Category Archives: Libertarianism

A conservative Twitter pal notes that back in 2015, before the conservative movement lost its mind, conservative writer Ben Domenech, writing for the really conservativeFederalist, called it insane that vaccine mandates would stir any controversy:

Fundamentally, the protection against life-threatening plague is one of the original reasons government exists. Weve had mandatory vaccines for schoolchildren in America since before the Emancipation Proclamation. The Supreme Court has upheld that practice as constitutional for over a century, and only the political fringes believe there ought to be a debate about such matters. This is one of the few areas where government necessarily exercises power [Ben Domenech, The Insane Vaccine Debate, Reason, 2015.02.03].

Domenech expressed sympathy for parents who wanted to delay shots for their kids but not for people who wanted to avoid vaccination without consequences:

Its the failure to deal with those consequences that frustrates me about this debate. If you choose to not vaccinate your children, that is your choice. In the absence of an immediate threat, such as a life-threatening plague or outbreak, the state doesnt have a compelling reason to administer that vaccination by force or to infringe on your rights. But that doesnt mean there are no tradeoffs for such a decision. If you choose not to vaccinate, private and public institutions should be able to discriminate on that basis. Disneyland should be able to require proof of vaccination as a condition of entry, and so should public schools. You shouldnt be compelled to vaccinate your child, but neither should the rest of us be compelled to pretend like you did [Domenech, 2015.02.03].

Domenech cited libertarian science writer Ronald Bailey, who expressed this very libertarian argument for vaccine mandates in a 2014 debate:

Vaccines are like fences. Fences keep your neighbors livestock out of your pastures and yours out of his. Similarly, vaccines separate peoples microbes. Anti-vaccination folks are taking advantage of the fact that most people around them have chosen differently, thus acting as a firewall protecting them from disease. But if enough people refuse, that firewall comes down, and innocent people get hurt.

Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated a good libertarian principle when he said, The right to swing my fist ends where the other mans nose begins.

Some people object to applying Holmes aphorism by arguing that aggression can only occur when someone intends to hit someone else; microbes just happen. However, being intentionally unvaccinated against highly contagious airborne diseases is, to extend the metaphor, like walking down a street randomly swinging your fists without warning. You may not hit an innocent bystander, but youve substantially increased the chances. Those harmed by the irresponsibility of the unvaccinated are not being accorded the inherent equal dignity and rights every individual possesses. The autonomy of the unvaccinated is trumping the autonomy of those they put at risk.

As central to libertarian thinking as the non-aggression principle is, there are other tenets that also inform the philosophy. One such is the harm principle, as outlined by John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, Mill argued that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Vaccination clearly prevents harm to others [Ronald Bailey, Refusing Vaccination Puts Others at Risk, Reason, April 2014].

Libertarians advocate maximum freedom, not absolute freedom. Maximum freedom results from imposing minimal restrictions on individuals to prevent harm to others. Vaccines are minimal restrictions that maximize freedom: they stop individuals from conducting their normal business for maybe twenty minutes and then allow everyone to go about all of their regular business with far less fear of infection, hospitalization, and death, all of which egregiously restrict freedom.

Even Kristi Noem used to believe mandatory vaccines were a good idea:

Gov. Kristi Noem says she opposes a bill eliminating the vaccination requirement for students.

Vaccinations have literally saved millions of lives over the years. That is not something that I can support, she said during her weekly press conference [Lisa Kaczke, Gov. Kristi Noem Opposes Bill to Drop Vaccination Requirements for Students, that Sioux Falls paper, 2020.02.21].

Ah, the good old days, when conservatives had a sane, practical commitment to protecting our freedom from real threats, like disease and death.

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Conservatives and Kristi Noem Used to Think Government Should Require Vaccines - Dakota Free Press

This is the year Social Security starts paying out more than it brings in. Which could become very expensive, for those of us who hope to retire someday.

The pension program for retired workers, their survivors, and the disabled built up a trillion-dollar reserve, back when the economy grew faster, and retirees didnt live so long. But with employers hiring less, and more workers retired, Social Security is selling its big pile of Treasury bonds to keep the checks coming, for a while.

Last Tuesday, the plans trustees warned they expect that money will run out in 12 years. When that happens, under current law, they say Social Security will have to cut payments to retirees, by about one-quarter forget about cost-of-living bumps and survive on what it still collects from workers and their bosses.

For decades, a dwindling pool of workers has been supporting an ever-growing number of baby boomer retirees. COVID-19 has exacerbated trends cutting the number of working people paying into the system, while increasing the number who have left the workforce and begun collecting from it.

All of which means Congress and the president may have to do something painful raise Social Security taxes, or trim payments, hike the retirement age, or do all of these at once. Which they have, in the past: notably in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan joined the Democrats in a deal to boost contributions a little, and slowly raise the age for normal retirement to the current 67, making the system more solvent, at least until that generation of Washington politicians was safely dead.

