Peter Orszag has what I think is a very good column about the desirability of increasing automaticity in certain aspects of American policymaking that’s been given provocative framing around the idea that America needs “less democracy.”

Provocative framing has a lot of marketing value, but it also provokes lots of people to disagree with you and I saw Orzag’s thesis being subjected to a lot of unwarranted scorn earlier today. I would suggest that people ignore the framing and focus on what he’s actually saying. He seems to have two really concrete suggestions. One is that we should try to enhance the scope of “automatic stabilizers” in American fiscal policy. This is orthodox Keynesian thinking and not something any progressive should have a problem with. The other is that we should strengthen the hand of non-elected boards to make adjustments to Medicare payment rates. Some progressives may have a problem with this on the grounds that cutting spending is a bad idea. But most progressives I know also claim to be admirers of single-payer health care systems that do a better job than America’s of controlling health care costs. The way that they do this is precisely through the sort of technocratic price controls that Orszag is praising.

What I would say on both sides is that framing everything as a conversation around more or less “democracy” is a foolish way to think about institutional design. In a democracy, political authorities are accountable to citizens. That principle is compatible with a wide array of institutional schemes. Electing Supreme Court justices to two-year terms wouldn’t make America “more democratic,” it would make us worse governed. Adopting default rules that strengthen automatic stabilizers wouldn’t be “less democratic,” it would be a good idea.

The Economist’s “Lexington” has an odd column which puts its finger on exactly what’s so unusually dysfunctional about the U.S. Congress and then spends the rest of its column-inches missing the point. But here’s the great insightful part:

Above all, British politicians accept the rules of a simple game: the ruling party governs (occasionally in coalition) while the opposition bides its time.

American politics, as Lexington notes, is totally different from that. And this drives all sorts of difference. It’s an important insight, and I think it highlights why it’s important to get a comparative perspective on things. The grand poobahs of Washington tend to instead focus on personality characteristics. Politicians are just too mean and narrow-minded and need to get nicer! Lexington correctly sees that personal behavior is driven by institutional settings, and American institutions drive a certain kind of gridlock on conflict. And yet his conclusion forgets everything he’s learned:

America needs to make big changes if it is to live within its means. But this will not be done by tinkering with its system of government. It is the people who work the system who need to change, primarily by meeting their opponents half way. They could make a start by asking a member of the other party over for dinner.

This just really can’t be right if you think about it. Get some policy writers from diverse perspectives in a room together, and you’ll quickly find points of common ground and win-win compromises emerging. Get some graybeard former politicians from diverse perspectives in a room together, and you’ll quickly find points of common ground and win-win compromises emerging. Get some active politicians from diverse perspective in a room together to talk about an issue that’s not at the fore-front of the political agenda, and you’ll quickly find points of common ground and win-win compromises emerging (think the Wyden-Bennett Health Americans Act). And yet it doesn’t happen. Why doesn’t it happen? It’s because of characteristics of the system that are much larger than any one man, woman, or dinner party.

Some people are noting that there are other states, most notably Wisconsin and Michigan, where the legislature can pull something similar. It’s worth noting, however, that under the U.S. Constitution, the discretion of state legislatures in allocating electoral votes is absolute. There’s no requirement that Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, or any of these other states hold any form of election. They could pass a law tomorrow saying delegating the selection of electors to Reince Priebus. This slightly addled constitutional provision has just been lurking around like a time bomb for over 100 years waiting for someone to push the envelop.

Good points. I think it’s interesting, though, that the Post editorial writer doesn’t suggest that the situation could be improved by implementing a rule requiring the upper house to operate by a 60 percent supermajority rule and giving minorities of as few as one member tons of tools to obstruct business. Nor do they seem to feel that, having modified the upper house’s rules in that way, it would be useful to object second- third- and fourth-tier members of the executive branch to a confirmation process dominated by supermajority voting and one-man days-long slowdowns. They don’t suggest any of those changes because, obviously, those would be terrible ideas. It’s obvious, at least, when you start talking a foreign country so people are freed of arbitrary psychological anchoring to the status quo. Try to talk about America, though, and the suggestion that a legislature proceed by industry-standard “the side with more votes wins” rule is considered both radical and also likely ideologically motivated opportunism or sour grapes.

