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David Postman quotes Rep. Christopher Hurst (D-Enumclaw), who is thinking about challenging Darcy Burner for the Democratic nomination for the 8th district:

“The reality is there’s no ownership [of the 8th district nomination]. The bottom line is what’s best for the citizens of the district. You can’t say that because someone ran before that’s owed to them. Maybe some of the real hardcore party faithful say that. But I’m sorry, I don’t buy that.

“The bottom line is if you couldn’t win in 2006 you really got to sit down and do some soul searching and do a very careful, realistic analysis. That’s what it’s all about. Nobody owns this.”

Does Darcy “own” the 8th District nomination? Of course not. If Rep. Hurst wants it, he had better go and get it, because Darcy Burner is doing all of the hard work winning candidates do. The ’06 cycle saw all sorts of party annointed candidates run hard and lose, while no-name types scored big upsets. Darcy came very, very close in a district that has never elected a Democrat, a district that heavily favors the GOP in PCOs.

What I’ve heard about Hurst makes me like him (retired cop with lots of family members in the military), but he’s going to have to earn the nomination, just like Darcy did. How? By doing the work. So, yeah, we can all talk about how Darcy hasn’t sewn it up, but talking is the least helpful thing a candidate can be doing right now.

Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for another exciting evening of politics under the influence. Yeah…some call us the the “liberal elite,” but we’re all on equal punditry grounds after a couple of pints. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Drinking Liberally’s Seattle hosts are Nick Beaudrot of Electoral Math and HorsesAss contributer TheHim (also at Blog Reload and EFFin’ Unsound).

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area, check out their Drinking Liberally; Jimmy will have the details.

The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 210 chapters in 44 states (plus DC). And if you don’t find a chapter near you…start one!

Washington State Democratic Party Chair Dwight Pelz has sent a letter to King County Council members, urging them to approve Executive Ron Sims proposal to purchase additional ballot tabulating machines, and in it he makes an important point about the integrity of elections in King County and throughout the state:

In 2004 ballots were tabulated by the existing Diebold-based system. Subsequently there was a machine recount, followed by a manual hand re-count – the ultimate possible audit. In each case the accuracy of the present Diebold – based system was confirmed. While the vote did change between the original tally and the machine recount and the hand re-count, changes in the vote totals were always attributed to ballots added or subtracted to the mix, such as the “voter intent” ballots ruled on by the Canvassing Board. In fact, the current system has experienced numerous recounts over the years, with no identified failures by the hardware or the software.

I wouldn’t trust Diebold touch-screen voting machines as far as I could spit, but even the most paranoid election watchdogs must admit that our statewide hand recount was indeed “the ultimate possible audit” of the paper ballot tabulating machines. And the audit found that there was absolutely, positively no tabulating fraud.

Read the full text of Pelz’s letter here. (And check out my nifty new plug-in.)

Seattle Times Staff:

Man fatally shot in Belltown

A 35-year-old man was shot and killed in Belltown Friday night during an argument.

The man was walking with a woman on the sidewalk along Pine Street near 2nd Avenue about 10:45 p.m. when a man standing near a parked car made a comment to the woman that started an argument among the three, said Seattle police Capt. Richard Belshay.

The there’s this from columnist Robert L. Jamieson, Jr:

Take a look at story behind Belltown gun slaying

LET’S GO TO the scene of the crime.

It’s Friday night, just after 10:45. Yellow police tape ribbons a block of Pine Street at Second and Third.

That’s weird. As a Belltown resident, I’ve never thought of Pine Street as being part of my neighborhood. Pine Street is downtown. So I visited www.Belltown.org to clarify this minor border discrepancy. Here’s their quote:

Belltown is the northern neighborhood of downtown Seattle bounded by Denny Way to the north, Elliott Avenue to the west, Sixth Avenue to the east, and Virginia Street to the south (historically and decades ago, the southern border was Stewart Street).

See! I told you so! Virginia Street to the south! Hahahaha!!!

