Monthly Archives: November 2011

Interstate Concealed Carry

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HR 822, the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011, is wending its way through Congress this week, and as one might expect with a gun-law bill, there is some controversy attached.  Much of the discussion centers on whether this is this a 2nd Amendment or a 10th Amendment issue: which should hold sway.  I suggest that it’s not either/or; it’s both.

For completeness’ sake, these two Amendments are quoted below.

2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

These are short, sweet, to the point, and crystalline in their meaning.  Every American is authorized to possess (and so to use) firearms; the Federal government cannot interfere with that.  Every State has the sole authority to set the conditions under which this right can be exercised; the Federal government cannot interfere with that, either.  The NCRCA simply makes clear the lack of conflict between the two Amendments.

(Indeed, one could, based on the 2nd and 9th Amendments, call into question the Federal government’s Commerce Clause regulation of interstate trafficking of firearms, but that’s an argument for a different thread.)

Much of the argument against the bill centers on the premise that the NRCRA will trample on states’ rights as guaranteed by the 10th Amendment, potentially to the destruction of the Federalism principles of our country.  Each State should be able to set its own laws regarding gun possession and how they are to be moved about within the boundaries of that State—including guns brought in from other States.  Those arguing for the bill insist either that we need to cure the patchwork of gun control laws and have a single, national law, or that, as Congressman Charlie Bass (R, NH) puts it, “The fact is, we have a tradition in this country of upholding other states’ laws [and] allowing them to apply in other states.”

All of these arguments are bogus.  Congressman Trent Franks (R, AZ) draws a useful analogy: “It’s kind of like having a driver’s license.  There are some states that have stricter driving laws than others.”  Now certainly the analogy breaks down pretty quickly: no one has a Constitutional right to own cars, with its inherent right actually to use those cars, while all of us have a Constitutional right to own firearms, with its inherent right actually to use those firearms.  However, the analogy serves well as far as it goes.

Each State, does in fact, set its own conditions for obtaining a driver’s license, including the level of training that must occur, who is authorized to conduct that training, even the driving conditions under which that training occurs (compare, for instance a license obtained in Wyoming, with its level of urbanization and traffic density, with a license obtained in Rhode Island or New York City).  Every other State must honor that issuing State’s license.  Each driver, though, must honor the driving laws of the State in which he drives—he cannot carry his issuing State’s laws with him to another State.

So it is with the NRCRA.  Each State, under this bill, sets its own conditions for obtaining a concealed carry license, including the level of training that must occur, who is authorized to conduct the training, and the conditions under which that training occurs.  The NRCRA also is quite clear about the gun owner’s obligation when he’s carrying his firearm in another State.  The Congress’ summary of the bill says this (the text of the bill itself can be found here) [emphasis added]:

[The bill will] authorize a person who is carrying a government-issued photographic identification document and a valid permit to carry a concealed firearm in one state…to carry a concealed handgun…in another state in accordance with the restrictions of that state.

There is no Federalism threat here.  And just as it’s on the motorist to know the driving laws, or the boating laws, or the hunting laws, or the you-name-it laws of the State in which he’s doing those things, so it is the obligation of the gun owner to know the relevant laws of the State in which he’s carrying and using his firearm.

On the question of “curing” a patchwork of laws, this is a simple Sophistry.  We have a patchwork of State-level laws in nearly every milieu—this is, in fact, what Federalism is all about.  Looking to our driver’s license analogy, again, here is a prime example of a patchwork of laws.  The speed limits on the state highway systems and in the several residential zones, for instance, vary wildly.  Indeed, it’s necessary to consider whether a drive to cure such patchworks is, itself, the greater threat to our federal system of governance.

Finally, concerning the argument that there is a tradition of “allowing [one state’s laws] to apply in other states,” what’s “applied” are permitting and licensing laws, not laws governing their use.  Illinois “applies” my driver’s license, but it “applies” its own driving laws.  Indeed, many of the licensing requirements aren’t even set by the States, but by the relevant guilds: medicine and law, for instance.  It is only within these guild boundaries that the States then set their own licensing and operating conditions.  And so on.

This is a bill that clarifies the relationship between two Amendments; there is no conflict here.

Do Progressives Think Americans are Stupid?

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The Daily Caller describes a conversation one of their reporters had with Representative Jerrold Nadler (D, NY) concerning photo IDs for voters.  Nadler says, with a completely straight face, that requiring photo IDs prior to voting in an American election is a “deliberate plot by conservatives and Republicans to suppress votes.”

Let’s look at the Progressive reasoning he offers in support of this thesis.