It’s certainly true as Kevin Drum says that one thing that happens when politicians don’t have the money to buy tons of television ads is that the guys who own newspapers get a lot of power. But I think it’s worth pointing out that this is just one of the many ways that money is bound to talk in the political system no matter what you do with campaign finance. Politicians are very dependent on lobbyists and trade associations not just for money, but for knowledge, expertise, and analytical capacity. But of course lobbyists and trade associations have those things in part because they cost money.

This is, I think, a pretty huge problem. But it’s not really one that can be solved by reducing people’s ability to give money to politicians. What’s needed are institutional reforms that give politicians more capacity to do analysis, and that put more political authority in the hands of politicians who have analytic capacity at their disposal. Whenever a decision is made “by the states” that means, in many places, that the decision is being made by term-limited part-time state legislators who have no practical alternative but to rely on lobbyists for guidance and information.

Fareed Zakaria has a smart column highlighting the dysfunctional mismatch between America’s highly polarized parties and our cooperation-oriented political institutions. Unfortunately, like a lot of people who write about this issue he seems to have fallen for the siren’s song of redistricting as a cure all. He cites a Mickey Edwards article in The Atlantic as offering good ideas, including “truly open primaries and handing over the power of redistricting to independent commissions.”

As it happens, we have a perfect controlled experiment in what an American legislature might look like without gerrymandering. It would look like the United States Senate. And the US Senate gives us plenty of examples of Senator-pairs who represent identical constituencies but have different partisan affiliations. So ask yourself, is it true that Pat Toomey and Bob Casey represent a streak of pragmatic dealmaking moderation that could get us out of this jam? How about Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown? What is true is that when you see a Republican elected from a clearly Democratic-leaning state like Scott Brown in Massachusetts, or a Democrat like Mark Pryor from Arkansas that this kind of “mismatched senator” tends to have a proclivity for dealmaking. But even so, the striking thing about partisan polarization in the United States is that Pryor has a more left-wing voting record than Brown just as Mary Landrieu is more left wing than Mark Kirk. Our null hypothesis about a House with less partisan gerrymandering should be that it would look more like the U.S. Senate. “Fair fight” districts would look like Ohio, schizophrenically sending us liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans according to circumstances prevailing on election day. Lopsided Republican districts would look like Arkansas, mostly sending us conservative Republicans but occasionally coughing up moderate Democrats. Lopsided Democratic districts would look like Massachusetts, mostly sending us liberal Democrats but occasionally coughing up moderate Republicans. But the moderate Republicans would still vote with the conservative Republicans most of the time, and the moderate Democrats would all be to the left of all the Republicans.

There are two main reasons why the parties are so polarized today. One is that we have the best-educated, best-informed electorate that we’ve ever had in American history, so elected officials are under more pressure to reflect the ideological views of their backers. The other is that we lack a major, high-salience issue that’s uncorrelated with the main fights in American politics. In the middle of the 20th century, some economic populists were also white supremacists and some business friendly conservatives had progressive views on race and racial politics was very important to a lot of people. If something brand new (barbershop licensing, parking regulation, etc.) were to become highly salient that might cut across existing partisan divisions. But absent that, we need to accept polarization and find a way to make our institutions work.

No matter how favorably pollsters with the Tarrance Group or other firms spun the bill in their pitch — casting it as the only path to saving the beloved health entitlement for seniors — the Ryan budget’s approval rating barely budged above the high 30s or its disapproval below 50 percent, according to a Republican operative familiar with the presentation.

What’s more, not only did House Republicans know this, but many of them drew the conclusion that this meant they shouldn’t push Medicare repeal:

The outward unity projected by House Republicans masked weeks of fierce debate, even infighting, and doubt over a measure that stands virtually no chance of becoming law. In a series of heated closed-door exchanges, dissenters, led by Ryan’s main internal rival — House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) — argued for a less radical, more bipartisan approach, GOP staffers say.

