McArdle, Obama Voter and Supposed Libertarian

Paragraphs such as this one, written in a post about California's fiscal crisis, shows how someone of her thinking could vote for Obama, rather than no one or a third party:

I am not under the illusion that this will be fun. For starters, the rest of you sitting smugly out there in your snug homes, preparing to enjoy the spectacle, should prepare to enjoy the higher taxes you're going to pay as a result. Your states and municipalities will pay higher interest on their bonds if California is allowed to default. Also, the default is going to result in a great deal of personal misery, more than a little of which is going to end up on the books of Federal unemployment insurance and other such programs.

Let me break this down in the simplest of terms. Government is inefficient. There are many Democrats and not a few Republicans who want big government and don't care about inefficiency. However, a lot of taxpayers in both parties, some moderate to Blue Dog Democrats, plus the more economically inclined conservatives, understand the cost of government.

The current financial and political system, as it exists up until recently, was one in which interest rates were artificially low and governments were protected from bankruptcy. Low interest for government debt hid the inefficiency of government spending. If the interest rate on municipal and state debt increases, it will reduce (since this is government, economically stupid but politically sound decisions won't go away) the most inefficient spending.

Higher interest rates on government debt aren't a bug, they're a feature.

Democraphobia in China

And not from the communists, but the Confucians.
The Confucian Party

They point out that China’s most fertile intellectual period was the Warring States era (476 to 221 B.C.) , when scholars like Mencius could openly criticize rulers for their immoral deeds and put forward political alternatives. My Confucian friends have criticized the government’s clumsy attempts to shut down debate about Charter 08, a manifesto published in 2008 which urged the Communist Party to abandon monopoly rule and establish a multiparty system of government.

But the same scholars were severely critical of the content of the charter, saying that it echoes 20th century efforts by Chinese liberals to seek complete Westernization as the solution to China’s problems. In fact, even liberal scholars like Qin Hui, China’s most influential social critic, openly criticized the charter’s substance. Had the government not interfered with the charter, it might have died a natural death.

For the Confucians, any long-lasting and stable political reform must be rooted in China’s own traditions. So should we view them as narrow nationalists? Quite the opposite. Jiang Qing, a leading exponent of the new Confucianism, explicitly criticizes the idea of state sovereignty, saying that sovereignty lies with “heaven” rather than the state. He argues for a democratic institution that would offer more opportunities for political participation, while criticizing democracy for being too narrowly focused on the interests of the current generation of voters.

Jiang proposes another political institution designed to represent non-voters whose interests are typically neglected in democratic states, such as foreigners, future generations and ancestors. Is democracy really the best way to protect future victims of global warming, he asks?

Confucian intellectuals have also put forward ideas for educational reform. Communism is dead as a unifying myth that can sustain the Chinese people, they argue, so what does China stand for now? Here’s where Confucian values become relevant. There are currently thousands of educational experiments to promote such Confucian values as harmony and compassion.
Tsinghua University, the university that trains much of China’s elite (and where I teach), may be leading the way. It has recently made the “four Confucian classics” compulsory reading for a group of undergraduate students in the humanities. Written over 2,000 years ago, the books will effectively replace some of the compulsory courses in Marxist-Leninism. In the traditional mode, students will memorize the texts before engaging in critical interpretation.

Today, such efforts to revive tradition really grab intellectuals . According to a recent survey of Chinese political attitudes by Duke University’s Tianjian Shi, China has become more traditional in its political orientation as it has developed economically. Reacting to the materialism that has accompanied rapid modernization, many intellectuals are turning to traditions like Confucianism that emphasize social responsibility.

Those looking for another explosion of political demonstrations like Tiananmen are likely to be disappointed. At the conference in Qufu, the Confucian critics were careful to tell government officials that they favor change on a stable basis.

If the Confucians get their way, political change will come slowly and peacefully. Since Deng Xiaoping opened the doors to economic reform over 30 years ago, various economic experiments have been carried out at different levels of government, with the central government taking what works and implementing the reforms in the whole country. That’s also likely to be the model for educational and political reform over the next 30 years. It may be starting right now in towns like Qufu.