Ian Underwood

Ian Underwood is the author of the Bare Minimum Books series (BareMinimumBooks.com).  He has been a planetary scientist and artificial intelligence researcher for NASA, the director of the renowned Ask Dr. Math service, co-founder of Bardo Farm and Shaolin Rifleworks, and a popular speaker at liberty-related events. He lives in Croydon, New Hampshire.

Make America States Again

The 17th Amendment was supposed to solve a particular problem — the political establishment was thought to be exercising too much control over the selection of senators, making the process too susceptible to corruption.  The idea was to fix that by taking control out of the hands of that establishment, and putting it directly into the hands of voters.

No, seriously.  People apparently thought that would address the problem.

But as is so often the case in politics, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Without solving the the old problem, it created a new, and much worse, problem — one that has recently metastasized from the Senate to the House. 

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Legalize Failure

Police in Wilmette, Illinois recently considered charges against a mother for letting her 8-year-old daughter walk the family dog around the block unsupervised.  Predictably, a lot of people are reacting with incredulity.  ‘How can something like this even happen?’ they want to know.

It’s very simple.  It happens because we’ve made failure illegal.

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Representative, or Role Model?

As the discussion over Andy Sanborn’s Q Score heats up, I can’t help being reminded of Pete Rose, who — despite his singular accomplishments as a player — remains ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

To paraphrase former major league outfielder Jim Dwyer:  The Hall of Fame is for baseball players.  Heaven is for good guys.

If your goal is to win a game, or a series, or a title, who do you want on your team?  The handsome, well-spoken guy with nice manners?  Or the crass, hard-charging guy with the skills and the drive to get the job done? 

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Can comics save politics?

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Recently I was discussing the latest Trump-related hysteria with a friend, who was upset about what he perceived to be a progressive double standard.  Basically, he was arguing that in cases where Trump is just doing the same thing that Obama was doing, then Obama’s supporters ought to be willing to admit that they’re either both right, or both wrong.  He thinks they’re not being consistent.

But I think they are being consistent, albeit in an unexpected way. 

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Party like it’s 1854

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There’s a lot of discussion just now about Eddie Edwards’s decision to pull out of the first Republican Congressional District 1 (CD1) debate rather than sign a pledge to support the eventual primary winner.

Is he showing ‘character’, and ‘standing up for his principles’, by refusing to sign the pledge?  That’s one way of looking at it.  Another is that he’s indicating a basic misunderstanding of what a political party is for, and what it means to belong to one.  He’s not alone. 

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Fixing schools: Is money really the issue?

A phrase we heard a lot the other night at Andru Volinsky’s traveling show was ‘fix it’, as in: ‘Some states have fixed it’, ‘The legislature doesn’t have the political will to fix it’, and so on.

Which raises the question:  Does something actually need to be fixed?

This needs to be asked, because whenever there is a conversation about reducing spending on government schools, we hear this argument:  ‘New Hampshire’s schools are among the best in the nation’, the implication being that this is a result of our willingness to spend so much on them (about $15,300 per pupil, well above the national average of $11,800).

That doesn’t sound like something that needs to be fixed, does it? 

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How we’ll get a state income tax

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I was in the audience last night at Richards School in Newport for Andru Volinksy’s dog and pony show on school funding in New Hampshire.

I got the chance to ask a question, which was, roughly:  Is there any interpretation that the Supreme Court could come up with, that is so outlandish, so contrary to common English usage — like deciding that from now on, ‘green’ actually means ‘blue’, or that in Article 19, the word ‘all’ now means ‘some’ — that the legislature would be justified in saying, ‘No, we’re not going to listen to you’? 

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From Laurie List to Cop Blockchain

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Kudos to the Union Leader for using Right to Know laws to obtain a (heavily redacted) copy of the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule (EES), often referred to as the ‘Laurie List’, and for making the list available online.

This is a list, maintained by the Attorney General, of police officers around the state who have ‘credibility issues’ that would prevent them from being effective witnesses at trial.

If you take the time to look at the list, and at the procedures governing its use, it should quickly become apparent that there are several glaring problems that need to be addressed. 

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Congressional candidates, what is your plan?

swamp

I mean, of course, your plan for dealing with the issues raised in the remarkable, and remarkably disturbing, Facebook series The Swamp.

For those who haven’t yet seen it, the series follows a group of idealistic, newly-minted members of the House of Representatives as they head to Washington, DC, to help drain the swamp.  Spoiler alert:  They drown.

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Maybe it’s Sununu who should resign

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On Friday, Governor Sununu called for the resignation of state senator Jeff Woodburn, saying:

[His] morally reprehensible, violent behavior has no place in public service, or anywhere else. Domestic violence will not be tolerated in New Hampshire. Senator Woodburn must resign. Immediately.

