Category: Political Philosophy

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Law National Security Political Philosophy Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Experimenting With National Security Policy

[digg-reddit-me]On September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was taken by surprise. Their immediate reactions are forgivable, if disheartening – the 7 1/2 minutes reading a book after being told “America is under attack;” the quick spreading of false information at the top levels as officials thought that the State Department had been attacked and that taxi cabs were planning on blowing themselves up in front of major Washington buildings; the order by Cheney to take out a civilian airliner, usurping the role of the president. President Bush and Condi Rice clearly panicked – as Rice has essentially admitted since leaving office:

Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11th, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans. And I know a lot of people are second-guessing now, but let me tell you what the second-guessing that would really have hurt me – if the second-guessing had been about 3,000 more Americans dying because we didn’t do everything we could to protect them.

Karl Rove, seeing his dream of a realignment of the electorate threatened by the biggest terrorist attack in American history likewise panicked.

Cheney though was emboldened – his sense of purpose, his disdain for America’s delicate system of checks and balances, and his radicalism imbued Bush’s first term with a reactionary fervor. The War on Terror became synonymous with Cheney’s goal of creating an imperial presidency. At this point, in the aftermath of this devastating attack, Rove began to plan for ways to turn this glaring weakness into a strength; and Cheney attempted to change the American structure of government – believing that 9/11 would have been prevented if only the president had more power. Thus, Cheney began to systematically use this crisis to centralize more power in the White House – and to assert greater executive powers and to outright reject the powers of the legislative, judicial, and quasi-independent branches of government to check his or the president’s power. Laws were read in such a way as to maximally expand presidential power – with a statute declaring war on Al Qaeda secretly being understood to overturn decades of legislation, for example; vast areas of law were secretly held to be unconstitutional checks on the president’s power and were ignored. In so doing, Cheney began to fundamentally alter the American social bargain.

It wasn’t until far right-wingers from Office of Legal Counsel Director Jack Goldsmith, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Deputy Attorney General James Comey, and quite a few other top CIA, FBI, and Justice employees were about to resign that Bush finally realized how radical his administration had become. By Bush’s second term, he began to walk most of his more radical policies back – though refusing to admit any fault and maintaining his authority to do all of it.

Now that Bush is no longer in office, liberals, libertarians, progressives, and other Bush administration opponents had two basic conceptions of how to move forward and how to look at the radicalism of Bush’s first term and his assertions of executive power that he maintained until he left office. The first conception was well expressed by Tom Malinowski of the Human Rights Watch at a Congressional hearing on June 11, 2009:

We should stop experimenting. We should not build yet another untested structure on a foundation of failure. We should finally, at long last, bring to justice the men who killed thousands of people on September 11, and others who have committed or planned or aided the murder of Americans. And we should do it in a system that works.

On the other side, some who opposed the radical actions of Bush-Cheney still saw within September 11 something similar to what Cheney did – a unique threat to our way of life. What these individuals are forced to do is balance the threat of catastrophic terrorism with the desire to preserve our way of life. Rather than starting with the assumption that a stronger president with fewer checks on his or her power is the only way to prevent terrorism, these individuals believe we must experiment with our laws and institutions, to tinker with them, to achieve this right balance – all within the public realm and with the consent of the people, rather than in secret.

In an interview with a British paper, Philip Bobbitt, for example, makes the case for why we need to experiment with our national security policy – focusing specifically on the idea of stockpiling laws:

I think when you go to weapons of mass destruction you’re talking about just a completely different level of horror and disruption…We must come, as societies, to some understanding of what we’re facing, and in these times of tranquillity organise ourselves and debate about what we will do if a catastrophe should come to pass. We should stockpile laws for such an eventuality, just as we stockpile vaccines. Then I think we have an excellent chance of getting through these attacks with systems of consent in place. But if we don’t do that, if we say oh, get real, this isn’t another second world war, surely you’re exaggerating the threat, this couldn’t possibly threaten our society now! It hasn’t yet! And if you don’t use the democratic process to put laws in place now, then in a way you become the ally of the terrorists because when a truly terrible series of mass atrocities really does occur and you don’t have anything to fall back on, that’s when you get martial law, that’s when you get the system that’s in democratic collapse, and you become the source of terror yourself. No, Bin Ladin isn’t going to invade and occupy Westminster and put Mullah Omar in the House of Lords, he’s not going to take over. If Britain becomes a state of terror it will be because we did it to ourselves and we did it because we did not prepare when we had the time and the peace to do so by law and by consensual systems.The United States can do the same thing. If we are busy throwing away laws, the one steady craft we have to get through this, Washington will turn us into a state of terror, we’ll do it. We’ll embrace it enthusiastically…

