When Do Police Have Reasonable Suspicion That You Are a Non-Citizen?

For the past couple of weeks I have been stewing about how to respond to Rick’s post in which he tried to analogize the outcry against Arizona’s new immigration law to the Tea Party’s blowout bash against the new federal health care legislation.  He called the left out for hypocrisy in its condemnation of the accusations of “socialized medicine” and “death panels,” asserting that the left is “is just as over the top as the most silly Tea Party [when it terms the Arizona law] ‘racist,’ ‘hysterical nativism,’ and evocative of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. It is cause, we hear, to read Arizona out of the civilized community.”

His rhetorical approach was really effective, I think, so I am going to copy it: starting with a concession to gain your trust, before pointing out the flaw I see in Rick’s argument.

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May Day Tea Parties

Most recently, the political left accused conservatives of dumbing down the President’s health care bill. It did not usher in “socialized medicine” and did not call for “death panels.” The conservatives weren’t completely wrong. The bill – both by its provisions and by anticipated responses to what are the almost certain ways in which it will fail to achieve its intended purposes – dramatically increases and centralizes public control of health care markets including decisions on what treatments are and are not “cost effective.”

But the folks on the left also had a point. Although one cannot expect mass political movements to be marked by the dispassionate and, we hope, carefully reasoned discourse to be heard in the court room or lecture hall, supporters of the health care bill argued (with some justification) that the over the top rhetoric obscured rather than clarified. Tea parties, they said and still say, are exercises in political hysteria and ignorance in which honest differences of opinion are turned into existential conflict and ordinary political opponents are portrayed as extraordinarily evil. Mass opposition to disfavored legislation and politicians is fine as long as it is accurate and temperate. This is what they say.

Except when they don’t.

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Forget About That Local Democracy Bit

One of the insights of Public Choice theory (a way of viewing political actors as self interested agents) is that intensely interested parties may often be able to exercise disproportionate influence over public policy to benefit their own interests at the expense of the common good. This proposal to vest greater control over local school districts and school boards with the state Superintendent of Public Instruction strikes me as a prime example.

I have no idea whether placing MPS under the responsibility of the Mayor would have helped what every one agrees are completely unacceptable outcomes. The idea was to place responsibility for the schools with a public official to whom more people pay attention and whose election and re-election is more salient, i.e., more people pay attention. School board races attract few voters and tend to be denominated by those who are self interested in the status quo or in particular proposals for reform. This results in a weaker demand for acountability on the part of the general public. If the mayor had to run for reelection based, in part, on the performance of the schools, it is more likely that something would get done.

One of the arguments against the takeover, however, is that it would diminish the voters’ direct control over the schools. 

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