We have a government, and we want it to do things for us, so we need to give it money to accomplish whatever goals we assign to it. Where should that money come from?
Currently, our answer is the income tax. Before exposing the income tax as a farce or endorsing an alternative, I will attempt to outline the various paths money can take through our economy so that we may easily identify the best way to apply a tax to fund government activity.
First, money comes from a mint. Money is not itself a thing of value, it is just exchanged for things of value, goods and services. Through the medium of various banks, this money enters the economy. This step is only important for the purpose of pointing out that money only represents potential wealth.
Lets begin our consideration with a person who does some work in exchange for wages. These wages are paid in the form of money. It is unimportant what that work was, be it construction work or investment banking, so long as it is paid for with money. From there, this person has four options. He can 1) spend the money on some good or service, 2) save the money in some financial institution, 3) invest the money, or 4) keep the money.
If the money is spent (1), then it is either spent on 1) necessities, or 2) luxuries. Either way, someone else receives money for a good or service that was produced via work. Though we can easily see a reason to treat these differently, for the purposes of the economy, they function almost identically, with the exception that demand for necessities is more stable than for luxuries, so we will label them the same.
That spent money (1) is handed over to either 1) an individual or 2) a company.
If the money is handed over to an individual (1.1) then we return to our original four options. At this point, it is useful to understand that a company is not the same as a person. A company is a financial intermediary; it does no actual work and consumes no goods or services, but only facilitates the interaction between one person or group of persons and another. It holds money to pay for the production of a good or service and collects it when that good or service is sold. It also collects money from investors, who are actual people or groups of people, to invest in creating a greater capacity to produce goods or services, and pays out profits back to those investors. Therefore, if the money is handed over to a company (1.2) the company has only two options, although one of those can play out in a variety of ways. The company, when receiving money, can 1) pay wages or repay investors, or 2) purchase goods or services. If the company pays out the money (1.2.1), either to workers or investors, whoever receives the money has our original four options. If the company instead purchases goods or services (1.2.2), whether those are materials the workers need in order to produce goods or services, or improvements to the company's capacity to support the production of goods or services, then we return to our second step, with the money being either paid to an individual or another company.
If our original money is saved (2), then it ends up in the hands of a financial intermediary, a bank. The bank only has two real options. To ensure a return on the money left in its hands, the bank either 1) lends it to a person or 2) lends it to a company. Lending it to a person (2.1) is a service, and the interest paid on that loan can be considered the price paid for that service. Lending the money to a company (2.2) is an investment, which places the bank as the intermediary between the company receiving the investment and the original holder of the money. The bank receives a return on that investment and pays a small interest rate to the individual who deposited the money, and pays the rest in combination to its employees and its own investors, since it is itself a company. All three of those results revert back to the original array of four options.
If the money is invested (3), the result is that the money is either 1) lost, totally or partially, or 2) gotten back with an increase. If the money was lost (3.1), someone got it, they just failed to return the expected increase in the potential supply of goods or services in the economy. Investors in companies assume this risk because they expect to make more than they lose. This is a reasonable assumption, so long as the total economy, the supply of goods and services, continues to grow. Companies cannot starve. They pay their employees and insulate them from some of the risk of producing a good or service. If no one buys whatever was produced, the employees do not immediately starve, they just have to look for another job when their previous employer, the unlucky company, dissolves. Neither can companies become rich. They cannot consume anything, so wealth is of no use to them. If they have extra money then we're back to what a company can do with money (1.2.1 or 1.2.2), which basically amounts to giving it away to someone else, a real person, who has our original options. This is the situation when our investor gets his money back with an increase (3.2); he again has to decide what to do with his money.
If the original holder of this money decides to keep it (4), then we're at a dead end. That money does nothing at all, and at every moment represents a decision between our first four options. This is the worst situation from both the perspective of the individual, he could be getting at least a small return on it from a bank or wealth, goods or services, from an individual or company, and from the perspective of the economy, which does not receive the benefit of this added exchange.
Or, to put it another way:
-I) Spend the money, on either necessities or luxuries
---A) Given to an individual
-----1) Start over
---B) Given to a company
-----1) Pay employee wages
-------a) Start over
-----2) Repay investors
-------a) Start over
-----3) Purchase goods or services from outside the company
-------a) Purchase from and individual, start over
-------b) Purchase from another company, return to B
-II) Save the money, money given to a bank
---A) Bank lends to an individual
-----1) Start over
---B) Bank invests in a company
-----1) Return to IB
-Note: A bank is itself a company, so any profits can be treated as from IB. Returns from a bank, in the form of capital plus interest, are money, and we start over.