If you want some visual proof, check out my Google map here. (Is there a way to imbed a Google map in a blog post? Help me out, computer nerds.) It may seem stupid to argue over a few blocks difference. Quite the contrary: borders are a big, big deal, be it Kashmir, Ireland, or the American Southwest.

That said, I say to you, Times and P-I:

I got my eye on you and your shoddy map reading skills.

The I guess I’m still around edition. As long as there’s bullshit and Goldy lets me keep a set of keys, I guess I’ll do this on a weekly basis.

Locally, Representative Bill Hinkle hates children. Or at least thinks that children of non-citizens don’t deserve education and health care.

Gary Randal gives us a review of a show by the Seattle Men’s Chorus that he hasn’t seen.

Consumers Against Higher Insurance Rates is an Astroturf organization and they are sponsoring a bullshit referendum to repeal recently passed consumer protection.

Nationally, it’s been mentioned here on HA, but the biggest bullshit artist of them all, Dick Cheney, is not a member of the executive any more. Oddly during the energy task force, he had said that he could claim executive privilege.

James Inhofe has a bit of a truth problem. He overheard a conversation the other day that happened 3 years ago. And the people who supposedly took part in the conversation don’t recall it. And shockingly, he’s the less crazy of the two Oklahoma Senators this week.

And internationally, China has surpassed the United States in total carbon emissions. This is mainly because they have 4 times our population and because much of the West has exported manufacturing to them. A normal person would see this as a reason to make sure that our trade agreements have strong environmental components. Crazy people see this as a time to gloat.

Just another reminder to those who forgot, that the race to succeed the late Norm Maleng as King County Prosecutor is a partisan race, and that Republican Dan Satterberg is not Norm Maleng.

Dan Satterberg, the acting King County prosecuting attorney, has promised to keep his office out of politics by explicitly barring his 250-lawyer staff from contributing money or endorsements to his election campaign.

But that, in his lawyerly interpretation, doesn’t prevent one of his top deputies from aggressively seeking political endorsements for Satterberg from a long list of the county’s most prominent lawyers and law firms. They include many who do work — some in the millions of dollars — for the prosecutor’s office.

Satterberg said Friday that there is nothing inconsistent between his admonition to his staff “to remain above politics” and the effort of Sally Bagshaw, chief of the prosecutor’s civil division, to ask members of numerous law firms not only to endorse the interim prosecutor but to encourage friends and lawyers in their firms to do likewise.

Nothing inconsistent. I guess that depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

Here is what Bagshaw wrote to about 100 attorneys at the region’s top law firms, some of which get millions of dollars of business directly from the division she runs:

Judy Maleng and I are supporting Dan Satterberg for King County Prosecuting Attorney. […] Our goal is to get the top lawyers in King County to endorse Dan early, and I would like to place 1000 lawyers’ names onto the website this week. I have two requests: may I add your name to our growing list of supporters, and will you help me garner endorsement support from others in your law firm? We’d like to get as many people from within your firm as well as your lawyer friends outside the office to add their name to our list. I appreciate your taking the lead on this.

And here is what Satterberg wrote to his staff in announcing his candidacy:

I will be proud to continue the policy that Norm established to not permit members of the office to either contribute money or a personal endorsement to my campaign. There are strong historical reasons for this prohibition; it is best for the office for employees to remain above politics.

Apparently, Bagshaw can “remain above politics” while asking attorneys who do business with her to “help me garner endorsement support from others in your law firm.” Apparently, “supporting” and “endorsing” are not the same thing.

A lawyerly interpretation indeed.

Imagine if President Bush had pledged that his administration would remain above politics in 2004, only to have Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld send out an email soliciting support from the nation’s top defense contractors. This is kinda like that.

Nobody is suggesting that Bagshaw’s email violates the law or any ethical code, or that such political solicitations are even unusual. It’s just that Bagshaw’s political efforts, and Satterberg’s lawyerly defense of them, clearly don’t meet his pledge to keep his office above politics.

