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Everybodys finding errors in Duke historian Nancy MacLeans work of speculative historical fiction on Nobel laureate James Buchanan and the libertarian movement, Democracy in Chains. Id feel left out if I werent misquoted, so Im relieved to find my name on page 211. Heres what MacLean says about me and some of my purported allies:

Now: Did I actually say that the poor and working class are intent on exploiting the rich? Or that they contribute nothing? Well, heres what I wrote on pp. 252-53 of The Libertarian Mind, which is the source MacLean footnotes:

Economists call this process rent-seeking, or transfer-seeking. Its another illustration of Oppenheimers distinction between the economic and the political means. Some individuals and businesses produce wealth. They grow food or build things people want to buy or perform useful services. Others find it easier to go to Washington, a state capital, or a city hall and get a subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors. Thats the political means to wealth, and, sadly, its been growing faster than the economic means.

Of course, in the modern world of trillion-dollar governments handing out favors like Santa Claus, it becomes harder to distinguish between the producers and the transfer-seekers, the predators and the prey. The state tries to confuse us, like the three-card monte dealer, by taking our money as quietly as possible and then handing some of it back to us with great ceremony. We all end up railing against taxes but then demanding our Medicare, our subsidized mass transit, our farm programs, our free national parks, and on and on and on. Frederic Bastiat explained it in the nineteenth century: The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. In the aggregate, we all lose, but its hard to know who is a net loser and who is a net winner in the immediate circumstance.

On the preceding pages I introduced James Buchanan and the concept of public choice:

One of the key concepts of Public Choice is concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. That means that the benefits of any government program are concentrated on a few people, while the costs are diffused among many people. Take ADMs ethanol subsidy, for instance. If ADM makes $200 million a year from it, it costs each American about a dollar. Did you know about it? Probably not. Now that you do, are you going to write your congressman and complain? Probably not. Are you going to fly to Washington, take your senator out to dinner, give him a thousand-dollar contribution, and ask him not to vote for the ethanol subsidy? Of course not. But you can bet that ADMs corporate officers are doing all that and more. Think about it: How much would you spend to get a $200 million subsidy from the federal government? About $199 million if you had to, Ill bet. So who will members of Congress listen to? The average Americans who dont know that theyre paying a dollar each for ADMs profits? Or ADM, which is making a list and checking it twice to see whos voting for their subsidy?

I also wrote on page 253 about the parasite economy, in which

every group in society comes up with a way for the government to help it or penalize its competitors: businesses seek tariffs, unions call for minimum-wage laws (which make high-priced skilled workers more economical than cheaper, low-skilled workers), postal workers get Congress to outlaw private competition, businesses seek subtle twists in regulations that hurt their competitors more than themselves.

Lets be clear: when public choice economists and I talk about rent seeking and concentrated benefits, and we point to subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors, were not trying to protect the rich. Were talking about ways that businesses, unions, and other organized interest groups seek to use government to gain advantages that they couldnt gain in the marketplace. And when we suggest limiting the power of government to hand out such favors, we are arguing in the interests of workers and consumers.

I do not believe that MacLeans two very short quotations from The Libertarian Mind and the paragraphs in which she situates them fairly depict my argument in the book. One might even say that she reversed the meaning of the predators and the prey. Unfortunately, selective quotation and misrepresentation seem to be MacLeans M.O., as Steve Horwitz, Phil Magness, Russ Roberts, David Henderson, David Bernstein, Bernstein again, Nick Gillespie, Michael Munger, and others have pointed out.

By the way, Professor MacLean derides me as a writer subsidized by wealthy donors. Well, yes, its true that the Cato Institute is supported by voluntary contributions, not by tax funding. And donors to organizations Duke University, NPR, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute tend to be well-off. But I assure Professor MacLean that I was absorbing the ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, the American Founders, and John Stuart Mill long before I discovered that there might be jobs available to write about such ideas.

Although James Buchanan was not involved in the founding of the Cato Institute, as MacLean writes, we are proud that he chose to write frequently for the Cato Journal,speak at various Cato events, and allow us to count him as a Distinguished Senior Fellow. And we regret that he has been so ill treated by a fellow academic.

Read more:
Another Misleading Quotation in Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains - Cato Institute (blog)

CARACAS Venezuelas democratic institutions are in ruins, its coffers are empty, and its citizens are searching for food in garbage dumps. Its people are dying from starvation, from preventable and curable diseases (at much higher rates than the Latin American average), and from violence including, in some cases, gunshot wounds inflicted by their own government.

