…and another unserious one.

The problem with Balko’s question is that the underlying premise is false. As a libertarian, Balko accepts the idea expressed by Ronald Reagan that “government is the problem”. Therefore, all government is bad, and therefore, government is always too big, and too expensive.

The Right’s obsession with “big government” is a red herring, and always has been. The choice is, and always has been, between good government and bad government. As a libertarian, Balko believes that “good government” is a contradiction in terms, so he’s reduced to arguing that since government is inherently bad, less government is better than more government.

If you reject Balko’s unstated premise that government is always bad, then the answer to his question is pretty simple. Government should be big enough to do all the things the people want it to do, but no bigger. Taxes should be high enough to pay for all the things people want to pay for, but no higher.

First, I’m not part of “The Right.” Second, I do believe in a basic set of night watchman and public goods responsibilities to be legitimate functions of government. Third, I didn’t argue that all government is inherently bad. I asked for liberals to define an upper limit on how much government is too much, using some fairly common metrics. Presumably, most leftists want more government than we have now. And presumably, most leftists would stop well short of advocating a totalitarian or Soviet-style communist state. I’m asking them to give a rough estimate of where they’d place their boundaries.

Finally, what exactly does “all the things people want to pay for” mean? Anything anyone wants at any time, government should pay for? Anything a majority of voters want? Anything a majority of the Congress wants? If a majority of Congress or a majority of voters decided tomorrow that the federal government should buy everyone in the country a free ice cream cone each Tuesday, would that be an appropriate reason to raise taxes?

Here’s the first (and thus far only) response to my challenge to lefty bloggers to state the maximum size and scope of government with which they’d be comfortable.

The author and I have such complete and utterly different worldviews, I’m not really sure how to begin to respond. It’s like we speak the same language, but all of the words have different definitions. She characterizes my providing actual data, with historical context for comparison, as “emotional thinking,” then says we should stop interfering, and just trust that the president, who was elected because he’s “articulate,” and the good members of Congress (me: who were elected because they rigged the game) to plan our health care system, financial system, and broader economy. This, apparently, is the opposite of thinking emotionally. None of us is smart enough to understand complex economic concepts, she says, so we should put our faith in Barack Obama, I guess because getting elected president magically infuses you with the wisdom to run the economy, or at least the smarts to pick the all-knowing advisers who can. Finally, we should stop “micromanaging” our politicians, so we don’t disturb them as they go about their business of micromanaging the private sector.

So where to begin? I guess we could start with the assumption that politicians always, or even mostly, act in the interest of the public, instead of the interests of politicians. They don’t. There’s the assumption that the skills and talents it takes to get elected are the same skills and talents one needs to govern effectively. They aren’t. There’s the assumption that any one person or even any group of people has even a fraction of the collected wisdom distributed over the course of billions of voluntary exchanges that make up an $11 trillion economy. They don’t. There’s the assumption that even if such a freakishly smart person existed, that person would also possess the political skills necessary to rise to become powerful enough to actually impart his wisdom to the people who can turn it into policy. And then there’s the assumption that even if said freakishly smart person could rise to have the president’s ear, that his advice would be heeded by Congress, and not corrupted, diluted, or merely subverted by special interests and the whims, turf wars, and power plays of politicians in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

I could go on.

I’d encourage you to read the post, though. It’s kinda’ fascinating.

Remember those secret meetings Dick Cheney had with oil and gas executives to discuss federal energy policy? The L.A. Times points out that Barack Obama the candidate sure did. From Obama’s campaign literature:

The Problem
Lobbyists Write National Policies: For example, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force of oil and gas lobbyists met secretly to develop national energy policy.

And…

Make White House Communications Public: Obama will amend executive orders to ensure that communications about regulatory policymaking between persons outside government and all White House staff are disclosed to the public.

Conduct Regulatory Agency Business in Public: Obama will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can see in person or watch on the Internet these debates.

Obama, the President? Not so much.

Obama administration officials have rejected a watchdog group’s request for a list of healthcare industry executives who’ve been meeting secretly in the White House with Obama staffers to discuss pending healthcare changes being drafted there and in Congress.

According to the Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, which is suspicious of the influence of health industry lobbyists and company officers, it received a letter from the Secret Service citing an Obama Justice Dept. directive and denying access to visitor logs under the “presidential communications privilege.”

Pike Place Market, Seattle.

Over at Hit & Run, I’ve put up a post challenging lefty bloggers and opinion makers to state what they believe ought to be the upper limits on various indicators of the size and scope of the federal government.

The idea here is to get some people on record, both to see just how much government interference some on the left believe is tolerable, but also to see what happens if and when the Obama administration’s spending exceeds those limits.

…damned if you don’t.