READ MORE: Social Security fund now expected to be depleted sooner, programs trustees say

Unfortunately, Reagan and Congress were unduly optimistic about the systems future. As Social Security historian Sylvester Schieber points out, the growth in income disparity has thrown an unexpected curveball into the system, as it releases the ultra-wealthy from payments after their incomes exceeds the tax cap (currently $142,800). Removing the cap would produce a gusher of money, but it strikes at the notion that Social Security checks should have some relationship to money paid in.

What to do?

The trustees have posted a lot of suggestions:

Cut yearly increases in Social Security. There are many schemes proposed for doing this, which would affect different retirees in different ways.

Boost the normal retirement age to 69 from the current 67. Raise the early retirement age from 62 to 65, and up the number of years you need to work to qualify. That would reduce stress on the system a lot. But, as the trustee report doesnt add, it would leave millions of current-retirement-age people in the workforce or cut their incomes, creating lots more stress.

Boost payroll taxes. Social Security already collects an amount equal to 12.4% of Americans gross pay, split between workers and bosses. A more realistic 16% would make the system pay for itself into the next century, the trustees estimate.

And yes, that would be hugely expensive. Social Security would end up consuming about $1 for every $6 in workers gross pay. Up from the current $1 for every $8.

Of course, smaller or later-life Social Security checks would also be terrifically unpopular. Which is why changes tend to get made quietly, over time.

Sens. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) headed a bipartisan list of colleagues who in April called for a national Social Security fix-it commission of experts, like the one that recommended the 1983 changes, instead of debating what to do on the floors of Congress, under the heat of cameras and the threat of poisonous party politics.

Isnt 12 years a long way off? Whats the hurry?

The longer we wait, the less money the program will have left. Wait until its about to go broke, and the cuts will have to be a lot larger, or the bailout a lot more expensive, or well have to repeat it very frequently. According to Schieber, a former chair of the systems advisory board, another reason for a current predicament is that Congress used to tinker with Social Security quite often, only to lose its nerve after the early 1980s fixes.

Cant we just borrow the money? That might be a way out. But the system is currently barred from deficit funding. To change that would undo another of the guiding and popular principles of the system that it is a pay-as-you-go system, not welfare, but one in which people earned their payments.

Some senators lame-duck Pat Toomey (R., Pa.), for example also still warn that borrowing has a fiscal price. Sooner or later you end up pumping so much money into the economy that you inflate prices, which slows new hiring, makes incomes worth less, and creates pressure for more government help. Indeed, in recent talks, for example to the York Rotarians last month, Toomey has accused the Democrats of using borrowed money to fund ever more ways to make the middle-class more dependent on government help.

Of course, Social Security itself, which Toomey praised among other early 20th-century reforms in that same talk, faced enormous opposition from some conservative Republicans when it was new. Sun Oil Co. boss Joseph Pew even tried to convince professors at Pennsylvanias Grove City College, which his family funded, not to participate in Social Security, on grounds it eased the natural moral pressure that forced people to work and save. (He was disappointed that only two economists agreed and refused payroll deductions.)

Some people would actually benefit if Social Security payments were cut. Notably, winners would include big investment firms, which could count on attracting more savings from the minority of workers who feel they can afford to set aside significant income for retirement.

But not all conservatives opposed Social Security. Friedrich Hayek, a godfather of libertarianism, in The Road to Serfdom, praised worker-funded retirement and insurance plans though he warned that attempts to socialize the cost beyond participants would provoke bitter opposition.

That, of course, is the problem facing Washington today: Who pays for our most expensive benefits not just Social Security, but also Medicare, and highway spending, both of which are also running out of long-term funding? Just the users, so many of whom have less to spare? Or all Americans, including the most successful? How to balance funding and spending, and how to make it fair?

This is the stuff we should expect our candidates for federal office to be addressing, and proposing realistic solutions, many of which we wont like.

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Social Security is running out of money. Heres how to fix it. - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Richard Doerflinger

By Richard Doerflinger Catholic News Service Posted September 3, 2021

Recently Ive seen television footage of two protests against vaccine and mask mandates. In my home state of Washington, a protester held up a large sign saying, My Body My Choice. A protest in Louisiana featured the slogan Freedom of Choice.

These, of course, have been mantras of the pro-abortion movement: Whatever I choose regarding myself is valid and beyond reproach, simply because its my choice.

Of course ones choices about abortion and the pandemic affect more bodies than ones own, devastatingly so in the former case. But some protesters were probably staunchly pro-life, objecting to vaccines that were developed (or later tested) using a cell line from an abortion performed decades ago. How must they have felt, seeing those slogans?

For me, that question leads to political, cultural and even spiritual reflections.

Libertarianism emphasizing individual freedom and some distrust of government power has always been part of American politics.

In recent decades, both major parties have embraced it to some extent, applying it differently: Democrats favored a strong government in economic matters but maximum freedom on moral issues of life and sexuality; Republicans favored the free market economy but defended traditional norms on the social issues.

That seems to be breaking down. Corporate America promotes the freedom to choose ones sexual orientation and even ones gender; and formerly pro-choice Democratic politicians work to force others to fund and even perform abortions.

