Category: Transformational Ideas

Roger Williams and Separation of Church and State

Wrongo spent part of vacation reading John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, an important (and very readable) book that describes the evolution of Williams’ beliefs about the proper role of religion in civil society. To the extent that we know anything about Roger Williams, it is that he founded Rhode Island. But, Barry makes a very persuasive case that he is an important reason why America has separation of church and state today, since Williams was the first person to describe individual liberty in modern terms.

We all learned in high school that colonists came to America for reasons of religious freedom. What few know is that, once they got here, the Puritans were more than willing to persecute those of the “wrong” religion. They built a society in which the heads of the church also ran the government, and only those who were admitted to their church (requiring a unanimous vote) had the right to vote.  In fact, Barry says that one study found that only 21% of emigrants to New England were know to have ever been admitted to church membership. This was very similar everywhere else in the Christian world in the early 1600’s.

The Puritan-run Massachusetts Bay colony was a place of religious authoritarianism. The origin of the conflict between church and state was the view of John Winthrop’s “city on a hill”, an authoritative and theocentric state, while Williams called for utter separation of church and state and respect for individual rights, such as the right not to attend church services.

Massachusetts banished Williams, who moved first to Plymouth and then was banished again to what is modern Rhode Island. Over time, Williams provided both an example, and an intellectual foundation that led to America institutionalizing religious freedom.

Americans are rightly grateful to our founding fathers, who set our Constitution in the right direction, imbedding in it that there would be no official religion, no religious requirement for public office, and a separation of church and state.

The founders didn’t develop those ideas on their own. The philosopher John Locke is often credited with inspiring the idea of religious freedom in Jefferson and Madison. Barry shows that Locke was influenced by Roger Williams, and that Williams had an even more inclusive idea of religious freedom than Locke, thinking that atheists and Catholics should also have religious freedom, ideas that Locke didn’t share.

Williams got his ideas about the supremacy of individual liberty from his work in England with Sir Edward Coke. Williams worked for Coke, taking shorthand, and Coke was a major intellectual influence on Williams’s philosophy. When King James tried to assert the divine right of kings in England, Coke stood up against him with little behind him but the common law. Coke fought to establish the power of habeas corpus. He said “every Englishman’s home is as his castle.” He fought for the supremacy of Parliament over the King, and the supremacy of the Magna Carta as a basis for deciding individual vs. state rights.

Some of the rights Coke fought for in England, and spent time in the Tower of London for espousing, ended up embedded in our American Constitution.

With Rhode Island, Williams created the first government in the world which broke church and state apart. King Charles II copied the concept and some of the language on religious freedom in Rhode Island’s charter into the charters of New Jersey and Carolina, despite establishing the Anglican Church there. Rhode Island was also the first colony to declare independence from England in 1776, two months before the rest of the colonies.

Barry makes the point that few of the founders read Roger Williams, who had died in 1683, but they had read Coke, and most members of the Constitutional Convention knew Williams as a symbol of religious and political liberty.

Since the rise of Christian conservatives in the 1970s, the debate over these issues sounds depressingly similar to that between Williams and Winthrop in Massachusetts. In more obvious ways, each day brings us a new conflict in America over defining the proper role of religion in the matters of state, whether it is pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control, states closing abortion clinics, bakeries refusing to provide wedding cakes to same sex couples, or companies refusing insurance coverage for drugs or procedures they believe violate their religious principles.

Williams risked his life for freedom. His ideas, and his kind of courage were both rare in the 17th century. His was not the 21st century, cartoon-kind. We need more of his kind of courage today.

He was a rare man of faith who thought religious freedom and personal liberty were completely consistent with religious faith.

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Technology Isn’t Creating Enough Middle Class Jobs

Yesterday we talked about how America is losing middle class jobs to technical outsourcing on our way to becoming a land of spreadsheets and flags. Today, let’s discuss another aspect of that; how technology continues to cost more and more mid-skilled jobs. We usually think of technology as a great panacea, making most of our processes more efficient. In fact, many of us can look back on the “sneakernet” of the 1980s and feel good about how far we’ve come with technology.

