Comments by Ohio

America was, by most reckoning, on an unsustainable economic path in 2007. The economy had been inflated for years, if not decades, by flaws in the financial system, chickens which came home to roost. If we take that as a given, shouldn't the recession be seen as a correction back to the true course of sustainable growth? It is a mistake to simply extrapolate from 2007 if growth in the period leading up to 2007 was falsely inflated. What was the true path? Ask me again in 5 years and we can extrapolate back in time.

We're talking about a popularity contest between bands, right? What is the worst that could happen? The wrong band gets picked? That generally happens anyway, I'm sure. This doesn't strike me as an issue to stand firm on one's liberal democratic principles. The risk of looking foolish is high.

It was clear that this was coming 2 years ago. If Greece had exited the Euro and defaulted on its debts then, we'd be a lot further along by now. Greece, after a truly painful year, would be growing now. Spain and Italy would be out or in, but by now we'd know. There'd be a lot of busted banks in Europe, but that is still likely to happen.

Actually, attitudes like yours have put in place development programs which are truly astounding in their ability to produce failure. Big programs that give a little bit to everyone just make the poor more accepting of their poverty. The program discussed in the article gives individuals hope and a reason to change the way they live their lives. It works because it is individualized, following more of a venture capital model than a communist party 5 year plan such as you advocate. And because hope and a good example are contagious, it reaps returns far greater than the investment. Please spare us the lectures on how poverty could be solved if we just taxed rich people more and gave the money to the poor. That has never worked and never will.

As the Chinese middle class grows, as they become more educated about the world, as the economy becomes more varied and sophisticated, a simple truth will become clear to them: The source of the wealth of China is not the ruling party or its precious system, but the middle class itself. The system, with all of its corruption and coercion, maintains the power and perogatives of the rulers; it does not produce wealth. Those threatening outsiders (heads up hauren2000, the Opium Wars have been over for a while, now) don't actually threaten the middle class, they only threaten the ruling class. The CCP had to free the economy from the oppressive grip of the CCP before it could blossom to new wealth. The new middle class created the wealth. The only brilliant insight the CCP has ever had is that selectively applied coercion allows citizens to generate more wealth than broadly applied coercion. When the CCP is disposed of few tears will be shed.

In the U.S., young and educated people tend to support gay marriage, with the old and less educated opposed. The US is less liberal on social issues than western Europe, but much more liberal than many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. I think a vote limited to US Economist readers would still answer Yes. The margin might be a little smaller.

That's very melodramatic of you, but your fiance might object (assuming one exists) if you have to wait until people are allowed to marry their pet goats, or 12 year olds are allowed to marry.

Marriage is about 2 people making some promises to society and society making some promises in return. Society has always regulated marriage and put limits on it. Not allowing gay marriage may be wrong (I certainly think so), but it is not new or unusual, nor does allowing gay marriage justify allowing everyone who desires to marry the righ to do so.

Not true. There are a lot of traditional Roosevelt Democrats (old people, union members, southerners and mountain westerners) who are socially conservative and who supported Obama even though he was a effete liberal elitist. This will be a bridge too far for some of them.

"And they're too willfully ignorant to realize that this definition doesn't exclude homosexuals."

Your average Ohio or North Carolina voter has seen gay people in a gay pride parade, i.e. as a caricature, and in movies portrayed as promiscuous men seeking anonymous sex in a bathhouse leading to AIDS. They have never seen a gay couple with a mortgage, a lawn to take care of, and children to raise. When they see that gay people want the same things out of marriage as straight people, i.e. a stable serious relationship with the purpose of forming a family, they will lose their inhibitions.

Calling those who you wish to convince willfully ignorant may be cathartic for you, but is unlikely to further the cause. The average gay couple in Manhattan is as willfully ignorant of the lifestyle of a small town family in North Carolina as is the case in reverse. Both rely chiefly on stereotypes.

I'm afraid that what voters in the heartland will demand is that if gay people want to be treated like those normal, boring, heterosexuals, they will have to address the public perception of gay people. Have a dress code at your next gay pride parade which outlaws unitards so the gay people who make it onto TV are the gay couple in jeans holding hands with their son or daughter. Years of that will change voter's minds. That's what it will take.

I saw a similar measure pass in Ohio 60/40. It's not that people voting against gay marriage necessarily hate homosexuals; there's a lot less of that these days. And most of them still don't know anyone who is openly homosexual. But they know that families are defined by marriage and children, and they are deeply reluctant to change their definition of marriage for fear that it will disrupt the structures that define families. These voters will need a lot of exposure to openly homosexual couples in the media, and particularly in their neighborhood, before people will accept that gay couples simply want the same structure that heterosexual couples have. It will happen, but it could take a generation.

Yes, you've been using NPWFTL for a long time. I hate inside jokes that I'm not privy to. What does it mean?

So quick to criticize, Albertican. When did the party which formed a majority in the Canadian federal parliament last receive a majority of the votes? Has it ever happened? Each system of representative democracy has its imperfections.

