Statement of Principle #4: Fiscal Responsibility

The fourth principle is:

Each unit of government must operate within its means; deficit spending must be avoided unless pressed by (actual) wartime conditions.

Policy consequences:  The entire federal budget must be reduced by 50% as soon as it is practically feasible, say within a maximum of 3 years.

Governing consequences: Tax cuts/reform at tied at the hip to spending cuts/efficiency reform. Or put it another way, revenue is one of half of the same coin as expenditures.

Explanation:

At the moment the 2012 federal budget is ~$3.8 trillion, about $1.3 trillion of that is deficit spending. Deficit spending is just another way of saying that the US government is burrowing (or printing) that money to pay for the services it is running.  Meanwhile, we have a national debt of about 15 trillion dollars, and about 84 trillion dollars is held in currently unfunded liabilities connected to Social Security and Medicare.  Put bluntly, this financial situation will, if not brought under control very soon, bankrupt the United States and it simply cannot be sustained.  It, also, cannot be corrected simply by raising taxes. The federal government must cut its budget drastically and do it soon or the United States is going to end up like Greece.

            The three largest parts of the budget at the moment are Social Security, Medicare and the Department of Defense (DoD). Together they make up about 60% of the federal budget.  We are not going to solve this problem unless the DoD Budget is cut substantially (40+%) and Social Security, Medicare need to be reformed.  Social Security is fairly easy to handled by ending universal Social Security for everyone below a certain age (say 45 years old) and transforming it into a much smaller targeted welfare program for people below the age cut off (as well as continuing universal Social Security for the people over the age limit) Medicare is a harder nut to crack because of so much of its cost is tied to healthcare cost in general, but there’s a lot of thing the federal government can do to free up the healthcare market that should help in lower costs, such as allowing people to purchase health insurance across state lines and other deregulatory measures that make healthcare a freer market. The bottom line through is SS, DoD, and Medicare are the three big ticket items of our budget and those are the three that need to be brought under control first.

            Now, there are a lot of other areas that can be cut and streamlined that would really help with the budgetary problem.  There is room to collapse multiple departments (Education, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development for example) into a single one if we just remove the fat and redundancy.  Let me give you a concrete example of this, right now the Department of Agriculture has two offices whose job is to inspect livestock, grain and other farm products production to make sure they are produced up to the mandated standards.  This is ostensibly done to protect consumers. Meanwhile, the FDA (in the Health and Human Services Department) inspects meat, and other foodstuff to make sure they are safe.  Again, ostensibly this is done for consumer protection. The difference as far as I can tell is that the FDA makes sure the product is safe, and the Department of Agriculture makes sure the production of that product is safe.  That’s just stupid, it is waste of money to, in essence, inspect the product twice.  What should happen (at a minimum) is the Department of Agriculture’s regulatory and inspection apparatus should be entirely done away with and let the FDA do its thing.  (I realize that the FDA inspection is still an intervention into the marketplace and this can increase the price, but I am perfectly fine with the government creating“baseline” outcomes for certain things, I will be explaining this point in more detail later) There are many, many examples of this sort of thing throughout the federal government.  In the remaining Statements of Principles I will discuss other areas of redundancy

Let me be perfectly clear about the tax point, the US government’s budgetary problems ought to be solved 99.99% of the time by spending cuts, but nonetheless there must be a discussion about how tax cuts exacerbated the budgetary problems and tax reform (including possible increases on wealthy individuals) needs to be on the table.   This is because it is reckless to separate spending and taxes given how closely related they are.  The Bush Tax Cuts compounded our financial problems and they shouldn’t have been done unless spending cuts went along with them.  You cannot cut taxes while maintaining spending at the current levels, or worse yet increasing spending (as Bush did because of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars)

Statement of Principle #3: The Democratic Process and Participation

Moving on now to more of the Democratic side of my beliefs, the third principle is as follows:

Free, open and representative elections must be held to ensure that the government is accountable to the populace at large.  The government is obligated to design elections such that as many voices as possible are heard.

Policy consequences: Citizens United was correctly decided, as this liberalization of campaign finance will greatly help individuals to organize. I favor moving lower houses of legislatures (House of Representatives, State Assemblies etc.) to proportional representation.  I think all chief executive races should be done with instant run off voting (people list the candidates in order of preference, the consensus choice wins)

Governing Consequences:  If a law is going to make voting more cumbersome on any group of people, there better be pretty solid evidence that it will also combat actual voter fraud. (Most Voter ID Acts is current use would fail this standard) Likewise, you better have solid evidence of voter fraud before saying an election was stolen.  The lower house of legislatures ought to be the most “active” part of government.