And while nobody is suggesting a quid pro quo, firms that received over $7.2 million in contract work from Bagshaw and the PAO, certainly know on which side their bread is buttered. As do the junior attorneys. Don’t kid yourself that a lawyer doesn’t know what’s expected of him when his boss asks him to endorse a candidate. It’s not just endorsements that this email is intended to generate, but tens of thousands of dollars in contributions.

And this isn’t just speculation. Democratic hopeful Bill Sherman said that he has been contacted by attorneys at firms all over town, complaining about the pressure they were receiving.

“It made them uncomfortable because of business their firms do with the county,” Sherman said. “They were telling me they feel like they were put in an awkward position by an important client.”

Satterberg can’t have it both ways. He can’t claim to keep his office above politics at the same time he grants approval to a top aide to use the prestige of the office to garner endorsements and contributions. The fact is, this is a political campaign, and Satterberg and his supporters are doing what it takes to win. And regardless of Satterberg’s best intentions, we should never forget that this is also a political office.

If Satterberg is going to run on Maleng’s legacy, it is only fair that he be judged on his actions as well as his words. And while Maleng surely earned the admiration and respect with which he has been memorialized, it is also important to remember that he was a political animal himself. Maleng had unfulfilled aspirations for higher office, and as much as he tried to keep politics out of the PAO, he used his position and prominence to raise money and garner support for his fellow Republicans. No doubt Satterberg would do the same.

By all accounts, Bill Sherman and Dan Satterberg are both professionally qualified, in their own ways, to administer the prosecutor’s office. But to insist that somehow a Satterberg administration would in some way be less political, is just plain silly.

The Supreme Court just saved Jesus from peer pressure to try drugs. Today the Court ruled 5 to 4 against a student displaying a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner at an off-grounds school event.

I suppose we can call this the “free-expression hits 4 Jesus” case.

The school principal thought the banner promoted drug use and, as a consequence, she confiscated the banner and suspended the student. The student, Joseph Frederick, simply thought the slogan was funny—and that it would attract the attention of TV crews covering the journey of the Olympic torch.

The majority opinion (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito) held that:

[t]he First Amendment does not require schools to tolerate at school events student expression that contributes to those dangers.

“Danger” refers to the harm of illegal drug use—in this case, the harm of drug use by a vulnerable Jesus.

This goes to show that conservatives really are humor impaired. Further studies will be needed to determine if this humor impairment syndrome (HIS) has some genetic underpinnings, is caused by environmental toxins, or whether it reflects a deficient childhood nutritional environment—you know, like being nursed by hyenas to avoid exposing the child to its mother’s breasts. I’m betting on the hyena scenario.

Justices Stevens’ dissenting opinion held that:

…the school’s anti-drug policy “cannot justify disciplining Frederick for his attempt to make an ambiguous statement to a television audience simply because it contained an oblique reference to drugs.”

The majority, apparently, equates promoting drug use for Jesus—a man who was executed in the First World War on Terror some 2,000 years ago, isn’t a citizen of the U.S., would take bong hits in the privacy of his own kingdom which, in any case, is outside the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.—might have the pernicious effect of inducing HIS-afflicted conservative students to take up drug use. (In other words, Jesus is just a gateway target.)

The same reasoning might prohibit “Bong Hits 4 Hitler,” since it could still provide pernicious inspiration for some HIS-positive conservatives.

Perhaps a safer slogan is “Bong Hits 4 Brontosaurus?” Oh…wait…among science-impaired HIS-positive conservatives, this is tantamount to promoting drug experimentation with family pets.

David Brewster writes about transit, and in typical Brewster fashion, he backs into his argument like a garbage truck underneath your window.

The case for transit is not an easy one to make for the voters. Costs are very high, and only a few of the voters live near enough to the lines to get much direct benefit. The trickle-down case is difficult to make, especially since expensive transit systems usually force cutbacks in bus service to pay for the rails. So it’s not surprising that the case is invariably oversold. One of the worst ways it is oversold is to urge people to imagine that these first baby steps, or “starter lines,” will someday grow into a full system, as in larger, older cities.