The US constitution was a bargain arrived at by representatives of 13 states, some big, some small. Anyone who wants to change that deal who can muster the requisite support may do so, but I doubt that the small states will give up much.

If a big state wants attention commensurate with its population, there is a simple method well within its powers. Any state can opt to draw electoral boundaries such that many, if not most of its districts are competitive between the two parties. If that state then opted to allocate its electoral votes by district as Maine and Nebraska do, it would then make the state an electoral battleground, which Texas, New York, and California are currently not.

Any federal system is a compromise. The electoral college is not an unreasonable one.

"Constitutions should be for setting the ground rules of a political system. When it is altered to support narrower policies then the potential for political conflict increases. "

But maintaining a balanced budget over the economic cycle during peacetime is in no way partisan or controversial. It should be one of the ground rules to which you refer. In a democracy with parties alternating power, it is destabilizing if one party is allowed to irresponsibly consistently run up deficits, leaving the opposing party to pick up the pieces (the Democrats used to be more profligate, lately it's more the Republicans). Eventually both parties decide it is too politically costly to be responsible stewards of financial probity, and at that point the Republic is in danger. And that is why the ground rules of good government should insist on long term fiscal probity.

Government provision of education and healthcare (or at least regulation of) is certainly necessary. Doing so at a local or regional level is infinitely preferable. Local and regional governments can cater to local tastes and priorities and thereby provide services better fitted to the needs and wants of the citizenry. Canada, for instance, makes education and healthcare provision a provincial responsibility. In America, in contrast, the Obama administration is attempting nationwide regulation of healthcare and federal meddling in education, and is facing a great deal of resistance.

It's healthy to have a large and liquid bond market, particularly if you aspire to be a reserve currency.

This is the real point. German women are being forced to choose between having children and working, and many are choosing to forgo children. This payment will be yet more ammunition for those who accuse any working mother of being a Rabenmutter, neglecting her children. Part of the reason for low German unemployment is that so many skilled women are not part of the work force. Many of these women are not happy with the choice forced upon them. And in any case, enough German women are refusing motherhood to put the German race into a steep demographic spiral. Twenty years from now, when some of the eastern states are outperforming Bavaria, where the median age will have climbed to 50, we will see the full impact of the CDU's policies.

The constitution of the US limits the powers of government to limit freedom because the founders assumed that otherwise the government would eventually become tyrannical. What I am suggesting is to limit the power of the government to be irresponsibly profligate because otherwise the government would eventually become irresponsible and profligate. Insisting on responsible fiscal policies does not imply either a strong social welfare state or a libertarian utopia. With either societal system you are still far better off with responsible fiscal policies. The problem is that responsible fiscal policies are not in the short term interest of either the populace or their government. And that's why we need constitutional limits to enforce long term good behaviour -- because people are flawed, especially politicians. That what the founding fathers realized with regard to the protection of liberty, and that's what we need now to protect sound fiscal management.

The services that governments need to do well, roads, police and emergency services, education, and health, are best provided by regional and local governments, where local representatives can finely tune services to demand. Central government, particularly in large countries like the US, cannot provide services without universal mandates and standards that are suboptimal in most local areas. Even the UK with only 50MM people has trouble running a health system that works equally well in London, the Scottish highlands, and deepest darkest Cornwall. The central government functions best if it is limited to external relations (including the military), playing referee (making sure commerce and the movement of people are uninhibited), large scale transport issues, and stabilizing transfer payments to cushion regional economic woes. When a central government tries to provide complex services like education and health care to a diverse populace, strife, resentment, over-regulation and inefficiency will result.

Australia is the antipodean Norway, a resource-strewn country with a relatively small population to share the wealth. Australia and Norway have risen and will fall with the rise and fall of commodity prices and the difficulty of extracting their extractable riches. Truly they are the lucky countries for now, but remember the fate of Nauru. What does Australia produce which doesn't come from the ground?

An economist with a sense of history would probably state that a country should try to maintain a 30-40% debt to GDP ratio during prosperous times of peace so that it might comfortably raise 30-40% of GDP for a war or other crisis if necessary. The trick is how to write that into a constitution so that this will take place despite the many short term demands of politics. One could create a supervisory financial authority which had the power to raise taxes or cut spending by specified rules to produce a budget constitutionally aimed at a small surplus unless certain economic conditions (recession, abnormally high unemployment) or a political supermajority dictated otherwise.
Just as an independent federal reserve, while imperfect, is better than the politically driven alternative, an independent Treasury, operating under consitutionally specified rules, would be better than where politics has led us. True, this would weaken the authority of an elected government. But a strong democracy does not require a strong central government; on the contrary, in most ways a strong government is antithetical to a free society. Tyrants have long predicted the fall of democracies because of the tendency for the pupulace to vote itself bread and circuses. As the American founding fathers understood and did their best to implement, a strong and lasting democracy must restrain the power of the majority to act, through their representatives or their president, against the best long term interests of the republic. A constitutionally constrained Treasury, by solving the fiscal equivalent of St. Augustine's dilemna, might restrain us from our bad impulses enough to preserve the Republic for another century.