But amazingly, Camp (and others) agreed to go along with it even though a minority of Republicans plus all Democrats could have easily blocked Medicare repeal if they wanted to:

At a fundraiser shortly after the vote, a frustrated Camp groused, “We shouldn’t have done it” and that he was “overridden,” according to a person in attendance.

All put together, it’s a fascinating picture of the emergence of very strong party discipline of the sort that hasn’t traditionally existed in the United States and continues not to exist in the Democratic caucus. In lots of countries the way things work is that once a party caucus has decided on a position, all members vote for it even if in the intra-caucus dispute they didn’t want to adopt that position. But American parties don’t normally work this way. Camp, however, seems to be saying that the House GOP now does. Indeed, party decision-making is sufficiently centralized that discipline can be imposed even when the members are well-aware that the line people being made to toe is unpopular. One of the unfortunate things about the political media’s commitment to “balanced” coverage is that not only do reporters generally feel impelled to always act as if the two parties are normatively symmetrical there also seems to be a reluctance to explore the systematic asymmetries between the parties in an even merely descriptive sense. As a result, we know less about the differences in these disciplinary dynamics, their sources, and their implications than we really ought to.

Goodwin Liu’s nomination to serve on the 9th Circuit came up for a vote today and Senate Republicans filibustered it to death. Ian Milhiser notes that many of those who voted to block an up-or-down vote on Liu until recently viewed the filibustering of judicial nominees to be categorically evil:

— Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.”
— Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA): “Every judge nominated by this president or any president deserves an up-or-down vote. It’s the responsibility of the Senate. The Constitution requires it.”
— Tom Coburn (R-OK): “If you look at the Constitution, it says the president is to nominate these people, and the Senate is to advise and consent. That means you got to have a vote if they come out of committee. And that happened for 200 years.”
— John Cornyn (R-TX): “We have a Democratic leader defeated, in part, as I said, because I believe he was identified with this obstructionist practice, this unconstitutional use of the filibuster to deny the president his judicial nominations.
— Mike Crapo (R-ID): “Until this Congress, not one of the President’s nominees has been successfully filibustered in the Senate of the United States because of the understanding of the fact that the Constitution gives the President the right to a vote.”
— Chuck Grassley (R-IA): “It would be a real constitutional crisis if we up the confirmation of judges from 51 to 60, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing if the Democrats were going to filibuster.”
— Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation.”

As I wrote at the time the correct progressive response to the “nuclear option”/filibuster controversy of 2005 would have been to seize the opportunity to eliminate or phase-out the filibuster. Had that happened, a few more right-wing judges would be on the bench today but much more progressive legislation could have passed in the 111th Congress and those extra conservative jurists would be counter-balanced by first-rate progressive jurists like Goodwin Liu.

For example, while it seems like it would be difficult in practice for a twentysomething to win a senate election, it’s very hard to see what the problem would be with letting such a person serve if he managed to win. I’d rather have Jamelle Bouie or Ezra Klein in the Senate than any number of folks currently there. I’ve been reading recently about the debates at the Constitutional Convention and it’s interesting that there doesn’t seem to have been much explicit discussion of these age limits or what their purpose is. The escalation with the restrictions on who can be in the House laxer than those for the Senate which are laxer than for the White House seems to mostly be part of a symbolic scheme where they wanted to kinda sorta replicate the Commons/Lords/Crown structure of the British constitution. But as best as I can tell there wasn’t some specific concern here about a crop of 27 year-old senators wrecking the Republic.

I’ve long been a bit skeptical of the merits of American-style strong judicial review as an institution. The practice is associated with some important human rights gains, including Brown v Board of Education and Roe v Wade, that have normally made it venerated among American liberals. But this kind of outcomes-oriented case doesn’t withstand a ton of scrutiny. After all, almost 100 years before the Supreme Court helped lead the civil rights revolution it was the Supreme Court that invalidated 19th century civil rights law. So I’m glad to see Dahlia Lithwick putting this issue on the table and discussing Jeremy Waldron’s case against judicial review.