-III) Invest the money
---A) Money lost, either totally or partially
-----1) A company received the money, but failed to return the expected output
-------a) Return to IB
---B) Money gained
-----1) Start over
-IV) Keep the money
---A) Start over So there we have a very basic outline of the economy.
8.2.07
30.1.07
Freedom of Religion and School Vouchers
Silly separation of church and state.
More precisely, silly people who claim to support the separation of church and state. First off, the phrase never appears in the constitution, though people like to find the concept there. The constitution does grant religious freedom, which has the effect of limiting what religiously oriented actions the government can take, and that's a good thing. But it does not mean that the government can't have an interest in anything that anyone considers a religious issue, just that that can never be the sole rationale for a government action. For example, the government can ban abortion without running afoul of the 1st amendment, but only by determining that fetuses have rights, not by stating that it knows that a soul is given at conception.
The abortion issue seems likely to sort itself out just now, although it will take a while. Less likely to sort itself out is the issue of the religious rights of school children and their families. "But how are those threatened?" you might ask. I wouldn’t offer the question if I didn’t intend to answer it.
Let's start with the concept of religion. Religion cannot be limited to simply a church structure with clearly delineated beliefs and practices. Religion is much more inclusive than that. Atheism is a religion, or more accurately a set of related religions. Religion is any set of beliefs regarding the purpose and meaning of life, the definition and sources of truth, and the nature of reality, possibly including a clear judgment on the supernatural but maybe not. In this sense, everyone has a religion, and therefore everyone has religious rights to protect, and not just from unfair subjection to another's beliefs. This is an important definition because it makes it clear that freedom of religion is never freedom from religion, since no one is ever nonreligious. Everyone has a right to religious expression, and everyone has a religion to express.
There are two main places in our society where the church state issue comes up most frequently: government and schools. We get upset when a government official gives as a reason for doing something their religious beliefs, and we say something along the lines of "Well, he can't just force his beliefs on everyone else," as if his reason is more important than the action. It isn't. First off, the action is what counts, what affects the rest of society. His reason explains to the rest of us why he might take a particular action and what his goals for that action are, but the action is still the point. Second, as stated above, everyone has religious beliefs, and by the definition used above those beliefs will always influence every decision a person makes. Always. We elected people based on what actions we think they'll take, and we based that judgment on the beliefs they espoused. Well, we shouldn't be surprised when they actually act on the beliefs we chose them for (the whole money and lying politician issue aside). This is annoying to hear in public discourse as it is clearly not a well considered opinion, but we can ignore it and move past it, and it would never stand up in court anyway.
More problematic is the issue of schooling. There are two basic issues here: should schools be nonreligious, and can schools be nonreligious? The answer to both questions is no, but we'll get there. For the first question we have to decide is what schools we're talking about. Some people have argued that private schools should not be allowed, but they were defeated in the Supreme Court long ago, and not too many people care to revisit the issue. I think the majority of people agree that private schools have every right to be religiously partisan. Good, now on to public schools. We have decided that it benefits society greatly to have a large population of people with at least a basic education, so we publicly fund schools. This public funding becomes an issue every time someone wants to start the school day with prayer, and occasionally when a valedictorian wants to thank the God of their choice in a graduation speech. The argument is that to allow religion to enter into any aspect of public education is to trample the rights of the tax payers, who don't get a choice about what they fund and shouldn't be forced to fund religious activities with which they disagree. Fair enough, the argument is rational and honest. The argument does, however, favor the rights of some over the rights of others, at least in the case of the valedictorian's speech, although I think the valedictorian would be highly likely to win that case in court. Rights aside, what about the quality of the education provided? Is an education devoid of any values, not just moral but also intellectual, of any value whatsoever? And it would have to be devoid of intellectual value, since religion is the ultimate source of any determination of what constitutes a valid source of truth. Without a determination that experience constitutes truth, science means nothing. Without a decision to believe written sources, history means nothing. Math requires a reliance on logic, and literature is an open debate anyway. Education is, and should be, filled with this sort of existential discussion, and this is exactly the sort of discussion that cannot be had in a nonreligious environment. For this reason alone all education should be religious, even if that religion ends up being materialist atheism.
Then there's the consideration of the rights of the parents to instill their religious values in their children, which tends not to be successful when the people they are trusting for the construction of their understanding of reality are not holding the same basic suppositions about the world. And the rights of children to possess and express sincere religious beliefs, which properly should come up in an educational setting but would be highly disruptive in a nonreligious educational setting. Both of these rights are fully protected by the phrase "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," but discarded by the current interpretation of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." So, no, schooling should not ever be nonreligious, whether that school is public or private.
