Regressive New York?

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, and even Iowa all now permit “opposite marriage,” while “liberal” New York (and California, too) lag behind. An excellent article in tomorrow’s New York Times notes that as a new bill makes its way through the legislature, some New York politicians seemingly remain closed-minded. For example, Jeremy Peter’s article has a great story about a State Senator, as in this snippet:

Proponents of same-sex marriage who visited Mr. Onorato in his office in Long Island City acknowledge they have not made much progress.

“He said right off the bat that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that this is a religious issue,” said Jeremiah Frei-Pearson, 31, a child advocacy lawyer who went to the senator’s office two weeks ago accompanied by a gay man and a straight official from one of the state’s most powerful labor unions.

“I explained to him that I go to church every week and that religion teaches us not to discriminate,” Mr. Frei-Pearson said, “and that ultimately your faith should be kept separate from this decision-making process.”

He said he also tried to appeal to Mr. Onorato by explaining that he was engaged to a black woman, and that an interracial relationship like his (Mr. Frei-Pearson is white) would have been frowned upon years ago, just as many gay relationships are today.

“None of that seemed to resonate,” Mr. Frei-Pearson said.

To which I can only say: wow! Great reporting, great quotes … backwards politician!

The many perspectives (and resistance) to gay marriage in New York might be a reflection of a quality of our state that is, in an odd way, less at issue in places like Vermont, Maine, and Iowa: diversity. The same can be said of California, a similarly large and divided state. Logically, one might expect homogenous societies to enforce orthodoxy and resist (seemingly) heterodox notions like acceptance of gay marriage, let alone gays themselves—while diverse communities should be the opposite. The logic, though, may overlook the much more complicated set of connections between people’s sense security and (emotional) safety. In a funny way, places like New York may be more challenging political and social environments precisely because they toss many, many different people and perspectives together.

Not buying it? Me either, necessarily, because it starts to sound like another excuse. The truth is that this is a classic case of groundless discrimination, for which too many bad excuses have already been offered.

With the new bill in the state legislature, New York’s politicians have an opportunity to show that such discrimination has no place in a society like ours. Whether you live downstate in New York City, or upstate in Buffalo, our state needs people who want to live here, make their lives and livelihoods here, pay taxes here, raise families here, and contribute to our society—regardless of whether they love someone of the same sex. Preventing gay marriage discourages people from making their homes here, and that’s no good for anyone.

Citizens of New York: contact your State Assembly member and State Senator and make your voice heard.

Where's My Gun?

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

The gun violence in America is seemingly endless. Just this afternoon, as I sat down to write about this issue after two weeks of rumination, the news flashed yet another story of more of the same: “Police: NC nursing home shooting kills 6, hurts 3,” reports the Associated Press. I find nursing homes aggravating and dispiriting, too, but I have no plans to shoot them up.

Here is what is on my mind about this whole subject, prompted by the shooting spree in the towns of Samson and Geneva, Alabama on 11 March 2009: if the National Rifle Association (NRA) claim that an armed populace helps stop crime is so true, how did Michael McLendon manage to kill 10 people before being stopped by the police? That’s the question, and it’s just that simple. And here is some context to help consider this issue.

According to the Violence Policy Center (VPC) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2005 the “Household Gun Ownership” rate in Alabama was 57.2%, while the “Gun Death Rate” was 16.18 per 100,000. Alabama ranks 5th in the VPC’s rankings of per capita gun-related deaths (behind, in descending order, Louisiana, Alaska, Montana, and Tennessee). The VPC’s argument is simply stated: “States in the South and West with weak gun laws and high rates of gun ownership lead the nation in overall firearm death rates,” and the statistics seem to back this up.

