Minor Thoughts from me to you

Avik Roy dives into the recent history of healthcare reform and details the bipartisan plan that the Democrats killed, in order to pass a partisan plan of their own.

Hence, a bipartisan health-care agenda at the federal level will necessarily look quite different than one at the state level. If liberals had bothered to ask, they could easily have elicited bipartisan support for a proposal that did the following: (1) set up the Obamacare exchanges for those under 400% of FPL; (2) applied the Ryan reforms to Medicare and Medicaid (or, alternatively, folded in Medicare and Medicaid acute-care into the PPACA exchanges); (3) equalized the tax treatment of employer-sponsored and individually-purchased insurance; and (4) not increase taxes or the deficit.

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Arnold Kling offers some perceptive words Congressional budgeting and campaign rhetoric.

Because the budget is so far from being sustainable, budget rhetoric needs to be re-interpreted.

When their side refuses to cut spending because it would be "cruel," they are ensuring that future spending cuts will be even crueler.

When our side refuses to raise taxes, we are ensuring that future tax increases will be higher.

Until the baseline is a sustainable budget, the rhetoric will be the opposite of reality.

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Nationally, we are gearing up for political silly season. The Republican primaries are half over and we're moving swiftly towards the national conventions and the fall election season.

In Wisconsin, the political silly season has been with us for the past 15 months and looks to stay with us straight through November. (In case you haven't heard, we've had recall elections for six senators and a hotly contested Supreme Court election. We have another 4 senate recall elections and a gubernatorial recall election scheduled.)

Politicking is off the charts and everyone is inclined to believe the absolute worst about everyone else. At times like this, I remember one of my favorite quotes (I have many) from Robert Heinlein, from The Green Hills of Earth.

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

In every party, most politicians are just plain dumb. Freely criticize every politician with whom you disagree. But don't degrade yourself by ascribing evil motives to people who are well-intentioned. It's usually wrong, it's uncharitable, and it reflects poorly on your own character. Instead, criticize the lack of knowledge. And then help the situation along by offering your own knowledge to fill the lack.

tl;dr: The repeal of Wisconsin's "Equal Pay Act" is much less significant than certain politicians would like you to think it is. And the pay gap overall is much narrower than certain interest groups would like you to believe it is.

A friend of mine linked to this article, from Facebook, upset that Republican State Senator Glenn Grothman isn't concerned about the male-female pay gap. So, I read the article. And, wow. It is very sloppily written.

According to The Daily Beast, “A 2007 study by the American Association of University Women found that college-educated women earn only 80 percent as much as similarly educated men a year after graduation.”

After ten years in the workforce, the gap opened to 12 percent.

Wait. What? A 20 perccent gap opened to a 12 percent gap? How does that work? Having nothing better to do with my time, I decided to look up the referenced 2007 study. (And, people? This is 2012 and you're writing for the web. You can link to studies for your readers. Don't make them do their own Googling.)

Here's the original study: Behind the Pay Gap (2007). I started with the Executive Summary. First page, second paragraph:

One year out of college, women working full time earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn. Ten years after graduation, women fall farther behind, earning only 69 percent as much as men earn.

Oh. So, the 80 percent pay gap increases 11 points, to a 69% pay gap. Now, to be fair to David Ferguson, he's pretty much re-writing a story from the Daily Beast. And this goofily worded section is in the original story. But quoting another story is no execuse for bad writing or for failing to correct the bad writing, for your own readers.

Now, about the pay gap itself. Reading this story and the Daily Beast story, one gets the impression that their is an immense pay gap between men and women. If you read the 2007 study closely though, the pay gap isn't nearly as immense.

One year out of college, women working full time earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn. Ten years after graduation, women fall farther behind, earning only 69 percent as much as men earn.

... The only way to discover discrimination is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation.

After controlling for variables other than sexism, the pay gap after 1 year is 5% and the pay gap after 10 years is 12%. Or is it? You could read "portion .. that remains is 5%" as meaning 5% of the 20%, which is 1%. Similarly, 12% of 31% is 3.7%.

To figure out which it is, I checked the Full Report, from the study.

