Category Archives: Politics

North Carolina Residents: Beware Another Tax Idea

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A couple of days ago Michelle Malkin wrote about a proposed law here in North Carolina that would assess fees on motorists based on how far they drive in a year. She included some very sound objections to the idea in her post, Nanny State alert: Meet the mileage police. My only quibble with her is over her characterization of it as a “nanny state” action, because its aim is not to protect us from ourselves or anything else; instead, it’s more a “greedy state” action, because it seems to be aimed solely at increasing revenue.

Why do they need to increase vehicle tax revenue? Because in the wake of high fuel prices, people started driving less … meaning less consumption … meaning less tax revenue. They want to make up shortfalls in the state government’s income.

On the surface, it seems fine that people who drive more should pay more — after all, people who use more electricity pay more. But while we may think of roads as public utilities, “consuming” your share of the road does not require someone to lay out the new roadway ahead of you or produce more roadway behind you because you’ve used it — unlike electricity that has to be generated and then is used up, or water that has to be treated before and after use. Once the road is built, it continues to exist for a long time, and the wear and tear of one vehicle at a time seems too miniscule to meter.

Speaking of the possibility of “metering” our vehicles, how much more state bureaucracy would be needed to collect this tax? The data collection, tax assessment, payment processing, accounting, disbursement, and tax fraud investigation would probably cost far more than this tax would ever produce. (I say that based not on knowledge of the numbers of people involved or any other specific facts, but rather on my own assessment of the inherent tendency of government offices to develop extra layers of oversight and other non-value-added functions.)

The same day that Ms. Malkin presented her argument against the tax idea, Raleigh area blogger Tabitha Hale took aim at the proposal in her post on Red County, NC Road-Use Tax A Privacy Violation? She looked at the issue from a different angle, considering the longer-term view in which GPS-capable data recorders would one day download driving patterns that would be used to assess the tax. Her argument against the bill is also a sound one.

The best case scenario would be for this proposal to be pulled from the table entirely; next best would be for it to die in committee; and next would be for it to be voted down. It seems little good can come from it. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped our government in the past from passing laws that have caused more harm than good.

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The GrayMan as Blogging Guest: U.N. Responsibility to Protect Doctrine

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I answered a call for guest bloggers from All American Blogger, and was asked to write about how the new Administration might address the United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. Below, I cross-posted the text from this page.

What Will a President Obama Likely Do With the U.N. Responsibility to Protect Doctrine?
by Gray Rinehart

Given that many in the international community seemed to interpret the recent U.S. election in terms favorable to themselves — so far accepting that the President-elect bodes well for their own nations — will our incoming President be likely to honor the goodwill he has gained by acceding to one of the United Nations’ most obnoxious doctrines?

The U.N. “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, abbreviated R2P, sounds laudable enough in that it requires sovereign nations to protect their citizenry against maltreatment and human rights abuses; however, the doctrine goes further: it enjoins other nations to intervene if domestic nations fail to protect their people to the satisfaction of the international community.

R2P is a transnationalist’s dream. It requires nations to intervene in other nations’ internal affairs, and requires that they do so at the behest and under the authority of the United Nations Security Council. (The recent Russian incursion into sovereign Georgia, for example, would not qualify as an R2P event — not simply because the humanitarian cause was overstated or even drummed up, but because the U.N. Security Council did not authorize it.)

According to the Genocide Intervention Network, R2P “was created [in 2001] by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, an independent international commission established by the government of Canada,” to address concerns raised by then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in response to the genocide in Rwanda. “In his report to the 2000 General Assembly, [Annan] challenged the international community to come to a consensus on when and how humanitarian interventions should proceed.” Furthermore,

R2P has redefined the conception of state sovereignty by arguing that international community [sic] has the responsibility to protect civilians in states that are unwilling or unable to do so.

Rebecca J. Hamilton, writing in the 2006 Harvard Human Rights Journal, put it well that this means (emphasis added)

Each state has a responsibility to protect its citizens; if a state is unable or unwilling to carry out that function, the state abrogates its sovereignty, at which point both the right and the responsibility to remedy the situation falls to the international community. This proposal refutes the long-standing assumption enshrined in Article 2(7) of the 1945 U.N. Charter, that there is no right to “intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

For the international community to usurp a nation’s sovereignty is a very serious matter, but R2P seems to treat it quite cavalierly. In a May 2008 paper for the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Groves argued that “Adopting a doctrine that compels the United States to act to prevent atrocities occurring in other countries would be risky and imprudent,” and that the U.S. “needs to preserve its national sovereignty by maintaining a monopoly on the decision to deploy diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, political coercion, and especially its military forces.”

