Badnarik: I will debate or be arrested

Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate for President, plans to debate tonight... whether the candidates want him to or not.

In practice, this probably means he'll get arrested trying to get into the debate hall. The media is likely to ignore this. But Badnarik deserves to be in the debates.

That said, I've noted some of the things that interested me about this debate.

One interesting note from the debates: the announcer makes a big point of noting that the "final list of questions" has been "seen only by myself, and certainly not the candidates". Yet, other reports indicate that the candidates know all of the questions in advance. How can this be reconciled?

Simple. They took two questions from each person selected to be in the "town hall", one for the President Bush and one for Senator Kerry. The moderator then selected some of those questions. But the candidates saw the whole list and had time to prepare for it. They won't know the specific list -- but they'll know all of the possible questions that are on that list.

Honest reporting, or shameful deception? You decide.

So far, though, the funniest thing about the debates isn't political at all:

Looks like C-Span picked Microsoft servers for their web hosting and paid the price (albeit only for a few minutes). They should have picked Linux.

Terrorism and the War in Iraq

So far, early into the debate, Kerry has been on the attack, but his facts are typical soundbites -- I recognize a lot of them as being either wrong or more complicated than he's portraying. Bush hasn't done a great job responding to him, but is trying to stress that the right actions matter more than popularity. As predicted, the Darfur

Kerry's favorite soundbite: "Rushed to war without a plan to win the peace." Although Bush hasn't used it, there's a saying in military circles: "No battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy." And there's this small matter of Turkey not letting one of our divisions drive through their terroritory.

The Kerry Doctrine appears to be that if we stop developing nuclear "bunker busters", other nations will stop trying to develop nuclear weapons. Sorry -- in the words of President Bush, that's naive and stupid. For the US, the preeminent military and nuclear power in the world, an additional type of nuclear weapon is a grain of sand at the beach.

For Iran or North Korea, a single nuclear weapon is the power to destroy an American city. This is not the Cold War, where we can negotiate with a rational, if ideologically opposed, opponent, and possibly reach bilateral agreeements to reduce arms levels. Terrorists do not care if they die, so long as they die in jihad. Terrorists cannot be deterred, only destroyed.

Domestic Policy and Health Care

The first question was reimportation of drugs from Canada. Bush sort-of flubbed his answer. He referred to safety issues and FDA testing. That's a valid concern, but it's not the real issue.

The real issue is patents; companies develop their drugs for the US market and offer them, once developed, to other nations. The US patent system allows them to recoup their R&D costs here. Other nations have socialized health care with single-payer status, which gives them more bargaining power, and they can effectively threaten to revoke the patent protection from drugs they think are too expensive.

The result is that drugs are developed for the US market and the R&D costs recouped there. By the time the drugs receive FDA approval for human use, the length of time remaining for their patent is half, or even less, of what it would be otherwise. That means R&D costs need to be recouped in just a few years, before other companies can (legally) produce generic versions.

Other countries can bargain harder, and sales to other nations represent a marginal profit that discounts the R&D cost. So the companies can make a profit selling to other nations at any price over the cost of production. There's no room in that for R&D, so the US is left holding the bill for research and development.

What does this mean? If the US begins to re-import drugs into the US, companies will reduce their research spending on drugs, because they will be less able to recoup there profits. Yes, existing drugs would be cheaper, and new ones less expensive -- for those newer drugs that are developed at all. The risk is that many of them won't be.

The Libertarian answer would be free trade. In general, that's the right answer. But off the top of my head, I'm not sure it would solve this particular problem. And I don't have a pat answer for what would. But before you can solve the problem, you need to understand it.

Kerry's answer: he's fighting for the middle class. Kerry as champion of the little guy is laughable. He's also running on a campaign of tax increases while claiming he has a tax cut. Amusing.

Kyoto

Kerry is harping on Kyoto. This is the bill that got a 98-2 vote in the Senate.... that's a 98-2 against. Kyoto is dead, Senator. Let it lie, and stop trying to molest the corpse.

Patriot Act

Unsurprisingly, since Kerry voted for it, he's spinning himself as for it, but against how Bush has implemented it. Bush says it's necessary to remove the barriers within the FBI for counterterrorism.

The fact is, the barriers in place before the Patriot Act went beyond the requirements of the law. They could have been relaxed reasonably without something as overbroad and hastily put together as the Patriot Act. Yes, we probably needed to relax the rules the FBI was operating under in terrorism cases, but we did not need to do so in the manner which the Patriot Act permits.

Abortion

Kerry seems to be in favor of funding the exercise of "rights" for those otherwise too poor to afford them. He represents abortion as one of those rights. I think that's bullshit. It's a tough question, but whether the government should be funding abortions is a much easier one. We do not have positive rights to the work or property or others. That represents a fundamental difference in philosophy between the Democratic candidate and the fundamental principles of American law.