Culturally this has been a long time coming. Social commentators once called the baby boom generation, born during the prosperity after World War II, the Me Generation. But some of the boomers descendants make them look socially responsible by comparison.

In the 1980s, sociologist Robert Bellah and philosopher Charles Taylor called the dominant worldview of our time expressive individualism. It sees persons as atomized individuals, who fulfill themselves by expressing their inner truth so they can invent their own destiny and even identity. Personal autonomy is the core of the person.

Law professor O. Carter Snead points out in his impressive new book What It Means To Be Human that on matters of life, death and procreation, this tends to reduce human relationships to contracts for mutual benefit, discarded when they no longer serve ones personal goals.

Even the human body becomes a mere instrument for achieving those goals and vulnerable people at the beginning and end of life who cannot freely express and pursue such goals may not be persons at all.

Snead shows that this ignores fundamental aspects of the human condition. We are embodied beings, not sovereign wills trapped in prisons of flesh. Our very existence depends on the love and care of others, beginning with our parents, and our flourishing depends on our learning to give and receive love.

What does expressive individualism make of religion? It can accept being spiritual but not religious spiritual wayfaring can be yet another way to advance oneself, and there is no religious authority to contradict that. But it has a serious problem with the Judeo-Christian claim that human flourishing comes from my loving God above all, and my neighbor as myself.

As Bishop Robert E. Barron says, Your life is not about you is a central Christian message. Jesus says to take up our cross and follow him, that we must lose our life to save it. Explaining the Sign of the Cross, Msgr. Ronald Knox used to say that its vertical gesture spells I and its second gesture crosses that out.

Nothing could be more alien to the self-absorption typical of our culture. Which means that nothing is more desperately needed.

***

Doerflinger worked for 36 years in the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He writes from Washington state.

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Trapped in the self Catholic Philly - CatholicPhilly.com

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is now prohibited from enforcing the 5 percent petition requirement for certain candidates seeking office in Georgia, handing a victory to the Libertarian Party of Georgia and any potential candidate who wishes to seek office as an independent.

Because the Libertarian Party of Georgia isnt a political party under state law and is instead considered a political body, a candidate must receive the signatures of 5 percent of registered voters in the district in which he or she wants to run. The same threshold applies to independent candidates. The Libertarian Party is, to this authors knowledge, the only entity to gain ballot access as a political body.

As a result of Georgias restrictive ballot access lawsoften criticized as being among the most restrictive in the countryno independent or third-party candidate has made it on the ballot for a U.S. House seat since 1964. In March, Judge Lanier Anderson issued an opinion in which he wrote that Georgias ballot access requirements violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the 5 percent signature requirement was adopted with a discriminatory purpose.

The opinion issued today by Judge Leigh May Martin, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, prohibits Secretary Raffensperger from enforcing the 5 percent petition requirement. Instead, only 1 percent will be required. This 1 percent petition requirement is equal to the requirement necessary for an entity to gain status as a political body under Georgia law.

Until the Georgia General Assembly enacts a permanent measure, a candidate to whom this signature requirement applies may access the ballot by submitting a nomination petition signed by a number of voters equal to one percent of the total number of registered voters eligible to vote in the last election for the office the candidate is seeking, Martin wrote, and the signers of such petition shall be registered and eligible to vote in the election at which such candidate seeks to be elected.

The opinion can be found here.

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Federal Judge Hands a Big Victory to Prospective Third-Party, Independent Candidates in Georgia Peach Pundit - Peach Pundit

Many people believe that the existence of strong and effective vaccines against COVID-19 implies that governments have the right to issue vaccine mandates. Under a mandate, residents must be vaccinated before they are allowed to enter places of work, schools or businesses.

This view has it exactly backwards. Paradoxically, it is the weakness of the existing COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine delivery system that justify vaccine mandates. Weak vaccines require strong laws.

The question of what governments or employers are authorized to do is first and foremost a question of political philosophy. Within political philosophy, deciding not to take a vaccine is a classic example of a decision whose consequences are not purely private.

Suppose that Robert (named in honor of the late, libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick) chooses not to be vaccinated against COVID-19. By remaining unvaccinated, Robert is more likely to spread COVID-19 to other persons. In the language of economics, Roberts decision imposes a negative externality on others. Therefore, a government has the right to regulate Roberts otherwise private decision to remain unvaccinated, just as it has the right to limit pollution. Roberts liberty interest in remaining unvaccinated is overridden by the public benefit in widespread vaccination.

Many proponents of vaccine mandates end their analysis here, but they shouldnt because Robert has a response. Suppose that COVID-19 affects only adults, that a vaccine is freely available to all residents and that all residents are fully informed with respect to the vaccines effects. Suppose further that the vaccine is perfectly effective against COVID-19. Finally, suppose that everyone pays for their own health care and that persons who contract COVID-19 dont impose a cost on the health care system through congestion.