And think, Brewster is for light rail. While the essay is mostly Brewster ceding ground to the enemy, do read the accompanying piece by Richard Morrill. After reading both pieces, I’m convinced one thing is true: Brewster and Morrill don’t ride the bus often.

Which, it can be said, is a big problem with public transit in Seattle. It has been designed by people who never ride it. Whenever I hear some douchebag on the radio talk about how we should just “put more money into buses” instead of rail, I want to fucking puke.

Buses are slow, slow, slooooooooow. The don’t appeal to new riders in the way rail does. Buses cannot handle large crowds, people with wheelchairs, or tourists asking the driver, “where’d Tom Hanks have lunch?” Whenever something bad happens on a Metro bus, the whole operation grinds to a halt. A fucking halt.

Recently, an attractive brunette got on the bus with her friends. One of her pals asked the brunette, “why don’t you ride the bus more often?” The brunette answered, “because the last time I rode the bus, some guy pooped on the seat.”

So, “the case for rail transit is hard to make”? Whatever. It isn’t for everyday bus riders like me!

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO:

7PM: Has King County Elections gone to the dogs?
This week we learned that a woman registered her dog to vote. I’ll explain why this is an example of an elections system that works.

8PM: Does liberal talk radio work?
The Center for American Progress this week released a report, “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio,” that finds that 91-percent of weekday talk radio programming is conservative. Imagine that. Um… why?

9PM: Faith-based capitalism
Fellow HA blogger Lee joins me for the hour to level his critique on “faith-based capitalism.”

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

It’s hard to be a loyal Republican these days.

When Vice President Dick Cheney refused to comply with an executive order regarding classification and declassification of government materials — asserting that his office “does not consider itself an entity within the executive branch” — even arch-conservative Instapundit criticized the argument as “politically idiotic and legally self-defeating.”

The Vice President really isn’t an Executive official, and isn’t part of the President’s administration the way that other officials are — for one thing, the VP can’t be fired by the President: As an independently elected officeholder, he can be removed only by Congress, via impeachment. (In various separation of powers cases, the Supreme Court has placed a lot of weight on this who-can-fire-you test).

[…] But here’s the thing: Whatever executive power a VP exercises is exercised because it’s delegated by the President, not because the VP has it already. So to the extent the President delegates actual power (as opposed to just taking recommendations for action) the VP is exercising executive authority delegated by the President, but unlike everyone else who does so he/she isn’t subject to removal from office by the President (though the President could always withdraw the delegation, of course). However — and here’s where the claim that Cheney is really a legislative official creates problems for the White House — it seems pretty clear that the President isn’t allowed to delegate executive power to a legislative official, as that would be a separation of powers violation. So to the extent that this is what’s going on, the “Cheney is a legislative official” argument is one that opens a big can of worms.

It certainly does. And Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) is striking back with the inevitable retort, introducing an appropriations amendment that would eliminate funding for Cheney’s office.

“The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. […] However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice President should be consistent. This amendment will ensure that the Vice President’s funding is consistent with his legal arguments.”

While it is fun to ridicule Cheney for his “man-size” safe, his disappearing emails, and his penchant for spying on White House staffers — Fox News commentator Juan Williams described the VP’s machinations as “a game in order to keep Dick Cheney in, I guess, some sort of secured undisclosed bunker of his mind” — these latest revelations are also somewhat frightening. That Cheney would even attempt to argue that his office is legally exempt from both executive orders and congressional oversight is an offense to the Constitution, and a shocking example of just how fragile our democracy can be in the hands of man who does not respect our democratic institutions.

Apparently, when HA moved servers Friday night, the old server was never shut down. Thus, as the new IP propagated through the various DNS servers over the next day, some of you continued to see the old site, while others (like me) were taken to the new site. Some of you may have seen comments, and at least one post, disappear. To which I say: oops.