More than three quarters of Venezuelas 31 million people want to free themselves from the stranglehold of their rulers, a small group of no more than 150 mafia-like figures (mostly military) who have hijacked the countrys democracy, robbed it blind, and created a devastating humanitarian crisis. The 18-year-old regime established by Hugo Chvez, and now led by President Nicols Maduro would rather hold an entire country hostage than lose power and potentially have to answer for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court. But how long can it hold on?

Venezuelans have actively pursued a change of government. In the December 2015 parliamentary election, two thirds of voters lent their support to the democratic opposition. That outcome should have loosened the regimes grip on the state and helped to re-establish the checks and balances envisioned in the constitution that Chvez himself drafted.

But the regime has systematically undermined the National Assembly through rulings from a Supreme Court that it packed with loyalists, using the outgoing legislature. At the end of last March, the Supreme Court went a step further, taking over all of the Assemblys powers a move so blatantly illegal that even the chavista Prosecutor General Luisa Ortega Daz denounced it as a rupture of the constitutional order.

With that, desperate Venezuelans took their opposition to the streets. On April 1, they began holding almost daily protests demanding another general election, despite the mortal danger of public opposition. Indeed, since the protests began, the regimes security forces have killed 85 demonstrators and wounded over 1,000 more, including by throwing tear-gas canisters into crowds and launching pellets at peoples chests, at close range. More than 3,000 protesters face criminal charges, simply for exercising their democratic rights.

Cornered, the ruling clique has become defiant. Maduro recently announced that if the regime cannot muster the votes needed to stay in power, it will use its weapons instead. But he is also taking more extreme political action to protect the regime: he has now ordered, by presidential decree (rather than by referendum, as the constitution requires), a constituent assembly, to be chosen on July 30, to draft a new communal constitution.

The demonstrations have now become what is essentially a popular uprising, with Venezuelas people calling on the armed forces to evict the regime from power. Ortega, for her part, has called on the Supreme Court to annul the regimes push to rewrite the constitution, but the court declared her request not receivable.

Venezuelans recognize that a Marxist-Leninist constitution approved by regime-appointed deputies would complete Venezuelas transformation into another Cuba within a month. The question is whether the rest of the world will stand by idly.

Luis Almagro, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States (OAS), has called its member states attention to the Venezuelan regimes grave constitutional and human-rights violations. At last months OAS General Assembly in Mexico, 14 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Bahamas, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico, the United States, Peru, St. Lucia, Uruguay, and Paraguay) proposed a draft resolution on how to initiate a dialogue with the Venezuelan regime to no avail.

Such a dialogue would have focused on pushing Venezuelas regime to comply with the commitments mediated by the Vatican last autumn, including holding free and fair elections this year, releasing political prisoners, restoring the National Assemblys constitutional powers, and accepting humanitarian assistance. But, though 20 OAS member states supported the resolution, ten did not, owing to their dependence on Venezuelan oil and financing. That left the resolution three votes short of the required two-thirds majority.

Emboldened by what it perceived as a victory, the Venezuelan regime has ramped up its violence against protesters and organized a bogus coup against itself. During the recent siege of the Legislative Palace, an officer of the National Guard assaulted Julio Borges, the president of the National Assembly the only institution with any legitimacy left. The regime is also set to appoint a tame new deputy prosecutor general to replace Ortega, who has had her bank accounts frozen and is barred from leaving the country.

The opposition is firing back, organizing via the National Assembly an official referendum, on the basis of articles 333 and 350 of the constitution. Venezuelans will be able to weigh in on Maduros plan to rewrite the constitution and the oppositions push for new elections, the restoration of all checks and balances, and the formation of a national unity government. The vote will take place on July 16, in all churches in Venezuela, and with international observers.

Having lost all legitimacy, Venezuelas kleptocratic and murderous regime is hanging on by a thread. Already, individual OAS member states have imposed targeted sanctions on officials affiliated with the regimes aggressive drug-dealing faction the sub-group responsible for murdering young people in the streets and torturing some 300 political prisoners. (The European Union has yet to join the effort.)

By rejecting a democratic transition, the regime is only prolonging its own agony and creating higher costs for Venezuela. While the ruling clique is not eager to negotiate, a deal offered via the OAS or at the United Nations Security Council could prove difficult to refuse in the current context.

Such a deal would require an immediate general election and the cancellation of the constituent assembly, and could be implemented relatively quickly and easily, according to the existing constitution. If successful, it could help reinvigorate international trust and cooperation. More immediately, it would give the desperate, starving, and repressed Venezuelan people their country back.

