Independence mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

Independence mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 18 minutes

Independence mailbag

Western water, my fake college class, and revisiting Al Gore

I think the optimal timing for July 4 is always a Tuesday. You obviously can’t just observe Independence Day as “the first Tuesday in July,” though, so instead we need to rely on dumb luck. But good for us, it’s a Tuesday July 4 kind of year!

This account of Justin Trudeau’s aggressive immigration expansion is pretty inspiring, as was this upbeat account of Venezuelans thriving on Martha’s Vineyard. The discovery of what seems like a 2,000-year-old depiction of pizza is mostly funny but I am always on board for all pizza-related news. More substantively, the United States is a really popular global hegemon, which is important to understanding our power and strength. Simone Biles is coming back. Buffets are coming back. Norovirus on cruise ships is coming back. Okay, the last one is maybe not so good, but it’s a sign of broad economic normalization, which is good. California strip malls are getting upzoned to allow for housing.

Now let’s answer some questions.

Lost Future: Didn't the opioid crisis kind of disprove widespread libertarian & leftist beliefs about the War on Drugs?

[Editor’s note: this was a very long question, but I think the first sentence captured it well.]

I never believed the libertarian line on the War on Drugs so I can’t really say whether it’s been debunked by the opioid crisis. As I’ve said before, while I am in many ways a libertarianism-appreciator, I have always thought that hard-core anti-paternalism does not make sense practically or philosophically. But if you’re in the market for an “I changed my mind about drug legalization because of the opioid crisis” take, German Lopez wrote a great one five years ago.

One thing I will say about this, though, is that the problem with legalizing things is in part downstream of the Supreme Court’s first amendment jurisprudence.

If I say “it’s illegal to sell cocaine,” then you can’t run a Facebook ad campaign for your cocaine business because your ads would be confessing to a crime. But the Court has sharply constrained Congress’ ability to regulate commercial speech relative to older jurisprudence. So if cocaine were legal, there would be tons and tons of cocaine advertising and cocaine marketing all trying to get as large a swathe of people to try cocaine. Companies would do whatever they could to push people over the ledge into addiction.

To me, it does not make a ton of sense to say “the only way you can curtail sports gambling marketing is to make it illegal to bet on sports.” Sending someone to prison for betting on sports seems crazy. But the idea that the huge proliferation of sports gambling ads and growing entwinement of sports gambling with professional leagues is good also seems crazy to me. I’ve been sort of reluctantly backed into the corner of “gambling should be illegal so that we can cut down on advertising,” which seems like a silly thing to say, but I think is correct relative to the existing set of precedents. But the fact that we’ve gotten into this space, precedent-wise, is to me an example of the downsides of having this super-empowered Supreme Court that’s now composed entirely of academics with really high LSAT scores rather than the more traditional court lineups that used to have lots of politicians and policymakers.

TheElasticStranger: Do you have a take on the water issues facing the American west (e.g. the vanishing Great Salt Lake, depletion of the Colorado River etc.). I would love to read some techno-optimism on a water abundance agenda via desalinization, infrastructure, policy, or whatever else.

It’s good to grow crops in the desert because it’s quite sunny and the sun is good for crops. The problem is that crops need water, and water is normally scarce in the desert. Every once in a while you luck into something like the Nile River, and it becomes the foundation for a great civilization and later the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Thousands of years later, Egypt’s productivity per acre is still off-the-charts.

We don’t have the Nile, but we do have the diversion of the Colorado River for agricultural purposes in California and Arizona.

Policymakers in both of those states, though, insist on treating the water scarcity issue as primarily a residential issue, even though in both cases agriculture dominates water use and gets preferential access to water. The solution to resource scarcity is to charge for access on equal terms for everyone, which would probably mean net reallocation of water away from agriculture and, in turn, net reallocation of agriculture toward rainier parts of the country.

Desalination works great, though. It’s just energy-intensive and costs money.

Eli Youngs: If you were going to teach a college course, what would the subject be and which books would you assign?

Susanna Siegel, an epistemologist at Harvard, taught a class in fall 2021 on “the philosophy of journalism” which is a topic that I’m very interested in. I actually pitched a senior thesis on this subject that I was discouraged from pursuing, so my dream is to return to campus teach Version 2.0 of the Philosophy of Journalism seminar, and have my vengeance on the whole department.

What would we read? Compared to Siegel, I am a little less interested in the question of objectivity and more interested in questions of normative ethics and how the concept of “journalistic ethics” does and does not correspond with general ethics. I think I would assign a lot of ethics content from working journalism institutions and from journalism school classes, and then try to interrogate what’s going on with them. It often seems to me that what’s called “ethics” in journalism is actually something else. Like is it actually unethical to disclose a source under any circumstances? I’m skeptical. But if journalists promote a norm whereby journalists who reveal sources will be shunned and ostracized from the field, that lends a ton of credibility to journalistic promises of anonymity that would otherwise be very challenging to enforce.

