FlyingSpit

Anyone But Newt

2012-01-27T18:10:00.000-08:00

I haven't written much in this space about the Republican Presidential primaries (or anything else for that matter) but the momentarily at least the spirit moves so I'll put two cents in.

As we all know, there's been a lot of theatrics and volatility from the candidates this cycle. Some of this comes from the sort of candidates who ran or considered running. Some of it was from the demands of the Republican voting base. Whatever it was, largely as a result of this sometime around October or November I fell in love with Mitt Romney. Whatever other virtues or faults he may have, I was deeply impressed by his bearing and ability to concentrate on fulfilling objectives, without getting sucked into meaningless drama.

From there, in my estimation at least, everything fell into place. In particular, there's two things about Mitt's depth of experience that leads me to hope he'll be an excellent candidate and an excellent President. First of all, that the trend in American governance is to have ever-more complicated rules, jurisdictions, funding streams, bureaucracies and so on. For most of us on the Right, that means we want to elect political powers who is the most reactionarily opposed to such things, eg Ron Paul. That's a substantial mistake IMO. For largely the same reasons that these bureaucracies are unaccountable in their arbitrary authority over us as individuals, they are also substantially unaccountable to the nominally higher boxes in the org chart. We're past the point where we need liberal Democrats to expand the reach of government. As things stand now, government grows as a matter of simple inertia and extends its reach simply by running on autopilot. Therefore, I'm less interested in who wants to tear down various arms of government and much more interested in who can. By that standard, I find Mitt Romney to be an excellent candidate.

Moreover, Mitt has a particularly comprehensive resume to be President. He was an executive at Bain Capital, he successfully rescued the Salt Lake Olympics at a time where it appeared to be heading toward failure, and he was also governor of Massachusetts. In the course of such things, he's professionally interacted with a wide variety of people. It's not exactly the case that Mitt Romney already knows everybody he'll be dealing with if he becomes President, but he does know the types of people he'll be dealing with and in particular how to evaluate their credibility.

All this is the longhand way of say I'm supporting Mitt and background for this Victor Davis Hanson post at NRO today. I'd like to sympathize with VDH's point and dial down the intraparty antagonism, especially given that policy-wise Newt and Mitt are probably much closer to each other than either one is to President Obama.

Unfortunately that's not the only variable in the equation. The reality is that by any plausible standard, Newt really is de facto disqualified from the Presidency. Newt really did cheat on his second wife with his third wife. He really did buy, with said third wife, a half million dollars worth of jewelry from Tiffany's. He really was found guilty of ethics charges by the House of Representatives and paid $300K in fines to resolve them. He really did make a public spectacle over being forced to depart from the rear entrance of an airplane as opposed to the front entrance. He really did receive well over a million dollars for lobbying or consulting for Fannie Mae. You might be able to get away with one or two of these things, but not all of them. (And this list is by no means exhaustive. There's more where that came from.)

The point for Newt-supporting conservatives to understand is, these are not bogus MSM narratives aimed at keeping conservatives down, they are just plain true and widely acknowledged by all parties as such. Newt is de facto disqualified for reasons having nothing to do with Mitt and if Mitt weren't running the GOP establishment would have to mobilize to find Anyone But Newt.

By contrast, Mitt's weaknesses aren't disqualifying. He helped create comprehensive collectivized medicine in Massachusetts, he's weak as a retail candidate, and he once made the family dog ride on the roof in a car trip. People can be upset about Romneycare if they want to, but that's not disqualifying. It's certainly legitimate to oppose Romney on those grounds, but for those who feel that way if they don't want Romney to have the nomination it's incumbent on them to find a different acceptable candidate. Newt Gingrich is not it.

Monetary Policy, pt II

2011-10-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

More an addendum to the last post, especially regarding to the connection between monetary policy and fiscal policy.

David Frum has gotten into the act over last week or so, specifically criticizing the hard money tendencies of the Republican Party. Now, in the main I agree with Mr. Frum. In particular, I support Mitt Romney relative to Gov Perry in no small part because of the reasons mentioned by Mr. Frum. But the issue is a little more complicated than Mr. Frum allows, for reasons that are worth being made explicit to illustrate the connection between monetary policy and trust in governance.

It is a very fundamental requirement of any successful economy to have a credible currency and loose money threatens the integrity of the currency. There are the well-known historical cases of the Weimar Republic and Zimbabwe where the economies were brought to ruination because of a debased currency as well as many other less spectacular examples. The Establishment is completely dismissive of these concerns but frankly the comparisons are less outlandish for me. Let's listen to the Establishment from an outsider's point of view.

The outsider hears, "We're going to do the same things that caused economic collapse in Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe but we're not going to suffer the collapse like they did because we're smarter and we'll execute better. We'll be able to do this in spite of the fact that there are no immediate plans to meaningfully cut government spending and consequently no apparent opportunity to go back to a tighter monetarily policy. Trust us." Given that Americans' trust in institutions is at all time low, is it really surprising that this train of thought isn't getting much traction? On the other hand, even if a tight money policy is not promoting growth or employment, at least it is preserving the dollar as a store of value.

On a side note, it is worth noting that of the Republican Presidential candidates, Rep. Ron Paul is the most extreme hard-money candidate. The gold standard is not necessarily spoken of as a hard money policy but undoubtedly it is. This is a feature for many Paul supporters but I suspect this just flies over the heads of many others. Because nobody actually expects Paul to win the nomination, the isolationist/non-interventionist types don't have to trouble themselves too much about it. There's not anything particularly good or bad about this, except to point out that it's not just the media who believes Rep. Paul has no chance to win the nomination. In their heart of hearts, the Ronulans know it too.

Populism, Perry, Monetary Policy

2011-10-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

There's been very little direct debate about monetary policy in American political culture, but the undercurrents of it are everywhere. Most prominently, Texas Gov. Rick Perry suggested that it would be treasonous for Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke to start a new round of quantitative easing before the election.

Yet there's one interesting counterpoint that as far as I know has drawn no comment at all from the blogosphere. During the Bryan era at the beginning of the 20th century, the populist faction of American politics favored soft money. Now, they favor hard money. Politically speaking, this tends to be associated with the Tea Party faction of conservative Republicans, but it's important to note that in the country at large this plays out mostly as a populist vs. elite issue, as Tyler Cowen and others have pointed out.

Back to Perry again. He has been roundly criticized (fairly, I think) for the reckless and inflammatory nature of his accusations against Mr. Bernanke. But as I think about it, it's worse than that. As the saying goes, it's worse than a crime, it's a mistake. The verdict on the performance of the Fed under this crisis will end up in macro textbooks some generations from now. We don't have to withhold our judgment till then. However, we should also get clear on what we should expect Mr. Bernanke and the Fed to accomplish. The subtext of Perry's accusations is that the us honest Americans are doing what we're supposed to, but the Washington elites are screwing everything up. But in this particular case at least, it's a bad rap: government spending and regulatory mismanagement, under the leadership of both parties and supported by the voters, has overburdened the economy and has left the monetary authorities without any good options.

This is especially topical today in light of the news that Thomas Sargent (and Christopher Sims) have won the most recent Nobel Prize for economics. As Professor Cowen summarizes,

One of his most important (and depressing) papers is Sargent, Thomas J. and Neil Wallace (1981). “Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic“. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 5 (3): 1–17. The main idea of this paper is that good monetary policy requires good fiscal policy. Otherwise the fight against inflation will not be credible. This is probably his most important paper.

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt V

2011-01-20T12:15:00.000-08:00

The Republicans’ plan looks pretty ugly, but I do not see any plausible alternatives. And I see one big opportunity: This is the chance to pry the parasitic government-employee unions off the body politic.
They have bankrupted the states, and the resulting crisis gives us the means and the opportunity to put an end to their plunder. When those contracts get renegotiated, Republicans should insist that they address more than pensions. - Kevin Williamson, National Review

School at 3:05

2010-10-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

I wouldn’t mind this bilge nearly as much if Ed Schultz showed the slightest bit of talent or style in spewing it. - Jonah Goldberg

One thing that makes politics difficult for me is that it's very difficult to see anybody remotely prominent from the other team worthy of any respect. Rachel Maddow seems like a nice person and President Obama gave some good speeches but it gets real thin real fast. Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the Prez, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi et al are horrific no-talent hacks.

Our team has Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Phil Gramm, Mitt Romney, John McCain. A distant and somewhat unlikable bunch to be frank but people who have led real lives and accomplished real things nonetheless.

How To Start A Recovery

2010-07-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

"Public servants, public service users and the poor are going to pay most of the price for the slash and burn Emergency Budget." - Luke Akehurst

Names Changed to Protect the Guilty

2010-04-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

Some guy has been involved in politics and political activism in some fashion for the past decade ranging from work on poverty issues, increasing accessibility to education, increasing voter participation, first nations representation, and energy efficiency and environmental issues. He is currently exploring opportunities to volunteer, contribute to his community, build a family, and embody a more vibrant sense of citizenship in some place.

He is a Fellow with a think tank (website coming) and is involved in national organizing as the Field Coordinator for an some activist group, a grassroots, not-for-profit organization flowing out of some cause. He also writes about political issues at a website where he is a contributor and founding member.

I chased a few links at a website I read sometimes and found this (slightly edited to remove identifying info). We can't know for sure, of course, but it seems a fair assertion to say that every significant part of this man's life is about manipulating the worldview of modern industrial society toward stealing from other people.

If he were, for example, merely some kind of anti-poverty activist we might suppose he was motivated by genuine solidarity with the poor. But that is way too narrow for our protagonist. His breadth of concern extends to education, the environment, the first nations (that's Canuck for Indians/Native Americans if you weren't aware), energy efficiency, and probably the DH rule as well.

The idea that we are supposed to somehow pay for the things we want out of the resources we have is either disdained or more likely never occurred to our protagonist in the first place.

What He Said, pt XIV

2010-03-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

My theory of the ruling class is that it comes from the lower right quadrant. That is, people who are highly educated but lacking in useful skills. If you will, the suits are in the lower-right quadrant and the geeks are in the upper-right quadrant.
My theory is that the ruling class gets its strongest support from people in the lower-right quadrant. They identify strongly with the ruling class. Placing an artificially high value on educational credentials is in the interest of the ruling class and everyone else in the lower-right quadrant. If it were not for the protection provided by credentialism and government employment, my guess is that many of those in the lower-right quadrant would have incomes no higher than those of people who are not college educated.
The challenge for the ruling class is to keep the other three quadrants from uniting in opposition to the ruling class. To try to retain support among the highly-educated who are skilled, the ruling class tries to blur the distinction between the upper-right quadrant and the lower-right quadrant. The ruling class would prefer to lump them all together into "the educated elite," or "technocrats." I fell for that one for a long time, but just recently the light bulb came on--hence the matrix. - Arnold Kling

Read the whole thing.

Waterloo

2010-03-23T20:52:00.001-07:00

Since the health care vote, David Frum has written a much-circulated piece on his site where he criticizes the conservative/Republican strategy on health care over the last year or so. Basically, he argues that we should have found a place to cut a deal and cut our losses.

Some of us on the mainstream Right have criticized Frum for insufficient loyalty to the cause over the last couple of years. It's mostly a bad rap. Unlike most dissident conservatives, he is not in the game to express disapproval of the Hannity-Palin axis. His story is a little more subtle. The Hannity-Palin axis is mildly distasteful, but more than that their politics and the people they represent are quite limited, so in the final analysis they are losers.

All of this is background to the main point, which is that Frum's problem is not disloyalty, but he is sometimes wrong on the merits and this is one such example. There are very few silver linings in the health care debacle, but the biggest one is that we have comprehensively disproved the proposition that the Democrats' health care reform was inevitable and continuous growth of the welfare state is something that we have to acquiesce to for the sake of making marginal improvements here or there.

As it is, the American people know they can resist, if they choose. It's also useful for our relations with the other team, strained as they are. They may be stonger than us, but their actions are never wise or just, and we shouldn't pretend that they are.

What She Said, pt XIII

2010-03-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

Oh, wait--suddenly it doesn't seem quite fair that Republicans could just ignore the will of their constituents that way, does it? Yet I guarantee you that there are a lot of GOP members out there tonight who think that they should get at least one free "Screw You" vote to balance out what the Democrats just did. - Megan McArdle

Perceptions

2010-03-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

For example, I asked about a topic that is on many peoples' minds right now: sovereign debt problems. The near-term deficit is basically not a problem; amortized over 15 or 20 years, the U.S. economy can afford this level of debt. But the long term deficit is a big problem, and I asked one of our "senior treasury officials" whether he was worried that we would cross some threshold where either the debt becomes a major drag on growth, or markets start demanding significantly higher yields to lend us money.

His answer was smart, if not totally reassuring. Ultimately, this is not about some numeric figure, like Ken Rogoff's 80% of GDP; it's about what the market believes. If the market believes that we are going to get our budget in order (at least sort of), then the deficits we're running over the next five or ten years can be sustained. If the market questions this, then we're in big trouble. The reason U.S. debt is the "risk free" rate is that in the past, we've always gotten it together in the end. - Megan McArdle

Not only have we gotten it together in the end, the market has perceived that we've gotten it together before we actually did. And even then the principal of our debt hasn't actually been repaid for a long long time. It's just gotten relatively smaller as the economy has gotten larger. In the end, creditworthiness is essentially a matter of perception. At one level this is kind of obvious but it has important consequences.

Among other things, it is being put in jeopardy by the current health care bill. If in spite of all the turmoil in public finance, we intend to add to the problem instead of attempting to address it, we are less trustworthy, financially speaking than we were before.

At the individual level, this is also related to my signalling argument for voting Republican. It's not circulated very much, but it's quite persuasive for me at least. I wish the party pushed it more than it has.

