So why the singular focus on teachers? The answer, of course, is that unlike plumbers or cab drivers or pharmaceutical workers or computer programmers, teachers, through their unions, were major contributors to the Obama campaign.

All victorious politicians engage in the unsavory practice of diverting spoils to their most vigorous supporters at everyone else’s expense. In this, the current administration may be no more blameworthy than any other. But I’m pretty sure that sending out the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to defend these political payoffs marks a new sort of low. Traditionally, the Council is composed of first-rate academics whose job is to give good counsel and remain above the political fray. Shame on the President for debasing that noble mission, and shame on Christy Romer for going along with it.

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The number of “unauthorized aliens” in Arizona at any given moment is estimated as just under a half million—about the same as the number of Jews in New Jersey. Over half the text of the Arizona law is devoted to penalizing employers who hire these people. Now suppose for a moment that the New Jersey legislature were to pass a bill penalizing anyone who hires a Jew. Would Professor Kobach defend this law, as he does Arizona’s, by pointing out that it doesn’t require anyone to carry a driver’s license?

The anti-immigration hysterics keep warning us that foreigners want to come over here and exploit our welfare system. The insincerity of that stance is exposed whenever, as in Arizona, its proponents set out to prevent those very same foreigners from coming here and working.

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I’ll be back on Tuesday with, I expect, something new to say.

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At least that’s the way the President of the United States seems to have it figured—your tax burden, according to him, is measured by what you’re paying right this moment as opposed to what you’re obligated to pay in the future.

That’s the only possible interpretation of his statement last night that Tea Partiers (and others) should be thanking him for cutting taxes. The reality is that President Obama, like President Bush before him, has rather dramatically raised government spending and therefore has raised your taxes. To say otherwise is like saying you got your new swimming pool for free because you put it on your credit card.

Once the money is spent, the bill must eventually come due—and there’s nobody around to foot that bill except the taxpayers. We are locked into higher current spending and therefore locked into higher future taxes. The president hasn’t lowered taxes; he’s raised and then deferred them. To say otherwise is—let’s be blunt—a flat-out lie.

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Suppose that year after year, you spend more than you earn. You are worried that you’ve become fiscally irresponsible. Which of the following is not a path back to fiscal sanity for your household?

1. Spend less.
2. Earn more.
3. Stop at the ATM more often so you’ll have more cash in your pocket.

Do we all understand why the answer is C? Good. Now let’s try another one.

Suppose that year after year, your government spends more than it collects in taxes. You are worried that it’s become fiscally irresponsible. Which of the following is not a path back to fiscal sanity for the government?

1. Spend less.
2. Collect more taxes.

The answer is not A. Spending less—at least spending less on things you don’t need—can certainly be a path back to fiscal sanity for a government just as it is for a household.

What about B—raising taxes? There seems to be this idea floating around that raising taxes is sort of like earning more income, and can therefore also be a path back to fiscal sanity. But that’s wrong. Raising taxes is not at all like earning more income; instead it’s very like visiting the ATM.

Here’s why: The government’s chief asset—in fact, pretty much its only asset—is its ability to tax people, now and in the future. The taxpayers are the government’s ATM. Make a withdrawal today, and there’s less available tomorrow.

Now the ability to tax is a pretty huge asset and the government has not (yet!) come close to depleting it. In that sense, there’s a lot of money in the bank. But no matter how much you’ve got in the bank, a policy of ever-increasing withdrawals is nothing at all like a decision to earn more income. (Besides, a lot of us have other uses in mind for that money.) It’s important to get the analogy right. And it’s clear from the op-ed pages that not everybody gets this.

There is this notion abroad that an extra billion in federal spending can be converted from “irresponsible” to “responsible” as long as it’s accompanied by an extra billion in tax hikes. That’s like saying a $500 haircut can be converted from “irresponsible” to “responsible” as long as you withdraw the $500 from your bank account.

So when the president appoints a commission on fiscal responsibility, as he did a couple of weeks ago, I find myself hoping that its members understand this simple point—and worrying that they don’t. Fiscal responsbility means spending less. Taxes have almost nothing to do with it.

