benign (i.e. non-cancerous) tumor inside my skull but fortunately outside my brain. It was large enough to put pressure on my brain, so required surgery. I got surgery, all went well, and I am now fully recovered, aside from a visible scar and a tendency of my scalp to itch.
According to 23andMe, 35,000 Americans a year are diagnosed with meningioma, and in most cases the tumor is small enough not to require surgery. Assume that 10,000 of those, like my case, do, making the annual probability for a random American 1/30,000. Further assume that the average cost is $100,000. That's the right order of magnitude—I saw the figures for what it cost my insurance company, but don't have them ready to hand at the moment. The average cost to the insurance company of that particular risk is then about $3.
Finally, assume that my "moderately increased risk" means twice the average risk, which seems if anything a high guess. It follows that in a world where insurance companies had and used that data, my medical insurance would cost me, or my employer, three dollars a year more than in a world where the data was not available.
There are, of course, lots of other risks that my health insurance insures against. For some my genetics are presumably favorable, for some unfavorable. It would require much more information than I have to estimate how much the cost of insurance would vary from one person to another if all of that information was available and used. But at least the single datum I happen to have suggests that the effects might be small.

Is Newt Gingrich Living in Sin?

He is currently divorced from his second wife, who is still alive, and married to his third. He also a Catholic convert. The Catholic church, as I understand its doctrine, does not accept divorce. Unless he somehow obtained an annulment, doesn't that make his current marriage adultery?
It's one thing to have committed a sin, repented, and reformed. But it looks as though he continues to commit mortal sin on a regular basis. Am I missing something?

Who is the Least Bad Candidate?

Last time around, when it was effectively down to three, I concluded somewhat tentatively that it was Obama. He seemed a little less bad than Hilary Clinton and had one big advantage over McCain—when Obama did bad things, we, people who supported free markets, wouldn't get blamed for them. And I thought there was at least a chance that he would do some good things.
Ex post, I was probably wrong, although it is hard to be sure; we will never know how bad the other two would have been. The one part where I was right was his advantage over McCain. If a Republican president had run an enormous deficit, insisted on his right to treat anyone he could label as a terrorist as outside the normal protections of the law, expanded the Afghan war, and ended up with the same economic results as Obama, it would have been harder to bring the Tea Party movement into existence and elect a considerable number of its candidates in the midterm elections.
We now have another presidential election coming up, and the same question. If we include Ron Paul in the candidate pool, the answer is pretty easy. While I have some reservations about his ability to function as President, given no experience as an executive, his policy positions are closer to mine than I have any reason to expect of a serious candidate. In particular, on two biggies, ending the War on Drugs and shifting to a non-interventionist foreign policy, he is on the right side. It's true that his monetary policy seems to assume that producing money will continue to be a government monopoly (those who know more about it are welcome to correct me if I am mistaken), although he wants to tweak the details a bit, so in that regard, if I correctly understand him, he shares the socialist views of the other candidates. But one can't have everything.
I suspect however that, as most commentators believe, Ron Paul has very little chance of getting nominated, let alone elected. His real function in this election is to force the Republican party—ideally both parties—to shift in a libertarian direction, by demonstrating that there are a lot of votes there, and at the same time to increase public support for policies currently supported by neither party. 
Besides, including him makes the choice of least bad candidate an uninteresting one.
I am inclined to eliminate Santorum as well, since he also seems at this point very unlikely to get the nomination. That leaves us, yet again, with a pool of three, this time consisting of Gingrich, Romney, and Obama. Which is least bad?
It is a hard question. If we consider politics purely as a source of entertainment, Gingrich is an easy winner—he would be more fun to argue with than either of the others, and is likely to put on a better show. But the same things that make him interesting also make him frightening. I don't think a candidate who believes that the President and Congress ought to have the power to overrule the Supreme Court, as he apparently does, is exactly what the country needs. And I could imagine him coming up with a lot of other original—and dangerous—ideas. He is obviously smart and articulate, and it is possible that, once in power, his bite would be better than his bark, but I am not sure I want to risk it.
Romney is easier to evaluate. Pretty clearly, he is a liberal Republican currently pretending, for political reasons, to be a conservative Republican. In terms of the policies he would prefer, given the choice, I doubt he would be very different from the current incumbent—perhaps a little worse on military matters. Think of him as Obama light. Which leaves me wondering if perhaps I should again choose Obama as the least bad, at least if the Republicans succeed, as they well may, in taking both houses of Congress. 
On the historical evidence, practically the only time the federal government runs a surplus is when one party holds Congress and the other the White House. While it is probably true that Obama is, as one commenter put it, not a Kenyan but a Swede, that his ideal is to make the U.S. into something more like a European welfare state, he is also a Chicago politician, unlikely to let his principles get in the way of his politics. Faced with a congress controlled by the other party, a substantial minority of it in favor of a sharp reduction in government expenditure and regulation, he might well decide that his best strategy is to outflank the Republicans on the right. He has already made a few gestures in that direction, in rhetoric if not yet in substance.
That could, of course, mean being even more willing than they are to reduce liberty in the name of fighting terrorism. But it could also mean trying to reduce government expenditure and regulation wherever doing so is not too politically expensive—most obviously the military, which Romney is quite unlikely to cut, but perhaps in other areas as well. And it is at least possible, although not likely, that if the Republicans do not learn from the lesson Ron Paul is teaching, Obama will, that he will conclude that a shift in a libertarian direction somewhere, perhaps drugs or foreign policy, is a sensible tactic to create a Democratic majority.