Let's get rid of our government, start over with a parliament: Revisited

A few months ago in the Scripps Howard column I made the 300-word case that America's Constitutional system is broken, and should be replaced by the parliamentary system in place in nearly all other advanced democracies. In The American Prospect today, Harold Meyerson makes the case at more length,   but offers more modest proposals instead:

The two reforms with the most support—ending the filibuster and abolishing the Electoral College—would do nothing to curtail the fragmentation of power within the federal government, but both would limit minorities’ ability to reduce the sway of majorities. Another reform that would create a more representative government would be to change the timing of elections and the terms of congressional office. Presidential contests draw far more votes than midterm congressional ones: From 1984 through 2008, turnout in presidential elections has ranged from 53 percent of eligible adults to 62 percent, while turnout in midterm elections from 1986 through 2010 has ranged from 39 percent to 42 percent. If House members were given four-year terms coterminous with the president’s, they would be answerable to the same larger electorate. This, of course, would also be true of senators. These wouldn’t be parliamentary elections—the candidates for president, senator, and representative would still be elected separately—but at least our elected officials would all derive their power from the identical and most broadly representative electorate. 

Although the federal government can’t go parliamentary, why can’t the states? Maintaining two legislative bodies at the state level has been pointless for the past 50 years, ever since the Supreme Court’s one-person, one-vote decisions; those rulings required state Senate districts, once apportioned by geographical unit (such as counties), to be apportioned by population, just as lower-house districts are. Talk about duplication and waste in government! Nebraska has long had a unicameral legislature. There’s no good reason why 49 other states shouldn’t follow suit. Nor is there a reason why at least a few more compact and homogenous states—Vermont? Oregon? Utah?—can’t go one step further to a parliamentary system. Two and a quarter centuries after the Philadelphia convention, America should be ready for some small-scale experiments in majority rule.

It's worth noting that the Constitution came together because the national government under the Articles of Confederation was so gridlocked that it couldn't pay the bills—America's Revolutionary War debts weren't being paid, with the result that the United States was seen as weak and feckless. Based on the Founders' own precedent, we're once again at a point in history (for the third time this year!) where it's time to consider altering our political system so that it can perform basic duties in a fashion accountable to the electorate. We're not going to adopt a parliamentary system anytime soon, but maybe we should.

Ross Douthat's confounding argument against banning the death penalty

Ross Douthat's column in today's New York Times—when did he get moved to Sundays?—attempts, I think, a form of moral sophistication but instead falls prey to silliness. His argument (I think) is that banning the death penalty would be really bad—because life in prison is really bad, maybe even worse than being executed, and in any case might cause prison reformers to take their eye off the ball.

But there’s a danger here for advocates of criminal justice reform. After all, in a world without the death penalty, Davis probably wouldn’t have been retried or exonerated. His appeals would still have been denied, he would have spent the rest of his life in prison, and far fewer people would have known or cared about his fate.

Well, maybe. But ... he'd still be alive.


Ah, Ross argues, but life in prison would be a fate worse than death.

This point was made well last week by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing for The American Scene. In any penal system, he pointed out, but especially in our own — which can be brutal, overcrowded, rife with rape and other forms of violence — a lifelong prison sentence can prove more cruel and unusual than a speedy execution. And a society that supposedly values liberty as much or more than life itself hasn’t necessarily become more civilized if it preserves its convicts’ lives while consistently violating their rights and dignity. It’s just become better at self-deception about what’s really going on.

We can't ask Troy Davis if he'd rather be dead or alive and in prison, but I suspect he'd prefer the former. I imagine his family would prefer him living, as well. And we wouldn't be wondering right now if the State of Georgia and the Supreme Court of the United States were essentially indifferent to questions of innocence when it comes to the rights of death row prisoners.

But Ross is correct, from what I can tell: Prison is hell. Is it worse than death? At the risk of being glib, an awful lot of prisoners aren't committing suicide, so I'll presume that the vast majority of them think that living is preferable.

Let's put aside Ross's obtuseness regarding the execution of potentially innocent life—I don't think he brooks many excuses when it comes to abortion—the real fundamental problem here is his assumption that we can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Hey: We can work to ban the death penalty because it's an unreliable yet irrevocable form of justice and work to reform prisons and our sentencing culture at the same time. There's no reason we can't do both! And indeed, justice may demand that we do so. Ross Douthat's position is that we have to choose which injustice to correct. We should try to have it all.

