David D. Friedman's Blog, page 8
November 17, 2012
My Favorite Spam
The one offering a "do it yourself solar system."
For those who are afraid that a Dyson Sphere provides only a temporary solution to the population problem.
For those who are afraid that a Dyson Sphere provides only a temporary solution to the population problem.
The Conservative Mistake
Two different arguments I have been having of late, with different people, are in an important way the same; both sets of people I am arguing with are, from my standpoint, making the same error. Both positions are held by people across the political spectrum, one more commonly on the right, the other on the left. One argument is over immigration, one over global warming.
Comments on my posts about immigration raise the concern that immigrants might change the country, make it more socialist, more crime ridden, more like the places they are coming from. None of the commenters offer much reason to expect change in that direction. As I pointed out in one exchange, the Volokh brothers, associated with the popular legal blog the Volokh Conspiracy, are immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union; while Eugene and Sasha may be more socialist than I am, they are less socialist than most of their fellow academics—or, for that matter, most Americans.
That is not entirely surprising, given that they have experienced the consequences of socialism at first hand. People who go to the considerable trouble of leaving the place where they grew up and moving somewhere very different are, by doing so, giving some evidence that they do not like what they are leaving. And casual observation suggests that immigrants, in particular Mexican immigrants, are rather more likely to hold views that American conservatives approve of, more likely to be religious, more likely to marry and stay married and raise children with two parents, than the average of those already here.
The fundamental error, as I see it, is the conservative mistake, the assumption that change is presumptively bad.
I have spent a good deal more time arguing global warming, and the pattern there seems much the same. If the average temperature of the globe goes up by several degrees C over the next hundred years, as seems likely, that will have both good and bad consequences, but I can see no strong reason to expect the net effects to be bad, still less catastrophically bad—a point I have argued at some length here.
If anything, one might expect the opposite, for two related reasons. The first is that human habitability at present is limited mostly by cold not heat—the equator is populated, the poles are not. The second is that, for well understood reasons, global warming can be expected to increase temperatures more in cold places and at cold times of the year than in warm. Combine those two and one might guess that a somewhat warmer world would be, on the whole, more suited to humans, not less. Here again, the main explanation of the opposite view seems to me to be the conservative mistake. The same is true, I think, of concerns about a variety of other issues, from fracking to cloning to GMO foods.
I call it a mistake, but perhaps that is unfair. One might argue, after all, that we know what the present is and know it is, at least tolerable, since we are at present tolerating it. A change might make things better, might make them worse, so why chance it?
That sounds like a plausible argument, but it contains a hidden assumption—that stasis is an option, that if we do not have more immigration our cultural and political circumstances will remain the same, that without anthropogenic CO2, climate will stay what it currently is.
Both versions of that assumption are demonstrably false. Over my lifetime, more still over the past century, the cultural and political institutions of the U.S. have changed substantially, for reasons that have very little to do with immigration. Over the past million years, the climate of the earth has changed radically, time after time, for reasons that have nothing to do with anthropogenic CO2. A rise in sea level of a foot or two would create problems in some parts of the world, but not problems comparable to the effect of half a mile of ice over the present locations of Chicago and London.
The conservative mistake comes with its own pseudoscientific slogan, "the precautionary principle." It is the rule that no decision should be made unless one can be confident that it will not have substantial bad effects—the lack of any good reason to believe it will have such effects is not enough.
I have long argued that the principle is internally incoherent. The decision to (for example) permit nuclear power could have substantial bad effects. The decision not to permit nuclear power could also have substantial bad effects. If one takes the precautionary principle seriously, one is obligated to neither permit nor forbid nuclear power.
Carrying that argument a little further, I have long argued, only partly in jest, that the precautionary principle is a major source of global warming. Nuclear power, after all, is the one source of power that does not produce CO2 and can be expanded more or less without limit as a substitute for power sources that do produce CO2. A major factor restricting the growth of nuclear power has been the precautionary principle, even if not under that name—hostility to permitting reactors to be built as long as there is any chance that anything could go wrong with either the reactor's functioning or disposal of its waste. That example demonstrates my more general point—that stasis is not an option. Whether or not we permit nuclear power, the world is going to change in lots of ways, and there is no a priori reason to expect the changes if we do not permit it to be worse than those if we do.
I am not arguing that there is never a good reason to fear change—sometimes a change can be reasonably predicted to have bad consequences. I am arguing that much opposition to change, across a wide range of different topics and disputes, is based on the mistaken assumption that if only that particular change is prevented, the next year, the next decade, perhaps even the next century, will be more or less the same as the present.
That is very unlikely.
In The Future and its Enemies , Virginia Postrel argued that the chief political division of the future would be between stasists and dynamists, between those who fear change and those who welcome it. If so, we may see some interesting political realignments.
Comments on my posts about immigration raise the concern that immigrants might change the country, make it more socialist, more crime ridden, more like the places they are coming from. None of the commenters offer much reason to expect change in that direction. As I pointed out in one exchange, the Volokh brothers, associated with the popular legal blog the Volokh Conspiracy, are immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union; while Eugene and Sasha may be more socialist than I am, they are less socialist than most of their fellow academics—or, for that matter, most Americans.
That is not entirely surprising, given that they have experienced the consequences of socialism at first hand. People who go to the considerable trouble of leaving the place where they grew up and moving somewhere very different are, by doing so, giving some evidence that they do not like what they are leaving. And casual observation suggests that immigrants, in particular Mexican immigrants, are rather more likely to hold views that American conservatives approve of, more likely to be religious, more likely to marry and stay married and raise children with two parents, than the average of those already here.
The fundamental error, as I see it, is the conservative mistake, the assumption that change is presumptively bad.
I have spent a good deal more time arguing global warming, and the pattern there seems much the same. If the average temperature of the globe goes up by several degrees C over the next hundred years, as seems likely, that will have both good and bad consequences, but I can see no strong reason to expect the net effects to be bad, still less catastrophically bad—a point I have argued at some length here.
If anything, one might expect the opposite, for two related reasons. The first is that human habitability at present is limited mostly by cold not heat—the equator is populated, the poles are not. The second is that, for well understood reasons, global warming can be expected to increase temperatures more in cold places and at cold times of the year than in warm. Combine those two and one might guess that a somewhat warmer world would be, on the whole, more suited to humans, not less. Here again, the main explanation of the opposite view seems to me to be the conservative mistake. The same is true, I think, of concerns about a variety of other issues, from fracking to cloning to GMO foods.
I call it a mistake, but perhaps that is unfair. One might argue, after all, that we know what the present is and know it is, at least tolerable, since we are at present tolerating it. A change might make things better, might make them worse, so why chance it?
That sounds like a plausible argument, but it contains a hidden assumption—that stasis is an option, that if we do not have more immigration our cultural and political circumstances will remain the same, that without anthropogenic CO2, climate will stay what it currently is.