Not Exactly Nothing

2010-03-01T19:43:00.000-08:00

The sad fact is that there's not much to be done for the long term unemployed, other than the obvious step of making sure that they don't miss any meals. Government retraining programs have a dismal record. So do tax credits for hiring workers, which are notoriously easy to game. Stimulus is a blunt tool. And the government can't hire the workers itself. What's left? Threatening employers at gunpoint?

The answer is, nothing. - Megan McArdle

Megan is appropriately pessimistic about the government's ability to create jobs. But that doesn't mean the government can't discourage or destroy the ability of the private sector to create jobs which it plainly can. For the government to avoid this is not nothing. Consider:

No. What I think is: These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.
If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, you’re not paying attention. It’s a recipe for long-term structural unemployment at European levels of 10%, 15%, and up. What’s even crazier is that the Obama administration wants to respond to this problem by…raising taxes and piling more regulatory burden on employers. - Eric Raymond (HT: Arnold Kling)

Some Reality-Based Community

2010-02-24T12:14:00.000-08:00

At a very fundamental, core level, Springston did not share our vision for a news publication with a progressive perspective. He held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News. It just wasn’t the right fit. - Atlanta Progessive News (HT: Derb)

Oh Really?

2010-02-23T09:53:00.000-08:00

"Well, there is a third option. Republicans could realize that 1) the future of conservatism depends upon restraining entitlement spending, 2) They'll never restrain entitlement spending without Democratic cover, and 3) Democrats won't give them cover unless they give some substantive ground. That would entail...." - Jonathan Chait

What if, instead, we wipe out most of the Democratic Party as we know it today, and then restrain entitlement spending with or without the support of whichever Democrats are left over? For fiscal hawks that has to be the best-case scenario.

What They Said, pt XII

2010-02-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck's entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments. - Wall Street Journal

What He Said, pt XI

2010-02-09T07:50:00.001-08:00

1. All Medicare savings must be used to shore up Medicare. None of those savings can be used to fund new insurance subsidies or entitlements. Medicare is unsustainable, and it is going to need every dollar that we can save, and more. There is nothing to spare for a new entitlement. - Arnold Kling

Mr. Kling has four other points to carry into the room as a hypothetical Republican negotiating a health care compromise with the Democrats. But this one is enough to kill the bill all by itself: no new subsidies, no new entitlements.

What He Said, pt X

2010-02-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

My point is that the ones throwing the temper tantrum right now are the Progressives. They think that the 2008 election gave them the right to operate like China's autocracy, and they are lashing out hysterically at those they perceive as preventing them from doing so On the one hand, the villains are a small minority in the Senate. Or maybe the villains are the incoherent majority of the people. - Arnold Kling

As the prospects for the health care bill have dimmed over the last month, the liberals have taken several new talking points as outlets for their frustration. "America is ungovernable" is one, well rebutted by Jay Cost. But there are others as well: the filibuster is bad, the Republicans are obstuctionist, the American people are idiots who watch Fox News. This part denial, part shrewd calculation to avoid consideration of one obvious possibility (getting more obvious by the day): liberalism is comprehensively bad and wrong and should be repudiated root and branch.

The latest in this trend is from a colleague of Nate Silver, who argues that the complaints against the health care bill can be boiled down to "process" in which case they can be addressed and minimized. And Mr. Schaller (and Steve DeOssie, who he cites) are correct to characterize the problems as process. Unfortunately that doesn't mean what Mr. Schaller wants it to mean.

There's a scene in Patton, IIRC, where the general is receiving an order by radio that he doesn't want to obey. So Patton pretends that the radio signal is scratchy and inaudible and does what he wants instead. Unfortunately for the other team, that maneuver won't work for the health care bill. With the results of Massachusetts special election, we know that the health care bill has been repudiated and that message has been heard. The message of the election of Senator Brown is this: don't listen to Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, or President Obama for that matter. You have to get right with us first. Anything else is raw insubordination.

At this point there are no real good options for the Democrats but the best one is to walk away from the bill, at least until it's no longer radioactive. It can't pass at this point, and the attempt to pass it will be severely repudiated by the voters.

What He Said, pt IX

2010-02-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

"The decision to spend $2.5 million on a silly census ad is a remarkably damaging self-inflected wound, and I'm not sure anyone in the Obama administration grasps that . . . " - Jim Geraghty

The same goes for the Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad too by the way. The ad itself was obviously tame, contrary to the fears of some ideologues. But most grassroots or church-sponsored projects are run on a shoestring, because contractors either donate their services or sell them at a cut-rate price. I have to think $2.5M in prolife activism would go pretty far if it were spent somewhere else.

Cry For Help

2010-02-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

Nate Silver wants to give Sarah Palin some friendly advice if she wants to remain a credible figure on the national political stage.

Truth be told most of his advice is good but it's missing the point. This wasn't a mistake of ignorance. At some level Gov Palin knows that it's ridiculous to write speaking notes on the palm of your hand for a nationally significant speech. I think she thought it was homey and cute, and also emphasizes the contrast with President Obama, who can't get out of bed without a Teleprompter. To some extent it really is homey and cute, but we also get a clue that Sarah Palin's character has a big streak of Drama Queen. In fact, I suspect that's why Andrew Sullivan dislikes her so much: she reminds him of himself.

For me at least the moral of the story is pretty clear: we like Sarah Palin but we're not invested in her.

Get Off My Cloud

2010-02-03T21:42:00.000-08:00

Of the prominent liberals in today's blogosphere, Nate Silver is one of the more levelheaded. He does an honest job of handicapping the horse race of public opinion, so he was willing to acknowledge the unpopularity of health care reform while the rest of his liberal brethren were still drinking the Kool-Aid. But like his liberal brethren, he still wants Congress to pass the bill anyway.

It's not too hard why liberal non-politicians still favor the health care bill. If you believe in the power of government to fix the big-ticket problems of the day as they do, this bill is a big step forward. The negative electoral consequences are somebody else's problem. What's a little more interesting is the line of argument he uses to persuade fence-sitting Congressmen and Senators.

Yes you may lose your seat, Silver concedes, but you will still be better off if you pass the bill. The apolitical middle may turn against you if you support the bill, but the party base is guaranteed to turn against you if you don't. Silver and the others making this argument might even be correct as far as that goes. But that's not the end of the story.

First of all, if you're a Democrat gloomy at the prospect of facing the voters in November, eg Blanche Lincoln and her 27% approval rating, there has to be a strong temptation to wonder how we got here in the first place. And the answer for that has to be fairly clear: President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and the liberal blogosphere have driven the party off a cliff, and arm-twisted the rest of the party to make sure they were in the car with them. Does Sen. Lincoln really want to trust her career to the likes of Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, or Jonathan Chait, when her excessive trust of such people is what has gotten her in the fix she's in now?

And, we're starting to see the intellectual shakiness of contemporary liberalism. The likes of Sen. Lincoln have a fairly coherent story if they flip on the health care bill now. She was for it, but didn't understand or appreciate before how much the folks back home were opposed to it, so she'll change her mind to defer to her constituents.

No, it's people like Silver, Chait, et al who can't admit to themselves the faults of the health care bill. If they acquiesce to the defeat of health care reform, their status and self-identification as liberals is called into question. And the ontological assumptions of liberalism aren't strong enough to withstand much scrutiny.

Bandwidth, pt II

2010-02-03T18:25:00.000-08:00

There will always be a scandal of the day in Washington. For those who otherwise might have missed it (ie, people with lives), Sarah Palin recently criticized White House advisor Rahm Emanuel for characterizing some temporary adversaries as "f***ing retarded" for not seeing things his way. She was offended by that usage, "retarded" not the profanity btw, for the sake of her son Trig who has Down Syndrome. We are supposed to show more sensitivity to the disabled, and so on.

In today's National Review Online, Hadley Arkes piles on. This is ridiculous on a couple of levels. Contrary to the opinion of some people, "retarded" will never be functionally equivalent to the n-word. The n-word is obviously intended as an insult by anyone who speaks it, because the speaker could have just as easily used "black guy" or some other formulation instead. But the reality is, some people are clever and others are dim, and there is no word for stupid that can hide the difference.

But more than that, we as conservatives have limited bandwidth, through which we can communicate to America at large. In some ways, that's the most precious resource we have. Moreover, bandwidth works like an investment. If we invest wisely, we will get more of it. If we squander it, it's gone.

With that in mind, we can't afford to crowd out our essential message: we can bring the return of prosperity and limited government to America, and the other team can't. And we're going to do that by X, Y, and Z. As long as we are engaged for this purpose, the American people will give us a fair hearing. And the same holds if we are talk about other important concerns worthy of the public's attention. But we can't appear to be engaged in cheap partisan point-scoring or mindless PC enforcement for its own sake. That's the same as telling the American people to ignore us, and it's a long time out of that wilderness.

Update: what he said.

What He Said, pt VIII

2010-02-01T12:05:00.000-08:00

....President Obama will never be successful until he accepts the assignment that history has given him. No one (anywhere) believes for one moment that he can add 30-35 million people to the health insurance rolls and not increase (sharply) the cost of health insurance. President Obama has been peddling this fable for months now and it has only served to make him look either (a) naive, or (b) utterly cynical. - James Pethokoukis

What She Said, pt VII

2010-02-01T12:02:00.000-08:00

Who are you more likely to leave: the spouse who makes a pass at another woman, and then thinks the better of it, or the spouse who goes through with it? Maybe you'll leave them either way. But it does not follow that they are better off going through with it. I don't think it is actually true that trying to pass a bill people hate, and then thinking the better of it because it turns out the electorate hates it, is no different from trying to pass a bill people hate, finding out that they really, really hate it, and then ignoring them and pushing it through anyway. - Megan McArdle

What He Said, pt VI

2009-12-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

In theory, I'm against laws banning smoking in bars and restaurants. I don't smoke, and I hate being in places where smoke is concentrated, but on principle, I think the government shouldn't tell bars and restaurants they can't allow people to smoke there. - Rod Dreher

But even if, like Rod, I should oppose smoking bans in bars and restaurants, in practice this is one exercise of the nanny state that actually works.

Six Of One

2009-11-03T07:23:00.000-08:00

Megan McArdle has written an interesting piece pushing back against the argument circulating on the Right that Obama's (and Bush's) wasteful fiscal policies are risking hyperinflation, instead supposing that we will have to endure a fiscal crisis instead. She might be right, but it looks to me like a distinction without a difference.

The next big economic bullet we have to contend with is the threat that the government's access to credit in arbitrarily large amounts will be lost or reduced. As that happens, interest rates will rise and the federal government will have to make some very difficult decisions. Megan's argument seems to operate under the assumption that when push comes to shove, the feds will choose to cut entitlement benefits rather than attempt to inflate away the debt. If that's true we have certainly not seen any movement in that direction so far. I know if I owned long term Treasury debt I would be less than reassured by Megan. Furthermore the actual bondholders don't necessarily believe her either, their problem is that they really don't have any good alternatives.

The Obama Recovery

2009-11-03T07:14:00.000-08:00

I agree with James Pethokoukis (and other commentators with a similar line) in the main, but his tone seems a bit churlish to me. The fact that GDP grew at 3.5% last quarter is good news, even if for technical reasons that number is exaggerating somewhat the growth in the real economy.

Instead of quibbling about whether last quarter's GDP growth rate was 3.5% or 2.0%, I would simply emphasize that appearances notwithstanding, we are actually in a recovery right now. This is what recovery looks like when Democrats are in power. If the voters want something better, they can vote Republican.

Obama On The Couch

2009-11-01T19:21:00.000-08:00

“Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career,” I wrote in Feb. 2008. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.” - David Goldman aka Spengler

We've seen quite a bit of this sort of thing from various people on the Right over the last year or so. Steve Sailer in particular has made an extensive study of it.

I have no particular beef with armchair psychoanalysis of political figures or prominent people in general. In many circumstances it's the only way to make sense of them. It's just that in this particular case I don't buy it, at least as it pertains to Barack Obama's performance as President of the United States.

Even if we accept that young Barack Obama was weaned on anti-Americanism, the 47-year old President Obama understands the gravity of his job and has circulated in "respectable" society long enough to render some analyses like Spengler's wrong if taken too literally. This is not just some speculation by the way, but clear from his performance through nine months in office. If Obama really intended to be the American Salvador Allende (and I for one was worried about it), he would have gone about things much differently.

No, the thing I fear about President Obama right now is that he is not just the President but also the First Groupie. Like some of his rockstar-worshipping fans, he in love with the sound of his own voice. As a consequence, he manages through atmospherics. The President's warm sonorous baritone isn't just a matter of soundbites, but serves in lieu of real engagement with America's problems.

Dede the Dissident Conservative

2009-11-01T18:47:00.000-08:00

The tide has turned very quickly for Dede Scozzafava in the special election for Congress in the 23rd District of New York.

Just a week or so ago, prominent establishment Republicans wanted the Right to coalesce around Republican nominee Scozzafava when it was clear that conservative insurgent Doug Hoffman had the message and the momentum in the race. Now, in the last day or so and less than a week before the election, Scozzafava has not only dropped out, she has endorsed the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens.

Now Dede Scozzafava hasn't written any books about sustainable agriculture or climate change, but she seems to me to be the pol's version of the dissident conservative. We are led to believe such people are supposedly motivated by reasons of high principle. But it's a crock. What really counts is the repudiation of the legitimate lower case r republicans left in America, ie, people like the Palins.

Mixed Signals

2009-10-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

Some of us on the Right are skeptical of the Church's instincts as it pertains to economic or political things. This is a matter of some exasperation for Church partisans. They can say, as Boethius does, "Look, the Church rejects socialism, the Church respects private property, the Church opposes class warfare. It says so right here in Rerum Novarum, written by the pope himself"

Well, our suspicions are not merely paranoia. Here's a couple of interesting links of back-and-forth from Rep. Joseph Kennedy and Abp. Dolan of New York (hat tip to the Corner). Note especially the words of Abp. Dolan: there's nothing in them that suggests any wavering on the traditional doctrines of the Church, in this case the prohibition against abortion. But, without explicitly agreeing, he seems to acquiesce to Rep. Kennedy's premise that of course we all support Democratic-sponsored health care reform once we can resolve these small side-issue dealbreakers.