At the same time, according to the Alabama Policy Institute's web site, “Firearms are used far more often to stop crimes than to commit them. In spite of this, anti-firearm activists insist that keeping a firearm in the home puts family members at risk, often claiming that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill a family member than an intruder.” Of course, to be fair to the Alabama Policy Institute (which thanks visitors to its web site for their “commitment to Alabama's families and Alabama's future”) they are not being super-thoughtful about their gun policy perspectives, and are instead just quoting from “Fables, Myths, and Other Tall Fairy Tales about Gun Laws, Crime, and Constitutional Rights,” by the National Rifle Association, as noted at the bottom of their page on “Gun Control Myths.” Surely the NRA would not lie. Right?

So, again: where were the guns during the Alabama shooting spree, aside from the ones being used by the murderer and, eventually, the police? If 57% of Alabama households have guns, and guns are used more often to stop crimes than to commit them, did Michael McLendon just happen to pick targets within the 43% of non-gun-owning households in Alabama? It was not like he was particularly stealthy or selective: the Reuters article reports that he was “firing at random” as he drove through town, including during an apparent stop at a service station. No one at the service station had a gun? Perhaps they just couldn’t get to it fast enough, or maybe they were too afraid, given that McLendon seemed to be shooting randomly. (That’s not blame: I know that in all likelihood I would be searching for safety in a situation like this.)

I am not blaming the victims of this terrible, terrible tragedy. They didn’t ask to be shot and killed. Among them was the wife and child of a deputy sheriff there, and that too raises further interesting questions, worthy of pursuit and pondering: what is this sheriff’s take on gun control issues? And the rest of the police in Alabama, too: do they also subscribe to the “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” perspective?

***

In accepting my own contradictions, I’m comfortable calling myself a solid libertarian who nonetheless finds some intellectual appeal in the Thaler / Sunstein approach to laws and decision-making. What does that mean in plain English? Here goes—in four parts.

Part 1. The libertarian in me supports the fundamental Second Amendment right to own guns. This is less because of the United State’s Constitution’s Second Amendment per se, and more because (as a libertarian) I do not like unnecessarily restricting people’s freedoms or blaming an object for its misuse by human idiots. (It is, to my mind, largely true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” and people have been killing each other aggressively since long before the invention of guns.) From cars to cigarettes to people who mix household cleaners containing chlorine and ammonia, we live in a dangerous world. But it’s not the fault of chlorine and ammonia that someone dumped them together.

Part 2. At the same time, the positions of the NRA are generally unsustainable; it is too simplistic by far to say there should be no restrictions on gun ownership at all, period. We agree, as a society, to regulate a broad swathe of things for the common good—from automobiles to zoos—so the idea that guns alone should be exempt from such a regulatory process is absurd.

Part 3. Part of what American society needs is a more honest and open debate about the cost to our society of gun regulation or deregulation. We have never really had a genuine national assessment of the issue—the “issue” here being the cost to our society in human life, not the regulation of guns. I don’t hold out much hope for this, just as I am not holding my breath for health care “reform” or that the Obama administration will push back on AIPAC, but it’s still a worthy goal.

Part 4. In the Thaler / Sunstein mold, we should consider moving away just from broad attempts at regulation or deregulation of guns, and towards a system that incentivizes responsible ownership and citizenship across the board—while imposing harsh penalties for those who abuse their rights.

We cannot simply eliminate guns from our society and our country; to think that we can is as simplistic as the views of the NRA. We can do a better job of trying to learn from tragedies like the one in Alabama, and do a better job of having real discussions about the impact of our choices—while pushing back on the fuzzy-headed thinking about this issue that comes from the extreme right and extreme left of our political spectrum.

E Pluribus Omnibus

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

Out of many, one piece of legislation.

One bill to slay all problems. One bill to stimulate all unstimulated areas of our economy. One bill, to tickle the fancy of those yearning for the good ol' days of the New Deal (most of whom, actuarially speaking, were not around to live through the original New Deal itself). As The Economist put it, one bill “larded with spending determined more by Democrat lawmakers’ pet projects than by the efficiency with which the economy will be boosted.”

One bill because multiple pieces of legislation—developed systematically, to address specific aspects of our economy that need help, and with all necessary due diligence and deliberation for each—would, obviously, be terrible. Genuine debate and analysis, obviously, would be a time-consuming abrogation of legislative responsibility, which would do nothing but slow down the momentum of the executive branch of government. Such an effort would be akin to voting to approve a war concocted (by the executive branch) under false pretenses. Or something like that.

