"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Buckminster Fuller

Well this is easily the best news from last week: Virginia Postrel is emerging from her bout with breast cancer with "no evidence of disease." I know from my own personal experience with Lance Armstrong disease that this is the closest the medical community will ever come to stating that one has been cured; "total remission without further evidence of disease" is the exact phrase I remember. Cancer in general is still technically "incurable," so the word "cure" is never uttered by the profession with regards to cancer.

Anyway, congratulations Virginia, rock on with your bad self! Is it just me, or does anyone else out there feel that liberal capitalism itself has just dodged a bullet?

Frankly, the internet could use more sites like this: Climate Debate Daily. It's an independent website presenting two columns, pro and con, of links to articles concerning climate change.

Many sites on the Internet, including some of those listed at the far left of the page, take firm views for or against the threat of anthropogenic global warming. As a matter of editorial policy, Climate Debate Daily maintains a studied neutrality, allowing each side to present its most powerful and persuasive case. Our object is to allow readers to form their own judgments based on the best available information.

No spin, no agenda, just sweet, sweet reason in a head-to-head, hand-to-hand, bare-knuckle format. Can't beat it with a ton of carbon. Hat tip: Ginny at Chicago Boyz.

Cross-posted at A Second Hand Conjecture.

It’s all up to the crackers now. Fred Thompson has left the building, leaving Rudy Giuliani the only candidate in the Republican race potentially capable of prevailing in November against either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama—or both. But Rudy may well have made a strategic error: having been the polling frontrunner for almost a year, Giuliani and his captains decided to forgo the smaller early state contests and focus on high-delegate states, beginning with Florida on January 29th. Giuliani's people have been bivouacked there for months. The effort has kept the candidate with a double-digit lead in the Sunshine State—until now.

Enter Duverger’s law, which states that district-based plurality elections favor a two party system due to voter polarization between the frontrunner and the strongest challenger. In the contests he skipped, Rudy finished most often in fourth or fifth place, with single-digit percentages. With John McCain and Mitt Romney now being perceived as the the top two candidates, Giuliani’s poll numbers have been plummeting in Florida, California, New Jersey, and even New York, the very delegate-rich states that he was counting on to elevate him to the nomination. In Florida, the latest polls now have Rudy in a three way tie for first place at best and losing to both McCain and Romney at worst.

But what makes it impossible to write Rudy off yet is the following: historically up to a third of Florida voters have taken advantage of the state’s liberal absentee/early voting rules to cast their ballots prior to actual elections. Giuliani’s team knew this going in, and assembled early voting and absentee voter “chase” teams that have been operating since before Iowa urging Rudy supporters to vote early. No other candidate has done this. With this being a four-way race, it's possible Rudy can absolutely stink on Tuesday yet still win due to early/absentee ballots cast for him back when he was fab.

What's more, given that the media has all but ruled it out, a Rudy win in Florida would turn the press upside down, making McCain's comeback in New Hampshire appear small and uninspired by comparison. The very trend that makes the chances of a Giuliani nomination currently appear hopeless contain the same forces required to make his big-state strategy work by making him the lead story one week before Super Tuesday. Duverger can giveth as well as taketh away.

America is the "land of the free." Not "land of the free if you're male like me," and not "land of the free if you're white like me," and not "land of the free if you pray like me," and not "land of the free if you have sex like me." America is the land of the free...period. Well, actually, comma. We're also supposed to be "the home of the brave."

The Liberal Capitalist Party believes that America could be braver. We could give homosexual Americans their civil rights due, their freedom of association, by allowing them to legally enter into the household-forming contract of marriage.

Time to brave up, America. In the eyes of the government, all marriages should be civil unions, equal and the same, for everyone.

Supporters of Fred Thompson aren't taking the results of yesterday's South Carolina primary very well. John McCain took a third of the vote, followed up by Mike "get thee behind me" Huckabee coming in second with a quarter of the vote. Big Fred only managed about 15% in spite of the fact that the SC primary was the first state contest in which he actually tried to get votes.