If all these conditions are satisfied, or even just more or less true, then the philosophical case for a vaccine mandate is quite weak. Yes, Roberts decision to remain unvaccinated increases the risk that others will contract COVID-19. But anyone can choose to eliminate that risk by getting vaccinated. Therefore, society is not justified in violating Roberts personal liberty by mandating that, in order to participate in civic life, he take a vaccine that he would rather avoid.

Robert would further argue that it is everyones personal responsibility to protect themselves against COVID-19 for example, by taking the vaccine if they wish to so a failure to exercise that responsibility is not a legitimate reason to infringe on his liberty.

From the standpoint of liberal (in the classical, English sense) political philosophy, Roberts argument is powerful on its own terms. But each of Roberts assumptions are empirically flawed. And because they are flawed, a liberal society in fact has a strong interest in implementing vaccine mandates.

First, COVID-19 affects children, and a vaccine has not yet been developed for all children. Moreover, even if an effective vaccine for children were widely available, a child who is unvaccinated is not responsible for that decision.

Second, society may also believe that communities that have faced historical discrimination and are distrustful of the health care system do not bear full responsibility for their decisions not to get vaccinated and deserve some protection from that decision through vaccine mandates.

Third, vaccines are widely available in the United States, but certain people such as the homeless and the undocumented may still have a difficult time obtaining access. Moreover, vaccines are not widely available in other parts of the world, and COVID-19 does not respect borders.

Fourth, existing vaccines are not perfectly effective against COVID-19. For example, even if vaccines reduce the likelihood of hospitalization by close to 90 percent, 10 percent of the total number of hospitalizations to date is still a big number.

Finally, in our health care system, society bears some of the cost of care and thus has a right to regulate individual health decisions that impose a high cost on the system as a whole.

Therefore, in the real world, Roberts decision to remain unvaccinated imposes costs, at a minimum, on children, disadvantaged communities, people in poorer countries, already-vaccinated individuals and funders and patients of the health care system. Moreover, none of these costs can be eliminated under our current constraints.

In other words, it is the limitations in current vaccine science and existing systems of vaccine delivery that justify incursions into the liberty of others. In a perfect world, liberty should prevail. But ours is not a perfect world, which makes vaccine mandates a legitimate part of a liberal society.

PrasadKrishnamurthy is professor of law at U.C. Berkeley School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the area of financial regulation and contracts.

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The paradox at the heart of the vaccine mandate debate | TheHill - The Hill

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Nearly 15,000 Nevadans register to vote in August - FOX5 Las Vegas

Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance was already some way along a journey when he took the stage at the first "National Conservatism Conference" in July 2019.

In the runup to 2016, he had been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump's candidacy. "I find him reprehensible," he tweeted a month before the election. "Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man."

Within three years, his views had evolved sufficiently to put him on the program of an event widely viewed as an attempt by right-wing pundits and scholars to erect an institutional structureor at least some intellectual scaffoldingaround the Trump phenomenon.

Earlier this year, just after announcing a run for U.S. Senate, he apologized to Ohio voters for having been "wrong about the guy."

But only last week did the full force of Vance's spiritual reversal become apparent: "I think our people hate the right people," he told The American Conservative magazine.

"Our people" might be understood broadly as the Republican base, while those he sees as worthy of contempt might be understood broadly as leftists and members of the coastal elite. Reached for comment, his campaign press secretary affirmed that "JD Vance strongly believes that the political, financial and Big Tech elitesdeserve nothing but our scorn and hatred."

By suggesting that antipathy toward the correct out-group is itself a moral imperative, Vance was engaging a powerful political current that has recently resurfaced within the conservative movement. He is not the first to be swept up in it.

In 2016 and 2017, New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote a pair of long magazine articles sounding the alarm to people of faith about rising illiberalism at home and abroad. "Simply put," he said in the second piece for Commentary magazine, "in the real-world experience of the 20th century, the Church, tradition, and religious minorities fared far better under liberal-democratic regimes than they did under illiberal alternatives."

Two years later, Ahmari had had enough of all that. In a now-infamous broadside in the Christian journal First Things, he insisted that conservatives learn to see "politics as war and enmity," that they shed their "great horror" of "the use of the public power to advance the common good," and that they be willing "to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils."

At the very core of the new illiberal conservatism is a yenfor powerand an unabashed willingness to use it to destroy one's political opponents. Summing up the problem with libertarians and "establishment" conservatives in an essay last year, Hillsdale College's David Azerrad assailed "the cowardice and accommodation in the face of leftist hegemony" exhibited by the "long list of enemies to the Right." The more "manly" and "combative" conservatism that Azerrad claimed to speak for "understands not just ideas," he said, "but power."

Demands of this sort can be plausibly justified only if one's adversaries are irredeemable and one's life itself is at stake. Listen to the new conservatives' online chatter and you'll hear just such claims: that the left wishes to "subjugate" or "exterminate" them; that progressives have no qualms about using state power to accomplish their ends; that to do anything less than respond "in kind" amounts to "unilateral disarmament"; that this is a "war" in which the only choices are "suicide" or victory at any cost.