Of course the problem with spending cuts is that there’s always someone opposed to them. The solution is to package a whole lot of cuts together so almost everyone has something to gain. Here, then, is an idea to get the commission started: Currently the Department of Agriculture steals from workers and business owners to give to farmers, the Department of Labor steals from farmers and business owners to give to workers, and the Department of Commerce steals from workers and farmers to give to business owners—with a lot of wealth falling through the cracks along the way. Eliminate all three departments and every American will lose one friend and two enemies. It’s the responsible thing to do.

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I can’t figure out her point. I am all for identifying problems and brainstorming about radical solutions, but I have no idea what problem Lowrey thinks she’s addressing.

The primary problem with representative democracy is that our representatives are captured by special interests. My senators plot to steal from you and your senators plot to steal from me, with a lot of collateral damage along the way. (And yes, you and your neighbors do constitute a special interest, as do I and mine.) The problem is exacerbated by the fact that my neighbors and I have a lot of interests in common, making it easier to steal on all our behalves at the same time. The solution is to make each senator’s constituency more diverse, not, as Lowrey proposes, less.

In my book More Sex is Safer Sex, I offered a few ideas along these lines, culled from the past few years of lunch table chat:

• Divide senatorial constituencies according to the alphabet, so that instead of a senator from Alaska and a senator from Wisconsin, we’ll have a senator for everyone whose last name begins with AA through AE. The point being that it’s easy to think up earmarks and pork barrel projects that will benefit the citizens of Alaska at everyone else’s expense, but not so easy to think up pork barrel projects that will benefit everyone whose last name happens to begin with Q.
• Give each voter two votes to cast in every senatorial election. You get one vote to cast in your own state and one to cast in the state of your choice.

  Again, this forces senators to answer to broader and more diverse constituencies, diluting the power of localized special interests.

• This one’s not in the book but should have been: Give each senator a personal budget so that once he;s voted for $X billion worth of spending, he’s not allowed to vote for any more spending until he gets re-elected. This pits his various sub-constituencies against each other, so that the New York Senator who lobbies for subsidies to New York City is sure to get a negative earful from upstate.

Am I serious? Of course I’m serious. I’m serious about the importance of identifying deep problems, calling attention to them, and thinking outside the box. That’s why I was thrilled recently to run Jamie Whyte’s guest post, proposing a novel and thought-provoking solution to another problem with democracy, namely: Voters with little impact on the outcome have little incentive to become well informed.

What are your best proposals for political reform—and what problem do they address?

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The Obama administration has its knickers all in a twist over rising health insurance premiums. As you wade through the rhetoric, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Greed does not cause rate hikes. I’m not sure why some premiums have shot up lately, but I’m quite sure that “greed” is not the answer. That’s because I’m quite sure that the insurance companies are no greedier today than they were a year ago. To explain a change in prices, you’ve got to point to something that’s changed. Greed is pretty much a constant.

   So what relevant factor has recently changed? The only plausible candidates are costs, including expected future costs due to health care “reform”. What costs, specifically? I wish I knew. Maybe some commenter does.

2. Greed, by itself, does not cause high prices either. In competitive markets, greed causes low prices as greedy companies struggle to steal each others’ customers.
3. Monopoly causes high prices. Monopoly power, like greed, can’t explain recent rate hikes because monopoly power in this market has not recently changed. But monopoly power, unlike greed, can explain permanently high prices. And there is considerable monopoly power in this market, partly because you’re not allowed to shop for insurance out of state and largely because your employer does your shopping for you. The Administration has shown almost no stomach for combatting this problem.

   Instead, their position is something very like this: “We can’t help ourselves from misusing our power to prop up this terrible monopoly, so give us the power to control it.” Kind of like the alcoholic who needs you to buy him a drink to steady his nerves before he drives home tonight. Don’t let him snow you.

4. Profits do not raise costs. The administration wants you to believe that we could lower the cost of insurance by limiting the profits of insurers. That’s bad economics, bad accounting and bad arithmetic.

   Imagine a hypothetical insurance company that forgoes profits in order to keep down premiums. That insurance company, just like any other, needs capital to operate—but it can’t attract investors, because it has nothing to attract them with. So where does the capital come from? It’s got to come from taxpayers—taxpayers who fork over money that could otherwise be earning income in retirement accounts. And that forgone income is a fullfledged cost.

   So yes, a publicly run insurance company could choose to earn $12 billion less in profit and return that saving to us in lower premiums—but only by taxing us enough and reducing our savings enough so we collectively earn $12 billion less in interest, dividends and capital gains.