Christina Ricci misses the overt misogyny of the 1960s

Pardon me for scoffing as Christina Ricci promotes her new show, "Pan Am":

It’s interesting. We’re portraying women who are navigating a blatantly misogynistic world, time, and society. And we live in a society that is a thinly veiled misogynistic society. And we are women trying to navigate that. It’s interesting, because in some ways, while it’s nice that everyone pretends the world today is not misogynistic, in other ways, at least before, when it was blatantly misogynistic, it was a little bit more honest. Things were called what they were called, and the rules were set, and people knew what things they had to meet, and what things they had to check off the checklist. And once they abided by certain things, they could then kind of go and run free and avoid things that needed to be avoided. It was, in some ways, less confusing, and in some ways, less dangerous. I struggle with which is better.

I know which is better. Now is better.

Ricci is correct, perhaps, that the old ways were "more honest." But hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue—and in the 21st century, misogyny and sexism are looked down upon. Even officially sanctioned, in some settings. That's progress, even if it's not as much as we'd like to see.

Beyond that: the rules, expectations, and checklists that women were expected—and, frankly, allowed—to fulfill during the 1960s setting of Ricci's new show were much more limited. Being a stewardess (or a teacher, or a homemaker) was about as far as most women could hope their talents to take them. Being an executive at a company? Election to congress or the Senate? Serving in a president's cabinet? It was unthinkable.

It's true that women oftentimes face obstacles in those heady settings that men simply don't. (Remember all the hubub about Hillary Clinton getting choked up during the New Hampshire primary in 2008?) But during the era Ricci pines for—and never experienced—women didn't even have the opportunities to rise that far.

There's still work to be done. I won't deny that. But Ricci expresses a kind of ignorance when she acts like the 21st century is no better than the 1960s. It really, really is.

Rich Lowry's piffle about Elizabeth Warren

At NRO, Rich Lowry hints that Elizabeth Warren—she of the "factory owner" quote that's gone viral among my liberal friends—is a bit of a socialist.

Her remarks and the celebration of them capture the Left’s romance with collective action over individual initiative. Most people don’t look at a successful manufacturer and say, “Yeah, but he’d be nothing without a surface-transportation network.” Although all of us (not just the rich) travel roads and bridges, few of us open factories.

 Lowry's wrong. Warren's remarks celebrate collective action and individual initiative working hand-in-hand. (And it's a necessary counterpoint to the ascendant Ayn Randian ideology that celebrates the individual without acknowledgement of the collective action that made it possible for the individual to succeed—indeed, disdains that collective completely.) Here's part of what Warren said:

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Lowry scoffs:

Focusing on infrastructure as the crucial support of entrepreneurial activity is like crediting the guy who built young Bill Gates’s garage with the start of Microsoft. Yes, Gates needed a roof over his head, and garages are useful. But it was Gates who had the ambition to do more in his garage than store his car and lawn-care products. Incalculably more important than his physical surroundings were his imagination and business sense. 

Could Gates have done it in Mogadishu or Peshawar? Certainly not. But the goods cited by Warren as the foundation of a workable business environment are extremely minimal.

I guess I don't get this. Lowry has to admit that the infrastructure and public safety made possible by government are essential to entrepreneurial activity—thus the Mogadishu comparison—but at the same time he dismisses it as "minimal."

I think that's extremely easy to say if you're not in Mogadishu. Gates can't get his work done without that garage, but it doesn't matter? Very weird. I assume Rich Lowry likes to build houses without foundations.

Millionaires can afford a tax increase

Ben and I talk a little bit about the "Buffett Rule" in this week's Scripps Howard column. I got my populist on:

Should the federal government raise taxes on millionaires? Why not? They're millionaires! They can afford it! Don't let all the crocodile tears over "class warfare" persuade you otherwise. 

It's time, in fact, for millionaires to start giving back to their country. While Americans in all income categories saw their tax rates slide slightly from 1979-2007, the top 1 percent of households saw a big drop: From 37 percent to 29.5 percent. The richest 400 households in America got an even better deal, says the Economic Policy Institute: Their average tax rate dropped from 26.4 percent to 16.6 percent -- a tax rate nearly 4 percent lower than the average American's. 

The millionaires can afford it. 