***

One bill that has been passed by Congress, and which President Barack Obama again defended in his address to a joint session of Congress this past week as the first of many new measures.

I started writing this column two weeks ago. The idea came to me as my 20 month old daughter played with her little wallet and the dollar in it, and I had a chance to look again at the dollar itself in some detail. She has been folding it, wrinkling it, putting it in and taking it out of her wallet, and I thought that it was perhaps odd that we had given her an actual dollar as a toy. What does that say about its value? And what would she learn from playing with a real dollar that (at 20 months) she couldn’t get from a fake one?

At his inaugural address, President Barack Obama said "Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age." I loved that line. It was concise and eloquent, but also accurate and honest. It was representative of the person I wanted Obama to be as president.

That Obama is a person and a president whom we as a nation have not yet seen. Doling out federal dollars—as any Republican can tell you, after eight years of practice in Congress and the White House—is more or less the opposite of making hard choices. It's easy because, much like playing Monopoly, it doesn't feel like real money. Real money is what poor and middle class people lose when the GOP-led process of bank deregulation allows financial institutions to spiral out of control. Real money is what a father gives his daughter, not because it is a toy, but because—as an alert young person, learning about the world around her—she should know what it is, how to handle it, to hang on to it, and over time, understand its value. She will have to make hard choices with what to do with that dollar, so learning what it means, what kind of attachment to have to it and what its existence represents, is itself meaningful.

***

Congress and the Executive branch, as everyone knows, do not handle real money. They handle theoretical money that may (or may not) exist in the future, and that someone other than themselves will have to earn years later. If our government understood real dollars, then it would (for one thing) have started closing the absurd gap that our Social Security and Medicare systems will have, between the money coming in and the money going out. The President and Congress might have acknowledged that if it's OK to have government-managed health care programs for the elderly (and the poor), it's not really such a leap to consider creating a government-run system for the rest of us. Government might start moving more actively to draw down our troops in Iraq, and begin saving money on some of these absurd foreign adventures. Heck, an intellectually honest government would recognize the pointlessness of the so-called “War on Drugs,” and move to start taxing drug use instead of trying fruitlessly to eradicate it.

Or Congress and the Executive branch could wake up to the reality that investing billions of dollars to help people who cheerfully and greedily screwed up—while making essentially meaningless gestures in the direction of the hard working people who did not over-extend themselves as a result of greed—is unlikely either to solve many economic problems or to win over long-term voters.

Any of those things, just from that very small list, represent hard choices. They might also have served as economic stimulus components in their own right, by focusing on our long-term health and alleviating future debt or averting future disaster. But those are just a few of the hard choices that need to be made, and our nation has made none of them so far. No hard choices, on virtually any subject.

President Obama, in his address to Congress this week, again laid out a picture of the damage that has been done, and the hard choices we face. He was as elegant and as eloquent as usual when he said “Now, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that for too long we have not always met these responsibilities, as a government or as a people. I say this not to lay blame or to look backwards, but because it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.” But at some point, the continued acknowledgment of the problem needs to shift into an actual moment of making hard choices. Granted, he has been in office for only 39 days. There are many more to go. I just wish that the stimulus bill—if it is representative of Obama’s approach—was representative of more clarity and restraint, and was a leading indicator of how problems will be tackled beyond throwing money at them.

Sadly, this was not really an omnibus stimulus bill that our Congress passed and our President signed. Instead, it was more like the world's biggest birthday cake: a cake created by 535 bakers and their assistants, for themselves, by raiding everyone else's kitchen for the necessary ingredients, and on which those same bakers and their helpers subsequently gorged themselves.

If we, as a nation, are to continue on the path that E Pluribus Unum implies—if we are to continue to be a united, strong one rising from the contributions of many—then the many need to see The One start confronting that "collective failure to make hard choices." Obama needs to start living up to his words, and fast.