Better the Devil You Know

The Down Under Defense Expert (DUDE) sent me an email asking me to read a voter's referendum they're considering in New Zealand. Feel free to read it yourself. I just wanted to expound a little bit on my answer. Here's what I wrote to the DUDE:

"I found it maddeningly complex. But then I'm used to the US system of winner-take-all (the NZ referendum calls the system First Past the Post (FPP)) and having minority party issues subsumed under the major parties. That said, I've heard/read good things about the Australian system. The others were variations on a theme that made little difference to me because I have little trust in the stability of governments with a multiplicity of parties.

"The advantage of a major-party system that incorporates minority views is that much of the assimilation and wheeling/dealing is done prior to the election. Otherwise, you end up with one small party can upset the entire governmental apple cart.

"I fail to see much advantage to the systems that encourage the minority parties, nor do I understand NZ's desire to change their system or the bewildering number of distinctions without a difference. If what you have works, don't fix what isn't broken."

There are three other systems: the existing NZ system (Mixed Member Proportional), the Irish system (Single Transferrable Vote), and the Japanese system (Supplementary Member). My observations are just that multi-party nations and governments seem more unstable than the U.S. The advantage of the multi-party system, if I had to guess it, is simply that it gives broader voice and more formal power to minority parties than exists in a single- or two-party system, as we have. If a smaller party (say, the Greens or Libertarians) had a strenuous objection to a particular law or course of action and their support was necessary to ensure a majority coalition, the government/parliament will be dissolved and new elections are called if no agreement can be reached. Most of these governments are designed along the British model, and nearly all of the major Western nations (incl. Israel and Japan) that use it have shakeups of that sort at one time or another.

The American results are gridlock followed by elections every two, four, or six years. But, again, the national majority parties--the Democrats and Republicans--are coalitions of what would be separate minority parties in these parliamentary democracies. Imagine, instead of the Dems and the GOP duking it out year after year, with the arguments occurring within the party caucuses, the individual coalition members each had its own party and then had their fights in Congress instead of on the convention floor. On the left, you'd have Big Labor/Government Unions, Trial Lawyers, Greens, Minority Rights Activists, Feminists, and flat-out Socialists and other small groups. On the right, you'd have Big Oil, the Moral Majority/Evangelicals, Gun Advocates, Economic Free-Marketeers, and members of the Armed Forces, and flat-out Fascists. Other groups with their own parties might include the Farmers, Bankers (who blow with the wind), Libertarians, and other moderates and Independents. Think our ballots are confusing now? Imagine how many hanging chads could screw up a soup like that!

That, my friends, is why we have primaries. Individuals representing these various smaller interests run off against each other within the larger parties. The winners of these contests have to form an internal platform within the Democratic or Republican Party that the bulk of the coalition can live with, and that final candidate goes up against his or her other number in the other party. Those two candidates, in turn, must convince 50% +1 of their fellow Americans (more or less--we have our own complexities with the Electoral College) to vote for them. The winner, then, must govern wisely and in the best interests of the nation as they see fit. If the majority of the public doesn't approve of their performance, the opposing party gets put into power in the legislature in reaction against the President. And so the pendulum swings, again, back toward the middle. That is the point and the genius of the American system. It gives me a headache to think of having to adjust to another one. I wonder what our cousins in New Zealand are thinking that they wish to reconstruct their system.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it is broken in places, fix those places before doing something stupid like trashing the whole system and tossing out whatever good the old system had. So sayeth this voter, anyway.

Banking Here and Abroad

The Swiss care more about your privacy than the U.S. Government does...even when you break the law!

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE5236OL20090304?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

Government Watching Continues

After I signed off the other night, it occurred to me that the first time I heard "czar" in connection with a U.S. government official was when Ronald Reagan appointed his "Drug Czar." That's when I started getting a lesson from more libertarian family members on Prohibition and the amount of money wasted on criminalizing drugs and alcohol.

Over the years, other czars have appeared on the scene: a copyright czar, an energy czar, and so forth. The Secretary of the Treasury is, for all practical purposes, an "economic czar," and was given extraordinary powers to spend federal money to bail out businesses he perceived to be in distress. We could get a "car czar" to address our failing auto industry.

What the heck are all these "czars" for, anyway? Do they do any good? Just so there's no mistake here: a "czar" is the title that used to be worn by Russian monarchs (and might be again, at the rate they're going). It's a Slavic rendering of "Caesar," ruler of the old Roman and Byzantine Empires. It means, in contemporary parlance, "the person in charge"; I can only guess that "czar" was applied as a cute term to convey that status.

As near as I can determine, these "czars" are put in place by Presidents to make things happen that federal agencies in their present form cannot address or to address problems that cut across multiple agencies' jurisdiction (the War on Drugs certainly qualifies in that respect). These czars are supposed to be "rainmakers" who can make things happen that others within existing agencies cannot. Again, rather than appoint yet another official and complicate the bureaucracy further, my simplistic mind would ask, "Why can't you just change the person in charge of the agency or agencies in question or fix how they operate to make them work better? Why not reform instead of complication?"

These positions remind me of the "Chancellor of the Exchequer," the man appointed by the King of England to guard the nation's treasury, which at the time was kept in a checkered bag, or the special titles bestowed in medieval European or Chinese courts as rewards for services to the king. There's a certain monarchical feeling to the whole thing. And, quite frankly, does anyone else have a problem with little Caesars being included in the apparatus of our nation's government?? Nixon instituted the practice, just around the time complaints arose about the "imperial presidency" (a term that arose in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson was in charge). As the power of the U.S. continues to increase, so too does the power of the president, and this "most powerful man in the free world" has only increased in power since the end of the Cold War.

*

And why should "czars" bother me so much? Maybe because of the great speed with which President Obama wishes to push through one of the largest spending bills I've ever seen. Recessions are not unprecedented. In my nearly 40-year lifetime, there have been five, including the present situation. None of them resulted in government takeovers of HUGE chunks of the economy or actual businesses. Much of this stimulus bill goes, as I noted yesterday, into government projects, not on infrastructure or activities necessarily relevant to government policy ($75M for smoking prevention? I thought he wanted to tax cigarettes so they could use the money to fund nationalized healthcare). Some of the money won't even be SPENT until 2010, so what's the big frickin' emergency?

If Obama is determined to have the most ethical administration since the Clinton Administration, shouldn't he give the Congress and the American people time to read the bill carefully to make sure there's nothing in it that's awry or counterproductive? And, again, if he intends to spend some of the money in 2010, why pass it as part of this year's budget?

For most of the 2000s, I heard how George W. Bush was using the war on terror as an excuse to give the Chief Executive unprecedented--nay, dictatorial--powers. I might have even half-believed some of it. On the flip side, I would say that President Obama is trying to use a recession--NOT a depression--as an excuse to give the federal government unprecedented economic power.

Immanuel Kant had a concept he called the "categorical imperative," which I will quote here:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

This is, essentially, the Golden Rule with teeth: not just "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Rather, "Act toward others as you would expect to be treated in every single case." While I'm not a huge fan of Kant, I do believe that more than half of our laws would not get passed if lawmakers thought this way: "Would I want this law to be passed if I knew my political opponents would use it against me when I'm out of power?" One might ask the same question of waterboarding or pay cuts or estate taxes or warrantless wiretaps or unemployment insurance. "Would you want this law passed if it applied to YOU?"

I have more reading to do. Let's be careful out there.