This becomes a moot point as soon as we consider the second question: can education be nonreligious. Just as no one is ever devoid of religious beliefs, even if they do not choose to define them as such, no education can be devoid of religious values. Those same value judgments on the sources of truth that provided the argument that schools shouldn't be nonreligious proves that they cannot be. No school can educate a child without making these judgments, and we cannot pretend that these judgments do not constitute religious decisions. In the end, rather than be nonreligious, all a school can do is choose its religious values. Public schools are religious institutions, just not of any religion that holds organized church services. That is not adequate fulfillment of the requirements of the argument put forth by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, among others. Since their argument does not have an appropriate solution, another way must be sought.
We have two options if we want to be institutionally neutral towards religion. We can either not fund education, in recognition that all schools teach religious values, or we can fund all religions schools evenhandedly. Since we believe that education is a public good, the first is not a good choice. That leaves the second. Yes, this involves giving government money to explicitly religious institutions, but it's only different in that explicit bit from the current situation. Since the government should not be running religious institutions, that means these schools will have to be privately operated. That means school vouchers. The ACLU and the Americans United should be supporting school vouchers, not opposing them, which brings us back to my opening statement.
Silly supporters of separation of church and state.
29.1.07
The Economy
The economy: one of the most interesting topics that can be found regarding a political system.
Most people think it’s boring. Who cares what people are doing to make money? It's regrettable that they even have to work, why should we waste our time talking about the various ways in which they sell their souls?
They’re wrong. It’s enthralling. It gets caught in the mind like a fishhook and stays there, festering. What we spend money on is a strong indicator of what we care about, both on a personal level and a national one. How we interact economically tells us how we really relate to each other. Are we as generous as we'd like to believe, or are we selfish backstabbing scumbags?
We, as a nation and as a culturally imperialist force, are capitalists. Oddly enough, most of us don't really know what that means exactly. We usually think we do, but we've missed something important somewhere and we don't quite know what or where. We get this nagging suspicion that maybe this thing that runs our lives isn't quite what we really want, but since we don't know what it is, and we can't agree on what it is that we really want, we don't even talk about alternatives seriously.
We think about capitalism as being synonymous with "free market economy," but it isn't. Capitalism is characterized by the investment of capital with the expectation of a profit, which will then be reinvested ad nauseam. This ends up meaning that the people with the money will make more money because they have the cash to invest, while the people without money can't fix that little problem, because they need all or most of what they have on hand. At first glance you'd think that the stock market would be the perfect fix to this situation, allowing people with only a little money to invest, but it isn't. It doesn't allow them much control of the companies in which they invest. Most of that stock is non-voting stock, because they'll never have enough shares to make a difference. Effectively, the stock market becomes a tool of the wealthy to make the less wealthy think that there's something resembling a level playing ground. In our capitalist system, the people with money get to start companies and make money, while the people without money have to work for them and buy goods and services from them. Money ends up back where it started with only a brief layover in the pockets of the workers. Investment doesn’t have to be a bad thing; investment leads to a buildup of capacity, which leads to more jobs and a larger supply of, and thus a lower price for, goods and services. However, the way we set the market up to receive investment is heavily weighted against the non-rich, or even one non-hyper-rich person.
Our modern economy is too big for a single capitalist to form a company that would successfully dominate a market. For that we need groups of rich oppressors. We call those groups corporations. Corporations have none of the good qualities that individual people have, even rich oppressors, and all of the worst. A corporation exists only to provide a return on shareholders' investments. Corporations have no consciences. Our rich oppressors don't have the means to oppress our citizenry - the sheer size of it prevents them - so the corporation has been created to be the new and improved oppressor.
So corporations, a natural product of capitalism, are evil. So what? We're free, right? We could do something about it if we wanted to. Well, maybe, but it wouldn't work. People who have ideas but no money can't get started in this system. Corporations have everything so wrapped up legally that there's not much leeway for anyone who can't employ an entire law firm. Intellectual property laws, stemming from the idea that everything should have an owner even if it isn't something that can actually be felt or seen, assist in the lock corporations have on economic life. If you've got a great idea, but it happens to threaten some major business, say you've got an idea for a workable alternative fuel vehicle and Ford's scared, a corporation can buy that idea from you and just sit on it, and it becomes illegal for you or anyone else to use that idea. Sure, they have to convince you to sell out, but they’ve got the money to convince most people. Basically, because they've got money, they get to make it illegal to produce things they don't like. That is not a feature of a free system. The whole ownership thing, while good and healthy for society when applied to material goods like clothes or furniture, but not material things like forests and bodies of water, is very damaging to society when applied to things like ideas. Non-material things, being non-material, cannot be owned. When they are owned, which in this case means when their use is forcibly and artificially restricted, society suffers.