It absolutely benefits me, as a working journalist, that lots of people believe they can tell me things off the record and I will keep their confidence. They do that in part because they think of me as trustworthy. But they also do it because they know that other journalists would punish me for violating anonymity, so even though there’s no law against it, the norm is strong and my promises are credible. But is this what ethics is? Don’t we see a lot of individual cases of sources being granted anonymity that actually seem pretty inappropriate?

Mike: You posted about how VCs are lying about the economy for political reasons. I think there's an element of that, but I also think that the tech industry is in a massive slump right now — capital has dried up, revenue is down, profits are down, startup equity is worthless, everyone's doing layoffs, recruiters aren't blowing up everyone’s inbox anymore, etc. My coworkers, generally liberal with no political agenda here, routinely say things like “when the recession is over,” and wouldn't believe it if you told them there is no recession.

And obviously software people don't write the news, and the press is extremely unsympathetic to the woes of the tech industry, so this background vibe doesn't just make it straight to everyone's news feed. But journalists do, and the last decade has famously been a tumultuous one for the industry. How do you think journalists have misreported the news based on over-extrapolating their personal circumstances?

Internet-era journalism very badly overweights the life experience of college graduates living in New York City.

And I think that’s a big part of the tech/media antagonism. If you look at the years 2009-2019, it was a time when the living standards of software engineers improved much faster than the national average but the living standards of young journalists improved much slower than the national average (or in many cases, actually declined). So we had a ton of gloom and doom narratives out of the media about how “capitalism” (i.e., constrained housing supply in Greater New York) was failing and a lot of triumphant narratives out of Silicon Valley about how the internet was creating all this unmeasured value (really just tech people were getting rich) and then a lot of egomaniacal fighting between these perspectives.

Stuart: Are big traffic roundabouts like Dupont Circle bad? They seem unappealing from a motorist, pedestrian, cyclist, and transit perspective. The green space in the middle seems less enjoyable with cars constantly circling it.

Roundabouts, as I understand them, are supposed to be an alternative to traffic lights as a way of managing intersections. But the big traffic circles in D.C. like Dupont and Logan Circles aren’t like that — they are circular parks that require traffic lights so pedestrians can get to them and the whole thing ends up being a big mess. I think it was a bad idea and the city would have been better off with a more regular grid and some more conventional parks.

Evan Bear: Was Al Gore a good candidate in 2000? Did he run ahead of the fundamentals or behind them? In hindsight should he have done more to embrace and highlight the Naderites' critiques, so as to make himself more appealing to swing voters?

Gore did okay, in my view, when you consider how many different directions he got screwed from — the timing of the Elián González situation, the Palm Beach County ballot design, the dumb Electoral College, Ralph Nader specifically targeting swing states late in the campaign.

That said, in retrospect, I think Democrats would have been better served by a nominee who was ideologically unremarkable but a change of pace from the Clinton administration. Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber or Vermont Governor Howard Dean or Maryland Governor Parris Glendening or someone like that. It would have been hard for Gore to appeal more to voters on the Gore-Nader margin without alienating voters on the Gore-Bush margin. But a governor would have answered general “time for a change” vibes in a non-specific way that could have helped on both fronts.

Alec Arellano: Last week’s “Community Meetings Aren’t Democracy” made me curious what you think of the various proposals from activists and scholars to have everyday citizens more directly involved in the actual policymaking and agenda-setting process. I’m thinking of things like participatory budgeting and Hélène Landemore’s idea of “open democracy.” To me it seems like these sorts of things would possibly not be as liable to the vetocratic pathologies of community meetings that rightfully concern you and other supply-side progressives. At the same time, though, at least in my reading, you’ve written a lot about politics and governance as a task for professionals, which would seem to cut against transferring substantial decision-making or agenda-setting power to ordinary citizens. I ask this question as someone who is interested in these sorts of citizen involvement proposals but is not necessarily a partisan of them.

I think deliberately constructed citizen panels could have a very interesting role to play in a different version of democracy. Like suppose you convened a group of 27 randomly selected Americans — like jury duty — and told them they had three months to come up with a long-term deficit reduction plan.

Obviously, 27 random people aren’t qualified to do that. But at the same time, the question of “what kind of retirement security do we want senior citizens to enjoy?” is not a technical economic question at all. The current structure of ping pong between professional politicians of rival parties generates a lot of denialism about the real tradeoffs and actively promotes public confusion about the possibilities such that the public — infamously — say they want less spending in general and then favor more spending on every particular item.

