First of all, I will always resent Rampell's stunning good looks... With a kisser like that and NPR on her resume, she's not to be trusted.

Second, note column three of "Table III. Results of Hiring Dynamics Model by Industry, Size, and Turnover," in the cited study which undergirds the piece. Government has the greatest "Mean Vacancy Duration," more than a third longer than the next described corner of our economy, "other Services."

Government may be doing all the hiring nowadays... And they may require a greater amount of paperwork. Certainly, government bosses have no reasons to take risks in hiring on behalf of productivity as regards their own performance reviews: Government's widgets can ship when they ship, since there's no competitive product threatening their market share.

Remember Obamacare? Sure you do.

Sorry... Worth getting it right.

"Could we please just have one libertarian presidential candidate who makes it into office? Before the country goes entirely to pot, before we all end up spied on and in jail and/or broke?"

I find it puzzling that you think this would do any good at all.

Do you think your hypothetical independent libertarian candidate is going to sit there in the Oval Office with his pen and his phone,singing multitudes of illegal executive orders, and that congress, and the federal agencies will just knuckle under and ignore the law?

No, your imaginary unicorn president will be impeached, in a New York Minute, unlike the current occupant who gets away with this shit because he still has the press and the Democratic Party covering his ass.

@ Israb: One does not sing executive orders, rather one sings to one's cat.

I agree with Amy - both the main parties seem intent upon driving the country off a cliff. A necessary prerequisite for a libertarian to make it into office would be that a majority of the electorate recognised this, creating an environment in which the shenanigans that you postulate might not prosper.

I may be wrong though - last night was football and I haven't had much coffee yet.

"@ Israb: One does not sing executive orders, rather one sings to one's cat."

My name isn't Israb. Two can play the typo game.

Apparently you understood my point, but failed to address it.

Does the phrase 'pedantic fuck' have any meaning to you?

I thought not.

I've gotta lean towards Isab on this one. We aren't electing kings here, even if we think we are. We're better off getting libertarian-minded people into state legislatures and the Congress, regardless of party affiliation.

But, as Other Rob points out, we'll only do that if the voters recognize the need.

I find it puzzling that you think this [a libertarian president] would do any good at all.

Well, if I were President, my first executive order would be to belay all proposed regulations. My second would be to set up a committee of the best people I could find to go thru the tens of thousands of executive orders and determine which ones should be revoked. Then revoke them.

Then start going thru all the regulations in effect and determining which ones cause more harm than good, and them eliminating them.

As someone famous once said, I have a pen and a phone. One can do a lot with those tools, and the executive authority. Congress could try to stop me, but, yeah, best of luck telling your constituents that they need more regulations not fewer in their lives.

As someone famous once said, I have a pen and a phone. One can do a lot with those tools, and the executive authority. Congress could try to stop me, but, yeah, best of luck telling your constituents that they need more regulations not fewer in their lives.

Posted by: I R A Darth Aggie at June 17, 2014 7:29 AM

Almost half the constituents are screaming for more regulations. They honestly think that the government can mandate good things.

Another third are too stupid and ill educated to even know what the various federal agencies are doing to make their lives worse.

The rest, unfortunately, do not make up a united voting block, and are spread throughout the country over 435 house districts, and the fifty states.

Congress delegated all that power for new regulations directly to the executive agencies. Getting rid of those regulations would be World War I trench warfare.

Lengthy court battles over every single one.

Unless you have a president that the press will support, and a majority in both the Senate, and the house, what you have is gridlock.

After the elections this next November, that is the best we can hope for.

I think you underestimate how much of Obama's so called authority is the result of Harry Reid trying to have it both ways, and still maintain power in Washington.

I also think the next president after Obama will have his or her hands full trying to clean up the mess in the Middle East while we all soldier on down here with gasoline at 8 bucks a gallon.

"But, as Other Rob points out, we'll only do that if the voters recognize the need."

Not going to happen with the press so far in the 2 Parties pockets. Would have thought with the way this administration has treated the press there would have been some who stopped singing their praise, but no only from fringe press. People realize the press is garbage, which is why it is starting to die, but the gov won't allow it to happen.

Could we please just have one libertarian presidential candidate who makes it into office? Before the country goes entirely to pot, before we all end up spied on and in jail and/or broke?

A Libertarian president will be more handicapped than free to act in a non-partisan manner. He won't be the independent savior of the country many Libertarians imagine he'll be.