So I've gotten a bit sidetracked. Oh well. Back to the topic at hand.
The free market is completely different. The free market, based on the freedom to make what you want, provided it isn't illegal to make that thing (illegal for everyone, not just for you), and sell it to whoever wants to buy it (not whoever is forced to buy it because they need it and you happen to be the only supplier, which isn't free at all), is the powerful force Adam Smith described. He wasn't really talking about capitalism. The free market actually is more efficient in terms of employing people and providing the goods and services they need at prices they can afford, but it's fragile and requires active protection to exist.
The free market economy is the traditional model of economic interaction. Anyone who wanted to could start up any business they wanted to and make a living, so long as someone else wanted what they were selling. Work made money. Now we've mixed it up. Work doesn't always make money. Look at the numbers. Federal minimum wage was, until very recently, $5.15 an hour. At that rate, which is the state minimum wage in the majority of states, a person would have to work about 75 hours a week to make $20000 a year. 20 grand barely keeps you out of bankruptcy in a lot of places, and that's with no vacation. Work alone doesn't keep people alive. Money, on the other hand, makes money. That just isn't right.
3.9.06
Issue statements
I had intended to attempt to formulate a complete political philosophy based on Christian morality, but as you can see it has failed to inspire me. Somehow I just can't manage to wrap all of Christian morality into a political stance without making assumptions that will end up excluding a wide swath of Christians. I'll keep working on it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Instead, I'll make a series of issue statements that I think are supportable. This will, of course, be added to as I think of more.
Concern for the Poor: By my rough estimate, the single most talked about issue in the Bible, concern for the poor is without question a major responsibility for every Christian. In our modern world, in our modern economy, personal action, while still very meaningful and of matchless importance in the lives of those touched by it, is not the most efficient means to accomplish the ends of improving the lives of the poor. Government action, because it can help so many more people at once, is an essential part of the equation. What that action should look like is somewhat more open to discussion. Intelligent economic policies are valuable to provide the greatest opportunity to the greatest number of people, but some sort of direct assistance is desirable to help those missed by those opportunities. That direct assistance need not look much like modern welfare, but it must exist, and we must support it.
Electoral Reform: I fully endorse both the 'Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote' and open-list proportional representation to elect both state legislatures and the House of Representatives. Both are needed to bring democracy to the US, and the second is needed if the two party system is to be broken. The right of the people to representation cannot be protected without eliminating wasted votes, currently endemic in our system. Protection of the disenfranchised and oppressed is central to the Gospel message.
Immigration and Border Security: Much of the national debate on immigration is supported by the basic assumption that the needs and rights of 'us' are more important than those of 'them.' This division is evil. As Christians we are called to love others as ourselves, not to love others but not quite as well as our friends and families. To declare anyone to be 'illegal' is to hate them, not to love them. Our borders will be most secure when they are open. Declared points of entry should be established, and the names and fingerprints of those seeking entry should be logged, but all who come should be admitted. Only those found to have committed an act we recognize as a crime should be denied entry. When this is the official policy, we can safely assume that anyone seeking to cross at any other point along the border is a criminal, and possibly a terrorist, who should be apprehended and investigated.
Marriage: Christian opposition to gay marriage is based exclusively on our objection to homosexuality on religious grounds. While we have the constitutional right to hold these beliefs, we cannot expect the government to outlaw something for that reason alone. Furthermore, if the subject is carefully considered, we find that all definitions of marriage are inherently religious in nature. Therefore, marriages should not be within the purview of the state, but rather left to churches to grant or deny. The state will need to establish some means by which to grant the rights currently granted through marriage, but with no ties to any sexual relationship at all. This means should not be called a 'civil union,' so as to avoid the current debate.
School Funding: Education is a public good, in that an educated populace is a great benefit to the country, and should be publicly funded. However, all education has a religious goal, the propagation of ideas about the sources of knowledge and authority. As such, it is a violation of the 1st amendment to publicly administer a school. The current public school system in every state is in violation of the 1st amendment. School vouchers offer the best way out of this problem by funding all children equally without regard to the religious choices made regarding the destination of that money.
Concern for the Poor: By my rough estimate, the single most talked about issue in the Bible, concern for the poor is without question a major responsibility for every Christian. In our modern world, in our modern economy, personal action, while still very meaningful and of matchless importance in the lives of those touched by it, is not the most efficient means to accomplish the ends of improving the lives of the poor. Government action, because it can help so many more people at once, is an essential part of the equation. What that action should look like is somewhat more open to discussion. Intelligent economic policies are valuable to provide the greatest opportunity to the greatest number of people, but some sort of direct assistance is desirable to help those missed by those opportunities. That direct assistance need not look much like modern welfare, but it must exist, and we must support it.