Everything should be operating normally now. (Normal, by HA standards, anyway.) If not, let me know.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO:

7PM: The Stranger Hour with Erica C. Barnett
The Stranger’s Erica C. Barnett joins me for a recap of the week’s local news, and a preview of what’s coming up in the week ahead. (That’s right, ECB can predict the future!) Josh Feit may also join us to give Postman his take on why reporting matters.

8PM: How did Cary carry the day?
When Cary Moon of the People’s Waterfront Coalition first proposed replacing the aging Alaska Way Viaduct with a surface boulevard, the powers that be said she was crazy. Three years later, the “surface plus transit” option is emerging as the consensus solution. Cary joins us for the hour to talk transportation and urban planning, and to explain how she moved her idea from crazy to consensus. It’s a textbook lesson in effective activism.

9PM: Who is Freewayblogger?
Over the past four years Freewayblogger has put over 4,000 anti-war signs along the roads of California and other western states. His travels bring him to Seattle this weekend, and he joins me in the studio to talk about his unusual odyssey. We’ll also be joined by HA co-blogger and Hominid Views proprietor Darryl. But I’m not sure we’ll let him speak.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

By now I’m sure most of you have heard the story King County resident Jane Balogh, who thought she was being clever by registering her dog to vote. It was supposed to be a protest against supposedly lax voter registration standards. It’s likely going to get her a misdemeanor conviction.

Our good friend Stefan, normally a fierce proponent of throwing the book at anybody who misses a statutorily required comma on a voter registration form, excuses Balogh’s stunt as “a noble act of civil disobedience to call attention to ineffectual voter registration standards that allow real fraud to occur.”

If it weren’t for the paw print stunt, which she used to deliberately give herself away, she could have gotten away with casting the dog’s ballot.

But she didn’t. In fact, she was caught.

It’s impossible to know how many ballots from non-existent people are cast and counted…

Just like it is impossible to know when Stefan stopped beating his wife.

… but we do know there have been hundreds of illegal votes that were counted for which nobody was ever prosecuted.

Of course, by “hundreds of illegal votes,” Stefan is referring to the infamous felon voters from 2004. They weren’t prosecuted because they didn’t know they were violating the law; they properly filled out registration forms, which elections officials improperly approved, due to incomplete records. (A problem by the way, that has since been largely fixed by the statewide voter registration database, that was well in the works before the notorious 2004 election.)

So what we have here is a woman who fraudulently registered her dog, and was caught, the failure to disprove something that we have no evidence exists, and a problem that has already been solved. And for this, Stefan advocates an overhaul of voting and voter registration systems to make it much more difficult for citizens to cast ballots.

I’m not sure exactly what motivates Stefan. Lingering resentment over Dino Rossi’s incredibly disappointing (for Stefan and Dino) and narrow loss in 2004? A genuine belief that it is better to suppress a thousand legitimate votes to stop a single case of fraud? A cynical program to suppress the vote in order to benefit Republicans?

It doesn’t matter. The fact is, what Stefan and his cohorts continually fail to do is prove that there is a significant incidence of voter fraud in King County or elsewhere in the state. Yes, there is the occasional double voter, or spouse voting the ballot of a recently deceased partner (problems, by the way, also largely fixed by the statewide database) — eight such perpetrators were convicted in King County in 2005. But there is no evidence at all of widespread, endemic or chronic voter fraud.

It’s a clever rhetorical device. Stefan warns that Balogh “could have gotten away” with voter fraud, even though she didn’t. Stefan opines that “it’s impossible to know how many ballots from non-existent people are cast and counted,” while providing no evidence that any such ballots have been cast or counted at all. He constantly uses voter registration irregularities and isolated cases of prosecuted fraud to suggest the possibility that voter fraud is widespread and rampant. But all the real evidence suggests that it is not.

Stefan, the EFF and other right-wing operatives are desperate to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. The question I have is: “Why?”

HA will be down for a few hours tonight as it migrates to an upgraded server. I’m told everything will be back to normal by Saturday morning.

