Bad Faith, Free Trade Style

The economic argument for free trade involves making a bunch of supply-demand diagrams and noticing that, if you expand trade to include the entire world, it can't help but increase overall surplus. That is, if the country becomes an exporter and the price of the good in that country increases, the gains for producers will outweigh the losses for consumers, and if the country becomes an importer and the price of the good drops, the gains for consumers will outweigh the damage to producers. This means that, in theory, one could then re-allocate some portion of the gains that the winners from trade accrue to the losers, allowing everyone to come out ahead as a net matter. If you do it right, free trade can be pareto efficient.

Mitch McConnell, a "supporter" of free trade, is planning to vote against various free-trade agreements the Administration wants if they don't drop their insistence on including Trade Adjustment Assistance in the pacts. TAA is a program aimed at helping workers displaced by the effects of free trade find new jobs. It constitutes, in other words, the exact kind of redistributive scheme that the standard economics argument in favor of free trade calls for to make everyone better off. And McConnell opposes it. This is a tell; he's tipping his hand that he doesn't really care about free trade. He doesn't want a Pareto improvement in the well-being of Americans; he wants a really, really big improvement in the well-being of large American companies that stand to profit from free trade done badly. This is the kind of thing to look for from a politician, because when they take a stance like this it means they are not playing the game in good faith.

The War Powers Act

I just read a post by Eric Posner, son of the conservative jurist Richard Posner and author of a book called The Executive Unbound, arguing that criticizing Harold Koh and John Yoo for advocating narrow interpretations of statutes to give the executive broader latitude in conducting foreign policy really amounts to criticizing the entire way American executives have handled foreign policy throughout history. I'm not sure I find his particular argument convincing, but I honestly don't really have a very easy time getting worked up about the War Powers Act. As I see it, basically, the Constitution prescribes a particular division of war-making powers: Congress is responsible for providing the military and for declaring war, and the executive is responsible for managing war. Maybe the practice in the post-WWII world of not really declaring war is unconstitutional. Maybe the executive really can just bomb some random country without asking Congress. Maybe NATO and the UN really are constitutional commitments of support for international military undertakings that change the prior balance of power among the branches of the U.S. government. But whatever the truth is about all of those issues, they are issues that Congress cannot change by simple statute. If Congress must declare all wars, and that includes everything from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya, then Congress can't give the President a 60-day window to conduct undeclared wars. Likewise, if these types of conflict can be legitimately begun by the President, I don't see that Congress can say that 60 days later the Commander-in-Chief needs to ask for authorization. Now, of course, Congress can always defund anything it wants, but in terms of formal war-making powers I just don't think that the process can be changed by a simple law. Whether you favor executive power or congressional power over war, the War Powers Act just isn't of a high enough constitutional stature to change what really ought to be going on. So yeah, Obama's violating the War Powers Act. But so what?

Gaming the Debt Limit Constitutional Option Scenario

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner was apparently discussing the debt limit with somebody today, and insisted upon reading the text of the least glamorous part of the most glorious part of the U.S. Constitution, namely Amendment XIV, Section 4. Specifically:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law ... shall not be questioned.

This sounds a lot like it means something like a statutory debt limit is invalid. Now, sure, we can quibble about whether it means exactly that, but it's a plausible argument that it means that. This is a strategy that's gaining traction among liberals, including pundits and Senators; if the Administration is considering using this option, just declaring that the debt limit doesn't exist so Republicans trying to use it as leverage can eff off, it's kind of a big deal. So, let's consider the various ramifications of using this tactic.

I did call it, didn't I?

Jonathan Chait has a piece today arguing that Obama's press conference yesterday was his imitation of Harry Truman's "give 'em hell" spiel. I would just like to say that I called it, writing back on November 3rd, 2010:

So make it clear, let's all come together to solve problems. Hope that Republicans agree to play on his terrain. And expect that they won't, and when they don't...

Give 'em hell, Barry!

My argument was that Obama should start out sounding like Clinton, wanting to work together with Republicans to find sensible, centrist policies to help the country, but anticipate that Republicans wouldn't work with him, and once they didn't, start sounding like Truman, castigating them for doing nothing and favoring the rich. And, uh, that's what happened.

+1 to me, +1 to Obama.

Nitpicking

I just happened to read a post on Fangraphs about the usefulness of the standard AVG/OBP/SLG "triple-slash" as a descriptive metric even in an age where there are all sorts of fancy offensive-evaluation metrics (the article mentions wOBA and wRC+ in particular, both Fangraphs creations which I'm not getting into here). In the course of doing so he mentions that, since AVG and SLG have the same denominator, you can subtract them and get something mathematically meaningful, in this case extra bases per at-bat (though he says extra bases per hit, which is wrong). This number is denoted ISO, short for "isolated power" and which I always pronounce as "iso-pop" in my head, for some obscure reason. Anyway, the point of this little blog post here is that ISO strikes me as a very strange way to go about measuring a player's pure power. Here's an example: suppose we have two players, one with a batting-average of .350 and a slugging percentage of .500, and another who's hitting just .220 but slugging .370. They both have an ISO of .150, but which one has more power? I'd say the guy with the abysmal average. Why? Because while the high-average guy is averaging 10 bases per 7 hits, or 1.43 bases per hit, the low-average guy is averaging 1.68 bases per hit. That's more raw power. ISO has the unfortunate quality that, while trying to isolate power, it is simultaneously including a bonus for the skill of not getting out, or at least of getting hits. You can subtract, but dividing makes more sense.

It's Not About Speech

The Supreme Court, by the tediously usual 5-4 majority, has just struck down a matching-funds campaign finance law in Arizona. The idea seems to be that a) we've already established that using money to disseminate political advertisements is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment; b) we've already established that the government cannot appreciably restrict that speech, i.e. enact contribution or spending limits; c) giving matching funds to the opposition is a dis-incentive for someone with lots of money to spend it on political advertising; therefore d) matching funds count as censorship. Oh my god I can't believe how wrong this is.

Tough Pars

Nate Silver writes (actually, tweets, but it is a form of writing, after all!):

Obama has a lot of pars on a tough course. Certainly could be much worse. But very few birdies.

This is part of an argument with Matt Yglesias structured around the difference between Andrew Cuomo's ability to exert effort and reap praise in the simple-majority NY Senate versus Obama's apparently more low-key leadership in the filibustered US Senate. They're sort of arguing over whether Obama has any particularly challenging and credit-worthy accomplishments that seem as much like an act of leadership as Cuomo's. I think it's actually a very apt metaphor. Roughly speaking, Nate's saying that Obama's playing the U.S. Open.