But technology has also reduced the number of middle class workers required, at a time when American wages are stagnant and benefits are falling for the remaining available jobs.

The meme used to be that if technology replaced workers, new jobs came along and net-net, more people were employed. Although things weren’t that simple, by 1900 if you were displaced, you could get another job because 99% of all jobs were still done only by humans.

Today corporations tell us that the knowledge economy can take as many workers as we can create, and since we can’t create them fast enough, technology firms need more of the H-1B visas we discussed yesterday. This is false. Facebook is touted as a prime player in the knowledge economy, but it only employs 5,800 to service 1 billion customers! Twitter has 400 million total users. It has 2,300 employees.

What is the value of Facebook and Twitter to the jobs economy? These are two of our very “best” success stories, and they only employ 8,100 workers. They have had a huge impact on society, but the total jobs they have created are only a rounding error in our economy.

Much of what we want to buy is produced in factories increasingly run with robots, and maintained and operated by small cadres of engineers. Increased sales of iPhones only add a few sales jobs at $12/hour in the US and not many new factory jobs in China. Also, keep in mind that globally, some 3 billion people are looking for work and the vast majority are willing to work for less than the average American.

We all know that technology is costing jobs, and by some estimates it could cost half of all current jobs in the next 20 years. So, we can expect an ever-greater number of unemployed chasing an ever-shrinking number of jobs that can’t be eliminated or simplified by technology. Thus, the prognosis for many medium and some higher-skilled workers appears grim. With this being said, technology is benefiting a lot of businesses and the way they operate. You’ll get a better understanding of it just by reading these Quotes about AI. Seeing as technology doesn’t look like it is going anywhere anytime soon, we might as well use it to our advantage in a business.

The oligarchs have seen these forecasts. That may explain their unwillingness to do anything serious to create effective jobs programs here at home. They don’t need to do anything, because there is a (virtually) infinite supply of skilled and unskilled workers in the overpopulated third world.

The issue is not technology, or robots, or restoring our manufacturing base. Nor is the issue better skills, or technology or outsourcing. We have too many people chasing too few good jobs.

Incomes will continue to stagnate, because automation does not threaten unskilled jobs. This is sometimes called “Moravec’s Paradox”, which says that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires relatively little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. The “Roomba” robotic vacuum cleaner is, despite years of development, just an expensive toy. It has had zero impact on the market for janitors and maids, yet, wages for American janitors and maids have fallen because of competition from the currently unemployed and newly arrived immigrants. While the Roomba aims to be a forward-looking cleaning solution, it still cannot compete with the manual vacuum cleaners, like Bissell’s, that still prove to be the preferred choice despite innovative attempts to move towards automation. See this link for Bissell vacuum cleaners – https://www.bissell.com/vacuums/upright-vacuum-cleaners/

If we forecast continuing technology breakthroughs (and we should), and combine that with the 3 billion people currently looking for work globally, we have to conclude that the planet is overpopulated if the goal is a growing global middle class.

This is why the quest for better technology has become the enemy of sustaining middle class growth in the developed world.

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Transformative Ideas – Part III, Make America A Humanitarian Force in the Middle East

What is our grand strategy in the Middle East? Do we have a strategy at all?

We are now escalating our military role in Yemen. The USS Roosevelt battle group is deploying from the Persian Gulf to the northern Arabian Sea to….do what?

Both the US and Iranian navies have now sent ships to the waters around Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition has been bombing rebel targets since March. The press says the Iranians are bringing weapons to the Houthi rebels in Yemen; the Iranians say they are not. This sets up a scenario that can lead to miscalculation, like we saw in 1988, when US officials said they were trying to keep shipping lanes open, and a fight between Iran and the US wiped out half of the Iranian Navy.