An Illinois teen knew he was too drunk to drive home after a Dave Matthews Band concert south of Milwaukee. So he fell asleep in his car, only to be awoken by a state trooper.

Travis Peterson, 19, of Dixon, Ill., said even though he told the officer he was drunk and sleeping it off, the trooper ordered him to leave because the lot was being cleared.

Once out of the parking lot, Peterson was arrested for drunken driving. He was subsequently found guilty and ordered to spend 60 days in jail.

Fortunately, his conviction was thrown out by a state appeals court.

My current city of residence has some of the safest roads in the country for a city of its size. Naturally then, city leaders want to undo some of that by installing red light cameras.

Golden Gate Park, California.

Last week, an undercover New York City police officer participating in a drug buy shot and killed 49-year-old Shem Walker during an altercation at Walker’s home in Brooklyn. Police say Walker, described by family and neighbors as an ex-con who had reformed, apparently thought the officer was a drug dealer or a vagrant. When the officer didn’t respond to Walker’s verbal demand to leave his property, apparently because he was wearing earphones to monitor the drug buy, Walker tried to forcibly remove him from Walker’s front stoop. The two got into an altercation. A second undercover officer then joined the fight, at which point the first officer shot and killed Walker.

The tension escalated Thursday when Walker’s family held a vigil on the same porch several days later. The family says that as they gathered, an NYPD officer pulled up and demanded identification. When several members refused, the officer called for backup. More officers arrived, and the vigil eventually erupted into shouting and shoving between the family and police. Police and family accounts obviously differ on who or what instigated the shoving. But it seems like a bad idea to send an officer to demand ID from participants in a vigil honoring an unarmed man who was killed by police just days earlier. Or, for that matter, putting undercover drug cops on private property in the first place.

Walker’s death is reminiscent of the Isaac Singletary incident in Florida from a couple of years ago. Singletary was shot and killed by undercover officers conducting a drug buy on his front lawn. He had confronted the officers with a rifle, thinking they were drug dealers. Those officers were cleared of any wrongdoing. Singletary’s family has filed a lawsuit.

Gene Healy fears the statism of the generation now coming of age politically:

In May, the Center for American Progress released a lengthy survey of polling data on Millennials, concluding that they’re a “Progressive Generation,” eager to increase federal power.

CAP is the leading Democratic think tank, so it has a vested interest in that conclusion. But they’re on to something. In the last election, 18-to-29 year-olds went for Barack Obama by a 34-point margin.

The CAP report shows that Gen Y is substantially more likely to support universal health care, labor unions, and education spending than older voters. And other surveys support CAP’s “Progressive Generation” thesis.

In 2008, the nonpartisan National Election Study asked Americans whether “the free market” or “a strong government” would better handle “today’s complex economic problems.” By a margin of 78 to 22 percent, Millennials opted for “strong government.”

Kids today are a credulous bunch. The 2007 Pew Political Values survey revealed “a generation gap in cynicism.” Where 62 percent of Americans overall view the federal government as wasteful and inefficient, just 42 percent of young people agree.

If there’s an upside to this it’s that the first generation that can’t remember a time before the Internet does seem to at least to care about civil liberties. They tend to be anti-war, anti-drug war, cognizant of and alarmed by police misconduct, and while they put too much trust in government, they do seem to be be genuinely motivated to force government transparency and accountability, two inherent Internet values. And frankly, if that motivation doesn’t fade, what they discover–either through government disclosures or through its refusal to disclose–ought to be enough to shake at least a few of them from their broader faith in the state.

By the way, Gene’s excellent book The Cult of the Presidency is now available in paperback, and includes an afterword on Obama.

Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder posted my questions about that odd photo that accompanied yesterday’s NY Times cover story on distracted driving. A commenter pointed to this post from PDNPulse, which includes the explanation from photographer Dan Gill:

Last year, Gill was assigned a story for the Times that involved shadowing a group of high school students. This photograph is from that body of work, but it was not published until now.

Gill himself writes:

“In the course of doing the story in which I was hanging out with or shadowing three high school students I made the picture.

“I met them at their high school after classes and spent the evening with them. I told them I would be with them but to forget I was there. It did not take them long for them to forget I was there. We rode from school to one of their houses and down an inter belt highway. The driver was constantly texting ‘his girls’ throughout our travels. At one point on the eight-lane inter belt either the driver suggested his friend hold the wheel or his friend suggested it…and they did it.

“Were we safe? Probably not…. As journalists, we are not here to judge or to direct, but only to observe and tell the story.”

This seems like a plausible explanation. I’d imagine the paper’s archive of photos are searchable by keword. So if they went looking for a photo for the texting story, Gill’s popped up. It probably would have helped to include a short version of that explanation with the photo, though. Looks like I’m not the only one who wondered how it was taken.

