Monarch High, Monarchy, Bongs, & the Rule of Law

The Daily Camera asks its editorial advisory board about the controversy at Monarch High School in Colorado:

A controversy over school rules, leadership and parenting erupted at Monarch High after the Boulder Valley school board decision to reinstate a student [Dylan Quick] who had been removed from the student council. The board voted 5-2 to reverse a decision by the principal and supported by the superintendent to remove a senior as head boy of the Louisville school, after he had been caught with marijuana paraphernalia at the school. The student council constitution states that a head boy can’t be removed without first being impeached by the council, and the boy’s parents, including his father — the Adams County District Attorney — had complained that the rules were not followed. What do you think?

My response:

“Monarch High is not a monarchy!” protesters could have chanted. By superseding the Student Council Constitution, the principal resembles a monarch high on power. “The King is above the law,” England’s King James I proclaimed in 1598.

Carlos Gonzalez, MVP voting, & Ken Buck’s spoilers

Has the Rockies’ Carlos Gonzalez won the National League MVP award?  The public doesn’t know yet, but we know how the voting works. Baseball writers don’t vote for one player. Instead, they rank their top ten, with higher ranked votes worth more points than lower ranked votes.  The player who accumulates the most points wins.

This version of preference voting reflects the electorate’s preferences better than our government elections do. If your favorite candidate is not a top contender, voting for him might make him a “spoiler” and help put your least favorite candidate in office. Instead of supporting your favorite candidate, you may resign yourself to voting for the proverbial “lesser of two evil” top contenders.

Newly-elected Secretary of State Scott Gessler endorses a solution: range voting. It’s like preference voting, but you can award each candidate any number of points within a specified range.  A simple version of range voting called “approval voting.” Vote for as many candidates as you like. The one with the most votes wins.  In this year’s election, if you preferred the Libertarian most and Michael Bennet least, you could vote for the Libertarian, but also for Ken Buck to help defeat Bennet. Some Buck supporters blame non-leftist candidates for spoiling a Buck victory. Instead, they should blame elected Republicans for supporting our crude voting system that makes spoilers possible.

“The state legislature should allow home rule municipalities and counties to develop voting methods that meet their needs, including approval voting and range voting,” says Gessler’s website. Boulder’s political parties should consider collaborating to bring one of these methods to Boulder County.

A version of this article was printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on November 6 2010.

Thanks to Dale Sheldon-Hess for pointing out the difference between range voting and preference voting.  I was operating within a word limit and wrongly figured that the MVP-style voting was a type of range voting.

Daily Camera reports misleading statistics on Boulder County incomes

Last week the Daily Camera reported that median Boulder County household incomes had dropped “nearly 12 percent” since 1999.  But the Camera did not mention the less alarming news — that per capita incomes have increased over the same time period by 1.5 percent, adjusting for inflation.  This is according to two reports by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: “Personal Income for Metropolitan Areas for 2009” and “Local Area Personal Income , 1998-2000.”

This sounds strange, but household income figures can mislead. Higher per capita income can decrease household income.  As economist Thomas Sowell notes, “Increased real income per person enables more people to live in their own separate dwelling units, instead of with parents, roommates, or strangers in a rooming house.”

Per capita income statistics aren’t perfect, either. The city or county could pass more zoning laws that inflate housing prices. These exclude poor people, and hence per capita income increases.

If you want to more accurately compare 1999 with 2009 incomes, look at income mobility, which compares the same flesh-and-blood people each time. For example, the Tax Foundation reports that “nearly 60 percent of households in the bottom income quintile in 1999 were in a higher quintile in 2007.”

But income mobility doesn’t tell the whole story either, as it neglects the value of employee benefits. “Health insurance costs relative to payroll increased 34 percent between 1996 and 2005,” write economists from the RAND Corporation.

A version of this article was printed in the Daily Camera on October 2, 2010.

Thanks to Linda Gorman for the link to the RAND study.

For further reading, I recommend Thomas Sowell’s article “Income Confusion.” He discusses the issue in dept, including income inequality, in his book Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Tea Parties, GOP primaries, and elections

The Daily Camera printed my response to the following question in its September 18 edition:

Looking to fall, the Tea Party — though loosely defined and with no official structure or leadership — will play a major role in the November elections, having sealed up several important primaries. But some Democrats have chosen to see Tea Party victories as their own, saying that the Republican Party will be the one that suffers as the newly excited, more conservative base siphons votes from the establishment. What do you think?

