A Tale of Two Vice Presidents


photo credit: BlatantNews.com

Once upon a time there was a young president who had campaigned on a platform of using the military more conservatively than his predecessor (who happened to be in the other party). During the campaign he had chosen a more experienced man as his running mate in an effort to soothe those voters who might be uncomfortable with his youth an lack of extensive experience.

Once in office an opportunity for military action presented itself and his vice president was among those who were keen to take the opportunity. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, the president heeded the advice of his hawkish vice president and took the necessary steps to expand his use of the military  contrary to his campaign rhetoric.

Of course I am talking about George Bush here and his vice president, Dick Cheney. The trick is that the first paragraph applies word for word to Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden.

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Freedom OF Religion

[quote]By now everybody in Utah at least has heard about the speech given by Elder Dallin H. Oaks at the BYU-Idaho devotional yesterday on the subject of freedom of religion. It will surprise nobody who knows anything about me to hear that I agree 100% with everything he said.

Considering that I could not hope to add insights beyond those of Elder Oaks some might question why I would bother to write anything about his speech. There are two reasons – first, this subject of our freedom of religion (for any atheists I could comfortably call it “freedom of conscience”) is important to every American who cares about preserving a viable nation where we enjoy any amount of liberty whatsoever and thus I could not pass up the chance to promote that message; and second, when I saw that some of what he said was being misunderstood (as shown in a poll where 2 in 3 respondents disagreed with his  assertion that the retaliation and intimidation against supporters of Prop. 8 was similar in nature to the voter-intimidation of blacks in the South) I knew that it was necessary for people who understood what he said to stand up and declare their understanding.

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Budget Hero Revisited

A post from last year that came up in my daily archive caught my attention with its title, A Budgetary Hat-Trick, I had a look to remind myself and rediscovered Budget Hero. When I played last year the budget was projected to go bust in 2033 barring any changes and I managed to balance the budget, increase security, achieve energy independence, and eliminate government waste at the same time so that the budget bust date was pushed back to sometime after 2070. When I looked this year I saw that the game had been updated after the stimulus and bailouts of the past year. The budget is now scheduled to go bust in 2028 without changes. That made me curious about whether I could still balance the budget. Remembering that all of this is completely dependent on the assumptions built into the game, here are the results I got.

I was able to balance the budget and run huge surpluses within 9 years by cutting virtually everything I could think of and jacking up the taxes on everything under the sun. Being a bit more reasonable I was able, like last year, to push the budget bust date into the indefinite future and achieve the goals of increasing national security, cutting government waste, and becoming energy independent.

Besides changing the starting numbers for the federal government fiscal situation the game was also updated to include new priorities to pursue (at least my memory tells me that “Health and Wellness” and “Economic Stimulus” are new since last year). I decided to see if it was even possible to increase national security, reduce government waste, and promote health and wellness simultaneously. It took more work than achieving energy independence and it was absolutely necessary to pass the Cap and Tax to get it done, but I was able achieve these goals.

It should be noted that I only achieved a very modest reduction in the deficit with these goals and I barely managed to earn the “Efficient Government” badge when trying to also get “Health and Wellness” but I did figure it out. I am absolutely confident that if the game were to allow players to choose 4 goals rather than 3 it would be impossible to get “Health and Wellness” and “Energy Independence” while still increasing national security and making government more efficient – something would have to give. (There are other sets of four badges that could probably be accomplished simultaneously.)

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Groundwork for a Campaign

In a recent comment I said:

. . . as a non-celebrity there is a long road of groundwork that I would have to lay before I could hope to run a campaign with any chance of being taken seriously. If I ever feel that I have laid that groundwork you can bet that I will run . . .

Today in Utah Policy I discovered Local Victory from a link in their Campaign Tips section. Honestly I have not paid particular attention to that section before, but this looked like a great resource. As I poked around the site I found “Getting Ready to Run for Office – 8 Steps to Take Today” which helps potential candidates prepare and claims to be applicable “whether that campaign is next year or ‘some year’.” I really liked the list and saw much of what I had seen as necessary preliminary steps but with a bunch more detail and listed in a way that makes me believe that I could actually make a plan to get that groundwork laid. I did notice however that some of the steps would be much easier to take after deciding on something more solid than “some office.”