Traditionally, we say that our Navy ensures freedom of the sea. So, are we again ensuring the freedom of the sea in the Bab al-Mandab Strait? Who threatens freedom of passage there?

Since 1980, US forces have invaded, occupied or bombed 14 countries in the Islamic world, and American soldiers have killed, or been killed, in them. Here’s the list:

Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-present), Bosnia (1995), Kosovo (1999), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-present), Sudan (1998), Yemen (2000, 2002-present), Pakistan (2004-present) and Syria (2014-present).

What is the outcome of our intervention in the Middle East? We should look at what we have accomplished in the Middle East, and what our sustained war footing has cost us.

Are Middle East nations more favorable to us? Are we more secure at home?

What of the millions of internally displaced persons and refugees in the Middle East? Estimates are that 3.1 million refugees are living outside their countries, while 13.1 million are displaced within Iraq and Syria alone.

A Brookings report, Arab Youth: Missing educational foundations for a productive life concluded that the percentages of primary school students who did not meet basic learning levels (average of numeracy and literacy) in 2011 was:

Around 90% in Yemen, 77% in Morocco, 69% in Kuwait and 63% in Tunisia. The best performers, with 30-40% of non-learning students, were Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, though in wealthy Qatar…over 53% of children at the secondary level were not learning.

It can’t have gotten better since 2011. These are flashing red lights. These tens of millions of uneducated young Arabs will prove to be homemade weapons of mass destruction, some directed at us. These young men and women cannot look forward to employment or meaningful roles in their societies. They are the feedstock for armed groups, criminal cults, and extremist militias, as we see in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, and Libya.

Here is the transformational idea: It is time we move away from US military intervention in the Middle East. Since it has failed us as a primary means of US policy, let’s change direction.

Let America keep a forward military position in the region, but we should stop bombing, shooting and droning. The National Priorities Project estimates that we have spent $1.6 Trillion on ME wars since 2001.

Instead, let’s use a big slice of that money to become the primary supplier of humanitarian and educational aid to the refugees and displaced people in the Middle East. We should position ourselves as a positive force for change among many millions of Muslims, and not be just another country in a long line of crusading infidels.

We can’t use military might to bring stability wherever it’s needed. We can’t remake parts of the world in our image, and the world doesn’t want us to even try to do so.

America has many fine attributes, but there is a naĂŻve and possibly ignorant side of the American psyche that gets us into trouble. It is the myth of American exceptionalism. It bleeds into our politics, our popular culture, and much of our military. It makes us very hard to like in the ME.

Mr. Obama decided that we should try something different in Cuba, when 50 years of doing the same thing didn’t produce results.

Well, we have been doing the same thing in the Middle East for at least 60 years. In 1953, Iran’s military, financed by the CIA, overthrew Prime Minister Mossadeq. The Shah took power and, as thanks for the American help, signed over 40% percent of Iran’s oil fields to US companies. You know the rest of the Iran/US story.

Let’s try something different in the Middle East.

(This is the third in an occasional series about transformative ideas. You can read the first about capitalism here and the second about restoring the military draft, here)

 

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Is Compulsory Voting a Problem, or a Solution?

At a town hall event in Cleveland last Wednesday, President Obama (nearly) said the US should make voting compulsory, like it is in Australia. Eleven countries, including Australia, Brazil, and Singapore, enforce compulsory voting laws. Another 11 have compulsory voting laws, but don’t enforce them.

The response to Obama’s suggestion was predictable. Fox News host Andrea Tantaros along with her fellow panelists on the show “Outnumbered” on Thursday, bashed Mr. Obama’s suggestion, saying:

Do we really want everybody voting? I don’t think so.

Co-host Melissa Francis said:

If you’re not engaged enough to vote, please don’t…Stay home.

Meanwhile, another co-host, Harris Faulkner, argued that mandatory voting would be un-American because our military:

Fought for our right to decide for ourselves.