Read more:
Death or Democracy in Venezuela - Project Syndicate

IRINnews.org

Securitising Africa's borders is bad for migrants, democracy, and development IRINnews.org South Africa's National Assembly recently passed a bill to set up a new border management agency. The Border Management Authority will fall under Home Affairs, a government department long distinguished by its lack of respect for immigrant and refugee ... and more »

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Securitising Africa's borders is bad for migrants, democracy, and development - IRINnews.org

Civility: we seek to instill it in our children and we expect it from even our most casual acquaintances. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Our constitution does not demand that our speech be civil. The constitution protects uncivil speech hate speech, even. But it does so not because our democracy approves of such speech, but because we believe that truth will expose lies and the evil of government censorship is greater than the perils posed by untoward speakers.

But what happens when the source of uncivil speech is not some fringe hate group, but the occupant of the Oval Office? And what happens when the lies target the very organs designed to ferret them out? We have never faced such questions before. Which explains why, on the 241st anniversary of our independence, American democracy finds itself in peril.

We have grown accustomed to the presidents lies, as recently inventoried in the New York Times. Yet such a simple enumeration fails to get at the danger. Consider Trumps workhorse that the mainstream media trucks in fake news.

If Trump were simply implying, without substantiation or proof, that the media routinely engages in unreliable reporting, this would be bad enough. But that is not the claim. Rather, it is that CNN, to take one favorite target, willfully fabricates false news to advance a partisan agenda.

The irony is rich, as the lie shamelessly attributes to CNN the very behavior that Trump himself is guilty of. Having maligned CNN as the enemy and not the vanguard of truth, the president minces no words about how enemies are to be treated. They are to be body-slammed to the floor and punched in the face.

Mr Trumps lies can better be understood as instances of libel they state falsehoods that malign their targets. As a sitting president, Mr Trump is, of course, immune from suit (just as he might be immune from indictment for having obstructed justice). But this does not change the libelous character of his speech.

What makes this libel so toxic is not the injury it does to the reputation of the New York Times or CNN, though certainly it may serve to discredit these organizations in the eyes of some segments of the public; it is the injury the comments do to our democracy.

But the full danger of Trumps uncivil speech becomes clear only when viewed through the filter of his defamation of our electoral process. The 2016 presidential election revealed genuine threats to the integrity of our voting system, and we have precise, reliable knowledge about their source.

But in his alarming testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the former FBI director James Comey revealed that while the president repeatedly asked whether the FBI had targeted him personally, he failed to express the slightest interest in the deeper issue Russias criminal tampering with our electoral process.

Instead, on his third day in office, Trump spread one of his most venomous lies: Between three million and five million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote. The president proceeded to bootstrap a bald lie into an alternative reality, establishing an independent commission to look into the nonexistent problem of voter fraud. Most recently, he has used the refusal of states to participate in this sham as evidence that they have something to hide turning lies into calumny.

Civility: we seek to instill it in our children and we expect it from even our most casual acquaintances. While a democracy can afford to tolerate some uncivil speech, it cannot withstand the sweeping cultivation of contempt directed against the institutions designed to keep government honest and elections safe.

This should be obvious to all public servants. And yet the present occupant of the White House has become the strident mouthpiece of uncivil speech that libels these very institutions.

Continued here:
The biggest threat to American democracy isn't Trump's uncivil speech - The Guardian

China wouldnt have to make major structural changes to practice indirect democracy.

By Xiaochen Su for The Diplomat

July 04, 2017

During Chinese President Xi Jinpingfirst visit to Hong Kong, the political conflict surrounding democracy and sovereignty in the city has been highlighted time and time again. Followingwhat many Western media called the broken promise of direct democracy, the citys pan-democrats have grown more disillusioned with the slow pace of political reform. Seeing the central government in Beijing as a fundamental obstacle to the reforms, a growing number has come to the conclusion that the citys political independence is the only way forward for establishment of true democracy.

Yet it is rather simplified argument to say that democracy in Hong Kong is not movingforward because of Beijings opposition. The Communist Party of China (CPC)emphasizes the importance of democracy in various documents and does have institutions set up within the existing political structure that allow for direct popular elections. It is, then, important to reexamine why the brand of democracy espoused by the CPC falls short of Hong Kongs (and indeed, any Western) definition of the same political concept, and how the differing definitions can be better aligned.

Section 5 of the Constitution of the Peoples Republic of China stipulates a system of indirect democracy. Members of governing council (Peoples Congress) at the lowest level of political jurisdictions (including villages, towns, and counties, and urban districts) are to be directly elected by the general population. In turn, the members of the local Peoples Congress vote for municipal ones, who in turn vote for regional/provincial ones, who in turn select members for the national Peoples Congress that conveys in Beijing. Just as the National Peoples Congress holds power to confirm appointments of the executive leadership of the Politburo through all-member votes, the local and regional Congresses can do the same for selection of local mayors and governors.