In the comments of my last post, commenter Russell Garrard wrote the following:

The Bush-haters will tell us that the supreme head of our government and his minions are supremely sinister and fiendish liars (albeit also moronic bumpkins). Then they turn around and tell us that only government can be trusted to vet what we put in our mouths and bodies. I don’t get it….

The larger argument that Russell is making (and we continued the back and forth in the comments over it) is that the government shouldn’t be trusted to do anything because free market forces will invariably do it better. I’m amazed at how often I hear this considering how much evidence there is that it’s not true in a number of circumstances (see: Larry Kudlow looking ridiculous on his own show when defending free market health care against Ezra Klein). The logic behind it is that companies will be so afraid of the financial ramifications of doing things against the public interest (secretly having bad things in their products or implementing cruel labor practices) that it’s pointless to have any kind of oversight by the government. This ignores a massive amount of history and common sense. Companies pursue profits and there have been many situations where that pursuit of profit has run counter to the general welfare of the citizens.

One of the more common ways in which this has happened is when it comes to addictive substances. From the tonics of the 19th century that secretly contained morphine to the cigarette industry of the 20th, companies have often put their pursuit of profit before the public good. These industries weren’t reformed because the corporations stopped seeing the profit potential of their actions, they were reformed because the government established rules (in the case of morphine, laws were created in the late 1800s that forced manufacturers to identify the ingredients of their tonics, causing many of them to immediately go out of business rather than admit their product contained morphine). Not all of the rules that our government has made over the years are perfect – in fact, some have been terrible – but a society is strongest when it allows for free enterprise, but also ensures that government can act as a corrective mechanism that can establish rules and safety nets for a system that, by design, ends up with winners and losers and a growing gap between the haves and have-nots.

Part of the myth that government is useless and unnecessary is rooted in a belief that any time government spends money, it’s an inefficiency. If there were a real need to spend that money, some say (and please feel free to read through this Sound Politics post and the comments if you think I’m just inventing a ridiculous strawman) that it’s only worthwhile to do if an actual person or company sees a profit potential. In this mindset, no roads, schools, or scientific research should ever be funded unless a company saw profit potential in that investment. Otherwise, it’s a waste. I never imagined that I would encounter so many people believing in such oversimplifications, yet I manage to come across it all the time when looking for things on our local right-wing blogs to make fun of. For all of these people, the moon landing must be the greatest boondoggle of all time, especially since some people still aren’t convinced we really went there.

Like the moon landing, there are valuable things that government can do that don’t provide the kind of immediate direct profit potential that a corporation would be interested in. From building transit to improving park space, there are various things that would give a return on investment for an entire community or even the entire country, but wouldn’t make sense for a corporate bottom line. As a capitalist system grows and matures, I believe that it can eventually allow for more and more of these things to be done by private entities (and this often puts me at odds with many liberals), but a belief that there’s some truism that a corporate entity is always the superior option distorts the proper balance we need to have between having the things we need provided for us by those motivated by money and those motivated by the ballot box.

Going back to the Sound Politics post I linked to, the Edmonds School District administration building obtained an espresso machine. The price tag ($10,000) alarmed the Sound Politics peanut gallery and many wailed about how wasteful government spending has become. The only problem is that the espresso machine was bought so that faculty could purchase their morning brews for less money inside the administration building and the proceeds would go towards the district’s general fund and toward school lunches. The machine was expected to pay for itself in less than two years. If that’s true, and there’s no reason to believe it wasn’t, it was an intelligent use of school budget funds and government doing something smart.