Whatever that means. The Wrongologist does not support mandatory voting, but not for the vacuous reasons you might hear on Fox News.

Compulsory voting raises questions. First, is voting a right or a duty? If it is a right, then participation in elections is voluntary. If it is a duty, then participation should be mandatory. In countries where voting is considered a duty, voting is compulsory and is regulated in their constitutions. Some countries impose sanctions (like a fine) on non-voters.

Second, what would happen if all citizens voted? Studies show that turnout increases quite a bit. A Harvard study indicated that there are secondary gains as well:

• Compulsory voting could reduce the role of money in politics. Political parties would not spend as much money on their get-out-the-vote efforts since high turn-out would already be ensured and would be fairly inelastic
• It might increase political awareness and engagement. Compulsory voting would change the ways in which candidates and political parties develop campaign strategies. For example, it might lead to fewer negative campaigns featuring attack ads
• Compulsory voting might increase government’s relevance by bringing in groups that are underrepresented among today’s voters, since the population that shows up for US elections is whiter, older, richer and more educated than the general population

But, America is a place where our “right to be left alone” is foundational. Would being legally compelled to vote deprive anyone of a part of their liberty? Yes, if you believe voting is a right, not a duty. And how big would that “deprivation” be, compared to what we have already lost of our 1st and 4th Amendment rights since 9/11?

Perhaps the final question is: Isn’t one goal of a representative democracy to maximize voter participation? Today, registering to vote isn’t easy for every American, but it ought to be. It shouldn’t be the job of the individual election boards to say who is worthy of registration.

It should be the state’s responsibility to issue every citizen a voter registration card. If the state wants to maximize voter participation, it should mail a voter ID card to each of us. How we would deal with those of us who slip through the cracks would need to be worked out.

We have seen the way that barriers to voting emerge. They create enough of a hurdle that a significant percentage of voters fail to clear it. It is not a terrible thing to demand that we have eligibility requirements for voters, but they are often enforced inequitably, and are enough of a nuisance that a significant minority will end up not voting. For the past decade in America, many individual states have been raising barriers, because barriers to voting confer partisan advantage. With mandatory voter registration, the state’s job would be to reduce the barriers to the lowest possible level.

It is arguable if citizens should be compelled to vote, or not. Wrongo believes that is the individual’s business. Yet, as voter participation drops, a self-selected minority determines who runs the country. They then set policy that primarily reflects their interests.

That isn’t the kind of society we need. We should want our country to see all citizens as full political equals, not just in theory, but in fact. The more that barriers to voting rise in America, and the further voter participation falls, the less we resemble that ideal society.

So, issue a universal voter registration card. Move voting to the weekend, or have an entire voting week. Make it frictionless, so it’s not a big effort. Go and vote, say hi to the neighbors, and then go home to view the results.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world.

 

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Happy Martin Luther King Day!

Although it was first observed in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. Day wasn’t recognized by all 50 states until 2000. It isn’t simply a day about the man; it’s a day about a Dream. MLK remains the hero of a certain generation of Americans for whom activism was a building block of their personal journey to adulthood.

In most ways, our nation has lost that sense of can-do, that all things are possible if you follow your Big Idea, because sadly, we no longer have people who can rally us to make Big Ideas happen. And isn’t it fascinating that the three men of the 20th Century who had big ideas and brought them to fruition, Gandhi, Mandela and Dr. King, all faced “it can’t be done” opposition, often violent, from the white power base in their countries. All three modeled non-violence for their followers, and all three lived to see their Big Dream become a reality in their own country.

Since it is Wake Up Monday, here are 3 songs that pay tribute to Dr. King, his ideals and his relentless drive for equality. It is important to remember that he was just 39 when he was killed.

First, “Glory” by Common and John Legend from the soundtrack of the current movie “Selma”:

50 years later, we are far from completely erasing our race-related issues, except on TV, where all day, every day, commercials show people of all races having fun together while shopping for fast food.