I’m absolutely confident that I will be spending more time on that site gathering ideas and information to get more prepared, to gauge how prepared I am, and to plan when and if I am ready to launch a campaign.

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Legislator as Communicator

The job of being a legislator demands that anyone who hopes to fill the role be a capable communicator. I’m not talking about the ability to speak in sound-bitese (although there is a place for that). I am talking about the ability to send and receive messages to voters and to other public officials they are called to work with (both outside and within the legislative body they are or hope to be members of).

Sending messages requires the ability both to craft a message and to deliver it in a way that it will be understood. That’s easy to say, but doing it is tricky as the message must be understood across a variety of media. The message must be understandable when it is delivered in written articles, interviews, town halls, sound bites, and in the various abbreviated forms that dominate the realms of advertising. Publishing is very easy in this age (just ask me, I’ve been publishing thoughts for years on many subjects), but some people realize that and seem to forget that actual communication is much more complicated.

Receiving messages  requires the ability to listen, read, or observe without filtering the input to remove any data that contradicts expectations. It also requires a willingness to be open to input from all sides and to make people aware of that willingness. That openness and ability to productively engage with detractors as well as supporters is crucial for a legislator to be effective and to have the necessary information to represent their constituents.

The skills of communication are one of the qualifications of a legislator that are crucial as part of the campaign and the actual job. In fact, the skills of communication should be vastly more important in re-election campaigns than fund raising (this is less true when first campaigning for an office). The only ability that should be as necessary as communicating in a re-election is the ability to work tirelessly.

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Davis School District Bond Election

When I first heard about the Davis School District bond election I started with my default position of not being anxious to give any public entity an open line of credit – certainly not a quarter of a billion dollars in open credit that could cost me hundreds of extra dollars per year in taxes – without solid justification for why it was necessary and a plan for how it would be used.

After doing some more research I can see that this is not “just in case” money as it first appeared and although the wording of the issue on the ballots is such that they can raise taxes to pay for the bonds they have shown through past performance that they do not desire to raise taxes and very well may be able to pay for the bonds without increasing taxes. Courtesy of that history of their commitment to bond frugally and the fact that there is a need for school infrastructure growth in the district I am willing to support this bond issue.

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How Economies Work


photo credit: unforth

When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations he was not writing about how economies and markets should work, he was writing about how they do work. Anyone who wants to know how they do work must read that book. Be prepared – it’s long and very detailed and you must be committed to doing a good deal of intellectual work if you are going to really understand it. The copy I have been reading is over 400 pages of small print and it is completely lacking in filler material.

I could not even pretend to give a summary of the book (as Wikipedia does) but I would like to point out one crucial detail that few people seem to realize and which shreds virtually every economic move our government makes. Money is a representation of value. Value is a representation of work and the only accurate determiner of price. Price controls and subsidies cannot alter the actual value of goods and services – all they can do is distort the representation of value and confuse the consumer by manipulating the data. Anytime there is a manipulative force in an economy the economy will respond, it will conform to the manipulation, but it still operates on the same universal laws.

I can easily understand how people today would be confused about the laws of economics because we have pundits, professionals, and even many economists who talk about the forces of economics as if they were under the control of men. The fact is that men can operate in accordance with those laws or they can try to manipulate them, but regardless of what we may observe the laws of economics will be obeyed and we will receive the consequences of our actions even if we are not sophisticated enough or have long enough lives to recognize those consequences. No matter how hard or how high we throw a ball – even into (or out of) orbit, it still must obey the laws of gravity.

The laws of economics are exactly as universal as the laws of physics. You can stand around all day arguing with a physicist about how gravity operates but at the end of the argument gravity will be unchanged. In your argument you can propose many great new ideas about how gravity should work, but gravity will be unchanged. If you have a misunderstanding of how gravity does work and operate based on that misunderstanding it will not preclude the possibility that you could design an airplane that flies, but designing an airplane that has not crashed yet does not prove that your understanding of gravity is correct and odds are pretty good that if your understanding is flawed the plane will have a flaw in its design that will either cause a crash or make the plane less functional than a plane designed by someone who understands the laws of physics.