Dailypundit's Bill Quick is fed up enough that he's soliciting ideas for a conservative third party. I don't know if he's ever stumbled upon this site, or what he might think of it if he has. But ironically, this site was in no small part inspired by the American Liberty League, a web initiative of Quick himself from a few years back. Still, I don't know that the Liberal Capitalist Party would be Bill's cup of tea. We tangled last year in the comments section on his site over an immigration topic, and it wasn't difficult for me to glean from the exchange that he has a lot of powerful emotions concerning his restrictionist positions. The Liberal Capitalist position of allowing labor markets to determine a level of orderly entry into the US would probably be a deal-breaker for him, even though we probably agree on most everything else.

So out of respect for a fellow (95%) liberal capitalist, and out of gratitude for the original inspiration he gave me, I invite him and his readers to dig into the site and use whatever ideas you can find that might be useful for creating the American Conservative Party Bill envisions. For instance, I actually put together an idea for an internet-based party modeled on the Request for Comments (RFC) system used to develop the internet itself. It's untested in politics as far as I know, but I still believe the idea has potential. And look through the FAQs and essays. There's all sorts of stuff in there.

It's also interesting that Steven Den Beste did a flyby and dropped the Duverger's law bomb in the comments section on Bill's new site. I posted about Duverger's law last year, here. These days I've been more or less persuaded that the odds of establishing a successful third party without the help of approval voting reform are infinitesimal. Even with approval voting Duverger would hold, we'd still have a two-party system, but at least it would loosen the institutional kung-fu grip™ that the Republicans and Democrats have on the first party and second party positions.

This is what we get when we quit:

And this is what we get when we don't quit:

It really is exactly that simple. Any questions?

Read Bobby Jindal's victory speech. 

Can Bobby Jindal get Katrina reconstruction on track? Can he do something—anything—about the state's failed school system? Can he loosen the grip of corruption that's been at Louisiana's throat since Napoleon sold the joint? Can this Rhodes Scholar keep the Saints in New Orleans? I, for one, believe he can, if only because Jindal himself seems to be crazy enough to believe he can.

That's one small step for Louisiana, and one giant leap for Louisiana-kind.

I generally enjoy Megan McArdle's commentary and find myself in agreement with her far more often than not, but this post is just, well, ignorant:

The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes, which is why DC feels like a prison from which it is impossible to escape unless one wants to spend four hours on the Beltway. We clearly need to institute comprehensive road tolls combined with a congestion pricing scheme. Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit.

Here's a table comparing dollars of government subsidy per 1000 passenger miles for different modes of transportation. Unfortunately it only goes to 2002, but I doubt much has changed since then.

Although government does subsidize auto use with road construction, these subsidies are offset by vehicle and fuel taxes paid by drivers. In fact you'll notice in the linked table that for most automotive modes, the government subsidy is actually negative because of these offsets, whereas transit subsidies are over a hundred dollars per thousand passenger miles since at least 1990. In 2002 it comes out to fifteen to twenty cents per passenger mile. It's clear that when Megan speaks of "massive subsidy provided to drivers" she is obviously either making her own false presumption or simply repeating a line from the leftist eco-narrative on transportation.

A real solution would entail:

1. Designing road systems to move traffic. For example, it's the year of Our Lord 2007; is there any sane reason that every traffic light in America isn't synchronized? This is especially important for the environment as a car moving at 45mph down the freeway creates a tiny fraction of the pollution that a car idling in traffic does, and of course for less time over the same distance.

2. Legalize transit. Most metro areas have gobs of laws outlawing or monopolizing various forms of transit, from prohibiting private buses and jitneys to creating sovietized taxi regimes. These barriers not only need to be removed, they need to be replaced with a generic infrastructure framework such as a system of transit stops and rights of way that competing private transit companies can use to provide orderly systems. This also means deregulating fares and allowing transit providers to charge what the market will bear. All other deregulation can't work if price controls on all forms of transit aren't eliminated.

3. Throughout most of the metro areas in the country, home offices are actually illegal to some degree or another through various zoning restrictions. We need to reverse this, and remove local legal barriers to private telecommunications development and deployment.

4. Convert general toll roads and existing HOV lanes into free roads with High Occupancy/Toll lanes. Control traffic on HOT lanes using variable tolls.

