Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

I watched the vice-presidential debate last night. It was reasonably interesting, but not all that exciting. I was hoping that Sarah Palin would address the obvious impossibility of the U.S. becoming self-sufficient in energy by drilling for more oil, but no such luck; when Joe Biden pointed out the numbers (4% of world oil reserves, 25% of world oil consumption), she simply didn’t respond.

One thing that was clear from the debate was Biden and Palin have very different positions on a number of issues. So I was honestly quite surprised to see on CNN (I was watching at the gym, I don’t actually have cable) that several “young people” watching the debate felt that there was no real difference between the candidates (link). Only some people felt that way, and of course reporters can find somebody to say anything. Still I was very surprised.

Either these people are not paying attention, or the candidates are somehow not communicating to them. I wonder what sorts of candidates these people would really like?

In November California will vote on whether to overturn the state court’s decision to permit homosexual marriage. I personally will vote to support the court, against the proposal. However, I think the whole issue is basically a mistake.

The government should not be in the business of legitimizing marriage. Currently marriage comes with a set of legal privileges, rights which one spouse has with regard to the other. It also has tax implications. These ideas are not inherently wrong, but I think it is a mistake to tie them to a notion of marriage. Our society no longer speaks with one voice regarding the definition of marriage. Therefore, we should shift those privileges and taxes to work in different ways.

People should be able to designate, perhaps on the annual tax form, who should have rights concerning medical and property decisions when they are incapable. People should be able to file taxes as a household composed of several adults sharing a residence. There should be laws which grant these privileges automatically when people share a residence for a long time, unless explicitly denied, along the lines of common-law marriage.

If we do that, then marriage can return to where it belongs: with the church. There will no longer be concerns about which marriages are valid, and which should be recognized across state boundaries. That seems to me to be a much more sensible system for today’s society.

This is not, of course, a new proposal.

I’ll be on vacation and not posting for the rest of the week, back after Labor Day.

The telecom companies helped the Bush administration in wiretapping people without a warrant. The wiretapping was illegal by any reasonable reading of the law (the law was written after the last burst of questionable government wiretapping during the 60s). There has been a strong push by some people to sue the telecom companies for their role in the wiretapping. It seems that the push is now over, in that both houses of Congress have voted to grant the companies retroactive legal immunity for their participation.

I’ve never completely understood the argument that it should be possible to sue the telecom companies. They didn’t undertake the wiretapping on their own. They did it on the request of the administration. On the one hand, they should have said “no, this request is wrong.” On the other hand, when the administration asks you to do something, you normally do it. We have checks and balances in the government itself. It’s a good idea for all citizens to seriously question government requests. But it should not be legally mandatory for them to do so.

If we are able to sue the telecom companies for their participation in this, what we are saying in effect is that they are responsible for judging the legality of a request from the administration. It seems to me that it is reasonable for the companies to say “the administration told us it was OK, and who are we to argue?” It does not seem right to hold them to a higher standard than that.

The real reason that people want to sue the telecom companies is because they can’t sue the people who really started the policy. The hope is that by putting pressure on the telecom companies now, we can avoid having this happen again in the future. That may be good strategy, but it doesn’t make it right. (As a practical matter the level of discussion on this issue is likely to deter the companies from similar actions for many years.)

I hope that the next administration will launch criminal prosecutions of the people who violated the wiretapping laws. Alternatively, Congress could start a real investigation. Those are the right ways to tackle the problem of illegal action by the government. Unfortunately these are not likely to happen. One need only look at the number of people involved in the illegal Iran/Contra arm sales who are currently back in government to see that there is only very weak punishment for illegal actions in Washington, D.C.

I see that both McCain and Clinton are suggesting that the gas tax should be abolished for the summer. Obama is resisting that, though he voted in favor of a similar proposal back in 2000 as a state senator.

Dropping the gas tax would be hideously irresponsible. The U.S. must start weaning itself off of oil as fast as possible. This is true both because burning oil increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and because relying on oil makes us dependent on countries with large oil reserves, and most of those countries are not our friends.

Dropping the price now will send people the message that when gas gets too expensive, the government will act. That is the exact wrong message. The message we need to send is that gas is going to get more and more expensive, and that people should use less.

If we are concerned about the effects of gas prices on poor people, then we should develop relief specifically for poor people, such as gas stamps by analogy to food stamps. Or better public transportation.

Side note: it’s interesting that this election will almost certainly be the first one to elect a sitting senator since Kennedy in 1960. Traditionally senators do not do well in presidential politics.

I vaguely recall that in one of Terry Pratchett’s books there is a quote along the lines of “he liked the idea of democracy until he considered the other people who would be voting.” No doubt other people have said similar things. Democracy always has the chance of devolving into mobocracy. The U.S. has a notoriously low percentage of people who actually vote; is that actually a good thing? Is it better when only interested people vote?

One natural fear about democracy is that it turns into a tyranny of the majority. The canonical example here would be the death of Socrates. Fortunately, in the U.S. this doesn’t seem to be the biggest problem, due at least in part to the Bill of Rights and the independent judiciary (in some places the first level of judges are elected, but there are higher levels which are appointed).

The problem in the U.S. seems to be more the capture by special interests. In a system like the U.S., the people who care a great deal about an issue can often get it passed because nobody exerts themselves to oppose it. I think this tends to lead to government by crisis. When there is some long-range problem, a relatively small group of people can delay action until the problem reaches crisis proportions. It’s difficult for a democracy to have a sensible long-term approach to problems. At least, that is true in a strong executive system like the U.S.; it is less true in a parliamentary system, in which parties must stake out clear positions.

Fewer people voting encourages capture by special interests and discourages tyranny of the majority. Capture by special interests discourages people from voting, as ti seems to have little effect. The special interests discourage people from voting, since it gives them a freer hand. Perhaps that is in part why the U.S. runs the way it does.

Of course, my forward-looking issue is your hobby-horse and their special interest. We all have our own.