Rob McKenna for Governor ?!?!

My friend Rob McKenna is running for governor of Washington State. He is presently attorney general.

Rob was student body president at the University of Washington when I was an undergrad there, and I got to know him (as I recall), through my friend Ken Troske, who knew him from high school. The three of us all ended up at the University of Chicago for graduate school, with Ken and me in economics and Rob in the law school. Indeed, in the fall of 2005, five of us - Rob and Ken were married then but I was not - had a fine adventure when we drove together, in two cars, from Seattle to Chicago, stopping along the way to see Mount Rushmore.

Make no mistake, Rob is a politician through and through, but conditional on that, he is a good guy. Maybe even unconditional on that. :)

The idea that he is some sort of extreme right-winger, put forth by this democrat website, is utterly ridiculous. Indeed, based on the discussions we had back in the day, I was always a bit surprised that he ended up as a Republican. My take was always that he was smart, organized, ambitious and much more a manager and a technocrat than an ideologue.

I don't endorse politicians on the blog, but I wish Rob the best of luck in his campaign.

Hat tip: Ken Troske

Life in the think tank world

Strobe Talbot in the Onion on his lost day.

Hat tip: Ken Troske

Legislative incompetence

The Nation (!) reports on truly astounding incompetence on the part of Congress in the writing of the tax provisions for alternative fuel use in the 2005 transportation bill. The result is distortions in the paper market and pointless, non-trivial transfers to some large paper companies.

The Nation, of course, blames not the legislature, but rather the companies:

Whether or not Congress gets around to turning off the spigot, the episode is a useful reminder of the persistently ingenious ways the private sector can exploit even well-intentioned legislation.

It is also a reminder that it is useful to think hard about legislation before passing it. The companies job is to maximize profits within the law, not to cut the legislature a break when it does something stupid.

And how come it has taken this long to fix? Yikes.

Hat tip: marginal revolution

Evidence and Policy

I recently did a review of an evaluation funded by the US Department of Labor for the folks at the Center for Evidence-Based Policy. My sense is that they are doing very good work. Their existence and occasional success indicates that there is a constituency among both of the major parties for spending money on policies with a strong evidentiary base and not spending money on things that do not have a strong evidentiary base.

It is worth keeping in mind that the problem is not just corruption in either the small sense that we usually think of it or the large sense of interest groups voting themselves rents at the expense of the public at large. Ignorance also plays an important role in the bad tasting product that emerges from the beltway sausage factory.

On libertarian feminism (and broader related issues)

I had a discussion with Jim Heckman many years ago in which he described a disagreement he had had with Richard Epstein at Chicago about separating out state oppression of blacks from what might be called social oppression of blacks. In the post-bellum south, he had argued, the two were largely one in the same and thus both difficult to separate and perhaps also not that useful to separate.

Along those lines, I think it is a narrow view indeed to assume that the best society can be obtained simply by figuring out how to restrain the state to the provision of public goods combined with thoughtful redistribution. Surely this would help, but it would not be enough. A society with such a modest state could still be a distinctly illiberal state, depending on what was happening with its culture. Social actions can be oppressive just like the over-armed agents of the state; that this oppression takes somewhat different forms makes it no less real. This, to me, is part of the appeal of thinking of myself as a classical liberal rather than a libertarian, as classical liberal thought extends its purview well beyond just questions of governmental size and scope.

I was reminded of this line of thinking by reading this piece by Reason's Kerry Howley on the relationship between libertarianism and feminism. Here's a taste:

Libertarians spend an enormous amount of time telling people that they are, in fact, oppressed. We don’t call it “consciousness raising” when we explain why you ought to be able to shoot up while selling your kidney to a sex worker, but that’s what it is.

Hat tip: Julian Sanchez