R2P actually involves three escalating responsibilities which nations owe not to their own people but to the people of foreign lands: as stated by the Genocide Intervention Network, the responsibilities to prevent “internal conflict and other man-made crises putting populations at risk;” to react to the same with “appropriate measures” ranging from sanctions (which have historically hurt more than helped indigenous populations while affecting determined tyrants hardly at all) to military action; and to rebuild after the event. The last “responsibility” is actually the least troublesome, since the U.S. in particular has shown greater will and ability to rebuild former enemies than any other nation in history. Most troublesome are the first, a clear blow against a nation’s sovereignty, and the second, a call for nations to intercede under the U.N. flag in matters which do not threaten other sovereign nations.

How might a President Obama handle R2P?

In October 2007, Senator Obama was noncommittal in his answer to a presidential candidate questionnaire. He said R2P was “an important and developing concept in international affairs and one which my Administration will closely monitor.” Cynics might point out that his answer was a somewhat verbose way of saying “we don’t know yet.” In contrast, we may take some encouragement from his unwillingness to commit to following the U.N. doctrine, and believe that he may weigh U.S. national interests above nebulous international interests or unproven geopolitical assertions.

Unfortunately, his nomination of Senator Clinton as Secretary of State is problematic in this regard, because her take on R2P appears to be much different — and Foggy Bottom is already known for playing by its own rules in the realm of diplomacy. In November 2007, in answer to the same candidate questionnaire, Senator Clinton said,

It is essential that the new Secretary General of the United Nations begin to bridge the gap between [the doctrine] and the institution’s deeds through a series of reforms intended to operationalize this concept. I am … committed to seeing that the United States and other economic and militarily capable states and organization take steps to bolster UN action.

Senator Clinton said that if she were elected President she would “adopt a policy that recognizes the prevention of mass atrocities as an important national security interest of the United States, not just a humanitarian goal.” That’s an interesting take on what should constitute a national security matter: a fine example of transnationalist thinking that would make a good topic for another day. Because she is not the President-elect, we may dismiss for the foreseeable future her promise to “develop a government-wide strategy to support this policy.” However, given the position to which she has been nominated, we should consider that she also said,

I will authorize my Secretary of State to institutionalize atrocity prevention into the work of the State Department, and I will direct my Secretary of State to strongly support the mission and activities of the office of reconstruction and stabilization, which plays an increasingly critical role.

As U.S. Secretary of State, then, is Ms. Clinton likely to subordinate Foggy Bottom to the directives of the U.N.? Is she likely to re-order U.S. diplomatic efforts in such a way as to support R2P and other international doctrines, to the detriment if not exclusion of our legitimate national interests? We wonder if such questions will be asked in her confirmation hearing. We hope her answer would be “no.” It is too soon to tell how independent her State Department would be from her President’s Administration — or if they would operate in synch — and which interests they would prioritize highest.

#

President-elect Obama was careful during his campaign not to make the mistake Senator Kerry did in 2004, of saying he would subject questions of U.S. involvement or action to a “global test.” It remains to be seen whether he and his appointees will place the sovereign interests of the U.S. ahead of transnational interests, or if they will subordinate U.S. interests to some “greater good.” Once he occupies the Oval Office, he will no longer be able to circumlocute his position; perhaps in his first “State of the World” address* he will tell us what direction he plans to take our nation, and the world.

_____
*In October 2007, Senator Obama reportedly said, “I’ll give an annual ‘State of the World’ address to the American people in which I lay out our national security policy.”

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Putting Civility Back Into Civil Discourse

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My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to put civility back into civil discourse. And even if I can’t put it back into the general discourse, which became increasingly shrill and at times simply vile during the campaign, I will try to keep my own discourse civil.

I don’t know if I succeeded during the election or not, but I hope I did. I won’t apologize for disagreeing with anyone or for stating my own opinions in sometimes strident terms, but I apologize if anyone feels I attacked them personally.

I think I succeeded in my civil discourse goal the day after the election, in a long conversation with a co-worker. (We were in a car together, so she couldn’t get away from me.) She didn’t like all of the questions I asked her as I tried to pin down the sources of her dissatisfaction with our country, but neither did she accept my invitation to slap me if I went too far. I count that as a success.