And these sentiments are not limited to anonymous accounts on the dark edges of social media. In July, former Trump official (and "Flight 93 Election" essayist) Michael Anton lambasted conservatives for not responding appropriately to the "proto-genocidal rhetoric" of the left. In February 2020, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule stepped into hot water by tweeting that the anti-Trump attendees of a center-right conference would be "the very first group for the camps." (He meant that their opposition to Trump will not be able to save them from the "gulags" when the "extremist left" takes over, he later clarified.) As talk radio provocateur Jesse Kelly put it this spring, "The Left and the Right have existed in a System where only the Left plays offense and the Right plays defense. They've existed in this System so long, both sides think it's normal. And permanent. It's not."

A couple of things should be clear at this point. For one, this is not a left-right schism. For those I call "Will-to-Power Conservatives," the fusionistright is no less an enemy than is the progressive-identitarian left. (Now would be a good moment to acknowledge that the politics of hate are not exactly foreign to segments of the progressive movement, either. Neither side has a monopoly on illiberalism.)

Second, this divide is not primarily about technocratic policy.

Consider that the same nationalist conference at which Vance spoke in 2019 featured a debate. On one side, representing the MAGA faction, former Mitt Romey adviser Oren Cass argued that Washington should use its powers of taxation and regulation to prop up American manufacturing against foreign competition. On the other, Richard Reinsch, an editor at the libertarian publisher Liberty Fund, made the case for free markets and against attempts by the state to choose winners and losers.

It can seem like this type of studious wrangling over the proper size and scope of government is the main rift on the right today. It's not. Cass' top-down industrial planning is about as far from my free trade libertarianism as a political agenda can be. But as a dispositional liberal, Cass recognizes, just as Reinsch and I do, that people can disagree without despising one another.

The same, I fear, cannot be said of Vance and his compatriots. And once hate becomes a virtue to be celebrated and opponents become enemies to be destroyed, before long, no response is off the table.

Students of intellectual history may be picking up a hair-raising resonance. The new illiberal conservatives have (sometimes quite explicitly) taken a page out of the book of Carl Schmitt, an anti-modernist, pro-authoritarian German political philosopher known for insisting that the core distinction of politics "is that between friend and enemy."

It's occasionally said that Schmitt's ideas were meant to be descriptive, not normative. Yet he plainly believed that blowing up constitutional limitations on the executive and withholding mercy from the out-group were the legitimate province of a sovereign state. Democracy, he once wrote, "necessarily involves first homogeneity and secondlyif necessarythe elimination or annihilation of heterogeneity."

As if to prove how strong the current of hate-based politics can be, Schmitt's beliefs would lead him to a stint as the "crown jurist of the Third Reich." Though he eventually left the Nazi Party, he refused to renounce the worldview that had made him one of Hitler's most prominent apologists.

With their talk of enemies and enmity and civilizational war, it seems the new illiberal conservatives have tapped into something that isn't so new after all.

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JD Vance Surrenders to the Politics of Hate - Reason

Democrats in Congress are considering a policy that was long unthinkable: a federal requirement that every American show identification before casting a ballot. But as the party tries to pass voting-rights legislation before the next election, it is ignoring a companion proposal that could ensure that a voter-ID law leaves no one behindan idea that is as obvious as it is historically controversial. What if the government simply gave an ID card to every voting-age citizen in the country?

Voter-ID requirements are the norm in many countries, as Republicans are fond of pointing out. But so are national ID cards. In places such as France and Germany, citizens pick up their identity card when they turn 16 and present it once theyre eligible to vote. Out of nearly 200 countries across the world, at least 170 have some form of national ID or are implementing one, according to the political scientist Magdalena Krajewska.

In the American psyche, however, a national ID card conjures images of an all-knowing government, its agents stopping people on the street and demanding to see their papers. Or at least thats what leaders of both parties believe. The idea is presumed to be so toxic that not a single member of Congress is currently carrying its banner. Even those advocates who like the concept in theory will discuss its political prospects only with a knowing chuckle, the kind that signals that the questioner is a bit crazy. There are only three problems with a national ID: Republicans hate it, Libertarians hate it, and Democrats hate it, says Kathleen Unger, the founder of VoteRiders, an organization devoted to helping people obtain ID.

Admittedly, this is probably not the best time to propose a new national ID. A large minority of the country is rebelling against vaccine passports as a form of government coercion. Yet public opposition to a national ID has never been as strong as political leaders assume. The idea has won majority support in polls for much of the past 40 years and spiked to nearly 70 percent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In a nationwide survey conducted this summer by Leger for The Atlantic, 51 percent of respondents favored a national ID that could be used for voting, while 49 percent agreed with an opposing statement that a national ID would represent an unnecessary expansion of government power and would be misused to infringe on Americans privacy and personal freedoms. Support was far higher63 percentamong respondents who said they had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 than it was among those who said they had voted for Donald Trump (39 percent).