What, in the eyes of Westerners, violates democratic principles, is the vetting of candidates before they are votedon by the common people.Chen An notes in his 1998 book on Chinese political reforms that candidates running for seats in the local Congresses must be nominated and receive explicit support before they can stand for elections. Given the outsized role played by the CPC in the Chinese party-state polity, it is unsurprising then that any potential candidate with views and ideologies different from the prevailing CPC ones will be filtered out at this stage. The vetting process, in essence, cements the CPCs monopoly over the countrys political establishment, reinforced through an existing democratic process.

Interestingly, the concept of vetting candidates before elections is exactly the same condition the central government proposed in 2014to Hong Kong as a condition for implementing universal suffrage. The pan-democrats rejection of this vetting sank perhaps the only possibility ofa smooth, Beijing-approved transition to universal suffrage and underscored the inherent difference between how the pan-democrats and Beijing understood democracy. Given the political reality of mainland China, the pan-democrats worry that vetted candidates will only include those from the pro-Beijing camp is highly reasonable and justified.

Thus, it can be said that the vetting of candidates is the primary point of contention separating China from Western-style democracy. It is commonly argued that Beijing insists on the vetting (in mainland China and Hong Kong alike) for the purpose of monopolizing power within the CPC and those politically friendly to the CPC. Not vetting candidates would quickly lead to erosion of CPCs political power as those from outside (and indeed, opposing) the party would become Congress members.

However, it is questionable whether suddenly stopping the vetting of candidates for local Congresses would rapidly alter the political balance in a manner unfavorable for the CPC. As the sole organized political institution in China for the past six decades, the CPC has acquired unwavering allegiance among millions who depend upon it, if only to get ahead in their own careers. Even if new political parties, unfettered by the CPC, were to form immediately tomorrow, it would take decades for them to match the organizational, financial, and communication powers the CPC presently has. The long time it would take for these political parties to maturewould provide more than enough time for the CPC to craft, adopt, and implement strategies that cement its dominant position in a more competitive political environment.

Furthermore, the fact that elections occur in a hierarchical, indirect manner in the current electoral institutions favors the incumbent party.Local elections focus on local issues of livelihood, which incumbent parties generally have much more political capital to resolve quickly and effectively. Even if the opposition wereto gain a majority in some local elections, their advantages in certain localities would quickly be eroded in regional and national elections if the majority of localities still favor the incumbent.

Without changes in the current political structure, even unvetted, popularly elected political leaders would be hamstrung by the CPC. The countrys dual party-state governance structure means political positions (such as governors) are subordinate to party positions (such as the regional party secretary). No matter how democratic the state governance structure becomes, it can face constraints in the face of an undemocratic party one. But given the credibility of state officials elected through a popular vote, it would be increasingly difficult for party officials to assert views opposite to those of state officials. Implementing indirect democracy without candidate vetting has the positive side effect of weakening the role of the party in the party-state structure over time, even without the need for significant structural changes.

Indeed, the primary benefit of implementing indirect democracy in China is how little political disruption it would cause in the process. All political institutions, with the exception of candidate nominations, would remain largely the same.

The result would be a true democracy that is beneficial for many reasons. The reform would be acceptable for the CPC, as its political dominance would not be immediately jeopardized inan indirect democracy. The ability to quickly execute long-term policy changes and grand projects, a benefit of the existing political structure that scholars like Tony Saich argueis at least partially responsible for Chinas recent economic rise, would largely remain intact. The indirect election of national leaders will alleviate the fear of a rise of nationalistic populism a la Donald Trump in the United States. Plus, the Western criticism is that China is not democratic can be better parried and refuted.

Those who have sought political changes in China, including scholars in the West and the Tiananmen leaders, have been too focused on overhauling the entire system in a top-down fashion. Understandably, such proposals draw the ire of the CPC and skepticism of a stability-minded Chinese populace. If the focus of reforms is instead bottom-up, starting with the abolishing of candidate vetting at local Congress elections, there is possibility of real changes that fit with the interests of all sides. Democratic-minded China-watchers in Hong Kong, mainland China, and elsewhere, should shift their strategies to demand more realistic, incremental reforms at the most grassroots level.

Xiaochen Su currently resides in Iringa, Tanzania, working for a NGO that helps smallholder farmers to increase productivity through provision of high-quality agricultural inputs and microcredit. Su previously studied International Political Economy at the London School of Economics.

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A Path to 'True' Indirect Democracy in China - The Diplomat