That is, after controlling for all the factors known to affect earnings, college-educated women earn about 5 percent less than college-educated men earn. Thus, while discrimination cannot be measured directly, it is reasonable to assume that this pay gap is the product of gender discrimination.

Okay. I think the Executive Summary isn't worded as clearly as I would like, but it is saying that 5% of the pay gap can't be explained by their regression analysis against other variables. So, the unexplained pay gap after 10 years is 12%. That's a lot better than the 20% and 31% mentioned in the Daily Beast article, but it's still not great.

But I had one more question: did the study account for the fact that men, generally speaking, negotitate more aggressively for starting pay and raises than women do?

I found this in the "What Can We Do About the Pay Gap?" section of the study? The fact that this in the potential solutions section strongly suggests, to me, that the authors didn't control for it, in their regression analysis.

Further magnifying these gender differences, women expect less and negotiate less pay for themselves than do men. Researchers have found that women expect less, see the world as having fewer negotiable opportunities, and see themselves as acting for what they care about as opposed to acting for pay. These learned behaviors and expectations (which may be based on experiences) tend to minimize women’s pay (Babcock & Laschever, 2003).

Individual differences in negotiating skills may lead to pay variation among workers with similar skill sets. Employers have a fair amount of discretion in setting wages as long as they pay at least the minimum wage and do not discriminate based on gender, race, ethnicity, age, or other protected group. One study by Babcock and Laschever (2003) found that starting salaries for male students graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with master’s degrees were about 7 percent higher (almost $4,000) than the starting salaries for similarly qualified women. Babcock and Laschever argue that this gap in part reflects differences in men’s and women’s willingness to negotiate. It may also reflect women’s perceptions about the labor market, expectations about the wages they’ll receive, and willingness to take a lower-wage job (Orazem, Werbel, & McElroy, 2003).

On a related front, several economic experiments have demonstrated that regardless of their actual work performance in a competitive setting and their beliefs about their performance, more women than men choose noncompetitive payment schemes over tournament (where a winner gets a prize and a loser gets nothing) or competition rates of payment for a task (Niederle & Vesterlund, 2005).

Indeed, when I checked "Figure 21. Key Variables Used in Regression Analysis, by Category", negotiating ability or style isn't listed as a variable. Given that, I'm perfectly willing to conceed that a 5% pay gap exists but I'm chalking it up to negotiating strategy rather than to overt discrimination. It's also not surprising that after 10 years of negotiating less aggressively, a 5% gap could grow to a 12% gap. I don't think you need to bring in the specter of active discrimination to explain that gap.

Secondly, Senator Grothman seems to say that the existing law was unfair because it would penalize employers who paid men and women differently on the basis of experience.

"Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person."

The way I read the law, that actually isn't the case.

Your employer may offer up a number of reasons for the differences in pay. It may point to a seniority system, a merit system, a system based on quality or quantity of work, or any other factor that accounts for the difference other than sex. Your employer could also try to argue that the jobs simply aren't substantially similar. Ultimately, however, if your employer responds to the allegations with a valid nondiscriminatory reason for the difference in pay, you must show that the reasons given are pretextual, and that the true reason for the unequal compensation is based on your sex.

Unequal pay for unequal experience does seem to be a valid exception, under state law.

Third, if you'll pardon my wordiness, I'll proceed to the actual effect of the bill that Governor Walker signed last week. I had to go to an Illinois lawyer to find a good description. That this description isn't in either The Raw Story's article or the Daily Beast's article just confirms my impression that both are sloppily written.

Here's how the bills have been described.

According to Mr. May, the Assembly has recently passed two bills: the first "repeals an employee's right to recover compensatory and punitive damages when they have proven in court that they were victims of workplace discrimination or harassment;" the second, according to Mr. May is a bill that repeals Wisconsin's Equal Pay Act, "which guarantees women the same pay as men for doing the same work."

Is that what happened?

What Mr. May does not mention is that compensatory and punitive damages were not available under the Wisconsin Fair Employment Act until 2009! So the Wisconsin Republicans' bill would simply undo what the lawmakers perceive as a recent mistake—not some venerable feature of Wisconsin law.

