The Party of the People?

Democrats in America have managed to convince the populace over the past 50 years that they truly represent the views of the common man; the working stiff; the underdog; etc. It is among the greatest marketing successes of all time. After all, the party has succeeded in convincing so many people for so long, while at the same time, having its key platform views be the most harmful to those in most need of defense.

For example???

Anti-Free Trade:

The marketing pitch line from the democrats is that free trade agreements "ship our jobs overseas." That's so easy to say and sounds so offensive to the working person. Isn't it obvious - shipping our jobs overseas must certainly be wrong?

As it turns out, we don't want every job in America. What we want is to have each American who seeks employment to have the highest value job he/she can perform. Therefore, we want a mix of jobs that perfectly match our talent supply. While success in that regard will minimize the unemployment rate, the real challenge is getting our fellow citizens to be better trained so that we can perform the highest value services in the world here in America. Better trained citizens will bring us an ever increasing standard of living.....and that is the real goal.

So, if you need our country (and every other) to be able to manufacture and provide services in a mix that matches its citizens skill sets, then you really need mobility of products and services to the greatest extent possible - FREE TRADE. If you restrict trade (in the form of tariffs which artificially change import prices, for example), you relegate a country that may be best suited to perform a certain task to a secondary position in the market. Since that country can't effectively sell its product/service anymore, you cause their citizens who were otherwise best suited to perform that task, to do some other task below their capability. You also make your own citizens pay more than they need to pay for the product or service in question. Trade restrictions are driven by unions and other special interests and supported by democrats - all in the name of "preserving jobs" for our citizens.

But if we don't "preserve jobs" for our citizens, won't they become permanently unemployed?

No. Thanks to the notion of comparative advantage, every person can be productive. Even unskilled workers in countries with minimal natural resources can use their manual labor to assemble products, etc. Importantly, this natural system of allocating productive work among countries and people (embodied in the concept of comparative advantage) works best without any artificial barriers being instituted (e.g., no tariffs but free and unfettered trade). If trade barriers are constructed, the natural feedback loop is distorted and people are encourage to do work in one place that could more productively be done elsewhere.

If that happens, who wins and who loses?

The winner is the particular constituency for whom a country instituted the tariff. For example, sugar is much more efficiently grown in South America vs. the U.S. but we have instituted tariffs on imported sugar to protect (for some reason) our local sugar cane growers (and you thought the Sugar Bowl was just a football game!). If we give U.S. sugar growers profit margins they don't deserve, who pays the price? Consumers pay by having to buy sugar at a higher price than they would if we allowed it all to be imported.

Is it fair to transfer wealth from the average, cookie-baking American to U.S. sugar growers?

But this isn't really the worst of it....

Think about the poor people of Africa vs. the U.S. and European farm lobbies. Farmers in the U.S. and Europe have a lot of political pull and a lot of heart string pull (remember "Farm Aid" and Willie Nelson). They have a massive and multi-faceted price support system that keeps the price of corn and many other farm commodities artificially high. Once again, the consumer pays more but the real crime is that the poor people of certain African countries who might otherwise be able to produce and export certain crops are unable to economically do so. Moreover, since the industrial capacity in Africa is so weak, farming is oftentimes the ONLY productive task available to many people. Therefore, giving profits to the Midwestern corn farmer really harms the African farmer in a very big way.

The democratic party may be a friend to the U.S. farmer but in the process, they destroy the potential of the poor African farmer. Who do you suppose needs our protection more, the average U.S. farmer or the average African farmer? Moreover, the many tyrannical leaders on the continent of Africa would have a much more difficult time maintaining power if their people had something to lose and became better educated.

Democrats hurt poor Africans and other downtrodden people of the world by opposing free trade.

Anti-Voucher/Charter School:

In the District of Columbia, the Opportunity Scholarship Program is quietly under siege by the democratic party and its key constituency, the teachers' unions. In one of the worst performing school systems, there is hope for 1,700 poor children whose parents cannot afford to send them to the Sidwell Friends school (the private school of choice for presidential children, including the Obama girls). This voucher program provides $7,500 per year toward tuition for children to attend the school of their choice. This is a bargain for taxpayers in D.C., since the local school system spends over $14,000 per student per year. Families participating in this program have an average annual income of approximately $23,000 and 99% of them are minority families.

