Last night, the Utah Legislature finally signed off on a map for Congressional districts. Unsurprisingly, more than a few individuals were engaged in over-the-top weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that could teach William Shanter more than a few things about over-acting. While I can accept a lot of legitimate complaints about the final product (it’s not my first choice either), a lot of the claims made by critics are either logically inconsistent or flat-out lies.

(more…)

Has anyone else noticed that the only “terrorism” cases the FBI seems to get and prosecute these days are the ones where the players have been setup? When that isn’t the case, it’s because alert passengers on a plane learned to fight back. If this is the sole way we can get terrorism cases, I think we can call the “war on terror” won and bring our troops home now.

Right now, large protests are going on in New York City and are starting to spread to other cities. People fed up with being out of work, with losing their homes, and with the powerful interests who caused the problem getting all kinds of favors have hit their breaking point. After a few years of changing out the bums in Congress (I won’t go so far as to say they were thrown out), they have no faith left in the political system to resolve their problems. And yet, somehow, the reform-minded economic right has completely blown the opportunity to sell their solutions.

What are many of them doing? For the most part, they’re busy insulting the protesters. The endless barrage of jokes about worthless liberal arts degrees, living in mom’s basement, and not showering are a sophomoric and demeaning way to reply to anyone who is suffering. In contrast, the left is out there standing in solidarity selling the illogical idea that the government that caused and perpetuates the problem can somehow fix it. If you were one of those people, who would you be listening to?

This is a missed opportunity to push for the destruction of crony capitalism and the decentralization of public and private power that creates and reinforces it. People are angry for the right reasons. Banks got trillions of dollars for destroying the economy so that they can now foreclose on the people to whom they fraudulently sold bad mortgages. Colleges are calling loans on degrees they’ve been hyping, overselling, and over-pricing for decades, a collusion across an entire industry. Congress is continually passing laws with no relevance to the problems of the common man despite having been significantly turned over in the last several elections. It’s the perfect storm to finally dismantle the systems that are killing the country.

By blowing this opportunity and engaging in tone-deaf messaging, you can almost bet that the solutions will be more of the same. More regulation that will be manipulated to create winners and losers. More ruinous over-spending on programs that promote dependency instead of independence. More members of Congress who say they feel our pain but simply create it. I suppose I shouldn’t expect any better from the guys who have been promoting the low-information tea party.

Every decision we make is a calculated risk, trying to figure out if the reward and odds of success are worth the potential pain. Most of the time, we do fairly well. Every now and again, someone, somewhere, will make such a boneheaded miscalculation that the rest of us will scratch our heads and go “huh?” Utah Democratic Party Chair Jim Dababkis is having one of those moments right now.

For those of you not paying attention, Dababkis threatened a lawsuit over the current redistricting effort due to perceived gerrymandering. I’ve looked at some of the proposed maps and, yes, I think the Sumsion 6 Congressional one in particular is a real stinker. It’s kind of a problem, though, to threaten to sue over a map that hasn’t even been adopted yet. Already some substantively different maps have been seriously discussed (including one from Speaker Lockhart that actually looks half-decent), and there’s still plenty of time for back-and-forth to create more new maps. Throwing down the threat now is petulant foot-stomping.

This doesn’t even get into the risk/reward problem that following through on such a threat presents. Consider that the odds of winning a lawsuit on redistricting are extremely slim. Even if such a suit succeeded, we’re talking about maybe 3-4 total seats affected in the legislature. And the cost? I’d say a good six figures after all of the inevitable appeals. (Them lawyers don’t come cheap.) It’s a very high cost with a very small reward and a very high risk. The money might as well be put on red down in Vegas.

The whole affair has been correctly pegged as grandstanding. Dababkis isn’t enough of a rank amateur to think that any suit filed would actually succeed, but he knows that he can score a bunch of political points with the party faithful, even if it is a complete waste of their rather limited funds. Unfortunately, it’ll stop there, and fail to resonate with the rest of the electorate.

Note: This is not a post on whether or not you agree with Rep. Paul’s policies. It is only about the viability of his candidacy, so let’s keep the comments on-topic, please. Any discussion on policies should be through the lens of the primary voters he needs to court.

The current field of Republican candidates for president largely leaves a lot to be desired. The field is crowded with a lot of candidates with little public recognition or differentiation from their competition. Heck, we even have a few political has-beens that got run out of their previous elected positions trying to make a go for it. I think most of them will get shaken out, but it may create a situation where it comes down to Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

(more…)

I’m not a fan of the Tea Party and haven’t been for some time. As Jon Stewart put it, most of them are moral majoritarians in tri-tipped hats. It’s hard to see how they differ from the Ralph Reed disciples that stormed into the Republican Party in 1994. That said, it seems like what has become just a mouthpiece for the more outrageous elements of the GOP had some roots in something worthwhile. It’s just been thoroughly co-opted by the establishment for their own purposes.

So how did it all start? Way back in mid-2008, Ron Paul’s campaign for president was winding down and the newly energized campaign volunteers were still all kinds of riled up. They were sick of the constant centralization of both government and economic power, and sickened by the power structure of the parties that only allows “annointed” candidates to advance to elections. A coalition of libertarians, fiscal conservatives, and reformers were ready to challenge any and all party structures that did business as usual. So what happened?

