Forward?

Doesn't Seem Like It

I went to a speech by former Governor Christine Todd Whitman last evening. A diverse crowd listened to her speak. By diverse, I mean many people of different skin colors, ages, and political parties too. It was put on by the Guinn Center here in Las Vegas. The Guinn Center is a non-profit. It’s focused on being non-partisan and data-driven.

What the Guinn Center is trying to thread the needle on these days is actually pretty complex. Being data-driven is a great idea. Being non-partisan is a great idea too.

The hard part is where you get the data from, and how you look at it. Not everyone totals up costs and opportunity costs the same way. But, at least they are trying and they are being pretty transparent about how they are doing what they are doing, so that’s a big step in the right direction.

You can’t make successful outcomes unless you try. If they fail, they can try again. Let’s hope they don’t fail.

Governor Whitman is not happy with political discourse these days. I think most of us would agree with her. One of her solutions is to be a part of The Forward Party. I went through their website and they have ideas that sound pretty good on paper. The devil is in the details of how their ideas would be implemented.

For example, here are their core principles:

• Free People: Revitalize a culture that celebrates difference and individual choice, rejects hate, and removes barriers so that each of us can rise to our full potential.

• Thriving Communities: Reinvigorate a fair, flourishing economy and open society where everyone can live a good life and is safe in the places where we learn, work, and live.

• Vibrant Democracy: Reform our republic to give Americans more choices in elections, more confidence in a government that works, and more say in our future.

Can anyone really disagree with them on the surface? No, not really. As I listened to Governor Whitman speak, I found myself mostly disagreeing with the crux of what she had to say.

One problem with their platform is that you cannot accurately quantify outcomes in any of their core principles. With the other political parties, you can quantify some of the things they stand for, even if you don’t agree with them. For example, can you quantify what a “fair” community is? Can it be rigorously defined and then scaled across every community in the United States?

The Forward Party wants open primaries and ranked-choice voting. They think this will increase voter turnout. They see low voter turnout as a problem.

Personally, I am against ranked-choice voting. It leads to bad outcomes. I might be able to get on board with open primaries depending on a lot of other issues that would need to be solved before you did an open primary.

Is it voter turnout that is the real problem? Or, is it not? Maybe American culture is that 60% of the people just want to be left alone by their government so they don’t even participate in it. Or, maybe the real problem isn’t turnout, but it is gerrymandering instead. Gerrymandering eliminates choice and competition in elections and allows political machines to choose candidates that will automatically do their bidding. For evidence, see Chicago and the state of Illinois. The last Nevada legislature session gerrymandered the state terribly in favor of Democrats. Odds are good we will see more extreme Democratic candidates now.

What if we had independent maps? Would turnout increase, and would you get what they would term, better quality candidates?

For example, in Nevada this year we had some candidates for statewide office that the elites and media considered “low quality”. What are the standards for high quality and low quality? No one has ever defined it. We had “high quality” candidates in Nevada for other offices that were beaten because of the gerrymander, poorly managed voter rolls, very loose voter rules on ballot harvesting, and voter ID. Would the Forward Party eliminate shady election practices, and endorse clean voter rolls and Voter IDs? They don’t say anything about that on their website.

Once the standards for acceptable candidates are defined, does it mean if I don’t meet those standards, I can’t run? That sounds more like Lordships than open American politics, seemingly violating the first principle of the Forward Party.

Many of the issues that the Governor outlined relied on polling data as a basis for a conclusion. We know that polling data is suspect. Just look at any recent Presidential election. How many were correct? When public opinion changes, do you change the policy to reflect the opinion?

The other problem we have in any solution to any problem is basic human nature. Humans are hard-wired to desire optionality. A little of this, a little of that. The truth is, many solutions require a very straightforward and disciplined rigorous approach. There isn’t room for optionality or variation.

Here is an example of what would be a “consensus”. To be clear, this is my opinion on one topic that was brought up-so it’s my consensus which isn’t the classical definition of consensus. The forum wasn’t designed to do deep dives on topics. It was a great forum to challenge some of your existing beliefs if you had any to begin with. It was also a good forum to raise some ideas to begin to think about different issues.

The Governor is really worried about climate change and said so several times in her remarks. There are a lot of people on the left in the United States worried about climate change. There are a lot of people on the right that are not. We get bombarded with statements like “98% of scientists agree”. Recall, in Galileo’s time, most of the scientists didn’t agree with him but I digress.

The left, of which I would include the Governor, solves the problem through the lens of constraints. The whole Davos conference that just concluded wasn’t about freedom and a free society. It was about putting shackles on innovation and individual liberty in favor of the collective. The collective is Big Government. The regulators and smart people in government can make better decisions for you than you can. If we went down the path that the suits at Davos want us to trod down, we would violate every principle that the Forward Party stands for. At Davos, you heard variations of phrases like this.

• We need to use less of this.

• We need to ban this.

• We need to regulate this.

• We need more tax money to do this.

• We need to tax this.

Hence, the solution is solar and wind which we have reams of data on. We know they do not work and cause as many environmental problems as fossil fuels when you total up all the costs and opportunity costs of using and implementing them.

Why doesn’t anyone look at the same problem and solve it through abundance? Abundance means choice and freedom.

Which system do we know about as mankind solves problems through abundance? Capitalism and free markets.

As you would learn from reading Thomas Sowell, capitalism takes scares resources, values them, and makes them abundant. It takes them and creates processes to distribute them so that we have more at cheaper and cheaper costs. Capitalism does this because the market is competitive. Competition is not just good for all of us, it’s GREAT.

I love Thomas Sowell’s comparison of photography to capitalism. In photography, you have a camera and a lens. Those instruments have limits. The photographer uses the limits to create something beautiful that anyone can choose to enjoy. The same with being a human on earth. We all have limits, and we all face costs and opportunity costs in our lives that we choose to accept, or not.

Hence, if you looked at climate change through the lens of abundance, there is only one answer that is currently feasible. It’s nuclear power. You’d scrap any ideas about wind or solar for large-scale public power use. Of course, that noise you just heard is the heads of environmentalists and elites around the world exploding.

Try going to Davos and telling everyone that we are going to abandon everything and go full-on nuclear around the world. See if you get a polite constructive acceptance of the idea or if someone waves a hand and dismisses you like a schoolchild.

I admire the Forward Party’s tenacity to try and take on many of the problems that confront us. My disagreement is that I think they are tackling problems that are unquantifiable, and might not be the real root problem that won’t be solved via the solutions they are proposing.