Explanation:

Some of my thought process on this point is because I do believe that the right to vote, as a means to select those who are discharged with the business of government, is a positive liberty.  It is one way that I think everyone has the right to self-rule.  But a lot of it is purely instrumental.  The more voices at the table making the decisions the a slower decision making process is and the decisions are more likely to be consensus positions and no faction is really ever going to have the power to dominate the rest. As the main concern is always to make sure the government is only acting in those ways that it is authorized too, and that the power of the state should always be consistently checked, spreading out the power among many hands is a simple and effective way of doing this.

            Now my point about the lower houses being the most active is related to it simply being the closest to the general population, meaning it ought to be more representative of the general will.  This is exactly the same reasoning the Founder used to give the House of Representatives the first crack at funding bills.

            Again I don’t think this point is going to be that controversial and that’s pretty much all I have got to say about it.

Statement of Principle #2: Restrained Government

Hello again, quick note about the CNN debate that happened tonight, I thought Ron Paul did a pretty good job overall in terms of substance but I wish he was a better debater in terms a rhetoric. He only got one really good line off, the one about how the moral and legal arguments against foreign interventionism do not work with Neocons so let’s try to economic one. Other than that the debate was pretty chaotic and not a lot of new points were made.  Based strictly on performance, I thought it was a wash for everyone. Anyway, principle two is:

Each unit of government may only act if and only if A) it is constitutionally authorized to act in that regard and B) it is empirically demonstrated that the unit of government’s action is as instrumentally effective as possible at securing a legitimate state end.

Policy consequences: The War of Drugs needs to end, especially at the federal level, the current power and privilege of the president needs to be curtailed, especially in regards to starting wars, assassinations and budgetary matters and much of the current regulatory oversight at all levels of government needs to be done away with.

Governing consequences: The second question asked about any law being proposed is “Is the government authorized to do this and will it be effective?” If the answer is no, then the state may not do it. Implicit in B) is the notion that that all governmental activity needs to be as efficient as possible.

There are two additional governing consequences that come out of this principle. They are:

i)         Chief executive officers (president, governors, mayors etc.) are largely discharged with only the duty of enforcing the law. As such the chief executive should only be an effective day-to-day administrator of the law, and they cannot go beyond that to any substantial degree without legislative assent.  For those who are familiar with this terminology, I favor the “chief clerk” view of executive power and privilege.

ii)              An independent, non-partisan, and amajoritarian judicial branch is needed to restrain the other two branches from exceeding their allotted authority.  As such, judicial review should be respected and one must think very carefully before making charges of judicial activism. I’m not denying that judicial activism exists, I’m saying the knee-jerk reaction by conservatives (and sometimes progressives, as was the case in Citizen United) to judicial decisions they don’t like can, and does, have an unwarranted chilling effect on the courts.

Explanation:

Forgive me a moment as I need to explain some political philosophy. I suggest if this point interests you, you check out Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay The Two Concepts of Liberty.  Ok, the beginning of the ideology (liberalism) that underwrites much of our constitutional system was Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.  John Locke in his The Second Treatise on Government refined, augmented and changed Hobbes’ ideas to largely the form that many (but not all) of the Founding Fathers assented too (but not exclusively so.)  Hobbes and Locke had many differences but it is the point of similarity that is at issue here.  Both Hobbes and Locke defined liberty in the negative sense.  That is, as long as a person was not actively being prevented by someone (or some natural barrier) from doing X, they were free to do X.  Negative liberty then is freedom from interference.  (Freedom is non-interference).  Negative liberty is often called the liberty of the moderns.  Meanwhile, the two main rivals for Hobbes/Locke on what liberty meant were Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacque Rousseau.  There are differences between them, and neither one defined liberty completely severed from the negative notion, but nonetheless each defined liberty as the enactment of self-mastery (or self-rule). A person was free as long as their action accorded to their higher rational interests.  Positive liberty is the freedom to self-rule. (A person is free when they control their baser selves). Positive liberty is often called the liberty of the ancients.

