The whole system was set up 200+ years ago on the principle that a small group would decide for the rest of us. The whole thing was "Cast your vote for your US Representative, your state legislatures and governor, and every four years for electors. Then shut up and do what you're told." Hell, direct election of US Senators only happened when things were within a very few states of calling a Constitutional Convention, despite the very high hurdle on that. At about the same time, citizen initiatives and recalls at the state levels were a radical new idea.
I'm not remarking on it good or bad, just pointing out that that's what happened (and continues to happen, all over the world). My personal opinion is that economic libertarianism in the US died when the frontier closed, although the corpse is still thrashing. Last night's debate was terrifying to me because it looks very much like civil libertarianism, even for the privileged groups in the US, is about to die.
This past summer I drove across the Great Plains with an about-to-turn-two granddaughter. For her, it was Lilo and Stitch [1]. We also planned on 90 minutes for lunch and a couple of other lengthy rest stops where there could be a bunch of running about. Oh, and tried to schedule things so that we were getting into the car at her normal nap times -- she dropped off to sleep pretty quickly.
[1] There's a market out there for a movie player app that's (a) almost impossible to get out of and (b) has controls to start/stop the playback and to make modest adjustments in the volume, but no more than that.
It's all part of the same trend. For the last hundred years or so, the developed countries of the world have decided that, as they got richer, there was a growing list of things that would be made available to everyone, not just the well-to-do. So we got modest public pensions, much more affordable access to college, guaranteed access to health care for (at least) some parts of the population, clean air, clean water, and so on. In the case of previously poor countries that reached developed status, at some point they all decided to do the same thing. The accounting for it differs from country to country, but there's no question about what's happened.
Resistance was most pronounced in the United States, with the net result that the same services are much more expensive to provide than in the other developed countries.
I agree with you about liberalism being the result of people feeling conservatism is wrong for the country, but how are you bringing those people along, getting them to see that what you want is indeed right for the country?
If you'll grant me the assumption that there's a strong correlation between the liberal/conservative split and the urban/rural split, then... Crop price supports, subsidized crop insurance, subsidized infrastructure from electricity under the REA to broadband under RUS and everything in between. School district equalization funds that keep rural schools going. More states than not have been running programs to try to maintain or increase rural health care services for decades. As an interesting one, satellite television at the same price everyone pays (you wouldn't believe what the satellite companies originally intended to charge customers who were beyond the reach of cable). There's at least an arguable case for liberals saying, "If you want us to help you pay for the parts of modernity that you like, you have to accept some parts that you're not so fond of."
Somewhat to Kolohe's point, there's plenty of federal employment in the Denver metro area -- big ones include the Denver Federal Center, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Ball Aerospace, and NIST/NOAA/NCAR/NREL just off the top of my head. But they're not why Douglas County is rich.
A third of Douglas County's population is in the very well-to-do Highlands Ranch. More than half lives in HR and the other towns along the northern boundary of the county. Any gap between those and the southern Denver suburbs disappeared years ago. In fact, some of the big southern suburbs -- Littleton, Aurora -- now extend into Douglas County somewhat.
Re the last couple of sentences, they may also be in the situation that if the employment went away and it took them a year to find a new position, there would have to be significant changes in expenditures. Somewhere recently I read a piece about families with a quarter-million or more in annual income who were effectively living paycheck to paycheck.
Not much. Most of Douglas County's rich folks work in the huge array of tech, finance, and high-end business services that has spread out from the Denver Tech Center.
Varies a lot. Consider the Koch brothers, current scourge of the Democrats (or at least, I'm getting weekly e-mails telling me that the Kochs are coming to steal our Congressional seats and eat our puppies). All four have advanced degrees from elite East Coast schools. Two were basically bought out of the family business. One of those splits his time between Boston and an elite coastal community where he spends lots of money on sailing. The other lives in NYC somewhere. One of the two still in the business lives in Manhattan and does their high finance. All three of those are serious patrons of the arts in NYC and Boston. The last lives in Wichita and handles the large and complex nuts-and-bolts of their oil services business, and is active in the fine arts in Wichita.