(At the risk of putting words in her mouth, I think she believes in the perfectability of our country and perhaps the entire human race. I do not. She admitted to being a glass half full person, whereas in the realm of geopolitics I’m more likely to point out that someone’s going to break the glass sooner or later so we’d better get a towel and a trashcan ready.)

Anyway, I offer as an example an online discussion about how this election may affect the military that I’ve had with my writing friend Dave Klecha on his blog, Bum Scoop. We don’t agree, but we’re not gouging each other’s virtual eyes out, either.

That, I think, is a good start.

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My Personal Electoral Results

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I thought it would be interesting to list the election results in terms of all the states I’ve lived in:

  • Georgia (where I was born) – 15 electoral votes – McCain
  • New Jersey – 15 – Obama
  • South Carolina – 8 – McCain
  • California – 55 – Obama
  • Colorado – 9 – Obama
  • Nebraska – 5 – McCain
  • Virginia – 13 – Obama
  • North Carolina – 15 – Obama (not yet called, but trending that way)

So that works out to 28 electoral votes for Senator McCain, and 107 for Senator Obama. (Imagine if all those states had gone for the Anti-Candidate; that’s a good chunk of the electorate.)

So, congratulations to Mr. Obama.

And now we get to see how much more interesting the times will get.

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Political Sportsmanship Vs. Hooliganism

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Senator Obama’s extraordinary popularity has been compared with that of rock stars and other celebrities, but we might also liken it to the popularity of sports figures. I bring that up because I’ve been thinking about how die-hard fans of “Team Obama” might celebrate what at this point is shaping up to be their victory.

I hope they do so more peacefully than sports fans sometimes celebrate their championship wins. All too often, those celebrations spin out of control, with over-exuberance leading to injuries and general mayhem.

A simple request: More good sportsmanship than hooliganism, please.

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Happy Election Day — A Tax Quiz

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Yesterday I wanted to post the question, “How much tax revenue do you get from a bankrupt business?” Instead I went to bed. So I posted the question now.

Before you answer too quickly, bear in mind that one Presidential candidate has stated to the press (ten months ago, but they didn’t report it) that his proposed cap-and-trade tax on carbon emissions would bankrupt new coal-fired power plants and (emphasis on that conjunction, AND) bring in enough additional revenue to fund alternative energy sources. See this if you don’t believe me; here’s part of the transcript:

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.

The only thing I’ve said with respect to coal, I haven’t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a (sic) ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.

It’s just that it will bankrupt them.

I thought you’d get zero tax revenue from a bankrupt business, but I’m not as smart as this particular candidate. I guess the one-time bankrupting “huge sum” is what will somehow generate “billions of dollars” for alternative energy.

But what of the people unemployed when the power plants go bankrupt, or the people employed (perhaps not for long) by the factories that either can’t get power or have to pay exorbitant prices for it? Not a word. (Or not a word that was reported. It will be interesting to learn if the newspaper involved deemed the quote un-newsworthy, or if they were asked to delete it by the campaign.)

Orson Scott Card pointed out on The Ornery American that this would amount to a huge tax on the poorest Americans. That shouldn’t surprise us, since this is the same candidate who vows to impose a penalty on businesses that don’t provide health insurance, on the supposition that taking more money away from the business makes the business somehow better able to pay wages and buy health insurance. (See this.)

Ah, the joys of election season. And tonight it will be all over. So sad. 🙁

But meanwhile … happy voting!

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More Significant than a Riot

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Carrying on civil discourse is difficult in this day of heated exchanges and vile rhetoric, and a conversation with a friend on a writing forum reminded me of this Robert A. Heinlein quote (from his novel FRIDAY):

Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms … but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

Given the excesses of this very medium, I wonder if we can rein in the invective and stop our disagreements from becoming unbridgeable divides. Mud-slinging used to be the purview of a select few; now, everyone seems to want to take a turn. As a result, we’re all a lot dirtier than ever before.

On that somewhat somber note, Happy All Hallow’s Eve!

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My Damaged Brain

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It’s always refreshing to learn that others think you’re mentally ill. Not mentally deficient, which would imply that if I learned enough I would be better, but sick in the head.

And I’m not talking about the standard “brain-damaged male” motif that I learned about so long ago; i.e., that male babies, bathed in testosterone in utero, emerge with damaged brains. Male brains. Same thing, apparently.