Electoral Reform: I fully endorse both the 'Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote' and open-list proportional representation to elect both state legislatures and the House of Representatives. Both are needed to bring democracy to the US, and the second is needed if the two party system is to be broken. The right of the people to representation cannot be protected without eliminating wasted votes, currently endemic in our system. Protection of the disenfranchised and oppressed is central to the Gospel message.
Immigration and Border Security: Much of the national debate on immigration is supported by the basic assumption that the needs and rights of 'us' are more important than those of 'them.' This division is evil. As Christians we are called to love others as ourselves, not to love others but not quite as well as our friends and families. To declare anyone to be 'illegal' is to hate them, not to love them. Our borders will be most secure when they are open. Declared points of entry should be established, and the names and fingerprints of those seeking entry should be logged, but all who come should be admitted. Only those found to have committed an act we recognize as a crime should be denied entry. When this is the official policy, we can safely assume that anyone seeking to cross at any other point along the border is a criminal, and possibly a terrorist, who should be apprehended and investigated.
Marriage: Christian opposition to gay marriage is based exclusively on our objection to homosexuality on religious grounds. While we have the constitutional right to hold these beliefs, we cannot expect the government to outlaw something for that reason alone. Furthermore, if the subject is carefully considered, we find that all definitions of marriage are inherently religious in nature. Therefore, marriages should not be within the purview of the state, but rather left to churches to grant or deny. The state will need to establish some means by which to grant the rights currently granted through marriage, but with no ties to any sexual relationship at all. This means should not be called a 'civil union,' so as to avoid the current debate.
School Funding: Education is a public good, in that an educated populace is a great benefit to the country, and should be publicly funded. However, all education has a religious goal, the propagation of ideas about the sources of knowledge and authority. As such, it is a violation of the 1st amendment to publicly administer a school. The current public school system in every state is in violation of the 1st amendment. School vouchers offer the best way out of this problem by funding all children equally without regard to the religious choices made regarding the destination of that money.
18.7.06
Religious Politics
Most evangelical Christians reliably vote republican. The stereotype is either that they vote this way because of abortion and gay rights, or that the Republican Party holds those positions to keep the “religious right,” but I think for most of them that’s just a justification. The religious right has just as much commitment to the rest of republican policy, the less obviously religious aspects of conservatism, as the other groups that make up the party. Some of these policies are not easily compatible with traditional Christian morality, so how did they get sold to the religious right? Why is the religious right comfortable with ignoring the first command in the bible, to care for the earth, in favor of supposed benefit to the economy? Why are they comfortable with ignoring the principle of concern for the poor to strip social services? Why are they happy to ignore the Old Testament prophets and various New Testament passages including most of the book of James to support oppressive corporate control of the economy and corruption of our government?
The so-called protestant work ethic gives some of the answer. The Christian tradition in our country has in it elements of economic determinism, ideas that wealth equals the favor of God and that that equates to an endorsement of both how that wealth was gained and any use to which it might be put. This has translated into a tendency to leave the poor to their own devices, few though those are. Christians tend to see this as good stewardship. We have abandoned all the rest of our moral imperatives to fixate on that one point.
This has to change. There are many moral issues that have nothing to do with money or sex and we have ignored them for too long. We have deep commitments to moral ends yet we do not seek to bring them into being through political means. Why not?
That answer comes from the American ideal of separation of church and state. In the way that this idea has played out in our modern world, the state rules over everything that can be considered public and is supposed to receive no interference or even input from the church. Meanwhile, the church is free to rule over whatever people want to give it in private and is supposedly free from any interaction with the state.
There are two problems with this division. First, the way we define public and private, and second, what constitutes influence or interference. We seem to have settled on “private” meaning whatever no one else has to see you doing, and “public” meaning just about everything else. Alternatively, “private can mean nearly everything in life, and “public” can be those things we think the government ought to control. The first definition seems the more popular, while the second is heavily favored by privacy advocates and libertarians. Either way, we can say that the private is essentially the not-public. With relation to religion, since either camp defines religion as private, this means both that we are expected to keep our religious beliefs to ourselves, making proselytizing a bit awkward, and that politics is supposed to have nothing to do with religion. That touches on the second problem. Private and public are not so easily separable as the words would seem to imply. The words are antonyms, yet the concepts, at least their applications in the real world, overlap. Private is taken to mean what goes on in our own homes, or what has no impact on anyone else, yet those things do have public implications. Similarly, public things have private roots. No one takes a public action without a private motivation.
