Month: September 2020

Equal Rights

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September 27, 2020

by Steve Stofka

Justice Ginsburg’s passing helps us focus on a principle that she fought for during her long career – equal rights. The right to life and liberty are stated plainly in the Declaration of Independence but they were not inserted in the Constitution. The Declaration is a statement of intent; the Constitution is the binding law of the land. Why were the words left out?

Within societies there is some person or governing body that confers property rights. Those rights can be temporary – the access to the Nile River granted by the Pharaoh. They can be permanent – the grant of an entire country by a Spanish king. Property rights are a foundational issue in our daily lives.

Our country was founded on the principle that some human beings were property and one human being could be granted the property right to another human being. Our Civil War was fought after the Supreme Court affirmed the property rights of slave holders in the Federal territories recently won in the war with Mexico. This was the court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision.

A governing body that grants property rights can take them away. Indian tribes learned that treaties are not contracts in white man law. For most of the 19th century, treaties were convenient shams – pretenses of principle. Whenever white people wanted gold, silver or grazing land, a treaty was “negotiable.”

Doesn’t the 5th Amendment give us a right to life and liberty? It states that no one should be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The 14th Amendment, Section 1 repeats that language, but it doesn’t grant any of us a right to those things. It says that if granted a right to those, the government should not take them away without a formal process. The Amendment permits the government to make laws that deprive us of rights.

Compare the language of the 5th Amendment with that of the 1st Amendment, which doesn’t allow the state to make any law abridging free speech.

In the 1972 Roe v. Wade case, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the state of Texas had an “interest” in protecting the “potentiality of human life,” but that a woman had a “right to privacy” inherent in the 14th Amendment (Oyez, n.d.). Justice Ginsburg faulted the court for its weak rationale. The all male Supreme could not reason that women have an equal protection under the law. No state interferes in the private relationship between a doctor and a male patient; therefore, they cannot do it with female patients. That autonomy is a “privilege” which no state may abridge, according to Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. Because of its flawed privacy rationale, a minority of people, mostly Christian groups, have chipped away at the decision.

Why did our country’s founders not specifically recognize a person’s property right to their own body? First, that would have negated the rights of slaveholders. Secondly, the state needs to take control of the bodies of men during times of war. To rephrase General Patton, it needs puppets it can throw into the cannon fire.

Just as men are fighting machines for the state in times of war, women are breeding machines for the state during their fertile years. In the 18th century when the Constitution was written, that was the case. It was assumed that more people maintained the vitality of society and the state. Ten years after the Constitution was written, economist Thomas Malthus’ raised a question that shocked Britain and caused many to shun him. What if more people were bad for society, and destabilizing to the state?

The diminutive Justice Ginsburg broke many doors slammed in her face by the legal profession. Throughout her career, she fought for the most fundamental right that any person can have – to stand equally under the law, be they man or woman. A tempered character, she was not one who rests in peace. She was a determined fighter who will rest only when this country finally acknowledges that most basic right of any human being.

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Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Oyez. (n.d.). Roe v. Wade. Retrieved September 25, 2020, from https://www.oyez.org/cases/1971/70-18

A Light Passes

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September 20, 2020

by Steve Stofka

Have we had enough yet? Almost 200,000 Americans have died from Covid, millions of Americans are out of jobs, hundreds of thousands of small family businesses have closed, millions of families are about to lose their homes, thousands of acres in western lands on fire, thousands more left homeless by Hurricane Sally and now Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. The nation wishes her two children and four grandchildren their condolences for her passing. At least half of the nation grieves for the political battle that is to come.

The day before Justice Ginsburg died, the National Constitution Center awarded her the 2020 Liberty Medal. Jeffrey Rosen, the host, spoke with two lawyers who have argued cases before the court and clerked for RBG. https://constitutioncenter.org/debate/podcasts

She was a pioneer in legal justice for human beings, regardless of the roles that society assigned them based on their sex. She helped to steer the Supreme Court to prejudicial practices against women by first encouraging her male colleagues to review practices that put men at a disadvantage.

She often wrote the opinion for the liberal justices on the court but had the respect of one of the court’s most conservative justices, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Her reasoning was sound; her principles were consistent; her loyalty to fair treatment under the law steered her through many an argument to a clear conclusion.