Of course this ignores the multitude of problems with the various Democratic proposals that have nothing to do with abortion. So, statements such as Dolan's which I suggest are fairly typical are one step up and two steps back: the Church's doctrines are affirmed while at the same time seeming to place them in an improper or uncertain context and conceding too much to the Left on non-doctrinal issues.

The Priority of Labor

2009-10-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

Boethius has written a lot of worth responding to. At the risk of repetition, let's pick up on this business of the priority of labor over capital one more time.

Boethius, speaking with the Church, is certainly correct in one sense: we can have labor without capital but we cannot have capital without labor therefore labor is literally first. But as I argued in a prior comment, most contemporary thought on about this topic is about the ethics of compensation: how much labor gets vs. how much capital gets.

But even if we accept this to be an error, the train of thought is still interesting for me at least. The idea is that the material goods of the world are ordered to human welfare. Labor, having priority, is more fundamental to human welfare than capital therefore it must be compensated at the expense of capital if necessary. What's interesting about this is that if even if some of the Left's premises are faulty, not all of them are. In particular, I have no problem conceding to the Left that the goods of the world are properly ordered toward human welfare.

But there's something of a paradox that says that if property that is held privately serves public ends better than property that is held publicly. But paradox or not, that's what the history of the last 150 years or so tell us very strongly. There are substantial costs in trying anything else.

"Nothing is more useful..."

2009-10-26T12:00:00.001-07:00

...than to look upon the world as it really is." This migh be mistaken for one of Koz's fundamental assertions, but this quote in fact comes from Pope Leo XIII, in his criticism of socialism in Rerum Novarum, section 18. Since Koz has additionally asserted that what passes for Catholic Social Doctrine includes "Economics for Leprechauns and Unicorns," my goal with this series of posts is to explore whether the difference in apprehended reality can be accounted for by 1) the Church's social doctrine is incorrect or deficient in some aspects; 2) Koz's opinions, on the contrary, suffer from those defects; or, 3) what Koz is criticizing is not actually church doctrine, but popularized versions used by factions within the Church for political ends.

"Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital [R.N. 19]," for example, seems to be another principle at odds with what Koz says is claimed by the Catholic left, which apparently implies that the Church should be more concerned with laborers than with capitalists. I would like to see a reference to where this is claimed, though I don't dispute that this is indeed claimed by many. The problem with this position, the distorted 'liberal' view, is also documented by Pope Leo, when he writes:

The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth [19].

I would agree that there is largely a knee-jerk notion smoldering in areas of the American Church that capitalists, those who provide capital for the benefit of laborers, are basically evil people. Obviously the Church does not teach this, and by emphasizing the necessity of harmony between classes would actually seem to be closer to the Reaganometric 'trickle down' theory than, say, an Alinskian agitprop strategy. We will see, however, that this is far from a clear endorsement of a completely free market or 'unbridled captialism', though the extent to which the Church is clear on the precise duties of capitalists is still very much openly disputed by conservative Catholic economists. We have much more to wade through before weighing in on that dispute, but for today, suffice it to say that if Koz's criticisms are aimed at real assertions by real people, I would hold that they do not speak in accord with Leo XIII.

Is the Church by Nature Socialist?

2009-10-24T06:22:00.000-07:00

At times, some within the Church have imagined that the ideal depicted in Acts 4: 32 should be the norm guiding the Church at all times:

"The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common."

For this reason, it has been an easy move for many Christians in the past 150 years to adopt a kind of de facto socialist point of view. However, already by the fourth century, and probably much earlier, Church Fathers were pointing out that this ideal from Acts was only lived in monastic settings, where in addition to a promise of poverty, monks and nuns also vowed celibacy. Marriage, being an institution of God for those in the world and not in monastic communities, necessitates the ownership of private property, which allows for parents to produce goods for the benefit of those who are helpless to do so for themselves, namely for children. Thus it is that Pope Leo XIII can write:

"it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. This being established, we proceed to show where the remedy sought for must be found."

He also makes the interesting exegetical argument that God Himself ordained private property, by noting that the commandment, "Thou shalt not covet," makes no sense if what someone else has to be coveted is in fact common property.

Finally in this section of Rerum Novarum (11-15), the pope accurately predicts the drying up of capital (=means of production) in communist states (as Koz noted in a recent comment on the current state of Polish labor) when he writes:

"the sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation."

It is worth noting that in both quotes, the interest of the Holy Father is in the alleviation of poverty, one of the Church's main projects while in the world. Thus, we see that the 'preferential option for the poor', is not an invention of Vatican II or socialists, but is inscribed in the very nature of the Church. However, when it comes to proposals on how to carry this out, the Church's preferential option, as we shall see, is realistic in the sense that it acknowledges the shortcomings of actual people and the need therefore of justice. The traditional definition of justice is the virtue of giving each person his or her due. In the area of our material existence, this means the preservation of justly acquired capital in the hands of the laborer who created it.

Labor, Capital, Private Ownership

2009-10-23T03:49:00.000-07:00

First of all, happy feast day to all of you out there named Boethius, who died on this date in 525 or so.

And in celebration of this wise man's life, I will, at long last, begin contributing some observations on Catholic social teaching, as presented in the encyclicals beginning with the timeless Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII.

One should note, right off, that we tend to read these older documents especially in light of present concerns, and with a history of interpretation, not all of which, as Koz has rightly suggested, actually harmonizes with what Pope Leo actually wrote. Thus, there is a tendency to look for clues of the Holy Father 'taking our side' by condemning socialism or capitalism and promoting the other option. In fact, the very assumption of having to choose between one or the other is largely false and is one more aspect of the debate of recent decades that distorts the teaching (and again, with Koz I assert that this distortion frequently comes from Catholics themselves).

That said, it can hardly be denied that the Church from the outset has condemned socialism firmly; indeed, Rerum Novarum was written precisely at a time that the Specter of Communism was hovering expectantly over much of Europe, certainly over the future of the royal family in Russia. The problem with socialism according to Leo, is the denial of the rights of private property by the proposal of common ownership administered by the state. In defending the right of private ownership, the Pontiff indirectly sets out a principle with which Koz apparently takes exception, that is the primacy of labor over capital.

I will conclude today's post by suggesting that this principle, when reduced to a 'catchphrase' (as rightly portrayed by Koz a few weeks ago), gives the false impression that somehow capital is a bad thing or should be 'given fewer favors' by whomever is doling them out. That already gives away some of the problems of this leftist stance. Who is giving the favors away if not the state that has unjustly appropriated capital? But more to the point, there is no need to choose between capital and labor. Labor takes raw materials and produces capital, and capital in turn opens up opportunities for new labor and an improvement in man's situation that hardly is available to, say, settlers on virgin land. The priority of labor over capital follows from man's spiritual nature enjoying priority over his material nature. By use of reason and imagination, man changes raw material into workable capital. Capital as such, therefore, does not exist in nature, but is always a product of thinking man. As a product of man's spiritual nature, it is a good thing, and should not be disparaged. The question pressing Leo, as we shall see, is the problem, obvious in socialism, but also a problem in some expressions of capitalism, of working man unjustly deprived of the fruits of his labor, that is, of his own capital, and therefore of his freedom to improve his own situation. He is typically today deprived either by the state, or by unjust practices of those whose power is primarily economic.

Some Disguise

2009-10-05T15:52:00.000-07:00

Steven Chapman tells us that 2016 Olympics not being awarded to Chicago is a "blessing in disguise." If that's so, the disguise wasn't very effective. I don't know of a single Chicagoan not trying to ride a gravy train who wanted Chicago to host the Olympics.

Economics for Leprechauns and Unicorns

2009-10-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

Let's make a couple of clarifications with respect to Boethius' lastest post.

First of all, the is/ought gap I was talking about in this post is referring to Catholic Social Doctrine. Catholic Social Doctrine is primarily (but not exclusively) associated with a set of papal encyclicals starting with Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII (and Boethius conveniently linked to). This is not the same thing Christian doctrine in general, Christian exhortations such as the commandment to love one's enemies, or Christian foreign policy.

Second, the is/ought gap is not about "goals" as much as premises. CSD often tries to instruct us on the proper social and economic relations in situations that are only vaguely recognizable to most of us.

If I had to reduce this to one example, I'd pick the "priority of labor over capital," a catchphrase of both the Catholic Left and the secular Left as well. First of all, it's fundamentally mistaken to think that the disparagement of capital is the way to meet basic human needs. But more than that, to a substantial extent the priority of labor over capital is a logical non sequitur. There is not necessarily any "they" who doles some goodies for labor and some for capital (and who is also subject to moral instruction from popes).

This is especially revealing in the context of the modern industrial welfare state. If the place where we arbitrarily choose between labor and capital is foreign for us, the modern welfare state plainly is not. Not every nation with a social-service apparatus is the same of course, but there's enough commonality to treat it as one phenomenon. But in spite of being a tangible reality for most of us, the social encyclicals speak of the welfare state only in vague terms. This leaves the field open for the Catholic Left to identify the expansion of the welfare state as the "Catholic" solution for modern social relations. Whatever may be said for that (and those of us on the Right are skeptical), the world that describes is a much more boring place than the one that actually exists.

The Sailer Strategy

2009-10-05T13:33:00.000-07:00

For at least a decade, Steve Sailer has found a good niche in the punditocracy by looking hard at margins of politically correct mainstream discourse. Nonetheless, I've got a strong gut feeling that this is fundamentally misguided.

First of all, the "fundamental Manichaeism" of black-white race relations is weaker now than at any time in American history. For the most part our cultural narratives have moved on to other things. Besides that, I think it's more effective to attack the "coolness deficit" directly. The GOP should emphasize that voting Republican signals the voter's intent to earn their own living. And, mooching off the taxpayers is not cool.

Things as they ought to be?

2009-10-03T15:57:00.001-07:00

Koz is mainly in the right to suggest that some, perhaps many, doctrines that have been advanced in the social encyclicals of the past 118 years seem at odds with things "as they are." By contrasting this to things as they ought to be, he implies that Catholic doctrine in general posits goals that are at odds with things 'as they are'; the root example being Christ's commandment to love, which receives plenty of lip service while Christian example too frequently is wanting in terms of performance. Those reborn in the Spirit are new creations, and yet they seem to change little, etc, etc. Chesterton's bon mot regarding Christianity never having been tried comes to mind.

That said, I think that Koz has a slightly different point in mind, that the encyclicals actually try to make observations of things as they and get them wrong; or propose ideals that might be fine if we were dealing with Christian kingdoms, but are very problematic when dealing leaders who are elected by population less and less evangelized and other nations that simply do not believe in the Christian gospel (i.e. Islamic states).

The difficulty in such charges is that the data is lacking, and I wonder what would happen if we actually examined specific phrases or sections of the social encyclicals, which are all readily available at the Vatican website (I may have left some out of that hyper-link barrage). Then analyze with respect to whether these things that ought to be can be understood without recourse to papal obtuseness.

More To Life Than Money

2009-09-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a couple of interesting tidbits to put side by side (indirect hat tip to Tyler Cowen for both).

First, the heterodox economic "policy" department at Notre Dame is being disbanded. This department justified itself as an attempt to integrate Catholic Social Thought with modern economics. Believing what I do about modern major universities, this more or less amounted to rationalizations for some flavor of neo-Marxist, social democratic New Left politics. That could be too harsh, I am not that familiar with their work.

On the other hand, anyone who has been paying attention in the blogosphere surely knows that there is an economics department from a less prominent university which has been setting the world on fire for the last few years at least: the department at George Mason U.

This is an interesting state of affairs, especially in light of the history of Catholic Social Doctrine. I think it's fair to say that nowhere else is there a larger gap between things as they ought to be and things as they are. Independently of the reader's ecclesial affiliation, the encyclicals and other fundamental documents are substantial, profound meditations about social relations among people. Unfortunately, the constituents of Catholic Social Doctrine seem to describe with irritating frequency the correct course of action or state of mind for a world other than the one that actually exists to you and me.

Some Catholics both Left and Right, want to think this is another example of anti-Catholic bias, in particular the reduction of man to an economic beast. That's a bum rap. If the exponents of CSD could do their work in the idiom of (and accountable to) the standards of modern econometrics, they would get a hearing from mainstream economists. Unfortunately CSD loses quite a bit when viewed through the prism of empirical data, and what's left over isn't very interesting.

Of course, that's not the end of the story. A couple of months ago Pope Benedict XVI released CARITAS IN VERITATE, his third encyclical. This work has generated lots of commentary like all encyclicals. But my sense is, what sets this letter apart from the other social encyclicals is that it confronts the world of late industrial capitalism as we actually recognize it, instead of how the popes saw it.

As I finish, let's also note the particular constituents of "Masonomics" mentioned earlier. For me, there's two important points to gathered from Tyler's short list. One, that economics is not necessarily afraid of the gooier, less pecuniary parts of our psyche. They're part of life. And in the subtext, that George Mason is not afraid of the econometric standards of the rest of the profession. If you can pull it off, it's not a bad place to be.

What He Said, pt V

2009-09-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

President Obama needs to make a decision: Either give the general the resources he believes he needs, or change the mission. I'm for changing the mission. Concentrate on the continued destruction of al Qaeda and its allies. Nothing else matters in this mess. - Ralph Peters

Most conservative commentators have been urging President Obama to deploy more troops to Afghanistan, but at least I've got Ralph Peters for company in going the other way. It seems to me there's some fairly obvious reasons why the strategic blueprint for Iraq shouldn't be exported to Afghanistan.