And the rich are getting richer. EPI also notes that from 1983-2009, the top 5 percent of households accumulated 82 percent of the nation's wealth gains -- half of that went to the top 1 percent -- while the bottom 60 percent lost ground during that time. In fact, the Census Bureau reported last week that the poverty rate is the highest measured in 52 years; the median household income declined in 2010 by 2.3 percent from the previous year. 

The millionaires can afford it. 

Republicans protest that levying such taxes will penalize "job creators" and discourage them from doing the hard work of capitalism. 

But take a look at the high, sustained unemployment rate. Right now there are four job seekers for every job opening in America. The rich aren't actually creating jobs right now; they're sitting on their money. Put that money into President Obama's jobs program! 

America's wealthy are getting wealthier. The rest of us are not. It's not "penalizing success" to ask millionaires to pay just a little more. But those higher taxes might give many Americans a shot to survive. 

The millionaires can afford it.

In fairness, I'm not certain Obama's jobs program will deliver the kind of employment jump-start we need. But at least it's something.

Mark Krikorian: Governments were made for executions

In the wake of the Troy Davis execution, NRO's Mark Krikorian argues that we wouldn't even have government if citizens didn't want murderers killed. (He doesn't name Davis, weirdly.) It's an odd argument.

If the state refuses, as a matter of policy, to execute murderers under any circumstances, it rejects the reason people submitted to government in the first place and underlines its own legitimacy. And this isn’t just theoretical bloviation — people sense it in their hearts, even if they don’t think about it in those terms. That was the appeal of Chuck Bronson’s Death Wish movies — when the state fails to carry out its most elementary duty, people will resort to vigilantism, i.e., they seek justice in the only way available to our ancestors in pre-political times.

It's true that one of the things that makes a government a government is that it largely has a monopoly on force. But I guess I'm hugely dubious about the idea that governments are made for the express purpose of executing people. And Krikorian's Charles Bronson example is illustrative of that. "Death Wish" came out in 1974—two years after the Supreme Court (temporarily, it turned out) ended the death penalty in the United States. But the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s had started several years before that.  People were already fed up.

I don't think people don't find their government illegitimate when it doesn't execute murderers. But they do find government illegitimate when it can't generally keep a lid on the number of murders, and generally bring murderers to justice. Pile that on top of a whole range of other, mostly lesser crimes, and people don't feel secure in their communities. New York hasn't executed anybody since 1963; the city faced questions of governability during the crime wave—along with a financial crisis—but was reborn in the 1990s thanks to a combination of demographics and policing that had nothing whatsover to do with the death penalty. New York became safer, so people became more confident in the city as a place to work, play, live, and pay taxes.

That's where a government gets its legitimacy: Protecting and serving its citizens. Killing a few of those citizens doesn't necessarily get the job done, especially—as in the case of Troy Davis—when there are real questions of innocence. The State of Georgia in particular, and death penalty jurisprudence in general, face more doubts about their legitimacy today than they did yesterday. It's not because they refused to execute a man.

The United States and the Economic Freedom of the World

The latest Economic Freedom index report is out, and the clear talking point is that the United States dropped four spots in the rankings. What that talking point omits is that the United States is still ranked No. 10 out of 141 nations. In other words: Our economy is still incredibly free, despite the socialist designs of President Barack Obama.

Still, even if one believes the United States is trending in the wrong direction, it's interesting to contemplate the nations ahead of us on the chart. Hong Kong comes in at No. 1; Singapore comes in at No. 2. These are not nations (ahem) noted for their political and civil liberties; the former is under the control of the People's Republic of China, while the latter is, well, Singapore. Tea Partiers have spent the last couple of years suggesting that economic liberty—freedom from regulations and burdensome taxes—are, perhaps, the foundational part of personal liberty. But the Economic Freedom Index suggests the two are easily separated.

Two other countries ahead of the United States on the list: The UK and Canada. These, of course, are the tyrannic socialist hellholes we were warned against becoming if the United States adopted a healthcare system anywhere close to ones run by those countries. Apparently they're also good places to do business.

I'm trying not to be snarky, and failing. The point is that much of the political rhetoric we've heard the last two years has suggested the United States is sliding into an anti-freedom morass of taxes, regulations, and central planning. Relative to the rest of the world, however, we're extraordinarily free—both economically, and with regards to our political and civil liberties. It's good to be vigilant in defense of freedom, but a little perspective helps.