Some Thoughts on the Filibuster

Some Senate Democrats want to eliminate the filibuster. I offer here some of my thoughts on the filibuster, using the New York Times morning report as a prop. On 1/27/21, the Times posted this, which includes my annotates. My annotates are highlighted. The rest is the Times:

Status quo vs. change

If you examine the history of the filibuster — a Senate rule requiring a supermajority vote on many bills, rather than a straight majority — you will quickly notice something: It has benefited the political right much more than the left.

In the 1840s (before the term “filibuster” existed), Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina used the technique to protect slavery. Over the next century, Southern Democrats repeatedly used the filibuster to prevent Black Americans from voting and to defeat anti-lynching bills. From the 1950s through the 1990s, Senate Republicans, working with some conservative Democrats, blocked the passage of laws that would have helped labor unions organize workers. Over the past two decades, the filibuster has enabled Republicans to defeat a long list of progressive bills, on climate change, oil subsidies, campaign finance, Wall Street regulation, corporate offshoring, gun control, immigration, gender pay equality and Medicare expansion. [Note that the whole section involves rights-violating Democratic agendas. The first two paragraphs blocked freedom's advance. The second two paragraphs blocked the advance of largely anti-freedom, rights-violating “progressive” legislation. Put the four paragraphs together, and you can see the consistency of the Democratic Party's anti-liberty essence over time. The Times also fails to mention an elephant in the room, the Progressive project to legally segregate America, which was pushed through despite the existence of the filibuster.  [Notice also that the Times lumps together pro-slavery Democrats with Republican/conservative opposition to the rights-violating Progressive agenda. Slavery, black disenfrancisement, lynching are the political right? This is why the Right/Left paradigm must be abandoned by pro-liberty forces.]

The early days of Joe Biden’s presidency, with the Democrats narrowly controlling the Senate, have intensified a debate over whether the party should eliminate the filibuster. If Senate Democrats did, they could try to pass many bills — say, on climate change, voting rights, Medicare expansion and tax increases on the rich — with 51 votes, rather than 60.

As part of the debate, many observers have pointed out that both parties have used the filibuster, and both could suffer from its demise. Democrats, for example, filibustered some of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees, as well as abortion restrictions and an estate-tax cut. A Senate without the current filibuster really would cause problems for Democrats at times.

On balance, however, there is no question about which party benefits more from the filibuster. Republicans do, and it’s not close. [And there is no doubt about which party is the bigger threat to liberty in America.]

The dictionary test

This makes sense, too. Consider the words conservative and progressive. A conservative tends to prefer the status quo, while a progressive often favors change. “The filibuster is a tool to preserve the status quo and makes it harder to make change,” Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate aide and the author of “Kill Switch,” a new book on the filibuster, told me. (I’m reading the book now and recommend it.) [There is nothing inherently good about change. If liberty is to be "conserved"--read, secured] in America, it is the "progressives" [read, regressives] idea of change that must be blocked.]

Jentleson documents that the country’s founders did not intend for most legislation to require a supermajority and that the filibuster emerged only in the 1800s. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both wrote passionate defenses of simple majority rule. They protected minority rights by creating a government — with a president, two legislative chambers and a judiciary — in which making a law even with simple majorities was onerous.

“What at first sight may seem a remedy,” Hamilton wrote, referring to supermajority rule, “is, in reality, a poison.” If a majority could not govern, he explained, it would lead to “tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.” [I have no strong opinion on the filibuster pro or con, although I lean toward keeping it if for no other reason than that it makes lawmaking more difficult and reigns in majority power. The filibuster can benefit or hurt either side at any given time. What I do know is that the fight over the filibuster is not the primary conflict. The primary fight is between individualism and collectivism, the resolution of which will decide the outcome of the conflict between liberty and tyranny. Fighting to fully restore our Constitution within our lawmaking capacity should be our goal. That would make the fight over the filibuster much less important.] Related Reading: Save the Filibuster Will Biden Acknowledge His Own Party’s ‘Central Role’ in Segregating America?

Pope Francis, Capitalism’s Arch Enemy, Condemns Free Market Capitalism -- Again

Pope Francis is again condemning Capitalism. Brad Polumbo calls out the Pope on the absurdity of his criticisms in The Pope Just Called Private Property a ‘Secondary Right.’ He Couldn't Be More Wrong, published for The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). 

I hate to be critical of a fellow champion of Capitalism. But I have to give this article two cheers. Why? Because the author gives the Pope the benefit of the doubt in claiming he doesn’t understand capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Francis thoroughly understands capitalism. 