That said, I’m not actually sure that the Affordable Care Act legislation that she’s uses as her example to kick the discussion off really illustrates the point very well. At the end of the day, the only reason the ACA legislation is even a little bit interesting is that the congressional coalition behind the ACA lost so many seats. If the votes for ACA were still there in congress, then an adverse ruling on the individual mandate would be irrelevant—it would be simple to do a patch that accomplishes the same thing as the mandate without specifically triggering the red herring objection about “regulating inactivity.” The problem is that the votes wouldn’t be there. And if you look at the most plausible alternatives to the American system, you’d be looking at something like Canada’s “notwithstanding” clause that allows a legislative majority to overrule a judicial decision. But the political support to invoke such a clause wouldn’t exist today were the law struck down.

More generally, I think the biggest element of the American political system that hyper-empowers judges actually isn’t our unusually strong judicial review, it’s our unusually cumbersome legislative process. If the Supreme Court strikes down the prevailing statute that attempts to limit corporate influence over elections, we don’t just pass a new law that steers clear of the constitutional issues they raised. We do nothing. And if the Supreme Court issues an interpretation of a statute that makes it extremely difficult for people to in practice enforce their rights, we don’t pass a new law clarifying the rules. We do nothing. That’s because we live in a country whose political system is overwhelmingly biased toward inaction. That, in turn, winds up making every judicial decision higher-stakes than it should be.

In that sense it’s a little bit odd that he cites the congresses of the 1980s as more functional than the current one, since it’s plain that the eighties are when the problem arose:

But more broadly, I think it’s quite simple to explain why congress can’t—and won’t—solve this issue. First ask: Would a debt deal accomplish anything useful in the short-term? Many people think that it wouldn’t. And people who think that a debt deal wouldn’t accomplish anything useful will naturally be reluctant to make concessions in pursuit of a goal that’s not substantively important. Many other people think that a debt deal would accomplish something useful for the US economy in the short-term. Which is another way of saying that it would guarantee the re-election of incumbent President Barack Obama. Which means that Republicans who think a debt deal would have a positive impact should refuse to make concessions in pursuit of a deal, Republicans who think a debt deal wouldn’t have a positive impact should also refuse to make a deal, and of course Democrats who think a debt deal wouldn’t have a positive impact should also also refuse to make a deal.

Or if you prefer to think in terms of political message/optics/etc rather than economic fundamentals just consider the White House signing ceremony for a big bipartisan deal. How’s Tim Pawlenty supposed to react to that? Does he say, “well, it turns out that Barack Obama is actually a visionary leader, an effective legislator, and a brilliant pragmatic compromiser who’s addressing the nation’s problems but you should elect me anyway?” Of course not. He needs to denounce the deal as a sellout of conservative principles. And for all the reasons that T-Paw needs to denounce the deal, so do all of T-Paw’s rivals for the nomination. And since John Boehner and Mitch McConnell know that this is what will happen, they should refuse to make a deal.

People often seem to me to have an unwarranted faith that these problems can be overcome. In a comparative context, American-style political systems normally break down.

Here in the United States we don’t have random un-elected monarchs to serve as our head of state. Which has its merits. But instead we bestow the honor and dignity that comes with being head of state on the a President who simultaneously serves as head of government. This doesn’t actually deny us the weird spectacle of things like a Royal Wedding. Instead it just happens at the White House:

There was dancing in the East Room afterward, with the Marine Band breaking into “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago. The ongoing Vietnam War left a number of ladies without husbands. Tricia’s sister, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, was without her husband, David. Lynda Bird Johnson was seen standing alone.