Both versions of that assumption are demonstrably false. Over my lifetime, more still over the past century, the cultural and political institutions of the U.S. have changed substantially, for reasons that have very little to do with immigration. Over the past million years, the climate of the earth has changed radically, time after time, for reasons that have nothing to do with anthropogenic CO2. A rise in sea level of a foot or two would create problems in some parts of the world, but not problems comparable to the effect of half a mile of ice over the present locations of Chicago and London.
The conservative mistake comes with its own pseudoscientific slogan, "the precautionary principle." It is the rule that no decision should be made unless one can be confident that it will not have substantial bad effects—the lack of any good reason to believe it will have such effects is not enough.
I have long argued that the principle is internally incoherent. The decision to (for example) permit nuclear power could have substantial bad effects. The decision not to permit nuclear power could also have substantial bad effects. If one takes the precautionary principle seriously, one is obligated to neither permit nor forbid nuclear power.
Carrying that argument a little further, I have long argued, only partly in jest, that the precautionary principle is a major source of global warming. Nuclear power, after all, is the one source of power that does not produce CO2 and can be expanded more or less without limit as a substitute for power sources that do produce CO2. A major factor restricting the growth of nuclear power has been the precautionary principle, even if not under that name—hostility to permitting reactors to be built as long as there is any chance that anything could go wrong with either the reactor's functioning or disposal of its waste. That example demonstrates my more general point—that stasis is not an option. Whether or not we permit nuclear power, the world is going to change in lots of ways, and there is no a priori reason to expect the changes if we do not permit it to be worse than those if we do.
I am not arguing that there is never a good reason to fear change—sometimes a change can be reasonably predicted to have bad consequences. I am arguing that much opposition to change, across a wide range of different topics and disputes, is based on the mistaken assumption that if only that particular change is prevented, the next year, the next decade, perhaps even the next century, will be more or less the same as the present.
That is very unlikely.
In The Future and its Enemies , Virginia Postrel argued that the chief political division of the future would be between stasists and dynamists, between those who fear change and those who welcome it. If so, we may see some interesting political realignments.
Crucible of Gold: A Brief Appreciation
I have just finished reading, and very much enjoying, the seventh of Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels. For those not familiar with them, they are the latest books in the genre invented by Captain Marryat in the 19th century and better known from C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels and the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brien. Novik's novels, like those, are set during the Napoleonic wars, and closely linked to the British navy. Her world differs from theirs in only one way, a feature that her predecessors neglected to include.
Dragons.
In His Majesty's Dragon, the first book of the series, Europe and the war are very much as they were in the real history, save that the navy includes an aerial corps made up of dragons—the biggest the size of a small ship—and their captains and crews. The dragons can speak, have about human level intelligence, but are regarded by most humans as animals and treated accordingly. Their captains, each bonded to his dragon at its hatching, mostly view the matter somewhat differently. The protagonists of the series are Captain Lawrence and Temeraire, his dragon; as their relationship develops, each becomes to the other his closest friend and companion.
One of the things I discovered when I wrote my first novel is that no plot survives contact with the characters. I suspect that Novik made the same discovery early in the series. England, at the beginning of the book, is implausibly similar to England as it actually existed, with many of the same people in it and the same Imperial enemy. As the story proceeds and the characters, and readers, see more and more of the world, it becomes less and less the world as it was and more and more the world as it would have been if humans shared it with another, larger and much longer lived species. In China we see a society where dragons and humans function on a basis of equality, in Africa and, in the latest book, South America, very different societies, in each of which the two species have come to a different, and internally plausible, relationship.
They are very good books.
Dragons.
In His Majesty's Dragon, the first book of the series, Europe and the war are very much as they were in the real history, save that the navy includes an aerial corps made up of dragons—the biggest the size of a small ship—and their captains and crews. The dragons can speak, have about human level intelligence, but are regarded by most humans as animals and treated accordingly. Their captains, each bonded to his dragon at its hatching, mostly view the matter somewhat differently. The protagonists of the series are Captain Lawrence and Temeraire, his dragon; as their relationship develops, each becomes to the other his closest friend and companion.
One of the things I discovered when I wrote my first novel is that no plot survives contact with the characters. I suspect that Novik made the same discovery early in the series. England, at the beginning of the book, is implausibly similar to England as it actually existed, with many of the same people in it and the same Imperial enemy. As the story proceeds and the characters, and readers, see more and more of the world, it becomes less and less the world as it was and more and more the world as it would have been if humans shared it with another, larger and much longer lived species. In China we see a society where dragons and humans function on a basis of equality, in Africa and, in the latest book, South America, very different societies, in each of which the two species have come to a different, and internally plausible, relationship.
They are very good books.
November 16, 2012
A Possible IP Solution
In my previous post, I proclaimed my neutrality in the IP wars. I think there are good arguments against all IP—for the curious, I recommend Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin and Levine. There are also good arguments for.
I do, however, have a suggestion, an approach that might keep most of the benefits of the current system and eliminate most of its costs. I start with copyright law, for which I think the case is clearer.
Currently, copyright provides two benefits to the holder. First, it prevents piracy—you cannot (legally) copy my book and sell it in competition with my publisher. Second, it provides the possibility of additional revenue from derivative works. That includes a translation, a movie based on a novel, a substantial quote from my work in someone else's book, and probably other things that I haven't thought of.
In my experience as an author, most of my revenue comes from the first benefit, a little from payments for translation rights, very little from any other derivative uses. My guess is that that situation is typical. On the other hand, looking at the literature on copyright law, I conclude that most of the problems come from restrictions on derivative works—qualified by the very fuzzy rules on fair use. This fits the argument I offered in the chapter on IP in my Law's Order—that the reason it made sense for copyright to be easier to get and longer lasting than patent was that it covered something for which property rules worked better, in part because the boundaries of the property were more clearly defined. I qualified that argument by saying that it applied to traditional protection against literal copying, not so much to other restrictions due to copyright law.
My proposal, then, is quite simple—abolish protection against derivative works. Copyright is infringed by a literal copy of at least a quarter of a work, where a work is anything that might be separately sold—a novel, an essay, a short story. Anything else is fair use. That rule would cost me a little revenue from translations, but not much else, and my guess is that that would be true for most authors. I am not an artist or a composer or (save on a very small scale) a computer programmer, but I suspect that a similar restriction would work for those fields as well. The result would be a slight reduction in the incentive to produce copyrightable works, a large reduction in the costs imposed by the copyright system.
Applying a similar approach to patent law is harder, because ideas have fuzzier boundaries than books—it is less clear what does or does not infringe. My current idea is that patent protection should be limited to applications of the claimed idea that are actually described in the patent application. But I would be happy to consider alternative suggestions.
And no, I am still not arguing that my versions of patent and copyright would be better than nothing—I think that's an open question. I am only arguing that they would be better than what we now have.
And yes, I'm still at the same conference. Multitasking is not one of my talents, but not all of the talks are ones I find interesting.
I do, however, have a suggestion, an approach that might keep most of the benefits of the current system and eliminate most of its costs. I start with copyright law, for which I think the case is clearer.
Currently, copyright provides two benefits to the holder. First, it prevents piracy—you cannot (legally) copy my book and sell it in competition with my publisher. Second, it provides the possibility of additional revenue from derivative works. That includes a translation, a movie based on a novel, a substantial quote from my work in someone else's book, and probably other things that I haven't thought of.