Guilty as charged.

But this is different: this has to do with those of us who consider ourselves to be conservative versus those who are liberal. The contention, expressed in the opening of “What Makes People Vote Republican?” by Jonathan Haidt, is that being a conservative, much less a Republican, is a mental illness:

… now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity” — a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

So Republicans do not respond to reason, while Democrats do not respond to references to good and evil. I love the assertion of intellectual superiority on the part of the author and the author’s peers, but the point seems sound that one side of the aisle operates under a moral relativism while the other prefers a clearer, more concrete morality.

The author examines this by considering morality and social contracts, primarily contrasting a hypothetical society based on John Stuart Mill’s assertions with one based on Emile Durkheim’s. This leads him to present the following distinctions between conservatives and liberals:

… people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations [of morality], and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally…. We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

So rational Democrats use only a fraction of the “moral spectrum,” rejecting other parts that irrational Republicans include in their approach to the world. And being Republican is a mark of mental illness, as implied above. Isn’t it at least possible that the author has it backward, that liberals and Democrats, however intellectual, are morally stunted?

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves.

If my damaged brain is why I am more of a conservative than a liberal (in modern terms), I wonder if it also explains why I feel I need a relationship with God to anchor my life. That’s part of the Anti-Candidate position on FAITH & FAMILY, recently posted over in the forum:

It took us awhile to accede to the faith of our parents — we thought we were too intellectual and sophisticated when we were younger — but having accepted it we did our best to pass it on to our children. And for one key reason: because faith provides an anchor in troubled times, and lifts our vision beyond our current situation and limited circumstances to consider the wider world and our proper place in it.

But that’s just me, and I’m brain-damaged. So don’t take my word for it: give it a try yourself. And let me know how it goes.

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I Voted for the Anti-Candidate!

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I cast my vote yesterday, and when I noticed there were several write-in spots on my Wake County ballot I made sure to write in the Anti-Candidate. (For those who missed it, the Anti-Campaign is alive and on life support, and will continue that way indefinitely.)

Bonus points to anyone who can identify, before all the results are posted, what race for which I wrote-in the Anti-Candidate.

As for the other races, in the best tradition of SF author Robert A. Heinlein I cast my vote less for any particular candidates — it seemed a poor slate overall — than against the candidates whom I think will do the most damage.

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GrayMan Guide to Voting in the Best Interest of YOUR Country … Not Someone Else's

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Before we go too far, did you hear that the Russians test launched some ICBMs a week ago Sunday?

Now, to the subject at hand:

Imagine you own a business. Not a big, multi-national conglomerate, just a moderate-sized manufacturing firm. You make a product that is useful, if not actually important, and you make it pretty well. You’re doing okay, even with the tightening money supply caused by so many risky loans that lenders are worried won’t be paid back. You’ve cut back some, but you’ve avoided the worst of the difficulty. You’re still taking care of your customers, your employees, and your investors.

Imagine also that your business’s main competition is with a bigger, more powerful firm. They control more of the market than you, and they’re no sleeping giant — they put a lot of their profits into R&D and are pushing the frontiers of your industry. You feel really good when you beat them at the game you’re both playing, but you wonder sometimes if you can continue to compete against them.

Now imagine that their CEO has announced that he’s stepping down, and your friend on their board — everyone in your industry knows each other, at least at the top levels — has asked your opinion of the two people being considered. One is well-known in the industry, with several patents to his name and a long track record of dependable, if sometimes erratic, service. The other is a newcomer to your industry, and even to manufacturing itself; he’s not that familiar with the kinds of products your two companies make, but he’s got a history of good work with nonprofits and lots of exciting new ideas.

Who do you recommend? If you’re true to your real interests — i.e., to what will most likely benefit your own company — you will recommend that your competitor choose the weaker of the two people. If they go along with your recommendation, you stand to benefit the most if their new CEO makes mistakes. In fact, because of your experience in the industry, leading a successful firm as you do, their new CEO may even be naïve enough to ask your advice when he’s not sure about what his board or his staff is telling him — and then you’ll really be in a good position to work to your own advantage.

Okay, with that in mind:

Why have so many foreign leaders endorsed one-time “New Party” candidate Senator Obama? According to this list, Senator McCain has received only one foreign leader endorsement, from the “president” (equivalent to the Mayor) of Madrid. Senator Obama has received 17 endorsements from foreign political leaders, enough that this Wikipedia page puts them in a separate section.

