Chicago Boyz – Page 2566 – Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.

Political Competition, Libertarians and Democrats

February 7, 2004 by Jonathan

(In response to my post below about election probabilities, Jay left some thoughtful comments about political competition. I was going to leave some comments of my own in response, but things got out of hand and I decided to turn my comments into the post which you are now reading.)

I am libertarian in most respects but have always thought that the Libertarian Party had an institutional screw loose on foreign and defense issues. For some unfathomable reason the admirable concept of “it’s wrong to initiate force” has been mistranslated into “we must not defend ourselves as a nation until enemy parachutists are landing on the White House lawn” (or whatever the post-9/11 equivalent of this notion is).

Misframing the Electoral Odds

February 6, 2004 by Jonathan

I agree with Bruce Bartlett about the election: Bush is likely to be reelected, and by a large margin, as long as the economy remains strong. I add the caveat that the odds could change if Bush makes a major blunder on the war and the Democrats present a serious alternative to his war policies, but this combination of events seems unlikely.

Speculations about which Democratic candidate is best on defense miss the bigger point, which is that none of the electorally competitive Democrats is good on defense. The press has to pretend that they are, because otherwise the race is over and there’s nothing to write about, but the rest of us can call a spade a spade.

(I agree that Bush is vulnerable in many areas — Saudi Arabia, not restraining government spending, not dealing seriously with intelligence failures, etc. But Clinton had at least as many political weaknesses in 1996. As long as economic growth continues to expand, a mediocre Democratic candidate is no more likely to defeat the incumbent now than a mediocre Republican candidate was then.)

A New Politics?

February 6, 2004 by Jay Manifold

Via InstaPundit, a typically excellent Fred Turner piece (2,800 words; reading time 7-14 minutes) that views American politics through, as it were, a polarizing filter rotated by 90° relative to the usual liberal/conservative one.
While this model is familiar to libertarians, it is not without its difficulties:

New SETI Technique

February 4, 2004 by Jay Manifold

Covington suggests (if that link doesn’t work, page down to Friday, January 30) that we look for alien intelligences by attempting to detect signatures of exotic experiments in physics. Given the problematic course of development of extraterrestrial civilizations, this is at least as good an idea as the more conventional approach. I hereby dub it the Covington Technique.
This reminds me of a proposal …

Photo

February 4, 2004 by Jonathan