The problem, of course, is that Senator Woodburn has been accused of violent acts (including throwing a cup of water at someone’s face, and striking her in the stomach), but not convicted of anything.  He says that he intends to fight the charges, which means that we must presume that he is innocent unless and until he is found guilty in court.

I would hope that, if the governor had given it a little more thought, he would have issued a somewhat different statement, like:

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Three Steps to Smaller Government

Here in New Hampshire, the Republican party — the ‘party of small government’ — controls both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office.  But government continues to grow.  Why?  Because in order to actually shrink government, three reforms are necessary, and none of them are in place.

(1) Everything, including existing RSAs and agency regulations, must sunset after a reasonably brief period, like 10 years.

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But gun control laws DO work

Whenever anything bad happens that involves a gun, we can safely predict that two other things are going to happen shortly thereafter. The first is that some kind of gun control laws will be proposed.  The second is that these proposals will be met with claims that ‘gun control laws don’t work’.

But the thing is, they DO work.

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Searching Under the Education Lamppost

On Tuesday, August 14, at 6 pm, there will be a discussion about school funding at Richards Elementary School in Newport.  The discussion, which will center around a report created by the (recently shuttered) New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies, will be led by Executive Councilor Andru Volinksy, and John Tobin.

(You’ll remember them as the attorneys who helped the New Hampshire Supreme Court conclude that it is ‘essential to the preservation of a free government’ to give that government a monopoly on education… relying on a constitutional article that says it’s the government’s job to protect the public from monopolies.) 

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The RINO Virus (Part III, Recovery)

 

Led by Marie Kondo, a wave of tidying up is sweeping the nation.  People everywhere are going through their belongings, posing some simple tests, and getting rid of the items that fail those tests.

In Ms. Kondo’s case, the test is:  Does this item spark joy?  If it does, you keep it.  If not, you thank it for being part of your life, and send it on its way (to a friend, or a thrift shop, or Goodwill, or the transfer station).

In the case of some ‘minimalists’, the test is:  If you didn’t already have this item, would you buy it again?  If not, get rid of it.

I think this latter attitude may be the key to getting the Republican party to regain its focus on its primary purpose: preserving the republic.  

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The RINO Virus (Part II, Cure)

It seems that not a week goes by that we don’t hear conservatives and libertarians moaning, ‘Why did we bother to elect Republicans if they’re just going to _____?’

Republicans seem to have forgotten what a political party is for.  It’s a way to focus time, effort, energy, and money so that they don’t get dissipated.  It’s a way of saying, ‘Instead of chasing all these rabbits, and not getting any of them, let’s just chase this one’. 

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Ubitopia

Universal Basic IncomeSuddenly, it’s everywhere.  Lately I’ve even heard even libertarians suggesting that it might be a good idea to provide a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to replace the buffet of specific welfare programs that are now available to people who can’t afford things like housing (Section 8), heat (LIHEAP), medical care (Medicaid), food (SNAP), and so on.

This idea is a classic example of what Thomas Sowell calls ‘stage one thinking’, which is the apparent inability (or unwillingness) to appreciate that actions have consequences, and consequences propagate.

(Yes, I know that Milton Friedman advocated for a negative income tax, which is one type of universal basic income.  But Friedman also advocated for income tax withholding, which has turned into what we might call ‘the opiate of the taxes’.)

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The RINO Virus (Part I, Diagnosis)

Years ago, a friend told me about something he calls the ‘baby test’.  To take it, raise either arm straight up so your upper arm touches your ear.  Bend the arm at the elbow.  If you can make a 90-degree angle, you’re not a baby.

It occurs to me that there is a similar test for whether you’re a Republican, although it’s conceptual rather than corporeal. The test is simple.  If you believe that it’s more important to achieve particular outcomes than to preserve a set of principles, you’re not a Republican.

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Voting wrongs

Imagine going into a meeting of a homeowner’s association and saying: I don’t own any of these units, but I stay here sometimes with a friend who owns one, so I should get a vote.

Imagine going into a meeting of the shareholders of a corporation saying:  I don’t own any shares of this company, but I use your products sometimes, so I should get a vote.

Imagine going to a polling place in Canada on election day and saying:  I’m not a citizen of Canada, but I go to school here, so I should get a vote.

These are all absurd, right? 

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Living wage, or MSRP?

Every time I hear about a state (most recently Massachusetts) or city (most recently Seattle) raising the minimum wage to some unsustainable level, it makes me wonder what I would do if I ran a business in one of those jurisdictions.

The obvious responses would be to (1) move to a new jurisdiction, (2) hire fewer employees, (3) raise my prices, or some combination of those three.  But there’s a less obvious response that I think I would try first. 

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It’s not ‘fake’ if you don’t want it to be real

Recently, Skip started a post with this charming thought:  ‘The job of a journalist is to report facts, add context where necessary, and leave it to the consumer to decide what he thinks.’ I would have agreed with that before I read Neil Postman’s excellent book How to Watch TV News.  But Postman helped me … Read more

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