You’ve probably heard the expression “a solution looking for a problem.” The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact isn’t really such a thing. It’s more like a problem looking for another problem. But, thanks to Washington Post columnist Jason Willick, I’ve finally found some reasons to like it.

Why is it a problem?

Here’s how the NPVIC works (or would work if implemented): Once states commanding a total of 270 or more electoral votes joined, each of those states would award its presidential electors to the winner of the “national popular vote.”

That’s clearly unconstitutional without an added bit that it’s unlikely to get. Per Article I, Section 10, “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State …”

The NPVIC isn’t likely to fare well in the US Senate, where every state of any size receives two seats. Smaller states also get more relative weight in the electoral college. Why would they give that up?

Of course, it’s always possible that a rogue Supreme Court might find an “if you hold your mouth just right” way to miracle an exception into the congressional consent requirement. But in theory (unfortunately MOSTLY in theory), the Constitution is changed by amendment, not by fantasizing popular fairy tales into it.

So while I can’t say I’m particularly enamored of the electoral college and its “weighted” way of deciding presidential elections, the NPVIC doesn’t seem much better.

Or didn’t, until I read Willick’s column.

“The winner-take-all electoral college has limited the number of viable candidates to two in most elections,” he writes. “A popular-vote free-for-all could invite five or six or more. If politicians would just need a national vote plurality to automatically be awarded the compact’s 270 votes … more candidates would think they have a chance. Larger candidate fields would lower presidential vote shares and weaken presidential mandates.”

Willick considers all of that a “concern.” I see it as very much feature rather than bug.

Five or six viable choices instead of two? That sounds great.

Presidents without perceived “voter mandates” to do whatever they happen to feel like doing because they happen to feel like doing it? Even better!

Add to that: Presidents whose parties didn’t control at least 34 Senate seats would no longer enjoy effective immunity from conviction upon impeachment. We’ve seen four presidential impeachments and zero convictions in the history of the US, even though the accused was plainly guilty in at least three of those four cases.

More presidential choices? Less presidential power? No presidential impunity? What’s not to like?

None of that would likely be enough to save the existing system. Nor, certainly, enough to make it really WORTH saving. But we could do worse.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

I walk a lot, and when I’m out walking I always keep my eyes peeled for cyborg assassins sent from the future to kill the mother of the man who would otherwise save humanity from extinction at the hands of Skynet.

I also look for anyone making ludicrously long jumps between buildings while dodging bullets fired by strangely calm and inhumanly fast guys in suits and sunglasses.

I’m almost but not quite obsessed with such prospects, probably because my news  feeds are chock full of wailing about the dangers of artificial intelligence.  It’s getting smart, fast. And it keeps getting smarter, faster. In fact, it will probably wake up, notice humanity, decide it doesn’t like us, and permanently replace us with copies of itself any minute now.

Unless, of course, we “regulate” it. Which, in the parlance of completely neutral and disinterested experts like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, means “make sure that nobody new can afford to get into the game and compete with companies like OpenAI.”

While I tend to instinctively oppose any and all proposals for government “regulation” of, well, anything, in this case the whole idea strikes me as particularly stupid.

The genie is out of the bottle, folks. AI is a thing. It’s going to remain a thing. It’s going to keep getting better and faster at doing all sorts of stuff that, once upon a time, only humans can do.

If the US government tries to “regulate” it, its advancement won’t stop. Some AI research will just get done elsewhere, and some of it will get done illegally right here at home. Ditto any international or multinational “regulation” scheme.

Don’t believe me? Consider nuclear weapons. The US government  successfully tested its first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945. The Soviet Union tested its first such weapon barely four years later on August 29, 1949. At least nine regimes now have nukes. Which are a lot more difficult and expensive to build than AI large language models.

I’m an optimist. I see no particular reason to believe that the coming super-AIs will automatically dislike people, or want to do us harm, and even current-level AI is happy (if it has, or ever will have, “emotions” as such) to help us out in many ways.

The AI revolution seems at least as likely to end in “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — AI-powered robots doing the dirty work that humans rely on for our existence, reducing economic scarcity to mostly a distant memory and leaving us free to binge old Grateful Dead concerts while gorging on vat-grown prime rib, or whatever else floats our boats — as in a Terminator or Matrix type dystopia.

And if I’m wrong, what can we realistically do about it? Unless we’re Sarah Connor or Neo types, not much. Whether such a phenomenon originates in San Jose or Shenzhen is irrelevant. It’s coming either way. I’d rather spend my time building a better humanity than ineffectually trying to stop AI from getting really good.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Is school choice bankrupting Arizona?” Jason Bedrick and Corey DeAngelis dispute claims to that effect by governor Katie Hobbs and State Representative Andrés Cano; their own viewpoint is in the title of their Wall Street Journal op-ed “School Choice Saves Arizona Money” (June 5).

It will come as no surprise that Hobbs and Cano are Democrats, or that Bedrick and DeAngelis are conservatives, fellows at the Heritage Foundation and the American Federation for Children (affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council rather than a youth brigade of the American Federation of Teachers).  But how closely do the predictable lines on the issue really align with the sides’ averred principles?

After all, liberals trace their philosophical roots to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which suggested that government “leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children.”  Mill’s observation that exceeding such a relatively modest involvement in schooling does “now convert the subject into a mere battlefield for sects and parties, causing the time and labour which should have been spent in educating to be wasted in quarrelling about education” sounds like it was written this week rather than in 1859.

And if modern liberals have shed the scruples about government spending of even moderate classical liberals like Mill, it’s hard for them to object to it being misspent.  If they agree with George Lakoff that “taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America,” then America — or a part of it like Arizona — gets to spend it as foolishly as its members allow it to, until they give up their membership. Some being spent via nominally private means doesn’t change the underlying caveat emptor.

Meanwhile, heavy subsidization has long become the status quo in education, crowding out more innovative approaches — as well as, ironically, more traditional parochial schools (and homeschoolers on both extremes). Bedrick and DeAngelis tout the partial control granted to parents over “a portion of their child’s state education funds” by so-called “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.”  Yet wouldn’t the truly fiscally conservative way to empower scholarship be simply not taxing that money away from parents in the first place?

It was far-leftists like Alexis Ferm who foresaw that schools might only be truly public if they were “sponsored by the groups that want to use them.” Joel Spring notes in Education and the Rise of the Corporate State that such self-funding was “precisely how the Modern School was organized” by Ferm’s comrades in the early twentieth century as “a model for the type of education center the radicals were to create as an alternative to the existing system.”

Their discoveries — and the rediscoveries of Spring’s generation of New Leftist scholars — have been ignored.  Yet the way forward out of today’s education quagmire may be indicated by the meeting of Freedom Avenue and Justice Street in Piscataway, New Jersey on the forgotten site of the Modern School.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Spending or Saving, Only Free Choice Can Make School Choice a Real Choice” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, June 8, 2023