Eighty-seven-year-old Alice Roosevelt was on hand, complaining that her seat had still been wet. In some respects her wedding continued to hover over all that had followed. Most subsequent White House weddings now called for a sword to cut the cake, as if reaching back to recapture what had been a spontaneous and magic moment of history. Nellie Wilson was contacted by a silk manufacturing company sending her samples, promising to name a color after her, but Alice Roosevelt had long ago “pre-empted my beloved blue, so I chose a lovely flame-color.” It was called “Nell Rose,” but it did not catch on like “Alice Blue.” Talking about the Nixon girls Alice would later offer one of her more biting comments. She said she liked “Julie better than Tricia. I’ve never been able to get on with Tricia. She seems rather pathetic, doesn’t she? I wonder what’s wrong with her?” The past chairman of the White House Conference on Presidential Children has pointed out that there were often deep reasons and issues behind the famous quips of Alice Roosevelt. Sitting in her damp seat in the Rose Garden, her glorious moment largely forgotten and her famous father now covered over by so many layers of important personalities and issues, Alice Roosevelt may have only been lashing out at the one White House bride whose beauty had transcended her own.

But of course it’s relatively rare for a sitting president to have a child get married. Still, even weddings aside the president doesn’t need to make do without courtiers. We have instead the White House Correspondents Association and its increasingly tacky and absurd annual dinner, an occasion at which it’s apparently “inappropriate” and “over the line” to mock the incumbent while sitting in the Presence of his majesty.

(cc photo by Ken Lund)

NC asks:

Today you tweeted about a Cato article about GOP led Ohio industrial policy, basically that was giving away massive tax credits and general subsidies. And I know you’ve come out against state level film credits. So basically, the topic I want to know more about is: what is optimal state policy to encourage economic growth?

I don’t think there’s a real answer to that question. In part that’s because state-level policy is kind of like SimCity, in that it’s clearly possible to lose but the victory conditions are fairly undefined. On top of that, different states are really quite differently situated. The general thing I would say is that state governments ought to think more about people and less about states as such. On the one hand, all the people of the planet earth are free and equal moral agents entitled to consideration in our thinking. On the other hand, if elected officials in Michigan have special Michigan-related responsibilities those are responsibilities to the people of Michigan not to its land area. If the upshot of your policy initiative is to move a factory from State A to State B so that people don’t move from State B to State A then the upshot is that you haven’t actually accomplished anything. Unless you’re creating new opportunities on net, including opportunities for people to move to your state (by reducing the cost of housing) and for people to get the skills needed to leave your state (by providing quality education) then you’re not really accomplishing anything.

I sometimes hear people say that states have incentives to pursue policies that are individually rational but collectively harmful. But the idea that those are the incentives is driven by poor habits of thought. Better journalism and more rational modes of thought can create a dynamic in which this kind of thing isn’t seen as desirable policy.

I wrote on Monday that I was torn between voting for Patrick Mara and voting for Bryan Weaver in yesterday’s DC City Council at-large race, but that what I basically wanted to do was vote for either of those guys over Vincent Orange. And in discussion after discussion of people with similar values to mine, that was the debate—shake things up with Mara the moderate Republican or go with Weaver the smart progressive reformer, but most of all let’s not end up with Vincent Orange. I also thought Josh Lopez seemed like he’d be a good councilman but just didn’t have the support. And now that the votes are in everything’s coming up Orange:

Orange claimed just over 28 percent of all votes cast, with Mara coming in at close to 26 percent. Sekou Biddle, who was appointed to the seat by the D.C. Democratic State Committee in January, ran third with 20 percent, Bryan Weaver had 13 percent, and Josh Lopez seven percent. Turnout only slightly exceeded 12 percent.

There’s not perfect way to run elections, but this particular way—lots of candidates in a first past the post race—is surely the worst of the lot. It’s possible that Orange is the second choice of an overwhelming number of Sekou Biddle supporters and thus that he would have won anyway in a IRV/AV election or an actual runoff. But we’ll never really know. And we ought to know! There’s no reason the fact that someone is the first choice of 28 percent of the voters should close the books on the question of who gets the job.