We need to focus on making our society more resilient in the event of an attack, on spreading information regarding terrorism so that citizens can make informed choices (as was successful in preventing the fourth attack on September 11). The laws regarding continuity of government – from my understanding – are incomplete Cold War relics. We need to take the threat of terrorism from the realm of fear and bring into the realm of rational thought. Obama, as president, is uniquely positioned to do this.

It seems to me that Malinowski’s approach – while understandable – is misguided. In a changing world,  our government must adapt, must experiment. And the threat from catastrophic terrorism – the threat inherent in a globalized world, with technology increasing the power of individuals exponentially – is real. It must change the calculus, the balancing test. We need to experiment with our national security policies – and get away from the Culture War politics that thanks to Rove and Cheney have come to dominate this arena. The Rule of Law and our way of life is better protected if we reflectively plan for an emergency now rather than overreacting in fear in the moment.

Categories
Barack Obama Conservativism Domestic issues Economics Financial Crisis History Liberalism Libertarianism Political Philosophy The Opinionsphere

A Generational Bargain (in which we are getting screwed)

[digg-reddit-me]Back when California’s looming bankruptcy was in the news, George Will wrote:

California’s perennial boast — that it is the incubator of America’s future — now has an increasingly dark urgency…California has become liberalism’s laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed.

Will may be right about fiscal conservatism – but he’s wrong in laying the blame for California’s problems on liberalism. The fault in California, like the fault in America, is deeper – a refusal by the Baby Boom generation to make tough choices to create a sustainable world, economy, or government. Bill Maher summarized California’s trap best:

We govern by ballot initiative – and we only write two kinds of those: spend money on things I like and don’t raise my taxes.

California’s initiative system aggravated a tendency that has been dominant in American politics for some time now. The problem with California – and America – is a combination of two factors:

  1. a kind of accidental unholy alliance between liberals who push for more government spending to alleviate poverty and better the nation and conservatives who want to cut taxes – with neither group having the power or political will to be fiscally responsible at the same time as they push for their pet projects ((This is a bit unfair on the national level – as George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton – with opposition Congresses checking them – proved to be exceedingly responsible, putting America on a sustainable course after the tax-cutting, free-spending Ronald Reagan and before the tax-cutting, free-spending George W. Bush.))
  2. the deliberate plan of the right-wingers who want to “starve the beast” – by which they mean encouraging the irresponsible system above of  increasing spending while cutting taxes (and these right-wingers do this knowing that the system is unsustainable and will crash, which is the only way they see to get rid of popular programs.)

This is a story of the cowardice of politicians and the idiocy of people.

This idiocy – in almost all of its forms – can be traced to the ascent of the Baby Boom generation as they took power with the Reagan administration. By increasing spending exponentially while cutting taxes – creating enormous deficits – Reagan supercharged (stimulated) the economy out of the stagflation of the 1970s. At the same time, he began the American government’s practice of becoming dependent on East Asia – relying on Japan to lend vast amounts of its money as our trade deficit with them grew. Reagan also began the trend of deregulation of industries – allowing them to take greater risks and reap greater profits if they succeeded – which also allowed companies to kick off a merger boom, leading more and more companies becoming too big to fail while they were regulated less and less. All of these steps led to an economy focused more on finance than industry – leading, along with factors due to globalization, to America’s industrial decline. The dominance of the financial sector in the economy, which is well known for its boom and bust cycle, led to a series of economic bubbles – and in fact, an economy in which growth was maintained through bubbles rather than real worth.

