Going Against the Crowd
Jonah Goldberg's long list and my short one
Jonah Goldberg offers a long list of views he has that go against the crowd. Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Before I offer my own list, let me comment on some of Jonah’s.
He says that the Electoral College is good and that it failed to do its job in 2016. I’m guessing he thinks that the electors should be allowed to use their own judgment, and that they should have made Hillary President? If so, I cannot conceive of that working out well. And I am not fan of Donald Trump.
He says that the Vietnam and Iraq wars were defensible. I would not say that. But you can make a case that the wars’ critics should not be so smug:
Ho and Saddam in fact were evil
we were fighting for important principles: that North Vietnam should not have been allowed to invade the South; and that Saddam should not be allowed to defy international demands for weapons inspection
But the pretexts for both wars were weak. The Tonkin Gulf incident was a nothingburger. And we claimed to know that Saddam had WMD’s, which was different from just demanding that he allow inspectors to come in. That pretext required us to actually find WMDs, which we didn’t.
And both wars had bad outcomes, because in both cases nation-building failed. In the case of Vietnam, the governments that we tried to stand up were just not good enough to be worth all the blood and treasure we spent on them. In the case of Iraq, we ended up with a bigger mess than what was there when we started.
Jonah argues that many political “reforms” of recent decades backfired. There certainly are folks who agree, starting with Jonathan Rauch.
One of Jonah’s claims, that “Campaign finance reform was a disaster,” is probably correct. But if you don’t put up any barriers to individuals buying elections, you end up with a two-party system where the two parties are George Soros and Peter Thiel.
That leads to my own “against the crowd” idea: change the tax status of all contributions to non-profits, including political contributions.
For example, you could allow individuals to deduct contributions from their income, as they do now, but only up to a limit of, say $20,000 in contributions per year per taxpayer. And I would go further. I would say that if your total contributions to non-profits in a year exceed $100,000, you pay additional taxes at a rate of 50 percent on those contributions. So if you give $300,000 to Harvard and make no other contributions, you get to deduct $20,000 from your income, but you pay an additional $100,000 (50 percent of($300,000 - $100,000)) in taxes. My goal is to expand the for-profit sector and shrink the non-profit sector.
Eliminate NFP altogether. We’d get used to no tax deductions. We had charities long before they needed their 501c3 status. Doubt it’ll happen, as foundations would be livid.
Richard Hanania had a great comment recently. "Conservative media and writers like Christopher Hitchens used to do glowing profiles of American soldiers who were motivated by the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq. Just a decade later, no American knows or cares whether Iraq is a democracy, and we don't even think of the country at all. It's quite sad."
I think that's one useful way to think about our intervention. Spending $2 trillion and thousands of American lives implies that this is something that is VERY important to our national interest or even to humanity as a whole. But I don't think anyone in America cares about Iraq and whether it is a democracy. I am reasonably well-versed in current events and geopolitics and I have no idea if it is a democracy. You could use that same logic for eg. Vietnam, Eastern Ukraine, etc. And I think you would still conclude that Taiwan and Israel are on one side of the equation and Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine are all on the other side.
I also think that campaign finance reform was a major mistake and that Citizens United was the wrong decision, but the first amendment issues are complicated.