(cc photo by hjl)

One of the main things I hope people take away from my blog is that people who are interested in politics need to get more interested in state and local races, downballot stuff and all the rest. There’s a lot more to America than Presidential elections. So in that vein, here in DC we have a special election for an at-large city council seat tomorrow and I can’t figure out who to vote for. The basic shape of things is that the frontrunner is Vincent Orange, a longtime also-ran on the DC political scene with fairly high name recognition and a solid chance of winning. Rather than him, I’d like to see either Bryan Weaver or Republican (gasp!) Patrick Mara win the race.

Between those two, I don’t have a strong preference. Weaver’s views are closer to my policy preferences than Mara’s, but given that the DC Council’s median is going to stay well to my left regardless of who wins I sort of think that Mara would be a useful anchor point on the council. But it’s just not that big a deal. The goal is to elect a smart, hardworking, basically sensible person and either of those guys would fit the bill. So I want to vote for the one who’s more viable to actually win. Except in the absence of polling or any kind of cool DC-focused election models, I have no idea who that is.

Left of center Canadian voters, I note, seem to be facing a similar problem where the rising popularity of the social democratic NDP seems to be having the practical impact of putting Stephen Harper’s Conservatives within reach of a majority. The solution isn’t the condescending old line that New Democrats need to hold their noses and vote Liberal, it’s more that anti-Harper voters need to think strategically and not vote for a party that’s in third place and their particular riding. Broadly speaking, that means voting NDP in British Columbia and Québec and voting Liberal elsewhere. But there’s a website called Project Democracy that’s offering a more precisely specified model to assist you with your tactical voting decision on a riding-by-riding basis.

It’s a cool development, and I hope that over time more polling and more tools like this will become available to help people in various situations optimize their voting behavior.

The interesting thing is that in a multi-party system it’s difficult for the party behind an attack ad like this to reap all the benefits. This makes Ignatieff and the Liberals look terrible, but depending on your ex ante political preferences thinking worse of Ignatieff could turn you into a voter for the separatist Bloc Québécois or the social democratic NDP rather than the center-right Conservatives. And, indeed, over the past week we’ve been seeing a surge in support for the NDP.

Everyone hated Congress in the pre-institutionalized Congress of the 19th century, when it was the House that had the filibuster; they hated Congress when it ran with ruthless efficiency under Speakers Reed and Cannon and during the early years of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency; they hated Congress during the New Deal; they hated it during the era of bipartisanship and the conservative coalition; they hated it when liberals took over and ended segregation and passed Medicare and Medicaid; they hated the reformed Congress of the 1970s; they hated it during the era of divided government; they hated it after the rise of the routine filibuster in the Senate; they hated it when the Gingrich Republicans took over; they hated it when the historic 111th passed tons of legislation. Trying to connect the American people’s deep and long-standing contempt for their Congress with any particular set or arrangements or procedures is a mug’s game.

This fact explains a lot about the practical operation of American politics. In theory, Congress is supposed to act as an important freedom-preserving “check” on executive power. In practice, everyone hates Congress so this doesn’t really work. If the President wants to challenge the prerogatives of some socially and politically powerful group of people or interests, then Congress is a highly efficacious tool for blocking reform. But if the executive branch wants to persecute the weak and the defenseless, then from Indian Removal to the Internment of the Japanese straight on through to detaining Bradley Manning without charges or trial, congress is almost invariably missing in action.

Meanwhile, as a smart member of congress about his or her ideas for tackling a tough problem and the solution almost invariably turns out to be using a commission of some sort to take congress out of the decision-making loop. And, indeed, most democracies have basically taken their national legislatures entirely out of the policymaking process—they simply appoint a cabinet and then wait for a new election.

First, look at how well ideology lines up with voting behavior among voters who aren’t very knowledgeable compared to those who know what they’re talking about:

The implication here is that the existence of a large bloc of crossover voters is driven by the existence of a large bloc of people who don’t actually know anything about politics. Such voters might be swayed by candidate-personality factors, by group-loyalty factors, by regionalism, whatever. But among better-informed voters, people act the way they ought to—as if important systematic ideological differences exist and you ought to vote for the candidate whose ideology is more similar to yours.