The consequences of troop withdrawal much different in Afghanistan than Iraq. Iraq, for all its flaws has been a nation and a civilization for a long time. If that were going to cease being the case because of lack of American security, America would have been blamed. Maybe we could live with that (fwiw, I could). But, whoever survived the rat fight after we left would have won lots of money, personnel, and resources at their disposal for terrorism, ethnic cleansing, diplomatic intimidation, anti-American propaganda and the rest of it. So we really did have to finish the job there, especially when there was a readily available means to do it.

These things do not apply to Afghanistan. There are no hungry bands of jackal-terrorists waiting to terrorize the docile civilians as soon as the Yanks leave. If anything, they go to Afghanistan for sanctuary, to get away from everybody else in the world who doesn't like them either. And given that we do not need nation-building in Afghanistan (and with doubtful likelihood of being able to accomplish it), we should adjust our personnel requirements accordingly.

The Few, The Proud

2009-09-16T06:41:00.000-07:00

I am fundamentally ambivalent toward Rod Dreher's cultural program. But I am much less ambivalent in support of his argument against the popular Right opposition to "elitism". I remember this rankling me all the way back to 1996 wherein Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp campaigned against "elites", which was fundamentally misplaced even then. The Marines, brain surgeons, and the CalTech faculty are elites. At some level elites are plainly a good thing. Rich Daley and Chris Dodd are in no way elite, they are the Establishment. Those of us on the Right, especially, should not confuse ourselves about the difference.

My Party, pt III

2009-09-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

I suspect Glenn Reynolds is right in his characterization of the Tea Parties as fundamentally anti-partisan. Of course this contradicts the liberal allegations that the whole phenomenon is just right-wing astroturfing. Still, this is not good news IMO.

We can sympathize with the Tea Partiers' suspicion that the two major parties in Washington are Tweedledee and Tweedledum. But ultimately that is a sucker's game. There is a fundamental difference between one party with actual prinicples who fails to uphold them in practice versus another party horrific prinicples or none at all. Public opinion can fight rear-guard actions well, but I strongly suspect nothing good is going to happen from Washington until the political prospects of actual Republicans are much stronger.

The Message, pt VIII

2009-09-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to Reihan for this. Reihan argues that the Dems in Congress will eventually pass something, so we should consider mitigating the eventual bill to the extent that we can. I disagree, to the extent that Demo-style health care "reform" is not at all inevitable and in fact will substantially depend on the Republican message over the next six weeks or so.

As I have mentioned more than once, a big part of the GOP's decline over the last five years or so is bandwidth. The party's representatives could say whatever, and people simply quit listening. But right now, as it relates to health care, we've got bandwidth. It's been such a struggle to get to this point, we've got to say something to convey the idea that health care reform can be something other than a bigger welfare state.

Jokers pt II, Message pt VII

2009-09-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

As longtime readers know, I am related to The Swing Voter, which is to say, my mother is usually a surprisingly reliable barometer of public sentiment. She loved the speech and thinks Republicans need to put something real on the table. She was shocked and appalled by the Joe Wilson booing. Until we get more reliable polls, I would assume that this was the general sentiment among independents. - Megan McArdle

I agree with Megan's mother on both counts. I didn't see the Obama speech, but the big controversy over Rep. Joe Wilson crudely interrupting the President can't help. No one is afraid of some old guy in a funny hat at a town hall meeting. But, a typical voter might very well be skeptical of an elected official who lacks enough self-control to keep basic decorum. In a slightly different context, Jon Henke gets it exactly right here, especially in the way cites the reasons William F. Buckley purged the John Birch Society out of mainstream conservatism. In short, we must attempt to demonstrate to the public at large that we ought to be governing.

Which, come to think of it, is a useful guideline for handling the substance of health care reform as well. First, that the status quo in health care system is not very good, so we have lots of opportunities to propose improvements to it that we're willing to be held accountable for. And more important than that, that we don't have to accept the liberals' framework for health care reform in the name of political feasibility. We should put together our proposals as if we were the governing majority, because if we handle this right we very well may be soon enough.

Time for the Health Care Debate

2009-09-10T10:01:00.001-07:00

With apologies for my long absence, I return with an observation on Health Care. I recently assented to watch Bill Moyers opine on this topic on Bill Maher's show (hopefully earning some advance credit to my time in purgatory). Moyers, whom I consider a thoughtful, old-style Democrat, said something to the effect that universal health care is the sign of a compassionate society. It's hard to disagree with a statement phrased thus without sounding unfeeling; and indeed, I hardly could disagree with the root idea. The question for me, as always, is 'what constitutes the society to which you refer?'

It is obvious to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of economics and bureaucracy that health care for 260 million strangers is a nightmare. We don't consider the health of the French to be our concern. Why should Donald Trump be personally concerned with health care for a barber in Omaha? Or vice versa? My point being that a smaller conception of 'society' makes a realistic and 'targetted' compassion possible, whereas the United States is simply too large and diverse for that sort of thinking.

The worst part of the collectivistic thinking that drives so much liberal political thought is that for most people, it provides an excuse to be anything but compassionate. "I gave at the office" is a reasonable response to any actual human being seeking financial help from us. Ironically, it turns out to be roughly the same response that Scrooge gives to his bleeding heart nephew. Aren't there work prisons still operating? Scrooge no doubt felt that the money taken from him in taxes should be enough of his contribution to 'society', and this obviates the obligation he might have to giving a hoot about Tiny Tim, in spite of the fact that humanly speaking, he should care about him. He's the son of his only employee!

In any case, the quandary for conservatives as I see it is that, being tied for now to the Party of Lincoln and his grand, centralizing war and the rhetoric necessitated by it, we end up by default thinking in terms of a national culture and 'society' rather than particular local one confederated for common defense. Consolidation of the society is a bonanza for politically connected business, such as military contractors and Big Pharma. In my opinion, a principled conservatism much return to a political theory of local particularity and scale back on the march toward socialism, so ably abetted by Nixon and the Bush dynasty.

Hi Koz!

Jokers To The Right

2009-09-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of angst, mostly not but entirely from the other team, about the flaky nature of the opposition Right these days. This is a typical lament.

The Left is befuddled that so far there's little if any backlash against the alleged gun nuts, birthers, "death panel" opponents, militia members, and red-baiters who have figured in a prominent role in the various town halls held across the country over the last month or so. For me, this is easy to explain: flaky or not, the public at large fears nothing of those people. Instead, the public is tremendously afraid for the future of the economy and has very little if any confidence in the Obama Administration's ability to handle it.

That said, the liberals are correct to say the mainstream Right should do a better job policing what comes out of the broader Right into the public debate. In particular, the mainstream Right should reject any no-enemies-on-the-Right mentality. The biggest reason for this is actually very practical. The mainstream Right has the chance, right now, to reclaim the control over the dominant narrative of American politics (and with it political power) if it's willing to take the risk of putting real alternatives forward. But nobody is going to substantially change their opinion about the fundamental priorities of our country based on a dispute over a birth certificate.

The Message, pt VI

2009-08-18T19:41:00.000-07:00

Michael Barone wrote in December of last year that Obama's electoral success was the result of a top-and-bottom coalition of the American electorate, roughly speaking the rich and destitute against the upper-middle class. He further notes that top-and-bottom coalitions tend to be unstable, and not just because there is too much divergence of interests but also because the establishment put in place by such a coalition only gets access to a very distorted picture of the reality around them.

We'll think about how this affects the Obama Administration some other time, but for now let's consider the opponents of the various Democratic health care plans circulating around. If not exactly top-and-bottom, we are definitely both ends against the middle. Mainstream conservatives want to reform and reduce the welfare state as much as is prudent. Medicare beneficiaries are want to keep the status quo. This is flying under radar a little bit now because in the media all the opponents get mushed together. But people will be figuring it out soon enough. Reihan has a piece on this today.

We need to make clear, that for the sake of the opposing the Obama bill, the old people are joining us, we're not joining them. So when people want to know what we would do, we have to be ready to tell them.

Stop The World And Melt With You

2009-08-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

One interesting twist in the global warming debate is, for all that we've heard that the "science is indisputable", we've heard very little about the engineering. As far as I know, until the public debate over global warming, there was never any serious consideration to the idea that the earth's overall climate patterns were a plausible object for engineering to our specifications.

But of course that's exactly what most of the anti-global warming agenda is. Through cap-and-trade, Kyoto, carbon taxes, or something else, the proposition is that we have reasonably direct control over the trajectory of the climate. I have grave doubts about this, and largely for that reason I oppose cap-and-trade and all the rest.

Having said that, there is such a thing as geo-engineering, which is usually taken to describe less drastic measures to affect the climate in ways that we supposedly prefer. Most of this discussion tends to take place on the Right, like today's piece by Reihan, as an end-run around draconian controls over the economy. I have no idea whether any of it is going to work, though I hope that it does. However, I'd much prefer to see it come from the other team. If they want to stop global warming, here's their chance. The other team could actually spend their energy on something useful for a change.

Robert Novak, RIP

2009-08-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

It's been published in many places that Robert Novak died today. RIP.

I wish very much that David Frum could have found a way to apologize for his unfortunate accusations against Novak while he was still alive.

Let's You And Him Fight

2009-08-17T10:05:00.000-07:00

As for the second question, this is where I realize that liberals often really just do not grok what libertarians are about. For them, this is a battle between people who like health care companies, and want to defend them, and people who like the government. But I don't care about the pharmaceutical companies qua pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies are interested in what is good for pharmaceutical companies. I am interest in what is good for society. - Megan McArdle

Oddly enough, I'm with the liberals on this one, at least as far as Megan characterizes the difference between liberals and libertarians. As Megan writes elsewhere, the business model of Big Pharma is contingent on the idea that somebody has to pay full retail. The way this has worked over time, that somebody turns out to be the US consumer. Other countries with various forms of collectivized medicine bully Big Pharma into selling its intellectual property cheap, and Big Pharma folds every time. That, in turn, puts substantial pressure on the American political establishment toward some kind of collectivized medicine here, and Surprise!, here we are. Those of us who might otherwise be supportive of Big Pharma shouldn't put ourselves in a situation we're defending Big Pharma's interest when it's not willing to defend itself.

The Message, pt V

2009-08-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

David Frum is following the money on the health care front. He seems to be worried that the Big Pharma's money on the airwaves is about to change the tide. I don't think so. I agree with Patrick Ruffini that in today's environment, message beats money. Money might be the deciding factor where the difference of opinion sways between the 40-yard lines on the political football field, but this particular game is going up and down the field.

This is especially interesting in the case of Big Pharma's ads in favor of health care reform. Liberals hate Big Pharma and the terms of this deal, that the liberals will not force price reductions on prescription drugs and Big Pharma will carry the political water for getting a bill through Congress, are not ones that I would trust holding up on either side.

You And Who's Army?

2009-08-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

There's another small point worth making relating to Spengler's essay. As much as we are conditioned to think that Jews and Muslims are now and are eternally destined to be at war like Oceania and Eurasia from 1984, historically it's just hasn't been that way. There were thousands or millions of Jews who lived more or less peacefully as a minority in the Muslim Ottoman Empire until the end of World War I. In fact, Spengler points out that most Jewish Israelis today are not descended from the refugees of the Holocaust, but instead refugees from Arab lands formerly under Ottoman rule.

The radicalization of Palestinian Muslims against the Jews dates from the interwar period and was achieved largely through the efforts of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, with a substantial assist from Adolf Hitler himself. As circumstances mandate, we may have to deal with such people, but we cannot afford to legitimize them as the authentic voice of the region.

Health Care and Porcupines, pt II

2009-08-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

Fundamentally, however, the difference between the systems is psychological. In Britain you worry what will happen when you fall ill; many Americans worry about what will happen if you fall ill. - Alex Massie (HT:Rod Dreher)

Another way to put this is that Britons' health anxieties tend to be about the availability of treatment, whereas Americans' health anxieties are financial. And our financial anxieties over health care are going to continue (and most likely increase in intensity) until there is substantial change in our health care system. Therefore, we should all understand that the defeat of the Obama plans is a means, not at end.

The Message, pt IV

2009-08-12T17:31:00.000-07:00

It is here that I think the seeds of a Republican political recovery in 2010 are born. Republicans don't need to convince the electorate that Obama is the second coming of Karl Marx. They need merely to establish that if one has any doubt that the stimulus, or Government Motors, or health care will work out exactly as planned, the only prudent thing is to vote Republican as a hedge. - Patrick Ruffini

This is okay for the moment, where the Obama health plan is running into a firestorm of public disapproval. It may even be smart, for the sake of bandwidth, wrt something like health care where we'll have to admit we don't have all the answers either when people start to care again. But ultimately they will, we'll have to show something concrete so we might as well get started on it now.

The Message, pt III

2009-08-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

As a campaign manager, I'd much, much rather be running the guy with a message and no money versus the guy with money and no message. Why? Because the guy with a message will eventually find momentum, which will deliver all the money he needs when he needs it. - Patrick Ruffini

There's more at stake in the political process now than there has been in recent history. Whereas before the voters were happy to let the political establishment run on autopilot, now they want to assert more input. Therefore they're willing to take on more of the spadework themselves if their favored candidate has a message that's strong and clear.

The New Alinskyites, pt II

2009-08-12T03:44:00.000-07:00

It's pretty amusing that after mocking community organizers during the presidential campaign, conservatives have enthusiastically adopted Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky's community organizing how-to, as a guide for mounting an effective opposition. - Ezra Klein

You heard it here first.

Health Care and Porcupines

2009-08-11T09:05:00.000-07:00

There's a cliche about how porcupines have sex (answer: very carefully) that's topical to the current problems with health care, especially as far as the Republicans are concerned. Even if we agree that the various iterations of the Obama health care plan ought to be defeated, Stacy McCain is wrong to criticize David Frum for looking at the bigger picture.