In my experience as an author, most of my revenue comes from the first benefit, a little from payments for translation rights, very little from any other derivative uses. My guess is that that situation is typical. On the other hand, looking at the literature on copyright law, I conclude that most of the problems come from restrictions on derivative works—qualified by the very fuzzy rules on fair use. This fits the argument I offered in the chapter on IP in my Law's Order—that the reason it made sense for copyright to be easier to get and longer lasting than patent was that it covered something for which property rules worked better, in part because the boundaries of the property were more clearly defined. I qualified that argument by saying that it applied to traditional protection against literal copying, not so much to other restrictions due to copyright law.
My proposal, then, is quite simple—abolish protection against derivative works. Copyright is infringed by a literal copy of at least a quarter of a work, where a work is anything that might be separately sold—a novel, an essay, a short story. Anything else is fair use. That rule would cost me a little revenue from translations, but not much else, and my guess is that that would be true for most authors. I am not an artist or a composer or (save on a very small scale) a computer programmer, but I suspect that a similar restriction would work for those fields as well. The result would be a slight reduction in the incentive to produce copyrightable works, a large reduction in the costs imposed by the copyright system.
Applying a similar approach to patent law is harder, because ideas have fuzzier boundaries than books—it is less clear what does or does not infringe. My current idea is that patent protection should be limited to applications of the claimed idea that are actually described in the patent application. But I would be happy to consider alternative suggestions.
And no, I am still not arguing that my versions of patent and copyright would be better than nothing—I think that's an open question. I am only arguing that they would be better than what we now have.
And yes, I'm still at the same conference. Multitasking is not one of my talents, but not all of the talks are ones I find interesting.
Solving the Patent Problem—and Much Else
I am at this instant attending a conference on what to do about problems with software patents. The purpose of this post is to argue that the real problem is more fundamental, and to propose a simple solution.
Under current law, an ordinary civil suit, whether for patent infringement or anything else, is a "heads I win, tails I break even" bet. If you persuade the court that it is more likely than not that your claim is right, you collect damages. If you don't, you don't.
That means that if you believe you are probably wrong, have one chance in five or ten of winning, it may still be worth suing. You could get lucky, and the other side could blink—agree to settle out of court—especially if your claim is for a lot of money. If you lose, you pay for your own lawyer and possibly, if the court thinks your claims are sufficiently unjustified, for the other side's legal costs. You do not pay for inflicting the risk of large damages on an innocent party.
This problem was faced more than two thousand years ago by the legal system of Periclean Athens, and they came up with a simple solution. Their equivalent of criminal law was privately prosecuted; the prosecutor usually got a large share of the fine paid by the convicted defendant. That created an obvious risk—accuse someone innocent, unpopular, and rich of a crime he did not commit, in the hope of either being paid off to drop the charge or persuading enough members of a large jury to get a majority vote for conviction.
Their solution was to make the prosecutor liable to a large fine, the equivalent of about three years of an ordinary workman's wages, if he failed to get at least 20% of the jury to vote for conviction.
How might we apply that approach to our legal system? A civil case, unlike a criminal case, is supposed to be decided by a "preponderance of the evidence." That means that if the plaintiff loses, it is more likely than not that the defendant was in the right, which means that it is more likely than not that the plaintiff was in the wrong, was trying to extort a payment to which he was not entitled. When the plaintiff wins, the legal system treats the result as if it was certain that he was in the right, so when he loses ... .
Which suggests a simple solution to the problem both of software patents and of tort litigation more generally. Make the losing plaintiff liable. Base the amount he owes the defendant on the amount he claims, giving plaintiffs, legitimate as well as illegitimate, an incentive not overclaim.
One of the speakers at the conference brought up the example of a Pigouvian tax, such as a tax on air pollution produced by steel mills, and argued that the equivalent in the context of software patents would be an increase in patent maintenance fees. Charging for patents when the problem is patent litigation is like charging steel mills for steel instead of for pollution. The correct implication of his example is that there ought to be a cost for suing people, ideally for suing innocent people. That is what I have just proposed.
P.S. A recent online comment on a different blog post of mine demonstrated the risk of discussing IP issues without proclaiming one's allegiance to one side or the other of the current IP wars. Let me make myself perfectly clear. I hold no position on whether copyright law or patent law ought to exist. My views on the arguments for and against can be discovered, by those sufficiently patient, from the recordings of the course on IP Theory I am currently teaching.
Under current law, an ordinary civil suit, whether for patent infringement or anything else, is a "heads I win, tails I break even" bet. If you persuade the court that it is more likely than not that your claim is right, you collect damages. If you don't, you don't.
That means that if you believe you are probably wrong, have one chance in five or ten of winning, it may still be worth suing. You could get lucky, and the other side could blink—agree to settle out of court—especially if your claim is for a lot of money. If you lose, you pay for your own lawyer and possibly, if the court thinks your claims are sufficiently unjustified, for the other side's legal costs. You do not pay for inflicting the risk of large damages on an innocent party.
This problem was faced more than two thousand years ago by the legal system of Periclean Athens, and they came up with a simple solution. Their equivalent of criminal law was privately prosecuted; the prosecutor usually got a large share of the fine paid by the convicted defendant. That created an obvious risk—accuse someone innocent, unpopular, and rich of a crime he did not commit, in the hope of either being paid off to drop the charge or persuading enough members of a large jury to get a majority vote for conviction.
Their solution was to make the prosecutor liable to a large fine, the equivalent of about three years of an ordinary workman's wages, if he failed to get at least 20% of the jury to vote for conviction.
How might we apply that approach to our legal system? A civil case, unlike a criminal case, is supposed to be decided by a "preponderance of the evidence." That means that if the plaintiff loses, it is more likely than not that the defendant was in the right, which means that it is more likely than not that the plaintiff was in the wrong, was trying to extort a payment to which he was not entitled. When the plaintiff wins, the legal system treats the result as if it was certain that he was in the right, so when he loses ... .
Which suggests a simple solution to the problem both of software patents and of tort litigation more generally. Make the losing plaintiff liable. Base the amount he owes the defendant on the amount he claims, giving plaintiffs, legitimate as well as illegitimate, an incentive not overclaim.
One of the speakers at the conference brought up the example of a Pigouvian tax, such as a tax on air pollution produced by steel mills, and argued that the equivalent in the context of software patents would be an increase in patent maintenance fees. Charging for patents when the problem is patent litigation is like charging steel mills for steel instead of for pollution. The correct implication of his example is that there ought to be a cost for suing people, ideally for suing innocent people. That is what I have just proposed.
P.S. A recent online comment on a different blog post of mine demonstrated the risk of discussing IP issues without proclaiming one's allegiance to one side or the other of the current IP wars. Let me make myself perfectly clear. I hold no position on whether copyright law or patent law ought to exist. My views on the arguments for and against can be discovered, by those sufficiently patient, from the recordings of the course on IP Theory I am currently teaching.
