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The Separation of Business and State One of the themes of the Ralph Nader campaign (did you know he's running for President again?) is that there should be a rule analogous to the concept of the "Separation of Church and State" that keeps corporate interests out of government. Some refer to this as "The Separation of Business and State". First off, I don't want to get into the argument on whether the "Separation of Church and State" is actually enshrined in the Constitution or not. It is an existing legal principle which is used in legal practice. I'm going to concentrate on whether we should have a "Separation of Business and State". I actually discussed this with a former coworker of mine (from a previous client) at Drinking Liberally a few months ago. I hadn't seen Eric in a while, and we ended up talking about this concept at the bar most of the night, while everyone else was sharing details on which anatomically correct Obama blow up doll they preferred sleeping with. (I kid... I kid... mostly). He made some great arguments for the concept, and really left me thinking about the idea. The basic premise is that corporations are right now treated as people, with all the rights that people in America have, even though they are not: In 1886 the Supreme Court, in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, was interpreted to have ruled that corporations were "persons" - before women were considered persons under the 19th amendment to have the right to vote. Ever since, corporations have enjoyed most of the same constitutional rights granted to real people. But corporations are not humans. They don't vote. They don't have children. They don't die in Iraq. The people who work for the corporations are of course real people, but the corporate "entity" should never be given equal constitutional rights to real human beings. The conclusion which Nader draws is that corporations should not truth about enzyte be allowed to donate to politicians as a separate entity, nor should they be allowed to lobby government as a separate entity. Corporations should not receive welfare (nor bailouts I'd assume). These are all things that people have a right to, but not a corporation. It actually makes a lot of sense to me... until you realize that Nader wants that to be a one way street. Nader wants to maintain (and possibly increase) corporate income taxes. He wants to control the methods by which corporate boards are elected. He wants to reign in executive pay. He certainly wants to increase corporate regulations in general. His list is actually pretty expansive. Though some of these things are not bad, many are simply increases of governmental control on corporations out of the notion that businesses are somehow evil. But if we use the "Separation of Church and State" as a model, you ought to immediately see the problem with what Nader is proposing. The goal of the "Separation of Church and State" is two ways. The government does not adopt an official religion, nor does it strive to control how religions operate, while the people are free to practice whatever religions they choose, in the manner they choose. The idea is that if you leave me alone, then I'll leave you alone. This is what fosters the most freedom, for the most people. Even though religions are not people either, they can still exert and extreme amount of influence in individuals, just like a corporation, but we still generally leave them alone. Granted, the separation is not perfect, but it is certainly better than what we currently have regarding corporations today. What Nader proposes turns the idea of "Separation" on it's ear. It's not a "Separation of Business and State", it's "Control of Business by the State". The state will still very much be involved in business. In fact, he wants the state to be more involved in corporations. It's as if we said that "Separation of Church and State" meant that the government could determine what day of the week was holy, which version of the Bible they used, how they celebrated communion, who was on the Board of Deacons and the government got 35% of all donations put in the offering... but the church would have no say in the matter all because we declared the church not to be "a person". Of course, one need only go back to U.S. History class and the Revolutionary War to see what other problems arise from this. Back then, the battle cry was "No taxation without representation!" Yet that is precisely what Nader wants to do. While he doesn't think corporations are human enough to vote, procreate, or fight wars, he does think they're human enough to pay taxes and be heavily regulated. Whether human or not, they are entities which can be controlled. They also have interests that are solely their own, and distinct from the people that govern them. And while he is right that corporations aren't human, they do have traits that are analogous to humans. They are born (through legal contracts) and can die (through bankruptcy). They have property which can be bought and sold, as well as taken by the government. They donate to charities, and participate in the