5. And finally, after a few years of reform, sell off most public transit systems, bus by bus if necessary. The chart linked above says it all. Maybe someone facing marketplace imperatives and competition can figure out a way to run these systems efficiently.

UPDATE: Cool! Megan responds. And I riposte in her comments...

Imagine there were no taxes on economic production: no income taxes, inheritance taxes, business taxes, corporate taxes, or excise taxes. Imagine instead that America's taxes were paid solely at the cash register in the form of sales taxes, with exceptions for food, rent and medical care.

Imagine how easy it would be to manage family finances when there were no more tax forms to fill out, no more receipts to save, no more tax professionals to pay, and no more budget-busting checks to write to the government. Families would have far more control over how much tax they paid in any given year by simply regulating their purchases instead of having to actually earn less money to ease their tax burden. What we earned would be ours, what we saved would be ours, period.

Imagine how much easier it would be to be self-employed, and to own and manage our own businesses. We wouldn't have to retain a payroll company to manage our employees' taxes like we have to do today even if we employ only a hand-full of people. No more intentional mis-allocations of resources and financial acrobatics would be required to avoid even greater tax losses. And there would be no more having to predict future income or being forced to prepay future taxes for those of us who employ ourselves, allowing a new Entrepreneur Society to be fully born.

Imagine ultra-full employment as firms from the world over flocked to the US to invent, produce and trade in a vastly simplified and cheaper business environment. The massive new competitive pressures of demand for labor would permanently keep the unemployment rate as close to zero as possible, and force wages to lead the inflation curve instead of follow it. In the United States, employees would cost less in spite of being paid more.

Imagine lower, fairer prices for just about everything we buy when businesses and corporations no longer have to imbed the cost of their taxes in the prices they charge us for their goods and services. Competition would force producers to pass the cost savings to consumers, and sooner rather than later. For many things this would mean lower actual cost even after additional sales taxes are factored in.

And lastly, imagine it no longer being in the government's interest to track the incomes and economic behavior of businesses and individuals. Imagine financial privacy actually being legally possible, with the government having no reason now or in the future to use the computer and communications technology already available to essentially catalog every one of our market transactions, monitoring (and eventually regulating) our economic lives.

It's called freedom, folks, and unlike most things we imagine, we can actually have this if enough of us come together and punch it into the national political narrative.

Over at Q&O, McQ has posted some video from 1991 in which then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney explains why the United States didn't overthrow Saddam during the Gulf War. And to be fair, the first Bush Administration made what few would disagree was a rational decision. In The first Gulf War, Arab League forces made up 40%+ of the coalition's ground forces that pushed Saddam out of Kuwait. For all we knew at the time, these guys could have started shooting at our guys if we had moved on Saddam. We should also remember that the 1991 war was far more politically tentative here at home, with the Congressional authorization to go to war passing in the Senate by a single vote.

Still, I bet we can all agree that if Bush Sr. had gone in and knocked off Saddam, the 2003 war, approved by a Congressional super-majority, would have never happened, and there would be 3600 American soldiers and countless Iraqis still alive today as a result.

With 20/20 hindsight, it's now obvious Bush Sr. should have secured at the get-go a commitment from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, et. al. to finish the job. in 1991 we had virtually destroyed Iraq's entire military, there was no Saddam Fedayeen, Al Queda was in it's infancy, Muqtada al Sadr was eleven years old, and there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis Saddam had yet to slaughter who most likely would have helped us.

As much as I'd love to say "oh well, live and learn," unfortunately I can't, because frankly it's still an open question whether we've learned anything from allowing Saddam to remain in power.

Jon Henke and MichaelW seem to think the idea of a bloggers' union is some sort of non sequitur.

Jon:

Collectively bargain with and receive health insurance from who? Who would they go on strike against? To whom does the blogger “shop steward” talk? What constitutes "management" for an independent blogger?

MichaelW:

But what of Jon’s question? Who is supposed to pay for these medical benefits and who would the union bloggers bargain with? Very few bloggers get paid as it is, so I don’t understand how forming a union will increase that number, much less wring benefits from the currently non-existent employers.