I'm not exactly sure if Frum is trying to say we should acquiesce to some kind of health care reform for the sake of exploding the third-rail status of the big entitlements. If he is, I don't necessarily agree with it. But, we do have to acknowledge that the cost of health care is creating substantial pressure against the status quo and that the GOP currently operates in a very limited bandwidth environment. Therefore it must conserve it's message as best as it can. In particular,

1. Health care costs are a very serious problem.
2. Just because the status quo is unsatisfactory, it does not follow that any change is an improvement.
3. So far we have no reason to be sure that any of the Democratic plans are better than the status quo.
4. The Democrats are in the majority so we have to respond on their terms.
5. As soon as the Democrats have a coherent explanation for why their plan improves the status quo, we'll consider it.
6. If the Democrats want to know how we'd attack the issue, we'll tell them.
7. So far, the Democrats haven't shown any interest in that.

I'm afraid this might already be too complicated, but on balance I don't think it is. The key is not to get distracted trying to push our own polemic.

Well...How Did I Get Here?

2009-08-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

Spenger has a very interesting new post up at Asia Times today. I want to take it in a little bit and decide what I think about it later. I do have one immediate quibble though.

The Vatican's Middle East "foreign policy" has been soft-headed for at least a couple of decades now. But I don't think the Vatican has any nostalgia for some pre-1948 Israel-free period of Christian ascendancy in the Middle East. If anything, the Church is nostalgic for the apostolic period when these local Churches were founded.

The Vatican wants to think of the Middle East in a pre-Islamic context. Of course the Middle East was pre-Islamic in the apostolic period and thinking in this way subconsciously emphasizes that the Christian apologetic is some ways palpable and tangible. The Coptics and the Maronites and various Christian communities came into being through the historically contingent acts of real people. In an indirect way we are reminded that Jesus Christ was a real person who walked the earth and His disciples really did carry His Word among the nations.

Chicago Writ Large

2009-08-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

David Goldman (ie, "Spengler") has a new post up wherein he argues that a GOP revival based on Obama's overreach is mostly wishful thinking. His thesis is distressingly plausible but IMO ultimately wrong. In Chicago, people who vote Democrat fall into two groups. The first are those who want to make the clout-based spoils system work for them. The other are those who want to associate themselves culturally with blue-state America.

For the purposes of extrapolation, it's this latter group which is important. For liberal urban professionals, the machine politics of the Daleys are a just a tax, not one that they're particularly happy with but a tolerable one. More than that, it's one that they can't do anything about. Even if they were willing to vote Republican, the party here runs at such a huge organizational deficit that disillusionment with the Democrats is more likely to turn to apathy than anger.

For America at large, the opposite is true. The financial burdens of welfare-state America are onerous, and getting worse under Obama. And the American people are for now still sovereign, and the expression of their sovereignty is the ability to veto the apparatchiks of government by voting Republican. Furthermore, even though it's not necessarily being expressed this way, the feeling of sovereignty being lost is growing among the voters. It's a close-run thing but I wouldn't be writing the GOP's obituary quite yet.

Ezra Klein Is Right

2009-08-05T07:20:00.000-07:00

Those are words I'd never thought I'd write.

"Imagine Barack Obama was born in Kenya. So what?
This isn't like Bill Clinton murdering Vince Foster and running drugs through the Arkansas airport.It's not like George W. Bush having foreknowledge of 9/11. As I understand it, the argument here is that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but that his mother said he was born in the United States and even had relatives lie to that effect. Presumably, she also told young Barack that he was born in Hawaii. The big reveal here is...what?" - Ezra Klein

Healthcare Horserace

2009-07-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

The health care debate has been in sort of a holding pattern for a couple of weeks now: the Democrats don't know exactly what problem they're trying to solve. Some days they want cost reduction, on others they want to guarantee access to low-income Americans (frankly, I don't think they can make progress on either count but I'm just a skeptic). In any case, they know that they want to pass a health care bill of some kind to claim a political victory.

In the last couple of days, there have been a couple of developments. The Blue Dog (ie, centrist) Democrats in the House supposedly cut a deal with Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman to make the "public option" health care plan contingent on this or that and set the doctor reimbursement rates at this instead of that. In response, the liberals on the committee revolted. They are threatening to walk if they don't get the public option they want.

From the pov of preventing the further collectivization of medicine, this is a bad tactical development. Once we get to the point of being accountable for accomplishing something useful, the liberals don't have a plausible story to sell to the American people. More than anyone, they have to be able to book a political win for its own sake. They have to give the centrists whatever they want to get a bill through Congress, and they will. As I see it, this maneuver is a preemptive attempt to save face now in order vote for half a loaf later. Thus, I'd say we're in more danger of getting the camel's nose under the tent now than earlier in the week.

I Used To Be An Anglophile, pt II

2009-07-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?” - Theodore Dalrymple (HT: The Corner)

This phenomenon is sadly familiar to anyone who has watched Prime Minister's Questions on C-Span for the last decade or so. No matter what the question, Tony and Gordon's answer is always, "Which nurses (or schools or police) are you going to cut?" In the end, the joke is on the taxpayer because the Tories (like the GOP over here) don't really intend to cut very much.

More than that, the moral imagination is tied to the practical imagination, and the UK is lacking in both.

Gettin' Paid

2009-07-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

"Information wants to be free." This is something of a cliche among hackers and futurists.

Because information can be copied and propagated much faster than real things, intellectual property is never exactly the same thing as real property. And because the development of private property was such an important building block in the history of economic development, we tried to put extend the concept we developed for land, horses, and bushels of grain to software and naming rights. But this is an abstraction, and abstractions leak.

One result of this is a quasi-Marxist exploitation of capital in an anti-matter universe. Instead of the capitalist denying to the laborer the fruit of his work, the consumer gets the benefit of millions of dollars in various kinds of technological development without having to compensate the capital that funded it. The moral of this story isn't to feel sorry for the capitalists. Among other things, for the most part developers of intellectual property couldn't have developed it without access to other intellectual property which may not have been compsenated either.

It's just that the inability to monetize intellectual achievements tends to retard their growth. As society gets wealthier it gets tech-ier, and this problem gets bigger. It would have been nice to confront it in better economic circumstances. The current economic crisis has suffered from really bad timing, on many different levels.

The Heartfelt Heart

2009-07-28T11:53:00.000-07:00

The course of human progress is not very predictable. But inasmuch as it can be predicted, I forsee the next several decades to be substantially about the unwinding of Cartesian mind-body dualism. Rod Dreher provides a useful data point here.

Variations On A Theme

2009-07-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

From James Pethokoukis: corporate America is successfully paring down its cost structure, and in some cases making money doing it. For its next trick it needs to figure out how to make things people want to buy.

My Party, pt II

2009-07-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

If we stipulate that, historically speaking, loyalties to political parties in America have largely been a matter of tribal allegiance (and I think we should), then what now? Certainly generations of votes from residents of Vermont and Illinois haven't stopped the current residents of those states from voting for the other team.

There's two explanations for this: the first is that party loyalties are still tribal, it's just that the members of the tribes are different. The other one is that whereas party loyalties have been tribal for most of America's history, they are ideological now. It may be some of both. This is an odd situation in American politics, but as Robinson points out that there is at least one clear antecedent for it: the founding era of the Republican party. Was the GOP the political expression of the abolition movement, or the successor the Whigs and Federalists in the North and Midwest? Well, both.

Ultimately the regional differences of that era weren't settled until the Civil War (and to some extent not even then). That might be a bad omen for us today. But you also could say that the unification of America into the truly United States was hard enough to come by, therefore not to be given up easily.

Technology Totem

2009-07-27T20:54:00.000-07:00

"Technology Entrepreneurs Will Save Us." That's the title of this blog post by Rich Karlgaard. If I were the sort to rail against the messianic pretensions of free-market fundamentalists, this would worth a good laugh. But I'm not, so let's just say I'm not convinced of Rich's thesis from a simple pragmatic angle.

What is tech? Leaving all the gooey futuristic stuff aside, for thirty years or so it's largely consisted of advances in chips, software, and biotech. These are still decent fields for development, but the consumer has largely adjusted to them and is not looking to buy the latest of their wares.

If I had to guess, the next frontier with the potential of reenergizing the economy will be Spiritual technology. The thing is, if it's spiritual, is it really tech? And if it is, will people pay for it? I have something of a contrary streak, so I tend to answer no to entrepreneurial people but yes to religious people.

My Party

2009-07-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

Returning to the issue of loyalty, then, I believe that our loyalties must start small and be based in loyalty to family and clan, friends, neighborhoods, co-workers and villages, and only through these mediating structures to larger-scale political groupings. Party politics seems to me to be a huge problem. - Boethius

Reading this brought to mind It's My Party, by Peter Robinson, and I skimmed it again for the first time in years. It's not necessarily a profound book, but it does have the important virtue of stating things which are obvious in retrospect, but wouldn't have crossed my mind otherwise. In any case, Robinson reminds us that party loyalties are largely tribal.

Furthermore, he argues this is actually a good thing. First of all, without them we would be in danger of fighting a civil war whenever the tribal disputes get too hot. Moreover, the fact that they are based on tribal loyalties means that they have some staying power. Therefore the existence of the opposition party is always a check on the tyranny of the government. In Robinson's book there is the example of the New Deal. The Democrats were dominant then like they are now. But, the banker/merchant class and Upper Midwest Protestants stayed loyal to the GOP for little other than tribal reasons. When Roosevelt overreached, for example his attempt to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, the existence of the Republican party still denied his ambitions even if it never politically defeated him.

In fact, if there were to be any cause of optimism today, it's because we've dodged that bullet for now. There was a period, say from December to March, where it looked like the GOP might die away altogether. Some say it still might. With Obama's recent missteps and the rise of the GOP in the polls, at least it's not imminent.

Getting Along

2009-07-27T15:24:00.000-07:00

This, by Peter Lawler, has been the occasion of some back and forth between Daniel Larison and the PoMoCons. For me, I think Lawler is correct to argue that the coalition of the unwilling is really at bottom an attempt to repudiate man as an Aristotlean political animal.

The European elites are postpolitical fantasists. Ie, they want to move past citizenship and nationhood, on the assumption that if technocrats can maintain enough social control over the populace then disputes over honor and treasure can be cooled down before they escalate to war. "Midwestern isolationists", ie, the paleocons are prepolitical fantasists. If we all stay at home hoeing vegetables in the backyard, we'll never have any contoversy with foreigners worth going to war over.

Larison is right to note that anti-capitalism really doesn't enter into it, at least here.

Trust Me, I'll Keep Score

2009-07-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

I'm with Megan McArdle on this one. From a free-market perspective we'd like to be able to rely on reputational concerns as a corrective against exploitation in the private health care insurance market (like we do for other kinds of insurance). But I don't think we can, at least not nearly as much. The insurance companies are the only ones who can accurately monitor the financial impact of a course of treatment, and the tempatation to leverage that is and will remain too great. This is a substantial part of the reason why health care economics will continue to be difficult for a while.

I have a hunch that cost reduction in health care won't happen until patients have lots of nasty conversations about money with doctors. Neither party really wants that, so here we are.

I'm Happy To Report.....

2009-07-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

....that at least one person agrees with me. (HT: FirstThings)

Say Say Say

2009-07-26T17:23:00.002-07:00

The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say formulated Say's Law, usually summarized as "supply creates its own demand", roughly the same time that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. That is, in a wide enough context, overproduction is impossible. The process of production creates demand among the producers, in fact exactly enough to buy the product according to an accounting identity.

According to John Kenneth Galbraith, Say's Law is an article of faith among economists, meaning that it is taken for granted by professional economists without much in the way of empirical evidence. This might actually be the case in a different way at the moment. Before we knew pretty well that other people wanted houses, cars, and computers and so on. Now, we have to create that don't exist and take it on faith that somebody will buy them.

More On Loyalty

2009-07-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

In the fickle world of politics, I'm not willing to stop with understanding 'at the gut level'. - Boethius

First of all, there is no reason why we have to stop at the gut level to explain the loyalties of mainstream American conservatives. They can be made quite explicit. As I mentioned a few posts ago, they have loyalties to the Republican party on one end and Greater Red State America on the other. It's just that for most people who spend less time analyzing this sort of thing than I do, these loyalties are intuited rather than stated.

As far as the larger issue of why we are or should be loyal to the United States as opposed to Des Moines, for all of its defects it is America where we have our citizenship. Ironically enough the best explanation I've seen for this recently comes from the Tarnac9, a small group of French antiglobalization activists (or terrorists, whichever you prefer):

The moment has come to put the category of “citizenship”, the heredity of an urban modernity that doesn’t exist in anywhere, into discussion. In the metropolis, being a citizen means simply reentering in the biopolitical job of governmentability, seconding the “legality” of a State, of a Nation and of a Republic that doesn’t exist if not only as ganglion of the Empire’s organized repression. The singularity exceeds citizenship. Vindicating one’s own singularity against citizenship is the slogan that, for example, migrants write daily with their blood on the Mediterranean coasts, in the CPT in revolt, on the wall of steel that divides Tijuana from San Diego or on the membrane of flesh and cement that separates the Rom bidonvilles from the shamefully sparkling City Center. Citizenship has become the award for faithful allegiance to the imperial order. The singularity, as soon as it can, happily does without it. Only the singularity can destroy the walls, borders, membranes and limits constructed as the infrastructure of dominion by biopower. - Tarnac9 (HT: also ironically, FirstThings)

Ie, it is at the level of our citizenship that our nihilist adversaries seek to attack us. That makes sense when you think about it because the state is legitimately accountable to its citizens and its those who wish to divert American power to their own ends must defeat that bond of accountability.

Of course America is an odd beast in this respect because we are citizens of the United States but the states are still theoretically at least sovereign. In the interest of localism we can wish that the states had more real power at the expense of the federal government and in fact the GOP has made that part of its program. Sometimes the Republicans go the mattresses for this and other times they just pay lip service to it. But in either case the United States (both as a nation and a government) is the level where the American polity interacts with the rest of the world. And for the sake of its integrity we should be loyal to it.