He says

It doesn’t have to be photo ID.  You get Social Security with Social Security cards and, by the way, plenty of voter IDs—you have a photo ID issued by a state university as a student or as a teacher, and those—in a lot of states, those aren’t valid.

However, none of these require proof of citizenship, as Congressman Nadler knows.  Social Security is for anyone who works in the US and earns wages—explicitly including non-citizens.  Additionally, our higher education system welcomes citizens from other nations (for very good reason), and the universities’ photo IDs are for their internal purposes: access to university facilities.  Finally, these documents don’t require any sort of background check, for instance to see whether even a US citizen is eligible to vote in the particular election: is the person a resident of the jurisdiction in question, for instance, is the person not a felon, and so on.

He continues

And there’s no valid reason why those shouldn’t be valid for voting purposes….

Except for the above, unless there’s concern that Chicago-style ballot box stuffing might be reduced with a photo ID.

Congressman Nadler also says

People generally have voter IDs because they drive cars, but lots of people don’t drive cars….

But as Nadler knows full well, states are happy to issue photo IDs to people who don’t drive.  It takes about as much time as it does to get an actual driver’s license.

He does address this, though.

A lot of these states that are passing these laws are making it very difficult to get the underlying document so it will take you a lot of time; it will cost you a lot of money to get it.

What laws, exactly, in what states?  Certainly, it’s easy enough to toss off these accusations without substantiating them.  Furthermore, while there is some time expenditure required, that simply means an adult American citizen needs to plan ahead a little bit and get the documentation and then the photo ID in advance of the election.  Some years ago, I needed to get a copy of my birth certificate from California pursuant to getting my passport (another of those photo IDs that would be accepted at a polling place, and also one of those photo IDs that’s required to fly or to reenter our country after having traveled abroad—is Congressman Nadler suggesting the DHS is deliberately throwing roadblocks in the way of honest Americans wanting to come home?).  That copy would cost me $21 today (so much for “a lot of money”) and a couple of weeks.  It took six more weeks for State to issue my passport.  Perhaps Congressman Nadler would like to address that “lot of time” with State.

Congressman Nadler finishes with this:

We don’t have 5 million cases of voter fraud. You don’t have 50 cases of voter fraud in the country of the kind of voter fraud that an ID card might deal with.

Again, he offers no evidence that the small number he tosses out is an accurate one.  However, stipulating that the number of voter fraud cases is small, what might happen, anyway?  In 2004, a Washington Governor was elected by a 129-vote margin out of 2.6 million votes cast, and in 2008, a Minnesota Senator was elected by 312 votes out of 2.4 million votes cast.  And in 2000, some might remember that a state’s electoral votes were awarded on the basis of 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast.  It wouldn’t have taken much fraud at all to have swung those outcomes.  And accusations of such fraud were (and are) widespread.

Yet Congressman Nadler assures us that requiring photo IDs in order to vote is nothing less than a “deliberate plot by conservatives and Republicans to suppress votes.”

Hmm….

GPS, Privacy, and the Government, Revisited

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I wrote here on the subject; today I’d like to revisit it.  Gordon Crovitz wrote on the subject yesterday, and there are still some misconceptions that need to be addressed.

To recap, this question arises from the case of U.S. v. Antoine Jones that is currently before the US Supreme Court.  In this case, a man, Antoine Jones, was suspected of involvement in the drug trade, and as part of an investigation of Jones, the police obtained a warrant to place a GPS tracker on Jones’ car.  The proximate reason the case has come up is that the tracker wasn’t planted until after the warrant had expired, and when it was planted, it was done so outside the jurisdiction of the court that had issued the warrant.

The misconceptions, though, aren’t directly related to these facts; they center on the nature of individual privacy, the relationship between an individual and the government vis-à-vis that privacy, and the need for a warrant at all in this sort of case.

One misconception, surprisingly, is demonstrated by Justice Antonin Scalia, who is no slouch concerning the principle of limited government.  During oral arguments for this case, the following exchange occurred:

MR. LECKAR [STEPHEN C., ESQ, representing Jones]: …because what you have here is society does not expect that the police, the human element would be taken out of — would be taken out of the surveillance factor.

JUSTICE ALITO: You know, I don’t know what society expects and I think it’s changing. Technology is changing people’s expectations of privacy.

Suppose we look forward 10 years, and maybe 10 years from now 90 percent of the population will be using social networking sites and they will have on average 500 friends and they will have allowed their friends to monitor their location 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, through the use of their cell phones. Then — what would the expectation of privacy be then?

Justice Alito’s question is valid if put into a proper context, but he does not do that.  His question relates solely to a man’s personal business, his personal relationship with his neighbors and friends (in every sense of that term).  Alito needs also to ask this question in an additional context: what is, and what would, the expectation of privacy be with respect to the government?  This is a very different expectation.  While technology may* reduce the degree of privacy expected in the man’s personal life, it is utterly irrelevant to his expectation with respect to his government.  We still expect government snooping to be held under strict controls.

Justice Alito goes on:

You don’t even see it [the GPS tracker]. It’s just a little wafer, they put it under the car, it does nothing.

If the wafer does nothing, why have the police planted it?  The fact is, this little wafer does quite a lot, and it does so by invading a man’s privacy.

Justice Anthony Kennedy also misunderstands the situation:

…it seems to me what you’re saying is that the police have to use the most inefficient methods.

Not at all, as I said in the earlier post (in fairness to Kennedy, Leckar misses this point, also).  The police should use the most current technology, the most current training, available to them in the conduct of their investigations.  As they recognized in the present case (but let expire before acting), they just need to get a warrant before they conduct a search and/or seizure.  Perhaps with an app that gives them a Web presence with a judge, so less time is spent on getting the two together in the same room for the discussion and issuance.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor shows a different misconception, addressing Leckar’s response to a preceding Kennedy question about video surveillance.

What an unworkable rule tethered to no principle.  A thousand video cameras may or may not be OK, depending on how large the city is?

You bet.  Additionally, the principle is quite plain: every man has a reasonable expectation of, a right to be free from, the prying eyes of government, absent a legitimate reason for the prying—which legitimacy is demonstrated by convincing a judge to issue a warrant.  Furthermore, each person, each case, is unique: we’re not cookie cutter products, or clones.  Finally, the government’s convenience is never an excuse for abridging individual liberties.

In the end, however public a man’s life might be from the perspective of his neighbors and friends, it must remain private from the government’s perspective.  Get the warrant.  This is, by far, a lesser hardship on the government’s men than warrantless invasions of Americans’ individual liberties are on Americans.

*As I pointed out in that earlier post, the very great expectation of privacy still extant in our personal lives is demonstrated by the hue and cry extant over the various social media’s invasions of that privacy.

Keynesian Spending vs. Personal Spending

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In this post, I want to talk about two fundamentally different views of spending in an American economy.

One view of spending is Keynesian: any spending is stimulative, and so government’s (stimulative) spending helps a stagnant economy break out of its stagnation.  Further, only government has the resources to provide the size of spending stimulus needed to break a downward cycle.

Thus, if we have a Keynesian stimulus of, say, the $800 billion of an Obama Stimulus bill, or the similar-sized aggregated stimulus spending of a New Deal 80 years, or so, ago, we would expect to see a stagnating, if not sharply contracting, economy break out of its doldrums and return to solid growth.  Yet we did not, in either case.

I won’t get into things like the fact that current government stimulus spending represents future taxes, or government stimulus spending represents a wealth transfer from productive sources to unproductive targets (in the laudable, but unsatisfied, hope that the recipients will become productive), or that government stimulus spending is aimed at a temporary response, while the costs of that spending—those taxes, and debt incurred—are long-term.  The reason government stimulus spending isn’t all that stimulative is that a tax dollar collected from an individual isn’t completely spent in the first place.  Some of that dollar is retained by the government for its own purposes, and some of that dollar is simply lost to intra-government friction.  Less than a dollar makes it out the door as actual spending.

The other view of spending is that personal spending is stimulative, and that were individuals in their aggregate to spend (or resume spending), a stagnating economy would break out of that stagnation.  Associated with this view is the commonly held belief that individual saving, by not being spending, does not contribute to breaking out of that stagnation.

When an individual spends a dollar, though, that whole dollar makes it out the door.  Of course, when the individual also saves that whole dollar is saved.  None of an individual’s dollar, while it’s in his hands, is lost to intra-individual purposes or to friction.

What happens to that individual’s dollar when he spends it, or to the government’s six bits that finally get into the economy as spending?  From here, they follow pretty much the same path: an initial food purchase is made at the local grocery store, some is spent on rent or mortgage, some is spent on the car, and so on.  Each of those recipients then spend some of their parts of that original dollar: on wages, on rent, on supplies, and so on.  All along the way, each individual or business recipient also siphons off a small amount as savings.  Each of those recipients, including the wage earners, repeat this general cycle until finally that original dollar has been consumed.  In general, the original dollar that an individual spends, in all of its spending incarnations through all those recipients’ subsequent spending, turns out to be worth around $1.75 to the local economy.  That government’s six bits, following the same path, though, can only amount to a little over $1.30 for the local economy at that same turnover rate.