The best argument for a national ID is that the nations current hodgepodge of identifiers stuffs the wallets of some people but leaves millions of Americans empty-handed and disenfranchised. Studies over the years have found that as many as one in 10 citizens lacks the documentation needed to vote. Those who do are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, poor, or over the age of 65. The Atlantic poll suggests that the gap remains: 9 percent of respondents said they lacked a government-issued ID, although a much smaller share (2 percent) said that was the reason they did not vote in 2020. Because the overwhelming majority of Americans do have IDs, we dont realize theres this whole other side of the country thats facing this massive crisis, says Kat Calvin, who launched the nonprofit Spread the Vote, which helps people obtain IDs.

Read: How voter-ID laws discriminate

The United States gives every citizen a Social Security card with a unique nine-digit number, but the paper cards lack a photograph. Passports have photos, but barely more than one-third of Americans currently have one thats not expired. By far the most common form of photo ID is a state-issued drivers license, but many elderly and poor citizens dont drive, nor do a significant number of Americans who live in large cities and rely on mass transit.

Opposition to national ID remains among groups on the libertarian right, such as the Cato Institute, as well as civil-liberties advocates on the left, such as the ACLU. But even they acknowledge that the fears of an all-knowing government sound a bit ridiculous in an era when Americans freely hand over so much of themselves to companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. We do have a national ID, Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security under President George W. Bush, told me. Its operated by giant tech companies, where every place you are, everything you do, everything you search for is recorded in some fashion and integrated as a matter of managing your data. Were locking the window, and weve got the front door wide open.

The idea of linking voting to a single ID card was not always so far-fetched. In 2005, a bipartisan commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker endorsed a federal voter-ID requirement. The panel recommended that the emerging Real ID, a product of one of many security reforms Congress passed after September 11, be used for voting. The Real ID Act set minimum security standards for drivers licenses and other IDs that are used to board flights and enter federal buildings. It wasand is, as the federal government makes clear 16 years laterexplicitly not a national ID. Even in the security-at-any-cost posture of the years following 9/11, there was a general recognition that there was an allergy to a national ID, Chertoff told me.

Some of the Democrats on the commission believed that a national ID was inevitable. The United States is moving toward a national ID, for reasons of homeland security, Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana representative and a member of the commission, wrote to his colleagues in a memo obtained by The Atlantic. That moment was the closest the two parties have come to a consensus on voter ID in the past 20 years. But despite a push by Carter for a unanimous endorsement, three Democrats on the commissionincluding former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschledissented from its headline recommendation.

Democrats in Congress ensured that the idea went nowhere. The day after the commission released its recommendations, Barack Obama, then in his ninth month as a senator, stood alongside Representative John Lewis of Georgia to denounce the ID proposal as a mistake and a solution in search of a problem. The commission had called for voter ID even as it acknowledged within its report that the issue the requirement purports to solvevoter fraudwas extremely rare. Carter defended the proposal as a corrective to the restrictive ID laws that Republican-led states had already begun to pass. Other Democrats, though, now see a damaging legacy for the Carter-Baker commission: It coated the idea of voter-ID laws with a bipartisan gloss, allowing Republican-led states to justify unnecessary restrictions on the liberty of many Americans to cast a ballot, Spencer Overton, one of the panels Democratic dissenters, told me.

The goal of the Carter-Baker commissions recommendation was to endorse a federal ID standard for voting while requiring statesand perhaps, eventually, the federal governmentto make secure IDs available to every citizen free of charge. But thats not what happened. In 2001, just 11 states required ID to vote. The movement has exploded in the two decades since, aided by a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 upholding a voter-ID law in Indiana, the 2010 wave election that empowered Republicans across the country, and the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act. Now 36 states have voter-ID laws on the books.

To understand why Democrats have so strenuously opposed voter-ID laws over the past two decades, consider the experience of Spread the Vote. With a staff of 16 and a budget of $1.6 million, the organization now operates in 17 states that require an ID to vote. Calvins staff and volunteers work with peoplemany of whom are homeless or were recently incarceratedto assemble and pay for the necessary documents. Securing just a single valid ID can take days or weeks. In its four years of existence, Spread the Vote has been able to get IDs for about 7,000 people. The organization estimates that the number of eligible voters in the U.S. who lack the IDs they need to cast a ballot is at least 21 million.

Read: How the government learned to waste your time

Generally, Democrats have long believed that negotiating with Republicans over ID laws was pointless because the GOPs insistence on them was less about protecting ballot integrity than about shaping the electorate to its advantage by suppressing the votes of people likely to back its opponents. Its hard not to see it as a part of a comprehensive strategy to engineer outcomes, Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor (and, briefly, a 2020 presidential contender), told me.

The Democratic Party is taking a new look at a federal ID standard this year out of desperation. Democrats in the Senate need Joe Manchin of West Virginia to support their push for voting-rights legislation, and in June, he circulated a set of policies he wanted to see in a revised bill. One would require voter ID with allowable alternatives (utility bill, e.g.) to prove identity to vote. His single-line proposal makes no mention of requiring a photo. Many states, including Texas, already allow alternatives to presenting a photo ID, although the exceptions vary widely.