The flip side to this, is where the government acts in ways that are not plausibly intended to represent the American polity as a whole, then there is no duty of loyalty. The various Farm Bills, housing assistance programs and so on may be good ideas in some sense but first and foremost they are redistribution schemes that grant or withhold favors to some subset of Americans, and for that reason no one owes any loyalty to them. It was the Iraq war that upset this particular apple cart for a lot of people. Because we had all gotten used to the modern Leviathan state as the battleground of the spoils system, we had lost the ability to appreciate circumstances where the debt of loyalty really does apply.

Going To The Mattresses

2009-07-21T09:08:00.001-07:00

William Kristol and James Pethokoukis have items out suggesting that the Obama Administration is ready to take a combative turn as it pushes to get cap-and-trade and some kind of health care reform through Congress. Republicans and the right-wing blogosphere will be complaining soon about being bulldozed if they're not already. I don't care about it that much in the abstract: I think it's making an unnecessary fetish out of the sausage-making parts of lawmaking. Ultimately, the other team has the majorities. It's naive to think they won't make use of them.

But concretely speaking, it's another story. Whenever the President has tried to short-circuit the deliberative process on a big-ticket bill, it's never for a good cause. Recent examples of this are the Bush Administration's attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, Medicare Part D, and the Obama stimulus. War opponents tend to include the Iraq War vote as well, but think that one is a bad rap.

What makes the Obama bills uniquely bad is that their proponents can't explain in complete sentences what these bills are intended to accomplish and how they're supposed to do it. If this state of affairs continues, and the liberal base continues to insist that these bills get pushed through (as Kristol and Pethokoukis imply), we are looking at the seeds of 1994 all over again: no bills and no majorities.

Sympathy For The Devil

2009-07-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

I agree that many of the Al Qaeda folks would like to impose Islamic culture, with the religion that comes with it. But part of their rhetoric involves pointing out the compromised nature of Islam in places like Saudi Arabia, where U.S. interests have corrupted the ruling elites (in [Osama] Bin Laden's eyes). But again, I doubt that it is fully 'U.S. interests' being served there, rather than the interests of the financial elite whose bases of operation are, unsurprisingly, New York and Washington. -- Boethius

There's a lot to respond to in Boethius' latest, but I wanted to note this train of thought tends to legitimize the likes of Osama as the legitimate leadership of that area of the world. Not that we should reject it out of hand necessarily but it is problematic. It's especially topical in Bin Laden's case because he is a non-state actor who lacks control over the machinery of a state, in contrast to Saddam, eg.

And not that it makes much difference, but Bid Laden's gripes against the US-Saudi relationship are pretty weak anyway. He doesn't like the fact that Saudi Arabia has relied on US petroleum engineers to help drill its oil and that the US stationed soldiers on the Arabian peninsula. But the US pays fair market value to everybody it trades with, and there wouldn't have been any US soldiers in Saudi Arabia if Saddam Hussein didn't invade Kuwait, with the threat to invade Saudi Arabia shortly thereafter.

Just like in relations between neighbors, in relations between nations we want to mind our own business and avoid giving offense unnecessarily. That doesn't mean it's plausible to do it.

Rambling On About Loyalty

2009-07-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

Koz writes:

"Elaborating on the particular loyalties of dissident conservatives, it's worth contrasting them to the mainstream Right. For the mainstream Right, there is a nexus of political loyalties that's fairly well understood at the gut level. The mainstream Right is connected on one end with the Republican political establishment, and on the other to Greater Red State America. This is in addition to the general patriotic loyalty to America in general."

In the fickle world of politics, I'm not willing to stop with understanding 'at the gut level'. In fact, this is precisely the critique that we curmudgeonly types level at liberals who parrot whatever Jon Stewart or Rachel Maddow or Barack Obama says, just because it feels right. We pride ourselves at welcoming ex-liberals 'mugged by reality', that is, having had to think through their inherited liberal opinions, even when they led in places more gut-wrenching than intuitive.

I used the examples of Boston and LA precisely because I don't feel that I have much in common with people in those places, other than the not inconsiderable fact that we belong to the same country (though I do wonder if you don't harbor some similar feelings as I do when you repeatedly say to the most populous state in the Union "Drop Dead."). To me, it is significant that Bin Laden probably is not planning terrorist attacks on Duluth or Mobile or Des Moines. His beef is not with 'red state America' or even 'blue state America', but very particularly with Washington and New York. And speaking of Bin Laden, I didn't use the words 'fear' or 'victim' in my original post. I agree that many of the Al Qaeda folks would like to impose Islamic culture, with the religion that comes with it. But part of their rhetoric involves pointing out the compromised nature of Islam in places like Saudi Arabia, where U.S. interests have corrupted the ruling elites (in [Osama] Bin Laden's eyes). But again, I doubt that it is fully 'U.S. interests' being served there, rather than the interests of the financial elite whose bases of operation are, unsurprisingly, New York and Washington.

At what point does loyalty demand that we issue honest criticism of our government? I would think that this would be a primary way for conservatives to express loyalty ("Government is The Problem!"), but I found this very difficult to do while Bush was Prez. Why is the critic's patriotism routinely questioned by the likes of O'Reilly? This guy rules criticism out before he even allows anybody to say anything. Why are people like that dominating conservative discussions? Frankly, I think that's totally un-American. We are supposed to be responsible citizens who debate our way through policy decisions and therefore safeguard the freedom of speech zealously. Or do we really?

It struck me today that we've made words like 'clan' and 'tribe' into bad words in the U.S. 'Family' is only barely hanging on. But these are where real loyalties begin, with real relationships. Part of the difficulty with the sort of patriotism that is demanded of us today is that it deliberately undermines any mediating structures between the individual and the massive State. Thus, not only is criticism difficult, but real action, which I stress is in the American tradition, is difficult. All associations have to be voluntary, and we all know how little promises to stick together mean today.

Last question: At what point are our government's depredations at a level where they surpass George III's? IMHO, we've probably passed that point.

I hope to post soon on Spiritualism and the pope's encyclical soon. I think that there is a lot of fruitful dialogue to come in those areas!

Spitcraft

2009-07-17T09:35:00.000-07:00

This is a subject near and dear to me, though sadly neglected on this blog. It is at least tangentially related to the subject of some email correspondence between Boethius and me some years back, something we christened Spiritualism, to be contrasted with philosophical materialism. It was a bit difficult to summarize the train of thought of the Spiritualists (abbreviated "Spits"), except to say that the epistemological and ontological foundation of an act of a person, combined with intent and experiencing the consequences, is at least as strong as the objective, "real" world.

In any case, I believe that we are at or near the end of the "Cartesian template" for human progress. This is a historical phenomenon that started, oh, 10 to 40 years ago, but in an indirect way it is very important to the current economic crisis. The process of development in technology continues, but the willingness of people to pay for its accomplishments has gone way down. Our economy will continue to struggle for at least as long as it appears that there are no good options for smart, energetic people to devote their time to.

This book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, has been the latest big thing on the alternative Right for a while. I haven't read it but I suspect that I would be sympathetic with its thesis. But I don't want to overstate the case that the ideas in it will serve as the foundation for economic revival. It may be that bourgeois America will escape its cubicles. If it does it will be for the sake of the workers' well-being. But that's only half the equation. There will also be a revolution on the consumer side as well, something that creates a sense of urgency. But the consumer is feeling poor, and will be wary of buying the latest brand of snake oil. The consumer has to go through a phase of social or spiritual development as well. Only then will he know what's worth spending money on.

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt IV

2009-07-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting indicator, first noted by the legendary economist Arthur Laffer: Renting a 26-foot U-Haul truck to go from Austin to San Francisco this July would cost you about $900. Renting the same truck to go from San Francisco to Austin? About $3,000. In the great balance of supply and demand, California has a large supply of people who are demanding to move to Texas. There's a reason for this. - Kevin Williamson in National Review

And All For One

2009-07-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

There's a grab bag of things worth mentioning regarding Boethius' latest.

The first thing is that I am very little conflicted about loyalty to America, and in particular that it constitutes one polity. There are a lot of ways to think about this, but I look at it from in a very practical way. No matter what the difference in weather, food, or accents, when I fly from Chicago to Los Angeles it's still the same country. It's not only about the formalities of passport control, but for me at least it really does feel that way too. But in flying from Los Angeles to Guadalajara, you land in a different country. It's as simple as that.

Elaborating on the particular loyalties of dissident conservatives, it's worth contrasting them to the mainstream Right. For the mainstream Right, there is a nexus of political loyalties that's fairly well understood at the gut level. The mainstream Right is connected on one end with the Republican political establishment, and on the other to Greater Red State America. This is in addition to the general patriotic loyalty to America in general. This is important because it creates the possibility of understood premises in a conversation with a mainstream conservative. For the dissident conservatives, leaving aside any questions of loyalty to America in general, their secondary political positive loyalties are quite murky. Even if one of them claimed to be loyal to paleoconservatism or Crunchy Conservatism, the objects of such loyalty are too fragmented to count. Therefore there tends to be a hint of sophistry in their arguments: it's always a little too vague just who's interest they're arguing for.

The libertarians are an interesting case: to the extent they exist as part of the Right at all, they function as dissident conservatives some of the time and mainstream conservatives the rest. Politically speaking I think their biggest issues have to do with organization, which come to think of it is sort of related to loyalty in their case.

About Bin Laden et al, I don't believe they fear being the victim of persecution by the state for the sake of religion. Instead they intend to be the religious persecutors themselves, through the state or whatever means of power they can use. We can hope, that the physical and cultural barriers between us and them mean that we can protect ourselves from them easier than some would have us believe. IMO that's an interesting, highly contingent judgment call. By contrast, the question of loyalty is this circumstance ought to be trivial.

Placing Loyalty

2009-07-07T18:28:00.000-07:00

Koz writes, "one thing that turns me off from the dissident conservatives is their lack of manly loyalty. We've been made to understand ad nauseum that their aspirations are higher than George W Bush's approval rating or Mark Levin's book sales figures. Great, then what exactly are they supposed to be loyal to, if not that? Whatever it is, they haven't told us."

I am quite happy to agree on this point, and it is perhaps the principal weakness in thoroughgoing libertarianism. I suppose Lew Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker would argue that a libertarian is free to be loyal to whatever he wishes and it is not their business to force their loyalty toward something else (mainly The State).

I've often argued that libertarianism is a bit like the Physics 101 problems sets in which we are allowed to posit a frictionless surface for the sake of learning about how acceleration works. This is very helpful either at the beginning of one's physics career, or at times, when a thought-experiment is needed to test some other highly complex set of variables. Libertarianism, in my opinion, should get more attention from the right, but in the end, policy decisions will have to deal with the real world, which includes relationships that libertarianism does not always take into account.

That said, I think that a principal problem with the Republican party is that the manly loyalty so yearned for by Koz (and myself) is assumed to be directed toward the Party and toward America. Now we should be loyal to our friends and to our homeland. But who are our friends, and what constitutes our homeland? I personally have always had difficulty on a gut level feeling like I'm somehow part of the same patria as Bostonians and Los Angelenos. As for the Republican party, well, I agree with them on _some_ issues, but actually fewer and fewer. Does manliness consist in simply being loyal for the sake of being loyal? Or are commitments born of some other considerations?

Thank you for the kind Indepedence Day wishes. I am most grateful to live in a country where I am free to practice my religion, under a Constitution that ranks among the great political documents of history. Let's hope it makes a comeback!

Update

After completing this post, I came upon this excellent article, comparing the libertarian views of Ayn Rand's The Atlas with the anarchist views of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It reminded me of some things to clarify in what I posted last night. That I am more in sympathy with Tolkien than Rand explains much of my critique of libertarianism. When asked my political views, I normally respond 'classical liberal and subsidiarist; when that's not possible, I'm a monarchist'. "The Return of the King" is a necessity in Middle Earth because of the ravages of Sauron's forces and the lingering dangers unleashed by it. But when peace returns, political decision-making devolves to the lowest possible authority necessary--what I mean by 'subsidiarist', a term borrowed from the Catholic Church's philosophy of government, post-Vatican II.

Returning to the issue of loyalty, then, I believe that our loyalties must start small and be based in loyalty to family and clan, friends, neighborhoods, co-workers and villages, and only through these mediating structures to larger-scale political groupings. Party politics seems to me to be a huge problem. We see that Republicans are pondering throwing overboard their pro-life principles for the 'greater good' of...of...beating the Democrats? What about the loyalty shown by the religious right for the past thirty years?

Faced with the menace of communism, there was plausible reason to rally 'round the cause of national security, meaning allowing for an expansion of a larger-scale political decision-making scheme. I am not at all convinced that terrorism presents the same necessity; if anything Bin Laden, et al, hate not our freedoms, but the looming specter of total state domination to the exclusion of religious principles. I dare say were we more free, they might respect us more, not less. In fact, I don't find that we are all that free politically. If I want to change something in my own Chicago neighborhood, well, I have no real recourse but to try and placate the higher powers of Daley's cabal or maneuver around implacable federal laws. And all this may, and often is, easily defeated by persons willing to participate in the corruption that such large-scale power entails.

Returning to loyalty: why be loyal to one's neighborhood when the prospect of real spoils looms if we forsake the neighborhood and remove ourselves to the abstracted levels of City Hall? Mutatis mutandis, if we go for the real golden goose of federal tax moneys and power? What sort of persons will wind up in national politics we can predict based on this, and these sorts of persons are not normally going to be ones that will elicit my sympathy, much less loyalty.