Let’s work together to make it a reality outside of TV before too many more MLK days come and go.

Next, U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)“. From their 1984 album, “The Unforgettable Fire”:

If listeners have any doubt that Martin Luther King Jr. is the subject of the song, these lyrics drive the point home:

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride.

But, MLK’s assassination took place in the early evening, rather than the early morning. That didn’t matter, everyone loves the song, and the Edge’s guitar at the start is one of the most recognizable riffs of the 1980’s.

Finally, the Wrongologist’s favorite MLK song, “Southern” by OMD from their album “The Pacific Age“. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, King delivered his last speech, which we now know as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day. OMD samples some of the content of that speech for their song “Southern”:

Although everyone knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” part of the speech, Wrongo thinks our focus should be on the following:

I want young men and young women, who are not alive today
But who will come into this world, with new privileges
And new opportunities
I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunities
Did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing
For freedom is never given to anybody

Why should we focus on that part of the speech? Because one day down the road, and it will not be long, young people will have forgotten what MLK meant to America, and how whatever remains of their rights came to be.

They won’t know anything about the intellectual foundations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Or, how the 13th Amendment ending slavery came about, and why, 100 years later in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, or how 48 years later, in June, 2013, the Roberts Court eviscerated it.

So, today, teach a child about why MLK is important.

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Transformative Ideas, Part II – Reestablish Compulsory Military Service

This is Part II of a continuing series in 2015, bringing forward for your review, ideas that have the potential to transform and end the ossification of our country. Part I was about ending our love affair with the unregulated free market.

In Part II, we argue for re-establishing compulsory military service. In response to the anti-military opinion during the Vietnam War, Nixon replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973. This facilitated our ability to make decisions about conducting wars without worrying about who fights them.

Registering for the draft (as differentiated from compulsory service) is still the law for young men in America. If you were born in 1996 or earlier, that means you’re potentially on the hook if America runs out of professional military during wartime.

There are two problems that compulsory military service will help to ameliorate. First, the permanent state of war that our politicians and defense contractors have fostered in the past 40 years. Charles F. Wald, retired Air Force general who oversaw the start of the air war in Afghanistan in 2001 told the WaPo in September:

We’re not going to see an end to this in our lifetime.

Second, a professional military has dangerously skewed the demographics of our professional military compared to our society at large.

We have a permanent state of war because the price we pay is opaque, or meaningless to most citizens, despite some estimates that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan cost more than $4.4 Trillion, including future obligations for the disabilities of American soldiers. Reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have “skin in the game” for the wars we fight. James Fallows in a very important article for The Atlantic gives us some perspective relative to when we had the draft and what goes on today: (brackets and parenthesis by the Wrongologist)

At the end of World War II, nearly 10% of the entire US population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve).

[Today] the US military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.

(Out of a population of 310 million, or about three-quarters of 1%, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many, many of them more than once)

Since 1970, the population of the US has grown by about 50%, from roughly 200 million to 300 million. Over the same period, the number of active-duty armed forces has fallen approximately 50%, from 3 million to 1.4 million. Fallows quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

My concern is this growing disconnect between the American people and our military…I would sacrifice some of [our military’s] …excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the American people. Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.

Moving to the demographic differences between the professional military and American society at large, Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general who is at the Duke Law Schools says: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

I think there is a strong sense in the military that it is indeed a better society than the one it serves…In the generation coming up, we’ve got lieutenants and majors who had been the warrior-kings in their little outposts…They were literally making life-or-death decisions. You can’t take that generation and say, ‘You can be seen and not heard.’

Dunlap told James Fallows: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

[The military is] becoming increasingly tribal…in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. It’s become a family tradition, in a way that’s at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.

Making Dunlap’s point, Danielle Allen, of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Military Service wrote about the political implications of a professional military in the WaPo:

By the end of the draft in 1973, military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true.