Why, The Man™ of course, you ignorant running-dog scabs. It's The Man™ with his boot to our throats, keeping us down. Why, if it weren't for The Man™...

You know the old saw about when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail? Well all the left has is The Man™, which of course is simply shorthand for power : economic power, political power, what have you. To the left, every social outcome, good or bad ("just" or "unjust") is determined by power. Unfortunately this premise tacitly forces the leftist world-view into an intentionalist box: when good things happen it's because good power—unions, left-wing activist groups, leftist politicians.—prevail over bad power—George Bush, greedy corporate management, neocons—otherwise bad things happen just as bad power intends them to.

When your world is this black and white, creating a "just" social institution like a bloggers' union makes perfect sense if bloggers want good things like job security, "fair" wages, and medical insurance, even if there is no readily identifiable The Man™ working to keep bloggers unpaid and uninsured. To the intentionalist left, it is sufficient for just power to intend it in order to have it, and if it still doesn't happen, well, it's because some unjust power must have thwarted it.

To me, that's the saddest aspect about life on the political left, being forced by their own logic to live in a world of imagined evil.

Although the supporting article focuses on a hypothetical Bloomberg candidacy, here are some astonishing numbers from a weekend USA Today/Gallup poll:

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 58% say the two major parties are doing "such a poor job" that a third party is needed. Just a third say the established parties "do an adequate job of representing the American people."

Wait! There's more:

43% of those surveyed in the new survey identify themselves as independents—significantly more than call themselves Democrats or Republicans. That proportion hasn't been higher in close to a decade.

And finally, the coup de grace:

Neither side now gets high marks from the public. President Bush's disapproval rating reached a high of 66% in the July Gallup Poll, and the June Poll put Congress' disapproval rating even higher, at 71%.

Disapproval ratings. Yow...

Brink Lindsey and I simply see the same world around us and that's all there is to it. His latest book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture, is on it's way to me as I type this, so I will soon be able to gauge the depth of our common vision, but after reading his supporting pieces in Reason Magazine and now this month's lead essay at Cato Unbound, to say that I'm startled is an understatement. His "soft libertarianism" is my liberal capitalism, and we both see it everywhere. Lindsey does us the additional favor of advancing a well-supported narrative of the social cataclysms that have brought us to where we are now, at the end of end of the American left-right political era.

Of course the political question left to us is: now what? Lindsey notes that the Libertarian Party is a "fringe operation." Will that change? Will the Democrats or the Republicans evolve? Or can another party emerge?

Back in December Lindsey seemed to be placing his bet on the Democrats, but since then their Congress has descended even farther in the polls than Bush. Certainly we've seen both parties evolve and evolve again over the generations, but can they jettison their twentieth century baggage and evolve at the same increasing speed as our social and political cultures?

Q: What is socialism?

A: The longest road from capitalism to capitalism.

Like all of the best jokes, this one kind of makes you want to laugh and cry and the same time, doesn't it?

As with so many policies produced by left-right Washington, the compromise immigration bill that the Senate effectively scuttled today was a lose-lose proposition from the beginning. It contained a one-time benefit for a chunk of our current illegals, but it didn't address the ongoing issues that compel Mexican laborers to stream over the border in the first place. It also contained billions of dollars worth of the same dubious enforcement measures that are currently failing, not the least of which was hundreds of miles of mostly symbolic fencing and a truly disturbing national employee verification system that would have increased the cost of every job in America and made the Federal government the final arbiter of every employment decision made in this country.

Although entrepreneurship is at an all-time high in the US, most of us still work for someone else, and so when the government comes along with a new scheme that demands businesses hand over yet another right to the government, too many Americans think little of it. And then a few years later, when the depressing effects of the new regulations come home to roost, the same Americans get angry and demand yet another government scheme to address it. It's pretty obvious that freedom loses in every revolution of this cycle, and when freedom loses, we all eventually lose.