He won't have at least one party backing him by default, so he'll have to horse-trade legislative support for every single measure he wants to pass. He'll have so many negotiated riders attached to his bills that any spending or regulatory restraint he wants to impose will be buried under the weight of the trades he had to make to get the bill passed.

The Libertarian Party needs to run winning mayoral candidates, gubernatorial candidates, and Congressional candidates - build a support network before trying to win the top office. Better for them that people ask why the Libertarians, who ran City X so well or saved State X from collapse, aren't in the Oval Office than for the people look upon the Libertarian presidential candidate as a perennial Harold Stassen.

Gary Johnson in 2012 was the first serious presidential candidate the Libertarians have ever run (and that includes Ron Paul in 1988). He's also the first one to get over half a percent of the popular votes.

People will take the Libertarian Party serious when it starts to take the presidential election seriously and run serious candidates. I mean, c'mon. Bob Barr? Andre Marrou? Harry Browne? That's the best they could do?

I don't think a libertarian candidate will be the second coming. I just think he/she will be better than the crop of Democrats or Republicans in terms of being for small government, etc.

Rampell's argument makes little sense. If a job is open and needs to be filled, "lingering uncertainty" has little to do with how long it takes to fill it.

"Lingering uncertainty," instead, has everything to do with whether the job gets listed at all.

As an employer, I can vouch for the fact that it does take longer to fill a job these days. Part of it is a surfeit of highly qualified candidates (it takes more time to go through 100 resumes than 20); part of it is that job descriptions have gotten a lot more detailed and specialized than they used to be; and part of it is the necessity of cross-training in today's world. (Bob may be a great bookkeeper, but can he take over for Betty in sales when she's on vacation?)

I can testify that there are a fair amount of job listings that don't get filled at all. The listing is a "just in case" listing against the possibility of some enabling future event that doesn't happen. Or, the enabling event does happen, but setbacks in some other part of the organization result in the position being filled by an internal candidate.

As far as the theoretical Libertarian candidate, the current position is sunk. There is no possibility of anyone with libertarian tendencies winning the election. With a large segment of the electorate, elections are tribal, and if they win, one of the things they demand of their leaders is that they use to government to stick it to all of the other tribes. We've got too many people running around loose with fundementally no concept of what America is. To them it's just a power game. Either you're on top or you're not.

There is only one way I see out of this without a major crisis: Somehow, the states are convinced to call a Constitutional convention, and then somehow said convention is guided to adopt new Constituttional provisions that sharply curtail the scope and power of the federal government. This is really unlikely, but I think it's more likely than any other scenario that results in the federal government being scaled back without a nationwide conflict of some sort.

I don't think a libertarian candidate will be the second coming. I just think he/she will be better than the crop of Democrats or Republicans in terms of being for small government, etc.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at June 17, 2014 8:47 AM

Being for something, and being able to do something, are two different things.

Understanding the way the government is organized keeps you from having unrealistic expectations for any single individual.

Thinking that a libertarian being "for" smaller government, will actually have any effect, is like thinking that Aaron Rogers can win the super bowl....all by himself.

Politics is a team sport.

If the libertarians ever manage to build a team, then they can get in the game. They are not even close to that level yet, as Conan points out. The place to start is the grassroots, and local, county and state races.

A libertarian team, like a libertarian party, feels like a contradiction in terms, and that's the root of it all...

Far too many of us are counting on intimate government support to make our lives work out. Government checks, government charity, government protection for our incompetent market positions, sustenance of worthless property and investment holdings, etc etc etc.

I think Amy's wrong about the 'charisma' of a libertarian candidate, because if we're looking to public servants for Keith Partridge cuteness, we're doomed anyway.

Barack Obama is, by those metrics, a teenage dreamboat.

In his first term, he spent more time fundraising than his five predecessors put together... And three of them were two-termers.

Well a presidential ticket of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul would be my dream.

They are close enough to reality while both would love to cut the federal government to the bone.

"I don't think a libertarian candidate will be the second coming."

Hey, we already have the Second Coming - we got Obama, didn't we? The one we have been waiting for!

In all seriousness though, I agree that both major parties are intent on driving us over a cliff. And, while I would support a libertarian candidate I do believe that unless he is a member of one of the two parties he (or she) wouldn't be able to do much. Both parties have too much invested in the status quo to let someone, anyone, change things.

No, things will only change when voters stop expecting/demanding their "freebies" and demand that government stop spending and regulating everything. I won't hold my breath for that to happen.