Today, a man who lives in a country where a Senate candidate promised to do BJs for Votes, chose to make a post in his very popular blog, about US politics. Specifically, how our unusual election system (as opposed to one, say, that has paralyzed the government for 150 days as they try to deny French speakers the right to vote for French-speaking representatives), is promoting bad global food policies in order to prop up a broken bio-fuel initiative.
First, it’s no secret that our ethanol plan can’t match the efficiencies of Brazil’s. But you know, you can’t start at the finish line. Here’s how you decrease your dependence on foreign oil. You identify some native resource that can fill the need. Then you build up the infrastructure so you have this biodiesel available at all. Now that you have the fuel, you can build machinery (cars, trucks, SUVs etc) that use it. Now that you have this fuel in gas stations and biodiesel-friendly cars on the road, you can slowly let the economy find its own competition and efficiencies.
It’s impossible to command farmers to plow in their cornfields and plant sugar-beets instead. I don’t even know if they grow well here. However, if there was a good demand for bio-fuels, over time, if it makes economic sense, farmers will choose to in order to better compete and make more money. The universe runs on enlightened self-interest, after all.
America doesn’t change quickly. We’re a big country with a very diverse population, and it is precisely the natural role of our government to use subsidies and incentives in order to lead the country into the future.
Now, Tobold also criticizes a system which front-loads the primary season with such minority opinions as Iowa and New Hampshire. Trust me, the politicians would like NOTHING BETTER than to campaign in Florida, Texas, California and New York only. We start off our election year listening to the people who ordinarily have no or little voice in the government. For a couple of months, everyone in the United States listens to Iowa and New Hampshire, states without that many people in them, states almost fanatically anti-urban, before the high-population states dominate all political conversation. Disclaimer: I am from New Hampshire. My parents live in a small town called Deerfield. They actually have monthly meetings in the town hall. For a couple of months every four years, politicians actually listen to their concerns, precisely because our election system is built to listen to people in all walks in life and all parts of the country, not just the Californians and New Yorkers.
Hey, politics is fun, and if we lived in a relatively small and compact European country, maybe we could be more efficient. But we live in a huge, wide-open country and are a nation of immigrants from a hundred nations and a thousand cultures, so it takes us some time to do things. But we get there eventually.
6 thoughts on “Tobold: It’s called POLITICS”
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Corn to ethanol doesn’t make economic sense. What drives it is not enlightened self-interest, but subsidies.
I’m certainly not claiming that Belgian politics are superior to US politics. Nevertheless the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries are certainly undemocratic. If you want to give minorities a voice, why not rotate and have a different state hold the first primaries in every election? The 130,000 people that went to the Iowa primaries in 2004 certainly can’t claim to represent the will of 300 million Americans. You’d wonder how US politics would look if the first primaries were held in a state closer to the Mexican border having lots of hispanic immigrants. Or in a city state like New York. Or in a “green” state like California. Ideally every state would be important and every voter’s opinion would count.
Subsidies are what build the infrastructure to allow biofuels a chance to gain a foothold in the American market. The fact that ethanol from corn is not efficient is not unknown in the US. It’s in the self-interest of the US to have farming be profitable. We import much of our oil. At least we don’t have to import our food.
National issues like immigration and health care are always topics of discussion. Even seemingly urban states like California and New York are both largely rural (NYC is only one small corner of a large state, and away from the coast, California is largely fields, mountains and desert with relatively few people), and for these people, Iowa and New Hampshire are their voices in proxy in the national debate.
The system seems to make no sense and is fairly chaotic, but absent a parliamentary form of government, it does the job of representing the views of the majority of Americans pretty well — not just those that live in cities, but also the views of the people who make that city life possible.
I do believe that the system should be changed. Currently putting some states primaries before others is bad. While it get people to listen to the smaller states. But it also effect how the other states would vote. For instance if Candidate A and B are very close in a tie poll wise, and these first 2 states go to Candidate A, people in the state that haven’t vote yet are less likely to vote for Candidate B now. And what happens is the person running for President in a Primary, is no longer picked by the whole of the party but by the few states that go first.
Well, for that you would have to take the selection of the state’s delegates to the Electoral College out of the control of the states. Remember, the US is a Federation — the states have agreed to have a common Federal government to handle commerce between them and such things as a common defense and money system. Taking away a state’s power to decide how they are governed would be a pretty big step.
The Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primaries give all the candidates just two states on which they can focus their message. It’s a physical impossibility and an economic one for many of them as well to get their message out to the entire US at once. The early primaries provide an immediate signal to the nation of which candidates are viable and winnow the field. This lets people in later primaries not waste their votes on ultimately non-viable candidates. I might want to vote for Dennis Kucinich, but if the real fight will be between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, then I’ve wasted my opportunity to help decide the real battle.
I can’t remember but didn’t Florida break with tradition and move their primary up earlier? In general I think the primary elections needs some tinkering with but I don’t think our acceptance of biofuel subsidies is directly related to the Iowa primary. In general Americans are desperate for any oil alternatives even if they aren’t that efficient. Our dependence on foreign oil has increasingly come with higher costs every year.
Corn to fuel does not make sense until you look at the bio fuel alternatives. Whoops, it turns out that having a huge infrastructure (land, people, equipment) dedicated to growing, harvesting, and processing corn makes that a better plan than trying to change all of Iowa over to some other crop.
On Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, yes, it is strange, especially living in California, where our primary used to be in June, after everything was decided. 10% of the country left out of the vote. But the going logic is that at least some smaller states get a say. If the first two primaries were in California and Texas (picking the two most populous states), the smaller states would see no attention at all, as the “trend” would be set by those states. The idea is to keep the campaign from being held only California, New York, Texas, and Florida. (And yes, the Democratic party has threatened to not seat the Florida delegates at the convention this summer if they hold their primaries early. We’ll see how that plays out in the end. The primaries are under the control of the parties, not the states! Crazy!)
On primaries in Iowa = corn subsidies. That does not follow. Congress votes the money for subsidies, not the president. Any presidential candidate saying they are for or against subsidies are just flapping their gums.