            I bring this up for a couple of reasons.  First, these two concepts of liberty are often confused, conflated and brought up together in popular discourse as a muddled package. (This is what is currently driving the “is healthcare a right?” debate)   To fully engage with arguments it is paramount that this distinction be kept in mind. Second, with a single exception (the right to vote, as I will discuss in detail later), I believe that the term liberty is best understood as only meaning the negative sense. I find the positive sense quite dangerous actually. This is important for the principle because it correctly frames the relationship between the state, individuals and rights.  Rights are negative; I have them because I have an overarching protection from interference with my goals and plans. In other words, the Constitution doesn’t grant me any rights, the Constitution constrains the authority of the state to interfere with me.  I don’t have the right to free speech; the government doesn’t have the authority to curtail my speech. (In practice this amounts to the same thing, but in theory it’s very different) As a consequence, the framing of all political question defaults to questions about what a state can do, not what rights that individuals have.

            Let me briefly explain the efficiency point, as I think that is mostly self-evident.  Given that the chief end of government is to secure public order and punishing private actors who violate the side constraints of another individual (i.e. interfering with someone) the persecution of crime, police, and the like clearly fit in the purview of state action.  However, this doesn’t tell me anything about which one of however many law and order policies to prefer, it’s at that point that outcomes, effectiveness, cost and etc considerations can come to forefront.

One point that needs to be stressed:

I’m calling this the restrained government principle, as opposed to the limited government principle. I’m doing so, and this may simply be an issue of semantics, because in my mind you can have a very robust government that is still limited. That is, a state that is granted a lot of authority by its constitution but never violates that authority granted would be limited.  Whereas restrained government in my mind, frames the point of keeping government in check and constraining the state to legitimate purposes.

Statement of Principle #1: Ordered Liberty

As promised here is the first statement of principle. But first I want to point something out about how this list is being constructed.  The principles are going to be listed in a strict hierarchy, meaning that principle one is always given priority over every other principle, principle two is given priority over every other principles, except one, and so forth.  What this means is I believe that you cannot fulfill principle six legitimately by violating principle one.  With no further ado, Principle One is:

The basic liberties as described in the Bill of Rights, the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14^th amendment are inviolable and paramount. All governments (state and federal) may not violate these liberties legitimately under any circumstances.

Policy consequences: I am, therefore, opposed to most of the War of Terror policies that Bush enacted and Obama has continued to codify into to American law, all of these policies need to be repealed sooner rather than later. These include, but are not limited, to The US PATRIOT Act, The Military Commissions Act of 2006, The FISA Amendment Act of 2008, and the relevant sections of The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.

Governing consequences: The very first question asked about any proposed law ought to be “Does this violate any person’s basic liberties?” If the answer is no, the state has no business enacting that law. Conversely, if the action under discussion is to repeal an existing law, the question is “Does the current law violate anyone’s basic liberties?” if the answer is yes, the state is obligated to repeal the law.

Explanation:

Individuals, by virtue of having self-directed agency (autonomy), are naturally granted the ability to run their affairs as they see fit as long they do not harm anybody else.  The chief aim of government then is to allow individuals the needed social and political space to pursue their life goals and plans, without undue interference from others.  The basics liberties form the side constraints on state action.  Which is to say they curtail state power; the state cannot interfere with the private sphere created by these rights of its citizens.  I don’t think this principle is going to be very controversial among my target audience, so I can leave it at that.

Points that need to be empathized:

I am including the 2^nd Amendment under this.  Gun control laws in this country are usually ill-designed and many (if not all) of them are unconstitutional on their face. The 2^nd Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights and it’s about time that Democrats act like it is.

Second, I believe in the imposition doctrine. This doctrine holds that the Bill of Rights is applied to state governments vis-à-vis the 14^th Amendment.  This means state governments are not allowed to violate the Bill of Rights anymore than the federal government is.  However, the 9^th and 10^th Amendments, in context of this and the constitution generally, still make it clear that states are given great latitude to enact local policies as they see fit and they have powers that the federal government does not have. As such I believe in States’ Rights insofar as this notion does not conflict with individuals’ liberties. I will say more about this topic later.

Third, the 1^st Amendment’s Establishment Clause contains the concept of the Separation of Church and State.  This point will also be addressed in more detail later, but I take the Separation of Church and State to simply be the state is required to remain neutral in matters of religion, that the state may not forbid religious expression in the public sphere nor may it promote sectarian religious views.

Style and Goals

Hello again, hopefully my introduction caught the interest of a few people.  Today I want to talk about two things. The first is the style of my posting and  political organization. The second is a list of goals that I want to accomplish with this project.