Government tells people what they can’t do; religion tells people what they should do. As long as each sticks to its role, the separation isn’t that difficult to maintain. Where it becomes difficult is when we include politicians, the people who actually make up the government. They tend to tell people what they should do, although those instructions rarely come with the force of law. Every politician, like everyone else, has a religion, and here in America every religious person gets to vote. This makes the division between the two a little tense and causes people to take it to extremes.
Religion, supposedly, should have nothing to do with politics. Separation of church and state is one thing. The church should be free from government control, and the government should not be under the thumb of any one religion or denomination. That much is clear. We take it too far. I have heard people gripe about how President Bush talks about his religious motivations for some of his actions. What’s wrong with his communication of the source of his motivation? Religion is a perfectly good motivation, an excellent one in fact. For a politician to state that he favors a particular action because his religion says he should is fine. However, religion makes very poor argument. If another politician shares the religious values and his interpretation as favoring an action, then the argument of “because the Bible says so” is redundant except as a call to action, and if the other politician does not share those beliefs or that interpretation then that argument will never convince him. Religion as argument is always either redundant or hopeless.
Religion is, however, a perfect motivator in politics. I have many opinions on many subjects, and when I examine those opinions I generally find a religious value as the source. With regards to politics, I am neither a republican nor a democrat; I have opinions on issues that would place me on both sides of that divide. Neither am I a moderate; generally my opinions are extreme in whatever direction they lean. This leads me to assume that my thinking does not lie neatly on the traditional conservative-moderate scale of political values. I am a Christian, and that is also my political identity. God may be neither a republican nor a democrat, but he does make clear his will for our actions in many of the political issues facing the world today. Why do we settle for the Republican Party as the tool to attempt to do the right thing in the political realm? Why do Christians not have a party that acts from their religious motivation?
The so-called protestant work ethic gives some of the answer. The Christian tradition in our country has in it elements of economic determinism, ideas that wealth equals the favor of God and that that equates to an endorsement of both how that wealth was gained and any use to which it might be put. This has translated into a tendency to leave the poor to their own devices, few though those are. Christians tend to see this as good stewardship. We have abandoned all the rest of our moral imperatives to fixate on that one point.
This has to change. There are many moral issues that have nothing to do with money or sex and we have ignored them for too long. We have deep commitments to moral ends yet we do not seek to bring them into being through political means. Why not?
That answer comes from the American ideal of separation of church and state. In the way that this idea has played out in our modern world, the state rules over everything that can be considered public and is supposed to receive no interference or even input from the church. Meanwhile, the church is free to rule over whatever people want to give it in private and is supposedly free from any interaction with the state.
There are two problems with this division. First, the way we define public and private, and second, what constitutes influence or interference. We seem to have settled on “private” meaning whatever no one else has to see you doing, and “public” meaning just about everything else. Alternatively, “private can mean nearly everything in life, and “public” can be those things we think the government ought to control. The first definition seems the more popular, while the second is heavily favored by privacy advocates and libertarians. Either way, we can say that the private is essentially the not-public. With relation to religion, since either camp defines religion as private, this means both that we are expected to keep our religious beliefs to ourselves, making proselytizing a bit awkward, and that politics is supposed to have nothing to do with religion. That touches on the second problem. Private and public are not so easily separable as the words would seem to imply. The words are antonyms, yet the concepts, at least their applications in the real world, overlap. Private is taken to mean what goes on in our own homes, or what has no impact on anyone else, yet those things do have public implications. Similarly, public things have private roots. No one takes a public action without a private motivation.
Government tells people what they can’t do; religion tells people what they should do. As long as each sticks to its role, the separation isn’t that difficult to maintain. Where it becomes difficult is when we include politicians, the people who actually make up the government. They tend to tell people what they should do, although those instructions rarely come with the force of law. Every politician, like everyone else, has a religion, and here in America every religious person gets to vote. This makes the division between the two a little tense and causes people to take it to extremes.
Religion, supposedly, should have nothing to do with politics. Separation of church and state is one thing. The church should be free from government control, and the government should not be under the thumb of any one religion or denomination. That much is clear. We take it too far. I have heard people gripe about how President Bush talks about his religious motivations for some of his actions. What’s wrong with his communication of the source of his motivation? Religion is a perfectly good motivation, an excellent one in fact. For a politician to state that he favors a particular action because his religion says he should is fine. However, religion makes very poor argument. If another politician shares the religious values and his interpretation as favoring an action, then the argument of “because the Bible says so” is redundant except as a call to action, and if the other politician does not share those beliefs or that interpretation then that argument will never convince him. Religion as argument is always either redundant or hopeless.
