In a not-particularly-surprising move, Arizona passed a very strict law giving police broad powers to crack down on illegal immigration. Equally unsurprising is the backlash from those who worry that rights will get trampled in the enforcement of this law. The biggest complaint is against the provision allowing police to stop anyone they suspect of being here illegally and have them prove that they are legal residents.

I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that such authority would never be abused. More disturbingly to me, 60% of people favor this law despite the fact that 58% of people in the same poll believe that the rights of some citizens will be infringed upon by the enforcement of this law. If we assume that all 40% of people who do not favor this law are among the 58% who fear the rights of citizens will be infringed then there is almost 1 in 5 who is willing to infringe on the basic rights of citizens in order to enforce our essentially arbitrary immigration laws.

My own position on immigration is the same as it was nearly three years ago – we’re asking the wrong questions and until we take the time to decide what we believe about the value of immigration for our nation we will never be able to write and enforce coherant laws relating to immigration.

My more conservative friends might wish to blackball me for saying it, but I think the first thing we need to do about the immigration issue is abandon any pretense that we are going to catch all the illegal aliens and send them home. If they are doing nothing except building our country throught their own honest labor then I think we are wasting our time trying to round them up and that is completely unacceptable if it also includes infringing upon the rights of citizens who might be mistaken for illegal immigrants.

On the other hand my few liberal friends will undoubtedly take umbrage with my position that immigration status should be a secondary offence, like seat belt laws (or like seat belt laws used to be in some places). A person should not be stopped simply on suspicion of being illegal but if they are stopped for any other reason they may be required to prove their legal status. Anyone who cannot prove their legal citizenship should be deported for any but the most minor of offenses. Those without a valid and current visa should be deported for any offense.

When minors are picked up for any offense their parents may be required to prove their legal status. Unless one parent was a citizen prior to the child’s birth or both parents are citizens currently, the child should be deported with (or to) any non-citizen parent.

Along with such laws, we should make an easy to get “Citizenship Visa” for those who desire to become citizens. The visa would expire after a set time sufficient to become a citizen and they would be deported if they did not become a citizen within the allotted timeframe. Those who left promptly when the visa expired would be able to apply for another such visa five (or possibly ten) years later while those who overstayed their visa would be denied future opportunities for such visas.

And by the way, the military should not accept anyone who was not a citizen or a holder of a citizenship visa.

There seems to be some confusion in the public mind about the purpose and nature of caucus meetings. For example Thomas Wright, chairman of the Salt Lake County Republican Party, is quoted in this article on KSL.com saying:

{the candidates have been busy recruiting people to show and get elected at those meetings.}

“That’s why it’s more important than ever for the everyday citizen who hasn’t been recruited by a candidate to go to their caucus meeting and run to be a delegate. If they allow the candidates to recruit and get their people elected as delegates, then ultimately the voice of that neighborhood has been taken away.”

This statement implies that those who have done their research before the caucus meeting and settled on a candidate are not “everyday citizens.” I freely admit my own reservations with choosing candidates who are focused only on one of the races they will be expected to vote on, but simply because a person has already chosen their senate candidate does not mean that they are not everyday citizens in their neighborhoods.

Another comment I heard directly contradicted the quote above and belied a complete misunderstanding of the purpose and function of representative government. One person stated that the caucus meetings were a failure because so many of the state delegates who were elected were not already committed to any senate candidate.

I would consider it a good attribute in a state delegate that they were already aware and engaged in a major race such as our senate race this year. That indicates a level of preparation that should make them more prepared to cast informed votes. On the other hand, the purpose of the caucus meeting is to choose delegates whose judgement the people of the precinct trust who will be prepared and informed in time to cast a vote at the convention, not to choose delegates who are necessarily already committed to one candidate without the extra weeks of close investigation to make their decision. What would such a delegate do if the race were to change because of their candidate getting out of the race – could their neighbors trust their secondary choice?

A proper understanding of the meetings highlights the underlying problems that we must solve to make any political system work. Over the weekend my father-in-law expressed his wish for a primary system rather than a caucus system. He asked why he could not have a chance to vote on all the candidates. I asked him why he could not vote on every piece of legislation that came before the state legislature or Congress. The answer is that not all people have the ability to get informed in the time available which is why we choose representatives at various levels.

The idea of representative government is that we choose people we trust to take the time and exercise their judgement in making decisions that we are not always able to be fully informed about. Of course those representatives should not ignore those they represent and should work to help their constituents become informed as much as possible but their job is not simply to parrot the will of the majority.