My response:

Who cares if elections hurt political parties? What matters is how well winning candidates represent voters’ preferences.  But Democrats and Republicans cooperate to support our lousy voting system at our expense. Known as “simple plurality voting,” it shields the two major parties from third-party competition. Like all government barriers to competition, this degrades product quality. In elections, the degraded products are the candidates.

In our elections the winning candidate need only be the proverbial “lesser of two evils.” Because of vote-splitting, he need not best represent the preferences of the voters. For example, even if more voters prefer either Dan Maes or Tom Tancredo to John Hickenlooper, Hickenlooper’s victory is ensured if the other two split the vote.

The “Tea Party victories” in primaries also show problems with simple plurality voting. Voters who prefer either the “Tea Party candidate” or the establishment Republican may combine to exceed those who prefer the Democrat. But the Democrat need only defeat the Tea Party candidate.

Here’s a simple way to run elections that both avoids these problems and chooses candidates that better represent voters. First, repeal or liberalize ballot access restrictions. Government should not keep candidates off ballots. Second, use “approval voting,” which means you can vote for as many candidates as you want. Whoever gets the most votes wins.

For example, you could vote for both Tancredo and Maes. No spoiler effect. No vote splitting. No in-fighting.  And compared to instant runoff voting, approval voting is simpler and does not punish popular second-choice candidates.

* * *

There’s some debate about which is system is better: approval voting or instant-runoff voting (IRV).  Last month I endorsed instant runoff, thinking that the range voting was the only better, but prohibitively complicated, alternative. But approval voting is the simplest form of range voting: you give a candidate either a “1″ or “0″ instead of more discretized range, e.g., 1, 2, or 3.

A couple of articles about IRV vs. approval voting are:

Approval Voting vs. Instant Runoff Voting, FairVote.org (groups favors IRV)
Range and approval voting vs. IRV, by “Maikeru,” which links to an article at RangeVoting.org about how instant-runoff can promote 2-party domination.

I haven’t read this book, but have heard good things about it: Gaming the Vote:  Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It), by William Poundstone.

Flood protection: If it’s not your business, it’s none of your business

From the Daily Camera:

The idea [from City of Boulder officials] is that a new set of codes would apply to new construction and substantial remodels of buildings that are designated as “critical facilities.” Under the city’s definition, those buildings include hospitals, sewage treatment plants, gas stations, nursing homes, police and fire stations, emergency shelters, urgent care centers, schools, day care centers, communications facilities and businesses that store or use hazardous waste.

The Daily Camera solicited its editorial advisory board to submit their views on this.  Mine was printed on August 28:

If it’s not your business, then it’s none of your business. Government has no right to mandate how private property owners protect against floods — let alone commandeer their buildings during emergencies. The proper response to a busybody in your life is “This is private and none of your business.”  The same goes for private properties that the city considers “critical facilities.” These include gas stations, nursing homes, day care and urgent care centers, and private schools and hospitals.

Property owners have the right and responsibility to insure against risk according to their own best judgment. In a free-market, short-sighted owners would pay for lax precautions through repairs, lost revenue, higher insurance premiums, and possibly lawsuits if hazardous materials are involved.

But government sabotages responsible ownership with tax-funded disaster assistance and the monopolistic National Flood Insurance Program. As a Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis discusses, the NFIP has little incentive to accurately asses flood risks. Over several years the NFIP “paid out $806,591 for repeated storm damage to a suburban Houston home that was valued at $114,480,” reported the Houston Chronicle.

Private flood insurers have beneficially balanced incentives. Selling policies that require excessive safety measures risks losing customers to competitors. But lax measures result in paying many costly claims.

Government mandates cannot achieve this balance. Boulder officials should consider the risks of mandates that significantly increase construction and remodeling costs. These can obstruct renovations and new construction, which can result in lost jobs, tax revenue, or continued use of already flood-prone buildings.

# # #

Further reading:

Flawed voting system creates Maes & Tancredo conflict

Colorado’s 2010 gubernatorial race reveals a major flaw in our plurality-based elections: vote splitting. It’s well-known that Dan Maes and Tom Tancredo will split the Republican vote. This makes it much easier for Democrat John Hickenlooper to win compared to if one candidate withdrew. In an August 11 Rasmussen poll, the combined Maes/Tancredo votes exceeded Hickenlooper votes by 6 percentage points. Maes and Tancredo are similar enough candidates that if either withdraws, the other may gain enough votes to win.

Election rules should not create such conflict, or the related “spoiler effect” where voting for your favorite candidate helps your least favorite candidate win. Elections need not bind voters this way.

