George Washington, America’s first president, devoted part of his 1796 farewell address to warning against “[t]he alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension.” He feared perpetual war for power between political parties both as “a frightful despotism” in and of itself, and as prelude to some future tyrant seeking “his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”

Was Washington right? Sort of. Political parties possess all the evil characteristics he attributed to them. What he seems to have missed is their inevitability.  By the time he exited the presidential stage, Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were already struggling for power, a struggle which continues to this day under other party names.

Any system that apportions power through political means is going to sprout factions. If those factions contest power through elections, they’re going to become parties.

Are there “non-partisan” elections? In theory, yes. In practice, not really.

For example, look at Nebraska’s state legislature, the Unicameral. Elections to it are theoretically non-partisan, but political parties back the candidates and 48 of its 49 members have known party affiliations.

In 2016, Nebraska Senator Laura Ebke changed her affiliation from Republican to Libertarian. In 2018, the Republican Party backed a Republican who unseated her. So much for “non-partisan.”

Ditto city governments around the country. Even where they’re formally “non-partisan,” most officials are party-affiliated and party-backed. Many politicians treat local office as the first rung of a climb up the party, and political, ladders.

Like it or not, if we’re going to keep a democratic process, we’re going to have political parties. Sorry, George. Fortunately, there are up sides.

At the individual candidate level, partisan affiliation conveys information. A Republican candidate is more like Mitch McConnell than like Nancy Pelosi; a Democratic candidate, vice versa; a Libertarian or Green candidate is something different.

That information is imperfect. Not every candidate will agree with everything in his or her party’s platform, or toe every party line in office. But it’s better than nothing.

At the macro level, partisan affiliation tells us whether we have a healthy democracy or are moving toward a one-party state, with one party becoming increasingly dominant or two dominant parties looking more and more like each other.

That last situation sums up recent decades pretty well. There’s a reason why both “major” parties are nominating creepy, handsy, probably senile, and undoubtedly corrupt septuagenarians for president this year: They’re fresh out of competing ideas. In “Hollywood for ugly people,” this is what a beauty contest looks like. Thankfully there’s no swimsuit competition.

So party on, I guess, but if you waste your vote on Republicans and Democrats, don’t complain when you get Trumps and Bidens.

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.

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“Full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the U.S.,” Alicia Adamczyk writes at CNBC, “and cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties.” Adamczyk gets her figures from the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report.

Here are a few numbers NLIHC isn’t as eager to talk about:

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, a whopping  1.9% of all American workers, and only 1% of full-time workers, earned minimum wage as of 2019. Also per BLS, minimum wage workers are more likely than average to be employed in food service jobs where wages are often supplemented with tips.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, 60% of workers in the lowest income decile (which would include minimum wage earners) receive public assistance benefits that top off a full-time minimum wage earner’s wages by an average of about $1.50 an hour.

And then we come to two assumptions in the NLIHC report that become problematic, especially when combined.

The first assumption is that rent is only “affordable” if it comes to less than 30% of a person’s income. But that seems awfully one-size-fits-all. What if spending 35% of my income on rent saves me 10% of that income somewhere else — utility bills or gas costs for longer commutes, for example?

The second assumption is that that there’s only one earner living in (or at least only one earner contributing to the rent on) the household. That assumption seems especially silly as applied to two-bedroom rentals. In reality, many people share housing. They move in with their romantic partners, or find amicable roomies. Just as many hands make light work, many paychecks make lower per-person rent.

Is the rent, as Jimmy McMillan says, too damn high? In some places, absolutely. In many places, probably.

Is the rent being too damn high a function of the minimum wage being too damn low? No. A tiny fraction of one percent of Americans struggling to make rent are full-time minimum wage workers without secondary sources of income.

The rent is too damn high because the housing supply is too damn limited.

Who are the geniuses limiting the housing supply with permit schemes, zoning restrictions, and supposed “fair housing” rules, all while pretending they’re doing tenants a favor?

The same geniuses who oppress workers with minimum wage laws, licensing requirements, and supposed “labor protections,” all while pretending they’re doing workers a favor.

Making it harder for the average worker to earn a living and find  a place to live may not be the intended purpose of government as we know it, but it’s certainly the result of government as we know it.

Perhaps it’s time for America’s workers to re-think government as we know it.

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.

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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he has an economic plan for America to “Build Back Better.” US president Donald Trump complains that Biden “plagiarized” significant elements of that plan from, you guessed it, Donald Trump.

Both plans are packed full of bad ideas that have been proposed a thousand times by a thousand other politicians, so the plagiarism claim seems more trollish than truthy. The problem with both economic plans isn’t that they’re plagiarized, it’s that they ARE economic plans.

What is an economy?

Ask a politician, and you might get the idea that an economy is a metaphorical truck full of goodies. Give the keys to the right politician and everyone gets candy and ice cream. Give the keys to the wrong politician and he rolls the truck into a ravine and everyone starves.

Ask a bureaucrat, and you’re likely to get lists of “key indicators,” accompanied by graphs and charts attempting to explain life, the universe, and everything in terms of those indicators.

In actuality, an economy is the aggregate of nearly every decision, made by nearly every human being on the planet, nearly every second, of nearly every hour, of nearly every day.

The economy is whether you have lunch, and if so what you eat and how much of it.

The economy is whether you go to work today or call in sick and return to bed.

The economy is whether you try to make that old beater last one more year, or give in and go shopping for a new car, or start bicycling more and driving less.

The economy is everything you and eight billion other people decide to buy or not buy, sell or not sell, consume or not consume, and do or not do, 24/7/365, cradle to grave.

The idea that a politician or bureaucrat (government or corporate) can come up with an “economic plan” that takes all the relevant variables into account — forecasts what people need or want and efficiently allocates resources to make sure they get it — isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous.  We’re not even very good at forecasting the weather yet. Behind politicians’ “economic plans” lies the kind of hubris that that turns recessions into depressions, droughts into mass starvation episodes, and trade wars into shooting wars.

According to the “Build Back Better” plan, “Joe Biden believes to his core that there’s no greater economic engine in the world than the hard work and ingenuity of the American people.” Trump makes similar noises.

If they actually believed it, their “economic plans” would be identical and 11 words long: “Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme” (“Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself”).

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.

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