Well, okay, but won't victims of employment discrimination be left without a remedy? No, almost never. The Wisconsin Fair Employment Act is largely duplicative of the federal anti-discrimination laws, all of which allow the full panoply of damages. Indeed, one of the business lobby's chief complaints is that the WFEA creates an unnecessary layer of administrative hearings, which of course cost money (and therefore increase the costs and risks of hiring employees, at the margins).

This is all a big misunderstanding. There is no such thing as the Equal Pay Act in Wisconsin. Instead, the 2009 Act that created the right to get compensatory and punitive damages under the WFEA—the Act discussed above that Republicans are now trying to appeal—was entitled the "Equal Pay Enforcement Act." This is confusing because there is a federal law called the "Equal Pay Act," which requires "equal pay for equal time." But Wisconsin's Equal Pay Enforcement Act actually has nothing to to with "equal pay for equal time"—it just provides for compensatory and punitive damages for the substantive laws passed previously. Since there is no separate Wisconsin Equal Pay Act, there is no separate bill to repeal it.

Wisconsin Law has a two-step process, when alleging an equal-pay violation.

Currently, an employee may file a complaint of workplace discrimination with Wisconsin's Department of Workforce Development (DWD). The DWD has the power to investigate the claim, hold hearings and award an employee back pay, reinstatement, costs and attorneys' fees upon a finding that the employer engaged in discrimination. Repealing the WFEA in the manner proposed will not take away any of these administrative proceedings or remedies. Instead, under current law, after an employee has already proved discrimination once at a hearing in the DWD, she has to then go to state court and again prove discrimination in order to recover compensatory and punitive damages. It is the right to go to state court to recover these damages that is in danger of being repealed.

Now that the "right to go to state court" has been repealed, employees will have to follow the federal process, to receive compensatory and punitive damages.

First, federal law mandates that, just like in Wisconsin, employees go through an administrative process at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) before bringing suit. After that administrative procedure, the employee then must bring a lawsuit in federal court to recover any compensation. Thus, the federal system also requires both an administrative and judicial step to resolve these claims.

About 2 weeks ago, I posted about Occupy Wall Street and Mr. Ahadzi. A few days ago, I received an email from an anonymous OWS supporter, offering OWS's side of the story.

With the supporter's permission, I'm reprinting it here.

You need to understand something about 702 Vermont Street and Wise Ahadzi. Firstly, Mr. Ahadzi left his home in early 2009. According to neighbors, the home became rodent-infested and was being used for criminal activity. Neighbors were very upset to be living next to an abandoned house. Mr. Ahadzi went into hiding. He was being chased by creditors, not just Countrywide Mortgage, but the utilities, credit cards. His business was trading in and writing about penny stocks. That was bankrupt as well...and god only knows who he owed money to from that business.

The house, being abandoned, was ransacked for anything valuable. Long before Occupy moved in, the appliances were stolen. There was no kitchen on Dec 6, 2011. There was lots of water damage in the kitchen. Occupy removed heavily damaged drywall from the kitchen.

Mr. Ahadzi showed up one day after the big hoopla on the news. He had been unreachable by Occupy and by Bank of America, successors to Countrywide. That's why they hadn't yet foreclosed. He is still the rightful owner of the property and could have asserted that right on December 7, but he is "negotiating" with Occupy, and with Countrywide.

Don't get sucked into the simple narrative of hippies trashing stuff. There's more at work here.

I'll just say that even with all of that information—OWS still didn't actually manage to do much with the house. By this account, OWS managed to remove some drywall from the house. Given that Habitat for Humanity can manage to build a house in a matter of days (or hours, in some cases), that's not especially impressive.

Veronique de Rugy:

First, agencies often fail to follow basic decision-making principles and assume that more regulation is always necessary. Back in March, my colleague Jerry Ellig testified before the House Judiciary Committee and made the point that the regulatory system suffers from systemic institutional problems. For example, there is a broad-based consensus on what regulatory analysis should involve and what its role in agency decision-making should be (as I described in my prior post), yet academic research shows that, more often than not, agencies do not produce or use thorough regulatory analyses. This is true regardless of what party is in charge of the executive branch.