So the Group of 27 would have time to deliberate with each other. And they’d have access to CBO experts, and I’m sure every think tanker and policy expert in America would be happy to talk to them. They’d be forced to actually choose, in a way that random people answering telephone polls are not. But they would also presumably be motivated to come up with something they sincerely think is a good idea, rather than do the politician game of angling for the next election. I’d be interested to see what they come up with. Is there a good path to institutionalizing this? How do you make sure they’re not just bribed? I have a lot of questions and I keep meaning to read Landemore’s book but I haven’t yet.

Bennie: Is the commentary about a weakened Putin so much wishful thinking? Prigozhin blinked and went into exile. Putin won.

Erica de Bruin, my go-to source on coups, seems to think Putin is genuinely weakened by this.

Stepping back, authoritarian leaders face a tradeoff between military efficacy and coup-proofing their security services. This has probably helped promote peace in the modern world because most dictators know their security forces are really tools for domestic repression, not for winning wars. But Putin decided to conquer Ukraine and then ended up in a surprising and costly standoff. Defeat is a risk to his regime, so on the margin he should probably invest less in coup-proofing and more in military effectiveness. But mutiny is a threat to the efficacy of his military, so he needs to invest less in promoting effective officers and more in promoting loyalty.

It’s lose-lose, and the best way for him to get out of the dilemma is to find some way to “declare victory and go home” from Ukraine.

Luke Christofferson: Let's say that you magically learned that you would be voting for a Republican in the 2036 general election. What's the most plausible series of events that you can imagine leading you there?

Say Biden gets re-elected in 2024, and then the Democratic nominee wins in 2028 — mildly unlikely, but not some kind of outlandish scenario. I think in response to that three-peat, Republicans become open to genuinely moderating, the way Democrats did in 1992. So in the 2032 race they give us the 2032 version of a Larry Hogan or Charlie Baker type. I probably still don’t vote for that guy, but he wins.

Parties usually respond to their first defeat by shifting left (even a moderate Dem like Biden ran on a 2020 platform that was way to the left of Barack Obama), so 2036 probably gives us a moderate Republican running for re-election against a very left-wing Democrat. If there’s a recession, Democrats have a decent shot. But if things are going fine in the country then the moderate Republican has a great shot at winning in a landslide with the votes of people like me.

This is probably not going to happen, but I think it’s perfectly plausible — it’s like a coin flip coming up tails four times in a row or rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice or something. You’d bet against it, but if it happened you wouldn’t be like, “wow, I have to rethink everything now!”

Jasper in Beijing: Do you have any thoughts on liquor licensing for bars and restaurants? The issue has been getting a lot of coverage lately in Boston, where they apparently now fetch over $600K. This seems bound to hurt the restaurant sector, by making it incredibly expensive to open a new establishment. What would an optimal policy look like in your view?

Quantity restrictions on liquor licenses are dumb; what we should have are higher taxes on booze.

Dave: Current SCOTUS justices receiving gifts and favors from people who have business before the court seems clearly corrupt but, at the same time, it does seem hard to draw a clear line between that and regular friendship. Since you have noted that the Supreme Court has created an absurdly narrow definition of “corruption,” I wonder if you have a workable definition that covers more ambiguous influence?

My inclination is to say it would make sense to hold Supreme Court justices to an incredibly high standard of ethical conduct, if only because I don’t really worry about “attracting competent candidates” to the federal appellate judiciary in the way I do for mayors and members of Congress and middle managers at obscure bureaucracies.

It seems like a lot of people want these Supreme Court jobs and that if guys like Thomas and Alito (and Ruth Bader Ginsburg!) were inclined to retire a bit earlier and enjoy less scrutiny on their vacation travel and so forth, that would be good for the country.

Alex: It's Canada day this weekend, and the 4th of July early next week. In honour of our respective national holidays, what's something our counties should learn from each other? Boring answers like healthcare not welcome.

Americans should learn from Canada about the merits of separate federal, provincial, and local party systems.

Alberta, the most right-wing province, just had a competitive election between the United Conservative Party (which is more right-wing than the Conservative Party of Canada) and the Alberta New Democratic Party, a kind of labor-populist party that has a different identity from both the federal Liberals and the federal NDP. The Quebec National Assembly has three parties in it that have basically nothing to do with federal politics. Vancouver has parties in city elections with nonsense names like ABC Vancouver and OneCity.

In America, by contrast, people just kind of robotically vote for the state legislative candidate who has a D or R next to their name based on how they feel about the incumbent president. This doesn’t make any sense in terms of democratic accountability and gives no consideration to the fact that the actual issues at stake in different elections are different.

