A critique of Ralph Nader's platform

OK, so on top of everything I said in the last blog, I also really dislike Ralph Nader. As such, here's a critique of most of his policies, as found on this page.

Before I start on details, I have to compliment him on this page. It was easy to find, and the information-to-rhetoric ratio is exceptionally high. I'd love it if the mainstream candidates had similar pages. Second, I support many of his policies, including some that are politically impossible to implement, like his call for universal healthcare.

The next issue on his list is electoral reform, which lets us get to the crux of Nader's public complaints about the political duopoly in this country. The thing about this duopoly is that it is not a question of some existing laws which need tweaking, but is a direct result of the U.S. Constitution, which stresses election by first-past-the-post, meaning that the one person to get the most votes is the winner, regardless of the mix of results. This is not true the world over: Israel is the best example of a system where a party with a small percentage of the popular vote gets a small percentage of seats in the Knesset. But first, notice that Israel is the size of one U.S. state, meaning that you can have a representative for a collective of like-minded individuals, whereas here in the U.S.A. we apportion representatives to geographical areas. [Dubya, when informed that Israel is a dozen miles across at its narrowest point, is said to have commented, `we have driveways that long in Texas'.]

It's no trivial matter to implement a system that allows a wider mix of beliefs but still ensures that all geographic areas of this third of the continent are represented. So to undo the political duopoly in the States, we'd need a new constitution, which would likely be significantly more complex than the one we have today. Such a reform is not really on par with tweaking tax policy; I'm not sure how one goes about calling a new constitutional convention, but a presidential campaign doesn't quite seem like the right forum. [Again, if you want obscure political science details on the duopoly topic, ask your favorite search engine about Duverger's law.]

Next up, as a sort of catch-all for many of Nader's public complaints, is corporate involvement in government. When I hear Nader speak of government's ``corporate paymasters'', I get flush with embarrassment, because it's the sort of gross oversimplification that makes people think liberals are all dumb. It is based on a false us-versus-them dichotomy. All of us, capitalists and laborers alike, want to have a healthy economy where we all have some kind of income and lots of the stuff we want to consume with that income readily available. Gosh, that's going to involve corporations, especially if we want things to be efficiently done (meaning the implementation of economies of scale and an efficient division of labor). As I've noted before, large corporations are a sort of natural law---and are always accompanied by a large number of small businesses. The number or scale of large corporations is not out of whack today; the sky is not falling in that regard.

But I digress. Nader wants us to believe that the large corporations are using their size to push for laws that favor them. This is entirely true. Under Nader, it won't change. You'd be an arse to change laws which affect ten thousand people without consulting some of them, and you'd also be an arse to change a law which affects a company of ten thousand people without consulting some of its leaders. From there, the average hearing is kind of scripted: the people complain that they are being unjustly oppressed, and the company will threaten to go out of business if its costs rise half a cent per unit. Like reading letters of recommendation, the decision maker then has to read through the boiler-plate phrases to work out what the real situation is. This is a non-trivial problem, is often entirely haphazard, and requires thinking on a scale which is much more detailed than any of Ralph's generalizations could ever address. Do governmental decision makers consistently rule unfairly in favor of corporations? I don't think there's really evidence that that's so; Ralph doesn't really present much evidence that it is.

As another vaguely apropos digression, let me tell you about my friend (Ms. TM of Washington, Columbia) who works for the Federal Court of Claims. When people have a complaint about the U.S. government, her court hears the case. My impression based on her discussion of her work is that it is amazingly un-political. The judges make a sincere effort to do the legal right thing, and many safeguards are in place to prevent conflicts of interest. They rule for the plaintiff about as often as they rule in favor of the U.S. government which employs them. The clerks who write the actual rulings are not major shareholders of anything, and typically perceive the cases as textbook legal exercises: plaintiff claims the law says one thing and defendant claims the law says something else---who's right? There's not a ``corporate paymaster'' in sight. As with most conspiracies, when we try to work out how the actual mechanism works, Ralph's claims that corporations run the government have no support. I'd give more examples, but have digressed enough as it is.