Beginning with Reagan, president after president stimulated the economy constantly – to avoid having to take the fall. But this system was unsustainable. As the Baby Boomers “surfed on a growing wave of debt” – both public and private – they sought to use debt to meet their rising expectations in the absence of creating real value. This was the generational bargain at the heart of the Reagan presidency – a bargain that allowed America to spend the Soviet Union into the ground and jumpstart the economy from the stagflation of the 1970s – but that, unchecked, thirty years later, now threatens our future.

The Baby Boomers pissed away the prosperity their parents bequeathed them and squandered the opportunities presented to them – and now are busy using their children’s future earnings (our future earnings) to buy their way out of the mess they have created. They avoided the challenges of their times and found people to blame. They focused on OJ Simpson, Britney Spears, Madonna, and Monica Lewinsky – on abortion, Vietnam, gays, and religion – and not on global warming, on campaign finance, on the corruption of our political process, on an overleveraged economy.

After decades of avoiding systematic problems – as the solutions became embroiled in the ongoing culture war – we now must face them. With two wars in the Mid-East, a failing world economy, a growing threat of catastrophic terrorism, and whatever else may come our way, procrastination is impossible. Now it’s time for us to try to salvage this wreck. It remains to be seen if we’re up to it.

David Brooks explained this grave situation facing Obama and the difficult tasks ahead (focusing especially on the growing deficit). Brooks concludes with reasons for hope and despair:

The members of the Obama administration fully understand this and are brimming with good ideas about how to move from a bubble economy to an investment economy. Finding a political strategy to accomplish this, however, is proving to be very difficult. And getting Congress to move in this direction might be impossible.

Your cards do not improve if you complain about the hand you have been dealt. But it is essential to understand how we got here. We also must not be complacent now that a leader who we admire has been given power. Individuals are empowered to a greater extent than ever before in history – for good or ill. Which is why it is never enough to get the right man or woman into public office – even if this is a useful initial step. What we must do – as individuals – is to see the world around us clearly and take steps to effect what changes we can, to live the values we hold in our hearts, to reach out to those affected by our actions.

[Image by orangejack licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Conservativism Economics Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

The Limits of the Free Market

George Will:

Trillions of dollars of capital are being allocated sub-optimally, by politically tainted government calculations rather than by the economic rationality of markets. Hence the nation’s prospects for long-term robust growth – and for funding its teetering architecture of entitlements – are rapidly diminishing.

The president’s astonishing risk-taking satisfies the yearning of a presidency-fixated nation for a great man to solve its problems. But as Coolidge said, “It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.” What the country needs today in order to shrink its problems is not presidential greatness. Rather, it needs individuals to do what they know they ought to do, and government to stop doing what it should know causes or prolongs problems.

One thing that has frustrated me greatly over the past months has been George Will’s apparently unshaken faith in the perfection of the free market. Here he demonstrates this again – speaking of the “sub-optimal” allocation of resources by the government. I have to wonder what he makes of how the financial sector allocated resources over the past few decades. At this point, I think most of us can appreciate the value of  “sub-optimal” investment when compared to the catastrophic investments the “free market” allowed.

It’s not that I don’t think Will has a point. For one, I tend to agree with his anti-royalist attitude towards the executive branch. And secondly, I agree with him that a free market, by distributing resources and power among many actors, can achieve a kind of collective wisdom – and by allowing constant tinkering and creative destruction we allow for the possibility of positive black swans. This is the genius of the market, rooted in the knowledge that no one person or team of persons can know enough to guarantee the right decision. Instead, the best results are obtained by creating many seperate decision-making bodies and creating a structure that allows those that are actually successful to be rewarded.

But Will doesn’t seem to have noticed the serious flaws in the American and worldwide market – or at least, the only flaws he seems to have noticed are those involving government interference.

[digg-reddit-me]Even in the most traditional analysis, bankers got into this crisis largely because they were able to escape regulation. They created shadow banks, derivative products, and other complex financial instruments which were designed to evade any regulations in place. George Will and others will likely point to government-backed organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as key causes in inflating the housing bubble – but it is difficult to actually make this case – as these institutions, for their size, weren’t that involved in the subprime mortgage market – and in fact were pushed to become involved by the enormous profits being made by the banks. What Will doesn’t want to acknowledge was that even in this most traditional analysis, the root of the problem is the misalignment of incentives rather than government distortions of the market.