Religion is, however, a perfect motivator in politics. I have many opinions on many subjects, and when I examine those opinions I generally find a religious value as the source. With regards to politics, I am neither a republican nor a democrat; I have opinions on issues that would place me on both sides of that divide. Neither am I a moderate; generally my opinions are extreme in whatever direction they lean. This leads me to assume that my thinking does not lie neatly on the traditional conservative-moderate scale of political values. I am a Christian, and that is also my political identity. God may be neither a republican nor a democrat, but he does make clear his will for our actions in many of the political issues facing the world today. Why do we settle for the Republican Party as the tool to attempt to do the right thing in the political realm? Why do Christians not have a party that acts from their religious motivation?
24.6.06
Failing duopoly
Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party serves the interests of the majority of Americans today, and I am referring to more than the longstanding back and forth of marginal control in congress. The array of choices presented to the voting public is sadly limited. To think that the full spectrum of political ideologies present in the American public is expressed in the choice between the slightly evolved views and beliefs of 19th century industrialists and 19th century enlightenment philosophers seems a little ridiculous. This must change. Not what the current parties offer, but what other choices are available must change. No two parties can ever adequately represent the desires and needs of 300 million people. To end this stranglehold on American politics will be very difficult, particularly because none of our current political leaders seem to have any interest in opening up the system to competition. Although a greater variety and number of political parties would solve or help many problems, including corruption, the disconnect between political leaders and the voting public, and voter disinterest, as well as improve the quality of public discourse, this is not my motivation. I want a political party I can identify with and that I can trust to represent my interests (as well as one I can feel comfortable running for office under), and I do not have that option in American politics today. The two parties are so entrenched that not only are they not anxious to change, they will not even allow other voices to be heard. For example, the presidential debates, the ones that are on tv every four years and don't actually constitute a debate, typically have only two participants not because there are only two viable candidates, although this is sadly the case, but because the forum is legally owned jointly by the two major parties and both would have to agree to allow another party to participate. Obviously, this does not often happen.
There is a group out there currently working on a plan to change the way we elect the president. Rather than get rid of the Electoral College, which would require a constitutional amendment, they seek to make it redundant. They are going to all the various state legislatures and attempting to get them to adopt an interstate agreement to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of the outcome in their own state. This plan can work. The states have the right to award their electoral votes however they want, and historically some have simply appointed them without a vote. The agreement would not take effect until a number of states constituting a majority in the electoral college signed on, at which point what the other states do with their own electoral votes doesn't matter. This will, if enacted, fundamentally change presidential elections.
It isn't enough. With this in place, presidential candidates might visit more places, and engage in more meaningful debate, the political dialogue in our country might be enriched, but there will still be only two candidates. The presidential election is not the source of power for the parties; congressional elections are. What I want is for this plan to become redundant itself. I want people to pay very little attention to the vote returns on election night, because I want everyone to already know the outcome. I want the outcome to reliably be that congress will elect the president, because no one candidate achieved a majority, and I want congress to have to find, every time, a compromise because no one party controls enough of congress to push through their own candidate without help from another party.
I have a plan, inspired by, as simple as, and potentially more effective than the plan to elect the president by popular vote. In addition, my plan would end gerrymandering forever. Unfortunately I lack the ability to put my plan into action. I have no means to go to state legislatures and pitch my idea, nor do I have any expectation that they would embrace it if they did hear it.
Without a way to get people into congress a political party will always be a small fringe movement, so congress is what must be opened to what are currently minor parties. The state legislatures have, in addition to their power over their electoral votes, the power to redraw their voting districts more or less at will. Typically this happens only every ten years with the release of new census data and the reapportioning of seats in the House of Representatives that goes with it, but Texas went ahead and redrew the map without that. I haven't heard yet whether the Supreme Court has ruled on the legality of that. That was all that was unusual about the Texas redistricting: when it happened, not how blatant the partisan redistricting was. Take a look at the map of Arizona's congressional districts and give me any other reasonable explanation for district two. Legislatures use this opportunity to solidify their districts, sometimes to maintain the balance of seats while reducing competition within districts, sometimes to attempt to shut out as much of the minority party as possible. This can be ended simply, and to do so would be a great victory for justice and equal representation.
Just get the states to say that all of their districts overlap, occupy the exact same territory, and that the seats they represent will be handed out in proportion to the votes cast, and this partisan redistricting ends forever and minority parties can grow and thrive. Currently a party has to get a majority, or at least the largest minority, in each district to win even a single seat. There might be a million people, enough to merit at least two representatives, across the country who vote, or would vote if they thought there was any point and they had a candidate on the ballot to vote for, for the green party, but since they aren't congregated in one place, they don't win a single seat. This wouldn't be completely solved without getting rid of the states' role in congressional elections, but that cannot happen without a constitutional amendment, and that amendment would never pass. Proportional representation by state is pretty good, and much more doable.
