Ridiculously tired today, and as I’m finally getting around to writing tonight, my head is about as foggy as I’ve ever known it. So rather than try to put together a good article for you (lost cause), I’ll just let loose on something funny I read during the last weeks of the presidential election campaigns.

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So the Wall Street Journal ran a series on the editorial page comparing the two major candidates’ stances on various topics. Shoehorned into the ‘education’ category was the topic of volunteering. Working from memory, here’s the executive summary:

McCain: Tells people they really ought to volunteer more.

Obama: Plans to expand the Peace Corps and launch a handful of similar government-run, tax-funded volunteer organizations to target other areas of need (education, local community service, etc.). Encourage mandatory ‘volunteering’ by tying certain federal education funding to community service requirements for students.

Not to jump all over our president-elect (really, if this were his only fault, I’d be a very happy person), but what?! It’s volunteering. I have never, ever, in all my long life, had difficulty finding an outlet for my freely-offered labor. Hard time finding a paying job? Yes. Yes indeed. Hard time finding people willing to hire me for no pay? Nope. Not once.

And here we are, a government in debt, with expensive wars and corporate bailouts going on, and we are going to spend more money on more programs . . . so people can work for no pay? Um, really, they can do that without a government program. If you have to pay people to do a given job, it is not actually volunteering. It is a federal program that pays a very low wage.

(–> Now if what you want is a low-wage jobs program, just come out and say so.)

I expect the origin of this particular plank of the campaign platform came from two bad habits we’ve gotten into. The first, is thinking that if our country has a problem, or a perceived problem in this case, the president ought to have a plan for how to fix it. When really, some of the time, the president ought to look us sternly in the face and say:

Well, get your act together.

But I suppose that is not very popular with voters, and we have thus trained our candidates to pretend they can fix us.

And then from there, it is only a matter of what kind of fix the candidate is used to tossing out. As a democrat, a shiny new program, or a beefed-up old program, is just the thing. If a republican felt the need to propose a fix, it would be a tax deduction, a tax credit, or maybe a special law allowing employers in certain altruistic industries to hire workers at lower-than-minimum wage.

[Republicans are at an advantage in this particular example, because we already have the tax deduction thing in place. Now they can just smile and tell their voter base to go start a 501(c)3 and be done with it. I agree. But don’t kid yourselves, if republican voters were still itching for more help in the ‘volunteering’ department, I am sure, just sure, there is a way to make a corporate subsidy for the purpose.]

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What significance for the junior economist? Well, a couple summary points:

Our candidates can’t necessarily add, it isn’t your imagination. I think ‘economic platform’ ought to be read as a kind of form of poetry, one of those genres that you must not read literally. Luckily much of what they put on their economic platforms would never pass through congress anyhow, so in the off chance they really mean what they say (the policy-platform equivalent of discovering that someone really does have butterflies in their stomach, or that cats and dogs truly are falling from the sky), there is still hope that it won’t come to pass.

Really smart people can still come up with dumb ideas. (Just ask my children about their mother.) As I mentioned in my ‘why economics is so confusing’ post, sometimes when something doesn’t make any sense to you, it is because it doesn’t make any sense, period.

If we voters actually want ‘change’, we are some of the people who are going to have to change. We can’t be pushing for a federal program or a new law or some other government action every time we see a problem, and then be surprised that our politicians are always trying to come up with new programs and laws for us. Do you want a shorter tax form? Quit asking for so many tax credits.

–> And so long as we evaluate a candidate’s stance on a given issue based on whether they voted to fund this or that special program, or put into place this or that new law, we are going to keep getting the programs and laws. It is entirely possible to be, say, in favor of helping the poor, without necessarily voting in favor of every bill that is labeled ‘help for the poor’.

And this last bit is tricky. Because if your representative voted against this or that social justice bill, how do you know whether it was because of an anti-social-justice bias, or just a disagreement with that particular bill? It means you have to know the candidate much better, over a much longer term. Which is not easy.