It would be great if conservatives would realize that the market doesn't care one bit whether the expensive regulation imposed upon it is intended to protect us from Mexican labor or to protect some sub-sub-species of nematode, and thus there is no practical or moral difference between the two, but I just don't see this happening, with immigration nor anything else. Unfortunately for America, as this immigration bill demonstrated, when both of their policies are wrong-headed, any compromise between the two sides of the aisle simply compounds their error instead of counterbalancing each other, and thus the best we can hope for under the current state of affairs is that they both fail. In other words, under the Democrats and Republicans, progress = the status quo. Not very inspiring for the future, is it?

First Whittle, then Rachel Lucas, then the Frogman, and now the best pure blogger ever, Michele Catalano, is back. What a glorious month it's been!

Hat-tip: Cranky-d 

During the Republican presidential debate hosted by CNN a couple of weeks ago, Congressman Ron Paul made a remarkable statement:

“We in the past have always declared war in the defense of our liberties or go to aid of somebody,” he said. “But now we have accepted the principle of preemptive war — we have rejected the Just War theory of Christianity.

“We have to come to our senses about this issue of war and preemption and go back to traditions and our constitution and defend our liberties and defend our rights,” he added.

This is a lovely thought, as evidenced by the 250 supportive comments to the CNN post. It's also factually incorrect:

Are we really to believe that this country never before waged war even though our national security was not being directly threatened? What then was the first of this republic's wars, its war for independence? That colonial rebellion, which would last eight long years, began as a disagreement over tax policy, not because our security was threatened—directly or indirectly.

Skipping lightly over the undeclared naval war with France (1798-1800), the same could be said of the War of 1812, which was a war of our choice. Indeed, at the time it wasn't easy for Americans to decide whether to go to war against France, Great Britain, neither or both.

The Mexican-American War needn't have been fought if this country had been willing to recognize Mexican claims. It, too, was a war of choice, not necessity.

And what about the Spanish-American War? Our national security was scarcely threatened by the decaying Spanish empire, much of which we soon made our own. Nor did we have to put down the Philippine Insurrection that followed — for years.

There was considerable hesitation before the United States chose to enter the First World War, too, under a president who had just campaigned for re-election under the popular slogan, He Kept Us Out of War.

Nor did American involvement in the Second World War begin, as it does in the movies, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the United States was being drawn into that conflict long before war was formally declared.

Back during the run-up to the Iraq war, there were a handful of blogs I frequently read which helped me anchor my confidence in my own world-view. But the war turned out to be a go, and a year or so later after everyone realized that Iraq wasn't going to be a drive-by, an almost suspicious number these bloggers either experienced life issues, or became simply burned-out from fighting the good fight on the front lines against the left-wing anti-American narrative. Some of these bloggers let their blogs go dormant, some quit them altogether, and some quit blogging about the war and politics and started blogging about some other, less controversial topic.

Dissident Frogman was one of those blogs that just sort of stopped. Thankfully, it now appears the Frogman's hiatus was only temporary, because he's back up and running. Written by an anonymous pro-American Frenchman(!), this blog is big-time funny, occasionally poignant, and very original, including original graphic artwork and animated gifs. He belongs on every liberal capitalist's blogroll and bookmarks collection. Seriously, it's that good, and the new layout is beautiful. Welcome back Frogman! I'll get you on my blogroll as soon as I can remember the password...

There is no law saying that by permitting foreign nationals to live amongst us and work, we have to put them on the track to permanent residency and citizenship. And if I'm wrong and there is such a law, well, we can change it. One of the reasons that so many Mexicans are willing to come here illegally is because they have no intention of ever becoming American citizens; the ones that want to become citizens are the ones waiting in the decades-long lines to get here legally.

So the first step the US has to take is to separate, both conceptually and legally, work visas from the process of becoming a US citizen. It is in our best interest to allow the former unfettered and slow-walk the latter. Congress should create a work visa that lasts, say, two years—a "W" visa, with "W" being for "work." There should be no restrictive quotas or conditions on a W visa; instead they should be restricted only by charging a price for them. This price should fluctuate based on the "market." We should charge as high a price as possible, but not so high that most Mexican workers decide that it's more cost-affective to enter and work in the US illegally. A good starting point would be to find out how much the coyotes charge and charge half of that figure (remember, the idea isn't to compete with them but to put them out of business). The last I saw, they were charging $1000-1500 per head.