Telling that they have backed out of the Presidential politics for now, and are focusing on Congressional seats and state issues.
The other day I typed the single search term "cartogram" into the image search on Google. Of the first 30 or so images, three were cartograms I'd built and used in various places on the Web. There was a brief euphoric "How cool is that!" moment before I remembered... tailored search.
That sucks. Do other search engines do that as well?
I wouldn't say sucks, especially if they're successfully moving links helpful to me higher up in the list. I assume that all the browser companies are doing that, or they're planning on going out of business because everyone thinks their search isn't as helpful as the competition's.
I've been pointing out the big data "risks" for going on two decades now. Google and the rest have a bazillion spare cycles, some of which get spent looking for personal preferences and connectivity networks. A couple of months ago, LinkedIn asked me if I know Will Truman (under his real name). Somewhere, some amount of time in Google Groups and other Internet activities reached some threshold and the software kicked out a possible linkage that got sold to LinkedIn.
Almost completely off topic, but unless one takes pains to hide their identity, Google's search results will be tailored at least somewhat to the individual. The order in which things are presented to me may be quite different than the order they are presented to you, particularly if the search includes terms that I have used in the past.
Hopefully you'll get better results than I did back in the late 70s (I assume that they've learned a lot). For two years, at steadily increasing dosages, I had exactly the same response to each shot: two hours of fairly intense allergy symptoms, then three days when I was completely symptom free, then back to whatever allergy symptoms were "normal" for me at that time of year. The allergy specialist said that he had discussed my peculiar reaction with colleagues, and no one had a clue what was going on.
A decade ago when I was taking graduate public policy classes at the University of Denver, the classes were mostly a lot 20- and early-30-something folk, and two of us in our fifties. On more than one occasion during the homeland security class, the other old fart and I went off on a rant that was a mix of (1) people died to get you those civil rights, (2) if you give them up you'll probably never get them back, and (3) Niemöller's "first they came for the socialists" quote.
The only one I remember in any detail ended up along the lines of, "After a quarter in this class, I know something about each of your backgrounds. I've got a much deeper understanding of what can be done with contemporary computing and communications technology than any of you. And I am terrified when I listen to what powers you're willing to grant to the government."
Western states are moving relatively rapidly to universal vote by mail. Prove you're eligible once, and each election after that you get a ballot in the mail, that you can return in the mail. I have eastern friends who tell me that there must be massive fraud going on in there somewhere, if only we would look harder. As I understand it, Oregon has been looking quite hard for 20 years now -- at some point, my friends need to admit that there's no more fraud than in-person voting produces.
Sounds like something my uncle, a former Green Beret, would have said. I did hear him tell someone in rural Iowa, "You're driving around with a loaded weapon in this vehicle that's not in someone's hands, who's taking care that it doesn't get pointed at people? Stop the car and let me out."
But will they be able to do anything with it? Back in the days when content was simple analog, there were limits to how much it could be concealed and still be useful. Now that things are digital, there are a number of strong encryption schemes with fancy key management and device enabling that make decryption in real time not impossible, but prohibitively expensive. Unless you use one of the approved devices for decrypting the signal.
Sirius broadcasts on known frequencies using known modulation schemes, so it's pretty easy to access the bit stream. Doing something useful with it is a much harder problem.
Indeed. There's a whole world currently counting on the fact that the US maintains a (very expensive) military capability to force an opening of the Strait of Hormuz if Iran decides to declare it closed, and trusts that the US won't make "only shipments bound for the US" a condition for doing the forcing. So long as the US can be trusted to not limit trade through the Strait, all of James's game theory applies and says that the proper strategy for the rest of the developed economies is "let the US pay for it".
OTOH, a WSA with a population of 75M could cheerfully give up any nuclear weapons capability and leave it up to the 225M in the ESA to cover those costs. After all, what does a Department of Defense for the WSA have to worry about? Canada? Mexico? A strike force from Asia by way of Hawaii, trying to sneak across 2,000 miles of empty ocean? The ESA, sneaking across 500 miles of Great Plains? To paraphrase Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, how many bombs does it take to wipe out the WSA? Nine, although a few of them would have to be awfully big: Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay area, LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Denver. But for conventional warfare, it's a really hard problem.