In terms of what Canada could learn from the U.S., it’s been a long time now since I was really up to speed on Canadian issues, but I’ve read that “there are too many regulatory barriers to interprovincial trade” in Canada, which inhibits domestic competition. A big point of emphasis in the United States, from Hamilton on forward, has been to try to have federalism but also an absence of internal trade barriers. And I think it works pretty well.

Jacob Fridman: You've written a lot about your fears of the GOP's attacks on Medicaid, so I was wondering if you had any thoughts on National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru's Washington Post op-ed where he talks about making Social Security and Medicaid both “progressive and conservative?”

Ramesh and I just straight-up agree about Social Security at this point and believe that the program should be made much flatter. A lot of people talk about how it’s good that Social Security is “universal” and not “means tested,” and I agree. But the actual structure of Social Security is that it gives more generous benefits to richer people over and above the fact that richer people live longer. Increasing the minimum benefit while cutting the higher-end benefits would save money, reduce poverty, and fight inflation.

There’s plenty of room to quibble about the particulars, but he’s right. That is broadly the direction of the Obama administration’s proposals in the grand bargain era, though more timidly than what Ponnuru suggests in his column. The time wasn’t right circa 2013, but it’s a good idea.

On Medicaid, I dunno. I think we are overdue for a conversation about fiscal federalism in general, since right now there are about eighty bajillion joint state-federal programs that all work slightly differently with very little rhyme or reason. But these programs are also very complicated, and I’d want to talk this over with some more people.

AW: Joe Rogan's proposal that Peter Hotez debate RFK Jr. on his podcast is obviously ridiculous from a format perspective (assuming the goal is to determine whose position is more factually correct). If you were going to design a structure for that debate, what would it be?

I think the further you get from the idea of, like, “The Big Debate That Will Settle Vaccines,” the closer you get to some ideas that might deliver enlightenment.

If Rogan, a very talented public communicator but obviously not a specialist, wants to “just ask questions” about vaccines, then I think he should interview someone like Emily Oster — a person who’s adept at public communication, who’s not a medical doctor who’d be “debating science,” but who’s known specifically for kicking the tires on studies and telling people what she found.

If we want to see RFK Jr. participate in a political debate about Covid vaccines, I’d like to see him go up against Alex Azar or someone else from the Trump administration who was involved with Operation Warp Speed.

If we want to see a medical scientist like Hotez really get into it with credentialed skeptics, then a written exchange between him and a more vaccine-skeptical doctor could be very interesting.

The point, though, with all of this is that you have to ask what you’re trying to accomplish. My personal view, which I freely admit I cannot prove, is that something like 80% of vaccine skepticism is motivated reasoning driven by a dislike of needles. The solution to the problem is to create oral or nasal vaccines, at which point people will suddenly find the pro-vaccines studies much more persuasive.

Douglas Thornurg: Should the democrats rethink their “not really a primary” primary with Joe Biden as Trump begins to sink? Trump is still riding high but his trend is slightly negative and based on episodes like his Fox interview you can see peak Trump has passed. Biden can beat Trump but he likely loses to most other GOP candidates. If the democrats don’t have any alternative in play during the primary season they’ll be stuck with Biden.

I personally like the man and think that the secret to his 2020 win is his own line “don’t compare me to the Almighty compare me to the alternative.” He’s an easy pick over Trump but not so easy versus other GOP alternatives.

I think the presidential nominating system is pretty bad. My guess is that if you had a secret ballot among Democratic Party members of Congress on the question “should Joe Biden step aside in favor of Gretchen Whitmer as 2024 nominee,” Whitmer would win easily. But that’s not how the system works. If Biden did step aside, the presumptive nominee would be Kamala Harris. She’s weak enough that she would draw challengers, but she might be able to scare off the best mainstream options and recreate something like the 2016 dynamic where she’d be facing off against a leftist and someone who’s fine but has zero shot.

I do wonder sometimes if it wouldn’t be better for, I dunno, Josh Shapiro to throw his hat in the ring and say explicitly “I have basically no policy disagreements with Joe Biden, I just think we should have a younger nominee.”

Would anyone vote for him? I feel like it would be a total flop, even though the pitch makes sense logically. But maybe it would work! The line he’d have to walk, though, is that if you suggest Biden is too old in the sense of “it would be better to have a Republican,” then rank-and-file Democrats would immediately hate you. You’d have to make a really super-duper narrow critique that’s like “literally just for the sake of atmospherics and maximizing the number of campaign events per day, it would be better to nominate me.” Which, again, I think is true. But it seems like a weak argument.