The unions will kill this program and their quiet approach is a provision that was tucked into one of the omnibus budget bills which requires the program be reauthorized by Congress after 2010. Obama signed the budget bill last week and despite one or two positive pronouncements on education (e.g., merit pay for good teachers), I still expect that he will not buck the democratic controlled Congress on the issue of the Opportunity Scholarship Program.

So, the democrats - the party of the people; will force 1,700 poor children back into the failing D.C. school system at a higher cost in order to protect teachers' jobs.

Carbon Cap and Trade System (aka "The Carbon Tax"):

In case you seek more recent examples of democratic punishment of the common man, let's introduce the carbon tax. Personally, I'm not sure I'm against this...but I can probably afford to pay my share. It’s the lower income folks that once again will get soaked.

This is driven by the environmental lobby (another key democratic constituency). The idea is to set an allowable limit of pollution that any business can emit. Companies would buy a permit from the government to emit a certain amount of carbon-based pollutants - this would raise big bucks for the Treasury (hence the "tax" moniker). Businesses that improve their emissions can then sell any excess pollution permit capacity to another business that would rather not spend money on cleaning itself up. With government shrinking the pool of permits over time, there will be less pollution allowed. Meanwhile, the government has a new funding source from selling the permits.

This should drive carbon emissions down (let's hope global warming is real). What it will also do is drive the cost of just about everything produced by mankind up. Companies will be forced to pass along the tax to consumers. In the language of taxation, this would be a very regressive tax in that it would impact lower income people more significantly, since they spend a greater proportion of their total income on subsistence expenses (food, shelter, etc.) vs. on investments.

Once again, the party of the people is driving a position which harms the common man the most.


These are just three short examples of how the “party of the people” harms the most vulnerable with its core positions. In the meantime, they give Americans a collective “hug” with speeches that sound wonderful; a young, minority president who lets guilty, white America repent for its historical racism; and a constant vilification of corporate America – the evil companies that create all things that are bad in this world.

Nice P.R. job!

The Two-Party Failure

In America, you're either a democrat, a republican or something that doesn't count. We call it the two-party system. While there have been a couple of bold attempts to run for major office by independent candidates - most notably, Ross Perot in 1992 - for the most part, you don't have a chance if you don't join one of the two major political parties. Sure, Ralph Nader makes the news each presidential election by running for office but since his first attempt, we all realized he doesn't have a chance.

As a result, any person who contemplates running for elected office and is concerned about winning, chooses to join one of the two major parties. It would be nice to believe that each person affiliates with the party that best matches their individual ideology. However, the savvy candidate probably picks the party in his/her geography that normally gets a majority of the votes cast in that particular area. So here we have our first quandary - as a candidate, do you select the party closest to your views or do you select the party that traditionally wins in your area?

While it may seem disingenuous to pick the party that would most help you win, it doesn't really matter from the perspective of compromising your ideals. As it turns out, you would be compromising your ideals in either case, unless your personal views perfectly match one party's platform (slim chance).

Herein lies the problem. In the two-party system, all candidates must compromise their views and adhere, in some substantial degree, to the party's platform positions - especially on the key issues. Why? Because the power structures within the party will demand your allegiance in order to get key committee assignments, key legislation introduced and passed, etc., once you're elected to office. This applies whether you are running for the legislative branch or the executive branch (thanks to checks and balances among the branches).

The result of all this is polarization. Do we really want polarized views? Wouldn't it be better to have a mosaic of individual views represented in the debate on matters of importance? There would be true debate; persuasive arguments; thoughtful decisions; real contemplation about matters of importance vs. a blind adherence to a position that the elected official knows he or she must support to guarantee re-election (would term limits help? Yes!).

So, let's change the election rules to outlaw political parties just like we outlaw monopolies that might result from corporate mergers (e.g., the Hart Scott Rodino Act). After all, if it's un-American for corporate monopolies or duopolies to exist then that should certainly apply to how we manage our competition for government leadership, shouldn't it? Imagine this - an open competition among individuals for the best collection of ideas. That sounds like a better democracy to me.

It's a favorite saying that democracy in America isn't a great system but it's better than any other option out there. I agree, but we ought to be open to making it even better; especially as its partisan flaws increasingly hamper our progress.