What we have today in Washington – among both political parties – are a bunch of people most of whom grossly misunderstand the laws of economics and who believe that the laws of economics are no less subject to revision than the speed limit on an interstate highway. They mistake the reference to an invisible hand and believe that it refers to sleight of hand. The do not recognize the fact that there is nothing tricky or supernatural about the laws that Smith explained centuries ago. He did not make them up, he simply wrote them down after decades of study and observation – like any good scientist. In fact, the name of the book is “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”

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Put the Shoe on the Other Foot


photo credit: Doug20022

I’m beginning to conclude that we should never make a political decision without first reversing our perspective of the decision and seeing how it looks. For example, on health care there is a lot of focus on what this will look like for those who want insurance but can’t get it. Only now do any politicians seem to be considering what this legislation does to those who have insurance or don’t want it.

Rep. Ron Paul does this with Afghanistan and I’d like to have a hypothetical look at Iran right now to see what it looks like.

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Liberty is . . .

If I am pursuing liberty it seems reasonable to try defining what “liberty” is. Let me start off by saying that I chose the name very carefully and in the years since then I have confirmed many times that I chose correctly – liberty is what I am pursuing, and nothing short of liberty will satisfy me.

The primary (top) dictionary definition of liberty is:

a. The condition of being free from restriction or control.

b. The right and power to act, believe, or express oneself in a manner of one’s own choosing.

c. The condition of being physically and legally free from confinement, servitude, or forced labor.

I would like to add my own working definition of what liberty is. Let me preface that list of what liberty is with a couple of statements of what liberty is not:

Now for what liberty is:

  • Liberty is hard work
  • Liberty is personal responsibility
  • Liberty is the freedom to make choices
  • Liberty is attainable only on an individual level
  • Liberty is compatible with all universal laws (laws of physics, laws of human nature, laws of economics, etc.)
  • Liberty is the highest goal a person could achieve

Finally I would like to state that there is no such thing as purely political liberty except in the sense that it is possible to live in a society that promotes/provides political liberty while personally making choices that curtail ones own personal liberty. This means that in order to achieve political liberty we must be willing and able to attain personal liberty in other areas of life through our use of personal choice and accountability – anything less than that is simply freedom.

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Legislator as Fundraiser

When it comes to raising money to run a campaign an ideal legislator needs to understand the real value of money in politics. They need to accept that a serious campaign will require more money than they can personally supply (unless they have significant personal wealth). They need to be comfortable asking people to support them financially – that requires not only being comfortable making the request, but also confident in the message they are promoting in their campaign. On the other hand, an ideal legislator should never fall into the trap of thinking that money can overcome the absolute necessity for them to be putting in hard work on the ground making their case among the people who will be casting their votes.

Here is where I know some people will disagree with me. I contend that a campaign even for federal offices can be financed entirely through personal donations by people residing within the jurisdiction of the office being sought. Contributions from businesses should be refused. Businesses and industries that are part of the district for the office being sought should make any desired contributions through the individuals within those companies. Money from Political Action Committees should not be given to specific candidates. Committees that wish to help a candidate should spend their own money in whatever way they feel will best help the candidate without the candidate ever receiving any money from them. “Abc PAC” can endorse a candidate, can buy booths saying they support that candidate, can make and distribute literature and other advertising materials for the candidate, but should not write a check to the candidate. Anything they produce should never have the candidate saying that they approved the message – in other words, the PAC and the candidate should be independent of each other with full right to voice their support of the efforts of the other.

Personally I would prefer that a candidate never run a campaign on debt although I am not ready to say that I could never support a candidate that uses debt to help finance their campaign. I would say that no good candidate should ever carry debt from one campaign to another. If they have not paid off their expenses from a previous campaign (for the same office or another office) they should not be running a new campaign.

I know that there are people who would argue that this ideal is not feasible in our current political environment and I am open to thoughts on what can and should be done, but please don’t just shoot down my ideal without explaining why we should not desire it.

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