Blocking Hagel sets a bad precedent & lets Obama label the GOP obstructionist. And what happens when the Rs take back the White House?[More on the Hagel non-filibuster here]
Blocking Hagel sets a bad precedent & lets Obama label the GOP obstructionist. And what happens when the Rs take back the White House?[More on the Hagel non-filibuster here]
Feb 16 2013
President Obama has proposed an increase in the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $9.00 an hour. This is after the George W. Bush increase, between 2007 and 2009, from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour. That would make it a 75-percent increase over 6 years. This is at a time when inflation has bee...
Feb 15 2013
I'm speaking at Students for Liberty's 2013 conference tomorrow and Sunday. My topics: public choice, voter irrationality, and The Case Against Education. I'll also be debating the Center for Immigration Studies' Jan Ting on (a) immigration, and (b) military intervention. The debate will filmed and ev...
Feb 15 2013
The Wall Street Journal's Mary Kissel tweets: Blocking Hagel sets a bad precedent & lets Obama label the GOP obstructionist. And what happens when the Rs take back the White House?[More on the Hagel non-filibuster here]Do precedents matter? Does my behavior today shape the future actions of others? Sure,...
READER COMMENTS
Ted Levy
Feb 15 2013 at 2:50pm
“I’m no great believer in free will–the neuroscientific evidence for it isn’t great–”
That is to say, you’ve evaluated the evidence against free will, you’ve considered the pros and cons, you’ve assessed whether there is sufficient or insufficient reason to believe it, and you’ve made your choice…and this should be dispositive, since had the evidence been more in free will’s favor you would have made a different choice.
Aaron Zierman
Feb 15 2013 at 3:52pm
What is not being taken into account here is the economics of precedent. There are undeniable long term effects when a new precedent is set. In the Hagel scenario, will a filibuster make it easier for cabinet appointments to be filibustered in the future? Most likely. The simple fact is that once something has been done, it can easily become the standard.
Bostonian
Feb 15 2013 at 4:02pm
“I’d still have to wonder whether individual acts of choice can drive long-term outcomes.”
John Roberts could have thrown out Obamacare, but he chose not to. One man can make a huge difference.
Curt
Feb 15 2013 at 5:15pm
I agree with the point that the internet is a powerful force which greatly influences political decisions.
I also agree with the notion that precedents are important.
In this situation it’s not so much a matter of individuals making decisions to be ‘mean’ or ‘kind’ but rather a group political decision, driven by a bunch of factors.
Laura
Feb 15 2013 at 5:19pm
While what is happening in the Senate looks like a filibuster, it isn’t actually one.
There is genuine debate and ongoing investigation here. So this isn’t purely a blocking move. Rand Paul and others genuinely believe they will sway the body.
Cloture is a vote of judgement by the Senate as to whether the discussion going on is real or just a blocking maneuver. If it is a blocking maneuver it is a filibuster. This is why cloture requires positive action rather requiring those who want more time to take positive action. They may be few, and cloture is an attempt to roll them by force. That’s why it takes sixty votes.
Now, whether the senate votes to end debate or not is not enough to tell you whether there was genuine debate in progress or if the hold was purely a blocking move. This is because the two parties insist on discipline from their members on procedural questions.
Arthur_500
Feb 15 2013 at 6:22pm
Influences may be strong but we allegedly elect political leaders. Leadership needs to balance their influences and continue to lead.
In my State we had a republican congressman who was lambasted at home for not signing on to Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. He responded very publicly stating that the Contract was not good for our State and no one should ever dare say he was not a good republican.
Partisian politics are not the issue here. My point is that here was a true leader who stood up to the influences and made a call he could stand by. Many came to respect him for that regardless of their political persuasion.
The truth is that we have precious few leaders in elected office. Most of them are like tumbleweeds blowing in the wind – no roots, no direction.
David R. Henderson
Feb 15 2013 at 6:34pm
@Garett Jones,
I’m no great believer in free will
And you’re blogging because?
Greg G
Feb 15 2013 at 7:05pm
“And you’re blogging because?”
In a deterministic world he’s blogging because that was his fate. You really can’t ask a believer in determinism to show good faith by performing an act of free will.