The second core problem with the current system is that the more regulation agencies generate, the harder it is for individuals and businesses to comply. In many cases, no one knows for sure how many of the regulations we have on the books are really necessary or effective.

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Margot Kaminski, for The Atlantic.

Over the past two decades, the United States has established one of the harshest systems of copyright enforcement in the world. Our domestic copyright law has become broader (it covers more topics), deeper (it lasts for a longer time), and more severe (the punishments for infringement have been getting worse). These standards were established through an alphabet soup of legislation: the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, and the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act of 2008. And every few years, there's a call for more.

Many features of existing U.S. copyright law are harsh by international standards. The U.S. penalizes the attempt to access digital material against a rights-holder's wishes, even when the material itself is not protected by copyright. We guarantee large monetary awards against infringers, with no showing of actual harm. We effectively require websites to cooperate with rights-holders to take down material, without requiring proof that it's infringing in court. And our criminal copyright law has such a low threshold that it criminalizes the behavior of most people online, instead of targeting infringement on a true commercial scale.

I'd say there's a strong argument to be made that we should be weakening U.S. copyright law—not strengthening it.

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There are a couple of things that I really wish the general public would understand. One is that gas prices (and oil prices) aren't, broadly speaking, under the control of any President. No President gets to take credit for prices falling and no President should take the blame for prices rising.

Is President Obama responsible for spiraling price of gasoline? Republicans say yes, but the facts say no.

Why have gasoline prices increased since the start of the year? The simplest explanation is that the price of crude oil has increased. Specifically, the spot price for Brent (North Sea) crude has increased $16 a barrel since January. Given that there are 42 gallons to a barrel, that works out to a 38 cent increase in the price of a gallon of oil. Spot prices for gasoline trade in New York have increased about 41 cents per gallon over the same time frame. So there you go.

Why is the price of North Sea oil relevant to the price of gasoline in the United States? Well, we import gasoline refined in Europe from North Sea crude. Even though these imports constitute less than 10 percent of U.S. gasoline consumption, they are necessary to satisfy domestic demand and their price sets the market price for all gasoline regardless of whether other cheaper crude sources are used to refine most of our gasoline.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this article.

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Tim Geithner (aka the tax cheat Treasury Secretary) wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, defending the new financial regulations. I think he better illustrated the perils of the passive voice, however.

A large shadow banking system had developed without meaningful regulation, using trillions of dollars in short-term debt to fund inherently risky financial activity. The derivatives markets grew to more than $600 trillion, with little transparency or oversight. Household debt rose to an alarming 130% of income, with a huge portion of those loans originated with little to no supervision and poor consumer protections.

A "shadow banking system had developed"? Just like that? All by itself? I think there might be some interesting history about why various people started trading and banking outside of the normal system. What incentives did they have to do that? What was wrong with the normal system?

Why were these shadow bankers so interested in inherently risky financial activity? Did they feel constrained by existing restrictions and regulations? Did they feel driven by some kind of requirements to see out excessive risk?

Why did the derivatives market grow so large? What benefit did bankers see in trading so massively in derivatives? Was there a reason that they couldn't trade more directly?

What did households choose to grow their debt so dramatically? What factors made them feel that large levels of debt were both safe and desirable?

These are just a few of the potential questions that people might ask, if Geithner had used the active voice. It's a good thing then that he used the passive voice to defend the administration's priorities.

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John Hinderaker recently did a presentation on corporate cronyism. He cleaned it up and posted both the slides and details online. It's true that the presentation was given at a semi-annual seminar hosted by the evil Koch brothers. I'm hoping that my liberal friends can manage to overlook that long enough to read the presentation and think about whether this level of government/corporate entanglement is a good idea.

What we have seen more recently, especially in the Obama administration, is something much more sinister — private sector, or corporate, cronyism — where the government uses its power to tax and spend, and its power to regulate, to help some companies and industries, making them artificially more profitable or keeping them in business, while using the same powers to disadvantage and potentially destroy other companies and industries that are not allied with the White House or with Congress.