But even though W visas should be easily renewable for an additional price every two years into perpetuity, purchasing them and living and working in the US under their auspices shouldn't entitle the foreign worker to citizen track status—or any other status for that matter, other than "W."

That's it. I'm sick of the sniveling. And the whining. And the absurd histrionics. So let's just do it. Let's build our wall. Let's deport every illegal that can be found. Let's sanction any and all employers we find hiring illegals. I'm ready, but I'm betting the anti-Mexicans aren't.

Let's see how well the right-wing lustre on the immigration restrictionists arguments holds up when the government starts sanctioning farmers out of business by the hundreds and thousands. After all, a majority of Americans oppose "amnesty," right? Let's see how well the thousands of middle-aged construction sector small businessmen like picking up a hammer again after all of their help is deported. Sure, it might pay a little more than it did when they were younger, but will they be more likely to vote Republican? And will the market be affected when housing starts don't merely slow but disappear? Let's watch how the poor and working classes deal with doubling grocery prices to go along with the fuel inflation they've already been struggling against. The inflation won't come because unemployed Americans will demand more than illegal Mexican workers for picking produce and manning feedlots. Prices will go up due to shortages of these goods, at least until foreign agricultural imports can grow enough to take up the slack. From countries like China and...Mexico.

And I'm all for a 2000 mile wall. Let's build it. That is, let us build it, not Mexicans. Let's pass a law banning any Mexican labor or materials from being used to build our all-American wall. And then let's see if it gets built. Let's see how much money it takes to get enough middle-class, legal Americans from behind their PCs in their air-conditioned cubicles and home offices to man a shovel in the Chihuahuan Desert.

I understand that most people are unaccustomed to the idea of actual labor scarcity and the implications of true full employment. The history of the human condition has until now been one of surplus labor punctuated by periods of intense job scarcity known as recessions. Thus many can't get their heads around today's employment reality: We. Are. Out. Of. Workers. Those that used to be on the low end of the totem pole have moved up, and now there is a shortage at the bottom. The problem we have is that the laws of supply and demand don't care if we can figure it out or not. They are going to do what they always do, regardless. Like all natural laws, they have no conscience.

Now some may be thinking to yourselves, "but I thought all you free-market types said that keeping illegals out is impossible? How are farms going to go out of business unless these barriers to immigration actually work?" Well ultimately they won't be kept out, or at least not most of them after they discover the holes in the new system and fake documents become more ubiquitous. What will cause the economic damage is the disruption caused by enforcement. When the INS comes and rounds up all the illegals picking your lettuce, what is the lettuce going to do? Patiently wait until you can scrounge up other workers to resume the harvest? No, it's going to quickly become unsalable, which means you aren't going to make this season's payments. To many farmers, it won't matter that enough illegals will figure out how to get here in time to pick next year's crop. For these farmers (and meatpackers, and landscapers, and contractors, and small restaurant owners, etc.), there won't be a next year.

The list of changes I've wanted to make to LiberalCapitalist.com had grown over the last year to the point that it was making me nuts, so I finally rolled up my sleeves and implemented most of them. I simplified the document structure and eliminated several sections that were essentially orphaned.

The biggest change was the elimination of the creaky old Xaraya forum in favor of the shiny fancy Simple Machines forum (SMF). You can get there by clicking on "The Conversation" in the menu above. As soon as I figure out how to move it, I'll shift it to the liberalcapitalist.org domain which I also have registered. There is a small inconvenience introduced with the change I must apologize for in advance, and that is if you've registered here on the blog your registration doesn't carry over to The Conversation, so you will have to re-register there in order to post in the forums. I'm afraid I couldn't migrate existing accounts either because the passwords of users are actually (gasp) secure. The only reason I've used registration here on the blog is because if I don't the site becomes quickly inundated with comment spam. As soon as I can figure out a way to do it without exposing myself to the tender mercies of the spambots, I'll enable guest commenting on the blog and do away with its registration altogether. If anyone has any comments, criticisms or suggestions, leave them below or email me at the address listed in the contact block at the bottom-right. Anyhoo, this site is now officially considered out of beta.