For example, a few U.S. cities use instant runoff voting, where to vote is to rank candidates according to your preference. Say the only candidates are Maes, Tancredo, and Hickenlooper, and you rank them in that order. If Dan Maes gets the least total first-choice votes, then he’s eliminated, and your vote is transferred to your next choice, Tancredo. In the runoff only Tancredo and Hickenlooper remain, and whoever has the most votes wins.

Critics of instant runoff voting point to possibly unfair results for popular second-choice candidates, or counter-intuitive results of Burlington Vermont’s recent mayoral election. But even with these potential drawbacks, instant runoff voting is preferable to today’s plurality voting. It remedies vote splitting, spoiler effects, and “wasted vote” concerns. More nuanced voting systems may improve upon instant runoff voting, but added complexity could limit their appeal.

This view on Colorado politics was originally printed in the Daily Camera (Boulder) on August 14 2010.

More resources on how the Democrats and Republicans shut out competition from third-party candidates:

• Book:  Not Invited to the Party: How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold, by James T. Bennett.
• The Cato Institute had an event on this last year. Watch or listen to it. Here’s a summary from the Cato site:

Free markets have few barriers to entry. Individuals and firms can offer new products or services to consumers, thereby fostering competition and choice. American elections, in contrast, are dominated by two parties. Not Invited to the Party synthesizes political science, economics, and history to demonstrate how the two-party system is the artificial creation of a network of laws, restrictions, and subsidies that favor the Democrats and Republicans and cripple potential challengers, depriving voters of truly vigorous political debate. Consequently, Americans are deprived of choices on election day and arguably, deprived of effective and accurate representation in Congress and the presidency.

City of Boulder should consider outsourcing, privatizing services

Background from the Daily Camera:

Boulder City Manager Jane Brautigam has been working this year to move to a “priority-based” budget, in which the things most important to the community are first in line for funding.

My response, published in the Camera:

The Boulder City Council should consider saving money the way private organizations often do: by outsourcing some of its operations to private firms. For-profit and non-profit firms that compete for government contracts have incentive to provide low-cost quality services. A firm won’t get a contract if its bid is too high, and its contract won’t be renewed if it does a lousy job. Typical savings from privatization are between five and twenty percent, reports the Reason Foundation.

The towns of Roswell and Sandy Springs, Georgia each have around 90,000 residents. But Sandy Springs’ annual budget is around $300 less per person. Why? Sandy Springs has outsourced many of its services to private-sector firms. Unlike surrounding cities with budget deficits, Sandy Springs has a surplus.

Outsourcing some Public Works services could be worthwhile. Consider Centennial, CO. In 2008 Centennial signed a five-year agreement with a private firm to “manage all public works functions for the city.” This includes “traffic engineering and operations, permit processing, inspections, administrative services, and street and roadside maintenance, including snow removal.”

Also examine Parks and Recreation. Consider outsourcing their operation to private firms.  Such privatization efforts have yielded 20% cost-savings. Or better yet, could the City raise money by leasing its facilities – rec centers, fields, pools, and golf course – to private organizations to manage them?

Or how about increasing user fees for Parks and Recreation programs? Don’t some programs compete with private firms, and make taxpayers subsidize other people’s leisure activities? This is both costly and unfair.

This was originally printed in the Daily Camera on July 31.

A couple of Daily Camera articles about this:

• Boulder’s low priorities for 2011 budget include SWAT team, EMT training
• Boulder city manager defends ranking public services

And the Priority Based Budget Memo dated July 27 by the City Manager and others. This includes one method by which they would prioritize city services.

End Boulder’s unnatural monopoly in electricity & natural gas service

Governments should not grant monopolies, but the Boulder City Council would by renewing Xcel’s franchise. Xcel would remain “the community’s sole provider for electrical and natural gas service,” says the City’s website. Xcel should do business without government protection from competition.  Competitors should be free to contract with land owners to run wire and gas lines, and sell their products to interested customers.

Some advocate another form of unnatural monopoly -  municipalization -  where government owns the electric utility. Supporters claim that “munis” have lower prices than franchised investor-owned utilities like Xcel. But this presents a false alternative between two types of government-created monopolies. Government should stick to its proper role: enforcing laws that protect individual rights. Here, this means repealing political controls that inhibit free-markets in electrical and natural gas service.

Others advocate “community choice aggregation.” This sounds like mandatory open access, which Texas has — Google “Texas  electricity shopping.” Mandatory open access involves forced competition that violates grid owners’ property rights: grid owners must sell grid access to competing power producers at contrived prices.