Consider the money that’s saved instead of spent, now.  How non-stimulative is that money, really?  In the immediate term of a dollar actually spent, it’s not stimulative.  But it is stimulative in the not too distant future: that dollar saved either is held under the individual’s mattress against a future spending need, or more likely, it’s deposited in a bank or other financial institution.  Once that dollar makes it into the bank, it becomes part of a collection of lots of individuals’ dollars, and that collection is loaned to a number of individuals and businesses—for spending.  Saved money, thus, represents not too very delayed stimulus spending by others who have borrowed the money for the purpose.

But in the end, who is really doing the spending?  Either way, whether government or individual spending, it’s the individual individual’s money that is spent, and so it’s the individual who’s doing the spending.  A critical difference is in the pathway described above that is followed by the individual’s dollar, and this difference determines how much of that dollar actually gets spent and so the final value of that spending.

A dollar taken from an individual in taxes is therefore an expensive dollar.  It represents a loss of a dollar of private saving for future spending or for future private lending for spending, or it represents a loss of $1.75 to the taxed individual’s local economy that would have resulted from his spending that dollar himself.  If that tax dollar—or the roughly three quarters of it suggested above—comes back to that same local economy, it’s only worth $1.30, a reduction in value of 45¢.

Since government spending can only come at the expense of taxing the individual, it cannot be as stimulative as the aggregation of individual spending, even when some of that individual spending is delayed through saving mechanisms, and even if that government spending comes during an economic contraction.

What is the President’s Jobs Agenda?

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What, exactly, is the President’s jobs agenda, now that he’s begun campaigning on one, a year ahead of the next election and three years into his administration—three years in which unemployment has been as high as 10% and has stagnated at 9% for the last two years?  Three years in which he has pushed through his Obamacare health care legislation and his Dodd-Frank Wall Street legislation.  Three years in which he has shaken his finger very firmly at America’s enemies as he has presided over our retreat from the world stage.

Let’s review the bidding.  His opening move, at the end of summer, was a $440 billion bill in which he collected parts of Stimulus I, with its spending imperative, added a push for higher taxes for his class warfare reelection campaign theme, and titled the collection “The American Jobs Act.”  What were the jobs?  There weren’t any, directly.  Much of that spending, though, was aimed at transfers of national taxpayer monies to state and local public service unions—teachers, police, and fire fighter unions—to retain their support in Obama’s campaign.

When that failed, his next move was to pull his jobs bill’s spend and tax legislation apart and push the spending piece parts—always paid for with higher taxes, rather than spending cuts elsewhere—separately.  He did this against the backdrop of his campaign for reelection.

In parallel with that, he’s been having his EPA write “clean” air rules that are Draconian in their effect on, for instance, coal-fired electricity generating power plants.  As Josiah Neely, an Analyst with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, points out, these rules threaten existing and future jobs in return for highly doubtful favorable effects on air quality.  The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, reports Neely, says that enforcing the Cross-State and related rules could result in power plant closures to the extent that 183,000 jobs could be lost every year until 2020.  Our president is unconcerned about this, however.  In 2008, Candidate Obama bragged that under his proposals “if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can—it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

Just last week, Obama has decided to punt on the Keystone XL pipeline, a project proposed—in 2008—to build a pipeline to carry oil from Canadian tar sands to refineries in Texas and along the Gulf coast.  He said that, after these three years of review, he wants yet more, “to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood.”  This delay will cost 20,000 construction jobs and potentially 100,000+ downstream, more permanent jobs in the US.

Finally, we have this announcement from the Stryker Corporation, a firm that makes implants and instruments for orthopedics and neurosurgery.  Stryker is reacting to Obamacare taxes that are soon to take effect, and their press release, presented 10 November, says in part [emphasis added]:

Stryker Corporation announced its intention to implement focused workforce reductions of approximately 5% of its global workforce and other restructuring activities….  The targeted reductions and other restructuring activities are being initiated to provide efficiencies and realign resources in advance of the new Medical Device Excise Tax scheduled to begin in 2013….

Obama’s Medical Excise Tax is an Obamacare tax that applies to revenues, as opposed to profits, and it is driving companies that want to do development work in this area to reduce effort in this area and to reduce associated employment.  Other companies will likely outsource jobs to overseas jurisdictions that don’t have such counterproductive employment policies.  (As an aside, it needs to be noted that Stryker’s implants now will be harder, and more expensive, for our wounded veterans to obtain.)

Finally, Obama’s do-nothing Democrat Senate is sitting on 15 jobs bills that would have a real impact on our unemployment and our unemployment rate.

What is Obama’s jobs agenda, then?  He doesn’t have one.  He’s still working on his tax and spend agenda, and pushing class warfare to get more of it imposed.