What Will fails to acknowledge is that our markets are constricted by lack of government interference. The freedom of the financial marketplace – especially the distribution of power and decision-making that makes the market work – is severely restricted by the size of our banks. Their size not only makes them too big to fail, it also prevents the market from being free.

Our financial and automobile industries have ended up combining the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism – without the benefits of either – and that is even before the government stepped in.

Think about it – the free market is effective because it prevents any small set of individuals from monopolizing decision-making. Especially in the world today with so much information available and events moving so quickly, the “right” business choices to make aren’t always clear. A free market – by allowing each business to make its own choice – prevents decision-making from falling victim to individual follies. But our current economic system – with it’s enormous corporations – ends up recreating the feudal system in which power is not centered in a single place, but in a handful of powerful “princes.” While these “princes” push for free market reforms, it is not in their interest to actually achieve this ideal free market – as Yglesias points out:

As a market approaches textbook conditions—perfect competition, perfect information, etc.—real profits trend toward zero. You make your money by ensuring that textbook conditions don’t apply; that there are huge barriers to entry, massive problems with inattention, monopolistic corners to exploit, etc.

George Will himself has pointed out that those “reforms” that are passed tend to be of a specific sort, following what Will calls, “the supreme law of the land…the principle of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.” What free market supporters rarely seem to admit is that the free market exists not in spite of the government, but because of it. And today, our market is far from free because the government has failed to protect it – and has instead allowed the worst characteristics of capitalism (exploitation of labor; externalizing as much cost to society as possible, for eg. pollution) with the worst characteristics of socialism (concentration of power and limitation of competition) to create a kind of modern feudal society. In  this feudal society, freedom is enjoyed by the “princes” of finance and industry while the creative ferment of a real free market is formally protected but effectively quashed.

I would like to see George Will take on the limitations of capitalism at some point. As a conservative and an intelligent man, he must see they exist.

[Image by mischiru licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Law Political Philosophy Politics

Judge Sotomayor Defends a Racist Cop

[digg-reddit-me]

All the talk of Sonia Sotomayor’s racism tends to focus on a few of her remarks in her speeches (especially one in particular) and her ruling in a single case. But looking at her record on discrimination lawsuits, for example, she only ruled for the plaintiffs in 10 of the 96 racial discrimination claims that were before her. In one prominent case, she sided with a police officer who had sent out anonymously racist and anti-Semitic mailings in a strongly worded dissent. What’s more significant to me though is the extent to which Sotomayor interpreted the law to protect individual rights, in this case, the First Amendment.

Last week, I wrote I was concerned about Sotomayor’s decision in the “douchebag” case:

I think the role of Courts in checking the increasing power of corporations, schools, and other semi-voluntary organizations to monitor and police the private activities of citizens is going to gradually become a big issue. That Sotomayor signed onto an opinion then that allowed the restriction of free speech on a non-school affiliated blog because calling administrators “douchebags” presented a “foreseeable risk of substantial disruption” is a matter of concern.

The case of Pappas v. Guiliani shows a different side of Sotomayor’s jurisprudence. The plaintiff was an NYPD officer who was resposible for maintaining the department’s computers. He received several mailings at his home from charity groups associated with another police department and returned them anonymously filled with “offensive racially bigoted materials.” Or so he thought. The Nassau County Police Department started an investigation – and were able to determine Thomas Pappas’s identity because the return envelopes were coded to be tracked. The police department sent out another mailing to Pappas – and again received hate mail in return. They notified the NYPD which then performed the same experiment – and once again, Pappas sent them back an envelope filled with racist literature. At a disciplinary trial before the NYPD, Pappas explained his behavior was a form of protest as he “was tired of being shaken down for money by these so-called charitable organizations.” The NYPD then fired him – and in return he sued claiming his dismissal violated his First Amendment rights. The first judge to hear his case dismissed it – and Pappas then appealed to a three judge panel of which Judge Sotomayor was one member.

The panel upheld the dismissal – but Sotomayor registered her lone dissent in a strongly-worded opinion.

In upholding the dismissal, the Court determined that Pappas speech was protected under the First Amendment as it was “upon a matter of public concern.” But the Court explained, under certain circumstances, free speech rights were subordinated to the interest of the state – specifically with regards to the state as an employer. The opinion quoted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “A policeman may have a constitutional right to [speak his mind], but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” Essentially, with regards to state employees, the protection of the First Amendment is limited to matters of public concern (to avoid an employee being protected while making privately disparaging or harassing remarks) and then must be balanced against the interests of the state in it’s public relations. If, for example, a police chief publicly states he is in favor of discriminating, he can then be fired – even though he is speaking on a matter of public concern – because his speech interferes with the ability of the police department to do it’s job. Court precedent states that each judge must evaluate the potential damage that would be caused by keeping the person and balance this against the First Amendment rights of the individual. In this case, the majority opinion found that the potential damage of a computer technician being a racist was vast – due to the publicity surrounding the case.

The other judge on the panel agreed that Pappas’s case should have been dismissed – but did not believe it was necessary to consider the First Amendment implications as the Court’s official opinion did, saying that Pappas’s speech was merely private – and thus not protected by the First Amendment.

Judge  Sotomayor though dissented:

Today the Court enters uncharted territory in our First Amendment jurisprudence. The Court holds that the government does not violate the First Amendment when it fires a police department employee for racially inflammatory speech — where the speech consists of mailings in which the employee did not identify himself, let alone connect himself to the police department; where the speech occurred away from the office and on the employee’s own time; where the employee’s position involved no policymaking authority or public contact; where there is virtually no evidence of workplace disruption resulting directly from the speech; and where it ultimately required the investigatory resources of two police departments to bring the speech to the attention of the community…The Court should not…gloss over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives because it is confronted with speech it does not like and because a government employer fears a potential public response that it alone precipitated.

She had several points. One was that while she did not dispute that someone “has no constitutional right to be a policeman,” the position one held was important. Thus, she writes:

In Rankin, the Supreme Court applied this analysis to the law enforcement context and found that “where . . . an employee serves no confidential, policymaking, or public contact role, the danger to the agency’s successful functioning from that employee’s private speech is minimal.” Rankin, 483 U.S. at 390-91.

She also attacked the Court’s opinion regarding how it attempted to balance the potential damage caused by Pappas’s mailing and his free speech rights:

At some level of abstraction or aggregation, the potential for racist statements to damage the NYPD may indeed be “immense.” But that is not how the fact-specific Pickering test is applied. The question is how potentially damaging is this speech — that is, these leaflets sent by this employee under these particular circumstances.

In the end, Sotomayor’s defense of Pappas is grounded in the precise principles I would hope:

The majority’s decision allows a government employer to launch an investigation, ferret out an employee’s views anonymously expressed away from the workplace and unrelated to the employee’s job, bring the speech to the attention of the media and the community, hold a public disciplinary hearing, and then terminate the employee because, at that point, the government “reasonably believed that the speech would potentially . . . disrupt the government’s activities.” Heil v. Santoro, 147 F.3d 103, 109 (2d Cir. 1998). This is a perversion of our “reasonable belief” standard, and does not give due respect to the First Amendment interests at stake.

Sotomayor’s opinion is exactly what I would want from a Supreme Court justice. It is grounded in law, precedent, and a reverence for our founding principles; in this instance, she is also defending the unsavory, even though she clearly disagrees with his positions; most importantly, she is protecting basic rights against powerful interests.

[Image by keithpr licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Israel Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

Leverage and Power

Glenn Greenwald:

A country, a company or an individual has every right to remain free of “interference” from others as long as they remain independent of the party seeking to “interfere.”  But if one chooses instead to become dependent on someone else or seeks help and aid from them, then complying with the demands of those providing the aid is an inevitable price that must be paid – and justifiably so.

Greenwald makes broad principled statements like this a lot in support of the specific points he is making – in this case, the idea that Israel can’t complain about American interference in its domestic affairs.

But as a civil libertarian, I find it difficult to see Greenwald accepting the application of this principle in other spheres. Wouldn’t that imply that the government would exert total control over people on welfare for example? What regulations would this invalidate between individuals and corporations?

As a practical matter, what Greenwald states is true – in that independence is inevitably given up when one gives up leverage. But at the same time, there are various laws and customs that prevent one from exercising one’s full leverage. In most circumstances, Greenwald would – I think – accept that.

Categories
Economics Financial Crisis Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

Brink Lindsey v. Paul Krugman

Last night taking the train home, I started reading Brink Lindsey’s essay in Reason countering Paul Krugman’s analysis of inequality in American history – and specifically what has caused inequality to worsen.

Now – my head was a bit fuzzy as I have a pretty bad head cold at the moment – but I found Lindsey’s argument was rather persuasive. Surprisingly so – as I’ve cited Krugman’s arguments on this issue many times on this blog (including here and here). I also recognize Lindsey’s phrase describing Krugman’s view holds an essential truth about this progressive understanding. I myself tried to express this – in a way to diffuse the charges of socialism during the campaign – “Leave It To Beaver Socialism.”  Here’s my description of the goal of Obamanomics:

Obama’s economic plan is not about socialism or revolution or any such radicalism. He’s not that type of politician. The goal of his Obamanomics (if you will) is not a socialist paradise or a European-style market socialism but a restoration of the economic justice that made 1950s and 1960s America so stable. Unless you think Leave It To Beaver took place in a socialist nation, then Obama’s economic plans shouldn’t strike you as far left.

At the time, I both recognized the power of postulating an ideal past which we should hearken back to – and understood that this is the root of reactionary politics. There is a proper way to understand history – and to try to achieve a balance that once existed. But very easily, with a slight misstep, you find you are trying to recreate a now defunct world – which is the founding myth that every reactionary subscribes to.

Lindsey concludes his essay:

[R]easonable people disagree hotly about what ought to be done to ensure that our prosperity is widely shared. But the caricature of postwar history put forward by Krugman and other purveyors of nostalgianomics won’t lead us anywhere. Reactionary fantasies never do.

Powerful stuff, true or not. And it is certainly making me reevaluate my understanding of the historical causes of inequality in 20th century America. I’ll have to read the essay again with a more clear mind. I tried looking for a progressive debunking of the essay – but all I found were attacks on Lindsey or Reason or libertarianism.

To be clear though – I haven’t abandoned my Krugman-inspired view of the economic history of 20th century America yet – and Lindsey’s argument was better at poking holes in the story offered by Krugman than giving a convincing portrait of its own. I suspect the truth may be found by accepting that liberal and conservative policies together led to the growing inequality we are experiencing today.

Categories
Barack Obama Conservativism Criticism Economics Financial Crisis Liberalism Political Philosophy The Opinionsphere

The intellectual deterioration of the conservative movement

Richard Posner has written one of those posts that gets talked about despite it’s lack of hyperventilation – it’s a thoughtful, reflective piece on what he calls the “intellectual deterioration of the once-vital conservative movement in the United States.” Posner summarizes the deteriotion:

[T]he policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings [such that]the face of the Republican Party [has] become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals [have] no party.

Posner sees this decline as a symptom of the movement’s success. I think he’s half right.

Philip Bobbitt posited some time ago his theory of the evolution of the state – from princely city-states to kingly states to imperial states to the modern nation-state. The next step – according to Bobbitt – the one to which we are already evolving – is the market-state. And while a nation-state was legitimized in the eyes of it’s people by ensuring people were provided for (thus setting up the economic battle of the Cold War, as capitalism and Communism competed on this front), the market-state is legitimized by offering the maximum amount of opportunity for it’s citizens. Bobbitt’s theory is interesting – and if not entirely perfect, it is certainly useful. 

Given this structure, you can easily understand how the nation-state liberalism of Lyndon Johnson gave way over time to the market-state liberalism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. By this reading, conservatism did not so much win any more than nation-state liberalism “won.” Both were appropriate responses to their times.

Unfortunately for it’s proponents, conservatism (like nation-state liberalism in the 1970s) did not evolve with the times, but remained staticly committed to the principles that worked so well three decades earlier. The innovative ideas of the 1980s have become the brittle orthodoxies of the present. As conservative historian Niall Ferguson explained – “only the left” has a credible response to the issues of our day. The Right is still fighting the battles they won decades ago.

Continue reading “The intellectual deterioration of the conservative movement”
Categories
Political Philosophy

State Capitalism and Government (In)Efficiency

Ian Bremmer’s most recent article in Foreign Affairs on state capitalism was rather interesting and analytical regarding the role of the government in an economy – until this sentence cropped up:

Deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency, and corruption are more likely to hold back growth.

Bremmer articles has gotten more than the usual amount of attention – George Will for example made it the basis for a column. Will rejects one of Bremmer’s basic premises though – that in the developed world, the recent forays into state capitalism are temporary:

[Bremmer] probably is wrong because he underestimates the pleasure politicians derive from using their nation’s wealth as a slush fund for purchasing political advantage.

Will implicitly accepts Bremmer’s above point here – pointing to a reason why government is less efficient than the market – because politics begins to affect it and detract from the bottom line.

Last night, I was at a discussion hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations with Bremmer and Felix Rohatyn on “the state’s growing influence on liberal market economics” – and this question came up a few times. Several people commented on this – and the questioned what I took to be the conventional wisdom on this subject. One, a banker or economist of some sort who assisted Eastern European countries by aiding their government entities (such as phone companies, etc.) transition from a Communist to a capitalist economy. He made it clear from his experience that these government entities were inefficient and wasteful. Rohatyn though made the point that this occurred in a closed, non-transparent economy – and these factors contributed to waste more than government involvement. Rohatyn also made the point – which had Bremmer nodding – that as we could see thanks to our insights into GM and the financial companies – that they seemed rather wasteful and inefficient as well. Rohatyn seemed to think efficiency was only possible if the right person was leading an organization – whether it be GM or the DMV. But I think it may be more a matter of transparency and competition. These are the essence of a free market – which for me should not be defined as the absence of the state from a market, but the presence of choice, of transparency, of competition. The state can engage in practices which destroy or undermine a free market – subsidizing certain companies and declaring monopolies by the state for example. The state must be mindful of how it affects the market if it chooses to compete with private companies.

All of this would be moot though if government is less efficient than private companies. But I wonder – and this is a question – if there is any proof that government is more inefficient than the private market. I mean – I can tell you from my own experience that government can be inefficient. But I can also tell you that private companies also can. In terms of health care, at least some studies have found that Medicare is more efficient at providing health care than private insurers – as they eliminate the first step of illegally rejecting all payments on claims as a matter of course.

Of course – the many examples of government efficiency are legendary – but wasn’t it one of our bastions of capitalism that spent millions on his own personal bathroom. Of course, waste is less galling if it isn’t done with our own money. But I’m hoping someone out there has a study proving this – or disproving it.

It seems to be one of those ideas that are just accepted – conventional wisdom.

Categories
Political Philosophy Politics Reflections

Understanding Reactionaries

[digg-reddit-me]I tend to judge an individual’s politics on two levels. First, on a more traditional left to right spectrum (leftist to progressive to liberal to conservative to right-wing.) This left to right perspective can be further broken down – but in general, whether due to social, political, or psychological reasons, individuals in a political system can be described as belonging to a discrete place on this spectrum. The second political judgment is where they fit on what I’m calling the Political Change Spectrum – pictured below. 

Reactionary Dick Cheney to Conservative George H. W. Bush to Reformer Teddy Roosevelt to Revolutionary Che Guevera

Footnote re. spectrum. ((Though I’m pretty confident about the middle two figures, Cheney and Che don’t necessarily cleanly fit into the categories in the way I wanted them to. Clearly, Cheney is a reactionary – and Che was a revolutionary – both fit in that sense. But Cheney was primarily a reactionary concerned about taking radical measures to protect the status quo while the ideal person I would pick would be someone seeking to restore a past status quo. Cheney did seek to restore a past status quo regarding executive authority – constantly harking back to the pre-Watergate presidency – but he didn’t seem to have a historical model for other aspects of his agenda. I wanted to choose an American political figure – but I had some trouble thinking of an American revolutionary who was of historical value and ended up with real power. Even the original revolutionaries were not revolutionaries in terms of this chart – though their French counterparts a few years later were.))