Tellingly, changes to the map of military service since 1973 align closely with today’s red and blue states. Montana, Alaska, Florida, Wyoming, Maine and Texas now send the largest number of people per capita to the military. The states with the lowest contribution rates? Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. What’s clear from the data is that a major national institution, the US military, now has tighter connections to some regions of the country than to others. The uneven pattern of military service is not an insignificant reflection of the cultural differences that characterize different regions of this diverse country. This has broad ramifications for our future.

Heidi A. Urben, a Lieutenant Colonel, studied the attitudes of the officer corps, and found that about 60% said they identify with the Republican Party, and that 70% had not changed their party affiliation, despite two long wars.

The Pentagon reports that bringing back conscription would be costly at a time when the US Army is drawing down its forces. It might cost billions to reinstate the draft, while maintaining the present quality of armed forces. But it may be the only way to wake up a detached and nonvoting public that has depersonalized military service. The additional cost of managing a draft and training all Americans for some kind of government service would pay dividends:

• A draft would ensure that government decision-making regarding military involvement would be undertaken only after the fullest debate — a debate today that seems to not be part of the national consciousness and hardly registers any interest by the public.
• A draft would narrow the gap between people in power in Washington and the men and women at peril in fighting our nation’s battles.
• A draft could re-balance the skewed demographics of the military.

A draft could mean that voting on Election Day would be more important in our now-fragile democracy. It could mean that going to war is worth having every citizen sacrifice, or it isn’t worth any soldier’s life.

 

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Transforming America, Part I

For the past few months, this blog has featured this quote:

He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time, comprehend –Hubert Selby Jr.

Let’s start this year with a meditation about one transformative idea. Not something that is peddled by the DC think tanks, but an idea that lurks just below the surface.

All of us have wondered, like the characters in Selby’s “Requiem for a Dream” (and maybe, with increasing frequency) “hey, something is wrong here”. Maybe you accept mainstream logic, but now you’ve come to realize that things are getting out of control, despite the constant messaging from your ideological god of choice that tries to pull you back to conventional thinking.

Here is the transformative idea for today: The free market isn’t a beautiful self-correcting machine. Instead, it is consuming our society and our environment for the benefit of a very few.

And it isn’t an orderly process; the trajectory is more like a slow free-fall in which the market system moves downward devouring everything, unless it is met by real opposition. In fact, the globalized version of the free market makes life horrible for lots of people, creating a constant need for intervention.

For a couple of examples, you don’t get the Russian Revolution(s) without the Czar trying to play ‘catch up’ with the West. You don’t get the Cuban Revolution without the crimes of the Batista regime.

When there is a backlash against corporatism, especially on the periphery, capitalists come up with a solution. Anyone is better than a bunch of reformers who want society to pay attention to people’s well-being rather than to profits.

With globalization, local thugs became very useful. Folks like Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, the Saud family in Saudi Arabia, Mubarak in Egypt, Suharto in Indonesia, and Hussein in Iraq. Most of the time, these folks did the job big business wanted done (even if it was messy). And the American government protected US corporate assets in-country, and propped up the compliant local politicians. The profits got privatized, and the losses socialized, since our taxes paid for the military aid to the dictators, while the corporates skimmed the profits. And much of those profits remained offshore, out of reach of our taxing authorities.

Today, the useful thugs working on behalf of the American Empire are in Washington DC. They have made our political system a self-replicating support system for free market capitalism. We have retained only a veneer of our democracy, while moving rapidly in the direction of an authoritarian business-state combine, an improved version of Mussolini-style corporatism.

Oswald Spengler, who’s “Decline of the West” argued in the 1920’s that the urban culture of Northern Europe was a “Faustian” world, (his term for one of 8 global cultures) characterized by bigness and rationality, eventually to be dominated by the soldier, the engineer, and the businessman.

Doesn’t that seem particularly relevant to today’s America? Spengler thought that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and that the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. Importantly, he said:

The ‘tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers’ is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective.