The subtitle of Polumbo’s article is:

Pope Francis’s criticisms of free-market capitalism don’t mesh well with available facts, empirical evidence, or a basic understanding of how economics actually works.

Polumbo also states:

There’s no doubt that the Pope is a learned man in matters of religion, and he likely has the best of intentions in preaching his collectivist gospel. But his elementary arguments against free-market capitalism are incredibly weak.

Best of intentions? Let’s delve a little deeper into Polumbo’s article. First, Polumbo offers select quotes from Pope Francis. All italics are mine:

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” Francis wrote in part of a lengthy religious text. “To care for the world in which we live means to care for ourselves. Yet we need to think of ourselves more and more as a single family dwelling in a common home. Such care does not interest those economic powers that demand quick profits.”

“In today’s world, many forms of injustice persist, fed by… a profit-based economic model that does not hesitate to exploit, discard and even kill human beings,” Francis lamented.

The Pope decried the free-market “dogma of neo-liberal faith” that views “the magic theories of ‘spillover’ or ‘trickle’ ... as the only solution to societal problems.” He went on to write that “market freedom cannot supersede the rights of peoples and the dignity of the poor.”

Francis reiterated his belief that “if one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it.” He concluded that “the right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods.”

Polumbo understands the vital economic, social, and moral role of property rights. 

Pope Francis explicitly argues that property rights are only a “secondary natural right;” superseded by the needs and wants of others. Taken to its logical conclusion, arguing that property rights are second to the needs of others really means property rights aren’t valid at all, because human needs and scarcity of resources are permanent realities.

Right. Without property rights, “human needs and scarcity of resources are permanent realities.” Any Communist dictator proves this point in spades. Polumbo cites Thomas Sowell and Frederick Bastiat in identifying the social and economic benefits of property rights, but also gets to the moral root of those benefits:

Moreover, Francis is wrong philosophically to dismiss property rights as secondary. We would all agree that the right to life is paramount. But property rights are an extension of the right to life—because a man’s right to life necessarily depends on his livelihood.

“The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation,” Ayn Rand once wrote. “Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.”

Can Pope Francis, the learned head of one of humanity's oldest institutions, really not know the available facts, empirical evidence, basic economics, or philosophical underpinnings of Capitalism, or of the disastrous history of Capitalism’s antipode in practice, collectivism? I think not. And if not, can we credit Him with “the best of intentions?” I think not. 

Can Francis really be ignorant of the available facts, empirical evidence, basic economics, or philosophical underpinnings of Capitalism, or of the disastrous history of Capitalism’s antipode in practice, collectivism? I think not. The Catholic Church, as an institution, has a vested interest in poverty. When the Church ruled for centuries, what we now call the Dark and Middle Ages, poverty reigned. It is only with the arrival of modern capitalism that general living standards exploded. Over the past 250 years, the Church had a front row seat to observe the rising prosperity, backed up by mountains of literature explaining the theoretical and empirical economic causes of the prosperity. How can any Pope deny these facts? Can the learned leader of an institution that has been around for 2000 years and has seen it all really be so ignorant of the reality of free market economics and the bloody record of collectivism? No. So why Francis’ trade against Capitalism? Easy. “The poor” is the Cathloic Church's base. Poverty and Church power are linked.

More fundamentally, poverty and Church morals are linked. If handouts to the poor trumps property rights, then the unearned trumps the earned. If poverty is the standard of morality, where does a social system that diminishes poverty based on individual self-determination leave the Catholic Church? Obsolete. The Church doesn’t care about people who work their way up from poverty. They only care about moving the wealth from those who do to those who don’t. The standard of Catholic moral teaching is self-sacrificial giving. If the ranks of those in need is shrinking, who’s left to give to? Poverty, not prosperity, is the Church’s moral standard. Given Capitalism’s record in practice, where does that leave the centuries of Church moral teaching about giving to the poor? 

Francis is the latest in a line of anti-Capitalist Catholic Popes. His demotion of property rights is not new. When Francis says “the right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods.,” he is reiterating Pope Paul VI in his 1967 Encyclical Populorum Progressio who advanced the totalitarian principle that the “public authorities” must coercively ensure that “created goods should flow fairly to all,” emphasizing that  “All other rights, whatever they may be, including the rights of property and free trade, are to be subordinated to this principle.” 

The Pope does not want to “help” the “underprivileged people.” He wants to preserve their misery and expand their ranks. Poverty is virtue, and the most virtuous act one can perform is to take a vow of poverty. That’s why the Church hates capitalism. That’s why Pope after Pope condemns Capitalism. We can explain how Capitalism works until we’re blue in the face. It doesn’t matter to the Church, and never has. Why? Because it’s not whether Capitalism works or how it works. The problem is that it works--works to facilitate man’s escape from poverty. And they’re smart. They attack capitalism at its root--profit-seeking, property rights, and the ethics of rational self-interest. 