Long Live the Male

2009-07-06T12:52:00.000-07:00

"[F]or men in America, the only plausible ideal of conduct is the idea of the Gentleman. What else is there? The Rock Star? The Cowboy? Norman Mailer's White Negro? The Underground Man? Huck Finn?" -- James Burnham to Jeffrey Hart

Well, let's take the winding road today. This has been overtaken by events a little bit. But sometime last week, when Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska and it appeared that she would remain so for a while, Stacy McCain kicked the hornet's nest again. I won't dwell too much on homosexuality here, except to note that this is actually tangentially related to my complaints against the dissident conservatives, relating in particular to the modern male sex role.

It took a while for me to figure this out, but one thing that turns me off from the dissident conservatives is their lack of manly loyalty. We've been made to understand ad nauseum that their aspirations are higher than George W Bush's approval rating or Mark Levin's book sales figures. Great, then what exactly are they supposed to be loyal to, if not that? Whatever it is, they haven't told us.

Men without loyalties outside themselves are perceived to be weak, and men who are perceived to be weak are not respected by other men, in particular me. This is particularly topical right now because the current economic travails are subtly affecting our perceptions of sex roles in ways that might actually help the much-beleagured bourgeois American male.

For at least as long as I've been alive, there's been a certain empty boorishness inside the typical American male. Not that all of us are mindless jerks, but most of us wouldn't know how to be a genuine article gentleman even if we tried (this applies men of just about every race and ecnomic class, btw). In fact the very concept of gentleman has shifted to reflect this very fact. Instead of referring to a man who serves as a visible marker of civilization by virtue of his standards in dress, bearing, and manners, we now speak of a gentleman as a good-hearted mensch in his personal relations. I'm sure it's possible to make a bigger deal out of this than it really is, but it's there nonetheless.

With the current economic crisis however, the bourgeois American male is challenged to do things that he actually has a chance of being able to do, and that are worthy of accomplishment. Until very recently, it was possible for anyone for anyone with an ounce of energy or at least as much intelligence as average houseplant to earn his own keep. Given that was the most demonstrable accomplishment of the American male, no one was very impressed. Well, that's a bigger deal now than it used to be. And given the fundamental sector shift the economy is going through, it will likely be an ever bigger deal in the future.

Reihan recently wrote an interesting article about this, where he largely sees it the other way, going so far as to call the current economic crisis a "he-cession." I would be more sympathetic to his thesis if the future of economic growth was a simple battle of brains vs. brawn. But I don't think it is. In fact I think we crossed that particular bridge a long time ago. Instead, we need energetic perseverant visionary leadership toward creating things (and careers) that don't exist yet, the foundation of a new economy we don't understand all that well. And as much as I love the girls, that's not who I'll be putting my money on to do it. And from what I've seen of the dissident conservatives so far, I'm not betting on them either.

Finally, let's give best wishes to our friend Boethius on the occasion of the anniversary of American Independence, a foremost accomplishment of visionary perseverant males. It's one of his favorite days of the year, being the patriotic Roman-American that he is.

Take This Job and Shove It

2009-07-04T13:11:00.000-07:00

The political world is buzzing over the resignation of Sarah Palin as governor of Alaska. I personally am not. Various pundits are suggesting that her national political career is over. That's probably so, but so what? Unlike most of the political establishment, she had a real life before she entered politics, and will have a real life to return to when her political aspirations are over. It's hard for me to see offhand what she gets in compensation that's worth enduring the cheapshots from David Letterman or Andrew Sullivan. To some extent we were lucky to have her for as long as we did.

Let's recall, the essential point of Palin's candidacy was bandwidth. That is, the Republican party is not defined by George W Bush, Congressional sex scandals, George Ryan, No Child Left Behind, or whatever else is left at its feet, fairly or otherwise. As Obama blunders and time passes this will less of an issue, and less justification to support Sarah Palin relative to Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, or whoever.

Things of Sense

2009-06-30T19:43:00.000-07:00

Poulos' criticism of the phrase 'a sense of' lacks full context for me, so I will have to work with the (few) examples he provides. Furthermore, wandering off as he does into a digression on his dissertation and other thoughts, might give the sense that he is right, but this does not convey objective rightness in and of itself.

"Give us a sense of what's going on out there in that hurricane, Bob." What is the difference between this formulation and the more traditional, "What are the conditions in the hurricane, Bob?" I suppose the former, offending statement is meant to invite the viewers to experience what a hurricane is like rather than quote wind speeds and rainfall rates that might otherwise convey little human meaning. So the question I would want to ask is, "What's wrong with making that experiential, sensate connection?" I don't see a problem with it myself. In fact, this seems to me a good example of a quite positive use for 'a sense of': we literally cannot experience the actual noun--the hurricane--ourselves. But for the sake of more immediate sympathy for those suffering from it, getting a 'sense' of it, having our senses engaged, is actually more of an 'incarnational' way of communicating the weather than the overly abstracted reporting of mere statistics.

The second example (and only other one I can find) is this:

"critics of contemporary life merely beg the question when they call for us to replace, say, our lost community with a new 'sense of community'. "

He may have a point here. I think this is a place where we tend to want to privilege our feelings over the objective experience of a thing. We probably don't have strong senses of real communities except at heightened moments, and ultimately I don't think that we seek out communities merely to get a sense of being a part of one. I don't often have a strong sense of being part of the Catholic Church in its full universality. When Pope John Paul II died, the beauty of the ceremonial for his funeral and the following conclave helped me to experience a stronger sense of communion with the universal Church. Even when I am not actively sensing this, however, the communion is still there. If one gets a sense of communion when there is not (as may be the case with 'cultural Catholics' who support abortion rights), this seems to me to be a good example of the disconnect betweent the objective thing and a sense of it.

Personally, I haven't noticed this explosion of poor usage. From what I imagine to be the common usage, I might actually support it. I am an advocate of a strongly Incarnational way of understanding this world; however, we must be discerning about what it is that we incarnate. Evil can just as easily incarnate itself as good, and so before we crown our own experience as unambiguously pointing to objective reality, we might exercise some restraint and merely admit that our experience is provisional: "I am getting a sense of your irritation about this phrase." Rather than, "You are angry about this phrase." This caution allows for our senses to be corrected by the objective reality.

I understand that there is impatience among conservatives with the lack of conviction that many postmoderns persons show toward the truth, but I think forbidding the use of this phrase will not help people arrive at truth. They will either find another way to express this reserve with regard to the truth, or will simply do what a lot of people do today and just assert their sense of things as true, whether or not this claim has any merit.

But it seems to me that even in the two examples he gives, the import of the phrase is slightly different, and this obviously badly vitiates his claim.

My Sense of Things

2009-06-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

James Poulos is an eccentric sort of conservative. He contributes to and keeps good relations with The American Spectator, so he's not a lame too-cool-for-Hannity dissident of the sort we've been complaining about in this space. Nonetheless, sometimes it seems to be difficult for some of us dim bulbs to figure out his train of thought.

One of his recurring gripes is to complain about "a sense of" as an idiom in contemporary speech and writing. I think we can stipulate that it is simply meaningless linguistic filler much of the time, and at first glance this seems to be a case of usage hypersensitivity, like those people who know the correct meaning of "momentarily" and cringe slightly when hearing the word in its colloquial sense. But I think Poulos wants to go further than that somehow, as if there is something actually blameworthy or alienating in its common use.

I don't get it. Again allowing for overuse, "a sense of" can be used to emphasize something quite real, ie, the epistemological distance between our experience of the world and its underlying reality. We can (and often do) experience a sense of alienation with respect to some cultural phenomenon or another without actually being alienated from it in any meaningful way. It's hard, for me at least, to describe the difference without using the offending phrase.

I wouldn't bother with this ordinarily but now we have our very own philosophe on retainer here at FlyingSpit. I wonder if Boethius thinks there's any there there.

Aesthetics for Me, Taxes for Thee

2009-06-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

Boethius inquires into the tension between the aethetics of conservatism and the capitalist, neoliberal economies we live in. He naturally touches on high art, because he's very interested in it. And because it is high art that is most directly a function of aesthetic judgment, that is where the rubber ought to meet the road.

But for the various dissident conservatives it's not, and that actually threw me for a loop for a while. Instead, the neo-Amish dissident conservatives are more interested in evaluating and (to the extent they can) guiding political-cultural affairs according to their aesthetic criteria. In short, they are usually motivated by the desire to repudiate the George W Bush Administration and the what they see as that part of America which supported him. This also has (for them) the benefit of asserting social superiority toward those they disdain. Ie, those Republican-voting yokels buy their food at Winn-Dixie (or God forbid McDonald's), but I buy my produce from a farmer's market every Sunday. Therefore I'm cooler than they are, hooray for me.

One problem with this is that they are inclined to overthrow capitalism in favor of some kind of communitarianism or distributism, ie, something they have hidden behind door #3 that has never existed before in a major industrial economy. Mainstream conservatives remember very well how hard it was to defeat Communism and socialism and are willing to live with the very real imperfections of capitalism for the sake of not having to win those battles again.

The other complaint that I have wrt dissident conservatism is that so much of it amounts to welfare for the intelligentsia. This is magnified of course by the fiscal priorities of the Obama Administration. We are at a time where the base of our economy is changing, toward things we don't understand and can't predict. Right now there is a profound call, IMO, for the right tail of the Bell Curve to assert leadership toward creating economically renumerative opportunities for the rest of the world to spend their time harvesting. Instead we have professors of this and environmental directors of that working to preserve their prerogatives.

What Aesthetics?

2009-06-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

The tragic death of Michael Jackson seems as good an opportunity as any to reflect on the 'aesthetics of modern economies', as Koz put it in a recent email exchange which gave rise to my invitation to blog here. Michael, as talented as he undoubtedly was, owed his extreme popularity to the very capitalistic arrangement of the modern recording industry, which has proven itself less able to generate, say, a Mozart.

Koz observes that many on the cultural right get themselves in a jam because they support modern economic arrangement, but lament the poorer level of cultural quality that emerges from the patronage of the mass public as opposed to, say the Esterhazy's or King Ludwig, not to mention the Church. There are some on the right, namely the stricter libertarians and Objectivists, who are fine with the trade-off, but others in the current coalition, variously labelled as the neo-Amish, Cunchycons, paleocons, et al, experience 'aesthetic revulsion about the lifestyle and media of the mainstream Right', the 'Hannity-Palin axis'. This obviously is a larger field than what I would strictly call aesthetics, but there is a continuum here, so my point about royal patronage still relates. For example, Sean Hannity would have a harder time making a living getting his opinion listened to if he didn't have the very capitalistic Fox network and the mass following it generates in programming propping him up. Sarah Palin is more intelligent, I think, but all the same seems to have emerged less, in my opinion, because of her inspired pronouncements on policy, than because of her appeal with the cultural milieu of Fox broadcasting.

I'm of several minds in this, and hope that the opportunity to work on a conversation will clarify some points.

Would it be inaccurate to consider the Hannity-Palin axis to be allied with the neocons? In listing the groups in the conservative coalition (such as it is right now), it strikes me that those I usually consider neocons seem to exhibit quite little in the way of actual culture (with the notable exception of the Catholic variety, such as Weigel and the late Neuhaus, may he rest in peace). Let it be known that I harbor no great appreciation for the neocon ideas. It seems that part of the neocon difficulty is that they bring from the left ideas about 'human nature' in the abstract that don't translate well on the ground. The idea, for example, that Iraqis would naturally desire and embrace democracy is based in an ideology about the human person that is divorced from what we observe in actual cultures.

When I say that neocons lack culture, I don't mean that Cheney, the Kristols and Podheretz aren't well-read, don't enjoy fine wine, listen to Mahler or whatever; it just that their personas come off as tone deaf to the connection between culture and locality; they tend to view the globe as a monolithic thing, and where it isn't, it needs more sameness, as in American policy. Rod Dreher or Joe Sobran or Mark Shea will more often drop in references to things like food, music, literature (and not just to make facile military points in the fashion of VD Hanson), etc. I should add that I do not intend to write off the neocons, though I've been tempted to in recent years; their thought has so influenced thinking on the right that it makes no sense at this point to pretend that the right can make any headway without the neocons.

The other groups (excepting again the libertarians and Objectivists), are more closely connected with local traditions, or at least small-scale cultural phenomena, as the name 'neo-Amish' especially evokes. But certainly Paleos have always been extrememly suspicious about over-arching ideologies and reluctant to favor, say, federal policy over state and local policy.

I will break there for now, though my thoughts in the area are numerous. Back to you, Koz.

If this is the case, then it might be that

Hey Baby, What's Your Signal?

2009-05-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

"Signaling" is relatively new, relatively obscure part of economics (hat tip to Bryan Caplan for this). The idea is, instead of some concrete objective some of our actions are done for the purpose of increasing our status in the perceptions of other people.

The literature on this typically deals with education as the canonical case. Ie, the utility of a Harvard doesn't necessarily depend on anybody learning anything there. Employers want to hire people who can get in to Harvard, applicants want to demonstrate they can get in, and they may want to associate with them too.

In the political world there's a couple of important things that are best understood in terms of signaling. First the bad news: the GOP has been bleeding highly-educated, wealthier coastal voters for two decades. Normally this shows up in public opinion surveys as referenda on social or environmental issues. They believe in gay marriage, the Republicans don't. They believe in global warming, the Republicans don't. But these are mostly signals. Most of the time, these issues don't affect those who claim to care about them. But, caring about them is an important signal of higher social status those who care about monster truck rallies. Suffice to say, it's not good for the GOP that there's a significant number of voters whose primary political motivation is to disassociate themselves from your political base.

On the other hand, the Republicans can also use signaling to their benefit. Most of the time the political actors try to promise various benefits to the voters, with the hope of getting political support in return. This is a difficult game for the GOP at the moment, among other reasons because they are so far out of power that they can't deliver on whatever they promise. But, their is a substantial tradition in America that people who want to earn their own living and mind their own business vote Republican. So, let's point that out and make it a signal. Joe Candidate (R, Podunk) can say "Hey, I don't know what can be accomplished if I am elected. Among other things, that will depend on how many of us there are. But, I want America to be a place where we get rewards for success instead of bailouts for failure. If that's what you want, vote for me."