My father-in-law then exposed the fundamental problem when he confessed that after seven years in his neighborhood he still did not feel that he could trust the judgement of any of the candidates for state delegate from his precinct. That tells me that the community is too loose, either politically or generally, if seven years is not enough time to find others in your neighborhood whose judgement you trust in such matters. If you can’t trust anyone in your neighborhood how can you hope to trust any of the senate candidates who are not even that close to you and who will be making even more complex and binding decisions than who to put on the ballot?

I woke up this morning incredibly frustrated. The fact that I am not a state delegate as I had hoped to be is a surprisingly small part of the reason for my frustration. The majority of my frustration is with the way the caucus meeting was held and conducted. I’ll skip the details for today but if you want to get an idea read Tyler Riggs’ caucus experience – it’s remarkably similar to mine.

If you had asked me yesterday I would have told you that professional or career politicians were at the root of our political problems at all levels of government. As of this morning I’m convinced that political novices are either aiding and abetting them or else giving them a run for their money regarding how much damage they can do to the cause of good government.

As much as I love becoming informed and discussing political issues, the experience from last night had me briefly flirting with the idea that I might abandon the field and leave the mess to some other sucker. Instead I got up this morning (because I could not go back to sleep) while my county party leaders were almost certainly still awake and trying to record the information (such as the names of attendees) from the caucuses. As I wrestled with my frustration I determined that I would not let this pass. Starting today I will pursue a crusade for freedom in which we will reform the way such grassroots participation as precinct caucus meetings take place. We will turn them into events that people in the community are comfortable attending and make politics a subject of widespread public discussion as it should be rather than being, with religion, one of the taboo subjects that are not discussed in polite company.

I am under no illusion that this will be easy but I will start with the Bountiful 18 precinct. I will start today and within two years, by the time of the 2012 caucuses, the harried and frantic atmosphere will be replaced with one of thoughtful and spirited, but civil debate conducted in an efficient and trustworthy manner.

Join me in my quest or start your own quest in your own precinct. I’ll be documenting my efforts, ideas, successes, and failures here.

Out of respect for the seriousness of this situation and the honor that should prevail within the elective body this should have been handled somwhere other than the floor of the house. Regardless of where the public announcement was made it should not have been followed with applause for any reason. (I might make an exception if he had chosen to announce his resignation in the same prepared statement.) I’m not saying that his colleagues should have publicly castigated him when he made the announcement but there was nothing to applaud in his admission of shameful past actions.

I believe that anyone who participated in that inappropriate applause should publicly explain their participation. Anyone who does not do so in the next few days should face at least a token opposition in the primaries by an opponent who will demand an explanation of that action. There are only two possible explanations: “I was foolishly caught up in the crowd” or “I was coerced to join in the applause.” Either reason should be publicly acknowledged.

I questioned my own representative relative to what happened and her explanation was in line with “it was a reaction to very surprising news.” In her own words she said:

At that time, his statement was so out of context for what we were expecting to hear . . . My personal reaction at that initial moment of hearing the 2 minute statement was thinking that while his political career was most likely over, 1) that the forthright nature of the confession was admirable and courageous, 2) the work he had done as a legislator was effective . . . and 3) he had been a real support to me on several tough issues this session. Those 3 thoughts, combined with the fact that in the House we have a propensity to stand and clap for everything, led to that reaction from all of us. Also, when Speaker Clark finished his statement it was an invitation to stand and support our colleague. There was no condoning or justification or excusing the behavior included in the statement, however.

Now, understand, the standing/clapping is a very different issue than condoning the initial behavior . . .

However, I can see how inappropriate the clapping was and the message that it sends to the public. It is confusing and misleading at best and ultimately was the wrong reaction to a wrong venue for a significant statement such as this. (From private email correspondence—used with permission.)

I consider that to be a reasonable explanation especially in light of a statement she made later that as more information has become available she is very disturbed by the behavior.

I think it is as important for the public to be conscious of how much more we know now than was public when his statement was read as it is for public officials (now and in the future) to recognize that a very measured public response is always in order (whether in drafting laws or in supporting a colleague) because the public will still see their initial response after more information is available.

Jane Hamsher wrote about the 11 Dimensional Chess approach to health care legislation that the Obama administration tried. That sent me back to some earlier thoughts I had shared about how we visualize the political spectrum. The simplest way to view things is one dimensional. Like the opening image here it breaks down into a right/left, red/blue, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat, or another single-axis spectrum. Many people recognize how inadequate such a simplified view is and various people (including myself) have sought to devise two-dimensional representations of the political landscape.

Of the many maps out there I think the easiest to comprehend is this from the Worlds Smallest Political Quiz:

With an axis measuring personal freedom issues and an axis measuring economic freedom issues it is not difficult to grasp the lay of the land according to this graph. Unfortunately this two dimensional representation, like all other two-dimensional representations, falls short of accurately describing reality.