We have guys demanding that they carry guns into church, I guess on the offhand chance that the organist will pop a cap in their ass.
We did have a case here of a shooter entering one of the megachurches, killing two and wounding three as he did so, who was stopped by a church member acting as a volunteer security guard using her privately-owned handgun. Still, the risk of getting killed in traffic is almost certainly higher.
Broadly, I don't disagree with anything you write here. As an intellectual exercise, I predict exactly one partition -- east-west with the Great Plains as the dividing line. I do so on the basis of various trends that are now occurring and are likely to continue in some fashion into the future. For much of my career, it's what was called a "Mike project" at the places I worked. Given several trends, what happens if you extend them? Does the forecast include interesting possibilities? If the partition happened in less than 25 years I would be shocked, for precisely the reason you and others have given: significant linkages of various sorts across urban America. I'm interested in other secession "plans", but don't predict that they'll happen.
What sorts of trends? There are reasons to believe that air and land transportation is going to get much more expensive in money and/or time in the future. Cheap petroleum is getting harder to find. Growing political pressure to control CO2 emissions. Imagine a generation that grows up in Portland for whom Times Square is a place they see pictures or videos of, but almost no one visits. Imagine a generation of New Yorkers who have never visited one of the big national parks in the West. Moving across the country becomes more difficult The cultural linkages get weaker. I claim that Friedman's The World is Flat predictions of an ever-shrinking world came out just when circumstances suggested the trend was about to reverse :^)
It's a nerd specialty, but I think there are going to be enormous pressures put on the US electric grid in the future. The two sides of my hypothetical partition are already headed down different paths. The western path leads to, I believe, a system that requires a regional strategy that won't work in the East. The current federal policies for how reliability is to be achieved were designed with the Eastern grid in mind, not the Western. Maybe the federal government is flexible enough to allow both, but I have my doubts.
Most of the people you're talking to would be very, very disappointed in how I think my partition would work. Ranchers who think they're going to suddenly get unfettered access to those millions of acres of public lands, for example. But a WSA would be very heavily urban/suburban, so wilderness and preservation are going to be well represented in the debate. Certainly there would be some differences -- western states would almost certainly have a much stronger interest in land exchanges that break down some of the god-awful checkerboard patterns the feds created in the 1870s. The libertarians will be disappointed, too. Regulations follow urbanization; it is no surprise that California, by population the least-rural state in the country, does so much regulation.
Here's a post I did after the Colorado election that had a the-county-commissioners-should-look-at-it advisory item on the ballot in a few counties. Will's right on the mark about all the points. The biggest share of North Colorado's population would still be Front Range suburbs. I did the exercise of drawing a real rural state (no town bigger than about 25,000) out of parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. The population cartogram suggests that even pulling from all three states, the population would be far to small.
@tod-kelly
As a hypothetical, from the perspective of a movement conservative... What is the difference between the tariffs and other laws starting in 1828, which had at least the secondary purpose of transferring wealth from the South to the North, and the succession of Medicaid expansion, same-sex marriage, and regulatory decisions that seriously penalize the use of coal for electricity generation? And why those shouldn't be viewed as as serious a threat to a regional culture and economics as the Tariff of Abominations and its assorted follow-ons? Serious enough that the only way to avoid the tyranny of the majority is to somehow get out of the Union?
I'm only a hack historian, but my perception is that the North believed "Oh, no, they're just talking, they won't possibly resort to violence and try to leave; if we just keep pushing, they will accept that we have the better argument." And the price to enforce the argument that the South should abandon a major aspect of its culture, and accept the transfer of wealth, was a million lives?
There are days when I'm terrified about what might happen.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Market Failure 5: Imperfect Information (When life hands you lemons, call your mechanic)”
The whole system was set up 200+ years ago on the principle that a small group would decide for the rest of us. The whole thing was "Cast your vote for your US Representative, your state legislatures and governor, and every four years for electors. Then shut up and do what you're told." Hell, direct election of US Senators only happened when things were within a very few states of calling a Constitutional Convention, despite the very high hurdle on that. At about the same time, citizen initiatives and recalls at the state levels were a radical new idea.