It would only take one state to get it going. Unlike the presidential plot, this one doesn't rely on the actions of any other state. Pressure to copy the first state to do this from voters who want more choices in their own state would help this grow, and states that started doing this after others had already started would benefit from the existence of working third (and fourth and fifth) parties elsewhere. Currently elections have losers. Forget the politicians who failed to get elected; the real losers are the voters whose party lost. In MA, where the majority is democratic, republican votes might as well not be cast. We hear about it most often in relation to the presidential election, but it matters more for the congressional elections. If MA is 60% democratic, why should 100% of its congressmen be democrats? That means that 40% of the people are disenfranchised. That's ridiculous.
Here's the point: I'm neither a democrat nor a republican, and I don't want to be disenfranchised. What benefits me will benefit many other people, and the country as a whole, and I want it. There's plenty of political power to go around; it ought to be spread a little more evenly.
There is a group out there currently working on a plan to change the way we elect the president. Rather than get rid of the Electoral College, which would require a constitutional amendment, they seek to make it redundant. They are going to all the various state legislatures and attempting to get them to adopt an interstate agreement to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of the outcome in their own state. This plan can work. The states have the right to award their electoral votes however they want, and historically some have simply appointed them without a vote. The agreement would not take effect until a number of states constituting a majority in the electoral college signed on, at which point what the other states do with their own electoral votes doesn't matter. This will, if enacted, fundamentally change presidential elections.
It isn't enough. With this in place, presidential candidates might visit more places, and engage in more meaningful debate, the political dialogue in our country might be enriched, but there will still be only two candidates. The presidential election is not the source of power for the parties; congressional elections are. What I want is for this plan to become redundant itself. I want people to pay very little attention to the vote returns on election night, because I want everyone to already know the outcome. I want the outcome to reliably be that congress will elect the president, because no one candidate achieved a majority, and I want congress to have to find, every time, a compromise because no one party controls enough of congress to push through their own candidate without help from another party.
I have a plan, inspired by, as simple as, and potentially more effective than the plan to elect the president by popular vote. In addition, my plan would end gerrymandering forever. Unfortunately I lack the ability to put my plan into action. I have no means to go to state legislatures and pitch my idea, nor do I have any expectation that they would embrace it if they did hear it.
Without a way to get people into congress a political party will always be a small fringe movement, so congress is what must be opened to what are currently minor parties. The state legislatures have, in addition to their power over their electoral votes, the power to redraw their voting districts more or less at will. Typically this happens only every ten years with the release of new census data and the reapportioning of seats in the House of Representatives that goes with it, but Texas went ahead and redrew the map without that. I haven't heard yet whether the Supreme Court has ruled on the legality of that. That was all that was unusual about the Texas redistricting: when it happened, not how blatant the partisan redistricting was. Take a look at the map of Arizona's congressional districts and give me any other reasonable explanation for district two. Legislatures use this opportunity to solidify their districts, sometimes to maintain the balance of seats while reducing competition within districts, sometimes to attempt to shut out as much of the minority party as possible. This can be ended simply, and to do so would be a great victory for justice and equal representation.
Just get the states to say that all of their districts overlap, occupy the exact same territory, and that the seats they represent will be handed out in proportion to the votes cast, and this partisan redistricting ends forever and minority parties can grow and thrive. Currently a party has to get a majority, or at least the largest minority, in each district to win even a single seat. There might be a million people, enough to merit at least two representatives, across the country who vote, or would vote if they thought there was any point and they had a candidate on the ballot to vote for, for the green party, but since they aren't congregated in one place, they don't win a single seat. This wouldn't be completely solved without getting rid of the states' role in congressional elections, but that cannot happen without a constitutional amendment, and that amendment would never pass. Proportional representation by state is pretty good, and much more doable.
It would only take one state to get it going. Unlike the presidential plot, this one doesn't rely on the actions of any other state. Pressure to copy the first state to do this from voters who want more choices in their own state would help this grow, and states that started doing this after others had already started would benefit from the existence of working third (and fourth and fifth) parties elsewhere. Currently elections have losers. Forget the politicians who failed to get elected; the real losers are the voters whose party lost. In MA, where the majority is democratic, republican votes might as well not be cast. We hear about it most often in relation to the presidential election, but it matters more for the congressional elections. If MA is 60% democratic, why should 100% of its congressmen be democrats? That means that 40% of the people are disenfranchised. That's ridiculous.
Here's the point: I'm neither a democrat nor a republican, and I don't want to be disenfranchised. What benefits me will benefit many other people, and the country as a whole, and I want it. There's plenty of political power to go around; it ought to be spread a little more evenly.
3.4.06
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