Having spent my entire adult life involved in third party politics, I've always thought that I had an appreciable understanding of how the two major parties protected their political duopoly by manipulating the rules of American democracy to block competition from smaller parties and independents. When it comes to refoming the state-by-state rules and laws governing ballot access, we can’t really look to the two majors for any type of support for reform because they are the direct beneficiaries of the status quo and the current arrangements produce no real downside for them. We can thus expect that they will always stand together to fight any reform that would enable others to take votes from them.

This is the reasoning that more or less forms the conventional wisdom that is most commonly used to explain the protracted dominance of the two major American parties and the obstacles to success that third parties must overcome to compete electorally. But as I've recently come to learn, this isn't the whole story. In fact, all of the rule-rigging is only a peripheral factor driving the two-party system. The primary cause was posited by French political scientist Maurice Duverger decades ago. He observed that when elections are based on choosing a single winner for office from within a geographical district, a two-party political system is the system most likely to emerge over time. Eventually this has become known as Duverger's law, and if it is correct, then America’s two party system is pretty much here to stay. And even if one believes, as I do, that the two-party system is on whole a more effective democratic system than multiparty systems, that doesn't mean it couldn't be better still for all of us if the Democrats and Republicans didn’t have a permanent lock on their memberships in this exclusive club, but rather rose and fell in prominence relative to other parties as well as each other according to their responsiveness to the desires of American voters.

As the Libertarian Party's repeated ballot access successes and subsequent dismal election results over the years have demonstrated, getting on the ballot and getting votes are two entirely different things. As it turns out, there's another hurdle, long lamented by third parties, that dwarfs the issue of ballot access: the "wasted vote" dilemma. Most voters intuitively sense the game theoretics behind our current single-vote/single winner election model: any vote not for the contender (the second place candidate) is for all intents and purposes a vote for the favorite (the front-runner) since any vote for any other candidate—because he or she has virtually no chance of winning—is "wasted" by not contributing to the ultimate outcome of the election. The wasted vote dilemma is thus an unintended Hobson's choice produced by the fact that voters have but a single vote to cast in any election, where most supporters of alternative candidates find themselves compelled to vote for one of the two front-runners instead of their actual preference. Net result? The vast majority of votes wind up going to the top two candidates and the two parties that support them. Third parties are cheated out of electoral support and thus the opportunity for long-term development because a mojority of their would-be voters choose the short-term gratification of participating in the contest between the top two contenders on the slate. Now there exists sound rebuttals to the wasted vote argument, but all of them require independent voters to trade their short-term electoral interests for potential preferred electoral opportunities in the future. Like most gratification deferral arguments, these arguments are not popular, and will most likely never be popular enough to drive any meaningful change.

Currently all fifty states use a voting system whereby each voter gets a single vote to exercise for any one candidate in any race. This single-vote/single winner system is most commonly referred to as a plurality vote system. Plurality voting has the benefit of being very simple, perhaps even the simplest form of voting, far easier to understand than some of the ranked ballot proportional voting schemes practiced in some countries in Europe as well as in Israel and Australia. Single-choice plurality ballots are simple to cast, and votes are simple to count, with each vote having the same value. And finally, the outcome of plurality elections are generally perceived by the electorate as fair and deliberate. In spite of these advantages however, there are still drawbacks to plurality voting. For one, there's tactical voting, where voters may decide to cast their one vote for a candidate they don't desire in an attempt to defeat a candidate they desire even less. For the major parties, the biggest flaw in the current system is it's tendency to regularly produce outcomes where a "spoiler" candidate splits off a margin of the vote to cause the otherwise most popular candidate to lose (think Perot in 1992, or Nader in 2000). And as we often see in our elections, candidates are too easily tempted to "go negative" with their campaigns, because the single-vote system makes the loss of a vote for the attacked opponent worth the same as a positive vote for the mud-slinger even though opinion polls show negative campaigns to be harmful to both the slinger as well as his or her target.

