Whole Foods Republicans. Brilliant!

Whole Foods Republicans. The line in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by Michael Petrilli of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution is simply brilliant. Here’s an significant chunk of what he wrote:

        ...yes, many shop at Whole Foods, which has become a symbol of progressive affluence but is also a good example of the free enterprise system at work. (Not to mention that its founder is a well-known libertarian who took to these pages to excoriate ObamaCare as inimical to market principles.)

        What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There's no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness. Nor do highly educated people have to agree that a strong national defense is harmful to the cause of peace and international cooperation.

Actually, I’m more of a Central Market Republican, but the difference is probably slight. As such, it’s almost personally embarrassing to me that I didn’t think of this first. John Mackey may not be on the party rolls per se, but as his writings show, he’s very much one of us—and his headquarters is literally right down the street from me.

Much of the rest of Petrilli’s column is about a dangerous anti-intellectual streak within the party as a whole, so to get firmly on his side, I’ll now dive right in. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was so silly that it probably ended any remaining significance that award had, but the Prize in the Economic Sciences is quite apt here. Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom won for their separate-but-related work in the New Institutional Economics. Ostrom's selection was particularly salient for the cause of human freedom. As I recently wrote elsewhere, in work dating back to her PhD dissertation in political science in 1965, Ostrom has focused on explaining how, contrary to Garret Hardin’s infamous assertion, the commons is actually usually not a tragedy. Rather, her meticulous research into thousands of case studies showed how self-governance by users of common resources quite frequently works, and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t.

That’s a long way from the bossy nanny-statism of the Obamanista crowd in Washington. The collective approach doesn’t require the “public option,” much less the public instruction that thou shalt carry insurance for this-that-and-the-other-thing, or diktats over what terms your mortgage must carry. A little nudging might be tolerable, even useful, as our Tory colleagues in the UK might agree, but commandeering the command heights of what could be the most dynamic sectors of the economy—health care, finance, and the new automotive business—just plain isn’t.

So what does this mean in Central Texas? Travis County has tended, over the past few years, to elect not just Democrats to office, but Democrats with no meaningful sense of the value of taxpayers’ money. Is there any other way to explain how Capital Metro manages to cover just 17 percent of its budget with actual fares from paying customers? Note that this outfit then decided that it needed to add trains that don’t run, much less run on time.

So how did they manage to pull that over on the taxpayers? A great part of the trouble here in Central Texas lies with the lack of credibility that the local GOP has with those Whole Foods Republicans—we are perceived not as offering more sensible ways to manage the commons, but as simply saying ‘no’ to whatever the locally dominant party proposes. That has worked for a long time in Texas’ 14th federal congressional district, but it’s not likely ever going to work around Austin. (Someone tell the governor that he didn’t do us any favors vetoing the three-foot bicycle safety bill.) To take control here, we need the hard work of politics: public dialogue, policy development, and campaign strategy relevant to an electorate that can be shown the benefit of conservative approaches to conservation, and smart ideas about management of public assets.

Across the United States, support for the Obamanistas is plummeting—but without better ideas, we’re so far short on picking up the gains. Simply put, we need Whole Foods Republicans running for office.

Taking on crankiness one statewide election at a time.

Ken Mercer, the Republican incumbent in seat #5 on the State Board of Education, sent out a message this morning laying into his primary challenger Tim Tuggey, a law firm partner and a former chairman of San Antonio’s transit board. This message, in particular, bears some analysis and commentary. In laying in, Ken lays out two major grievances:

Tim Tuggey gives money to Democrats. Ken specifically takes issue with Tim’s donations to Democrat politicians and organizations over the past few years, with personal checks to federal representative Chet Edwards, Texas senator Kirk Watson, and the federal Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee. Ken has a reasonable question to ask there, and could do so in that debate that he has requested. That said, I might already have an answer to this below. Read on.

Tim Tuggey is a “lawyer-lobbyist.” Ken doesn’t like lawyers much—heck, even lawyers make lawyer jokes—but he really doesn’t like lobbyists. So Ken writes that

        Conservative Republicans agree that a 'lawyer-lobbyist' should never run for public office. In our 2010 debates, I will call on Mr. Tuggey (and his supporters) to share and debate his bizarre definition of "Conservative."

I’ll first recommend that any sitting member of the Texas Board of Education learn the conventions of English capitalization. That’s conservative, as he’s using it in that sentence. (If Ken’s native language were Spanish, I might cut him some slack, but I’m fairly certain that’s not the case.) For guidance, I recommend consulting section 7.19 of the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. (I’d send him to the 15th edition, but I’ve so far been too cheap to update my library.)

Still, as a Republican who’s also a pretty conservative guy, I’d like to know just why lobbyists shouldn’t ever run for office. Section 27 of Article 1 of the Texas Constitution—our Bill of Rights—guarantees that

        The citizens shall have the right, in a peaceable manner, to assemble together for their common good; and apply to those invested with the powers of government for redress of grievances or other purposes, by petition, address or remonstrance.

Those of us who live in Austin can easily go in person to yell at those so invested. Those in Texarkana or El Paso have a longer drive ahead of them. Moreover, if lots of people around the state have the same grievance, it may just be economically efficient to organize into an interest group, and to hire someone to do that grieving for them. It might even make sense to hire a lawyer to do it—lawyers usually know something about how government actually works, and they frequently look good in suits. So there should be no surprise that we have lawyers and lobbyists in Texas (like in almost every decently-governed country in the world), and that some of those lawyers and lobbyists are (gasp) lawyer-lobbyists. Thus, we actually do need these lawyers and lobbyists, and I can’t think of any legitimate profession whose members in Texas are prohibited from public office. Maybe Ken can help us out with that. He’s on the Board of Education, after all.

That gets me back to the issue of those donations to Democrats. I haven’t spoken with Tim about that, but I might wonder as well. It’s just possible that some of his clients are Democrats. That wouldn’t be shocking—some of my clients are Democrats, and I’m neither a lawyer nor generally a lobbyist. Heck, I even have friends who are Democrats. So maybe Chet or Kirk or someone on the DSCC shook Tim down. I don’t know, but Ken can ask that question if he wants.

So Tim gives money to Democrats, and he might be the useful butt of lawyer jokes. All the same, I still have more than sufficient reason for endorsing his candidacy in the primary:

Ken Mercer is a crank. Ken is a creationist, and he has been wasting a lot of the board’s time with fights over the specific language of educational standards that are never going to find their way into a classroom. That’s right—never. That’s because the vast majority of Texas public school teachers aren’t so stupid as to recycle logical fallacies about Piltdown Man. Intelligent design is an important concept, but when I was in high school, I got my theology in theology class, and my biology in biology class. Texas public schools don’t generally teach theology (no surprise there), so discussions of this issue should be pretty limited.

Crankiness is eccentricity taken to obsession over a single subject. Ken would do better trying to assert a link between vaccines and autism, or extolling the economic merits of a gold standard. Those are lame ideas short of theory and evidence as well, but at least they’re objectively provable. His cranky creationist rants don’t belong on the board, and as such, neither does he. If we Republicans are going to continue to thrash the Democrats across Texas—including rolling into Travis County—we need officeholders with some intelligence and design behind their viewpoints and policies. And that’s why we need Tim Tuggey.