November 15, 2012
Immigrants and Welfare
<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-indent:.3in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style></div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Give me your tired, your poor, </i></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,</i></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, </i></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Send these, the homeless, tempest- tossed to me;</i></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>I lift my lamp beside the golden door. </i></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">VERSE ENGRAVED ON THE BASE OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY</span></span></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">One possible response to the observation that the U.S. had effectively open immigration for most of its history and it turned out pretty well, one made by a commenter to my previous post, is that the U.S. was not then, and is now, a welfare state. As long as immigrants came to work and produce, they were a net benefit. The problem comes from the risk that poor immigrants today will come in order to live off our welfare system at a level considerably better than they could manage, even with hard work, in the countries they came from.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That is an old argument, one I discussed in my <a href="http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Mac... book</a> some forty years ago. There are a number of possible responses.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The first is the empirical question—is there evidence that immigrants in fact impose net costs on the U.S. tax and spending system? I think the answer is no, although it is not a question I have looked into in any detail. Immigrants tend to be young and healthy, hence impose lower costs than the average of those already here. And some of our governmental costs, most notably national defense and interest on the national debt, are independent of population, so easier to pay the more people are helping to pay them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A possible response is that current legal immigrants are better educated and richer than those who would come if restrictions on immigration were relaxed or eliminated, so not a relevant sample. That does not apply to illegal immigrants, however. A possible argument there is that the very fact they are illegal makes them less able to take advantage of government services. Most obviously, an illegal immigrant who provides his employer with a bogus social security number is paying money into the Social Security fund and is never going to be able to collect. Grant them all amnesty, and who knows what will happen?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One might see that as an argument for what a cynic would view as current policy—let them come and keep them illegal. A more attractive alternative, in my view, would be to let them come, make them legal, but have restrictions on what benefits immigrants who are not yet citizens are entitled to. Immigrants pay taxes, direct and indirect, so it should not require a very sharp reduction in access to government services to keep them from being a net drain. It might not require any at all—that is an empirical question.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A more extreme version, which I proposed a long time ago, would be to provide new immigrants with none of the services that go to recognizable individuals, as opposed to services such as the existence of roads or national defense—no welfare, no public schooling, no unemployment compensation. Of course, to be fair, the immigrants should also be exempt from whatever part of taxes pays for those services—raising the possibility that some well off citizens might conclude that their current benefits were not worth what they cost, and alter their status accordingly.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Unless we want to maintain a permanent class of non-citizen residents corresponding to the <i>metics</i> of classical Athens, non-citizen immigrants will eventually receive citizenship, entitling them to all the benefits (and burdens) thereof. But by that time they will have been supporting themselves, and adjusting to their new environment, for long enough so that they should be no more likely to be a burden than anyone else. Perhaps less, given the personal qualities required to choose to make a new life in a new place. Living on welfare might look like a good deal for someone whose only experience is trying to survive in an impoverished third world country, but less so after a decade or so living and working in a first world country at first world wages. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is one more argument I have offered in the past, one that ought to appeal to libertarians, perhaps to conservatives, but not to some other people. The existence of a welfare state may be an argument against freer immigration. But freer immigration is also an argument against the welfare state. Increases in the level of welfare will have some tendency to pull in poor immigrants, increasing the cost of those increases to those already here, which should make increases less politically popular. That is an argument for freer immigration from the point of view of those opposed to the welfare state.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is also an argument against freer immigration for those in favor of a welfare state, which suggests that perhaps it ought to be the Democrats, not the Republicans, opposing any reduction in current immigration restrictions. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Having let myself slide back into a very old argument, I will show my true colors by quoting the end of the chapter on immigration from my first book:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It is a shame that the argument must be put in terms of the economic or psychological 'interest' of the present generation of Americans. It is simpler than that. There are people, probably many millions, who would like to come here, live here, work here, raise their children here, die here. There are people who would like to become Americans, as our parents and grandparents did. </span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with new lines, 'America the closed preserve/That dirty foreigners don't deserve.' Or we can open the gates again. </span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> Welcome, Welcome, Emigrante </i></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> To my country welcome home.</i></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (<i>The Machinery of Freedom</i>, Chapter 14) </span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com...' alt='' /></div>
U.S. Immigration: A Brief Historical Note
A commenter on my previous post wrote that "Having open borders renders the entire concept of a country meaningless." That got me curious about the relevant history. My memory was that current restrictions on immigration date only from the 1920's, that prior to that the U.S. had effectively unrestricted immigration, with the only major exception being restrictions on Chinese immigration to the west coast in the late 19th century. I knew that Ellis Island existed, but was unsure what limits, other than checking for contagious diseases, it enforced.
Google is your friend. A little checking turned up the following information:
1. Ellis Island was only established as a federal immigration point—the first such—in 1890.
2. The first federal restrictions on immigration were passed in 1875; they excluded criminals, prostitutes, and Chinese contract laborers. Congress passed the first general law restricting immigration in 1882, banning immigration from China. In 1917 the restriction was extended to immigrants from other Asian Pacific countries. Numerical immigration quotas only came in in 1921, but did not apply to immigrants from Latin America until 1965.
3. While it is hard to be certain, it does not sound as though there was any effective mechanism for enforcing restrictions in the early period. That was obviously true for immigration across land borders, and I do not think there was any enforcement mechanism covering all ports that would have prevented someone from simply walking off a ship and blending into the local population—easy to do anywhere with a significant group of the immigrant's ethnicity.
On the other hand, checking estimates of ethnically Chinese in America, it looks as though the numbers increased slowly after 1880 and actually declined from 1900 to 1920. I do not know how reliable those estimates are, or whether they reflect factors other than legal restrictions on immigration, most obviously racial legislation restricting Chinese in America and so making it a less attractive destination.
My conclusion is that if the concept of a country is meaningless without at least nominal restrictions on immigration, the U.S. only came into existence about 1875. If the restrictions have to be real—i.e. effectively enforced—the U.S., if it exists at all, has been a country for only a few decades, making it younger than I am.
The other side of the story is public hostility to immigrants. That goes back much farther than 1875—for a very readable account of what successive waves of immigrants faced, I recommend Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America . I am not sure to what extent the survival of effectively open immigration well into the 20th century, with the exception of restrictions on oriental immigrants, reflects a balance of political forces pro and con, and to what extent the limited ability of the federal government to enforce restrictions. It is worth remembering that, throughout the 19th century, the federal government was the smallest of the three divisions (local, state, and federal), at least judged by revenue and expenditures.
And I still do not have any clear idea of why Republicans have been more hostile to illegal immigrants than Democrats in recent years. One possibility is that it has nothing much to do with the parties, that enough voters are hostile to illegal immigrants so that the anti-amnesty pro-border fence position looked like a good way of getting votes and which party tried to exploit it more was largely a matter of historical accident.
That would fit the observation that the Democrats, while not as bad on that issue (from my point of view) as the Republicans, still engage in a somewhat watered down version of the same sort of rhetoric. The difference was most pronounced in the primaries, and it makes sense that if hispanic voters were already more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, Republican candidates would see rhetoric likely to offend hispanics as less risky, at that stage of the election, than Democratic candidates would.