community. They consume goods, as well as produce them. The coercive power of government on the people, and on business, is immense. When government exerts that sort of power against an entity, whether alive or not, that entity will seek to control that power as much as possible for it's own advantage. Nader seeks to increase the power against corporations, while somehow thinking that they won't find a way to harness that increasing power for their own good though some mechanism. The solution to corporate influence on government is instead to decrease government influence on corporations. Taxes on corporations should be reduced or eliminated, as should regulations. Welfare for corporations should likewise follow suit. Government influence of corporations should be the same as its influence over people. It should not seek to control their operation, but rather mediate their disputes when they interact with each other through contractual obligations. The real goal should be a "Separation of Business and State"... but a true separation. One in which corporations have little influence over government, and government has little influence over corporations. Separations are a two way street. Add to del.icio.us | Digg this Post | Filed Under: Politics Thursday, October 30, 2008 Where's My Bailout? Add to del.icio.us | Digg this Post | Filed Under: Politics
Even More on Random Stops This just goes to prove what I was talking about in my original post on sobriety checkpoints. They are used by police as dragnets to look for minor offenses to raise revenue, while not helping public safety one bit. Here is a story about police in DeForest using "fake checkpoints" to ticket people: This weekend DeForest police will again be intentionally creating the false impression of a random checkpoint for drunken drivers. Random checkpoints are illegal in Wisconsin and 11 other states. About three weeks ago, police set up a fake checkpoint along Highway V. Officers wore bright reflective vests, set up cones and electronic road signs warning of a "OWI task force ahead." But instead of pulling over drivers randomly, officers stopped motorists for any infractions they spotted, including a broken license plate light. That effort resulted in 10 citations, 30 warnings and one non-alcohol-related arrest. Dane County has had 29 traffic fatalities so far this year, 15 of which were alcohol-related. You'll notice that the last time they did this, there were no arrests for drunk driving. They didn't find a single drunk driver. Yet immediately after they talk about what they did find, they try to justify this with statistics about drunk driving, despite the fact that they didn't arrest any in this dragnet. In fact, I would venture to guess that by putting up signs advertising an "OWI task force ahead", they are actually going to scare drunk drivers into finding other roads home, and avoiding the checkpoint. I would guess that the actual purpose behind the signage is to lull drivers into a false sense of security. Have a broken tail light? You think you'll go through just fine because you haven't been drinking. That is until, surprise, you get nailed with a ticket. In the mean time, the guy who just slammed down a couple extra car bombs with his buddies before driving home turned onto a side road and crashed into your neighbor killing their child in the passenger seat. But hey, at least they stopped your dangerous broken tail light. Drunk driving is a problem. The solution is to have stricter penalties for multiple offenders, and better roaving patrols which look for actual evidence of drunk driving, like swerving in your lane, stopping for green lights, driving unusally slow, etc. Cops at checkpoints can't do that. And there is no guarantee that a drunk driver has a broken tail light. Add to del.icio.us | Digg this Post | Filed Under: Stupid Laws
The Sky's The Limit My newest Demotivator:
You can see all my previous demotivators in this Flickr set. Add to del.icio.us | Digg this Post | Filed Under: Demotivators
Read The World According to Nick on Your Kindle For those of you who have an Amazon Kindle, did you know you can subscribe to this blog and read me on the go? Here is the link to purchase your subscription, which currently is a bargain at 99 cents a month. That's right folks, I'm a cheap date. If you've ever thought about buying a Kindle, now is the perfect time too. Because it's currently one of Oprah's "favorite things", you can get $50 off a Kindle purchase through Halloween. Add to del.icio.us | Digg this Post | Filed Under: Blogging Wednesday, October 29, 2008 The Financial 9/11 As the dust settles from the "financial meltdown" that we've been dealing with the last several weeks, it seems to be increasingly clear that... well... nothing melted down. Yes, there were some issues with sub-prime mortgages that caused issues with certain financial institutions that had over leveraged and made bad decisions. But the reality is, the fundamentals of the economy actually are pretty strong, and the massive bailout that we passed was more than likely not necessary. Most of the bad lending decisions that were made needed to be corrected, and