Blatant Reality

What presidential candidate would be the financially smart choice for you? The website Election Stocks may have the answers for you.

(h/t Dominic Basulto)

Election Stocks is an investment site. Our purpose is to examine the 2008 elections from a financial market perspective. The goal is to help investors make wise decisions.

The material at Election Stocks reflects the work of our research team — political scientists (current or former college professors), investment professionals, and some talented students. We intend to use the conclusions in making our own investment decisions.

 

Why make public the results of our research? The answer is simple: Sharing can help us all.

 

We hope and expect that this will be a community-based effort. Anyone who learns something important about a candidate’s issue positions should join the discussion. Issue positions, if adopted, have implications for specific stocks. The discussion forums provide a place for everyone to discuss candidates, issues, and the affected stocks.

A recent article in the magazine Foreign Affairs analyzed why democracies were becoming more prevalent in the world even though direct intervention always seems to fail. Their argument is that by promoting a free-market economy, the necessary social conditions for a democracy will take root. The author asserts that these two key social conditions are liberty and popular sovereignty. However, the melding of these two conditions to form one political system is quite a task.

If popular sovereignty is relatively easy to establish, the other component of democracy, liberty, is far more difficult to secure. This accounts for both the delay in democracy’s spread around the world in the twentieth century and the continuing difficulties in establishing it in the twenty-first. Putting the principle of liberty into practice requires institutions: functioning legislatures, government bureaucracies, and full-fledged legal systems with police, lawyers, prosecutors, and impartial judges. Operating such institutions requires skills, some of them highly specialized. And the relevant institutions must be firmly anchored in values: people must believe in the importance of protecting these zones of social and civic life from state interference.

This paragraph establishes the main reason why a democracy in the Middle East is nonexistent: Even though popular sovereignty has been established in some of the Middle Eastern countries, liberty, as described above, is no where to be seen. Establishing liberty will take a lot of hard work and, more importantly, time. This article continues by stating what the minimum requirement of time would be and also how liberty cannot be established.

The relevant unit of time for creating the social conditions conducive to liberty is, at a minimum, a generation. Not only does the apparatus of liberty take time to develop, it must be developed independently and domestically; it cannot be sent from elsewhere and implanted, ready-made.

From this statement we can assume that if liberty is going to be established in Iraq, it is going to take a lot longer than the measly four years we have been in there. Also, we must learn that any one style of democracy cannot be forced onto other cultures, because they may reject it. It has to be more of a case by case basis involving the two basic principles: liberty and popular sovereignty. Present day democracies vary from country to country, but each true democracy has those two basic principles. For example, even though the democracies in England, France, and the USA differ greatly, no one would question if each is indeed a democracy.

The article continues to state that the reason more and more countries are adopting democracies is that fact that democracies have been proven to work.

Countries, like individuals, learn from what they observe. For countries, as for individuals, success inspires imitation. The course of modern history made democracy seem well worth emulating.

And how might they establish an effective democracy? By first establishing a free-market economy of course.

The key to establishing a working democracy, and in particular the institutions of liberty, has been the free-market economy. The institutions, skills, and values needed to operate a free-market economy are those that, in the political sphere, constitute democracy. Democracy spreads through the workings of the market when people apply the habits and procedures they are already carrying out in one sector of social life (the economy) to another one (the political arena). The market is to democracy what a grain of sand is to an oyster’s pearl: the core around which it forms.

Two important habits form because of free-market economies and these are trust and compromise.

For a government to operate peacefully, citizens must trust it not to act against their most important interests and, above all, to respect their political and economic rights.

And…

Compromise inhibits violence that could threaten democracy.

Overall, establishing a democracy takes time and can very well be established without any outside influence. However, there are some lingering questions about what the role of the US should be since there is no reason for us to militarily get involved in another country for the reason of promoting democracy. For example, how long should we wait for a country to become democratic? One generation? Two? As long as it takes? What will be going on behind the curtain while we are waiting? Should we ignore rogue and terrorist states if they show signs of progress (ie a free-market economy)? What happens if we have to get militarily involved in a country for our own protection like Afghanistan? Do we topple the government and and leave the country to figure everything out for itself? What role should we then play in rebuilding a country? If democracies established because of US military intervention always fail, then should we give up and just install another dictator that is friendly to the US? These are questions that need to be answered if we are to accept the fact that the US has had a miserable record in recent history of trying to establish democracies around the world.

Out of all the Republican Candidates, it looks like Huckabee could move into fray with the Big Dogs (Thompson, McCain, Romney, Giuliani) and become a top tier contender.

There was a near-unanimous view that, among Republicans, only Huckabee has the potential to do so. But there was an equally strong view that it would be awfully difficult.

 

Huckabee has been inching his way upward all summer. His debate performances have been solid; his conservative conviction, clever one-liners and upbeat personality have won him strong reviews; and he has caught the eye of Democrats, as well. But with Giuliani, Romney, Thompson and McCain as competition, the opportunity to break through is limited. Still, he is the most likely to surprise one of those big four come the early states, and he already leads McCain in Iowa.

The most recent Rasmussen poll shows Huckabee at 6%, the highest he has been.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee remains atop the second tier and is preferred by 6%.

Three months ago, I thought that this guy had no chance at all. Now things seem to be changing, and I’m hoping I was dead wrong.

Huckabee’s official campaign website can be found here.

As this Jakarta Post article points out, by refusing to even debate the “global warming deniers,” they have essentially limited our freedom of speech and hindered the scientific method.

Following this line, there are signs of a growing intolerance in the debate about global climate change. Climate-change denial has become a taboo that invites a sense of moral repugnance for the deniers.

 

An article in the respected weekly, Newsweek (The Truth About Denial on Aug. 13, 2007), equated global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. At the same time, reputable scientists were accused of being paid to create confusion in the face of consensus

 

Those skeptical about projected impacts of climate change are either accused of crimes against humanity or treated as cranks or “flat-earthers of the 21st Century”. Perhaps worse, climate-change skeptics are often deemed to be lackeys of industrialists or oil companies.

 

As it turns out, most “skeptics” are simply those that raise doubts about the certainty of computer models of the future that predict climate doom. For their part, non-deniers readily accept long-term projections for climate change that rely upon computer models.

 

Citing computer model forecasts to justify scientific consensus about climate change beggars logic and denies real world experience. As it is, weather forecasters and economists using similarly-elaborate computer models are legendarily inept in making short-term predictions.

 

Demonizing or ridiculing those that doubt the extent and cause of climate change has a chilling effect on free speech that makes open, rational debate almost impossible. For example, Great Britain’s Royal Society asked ExxonMobil to cease funding groups that “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”. It is disturbing that such an august body would claim that any scientific enquiry be treated as though it reveals untouchable, cast-iron facts.

People must realize that science is all about questioning the norm. Without asking questions and constantly reviewing what is happening, there would never be any advances. Global warming deniers aren’t as ignorant as the media portrays us. Most of us are just deeply concerned with the arguments for anthropological warming and the lack of those on the man-made warming side to address these questions we have. Most of the time they just brush aside our questions and arguments as being made by those in the pocket of oil companies. Until there is an honest debate concerning the global warming issue with real science involved that can be peer tested and reviewed, then the truth will not be found.