Now in regards to style, I prefer direct and straight forward communication.  As such I think a lot my posts might come across as dry.  I’m afraid this can also be chalked up to my training in philosophy. Good philosophy like wine is very dry. In any case, if at times it seems like I am being didactic, please forgive me.  I want this project to be as much of a dialog as possible. This brings me to my second point, I am not looking for perfect agreement on everything policy position I take. I’m looking for people in the “ballpark” of the type of public policy I would prefer.  It should be noted that I think the quest for ideological purity is one of the reason I think Libertarians Party people can be tone deaf at times. (Again this is a constructive criticism, hardcore supporters of any ideology can fall into this trap.)   Now this raises the question of the type of public policy I prefer; over the next week or so I will be posting 12 statements of principle that will lay out the core of my political and social beliefs. Like I said they are largely classical liberal.

After that point, I will be posting analysis of each of the current crop of presidential candidates, minus Newt Gingrich (I don’t think he has a chance of being the Republican nominee) and the general blog habit of finding news stories I find interesting and commenting on them. I may very occasionally post some personal news.  If there is anything you think this blog needs feel free to let me know.

This brings me to my goals. My goals are as follows:

The DLCaucus' blog and social media:

1) Post and tweet at least once per day

2) Be interesting and entertaining enough to attract a significant number of people using these media sites

3) Develop connections to people and activists that are interested in this project.

The DLCausus:

1) Formally establish the DLCaucus as a 501(c)(4) and/or 527 PAC

2) Develop a nationwide network of people and activists willing to work with the DLCaucus

3) Have the DLCaucus play a role in the 2016 Democratic Primary by supporting Libertarian Democrats and pro-liberty policies within the Democratic Party

Yes, I am dreaming big for one person in Milwaukee, WI but good things have to start one person at a time.  Let’s make America free!

An Introduction and an Overview

Hello, I’m a Michael Miecielica. I started this blog and group after looking around the web and finding very few resources for people of my political persuasion.  In short, I’m a classical liberal (or libertarian) coming from a progressive/Democratic background and culture.  For the last few years I have been working in the LGBT community and LGBT Rights movement. Now, because of this, a lot of my connections are Democratic and progressive orientated.  That is all fine and dandy but as the presidency of Barack Obama demonstrates the current Democratic leadership isn’t even good on issues, like civil liberties, that Democrats are supposed to be good on; Let alone issues like fiscal responsibility and tax burden that Democrats have always been iffy on. So, I spent sometime looking into other political groups, associations and the like. While such groups are the Ron Paul campaigns, the Libertarian Party, The Cato Institute and the like were a lot better in a lot of ways I didn’t feel quite at home throwing my lot in with them and I didn’t quite find substantial agreement in a couple of really important ways to me.

            Furthermore, almost all the groups I ran into seemed to be focused on the Republican Party and/or third party politics.  Now, I know there are some libertarian-leaning Democrats, like Russ Feingold (D-WI) and John Lynch (D-NH), and I know that the Democratic Freedom Caucus exists. But still, almost all the pro-liberty groups are Republican Party focused and the Democratic ones don’t seem very active.

            I thought this was problematic in a couple of ways. First of all, millions of individuals are partisan Democrats and they are not going to be convinced of the principle of liberty unless someone works to convince them within the Democratic Party.  Furthermore, for the committed progressive libertarianism is just viewed as Republican under a different name.  That is not correct, obviously, but a lot of Progressives think in those terms.  What I am saying is that I see a real need for Libertarian Democrats, former Democrats, and pro-liberty independents to create a movement in the Democratic Party similar to the Ron Paul campaigns in the Republican primaries to make the Democratic Party less awful.

            On the flip side, in my various explorations of the current libertarian groups, I found a lot of tone deafness and inability to communicate with progressives.  (This is a constructive criticism; Progressives have the same problem in reverse). A lot of times I found libertarians talking about economics in terms of themselves first; that might make for a sound argument but it gets filtered out by progressives immediately.  A part of this I think is libertarians’ misplaced focus on small(er) spending matters, like humanitarian foreign aid, which yes ideally wouldn’t exist, or at least wouldn’t exist as a matter of public policy, but it sounds bad to complain about when we are wasting so much more money on more destructive things.  So I, also, saw a need to be able to convert libertarianism into progressive speak.

            This is why I started this blog and group.  I am hoping that this blog and group feeds both needs.  One the one hand, this blog is meant to be a nexus for pro-liberty people with Democratic connections and sympathies. On the other, it is meant to build common ground between libertarians and progressives in order to increase understanding between them and to work together on issues of common cause.  I hope others will join me.

Personal:

I’ve been interested in politics since I was 8 years old.  I recently graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a BA in philosophy. In my free time I enjoy reading, cinema, video games and a good debate.