Nor is ruling in favor of labor the right thing to do 100% of the time. There's a balance to be struck between capital and labor, and both sides will always be pushing government to shift their way. This is a decent description of the structure of the last few centuries of civil society, and Ralph is not going to change it. The generalizations about parties (Reps are capital-biased, Dems are labor-biased) are generally true, and since Reps are in power now, the balance is decidedly skewed toward business interests, but electing a Democrat would undo this just as electing Ralph would.

There are certainly individual cases of blatant bordering-on-fraud business influence, notably everything Richard ``Dick'' Cheney has ever done. Now and then, there is a conspiracy, and it should be brought to daylight and eliminated. Mechanisms to ferret out conflicts-of-interest among decision makers, which already exist, deserve support. I agree with Ralph that we should take accounting and other corporate fraud much more seriously. But this is taking care to ensure that we correct the system when it breaks, which is very different from Ralph's rhetoric that the entire system is broken.

He opposes media concentration. From what I gather, the huge wave of mergers wasn't too much of a conspiracy either. It had a few causes, including economists for the people who couldn't get their frigging act together (really, I tried.), the Republican pro-business bias, and the existing system which already allocated the airwaves in a horrendously dumb manner (and can't undo that constitutionally---it'd be a takings case which would be brought to the Court of Claims, and Ms. TM would be correct to rule in favor of the corporations). I agree that the media is overconcentrated, and that this is important, but I expect that if we elect a Democrat, and he selects a reasonable human being to head the FCC, increasing media concentration will be halted and maybe reversed.

I think it's interesting that Ralph supports ``free access to ballot-qualified candidates on television and radio'', since he's an outsider now and therefore doesn't get matching campaign funds the way that the Reps and Dems do. Personally, I think the whole system would be more open and representative if the entire matching-funds thing were eliminated, but that's another article (which I promise to write soon).

His family farm policy says that we should support the independent and organic farmers. This is oh-so-close to the sort of agricultural subsidies that Ralph would complain about anywhere else. It's consistent with his `small companies are better' philosophy, but it seems hard to reconcile with the fair trade point on the platform later on.

He wants better employee protections. I concur with this point: calling people who work 37.5 hours a week `part-time' is a dishonest abuse of the letter of the law. Restrictions on unions mean that they can not negotiate on equal footing with the corporations they're supposed to be negotiating on equal footing with. This plank includes Ralph's most concrete and doable suggestion.

He wants to repeal incorporation laws. This is Ralph's anti-corporate stance taken to its silly extreme. The company-as-person is a convenience for the legal system which makes it easier to work out a consistent framework. But it's just a metaphor. Ralph points out (correctly) the corporate metaphor is applied selectively, giving corporations many of the rights of people but exempting them from some of the responsibilities humans have. But that doesn't mean that we need to outlaw the darn metaphor.

He opposes the occupation of Iraq. I agree that the invasion was a horrible idea, but I'm not sure what to do about it now. His one concrete proposal, installing a UN peacekeeping force, would shift some of the costs of clean-up to the rest of the world and away from the U.S., but the next president's hands are going to be tied regarding U.S. involvement in Iraq for a long time to come, and this would be true of President Ralph too. That's why this plank of the platform is heavy on bitching about the invasion from last year and is light on things to do in the future.

He wants to restore civil liberties, end the war on drugs, reform the criminal justice system, and care more for the environment. I concur. Why is this stuff way at the bottom of the platform, after all that us-versus-the-corporations rhetoric?

Perhaps it's because these positions are either in agreement with or just to the left of the Democratic positions. Most of what distinguishes Ralph from the other candidates is his rhetoric on how corporations are evil and need to be reigned in. Coincidentally, this is also the part of his platform which rides on a destructive oversimplification. Electing a President who will avowedly ignore all business interests is about as bad an idea as electing a Texas oilman to be President, and will lead to a government which is equally unbalanced and un-democratic, albeit with a skew that we find more agreeable.

If Ralph were a candidate within the Democratic party, and had run in the primaries, then he could have focused on the issues that the other candidates focused on, like civil liberties or criminal justice. We could have cast our votes for him and sent a signal to the party indicating that we like the candidate whose position is further to the left. Instead, Ralph has to distinguish himself from the Dems as much as possible, meaning that he needs to focus on his corporate rants over the more real issues which he agrees with Dems on. A vote for Ralph as an outsider thus becomes a vote for Ralph's corporate conspiracy theories.