I don’t know how many distinct axis may usefully divide the political landscape to understand the many varied perspectives that play into our national political debate but I have identified at least one more axis besides the personal and economic freedom axis – there is the power axis that deserves to be considered. How much political power a person has seems to have a distinct influence on their political outlook. Unlike the personal and economic outlook axis, which are virtually independent of each other, the power axis tends to insert some biases into people. The more political power a person attains the more likely they are to gravitate towards some degree of Big Government statism. I’m not sure which is the cause and which is the effect (I suspect they are simply intertwined) but there definitely seems to be a correlation between rising power and rising acceptance of statism. (I wish I could come up with a visual representation for this.)

While it is important for us to recognize that third dimension, perhaps another important insight can be gained from simply accepting the existence of any new axis – our perspective can be deceptive as to the view of others. From whatever your vantage point in the political universe your understanding of other viewpoints will be greatly enhanced anytime you are able to acquire a description of the other viewpoint from a vantage point that is not substantially the same as your own. Without that different perspective your view is reduced to two dimensions or less and you may fail to discern where others differ in their perspectives, or you may fail to recognize the significance when two people (perhaps as different as Ms. Hamsher and myself) agree on a particular point.

Back in October I wrote about the dangers of a crisis mentality and tried to show that the abuse of crisis was not a one-party trait. I see that Will Wilkinson did a better job of showing that this month in Let the next crisis go to waste:

The Aughts began in crisis when the second plane hit the second tower on Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush administration, loath to let a serious crisis go to waste, managed to parlay the nation’s alarm and credulity into an ill-conceived invasion of an entirely unrelated country, wasting over a trillion dollars and many tens of thousands of lives, all while losing control of the fight in Afghanistan and failing utterly to bring down Osama bin Laden.

Bush’s botched attempts to capitalize on crisis—the ugly aftermath to which Obama is heir—might have made an alert leader wary. But instead, Obama set up shop in the Oval Office and proceeded immediately to use crisis as (Emanuel’s words again) “an opportunity to do things you’d think you could not do.”

Rather than acting as a prudent guardian of the public good in a time of economic turbulence and hardship, Obama and the Democratic Congress have hurried to check the boxes on their partisan wish list precisely when the nation most needed a restorative break from transformative ambition.

When Obama was campaigning he promised change – the only change we got was that the president was officially affiliated with a different party than before. His opponents during the campaign were vocal about the fact that they could not believe he would deliver the promised change. Since his inauguration some of those who supported him have found that they no longer believe in the change he promised. We were promised an end to “politics as usual.” Instead some left wishing for the politics of the 90’s – nasty as they were – rather than the politics of today. As Mr. Wilkinson put it:

This marriage of incompetence and craven opportunism is so much in the familiar spirit of the age that one must conclude that the age itself remains unchanged.

The “crisis as opportunity” mentality can lead to only one thing – criminal behavior. It is the same mentality that leads to looters during the L.A. race riots of the past and the Hatian earthquake of the present.

I have concluded that regardless of whatever other rhetoric a candidate may offer in the future the biggest change I want to see will be a candidate who promises to treat a crisis as a crisis and not as an opportunity.

After the town hall meeting I attended on Wednesday I have been thinking about pension plans generally. The state of Utah is looking at changing their pension offerings for new employees to save the state from future financial ruin. I have seen other companies go through that process already. As a nation we have seen the cost of defined benefit pensions contribute mightily to the downfall of GM and Chrysler as well as having a hand in the struggles throughout the airline industry not so many years ago.

As I thought about all these examples I realized that even a fully funded defined benefit pension program is a gamble for any organization. Employees like the security, but it is an inherently risky proposition to offer such a plan.

I decided to look into the history of pensions and as with so many other systemic problems we face, the problem of widespread pension offerings really took root as a result of a poorly conceived government intervention, namely wage freezes during WWII where companies began exploring new ways to compensate workers besides simply using salary as compensation. Notice that this is also at the root of our dysfunctional employer-dependent health insurance boondoggle. The fact that both of these crippling trends were incubated by government wage interference and nursed along afterward through favored status in our tax policy should be a major red flag against further socialist economic moves by our government – no matter how good it might look now there is bound to be a crippling downside that will rear its ugly head later.

These days everybody wants to help the poor people of Haiti – and that’s obviously a good thing but when I think about Haiti it makes me wonder what the proper course of action is for outside nations to help that struggling country. I’m not talking about the proper course of action to help after the earthquake last week – that’s relatively simple to answer: get aid in supplies and personnel on the ground quickly to restore order and save lives (even though it’s not an easy task). I’m talking about the real fundamental problems that have been plaguing the nation of Haiti as demonstrated by their history of the last 20 years.

