Patrick: September 2008 Archives

First, there's a great editorial from Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times featuring the work of Aaron Sorkin.  Read it here.

Secondly, Ron Paul has made an impressive return to the media spotlight.  Yes, I know for many of us he never left.  However, he has been on every major news source this past week, multiple times, discussing the collapse of the financial sector, the Fed's bailouts, and the SEC's new regulation.  Now that all he had warned us about back in May has come to fruition, he's getting a second look from the media, and plenty of TV time.  While I'm not a big fan, one of the best discussions yet was on Glenn Beck's program.  You can watch it here and here.

"Monetary history shows that this type of system will not last, the question is that will the new system be a free society, or a totalitarian society." - Ron Paul

Last,  Obama has returned to the top, narrowly beating out McCain who's post-convention bump has past.  However, the big story is not that Obama is ahead, but is instead the incredible amount of states in the swing column.  This week  the swing states are now at their highest point in the campaign.

Electoral College Map:

Graph:

      A few years back I stumbled upon an index of indexes, the State of World Liberty Index.  The index is simply a combination of economic and social indicators of freedom from the Frasier and CATO institute's Economic Freedom in the World Project, Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, Freedom House's Freedom in the World, and Reporters without Borders' Press Freedom Index.
     Since first discovering the index, I've attempted from time to time to contact it's creator to update the index values, and improve upon it's measures.  However, I've been unsuccessful, and I believe the e-mail on the website is no longer operable.
    For 2008, I've taken the method used in the original State of World Liberty Index and simply updated it's values.  There are many improvements we can make to this system, such as using more nuanced measures of political and social freedom, but the existing index does result in some interesting figures, particularly when comparing it to the same index from 3 years back.  As a reminder, the index is measuring liberty in each of these countries from a year ago.  With all the recent nationalization moves in the United States, we should expect it to be much lower today than the index demonstrates.  The U.S. has already fallen 5 spots since 2006.

In the top tier with index scores >80 we have, in rank order:
1. Bahamas
2. Estonia
3. Iceland
4. Canada
4. Cyprus
4. Switzerland
4. Uruguay
8. Mauritius
8. United States
8. Lithuania
8. Ireland

In the bottom-most tier, we have only North Korea, with a score of 15.

The remaining countries lie somewhere in between, as depicted in the below map.  The bluer the country, the more free it is.  Green is somewhere in between, yellow is less free. As it transition toward red, liberty decreases.  In addition to this map, I've posted the excel spreadsheet under my Papers and Projects page, and would be happy to provide more information upon request. 

Given recent events in the financial sector, I was reminded of the following from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

There were not many lights on the earth below.  The countryside was an empty black sheet, with a few occasional flickers in the windows of some government structures, and the trembling glow of candles in the windows of thriftless homes.  Most of the rural population had long since been reduced to the life of those ages when artificial light was an exorbitant luxury, and a sunset put an end to human activity.  The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls, and power-conservation rules.

            But when the place that had once been the source of the tide - New York City - rose in the distance before them, it was still extending its lights to the sky, still defying the primordial darkness, almost as if, in an ultimate effort, in a final appeal for help, it were now stretching its arms to the plane that was crossing its sky.  Involuntarily, they sat up, as if at respectful attention at the deathbed of what had been greatness.

            Looking down, they could see the last convulsions: the lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion, and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane.  The news of the continents severed artery had now engulfed the city, men were deserting their posts, trying, in panic, to abandon New York, seeking escape where all roads were cut off and escape was no longer possible.

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth.  It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations - and that the lights of New York had gone out.

"It's the end," she said.

"It's the beginning," he answered.

Between the election and various other political screw ups of the past week, there's all kinds of news to report.

First, Bush has decided to fully nationalize Fannie and Freddie Mac, successfully making a financial disaster far worse.  Absolute economic and political foolishness.  Read about it here.

Second, apparently only the Libertarian Party will be on the Texas ballot this November.  According to Texas Law "names of the party's nominees for president and vice-president" must be submitted to the secretary of state's office "before 5 p.m. of the 70th day before the presidential Election." (Texas Election Code 192.031)  Interestingly, both the Democrats and the Republicans missed the deadline, and so by law cannot be on the ballot.  Now, I can't imagine the law will actually be upheld, but it should be interesting to see how they manage to side-step it.  You can find everyone's filings here.  Read more about it here.

Now, here's a fun constitutional exercise as a result of this.  If McCain were going to win the electoral college, he could not, however, by any way you crank the numbers, receive over 270 electoral votes without Texas.  So if both McCain and Obama had less than 270 votes (with Barr having Texas 32), the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives.  The house would then vote, with each state's delegation receiving only one vote, and a majority (26 votes) necessary to elect a president.  Obama should squeak by with a majority in that case, and then win the election that McCain should have won in the electoral college.

Meanwhile, the vice president is selected by the Senate.  The Senate breakdown is currently 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans, but if Joe Liberman votes with the Republicans, then the Vice President-Elect will be Sarah Palin, due to a 50/50 vote in the Senate and Dick Cheney breaking the tie.

Interestingly, if neither McCain nor Obama won a majority of the votes in the House of Representatives by January 20th, the Vice President-Elect becomes the president.

Now it would never actually get to that point, but it's an interesting exercise.

In other news, the Ron Paul's Rally for the Republic in Minneapolis appears to have been a huge success.  You can watch the full thing here, some good coverage from MSNBC here, a good story from the Economist here, and Ron Paul on the Colbert Report here.

Finally, this weeks electoral college shows little change from last week's mostly because we just haven't had any new polls in most states.  The only big state where we've gotten a new poll since McCain's Palin pick is Ohio, which obstinately demonstrated no change from either the pick, or the Democratic convention.  We should start getting new polls pretty quick in the next couple weeks to illustrate the convention aftermaths.  Here's our map for this week: