False Denials of Comparison Between Roads and Families

In further proof of his lax moral standards,* it took Mangeek too long to read my post responding to one of his recent comments for his own response to attract much attention, so I'll reprint it here:

... what I'm trying to say, Justin, is that I think conservatives (for the most part) are finding all the wrong explanations for why things are the way they are...

I can put a dollar-value on the per-pound impact of the weight of a car on roads. It's a direct cause-and-effect relationship that allows large vehicle drivers to externalize part of the societal costs they are responsible for onto those of us who live more modest lifestyles.

Meanwhile, while you can draw correlations between marital status and costs on society, I'm not sure they're cause-and-effect. In any case, we already 'reward and punish things we like/dislike' via different tax rates on married people, homeowners, business owners, and trust-fund kids.

Maybe society would be better-served overall if families were encouraged to (for example) drive safer, more efficient, and less costly vehicles (or buy smaller homes, or not take out $BIG student loans, etc.) than if we mandated which gender and legal configurations they were allowed to be. Just Sayin'.

It's important to note that my post was in reaction to his questioning the necessity of moral judgment in society. In the above, he does little more than agree that he's got no problem with the practice in concept, just on the particulars.

But on those particulars, his argument is clearly flawed. As a point of fact, he cannot "put a dollar-value on the per-pound impact of the weight of a car on roads." He could, perhaps, put such a value on the effects of a specific car under very narrow circumstances, but it could hardly accurately describe the different usages of the actual people he'd like to tax.

Let's say Joe drives a vehicle with a heavy curb weight — some kind of SUV — but he hardly ever puts additional weight inside it (after all, he's only 120 lbs), and he only drives it a quarter mile each morning and afternoon before he is across his city's border and therefore off the roads for which he's ostensibly being taxed. Meanwhile, 400 lb Bob has a much lighter curb-weight car, but he typically drives it filled to brimming with books and other heavy objects; moreover, his routine calls for him to drive it 10 miles each way across the town in which he lives.

And that's before we get into their driving styles. Joe takes it easy, while driving, and tries to slow down for intersections over greater distances. Bob is heavy on the gas pedal and the brakes, very often peeling out when starting and skidding when stopping.

In short, Mangeek cannot present his moral preference as a clear transfer of cost in a cause-effect relationship. Indeed, work in all of the relevant variables and defining the cost of cars by their weight isn't much different than attributing costs to divorce and out-of-wedlock births. All else being equal, I've no doubt that heavier vehicles exact more of a toll on the roads, but the same can be said of broken families.

Nowhere is Mangeek's skewed comparison more clear than in his closing. We aren't comparing a soft "encouragement" of vehicle types to a stiff penalty against particular relationships. Quite the opposite is true: He wants to exact a penalizing tax against owners of larger vehicles, while he objects to mere recognition of a family type that still ought to be considered to be ideal.

* Note: This opening phrase is tongue in cheek.

Dismissing the Fundamental Political Question

Marc's post, yesterday, about the correspondence of a growing gap in wealth and a growing gap in once-expected behaviors between economic classes has led down some interesting roads and, I think, exposed some problematic thinking. One comment worth its own consideration comes from Mangeek:

"...shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms"

Why is this necessary? Let people live the way they want. Maybe traditional institutions and 1950s ideas about what a family is aren't what's best in a stagnating, globalizing economy.

America is clearly not going to be the dominant world economy in twenty years. We shouldn't stuff our heads in the sand and pretend that if everyone got married and stopped looking at porn, we'd get back on top. We need to break out of traditions and try some New Stuff (or some Old Stuff, depending on how you look at it).

Taking the second paragraph first, it's anachronistic to align economic malaise with a vision of our society as calcifying in dogmatic adherence to traditional norms. New Stuff won't inherently be beneficial within a context of changing circumstances just because its new. Indeed, a key benefit of the social standards that evolved up until around the middle of the last century was that they provided stability allowing society to adapt and address the circumstances of a changing world.

The circumstance that progressive economic and social policies require precisely flips the equation: They take economic growth as the given foundation on which to build a system of radical social change. That won't work. Children dealing with the fallout of their parents' divorce or growing up with the instability of an unmarried household won't be as well positioned to identify and address the changing world. Young men indulging their every sexual whim in a protracted adolescence will behave as their self-absorbed lifestyles suggest in other contexts, as well.

That doesn't mean that we must revert entirely to an increasingly abandoned social model, or that we shouldn't strive to maintain some real advances (the status of women high among them). It is folly, though, to take economic decline as an excuse to do whatever we want to do.

But then, Mangeek has proven in other conversations that he isn't actually interested in complete freedom of behavior. His willingness to use government coercion to get people to abandon large vehicles implicitly points to the problem with the first paragraph quoted above. Basically, what people want to do and what the community requires them to do for its broader health aren't in such accord that we can open the gates to unfettered individualism.

Generally speaking, there are two approaches to dealing with the social need to control and direct behavior. One is to create social institutions to which people hew voluntarily, but that impose expectations. Marriage is an excellent example: The institution has a variety of benefits, chief among them being social approval and support of the core household relationship, but it imposes responsibilities of fidelity and devotion. Its demands also extend to those doing the sorts of things that best happen within marriage, such as having children. The broad consensus about the importance of the institution creates pressure while leaving individuals free to engage in behavior that deviates from the norm.

The other approach to imposing necessary controls is to directly enforce them through government, whether by financial penalties, criminal prosecution, or the darker insinuations of a police state. In this case, a relatively small group defines behavior for everybody, and those definitions (we can expect) will tend to resemble their own limited preferences and to profit their social groups.

"Let people live the way they want" sounds like a liberating plea, but it stops where joint action begins. Those who want to live within a society that acknowledges across its institutions the unique nature of intimate male-female relationships (namely, that they tend to generate children) are out of luck. The residents of Cranston cannot even decorate their shared public school with a benign old prayer banner. In short, "let people live the way they want" is at odds with the first, more free, means of directing society described above.

Consequently, the slogan will lead toward the second, more authoritarian, means. As social problems emerge, the limited group with power will either dictate a growing regiment of behavior or prevent others from developing solutions to solve them.

Trillo's Flawed Government Theory

I don't relish the observation, but it seems to me that Rep. Joe Trillo (R, Warwick) is displaying an unhealthy political philosophy in his quest for a Quonset casino:

"It would have to be bigger than Foxwoods, bigger than Mohegan Sun, otherwise it's not going to work," he said. "To just go with a regional casino, it won't be able to compete."

Trillo also envisioned a scenario in which a single operator would buy and run the privately-owned Twin River and Newport Grand, and the new Quonset Point casino. Asked if he had been approached by anyone interested in making such a major investment while the Mohegan Sun struggles financially, Trillo said an emphatic no: "I have purposely stayed away from any casino operators."

It's well and good, if true, that Trillo is avoiding the corrupting influence of those whose money would be necessary to make his vision a reality, but of itself, a vision of such scope and specificity is not an appropriate basis for government action. It isn't the job of elected officials to decide what sort of business on what sort of scale for what sort of market their area ought to have and then go about developing it.

Government should stick to ensuring that the marketplace remains competitive, broadly, and that its policies are not hindering the people from pursuing activities that, within limited boundaries of order and cultural integrity, they believe will be profitable and beneficial.

The Mood on the Right

Roger Kimball expresses a pessimism with which I confess more than a little sympathy:

Tootling around Washington, I was struck by — well, not by its prosperity, exactly, but by what is clearly a lavish outlay of funds — your funds, in fact. Everywhere I turned there were huge building cranes. In one spot, I counted seven over the space of a few blocks. It looked a little like a third world country suddenly flush from newly discovered mineral reserves of some sort. Which I suppose describes the situation in Washington accurately enough, except that for "mineral reserves" you need to substitute "deficit spending." I remember meeting my friend Edward Shils several years ago in Washington: "My, they live well on our money," he said. What would he say today, I wonder, when Washington has come more and more to resemble Versailles circa 1780.

The cranes are markers of a "permanent political class," Kimball goes on to say, living well off of government largess and the investments on inside information and special-interest gifts that flow their way. And what's true for money is true for power — power over the smallest details of our lives.

Something’s happening — maybe it already has happened — to the republic conceived in liberty. The Tea Party sounded the alarm in 2010 and there was a rustle-bustle of acknowledgment. Their voices seem oddly, ominously silent now.

Part of that sense, I'm persuaded, comes from the (quite deliberate) allocation of newspaper column inches that might have gone to Tea Party–type stories that have instead been devoted to the antics of the Occupy movement. More broadly, and more hopefully, I think the Tea Party has gone from a movement to an organization, or rather organizations peppered throughout the civic sphere.

As an outside, grassroots movement, the Tea Party managed to sway some elections. Still, 2011 and its debt-ceiling debacle proved that the movement hadn't broken the threshold beyond which the political class hesitates to govern by illusion. And so, we all await the next election, puzzling out how to get a real reaction from government.

Conservatives' pessimism, then, may be the disquiet accompanying the sense that a lack of noise means a lack of action and momentum. We'll see whether that's the case. In the meantime, it's worthwhile to continue pointing to the path that it would be disastrous to take.

Big Finance Likes Totalitarianism, but Democracy Requires Hard Lessons

I'll admit that I don't have much new to say about the continuing activities of the state-appointed budget commission now ruling East Providence:

The state-appointed budget commission overseeing the city's finances convened for the first time Wednesday, chose Michael O'Keefe, a former state budget director, as its president, and established its first priority: improving the city’s cash flow.

Essentially, that means debt; the city needs $10 million in tax anticipation notes, and the lowering of its rating to "junk" will make that "more difficult and expensive," as O'Keefe puts it. It all comes back to government debt and charming investors. We've discussed previously that the municipal takeovers are meant as "a statement to Wall Street," and the point merits continued emphasis. What Wall Street likes about state-imposed budget commissions is that they open the door to options that might benefit civic units as economic entities, but not necessarily as self-determinant civil societies. The state can take money from other parts of the state to hand to struggling cities and towns; it can impose taxes on local residents without fearing democratic reaction; it can change policies and, ultimately, contracts to address shortfalls.

At bottom, the problem is that the way in which the state determines a preferred mix of these solutions will depend on the influences on it. That means not only special interests, like organized labor, but also the general priorities of the class of people who occupy the state's bureaucracy and elected positions. The people who actually live in a city or town are not likely to rate very highly, and voters in other cities and towns are not likely to pay all that much attention.

I'd suggest that a healthier solution — in the long term, and with an eye toward effective democracy — would be to let a city or town run out of money. Let it reach the point at which it cannot provide services or pay employees. Or, alternately, that it must raise taxes and impose fees almost immediately. If we're to be a self-governing people, we have to experience, together, the consequences of incompetent leaders and bad decisions.

Of course, if people start learning such lessons on the small, local scale, they might begin applying them at the state and national levels. And we couldn't have that, now could we?

Open Thread: Traditional Politicking vs. Occupy Wall Street

Open thread question, especially to those who have been impressed by at least the energy of the Occupy Wall Street movement: As several hundred people assemble in Pawtuxet this evening, on the shortest day of the year and just a few days before Christmas to make an important decision regarding their future political direction, how is this assembly of citizens looking to make a difference in their goverment and society any less worthy of respect than Occupy Wall Street?

The Understand Occupy Wall Street, All You Need To Understand is All of Political Philosophy, Part 1

Looking towards Marxism to explain Occupy Wall Street, as a number of writers have recently done, doesn't go far enough to explain the sort-of-movement's set of agenda items, or its choice of means for achieving its agenda. To fully understand the Occupy Wall Street Protests, its Providence counterpart, and how they differ from the Tea Party organizations, a wider view of political philosophy is needed -- in fact, a view of all of it. Fortunately, understanding all of political philosophy is not quite as daunting a task as it may initially sound (especially when you have bloggers to guide you).

Alfred North Whitehead once said that "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato". If you believe Whitehead, all you need to do to understand all of philosophy, political philosophy included, is digest the entire works of Plato. Of course, Whitehead’s claim was ridiculously broad; obviously it was the combination of Plato and Aristotle who at one point or another said everything on the subject of philosophy there is to be said.

Slight hyperboles aside, it is safe to say that most if not all of the important concepts still used in philosophy today were developed by the ancient philosophers. The differences that separate modern from ancient philosophy are in the normative, i.e. in the widespread acceptance of basic set of rights possessed by everyone, commoners and aristocracy alike. In the words of 20th century philosopher Allan Bloom, rights are “new in modernity, not a part of the common sense language of politics or of classical political philosophy". In the ancient world, it was possible to think deeply and be concerned about concepts such as justice and virtue, yet still not be troubled by a practice such as slavery. This was not possible after the idea of universal equality had taken root. The political implication of this, also in Bloom's words, is that modernity is “constituted by the political regimes founded on freedom and equality, hence on the consent of the governed".

I don't believe that philosophers or historians have settled on any single explanation of how the idea of the political equality of all men (and eventually women) crept decisively into society's way of thinking over the millennia between Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment, but one theory worth pondering is that it was catalyzed by the spread of Christianity, with its core belief in all men being equal in the eyes of God. We do know that a connection between a Creator of all and equal rights for all was expressed at the beginning of the American Declaration of Independence, meaning that America’s founders either really believed in this idea, or if they didn’t, they were unable to identify a better alternative to base the existence of equal rights upon.

In tracing how ideas of liberty and equality made their way to the United States, historian Bernard Bailyn has noted they arrived in various forms: "Enlightenment abstractions", "common law precedents", "covenant theology", and "classical analogy", some more philosophical, some more practical. The Enlightenment abstractions -- the most purely philosophical part -- included the early and very successful theory of individual equality that had been posited by John Locke. Locke's idea was that all men possessed a natural freedom in a "state of nature", but that other men and unpleasant aspects of nature threatened that freedom. In response, individuals made a contract with another, agreeing to give up a small part of their natural freedom, to protect themselves from the threats that had the power to limit their freedom in a more severe way.

There were two great counterpoints to the ideas of Locke. One came from Edmund Burke. Burke rejected the idea that the goal of society was to restore man to life as it might have been in a state of nature. Burke doubted that such a state had existed in a meaningful way at any place or time. Man had always lived surrounded by other men and, in response, society had evolved habits and institutions that could protect an “ordered liberty” that would be something substantially less without them.

The other great reaction to Locke was that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Unlike Burke, Rousseau shared Locke's idea that the goal of political organization was to get man as close to an ideal state of nature has possible. However, unlike Locke, he didn't believe it would follow naturally from the pursuit of individual interests. Instead, Rousseau believed everyone had to subsume their individual wills into society's "general will" in order to experience true freedom in modern existence.

I would not go quite as far as Alfred North Whitehead did in tracing everything back to any single thinker or very small set of thinkers but, over the past 300 years, there hasn't been very much added to the combinations of underlying assumptions about the modes of political interaction explored by Locke, Burke and Rousseau. Their work has endured for centuries, because they each painted coherent pictures of how human instincts and intuitions about political interaction combine with conscious ideas of individual freedom and equality. There are some modes of human thinking that don't really change, and a good comprehensive description from seventeenth or eighteenth century still applies today -- so long as we are willing to stick with that normative idea that all men and women are created equal.

Social science taxonomists of various stripes would say that Locke, Burke and Rousseau gave expression to modes of thinking that are liberal (in the classical sense), conservative (which is a little different from "American" conservatism) and radical (which is a different thing from liberal), respectively. (But just in case, I've missed someone big, I will create an open thread immediately below this post, for anyone who wants to make a case for a fourth, orthogonal political philosopher).

What has been added to the work of the early modern political theorists is a whole lot of history, allowing for some assessment of whether the various theories are really all that logical, once the reality of human nature is added.

Looking across the breadth of political philosophy, the differences between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street become obvious. At the very fundamental level, the movements capture very different aspects of possible human reactions to political problems. The Tea Party movement, with its focus on Constitutional government, i.e. on preserving institutions and habits that have served many people very well for many years, are mounting a Burkean defense (of a day-to-day system, somewhat paradoxically, that is heavily justified in terms of the ideas of Locke.)

The Occupy Wall Streeters and Occupy Providencers, on the other hand, are tapping into the side of human nature explored by Rousseau -- the philosopher of the big three whose ideas by-far provide the worst guide for building a livable political program...

Open Thread: Is there a Big Idea in Modern Political Philsophy that's Not Somewhere in the Work of John Locke, Edmund Burke, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

I can't think of a body for this post that makes clearer what's in the title.

The Cultural Cycle We're In

Commenting on the image cut by "union protesters" (that is, protesting union members), Alice Losasso of West Warwick quotes Scottish historian Alexander Tytler as follows:

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

I'd like to think that the cycle can be broken, but I'm not so sure. As Tytler indicates in the preceding paragraph, the forces pushing toward decline control the vote because they get goodies from the system. The topic brings to mind a comment that Phil left yesterday to one of my pension posts:

I think it is appropriate to try to stifle reform that targets aging retirees. Do you want your generation to be the one that breaks contracts and faith with your elders once they have stopped working?

My "elders" fashioned the yoke of government regulation and inside dealing that is strangling our economy; they set fire to the cultural pillars that must stand in order to sustain liberty and abundance over the long term; they worshiped their own untrammeled independence to such a degree that they failed to reproduce in sufficient numbers to maintain the Ponzi schemes that they developed; and they made themselves promises at the expense of those whom they deigned to beget. The generation that once declared, "don't trust anyone over 30," is now insisting, "don't discomfit anyone over 60."

For my part, I'm utterly unpersuaded that those now approaching middle age, much less those who are younger still, are therefore obligated to maintain the scheme. There is no moral obligation for a young, struggling family to ensure a cushy retirement that maintains an arbitrarily high standard of living for people who have ceased to produce. But to enforce that obligation, and others like it, my "elders" will be only too happy to place increasing power in the hands of an incompetent governing class that will persist long after the gray years of the Boomers — probably until the entire civilization collapses or a bloody revolution sets things aright. From my perspective, some rational, not-exactly-arduous reforms now would be preferable.

ADDENDUM.

Russ was happy to point out in the comments that the Tytler quotation is actually a common misattribution. That's fine. Just as I wouldn't argue that a cultural observation must be true because some historian made it, I won't discount that it might be true even if he didn't say it, especially for use in a more philosophical-type blog post.

What Kind of Progress?

Peter Thiel's cover story for the October 3 National Review is worth a read. Essentially, he breaks "progress" into distinct components and argues that the United States is losing steam on the most important. Part of our problem, he argues, is that we've culturally begun to behave as if every aspect of society moves forward in some sort of inexorable march:

Today's aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless fake cultural wars around identity politics are the main reason we have been able to ignore the tech slowdown for so long.

It's not only on the Left that one finds this (although it seems most pronounced, there). One often gets the impression during general political/philosophical discussions that the modern zeitgeist includes a strong faith that history and evolution inevitably move toward an Elysium of technological wonders, economic surplus, and unmitigated equality not of opportunity, but of outcome.

So, moving toward a social shift that advocates successfully paint in the colors of advancement — whether same-sex marriage, de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants, the silencing of supposedly intolerant voices, or public funding for abortion via government control of healthcare — comes to be seen as inherently compatible with innovation and liberty. That imperative holds no matter the method of achieving the shift.

Political Donors as the Judges of Right and Wrong

Readers of the Sunday Providence Journal will be familiar with the "In Quotes" column that typically appears on page A2; basically it's a few notable quotes from the week, usually with a picture of the speaker. This week, one in particular caught my eye, because it's from Brown professor Wendy Schiller, and I think it expresses a surprisingly simplistic thought for a political science professional.

On the huge inflow of funds to Gina Raimondo's campaign fund:

If this person who's advocating changing the pension system can attract that kind of support, it is an external signal that she's on the right track.

Actually, it's not. It's a signal that people with big money to devote to politics like something about Raimondo's prospects. No doubt, some of it has been donated in admiration for her pension efforts, but (as I've been suggesting for a while, now) some of it is surely related to her likelihood to be a progressive warrior when she translates her pension caché into a higher office.

It's a bit humorous, though, to read a Brown professor seeing big campaign money as a form of validation. I haven't followed Schiller closely enough to offer this as more than a musing, but I do wonder whether her analysis would be the same were the treasurer likely to be a far-right stalwart once she'd moved on from the pension mess and the treasurer's office.

Will OWS Have Next Steps?

Michael Morgenstern, a Brown University graduate and blogger sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement, does an excellent job of summing up OWS' political and organizational let's-call-them-challenges-for-now with this short passage...

Anarchy doesn’t work. Income disparity will always exist to some extent. Destroying a system rather than working with it (at least to some extent) is extremely dangerous, and very few people in history has shown themselves to be good at that. Change is difficult, and it requires a vision of an alternate future. If the vision is yet to be formed, we need a roadmap to the vision. And the greatest truth: not everybody can be represented in every element of this movement. Like a clever politician, the movement has allowed each member to see him or herself in it; but like any politician, its true test will come when it is asked to actually make a decision.

Ah, Communism: the Political Structure of the People!

This is about what one should expect from a communist utopia:

Until May, a sign inside the gate identified the property as the Beijing Customs Administration Vegetable Base and Country Club. The placard was removed after a Chinese reporter sneaked inside and published a story about the farm producing organic food so clean the cucumbers could be eaten directly from the vine. ...

Many of the nation's best food companies don't promote or advertise. They don't want the public to know that their limited supply is sent to Communist Party officials, dining halls reserved for top athletes, foreign diplomats, and others in the elite classes. The general public, meanwhile, dines on foods that are increasingly tainted or less than healthful — meats laced with steroids, fish from ponds spiked with hormones to increase growth, milk containing dangerous additives such as melamine, which allows watered-down milk to pass protein-content tests.

Communism, like socialism more broadly, is about the haves buying off the have-nots with promises and rhetoric to make their tyranny sound charitable. At the end of the day, the wall around the edible food supply is just as high or higher, and the people outside have less opportunity to develop their own.

Does Anyone Else Find It Ironic, Or Possibly Redundant, That They've Come to Occupy the Most Anti-Corporate State in the Country?

A contingent from "Occupy Wall Street" is now gearing up to "Occupy Providence". Earlier this evening, WPRO's Matt Allen interviewed Bob Plain. He is covering the Occupiers' Rhode Island campaign, which is currently in the planning stage. (Hey, Bob, when you get a minute, can we hear more about the hand signals employed at their meetings?)

From the beginning, the Occupiers' principles and goals have been passionate but somewhat diffuse, not to say vague. Even The Daily Show professed to being a little unclear on the point. But since then, the original "Occupy Wall Street" chapter has penned a Declaration. From it and from statements by Occupiers themselves, they seem pretty down on corporations and capitalism and business.

Well, go-o-o-o-lly, Occupiers, welcome to Rhode Island!!! Your principles were implemented here long ago. Accordingly, we now have the worst business climate in the country, with the corresponding economy, (non)employment rate and shriveled tax base to show for it. With the state having been corporately pre-trashed before your arrival, you should feel right at home!

By all means, stay and "occupy". But you don't need to go all out. Rest up for the next state. Patronize our coffee shops. Be sure to make your way over to Thayer Street at some point (you'll love it).

In terms of the mission, your work here is done.

Snow Drifting Across the True Meaning of the Wall

A central reason that I don't often write about pop literature and such — apart from the fact that, as fun as doing so can be, my time is better spent elsewise — is that the online practice of warning about spoilers seems to me to indicate a potential threat to the sanctity of those moments when good books (or movies) can surprise and offer unrepeatable moments of revelation. But I've stumbled on a cross-blog conversation about George R.R. Martin's recently released A Dance with Dragons among some progressives, and their points seem to me to indicate a profound difference in the way people of differing politics view the world.

However, offering my take would be impossible without casual declaration of the single biggest spoiler of the plot, so be warned, ye who've yet to read all of the books of the Song of Ice and Fire series so far.

As I recall, Martin was a fundraising fan of Barack Obama during the last election season, so I've no illusion that he's setting out to write books with a conservative moral. That said, authors who accurately capture something in human nature inevitably support a conservative reading of society, because (as I've assessed) such a reading more accurately captures reality. Thus, it might be true that Martin would develop to substantial degree an underlying theme without intending or liking the real-life sociopolitical conclusions that naturally extend from it.

For those who haven't been following the series, the story is centered on the island/continent nation of Westeros, which more or less mirrors North America in climate, if not shape. The South is hot and somewhat exotic in a Central American way; the North is always cold. The seasons, while proceeding in the order of our own, don't follow a set calendar.

The society resembles a Medieval kingdom in which magic exists around the fringes, although it was stronger in living memory and appears to be resurgent. Events in the first book, A Game of Thrones, set into motion political turmoil just as dragons are heralding the return of magic on another continent to the distant east and dark, cold forces are rumbling in the far north. Those forces manifest in a race of Others, who may be generically described as ice demons with the power to raise up the dead as zombies.

The character with whom we're most concerned, here, is Jon Snow. "Snow" is the surname that the people of the North give to illegitimate children who cannot be fully integrated into their families (and lines of heredity), and Jon's father was the premiere lord of the region, the Warden of the North, Eddard Stark. (It's been clear since the first book, at least to me, that Jon is actually the son of Eddard's sister and a prince from a line of dragon-riding royalty, both dead, but that's not important, just now.)

Locked out of his family's development among the various nobles who'd begun jockeying for position, Jon went farther north to serve in the Night's Watch — a brotherhood charged with defending the northern border of the kingdom. Truth be told, the northern border pretty well defends itself, inasmuch as an ancient Wall of ice seven hundred feet high spans the entire continent from east to west. Moreover, with the fading of magic in the world, the dark creatures of the deep northern forest have sunk to the status of old wives tales, and the Wall is mainly seen as protecting the kingdom from the occasional raids of Wildlings — tribes of people who live in a more primitive manner but consider themselves more free.

The Night's Watch has therefore mainly become a maintenance crew that the kingdom uses in large degree as a service option for criminals who would otherwise be killed or left to rot in prison, led by more respectable characters who have for one reason or another found cause to step outside of the kingdom's society. Various circumstances (primarily the mass death of many of the brotherhood's most competent figures) conspire to place the teenage Jon Snow in the position of Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and Dances, the fifth book of a projected seven, spends much time describing his effort to prepare for the gathering supernatural storm beyond the Wall.

The core component of his strategy is to bring the Wildlings across the border to civilization — both to help man the Watch's score of crumbling fortresses and to prevent the tribes' becoming an army of zombies when the Others make their move. In Jon's approach, Alyssa Rosenberg, of ThinkProgress, sees a progressive restructuring of society, and the fissure that becomes a gulf between Left and Right emerges in a single adjective:

... Jon responds by becoming a nation-builder, redefining "the realms of men" to include the Wildlings, integrating them into Westeros's society with intermarriages, land, rebuilt castles, and alliances. In that decision, Jon does more to reconceptualize what Westeros should be than any of the five kings he’s stayed neutral from.

It's an astonishing act of political and moral vision. And his brothers murder him for it. Even more so than [Eddard's] execution, Jon's death feels to me like the most fully-realized tragedy in the novel. Where his father was a decent man of limited vision who was killed by an insane person, Jon learned Ned's lessons, but he also showed a moral and political flexibility his father lacked, and was murdered by a shattered institution he was trying to force into a future where it would be able to survive.

I'll put aside the fact that many readers would dispute the insinuation that stodgy ol' Eddard wouldn't have acted just as young, daring Jon does and get right to the word that marks deep ideological differences between conservatives and Rosenberg: "shattered," as in the "shattered institution" of the Night's Watch. A better adjective would be atrophied — atrophied as a result of the apathy of a society that no longer trusts its own traditions sufficiently to exert even minimally adequate effort in the preservation of an ancient institution.

The mission of the Night's Watch, far from being heroic, is no longer considered to be serious, for most of the kingdom. Collectively, Westeros feels as if the Watch ought to continue to exist — almost as a park ranger service — but it is a subject of mockery to suggest that the rangers face anything more terrifying than unwashed savages and a lifetime of winter weather.

So, to some degree, I side with Spencer Ackerman in his argument against Rosenberg, but he errs (or accedes to error) in a way that a conservative worldview would help avoid. Ackerman suggests that Jon's decisions are guided by a pragmatic intention of increasing the manpower of the Night's Watch, not a unitary vision of humanity:

Nor does Jon display any interest in building a nation. The Wildlings don't get integrated into the North. They get a ghetto in the Gift [a largely uninhabited region south of the Wall], in which they're dependent on the Night's Watch. Jon strolls his Brothers into the Gift to hand out what provisions he can spare -- and while he does so, he makes a pitch for the Wildlings to join their old enemies in the Watch. ...

Others might call Jon a usurper. He's not a king. He's a controversial, compromise choice for Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. The Night's Watch is a brotherhood of guardsmen. Its job, as understood by anyone south of the Wall, is to keep the Wildlings out of Westeros. And what did Jon just do?

Inasmuch as Ackerman is describing a matter of perspective and the attitudes of the characters in the books, the error is not clearly his, but it is an error to see the Watch's mission as he describes it. Seeing it otherwise makes of the Wall a fabulous metaphor on which to drape social and political commentary.

Plainly put, the Wall is a defensible line across the narrowest region of the continent that incorporates all of the most desirable geography for habitation and trade. It defends civilization from an ancient darkness that would destroy it. With that darkness long receded, some people choose to exist beyond the Wall, where they can claim greater individual liberty (albeit with the more superficial freedom that comes with rejection of civilized norms). But with the tide of evil again rising, that choice is no longer tolerable to the larger society of mankind, and Jon is in the most likely position in the realm to spot that reality. The Wildlings have to be brought within the defensible border and encouraged to bolster the Night's Watch, the traditional institution that has heretofore symbolized for them the militant arm of a society that would force them to be "kneelers."

Thus, while Ackerman's main point in his post — that "if you wish to change the realm, you have to engage in the painful, arduous task of building legitimacy through... recognized institutions" — is insightful and in accord with conservative principles, it skips the larger, more important point. Just as Jon Snow wasn't interested in nation building, he wasn't interested in changing the realm. He spends almost zero time lamenting that Wildlings and Westerosi can't just get along.

He does, however, frequently make note of the practices and assumptions that prevent the two sides from communicating and interacting effectively. Animosity between them is a practical hurdle to acknowledge and overcome, but it isn't a moral imperative that must be assuaged. The mating and marriage practices of Wildlings aren't to be respected in the sense of multicultural appreciation, but in the sense that they must be tolerated to the extent that one wishes to work alongside those who hold different views. Some of the ways in which Wildlings differ from Westerosi might be admirable in a certain context, and (more often) they might be inconsequential to Jon's proximate mission, but some of their differences, particularly their lack of discipline, must be changed.

Moreover, Jon's egalitarianism exists entirely within his sense of honor and duty, as components of a traditional moral code, as well as his respect for the rules by which men and women agree to live. While the Wildlings are inside the Wall, they must respect the laws of the kingdom, just as while he's a sworn brother of the Night's Watch, he must resist the call of family and political intrigue.

That's why, contrary to yet another progressive commenting on the book, I'm concerned that Jon's apparent killing at the end of the book is not a shining literary moment, but possibly a failure of the author to develop a principal character in a consistent, believable way. But commentary on that will have to await another post.

A "Meddling" Government Directed by "A Few Players"

Justin's post brought the word "meddling" to mind. And that made me remember this from Tocqueville:

The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling. Despotism of this kind though it does not trample on humanity, is directly opposed to the genius of commerce and the pursuits of industry.

Reading from that same chapter, further down, Tocqueville wrote this:

When the bulk of the community are engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs. At such times it is not rare to see on the great stage of the world, as we see in our theaters, a multitude represented by a few players, who alone speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd: they alone are in action, while all others are stationary; they regulate everything by their own caprice; they change the laws and tyrannize at will over the manners of the country, and then men wonder to see into how small a number of weak and worthless hands a great people may fall.

Of course, back then, he also observed, "Hitherto the Americans have fortunately escaped all the perils that I have just pointed out..."

Saving Everybody from Themselves

On July 14, Andrew put up an excellent post responding to a comment from Michael Morse and explaining what we mean when we talk about the inherent corruption of the public sector, particularly with respect to unionization:

When someone regularly deals on a firsthand basis with people in need of real help -- and in the case of public safety workers, people who are in real danger -- it is natural to prioritize the needs of those making or answering calls for help ahead of the monitions raised by people not immediate in distress, who are asking for relief from the strains they feel are being created by publicly-imposed obligations. But just like self-interest is not inherently bad, but leads to problems when pressed too far, so too can the impulse to help those whom we have most direct contacts with create problems and confusion, when effects of our actions on people outside of our personal interactions are too severely discounted. No human being is immune to this, which means no human system is immune to this.

The next day, Michael made a relevant appearance in a Bob Kerr column titled, "It keeps happening because no one tries to stop it":

... among the shooting victims and stabbing victims, those injured in traffic accidents and those hurt in fires, are the drunks. There will always be the drunks because, says Morse, they are a problem that is tolerated rather than dealt with. There have been a few initiatives, some trying to shift the focus from the physical to the psychological. But they haven't gotten anywhere. The drunks keep falling and the city has to keep picking them up.

"They're survivors," says Morse. "I don't get angry. They're using the tools at their disposal. They get to eat and get cleaned up at the hospital. If they're a little too ripe, they get new clothes."

There will always be drunks, but I'm not sure one can blame society for not "dealing with" their problems. Indeed, it's not unlikely that public efforts to assist alcoholics reinforce the thinking and bad impulses that draws them to the bottle in the first place. (Rephrasing it from language of personal decisions and responsibility to language of psychological disease doesn't gain us any ground, here.)

Being familiar with Bob Kerr, I'm comfortable inferring that his means of dealing with alcoholics problems would take some form of government action to alleviate "root causes." If they've got some diagnosable medical issue (such as depression), he'd have the government provide them with treatment and medicine. If they're lacking for material comforts, he'd have the government supply them. If they're chronically unemployed, he'd have the government employ them, train them, and give them subsidies while waiting for them to conclude that working a whole lot harder for a little bit of income beyond the subsidies makes sense.

In other words, he'd respond using methods that have seemed to me only to prolong adolescence and cultivate dependence when applied to teenagers.

Kerr begins and ends the column lauding a woman who took time out of her life to stop and call 911 to help a particular drunk passed out on the street. Even in a libertarian construct, there is an extent to which we are obligated to deal with drunks, even if only to keep them from disrupting the lives of everybody else. If the expense isn't too great relative to the society's wealth, picking them and helping them home is preferable to turning them into criminals.

But the error to which we incline when we take that woman's compassion as a model for public policy is one of hindering long-term objectives in the service of the short-term gratification that comes with feeling compassionate. We will never eliminate the problems of human society and remain human. To alleviate those problems, though, and to improve the lot of our fellows as individuals, we ought to focus less on assuring them that we will do everything we can for them and more on creating a society in which the rewards of better decisions can overcome the lure of self destruction.

That means making it less difficult for people to find ways of supporting themselves. It means getting government out of the way of both productive activities and destructive stumbles. And it means returning to a confidence in higher purpose and more profound truths than a Marxist can admit.

Government's Version of Accountability

So, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is threatening to stop enforcing regulations if Congress doesn't modify them to account for the failure of those regulated to comply:

Frustrated by what he called a "slow-motion train wreck" for U.S. schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he will give schools relief from federal mandates under the No Child Left Behind law if Congress drags its feet on the law's long-awaited overhaul and reauthorization. ...

Duncan has warned that 82 percent of U.S. schools could be labeled failures next year if No Child Left Behind isn't changed. Education experts have questioned that estimate.

Still, no one thinks states will meet the law's goal of having 100 percent of students proficient in math and English by 2014. A school that fails to meet targets for several consecutive years faces sanctions that can include firing teachers or closing the school entirely.

Therein lies the problem with repairing government ineptitude with greater and more-centralized government authority: Nobody actually believes government will use the stick against itself or its favored constituencies when the carrots stop working. Government self-regulation is a perpetual bluff.

ADDENDUM:

For those who might be tempted to make the distracting claim that I can't believe what I write because the legislation in question passed during the Bush Administration, I should note that I thought, said, and wrote much the same back when the law was still in the works.

Self-Government's Intrusion on Fantasy Life

The argument over the value or harmfulness of television is an old one, but Ben Berger brings it to an important insight. He notes that the medium itself has downsides, and that it tends toward content that compounds them:

... Postman and his fellow media guru Marshall McLuhan both insisted that "the medium is the message," that it matters less what we watch than that we watch — watch rather than listen, read, or think in silence. Content is not irrelevant, of course: Watching violent programs in high doses correlates with reduced sociability and increased volatility, especially in youngsters. Watching crime shows and even news in high doses correlates with the excessive cynicism that the late media scholar George Gerbner called "mean-world syndrome," which impedes social trust and public-spiritedness. And a number of economists have found that TV's commercialism makes viewers more materialistic and less satisfied.

And as a medium, it taps into human — and American — tendencies that were already a risk factor to our freedom and democracy:

... Tocqueville captures our present dilemma. TV, like democracy, is a technology of freedom. It provides a window onto many worlds and offers vast amounts of information. It also caters ever more perfectly to the very proclivities — materialism and privatism — that in Tocqueville's view produce dissatisfaction and disengagement, tending "to isolate men from each other."

Therein enters the insight (emphasis added):

... Tocqueville, who would have appreciated the political dimension of our attention-deficit democracy: For those who immerse themselves too completely in their private worlds, self-government can seem an annoying intrusion. Such citizens may be tempted to delegate increasing authority to a centralized administration. Inattentive and inwardly focused, having lost the habit and art of associating, they would be unlikely to notice the erosion of their freedom and unable to stop it in any case. In the end, democracy as a technology of freedom may actually make citizens more dependent: dependent on an overweening administration and on the petty pleasures for which they sacrificed self-government.

This immersion has a further problem that Berger does not note: As the technologies that facilitate immersion advance, they become more dependent upon resources. A book once borrowed or purchased for relatively little expense can entertain for many hours. A movie lasts about two hours and requires a television and often a player or receiver of some kind, perhaps even a service.

So, not only does the private-world of insular and inactive television viewing make the call of town meetings and the voting booth an intrusion, but it creates a lifestyle that political forces can promise to help maintain — or threaten to eliminate.

Government's Disfigurement of American Society

I've been meaning to highlight the following paragraph, from Kevin Williamson's March 7 National Review consideration of How the West Was Lost by Dambisa Moyo:

The U.S. and Europe have the worst kind of problems: ones that are easy to understand but difficult to solve. Our worst problem is that democratic governments lack the kind of robust fiscal controls that prevent the political class from pillaging the productive economy to feather the nests of its own members and their clients. (China has relatively strong fiscal limitations: a police state and poverty.) The West is in trouble not because Beijing is lending us money, but because of why we are borrowing it: At every level — federal state, local, county, school district, sewage-treatment authority — we have disfigured our institutions such that they function principally as wealth-transfer mechanisms for the benefit of the political class. The word for this is "corruption," and it is at least as much a moral problem as an economic one. We are our own disease.

Williamson oversteps in two respects. A nondemocratic government doesn't have fiscal controls against its own corruption that democracies lack. It just doesn't offer the frustrating promise that peaceful democratic action can thwart the political class's will over the long term. The only option is violent revolution.

Consequently, "our worst problem" isn't the lack of internal government controls, but the deterioration of our culture.

Whom Do the Public and Private Sectors Serve?

Yesterday, I noted a couple of differences between the public and private sectors when it comes to the calculation of hiring new employees, prompting commenter Michael (himself a public employee) to write:

The big difference between the public sector and the private sector is the most important. The public sector exists for service and the private sector exists for profit. Government exists to service the people, hence the public sector.

It wouldn't be a semantic game to reply that Michael's distinction is awfully fine. The restaurant across the street exists serves the public, as do the convenience store and the mechanic's garage, the funeral home and the wedding planner, the insurance agent and the bank. Moreover, as the healthy economy around Washington, D.C., throughout the entire recession illustrates, the people who work within and operate government clearly profit by the activity. Indeed, much of the revelation about the public sector, over the past decade or so, has been that there isn't much (arguably any) financial sacrifice involved in the vocation of government service.

Until very recently, I might have ceded the point that the government is at least like a non-profit organization in that it doesn't need to show a profit beyond salaries for the sake of an owner, partners, or stock holders. But even that is beginning to seem like an assumed — that is, not accurate or real — difference. Consider:

... at least one credit rating agency has already made it clear that unless that agreement includes at least $4 trillion in budget cuts over the next decade, the country's AAA rating could be lost. Right now, the proposals under discussion cut around $2 trillion or less. ...

JPMorgan's Belton said clients have started asking how markets will respond if the U.S. loses its AAA rating. A drop to AA will mean permanently higher borrowing costs for the U.S. government, he said. And because government lending rates act as a floor for other lending rates, mortgages, student loans, corporate debt and other types of loans will become more expensive.

Add this to the general consensus that the government must allow itself to continue borrowing money so as not to default on interest payments to people who've invested in the government by buying bonds, and it begins to appear that the feds are really in the business of offering a low-risk investment opportunity. Corporate stockholders invest their money in the expectation that the company will be successful enough in serving the public that people will continue to pay profitable rates for its services. Government bondholders invest their money in the expectation that the government will continue to be successful enough in offering its own services that the public will continue to tolerate its tax bills.

Of course, with forty cents of every dollar that the government spends being borrowed, the federal government really isn't that far off from the Madoff scheme of paying prior investors with money from new investors. Also of course, the government doesn't have to be but so efficient in its service offerings, because those who receive them are for the most part not those who pay for them.

This lesson of the debt-ceiling debate comes close on the heals of the lessons of the stimulus program, which amounted to hugely expensive insulation of government entities and their employees from the effects of the recession. What we're learning is that the United States government and its subsidiaries exist primarily to ensure well paying and astonishingly secure employment to those on the public-sector payroll and a secure profit to those investing in the ability of American governments to impose taxes on the people whom they ostensibly represent.

The Kaleidoscopic Arguments Against Democracy

Last week, in Tiverton, the committee tasked to create an alternative to the financial town meeting (FTM) held a hearing on its proposal. Basically, the budget process would follow the same steps, with the Town Council and School Committee submitting budgets to the Budget Committee, which puts together a final request for the consideration of the electorate. However, rather than having a few hundred voters (many with direct financial interest in the outcome beyond their tax bills) gather together in the high school gymnasium and offer amendments before voting on final approval by a show of hands, residents would be able to stop by a polling place for an all day referendum during which they would vote on the budget using a private ballot.

The Town Council and School Committee could place alternatives in front of voters, as could any resident, with the signatures of at least 50 people. If no option wins a majority of the vote, either a run-off referendum would decide between the two highest vote getters or the previous year's budget would remain in effect for another year, depending which version of the proposal the current Town Council and special-election voters approve.

Not surprisingly, the most interesting aspect of the hearing was the series of objections offered by members of the Democratic Town Committee, most of whom have been active advocates of the policies that have doubled property taxes in the past decade. Joanne Arruda — a former Town Council member, current Budget Committee member, and plaintiff in a lawsuit apparently intended to punish the leader of a local taxpayer group for his civic activities — complains that (in the reporter's paraphrase) "anyone could get 50 signatures and put a budget before the voters." (Over course, with the FTM, anyone can do the same without any signatures.) And current Town Council member Brett Pelletier thinks it should remain the job of elected representatives to prepare the budget. In short, the referendum would be too democratic.

Meanwhile, Carol Herrmann, currently a member of the School Committee (and herself a public-school teacher, in Westport, MA, I believe), complains that voters will only be able to vote on the budgets as presented on the ballot. That is, the referendum would not be democratic enough.

My favorite commentary is in the "not democratic enough" wing of the attack and comes from former Town Council member Louise Durfee, herself a plaintiff in the aforementioned lawsuit:

"There's an elephant in the room and no one is talking about it," she said. "Both of these proposals give the Town Council power over the budget that it has never had before."

By eliminating the FTM, she said, just two members of the council would have veto power over any budget that goes over the cap, a possibility she saw on the horizon as pension contributions squeeze town and school budgets.

"Despite all the claims that this [referendum proposal] can increase participation, unstated and not disclosed is the other fact that under these proposals the budget control passes to the town council," Ms. Durfee said.

The only reason that's even arguably true is that her Town Council used every trick in the Rhode Island insider playbook, with some help from connections in the state bureaucracy, not to follow the plain meaning of the tax cap legislation. The referendum would close the loophole that allowed the Town Council to squeak by without taking the required 4/5 vote to exceed the tax cap, so the town would have to follow state law. In Durfee's political view, that constitutes a power grab.

The best part is that her justification is a professed need for future money grabs: She expects the pension crisis to drive tax increases well above the state cap and wants as few hurdles as possible to ensuring that residents, not the town government, have to downsize their budgets.

With a referendum, Durfee and her crew would have to dominate town government or at least gather 50 signatures to place a massive tax increase on the ballot, persuade a majority of residents to vote for it, and convince six of the seven sitting Town Council members to let the people's vote stand. With the FTM, as currently practiced, they can just follow their annual strategy of scaring a couple hundred town employees and heavy users of town services into taking a couple of hours to force their will on the other 15,000 of us.

Civics in an Evolving Society

The topic of conversation, when Andrew spoke with Tony Cornetta on the Matt Allen Show, last night, was constitutional principle and the wise structure of our government. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

Gimme that Old-Tyme Constitutionalism!

The passage of the state budget, followed by a flurry of bills passed and not passed in the last week of the 2011 Rhode Island General Assembly session, were clear demonstrations of the value and the wisdom of two foundational principles of American constitutional governance.

1. The Division of Powers, more commonly referred to as the "Separation of Powers": In American-style constitutional systems, the Governor and the legislature both have a role in the making of laws, and it was this division of the lawmaking power that prevented an executive elected only by a plurality from imposing a tax policy that was unpopular with the majority. The legislature did their job of representing the 64% of the population who didn't vote for the current Governor or his program, accurately reflecting the fact that the Governor's high-profile taxation proposal was not popular or desired by the citizens of Rhode Island.

2. Bicameralism, Baby! The structure of two legislative chambers, neither of which owes its power to the other and both comprised of members who are electorally accountable to the people, was key in slowing down or stopping some of the legislation (the I-195 bill, binding arbitration) that otherwise would likely have been passed into law without appropriate time for public deliberation. Think how much different the outcome of the legislative session might have looked, if one individual like Majority Leader Dominick Ruggerio could extend the power he holds over the Senate to the entire legislature. It is the bicameral structure of the legislature that prevents this from easily occurring.

There are often feelings that "old" structures of governance have only limited application in the modern world, but sometimes the structures of a venerable and tested system are exactly what is required to keep government responsive to the people.

Federalist 51 hits both the principles of the division of powers and bicameralism, for anyone interested in further thoughts on the subject.

"You earn political capital in order to spend it to achieve big things."

Now here's a concept too often missing in politics. It was spoken by the Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, on the Today Show Friday. (Lauer was interviewing the Dreamy One about the public pension and health bill just passed by the NJ Assembly.)

Matt Lauer: Your approval rating -- 47% of the people in New Jersey disapprove right now of the job that Chris Christie is doing in the state. Simply go with the territory?

Gov Chris Christie: Yes. You earn political capital in order to spend it to achieve big things. And what makes what happened in New Jersey different than what happened in other places is, we did it in a bipartisan way. This is not just a Republican plan or a Democratic plan. It's a bipartisan plan where we compromised to put the people first, Matt. This is ... the taxpayer is going to be saved $130 billion over the next thirty years.

"You earn political capital in order to spend it to achieve big things." Like saving public pensions. Like not viewing tax dollars as monopoly money, to be casually spent and mandated on budget items of dubious public (in the broader sense) benefit. Like creating a business climate that doesn't chase the golden-egg-laying goose around with a tax-and-fee hatchet but rather, welcomes businesses - and jobs - to the state.

Like focusing your legislative efforts on putting "the people first" and your own re-election second. In the end, is there any point to getting re-elected if you are not achieving big things?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This Is Consolidation

The Providence Journal editorial board highlights a piece of legislation that, while unlikely to become law, illustrates the potential consequences of consolidation for the sake of efficiency and ease:

... Sen. John Tassoni (D.-Smithfield) — a member of the state's AFL-CIO executive board, former business agent for the state's largest public-employees union, AFSCME Council 94, and the publisher of a union newspaper — wants to use his public power to oust Ms. Gallo. He also wants to replace the Board of Trustees that voted to fire those teachers. ...

Clearly, [Tassoni's rhetoric] can be taken with a grain of salt, given that he had not bothered to discuss his concerns with Ms. Gallo, and he has an obvious huge conflict of interest as a union official, elected to public office with the strong financial backing of government unions to promote their economic interests.

Hey, if the state can insert a municipal dictator (popularly known as a "receiver") to oust the elected mayor and make the elected city council less than an advisory body, then why shouldn't it also pass judgment on superintendents and school boards? That's consolidation.

The lesson extends even to less brazen steps. The farther governance moves from voters, as from local development of school policies among neighbors to regional and statewide implementation of policies, the more incentive special interests (notably unions) will have to fill elected positions with the likes of Tassoni. As the Projo editors note, Governor Chafee has already "removed several of the student-focused reformers... from the state Board of Regents," even though large segments of the state did not vote for this governor's election.

I’ll believe it when I see it

I’ll believe it when I see it. So starts the latest post by Seth Godin. It's apropos given the current controversy surrounding the bin Laden death photos.

We have to accept that once we start down the slippery slope of always (or never) believing, we end up in Alice-in-Wonderland territory. Do you have firsthand knowledge that the Earth is round (a sphere)? Really? Have you ever seen the tuberculosis bacteria? Perhaps it doesn’t exist, they might say it’s just a fraud invented by the pharmaceutical industry to get us to buy expensive drugs... Or consider the flip side, the Bernie Madoff too-good-to-be-true flipside of invisible riches that never appear. After all, if someone can't prove it's a fraud yet, it might be true!

Eight things you’ve probably never seen with your own eyes: Buzz Aldrin, the US debt, multi-generational evolution of mammals, an atom of hydrogen, Google’s search algorithm, the inside of a nuclear power plant, a whale and the way your body digests a cookie. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, nor does it mean you can’t find a way to make them useful.

Do governments and marketers lie to us? All the time. Does that mean that the powerful (reproducible, testable and yes, true) invisible forces of economics, history and science are a fraud? No way.

Once you go down that road, you’re on your own, no longer a productive member of a society built on rational thought. Be skeptical. Test and measure and see if the truth is a useful hypothesis to help move the discussion forward. Please do. But at some point, in order to move forward, we have to accept that truth can’t be a relative concept, something to use when it suits our agenda but be discarded when we're frightened or want to score a point....Merely because it's invisible doesn't mean it's true--or false.

I don't think it's that people are skeptical about the death of bin Laden. I think the attitude is more like the Reaganesque "trust but verify", right? But at some point, whether the photos are officially released or not, time will prove that bin Laden is really dead: when there are no more audio or visual releases from him, when his terrorist heirs continue to be silent...or when the photos eventually leak out.

ADDENDUM: Incidentally, don't take the above as giving the Obama Administration a pass on handling the after-action "messaging" or the like. In short, the military--as usual--did it's job. The politicians aren't.

Godin on the "Economies of small"

Seth Godin has advice for the little guy. Like small business or even a small state.

Economies of scale are well understood. Bigger factories are more efficient, bigger distribution networks are more efficient, bigger ad campaigns can be more efficient. It's often hard to defeat a major competitor, particularly if the market is looking for security and the status quo.

But what about the economies of small? Is being bigger an intrinsic benefit in and of itself?

If your goal is to make a profit, it's entirely possible that less overhead and a more focused product line will increase it.

If your goal is to make more art, it's entirely possible the ridding yourself of obligations and scale will help you do that.

If your goal is to have more fun, it's certainly likely that avoiding the high stakes of more debt, more financing and more stuff will help with that.

The marketplace has changed: the ability to produce, market and sell to smaller groups of consumers has been made easier with technology. Consumers minds have changed along with it--we expect flexibility and the ability to get just what we want when we want it at a decent price. It doesn't have to be the cheapest price, so long as we see value in the quality of the product. Economies of scale still do work, but maybe not always.

I think we embraced scale as a goal when the economies of that scale were so obvious that we didn't even need to mention them. Now that it's so much easier to produce a product in the small and market a product in the small, and now that it's so beneficial to offer a service to just a few, with focus and attention, perhaps we need to rethink the very goal of scale.

Don't be small because you can't figure out how to get big. Consider being small because it might be better.

In many ways, Rhode Island really doesn't have any other choice but to embrace its "smallness." We're not going to get geographically bigger and our population has stayed the same seemingly forever. The argument around here has been focused on the efficiency that can be gained by embracing the concept of economies of scale by consolidating government services, say, at the county level. But we're not holding our breath, are we?

We have to get leaner in government--"less overhead"--and consolidation still makes sense (despite my pessimism that it will ever happen). Less waste can free up money to deliver those government services that the majority of Rhode Island citizens desire--"more focused product line"--like an efficient DMV, good roads/infrastructure, etc.

So how do we do it? By "ridding [ourselves] of obligations and scale." More on that later.

The Never-Ending Upward Line of Government Spending

Andrew suggested that government spending cannot continue to go up in a straight line indefinitely, on last night's Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

What Inspires Political Activity?

A recent iteration of First Things' "While We're at It" feature mentioned the Wall Street Journal lament of feminist Erica Jong that breeding and raising children is a fad that just won't die. From the lament:

Unless you've been living on another planet, you know that we have endured an orgy of motherphilia for at least the last two decades. Movie stars proudly display their baby bumps, and the shiny magazines at the checkout counter never tire of describing the joys of celebrity parenthood. Bearing and rearing children has come to be seen as life's greatest good. Never mind that there are now enough abandoned children on the planet to make breeding unnecessary. Professional narcissists like Angelina Jolie and Madonna want their own little replicas in addition to the African and Asian children that they collect to advertise their open-mindedness.

The intellectual problems that Jong evinces are plentiful. (Why, for one, should we criticize celebrities for adopting third-world children in addition to having their own, even as we point to "abandoned children" as a standing problem?) Much of what she writes can be dismissed on purely ideological grounds; that is, if the reader doesn't share the ideology, the points are without sense.

However, the First Things blurb is a little unfair, in that Jong's initial statements of ideological gunk are really just a foundation on which she builds more interesting walls, some of which are certainly reasonable, even insightful:

What is so troubling about these theories of parenting—both pre- and postnatal—is that they seem like attempts to exert control in a world that is increasingly out of control. We can't get rid of the carcinogens in the environment, but we can make sure that our kids arrive at school each day with a reusable lunch bag full of produce from the farmers' market. We can't do anything about loose nukes falling into the hands of terrorists, but we can make sure that our progeny's every waking hour is tightly scheduled with edifying activities.

Our obsession with parenting is an avoidance strategy. It allows us to substitute our own small world for the world as a whole. But the entire planet is a child's home, and other adults are also mothers and fathers. We cannot separate our children from the ills that affect everyone, however hard we try. Aspiring to be perfect parents seems like a pathetic attempt to control what we can while ignoring problems that seem beyond our reach.

In her attempt to connect these dots, Jong joins strange principles that jar discordantly with reality:

... although attachment parenting comes with an exquisite progressive pedigree, it is a perfect tool for the political right. It certainly serves to keep mothers and fathers out of the political process. If you are busy raising children without societal help and trying to earn a living during a recession, you don't have much time to question and change the world that you and your children inhabit. What exhausted, overworked parent has time to protest under such conditions?

If there's a conservative who has advocated "attachment parenting" — which entails parents' effectively binding themselves to their children — I haven't read his or her work. And, moreover, if there's a politically active right-winger who wants to divert devoted parents from the political fight, he or she has wisely learned to keep that counter-intuitive intention quiet.

Perhaps her imagination doesn't reach that far, but Jong need only have brought to mind the conservative's vision of an ideal family... even a cliché version of that vision: One parent able to stay home with the children, neighborhoods full of such nuclear, one-income households and churches full of such families. After all, the kids don't need such close watching when there are parents watching from nearly every house on the block.

And I can't help but wonder, too, what the motivation for political activism is supposed to be (apart from dedicated advocacy for the Special Interest of Me) when children aren't part of the equation.

Reporting on Experts

Theodore Gatchel notes a perpetual problem facing a public that wishes to be informed:

There are so many experts on virtually every subject imaginable that anyone who relies on them for information is faced with the problem of determining which experts to trust. Unfortunately, almost everyone falls in that category. Investors rely on experts for market information, patients rely on doctors, governments depend on intelligence agencies, and everyone listens to the weather report.

As experts proliferate, so do the differences of their opinions. President Eisenhower once said about the reports he received concerning the French in Indochina, "There are almost as many judgments as there are authors of messages." The problem then becomes one of determining which experts to believe. Eisenhower's complaint is every bit as applicable today as it was when he made it.

Gatchel suggests a report card system for experts to enlighten readers as to how particular experts' "predictions have panned out in the past." The problem, it seems to me, is that any such attempt does little but create another topic on which experts can proliferate.

Consider a generic weekly columnist for a major national newspaper: the number of claims and implied predictions in his work would quickly become so plentiful, with so much of their accuracy subject to legitimate debate, that it would become easy work to distort his overall success by selecting particular predictions and interpreting real-world outcomes in a particular way. The result would be the translation of opinion into ostensibly objective data — like a PolitiFact score sheet for the honesty of public figures.

Where's the Socialism?

It always seems a bit silly, to me, to fight over words. Use of the word "socialism," for example, tends to be descriptive among conservatives. That is, we use it because we're trying to describe a system or institution that we're addressing, not because it polls badly and we want to throw tar on an otherwise unobjectionable thing. The reaction from the left, though, is often to insist that the term does not wholly apply, rather than to take up the real topic — which is that the aspects that the thing shares with an abstract whole socialism are objectionable in their own rights.

Kevin Williamson takes up that thread:

A more complete definition of socialism incorporates two criteria: The first is that socialism entails the public provision of non-public goods. The second is the use of central planning to implement that policy.

What is a public good? Economists distinguish between public and non-public goods on two grounds, features known as rivalry and excludability. Public goods, under the economic definition, are goods which are non-rivalrous in their consumption and non-excludable in their distribution. A couple of examples will make these distinctions clear. A rivalrous good is one for which my consumption of one unit of the good leaves one unit less for your consumption. A mango is rivalrous in consumption: Every mango I eat is a mango you cannot eat. But some goods are non-rivalrous: a highway, for instance. If I drive down a mile of highway, that does not leave one less mile for you to drive down.

Of course, with the disputes in which socialism arises, the boundaries of the economic term expands, such that some disputants behave as if all goods are ultimately public, and individual consumption is a presumption to be regulated by the state, which Williamson brings up subsequently:

The modern experience suggests that the economist Ludwig von Mises was only partly correct when he wrote, "The socialistic State owns all material factors of production and thus directs it." That was true for the authoritarian, single-party powers of his day. In our own time, the converse is a more accurate description of the real economic arrangement: Under socialism, the state directs the material factors of production as if it owned them. The state does not have to actually own factories, mines, or data centers if it has the power to dictate, in minute detail, how business is conducted within them. Regulation acts as a proxy for direct state ownership of the means of production.

The key example — not only in structure, but in evidence of socialism's inevitable failure — is public education as currently constituted, which despite the popularity of arguments about "socialism" is not often enough raised.

Rahe: "How to think about the Tea Party"

Historian Paul Rahe offers his perspective on the Tea Party. An extended excerpt:

Over almost a century, under the influence of the Progressives and their heirs—the proponents of the New Deal, the Great Society, and Barack Obama’s New Foundation we have experienced a gradual consolidation of power in the federal government. Legislative responsibilities have been transferred to administrative agencies lodged within the executive—such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, and the vast array of bodies established under the recent health-care reform—and these have been delegated in an ever increasing number of spheres the authority to issue rules and regulations that have the force of law.

In the process, the state and local governments have become dependent on federal largesse, which always comes with strings attached in the form of funded or unfunded “mandates” designed to make these governments fall in line with federal policy. Civic agency, rooted as it normally is in locality, has withered as the localities have lost their leverage. The civic associations so admired by Alexis de Tocqueville have for the most part become lobbying operations with offices in Washington focused on influencing federal policy, and many of them have also become recipients of government grants and reliable instruments for the implementation of federal policy.

Continue reading "Rahe: "How to think about the Tea Party""

Big Government or Small, the Culture Must Be Healthy

It's unfortunate that Rich Lowry's article in the January 24 National Review, "What the Whigs Knew," is inaccessible except to subscribers, but two portions are worth typing out:

[Eva] Moskowitz combines a fiery faith in the ability of all children to learn with a traditional — nay, downright retrograde — means of molding them into successful students. The New York Times describes the educational philosophy of her Harlem Success Academy as "a mix of the liberal Bank Street College of Education approach and the traditional Catholic school model.

"Parents must sign the network's 'contract,' a promise to get children to class on time and in blue-and-orange uniform and guarantee homework, and attend all family events," New York magazine explains. Children who defy the school's strict rules must show up for "Saturday Academy" together with their parents. New students get instruction on how to walk appropriately in the school's "zero noise" hallways and how to engage in active listening — "legs crossed, hands folded, eyes tracking the speaker."

Of course, such an approach won't work for all students, and some parents won't care enough about their children to keep the rules, themselves, but there's something intuitive about the approach and something undeniable about the importance of the objectives that Moskowitz's policies seek to achieve, mainly parental involvement and a respect for structure.

The second portion:

America has become a less mobile society because so many people have lost touch with the Whiggish virtues, and even more basic ones. Society's most important cvharacter-forming and -reinforcing institution, marriage, is in retreat among everyone outside college graduates. This retreat is why we have a semi-permanent underclass, and it contributes to the struggles of the working class. The dependence on government of able-bodied adults is almost entirely a cultural phenomenon; the economic stagnation of the working class is partly one.

The Left has no interest in hearing this. It champions what can be thought of as a libertine statism — an expansive government that is neutral or hostile toward traditional values. It offers dependence on the state to those whose disorderly lives run counter to these virtues and makes it difficult to succeed in a capitalist society. It tends to create a society whose dysfunction is a constant call on government.

That pretty well sums up the conservative view of statism: The freedom offered is the freedom to be sufficiently self-destructive to have to rely on the government. Traditional values — that is, Western, particularly American traditional values — served mainly to strengthen the individual and the family. There's very little room for social engineering and bureaucracy in such small, localized groups.

Picking a Level of Democracy

My Patch column this week laments the trick of picking a particular aspect of "the democratic process" as dominant for the sake of a particular issue:

... too often disputes about public policy hinge more on which side can use prettier words than which side better captures the will of the public, let alone adhering more closely to the truth. And in our political discourse, among the most beautiful and powerful words is "democracy."

So we read retired Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Stephen Fortunato proclaiming that a direct vote of the people on the issue of same-sex marriage "is a ploy to subvert the orderly workings of our democratic processes," which he describes as legislators' sitting as moral and intellectual judges, only subsequently held to account by voters. On a completely separate issue, we read the contrasting view of former Tiverton Town Councilor Brian Medeiros that an ordinance capping the town's budget increase at 2.5% would represent a usurpation by the Town Council of "rights reserved solely for the people of Tiverton."

The first example is merely an example, and I go on to focus on the latter. And, of course, I don't exempt myself from slipping into convenient definitions.

For Whom They Work

Maybe it's a small thing, but such ideological tells as the sentence that I've emphasized in the following paragraph from an unsigned Projo editorial have been catching my attention more, lately:

It's no violation of the First Amendment for Mr. Chafee, a liberal, to do what he says he will do: Ban his people from talking in these talk-show echo chambers on state work time. (His administration made an exception for emergencies such as storms; he may find there are lots of emergencies.) After all, you don't have to work for Mr. Chafee.

Is it stating the obvious to suggest that even public officials appointed by the governor work for the people of the state? It's not a minor point, in this context: If department heads and other employees of the state's executive branch of government work for the people, rather than for the public CEO, then it's not just imprudent, but inappropriate of Governor Chafee to create barriers to their communication with their actual employers.

Inasmuch as they're not using "state work time" to promote matters completely disconnected from their public jobs, banning them from addressing tens of thousands of talk-radio listeners should be coupled with bans on addressing much smaller audiences in person or by other media. Surely the Providence Journal would object to such executive overreach.

Drunk on Taxation

Speaking of statism, the Providence Journal editorial page betrayed its inclination in that direction, recently, on the topic of alcohol tax:

Congratulations. By beating each other's alcohol tax down to zero, neither New Hampshire nor Massachusetts is collecting revenues that it could.

And where does this new era of tax-free booze to the north leave Rhode Island merchants with their 7 percent liquor sales tax? In a tough competitive place. ...

This region must start thinking of itself more as a confederation and less as a collection of six feudal rivalries. The six New England states should agree to a region-wide liquor tax. They could all end up richer.

"They," obviously, means the state governments, not the people of New England, who could, by the editors' advice be more extensively taxed if they were more effectively trapped by cooperating governments. Lost in the analysis — not even mentioned — is the benefit of this interstate competition to consumers, who are not, especially with alcohol, necessarily of the leisure class.

Yes, yes, we can all agree that alcohol is, in a technical sense, unnecessary, and sometimes, it turns wicked. But one's perspective on taxation and the relationship between the state and the people is much more broadly applicable.

Watching the exchange of dollars for alcohol and lottery tickets while in line at the liquor store, one is tempted to wonder what percentage of the taxes and gambling profit the government siphons off before handing the money back in the form of inefficient services. No doubt, the editors would defend their position suggesting that sin taxes force residents to support important government activities (such as infrastructure and education) that they'd otherwise let slip, if left to their own choices. That only returns to the statist point: it comes down to one group of citizens taking from another to support their own priorities, which they assume to be more important and which, in many cases, winds up benefiting them financially.

Principles Opposed to Slavery and Statism

Once again, I find I must recommend an inaccessible article in National Review, this one by Gettysburg College history professor Allen Guelzo:

The antidote to slavery, Lincoln insisted, was also economic free labor. In the 19th century, free labor was the shorthand term for a particular way of viewing capitalism: as a labor system, in which employers and employees struck bargains for production and wages without restriction and where the boundaries between these two roles were fluid enough that today's employee could, by dint of energy, talent, and foresight, become the employer of tomorrow.

Slavery was the polar opposite fo free labor. With very rare exceptions, it denied the slave any future but that of being a slave, and it replaced the open-ended arrangements of employees and employers with a rigidly dictatorial system. The harmful effects extended beyond the slaves themselves, Lincoln wrote, because in the process, all labor became stigmatized as "slave work"; the social ideal became "the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned work," rather than "men who are industrious, and sober, and honest in the pursuit of their own interests." Men who are industrious — that, of course, described Lincoln. Slavery, then, was not merely an abstraction; it was the enemy of every ambition Lincoln had ever felt.

Especially interesting are the links that Guelzo implicitly draws between the social system built on American slavery and a social system built on statism. For one thing, both characterize a relationship of freely exchanged employment as its opposite:

Lincoln was aware that pro-slavery propagandists had begun claiming in the 1850s that laborers in northern factories were, in reality, no more free to make wage bargains than slaves on southern plantations. In fact, they claimed, "free labor" was worse off, because employers had no obligation to provide health care for mere wage-earners or to support them in childhood and old age, the way slaveowners did for their slaves.

Not for no reason, then, did the Confederate government organize itself in line with the principles of its guiding institution:

... while the Union government contracted out its wartime needs to the private sector, the Confederate government set up government-owned supply facilities...

Historian Raimondo Luraghi called it "quasi-socialist management."

Despite the links between slavery and statism, two considerations have to taken into the balance, one qualifying the case of the former, the other the case of the latter. First, the slave-based system, here, is specifically that of the mid-to-late 1800s — the last guard, as it were, striving to maintain the system. In prior eras, slavery was simply a fact of life coexisting, however discordantly, with evolving notions of liberty.

Second, statists often begin with the well-being of the lower classes primary in their minds. In that respect, their views are opposite those of slaveholders. What unites them is the notion that the great majority of human beings are better off letting experts with centralized authority govern their lives. No matter the impetus, that sounds like slavery to me, no matter how beneficent.

Advice for the Young Regulator

Kevin Williamson churns out the economic heresies when he defines "social value" as "the stuff society actually values" and "profits" as "evidence of the creation of social value." Much of modern discourse is a debate over semantics, but choose the words as you wish, the underlying economic principles remain the same, and Williamson is entirely correct to explain the perversity of heavy government regulation as follows (addressed as if to the newly appointed regulator):

You can see the problem: You want to regulate because you do not trust competition among firms to serve the public interest. But regulation becomes just one more arena for . . . competition among firms. Round and round we go: Instead of competing to sell people the tastiest hamburgers at the lowest price, or competing to hire the most productive Teutonically efficient burger-slingers at the most efficient wage, companies compete in the field of regulatory-compliance efficiency, which does not shovel any greasy social value into anybody’s ravening public-interest maw at all. The weird thing is that the more you regulate, the more McDonald's will discover that its most important profit-controlling variables are only tangentially related to selling people hamburgers. The clown finds out that Jack in the Box got himself a waiver from Obamacare, and now he wants one for the Hamburglar and Grimace, and we're right back to the original competition among firms that you didn't trust in the first place, but with a perverse twist: Instead of competing to provide social value in the marketplace, firms compete to wring profit out of politics.

And that, if we extend Williamson's logic outward, introduces competition among politicians to make promises to powerful parties, so that they can define social value in such a way that the firms will support their campaigns and arrange for special deals and lucrative gigs when the political career runs its course, not only for the politicians, but also for the regulators and the people whom they hire to come up with the rules.

So, the rules pile up, creating unnecessary, unproductive jobs navigating them, drawing profits and wages away from people who create things that society actually values, rather than people whose main occupation is trying to convince others that they're acting in the interest of "social value." Moreover, the rules become a minefield limiting the ability of new firms to arise and compete with the big boys, who therefore can get away with much more of the objectionable activity (devaluing labor and the rights of the community) that much regulation is broadly meant to curb.

But here's the thing: Betamax and the Arch Deluxe and Clairol's Touch of Yogurt Shampoo (seriously, that existed) just get yanked off the shelves when hordes of people don't buy them, and the great big milling laboratory of the marketplace tells Joe Businessman, who is really a research scientist seeking social value, to shelve that particular hypothesis and maybe not expect a bonus this year. But there's no feedback mechanism like that in government, which means that when you do stupid, you do immortally stupid. You might find yourself asking why Alabama has a law against having an ice-cream cone in your back pocket at any time or chaining your alligator to a fire hydrant. (What was the precipitating episode there, Bubba?) You get Americans in the 21st century still paying the temporary emergency telephone tax to fund the Spanish–American War (1897–98). On and on it goes. Forever. Deathless stupidity tends to accrete and clog up the system, over time, and Washington is a factory whose workers produce deathless stupidity like it's their job, like they're getting paid for it. Because it is. Because they are.

The Crashing System

Unfortunately, the decision at National Review to cease providing access to the online issues of the magazine to print subscribers has left me unable to copy and paste interesting passages from its pages, and inasmuch as I'm not going to pay for two subscriptions and like the portability and markability of actual paper pages, I'm not willing to switch media. But some thoughts from an essay by Anthony Daniels are worth typing. (The article's here, if you can access it.)

The angry young people [of Europe], not unnaturally, want the same privileges that their parents awarded themselves in the high-minded name of social justice, on the live-now-pay-later principle. Why should they, the younger generation, have to live harder, more arduous, less secure lives than their elders lived? If their parents enjoyed free education, secure employment with guaranteed holidays and sick pay, and early retirement with generous unfunded pensions linked to the rate of inflation — what the french call les acquis — why should not they? Is not an ever-rising standard of living, with more and more entitlements and holiday destinations within the reach of al, the fundamental law of the universe, to say nothing of the meaning of life?

There are moral and philosophical aspects of the topic, of course, but the economics are full of lessons (emphasis added):

That the scheme of the welfare state was in essence improvident if not outright criminal was known from the very first. The British Labour politician for long revered in some quarters of Britain as the founder of the National Health Service, Aneurin Bevan, famously or infamously boasted that the great thing about the National Insurance Fund (from which various benefits were to be paid the sick, the unemployed, and the retired) was that "there ain't no fund." Payments were thus to be met from current tax receipts, which, if insufficient, were to be augmented by borrowing. Bevan gloried in the improvidence because he knew that it would change once and for all the relationship between the citizen and the state, increasing enormously the power of the political class and its bureaucratic clientele. It would destroy saving for a rainy day as the personal source of security, replacing it with dependence on the government. A strong government needed a feckless population, and — certainly in the case of Britain — got it.

To some extent, this system provides an economic boost by transporting wealth from the future to the present, via borrowing. Moving more of that inclination from private debt to government debt helped to obscure the economic fact that the future might need that money.

Rules Should Require Effort

I said (somewhere) it back when Republicans were in the minority in the House, and even though the filibuster technique has been helpful to causes that I've supported in recent years, I'll say it again: this sounds reasonable to me:

... Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat ... proposes that lawmakers be on the floor debating throughout the time they are relying on filibusters to derail measures. "You shouldn't filibuster casually" by being able, as currently allowed, to invoke the tactic "and go to dinner or go on vacation," he said. ...

[Democrats] also want to abolish the system of secretive "holds" senators can use to delay presidential nominations without identifying themselves and their reasoning.

There's no reason that politicians can't organize relay speechification when the legislation justifies that degree of opposition, and there's no reason that they can't identify themselves when they want legislation held.

With the reach and authority of the federal government continually expanding, a strong case could be made that more types of legislation should require supermajority votes, but that's an argument that has to made, not assumed.

The Point of Separation

RI Bishop Thomas Tobin asks the key question:

Nor should the so-called "separation of church and state" be used as a weapon to silence the faith community, or restrict its robust participation in the debate of important public issues. I've found that whenever I've spoken out on public issues — e.g., abortion, gay marriage or immigration — some irritated souls, arguing the "separation of church and state" will insist that I'm out of line. In fact, religious leaders have every right, indeed the duty, to speak out on public issues. If we fail to do so, we're neglecting our role as teachers, preachers and prophets. And if we don't bring the spiritual dimension, the moral dimension to the discussion of these issues, who will?

The obvious answer is that they will — those who wish to push the notion of separation. What they tend to oppose, I'd suggest, is not the insertion of extralegal principles into the law, nor subjective judgments about morality. Such things are unavoidable and, in any case, their saturation of public discourse flows more regularly from secularists; they just change the terms to "rights" and "justice" and assert their interpretation of such concepts to be mere objectivity.

The objection of secularists is to foundations for government action that derive from other institutions and sources of authority than themselves, whether that means religion or, more generally, tradition. It is illegitimate, they argue, to look to a Supreme Being for guidance or the long history of mankind's consideration of His moral demands, because they wish to provide the guidance in His place.

Party Games in "Non-Partisan" Tiverton

Back in 2007, I argued against non-partisan elections in Tiverton. Those who disagreed took a very community-oriented view:

ARGUING AGAINST asking Tiverton voters whether they'd like to return to partisan elections after one cycle of nonpartisanism, Charter Review Commission member Frank "Richard" Joslin made two points that have the ring of Rhode Islandry: First, that residents who actually vote (or get involved) know who belongs to what party, and second, that Joslin's fellow members of the Tiverton Democratic Committee are so ideologically diverse as to make party labels of negligible value. At the previous meeting, Commissioner Frank Marshall had asserted that everybody elected to local office is there simply to work hard and do right by the town.

Thus do Rhode Islanders like to believe about themselves. Everybody who cares knows, so inside information is by definition public, and everybody votes for the person, not the party, because the individuals are so independent and well intentioned.

That's all well and good, and to large extent true. But party isn't nothing; otherwise, there would cease to be a Tiverton Democratic Committee.

I raise the debate now because it came to light in the comments of my liveblog from Monday night's Town Council meeting that the lone Republican in Tiverton's delegation to the State House, Dan Gordon, was not informed that his peers would be briefing the local governing body. In fact, the same thing happened at the last regular School Committee meeting.

There are certainly legitimate reasons that the relevant clerks for the municipal government and the school department did not contact the only non-incumbent elected representative that Tiverton has sent to the General Assembly for this session. His contact information might not have been readily at hand or accurate. And the Democrat senators and representative might have merely forgotten to mention the meetings, even after the Republican's absence at the School Committee meeting.

It is conspicuous, though, that Rep. Jay Edwards is a member of the Democrat committee... as is Town Clerk Nancy Mello... as are three of the five School Committee members... as is, I believe, the Democrat candidate whom Gordon defeated in the last election. As Joslin once said, everybody knows who belongs to what party, especially those who continue to operate as members thereof.

Primary Power to the People

John Fonte's review of The New Road to Serfdom, by Daniel Hannan, focuses mainly on international policy — and avoiding Europeanization and submission to anti-democratic supranational bodies. However, given periodic discussion around here about the structure of government and of elections, this is the passage that most caught my eye:

Hannan is particularly impressed with the American system of primary elections. He points out that in Britain and Europe, candidates for parliament are chosen by the political parties. This leads to the perpetuation of a closed political class and the exclusion of issue positions favored by the public but frowned upon by elites. In the U.S., by contrast, an outsider can defeat the party leaders' choice in a primary; this fosters a more democratic process, and brings into the open issues that elites prefer not to discuss.

Some readers are impressed with European parliamentary systems that allow votes among multiple parties, which must then form coalitions for governance, but as the quotation above states, voters are reduced to electing parties, rather than people. It's not quite so simple, of course; it's in the interest of the parties to find and promote politically attractive candidates, for one thing. But as the Tea Party movement has illustrated, even in our more-individualistic system, establishment partisans will only take popular appeal so far, unless forced.

Beneath the talk of voter choices, one surmises that those who admire European governments rather like "the perpetuation of a closed political class" — mainly because they do not trust the unguided masses to elect wisely. Better, they think, to let voters choose from a slate of general principles and leave the actual exercise of power to people who know how to use it.

Sympathy for the Dictator

My, isn't that totalitarian hand attractive for reasons small and large. From Another RI Blogger:

Sheldon Whitehouse was a sponsor of S2847, Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM Act), which has been a long, long time coming. What this bill does is finally requires the television networks to make the volume of the commercial advertising to match the programming. Hallelujah. This has been high on my list of irritants for many years.

I remember being a kid and watching TV in bed in my upstairs bedroom. The latest from Happy Days or Laverne and Shirley. All would be fine until the commercials would come on at an increased volume. My father would yell from downstairs "Turn that TV down!". So I'd get up and turn the volume down. Then when the program came back on, I couldn't hear it. So I'd get up and turn it back on until the next commercial break. "I said turn that TV down!" Back and forth we’d go.

Now a father, RI Blogger has had that familiar experience of loud commercial waking a light-sleeping baby.

Look, government regulation of television volume is not likely to signal the end of the republic, but the oppression of "there ought to be a law" is a patchwork, encouraging voters to acclimate to the big government mentality and investing them in its exercise of power. In both of RI Blogger's examples, the conspicuous factor is the willingness to deal with the supposed hardship for the sake of Happy Days. If loud commercials were apt to drive viewers away from television, then those who control programming wouldn't allow them. But television is apparently now a right and a necessity, so we get the U.S. Senate wielding its power to make it a more pleasurable experience.

Evolving the Welfare State

Jim Manzi argues that, as conservatives strive to claim a decisive voice in governance, we should see the welfare state not so much as a demolition project, but as remodeling, with a different end-goal in mind:

... it would be foolhardy, from a conservative perspective, to eliminate a system so central to day-to-day life and long-term planning — and especially to do so all at once, acting on an unproved theory.

While it is always possible that some future society will find a way to cultivate widespread wealth and stability without a welfare system, or that existing welfare systems will wither away, the welfare state appears to be concomitant with the growth that capitalism creates. As far as can be determined from history, the idea of an advanced capitalist society without a welfare system is misplaced nostalgia — or more accurately, an anachronism. It is like wishing for a commercial jet aircraft without wing stabilizers. ...

... First, the primary purpose of the system should be to support capitalism, not to oppose it. Second, we should seek the system's maximum alignment with the elements of human nature that make us want it in the first place. Together, these two criteria simply mean that we should be as informed as possible about the costs and benefits created by the welfare system as we seek the greatest possible benefit for each unit of theoretically forgone growth that we invest in it. Third, we should attempt to shoot ahead of the duck by modifying the welfare system in a fashion that anticipates foreseeable changes in society and technology while leaving us maximum flexibility to respond to unforeseeable changes.

This all begins to sound like the folly of central planning — only declaring that our experts will manage the beast better than their experts. To be sure, we should not forsake those who simply fall through the inevitable economic and charitable cracks of a freely operating society, and we should not pull the rug out from under those who have taken the central planners at their word without offering a path off of it. Still, if increased individual autonomy and shrinking government are not the goals of reform, then the same incentive structures that have pulled the welfare state to its current position will remain in place.

The distinction manifests in all aspects of government operation, including in education:

... For several decades, a goal of the libertarian Right has been to voucherize social programs so that the government provides the cash but allows private firms to compete in markets to provide the services. But this is not always as practical as it sounds. ...

To return to the example of K–12 schools, the focus on true privatization has been both doctrinaire and artificial. If school choice ever grows beyond Tinkertoy demonstration projects, taxpayers will appropriately demand that a range of controls be imposed on the schools they are funding. Would we allow families to use vouchers to send children to schools that taught no reading or mathematics, but only bomb-making, or that offered lavish "support payments" to parents that were, in effect, bribes? No, we would inevitably — and justifiably — have a fairly detailed set of regulations, along with inspection, adjudication, and enforcement mechanisms. At that point, what would be the difference between such "private" schools and "public" schools that were allowed greater flexibility in hiring, curriculum, and student acceptance, and had to compete for students in order to capture funding? Little beyond the label.

Publicly funded private schools is an oxymoron, but greater flexibility to meet different needs and to improve general performance through market competition can nonetheless be found in a public-school system involving parental choice and the freedom of schools to operate outside of collective-bargaining agreements and other restrictions. The most basic institutional requirements of a market would be present: consumer choice and widely distributed buying power on the demand side, capacity and flexibility on the supply side.

Here, Manzi embarks on the same sort of argument from extremes that his entire promotion of temperance eschews. The conservative principle of trade-offs and individual assessment of costs should make it obvious that the problem that Manzi raises is a matter of the degree of vouchers. The core rationale behind including private schools in a voucher system even if, for example, they concentrate on religious education, is that the state is giving the money to the parents for the purpose of education, not "establishing" the religion that its money ultimately supports. That perspective draws obvious lines for vouchers.

The system could be one in which parents can allocate every penny earmarked for their children's education to the full-fledged public school of their choice, including charter schools that are freed from some of the chains of the broader system. But parents could also receive a portion — say, only that money which they pay into education through taxes — if they opt for private schools. In that way, the vouchers are only relieving the parents of the burden of paying for schools that their children do not use. Even by that structure, the government could reasonably have limited requirements that the schools actually teach basics like mathematics, whatever else they include in the curriculum.

The idea, again, is not to change the guiding principle of the overwhelming state machine, but to increase the autonomy and authority of individual citizens.

Affecting What We Can

In a November article for National Review (yes, I'm a bit behind), Keith Hennessey offers ten methods by which elected officials can begin "moving incrementally in the right direction" when it comes to the economy. Most of the items deal with particular issues and ought to be considered, but his #2 speaks to a general approach to governance and ought to be elevated above the rest:

Two. Set the right goal: creating the conditions for growth rather than trying to create growth. Policymakers need to get the policies right and let business leaders decide how to run their firms. Corporate leaders are sitting on unprecedented piles of cash, waiting to see what Washington will foul up next. Take Washington out of their decision-making by creating a stable, predictable, low-cost business environment. They will then decide how best to hire, invest, and expand. Your job as an elected official is not to create economic growth or jobs, it is to create the conditions under which the private sector creates growth and jobs. Stick to your lane and let business leaders stick to theirs.

It is accurate as both a slight and a neutral statement of fact to say that legislators and government executives are not qualified to direct industry and the economy. Actually, nobody is, on a macro scale, but politicians are especially unqualified, and moreover, it is dangerous simultaneously to insert powers of specific economic development into the same hands that hold powers of policing and taxation.

The line between setting conditions and dictating mandates can be gray, in spots, but it's the principle that matters: Let the people investing their reputations and livelihoods on particular endeavors determine the best methods, and make it easier for them to move forward.

Don't Lament the Inevitable; Change the Thinking

It's always amusing to read such things from an editorial board that has, among other things, advocated for centralization of the healthcare system:

One of its themes is how much government policy has been taken over by self-interested individuals who rotate between government and the private sector (including academic) jobs. They use government jobs as a way of ensuring even greater riches for themselves when they get out. Perhaps the most noteworthy are the "scholars" paid vast consulting and directorship sums to promote certain interests. In doing so, these academics become rich themselves.

Such "scholars" are supposed to be disinterested seekers after truth. In fact, all too many are just businesspeople in search of the fast buck, combined, of course, with the respect due to professors.

The Providence Journal can question the scholars' authenticity all it wants, but the distance between the financial-services individuals whom it attacks and those whose fortunes are based on the promotion of particular ideologies as academic research is not far. For that matter, wealth is not the only motivation for corrupted thinking on the campus.

More to the point, though, when a system relies on "experts" and "scholars" to set policies that, although ultimately filtered through a representative democracy, affect huge expanses of the economy and human life, the incentive will be inevitably strong to procure those labels and slap them on special interests. After all, who is more of an expert than the person who lives and breaths a topic?

This is a core flaw in all approaches to problem-solving via government, whether the area is finances, education, or healthcare.

A Mechanism for a (Slightly) Longer View

The Dear Mr. Chafee letter by John Marion, of Common Cause, makes a generally applicable suggestion that might lead to food for thought:

... I would suggest that when Gov.-elect Chafee makes most of his decisions, he should use a 25-year time horizon. ...

The electoral cycle is short because we insist on accountability through the ballot box. If our leaders had generation-long terms of office we could not send them signals about whether we approve or disapprove of their actions frequently enough. But a four- (and for members of the General Assembly, two-) year electoral cycle creates an incentive for politicians to be shortsighted in their policymaking.

Arguably, the party system acts as a mechanism for extending the political horizon somewhat. If politicians are concerned about the health and growth of a political party, then they have incentive not to push policies that will whiplash.

Two "of courses" arise. First, of course, a longer view of that sort can be extremely detrimental. Think the Democrats' scheming to create an electoral base with illegal immigrants, destitute inner-city minorities, and public-sector organized labor.

Second, of course, (and relatedly) the longer views of political parties tend to favor policies that increase the influence of government. If the goal is to build constituencies, then policies that increase dependents over time will bring their own reward. The necessity of limiting government's reach is something that each generation must learn (which is difficult when pretty much the entire educational system from kindergarten through college preaches a different gospel), and it will tend to ebb and swell with the health of the economy and the periodic overreaching of the creeping socialists.

Dealing with the Second Primary

It seems as if something has significantly changed in electoral politics — or else, that something that has been changing crossed into a visible field of light. The most striking example may have been in Alaska, where Senator Lisa Murkowski rejected the decision of the Republican Party's primary voters and ran as a write-in candidate, ultimately defeating Republican Joe Miller. In Rhode Island Doug Gablinski (D, Bristol, Warren) attempt the same feat, and of course the governor's race was four-way, with independent, Democrat, Republican, and Moderate candidates.

In some respects, one could say that the general election is becoming another shot at a primary, with all of the strategic opportunities that entails. Particularly, I think of the verb "to primary" — indicating the strategy whereby a faction unhappy with a particular office holder runs a candidate against him or her in the primaries. That will surely become a possibility in future general elections, with a special interests, like public sector unions, trying to knock disfavored politicians out in the primaries and then trying to split the vote so that the opposite party wins the general election.

So, legislation proposed by incoming Republican representatives Patricia Morgan and Michael Chippendale to create runoff elections that ultimately bring the race for office down to two candidates is certainly reasonable:

They say the creation of a runoff election requires an amendment to the state Constitution that would need to be passed by both chambers of the General Assembly, then approved by voters in the next general election. ...

"This year there were 12 races in Rhode Island won with less than 50 percent of the vote. I fear this is an issue that will only grow over the next several election cycles," [Morgan] said. "Ultimately we'll see more disenfranchised voters, which will contribute to the existing problem of voter apathy and mistrust of the government."

Politics and Redemption

The talk was of political theory and second chances for Michael Vick when I spoke with guest host Tony Cornetta on the Matt Allen Show last night. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

I didn't go into the sales pitch, but please email or call (401-835-7156) me to pledge financial support — as subscriptions, donations, or advertising — for 2011 to help us create a full-time job within Anchor Rising.

Beware Too-Efficient Government

Over on the WPRI site, Ted Nesi is running a series of "Dear Mr. Chafee" essays by "five of the state’s smartest citizens." I'll admit that I'm a bit suspicious of his claim — inasmuch as I'm on the list — but Tom Sgouros, who penned the first in the series is surely among the more intelligent on Rhode Island's far left. Of course, he therefore more clearly enunciates the error in progressive thinking:

... lurking under most of these issues is one big issue: the relationship between the state and the cities and towns. Our governments exist to provide a set of services we all need. The strange thing is how we think that having governments constantly at odds with each other is the most efficient way to deliver those services.

In the minds of Sgouros's ilk, the American experiment in government — democracy, checks and balances, and all that — has either been proven a failure or perhaps should never have been attempted. To Sgouros, "governments exist to provide a set of services." To the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence, "Governments are instituted among Men" to secure "certain unalienable Rights." The founders knew that a government empowered to be efficient was empowered to — and would surely find reason to — oppress.

What's astonishing is that Sgouros cites evidence that ought to speak against centralization for just the opposite, using Central Falls as an example:

...would the mayor have made the bad decisions he made without seeing the state as a separate party able to bail him out ...?

The only way increasing the centralized hand would decrease mayors' inclination to pass bucks upward would be if the leaders of local communities weren't elected by their communities, but appointed by the state. That is, if they were accountable to the state for their positions. The American experiment meant to make government accountable to the people, but in the name of efficiency, Sgouros has already discarded such notions. It shows in his terrible understanding of how democracy is structured to function:

... the forms of cooperation have to become part of the government, since a "system" that depends on the good will of this mayor or that governor isn't a system at all.

I shiver to contemplate what "the forms of cooperation" might be, but I also shiver to think that voters actually believe that elected officials' core motivation should be "good will." Many do, of course, and many of them probably share Sgouros's worldview. After all, he's happy to rely on the good will of state legislators and leaders — perhaps a national technocracy — although that's largely because he trusts his allies to control them.

What voters ought to trust in is the desire of leaders to stay in office and their realization that the people are empowered to remove them. The closer those leaders are to the people who can vote them out of a job, the more effective that mechanism will be. That those higher up the chain, at the state and national levels, have made a practice of bailing leaders out when they've failed as miserably as in Central Falls does not in any way suggest that centralized government will be more accountable.

Thankful for the Window

Roger Simon's Thanksgiving musings struck me as particularly poignant:

My real beef with Barack Obama is that he does not want to acknowledge that [America represents human aspiration to the world] or he doesn't believe it. I don't know which. But in any case he rejects it. I saw that most clearly on what was for me the worst moment of his sad presidency — when he failed to respond publicly in support of the democracy demonstrators in Iran. He wouldn't be a window for their dreams and aspirations. Ironically, given his own bloviations, he offered them no hope. He wasn't a wimp — to come back to Smith's dichotomy in his first paragraph. He was something worse — a cold narcissistic fish, interested in only his now-absurd negotiation with Ahmadinejad and, of course, in himself. He left the Iranian students with no window — no American dream for their world.

On this Thanksgiving Day, I sincerely hope that Barack Obama and what he stands for is just a bump on an ever-bumpy road and that we are on our way out of the slough of despond that our country finds itself in. I think we can all agree, however, that this slough is pretty deep. Getting out of it will not be as easy as a few tea party victories. The work has only just begun. But it's worth the effort, most certainly.

Returning States' Role in Civic Structure

One can sense a desire, in the broadly defined Tea Party movement, to repeal something among the many decisions, amendments, and statutes that have diluted the Founders' experiment of divided government powers. Todd Zywicki marks the introduction of the Seventeenth Amendment to the list of candidates for rethinking:

Election of senators by state legislatures was a cornerstone of two of the most important "auxiliary precautions": federalism and the separation of powers. Absent some direct grant of federal influence to state governments, the latter would be in peril of being "swallowed up," to use George Mason's phrase. Even arch-centralizer Hamilton recognized that this institutional protection was necessary to safeguard state autonomy. In addition, the Senate was seen as a means of linking the state governments together with the federal one. Senators' constituents would be state legislators rather than the people, and through their senators the states could influence federal legislation or even propose constitutional amendments under Article V of the Constitution.

The Seventeenth Amendment ended all that, bringing about the master-servant relationship between the federal and state governments that the original constitutional design sought to prevent. Before the Seventeenth Amendment, the now-widespread Washington practice of commandeering the states for federal ends — through such actions as "unfunded mandates," laws requiring states to implement voter-registration policies that enable fraud (such as the "Motor Voter" law signed by Bill Clinton), and the provisions of Obamacare that override state policy decisions — would have been unthinkable. Instead, senators today act all but identically to House members, treating federalism as a matter of political expediency rather than constitutional principle.

The Seventeenth Amendment also, it seems to me, put another arrow in the notion of federalism by giving special interests even more opportunity to sow together constituencies across state borders. There are points to be made on both sides, but there are reasons for representative government on multiple tiers.

In general, though, I doubt the prospects of passing amendments to address this sort of complex civic question. What's needed, perhaps, is a single amendment — the Return to Foundations Amendment, or something — that pulls together several of the ideas for repeal and modification that are floating around as separate movements.

Unemployment Benefits and Change

Being unemployed for long periods is a terrible experience for those who lack the resources to survive an extended financial drain. Especially when a family is on the line, the hopelessness and fear of joblessness is one of modern life's greatest anxieties.

Still, at a certain point, unemployment benefits begin to become a weapon of dependency for government agents:

Thousands of out-of-work Rhode Islanders will start running out of unemployment benefits on Nov. 30 unless Congress acts to renew certain federal benefit programs.

About 30,000 unemployed people are collecting jobless benefits in Rhode Island, where the unemployment rate is 11.5 percent, fifth-highest in the nation.

If certain federal benefit programs expire as scheduled late this month, about 17,000 unemployed Rhode Islanders would run out of benefits sooner than they otherwise would, state figures show.

Short-term help is, I'd argue, a just and reasonable responsibility of state government, and during times of economic stress, the federal government should shift funds from other expenditures to help the states in their efforts. But when nearly two years of government subsidies come to be seen as a humanitarian necessity, the calculation begins to change.

After all, those who are kept afloat by such funds are less likely to make changes that might improve their circumstances while contributing to the economy. That's true on a personal level, with the decreased the likelihood that workforces will move from place to place or industry to industry as the economy requires, or reconfigure their living circumstances toward more sustainable expectations and better fortified family supports. It's also true on a political level, with the ire of unemployed voters focused on maintaining and extending their temporary benefits rather than pressuring politicians to cease their games and get out of the economy's way.

New England's Liberal Conservative Non-Schizophrenia; Or Something

Robert Whitcomb ruminates over the "psychological" conservatism of New England:

New Englanders are in fact more psychologically conservative than most of the rest of the country, whatever the social and economic liberalism ascribed to them by the press.

That their rates of divorce, illegitimacy, alcohol and other drug abuse, personal bankruptcy and other signs of social dysfunction are less than most of the country's speaks to the region's social stability (call it "conservatism'') compared to, in particular, the Sunbelt.

There, many folks like to call their states "conservative'' but the chaotic personal lives of so many folks belie that description.

Without digging around, my sense that Whitcomb is correct, here. But then he goes on to allude to a sort of dispositional conservatism, at least when it comes to politics:

Why do New Englanders tend not to make big changes in their political representation, whatever the national gyrations?

I'd guess it's because they're more wary than most of the country of promises of change. And they don't have as schizophrenic views about government as many Americans: They know that any advanced society needs a lot of it.*

Well, not quite. Look what happened in Maine, where Republicans swept through Augusta, winning the Governor's race and both legislative Houses. Or New Hampshire where both Congressional and Senate seats are now held by the GOP and the legislature flipped to Republican super-majorities (after drifting Democratic in recent years from its own version of Yankee Conservatism). No, New Englanders aren't immune to making big political changes. At least not all of them.

Perhaps it would be more insightful to look into why 4 of the 6 New England states seem to be political outliers this year and, generally speaking, why dispositional conservatives are so politically liberal. I think Whitcomb is close to identifying it when he says, to paraphrase, New Englanders recognize that modern society requires big government. In other words, there are plenty of New Englanders (particularly, it seems, in Mass., RI, CT and VT), who are interested in conserving the current state of political affairs because they benefit directly from the status quo via jobs or benefits or entitlements. So, in this case, dispositional conservatism reinforces political liberalism. Oh, and self-interest.

*As an aside, regarding that schizophrenic conservatism exhibited elsewhere, here we see a similar thought process as that exhibited in today's aforementioned ProJo editorial concerning "fiscal hyper-hypocrisy".

Letting Government Be Neutral

Catching up on my reading, I highlighted the following, from First Thing editor Joseph Bottum's thoughts on the Ground Zero mosque controversy:

Real democracy is messy. It's got protestors and agitators and banners and manners and morals and financial pressures and gossip and policemen on horses keeping an eye out to make sure it doesn't turn violent. Oh, yes, it's also got government, but apart from paying for those policemen, government ought not to be too deeply involved as these things sort themselves out. If what the Muslims want to do is not illegal, than government should have nothing more to say.

That does not mean, however, that everyone else should also have nothing more to say. The attempt to build a large, new mosque and Islamic center anywhere near the site of the World Trade Center is so offensive, so bizarre, and so deliberate that it should be stopped.

And stopped it will be, through the offered mediation of New York's Archbishop Dolan, or the skittishness of the financial community, or the disturbance of the neighbors, or the anger of the protestors, or the refusal of the building contractors. It will be messy, and it will be sharp. Inspiring and disturbing, with loud shouts on the streets and a few quiet words in the back rooms.

But that's democracy—it's how things get done when you accept that government shouldn't do everything. The churches and the synagogues have long experience with this kind of democratic negotiation. Time for the mosques to learn how to do it, too.

It comes down to this: As the ostensibly neutral arbiter and the licit wielder of deadly force, the government should not determine what its principles (society's principles) should be. That includes the mandate for "tolerance." At lower levels of government, the people should be able to insert their principles into government as they see fit, but the moment government steps in to resolve disputes — as opposed to ensuring the conditions in which they can be resolved without violence — being unalterably tolerant of one perspective inherently requires being intolerant of perspectives that oppose it.

If the arbiter insists, even, that "hate" is inadmissible as justification, then his criteria are no longer objective; hatred is all too evident in the side with which one disagrees and too difficult to see among those who've reached the one's own conclusion.

If It Were Rational, Their Power Would Decrease

Theodore Gatchel suggests that one way to improve the function of Congress is to narrow the focus of each legislative item:

If the Democrats had broken health-care legislation into smaller, "clean" bills, each of which dealt with a single aspect of health care, President Obama might well have gained more of what he wanted, and Tuesday night's results might have been very different. If the Democrats had included tort reform and letting insurance companies compete across state lines — both of which could reduce consumers' costs — in their agenda, they undoubtedly would have received much-needed bipartisan support.

Gatchel notes that politicians dislike such an approach because it would make it more difficult to slip unpopular and self-serving measures into laws. It would also reduce incumbents' access to deniability — claiming to have opposed unpopular aspects of bills, but pointing to positive aspects as the areas of focus. The extreme nature of ObamaCare's legislative process shows the ultimate form of that reasoning; it became starkly the reality that legislators were pointing to a few positive intentions — regardless of practical likelihood — and insisting that they compensated for whatever might prove to be in the bill.

One should note, in counterbalance to Gatchel's suggestion, that there are circumstances in which piecemeal legislation can be less effective, even incoherent, even harmful. On a broad scale, the example comes to mind of leftist regulatory schemes that favor large incumbent businesses deleteriously mixed with rightist free-market principles, creating a free rein for monopolistic powerhouses.

That danger could easily be mitigated, however, if bills contained provisions that required all of their key components to be passed individually before they collectively became law.

Some Truths Well Put

I'll be relieved when today has passed, for community engagement reasons, and I'll be relieved when Tuesday has passed, for political involvement reasons, and I'll be relaxed when November has passed, for professional reasons. Which all serves obliquely to explain why I'm just now, of a Saturday morning, catching up on Mark Steyn's week of insightful daily posts. Read them all, by all means, but as usual with Steyn, a few paragraphs stand out from each. On Tuesday:

An America comprised of therapeutic statists, regulatory enforcers, multigenerational dependents, identity-group rent-seekers, undocumented laborers, stimulus grantwriting liaison coordinators, six-figure community organizers, millionaire diversity-outreach consultants, billionaire carbon-offset traders, a diversionary-leisure "knowledge sector", John Edwards' anti-poverty consultancy, John Kerry's vintner, and Al Gore's holistic masseuse will still offer many opportunities, but not for that outmoded American archetype, the self-reliant citizen seeking to nourish his family through the fruits of his labor. And nor for millions of others just struggling to stay afloat. A statist America won't be a large Sweden — unimportant but prosperous — but something closer to the Third World, corrupt and chaotic, broke and brutish — for all but a privileged few.

The new class war in the western world is between "public servants" and the rest of us. In Washington, the marching bureaucrats are telling us government doesn't suck. But in Greece, the bloated public service has sucked so much out of the economy there's nothing left.

On Wednesday:

Got that? If you own a deli, you better have, because New York is so broke they need their nine cents per sliced bagel and their bagel inspectors are cracking down.

In such a world, there is no "law" — in the sense of (a) you the citizen being found by (b) a jury of your peers to be in breach of (c) a statute passed by (d) your elected representatives. Instead, unknown, unnamed, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats determine transgressions, prosecute infractions and levy fines for behavioral rules they themselves craft and which, thanks to the ever more tangled spaghetti of preferences, subsidies, entitlements and incentives, apply to different citizens unequally. You may be lucky: You may not catch their eye — for a while. But perhaps your neighbor does, or the guy down the street. No trial, no jury, just a dogsbody in some cubicle who pronounces that you’re guilty of an offense a colleague of his invented. ...

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don't make the rules, you don't vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services — all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

On Thursday:

In the 20th century the intermediary institutions were belatedly hacked away—not just self-government at town, county, and state level, but other independent pillars: church, civic associations, and not least (as the demographic profile of Dillon indicates) the basic building block of functioning society, the family. After the diminution of every intervening institution, very little stands between the central authority and the individual, which is why the former now assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life and why schoolgirls in Dillon, South Carolina think it entirely normal to beseech the Sovereign in Barackingham Palace to do something about classroom maintenance. ...

The object is to reduce and eventually eliminate alternatives — to subsume everything within the Big Government monopoly. Statists prefer national one-size-fits all — and ultimately planet-wide one-size-fits-all. Borders create the nearest thing to a free market in government — as the elite well understand when they seek to avoid the burdens they impose on you. John Kerry, a Big Tax senator from a Big Tax state, preferred to register his yacht in Rhode Island to avoid half-a-million bucks in cockamamie Massachusetts "boat sales and use" tax. Howard Metzenbaum, the pro-Death Tax senator from Ohio, adjusted his legal residency just before he died from Ohio to Florida, because the former had an estate tax and the latter didn't. This is federalism at work: States compete, and, when they get as rapacious as Massachusetts, even their own pro-tax princelings start looking for the workarounds.

Bazillionaire senators will always have workarounds — for their land, for their yachts, for their health care. You won't.

And today:

In California, the people can pass a ballot proposition, but a single activist judge overrules them. In Arizona, the people's representatives vote to uphold the people's laws, but a pliant judge strikes them down at Washington's behest. It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the constitution unconstitutional. It is never a good idea to send the message, as the political class now does consistently, that there are no democratic means by which the people can restrain their rulers. As Pat Cadell points out, the logic of that is "pre-revolutionary".

What Judge Bolton in Arizona and Judge Walker in California have in common and share with Mayor Bloomberg's observations on opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is a contempt for the people. The rationale for reversing the popular will in all three cases is that the sovereign people are bigots. In Arizona, they're xenophobic. In California, they're homophobic. In New York, they're Islamophobic. Popular sovereignty may be fine in theory but not when the people are so obviously in need of "re-education" by their betters. Over in London, the transportation department has a bureaucrat whose very title sums up our rulers' general disposition toward us: "Head of Behavior Change."

What Steyn excels at laying out is the application of a basic understanding of America's conception of liberty and the civic structure that supports it to broad issues of the day. We can see those applications in every layer of government. Town-level school committees that bend to the will of state-and-nation-level labor unions that have had decades and publicly funded full-time jobs to restructure the public debate in such a way as to hinder necessary change. State legislators who apparently have no concept of the effects of the legislation that they pass at the behest of self-interested and ideological constituencies, and a gubernatorial front-runner whose "vision for Rhode Island's recovery" is 100% driven by the decisions and top-down crafting of government policies — picking industries and individual winners and, of course, spending more money on government activities. A federal government that is nakedly hostile to citizens who wish to govern themselves by different standards than the ruling class prefers.

Pared down, there are two paths to take this coming Tuesday — chosen at every level of the ballot. One begins to turn the nation back toward a liberty and self-autonomous spirit that can restore the United States to its city-on-a-hill status and, indeed, ensure that the nation continues to exist as such. The other allows the noose to continue tightening.

Cause and What-Can-Effect

This unsigned editorial in the Providence Journal makes a reasonable case:

Much of the debate about unemployment assiduously avoids the basic causes of long-term joblessness and falling wages.

One is globalization. Large U.S. companies, aided by modern telecommunications and fast transportation, find it increasingly easy to move jobs abroad, where the wages tend to be much lower than they are (or were!) in the U.S. This produces a race to the bottom that drags down U.S. wages and employment.

The writer goes on to note some of the contributing factors, as well as a couple positives to the trend: higher investment yields and improved living conditions for the benefiting countries. But what he or she fails to address is the differing degrees to which government can affect the issues that come into play.

People in poorer countries will work for less. That's a fact. Technology has lowered barriers to overseas production. Another fact. China is playing protectionist games. All of these can be addressed in different ways, but all methods are likely to be slow and risky.

What our domestic government can do is to ease the burdens that it places upon our own economy. That's politically difficult, of course, not only because it requires government to give up some of its reach and authority, but also because it will force powerful constituencies — on both sides of every issue — to make adjustments to evolving reality. But there is no other option that doesn't turn our "race to the bottom" into a race to authoritarianism.

A Foreign Reason to Get Our Own House in Order

How about a frightening assessment of our relationship with China:

Why would China so brazenly challenge the world's economic powers like this? Because the country's leaders know what our leaders are only beginning to understand — that China would probably win a global trade war.

It's certainly worth reading Eric Weiner's entire essay for the details of his argument, but the point that I draw from his conclusion is that America's indebtedness and creeping cultural dependency have left us with no good governmental cards to play. Extrapolating a way forward, I'd suggest that Americans need to increase their efforts encouraging the Chinese people to push back against the abridgment of their rights and, perhaps more importantly, to begin restructuring our society so that we're less dependent on foreign loans and more apt to produce and to do business with our own countrymen and women.

Which strongly relates, it seems to me, to Peggy Noonan's latest insight into the national mood:

For those who wonder why so many people have come to hate, or let me change it to profoundly dislike, "the elites," especially the political elite, here is one reason: It is because they have armies of accountants to do this work for them. Those in power institute the regulations and rules and then hire people to protect them from the burdens and demands of their legislation. There is no congressman passing tax law who doesn't have staffers in his office taking care of his own financial life and who will not, when he moves down the street into the lobbying firm, have an army of accountants to protect him there.

Washington is now to some degree the focus of the same sort of profound resentment that Hollywood liberals inspired when they really mattered, or seemed really powerful. For decades they made films that were not helpful to our culture or society, that were full of violence and sick imagery. But they often brought their own children up more or less protected from the effects of the culture they created. Private schools, nannies, therapists, tutors. They bought their way out of the cultural mayhem to which they'd contributed. Their children were fine. Yours were on their own.

It all comes down to a desperate need to return the focus of our nation to individual autonomy, which requires, most of all, that more of the necessary restraints on others' behavior be accomplished through cultural means, rather than governmental. Central management and individual liberty are mutually exclusive, in the long run, and since we can't manage our way to a stronger global economic footing, we have to achieve it through our heritage of freedom and personal volition.

Green and Blue v. Red

An op-ed in the New York Post, by Sen. James Inhofe (R, OK) points to a couple of topics worth discussion:

One insidious force keeping unemployment high is regulatory uncertainty: Companies that could hire (or re-hire), don't — because they're worried about what new restrictions will be coming down from Washington.

Congress bears much of the blame — especially for the new "financial reform" law, which leaves so many details to be filled in later. But a major contributor to businesses' worries is the Obama Environmental Protection Agency, which is issuing a daily barrage of rules and regulations threatening jobs in American industry.

So concludes "EPA's Anti-Industrial Policy: Threatening Jobs and America's Manufacturing Base" — a new report from the minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (on which I serve as ranking member).

Inhofe goes on to describe three of the four "most egregiously anti-business proposals" of the EPA, on which the report focuses:

• New rules for industrial boilers
• Unnaturally lowered ozone levels
• The claim that the agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide

The fourth proposal addressed in the full report (PDF) has to do with regulation of Portland Cement plants. Notably, all of the proposals have had the effect of putting Republicans and private-sector unions on the same side of advocacy — because both sides have reason to fear policies that could cost the economy almost a million jobs, many of them industrial.

But the Republicans don't have entirely clean hands on a broader view. Return your thoughts to Inhofe's lament over regulatory uncertainty. Such uncertainty is surely an inevitable consequence of our deeply divided political sphere. Indeed, the only thing that has been certain, over the past two decades, has been that government authority would grow and expand, but with a modicum of respect for free market principles that has driven the economy of the United States. Republicans of the current generations have failed to pull government in the other direction — with many, including President Bush, apparently quite comfortable with its expansion. That consistent trend enabled companies (particularly large companies) to adjust and plan for their own benefit, and smaller businesses and individuals could predict what rules would persist and which were prone to adjustment.

What President Obama and the Congressional Democrats have illustrated is that the balance cannot hold. Eventually, government's size and power becomes such that expansion requires it to rewrite rules by which other social powerhouses thrive. That's the line being crossed. Businesses operate by the larger principle (crass as it is) of profit, which makes it unlikely that a new corporate executive regime will change policies based on whim. When they do, the fact that companies are replaceable means that the gap they leave will be filled; another company will spot the poorly managed competitor's dash to the cliff and maneuver to fill its abandoned space. There is no secondary government.

Government, by its nature, is subject to the whims of those who hold its reins. Especially when public offices become the domain of independently wealthy politicians, they become prone to ideological excess, and ideology defines its own larger principles, making their decisions much less predictable. The nation's deep political divide matters most of all because the size of government grants unwieldy power to the side that happens to be winning for the moment.

Nancy Driggs Sums Up a Campaign's Rationale

On Saturday, Tiverton Citizens for Change hosted a fundraiser for local candidates, featuring speeches from several. Nancy Driggs, Republican for RI House District 70 (Portsmouth, Tiverton), gave us something a bit more comprehensive than a review of local issues. Here is what she said.

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My name is Nancy Driggs, and I am the non-incumbent candidate for RI State Representative, District 70. I was graduated from the Univ. of Pennsylvania undergraduate, and from the U.C.L.A. School of Law. I am licensed to practice law in California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. My major areas of practice have been in the corporate/securities area, both at the SEC and a major Boston law firm, and then for almost 20 years, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as a litigator in child custody cases of child abuse and neglect, and ultimately termination of parental rights to free the child for adoption.

I have been married to John Perkins, a partner in the RI small business of Wellington Yacht Partners, for 34 years. We have three children, a daughter who is a pediatrician/neonatologist at Women's and Infants, a son who is a financial analyst in Maryland, and another son who is a lawyer in Boston. We have two and three-quarters grandchildren.

In order to discuss what I consider the most compelling issues in our state, I have to discuss underlying principles, which guide me, and which inform these other issues.

The well-being of children, the most vulnerable amongst us, has been, always, a top priority for me. I believe, however, that we, as a society, and within our state, are destroying many young lives.

In my years of legal work in this arena I have seen the devastation wrought on families by our current "entitlement" and "benefit" culture. We have created, and continue to create, generations of government dependents. We have ruined families. A father's role to support offspring is ignored — the state (substitute taxpayer), instead, becoming the provider. We have neutered and made irrelevant, any sense of personal accountability and responsibility for actions — substituting, again, the taxpayer to provide for their children.

I remember being in Family Court in Providence for a hearing. I represented, at that time, the one year old child of an 18 year old mother. The child was in foster care because of mother's domestic violence issues with the child's father. It became clear that day that mother was again pregnant, and I asked her how she expected to take care of that child. Her answer? I get aid from the state. There was no sense that aid actually came from taxpayer's pockets. There was no shame that she would be taking it. There was no personal accountability.

I think, however, that this new vocabulary of "entitlements" and "benefits" that I witnessed in my work in the child custody arena, is symptomatic of society at large. And it needs to be changed. It has replaced the vocabulary of "fiscal accountability" and "personal accountability" that I grew up with. We are living in a surreal and dangerous world right now in Rhode Island where the government is demanding more and more money from the taxpayers to fund its ever-growing self and its many programs, and the taxpayers are finally saying, "enough, I'm out of here."

And when the taxpayer goes, whether an individual, or a corporation, so go jobs, and so go their revenues from the state's coffer.

It is as simple as that. We need to bring fiscal reality back into focus. We use the words "balance sheet" and "balanced budget," but we ignore the definition. A financial statement and a budget are balanced when liabilities equal assets. We don't run our household budget by expenditures that are based on a hoped-for gift from Uncle Sam, who, by the way, we know is also bankrupt and hugely in debt. We shouldn't run our state this way, yet that is exactly the FY 2011 budget our State Representatives passed last year.

We know that when our household incomes are down, the first things we give up are the "extras" — eating out, movies, trips. We don't first turn off our electricity, or the heat. Yet, we are told by our current representatives that if we cut back state spending the first thing to go will be police, firemen, ambulance, schools. That is nonsense, and it is time to call it that.

We don't have a revenue problem in Rhode Island. We have a spending problem, exacerbated and heightened by this mentality of "entitlements" and "benefits." My passion is to return "fiscal accountability" and "personal responsibility" to their proper and necessary function in society.

The America of our history, and our glory, always has been a "can do" country. We are the land of the free and the home of the brave, but we are at the brink of destroying the very values that still make us the country to which everyone wants to immigrate. Americans traditionally have been a hard-working people, intent on making a better life for those that follow. And until recently, that dream could be a reality. No more. If we don't stop this reckless, unaccountable, unprincipled spending — at every level of government — for the first time in the history of this country our children will NOT be able to have the opportunity for a life better than ours.

Big government is a malignancy. Its many impersonal tentacles are wrapping themselves around more and more of our liberties and freedoms, most often in the guise of compassion. Big government needs to be excised from our lives.

This is probably the most important election in the history of our country. This election is about the soul of our country, and us. This election is about private property rights, about who is more entitled to the fruits of your labor, your wallet, and to make decisions of where your money should be spent — government or you. This election is about the proper role of government and the individual in society.

I believe in free enterprise. I believe the individual should be free to keep as much of his/her money as possible, and to determine where that money should be spent. I believe in the Constitution, and the limited role of government it envisions.

I believe if we return to my passion, replacing the current culture of "entitlements" and "benefits" with the principles of "fiscal accountability" and "personal responsibility," if we allow these principles to inform our tax policy, our regulatory policy, our education standards, our healthcare debate, we will have gone a huge distance in bringing our cities, states and nation back from the brink of bankruptcy — moral and fiscal — upon which they all teeter.

This is why I am running.

Balancing a Budget; Balance Lucky Parent Syndrome?

Yesterday's RISC-Y Business NewsLetter contained a Woonsocket Call article (not available on line) describing the onerous cuts to the school budget identified by the school committee.

Mayor Leo T. Fontaine has sued the school department on a bid to balance its budget and on Monday school officials may meet his challenge with a stunning round of cuts not seen since the city budget battles of the early 1990s.

Villa Novan sports at all levels will be up for elimination School Committee Chairman Marc A. Dubois said Friday, and also all regular student transportation services.

A committee attempt to erase the remaining $2.8 million in red ink in the 2010-2011budget could also include the elimination of all teacher assistants at the elementary level and a cut of approximately $500,000 in capital expenditures on which the city is entitled to receive 80 percent reimbursement from the state.

I e-mailed an observer of Woonsocket politics yesterday to express exasperation that cuts had been identified only at the point of a lawsuit and to inquire whether he was aware of potential cuts that didn't make the list. The gentleman, not a bleeding heart on any front, replied below with little sympathy for my premise.

Let's establish the facts on the ground before taking up his questions.

- Woonsocket has an inadequate tax base. Not "inadequate" like Providence, which has a tax base but is legally barred from levying 45% of it. In Woonsocket, it simply doesn't exist in a sufficient mass, no matter how many tax laws are changed.

- Teacher pay in Woonsocket is in the bottom quarter statewide and they pay a 20% health co-share.

- We don't (myself included) all have $100,000+/year jobs. So there are "poorer" households and poorer communities.

Now to his questions.

Before I begin this debate, I need to know if you believe that suburban students are entitled by their good fortune (lucky parent syndrome) to have more opportunities offered to them? If so, why? If not, then how should the obvious socio-economic differences among the various cities and towns be balanced to assure equal opportunities?

Does the rest of the state not have an obligation to balance, if not equalize, opportunity, defined here as a good education, for children in less affluent communities?

Floating Anarchy

Elsewhere in the world, conditions akin to slavery:

Forced labour and human rights abuses involving African crews have been uncovered on trawlers fishing illegally for the European market by investigators for an environmental campaign group.

The Environmental Justice Foundation found conditions on board including incarceration, violence, withholding of pay, confiscation of documents, confinement on board for months or even years, and lack of clean water.

The video included in the story tells of abandoned ships on which the companies, for some reason, keep lone crewmen. On active ships the condition is one of servitude, with all of those old manipulations, such as deliberate debt traps and physical abuse.

What's striking, from the standpoint of political thought, is the way in which the story points to the narrow path along which societies must tread. On the one hand, governments are necessary that can enforce basic rules concerning freedom and treatment of fellow human beings (and, yes, resource management). On the other hand, poverty and a lack of opportunity are the conditions that drag people into this modern slavery, and one needn't trace personal stories far, I'd wager, in order to see an abuse or poorly conceived intervention by government agencies.

The Unthrilling Election

On last night's Matt Allen Show, Matt and I pondered why there seems to be little excitement around Rhode Island's gubernatorial race. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

The Straight Line Crosses Political Groupings

Timothy Sandefur's edifying review of the shift in legal thought on the Supreme Court during the era of President Franklin Roosevelt's progressive revolution points, among other things, to the way in which political groupings do not draw straight lines across history, such that a conservative or progressive today would have agreed with their supposed forerunners:

For a legislature to exert power in this way — for the personal benefit of the lawmaker or his allies — would be to act arbitrarily; to exert its mere will. But the due-process-of-law clause allows states to act only pursuant to law — that is, general rules serving the public good. In 1874, less than a decade after the Fourteenth Amendment added a new "due process of law" clause to the Constitution, the Court held that states could not take property from some citizens to benefit others because such legislation was not "law," but "a decree under legislative forms." Legislation restricting freedom only to enrich a particular faction, or lacking any basis other than legislative say-so, abridges liberty without due process of law.

Progressive-era lawyers recognized that this legal doctrine was among the most serious obstacles to redistributive legislation. They therefore formulated a theory that the due-process clause required only fair procedures, and that the constitutional prohibition on legislative arbitrariness — which they derisively labeled "substantive due process" — had been concocted by "activist" judges who merely enforced their individual political views from the bench. The judges of a previous generation would have been stunned by this accusation, but by the 1930s, it had become common in the legal academy and among younger lawyers. The clash between the two interpretations of the due-process clause would form one of the central dramas of the New Deal decade.

As it happens, I agree with the progressives, as described in the above. Within the boundaries of the Constitution, states ought to be able to be given maximal leash, with residents never deprived of the right to work to change policies or to leave, and the expectation that state governments that choose poorly will watch productive residents leave and take the health of the local society with them. The problem is that federalism turned out to be an argument of convenience for factions outside of the judicial majority.

The insight of the progressives in the text that I've just quoted was that there exist rules laid out in the law concocted by people in a system of self government and that the people could therefore change them. Experiment. In terms of government, there isn't some abstract, pure Law to which legislatures and jurists must hew, because that abstraction turns out to be suspiciously similar to the opinions of the ruling class. But once they gained the majority, the progressives set about undermining the rules that made possible the very notion of due process:

... the Constitution explicitly bars states from "impairing the obligation of contracts," a prohibition adopted in response to uprisings like the 1786 Shays's Rebellion, in which farmers mobbed foreclosure sales, closed courts, and demanded "debtor stay laws" like that enacted in Minnesota. Laws limiting lenders' ability to recover from defaulting borrowers dry up credit and stifle economic expansion, which is why James Madison described them as "wicked" and "contrary to the first principles of the social compact." Even law professor William Prosser, who helped Minnesota legislators write the law, confessed in 1934 that the contracts clause "was inserted in the Constitution for the purpose of preventing precisely [this] type of legislation."

When a bank foreclosed on the Blaisdell family's boarding house, they sought to extend the redemption period. The judge refused, finding the law unconstitutional, but the Blaisdells appealed, and the Supreme Court upheld the law in a 5–4 decision. Admitting it could not be reconciled with the Constitution, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes nevertheless held that the law was justified by the economic "emergency." It was "no answer," he claimed, "to insist that what the provision of the Constitution meant to the vision of that day it must mean to the vision of our time." To say "that the great clauses of the Constitution must be confined to the interpretation which the framers, with the conditions and outlook of their time, would have placed upon them" simply "carrie[d] its own refutation."

With legislatures thus freed to to do anything, provided it coincided with the ideologies and opinions of a majority of Supreme Court justices, the deterioration of the American experiment began in earnest. In our day, the federal government has stepped up its own involvement — from minimum wages to, now, healthcare — making real due process — the ability to organize and work for change in response to unjust laws — that much more difficult, and the decision of our rulers that much more arbitrary.

Servility with Outward Liberty

In a review of Kenneth Minogue's The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (subscription probably required), Diana Schaub touches on a topic that is subtle, but central to current political disputes. "Freedom is mentally and morally demanding; bondage is easy (painful and miserable, but easy)," she writes. Therefore, we are beginning to see the emergence of "a new 'dependence of mind' compatible with the outward forms of freedom."

The "one right thing" to do — the new orthodoxy — becomes defined not by the individual, with reference to authorities that may be addressed on their own merits, whether scriptural, traditional, or empirical, but by social activists, with government as "the agent of human improvement":

Servility takes a double form: "On the one hand, human beings are mobilized . . . to be the instruments of the social purpose of perfecting the world. On the other hand, as the beneficiaries of free-standing rights, they have been liberated from most frustrations and inhibitions on their right to satisfy all their own impulses. They are, in other words, to be collectively dutiful and individually hedonistic." Both attitudes entail servility. One's ideas and pieties are acquired through social osmosis. One follows along, obeying or at least mouthing the right slogans. Meanwhile, one's day-to-day behavior is impulsive, not under the guidance of long-range reason. To mention just one instance: "Saving for a rainy day" (the practice of delayed gratification) is not imperative, or perhaps even possible, when the state taxes you for the provision of all needs. Consumption, debt, impulse-buying, and gambling are all officially encouraged. The servile mind is enslaved to society without and the passions within.

Arguably, the skill that Western society developed, over millennia, was one of self discipline yielding a higher liberty, and when liberated from oppressive domination by others (through democracy) and given structures that facilitate the choice to rise above the base urges of the self (mainly through religion), humankind will strive and advance.

It is well known history (and, truthfully, current events) that people desiring to dominate can leverage that understanding to impose servility in the name of stamping out personal urges, with a corruption of religious structures as the primary vehicle. What we're seeing, in our place and time, is the encouragement of poor behavior so that the dominators have reason to impose their own order to manage the consequences through government.

A Government-Everything Complex

News comes this morning that the inclusion of a repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" has sunk a defense policy bill in the U.S. Senate:

Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked an effort by Democrats and the White House to lift the ban on gays from serving openly in the military, voting unanimously against advancing a major defense policy bill that included the provision. ...

Democrats included the repeal provision in a $726 billion defense policy bill, which authorizes a pay raise for the troops among other popular programs. In a deal brokered with the White House, the measure would have overturned the 1993 law banning openly gay service only after a Pentagon review and certification from the president that lifting the ban wouldn't hurt troop morale.

Although I oppose progressives' efforts to impose social engineering on our military forces, my larger concern, on this issue, is that such policy decisions are unnecessarily bound up with budgeting, such as the aforementioned raises. If it's true, as the Democrats have asserted, that they're merely following "public opinion," why ought the controversial issue not be handled on its own? The other day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) announced his intention also to append a bill that would have (had it not been blocked) allowed young illegal immigrants "who attend college or join the military to become legal U.S. residents."

Add in with this social stuff policies that more appropriately belong in a bill addressing military spending. I'm thinking of the F136 engine for the F-35 Lightning II jet engine. Back in the mid-'90s, the bidding process left the engines in the hands of the company Pratt & Whitney (the F135), but General Electric/Rolls-Royce managed to secure funding for its alternate, as well.

Four years ago, the Department of Defense and both administrations began attempting to withdraw funding for the F136, but Congress has kept it going. The core remaining argument on behalf of the engine is made on the grounds of market competition — although it's questionable whether a single entity's purchase of two products creates real competitive incentives for either provider.

What makes the engine issue particularly relevant is that President Obama has vowed to veto the defense policy bill if it includes funding for the F136. The opportunity, therefore, for political maneuvers that have nothing to do with the well being of the military or the nation would have been huge if a pledge to veto wasteful spending had come up against the waves of homosexual and immigration activism.

These are the sorts of complicated and difficult-to-follow conflicts that arise with big government, of which the much-forewarned military-industrial complex seeks to make use to ensure continued economic benefit to interested parties. Yet, the typically left-leaning folks who decry such back-room cooperation when it comes to businesses and the military would like nothing better than to extend that same complexity and opportunity for diversion and corruption to every aspect of American society — healthcare, finances, the "green" industry, and on and on and on.

Fighting Tyranny Inherently Breaks the Rules

I've been meaning to comment on the latest development in the governance of Central Falls: the city council's decision to hire an independent lawyer, apparently without knowing how it will pay the bill if Receiver-King Mark Pfeiffer, appointed by the state, refuses to allow it.

The move by the council is a reaction to state-appointed receiver Mark A. Pfeiffer's announcement last week that to close a $2.1-million deficit in last year's budget and a projected $6.3-million hole in the current year, he will need to raise the tax rate by 10 percent. For homeowners, that will mean the rate per $1,000 of assessed value will go from $19.22 to $21.14. There are different rates for commercial and industrial buildings.

On the limited matter of whether the council should be spending scarce resources on such a thing, it's difficult to argue with Amy Kempe, here:

[The council's prospective lawyer, Lawrence] Goldberg said the council needed its own lawyer in cases where it disagreed with Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer has told the council to use the city solicitors, but Goldberg said they now answer to Pfeiffer.

"They have divided loyalties," Goldberg said.

Amy P. Kempe, spokeswoman for Pfeiffer, said Tuesday night that Pfeiffer wouldn't approve a new lawyer.

"They should utilize the services of the solicitor's office so as not to add extra expense to the city of Central Falls," Kempe said.

But this is the problem with dictatorship. People lose trust in the process for addressing grievances or (rightly) conclude that the route is unduly long and complicated. To resolve differences with the receiver, the people of Central Falls would have to change enough state officeholders to halt a targeted law. Otherwise, they'd have to argue to a judge that the law or the actions being taken in its name are illegal. To expect city solicitors to take on their own boss in the name of residents, through their elected council, is little more than a banana republic pretense toward representative democracy.

Of course, beneath all of these fine procedural points, we can only shake our heads at the capacity of the state government of Rhode Island to come up with a way to make the mayor and city council of Central Falls look like victims.

A Model Governor and Some Pointers on Government Structure

Among New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's accomplishments has been knocking President Obama from the cover of National Review magazine after a summer-long run. As the related article shows, however, Christie's more significant accomplishment has been successfully plucking at strings that many of us have spotted before:

... it was true so far as it went. [Democrat Senate President Stephen] Sweeney had shown leadership on pensions, working with the governor to assure broad Democratic support for reform. This struck some in the state's labor movement as a special kind of betrayal, since Sweeney was himself head of an ironworkers' union. But it made sense. Private-sector unions like Sweeney's depended on economic activity for work, and his members were suffering mightily through the recession, even as public-sector labor was shielded from the worst of it.

Thus did Christie split the Democrats in the state legislature from their traditional labor base, exploiting fissures both between public- and private-sector unions and between the teachers' unions and the taxpaying public. Having taken their best shot at Chris Christie, the opposition now found themselves chastened, confused, and cannibalized.

When problems become as deep as those facing states like New Jersey and Rhode Island, it becomes more difficult for Democrats to cobble an alliance of constituencies that are insulated from the damage of their policies. (Which is not to say that enough people can't be hoodwinked into erroneous support.) What's fascinating, though, is the evident importance of the basic, boring structure of the government:

Nor could the Democrats, having lost the public-opinion battle, count on stopping Christie's budget in the house: New Jersey's constitution gives an oppositional majority little in the way of procedural tools to block a determined governor's path. As the only at-large elected official in the state, the governor not only commands the bully pulpit but appoints all the key executives — from attorney general to education commissioner — who might stand in his way. Moreover, his line-item budget veto is both powerful and precise, giving him the ability to strike whole clauses or decrease individual appropriations to the cent. The only thing the governor can't do is raise spending.

In Rhode Island, it would be more appropriate to call the governor the opposition, and it is he (or she) with "little in the way of procedural tools" to block a strong majority in the General Assembly. I typically favor the legislature in the structure of a divided government, but our state proves decisively that many of the reasons that I do so are able to be subverted. Gerrymandering, for one thing, protects incumbents and facilitates the development of reliable voting blocs for politicians. I'd also note that New Jersey's legislators are paid sufficiently well that somebody who is neither independently wealthy nor liable to see office as a profitable aspect of his or her private occupation could justify a run for public office.

As for the governor's office, I'm not so sure that I'd want fewer of his lower executives to be elected, butthe line-item budget veto would be a worthy change to local law.

Public Servants as CEOs

Joe Mysak takes up the topic of Bell, California's highly paid public servants:

In his only statement to the press to date, the $787,637 man, [City Manager] Robert Rizzo, told the Los Angeles Times, "If that's a number people choke on, maybe I'm in the wrong business. I could go into private business and make that money. This council has compensated me for the job I've done."

To which the answer should be, "go right ahead." One hears this point frequently from highly paid government administrators, and while it's legitimate to allocate compensation sufficient to attract talented people, it's also true that candidates for public-sector jobs aren't necessarily the same as candidates for similar private sector jobs. A school district employee who has risen through the ranks from teacher to principal to superintendent has highly specific experience that may not garner a six-figure salary (plus the equivalent of public sector benefits) in another field.

Of course, as Mysak goes on to relate, the situation in Bell is egregious even so:

"There are darned few $787,000 salaried positions anywhere in the private sector for managers who run an organization of similar size," said Girard Miller, a public-pension and finance consultant at PFM Group in Los Angeles. Bell has 80 full-time employees, according to its latest financial report.

Unfortunately, while Bell is extreme, the reality is that government has become so broad, complicated, and pervasive that few citizens care to keep tabs on such matters to the extent necessary. The only rational response, in my view, would be to shrink it and limit its responsibilities.

When Government Shouldn't Operate as a Business

Amid examples of failed loan guarantees, Providence Journal reporter Bruce Landis interviews Gary Sasse about the 38 Studios deal, in which a videogame company has $75 million in backing from the state of Rhode Island:

If the company doesn't pay, Sasse pointed out, "The taxpayers of the state would be on the hook."

"You're playing with other people's money," Sasse said, and argued that it's too risky a use of tax money.

He also said that the qualities most important to companies are good schools, a trained work force, low taxes and an infrastructure in good condition. Without them, he said, in the long run other economic development tools such as loan guarantees "aren't going to get you where you want to be."

The cliché — with which I typically agree — that government should run like a business comes to mind, because when it comes to loan guarantees, we're moving beyond the phrase's intent. What government should emulate, in the private sector, is the imperative to provide a better product more efficiently — to pretend that its revenue entails a consensual exchange of money for service that it must justify to the payers.

That is a wholly distinct approach from behaving like a business in the sense of taking financial risks with the hope of making money. Even mitigated risk is inappropriate when the investors (taxpayers, in this case) have no choice but to participate and do not have clear, direct rewards to which they are contractually entitled should things work out well.

Why Dependency Is Chronic

The article, by Neil Downing, takes the tack of describing people who find their Social Security checks indispensable, but the recipient numbers are the important part, to my mind:

Now, 200,202 Rhode Islanders are collecting Social Security benefits, according to newly issued figures from the Social Security Administration’s Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics. ...

Nationwide, Social Security beneficiaries now number more than 52.5 million, up from 50.9 million as of December 2008, and 49.9 million as of December 2007.

Drawing on U.S. Census data, 19% —almost one-fifth — of Rhode Islanders receive some sort of Social Security benefit (which compares with 17% nationwide). The ratio is going to grow, given retiring Baby Boomers, shrinking generations, and longer lives, bringing the feasibility of the program into question.

The larger lesson (which one can see national politicians, especially Democrats, have learned) is that it's possible to buy constituencies. The trap of European quasisocialism (or the real thing) is that the political parties begin striving to prove that they can better manage benefits, not to admit that they are far less competent than the citizenry to manage individual lives.

Brilliance Isn't Enough

Thomas Sowell, writing about a planned vs. free-market economy, remarks on the contrast between wicked smart planners and the small decisions made by the average Joes and Jills:

How was it even possible that transferring decisions from elites with more education, intellect, data and power to ordinary people could lead consistently to demonstrably better results?

One implication is that no one is smart enough to carry out social engineering, whether in the economy or in other areas where the results may not always be so easily quantifiable. We learn, not from our initial brilliance, but from trial and error adjustments to events as they unfold.

Science tells us that the human brain reaches its maximum potential in early adulthood. Why then are young adults so seldom capable of doing what people with more years of experience can do?

Because experience trumps brilliance.

Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they preempt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people as a whole.

Yes, too many of our "brilliant" elites continue to mistake intelligence for wisdom.

The Government They Prefer

It's always notably plausible that there's a larger truth in the mix when I agree with Bob Kerr, but while his column lamenting the possibly fatal restrictions that the Tiverton Town Council has placed on an annual charity event, this year, counts in that regard, I'd suggest that he should think on the larger lessons that the controversy teaches about government. As Kerr describes it:

For seven years, Jane Bitto, who owns Evelyn's Restaurant with her husband, Dominic, has gone to Town Hall to get the permit for "Singing Out Against Hunger," three days of music in September that has raised a lot of money and a pile of nonperishable food for East Bay Community Action’s food pantries. Last year, in a bad economy, it raised $25,000. ...

There have been complaints. That's what Bitto heard when she went to Town Hall. There have been complaints from people living on the opposite side of Nanaquaket Pond from Evelyn's. The music is too loud and it goes on too long, they say.

As Kerr touches on — and as I've seen occur time and again in local politics — the process wasn't one in which people with complaints were asked to step forward to make them and confront those whom they wished to restrict. Council members made general statements about hearing complaints — complaints submitted through the typical Rhode Island method of a note, visit, or phone call to people with power — and blindsided their target only when the time to the event was too short to mount an effective response.

Kerr calls it "the flip side of small town charm." Over on the Tiverton Citizens for Change Web site, I beg to differ. This turn of events is the entirely predictable consequence of small-town fiefdoms. "Community minded" tends to mean a town or neighborhood conforming with a small group's personal preferences, with differences resolved through imposition rather than compromise. Just like we weren't the ones who turned this year's financial town meeting into an offensive circus, or who strove to ban the Easter Bunny from the public schools a couple of years ago, it isn't us selfish tax-hawk newcomers who aren't willing to tolerate a little prime-time music come a late-summer evening.

Rather, it's the same folks who regularly squash businesses' attempts at economic development. It's the same contingent who skirted the law to raise taxes by an oppressive amount and who then sued TCC President Dave Nelson for having the audacity to complain about their tactics, including Town Administrator James Goncalo's sending of false documents to the state. In other words, Kerr and his sympathizers should look at their concept of a government that cares and question whether it's possible to preserve such an entity from people who care above all about themselves.

I've heard it stated many times that those who hate the town — as indicated by an aversion to massive mid-recession tax increases — should leave. Oddly, I don't expect to hear similar suggestions when the indication of that hatred is aversion to live music in a public place for an excellent cause.

Concerns About Process in Central Falls

The city of Central Falls is surely better off without Mayor Charles Moreau in office, and many of us likely share the opinion (from afar) that he'd best serve the state by taking this opportunity to quietly exit public service (which phrase I type with some difficulty, in this context). But let's take a moment to phrase in frank terms what has happened: The state has appointed a person, unaccountable to voters except through the multiple steps from him to the Department of Revenue to the governor, who has stripped an elected official of everything except the title of his office and some entry-level pay on the premise that "you can't have two leaders." If he so chooses, that appointee, retired Superior Court Judge Mark Pfeiffer," could do the same to the City Council.

On a personal level, the outcome for Moreau is probably just, but the bare facts of the case ought to give us pause.

Less Organized Freedom

In the latest Claremont Review of Books (sub req'd), Wilfred M. McClay discusses President Obama's resume, Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, the Tea Party and Turner's Frontier thesis as a preamble for his proposition that the path to national renewal lay in a less organized America.

There is a danger of overorganization in American life, of an over-emphasis upon credentialism and specialization, forces that taken in excess can cripple our sense of human possibility, and along with it the health of our communities, and our liberty. President Obama wants everyone to go to college, and he sees this, not unjustifiably, as the federal government's lending a generous helping hand of opportunity. But perhaps it is less generous than it seems. Perhaps we already have too much schooling in our culture, too much hegemony of the schooled, too much licensing, too much regulation of experience, too little space to move around and find our own way, to experiment and make mistakes, to exercise the power of personal initiative without the supervision of experts, nannies, busybodies, and others who should spend more time minding their own business.

Perhaps we have become too concerned with pedigree, with the right schools, the right career path, and so on....Indeed, there was a time well within the memory of many living Americans when one's advancement in life was not so heavily determined by the credential of where, or even whether, one attended college....One of the greatest of America's 20th-century presidents—and one of the most literate and historically informed since the time of the founders—was Harry S. Truman, who did not have a college education at all, but instead began working for the Santa Fe Railroad when he graduated from high school....

We need to restore and preserve a less regimented, less status-stratified, less school-sorted, more open-ended America. We need an economy and legal structures that are as open as possible to enterprise and innovation. An educational system that is open to all, and geared not to the manufacturing of credentials (or artificial and dysfunctional rites of passage) but to the empowering of individuals. A society that concerns itself with the knowledge and skills a person can acquire, not where or how he acquired them....

[We need to celebrate] the enduring frontier spirit in America, which far from being deplored, ought to be celebrated and nurtured. In doing so, we will be celebrating the ability of this country to give unprecedented scope to the amazing and unpredictable depths of the human person, depths that cannot be produced factory-like by the right schools or the right social arrangements, but emerge from the unpredictable and often surprising potential in the minds and hearts and spirits of ordinary people when they are left free to pursue their ambitions. The examples of Lincoln and Alaska exemplify qualities of character and spirit that are at the heart of what this country is at its best, and that we should want to foster and preserve in the years ahead.

Smaller as Well as Divided

It's fortuitous that I'm a bit behind my blogging schedule today, because Marc's closing point happens to relate to my thoughts upon reading Red Jahncke's criticism of the Dodd-Frank Act regulating the finance industry. Jahncke gives a little history:

Under Glass-Steagall, banks were local and regional champions. In New England, for example, Connecticut had Connecticut National Bank and Rhode Island had Fleet Bank. Then, as the states formed regional banking "compacts," New England had Bank of New England and a much-larger Fleet. No matter how well or poorly managed (many failed), these institutions cared. Local and regional bankers knew local and regional businessmen.

Then, in 1994 Congress scrapped state control of interstate banking under Glass-Steagall and allowed nationwide branching. Banks became behemoths with no loyalties and no person-to-person knowledge or understanding of borrowers.

In 1999, Congress repealed the rest of Glass-Steagall, i.e. its separation of commercial and investment banking. And that unleashed huge, highly complex, diversified financial conglomerates -- a very new phenomenon. The short experience with these giants has not been good.

As Anchor Rising readers will surely be able to recite, this is far from the whole story, inasmuch as it was a particular type of asset underlying complex derivatives and forms of investment insurance that catalyzed the collapse. In other words, the bigness and complexity of the banks may have caused problems on their own, but without implicit government backing of — and government incentives for — risky mortgages, investors would not have been as willing to ignore the stability of the table on which the house of cards was being built.

Those tasked with investigating investments — and regulating them, as Jahncke points out — didn't fear the financial structure when they perhaps should have, but they also didn't fear the instability of loans going to people for amounts that they could not afford. Referring back to Marc's post: divided government can, in some instances, get us the least-bad of both sides, but it can also result in a toxic combination, as powerful players find that sweet spot for manipulation in the crack that runs between laissez faire and subsidization.

As for Jahncke's concerns, I'll agree that the Dodd-Frankenstein monster has gone in entirely the wrong direction, essentially writing the problems into the law, and that a different reform could be helpful toward stabilizing the market. But no reform could match a cultural decision that we're all better off knowing our bankers and sticking with those dedicated to our own local markets.

A Faulty Concept of Government

It feels a bit like giving in to provocation to respond to a July 6 column by the Newport Daily News's Joe Baker, but the piece seems so indicative of a certain error in political philosophy that I've talked myself into thinking a response worthwhile. (A link, however, is not worthwhile, because the paper offers no means of directing readers anywhere near the actual piece in question.)

Even sympathetic readers should be able to spot the instances in which Mr. Baker's approach shows signs of fundamental error by leading to conflicting conclusions separated by mere sentences. Note, for example, Baker's description of the idyllic, simple times during which our government was formed. The government could be limited, he appears to be arguing, because a simple society doesn't need a Big Brother. For one thing:

The population was smaller and organized into a series of communities in which it was hard for a criminal to hide...

But things went wrong when:

... shysters soon realized that this lack of government oversight allowed them to play hard and fast with the rules so they could make money.

But shouldn't the "community" that once guarded against criminals have been able to spot the shysters? And in times of less mobility, wasn't it easier for criminals to skip town and strike again? Of course, by "shysters," one gets the impression that Baker's not thinking crook, so much as businessman, which leads us to the other glaring incoherency in his piece:

Big corporations like a weak national government because it bolsters their hand when they want to puff up that bottom line. That's why huge international companies try to restrict the input of local governments, which have much more to lose from whatever these companies want to do.

But if the objective of evil corporations is to thwart local governments, what better mechanism could there be than a strong national government? After all, corporations with interests in multiple states, are likely to have more incentive to sway the federal government in creative ways than local governments have understanding and influence with their national representatives.

The problem comes down to Baker's basic understanding of government and its purpose:

Government keeps a system in place that provides order for the greater good of the nation as a whole and not for any one particular interest group.

As a practical matter, big government actually creates a focal point for the attention of the loathed "interest groups," and the notion that it can be trusted to be a neutral arbiter is one that Baker would surely dispute in other contexts. As a philosophical matter, what those who share Baker's politics tend to forget is that the community — and the nation — is something bigger than government. We government-haters think that societies are sufficiently complex to have undirected systems that serve the greater good more effectively and efficiently than central planners ever could.

Government is the entity, within the larger community, that we entrust with such tasks as require force, especially policing and war, but also some degree of check against the tyranny of the powerful, which is where public infrastructure comes in. There's a balance to be struck, but in Joe's world, we should begin by placing overriding trust in the entity who doesn't have to ask for money, but can tax, and that doesn't have to persuade against proscribed activities, but can arrest, jail, and even kill.

Do I really have to explain why that's not a great idea?

Tom Ward Gets to the Core of the Question of Government's Philosophy

... in his Vally Breeze column a couple of weeks ago for the Fourth of July.

Do we want to be left alone for "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," as Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, or do we prefer the soft tyranny that comes with the security of a welfare state that minimizes the rewards of honest labor in order to eliminate the risks that come from a life badly led?

Complication Underlies the Conservative Critique

Jeffrey Friedman's analysis of the origins of our current economic crisis and assessments thereof is worth reading, but he wraps it in the pose that everybody else is wrong:

To their credit, liberal analysts realized from the start that the cause of the recession was a banking crisis, not a housing crisis. In explaining the banking crisis, however, liberals used a theory drawn straight from the rotten core of contemporary social science: the theory of "moral hazard." It suddenly became conventional wisdom that the crisis had been caused by banks that rewarded successful employees with big bonuses but failed to penalize losses. This was said to have encouraged recklessness. Later, conservatives came up with their own variant of moral hazard, according to which bankers took too many risks because they knew that their banks, being "too big to fail," would be bailed out if their bets turned sour; so why not make the riskiest, most lucrative bets?

Most reasonable spectators would, I think, disagree with Friedman in that they'd acknowledge the role of each of these factors — and others, as well. Friedman would respond that the evidence is against them:

The intellectual bankruptcy of these theories lies in their assumption that the bankers knew they were making "reckless" bets. This assumption is demonstrably false: Ninety-three percent of the mortgage-backed bonds acquired by commercial banks either were rated AAA — the safest possible rating — or were issued by Fannie and Freddie, giving them an implicit government guarantee. Because of their perceived lack of risk, these bonds generated less revenue than did bonds with lower ratings. Revenue-hungry bankers who were oblivious to risk never would have bought Fannie, Freddie, or triple-A bonds; more lucrative double-A, single-A, and lower-rated mortgage-backed bonds were always available. Both the liberal and the conservative moral-hazard theories are therefore wrong. For the most part, the bankers didn’t deliberately take big risks, or they would have taken big risks that paid a higher yield.

Friedman ought to have paused before submitting his essay to National Review and considered whether it's plausible to assert that anybody — anybody with a coherent understanding of events — had really made it integral to their scenarios that entities looking for safe, long-term bets (such as pension funds) had been lured into overt risks. For most people and groups with money in the game, the risk was actual, not intentional, although those advising them might have had some inkling of the instability of the underlying assets.

What appears to have happened, in a nutshell, is that the marketplace — consisting of players with various degrees of savvy and awareness — decreased the degree to which it assessed risk in terms of the thing being traded and increased the degree to which it assessed risk in terms of the entities involved. Investors weren't betting on the likelihood that the sun wouldn't come up the next day; they were betting somebody else's assurances that it would not. Because of implicit government backing, traders and ratings agencies gave mortgage-backed securities ratings on par with those given to the government, and because of their size and the safety of being at the top of the ladder, large firms and their agents behaved as if they expected their losses to be mitigated, should things go awry, and because the above put smiley-face stickers on the trades, everybody else bought in.

For none of those involved is an acknowledgment of risk necessary.

Friedman pivots, on this obvious fact, in order to reach the point that truly interests him: That we have to acknowledge the complexity of life and the possibility of error. What's interesting about this, to me, is that Friedman thinks he's introducing something new. Such statements as the following read as if drawn from foundational documents of modern conservative political theory:

The experts, the regulators, and the bankers were ignorant of a risk caused by a complication that hadn’t occurred to them. The experts, regulators, and bankers were wrong; but they were not evil. They were simply outwitted by a complex world. ...

A more sophisticated approach would attend to the fallible ideas not just of voters but of bureaucrats, legislators, and judges — and to the roots of these ideas, both mass and elite, in cultural sources of (mis)information and ideology, such as the mass media and formal education.

All Friedman is doing, here, is describing the basic reasons for the conservative worldview — from libertarian principles of limited government to the Christian belief that evil is an illness and delusion, not an individual personal quality.

Exceptionalism as Limit to Options

On the question of American exceptionalism (subscription required), James Bennett puts aside conservatives' emphasis on abstractions like "freedom, prosperity, and innovativeness" as well as liberals' emphasis on "America's unique evil or guilt." Rather, he looks to culture and history to explain how the United States differs from other countries in a substantive way.

His analysis comes down, essentially, to three factors: family structure, geography, and narrative. On the first, America follows other English-speaking nations in its traditional liberty of family structure. Adults in the Anglosphere have long chosen their own spouses, sent their children out into the world to do the same, and minimized expected structures of inheritance such as primogeniture, the result being as follows:

... The individual in the English-speaking world has always been psychologically more independent and less willing to place himself under the control of others. He expects to be on his own, with a spouse of his own choosing, to make his own way in the world, and if possible to live in a home of his own.

America is then uniquely defined by the effects of the American continent on the variations of English-speaking peoples who arrived on its shores during and after the Age of Exploration:

America's uniqueness can be explained in two main ways. First is the "frontier thesis" of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. In the 1890s Turner wrote that early settlers in America underwent a psychological transformation because of the constant lure of open land to the west, which turned deferential, class-conscious Englishmen into egalitarian, assertive, republican Americans. The other view, most recently stated by David Hackett Fischer, is that, in essence, all the ingredients that made Americans what they are today were present when the first colonists left the British Isles. According to Fischer, what the Americans brought to the wilderness was at least as important as what they found there.

Subsequently, the circumstances and methods of our national founding institutionalized these attributes in the legal language of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and subsidiary documents. All three factors — culture/family structure, geography, and institutional narrative — have carried the uniquely American character into the present time. One significant consequence is the inadvisability of emulation of picked and chosen attributes of other countries:

The Anglosphere in general is poorly adapted to large-scale, planned, centrally directed state enterprises or invasive measures to promote equality of outcome. Governmental mechanisms have been and will continue to be used on a pragmatic basis, but they are not immune to public-choice problems, as can be seen in the regulatory capture of the home-mortgage industry, or the taxpayer bailout of the auto industry. Our history is filled with short-term successes of government action that eventually succumbed to these public-choice problems and required reform or abolition. The government financing of railroad construction after the Civil War was a scandal-ridden disgrace, for example. When we try to be like the French, Germans, or Japanese, we are particularly liable to poor implementation, because our cultural structures are dissimilar to theirs. Government-run enterprises in those countries are likely to work better than they would here. Even if it were desirable to imitate them, we would not be able to do as good a job.

To put it in analogy, one cannot drive a bulldozer like a motorcycle. Bennett points out, as a contrary example, that the French are more comfortable with meritocracy in government, so the state bureaucracy has developed a practice of identifying talented students and channeling them to itself. One can see an attempt at emulation in President Obama's plan to forgive the (government-owned) debt of college graduates if they go into "public service." America's discomfort with the government's picking winners, though, requires us to use generic acquisition of a college degree as the evenly applied criterion, while at the same time making college degrees universally accessible. The attempt at institutionalized meritocracy therefore will fail.

Broadly stated, the factors that have fostered the United States' dynamism do not fit well into a statist public structure. That helps to explain why civic statists are so frequently simultaneously social liberals. It's possible (if functionally deluded) to be an economic conservative and social liberal; by contrast, socio-cultural conservatism generates habits of mind at odds with economic liberalism. A person acculturated to strive for the good of his own family will resent the attachments of economic dependents to his or her estate without his consent. That same person placed within a bureaucratic milieu will not be an effective socialist because, in effect, his capitalistic individualism will color his judgment.

ADDENDUM:

I'd further suggest — if I had the time to go that far beyond Bennett's argument, just now — that the American system more closely comports with human nature. That is to say that cultures that are better suited to socialism are merely papering over individualism. Personal interests will ultimately corrupt such systems, leading to economic malaise and civic turmoil.

Government as Lone Shark Collector

I've written, periodically, about my belief that debt is the new method of indentured servitude. If we can get young adults to enter the working world with hundreds of thousands of dollars in education loans, some additional thousands in credit card debt (incurred on the expectation of profitable labor after graduation), with car loans a near necessity, and housing options pushing them toward entering into mortgages, we've taken away a great deal of the freedom that economic independence imparts. The situation gets chilling if this story is anything more than journalistic sensationalism of a few peculiar cases:

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts.

In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man "to indefinite incarceration" until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.

I expect we'll see this trend expand as the federal government takes on more responsibility in the finance sector, including the bailing out of too-big-to-fail banks. The reality that every loan shark has always known is that some debts cannot be collected. That's the risk of lending. If the government begins stepping in to jail those who fall behind, the public is taking the role of the crooked-nosed debt collector banging on the door and the balance of risk and benefit that makes lending a healthy application of free will and mutual benefit begins to evaporate.

Lamenting the Impossibility of Having and Eating the Cake

This short article about job prospects for young adults in Greece catches many of the various nuances, but it still seems as if there's a disconnect of cause and effect. Consider:

From their settled perches, the elders criticize and cluck. The young, they say, have either no initiative, a dearth of opportunities, or some combination of the two. They fear that young people will be unable to start their own families and they fret over the prospect of Greece’s demographic undoing.

The youth of Greece are merely responding as the culture in which they were raised taught them. They feel owed — and their elders don't appear to be enthusiastic to undo the government catering that they've enjoyed in order to secure opportunity and a healthy polity for their children. This is the inevitable result of a big nanny-state government.

Now begins another phase, which one suspects was part of the intention of those who strove to set this international movement in motion:

[Twenty-year old Olga] Stefou believes that the government is bound to respond to her discontent. And she has suggestions: Greece should make up its budget shortfall by pulling its 122 troops from Afghanistan and levying steep taxes on the Orthodox Church rather than squeezing the workers, she says.

Moving six score troops from active to inactive duty and transferring wealth from a Church is not going to make up for the demands of unemployed youth with high expectations as to what the world owes them. It is, however, subtle evidence that there are people strategizing to turn a shiftless and insecure generation into a political, quasi-military weapon.

It makes for an interesting, frightening question to consider the addition of the Muslim fanatics currently permeating Europe to the dynamic. Secular revolutionaries may discover that the discontented troops that they've been carefully cultivating find something more compelling in the notion of jihad than of a worker's paradise.

Repeating Public-Sector History

It seems humanity is fated to always reconvincing itself that it's got the problems all figured out and can henceforth hand broad control to government entities. Ed Achorn makes a contrary suggestion:

Britain confronts what has historically been the great threat to representative republics. A majority of voters, whipped on by self-interested politicians, eventually figure out how to game the system to steal from a minority of productive taxpayers. As an avaricious government expands, the pummeled taxpayers have less incentive to produce and the economy struggles, with massive public debt ensuing. When the money runs out, social upheaval follows, with the imposition of dictatorship.

You can read about it in the ancient historians.

Or you can look at Central Falls, where the citizens have lost their power, through their elected representatives, to make their own decisions. A receiver will decide for them.

It may seem a little off to present a bankruptcy-style receiver as a "dictator," but such consolidations of power, following upon a representative form of government, necessarily look like a benign, good idea at the beginning. True, there are checks and balances in the case of a municipal ruler, but the point of Achorn's column is that Central Falls is a warning of things come at higher levels of government.

Ionic Politicians and What The Really Know

Boston's Mayor Menino made one of his typical gaffes the other day when he was describing such "ionic" Boston sports moments like that time Varitek split the uprights for the Patriots. The Assistant Village Idiot (an "iconic" title ;) explained that the sports-knowledge and vocabulary deficiency that Menino displayed is an indicator about politicians' knowledge on most subjects in general:

They know lots of important information about getting elected: what emote-words voters want to hear, what the party breakdown is in various regions, what types of advertising are most effective, what issues are currently hot, whose hands need to be shaken, how to raise money. As many of them are lawyers, they also know legal terminology pretty well. Some don't have much beyond that in knowledge of the law, but there are a fair number who actually do understand it. They know how their own legislative bodies work, who is responsible for what, and something of who the key people are.

That’s about it. You can't count on elected officials at any level actually knowing more than that. Getting sports names and facts wrong is not an interesting oddity--it is a window into the rest of their knowledge. There's nothing wrong with not knowing something about a subject. There is something very wrong about pretending to know a subject when you don't, and then asserting legislative power over it.

Unfortunately, as we rely more and more on government to get through our daily lives, we come to believe that our politicians are experts on almost everything. The truth is, of course, that they're not, so they turn to career bureaucrats--with an interest in maintaining their own relevancy--for guidance. That is, if they deem it necessary and don't think they can get by by faking it.

The Overt Fishiness of Government

A recent column by Mark Patinkin profiling a Rhode Island fisherman contains this unsurprising gem:

After each haul, [Niles Pearsall] has to painstakingly throw back restricted fish — sometimes half or more of what the nets haul up. The irony is that many are dead anyway. He said it's like throwing $20 bills into the sea. ...

He claimed there are two reasons the government has it wrong. First, the rules are out of date. And second, he said, government test boats dragged areas incompetently, came up with few fish and decided that meant they were scarce. Pearsall says more seasoned fishermen dragged the same areas and came up with full nets — lately more than ever.

Government does have a role in ensuring that self interest doesn't drive the total draining of natural resources. The problem is that, when it becomes too big and its purview too broad, the democratic feedback loop cannot function. The only way public bureaucracy can even come close to managing various interests related to a particular industry is if political forces put knowledgeable people in the right positions with incentive to balance the claims of various parties.

But who's going to pressure politicians on behalf of fishermen when we're having to pressure them to manage our healthcare reasonably?

What Is Government For?

At last, a comment from Stuart worth further exploration:

...the point is that governments were created to use our - yours and mine - pooled resources to create BETTER things than we could have created by our lonesome selves. In fact, good systems of government like that of the USA are the biggest friend of capitalism because they create the conditions and mitigate some of the risks where capitalism can flourish.

Well, some might argue that "governments were created" to give the dominant person or faction a means of making everybody else accede to his or their demands, but I'll allow that society's concept evolved, building up to a recreation of the concept of government. What's interesting about the above paragraph, though, is that each sentence describes a different concept of government: The first is left-wing, treating the government as a collective bee-hive, in which the members are all parts of a social organism. The second sentence presents a more right-wing positioning of government, as a mechanism to enhance the individual capacity of the governed.

It should surprise nobody that I think the first concept to be deeply flawed, not the least because it makes the typical progressive error of conflating government with the very concept of organization. All varieties of groups form in order to accomplish things beyond the ability of the individual, whether they are religious, economic, social, cultural, or governmental. Each type of organization will have different sources and applications of authority, depending on which aspect of society it inhabits, and "government" is sort of the final layer. And it should be a very thin layer, inasmuch as we leave to government the authority to use force — both of imprisonment and violence — whereas we insist that the other groups remain voluntary.

The difficulty that left-wingers face, within this model, is that too few people are willing to submit to their will voluntarily, so they wish to move more and more of their policy preferences into the category of organization that uses force. In other words, through all of our evolution, progressives wish to bring the notion of government back to being a mechanism by which the dominant faction imposes its desires on everybody else.

Growth Rather than Radical Reworking

The following passage, from an autobiographical essay by Fr. Richard Neuhaus, from 2002, caught my eye, because it strikes me as a generally applicable principle for organizational growth, as opposed to continual redefinition:

The Church's teaching lives forward; it is not reconstructed backward—whether from the fifth century or the sixteenth or the nineteenth or the twenty-first. But through all the changes of living forward, how do we know what is corruption and what is authentic development? Recall Cardinal Newman's reflection on the development of doctrine, a reflection that has been incorporated by magisterial teaching. He suggested seven marks of authentic development: authentic development preserves the Church's apostolic form; it reflects continuity of principles in testing the unknown by the known; it demonstrates the power to assimilate what is true, even in what is posited against it; it follows a logical sequence; it anticipates future developments; it conserves past developments; and, throughout, it claims and demonstrates the vigor of teaching authority. And thus it is, said St. Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, that in authentic development of doctrine nothing presents itself in the Church's old age that was not latent in her youth. Such was the truth discovered by Augustine, a truth "ever ancient, ever new."

Basically, the idea is to define what is essential in both principle and structure and to measure all changes by that. In the case of the United States, for example, we could say that we have the Declaration of Independence for principle and the Constitution and other documents for structure. It will risk a wayward path to pursue the principles of the Declaration by subverting the structure of the Constitution, and vice versa.

Unfortunately, both for the Church and the nation, people love the idea of expediency. With healthcare, the motivation is to simply declare that all will have it. With our evolving sense of personal freedom, the flawed mandate is to simply grant it, structural considerations be damned. Neither is possible, because the idea behind our national founding and the Idea behind the Church's founding is a holistic kernel in which the forward-moving history was contained.

"Servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind"

In these times, the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville seem as apt as ever:

[Government] takes upon itself alone to secure [the people's] gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood....For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

According to de Tocqueville, it is a misunderstanding of the concept of equality--which rightly understood should be an equality of liberty and opportunity, not of standing--that leads a democratic society down the primrose path to dependency upon government.

[Government] extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

Thus, the tropes of democracy are maintained so that "we the people" may elect our own masters.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large.

ADDENDUM: Michael Ledeen noted basically the same passages a couple days ago, but is optimistic:

Tocqueville had it right, and it’s exactly what has happened on his old continent. Europe has fallen under precisely that sort of tyranny, and our would-be tyrants thought they could do the same here.

But the scheme did not succeed, at least the way they planned it. Instead of embracing the tyranny, the American people unexpectedly rose up against it. To use Tocqueville’s metaphor, Americans acted like a recalcitrant child and refused to behave. At which point the tyrannical wannabes decided to slap us down and make us behave properly. They were forced to carry out a coup, a baldfaced seizure of power. Thus, the Demon Pass. Thus the two most memorable lines from the coup plotters: (Pelosi): “we have to pass it to find out what’s in it,” and (Hastings): “there are no rules. This is the U.S. Congress.”

That was not the way it was supposed to happen. We were supposed to go quietly. Instead we fought back, and the final outcome of this big fight–the one I foresaw more than a year ago–is still in doubt. The would-be tyrants may prevail; after all, they have the awesome power of the state. But we have the numbers and a superior vision.

Americans can be very tough in this kind of fight. Ask King George.

Making the United States Exceptional Again

Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru had an excellent cover piece in the National Review before last on the domestic battle over American exceptionalism, which divides pretty conveniently along the current line of left and right. President Obama is obviously a key figure in the dispute.

Not surprisingly, what strikes me is the gargantuan task facing those of us who'd like to defend and reassert the principles on which our nation was founded:

Corporations, meanwhile, are also becoming more dependent on government handouts. Rivalry between business and political elites has helped to safeguard American liberty. What we are seeing now is the possible emergence of a new political economy in which Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government all have cozy relations of mutual dependence. The effect would be to suppress both political choice and economic dynamism.

The retreat from American exceptionalism has a legal dimension as well. Obama's judicial nominees are likely to attempt to bring our Constitution into line with European norms. Here, again, he is building on the work of prior liberals who used the federal courts as a weapon against aspects of American exceptionalism such as self-government and decentralization. In­creasingly, judicial liberals look to putatively enlightened foreign, and particularly European, opinion as a source of law capable of displacing the law made under our Constitution.

Liberal regulators threaten both our dynamism and our self-government. They are increasingly empowered to make far-reaching policy decisions on their own — for instance, the EPA has the power to decide, even in the absence of cap-and-trade legislation passed by Congress, how to regulate carbon emissions. The agency thus has extraordinary sway over the economy, without any meaningful accountability to the electorate. The Troubled Asset Relief Program has turned into a honeypot for the executive branch, which can dip into it for any purpose that suits it. Government is increasingly escaping the control of the people from whom it is supposed to derive its powers.

I'd suggest that the Republicans of the Bush years proved that the temptations for corruption and intermedling are too great at the national level. Even the best intentioned of people will find it difficult to resist the urge to reach in and fix every problem in sight — which is to say that they'll convince themselves not to relinquish the power of their offices. The only possibility, that I can see, is a resurgence of attention to local and state government, forcing freedom and federalism back up the tiers of government and pulling authority back toward the people.

How Centralized Education Could Turn Ugly

Right now, public education is such an expensive catastrophe that top-down imposition of standards and reasonable organizational principles is an attractive option. But there's a very dark side to the impulse, hints of which can be found here:

Governors and education leaders on Wednesday proposed sweeping new school standards that could lead to students across the country using the same math and English textbooks and taking the same tests, replacing a patchwork of state and local systems in an attempt to raise student achievement nationwide. ...

The stakes could be high. President Barack Obama told the nation's governors last month that he wants to make money from Title I - the federal government's biggest school aid program - contingent on adoption of college- and career-ready reading and math standards.

We tend to think of textbooks and standards as sort of pure and objective vessels for knowledge, but they do a lot of cultural work. Perhaps you recall the overt political correctness of word problems in math. In English, the studied texts inherently use the tools of language to construct arguments and convey sensibilities. Controlling textbooks, in other words, brings with it an opportunity to define common understanding, to associate political ideology with "clear thinking," or at least "good writing."

And students of history will surely see the probability that standards will not long be left with the single mandate of educating Americans. A review of the book The Science on Women and Science — which is a collection of essays on the application of Title IX equity rules to scientific education — brings home the point. Title IX has wreaked havoc in athletics and transferred to classroom curricula, the movement could leverage standards in pursuit of equal representation, in a field, as opposed to academic excellence.

As with all consolidations of power, the justifications have their appeal, and the people acquiesce with the understanding that there's consensus about the proper focus and scope of that power's usage. Once it's pooled, though, power attracts a different sort of animal (or allows those present to shed their disguises).

The Quick Defensiveness Against Warnings of Tyranny

If you're following my posts on the Tiverton Citizens for Change blog, you might have noticed my liveblog mention of Tiverton Town Council Member Hannibal Costa's comparison of federal mandates on the town to the rise of the Nazis. His comment was surely a bit on the incendiary side, given the minimal nature of the requirement (emergency training for town officials), but the general argument is right on, and one that he's been making as long as I've been watching town politics.

Well, the editors of the Newport Daily News thought Costa's statements egregious enough to merit a chastisement in Wednesday's paper (making a curious reference to his "ilk"). This morning, I explain why the editors' reaction is, itself, a bit extreme and, moreover, potentially dangerous.

A Desire for Central Planning

Eamonn Butler thinks that Canada's spending reform model is the solution for governments with spending problems:

The Canadians' first move was to appoint a minister for public-service renewal — a single individual with the authority to drive change and make sure that all ministers did their bit. They put nothing off limits, not even health care. There were no spending targets because they knew that departments simply spend up to such limits. But there was a complete review of all government activity.

Ministers had to define what their department was for and ask whether it really needed civil servants, or could it be done better by private bodies or by the public themselves. With a reform minister rather than a finance minister in charge, everyone bought into this as a total rethink of how the government served citizens, not just an exercise in penny-pinching.

I don't know enough about Canadian politics to know whether Butler's characterization is accurate or how the structure of government differs from that of the United States, but a couple of general observations are still possible. First, such a program depends heavily on the person in the reform ministry chair. Inasmuch as we don't have a parliamentary system, I would argue that our chief executive, the president, should fill that role, and that the people of the nation should vote to select him.

The related "second" is that benevolent dictatorships look good on paper but require a sacrifice of liberty and self-governance that is (and ought to be) anathema to the American system. If subordinate ministers did not rebel and workers did not strike, it is probable that they had some confidence in the particular leader to address matters as fairly as possible. But it is also probable that they saw no benefit in doing so, because that leader had power over them.

My suggestion is that the United States should head in the other direction: less government intervention. The reason our politics are so contentious and our special interests so gargantuan and influential is that we've consolidated far too much power in Washington, D.C. Spread that out, back to states and municipalities, and not only will there be less motivation for lobbyists to consolidate attention on federal seats, but the people will be better able to mount counter actions, thus increasing pressure on special interests to keep their demands reasonable.

Taking Back the Government

An interesting strategic discussion has developed in the comments to a post from last Thursday. Writes Michael:

How do we regain control of our government? I don't know. Politics is a rich man's game now, and probably always was, just not as blatant. Without lobbyists in the State House, or White House peddling their influence things might be a little better. I am not innocent here, my union, th IAFF has a huge lobby in Washington, and a lot of local clout as well. I believe that this is a direct result of us trying to maintain an equal footing at the upper levels of government. Collectively, firefighters are able to contribute money to get some leverage, leverage that would be used by people and institutions with opposing views about things like minimum manning, equipment, training, working conditions and safety.

Get rid of the lobbyists on both sides and begin there. Stop making it so expensive to win an election, but how?

To which BobN responds:

It's a very complex question, but here are some stream-of-consciousness thoughts:

1. In the worst case, a second American Revolution. Not recommended. I think we have the obligation to do everything in our power to avoid going down that path.

2. That's why it is so important for people to re-learn (or learn, since it isn't much taught in school any more) American history, and to become politically active. (Is it a Statist conspiracy that public school "health" classes encourage kids to be sexually active to distract them from being politically active?)

3. Politics isn't necessarily a rich man's game, if enough people can be mobilized. Sure it takes money - some professionals estimate $10K for a state rep seat, double that for a state senate seat. And at the state level, those local races determine everything because the GA has all the power. You don't need a state-wide TV or radio buy to run for rep in District 31 - most of that money would be wasted. The right candidates can tap into grassroots-level money and use it effectively in ways that are tightly targeted on their districts.

4. Here's one way to look at it: if each of the 3500 people at the first Tax Day Tea Party contributes $3, that's a rep seat budget.

5. The experience of the past year gives me hope that people are seeing through media propaganda, making message more important than money. As voters become more informed and aware, that dynamic will strengthen. The imminent threats to family budgets from unemployment, nationalized health care, and government employees outstripping them in income and benefits, have angered many people enough to get off their couches and get active. This is very healthy for society.

6. Contributing to the weakening of money is the internet. Putting ads on Youtube or your website costs nearly nothing, and if they are really good they go viral to provide a size and quality of audience that money can't buy. Blogs are rapidly growing their influence relative to TV and big newspapers.

That said, the Statists have been amassing power for decades and the government/Progressive machine has a great deal of power woven into the system. Defeating them will not be easy and it will not take only one election cycle.

My first thought is that the problem with the "block the lobbyists" impulse is that lobbyists — aka, citizens — have Constitutional rights to petition their government and otherwise speak and contribute toward elections and legislation.

My second thought may sound simplistic, but I'd suggest that the answer to all of these problems is to move away from centralized government. If more issues are decided by state governments, representing relatively small portions of the country, and town governments, overseeing populations in the thousands, there simply won't be as much incentive for multimillion dollar advertising campaigns. This is true not only because the audience/electorate would be much smaller, but also because motivated residents could more easily counteract big-dollar campaigns with grassroots assistance and community interaction.

The difficult part — even once a critical mass of people stop being lured by the promise of marginal economies of scale savings through regional and national administration — will be electing a political class intent on dispersing its own power, replacing incumbents with non-politicians who will fight to claim power from above while pushing as much as feasible to tiers of government below. That's an long-shot type of task that'll have to begin with representatives way at the bottom of the hierarchy building up constituencies to demand the return of their authority and pushing for an end to gerrymandering so that lower political structures that cover geographical areas (i.e., towns and cities) have direct lines (and career paths) to higher offices.

The Window and the House of Cards

Apart from the complications of Rhode Island law, as a matter of political theory, this strikes me as a reasonable argument:

The lawsuit [by the city of Woonsocket], which also names State Controller Marc A. Leonetti and General Treasurer Frank T. Caprio as defendants, said the money [that the state was supposed to give towns for automobile excise taxes] was appropriated by a legislative act of the General Assembly and that means Carcieri, Leonetti and Caprio have "a clear legal duty" to pay it.

"He may submit the budget, but he does not have the authority under the state Constitution or state law unilaterally to change the General Assembly's budget after it has passed," [Woonsocket Mayor Leo] Fontaine said.

I've long been including, among my complaints against Governor Carcieri, that he is far too passive about describing the ownership of the budget. Even though we're into the second month of the calendar year — and the legislative session — legislators have yet to act on the supplemental budget. So, the governor should pay out whatever money is due, to whomever it's due, until the money runs out and then just shut down. "I'm bound by law to follow the General Assembly's budgeting," he could say, "and they've chosen to spend the account dry rather than take corrective action." It's their responsibility.

WPRI's recent poll data gives reason to hope that the public is coming around to an understanding of the political dynamics, in this state. Overall, 53% of Rhode Islanders blame the GA for the budget crisis, with another 25% splitting blame between the legislature and the executive. Perhaps based on relative degrees of attention, the General Assembly fares worse as the age of the respondent goes up. Moreover, 61% of respondents want cuts in spending and services and not in taxes.

If increasing understanding is to translate into the appropriate electoral actions — rather than merely contributing to the general grumble — the governor must make the necessary political decisions crystal clear. He should declare that the General Assembly's failure to act has been an open window next to the budgetary house of cards and then get out of the way of the inevitable.

A Relationship with Knowledge

First, a line that's supremely relevant for those of us who've been beating our heads against a wall of political inertia, in Rhode Island:

In my experience, compulsively objective scientists are evenly matched, or even outmatched, by shamelessly subjective humanists. More than once I’ve been shocked by colleagues who seem unable to grasp that richly elaborated accounts of personal experiences do not refute claims about statistical tendencies.

That's from R.R. Reno's response to a book addressing our relationship with knowledge by Paul Griffiths:

The first half of Intellectual Appetite provides a metaphysical analysis (or, more accurately, the grammar of a metaphysical analysis—Griffiths operates as formally as possible to encompass a wide range of metaphysical options) that allows us to explain why, for a Christian, the basic move of "enclosure by sequestration" trains the mind to be false to reality. The world is not made up of tiny little bits of disconnected reality, all just waiting for our mental appropriation. Everything is saturated with the sustaining power of God’s creative will. Nothing merely exists, because everything comes into being and endures in the shimmering light of the divine gift of existence.

By the phrase "enclosure by sequestration" Reno means to indicate the human tendency to disassemble the components of reality for inspection. As a practical matter, this is how the limits of our own capacity for comprehension require us to proceed, but the danger is that we'll pick and choose those components that serve the reality that we prefer to conceive. If we were to stroll farther into the metaphysical weeds, I'd suggest that we do, in a real way, succeed in constructing our own realities, but that doing so does not make each variation equally valid. They can all be measured by their distance from and movement with respect to objective Truth.

In this view, nothing — no action or thought — is inactive, because what we believe the world to be manipulates reality as surely as what we do with our physical bodies. So, I disagree with Reno's interpretation, here:

In his Confessions, St. Augustine provides a particularly vivid account of the power of spectacles. He reports that his close friend Alypius, though possessing a good and cultured character, became addicted to the bloody, violent games that provided civic entertainment in the ancient world. At first, Alypius "held such spectacles in aversion," Augustine writes. One day, some friends persuaded him to go. Alypius steeled himself, closing his eyes to avoid participating in the barbarism. At the crucial moment, as the blood gushed and the crowd roared, "he was overcome by curiosity," and "he opened his eyes."

But Augustine's account does not turn toward ownership, as the phenomenology preferred by Griffiths suggests. On the contrary, all the images Augustine uses point in the opposite direction: "He was struck in the soul by a wound graver than the gladiator, whose fall had caused the roar." "His eyes were riveted." He "was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure." He becomes addicted and captivated. It isn't that Alypius owns the spectacle. The spectacle owns Alypius.

It would be closer to the truth, I'd suggest, that however much he may enslave himself to his own fixations, the voyeur is actually pursuing a sense of ownership of the gladiator's final moments, as if for a collection of images that the spectator has accumulated. Moreover, the scene allows him to participate without immediate bodily risk — to benefit whether the gladiator survives or dies.

The viewing is not passive. It constructs the communal hand that forces the gladiator into a fight for his real life. It represents a movement toward a particular understanding of reality, one in which the senses are deadened to violence in a way that minimizes the travesty and in which the participant is not a person with a soul with which to communicate, but an object. Hence, the progression toward ever more gratuitous scenes and perhaps an increasing likelihood of acting them out.

Howard Zinn

It shouldn't go unremarked that radical left historian Howard Zinn has passed away at the age of 87. Zinn, Matt Damon's favorite historian, is best known for his A Peoples History of the United States, a controversial work that has generated mountains of debate within (and outside of) the historical profession. (He even caused a stir around here back in 2004 when he was invited to speak at South Kingstown High unbeknownst to many parents). Disagree with him or not, Zinn will remain hugely influential in the fields of history and political thought for years to come.

Continue reading "Howard Zinn"

Funny That Progressive Thought Hasn't Made Any Progress

The current print edition of National Review includes a collection of pieces on turn-of-the-last-century founders of modern liberalism that are valuable not the least in the degree to which they shed light on current strains of thought on the Left (strains that seem not to have progressed very much, in the last hundred years). Although it does not appear to be in free online form, yet, subscribers can read Jonah Goldberg's article on economist Richard Ely here. Of particular note is the imagery that Ely offers with respect to a leftist understanding of how society should function:

"The nation in its economic life is an organism," he wrote, "in which individuals, families, and groups . . . form parts." Hence competition and self-interest are generally bad things, working against the tide of progress. After all, organs in the human body do not compete against one another, so why should organs of the body politic? History, like evolution itself, was moving toward greater social cooperation. And it fell to experts to decide how to advance that process. "A new world was coming into existence, and if this world was to be a better world we knew that we must have a new economics to go along with it." Not only did this vision provide a perfect rationale for empowering social planners, it necessarily consigned the rights and liberty of the individual to being an afterthought — hence Ely's advocacy of what he called "coercive philanthropy." If experts can glean which way social betterment lies, who is the individual to object? The job of the economist is not to consider discrete questions about how to, say, maximize productivity or measure discretionary income. It is to fix society in all its relations, right down to each individual. The goal of the economist, Ely believed, was to hasten "the most perfect development of all human faculties in each individual." Whether the individual wanted that development was irrelevant.

The equation of society with an organism ought to be more disturbing than it appears at first glance. For one thing, the statement that organs cooperate, rather than compete, is arguable. Each organ will attempt to draw to itself what it needs and absorb that sustenance until it is sated. The difference, from human beings, is that organs aren't exactly mobile within the body; they must await the allocations of more dominant parts of the body. Which brings us to the second thing — namely, that organs exist within a hierarchy. On a cold day, your body will draw heat, as necessary, from your feet in order to supply your torso and your head. (I recall an article from my youth titled "To Keep Your Hands Warm, Wear a Hat," or something similar.)

Think of the disruption to the body if the pinkie toe could move and took up the notion that it could be a heart or a brain. Thus do progressive planners think of society. Sure, they'll take care of each and every appendage, but every citizen must know his or her place, and not surprisingly, the planners themselves are confident that they belong in the skull, with its warm comfort, thick walls, and incomparable view.

Intellectuals

Thomas Sowell:

...It may seem strange that so many people of great intellect have said and done so many things whose consequences ranged from counterproductive to catastrophic. Yet it is not so surprising when we consider whether anybody has ever had the range of knowledge required to make the sweeping kinds of decisions that so many intellectuals are prone to make, especially when they pay no price for being wrong.

Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

We have had to learn the consequences of elite preemption the hard way — and many of us have yet to learn that lesson.

Proof of the Existence of Government

Somehow, one is not surprised that this instance of governance has not sparked the shock and outrage that accompanied the decision of Swiss voters to ban minarets:

... the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, has ruled that the government of Italy must remove crucifixes from public school classrooms throughout that country. According to the decision of the court, "The presence of the crucifix . . . could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign." This, the court said, could be "disturbing for pupils who practiced other religions or were atheists."

Yes, public/private distinctions apply, but the question is one of governance. The Swiss have determined public scenery to be subject to public considerations of culture, and the Italians should be able to do the same with public classrooms. If a distant, largely unaccountable government in another country can decide such matters of local taste, then — whatever one's belief in God — there's no such thing as self-government.

Rights and Benefits

As Monique insisted, last night, healthcare is not an "inalienable right." Because it requires other people (doctors, et al.) to provide services, it is actually a consumer good. It's a vital one, to be sure, and one for which people will exchange significant percentages of their resources, but that doesn't make it a right.

It does, however, make it an attractive target for people who would like to control your life, such as the current collection of Democrats and their armies of government bureaucrats, who believe doing so to be their right. The ideological distortion of the nature of healthcare serves no purpose but to disguise the fact that government cannot provide this "right" at a lower cost than people can procure it for themselves. If the Democrats' motivation were otherwise, their solution would exclude all of the interference and fluff and provide for the government to grant healthcare to those who want it but can't afford it, and deliberations would consist of a debate about what aspects of "healthcare" are rights, and which are extra. Instead, the objective of legislation has clearly been to determine who controls the industry and how.

Recasting the structure of healthcare "reform" with the assumption that healthcare is a right shows the notion to be nonsense. What other "right" do we require citizens to purchase? What other right requires that people provide the services and that employers offer access to those services as a benefit? Again, rights aren't the sort of things subject to determination of cost effectiveness.

Ezra Klein makes a related point when he suggests that "health-care coverage is not a benefit. It's a wage deduction":

Cost control is not, in fact, all pain and no gain. It's some pain in return for a fat raise. A 2006 study, for instance, by Harvard's Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra used malpractice payments to estimate the effect of premium increases on wages. They found that a 10 percent increase in health-care premiums "results in an offsetting decrease in wages of 2.3 percent" and an increase in unemployment of 1.2 percentage points. Compensation is basically a set sum for employers, and they don't seem to care much whether it goes into wages or into health-care costs.

Assessments of value exist all along the healthcare service chain. Doctors become doctors because the career presents an opportunity to earn the standard of living that they desire through an occupation in which they have an interest. Employers provide health insurance because it helps them to attract and retain employees more effectively than simple cash remuneration. Heretofore, as with all benefits, workers could presume the exchange to be worthwhile; they were giving up part of their natural pay in order to gain something that would cost them more were they to pay for it individually. If one spouse's employer provides better value, the couple switches. If the employee is healthy, he or she opts to take the money instead. The legislation on track to become law merely layers on disguises that enable citizens to ignore the fact that healthcare has a cost.

Back to Klein:

When Americans rejected managed care [such as HMOs], in other words, they didn't know they were ending wage increases, too. But since 1990, wages have tracked changes in premiums more closely than they've tracked the growth of GDP. Maybe if more workers knew that, they would be more interested in efforts to control health-care costs.

Anybody who has watched unions negotiate their contracts can appreciate the point. They'll give up wage increases if their negotiators believe that health insurance benefits will ultimately result in a greater transfer of wealth, and vice versa. What legislators who profess the healthcare-as-a-right doctrine are effectively doing is declaring that somebody must pick up the bill for extensive coverage without reference to the exchange in wages or economic activity or whatever else the burden will land on. And because those ultimately paying the cost won't know the dollar amount (indeed, they probably won't realize they are paying it at all), the bill can only increase.

Personally, I see it as more appropriate to insist that we have a right not to pay more for a service than we are willing to pay for it.

The Future We Face

So another year closes, and another company comes under the umbrella of United States of America, Inc.:

The federal government said Wednesday that it will take majority control of troubled auto lender GMAC and provide an additional $3.8 billion in aid to the company, which has been unable to raise from private investors the money it needs to staunch its losses.

As it happens, one of my family's vehicles is currently subject to a GMAC loan, leading me to wonder, first, why my debt shouldn't disappear if my government is purchasing the company and, second, how penalties for failure to pay might change if the feds settle in to ownership. Debtors prison, perhaps? Of course, the government has been meddling in the lending game for years, helping to dig the population's debt hole to its current globe-crossing depth (to China), and as a National Review editorial blurb suggests, the president, at least, has conflicting intentions:

With unemployment persisting at painful levels, President Obama casts himself as the scourge of the "fat cats"--he has taken to the language of vacuous populism--castigating banks for making too many risky loans.

At the same time, he dressed down a group of bankers, demanding they make more loans, which means riskier ones.

Arguably, GMAC is in its current position because it made loans that its business model did not support. With government involvement, politicians can sift through potential borrowers and determine which groups are high-risk/high-value (and therefore deserving of subsidization by taxpayers) and which groups are just high risk. That way, risky loans can be rephrased in moral terms and promoted as a debt that society owes the oppressed.

Combine that debt with another that politicians with too much power have incurred and which Nick Gillespie foresees as bringing us to this state of affairs:

There is a looming showdown in American society between public-sector employees and the rest of us, in terms of job security and, especially, unsustainable gold-plated retirement and health benefits that are working hard to bankrupt whole states such as California, New York, and New Jersey. As with some parts of the private sector (domestically owned auto companies, for instance), basic compensation packages were hammered into place in a very different America, and conferred massive future benefits when politicians were either too stupid or too cowardly to confront basic questions of fiscal responsibility.

Government has long been the answer for those who wish to play philanthropist with other people's money and for those who wished to ensure ever-increasing comfort and security through collective manipulation of a democratic system.