These are also commonly used political terms that describe a political actor’s relationship to the status quo. To break it down further – the reactionary seeks to overturn the current order and return to a previous status quo, or alternately, to use radical measures to protect the current status quo; the conservative seeks to maintain the status quo; the reformer seeks to improve the status quo without overturning it; the revolutionary seeks to overthrow the system and put in place another one.

Political actors generally do not fall exclusively on one part of this scale – and may have some reformist positions and some reactionary ones. While a politician can take a left-wing or right-wing position,

But to a surprising degree, one can predict the actions and positions of a political actor based on their overall position on this spectrum – perhaps because it captures on a fundamental level how a political actor feels about his or her society and their natural temperament.

The reason I bring this up is a question: I have noticed that reactionaries tend to take within themselves (internalize) an exaggerated view of their enemy – and presume when making their own plans – that the enemies tactics and strategies are better than their own. What ends up happening in many of these reactionary groups is that they construct themselves on a model based on their worst fears of their enemy. The John Birch Society, for example, organized in self-sufficient cells with individual members having little to no knowledge of the group outside of their cell; they based this model on their perception of how Communist cells operated. Dick Cheney saw on September 11 the efficacy of violence and destruction to bring a people to heel; he apparently shared the view Osama Bin Laden did that America was not strong enough, not resilient enough to protect it’s way of life while remaining the same America – and so he then sought to unleash the righteous might of America on, eventually, a nation that had nothing to do with September 11 and remake the presidency into a national security dictatorship.

This internalizing of the enemy’s tactics and strategy does not only occur in reactionary groups – but I think – and this is my question – that reactionary groups are defined primarily by their worst fears of their enemy – which they then internalize and model their own organization on.

Reactionaries are more susceptible to this because they have already lost – to some degree – and generally believe their enemy must have in some way won not by honest means but by some clever stratagem. The rationale is that by imitating this stratagem the reactionaries will be able to protect their way of life. But it is impossible to maintain the status quo by radical action – because such actions inevitably upset the very thing being protected.

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

Equality of Result versus Equality of Opportunity

[digg-reddit-me]It is noteworthy that a certain type of older conservative or right-wing intellectual finds it necessary to insist repeatedly that Obama’s politics is “the same old” stuff as liberals tried earlier in history. These olders intellectuals try to place Obama in the context of typical big-government liberals – and they presume by doing so they are taking the wind out of his sails and making him a more prosaic and less historic figure.

Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a column explaining that Obama was interested in “the same old equality of result.” He describes the debate going back to the Greeks between “the equality of result” and “the equality of opportunity” – and he identified France with the first and America with the second. His implicit question: Do we want to become France? George Will and others have described Obama’s administration as the third or fourth wave of liberalism. There is a strong need among this group to get across the message that Obama isn’t different – he isn’t change – he’s just more of the same stuff that they – as Republicans – defeated back in 1980 and 1984 and 1994 and 2004. 

But insistince does not make it so.

Obama’s liberalism is not the liberalism of the Great Society or of Jimmy Carter – or even of Bill Clinton. Hanson, Will, and others refuse to acknowledge that in the debate between equality of result and equality of opportunity, they already won. Obamaism is about expanding equality of opportunity – which would be clear if Hanson were doing more than reciting talking points. Look at the three specific programs Hanson cites before claiming Obama wants “equality of results”:

…creating a new health care bureaucracy, cap-and-trade, allotting trillions more for education…

None of these try to achieve an “equality of results.” They are about ensuring people equal opportunity to succeed – and ensuring the market properly prices activities which are damaging to society in general. For example, if you want everyone to have an equal opportunity to succeed, you need to make sure that everyone who is intelligent enough and works hard enough can get an education. Health care costs and concerns have made it much more difficult for smaller businesses to succeed – so Obama is proposing to open up the federal program. This will even the playing field in competition between big and medium- to small-sized companies to a significant degree. Cap and trade imposes a market mechanism to take into account the costs of polluting activities.

Hanson and the others of his generation need to understand that they won the opportunity versus results debate. Liberalism today has evolved to deal with the demands of the moment. 

Perhaps they should focus on their own political philosophy to see that it does as well.