Read: The strange elegance of Joe Manchins voter-ID deal

The most surprising aspect of Manchins floated idea was the reaction of Democratic leaders. None of them shot it down. Stacey Abrams, who has fought restrictive voting laws nationwide since narrowly losing her 2018 bid to become Georgias governor, said she could absolutely support that provision. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the Houses third-ranking Democrat and a close ally of President Joe Biden, was also okay with it. Ive never, ever said I was opposed to voters IDing themselves, Clyburn told me. A guy cant just walk off an airplane from a foreign country and walk into a voting booth and say, I want to vote. You have to ID yourself. Clyburn said an ID law just has to be equitable: The government cant, as some red states do, accept a hunting license as a form of ID for voting but not a student ID.

To Calvin, however, the initial acquiescence of Democrats such as Abrams and Clyburn to an ID proposal was a betrayal. My reaction was blinding rage followed by massive heartbreak and disappointment, she told me. A utility bill, she said, was a meaningless alternative for most of the people she tries to assist. My whole job is helping people who dont have utility bills get IDs, she said. What they were saying is: If you dont have a home or an apartment or if your name isnt on the lease on that home or apartment, you dont deserve to vote, you dont deserve to participate in democracy.

Calvin told me she would enthusiastically support a national voter-ID law on one condition: if it followed immediately after the creation of a national ID for everybody, with a plan and a budget to implement it. She suffers no illusions about the likelihood of that happening, however. Its a pipe dream, she said. Calvins right. Democrats may be open to requiring voter ID, but the prospect of a national ID is still too hot to touch.

After Clyburn spent several minutes explaining the kind of ID law he could support, I asked him whether the solution was simply to create an ID for everyone. The lawmaker responsible for counting votes in the House stopped me immediately. Im not into that, he said. I pressed him, bringing up the Carter-Baker commission, the use of national ID in other countries. I know where youre going with this, Clyburn replied. Im not there.

Read the original:
Voter ID: Why Doesn't America Have a National ID Card? - The Atlantic

Its often said that Wario is an enigma. Who says that? Thats not one of the questions were here to answer.

Its Wario Month here at Wariogon, and there are some burning questions out there about Wario. While hes certainly the loudest and proudest of the overall-wearing citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom, there are some common misconceptions about him.

Lets dive into the things you need to know ahead of our month celebrating the gold and garlic-loving prince of video games (and farts).

Warios first appearance was Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins on the Game Boy. He served as the games primary antagonist, and he was reportedly born out of one Nintendo teams frustration over making a game based on a different teams protagonist.

Thus Wario, envisioned by creator Hiroji Kiyotake as the Bluto to Mario's Popeye, was born. Wario went on to take over the Land series, dubbing it Wario Land. Most notably, Wario joined the ever-growing roster of Mushroom Kingdom denizens to golf, kart, and party with Mario and his friends. He eventually opened WarioWare to make his own video games, and he even starred in his own 3D platform on the Nintendo GameCube, Wario World, but we dont talk about that.

Growing up, I remember hearing playground rumors about Wario. (Clearly, I had a lot going on during second grade.) The most popular one was that Wario and Mario were cousins. But thats not the case. Wario and Mario were actually just childhood rivals, and the two share no blood relation.

So, Mario and Wario arent cousins, but surely Waluigi is Warios brother? No, thank god.

Wario was the original Wa inhabitant of the Mushroom Kingdom, showing up as a villain for Mario in 1992. Waluigi, on the other hand, is an absolute creep who only exists so Wario could have a duos partner in tennis. None of that is a joke.

An issue of Nintendo Power cataloged last year on Twitter revealed that Waluigi is just some goober that Wario hired. Waluigi isnt even his real name. Wario apparently searched an internet actor pool and hired Jimmy Poppadopolos to act like his duo partner and be a foil for Luigi. Waluigi has since legally changed his name. Seriously.

This question has a pretty complex answer. Wario isnt the main villain of the series, to be sure. But even Bowser, who trumps Wario in sheer villainy, is more of an antagonist than a villain. Bowser is a good dad who even occasionally acts in a more comedic role for story-based Mario titles like the Mario & Luigi games or Paper Mario. In many cases, Bowser is more of a frenemy than an antagonist. And with how much Bowser, Wario, Mario, and the rest of the gang hang out while playing sports and driving, Im not sure you could even call Bowser a bad guy.

With Wario clearly in a lower bad guy tier than Bowser, I think its safe to downgrade him from villain to jerk.

Youd think so, but Id guess no.

Youll find surprisingly little if you type Wario and IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) into Google, so Ill just say this from the heart: Warios farts are weaponized and on demand. It is, in fact, crueler if he doesnt have IBS and has instead just cultivated his body to be an unnatural fart machine. A weapon of gas destruction, if you will.

Another question thats surprisingly complex to answer.