Does being an Obama crony pay off? This graphic from Peter Schweizer’s book sums it up as well as anything: the members of Obama’s national finance committee have already recouped an average of around $25,000 in federal dollars for their companies, for every dollar they raised for Obama’s campaign. Is that a good investment, or what?

I'm opposed to these shenanigans no matter who is in power.

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I'd like to say that I'm surprised by this, but I'm not. Sorry Occupy. You just confirmed every stereotype that I already had about you. Way to blow an opportunity.

Occupy was being criticized — even from the left — for being vague in its goals. The signs railed against bailouts and the greed of the 1%, but protesters coalesced around no legislation, no candidate, no reforms. Everyone agreed that inequality is bad, but what to do about it?

“Occupy Our Homes” was that idea. The group would take over an empty house, foreclosed on by a bank, fix it up and provide shelter to a homeless family.

Last week, Wise Ahadzi opened the door to the house he still owns, 702 Vermont Street in East New York.

Inside is a war zone. The walls are torn down, the plumbing is ripped out and the carpeting has been plucked from the floor. It’s like walking through a ribcage.

Garbage, open food containers and Ahadzi’s possessions are tossed haphazardly around the house.

“This is where my kitchen was,” Ahadzi says. There is no sink, no refrigerator and no counter space. Instead there are dirty dishes piled high waiting for a dip in three large buckets of putrid water that serve as the dishwashing system.

That's not even the worst part. No, the worst part is the way that Occupy took over Ahadzi's house (the guy who was kicked out of his house in 2009, after he fell behind on mortgage payments) and gave it to another guy that they liked better and knew personally. That, right there, is pretty much everything that's wrong with a populist mob, in just one story.

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I knew things were getting better, but this is unexpected.

The United States' rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal oil projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts.

After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling rigs have rushed into the nation's oil fields, suggesting a surge in domestic crude is on the horizon.

... By the EIA's forecast, the United States will challenge Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer when crude and other forms of liquid petroleum are included. But the U.S. is also the world's top oil consumer, demanding nearly 20 million barrels a day. So even with an oil boom, the nation still falls far short of its energy demands.

I'd love to challenge Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer. I'd love to weaken the power of those terrorist sponsoring, women abusing cowards.

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I like the way Sheldon Richman explains the difference between freedom and compulsion, between negative liberty and positive liberty.

Here's the bottom line.

What we have in this debate is a clash not between two liberty interests, but rather between two rights-claims – one negative (genuine), the other positive (counterfeit). All that is required for the exercise of a negative right (to self-ownership and, redundantly, liberty and one’s legitimately acquired belongings) is other people’s noninterference. (“When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof,” writes James A. Sadowsky, S.J.) But the fulfillment of positive rights requires that other people act affirmatively even if they don’t want to — say, by providing products or paying the bills. If one person’s freedom depends on the infringement of someone else’s freedom, the first claim is illegitimate. To hold otherwise is to reject the principle of equality.

This controversy is not about contraception. It’s about freedom versus compulsion.

And here's the part that's been driving me nuts for two weeks now. There are too many smart people repeating this line. Are they really that dumb? Or do they just think that everyone else is?

How exactly was the liberty to use contraception jeopardized by the Catholic exemption? In no way would a woman’s freedom in this respect be infringed simply because her employer was free to choose not to pay for her contraceptive products and services.

Yet advocates of Obamacare insist on conflating these issues. They repeatedly portray opposition to forced financing of contraception as opposition to contraception itself. (Alas, some conservatives have encouraged this conflation.) Must the difference really be spelled out?

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SPM’s consideration of taxes will help Obama’s reelection campaign if (and I believe it’s more like when) the Census Bureau surprises everyone and releases its related report in October of next year instead of November, as it did this year, and attempts with media help to give it greater credibility than the official measurement. By far the largest tax low-income families pay is the payroll tax. In 2011, that tax was reduced by two percentage points. As a result, when next year’s SPM report comes out, millions of Americans will no longer be “low income” under its framework. I can imagine the campaign verbiage already: “Who first broached the idea of eliminating part of the payroll tax? Why, it was Barack Obama, who singlehandedly moved millions into the middle class in one bold move, undoing much of the damage of the past decade’s misguided policies.”