So here we are. One day, it was 2014, the next day, 2015. What has changed? Nothing. What will change? Nothing, unless you begin a process of thinking about one transformative idea:

The free market doesn’t self-correct. Therefore, it is an ideology that must be changed.

The struggle between market forces and societal needs has always existed. In the 20th Century, we evolved a series of social democracies that kept the rights of the people balanced against the rights of the corporations, with some of the pushback actually coming from businesses themselves.

But today, well-funded efforts to roll back New Deal and New Society social welfare programs are well advanced. And there are only so many times that this blog and others can point out that many Americans have been unemployed since 2008.

The political question is what happens to this great new underclass in America? An underclass that has grown large because of the past 7+ years of economic disparity. Since the free market system that is grinding up our society is a utopian fantasy, we should be able to turn to our democratic system to help solve the real failures of our economic system.

But, our democratic system has been co-opted by the free marketers. So, who can ordinary people turn to for help AGAINST the market?

The corporatists and their captured politicians have a term, “there is no alternative” or TINA. It has come to mean that “there is no alternative” to free markets, free trade, and globalization, if our society is to prosper. They stress TINA to keep ordinary people from seeing that we need to constrain the worst of free market excesses.

The unbridled free market has to die.

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It’s Just A Suggestion, But…

Would Gun Insurance Help?

Not insurance that pays to replace stolen firearms, but liability insurance for the damage that is done by firearms. Over the past few days, there have been many suggestions about mandating such insurance as a way of:

  • Paying for the damages done by people irresponsibly using (storing, playing with, or loaning) their guns
  • Reducing gun ownership by increasing the costs associated with it

Can we agree that guns as weapons are inherently dangerous to society? Can we agree that gun owners should bear the risk and true social costs of gun ownership?

Suggestion: Require both owners and sellers to purchase liability
insurance that is underwritten by private insurance companies according to the relative risk of the gun or the buyer. As John Wasik writes in Forbes:

When you buy a car, your insurer underwrites the risk according to your age, driving/arrest/ticket record, type of car, amount of use and other factors. A teenage driver behind the wheel of a Porsche is going to pay a lot more than a 50-year-old house wife. A driver with DUI convictions may not get insurance at all. Like vehicles, you should be required to have a policy before you even applied for a gun permit. Every seller would have to follow this rule before making a transaction.

This is where we take social economics beyond theory. Actuaries would work to understand which buyers/guns are most at risk to commit a gun crime, or to be used in a gun crime. Gun owners/buyers would then be underwritten according to age, mental health and place of residence, credit/bankruptcy record and/or marital status, whatever causal criteria turn out to be the most relevant.

Insurance companies have mountains of data and know how to use it to price policies, or in industry parlance, to reduce the risk/loss ratio. Wasik continues:

Who pays the least for gun insurance would be least likely to commit a crime with it. An 80-year-old married woman in Fort Lauderdale would get a great rate. A 20-year-old in inner-city Chicago wouldn’t be able to afford it. A 32-year-old man with a record of drunk driving and domestic violence would have a similar problem.

Moreover, the market would over time, become very efficient at weighing these risks, since insurers specialize in figuring out the odds of something going wrong and charging the appropriate amount for the risk.

And there’s a good argument that the damage caused by firearms gives the government a “compelling interest” to require insurance, the basic test for infringing the constitutional rights of our 2nd Amendment lovers.

If it seems like requiring insurance might be too expensive, remember that the social cost is already expensive: We pay a huge cost for firearms injuries, says the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a part of NIH. According to their study, most injuries are paid for with public funds. Mandatory insurance would shift that cost from a public tax burden to a private insurance burden borne by gunowners. Quoting from the conclusion of the referenced study:

96 % of the patients in this report had their costs of care covered by the government, because they had no primary insurance coverage.

There could be a possibility of lower taxes down the road, if medical costs paid by the government come down; the taxes needed to pay those medical costs could come down too.