"
I'm not remarking on it good or bad, just pointing out that that's what happened (and continues to happen, all over the world). My personal opinion is that economic libertarianism in the US died when the frontier closed, although the corpse is still thrashing. Last night's debate was terrifying to me because it looks very much like civil libertarianism, even for the privileged groups in the US, is about to die.
On “Traveling with Children”
This past summer I drove across the Great Plains with an about-to-turn-two granddaughter. For her, it was Lilo and Stitch [1]. We also planned on 90 minutes for lunch and a couple of other lengthy rest stops where there could be a bunch of running about. Oh, and tried to schedule things so that we were getting into the car at her normal nap times -- she dropped off to sleep pretty quickly.
[1] There's a market out there for a movie player app that's (a) almost impossible to get out of and (b) has controls to start/stop the playback and to make modest adjustments in the volume, but no more than that.
On “Market Failure 5: Imperfect Information (When life hands you lemons, call your mechanic)”
It's all part of the same trend. For the last hundred years or so, the developed countries of the world have decided that, as they got richer, there was a growing list of things that would be made available to everyone, not just the well-to-do. So we got modest public pensions, much more affordable access to college, guaranteed access to health care for (at least) some parts of the population, clean air, clean water, and so on. In the case of previously poor countries that reached developed status, at some point they all decided to do the same thing. The accounting for it differs from country to country, but there's no question about what's happened.
Resistance was most pronounced in the United States, with the net result that the same services are much more expensive to provide than in the other developed countries.
On “Food for Thought”
I agree with you about liberalism being the result of people feeling conservatism is wrong for the country, but how are you bringing those people along, getting them to see that what you want is indeed right for the country?
If you'll grant me the assumption that there's a strong correlation between the liberal/conservative split and the urban/rural split, then... Crop price supports, subsidized crop insurance, subsidized infrastructure from electricity under the REA to broadband under RUS and everything in between. School district equalization funds that keep rural schools going. More states than not have been running programs to try to maintain or increase rural health care services for decades. As an interesting one, satellite television at the same price everyone pays (you wouldn't believe what the satellite companies originally intended to charge customers who were beyond the reach of cable). There's at least an arguable case for liberals saying, "If you want us to help you pay for the parts of modernity that you like, you have to accept some parts that you're not so fond of."
On “Only the Right Believes in Class Conflict Anymore”
Somewhat to Kolohe's point, there's plenty of federal employment in the Denver metro area -- big ones include the Denver Federal Center, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Ball Aerospace, and NIST/NOAA/NCAR/NREL just off the top of my head. But they're not why Douglas County is rich.
"
A third of Douglas County's population is in the very well-to-do Highlands Ranch. More than half lives in HR and the other towns along the northern boundary of the county. Any gap between those and the southern Denver suburbs disappeared years ago. In fact, some of the big southern suburbs -- Littleton, Aurora -- now extend into Douglas County somewhat.
"
A boat is a hole in the water into which you can throw an infinite amount of money.
"
Re the last couple of sentences, they may also be in the situation that if the employment went away and it took them a year to find a new position, there would have to be significant changes in expenditures. Somewhere recently I read a piece about families with a quarter-million or more in annual income who were effectively living paycheck to paycheck.
"
Not much. Most of Douglas County's rich folks work in the huge array of tech, finance, and high-end business services that has spread out from the Denver Tech Center.
"
Varies a lot. Consider the Koch brothers, current scourge of the Democrats (or at least, I'm getting weekly e-mails telling me that the Kochs are coming to steal our Congressional seats and eat our puppies). All four have advanced degrees from elite East Coast schools. Two were basically bought out of the family business. One of those splits his time between Boston and an elite coastal community where he spends lots of money on sailing. The other lives in NYC somewhere. One of the two still in the business lives in Manhattan and does their high finance. All three of those are serious patrons of the arts in NYC and Boston. The last lives in Wichita and handles the large and complex nuts-and-bolts of their oil services business, and is active in the fine arts in Wichita.
Telling that they have backed out of the Presidential politics for now, and are focusing on Congressional seats and state issues.