This week, my criminal justice column for Reason looks at how last week’s Sotomayor hearings showed there’s no real national debate on what protections the Constitution should afford criminal defendants. If you’re a national politician, there’s really only one acceptable position on crime: We need to get tougher on it.

I have a piece up at the The Daily Beast looking at the cops-shooting-dogs phenomenon.

Snippet:

If dangerous dogs are so common, one would expect to find frequent reports of vicious attacks on meter readers, postal workers, firemen, and delivery workers. But according to a spokesman from the United States Postal Service, serious dog attacks on mail carriers are vanishingly rare. Bites do happen, but postal workers are given training on how to distract dogs with toys, subdue them with voice commands, or, at worst, incapacitate them with Mace. Mail carriers are shown a two-hour video and given instruction on how to recognize and read a dog’s body language, how to differentiate between aggressive charging and playful bounding, and how to tell a truly dangerous dog from a merely territorial one.

Few police departments offer this kind of training, though groups like the ASPCA and the Humane Society say they’d be more than happy to provide it. “New York is the only state I know of that mandates formalized training, and that’s during academy,” says Joseph Pentangelo, the ASPCA’s assistant director for law enforcement, who also served 21 years with the NYPD before retiring in 2001. “There are some individual departments in other parts of the country that avail themselves of our training, but not many. Not enough.”

Kid dancing on a public sculpture, Boston.

Afternoon at the park.

By Tom Mccauley, Associated Press - Ap

Here’s the news story. Immature/locker room humor will be rewarded, not penalized.

Someone asked me the question the other night.

If you say John, you take yourself far too seriously. If you say Ringo, you’re trying to be funny. If you say Paul, you’re kind of the joke. So the correct answer is “George.”

Also, if the question is “Stones or Beatles?”, the correct answer is “The Who.”

It’s Mexico’s drug war. And yes, you’re helping to pay for it.

The Mexican army has carried out forced disappearances, acts of torture and illegal raids in pursuit of drug traffickers, according to documents and interviews with victims, their families, political leaders and human rights monitors.

From the violent border cities where drugs are brought into the United States to the remote highland regions where poppies and marijuana are harvested, residents and human rights groups describe an increasingly brutal war in which the government, led by the army, is using harsh measures to battle the cartels that continue to terrorize much of the country.

In Puerto Las Ollas, a mountain village of 50 people in the southern state of Guerrero, residents recounted how soldiers seeking information last month stuck needles under the fingernails of a disabled 37-year-old farmer, jabbed a knife into the back of his 13-year-old nephew, fired on a pastor, and stole food, milk, clothing and medication.

In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, two dozen policemen who were arrested on drug charges in March alleged that, to extract confessions, soldiers beat them, held plastic bags over their heads until some lost consciousness, strapped their feet to a ceiling while dunking their heads in water and applied electric shocks, according to court documents, letters and interviews with their relatives and defense lawyers.

None of this is particularly new. The tactics between the Mexican army and the drug cartels have grown increasingly brutal since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon quite literally made the drug war a military operation.

So far, he’s won nothing but praise and continued funding from American politicians.

This is a great idea:

The initiative includes a bold new online effort, the NAACP Rapid Report System (RRS), a quick, effective way for citizens to report instances of police misconduct, and to help public safety officials move beyond the “tough on crime” policies that have lost their effectiveness. The Rapid Report System will be available starting July 6, through the NAACP website (www.naacp.org).

The user-friendly online RRS form will allow residents to send instant texts, emails, or video reports of police abuse to the association via cell phone.

The good news is that the technology behind this is only going to get better. Services like Qik already offer live streaming and instant archiving of cell phone videos. The service requires a fairly high-end phone and service plan, but as phones and plans get cheaper, Qik and similar sites are bound to get more popular. If they’re smart, the makers of the terrific, inexpensive FlipVideo devices will partner with a cell service provider and come up with a cheap way to give their customers web access.

As we saw in Iran last month, the ability to instantly capture photos and video and store them off-site is an incredibly powerful tool. As more and more people acquire it, police officers will have to approach their jobs with the knowledge that everything they do while on duty can legally be captured and stored on a server they won’t be able to access. Confiscating phones and cameras won’t work anymore. The law enforcement community shouldn’t fight this technology, they should embrace it. It’s just as likely to protect the good cops from false reports of abuse as it is to expose the bad ones.

(Hat tip: Popehat)

I don’t know that I can really pick a favorite Dylan song. Not even sure I can pick a favorite off of this particular album. But this is the song I seem to listen to most often (at least according to my iTunes statistics). Pretty ballsy to put out an 11-minute track back in the three-minute pop song era, too.

So here’s Dylan’s own Wasteland, “Desolation Row,” from Highway 61, Revisited.