Maybe government-enforced competition is preferable to a government-enforced monopoly. But why settle for this?  Electricity is more a government-created monopoly than a “natural” one. Though state and federal controls inhibit competition, utilities compete for customers in about 10 U.S. towns. Such competition was more common before governments imposed regulations on them, as documented in “Electric Avenues,” published by the Cato Institute. Since the electric utilities themselves lobbied for these regulations, ask yourself who has benefited.

This was originally printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on July 17 2010.

More references on free-markets in electricity generation and distribution:

• Give Consumers Choice on Utilities, Vernon Smith and Lynne Kiesling at Reason.org.
• “Electricity Policy,” Chapter 44, Cato Handbook on Policy, 6th Edition, (2005).
• Clyde Wayne Crews, “Electric utility reform: The free market alternative to mandatory open access”, The Electricity Journal, Volume 10, Issue 10, December 1997, p. 32-43 [pdf][html at CEI.org]
• Electric Choices, Deregulation and the Future of Electric Power, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. (associated with the Independent Institute.)
• Raymond C. Niles, Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid, The Objective Standard, Summer 2008.

Image via OpenClipArt.

CU campus concealed-carry & right to self-defense

Banning seat belts in cars would be immoral. Banning guns deserves equal condemnation.  Self-defense is a fundamental human right – not granted by governments, but recognized by just law. Gun bans deny peaceful people an effective means of self-defense against violent criminals, who ignore gun bans. Just as someone who disables seat belts shares responsibility for the resulting traffic fatalities, gun ban supporters are partially responsible for victims of violent crimes.

The issue at CU is whether people with concealed-carry handgun permits can be armed on campus.  Armed with baseless prejudice against permit holders, supporters of campus gun bans imagine hypothetical horrors that might result from allowing it. But none of these have occurred on campuses, like CSU, that have allowed concealed-carry. Actual horrors — mass school shootings — have occurred only on so-called “gun-free” campuses.

Violent criminals seek unarmed victims, as Dave Kopel documents in his law review article, “Pretend ‘Gun-free’ School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction.” A “gun free” campus invites rapists and murderers: “Commit your crimes here – your victims won’t shoot you!”

“Dial 911 and die,” warns Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Police typically cannot respond in time to stop shootings, and have no legal obligation to protect us. Students owe their lives to heroic civilians such as Joel Myrick, Mikael Gross, and Tracey Bridges, who stopped school shootings with guns they retrieved from their cars.

Gun bans disarm such potential heroes and invite rapists, gay-bashers, and murderers to prey on defenseless victims.

The above was printed in the July 3 Daily Camera (Boulder, CO).

Other gun control resources:

• GunCite
• Is there a right to own a gun?, by Mike Huemer
• Dave Kopel
• ConcealedCampus.org’s rebuttal of common arguments against concealed-carry on campus

(Graphic courtesy of Oleg Volk and A-Human-Right.com.)

To lower college costs, eliminate tax-funded tuition subsidies

Last week Governor Ritter signed a bill that allows Colorado’s tax-funded universities to raise their tuition.  In response, “some Colorado students will see increased financial aid to offset the higher tuition, ” InDenverTimes reports.

Surely some parents are rightly concerned with fast-rising tuition costs.  But Capping college tuition would either degrade a school’s quality or reduce scholarships students receive. For lower tuition prices, eliminate tax-funded tuition subsidies and financial aid. Employers and prospective students would benefit.

Government-subsidized student loans and grants increase tuition prices. When government subsidizes the cost of education, students pay less, so more people want to buy what colleges sell. Colleges respond by increasing tuition and fees. This isn’t just theory.  Economist Gary Wolfram’s research documents empirical evidence that backs it up.

College subsidies hurt both students and employers. College isn’t for everyone, but tuition subsidies create the illusion that it is. As career counselor Marty Nemko summarizes, “College students with weak high school records usually drop out, having learned little, and with devastated self-esteem, a mountain of debt, and a job they could have obtained without college.” Employers hurt because these students could have spent their college years gaining valuable skills through, for example, an apprenticeship program or on-the-job training.

Absent harmful tax-funded college subsidies, private alternatives would replace them. These would include the familiar student loans and scholarships. An intriguing alternative would be “human capital contracts,” where in exchange for investors’ paying their college expenses, students repay them a percentage of their future earnings over a specified time.

Whatever the alternatives, it’s immoral for politicians to confiscate our earnings to distort the labor market and meddle in people’s lives. Young adults have the right to pursue their dreams and careers according to their own judgment, rather than the schemes of politicians.

A version of this article was published on-line in the Daily Camera on June 12, 2010.