Don’t believe for a minute that those leaders are endorsing him in the name of “international goodwill,” you starry-eyed dreamer. They are looking for what most advantages their own countries or nonstate organizations, and nothing more. They want to face the most inexperienced leader we can elect: the leader who is most likely to accede to their wishes and even to their demands, the leader they think will surrender the best interests of our country to some nebulous “greater good.”

Maybe you don’t care about what those foreign people think. Maybe, in this time of tight credit and unstable markets, you’re in the “what can my country do for me” crowd, and you don’t care if our country bankrupts itself as long as the nanny state promises to care for us from our first breath (but not before) to our last. You either believe that Senator Obama, who has not yet mastered the intricacies of the legislative process, will accomplish by executive fiat what he was unable to accomplish by legislation; or that a Democratic President, House, and filibuster-proof Senate will manifest the wisdom necessary to give you more of what you want while costing you absolutely nothing. (It’s okay if they pass the costs along to other people.) Remember, anything they break in the process is unlikely ever to be fixed — because government programs rarely die — which is one reason Thomas Jefferson advised that activist government is not the best kind under which to live.

So maybe what those foreign people think isn’t important to you at all. But it’s important to them, and I’m sure every foreign leader who has endorsed Senator Obama — again, here’s the list, and not surprisingly almost every other one is a socialist of one stripe or another — will appreciate your casting your vote in their best interest even if you don’t mean to.

Maybe, though, you’re in the “blame America first” crowd, and you think every good thing we’ve done has only been a veneer of goodness over a rotten interior, and a weak U.S.A. is the best solution. Or maybe you are a dyed-in-the-wool transnationalist, and believe that what’s best for the United Nations is best for the United States. (I might ask you why you maintain your U.S. citizenship, if you think so little of your own country, but that’s an issue for another day.) You may not admit it, even to yourself, but you probably believe Senator Obama is the right man to take our country down a few notches. I think you’re right: Senator Obama is the right man to take our country down a peg. I hope we’re both wrong.

At the end of the day, those foreign leaders — in addition to Hamas spokespeople and others who expressed and then withdrew their support (e.g., Hugo Chavez) — express their preference based on what is best for their countries. It’s natural that they do so, but we should not blithely assume their best interest is also ours.

I’ve heard that other countries, and especially their leaders, might “like” us more if Senator Obama is elected; of course they will, because they’ll be happy that we elected the President they want, the one who is best for them. Any “goodwill” will flit away soon enough, though. Once he’s in office they will test his resolve — our resolve — on trade, cooperative ventures, and military matters, to gauge the strength of his determination and where his true loyalties lie. Even his running mate, Senator Biden, says so. Then we’ll see if he makes decisions that are in our best interest, or theirs.

And if he makes decisions in anyone’s best interest other than the U.S.A.’s — and his stated intentions to abandon the mission in Iraq, to stifle free and fair trade, and to expand diplomatic outreach to the most reprehensible leaders on the planet indicate his willingness to do so — then President of the United States is not the right position for him.

And from what he has promised in the area of national security — e.g., decimating the nuclear deterrent* at a time when Russia is flight testing multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles** and a State Department advisory group is warning about the dangers of China’s efforts to modernize their military*** — I’m afraid he will decide in favor of everyone but us. If that happens, they may “like” us more, but they’ll respect us less.

Enough ranting. If you read this far, thank you; I hope I didn’t bore you too much.

In two weeks, the polls will open and close and our votes will be counted. In the end, we will each and all vote in our best interests as we perceive them. I will vote in the best interest of MY country. Will you?

___

*As seen in this blog entry from March 12, 2008, in which I wrote,

…it seems almost shameful that someone who wants to be the Commander in Chief should be so unaware of how thin our nuclear arsenal has become over the last few years, as we’ve taken weapon systems offline (e.g., Peacekeeper) and not replaced them, that he would wish to cut it even more.

**On October 12, 2008, according to this report. Did you hear anything about it from the U.S. media? I didn’t.

***It said, “Chinese military modernization is proceeding at a rate to be of concern even with the most benign interpretation of China’s motivation,” according to this October 13, 2008 report. Did you hear about that from the U.S. press? I didn’t.

___

(This post was not brought to you by the Anti-Candidate.)

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