One of the characteristics of a secret ballot is that others can’t tell how you voted. This might protect voters from harassment or intimidation, but it also prevents voters from providing assurance to others about how they voted. A voter might have claimed to have voted a certain way, but the secret ballot means that others can never be sure.

The secret ballot is a barrier to voters selling their votes because the purchaser cannot be certain that the seller voted as promised. Mail-in voting reduces this impediment to selling one’s vote. The purchaser can watch the voter complete the ballot, or even complete the ballot for the seller. Buying votes becomes easier with mail-in ballots.

There are already concerns about ballot harvesting, in which one individual collects ballots from many others to deposit in drop boxes. It’s a small step from collecting ballots from many others and “helping” those voters fill in their ballots. And while ballot harvesting is aimed at ballots turned in to election officials, there is little to stop the ballot harvester from just mailing in those ballots.

On November 8th, Californians will vote up or down on key propositions. Here’s expert analysis from researchers at the Independent Institute, offering what you need to know about these ballot measures:

Prop 1
Proposition 1 Is Perverse Virtue-Signaling 
Since abortion is already completely legal in California, why is Prop 1—which will amend the state constitution to guarantee a right to a state-funded abortion—on the ballot, and why are more than $9 million being spent to support its passage? California taxpayers are burdened enough without having to bear the cost of on-demand abortions for anyone, from anywhere, up to full term. READ MORE »

Props 26/27
Propositions 26 and 27 Are More about Protectionism than Gambling  
Propositions 26 and 27 are ostensibly about sports betting, but they are rife with objectionable provisions and protectionism for the special interests pushing them. Californians would be better served by ditching both propositions and pressuring lawmakers to remove existing restrictions on gambling. READ MORE » 

Covid-19 is likely endemic and will remain with us for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, it is also becoming milder. Some medical research argues that current dominant variants are less deadly than the flu. Hospitalizations have also steeply declined in recent weeks.

Regardless, President Biden recently announced he is extending the Covid-19 public health emergency for another 90 days. This will place the country under a public health emergency for Covid into early 2023. The U.S. is also under a public health state of emergency for monkeypox. 

This comes at a surprising time. On October 21st, there were about 7,100 new Covid-19 cases. Ten months prior, data collectors at Johns Hopkins University reported over 1 million new Covid-19 cases. This reduction occurred despite Covid’s continual mutation into more contagious variants and dramatically curtailing of recommended public health guidelines to prevent disease spread.

The California Coastal Commission (CCC) has approved the Doheny Ocean Desalination Plant in Orange County. As the California Globe reports, the new plant will produce five million gallons a day for the South Coast Water District, “reducing the freshwater burden for a large swath of Orange County.” Such approval, in a drought-stricken state, is the exception rather than the rule.

As the Globe explains, in May the CCC rejected the Poseidon desalination plant in Huntington Beach that had been in progress for nearly 20 years. That project was supported by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, Governor Gavin Newsom, and approved by an appellate court ruling. As we noted, that plant would have provided 50 million gallons of fresh water per day.

Follow the science,” we are told, especially the junk science that climate alarmists invent. I recently debunked a piece of junk climate science whose alarmism was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, CBS, and elsewhere. The junk science was produced by the Federal Reserve. Fed officials claimed that warming will cut economic growth by a third, but my simple statistical analysis showed their results were within the margin of error and that minor improvements and new data flip their result!

Mainstream economics shows that warming will have minor economic effects compared to the economic growth we expect over the next century. That is a problem for the climate lobby, which unfortunately includes the Fed. Since economic growth will swamp the economic effects of global warming, the Fed set out, it seems, to prove that warming will reduce growth. The fact that Florida, on average 26 degrees warmer than Michigan, has grown faster didn’t faze them.

The Wall Street Journal featured a major exposé of how many federal government employees are becoming wealthy by investing in stocks. Before reading any further, be warned. It’s not a small problem.

Here’s an excerpt from the WSJ’s report:

Thousands of officials across the government’s executive branch reported owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

More than 2,600 officials at agencies from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, disclosed stock investments in companies while those same companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. That amounts to more than one in five senior federal employees across 50 federal agencies reviewed by the Journal.

The U.S. government’s 2022 fiscal year ended on September 30, 2022. At that time, the nation’s total public debt outstanding totaled $30.93 trillion. That’s the equivalent of $238,051 of debt for each American household, or $93,192 for each individual American.

Who does the U.S. government owe all that money to?

With mid-term elections on the horizon, my email box has been inundated with messages from candidates, parties, and interest groups. Mostly, they are asking me to donate money. Still, when they ask for my vote, many of their messages tell me that I should vote for the political party rather than the candidate. Democrats are telling me I should vote for them so they can maintain control of Congress. Republicans are asking me for my vote to flip the House and Senate.

The message I am getting from candidates isn’t “I am the best person for the job,” but “Elect me so my party will have more control.” As you are looking ahead to the mid-term elections, will you be casting your vote for a candidate or the candidate’s party?

Considering the contemporary partisan divide, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to vote for the party. Lots of voters (maybe most?) will do this. If that’s the case, why not redesign the electoral system so that voters vote directly for parties rather than indirectly voting for parties by voting for their candidates?

Regardless of the academic merits, the Nobel prize awarded to Ben Bernanke—as well as to Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig—for their work on financial crises, particularly during the Great Depression, will entail a negative effect. It will help reinforce the myth initiated by Milton Friedman, and sustained by the former Fed chairman himself, that the disaster in the 1930s was caused by the central bank´s failure to pump money.

Diamond and Dybvig have written about the risks of “maturity transformation” (the mismatch between demand deposits that clients can withdraw at short notice and long-term loans provided by banks). In the dire context of the early 30s this inherent imbalance, among other factors, led to the collapse of many financial institutions and helped turn the crisis into a depression. Ben Bernanke has also focused on bank failures and their impact on the economy. In his view, during the Great Depression the financial entities helped precipitate the collapse of the money supply because, given their negative expectations, they failed to lend to borrowers who would otherwise have been given loans. The conclusion being, as Bernanke would try to show in practice many decades later, that a major intervention by the central bank (bailouts and other forms of support to the financial system) can prevent this.

Next year will mark 30 years since California’s Parental Choice in Education Initiative, Proposition 174, appeared on the ballot. The measure provided a voucher equal to roughly $2600 for use at qualifying government, independent or religious schools. 

As the Christian Science Monitor noted, “not since California started the national tax revolt in 1976 by adopting Proposition 13 have voters faced an initiative with greater political and policy consequences.” Proposition 174 failed, partly due to opposition from then-governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, who called the measure “too costly.” 

Since 1993, California voters have had no opportunity to vote on a parental choice measure. The pandemic amplified the problems of government schools with unnecessary shutdowns. Children are now subject to racist government propaganda, and parents may be branded domestic terrorists if they dare to protest. The problems parents face are best modeled by the “captain of the anti-choice team.”