Whether or not we live in a world with free will or determinism there is no debate about the fact that we live in a world where people often behave in ways that are inconsistent with their beliefs.
MingoV
Feb 15 2013 at 7:21pm
Ms. Kissel ignores the Constitution and its “advice and consent” Appointments Clause. Apparently, Ms. Kissel believes that supporting Obama’s (poor) choice is more important than persuading Obama to choose a Secretary of Defense who is, at a minimum, neutral towards Israel.
The free will/free choice issue is not relevant in this situation. Presidents never had free will in regard to major appointments. If Obama didn’t want such constitutional limitations (that he twice swore to uphold), then he should not have run for president. It’s like someone volunteering for the Army and complaining because he doesn’t have the freedom to bring his girlfriend into the barracks.
joshua
Feb 15 2013 at 9:02pm
Of course filibusters can set precedents – they already have! Didn’t D’s filibuster some assorted Bush nominees? Or are the specific circumstances different enough that pundits can claim this filibuster is not a reaction to those ones but future filibusters would be a reaction to this one?
philemon
Feb 15 2013 at 9:52pm
I’m no great believer in free will–the neuroscientific evidence for it isn’t great–but even if I were, I’d still have to wonder whether individual acts of choice can drive long-term outcomes. In competitive markets and perhaps in politics, the answer is no.
1. Even in a deterministic universe, previous actions are causally connected with and thus drive later outcomes. Whether the will is ‘free’ in a way that requires a non-deterministic universe, or is a separate issue. The same for the neuroscientific case against free will–surely you not saying that according to neuroscience, an agent’s action at t1 is not causally connected with the outcome of that action at t2?
2. If the question is whether a singular individual act at t1 can drive some long term outcome at t2, then answer is obviously–very often not. And this is the same whether the universe is deterministic or not, whether free will exists or not. Commonsense tells us that, often enough, an individual’s action won’t make a difference. (Think of the usual reason against bothering to vote.)
3. If the question is whether individual acts at t1 can drive some long term outcome at t2, then, the answer is: Sure, why not? One supplier cutting her prices will not make a difference to the market as a whole. But one scenario in which there is a shift in the market as a whole just is the situation in which some critical mass of suppliers each (individually) adjusting their prices–for whatever reason, free will or not.
Patrick R. Sullivan
Feb 16 2013 at 12:12pm
Isn’t this just a classic Re-iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma? According to Axelrod, the best strategy is Tit for Tat.
Adam
Feb 16 2013 at 7:48pm
Assuming free will does not exist, the idea of free will still has significant bearing on social outcomes. For example, imagine a society in which everybody is taught from birth that freewill does not exist. Also imagine that everyone believes this. All members of this society would view their actions has having no bearing on outcomes, so the incentive to act would be completely eliminated. Action may still occur due to physiological reflex, but never due to a conscious will to alleviate uneasiness. The productivity of this society would fall to never before seen lows. We have already seen a natural experiment of this kind in the form of North and South Korea. In the former,citizens’ incentive to act is very low because, free will or not, they can’t change outcomes. The conclusion is that even if people respond on a subconscious level prior to conscious action, we should be very careful in ridding ourselves of the idea of free will, or the ability to affect outcomes.
Richard
Feb 17 2013 at 10:03pm
I don’t understand Henderson’s point. What does free will have to do with whether someone is blogging? People would blog in a deterministic universe, I suppose.
Tracy W
Feb 18 2013 at 7:00am
Do you think the actions of elite politicians are driven by forces as strong, as deterministic, as in a competitive market?
No. Most noticeably, in a competitive market, you can always turn around and buy from another provider. In a democracy, you get a choice once every few years, and typically only an effective choice between 2 or 3 people, as in there’s no chance that the others will get enough votes to win. That’s not a competitive market.
I keep finding myself contemplating the counter-factual, if George Washington had been a power-hungry type, rather than someone who stood down after 2 presidencies, could the USA have become a dictatorship? There’s no way of definitively answering that one but plenty of countries with written democratic constitutions have become dictatorships, while the UK and NZ without written constitutions have stayed democracies. That does imply path-dependency effects.
Comments are closed.