Wario is Italian now, but he wasnt always. Warios original voice actor was German translator Thomas Spindler, and his line that sounds like oh, I missed! is actually So ein Mist! which is German for oh crap! On brand for Wario. Spindler said Wario was always envisioned as German.

However, outside of his Mario Strikers Charged theme song which has a German folk song vibe Wario is largely viewed as Italian. The shift seems to have happened as soon as Charles Martinet, Marios voice actor, took over the role. The Wario we hear today speaks more than any of Martinets other characters and in an even thicker Italian accent than Mario.

Maybe?

In a Nintendo Power issue from 2000, the magazine asked producer Hiroyuki Takahashi if Wario had his own partner the way Mario and Luigi have Peach and Daisy. Marios creator, Shigeru Miyamoto told the producer that he didnt want to see whatever girlfriends Wario and Waluigi would find for themselves.

However, the same Nintendo Power blog that outs Waluigi as Jimmy Poppadopolos also suggests that Wario and Waluigi may have had a budding romance. The article does say that as of Mario Kart Double Dash the two have parted ways physically, which is perhaps the worst imaginable way to put that.

So, if Wario does fuck, he probably fucks Waluigi. Do with that information what you will.

If you google Wario, as I often do, youve probably run into this auto-complete, asking if Wario considers himself a member of the Libertarian political party.

This is actually not a sincere question, but instead an old school Twitter meme from 2011.

But in service of this FAQ: No, Wario is not a Libertarian. Wario clearly doesnt believe in or understand government, otherwise he would have run for office at this point.

Read the rest here:
Everything you need to know about Wario - Polygon

By James Kaufman

Updated: 21 hours ago Published: 21 hours ago

Rep. James Kaufman, R-Anchorage, speaks on the opening day of the Alaska Legislature's third special session of 2021 on Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. (James Brooks / ADN)

As an elected state representative who has been in the middle of the big debate about the fiscal policy of the state of Alaska, including the Permanent Fund dividend and how we fund our state government, I thought I should provide some context to my recent votes on House Bill 3003, which included this years PFD and other spending items.

I am a Republican, with a bit of libertarian in me. I have looked at the PFD issue closely and seriously. In doing so, I have determined that the future of larger-than-recent PFDs would require the creation of new bureaucracy and new taxes.

This creates a challenge, because during my campaign, anyone who met me at their door, my events or heard me on television, radio, Zoom meetings, etc., knew that my beliefs were and still are as follows:

I am not anti-PFD, but the states ability to pay according to the historical formula has been diminished by shifting and declining revenue, combined with a government that needs reformation to provide a higher quality product at a more reasonable cost.

Without reductions in total cost of government, PFDs larger than those recently issued will require new taxes.

I am not yet in favor of ramping up taxes to feed a government that has not implemented a coherent set of improvement initiatives to get more value out of the cash being burned.

We need to build consensus and fix the conflicting statutes.

I developed my positions by paying attention to the voices of my constituents and the past decisions that led us here. I was honored to have won without promising anything specific about PFD amounts, but rather that I would approach problems methodically while trying to drive our state government toward higher efficiency, better results and more accountability.

During the Aug. 30 House floor session, I voted to support an $1,100 dividend as opposed to larger dividends, including the $2,350 amount calculated by the governors proposed 5% percent-of-market-value 50-50 plan and the original statutory amount, which would have yielded more than $3,700.

I voted the way I did because we have not yet resolved the source of the conflict, our structural fiscal imbalance. I feel that I would be breaking a campaign promise if I were to support an unbalanced budget or new broad-based taxation to close the gap. However, even with these constraints, we can still have a dividend that is above recent status quo, at about $1,100 and growing into the future.

We have the recommendations of the latest Fiscal Policy Work Group, but those recommendations have not been completely agreed upon, and none of the recommendations have been implemented. Larger dividends have not been paired with possible new sources of revenue, who would pay and how tax collection would be administered. There has been talk of cost reductions, but realizing those reductions will be painful and hard to achieve unless we can learn how to improve our management systems and rethink some of our processes and assumptions.

I am not in favor of new or increased taxes if we dont first improve how the state manages spending during periods where revenue increases. I believe that the most important and first steps are to establish a functional limit on government spending and then begin implementing improvement projects to drive out waste and increase performance.

HJR 301/HB 3001 are my proposed policy solutions for implementing cost control by linking appropriation limits to our private sector performance. I will continue to introduce other legislation aimed squarely at my core policy focus of improving operational and quality management systems and practices within the executive branch of the state of Alaska.

In making these suggestions to avoid new taxes until we cap spending and improve government operations, I have not moved away from my conservative roots or my campaign promises, which guide me toward trying to build our private sector, promoting responsible fiscal policies, and seeking to continuously improve the quality of Alaskas government.

Rep. James Kaufman, R-Anchorage, represents House District 28 in the Alaska Legislature, encompassing southeast Anchorage, Turnagain Arm and Girdwood.

The views expressed here are the writers and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

Read the original:
My recent votes on the PFD - Anchorage Daily News