"
Dejah Thoris of Helium and/or John Carter? NSFW.
"
The other day I typed the single search term "cartogram" into the image search on Google. Of the first 30 or so images, three were cartograms I'd built and used in various places on the Web. There was a brief euphoric "How cool is that!" moment before I remembered... tailored search.
"
That sucks. Do other search engines do that as well?
I wouldn't say sucks, especially if they're successfully moving links helpful to me higher up in the list. I assume that all the browser companies are doing that, or they're planning on going out of business because everyone thinks their search isn't as helpful as the competition's.
I've been pointing out the big data "risks" for going on two decades now. Google and the rest have a bazillion spare cycles, some of which get spent looking for personal preferences and connectivity networks. A couple of months ago, LinkedIn asked me if I know Will Truman (under his real name). Somewhere, some amount of time in Google Groups and other Internet activities reached some threshold and the software kicked out a possible linkage that got sold to LinkedIn.
"
Almost completely off topic, but unless one takes pains to hide their identity, Google's search results will be tailored at least somewhat to the individual. The order in which things are presented to me may be quite different than the order they are presented to you, particularly if the search includes terms that I have used in the past.
On “Weekend!”
Hopefully you'll get better results than I did back in the late 70s (I assume that they've learned a lot). For two years, at steadily increasing dosages, I had exactly the same response to each shot: two hours of fairly intense allergy symptoms, then three days when I was completely symptom free, then back to whatever allergy symptoms were "normal" for me at that time of year. The allergy specialist said that he had discussed my peculiar reaction with colleagues, and no one had a clue what was going on.
On “Linky Friday #144: Far Out”
A decade ago when I was taking graduate public policy classes at the University of Denver, the classes were mostly a lot 20- and early-30-something folk, and two of us in our fifties. On more than one occasion during the homeland security class, the other old fart and I went off on a rant that was a mix of (1) people died to get you those civil rights, (2) if you give them up you'll probably never get them back, and (3) Niemöller's "first they came for the socialists" quote.
The only one I remember in any detail ended up along the lines of, "After a quarter in this class, I know something about each of your backgrounds. I've got a much deeper understanding of what can be done with contemporary computing and communications technology than any of you. And I am terrified when I listen to what powers you're willing to grant to the government."
On “Marquee Case On The Docket: Evenwel v. Abbott”
Western states are moving relatively rapidly to universal vote by mail. Prove you're eligible once, and each election after that you get a ballot in the mail, that you can return in the mail. I have eastern friends who tell me that there must be massive fraud going on in there somewhere, if only we would look harder. As I understand it, Oregon has been looking quite hard for 20 years now -- at some point, my friends need to admit that there's no more fraud than in-person voting produces.
On “Cowen on Gun Control and Militarism”
Sounds like something my uncle, a former Green Beret, would have said. I did hear him tell someone in rural Iowa, "You're driving around with a loaded weapon in this vehicle that's not in someone's hands, who's taking care that it doesn't get pointed at people? Stop the car and let me out."
On “Market Failure 4: Collective Action Problems (Tragedies and Catch 22s)”
But will they be able to do anything with it? Back in the days when content was simple analog, there were limits to how much it could be concealed and still be useful. Now that things are digital, there are a number of strong encryption schemes with fancy key management and device enabling that make decryption in real time not impossible, but prohibitively expensive. Unless you use one of the approved devices for decrypting the signal.
Sirius broadcasts on known frequencies using known modulation schemes, so it's pretty easy to access the bit stream. Doing something useful with it is a much harder problem.
On “The Texas Secession Microcosm”
Indeed. There's a whole world currently counting on the fact that the US maintains a (very expensive) military capability to force an opening of the Strait of Hormuz if Iran decides to declare it closed, and trusts that the US won't make "only shipments bound for the US" a condition for doing the forcing. So long as the US can be trusted to not limit trade through the Strait, all of James's game theory applies and says that the proper strategy for the rest of the developed economies is "let the US pay for it".