Does this make the electoral aspirations of American third parties a hopeless pipe dream? Maybe not. There is an election reform for which all of America—including the Democratic and Republican parties—just might be ready. The election reform that would put a stop to all of the negative externalities of our plurality system is called approval voting. In an approval voting system, the only difference from our current system is that voters can each vote one time for any candidate in any race. After the polls close, votes are tallied for each of the candidates the same way they are today (using the exact same methods and equipment) and the candidate with the most votes wins. There are advocacy groups currently agitating for this reform which can explain the simple mechanics more thoroughly than I can, but in short, approval voting would mean that every voter could vote for either one or both of the two front-runners and their preferred down-ballot candidate if they choose, making the wasted vote dilemma a thing of the past. The wasted vote dilemma can only occur when voters have only a single vote to cast. Third parties would finally be free to thrive or die based on their own merits instead of an unintended consequence of our electoral system. Although approval voting or similar electoral reform may not be sufficient to end the duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, it may very well be a necessary step. Otherwise third parties will be stuck having to wait for one of the two major parties to completely collapse like the Whigs of yore, or pray for a political superstar like a Teddy Roosevelt to materialize and lead them to victory. And at the end of the day, an approval voting system also would result in more power in the hands of voters. In a democracy, more actual votes equals more political power for the People.

Here, Jane Galt, a.k.a. Asymmetrical Information's Megan McArdle, goes digging for comedy gold in Matthew Yglesias' comments section from a post of last week regarding the Parker v. District of Columbia. She finds a couple of doozies to hoist, including one from a commenter claiming that the Second Amendment was written to protect "the right of the People" to join the military. Although some years ago I would have appreciated the unintended humor, these days, well...not so much.

I don't know if it's because of 9/11, or the impatience with foolishness that results from growing older, or some other reason that has yet to occur to me, but I'm completely over the gun control debate. Everybody should be over it because the debate is finished, and we have an obvious winner.

I recall reading a Molly Ivins (RIP) column years ago in which she sneered at gun rights arguments for citing "canned quotes of the founders" to buttress the position that the Second Amendment protects individuals' rights—you know, just like the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights do. Molly lived in my town, and I was always hoping I'd bump into her one day so I could ask her for the canned quotes of the Founders that supported her argument. It would have been a rhetorical question of course, because the fact is there are none. That's none, as in zero. The simple fact is there is no evidence whatsoever that would indicate any of the Founders would have tolerated (much less supported) any government prohibition of firearms. The bizarre "militia rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment that the prohibitionists have been trying to make play all these years folds at the slightest touch on historical, legal, and even grammatical grounds.

And then there's our experience with right to carry laws. The anti-gun establishment argued forcefully that such laws would bring the violence of the OK Corral to our streets. But most of the states legalized concealed carry anyway, and the exact opposite of the prohibitionist predictions occurred: states with legal concealed carry experienced significant reductions in crime, including gun crime, in both absolute terms and relative to the handful of states where concealed carry remains illegal. Unfortunately for the gun control movement, their entire rationale for gun control was predicated on appeals to crime control and public safety, and thus their arguments have lost all possible credibility.

When we then add to the list the fact that gun prohibitionist have imagined no enforcement regime other than the same failed method the government employs to ban cocaine, the circle of refutation is complete. Arguments for gun control fail in every respect: the link-between-guns-and-crime argument, the Constitutional argument, and the enforcement argument. What arguments they have left, even if granted, are only barely capable of temporarily muddying the waters.

It's time to stick a fork in gun control, folks, it's done. It's so done it's not even funny anymore, or at least not to me. Now that O'Connor is gone, I predict that within the next few years the United States Supreme Court will "incorporate" the Second Amendment (by interpreting it based on the due process and equality clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment) as being an individual right inviolable by any level of government.

Anyway, I think we've had our fun, and now it's time for gun rights supporters to declare victory and advance the debate. We should quit humoring those gun opponents whom are too stuborn to admit defeat by arguing with them, but should instead dismiss them with a brief, perfunctory referral to Article V of the US Constitution. If they don't like the right to bear arms, then they can try to amend the Constitution themselves like good little Americans.