Google is your friend. A little checking turned up the following information:
1. Ellis Island was only established as a federal immigration point—the first such—in 1890.
2. The first federal restrictions on immigration were passed in 1875; they excluded criminals, prostitutes, and Chinese contract laborers. Congress passed the first general law restricting immigration in 1882, banning immigration from China. In 1917 the restriction was extended to immigrants from other Asian Pacific countries. Numerical immigration quotas only came in in 1921, but did not apply to immigrants from Latin America until 1965.
3. While it is hard to be certain, it does not sound as though there was any effective mechanism for enforcing restrictions in the early period. That was obviously true for immigration across land borders, and I do not think there was any enforcement mechanism covering all ports that would have prevented someone from simply walking off a ship and blending into the local population—easy to do anywhere with a significant group of the immigrant's ethnicity.
On the other hand, checking estimates of ethnically Chinese in America, it looks as though the numbers increased slowly after 1880 and actually declined from 1900 to 1920. I do not know how reliable those estimates are, or whether they reflect factors other than legal restrictions on immigration, most obviously racial legislation restricting Chinese in America and so making it a less attractive destination.
My conclusion is that if the concept of a country is meaningless without at least nominal restrictions on immigration, the U.S. only came into existence about 1875. If the restrictions have to be real—i.e. effectively enforced—the U.S., if it exists at all, has been a country for only a few decades, making it younger than I am.
The other side of the story is public hostility to immigrants. That goes back much farther than 1875—for a very readable account of what successive waves of immigrants faced, I recommend Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America . I am not sure to what extent the survival of effectively open immigration well into the 20th century, with the exception of restrictions on oriental immigrants, reflects a balance of political forces pro and con, and to what extent the limited ability of the federal government to enforce restrictions. It is worth remembering that, throughout the 19th century, the federal government was the smallest of the three divisions (local, state, and federal), at least judged by revenue and expenditures.
And I still do not have any clear idea of why Republicans have been more hostile to illegal immigrants than Democrats in recent years. One possibility is that it has nothing much to do with the parties, that enough voters are hostile to illegal immigrants so that the anti-amnesty pro-border fence position looked like a good way of getting votes and which party tried to exploit it more was largely a matter of historical accident.
That would fit the observation that the Democrats, while not as bad on that issue (from my point of view) as the Republicans, still engage in a somewhat watered down version of the same sort of rhetoric. The difference was most pronounced in the primaries, and it makes sense that if hispanic voters were already more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, Republican candidates would see rhetoric likely to offend hispanics as less risky, at that stage of the election, than Democratic candidates would.
November 13, 2012
Why is the Republican Party Hostile to Immigrants?
In my previous post, I mentioned hostility to immigrants as a major weaknesses of the Republican party, the main source of their poor showing among hispanic voters. That hostility was demonstrated in the primary campaign, where candidates seemed to be competing with each other on how high a fence they wanted to build along the Mexican border (nobody seems to worry much about the Canadian border), and how strongly they would try to pressure illegal immigrants to leave. One interesting, and important, question, is why.
A possible response, suggested by a commenter, is that the hostility is not to immigrants but to illegal immigrants, and that it is not really to illegal immigrants but to illegality, that Republicans, more than Democrats, object to people breaking the law and getting away with it. That is possible—certainly almost all of the discussion was put in terms of illegals. On the other hand, one obvious way of reducing the pressure for illegal immigration would be to make legal immigration much easier, and nobody in the Republican party, nobody I noticed in either party, was arguing for that policy. And one solution to the problem of how to deal with the illegals already here would be to give them the option of leaving and coming back, this time as part of a legal process.
As it happens, I know someone who did that. One of my best students—one of the two named in the dedication to one of my books—told me that he had been an illegal immigrant. His family came in on a tourist visa, stayed long past its expiration. Eventually they went to Canada, came back as legal immigrants, in time became citizens. He ended up going to Harvard law school and, when I was last in touch, was an attorney in Los Angeles. But it would have been a lot harder if his family had been penniless and uneducated.
One test of the illegality explanation would be to ask if Republicans are particularly hostile to other forms of illegality. It's tempting but not entirely fair to ask whether they always keep to the speed limit—by my observation, almost nobody does, and on some roads anyone who did would be a traffic hazard. Off hand, I cannot think of any politically live controversies other than immigration over whether lots of people who have broken a law should be prosecuted or forgiven that we could use as a better test. Perhaps a reader can suggest one.
I can think of a variety of other reasons why people might be opposed to immigration, legal or illegal. There is the argument, I think mistaken but not obviously implausible, that there are not enough jobs to go around and we don't need more people competing for them. There is the concern that poor people will come in and go on welfare, or commit crimes, or litter the streets, or change our culture in ways those already here don't like. There is the general nationalist sentiment that favors "us" and fears "them."
But I do not see any good reason why those arguments would be more popular with Republicans than with Democrats, enough more popular to explain the Republican party pushing policies likely to drive a lot of voters away. The groups I would expect to be most concerned with competition from immigrant workers would be labor unions, and they mostly support the Democrats.
And for one good response to the "illegals deserve to be punished for what they did" argument, from a prominent Republican and ex-majority leader:
A possible response, suggested by a commenter, is that the hostility is not to immigrants but to illegal immigrants, and that it is not really to illegal immigrants but to illegality, that Republicans, more than Democrats, object to people breaking the law and getting away with it. That is possible—certainly almost all of the discussion was put in terms of illegals. On the other hand, one obvious way of reducing the pressure for illegal immigration would be to make legal immigration much easier, and nobody in the Republican party, nobody I noticed in either party, was arguing for that policy. And one solution to the problem of how to deal with the illegals already here would be to give them the option of leaving and coming back, this time as part of a legal process.
As it happens, I know someone who did that. One of my best students—one of the two named in the dedication to one of my books—told me that he had been an illegal immigrant. His family came in on a tourist visa, stayed long past its expiration. Eventually they went to Canada, came back as legal immigrants, in time became citizens. He ended up going to Harvard law school and, when I was last in touch, was an attorney in Los Angeles. But it would have been a lot harder if his family had been penniless and uneducated.
One test of the illegality explanation would be to ask if Republicans are particularly hostile to other forms of illegality. It's tempting but not entirely fair to ask whether they always keep to the speed limit—by my observation, almost nobody does, and on some roads anyone who did would be a traffic hazard. Off hand, I cannot think of any politically live controversies other than immigration over whether lots of people who have broken a law should be prosecuted or forgiven that we could use as a better test. Perhaps a reader can suggest one.
I can think of a variety of other reasons why people might be opposed to immigration, legal or illegal. There is the argument, I think mistaken but not obviously implausible, that there are not enough jobs to go around and we don't need more people competing for them. There is the concern that poor people will come in and go on welfare, or commit crimes, or litter the streets, or change our culture in ways those already here don't like. There is the general nationalist sentiment that favors "us" and fears "them."
But I do not see any good reason why those arguments would be more popular with Republicans than with Democrats, enough more popular to explain the Republican party pushing policies likely to drive a lot of voters away. The groups I would expect to be most concerned with competition from immigrant workers would be labor unions, and they mostly support the Democrats.