Francis is not ignorant. He’s a Marxist (“the principle of the universal destination of created goods,” or, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need) and a communist (“[W]e need to think of ourselves more and more as a single family dwelling in a common home.”) and an altruist (“[I]f one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it.”). Francis knows exactly what he is saying. And he means it. Francis and the Church are not misguided souls. They are Capitalism’s arch enemies as much as Communism is. This fact must be explicitly acknowledged by Capitalism’s champions. 

Related Reading:

Pope Francis’s Anti-Capitalism is No Misunderstanding

Catholic Social Doctrine is both Socialist and Statist

How the Catholic Church Paved the Way for the Birth Control Mandate

Pope Francis’s Embrace of Anti-Fossil Fuel Agenda Follows From Church’s Anti-Capitalism

The Illegitimacy of Pope Francis's “Legitimate Redistribution” of Wealth—Natalie Ogle for The Objective Standard

Pope Francis: Prosperity, Liberty, and Climate Change are the Common Enemy

Pope Francis’s ‘Authority’ Stems From The Church’s Authoritarian Self-Image

Climate Alarmism and the Catholic Church; Faith-Based Allies in the War on Prosperity

The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages: A Critique of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason by Andrew Bernstein for The Objective Standard

QUORA: 'How is capitalism NOT a zero-sum game?' -- The Mugger vs the Landlord

Recently, I posted an answer to the Quora* question, How is capitalism NOT a zero-sum game? (Also available on my 1/14/21  blog post). Another answer triggered a reply from me.

Pascal Morimacil’s answered:

The basic idea is that if you consider every transaction individually, without looking at anything else, then it kinda seems like both people are better off, since they agree to the trade.

So for example, you pay rent for the right to exist somewhere, and then someone else lets you exist without evicting you. It’s said to be win-win. So, a creation of wealth.

---

You could analyze a mugging that way, and declare it to be a win-win wealth creating situation.

The victim is paying for the right to exist, and the mugger lets them exist without shooting them. Win-win. If the victim thinks the price is too high, they can just decide not to pay.

---

You kind of have to ignore the gun, or the threat of eviction

And if you also ignore a lot of other things, like pollution and so on, and rising wealth inequality, well, at some point you are just deciding that money changing hands means things are getting better for everyone.

My reply:

There is no “if you consider every transaction individually, without looking at anything else”: The only way to analyze economics (or any aspect of human affairs) is to begin with the individual, since the individual is the only human entity that exists. The “economy” is an abstraction, subsuming all relevant individual transactions. All other considerations are derivative from individualism. 

And you should never “ignore the gun, or the threat of eviction,” both of which are instances of force. But the corollary is you should not ignore the nature of that force: Is the force aggressive, or defensive? 

From that premise, the analogy is backwards. In the real world, the free-loading renter is the mugger -- that is, the aggressor.

In the legitimate rental transaction, both offer value to the other, and it is a mutually consensual  transaction. No force is involved. The renter pays his money, which represents wealth creation to the landlord, in exchange for living in the rental unit, which is wealth creation to the renter, since each is getting a higher value than he is giving up. It’s win-win, by mutual consent. The mugger, on the other hand, offers nothing of value to his victim, and the victim doesn’t consent, because the mugger is using aggressive force to take his victim’s property. The mugger is actually threatening two of his victim’s values, his life and his money. Holding a gun on someone is not wealth creation. Not killing his victim is not a value. It is the negation of a value, not unlike the whip of a slave master. To call the mugger’s actions wealth creation is absurd and a slap in the face to anyone who has ever done an honest day’s work.

If the renter stops paying rent, for whatever reason (need is not a license to steal), the transaction is no longer win-win, and the renter has a moral obligation to vacate the property (assuming the landlord doesn’t grant him rent-free occupancy). If the renter refuses to vacate, despite not paying his rent, he is demanding someone else’s property without offering any value in return and without his consent. It is theft as much as is the mugging. The renter’s refusal to vacate the rental unit is a form of aggressive force, since the renter is physically preventing the owner from re-renting his property, denying him rental income. Thus, the mugger forcibly taking his victim’s money is in principle no different from the renter occupying the landlord’s property without paying rent. 