could have easily occurred through normal bankruptcy law. The Federal Reserve of Minneapolis put together an excellent whitepaper which examines many of the "so called facts" of the crisis, and finds them mostly to be untrue: The financial press and policymakers have made the following four claims about the nature of the crisis. Here we examine these claims using data from the Federal Reserve Board. Our argument that all four claims are false is based on data up until October 8, 2008. The paper is complete with charts and graphs that show everything pretty clearly, even if you don't have an MBA. Here is a bit more of a common sense look at things from UCLA economist Lee Ohanian which is worth watching as well. Posted at 9:43 PM by Nick | 1 Comment | No Trackbacks Add to del.icio.us | Digg this Post | Filed Under: Current Events
Statistically Speaking I don't follow the polls too much... and I think I rarely if ever blog on them. A lot of people right now are pointing to one poll or another as evidence that "it's all over", but I'm not quite sure that's the case. That's not to say that McCain will win... I still think he's going to lose. But the polls are just all screwed up, and there is a lot of good analysis on this right now as to potential reasons. First, to the evidence that the polls actually are goofy this time around. Real Clear Politics has a couple of good posts talking about the nature of the polls this year. First, they put together a good running average of the current tracking polls, in an effort to smooth out inconsistencies. One of the things they're noticing is that there is a wide variation in the different polls. The standard deviation (which in laymen's terms is a statistical measure showing how far any one poll is from the average) is higher than it was 4 years ago by a sizeable margin (2.7 compared to 1.7). Other polls are showing that the RCP average is outside their margin of error, showing that they disagree significantly with other polls taken during the same period. Of course, none of this actually tells us what the actual results ought to be, but instead tell us that there are probable issues with the polling numbers. In the end, the only poll that matters is the one that takes place election day, but the current polls are not a likely predictor of the actual outcome. But what could be causing this variation? There are some plausible reasons... many of which point to a tighter race between McCain and Obama, rather than a landslide. The first is that many of the pollsters are over sampling Democratic voters in their polls: From these numbers, it’s difficult to understand Obama’s 11-point advantage — until you look further into the polls internals and see that the results are based on a respondent sample that was 40 percent Democrat (D), 27 percent Republican (R), and 30 percent Independent (I). Three percent expressed no preference. Granted this is from just one poll, but it gives you a glimpse into how sampling can have a very large effect on the outcomes of a poll. I have not taken the time to look at all the polling internals, but a few that I've looked at have not made their demographic sampling easily available either. Another potential problem for some of these polls is when they do the polling: Pollsters have long known that the demographic makeup of a random telephone sample changes from night to night. Those with families are less likely be available at home during weekend polling. Since that demographic tends to vote more Republican, weekend polling often understate support for the GOP. Polling companies use weighting to attempt to balance unbalanced weekend samples. But the Gallup traditional daily tracking poll doesn’t seem to have balanced the disparity enough. Many people, especially Obama supporters, are actually concentrating on the Bradley Effect... which based on most of the primaries, is pretty thoroughly debunked. It's a nice story, which plays nicely into preconceived notions of racism... but the reality is that Obama's past poll performance shows that the Bradley Effect was quite possibly the exception, not the rule. Granted, nobody likes digging into demographic sampling, and weighted averages based on day and time, because that's boring... but these are key issues when you are trying to take polls using small representative samples of the population and then draw conclusions about the population at large. The sample literally makes or breaks the data. Republican internal polling also seems to show some bright spots for McCain (though you should obviously take things with the appopriate grain of salt). Once again, none of this tells us what Tuesday will actually bring, but it does cast some doubt to the accuracy of the current polls. Given how much people pay attention to the polls, it's important that they be as accurate as possible. If there is too much discrepency between polling and the actual results, people will begin to question the legitamcy of the election, even though the polling may have simply been wrong all along. This serves nobody's best interests... except maybe the loser. .
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