I have no doubt that the conservative Federalist Society already has a waiting list of Supreme Court replacements for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump to consider. Will they delay this appointment in the hopes that it will bring out more Republican voters? If Trump loses the election, McConnell can bring the appointment of a new Justice before the Senate in December or January. If Republicans lose the majority in the Senate, he will have to make the appointment in December because the new Senators take their seats on January 3rd, 2021.

As I write this on Friday night, McConnell has just announced that he will seek a quick nomination. The gloves are off. It’s about to get bloody. In further updates, Republican Senators Susan Collins and Mitt Romney have said that they don’t think a nomination is appropriate just before an election. Whether McConnell has enough votes to proceed with the nomination, some Republican Senators may want the vote anyway to show their allegiance to Trump just before the election.

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Photo by Juskteez Vu on Unsplash

The Urban Refugee Crisis

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Photo by Julie Ricard on Unsplash

September 13, 2020

by Steve Stofka

In popular urban areas, affordable housing has been a persistent problem. Housing costs can consume 50% or more of a working person’s pay. Urban residents have become refugees in their own city, living in tents on downtown sidewalks.

Homeless tent “cities” in urban areas were already a problem, and the Covid crisis has exacerbated the situation. The tent areas are a breeding ground for 19th century diseases like cholera and typhus (Gorman, 2019).

The free market has not been able to solve this problem. Wanting to maximize his return on a property investment, a developer has more incentive to build luxury units than lower cost condos or apartments. Are they greedy and rapacious? Let’s take the developer out of the equation. Imagine telling a farmer that they must dedicate part of their land to growing more affordable wheat when rye is twice the price. In front of capitol buildings in mid-west states, there would be tractor protests by farmers. So why should it be different with a developer? They have an asset, an input, and want to get the most out of that asset.

Cities have tried several solutions with poor results. Santa Monica, a destination city in California, passed a rule that 30% of new multi-family housing had to be affordable units. Residential building has come to a halt (SCAG, 2019).

The city and state of California have passed funding laws to support affordable housing, but it is expensive (Camner, 2020). In popular coastal states where taxes are already high, a proposal of affordable housing subsidies to developers arouses ugly passions.

Affordable housing is a negative externality, a cost not borne by the developer or the buyer of a upclass condo or townhome. Perhaps there should be a fee on each unit? The cost of the externality is so expensive that the high per unit fee would limit sales of new units and raise little revenue to build affordable housing.

Let’s suppose that a couple buys a new condo from a developer. The couple has paid in the 75th percentile of housing prices in that area, but they enjoy ocean views and the cultural and social amenities of the neighborhood. In front of their new condo complex, several homeless people pitch tents on the public sidewalks. The couple is outraged. For the price they have paid, they reason that they should not have to endure the sights and behaviors of the homeless. The couple complains to the developer and the city. An urban economist would understand that the couple shares some tiny responsibility for the homeless problem but they, and their fellow residents, are bearing the costs out of proportion to their responsibility.

If there were a way to cut up and distribute the homeless problem among all the residents of an area, the problem might not be so noticeable. Fortunately, we live in a society that does not dismember human beings to achieve a perfectly equitable distribution of society’s costs. There will always be what biologists call a “clustered” distribution of homeless people.

Planned refugee camps have better health conditions than tents thrown up on a sidewalk. Should a city like Santa Monica accept the clustering problem and house their homeless in urban refugee camps? The city could provide better sanitary conditions and perhaps build a clinic at the refugee camp that would relieve downtown emergency rooms of attending to the many medical needs of the homeless.

In want of a perfect solution, our society has created an ever worsening problem. If the homeless can abide living clustered together with little privacy and no sanitation on a public sidewalk, then they would certainly abide a tented refugee camp with a bit more order, sanitation and medical facilities nearby.

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Notes:

Camner, L. (2020, February 10). Santa Monica’s affordable housing policies have failed -. Retrieved September 11, 2020, from https://www.smdp.com/housing-policies-have-failed/185877

Gorman, A. (2019, March 11). Medieval Diseases Are Infecting California’s Homeless. Retrieved September 11, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/typhus-tuberculosis-medieval-diseases-spreading-homeless/584380/

Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). (2019). Profile of the City of Santa Monica, p. 12. Retrieved from https://www.scag.ca.gov/Documents/SantaMonica.pdf

Bridge the Gap?