OTOH, a WSA with a population of 75M could cheerfully give up any nuclear weapons capability and leave it up to the 225M in the ESA to cover those costs. After all, what does a Department of Defense for the WSA have to worry about? Canada? Mexico? A strike force from Asia by way of Hawaii, trying to sneak across 2,000 miles of empty ocean? The ESA, sneaking across 500 miles of Great Plains? To paraphrase Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, how many bombs does it take to wipe out the WSA? Nine, although a few of them would have to be awfully big: Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay area, LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Denver. But for conventional warfare, it's a really hard problem.
On “What Passes For A Profile In Courage These Days”
We have guys demanding that they carry guns into church, I guess on the offhand chance that the organist will pop a cap in their ass.
We did have a case here of a shooter entering one of the megachurches, killing two and wounding three as he did so, who was stopped by a church member acting as a volunteer security guard using her privately-owned handgun. Still, the risk of getting killed in traffic is almost certainly higher.
On “The Texas Secession Microcosm”
Dang, everyone here is a better writer than I am.
Broadly, I don't disagree with anything you write here. As an intellectual exercise, I predict exactly one partition -- east-west with the Great Plains as the dividing line. I do so on the basis of various trends that are now occurring and are likely to continue in some fashion into the future. For much of my career, it's what was called a "Mike project" at the places I worked. Given several trends, what happens if you extend them? Does the forecast include interesting possibilities? If the partition happened in less than 25 years I would be shocked, for precisely the reason you and others have given: significant linkages of various sorts across urban America. I'm interested in other secession "plans", but don't predict that they'll happen.
What sorts of trends? There are reasons to believe that air and land transportation is going to get much more expensive in money and/or time in the future. Cheap petroleum is getting harder to find. Growing political pressure to control CO2 emissions. Imagine a generation that grows up in Portland for whom Times Square is a place they see pictures or videos of, but almost no one visits. Imagine a generation of New Yorkers who have never visited one of the big national parks in the West. Moving across the country becomes more difficult The cultural linkages get weaker. I claim that Friedman's The World is Flat predictions of an ever-shrinking world came out just when circumstances suggested the trend was about to reverse :^)
It's a nerd specialty, but I think there are going to be enormous pressures put on the US electric grid in the future. The two sides of my hypothetical partition are already headed down different paths. The western path leads to, I believe, a system that requires a regional strategy that won't work in the East. The current federal policies for how reliability is to be achieved were designed with the Eastern grid in mind, not the Western. Maybe the federal government is flexible enough to allow both, but I have my doubts.
Most of the people you're talking to would be very, very disappointed in how I think my partition would work. Ranchers who think they're going to suddenly get unfettered access to those millions of acres of public lands, for example. But a WSA would be very heavily urban/suburban, so wilderness and preservation are going to be well represented in the debate. Certainly there would be some differences -- western states would almost certainly have a much stronger interest in land exchanges that break down some of the god-awful checkerboard patterns the feds created in the 1870s. The libertarians will be disappointed, too. Regulations follow urbanization; it is no surprise that California, by population the least-rural state in the country, does so much regulation.
"
Here's a post I did after the Colorado election that had a the-county-commissioners-should-look-at-it advisory item on the ballot in a few counties. Will's right on the mark about all the points. The biggest share of North Colorado's population would still be Front Range suburbs. I did the exercise of drawing a real rural state (no town bigger than about 25,000) out of parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. The population cartogram suggests that even pulling from all three states, the population would be far to small.
"
@tod-kelly
As a hypothetical, from the perspective of a movement conservative... What is the difference between the tariffs and other laws starting in 1828, which had at least the secondary purpose of transferring wealth from the South to the North, and the succession of Medicaid expansion, same-sex marriage, and regulatory decisions that seriously penalize the use of coal for electricity generation? And why those shouldn't be viewed as as serious a threat to a regional culture and economics as the Tariff of Abominations and its assorted follow-ons? Serious enough that the only way to avoid the tyranny of the majority is to somehow get out of the Union?
I'm only a hack historian, but my perception is that the North believed "Oh, no, they're just talking, they won't possibly resort to violence and try to leave; if we just keep pushing, they will accept that we have the better argument." And the price to enforce the argument that the South should abandon a major aspect of its culture, and accept the transfer of wealth, was a million lives?
There are days when I'm terrified about what might happen.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.