The mugging victim is not “paying” for the “right to exist”; i.e., the right to life. The right to life means only the right of self-ownership and self-governance; i.e., to think and act on one’s own judgement, in pursuit of one’s values, by peaceful respectful means: The right to life does not mean the “right” to force others to provide the means of living (“existing” in your terminology). The right to life, like the right to one’s property, is an inalienable right, held equally by everyone--and that includes the right not to be anyone’s slave. The renter is not paying for his “right to exist.” He is paying for the right to a particular housing unit, derived from the mutually agreed obligation to pay rent to use the landlord’s property. The renter’s non-payment forfeits his right to the housing unit. Being evicted does not forfeit his right to exist, or to his life. 

Now let’s say the mugger’s victim manages to flag down a cop, who stops the robbery, apprehends the mugger, and returns the money to the victim. That’s no different from the landlord beginning legal eviction proceedings. Both are acts of self-defense. The government’s only proper purpose is to protect and secure individual rights, including rights to property and free (voluntary, mutually consensual) trade--in effect, to act as the individual’s agent of self-defense. If the landlord gets a court-ordered eviction notice, and the police have to be called to enforce it, that’s no different from a cop coming to the aid of the mugger’s victim. The gun and the eviction are not analogous. The threat of the mugger is aggressive force. The eviction notice is defensive force.

As to the last two points touched upon, wealth inequality is a natural consequence of the varying productive abilities and personal circumstances of human beings, when left equally free to flourish by the justice, political equality, liberty rights, and constitutionalism of capitalism. Productive work and trade, to the extent it is free of aggressive force as it is under capitalism, expands the amount of wealth, as happens with the renter and the landlord. Trade doesn’t merely divide up a fixed quantity of wealth, like what happens between the mugger and his victim.  Under capitalism, wealth inequality is not a proof of zero-sum economics, but a progressive consequence of the win-win nature of capitalism--that an individual’s economic success is tied not to theft but on the diversity of productive ability to create value for others. Those who create the most value for the most people tend to be more wealthy than those who produce less value for fewer people. As long as every transaction is consensual and freely judged by each to be a net gain, it is win-win, not zero-sum. Pollution is a side effect of industry and is resolvable through technological innovation and proper law. History has shown that capitalist economies are much better at alleviating pollution than centrally planned (socialist) economies because technological innovation and proper (rights-protecting) law are features of free markets, not dictatorships. The same freedom of capitalism that facilitates economic progress facilitates solutions to pollution. Today we live in the cleanest ever environment for humans, especially in the U.S., not in spite of but because of the prosperity.

Related Reading:

QUORA: ‘Is capitalism voluntary?’

QUORA: ‘Why has modern capitalism risen in the West?’

QUORA: ‘How do capitalists justify the inequality/high disparity part of a capitalistic society that a socialistic system tends to stop?’

QUORA: 'Can certain forms of capitalism be made to work for the people instead of just the elite?'

QUORA*: ‘Is it fair to claim that capitalism does not create better lives, but simply shifts the suffering somewhere else?’

QUORA: 'Why do people think capitalism is ethical?'

QUORA: ‘Is it fair to say capitalism has killed more people than communism?’

QUORA *: 'How is capitalism good despite the fact that it creates higher and lower classes?'

QUORA: '[W]hy do we ignore all the examples of capitalism failing, like the major divide between the wealthy and the poor in the US?'

QUORA: ‘Given that I live in a capitalist society, how can I avoid having my labor exploited?’

QUORA: "Is having an 'Anarcho-capitalist' society possible?"

* [Quora is a social media website founded by two former Facebook employees. According to Wikipedia:

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[3]Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[4]

You can also reply to other users’ answers.]

Happy Groundhog Day

 Happy Groundhog Day! May we have six more weeks of winter. (Well, we havn't actually had real winter yet, at least not in New Jersey.)

Will Biden Acknowledge His Own Party’s ‘Central Role’ in Segregating America?

From AP News, 1/27/21:

President Joe Biden on Tuesday ordered the Department of Justice to end its reliance on private prisons and acknowledge the central role government has played in implementing discriminatory housing policies.

In remarks before signing the orders, Biden said the U.S. government needs to change “its whole approach” on the issue of racial equity. He added that the nation is less prosperous and secure because of the scourge of systemic racism. 

My emphasis. I wonder if Biden will acknowledge the “central role” of his own Party’s deliberate, decades-long, systemic design to legally segregate America. It’s all laid out in Richard Rothstein’s book “The Color of Law”. Segregation was the project of the liberal/progressive/Democratic Party agenda. Rothstein writes:

“Racial segregation in housing was not merely a project of southerners in the former slaveholding Confederacy. It was a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders” including Franklin D. Roosevelt. [p. X - XII, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America] 

I always knew that legalized segregation existed in America even though, as Rothstein observes, “segregation was always unconstitutional.” But I never knew the extent, or who was primarily to blame, until I read this shocking book. Will Biden acknowledge the whole truth, especially since the very same liberals intend to push reparations? Will he place blame where it belongs, with his own Party? Or will he blame “white supremacy” or some other such bullshit excuse?