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt III

2009-05-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

Between democracy, immigration and big government, you can choose any two. You can't have all three. - Eddy Elfenbein

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt II

2009-05-19T05:28:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to Steve Sailer for this one, not that it's any big secret by now. And let's also note that the money spigot still hasn't been turned off. Nobody's writing any new subprime loans, but public-sector pensions, entitlements, and various other forms of pork-barrelling are still going strong.

A Tale of Two (Sort-of) Cities

2009-05-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

Or, why the situation for the Repulicans/conservatives is not as bad as it looks.

http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2009/05/a-week-in-the-american-heartland.html
http://www.leftlanenews.com/bankruptcy-could-cost-gm-chrysler-retirees-23b-in-benefits.html

Teabag Parties

2009-04-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

As most of the world knows already, on April 15, there were "Tea Party" protests in hundreds of places across America. As might be expected, they were the occasion of some polemic back-and-forth. Doctrinaire Leftists and various other parties with an axe to grind against Middle America complained on various grounds: the protests had no grass roots support, the protesters were too quiet about government spending when Bush was President, and so on. Just another day at the office in our culture wars.

This particular episode has at least one interesting wrinkle though. A substantial number of the critics have insisted on calling the protests "Teabag Parties, " either implicitly or explicitly associating the protests with a kinky sex act. The whole thing is kind of a stupid distraction. The Boston Tea Party was a tax protest, the 2009 Tea Parties were tax protests. The sex act underlying the joke has nothing to do with either one. Nonetheless, there are a couple of things worth mentioning.

First of all, the whole thing was in bad taste. As a red-blooded male who's seen my share of Beavis and Butthead, I'll concede that responses like this are overdone. But repeatedly airing this particular gag on supposedly mainstream TV like CNN and MSNBC is cheap, not necessarily because the precious three-year-olds are watching, but because there are adults watching who might want to escape the forced sexualization of the culture, and current events cable ought to be one place to be able to do it.

The second point is a little more subtle. We're living in difficult economic times of course. And it's becoming more and more difficult, for people on various rungs of the social or economic ladder, to achieve financial security. What little security there is, is protected by the nuclear family, ie, the bonds created by getting married and having kids are strong enough to weather some bad times. It's the people who have those bonds who are protesting at the Tea Parties. They're not looking to the government for help, they want the government to get out of the way of earning a living.

The other side, the people who don't get married, don't have kids, are in palpable danger of being hung out to dry in this recession. Therefore they have to rely on political power to protect government transfer programs, which require high taxes. Unfortunately for them, the American tax base simply isn't big enough to support the government in the place where the Obama Administration is leaving us at any tax rate. They can make jokes about teabags if they want to but in the end the joke is on them.

The Reset, pt II

2009-04-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

Let me fill in a couple gaps from my last post. Much of the economic commentary over the last couple of weeks at least has been focused on the banks. Are they solvent or not? In this context it's important to emphasize that even though we are obviously in difficult economic times, the nature of the problems is different than it was as recently as six months ago. At that time, it looked like there was a decent chance all lending and most other economic activity would come to a screeching halt. We should count ourselves fortunate that that didn't happen.

Numerous commentators have complained that in spite of all the government help the banks have gotten, they are still not lending in the volume we would like to see, instead they are ratholing the money away to shore up their balance sheets. This is true, but it's only half the picture at best. Because we are in a recesssion, the demand for credit from creditworthy borrowers is contracted as much as the supply. The quality borrowers that do want credit are able to get it on reasonable terms.

Therefore let's ignore the banks for a while. Frankly we don't know whether the banks are solvent or not. They are fine on a cash flow basis now. Whether or not they fail in the future depends on the extent to which there will be too many defaults in the their loan portfolio, on loans which have been performing up till now.

What we really need is a sector shift, a trend toward the production of goods and services which will be valuable in the future, and may not have been in the past.

Edit: in an important way, we can't help the banks anyway. More than most industries, in finance perception is reality. That is, whether or not the banks actually are insolvent, they are perceived to be insolvent at the moment at least. They are having serious problems borrowing from anyone else except the government. Therefore they have a strong incentive to hoard the capital they do have. If the government gives more financial support, that will help the perception as well as the reality, but only to an extent. Many of our bigger banks, especially Citi, have glommed together so many things and made so many deals, that it's very difficult to get a definitive handle on their financial status. And in this environment, what you don't know definitely can hurt you. Therefore the banks' financial conditions needs to be simpler as well as stronger, and that takes time.

The Other Reset Button

2009-04-14T12:05:00.000-07:00

On macroeconomic things, I tend to be free market enthusiast of the George-Gilderite type. As far the web goes, this school of thought is probably best personified by Larry Kudlow, Rich Karlgaard, and James Pethokoukis. Unfortunately, my team has been taking it on the chin over the course of our current economic problems. The natural optimism of this school has fallen flat, as the gap between what is and what ought to be gets clearer and bigger.

I mention this because I like very much like a post Rich Karlgaard has up in Forbes. Frankly it's a great deal more credible than some other things he's written. Though Rich makes it seem boldly contrarian, there's actually a whispering consensus that the US economy will return to positive (though small) growth in 4Q 2009 and 1Q 2010. This is in itself an important development that will have, or at least ought to have, significant consequences for how we handle economic issues in public debate. Our problems are still severe, but no longer nearly as urgent. Therefore we should engineer economic policy with a strong determination to get it right, instead of getting something plausible in operation right away.

But the bigger issue is, let's say we're in a weak recovery by the end of the year, then what? Once people have adapted to the new economic reality and stabilized their financial situation, what will they buy? Nobody knows (and that's actually quite important). We have some idea of what things might look like financially but it's all a big cipher qualitatively and aesthetically. It's uncharted territory. In Rich's case, it means tooling around Northern California in a new a $4000 bicycle, which can be rationalized to be actually cheap compared to the jet plane he's forgoing.

This is the sort of thing we have to find out for ourselves, individually and collectively. And we will if we get the chance. But there is a powerful tendency among liberals and bobos to deploy capital towards market failing but politically favored ends. If this happens our economy will stay where it is at best, or deteriorate further. A substantial part of the political dogfighting in the next year or so will be about whether this happens or not. And if so, to what extent.

Long Way to Zero

2009-02-22T20:30:00.000-08:00

Some people like to buy stocks after they've substantially gone down in value. Sometimes the thought is, that after the stock has already depreciated it's less risky. But that's a mistake. No matter where is now or where it came from, it can always depreciate by 10%. And another 10%. And again, and again, and again. As the Wall Street-cliche has it, it's a long way to zero.

I was thinking about this in reading a post by David Henderson at Econlog. It seems like the current Administration and to a substantial extent the voters have given themselves to try just about anything to "fix" the recession on the theory that things can't get any worse. One thing that has me particularly distressed about our current economic misfortunes is that Americans at large still in my opinion have very little perception of the tremendous economic value that we still have, and how close we are to losing it.

Libertarians

2009-02-19T08:56:00.000-08:00

I’m trying to show how attractive classical liberalism can be once it is scoured of the conservative barnacles of the now irrelevant Cold War alliance and once it begins to take seriously (rather than just ignore) the powerful arguments of the best contemporary liberal thought. - Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson wants to believe that the association with the Right has corrupted American libertarianism. Unfortunately for him, he's exactly backwords on that point. The historical association with the Right is the only thing that keeps libertarianism even remotely legit. Without it, libertarianism in America amounts to, "Pleeeease let me smoke my dope in peace." It may be a decent argument even, but it impresses nobody.

And about engaging the best arguments contemporary liberal thought, that's like talking to the best cello player in Fresno.

American Islam

2009-02-17T16:08:00.001-08:00

David Frum has a new post up about Mormonism, which strikes me as being essentially an American form of Islam, some of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the Islamic version of Islam. Theologically, both are founded on kooky precepts which nobody really believes. But both are sustained by as a means to support communities of their believers. Fortunately for Mormons, America has never been the site of Hobbsean war of all against all. Therefore the tribal violence of Mormons and against Mormons has gone away, leaving just good stuff, communitarianism, strong families, etc., to continue in its wake.

Btw, the apparent point of Frum's post is to rehabilitate the hypothetical Presidential candidacies of Mitt Romney and Jon Hunstman. I don't think that'll work. Eventually somebody has to take the theological kookiness of Mormonism seriously, and GOP base voters will if nobody else does.

Snobbery, pt II

2009-02-17T15:20:00.000-08:00

What he said.

It may be obvious from the link but it's worth pointing about exactly why the Will Wilkinsons of the world will play second fiddle to the Sarah Palins if freedom in America has any future. Simply speaking there are by orders of magnitude more Palins that Wilkinsons so in any coalition containing them both, the Palins will be the lead dog.

It's a little less obvious (and counterintuitive to many) but the Palins are actually smarter for the same reasons. That is, because Will Wilkinson wants to impose top-down social control over their "reactionary" impulses, he is necessarily going to be on the wrong end of a Hayekian information gap, something that any libertarian ought to know.

The Message, pt II

2009-02-17T09:44:00.000-08:00

A day of organizing is worth a week of blathering about "strategy," and an hour of fund-raising is worth far more than a month of navel-gazing op-ed columns pumped out by the punditocracy. - Robert Stacy McCain

I agree with (the other) McCain most of the time, and in fact with most of the post the quote is from. But as much as we might be disappointed with the conservative punditocracy over the last couple of months or years, we can't get by without them. Organizing, candidate recruitment and fundraising are all fairly substantial commitments in the lives of those who participate in them. What is it that we're shooting for that justifies all that energy? I don't think we can be successful in those areas until we get some decent answers.

Winning the Debate

2009-02-17T08:36:00.000-08:00

Back in the day, conservatives used to console themselves that they were "winning the debate" over this issue or that. That is, even if we hadn't yet changed the laws to our liking, nobody with an intellectual credibility was willing to defend the liberal status quo with respect to rent control, Communism, or welfare. I remember being occasionally being frustrated upon hearing this, especially in the middle-to-late 90s, where I thought we'd done enough to be winning more than debates.

Now of course, conservative influence is at a low tide, so we should be grateful for small favors. So I guess we ought to be happy that even though in Realpolitik terms we've lost everything that matters, we are in fact winning the debate, for the first time in quite a while I might add.

Most of it has to do with the stimulus package. Recently Matthew Ygesias criticized Harvard economist Greg Mankiw for not being sufficiently condemnatory of Sen Jim DeMint's alternative to the Obama stimulus. From here, he conclude that Mankiw is not merely a reputable economist but also something of a Republican hack. In Jon Chait's mind, this is a "devastating critique."

At one level at least this is plainly ridiculous. Frankly I'd be interested to know what Mankiw thinks about DeMint's plan, but the zeroth order reason why Mankiw hasn't written anything about it is because the DeMint plan had no chance of becoming law and nobody took it that way. And Yglesias surely knows this because a couple of links earlier he criticizes Mankiw's own ideas as being politically implausible.

What's impressed me most about the recent debates is that the Right, largely but not completely represented by libertarian economists, has not only argued their corner well but also demonstrated much more emotional balance about the whole thing. Somehow liberals can't shake off their pissed-off malcontent personas even after they've won.

Cost of Snobbery

2009-02-14T12:52:00.000-08:00

"Here I'm starting from the premise that American politics has been fitfully sorting itself into a meritocracy-versus-populism dynamic, with one party (the Democrats) dominated by the mass upper class and the other party (the GOP) representing the middle and working-class voters who resent this newish elite, for good reasons and for bad. The European model Reihan gestures at has succeeded - to date - by largely marginalizing the latter temper, with the result that the continent's right-populist types (your Le Pens and your Haiders) are simultaneously more extreme and more powerless than the equivalent figures in the United States. But conservative populism in the United States is way too potent to be marginalized in that fashion, I think...." - Ross Douthat

Ross writes an interesting post about how libertarians might fit in the big-picture American political dynamic as it evolves over the next decade or so. Leaving aside the libertarians for a moment, I disagree with Ross that right-populism in American cannot be marginalized. I for one think that's America's biggest political risk for the moment.

More than that though, we should wonder why the populism should currently be associated with the Right in America. Fifty years ago, it was associated with the Left (and politically speaking found its home with the Democrats). One one level, it makes more sense that way: modern economies, especially modern capitalist economies, are socially volatile to the point the people with the strong ties to the blood and soil might want help from the political establishment to protect them from being knocked around by incomprehensible forces bigger than they are. Nonetheless, it doesn't work that way, at least now. And the reason why is very illuminating.

Relatively speaking, the conservative base in America has strong families, which, besides being intrinsically valuable, are also protection during bad times. It's a very important but largely ignored reality that intrafamily economics are much more efficient than the general economy. The consequence of this is, with respect to being able to provide for themselves the conservative base has a broader imagination than typical liberals do. We get to slightly comic situation where the supposedly simple-minded Palins shoot their own food, whereas people with master's degrees in comparative literature are agitating for stimulus packages. It seems obvious to me, but the idea that not everybody can get a bailout is actually quite controversial.

Not Good News

2009-02-09T13:11:00.000-08:00

We all know that the Obama stimulus package seems likely to pass at this point, and that's not good news. But what's at least as interesting is that how this reflects what the American people want, or will want. Check this out. A man in Elkhart Indiana asking a question to President Obama not only wants a bailout, he doesn't want to suffer the inconvenience of waiting in line to get it. It's quite an honor for the American taxpayer to be able to send his money to some guy he's never met, for nothing in return and at that person's convenience. It's nice work if you can get it.

This is an important transition point toward becoming a Euro-style social democracy. The political class wants to sever the the bounds of accountability imposed by people from flyover country. So it pushes out federal money so as to make everybody dependent on their largesse. From there, he who pays the piper calls the tune. But takes two to do this tango, and the power-happy pol has found his partner.