And while political information isn’t a strict function of educational attainment, it is true in a rough and ready sense that better-educated people are better-informed about politics. And guess what’s been happening as we’ve become more polarized:

Abramowitz details evidence that “citizens with a college education are much more likely to understand ideological concepts ad to use these concepts to evaluate the parties and candidates” and also that “college graduates have more consistent beliefs across a wide range of issues than individuals with less formal education.” In other words, better educated people are more likely to listen to coalition merchants and more likely to apply ideological coalition concepts correctly. The right question to be asking is how should we adapt political institutions to a world of more sophisticated voters and more coherent, accountable parties.

Political movements need money. And that means that political movements tend to owe some debt to rich people who give them money. One question that naturally arises is whether those rich people are giving money out of ideological conviction, or as part of a business oriented lobbying strategy. And certainly this has been one interpretive front in the ongoing battle over how to understand the political activities of the Koch Brothers. Their defenders would like you to believe that these are just two rich guys who happen to love liberty. Their detractors tend to note that the liberty to pollute mankind’s commonly owned atmosphere is actually a pretty strange form of liberty, albeit one that serves the interests of a firm heavily involved in the natural resource extraction industry.

Nobody in life is purely cynical, and doubtless the Koch Brothers believe in their own mission, but time and again they seem primarily interested in a conception of liberty that’s good for their bottom line. A report in the Nation yesterday that Koch Industries was instructing its employees how to vote offers some compelling evidence in favor of the progressive interpretation of these events. This kind of conduct used to be illegal, but thanks to Citizens United it’s now arguably permitted for firms to try coerce their employees to vote for favored candidates. But are the Kochs trying to use their economic power to advance abstract political ideals, or are they trying to boost Koch Industries’ profits?

According to the Koch Industries PR team it’s all about the bottom line:

Today’s article in The Nation Magazine contains a series of inaccurate and irresponsible claims about Koch Industries and its outreach to employees regarding the endorsement of individual political candidates. Our October 2010 letter to employees clearly stated, ” …deciding who to vote for is a decision that is yours and yours alone, based on the factors that are important to you. Koch and KOCHPAC support candidates we believe will best advance policies that create the economic conditions needed for employees and businesses such as ours to survive and prosper.”

The materials in the packet are entirely consistent with the law and Koch Industries’ record of public statements in support of free-market policies and previously disclosed contributions by KOCHPAC to candidates for public office. Unions have long communicated their preferences to their members knowing full well that inside the voting booth those members would make their own decisions. We are confident that our employees who reviewed the information we sent them did the same.

That seems pretty clear cut. The Kochs are rich businessmen and their wealth gives them social and political influence that they want to use to advance the interests of their company.

I sometimes wonder what the market value of a vote would be if you were allowed to buy and sell them on an open marketplace. Amanda Terkel’s report on allegations of fraud in the effort to garner recall petitions against Democratic State Senators in Wisconsin gives us perhaps a window into the issue:

According to a draft of the Democratic complaint to the GAB, obtained by The Huffington Post from a Democratic source, a woman who was at John’s Main Event, a tavern in Burlington, Wis., with her friends on Feb. 27, “heard that someone was providing ‘shots’ to people if they signed a petition to recall State Senator Robert Wirch,” a Democrat.

The woman, who signed the complaint, said a bartender showed her the recall petition and told her that if she signed it, she and her friends would get free shots.

The source also passed along an audio recording of the encounter, in which the woman says, “So you’re going to get us — one, two, three, four, five shots if we sign this?” A man responds, “That’s right. … I’ll buy them.”

According to Yelp, John’s is “Great for a casual beer-and-burger dinner” and features “a good variety of micro-brews” but no word on the ordinary retail price of a shot. According to a book I recently read about George Washington, bribing the electorate with free alcohol was considered par for the course in colonial Virginia.