Related Reading:

NJ: Focus on Educational Freedom, Not ‘Desegregation’

A Newark, NJ Mother Demonstrates the Educational Power of Parental School Choice

Title 2: Government vs. Private Action

How to Overcome Bigotry in a Free Society

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. 

My Facebook post

Corporate Halt to Political Donations Highlights Value of Private Campaign Funding

[Updated 3/7/21]

A major plank in the Democratic Party Platform includes a plank to ban all private funding of elections, saying “Democrats believe that the interests and the voices of the American people should determine our elections.” How will they do that? Through a constitutional amendment “eliminating all private financing from federal elections.” Who will then finance election campaigns? The government, with money seized from private citizens regardless of their consent. (Page 57)

Private funding of political campaigns is one of the best ways for citizens to keep politicians accountable to those they seek to govern. Politicians should have to go to the citizens, hat-in-hand, to ask for money to finance their campaigns. The Democrats’ want to take that accountability away, and give politicians free reign to grab their money away without their consent. As I wrote on this subject in 2016:

Public funding is a dream come true for the power-hungry political class. Imagine politicians being able to go on their unfettered way of regulating, taxing, and controlling our lives without having to put up with those pesky private citizens getting in their way? How many politicians would love to silence dissent and challenge? Nothing could be more contrary to democratic principles under constitutional republicanism than that.

The Democratic statists would enhance “the voices of the American people” by banning their voice in who gets funded to run for office, and switching that voice to the politicians who themselves would determine who gets the funding.

Well, we just got a lesson on the value of private financing. As The New York Times reported on 1/12/21:

Large corporations and their lobbyists usually try to steer clear of messy political fights. Companies prefer to work behind the scenes, giving money to both political parties and quietly influencing tax policy, spending and regulation. But President Trump’s effort to overturn the result of the presidential election — and the violent attack on Congress by his supporters — has created a dilemma for many companies. A growing number have decided that they are, at least for now, not willing to support members of Congress who backed Trump’s efforts to change the election result and promoted lies about election fraud.

Over the weekend, several large companies — Marriott, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Commerce Bancshares — announced a suspension of donations to members of Congress who voted against election certification. Yesterday, the list expanded to Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, Airbnb, Mastercard, Verizon and Dow, the chemical company. Hallmark has even asked for its money back from two of the senators who opposed certification, Josh Hawley and Roger Marshall.

The Times also noted that some companies announced halts on all campaign giving, while others announced no halt. These are major corporate donors. I suspect that many smaller donors are reconsidering their donations after the tumultuous lockdown and violent 2020.

Another example of how campaign funding gives private citizens a voice over the politicians came after the January 6th Capitol riot during Congress’s Electoral College certification vote for Joe Biden. In a 3/6/21 article, Chamber of Commerce declines to rebuke members of Congress who voted to overturn 2020 election, Aaron Gregg reports for the Washington Post:

America’s largest business lobby says it will not pull support for members of Congress based solely on whether they voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election win in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

In a memo released Friday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said that the organization would continue to evaluate the actions of individual members of Congress but would not withhold funds based solely on their vote.

"There is a meaningful difference between a member of Congress who voted no on the question of certifying the votes of certain states and those who engaged and continue to engage in repeated actions that undermine the legitimacy of our elections and institutions," wrote Ashlee Rich Stephenson, a senior political strategist at the chamber.

I don’t know what kinds of effects these private donor actions will have on the politicians affected. But they surely will have some effect. At any rate, the donor boycotts will surely send a message--a message that they would not be able to send without the leverage that comes with politicians having to depend on their private constituents for money they need to run their campaigns on.

Of course, people have the moral right to decide whether and who to donate money to in political campaigns. The politicians have no right to seize their campaign funds from American citizens through taxes. America is supposed to be a free country. The politicians are supposed to serve the people, not master them.

That said, these corporate boycotters have given us a practical demonstration on the value of private campaign funding. They demonstrate how private campaign financing makes politicians accountable to the governed. In the name of “believe[ing] that the interests and the voices of the American people should determine our elections,” the Democrats want to greatly reduce the American people’s voices in American politics.

Related Reading:

Campaign Finance—Voluntary Contributions vs. Public Funding: Which is ‘Dirty?’