But that’s not how it works among the faith-based capitalism crowd. Whenever government spends money, it’s an inherent inefficiency to them. To demonstrate how this can lead to pure silliness, let’s say there are two cities that each have a park that needs to be refurbished. The first city finds a coalition of business owners and private citizens who pony up the $50,000 for the refurbishing. The second city uses public funds. There’s an argument to be made that the second city is not wisely spending taxpayer money, just as it’s possible that the business owners in the first city might not get what they think they may get back from their investment (good publicity). But what I don’t agree with is the idea that the actual job of refurbishing the park will be done more or less efficiently depending upon which avenue is chosen. The idea that those being paid by a for-profit entity will work harder than those being paid the same rate by a government entity has no basis in any reality that I’m familiar with, yet it’s an article of faith for so many. The issue of accountability usually appears in that theory as well, but anyone who’s ever worked in the private sector can tell you that massive inefficiencies and beaurocracies exist in for-profit entities as well.

Leave it to our friend Stefan to take this idea and go careering over the hills with it.

Last weekend I asked readers to suggest a word to represent the opposite of “Statism”. Thanks to all who participated in the ensuing discussion. Among the best suggestions: classical liberalism, small-l libertarianism, objectivism, Americanism, capitalism. My personal favorite, suggested by Eric Earling, “civic entrepreneurialism”. That best captures the spirit of what I was looking for — civic engagement based on private enterprise, as opposed to state coercion. But I’d still prefer a single snazzy word to represent the concept.

Incidentally, the concept of private initiative in lieu of state coercion is, IMHO, the preferred alternative not only where it is traditionally proposed (e.g. education, social services), but also for traditionally social conservative issues. Take, for example, abortion. This merits a longer post, but if the goal is to reduce the number of abortions, wouldn’t it be more effective for private organizations to deliver positive messages to change people’s minds about the issue, than to expect government intervention to solve the problem?

After I read this post, I sat back in my chair, stroked my goatee, looked up at the ceiling, read it again, thought about driving down the coast this summer, paced around the room a few times, read it a third time, rubbed my temples for a minute and then just turned the computer off. After a few days, I think I’ve got it.

Going back to the example with the parks, Stefan has actually convinced himself that not only can private enterprise refurbish the park more efficiently than government can for that $50,000, but it can do a number of things that government is completely incapable of doing as well.

It’s true that there are a number of things that government can’t do. Following drug policy, I’m well aware of what the limits of government are. Whether it was alcohol prohibition of the 20s or the current drug prohibition, people in our government have been trying to do the impossible. It just can’t deter people from exhibiting irrational behavior, and drug addictions are irrational behaviors. If those irrational behaviors have been shown to be detrimental to others, we obviously demand the government deal with that person, but putting them in jail doesn’t “fix” their irrational behavior – even when the sentence they are given is justified. This is why government-run drug treatment programs have been shown to be very cost effective from a taxpayer standpoint.

But this is very different from establishing rules or openly participating in a marketplace, where people overwhelmingly display more rational behaviors. People may not always make the smartest decisions when it comes to their own finances or running a large corporation, but they tend to have a rational basis for their decisions. As a result, government can be much more effective at using prison or financial penalty as a deterrent and to get people to play by the rules. There will always be a small subset of people who will act irrationally out of greed, and just as those whose drug addictions cause them to violate the freedom of others, they should still be sent to jail (or fined), even it doesn’t deter their irrational behavior without counseling or other psychological help.

For Stefan, and the Sound Politics nut squad, government can’t do anything at all, and beyond that, who knows what things they’ve tried and failed at that the free market can do! People are still having abortions? Hell, we haven’t unleashed the grand power of capitalism at that scourge. A few Wal-Mart funded PSA’s and the abortions just disappear. Haven’t solved drug addiction? Give Bank of America the keys. Can’t defeat terrorism? Try Blackwater (oh wait, we already did that).

Even though government has no ability to make people act responsibly if their motivations are irrational, it does have the ability to be responsible in dealing with those who are acting rationally. In other words, government is mainly useless in changing behaviors done in the pursuit of pleasure, since those behaviors tend to be impulsive or irrational, but it can be useful in dealing with those done in pursuit of profit. The pursuit of profit is a major motivator in life, but it’s not the only one, and government can utilitize other motivators like patriotism, compassion, and scientific curiosity to accomplish things as well. It’s just imperative that we hold the people we put in government accountable for what they’re doing.