   By analogy, that same public insurance company could hypothetically require 10,000 clerical workers to put in 40 hours a week at zero pay. Would that reduce the cost of insurance? Surely not. It would reduce the premiums, but not the cost. Instead, it shifts the cost to those 10,000 workers, who, I’m sure, would tell you quite forcefully that the cost to them is considerable.

   Capital and labor are costly. Those costs are quite literally unavoidable. They can be shifted around but they can’t be eliminated. Lowering wages does not lower costs; it just shifts them on to the backs of the conscripted workers. Lowering profits does not lower costs; it just shifts them on to the backs of the conscripted investors, for which read “taxpayers”.

   [These arguments apply to ordinary profits. If you think that profits in the insurance industry are excessive, then we're back to the issue of monopoly power, which is the only plausible source of consistently excessive profits. Keep in mind too that a single years' profits are the wrong way to measure excess; all industries have good years and bad years.]

5. Choices must be made. Adminstration spokesperson Robert Gibbs said the other day that you shouldn’t have to choose between having more health care and having more housing. Note well that when he says that’s a choice you shouldn’t have to make, what he means is that it’s a choice you shouldn’t get to make. He wants to make it for you.

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Last year, the British government decided to lift the top rate of income tax from 41 to 52 percent. Last month, Lord Myners, the UK Secretary of State for Financial Services, said that the policy would raise not nearly as much revenue as had been expected. People are apparently making efforts to avoid paying it. A host of politicians and commentators responded that it was always a foolish idea, a purely “political” policy.

But how can a bad policy be good politics? What defect in the electoral system can explain this?

The most popular explanation these days is the malign influence of “special interests”. Perhaps there is something in this. But a more fundamental defect is always overlooked, presumably because it is mistaken for a virtue of modern democracies. The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote: about 62 percent of adults at the last general election, both in Great Britain and in the United States. The best way to get more sensible policies would be to reduce the number of voters to less than 0.01 percent of the population.

To see why, consider a question that arises in banking. How many bankers should be involved in deciding whether to approve a loan application? The ideal number may vary with the complexity of the application. But the right answer is always, “very few.”

If a loan officer’s initial decision required sign-off by a majority of 100 other bankers, his own judgement would have little effect on the final outcome. So he would have little incentive to think hard about the application and the likelihood that the loan will be repaid. Since this would be equally true for each of the other 100 bankers, none would bother to think hard. Why struggle to make the right decision when your decision will have no effect?

This is the position of voters in a general election. Each individual’s vote makes no difference to the outcome. Even marginal districts are won with majorities of hundreds. If you had stayed home instead of voting, the same candidate would have been elected.

If each person’s vote makes no difference to the candidate elected, why do so many people vote? One answer, as the economist Geoffrey Brennan has argued, is that people enjoy it. The simple act of going to a polling booth and ticking a box is imagined to display democratic virtue. And, by ticking one box rather than others, people can feel themselves to be generous or pragmatic or progressive or something else they like to be.

Enjoying such feelings is easily worth the cost of taking two hours off work on a Tuesday every couple of years. But it is not worth the effort of learning anything about economics, jurisprudence, international relations or even the policies of the candidate you vote for. Research into voters’ knowledge shows a stunning degree of ignorance. Most voters would be as likely to vote for the best candidate if they entered the polling booth blindfolded.

In fact, blindfolds would increase most voters’ chance of making the best choice. Because, as Bryan Caplan shows in The Myth of the Rational Voter, ignorant voters do not make their mistakes randomly. They are biased towards particular errors; they tend to underestimate the benefits of trade and they believe that the prices of goods and labour are determined by corporate greed rather than by supply and demand, to take but two of many examples.

Hence the many foolish policies followed by democratic governments. And hence politicians’ sentimental and grandiose rhetoric. Modern politics is just as you should expect it to be when votes are cast by ignorant people taking advantage of a low-cost source of emotional gratification.

So what is the best way to improve modern politics? The answer is not to increase voter turnout. On the contrary, the number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district should be about right. If you were one of these 12 voters then, like one of 12 jurors deciding if someone should be imprisoned, you would take a serious interest in the issues.

These 12 voters should be selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress – 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate – there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed relative to the general population: the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day. All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.