And for one good response to the "illegals deserve to be punished for what they did" argument, from a prominent Republican and ex-majority leader:
I don't like illegal immigration, but I'll tell you something: I don't run stop lights. But you put me out on the road at two o'clock in the morning on the way to the all-night drugstore to get medicine for my babies, and you give me a stop light that is stuck on red, and no traffic in sight, and I'm gonna go through that red light."
(Dick Armey)
Election Dirty Tricks: Speculation and Comment
I recently came across an online account of how badly the Romney campaign messed up its election day get-out-the-vote operation, with large numbers of volunteers going unused because of failures of the computerized system that was supposed to coordinate them. The account takes it for granted that the errors were due to incompetence by the campaign. While that is the most plausible explanation, there is another and more interesting possibility—deliberate sabotage by one or more Obama supporters who managed to infiltrate the Romney campaign. Such things have been known to happen in elections.
Which reminds me of a talk I heard some years ago from someone who had been involved, at a fairly high level, in state politics. He started by commenting on how shocked he was at the breach of political ethics in the Watergate case. Then he went on to explain.
In the old days, he told us, we spied on them and they spied on us, and both sides took it for granted; that was part of the game. This time some bastard called the cops. Clearly unethical behavior—what is the world coming to?
Which raises the question of whether such dirty tricks may actually play a positive function in politics, seen not as an exercise in morality but as a way of choosing a leader. If Romney can't even protect his own campaign from infiltration and sabotage, can we trust him to protect the country?
The implication in the other direction—what it means if there was sabotage and it was the work not of a few individuals working on their own but of the Obama campaign—is less clear. Insofar as we regard the President as our leader and trust him to employ dirty tricks only against our enemies, his ability to do so is a plus. Insofar as we suspect that we might ourselves be targeted, or that the same tactics might be used to keep us ignorant of information relevant to deciding how to vote in the future, it is a minus.
Which reminds me ... of the Ottoman Empire. In its early and successful period, the succession mechanism was fratricide. When the Sultan died, those of his sons who wanted the throne raised troops and fought it out. It was a costly way of choosing a ruler—considerably more expensive, relative to the wealth of the Empire, than our procedure relative to our wealth. On the other hand, it was a succession mechanism that selected for the ability to win a war, to avoid assassins, to attract support, a collection of military and political talents that might be very useful to a Sultan. As best I can tell, the point at which that mechanism disappeared was about the point at which the Sultan became a pampered figurehead rather than the real ruler of the empire and commander of the army. Also about the point at which the Ottoman Empire stopped expanding.
All of which makes interesting speculation on the real, as opposed to theoretical, mechanics of democracy. But the odds are that it is speculation built, in this case, on air, that the problem really was incompetence, not sabotage.
Which reminds me of a talk I heard some years ago from someone who had been involved, at a fairly high level, in state politics. He started by commenting on how shocked he was at the breach of political ethics in the Watergate case. Then he went on to explain.
In the old days, he told us, we spied on them and they spied on us, and both sides took it for granted; that was part of the game. This time some bastard called the cops. Clearly unethical behavior—what is the world coming to?
Which raises the question of whether such dirty tricks may actually play a positive function in politics, seen not as an exercise in morality but as a way of choosing a leader. If Romney can't even protect his own campaign from infiltration and sabotage, can we trust him to protect the country?
The implication in the other direction—what it means if there was sabotage and it was the work not of a few individuals working on their own but of the Obama campaign—is less clear. Insofar as we regard the President as our leader and trust him to employ dirty tricks only against our enemies, his ability to do so is a plus. Insofar as we suspect that we might ourselves be targeted, or that the same tactics might be used to keep us ignorant of information relevant to deciding how to vote in the future, it is a minus.
Which reminds me ... of the Ottoman Empire. In its early and successful period, the succession mechanism was fratricide. When the Sultan died, those of his sons who wanted the throne raised troops and fought it out. It was a costly way of choosing a ruler—considerably more expensive, relative to the wealth of the Empire, than our procedure relative to our wealth. On the other hand, it was a succession mechanism that selected for the ability to win a war, to avoid assassins, to attract support, a collection of military and political talents that might be very useful to a Sultan. As best I can tell, the point at which that mechanism disappeared was about the point at which the Sultan became a pampered figurehead rather than the real ruler of the empire and commander of the army. Also about the point at which the Ottoman Empire stopped expanding.
All of which makes interesting speculation on the real, as opposed to theoretical, mechanics of democracy. But the odds are that it is speculation built, in this case, on air, that the problem really was incompetence, not sabotage.
November 12, 2012
Which Way the Republicans?
The Republican party seems to have shot itself in the foot this time in at least two ways. The big one was positioning itself as more anti-immigrant than the Democrats, pushing the Hispanic vote, which on other grounds ought to be largely Republican, over to the other side. One of the few things that Bush got right in my view, at least more nearly right than the rest of his party, was immigration.
The other mistake was having two senatorial candidates sufficiently inexperienced, or poorly advised, or insensitive to connotations of language, to make statements that could be viewed as condoning rape.
Quite a lot of people would put the matter more strongly than that, but I think they are mistaken. If you actually look at what Todd Akin said, it demonstrated nothing worse than ignorance of human biology. And there was a reason for the mistake—arguably a creditable reason. Akin was both a committed opponent of abortion and a sufficiently decent human being to be unhappy with the idea of a woman having to bear a child conceived by rape. He solved the problem by believing the claim, apparently originated by a physician on his side of the abortion controversy, that a woman who was raped would not get pregnant. The belief is false, but not entirely absurd—I gather that a pregnant rabbit can, under some circumstances, reabsorb the fetuses. And it is a very convenient belief for someone in Akin's position.
There is no good reason to expect senatorial candidates to know much about biology. And the pattern of imagining away conflicts between the policies you support and the consequences you want is hardly unique to him. Think of all the people who claim, and presumably believe, that cap and trade or subsidies to renewable energy will not only reduce CO2 output but create jobs and save money, or the supporters of farm bills who like to believe that they help not only the farmers but the rest of us as well.
Akin's other mistake was the term "legitimate rape." It was easy to interpret that as implying that some rape is legitimate—acceptable. But it was clear in context that what he meant was rape that is really rape, rather than consensual sex mislabeled rape; it was not the act he was describing as legitimate but the label.
There is quite a lot of "rape" that in that sense is not legitimate—when a seventeen year old sleeps with his fifteen year old girlfriend, for instance, in a state that classifies that act as statutory rape. His mistake was failing to filter out of his response to a question words that could readily be misinterpreted—and, predictably, would be.
Richard Mourdock, the other senator who got caught up in the rape controversy, was not even guilty of a mistake, unless one is willing to classify religion as a mistake—a defensible position, but not one that many in politics are willing to take. For those who believe in an omnipotent God, there is an obvious problem—how to explain bad things happening. The simplest solution, although not the only possible one, is to believe that even bad things are somehow part of God's plan. It was for saying that, in the emotionally loaded context of rape, that Mourdock got in political trouble.
