A few items

I suggest a comment/blog post policy: unless it is a personal reply to the individual in the post please just write a new blog post. This will certainly increase the volume of blog posts but I'm not sure why that's harmful---I'd prefer it to all be in one place. If that means Karl's reply to his own post is a new post...well...more people will get to read Karl...and that can't be a bad thing.

In that spirit I'm responding to the politics thread that originated in Scott's welcome post:

1. On ideology vs party. I agree with Scott and Karl that change is likely to come from within one of our two major parties and not from without. I didn't mean to seem to suggest otherwise. My main concern is that any political discussion here remains absolutely friendly. My experiences indicate this is not a trivial concern. I voted for Bush twice. If I were to initiate a discussion with many of my Massachusetts friends with that I think it would be harder to have a productive and friendly discussion. Does that make me a Republican? I guess if it's that or Democrat. But I've just never found it helpful to start or to focus a conversation on that.

On a related but more abstract point I've often wondered at how party affiliation reinforces and even creates ideology. Take two mostly unrelated political issues: say, for example, the Iraq war (or even foreign policy more generally) and taxes. Suppose an outsider, with no knowledge of parties or political history, were asked to guess the percentage of people supporting one position on Iraq who also held another position on taxes. Say, for example, the percentage of people who opposed the Iraq war (in whatever sense) who also supported more progressive taxes. Maybe an outsider would infer some relationship between the arguments supporting the two sides of these issues and decide that they're not totally unrelated. But I think it's likely the guess would tend toward 50%---why would opposing the Iraq war strongly coincide with favoring taxes on the rich? Yet as we all know the actual percentage is very high---and the stronger the opposition to the Iraq war in general the stronger the support for progressive taxes.

We can conclude one of at least two things: one, that I'm underestimating the relationship between these two issues and a wise observer really would guess that rich people who don't like high taxes would favor the Iraq war for some subtle reason; or two, that many people who jointly hold opinions on these issues did not arrive at those opinions strictly through reason and logic---they are led to these opinions (or at least given incentive to hold them) through their associations with others, specifically party affiliation. As you might guess, I find the second explanation more plausible. But I'd love to hear what y'all think.

2. On hijacking this blog with non-book discussion. I'm not sure everyone here is interested in the political discussion and don't want those of us who are to take over. I also don't want to have piecemeal discussions in the comments and do enjoy hearing everyone's opinion. I'm happy to limit our discussion here (somewhat) and leave it to one of us to select a book which invites discussion on these topics if others think that'd be more appropriate. I'd gladly pre-select "Free to Choose" by Milton and Rose Friedman as my next book club selection (whenever that is) if we don't exhaust this discussion on someone else's book before then.

3. On not making this post too long. I look forward to responding to Karl and Scott's arguments (in the comments) but will save that for another post pending viewpoints from others on where and how best to pursue this discussion (see point 2).