Cynical and paranoid? Perhaps. But hasn't the past 50 or 60 years taught us that it's hard to be too cynical when it comes to our government?

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Take-aways: Ron Paul is not racist, an anti-semite, or anti-gay. He is however, from a much older generation and is personally uncomfortable around gays, clueless about Hispanic and Black culture, and opposed to the nation of Israel. Also, he very nearly voted against the Afghanistan War.

This is worth a read, to get a better read on Ron Paul.

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In 1986, Congress passed EMTALA, making it a federal crime to transfer a patient from one hospital/emergency room to another for financial reasons. It compels hospitals to render care, even without any compensation.

... But EMTALA did more. It killed the voluntary nature of the Medicaid system.

... Today, if Arizona decided to leave Medicaid and resume its pre-Medicaid system, it couldn’t do so. EMTALA would prevent it from functioning. EMTALA specifically bans any hospital from transferring patients for financial reasons. Arizona’s pre-Medicaid system depended upon the transfer of indigent patients from private centers into its indigent health system, thus relieving private hospitals and providers from the burden of constantly providing uncompensated care.

States should be free to design their own systems and innovate, instead of all being forced into the same rigid mold.

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How insane is this?

If you defend your family and property from a knife-wielding druggie in Massachusetts, you’d better be prepared to also defend yourself from the justice system, too.

McKay is the young father who, seeing a local druggie breaking into his truck and stealing the tools he uses to pay the bills, confronted him, subdued him and held him for the police. When the police arrived, they found the bad guy had a knife, a billy club and — thanks to the unarmed McKay — a broken jaw.

Instead of thanking McKay for helping get an armed criminal off the streets, Swampscott officials charged him with a felony. As a Swampscott police spokesman said at the time, “We don’t urge anybody to fight back. We want them to call us.”

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Eric S. Raymond gives his explanation for why he loves the unlovable: Walmart.

I do not love the ambience of Walmarts; by my standards they’re loud, cheerless, and tacky – and that describes a lot of their merchandise and their shoppers, too.

But my esthetic and aspirational standards are those of a comparatively wealthy person even in U.S. terms, let alone world terms. To the people who use Walmart and belong there, Walmart is a tremendous boon that stretches their purchasing power, enabling them to have things that don’t suck.

That’s why I love the idea of Walmart, and will defend it against its enemies.

This is my reason too. Even though I rarely shop at Walmart, I'm glad that it exists.

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This is absolutely wrong and is a very good example of why the current hysteria over illegal immigration is a bad thing. We are a nation of immigrants. We shouldn't be so paranoid about immigrants that we're willing to treat citizens like crooks.

In a spate of recent cases across the country, American citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.

Americans said their vehement protests that they were citizens went unheard by local police and jailers for days, with no communication with federal immigration agents to clarify the situation.

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David M. Primo talks about how campaign finance laws work to restrict free speech.

This past election when Dina Galassini emailed some friends urging them to join her in opposing a ballot initiative proposing $30 million in bonds for the town of Fountain Hills, Ariz., she thought she was doing what Americans have done throughout our nation’s history—speaking out on matters of public concern. Instead, she received a letter from a town clerk strongly urging her to “cease any campaign related activities.” It turns out she failed to fill out the paperwork required by Arizona’s campaign finance laws and therefore didn’t have the government’s permission to speak.

Under Arizona law, as in most states, anytime two or more people work together to support or oppose a ballot issue, they become a “political committee.” Even before they speak, they must register with the state, and then they must track every penny they spend, and if spending more than a small amount, fill out complicated reports detailing every move.

Worse yet, these laws do nothing to help educate voters. They're worthless, they're unconstitutional, and they're keeping citizens from becoming involved in politics.

I honestly don't understand why "progressives" think that these laws are such a great idea. Why is it okay for me to be involved in politics by myself but not okay for me and 10 or 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 people to pool our time, resources, energy, and money together, to promote or oppose an idea?

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