In the last 20 years there have been four regular elections – the winner of all four has alternated between Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his good friend René Préval. As far as I understand they never ran against each other so this is not a matter of oscillating between political parties. Both times that Aristide was elected he was later exiled. The first time he was eventually returned to power thanks to U.S. intervention – the second time it was the U.S. that sent him into exile. Hence my question – what is to be done for Haiti?

Regular elections in Haiti should be scheduled for late this year. Perhaps at that time the people of Haiti can start fresh trying to bring stability and prosperity to their nation, but if they elected the same man twice in ten years who they then accused of corruption and gave him a vote of no confidence I’m not sure that they know how to solve their problems.

Assuming that their recent history holds and they continue to face corruption and poverty long after the devastation of the earthquake is behind them, what is the proper help that other nations might offer? In that case I doubt that perpetual aid is the solution. What they seem to need is ingenuity and I don’t know of any way to lend such a crucial commodity. We are well practiced at impeding constructive ingenuity, but not so successful in fostering it.

When I wrote about the importance of investing in yourself I was having trouble trying to find the words to convey what I meant. I finally found a way to explain what I mean so that nobody should be confused (I hope).

Virtually every book on financial planning or wealth building I have ever encountered says something to the effect that there are two ways to have more money. The most obvious being to make more money and the too-often overlooked being to spend less money. When I wrote about investing in yourself my expectation was that readers would assume I was talking about the things that amount to making more money – increasing your education being frequently cited. That kind of self investment is focused on being better able to produce more goods, or more valuable goods for others to purchase in an economic marketplace.

What I was trying to advocate before was to not forget about self investments that amount to spending less. I would generalize those kinds of self investment as focusing on being able to produce for yourself those things which you have become accustomed to purchasing in the economic marketplace. That may be producing the same thing, or it may be producing a substitute.

The doctrine of the free market and the value of specialization to produce more total goods (Friday catching fish to trade with Robinson Crusoe for the coconuts he was harvesting) seems to have been repeated so much that we fail to recognize and properly value the dangers of over-dependence. No matter how much more Friday and Robinson Crusoe can produce together, either one of them needs to be able to survive alone should something happen to their partnership. That means that there is value beyond compensation for Friday to know how to get his own coconuts or something to replace them.

The first step in this kind of self investment would be taking the time to acknowledge what things you depend on that you do not produce yourself, and more importantly recognizing which of these things you are unable to produce for yourself.

Meanwhile, over at Fire Dog Lake (again) I find another insightful post from a staunch liberal, this time it’s from Jane Hamsher (yesterday it was Jon Walker) who is talking about what she calls the left/right populist wrap around.

There is an enormous, rising tide of populism that crosses party lines in objection to the Senate bill. We opposed the bank bailouts, the AIG bonuses, the lack of transparency about the Federal Reserve, “bailout” Ben Bernanke, and the way the Democrats have used their power to sell the country’s resources to secure their own personal advantage, just as the libertarians have. In fact, we’ve worked together with them to oppose these things. What we agree on: both parties are working against the interests of the public, the only difference is in the messaging. (emphasis added)

This is another example of the media missing the boat. They play everything as Left vs Right. They promote the notion that anything which angers both the radical right and the radical left must be pretty good policy – that’s their definition of centrist. In contrast, Ms. Hamsher pits the left/right populist wrap around against the beltway insiders – or as some of my commenters have called them, the corporatists.

Being able to unite the left wing and the right wing in opposition to a policy does not make that a good policy. After all, the German Fascists were able to unite the American Capitalists and the Soviet Communists in opposition against them, but you won’t here anyone (except neo-nazis) arguing that the German Fascists were good because of that.

We’ve had a perfect example of that here recently. I consider myself to be more conservative than the “conservatives” in Congress. Charles considers himself to be more liberal than the “liberals” in Congress. We disagree on many issues, but we’d both like to see a government that represented the people of the United States. I don’t see how it can be argued that Congress is getting it right when I want to see my Republican senator defeated and have him replaced with a real Conservative and Charles want to see his Democratic senator defeated and have her replaced with a real Liberal. (Excuse me for putting words into your mouth Charles.)

There is a disconnect between the roots of representative government and the tree of elected officers. Anyone who thinks that is a positive sign or healthy in any way is definitely missing the boat.

P.S. Having two hits in two days means I will now be following Fire Dog Lake rather than waiting for others to point out their latest articles.