Freedom Line Blog

Tomorrow voters in Ohio’s new 9th congressional district will decide whether America will get another two years of the Dennis Kucinich experience.  Pitted against fellow Democratic incumbent Marcy Kaptur, Kucinich has raised nearly twice as much money ($406k) as Kaptur ($204k) since the start of the year, but is trailing with one important constituency – other Democratic members of Congress.

From Roll Call:

Earlier this week, Rep. David Price’s (D-N.C.) re-election committee and [Senate Majority Whip Dick] Durbin’s Prairie political action committee each donated $1,000 to Kaptur. The Congresswoman also received a $1,000 check from Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-Conn.) campaign at the start of this year, according to online fundraising records. Both Price and DeLauro serve with Kaptur on the Appropriations Committee. Durbin, also an appropriator, was first elected to the House in 1982, the same year as Kaptur.

Earlier in the redistricting process Kucinich flirted with running in a newly created seat in Washington State, though much like his ill-fated presidential campaigns, the groundswell of support Kucinich needed to move states never materialized.

Thankfully for politicos, the winner of the member vs. member tussle tomorrow won’t fade into obscurity since the likely Republican nominee will be Sam Wurzelbacher, aka, “Joe the Plumber” from the 2008 presidential campaign.

Only in Ohio.

It’s one of the stranger alliances imaginable in the current Congress, but it looks like a possibility. Per a story in Roll Call:

Frustrated by the White House’s handling of the civil war in Libya, House Republicans will meet Thursday to discuss what steps Congress should take to intervene — including the possibility of backing Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s resolution calling for an end to U.S. involvement.

Although GOP support for the Ohio Democrat’s resolution is far from certain, an aide said the fact that it is even being discussed is a sign of how unhappy Republicans are. “Members are really angry with the way the administration has handled this,” a GOP aide said.

The opposition has a good case on the merits. As I’ve chronicled before, the Libyan mission is an orgy of confusion with a tangential (at best) connection to American national security interests.

It will be interesting, however, to see how Republicans in particular deal with the legal issues surrounding the war. President Obama has already exceeded the 60 day window given to him by the 1973 War Powers Resolution to receive Congressional authorization for the war, which could be a solid Republican talking point — except for the fact that huge swaths of the conservative foreign policy and legal intellegentsia consider the War Powers Resolution to be an unconstitutional infringement on the president’s war-making powers. To complicate matters even further, Obama himself was a vigorous opponent of presidents using that war-making authority in exactly the way he has in Libya.

So what happens next? It seems the only thing we can expect for sure is inconsistency all around.

The Daily Caller confirmed that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is seriously contemplating a move to Washington State to run for Congress.  Kucinich’s current Cleveland area seat is rumored to be on the chopping block since the 2010 Census revealed Ohio losing two seats due to population decreases.

Interestingly, Kucinich’s communications director says that the anti-war congressman has received requests to move and campaign from groups in twenty states; including Washington which will gain a seat in reapportionment.

Kucinich is already visiting the state to gauge his chances.  If successful, he’ll almost be as far to the left geographically as he is politically.

The basic point of departure between progressives and classical liberals (a term I’m using to encompass any political ideology that supports a free market) when it comes to solving an economic problem is how each deals with scarcity. Scarcity occurs when the demand for a resource like land, labor, or capital is greater than its supply. The lack of the resource (i.e. it’s scarcity) leads to prioritizing how to use that resource most efficiently. This is where public policy disagreements come into play. Typically, progressives see just about everything as scarce, and argue for a neutral government to allocate scarce items fairly. For progressives, there is almost never an instance where the policy impulse to find a way to create more of something. Instead, government’s task is to “spread the wealth around” – be it energy through carbon credits, capital through welfare redistribution, or health care through rationing.

Classical liberals are of a different mindset. They start by questioning whether the scarce resource is correctly is really scarce. Consider health care. A progressive would argue that if the number of licensed doctors became static or declined, limiting the amount of patient visits per year would be appropriate in order to “share” the scarce resource of medical expertise over the largest amount of people. A classical liberal, though, would ask whether a licensed nurse could be allowed to take on more responsibility for diagnosing and treating patients with common ailments like colds, cuts, and other minor medical problems. By expanding the amount of people who are licensed to treat patients, the scarcity vanishes because people are allowed to visit a medical professional as much as they need to.

Now to the issue of job creation. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is proposing a bill to give people as young as 60 years old a financial incentive to retire early by offering early retirement with social security benefits and health care subsidies paid for from COBRA. The thinking is that are a finite amount of jobs in the American economy, and the federal government must find a way to get older workers out to create room for younger workers. Sounds like jobs are “scarce” these days, right?

Not so fast. The workers who have survived the rash of lay-offs are most likely to be those who are highly producing because businesses can no longer afford to carry dead wood on their payrolls. Moreover, if older workers are convinced to leave the job market, that means centuries of accumulated knowledge and expertise will be leaving with them. In the alternative, if it is the low-skilled elderly that Kucinich is targeting (a more likely scenario since guaranteed Social Security and COBRA benefits aren’t enticements for people making more than minimum wage), the vacancies they create won’t be enough to support younger workers with families trying to get out of apartments and into all those foreclosed houses.

The better way to look at how to create jobs isn’t to figure out how to best allocate the ones in existence – it’s figuring out how to encourage even more to be created. With more people working the economy will be that much stronger, which will eventually lead to the kind of scarcity only an employer fears: not enough hard-working, qualified people to fill all their employment needs.