Aside from those two errors and some mess ups in the mechanics of getting out the vote, it is not clear to me what the Republicans got wrong or why they lost. There are a variety of issues on which they could and, in my view, should have taken a different position, such as foreign policy, military expenditure, or the war on drugs. But I have no particular opinion as to whether doing so would have gained votes or lost them.
Which long prelude leads into the real subject of this essay—the future of the Republican party. Currently it is an alliance of several quite different factions, united mostly by the desire to elect candidates. It is possible that that situation will continue—but less likely as a result of the recent defeat in the presidential election. If not, there will either be a civil war within the party, with different factions trying to take over, or a new compromise, probably brokered by the professionals at the top and sold to as much of the existing membership as possible.
What are the factions, what policies are important to them, where are there irresolvable conflicts?
The faction I am closest to is the libertarian faction identified with Ron Paul. Its policies include opposition to aggressive foreign policy and the resulting wars, support for ending or at least scaling back the war on drugs, and support for actual reductions in federal spending—as opposed to the reductions in the rate of growth of spending which are what everyone else means by spending cuts. Insofar as it has a view on issues such as gay marriage or abortion it tends to be the opposite of the current position of the Republican party, although those issues did not play a large role in Ron Paul's campaign for the nomination. He himself is anti-abortion, although he mostly qualified that view by arguing that the question should be dealt with at the state rather than the federal level.
A faction close to that one but not identical is the Tea Party. Its central policy is holding down government spending and the deficit. Membership appears to include both libertarians and social conservatives.
The social conservatives are a third faction, and the one that ended up playing a dominant role in the primary campaign—with the result that the winner of that campaign had to rapidly reverse course once he was nominated, in order to get closer to the political center. Social conservatives have no particular reason to be for or against an aggressive foreign policy, are likely but not certain to support the war on drugs, are hostile to abortion and to gay marriage—although one might argue that their support for marriage ought to outweigh their disapproval of homosexuality. Their ideology has no obvious implications for the level of federal spending, so long as the money isn't spent on things they disapprove of.
The fourth faction is the neo-conservatives. My guess is that they are the smallest of the four judged by numbers but play a major role in the party leadership. They are strongly in favor of an aggressive foreign policy and war when necessary to implement it. They are, as a result, hostile to cuts in defense spending, and so less likely to support reductions in overall spending than any of the other three groups, especially the first two.
If this rough typology of the factions is correct, what plausible coalitions might form over the next few years?
The easy one is a coalition of the libertarians and the tea party, since both agree on the central policy of the latter, reducing government spending and the deficit, and the tea party has no policy on other issues the libertarians care about. One way of reducing government spending is by a less aggressive foreign policy, requiring a smaller military, so Tea Party Republicans ought to be at least somewhat sympathetic to the libertarian position on foreign policy.
A coalition of social conservatives and neo-conservatives is less plausible, since they have nothing much in common, but at least there are no major issues on which their positions are directly opposed. Much the same is true for a coalition of social conservatives and the Tea Party.
I think that exhausts the possibilities for coalitions without serious internal conflicts. Neo-conservative support for a strong military and the foreign policy that requires it is directly contrary to the position of the libertarians and at least partly in conflict with the Tea Party, since expanding one major part of the budget makes it harder to reduce the total. Social conservative opposition to legal abortion and gay marriage conflicts with libertarian views on those issues, and social conservatives are unlikely to support libertarian calls for legalizing (at least) marijuana.
One possibility is for the party to split—but it is hard to see how any of the two-faction coalitions I have described could get enough votes to win a national election, unless it could somehow pull a substantial number of voters out of the democratic coalition. A Tea Party/Libertarian coalition could conceivably attract voters in favor of legalized marijuana, a position favored by a substantial number of Democrats, but I doubt that would be sufficient. Adding support for some way of making illegal immigrants legal might do it—but might also drive out some of the Tea Party faction. A coalition of neo-conservatives and social conservatives looks even less hopeful, at least as long as the Democrats continue to support an aggressive foreign policy.
The closest to a workable restructuring of the party I can come up with would be one that dropped the neo-conservatives, probably the smallest faction, downplayed the conflicts between libertarians and social conservatives, and emphasized spending reduction and associated shifts in foreign policy.
One alternative, given the American political system, is a national coalition of regional parties sharing a common name and not much else. That, after all, is what the Democratic party was for a long time. But I still find it hard to see what, beyond the desire to elect a president, the neoconservatives would have in common with the other three factions sufficient to make the alliance worth the while of either side. And it is hard to imagine a presidential candidate who would appeal to both anti-war libertarians and neo-conservatives.
Another alternative is for one coalition to control the party and hope that the others will stay in despite not being given much beyond crumbs. That is what happened this time, with neo-conservatives and social conservatives getting their preferred policy positions and conceding to the other two nothing much beyond the promise to increase federal spending a little more slowly than the Democrats. If the efforts of the Ron Paul people to take over state party organizations turn out to have succeeded, we might get a rerun of that with the roles reversed. I am not sure what reason neo-conservatives would have to stay in a party dominated by libertarians and the Tea Party, given the alternative of supporting a Democratic party with an aggressive foreign policy, but at least the social conservatives, having nowhere better to go, might remain out of inertia. And some of the anti-war left might finally let the reality of the current administration's policy overcome their ideological distaste for Republicans.
The most interesting alternative would be some restructuring that tore both parties apart, forming new coalitions out of the pieces. Foreign policy is one issue that could do that, drug policy another. No others occur to me, but perhaps readers can offer suggestions.
P.S. (added later) It occurs to me that I ought to tie the end of this essay back to the beginning. Both of the problems I listed come from the social conservative faction—at least, I cannot think of any reason why the other three should be especially hostile to immigration. On the other hand, reducing the coalition to two factions doesn't look like a viable strategy. Perhaps the best option is to point out to the social conservatives that Mexican immigrants are rather more religious and more socially conservative than the current population, so should be welcomed—and persuade them to be more careful about how they defend their position on abortion.
The other mistake was having two senatorial candidates sufficiently inexperienced, or poorly advised, or insensitive to connotations of language, to make statements that could be viewed as condoning rape.
Quite a lot of people would put the matter more strongly than that, but I think they are mistaken. If you actually look at what Todd Akin said, it demonstrated nothing worse than ignorance of human biology. And there was a reason for the mistake—arguably a creditable reason. Akin was both a committed opponent of abortion and a sufficiently decent human being to be unhappy with the idea of a woman having to bear a child conceived by rape. He solved the problem by believing the claim, apparently originated by a physician on his side of the abortion controversy, that a woman who was raped would not get pregnant. The belief is false, but not entirely absurd—I gather that a pregnant rabbit can, under some circumstances, reabsorb the fetuses. And it is a very convenient belief for someone in Akin's position.
There is no good reason to expect senatorial candidates to know much about biology. And the pattern of imagining away conflicts between the policies you support and the consequences you want is hardly unique to him. Think of all the people who claim, and presumably believe, that cap and trade or subsidies to renewable energy will not only reduce CO2 output but create jobs and save money, or the supporters of farm bills who like to believe that they help not only the farmers but the rest of us as well.