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Photo by Ragnar Vorel on Unsplash

September 6, 2020

by Steve Stofka

What issues are your priorities this election? For more than thirty years Pew Research has surveyed people about their priorities. For the first time in 2019 a majority of 765 respondents answered that there is a “great deal” of difference in where each party stands, up from 25% in 1987 (Pew Research, 2020). I’ve included the full list at the end.

In January 2019, soon after the midterm elections Pew surveyed 1500 adults (Jones, 2020). I don’t know why the abortion/free choice debate is not on the issue list since that single issue may decide some voters. I’m particularly interested in the large gaps in those priorities among those who lean Democrat or Republican. I’ll start with gaps of 25%. For instance, terrorism is a concern for 80% of Republicans but only 55% of Democrats. Other Republican priorities are Immigration, the Military and Crime.

As you can see, these are fear issues. Should a person in a town of 2000 be more concerned about terrorism than a resident of NYC? Of course not, but it is what it is. People vote out of fear and hope, but fear probably wins the wrestling match, especially among Republican voters who are not hopey, changey voters, as former VP candidate Sarah Palin noted (Gonyea, 2010).

The issue of crime illustrates the conflicting complexities of these issues. It is a 60% priority for Republicans, who are in suburban and rural areas where there is less crime, and a 40% priority for Democrats, who are in dense urban areas where there is a higher incidence of crime. Because crime is much lower than in past decades, this issue has slipped as a priority for Democrats (FBI, n.d.).  

Two of the highest Democrat priorites – Cimate Change and the Environment – have a huge gap of 50% with Republican voters. Democrat politicians have not been able to make these two fear issues personal for Republicans. If they could, they would draw more voters to their side on this issue. 25% gaps exist on issues of the Poor and Needy, Health Care, Education and Race Relations. Rural Republican voters are more likely to be poor and needy, but this is not a fear issue for them (USDA, n.d.).

What strategy would a politician or political consultant advise? Run toward the base? If so, one would emphasize these issues where there are large gaps between the two primary factions in this country. The President has largely adopted this strategy. Republican voters are more inclined to fall in line and the President is relying on this party loyalty even if they don’t like him personally.

Some issues where there is a smaller gap between factions are the economy, the budget deficit, jobs, global trade, drug addiction, transportation, Social Security and Medicare.

A politician reaching out to voters on the fence in this election would focus on these issues. Joe Biden hits the jobs theme, the budget deficit, and protecting Social Security and Medicare to appeal to voters who have had their fill of the President’s divisiveness.

In the coming two months, candidates may adjust their strategies. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton may not have addressed these shared concerns as well and it cost her the election.  Governing comes after winning an election. In politics, winning is packaging the concerns and identities of voters into an appealing, if not attractive, box that will get them to come out and vote.

What are your priorities this election season? Are you a multi-issue voter, a single issue voter, a party voter regardless of the issues? Here’s the Pew survey list of 18 issues: terrorism, immigration, military, crime, climate change, environment, poor and needy, race relations, health care, education, economy, Social Security, Medicare, jobs, drug addiction, transportation, global trade, and the budget deficit.

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Notes:

FBI. (n.d.). Crime rates in the United States, 2008 – 2018. Retrieved September 05, 2020, from https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/national/united-states/crime

Gonyea, D. (2010, February 07). ‘How’s That Hopey, Changey Stuff?’ Palin Asks. Retrieved September 05, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123462728

Jones, B. (2020, August 26). Republicans and Democrats have grown further apart on what the nation’s top priorities should be. Retrieved September 05, 2020, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/05/republicans-and-democrats-have-grown-further-apart-on-what-the-nations-top-priorities-should-be/

Pew Research Center. (2020, August 21). Public’s 2019 Priorities: Economy, Health Care, Education and Security All Near Top of List. Retrieved September 05, 2020, from https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/01/24/publics-2019-priorities-economy-health-care-education-and-security-all-near-top-of-list/

U.S.D.A. (n.d.). Rural Poverty & Well-Being. Retrieved September 05, 2020, from https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-poverty-well-being/