Well, those in power in the parties didn’t get there by being stupid. They saw the wave coming and knew they had to nip that sucker in the bud, and what better way than pulling a reverse infiltration? Almost immediately, the same people who had been a part of the problem started loudly singing the praises of the Tea Party, carefully steering it into an attack dog of the Republican Party, not a near-partyless populist mob demanding more from everyone. In Utah, the problem was particularly bad as the organizers chose to invite elected officials to come speak to crowds, hardly the kind of thing a reform movement should want. It only took weeks or months to quell the uprising and get the media to label the newly-formed beast as a group of angry zealots  whose rage was fueled by racism, misogyny, xenophobia, or whatever ugly thing could be attached to it.

What got botched was a trans-partisan populist movement to fight against centralization of power, public and private, that has lead to rampant crony capitalism, impenetrable political party power structures that exclude any kind of insurgent candidates from the process, and the reigning in of an out-of-control pattern of federal spending perpetuated by both parties. All of these are laudable and arguably popular goals. Unfortunately, they’ve been buried under a mountain of far-right social neo-conservatism with a very narrow appeal, obviously explaining the precipitous drop in popularity among the general populace.

Is there any hope for these much needed reforms to happen anytime in the near future? Maybe. It depends on if the lightning in a bottle during the first few weeks can be recreated, or if the original reformers have stuck around now that the real work begins.. Otherwise, I expect the same old story.

Despite being on the same end of the political spectrum, there is a stark contrast between Sutherland Institute and the Utah Taxpayers Association. Most of this boils down to tone and attitude. Another aspect is the level of engagement with the politically involved, and how ideas are found and developed. In the end, it’s the difference between a conversation and a lecture.

A lecture is a one-way street, presenting your point of view and ignoring or shutting down feedback. This restricts the sources of ideas to just those whom the lecturer has hand-picked, often in a way that reinforces their own biases. All too often, it comes across as condescending arrogance. This, unfortunately, is exactly how the Utah Taxpayers Association operates. There is no debate, no discussion, and almost zero interaction. You’re expected to accept their obviously superior point of view without question or discussion.

Sutherland Institute provides a sharp contrast to this. They regularly interact with politicos of multiple political perspectives and seek input on new policies they may not have thought of. These policies are then discussed openly to try and find a good solution. It’s a conversational tone, one in which understanding is actively sought. This is the opposite approach that the Utah Taxpayers Association takes, seeking a problem and then trying to find solutions via a collaborative process.

I feel like Sutherland Institute is adding to the dialog, whereas the Utah Taxpayers Association is merely trying to shout everyone else down. Which do you think is better serving the interests of our state?

We all knew that redistricting would be a tough business, but I’m not sure anyone suspected it would be this tough. In addition to the normal partisan concerns, cities and counties are all calling for not being split up into multiple districts. There’s also a dichotomous message of “don’t gerrymander” combined with “don’t make us lose seats even though the population figures say we should” coming from Utah Democrats. There are things, though, that would readily alleviate many of these problems.

The Legislature has opted to keep the House frozen at 75 seats rather than allowing it to expand to the limit of 87 from Article IX, Section 2 of the Utah Constitution. This creates less flexibility in redistricting as each seat need to contain roughly 33,000 residents. Even an expansion to the maximum limit would only drop the size of a district to 28,500. This makes it difficult to not split up large cities or combine smaller cities together, sometimes in piecemeal, but it is a step in the right direction. Consider that in 1900, just four years after statehood, Utah had just 276,000 people and a district with the current number of seats would be just 3700 people. We have ten times as many people, but no more representation. This will obviously mean that many voices will not be heard.

While we can’t do much about the federal level (though organizations like ThirtyThousand working to fix it), we can absolutely work to make sure that our districts allow for much more fine-grained representation. It’s too late to do anything for this year, but we should ask that something be done to expand the House as much as possible. It will keep neighborhoods whole, make legislators more responsive and accountable, and allow cash-poor candidates the opportunity to serve.

In most companies, growing larger means you have the capability to offer a wider range of products and services than when you got started. Once your customer base reaches a certain size, products that were once too specialized to be worth pursuing are now worth the time and effort of investment. After all, no two customers are the same or have the same needs, and failing to meet customer needs means you will doom your business.

Education should operate in the same fashion. No two students learn the same way, and any given group of them may cover as many different career paths as there are students. Accommodating this variety is very difficult in a smaller school or school district for the same reasons that small companies can’t offer a wide array of specialized products: it’s simply not efficient to do so. This should mean that a larger school or school district should be able to offer many specialized areas of study. In practice, however, we’re married to the idea of producing the exact same product using the exact same methods because it’s “efficient”.

(more…)

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been a fan of libertarianism. I generally like government to take as light as hand as is necessary to get things done. I’m also a fan of government decisions being made as close as possible to those being affected. This ensures that bad decisions are contained and many potential good solutions can be tried and tweaked. I think these two ideologies go hand-in-hand, but it seems that all too many, at least in practice, disagree.

(more…)