Which brings us to an essay by Patrick Deneen, which I found via Mark Shea. One must swallow a very particular interpretation of history in order to agree with Deneen's entire essay, but his conclusion has the resonance of truth:

The choice facing America today is grim: it shows every sign of a willingness to embrace the Chinese model, a model it will likely choose to remain "competitive," but also daily demonstrates its habits of blandishing a citizenry that demands to be coddled. The "democracy" continues to demand its fair share of a dwindling pie, an expected denoument when citizens have been redefined as "consumers." I wager that in 10 years' time, the nation will either have sunk itself beneath the untenable weight of continuing payment of a bribe that could never be sustained — and will look like a third world "banana republic" — or, it will have "successfully" made the transition to another regime, an form of autocratic capitalism in which the State will change the terms of the bribe, paying us with materialist distractions in exchange for our political rights and equality. I daily see signs of both prospects, and can't clearly discern at the moment which will arise. Either way, our culmination is grim, for in either event we will cease in any real sense to be a Republic.

Either way, the strategy is to beg, borrow, and steal for a continuing supply of illusory comfort, the difference being whether we chase denial into the mentality of a basket case or give totalitarianism a try, trading freedom for cheap loans, subsidized toys, and deteriorating healthcare. Neither choice is sustainable, but some minority portion of society might squeeze another half-century or so out of the delusional scam.

Of course, there's a third option, entailing real tolerance of political differences and a widely dispersed government structure. Luckily, we're all familiar with the necessary terms — federalism, checks and balances, representative government, property rights, due process — requiring us merely to reaffirm their meaning and importance.

It is in this last possibility that I find room for hope for the new year. Calamities may loom, but Western civilization will not collapse over night. Our national memory of principles of freedom will not dissipate with the winter clouds. Therefore, start where it all must begin: with your self, your family, your town, your state, and your nation. Be vigilant of changes and affronts far and wide, but begin where you can have the most effect.

Your example and lessons to loved ones will ripple throughout society. Your affirmation of principle in the town hall will echo to Providence, to Washington, to Brussels. Such could be the catalyst expanding a new invigoration around the planet, one well-lived life at a time.

A Commission (a "Panel," if You Will)... That's the Ticket!

Thomas Sowell puts it pretty starkly:

The appointment of White House "czars" to make policy across a wide spectrum of issues — unknown people who get around the Constitution's requirement of Senate confirmation for cabinet members — is yet another sign of the mindset that sees the fundamental laws and values of this country as just something to get around, in order to impose the will of an arrogant elite.

The problem is that it isn't just the political elite who lack a sufficient understanding of the real value of democratic processes. Sowell blames "dumbed-down education in schools and colleges that have become indoctrination centers for the visions of the Left," although the reference to political direction might obscure the essence of the poorly formed vision — namely, that it is possible for people to figure out and design broad social programs that will improve life for all if they're only given the power to implement them. And so, we get this disappointing, but not surprising, editorial from the Providence Journal:

Neither Congress nor the Obama administration (nor that of George W. Bush) has shown the gumption to act honestly to confront these costs. Perhaps commissions will give them adequate cover to take on the "special-interest groups." (We're all de-facto members of several such groups; one man's pork is another man's national treasure.) ...

So a bipartisan congressional committee should pick the members of these commissions and give them as much power as possible. Such panels would probably feel compelled to recommend higher taxes and sharp cuts in some programs.

In the Projo's telling, such a plan is all up-side: giving an unelected panel as much power as possible (to break some eggs) with adequate immunity to push elected representatives to do that which the public does not want. That attitude is a recipe for totalitarianism and a collapsed nation, but it's frighteningly pervasive. Everybody, after all, has a vision that would clearly work... if only it could be forced on the nation.

As if to prove its own incoherence, the editorial shifts gears to complaints that people are heeding ideological sympathizers whom they trust to specialize in sensing political winds, rather than giving rein to Congressional "staffers specializing in the subject at hand" as they craft complex legislation. The essay ends thus:

Representative democracy is a terrible system, but, as Churchill noted, better than all the others.

One might get the erroneous impression that the editorial writers are supporters of representative democracy, even after they'd spent a few hundred words advocating for rule by unelected groups and behind the scenes staff experts.

With a Combination of Powers, the Devil Smiles

We're all familiar with the concept of separating powers across government. Especially in the United States, the notion of checks and balances is woven throughout civic education. Too few in the modern era appreciate the importance of separating powers across society. Not for long will powerful people in business, religion, and government maintain mutual respect out of intellectual habit; such respect will only flow perpetually from the actuality of power. The businessman will respect the religious leader because the former's customers trust the judgment of latter. The politician will respect the businessman because the latter has economic clout.

Hopefully, we in the West are beginning to wake up to the fact the more we look to government to handle, the more power politicians will demand and the more authority they will assert. Thus, as an editorial explains in a recent Rhode Island Catholic, a government tasked with ensuring equality will interpret its authority in such a way as to draw parameters around tolerable religious beliefs and practices:

The bill, which claims to eliminate discrimination in the workplace, would regulate churches including the Catholic Church as employers. It would make it unlawful to require a Catholic priest to be male, unmarried or not in a civil marriage, since no priest would be able to clearly demonstrate that their time was wholly spent leading prayer, liturgy or worship and promoting and explaining doctrine. The Bishops of England and Wales have protested the bill and its immensely serious consequences for over two years. ...

Catholic Bishops reject claims by the government that as long as priests spend 51 percent of their time leading worship and preaching the Gospel they would be spared any hostile legal action. They suggest that priestly ministry is so diverse and includes pastoral work, private prayer and study, administration and building maintenance that it would be impossible to guarantee that such a condition could be met. The rejection of the government’s claims includes the objection by Catholic Bishops that the government would now effectively define what work a priest must perform. Last month an amendment to protect the liberty of churches was rejected by the House of Commons and as a result the bill will likely become law next year.

News of strengthening allegiances across Christian denominations is clearly related:

"For religion, militant secularism is just as dangerous as militant atheism was. Both tend to exclude religion from the public and political sphere, relegating it to a ghetto, confining it to the area of private devotion," [Russian Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion wrote in an introduction to a book of speeches by Roman Catholic Pope Benedict XVI].

The archbishop added that in modern Europe the "unwritten rules of political correctness" are increasingly applied to religious institutions, to the point that believers can no longer express their religious convictions publicly because it would be considered a violation of the rights of non-believers.

Archbishop Hilarion said Europe's political unification had brought with it the risk of a new pan-European "dictatorship" that would impose a single model of secular humanistic values on all European countries.

Religious leaders are not innocent in the modern movement to grant government authority to implement preferred social policies, so the first step in combating its overreaches will be admission of culpability and reconsideration of political philosophy. Even now, when it comes to economic and (sadly) environmental matters, the belief that government can simply dictate the enlightened practices is proving to have an insidious allure among the faithful.

It will not prove possible to imbue an all-powerful government with respect for the individual and communal rights granted by an all-powerful deity. To the extent that such a thing ever seemed possible, the impression relied entirely on secular leaders' respect for the power of individuals and communities in other social spheres. Where government sees opportunity to marginalize those checks on its power, it will.

Impressions from a Declining Country

Sometimes the order in which one processes information can create broader impressions than the individual items suggest. For just such an experience, first watch Steven Crowder's short video about the crumbling, desolate city of Detroit, whose condition he attributes to the loving manipulations of big government.

Now consider this news:

Almost two months ago, the Commerce Department cheered the announcement that the third quarter GDP had grown at an annualized rate of 3.5%. The Obama administration hailed it as a sign that their economic policies had spurred real growth. Even when Commerce sharply revised the number downward a month later to 2.8%, the White House continued to argue that the lower number still meant that the US had turned the corner, even after a number of critics asked how Commerce could have missed the number so widely. ...

Today, Commerce backtracked even further. The annualized growth number for Q3 turns out to have been 2.2%, a revision of over a third from its original estimate two months ago...

... The Cash for Clunkers program and the first-time homebuyer tax credit was estimated to have contributed as much as half of the original Commerce estimate of 3.5%. Assuming that to still have contributed at least 1.5% of the final GDP, that leaves a rather pathetic 0.7% growth in Q3 without it. It's barely a recovery at that level.

And this morning, we learn:

November saw a dramatic increase in the number of houses sold in Rhode Island — up 61.1 percent compared with November 2008, according to statistics compiled by the Rhode Island Association of Realtors.

Part of the increase can be explained by a one-month-only $8,000 tax credit that expired at the end of November. Part of it may be related to the false prediction of growth. No doubt, there's also a genuine improvement of buyer mood; people who have been in the market for a home are more comfortable with the probability that prices are at or near their new bottom and that interest rates aren't going any lower. University of Rhode Island Economics Professor Len Lardaro puts it thus: "we're [now] in a typical recession, not a free-fall, like we were in a year ago."

Nowhere, however, has anybody explained what specifically is going to turn things around. Even up to the Commerce Department, it seems as if economic forecasts are taking as an assumption that 4% or so is simply "normal" growth, to which the economy will return as a function of its essential nature. The picture that is actually beginning to emerge more resembles an old car, and all variety of government officials, economists, and media cheerleaders are standing around trying various tricks and gimmicks to get the beast moving — not the least by employing positive thinking: "It's just about to go, now!" It whines and whirs and sputters, but it isn't turning over. And it's cold outside.

Of course, economic movement is only necessary for certain destinations. We can trust, for example, that Detroit will come to us. Rhode Islanders should be especially aware of the fact that, by contrast, economic turnaround and improvement must be pursued, not awaited

Prescriptions for Failed States

In the most recent Claremont Review, William Voegeli examines some of political and institutional factors that have led to California's current crisis, particularly the role that Progressivism has played. Key to his argument is the understanding of what early twentieth century Progressives in California were trying to achieve:

According to historian Alonzo Hamby, the framework for Progressive politics was the conviction that the political conflict was between "the people" and "the interests." It followed that the highest political duty was to help the people resist and ultimately triumph over the interests. One problem with this framework is that it lends itself better to the disdain than to the practice of politics. "The Progressives did not like politics," writes political scientist Jerome Mileur, because "the politics they saw was not about the public purpose of the nation, but was instead consumed by local interests and private greed, indifferent alike to the idea of a great community and the idealism of grand purpose."

...Progressivism's anti-politics was designed for the people as they ought to be, not as they really are. Positing that the fundamental choice is between the people and the interests presupposes that the people are authentic only when they are disinterested. The Progressives' goal was to equip the people with the means to advance encompassing, lofty ambitions by thwarting the interests' narrow, selfish ones. The means to this end was to collapse the constitutional space between the people and the government, dismantling the political mechanisms that conferred unfair advantages on connected insiders.

Today, the ballot initiative is probably the most recognizable Progressive remedy, which is practiced in California to a seemingly greater scope than other states, but the direct primary replaced the smoke-filled room, electing judges, recall elections and the ubiquitous referendum were also instituted.

This so-called "hyperdemocracy", as Voegeli explains, is reliant on a weird dichotomy. While the people can be a check against the interests, the Progressive solution of more direct political involvement requires both their disinterest in politics per se, but requires an interest in policies. Most people simply can't make enough time in the day to lead their lives and keep an eye on policies and politicians.

Realizing that this wasn't enough, the Progressive solution lay in the expert administrators, who naturally take it upon themselves to make the proper choices for the silent masses who are usually just not that into politics. Thus, civil service and the spread of the "unionocracy", as Voegeli calls it. Rhode Islanders know where Voegeli is going here, so I won't linger on well-trod ground. Yet, his observations about the Golden State seem applicable to the Ocean State.

...the political strategies of both conservatives and liberals concentrate on how to deal with that angry public. The conservative strategy is to get the public angry, and see that it stays angry. Conservative talk-radio hosts compete to identify the latest and most astounding outrage, and to see who can denounce it most stridently. The liberal strategy is...to avoid rousing that public to anger, but also, when the voters do put on their war paint, to wait for their ire to ebb due to the passage of time and the inevitable reappearance of life's many nonpolitical preoccupations. When the anger has passed, government-as-usual can resume without meddling by citizen-amateurs....

The evidence is incontestable: the liberal strategy of waiting for the public's anger to subside is far sounder than the conservative strategy of hoping it will gather strength. The liberal calculation rests on a shrewd assessment, not only of human psychology but also of modern mobility. California is not yet East Germany, which means that one of the ways Californians who are mad as hell can decide not to take it any more is by moving away.

Sounds familiar. Voegeli has a two-part solution for California that may also apply here in Rhode Island:

First, the state's Republican Party will have to break free from the gravitational pull of the Progressive legacy to establish itself as the vital political intermediary between the public's desire for fair and frugal public services, and a newly chastened government that delivers them conscientiously. The historical record clearly establishes that direct legislation and galvanizing leaders are not adequate to this task, and independent administrative experts can be trusted only to sabotage it.

Second, the institutional capacity of the Republican Party will be inadequate to its mission unless it persuades Californians that they have an urgent, abiding, and legitimate interest in reclaiming their government from the public employee unions who have asserted squatters' rights over it. The logic of Progressivism called for independent administrators to discern and implement the people's disinterested, inchoate aspirations for government. Instead, the permanent government has become increasingly adept and brazen at advancing its own private interest by invoking platitudes about the public's. The vindication of the public's real, as opposed to its faux, interest will require walking back, over several years, the depredations the permanent government has perfected over decades.

As Voegeli explains earlier, populist-based "rebuke[s of] the governing class in the manner of Network's Howard Beale: "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!" only work for so long and can only go so far.

How Dead Can Capitalism Be…

…when Harvard University's alumni magazine is publishing articles about Ayn Rand that end on this note…

Nearly 30 years after her death, Rand’s once controversial philosophy of individualism and capitalism has become part of the warp and woof of American political culture.

Issues-Based Politics and Government Philosophy

Bishop Thomas Tobin makes a fortuitous juxtaposition in a recent edition of his "Without a Doubt" column (emphasis added):

Therefore I'm looking for candidates who will explain their stance on the dignity of human life and how that translates into action. I want candidates to address the value of marriage and family, and explain to me how homosexual marriages won't erode the traditional underpinnings of our society. I'd like to find candidates who’ll support the comprehensive reform of the health care system in a way that preserves important moral values. I'd like to see candidates embrace authentic educational choice and describe to the public how such competition would be good for our community. And I want candidates who can repair the economy and maintain fiscal discipline without placing the burden upon or targeting the unemployed, the homeless, the indigent elderly or the immigrant.

Certainly, there are "comprehensive reforms" of healthcare that would point in a direction of increased consumer choice and autonomy — which I believe to more fully conform with the Church's understanding of reality than increased socialization. However, none of the plans currently being described with that phrase are otherwise than degrees of government takeovers and mandates. In other words, they're precisely of a kind with the political theory that created the education regime into which the bishop would like to introduce choice.

It's a central plank in Christian social teaching that ends do not justify means. The end of helping ailing people does not justify the cost of diminished freedom of conscience and autonomy of action inherent in direct government manipulation of the society any more than the objective of ensuring an educated population did in the past.

It seems to me that the quality of our students' education has been on a steadily declining course, under government watch, and that the majority of young Americans are educated in an environment in which officials are explicitly forbidden from behaving as if it is more likely than not that God exists. Regrettably, it's not a topic that I've had the time to explore in detail, but I would hope that the Catholic Bishops would devote some resources and prayer to the question of what effect the Democrats' "comprehensive healthcare reforms" would have on Catholic hospitals, not to mention Catholic employers that cover employees health insurance... even if there are conscience clauses and restrictions on support for abortion.

Death, Taxes, and the Impossibility of Separation

In an essay in the current issue of The RI Catholic, I attempt to link my conversion from nihilism to Catholicism with the impossibility of truly separating church and state by way of introducing my heretofore monthly column in the publication:

Faith-filled or faithless, no such existential philosophies can be sopped off the skin like bath water. They have consequences. They show on the faces that we present to the world.

Moreover, they determine what sort of obligations we acknowledge. One hears often about a separation of church and state, but there can be no such thing. Even a culture that takes the impetuous stand that nobody has a right to impose restrictions will paradoxically find itself knocking down doors in search of hegemony, lest somebody, somewhere tells somebody else what to do. Even a government that preaches an individual autonomy to "define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," as the Supreme Court put it when finding a Constitutional right to sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas, will collect taxes and allocate the dollars by its own mysterious process.

Patinkin's First Hand Exposure to Failure of Communism

I don't usually associate ProJo lifestyle columnist with hefty political writing (that's not a slam at Patinkin--I generally enjoy his columns--but politics isn't his usual "beat"), so I was impressed with his Saturday column in which he writes about his first-hand observations on the failures of communism.

Much of the 20th century was a contest between Communism and capitalism. It seemed a valid race, because Russia was the one other superpower, a military giant that beat us into space.

I was stunned when I looked behind the scenes.

Communism was an economic disaster. That’s why it failed.

The theory was for the state to erase the rich-poor gap by guaranteeing jobs for all at equal pay. In countries like Russia, laborers made the same as bosses. That way, instead of working selfishly for personal gain, people would supposedly strive for the common good.

That sounded fine in the time of the czars, when the masses starved while the rich had palaces. It may even sound good today when Wall Street CEOs make $50 million while undermining the economy.

There’s only one problem. Communism doesn’t work, and for a simple reason. It goes against human nature.

Capitalism, on the other hand, recognizes the truth about people. We are selfish. We only will work our hardest — and thereby build up society — if it gets us ahead.

But what about the Communist theory that folks will work harder still for community and state?

I thought I’d find at least some of that. I didn’t.

Read the rest of his column to read what he did find. Patinkin's experience rings very true with on of my own. In 1992, I spent Christmas in Riga, Latvia while working on an American cargo ship. The Iron Curtain had fallen, but the country was still in the middle of a transition out from under Soviet power. There were still Soviet troops in the streets and Soviet memorials (guarded by the aforementioned troops) and Communist propaganda was still in evidence. These contributed to a lingering resentment among native Latvians. For instance, I witnessed a young woman get harangued by two or three older Latvian ladies and found out it was because she was a "White Russian", in other words, an interloper.

Yet, there was also optimism in the air, the feeling amongst the native Lativians I talked with (OK, in the "American Bar"!) was that they were ready to embrace freedom and an open economy. And the currency of choice--as Patinkin also described--was the US dollar. I haven't been back since then, but I'm sure Latvia has experienced the growing pains of capitalism. However, despite the failures and missteps, I'd bet that most Latvians don't want to go back to the "good old days" of a planned economy where everything is depressingly "equal."

Catholic Democrats

Roger Williams University PoliSci Professor and OSPRI Fellow Ernest Greco has a piece in the ProJo advocating for a European style Christian Democrat party. While I don't think U.S. political ground is as fertile as Greco does for a new political party, he offers a concise summary of the big picture.

Unfortunately, too many of America’s Catholic ethnics...still seem to be firmly anchored to the Democratic Party. Especially in the blue states of the Northeast and the Great Lakes, an informal coalition and division of labor appears to have developed within that party.

“Progressives,” as our social democrats and liberal democrats collectively label themselves, control the party ideology, platforms and nominations, especially at the national level. We Christian democrats turn out the votes in places like Johnston, Pawtucket and Kalamazoo. They control the Supreme Court and we get the Registry of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Public Works. They rely on the support of those notorious “cafeteria Catholics,” who seem to think that the sanctity of life, the integrity of marriage, and the authority of the family are not nearly as important as a higher minimum wage or “taxing the rich.” We equally numerous “cafeteria Democrats” have (mostly) stayed with our grandfathers’ party because of tradition, an unhealthy attraction to patronage, and a mysterious belief that any candidate on the ballot with a “D” after his name may be the second coming of FDR or JFK.

Greco's analysis seems to describe the national picture well, but it doesn't quite fit Rhode Island. Rhode Island's Catholic Democrats hold the reins of political power from the State House to the DMV and DPW. Their answer to the question that CCRI's David Carlin asked, "Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?", is emphatically YES. I don't see that changing any time soon.

Yes, a Little State Can Learn from a Big State

Wouldn't it be refreshing if this sort of thing were written about our small Northeastern state?

[Texas] Republicans did not take the bait [to raise taxes]. Governor [Rick] Perry told the legislature to not even bother sending him a bill with a tax increase, because he would not sign it. Instead, he submitted a budget in which every spending line was a zero — an act of political theater, to be sure, but an effective one. Republicans ran a classic good-cop/bad-cop routine on the bureaucracy, with Perry taking a hard line against tax increases and Rep. Talmadge Heflin, at that time the new Republican chairman of the Appropriations Committee, meeting with the heads of the state's 35 largest agencies and asking them to start from zero. The agency chiefs were told that they had to keep spending at less than 87.5 percent of the previous year's level, draconian cuts by the standards of most state governments, but they were given maximum flexibility in achieving those goals.

Particulars can vary; ultimately the philosophy is what's important:

"There are certain truths that have to be agreed to," Perry says. "One is that economies grow when they are free from over-taxation, over-regulation, over-litigation, and they have a skilled work force. Government isn't difficult in theory — don't spend all the money, keep taxes low, have a fair and predictable regulatory climate, keep frivolous lawsuits to a minimum, and fund an accountable education system so that you have a skilled work force available. Then get the hell out of the way and let the private sector do what the private sector does best. It's simple in theory, but it's difficult to accomplish. In Texas, we've implemented that theory, and it's produced an economy that has no match in America."

That description looks like the photo negative of Rhode Island.

Nebulous Rationality

Corruption of culture is a nebulous and subjective concept which has been used toward evil authoritarian ends for as we can remember. Sorry, unless there is a clear victim, legislation of such morality, or culture as you call it, is not a proper function of government, as you would certainly agree if the progressives took control and sought to impose their own morality and culture upon you.

So writes Dan in a comment, here. As a historical matter, I'd argue that, while (yes) the "nebulous and subjective concept" has been used for evil, it has also been used to focus and advance Western civilization. The idea is to get better at applying it, not to declare ourselves beyond its necessity.

But we could argue history and import until the sun comes up and still not say anything new or change anybody's mind, so let's pick up the thread with another sentence of Dan's, written here:

... there is a difference between having a broad and intrusive law like prostitution law which actually makes certain activities that shouldn't rationally be prohibited illegal and a narrow law like theft for which enforcement requires a certain amount of investigation to confirm the elements.

It can hardly be argued whether objective rationality has also contributed to "evil authoritarian ends" in history. Recent history. The problem is that it isn't objectively rational and only appears so, in our conversation, because Dan places arbitrary restrictions on its allowable origin and permissible application to determine who judges what as harmful and to whom.

A person who believes that God will punish a society for toleration of prostitution is advocating a personally rational policy when he supports the criminalization of prostitution. To declare his internally rational worldview invalid in the formation of the law is to establish a state religion premised on the impossibility of such a God. In another direction, a person who sincerely believes that his own will is the determinant of reality is also being perfectly rational in advocating for policies that allow him to subject others to what some might call harm. With a nod to our progressive friends, one could bring to mind, as an example, a greedy corporate executive who advocates politically according to his rational self interest, even though the proposed policies are unreasonable by community standards.

Libertarians, I'd further argue, found their views on an irrational faith that the only harms that matter are direct and provable and the dogma that all must accept their criteria for the passage of laws. Both counts are absurd. Anybody who thinks human beings are capable of discerning the waves of cause and effect and articulating their observations with sufficient clarity to codify them into law is irrational.

Center-mass conservatives see tradition as the means of learning, over time, what practices cause harm, often on a profound scale. That which does not pick my pocket may yet bring down my house, and a wise society will seek to give its citizens a means of expressing the dangers that they see, while preserving the rights of those with their eyes on different threats.

We accomplish the feat by constructing a governing system that enables tiers of community norms. It gives us all sorts of room to decide whether and at what layer of government to accomplish the inevitably muddy work of agreeing to laws in order to maintain the freedom of our beliefs and to work together and compromise wherever possible. So, the town should be free to zone strip clubs out, while the state should leave strip clubs alone but prevent the establishment of prostitution as a region-defining industry, and the federal government should protect the rights of sex-trade advocates to speak and protest at town council meetings.

To put it plainly, we work the subjective stuff out on as small a scale as makes our decisions effectual.

The decision about whether prostitution should be legal in Rhode Island is logically prior to the method of making it illegal, so Dan's subsequent objections about leaving "selective enforcement" up to the police is premature. If we agree, however, for the sake of argument, that prostitution should be illegal, then we might also agree that the prostitutes should not be the target of the penalties and that enforcement may also be constrained to limit investigatory efforts. The principle would be that, if you don't get caught, then the transaction was really and truly a private matter.

The grandest irrationality of the state's pro-prostitution libertarians is the apparent believe that a state with a governing system conspicuously strangling the private sector — that can't keep its hands off even minute details of life — will somehow adhere to a libertarian ideal when it comes to prostitution. Now that it is widely known that prostitution is legal, here, the government will not fail to extend its reach into the occupation, should the "loophole" making it legal become, instead, a portal.

What the libertarians will accomplish, with their small-government zealotry, will be an intrusive regime that fails to flush out the illicit. Regulation of prostitution means licensing, testing, workplace inspection, and more, and all it does is create a legal subset, leaving those who will not, cannot, or do not want to live within the rules to create an even seedier black market.

Of course, Dan professes not to care about seediness. Even if a majority of prostitutes are merely trapped in the trade to support their hard-drug habits, it remains a private matter. Once again, to believe that such a society as ours will not cry for government to do something to help such poor souls is to believe something more incredible than found in the strangest sects of the jungle.

Readers will note that my tack, when progressives et alia strive to impose their morality, is to argue that the imposition ought to be made at the state level (or smaller) and then to argue why the law wouldn't achieve its stated aims or is wrong or reckless for other reasons. This isn't only a strategic move; it's also reflective of strong convictions that a rational system can only operate in such a way.

Government and Society

Robert George offers an important basis for emphasis here, but there's an important inward extension to his description of the law:

The law is a teacher. It will teach either that marriage is a reality in which people can choose to participate, but whose contours people cannot make and remake at will, or it will teach that marriage is a mere convention, which is malleable in such a way that individuals, couples, or, indeed, groups can choose to make of it whatever suits their desires, goals, and so on. The result, given the biases of human sexual psychology, will be the development of practices and ideologies that truly tend to undermine the sound understanding and practice of marriage, together with the development of pathologies that tend to reinforce the very practices and ideologies that cause them.

The inward extension is that, as much as the law is a teacher, its "students" in a democratic society must ultimately approve of the lesson. It's a matter of give and take — mutual reinforcement. The country's people construct the law, and the law helps to guide their behavior. Regulations act as guidelines toward a desired end.

This same adjustment must be made to an excellent piece by RI locals Michelle Cretella and Arthur Goldberg:

Legislators and justices will do well to heed the findings of J.D. Unwin, British anthropologist and author of Sex and Culture. After studying 86 societies spanning 5,000 years of history he found a distinct correlation between increasing sexual freedom and social decline. Unwin postulated that when social regulations forbid indiscriminate satisfaction of sexual impulses, the sublimated sexual impulses are channeled into a "social energy" that builds society. Conversely, he found no instance in which a so