Given that gun violence kills more than 30,000 Americans annually, it is harmful not only to our well being, but our economy, so using economic disincentives to moderate their use makes sense.

If you think that the idea of mandatory insurance is onerous, think again:

You can’t finance a home mortgage without homeowner’s and title insurance. If you haven’t got title insurance and are interested in getting some advice about it, you could contact an insurer like Bay Title Company for example to see what help they could give you. Insurance is needed for just about anything. Want to own a car? Most states require liability insurance. You can’t employ someone in most states without worker’s compensation or unemployment insurance.

The advantages of mandatory gun insurance include the following:

  • Responsibility is placed on the gun owner: The law would require firearm owners to take responsibility for their firearms. Insurance separates responsible firearm owners from irresponsible ones
  • Control remains in the private sector: Private firms will vet the buyer for proper acquisition of firearms, not the Government
  • 2nd Amendment rights are protected: Anyone can purchase firearms as long as they can get insured
  • Promotes registering of existing weapons: Unregistered weapons will not be insured so the owners will not be able to buy ammo for those guns
  • Those who are injured: Will receive some recompense for their injury

What about the economic burden on gun owners?

If the insurance is required by the gun, the cost may prevent some people from buying them. A buyer in the middle class or higher could easily afford insurance on multiple weapons. If insurance was required for each gun registered, it might discourage multiple purchases by high risk owners. It may make people more responsible when they store their guns: Stolen guns had better be from a broken-into gun safe or your policy renewal will be a lot more expensive; the same would probably happen to your rates if little Billy finds a loaded gun in the desk drawer and shoots his friend with it.

It probably means that poorer people won’t be able to afford the insurance, so it probably will not dramatically affect gun violence (or coverage for same) in inner cities. We know that people take the chance of driving without insurance all the time and it’s a lot easier for someone to hide an uninsured gun than to drive an uninsured automobile.

But, will it work?

Insurers underwrite risk: casualty loss, liability, health, auto, home and life insurance. If you’re looking into life insurance you’ll want to make sure you research as much as possible or get expert advice so you know the policy you’re going with is the best suited one for you. For those of you in Canada, the most trusted comparison site is arguably PolicyMe.com so that might be the place to start. For American citizens, there are similar comparison sites that you could use. I always think these are the best way to view prices. One thing to remember is that Affordable Life USA offers great Mortage Life Insurance. Just make sure you do your research before accepting the first quote. With gun insurance, instead of charging the highest premiums for overweight smokers, alcoholics with bad driving records and dangerous hobbies, the most expensive gun policies will be priced for those who are younger with histories of mental illness, divorce, criminal records or severe financial difficulties. Or, the highest prices will be for the kinds of weapons that kill the most people the quickest: A shotgun owner who has hunted for years without incident would pay far less than a first-time owner purchasing a semi-automatic.

People would have a financial disincentive to purchase the most risky firearms. They would have a financial incentive to attend gun safety classes and use trigger locks. Using insurance to drive outcomes instead of attempting to enforce widespread bans and confiscation may result in much of the behavior we seek, without another festering, divisive issue draining our society.

Requiring insurance will simply add the already known social costs to the actual manufacturing costs of a weapon. If the social costs go higher, price of owning a weapon will be higher; if the social costs go down, so will insurance costs.

The market will decide what the fair price will be.

Insurance can be used to effectively price the risk and costs of social harm. This idea falls short of immediately getting rid of the most dangerous weapons and it will not prevent the next Newtown, but we have to start somewhere.

The Constitution was ratified in 1789. We are the Founders now. These are our problems and we must come up with our own solutions. The 2nd Amendment does not fit perfectly with current circumstances. Gun ownership has become a bigger problem than any of the problems it was meant to solve. The British are NOT coming; Indians no longer threaten your little fort.

Buy insurance for each gun, or turn the gun in.

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