Akin's other mistake was the term "legitimate rape." It was easy to interpret that as implying that some rape is legitimate—acceptable. But it was clear in context that what he meant was rape that is really rape, rather than consensual sex mislabeled rape; it was not the act he was describing as legitimate but the label.
There is quite a lot of "rape" that in that sense is not legitimate—when a seventeen year old sleeps with his fifteen year old girlfriend, for instance, in a state that classifies that act as statutory rape. His mistake was failing to filter out of his response to a question words that could readily be misinterpreted—and, predictably, would be.
Richard Mourdock, the other senator who got caught up in the rape controversy, was not even guilty of a mistake, unless one is willing to classify religion as a mistake—a defensible position, but not one that many in politics are willing to take. For those who believe in an omnipotent God, there is an obvious problem—how to explain bad things happening. The simplest solution, although not the only possible one, is to believe that even bad things are somehow part of God's plan. It was for saying that, in the emotionally loaded context of rape, that Mourdock got in political trouble.
Aside from those two errors and some mess ups in the mechanics of getting out the vote, it is not clear to me what the Republicans got wrong or why they lost. There are a variety of issues on which they could and, in my view, should have taken a different position, such as foreign policy, military expenditure, or the war on drugs. But I have no particular opinion as to whether doing so would have gained votes or lost them.
Which long prelude leads into the real subject of this essay—the future of the Republican party. Currently it is an alliance of several quite different factions, united mostly by the desire to elect candidates. It is possible that that situation will continue—but less likely as a result of the recent defeat in the presidential election. If not, there will either be a civil war within the party, with different factions trying to take over, or a new compromise, probably brokered by the professionals at the top and sold to as much of the existing membership as possible.
What are the factions, what policies are important to them, where are there irresolvable conflicts?
The faction I am closest to is the libertarian faction identified with Ron Paul. Its policies include opposition to aggressive foreign policy and the resulting wars, support for ending or at least scaling back the war on drugs, and support for actual reductions in federal spending—as opposed to the reductions in the rate of growth of spending which are what everyone else means by spending cuts. Insofar as it has a view on issues such as gay marriage or abortion it tends to be the opposite of the current position of the Republican party, although those issues did not play a large role in Ron Paul's campaign for the nomination. He himself is anti-abortion, although he mostly qualified that view by arguing that the question should be dealt with at the state rather than the federal level.
A faction close to that one but not identical is the Tea Party. Its central policy is holding down government spending and the deficit. Membership appears to include both libertarians and social conservatives.
The social conservatives are a third faction, and the one that ended up playing a dominant role in the primary campaign—with the result that the winner of that campaign had to rapidly reverse course once he was nominated, in order to get closer to the political center. Social conservatives have no particular reason to be for or against an aggressive foreign policy, are likely but not certain to support the war on drugs, are hostile to abortion and to gay marriage—although one might argue that their support for marriage ought to outweigh their disapproval of homosexuality. Their ideology has no obvious implications for the level of federal spending, so long as the money isn't spent on things they disapprove of.
The fourth faction is the neo-conservatives. My guess is that they are the smallest of the four judged by numbers but play a major role in the party leadership. They are strongly in favor of an aggressive foreign policy and war when necessary to implement it. They are, as a result, hostile to cuts in defense spending, and so less likely to support reductions in overall spending than any of the other three groups, especially the first two.
If this rough typology of the factions is correct, what plausible coalitions might form over the next few years?
The easy one is a coalition of the libertarians and the tea party, since both agree on the central policy of the latter, reducing government spending and the deficit, and the tea party has no policy on other issues the libertarians care about. One way of reducing government spending is by a less aggressive foreign policy, requiring a smaller military, so Tea Party Republicans ought to be at least somewhat sympathetic to the libertarian position on foreign policy.
A coalition of social conservatives and neo-conservatives is less plausible, since they have nothing much in common, but at least there are no major issues on which their positions are directly opposed. Much the same is true for a coalition of social conservatives and the Tea Party.
I think that exhausts the possibilities for coalitions without serious internal conflicts. Neo-conservative support for a strong military and the foreign policy that requires it is directly contrary to the position of the libertarians and at least partly in conflict with the Tea Party, since expanding one major part of the budget makes it harder to reduce the total. Social conservative opposition to legal abortion and gay marriage conflicts with libertarian views on those issues, and social conservatives are unlikely to support libertarian calls for legalizing (at least) marijuana.
One possibility is for the party to split—but it is hard to see how any of the two-faction coalitions I have described could get enough votes to win a national election, unless it could somehow pull a substantial number of voters out of the democratic coalition. A Tea Party/Libertarian coalition could conceivably attract voters in favor of legalized marijuana, a position favored by a substantial number of Democrats, but I doubt that would be sufficient. Adding support for some way of making illegal immigrants legal might do it—but might also drive out some of the Tea Party faction. A coalition of neo-conservatives and social conservatives looks even less hopeful, at least as long as the Democrats continue to support an aggressive foreign policy.
The closest to a workable restructuring of the party I can come up with would be one that dropped the neo-conservatives, probably the smallest faction, downplayed the conflicts between libertarians and social conservatives, and emphasized spending reduction and associated shifts in foreign policy.
One alternative, given the American political system, is a national coalition of regional parties sharing a common name and not much else. That, after all, is what the Democratic party was for a long time. But I still find it hard to see what, beyond the desire to elect a president, the neoconservatives would have in common with the other three factions sufficient to make the alliance worth the while of either side. And it is hard to imagine a presidential candidate who would appeal to both anti-war libertarians and neo-conservatives.
Another alternative is for one coalition to control the party and hope that the others will stay in despite not being given much beyond crumbs. That is what happened this time, with neo-conservatives and social conservatives getting their preferred policy positions and conceding to the other two nothing much beyond the promise to increase federal spending a little more slowly than the Democrats. If the efforts of the Ron Paul people to take over state party organizations turn out to have succeeded, we might get a rerun of that with the roles reversed. I am not sure what reason neo-conservatives would have to stay in a party dominated by libertarians and the Tea Party, given the alternative of supporting a Democratic party with an aggressive foreign policy, but at least the social conservatives, having nowhere better to go, might remain out of inertia. And some of the anti-war left might finally let the reality of the current administration's policy overcome their ideological distaste for Republicans.
The most interesting alternative would be some restructuring that tore both parties apart, forming new coalitions out of the pieces. Foreign policy is one issue that could do that, drug policy another. No others occur to me, but perhaps readers can offer suggestions.
P.S. (added later) It occurs to me that I ought to tie the end of this essay back to the beginning. Both of the problems I listed come from the social conservative faction—at least, I cannot think of any reason why the other three should be especially hostile to immigration. On the other hand, reducing the coalition to two factions doesn't look like a viable strategy. Perhaps the best option is to point out to the social conservatives that Mexican immigrants are rather more religious and more socially conservative than the current population, so should be welcomed—and persuade them to be more careful about how they defend their position on abortion.
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