Some will complain that this system would disenfranchise most of the population. It would not, because every adult would be eligible for random selection. Of course, each of us would have a tiny chance of being selected. But, on the current system, it is equally improbable that any individual’s vote will make a difference to the election’s outcome. The difference with this “jury” system is that those whose votes make a difference would know who they are. And that would give them a reason to take the job seriously.

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Jamie Whyte is the author of Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists and Other Serial Offenders.

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Eight out of nine justices (plus retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) ignored Turkewitz’s inquiry about what would happen if a secession case were to reach the Supreme Court. Rather astonishingly, however, Justice Scalia responded with the following letter, which Turkewitz’s brother Eric posted on his blog this week:

Now, as Eric Turkewitz observes, Scalia (not for the first time) might be expressing a minority opinion here. By coincidence, exactly the same question was discussed just a week ago over at the Volokh Conspiracy, where Eugene Volokh suggests that a 144 year old military victory could well be considered something short of a definitive resolution of a constitutional issue.

A grateful hat tip to Jon Shea, who called my attention to this remarkable story in a comment to an earlier post.

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I was therefore maximally sympathetic to the poor XM radio host (I think it was Pete Dominick but I’m not sure) who was stuck interviewing a man named John Sakowicz last Friday. Sakowicz, who hosts his own radio show in northern California, was there to warn about the dangers inherent in our growing national debt. He was very clear about this much: the debt and its associated dangers are massive, explosive, perhaps even apocalyptic. He was entire unclear, however, about exactly what those dangers are.

Pressed for an explanation, Mr. Sakowicz rather breathlessly announced that every child born in America today is born with a $45,000 share of the national debt. (He should have said the average child and $45,000 is probably not the right number, but those are minor quibbles). The host, bless him, asked exactly the right question, namely “What does that mean?”. To which Mr. Sakowicz attempted to clarify his meaning by repeating the $45,000 figure in a considerably more agitated tone of voice. To which the host calmly replied: “Okay, but what does that mean? Take my daughter, for example. Exactly how does this affect her life? Does it meant that she’ll pay that much more in taxes…..or what?”. To which Mr. Sakowicz replied that $45,000 is a really big pile of money.

Well, yes, $45,000 is a really big pile of money, but the host’s question was exactly on target. When we say that an American child is born owing $45,000, (or $40,000, or $350,000) what does that mean for the life of the child?

Answer: Pretty much nothing. What matters to your kids is not their share of the national debt, but their overall inheritance. There are two parts to that inheritance. First, there’s what your kids get directly from you. Second, there are the factories, machines and tools that other kids inherit, creating opportunities for your kids to earn higher wages.

What we collectively leave our kids is equal to what we collectively produce minus what we collectively use up. When the government commissions someone to build, say, a tank or a highway or a bridge to nowhere, using, say, a million dollars’ worth of resources, those resources are subtracted from the next generation’s inheritance—partly from your own kids’ and partly from other people’s kids’, which affects your kids’ wages. If you like, you can (perhaps partly) compensate for your kids’ share of that burden by tightening your belt and leaving a little more in your bequest. But the moral is that it’s government spending, not government debt that has the potential to impoverish our children.

To see that debt is not the culprit, suppose for a moment that we decide to eliminate the debt tomorrow by raising taxes, so the average American forks over $40,000. What does that do for the average child who’s born tomorrow? It removes a $40,000 debt burden and simultaneously cuts his inheritance by $40,000. How is that child’s life affected? To a good first approximation, not at all. (I am glossing over some complications here, but they are of relatively minor importance.) And of course that calculation makes perfect sense because the only way you can make the next generation richer is by conserving actual resources—which you can’t accomplish with accounting tricks.

Ah! you might say, but we’ve done more than that—we’ve saved that child not just from $40,000 in debt but also from a lifetime of accumulated interest on that debt. Yes, and we’ve also robbed that child of not just $40,000 in inheritance but also of a lifetime of accumulated interest on that inheritance. It all washes out.

This is why it’s so frustrating to hear talk of blue ribbon commissions assigned to the task of “debt reduction”. “Debt reduction” can mean less spending, or more taxes, or some combination thereof. But to raise taxes solely for the purpose of debt reduction is to mask the problem, not to solve it. Debt is not the problem; spending is. Hysteria about the debt is misdirection.

Edited to add: In the month of January, the federal government spent approximately $1000 per American.

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